(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)

(gentle music) >> Hello, beautiful humans and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, where we are combating the dry air of the desert and all giggling about the rasp of our voice at this stage. We're theCUBE and we are live from AWS reinvent. I am Savannah Peterson, joined by the fabulous Paul Gillin. Paul, how are you holding up? How are your feet doing? >> My feet are, I can't feel them anymore. (both laugh) >> We can't feel much after these feet. >> Two miles. Just to get from, just to get to to the keynotes this morning. >> Did you do your cross training to prepare >> For, >> Apparently not well enough. (Savannah laughs) Not well enough. >> Well, it's great to have you here >> likewise. and I'm very excited for our next conversation. We've got Ramesh from Prosimo. >> Thank you. >> Savannah: Welcome to the show. How is the show going for you? How's your voice? >> Oh my God. I woke up this morning and I could not hear my own voice. I'm like, this is not me. I think it's the dry air here, so if I cough, I apologize in advance. But no, the show has been great. It's been nonstop at the booth. It's wonderful to see all the customers in one place so you don't have to schedule lots of meetings spread across three, four weeks. So you get to >> Savannah: Right. I, yeah >> So yesterday was like eight to six, nonstop and it was awesome, right? Because you get to meet all these guys. The other important thing is the focus on the right layer, right? Like, I loved the keynote from Adam. It was about applications, services, data. Nowhere in there was there like infrastructure. Like we are infrastructure, right? I actually love that because that's where the focus should be and that's what customers are caring about right? So it's, it's been great so far. >> Yeah. I'm so happy to hear your booth's packed. I know exactly what you mean. I mean, we're going to be talking about optimization. It's a theme, but we also optimize our time here >> Ramesh: Yeah. >> on the show floor by getting to engage with our community. Prosimo's been around for three years just in case folks aren't familiar, give us the pitch. >> Sure. We are in the cloud networking space, solving for two problems. What happens within the cloud as you bring up VPCs, vnet and workloads, how are they able to talk to each other, secure each other, and how to use those access workloads? Those are the two problems that we solve for. It stemmed from really us seeing a complete diversion in what cloud wants versus what network really focuses on. Cloud has been always focused on applications and speed of operations and network has always been about reliability, scalability, and robust architecture. And we didn't really see these things come together. So that's when prosimo was born. >> So what are some of the surprises newcomers to the cloud may encounter with networking, with cloud networking that was not a factor when they were fully on-prem? >> So the first thing is in the cloud, you can't deal with the workload the same way you dealt with in the data center. In the data center, you usually had pools of service. They were all allocated some level of addressing. And it was not about the workload, it was more about the identity, IP addresses and so forth. In the cloud, those things have completely gotten demolished, right? You have to refer to a S3 service as an S3 service. It's not an IP endpoint. IP endpoint comes and goes, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And so you have to completely shift around that, right? >> Now, this actually challenges almost 10 years, 12, 20 years maybe, of networking that we knew about, right? So that's why cloud networking is almost night and day difference compared to regular networking right? And, we're seeing that and that's what we are really helping customers with. >> What are some of the trends that you're seeing? I, well actually, let me ask you this question. Do you, is there an industry or vertical you work with specifically? I would imagine most people across, >> Ramesh: The Yeah, across. >> Yeah. >> Anybody that has workloads in the cloud right? >> Yeah, right. >> Ramesh: That's, >> I mean I can't imagine any companies that would have that. >> Exactly. (Savannah laughs) >> What are some of the trends that you're seeing? I know we talk about time to value. We talk about cost optimization. Is that the top priority for your customers? >> Yeah. Up until end of last year, a lot of the focus was about speed of operations. And so people would look at what are the type of workloads? How do I enable things? How do I empower my development team? So, if I'm the cloud platform team responsible for connecting, securing and making sure my applications can get deployed smooth and fast, that was the primary focus. Fast forward to this year, we started to see this a little bit at the beginning of the year. Now it's in full force. It's about cost control, right? It's about egress charges coming out of the cloud. Suddenly the cloud bill and every single line item on the cloud bill is in focus, right? And so that has a direct impact on what does this mean for networking. Cloud networking for many may not be familiar, it's about 14% of the cloud bill. And so anything that materially moves the needle on the cloud networking costs can actually have a have a big impact, right? And so we have seen the focus on the speed of operations are still there but cloud cost control has become a big part of it. >> So where are the excesses? I mean, it's, it's a big part of the bill. Where can company, where do companies typically waste money in networking costs? >> So, if you bring a person who understands networking and networking architecture really, really well, they'll can build a solid architecture, but they'll not focus on operations and automation. If you bring a 25 year old, they will automate the heck out of it. They know python day in and day out. And so they'll automate the heck out of it but it will not be with a robust architecture, right? And so you, on one hand, you end up wasting because you do things very suboptimally. It's a solid architecture, it's a really good design but it's really bad for operations. In the other hand, with push of a button you can get anything done but underneath the covers, underneath the hood, if you look at it, it's a mess, right? And so you have more competence than necessary. And so, what customers want is really a best of both, right? You need solid architecture that has all the right principles but also you need the automation so that you don't employ four, five people and a whole toolkit in order to make things work, right? And that's where we see most of the efficiencies come from >> You said you were you were super busy at your booth. Do customers understand that this is a problem now? >> So more so now than I would say last year. The last reinvent when we had a session. >> Yeah. >> We had to educate a lot of people on these are the requirements for cloud networking. Thanks to Gartner, thanks to many of the sessions you guys have been doing as well. The focus and the education for what cloud networking requires has started to come about. Now, this is where the savviness of the customer is important, right? Like there are customers in different stages of their journey. Those that have been operating in the cloud for three years plus, know that they've crossed that initial phase, right? Like you have basic hygiene, you have certain things and moving from hundreds of VPCs to maybe about thousand, right? And so at that time, the set of challenges I need to work with are very, very different, right? So now increasingly we are seeing at the booth the challenges are, "Hey, I know how to operate in the cloud". Right? Like, "Don't talk to me about that." Right? "But how do I get from hundred to a thousand?" Because I have a gun to my head. My CIO has said, I need to decommission my data centers in the next couple of years and I need to go all in on cloud. Help me with that, right? And so it's the, I wouldn't call it like massive scale it's the scale from kind of the trivial to the next stage that's actually causing a lot of these problems to surface. >> It's that layer of transformation. >> Ramesh: Yeah. It's when you've made the commitment and now we've got to catch everything up >> [Ramesh} exactly. >> across the company locations and probably a variety of different silos doing different things. >> Ramesh: Exactly. Yeah. >> Super complex. So, how do folks get started with you? >> Yeah, so typically we start with like, even if the customer says, "Here's what my blueprint looks like." We say, "Bring two regions." That's it, two regions, a few workloads. We'll help you set up the connectivity, set up the secure access required, set up the foundational things There's a certain level of automation, right? Let's get to that point because governance is different. The cloud privileges are different so let's work through all of that, right? Usually this takes about a week or so. The actual proof of concept, proof of value can be done in a day, but getting permissions and what not takes about, about a week, right? And once you show two regions then it's actually game on, right? Then you go from 10 VPCs to a hundred to a thousand and it's just like one to one thing after another. So that's usually how we see customers get started. We have a full stack that covers kind of what does this mean for the network to application services to kind of layer seven and so forth. We tell the customer, as much as we want you to focus on the entire stack, let's start with one, right? Start baby steps, start with one. Because for many, cloud itself is, I wouldn't say new but they're in a region that's not comfortable, right? So you wannna, you don't want to throw too much at them. >> Savannah: Right. >> So we help them kind of progressively move towards different types of workplace. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And you have a multicloud story as well. >> Ramesh: That's correct. >> So when companies begin to cross clouds with workloads, move them between clouds, what kinds of issues emerge then? >> Yeah, so there are two parts for this, right? There is the AWS and data center and then there is the AWS plus other clouds. Two different set of problems, actually, >> Paul: Hm-hmm. Hm-hmm. The AWS plus connectivity, back into my data center almost every single enterprise. We deal with kind of the global 2000. Every single one of them has that, right? And so we kind of, we go through a series of steps, come up with an architecture, deploy a solution. After that, it's, Hey, I have BigQuery in Google that needs to talk back to an S3 bucket out here. Like, no networking solution can help you with that. Like, you need like cloud native principles in order to come into the picture. So increasingly we are seeing requests for, hey I have a distributed workload. It's not, it's not that one single application is spread across multiple clouds, but I have these islands of workloads that all need to talk to each other. >> Paul: Right. And what I don't want to do is actually build highways that actually connect all these things together because that's a waste of time. I actually want to make sure that only these applications that care about the talking to each other, are allowed to talk to each other. So that's kind of one foundational thing that we see. A few others are around compliance and governance. So we say, Hey, if I'm a retailer, I need to have some workloads in Azure some in the GCP and so forth. So it depends on kind of the industry compliance, regulatory requirements and so forth. >> So many different needs >> Ramesh: Exactly. for so many different types of companies. But also, you know, creating that efficiency is so great. >> Ramesh: Yup. >> And especially that time to value tune, cost reduction >> Ramesh: Yup. doing a lot of great things for your customers. There's a note on my run sheet here that you've seen some success with Topgolf and I suspect we have some golfers in the audience. John even used to be a caddy. We had a caddy segment with someone who was a pro caddy. Drew, when we were at Cape Con. Tell us about that story. >> So it was a really wild idea. We said, okay people are going to be walking around 22,000 steps right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And so >> Like Paul, >> And, they're going to be talking to people, listening to sessions. So we said, let's, what do most others do? You set up some time in a restaurant, you come, you have a social time, and what not. We said, let's give people something different. So we reserve the Topgolf here and we opened it up. We initially paid for a certain number of things. It's actually gone three x of that right now. So we had in the Topgolf, can you give us like the entire thing? I think people just want to go do something different, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And of course the topic is important but equally important is like, I just want to have a good time, right? >> Yeah. And if you, hit a few And there you go. >> It doesn't have to relate back to network >> Cloud, network. >> Yeah, exactly. And so >> Well, it's all about building community. >> Exactly. >> And especially right now, we all, you know, we're stronger together. >> Ramesh: Yup. We're entering a unique time, we're coming out of a unique time. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> And, no, I think that's great. And we actually do a swag segment here on theCUBE, differentiating on the show floor. I mean, it's clear because of how thoughtful you are >> Ramesh: Yeah. there's a reason that your, that your booth is so busy. >> Ramesh: That's right. >> So what's next? What can you, can you give us a little sneak preview? What's coming out for you? >> Yeah, so, I'm sensitive and sympathetic to all the macroeconomic conditions that are happening but there's been, we have not skipped a beat. So our business is growing really well. Thanks to all the things that are happening in the cloud. Increasingly, folks are looking at, you know, how how do I move in mass into the cloud? And so a few themes have come about as a result. One, certainly around cost control. How do I, how do I make, how do we make sure that we help our customers in that journey, right? So we have a few things around those lines. Modernization, especially after you go through the first few workloads, the next few that come about are invariably modern workloads. And modern workloads is this sensitive thing where I think the ultra savvy developers know what to do but the infrastructure guys don't know what to do in order to serve, right? And so we have actually developed a set of capabilities to help with that kind of modernization, right? Because it's not enough if your apps are modernized, your infrastructure that serves the apps also need to be modernized. And so those are the, those are the things and certainly, getting our customers less than us. We want to get our customers to talk. And so you'll see quite a bit of that as well. >> I want to ask you about a statement that was in the notes that we were reading, running up this interview. Zero Trust network access is the next solution that will be disrupted. What do you mean by that? >> So, when we started the company about three years ago, zero test network access was there. It was about maybe two, three years old at that time. And so we said, it needs to be done differently in the cloud. Why? Because you are a user. You're trying to access an application in the cloud. Do you care what's in the middle? You really don't, you just want to be able to open up your laptop, go to dub dub something.com and you should be able to access, right? But that's not how the experience is today. There's invariably something that comes, a middle mile solution that comes in the middle, right? And then the guy needs to operationalize all of that. And that now passes on to you. You need to launch a an agent on your thing, connect into something. It just brings a lot of complexity, right? So we looked at that problem and we said, cloud has done really really a few things really, really well, right? It's literally at your doorstep. Cloud presence is literally at your doorstep. So as you open up your browser, connect from your home, I don't need anything in the middle. I am jumping straight into the cloud. And so when you do that, then you actually have the luxury of bringing a few capabilities to the entry point of the cloud so that security can be done better, posture control can be done better and so on and so forth. So we developed those capabilities almost three years ago. We have quite a few large enterprises that have deployed this. And we fundamentally believe on building on top of the hyperscale network because billions of tens of billions of dollars go into the investment here. And we want to be building a layer of value on top, right? And so we've been working closely with our AWS buddies here and actually built capabilities so that the infrastructure presence, the massive reach and also the underlying capabilities for zero trust are provided. But what the customer regains in terms of value is through our platform, right? And so we'll see a whole lot more innovation along these lines. Probably bad news for the Middle Mile provider who sit in the, in the middle because hey AWS is literally at your doorstep, so you have to rethink your strategy. >> Going to be a lot of agility >> Ramesh: Yes, absolutely. >> In a very different context than we normally use it in Nerdland. And no, I think that's great. So we have, it's an exciting time for you as a company. We have a new challenge here at Reinvent. >> Okay. >> On theCUBE. I know you're a venerable alumni. >> Yep. >> You have been on theCUBE multiple times with multiple companies which is very impressive. Which says a lot about you. Although given how fun this interview's been, I'm not surprised. Give us your 30 second, Instagram real highlight, sound bite on the biggest or most important theme or takeaway from this year's show. >> From this show? Yeah, so if you look across the keynotes in all the sessions, the focus is on data, services and the applications. So the biggest takeaway I would offer anybody is focus on that first because that's where the outcome needs to shine. The rest of the stuff is a means to an end. I am an infrastructure guy through and through, I have been for the last 20 years. It hurts me to say infrastructure is a means to end but it is, right. Let the people dealing with the infrastructure deal with the infrastructure. If you are a customer or a client of the service, focus on the outcome, focus on the apps, focus on the services focus on on the data. That would be the biggest takeaway. >> Savannah: I appreciate your >> Paul: Words of wisdom >> Savannah: transparency. Yeah, no, exactly. Words of wisdom and very honest words of wisdom. Really great to talk to you about intelligent infrastructure. >> Absolutely. >> Savannah: Thank you so much for being on the show, Ramesh. >> Thank you. >> Savannah: It's been, it's been awesome. Paul, it's always a pleasure. >> Likewise. Thank you all for tuning in today here live from the show floor at AWS, reinvent in beautiful sin city, in the high desert and the high end dry desert with Paul Gillin. My name is Savannah Peterson and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (gentle music)

