(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)

>> 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.

(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)

>> Narrator: Live from Stanford University, it's theCUBE covering the Women in Data Science Conference 2017. >> Hi welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin and we are live at Stanford University at the second annual Women in Data Science one day tech conference. We are joined by one of the speakers for the event today, Claudia Perlich, the Chief Scientist at Dstillery, Claudia, welcome to theCUBE. >> Claudia: Thank you so much for having me. It's exciting. >> It is exciting! It's great to have you here. You are quite the prolific author, you've won data mining competitions and awards, you speak at conferences all around the world. Talk to us what you're currently doing as the Chief Scientist for Dstillery. Who's Dstillery? What's the Chief Scientist's role and how are you really leveraging data and science to be a change agent for your clients. I joined Dstillery when it was still called Media6Degrees as a very small startup in the New York ad tech space. It was very exciting. I came out of the IBM Watson Research Lab and really found this a new challenging application area for my skills. What does a Chief Scientist do? It's a good question, I think it actually took the CEO about two years to finally give me a job description, (laughter) and the conclusion at that point was something like, okay there is technical contribution, so I sit down and actually code things and I build prototypes and I play around with data. I also am referred to as Intellectual Leadership, so I work a lot with the teams just kind of scoping problems, brainstorming was may work or dozen, and finally, that's what I'm here for today, is what they consider an Ambassador for the company, so being the face to talk about the more scientific aspects of what's happening now in ad tech, which brings me to what we actually do, right. One of the things that happened over the recent past in advertising is it became an incredible playground for data signs because the available data is incomparable to many other fields that I have seen. And so Dstillery was a pioneer in that space starting to look at initially social data things that people shared, but over the years it has really grown into getting a sense of the digital footprint of what people do. And our primary business model was to bring this to marketers to help them on a much more individualized basis identify who their customers current as well as futures are. Really get a very different understanding than these broad middle-aged soccer mom kind of categories to honor the individual tastes and preferences and actions that really truly reflect the variety of what people do. I'm many things as you mentioned, I publish mom, what's a mom, and I have a horse, so there are many different parts to me. I don't think any single one description fully captures that and we felt that advertising is a great space to explore how you can translate that and help both sides, the people that are being interacted with, as well as the brands that want to make sure that they reach the right individuals. >> Lisa: Very interesting. Well, as buyers journey as changed to mostly online, >> Exactly. >> You're right, it's an incredibly rich opportunity for companies to harness more of that behavioral information and probably see things that they wouldn't have predicted. We were talking to Walmart Labs earlier and one of the interesting insights that they shared was that, especially in Silicon Valley where people spend too much time in the car commuting-- (laughter) You have a long commute as well by train. >> Yes. >> And you'd think that people would want, I want my groceries to show up on my doorstep, I don't want to have to go into the store, and they actually found the opposite that people in such a cosmopolitan area as Silicon Valley actually want to go into the store and pick up-- >> Claudia: Yep. >> Their groceries, so it's very interesting how the data actually can sometimes really change. It's really the scientific method on a very different scale >> Claudia: Much smaller. >> But really using the behavior insights to change the shopping experience, but also to change the experience of companies that are looking to sell their products. >> I think that the last part of the puzzle is, the question is no longer what is the right video for the Super Bowl, I mean we have the Super Bowl coming up, right? >> Lisa: Right. Right. >> They did a study like when do people pay attention to the Super Bowl. You can actually tell, cuz you know what people don't do when they pay attention to the Super Bowl? >> Lisa: Mm,hmm. >> They're not playing around with their phones. They're actually not playing-- >> Lisa: Of course. >> Candy Crush and all these things, so what we see in the ad tech environment, we actually see that the demand for the digital ads go down when people really focus on what's going on on the big screen. But that was a diversion ... >> Lisa: It's very interesting (laughter) though cuz it's something that's very tangible and very ... It's a real world applications. Question for you about data science and your background. You mentioned that you worked with IBM Watson. Forbes has just said that Data Scientist is the best job to apply for in 2017. What is your vision? Talk to us about your team, how you've grown that up, how you're using big data and science to really optimize the products that you deliver to your customers. >> Data Science is really many, many different flavors and in some sense I became a Data Scientist long before the term