>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Magento Imagine 2019, brought to you by Adobe. >> Welcome to the theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin at The Wynn, in Las Vegas for Magento Imagine 2019. This is a three day event. You can hear a lot of exciting folks networking behind me, talking tech, talking e-commerce innovation and we're pleased to welcome fresh off the keynote stage a couple of guests from HP. We've got Gillian Campbell, the Head of Omni-channel Strategy and Operations. Gillian, thank you for joining us. >> Thank you for asking us. >> Our pleasure and Herriot Stobo, Director of Omni-channel Innovation and Solutions, also from HP. Welcome. >> Thank you very much. >> So Gillian fresh off the keynote stage, enjoyed your presentation this morning. >> Gillian: Thank you. >> Everybody I think in the world knows HP. Those of us consumers going, you know what actually, that reminds me, I need a new printer. >> We can help you. >> Thank you, excellent. Whether I'm shopping online or in a store. So you gave this really interesting keynote this morning talking about what HP is doing, starting at Apache. You really transform this shopping experience. Talk to us a little bit about HP, as I think you've mentioned it as a $50 billion start up and from a digital experience perspective, what you needed to enable. >> Yeah, so as I said, HP have been around for 80 years and in 2015, we became our own entity, HP Inc., and really started looking at how do we enable digital to be pervasive through everything that we do. Our internal processes are reached to customers and identified a great opportunity to really take leading edge and our digital commerce capabilities and we already had some early proof points and APG so we launched a global initiative and we're now on that journey to enable that best in class experience through the digital platforms. >> So Herriot talk to us about, you're based in Singapore. >> Yes. >> What were some of the market dynamics that really made it obvious that this is where we want to start building out this omni-channel strategy starting in Apache? Is it, you know whether, Gillian you mentioned it before. We started retail spaces, some being expensive. Is it more mobile experience and expectations on consumer's part? >> I think we've got a mix of different starting points across Asia. We've got some mega cities like Hong Kong and Singapore rising, Tokyo. And then we've got you know emerging markets across South-East Asia. We don't necessarily have any single market place that controls the entire market as we might see in other regions and so we've had a lot of runway to go and experiment and try new things. We also have an ecosystem of branded retail in Asia. Not in all markets, predominantly in India but also in some markets in South-East Asia that allow us to really blend the experience across both offline and online and to give customers choice at the end of the day. Let them decide how they want to shop and interact with our brand. So we have been running Magento 1 since we first launched our online store businesses in Indonesia and Thailand about six years ago and then we moved into China, replatformed, lexi-platform onto Magento 1 and then that was really the foundation of what we decided to go and build upon to become a global program. so we already had some proof points under our belt with Magento so. >> And what were some of those early wins that really started to make this really obvious that this omni-channel experience, the ability to give customers choice? Whether they want to start the process online, finish it in store, vice verse, or at least have the opportunity to have a choice? What were some of those early wins and business outcomes that you started to see? >> I think even just from because we're all, customers are people. Whether you're a corporate customer, a small business, or a consumer, we're all people and we all know that we shop that way. So essentially the storyline on that back to HP was we have to enable experiences that we would want to experience as well and it was quite a shift for a tech company who were really all about the products to be thinking about, well, how do we really enable that end to end experience? And as Herriot said, the runway was open. We already had some proof points. I was new in the job so I was like all listening to, you know, what the team were telling me. We have a great opportunity here and took that formered as a new concept for the company. We got funding approval and you know the rest is the history and the journey that we're on. So I think it was just taking a different perspective and a different approach and working with a team who already had the, built some of that credibility and others proof points with the earlier deployments and I think we kind of took a risk at the time when we started the engagement with Magento. They weren't in that leadership quadrant and we took a risk to say, let's partner with an energizing company and do something a little bit different and we're still here working towards it so I think that for me was the breakthrough, was just having the tenacity to say, we're gonna drive this path forward. It may not be how we would have done things in the past, but we're a different company now. and we had much more thinner air cover to be able to do that. >> Little bit more agility and flexibility. >> Yeah, absolutely. So you guys, you talked about, Gillian about all the buyers. We are the consumers and we have this expectation, growing expectation that I want to be able to get any and transact anything that I want to buy, whether I'm a procuring person for a company and I'm traveling but I need to approve expenses or I'm a salesperson maybe sitting next to a medium-small business customer. I need to have the option at least to have this store front. What are the things that you guys launched in Apache, leverage be the power of Magento Commerce was click to collect. So tell me a little bit about from maybe an e-commerce cultural perspective, what is it that makes people want to have the ability to start online and actually complete the transaction in a physical location? >> Essentially I was in the Advisory Board yesterday and one of the other customers of Magento said, "Until we can invent a way to touch and feel online, "there's always gonna be a need to have, "outlets where you can go touch and feel." and I think with the click and collect, some of our products are, you know, high-end PCs and gaming devices and printers that is hard to get a good appreciation of what it looks and feels like online. So if you're gonna be spending you know, a significant money you may want to go in and be able to see the colors, feel the finish. You know some of our newer products with the leather portfolios is not something you can truly appreciate without touching it. So I think we have to enable again those customers who do want to experience, feel the weight, you know feel the finish, see the color scheme 'cause its usually important, again not for all customers. Some customers are quite happy to spend thousands of dollars on an online purchase without seeing it and then making sure they have a good facility to be able to, well if they wanted to, to return if they got the normal the product. >> As we look though at like we talked about, this consumerization of everything where we have this expectation and the numbers, I think you even mentioned it maybe in your keynote, Gillian, the numbers of, or somebody did this morning, like upwards of half of all transactions are starting on mobile so we got to start there. What are some of the things that you guys have seen in region in terms of mobile conversions? >> So there's still a massive gap between desktop and mobile conversions, first of all. I mean we're not anywhere near parity between the two. But obviously we're seeing a huge volume of traffic coming in as well and it's shifting that way, so you would expect it to drop as result. I think with Magento what we've seen over the, you know, past few deployments that we've been running and that were over 8% improven. But the desktop conversions are far higher. I mean in terms of improvement and actual conversion so we've still got a long way to go. There and that's a naturative process, that's a journey that probably never ends in terms of ongoing optimization and experimentation. So yeah a lot happening there. I think just on the click and collect topic as well that you were asking about people wanting to start their journey online and then come into bricks and mortar. We're seeing a huge uptake on it just by experimenting, by piloting. Over 26% of our consumer notebooks in India that we've put onto this program were being collected in store and this is in environments which are inherently chaotic on the streets. You don't want to go out there but actually I'm passing that way anyway so it's just easier for me to pick it up on the way home and probably quicker 'cause I can collect in two hours. So it's just giving people customer choice, no additional incentive and it seems to take. So now we're expanding out regionally. >> So you said there's, this morning, Gillian, in your keynote eight markets covered, mostly Apache, but also in Latin America. >> We just started in Latin America, again, the development process is not just as simple as we're switching on. So we've been doing a lot of work for this past six months with Latin America. The team there, they're super excited to get launched. There's some differences there, we've talked about the regional variation around fulfillment models that we have to adapt towards but the intent is to get Latin America deployed, leveraging some of the layer lengths from what we've done in Asia specific and then starting to move around into more the near region and then ultimately back into the US and Canada. >> So as you look forward and of course you've mentioned we're on this journey right, what are some of the key learnings that you're going to apply? You mentioned this morning, something that was very intriguing and that was, respect the integrity of the Magento platform. Talk about that in context of some of the other learnings that you'd recommend for colleagues and similar or other industries to be able to achieve what you have on a global scale. >> I think from the outset, there was this kind of like baggage of deployments of capabilities not just in commerce but deployment of capabilities across HP that we had not respected the integrity of the platform. We had adjusted the code and developed on the code to make it HP specific and with the new HP Inc. company one of the guided principles was no, when we buy the leverage software applications respect it for what it is and adjust business processes and adjust integration rather than adjust the core so that we can get the advantage of the longer term opportunity without creating such like. So it was really just a foundational, you know, let's not go in here with a mindset that we know better than the core. The core is there for a reason and then build around that and ensure the integration and I think you know with Herriot's leadership, we've been able to you know, just keep that firm is why we can be successful and be successful longer term as well. So that all the, and one of the things we talked about yesterday also is the excellent capabilities that are coming with Adobe and the integration that we talked about the recommendation of Adobe Sensei and integrate that with Magento Core. If you don't keep to the respect the integrity, those upgrades and capabilities become really hard to take benefit of so we're really excited about, you know, again, sticking with the core and enabling and growing with the core with Magento and Adobe. >> I would just build on it, I mean I think its never gonna be easy running a global commerce platform. Single instance, multiple countries, you know, 27 markets to get started with. Who knows where we're gonna end. Its always gonna be a challenge so we have to keep it as simple as possible. These upgrades are fast and furious and that's great and we all gets lots of benefit but if we start going down our own path, we've lost it. We've lost the benefit. >> And that's one of the things too that Jason Wolfsteen said this morning was that the word Magento was gonna be enabling businesses to achieve without getting in their way and it kind of sounds Herriot, like you're saying the same thing. That we've gotta be able to respect the technologies that we're building so we don't get in our own way and we keep it simple as we wanna expand globally. Ultimately at the end of the day, you're creating these personalized experiences with consumers and that personalization is so important because it's more and more not only are we transacting or wanting to on mobile but we want our brands like HP to know us. We want you to know our brand value, you know our average order value so that we can become part of the experience but also ideally get rewarded for being loyal. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, I mean, I mean just coming to mobile again but you know, 2.3 delivers the native PWA capabilities which we're super excited to get started with. You know we've got so many used cases for this straight away, right out the box but you know we've got to do it gradually, do it the right way. I think we're also aware that we're not gonna be able to run with PWA in all markets straight away 'cause not all markets are ready for it quite frankly. User behavior- >> Is that a cultural thing? >> It's purely cultural. Maybe technical and just technical ecosystems as well. Places like China in particular, where, you know, customers use app stores but they use app stores from every single phone manufacturer right there. That's where the customer is. We can't just move away from that so we need to keep some of those legacy approaches for a little while and then yeah test in other regions and then take the learnings when we're ready to adopt it. >> Exciting so here we are at, this is the first Magento Imagine since the Adobe acquisition. Gillian, let's wrap things up with you. What are your, you mentioned you were part of the Customer Advisory Board yesterday, just some of your perspectives on this years' event now that Magento is powering the Adobe commerce cloud. >> I actually attended the Adobe Summit a few weeks ago here also in Vegas and started to see the thread of commerce coming into that conference and then seeing the Adobe, the experience, coming into Magento and I just think it's a perfect combination of opportunities especially for a company like HP where we were linked in to connect, you know, marketing and sales and support across the customer journey and the capabilities with Adobe and some of the marketing stack, and then the commerce stack, and there was support bringing that together is a super exciting opportunity for us. You know the partnership that we have with both Adobe and Magento again as one as I really, they were just starting what the next journey was gonna look like. >> We feel that about so many things, we're just starting, but Gillian, Herriot, it's been a pleasure to have you on theCUBE for Magento Imagine 2019. Thank you both for your time. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Our pleasure. I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE live from The Wynn Las Vegas at Magento Imagine 2019. Thanks for watching. (light music)

(uplifting music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a CUBE Conversation. Really excited to have a start up in the serverless space here in our studios in Palo Alto. Welcome to the program, first-time guest, we have Nate Taggart, who's the CEO, and Farrah Campbell, who's the Ecosystem Manager, both with Stackery. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Stu, thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> Farrah, I know you're just in from Vegas and from the DevOps Enterprise Summit. Why don't we start there a little bit? DevOps, this big wave, a lot of changes, what's the energy you're hearing, what are people talking about what's exciting them these days? >> A lot of things are exciting them. I think that the whole ecosystem is changing. There's so much happening it's almost like the 80s and 90s, you know what I mean, where there's like the dot-commer I guess. There's so much new technology that's out there and it's available. I think that people are really trying to understand where they should go. Maybe I've already started with containers, now people are talking about serverless. What do I do? >> It's a great point. These waves of technology come so fast. When people write their strategy, you might now even want to write it in ink. (Nate and Farrah laughs) They may be drawing because Clay Christensen always says it's something you should revisit. You should go at least once a quarter. It's directionally where I need to go, but things change. All right, Nate, Stackery. Bring us back. First, give us a little bit about the team's background, yourself and what led to the formation of the company. >> Yeah, thanks, Stu. My founding team actually comes out in New Relic. We were early employees there, stayed 'til the IPO. We've worked building, DevTooling for a long time, hand-managing at scale infrastructure. One of the things that we found was, I mean, New Relic was a high-velocity engineering team and the bottleneck, in many cases, was infrastructure. After New Relic, I worked with the data science group at GitHub, again, building massive data infrastructure and the bottleneck was not figuring out what to do. It wasn't the work in front of us. It was the underlying, un-differentiate heavy-lifting of infrastructure. Chase Douglas, my co-founder, and I, when we saw AWS Lambda come out us, it's the first example of a wave of serverless services, we got really excited and realized this took away a lot of the barriers and a lot of the burden of building new applications, started playing with it. This was three years ago. Over the next few years, we've been working with all the serverless pioneers figuring out what are the changes that they're experiencing from their operations cycle from managing the life cycle of an application, how are their teams in the dynamics changing the workflow. We took those best practices and built it into Stackery, which is now a software product to accelerate serverless operations. >> We've been watching this for a while. Give us a little bit of a perspective first. There's some things different about this serverless wave or functions as a service. I'm an infrastructure guy by background and we've always wanted to not have the boat anchors of network and storage slow us down, but I lived through the virtualization wave. (Nate laughs) I've got the scars of over a decade. >> Sure. >> Working in the ecosystem of trying to fix that. Everybody got super excited when containers in a Docker helped bring that to the mainstream, but it was tools helping us move up the stack a little. Serverless, to me, when I look at it, it really starts from the application level down and there's still lots of infrastructure stuff. It's not like it disappears. I've got the great T-shirt from the cloud guru people. (Nate laughs) It's like there is no cloud of someone else's computer, they have the longer version of that for serverless. I love your viewpoint 'cause, New Relic, they'd seen, they track, they monitor that, you had a great way to look at it, GitHub of course, but what's the same, what's different about what's so important about serverless and what it does for companies? >> Fundamentally, we're looking at just two different patterns and neither one of them is right or wrong, but they have different use cases, different applications, areas where they excel. New Relic was a big champion in early pioneer of Docker. We used a lot of containers, a lot of orchestration technology, so I'm still a big proponent of that. I think when I look at the serverless marker today, it's tempting to look at it as an abstraction layer, disfunction as a service, there's maybe micro-container type view. It's not really the pattern we're seeing in industry. What we're actually seeing is people are saying it's a manage service and it's not just Lambda, it's not just compute as a manage service. It's me stringing together the manage components I need to develop quickly and deliver business value to focus on business logic instead of the plumbing. I think API Gateway is manage service, I think there's manage databases in their manage service, there's event streams. You pull all the pieces together and Lambda may be a component of that. In that way, it actually fits in and compliments a container program. >> Absolutely. What I was trying to say is containers kill VMs and serverless kills this. It's kind of like cloud is more of an operation model. >> Sure. >> Serverless is more of how I build my applications and services that I can use, not the unit of how I build something. Farrah, when I look at it, the conversations I've had with users, it's not the okay, let me take the person that did some silo and teach them to code or put that together. I've talked to marketing people that are like, "I got involved and I can do this." What are you seeing from the personnel and who's using it, how is it very different from what we've seen in the past? >> I think it opens up a lot of doors. I think it makes the unattainable attainable. You see people that go from front end to full stack. It takes you to the tip of technology. I'm mentoring a woman that is using serverless as a way to get app out. She doesn't understand infrastructure, she doesn't understand all the ops and how to set all those things up and it would take a long time to figure all those things out. Those are harder doors to open. Everything's been done the same for a very long time. There's like this free knowledge is shared here. Serverless has an ecosystem. It's kind of like a community where everybody is working together, sharing knowledge and trying to actually build something bigger and better, something that feels good to be a part of. We have a lady that's working at our office coming out of code school and she is a killer engineer. You can talk more about what Anna's doing for us at Stackery, but she's coming out of a code school and is operating as if she's a full-stack engineer >> I think that's really the compelling story behind serverless, is focus on business value. >> Yeah. >> And that's the mission of every software engineer. It's the reason most of us got into software engineering was 'cause we wanted to solve puzzles, we wanted to work with logic and idea, we wanted to build. We didn't want to sit and configure infrastructure as code templates in order to stand up some basic EC2 server, so that we can run our application, right? >> Nate, maybe you troned a little bit for us. What does Stackery do in this ecosystem? What are you helping customers? If you've got any customer examples, we'd love to hear that. >> Absolutely. First off, the development model is changing. If you want to do serverless, serverless, again, is a manage service. I can't replicate all of AWS on my laptop. In order to work with these manage services, in the development cycle, I'm shipping code to the cloud. I'm provisioning resources in the cloud. Maybe in my own account or a developer account, but I have to know how to provision those resources and then configure those resources. If I'm doing this in a professional environment, then it means I need to do this in a way that's automated, scalable, I can hand off to someone else, they can replicate and this is the workflow to tooling, the guardrails that Stackery brings to your serverless program. We make it so that a developer can take a branch out of version control and deploy their own instance of it in their sand-boxed environment within their AWS account. This was kind of automation workflows, handling of configuration templating, being able to pull a resource off the shelf, I need to put my database in a VPC (Nate snaps fingers) and boom, it's pre-configured and ready for you to go. >> Okay. >> Stackery also enables you to work on your core problems. I'm not busy trying to research how the 1400 services are going to interact with each other. I don't have time to do that. I'm trying to focus on one of my projects. I'm focused on a deadline. I'm trying to get a specific task done. I don't have time to research for a week to try to get that, to figure that out. Not only that, it's not a language, so focusing time and trying to figure out and formulate cloud formation, it seems like a waste of time. >> The flip side of this is that that is some of the most important mission critical work that teams are doing. You can't provision into your production AWS account if you have misconfigured IM roles. You don't want to open access to that account to every single person in the organization. You don't want misconfigured resources. This new model, this new development change, where the application is at the heart of the life cycle, if we're not helping people to quickly stand up correctly configured resources then we're putting more load