>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2021. This is "theCUBE's" ongoing coverage, where we go out to the events, in this case, of course, virtually, to extract the signal from the noise. And now we're going to talk about the shifts in customer employee experiences and channels. The past year, obviously, has exposed gaps in both of those areas. The shift to digital channels, something that hit every industry. If you weren't a digital business, you were out of business. So, there's huge demand for better, a.k.a. less frustrating, and hopefully superior, customer experiences. That's never been higher. It puts a lot of pressure on companies and their marketing departments to deliver. And with me to talk about these trends are two great guests. Alex Shootman, the General Manager of Adobe Workfront. Alex was CEO of Workfront, which Adobe acquired last year. And Matthew Candy, Global Managing Director of IBM iX. Gentleman, welcome. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Great to be here. >> Matt, let's start with you. Maybe you could talk to the shifts that I talked about earlier, in the past year, and customers' expectations, and how they changed, and how you guys responded. >> Yes, so, Dave, I mean, it's been, my goodness, what a year, right? If we'd gone back and thought, we never would have seen this coming. And certainly, I guess, for the clients, I run the digital customer experience business, the services business, here at IBM, and certainly, we have been very busy helping clients, across just about every industry, accelerate their digital transformation efforts. And I think what has been absolutely clear, is digital, mobile, all of these ways of engaging with customers through channels, has been an absolutely critical way in which businesses have kept going, and survived over this time. And certainly, we've seen that transformation accelerate, right? And companies shifting from face-to-face interactions from a B2B sales perspective, into a kind of online B2B commerce, et cetera. So, really it's become digital by default. And I think customers really demanding personalized experiences, and wanting to make sure that these companies really know you in how they deal with you. >> You know Matt, I mean, our business, you think about our business, it was predominantly going out to events, live events, and then overnight, our entire industry had to shift to virtual. And what it was is, you had all these physical capabilities, and people trying to shove it into virtual, and it was really hard. There was a lot of unknowns, and really different. I imagine there's some parallels within marketing organizations. And I wonder if you could talk, Matt, about what kind of barriers you saw about delivering those kind of digital interactions and experiences. >> Yes. So, I guess, we've seen kind of five core challenges that companies have been facing. So, firstly, around volume and velocity of content. So, as we're putting more demand into organizations, right, for more content at a greater pace, right, this causes challenges for companies in terms of being able to get content out there, and surface it through their digital channels, right? Whether that's kiosks, or voice, web, mobile, et cetera. And that pace is not slowing down. Second thing is this demand for personalization. So, as companies and individuals are touching through all of these touch points across marketing sales and service, the need to be able to interact in the right way, showing that you know me, using personal data to match the right offer at the right time, critically important. Thirdly, the martech stack, right. Across many of these organizations, this explosion in marketing technology over the last 10 years has been absolutely incredible. And so one of the big challenges companies have is how we tie all of these different components of the stack together, to build this seamless experience. Fourth challenge, right? Additional communication channels. So, as we need more content and personalization, and we've got to join up across all these different systems, how do we make this consistent across all of these channels, right, whether it's digital or physical, is a true test of many organizations' ability to respond. And the fifth point is the coordination needed across departments within companies. And so, how the marketing department deals with legal, with regulatory approvals, with sales. How they go out to their agency partners. And this has certainly got a lot more complex across geographies, and across boundaries, within companies and outside. And so we see, absolutely, this need to put in place, basically, the marketing system of record that helps manage this. And this is where we see huge opportunity together with Adobe. >> Yeah, so, Alex, maybe you could talk about this a little bit. I mean, you guys are well-known for deep expertise and leadership, and orchestrating marketing workflows and the like. Matt talked about the martech stack. What's your take on this? And how are IBM iX and Adobe Workfront working together? >> What has occurred in response to what Matt talked about, is that companies started realizing that work was a tier one asset inside the marketing team. You know, they looked at, if you go back in time, and you look at financials in a company, people thought, "Wow, this is really important to us. We should put a system in place to manage financials." They realized their customers were really important, so they said, "We should put a system in place to manage our customers." People are important. They bought Workday to make sure that they could manage their people. And all of this complexity that Matt talked about caused enterprises to realize that the work of marketing was as important as some of those other activities in the organization. And so they started investing in a marketing system of record, like Workfront. >> You know, that's interesting. Just a quick aside. I mean, if you think about a lot of the problems we have in data and big data, typical to talk about stovepipe. You just mentioned three examples, finance, HR, and now marketing, where we've contextualized the system. In other words, the domain experts, the people in finance, and HR, and marketing, they're the ones who know the data the best. They don't have to go, necessarily, to some big data team, and data scientist, and all this stuff. They know what they want and they know it. And that's really what you guys are serving in your streamlining. This notion, Alex, of a marketing system of record is really interesting. I mean, it's relatively new, isn't it? So, why does it matter so much to marketers? >> Yeah, if you think about it, we've been able to serve 3,000 enterprises around the globe. We serve all 10 of the top 10 brands. Half of the Fortune 100. And what has created the need for the new, if you think about it, are the challenges that start arising when you implement the concepts that Matt talked about. Consider one of the largest private credit card issuers on the planet. And you think about delivering that personalized experience all the way to an end customer. You've got a private credit card issuer. They do business with hundreds of thousands of companies. Their account managers are interacting with those companies, and all of that lands back on a marketing organization that has to jointly plan promotions with those companies to drive the private credit card business. That marketing team needs visibility to the work that's happening. Or consider a major medical manufacturer who's trying to get medical products out the door. And the marketing team is trying to coordinate with the product team, with the regulatory team, with the supply chain team, with the legal team. And they're trying to orchestrate all of that work, so that they can get products out the door more quickly. Or maybe a financial services organization that's also trying to get new products out the door, and they're trying to get all the approval about the content that goes with those products, and it's all about speed to market. That's what's creating the need for the new, as you phrased it, Dave. >> Yes. Excellent. Thank you. So, then Matt, paint a picture. A lot of people may not be familiar with IBM iX. Maybe how you guys... You got creators, you got deep expertise in this area. So, maybe talk about where you add value, and how you work with Adobe. >> Okay, so IBM iX, so, we sit within the services business at IBM. As you said, Dave, right, we have designers, experienced strategists, engineers, basically able to deliver kind of end-to-end digital and customer experience solution, right from the creative, all the way through to the technology platforms, and the operations. Adobe is one of our key strategic partners across IBM, and certainly within my part of the business. And so, we couldn't have been more delighted when Workfront joined Adobe, through the acquisition there. So, we already had a strong relationship with the Workfront team. And so now seeing that as part of the Adobe platform and family there, really opens up massive opportunities. We're working with several major airlines, automotive companies, retailers, using Adobe technology to transform the customer experiences that they have. Putting in place new digital platforms, and new ways of engaging with those customers. But what is absolutely clear, as Alex was talking about, this need for a marketing systems of record, as this landscape becomes more complex, as the velocity of change increases the need to not just focus on the customer experience, and how a customer interacts with the brand, but the need to get the workflows and the processes within the organization that sit behind that, organized, executing in the correct way, in an efficient way, in order to make sure that you can deliver on that customer promise. And so this is absolutely critical, effectively, to drive this kind of workflow improvement, the productivity improvement, and put intelligence and automation into these processes, across the organization. So there is, certainly, we believe a huge opportunity together in the market, to help clients transform, and to deliver the value in this space. >> Got it. Alex, maybe you can just, at a high level, share some examples of how Adobe, and drawing on your experiences from Workfront, how you've helped companies where they had to get content out, they had to automate the processes, and the outcomes that you saw, that you hope to share with other clients. >> You know what, what Matt's talking about is the need for intelligent workflows within a marketing organization. Because a marketing organization is trying to solve one of two challenges. Either they're trying to be more efficient because they can't get more resources to do the work that they need to do, or they're trying to operate with speed. And so what our breakthrough thinking was, Dave, in terms of solving these problems, and then I'll give an example, is the realization that while it seemed like work should be different in different enterprises, ultimately, all work has five elements to it. The first thing is, you decide to do something, or I ask you to do something. So, we have to have the strategic planning around the intake of work. Then we have to plan out the work. Then we actually have to execute the work. We have to understand who's doing what. We have to have transparency to whether or not that work is getting done, or if people need help in that work. Then that work needs to be approved by somebody. And then finally, especially in marketing, then we have to actually deliver that work to a technology like ADM, where we're going to publish it on the web. So, if you take the case of a major financial, a financial company that serves consumers, that financial company is constantly bringing new products to market. Now, if you're bringing new products to market, if you think about the United States, you have to make sure that you have supported the regulatory approval that's necessary for a product. So, that product has to be able to go to the right investor. That product, if it's in a certain state, has to have oversight to it. So, now you're a marketing team, in a financial services organization that's supporting getting new product to market, and in a particular customer, it used to take 'em 63 days to go through all of the approvals necessary to just get content out the door. Now that they are effectively intaking the work, planning the work, executing the work reviewing the work, and delivering the work digitally, that's down to eight days. >> And with the martech platform, you have the data. So, you know what content you want to get out, and you can make decisions much better. I mean, my big takeaway is, you got the art of marketing, and those with the marketing DNA, I don't have that gene, but it's intersecting with the science and automation, and the data, and the workflows, and driving efficiency, and ultimately driving results and revenue. So, that's my big takeaway from this conversation, but Alex, maybe you could give us your takeaway, and then Matt, you can bring us home. >> Yeah. I mean, my takeaway is in this new economy, marketing is a tier one corporate activity. Marketing is a peer activity to manufacturing, to distribution, to sales, and to finance. And every one of those disciplines are managed with a system. Marketing needs its own system, because it's as important as any other organization. And so to me, Dave, it's no more complicated than that. That marketing is now as important as every other function. And it needs to be managed as every other function. And Workfront is the application that marketing manages the workflows, and the business of marketing. >> All right, Matt. Give us your final thoughts, please. >> Yep, no. My final thought, building on what Alex said, so, we've put together a joint point of view with Adobe, and with Workfront, called "Intelligent Content Transformation," right. That is our strategic framework to help clients accelerate on this journey, both of delivering these amazing customer outcomes, but how we transform the processes within the marketing organization. And I think that yes, you can continue to focus on delivering amazing digital experiences for customers, and it's absolutely critical, and that's critical to revenue growth, but actually, what's also critical, is to drive efficiency in these workflows across the enterprise, right? And that is not only going to enable the revenue growth, it's going to enable you to deliver on that promise. But it's also going to result in significant cost and efficiency improvements for these companies, by focusing on marketing in the same way as we have done for procurement transformation, supply chain transformation, finance transformation, HR transformation, right? There's a lot of effort gone into the efficiency of those workflows. We've got to do the same for marketing. So, massive opportunity, Dave, massive. >> It is massive. Every company has to, in some way, shape, or form, put high-quality content in front of their customers to engage with them. Gentlemen, thanks so much for coming on "theCUBE." Really appreciate your time. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> All right- >> See you again. >> And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for "theCUBE." You're watching IBM Think 2021, the virtual edition. We'll be right back. (bright music) ♪ Da, de, de, da, da, de, da, la ♪ (bright music)

>>from >>Around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by >>IBM. Welcome back to IBM Think 2021. This is the cubes ongoing coverage where we go out to the events in this case of course virtually to extract the signal from the noise. And now we're gonna talk about the shifts in customer employee experiences and channels the past year obviously is exposed gap gaps in both of those areas. The shift to digital channels, I mean hit every industry if you weren't a digital business, you were out of business. So there's huge demand for better a. K. A less frustrating and hopefully superior customer experiences that's never been higher. It puts a lot of pressure on companies and their marketing departments to deliver. And with me to talk about these trends are two great guests Alex shooting in. The general manager of adobe work front Alex was ceo of Work front, which Adobe acquired last year and Matthew Candy Global managing director of I. B. M. I. X. Gentlemen welcome thanks for coming on, >>thanks for having us speaking >>matt, let's start with you. Maybe you could talk to the shifts that I talked about earlier and in the past year and customers expectations and how they changed and how you guys responded >>Yes, today, I mean it's been my goodness, what a year, right. Um you know, if we've got back and and thought yeah, we never would have seen this coming. Um and certainly I guess for the clients, you know, I run the digital customer experience business, the services business here at IBM and certainly, you know, we have been very busy helping clients across just about every industry accelerate their digital transformation efforts. And I think you know what has been absolutely clear is you know, digital mobile um you know, all of these ways of engaging with customers through channels has been an absolutely critical way in which businesses have kept going and survived over this time. And and certainly, you know, we've seen that transformation accelerate right? And and companies shifting from face to face interactions from a B two B sales perspective, um you know, into, you know, into a kind of online, B two B commerce etcetera. So really it's become digital by default and I think customers really demanding personalized experiences and wanting to make sure that these companies really know you and how they deal with you. >>You know, matt, I mean our business to think about our business, it was predominantly going out to events, live events and then overnight our entire industry had to shift to virtual and what it was is you had all these physical capabilities that people try to shove it into virtual. And it was really hard. It was it was a lot of unknowns really different. I imagine there's some parallels within marketing organizations and I wonder if you could talk about what kind of barriers you saw about delivering those kind of digital interactions and experiences. >>Yes, so I guess, you know, we've seen kind of five core challenges that companies have been facing. So firstly around volume and velocity of content. So, you know, as we're putting more demand into organizations right for more content to the greater pace. This causes challenges for companies in terms of being able to get content out there and surface it through their digital channels, right? Whether that's kiosks or voice, web mobile etcetera. And that pace is not slowing down. Second thing is this demand for personalization. So, you know, as companies and individuals are touching through all of these touchpoints across kind of marketing, sales and service, the need to be able to kind of interact in the right way, showing that, you know, me using personal data to match the right offer at the right time, critically important. Thirdly, the Martek stack across across many of these organizations is explosion in marketing technology over the last 10 years has been absolutely incredible. And so one of the big challenges companies have is how we tie all of these different components for stack together to build their seamless experience. Fourth challenge, right, additional communication channels. Um, so as we need more content and personalization and we've got to join up across these, all these different systems, how do we make this consistent across all of these channels? Right. Whether it's digital or physical, um, you know, is a true test of many organizations ability to respond. And the 5th point is the coordination needed across departments within companies. And so, you know how the marketing department deals with legal with regulatory approvals with sales, how they go out to their agency partners. And and and and this has certainly got a lot more complex across geography and across boundaries within companies and outside. And so we see, you know, absolutely this need to put in place and marketing, you know, basically the marketing system of record that helps kind of manage this and this is where we see huge opportunity together with adobe. >>Yeah, so Alex, maybe you could talk about this a little bit. I mean you guys are well known for deep expertise and leadership and orchestrating, you know, marketing workflows and the like Matt talked about the Martek stack. What's your take on this and how R R I B M I X and an adobe work front working together >>at what has occurred in response to what matt talked about is that companies started realizing that work was a tier one asset inside the marketing team. You know, they looked at, if you go back in time and you look at financials in a company, people thought, wow this is really important to us. We should put a system in place to manage financials. They realized their customers were really important, so we should put a system in place to manage our customers. People are important. They bought work day to make sure that they could manage their people. And all of this complexity that matt talked about caused enterprises to realize that the work of marketing was as important as some of those other activities in the organization. And so they started investing in a marketing system of record like work from. >>You know, that's interesting. Just a quick aside, I mean, if you think about a lot of the problems we have in in, you know, data and big data that people talk about stovepipe, you just mentioned three examples Finance HR and now marketing where we've contextualized the system, in other words, the domain experts, the people in finance and HR and marketing, they're the ones who know the date of the best. They don't have to go necessarily to some big data team and data scientists and all the stuff they know what they want and they know it and that's really what you guys are serving in your streamlining this this notion, Alex of a marketing system of record is really interesting. I mean, it's it's relatively new, isn't it? And so why does it matter so much to marketers >>if you think about it? We uh we've been able to serve 3000 enterprises around the, around the globe. We serve all 10 of the top 10 brands. Half of the fortune 100. And what what has created the need for the new if you think about it, are the challenges that start arising when you, when you implement the concepts that matt talked about, consider one of the largest private credit card issuers on the planet. Uh, and you think about delivering that personalized experience all the way to an end customer. You've got a private credit card issuer. They do business with hundreds of thousands of companies. Their account managers are interacting with those companies. And all that lands back on a marketing organization that has to jointly plan promotions with those companies to, uh, to, to drive the private credit card business. That marketing team needs visibility to the work that's happening. Or consider a major medical manufacturer who's trying to get medical products out the door. And the marketing team is trying to coordinate with the product team with the regulatory team, with the supply chain team, with the legal team and they're trying to orchestrate all of that work so that they can get products out the door more quickly. Or maybe a financial services organization that's getting new. Also trying to get new products out the door and they're trying to get all the approval about the content that goes with those products and it's all about speed to market. That's what's creating the need for the new, uh, kind of, as you phrased it Dave. >>Excellent. Thank you. So no matter paint a picture sort of, uh, you know, people may not be familiar with I. B. M. I X. Maybe how you guys, you got, you got creators, you've got deep expertise in this area. So maybe talk about how where you add value and how you work with adobe. >>So IBM so we sit within the services business at IBM um as you said, Dave Right, we have, you know, designers, experienced strategists, engineers, um you know, basically able to deliver kind of end to end digital customer experience solution right from the creative all the way through to the technology platforms. Um And the operations adobe is, you know, one of our key strategic partners across IBM and certainly within my part of the business. And so, you know, we couldn't have been more delighted when work front joined adobe through the acquisition there. So we already had a strong relationship with the work front team. Um and so now seeing that as part of the adobe kind of platform um and and family, they're really opens up massive opportunities. You know, we're working with several major airlines, automotive companies, retailers, um using adobe technology to transform the customer experiences that they have, putting in place new digital platforms, a new ways of engaging with those customers. But but what is absolutely clear, you know, and as Alex was talking about this need for a marketing systems of record, as this landscape becomes more complex, as the velocity of change kind of increases the need to not just focus on the customer experience and how a customer interacts with the brand, but the need to get the workflows and the processes within the organization that sit behind that, you know, organized executing in the correct way, uh you know, in an efficient way in order to make sure that you can deliver on that customer promise. And so this is absolutely critical effectively to get to get to drive this kind of workflow improvement of productivity improvement and put intelligence and automation into these processes across the organization. So there is a you know, certainly we know we believe a huge opportunity together in in in the market um to help clients transform um and to deliver the value in this space. Got >>it Alex, maybe you can just at a high level share some examples of how adobe and from your drawing on your experience from from work front, how you've helped companies where they had to get you know content out, you had to automate the processes and and the kind of outcomes that you saw that you hope to share with other clients. >>You know what that's talking about is the need for intelligent workflows within a marketing organization. Because the marketing organization is trying to solve one of two challenges. Either they're trying to be more efficient because they can't get more resources to do the work that they need to do or they're trying to operate with speed and so what our breakthrough thinking was there in terms of solving these problems. And then I'll give you an example is the realization that while it seems like work should be different in different enterprises. Ultimately all work has five elements to it. The first thing is you decide to do something or I ask you to do something. So we have to have this strategic planning around the intake of work. Then we have to plan out the work. Then we actually have to execute the work. We have to understand who's doing what we have to have transparency to whether or not that work is getting done or people need help in network, then network needs to be approved by somebody. And then finally, especially in marketing, then we have to actually deliver that work to a technology like Am where we're going to publish it on, on the web. So if you take the case of a major financial, uh, a financial company that serves consumers, that financial company is constantly bringing new products to market. Now, if you're bringing new products to market, if you think about the United States, you have to, you have to make sure that you have, uh, supported the regulatory approval that's necessary for a product. So that product has to be able to go to the right investor. That product, if it's in a certain state, has to have oversight to it. So now you're, you're a Marketing team in a financial services organization that supported getting new product to market. And in a particular customer used to take them 63 days to go through all of the approvals necessary to just get content out the door. Now that they are effectively uh in taking the work, Planning the work, executing the work, reviewing the work and delivering the work digitally. That's down to eight days. >>And with the Martek platform, you have the data so you know what content you want to get out and you can make decisions. Much about. My big takeaway is you got the art of of of of marketing. And those were the marketing D. N. A. I don't have that, you know that that gene uh but it's intersecting with with the science and automation and the data and the workflows and driving efficiency and ultimately driving results in in revenue. So that's kind of my big takeaway from this conversation. But but Alex maybe you can give us your take away and then matt, you can bring us home. >>Yeah, I mean my takeaway is in this new economy, marketing is a is a tier one corporate activity. Marketing is a pure activity to manufacturing, to distribution to sales into finance. And every one of those disciplines are managed with a system. Marketing needs its own system because it's as important as any other organization. And so to me, David is no more complicated than that, that marketing is now as important as every other function and it needs to be manages every other function. And work front is the application that marketing manages the workflows in the business of marketing. >>Alright. Matt, give us your final thoughts please. >>Yeah, no, my final thought, building on what building what Alex said. So we've put together a joint point of view with with Adobe in with Work front called intelligent content transformation. Right? That is our strategic framework to help clients accelerate on this journey, both of delivering these amazing customer outcomes. But how we transform the processes within the marketing organization and I think you know that yes, you can continue to focus on delivering amazing digital experiences for customers. And it's absolutely critical and that's critical to revenue growth. But actually what's also critical is to drive efficiency in these workflows across the enterprise. Right? And that is not only going to enable the revenue growth is going to enable you to deliver on that promise, but it's also going to result in significant cost and efficiency improvements for these companies by focusing on marketing in the same way as we have done for procurement, transformation, supply chain transformation, finance transformation, HR transformation, right? There's a lot of effort garment into, into the efficiency of those work clothes. We've got to do the same for marketing. Um so massive opportunity, massive. It is >>massive. Every company has to in some way, shape or form, put high quality content in front of their customers to engage with them. Gentlemen, thanks so much for coming on the cube. Really appreciate your time. >>Yeah, Thanks for having us. >>All right, and thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube. You're watching IBM think 2021. The virtual edition. We're right back. >>Mhm.