>>Good evening, brilliant humans. My name is Savannah Peterson and very delighted to be streaming to you. Live from the Cube Studios here in Motor City, Michigan. I've got John Furrier on my left. John, this is our last interview of the day. Energy just seems to keep oozing. How >>You doing? Take two, Three days of coverage, the queue love segments. This one's great cuz we have a practitioner who's implementing all the hard core talks to be awesome. Can't wait to get into it. >>Yeah, I'm very excited for this one. If it's not very clear, we are a community focused community is a huge theme here at the show at Cape Con. And our next guests are actually a provider and a customer. Turning it over to you. Lisa and Jake, welcome to the show. >>Thank you so much for having us. >>It's great to be here. It is our pleasure. Lisa, you're with Cockroach. Just in case the audience isn't familiar, give us a quick little sound bite. >>We're a distributed sequel database. Highly scalable, reliable. The database you can't kill, right? We will survive the apocalypse. So very resilient. Our customers, mostly retail, FinTech game meet online gambling. They, they, they need that resiliency, they need that scalability. So the indestructible database is the elevator pitch >>And the success has been very well documented. Valuation obviously is a scorp guard, but huge customers. We were at the Escape 19. Just for the record, the first ever multi-cloud conference hasn't come back baby. Love it. It'll come back soon. >>Yeah, well we did a similar version of it just a month ago and I was, that was before Cockroach. I was a different company there talking a lot about multi-cloud. So, but I'm, I've been a car a couple of years now and I run community, I run developer relations. I'm still also a CNCF ambassador, so I lead community as well. I still run a really large user group in the San Francisco Bay area. So we've just >>Been in >>Community, take through the use case. Jake's story set us up. >>Well I would like Jake to take him through the use case and Cockroach is a part of it, but what they've built is amazing. And also Jake's history is amazing. So you can start Jake, >>Wherever you take >>Your Yeah, sure. I'm Jake, I'm CEO and co-founder of Offset. Oted is the commercial entity behind Spice Dvy and Spice Dvy is a permission service. Cool. So a permission service is something that lets developers and let's platform teams really unlock the full potential of their applications. So a lot of people get stuck on My R back isn't flexible enough. How do I do these fine grain things? How do I do these complex sharing workflows that my product manager thinks is so important? And so our service enables those platform teams and developers to do those kinds of things. >>What's your, what's your infrastructure? What's your setup look like? What, how are you guys looking like on the back end? >>Sure. Yeah. So we're obviously built on top of Kubernetes as well. One of the reasons that we're here. So we use Kubernetes, we use Kubernetes operators to orchestrate everything. And then we use, use Cockroach TV as our production data store, our production backend data store. >>So I'm curious, cause I love when these little matchmakers come together. You said you've now been presenting on a little bit of a road show, which is very exciting. Lisa, how are you and the team surfacing stories like Jakes, >>Well, I mean any, any place we can obviously all the social medias, all the blogs, How >>Are you finding it though? >>How, how did you Oh, like from our customers? Yeah, we have an open source version so people start to use us a long time before we even sometimes know about them. And then they'll come to us and they'll be like, I love Cockroach, and like, tell me about it. Like, tell me what you build and if it's interesting, you know, we'll we'll try to give it some light. And it's always interesting to me what people do with it because it's an interesting technology. I like what they've done with it. I mean the, the fact that it's globally distributed, right? That was like a really important thing to you. Totally. >>Yeah. We're also long term fans of Cockroach, so we actually all work together out of Workbench, which was a co-working space and investor in New York City. So yeah, we go way back. We knew the founders. I, I'm constantly saying like if I could have invested early in cockroach, that would've been the easiest check I could have ever signed. >>Yeah, that's awesome. And then we've been following that too and you guys are now using them, but folks that are out there looking to have the, the same challenges, what are the big challenges on selecting the database? I mean, as you know, the history of Cockroach and you're originating the story, folks out there might not know and they're also gonna choose a database. What's the, what's the big challenge that they can solve that that kind of comes together? What, what would you describe that? >>Sure. So we're, as I said, we're a permission service and per the data that you store in a permission service is incredibly sensitive. You need it to be around, right? You need it to be available. If the permission service goes down, almost everything else goes down because it's all calling into the permission service. Is this user allowed to do this? Are they allowed to do that? And if we can't answer those questions, then our customer is down, right? So when we're looking at a database, we're looking for reliability, we're looking for durability, disaster recovery, and then permission services are one of the only services that you usually don't shard geographically. So if you look at like AWS's iam, that's a global service, even though the individual things that they run are actually sharded by region. So we also needed a globally distributed database with all of those other properties. So that's what led us >>To, this is a huge topic. So man, we've been talking about all week the cloud is essentially distributed database at this point and it's distributed system. So distributed database is a hot topic, totally not really well reported. A lot of people talking about it, but how would you describe this distributed trend that's going on? What are the key reasons that they're driving it? What's making this more important than ever in your mind, in your opinion? >>I mean, for our use case, it was just a hard requirement, right? We had to be able to have this global service. But I think just for general use cases, a distributed database, distributed database has that like shared nothing architecture that allows you to kind of keep it running and horizontally scale it. And as your requirements and as your applications needs change, you can just keep adding on capacity and keep adding on reliability and availability. >>I'd love to get both of your opinion. You've been talking about the, the, the, the phases of customers, the advanced got Kubernetes going crazy distributed, super alpha geek. Then you got the, the people who are building now, then you got the lagers who are coming online. Where do you guys see the market now in terms of, I know the Alphas are all building all the great stuff and you guys had great success with all the top logos and they're all doing hardcore stuff. As the mainstream enterprise comes in, where's their psychology, what's on their mind? What's, you share any insight into your perspective on that? Because we're seeing a lot more of it folks becoming like real cloud players. >>Yeah, I feel like in mainstream enterprise hasn't been lagging as much as people think. You know, certainly there's been pockets in big enterprises that have been looking at this and as distributed sequel, it gives you that scalability that it's absolutely essential for big enterprises. But also it gives you the, the multi-region, you know, the, you have to be globally distributed. And for us, for enterprises, you know, you need your data near where the users are. I know this is hugely important to you as well. So you have to be able to have a multi-region functionality and that's one thing that distributed SQL lets you build and that what we built into our product. And I know that's one of the things you like too. >>Yeah, well we're a brand new product. I mean we only founded the company two years ago, but we're actually getting inbound interest from big enterprises because we solve the kinds of challenges that they have and whether, I mean, most of them already do have a cockroach footprint, but whether they did or didn't, once they need to bring in our product, they're going to be adopting cockroach transitively anyway. >>So, So you're built on top of Cockroach, right? And Spice dv, is that open source or? >>It >>Is, yep. Okay. And explain the role of open source and your business model. Can you take a minute to talk about the relevance of that? >>Yeah, open source is key. My background is, before this I was at Red Hat. Before that we were at CoreOS, so CoreOS acquisition and before that, >>One of the best acquisitions that ever happened for the value. That was a great, great team. Yeah, >>We, we, we had fun and before that we built Qua. So my co-founders and I, we built Quay, which is a, a first private docker registry. So CoreOS and, and all of those things are all open source or deeply open source. So it's just in our dna. We also see it as part of our go-to market motion. So if you are a database, a lot of people won't even consider what you're doing without being open source. Cuz they say, I don't want to take a, I don't want to, I don't want to end up in an Oracle situation >>Again. Yeah, Oracle meaning they go, you get you locked in, get you in a headlock, Increase prices. >>Yeah. Oh yeah, >>Can, can >>I got triggered. >>You need to talk about your PTSD there >>Or what. >>I mean we have 20,000 stars on GitHub because we've been open and transparent from the beginning. >>Yeah. And it >>Well, and both of your projects were started based on Google Papers, >>Right? >>That is true. Yep. And that's actually, so we're based off of the Google Zans of our paper. And as you know, Cockroach is based off of the Google Span paper and in the the Zanzibar paper, they have this globally distributed database that they're built on top of. And so when I said we're gonna go and we're gonna make a company around the Zabar paper, people would go, Well, what are you gonna do for Span? And I was like, Easy cockroach, they've got us covered. >>Yeah, I know the guys and my friends. Yeah. So the question is why didn't you get into the first round of Cockroach? She said don't answer that. >>The question he did answer though was one of those age old arguments in our community about pronunciation. We used to argue about Quay, I always called it Key of course. And the co-founder obviously knows how it's pronounced, you know, it's the et cd argument, it's the co cuddl versus the control versus coo, CTL Quay from the co-founder. That is end of argument. You heard it here first >>And we're keeping it going with Osted. So awesome. A lot of people will say Zeed or, you know, so we, we just like to have a little ambiguity >>In the, you gotta have some semantic arguments, arm wrestling here. I mean, it keeps, it keeps everyone entertained, especially on the over the weekend. What's, what's next? You got obviously Kubernetes in there. Can you explain the relationship between Kubernetes, how you're handling Spice dv? What, what does the Kubernetes piece fit in and where, where is that going to be going? >>Yeah, great question. Our flagship product right now is a dedicated, and in a dedicated, what we're doing is we're spinning up a single tenant Kubernetes cluster. We're installing all of our operator suite, and then we're installing the application and running it in a single tenant fashion for our customers in the same region, in the same data center where they're running their applications to minimize latency. Because of this, as an authorization service, latency gets passed on directly to the end user. So everybody's trying to squeeze the latency down as far as they can. And our strategy is to just run these single tenant stacks for people with the minimal latency that we can and give them a VPC dedicated link very similar to what Cockroach does in their dedicated >>Product. And the distributed architecture makes that possible because it's lighter way, it's not as heavy. Is that one of the reasons? >>Yep. And Kubernetes really gives us sort of like a, a level playing field where we can say, we're going going to take the provider, the cloud providers Kubernetes offering, normalize it, lay down our operators, and then use that as the base for delivering >>Our application. You know, Jake, you made me think of something I wanted to bring up with other guests, but now since you're here, you're an expert, I wanna bring that up, but talk about Super Cloud. We, we coined that term, but it's kind of multi-cloud, is that having workloads on multiple clouds is hard. I mean there are, they are, there are workloads on, on clouds, but the complexity of one clouds, let's take aws, they got availability zones, they got regions, you got now data issues in each one being global, not that easy on one cloud, nevermind all clouds. Can you share your thoughts on how you see that progression? Because when you start getting, as its distributed database, a lot of good things might come up that could fit into solving the complexity of global workloads. Could you share your thoughts on or scoping that problem space of, of geography? Yeah, because you mentioned latency, like that's huge. What are some of the other challenges that other people have with mobile? >>Yeah, absolutely. When you have a service like ours where the data is small, but very critical, you can get a vendor like Cockroach to step in and to fill that gap and to give you that globally distributed database that you can call into and retrieve the data. I think the trickier issues come up when you have larger data, you have huge binary blobs. So back when we were doing Quay, we wanted to be a global service as well, but we had, you know, terabytes, petabytes of data that we were like, how do we get this replicated everywhere and not go broke? Yeah. So I think those are kind of the interesting issues moving forward is what do you do with like those huge data lakes, the huge amount of data, but for the, the smaller bits, like the things that we can keep in a relational database. Yeah, we're, we're happy that that's quickly becoming a solved >>Problem. And by the way, that that data problem also is compounded when the architecture goes to the edge. >>Totally. >>I mean this is a big issue. >>Exactly. Yeah. Edge is something that we're thinking a lot about too. Yeah, we're lucky that right now the applications that are consuming us are in a data center already. But as they start to move to the edge, we're going to have to move to the edge with them. And it's a story that we're gonna have to figure out. >>All right, so you're a customer cockroach, what's the testimonial if I put you on the spot, say, hey, what's it like working with these guys? You know, what, what's the, what's the, you know, the founders, so you know, you give a good description, little biased, but we'll, we'll we'll hold you on it. >>Yeah. Working with Cockroach has been great. We've had a couple things that we've run into along the way and we've gotten great support from our account managers. They've brought in the right technical expertise when we need it. Cuz what we're doing with Cockroach is not you, you couldn't do it on Postgres, right? So it's not just a simple rip and replace for us, we're using all of the features of Cockroach, right? We're doing as of system time queries, we're doing global replication. We're, you know, we're, we're consuming it all. And so we do need help from them sometimes and they've been great. Yeah. >>And that's natural as they grow their service. I mean the world's changing. >>Well I think one of the important points that you mentioned with multi-cloud, we want you to have the choice. You know, you can run it in in clouds, you can run it hybrid, you can run it OnPrem, you can do whatever you want and it's just, it's one application that you can run in these different data centers. And so really it's up to you how do you want to build your infrastructure? >>And one of the things we've been talking about, the super cloud concept that we've been issue getting a lot of contrary, but, but people are leaning into it is that it's the refactoring and taking advantage of the services. Like what you mentioned about cockroach. People are doing that now on cloud going the lift and shift market kind of had it time now it's like hey, I can start taking advantage of these higher level services or capability of someone else's stack and refactoring it. So I think that's a dynamic that I'm seeing a lot more of. And it sounds like it's working out great in this situation. >>I just came from a talk and I asked them, you know, what don't you wanna put in the cloud and what don't you wanna run in Kubernetes or on containers and good Yeah. And the customers that I was on stage with, one of the guys made a joke and he said I would put my dog in a container room. I could, he was like in the category, which is his right, which he is in the category of like, I'll put everything in containers and these are, you know, including like mis critical apps, heritage apps, since they don't wanna see legacy anymore. Heritage apps, these are huge enterprises and they wanna put everything in the cloud. Everything >>You so want your dog that gets stuck on the airplane when it's on the tarmac. >>Oh >>God, that's, she was the, don't take that analogy. Literally don't think about that. Well that's, >>That's let's not containerize. >>There's always supply chain concern. >>It. So I mean going macro and especially given where we are cncf, it's all about open source. Do y'all think that open source builds a better future? >>Yeah and a better past. I mean this is, so much of this software is founded on open source. I, we wouldn't be here really. I've been in open source community for many, many years so I wouldn't say I'm biased. I would say this is how we build software. I came from like in a high school we're all like, oh let's build a really cool application. Oh you know what? I built this cuz I needed it, but maybe somebody else needs it too. And you put it out there and that is the ethos of Silicon Valley, right? That's where we grew up. So I've always had that mindset, you know, and social coding and why I have three people, right? Working on the same thing when one person you could share it's so inefficient. All of that. Yeah. So I think it's great that people work on what they're really good at. You know, we all, now you need some standardization, you need some kind of control around this whole thing. Sometimes some foundations to, you know, herd the cats. Yeah. But it's, it's great. Which is why I'm a c CF ambassador and I spend a lot of time, you know, in my free time talking about open source. Yeah, yeah. >>It's clear how passionate you are about it. Jake, >>This is my second company that we founded now and I don't think either of them could have existed without the base of open source, right? Like when you look at I have this cool idea for an app or a company and I want to go try it out, the last thing I want to do is go and negotiate with a vendor to get like the core data component. Yeah. To even be able to get to the >>Prototypes. NK too, by the way. Yeah. >>Hey >>Nk >>Or hire, you know, a bunch of PhDs to go and build that core component for me. So yeah, I mean nobody can argue that >>It truly is, I gotta say a best time if you're a developer right now, it's awesome to be a developer right now. It's only gonna get better. As we were riff from the last session about productivity, we believe that if you follow the digital transformation to its conclusion, developers and it aren't a department serving the business, they are the business. And that means they're running the show, which means that now their entire workflow is gonna change. It's gonna be have to be leveraging services partnering. So yeah, open source just fills that. So the more code coming up, it's just no doubt in our mind that that's go, that's happening and will accelerate. So yeah, >>You know, no one company is gonna be able to compete with a community. 