on the ITT, more load on the operational team and actually slowing down development. >> Bring us inside. When do you usually get engaged, who's driving those engagements, when you talk about write, what were they doing before and what does this enable them to do once they're engaged? >> Even though serverless feels like an infrastructure solution, it's actually the application development side of the house that tends to be the leading adopter. A lot of cases, they're trying to un-bottleneck their operations team or not send them low-criticality work loads. A typical entry point might be something like a cron job. We have this little function that just needs to run once a day. Do I really need to have a capacity-planning meeting with the ops team to get this out in production? They go, "Okay, we'll write the code, we'll ship it as a serverless function and we'll get it out the door." That works really well when you're a single-principle engineer with maybe elevated privileges in your cloud accounts. It doesn't work so well as a replicable process that you can then scale across the org. I don't think ops leaders want just like let's open the gates to our kingdom. Instead, what we see is that four companies to go through a maturing curve of embracing this technology where they go from background tasks, data pipelines, cron jobs, low-visibility work to maybe more core services that can extend their product or deliver more customer-facing value. They have to answer a lot of questions in terms of how do we change our process and our culture in order to embrace the velocity of serverless without losing the control that our ops team's been providing for us. >> Also, setting your team up for success. Anybody knows that if I'm working on a specific task or we get a project I'm working on, if I don't understand it and can't figure it out, I'm going to get frustrated, I'm not liking my job anymore, I hate this problem that we're working on, this initiative is dumb, I don't want to be a part of this, but Stackery allows somebody, it made me feel good about it, all the things that you can accomplish. We have a customer that's using this right now that they are moving faster than they ever thought that was possible and it's been so much fun to see their excitement and more things that they learn about that they're using it like, "Look what we just did!" They were going to pull out the whiteboard. He was like, "Let's not pull out the whiteboard, Let's just pull out Stackery." That's awesome. >> It's really fun. We opened Slack channels for some of our customers and it's so exciting to watch them get so fired up about being able to self-serve, being able to actually deliver value and hit their milestones very quickly and successfully. You were talking about what segments are driving this. One of the interesting patterns that we've seen is that it's not like the cutting-edge infrastructure team. In a lot of cases, it might be the under-served software teams in an organization. One of our first customers was an enterprise company doing retail and it was their marketing enablement team, a business enablement team that says, "Hey, our work is important. It drives revenue," is critical to our business, but it feels like a busy workload to the ops team and it's hard to get priority on this. For them to be able to self-serve to relieve some of that back pressure, but then deliver the business value, it was like an immediate measurable win for 'em. >> We often talk about the future of jobs so often, it's like oh, well. Really, you need to be a data scientist. You could go get all this training, you need to get there. It sounds like the bar is kind of low to be able to jump in here and don't necessarily need to go through certifications to start getting real results. >> I think maybe instead of saying, "The bar is low," we're opening the doors wider. We're saying that you can be successful by being able to write software and deliver business value and that you don't need to learn, also, how to configure cloud resources or write infrastructure as code templates or manage an operations lifecycle, personally, to be able to ramp up and add value to your organization. >> All right. Nate, how many people in the company, tell us what you can about funding and which expect to see from you and the team throughout the next six to 12 months. >> Absolutely. Officially, our company is now two years old, we're a team of 15 and we've raised seven and a half million dollars led by Voyager Capital and Hummer Winblad. >> Okay. >> I want to add that I had been involved in a number of startups. This team is different. We have five women on our team. >> Yeah. >> When I joined 10, there was four. We have one in ops and three women engineers >> We're up to six now. >> I know, but that's what I'm saying. I'm talking 'about when I started and that is like you don't see that. >> I wonder. There's certain shows I go to when I go to the Cloud Foundry show, when I go to Kubernetes show, when I go to, more of, the developer-centered shows, I do tend to find a higher percentage women. Are we seeing it or is that really? >> Oh, for sure. My first conference, when I started Stackery, was Serverlessconf. It was awesome. I walked into this hackathon actually scared to death because I've been to them before and was basically laughed out of there like, "What are you doing here?" I asked to be a part of a team that had to build a product and we to demo it and I went up to 'em and told 'em that I knew nothing about. I'm not an engineer, I can't write code at all, but I did understand business problems and I was trying to understand where serverless could be useful or what service would be useful. They were like, "Let's find you a team," and they had me working on the business plan while they were doing all the coding and I was like, "Let's do check-ins every single hour." Just that feeling like a welcome. You felt welcomed there and, as a women working in tech, I haven't felt welcomed at a number of conferences or a lot of hackathons, but I definitely felt welcomed there. >> It's great to hear. I saw on Twitter the other day and it was like, "Could you just imagine if for the last thousand years, we'd actually use the brainpower of the entire human race, (Nate laughs) not having kept 50% of the population from contributing." Nate, want to give you the final word. Serverless, it's growing fast, there's a lot of excitement, but what do you see as the biggest challenges. What does the industry need to work on? What's exciting you that, when we come and sit down in 2019, you're hoping we've moved the ball more? >> I think that one take-away that I want to make sure your audience has is that if you're sitting here saying, "We're not doing serverless," you're wrong. Someone in your organization is doing it. If you have this self-served model where pockets of the organization, this is the old shadow IT, where they are self-serving their configuring resources, their provisioning and it's outside of your peri-view, you're going to want to start putting practice steps in place to make sure that they're able to be successful with that mission. If they're not successful with that mission, they increase risk on your cloud strategy as a whole. They put more workload back on the operations team if that team ends up being a bottleneck for these needs. I hear a lot of IT leaders going, "I don't know if we're doing serverless today." It's like, "No, you are. I've talked to two of your engineers. I know you are." (Nate chuckles) >> Absolutely, right there. When I interviewed Andy Jassy, we had him on theCUBE last year, it was serverless becomes the underlying foundation for everything that AWS is doing. It is going to leave the audience with it is not a single product, or unnecessarily a single tool, but this is what all the cloud is doing and it's moving there pretty fast. It's something that the users can get involved with even more. All right. >> Absolutely. >> Nate and Farrah, thank you so much for joining us. Look forward to watching Stackery and seeing the updates. Make sure to check out thecube.net for all of our coverage. We'll have a big coverage of course from AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. Lots of other shows. I'm personally always excited about what's having in the serverless and emerging trends. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE. >> Thanks.

>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Food IT: Fork to Farm. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hi, welcome back, I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE, we are at the Farm IT event. This is an incredible opportunity to talk with folks that are experts in agriculture, food and agriculture, academia, farmers, producers, those all across the food chain. The theme of this event is Fork to Farm, and I'm excited to be joined by my next two guests, we have Dan Sonke, the Director of Sustainable Agriculture from Campbell's Soup, welcome. >> Thank you. >> And you can't say this, but Dan has Campbell Soup tennis shoes on and they're awesome. And David Sypnieski, the Founder and CEO of Athena Intelligence, welcome gentlemen. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, good to be here. >> So this has been, before we went on we were kind of talking about kind of my thoughts on Ag-Tech, and this is a really interesting and unique opportunity for theCUBE, to really look at the influences of Big Data and Analytics, Cloud Computing, Open-source Software, Blockchain, and how this all can be very influential across the food chain and you know, from the event's theme perspective, it's really been a lot this morning, talking about the tech-enabled food consumer really driving a lot of this change, expectation-wise. But Dan, first question to you, knowing, growing up on Campbell's Soup as a kid, founded in 1869, how is Campbell's Soup taking action to implement not only support-sustainable agriculture, but also, what were the drivers? >> Well, we definitely see consumers driving interest in where the food comes from, where ingredients that go into Campbell's Soup come from. We, a few years ago, decided that we wanted to be a company that makes real food that matters for life's moments, so that's our mission, that's our purpose, and so we want to connect to consumers with the information that supports that claim, that the food is trustworthy, that it's authentic, and that it resonates with the emotional side of how it's consumed in families, and the moments that matter. >> And also probably from a branch perspective, this is a historic brand in the United States, and that's probably quite important to meet those needs. >> Absolutely, we want to we the most transparent food company, we want to be open and honest with our consumers, and satisfy their desire for real food. >> So talk to us about kind of the genesis of the sustainability in agriculture at Campbell, when did that start? And really, besides the consumers, maybe some on the customer side, who was really driving this initiative? >> Well, we drive it internally, so six years ago, we decided to venture into sustainable agriculture in a formal way. We did a stakeholder assessment, so we talked to customers, we talked to investors, we talked to farmers, suppliers, folks inside the company, outside the company, North America, Europe, Australia, and asked them a series of questions, and said where should we focus, what are the crops, what are the subject areas we should focus on in agriculture sustainability? And we came up with a focus on tomatoes and other vegetables that people think of when they think of Campbell's Soup, we're largely a vegetable nutrition, and whole-grain nutrition company, so we wanted to focus there. And we focused on water, fertilizer, greenhouse gases, soil and pesticides, so that was our focus area, and we really took a measure-to-manage approach, so intentionally going to farmers, starting with tomatoes, with a limited set of questions that capture a lot of information and would be information growers would have, so we asked them how much water did you apply to make the crop, how much fertilizer do you use, what was the irrigation system, what are some of the decision tools that you used to make informed decisions? And so we started collecting that data. We also started capturing the geographic locations of the fields, believing that the technology would come to enable us to put that together, and lo and behold, fast-forward five years, now we have five years of data. We've tracked some really great stuff that our farmers have done. For example, last year water use per pound of tomato grown, was down by 20% over our first year of tracking that data. >> Wow. >> Huge gains, and efficiency and, you know, especially since it's a California crop, that was in the period of a five-year drought, so very encouraging to see that growers can do that kind of thing, and very proud of our growers for doing that. >> Absolutely, and on the technology side, so we've got David here. Athena Intelligence, talk to us a little bit about the genesis of Athena Intelligence, and how your working in partnership with Campbell's Soup. >> Sure, so I've got a storied background in agricultural tech work with production, growers, ag-tech companies, processors like Campbell's and others. And several years ago I kind of realized the fact that while all of this technology is from Silicon Valley and around the world, it's starting to, kind of make it's way into agriculture. An assumption that everyone makes is that the data is ready to be used in some sort of technology. >> Right. >> Alright, so kind of the the running joke in the field is that, you know, that a lot of technology has built a lot of solutions that are desperately looking for a problem to solve. And the problem, while it sounds simple, it not so easy to put together. But the problem is that, as Campbell's Soup for example, was collecting all of that data, you know, the entire industry has never really been familiar with the structure of how do you actually use data in any kind of meaningful kind of data science or analytical way and so, just being able to compile it all from various different formats and sources was a burden, so while you had all this data, it actually couldn't be used at all. And so Athena Intelligence was about basically, me coming to the realization, and collaborating with Dan, and Campbell's has been a great partner of saying, you know, we're going to solve that one problem, the unglamourous, the unsexy, problem of building a piece of technology which can efficiently and automatically begin to clean up, and normalize, and standardized data sets from multiple different sources and-- >> And we're talking about like data from weather sources, sensors, satellite imagery-- >> Right, so it's a fusion of public and private data, so the public data, everything from satellite imagery to soil, to weather stations, river flows, 98 different attributes of the weather, and water-related data. And then of course all of the private data, both Campbell's internal processing data, and then all the data that they're collaborating with their suppliers so, it's a pretty broad assortment which comes from, I mean the formats are everything from a hand-written notebook, to a PDF, to Excel to-- >> Wow. >> It's all over the board. >> So this is really Big Data and Analytics, being able to bring and aggregate data from different sources, facilitate data discovery. >> We're making data efficient right now, because the problem is that it's so, it's such a laborious effort. You know, 90% of the time people are putting in, just trying to clean and organize it. >> Right. >> Leaving very little time to be able to analyze it, let alone make any decisions or collaborate on it. So we're addressing that 90% of the time that people spend on trying to put the stuff together in the first place. >> Okay so Dan, walk us through kind of a use-case example of how your implementing, or have implemented, Athena Intelligence software, and what some of the outcomes have been so far. >> Right, so the goal has been to take the quality data that comes in to our systems, and that is one area where we do use data historically quite a bit, we have tons of data on every load of tomatoes that comes into our processing plants. But then we're marrying that data to the publicly available weather, soil, water data, and the data that the growers report on sustainability practices. And the goal is to find the win, win, win, the win for the environment, the win for the farm profitability, and the win for Campbell's Soup quality, and sustainability drivers as well. And the example that we're currently pursuing is tomato solids, so that's an obscure term for most people, but it's a industry measurement of how much sugar is in the tomatoes basically. >> Okay. >> The solids of the tomatoes coming in, affect how they process into our ingredients, the higher solids, the easier they are for us to process, and the less energy it requires for us to do that. So it's a sustainability win as well. We already pay growers for higher solids. We know a few things that can generate higher solids on the farm, but we think there are more pieces of information that have been hiding in that Big Data set. So can we tease out what soils produce higher solids, or what irrigation practices drive higher solids, or whatever it is, so we're in the process right now. We've got a project going between our research innovation fund, Athena, and that's the target that we're going after this summer is to dig into five years of data, and find that win. >> Wow. So it sounds like Athena Intelligence has really enabled Campbell's Soup to become a data-driven company? >> Well, we certainly are a data-driven company, but this is extending the reach of the data outside the four walls of our factory-- >> And also into the farmer, so you're really enabling the farmers to embrace data, evaluate what they have. Have you seen any...? So one of the things we were talking about earlier today, or was being talked about was the labor shortages, as well as attrition. So you mentioned you know, things in ledgers and hard copy. Are you also seeing an influence maybe, that Campbell's having to your farmers, becoming much more, less paper-driven, and maybe more modern in terms of the way that they're collecting and storing data? >> Well, I can't say that we can take credit for that, but we certainly want to be one of the many voices at events such as this one, to be a beacon, calling the industry to solve this problem. David really mentioned it. The challenge is, growers don't have the resources to capture data easily. If they were you know, if that was their mindset, they'd probably be accountants and not farmers right? Farm they have, you know, they're in farming for all the attributes of a farm lifestyle, not a data-capture lifestyle. >> Right. >> So capturing that farm data, and making it easy for them to get the data into systems that they can then use, is one of my passions right? A lot of companies are out there saying, "Oh, we can create a platform that will help Campbell's "get information out of the farms." And I keep telling them, "No, if you create the system "that makes it easier for farmers to use their own data, "to get more efficient and more profitable, "they'll put the data in." >> Okay. >> That's not-- >> So you think that's really where the sweet spot is, and the next step is really-- >> And that's how we drive sustainability. >> Because if they, if the tools can help them with the data to make more informed decisions that's, that's what we want to get out of our sustainability programs, it's not just data for reports say, for Campbell's, it's how do we drive progress on the farm, and we do that by creating the systems that everybody can use more easily. >> Well, it's so neat to hear that a company that so many of us know and have grown up with, has evolved so much to be very focused, and have sustainability really, as a core, and it's also great to know that there are technologists out there that have that Ag-Tech experience, that are enabling companies to leverage the power of Big Data, so gentlemen, I want to thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing your insights with us, we wish you the best of luck, and look forward to seeing what happens in the next few years. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> My pleasure. And we want to thank you for watching theCUBE again, I'm Lisa Martin, and we are at the Farm IT event From Fork to Farm, or Food IT event. We will be back with some more great guests, so stick around. (techno music)

welcome back to pre owned alive Jeff Rick here with the cube as you know we go out to the signals we we go out to the offense we extract the signal from the noise or date to hear percona live Santa Clara Convention Center the heart of Silicon Valley John had to step away so I'll be going solo on this and we're excited to to invite to the cube Lane Campbell CEO and co-founder of Blackbird welcome to the cube thank you very much so Blackbird is a new name I saw on my notes what was what was it called before well we are a merger of two companies Palomino DB has been a longtime sponsor and contributor at at Kona for about seven years it has focused on MySQL database operations and consulting dr dev was an operation shop with a DevOps focus okay and we've decided to merge together take everything up the stack build a company that could operate everything with a heavy database focus awesome so when did you complete the merger probably thirty years from now but technically we did in January first okay very good congratulations never never that fun to to complete all the other processes behind a merger absolutely good deal so we caught you I guess in between two keynotes here mmm-hmm at the show mhm so when he tell us a little bit about what you're covering earlier and what are you gonna cover in the not-too-distant future as soon as you get to your slides after we finish the interview absolutely I'm doing a melange of Amazon Web Services talks this time so I just finished scaling MySQL and Amazon Web Services or I talked about both options of Amazon's RDS and ec2 opportunities and the next session is a deep dive into RDS so the relational database service okay great so we were just at at Amazon summit last week in San Francisco we're at Amazon reinvent last year will be at Amazon some in New York City in a couple of months I think July and then of course back at reinvent in October so clearly Amazon has changed in the world that cloud service has been completely transformative and the enterprise disruptive everyone's running to to catch the Andy Jesse and the team at the show just released it just you know it's like an avalanche of feature improvements feature improvements as the breadth of services gets wider and then the depth of the services gets deeper and then I think they announced their forty third consecutive price decrease yes at the show so there's just relentless innovation both in terms of the feature set as well as the as the as the pricing pressure so how did you get involved on working on the Amazon side and what are you seeing in the marketplace with some of your customers and how is it transforming absolutely we started with Amazon when clients were going to it and it was obviously something we need to support particularly we've always been a very bespoke cost company we do make sure to support our customers but like Amazon we can't do everything so Amazon will start with a core and then they'll evolve based on customer need they'll start digging out new features new functionality and so we did the same thing and as more customers used Amazon we moved to Amazon as more customers use RDS we started using RDS and yeah at this point I would say about 75% of our customers are in some sort of cloud whether it is Amazon Google compute Rackspace cloud and even some folks who are building their own private clouds as well and realistically the own that's the way it's gonna go in a few years everything if every piece of infrastructure will be abstracted and this isn't a really exciting time to be part of the move towards that as we evolve our own maturity matrix for customers to show them where they stand on the DevOps maturity Bay matrix being in a virtualized environment where one can evolve very agile configuration management and infrastructure as code is crucial and so we have that's what we at this point we're helping a lot of our customers get to that point we're helping a lot of our customers not need operation staff and managing everything ourselves which is much easier in a virtual cloud environment and also letting people know when it's not the right choice for them so so on the Amazon side right they have the service of yours your value-add then is helping customers is it a configuration piece is it how they set it up is it what apps are they using I mean where where's your value-add sit on top of the Amazon infrastructure then they're purchasing directly from Amazon so Amazon themselves are utility that's all they want to be and they're not interested in running systems that sit on their