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering IBM Think 2018, brought to you by IBM. (lively music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to The Cube. We're here live in Las Vegas for IBM Think 2018. It's where all the action's happening. Third day of three days, wall to wall coverage, I'm John Furrier, co-host of The Cube, we have two great guests here, Paul Papas, Global Leader of Digital Strategy at IBM's iX, new digital agency, and his cohort Matt Candy, European leader of IBM iX, a new agency within IBM specifically developed for expanding the digital services to their customers, to create the best experiences, using technology, data, and other analog and digital capabilities. Wimbledon and among others. Guys, welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you, thank you, and thanks for that great introduction. >> So Paul, so take a minute, this is a novel concept. When I think of agency I think ad agency, buy some keywords, PR firms, you know, more of an adjunct to a core organization, kind of a service provider. >> Yeah. >> You guys have it a little bit different agency focus, more like management consultants meets World Economic Forum, meets, you know, UX UI design, because you are building this company. Take a minute to explain what iX is, and what's different about it in context what people might think it is. >> Sure, and thanks, a great set up in there it's like you melded a lot in there of what we do. So you can think of us as a combination of strategy consultancy, digital agency, consulting systems integrator. So we do three things with our clients, we help them design, well we help them define, their digital strategies, really their business strategy in a digital world. We help them design world-class customer experiences. Experiences that are going to be personalized, and have an impact. And then lastly we help them implement the technology. Implement the customer platforms that they use to engage with their customers in a personalized, meaningful, omni-channel way, all of those things that we do help drive a measurable business impact so nothing we do is hypothetical, everything we do is real and drives a real business impact for our clients. So, where if you might look at an agency a lot of people think of agency as marketing communications agencies, and the world has changed so fast around digital, >> Or ad agencies. >> Or advertising agencies, you know, in that vein, we're on the more transformational side. In fact we consider ourselves a business design partner. So what we're trying to do with our clients around the world is help them redefine, redesign their businesses, so that they're fit for purpose, so that they can survive and thrive in this modern world. >> Yeah, I want to get your thoughts on this, because you know looking back as a historian if you will of evolution, technology used to be slower, so agencies added value on something complex, ad agencies would create ad campaigns and some glam, glamour around something. And we even saw it in some of the lead gen side of the business, where this beautiful micro-site and the graphics are amazing, it looked great but actually didn't scale there's no tech behind it. Now fast forward, you have the requirement for cool, relevant, and glamorous, but actually having tech involved. Cloud computing has really enabled this, and the role of data has really enabled it, so this is now the new normal, the new normal for these higher-end functionalities is actually having a tech stack, technology stack, combined with business engineering logic, >> Paul: Yeah. >> And real business outcome, like profit, money outcome objectives that people might want. How do you guys explain that story because, you know, I would just call a consultant up in the past, are you guys combining it to make it easier? What's the purpose that customers call you guys in for? What are they asking for from you guys? >> So I'll start off and then Matt, you can add color commentaries, so, the way we describe what you just, what you just brought to life there, was, we have multi-disciplinary teams, so we have a combination of business strategists right, so when our clients are engaging us, they could be working with a business strategist who's really comfortable showing up for work and wearing a suit and tie, and he could be sitting next to, in our studio, sitting next to one of our creative designers who's tattooed from his wrist to his neck. >> The hoodie guy building everything. >> The hoodie guy, right, sitting there building there, next to one of our data scientists who's popping open his Lenovo laptop, it's got the latest chip in it, and he's so pumped 'cause he's going to run some crazy data analytics on it, applying AI on top of it. And all of these people work together using Design Thinking so we have an approach we call IBM Design Thinking, they've all been trained, we've trained over 16 thousand people on Design Thinking, and they all work together and come together to solve our clients' ploblems. They work in a studio environment, and we've opened up 38 studios around the world. Studios are places where we co-create with our clients, or we invite our clients in to ideate, innovate and co-create >> So it's agile on the format, on the projects, not like Waterfall, hey now you pass the ball to the other guy, it's all integrated team. >> Yes, and what you end up having is, you end up having the view of understanding the business and the client's business challenge, which is where we start when we define the strategy, when we do the design work, it's underpinned with an understanding of the technology that's going to bring this to life. So we like to say that we don't do creative for creative's sake or creative just for the beauty of the art, we do creative that can actually be made real. >> Yeah, you guys put a relevant package together. So I got to ask you now, the beauty of cloud computing was, is that you don't have to provision a data center if you don't need it. Now you see people needing a data center for privacy reasons they store their data, hence the hybrid cloud strategy, et cetera et cetera, but if I want to do something like what you guys are doing, it's going to cost me money to build it out. One, where are the people? Skills of the people, salaries of the people, tools for the people, all that is expensive to build out. So it's natural to go to someone who's already got it. So I want you guys to talk about that dynamic, of buy versus build, what stays in-house that's core competency, and what's the scale leverage that the clients get from working with you guys, 'cause you have that advantage. >> Yeah, and actually what I like to tee up is, this cost effective approach that we use to help our clients jumpstart the work that they're doing, we call it an innovation garage, and Matt and the team in the UK and in Europe have really been champions of this approach. Why don't you share some of the work we do around innovation garages. >> Yeah, so, I mean, one example is our client BP who we've been working with in this space, and helping them drive a lot of the digital reinvention of their business. And so, teams of data scientists, designers, developers, working hand in hand with product owners from the client side but ideating, finding new different digital products and services that help improve advocacy of customers drive loyalty, drive new revenue streams but very quickly taking those ideas and turning them into prototypes right, paper prototypes, actual MVPs, minimum viable products, launching them into market right, choosing some target markets, but putting very measurable KPIs around each of those things >> What's the timetable on that roughly, ballpark? >> Probably getting those MVPs out at eight to 10 weeks right >> So, fast. >> Oh yeah, fast. >> It's not months, not eight months. >> No, no, there's no Waterfall. And so a radically different approach to getting things out there, in the hands of real users. And then testing and learning, iterating, and then based on the data, actual fact and data backed against those KPIs and measurements then starting taking the decision around whether we're going to scale that into a global product. >> Yeah before we go to drill down on that, what's the alternative to doing that? How many months would it take if I want to do it from scratch in-house? >> Spinning up large transformation programs right, and >> John: A year. >> Yeah, at least, multi-years >> John: At minimum. >> Multi-years, and I think the other thing John, that's kind of key about this way of working, is that you're starting to infuse new ways of working and new ways of thinking into the client's organization right, and so Design Thinking: lean, agile, dev ops, right all of these approaches to get things done in a more rapid way and so, you're kind of driving change and transformation through making and creating and doing, not through some big change management program. And so we've been, if I took BP for example, training and certifying their people in IBM Design Thinking, certifying them as product owners and so, through the act of making and creating these services, it's changing their culture and changing how they get stuff done and it's a bit like a fire, kind of a little fire that burns and spreads within the organization as people see what's going on and want to become part of it. >> And one of the ways we do that we actually co-locate in these innovation garages. So you take a company like BP, if you go to our South Bank office, we have a dedicated floor where you have a hundred BP people with the IBM iX team, working in this innovation garage model, >> So they're learning too with you it's not like you're doing all the work and they're integrating in. No, no, we're learning together and they're building new skills and we're building new skills, and we're coming up with new ideas and innovations we're doing it in a cost-effective way, to your point before, in the past companies would spend a lot of money to try to go down a big path and try to in essence, boil an ocean sometimes. >> Yeah and your one guy quits, you got to replace, skill gaps, massive challenges. >> But also I find that from the client's perspective the thing that they're most proud of, some of the things they're most proud of, is the bin, what they call the bin. And so it's all of those ideas that we've killed as far to the left as possible right, and taking an idea that traditionally may have turned into some big program, multi-millions spent on doing it to find that it actually didn't deliver the outcome for the end consumer. >> So Matt, talk about the example with Wimbledon 'cause obviously everyone kind of can recognize that brand, you guys have been working at Wimbledon, you have a relationship with them so they've known IBM for years. What's the current state of the art with Wimbledon? What are some of the things you're doing for those guys and how is iX team, your integrated design team, working with those guys? >> So we've been partnering with Wimbledon now for about 28 years, so relationship goes back to 1990, I mean Wimbledon's been around back since the 1870s, you know, the home of kind of tennis, tennis in an English garden, so complete with rain and drizzle and gray clouds and everything else. And so, probably over the last seven years we've been working with them to drive their digital transformation, and so, how they engage with fans, and so how they use data and analytics to drive insights to put very personalized experiences in the hands of fans. So if you think about an event like Wimbledon, runs for 13 days, and about 500 thousand people get to physically experience Wimbledon in the grounds. And so their whole strategy from a digital perspective is taking the beauty of the grounds and the experience, and how they can manifest that digitally to millions of people around the world. >> And that's more than live streaming that's more than highlights, that's replicating the vibe the buzz, the experience of being there. >> Completely, so if you look at the web channel right when you go to that website, you don't actually see tennis players and stuff on there. What you might see is a beautiful flower just wafting in the breeze right, so a lot of the technology and the experience that we put together is trying to bring to life the beauty of the grounds right, through those digital mediums. And also being very thoughtful and purposeful about the different channels, so when you think about the mobile app right people use that to get snack access to data they're on the move, they want to understand the scores, alerts, iPad, people tend to use that sat on the sofa in front of the telly, you know, second screen experience so there's a different set of use cases and demands. We launched the first Apple TV app for grand slam tennis tournaments. So again, people tend to be using that for catch up and replays and so, being very thoughtful and purposeful about the... >> And you got to keep track of the digital culture 'cause it's like fashion, you got to know what's state of the art, what's going to sell VR, AR, whole new creatives coming out >> You do but you also have to do it in a way that's authentic to the product. >> Tech fashion. (laughter) The latest and greatest. >> Hashtag new hashtag tech fashion But you also have to do it, what I was going to say, you have to do it in a way that's authentic to the brand that you're representing. >> John: And relevant. >> Correct, so we're expressing the brand of Wimbledon online through digital channels and mobile channels, it has to be consistent with the brand, the brand values, the brand purpose, the brand mission. >> And that goes in to the design side of it 'cause they're going to tell you look if we go off the brand, we're not... >> The beauty, the elegance, the elegance of the sport, the elegance of the All England Tennis Club, you have to capture all of that and represent it in a way that's genuine. >> Alright so this is where the melting pot between agency, creative, ad agency, where it's much more about experience, less about the tech, and tech come together. So I wanted to ask you, I did a panel this year at Sundance called the New Creative, with Intel and it was all about the emerging new creative artists that have tech behind it, and here's what we talked about, I want to get your reaction to it. Agile, which killed Waterfall development, made things less risky, the old days was, you build something, a lot of craftsmanship goes into it, but you ship it, you don't know if it's going to work, and you hope it works and sells. Then Agile de-risked that, but you're shipping code every day. But what we lost with Agile that's now coming back, and I think this is where you guys are hitting the mark, the idea of craftsmanship in the product is coming back. So you got Agile, that's good, but it felt boring, it felt, the products didn't feel great. Yeah, certainly they were successful and they used data to be agile and always be iterating, fail fast, et cetera, but now the users want craftsmanship, they want art, they want more experience in the tech product What's your reaction to that, what's your vision? Do you agree and, if you do, what's your opinion? >> Well I agree on the recommitment to craft, and the approach that we take to that is really starting with Design Thinking, and we view this a couple different ways. One, we think Design Thinking is a way to actually solve business problems in the modern world. Now design, we view as a craft. So we have very specific craftspeople that are pure designers, that's what they do every day for a living. Everyone in our organization practices Design Thinking. So I believe that the use of Design Thinking coupled with our design community and the world-class talent that we have there, has enabled to really get an underlying need, right. So when you're doing a design, you have to have the understanding of the underlying need of the customers that you're trying to serve. And that's what we really get at, so the craftsmanship that comes in through applying Design Thinking, applying your design principles to creating something that can then be made real and have an impact. If you ask our designers, in our 38 studios around the world what they love about being part of IBM iX and being part of IBM, it's the impact that they can have. That they can see their design scale, they can see it brought to life in a way that is far beyond anything they could've done at any agency >> Can't fake design, it's like security, you can't fake it, it either works or it doesn't. >> And the way we think about design right is about almost design with a capital D. And so it's not just about how things look and feel, it's about how they work, and so how you can apply design to help solve problems in a very different way right. And how you apply design to strategy because designers are problem solvers. And so actually having people apply a designer's mindset to problem solving, you end up with very different outcomes right, you end up with a lot more innovation driving into what you're building, and I think you end up with products and services that actually help make somebody's life a little bit easier right, you're taking friction out of their life you're delivering something meaningful and of value to them. >> You're doing empathy mapping, you're doing customer journey mapping, you're doing a persona development. I want to build on what Matt said though that designers are problem solvers. When we look at Design Thinking, we have a method called IBM Design Thinking, and the logo that we use for Design Thinking is actually an infinity loop. So what we do is we combine Design Thinking with Agile and I think of IBM Design Thinking as a 3-D printing of a solution to a problem. We're designing it, we're getting at an underlying need, we're prototyping something fitting a proof of concept, we're learning, we're now doing another iteration of Design Thinking and learning more about the underlying need, testing something, and as we keep testing and learning, we add more texture to the solution of the problem and it starts coming into focus for us. >> Yeah, and the key word's problem. I interviewed a Stanford professor on the cutting edge of innovation, design she said, "Don't fall in love with your product. Fall in love with solving problems." And I think that's kind of what you guys believe. >> And I think John, to the point that you raised, about Agile, you know, we see many organizations driving kind of Agile transformation and shifting, and you know, I think our perspective is very much is you need this combination of design, of Agile and dev-ops together, because Agile allows you to pivot quickly, dev-ops allows you to kind of learn and get rapid feedback from production and putting things out there, and you've got to have this kind of design-led approach to doing stuff, because you've got to make sure that what you're building and putting out there serves a purpose and a real outcome for the end user. >> That's perfect, and most people think oh, we're Agile, check. No, whoa, hold on, stop, yeah it's not a silver bullet. >> You brought up a great point from a business leadership perspective that don't fall in love with your products, fall in love with the problems that you're solving, We are seeing that across every industry we work in, and I think this new digital age, with all these emerging technologies going mainstream so fast, AI, AR, VR, blockchain, it's allowing companies to, in some ways, reimagine their purpose, but in some ways, revisit their original purpose. So if you look at, Ford as an example, they've declared that they're going from pure car manufacturing, to mobility services. If you look at our clients in the life sciences industry, years ago they would've declared themselves as pharmaceutical manufacturers right? But now they would look at themselves as partners in health and partners in the health ecosystem. And every industry we're operating in, there's that re-imagining or revisit of the core mission. >> I think this is the only interview I haven't asked about blockchain, but I was just talking to Jesse Lund about blockchain and we talked about digital currencies, digital, and we observed, and we were talking about things are happening faster. So what's happening on digital it's a speed gain, across the board, with currency there's no clearing, it's digital, it moves instantly. So his banking side, that's his thesis, but here, your customers are challenged with looking down the barrel and being scared when, damn, this is going to be fast, what if I screw this up? I mean this is kind of how I see it happening, like it's accelerated in all aspects. >> And this is where I think, in terms of the business that we're in how we're different, and you've kind of raised the traditional agencies and stuff earlier, John. I think the difference for us is, you know when you think about the world of advertising, and companies driving their message out through shouting loudly and campaigns and building micro-sites, actually, our perspective very much is that these, most organizations need to look at how they digitally reinvent, right. And so therefore the scale of change needed as they look to reinvent their businesses, the business models, the skill pools within the organization, how they're going to use data and insights to drive different experiences you start to move to a very different level of change and transformation right, and one where these technology platforms, and becoming a platform business in these organizations, right, need a partner fundamentally who can help them scale and drive that change. >> And the data's critical, using data, using cloud, dev-ops, Agile, design, all rolled into a highly accelerated process, that's hard. >> It is hard but, >> You guys are doing it though. >> Well yeah, that's what we do for a living. It's what our clients are faced with right now. It's kind of a like a Dickensian-like challenge, right, it's A Tale of Two Cities. With all the emerging tech that we were talking about before there's never been a better time to create new innovations. To be innovative in some of the things that we're doing with BP was a great example of that. And some of the bigger things we're doing with some clients that are trying to reinvent their organization around a renewed purpose. But at the same time, there's never been a bigger threat to existing companies, in terms of there's never been more opportunity to be disrupted. So between these two poles of never been a better time to be in business, never been a tougher time to be disrupted, that's where our clients are operating. And this juxtaposition of core and new where our clients have mostly been in business for more than a few years. They have a core business that they need to grow and optimize, while they also need to expand into the new. And they can't do one or the other, they have to do both at the same time. >> And you know the customers I talk to in the industry, around this area, really look down, they look at three choices. Go for it, that's scary, need a partner to do that you guys are there for that. Don't do anything, put your head in the sand. Or three, create blockers and ban stuff. So you're seeing, you kind of walk in and you kind of figure out who's doing what. You see the blockers with all these excuses, no well we've got this other... And then the head, well we should be, they don't do anything, they're not moving. And then people who move. >> Yeah. >> I mean that's the reality right now. >> You know, what we see, we just published this research you know, a C-suite study, so we interviewed 12,000 C-suite executives, over 2,500 CEOs, and the title of this study's The Incumbents Strike Back, and that's what we're seeing now, so we're not seeing folks kind of sitting or putting their heads in the sand, they're looking at their legacy business, and the competitive advantage they have because of all the knowledge and incumbent advantage that they have, and now applying that. >> Well Paul and Matt, we don't have enough time to go into the impact of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, and initial coin offering's impact, to the token economics of how your business will change but we'll do that another time. >> Fantastic. >> Alright thanks for joining The Cube. I'm John Furrier here live in Las Vegas for IBM Think 2018. A lot of great conversations here in The Cube number one live tech coverage, extracting the signal from the noise. We'll be back with more after this short break. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson and we are recapping the Citrix launchpad series. This series presents announcements on LinkedIn live on a variety of subjects, specifically cloud, security, and work. Three topics that I think all of us are keenly aware of going through the last 18 months of the pandemic. Citrix has taken time to sort of regroup and look at ways that security can be improved so that it isn't a hindrance for members of staff, but instead offers a unified integrated way of dealing with security across all of the variety of situations we find ourselves in today. Everything from a mobile device in a cafe through actually working back in the office when we get the opportunity to, to accessing information on a company issued laptop in a home office, secured networks, unsecured networks, secured browsers, unsecured browsers, the permutations are nearly endless. So Citrix has taken an interesting point of view, starting from the perspective of zero trust, meaning everything must be authenticated. They apply contextualism to their strategies. So the context and the posture of the access, the device, the location, all of those matter so that security protocols are tailored to help enhance productivity and security instead of, again, being a hindrance. So I highly recommend you go to the Citrix launchpad site dedicated to security. Two senior Citrix execs, Tim and Joe, will go through great detail on the announcements, but let's recap a little bit from an overview perspective. The first is this idea of secure private access. You combine that with secure internet access, and now you have a package that allows this contextual security posture that can change and adapt based upon varying conditions. Additionally, they have announced a partnership with Google where all of these capabilities are built into the Chrome OS. So now you have a device level native support for these protocols. They're also talking about bot management as something that is critical to security, moving forward. Bots out fishing, you want to kill them. You don't want them getting into your system, but there are some bots that are okay that have poking around in your environment. So again, go into the details with Tim and Joe. Having said that, I am delighted to have a very special guest here. Friend of theCUBE, veteran of theCUBE, author, advisor, author of the book, Cyber Minds and Tech Executive, Shira Rubinoff, is going to join us in just a moment. (upbeat music) Hello, and welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, and we are recapping the Citrix launchpad series with a focus on the topic of security. Now, whenever we're going to talk security on theCUBE, we have a CUBE veteran and smartest person on cybersecurity that we know, Shira Rubinoff. She's a cybersecurity executive author and advisor, specifically author of the excellent book on the subject, Cyber Minds. Shira, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you. Pleasure to be here. >> How are you today? >> Doing great, always great to be on theCUBE and talk to you folks and certainly be part of something from Citrix. >> Well, that might be the last pleasant thing that we say, because we are surrounded by security threats. So are you ready to get serious? >> Oh, always with a smile, serious with a smile. >> So, one kind of overriding question that a lot of people have now, if you're an IT executive, you've experienced a complete change in the world from so many different angles, but how has the pandemic changed the way you think of security? What are the dynamics at play, things that are different now that we couldn't have anticipated maybe two or three years ago? >> Interesting question. Certainly, if we look at the scope and the ecosystem of the way that organizations operated, it was pretty much in the high 90% of people being in the office with just the few percentage being working from home. And that had to shift literally overnight to literally the flip side of it, having the multitude of the organization work from home, work remotely, and maybe the few people that had to be in the office were there. So all of a sudden organizations were left with this, how do we secure down our organization? How do we keep our employees safe? How do we keep our organization safe? How do we connect to the outside world? What do we do to maintain the proper cyber? That's call it cyber hygiene within an organization. And that's a topic that I talk about quite frequently. When you look at cybersecurity as a whole, we look at the cyber posture of an organization. We also have to break it down and say, what does an organization need to do to be fully cyber secure? So of course, the ongoing training and that had to shift as well. We have now training for the organization and employees, but also think about the consumers and who else is interacting with organizations. We have to switch how that is done. And that has to be ongoing in the global awareness, the cybersecurity of course is at top of mind. And then that would lead to us to zero trust. Zero trust is a massive, massive piece of cybersecurity need for organizations. We think about it as who needs the data is king. Whoever has the data, they rule the world. They own the organization, they do what they need to do. Zero trust, limited access, knowledge of who gets in, why they get in, the need to get in, and the need for that within organization. So zero trust is a very key component and Citrix is very focused on as well. We talk about updated security and patching and all that has to happen, think about remotely. So not only are we thinking about all these topics, we have to think about them going at warp speed with people that might be working remote, who also have other things they have to take care of. Maybe they're taking care of elderly parents, maybe they're having to watch their kids on zoom, making sure they're staying on zoom, and all sorts of things with school, and other maybe roommates who are working for other organizations, not having important information in the backgrounds of their zoom while they're having these important conversations with organizations. But also think about the multiple devices people are using. They may have an area that's set up properly in order to do their work, but then again, they have to be in another room at the same time. Oh, let me just grab my device. So the whole area of the multiple devices, the warp speed of working and not, let's call this pause. And this is one of the key elements that I would tell all organizations to stop and pause, to think about what you're doing before you do it. Give the headaches, but that was not interplayed when the height of the pandemic. The height of the pandemic, we were worried about what's going on? Need knowledge of information, where we're getting this information, downloading it, clicking on links. Then we're working at the same time, taking care of people. So all these things are happening simultaneously, leaving these open vectors for the tax surface to be that much more heightened for the bad actors to get in. >> So, you advise some of the largest companies in the world on this subject, and obviously you're not going to reveal any names or specifics, but as a general overall view from your perspective, how are we doing right now? Is the average large organization now sort of back on cruise control, having figured everything out for this new reality? On a scale of 1 to 10, how well are we executing against all of these changes? >> That's a great question. Let me talk about the global whole. I think organizations are actually doing really well. I think there was a quick ramp up to figure out how to get it done, but because of also the shift of sharing of information that some of these largest companies across the world, they came together to share information with bad actors, to share information about the tax, to share information about what to do if something happens, who's out there and buying together almost like a whole. So it wasn't each finger on its own. It's a hand as a whole looking at it from a stronger