50,000 users contributing versus you riding it yourself in your garage with >>Your dogs. Well it's people driven too. It's humans not container. It's humans working together. And here you'll see, I won't say horse training, that's a bad term, but like as projects start to get traction, hey, why don't we come together as, as the world starts to settle and the projects have traction, you start to see visibility into use cases, functionality. Some projects might not be, they have to kind of see more kind >>Of, not every feature is gonna be development. Oh. So I mean, you know, this is why you connect with truly brilliant people who can architect and distribute sequel database. Like who thought of that? It's amazing. It's as, as our friend >>You say, Well let me ask you a question before we wrap up, both by time, what is the secret of Kubernetes success? What made Kubernetes specifically successful? Was it timing? Was it the, the unambitious nature of it, the unification of it? Was it, what was the reason why is Kubernetes successful, right? And why nothing else? >>Well, you know what I'm gonna say? So I'm gonna let Dave >>First don't Jake, you go first. >>Oh boy. If we look at what was happening when Kubernetes first came out, it was, Mesosphere was kind of like the, the big player in the space. I think Kubernetes really, it had the backing from the right companies. It had the, you know, it had the credibility, it was sort of loosely based on Borg, but with the story of like, we've fixed everything that was broken in Borg. Yeah. And it's better now. Yeah. So I think it was just kind and, and obviously people were looking for a solution to this problem as they were going through their containerization journey. And I, yeah, I think it was just right >>Place, the timing consensus of hey, if we just let this happen, something good might come together for everybody. That's the way I felt. I >>Think it was right place, right time, right solution. And then it just kind of exploded when we were at Cores. Alex Povi, our ceo, he heard about Kubernetes and he was like, you know, we, we had a thing called Fleet D or we had a tool called Fleet. And he's like, Nope, we're all in on Kubernetes now. And that was an amazing Yeah, >>I remember that interview. >>I, amazing decision. >>Yeah, >>It's clear we can feel the shift. It's something that's come up a lot this week is is the commitment. Everybody's all in. People are ready for their transformation and Kubernetes is definitely gonna be the orchestrator that we're >>Leveraging. Yeah. And it's an amazing community. But it was, we got lucky that the, the foundational technology, I mean, you know, coming out of Google based on Go conferences, based on Go, it's no to coincidence that this sort of nature of, you know, pods horizontally, scalable, it's all fits together. I does make sense. Yeah. I mean, no offense to Python and some of the other technologies that were built in other languages, but Go is an awesome language. It's so, so innovative. Innovative things you could do with it. >>Awesome. Oh definitely. Jake, I'm very curious since we learned on the way and you are a Detroit native? >>I am. Yep. I grew up in the in Warren, which is just a suburb right outside of Detroit. >>So what does it mean to you as a Michigan born bloke to be here, see your entire community invade? >>It is, I grew up coming to the Detroit Auto Show in this very room >>That brought me to Detroit the first time. Love n a I a s. Been there with our friends at Ford just behind us. >>And it's just so interesting to me to see the accumulation, the accumulation of tech coming to Detroit cuz it's really not something that historically has been a huge presence. And I just love it. I love to see the activity out on the streets. I love to see all the restaurants and coffee shops full of people. Just, I might tear up. >>Well, I was wondering if it would give you a little bit of that hometown pride and also the joy of bringing your community together. I mean, this is merging your two probably most core communities. Yeah, >>Yeah. Your >>Youth and your, and your career. It doesn't get more personal than that really. Right. >>It's just been, it's been really exciting to see the energy. >>Well thanks for going on the queue. Thanks for sharing. Appreciate it. Thanks >>For having us. Yeah, thank you both so much. Lisa, you were a joy of ball of energy right when you walked up. Jake, what a compelling story. Really appreciate you sharing it with us. John, thanks for the banter and the fabulous questions. I'm >>Glad I could help out. >>Yeah, you do. A lot more than help out sweetheart. And to all of you watching the Cube today, thank you so much for joining us live from Detroit, the Cube Studios. My name is Savannah Peterson and we'll see you for our event wrap up next.

foreign [Music] my name is Savannah Peterson and I am very excited to be coming to you today from the cube in Palo Alto we're going to be talking about kubecon giving a little preview of the hype and what you might be able to expect in Detroit with the one and only co-founder and CEO of the cube and siliconangle John ferriere John hello how are you today thanks for hosting and doing the preview with me my goodness a pleasure I we got acquainted this time last year how do you think the ecosystem has changed are you excited well first of all I missed kubecon Valencia because I had covid I was so excited to be there this big trip plan and then couldn't make it but so much has gone on I mean we've been at every kubecon the cube was there at the beginning when openstack was still going on kubernetes just started came out of Google we were there having beers with Lou Tucker and a bunch of The Luminaries when it all kind of came together and then watch it year by year progress through and how it's changed the industry and mainly how open source has been really the wave behind it combining with the Linux foundation and then cncf and then open source movement and good kubernetes has been amazing and under it all containers has been the real driver and all this so you know Docker containers Docker was a well-funded company they had to Pivot and were restructured now they're pure open source so containers have gone Supernova on top of that kubernetes and with that's a complete ecosystem of opportunity to create the next operating system in in software development so to me kubecon is at the center of software software 2030 what do you want to call it super cloud it's that it's really action it's not where the old school is it's where the new school is excellent so what has you most excited this year what's the biggest change from this time last year and now well two things I'm looking at this year uh carefully both from an editorial lens and also from a sponsorship lenses where is the funding going on the sponsorships because again a very diverse ecosystem of Builders but also vendors so I'm going to see how that Dynamics going on but also on the software side a lot of white space going on in the stack or in the map if you will you know the run times you've got observability you got a lot of competition maybe projects might be growing some Rising some falling maybe merge together I'm going to see how that but there's a lot of white spaces developing so I'm curious to see what's new on that area and then service meshes is a big deal this year so I'm looking for what's going on so it's been kind of a I won't say cold war but kind of like uh you know where is this going to go and because it's a super important part of of the of the orchestration and managing containers and so be very interested to see how service mesh does istio and other versions out there have been around for a while so that and also the other controversy is the number of stars on GitHub a project may have so sometimes that carries a lot of weight but we're going to look at which ones are rising which ones are falling again um which ones are getting the most votes by the developers vote with their code yeah absolutely well we did definitely miss you down in Los Angeles but it will be great to be in Detroit what has you most excited do you think that we're going to see the number of people in person that we have in the past I know you've seen it since the beginning so I think this year is going to be explosive from that psychology angle because I think it was really weird because La was on they were a bold to make that move we're all there is first conference back it was a lot a lot of like badges don't touch me only handshakes fist pumps but it was at the beginning of the covid second wave right so it was kind of still not yet released where everyone's was not worried about it so I think it's in the past year in the past eight months I mean I've been places with no masks people have no masks Vegas other places so I think it's going to be a year where it will be a lot more people in person because the growth and the opportunities are so big it's going to drive a lot of people in person just like Amazon reinvent those yeah absolutely and as the most important and prominent event in the kubernetes space I think everyone's very excited to to get back together when we think about this space do you think there that anyone's the clear winner yet or do you think it's still a bit of a open territory in terms of the companies and Partnerships I think Red Hat has done a great job and they're you know I think they're going to see how well they can turn this into gold for them because they've positioned themselves very well open shift years ago was kind of waffling I won't say it in a bad way but like but once they got view on containers and kubernetes red has done an exceptional job in how they position their company being bought by ibms can be very interesting to see how that influences change so if Red Hat can stay red hat I think IBM will win I think customers that's one company I like the startups we're seeing companies like platform nine Rafi systems young companies coming out in the kubernetes as a service space because I think whoever can make kubernetes easier because I think that's the hard part right now even though that the show is called kubecon is a lot more than kubernetes I think the container layer what docker's doing has been exceptional that's the real action the question is how does that impact the kubernetes layers so kubernetes is not a done deal yet I think it hasn't really crossed the chasm yet it's certainly popular but not every company is adopting it so we're starting to see that we need to see more adoption of kubernetes seeing that happen it's going to decide who the winners are totally agree with that if you look at the data a lot of companies are and people are excited about kubernetes but they haven't taken the plunge to shifting over their stack or fully embracing it because of that complexity so I'm very curious to see what we learn this week about who those players might be moving forward how does it feel to be in Detroit when was the last time you were here I was there in 2007 was the last time I was in that town so uh we'll see what's like wow yeah but things have changed yeah the lions are good this year they've got great hockey goalies there so you know all right you've heard that sports fans let John know what you're thinking your Sports predictions for this season I love that who do you hope to get to meet while we're at the show I want to meet more end user customers we're gonna have Envoy again on the cube I think Red Hat was going to be a big sponsor this year they've been great um we're looking for end user project most looking for some editorial super cloud like um commentary because the cncf is kind of the developer Tech Community that's powering in my opinion this next wave of software development Cloud native devops is now Cloud native developers devops is kind of going away that's killed I.T in my opinion data and security Ops is the new kind of Ops the new it so it's good to see how devops turns into more of a software engineering meet supercloud so I think you're going to start to see the infrastructure become more programmable it's infrastructure as code so I think if anything I'm more excited to hear more stories about how infrastructure as code is now the new standard so if when that truly happens the super cloud model be kicking into high gear I love that let's you touched on it a little bit right there but I want to dig in a bit since you've been around since the beginning what is it that you appreciate or enjoy so much about the kubernetes community and the people around this I think there are authentic people and I think they're they're building they're also Progressive they're very diverse um they're open and inclusive they try stuff and um they can be critical but they're not jerks about it so when people try something um they're open-minded of a failure so it's a classic startup mentality I think that is embodied throughout the Linux Foundation but CNC in particular has to bridge the entrepreneurial and corporate Vibe so they've done an exceptional job doing that and that's what I like about this money making involved but there's also a lot of development and Innovation that comes out of it so the next big name and startup could come out of this community and that's what I hope to see coming out here is that next brand that no one's heard of that just comes out of nowhere and just takes a big position in the marketplace so that's going to be interesting to see hopefully we have on our stage there yeah that's the goal we're going to interview them all a year from now when we're sitting here again what do you hope to be able to say about this space or this event that we might not be able to say today I think it's going to be more of clarity around um the new modern software development techniques software next gen using AI more faster silicon chips you see Amazon with what they're doing the custom silicon more processing but I think Hardware matters we've been talking a lot about that I think I think it's we're going to shift from what's been innovative and what's changed I think I think if you look at what's been going on in the industry outside of crypto the infrastructure hasn't really changed much except for AWS what they've done so I'm expecting to see more Innovations at the physics level way down in the chips and then that lower end of the stack is going to be dominated by either one of the three clouds probably AWS and then the middle layer is going to be this where the abstraction is around making infrastructure as code really happen I think that's going to be Clarity coming out of this year next year we should have some visibility into the vertical applications and of the AI and machine learning absolutely digging in on that actually even more because I like what you're saying a lot what verticals do you think that kubernetes is going to impact the most looking even further out than say a year I mean I think that hot ones Healthcare fintech are obvious to get the most money they're spending I think they're the ones who are already kind of creating these super cloud models where they're actually changed over their their spending from capex to Opex and they're driving top line revenue as part of that so you're seeing companies that wants customers of the I.T vendors are now becoming the providers that's a big super cloud Trend we see the other verticals are going to be served by a lot of men in Surprise oil and gas you know all the classic versus Healthcare I mentioned that one those are the classic verticals retail is going to I think be massively huge as you get more into the internet of things that's truly internet based you're going to start to see a lot more Edge use cases so Telecom I think it's going to be completely disrupted by new brands so I think once that you see see how that plays out but all verticals are going to be disrupted just a casual statement to say yeah yeah no doubt in my mind that's great I'm personally really excited about the edge applications that are possible here and can't wait to see can't wait to see what happens next I'm curious as to your thoughts how based given your history here and we don't have to say number of years that you've been participating in in Cape Cod but give them your history what's the evolution looked like from that Community perspective when you were all just starting out having that first drink did you anticipate that we would be here with thousands of people in Detroit you know I knew the moment was happening around um 2017-2018 Dan Coney no longer with us he passed away I ran into him randomly in China and it was like what are you doing here he was with a bunch of Docker guys so they were already investing in so I knew that the cncf was a great Steward for this community because they were already doing the work Dan led a great team at that time and then they were they were they were kicking ass and they were just really setting the foundation they dig in they set the architecture perfectly so I knew that that was a moment that was going to be pretty powerful at the early days when we were talking about kubernetes before it even started we were always always talking about if this this could be the tcpip of of cloud then we could have kind of a de facto interoperability and Lou Tucker was working for Cisco at the time and we were called it interclouding inter-networking what that did during the the revolution Cloud yeah the revolution of the client server and PC Revolution was about connectivity and so tcpip was the disruptive enable that created massive amounts of wealth created a lot of companies created a whole generation of companies so I think this next