(light music) (airy white noise rumbling) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. We're here, day four of our coverage of AWS re:Invent 22. There's been about, we've heard, north of 55,000 folks here in person. We're seeing only a fraction of that but it's packed in the expo center. We're at the Venetian Expo, Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante. Dave, we've had such great conversations as we always do on theCUBE. With the AWS ecosystem, we're going to be talking with another partner on that ecosystem and what they're doing to innovate together next. >> Well, we know security is the number one topic on IT practitioners, mine, CIOs, CISOs. We also know that they don't have the bench strength, that's why they look to manage service providers, manage service security providers. It's a growing topic, we've talked about it. We talked about it at re:Inforce earlier this year. I think it was July, actually, and August, believe it or not, not everybody was at the Cape. It was pretty well attended conference and that's their security focus conference, exclusive on security. But there's a lot of security here too. >> Lot of security, we're going to be talking about that next. We have two guests from Capgemini joining us. Mike Wasielewski, the head of cloud security, and NextGen secure architectures, welcome Mike. Anne Saunders also joins us, the Director of Cybersecurity Technology Partnerships at Capgemini, welcome Anne. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Hey guys. >> So, day four of the show, how you feeling? >> Anne: Pretty good. >> Mike: It's a long show. >> It is a long, and it's still jamming in here. Normally on the last day, it dwindles down. Not here. >> No, the foot traffic around the booth and around the totality of this expo floor has been amazing, I think. >> It really has. Anne, I want to start with you. Capgemini making some moves in the waves in the cloud and cloud security spaces. Talk to us about what Cap's got going on there. >> Well, we actually have a variety of things going on. Very much partner driven. The SOC Essentials offering that Mike's going to talk about shortly is the kind of the starter offer where we're going to build from and build out from. SOC Essentials is definitely critical for establishing that foundation. A lot of good stuff coming along with partners. Since I manage the partners, I'm kind of keen on who we get involved with and how we work with them to build out value and focus on our overall cloud security strategy. Mike, you want to talk about SOC Essentials? >> Yeah, well, no, I mean, I think at Capgemini, we really say cybersecurity is part of our DNA and so as we look at what we do in the cloud, you'll find that security has always been an underpinning to a lot of what we deliver, whether it's on the DevSecOps services, migration services, stuff like that. But what we're really trying to do is be intentional about how we approach the security piece of the cloud in different ways, right? Traditional infrastructure, you mentioned the totality of security vendors here and at re:Inforce. We're really seeing that you have to approach it differently. So we're bringing together the right partners. We're using what's part of our DNA to really be able to drive the next generation of security inside those clouds for our clients and customers. So as Anne was talking about, we have a new service called the Capgemini Cloud SOC Essentials, and we've really brought our partners to bear, in this case Trend Micro, really bringing a lot of their intelligence and building off of what they do so that we can help customers. Services can be pretty expensive, right, when you go for the high end, or if you have to try to run one yourself, there's a lot of time, I think you mentioned earlier, right, the people's benches. It's really hard to have a really good cybersecurity people in those smaller businesses. So what we're trying to do is we're really trying to help companies, whether you're the really big buyers of the world or some of the smaller ones, right? We want to be able to give you the visibility and ability to deliver to your customers securely. So that's how we're approaching security now and we're cloud SOC Essentials, the new thing that we're announcing while we were here is really driving out of. >> When I came out of re:Invent, when you do these events, you get this Kool-Aid injection and after a while you're like hm, what did I learn? And one of the things that struck me in talking to people is you've got the shared responsibility model that the cloud has sort of created and I know there's complexities across cloud but let's just keep it at cloud generically for a moment. And then you've got the CISO, the AppDev, AppSecDev group is being asked to do a lot. They're kind of being dragged into security that's really not their wheelhouse and then you've got audit which is like the last line of defense. And so one of the things that struck me at re:Inforce is like, okay, Amazon, great job for their portion of the shared responsibility model but I didn't hear a lot in terms of making the CISO's life easier and I'm guessing that's where you guys come in. I wonder if you could talk about that trend, that conceptual layers that I just laid out and where you guys fit. >> Mike: Sure, so I think first and foremost, I always go back to a quote from, I think it's attributed to Peter Drucker, whether that's right or wrong, who knows? But culture eats strategy for breakfast, right? And I think what we've seen in our conversations with whether you're talking to the CISO, the application team, the AppDev team, wherever throughout the organization, we really see that culture is what's going to drive success or failure of security in the org, and so what we do is we really do bring that totality of perspective. We're not just cloud, not just security, not just AppDev. We can really bring across the totality of the Capgemini estate. So that when we go, and you're right, a CISO says, I'm having a hard time getting the app people to deliver what I need. If you just come from a security perspective, you're right, that's what's going to happen. So what we try to do is so, we've got a great DevSecOps service, for example in the cloud where we do that. We bring all the perspectives together, how do we align KPIs? That's a big problem, I think, for what you're seeing, making CISO's lives easier, is about making sure that the app team KPIs are aligned with the CISO's but also the CISO's KPIs are aligned with the app teams. And by doing that, we have had really great success in a number of organizations by giving them the tools then and the people on our side to be able to make those alignments at the business level, to drive the right business outcome, to drive the right security outcome, the right application outcome. That's where I think we've really come to play. >> Absolutely, and I will say from a partnering perspective, what's key in supporting that strategy is we will learn from our partners, we lean on our partners to understand what the trends they're seeing and where they're having an impact with regards to supporting the CISO and supporting the overall security strategy within a company. I mean, they're on the cutting edge. We do a lot to track their technology roadmaps. We do a lot to track how they build their buyer personas and what issues they're dealing with and what issues they're prepared to deal with regards to where they're investing and who's investing in them. A lot of strategy around which partner to bring in and support, how we're going to address the challenges, the CISO and the IT teams are having to kind of support that overall. Security is a part of everything, DNA kind of strategy. >> Yeah, do you have a favorite example, Anne, of a partner that came in with Capgemini, helped a customer really be able to do what Capgemini is doing and that is, have cybersecurity be actually part of their DNA when there's so many challenges, the skills gap. Any favorite example that really you think articulates how you're able to enable organizations to achieve just that? >> Anne: Well, actually the SOC Essentials offering that we're rolling out is a prime example of that. I mean, we work very, very closely with Trend on all fronts with regards to developing it. It's one of those completely collaborative from day one to going to the customer and that it's almost that seamless connectivity and just partnering at such a strategic level is a great example of how it's done right, and when it's done right, how successful it can be. >> Dave: Why Trend Micro? Because I mean, I'm sure you've seen, I think that's Optiv, has the eye test with all the tools and you talk to CISOs, they're like really trying to consolidate those tools. So I presume there's a portfolio play there, but tell us, tell the audience a little bit more about why Trend Micro and I mean your branding with them, why those guys? >> Well, it goes towards the technology, of course, and all the development they've done and their position within AWS and how they address assuring security for our clients who are moving onto and running their estates on AWS. There's such a long heritage with regards to their technology platform and what they've developed, that deep experience, that kind of the strength of the technology because of the longevity they've had and where they sit within their domain. I try to call partners out by their domain and their area of expertise is part of the reason, I mean. >> Yeah, I think another big part of it is Gartner is expecting, I think they published this out in the next three years, we expect to see another consolidation both inside of the enterprises as well as, I look back a couple years, when Palo Alto went on a very nice spending spree, right? And put together a lot of really great companies that built their Prisma platform. So what I think one of the reasons we picked Trend in this particular case is as we look forward for our customers and our clients, not just having point solutions, right? This isn't just about endpoint protection, this isn't just about security posture management. This is really who can take the totality of the customer's problems and deliver on the right outcomes from a single platform, and so when we look at companies like Trend, like Palo, some of the bigger partners for us, that's where we try to focus. They're definitely best in breed and we bring those to our customers too for certain things. But as we look to the future, I think really finding those partners that are going to be able to solve a swath of problems at the right price point for their customers, that is where I think we see the industry moving. >> Dave: And maybe be around as an independent company. Was that a factor as well? I mean, you see Thoma Bravo buying up all his hiring companies and right, so, and maybe they're trying to create something that could be competitive, but you're saying Trend Micros there, so. >> Well I think as Anne mentioned, the 30 year heritage, I think, of Trend Micro really driving this and I've done work with them in various past things. There's also a big part of just the people you like, the people that are good to work with, that are really trying to be customer obsessed, going back right, at an AWS event, the ones that get the cloud tend to be able to follow those Amazon LPs as well, right, just kind of naturally, and so I think when you look at the Trend Micros of the world, that's where that kind of cloud native piece comes out and I like working with that. >> In this environment, the macro environment, lets talk a bit, earning season, it's really mixed. I mean you're seeing some really good earnings, some mixed earnings, some good earnings with cautious guidance. So nobody really (indistinct), and it was for a period time there was a thinking that security was non-discretionary and it's clearly non-discretionary, but the CISO, she or he, doesn't have unlimited budgets, right? So what are you seeing in terms of how are customers dealing with this challenging macro environment? Is it through tools consolidation? Is that a play that's going on? What are you seeing in the customer base? >> Anne: I see ways, and we're working through this right now where we're actually weaving cybersecurity in at the very beginning of how we're designing offers across our entire offer portfolio, not just the cybersecurity business. So taking that approach in the long run will help contain costs and our hope, and we're already seeing it, is it's actually helping change the perception that security's that cost center and that final obstacle you have to get over and it's going to throw your margins off and all that sort of stuff. >> Dave: I like that, its at least is like a security cover charge. You're not getting in unless we do the security thing. >> Exactly, a security cover charge, that's what you should call it. >> Yeah. >> Like it. >> Another piece though, you mentioned earlier about making CISO's life easier, right? And I think, as Anne did a really absolutely true about building it in, not to the security stack but application developers, they want visibility they want observability, they want to do it right. They want CI/CD pipeline that can give them confidence in their security. So should the CISO have a budget issue, right? And they can't necessarily afford, but the application team as they're looking at what products they want to purchase, can I get a SaaS or a DaaS, right? The static or dynamic application security testing in my product up front and if the app team buys into that methodology, the CISO convinces them, yes, this is important. Now I've got two budgets to pull from, and in the end I end up with a cheaper, a lower cost of a service. So I think that's another way that we see with like DevSecOps and a few other services, that building in on day one that you mentioned. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> Getting both teams involved. >> Dave: That's interesting, Mike, because that's the alignment that you were talking about earlier in the KPIs and you're not a tech vendor saying, buy my product, you guys have deep consultancy backgrounds. >> Anne: And the customer appreciates that. >> Yeah. >> Anne: They see us as looking out for their best interest when we're trying to support them and help them and bringing it to the table at the very beginning as something that is there and we're conscientious of, just helps them in the long run and I think, they're seeing that, they appreciate that. >> Dave: Yeah, you can bring best practice around measurements, alignment, business process, stuff like that. Maybe even some industry expertise which you're not typically going to get from a product company. >> Well, one thing you just mentioned that I love talking about with Capgemini is the industry expertise, right? So when you look at systems integrators, there are a lot of really, really good ones. To say otherwise would be foolish. But Capgemini with our acquisition of Altran, a couple years ago, I think think it was, right? How many other GSIs or SIs are actually building silicon for IoT chips? So IoT's huge right now, the intelligent industry moving forward is going to drive a lot of those business outcomes that people are looking for. Who else can say we've built an autonomous vehicle, Capgemini can. Who can say that we've built the IoT devices from the ground up? We know not just how to integrate them into AWS, into the IoT services in the cloud, but to build and have that secure development for the firmware and all and that's where I think our customers really look to us as being those industry experts and being able to bring that totality of our business to bear for what they need to do to achieve their objectives to deliver to their customer. >> Dave: That's interesting. I mean, using silicon as a differentiator to drive a lot of business outcomes and security. >> Mike: Absolutely. >> I mean you see what Amazon's doing in silicon, Look at Apple. Look at what Tesla's doing with silicon. >> Dave: That's where you're seeing a lot of people start focusing 'cause not everybody can do it. >> Yeah. >> It's hard. >> Right. >> It's hard. >> And you'll see some interesting announcements from us and some interesting information and trends that we'll be driving because of where we're placed and what we have going around security and intelligent industry overall. We have a lot of investment going on there right now and again, from the partner perspective, it's an ecosystem of key partners that collectively work together to kind of create a seamless security posture for an intelligent industry initiative with these companies that we're working with. >> So last question, probably toughest question, and that's to give us a 30 second like elevator pitch or a billboard and I'm going to ask you, Anne, specifically about the SOC Essentials program powered by Trend Micro. Why should organizations look to that? >> Organizations should move to it or work with us on it because we have the expertise, we have the width and breadth to help them fill the gaps, be those eyes, be that team, the police behind it all, so to speak, and be the team behind them to make sure we're giving them the right information they need to actually act effectively on maintaining their security posture. >> Nice and then last question for you, Mike is that billboard, why should organizations in any industry work with Capgemini to help become an intelligent industrial player. >> Mike: Sure, so if you look at our board up top, right, we've got our tagline that says, "get the future you want." And that's what you're going to get with Capgemini. It's not just about selling a service, it's not just about what partners' right in reselling. We don't want that to be why you come to us. You, as a company have a vision and we will help you achieve that vision in a way that nobody else can because of our depth, because of the breadth that we have that's very hard to replicate. >> Awesome guys, that was great answers. Mike, Anne, thank you for spending some time with Dave and me on the program today talking about what's new with Capgemini. We'll be following this space. >> All right, thank you very much. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (gentle light music)

>>Okay, welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Amazon re Mars two days of coverage, we're getting down to wrapping up day one. I'm John furrier host of the cube space is a big topic here. You got machine learning, you got automation, robotics, all spells Mars. The two great guests here to really get into the whole geo scene. What's going on with the data. We've got Marcus Norren business development and geo data. Sogeti part of cap Gemini group, and Yoki well kissed portfolio lead data and AI with Sogeti part of cap, Gemini gentlemen, thanks for coming on the queue. Appreciate it. Thanks >>For having us. >>Let me so coming all the way from Sweden to check out the scene here and get into the weeds and the show. A lot of great technology being space is the top line here, but software drives it. Um, you got robotics. Lot of satellite, you got the aerospace industry colliding with hardcore industrial. I say IOT, robotics, one, whatever you want, but space kind of highlights the IOT opportunity. There is no edge in space, right? So the edge, the intelligent edge, a lot going on in space. And satellite's one of 'em you guys are in the middle of that. What are you guys working on? What's the, the focus here for cap gem and I Sogeti part of cap >>Gemini. I would say we focus a lot of creating business value, real business value for our clients, with the satellites available, actually a free available satellite images, working five years now with this, uh, solutioning and, uh, mostly invitation management and forestry. That's our main focus. >>So what's the product value you guys are offering. >>We basically, for now the, the most value we created is working with a forest client to find park Beal infests, uh, in spruce forest. It's a big problem in European union and, uh, Northern region Sweden, where we live now with the climate change, it's getting warmer, the bark beetle bases warm more times during the summer, which makes it spread exponentially. Uh, so we help with the satellite images to get with data science and AI to find these infestations in time when they are small, before it's spread. >>So satellite imagery combined with data, this is the intersection of the data piece, the geo data, right? >>Yeah. You can say that you have, uh, a lot of open satellite data, uh, and uh, you want to analyze that, that you also need to know what you're looking for and you need data to understand in our case, a certain type of damage. So we have large data sets that we have to sort of clean and train ML models from to try to run that on that open data, to detect these models. And, and when we're saying satellite data and open data, it's basically one pixel is 10 by 10 meters. So it's not that you will see the trees, but we're looking at the spectral information in the image and finding patterns. So we can actually detect attacks that are like four or five trees, big, uh, using that type. And we can do that throughout the season so we can see how you start seeing one, two attacks and it's just growing. And then you have this big area of just damage. So >>How, how long does that take? Give me some scope to scale because it sounds easy. Oh, the satellites are looking down on us. It's not, it's a lot of data there. What's the complexity. What are the challenges that you guys are overcoming scope to scale? >>It's so much complexity in this first, you have clouds, so it's, uh, open data set, you download it and you figure out here, we have a satellite scene, which is cloudy. We need to have some analytics doing that, taking that image away basically, or the section of the image with it cloudy. Then we have a cloud free image. We can't see anything because it's blurry. It's too low resolution. So we need to stack them on top of each other. And then we have the next problem to correlate them. So they are pixel perfect overlapping. Yeah. So we can compare them in time. And then they have the histogram adjustment to make them like, uh, the sensitivity is the same on all the images, because you have solar storms, you have shady clouds, which, uh, could be used still that image. So we need to compare that. Then we have the ground proof data coming from, uh, a harvester. For instance, we got 200,000 data points from the harvester real data points where they had found bark Beal trees, and they pulled them down. The GPS is drifting 50 meters. So you have an uncertainty where the actually harvest it was. And then we had the crane on 20 meters. So, you know, the GPS is on the home actually of the home actual machine and the crane were somewhere. So you don't really know you have this uncertainty, >>It's a data integration problem. Yeah. Massive, >>A lot of, of, uh, interesting, uh, things to adjust for. And then you could combine this into one deep learning model and build. >>But on top of that, I don't know if you said that, but you also get the data in the winter and you have the problem during the summer. So we actually have to move back in time to find the problem, label the data, and then we can start identifying. >>So once you get all that heavy lifting done or, or write the code, or I don't know if something's going on there, you get the layering, the pixel X see all the, how complex that is when the deep learning takes over. What happens next? Is it scale? Is it is all the heavy lifting up front? Is the work done front or yeah. Is its scale on the back end? >>So first the coding is heavy work, right? To gets hands on and try different things. Figure out in math, how to work with this uncertainty and get everything sold. Then you put it into a deep learning model to train that it actually run for 10 days before it was accurate, or first, first ation, it wasn't accurate enough. So we scrap that, did some changes. Then we run it again for 10 days. Then we have a model which we could use and interfere new images. Like every day, pretty quickly, every day it comes a new image. We run it. We have a new outcome and we could deliver that to clients. >>Yeah. I can almost imagine. I mean, the, the cloud computing comes in handy here. Oh yeah. So take me through the benefits because it sounds like the old, the old expression, the juice is not worth the squeeze here. It is. It's worth the squeeze. If you can get it right. Because the alternative is what more expensive gear, different windows, just more expensive monolithic solutions. Right? >>Think about the data here. So it's satellite scene. Every satellite scene is hundred by a hundred kilometers. That pretty much right. And then you need a lot of these satellite scene over multiple years to combine it. So if you should do this over the whole Northern Europe, over the whole globe, it's a lot of data just to store that it's a problem. You, you cannot do it on prem and then you should compute it with deep learning models. It's a hard problem >>If you don't have, so you guys got a lot going on. So, so talk about spaghetti, part of cap, Gemini, explain that relationship, cuz you're here at a show that, you know, you got, I can see the CAPI angle. This is like a little division. Is it a group? Are you guys like lone wolves? Like, what's it like, is this dedicated purpose built focus around aerospace? >>No, it's actually SOI was the, the name of the CAPI company from the beginning. And they relaunched the brand, uh, 2001, I think roughly 10, 20 years ago. So we actually celebrate some anniversary now. Uh, and it's a brand which is more local close to clients out in different cities. And we also tech companies, we are very close to the new technology, trying things out. And this is a perfect example of this. It was a crazy ID five years ago, 2017. And we started to bring in some clients explore, really? Open-minded see, can we do something on these satellite data? And then we took it step by step together of our clients. Yeah. And it's a small team where like 12 >>People. Yeah. And you guys are doing business development. So you have to go out there and identify the kinds of problems that match the scope of the scale. >>So what we're doing is we interact with our clients, do some simple workshops or something and try to identify like the really valuable problems like this Bruce Park people that that's one of those. Yep. And then we have to sort of look at, do we think we can do something? Is it realistic? And we will not be able to answer that to 100% because then there's no innovation in this at all. But we say, well, we think we can do it. This will be a hard problem, but we do think we can do it. And then we basically just go for it. And this one we did in 11 to 12 weeks, a tightly focused team, uh, and just went at it, uh, super slim process and got the job done and uh, the >>Results. Well, it's interesting. You have a lot of use cases. We gotta go down, do that face to face belly to belly, you know, body to body sales, BI dev scoping out, have workshops. Now this market here, Remar, they're all basically saying a call to arms more money's coming in. The problems are putting on the table. The workshop could be a lunch meeting, right. I mean, because Artis and there's a big set of problems to tackle. Yes. So I mean, I'm just oversimplifying, but that being said, there's a lot going on opportunity wise here. Yeah. That's not as slow maybe as the, the biz dev at, you know, coming in, this is a huge demand. It will be >>Explode. >>What's your take on the demand here, the problems that need to be solved and what you guys are gonna bring to bear for the problem. >>So now we have been focus mainly in vegetation management and forestry, but vegetation management can be applicable in utility as well. And we actually went there first had some struggle because it's quite detailed information that's needed. So we backed out a bit into vegetation in forestry again, but still it's a lot of application in, in, uh, utility and vegetation management in utility. Then we have a whole sustainability angle think about auditing of, uh, rogue harvesting or carbon offsetting in the future, even biodiversity, offsetting that could be used. >>And, and just to point out and give it a little extra context, all the keynotes, talk about space as a global climate solution, potentially the discoveries and or also the imagery they're gonna get. So you kind of got, you know, top down, bottoms up. If you wanna look at the world's bottom and space, kind of coming together, this is gonna open up new kinds of opportunities for you guys. What's the conversation like when you, when this is going on, you're like, oh yeah, let's go in. Like, what are you guys gonna do? What's the plan, uh, gonna hang around and ride that wave. >>I think it's all boils down to finding that use case that need to be sold because now we understand the satellite scene, they are there. We could, there is so many new satellites coming up already available. They can come up the cloud platform, AWS, it's great. We have all the capabilities needed. We have AI and ML models needed data science skills. Now it's finding the use cases together with clients and actually deliver on them one by >>One. It's interesting. I'd like to get your reaction to this Marcus two as well. What you guys are kind of, you have a lot bigger and, and, and bigger than some of the startups out there, but a startup world, they find their niches and they, the workflows become the intellectual property. So this, your techniques of layering almost see is an advantage out there. What's your guys view of that on intellectual property of the future, uh, open source is gonna run all the software. We know that. So software's no going open source scale and integration. And then new kinds of ways are new methods. I won't say for just patents, but like just for intellectual property, defen differentiation. How do you guys see this? As you look at this new frontier of intellectual property? >>That's, it's a difficult question. I think it's, uh, there's a lot of potential. If you look at open innovation and how you can build some IP, which you can out license, and some you utilize yourself, then you can build like a layer business model on top. So you can find different channels. Some markets we will not go for. Maybe some of our models actually could be used by others where we won't go. Uh, so we want to build some IP, but I think we also want to be able to release some of the things we do >>Open >>Works. Yeah. Because it's also builds presence. It it's >>Community. >>Yeah, exactly. Because this, this problem is really hard because it's a global thing. And, and it's imagine if, if you have a couple of million acres of forest and you just don't go out walking and trying to check what's going on because it's, you know, >>That's manuals hard. Yeah. It's impossible. >>So you need this to scale. Uh, and, and it's a hard problem. So I think you need to build a community. Yeah. Because this is, it's a living organism that we're trying to monitor. If you talk about visitation of forest, it's, it's changing throughout the year. So if you look at spring and then you look at summer and you look at winter, it's completely different. What you see. Yeah. Yeah. So >>It's, it's interesting. And so, you know, I wonder if, you know, you see some of these crowdsourcing models around participation, you know, small little help, but that doesn't solve the big puzzle. Um, but you have open source concepts. Uh, we had Anna on earlier, she's from the Amazon sustainability data project. Yeah, exactly. And then just like open up the data. So the data party for her. So in a way there's more innovation coming, potentially. If you can get that thing going, right. Get the projects going. Exactly. >>And all this, actually our work is started because of that. Yes, exactly. So European space agency, they decided to hand out this compar program and the, the Sentinel satellites central one and two, which we have been working with, they are freely available. It started back in 2016, I think. Yeah. Uh, and because of that, that's why we have this work done during several years, without that data freely available, it wouldn't have happened. Yeah. I'm, I'm >>Pretty sure. Well, what's next for you guys? Tell, tell me what's happening. Here's the update put a plug in for the, for the group. What are you working on now? What's uh, what are you guys looking to accomplish? Take a minute to put a plug in for the opportunity. >>I would say scaling this scaling, moving outside. Sweden. Of course we see our model that they work in in us. We have tried them in Canada. We see that we work, we need to scale and do field validation in different regions. And then I would say go to the sustainability area. This goes there, there is a lot of great >>Potential international too is huge. >>Yeah. One area. I think that is really interesting is the combination of understanding the, like the carbon sink and the sequestration and trying to measure that. Uh, but also on top of that, trying to classify certain Keystone species habitats to understand if they have any space to live and how can we help that to sort of grow back again, uh, understanding the history of the, sort of the force. You have some date online, but trying to map out how much of, of this has been turned into agricultural fields, for example, how much, how much of the real old forest we have left that is really biodiverse? How much is just eight years young to understand that picture? How can we sort of move back towards that blueprint? We probably need to, yeah. And how can we digitize and change forestry and the more business models around that because you, you can do it in a different way, or you can do both some harvesting, but also, yeah, not sort of ruining the >>Whole process. They can be more efficient. You make it more productive, save some capital, reinvest it in better ways >>And you have robotics and that's not maybe something that we are not so active in, but I mean, starting to look at how can autonomy help forestry, uh, inventory damages flying over using drones and satellites. Uh, you have people looking into autonomous harvesting of trees, which is kind of insane as well, because they're pretty big <laugh> but this is also happening. Yeah. So I mean, what we're seeing here is basically, >>I mean, we, I made a story multiple times called on sale drone. One of my favorite stories, the drones that are just like getting Bob around in the ocean and they're getting great telemetry data, cuz they're indestructible, you know, they can just bounce around and then they just transmit data. Exactly. You guys are creating a opportunity. Some will say problem, but by opening up data, you're actually exposing opportunities that never have been seen before because you're like, it's that scene where that movie, Jody frost, a contact where open up one little piece of information. And now you're seeing a bunch of new information. You know, you look at this large scale data, that's gonna open up new opportunities to solve problems that were never seen before. Exactly. You don't, you can't automate what you can't see. No. Right. That's the thing. So no, we >>Haven't even thought that these problems can be solved. It's basically, this is how the world works now. Because before, when you did remote sensing, you need to be out there. You need to fly with a helicopter or you put your boots on out and go out. Now you don't need that anymore. Yeah. Which opened up that you could be, >>You can move your creativity in another problem. Now you open up another problem space. So again, I like the problem solving vibe of the, it's not like, oh, catastrophic. Well, well, well the earth is on a catastrophic trajectory. It's like, oh, we'll agree to that. But it's not done deal yet. <laugh> I got plenty of time. Right. So like the let's get these problems on the table. Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is, this is the new method. Well, thanks so much for coming on the queue. Really appreciate the conversation. Thanks a lot. Love it. Opening up new world opportunities, challenges. There's always opportunities. When you have challenges, you guys are in the middle of it. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks guys. Okay. Cap Gemini in the cube part of cap Gemini. Um, so Getty part of cap Gemini here in the cube. I'm John furrier, the host we're right back with more after this short break.