environment and so we will help customers from a strategic view deciding which which in which a virtualized environment whether it's Amazon or something else is the right choice we will help them choose which of their architectural components should use an Amazon service versus their own service that they would run anywhere and once we do that we help people migrate to Amazon and we can run it the whole thing okay so you help them run it absolutely yes then are you guys playing an OpenStack as well we do have a few customers in OpenStack it's growing a combat side little earlier but yes absolutely so talk a little bit about when when customers are talking about making the move to the cloud and they want to use Amazon or they want to use a service like that what are some of the strategic gates you walked in through and making a decision as to whit you know what should be where what workloads should be in a public cloud what workload should be maybe on their own or behind the firewall or you know where a hybrid is more appropriate absolutely and I will say that up until recently we have predominantly worked with startups who are about in their mid level of maturity so not as much enterprise clients who might have much more hybridized environment realistically a lot of the folks that come in don't have large operations staff they don't and the staff that they do have want to be working on features right what we call development velocity and so we look for customers who recognize that and item a at this point I don't think a virtualized environment is optional anymore and more often than not unless they are an enterprise or unless they have a large commitment to an existing data center going with something like open stock doesn't make a lot of sense but that being said we do make sure with anyone that we are bringing in that we set everything up with a mitigated risk so that it is easy to get them out even though we've never had an issue with any specific provider for risk purposes it makes a lot of sense to use multiple clouds or to use an on-premise and other hybrid so then so that their startups or most of the applications that you're getting involved with their new applications that they're building as part of their startup a game or whatever one if you can give any examples so we're very much in their retail vertical and the gaming vertical we do have a few others in healthcare and you know sometimes I tease sometimes infrastructure but predominantly and most of the verticals we work with are either retail or gaming and in those environments we will either be brought in for a system that has grown past often that's already either already in Amazon but it was not architected for scale okay and we will come in and help them get to that next level okay more often than not we do have of course some green fields we're doing a large large infrastructure change right now for a new acquisition for Shutterfly okay and in that environment we're going right to RDS and using that okay so one of the one of the potential knocks on a cloud environment or infrastructures of service is is is there a point in time where the cost of rent suddenly becomes more than it would be the cost to buy we're often for speed of implementation getting started clearly renting a service is the easier and lower friction do you find that with your customers or as Amazon able to keep up in terms of pricing reductions where they can stay where they tend to stay kind of Amazon pure as opposed to hitting you know kind of this breaking point where maybe we really should put in our own infrastructure and it's getting really expensive to continue to kind of rent the service absolutely in RDS there was a there was a point where people were getting priced out of RDS which is more expensive than the instances underneath and at that point we had a lot of customers coming to us asking to move the new PI think they dropped most of their prices and RDS by 40% last week so it's amazing right so it gets a lot better some of the larger systems can be very significant but at this point you can get a managed database server that is fully redundant for about six thousand dollars a year and it's pretty impressive what we will find is we'll help customers manage cost one of the things people forget is you have a whole new component of infrastructure management in how do you whether it's using reserved instances spot instances auto scaling up and auto scaling down removing snapshots there's so many opportunities to manage costs that people forget about and we make sure that that happens as well so that people don't get runaway kraut runaway bills so to really find really fine-tune their their their instance at AWS or kind of cost optimize based on because there's a lot of choices right there's a lot of there's a lot of variables in an Amazon in a lot of Amazon purchase yes and there are absolutely tons of ways to save money it's essentially just another facet of automation becomes the cost management part of it and that's one of the most amazing things of Amazon is particularly for a customer that can leverage elasticity whether it's because of peak seasons retail during Christmas education during semesters any customer that can rely on the Dyna Missa tee of an Amazon can scale up can scale down can shift out and really pay when they need to pay or not pay when they don't okay so you've been doing this for a while from kind of a longer-term perspective right there's a lot of new entrants into the public cloud space really you know Google compute and you know Cisco just announced a billion-dollar initiative I think last week for their new public cloud you got HP cloud but sure there's a lot of clouds out there mmm but clearly it appears that anglin's got a giant lead I think Andy said it was their eighth year of the AWS summit what's your kind of perspective as a kind of a service provider looking at the market and trying to deliver value to your customers as to Amazon's position relative to everybody else kind of jumping in the game so at this point we predominantly work with either Amazon Google compute or Rackspace and that is where we focused we don't do a significant amount of Windows so we haven't really played too much with Azure at this point we are predominantly working with what our customers already have if it is completely Greenfield which it's pretty rare they'll bring in a service provider that early we would tend to focus on a combination of those two and that of course will depend on the strategy and the goal we don't want to over build something before they actually have the revenue and the business model supporting what they need there's a lot of options out there like anything it's a matter of managing risk and as a I am a CEO but I was a database administrator by trade and managing risk is core so I will not go to a new database release in its first year and I will not go to a new cloud and probably its first three to four years unless there's something extraordinarily compelling feature that just makes you be willing to accept a huge amount of risk right okay so let's shift gears a little bit and talk about we're here at Percona live shows growing I think he said it's his tenth year of the show why is this important event what's the what's the feeling you're getting here at the show from the community so I started coming to these back when they was in our Riley show when it was the O'Reilly of MySQL conference versus percona who took it over open source is a huge deal and it still is extraordinarily relevant I believe very firmly that open source technology and the access to code the access to tech and to software and the access to open source education is what's going to help us get into the next level of the technological workforce at this point I'm not sure you probably know the numbers since I know you do this more than me but even in Silicon Valley there are 300,000 Latino families who don't have access to computers and internet so any any come any organization like percona liven like MySQL that is based on open source needs to be supported because that is going to be what helps a child in Kenya solve cancer figure out cancer and get us to the next level so that's why I come out here yeah we support closed source databases too but wherever possible we're going to come support an open source product so let's shift gears again cuz I know you're passionate about diversity in tech and you've talked about some of the digital divide you know with with families and people having access to the to the tools and then of course the education and and and the focus on stem we're big fans of women in tech and diversity in tech all of us have we don't have a lot of women hosts but we all have a lot of daughters yeah we're pretty passionate about it and growing up here in the heart of the valley clearly girls need to learn how to code mom so can you talk about some of the things that you get involved with to support that effort in terms of diversity in tech absolutely one one amazing incident actually is at percona live last year they did not have a code of conduct and we had a bit of an issue and some there was a some conversations had and this year we're gonna live now has a code of conduct which helps women come out and feel like there's a clearly written statement that they will not be harassed they will not be intimidated that they are welcome and that is a huge step in and of itself and it was really an issue last year in the year 20 2013 there always is there always is it's amazing when you actually start looking at women speaking out about harassment and you know even abuse at conferences how it quickly devolves into them being attacked stalked harassed it's pretty radical so I was very happy that rakonin took that on and got that in place I was on the content committee for this conference and I was in the beginning there were only about five five proposals out of 400 from women and they were really very nice about helping me extend it and get out there and get more women presenting at the conference here which is great I'm speaking at a bright role hosted data-driven Women events in about a month and wherever I can getting out there at the ghats he just invited me to code his craft to talk about that at their meetups as well good that's he's an amazing organization for bringing women into tap good it seems to be getting more exposure so just a shot out four we've got a great women in tech playlist of women in tech that have been on the cube if you go to Silicon angle dot TV look under playlist women in tech I think we just looked before we came on there we have 97 women of all roles responsibilities seniority size of companies who've been on the cube and you'll be joining that list shortly X so we're big fans and and it's it's it is amazing in 2014 that this is still an issue but we do see more and more at these conferences that there's often you know kind of a women in tech launch track or special networking event or or thanks to really encourage two women to be not only involved but really kind of take a leadership position we saw that back with at EMC world last year with Sheryl Sandberg as well so that's that's great so what's kind of next you've been doing this a long time you've been involving this community a while what's kind of the next big hill to take in terms of the micing community well right now for us it's DevOps and I don't know if you're familiar with it but near this culture of bringing the development operations teams together as we have more infrastructure as code as we get to a point where you cannot compete if you cannot continually push code out push change out that's where we reached and with every customer we're working on we're pushing development velocity getting them to have you know the ability to push code out as fat as rapidly as they won and as safely as they want we just announced today an open-source toolkit for continuous delivery for databases that is starting with MySQL and we feel like that's going to be the next step big data of course is there we are in the middle of ramping up a cassandra team which is a very good addition in the data ecosystem to a relational system like like MySQL and the demand for it is insane so we're very excited to have just brought on our second full time experience because Andre DBA and a building that out as well so in the clients right there's a lot of huge trends right now there's there's kind of mobile first right it was to recently get the mobile first as a driver there's the DevOps culture and and agile software development you know just get stuff out in this this continual pace of improvements and bug fixes and rolling and then and then finally the data first mm-hmm which is kind of the newer trend within your clients of those three things what's really the the primary driver if you had to pick one of the three I will answer that in a way that doesn't answer your question but that happens often excellent right now I believe it's DevOps in a few years and no one will know what that is anymore it will be ubiquitous it is an opportunity right now and then it's going to be data at this point you know we're in the cloud environment and it is the next revolution this virtualized environment infrastructure as a utility just like the electrical and industrial revolutions but data really is a big data and you know how does how to get the data in right now we're in the basics how do you get all of that data in there how do you keep it available how do you manage these huge forms of data but soon it will be about the machine learning and the continued evolution of pulling insights from it and that's what we're gonna be seeing awesome Elaine thanks for coming on the cube Thank You V been here with Len Campbell the CEO and co-founder of Blackbird we're at percona live 2014 Santa Clara California you're watching the cube we go out to the events extract the signal from the noise get the smartest people that we can find in the room bring them on the cube ask them the questions you'd like to ask them so thanks for staying with us we'll be back after this short break with our next guest

>>from the cube studios in Palo alto in boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. >>This is a cute conversation. Welcome to the cubes coverage of HP discover 2021 I'm lisa martin. I've got three guests with me here. They're going to be talking about the partnership between HP and AMG. Please welcome George hope worldwide Head of partner sales at HP terry, Richardson north american channel chief for AMG and Peter chan, the director of media channel sales at AMG Gentlemen, it's great to have you on the cube. >>Well, thanks for having us lisa. >>All right, >>we're excited to talk to you. We want to start by talking about this partnership terry. Let's go ahead and start with you. H P E and M D have been partners for a very long time, very long history of collaboration. Talk to us about the partnership >>HB named, He do have a rich history of collaboration spinning back to the days of chapter on and then when A M. D brought the first generation AMG equity process department back in 2017, HP was a foundational partner providing valuable engineering and customer insights from day one AmY has a long history of innovation that created a high performance CP roadmap for value partners like HP to leverage in their workload optimized product portfolios, maximizing the synergies between the two companies. We've kicked off initiatives to grow the chain of business together with workload focused solutions and together we define the future. >>Thanks terry George, let's get your perspective as worldwide had a partner sales at HP. Talked to me about H P S perspective of that AMG partnership. >>Yeah, they say it's uh the introduction of the third generation AMG Epic processors, we've we've doubled our A. M. D. Based Pro Lion portfolio. We've even extended it to our follow systems. And with this we have achieved a number of world records across a variety of workloads and are seeing real world results. The third generation am the epic processor delivers strong performance, expand ability and the security our customers need as they continue their digital transformation, We can deliver better outcomes and lay a strong foundation for profitable apartment growth. And we're incorporating unmatched workload optimization and intelligent automation with 360° security. And of course, uh with that as a service experience. >>But as a service experience becoming even more critical as is the security as we've seen some of the groundbreaking numbers and data breaches in 2020 alone. Peter I want to jump over to you now. One of the things that we see H P E and M. D. Talking about our solutions and workloads that are key areas of focus for both companies. Can you explain some of those key solutions and the value that they deliver for your customers? >>Absolutely. It's from computing to HPC to the cloud and everything in between and the young HB have been focused on delivering not just servers but meaningful solutions that can solve customer challenges. For example, we've seen here in India, the DL- 325 has been really powerful for customers that want to deploy video. Hp nmD have worked together with icy partners in the industry to tune the performance and ensure that the user experience is exceptional. Um This just one example of many of course, for instance, the 3 45 with database 3 65 for dense deployments, it's key the 35 That has led the way in big data analytics. Um the Apollo 60 500 breaking new path in terms of AI and Machine learning, quite a trending topic and m D H p are always in the news when it comes to groundbreaking HPC solutions and oh by the way, we're able to do this due to an unyielding commitment to the data center and long term laser focused execution on the M the road map. >>Excellent. Thanks. Peter. Let's talk about the channel expansion a little bit more terry with you. You know, you and the team here. Channel Chief focused on the channel. What is A. M. D. Doing specifically to expand your channel capabilities and support all of the Channel partners that work with Andy >>great question lisa Campbell is investing in so many areas around the channel. Let's start with digital transformation. Our Channel partners consistently provided feedback that customers need to do more with less between A and B and H P. E. We have solutions that increase capabilities and deliver faster time to value for the customer looking to do more with less. We have a tool on our website called the and metrics server virtualization, Tco estimation tool and those who have visually see the savings. We also have lots of other resources such as technical documentation, A and E arena for training and general CPU's departments can take advantage of aside from solution examples, AMG is investing in headcount internally and at our channel part race. I'm actually an example of the investment MD is making to build out the channel. One more thing that I'll mention is the investment that are, you know, lisa su and Andy are making to build out the ecosystem from head Count to code development and is investing to have a more powerful user experience with our software partners in the ecosystem. From my discussions with our channel partners, they're glad to see A and d expanding our our channel through the many initiatives and really bringing that ecosystem. >>Here's another question for you as channel chief. I'm just curious in the last year, speaking and you talked about digital transformation. We've seen so much acceleration of the adoption of that since the last 15 months has presented such challenges. Talk to me a little bit about some of the feedback from your channel partners about what you am, D N H B are doing together to help those customers needed to deliver that fast time to value, >>you know, so really it's all about close collaboration. Um we we work very closely with our counterparts at H P. E just to make sure we understand partner and customer requirements and then we work to craft solutions together from engaging, technically to collaborating on on, you know, when products will be shipped and delivered and also just what are we doing to uh to identify the next key workloads and projects that are going to be engaged in together? So it's it's really brought the companies I think even closer together, >>that's excellent as a covid catalyst. As I say, there's a lot of silver linings that we've seen and it sounds like the collaboration terry that you mentioned has become even stronger George. I want to go to you. Let's HP has been around for a long time. My first job in tech was Hewlett Packard by the way, many years ago. I won't mention how long but talk to me about the partnership with AMG from H P s perspective, is this part of H P S D N A? >>Absolutely. Partnering is our D N A. We've had 80 years of collaboration with an ever expanding ecosystem of partners that that all play a key role in our go to market strategy. We actually design and test our strategic initiatives in close collaboration with our partners so that we can meet their most pressing needs. We do that through like farmer advisory boards and things of that nature. Um but we have we have one of the most profitable partner programs in the industry, 2-3 times higher rebates than most of our competitors. And we continue to invest in the partner experience in creating that expertise so partners can stand out in a highly competitive market. Uh And Andy is in direct alignment with that strategy. We have strong synergies and a common focus between the two companies. >>And I also imagine George one question and one question to that there's tremendous value in it for your end user customers, especially those that have had to everyone pivot so many times in the last year and have talked to me a little bit about George What you're saying from the customer's perspective. >>Well as Antonio Neri said a couple of years back, the world is going to be hybrid and uh, he was right. We continue uh we continue to see that evolution and we continue to deliver solutions around a hybrid digital world with, with Green Lake and the new wave of digital transformation that we refer to now as the age of insight customers want a cloud experience everywhere. And 70% of today's workloads can easily be re factored for the public cloud or they need to stay physically close to the data and other apps at the emerging edge or in polos are in the data centers. So as a result, most organizations are forced to deal with the complexity of having two divergent operating models and they're paying higher cost to maintain them both with Green Lake, we provide one consistent operating model with visibility and control across public clouds and on prem environments. And that applies to all workloads, you know, whether it's cloud native or non cloud native applications. Um we also have other benefits like no cloud block in or no data. Egress charges, so you have to pay a steep price just to move workloads out of the public cloud. And then we're expanding collaboration opportunities within for our partner ecosystem so that we can bring that cloud experience to a faster growing number of customers worldwide. So we've launched new initiatives uh in support of the core strategy as we accelerate our as a service vision and then work with partners to unlock better customer outcomes with Green Lake and of course, hb compute of which I am d is part of is, is the underlying value added technology. >>Can you expand on some of those customer outcomes as we look at, as I mentioned before, this very dynamic market in which we live. It's all about customer outcomes. What are some of those that from a hybrid cloud environment perspective with Green like that you're helping customers achieve? >>Well, at least Greenland has come out with with about 30 different different offerings that package up some solutions. So you're not just buying infrastructure as a service. We have offerings like HPC as a service. We have offerings like uh, V D I as a service, ml, ops as a service. So we're packaging in technology, some are are some are not ours, but into completing some solutions. So that creates the outcome that the customers are looking for. >>Excellent. Thanks, George and Peter, last question to you again with the hybrid cloud environment being something that we're seeing more and more of the benefits that Green Lake is delivering through the channel. What's your perspective from a. M decide? >>Absolutely lisa. So, so I mean I think it's clear with a MD based systems, customers get the benefit of performance, security and fast time to value whether deployed on prem and cloud on a hybrid model. So please come try out our HP system based on name the processors and see how we can accelerate and protect your applications. Thank you lisa. >>Excellent, Peter George terry, thank you for joining me today. I'm sure there's a lot more that folks are going to be able to learn about what AM D and H. P. Are doing together on the virtual show floor. We appreciate your time. Thank you. Yeah, for my guests, I'm lisa martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of HP discover 2021 Yeah.