perspective. So I think that shift coupled with the fact of the knowledge and understanding of what companies needed to do in terms of locking down the organization, but also allowing and helping their employees, empowering them to get their work done, but get it done in a secure safe fashion. And I believe now, obviously, we all know, they obviously, but the ransomware attacks are now prevalent and they're becoming even more intense with the rise of 5G, a way that attacks could happen, the warp speed. We're now having to understand that being reactive is not enough, being proactive is something that is wonderful to see organizations are doing as well. It used to be okay, let's be reactive. If something happens, what do we do? Let's have a plan in place. But that's not good enough and we've seen that happen because these attacks are coming a warp speed. So the proactivity of these organizations that they've taken is applaudable in general. I can't talk for all the companies, but the ones that I've been consulting to and have interactions with, I'm pleasantly surprised and not surprised as well, that the way that they've taken their cyber posture so seriously, and where they focus in, not only on the organization as a whole, but their employees as individuals, what their needs are and being able to give them what they need to do their jobs well. >> Yeah, that makes sense. You can almost think of it like cybersecurity is a team sport and to the extent that all of that proactive work that an organization can do can be absolutely undermined if we don't do our parts as endpoints, as endpoint people. And when someone reads Cyber Minds, I think there's an undercurrent that I definitely sensed. And then when I looked more closely into your background, I realized that, yes, in fact, you do have a background in psychology. I want to shift to a question along that line, if you don't mind. Thinking about the psychology of people who have lived through the pandemic, this concept of our personal hygiene and our personal security has been in the forefront of our mind. As you leave the house, and there's hand sanitizer and masks and maybe gloves, we're very, very aware of this. How has that affected us from a cybersecurity team sport perspective? Has that made us better players on the field? What are your thoughts in that regard? >> I actually love that question. As we saw the pandemic heightened, everyone became hyper aware of their own personal, what's called cleanliness. And in terms of where they are, what they're doing, if they're masking, if they're putting on gloves, the sanitizers are everywhere, six feet apart. Everybody's thinking about that. It's a forefront. It became a way of life. And if you then do you shift that and you're saying, okay, let's look at the technology or the cybersecurity part of it, your own personal safety, your own personal cybersecurity. I think we failed a lot in that area. I think because of the fact, if you think about the human psychology and the pieces that people needed to know information, everybody was hungry for the latest and greatest information. What's going on? What are the stats? How many people? Just terrible, terrible pandemic with so many people getting sick. So many people dying and wanting to know, what is going on? what are the latest rule sets? What can I do? What else can I do to protect myself? What is my business doing? So we also had bad actors sending out the phishing attacks, heightened tremendously. There is information being sent out, click here for the latest here. This is Dr. Fauchi, his latest report. Everything going out there was not necessarily to help us, but to hurt us. And because of people's human psychology of thinking, I need to protect myself, so I need the information. The stop and pause is, is this the right information? Is this a safe place to go? But then there's also the other flip side of, if I'm not interacting, I'm not there. Think about the different generational people we have going on. Gen Z, millennials, all sorts of it. Everybody's all over social media. And everybody needs to and wants to have a presence there, certainly in this world. So putting out lots of information and being present was very critical 'cause people weren't in-person anymore. So people were interacting online, whether it being on social, whether it being telling people where they're going, what they're doing, what they're eating, what their favorite animal is, all sorts of things that they were doing. But they were giving over personal information that made have be utilized as passwords or ways to get to know somebody, to either do a spear phishing attack or any types of attacks to gather information to hurt, not just a personal to steal money or to steal someone's identity or to come in and hurt the company, but information was everywhere. So we were taking care of our personal cleanliness, but our cyber hygiene with our psychologies aspect of cybersecurity itself, I think took a big dive. And I think that people started becoming aware as these attack surfaces grew. There were also different types of attacks that were happening where phone calls were coming in and saying, somebody is breaking into your bank account. Just verify yourself, give me the last four digits. I need to know who you are. So playing on the human psyche of fear, somebody is trying to get you nervous. So what are you going to do? You're going to act quickly without thinking. Or all sorts of, I think we were talking earlier about extended warranties for different things. That also grew extensively, but how did they do that? They were gathering information, personal information to give you something you want. So if you're playing again on the human psychology of people, when people get what they want, they're more likely to give over something they may not give to somebody else anyway. And one of my biggest example or a strong example is back in the day with Candy Crush. If you think about that game, before you sign up for that game, you literally have to give over your kidney. You're giving over access to your camera, to your contacts. If you look back at the permissions you are giving, it's really unbelievable that everybody was clicking yes, because they wanted to play a game. So take that example and transfer that into real life. We were doing the same thing. So the importance of brushing up on that personal cyber hygiene and really understanding what people needed to do to heighten their own security themselves, less sharing on social, not giving over information that they shouldn't, not allowing a trusted source who isn't really a trusted source into it. Having strong zero trust, not just organizations, but for yourself was very important. >> Yeah now, did we, Chuck. Chuck's my producer. Did we get Shira's social security number and her date of birth? Shira, can you give us that? >> Sure, it's 555-55-5555. >> Excellent Aha, phishing attack. >> There you go, go for it. (laughs) >> So you think there could be a little bit of security fatigue that might come into play when we're thinking of living up to our responsibilities as those end points? >> I think there was just fatigue in general and people were tired of being locked in the house. People were tired of having everybody under the same roof all the time, 24/7. Trying to get work done, trying to get school done, taking care of people, what they needed to do, having groceries delivered, going into groceries, all the thoughts that they had to do that was just a way of life before that we all took for granted during the pandemic. It was just a whole shift. People were just antsy, jumpy. We needed to connect and we need to connect in any way we could. So all these open vectors became a problem that ended up hurting us rather than helping us. So this has been something that was a big mind shift as a pandemic continued. People started realizing what was going on and organizations took a good stand on educating the population and telling them, look, these are the things that are happening. This is what we need to do. Certainly a lot of the companies I'm working with did such a great job with that. Giving their employees the wherewithal of wanting to connect, but doing in a secure manner. Giving them the tools of what they needed to do personal, only also in their personal lives, not just for their work lives. So that was helpful too. And as we're coming out of it, hopefully continue to come completely out of it, we'll see the shift back into, let's take that stop and pause. Let's think what we're doing. >> Yeah, well, we are all looking back to whatever resemblance of normal we can get to. Shira, I can spend hours picking your brain on a variety of subjects. Unfortunately, we are coming to the end of our time together. Do you promise to come back? >> Certainly, a big fan of theCUBE. >> Well, fantastic. Shira Rubinoff, thank you so much for your time. This is Dave Nicholson with a very special CUBE conversation, signing out. Thanks for watching. >> Shira: Thank you too. (gentle music)

>> Hello and welcome to this special Cube Conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, and we are recapping the Citrix Launchpad series with a focus on the topic of security. Now, whenever we're going to talk security on The Cube, we have a Cube veteran and smartest person on cybersecurity that we know Shira Rubinoff. She's a cyber security executive author and advisor, specifically author of the excellent book on the subject, 'Cyber Mines'. Shira welcome back to The Cube. >> Thank you. Pleasure to be here. >> How are you today? >> It's been great. Always great to be on The Cube and talk to you folks, and certainly be part of something from Citrix. >> Well, that might be the last pleasant thing that we say, because we are surrounded by security threats. So are you ready to get serious? >> Oh always. With a smile, serious with a smile. >> So, you know, one over kind of overriding question that a lot of people have now. If you're an IT executive you've experienced a complete change in the world from so many different angles, but how has the pandemic changed the way you think of security? What are the dynamics at play things that have, that are different now that we couldn't have anticipated maybe two or three years ago? >> Interesting questions. Certainly if we look at the scope and the ecosystem of the way that organizations operated, it was pretty much, you know, in the high 90% of people being in the office with just the few percentage being working from home. And that had to shift literally overnight to literally the flip side of it, having the multitude of the organization work from home, work remotely, and maybe the few people that had to be in the office were there. So all of a sudden organizations were left with this. How do we secure down our organization? How do we keep our employees safe? How do we keep our organization safe? How do we connect to the outside world? What do we do to maintain the proper cyber let's call it cyber hygiene with an organization. And that's a topic that I talk about quite frequently. When you look at cybersecurity as a whole, we look at the cyber posture of an organization. We also have to break it down and say, what does an organization need to do to be fully cyber secure? So of course the ongoing training and that had to shift as well. We have now training for the organization and employees, but also think about the consumers and who else is interacting with the organizations. We have to switch how that is done. And that has to be ongoing. And the global awareness of cybersecurity, of course, a top of mind. And then that would lead to also zero trust. Zero trust is a massive, massive piece of cybersecurity need for organizations. We think about it as who needs the data is king. Whoever has the data, they rule the world, right? They own the organization, they do what they need to do. Zero trust, limited access, knowledge of who gets in, why they get in, the need to get in and the need for that with an organization. So zero trust is a very key component of Citrix is very focused on as well. We talk about updated security and patching and all that has to happen. Think about remotely. So not only are we thinking about all these topics, we have to think about them going at warp speed with people that might be working remote, who also have other things they have to take care of. Maybe they're taking care of elderly parents. Maybe they're having to watch their kids on Zoom, making sure they're staying on Zoom and all sorts of things with school and other maybe roommates who are working for other organizations, not having important information in the backgrounds of their Zoom while they're having these important conversations with organizations. But also think about the multiple devices people are using. They may have an area that's set up properly in order to do their work, but then again, they have to be in another room at the same time. Oh, let me just grab my device. So the whole area of the multiple devices, the warp speed of working and not, let's call it this pause. And this is one of the key elements that I would tell all organizations to stop and pause to think about what you're doing before you do it. It's never headaches, but that was not interplayed. When the height of the pandemic, the height of the pandemic, we were worried about what's going on need knowledge of information, where we're getting this information, downloading it, clicking on links. Then we're working at the same time, taking care of people. So all these things are happening simultaneously, leaving open these open vectors for the tax surface to be that much more heightened for the bad actors to get in. >> So you advise some of the largest companies in the world on this subject, and obviously you're not going to reveal any names or specifics, but as a general overall view, from your perspective, how are we doing right now? Are, are, is the average large organization now sort of back on cruise control, having figured everything out for this new reality on a scale of one to 10, how well are we executing against all of these changes? >> That's a great question. Let me talk about the global whole. I think organizations are actually doing really well. I think there was a quick ramp up to figure out how to get it done, but because of also the shift of sharing of information that some of these largest companies across the world, they came together to share information with bad actors, to share information about the tax, to share information about what to do if something happens who's out there and buying together almost like a whole. So it wasn't, you know, each finger on its own. It's a hand as a whole looking at it from a stronger perspective. So I think that shift coupled with the fact of the knowledge and understanding of what companies needed to do in terms of locking down the organization, but also allowing and helping their employees, empowering them to get their work done, but get it done in a secure, safe fashion. And I believe now, you know, obviously we all know they obviously, but the ransomware attacks are now prevalent and they're becoming even more intense with the rise of 5G, the way that attacks could happen, the warp speed we're now having to understand that being reactive is not enough. Being proactive is something that is wonderful to see organizations are doing as well. It used to be okay, let's be reactive. If something happens, what do we do? Let's have a plan in place, but that's not good enough. And we've seen that happen because these attacks are coming at warp speed. So the proactivity of these organizations that they've taken is applaudable, you know, in general, you know, I can't talk for all the companies, but the ones that I've been consulting to and have interactions with, I'm pleasantly surprised and not surprised as well, that the way that they've taken their cyber posture so seriously, and where they focus in not only on the organization as a whole, but their employees as individuals, what their needs are and being able to give them what they need to do their jobs well. >> Yeah, that makes sense. When you can, you can almost think of it like, you know, cybersecurity is a team sport. And to the extent that all of that proactive work that an organization can do can be absolutely undermined if we don't do our parts as endpoints, as endpoint people. And you know, when someone reads cyber minds, I think it'd be, I think it's, there's an undercurrent that I definitely sensed. And then when I looked more closely into your background, I realized that, yes, in fact, you do have a background in psychology. I want to shift to kind of a question along along that line, if you don't mind. Think about the psychology of people who have lived through the pandemic, this concept of our personal hygiene and our personal security has been in the forefront of our mind. You leave the house and there's hand sanitizer and masks and maybe gloves. We're very, very aware of this. How has that affected us from a cybersecurity team sport perspective has that, has that made us better players on the field? What are your thoughts in that regard? >> I actually love that question. You know, as we saw the pandemic heightened, everyone became hyper aware of their own personal, well cleanliness. And in terms of where they are, what they're doing, if they're masking, if they're putting on gloves, the sanitizers are everywhere, six feet apart. Everybody's thinking about that. It's a forefront. It became a way of life. And if you, then you shift that and you're saying, okay, let's look at the technology, the cybersecurity part of it, your own personal safety, your own personal cybersecurity. I think we failed a lot in that area. I think because of the fact you think about the human psychology and the pieces that people need to know information, everybody was hungry for the latest and greatest information. What's going on? What are the stats? How many people? Just terrible, terrible pandemic with so many people getting sick. So many people dying and wanting to know what is going on? What are the latest rule sets? What are, what can I do? What else can I do to protect myself? What is my business doing? So we also have bad actors sending out the phishing attacks, heightened tremendously. There is information being sent out. Click here for the latest here. This is Dr. Fauci's latest report, everything going out there was not necessarily to help us, but to hurt us. And because of people's human psychology of thinking, I need to protect myself. So I need the information. The stop and pause is, is this the right information? Is this a safe place to go? But then there's also the other flip side of, if I'm not interacting, I'm not there. Think about the different generational people we have going on. Gen Z, millennials, all sorts of it. Everybody's all over social media. And everybody needs to and wants to have a presence there certainly in this world. So putting out lots of information and being, being present was very critical because people weren't in person anymore. So people were interacting online, whether it being on social, whether it be telling people where they're going, what they're doing, what they're eating, what their favorite animal is, all sorts of things that they were doing. But they were giving over personal information that made of be utilized as passwords or ways to get to know somebody, to either do a spear phishing attack or any types of attacks to gather information to hurt. Not just a personal to steal money or to steal someone's identity or to come in and hurt the company. But information was everywhere. So we were taking care of our personal cleanliness, but our cyber hygiene with our psychology's aspect of cybersecurity itself, I think took a big dive. And I think that people started becoming aware as these attack surfaces grew. There were also different types of attacks that were happening, where phone calls were coming in saying, somebody's breaking into your bank account. Just verify yourself, give me the last four digits. I need to know who you are. So playing on the human psyche of fear. Somebody is trying to get you nervous. So what are you going to do? You're going to act quickly without thinking or all sorts of, I think we were talking earlier about extended warranties for different things. You know, that has, that also grew extensively, but how did they do that? They were gathering information, personal information to give you something you want. So if you're playing again on the human psychology of people, when people get what they want, they're more likely to give over something they may not give to somebody else anyway. And one of my biggest example of a strong example is back in the day with Candy Crush. If you think about that game before you sign up for that game, you literally have to give over your kidney. You're giving over access to your camera, to your contacts. If you look back at the permissions you're giving, it's really unbelievable that everybody was clicking yes because they wanted to play a game. So take that example and transfer that into real life. We were doing the same thing. So the importance of brushing up on that personal cyber hygiene and really understanding what people needed to do to heighten their own security themselves. Less sharing on social, not giving over information that they shouldn't. Not allowing a trusted source, who isn't really a trusted source into it. Having strong zero trust, not just for organizations, but for yourself was very important. >> Yeah. Now did we Chuck, Chuck, Chuck's my producer. Did we get Shira's social security number and her date of birth? Shira, can you give us that? >> Sure, it's 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5. >> Excellent, ha! Phishing attack. >> There you go. Go for it. (both laughing) >> So, so you think there could be a little bit of security fatigue that might come into play. When, you know, when we're thinking of living up to our responsibilities as those end points. >> I think there was just fatigue in general. >> Yeah. >> People were tired of being locked in the house. People were tired of having everybody under the same roof all the time, 24/7, trying to get work done, trying to get school done, taking care of people, what they needed to do. Having groceries delivered, going into groceries, all the thoughts that they had to do, that was just a way of life before, that we all took for granted during the pandemic. It was just a whole shift. People were just antsy, jumpy. We needed to connect and we need to connect in any way we could. So all these open vectors became a problem that ended up hurting us rather than helping us. So this has been something that was a big mind shift. As the pandemic continued, people started realizing what was going on and organizations took a good stand on educating the population and telling them, look, these are the things that are happening. This is what we need to do. Certainly a lot of the companies I'm working with did such a great job with that, giving their employees the wherewithal of wanting to connect, but doing in a secure manner, giving them the tools of what they needed to do personal only, also in their personal lives, not just for their work lives. So that was helpful too. And as we're coming out of it, hopefully continue to come completely out of it, we'll see the shift back into let's take that stop and pause. Let's think what we're doing. >> Yeah, well, we are all looking back to whatever semblance of normal we can get to. Shira I could spend hours picking your brain on a variety of subjects. Unfortunately, we are coming to the end of our time together. Do you promise to come back? >> Certainly a big fan of The Cube. >> Well, fantastic. Shira Rubinoff thank you so much for your time. This is Dave Nicholson with a very special Cube Conversation signing out. Thanks for watching. >> (Shira) Thank you, Dave. (lively music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. (soft music) >> Hi, Lisa Martin, with theCUBE here, talking with Caitlin Gordon, the VP of Product Marketing, at Dell technologies. Caitlin how are you? It's great to see you. >> I'm doing very well Lisa, thank you so much for having me. >> Nice to see you back on theCUBE. So lots of stuff going on in the news the last few months or so. A lot of stuff with respect to Cyber Recovery, Cyber Security, but talk to us about what's happening in the Purpose-Built Appliance Backup Appliance market. This market is growing. What's happening there, and talk to me about Dell's leadership role. >> Yeah, we've kind of come full circle. I've been in the data protection space for a while and I would say that, you know now we're looking at this as a $4 billion industry and security and protection has bubbled backup to the top of the list from an IT perspective. And one of the simplest, fastest ways to improve data protection is leveraging Backup Appliances. And there's really two segments within that. There's what I'll refer to as the target appliances and the integrated appliances. And we actually have had leadership in this space, since really the beginning. You know 50 cents of every dollar in this market is spent on Dell equipment. Where we see massive growth is really in that integrated appliance market. And those integrated appliances really simplify the deployment of not only the protection storage, but the protection software. So you can modernize your data protection, get much faster recovery, faster backups, as well as really get a smaller footprint, better efficiency, all in one single solution. And that's really where we've seen a lot of growth in the appliance market recently. >> Yeah. So as that, an integrated appliance market is growing twice as fast as targeted, give us a picture. You mentioned a few things, but kind of dig deeper into why customers are opting more and more for the integrated approach. >> Yeah that comes back to kind of a lot of the trends we see in IT overall. It's simplicity. It's ease of, how can you get to a better solution, a better outcome faster. And when it comes to integrated data protection appliances, it really it takes the guesswork out of it. You know, you have software and hardware, that's optimized to work together. You're really quick and easy to deploy, really simple to manage, 'cause it's all fully integrated and you get to a solution where you can get things like 65 one data reduction, get a very small footprint, get really fast improvements to not only backups, but probably even more importantly to recovery, get instant access to that data. And you really are able to with one purchase, transform all of your data protection. Now there's still a lot of great uses for target appliances as well of better flexibility. But, we've seen this overall you've seen this Lisa, every trend in probably IT and life, right? Simplicity. How can you get a faster, better answer? And integrated appliances really lean into that. It's as similar to what we see in the hyperconverged space, kind of in the primary storage and compute side of things. >> Yeah, I think we all want faster, simpler, better in every walk of life. One of the things this year that, in all of that lack of simplification, the complexity that we're living in that we've seen, is the rise of ransomware. It's not only on the rise, it's getting more personal. We've seen, you know, big companies, Garmin was attacked, one of the Cruise Lines was attacked, The New Zealand Stock Exchange, Facebook and Tik Tok were hacked. So we're starting to see so much more vulnerability and the ability of these hackers to expose more vulnerabilities. Have you seen that impacting your customers saying, "Hey, we need help here because now we have so many employees and devices, scattered." >> Yeah, unfortunately we have. You know, we've been talking about Ransomware Protection, Cyber Resiliency, Cyber Recovery with our customers for quite a number of years. And, now it's not a niche conversation just with financial institutions, it's a conversation with all of our customers. 'Cause either they've felt it or they've seen their competitors feel it and they need to protect themselves. So it has really become a conversation but it's not only our specialty sellers, but all of our sellers are having with our customers. And, it's really about not only being able to protect against them, which is an important part, but also recover from them. And that's really what our PowerProtect Cyber Recovery Solution is all about. And the exciting thing for us is that we actually have recently become the first Cyber Recovery Solution endorsed by Sheltered Harbor. Which really gives you an idea of the level of investment that we've made to provide that secure, automated air gap solution to give our customers that peace of mind. Because unfortunately this is becoming table stakes for any data protection out there today. >> Well, and as more and more, we see every company either becoming a data company or needing to become a data company to not just survive these times, but become successful as time goes on. To a point, it's one thing about protecting the data, but the actual need is to recover it should anything happen. Tell us a little bit more about Sheltered Harbor and what you guys were the first there to receive? Tell me a little bit more about that. >> Yeah, absolutely. Okay a little bit more on overall our solution and Sheltered Harbor is actually a consortium of organizations, primarily financial institutions that have really come together to define the standards, of what we need or Cyber Resiliency for Cyber Recovery. And for us with PowerProtect Cyber Recovery, we've worked closely with that organization, to meet those standards. And with that work and with that actual deploying in with one of our customers, we were able to become the first Cyber Recovery Solution endorsed by Sheltered Harbor to meet their standards there. And what's an important about our solution is that it's both that automated air-gapped solution for the data isolation, which is a part of it. But it's also, we have the CyberSense analytics and forensic tools that give you the ability to discover, to diagnose and to remediate against these attacks. So it gives you both sides of protecting that data air-gapping it, but also being able to intelligently discover and remediate against those attacks, if they do indeed happen. >> As VP of Product Marketing, I'm sure you're with customers often these days virtually. When you're having customer conversations, as you were singing out data protection and being able to recover and remediate, should anything like a ransomware attack happen, that's business critical. That's, you know, lifeline kind of stuff we're talking about. Have you seen the conversations within customer organizations shifts or is this now a board level or a C-level conversation in terms of data protection? >> Yeah, it's interesting. It's become a more frequent conversation. The people involved, are different. It's not just the backup administrators that are involved, it's really about the overall compliance strategy, the CSOs that are involved here. And it's becoming a corporate mandate as it really unfortunately needs to be at this point. So it's coming up more frequently, but also the types of people involved in that conversation have really changed the types of things we're having to talk about and build solutions for. So it's really changed that dynamic for us. And it's been great to really be on the front lines of that with our customers. You know, it started with those financial institutions and now it's really commonplace, to talk about this with everyone. >> So let's talk customers. Give us an example or two of some customers that are leveraging this new technology that are really achieving like the big deduplication ratio that you talked about, but also enabling their business to move forward. >> Yeah. One of my favorite ones for a couple of reasons I'll confess is, World Candy. Actually there are a World Corporation, but to me, they're a candy company. They actually make some chocolate out of Pennsylvania one of my favorites, chocolate covered pretzels. And they're a great example, right? 