inflection point is kind of happening right now I think kubernetes is one step of this abstraction layer but you start to see companies like snowflake who's built on AWS and then moved to multiple clouds Goldman Sachs Capital One you're going to see insurance companies so we believe that the rise of the super cloud is here that's going to be Cloud 3.0 that's software 3.0 it's software three what do you want to call it it's not yesterday's Cloud lift and shift and run a SAS application it's a true Enterprise digital digital transformation so that's that's kind of the trend that we see riding in now and so you know if you're not on that side of the street you're going to get washed away from that wave so it's going to be interesting to see how how it all plays out so it's fun to watch who's on the wrong side it is very fun I hope you all are listening to this really powerful advice from John he's dropping some serious knowledge bombs on us well holding the back for kubecon because we've got we got all the great guests coming on and that's where all the content comes from I mean the best part of the community is that they're sharing yeah absolutely so just for old time's sake and it's because it's how I met your fabulous team last year Define kubernetes for the audience kubernetes is like what someone said it was a magical Christmas I heard that was a well good explanation with that when I heard that one um you mean the technical definition or like the business definition or maybe both you can give us an interpretive dance if you'd like I mean the simplest way to describe kubernetes is an orchestration layer that orchestrates containers that are containing applications and it's a way to keep things running and runtime assembly of like the of the data so if you've got you're running containers you can containerize applications kubernetes gives you that capability to run applications at scale which feeds into uh the development uh cycle of the pipelining of apps so if you're writing applications and you want to scale up it's a fast way to stand up massive amounts of scale using containers and kubernetes so a variety of other things that are in the in the in the system too so that was pretty good there's a lot more under the hood but that's the oversimplified version I think that's what we were going for I think it's actually I mean it's harder to oversimplify it sometimes in this case it connects it connects well it's the connective tissue between all the container applications yes last question for you John we are here at the cube we're very excited to be headed to Detroit very soon what can people expect from the cube at coupon this year so we'll be broadcasting Wednesday Thursday and Friday we'll be there early I'll be there Monday and Tuesday we'll do our normal kind of hanging around getting some scoop on the on the ground floor you'll see us there Monday and Tuesday probably in the in the lounge too um come up and say hi to us um again we're looking for more stories this year we believe this is the year that you're going to hear a lot more storytelling coming out of this community as people get more proof points so come up to us share your email your your handle give us yours give us your story we'll publish it we think we think this is going to be the year that cloud native developers start showing the signs of the of the rise of the supercloud that's going to come out of this this community so you know if you got something to say you know we're open to share stories so we're here all that speaking of John how can people say hi to you and the team on Twitter at Furrier at siliconangle at thecube thecube.net siliconangle.com LinkedIn Dave vellantis they were open on all channels all right signal Instagram WhatsApp perfect well pick your channel we really hope to hear from you John thank you so much for joining us for this preview session and thank you for tuning in my name is Savannah Peterson here in Palo Alto at thecube Studios looking forward to Detroit we can't wait to hear your thoughts do let us know in the comments and let us know if you're headed to Michigan cheers [Music] thank you

>>We're back in Boston, the Cube's coverage of AWS reinforced 2022. My name is Dave ante. Steve Malanney is here as the CEO of Aviatrix longtime cube alum sort of collaborator on super cloud. Yeah. Uh, which we have an event, uh, August 9th, which you guys are participating in. So, um, thank you for that. And, yep. Welcome to the cube. >>Yeah. Thank you so great to be here as >>Always back in Boston. Yeah. I'd say good show. Not, not like blow me away. We were AWS, um, summit in New York city three weeks ago. I >>Took, heard it took three hours to get in >>Out control. I heard, well, there were some people two I, maybe three <laugh>, but there was, they expected like maybe nine, 10,000, 19,000 showed up. Now it's a free event. Yeah. 19,000 people. >>Oh, I didn't know it >>Was that many. It was unbelievable. I mean, it was packed. Yeah. You know, so it's a little light here and I think it's cuz you know, everybody's down the Cape, >>There are down the Cape, Rhode Island that's after the fourth. The thing is that we were talking about this. The quality of people are pretty good though. Yeah. Right. This is there's no looky lose it's everybody. That's doing stuff in cloud. They're moving in. This is no longer, Hey, what's this thing called cloud. Right. I remember three, four years ago at AWS. You'd get a lot of that, that kind of stuff. Some the summit meetings and things like that. Now it's, we're a full on deployment mode even >>Here in 2019, the conversation was like, so there's this shared responsibility model and we may have to make sure you understand. I mean, nobody's questioning that today. Yeah. It's more really hardcore best practices and you know how to apply tools. Yeah. You know, dos and don't and so it's a much more sophisticated narrative, I think. Yeah. >>Well, I mean, that's one of the things that Aviatrix does is our whole thing is architecturally. I would say, where does network security belong in the network? It shouldn't be a bolt on it. Shouldn't be something that you add on. It should be something that actually gets integrated into the fabric of the network. So you shouldn't be able to point to network security. It's like, can you point to the network? It's everywhere. Point to air it's everywhere. Network security should be integrated in the fabric and that wasn't done. On-prem that way you steered traffic to this thing called a firewall. But in the cloud, that's not the right architectural way. It it's a choke point. Uh, operationally adds tremendous amount of complexity, which is the whole reason we're going to cloud in the first place is for that agility and the ability to operationally swipe the card and get our developers running to put in these choke points is completely the wrong architecture. So conversations we're having with customers is integrate that security into the fabric of the network. And you get rid of all those, all those operational >>Issues. So explain that how you're not a, a checkpoint, but if you funnel everything into one sort of place >>In the, so we are a networking company, uh, it is uh, cloud networking company. So we, we were born in the cloud cloud native. We, we are not some on-prem networking solution that was jammed in the cloud, uh, wrapped >>In stack wrapped >>In, you know, or like that. No, no, no. And looking for wires, right? That's VM series from Palo. It doesn't even know it's in the cloud. Right. It's looking for wires. Um, and of course multicloud, cuz you know, Larry E said now, could you believe that on stage with sat, Nadela talking about multi-cloud now you really know we've crossed over to this is a, this is a thing, whoever would've thought you'd see that. But anyway, so we're networking. We're cloud networking, of course it's multi-cloud networking and we're gonna integrate these intelligent services into the fabric. And one of those is, is networking. So what happens is you should do security everywhere. So the place to do it is at every single point in the network that you can make a decision and you embed it and actually embed it into the network. So it's that when you're making a decision of does that traffic need to go somewhere or not, you're doing a little bit of security everywhere. And so what, it looks like a giant firewall effectively, but it's actually distributed in software through every single point in a network. >>Can I call it a mesh? >>It's kind of a mesh you can think of. Yeah, it's a fabric. >>Okay. It's >>A, it's a fabric that these advanced services, including security are integrated into that fabric. >>So you've been in networking much of >>Your career career, >>37 years. All your career. Right? So yay. Cisco Palo Alto. Nicera probably missing one or two, but so what do you do with all blue coat? Blue coat? What do you do with all that stuff? That's out there that >>Symantics. >>Yes. <laugh> keep going. >>Yeah, I think that's it. That's >>All I got. Okay. So what do you do with all that stuff? That's that's out there, you rip and replace it. You, >>So in the cloud you mean yeah. >>All this infrastructure that's out there. What is that? Well, you >>Don't have it in the right. And so right now what's happening is people, look, you can't change too many things. If you're a human, you know, they always tell you don't change a job, get married and have a kid or something all in the same year. Like they just, just do one of 'em cuz you it's too much. When people move to the cloud, what they do is they tend to take what they do on Preem and they say, look, I'm gonna change one thing. We're gonna go to the cloud, everything else. I'm gonna keep the same. Cuz I don't wanna change three things. So they kind of lift and shift their same mentality. They take their firewalls, their next gen fire. I want them, they take all the things that they currently do. And they say, I'm gonna try to do that in the cloud. >>It's not really the right way to do it. But sometimes for people that are on-prem people, that's the way to get started and I'll screw it up and not screw it up and, and not change too many things. And look, I'm just used to that. And, and then I'll, then I'll go to change things, to be more cloud native, then I'll realize I can get rid of this and get rid of that and do that. But, but that's where people are. The first thing is bring these things over. We help them do that, right? From a networking perspective, I'll make it easier to bring your old security stuff in. But in parallel to that, we start adding things into the fabric and what's gonna happen is eventually we start adding all these things and things that you can't do separately. We start doing anomaly detection. We start doing behavioral analysis. Why? Because the entire network, we are the data plan. We see everything. And so we can start doing things that a standalone device can't do because not all the traffic steered to them. It can only control what's steered to you. And then eventually what's happening is people look at that device. And then they look at us and then they look at the device and they look at us and they go, why do I have both of this? And we go, I don't know. >>You don't need it. >>Well, can I get rid of that other thing? That's a tool. >>Sure. And there's not a trade off. There's not a trade off. You >>Don't have to. No. Now people rid belts and suspenders. Yeah. Cause it's just, who has, who has enough? Who has too much security buddy? They're gonna, they're gonna do belt suspenders. You know anything they can do. But eventually what will happened is they'll look at what we do and they'll go, that's good enough. That happened to me. When I was at Palo Alto networks, we inserted as a firewall. They kept their existing firewall. They had all these other devices and eventually all those went away and you just had a NextGen >>Firewall just through attrition, >>Through Atian. You're like, you're looking, you go, well, that platform is doing all these functions. Same. Thing's gonna happen to us. The platform of networking's gonna do all your network security devices. So any tool or agent or external, you know, device that you have to steer traffic to ISS gonna go away. You're not gonna need it. >>And, and you talking multi-cloud obviously, >>And then don't wanna do the same thing. Whether man Azure, you know the same. >>Yeah. >>Same, same experie architecture, same experience, same set of services. True. Multi-cloud native. Like you, that's what you want. And oh, by the way, skill, gap, skill shortage is a real thing. And it's getting worse. Cause now with the recession, you think you're gonna be able to add more people. Nope. You're gonna have less people. How do I do this? Any multicloud world with security and all this kind of stuff. You have to put the intelligence in the software, not on your people. Right? >>So speaking of recession. Yep. As a CEO of a well funded company, that's got some momentum. How are you approaching it? Do you have like, did you bring in the war time? Conig I mean, you've been through, you know, downturns before. This is you are you >>I'm on war time already. >>Okay. So yeah. Tell me more about how you you're kind of approaching this >>So recession down. So didn't change what we were doing one bit, because I run it that way from the very beginning. So I've been around 30 years, that's >>Told me he he's like me. You know what he said? >>Yeah. Or maybe >>I'm like, I want be D cuz he said, you know, people talk about, you know, only do things that are absolutely necessary during times like this. I always do things that are only, >>That's all I >>Do necessary. Why would you ever do things that aren't necessary? >><laugh> you'd be surprised. Most companies don't. Yeah. Uh, recession's very good for people like snowflake and for us because we run that way anyway. Mm-hmm <affirmative> um, I, I constantly make decisions that we have to go and dip there's people that aren't right for the business. I move 'em out. Like I don't wait for some like Sequoia stupid rest in peace. The world's ending fire all your people that has no impact on me because I already operated that way. So we, we kind of operate that way and we are, we are like sat Nadel even came out and kind of said, I don't wanna say cloud is recession proof, but it kind of is, is we are so look, our top customer spends 5 million a year. Nothing. We haven't even started yet. David that's minuscule. We're not macro. We're micro 5 million a year for these big enterprises is nothing right. SA Nadel is now starting to count people who do billion dollar agreements with him billion over a period of number of years. Like that's the, the scale we have not even >>Gun billion dollar >>Agreements. We haven't even under begun to understand the scope of what's happening in the cloud. Right. And so yeah, the recession's happening. I don't know. I guess it's impacting somebody. It's not impacting me. It's actually accelerating things because it's a flight to quality and customers go and say, I can't get gear on on-prem anyway, cuz of the, uh, shortage, you know, the, uh, uh, get chips. Um, and that's not the right thing. So guess what the recession says, I'm gonna stop spending more money there and I'm gonna put it into the cloud. >>All right. So you opened up Pandora's box, man. I wanna ask you about your sort of management philosophy. When you come into a company to take, to go lead a company like that. Yeah. How, what, what's your approach to assess the team? Who do you, who do you decide? How do you decide who to keep on the bus? Who to throw off the bus put in the right seats. So how long does that take you? >>Doesn't take long. When I join, we were 30, 30, 8 people. We're now 525. Um, and my view on everything and I I've never met Frank Lubin, but I guarantee you, he has the same philosophy. You have a one year contract me included next year, the board might come to me and say, you were the right CEO for this year. You're not next year. Ben Horowitz taught me that it's a one year contract. There's no multi-year contract. So everybody in the company, including the CEO has a one year >>Contract. So you would say that to the board. Hey, if you can find somebody better, >>If, and, and you know what, I'll be the first one to pull myself, fire myself and say, we're, we're replacing me with somebody better right now. There isn't anybody better. So it's me. So, okay, next year maybe there's somebody better. Or we hit a certain point where I'm not the right guy. I'll I'll, I'll pull myself out as the CEO, but also internally the same thing just because you're the right guy this year. And we hire people for the, what you need to do this year. We're not gonna, we don't hire, oh, like this is the mistake. A lot of companies make, well, we wanna be a billion dollars in sales. So we're gonna go hire some loser from HPE. Who's worked at a company for a billion dollars. And by the way has no idea how they became a billion dollars, right. In revenue or billions of dollars. >>But we're gonna go hire 'em because they must know more than we do. And what every single time you bring them in what you realize, they're idiots. They have no idea how we got to that. And so you, you don't pre-hire for where you want to be. You hire for where you are that year. And then if it's not right, and then if it's not right, you'd be really nice to them. Have great severance packages, be, be respectful for people and be honest with them. I guarantee you Frank, Salman's not, if you're not just have this conversation with a sales guy before I came into here, very straight conversation, Northeast hockey player mentality. We're straight. If you're not working out or I don't think you're doing things right. You're gonna know. And so it's a one year, it's a one year contract. That's what you do. So you don't have time. You don't the luxury of >>Time. So, so that's probably the hardest part of, of any leadership job is, and people don't like confrontation. They like to put it off, but you don't run away from it. It's >>All in a confrontation, right? That's what relationships have built. Why do war buddies hang out with each other? Cuz they've gone through hell, right? It's in the confrontation. And it's, it's actually with customers too, right? If there's an issue, you don't run from it. You actually bring it up in a very straightforward manner and say, Hey, we got a problem, right? They respect you. You respect them, blah, blah, blah. And then you come out of it and go, you know, you have to fight like, look with your wife. You have to fight. If you don't fight, it's not a relationship you've gotta see in that, in that tension is where the relationship's >>Built. See, I should go home and have a fight tonight. You gotta have a fight with your wife. <laugh> you know, you mentioned Satia and Nadella and Larry Ellison. Interesting point. I wanna come back to that. What Oracle did is actually pretty interesting, do we? For their use case? Yeah. You know, it's not your thing. It's like low latency database across clouds. Yeah. Who would ever thought that? But >>We love it. We love it because it