>>Mm. Okay, we're back. Digging into the infrastructure to make hybrid work possible. High performance, cost effective, scalable and secure. That's what it's all about. So far, we've covered the rapid migration to WiFi 60 technology and the role that switching is going to play. And now we're gonna get into private five g to do that. Let's welcome Masumi here. Who is vice president and general manager of mobile cable and the Iot business at Cisco and Greg Dorey, who is the vice president of product management for the networking experiences group of Cisco. He's responsible for Catalyst access that whole portfolio enterprise five G Cisco DNA spaces, Cisco, Iasi A lot of stuff there. Uh, Greg gentlemen, welcome, >>Dave. Thank you for having us. >>Yeah, our pleasure. So let's start with you on the topic of private five g five g. What do we need to know about that? And more specifically, you know what's unique about Cisco's private five G? >>So, most importantly, delivering private five G in enterprise terms that's super important to look at five p. Many of our peer groups might have got it wrong. We're looking at private five g with the lens of enterprise. What enterprise really needs is five g going to come and displace a lot of existing technology? Or is it going to help augment the technology that enterprise has an excellent Their digitisation is you need. I wanted to start Dave with the basic premise of hybrid work, and what hybrid work really means. Is it only for knowledge worker or is it for all workers? So we strongly believe hybrid work needs to empower all workers. It's not only connecting remote workers but also bringing people things and space together. And I strongly believe the combination of WiFi six n five g for private network is going to accelerate that journey, bringing people things and space together in a very, very cohesive way. Why are our offer is so unique? We are going to create a continent. Enterprises don't have to make a hard choice. They will be using WiFi technology and five G technology hand in hand without creating a disruption on their policy and identity systems. They don't have to rethink. Do I have to go and build a new background is a common background that will support both WiFi as well as five t Most importantly, delivering this enter offer as a service with the ease of consumption is of operation and trusted environment that they can put their mission critical workloads on. >>I like it. So couple takeaways there are inclusive of all workers, not just knowledge workers non disruptive. Everybody loves to hear that. And of course, the as a service model is key. So let me stay with you. I mean, we can't wait for five g, right? It's lightning fast. They've got super low latency, very high bandwidth. So that's what everybody is excited about. The question, though, is is five g gets introduced. You know it's going to power things like Coyote Networks. Is that going to replace WiFi and legacy Wired broadband? >>Absolutely not. So we see private five years, an augmentation to the enterprise on top of WiFi WiFi. As you heard in the previous conversation, WiFi is bringing more capability with WiFi six and WiFi 16 and five G is going to be yet another augmentation. WiFi and fight. The will coexist within enterprise for many years to come. I would like my friend Greg to talk a little bit about this continuum. Greg. >>Yeah, I think it's sort of like I like to say it's an and not an AR because there's enough use cases out there. Richard Pryor Spectrum And you know, spectrum >>is a constraint, so >>you have private five G, your WiFi six and both offer opportunities. So, for example, in an indoor carpet setting where you're basically connecting your phone for basic browsing or connecting your laptop, WiFi is sufficient. But if it's a process automation, uh, factory where you need seven nines of reliability, private five g is a better technology. Similarly outdoor large areas. It's probably private. Five g right like this, you can have easy handoff between public and private, so it's use case driven, and once it's used case driven, it's going to be an are because there's so many next time use cases, whether it's a are we are drones, self driving cars, you name it right, like And so I think these two technologies five g and Y 5 60 is gonna work hand in hand to deliver awesome outcomes for our customers. >>Yeah, and just the data volumes are gonna be incredible. We always talk about the data volumes. You ain't seen nothing yet is what I always say. But the thing is, every new tech that's introduced into the enterprise, you can almost be certain that is going to bring adoption challenges. And not only that also is going to bring changes in the way you do things. And that brings new complexities from an operational standpoint. So my question is, how are you addressing this with the introduction of five g. >>Dave, this is a fantastic question, and this is why we have spent me and Greg have spent tremendous amount of time to create continual. I'll start with the foundation first, back down. So we have been building this enterprise backbone, supporting what Wild Connexion as well as WiFi Connexion. We wanted to make sure that as private five G camps within enterprise, you don't have to rethink and reimagine your background is the common backbone that will support both WiFi WiFi six WiFi 60 as well as private five g. You rest assured that it is the same backbone that we have heard in the previous section on the Cap 90 that will also support a private key access. The second aspect of private five G is as you build any new technology into enterprise. Oftentimes we get into this trap to get to an outcome. We move fast and we create asylum. And then that silo operation creates a barriers to mainstream it. So upfront we have to think about not creating another silent and how we're doing it. Number one is a device that can connecting to WiFi network or a private five G network. You don't have to reimagine or rethink how I'm going to manage. The identity will create continue of the common identity across the WiFi access or five t access in the same environment. The second aspect of that is, how are we going to reach in all our staff are enterprise staff is well trained with WiFi technology and white technology. Now five G comes with tremendous amount of value and benefit, but it also comes with inherent technology complexity, learning problems. This is where our simple to consume simple to operate model of sass comes to play. That we're going to take all those complexity away. It is a cloud deliberate service enterprise don't have to go through this massive learning car. Adopting this technology last but not list on how you're going to manage your capital. Any new technology and enterprise, Oftentimes you need a huge amount of upfront investment to adopt the technology to get to the other side of getting the outcome. So again, our business model of SARS will allow Enterprise to adopt this new technology and pay as you go model to meet with enterprise needs. Finally, I also wanted to pass to break to touch a little bit more on how we are thinking about this common identity across any access in the enterprise. Greg to your >>So we we talk about it in two different ways. One is a lot of enterprises today use our identity and secure management platform. We call it Isis Co ice platform. And so years and years of policy and identities Excess service, radio service they use, uh, etcetera are plugged in already into our eyes. Right. So if you can share that with this private five years as a service, uh, infrastructure that Muslims been building, we think we'll be able to create that bridge because we're not forcing enterprises to create new identities, a new policy. So thats sort of step one to make it easier. Uh, you also talk through something where, in the case of a public five g network, for example, the It's very convenient because you take your phone out of your pocket and it's connected to the network, right? Was this for WiFi? You have to log into an S I D in your hotel or in your home and home. It's automatic, but that's that logging process that creates friction. And that's a problem, because then you can't be seamless. So we initiated what we call us open roaming, right? Like that's, uh, identity federation that we first created between identity owners. Could be carriers could be, um, anything that anyone who owns an identity and they will share with venues. And so if the sharing happens, then that Onboarding can be automatic and once on boarding is automatic, then it's easy to pass off between five and five G. And so that's again another way in which you can lower the adoption barriers because you share across public private G and WiFi networks. So these are two concrete examples of how we thought about lowering the barriers of adoption. As we enter into this heterogeneous >>world, >>I can't wait. Let's let's talk about how this thing scales in the go to market, what are the most likely or maybe preferred or obvious routes to market for private five g Francisco >>so they stay tuned when when they announce more about it. But I can also assure you that exposed to the spectrum is a challenge for many enterprises when it comes to cellular technology. In some countries, there are more spectrum accessible by enterprise. In many countries, that's not the case. So we have talked to very carefully that how do we bring this offer to the market? Partnering with many service providers and mobile operators, where in countries where we don't have direct access to the spectrum, our partnership with mobile operators that you will hear more about as we come to mobile world Congress is going to allow our enterprise to consume this technology even if they don't have the spectrum in places where the enterprise might have direct spectrum access. We'll also bring in our relativist providers to hide the complexity of the new technology on top of our cell services or a cloud deliberate services. This is the augmentation with the partnership with menaces providers and mobile operators that will ease this journey for enterprises are most important. Primitive in this journey is to keep it simple for enterprise. Make it intuitive and trust it from day one. >>Outstanding. Okay. Assume, Greg, Thanks so much. It's great to have you guys. I really appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Thank you. Mm mm.

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante last week's aws re invent brought into focus the degree to which cloud computing generally and aws specifically have impacted the technology landscape from making infrastructure orders of magnitude simpler to deploy to accelerating the pace of innovation to the formation of the world's most active and vibrant infrastructure ecosystem it's clear that aws has been the number one force for change in the technology industry in the last decade now going forward we see three high-level contributors from aws that will drive the next 10 years of innovation including one the degree to which data will play a defining role in determining winners and losers two the knowledge assimilation effect of aws's cultural processes such as two pizza teams customer obsession and working backwards and three the rise of super clouds that is clouds that run on top of hyperscale infrastructure that focus not only on i.t transformation but deeper business integration and digital transformation of entire industries hello everyone and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we'll review some of the takeaways from the 10th annual aws re invent conference and focus on how we see the rise of super clouds impacting the future of virtually all industries one of the most poignant moments for me was a conversation with steve mullaney at aw aws re invent he's the ceo of networking company aviatrix now just before we went on the cube nick sterile one of aviatrix's vcs looked up at steve and said it's happening now before i explain what that means this was the most important hybrid event of the year you know no one really knew what the crowd would be like but well over twenty 000 people came to reinvent and i'd say at least 25 to 26 000 people attended the expo and probably another 10 000 or more came without badges to have meetings and side meetings and do networking off the expo floor so let's call it somewhere between thirty to forty thousand people physically attended the reinvent and another two hundred thousand or more online so huge event now what nick sterile meant by its happening was the next era of cloud innovation is upon us and it's happening in earnest the cloud is expanding out to the edge aws is bringing its operating model its apis its primitives and services to more and more locations yes data and machine learning are critical we talk about that all the time but the ecosystem flywheel was so evident at this year's re invent more so than any other re invent partners were charged up you know there wasn't nearly as much chatter about aws competing with them rather there was much more excitement around the value that partners are creating on top of aws's massive platform now despite aggressive marketing from competitive hyperscalers other cloud providers and as a service or on-prem slash hybrid offerings aws lead appears to be accelerating a notable example is aws's efforts around custom silicon far more companies especially isvs are tapping into aws's silicon advancements we saw the announcement of graviton 3 and new chips for training and inference and as we've reported extensively aws is now on a curve a silicon curve that will outpace x86 vis-a-vis performance price performance cost power consumption and speed of innovation and its nitro platform is giving aws and its partners the greatest degree of optionality in the industry from cpus gpus intel amd and nvidia and very importantly arm-based custom silicon springing from aws's acquisition of annapurna aws started its custom silicon journey in 2008 and is and it has invested massive resources into this effort other hyperscalers notably microsoft google and alibaba which have the scale economics to justify such custom silicon efforts are just recently announcing initiatives in this regard others who don't have the scale will be relying on third-party silicon providers a perfectly reasonable strategy but because aws has control of the entire stack we believe it has a strategic advantage in this respect silicon especially is a domain where to quote andy jassy there is no compression algorithm for experience b on the curve matters a lot and the biggest story in my view this past week was the rise of the super clouds in his 2020 book with steve hamm frank slootman laid out the case for the rise of data cloud a title which i've conveniently stolen for this breaking analysis rise of the super cloud thank you frank in his book slootman made a case for companies to put data at the center of their organizations rather than organizing just around people for example the idea is to create data networks while people of course are critical organizing around data and enabling people to access and share data will lead to the democracy democratization of data and network effects will kick in this was essentially metcalfe's law for data bob metcalf was the inventor of ethernet ethernet he put forth that premise when we we both worked or the premise when we both worked for pat mcgovern at idg that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its users or nodes on the network thought of another way the first connection isn't so valuable but the billionth connection is really valuable slootman's law if i may says the more people that have access to the data governed of course and the more data connections that can be shared or create sharing the more value will be realized from that data exponential value in fact okay but what is a super cloud super cloud is an architecture that taps the underlying services and primitives of hyperscale clouds to deliver incremental value above and beyond what's available from the public cloud provider a super cloud delivers capabilities through software consumed as services and can run on a single hyperscale cloud or span multiple clouds in fact to the degree that a super cloud can span multiple clouds and even on-premises workloads and hide the underlying complexity of the infrastructure supporting this work the more adoption and the more value will be realized now we've listed some examples of what we consider to be super clouds in the making snowflake is an example we use frequently frequently building a data cloud that spans multiple clouds and supports distributed data but governs that data centrally somewhat consistent with the data mesh approach that we've been talking about for quite some time goldman sachs announced at re invent this year a new data management cloud the goldman sachs financial cloud for data with amazon web services we're going to come back to that later nasdaq ceo adina friedman spoke at the day one keynote with adam silipsky of course the new ceo of aws and talked about the super cloud they're building they didn't use that term that's our term dish networks is building a super cloud to power 5g wireless networks united airlines is really in my view they're porting applications to aws as part of its digital transformation but eventually it will start building out a super cloud travel platform what was most significant about the united effort is the best practices they're borrowing from aws like small teams and moving fast but many others that we've listed here are on a super cloud journey just some of the folks we talked to at reinvent that are building clouds on top of clouds that are shown here cohesity building out a data management cloud focused on data protection and governance hashicorp announced its ipo at a 13 billion valuation building an it automation super cloud data bricks chaos search z-scaler z-scaler is building a security super cloud and many others that we spoke with at the event now we want to take a moment to talk about castles in the cloud it's a premise put forth by jerry chen and the team at greylock it's a really important piece of work that is building out a data set and categorizing the various cloud services to better understand where the cloud giants are investing where startups can participate and how companies can play in the castles that are being built that have been built by the hyperscalers and how they can cross the moats that have been dug and where innovation opportunities exist for other companies now frequently i'm challenged about our statements that there really are only four hyperscalers that exist in the world today aws microsoft google and alibaba while we recognize that companies like oracle have done a really excellent job of improving their clouds we don't consider companies like oracle ibm and other managed service providers as hyperscalers and one of the main data points that we use to defend our thinking is capex investment this was a point that was made in castles in the cloud there are many others that we look at elder kpi size of ecosystem partner acceleration enablement for partners feature sets etc but capex is a big one here's a chart from platform nomics a firm that is obsessed with cl with capex showing annual capex spend for five cloud companies amazon google microsoft ibm and oracle this data goes through 2019 it's annual spend and we've superimposed the direction for each of these companies amazon spent more than 40 billion dollars on capex in 2020 and will spend more than 50 billion this year sure there are some warehouses for the amazon retail business in there and there's other capital expenses in these numbers but the vast majority spent on building out its cloud infrastructure same with google and microsoft now oracle is at least increasing its cap x it's going to spend about 4 billion but it's de minimis compared to the cloud giants and ibm is headed in the other direction it's choosing to invest for instance 34 billion dollars in acquiring red hat instead of putting its capital into a cloud infrastructure look that's a very reasonable strategy but it underscores the gap okay another metric we look at is i as revenue here's an updated chart that we showed last month in our cloud update which at the time excluded alibaba's most recent quarter results so we've updated that very slight change it wasn't really material so you see the four hyperscalers and by the way they invested more than a hundred billion dollars in capex last year it's gonna be larger this year they'll collectively generate more than 120 billion dollars in revenue this year and they're growing at 41 collectively that is remarkable for such a large base of revenue and for aws the rate of revenue growth is accelerating it's the only hyperscaler that can say that that's unreal at their size i mean they're going to do more than 60 billion dollars in revenue this year okay so that's why we say there are only four hyperscalers but so what there are so many opportunities to build on top of the infrastructure that the three u.s giants especially are building as folks are really cautious about china at the moment so let's take a look at what some of the companies that we've been following are doing in the super cloud arena if you will this chart shows some etr data plotting net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share or presence in the etr data set on the horizontal axis most every name on the chart is building some type of super cloud but let me start as we often do calling out aws and azure i guess they're already super clouds but they're not building necessarily on top of of of other people's clouds and there are a little bit you know microsoft does some of that certainly google's doing some of that amazon really bringing its cloud to the edge at this point it's not participating in multi-cloud actively anyway aws and azure they stand alone as the cloud leaders and you can debate what's included in azure in our previous chart on revenue attempts to strip out the microsoft sas business but this is a customer view they see microsoft as a cloud leader which it is so that's why its presence on the horizontal axis and its momentum is is you know very large and very strong stronger than even in aws in this view even though it's is revenue that we showed earlier microsoft is significantly smaller but they both have strong momentum on the vertical axis as shown by that red horizontal line anything above that remember is considered considered elevated that 40 percent or above now google cloud it's well behind these two to we kind of put a red dotted line around it but look at snowflake that blue circle i mean i realize we repeat ourselves often but snowflake continues to hold a net score in the mid to high 70s it held 80 percent for a long time it's getting much much bigger it's so hard to hold that and in 165 mentions in the survey which you can see in the inserted table it continues to expand its market's presence on the horizontal axis now all the technology companies that we track of all of them we feel snowflake's vision and execution on its data cloud and that strategy is most is the most prominent example of a super cloud truly every tech company every company should be paying attention to snowflakes moves and carving out unique value propositions for their customers by standing on the shoulders of cloud giants as ceo ed walsh likes to say now on the left hand side of the chart you can see a number of companies that we spoke with that are in various stages of building out their super clouds data bricks dot spot data robots z z scalar mentioned hashi you see elastic confluent they're all above the forty percent line and somewhat below that line but still respectable we see vmware with tanzu cohesity rubric and veeam and many others that we didn't necessarily speak with directly at reinvent and or they don't show up in the etr dataset now we've also called out cisco dell hpe and ibm we didn't plot them because there's so much other data in there that's not apples to apple but we want to call them up because they all have different points of view and are two varying degrees building super clouds but to be honest these large companies are first protecting their respective on-prem turf you can't blame them those are very large install basis now they're all adding as a service offerings which is cloud-like i mean they're behind way behind trying to figure out you know things like billing and they don't nearly have the ecosystem but they're going to fight rightly they're going to fight hard and compete with their respective portfolios with their channels and their vastly improved simplicity but when you speak to customers at re invent and these are not just startups we're talking to we're talking about customers of these enterprise tech companies these customers want to build on aws they look at aws as cloud and that is the cloud that they want to write to now they want to connect they're on-prem but they're still largely different worlds when you when you talk to these customers now they'll fully admit they can't or won't move everything out of their data centers but the vast vast majority of the customers i spoke with last week at reinvent have much more momentum around moving towards aws they're not repatriating as everybody's talking about or not everybody but many are talking about and yeah there's some recency bias because we just got back but the numbers that we shared earlier don't lie the trend is very clear now these large firms that we mentioned these incumbents in the tech industry these big enterprise tech giants they're starting to move in the super cloud direction and they will have much more credibility around multi-cloud than the hyperscalers but my honest view is that aws's lead is actually accelerating the gap in my opinion is not closing now i want to come back and dig into super cloud a little bit more around 2010 and 2011 we collaborated with two individuals who really shaped our thinking in the big data space peter goldmaker was a cell side analyst at common at the time and abi abhishek meta was with bank of america and b of a was transforming its data operations and avi was was leading that now peter was you know an analyst sharp and less at the time he said you know it's going to be the buyers of big data technology and those that apply big data to their operations who would create the most value he used an example of sap he said look you you couldn't have chosen that sap was going to lead an erp but if you could have figured out who which companies were going to apply erp to their business you would have made a lot of money investing so that was kind of one of his investment theses now he posited that the companies that would apply the big data technology the buyers if you will would create far more value than the cloud errors or the hortonworks or a collection of other number of big data players and clearly he was right in that regard now abi mehta was an example of that and he posited that ecosystems would evolve within vertical industries around data kind of going back to frank slootman's premise that in putting data at the core and that would power the next generation of value creation via data machine learning and business transformation and he was right and that's what we're seeing with the rise of super cloud now after the after the first reinvent we published a post seen on the right hand side of this chart on wikibon about the making of a new gorilla aws and we said the way to compete would be to take an industry focus or one way to compete with take an industry focus and become best to breed within that industry and we aligned really with abbey meta's point of view that industry ecosystems would evolve around data and offer opportunities for non-hyperscalers to compete now what we didn't predict at the time but are now seeing clearly emerge is that these super clouds are going to be built on top of aws and other hyperscale clouds makes sense goldman's financial cloud for data is taking a page out of aws it's pointing its proprietary data algorithms tools and processes at its clients just like amazon did with its technology and it's making these assets available as a service on top of the aws cloud a super cloud for financial services if you will they are relying on aws for infrastructure compute storage networking security and other services like sagemaker to power that super cloud but they're bringing their own ip to the table nasdaq and dish similarly bringing forth their unique value and as i said as i said earlier united airlines will in our view eventually evolve from migrating its apps portfolio to the cloud to building out a super cloud for travel what about your logo what's your super cloud strategy i'm sure you've been thinking about it or perhaps you're already well down the road i'd love to hear how you're doing it and if you see the trends the same or differently as we do okay that's it for now don't forget these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen all you do is search breaking analysis podcast you definitely want to check out etr's website at etr.plus for all the survey data remember we publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com you can email me if you want to get in touch with david.velante at siliconangle.com you can dm me at devolante on twitter you can comment on our linkedin posts this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr have a great week stay safe be well and we'll see you next time [Music] you

>>from around the >>globe. It's the cube >>with digital >>Coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM >>Well how everybody john wall is here on the CUBA as we continue our IBM think initiative And today talking with Clemens, Raymond, who is the global CTO cloud and DeVOPS leader at Cap Gemini And Clemens, thanks for joining us here on the cube. Good to see you today. >>Thank you. Thank you very much. Nice to be here. >>Yeah. Tell us a little bit about Cap Gemini. If you will first off for our viewers at home that might not be familiar with your services. Tell us a little bit about that and maybe a little bit about your specific responsibilities there. >>So who doesn't know Cap Gemini in this system? Integrator world and the world has been living on the stone. And uh, so Geminis a worldwide system, integrated liquid offerings in all kinds of spaces in all areas there. >>Uh, my >>responsibility is mainly around cloud and devils >>have taken care >>our countries on delivery centers have the right knowledge around clouds, right capabilities around devils to support our customers and with their journey to the cloud into a digital organization. >>Everybody's talking about digital these days, right. And everybody this magical digital transformation that's occurring that's been going on for quite some time. Um, what does that look like to you? And when you start defining digital organizations and digital transformations, what are the kinds of things that you're talking about with organizations in terms of that kind of migration path? >>Yeah, so it's quite interesting to start discussion about how does a digital landscape looks like >>for an >>organization wants to start transforming to a digital organization. >>And then when you are >>looking at that, I'm always starting the discussion with business capabilities. An organization wants to create business capabilities >>either to uh, interact and engage with their workforce to make them work in the most efficient way. And what we are using for that are all kinds of different digital channels and those digital channels that can be a mobile app. I'm working with my mobile app to connect with my work, I'm calling, I'm using zoom are using teams and that kind of stuff were also using chatbots for IOT devices and that's what the normal workforce expect. Nowadays all have to have all those digital channels to interact with the business. That's also on the other side, at the customer side, our organizations want to to to engage and and grow on the customer side and have the nice interaction there. And again they are using those digital channels, all the different digital channels, maybe IOT maybe a P. I. S. To interact with those customers to bring them uh the engagement interaction they really want to have. And and in that transformation part definitely they are looking at what kind of challenges I have with working with customers like this and working with my workforce now everybody is working from home, challenges with maybe with uh connections and that kind of stuff, but they're also starting to leverage and that's that's where the transformation and migration starts with their their own prem systems, their legacy systems to move those kinds of capabilities and enriched with cloud native capabilities to all kinds of enterprise solutions, like the ones from IBM for example to expose that to their digital channels to their organizations and that that's the landscape how it looks like. And then we have the discussion with organizations, How do you want to engage with your customers? What kind of digital channels do you need? Uh What are the business systems you have and how can we enrich them and expose them to the outside world with all the enterprise solutions around them? >>And when you talk about a process like this, which is, you know, sounds holistic, right? You're looking at, what do you have? What do you want to go? What are your, what are your business needs? You know, which all makes great sense. But then all of a sudden you start hitting speed bumps along the way. Right? Um, there are always challenges in terms of deployments are always challenges in terms of decisions and those things. So what are you hearing again from on the customer side about what are my paying points? What are my headaches here? As I know I want to make this jump. How do I get there? And I have these obstacles in my way? >>Yeah, definitely. And, and, and, and uh, the ones I explained already which are, are on the workforce site and on the customer side, you want to have the engagements there, you ought to have the interactions there and then you have that whole digital landscape which comes with some interesting challenges. And how do I implement this landscape in in the right scalable way? How do I expose my data and situate that it is secure? How do I I leverage all the capabilities from the platforms I'm using and how do I make all these moving parts, uh, consistent, compliant with the regulations I need to work towards to how do I make it secure? So, so those are definitely big enterprise challenges that compliance is security and that kind of stuff. But also technology challenges. How do I adopt those kinds of technologies? How do I make it scalable? How do I make it really and integrated solution on its own so that my platform is not only working for the digital channels we know right now, but they are also ready for the digital channels. We don't know yet. We'll start calling uh, biggest challenges after you >>get into that a little bit later too, because you raised a great point. Well, let's just jump right now. We know what the hearing now is, but you just talked about building for the future building for more expansive footprint or kinds of capabilities that frankly, we're not even aware of right now. So how do you plan for that kind of flexibility, that kind of agility when it's a bit unpredictable. >>Yeah, and, and, and that's what every organization tries to be an agile, flexible resilient. Uh, and you need to build your system conformed that and, and uh, where we normally start with, you need to have a clear foundation and and and, and and the foundation when, for example, when you are using the cloud for it, uh, every organization is cloud for it. You want to have that foundation in such a way that that those digital channels can, can connect really easy to it and that the capabilities, the business capabilities created are done by product teams. Product and feature teams are creating those kinds of capabilities on top of that cloud foundation. And in that foundation you want to put everything in place. What makes it easy for those teams to focus on that business functionality on those business capabilities? You want to make it very easy for them to do it the right thing that I always love to say that that's what you want to put in your cloud foundation, that's where you are are dishing your security. Every application was landing on the Foundation has secured. Uh, you are embracing a standard way of working, although not every devops teams like that, they want to be self organizing and that kind of stuff. But when you are having 50 or 100 devops teams, you want to have some kind of standardization and provide them away. And again, the easy way should be the right way to provide them templates, provide them technologies so that they can really focus very quickly on on those kinds of business capabilities. So, so the clerk Foundation is the base mm that needs to be in place. >>You've been doing this for a long time and, you know, the conversation used to be, you know, should we move to the cloud? You know, can we move to the cloud now? It's about how fast can we move to the cloud? How much do we move to the cloud, you know? Um So looking at that kind of the change in paradigm, if you will, what are organizations having to consider in terms of, you know, the scale, the depth, the breadth of their offering now, because innovation and as you know, it can happen in a much faster pace than it could have just, you know, a very short time ago. >>And then I'm reflecting again back to the easy things should be the rifle, that's what you want to do with your for your concept, it's and and and that's where you should focus on as an organization, for example, what we put in place and we put a lot of standardization, a lot of knowledge in place, in what we call in an inner source library. And in that inner source library, for example, we put all kinds of strips, all kinds of templates, all kinds of standardization. Four teams who either want to to deploy open shift on that platform or want to start working with certain cloud packs that they can set it up very easily conforms the standards of the organization and start moving from there. And then in the cloud foundation you have your cloud management, the IBM Club Manager because organizations are definitely going towards the hybrid scenarios. Different organizational units, wants to start using different clouds in there and and and also for the migration part. You want to have that grow from there and standardization Inner Source and having those templates ready. It's it's, it's, it's key for organizations now to, to to speed up and be ready to start joking around with red workloads on any cloud where you want to add that. That's the idea. >>Sure. So red hats involved in issue and IBM involved as well. Obviously your partnership working with them um talk about that kind of merger of resources if you will. And in terms of how what the value proposition is to your clients at the end of the day, they have that kind of firepower working on their behalf. >>Yeah, that's for example, I B M is for us, a very important partner, definitely on the hybrid multi cloud scenarios where we can leverage open shift on on on those kinds of platforms for our customers. We created what I said uh templates, scripts, we use the IBM garage project for it to create deployments for our teams in the kind of self serving way to deploy those open shift clusters on top of the cloud platform day of their choice. And then for sure with the multi cloud manager from IBM we can manage that actually in the landing zone and that's actually the whole I. D. And you want to give the flexibility and the speed uh to your devoPS teams to be able to do the right thing is the easy thing and then manage it from your cloud foundation so that they are comfortable that when they put in the work loads in that whole multi hybrid cloud platform that it is managed organized all in the right way. And that that's definitely where IBM read that over shift comes in play and and because they have already such a great tool sets ready, they really think devoPS, that's what I really like. Also with the migrations it comes with a lot of devops capabilities in they're not playing lift shift but also the modernization immediately in there. And and that's what I like about our partnership which made the IBM it says they are devops in mind also that, that's, that's cool. >>What about the speed here? Just in general? Just but almost the pace of change and what's happening in that space because it used to be like these kinds of things took forever. It seemed like and where evolutions transitions were to take a long period of time, it's not the case anymore. You know, things are happening in relatively lightning speed. Um, so when you're talking with the organization about the kinds of changes they can make and the speed at which they can do that marry those up for me and those conversations that you're having and if I'm a, you know Ceo out there and I'm thinking about how am I going to flip this switch convinced me right now, the, the key factors right? And and how, how easy, how right will this be for me? >>So as a C I. O. You want to have your, your scalable and you're flexible organization. Probably at this moment you are sitting with your thumb print system with probably a very large relational database with, with several components around there. And now you want to fuel those digital channels there at a great way with IBM with red hat is that we can deploy open shift container solutions everywhere and then starting to modernize those small components around the big relational database. We were starting to do that. We can do that really at at light speeds and then there are, we, we have a factory Modell up and running where we can put in the application landscape of a customer and look at it and say, okay, this one is quite easy, we are running it to our modernization street and it runs into a container and from there you start to to untangle actually the hairball of your whole application landscape and started to move those components and you definitely want to prioritize them. And, and that's where you have discussions with the business, which is most valuable to move first and which one to move there. And that's actually what we put in place is the factory model to analyze an application and escape off a customer having the descriptions with those customers and then say, okay, we are going to move these workloads first. Then we are going to analyze the code of these and then we are going to move these and we really start rocking fast, moving their workloads to the cloud and so that they can start enrich those digital channels you want to do that and have. >>Right, well, a great process and I love your analogies by the way you talk about hairball here, I totally get it. Clemens, Thank you for the time today. I appreciate hearing about the Cap Jim and I story and about your partnership with IBM. Thank you very much. >>Thank you very much. >>All right, so what we have learned one thing, the easy thing is the right thing and that's the Cap gemini way of getting things done. You've been watching part of the IBM think initiative here on the cube. Mhm. Yeah, Yeah.

>>We work with and we cover some of the old guard, older companies like Dell EMC, HPE, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft. And they're doing really good work pivoting and trying to be ready for this new wave. It's not just not a blockchain. It's just how the world works. Cloud, you know, IOT, but decentralized cannot be ignored. Are they ready? Do you think they're ready? Do you think they even understand what's coming and >>No, no, they're not ready. And it's not, to me. It's not even about just blockchain. I mean, blockchain technology they can adopt. The bigger issue is digital disruption and digital disruption is all about the data at the core of the organization and, and business models that are built around data. And if you think about the history of companies, it's human expertise and data is bolted on, and we've seen this time and time again. But if you look at the top five market cap companies, Facebook, Amazon, Google, et cetera, they're data companies. Data is at the center and they take human expertise and wrap it around there. So the future is going to be about innovation with data, with artificial intelligence and cloud economics, and the old guard doesn't have those things. Blockchain fits in there. To me, blockchain is about building out a new distributed web and on top of the old web and rewarding those who are building it. So it's a new form of open source where the builders get paid.