'Cause they're certainly not an IT specialty organization. They're trying to contract manufactured candy and they want to get things done as efficiently as possible. So they were looking a solution to overall modernize, their overall IT and that came with the combination of an Integrated Data Protection Appliance, as well as VXRail. And by implementing that, they were able to reduce their backup times from running overnight all night, to just two hours. They were able to get dedupe ratios of a 12O to one, 99.2% reduction, which is just incredible. And they were able to reduce their physical server footprint by 60%. So you can just imagine with an organization like this, that needs to run things as efficiently, as simply, as quickly as possible, how transformational that is. And, probably one of the other things that we find out of customers like this is, it's really about finding them a partner that can solve all of their problems in one place. And for data protection that's certainly one of the biggest things for PowerProtect is we now have a one-stop shop appliances software for all your data protection needs, large and small. And my favorite thing is actually our quote from this customer which is, he calls it a perfect partnership and that they have a single hand to high five. And we love to get those high fives from our customer and we really like to be that partner for them and to help them solve these challenges really no matter where their data is or what their challenges are. >> I like that a single can for a virtual high five. Speaking of partners, what's the channel play here? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for us, Dell Technology is overall channel partners are absolutely critical and in the data protection space, probably even more so. So channel partners are a huge part of our go-to-market. And one of the reason that channel partners really like to work with us, with Dell technologies on the data protection side, is because of the breadth of that portfolio. And now with our most recent enhancements on the appliance side, you now have a full PowerProtect portfolio. Target appliances, integrated appliances, physical, virtual, as well as modern data protection software with PowerProtect data manager. And for our partners, and for us, it's so important that they can have one vendor to offer all of these solutions because we know that our customer's challenges are complex, they're diverse, their data sets are diverse and they need to be able to partner with someone, leverage us as a vendor, leverage our partners, leveraging us as a vendor to really give our customers that answer. And that could be very different needs. They have traditional applications, they have new modern applications in Kubernetes and the growth of, and the importance of those types of applications. Our partners don't want and our customers don't want to have to deal with multiple vendors. Multiple vendors actually can increase risk, increase costs. They want to keep that simple, efficient. And that's why partnering with us, with Dell Technologies, why our channel partners really find us to be such a critical vendor to work with on the data protection side. >> So you've shared some impressive stats about what the technology is able to deliver. You gave us the great World Candy company example in terms of the things I heard a big workforce productivity there, they've got big deduplication there. They're able to sounds like reduce their on-prem footprint. From an economic value perspective, help us understand what the economic value of the DP series and even maybe feedback from the analyst community. >> Yeah, we've actually got a recent study which I'd encourage you guys to go read and I will just kind of give you the Cliffs Notes version of it. Which shows you the advantages of leveraging Dell Technologies portfolio for data protection. You can have your cost to protect as low as 1 cent per gigabyte per month, which is impressive. And that's that efficiency that you can get with PowerProtect. It's a reduction in the administration costs for data reduction of 22%, a reduction of 84% in your Cloud resources and services. We all know that people have moved to Public Cloud and probably one of the biggest concerns is the cost of that. By implementing the right data protection solutions, leveraging our in-cloud backup and protection, you can actually significantly reduce that because of the way that we've implemented it. And overall, you can't argue with anything that reduces costs by 98%. So you can reduce your storage resource costs by 98% by leveraging the PowerProtect portfolio. And again, it's a recent ESG study, which you can find on our website and read more about that study and the economic elements that lead into that. But you can just see the dramatic impact that can have, not only are you protecting your most valuable asset of data, but you're doing so in a way that saves the company money, and time and resources. And we all know that's never been more critical than ever. >> Those are very impressive, but compelling stats. Last question, talking about the three waves that we know Dell technologies is writing, we've got VMware, Cloud, Cyber Recovery, give us a flavor of the launch and the news and the new capabilities for this one-stop shop with perspective of what's happening in Cyber Recovery today. >> Yeah, so we've got enhancements on all fronts. So we, let me go in order there. So we've got on the Cloud front our PowerProtect data manager, which we've talked about a lot this year. We continued to really enhance that. Some recent enhancements, the ability to deploy that in Azure and AWS Cloud, to be able to do in-Cloud data protection. On the VMware side as we talked about just recently at VMworld, we've got new integrations with Storage Based Policy Management to really simplify and automate protection for the Vadmins as well as protection administrators. The ability to support, real mission critical applications and VMs, that are something we're working on to be able to more intelligently protect those VMs that have become more challenging to protect in traditional methods as well as integration with protect VCF. And then lastly, I think we've covered a bit today is certainly on that Cyber Recovery, Cyber Resiliency solution. First one to be endorsed by Sheltered Harbor in providing that air gap solution, as well as that ability to discover to remediate from those attacks. And you can kind of get a sense of, where we're really focused on. Those are our big three areas in both our appliance as well as our software portfolio really focused on simplifying that for our customers. >> Well Caitlin, we thank you for joining us as per what theCUBE has seen for many years with Dell Technologies. Lots of innovation, continued innovation. We thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE today. >> Thanks so much for having me. It was great to be here, Lisa. >> Excellent. With Caitlin Gordon, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. (soft music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello everybody and welcome to this week's CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. It is Breaking Analysis, but first I'm coming to you from the floor of Cisco Live in Barcelona, and I want to talk about storage. Storage continues to be soft but there are some bright spots. I've been reporting on this for awhile now and I want to dig in and share with you some of the reasons why, maybe give you some forecasts as to what I think is going to happen in the coming months. And of course, we want to look into some of the ETR spending data, and try to parse through that and understand who's winning, who's losing, who's got the momentum, where are the tailwinds and headwinds. So the first thing I want to show you is let's get right into it. What this slide is showing here is a storage spending snapshot of net score. Now remember, net score in the ETR parlance is an indicator of momentum or spending velocity. Essentially every quarter, what ETR does is they go out to, in this case, 1100 respondents out of the 4500 dataset, and they ask them are you spending more or are you spending less. Essentially they subtract the less from the more and that constitutes net score. It's not that simple but for this purpose, that's what we're showing. Now you can see here on the left hand side, I'm showing all respondents out of 1161. You see the January survey net scores. You've got Rubrik, Cohesity, Nutanix, and Pure, and VMware vSAN are the top five. So Rubrik and Cohesity, very strong, and interesting, Rubrik was very strong last quarter. Cohesity not as strong but really shooting up. It kind of surprised me last quarter, Cohesity being a little low but they were early into the dataset and now they're starting to show what I think is really happening in the marketplace. That's a good indicator. But you can see 75 percent, 72 percent. Nutanix still very strong at 56 percent, driving that hyperconverge piece. You see Pure Storage at 44 percent, down a little bit, talk a little bit more about that in a moment. VMware vSAN, Veeam, et cetera, down the list. The thing about the left hand side and storage in general, you can see the softness. Only about one third of the suppliers are in the green, and that's a problem. If you compare this to security, probably three quarters are in the green. It's a much hotter segment. Now, look on the right hand side. The right hand side is showing what ETR calls GPP, giant, public, and private. You can see there's an N of 403. These are the largest, the very largest public and private companies, private company being a company like Mars Candy. And they say that they are the best indicators of spending momentum in the dataset. So really isolating on some of the large companies. Look what happens here. You can see Rubrik gets even stronger as does Cohesity, they're into the 80 percent range. That's really rarefied air, so very strong. You can see Nutanix drops down. It does better in the smaller companies, it appears. They drop down to 41 percent. Pure gets stronger in the GPP at 68 percent. You can see VMware's vSAN uptick to 45 percent. Nimble gets better, HPE's Nimble, to 54 percent. Dell drops down to 4.8 percent. HPE goes up to 33 percent. HPE was red in the left hand side. You can see Veeam drops, not surprising, Veeam in the biggest companies is not going to be as prevalent. We talked about that in our Breaking Analysis segment after the acquisition of Veeam. You can see NetApp bumps up a little bit but it's still kind of in that red zone. I also want to call your attention to Actifio. They're way down on the bottom in the left hand side, which kind of surprised me. And then I started digging into it because I know Actifio does better in the larger companies. In the right hand side, they pop up to 33 percent. It's only an N of three, but what I'm seeing in the marketplace is Actifio solving some really hard problems in database and copy data management. You're starting to see those results as well. But generally speaking, this picture is not great for storage, with the exception of a few players like Rubrik and Cohesity, Pure, Nutanix. And I'm going to get into that a little bit and try to explain what's going on here. The market's bifurcated. Primary storage has been on the back burner for awhile now, and I've been talking about that. The one exception to that is really been Pure. Little bit for Dell EMC coming back, we'll dig into that a little bit more but Pure has been the stand-out. They're even moderating lately, I'll talk about that some more. Secondary storage is where the market momentum is and you can see that with Rubrik and Cohesity. Again, we'll talk about that some more. Let me dig into the primary side. Cloud, as I've talked about in many Breaking Analysis segments is siphoning off demand from on-prem spend. The second big factor in storage has been there was such an injection of flash into the marketplace, it added headroom. Customers used to buy spindles to get performance, and they don't need to do that so much anymore because so much flash was pushed into the system. The third thing is you're still seeing in primary the consolidation dynamics play out with hyperconverge. So hyperconverge is the software defined bringing together of storage, compute, and networking into a single logical managed unit. That is taking share away from traditional primary storage. You're also seeing tactical NAND pricing be problematic for storage suppliers. You saw that with Pure again this past quarter. NAND pricing comes down, which you'd think would be a good thing from a component standpoint, which it is, but it also lowers prices of the systems. So that hurt Pure's revenue. Their unit volume was pretty good but you're seeing that sort of put pressure on prices, so ASPs are down, average system prices. Let's turn our attention to the secondary market for a moment. Huge injection of venture capital, like a billion dollars, half a billion dollars over the last year, and then another five billion just spent on the acquisition of Veeam. A lot of action going on there. You're seeing big TAM expansions where companies like Rubrik and Cohesity, who have garnered much of that VC spending, are really expanding the notion of data protection from back-up into data management, into analytics, into security, and things of that nature, so a much bigger emphasis on TAM expansion, of course as I talked about the M and A. Let's dig into each of these segments. The chart that I'm showing now really digs into primary storage. You can see here the big players, Pure, Dell EMC, HPE, NetApp, and IBM. And lookit, there's only company in the green, Pure. You can see they're trending down just a little bit from previous quarters but still far and away the company with most spending momentum. Again, here I'm showing net score measure of spending velocity back to the January '18 survey. You can see Dell EMC sort of fell and then is slowly coming back up. NetApp hanging in there, Dell EMC, HP, and NetApp kind of converging, and you can see IBM. IBM announced last quarter about three percent growth. I talked about that actually in September. I predicted that IBM storage would have growth because they synchronized their DS8000 high-end mainframe announcement to the z15, so you saw a little bit of uptick in IBM. Pure, as I said, 15 percent growth. I mean, if you're flat in this market or growing at three percent, you're doing pretty well, you're probably a share gainer. We'll see what happens in February when Dell EMC, HPE, and NetApp announce earnings. We'll update you at that time. So that's what you're seeing now. Same story, Pure outpacing the others, everybody else fighting for share. Let's turn our attention now to secondary storage. What I'm showing here is net score for the secondary storage players. I can't isolate on a drill down for secondary storage, last slide I could do on storage overall, but what I can show is pure plays. What's showing here is Rubrik, Cohesity, Veeam, Commvault, and Veritas. Five pure play, you can argue Veritas isn't a pure play, but I consider it a pure play data protection vendor. Look at Rubrik and Cohesity really shooting up to the right, 75 percent and 72 percent net scores, respectively. You see Veeam hanging in there. This is again, all respondents, the full 1100 dataset. Commvault announced last quarter it beat earnings but it's not growing. You can see some pressure there, and you can see Veritas under some pressure as well. You can see a net score really deep in the red, so that's cause for some concern. We'll keep watching that, maybe dig into some of the larger accounts to see how they're doing there. But you can see clear standouts with Rubrik and Cohesity. I want to look at hyperconverge now. Again, I can't drill into hyperconverge but what I can do is show some of the pure plays. So what this slide shows is the net score for some of the pure play hyperconverge vendors led by Nutanix. The relative newcomer here is vSAN with VMware. You can see Dell EMC, VxRail, and Simplivity. I would say this. A lot of the marketing push that you hear out of Dell and out of VMware says Nutanix is in big trouble, they're dying and so forth. Our data definitely shows something different. The one caution is, you can see Nutanix and larger accounts, not as strong. And you can see both vSAN and Dell EMC stronger in those larger accounts. Maybe that's kind of their bias and their observation space, but it's something that we've got to watch. But you can see the net scores here. Everybody's in the green because overall, this is a strong market. Everybody is winning. It's taking share as I said from primary. We're watching that very closely. Nutanix continues to be strong. Watching very carefully that competitive dynamic and the dynamics within those larger companies which are a bellwether. Now the big question that I want to ask here is can storage reverse the ten-year trend of the big cloud sucking sound that we have heard for the past decade. I've been reporting with data on how cloud generally has hurt that storage spend on-prem. So what I'm showing here in this slide is the net score for the cloud spenders. Many hundreds of cloud spenders in the dataset. What we're showing here is the net score, the spending velocity over the last 10 years for the leaders. You can see Dell EMC, the number one. NetApp, right there in terms of market share, IBM as well. I didn't show HPE because the slide got too busy but they'd be up there as well. So these are the big spenders, big on-prem players and you can see, well, it's up and down. The highs are lower and the lows tend to be lower. You can see on the latest surveys, maybe there's some upticks here in some of the companies. But generally speaking, the trend has been down. That siphoning away of demand from the cloud guys. Can that be reversed, and that's something that we're going to watch, so keeping an eye on that. Let me kind of summarize and I'll make some other comments here. One of the things we're going to watch here is Dell EMC, NetApp, and HPE earnings announcements in February. That's going to be a clear indicator. We'll look for what's happening with overall demand, what the growth trajectory looks like, and very importantly, what NAND pricing looks like. As a corollary to that, we're going to be watching elasticity. I firmly believe as prices go down, that more storage is going to bought. That's always been the case. Flash is still only about 20, 25, 30 percent of the market, about 30 percent of the spending, about 20 percent of the terabytes. But as prices come down, expect people to buy more. That's always been the case. If there's an elasticity of demand, it hasn't shown up in the earning statements, and that's a bit of a concern. But we'll keep an eye on that. We're also going to watch the cloud siphoning demand from on-prem spend. Can the big players and guys like Pure and others, new start-ups maybe, reverse that trend. Multi-cloud, there's an opportunity for these guys. Multi-cloud management, TAM expansion into new areas. Actually delivering services in the cloud. You saw Pure announce block storage in the cloud. So that's kind of interesting that we'll watch. Other players may be getting into the data protection space, but as it relates to the cloud, one of the things I'm watching very closely is the TAM expansion of the cloud players. What do I mean by that. Late last year, Amazon announced a broader set of products or services really in its portfolio. Let's watch for Amazon's moves and other big cloud players into the storage space. I fully expect they're going to want to get a bigger piece of that pie. Remember, much if not most of Amazon's revenue comes from compute. They really haven't awakened to the great storage opportunity that's out there. Why is that important. You saw this play out on-prem. Servers became a really tough market. Intel made all the money. Amazon is a huge customer of Intel, and Intel's getting a big piece of Amazon's EC2 business. That's why you see, in part, Amazon getting into its own chip design. I mean, in the server business, you're talking about low gross margin business. If you're in the 20s or low 30s, you're thrilled. Pure last quarter had 70 plus percent gross margins. It's been a 60 plus percent gross margin business consistently. You're going to see the cloud guys wake up to that and try to grab even more share. It's going to be interesting to see how the traditional on-prem vendors respond to that. Coming into last decade, you saw tons of start-ups but only two companies really reached escape velocity: Nutanix and Pure. At the beginning of the century, you saw Data Domain, Isilon, Compellent, 3PAR all went public. EqualLogic and LeftHand got taken out. There are a bunch of other companies that got acquired. Storage was really a great market. Coming into this decade, mid part of the decade, you had lots of VC opportunity here. You had Fusion and Violin, Intentury went public. They all flamed out. You had a big acquisition with SolidFire, almost a billion dollars, but really Pure and Nutanix were the only ones to make it, so the question is, are you going to see anyone reach escape velocity in the next decade, and where's that going to come from. The likely players today would be Cohesity and Rubrik. Those unicorns would be the opportunity. You could argue Veeam, I guess reached it, but hard to tell because Veeam's a private company. By escape velocity, we're talking large companies who go public, have a big exit in the public market and become transparent so we really know what's going on there. Will it come from a cloud or a cloud native play. We'll see. Are there others that might emerge, like a Nebulon or a Clumio. A company like Infinidat's doing well, will they hit escape velocity and do an IPO and again, become more transparent. That's again something that we're watching, but you're clearly seeing moves up the stack where there's a lot more emphasis in spending on cloud, cloud native. We clearly saw it with hyperconverge consolidation but up the stack towards the apps, really driving digital transformations. People want to spend less on heavy lifting like storage. They're always going to need storage. But is it going to be the same type of market it has been for the last 30 or 40 years, of great investment opportunities. We're starting to see that wane but we'll keep track of it. Thank you for watching this Breaking Analysis, this is CUBE Insights powered by ETR. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time.

>>from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley. Palo ALTO, California It is a cute conversation. >>Welcome to another wicked bond digital community event, this one sponsored by Clue Me. Oh, I'm your host, Peter Burroughs. Any business that aspires to be a digital business needs to think about its data differently. It needs to think about how data could be applied to customer experience, value propositions, operations and improve profitability and strategic options for the businesses that moves forward. But that means openly, either. We're thinking about how we embed data more deeply into our operations. That means we must also think about how we're going to protect that data. So the business is not suffer because someone got a hold of our data or corrupted our data or that system just failed and we needed to restore that data very quickly. Now what we want to be able to do is we're going to do that in a way that's natural and looks a lot like a cloud because we want that cloud experience in our data protection as well. So that's we're gonna talk about with Clue Meo Today, a lot of folks think in terms of moving all the data into the cloud. We think increasingly we have to recognize the cloud is not a strategy for centralizing data but rather distributing data and being able to protect that data where it is utilizing a simple, common cloudlike experience has become an increasingly central competitive need for a lot of digital enterprises. The first conversation we had was with poo John Kamar, who John is a CEO and co founder of Cuneo. Let's hear a Peugeot on had to say about data value. Data service is and clue Meo. John, Welcome to the show. >>Thank you. Very nice to be here. >>So give us the update. Include me. Oh, >>so come you. Ah, a two year old company, right? We dress recently launched out of stealth. So so far, you know, we we came out with the innovative offering which is a sass solution to go and protect on premises in November and vmc environments. That's what we launched out of style two months ago. We want our best of show. When we came out off Stilton in November 2019. But ultimately we started with a vision about protecting data respective off buried, recites So it was all about, you know, you know, on premises on Cloud and other SAS service is so one single service that protects data introspective about recites So far, we executed on on premises VM wear and Vmc. Today What we're announcing for the first time is our protection to go and protect applications natively built on aws. So these are application that ineptitude natively built on aws that clue me in as a service will protect respective off. You know them running, you know, in one region or cross region cross accounts and a single service little our customers to protect native AWS applications. The other big announcement we're making is a new round of financing, and that is testament to the interest in the space and the innovative nature off the platform that we have built. So when we came out of still, we announced we had raised two rounds of financing $51 million in series and series B round of financing. Today, what we're announcing is a serious see around the financing off $135 million the largest. I would say Siri see financing for a sass and the price company, especially a company that's a little over two years >>old. Look, graduations that's gonna buy a lot of new technology and a lot of customer engagement. But what customers is a set up from where customers are really looking for is they're looking for tooling and methods and capabilities that allow them to treat their data differently. Talk a bit about the central importance of data and how it's driving decisions. ACLU mia >>Yes, so fundamentally. You know, when we built out the data platform, it was about going after the data protection as the first use case in the platform. Longer term, the journey really is to go from a data protection company to a data management company, and this is possible for the first time because you have the public cloud on your side. If you're truly built a platform for the cloud on the public cloud, you have this distinct and want a JJ off. Now, taking the data that you're protecting and really leveraging it for other service is that you can enable the enterprise for, and this is exactly what and the prices are asking for, especially as they you know, you make a transition from on premises. So the public cloud where they're powering on more and more applications in the public cloud and they really, you know, sometimes have no idea in terms off where the data is sitting and how they can take advantage off all these data sources that ultimately clueless protecting >>Well, no idea where the data sitting take advantage of these data. Sources presumably facilitate new classes of integration because that's how you generate value out of data. That suggests that we're not just looking at protection as crucially important as it is we're looking at new classes of service is they're gonna make it possible to alter the way you think about data management. If I got that right and what are those in service is? >>Yes, it's It's a journey, As I said, very starting with Finnegan Data protection. It's also about doing there the protection across multiple clouds, right? So ultimately we had a platform. Even though we're announcing, you know, aws, you know, applications support. Today. We've already done the ember and BMC as we go along. You'll see us kind of doing this across multiple clouds, an application that's built on the cloud running across multiple clouds, AWS, Azure and DCP. Whatever it might be, you see, it's kind of doing there, the protection across in applications and multiple clouds. And then it's about going and saying, Can we take advantage of the data that we're protecting and really power on adjusting to use cases, they could be security use cases because we know exactly what's changing when it's changing. There could be infrastructure. Analytics use cases because people are running tens of thousands off instances and containers and envy EMS in the public cloud. And if a problem happens, nobody really knows what caused it. And we have all the data and we can kind off index it in the back end and lies in the back end without the customer needing to lift a finger and really show them what happened in their environment that didn't know about right. So there's a lot of interesting use cases that get powered on because you have the ability to index all the data year. You have the ability to essentially look at all the changes that are happening and really give that visibility. Tow the end customer and all of this one click and automating it without the customer needing to do much. >>I will tell you this that we've talked to a number of customers of Romeo and the fundamental choice. The clue. Meo choice was simplicity. How are you going to sustain that? Even as you have these new classes of service is >>that is the key right? And that is about the foundation we have built at the end of the day, right? So if you look at all of our customers that have on border today, it's really the experience where in less than 15 minutes they can essentially start enjoying the power of the platform and the back end that we have built. And the focus on design that we have is ultimately why we're able to do this with simplicity. So so when when we when we think about you know all the things we do in the back, and there's obviously a lot of complexity in the back end because it is a complex platform. But every time we ask ourselves the question that okay from a customer perspective, how do we make sure that it is one click and easy for them? So that focus and that attention to detail that we have behind the scenes to make sure that the customer ultimately should just consumed the service and should not need to do anything more than what they absolutely need to do so that they can essentially focus on what eggs value to the business >>takes a lot of technology, a lot of dedication to make complex things really simple. Absolutely. John Kumar, CEO and co founder of Coolio. Thanks very much for being on the Cube. Thank you. Great conversation with you, John. Data value leading to data service is now. Let's think a little bit more about how enterprises ultimately need to start thinking about how to manifest that in a cloud rich world, Chad Kenney is the vice president and chief acknowledges a Cuneo and Chad and I had an opportunity to sit down to talk about some of the interesting approach. Is that air possible because of cloud and very importantly, to talk about a new announcement that clue me is making as they expand their support of different cloud types? What's your Chad had to say? The notion of data service is has been around for a long time, but it's being upended, recast, reformed as a consequence of what cloud can do. But that also means that Cloud is creating new ways of thinking about data service. Is new opportunities to introduce and drive this powerful approach of thinking about digital businesses centralized assets and to have that conversation about what that