>> Narrator: From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCube Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCube. We're still on our Palo Alto studios, we're still getting through COVID and we're still doing all of our remotes, all of our interviews via remote and I'm really excited to have a guest we had around a long time ago. I looked it up is 2016, April 2016. She's Coco Brown, the founder and CEO of the Athena Alliance. Coco, it's great to see you. >> It's great to see you as well. We actually formally started in April of 2016. >> I know, I saw, I noticed that on LinkedIn. So we were at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference in Phoenix, I remembers was a really cool conference, met a ton of people, a lot of them have turned out that are on your board. So yeah, and you formally on LinkedIn, it says you started in May. So that was right at the very, very beginning. >> Yeah, that's right. >> So for people that aren't familiar with the at the Athena Alliance give them the quick overview. >> Okay. Well, it's a little different that it was four years ago. So Athena first and foremost is a digital platform. So you literally log in to Athena. And we're a combination of community access to opportunity and learning. And so you can kind of envision it a little bit like a walled garden around the LinkedIn, meets Khan Academy for senior executives, meets Hollywood agency for women trying to get into the boardroom and senior level roles in the c-suite as advisors, et cetera. And then the way that we operate is you can have a self-service experience of Athena, you can have a concierge experience with Athena with real humans in the loop making key connections for you and you can add accelerators where we build brand packages and BIOS and give you executive coaching. So... >> Wow. >> Kind of a... >> You've built out your services portfolio over the last several years. But still the focus >> yes, we have. is boards, right? Still the focus is getting women on public boards, or is that no longer still the focus? >> No, that's a big piece of it for sure. I mean, one of the things that we discovered, that was the very first mission of Athena, was to bring more women into the boardroom. And as we were doing that we discovered that once you get into a senior realm of leadership in general, there's more things that you want to do than just get into the boardroom. Some of it may be wanting to be an investor or an LP in a fund or become a CEO, or certainly join outside boards but also be relevant to your own inside board. And so we started to look at Athena as a more holistic experience for senior leaders who are attempting to make sure that they are the best they can be in this very senior realm of overarching stewardship of business. >> Awesome. and have you seen, so obviously your your focus shifted 'cause you needed to add more services based on the demand from the customers. But have you seen the receptiveness to women board members change over the last four years? How have you seen kind of the marketplace change? >> Yeah, it's changed a lot, I would say. First of all I think laws like the California law and Goldman Sachs coming out saying they won't take companies public unless they have diverse board data. The statements by big entities that people are paying attention to made the boardroom dynamics a conversation around the dinner table in general. So it became more of a common conversation and common interest as opposed to just the interest of a few people who are trying to get in there. And so that's created a lot of momentum as well as sort of thoughtfulness from leaders and from employees and from larger stakeholders to say the diversity at the top business has to mimic the demographics of society as a whole. And that's become a little bit more accepted as opposed to grudgingly sort of taken in. >> Right. So one of the big problems always it's like the VC problem, right? Is the whole matchmaking problem. How do you, how do qualified people find qualified opportunities? And I wonder if you can speak a little bit as to how that process has evolved, how are you really helping because there's always people that are looking for quality candidates, and there's great quality candidates out there that just don't know where to go. How are you helping bridge kind of that kind of basic matchmaking function? >> Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of different ways to go about it. One is certainly to understand and have real connections into the parts of the leadership ecosystem that influences or makes the decision as to who sits around that table. So that would be communities of CEOs, it's communities of existing board directors, it's venture capital firms, its private equity firms, and as you get really entrenched in those organizations and those ecosystems, you become part of that ecosystem and you become what they turn to to say, "Hey, do you know somebody?" Because it still is a "who do yo know" approach at the senior most levels. So that's one way. The other mechanism is really for individuals who are looking for board seats who want to be on boards to actually be thinking about how they proactively navigate their way to the kinds of boards that they would fit to. I like in a very much to the way our children go after the schools that they might want to when it's time for university. You'll figure out who your safeties, your matches, your reaches are, and figure out how you're going to take six degrees of separation and turn them into one through connections. So those are that's another way to go about it. >> You know, it's interesting, I talked to Beth Stewart from True Star, they also help place women on boards. And one of the issues is just the turnover. And I asked that just straight up, are there formal mechanisms to make sure that people who've been doing business from way before there were things like email and the internet eventually get swapped out. And she said, that's actually a big part of the problem is there isn't really a formal way to keep things fresh and to kind of rotate the incumbents out to enable somebody who's new and maybe has a different point of view to come in. So I'm curious when someone is targeting their A-list and B-list and C-lists, how do they factor in kind of the age of the board composition of the existing board, to really look for where there's these opportunities where a spot opens up, 'cause if there's not a spot open up clearly, there's really not much opportunity there. >> Yeah, I mean, you have to look at the whole ecosystem, right? I mean, there's anything from let's say series A, venture backed private companies all the way up to the mega cap companies, right? And there's this continuum. And it's not, there's not one universal answer to what you're talking about. So for example, if you're talking about smaller private companies, you're competing against, not somebody giving up their seat, but whether or not the company feels real motivation to fill that particular independent director seat. So the biggest competition is often that that seat goes unfilled. When you're talking about public companies, the biggest competition is really the fact that as my friend Adam Epstein of the small cap Institute will tell you, that 80% of public companies are actually small cap companies. And they don't have the same kinds of pressures that large caps do to have turnover. But yeah, it takes a big piece of the challenge is really boards having the disposition collectively to see the board as a competitive advantage for the business as a very necessary and productive piece of the business and when they see that then they take more proactive measures to make sure they have a evolving and strong board that does turnover as it needs to. >> Right. So I'm curious when you're talking to the high power women, right, who are in operational roles probably most of the time, how do you help coach them, how should they be thinking, what do they have to do different when they want to kind of add board seats to their portfolio? Very different kind of a role than an operational role, very different kind of concerns and day to day tasks. So, and clearly, you've added a whole bunch of extra things to your portfolio. So how do you help people, what do you tell women who say, "Okay, I've been successful, "I'm like successful executive, "but now I want to do this other thing, "I want to take this next step in my career"? What usually the gaps and what are the things that they need to do to prepare for that? >> Well, I'm going to circle in then land a little bit. Autodesk was actually a really great partner to us back when you and I first met. They had a couple of women at the top of the organization that were part of Athena, specifically because they wanted to join boards. They are on boards now, Lisa Campbell, Amy Bunszel, Debbie Clifford. And what they told us is they were experiencing everything that we were offering in terms of developing them, helping them to position themselves, understand themselves, navigate their way, was that they simply became better leaders as a result of focusing on themselves as that next level up, irrespective of the fact that it took them two to three years to land that seat. They became stronger in their executive role in general and better able to communicate and engage with their own boards. So I think, now I'm landing, the thing that I would say about that is don't wait until you're thinking oh, I want to join a board, to do the work to get yourself into that ecosystem, into that atmosphere and into that mindset, because the sooner you do that as an executive, the better you will be in that atmosphere, the more prepared you will be. And you also have to recognize that it will take time. >> Right. And the how has COVID impacted it, I mean, on one hand, meeting somebody for coffee and having a face to face is a really important part of getting to know someone and a big part of I'm sure, what was the recruitment process, and do you know someone, yeah, let's go meet for a cup of coffee or dinner or whatever. Can't do that anymore, but we can all meet this way, we can all get on virtually and so in some ways, it's probably an enabler, which before you could grab an hour or you didn't have to fly cross-country or somebody didn't have to fly cross-country. So I'm kind of curious in this new reality, which is going to continue for some time. How has that impacted kind of people's ability to discover and get to know and build trust for these very very senior positions. >> HBR just came out with a really great article about the virtual board meeting. I don't know if you saw it but I can send you a link. I think that what I'm learning from board directors in general and leaders in general is that yes, there's things that make it difficult to engage remotely, but there's also a lot of benefit to being able to get comfortable with the virtual world. So it's certainly, particularly with COVID, with racial equity issues, with the uncertain economy, boards are having to meet more often and they're having, some are having weekly stand ups and those are facilitated by getting more and more comfortable with being virtual. And I think they're realizing that you don't have to press flesh, as they say, to actually build intimacy and real connection. And that's been a hold up, but I think as the top leadership gets to understand that and feel that for themselves, it becomes easier for them to adopt it throughout the organization that the virtual world is one we can really embrace, not just for a period of time. >> It's funny we had John Chambers on early on in this whole process, really talking about leadership and leading through transition. And he used the example, I think had been that day or maybe a couple days off from our interview where they had a board meeting, I think they were talking about some hamburger restaurant, and so they just delivered hamburgers to everybody's office and they had the board meeting. But that's really progressive for a board to actually be doing weekly stand ups. That really shows a pretty transformative way to manage the business and kind of what we think is the stodgy old traditional get together now and then, fly and then get some minutes and fly out, that's super progressive. >> Yeah. I mean, I was on three different board meetings this week with a company I'm on the board of in Minnesota. And we haven't seen each other in person in, I guess since January. (woman laughs) >> So final tips for women that want to make this this move, who, they've got some breathing space, they're not homeschooling the kids all day while they're trying to get their job done and trying to save their own business, but have some cycles and the capabilities. What do you tell them, where should they begin, how should they start thinking about, kind of taking on this additional responsibility and really professional growth in their life? >> Well, I mean, I think something very important for all of us to think about with regard to board service and in general as we get into a very senior level point in our careers at a managing and impact portfolio. People get into a senior point and they don't just want to be an executive for one company, they want to have a variety of ways that they're delivering impact, whether it's as an investor or as a board member or as other things as well as being an operator. And I think the misnomer is that people believe that you have to add them up and they, one plus one plus one equals three, and it's just not true. The truth is that when you add a board seat, when you add that other thing that you're doing it makes you better as a leader in general. Every board meeting I have with [Indistinct] gives me more than I bring back to Athena as an example. And so I think we tend to think of not being able to take on one more thing and I say that we all have a little more space than we think we have to take on the things we want to do. >> Right? That's a good message to me. It is often said if you want to get something done, give it to the busiest person in the room. It's more likely to get it done 'cause you got to be efficient and you just have that kind of get it done attitude. >> That's right. >> All right, Coco. Well, thank you for sharing your thoughts. >> Congratulations, so I guess it's your four year anniversary, five year anniversary [Indistinct] about right? >> Yes, four. >> That's terrific. And we look forward to continuing to watch the growth and hopefully checking in face to face at some point in the not too distant future. >> I would like that. >> All right. Thanks a lot Coco. >> Great talking to you. >> Already. >> She's Coco, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCube. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, you welcome back to the cubes coverage of combo go 19. We're in Colorado this year. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we have a couple of gents joining us alumni of the cube. We're gonna have a really spirited conversation. Please welcome Avinash locks from the CEO of Hedvig, one of our alumni and Don Foxer, the VP of storage solutions from combo and Ann Campbell. Oh gee, Dawn, you can say that, right? Yes, yes. So guys, just a little bit of news coming out with combo and Hedvig in the last month or so, you guys announced combo, announced they were acquiring Hedvig. We last had you on the cube of an Asha DockerCon 18 talking about had veg. And here we are, the announcement comes in September. Acquisitions already closed, lots of buzz, lots of excitement. I'll finish. Let's start with you. Why Convolt >>good question. Uh, first of all, thanks for having me. Uh, C, the way I look at it, I believe the enterprises are gravitating towards complete solutions. If you look at, uh, data management and backup Conwell's clearly the leader in that space, I don't have to say it, I think the analysts have all attested to it. We bring in a very complimentary set of tools that I think coupled together could be a complete solution for a large variety of workloads in the modern data center. And hence it makes it a ideal fit. And also the cultures from an engineering perspective, being Hedwig being a small company in Cornwall is also a small company. But you know, definitely big when compared to what we are at. Um, the cultures were more or less aligned in terms of the engineering culture, so to speak. And that makes it, uh, it made it a very natural choice. Do you know, feel comfortable going into a bigger company. So it worked out really well. >>So Don way we've seen the slides given in the keynote, they talked about the two halves of the brain, the storage management and the data management. Talked to us a little bit about of Hedwig plus con vault and how that goes together. Yeah, for sure. I mean, if you start to look at the, I mean, I guess you look at the marketplace today and you can tell that, uh, kind of the, the lines of delineation of what vendor a versus vendor B versus vendor seat is doing is completely blurred, right? And you'll see that with the attachment of secondary storage, you see that with way backup companies and are driving more towards sort of, you know, uh, the app dev space. And we really start to look at where, what Combolt's doing and, and, and I always say when we talked about the acquisition of Hedvig, it's accelerating the vision that we've had on be able to provide a really super scalable backend for where you can land information that Combalt protects, but the really interesting and cool part, but as you start to realize the tool set that it has within it, it also keeps us very relevant for the future, for where it, in the shifts with applications are going. >>Then it gives us a chance to really give that complete solution from giving the storage, taking the information as it's being created and storing it in a compliance form, storing it off to the cloud, maybe re-purposing it, reusing it into the future. So that's how this really starts to come together. You have the index in control and management, the understanding of what Combolt provides the data management and you have all the flexibility and control that the Hedvig platform provides and Miriam together just gives you that much more agility for how you can use that information, that data. I want to understand what being part of Convolt will be different for Hedvig. I think back to, I've been talking to you since the company came out of stealth. We're huge proponents of the learnings that the hyperscalers had. You came from Amazon and Facebook. Bringing that to the enterprise is great, but building something that is highly scalable versus frigging something that has repeatability and scalability through thousands of deployment, like convoluted have are two separate issues. So, you know, we'll, we'll being part of Convolt, how will that impact your business and your group? >>I think the latter is what is going to make it really exciting for us. I think we added a point where the product that we are bringing into the market or we are brought into the market, it's pretty mature and most of the customers would deploy it and use it. They've been extremely happy with the way it performs and the way it has performed over time. And I think with the combo, they have a larger footprint in the enterprise, large channel infrastructure already in place makes it a lot more easy to push the product out there into the market. And uh, we will be given and VR given complete autonomy plus you what it would it is at Viva doing. And obviously, you know, when you go into any other organization that has got to be some cross-pollination, which is also something that we will be pursuing. But these two things I think, uh, make it very exciting times for us. >>Didn't you? You mentioned the word acceleration a few minutes ago. I'm just wondering from your perspective being called on as long as you have, do you and maybe customers and partners see the Hedvig acquisition as? Sanjay was saying something that's trending on Twitter today is the hashtag new comm dolls. Yep. So it's actually interesting. At first when the acquisition was announced, there were some partners that were like, Hmm, okay, I need to think about this a little bit. And then as we kind of went through the talk track and sort of explain some of the power with the head of the platform delivers, there were a number of, there was suddenly aha. Like you could just tell the light bulb went off. I get where this is going. And then you see what we're doing from Convolt metallic as well, right? The the SAS offering. And you see how we're continuing to drive all of the innovation in that core product. I don't know if you want to call it a combo to Datto, but I do think we've entered a new era of what we're delivering back to our customers from a solutions perspective. And it's really exciting because you can talk to a customer about backup and give them the best solution in the world, but we can also start to expand and get a whole heck of a lot more strategic and help be thought leaders and some of these new spaces, >>well, some of the commentary that I was reading about the acquisition from analysts say, Hey, this is a potentially, this is going to give Combalt opened the door for a bigger presence in the surge defined space, a big market. Also elevate comm vault from a Tam perspective. Talk to us about those perspectives. As some of the analysts said, when Sanjay came onboard nine months ago, Hey combo, you really got to expand your market share and get a kick out of just cultivating the large enterprises. How do you see that? >>Yeah, sure. I mean that's the easiest place to point to the secondary storage market place, right? So the secondary to storage marketplace, it's double digits in billions of market share. And that can be anything from things like object storage. It could just be scale-out, NAS. It could be, um, it could be, you know, companies like Cohesity and others that have a platform that build out secondary storage is a whole slew of people that play in that space. Uh, it also goes back to like appliances in a whole form of other storage types that are purpose built. So the secondary storage is a fairly broad sort of brush that people paint. You know, something is not running production workloads. But the interesting thing is, and this is kind of something that when the we've talked about we see those lines of private production or primary, secondary, tertiary, that's starting to really blur out. >>Um, so that market share that is in secondary storage, that market share that attaches also to object for where your, where we're going from a even a scale out backup perspective. You know, those are I going to be target areas that we can start to give customers solutions into in a really integrated and complete way. Uh, one of the customer areas that I've heard from Convolt that I'm curious if it might be applicable for your, for your team of an option is the service providers, you know, they've sold and you talk about how many end users actually leverage Convolt technology. It's like almost an order of magnitude more when you go through the service providers and when you talk about scalability and the requirements that that seems to be like it