drives multi-cloud it drives. Um, and, and, and I actually think we're gonna have multi-cloud applications that are gonna start happening. Um, right now you don't, you have developers that, that, that kind of will use one cloud. But as we start developing and you call it the super cloud, right. When that starts really happening, the infrastructure's gonna allow that networking and network security is that bottom layer that Aviatrix helps once that gets all handled. The app, people are gonna say, so there's no friction. So maybe I can use autonomous database here. I can use this service from GCP. I can use that service and, and put it all into one app. So where's the app run. It's a multicloud app. Doesn't exist today. >>No, that doesn't happen today. >>It's it's happen. It's gonna happen. >>But that's kind of what the vision was. No, seven, eight years ago of what >>It's >>Gonna, that would be, you know, the original premise of hybrid. Right? Right. Um, I think Chuck Hollis, the guy was at EMC at the time he wrote this piece on, he called it private cloud, but he was really describing hybrid cloud application and running in both places that never happened. But it's starting to, I mean, the infrastructure is getting put in place to enable that, I guess is what you're saying. >>Yep. >>Yeah. >>Cool. And multicloud is, is becoming not just four plus one is a lot of enterprises it's becoming plus one, meaning you're gonna have more and more. And then there won't be infrastructure clouds like AWS and so forth, but it's gonna be industry clouds. Right? You've you've talked about that again, back to super clouds. You're gonna have Goldman Sachs creating clouds and you're gonna have AI companies creating clouds. You're gonna have clouds at the edge, you know, for edge computing and all these things all need to be networked with network security integrated. And you mentioned fact >>Aviatrix you mentioned Ben Horowitz, that's mark Andreesen. All, all companies are software companies. All companies are becoming cloud companies. Yeah. Or, or they're missing missing opportunities or they might get disrupted. >>Yeah. Every single company I talk to now, you know, whether you're Heineken, they don't think of themselves as a beer company anymore. We are the most technologically, you know, advanced brewer in the world. Like they all think they're a technology company. Now, whether you're making trucks, whether you're making sneakers, whether you're making beer, you're now a technology company, every single company in >>The world, we are too, we're we're building a media cloud. You're you know, John's, it's a technology company laying that out and yeah. That's we got developers doing that. That's our, that's our future. Yep. You know? Cool. Hey, thanks for coming on, man. Thank you. Great to see you. Thank you for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be back right after this short break. It keeps coverage. AWS reinforced 20, 22 from Boston. Keep it right there. >>You tired? How many interviewed.

>>The Cube Presents Dell Technologies World Brought to You by Dell. >>Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Cubes Coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022. Live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin With a Volonte. This is Day two of the Cubes coverage. We've had a lot of great focus on talking about multi cloud partner ecosystems, as et cetera, the last day and a half. Now we're going to have a conversation with Dell, and we've got two guests joining us. Please welcome David Linthicum, the chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte, and Brad Lewis, the senior vice president and GM of the global transformation office at Dell Technologies. Guys, welcome to the Cube. >>Thank you for having us. You guys >>so lots to talk about multi cloud. You can't. It's one of the biggest themes here, David. I want to start with you. One of the things that Michael Dell said in his keynote, and he said it on the Cape today is its multi cloud world by default. What does that mean to you? >>What that means is that if you don't find multi cloud, multi cloud is going to find you. It's a complex distributed system that basically is invasive to what we do within the enterprise. So anybody who's leveraging cloud computing is going to find that there is a need to leverage multiple clouds of multiple kinds of technologies. And therefore we're kind of focused on what's in between the clouds versus the clouds themselves. And I think that's okay. We're leveraging multi cloud by choice. It's driving innovation. It's driving agility. That's why people are adopting it. So whether or not you have it or not within your enterprise chances are you do. Are you going to have it pretty soon, >>right? I think stand I saw yesterday was 75% of organisations have at least 3 to 4 different clouds. What is your take on when you're talking with customers in the field? How are they? How are they managing that approach? What are they doing right? What do they Maybe not doing right. >>I think what they're doing wrong mainly was hit. That one first is that they're managing their clouds within the silos. And so, in other words, are using whatever native tools are in the particular cloud provided to do operations do security, governance, things like that. And the reality is, it's a more holistic approach that needs to be taken. We need to span these solutions across the different cloud providers and also the existing legacy systems thinking holistically about that. It's just something we haven't done ever with an I t. And now we're having to do it. Read. >>What is the global transformation office? Adele, What's your What's your role in your mission? Sure. >>So our mission is working with our customers, who are really focused on driving outcome centric types of relationship with us, so worried less about the just in and of itself and really wanting to figure out how do I take advantage of all of those capabilities that Dell and its partner ecosystem have to drive business value? Ultimately, what does a great experience look like that or a developer for my lines of business? How do I start to improve the type of agility that I've got? How do I office stuff up some of the types of flexible platforms that I'm really reading about or aspiring to be able to offer? So being able to look at that holistic through through the lens of technology, the economics of that. The operational constructs and operating models around it and being able to really take all of those assets and capabilities and map them to the types of outcomes, milestones and timelines that are relevant to that. >>Who is your ideal partner at the customer? Is it uh, C I o the line of business? Somebody in infrastructure? >>It's all of the above, I think, as we get as we get through the conversation, what will become apparent is tech as part of the answer. So it's not. It's important. It has to be considered. It has to be architected. Well, it has to be operated well. But as important as taking an increasingly more so is how to David's point, how are you going to go and build that common model of operational construct around all of these different platforms so you don't end up with a silo based approach? Application owners and driving utilisation and adoption is important and more so than it's ever been. So having those line of business tie ins and the application owners all of those different stakeholders finance and being able to set expectations well and being able to deliver against those consistently and reliably and the impact that has on confidence and investment. All of those things become part of the fabric of a collective that's about mapping to those. So there's no one set of stakeholders that we work with. But what is really important as having somebody who sits across all of those things that has the ability to call the shots and make decisions when hard decisions are having to be made because where things don't typically work well is when we get into stalemates or standoffs, where there's different factional issues or politics comes into it or somebody is not empowered? Having that governance model so that there is a senior stakeholder who can move roadblocks and make sure that we remain aligned is one of the most critical factors. >>David question for you removing those roadblocks the last two years. Obviously, we've seen a lot of organisations massively pivot multiple times right to survive and not to thrive. But we've seen so much investment in the remote workforce and now a lot of businesses facing ageing infrastructure, what do we do? How do you help them remove those roadblocks? Obviously time is of the essence right. So from a competitive perspective, what more do some of those conversations look and sound like >>they're one? Get the obstacles out of the way. In other words, if you think this is about building more data centres to have more VPN, traffic and things like that, that's not what it's all about. This is about finding solutions that provide scalability within the organisation and it's going to maintain scalability. Keep in mind, we're running to work force. People are going to work independently. They're gonna exist on their own infrastructure. They're going to have their own data which is personalised to them. They're gonna basically interact with other employees and other co workers in different, more collaborative ways. Hopefully. So the idea being that we're trying to get everything back centralised again is crazy. We need to figure out ways in which we can diversify the workforce, diversify that kind of technology we're using and leverage things that are really kind of on demand and scalable quick thinking about building data centres. >>Okay, so square the circle for me because I totally agree with what you just said. But it seems like a lot of organisations when it comes to data are taking that approach like Okay, let's centralise all the data so we can make it more manageable and more efficient to manage. Yet we talk about edge. Data is distributed by its very nature. So help me understand that Yin and Yang. >>I think it's partially we get into, obviously, the governance and the data governance and sort of all of the regulator in compliance aspects of that part of it is also emerging technologies. It's the area that's probably the least mature. We spend a lot of time figuring around how to have operational toolsets around multi cloud. Then we figured about how to have applications traverse multi cloud. Now we're moving on to the real crux of the problem and especially as translate edge start to take hold. We're generating large volumes of data is being generated at the edge. It's being generated in the in the core, and that ability to look at things holistically is going to become increasingly important. It's an area of focus for obviously us at Dell Technologies. It's where we're investing heavily and from an R and D standpoint. It's where the marketplace is going to evolve. But it's still in an early stage of maturity and being able to look at that holistically, >>so not necessarily shove it all into a single data store but enable it to be distributed and managed and and governor who should own the data life cycle. Should it be somebody in the business? Should it be somebody in I t. Should it be a data >>group? >>It's >>now. There is a long How long have we got? Well, I mean, you must have these discussions. We absolutely do, but sort of being serious about it. I think the important point is the people who ultimately are the ones who are who are responsible for getting value from that data is where it should resign. So because of the people who have the greatest insight and understanding of how of how to really get value from it, because ultimately we want to pivot from having a data conversation to how do we generate information and actionable information? It's not a data problem in and of itself, it's it's This is a business intelligence. How do we get value from this and that the best place for the data to live is the people who are going to be able to make the most of that. So >>Deloitte's gonna be having these conversations all the time with your customers. But this is, uh, an organisational discussion, isn't it? >>It's also a functional discussion. You have to remember that there's two tiers there. There's the people who own the data tier but don't necessarily want to administer the data so they know what the data is, What it does, they control how it's changed. They control how it's monitored, and we have multiple people that are distributed all over the company that do that. And then there's the people that actually run the control plane, and we get to distribute a data we're having to get to a common control plane that goes across the various databases, which is able to make the changes to the metadata and changes to the technical geeky stuff we have to do to keep data running. And so it's okay to have that. It's okay to have non technical and technical users who still maintain ownership of the data, and they work together in kind of a devops situation to make sure that we're maintaining the data to the needs of the business, and we have the business owners in there to tell us what that is. And we have the data administrators and that would actually make the changes. >>So the technology is, uh, an implementation detail in that model. Um, that's not It's not the tail wagging the dog. It's subservient to the business. Essentially, >>they're working together. And the reality is that the people who have the technical know how and have the business now how are often city in two different organisations that can exist anymore. They need to be maintained. They need to remove the barriers. And I deal with this with my clients all the time. They can't sit in silos. They need to collaborate together to make sure that the systems and the data are going to reflect and to solve the needs of the business. The only way to do that is to have collaboration at that level. >>So Lisa referenced multi cloud by default. You know, Chuck Witton was talking about that on the Cube recently. Uh, so I have often said multi clouds, Really? Multi vendor. It's like, Oh, I woke up. I got all these clouds. Okay, So what are the right strategies for customers? Where are they starting? How are they thinking about it? >>The people who are making the best progress is looking at it holistically. Looking at what does what does God look like? What are the things that are important to us? One of the capabilities were wanting to offer up and going into going into things, worried less about the tech of it. But more about how are we going to do things like accelerate business agility? How are we going to start to empower our lines of business to have first mover advantage? How do we take advantage of all of these disparate capabilities that over time it's going to vary? Who has competitive advantage? You could have one provider comes up with something that's a really compelling use case for what you're looking to do. But so if you've got the ability to be able to consume as a consistent ecosystem, all of those different partners, it's very easy to tap into that quickly and effectively delivering it. If you're trying to build things so that you're only tied into different people in different ways with different operational constructs, that don't really talk very well together. It's going to become very difficult for you to really take the maximum advantage of multi Cloud. So the thing that I would stress is, what are you actually trying to accomplish out of that work from the top down? Think about what good looks like. What are the capabilities that are meaningful and impactful to the business. And then the easiest thing in the world is to figure out which technology choices you have that enable that. But it has to be done through that lens of what is business value look like? And how do we manage that? And maximise that versus making desperate sort of distinct technology choices >>with the focus on business scene, which is absolutely critical. David, What's the GTM like between Dell and Deloitte? How do you when you bring them in? It's >>a perfect relationship. You've got to remember the customers and our clients have to have two things. Number one. They have to have a trusted adviser, and someone can bring to bear risk. Financial financial analysis, the ability to deal with technology, data, security, governance, things like that which are hard problems to solve. But do so in an objective way, making sure we're bringing the right solutions to bear to solve the problems looking after for the client as well as a technology partner that has the breath of everything you see on this floor that we can pick and choose different technologies to bring together to solve their exact needs. So having a partner like Dell is very important because ultimately allows us to pick the right solutions for the customer and bring to bear the exact solutions are going to solve their issues and do so in a way where they're going to be 100% optimised, where the solution that they're running is going to be near 100% optimisation as much as we can, and therefore that's going to value the business. Do you tend >>to these days, uh, to come into an organisation on a more sort of project basis? Or is it more things like we're talking digital transformation or data architecture? And then you figure out okay, where's the priorities? And the spending have to be is a kind of a top down or is it bottom up or a middle out? >>It tends to be a little bit of well, ultimately it ends up being both. So whether the conversation starts at a macro level and it's a more existential, how do we? How do we want to go to market and how do we want to support our business? A lot of conversations start that way. Sometimes it'll be bottom up where it is a specific project. We've got a net new application. We've got to go to market initiative, a new geography, whatever it happens to be. That is sort of what spawns that type of a dialogue. But ultimately, those two things do end up balancing out. Because if you do anything well and the expectation is that we're going to do things well, then it will grow. Or alternatively, if the aspiration is is that you want to do things in the best way possible, it will attract and pull through use cases and projects as and where required anyway. So the two things end up becoming pretty symbiotic, irrespective of whether it started as a top down. Michael meets a customer and sort of starts that way, or it's something from the grassroots up that it's more demand based from a project. >>When you have edged discussions with customers, how much of that is? You know, maybe it's the OT people or the folks out at the edge, and how much is I t involved in those discussions? >>It tends to be so. It's becoming more mainstream that it's a more holistic conversation, so a little bit is always the case. Some of the early conversations tend to be about use cases that are very business century so that you will have conversations with somebody who imagine somebody doing payments of distributed payments in financial services or something like that. And it's all about mobile banking and proximity and things. So you tend to talk to people about well, what are the potential use cases? How do you monetise some of those things? And then you talk to end up in a technology conversation or some could be potentially. Somebody says, Well, look, we've got the Capital Markets group want to do something, or the consumer banks want to go do something that's eccentric. How would we go about doing that from the organisation? We're now getting to a much greater degree of maturity with a lot of customers where it is a collaborative where you've got the person who owns the business problem or the business opportunity, plus the technology group. And it's a collaborative around. Well, what does the technology solution need to be able to offer up and deliver? And if we can do those things, how would we then go and leverage that technology and the most effective way to drive those types of business outcomes? We're talking about seeing >>a similar >>patterns. Yeah, I'm seeing very similar patterns. Ultimately, this is about tactical technology that has a strategic purpose. And you gotta remember we've had edge in one way, shape or form around for the last 30 years. We just haven't done it very well. And the thing is, we're starting to move a lot of these processes and a lot of these data collections, a lot of these analytics and a lot of knowledge engines, you know, out to the edge of the networks. And by doing so, that creates a strategic opportunity for folks in the organisations to figure out how that's going to work for them. And so it isn't necessarily a geeky conversation that we're having it strategically. We're looking to expand the way in which we're doing compute and doing data storage. It has these opportunities within the industry you're in. We're going to build this technology to make it happen. And that goes to both sides, people who do the implementation boards of directors and CEOs. But >>you can kick out if you have to, >>but they've all got to be there. And that collaboration seems like it's absolutely foundational to overall projects being successful. Guys, thank you so much for joining David me on the programme today. Talking about Dylan deployed better together and all the opportunities that there are to unlock the value and multi cloud. We appreciate your insights. >>Thanks for having us our >>pleasure. Thanks for our guests and a volonte. I'm Lisa Martin coming to you live from Las Vegas. Day two of our coverage of Dell Technologies World stick around. We'll be right back with our next guest. >>Thanks. >>Mm. Mhm. Mhm.