means. We've got Chad Candy, who's a VP and chief technologist of Kumiko with us today. Chad, welcome to the Cube. >>Thanks so much for having me. >>Okay, so what? Start with that notion of data service is and the role because gonna play clue. Meo has looked at this problem or looked this challenge from the ground up. What does that mean? >>So if you look at the cloud is a whole customers have gone through a significant journey. We've seen you know that the first shadow I t kind of play out where people decided to go to the cloud I t was too slow. It moved into kind of a cloud first movement where people realize the power of cloud service is that then got them to understand a little bit of interesting things that played out one moving applications as they exist. We're not very efficient, and so they needed to re architect certain applications. Second, SAS was a core way of getting to the cloud in a very simplistic fashion without having to do much of whatsoever. And so, for applications that were not core competencies, they realized they should go sass. And for anything that was a core competency, they needed to really re architect to be able to take advantage of those very powerful cloud service is. And so when you look at it, if people were to develop applications today, cloud is the default. They'd go tours. And so for us, we had the luxury of building from the cloud up on these very powerful cloud service is to enable a much more simple model for our customers to consume. But even more so to be able to actually leverage the agility and elasticity of the cloud. Think about this for a quick second. We can take facilities, break them up, expand them across many different compute resource is within the cloud versus having to take kind of what you did on prim in a single server or multitudes of servers and try to plant that in the cloud from a customer's experience perspective. It's vastly different. You get a world where you don't think about how you manage the infrastructure, how you manage the service, you just consume it. And the value that customers get out of that is not only getting their data there, which is the on ramp around our data protection mechanisms, but also being able to leverage cloud. Native service is on top of that data in the longer term, as we have this one comment global index and platform. What we're super excited today to announce is that we're adding in eight of US native capabilities to be ableto protect that data in the public cloud. And this is kind of the default place where most people go to from a cloud perspective to really get their applications are up and running and take advantage of a lot of those cloud. Native service is >>well, if you're gonna be Claude native and promised to customers is going to support There were clothes. You've got to be obviously on eight of us, So congratulations on that. But let's go back to this notion of you use the word powerful 80 of the U. S. Is a mature platform, G C P is coming along very rapidly. Azure is also very, very good. There are others as well, but sometimes enterprises discover that they have to make some tradeoffs. To get the simplicity, they have to get less function, to get the reliability they have to get rid of simplicity. How does clue Meo think through those trade offs to deliver that simple? That powerful, that reliable platform for something is important. Data protection and data service is in general, >>so we wanted to create an experience that was single click, discover everything and be able to help people consume that service quickly. And if you look at the problem that people are dealing with a customer's talk to us about this all time is the power of the cloud resulted in hundreds, if not thousands of accounts within eight of us. And now you get into a world where you're having to try to figure out how did I manage all of these for one? Discover all of it and consistently make sure that my data, which, as you've mentioned, is incredibly important to businesses today as protected. And so having that one common view is incredibly important to start with, and the simplicity of that is immensely powerful. When you look at what we do as a business, to make sure that that continues to occur is first, we leverage cloud. Native Service is on the back, which are complex, and getting those things to run and orchestrate are things that we build on the back end on the front end. We take the customers view and looking at what is the most simple way of getting this experience to occur for both discovery as well as you know, backup recovery and even being able to search in a global fashion and so really taking their seats to figure out what would be the easiest way to both consume the service and then also be able to get value from it by running that service >>A W s has been around well, a ws in many respects founded the cloud industry. It's it's certainly sales force on the South side. But a W. S is the first company to make the promise that it was gonna provide this very flexible, very powerful, very agile infrastructures of service. And they've done absolutely marvelous job about it, and they've also advanced the stadium to the technology dramatically and in many respects, are in the driver's seat. What tradeoffs? What limits does your new platform faces? It goes to eight of us. Or is it the same Coolio experience, adding, Now all of the capabilities of eight of us? >>It's a great question. I think a lot of solutions out there today are different parts and pieces kind of club together. What we built is a platform that these new service is just get instantly added. Next time you log in to that service, you'll see that that available Thio and you could just go ahead and log in to your accounts and build to discover directly. And I think that the the power of sass is really that not only have we made it immensely secure, which is something that people think about quite a bit with having, you know, not only did in flight, but data at rest, encryption on and leveraging really the cloud capabilities of security. But we've made it incredibly simple for them to be able to consume that easily, literally not lift a finger to get anything done. It's available for you when you log into that system. And so having more and more data sources in one single pane of glass and being able to see all the accounts, especially in AWS, where you have quite a few of those accounts, and to be able to apply policies in a consistent fashion to ensure that your you know, compliant within the environment for whatever business requirements that you have around data protection is immensely powerful to our >>customers. Judd Jenny, chief technologist Clue me Oh, thanks very much for being on the Cube. Thank you. Great conversation. Chad especially interested in hearing about how Camilo is being extended to include eight of US service, is within its overall data protection approach and obviously into data service is let's take a little bit more into that clue. MEOWS actually generated and prepared a short video we could take a look at that goes a little bit more deeply into how this is all gonna work. >>Enterprises air moving rapidly to the cloud. Embracing sass for simplified delivery of key service is in this cloud centric world. I T teams could focus on more strategic work, accelerating digital transformation initiatives when it comes to backup. I t is stuck designing, patching and capacity planning for on Prem Systems. Snapshots alone for data protection in the public cloud is risky, and there are hundreds of unprotected SAS applications in the typical enterprise. Move to cloud should make backup simpler, but it can quickly become exponentially worse. It's time to rethink the backup experience. What if there were no hardware, software or virtual appliances to size, configure, manage or even by it all? And by adding enterprise backup, public cloud workloads are no longer exposed to accidental data Deletion and Ransomware and Clooney. Oh, we deliver secure data backup and recovery without any of that complexity or risk. We provide all of the critical functions of enterprise backup de Doop and scheduling user and key management and cataloging because were built in the public cloud, weaken rapidly, deliver new innovations and take advantage of inherent data security controls. Our mission is to protect your data wherever it's stored. The clue. Meo authentic SAS backup experience scales on demand to manage and protect your data more easily and efficiently. And without things like cloud bills or egress charges, Clooney oh gives you predictable costs. Monitor and global back of compliance is far simpler, and the built in always on security of clue. Meo means that your data is safe. Take advantage of the cloud for backup with no constraints. Clue. Meo Authentic sass for the Enterprise. >>Great video as we think about moving forward in the future and what customers are trying to do. We have to think more in terms of the native service is that cloud can provide and how to fully exploit them to increase the aggregate flexibility both within our enterprises, but also based on what our supplies have to offer. We had a great conversation with Runes Young, who is thesis CTO and co founder of Cuneo, about just that. Let's hear it wound had to say everybody's talking about the cloud and what the cloud might be able to do for their business. The challenge is there are a limited number of people in the world who really understands what it means to build for the cloud utilizing the cloud. It's a lot of approximations out there, but not a lot of folks are deeply involved in actually doing it right. We've got one here with us today, wound junk is thesis CEO and co founder of Clue Meo Womb. Welcome to the Cube. >>Happy to be here. >>So let's start with this issue of what it means to build for the cloud. Now Lou MEOWS made the decision to have everything fit into that as a service model. What is that practically need? >>So from the engineering point of view, building our sauce application is fundamentally different. So the way that I'll go and say is that at Cuneo we actually don't build software and ship software. What we actually do, it builds service and service is what you're actually shipped Our customers. Let me give you an example. In the case of Kun, you they say backups fail like so far sometimes fails. We get that failures too. The difference in between Clooney oh, and traditional solutions is that if something were to fail, we are they one detecting that failure before our customers do Not only that, when something fails, we actually know exactly why it failed. Therefore, we can actually troubleshoot it, and we can actually fix it and operate the service without the customer intervention. So it's not about the books also or about the troubleshooting aspect, but it's also about new features. If you were to introduce a new features, we can actually do this without having customers upgraded call. We will actually do it ourselves. So essentially it frees the customers from actually doing all these actions because we will do them on behalf of them >>at scale. And I think that's the second thing I want to talk about quickly. Is that the ability to use the cloud to do many of the things that you're talking about? At scale creates incredible ranges of options that customers have at their disposal. So, for example, a W s customers of historically used things like snapshots to provide ah modicum of data protection to their AWS workloads. But there are other new options that could be applied if the systems are built to supply them. Give us a sense of how clue Meal is looking at this question of, you know, snapshots were something else. >>Yes, So, basically, traditionally, even on the imprints, out of the things, you have something called the snapshots and you had your backups right, and they're they're fundamentally different. But if you actually shift your gears and you look at what A. W s offers today. They actually offers stability for you to take snapshots. But actually, that's not a backup, right, And they're fundamentally different. So let's talk about it a little bit more what it means to be snapshots and a backup, right? So they say, there's a bad actor and your account gets compromised like your AWS account gets compromised. So then the bad actor has access not only to the EBS volumes, but also to the snap shows. What that means is that that person can actually go in and delete the E. V s volume as well as the TVs nuptials. Now, if you had a backup, let's say you are should take a backup of that TVs William to whom you that bad actor would have access to the CVS volumes. However, it won't be able to delete the backup that we actually have, including you. So in the whole thing. The idea off Romeo is that you should be able to protect all of your assets, that being either an on Prem or neither of us by setting up a single policies. And these are true backups and not just snapshots >>and that leads to the last question I have, which is ultimately the ability to introduce thes capabilities. At scale creates a lot of new opportunities of customers can utilize to do a better job of building applications, but also, I presume, managing how they use AWS because snapshots and other types of service can expand dramatically, which can increase your cost. How is doing it better with things like Native Backup Service is improve customers ability to administer the AWS spend and accounts. >>So, great question. So, essentially, if you look at the enterprises today, obviously they have multiple on premise data centers and also a different car providers that they use like AWS and Azure and also a few SAS applications, Right? So then the idea is for Camilo is to create this single platform what all of the stains can actually be backed up in a uniform way where you can actually manage all of them. And then the other thing is all doing it in the cloud. So if you think about it, if you don't solve the problem, fundamental in the cow, their stings that you end up paying later on. So let's take an example. Right. Uh, moving bites. Moving bites in between one server to the other. Traditionally basically moving bites from one rack to the other. It was always free. You never had to pay anything for that. >>Certainly in the data center. >>Right? But if you actually go to the public cloud, you cannot say the same thing, right? Basically, moving by across AWS recent regions is not free anymore. Moving data from AWS to the on premises. That's not for either. So these are all the things that you know cop provider service providers are gods has to consider and actually solved so that the customers can on Lee back it up into come you. But then they actually can leverage different cloud providers, you know, in a seamless way, without having to worry all of this costs associated with it so criminal we should be able to back it up. But we should be able to also offer mobility in between either aws back up the M word or the M C. >>So if I can kind of summarize what you just said that you want to be able to provide to an account to an enterprise, the ability to not have to worry about the back and infrastructure from a technical and process standpoint, but not also have to worry so much about the back and infrastructure from a cost of financial standpoint that by providing a service and then administering how that service is optimally handled, the customer doesn't have to think about some of those financial considerations of moving get around in the same way that they used to. Have I got that right, >>I absolutely, yes, basically multiple accounts, multiple regions, multiple couple providers. It is extremely hard to manage. What come your does. It will actually provide you a single pane of glass where you can actually manage them all. But then, if you actually think about just and manageability this, actually you can actually do that by just building a management layer on top of it. But more importantly, you really need to have a single data repository for you. For us to be able to provide a true mobility in between them. One is about managing, but the other thing is about if you're done, if you're done in the real divide way, it provides you the ability to move them and leverages the cloud power so that you don't have to worry about the cloud expenses but whom you internally is the one that actually optimizing all of this for our customers. >>Wound young cto and co founder of Coolio. Thanks very much for being on the Q. Thank you. Thanks very much. Room I want to thank clue me Oh, for providing this important content about the increasingly important evolution of data protection Cloud. Now, here's your opportunity to weigh in on this crucially important arena. What do you think about this evolving relationship? How do you foresee it operating in your enterprise? What comments do you have? What questions do you have of the thought leaders from Clue Me? Oh, and elsewhere. That's what we gonna do now we're gonna go into the crowd chat. We're gonna hear from each other about this really important topic and what you foresee in your enterprise as your digital business transforms, it's crochet

>>live from Washington, D. C. >>It's the Cube >>covering Bumi World 19. Do you buy movie? >>Hey, welcome back to the Cube. We've got candy. That's right. I am Lisa Martin in Washington, D. C. At booming World 19 with John Ferrier and John and I are excited to be talking next with a chief technology officer of candy dot com. Gary, welcome to the Cube. >>Thank you for having me great to be here. >>So tell our audience about candy dot com Guinea all that you want dot com cool stuff. >>It is cool stuff. It is the endless. I'll just like going to the supermarket and never runs. Oh, it's absolutely perfect. That's actually how we started knowing that there was so much candy out there that people wanted in the lines just weren't long enough to put him in, no matter where you checked out, and we started off being the online candy store, which was a foot in the door, but it was a very small opening at that time. >>One of the things you said when I met you today whilst eating candy that you guys brought thank you very much for that was very appropriate. Um, was that candy? Is recession proof? >>It is. It's it's ah, you know, good times, bad times. You know, people are gonna have birthday parties. People get married holidays. They're going to come. You know, you've had a really great day. It's a candy bar. You know, you've had a really bad day. It's the candy bar. That's just it's an impulse buy, but it's an impulse buy with your favorite. I mean, it's something to comfort more than anything else, actually. And the technology side talk about how you guys were organized. What? Some of the challenges and how does Bumi fit in? Take us through the journey. Sure, when we started out, we thought, How hard could it be doing? Data entry will get the orders. They'll come across, we'll have some people. Instrument to the system will start filling up, you know, and then everything else will take care of itself. And within about a few minutes, we realized that that was probably not going to work. It was not scalable because first of all, data entry is air pro. You know, if you have someone actually trying to do with their, it's not gonna work for us. So we realized that there was a mechanism out there with Edie I and we went to 1/3 party provider to help us with the FBI. And that's how we started with the first couple of integrations and it was good. It got us off the ground and got us further into that door. >>So you started with, um, how many different partners trading partners take us back to kind of the last 10 years of candy dot com and how that Trading Partner Network has grown. >>Oh, it's like the journey. It's still we starts with the first step. We had one that was interested, one that wanted to work with Austin, and we started to do the work with them and figure out how to handle it. But they had multiple divisions, so, you know, there was only one that was 32 actual integrations that had to be done on being a traditional brick and mortar. It's very competitive. So once the word got out that they were work with us, there was a couple other. So we had six pretty big ones lined up early on that we needed to have integrated in up and running very quickly. >>And from a digital perspective, what were some of the initial system's applications that you implemented just start being able to manage and track those trading partner interactions to ensure that you're able to deliver? You know what? The candy, the candy demand that you need to fill? >>It was, sadly, a lot of C S V. A lot of email, a lot of phone calls back and forth. There was a lot of hours, and it was one those ones where we would really just bring in temps and try to keep up with it did not really have a repeatable process or a good technical footprint of what we needed to d'oh way didn't know what we didn't know when we started, and we very rapidly came to become aware of what we needed to do. >>So starting with air P Net sweet brought net Sweden two years ago. Tell us about that and what you thought was gonna solve all of our problems. Well, that's why it's >>a great package because it brought us both order management and it brought us here. Pee in. There were so many models and so much technology behind it and they have a warehouse module. There's, like all we could grow forever With this, it will never be bounded. This is gonna be fantastic. But what we forgot is that it was only as good as the data in there. And if we're using as a manual data entry, it's not going to meet our needs. We needed to come up with a better way in a more efficient way to get the data in. And this was still back in the day when we're trying to fulfill something within a week, much less where we're at today. >>Okay, so where does Bumi fit into play? >>We realized, unfortunately that even when you have an integration up and running and as good as the integration is, some of your trading partners will have changes. They're going to give you a different reference number. They're gonna give you a different requirement. They're gonna make something that was optional now mandatory. So we had problems because it wasn't just also that was impacting everyone that was doing an integration with that trading partner had it. So if I had outsourced it and there was 100 people that had that map. We were one of 100. Sometimes we were one, and sometimes we were as far away from one is possible and you understand that, and you appreciate it because there's only a finite number of hours to get things done. So we understood that to be really profitable and get to the level of service we needed to control the data. And that's when we decided that we needed to bring the E. D I and house. >>So when you were looking for the right integration partner, what was it about Bhumi from a technology perspective and a business perspective that really differentiated it. >>First and foremost, the number one requirement had to talk to nets. We had a have a native nets. We'd integration if it did not talk to net sweet. It wasn't gonna make it onto our plate because we weren't gonna spend the time to reinvent the wheel when obviously the wheel was out there. We had actually done that once before, and it was successful but painful. And there's people out there who build a connection and work to silver partners like blooming in the platinum partners that can go out and they can actually keep up with the release before it comes out. And you're being proactive by the reactive from a business need. It was We can't drop data. We need to be efficient. We need to be timely. We need visibility. And looking at Bumi, it met all those needs. We had a connection into nets. We had a reporting tool. We had error messages coming back. We had everything that we needed to manage our own world and take control of it. Or so we thought >>that look. Okay, so get this implemented. What sort of opportunities is the start opening up? You talked about control there, or so we thought. What have you been able to unlock where control is concerned? In the last few years, >>what we didn't realize with what we were doing is that way. We're just basically turning on everything and trying to run this efficiently and fast as possible. And that was really the wrong approach to take what we needed to do it as some governance to it as some logic to it, too, you know, not compete with jobs. There's there's a finite number of avenues into the back end system, you need to utilize it. But there was also tools that we found out inside this system that handled things like error trapping and retrial, logic and time outs and stuff like that. And as we worked with the subject matter experts at Boom, as we worked with the people at Nets, we in our account managers who would show us things and help us long. We learned a lot more about him. When we went live back in February of 2016 we were very excited. We did 1000 orders into our system and one day and we thought, How phenomenal is this? I mean, 1000 orders. How many more orders could you actually look for? And we very soon realized that there was a lot more orders willing to come into our system if we could handle it. >>So what? So when you first started with Bhumi went from some number 2 1000 orders today. What was that original number that you guys were able to handle when it was more of a manual process? >>It depend on how many attempts we could hire that sometimes it was 100 orders we got in. Sometimes it was 100% dependent on people. Also depend on someone, Remember, understands the spreadsheet. >>The Sun's painful, >>painful and not really easy to plan for. >>But you discovered pretty quickly you went from I won't say 0 to 1000. But somewhere in between that realized tha the capabilities, though of this system was gonna allow you to get 20,000 orders per day. Where was the demand coming from? Was it coming from trading partners was coming from their customers? Was it coming from your internal team seeing Hey, guys, I think there's a lot more power here than we originally thought. >>Well, success begets success because we were able to get an order in now in a timely fashion and ship it out there. All of a sudden, I realized we were shipping orders within 48 to 72 hours. It wasn't taking 10 days anymore, so we had repeat customers, which obviously makes your numbers go up. And then, as you know, your experience is good and you share it because social media is the weight of the world All the sudden, you know if if you tell two friends and they tell two friends we start getting more volume. Damn white starts happening is someone realizes they're losing market share of their brick and mortar website. And who was fulfilling the orders for them if they're doing so well and we're losing business and they start knocking on the door saying what? We'd like to work with you as well. And the other thing, too, is just timing. In the United States, it's pretty warm between April and October, and the bulk of perishable and heat sensitive product will ship through one of our warehouses because we have the thermal controls in the programs in place to give a good experience to make sure the product arrives the way it's supposed to be treated. >>Yeah, you were mentioning that when you were on stage this morning with Mandy Dolly Well, Mami CMO and Jason Maynard from Net Sweet that there are obviously, if you order some chocolate. I wanted to get there in the exact state in which I saw it online, right? But there's you've gotta have a lot of access, invisibility and systems to be able to help you facilitate that temperature control, depending on the type of product. >>Absolutely. So we're very proud of the fact that, you know, we're temperature controlled where humidity controlled were suf certified. We've done everything the right way to make sure that what we do is gonna be the best experience that your food is safe. Because, Paramount, the last thing we ever want to do is to keep a product of someone's gonna make your child sex because, you know, you don't want anyone to get sick. But the worst feeling is apparent is when your kid doesn't feel well. So we understand that Andi have a phenomenal staff. Are Q A team will go through and we have ways to test the product to get to the melting point. And we know different products melted different temperatures, and we determine what those temperatures are. We build those thresholds we do calls out to get the weather. No, I'm shipping it from my location to you. What's the temperature of my It doesn't matter if it's cold at your place. It is 90 where I'm shipping it from. So we look at what is it now? Where is it going? What's it gonna be the next few days? How big is it? You know how much product is in there with that? That isn't heat sensitive. And we have a pretty complex algorithm that we put in place That has really enabled us to handle the summer months and give a good product because, I mean a lot of people like s'mores, but they don't want the pre melted chocolate showing up at their house. >>Would agree. That takes the fun out of the bonfire part, right? Exactly. So let's talk about the people transformation because you were saying your 100% dependent on manual Somebody even sending the spreadsheet little into star inputting data to process X number of orders per day went from almost 0 to 1000 overnight with Bhumi, then saw this capacity for 20,000. How have has your team has other business units within candy like finance? How are they benefiting from all of this? What a presume is massive workforce productivity gains that you're giving everybody? >>Absolutely. It was a great problem tohave because as we got bigger and we started getting more and more orders than we got more and more invoices and you know, we got more and more checks in which we always think it's a good thing, but those checks need to be reconciled. They have to be reconciled against the transaction Inside the Nets week. It's no exaggeration that we would have pages printed out with a ruler going down and highlighting one by one on the invoice to make sure nothing was omitted. And we were spending an individual spent an eight hour day, three days a week, just going through direct missile. One invoice that was coming in and we would get two or three a week from them. So it was painful and again also error prone. And these people are very creative, very smart, and they offer so much more to the business that it was a waste of their time in a waste of their intellect. S o del. Booming, we found out, is not just any eyes phenomenal, Aditi, I but it has all these other tools and won. The tools we had was to be able to take the remittance file from the financial institution, reconcile it against the invoice is in the system and create a C S V import that would run that we have a script for that created a cash payment in our system that would actually close out the invoices and be paid so that we don't take care of it. It was done, and finance would basically get the file and e mail to us. We would file it back and they'd run an import. So instead of 250 hours a week, it was five minutes of file. >>That's a dramatics saving hundreds of hours a month, but also faster time to revenue recognition. >>That's a big one, you know, because when you try to get people discounts or give them brakes or if your terms are out there, it's nice to get it in there and keep your system's clean, because you also have to answer to the end of the month. You know you want to close the books and everything in manual processes. Air one the few things that you can't just throw more horsepower at. >>I'm glad you brought up, though from a resource kind of reallocation. Perspective is, these folks, in particular areas of the business, have value that they're not able before weren't able to really unlock and deliver. Now, with the technology in place, they're able to probably focus on more strategic areas of the business or more strategic projects. I also imagine your sales. We said faster time to revenue in revenue recognition, but big boost to candy dot comes sales. Since you've implemented the technology >>direct, I mean the sales numbers have just grown. I mean, as much as we do. No do are forecasting and think where it's going to go. Wee wee drastically underestimated this year. The summer was very, very good to us. Our first year under booming, we ran for 11 months. We did a little over 600,000 orders for that first year. In comparison, in June, July and August this year, we did over a 1,000,000 orders. That's a lot of chocolate. So a >>lot of candy, >>most certainly >>busier time, period. I mean Halloweens in a few weeks, Christmas is coming. How does that compare in terms of like the Flux >>way? Have a peek? Obviously, Halloween Halloween is obviously the time, of course. November 1st, our orders are zero because everyone walks in with a pillowcase of candy from their kids to the office, so it literally goes from a 1,000,000 miles an hour or two nothing, and it's it's kind of eerie. But throughout the summer we stay very, very busy because a lot of the market places don't have the facility and listen, they're great, you know, it's one stop shopping. They have everything, but everything is in a warehouse in that entire warehouse is not properly controlled to handle food products. So they decided it was an advantageous for them to ship, you know, during the summer, and it's poorly monitored as a summer Shipp program. But it's really more of a heat sensitive program because we'll add the thermal product to protect the thermal packaging to protect the product, even in February. I mean, there's some spots in Florida in Texas at a pretty one that you want to protect the item. So it's a heat sensitive program that we're very proud of, and we keep advancing and we keep growing. And, you know, I have. I'm very fortunate. I have a great team. I mean, we're not gonna call out, you know, like Jim and Scott, because that would be wrong to deal with. These guys have been with me from the start, and they put the E. T. I in place. They put the scripting in place that the guys were just, you know, rock stars on. Do I look good because of their effort? And I'm very, very proud of the team we've assembled that does this to make sure that you're and satisfaction is always met. >>Awesome story. So I imagine you know, when we hear like, four out of five dentists recommend this kind of bet. Is the fifth dentist recommending candy dot com? Is that where that guy's been? >>Yeah, he's got four kids >>going through college and >>everything, so he figures candy dot com to go. Way to make the money to make sure those tuition skip. >>All right. Well, Gary, it's been a pleasure to have you on the keys. Thank you for sharing what you're doing with bhumi at candy dot com. We appreciate and thanks for all the candy. >>Oh, our pleasure. Thank you very much for having been a great couple of days. I'm glad to be part of it. >>All right. Our pleasure for John Ferrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from Bhumi World 19. Thanks for watching