really existed. Back then I was just a particular weird kind of geek. (laughter) You know all of a sudden it's-- >> Now it has a name. (laughter) >> Right and the reputation to be fun and so you see really many different application areas depending very different skillsets. What is originally the focus of our company has always been around, can we predict what people are going to do? That was always the primary focus and now you see that it's very nicely reflected at the event too. All of sudden communicating this becomes much bigger a part of the puzzle where people say, "Okay, I realize that you're really "good at predicting, but can you tell me why, "what is it these nuggets of inside-- >> Interpretation, right. >> "That you mentioned. Can you visualize what's going on?" And so we grew a team initially from a small group of really focused machine learning and predictive skills over to the broader can you communicate it. Can you explain to the customer archieve brands what happened here. Can you visualize data. That's kind of the broader shift and I think the most challenging part that I can tell in the broader picture of where there is a bit of a short coming in skillset, we have a lot of people who are really good today at analyzing data and coding, so that part has caught up. There are so many Data Science programs. What I still am looking for is how do you bring management and corporate culture to the place where they can truly take advantage of it. >> Lisa: Right. >> This kind of disconnect that we still have-- >> Lisa: Absolutely. >> How do we educate the management level to be comfortable evaluating what their data science group actually did. Whether they working on the right problems that really ultimately will have impact. I think that layer of education needs to receive a lot more emphasis compared to what we already see in terms of this increased skillset on just the sheer technical side of it. >> You mentioned that you teach-- >> Claudia: Mm,hmm. >> Before we went live here, that you teach at NYU, but you're also teaching Data Science to the business folks. I would love for you to expand a little bit more upon that and how are you helping to educate these people to understand the impact. Cuz that's really, really a change agent within the company. That's a cultural change, which is really challenging-- >> Claudia: Very much so. >> Lisa: What's their perception? What's their interest in understanding how this can really drive value? >> What you see, I've been teaching this course for almost six years now, and originally it was really kind of the hardcore coders who also happened to get a PhD on the side, who came to the course. Now you increasingly have a very broad collection of business minded people. I typically teach in the part-time, meaning they all have day jobs and they've realized in their day jobs, I need this. I need that. That skill. That knowledge. We're trying to get on the ground where without having to teach them python and ARM whatever the new toys are there. How can you identify opportunities? How do you know which of the many different flavors of Data Science, from prediction towards visualization to just analyzing historical data to maybe even causality. Which of these tools is appropriate for the task at hand and then being able to evaluate whether the level of support that a machine can only bring, is it even sufficient? Because often just because you can analyze data doesn't mean that the reliability of the model is truly sufficient to support then a downstream business project. Being able to really understand those trade offs without necessarily being able to sit down and code it yourself. That knowledge has become a lot more valuable and I really enjoy the brainstorming when we're just trying to scope a project when they come with problems from their day job and say, "Hey, we're trying to do that." And saying, "Are you really trying to do that?" "What are you actually able to execute? "What kind of decisions can you make?" This is almost like the brainstorming in my own company now brought out to much broader people working in hospitals, people working in banking, so I get exposed to all of these kinds of problems said and that makes it really exciting for me. >> Lisa: Interesting. When Dstillery is talking to customer or prospective customers, is this now something that you're finding is a board level conversation within businesses? >> Claudia: No, I never get bored of that, so there is a part of the business that is pretty well understood and executed. You come to us, you give us money, and we will execute a digital campaign, either on mobile phones, on video, and you tell me what it is that you want me to optimize for. Do you want people to click on your ad? Please don't say yes, that's the worst possible things you may ask me to do-- (laughter) But let's talk about what you're going to measure, whether you want people to show up in your store, whether you really care about signing up for a test drive, and then the system automatically will build all the models that then do all the real-time bidding. Advertising, I'm not sure how many people are aware, as your New York Times page loads, every single ad slot on that side is sold in a real-time auction. About 50 billion times a day, we receive a request whether we want to bid on the opportunity to show somebody an ad. >> Lisa: Wow. >> So that piece, I can't make 50 billion decisions a day. >> Lisa: Right. >> It is entirely automated. There's this fully automated machine learning that just serves that purpose. What makes it interesting for me now that ... Now this is kind of standard fare if you want to move over and is more interesting