could be a fit for a. >>Yeah, you could even think of someone who is running a private cloud in their own on premise data center as being a service provider for their own internal consumption. Grateful folks working in tunnel. I guess going to an MSB or even do a larger service providers is an extrapolation of the same thing. So it'll obviously make it a very natural fit because you know, everyone understands the cap X game. Operational efficiency is the harder problem to actually crack. And with systems like this you can actually address that very simplistically. And it also allows them to kind of scale with their growth in a very effortless fashion. So it makes an agile mix a lot of natural sense. >>And that's an interesting point cause that aligns well too with the way the Combalt software themselves also attack attaches, right? We do a much better job of running that value back to the larger enterprise or those that are seeing more of that operational efficiency challenge. So it's another reason why this is a great intersection or you know, great, great marriage of the two technologies, um, what want to speak with, I think we talked about Sanjay about he of being at puppet worked a lot with dev ops in that environment. I heard from Convolt COO that five of the 45 developers that are here doing whiteboard session come from Hedvig. So speak a little bit of that, that customer base, the developer community microservices, you know, that kind of modern >>I think we have a, a demo session. I don't know what time, but we're going to give you a comprehensive overview of how, uh, you know, kind of Kubernetes orchestrated containers works with Hedwig. I think if people are here, they're hearing me, they should definitely check it out. And, uh, if you look at some of our larger customers, they deploy us in environments where they want to have practically zero touch provisioning capability, right? Which means that you got your infrastructure ought to be completely programmable, which bitches, what the DevOps movement is all about. And uh, the comprehensive set of APIs that be exposed for control and data plane, it actually makes that pipe dream a reality. >>Let's talk a little bit about the integrations. I mentioned a minute ago. The announcement was in September, the acquisitions close and you guys have already really started to buckle down into the integration between the technologies. Can you talk to us about that? And then I'd love to get your perspective on existing had big customers, you know, what door does this open for them? >>So for an existing customers, they are very happy because they now are convinced that we have a larger footprint and we have a lot more people to help to help support them as they grow and they don't have this field anymore as to how perhaps a small startup would be able to support them. So that fear factor goes away. So they're all very relieved on that front. Second, from an integration perspective, uh, there's a lot of things that we are working on from a technological perspective that is getting deep into the roadmap. I dunno if he can talk much about it at this point, but a non-technology we're all well integrated in, we are all Commonwealth employees now Gunwale badges come while emails so well integrated at this point. >>I guess maybe from a high level perspective, what we probably can say is probably number one, we want to make sure the experiences across both products are merged. So it truly views as you know, one one true company vault and providing that experience. And that's everything from installation to support to how we communicate and manage the, the ongoing relationship with the customer. So that's one there's always work to do there. Right? And the next core piece is just how we can make the two technologies basically make, you know, the had big platform, a part of the combo data platform and make sure those two integrations are as tight as possible. And that will be a longterm path, right? Because as that becomes more integrated, there's going to be new ideas, new innovations, and she's gonna come up with a whole lot of new things that we could potentially do that will meet the needs for the customer. And I think the third piece that ties back into the dev ops conversation is we've got two really solid API stacks. So bringing those together is going to be important in the future as well. So that it really is a crisp and clean sort of programmable infrastructure for customers from how the storage is delivered all the way to how it's managed and potentially even deleted out the back end. >>Well, with how quickly we're seeing Convolt move in the last nine months, I mean this year there's so much innovation from leadership changes in sales and marketing, new GTM routes, et cetera. What can, what can combo customers expect in terms of, I know you can't divulge too much on the roadmap, but you know with faster, shorter cycles of development. >>So I'll go first. I mean I think as you look at the sort of sort of where maybe the easiest way to answers is we're staying in front of where the market is heading and we're making sure we're providing solutions that can get customers to solve those challenges when they hit them. We don't want them to have to hit those challenges, have to then struggle, fight, figure out what it is they can do while everyone in their market moves past them. We want to be there with a solution that answers some of those challenges that day. They hit them more preemptive, preemptive, absolutely more preempted to react. That's a perfect way to put it. Thank you. So that's part of what they can expect from us and we do a lot of research and working with our customers and understanding where their future needs are, where they're going. We spend a lot of time with industry experts and analysts too for what they're seeing across the globe. Obviously we can only go so far and travel and talk to so many people. So we leveraged the collective of the industry to also kind of have a pretty good gauge and I'll say we've got leaders like Amash and Sanjay that are also awesome at just kind of having a really good pulse on where the industry is going and what we should be doing as a company. >>I'm just getting pickled in so too early for me to answer how that roadmap may Michio or how customers may perceive. But I think, uh, what should be very encouraging is that we bring so many, so much more capabilities. The enterprise has always been in this mindset of procuring things with a single throat to choke and this makes it very easy for them. >>What's the question of done for you is some of the things that Sue and I have talked about with guests today is from a partner perspective, there's been a lot of positive feedback in Navarro community we talked with and think we're talking with Rick de Blasio tomorrow. Want to understand, you know, some of the new partner programs, how are his Convolt traditional channel, your VARs, but also all the way up to your. Their reaction to all of the changes and the acceleration that Cohmad is driving is particularly with respect to head veg. >>For the most part it's been incredibly positive and even though the technology partner side, it's, it's fairly positive and also it forces us to have a much closer conversation on. All right, let's continue to talk about how we're successful together in the marketplace because we understand that our customers will need more than one vendor, more than two vendors to be successful as they kind of tackle the challenges that are in front of them. So you know, we're not going to stop our innovation and partnering and technology ecosystem development because that's so important to allow the customer to have the choice. We know that we're only one of many players and so we want to give them the choice to use whatever they need. We just want to help them control and manage the data >>and help them maybe simplify their operations. And especially as you know, we don't, we don't go to any event without talking about multi-cloud. It's the world that most businesses are living in. And, and I'll say, if you're not you Willy, how can what combat is doing now, not just with Hedvig but also just with some of the structural changes and directions that you guys have made it help customers embrace multicloud actually be able to protect, recover that data and >>you know, shift, sift insights from it. Yeah, sure. Please. All right, so multi-cloud, so first it starts off in tying in the ecosystems of the different cloud players offer, right? You need to be able to sort the support their platforms. You need to be able to continue to abstract out the information, the data itself that may be tied to an application or tied to a platform and give that level of portability. It's actually something that Hedvig does a fantastic job on as well and when you start to have that level of portability, well then it becomes a heck of a lot easier to either use other platforms within that cloud or a separate cloud or something you might homegrown build yourself as. That's part of the big value prop. We're doing all of these things not to have the best infrastructure but to make it easier for customers to use that data. So that means integrating and being strong partners to cloud players. It means continuing to be a really technological leader in how you can support all the platforms and services they offer and really allow the data to rise to the top as far as the value perspective goes and that's really where we continue to drive our innovation, at least on the on the data management side. >>That's a good Commonwealth perspective. The Hedvig perspective comes from a different angle. We always look at data portability, be it multicloud or even be at hybrid via met a lot of customers who went down the hybrid pot and then had to pull back. And when you pull back, you don't want to be in a situation where you're rewriting your entire application because your data is persisted in a very different way. But providing that data portability with an abstraction that sits between the application and the underlying physical infrastructure, I think is going to be a very important solution to take. You know, view often in this mix and hence together it becomes a comprehensive solution. >>Well guys, we thank you so much for stopping by joining soon and be on the program telling us a little bit more about this exciting new venture that you guys are going in together and we look forward to hearing more about it as it unfolds and maybe getting some customers on the cube next year. Absolutely. All right. Thank you. Thanks for Sumeta, man. I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube from convo. Go 19.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Magento Imagine 2019, brought to you by Adobe. >> Hey, welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. We're coming to you live from Magento Imagine 2019. Welcoming to theCUBE for the first time Gary Specter, the VP of Commerce, Sales and Customer Success at Adobe. Gary, welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you, I'm thrilled to be here. >> So there's about 3,500 people here, you guys have, from 60-plus countries. >> Gary: That's right. >> I think 100 sessions, 150 speakers. People coming down from ceilings, up from the floor. >> Gary: And we're streaming live. >> First ever live stream, yes. >> On the general set, first ever. That's right. Someone tweeted out that there are 35,000 people watching. >> Marketing probably loved that and then had a heart attack at the same time. >> Yeah, I'm sure they did. Not exactly accurate but I'll take what I can get. >> Tell us about the event, the spirit of the event. This is kind of, yesterday evening things kicked off. What of some of the things you've hearing from customers, partners, developers? >> So, I think the thing that's really unique about Imagine is that it does involve partners, the community, developers, along with Magento and our customers and our prospects. And it makes it really different because the developer community and our partners are so passionate about Magento. And I think everybody feels really good about the marriage of Adobe and Magento. You had technologies that were very well aligned, not overlapping. It enables us to extend the capabilities of what we can do from both the Adobe side or the Magento side. I like to say that the color palette got a lot bigger, and I think there's a lot of excitement around that and what that means to all of these people, developers, partners, the ecosystem, customers, prospects. So the energy is really high. I think obviously people are, what's next? And what does this mean for Magento? And I think it means investment, I think it means a higher rate of agility and an expansion of what we do. Acceleration of our roadmap. So I think people are very, very positive. And this is my fourth Imagine, and it's really, I've never felt the energy higher than at this Imagine. So it's exciting for me. >> Gary, one of the interesting ways that you talked about community and everybody wants developer communities, right? And you guys also have open source as a passion. But you phrased it in a way I've never heard before, is that you like going to sleep at night knowing that there's a whole bunch of other CEOs betting their business-- >> That's right. >> On this platform. >> Yeah. >> And it's not just you guys, so it's a really different way to think about open source. We often think of the developers and there's smart people outside your four walls contributing code. But it's not often couched in terms of the business terms. >> No. >> If there's are other people betting their business, thinking about how are they gonna help grow your business by building their business on top of Magento. >> That's what drives the passion of the community. These people realize that there's a symbiotic relationship here. If Magento successful, the ability for them to be successful is very broad. And if Magento's not successful, then you have to ask yourselves did I make the right bet? So a lot of our tech partners have build these great solutions on top of Magento, and it's a partnership. And you don't have that anywhere else, and again, I sleep better at night, to your point. I don't know where you got that quote, but it's actually mine, it's phenomenal. >> No, no, I think I got it from your Argentina 2017 talk perhaps. >> Actually, it's true. I know that all of these tech partners, these CEOs, they have my back. I'd like them to know I have theirs. And I don't think Adobe has any, there's no reason or rhyme why that would ever change. I think Adobe will enhance it. And I think that's why there so much excitement here. >> Well, and it's really a validation and what we talked about before, the prior segment, was now to bring the marketing tools, and the AI and all the power that's in that big building in San Jose, free the commerce transaction, really, to your point, adds so much more horse power to the total solution. >> Like I said, color palette just got a lot bigger. There's so many more things that we can do and so many more colors we can use to create these great experience for our brands and our customers, that we could've done before but it was a lot of work, but now we've got all of the makings of a platform that will enable that and we're already pretty far along in taking the Adobe experience cloud and making that work. And I'm just really excited about the future and what this offers for our customers and our brands. >> We've heard a number of guests that talk about just what you were referring to a minute ago, and that was really this symbiosis of Adobe, the power that Adobe brings, the data that Adobe brings, along with Magento, So a new Adobe commerce buy was just launched a couple of months ago, at Adobe Summit powered by Magento Commerce, but you look at it as analytics, advertising, marketing, commerce, fundamentals for managing what is a changing and highly demand customer experience, 'cause we want more and more things accessible from right here. So some of the feedback from customers, partners, developers since that announcement and now going "Ahh, okay now I can actually touch and see and play with this two symbiosis machines coming together." >> Yeah, I think it's not a hard thing to get. I think when the acquisition first happened, there's a little let's wait and see and make sure they get it right. And I think what I feel today, or what people have given to me today is the feedback that they're believers. They know that we're gonna execute on this strategy, and this strategy is gonna allow us to extend our lead on our competitors, which in return, allows these brands and these commerce players to extend their lead on their competitors. >> Let's talk about the small/medium business folks for a minute. When the announcement was made last year, the intention, right after Imagine 2018 I believe, for Adobe to acquire Magento, and then right after they acquired Marketo, there was some concern for is Adobe gonna kind of shift what Magento has been doing, so successfully for so long, away from focusing on those smaller merchants to the enterprise folks. Yesterday and today, we heard some great, exciting announcements with what you guys are doing with Amazon Sales Channel, with Google Shopping, and it sounded like the small and medium business size folks were going "Yes, this is what we need." Talk to us a little bit about that. >> I mean, you mentioned two, along with PWA and some of the other things that we're doing. While these can be leveraged in the enterprise, they were built for the mid-market in the SMB space. And there is no doubt that Adobe and Magento both understand how important SMB and the mid-market is. And in fact, we've seen acceleration in the SMB space since the acquisition, from the Magento side of the house. And Adobe is fully committed and knows that there's market share there to be had. And the application or the business problems that we solve at the enterprise, are still applicable for the mid-market and the SMB space. They're handled in a little bit different of a manner, but they have same aspirations. And the solution's gonna be able, when you look across everything that you're gonna be able to do, it plays for both markets. And Adobe has an incredible opportunity to really drive market share in this mid-market. They don't have a big footprint there today. Even if you capture just a small portion of it, and its our plans to capture a large portion of it, but even a small portion of it is gonna make a big impact on Adobe. So I think that we will see acceleration in the mid-market and in the SMB space with what we're doing, what we're developing together, and the different types of products that we can offer to those markets that Adobe has in its broader portfolio. >> And of course on the enterprise side, what we don't see here that we saw at Adobe Summit a couple weeks back are some of the really big integrators who have huge practices built around and on top of the Adobe tool set that now you get to leverage. I'm sure you're pretty excited about as running field. There's, again, a whole nother group of people, not necessarily CEOs, but managing partners, who have bet their jobs, bet their livelihood, bet their practices on this, and now you getta take advantage of those resources as well. >> Absolutely, and I think that a lot of the large integrators and partners, I think everybody's starting to understand that commerce is very different now than it was five or 10 years ago, right? I call it bite small, chew fast. And HP is a great example, where they started in some of the smaller APAC countries and then went to Brazil, and they're looking at the US last, but they're taking it a step at a time. One country, one country, one country. And a lot of our big retailers or brands that wanna expand globally are doing the same things, or companies that have portfolios of brands, one at a time. Bite small, chew fast. Launch, be successful, launch, be successful. And I think the SIs, including the large partners, understand that and they're changing the way that they look at businesses holistically. So I think right time, right place. >> Yeah, we had Gillian Campbell from HP on right after her keynote this morning, and it was an interesting kinda POC program. And I said what was some of the market dynamics that identified APAC as the right market to start in. And part of that, I think, was that from a historical legacy perspective of using Magento on the HP Inc. side. But some of the things I found interesting to them was that leveraging the data to understand the cultural e-commerce differences snd how different cultures interact with different social media platforms or purchasing platforms differently, and how important it is to really understand those commerce patterns and start to drive conversions from there there and then go success, roll it out, rinse and repeat. >> And she nailed it right? I mean, buy online, pick up in store versus having it delivered to your home, if you live in the middle of India, what's the reality of you getting that delivered in an hour? And if you look at country like Russia, which is very spread out, right, so there's not a high density outside of a lot of their major cities and you have a lot of the same issues. If you're gonna have it ship to your home, how long is it gonna take? It might be easier just to go pick it up in the store. And I think it's different in every region. And it's good to be able to have access to that data to get a good read on what are the things our customers want specifically to drive the experience they need within that region. >> Right, key for a company whether it's something the size of an HP Inc. or not, to be able to scale globally, but also have that sort of local market adaptation where you're able to react, understand the preferences in your markets, and deliver exactly what those consumers want. So having a tool like Magento as the power to enable that global scale regional adaptation, it's a driver. >> And I think you start to add complexity when you look at do they use their phone, do they use their computer? Do they use social networks and buy buttons? I have an interesting dynamic in my own house where I've got a 13-year-old, and the way that she would shop online is different than the way that my wife would shop online, which is very different from how I would shop online. I browse and go to the store. My wife uses her computer. My daughter shops on Pinterest, or Instagram, or Facebook. Very different journeys for the three of us, and we could be buying the same thing, and we're all gonna do it differently. So it crosses generations as well. >> So, Gary, it feels like kinda the dust has settled post-Adobe acquisition where everybody feels kinda comfortable, and it's been a year and everything didn't go bananas. So as you look forward now, after things have kinda settled, what are some of your priorities over the next year, If we sit down a year from now, what are you working on? >> I can tell you that for me, the biggest priority for me is to make sure that the mid-market and the SMB flywheel is effective, the way that we go to market, the way that we target that segment. And it's not that I'm not interested in the enterprise. I'm extremely interested in the enterprise. But we have a lot of people that are working on the enterprise. And Adobe doesn't have deep domain expertise around the mid-market. But with Marketo and Magento, you now do. So for me personally, I wanna make sure that that flywheel is well-run, it's well-oiled, it's set up for success, that operationally, the things that we do to drive market share in that segment run as effectively as the rest of Adobe on the enterprise side. It's a new sales motion for Adobe. But the good news is I think Adobe understands that. We understand that as a company, and I think over the next year, for me, that's where my focus is gonna be. >> So if we keep looking out to the next year, this is your fourth Magento Imagine. >> It is. >> Is there gonna be a Magento Imagine 2020? >> So I will tell you that there will be an Imagine 2020, and I will share details around that Wednesday. I've been asked to help close Imagine out, and when I do, I will be thrilled to announce our plans for Imagine 2020. >> So can folks watch that on the livestream tomorrow, Wednesday, that 15th? >> They can. >> Are you gonna be coming up from the floor, the ceiling? >> I think I'm probably just gonna dance on out. I have been invigorated, I love being here. Imagine is the one opportunity every year where I come out of this thing just feeling really good about the opportunities that we had ahead of us. And by Wednesday, although tired, I'm usually really happy to be going back and getting in the field with my teams and just driving opportunity. And I think we had an amazing one. >> Well, we'll be all watching. Is it imagine.magento.com to watch the livestream ? Or magento.imagine.com. go to to the Magento.com site, Wednesday tomorrow in the afternoon, you're gonna be able to hear more about what's to come next year. Gary, thank you so much for giving us time today. >> Thanks for having me, enjoy it. >> Our pleasure. >> It's great to meet you all. >> Excellent >> Thank you. >> For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin. Tou're watching theCUBE live from Magento Imagine 2019 from Vegas. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube! (funky electronic music) Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante! >> Welcome, everybody, to this Cube conversation here in our Marlborough offices. I am very excited today, I spent a number of years at IDC, which, of course, is owned by IDG. And there's a new book out, relatively new, called Future Forward: Leadership Lessons from Patrick McGovern, the Visionary Who Circled the Globe and Built a Technology Media Empire. And it's a great book, lotta stories that I didn't know, many that I did know, and the author of that book, Glenn Rifkin, is here to talk about not only Pat McGovern but also some of the lessons that he put forth to help us as entrepreneurs and leaders apply to create better businesses and change the world. Glenn, thanks so much for comin' on theCube. >> Thank you, Dave, great to see ya. >> So let me start with, why did you write this book? >> Well, a couple reasons. The main reason was Patrick McGovern III, Pat's son, came to me at the end of 2016 and said, "My father had died in 2014 and I feel like his legacy deserves a book, and many people told me you were the guy to do it." So the background on that I, myself, worked at IDG back in the 1980s, I was an editor at Computerworld, got to know Pat during that time, did some work for him after I left Computerworld, on a one-on-one basis. Then I would see him over the years, interview him for the New York Times or other magazines, and every time I'd see Pat, I'd end our conversation by saying, "Pat, when are we gonna do your book?" And he would laugh, and he would say, "I'm not ready to do that yet, there's just still too much to do." And so it became sort of an inside joke for us, but I always really did wanna write this book about him because I felt he deserved a book. He was just one of these game-changing pioneers in the tech industry. >> He really was, of course, the book was even more meaningful for me, we, you and I started right in the same time, 1983-- >> Yeah. >> And by that time, IDG was almost 20 years old and it was quite a powerhouse then, but boy, we saw, really the ascendancy of IDG as a brand and, you know, the book reviews on, you know, the back covers are tech elite: Benioff wrote the forward, Mark Benioff, you had Bill Gates in there, Walter Isaacson was in there, Guy Kawasaki, Bob Metcalfe, George Colony-- >> Right. >> Who actually worked for a little stint at IDC for a while. John Markoff of The New York Times, so, you know, the elite of tech really sort of blessed this book and it was really a lot to do with Pat McGovern, right? >> Oh, absolutely, I think that the people on the inside understood how important he was to the history of the tech industry. He was not, you know, a household name, first of all, you didn't think of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and then Pat McGovern, however, those who are in the know realize that he was as important in his own way as they were. Because somebody had to chronicle this story, somebody had to share the story of the evolution of this amazing information technology and how it changed the world. And Pat was never a front-of-the-TV-camera guy-- >> Right. >> He was a guy who put his people forward, he put his products forward, for sure, which is why IDG, as a corporate name, you know, most people don't know what that means, but people did know Macworld, people did know PCWorld, they knew IDC, they knew Computerworld for sure. So that was Pat's view of the world, he didn't care whether he had the spotlight on him or not. >> When you listen to leaders like Reed Hoffman or Eric Schmidt talk about, you know, great companies and how to build great companies, they always come back to culture. >> Yup. >> The book opens with a scene of, and we all, that I usually remember this, well, we're just hangin' around, waitin' for Pat to come in and hand out what was then called the Christmas bonus-- >> Right. >> Back when that wasn't politically incorrect to say. Now, of course, it's the holiday bonus. But it was, it was the Christmas bonus time and Pat was coming around and he was gonna personally hand a bonus, which was a substantial bonus, to every single employee at the company. I mean, and he did that, really, literally, forever. >> Forever, yeah. >> Throughout his career. >> Yeah, it was unheard of, CEOs just didn't do that and still don't do that, you were lucky, you got a message on the, you know, in the lunchroom from the CEO, "Good work, troops! Keep up the good work!" Pat just had a really different view of the culture of this company, as you know from having been there, and I know. It was very familial, there was a sense that we were all in this together, and it really was important for him to let every employee know that. The idea that he went to every desk in every office for IDG around the United States, when we were there in the '80s there were probably 5,000 employees in the US, he had to devote substantial amount-- >> Weeks and weeks! >> Weeks at a time to come to every building and do this, but year after year he insisted on doing it, his assistant at the time, Mary Dolaher told me she wanted to sign the cards, the Christmas cards, and he insisted that he ensign every one of them personally. This was the kind of view he had of how you keep employees happy, if your employees are happy, the customers are gonna be happy, and you're gonna make a lot of money. And that's what he did. >> And it wasn't just that. He had this awesome holiday party that you described, which was epic, and during the party, they would actually take pictures of every single person at the party and then they would load the carousel, you remember the 35-mm. carousel, and then, you know, toward the end of the evening, they would play that and everybody was transfixed 'cause they wanted to see their, the picture of themselves! >> Yeah, yeah. (laughs) >> I mean, it was ge-- and to actually pull that off in the 1980s was not trivial! Today, it would be a piece of cake. And then there was the IDG update, you know, the Good News memos, there was the 10-year lunch, the 20-year trips around the world, there were a lot of really rich benefits that, you know, in and of themselves maybe not a huge deal, but that was the culture that he set. >> Yeah, there was no question that if you talked to anybody who worked in this company over, say, the last 50 years, you were gonna get the same kind of stories. I've been kind of amazed, I'm going around, you know, marketing the book, talking about the book at various events, and the deep affection for this guy that still holds five years after he died, it's just remarkable. You don't really see that with the CEO class, there's a couple, you know, Steve Jobs left a great legacy of creativity, he was not a wonderful guy to his employees, but Pat McGovern, people loved this guy, and they st-- I would be signing books and somebody'd say, "Oh, I've been at IDG for 27 years and I remember all of this," and "I've been there 33 years," and there's a real longevity to this impact that he had on people. >> Now, the book was just, it was not just sort of a biography on McGovern, it was really about lessons from a leader and an entrepreneur and a media mogul who grew this great company in this culture that we can apply, you know, as business people and business leaders. Just to give you a sense of what Pat McGovern did, he really didn't take any outside capital, he did a little bit of, you know, public offering with IDG Books, but, really, you know, no outside capital, it was completely self-funded. He built a $3.8 billion empire, 300 publications, 280 million readers, and I think it was almost 100 or maybe even more, 100 countries. And so, that's an-- like you were, used the word remarkable, that is a remarkable achievement for a self-funded company. >> Yeah, Pat had a very clear vision of how, first of all, Pat had a photographic memory and if you were a manager in the company, you got a chance to sit in meetings with Pat and if you didn't know the numbers better than he did, which was a tough challenge, you were in trouble! 'Cause he knew everything, and so, he was really a numbers-focused guy and he understood that, you know, his best way to make profit was to not be looking for outside funding, not to have to share the wealth with investors, that you could do this yourself if you ran it tightly, you know, I called it in the book a 'loose-tight organization,' loose meaning he was a deep believer in decentralization, that every market needed its own leadership because they knew the market, you know, in Austria or in Russia or wherever, better than you would know it from a headquarters in Boston, but you also needed that tightness, a firm grip on the finances, you needed to know what was going on with each of the budgets or you were gonna end up in big trouble, which a lot of companies find themselves in. >> Well, and, you know, having worked there, I mean, essentially, if you made your numbers and did so ethically, and if you just kind of followed some of the corporate rules, which we'll talk about, he kind of left you alone. You know, you could, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted, you could stay in any hotel, you really couldn't fly first class, and we'll maybe talk about that-- >> Right. >> But he was a complex man, I mean, he was obviously wealthy, he was a billionaire, he was very generous, but at the same time he was frugal, you know, he drove, you know, a little, a car that was, you know, unremarkable, and we had buy him a car. He flew coach, and I remember one time, I was at a United flight, and I was, I had upgraded, you know, using my miles, and I sat down and right there was Lore McGovern, and we both looked at each other and said right at the same time, "I upgraded!" (laughs) Because Pat never flew up front, but he would always fly with a stack of newspapers in the seat next to him. >> Yeah, well, woe to, you were lucky he wasn't on the plane and spotted you as he was walking past you into coach, because he was not real forgiving when he saw people, people would hide and, you know, try to avoid him at all cost. And, I mean, he was a big man, Pat was 6'3", you know, 250 lbs. at least, built like a linebacker, so he didn't fit into coach that well, and he wasn't flying, you know, the shuttle to New York, he was flyin' to Beijing, he was flyin' to Moscow, he was going all over the world, squeezing himself into these seats. Now, you know, full disclosure, as he got older and had, like, probably 10 million air miles at his disposal, he would upgrade too, occasionally, for those long-haul flights, just 'cause he wanted to be fresh when he would get off the plane. But, yeah, these are legends about Pat that his frugality was just pure legend in the company, he owned this, you know, several versions of that dark blue suit, and that's what you would see him in. He would never deviate from that. And, but, he had his patterns, but he understood the impact those patterns had on his employees and on his customers. >> I wanna get into some of the lessons, because, really, this is what the book is all about, the heart of it. And you mentioned, you know, one, and we're gonna tell from others, but you really gotta stay close to the customer, that was one of the 10 corporate values, and you remember, he used to go to the meetings and he'd sometimes randomly ask people to recite, "What's number eight?" (laughs) And you'd be like, oh, you'd have your cheat sheet there. And so, so, just to give you a sense, this man was an entrepreneur, he started the company in 1964 with a database that he kind of pre-sold, he was kind of the sell, design, build type of mentality, he would pre-sold this thing, and then he started Computerworld in 1967, so it was really only a few years after he launched the company that he started the Computerworld, and other than Data Nation, there was nothing there, huge pent-up demand for that type of publication, and he caught lightning in a bottle, and that's really how he funded, you know, the growth. >> Yeah, oh, no question. Computerworld became, you know, the bible of the industry, it became a cash cow for IDG, you know, but at the time, it's so easy to look in hindsight and say, oh, well, obviously. But when Pat was doing this, one little-known fact is he was an editor at a publication called Computers and Automation that was based in Newton, Massachusetts and he kept that job even after he started IDC, which was the original company in 1964. It was gonna be a research company, and it was doing great, he was seeing the build-up, but it wasn't 'til '67 when he started Computerworld, that he said, "Okay, now this is gonna be a full-time gig for me," and he left the other publication for good. But, you know, he was sorta hedging his bets there for a little while. >> And that's where he really gained respect for what we'll call the 'Chinese Wallet,' the, you know, editorial versus advertising. We're gonna talk about that some more. So I mentioned, 1967, Computerworld. So he launched in 1964, by 1971, he was goin' to Japan, we're gonna talk about the China Stories as well, so, he named the company International Data Corp, where he was at a little spot in Newton, Mass.-- >> Right, right. >> So, he had a vision. You said in your book, you mention, how did this gentleman get it so right for so long? And that really leads to some of the leadership lessons, and one of them in the book was, sort of, have a mission, have a vision, and really, Pat was always talking about information, about information technology, in fact, when Wine for Dummies came out, it kind of created a little friction, that was really off the center. >> Or Wine for Dummies, or Sex for Dummies! >> Yeah, Sex for Dummies, boy, yeah! >> With, that's right, Ruth Westheimer-- >> Dr. Ruth Westheimer. >> But generally speaking, Glenn, he was on that mark, he really didn't deviate from that vision. >> Yeah, no, it was very crucial to the development of the company that he got people to, you know, buy into that mission, because the mission was everything. And he understood, you know, he had the numbers, but he also saw what was happening out there, from the 1960s, when IBM mainframes filled a room, and, you know, only the high priests of data centers could touch them. He had a vision for, you know, what was coming next and he started to understand that there would be many facets to this information about information technology, it wasn't gonna be boring, if anything, it was gonna be the story of our age and he was gonna stick to it and sell it. >> And, you know, timing is everything, but so is, you know, Pat was a workaholic and had an amazing mind, but one of the things I learned from the book, and you said this, Pat Kenealy mentioned it, all American industrial and social revolutions have had a media company linked to them, Crane and automobiles, Penton and energy, McGraw-Hill and aerospace, Annenberg, of course, and TV, and in technology, it was IDG. >> Yeah, he, like I said earlier, he really was a key figure in the development of this industry and it was, you know, one of the key things about that, a lot publications that came and went made the mistake of being platform or, you know, vertical market specific. And if that market changed, and it was inevitably gonna change in high tech, you were done. He never, you know, he never married himself to some specific technology cycle. His idea was the audience was not gonna change, the audience was gonna have to roll with this, so, the company, IDG, would produce publications that got that, you know, Computerworld was actually a little bit late to the PC game, but eventually got into it and we tracked the different cycles, you know, things in tech move in sine waves, they come and go. And Pat never was, you know, flustered by that, he could handle any kind of changes from the mainframes down to the smartphone when it came. And so, that kind of flexibility, and ability to adjust to markets, really was unprecedented in that particular part of the market. >> One of the other lessons in the book, I call it 'nation-building,' and Pat shared with you that, look, that you shared, actually, with your readers, if you wanna do it right, you've gotta be on the ground, you've gotta be there. And the China story is one that I didn't know about how Pat kind of talked his way into China, tell us, give us a little summary of that story. >> Sure, I love that story because it's so Pat. It was 1978, Pat was in Tokyo on a business trip, one of his many business trips, and he was gonna be flying to Moscow for a trade show. And he got a flight that was gonna make a stopover in Beijing, which in those days was called Peking, and was not open to Americans. There were no US and China diplomatic relations then. But Pat had it in mind that he was going to get off that plane in Beijing and see what he could see. So that meant that he had to leave the flight when it landed in Beijing and talk his way through the customs as they were in China at the time with folks in the, wherever, the Quonset hut that served for the airport, speaking no English, and him speaking no Chinese, he somehow convinced these folks to give him a day pass, 'cause he kept saying to them, "I'm only in transit, it's okay!" (laughs) Like, he wasn't coming, you know, to spy on them on them or anything. So here's this massive American businessman in his dark suit, and he somehow gets into downtown Beijing, which at the time was mostly bicycles, very few cars, there were camels walking down the street, they'd come with traders from Mongolia. The people were still wearing the drab outfits from the Mao era, and Pat just spent the whole day wandering around the city, just soaking it in. He was that kind of a world traveler. He loved different cultures, mostly eastern cultures, and he would pop his head into bookstores. And what he saw were people just clamoring to get their hands on anything, a newspaper, a magazine, and it just, it didn't take long for the light bulb to go on and said, this is a market we need to play in. >> He was fascinated with China, I, you know, as an employee and a business P&L manager, I never understood it, I said, you know, the per capita spending on IT in China was like a dollar, you know? >> Right. >> And I remember my lunch with him, my 10-year lunch, he said, "Yeah, but, you know, there's gonna be a huge opportunity there, and yeah, I don't know how we're gonna get the money out, maybe we'll buy a bunch of tea and ship it over, but I'm not worried about that." And, of course, he meets Hugo Shong, which is a huge player in the book, and the home run out of China was, of course, the venture capital, which he started before there was even a stock market, really, to exit in China. >> Right, yeah. No, he was really a visionary, I mean, that word gets tossed around maybe more than it should, but Pat was a bonafide visionary and he saw things in China that were developing that others didn't see, including, for example, his own board, who told him he was crazy because in 1980, he went back to China without telling them and within days he had a meeting with the ministry of technology and set up a joint venture, cost IDG $250,000, and six months later, the first issue of China Computerworld was being published and within a couple of years it was the biggest publication in China. He said, told me at some point that $250,0000 investment turned into $85 million and when he got home, that first trip, the board was furious, they said, "How can you do business with the commies? You're gonna ruin our brand!" And Pat said, "Just, you know, stick with me on this one, you're gonna see." And the venture capital story was just an offshoot, he saw the opportunity in the early '90s, that venture in China could in fact be a huge market, why not help build it? And that's what he did. >> What's your take on, so, IDG sold to, basically, Chinese investors. >> Yeah. >> It's kind of bittersweet, but in the same time, it's symbolic given Pat's love for China and the Chinese people. There's been a little bit of criticism about that, I know that the US government required IDC to spin out its supercomputer division because of concerns there. I'm always teasing Michael Dow that at the next IDG board meeting, those Lenovo numbers, they're gonna look kinda law. (laughs) But what are your, what's your, what are your thoughts on that, in terms of, you know, people criticize China in terms of IP protections, etc. What would Pat have said to that, do you think? >> You know, Pat made 130 trips to China in his life, that's, we calculated at some point that just the air time in planes would have been something like three and a half to four years of his life on planes going to China and back. I think Pat would, today, acknowledge, as he did then, that China has issues, there's not, you can't be that naive. He got that. But he also understood that these were people, at the end of the day, who were thirsty and hungry for information and that they were gonna be a player in the world economy at some point, and that it was crucial