>>live from Washington, D. C. It's the Cube covering Bumi World >>19 Do you buy movie? >>Welcome to the Cube of Leader in live tech coverage on Lisa Martin John for years with me were a Bumi World in d. C this year Excited to have there could be four really chatty people in this segment warning you now we've got Mandy Dollar while the cmo abou me Anibal Corker s V p of sales guys welcome thistles been in Austin. This is day one of the main event partner event started yesterday Partner Summit One of the things that is always very resonant with Bhumi events as you get this sense of collaboration with your partners with your customers and it's very symbiotic. So some of the numbers that came out today I wanted to kind of geek out on numbers because last boom, the world was on the 11 months ago, and I think the numbers we were talking about where 7500 customers adding five new a day. Now it's over 9000 in over 80 countries. Your partner program is blowing up 580 partners, incredible growth. And Chris McNab told Jonah me earlier today. This event? Actually, no, he said in the keynote five x What? It was the first event. Wow. You guys all look very refreshed for being this busy facade. Mandy, talk to us about what's going on. Abou me from your perspective. The new branding is really cool to have that represent what booby is delivering. We're at a >>growth trajectory and we had to refresh our brand to put a new face on this business so we could accelerate our growth. This is a whole new boo me to the world. When I stood up, it sails kick off earlier this year. In February, we reposition the company and focused ourselves on selling solutions. And as a part of that strategy, to start to amplify this brand to really become more of a known entity in the market, it was time for us to polish the brand up. You know, we had tremendous product market fit for many years. We just forgot to tell the world. So when I came on board, I can't keep a secret. Here I am Brandy. Look and feel. Lots of new customer stories. We're accelerating outcomes. >>Very clean. Logo queen branding. What's the brand promise. Where do you want to take the brand? What's next? Where's this going? Take us through the vision. >>Great question. The vision for the business Is that why we exist? We went through and, you know, we deliver a connected business experience that the real reason why we exist is to accelerate business outcomes for our customers. That is our vision, all right. We're connecting and unifying everything in a ditch. Digital ecosystem. The world has gone digital. No longer is software eating the world digital. Is the new game in town gloomy as well. Poised to go do that? That is the vision. And it's all about the customer and sharing their stories and the winds that they have worthy, enabling technology that drives that outcome faster and better than anybody else >>we had on earlier the founder of Bumi sharing early successes, Lisa asked him the background behind all started, and he said, we made a big bet and self aware Founder said We got lucky and he got lucky. Made a big bet on cloud. Now you guys have 9000 customers. Last year, your number one number one priority was customer success equation then the keynote again this year. You guys are crazy about customer outcomes. What >>is >>that mean? You hear customer success equation? What is the equation? Because the math equation isn't like, is it? What? What is the formula? >>Well, I think it entails a couple of key things. It starts with the product right, and it doing exactly what people are looking for it to do. And the reality is most people come in and they have an idea that they want to do X, and they really end up doing X plus y Times E. And and that becomes that's a big part of it. So getting to understand the platform and then showing them, you know that we really care about their success, that in fact it's either win, win relationship or lose lose, we have to make them successful. We have a tremendous muscle when it comes to customer success and our support efforts and those types of things. So just making sure that they're on the right journey, that they're leveraging the platform that's doing what they wanted to do. And again, we're seeing so many customers come back in now because of that and thinking that they can solve so many more problems than what they originally anticipate >>talking on our opening around. Um, you're successful business model like you talk more about that. But in contrast to what we've been reporting on our sites and silken angle in the Cube is Wall Street sees we work pulled their I p o uber, all these big companies, they buy market share, get a position, and then they try to crank the monetization. They're not being looked upon favorably right now, because that entails extracts from the customer. You guys are more on the other side, the Cloud SAS model, which is provide value if you need more, buy more, lower price fits increased. That's an Amazon like flywheel. Yeah, So you guys are on the positive side of the SAS formula as you have that first you guys agree with that's happening. But what do you say to customers who is booming? Because now you're you have leverage software business. Yeah, we have the professional service is what does this mean for customers? >>We'll get I would say that what it means is that they can come in and solve a problem so much faster than they ever thought they could solve it before. They're thinking they want to go on a journey. Everyone talks about the journey right, and it all. It comes in about 1000 different shapes and sizes. And with Bumi having a layer like this to be able to connect, what you need to connect when you need to connect it, how you need to connect it, that's and doing that in such in a fashion that no one ever really thought. And again. You said you had Rick Nucci and in the Founder where they thought I just talked to a minute ago. And I always say he was talking about how he was listening to some of the customers success stories. And I looked at him. I said You didn't think they were ever going to do all this stuff, that they could do all these things And he said, You know what? We didn't anticipate. It really didn't and so getting them to do that. But the key, to be honest, a big part of our growth, although we're acquiring lots of new logo. Certainly, as you mentioned, let's new customers a huge part of our growth is that again people are going, man. OK, I I brought in a new SAS application service now, or something like that. Okay, that's good. But I've got all these FTP problems and I've got this database issue and I need to be able to leverage this existing on Premiere P. And now I'm going to work Day and I have to be able to, and it's just it's just we see them just starting to get very creative about how they're leveraging the fact >>it's opening up. You say, you know, from a marketing perspective, unlocking potential. But it's really true. I I saw yesterday first and the manifestation of the Bumi fandom. That's rial. I was talking to one of your customers who integrated use integration for a particular opportunity. I thought there might be some, you know? Wow, there's gonna be a lot of data coming out. What can we do with this? And all of the, um, kind of side benefits that came from that they couldn't have predicted. Neither could have Rick Nucci, but how they're able to become even, you know, as a transportation logistics provider, trusted advisors to the carriers and the shippers that work with them. And then they're realizing, Oh, actually what we're doing, you know, under the hood with Bhumi is making a carrier more productive because the workload is less less clicks, etcetera. So it's really it shows the transformation doesn't just stay within your customer, their customers as well. The sort of this snowball effect. It really got that resoundingly yesterday from summer combo, >>where we see the people, the customers figure out if this becomes a common data layer for their monetization journey, right. So now they have control of all this data, no matter where it is and how it's going out in public cloud private clouds, public's ask, whatever it is, and then they now they've got control. They can become creative with the data. Now they can provide new service is to customers and suppliers and partners and internal stakeholders, whatever it might be. And I think that's that's it. Haven't clicked for us a couple years ago, and Mandy has been great about making that really how we send the message and it's really seen takeoff. >>We really speak about transformation, right? That's business processes. That's customer experience. How do you take that data and build upon it using our flow capabilities and take thes wrote processes and start to have them automated in a way that you're driving new customer experiences. Right? Employees on boarding is one that we use internally. We talked about it before our MPs went from a negative. I don't know, two incredibly positive, right? That's what this technology can do. Once you have that data layer in, we become that enabling technology to to go drive these additional >>out. And he has net promoter score for the folks at the jargon that this piece of a good point with the new branding we saw, it resonates. Well, it's gonna create a lot of brand impressions. I know you've done a great job of getting it out there. It's only gonna get better. But you get the brain of pressure. Then I want to know who is booming. If they know Bhumi, who what's the new room? We're gonna be like, What's the plan? How we're going to scale up the messaging? How you gonna take it? The market with the brand, There >>s O. Our core strategic initiatives are really what's on top of mind for Cee Io's right connection is important. That the stuff that will talked about in terms of on Prem and multi hybrid cloud scenarios right modernization, right? Getting stuff off of legacy Fed has a massive opportunity in terms of modernization. We're seeing that already. You know, we were Fed RAM certified in August. We've already got her for stealing the door. Congratulations. A fantastic opportunity on modernization, transformation. The stuff I spoke about customer experience, the one I'm particularly excited about. This is the marketing strategy coming through the innovation layer. We have a quick serve retailer that is now taking facial recognition. When I go through a drive thru triangulating my data with Maya vehicle license plate, making me on the spot loyalty offers and also saying, Oh, Mandy, would you like your regular breath breakfast sandwich Order That is the artist >>or not, you're in a good mood or Rolls Express. Oh, >>yes, >>minutes late today she's going to storm through here, right? Like that level of sentiment analysis based on my voice. The other stuff we heard this morning, right? We're triangulating all of that to go Dr whole new ways of doing business. So that's what I find hard. Your >>ecosystem is a key part of any growth strategy. I have to get the customer equation I loved. Loved the business model. You know, a big fan Disclose that everyone knows that. But be successful. You guys have a challenge. You have to grow the brand. You had to build the ecosystem, build the community with education pieces again. They're these >>air >>real blocking and tackling things. What? You guys, what's your opinion? What do you guys gonna do with that? Give us the playbook. >>We've brought it all together under one brand now, right Community saw this morning the boom Evers. The >>asked 1000 people in that community manager. >>Absolutely. And now we are ready for exponential growth, right? We have a way to game. If I We have a way to certify and train more people are partners. Demand it. There's a skills gap in the market in technology. That's a known fact for many years. So how do we quickly enable intelligence around the Bumi platform and mind trust and share? So that's something that's gonna happen. So we're creating this in waves were creating a viral ality component to our community right, all under the Bumi brand. So it all becomes additive. And that was important for us, as far as a growing up as a business is. Well, we're We're on this fast growth trajectory and everybody's off doing their thing. So I came in and said, All right, guys, let's let's build some cohesion here and that is going to help us as we scale this business >>will. On the sales side, you're gonna get a lot of pull now from the marketing Digital's. A lot of organic stuff goes on digital. We know we do a lot of cubes that we see the data. You guys still get the lead. You got too close sale cycles. This is kind of the business side of it. How's that going? What's that? What's an engagement looked like? How fast do Customs committees that word of mouth they talk to each other? What if some of the dynamics in the field? >>Well, we're seeing some of those times shrink. It's weird. I've been here seven years, so it's, you know, my team then was like 10. Now it's 470 or something, and so we've grown very fast, but it's on. We came in before. It was kind of like a connection deal. Last minute I thought, you know Oh gosh, I got an immigration problem. But now, a couple years later, it started really extending because it became a little more strategic. But now we're starting to see it shrink because people realize they're bringing it in, and they know that it's something that's key to what they have to do. What we're seeing is, is it's it's It's something that all of our partners are partners air so critical to helping us with the journey because we're really still just talking about one little piece of that larger pie. And so they come in and become with Come in with us every single time and we're globalizing as you mentioned all the countries that we're doing this in. But you know, France and Germany, or big efforts for Japan, the Fed those were like four areas. If I could pick that partners and how we're going to those markets >>are credible. Follow up on that. Just as you guys are getting these deals. Whats When does a customer know they have a Bumi opportunity? What is their problems? or a moment Is that a certain use cases? It like, Wow, I got integration problem. Is it integration? Problem called Boo me. What's that? What's the success pattern that you're seeing for the winds? >>You know, I'm gonna go back to the four that we talked about because, you know, part of part of my challenges, the sales leader for seven years was I've said this is the most organic technology I've ever I've ever dealt with. Representative. Because when we walked in, it could go anywhere. People wanted to do Data Analytics. They wanted to solve that TP problem. They wanted to do front. And you heard Olive from Sky. And she's thinking front end customer support stuff. So it really could go anywhere now is always always about managing data and collecting it. But, I mean, it really was. It comes from so many places, and the sale cycle has been, you know, has changed because of it. >>So as the marketing and the brand have evolved since Mandy spent on board, how much are you time? Are you still spending describing? Okay. So Bumi is how much more brand awareness and recognition do you have now? And how is that making the job easier? Because the attention the renewal rate is really high. 97%. >>Yeah, what's actually almost 99% from our field customers, and then we get over AM customers as well, about 97%. So how do we How do we keep the customers >>in terms of brand awareness, all the recognition? How much if you compared to seven years ago, when you were having to say, Well, buoy is now with Chris, McNall said, Hey, there's gonna be 100 different mentions of customer stories at this event alone. How much easier is your job? Enough sense? Because people are now much more aware of Bloomie's capability. >>I think people realize they need. This is what I say to all of our partners and even we're talking Deltek people. Every single customer will invest in this type of technology over the next several years. It might be a very tactical thing to do, but but call it a night pass. Call it a simpler way to connect and manage and access your data. So, yes, we're proud we're over that bridge to say OK, this is what was legitimate I think we're still having conversations about how strategic it is. But again, that's typically an interpretive process. We weigh very rarely come in and say Someone says, Oh, I'm going to replace all of this So it is. It's I'm going to solve this problem And then they go, Oh, all right now And its architects and leaders are going, Oh, well, we could solve all of these other problems that we've had >>Well, and if I may, they say, normally it would have taken me months to do this and you did it in days. Yes, we're interested. So that's that's the value. Proper >>the equation. Accelerate, right? >>Well, they were. The thing that we're observing is that the projects are increasing, not decreasing, and the number of project because they could be little things. That's right. That time to value is the proof points versus the long monolith proposal. It's up and running, and the jet states for months and months. >>Well, you talk about the integrators that we have so many integrators that we work with. We were worried at first years ago. Are we taking their business from them a little bit right? Because they have a lot of folks who are focused on that. But what they found is they're solving problems faster. But they're just doing the time. More problems, right? There's that there's this. Projects are growing. >>What I love about your business model is that the trend that we're covering is it's not I t setting the pace of projects. It's the projects themselves that then dictate to the cloud scale. And so I think you guys are tipping on this new we call Cloud to point out, which is it's completely flipped around anyone. If it's a mission based organization or for profit, there's a project to do something valid. You That's right. I t is just has to support it, not dictate terms. So this is a whole different level of thinking. Having the SAS business model >>well and layer in the usability of the product, right? The interface We go after citizen integrators lines of business. I can go build something for my marketing text back that's powerful, >>and the veterans examples of great one of the key No. Two people have to get done and they make a difference. They create value, >>absolutely speaking of value, this event is five x bigger then it was two years ago. Mandy, congratulations on everything that you guys have done. The voices of your customers are couldn't be stronger. That's the best friend validation that you can get. We're excited to be here. We've had a great day. One can't wait for day two tomorrow. >>Yeah. What are you doing? The product. >>Yes, I do. And more customers as well. We could all live on from sky, for example. Jillian is on. I think candy dot com hopefully is gonna bring in some candy. >>Yes, they well, two ton can. Absolutely. There's candy right back >>here. Awesome, guys. Thank you, Will and Mandy. So much for having the cube here and joining with us today. >>Thank you for your support. It's always great to chat with you about >>our pleasure. See, I told you it's gonna be chatty. John Ferrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from Bhumi World 2019. Thanks for watching

>> From Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, if the queue covering Vita Winter warmer, twenty nineteen brought to you by Silicon Angle media. >> Hi. I'm stupid women. And this is the cubes coverage of V tug. Winter warmer twenty nineteen, where we see the emergency connections between virtual ization and cloud computing happened have on the program A user at the event Con Rebates. Who is a senior integration engineer with P s lifestyle. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Nice to be here. >> All right, So, PS lifestyle, let's start there. Tell us a little bit about that in your role as a senior integration engineer and what that means. >> Okay, So, PS lifestyle, we're national Hair Salon were in thirty seven states, and we have, Ah, super niche angle. All of our salons are in senior assisted living communities as we focus exclusively on seniors and, you know, well, twenty mics in your life more enjoyable. >> Okay, well, that's that's excellent. We always talk about, you know, jobs of the future and where there is growth. Ueno the boo birds generation is, you know, creating lots of people, you know, in health care. And, you know, part of health is making sure you're feeling happy about how you look. So I don't need to worry too much about my hair. These days, but we do, other than just head say, the older generation >> way do some of that, like massage services. Just just Yeah, well, being >> very, very cool is, you know, definitely not something we've talked about on our program. And after nine years and thousands of interviews, it's nice to have some interesting angles talk about. So you're a senior integration engineer? My understanding from some of the prep is you're really working on cloud related activity primarily. >> Yeah. So I came on board about a year ago. I switched out of our operations, roll into a development role and P s lifestyle are looking too, uh, bring the internal systems forward. I've been doing a lot of work, a lot of writing the stylist in the field when I end up writing out their services that they perform everyday, which doesn't really scale. So yeah, they're trying. Teo, bring the services into the present. Um, get get away from having to write everything down. So we're building out like a It's not quite a point of sale. System is somewhere between point of sail on, like, an Internet s so that everyone in the field automate what they're doing? Our accounting team doesn't have tio re input everything that comes in. Andi, just make things flow smoother. >> Okay? So frigates inside a little bit, You know what cloud services are using, and there's there's coating that you're doing is is part of that also. >> So right now we're developing in a PHP framework called Larry Gill. And we're playing to both elastic being stalking a w s and s, um, and we're building. So we have off front ends our old Larry Gill in Elastic Beanstalk. Not back in. We're building a P. I's in Lumen and the micro services are in T. C s. So we could have been scaling. >> Yeah, and, you know, Cloud seems an obvious solution for, you know, a a highly distributed in environment, like as retail too often is. And you know your locations are Is that How long could you bring us? A little bit, as you've been on for a year. But how long has that car journey been going on? >> Actually, a year. Okay. Came in just as just a CZ. The company started developing. Thiss has been on the on the horizon for about two years. And as the study of ramping up. They brought on additional people such myself. Just a stuff up so that we could actually walk through it. >> Okay. And I was there, you know, eight of us, Obviously the leader in the spaces. It was there some consideration as Teo, which cloud they'd be using. There's >> no things they were already using a ws to some capacity for Like what? Press hosting. It was just a natural continuation of that with me coming on board I've been looking at Well, what if we do want redundancy? Do we do we try Multi cloud, You know that's now on option. You know, maybe we start exploring technologies like Tara forms so that we can actually duplicate environments just in case. On the very rare instance that eight of us does go down. Yeah, well, so >> is that a concern? When you know, people say, you know, a ws going down, does an availability zone sometimes have issues shore, But can't you architect around this, or, you know, >> you know, I mean, we've had issues where a w s has been unavailable to us for, like, non technical reasons. In that case is like we were we were trapped. Unfortunately, we were not in production at the time, But it's, you know, that's a little look, a lesson you learn once, and then you think, Well, all right, I need a backup, just in case something does happen. And I know it's, like, very unlikely to happen, so that that then informs, you know, what is my back up? You know how much how much dough I invest in the back of >> great? Yeah, because, you know, multi cloud is one of those things that people talk about when you dig down, It's like, Okay, we understand. Why is that something you're doing? Because, you know, I want tohave price leverage of one against the other. Is it? Is there a service that I wanted one that, you know that might not be available other? Or is it it's kind of insurance. And in your case that saying, you know, in the case that you are, Are you saying I think from an architectural standpoint, I'm not looking to run in both clouds all the time. But if I have an outage, I should be able to kind of fail over almost on spin, something up relatively fast. And another environment. >> Eggs. Exactly. So it's like way we're talking about, you know, possibly looking in Asia. Maybe that's a little overkill. Maybe we could just do with, like, a droplet on on digital Ocean Does our entire environment we develop in Dhaka. That's pretty easy just to pick up and leave, pick up and move somewhere else on DH. You know, maybe far standby environment is nowhere near as powerful, at least still running. >> Yeah, and so, so great. You know, you've got that containers is kind of the base level for free. How are you developing? You know what one of the challenges out there is, you know, digital ocean, great for developers. Work for the containers, but, uh, you know, please correct me if I'm not getting this right, you know, You know, Cloud today isn't a utility, so I can't just say, Oh, I'm running on a day of us and let me just take everything and throw it in azure throat. Indio, You know, we're like, there's usually, you know, some work and prepped to make sure that I've got what I need. >> There is there is so it's like, so right now, it's like we're focused on us so we can work with the tooling. And then, as as we start getting more comfortable, we can start looking at extending that tolling toe, be a little flexible toe with multiple providers >> and cloudy. And if some people you know, concern is Tio, you know, how do how do I make sure that my costs just don't kind of spiral out of control is you know, how does kind of the internal control, you know, is there budgeting process in place? Do you have? Do you have a good understanding around what you have today? You know, is there much growth going on and what you have? And you know what? I'll be down. >> We've been actually very surprising. That resource is that we get on our tier of VWs. It's like we're not even scratching the surface. So we keep looking at, you know, we need toe. Everyone says, Oh, you need to worry about scaling. You need to worry about this and that way Haven't even touched what we have s so we were right. Now our focus is more on just making sure things run and then start scaling us as we run into that issue. >> All right, Candy. Last thing. What will What brings you to this event? So obviously it's it's been doing more than virtual ization and canoeing cloud for about five years now. You know what? What? What? What brings you to this show? >> The community is fantastic. So I have been working with in a previous life I worked with somewhere, which is how I got it in tow. Vey tug. And the community around Socialization is just incredible, Very supportive. So it's like I try and give back, so come back. And >> so so just going to follow up on that. I know virtualization community, you know, very welcoming. And the like do you find in the cloud world similar types of communities? >> Yeah, so it's I've actually just started up, eh? Of'em will use a group and then a WS user group on both of those communities have been fantastic so far. I walk in also with PHP, as I said, and that's an entirely different community. I'm not saying it's not friendly, but it's a different style. >> Yeah, absolutely. You find different cultures and these various ecosystems. And yeah, it's very different. You know, the early VV number one, you've had people. It's like, Oh, I'm used to being about have to do a little bit of, you know, building on top of it. A Ws is definitely builders, you know, and what they're doing. And you know on that. So can we really appreciate you joining? Sharing your experiences on what's happened the cloud and the community's involved in? Yeah. Thanks for running user groups. Those air always super helpful, and it's usually done out of the passion and doing it. It's It's not like that. That's your day job, you know? All right. Candy Bates. Thanks so much for joining. Uh, I'm still Minutemen, and thanks so much >> for watching the cue.