parts. Well, can you for instance predict which of the 15 different creatives I have for Jobani, should I show you? >> Lisa: Mm,hmm. >> The one with the woman running, or the one with the kid opening, so there is no nuances to it and exploring these new challenges or going into totally new areas talking about, for instance churn prediction, I know an awful lot about people, I can predict very many things and a lot of them go far beyond just how you interact with ads, it's almost the most boring part. We can see people researching diabetes. We can provide snapshots to farmer telling them here's really where we see a rise of activity on a certain topic and maybe this is something of interest to understand which population is driving those changes. These kinds of conversations really making it exciting for me to bring the knowledge of what I see back to many different constituents and see what kind of problems we can possibly support with that. >> Lisa: It's interesting too. It sounds like more, not just providing ad technology to customers-- >> Claudia: Yeah. >> You're really helping them understand where they should be looking to drive value for their businesses. >> Claudia: That's really been the focus increasingly and I enjoy that a lot. >> Lisa: I can imagine that, that's quite interesting. Want to ask you a little bit before we wrap up here about your talk today. I was looking at your, the title of your abstract is, "Beware what you ask for: The secret life of predictive models". (laughter) Talk to us about some of the lessons you learn when things have gone a little bit, huh, I didn't expect that. >> I'm a huge fan of predictive modeling. I love the capabilities and what this technology can do. This being said, it's a collection of aha moments where you're looking at this and this, this doesn't really smell right. To give you an example from ad tech, and I alluded to this, when people say, "Okay we want a high click through rate." Yes, that means I have to predict who will click on an ad. And then you realize that no matter what the campaign, no matter what the product, the model always chooses to show the ad on the flashlight app. Yeah, because that's when people fumble in the dark. The model's really, really good at predicting when people are likely to click on an ad, except that's really not what you intended-- >> Right. >> When you asked me to do that. >> Right. >> So it's almost the best and powerful that they move off into a sidetracked direction you didn't even know existed. Something similar happened with one of these competitions that I won. For Siemens Medical where you had to identify an FMI images of breast, which of these regions are most likely benign or which one have cancer. In both models we did really, really well, all was good. Until we realized that the patient ID was by far the most predictive feature. Now this really shouldn't happen. Your social security number shouldn't be able to predict-- >> Lisa: Right. >> Anything really. It wasn't the social security number, but when we started looking a little bit deeper, we realized what had happened is the data set was a sample from different sources, and one was a treatment center, and one was a screening center and they had certain ranges of patient IDs, so the model had learned where the machine stood, not what the image actually contained about the probability of having cancer. Whoever assembled the data set possibly didn't think about the downstream effect this can have on modeling-- >> Right. >> Which brings us back to the data science skill as really comprehensive starting all the way from the beginning of where the data is collected, all the way down to be extremely skeptical about your own work and really make sure that it truly reflects what you want it to do. You asked earlier like what makes really good Data Scientists. The intuition to feel when something is wrong and to be able to pinpoint and trace it back with the curiosity of really needing to understand everything about the whole process. >> Lisa: And also being not only being able to communicate it, but probably being willing to fail. >> Claudia: That is the number one really requirement. If you want to have a data-driven culture, you have to embrace failure, because otherwise you will fail. >> Lisa: How do you find the reception (laughter) to that fact by your business students. Is that something that they're used to hearing or does it sound like a foreign language to them? >> I think the majority of them are in junior enough positions that they-- >> Lisa: Okay. >> Truly embrace that and if at all, they have come across the fact that they weren't allowed to fail as often as they had wanted to. I think once you go into the higher levels of conversation and we see that a lot in the ad tech industry where you have incentive problems. We see a lot of fraud being targeted. At the end of the day, the ad agency doesn't want to confess to the client that yeah they just wasted five million dollars-- >> Lisa: Right. >> Of ad spend on bots, and even the CMO might not be feeling very comfortable confessing that to the CO-- >> Right. >> Claudia: Being willing to truly face up the truth that sometimes data forces you into your face, that can be quite difficult for a company or even an industry. >> Lisa: Yes, it can. It's quite revolutionary. As is this event, so Claudia Perlich we thank you so much for joining us-- >> My pleasure. >> Lisa: On theCUBE today and we know that you're going to be mentoring a lot of people that are here. We thank you for watching theCUBE. We are live at Stanford University from the Women in Data Science Conference. I am Lisa Martin and we'll be right back (upbeat music)