>>From the cubes studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cute conversation. >>The external storage array business, as we know it has changed forever. You know, you can see that in the survey data that we do and the financial information from the largest public storage companies. And it's not just because of COVID, although that's clearly a factor which has accelerated the shifts that we see in the market, specifically, those CIO is, are rationalizing their infrastructure portfolios by consolidating workloads to simplify, reduce costs and minimize vendor sprawl. So they can shift resources toward digital initiatives that include cloud containers, machine intelligence, and automation all while reducing their risks. Hello everyone. This is Dave Vellante and welcome to this cube conversation where we're going to discuss strategies related to workload consolidation at petabyte scale. And with me is Dr. Rico. He's the vice president office of the CTO at INFINIDAT welcome back to the cube doc, always a pleasure to see you >>And great to be here. Always a pleasure to work with you, Dave. >>So doc, I just published a piece over the weekend and I pointed out that of the largest storage companies, only one showed revenue growth last quarter, and that was on a significantly reduced compare with last year. So my first question to you is, is INFINIDAT growing its business. >>Oh, absolutely. It's been a very interesting year all across as you can quite imagine. Um, but you know, our footprint is such that with our elastic pricing models and the, and the fact that we've got excess capacity, uh, in almost every single system that's out there, we were really given our customers a, an opportunity to take advantage of that, to increase their capacity levels while maintaining the same levels of performance and availability, but not have to have anybody on premises during this crazy, you know, COVID struck era. >>Yeah. So you're bringing that cloud model to the, to the data center, which has obviously been a challenge. I mean, you mentioned the subscription sort of like pricing, we're going to get into the cloud more, but I wonder if we could step back a little bit and look at some of the macro trends that you're seeing in the market and specifically as it relates to on-prem storage strategies that CEO's are taking. >>Yeah. You know, it's been interesting, we've seen over the course of the past five years or so, certainly a big uptick in people looking at next generation or what they believe in perceived to be next generation storage platforms, which are really just evolutions of media. They're not really taking advantage of any new innovations in storage and, you know, not withstanding our own products, which are all software driven. We've talked about that before, but what what's really happened in this past year, as you, as you said, CEOs and CTOs, they're always looking for that, that next point of leverage advantage. And they're looking for more agility in application deployment, they're looking in a way to rapidly respond to business requirements. So they're looking very much at those cloud-like requirements. They're looking at those capabilities to containerize applications. They're looking at how they can, um, you know, shift out virtual machines if they're not in a directly in a container, uh, and how the storage by the way, can, can have the same advantage and in order to do so, they really need to look at storage consolidation. You know, I think Dave, to, to sum it up from the storage perspective, you know, I love Ken Steinhardt was recently on a video and, you know, he was, he was challenged that, you know, people aren't looking at spinning rust, riff, you know, a derogatory wave of referring a disc and, and Ken, so rightly and accurately responded. Yeah. But people weren't really looking for QLC either. You know, what they're looking for is performance, scale availability and certainly cost effectiveness and price. >>Yeah. It was like, I set up front dock. I mean, if you're a C level executive today, you don't want to worry about your storage infrastructure. You've got bigger problems to worry about. You just want it to work. And so when you talk about consolidating workloads, people often talk about the so-called blast radiation. In other words, people who run data centers, they understand that things fail. And sometimes something as simple, it might be a power supply can have a catastrophic downstream effect on application availability. So my question is, how do you think about architecting systems? So as to minimize the effects of component failures on the business? >>Yeah. You know, it's a very interesting term, Dave blast radius, right? We've, we've heard this referred to storage over the last several decades. In fact, when it really should refer to the data center and the application infrastructure. Uh, but you know, if we're talking about just the storage footprint itself, one of the things that we really need to look, look at is the resilience and the reliability of the architecture. And when you look at something that is maybe dual controller single or double power supply, there are issues and concerns that take in, in, into, into play. And what we've done is we've designed something that's really triple redundant, which is typically only been applied to the very high end of the market before. And we do it in a very active, active, active manner. And naturally we have suggestions for best practices for deployment within a data center as well, you know, multiple sources of power coming into the array and things of that nature. But everything needs to be this active, active, active type of architecture in order to bring those reliability levels up to the point where as long as it's a component failure within the array, it's not going to cause an outage or data on availability event. >>Yeah. So imagine a heat map when people talk about the blast radius. So imagine the heat map is green. There's a big, you know, there's a yellow area and there's a, there's a red area. And what you're saying is, as far as the array goes, you're essentially eliminating the red area. Now, if you take it to the broader installation, you know, that red area, you have to deal with it in different ways, remote replication, then you can at the sink and in a sink. Uh, but, but essentially what I'm hearing you say, doc, is, is you're squeezing that red area out. So, so your customers could sleep at night. >>That absolutely sleep at night is so appropriate. And in fact, we've got a large portion of our customer base is, or they're running mission critical businesses. You know, we have some of the most mission critical companies in our, in our logo portfolio, in the world. We also have, by the way, some very significant service provider businesses who were we're providing, you know, mission critical capabilities to their customers in turn, and they need to sleep at night. And it it's, you know, availability is only one factor. Certainly manageability is another cause you know, not meeting a service level is just like data unavailability in some respects. So making manageability is automatic as it can be making sure that the, that the system is not only self-healing, but can re respond to variations in workload appropriately is very, very critically important as well. >>Yeah. So that, that you mentioned mission critical workloads, and those are the, those are the workloads that let's face it. They're not moving into the cloud, certainly not in any, any big way, you know, why would they generally are CIO CTO is they're putting a brick wall around that saying, Hey, it works. We don't want to migrate that piece, but I want to talk more about how your customers are thinking about workload consolidation and rationalizing their storage portfolios. What are those conversations like? Where do they start and what are some of the outcomes that you're seeing with your customers? >>Yeah, I think the funny thing about that point Dave, is that customers are really starting to think about a cloud in an entirely different way. You know, at one point cloud meant public cloud and men, this entity, uh, outside the walls of the data center and people were starting to use services without realizing that that was another type of cloud. And then they were starting to build their own versions of cloud. You know, we were referring to them as private clouds, but they were, you know, really spread beyond the walls of a single data center. So now it's a very hybrid world and there's lots of different ways to look at it, hybrid cloud multi-cloud, whatever moniker you want to put on it. It really comes down to a consistency in how you manage that infrastructure, how you interface with that infrastructure and then understanding what the practicality is of putting workloads in different places. >>And practicality means not only the, you know, the latency of access of the data, but the costs associated with it. And of course the other aspects that we talked about, like what the, the availability metrics, and as you increase the availability and performance metrics, those costs go up. And that's one of the reasons why some of these larger mission critical data centers are really, you know, repatriating their, their mission, critical workloads, at least the highest, highest levels of them and others are looking at other models, for example, AWS outposts, um, which, you know, talked about quite a bit recently in AWS reinvent. >>Yeah. I just wrote, again, this weekend that you guys were one of the, uh, partners that was qualified now, uh, to run on AWS outpost, it's interesting as Amazon moves, it's, you know, it's, it's it's model to the edge, which includes the data center to them. They need partners that can, that really understand how to operate in an on-premise world, how to service those customers. And so that's great to see you guys as part of that. >>Yeah. Thank you. And, you know, it was actually a very seamless integration because of the power and capability of all of the different interface models that we have is they all are fully and tightly integrated and work seamlessly. So if you want to use a, you know, a CSI type model, uh, you know, do you interface with your storage again, uh, with, with INFINIDAT and, you know, we work with all of the different flavors so that the qualification process, the certification process and the documentation process was actually quite easy. And now we're able to provide, you know, people who have particularly larger workloads that capability in the AWS on premises type environment. >>Yeah. Now I implied upfront that that cloud computing was the main factor, if not the primary factor, really driving some of the changes that we're seeing in the marketplace. Now, of course, it's all, not all pink roses with the cloud. We've seen numerous public cloud outages this year, certainly from Microsoft. We saw the AWS Kinesis outage in November. Google just had a major outage this month. Gmail was down G suite was down for an extended period of time. And that disrupted businesses, we rely on that schools, for example. So it's always caveat emptor as we know, but, but talk to INFINIDAT cloud strategy, you mentioned hybrid, uh, particularly interested in, in how you're dealing with things like orchestration and containers and Kubernetes. >>Yeah, well, of course we have a very feature rich set of interfaces for containers, Kubernetes interfaces, you know, downloadable through native, uh, native. So they're, they're very easy to integrate with, you know, but our cloud strategy is that, you know, we are a software centric model and we, you know, all of the, all of the value and feature function that we provide is through the software. The hardware of infiniboxes really a reference architecture that we, uh, we deliver to make it easier for customers to enjoy say 100% availability model. But if, if you want to run something in a traditional on premises data center, you know, straighten InfiniBox is fine, but we also give you the flexibility of cloud-like consumption through our pricing models, our, our elastic pricing models. So you don't need to consume an entire InfiniBox day one. You can grow and shrink that environment with, uh, with an OPEX model, or you can, um, buy it as you consume it in a, in a cap ex model. >>And you can switch, uh, from OPEX over to CapEx if it becomes more cost effective for you in time, which I think is, is what a lot of people are looking for. If you're looking for that public cloud, we, you know, we have our new tricks cloud offering, which is now being delivered more through partners, but you know, some businesses and especially the, the mid tier, um, you know, the SMB all the way through the mid enterprise are also now looking to cloud service providers, many of which use InfiniBox as, as their backend. And now with AWS outposts, of course, you know, we can give you that on premises, uh, uh, experience of the public cloud, >>You guys were early on. And obviously in that, that subscription-based model, and now everyone's doing it. I noticed in the latest Gartner magic quadrant on, on storage arrays, which you guys were named a leader, uh, they, I think they had a stat in there and said, I, I forget what the exact timeframe was that 50% of customers would be using that type of model. And again, I guarantee you by whatever time frame, that was a hundred percent of the vendor community is going to be delivering that type of model. So, so congratulations on being named a leader, I will say this there's there's there's consolidation happening in the market. So this, to me, this bodes well, to the extent that you can guarantee high availability and consistent performance, uh, at, at scale, that bodes well for, for you guys in a consolidating market. And I know IDC just released a paper, it was called, uh, I got, uh, I got a copy here. >>It's called a checklist for, uh, storage, workload consolidation at petabyte scale. It was written by Eric Bergner, who I've known for a number of years. He's the VP of infrastructure. Uh, he knows his stuff and the paper is very detailed. So I'm not going to go through the checklist items, but I, but I think if you don't mind, doc, I think it's worth reading an excerpt from this. If I can, as part of his conclusions, when workload consolidation, it organizations should carefully consider their performance availability, functionality, and affordability requirements. Of course, few storage systems in the market will be able to cost effectively consolidate different types of workloads with different IO profiles onto a single system. But that is in INFINIDAT forte. They're very good at it. So that's a, that's quite a testimonial, you know, why is that your thoughts on what Eric wrote? >>Well, you know, first of all, thank you for the kudos on the Gartner MQ, you know, being a leader on the second year in a row for primary storage, only because that documents only existed for two years, but, uh, you know, we were also a leader in hybrid storage arrays before that. And, you know, we, we love Gardner. We think they're, they're, you know, um, uh, real critical, you know, reliable source for, for a lot of large companies and, and IDC, you know, Eric of course is, uh, he's a name in the industry. So we, you know, we very much appreciate when he writes something, you know, that positive about us. But to answer your question, Dave, you know, there's, there's a lot that goes on inside InfiniBox and is the neural cash capabilities, the deep learning engine that is able to understand the different types of workloads, how they operate, uh, how to provide, you know, predictable performance. >>And that I think is ultimately key to an application. It's not just high performance. It's, it's predictable performance is making sure the application knows what to expect. And of course it has to be performant. It can't just be slow, but predictable. It has to be fast and predictable providing a multi-tenant infrastructure that is, that is native to the architecture, uh, so that these workloads can coexist whether they're truly just workloads from multiple applications or workloads from different business units, or potentially, as we mentioned with cloud service providers, workloads from different customers, you know, they, they need to be segmented in such a way so that they can be managed, operating and provide that performance and availability, you know, at scale because that's where data centers go. That's where data centers are. >>Great. Well, so we'll bring that graphic back up just to show you, obviously, this is available on your website. Uh, you can go download this paper from Erik, uh, from IDC, www infinidat.com/ian/resource. I would definitely recommend you check it out. Uh, as I say, Ericsson, you know, I've been in the business a long, long time, so, so that's great, doc, we'll give you the last word. Anything we didn't cover any big takeaways you want to, you want to share with the audience? >>Yeah. You know, I think I'll go back to that point. You know, consolidation is absolutely key for, uh, not just simplicity of management, but capability for you respond quickly to changing business requirements and or new business requirements, and also do it in a way that is cost-effective, you know, just buying the new shiny object is it's expensive and it's very limited in, in shelf life. You're just going to be looking for the next one the next year. You want to provide something that is going to provide you that predictable capability over time, because frankly, I have never met a C X O of anything that wasn't trying to increase their profit. >>You know, that's a great point. And I just, I would add, I mean, the shiny new object thing. Look, if you're in an experimental mode and playing around with, you know, artificial intelligence or automation thinking, you know, areas that you really don't know a lot about, you know, what, check out the shiny new objects, but I would argue you're on-prem storage. You don't want to be messing around with that. That's, it's not a shiny new objects business. It's really about, you know, making sure that that base is stable. And as you say, predictable and reliable. So doc Terico thanks so much for coming back into cube. Great to see you. >>Great to see you, David, and look forward to next time. >>And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante and we'll see you next time on the queue.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of biz ops Manifesto unveiled Brought to you by Biz Ops Coalition >>Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with the Q. Come to you from our Palo Alto studios today for a big big reveal. We're excited to be here. It's the biz. Opps manifesto, unveiling things been in the works for a while and we're excited. Have our next guest one of the really the powers behind this whole effort. And he's joining us from Boston. It's surge Lucio, the vice president and general manager Enterprise software division that Broadcom Serge, Great to see you. >>Good to see. Oh, absolutely. So you've been >>in this business for a very long time? You've seen a lot of changes in technology. What is the biz Ops manifesto? What is this coalition all about? Why do we need this today in in 2020? >>Yeah, so? So I've been in this business for close to 25 years, writes about 25 years ago, the agile manifesto was created, and the goal of the actual manifesto was was really to address the uncertainty around software development and the inability to predict the effort to build software. And if you if you roll that kind of 20 years later and if you look at the current state of the industry, the Product Project Management Institute estimates that we're wasting about a million dollars every 20 seconds in digital transformation initiatives that do not deliver on business results. In fact, we we recently served, uh, the number of executives in partnership with Harvard Business Review and 77% off. Those executives think that one of the key challenges that they have is really at the collaboration between business and I t. And that that's been kind of a case for almost 20 years now. Eso the key challenge we're faced with is really that we need a new approach. And many of the players in the industry, including ourselves, have been using different terms. Right? Some are. We are talking about value stream management. Some are talking about software delivery management. If you look at the site reliability engineering movement, in many ways it embodies a lot of this kind of concepts and principles. So we believe that it became really imperative for us to crystallize around kind of one concept and so In many ways, the Bezos concept and the bazaars manifesto are out, bringing together a number of ideas which have been emerging in the last five years or so and defining the key values and principles to finally helped these organizations truly transform and become digital businesses. And so the hope is that by joining our forces and defining kind of key principles and values, we can help kind of the industry not just by, you know, providing them with support, but also tools and consulting that is required for them to truly achieve that kind of transformation, that everybody's >>right, right? So co vid Now we're six months into it, approximately seven months into it. Um, a lot of pain, a lot of bad stuff still happening. We've got a ways to go. But one of the things that on the positive side, right and you've seen all the memes and social media is a driver of digital transformation and a driver of change. Because we have this light switch moment in the middle of March and there was no more planning, there was no more conversation. You suddenly got remote. Workforce is everybody's working from home, and you gotta go, right, So the reliance on these tools increases dramatically. But I'm curious, you know, kind of short of the beginnings of this effort and short of kind of covert, which, you know, came along unexpectedly. I mean, what were those inhibitors? Because we've been making software for a very long time. Write the software development community has has adopted kind of rapid change and and iterative delivery and and sprints what was holding back the connection with the business side to make sure that those investments were properly aligned with outcomes. >>Well, so So that you have to understand that I ts is kind of its own silos. And traditionally it has been treated as a cost center within large organizations and not as a value center. And so as a result, kind of the traditional dynamic between the I t. And the business is basically one of a kind of supplier to to kind of a business on. Do you know if you could go back? Thio? I think Elon Musk a few years ago, basically, at these concepts, off the machines to build the machines and you went as far as saying that the machines or the production line is actually the product, so meaning that the core of the innovation is really about building kind of the engine to deliver on the value. And so, in many ways, way have missed on this shift from, um, kind of I t becoming this kind of value center within the enterprises and any told about culture now culture is is the sum total of behaviors and the realities that if you look at the i t, especially in the last decade with the agile with develops with hybrid infrastructures, it's it's way more volatile today than it was 10 years ago. And so the when you start to look at the velocity of the data, the volume of data, the variety of data to analyze kind of the system, um, it's very challenging for I t. To actually even understand and optimize its own processes, let alone to actually include business as kind of an integral part of kind of a delivery chain. And so it's both kind of a combination off culture which is required a za well as tools, right to be able to start to bring together all these data together and then given the volume variety velocity of the data. We have to apply some core technologies which have only really, truly emerging last 5 to 10 years around machine learning and knowledge. And so it's really kind of a combination of those freaks which are coming together today. Truly, organizations get to the next level, >>right? Right. So let's talk about the manifesto. Let's talk about the coalition, the Biz Ops Coalition. I just like that you put down these really simple you know, kind of straightforward core values. You guys have four core values that you're highlighting, you know, business outcomes over individual projects and outputs, trust and collaboration over side load teams and organizations, data driven decisions. What you just talked about, you know, over opinions and judgment on learned, responded Pivot. I mean, surgery sounds like pretty basic stuff, right? I mean, aren't isn't everyone working to these values already? And I think you touched on it on culture, right? Trust and collaboration, data driven decisions. I mean, these air fundamental ways that people must run their business today or the person that's across the street that's doing it is gonna knock him right off the block. >>Yeah, so that's very true. But so I'll mention the novel survey. We need, uh, think about six months ago and twist in partnership with an industry analyst, and we serve it again. The number of 80 executives to understand how many were tracking business outcomes somebody you have, the software executives I T executives were tracking business outcomes, and the there were. Less than 15% of these executives were actually tracking the outcomes of the software delivery. And you see that every day, right? So in my own teams, for instance, we've bean adopting a lot of these core principles in the last year or so, and we've uncovered that 16% of our resource is we're basically aligned around initiatives which were not strategic for us. I take, you know, another example. For instance, one of our customers in the airline industry uncovered, for instance, that a number of that they had software issues that led to people searching for flights and not returning any kind of availability. And yet, you know, the I T teams whether its operations software involvement were completely oblivious to that because they were completely blindsided to it. And so the connectivity between the in words metrics that Turkey is using, whether it's database I, time cycle, time or whatever metric we use in I t are typically completely divorced from the business metrics. And so at its core, it's really about starting to align the business metrics with with the the software delivered change. Right, this, uh, this system, which is really a core differentiator for these organizations. It's about connecting those two things and and starting Thio infuse some of the actual culture and principles. Um, that's emerged from the software side into the business side. Of course, the lien movement and over movements have started to change some of these dynamics on the business side. And and so I think this thesis is the moment where we were starting to see kind of the imperative to transform. Now Cuvee the obviously has been a key driver for that. The the technology is right to start to be able to leave data together and really kind of also the cultural shifts through agile fruit develops through the SRE movement, fueling business transformation. All of these things are coming together and that are really creating kind of conditions. For the Bezos Manifesto to exist. >>So, uh, Clayton Christensen, great hard professor innovator's dilemma might still my all time favorite business books, you know, talks about how difficult it is for in comments to react to to disruptive change, right, because they're always working on incremental change because that's what their customers are asking for. And there's a good our ally when you talk about, you know, companies not measuring the right thing. I mean, clearly, I t has some portion of their budget that has to go to keeping the lights on, right, that that's always the case. But hopefully that's a an ever decreasing percentage of their total activity. So, you know what should people be measuring? I mean, what are kind of the new metrics? Um, in biz ops that drive people to be looking at the right things, measuring the right things and subsequently making the right decisions investment decisions on whether they should do, you know, move Project a along or Project B. >>So there are really two things, right? So So I think what you are talking about this portfolio management, investment management, right and which, which is a key challenge, right in my own experience, right driving strategy or large scale kind of software organization for years. It's very difficult to even get kind of a base data as to who is doing what. Uh, I mean, some of our largest customers were engaged with right now are simply trying to get a very simple answer, which is how many people do I have, and that specific initiative at any point in time and just tracking that information is extremely difficult. So and and again, back to Product Project Management Institute, they have estimated that on average, I two organizations have anywhere between 10 to 20% of their resource is focused on initiatives which are not strategically aligned. So so that's one dimensional portfolio management. I think the key aspect, though that we are we're really keen on is really around kind of the alignment of the business metrics to the ICTY metrics eso I'll use kind of two simple examples, right and my background is around quality and I have always believed that fitness for purpose is really kind of a key, um, a philosophy, if you will. And so if you start to think about quality is fitness for purpose, you start to look at it from a customer point of view, right? And fitness for purpose for core banking application or mobile application are different, right? So the definition of a business value that you're trying to achieve is different on DSO the And yet if you look at our I t operations are operating there are using kind of the same type of kind of inward metrics like a database off time or a cycle time or what is my point? Velocity, right? And s o the challenge really is this inward facing metrics that the I t. Is using which are divorced from ultimately the outcome. And so, you know, if I'm if I'm trying to build a poor banking application, my core metric is likely going to be up time, right? If I'm if I'm trying to build a mobile application or maybe a social mobile app, it's probably going to be engagement. And so what you want is for everybody across I t to look at these metric and what part of the metrics withing the software delivery chain which ultimately contribute to that business metric in some cases, cycle time, maybe completely relevant. Right again. My core banking up. Maybe I don't care about cycle time. And so it's really about aligning those metrics and be able to start to differentiate. Um, the key challenge you mentioned around the around the disruption that we see is or the investors is. Dilemma now is really around the fact that many idea organizations are essentially applying the same approaches for innovation right for basically scrap work, Then they would apply to kind of over more traditional projects. And so, you know, there's been a lot of talk about to speed I t. And yes, it exists. But in reality are are really organizations truly differentiating out of the operate their their projects and products based on the outcomes that they're trying to achieve? And and this is really where bizarre is trying to affect. >>I love that. You know, again, it doesn't seem like brain surgery, but focus on the outcomes right and and it's horses for courses. As you said this project, you know what you're measuring and how you define success isn't necessarily the same as it is on this other project. So let's talk about some of the principles we talked about the values, but you know I think it's interesting that that that the bishops coalition, you know, just basically took the time to write these things down, and they don't seem all that super insightful. But I guess you just got to get him down and have them on paper and have it in front of your face. But I want to talk about, you know, one of the key ones which you just talked about, which is changing requirements right and working in a dynamic situation, which is really what's driven. You know this, the software to change and software development because, you know, if you're in a game app and your competitors comes out with a new blue sword, you've got to come out with a new blue swords. So whether you have that on your compound wall, we're not. So it's It's really this embracing of the speed of change and and and making that you know the rule, not the exception. I think that's a phenomenon. And the other one you talked about his data right and that today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be generated by machine learning and ai and you know and the big data thing with a dupe you know, started years ago. But we are seeing more and more that people are finally figuring it out that it's not just big data on It's not even generic machine learning artificial intelligence. But it's applying those particular data sets and that particular types of algorithms to a specific problem to your point, to try to actually reach an objective. Whether that's, you know, increasing the your average ticket or, you know, increasing your check out rate with with with shopping carts that don't get left behind and these types of things. So it's a really different way to think about the world in the good old days, probably when you got started, when we had big Giant you know, M R D s and P R. D s and sat down and coded for two years and and came out with a product release and hopefully not too many patches subsequently to that. Yeah, >>it's interesting right again, back to one of these service that we did with about 600 the ICTY executives and we we purposely designed those questions to be pretty open. Andi and one of them was really wrong requirements, and it was really around. Kind of. What is the best approach? What is your preferred approach towards requirements? And if I remember correctly, Over 80% of the ICTY executives said that the best approach their preferred approach is for requires to be completely defined before self for the bombing starts, let me pause there. We're 20 years after the agile manifesto, right, and for 80% of these idea executives to basically claimed that the best approach is for requires to be fully baked before solved before software development starts basically shows that we still have a very major issue again. Our apotheosis in working with many organizations is that the key challenges really the boundary between business and I t. Which is still very much contract based. If you look at the business side, they basically are expecting for I t deliver on time on budget, Right? But what is the incentive for I t to actually deliver on the business outcomes, right? How often is I t measured on the business outcomes and not on S L. A or on a budget secretary, and so that that's really the fundamental shift that we need to. We really need to drive up to send industry andi way. Talk about kind of this dis imperative for organizations to operate. That's one. And back to the, you know, various doors still, Um, no. The key difference between these large organization is really kind of a. If you look at the amount of capital investment that they can put into pretty much anything, why are they losing compared Thio? You know, startups. What? Why is it that more than 40% off personal loans today are issued not by your traditional brick and mortar banks, but by start ups? Well, the reason, Yes, it's the traditional culture of doing incremental changes, not disrupting ourselves, which Christenson covered at length. But it's also the inability to really fundamentally change kind of dynamic between business I t and partner, right, to to deliver on a specific business. All >>right, I love that. That's a great That's a great summary and in fact, getting ready for this interview. I saw you mentioning another thing where you know the problem with the agile development is that you're actually now getting mawr silos because you have all these autonomous people working you know, kind of independently. So it's even harder challenge for for the business leaders toe, as you said to know what's actually going on. But But, sir, I want to close um, and talk about the coalition eso clearly These are all great concepts, these air concepts. You want to apply to your business every day. Why the coalition? Why, you know, take these concepts out to a broader audience, including your competition and the broader industry to say, Hey, we as a group need to put a stamp of approval on these concepts. These values these principles. It's >>so first, I think we we want everybody to realize that we are all talking about the same things, the same concepts e think we were all from our own different vantage point, realizing that things have to change and again back to you know, whether it's value stream management or site reliability, engineering or biz Opps we're all kind of using slightly different languages on DSO. I think one of the important aspects of these apps is for us, all of us, whether we're talking about consulting actual transformation experts, whether we're talking about vendors right to provide sort of tools and technologies or these larger enterprises to transform for all of us to basically have kind of a reference that lets us speak around kind of in a much more consistent way. The second aspect is for to me is for these concepts to start to be embraced not just by us or trying or vendors, um, system integrators, consulting firms, educators, spot leaders but also for some of our own customers to start to become evangelists of their own in the industry. So we are. Our objective with the coalition is to be pretty, pretty broad, Um, and our hope is by by starting to basically educate our joint customers or our partners that we can start to really foster disbelievers and and start to really change some of dynamics. So we're very pleased that if you look at what some of the companies which have joined the the manifesto eso, we have vendors such as stashed up or advance or pager duty, for instance, or even planned you one of my direct competitors but also fought leaders like Tom Davenport or or Cap Gemini or smaller firms like Business Agility Institute or Agility Elf on DSO our goal really is to start to bring together. For three years, people have bean LP. Large organizations do digital transformation. Vendors were providing the technologies that many of these organizations used to deliver all these digital transformation and for all of us to start to provide the kind of education, support and tools that the industry need. >>That's great search. And, you know, congratulations to you and the team. I know this has been going on for a while putting all this together, getting people to sign onto the manifesto of putting the coalition together and finally today getting to unveil it to the world in a little bit more of a public opportunity. So again, you know, really good values, really simple principles, something that that shouldn't have to be written down. But it's nice because it is. And now you can print it out and stick it on your wall. So thank you for for sharing the story. And again, congrats to you on the team. >>Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. >>My pleasure. Alright, He surge If you wanna learn more about the bizarre manifesto goto biz Opps manifesto dot or greed it and you can sign it and you can stay here from or coverage on. The Cube of the bizarre manifesto unveiled. Thanks for watching. See you next time.