>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Welcome back to Las Vegas. We're here in the Venetian convention center. My name is Dave Alan. I'm here with my co-host John fur. You're watching the Cube's live coverage of Dell tech world 2022. Great crowd. I would say 7,000, maybe even 8,000 people. When you add in all the peripheral attendees, Jeff Clark is here. He's the vice chairman and co-chief operating officer of Dell technologies. Great to see you face to face, man. >>Hey guys. Good to see you again. Awesome. >>So really enjoyed your keynote this morning. You were pumped up, uh, I thought the, the presentations and the demos were crisp. So congratulations. Thank you. How you feeling? >>Doing a great job? How am I feeling? Uh, well, one relieved. If you know me well enough, I'm an engineer by heart. So trade the anxiety to do that is, uh, and build up is quite draining, but having it done, I feel pretty good now, but I feel good about what we discussed. Uh, it was a fun day to be able to talk to real customers and partners face to face like we're doing here and showcasing what we've been doing. I must admit that was a little bit of fun. Yeah. >>Well, we're chilling on the cube. Uh, we're laid back as you know. Um, what was your favorite moment? Cause you got a lot of highlights. The snowflake deal. We love been talking about it all, all show. Um, the, the, I IP of Dell with software define was pretty cool. Lot of great stuff. What's what >>Some cool laptop stuff too. That was interesting. You know, I don't have to. Where's the, where's the share button. >>We have a discord server now and all 18,000 people want to know. >>You're asking me to pick a monks, my should, which I like the most. >>How big is your monitor on your desk? >>Uh, I have a 49 on one side and a 42 on the other side. That's what both you guys need >><laugh> productivity, da >><laugh> well, in the world of zoom, it was incre incredibly productive to have that surface area in front of you. So, which of my announcements was my favorite, I think from a raw technology point of view, showcasing Dell, thinking about what we've done in a very differentiated way. It's hard not to say the power flex >>Engagement. Oh, look at that. Look, I wrote just, just wrote down power flex. Yep. Right. >><laugh> okay. Think about it. Softer defined. We, the leader and softer defined, uh, infrastructure that can be, think of it as independently, independent ability to scale compute from storage so we can linear scale and those no bounds, unlimited IO performance. The ability to put file block support, hyper hypervisors and bare metal all on a single platform. And then we made a, a bunch of other improvements around it. It's truly an area where we a leader we're differentiated in our core IP matters >>And that's Dell IP, Dell technology top >>The bottom. >>Okay, cool. >>So from a pure technical point of view, it's probably my favorite. What's not liked about PowerMax, the most mission critical, the most secure high end storage system in the world. And we made it better. We made it more secure. We put an isolated vault in it. We added some, uh, multifactor authentication. We improved the architecture for twice the performance, 50% better response time, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yes, pretty cool. <laugh> and then you gotta put a notebook in front of everybody where you think about in this modern workplace. And what we've learned is hybrid users. What software that we've embedded into that latitude 93 30 was pretty interesting. I thought. And then if I pull day one into the conversation, sort of the direction of where we're going of, multi-cloud the role of multi-cloud and our ability to be sort at the center of our customers multi-cloud world. I loved how Chuck described moving from multi-cloud by default to multi cloud, by design, and then the subsequent architecture that we put behind it. And then probably cherry on the old cake was the snowflake announcement that got a lot of people excited about bringing a really differentiated view of cloud based analytics down on our object storage. I know that was more than one, but I can't help. >>I like the cherry on top >>You've um, said a number of times, I think the 85% of your engineers are software engineers. You talked about, is that the right number, roughly? Yes, sir. And, and so, uh, you talked also about 500 new features today and, and every time you're talking about those features, I inferred anyway, it was part of the OS. A lot of it anyway, a lot of software does hardware still matter? And if so, why? >>Of course hardware still >>Matter. Explain why. >>Well, last time I checked doesn't the software stuff work on the hardware. Exactly. Doesn't the software things make hardware calls to exploit the capability we built into the software. Of course it does says it absolutely does matter, but I think what we're trying to describe or to get across today is we're moving up the stack, we're adding more value. Basically our customers are dragging us into a broader set of problems and software is increasingly the answer to that running on the best hardware, the best infrastructure, being able to build the right software abstraction to hook into either data frameworks, like a snowflake, being able to present our storage assets of software in the pub book cloud, ultimately the ability to pull them and think of it as a pool of storage for developers to make developers lives easier. Yeah. That's where we're going >>And, and is accurate in your view, you're going up to stack more software content and there's value. That's also flowing into Silicon, whether it's accelerators or Nicks and things like that, is that a right way to think about what's happening in hardware and software. We, >>You and I have had a number of conversations, David, the evolution of the architecture, where we're going from a general purpose CPU based thing to now specialty processors, whether that be a smart Nick purpose, built accelerators. If we leaped all the way out to quantum, really purpose built accelerators for a specific algorithm, there's certainly specialization going on. And as that happens, more software and software defined is necessary to knit together. And we have to be the person that does that. Mm-hmm <affirmative> yeah. >>Talk about how the software defined piece makes the innovation happen on the hardware. Is it, is it the relationship that it's decoupled or you guys are just building design Silicon to make the software better? Cuz that interplay is a design, uh, is designed in, right? >>Uh, I, I think it's a little bit of both clearly being able to exploit the underlying hardware features and capabilities in your software in a differentiated way is important. Something we've excelled at for many, many years, but then the ability to abstract. If you think about some of the things that we talk about as a data fabric or a data plane and a data plane working across different architectures, that's an abstracted piece of software that ultimately leads to a very different and that's where we're driving towards >>What's different now. And what's similar now from the past, I was just on a, a panel. I talking about space, Cal poly and California space symposium and this hardware and space and it's, software's driving everything you can't do break, fix and space. It's talk about the edge. You can't talk about. You can't do break hard to do break, fix and space. So you gotta rely on software in the supply chain. Big part of the design as software becomes more prevalent with open source and et cetera, that innovation equation is designed in. What's your, what's your thoughts on that? >>Help me understand John, what more of this specific of what you're looking for, where do you want to dive into >>The, as Silicon becomes more of a more efficient, what does that do for the software in things like edge, for instance, as the boxes move out and the, the devices move to the home, they gotta be faster, more intelligent, more secure. Uh, Michael says it's a, it's a compute tower now 5g for instance. >>Yeah. Uh, maybe another way to look at it. We've been in the industry a little while for the longest time hardware capabilities were always ahead of software. We built great hardware. We let software catch up. What's changed certainly in this time. And as we look going forward is the software capabilities are now ahead of those very hardware capabilities in bringing it. And to me, that's a, it's a very fundamental change. Certainly in my 35 years of doing this, that's very different. And if you believe that continues, which I do, particularly as we face increasingly more difficult challenges to continue with Moore's law, how do we continue to build out the transistor density? We've all benefited from for four, five decades now, softer innovation is going to lead, which is what we tried to hint at today. And I think that's the future. That's where you're gonna see us continue to drive and think about how we talk about, uh, technology today. I know Dave and I had this conversation not too long ago, whether it's infrastructure is code, who would've thought of that idea a decade ago. <laugh> uh, if we think about, uh, data as code we were talking about before we got on air, what data on code data's little bits, one's in zero stored in Silicon, you store >>It, <laugh> you move it >>Around now. So it, it opens the door or the door to, I think innovation done differently and perhaps even done it more scale as if we abstract it correctly. >>Yeah. And might led a good point on when he was on about all the good benefits that come from that in the customer and in society. And I guess the next question with the customer side, it take your, if the, if the flip, if the script is flipping, which I believe that it is, I agree with you. How does the customers deal with the innovation strategy? Because now they wanna take advantage of the new innovation, but what problems and opportunities are they facing? That's different now than say a decade ago, if you're in it or you're trying to create a great group within your CISO organization. I mean, there are problems now that we didn't see before. What do you, how do you see that? >>Well, I, I, I think the, the biggest change would be again, if you look and reflect on our careers, it was sort of in the business, it played a role. It was often put off to the corner, just make the place sort of work. And today, and I think the pandemic has the pandemic and global health crisis accelerated this technology is now part of people's business and you can't compete without technology. And in fact, we saw it during the early days of the pandemic, those CU customers that were further along on their digital transformation, generally weathered the storm in their sector better than those who were behind. >>Yeah, >>Absolutely. What does that tell us technology was an enabler. Technology helped them, whether the storm prepared them, made them more competitive. So now I think I don't meet many CIO and CEOs who don't have the conversation about their business model and technology being symbiotic, that they're integrated, that they can't do one without the other. That's a very different mindset than when we grew up in this industry where this stuff was. So now you take that as a basis. We got data everywhere. Most of the data's gonna come out of the data, not in the data center's gonna be created outside of the data center. The attack surface has grown disproportionately >>People, people sharing data, too, their data with other data, very much so generating >>Data in places. Sometimes they don't know where it is and hope to get it back. So the role to be able to protect that estate, if you will, to be able to protect the information, which increasingly data is companies fuel, but makes 'em go, how do you protect it? How do you ultimately analyze it? How do you provide them the insights to ultimately run and drive their business? That's the opportunity. >>So we are in the same wavelength with Powerflex and, and I'm a little concerned about confirmation bias, but, but I, I wanna say this, I really like the way your Dell's language and yours specifically has evolved. You talk about abstraction layers, hiding that underlying complexity, building value on top of the hyperscalers on prem connecting sore, we call it super cloud. You guys call it multi-cloud. We saw two examples of that today, project Alpine and the snowflake is early examples. Uh, I'm trying to gauge how real this is. We think it's real. Uh, we talked to customers who clearly say, this is what they want. Um, I wonder if you could add a little detail to that, some color on your thoughts on, on how real this is, how it will evolve over time. >>Well, from our, from our seat and the way that I, that, that I see it in driving our underlying product development, roadmaps, people want to drag into conversation about public and private and this, and what have you. And, and that's not how customers work today. Uh, customers really have got to this point where they want to use the best capabilities regardless of where they lie. And if that's keeping mission critical data on premise taking advantage of analytic tools in the cloud, doing some test dev in the public cloud, moving out to edge, they want to be able to do that reasonably quickly and not. We were talking about this before we got on the air in an easy fashion. It can't be complex. Yeah. So how do you actually knit this together in a way that is not complex and enables customers? That's what I think customers want. So you think about our multi-cloud vision. It's about building an ecosystem across all of the public clouds, which we've made announcement and announcement to do that. Well, >>You said earlier default versus by design, which referencing to the multi-cloud. But I think the design is the key word here. The design is a system architecture you're talking about. You said also technology and business models are tied together and enable or that's. If you believe that, then you have to believe that it's a business operating system that they want, they wanna leverage whatever they can. And at the end of the day, they have to differentiate what they do >>Well, that that's exactly right. If I take that in what, what Dave was saying. And, and, and I summarize it the following way. If we can take these cloud assets in Cape capabilities, combine them in an orchestrated way to delivery, distributed platform, game over, >>Tell us we gotta wrap, which bummed me out because I, we had so much, we haven't covered. We haven't talked about 5g. We really haven't hit on apex. Uh, what else is exciting? You something, you know, let's let's in the last minute or so, let's do a wrap. >>We just, >>I know we just got started. We had >>A schedule, >>Two guys, the boss, this >>Is great. We wanna go the next, >>Not when it comes to the schedule, just laid >>Out the, just laid out the checkmate move right there. You know, um, >>Look, what I get excited about, uh, >>Edge to me is a domain that we're gonna see in this part of our careers have the same level of innovation and discovery that we just saw in the early part of our careers and probably times 10 or times a hundred. And I, and I think about the world we live in and matching up what's happening in this digitization of our world and everything, having a sensor in it, collecting data everywhere on everything, and then being able to synthesize it in a way that we can derive reasonable insight from to be able to make real time decisions from whether that be in healthcare, a smart city, a factory of the transportation area, our own website of how the traffic comes in and how we present our offers more effectively to what you want, which are different than what Dave wants. The possibilities are unlimited and, or on the half of the first ending, if you like baseball, analogies, absolutely. And a long way to go and a tremendous amount of innovation that'll happen here. I get excited about that place. Now. It's not gonna happen overnight every once say, oh, we're smoking edge. Wasn't at IOT, stop putting a timeframe on it. Yeah. Know, the foundation is built to be able to develop, evolve and innovate from here. Like I've never seen. >>And the playbook to get back to your game overcome is whoever can simplify the comp and reduce the complexity and make things simpler and easier. That's, I mean, that's kind of the formula for success basically. I mean, it sounds kind of easy, right? Like >>Spot on, >>Just do it, but what, but that's hard. >>Remember it's hard and being able to build data centers and, and millions of places. So for example, what we'll leave in a little 5g, you think about all of the public cloud data centers today. I think there's roughly 600 locations. You've got 7 million cell towers. Yeah. 7 million cell towers gonna >>Be like how reach right there. >>Data center at the edge of the network. Yeah. As we just aggregate the telecom infrastructure. Sure. From a monolithic big black box into a disaggregated standards based architecture with virtualization and containerization in it. >>I mean, outta compute, I love the whole Metro operating model there, like having that data center at that edge, all that wire wireless coming in. >>I >>Agree. Pretty impressive. Powering the Teslas and all the cars out there sending telematics to, uh, people's phones. And >>Let's wait to next wearables >>Here >>To, I was gonna say next Dell technology world choose to have some fun. <laugh> >>Jeff Clark. Thanks so much for coming to the cube. You're awesome guest and, uh, congratulations on all the success and really appreciate your time. Yeah. Thanks for >>Having me. Thanks for kind words. >>All right. Thank you for watching. This is Dave for John furrier, Dell tech world 2022 live. We'll be right back. You're watching the cube. >>That was great. Mean you great riff.