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018 Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we are in Orlando at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018. This is an enormous event, 16 football fields. American football fields is the size of this space. Incredible, we're welcoming back to theCUBE, one of our distinguished alumni. >> Thank you. >> Uddhav Gupta you are the global vice-president and GM of the SAP App Center, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Yes, thank you so much, thank you for having me. And isn't this a lovely event? >> It's amazing. >> It is. >> So much energy and excitement yesterday during Bill McDermott's keynote. He talked about SAP, 46 years old now, has 398,000 customers and is responsible for 77% you said of the world's transactions. >> Yes, yes. >> Unreal. >> And you know the best part about this is we got 77% of the transactions, and if you walk around and ask people about SAP, they don't even know SAP, right? It's funny, I'm from the Bay Area and the first time people started taking SAP and acknowledging the brand of SAP was when they start to see SAP Center. Because that's home. >> The shark tank. >> To the Sharks. >> Yup. >> And they're like, oh, that was the first time. And then the second time we put a building out. We bought SuccessFactors and we got a SuccessFactors building by the airport and then, "Oh yeah we know SAP from the building next to the airport." But now people are starting to becoming really serious of associating themselves with the brand because now they started understanding what a crucial role SAP plays in their lives, right? If SAP doesn't do what it does, the entire supply chain for many large enterprises stops, right? Which means, your beverages don't come, and your food doesn't come in, nothing, right? Your lines are stopped. >> Yeah, we're with you. Your medicine doesn't come. >> Right. >> It is just. >> Yes. >> Well you guys have had Bill McDermott has talked about for a while about, we wanna become one of the world's top 10 most valuable brands but for invisible software you know you talk about, you want to be up there with the Apples and we can engage and touch with so many of these brands, and people probably don't know, a lot of people. >> Yes. >> That they are using SAP that's driving so many businesses, industries, and you guys have done a very good job of articulating your brand value through the voices of your customers who are transforming industries, they're saving lives, and also your partner ecosystem. So talk to us about the partner ecosystem and how they're really enabling partners like NetApp. What you're doing with the App Center to really enable SAP's growth and transformation through your partner ecosystem. >> Absolutely, so one of the good things is, if you look at the different transformations that the software industry has gone and cloud is one big one, right? And right now, with the cloud that one day we've regarded is the Cloud is a completely different dynamics of software. It's a very closed environment, the software itself so not everybody can actually basically just go ahead and deploy anything within the software itself, right? So that's created a huge economy of ecosystem for us where we've got partners that are building Sas Solutions, that extend our core business products. We got partners that are building content services that can actually be consumed within our business products. Similarly, SAP has made this transition from being more of a software applications company to actually being a platform company and now taking it into the cloud. So we've got a whole new generation of partners that we kind of started working with that provide technology services into the platform, right? And that's why we work with partners like NetApp. We work with partners like (mumbles). We works with partners, even SIs. They're starting to build a whole bunch of repeatable solutions, right? So in order to bring all these innovations that are happening around the SAP ecosystem, in the hands of our customers, like NetApp is a customer of SAP, too. How do we bring that easily into their hands so they can discover these products? They can try the products, they can buy these products. And then they can manage these products. And that's the whole idea of the App Center. >> And this has only been around for a year. In fact, you just celebrated your first birthday. >> Exactly. >> But a tremendous volume of apps that are already available. >> Yes, it's amazing. >> For try and buy. >> The ecosystem has really embraced us, they put their hands open, right? So within a year we've got 1100 partners that are on the App Center. We've got 1500 solutions that are on the App Center. And we are growing like crazy, right? We've got amazing endorsements from partners and donor. We've got amazing endorsement from customers. Some customers have come and done repeated purchases on the App Center within a month, right? The number of trials we're executing for partners is huge. On the whole, it's doing really well. >> So let's talk about the range of applications. I know when I think of App Center I think of App Center on my phone. >> Yes. >> And I can go and get something as silly as a flashlight or, in my case, as life-changing as my running app that keeps track of my fitness over the course of several years and I have great data to mine from that. What types of applications and industries, what industries do they serve in the App Center? >> So the App Center is really made for businesses. >> Right. >> So definitely we don't have Candy Crush there, right? (everyone laughs) >> Don't ask them. >> I don't know if that's a good thing. >> Oh, that's good, right, but you have a bunch of fun application for enterprises, right? Which allow them to get a better insight in how the company is operating. And then we have, to give you analogy to your fitness application that gives you a better idea of how your body works. We've got application that basically do the same thing for enterprises, right? So let me give you an example. We've got a major SI that actually has built an audit and compliance application for HR, right? So I can actually tell you, within your organizations what's your diversity ratio, what's your compliance ratio, how are people being paid, gender equality and gender pay, equal pay is a big topic that many CIOs are looking at. It kind of helps on those kinds of areas, right? Then we've got apps or solutions in there that basically deal with helping customers do better sales, right? We have apps in there that basically help provide you tools that can better monitor your platforms, right? Tools that help you migrate. All these things are available on the App Center. >> I'm curious from a differentiation standpoint, SAP has been very vocal about wanting, challenging the old legacy CRM. >> Yes. >> And wanting to be number one. Against their, you know, the (mumbles) competitors. How does the App Center and how you've enabled it so quickly and with such diversity of apps, how does this differentiate SAP? >> Absolutely, so we've owned the back office for a very long time now, right? So now it's time for us to basically get in front of the end users and get into the daily work that they do. It's very important for us to also own different offers. That's a whole big initiative, you heard with C4, right? To enable that, we've got cloud platform, right? And that's the other biggest piece of the puzzle, right? Now when you add these two things up, you don't basically, when you look at customers, the biggest thing for them is time to value, right? The whole concept of the bill versus buy is kind of starting to fade and the customer like, "Here's my problem, is there a solution out of the box "that can actually solve my problem?" If he gets a 100%, great, if he gets 90%, okay. If he gets 80%, I'll take it and then I'll improvise on it. And that's exactly what the App Center does. It gives you an out of the box solution from our ecosystem. So you can get started with it, and then you can collaborate with the ecosystem, to either improvise on it or take a step back and say, "Okay, now we've plugged the hole, now let's find "a more detailed solution to actually build "a more scalable outcome out of it." >> So let's talk about licensing flexibility from apps and App Center. One how do customers pay for. >> Yes. >> Their apps in the App Center? And then two, what are the licensing options for both partners and customers, for those individual apps? >> So the beauty of the apps and then the way we started up is the transaction is directly happening between the partners and the customers. So the partners can actually price their applications the way they wanted, right? So some partners that are basically doing content services are doing it by based on utilization, right? So you actually use this many number of API calls, that's how it's priced. Some of the others are doing SAS applications and they are pricing it by users. So the partners have complete flexibility of pricing and packaging the way they want. Also because we're actually using the App Center to sell to enterprises, it's very unlikely that somebody's gonna go ahead and say, "Oh, he has a gold, bronze, and silver package, "I'm just gonna pick one of them." On the App Center you can actually go ahead and custom package or create custom packages with tailored customs and conditions that are specific to that customer. And the customer can then buy it, right? So we've kind of thought of this from an enterprise standpoint. And that's the beauty, right? When you work with partners like NetApp, that is important for them, right? NetApp is a partner that basically goes ahead and works with some of the largest businesses, right? It's important for them to have the flexibility to go ahead and do the business with them digitally. >> So I'm curious. At every event we talk about digital transformation, right? It's table stakes these days. But at SAPPHIRE 2018 there's been a lot of discussion around the intelligent enterprise. >> Yes. >> I'm curious how this one year old App Center that SAP has built and that you're managing, how are you using the data that you're getting about the types of apps that are being developed and consumed, how are you utilizing that data to transform SAP? >> Absolutely, if you think of the intelligent enterprise, we're doing everything that we can from the platform side. But what's the point of being intelligent if you don't apply your intelligence somewhere, right? And that's exactly. >> You're like my mother. >> (laughs) And that's what we're trying to do with their apps, right? So while the platform is intelligent. It can do a lot of stuff. The apps are the one that will help you derive the value from the platform. And that's where the App Center is super important and the apps that are on the App Center support the product. That's the role within the apps in the place for the intelligent enterprise. >> So Bill McDermott also talked about trust and the trust is the new currency. When you put forth something like the SAP App Center, you're kind of co-signing that, you know what, these apps, these are partners, and this is a partner exchange. Can you talk to the value to the enterprise of wanting to something like a App Center to purchase applications? >> Oh, trust is a big thing, right? These days, I mean, you. Enterprises come to SAP because they know SAP is such a trusted brand. So when we did the App Center we also made sure that every app that goes on the App Center is actually totally validated by an integration and certification center team, right? So you don't find anything on the App Center that has not gone through a vetting process. The second thing you don't know show that on the app center you find apps that are relevant to your SAP landscape and that's not a Shopify, right? You're not going and selling something that has no relevance to the enterprise. The third thing that we've done, and very important for customers is we've actually built workflows that allows them to still have the same comfort of procuring a software but only doing it digitally. So, for example, a customer may say, "Look, not every user "in my company is allowed to buy apps." But if a user is interested in buying an app, he should be able to request purchase, and then somebody who's entitled in the company to go through contracts and negotiate on behalf of the company can actually negotiate it, and then the purchase happens. So we will employ trust at every level of the App Center. >> Security is such a hot topic these days, right? I mean, there's been so many public breaches of corporate data, there's just one again the other day with, I think it was MyDNA or MyHeritage. >> Yes. >> And that kind of opportunity for people to submit a cheek sample and get their DNA is so popular. That's a lot of personal information. So the security woven into the fabric of that is all key. >> Absolutely. >> So you mentioned the number of partners and the number of apps. I think you said thousand partners. >> A thousand partners and 1500 apps. >> 1500 apps in the first year. >> In the first year. >> What are you excited about for the next year? What do you think we're gonna be talking about next SAPPHIRE? >> I think the growth in the number of apps and partners that are gonna come over, it's gonna be a hockey stick event we're completely looking forward to that. But what's gonna be interesting is, as these apps come by, and you've pointed it out, security is one topic, but GDPR compliance is another big one. So one of the things that we've been working with a lot of these partners is to basically become more and more GDPR compliant. Because some of these apps are dealing with HR data. Some of these apps are gonna start dealing with customer data and they have to be GDPR compliant. So that's what we're working on with them and we'll see more and more of those kind of things happen. But the second big thing that we're looking forward is going beyond the apps, right? We call it the App Center, we could call it Solution Center, we could call it anything. But the idea is you gonna have apps, but you're also gonna have vendors like NetApp being able to digitally sell the products to our end customers, right? Somebody bought HANA, they need a HANA appliance, with an adapt storage, that's possible on the App Center. Or some other tools, somebody's existing NetApp customer managing really large SAP landscapes. And they can buy tools that will basically help them manage the NetApp landscape, right? Or SAP landscape running a NetApp gear. So those are kinds of things that I'm looking forward to actually coming into the App Center. The third thing is sensors. People are building IoT Scenarios and we are having tons of partners basically certify sensors against our IoT technology. How about we bring those into the App Center, right? So it's gonna be a huge and beautiful portfolio of solutions. >> Practical question before we let you go is. Simple concept 'cause my mind is working and I come from a traditional SAP shop. So I'm thinking, what interesting things have you seen customers do with SRM and the App Center. I mean, it seems like, App Center, another supplier for SRM should be some integrations? Am I making an assumption? What are some of, as we look at, or even App Center and someone that has SAP core products, what are some of the integration for them? >> Oh, you hit the nail, right? What some of the customers are coming back to us and asking is, can you actually do an App Center specifically for my enterprise, right? Where I as a user can basically go, curate a whole bunch of apps that I've kind of looked at the terms and conditions or have met certain standards, etcetera. And accept the terms of conditions for those products right? Accept those products, negotiate the price, or whatever they do. And then make that open to all of my users of their ecosystem, right? So that way, anybody in that scenario can actually go purchase an app and start using it in production. >> And then I have all of my work full from SRM to approve the purchase of the app. >> Exactly, so it kind of ties in very neatly into that. >> So your 18th SAPPHIRE. >> Yes. >> What are some of the key takeaways that you're gonna go back to the Bay Area with? >> You know, the beauty is every SAPPHIRE keeps growing bigger and bigger and the questions every three, four year we've done a new transformation, right? Last year when I come to this conference, people were still kind of unaware and not really ready to embrace the cloud in an enterprise base. This year, I didn't hear one customer say, "Should we go to the cloud?" Everybody like, "We are on the cloud, how can you help us?" How can SAP and customers and partners like NetApp actually help us get there? And that's a refreshing feel, right? Because now we can talk to them about all the grand plans that we have for them. Prior we were basically still selling them on the concept. Now we're actually walking them and talking to them about how they embrace the cool stuff that we're doing. >> Awesome. >> So it's refreshing. >> It is cool stuff. >> It is. >> Uddhav, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> Talking with Keith and me about what you guys are doing with the App Center and happy first birthday again. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Thank you for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018. Thanks for watching.

hello everyone I'm Jean Faria we are reporting on the ground near Puerto Rico for blockchain unbound exclusive conversations at coinage end of covering all the action restart week of ten of events cryptocurrency blockchain all the people are here with the local ecosystem the cube is here it's great to have you on thanks for joining blockchain innovation is today global this is a revolution way bigger than the Internet itself programmable money programmable contracts that wipes out finance it wipes out legal it wipes out governance in many ways there's no central authority you have access to open source software it's fully connected so now is the time to make it translate we've all heard about the steam digital transformation its businesses that if they don't evolve and adopt blockchain AI all these other things they have a threat of being put out of business it is extremely competitive a new set of stakeholders investors global players governments are it's happening now you have a chance to be a part of an economy without a permission of a centralized organization have to pay 200 people in 40 countries and it's an unholy mess with withholding taxes and concerns around money transfer costs a hassle it's a nightmare like all currency control so you're only allowed to move a certain amount of capital out the country legally so what happens in all your backups our currency and you can effectively invest in assets around the world this is making it much easier to contribute to help people to get healthy and you don't have to go to school there's a very big influx of young and talented minds at that right and this is really changing the revolution landscape you've got the radical Burning Man hippie guy all the way to a three-piece suit yeah and that diversity is very very rich a lot of people are scared I like whoa hold on slow down we're not gonna prove it the other half saying no this is the future so you have two competing forces colliding for some reason crypto really pokes at people's biases you know why does it have any value and I go well why does the United States dollar have any value I mean you've got Full Faith and Credit of the government that's in debt by 20 trillion dollars you know is that a good idea most people that come here sorry with the what the how and people are scared but the young people are like yo this is happening this is not a moment this is a movement is definitely oh say 1996-97 of the internet bubble it's just starting people know there's something really magical they don't quite know what you know America really grew because you're abused to have all the controls and so the capital by sea left Europe and away in America and now it's happening 300 years later as America has all the controls and the capital starting to go away so a new Liberation's happening incredible resources are now being poured in problems that were ignored for many many and what is beautiful is that block Candy's doing it open-source is accelerating the tech these ideas are being freely shared whereas before there's bottlenecks in the collaboration aspect if we're able to write a contract in a thousand people be able to verify that contract and we're able to transfer money from one person to another without the two parties being involved we've got a perfect scenario security and speed and fairness all at the same time you can create these chains of trust and that can happen anywhere in the world you're on a level playing field if you have 4G connectivity now you can compete globally and be a part of the global economy so if you're someone who's in the emerging developing world and you want to begin to build wealth and you'd like to own a piece of first world real estate and today the minimum is about a thousand dollars but by implementing the Plott chain further they won't eventually get down to one dollar you can buy a piece of real estate and enjoy the returns on that I want to solve the wealth gap and I truly believe we can do it when we can allow anyone anywhere to invest in good quality assets a conduit with the current system there's too many friction costs the killer app right is money it's paying people that is the killer app of the block type right now let's say that money is software and it is software so if you buy something with a credit card what do you think's happening it's all software and what has happened is open-source software has always eventually won with respect to close source software so proprietary money is probably back on its heels because open-source money's coming in something like that will give liquidity to a lot of small business owners America is a country of small business owners across the globe it supports small business owners it's an interesting model yeah you don't have to give up any equity you don't have to give up any poor seats yeah right it's much leaner my super if you're an investor you gotta get a pound of flesh somewhere is it's just getting it on the discounted tokens is there a little liquidity going on when you think about you know private sale presale is 99% a token deal right although equities coming in because a lot of more venture capital is coming in and they're demanding a piece of the action from a company and equity perspective its equity might be future revenue sometimes as dividends or the opportunity get dividends so it's a combination of you have a preference you care you know at the other day equity is I was always preferable there is a provision in the 1934 Securities Act called section 12 G it allows us Spacely to go public by telling the SEC we're doing it without having to delay it to wait for their permission after 60 days it's a derivative so we'll continue to clear comments but but the thing is with tokens who knows how long that'll take I mean is the SEC gonna Shepherd something through with crypto 1 or do they gonna make it take 5 years I don't know [Music] all over the island this is the new Oliver field the world is moving too fast today for a big country to keep up it's all gonna happen now in this next century at the city level and so we work a lot with four smaller countries or small countries because I know estonia armenia baja rains got you know dubai envy so i mean every country wants to be the crypto country multiple small countries are going to come into the space which they know now they can get the capital flowing into that company and they're gonna allow their rules to be lacs they're gonna let capital flow through and then us will have to change or maybe UK will have to change orders against us will have to change in the first world a lot of what we're talking about is a nice-to-have it's it's sort of a bit of a game and if i can participate but where I come from an emerging war that's a necessity they are no other solutions so if you live in South Africa or China or India and you want to get your money into a first world country like England Australia America it's very very difficult and virtually no one can do it but it's a major problem because you want wealth preservation you want but Plan B you want your children to be able to go to a first world university etc etc etc Puerto Rico being a free associated States of the United States of America is like the best place to actually test this possibly some push for that for infrastructure for you know internet for all sorts of different things in terms of building the best infrastructure the new newest best-in-class for your business it's four percent corporate taxes and individual it's zero percent now that's what you got to move here you gotta move here okay but you don't have to give you deliver your US citizenship no taxes are great at the same time they fall in love with the islands so it's amazing because to me Puerto Rico is a combination of LA's whether San Francisco's open-mindedness and Barcelona's you know deep European history it's just a really beautiful place and it's US territory so it's a short hop and a jump to the States if you need to most people in America mainland sort of think they're going to a foreign country because it's treated that way by our government how do I come to Puerto Rico do it right not offend the culture in abil them together what's your experience with the play ball stay good friends lost their relocation services for their business and themselves so they write a big check to you guys for the service but it's you guide them through the entire process and there's real energy here because there's a social movement underneath the entire cryptocurrency movement and that's to basically help your fellow man or women all these activity is really going to give a a shot in the arm to the Puerto Rican economy and we're bringing our funds and we're bringing our advisory the radar Thank You exponent there the hurricane was a horrible atrocity that happened and now we have this blank canvas to create a vision for Puerto Rico so what we're doing is we're connecting every single University on the island to work on open source projects to like make solutions for the private sector they know that if they can buy power on a cellphone like they're already doing for other goods and services now we've got a game-changer this is restart week and one of the other things that we've done is help all of the conference's come together collaborate rather than compete so go into the same week and put all of these satellite groups around it and then we blanket it a week around it so that we had one place for people to go and look for all of the events and then also for some for them to understand a movement about the education piece it's very difficult for people that kind of get caught up to speed because there's some technical things that need to understand to really apply this technology into the business world the other day we had an event where we talked 50 people how to create a smart contract from scratch those are 50 people who are not the same anymore ecosystems developing yet entrepreneurs you got projects you got funding coming in but as it's gonna be a fight for the ecosystem because you can't have zillion ecosystems there are definitely some you know the galaxies and you know regulatory aspects that you know put some concerns and a lot of you know people's mind since its inception you've seen people and media and mainstream media in particular target Bitcoin and they're just adopting the government narrative saying oh everyone in this industry is corrupt Oh everyone in this industry is an ICS camera Oh everyone in this industry is a a drug runner and they have all selling drugs on the dark web and and it's like you know what like you can do some research and don't get better than that traditional media they want to take down everybody that they don't consider you know like a birds of the same feather there actually are a lot of scammers and a lot of like dark forces inside of the cryptocurrency movement so that's why I think we welcome kind of more regulatory influence because you know none of us want to see bad actors in the space we've seen folks go out raise you know really big about to capital with no product roadmap no business talking roadmap no real way to get from zero to X what are they trying to shoehorn a regular business onto the blockchain and just assume that by adding crypto at the end of you know toilet paper they're gonna get something I had another founder tell me that you know Mike tokens are worth 100 million humming yep you don't have a user you just have a product you're tokens I've hiked if you ask me it's it's what little I can tell my house is 100 million dollars it's only worth as much as the top buyer how much we really need hardcore reputation systems in our industry and in the for the world I think 2018 is going to be the year of clarity on regulation and I think that's where Puerto Rico comes in and plays a major role just to see the thousands of people who have come here to support these several conferences has been amazing my most surprising thing though is the amount of people that have told me that they bought a one-way ticket and have no intention of going home so to make Puerto Rico your home I think is a really amazing first step when I go to the supermarket and where I go it's full of American and people from outside and when you ask them where you're from and they will tell you from Puerto Rico this is gonna become the epicenter of this multi-billion dollar market we need to have people prepared for this you have to create the transparency the beauty of the transparency is there's actually privacy baked in and that's what I love about blockchain is it has all of the good things all communities need to evolve in my opinion between technology communities open networks of governance where we have peer-to-peer distribution of finance and of resources in a way that allows people to aggregate around the marketplaces that are actually benefitting the way that they believe the world should work we're going to be tools that far surpassed what's currently available in terms of the messages the websites all these things for 20 years the Internet has been free it's a really beautiful thing for consumption and open-source is the absolute right methodology for software when it comes to your own content a reward it makes sense everybody is going to get to play together across every device the developers are going to get rewarded for creating content people are going to be rewarded for creating things inside the games and the players are going to get rewarded for getting to the top levels of all the games and we're going to reward them through our cryptocurrency if we begin to own ourself sovereign identity then when we're owning our data that's the foundation for universal basic income communications completely frictionless payment completely frictionless and governance completely frictionless and we have to put this all together who wins here the average citizen entrepreneur that is leveraged citizen player that wants to start something whether it's a banking a service provider of some sort an entrepreneur or a new financial instrument or firm you all have greenfield opportunity here the first thing I would tell found us is to reach out ok this community is very very supportive like you can reach out to me you can reach out to other guys LinkedIn Facebook or come to these events and say your idea and you need help because you will need help you cannot run this alone ok you are running a company you're running your team have a good team that's the first thing you got to be vigilant and you keeping your money in a hard wallet not keeping your private keys on your computer if you're using a centralized system those centralized systems are really easily exploitable strategic partnerships Advisors founding team and then show the idea to the people explain yourself frankly and honestly and I think the community will reward you to go and find it ring whether you're a fortune 500 company or a startup it's all about building the community and I believe that whether it's utility Target or security or combination of the two it provides an incredible vehicle to ultimately be the catalyst to your community and if you the to community adding value then you're going to build a company event it's always gonna be led by the business model because you need something to act as the power pull to pull the thing along right and you can continuously pump capital into something but if the model is wrong it's just going to drain and it's going to go to inefficient systems and in the end maybe do some help but but a very small percentage of the capacity of what it could do then the advice would be to entrepreneurs don't fret about the infrastructure just nail your business models right and because the switching cost might not be as high as you think that's right we're in the old days when we grew up yeah you made a bad technology decision you're out of business yeah but the first advice that I give my clients is to stomp this is this business that's too much formal in it yeah right if you're missing out so no just because everybody's out there Nico you should be doing an SEO right yeah 46% of I SEOs have already failed already failed start with the business gather this in the counties down right so free cash flow unique value proposition Prada market fit what sits under business think about the token model right the token model has to go in handy now with your business model and revenue model and once you figure out that business and took the models now it's time to think about compliance I'm gonna raise money in the US and abroad I've decided to go to security choking hypothetical instance absolute what do I do is there for you an incentive mechanism or is a fundraising mechanism or both who's gonna be my user who's gonna use this token right there aren't gonna be moms dads hospitals they was my target and then how they're gonna use it and are they gonna hold it I'm gonna sell it are they gonna trade it so all these different things define that oh c'mon once you get your token actually authenticated realized everything's transparent and it gets on that secondary market it's better to use that to invest in anything you need investment get everybody incentivized around your token all your employees all your vendors everybody incentivize around that token it's a thousand percent more powerful than a dollar so the dollar doesn't go up in value in your token your token can go up and down and as soon as you find just one spark it blows up everybody boats rise equal it's pasta Sara Lee the time to crack open the champagne you still have to demonstrate product market fit you have to help build a market in our particular case so there's a lot of hard work launch it's a start line it's just like it's only a step along the whole process you know what made people get it you showed them the money yeah you showed them the money sometimes people don't you can explain these concepts that are world-changing super high level or whatever people were not actually gonna get it until it's useful to them average business people and senior business people who have typically been shut off to the idea of blockchain are now seeing this as very real and here to stay momentum is just beginning it's gonna be amazing what these guys come up with that's one of the things I love about doing this thing right I'm an old guy and I get to hang around these smart young people makes me feel young again yeah but the other thing that we have and I think you should share it as well as we have to offer to these young guys experience thing we just invented a new category in the ico category an advisor token and a you have to have the stomach for it and I think you just have to be as educated and as you can what government entity can resist for the long term something that's actually trying to provide a better and better and better financial infrastructure you should be able to participate in many different nations who have many different economies that are all really cooperating interdependently to create the best possible life for all human good one dollar will not change your life but if you change your habits you'll change your financial destiny and so my philosophy is get it to a dollar so that every single person can participate and once you start to learn good habits around money and wealth the rest it's a formula like it's a flywheel instead the world will become a better place we'll have better companies positive impact is not counter to profit they go hand in hand the Puerto Rico movement it's a movement while Czech entrepreneurs capital investors the pioneers in the blockchain decentralized Internet are all here this is like the Silicon Valley of the crypto right I think they're calling it crypto island yes TV show we should be honest like it's not lost its crypto island exclusive coverage for Puerto Rico's - Cuba I'm John Ferrari getting the signal here out of all the noise in the market this is what we do this is the cube mission great strip we start week Point agenda open content community thanks for watching [Music]