for IDG to be at the forefront of that, not just play later, but let's get in early, let's lead the parade. And I think that, you know, some part of him would have been okay with the sale of the company to this conglomerate there, called China Oceanwide. Clearly controversial, I mean, but once Pat died, everyone knew that the company was never gonna be the same with the leader who had been at the helm for 50 years, it was gonna be a tough transition for whoever took over. And I think, you know, it's hard to say, certainly there's criticism of things going on with China. China's gonna be the hot topic page one of the New York Times almost every single day for a long time to come. I think Pat would have said, this was appropriate given my love of China, the kind of return on investment he got from China, I think he would have been okay with it. >> Yeah, and to invoke the Ben Franklin maxim, "Trading partners seldom wage war," and so, you know, I think Pat would have probably looked at it that way, but, huge home run, I mean, I think he was early on into Baidu and Alibaba and Tencent and amazing story. I wanna talk about decentralization because that was always something that was just on our minds as employees of IDG, it was keep the corporate staff lean, have a flat organization, if you had eight, 10, 12 direct reports, that was okay, Pat really meant it when he said, "You're the CEO of your own business!" Whether that business was, you know, IDC, big company, or a manager at IDC, where you might have, you know, done tens of millions of dollars, but you felt like a CEO, you were encouraged to try new things, you were encouraged to fail, and fail fast. Their arch nemesis of IDG was Ziff Davis, they were a command and control, sort of Bill Ziff, CMP to a certain extent was kind of the same way out of Manhasset, totally different philosophies and I think Pat never, ever even came close to wavering from that decentralization philosophy, did he? >> No, no, I mean, I think that the story that he told me that I found fascinating was, he didn't have an epiphany that decentralization would be the mechanism for success, it was more that he had started traveling, and when he'd come back to his office, the memos and requests and papers to sign were stacked up two feet high. And he realized that he was holding up the company because he wasn't there to do this and that at some point, he couldn't do it all, it was gonna be too big for that, and that's when the light came on and said this decentralization concept really makes sense for us, if we're gonna be an international company, which clearly was his mission from the beginning, we have to say the people on the ground in those markets are the people who are gonna make the decisions because we can't make 'em from Boston. And I talked to many people who, were, you know, did a trip to Europe, met the folks in London, met the folks in Munich, and they said to a person, you know, it was so ahead of its time, today it just seems obvious, but in the 1960s, early '70s, it was really not a, you know, a regular leadership tenet in most companies. The command and control that you talked about was the way that you did business. >> And, you know, they both worked, but, you know, from a cultural standpoint, clearly IDG and IDC have had staying power, and he had the three-quarter rule, you talked about it in your book, if you missed your numbers three quarters in a row, you were in trouble. >> Right. >> You know, one quarter, hey, let's talk, two quarters, we maybe make some changes, three quarters, you're gone. >> Right. >> And so, as I said, if you were makin' your numbers, you had wide latitude. One of the things you didn't have latitude on was I'll call it 'pay to play,' you know, crossing that line between editorial and advertising. And Pat would, I remember I was at a meeting one time, I'm sorry to tell these stories, but-- >> That's okay. (laughs) >> But we were at an offsite meeting at a woods meeting and, you know, they give you a exercise, go off and tell us what the customer wants. Bill Laberis, who's the editor-in-chief at Computerworld at the time, said, "Who's the customer?" And Pat said, "That's a great question! To the publisher, it's the advertiser. To you, Bill, and the editorial staff, it's the reader. And both are equally important." And Pat would never allow the editorial to be compromised by the advertiser. >> Yeah, no, he, there was a clear barrier between church and state in that company and he, you know, consistently backed editorial on that issue because, you know, keep in mind when we started then, and I was, you know, a journalist hoping to, you know, change the world, the trade press then was considered, like, a little below the mainstream business press. The trade press had a reputation for being a little too cozy with the advertisers, so, and Pat said early on, "We can't do that, because everything we have, our product is built, the brand is built on integrity. And if the reader doesn't believe that what we're reporting is actually true and factual and unbiased, we're gonna lose to the advertisers in the long run anyway." So he was clear that that had to be the case and time and again, there would be conflict that would come up, it was just, as you just described it, the publishers, the sales guys, they wanted to bring in money, and if it, you know, occasionally, hey, we could nudge the editor of this particular publication, "Take it a little bit easier on this vendor because they're gonna advertise big with us," Pat just would always back the editor and say, "That's not gonna happen." And it caused, you know, friction for sure, but he was unwavering in his support. >> Well, it's interesting because, you know, Macworld, I think, is an interesting case study because there were sort of some backroom dealings and Pat maneuvered to be able to get the Macworld, you know, brand, the license for that. >> Right. >> But it caused friction between Steve Jobs and the writers of Macworld, they would write something that Steve Jobs, who was a control freak, couldn't control! >> Yeah. (laughs) >> And he regretted giving IDG the license. >> Yeah, yeah, he once said that was the worst decision he ever made was to give the license to Pat to, you know, Macworlld was published on the day that Mac was introduced in 1984, that was the deal that they had and it was, what Jobs forgot was how important it was to the development of that product to have a whole magazine devoted to it on day one, and a really good magazine that, you know, a lot of people still lament the glory days of Macworld. But yeah, he was, he and Steve Jobs did not get along, and I think that almost says a lot more about Jobs because Pat pretty much got along with everybody. >> That church and state dynamic seems to be changing, across the industry, I mean, in tech journalism, there aren't any more tech journalists in the United States, I mean, I'm overstating that, but there are far fewer than there were when we were at IDG. You're seeing all kinds of publications and media companies struggling, you know, Kara Swisher, who's the greatest journalist, and Walt Mossberg, in the tech industry, try to make it, you know, on their own, and they couldn't. So, those lines are somewhat blurring, not that Kara Swisher is blurring those lines, she's, you know, I think, very, very solid in that regard, but it seems like the business model is changing. As an observer of the markets, what do you think's happening in the publishing world? >> Well, I, you know, as a journalist, I'm sort of aghast at what's goin' on these days, a lot of my, I've been around a long time, and seeing former colleagues who are no longer in journalism because the jobs just started drying up is, it's a scary prospect, you know, unlike being the enemy of the people, the first amendment is pretty important to the future of the democracy, so to see these, you know, cutbacks and newspapers going out of business is difficult. At the same time, the internet was inevitable and it was going to change that dynamic dramatically, so how does that play out? Well, the problem is, anybody can post anything they want on social media and call it news, and the challenge is to maintain some level of integrity in the kind of reporting that you do, and it's more important now than ever, so I think that, you know, somebody like Pat would be an important figure if he was still around, in trying to keep that going. >> Well, Facebook and Google have cut the heart out of, you know, a lot of the business models of many media companies, and you're seeing sort of a pendulum swing back to nonprofits, which, I understand, speaking of folks back in the mid to early 1900s, nonprofits were the way in which, you know, journalism got funded, you know, maybe it's billionaires buying things like the Washington Post that help fund it, but clearly the model's shifting and it's somewhat unclear, you know, what's happening there. I wanted to talk about another lesson, which, Pat was the head cheerleader. So, I remember, it was kind of just after we started, the Computerworld's 20th anniversary, and they hired the marching band and they walked Pat and Mary Dolaher walked from 5 Speen Street, you know, IDG headquarters, they walked to Computerworld, which was up Old, I guess Old Connecticut Path, or maybe it was-- >> It was actually on Route 30-- >> Route 30 at the time, yeah. And Pat was dressed up as the drum major and Mary as well, (laughs) and he would do crazy things like that, he'd jump out of a plane with IDG is number one again, he'd post a, you know, a flag in Antarctica, IDG is number one again! It was just a, it was an amazing dynamic that he had, always cheering people on. >> Yeah, he was, he was, when he called himself the CEO, the Chief Encouragement Officer, you mentioned earlier the Good News notes. Everyone who worked there, at some point received this 8x10" piece of paper with a rainbow logo on it and it said, "Good News!" And there was a personal note from Pat McGovern, out of the blue, totally unexpected, to thank you and congratulate you on some bit of work, whatever it was, if you were a reporter, some article you wrote, if you were a sales guy, a sale that you made, and people all over the world would get these from him and put them up in their cubicles because it was like a badge of honor to have them, and people, I still have 'em, (laughs) you know, in a folder somewhere. And he was just unrelenting in supporting the people who worked there, and it was, the impact of that is something you can't put a price tag on, it's just, it stays with people for all their lives, people who have left there and gone on to four or five different jobs always think fondly back to the days at IDG and having, knowing that the CEO had your back in that manner. >> The legend of, and the legacy of Patrick J. McGovern is not just in IDG and IDC, which you were interested in in your book, I mean, you weren't at IDC, I was, and I was started when I saw the sort of downturn and then now it's very, very successful company, you know, whatever, $3-400 million, throwin' off a lot of profits, just to decide, I worked for every single CEO at IDC with the exception of Pat McGovern, and now, Kirk Campbell, the current CEO, is moving on Crawford del Prete's moving into the role of president, it's just a matter of time before he gets CEO, so I will, and I hired Crawford-- >> Oh, you did? (laughs) >> So, I've worked for and/or hired every CEO of IDC except for Pat McGovern, so, but, the legacy goes beyond IDG and IDC, great brands. The McGovern Brain Institute, 350 million, is that right? >> That's right. >> He dedicated to studying, you know, the human brain, he and Lore, very much involved. >> Yup. >> Typical of Pat, he wasn't just, "Hey, here's the check," and disappear. He was goin' in, "Hey, I have some ideas"-- >> Oh yeah. >> Talk about that a little. >> Yeah, well, this was a guy who spent his whole life fascinated by the human brain and the impact technology would have on the human brain, so when he had enough money, he and Lore, in 2000, gave a $350 million gift to MIT to create the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. At the time, the largest academic gift ever given to any university. And, as you said, Pat wasn't a guy who was gonna write a check and leave and wave goodbye. Pat was involved from day one. He and Lore would come and sit in day-long seminars listening to researchers talk about about the most esoteric research going on, and he would take notes, and he wasn't a brain scientist, but he wanted to know more, and he would talk to researchers, he would send Good News notes to them, just like he did with IDG, and it had same impact. People said, "This guy is a serious supporter here, he's not just showin' up with a checkbook." Bob Desimone, who's the director of the Brain Institute, just marveled at this guy's energy level, that he would come in and for days, just sit there and listen and take it all in. And it just, it was an indicator of what kind of person he was, this insatiable curiosity to learn more and more about the world. And he wanted his legacy to be this intersection of technology and brain research, he felt that this institute could cure all sorts of brain-related diseases, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc. And it would then just make a better future for mankind, and as corny as that might sound, that was really the motivator for Pat McGovern. >> Well, it's funny that you mention the word corny, 'cause a lot of people saw Pat as somewhat corny, but, as you got to know him, you're like, wow, he really means this, he loves his company, the company was his extended family. When Pat met his untimely demise, we held a crowd chat, crowdchat.net/thankspat, and there's a voting mechanism in there, and the number one vote was from Paul Gillen, who posted, "Leo Durocher said that nice guys finish last, Pat McGovern proved that wrong." >> Yeah. >> And I think that's very true and, again, awesome legacy. What number book is this for you? You've written a lot of books. >> This is number 13. >> 13, well, congratulations, lucky 13. >> Thank you. >> The book is Fast Forward-- >> Future Forward. >> I'm sorry, Future Forward! (laughs) Future Forward by Glenn Rifkin. Check out, there's a link in the YouTube down below, check that out and there's some additional information there. Glenn, congratulations on getting the book done, and thanks so much for-- >> Thank you for having me, this is great, really enjoyed it. It's always good to chat with another former IDGer who gets it. (laughs) >> Brought back a lot of memories, so, again, thanks for writing the book. All right, thanks for watching, everybody, we'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante. You're watchin' theCube. (electronic music)

(techy music playing) >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here at the CUBE, we're in our Palo Alto Studios for a CUBE Conversation. You know, it's kind of when we get a break, we're not at a show. It's a little bit quieter, a little calmer situation so we can have a little bit different kinds of conversations and we're excited to have our next guest and talk about a really important piece of this whole cloud thing, which is not only do you need to turn things on, but you need to also turn them off and that's what gets people in trouble, I think, on the cost comparison. We're joined by Krishna Subramanian, she is the co-founder and COO of Komprise, welcome. >> Thank you, thanks for having me on the show. >> Absolutely, so just real briefly for people that aren't familiar, just give them kind of the overview of Komprise. >> Komprise is the only solution that provides analytics and data management in a single package and the reason we started the company is because customers told us that they're literally drowning in data these days. As data for print continues to grow, a lot of it is in unstructured data and data, you know, what's unique about it is that you never just keep one copy of data because if your data is lost, like if your child's first year birthday picture is lost you wouldn't like that, right? >> Jeff: Do not bring that kind of stuff up in an interview. (laughs) We don't want to talk about lost photographs or broken RAID boxes, that's another conversation, but yes, you do not want to lose those pictures. >> So, you keep multiple copies. >> Right, right. >> And that's what businesses do. They usually keep a DR copy, a few backup copies of their data, so if you have 100 terabytes of data you probably have three to four copies of it, that's 400 terabytes and if 70% of that data hasn't been touched in over six months 280 of your 400 terabytes is being actively managed for no reason. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> And Komprise analyzes and finds all that data for you and shows you how much you can save by managing it at lower cost, then it actually moves and archives and reduces the cost of managing that data so you can save 70% or more on your storage. >> Right, so there's a couple components to that that you talked about. So, break it down a little bit more. One is how actively is the data managed, how hot is the data, you know, what type of storage the data is based on, its importance, its relevance and how often you're accessing it. So, one of the big problems, if I heard you right, is you guys figure out what stuff is being managed that way, as active, high value, sitting on flash, paying lots of money, that doesn't need to be. >> That's exactly right, we find that all the cold data on your current storage... We show you how much more you're spending to manage that data than you need to. >> So, how do you do that in an environment where, you know, that data is obviously connected to applications, that data might be in my data center, it could be Amazon or could be at GCP, how do you do that without interfering with my active applications on that data, because even though some of it might be ready for cold storage there might be some of it, obviously, that isn't. So, how do you manage that without impacting my operations? >> That's a great question, because really, you know, data management is like a good housekeeper. You should never know that the housekeeper is there, they should never get in the way of what you're doing, but they keep your house clean, right? And that's kind of what Komprise does for your data, and how do we do that? Well, we do that by being adaptive. So, Komprise connects to your storage just through open protocols. So, we don't make any changes to your environment and our software automatically slows itself down and runs in the background to not interfere with anything active on your storage. So, we are like a good partner to your storage. You don't even know we're there, we're invisible to all the active work and yet we're giving all these important analytics and when we move the data, all the data looks like it's still there, so it's fully transparent. >> Okay, you touched on a couple things. So, one is how do you sit there without impacting it? I think you said you partner with all the big data, or excuse me, all the big storage providers. >> Krishna: Yes. >> You partner with all the three big cloud providers, just won an award at re:Invent, congratulations. >> Krishna: Thank you. >> So, how do you do that, where does your software sit, does it sit in the data center or does it sit at Amazon and how does it interact with other management tools that I might already have in place? >> That's a great question, so Komprise runs as a hybrid cloud service, and essentially there is a console that's running in the cloud, but the actual analysis and data movement is done by virtual machines that are running at the customer's site and you literally just point our virtual machine at any storage you have and we work through standard protocols, through NFS, SMB CIFS, and REST S3, so whether you have NetApp storage or EMC storage or Windows File Servers or Hitachi NAS or you're putting data on Amazon or Azure or Google or an object storage, it doesn't actually matter. Komprise works with all those environments because we are working through open standards, and because we're adaptive we're automatically running in the background, so it's working through open standards and it's non-intrusive. >> Okay, and then if you designate that some percentage of this storage does not need to be in the high, expensive environment, you actually go to the next step and you actually help manage it and move it, so how does that impact my other kind of data management procedures? >> Yes, so it's a great question. So, most of the time you would probably have some DR copy and some backups running on your hot storage, on your flash storage, say, and you don't want to change that and you don't want users to point anywhere else, so what Komprise does is it takes the cold data from all that storage and when it moves that data it's fully transparent. The moved data looks like it's still there on that storage, it's just that the footprint is reduced now, so for 100MB file you just have a one kilobyte link on that storage, and we don't use any stub files, we don't put any agents on the storage, so we don't make any changes to your active environment. It's fully transparent, users and applications think all the data is still there, but the data is now sitting in something lower cost and it's dynamically managed through open standards, just like you and I are talking now and I don't need a translator between us because we both understand English. >> Jeff: Right. >> But maybe if I were speaking Japanese you might need a translator, right? >> Jeff: I would, yeah. (laughs) Yes. >> Krishna: That was just a guess, I didn't know. So, that's kind of how we do it, we work through the open standards and in the past solutions were... We didn't do that, they would have a proprietary protocol and that's why they could only work with some storage and not all, and they would get in the way of all the access. >> But do I want it to look like it looked before if in fact it's ready to be retired into cold storage or Glacier or whatever, because I would imagine there's a reason and I don't know that I necessarily want the app to have access. I would imagine my access and availability of stuff that's in cold storage is very different kind of profile than the hot stuff. >> It depends, you know, sometimes some data you may want to truly archive and never be able to see it live. Like, maybe you're putting it in Glacier, and you can control how the data looks, but sometimes you don't want to interrupt what the applications are doing. You want to just go to a lower cost of storage, like an object storage on-premise. >> Right. >> But you still want the data accessible because you don't want a vague user and application behavior. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> Yeah. >> Okay, so give us a little bit more information on the company. So, you've been around for three years. We talked a little bit before we turned the cameras on, you know, kind of how many people do you have, how many customers, how many rounds of funding have you guys raised? >> Komprise is growing rapidly. We have about 60 people, we have a headquarters in Campbell, California, we also have offices in Bangalore, India. We just hired a new VP of worldwide sales and we're putting field sales teams in different regions, we have over 60 customers worldwide. Our customer base is growing rapidly. Just this last quarter we added about four times the number of customers, and we're seeing customers all the way from general mix and healthcare to big insurance and financial services companies, anywhere where there's data, you know. Universities, all the major research universities are our customers and government institutions, you know, state and local governments, et cetera. So, these are all good markets for us. >> Right, and you said it's a services, like a SAS model, so you charge based on how much data that's under management. >> Yeah, we charge for all the data that's under management and it's a fraction of what you pay to store the data, so our cost is like less than half a penny a gig a month. >> Right, it's pretty interesting, you know, we just got back from AWS re:Invent as well, over 40,000 people, it's bananas. But this whole kind of rent versus buy conversation is really interesting to me, and again, I always go back to Netflix. If anybody uses a massive amount of storage and a massive amount of network and computing where they own like, I don't know, 50% of the Friday night internet traffic, right, in the States is Netflix and they're still on Amazon. I think what's really interesting is that if you... The flexibility of the cloud to be able to turn things on really easily is important, but I think what people often forget is it's also you need to turn it off and so much activity around better managing your investment and the resources at Amazon to use what you need when you need it, but don't pay for what you don't need when you don't, and that seems to be, you know, something that you guys are right in line with and consistent with. >> Yeah, I think that's actually a good way to put it. Yeah, don't pay for data when you don't need to, right? You can still have it but you don't need to pay for it. >> Right, well Krishna, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day to stop by and give us the story on Komprise. >> Yeah, thank you very much, thanks for having me. >> All right, pleasure, she's Krishna, I'm Jeff, you're watching the CUBE. We're at Palo Alto Studios, CUBE Conversation, we'll see you next time, thanks for watching. (techy music playing)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Veritas Vision, everybody. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stu Miniman. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is Day One wrap of the Veritas Vision conference. Veritas, as we said earlier, is a company that has gone through a number of changes, Stu. I mean, I remember when the company launched in 1983. It was sort of, you know, it was focused on backup. It was Veritas and Legato. And they kind of grew through the PC era and the client server era, really started to take off. And then they exploded in the internet era. Their evaluation went through the roof. They ended up buying C8's backup business. They really drove that and then got purchased by Symantec for a big number. I mean, I think the number was 15 billion. I mean, it was in the teens as I recall. Really never did much under Symantec, or, Symantec never did much with Veritas. I think they had a vision of information management and that never really panned out. Spun the company back out, devested it, sale to Carlyle and some other investors for, I thought the number was 8 billion, somebody told me 7 billion today. That must be net of cash. 2.3 billion dollars in revenue. My understanding from sources is that valuation is way, way up, nearly double from 2015. Now, maybe that's an inflated number, but I'm not surprised. The market's been booming. So that's sort of the inside organizational issues. We're here at The Aria, what do you say, Stu, a couple thousand people, 2500? >> Yeah, it's about 2000, Dave, and it's interesting, I talked to some people that had gone to the old Veritas Vision, years ago, and gotten up to about 4000 or 5000 people. But, grown since last year, good energy at the show. We got to talk to the Vox community people. They've got 10,000 people online contributing to their forums, participating, launched the VIP program for some of the super users they have here. Definitely good crowd in the keynote. Good people clapping and participating, getting excited. It surprised me a little bit the number one topic of conversation is GDPR. As you said in our last interview, we're going down the deep abyss of how you're going to get litigated out of all of your money if you don't follow this. It's like way worse than Y2K, ah, some stuff's going to break and maybe turn off for a bit. >> Well, you know what I liked about the GDPR discussions though, they had answers. >> Yeah. >> Other events where I've gone to GDPR, it's been scary, scary, scary, scare you, scare you, scare you, and then call us. >> Yeah. >> And we'll give you some services. What I liked about, what I'm hearing from Veritas is, they've got at least a quasi-prescription as to what to do. So that's good. But the more interesting part to me Stu is you've got this enterprise backup legacy, I'll say it, legacy backup install base, enormous. A leader, they've mentioned many times, 15 years in a row leader in the magic quadrant. And I believe it, you talk to customers, what are you running, NetBackup, everybody's running NetBackup. But how they're transitioning into this vision of multi-cloud, data protection resilience across the Enterprise, across clouds, hyper scale. What I'm not fully clear on yet is how they get customers from point A to point B. And we heard from the keynotes this morning and Bill Campbell. We invested a bunch of dough in R&D, we're writing stuff that's cloud-native, container-based, micro services. So sort of all the right application development buzzwords and I believe that they're developing there. But I don't understand how they migrate that install base. Is there some kind of abstraction layer? Is there some kind of new UI? We heard them jokingly say today in the keynotes that, we hear you, customers, we know our UI sucked, we're working on that. I didn't see any announcements on that, but, that's something that, presumably, is a promise they're putting forth. But, I wasn't clear, maybe you could help clear it up, on how you get from point A of legacy install backup software to this nirvana of multi-cloud hyper scale micro services. >> Yeah, I mean, Dave, when we talked to Bill Coleman, his three Vs, value, vision, and that values of the company itself, clearly has got a compelling vision. He said not only ten years from now, but probably five years from now, every product I'm selling is going to be obsolete. And it's an interesting thing to hear because 15 years of experience, we're trusted, but we know that every product that you bought from Veritas in the past is going to be replaced by new things. And, right, how do we get, say okay, I've been buying that backup for a decade, do I get this visualization product, and if I'm looking at AWS, is Veritas the company I turn to? So really it gets down to, Dave, that blocking and tackling. Talked about the consultants, the partners, both on the go to market side as well as the technology side. Can Veritas get in there, can they have compelling differentiated products that solve a need in the market? We've talked to a number of companies this last year where I've looked at is this hybrid multi-cloud world. If you're software, how do you play in this market? Because isn't Microsoft, Google, Amazon, aren't they going to just do this? Information governance invisibility, absolutely. Amazon has a solution for you. Google has a solution for you. Microsoft has solutions. But, if I'm going to be across those environments, we haven't had a solution that goes across all of those environments. So, there's a hole in the ecosystem, and Veritas, along with many other companies, are trying to put that big elephant on the table and eat pieces out of it, so, it's interesting. >> And Coleman's background, from BEA, started at BEA, I think he took the thing up to half a billion dollars, sold it to Oracle for a big number. But you look at what BEA did, they were sort of the application integration glue. And that's a lot of, you hear a lot of similar messaging modernized around multi-cloud, around hyper scale, around micro services and the like. So, Coleman obviously has experience doing that. I thought he's a very clear thinker. I had not met him before. Furrier knows him pretty well, from his VC days. But I thought he laid out a pretty clear direction. So he's got street cred on this. SEEP com, done it before, I think this company has a decent balance sheet. They seem to have some patient capital in Carlyle. It doesn't appear that Carlyle's trying to suck all the money out. They don't have the 90-day shot clock. He basically, Bill Coleman basically said, look, we're fine shrinking to grow. We're shifting from a upfront license model, perpetual license model, to a ratable model. We could never do that as a public company. So it's going to be very interesting to see if and when they emerge as a public company, what that looks like and where they come from. >> Yeah, and Dave, one of the things I've been poking at is where do they sell to? If this was the backup administrator, that's not somebody that's going to help them with the transformation. It's digital transformation, it's my cloud strategy. It's things like GDPR where I'm going to need to get up the stack to the CIO, to the C-suite, prove the value that Veritas has, and therefore they can then get all these new products in where everything, the 360 data management, really at the core of what they're doing, and whole lots of other products. I mean, Dave, we didn't even dig into some of the object and file storage pieces that are in here. I know we've got their chief product officer on the Cube tomorrow. But a lot of products, pretty broad software suite. And for an infrastructure company, it's always interesting to hear them say, really, infrastructure doesn't matter. The no hardware agenda, but it's your data that matters, and we've got a vision here at Veritas Vision to bring you forward and lots of plays on the name of the company. Veritas, the show is the truth in information. >> Yeah, so, let's talk about the lineup tomorrow. A lot of product stuff tomorrow. Mike Palmer's coming on, he gave a great keynote this morning. Very funny, he gave a scenario of the world ending because basically people didn't have their data act together. They had these images of Las Vegas hotels in chaos and waterfalls running through the hotels and drones attacking and just total chaos. So we're going to get into a lot of the portfolio stuff and I think try to answer, Stu, some of those questions that I raised about how do you get customers from point A, where they are today, to point B. Are you going to, how are you going to transition them. Are there financial incentives? Is there some kind of abstraction layer that you're developing? What is that framework that brings us to that nirvana? So, give you the last word here, Stu. >> Yeah, so looking forward to digging in more with some of the customers, some of the partners. Good energy at the show. It's exciting to be here for the first time. And looking forward to Day Two. >> All right, good, good wrap, Stu. Thank you, and thank you for watching. Go to siliconangle.com for all the news. We saw some Oracle news today. Hitachi changed its name or Pentaho changed its name, we're not really sure about that. But all the news on siliconangle.com, go to wikibon.com for all the research. And of course, thecube.net to see this show, replays, youtube.com/siliconangle is where we archive all this stuff. Lot of websites. >> Yeah, and make sure to subscribe on our YouTube channel. >> Yeah, please do subscribe on that YouTube channel and follow us on Twitter, @thecube, @stuminiman, @dvellante. That's a wrap Day One, this is The Cube, we'll see you tomorrow from Veritas Vision from Vegas, take care. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Food IT, Fork to Farm. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin, with Jeff Frick, and we have just spent a really interesting educational day at the Fork to Farm event, Food IT. Jeff we've spoken with investors, ag-tech experts, folks in academia who are training the next generation of farmers, to Campbell Soup, who's been around since the late 1800s, are really focused on helping the agriculture and food industry combat the challenges of environmental sustainability, of climate change, of labor shortages, it's been a really, really intriguing day, where tech meets food and agriculture. >> Yeah and just a huge opportunity. One of the themes that kept coming up over and over again, is the average age of the farmers today. Heard 70 something, 60 something, whatever, they're getting old, so there's going to be a huge turnover in this industry, so both a challenge as well as an opportunity for the next generation of ag-people to make some of these changes, and change the way the industry works. The other thing that's really interesting that I found Lisa, is that there's really big social issues that are at play here. We talked about water, we talked about labor, that play into this whole thing, sustainability. And again, tying it back to their theme of its fork to farm, how much of that's now driven by the consumer and the industry, it's kind of a reaction to the consumer, which we see over and over and over in all the other shows that we go. The consumerization IT, driven by younger people's interactions with their phones, is setting an expectation of the way they want everything to work. And so, it sounds like the food industry is really at the cutting edge of this, still really early on, but as we saw in some of those market maps, and the innovation is rich, feels like we're really at the start of this thing. So even though this show has been around for a few years, they have the big show in Salinas next week, the Forbes show, that's still really early days of leveraging tech, innovation, to change the food industry. >> It is, and you brought up that the labor shortages, and that was echoed quite a bit today, for a number of reasons. One, the aging population of farmers as you mentioned. Two, also in California, the minimum wage going up, and that's not only going to be a problem Jeff for farmers, but it's actually now pervading into the retail space, where they're going to have to start depending on robotics to be able to create, or to reduce their cost, to provide even fast food. That was something that was quite interesting to me, I hadn't really quite thought about, from that channel perspective. >> Right, right. >> And then as you mentioned, on the tech enabled consumer side, I was talking with Jeff earlier, I kept thinking farm to fork, 'cause farm to table is so trendy now, right? There's a lot of apps. And you gave me this a-ha grasshopper look, and it was really because as consumers we've really demanded so much. We want transparency, we want to know exactly what's in things, and we want organic, and hormone-free, and we also want things delivered whenever, and wherever we want them. We think of the distribution model, has really become very decentralized, and a lot of that being driven by the consumer. On the farm side too, regarding the attrition, there's also a lot of antiquated, especially in the post-harvest supply chain, things that are still written down on paper, traceability is a huge challenge for them. And I think from some of the things we heard today, a lot of the farming, especially in California, they can't really quite see all the data that they have, but they are sitting on a lot of information, that not only could make their farms more efficient, but could also facilitate you think, even knowledge transfer to the next generation of farmers. Right, right. Yeah a lot of talk about kind of there wasn't a lot of data, now it's a data flood. So how do you use those data sources to be more intelligent in what you do? And I specifically asked some of the guests, you know, are kind of the classic big data players participating in this space, and she said, "Not really." They're all kind of holding off on the side waiting to get in. But these are big numbers, this is a big impact. The professor from St. Louis Episcopal talked about a billion dollars worth of strawberries that you got to get off the field, and if you don't have the labor to get it off, and the data to get the labor and to time it right, it's a billion dollars worth of strawberries, and these are big numbers. And the other thing that just fascinated me, is again, this power of the consumer. The Google guy who took basically what was a service just to feed employees and keep them around so they write more code, but using that as a platform to drive much more thoughtfulness and intelligence. And supply chain changes around food, and even called it food shot in reference to the moon shot. >> The moon shot, yes. >> Enabled better diets, shift diets, food transparency, reduced loss and waste, accelerate transformation to a circular food economy. So, and they said, I think he's been at it for 15 years or thereabout. So really an interesting kind of a twist, on what you would not expect from the food service people, you think of them just supplying food. >> Exactly. >> Not trying to drive cultural change. >> Exactly, and trying to scale, but they're using data from their own googlers, to help determine and evaluate what people are doing, what they want, preferences, making it more personal, and using data in that way to also then facilitate some of the upstream, you know from the supply perspective, making things, meeting those challenges that the consumers are demanding, but you said he's been at Google for five years, and when he first got the call being in hospitality for so long, he just thought, "Google, what do they want to talk to me for?" And how revolutionary they've been, and you can think of how much education can happen from Google Food alone. I was quite blown away by that. >> Yeah, the other kind of theme is unused resources. So, one of the food trucks that they had seaweed. Why seaweed? Because it takes no fresh water, it takes no fertilizer, and it's carbon negative. So not really about how does it taste, but some specific reasons to try to make seaweed a better food, a more satisfying food. Talked about kale, and really again what a great example of a, can't say it, Fork to Farm tradition, 'cause before kale was a throwaway, nobody grew kale, now suddenly everybody wants kale smoothies, and so there's nothing, plant became something of importance, driven by the consumer, not necessarily by the producers. So, very dynamic times. I think again, the trend we see over and over and over, finding the hollowing out of the middle. You know, you don't want to be just a generic provider in the middle, you better have massive scale, or you better be a real specialty provider. And then finally the ramifications of the Amazon purchase of Whole Foods, really validating, yes you want digital, yes you want data, yes you want to provide better customer service. But at the same time, you still need a physical presence, kind of validating the physical presence of the store like Whole Foods. So really a very dynamic activity going on in this space. >> And it'll be interesting to see what happens over the next five to 10 years, as farming generationally changes hands. And there is technology that's available today, right? We talked about big data, there's many, many sources of public data, whether it's satellite imagery, water data that can be utilized and then paired with private data that a farm has. Or using GPS devices on tractors and combines, robotics. You talked to the inventor of the Sally Salad machine, there's a lot of technology that might be, I don't know if I'd say ahead of its time, but I think from a farming perspective, there's a little bit of a gap there right now. So it'll be very interesting to see how farms evolve from a technology perspective. I love how the Forbes AgTech Summit, I think it's tomorrow and Thursday in Salinas Valley, what a great juxtaposition of Silicon Valley and a world hub of technology innovation, to Salinas, which is the salad bowl of the world. I think that is quite interesting, and some of the dynamics that they've seen, I think this was their fourth event tomorrow. >> Jeff: Fourth event, right, right. >> Really starting to get more farmers interested in understanding the potential that ag-tech can have on profitability, efficiencies, reducing waste, even things like discovering and preventing foodborne pathogens. >> Right, and robots, we need robots, we don't have enough labor. Michael Rose said there's going to be a shortage of hundreds of thousands of line cooks. Just regular, ordinary line cooks at restaurants, and that's really kind of one of the applications of the salad machine, because as you hit the button below that cook, you can hit the button to load that salad, while you run off and pull the rest of the entree meals together. So, again, it's really fun to see the consistent themes that we see over and over, that's computing cloud and data-driven decision making, applied to what's arguably one of the most important things going on, which is feeding us a lot of conversation about the world's population getting to 10 billion in the not too distant future, that have to be fed. And again, with the aging of the population, the traditional farmers, a real opportunity to do kind of a refresh with a bunch of people that have grown up with these things. So, really cool show, a great day, hope you had fun, I had fun. >> Oh, I had a great time, it was really educational. I think that you hit the nail on the head, there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. I think what the Mixing Bowl is doing, along with Better Foods, is really bringing the people that are creating food, and producing it together, and connecting them with the people that are creating technology. So, I think this is the tip of the iceberg head of lettuce, maybe? So, I am excited to see what happens over time, but not only was it a great event, but I'm now very hungry. >> Now you're very hungry, there's more food trucks outside. Alright Lisa, well thank you again for hosting. >> Thank you. >> Again, another great show. I think last time we were together was at the NAB. >> NAB. >> Talking about media entertainment, so the digitization, transformation continues, driven by all these huge macro-factors of cloud, big data, so the beat rolls on. >> It does. >> Alright, she's Lisa Martin, and I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCube. Thanks for watching, we've got a busy spring coming to an end. Had a little bit of a lull in the summer then we'll hit it hard again in the fall, so thanks for watching siliconangle.tv, youtube.com/siliconangle, and siliconangle.com for complete coverage of a lot of stories beyond just theCUBE. I'm Jeff Frick, signing off with Lisa Martin from Food IT, from Fork to Food, thanks for watching.