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage, a BizOps manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz ops manifesto. Unveil. Something has been in the works for a little while. Today's the formal unveiling, and we're excited to have three of the core of founding members of the manifesto authors of the manifesto. If you will, uh, joining us again, we've had them all on individually. Now we're going to have a great power panel first up. We're gab Mitt, Kirsten returning he's the founder and CEO of Tasktop mic. Good to see you again. Where are you dialing in from? >>Great to see you again, Jeff I'm dialing from Vancouver, >>We're Canada, Vancouver, Canada. One of my favorite cities in the whole wide world. Also we've got Tom Davenport come in from across the country. He's a distinguished professor and author from Babson college, Tom. Great to see you. And I think you said you're at a fun, exotic place on the East coast >>Realm of Memphis shoe sits on Cape Cod. >>Great to see you again and also joining surge Lucio. He is the VP and general manager enterprise software division at Broadcom surge. Great to see you again, where are you coming in from? >>Uh, from Boston right next to kickoff. >>Terrific. So welcome back, everybody again. Congratulations on this day. I know it's, it's been a lot of work to get here for this unveil, but let's just jump into it. The biz ops manifesto, what was the initial reason to do this? And how did you decide to do it in a kind of a coalition, a way bringing together a group of people versus just making it an internal company, uh, initiative that, you know, you can do better stuff within your own company, surge, why don't we start with you? >>Yeah, so, so I think we were at a really critical juncture, right? Many, um, large enterprises are basically struggling with their digital transformation. Um, in fact, um, many recognize that, uh, the, the business side, it collaboration has been, uh, one of the major impediments, uh, to drive that kind of transformation. And if we look at the industry today, many people are, whether we're talking about vendors or, um, you know, system integrators, consulting firms are talking about the same kind of concepts, but using very different language. And so we believe that bringing all these different players together, um, as part of the coalition and formalizing, uh, basically the core principles and values in a BizOps manifesto, we can really start to F could have a much bigger movement where we can all talk about kind of the same concepts and we can really start to provide, could have a much better support for large organizations to transform. Uh, so whether it is technology or services or, um, we're training, I think that that's really the value of bringing all of these players together, right. >>And Nick to you, why did you get involved in this, in this effort? >>So Ben close and follow the agile movement since it started two decades ago with that manifesto. >>And I think we got a lot of improvement at the team level, and I think as satisfies noted, uh, we really need to improve at the business level. Every company is trying to become a software innovator, uh, trying to make sure that they can adapt quickly and the changing market economy and what everyone's dealing with in terms of needing to deliver the customer sooner. However, agile practices have really focused on these metrics, these measures and understanding processes that help teams be productive. Those things now need to be elevated to the business as a whole. And that just hasn't happened. Uh, organizations are actually failing because they're measuring activities and how they're becoming more agile, how teams are functioning, not how much quickly they're delivering value to the customer. So we need to now move past that. And that's exactly what the that's manifested provides. Right, >>Right, right. And Tom, to you, you've been covering tech for a very long time. You've been looking at really hard challenges and a lot of work around analytics and data and data evolution. So there's a definitely a data angle here. I wonder if you could kind of share your perspective of what you got excited to, uh, to sign onto this manifesto. >>Sure. Well, I have, you know, for the past 15 or 20 years, I've been focusing on data and analytics and AI, but before that I was a process management guy and a knowledge management guy. And in general, I think, you know, we've just kind of optimized that to narrow a level, whether you're talking about agile or dev ops or ML ops, any of these kinds of ops oriented movements, we're making individual project, um, performance and productivity better, but we're not changing the business, uh, effectively enough. And that's the thing that appealed to me about the biz ops idea that we're finally creating a closer connection between what we do with technology and how it changes the business and provides value to it. >>Great. Uh, surge back to you, right? I mean, people have been talking about digital transformation for a long time and it's been, you know, kind of trucking along and then covert hit and it was instant lights, which everyone's working from home. You've got a lot more reliance on your digital tools, digital communication, uh, both within your customer base and your partner base, but also then your employees when you're, if you could share how that really pushed this all along. Right? Because now suddenly the acceleration of digital transformation is higher. Even more importantly, you got much more critical decisions to make into what you do next. So kind of your portfolio management of projects has been elevated significantly when maybe revenues are down, uh, and you really have to, uh, to prioritize and get it right. >>Yeah. Maybe I'll just start by quoting Satina Nello basically recently said that they're speeding the two years of digital preservation just last two months in any many ways. That's true. Um, but, but yet when we look at large enterprises, they're >>Still struggling with the kind of a changes in culture that they really need to drive to be able to disrupt themselves. And not surprisingly, you know, when we look at certain parts of the industry, you know, we see some things which are very disturbing, right? So about 40% of the personal loans today, or being, uh, origin data it's by fintechs, uh, of a like of Sophie or, uh, or a lending club, right? Not to a traditional brick and mortar for BEC. And so the, well, there is kind of a much more of an appetite and it's a, it's more of a survival type of driver these days. Uh, the reality is that's in order for these large enterprises to truly transform and engage with this digital transformation, they need to start to really align the business. And it, you know, in many ways, uh, make covered that agile really emerged from the core desire to truly improve software predictability between which we've really missed is all that we, we start to aligning the software predictability to business predictability and to be able to have continual sleep continuous improvement and measurement of business outcomes. So by aligning kind of these, uh, kind of inward metrics, that's, it is typically being using to business outcomes. We think we can start to really ELP different stakeholders within the organization to collaborate. So I think there is more than ever. There's an imperative to act now. Um, and, and resolves, I think is kind of the right approach to drive that transformation. Right. >>I want to follow up on the culture comment, uh, with Utah, because you've talked before about kind of process flow and process flow throughout a whore and an organization. And, you know, we talk about people process and tech all the time. And I think the tech is the easy part compared to actually changing the people the way they think. And then the actual processes that they put in place. It's a much more difficult issue than just the tech issue to get this digital transformation in your organization. >>Yeah. You know, I've always found that the soft stuff about, you know, the culture of the behavior, the values is the hard stuff to change and more and more, we, we realized that to be successful with any kind of digital transformation you have to change people's behaviors and attitudes. Um, we haven't made as much progress in that area as we might have. I mean, I've done some surveys suggesting that, um, most organizations still don't have data-driven cultures. And in many cases there is a lower percentage of companies that say they have that then, um, did a few years ago. So we're kind of moving in the wrong direction, which means I think that we have to start explicitly addressing that, um, cultural, behavioral dimension and not just assuming that it will happen if we, if we build a system, >>If we build it, they won't necessarily come. Right. >>Right. So I want to go to, to you Nick cause you know, we're talking about workflows and flow, um, and, and you've written about flow both in terms of, um, you know, moving things along a process and trying to find bottlenecks, identify bottlenecks, which is now even more important again, when these decisions are much more critical. Cause you have a lot less, uh, wiggle room in tough times, but you also talked about flow from the culture side and the people side. So I wonder if you can just share your thoughts on, you know, using flow as a way to think about things, to get the answers better. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I'll refer back to what Tom has said. If you're optimized, you need to optimize your system. You need to optimize how you innovate and how you deliver value to the business and the customer. Now, what we've noticed in the data, since that we've learned from customers, value streams, enterprise organizations, value streams, is that when it's taking six months at the end to deliver that value with the flow is that slow. You've got a bunch of unhappy developers, unhappy customers when you're innovating house. So high performing organizations we can measure at antenna flow time and dates. All of a sudden that feedback loop, the satisfaction, your developers measurably, it goes up. So not only do you have people context, switching glass, you're delivering so much more value to customers at a lower cost because you've optimized for flow rather than optimizing for these, these other approximate tricks that we use, which is how efficient is my adult team. How quickly can we deploy software? Those are important, but they do not provide the value of agility of fast learning of adaptability to the business. And that's exactly what the biz ops manifesto pushes your organization to do. You need to put in place this new operating model that's based on flow on the delivery of business value and on bringing value to market much more quickly than you were before. Right. >>I love that. And I'm gonna back to you Tom, on that to follow up. Cause I think, I don't think people think enough about how they prioritize what they're optimizing for, because you know, if you're optimizing for a versus B, you know, you can have a very different product that, that you kick out. And, you know, my favorite example is with Clayton Christianson and innovator's dilemma talking about the three inch hard drive, if you optimize it for power, you know, is one thing, if you optimize it for vibration is another thing and sure enough, you know, they missed it on the poem because it was the, it was the game console, which, which drove that whole business. So when you're talking to customers and we think we hear it with cloud all the time, people optimizing for a cost efficiency, instead of thinking about it as an innovation tool, how do you help them kind of rethink and really, you know, force them to, to look at the, at the prioritization and make sure they're prioritizing on the right thing is make just that, what are you optimizing for? >>Oh yeah. Um, you have one of the most important aspects of any decision or attempt to resolve a problem in an organization is the framing process. And, um, you know, it's, it's a difficult aspect to have the decision to confirm it correctly in the first place. Um, there, it's not a technology issue. In many cases, it's largely a human issue, but if you frame >>That decision or that problem incorrectly to narrowly say, or you frame it as an either or situation where you could actually have some of both, um, it, it's very difficult for the, um, process to work out correctly. So in many cases, I think we need to think more at the beginning about how we bring this issue or this decision in the best way possible before we charge off and build a system to support it. You know, um, it's worth that extra time to think, think carefully about how the decision has been structured. Right, >>Sir, I want to go back to you and talk about the human factors because as we just discussed, you can put it in great technology, but if the culture doesn't adopt it and people don't feel good about it, you know, it's not going to be successful and that's going to reflect poorly on the technology, even if that had nothing to do with it. And you know, when you look at the, the, the, the core values, uh, of the Bezos manifesto, you know, a big one is trust and collaboration, you know, learn, respond, and pivot. Wonder if you can share your thoughts on, on trying to get that cultural shift, uh, so that you can have success with the people, or excuse me, with the technology in the process and helping customers, you know, take this more trustworthy and kind of proactive, uh, position. >>So I think, I think at the ground level, it truly starts with the realization that we're all different. We come from different backgrounds. Uh, oftentimes we tend to blame the data. It's not uncommon my experiments that we spend the first 30 minutes of any kind of one hour conversation to debate the validity of the data. Um, and so, um, one of the first kind of, uh, probably manifestations that we've had or revelations as we start to engage with our customers is spoke just exposing, uh, high-fidelity data sets to different stakeholders from their different lens. We start to enable these different stakeholders to not debate the data. That's really collaborate to find a solution. So in many ways, when, when, when we think about kind of the types of changes we're trying to, to truly affect around data driven decision making, he told about bringing the data in context and the context that is relevant and understandable for, for different stakeholders, whether we're talking about an operator or develop for a business analyst. >>So that's, that's the first thing. The second layer I think, is really to provide context to what people are doing in their specific silo. And so I think one of the best examples I have is if you start to be able to align business KPI, whether you are counting, you know, sales per hour, or the engagements of your users on your mobile applications, whatever it is, you can start to connect that PKI to business KPI, to the KPIs that developers might be looking at, whether it is all the number of defects or velocity or whatever over your metrics that you're used to, to actually track you start to be able to actually contextualize in what we are, the effecting, basically a metric of that that is really relevant. And then what we see is that this is a much more systematic way to approach the transformation than say, you know, some organizations kind of creating some of these new products or services or initiatives, um, to, to drive engagements, right? >>So if you look at zoom, for instance, zoom giving away a it service to, uh, to education, he's all about, I mean, there's obviously a marketing aspect in there, but it's, it's fundamentally about trying to drive also the engagement of their own teams. And because now they're doing something for good and many organizations are trying to do that, but you only can do this kind of things in the limited way. And so you really want to start to rethink how you connect to, everybody's kind of a business objective fruit data, and now you start to get people to stare at the same data from their own lens and collaborate on all the data. Right, >>Right. That's a good, uh, Tom, I want to go back to you. You've been studying it for a long time, writing lots of books and getting into it. Um, why now, you know, what, why, why now are we finally aligning business objectives with, with it objectives? You know, why didn't this happen before? And, you know, what are the factors that are making now the time for this, this, this move with the, uh, with the biz ops? >>Well, and much of a past, it was sort of a back office related activity. And, you know, it was important for, um, uh, producing your paychecks and, uh, capturing the customer orders, but the business wasn't built around it now, every organization needs to be a software business, a data business, a digital business, the auntie has been raised considerably. And if you aren't making that connection between your business objectives and the technology that supports it, you run a pretty big risk of, you know, going out of business or losing out to competitors. Totally. So, um, and even if you're in, uh, an industry that hasn't historically been terribly, um, technology oriented customer expectations flow from, uh, you know, the digital native, um, companies that they work with to basically every industry. So you're compared against the best in the world. So we don't really have the luxury anymore of screwing up our it projects or building things that don't really work for the business. Um, it's mission critical that we do that well. Um, almost every time, I just want to fall by that, Tom, >>In terms of the, you've talked extensively about kind of these evolutions of data and analytics from artismal stage to the big data stage, the data economy stage, the AI driven stage and what I find diff interesting that all those stages, you always put a start date, you never put an end date. Um, so you know, is the, is the big data I'm just going to use that generically a moment in time finally here where we're, you know, off mahogany row with the data scientists, but actually can start to see the promise of delivering the right insight to the right person at the right time to make that decision. >>Well, I think it is true that in general, these previous stages never seemed to go away. The, um, the artisinal stuff is still being done, but we would like for less and less of it to be artisinal, we can't really afford for everything to be artisinal anymore. It's too labor and, and time consuming to do things that way. So we shift more and more of it to be done through automation and B to be done with a higher level of productivity. And, um, you know, at some point maybe we reached the stage where we don't do anything artisanally anymore. I'm not sure we're there yet, but we are, we are making progress. Right. >>Right. And Mick, back to you in terms of looking at agile, cause you're, you're such a student of agile. When, when you look at the opportunity with biz ops and taking the lessons from agile, you know, what's been the inhibitor to stop this in the past. And what are you so excited about? You know, taking this approach will enable. >>Yeah. I think both search and Tom hit on this is that in agile what's happened is that we've been measuring tiny subsets of the value stream, right? We need to elevate the data's there. Developers are working on these tools that delivering features that the foundations for for great culture are there. I spent two decades as a developer. And when I was really happy is when I was able to deliver value to customers, the quicker I was able to do that the fewer impediments are in my way, that quicker was deployed and running in the cloud, the happier I was, and that's exactly what's happening. If we can just get the right data, uh, elevated to the business, not just to the agile teams, but really this, these values of ours are to make sure that you've got these data driven decisions with meaningful data that's oriented around delivering value to customers. Not only these legacies that Tom touched on, which has cost center metrics. So when, from where for it being a cost center and something that provided email and then back office systems. So we need to rapidly shift to those new, meaningful metrics that are customized business centric and make sure that every development the organization is focused on those as well as the business itself, that we're measuring value. And that will help you that value flow without interruptions. >>I love that mic. Cause if you don't measure it, you can't improve on it and you gotta, but you gotta be measuring the right thing. So gentlemen, uh, thank you again for, for your time. Uh, congratulations on the, uh, on the unveil of the biz ops manifesto and bringing together this coalition, uh, of, of, uh, industry experts to get behind this. And, you know, there's probably never been a more important time than now to make sure that your prioritization is in the right spot and you're not wasting resources where you're not going to get the ROI. So, uh, congratulations again. And thank you for sharing your thoughts with us here on the cube. >>Thank you. >>Alright, so we had surge Tom and Mick I'm. Jeff, you're watching the cube. It's a biz ops manifesto unveil. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back. Variety. Jeff Frick here with the cube. We're in our Palo Alto studios, and we'd like to welcome you back to our continuing coverage of biz ops manifesto unveil some exciting day to really, uh, kind of bring this out into public. There's been a little bit of conversation, but today's really the official unveiling and we're excited to have our next guest is share a little bit more information on it. He's Patrick tickle. He's a chief product officer for planned view. Patrick. Great to see you. >>Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for the invite. So why >>The biz ops manifesto, why the biz ops coalition now when you guys have been at it, it's relatively mature marketplace businesses. Good. What was missing? Why, why this, why this coalition? >>Yeah. So, you know, again, why is, why is biz ops important and why is this something that I'm, you know, I'm so excited about, but I think companies as well, right? Well, no, in some ways or another, this is a topic that I've been talking to the market and our customers about for a long time. And it's, you know, I really applaud this whole movement. Right. And, um, it resonates with me because I think one of the fundamental flaws, frankly, of the way we have talked about technology and business literally for decades, uh, has been this idea of, uh, alignment. Those who know me, I occasionally get off on this little rant about the word alignment, right. But to me, the word alignment is, is actually indicative of the, of the, of the flaw in a lot of our organizations and biz ops is really, I think now trying to catalyze and expose that flaw. >>Right. Because, you know, I always say that, you know, you know, alignment implies silos, right. Instantaneously, as soon as you say there's alignment, there's, there's obviously somebody who's got a direction and other people that have to line up and that kind of siloed, uh, nature of organizations then frankly, the passive nature of it. Right. I think so many technology organizations are like, look, the business has the strategy you guys need to align. Right. And, and, you know, as a product leader, right. That's where I've been my whole career. Right. I can tell you that I never sit around. I almost never use the word alignment. Right. I mean, whether, you know, I never sit down and say, you know, the product management team has to get aligned with dev, right. Or the dev team has to get aligned with the delivery and ops teams. I mean, what I say is, you know, are we on strategy, right? >>Like we've, we have a strategy as a, as a full end to end value stream. Right. And that there's no silos. And I mean, look, every on any given day we got to get better. Right. But the context, the context we operate is not about alignment. Right. It's about being on strategy. And I think I've talked to customers a lot about that, but when I first read the manifesto, I was like, Oh yeah, this is exactly. This is breaking down. Maybe trying to eliminate the word alignment, you know, from a lot of our organizations, because we literally start thinking about one strategy and how we go from strategy to delivery and have it be our strategy, not someone else's that we're all aligning to. And I, and it's a great way to catalyze that conversation that I've, it's been in my mind for years, to be honest. Right. >>So, so much to unpack there. One of the things obviously, uh, stealing a lot from, from dev ops and the dev ops manifesto from 20 years ago. And, and as I look through some of the principles and I looked through some of the values, which are, you know, really nicely laid out here, you know, satisfy customer, do continuous delivery, uh, measure, output against real results. Um, the ones that, that jumps out though is really about, you know, change, change, right? Requirements should change frequently. They do change frequently, but I'm curious to get your take from a, from a software development point, it's easy to kind of understand, right. We're making this widget and our competitors, beta widget plus X, and now we need to change our plans and make sure that the plus X gets added to the plan. Maybe it wasn't in the plan, but you talked a lot about product strategy. So in this kind of continuous delivery world, how does that meld with, I'm actually trying to set a strategy, which implies the direction for a little bit further out on the horizon and to stay on that while at the same time, you're kind of doing this real time continual adjustments because you're not working off a giant PRD or MRD anymore. >>Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. You know, one of the terms, you know, that we use internally a lot and even with my customers, our customers is we talk about this idea of rewiring, right. And I think, you know, it's kind of a, now an analogy for transformation. And I think a lot of us have to rewire the way we think about things. Right. And I think at Planview where we have a lot of customers who live in that, you know, who operationalize that traditional PPM world. Right. And are shifting to agile and transforming that rewire is super important. And, and to your point, right, it's, you've just, you've got to embrace this idea of, you know, just iterative getting better every day and iterating, iterating, iterating as opposed to building annual plans or, you know, I get customers occasionally who asked me for two or three year roadmap. >>Right. And I literally looked at them and I go, there's no, there's no scenario where I can build a two or three year roadmap. Right. You, you, you think you want that, but that's not, that's not the way we run. Right. And I will tell you the biggest thing that for us, you know, that I think is matched the planning, uh, you know, patents is a word I like to use a lot. So the thing that we've like, uh, that we've done from a planning perspective, I think is matched impedance to continuous delivery is instituting the whole program, implement, you know, the program, increment planning, capabilities, and methodologies, um, in the scaled agile world. Right. And over the last 18 months to two years, we really have now, you know, instrumented our company across three value streams. You know, we do quarterly PI program increment 10 week planning, you know, and that becomes, that becomes the Terra firma of how we plan. >>Right. And it's, what are we doing for the next 10 weeks? And we iterate within those 10 weeks, but we also know that 10 weeks from now, we're gonna, we're gonna adjust iterate again. Right. And that shifting of that planning model to, you know, to being as cross-functional is that as that big room planning kind of model is, um, and also, uh, you know, on that shorter increment, when you get those two things in place, also the impedance really starts to match up, uh, with continuous delivery and it changes, it changes the way you plan and it changes the way you work. Right? >>Yeah. Their thing. Right. So obviously a lot of these things are kind of process driven, both within the values, as well as the principles, but there's a whole lot, really about culture. And I just want to highlight a couple of the values, right? We already talked about business outcomes, um, trust and collaboration, uh, data driven decisions, and then learn, respond and pivot. Right. A lot of those are cultural as much as they are process. So again, is it the, is it the need to really kind of just put them down on paper and, you know, I can't help, but think of, you know, the hammer and up the, a, the thing in the Lutheran church with it, with their manifesto, is it just good to get it down on paper? Because when you read these things, you're like, well, of course we should trust people. And of course we need an environment of collaboration and of course we want data driven decisions, but as we all know saying it and living, it are two very, very different things. >>Yeah. Good question. I mean, I think there's a lot of ways to bring that to life you're right. And just hanging up, you know, I think we've all been through the hanging up posters around your office, which these days, right. Unless you're going to hang a poster in everybody's home office. Right. You can't even, you can't even fake it that you think that might work. Right. So, um, you know, you really, I think we've attacked that in a variety of ways. Right. And you definitely have to, you know, you've got to make the shift to a team centric culture, right. Empowered teams, you know, that's a big deal. Right. You know, a lot of, a lot of the people that, you know, we lived in a world of quote, unquote work. We lived in a deep resource management world for a long, long time, and right. >>A lot of our customers still do that, but, you know, kind of moving to that team centric world is, uh, is really important and core to the trust. Um, I think training is super important, right. I mean, we've, you know, we've internally, right. We've trained hundreds employees over the last a year and a half on the fundamentals really of safe. Right. Not necessarily, you know, we've had, we've had teams delivering in scrum and the continuous delivery for, you know, for years, but the scaling aspect of it, uh, is where we've done a lot of training investment. Um, and then, you know, I think a leadership has to be bought in. Right. You know? And so when we pie plan, you know, myself and Cameron and the other members of our leadership, you know, we're NPI planning, you know, for, for four days. Right. I mean, it's, it's, you've got to walk the walk, you know, from top to bottom and you've got to train on the context. Right. And then you, and then, and, and then once you get through a few cycles where you've done a pivot, right. Or you brought a new team in, and it just works, it becomes kind of this virtuous circle where he'll go, man, this really works so much better than what we used to do. Right. >>Right. The other really key principle to this whole thing is, is aligning, you know, the business leaders and the business prioritization, um, so that you can get to good outcomes with the development and the delivery. Right. And we know again, and kind of classic dev ops to get the dev and the production people together. So they can, you know, quickly ship code that works. Um, but adding the business person on there really puts, puts a little extra responsibility that they, they understand the value of a particular feature or particular priority. Uh, they, they can make the, the, the trade offs and that they kind of understand the effort involved too. So, you know, bringing them into this continuous again, kind of this continuous development process, um, to make sure that things are better aligned and really better prioritize. Cause ultimately, you know, we don't live in an infinite resources situation and people gotta make trade offs. They gotta make decisions as to what goes and what doesn't go in for everything that goes. Right. I always say you pick one thing. Okay. That's 99 other things that couldn't go. So it's really important to have, you know, this, you said alignment of the business priorities as well as, you know, the execution within, within the development. >>Yeah. I think that, you know, uh, you know, I think it was probably close to two years ago. Forester started talking about the age of the customer, right. That, that was like their big theme at the time. Right. And I think to me what that, the age of the customer actually translates to and Mick, Mick and I are both big fans of this whole idea of the project, the product shift, mixed book, you know, it was a great piece on a, you're talking to Mick, you know, as part of the manifesto is one of the authors as well, but this shift from project to product, right? Like the age of the customer, in my opinion, the, the, the embodiment of that is the shift to a product mentality. Right. And, and the product mentality in my opinion, is what brings the business and technology teams together, right? >>Once you, once you're focused on a customer experience, that's delivered through a product or a service that's when I that's, when I started to go with the alignment problem goes away, right. Because if you look at software companies, right, I mean, we run product management models, you know, with software development teams, customer success teams, right. That, you know, the software component of these products that people are building is obviously becoming bigger and bigger, you know, in an, in many ways, right. More and more organizations are trying to model themselves over as operationally like software companies. Right. Um, they obviously have lots of other components in their business than just software, but I think that whole model of customer experience equaling product, and then the software component of product, the product is the essence of what changes that alignment equation and brings business and teams together because all of a sudden, everyone knows what the customer's experiencing. Right. And, and that, that, that makes a lot of things very clear, very quickly. >>Right. I'm just curious how far along this was as a process before, before covert hit, right. Because serendipitous, whatever. Right. But th the sudden, you know, light switch moment, everybody had to go work from home and in March 15th compared to now, we're in October, and this is going to be going on for a while, and it is a new normal and whatever that whatever's going to look like a year from now, or two years from now is TBD, you know, had you guys already started on this journey cause again, to sit down and actually declare this coalition and declare this manifesto is a lot different than just trying to do better within your own organization. >>Yeah. So we had started, uh, you know, w we definitely had started independently, you know, some, some, you know, I think people in the community know that, uh, we, we came together with a company called lean kit a handful of years ago, and I give John Terry actually one of the founders leaned to immense credit for, you know, kind of spearheading our cultural change and not, and not because of, we were just going to be, you know, bringing agile solutions to our customers, but because, you know, he believed that it was going to be a fundamentally better way for us to work. Right. And we kind of, you know, when we started with John and built, you know, out of concentric circles of momentum and, and we've gotten to the place where now it's just part of who we are, but, but I do think that, you know, COVID has, you know, um, I think pre COVID a lot of companies, you know, would, would adopt, you know, the, you would adopt digital slash agile transformation. >>Um, traditional industries may have done it as a reaction to disruption. Right. You know, and in many cases, the disruption to these traditional industries was, I would say a product oriented company, right. That probably had a larger software component, and that disruption caused a competitive issue or a customer issue that caused companies and tried to respond by transforming. I think COVID, you know, all of a sudden flatten that out, right. We literally all got disrupted. Right. And, and so all of a sudden, every one of us is dealing with some degree of market uncertainty, customer uncertainty, uh, and also know none of us were insulated from the need to be able to pivot faster, deliver incrementally, you know, and operate in a different, completely more agile way, uh, you know, post COVID. Right. Yeah. That's great. >>So again, a very, very, very timely, you know, a little bit of serendipity, a little bit of, of planning. And, you know, as, as with all important things, there's always a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work involved. So a really interesting thank you for, for your leadership, Patrick. And, you know, it really makes a statement. I think when you have a bunch of leaderships across an industry coming together and putting their name on a piece of paper, uh, that's aligned around us some principles and some values, which again, if you read them who wouldn't want to get behind these, but if it takes, you know, something a little bit more formal, uh, to kind of move the ball down the field, and then I totally get it and a really great work. Thanks for, uh, thanks for doing it. >>Oh, absolutely. No. Like I said, the first time I read it, I was like, yeah, like you said, this is all, this all makes complete sense, but just documenting it and saying it and talking about it moves the needle. I'll tell you as a company, you gotta, we're pushing really hard on, uh, you know, on our own internal strategy on diversity inclusion. Right? And, and like, once we wrote the words down about what, you know, what we aspire to be from a diversity and inclusion perspective, it's the same thing. Everybody reads the words and goes, why wouldn't we do this? Right. But until you write it down and kind of have again, a manifesto or a Terrafirma of what you're trying to accomplish, you know, then you can rally behind it. Right. As opposed to it being something that's, everybody's got their own version of the flavor. Right. And I think it's a very analogous, you know, kind of, uh, initiative, right. And, uh, and this happening, both of those things, right. Are happening across the industry these days. Right. >>And measure it too. Right. And measure it, measure, measure, measure, get a baseline. Even if you don't like to measure, even if you don't like what the, even if you can argue against the math, behind the measurement, measure it, and at least you can measure it again and you can, and you've got some type of a comp and that is really the only way to, to move it forward. Well, Patrick really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for, uh, for taking a few minutes out of your day. >>It's great to be here. It's an awesome movement and we're glad >>That'd be part of it. All right. Thanks. And if you want to check out the biz ops, Manifesta go to biz ops, manifesto.org, read it. You might want to sign it. It's there for you. And thanks for tuning in on this segment will continuing coverage of the biz op manifesto unveil here on the cube. I'm Jeff, thanks for watching >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody Jeffrey here with the cube. We're coming to you from our Palo Alto studios. And welcome back to this event is the biz ops manifesto unveiling. So the biz ops manifesto and the biz ops coalition had been around for a little while, but today's the big day. That's kind of the big public unveiling or excited to have some of the foundational people that, you know, have put their, put their name on the dotted, if you will, to support this initiative and talk about why that initiative is so important. And so the next guest we're excited to have is dr. Mick Kirsten. He is the founder and CEO of Tasktop mic. Great to see you coming in from Vancouver, Canada, I think, right? Yes. Thank you. Absolutely. I