>>Hello and welcome back to the cube in person at an event AWS reinvent 2021. We're here live with two sets. Also virtual we've watched the cube on the site. Virtual sits a hybrid event. I'm John for your host of the cube. We're here for three days. Wall-to-wall covered chicken off day one. All about software. ISV is also the value of the cloud. We've got two great guests, John Grosse and senior vice president, chief revenue officer Prisma, cloud of Palo Alto networks. Welcome to the cube. >>Thank you for having me excited to be here. >>Three to Joseph's general manager technology partners from AWS. Thanks for coming on again. Good to see you. So obviously the story here at re-invent is Adam Lesley, new CEO taking over Andy Jassy, uh, tomorrow's a big keynote. We're expecting to hear that the cloud is kind of going next gen. The next gen cloud is here. It's about applications, modern applications and true infrastructure as code security is code data as code essentially, applications are now the number one priority. This is a big thing. This is part of the movement of the cloud. So I got to get your guys' perspectives. Where are we in that movement? What are customers doing as they migrate to the cloud? It's not just lift and shift. They're like, okay, I got to rearchitect my business. Big things are happening. What do you guys see? >>Well, I think there's a couple of big drivers at the highest level, right? Some customers are thinking about migrating their it estate to the cloud. They want to take cost out. They want to drive agility. They want to drive a better user experience and you have other customers that want to innovate, right? They want to drive innovation that leverage the cloud for innovation and increase their speed of execution. And as they look at that opportunity, they're having to rethink dev ops and which is making them also think more about DevSecOps and how are they going to accelerate that cloud application life cycle so they can take advantage of microservices. And in addition to that, as we look back on the last two years, as we were talking about before we came on the air and this unfortunate pandemic era that will maybe refer to it, as many customers have been thinking about their supply chains, you know, what am I going to do with my supply chain? How do I really take problems out of that supply chain? So I can continue to serve my customers in my markets. And it's also made them think about different ways to approach their customers. How do they reach their customers? And then how do they fulfill bill and continue to nurture those customer relationships? So I think it goes to the big drivers >>And the, and the security aspect is so huge. You guys have Palo Alto networks? No, that's just give us a perspective and reaction to that. As people digitize their business, you get security built in from day one. This is the number one thing we talk about on the cube bit, baking it in from day one, whether they say shifting left, whatever sure. It's your business, you're now digital. Yeah. >>What are the things that we think we bring to CEO's and CIS is into boards is really three different ways to get started with cloud native security. With Prisma cloud, you can start at the simplest of terms with posture management. I just want to inventory my assets and know what I have out there and make sure those are secure. I want to be compliant. We want to deliver on compliance and governance for my board, my leadership team, others are thinking about workload protection, Kubernetes, serverless containers. What am I going to do with those critical workloads that I'm now moving to the cloud? And then to your point, big push area is shifting security left. I've got to build security in right from the start of that application development life cycle change the way I think about CIC D and delivering those applications securely in the cloud and doing a fast now time to market on applications is critical for customers. And they've got to think about building security. And so they don't have to rework those apps and build security and later. >>So let's talk about what you guys have been doing with customers during the pandemic and how they're going to come out of it with a growth strategy. We had some great talks on our cube program around how the software development life cycle is changing, how modern applications are being built. And I'll see Amazon, you guys enable people to make money on top of Amazon because you make money too. But how are you guys helping customers? What's the big thing that come out of the pandemic. >>Yeah, so, well, the pandemic has been unfortunate for all of humanity, but through this, we have really seen customers accelerating their journey into AWS and security is top of mind for them as customers continue to digitize their software, they are really looking for solutions from Palo Alto networks on AWS. And what they're looking for is something very simple and cost-effective which Palo Alto has provided because of our long-term partnership. And as John mentioned, right due to the pandemic and many other factors around it, there have been many constraints placed on the supply chain, but the economies of scale with AWS has really helped partners and customers address many of these constraints. So we have seen a tremendous movement into AWS the last 20 months. >>And how, how has the partnership for Palo Alto networks been for you guys? Because I wrote in my article, I just posted last night around the preview of this event in my interview that has Leschi is that cloud is enabling the partners Amazon's cloud is enabling partners to do more than be a point solution. And that we're talking about a platform, not tools. I mean, this tools tools are great, but this notion of super clouds are developing where partners are leveraging more than just hosting, right? >>What's your partnerships always start and end with customers. So one of the things we're most excited about from a first of a cloud perspective is we now have over 800 calmly customers that are utilizing Prisma cloud is secure workloads and to secure their security posture management and shift security left using Prisma cloud on AWS. And the other, a couple of big ingredients that we've had together is really multi-dimensional partnership that makes that all possible, right? We're an advanced technology partner. We have a number of programs that we run together, and we've also been a part of a handful of product launches and innovation launches that we're super excited about, like what we've done with guard duty, like what we've also done with auto provisioning using control tower. So multi-dimensional partnership, which is always the best we think starts with customers. And then from there, what we've done is we've taken a really intentional programmatic approach as we think about innovation programs and go to market together. Yeah. >>Follow up on the, you know, mind, you guys have been very successful at Palo Alto networks as your customer base, the more, more sophisticated and smarter around cloud, you got to add more value and be responsive. What is the big trend in your customer base? You see with cloud? Are they obviously keeping stuff on, on premises for certain things, obviously security reasons, but also data's got to open up. So now you have a more of a bigger data aperture. >>Absolutely. Absolutely. And what's happening is what should happen, which is customers are asking us to do more and innovate faster. And so, you know, we're really excited about our recent launch at Prisma cloud 3.0 where it really expanded the platform. Uh, we're now bringing an adoption adviser, which is going to simplify the experience for our mutual customers so that they can more readily adopt CSPs CWPP and extend their utilization of the platform. At the same time, we've made a number of announcements about adding more value into our infrastructure as code approach, you know, shifting security left. So very excited about that. And, and so I think that, you know, what we're finding is that we're needing to listen to customers and quickly build and deliver, uh, innovation in the cloud is they're all trying to your point new use cases and stretching their needs for cloud security. >>I got to say one of my observations of the past two and a half years, even coming into the pandemic was security clearly being baked in from the beginning, but the pandemic really exposed those who were ready for it. Yeah. And that, and that's a big point. And now it's like dev sec ops, no one argues about it anymore. Right. It is what it is. Right. That's a huge difference from just five years ago. >>Absolutely true. Absolutely true. And now, you know, as you're seeing, you know, partnering with AWS customers are delivering actually their end product in the cloud. Right. And that is the most critical relationship is their customer's customer. And they've got to make sure that it absolutely is a secure user experience because now we're talking about customers, identity payment information, we're talking about critical customer relationship management now all in the cloud. And it has to be secured end to end. So very exciting opportunities. >>I mean, uh, you're under a lot of pressure. Now you have a lot of these big partners doing big business. They have big customers. I know they do. Palo Alto has a lot of great customers. How do you support them? What are you guys doing to continue to nurture and support your customers? >>Yeah. Customers is the key word there, John. So we provide value to Palo Alto and other partners to a number of different ways. But one approach that we take is called a well-architected review. It's a process which looks at the software solutions through pillars of security, reliability, performance, cost optimization, and operational excellence. And the reason for that is we want to make sure that the foundation for customers is laid in the best way possible. Because once you have that foundation laid, you can really, really build and scale your business. And so that is one of the ways we continue to provide value and Palo Alto we've taken the well-architected review through all of their solutions, bought the ones existing and the ones in the future. >>I got to say, I've noticed you guys have been using the word primitives a lot. Now it's foundational services. Um, because what we're talking about here is foundation. And a lot of the trends we're seeing from your customers, both is they want to refactor their business value in the cloud, the modern application trend, isn't just apps is about business model innovation in the software itself. So it's asking the infrastructure to be code, ask you to be programmable security with automation, all that AI, this is a trend. Do you guys agree with that? Yeah, >>I absolutely. I do. And I think what you're seeing now from customer's point of view is they need to build security into that application lifecycle mental model. They have to have an end-to-end vision of how they're going to deliver those, those applications at speed and do it, you know, utilizing cloud native architecture so that they can have microservices that deliver value in they're more flexible. And that's part of the power. I think of AWS and Palo Alto networks. First of all, cloud is we're enabling customers to innovate at speed shift left with security, build security into those apps, take rework out, deliver applications faster, which obviously drives more value to them. >>Yeah. I'd love to get your thoughts on something, John, if you don't mind, while you're here, we were talking about for reinvented around major inflection points and every major inflection point in the history of the tech industry, whenever there's a change of how people develop applications, speed and performance was super important. Critical. How do you guys see that? Cause you guys are on the front lines with security performance matters. Now whether it's in the cloud or in transit, what's your >>Absolutely absolutely. You know, it was really interesting in customer conversations. Even some of the customer conversations I've had today, every customer now starts a conversation with some element of cloud security, security, posture management, workload protection, identity data, but they all are coming back now to shifting left with security. It's part of every single conversation. Yes. I was primarily leaders into posture management. Oh, by the way, absolutely got to dive into how I'm going to shift left and build security in. And so that speed of development now I think is going to be a key competitive differentiator for customers. They're going to have to become experts at delivering on that entire application pipeline. >>But your reaction to that speeds and feeds >>Well, it is, I believe it's really important. And um, we're trying to do everything that we can help partners like Palo Alto network with our processes. And most importantly, scaling the business, which I'm sure we'll talk about shortly, how we work together to really get those 800 customers >>Talking about that. Cause you have the advanced technology partnership program. Talk about what you guys do there. >>Yeah. So first of all, I want to thank John and the entire Palo Alto team for building such an excellent partnership across build co-sale and co-market. And as an advanced technology partner, Palo Alto is part of four different competencies, security containers, DevOps networking. And the reason why these competencies are so crucial is because you're able to list your validated solutions with public customer references by use case in each of these competencies, which I think John, you would agree enables them, asked to do focus, demand generation activities through dev days, blog posts, webinars, account mapping, which of course generates those opportunities together. And Palo Alto is also part of our ISB accelerate program. So our sales team is in incented in order to work with Palo Alto and help them close opportunities. And then also you are on AWS marketplace, which enables you to do free trials and enabling you to really scale across the globe. And then we are also helping Palo Alto across the globe with resources, including public sector to help them scale their business. >>The whole selling thing is interesting as the chief revenue officer, it's like, oh yeah, I love that. Um, this is a big deal. Talk about that further. I know the marketplace is where people are buying, but it's a joint sales, Amazon salespeople sell for you, right? >>Cosa, we call it co-sale whereby we can share opportunities with each other. And when we do share those opportunities, the sales teams are engaging together to understand, Hey, what's going on at the customer? What are the pain points? What are the use cases, value proposition, and then going in together to the customer to win the deal. And then continuing that relationship beyond to continue to grow net new revenue, >>Not too shabby, is it, oh yeah. Get more feet on the street. So to speak and virtual, >>There you go. It works on both dimensions and to all the points you made. I mean, we have some terrific mechanisms we use together, you know, like immersion days, dev days where we're able to work with customers, deliver well-architected visions for our customers together. And when we were both designed in, it's obviously a great, it's a great win for the customer enables us to scale. >>I think it's a cutting and not everyone gets these services to, you have to be a certain lay level to get the joint selling. >>That is correct. That's an advanced technology partner and also as part of ISB accelerate, which is our very focused Cosell program. Awesome. >>Well, thanks so much for coming on the cube. Really appreciate. Congratulations on a great partnership. Uh, two great brands. Congratulations, final minute. Just what's your expectation. As we come out of this pandemic, what do you see customers doing? What's the one thing that all customers are preparing for coming out of the pandemic? What do you guys see? >>Well, I think now customers are preparing for acceleration in all of their routes to market. Right now they're having to anticipate their return to some of the normal routes to market that they've for some time now have been trying to reinvent around and trying to drive primarily digital, go to market. Now I think we're going to see growth on every dimension with our customers, because they're going to need to return to some kind of normal with their supply chains, delivering through brick and mortar and their traditional delivery models on top of driving hyper growth that they're already enjoying through their digital go-to-market. >>That's great insight. So, you know, your, your thoughts on companies coming out of the pandemic, looking for a growth strategy, what's the, >>Well, I think they're going to prepare in order to address this pandemic in the future, Some calamity of some way. Right. But I do think that what I'm observing personally, especially segments that have been slower to adopt because they wanted evidence. The pandemic has really increased that whether that's vaccine research or treatment research, it has really accelerated that. So I agree with John B going to >>See it all across the board. I mean, one thing I'd say just support those two awesome insights is that the pandemic expose what works and what doesn't work. Right. You can't hide the ball anymore. You know, if, if software's being used, it's successful. If not, as self-aware right. You can't hide the ball cloud. If it's not working, you know what right away. Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on the Cape. Really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Okay. Cube coverage here at reinvent live 2021. I'm John for your host of the cube. Stay with us wall to wall coverage for the next four days here in the queue.