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering InterConnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back, everyone. Live here in Las Vegas, this is The Cube's coverage of IBM's Interconnect 2017. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Eric Herzog, Cube alumni, Vice President of Product Market at IBM storage. Welcome back to The Cube. Good to see you with the shirt on. You got the IBM tag there, look at that. >> I do. Well, you know, I've worn a Hawaiian shirt now, I think, ten Cubes in a row, so I got to keep the streak going. >> So, pretty sunny here in Vegas, great weather. Storage is looking up as well. Give us the update. Obviously, this is never going away, we talk about it all the time, but now cloud, more than ever, a lot of action happening with storage, and data is a big part of it. >> Yeah, the big thing with us has been around hybrid cloud. So our software portfolio, the spectrum family, Spectrum Virtualize, Spectrum Protect, our backup package, Spectrum Scale, our scale out NAS, IBM Cloud Object Storage, all will move data transparently from on-premises configurations out to multiple cloud vendors, including IBM Bluemix. But also other vendors, as well. That software's embedded on our array products, including our VersaStack. And just two weeks ago, at Cisco Live in Melbourne, Australia, we did a announcement with Cisco around our VersaStack for the hybrid cloud. >> So what's the hybrid cloud equation look like for you guys right now, because it is the hottest topic. It's almost like brute force, everywhere you see, it's hybrid cloud, that's what people want. How does it change the storage configurations? What's the solutions look like? What's different now than it was a year ago? >> I think the key thing you've got to be able to do is to make sure the data can move transparently from an on-premise location, or a private cloud, you could have started as a private cloud config and then decid it's OK to use a public cloud with the right security protocols. So, whether you've got a private cloud moving to a public cloud provider, like Bluemix, or an on-premises configuration moving to a public cloud provider, like Bluemix, the idea is they can move that data back and forth. Now, with our Cisco announcement, Cisco, with their cloud center, is also providing the capability and moving applications back and forth. We move the data layer back and forth with Spectrum Virtualize or IBM's copy data management product, Spectrum Copy Data Management, and with Cloud Center, or the ECS, Enterprise Cloud Sweep, from Cisco, you can move the application layer back and forth with that configuration on our VersaStacks. >> So this whole software-defined thing starts, it started when people realized, hey, we can run our data centers kind of the way the big hyper-scalers do. IBM pivoted hard toward software-defined. What's been the impact that you've seen with customers? Are they actually, I mean, there was a big branding announcement with Spectrum and everything a while back. What's been the business impact of that shift? >> Well, for us, it's been very strong. So if you look at the last couple quarters, according to the analysts that track the numbers, from a total storage perspective, we've moved into the number two position, and have been, now for the last two years. And for software-defined storage, we're the number one provider of software-defined storage in the world, and have been for the last three years in a row. So we've been continuing to grow that business on the software-defined side. We've got scale-up block configurations, scale-out block configurations, object storage with IBM Cloud Object Storage, and scale-out NAS and file with our IBM Spectrum Scale. So if you're file, block, or object, we've got you covered. And you can use either A, our competitor's storage, we work with all our competitor's gear, or you could go with your reseller, and have them, or your distributor provide the raw infrastructure, the servers, the storage, flash or hard drives, and then use our software on top to create essentially your own arrays. >> So when you say competitor's gear, you're talking about what used to be known as the SAN Volume Controller, and now is Spectrum Virtualize, right? Did I get that right? >> Yes, well, we still sell the SAN Volume Controller. When you buy the Spectrum Virtualize, it comes as just a piece of software. When you buy the SAN Volume Controller as well as our FlashSystem V9000, and our Storwize V7 and V5000, they come with Spectrum Virtualize pre-loaded on the array. So we have three ways where the array is pre-loaded: SAN Volume Controller, FlashSystems V9000, and then the Storwiz products, so it's pre-loaded. Or, you can buy the stand-alone software Spectrum Virtualize and put it on any hardware you want, either way. >> So, I know we're at an IBM conference, and IBM hates, they don't talk about the competition directly, but I have to ask the competitive questions. You've had a lot of changes in the business. Obviously, cloud's coming in in a big way. The Dell EMC merger has dislocated things, and you still see a zillion starups in storage, which is amazing to me, alright? Everybody says, oh, storage is dead, but then all this VC money still funneling in and all this innovation. What's happening in the storage landscape from your perspective? >> Well, I think there's a couple things. So, first of all, software-defined has got its legs, now. When you look at it from a market perspective, last quarter ended up at almost 400 million, which put it on a, let's say, a 1.6 to 2 billion dollar trajectory for calendar 2017, out of a total software market of around 16 billion. So it's gone from nothing to roughly 2 billion out of 16 billion for all storage software of all various types, so that's hot. All flash arrays are still hot. You're looking at, right now, last year, all flash arrays end up at roughly 25% of all arrays shipped. They're now in price parity, so an all-flash array is not more expensive. So you see a lot of innovation around that. You're still seeing innovation around backup, right? You've got guys trying to challenge us with our SpectrumProtect with some of these other vendors trying to challenge us, even though backup is the most mature of the storage software spaces, there's people trying to challenge that. So, I'd say storage is still a white-hot space. As you know, the overall market is flat, so it is totally a drag out, knock-down fight. You know, the MMA and the UFC guys got nothing on what goes on in the storage business. So, make sure you wear your flak jacket if you're a storage guy. >> Meaning, you got to gain share to grow, right? >> Yes, and it's all about fighting it out. This Hawaiian shirt looks Hawaiian, but just so you know, this is Kevlar. Just in case there's another storage company here at the show. >> So what are the top conversations now with storage buyers? Because we saw Candy's announcement about the object store, Flex, for the cold storage. It changes the price points. It's always going to be a price sensitive market, but they're still buying storage. What are those conversations that you're having? You mentioned moving data around, do they want to move the data around? Do they want to keep it at the edge? Is it moving the application around? What are some of those key conversations that you're involved in? >> So we've done a couple innovative things. One of the things we've done is worked with our sales team to create what we call, the conversations. You know, I've been doing this storage gig now for 31 years. Seven start-ups, IBM twice, EMC, Maxtor and Seagate- >> John: You're a hardened veteran. >> I'm a storage veteran, that's why this is a Kevlar Hawaiian shirt. But no CIO's a storage guy, I've never met one, in 31 years, ever, ever, ever met a storage guy. So what we have to do is elevate the conversation when you're talking to the customer, about why it's important for their cloud, why it's important for machine learning, for cognitive, for artificial intelligence. You know, this about it, I'm a Star Trek guy. I like Star Wars, too, but in Star Trek, Bones, of course, wands the body. So guess what that is? That's the edge device going through the cloud to a big, giant server farm. If that storage is not super resilient, the guy on the table might not make it. And if the storage isn't super fast, the guys on the table might not make it. And while Watson isn't there, yet, Watson Health, they're getting there. So, in ten years from now, I expect when I go to the doctor, he's just like in Star Trek, waving the wand, and boy, you better make sure the storage that that wand is talking to better be highly resilient and high performing. >> Define resilient, in your terms. >> So, resilient means you really can't have more than 30 seconds, 50 seconds a year of down time. Because whoever's on the table when that thing goes down has got a real problem. So you've got to be up all the time, and if you take it out of the healthcare space and look at other applications, whether you look at trading applications, data is the new gold. Data is the new diamonds. It's about data. Yes, I'd love to have a mound of gold, but you know what, if you have the right amount of data, it worth way more than a mound of gold is. >> You're right about the CIO and storage. They don't want to worry about storage. They don't want to spend a lot of time thinking about it. A CIO once said to me, "I care about storage like this, "I want it to be dirt cheap, lightning fast, and rock solid." Now, the industry has done a decent job with rock solid, I would say, but up until Flash, not really that great with lightning fast, and really not that great with dirt cheap. Price has come down for the hardware, but the management has been so expensive. So, is the industry attacking that problem? And what's IBM doing? >> Yeah, so the big thing is all about automation. So when I talk about moving to the hybrid cloud, I'm talking about transparent migration, transparent movement. That's an automation play. So you want to automate as much as you can, and we've got some things that we're not willing to disclose yet that'll make our storage even more automated whether it be from a predictive analytics perspective, self-healing storage that actually will heal itself, you know, go out and grab a code load and put the new code on because it knows there's a bug in the old code, and do that transparently so the user doesn't have to do anything. It's all about automating data movement and data activity. So we've already been doing that with the Spectrum family, and that Spectrum family ships on our storage systems and on our VersaStack, but automation is the critical key in storage. >> So I wonder, does that bring up new KPIs? Like, I presume you guys dog food your own storage internally, and your own IT. >> Eric: Yes >> Are you seeing, because it used to be, OK, the light's green on the disc drive, and you know, this is our uptime or downtime, planned downtime, you know, sort of standard metrics that we've known for 30-40 years. With automation, are we seeing a new set of metrics in KPIs emerge? You know, self-healing, percentage of problems that corrected themselves, or- >> Well, and you're also seeing things like time spent. So if you go back to the downturn of seven, eight, and nine, IT was devastated, right? And, as you know, you've seen a lot of surveys that IT spend is basically back up to '08, OK, the pre-08 crash. When you open up that envelope, they're not hiring storage guys anymore, and usually not infrastructure guys. They're hiring guys to do devops and testdev, and do cloud-based applications, which means there's not a lot of guys to run the storage. So one of the metrics we're seeing is, how much guys do I have managing my storage, or, my infrastructure? I used to have 50, now I'm a big bank, can I do it with 25? Can I do it with 20? Can I do it with 15? And then, how much time do they spend between the networking, the storage, the facilities themselves. These data center guys have to manage all of that. So there are new metrics about, what is the workload that my actual human beings are doing? How much of that is storage versus something else? And there's way less guys doing storage as a full-time job, anyway, because what happened in the downturn? And, so automation is critical to a guy running a datacenter, whether he's a cloud guy, whether he's a small shop. And clearly in the Fortune, global 2500, those guys, where they've got in-house IT, they've cut back on the infrastructure team and the storage team, so it's all about automation. So, part of the KPIs are not just about the storage itself, such as uptime, cost per Gig, cost per transaction, the bandwidth, you know, those sorts of KPIs. But it's also about how much time do I really spend managing the storage? So if I've only got five guys, now, and I used to have 15 guys, those five guys are managing, usually, three, to four, to five times more storage than they did in 2008 and 2009. So now you've got to do it with five guys instead of 15, so there's a KPI, right there. >> So, what about cloud? We heard David Kinney talk today about the object store with that funny name, and then he talked about this cloud-tiering thing, and I couldn't stay. I had to get ready for theCube. How do you work with those guys? How do you sell a hybrid story, together, because cloud is eating away at the traditional infrastructure business, but it's all sort of one big, happy family, I'm sure. But how do you work with a cloud group to really drive, to make the water level higher for IBM? >> So, all of our products from the Spectrum family, not all, but almost all our products from the Spectrum family, will automatically move data to the cloud, including IBM Bluemix/SoftLayer. So our on-premises can do it. If you buy our software only, and don't buy our storage arrays, or don't buy a Storwize, or don't buy a flash system, you still can automatically move that data to the cloud, including the IBM cloud object store. Our Spectrum Scale product, for example, ScaleOut NAS, and file system, which is very highly used in big data analytics and cognitive workloads, automatically, by policy, will tier-data to IBM cloud object storage. Spectrum Protect can be set up to automatically take data and back it up from on-premises to IBM cloud object storage. So we've automated those processes between our software and our array family, and IBM cloud object storage, and Bluemix and SoftLayer. And, by the way, in all honesty, we also work with other cloud vendors, just like they work with other storage vendors. All storage vendors can put data in Bluemix. Well, guess what, we can put data in clouds that are not Bluemix, as well. Of course, we prefer Bluemix. We all have IBM employee stock purchase, so of course we want Bluemix first, but if the customer, for whatever reason, doesn't see the light and doesn't go to Bluemix and goes with something else, then we want to make sure that customer's happy. We want to get at least some of the PO, and our Spectrum family, and our VersaStack family, and all of our array family can get that part of the PO. >> You need versatility to be on any cloud. >> Eric: We can be on any cloud. >> So my question for you is, the thing that came out of our big data, Silicon Valley event last week was, Hadoop was a great example, and that's kind of been, now, a small feature of the overall data ecosystem, is that batch and real time are coming together. So that conversation you're having, that you mentioned earlier, is about more real time than there is anything else more than ever. >> Well, and real time gets back to my examples of Bones on Star Trek wanding you over healthcare. That is real time, he's got a phaser burn, a broken leg, a this and that, and then we know how to fix the guy. But if you don't get that from the wand, then that's not real time analytics. >> Speaking of Star Trek, just how much data do you think the Enterprise was throwing off, just from an IOT standpoint? >> I'm sure that they had about a hundred petabytes. All stored on IBM Flash Systems arrays, by the way. >> Eric, thanks for coming on. Real quick, in the next 30 seconds, just give the folks a quick update on why IBM storage is compelling now more than ever. >> I think the key thing is, most people don't realize, IBM is the number two storage company in the world, and it has been for the last several years. But I think the big thing is our embracing of the hybrid cloud, our capability of automating all these processes. When they've got less guys doing storage and infrastructure in their shop, they need something that's automated, that works with the cloud. And that's what IBM storage does. >> All right, Eric Herzog, here, inside theCube, Vice President of Product Market for IBM Storage. I'm John Furrier, and Dave Velante. More live coverage from IBM InterConnect after this short break. Stay with us. (tech music)

(smooth electronic music) >> Hello, everyone, welcome to theCUBE here in Palo Alto covering Mobile World Congress 2017, #MWC17. I'm John Furrier. We are here with Dan Lahl who's the Vice President of Product Marketing at SAP. SAP HANA Cloud now named SAP Cloud. Dan, thanks for coming in and talking about Mobile World Congress. >> You bet and I'm happy to talk about SAP Cloud Platform. That's what we're talking about. >> So the big news is a lot of stuff going on with Mobile World Congress but let's get down from SAP's perspective. You guys have changed the name from SAP HANA Cloud Platform to SAP Cloud Platfrom >> [Dan] Yeah that's right. >> So why that nuance there? What's the specific point there? >> It's way more than just dropping a word from the name of the product. It's really about repositioning where SAP is. So SAP has been an application company for forever. But as companies move to now from mode one, which is kind of application running, to mode two, which is doing more about agility, optimizing their enterprise, digital transformation, we have to have an offer in that second place. That's where the SAP Cloud Platform fits. Things like IoT services, and integration services, and over 40 services we offer on the platform. We're now helping companies become more agile by being very easy and able to personalize any SAP asset, any SAP app. So you have S/4HANA, you want to personalize it, customize it? You use Cloud Platform to do that. You want to integrate success factors in with your on premise apps SAP or otherwise? You use Cloud Platform to do that. >> A lot of change over the past year. At Sapphire last year, we talked about this at theCUBE. In Orlando I interviewed you specifically about the cloud momentum. One of the things that was striking me, and we talked specifically about SAP had this installed based customer set, which you guys have some of the biggest names in business from powering by SAP. Then new sets of developers onboarding and significant was the Apple announcement where you guys were partnering with Apple Computer and Apple doesn't usually go up on stage with many partners. >> That's right. >> It's very rare. They were onstage with you guys. This was really a seminal moment because this kind of brings two worlds together. It brings the existing SAP software world and the Apple world. So a lot's changed there. I know the news that's hitting around Apple's GA, general availability, of the iOS kit. But also it's the growth of the cloud within SAP and the SaaSification that you guys are going through that journey. Give us an update on those two fronts. The iOS news, that general availability, what does that mean? Two, how is the SaaSification of SAP inside the entire, across the business? >> You bet, you bet. So really exciting with the Apple SDK. When we met last year, I sat on the edge of the bed and told you how great it's going to be, okay? We really hadn't defined exactly what was going to be in the SDK. We already had the all the parts, and pieces to be able to take an iPhone device, and pull it back in to access SAP applications. But we really didn't have much native work that we had thought through with Apple on the deliver side on the mobile device. So we've added a number of controls that Apple is actually adding in to their system into the iOS 10. We're actually creating applications, taking advantage of these new controls. As enterprise applications work in a little bit more complex way than let's say playing Candy Crush on your iPhone, right? We've come up with new controls to make it more easy for someone like a project manager to do project management over their day. Or a service technician to do how they look at their appointments, how they're going to look at parts and pieces they need to put into different service appointments. It's been a really great collaboration. Then the other thing we're doing is we're adding SAP Academy or iOS Academy. The iOS Academy will be aimed at training a million SAP developers and 10 million Apple developers on how to use this SDK, how to think about delivering enterprise apps using this native iOS environment. >> What's the impact to the customer? Because Apple essentially, it's their phone, so you're talking about a mobile native app. >> [Dan] Yes, exactly. >> Taking a software cloud model to the phone. Is that kind of the key point? >> Yeah. SAP has been awesome at business processes and really funky at how it's displayed on screens. I mean I know when I started work at SAP, every screen I had to look for where the next key was. Apple is just the opposite. They're awesome at the UI but not known for the greatest business processes. So we're marrying those two things together. >> Bill McDermott has always been high on the Apple. I remember four Sapphires ago he was holding up the iPad saying-- >> That's right. >> "This is going to power our analytics business." >> Which it is. >> He was right on that. >> He's driven us to make that happen. Apple's come along which has been really great. Again, now we're delivering. >> How was the SaaSification going on because workloads as a service is a theme that comes up a lot. You see hybrid cloud certainly driving a lot of that momentum. Hybrid cloud is not as sexy as AI and autonomous vehicles. But certainly it's a lot of brute force action going on. People are really moving to the hybrid cloud. >> That's right. Hybrid cloud is going to be with us for at least 10 years. Everybody thought okay, the cloud is going to be awesome. As an LOB, I'm just going to pick my app whether that's CRM, or HCM, or whatever. I'm going to have this awesome app that I'm just going to be able to run in my business. Then they figure out oh, as a line of business, this is hard to manage. I'm going to give it back to IT. IT says, "Wow, the HCM guys are not "tied in with workforce management." There's nothing between how we're managing our people and how we're managing our workforce. Or how we're doing our pipeline with how we're managing our supply chain. The SaaSification, what we're providing with Cloud Platform is the ability to tie those things together. So native integration services to be able to tie things like success factors or, believe it or not, Salesforce into SAP delivery systems, supply chain systems, bringing ecosystems together using SAP Cloud Platform. So the personalization of the SaaS apps, integration of the SaaS apps into the enterprise, and then actually working with customers to create ecosystem hubs believe it or not. So we've got customers that have actually said, "Hey, I'm a manufacturer but I've got a lot of information "about what's going on in the manufacturing process "and how my customers are using my products. "I'm going to build a hub on the Cloud Platform "and get all my customers and partners "working together on that hub. "Now I'm actually selling information "that'll allow me to sell more of my product." So we see that happening too. >> We're with Dan Lahl, the Vice President of Product Marketing with SAP, breaking down the Mobile World Congress 17 coverage. I'm John Furrier here in theCUBE. Dan, I want you to take a minute to just lay out all the news and the key announcements that's happening this week for SAP at Mobile World Congress. In context of the backdrop of the key things that are happening in terms of the trends at the show. >> Yeah so I'll talk mostly about the Cloud Platform content. So there's some other things happening with SAP. But from a Cloud Platform perspective, it really is the shift to Cloud Platform as a strategic platform for the company in the cloud. So that's really big. Along with that, the iOS SDK, we've already talked about. We're going into beta on our IoT services. So we've now got over 40 protocols that we're supporting. We've got device management, device provisioning, dashboards for monitoring and managing those. The IoT services, which will be the foundation for our portfolio of apps that we deliver, is all going to be on Cloud Platform. We're delivering that service. They're going to announce some things in the Leonardo portfolio, which is our IoT applications. Those work together hand in glove. Some other things, some other bits and bites. We're opening data centers in Japan and China. We're hitting the Asia Pacific market pretty hard allowing customers to take their-- >> Those are SAP data centers? >> SAP data centers. >> Cloud, for SAP Cloud. >> To run SAP cloud in Japan and China with backup and recover, disaster recovery, HA, in between those data centers. Then also we're providing the capability for customers to bring their own applications onto our cloud if they want to run them closed to their cloud applications or SAP Cloud applications. So a VM style of service that we bring. But we're not going to compete against AWS in that. But if you want to bring that next to an SAP app, boom, you can do that very easily. >> I want to ask you about some of the hot trends that we're tracking on (mumbles) on thCUBE and certainly looking at the data. It's pretty obviously that IoT is the hottest, I would call tangible, trend. AI is the hottest hyped trend. >> Coming trend, yeah. >> Well I mean I think AI is legit and I'm a big fan of AI. But I think it gives people a more of a mental model than IoT. IoT's like oh, industrial, internet of things. It's kind of esoteric to the mainstream. AI is robots, flying drones, flying saucers, flying cars. So it gives people a kind of a feel for kind of what machine learning and IoT can point to. So I want you to talk about what you guys got going on there. The other thing that comes up from a customer standpoint, I want to get your thoughts and commentary on, is the number one thing that comes up besides topic on IoT is integration. Integration points is critical. So open cloud is something that you guys have promoted. IoT kind of brings that to the table. How do I bridge IoT into the cloud? How do I integrate either my on parameter clouds? These are the kind of the threads that are being discussed right now. >> You forgot big data. You forgot that one too. So hey, I worked for an AI company in the 90s after AI was dead, okay? AI was hot in the 80s. I worked for an AI company in the 90s. It was dead until today. >> It's back again. >> I'm just shocked that it's back. So the AI piece-- >> By the way, machine learning hasn't really changed much since 10, 20 years ago either. >> Exactly either as well. But we're building all of our AI and machine learning capabilities using SAP Cloud as the base. We're bringing in some open source technology from Google and others. But we're going to be building services on top of Cloud Platform that will allow you to build machine learning AI apps as well as delivering bespoke applications like matching invoices and some other things that makes sense for SAP. >> Well the IoT thing you bring up, in joking about AI, I think the reality is that AI's been around for a long time as you mentioned, as well as machine learning. But I think that the trend that comes up that makes it so peaked for real time right now is cloud horsepower is awesome, almost infinite compute power available, and the tsunami of data. So you combine the fact that, all those new data sources, with horsepower, and now with 5G dropping on main stage with Intel's announcement, you're seeing a confluence of a new fabric being kind of weaved together. That's interesting because now you have the compute, that's not a bottleneck anymore. So overhead whether it's security encryption, and/or security techniques, machine learning, goes away. AI can now do other things. So this is an interesting-- >> It's an interesting area. You kind of named it. You have to have the ability to ingest all this stuff through an IoT type of streaming capability. You got to be able to analyze it in real time, that's our in-memory capability. We talked about the AI, analyze it in real time. The one thing we haven't talked about is you have to have a big data repository to be able to troll through months and years of data. We've actually added the Altiscale company to our portfolio. So now Altiscale is part of SAP. We're renaming that Big Data Services. But it'll be basically Altiscale. So now you've got Hadoop in the cloud. So you've got an IoT, you've got your in-memory capability through HANA in the cloud. You've got your Hadoop in the cloud. All of that is one piece of cloth to us. You can apply IoT against that. You can apply AI against that. You can apply machine learning against that. And guess what? Blockchain against that as well. That's a little bit early for us. But that is-- >> It's on the horizon for sure. >> [Dan] Exactly. >> This is basically talking about where you process the data and now see the IoT edge is something that we keep our own research team. Our team's been actively pursuing. So I want to ask you to explain a little bit about this IoT service you guys announced. What is that about? I mean how would you describe that capability in SAP Cloud? >> Well it's funny. IoT is all about streaming data if you think about. I've been in streaming data since 2008 'cause we were heavy into financial services and understanding the transaction. So we were running algorithmic trading back in 2008 and we bought a couple of companies that did that. You would say, "Streaming data," to people and they would go like this, right? But now with the iPhone, and people understanding that their iPhone is a sensor device, and people now finally get that well data streaming is a big deal. >> Autonomous vehicle's a highlight set big time. >> Exactly. You kind of hit the nail on the head when you said you have to have not only an analysis inside the data center, in the cloud, but you have to push as much as can of that out to the edge. So part of what we're delivering as IoT services is a whole edge set of components that will actually do some of the analytics out at the edge in the hubs. Like what Intel provides, or Huawei, or Dell, or other companies with these gateway hubs. As well as capturing streaming data, doing store and forward of that data. So it's pushing IoT out to the edge for real time decision making, bringing it back into the data center for maybe a little bit more real time deeper analysis, and then connecting it to a big data source so you can actually troll through that over time, and say over the last six months, "Here's the supplier that's doing great. "Here's the supplier that's giving me not so great parts." All of those pieces for customers at the end of the day is really important. Making them more agile in the IoT environment. Making them more connected in the IoT environment and big data environment. Connecting the enterprise to that. So it's all helping customers from our view. >> Congratulations on the news. Well first the name change I think symbolizes a cloud centric philosophy company wide, which is great. SaaSification of SAP, which is huge for your customer base. But also the Apple news I've always been bullish on because that brings an opportunity for developers to work with you and vice versa. The monetization for developers to play in your ecosystem certainly is a great opportunity. Those are the two big news. >> Just think about that Apple piece. They can now take a process, they can build a set of controls, build a new app, and then monetize that in the App center. That will be very cool. Monetizing enterprise applications or extensions to enterprise applications. Pretty cool. >> Well that's one of the reasons why the enterprise is super hot right now. 'Cause the consumer market is (mumbles) you've seen those unicorns you see Airbnb, you see Uber, all the examples we talk about. Netflix, Amazon, enabling all that good stuff, and others. But now the enterprise is sexy one, because there's some real transformation going on from the network to the Apple Air. But there's business to be done, there's actual opportunities for people to have their work of art, the developers if you will, be monetized. >> If you put IoT, and big data, and AI behind all of that, and then make it look beautiful on the device, that's beautiful. >> IoT is a real trend. I mean that-- >> It's real. >> It's definitely happening right now and I think that's where the meat on the bone is in my mind. Okay Dan, final question for you. For the folks watching and our paying attention to Mobile World Congress in general and in the world, what is the key thing that you think they should walk away with about SAP Cloud now? With the new name, with the Apple news, all this good stuff happing at Mobile World Congress. What is the key walk away message that you'd like to send to folks to know the current state of SAP Cloud? What's the key message? >> So I would say the key message is we've talked about it but now we're delivering. SAP is all in on the cloud. We're not only delivering the SAP Cloud Platform but also S/4HANA, cloud as well. Tons of apps being built using SAP Cloud Platform. SAP is all in on the cloud, all in in mode two computing to help our customers. That's the big news. >> Dan Lahl, Vice President of Product Marketing at SAP Cloud. I'm John Furrier. You're watching a special two day coverage of Mobile World Congress 2017 here in the studios of Palo Alto covering it from Silicon Valley. We've got folks on the ground bringing you more action after this short break. (smooth electronic music) (light electronic music)