hope your air is a little better out there. I know you had some of the worst air of all of us, a couple, a couple of weeks back. So hopefully things are, uh, are getting a little better and we get those fires under control. Yeah. >>Things have cleared up now. So yeah, it's good. It's good to be close to the U S and it's going to have the Arabic cleaner as well. >>Absolutely. So let's, let's jump into it. So you you've been an innovation guy forever starting way back in the day and Xerox park. I was so excited to do an event at Xerox park for the first time last year. I mean, that, that to me represents along with bell labs and, and some other, you know, kind of foundational innovation and technology centers, that's gotta be one of the greatest ones. So I just wonder if you could share some perspective of getting your start there at Xerox park, you know, some of the lessons you learned and what you've been able to kind of carry forward from those days. >>Yeah. I was fortunate to join Xerox park in the computer science lab there at a very early point in my career, and to be working on open source programming languages. So back then in the computer science lab, where some of the inventions around programming around software development teams, such as object oriented programming, and a lot of what we had around really modern programming levels constructs, those were the teams I have the fortune of working with, and really our goal was. And of course there's as, as you know, uh, there's just this DNA of innovation and excitement and innovation in the water. And really it was the model back then was all about changing the way that we work, uh, was looking at for how we could make it 10 times easier to write code. But this is back in 99. And we were looking at new ways of expressing, especially business concerns, especially ways of enabling people who are, who want to innovate for their business to express those concerns in code and make that 10 times easier than what that would take. >>So we create a new open source programming language, and we saw some benefits, but not quite quite what we expected. I then went and actually joined Charles Stephanie, that former to fucking Microsoft who was responsible for, he actually got Microsoft word as a spark and into Microsoft and into the hands of bill Gates on that company. I was behind the whole office suite and his vision. And then when I was trying to execute with, working for him was to make PowerPoint like a programming language, make everything completely visual. And I realized none of this was really working in that there was something else, fundamentally wrong programming languages, or new ways of building software. Like let's try and do with Charles around intentional programming. That was not enough. >>That was not enough. So, you know, the agile movement got started about 20 years ago, and we've seen the rise of dev ops and really this kind of embracing of, of, of sprints and, you know, getting away from MRDs and PRDs and these massive definitions of what we're going to build and long build cycles to this iterative process. And this has been going on for a little while. So what was still wrong? What was still missing? Why the BizOps coalition, why the biz ops manifesto? >>Yeah, so I basically think we nailed some of the things that the program language levels of teams can have effective languages deployed soften to the cloud easily now, right? And at the kind of process and collaboration and planning level agile two decades, decades ago was formed. We were adopting and all the, all the teams I was involved with and it's really become a self problem. So agile tools, agile teams, agile ways of planning, uh, are now very mature. And the whole challenge is when organizations try to scale that. And so what I realized is that the way that agile was scaling across teams and really scaling from the technology part of organization to the business was just completely flawed. The agile teams had one set of doing things, one set of metrics, one set of tools. And the way that the business was working was planning was investing in technology was just completely disconnected and using a whole different set of advisors. >>Interesting. Cause I think it's pretty clear from the software development teams in terms of what they're trying to deliver. Cause they've got a feature set, right. And they've got bugs and it's easy to, it's easy to see what they deliver, but it sounds like what you're really honing in on is this disconnect on the business side, in terms of, you know, is it the right investment? You know, are we getting the right business ROI on this investment? Was that the right feature? Should we be building another feature or should we building a completely different product set? So it sounds like it's really a core piece of this is to get the right measurement tools, the right measurement data sets so that you can make the right decisions in terms of what you're investing, you know, limited resources. You can't, no one has unlimited resources and ultimately have to decide what to do, which means you're also deciding what not to do. And it sounds like that's a really big piece of this, of this whole effort. >>Yeah. Jeff, that's exactly it, which is the way that the agile team measures their own way of working is very different from the way that you measure business outcomes. The business outcomes are in terms of how happy your customers are, but are you innovating fast enough to keep up with the pace of a rapidly changing economy, rapidly changing market. And those are, those are all around the customer. And so what I learned on this long journey of supporting many organizations transformations and having them try to apply those principles of agile and dev ops, that those are not enough, those measures technical practices, those measured sort of technical excellence of bringing code to the market. They don't actually measure business outcomes. And so I realized that it really was much more around having these entwined flow metrics that are customer centric and business centric and market centric where we need it to go. Right. >>So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about your book because you're also a bestselling author, a project, a product, and, and, and you, you brought up this concept in your book called the flow framework. And it's really interesting to me cause I know, you know, flow on one hand is kind of a workflow and a process flow and, and you know, that's how things get done and, and, and embrace the flow. On the other hand, you know, everyone now in, in a little higher level existential way is trying to get into the flow right into the workflow and, you know, not be interrupted and get into a state where you're kind of at your highest productivity, you know, kind of your highest comfort, which flow are you talking about in your book or is it a little bit about, >>Well, that's a great question. It's not what I get asked very often. Just to me, it's absolutely both. So that the thing that we want to get to, we've learned how to master individual flow. That is this beautiful book by me, how he teaches me how he does a beautiful Ted talk by him as well about how we can take control of our own flow. So my question with the book with project replies, how can we bring that to entire teams and really entire organizations? How can we have everyone contributing to a customer outcome? And this is really what if you go to the biz ops manifesto, it says, I focus on outcomes on using data to drive whether we're delivering those outcomes rather than a focus on proxy metrics, such as, how quickly did we implement this feature? No, it's really how much value did the customer go to the feature and how quickly did you learn and how quickly did you use that data to drive to that next outcome? >>Really that with companies like Netflix and Amazon have mastered, how do we get that to every large organization, every it organization and make everyone be a software innovator. So it's to bring that co that concept of flow to these entwined value streams. And the fascinating thing is we've actually seen the data. We've been able to study a lot of value streams. We see when flow increases, when organizations deliver value to a customer faster, developers actually become more happy. So things like the employee net promoter scores rise, and we've got empirical data for this. So the beautiful thing to me is that we've actually been able to combine these two things and see the results in the data that you increase flow to the customer. Your developers are more happy. >>I love it, right, because we're all more, we're all happier when we're in the flow and we're all more productive when we're in the flow. So I, that is a great melding of, of two concepts, but let's jump into the, into the manifesto itself a little bit. And, you know, I love that, you know, took this approach really of having kind of four key values and then he gets 12 key principles. And I just want to read a couple of these values because when you read them, it sounds pretty brain dead. Right? Of course. Right. Of course you should focus on business outcomes. Of course you should have trust and collaboration. Of course you should have database decision making processes and not just intuition or, you know, whoever's the loudest person in the room, uh, and to learn and respond and pivot. But what's the value of actually just putting them on a piece of paper, because again, this is not this, these are all good, positive things, right? When somebody reads these to you or tells you these are sticks it on the wall, of course. But unfortunately of course isn't always enough. >>No. And I think what's happened is some of these core principles originally from the agile manifesto two decades ago, uh, the whole dev ops movement of the last decade of flow feedback and continue learning has been key. But a lot of organizations, especially the ones that are undergoing digital transformations have actually gone a very different way, right? The way that they measure value in technology and innovation is through costs for many organizations. The way that they actually are looking at that they're moving to cloud is actually as a reduction in cost. Whereas the right way of looking at moving to cloud is how much more quickly can we get to the value to the customer? How quickly can we learn from that? And how quickly can we drive the next business outcome? So really the key thing is, is to move away from those old ways of doing things, a funny projects and cost centers, uh, to actually funding and investing in outcomes and measuring outcomes through these flow metrics, which in the end are your fast feedback and how quickly you're innovating for your customer. >>So these things do seem, you know, very obvious when you look at them. But the key thing is what you need to stop doing to focus on these. You need to actually have accurate realtime data of how much value your phone to the customer every week, every month, every quarter. And if you don't have that, your decisions are not driven on data. If you don't know what your boggling like is, and this is something that in decades of manufacturing, a car manufacturers, other manufacturers, master, they always know where the bottom back in their production processes. You ask a random CIO when a global 500 company where their bottleneck is, and you won't get a clear answer because there's not that level of understanding. So let's, you actually follow these principles. You need to know exactly where you fall. And I guess because that's, what's making your developers miserable and frustrated around having them context, which on thrash. So it, the approach here is important and we have to stop doing these other things, >>Right? There's so much there to unpack. I love it. You know, especially the cloud conversation, because so many people look at it wrong as, as, as a cost saving device, as opposed to an innovation driver and they get stuck, they get stuck in the literal and the, and you know, I think at the same thing, always about Moore's law, right? You know, there's a lot of interesting real tech around Moore's law and the increasing power of microprocessors, but the real power, I think in Moore's laws is the attitudinal change in terms of working in a world where you know that you've got all this power and what you build and design. I think it's funny to your, your comment on the flow and the bottleneck, right? Cause, cause we know manufacturing, as soon as you fix one bottleneck, you move to your next one, right? You always move to your next point of failure. So if you're not fixing those things, you know, you're not, you're not increasing that speed down the line, unless you can identify where that bottleneck is or no matter how many improvements you make to the rest of the process, it's still going to get hung up on that one spot. >>That's exactly it. And you also make it sound so simple, but again, if you don't have the data driven visibility of where that bottom line is, and these bottlenecks are adjusted to say defense just whack them. All right. So we need to understand is the bottleneck because our security reviews are taking too long and stopping us from getting value for the customer. If it's that automate that process. And then you move on to the next bottleneck, which might actually be that deploying yourself into the cloud. It's taking too long. But if you don't take that approach of going flow first, rather than again, that sort of cost reduction. First, you have to think of the approach of customer centricity and you only focused on optimizing costs. Your costs will increase and your flow will slow down. And this is just one of these fascinating things. >>Whereas if you focus on getting closer to the customer and reducing your cycles out on getting value, your flow time from six months to two weeks or two, one week or two event, as we see with the tech giants, you actually can both lower your costs and get much more value for us to get that learning loop going. So I think I've, I've seen all these cloud deployments and one of the things happened that delivered almost no value because there was such big bottlenecks upfront in the process and actually the hosting and the AP testing was not even possible with all of those inefficiencies. So that's why going float us rather than costs when we started our project versus silky. >>I love that. And, and, and, and it, it begs repeating to that right within the subscription economy, you know, you're on the hook to deliver value every single month because they're paying you every single month. So if you're not on top of how you're delivering value, you're going to get sideways because it's not like they pay a big down payment and a small maintenance fee every month. But once you're in a subscription relationship, you know, you have to constantly be delivering value and upgrading that value because you're constantly taking money from the customer. So it's such a different kind of relationship than kind of the classic, you know, big bang with a maintenance agreement on the back end really important. Yeah. >>And I think in terms of industry shifts that that's, it that's, what's catalyzed. This industry shift is in this SAS and subscription economy. If you're not delivering more and more value to your customers, someone else's, and they're winning the business, not you. So, one way we know is to delight our customers with great user experience as well. That really is based on how many features you delivered or how much, how much, how many quality improvements or scalar performance improvements we delivered. So the problem is, and this is what the business manifesto, as well as the flow frame of touch on is if you can't measure how much value you deliver to a customer, what are you measuring? You just backed again, measuring costs, and that's not a measure of value. So we have to shift quickly away from measuring costs to measuring value, to survive. And in the subscription economy, >>We could go for days and days and days. I want to shift gears a little bit into data and, and a data driven decision making a data driven organization cause right day has been talked about for a long time, the huge big data meme with, with Hadoop over, over several years and, and data warehouses and data lakes and data oceans and data swamps. And you can go on and on and on. It's not that easy to do, right? And at the same time, the proliferation of data is growing exponentially. We're just around the corner from, from IOT and five G. So now the accumulation of data at machine scale, again, is this gonna overwhelm? And one of the really interesting principles, uh, that I wanted to call out and get your take right, is today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence. I wonder if you can, again, you've got some great historical perspective, um, reflect on how hard it is to get the right data, to get the data in the right context, and then to deliver it to the decision makers and then trust the decision makers to actually make the data and move that down. You know, it's kind of this democratization process into more and more people and more and more frontline jobs making more and more of these little decisions every day. >>Yeah. I definitely think the front parts of what you said are where the promises of big data have completely fallen on their face into the swamps as, as you mentioned, because if you don't have the data in the right format, you've cannot connect, collected that the right way you want it, that way, the right way you can't use human or machine learning on it effectively. And there've been the number of data where, how has this in a typical enterprise organization and the sheer investment is tremendous, but the amount of intelligence being extracted from those is, is, is a very big problem. So the key thing that I've noticed is that if you can model your value streams, so you actually understand how you're innovating, how you're measuring the delivery of value and how long that takes, what is your time to value through these metrics like full time? >>You can actually use both the intelligence that you've got around the table and push that down as well, as far as getting to the organization, but you can actually start using that those models to understand and find patterns and detect bottlenecks that might be surprising, right? Well, you can detect interesting bottlenecks when you shift to work from home. We detected all sorts of interesting bottlenecks in our own organization that were not intuitive to me that have to do with, you know, more senior people being overloaded and creating bottlenecks where they didn't exist. Whereas we thought we were actually an organization that was very good at working from home because of our open source roots. So the data is highly complex. Software value streams are extremely complicated. And the only way to really get the proper analysts and data is to model it properly and then to leverage these machine learning and AI techniques that we have. But that front part of what you said is where organizations are just extremely immature in what I've seen, where they've got data from all their tools, but not modeled in the right way. Right, right. >>Right. Well, all right. So before I let you go, you know, let's say you get a business leader. He, he buys in, he reads the manifesto, he signs on the dotted line and he says, Mick, how do I get started? I want to be more aligned with the, with the development teams. I know I'm in a very competitive space. We need to be putting out new software features and engage with our customers. I want to be more data-driven how do I get started? Well, you know, what's the biggest inhibitor for most people to get started and get some early wins, which we know is always the key to success in any kind of a new initiative. >>Right? So I think you can reach out to us through the website, uh, for the manifesto. But the key thing is just, it's definitely set up it's to get started and to get the key wins. So take a product value stream. That's mission critical if it'd be on your mobile and web experiences or part of your cloud modernization platform where your analytics pipeline, but take that and actually apply these principles to it and measure the end to end flow of value. Make sure you have a value metric that everyone is on the same page on, but the people on the development teams that people in leadership all the way up to the CEO, and one of the, where I encourage you to start is actually that end to end flow time, right? That is the number one metric. That is how you measure it, whether you're getting the benefit of your cloud modernization, that is the one metric that when the people I respect tremendously put into his cloud for CEOs, the metric, the one, the one way to measure innovation. So basically take these principles, deploy them on one product value stream measure, Antonin flow time, uh, and then you'll actually be well on your path to transforming and to applying the concepts of agile and dev ops all the way to, to the, to the way >>You're offering model. >>Well, Mick really great tips, really fun to catch up. I look forward to a time when we can actually sit across the table and, and get into this. Cause I just, I just love the perspective and, you know, you're very fortunate to have that foundational, that foundational base coming from Xerox park and they get, you know, it's, it's a very magical place with a magical history. So to, to incorporate that into, continue to spread that well, uh, you know, good for you through the book and through your company. So thanks for sharing your insight with us today. >>Thanks so much for having me, Jeff. Absolutely. >>All right. And go to the biz ops manifesto.org, read it, check it out. If you want to sign it, sign it. They'd love to have you do it. Stay with us for continuing coverage of the unveiling of the business manifesto on the cube. I'm Jeff. Rick. Thanks for watching. See you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage, a biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back. You're ready. Jeff Frick here with the cube for our ongoing coverage of the big unveil. It's the biz ops manifesto manifesto unveil. And we're going to start that again from the top three And a Festo >>Five, four, three, two. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the cube come to you from our Palo Alto studios today for a big, big reveal. We're excited to be here. It's the biz ops manifesto unveiling a thing's been in the works for a while and we're excited to have our next guest. One of the, really the powers behind this whole effort. And he's joining us from Boston it's surge, Lucio, the vice president, and general manager enterprise software division at Broadcom surge. Great to see you. >>Hi, good to see you, Jeff. Glad to be here. >>Absolutely. So you've been in this business for a very long time. You've seen a lot of changes in technology. What is the biz ops manifesto? What is this coalition all about? Why do we need this today and in 2020? >>Yeah. So, so I've been in this business for close to 25 years, right? So about 20 years ago, the agile manifesto was created. And the goal of the agile manifesto was really to address the uncertainty around software development and the inability to predict the efforts to build software. And, uh, if you, if you roll that kind of 20 years later, and if you look at the current state of the industry of the product, the project management Institute, estimates that we're wasting about a million dollars, every 20 seconds in digital transformation initiatives that do not deliver on business results. In fact, we were recently served a third of the, a, a number of executives in partnership with Harvard >>Business review and 77% of those executives think that one of the key challenges that they have is really the collaboration between business and it, and that that's been kind of a case for, uh, almost 20 years now. Um, so the, the, the key challenge that we're faced with is really that we need a new approach. And many of the players in the industry, including ourselves have been using different terms, right? Some are being, are talking about value stream management. Some are talking about software delivery management. If you look at the site, reliability engineering movement, in many ways, it embodies a lot of these kind of concepts and principles. So we believed that it became really imperative for us to crystallize around, could have one concept. And so in many ways, the, a, the BizOps concept and the BizOps manifesto are bringing together a number of ideas, which has been emerging in the last five years or so, and, and defining the key values and principles to finally help these organizations truly transform and become digital businesses. And so the hope is that by joining our forces and defining public key principles and values, we can help the industry, uh, not just, uh, by, you know, providing them with support, but also tools and consulting that is required for them to truly achieve the kind of transformation that everybody's taking. >>Right. Right. So COVID now we're six months into it, approximately seven months into it. Um, a lot of pain, a lot of bad stuff still happening. We've got a ways to go, but one of the things that on the positive side, right, and you've seen all the memes and social media is, is a driver of digital transformation and a driver of change. Cause we had this light switch moment in the middle of March, and there was no more planning. There was no more conversation. You've suddenly got remote workforces, everybody's working from home and you got to go, right. So the reliance on these tools increases dramatically, but I'm curious, you know, kind of short of, of the beginnings of this effort in short of kind of COVID, which, you know, came along unexpectedly. I mean, what were those inhibitors because we've been making software for a very long time, right? The software development community has, has adopted kind of rapid change and, and iterative, uh, delivery and, and sprints, what was holding back the connection with the business side to make sure that those investments were properly aligned with outcomes. >>Well, so, so you have to understand that it is, is kind of a its own silos. And traditionally it has been treated as a cost center within large organizations and not as a value center. And so as a result, kind of a, the traditional dynamic between it and the business is basically one of a kind of supplier up to kind of a business. Um, and you know, if you go back to, uh, I think you'll unmask a few years ago, um, basically at this concept of the machines to build the machines and you went as far as saying that, uh, the, the machines or the production line is actually the product. So, uh, meaning that the core of the innovation is really about, uh, building, could it be engine to deliver on the value? And so in many ways, you know, we, we have missed on this shift from, um, kind of it becoming this kind of value center within the enterprises and end. >>He talks about culture. Now, culture is a, is a sum total of behaviors. And the reality is that if you look at it, especially in the last decade, uh, we've agile with dev ops with, um, I bring infrastructures, uh, it's, it's way more volatile today than it was 10 years ago. And so the, when you start to look at the velocity of the data, the volume of data, the variety of data to analyze the system, um, it's, it's very challenging for it to actually even understand and optimize its own processes, let alone, um, to actually include business as sort of an integral part of kind of a delivery chain. And so it's both kind of a combination of, of culture, um, which is required, uh, as well as tools, right? To be able to start to bring together all these data together, and then given the volume of variety of philosophy of the data. Uh, we have to apply some core technologies, which have only really, truly emerged in the last five to 10 years around machine learning and analytics. And so it's really kind of a combination of those freaks, which are coming together today, truly out organizations kind of get to the next level. Right, >>Right. So let's talk about the manifesto. Let's talk about, uh, the coalition, uh, the BizOps coalition. I just liked that you put down these really simple, you know, kind of straightforward core values. You guys have four core values that you're highlighting, you know, business outcomes, over individual projects and outputs, trust, and collaboration, oversight, load teams, and organizations, data driven decisions, what you just talked about, uh, you know, over opinions and judgment and learned, respond and pivot. I mean, surgery sounds like pretty basic stuff, right? I mean, aren't, isn't everyone working to these values already. And I think he touched on it on culture, right? Trust and collaboration, data driven decisions. I mean, these are fundamental ways that people must run their business today, or the person that's across the street, that's doing it. It's going to knock them out right off their block. >>Yeah. So that's very true. But, uh, so I'll, I'll mention an hour survey. We did, uh, I think about six months ago and it was in partnership with, uh, with, uh, an industry analyst and we serve at a, again, a number of it executives to understand only we're tracking business outcomes. I'm going to get the software executives, it executives we're tracking business outcomes. And the, there were less than 15% of these executives were actually tracking the outcomes of the software delivery. And you see that every day. Right? So in my own teams, for instance, we've been adopting a lot of these core principles in the last year or so, and we've uncovered that 16% of our resources were basically aligned around initiatives, which are not strategic for us. Um, I take another example, for instance, one of our customers in the, uh, in the airline industry and Harvard, for instance, that a number of, uh, um, that they had software issues that led to people searching for flights and not returning any kind of availability. >>And yet, um, you know, the it teams, whether it's operation software environments were completely oblivious to that because they were completely blindsided to it. And so the connectivity between kind of the inwards metrics that RT is using, whether it's database time, cycle time, or whatever metric we use in it are typically completely divorced from the business metrics. And so at its core, it's really about starting to align the business metrics with the, the, the software delivery chain, right? This, uh, the system, which is really a core differentiator for these organizations. It's about connecting those two things and starting to, um, infuse some of the agile culture and principles. Um, that's emerged from the software side into the business side. Um, of course the lean movement and other movements have started to change some of these dynamics on the business side. And so I think this, this is the moment where we are starting to see kind of the imperative to transform. Now, you know, Covina obviously has been a key driver for that. The, um, the technology is right to start to be able to weave data together and really kind of, uh, also the cultural shifts, uh, Prue agile through dev ops through, uh, the SRE movement, uh frulein um, business transformation, all these things are coming together and that are really creating kind of the conditions for the BizOps manifestor to exist, >>Uh, Clayton Christianson, great, uh, Harvard professor innovator's dilemma might steal my all time. Favorite business books, you know, talks about how difficult it is for incumbents to react to, to disruptive change, right? Because they're always working on incremental change cause that's what their customers are asking for. And there's a good ROI when you talk about, you know, companies not measuring the right thing. I mean, clearly it has some portion of their budget that has to go to keeping the lights on, right. That that's always the case, but hopefully that's an ever decreasing percentage of their total activity. So, you know, what should people be measuring? I mean, what are kind of the new metrics, um, in, in biz ops that drive people to be looking at the right things, measuring the right things and subsequently making the right decisions, investment decisions on whether they should do, you know, move project a along or project B. >>So there, there are only two things, right? So, so I think what you're talking about is portfolio management, investment management, right. And, um, which, which is a key challenge, right? Um, in my own experience, right? Uh, driving strategy or a large scale kind of software organization for years, um, it's very difficult to even get kind of a base data as to who is doing what, uh, um, I mean, some of our largest customers we're engaged with right now are simply trying to get a very simple answer, which is how many people do I have and that specific initiative at any point in time and just tracking that information is extremely difficult. So, and, and again, back to a product project management Institute, um, they're, they've estimated that on average, it organizations have anywhere between 10 to 20% of their resources focused on initiatives, which are not strategically aligned. >>So that's one dimension on portfolio management. I think the key aspect though, that we are really keen on is really around kind of the alignment of a business metrics to the it metrics. Um, so I'll use kind of two simple examples, right? And my background is around quality. And so I've always believed that fitness for purpose is really kind of a key, um, uh, philosophy if you will. And so if you start to think about quality as fitness for purpose, you start to look at it from a customer point of view, right. And fitness for purpose for core banking application or mobile application are different, right? So the definition of a business value that you're trying to achieve is different. Um, and so the, and yet, if you look at our, it, operations are operating, they were using kind of a same type of, uh, kind of inward metrics, uh, like a database of time or a cycle time, or what is my point of velocity, right? >>And, uh, and so the challenge really is this inward facing metrics that it is using, which are divorced from ultimately the outcome. And so, you know, if I'm, if I'm trying to build a poor banking application, my core metric is likely going to be uptime, right? If I'm trying to build a mobile application or maybe your social mobile app, it's probably going to be engagement. And so what you want is for everybody across it, to look at these metric, and what's hard, the metrics within the software delivery chain, which ultimately contribute to that business metric and some cases cycle time may be completely irrelevant, right? Again, my core banking app, maybe I don't care about cycle time. And so it's really about aligning those metrics and be able to start to differentiate, um, the key challenges you mentioned, uh, around the, the, um, uh, around the disruption that we see is, or the investors is the dilemma now is really around the fact that many it organizations are essentially applying the same approaches of, for innovation, right, for basically scrap work, then they would apply to kind of over more traditional projects. And so, you know, there's been a lot of talk about two-speed it, and yes, it exists, but in reality are really organizations, um, truly differentiating, um, all of the operate, their, their projects and products based on the outcomes that they're trying to achieve. And this is really where BizOps is trying to affect. >>I love that, you know, again, it doesn't seem like brain surgery, but focus on the outcomes, right. And it's horses for courses, as you said, this project, you know, what you're measuring and how you define success, isn't necessarily the same as, as on this other project. So let's talk about some of the principles we've talked about the values, but, you know, I think it's interesting that, that, that the BizOps coalition, you know, just basically took the time to write these things down and they don't seem all that, uh, super insightful, but I guess you just gotta get them down and have them on paper and have them in front of your face. But I want to talk about, you know, one of the key ones, which you just talked about, which is changing requirements, right. And working in a dynamic situation, which is really what's driven, you know, this, the software to change in software development, because, you know, if you're in a game app and your competitor comes out with a new blue sword, you've got to come out with a new blue sword. >>So whether you had that on your Kanban wall or not. So it's, it's really this embracing of the speed of change and, and, and, and making that, you know, the rule, not the exception. I think that's a phenomenal one. And the other one you talked about is data, right? And that today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be generated by machine learning and AI, and, you know, in the, the big data thing with Hadoop, you know, started years ago, but we are seeing more and more that people are finally figuring it out, that it's not just big data, and it's not even generic machine learning or artificial intelligence, but it's applying those particular data sets and that particular types of algorithms to a specific problem, to your point, to try to actually reach an objective, whether that's, you know, increasing the, your average ticket or, you know, increasing your checkout rate with, with, with shopping carts that don't get left behind and these types of things. So it's a really different way to think about the world in the good old days, probably when you got started, when we had big, giant, you know, MRDs and PRDs and sat down and coded for two years and came out with a product release and hopefully not too many patches subsequently to that. >>It's interesting. Right. Um, again, back to one of these surveys that we did with, uh, with about 600, the ITA executives, and, uh, and, and we, we purposely designed those questions to be pretty open. Um, and, and one of them was really role requirements and, uh, and it was really a wrong kind of what do you, what is the best approach? What is your preferred approach towards requirements? And if I remember correctly over 80% of the it executives set that the best approach they'll prefer to approach is for requirements to be completely defined before software development starts. Let me pause there where 20 years after the agile manifesto, right? And for 80% of these idea executives to basically claim that the best approach is for requirements to be fully baked before salt, before software development starts, basically shows that we still have a very major issue. >>And again, our hypothesis in working with many organizations is that the key challenge is really the boundary between business and it, which is still very much contract based. If you look at the business side, they basically are expecting for it deliver on time on budget, right. But what is the incentive for it to actually delivering all the business outcomes, right? How often is it measured on the business outcomes and not on an SLA or on a budget type criteria. And so that, that's really the fundamental shift that we need to, we really need to drive up as an industry. Um, and you know, we, we talk about kind of this, this imperative for organizations to operate that's one, and back to the innovator's dilemma. The key difference between these larger organization is, is really kind of a, if you look at the amount of capital investment that they can put into pretty much anything, why are they losing compared to, um, you know, startups? What, why is it that, uh, more than 40% of, uh, personal loans today or issued not by your traditional brick and mortar banks, but by, um, startups? Well, the reason, yes, it's the traditional culture of doing incremental changes and not disrupting ourselves, which Christiansen covered at length, but it's also the inability to really fundamentally change kind of a dynamic picture. We can business it and, and, and partner right. To, to deliver on a specific business outcome. Right. >>I love that. That's a great, that's a great summary. And in fact, getting ready for this interview, I saw you mentioning another thing where, you know, the, the problem with the agile development is that you're actually now getting more silos because you have all these autonomous people working, you know, kind of independently. So it's even a harder challenge for, for the business leaders to, to, to, as you said, to know, what's actually going on, but, but certainly I w I want to close, um, and talk about the coalition. Um, so clearly these are all great concepts. These are concepts you want to apply to your business every day. Why the coalition, why, you know, take these concepts out to a broader audience, including your, your competition and, and the broader industry to say, Hey, we, as a group need to put a stamp of approval on these concepts, values, these principles. >>So, first I think we, we want, um, everybody to realize that we are all talking about the same things, the same concepts. I think we were all from our own different vantage point, realizing that, um, things after change, and again, back to, you know, whether it's value stream management or site reliability engineering, or biz ops, we're all kind of using slightly different languages. Um, and so I think one of the important aspects of BizOps is for us, all of us, whether we're talking about, you know, consulting agile transformation experts, uh, whether we're talking about vendors, right, provides kind of tools and technologies, or these large enterprises to transform for all of us to basically have kind of a reference that lets us speak around kind of, um, in a much more consistent way. The second aspect is for, to me is for, um, these concepts to start to be embraced, not just by us or trying, or, you know, vendors, um, system integrators, consulting firms, educators, thought leaders, but also for some of our old customers to start to become evangelists of their own in the industry. >>So we, our, our objective with the coalition needs to be pretty, pretty broad. Um, and our hope is by, by starting to basically educate, um, our, our joint customers or partners, that we can start to really foster these behaviors and start to really change, uh, some of dynamics. So we're very pleased at if you look at, uh, some of the companies which have joined the, the, the, the manifesto. Um, so we have vendors and suggest desktop or advance, or, um, uh, PagerDuty for instance, or even planned view, uh, one of my direct competitors, um, but also thought leaders like Tom Davenport or, uh, or cap Gemini or, um, um, smaller firms like, uh, business agility, institutes, or agility elf. Um, and so our, our goal really is to start to bring together, uh, thought leaders, people who have been LP, larger organizations do digital transformation vendors, were providing the technologies that many of these organizations use to deliver on these digital preservation and for all of us to start to provide the kind of, uh, education support and tools that the industry needs. Yeah, >>That's great surge. And, uh, you know, congratulations to you and the team. I know this has been going on for a while, putting all this together, getting people to sign onto the manifesto, putting the coalition together, and finally today getting to unveil it to the world in a little bit more of a public, uh, opportunity. So again, you know, really good values, really simple principles, something that, that, uh, shouldn't have to be written down, but it's nice cause it is, and now you can print it out and stick it on your wall. So thank you for, uh, for sharing this story. And again, congrats to you and the team. Thank you. Appreciate it. My pleasure. Alrighty, surge. If you want to learn more about the biz ops, Manifesta go to biz ops manifesto.org, read it, and you can sign it and you can stay here for more coverage. I'm the cube of the biz ops manifesto unveiled. Thanks for watching. See you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of this ops manifesto unveiled and brought to you by >>This obstacle volition. Hey, welcome back, everybody Jeffrey here with the cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz ops manifesto unveiling. It's been in the works for awhile, but today's the day that it actually kind of come out to the, to the public. And we're excited to have a real industry luminary here to talk about what's going on, why this is important and share his perspective. And we're happy to have from Cape Cod, I believe is Tom Davenport. He's a distinguished author and professor at Babson college. We could go on, he's got a lot of great titles and, and really illuminary in the area of big data and analytics Thomas. Great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Happy to be here with you. >>Great. So let's just jump into it, you know, and getting ready for this. I came across your LinkedIn posts. I think you did earlier this summer in June and right off the bat, the first sentence just grabbed my attention. I'm always interested in new attempts to address longterm issues, uh, in how technology works within businesses, biz ops. What did you see in biz ops, uh, that, that kind of addresses one of these really big longterm problems? >>Well, yeah, but the longterm problem is that we've had a poor connection between business people and it people between business objectives and the, it solutions that address them. This has been going on, I think since the beginning of information technology and sadly it hasn't gone away. And so biz ops is a new attempt to deal with that issue with a, you know, a new framework, eventually a broad set of solutions that increase the likelihood that will actually solve a business problem with an it capability. >>Right. You know, it's interesting to compare it with like dev ops, which I think a lot of people are probably familiar with, which was, you know, built around, uh, agile software development and a theory that we want to embrace change that that changes. Okay. And we want to be able to iterate quickly and incorporate that. And that's been happening in the software world for, for 20 plus years. What's taken so long to get that to the business side, because as the pace of change has changed on the software side, you know, that's a strategic issue in terms of execution, the business side that they need now to change priorities. And, you know, there's no PRDs and MRDs and big, giant strategic plans that sit on the shelf for five years. That's just not the way business works anymore. It took a long time to get here. >>Yeah, it did. And, you know, there had been previous attempts to make a better connection between business and it, there was the so called strategic alignment framework that a couple of friends of mine from Boston university developed, I think more than 20 years ago, but you know, now we have better technology for creating that linkage. And the, you know, the idea of kind of ops oriented frameworks is pretty pervasive now. So I think it's time for another serious attempt at it. >>And do you think doing it this way, right. With the, with the BizOps coalition, you know, getting a collection of, of, of kind of likeminded individuals and companies together, and actually even having a manifesto, which we're making this declarative statement of, of principles and values, you think that's what it takes to kind of drive this kind of beyond the experiment and actually, you know, get it done and really start to see some results in, in, uh, in production in the field. >>I think certainly no one vendor organization can pull this off single handedly. It does require a number of organizations collaborating and working together. So I think our coalition is a good idea and a manifesto is just a good way to kind of lay out what you see as the key principles of the idea. And that makes it much easier for everybody to understand and act on. >>I, I think it's just, it's really interesting having, you know, having them written down on paper and having it just be so clearly articulated both in terms of the, of the values as well as, as the, uh, the principles and the values, you know, business outcomes matter trust and collaboration, data-driven decisions, which is the number three of four, and then learn, respond and pivot. It doesn't seem like those should have to be spelled out so clearly, but, but obviously it helps to have them there. You can stick them on the wall and kind of remember what your priorities are, but you're the data guy. You're the analytics guy, uh, and a big piece of this is data and analytics and moving to data driven decisions. And principle number seven says, you know, today's organizations generate more data than humans can process and informed decisions can be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence right up your alley. You know, you've talked a number of times on kind of the mini stages of analytics. Um, and how has that evolved over over time, you know, as you think of analytics and machine learning, driving decisions beyond supporting decisions, but actually starting to make decisions in machine time. What's that, what's that thing for you? What does that make you, you know, start to think, wow, this is this going to be pretty significant. >>Yeah. Well, you know, this has been a longterm interest of mine. Um, the last generation of AI, I was very interested in expert systems. And then, um, I think, uh, more than 10 years ago, I wrote an article about automated decision-making using what was available then, which was rule-based approaches. Um, but you know, this addresses an issue that we've always had with analytics and AI. Um, you know, we, we tended to refer to those things as providing decision support, but the problem is that if the decision maker didn't want their support, didn't want to use them in order to make a decision, they didn't provide any value. And so the nice thing about automating decisions, um, with now contemporary AI tools is that we can ensure that data and analytics get brought into the decision without any possible disconnection. Now, I think humans still have something to add here, and we often will need to examine how that decision is being made and maybe even have the ability to override it. But in general, I think at least for, you know, repetitive tactical decisions, um, involving a lot of data, we want most of those, I think to be at least, um, recommended if not totally made by an algorithm or an AI based system. And that I believe would add to, um, the quality and the precision and the accuracy of decisions and in most organizations, >>No, I think, I think you just answered my next question before I, before I asked it, you know, we had dr. Robert Gates on the former secretary of defense on a few years back, and we were talking about machines and machines making decisions. And he said at that time, you know, the only weapon systems, uh, that actually had an automated trigger on it were on the North Korea and South Korea border. Um, everything else, as you said, had to go through a sub person before the final decision was made. And my question is, you know, what are kind of the attributes of the decision that enable us to more easily automated? And then how do you see that kind of morphing over time, both as the data to support that as well as our comfort level, um, enables us to turn more and more actual decisions over to the machine? >>Well, yeah, as I suggested we need, um, data and the data that we have to kind of train our models has to be high quality and current, and we need to know the outcomes of that data. You know, um, most machine learning models, at least in business are supervised. And that means we need to have labeled outcomes in the, in the training data. But I, you know, um, the pandemic that we're living through is a good illustration of the fact that, that the data also have to be reflective of current reality. And, you know, one of the things that we're finding out quite frequently these days is that, um, the data that we have do not reflect, you know, what it's like to do business in a pandemic. Um, I wrote a little piece about this recently with Jeff cam at wake forest university, we call it data science quarantined, and we interviewed with somebody who said, you know, it's amazing what eight weeks of zeros will do to your demand forecast. We just don't really know what happens in a pandemic. Um, our models maybe have to be put on the shelf for a little while and until we can develop some new ones or we can get some other guidelines into making decisions. So I think that's one of the key things with automated decision making. We have to make sure that the data from the past and that's all we have of course, is a good guide to, you know, what's happening in the present and the future as far as we understand it. >>Yeah. I used to joke when we started this calendar year 2020, it was finally the year that we know everything with the benefit of hindsight, but I turned down 20, 20 a year. We found out we actually know nothing and everything and thought we knew, but I want to, I want to follow up on that because you know, it did suddenly change everything, right? We've got this light switch moment. Everybody's working from home now we're many, many months into it, and it's going to continue for a while. I saw your interview with Bernard Marr and you had a really interesting comment that now we have to deal with this change. We don't have a lot of data and you talked about hold fold or double down. And, and I can't think of a more, you know, kind of appropriate metaphor for driving the value of the biz ops when now your whole portfolio strategy, um, these to really be questioned and, and, you know, you have to be really, uh, well, uh, executing on what you are, holding, what you're folding and what you're doubling down with this completely new environment. >>Well, yeah, and I hope I did this in the interview. I would like to say that I came up with that term, but it actually came from a friend of mine. Who's a senior executive at Genpact. And, um, I, um, used it mostly to talk about AI and AI applications, but I think you could, you could use it much more broadly to talk about your entire sort of portfolio of digital projects. You need to think about, well, um, given some constraints on resources and a difficult economy for a while, which of our projects do we want to keep going on pretty much the way we were and which ones are not that necessary anymore? You see a lot of that in AI, because we had so many pilots, somebody told me, you know, we've got more pilots around here than O'Hare airport and, and AI. Um, and then, but the ones that involve doubled down, they're even more important to you. They are, you know, a lot of organizations have found this out, um, in the pandemic on digital projects, it's more and more important for customers to be able to interact with you, um, digitally. And so you certainly wouldn't want to cancel those projects or put them on hold. So you double down on them and get them done faster and better. Right, >>Right. Uh, another, another thing that came up in my research that, that you quoted, um, was, was from Jeff Bezos, talking about the great bulk of what we do is quietly, but meaningfully improving core operations. You know, I think that is so core to this concept of not AI and machine learning and kind of the general sense, which, which gets way too much buzz, but really applied right. Applied to a specific problem. And that's where you start to see the value. And, you know, the, the BizOps, uh, manifesto is, is, is calling it out in this particular process. But I'd love to get your perspective as you know, you speak generally about this topic all the time, but how people should really be thinking about where are the applications where I can apply this technology to get direct business value. >>Yeah, well, you know, even talking about automated decisions, um, uh, the kind of once in a lifetime decisions, uh, the ones that, um, ag Lafley, the former CEO of Procter and gamble used to call the big swing decisions. You only get a few of those. He said in your tenure as CEO, those are probably not going to be the ones that you're automating in part because, um, you don't have much data about them. You're only making them a few times and in part, because, um, they really require that big picture thinking and the ability to kind of anticipate the future, that the best human decision makers, um, have. Um, but, um, in general, I think where they, I, the projects that are working well are, you know, what I call the low hanging fruit ones, the, some people even report to it referred to it as boring AI. >>So, you know, sucking data out of a contract in order to compare it to a bill of lading for what arrived at your supply chain companies can save or make a lot of money with that kind of comparison. It's not the most exciting thing, but AI, as you suggested is really good at those narrow kinds of tasks. It's not so good at the, at the really big moonshots, like curing cancer or, you know, figuring out well what's the best stock or bond under all or even autonomous vehicles. Um, we, we made some great progress in that area, but everybody seems to agree that they're not going to be perfect for quite a while, and we really don't want to be driving around on, um, and then very much unless they're, you know, good and all kinds of weather and with all kinds of pedestrian traffic and you know, that sort of thing, right? >>That's funny you bring up contract management. I had a buddy years ago, they had a startup around contract management and I've like, and this was way before we had the compute power today and cloud proliferation. I said, you know, how can you possibly build software around contract management? It's language, it's legal, ease. It's very specific. And he's like, Jeff, we just need to know where's the contract. And when does it expire? And who's the signatory. And he built a business on those, you know, very simple little facts that weren't being covered because their contracts are in people's drawers and files and homes. And Lord only knows. So it's really interesting, as you said, these kind of low hanging fruit opportunities where you can extract a lot of business value without trying to, you know, boil the ocean. >>Yeah. I mean, if you're Amazon, um, uh, Jeff Bezos thinks it's important to have some kind of billion dollar project. And he even says it's important to have a billion dollar failure or two every year. But I think most organizations probably are better off being a little less aggressive and, you know, sticking to, um, what AI has been doing for a long time, which is, you know, making smarter decisions based on, based on data. >>Right? So Tom, I want to shift gears one more time before, before we let you go on, on kind of a new topic for you, not really new, but you know, not, not a, the vast majority of, of your publications and that's the new way to work, you know, as, as the pandemic hit in mid March, right. And we had this light switch moment, everybody had to work from home and it was, you know, kind of crisis and get everybody set up. Well, you know, now we're five months, six months, seven months. A number of companies have said that people are not going to be going back to work for a while. And so we're going to continue on this for a while. And then even when it's not what it is now, it's not going to be what it was before. So, you know, I wonder, and I know you, you, uh, you teased, you're working on a new book, you know, some of your thoughts on, you know, kind of this new way to work and, and, and the human factors in this new, this new kind of reality that we're kind of evolving into, I guess. >>Yeah. I missed was an interest of mine. I think, um, back in the nineties, I wrote an article called, um, a coauthored, an article called two cheers for the virtual office. And, you know, it was just starting to emerge. Then some people were very excited about it. Some people were skeptical and, uh, we said two cheers rather than three cheers because clearly there's some shortcomings. And, you know, I keep seeing these pop up. It's great that we can work from our homes. It's great that we can, most of what we need to do with a digital interface, but, um, you know, things like innovation and creativity, and certainly, um, uh, a good, um, happy social life kind of requires some face to face contact every now and then. And so I, you know, I think we'll go back to an environment where there is some of that. >>Um, we'll have, um, times when people convene in one place so they can get to know each other face to face and learn from each other that way. And most of the time, I think it's a huge waste of people's time to commute into the office every day and to jump on airplanes, to, to, um, give every little, um, uh, sales call or give every little presentation. Uh, we just have to really narrow down what are the circumstances where face to face contact really matters. And when can we get by with digital? You know, I think one of the things in my current work I'm finding is that even when you have AI based decision making, you really need a good platform in which that all takes place. So in addition to these virtual platforms, we need to develop platforms that kind of structure the workflow for us and tell us what we should be doing next, then make automated decisions when necessary. And I think that ultimately is a big part of biz ops as well. It's not just the intelligence of an AI system, but it's the flow of work that kind of keeps things moving smoothly throughout your organization. >>I think such, such a huge opportunity as you just said, cause I forget the stats on how often we're interrupted with notifications between email texts, Slack, a sauna, Salesforce, the list goes on and on. So, you know, to put an AI layer between the person and all these systems that are begging for attention, you've written a book on the attention economy, which is a whole nother topic, we'll say for another day, you know, it, it really begs, it really begs for some assistance because you know, you just can't get him picked, you know, every two minutes and really get quality work done. It's just not, it's just not realistic. And you know what? I don't think that's a feature that we're looking for. >>I agree. Totally >>Tom. Well, thank you so much for your time. Really enjoyed the conversation. I got to dig into the library. It's very long. So I might start at the attention economy. I haven't read that one. And to me, I think that's the fascinating thing in which we're living. So thank you for your time and, uh, great to see you. >>My pleasure, Jeff. Great to be here. >>All right. He's Tom I'm Jeff. You are watching the continuing coverage of the biz ops manifesto and Vail. Thanks for watching the cube. We'll see you next time.

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

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of enterprise data automation, an event Siri's brought to you by Iot. Tahoe Welcome everybody to Enterprise Data Automation. Ah co created digital program on the Cube with support from my hotel. So my name is Dave Volante. And today we're using the hashtag data automated. You know, organizations. They really struggle to get more value out of their data, time to data driven insights that drive cost savings or new revenue opportunities. They simply take too long. So today we're gonna talk about how organizations can streamline their data operations through automation, machine intelligence and really simplifying data migrations to the cloud. We'll be talking to technologists, visionaries, hands on practitioners and experts that are not just talking about streamlining their data pipelines. They're actually doing it. So keep it right there. We'll be back shortly with a J ahora who's the CEO of Iot Tahoe to kick off the program. You're watching the Cube, the leader in digital global coverage. We're right back right after this short break. Innovation impact influence. Welcome to the Cube disruptors. Developers and practitioners learn from the voices of leaders who share their personal insights from the hottest digital events around the globe. Enjoy the best this community has to offer on the Cube, your global leader. High tech digital coverage from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of enterprise, data, automation and event. Siri's brought to you by Iot. Tahoe. Okay, we're back. Welcome back to Data Automated. A J ahora is CEO of I O ta ho, JJ. Good to see how things in London >>Thanks doing well. Things in, well, customers that I speak to on day in, day out that we partner with, um, they're busy adapting their businesses to serve their customers. It's very much a game of ensuring the week and serve our customers to help their customers. Um, you know, the adaptation that's happening here is, um, trying to be more agile. Got to be more flexible. Um, a lot of pressure on data, a lot of demand on data and to deliver more value to the business, too. So that customers, >>as I said, we've been talking about data ops a lot. The idea being Dev Ops applied to the data pipeline, But talk about enterprise data automation. What is it to you. And how is it different from data off >>Dev Ops, you know, has been great for breaking down those silos between different roles functions and bring people together to collaborate. Andi, you know, we definitely see that those tools, those methodologies, those processes, that kind of thinking, um, lending itself to data with data is exciting. We look to do is build on top of that when data automation, it's the it's the nuts and bolts of the the algorithms, the models behind machine learning that the functions. That's where we investors, our r and d on bringing that in to build on top of the the methods, the ways of thinking that break down those silos on injecting that automation into the business processes that are going to drive a business to serve its customers. It's, um, a layer beyond Dev ops data ops. They can get to that point where well, I think about it is is the automation behind new dimension. We've come a long way in the last few years. Boy is, we started out with automating some of those simple, um, to codify, um, I have a high impact on organization across the data a cost effective way house. There's data related tasks that classify data on and a lot of our original pattern certain people value that were built up is is very much around that >>love to get into the tech a little bit in terms of how it works. And I think we have a graphic here that gets into that a little bit. So, guys, if you bring that up, >>sure. I mean right there in the middle that the heart of what we do it is, you know, the intellectual property now that we've built up over time that takes from Hacha genius data sources. Your Oracle Relational database. Short your mainframe. It's a lay and increasingly AP eyes and devices that produce data and that creates the ability to automatically discover that data. Classify that data after it's classified. Them have the ability to form relationships across those different source systems, silos, different lines of business. And once we've automated that that we can start to do some cool things that just puts of contact and meaning around that data. So it's moving it now from bringing data driven on increasingly where we have really smile, right people in our customer organizations you want I do some of those advanced knowledge tasks data scientists and ah, yeah, quants in some of the banks that we work with, the the onus is on, then, putting everything we've done there with automation, pacifying it, relationship, understanding that equality, the policies that you can apply to that data. I'm putting it in context once you've got the ability to power. Okay, a professional is using data, um, to be able to put that data and contacts and search across the entire enterprise estate. Then then they can start to do some exciting things and piece together the the tapestry that fabric across that different system could be crm air P system such as s AP and some of the newer brown databases that we work with. Snowflake is a great well, if I look back maybe five years ago, we had prevalence of daily technologies at the cutting edge. Those are converging to some of the cloud platforms that we work with Google and AWS and I think very much is, as you said it, those manual attempts to try and grasp. But it is such a complex challenges scale quickly runs out of steam because once, once you've got your hat, once you've got your fingers on the details Oh, um, what's what's in your data state? It's changed, You know, you've onboard a new customer. You signed up a new partner. Um, customer has, you know, adopted a new product that you just Lawrence and there that that slew of data keeps coming. So it's keeping pace with that. The only answer really is is some form of automation >>you're working with AWS. You're working with Google, You got red hat. IBM is as partners. What is attracting those folks to your ecosystem and give us your thoughts on the importance of ecosystem? >>That's fundamental. So, I mean, when I caimans where you tell here is the CEO of one of the, um, trends that I wanted us CIO to be part of was being open, having an open architecture allowed one thing that was close to my heart, which is as a CEO, um, a c i o where you go, a budget vision on and you've already made investments into your organization, and some of those are pretty long term bets. They should be going out 5 10 years, sometimes with the CRM system training up your people, getting everybody working together around a common business platform. What I wanted to ensure is that we could openly like it using AP eyes that were available, the love that some investment on the cost that has already gone into managing in organizations I t. But business users to before. So part of the reason why we've been able to be successful with, um, the partners like Google AWS and increasingly, a number of technology players. That red hat mongo DB is another one where we're doing a lot of good work with, um and snowflake here is, um Is those investments have been made by the organizations that are our customers, and we want to make sure we're adding to that. And they're leveraging the value that they've already committed to. >>Yeah, and maybe you could give us some examples of the r A y and the business impact. >>Yeah, I mean, the r a y David is is built upon on three things that I mentioned is a combination off. You're leveraging the existing investment with the existing estate, whether that's on Microsoft Azure or AWS or Google, IBM, and I'm putting that to work because, yeah, the customers that we work with have had made those choices. On top of that, it's, um, is ensuring that we have got the automation that is working right down to the level off data, a column level or the file level we don't do with meta data. It is being very specific to be at the most granular level. So as we've grown our processes and on the automation, gasification tagging, applying policies from across different compliance and regulatory needs that an organization has to the data, everything that then happens downstream from that is ready to serve a business outcome now without hoping out which run those processes within hours of getting started And, um, Bill that picture, visualize that picture and bring it to life. You know, the PR Oh, I that's off the bat with finding data that should have been deleted data that was copies off on and being able to allow the architect whether it's we're working on GCB or a migration to any other clouds such as AWS or a multi cloud landscape right off the map. >>A. J. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube and sharing your insights and your experience is great to have you. >>Thank you, David. Look who is smoking in >>now. We want to bring in the customer perspective. We have a great conversation with Paul Damico, senior vice president data architecture, Webster Bank. So keep it right there. >>Utah Data automated Improve efficiency, Drive down costs and make your enterprise data work for you. Yeah, we're on a mission to enable our customers to automate the management of data to realise maximum strategic and operational benefits. We envisage a world where data users consume accurate, up to date unified data distilled from many silos to deliver transformational outcomes, activate your data and avoid manual processing. Accelerate data projects by enabling non I t resources and data experts to consolidate categorize and master data. Automate your data operations Power digital transformations by automating a significant portion of data management through human guided machine learning. Yeah, get value from the start. Increase the velocity of business outcomes with complete accurate data curated automatically for data, visualization tours and analytic insights. Improve the security and quality of your data. Data automation improves security by reducing the number of individuals who have access to sensitive data, and it can improve quality. Many companies report double digit era reduction in data entry and other repetitive tasks. Trust the way data works for you. Data automation by our Tahoe learns as it works and can ornament business user behavior. It learns from exception handling and scales up or down is needed to prevent system or application overloads or crashes. It also allows for innate knowledge to be socialized rather than individualized. No longer will your companies struggle when the employee who knows how this report is done, retires or takes another job, the work continues on without the need for detailed information transfer. Continue supporting the digital shift. Perhaps most importantly, data automation allows companies to begin making moves towards a broader, more aspirational transformation, but on a small scale but is easy to implement and manage and delivers quick wins. Digital is the buzzword of the day, but many companies recognized that it is a complex strategy requires time and investment. Once you get started with data automation, the digital transformation initiated and leaders and employees alike become more eager to invest time and effort in a broader digital transformational agenda. Yeah, >>everybody, we're back. And this is Dave Volante, and we're covering the whole notion of automating data in the Enterprise. And I'm really excited to have Paul Damico here. She's a senior vice president of enterprise Data Architecture at Webster Bank. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Nice to see you too. Yes. >>So let's let's start with Let's start with Webster Bank. You guys are kind of a regional. I think New York, New England, uh, leave headquartered out of Connecticut, but tell us a little bit about the >>bank. Yeah, Webster Bank is regional, Boston. And that again in New York, Um, very focused on in Westchester and Fairfield County. Um, they're a really highly rated bank regional bank for this area. They, um, hold, um, quite a few awards for the area for being supportive for the community. And, um, are really moving forward. Technology lives. Currently, today we have, ah, a small group that is just working toward moving into a more futuristic, more data driven data warehouse. That's our first item. And then the other item is to drive new revenue by anticipating what customers do when they go to the bank or when they log into there to be able to give them the best offer. The only way to do that is you have timely, accurate, complete data on the customer and what's really a great value on off something to offer that >>at the top level, what were some of what are some of the key business drivers there catalyzing your desire for change >>the ability to give the customer what they need at the time when they need it? And what I mean by that is that we have, um, customer interactions and multiple weights, right? And I want to be able for the customer, too. Walk into a bank, um, or online and see the same the same format and being able to have the same feel, the same look and also to be able to offer them the next best offer for them. >>Part of it is really the cycle time, the end end cycle, time that you're pressing. And then there's if I understand it, residual benefits that are pretty substantial from a revenue opportunity >>exactly. It's drive new customers, Teoh new opportunities. It's enhanced the risk, and it's to optimize the banking process and then obviously, to create new business. Um, and the only way we're going to be able to do that is that we have the ability to look at the data right when the customer walks in the door or right when they open up their app. >>Do you see the potential to increase the data sources and hence the quality of the data? Or is that sort of premature? >>Oh, no. Um, exactly. Right. So right now we ingest a lot of flat files and from our mainframe type of runnin system that we've had for quite a few years. But now that we're moving to the cloud and off Prem and on France, you know, moving off Prem into, like, an s three bucket Where that data king, we can process that data and get that data faster by using real time tools to move that data into a place where, like, snowflake Good, um, utilize that data or we can give it out to our market. The data scientists are out in the lines of business right now, which is great, cause I think that's where data science belongs. We should give them on, and that's what we're working towards now is giving them more self service, giving them the ability to access the data in a more robust way. And it's a single source of truth. So they're not pulling the data down into their own like tableau dashboards and then pushing the data back out. I have eight engineers, data architects, they database administrators, right, um, and then data traditional data forwarding people, Um, and because some customers that I have that our business customers lines of business, they want to just subscribe to a report. They don't want to go out and do any data science work. Um, and we still have to provide that. So we still want to provide them some kind of read regiment that they wake up in the morning and they open up their email. And there's the report that they just drive, um, which is great. And it works out really well. And one of the things. This is why we purchase I o waas. I would have the ability to give the lines of business the ability to do search within the data, and we read the data flows and data redundancy and things like that and help me cleanup the data and also, um, to give it to the data. Analysts who say All right, they just asked me. They want this certain report and it used to take Okay, well, we're gonna four weeks, we're going to go. We're gonna look at the data, and then we'll come back and tell you what we dio. But now with Iot Tahoe, they're able to look at the data and then, in one or two days of being able to go back and say, Yes, we have data. This is where it is. This is where we found that this is the data flows that we've found also, which is what I call it is the birth of a column. It's where the calm was created and where it went live as a teenager. And then it went to, you know, die very archive. >>In researching Iot Tahoe, it seems like one of the strengths of their platform is the ability to visualize data the data structure, and actually dig into it. But also see it, um, and that speeds things up and gives everybody additional confidence. And then the other pieces essentially infusing ai or machine intelligence into the data pipeline is really how you're attacking automation, right? >>Exactly. So you're able to let's say that I have I have seven cause lines of business that are asking me questions. And one of the questions I'll ask me is, um, we want to know if this customer is okay to contact, right? And you know, there's different avenues so you can go online to go. Do not contact me. You can go to the bank And you could say, I don't want, um, email, but I'll take tests and I want, you know, phone calls. Um, all that information. So seven different lines of business asked me that question in different ways once said Okay to contact the other one says, You know, just for one to pray all these, you know, um, and each project before I got there used to be siloed. So one customer would be 100 hours for them to do that and analytical work, and then another cut. Another of analysts would do another 100 hours on the other project. Well, now I can do that all at once, and I can do those type of searches and say yes we already have that documentation. Here it is. And this is where you can find where the customer has said, You know, you don't want I don't want to get access from you by email, or I've subscribed to get emails from you. I'm using Iot typos eight automation right now to bring in the data and to start analyzing the data close to make sure that I'm not missing anything and that I'm not bringing over redundant data. Um, the data warehouse that I'm working off is not, um a It's an on prem. It's an oracle database. Um, and it's 15 years old, so it has extra data in it. It has, um, things that we don't need anymore. And Iot. Tahoe's helping me shake out that, um, extra data that does not need to be moved into my S three. So it's saving me money when I'm moving from offering on Prem. >>What's your vision or your your data driven organization? >>Um, I want for the bankers to be able to walk around with on iPad in their hands and be able to access data for that customer really fast and be able to give them the best deal that they can get. I want Webster to be right there on top, with being able to add new customers and to be able to serve our existing customers who had bank accounts. Since you were 12 years old there and now our, you know, multi. Whatever. Um, I want them to be able to have the best experience with our our bankers. >>That's really what I want is a banking customer. I want my bank to know who I am, anticipate my needs and create a great experience for me. And then let me go on with my life. And so that's a great story. Love your experience, your background and your knowledge. Can't thank you enough for coming on the Cube. >>No, thank you very much. And you guys have a great day. >>Next, we'll talk with Lester Waters, who's the CTO of Iot Toe cluster takes us through the key considerations of moving to the cloud. >>Yeah, right. The entire platform Automated data Discovery data Discovery is the first step to knowing your data auto discover data across any application on any infrastructure and identify all unknown data relationships across the entire siloed data landscape. smart data catalog. Know how everything is connected? Understand everything in context, regained ownership and trust in your data and maintain a single source of truth across cloud platforms, SAS applications, reference data and legacy systems and power business users to quickly discover and understand the data that matters to them with a smart data catalog continuously updated ensuring business teams always have access to the most trusted data available. Automated data mapping and linking automate the identification of unknown relationships within and across data silos throughout the organization. Build your business glossary automatically using in house common business terms, vocabulary and definitions. Discovered relationships appears connections or dependencies between data entities such as customer account, address invoice and these data entities have many discovery properties. At a granular level, data signals dashboards. Get up to date feeds on the health of your data for faster improved data management. See trends, view for history. Compare versions and get accurate and timely visual insights from across the organization. Automated data flows automatically captured every data flow to locate all the dependencies across systems. Visualize how they work together collectively and know who within your organization has access to data. Understand the source and destination for all your business data with comprehensive data lineage constructed automatically during with data discovery phase and continuously load results into the smart Data catalog. Active, geeky automated data quality assessments Powered by active geek You ensure data is fit for consumption that meets the needs of enterprise data users. Keep information about the current data quality state readily available faster Improved decision making Data policy. Governor Automate data governance End to end over the entire data lifecycle with automation, instant transparency and control Automate data policy assessments with glossaries, metadata and policies for sensitive data discovery that automatically tag link and annotate with metadata to provide enterprise wide search for all lines of business self service knowledge graph Digitize and search your enterprise knowledge. Turn multiple siloed data sources into machine Understandable knowledge from a single data canvas searching Explore data content across systems including GRP CRM billing systems, social media to fuel data pipelines >>Yeah, yeah, focusing on enterprise data automation. We're gonna talk about the journey to the cloud Remember, the hashtag is data automate and we're here with Leicester Waters. Who's the CTO of Iot Tahoe? Give us a little background CTO, You've got a deep, deep expertise in a lot of different areas. But what do we need to know? >>Well, David, I started my career basically at Microsoft, uh, where I started the information Security Cryptography group. They're the very 1st 1 that the company had, and that led to a career in information, security. And and, of course, as easy as you go along with information security data is the key element to be protected. Eso I always had my hands and data not naturally progressed into a roll out Iot talk was their CTO. >>What's the prescription for that automation journey and simplifying that migration to the cloud? >>Well, I think the first thing is understanding what you've got. So discover and cataloging your data and your applications. You know, I don't know what I have. I can't move it. I can't. I can't improve it. I can't build upon it. And I have to understand there's dependence. And so building that data catalog is the very first step What I got. Okay, >>so So we've done the audit. We know we've got what's what's next? Where do we go >>next? So the next thing is remediating that data you know, where do I have duplicate data? I may have often times in an organization. Uh, data will get duplicated. So somebody will take a snapshot of the data, you know, and then end up building a new application, which suddenly becomes dependent on that data. So it's not uncommon for an organization of 20 master instances of a customer, and you can see where that will go. And trying to keep all that stuff in sync becomes a nightmare all by itself. So you want to sort of understand where all your redundant data is? So when you go to the cloud, maybe you have an opportunity here to do you consolidate that that data, >>then what? You figure out what to get rid of our actually get rid of it. What's what's next? >>Yes, yes, that would be the next step. So figure out what you need. What, you don't need you Often times I've found that there's obsolete columns of data in your databases that you just don't need. Or maybe it's been superseded by another. You've got tables have been superseded by other tables in your database, so you got to kind of understand what's being used and what's not. And then from that, you can decide. I'm gonna leave this stuff behind or I'm gonna I'm gonna archive this stuff because I might need it for data retention where I'm just gonna delete it. You don't need it. All were >>plowing through your steps here. What's next on the >>journey? The next one is is in a nutshell. Preserve your data format. Don't. Don't, Don't. Don't boil the ocean here at music Cliche. You know, you you want to do a certain degree of lift and shift because you've got application dependencies on that data and the data format, the tables in which they sent the columns and the way they're named. So some degree, you are gonna be doing a lift and ship, but it's an intelligent lift and ship. The >>data lives in silos. So how do you kind of deal with that? Problem? Is that is that part of the journey? >>That's that's great pointed because you're right that the data silos happen because, you know, this business unit is start chartered with this task. Another business unit has this task and that's how you get those in stance creations of the same data occurring in multiple places. So you really want to is part of your cloud migration. You really want a plan where there's an opportunity to consolidate your data because that means it will be less to manage. Would be less data to secure, and it will be. It will have a smaller footprint, which means reduce costs. >>But maybe you could address data quality. Where does that fit in on the >>journey? That's that's a very important point, you know. First of all, you don't want to bring your legacy issues with U. S. As the point I made earlier. If you've got data quality issues, this is a good time to find those and and identify and remediate them. But that could be a laborious task, and you could probably accomplish. It will take a lot of work. So the opportunity used tools you and automate that process is really will help you find those outliers that >>what's next? I think we're through. I think I've counted six. What's the What's the lucky seven >>Lucky seven involved your business users. Really, When you think about it, you're your data is in silos, part of part of this migration to cloud as an opportunity to break down the silos. These silence that naturally occurs are the business. You, uh, you've got to break these cultural barriers that sometimes exists between business and say so. For example, I always advise there's an opportunity year to consolidate your sensitive data. Your P I. I personally identifiable information and and three different business units have the same source of truth From that, there's an opportunity to consolidate that into one. >>Well, great advice, Lester. Thanks so much. I mean, it's clear that the Cap Ex investments on data centers they're generally not a good investment for most companies. Lester really appreciate Lester Water CTO of Iot Tahoe. Let's watch this short video and we'll come right back. >>Use cases. Data migration. Accelerate digitization of business by providing automated data migration work flows that save time in achieving project milestones. Eradicate operational risk and minimize labor intensive manual processes that demand costly overhead data quality. You know the data swamp and re establish trust in the data to enable data signs and Data analytics data governance. Ensure that business and technology understand critical data elements and have control over the enterprise data landscape Data Analytics ENABLEMENT Data Discovery to enable data scientists and Data Analytics teams to identify the right data set through self service for business demands or analytical reporting that advanced too complex regulatory compliance. Government mandated data privacy requirements. GDP Our CCP, A, e, p, R HIPPA and Data Lake Management. Identify late contents cleanup manage ongoing activity. Data mapping and knowledge graph Creates BKG models on business enterprise data with automated mapping to a specific ontology enabling semantic search across all sources in the data estate data ops scale as a foundation to automate data management presences. >>Are you interested in test driving the i o ta ho platform Kickstart the benefits of data automation for your business through the Iot Labs program? Ah, flexible, scalable sandbox environment on the cloud of your choice with set up service and support provided by Iot. Top Click on the link and connect with the data engineer to learn more and see Iot Tahoe in action. Everybody, we're back. We're talking about enterprise data automation. The hashtag is data automated and we're going to really dig into data migrations, data migrations. They're risky, they're time consuming and they're expensive. Yousef con is here. He's the head of partnerships and alliances at I o ta ho coming again from London. Hey, good to see you, Seth. Thanks very much. >>Thank you. >>So let's set up the problem a little bit. And then I want to get into some of the data said that migration is a risky, time consuming, expensive. They're they're often times a blocker for organizations to really get value out of data. Why is that? >>I think I mean, all migrations have to start with knowing the facts about your data. Uh, and you can try and do this manually. But when you have an organization that may have been going for decades or longer, they will probably have a pretty large legacy data estate so that I have everything from on premise mainframes. They may have stuff which is probably in the cloud, but they probably have hundreds, if not thousands of applications and potentially hundreds of different data stores. >>So I want to dig into this migration and let's let's pull up graphic. It will talk about We'll talk about what a typical migration project looks like. So what you see, here it is. It's very detailed. I know it's a bit of an eye test, but let me call your attention to some of the key aspects of this, uh and then use if I want you to chime in. So at the top here, you see that area graph that's operational risk for a typical migration project, and you can see the timeline and the the milestones That Blue Bar is the time to test so you can see the second step. Data analysis. It's 24 weeks so very time consuming, and then let's not get dig into the stuff in the middle of the fine print. But there's some real good detail there, but go down the bottom. That's labor intensity in the in the bottom, and you can see hi is that sort of brown and and you could see a number of data analysis data staging data prep, the trial, the implementation post implementation fixtures, the transition to be a Blu, which I think is business as usual. >>The key thing is, when you don't understand your data upfront, it's very difficult to scope to set up a project because you go to business stakeholders and decision makers, and you say Okay, we want to migrate these data stores. We want to put them in the cloud most often, but actually, you probably don't know how much data is there. You don't necessarily know how many applications that relates to, you know, the relationships between the data. You don't know the flow of the basis of the direction in which the data is going between different data stores and tables. So you start from a position where you have pretty high risk and probably the area that risk you could be. Stack your project team of lots and lots of people to do the next phase, which is analysis. And so you set up a project which has got a pretty high cost. The big projects, more people, the heavy of governance, obviously on then there, then in the phase where they're trying to do lots and lots of manual analysis, um, manual processes, as we all know, on the layer of trying to relate data that's in different grocery stores relating individual tables and columns, very time consuming, expensive. If you're hiring in resource from consultants or systems integrators externally, you might need to buy or to use party tools. Aziz said earlier the people who understand some of those systems may have left a while ago. CEO even higher risks quite cost situation from the off on the same things that have developed through the project. Um, what are you doing with Ayatollah? Who is that? We're able to automate a lot of this process from the very beginning because we can do the initial data. Discovery run, for example, automatically you very quickly have an automated validator. A data met on the data flow has been generated automatically, much less time and effort and much less cars stopped. >>Yeah. And now let's bring up the the the same chart. But with a set of an automation injection in here and now. So you now see the sort of Cisco said accelerated by Iot, Tom. Okay, great. And we're gonna talk about this, but look, what happens to the operational risk. A dramatic reduction in that, That that graph and then look at the bars, the bars, those blue bars. You know, data analysis went from 24 weeks down to four weeks and then look at the labor intensity. The it was all these were high data analysis, data staging data prep trialling post implementation fixtures in transition to be a you all those went from high labor intensity. So we've now attacked that and gone to low labor intensity. Explain how that magic happened. >>I think that the example off a data catalog. So every large enterprise wants to have some kind of repository where they put all their understanding about their data in its price States catalog. If you like, imagine trying to do that manually, you need to go into every individual data store. You need a DB, a business analyst, reach data store. They need to do an extract of the data. But it on the table was individually they need to cross reference that with other data school, it stores and schemers and tables you probably with the mother of all Lock Excel spreadsheets. It would be a very, very difficult exercise to do. I mean, in fact, one of our reflections as we automate lots of data lots of these things is, um it accelerates the ability to water may, But in some cases, it also makes it possible for enterprise customers with legacy systems take banks, for example. There quite often end up staying on mainframe systems that they've had in place for decades. I'm not migrating away from them because they're not able to actually do the work of understanding the data, duplicating the data, deleting data isn't relevant and then confidently going forward to migrate. So they stay where they are with all the attendant problems assistance systems that are out of support. You know, you know, the biggest frustration for lots of them and the thing that they spend far too much time doing is trying to work out what the right data is on cleaning data, which really you don't want a highly paid thanks to scientists doing with their time. But if you sort out your data in the first place, get rid of duplication that sounds migrate to cloud store where things are really accessible. It's easy to build connections and to use native machine learning tools. You well, on the way up to the maturity card, you can start to use some of the more advanced applications >>massive opportunities not only for technology companies, but for those organizations that can apply technology for business. Advantage yourself, count. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube. Much appreciated. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>>Fly from San Francisco. It's the cube covering RSA conference 2020 San Francisco brought to you by Silicon angled medias >>live in. Welcome to the cube coverage here in San Francisco at Moscone hall for RSA 2020 I'm John furrier, host of the cube. We're here breaking down all the actions in cyber security. I'll say three days of wall-to-wall cube coverage. You got two great guests here, experts in the cybersecurity enterprise security space. Over 25 years. We've got two gurus and experts. We've got Bob Mindell, executive vice president of North America cyber practice for cap Gemini and Joe McMahon, head of North America cyber strategy, even a practitioner in the intelligence community. Langley, you've been in the business for 25 years. You've seen the waves guys, welcome to the cube. Thank you John. Thanks for having us. So first let's just take a step back. A cyber certainly on the number one agenda kind of already kind of broken out of it in terms of status, board level conversation, every CSO, risk management and a lot of moving parts. >>Now, cyber is not just a segment in the industry. It is the industry. Bob, this is a big part of business challenge today. What's your view? What was going on? So John has a great point. It's actually a business challenge and that's one of the reasons why it's now the top challenge. It's been a tech challenge for a long time. It wasn't always a business challenge for you as was still considered an it challenge and once it started impacting business and got into a board level discussion, it's now top of mind as a business challenge and how it can really impact the business continuity. Joe is talking before we came on camera about you know CEOs can have good days here and there and bad days then but sees us all have bad days all the time because there's so much, it's so hard. You're on the operations side. >>You see a day to day in the trenches as well as the strategy. This is really an operations operationalizing model. As new technology comes out, the challenge is operationalizing them for not only a business benefit but business risk management. It's like changing an airplane engine out at 35,000 feet. It's really hard. What are you seeing as the core challenge? This is not easy. It's a really complex industry. I mean, you take the word cybersecurity, right? Ready? Cybersecurity conference. I see technology, I see a multitude of different challenges that are trying to be solved. It means something different to everybody, and that's part of the problem is it's a really broad ecosystem that we're in. If you meet one person that says, I know all of cyber, they're lying, right? It's just like saying, I know active directory and GRC and I know DNS and I know how to, how to code, right? >>Those people don't exist and cyber is a little bit the same way. So for me, it's just recognizing the intricacies. It's figuring out the complexities, how people processing technology really fit together and it's an operation. It is an ongoing, and during operation, this isn't a program that you can run. You run it for a year, you install and you're done. There's ebbs and flows. You talked about the CISOs and the bad days. There's wins and there's losses. Yeah. And I think part of that is just having the conversation with businesses. Just like in it, you have bad days and good days wins and losses. It's the same thing in cybersecurity and we've got to set that expectation. Yeah, you didn't bring up a good point. I've been saying this on the cube and we've been having conversations around this. It used to be security as part of it, right? >>But now that it's part of the business, the things that you're mentioning around people, process, technology, the class, that kind of transformational formula, it is business issues, organizational behavior. Not everyone's an expert specialism versus generalists. So this is like not just a secure thing, it's the business model of a company is changing. So that's clear. There's no doubt. And then you've got the completion of the cloud coming, public cloud, hybrid multi-cloud. Bob, this is a number one architectural challenge. So outside of the blocking and tackling basics, right, there's now the future business is at risk. What does cap Gemini do? And because you guys are well known, great brand, helping companies be successful, how do you guys go to customers and say, Hey, here's what you do. What's the, what's the cap Gemini story? >>So the cat termini stories is really about increasing your cybersecurity maturity, right? As Joe said, starting out at the basics. If you look at a lot of the breaches that have occurred today have occurred because we got away from the basics and the fundamentals, right? Shiny new ball syndrome. Really. Exactly exasperates that getting away from the basics. So the technology is an enabler, but it's not the be all and end all right, go into the cloud is absolutely a major issue. That's increasing the perimeter, right? We've gone through multiple ways as we talked about, right? So now cloud is is another way, cloud, mobile, social. How do you deal with those from on prem, off prem. But ultimately it's about increasing your cyber cyber security maturity and using the cloud as just increasing the perimeter, right? So you need to, you really need to understand, you have your first line defense and then your maturity is in place. Whether the data resides in your organization, in the cloud, on a mobile device, in a social media, you're responsible for it all. And if you don't have the basics, then you're, you're really, and you guys bring a playbook, is that what you guys come in and do? Correct. Correct. Right. So our goal is to coordinate people, process technology and leverage playbooks, leverage the run books that we had been using for many years. >>I want to get down to you on this one because of what happens when you take that to the, into the practitioner mode or at implementation. Customers want the best technology possible. They go for the shiny new choice. Bob just laid out. There's also risks too because it may or may not be big. So you've got to balance out. I got to get an edge technically because the perimeters becoming huge surface area now or some say has gone. Now you've got edge, just all one big exposed environment, surface area for vulnerabilities is massive. So I need better tech. How do you balance and obtain the best tech and making sure it works and it's in production and secure. So there's a couple of things, right, and this is not, it's not just our, and you'll hear it from other people that have been around a long time, but a lot of organizations that we see have built themselves so that their cybersecurity organization is supporting all these tools that we see. >>That's the wrong way to do it. The tools should support the mission of the organization, right? If my mission is to defend my enterprise, there are certain things that I need to do, right? There's questions I need to be able to ask and get answers to. There's data I need visibility into. There's protections and controls I need to be able to implement. If I can lay those out in some coordinated strategic fashion and say, here's all the things I'm trying to accomplish, here's who's going to do it. Here's my really good team, here's my skilled resources, here's my workflows, my processes, all that type of stuff. Then I can go find the right technology to put into that. And I can actually measure if that technology is effective in supporting my mission. But too often we start with the technology and then we hammer against it and we run into CISOs and they say, I bought all this stuff and it's not working and come hell yeah. >>And that's backing into it the wrong. So I've heard from CSOs, I'd like they buying all these tools. It's like a tool shed. Don't be the fool with the wrong tool as they I say. But that brings up the question of, okay, as you guys go to customers, what are some of the main pain points or issues that they're trying to overcome that that are opportunities that you guys are helping with? Uh, on the business side and on the technical side, what are some of the things? So on the business side, you know, one is depending on their level of maturity and the maturity of the organization and the board of directors and their belief in, in how they need to help fund this. We can start there. We can start by helping draw out the threat landscape within that organization where they are maturity-wise and where they need to go and help them craft that message to the board of directors and get executive sponsorship from the board down in order to take them from baby, a very immature organization or you know, a reactive organization to an adaptive organization, right. >>And really become defenders. So from a business perspective, we can help them there. From the technology perspective, Joe, uh, you know, or an implementation perspective. I think, you know, it's been a really interesting road like being in this a long time, you know, late two thousands when nation States were first really starting to become a thing. All the industries we were talking to, every customer is like, I want to be the best in my industry. I want to be the shining example. And boards in leadership were throwing money at it and everybody was on this really aggressive path to get there. The conversation is shifted a little bit with a lot of the leadership we talked to. It's, I just want to be good enough, maybe a little bit better than good enough, but my, my objective anymore is it to leave the industry. Cause that's really expensive and there's only one of those. >>My objective is to complete my mission maybe a little bit above and beyond, but I need the right size and right. So we spent a lot of time helping organizations, I would say optimize, right? It's what is the right level of people, what is the right amount of resources, what's the right spend, what's the right investment, the right allocation of technology and mix of everything, right? And sometimes it's finding the right partner. Sometimes it's doing certain things in house. It's, there's no one way to solve this problem, but you've got to go look at the business challenges. Look at the operational realities of the customer, their budgets, all those, their geographies mattered, right? Some places it's easy to hire talent. Some places it's not so easy to hire talent. And that's a good point, right? Some organizations, >>they just need to understand what does good look like and we can, we have so many years of experience. We have so many customers use skates is we've been there and we've done that. We can bring the band and show them this is what good looks like and this is sustainable >>of what good looks like. I want to get your reactions to, I was talking to Keith Alexander, general Keith Alexander, a former cyber command had last night and we were talking about officers, his defense and that kind of reaction. How the Sony hack was was just was just, they just went after him as an example. Everyone knows about that hack, but he really was getting at the idea of human efficiency, the human equation, which is if you have someone working on something that here, but their counterpart might be working on it maybe from a different company or in the same company, they're redundant. So there's a lot of burnout, a lot of people putting out fires. So reactive is clearly, I see as a big trend that the conversation's shifting towards let's be proactive, let's get more efficient in the collaboration as well as the technology. What you, how do you guys react to that? What's your view on that statement? So >>people is the number one issue, in my opinion. In this space, there's a shortage of people. The people that are in it are working very long hours. They're burnt out. So we constantly need to be training and bringing more people into the industry. Then there's the scenario around information sharing, right? Threat information sharing, and then what levels are you comfortable with as an organization to share that information? How can you share best practices? So that's where the ice sacks come into play. That's also where us as a practitioner and we have communities, we have customers, we bring them together to really information, share, share, best practice. It's in all of our best interests. We all have the same goal and the goal is to protect our assets, especially in the United States. We have to protect our assets. So we need, the good thing is that it's a pretty open community in that regards and sharing the information, training people, getting people more mature in their people, process technology, how they can go execute it. >>Yeah. What's your take on the whole human equation piece? Right? So sharing day, you probably heard a word and the word goes back to where I came from, from my heritage as well, but I'm sure general Alexander used the word mission at some point, right? So to me, that's the single biggest rallying point for all of the people in this. If you're in this for the right reasons, it's because you care about the mission. The mission is to defend us. Stop the bad guys from doing days, right? Whether you're defending the government, whether you're defending a commercial enterprise, whether you're defending the general public, right? Whatever the case is, if you're concerned, you know, if you believe in the mission, if you're committed to the mission, that's where the energy comes from. You know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of talk about the skill gap and the talent gap and all of those types of things. >>To me, it's more of a mindset issue than anything. Right? The skill sets can be taught. They can be picked up over time. I was a philosophy major. All right? Somehow I ended up here. I have no idea how, um, but it's because I cared about the mission and everybody has a part to play. If you build that peer network, uh, both at an individual level and at an organizational and a company level, that's really important in this. Nobody's, nobody's an expert at everything. Like we said, you brought a philosophy. I think one of the things I have observed in interviewing and talking to people is that the world's changed so much that you almost need those fresh perspectives because the problems are new problems, statements, technology is just a part of the problem set back to the culture. The customer problem, Bob, is that they got to get all this work done. >>And so what are some of the use cases that you guys are working on that that is a low hanging fruit in the industry or our customer base? How do you guys engage with customers? So our target market is fortune 500 global 1000 so the biggest of the big enterprises in the world, right? And because of that, we've seen a lot of a complex environments, multinational companies as our customers. Right? We don't go at it from a pure vertical base scenario or a vertical base solution. We believe that horizontal cybersecurity can it be applied to most verticals. Right. And there's some tweaking along the way. Like in financial services, there's regulars and FFIC that you need to be sure you adapt to. But for the most part the fundamentals are applicable. All right. With that said, you know, large multinational manufacturing organization, right? They have a major challenge in that they have manufacturing sites all over the world. >>They building something that is, you know, unique. It has significant IP to it, but it's not secure. Historically they would have said, well, nobody's really gonna just deal steal what we do because it's really not differentiated in the world, but it is differentiated and it's a large corporation making a lot of money. Unfortunately ransomware, that'd be a photographer. Ransomware immediately, right? Like exact down their operations and their network, right? So their network goes down. They can have, they can, they can not have zero downtown and their manufacturing plants around the world. So for us, we're implementing solutions and it's an SLA for them is less than six seconds downtime by two that help secure these global manufacturing environment. That's classic naive when they are it. Oh wow. We've got to think about security on a much broader level. I guess the question I have for you guys, Joe, you talk about when do you guys get called in? >>I mean what's your main value proposition that you guys, cause you guys got a broad view of the industry, that expertise. Why do, why are customers calling you guys and what do you guys deliver? They need something that actually works, right? It's, it's you mentioned earlier, I think when we were talking how important experiences, right? And it's, Bob said it too, having been there, done that I think is really important. The fact that we're not chasing hype, we're not selling widgets. That we have an idea of what good looks like and we can help an organization kind of, you know, navigate that path to get there is really important. So, uh, you know, one of our other customers, large logistics company, been operating for a very long time. You know, very, very mature in terms of their, it operations, those types of things. But they've also grown through merger and acquisition. >>That's a challenge, uh, cause you're taking on somebody else's problem set and they just realize, simply put that their existing security operations wasn't meeting their needs. So we didn't come in and do anything fancy necessarily. It's put a strategic plan in place, figure out where they are today, what are the gaps, what do they need to do to overcome those gaps? Let's go look at their daily operations, their concept of operations, their mission, their vision, all of that stuff down to the individual analysts. Like we talked about the mindset and skillset. But then frankly it's putting in the hard work, right? And nobody wants to put in the heart. I don't want to say nobody wants to put in the hard work. That's fun. There's a lot of words that's gets done I guess by the questions that you guys getting called in on from CSOs chief and Mason security officers. >>Guess who calls you? So usually we're in talking to the Cisco, right? We're having the strategic level conversation with the Cisco because the Cisco either has come in new or has been there. They may have had a breach. Then whatever that compelling event may be, they've come to the realization that they're not where they need to be from a maturity perspective and their cyber defense needs revamping. So that's our opportunity for us to help them really increase the maturity and help them become defenders. Guys, great for the insight. Thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate you sharing the insights. Guys. Give a quick plug for what you guys are doing. Cap Gemini, you guys are growing. What do you guys look to do? What are some of the things that's going on? Give the company plug. Thanks Sean show. It's been a very interesting journey. >>You know this business started out from Lockheed Martin to Leidos cyber. We were acquired by cap Gemini a year ago last week. It's a very exciting time. We're growing the business significantly. We have huge growth targets for 2020 and beyond, right? We're now over 800 practitioners in North America, over 2,500 practitioners globally, and we believe that we have some very unique differentiated skill sets that can help large enterprises increase their maturity and capabilities plug there. Yeah, I mean, look, nothing makes us happier than getting wins when we're working with an organization and we get to watch a mid level analyst brief the so that they just found this particular attack and Oh by the way, because we're mature and we're effective, that we were able to stop it and prevent any impact to the company. That's what makes me proud. That's what makes it so it makes it fun. >>Final question. We got a lot of CSOs in our community. They're watching. What's the pitch to the CSO? Why, why you guys, we'd love to come in to understand what are their goals, how can we help them, but ultimately where do they believe they think they are and where do they need to go and we can help them walk that journey. Whether it's six months, a year, three years, five years. We can take them along that journey and increase the cyber defense maturity. Joe, speak to the CSO. What are they getting? They're getting confidence. They're getting execution. They're getting commitment to delivery. They're getting basically a, a partner in this whole engagement. We're not a vendor. We're not a service provider. We are a partner. A trusted partner. Yeah, partnerships is key. Building out in real time. A lot new threats. Got to be on offense and defense going on. A lot of new tech to deal with. I mean, it's a board level for a long time. Guys, thanks for coming on. Cap Gemini here inside the cube, bringing their practices, cybersecurity, years of experience with big growth targets. Check them out. I'm John with the cube. Thanks for watching.

(energetic electronic music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a special Cube interview here at the Schneider Electric offices in Boston, Massachusetts. Happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest, Hervé Coureil, who is the Chief Digital Officer at Schneider Electric. Thank you so much for having us-- >> Oh, thanks for having me. >> It's a little rainy, but that's what we can expect in Boston-- >> Don't say that. >> But, lovely view. Thanks so much. >> Thank you. >> Great, so first of all, give us a little bit about your background. You're the Chief Digital Officer today, we love talkin' to the CDOs, you've been a CIO, you've been a CFO, and we'll definitely get into some of the organizational dynamics as to who reports to whom and who owns what and the like. >> Sure, so, you know, in the day, I started in finance, actually, I did a lot of work in M&A. After a while, we are quite a pretty large company called APC and I became the CFO, and really, working essentially on post-modular integration, right? So how do we put all those pieces together? And when you do that, you quickly realize that actually technology is on the critical path all the time, so you know, I developed quite a keen interest at that time for technology, and that's when Schneider decided, really, to change its setup, to evolve its organization with a program called One Schneider. We created the CFO position and that's where, basically, I took the helm as the CIO for Schneider Electric. And you know, over time, when digital became a thing, it was not just about, you know, how you digitize the company, it was also how you create a digital business, so that's how we created Schneider Digital and I became the CDO. So all of this sounds like super logical right now, of course it was more complicated than that. But that's a view of the whole arc of the story. >> Yeah, lots of politics, we understand, organizations, large M&As, we understand that there's challenges, things to work through. If you could, for our audience, just frame Schneider Electric. I actually, you know, disclaimer, I worked for American Power Conversion way back longer than I'd like to even admit, but you know, uninterrupted power supplies, they really helped create a market, and had some excellent technology, strong engineering background, which is what led me to that company, but Schneider Electric today, of course, much bigger than just APC, give us a little bit of a frame. >> So, Schneider Electric is a pretty large global corporation, I think we employ something like 140,000 people, so pretty large multi-billion company. We basically are in the business of energy management and industry automation, we are specialists of that. Our core value proposition is really bringing efficiency and sustainability to our customer. We do that in a number of areas, whether it's buildings, whether it's, you know, large infrastructures, data centers, factory floors, and industry all processes, but sort of a core common thread, if you will, is how you bring efficiency, sustainability to our customers. >> Great, you talked a little bit about your background as a CFO was to help with the merger. Bring us up to what is your role as a Chief Data Officer, what is the mandate you have? We're going to spend some time unpacking digital transformation. We always say the difference between a company before and after that digital transformation is, you know, data is so important, you must be data driven, you must understand it, and therefore often there is a CDO involved. So, what led to this role? And what is that specific mandate that you have? >> Sure, so, you know, I did mention just before that, you know, we had the concept of efficiency, right? We try really, we have a value prop about, you know, safety, reliability that over time evolves towards efficiency and sustainability. And in order to provide efficiency, whether it's in a building, whether it's an industry, or building a process, what needs to happen is not just with hardware, right? You need to be able to extract data from products, from systems, you need to be able to make sense of that data, to analyze it and then to act on it, right? To sort of close the loop from data to insight, insights to action, so that's where for us, the digital transformation was not just about digitizing ourselves, but it was also about augmenting the value proposition that we have for our customers, augmenting what we can offer our customer base. We offer services that could push the boundaries of, you know, efficiency and sustainability and then we're all about adding an information component, right? A data component on top of, you know, the best hardware and software. So that's sort of of the evolution and you were speaking about the mandate. So the mandate is really around four things. First is really, is of a digital business so how we create digital offers that are going to augment to complement our existing offers, making, you know, taking advantage of cloud, taking advantage of analytics, AIs, and providing, you know, predictive maintenance, providing optimization services, right? That can augment our value prop. It's also about bringing the ecosystem of partners that can really reinforce those value props for those digital affairs. So it's really first about that digital business, then it's about digitizing our sales and it's three things. It's first how we engage customers, so customers and partners who're thinking about what's our digital footprint? How we create basically a digital experience for our customers and partners that is even better than the one we're having in the physical world. Then it's about operation, so our backend systems, you know, making sure that we have a backend system that scales. And the last mandate is security. >> Okay, it's a pretty broad mandate. A lot of things going on, 140,000 people working for Schneider, not to mention you talked about your customers, your partners, all of these things. >> Hervé: Absolutely. >> You know, what's the scope of this, how many years ago did this start? Is there a phased rollout that you're looking, is there, you know, was there just a budget assigned to it? Bring us a little bit as to how this all rolls out. >> So, sure, a couple of things. I would say, so we started three years ago, really, with digital mandate. Only that started well before because actually, you know, if you're in the business of industrial automation, you haven't waited the advent of IOT to connect machines to a supervisor regulator to controls, etc. Now what happened is, of course, the power of a cloud, the power of analytics, and you could take things even further. So really three years ago was when we started thinking about Schneider Digital, and the way we thought about it is we didn't want it to be something totally on the side of the business, so it's not a separate P&L, it's not, you know, a separate organization, we're serving the businesses, we're augmenting the businesses, we're providing them with transversal capabilities, we're providing our businesses with digital services platform-level component that they can reuse, etc. So that they can go faster in addressing their customers. And it was critical for us to find that sort of appropriate distance, if you will, because you need to incubate a digital business, but at the same time, if it just happens on the side, you never augment the core. And so you kind of lose, right? The main benefit out of it. >> Yeah, it's nice that you have the background of also being a CIO. Everything that I'm hearing you talking about is what we hear from many leading companies out there, that it's, right, it's not just doing what the business asks, it's helping to often create new products or, you know, in many cases, even, you know, it's innovation helping to drive the business. I want to, you mentioned at the end of one of your last pieces, talked about security. That's something critical when you're talking about data, and in your CDO role, tell us a little bit about the security of how that's involved in this total solution. >> Sure, so far as you know, it's of course became, you know, more and more important over time. And we're really here to rethink how we're approaching security, right? Going away from this idea of defending the perimeter, moving to concepts much more like a zero trust approach because the world has changed with employees that like to work from, you know, their taxis and planes, and we had really to rethink the posture, right?, of Schneider Electric, and also how we work with customers, and we can help, how we can help our own customers improving the cybersecurity of their building or industrial operations, right? So we have, we see it as a pretty broad mandate, actually, quite end-to-end, it's not just about, you know, building thick walls, I think the times of perimeter defense are long gone, but it's really about thinking about it as a full cycle from identification to recovery and putting a risk-based approach and some, you know, continuous improvement approach into it. A lot of discipline, basically. >> All right, and Hervé, are there some partners that were important in this digital transformation? >> So overall or specific in security? >> Both, yeah. >> So yes, I mean, we have big partners, and you know, you wouldn't, you could guess, right? I mean, of course you know we are working a lot with Amazon, we're working a lot with Microsoft, we're working a lot with Salesforce, on the system integration side, you know, we work with Cap Gemini, with Accenture, so we have, of course, a bunch of yeah, of traditional partners, you know, you would expect. I mean, we try to be more and more very considerate about what we want to do ourselves and when we basically, you know, delegate some functional points to partners. And then we also created an ecosystem of partners around security and Schneider is a very partner-centric company because we actually work with through partners most of the time. So, you know, working as an ecosystem is actually something that's pretty natural to us, we just had to learn how to do it in the digital age. >> Yeah, that's great, a company of your size, right? It's not only the suppliers there, but building that ecosystem, yeah. Anything more on the security side that you want to call out, regarding that journey? >> So, you know, we've been working, we've developed a lot. I mean, we felt that security was, it takes a village, right? And the ecosystem approach was even more important, so we've been working with Zscaler on a network-level security, we've been working with IBM and Deloitte, on other areas, we've been working with Cylance as well, I mean, I wouldn't, there's a long list, right? But we've tried to build an ecosystem both at a surface level and at a solution level 'cause the problem often with security is that, you know, you can have a lot of point solutions that would solve a very narrow problem, but it's really, you know, what really makes a difference is your ability to integrate, is your ability to have a pane of glass where you can figure out correlations and then pretty quickly take action, so it's striking that balance between adding solution that would add you a new source of information, you understanding of your context with the ability to act on this information. >> Yeah, and Hervé, what lessons have you learned going through this? You talked about the balance between what you do in-house versus what you look to outside, that's a general trend we've seen in cloud for the last 10 years or more, so, you know, looking back at what you've done so far in three years, any advice that you'd give to your peers? >> Probably three things. So the first thing you mentioned is the ecosystem, right? Is that it's not us versus them, it's how you embark an ecosystem of partners and how you bring some logic in that ecosystem. So that's really key. The second thing is really scale. I think I always say that in digital, it's always super easy, you know, to come with the latest shiny object, do a proof of concept, etc. But usually, that doesn't matter. The key sauce, the secret sauce is how you scale. Often and in particular in today's world, people tend to have a misconception of scale, that this is just size. Actually, very often in, you know, in digital, scale is about replicability, it's how easy can you replicate? Which is a slightly different concept when you think about it. But thinking scale first, I mean, you know, is so critical to us. And the third point would be performance management, actually, we've spent a lot of time defining, or maybe that's my roots as a finance person a long time ago, but it's, you know, what does success mean, right? What are the metrics of success? We'll call them the true north. What true norths are we pursuing? And how do we allocate resource? Because at the end of the day, you'll only scale if you're able to allocate resource, so if you want to have a sophisticated digital organization, you need to start by having a sophisticated resource allocation process. >> Yeah, how about the outcomes? You know, what if ultimately your end user customers, what do they see out of this digital transformation? And also would love if there's any commentary on the employees, we understand, you know, getting them involved in training and the like can be challenging, but you know, ultimately, you know, how does digital impact both your external and internal customers? >> Sure, so, let me unpack that, right? In terms of true north or outcomes, the key thing we look at first is how we create the digital business, on how much are we creating adoption, right? With our customers. So we really track, you know, how many new things we and our ecosystem, how much more value are we creating to our customers? Are those customers adopting those new value points? Those new solutions? Those new ideas? So, and of course, you know, how much are we growing behind that, etc.? But it's really this idea of value and adoption to start with. When we look at the engagement, the customer side, we look at the customer satisfaction in the physical world and we compare it with the customer satisfaction in the digital world. And we want the two to be at par. When it comes to the backend, we look at how much we're simplifying that backend, so we're tracking technical depth and so forth. And then on security, we look at external scoring so that we always, you know, keep ourselves (laughs) right next to the external assessment and how we're doing. So that's basically, you know, how we look at the four dimensions that I was mentioning at the beginning. To answer the second part of your question, which was more about employees, I mean, it's a huge effort, of course, you know, creating the organization, a lot of recruitments, a lot of training, we've been working a lot on, you know, providing you with a digital citizenship course on up to very technical course we found completely our approach to learning, and there are many, many aspects of the employee experience that we've been working on, I mean, providing mobility, providing, you know, on finding that balance, right? Between security and enabling the new world of work where people are going to work on the go and offering them a much better level of access basically to the corporate resources, mobile, and so forth. This has been a massive transformation over a year. >> Hervé, the last thing I'd like to ask you, Just, you know, the changing dynamics of organizations today, as we started out talking, you know, CDO is still a relatively new role out there. The role of the CIO has changed an awful lot, you know, over the length of our careers, so, you know, what are you seeing in those dynamics? You've worn both of those hats and you know, where do you see things going and any feedback you'd give to the industry to make the lives easier of the CDOs and CIOs out there? >> Well, I think it's, you know, I would say I've seen the roles held very differently from an industry to another. So, you know, it's probably hard to replicate from, you know, the energy management and industrial automation industry to others, but in an industry like ours, where the products are becoming digital because basically, you know, you want to create data in the real world, you want to be able to process that data, create insights from that data, and then you want to be able to act in the real world based on those data. You really need to look at those two aspects, and there was a great, actually, paper from MIT a while ago about digitized on digital, so really, I really like to say digital is really about creating this digital business, you know? Real world data, transforming this real world data in insights and action and then acting in the real world, while CIO is mostly being about how you are digitizing the company, right? So, the employee experience, the customer experience, the partner experience, having transforming your backend into a machine that scales, and both equally share that last mandate that's even a broader mandate, at the level of the enterprise that goes with security. So that's how I would roughly, if you will, you know, define the space. >> Hervé Coureil, thank you so much for sharing your experiences, it's been a pleasure talking with you. >> Hervé: Thanks for having me. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman, we're here at Schneider Electric's office in Boston, Massachusetts, and as always, thanks for watchin' theCUBE. (energetic electronic music)

>>live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Q covering I f s World Conference 2019. Brought to you by I >>f. S, I say, What a minute. I didn't cash it. Everybody welcome to I f s World 2019. You watching the Cube? The leader in live tech coverage on day Volante with my co host, Paul Galen. Marty Martin is here. She is the president of the service management division of I F s and C e o of work wave. Marty, good to see you. >>Yeah, it's great to be here. I'm so excited. >>A lot of action going on. You guys. Service management, Field Service management particular. You guys had an acquisition today. We're gonna talk about Let's start with your role you came in and 2017 with the >>pretty acting. Actually, >>2018 finalized the acquisition. I think they announce it in 2017. So tell us about how you came in and where you're at today with >>Certainly. So work wave the company. I lied. Join the effects family in 2017. Darren Ruess, who joined I f s in April 2018 recruited me into form a global business unit around service in August of 2018 and the reason why we did this is service isn't only a part of our economies all over the world, but it's a super great growth area that almost every business can go after in in progress both revenue and margins. So we had a lot of great software products, and we really wanted to improve our go to market around this. >>So why, why all of a sudden today, this talk about service management? Why's it becoming so hard? I mean, everybody's always been focused on customer service, but why this service management generally and field service management while the buzz. >>So first off, you've had the evolution of a number of line of business applications and service certainly has been a part of maintenance organizations or break fix where you're going out in repairing thing. What we're realizing now when you talk about service ization, how o E EMS air building what's called aftermarket revenue? There is literally $100 billion of revenue that you can get from that you look, we had Melissa did a nano from Souza. If you think about open source software, they make money from sirve ties, ing, open source software and the products. You look at apple how they're doing APs. So people are starting to realize that service is an engine for brand loyalty, customer experience, not just a cost center. How it used to be, what the >>customers do. Ah, companies do wrong with service one of the areas where they tend to have the greatest inefficiencies where you can help him. >>So first off, I'd say that often in the C suite, unless they're pure place service companies. They don't understand how transformative service is and how important it is to their brand. Many times now, if you have digital enablement of a new customer, the first time they see a face of your brand might be your service technician. So getting the awareness of the C suite is Step one, because we want to start talking about outcomes that grow revenue and profits and getting them to invest in service. So you know, many times will say, Oh, I want to do a C. R M project. I want to do an E r P project. That's certainly things were good at it. Here I a fest, but we can coach them through how you take the market opportunity for your company and service enabled by our technology and transform. Tomorrow I'll be with Accenture, one of our many great partners, and we're talking about adapting the business, the service transformation, sometimes digitally, sometimes with workflow transformation. But that opportunity and service is huge and almost never. There's no company I know of that's taking 100% of their service market share. That's the difference, especially in slower growth. Asset manufacturing are more mature verticals. >>So I was here last night walking the floor, and I went to the extent you Booth, you know, anytime you see, except you're in a show like this. Okay, Censure. You think Large company Global. I was actually quite impressed a little bit surprised to see you know, their presence here because they they go where the money is, right? And so my specific question is, think, except you think big companies. But you guys obviously focused on what range of companies smaller midsize company. So what's the landscape? Looked like? What's the difference is between sort of smaller and larger companies, >>so that's a great question. I'll take it in part So if you think about a neck censure definitely they looked a large. I also have had meetings with the Lloyd McKinsey Cap gem and I dxc etcetera Also tcs Tech Mahindra which a little bit or more telco focused. So if you think about at the very large and you have telco utilities, large manufacturing O e ems that our customers and definitely the customers I'm pursuing Maur with this focus But we also with work with go down to the S and B We had panels also of, for example, female owners of franchises and also males as well that are creating new service businesses and they're starting maybe with one truck in out providing service. So the fact that we can handle not only the breath and depth of complex service needs, but through work wave we also can encourage the small service businesses to reach their full potential is fantastic. And you know that makes me excited every day. And part of why I focused on service specifically is you are delighting customers. You are the face of a brand and you're making a difference. It's not something that s 02 is esoteric. This is about really value that we're delivering, >>always interested in the dynamics of serving the SNB market >>because one of >>these small companies don't really have that. Maybe family owned there found her own. They don't really put a lot of value on technology. How >>do you >>get in the door? How do you convince them that automating the service function is actually worth the investment? >>Well, first off, I'd say that even the big companies are struggling to go paperless. Okay, so, you know, I think some of the challenges we see survive, if you will, big to small, especially when you look globally in different countries. What have you. But the approach we take in the S and B is that we want to be a software as a service provider, and we were to really handle everything they need in their business. So everything from how they grow leads how they have c r m type functionality. How, then they're delivering service, how they're cross selling service, how they're billing service. So at the at the S M B level, we're putting that kind of all in one technology and there's really not that much integration or I T Service is around that right. We want it to be easy and fast, etcetera, as you go more into the mid market and then definitely into the enterprise. Then you start getting more complexity. You get more I t service's integrations, more configurable ity, sometimes even some customized software. So there is a definitely a difference in the complexity. But the fundamentals of what a service business needs really isn't that much different to your >>customers that you mentioned customize and you guys were SAS space. That's one of the text that we'd like to sort of explore a little bit. A lot >>of >>times SAS companies want to avoid, you know, custom mods. But at the same time, you guys are trying to offer a choice. So help us square that circle. How do you What's the conversation like with customers in terms of how you advise them, You guys obviously do a lot of deep functionality, you know? How do you sort of advise them whether or not to go heavily custom or try to go out of the box? >>Certainly. So in the true, I'd say the small business of a medium you start getting some crossover, but in the small business, Absolutely avoid customization because you won't be able to stay evergreen. It's going to be too hard to maintain. You don't have the subject matter experts, et cetera, so that's really a truce. Ask that from a community. A product engagement. We need to be driving the partnership with the customers that they can use a software out of the box in ways that matter to them. As you start getting into the mid market and especially the enterprise, then it becomes more of a choice, right? How much money do you have to spend? How robust is your organization and set trek? And in general, I advise customers if they care about evergreen software, et cetera. If they care about ease of upgrades, don't customize that Being said, we recognize sometimes in the field with your brand experience Custom mobile. You may need to customize a little bit, so it's Ah, say, a chicken and an egg. You have to weigh the benefits of the costs, and that's what we work through with our >>customers. Specifically morning. What's the upgrade cycle like? There's a customer having the choice Thio upgrade at a particular time, Or do they have a window? >>So it varies primarily, there's a few exceptions, but in general, with the work way, Family of products is true SAS. So it's almost like you're Apple Phone. We pushed the upgrade and you have to take it. Okay, And that's the true SAS model at I. F. S. And this is something Darren talked about in his keynote. We pride ourselves on offering choice. So even though we do have regular release cycles, we encourage customers to upgrade regularly. They have the choice on when they take upgrades and also how they deploy. We have some markets with things like data, privacy and what have you that they may, for that reason or for other reasons, go on premise even still today. So we give them the choice on how they upgrade as well as where they host. >>I'm fascinated by your product line. You have products for pest control. H V. A. C. Plumbing cleaning service is long and landscape. How different are these industries really in terms of their their automation needs? >>Well, I'll tell you one of the personal factors that Darren wanted to make sure I was comfortable with was multitasking. And that definitely is the case, because an I f s, we serve five key industries. So if you think about manufacturing utilities, telco service providers and Andy Okay, that's more at the enterprise level. If you think then when you go toe work wave. Those verticals that you mentioned are all the ones we service at work wave, and they are different. So you know what? Work wave. It's primarily service industries where you're going into ah, home and a little bit The commercial aspect and I effects were also doing more some heavy industries, some very large asset base, things like that. So I like to think about it as a product I service consumer based service. And then you can also differentiate across verticals with what are called high value assets versus, you know, Mork consumer size assets. >>So what >>are >>the one of the key technology enablers that are driving service management today? I mean, obviously, cloud, we talked about sas a lot of push on you X and customer experience, but what other key ones? >>So all the three that you mentioned mobile is huge. You know, Pete and even today, like I run. I work mainly from my phone, and that's really what people want. They want efficient work flows that are configurable on mobile, tied to the customer, the asset, the business. And that's an area that we're continuing to make investment. We also try to prioritize how we bring in the new technology trends into service. Because every technology trend that you see has applicable ity and service supply chain and how you run spare parts specially globally, you can see applications for Blockchain augmented emerged Reality how you can connect the field tech with an expert resource or remote resource to the consumer. That is obvious, right? So you talked about the enabling technologies like Cloud, how we're thinking about data platforms and Data's the currency. Of all of that, we need to d'oh. His service is really about a an execution engine, right? Because to deliver a customer experience that makes people come back to your brand. To purchase Maur, you need great service, so any time somebody talks about customer experience, but they don't talk about service. I want to say you're really naive because you can just get the customer. You have to delight the customer. >>Uh, the, uh, there's a lot of interesting technology going on now in the area. Fleet Management making fleets more efficient How does that figure into the service is? You offer. >>So Fleet management is an important part, and it's one that you have a very tangible return on investment when you deploy route management route optimization, fleet management. So you have the aspects that are very tangible, relate to how do you get the person or the truck where it needs to be when it needs to be okay, and that's pretty well understood. Then how do you get the most efficient schedule that minimizes miles driven gas, used et cetera? And then, of course, you also are thinking about health and safety. There's some cool things now that you can partner that if you have these fleet technologies installed in a way that is integrated in your service business, you can actually get lower insurance premiums, right? So it's not just the conventional use. Cases were starting to think in this kind of gig economy, how you can also be thinking about bringing in Maura what's called a contingent workforce. So if you have surge capacity in a certain period or you want to just do more third party service, probably your appliances. You know they're not the employees, if you will, of a g e or a world polar and LG right there Probably a contingent workforce. And that's a model that's also evolving. But to do Fleet Management across say, contractors, not just employees is an area that were thinking more and more led by some of the uber ization, if you will, of the of the marketplace >>right up against the clock, Marty. But to last questions You made an acquisition today, Vashti Uh, yeah, uh, I thought of it as a tuck in acquisitions, although Darren essentially sort of said, it's gonna make you the leader now in service management. Um And then I want to understand how you guys differentiate from some of the big whales. >>So, you know, overall, we're on track to be about 700 revenue this year in service management. We're working to get to 200 million, right? So this year will probably be around maybe 1/5 50 ish per se. Don't quote me on that check with our coms team, but the point being is that we have the ability to use these tuck in acquisitions and service to accelerate our lead, not just from a revenue perspective, which is what we were just talking about. But from a product perspective, you might have followed Salesforce acquiring Click. That means we are the only independent. Aye, aye. Optimization engine that is field tested. Battle ready. So that's great. This s t a is how we consolidate our dominance and complex service. So what darren was speaking to is not on Lee the service management segment of our revenue and how we continue to accelerate over the oracles in the S a. P s and the service maxes et cetera of the world. But how we take what we're already dominant in and really put the hammer down. Honesty is part of that. >>Your differentiation then if I infers, is focus. Um, you're you're deep customer customs agent deep >>domain expertise. Yeah, So really, when you think about a i optimization, which drives a ton of business value and the ability to handle the complex service cases that then drive business outcomes and outcomes based service models, we are number one and s dea tucks into that, even though it is very strategic on how we position ourselves with leadership and service. >>All right, Challenger becomes number one, Marty. Thanks very much. All right, Keep it right, everybody. Dave A lot with Paul Galen. You're watching the Cube from Boston Mass. I f s world 2019 right back.

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube, covering pure storage. Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Welcome back to the Cube, The leader and live tech coverage. I'm Lisa Martin with David Dante. We got a pretty cool guests coming up next, guys, you may have seen him here on the Q before. He has back Matt Harris, the head of I T for Mercedes AMG, Petronas Motor Sport. Matt, Welcome back. >> Often a >> way got the car over there with excitement. One of the coolest sports I've ever become involved with. Formula One is this incredible mix of technology strategy. All these crazy things you guys that Mercedes have been partners, customers a cure for about what? 45 years? >> 2015. As a customer, we became partners in 2016. >> I wonder if they like to save Mercedes AMG Petunias Motor Sport has had five consecutive years of both constructors championships driver's championships. You're a great position on both for 2019. It was a little bit of a history about the product that you put out on truck every other week and how pure storage is a facilitator of that. >> Yeah, okay, so it's an interest in a story for those that are interested in Formula One, because what you see on the track looks the same. But realistically, every time he goes out, the guarantee will be different. That level of difference could be a simple wing change or configuration, always based on data that we're learning from during a race again. But every week we also have a different car dependent on the track we're going to. So we have two different worlds that basically were to rate on a minute by minute, hour by hour and day by day at the track. But in the factory, that could be the same sort of it oration. But it could also be into weekly or monthly or year for a car. So all of that is based on data. So everything we do is that businesses revolves around data. We never make a change to the car without me now to back it up with empirical knowledge. Even if the driver turns around and tells us they feel something called, they believe something, we will always make sure we have data to back up that decision, So access to data is critical. Compute performance whether it's high performance, compute for our safety, for instance, whether it's for you as an end user, access to data is critical across everything that we do is time critical Time is our currency really as a business if we slow down your job? Generally, that probably means that you've got less time to make the correct decision. Or maybe you have to turn into a guess or a hunch, which that's never a good place to be in our sport. >> No, I would think not. >> I've I recall, from our conversation last year their rules that say, How many people you can have in your entourage like 60. I think it was yes, and at the time I think you said you got, like, 15 Allocated to data. Is that ratio kind of still holding? I >> still exactly the same in our tracks. On environment, they're still the same in the factory. We have more than that, depending on how many people on what time of day, what day of the week. So on a Friday race day, practice day, we can have a minimum. There'll be 30 people in our race support room will be looking at data along with those other 15. But you can have the whole Aargh department or design department or logistics. Whoever could still be looking at data from the track real time, so we can have as many as 4 to 500 looking at data if they want to. And if that's the right thing going on earlier in the season, you generally get more people looking As the season goes on. It's probably more aargh focused, maybe mechanically if we got something new, or maybe the engine division again in a completely separate building in the U. K 40 miles apart, they've got another set of people that will be looking and trolling through data riel time from the but looking really at the power unit rather than the chassis side. >> And you're generating, like roughly half a terabyte a weekend on a race weekend. Is that still about the same? Or is that growing a car >> perspective? It's just under half a terabyte, but we produce up to another half a terabyte of other supporting data with that GPS data, weather data, video, audio, whatever it would be other information to help with the strategy side of things So we're around 77 50 to 1 terabyte for race weekend, >> and each car has about 300 sensors. I think when we spoke with you last year, or maybe you're half ago is about 200 so that's increasing in terms of all the data being captured every race weekend. But one of the things that I love that matter sizes, you know, we're idea at Mercedes is not that unlike I t at other groups who really rely on high performance systems. But you do put out a new product every two weeks and this really extreme range of conditions, your product is extremely expensive as pretty sexy. Like the portability factor. You have to set up a tea shop, have any 20 weekends a year and set it up in what, 36 hours and take it down in six. >> And a nine year old joke about the taking it down in six is a bit like a Benny Hill sketch. It's obviously choreographed and, well, well rehearsed, but we have all the same systems as any normal business would have the tracks. That environment is very different, though we don't have air conditioning in so all the IittIe equipment has to work at the natural ambient air temperature of the country. We're in this year. Believe it or not, Germany and hungry have been our biggest challenge. We've had for the last 43 to 4 years because they had 45 degree air ambient air temperature. So forget humidity for a minute, which is Another kettle of fish probably affects us a bit more, maybe, than the systems, but we're only chucking that air as fast as we can across the components. So we're not putting any cooling into what is probably around the tolerance of most I T systems. So we have to rely basically on air throughput to terminate. Keep kit. Cool. Now the benefit with pure is actually doesn't create any heat, either. There's no riel heat generation, so it's quite tolerant, which helps us get it doesn't create Maur, but the environment we put it into is quite special. But what we're doing is what any business would want to do. Access toe email file systems. What we're trying to do is give it in a performance fashion. People need to make a decision. So in qualifying, for instance, those 300 sensors. That information that we've got from the car, we've got minutes to make a decision based on data. If it takes you too long to get the data off, you can't then look at the data to make a decision. So we have to make sure data in just from the car and then basically multi access from everybody in the factory or the track side is performance enough to make a decision before the car goes back out again. Otherwise, we're wasting track time. >> So you've always had data in this business. Early days was all analog, and it obviously progressed and thinking about what you want to do, Going forward with data. What kind of information or capabilities don't you have? Where that technology in the future could address >> s so interesting. One is technology of the future. If you know what it is, let me know with what we know right now, I think a lot of it's gonna be about having the ability to have persistent storage. But actually the dynamic of the compute resource eso looking at things like kubernetes or anything like that to turn around and have dynamic resource spin up as and when required to do high performance computer calculations based on the data, maybe to start giving us some automated information, I'm gonna be careful of the M l A. I is for our businesses, it's not quite as simple as others because our senior management very technically capable, and they just see it as advanced statistical analysis. So unless you program, it is not gonna give you an answer. Now we've started to see some things this year were actually the computer is teaching us things we didn't ask it to. So we have got some areas where we're beginning to learn that. That's not necessarily the case now, but for us that access to data moving forward, it's probably gonna be compute. Combined with that underlying storage platform, there's going to be critical onstage. You you heard Robin people talking about the ability to have that always present storage layer with the right computer. That's something for us is going to be critical, because otherwise we're gonna waste money and have resource sat doing nothing. >> Is security >> an issue for you? I mean, it's an issue for everybody, but there isn't a game of honor because you got this, you know, little community that you guys trying to hack each other systems. >> So it's an interesting one inside the sport, Actually, no. Because a few years ago there was a very high profile case where data went between two teams and there was £100 million fine's exclusion from the sport for a season. So that's that's >> too big. You don't mess with that. >> But also, if you think of that from our perspective, we've got the Daimler star on here. We cannot afford to have any of that Brenda brand reputational rubbing off on Damon's. So that's a no no other teams I can't talk for. But we're all fairly sensible between ourselves. What will be interesting moving forward is what technologies air in our sport, but actually of the whether their motor manufacturers or not, is their technology in there that they're interested in. Maybe the battery technology from the power unit side of things is that the power unit itself. So are other things actually more interesting to those other >> places. It legal for you, you know, by the rules of sports, a monitor, just data or captured data, whether it's visual, whatever from your competitors. Eso anything, >> this public? Yes, it's fair game. Okay, so we get given all the teams. Actually, we get a standard set of three or four different streams of information around GPS timing on some video feeds and audio feeds on their publicly consumable by the team's. When I say public for a second on those feeds, we can do what we like. You know that there for us to infer information, which we do a lot off, is what helps our strategy team to turn around and actually predict what we might or might not need to do as far as a pit stop or tire degradation. >> And that's where the human element must come into understanding the competent, like to football coaches who who know each other right? >> Well, yes. And now, if you think if you add to that the human element off Well, what happens if one team strategy person changes? Are they gonna make a different call based on the same data? Is their hunch different? Do they think they know better within a team? You can have that discussion. So what happens in another team where they're cars, not as performance so their mindset. Maybe they're thinking differently. Or maybe a team's got the most performance car of the moment and they think that they're going to do X. And we're like, Well, we're gonna do something different than to try and actually catch them out. So do we. Now don't do the normal thing. >> So let's hope >> Gamification I love it. >> Let's look at all. Make a prediction. 2019 is gonna be another Mercedes AMG way. So at the end of the season, all of the data that you have collected from the cars, all the sensors, all the weather data, GPS, et cetera how does pure facilitate in the off season the design of the 2020 car, for example, Where does where does things like computational fluid dynamics? >> Okay, so all of our production data is on pure, whether it's on a ray or blade somewhere, it's on pure storage across the site. So they're involved. Whether you're talking about design, whether you're talking about final element analysis for hyper a ll, the C f. D. Using high performance computer systems, everything some pure so from that point of view, is making sure we're using the right resource in the right place to get the best performance. Now, see if he's an interesting one because we're regulated by the F A a. About the amount of compute that weaken you. He's now. Because of that, you want it to be as efficient as you possibly can. It's not speed but the efficient use off CPU time. So if a CPU is waiting for data, that's wasted, Okay, so for us, it's trying to make sure that whole ecosystem is as efficient as we can. That's obviously an integral part of everything we do, so whether we're wind tunnel testing, whether we're in the dino, the simulators, but everything basically comes back to trying to understand and correlate the six or seven different places we generate data, trying to make sure that when there's a change in the simulator, we understand that change in the real world or in a diner or in safety. So all of that, what pure do is allow us to have that single place to go and look how I perform and always available. And for me, I don't have to have a story. Jasmine. Yeah, we've got a team of people that actually are thinking about that for us at Pure, You know, there is invested in us these days. Yeah, I walk around here, I'm very fortunate. I get to see all of the senior guys here and there. They are asking me what's going on and how's things with sequel Oracle Because they know exactly what we're doing and they're they're trying to say what's coming. So things like object engine Pierre So we've been talking to pure about using that over the coming months. But what? We're not having it at the moment. Go out and learn it. Actually, they coming in and they're telling us all about it. So they become a virtual extension to my team, which is just amazing. >> Yeah, far more efficient. You're able to focus on a much more things that drive value for the business. As we look at some of the things like the Evergreen business model. What were some of the big ah ha we hear is the right solution for us back in 2015. Is that >> so? Evergreen and love. Your stories were two things at the time that we're just incredible for us because love your storage was basically you could have an array and basically you could use it. And there was no commitment, no anything. But if you like that, you could keep it, obviously, paying for it. Ah, nde. When we did that in the factory, basically, within a week of being in there that the team were like, Whoa, hang on, that's going nowhere. So that was That was a nice, easy one. But Evergreen was an interesting one, which has only really, truly for me. I've always bought into it. But the last probably 18 months we've used it time and time and time again because the improvements with the speed of light x 90 coming envy Emmy drives. When we were looking at capacity, what we did was we turned round and said, Well, actually, we can buy more dense units in the next 90 so we're only buying the extra capacity, but we were getting new technology. So nations, all the innovation that you're putting into their products were getting it. So today, when they were talking about the memory based access, and if your things always sat there going, I can use that. Oh, and there's no there's no work for me, there's no effort. The only thing I gotta worry about is whether I've got capacity for that. Those modules to go in. So Evergreen has worked several times because I don't have to go back to the cap export and go. Could I have another x £1,000,000 please? Why? I need some more storage. Yeah, but you bought some of the other day. Yeah, well, that one. I need to get rid of it because I need a bigger one. And I don't have to do that. Now. I just go in. I'm telling them what the increases for which actually, they can choose Then if they want to increase, they know what the business benefit is rather than just I t has got to turn around and either replace it because of age or the new version doesn't support is not an uplift, not upgrade from the old. One >> I've seen was looking at some of your stats and the case study that's currently online on. Imagine these numbers have gone up 68% reduction in data center Rackspace and saving £100,000 a year and operating costs >> those that would have been probably two years ago. Ish roughly those figures. And the operating cost is a huge improvement for us. Cap Ex is probably the biggest one for me. They were moving forward with cost caps coming into Formula One. That type of thing is gonna be invaluable. Does not happen to do a forklift upgrade of your storage. Well, I wouldn't know what I would do if I had to upgrade what I now own from pure I can't even imagine what? I don't want to turn around town my bosses what that's >> gonna cost. Well, it sounds like you really attacked the op X side with R and D with pure r and D. I kind of like that shifting, you know, labor toe are Andy because you don't want to spend labour on managing storage a raise, make no sense for your business. Okay. What do you want? Pure toe spend? R and D are now, what problem can they saw for? You mean >> so racy is gonna help If I'm really honest, that's actually is gonna help fill a whole quite well for us because we weren't really sure what to put some of that less hot data we were like, Well, where we going to start to put this now? Because we were beginning to fill up the array and the blades. Actually, with a racy no, we can actually use that different class of storage actually, to keep it still online. Still be out to do some machine learning A. I in the future when that comes around. But actually I can now have Maur longevity out of my existing array and blades. So that's brilliant and coming, I think, having I need to be careful, I know some things that are coming. Uh, the active sinking array is brilliant, and we've been using that since it came out. Having that similar or same ability in Blade when it comes will be a very advantageous having those played enclosures. We've gone to multi chassis flash played over the last six weeks, so that for us is great. Once we can start to synchronize between those two, then that's ah, that's another big one for us, for resiliency, for fault, tolerance, but also workload movement. That thing I said about persistent stories, layer, I'm not gonna need to care where it is, and it will be worked out by the storage in the orchestration layer so it can have the storage in the computer in the right place. >> Wow. Great story, Matt, as always. And I think it's Pierre calls this the unfair advantage coming to life. Best of luck for the rest of the 2019 season. >> I'll take it. >> All right, We'll see you next time. >> Thank you. >> Keep before >> for David Dante. I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from Cure Accelerate in Austin, Texas.