>>mm Welcome back to the huge covered cubes coverage of VM world 2021. The virtual edition tom gillis is back on the cube. He's in S. V. P at VM ware and the GM of network and advanced security at the company. Tom. Always a pleasure to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Hey, thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure to be back here on the cube. I really enjoyed it. We've we've been, we've known each other for I don't want to count how many years but more than a few. Uh it's always an interesting conversation. >>We've had a lot of face to face interactions a couple years in a row were virtual. We'll be back together at some point. I'm >>calling. Yeah. Yeah. I'm actually on the road with customers. So it's starting to happen. >>Yeah, us too. We did uh we did public sector summit in D. C. This week. I'm heading out to Vegas next week for a show. So it is, it is starting to happen. So just a matter of time hey, >>when I start >>with with your your scope of responsibilities? Network and advanced security, you're kind of putting those two areas together. Very important. It makes sense synergistically. But how are you guys thinking about that? Maybe you could add some color. >>Yeah, sure thing. Um So network in advance security means all things security of Myanmar. So it's carbon black with our endpoint product, NsX in the data center. It's our tons of service mesh for cloud native applications to all the security stuff that goes into our anywhere workspace. Um and you know, I think you you probably get the message here dave at the end where there's three big waves that we're trying to ride. You know, multi cloud computing platform, which is our hallmark, is what we're known for running out across every cloud. It's the cloud native applications, building tools for new modern apps. And then really kind of the future of both networking and compute is being defined by this anywhere workspace. Our mission is to put security and connectivity into all of that. That makes it work. That makes it work well at scale. And so it made sense to put all that under one roof. Uh, I'm the guy and that's what we're doing. >>Yeah, you talk about that anywhere workspace, which, You know, it was always kind of a great vision and then it was somewhat aspirational, but then it became not only reality, but a mandate over the past 15, 18 months and that has that ripples through two implications on networking, even getting flatter and the security implications. So, all those things are coming together >>there really are. You know, I think we can't under estimate the profound impact that covid and the kind of work from home has had on our lives on society were still turning through what those implications are, but in networking it's cause for a fundamental rethink and for 20 years I've been doing networking and for 20 years we had this notion of a demarcation point networks defined as something that it was a DMZ, right? And, and on one side of that, TMZ was a dirty, untrusted internet, who would scary the other side is the clean, blissful corporate network where you know, only butterflies and unicorns exist and you know, wherever you were in the world, your traffic would be back hauled through that dems so that it could be scrubbed. And if you ever used tools like we're using now zoom, you know, you realize that that experience of back hauling traffic through traditional VPN is pretty simple. And so, so across the industry, enterprises are saying, you know what, there's got to be a different way instead of moving by traffic to the security services. What if I turn that upside down, That's what we're doing a VM ware, which we're taking those security services that we live in the DFc. We're doing what VM ware does well, which is defined them as software and then running them in hundreds of points of presence around the world. Hundreds. And so we effectively moved the security close to the users wherever the users are instead of the other way around. And that's the way we think we'll be building networks in a post pandemic world. >>Yeah. And that talks to the trend of this hyper decentralized system that's basically everywhere now, you know, even even out to the edge. And so, so you now have this, you know, zero trust used to be a buzzword and, and again, it's become this, this mandate. You guys actually did some, I think it was you who did some really interesting research post the solar winds hack on. Talking about things like island hopping and explaining how malware was getting in self forming and some of the insidious ways in which the, the adversaries and, and that is a function of a lot of things. The adversaries are obviously highly capable. Uh, they're motivated because it's lucrative and, and, and they keep upping the game on the good guys if you will. >>Yeah, it's nuts. But, and so so think about the impact that ransomware has had. Uh, and also to your point about the anywhere workspace. I'm right now in boston, I could, you know, tomorrow I'm going to be in texas and the day after that I'll be in san Francisco. So I'm popping all over the place, you know, we're back meeting customer's going wherever they want us to be. But wherever I am, I'm able to connect and, and my traffic needs to be protected. Now in boston it was a ransomware attack against the ferry. We're not talking about a bank or like a sophisticated, you know, sort of organization, it's a ferry that moves people from Cape Cod to an island across the water and it disrupted that ferry for days. So so at VM ware, we're measuring all the inner workings of what's happening in the data center and we collect more than eight trillion with a T eight trillion events per week and that allows us to be able to identify these anomalies like ransomware. And so just in the last 90 days we've stopped more than a million ransomware attacks. 1.1 million ransomware attacks that we stopped within six seconds, More than a million ransomware attacks in the last 90 days. To give you a sense of the magnitude of this problem it's everywhere. And you you reference Zero Trust. Zero Trust is a concept, it's a philosophy, is not a product by Zero Trust. You implement a Zero Trust model which says in a deep perimeter Rised world in a world where people like tom or hopscotch on all over the place and Dave's in boston and you know, I could be in san Francisco, we have to make the assumption that somehow some way, you know, our machine or a user has been compromised. And so you wrap each little piece of the infrastructure, each little piece of the application, you wrap it a protective armor to assume that everything around it is hostile and that's how we stop somewhere. That's how we can keep your infrastructure safe. And this is something you have and where does very uniquely because of the intrinsic attributes of our platform, our virtualization platform and our multi cloud platform. >>Yeah. You talk about the ferry anybody who's ever taken the ferry to Nantucket knows it's a pretty low tech operation and when that ferry goes down, it's one thing, it's, it's whether you can kind of understand that but people's lives get ruined, their vacations get ruined, they can't get off the island. Commerce comes to a grinding halt. It's extremely, extremely expensive really. >>For days, >>for days it was >>Like it wasn't a 20 minute outage. You know, it was like a fairy is not running for a couple things like that. That is a huge, huge, very high impact thing. And the fact that it was so pedestrian, like they don't have billions of dollars in the bank and you know, sort of super secret defense technologies, it's a ferry, you know, right, come on rental cars everywhere. So everywhere >>talk about your software approach two networking and security a little bit more. How that changes the experience for organizations generally, and developers specifically. >>So in a multi cloud world you can't always count on having physical infrastructure that you can touch. And in fact, do you really want to touch that stuff. And so our idea is that if you think about infrastructure, its job is to support the needs of the application. And so for example, in Kubernetes, we have the ability for developers say, look, here's my cool new application and this peace talks to this peace talks to this piece and nothing else. And so we can implement those types of controls using what we call a service smash, which allows us to, to make those connections smooth and seamless across clouds. Some of it could run on amazon, some of them could be running in a private cloud infrastructure. Some of them could be running in the traditional VM and in fact many complication applications do just that. So we can facilitate that communication back and forth and we have the ability to look for stuff that you just never happened because when you understand how an application is supposed to work, it allows you to spot, hey, wait a minute. That's not right. That's that, that's that, that don't like someone trying to manipulate the ferry system rather than somebody trying to board the ferry and get off. And I think, you know, there's a really interesting observation here, which is when you, when you, if you can see the inner workings of an application, like it looks for example, let's think about a mortgage payment application filed, a mortgage payment application and the Attackers has stolen a credential. They're going to get in. It's really hard to figure out a friend from foe. But once they get into mortgage payment application, I'm not going to pay my mortgage right? They do crazy anomalous things like wildly anomalous things. If you can see them, you can stop them and we have the unique ability to see them because we put the telemetry, the observation into our virtualization platform that runs on every cloud that runs wherever the user is. Right and pulling all that together into a central issue. That's something I think the N word to do uniquely and this is why we're having such success insecurity. >>I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about securing containers. You just sort of reference that but containers are moving target just a few short years ago, containers are ephemeral. You weren't you weren't gonna be running you know, your mission critical or business critical postgres in containers. But now that's changed. You're getting state. But so that's a moving target. How are you thinking about handling? You know, those kind of changes And what about the architecture allows you to be kind of future proof if you will. Sorry to use that >>word? No, no, it's a good question. So you've articulated right. So if you think about a traditional application, we used to always talk about three tiered web app, there's a web server is app server and the database a little more complicated than that. But you can usually go in and you could touch those three tiers. This box is the web tier. This box step here. This big box, is that it. And so security controls were built around this idea that you could you could wrap that relatively easily. We talk about a container based application And all these microservices. It's not three tiers anymore. It's 300 tears or maybe 3000 tears. Bitty little things, these little services that turn up and turn down and they all have a piece and so our view is that the A P is the new endpoint, the ap is where the action happens and not just the ap that faces the internet but all the inner workings, all the internal apps. And so because we put that application together, because we help the developers create those apaches, we have a unique understanding of how those apps are used and we're just introducing the ability to provide visibility around how are these epi is being used and then we can do anomaly detection and we are seeing a whole new set of attacks that are using legitimate apiece. They're not appease that are that are that are broken or malformed but the Attackers are finding ways to extract data from an API that maybe they shouldn't remember some of the facebook stuff where they had these Attackers were profiling users and there's no limit to how they could profile users and they were just expecting huge amounts of data that's an ap breach. These are the kind of problems that we can solve for our customers with these built in Tan Xue uh service mesh and api security controls >>you think about all these trends we're talking about and I want to ask you about how it's affected go to market because kind of the old days you had box sellers, they, you know, they would integrate VM ware or whatever. They you might have a specialist that was really good at ST for instance, S. A. P. And they were good partners. So that kind of value add developers have become a new channel for you and I wonder how you think about that, how they're now influencing their go to market. >>Yeah, that's that's a clear trend in the industry are absolutely right on, we call it moving left, right. So it's getting earlier and earlier in the development process. And so one of the things that renouncing at the show here is that the tons of community edition that makes it super easy for developers without putting down a credit card or making a big expensive commitment. They can start using these tools and get productive right away. And so so on top of that we build security controls that understand the total life cycle. So as the developers writing code, we're checking that code to make sure is this compliant doesn't have any known vulnerabilities. This is gonna break something. If you if you put it out there and then when you go to hit commit and say, all right, I'm ready to go, we've already done the homework to make sure the code is clean, we'll put it in the right place. So placing it into production in a way that is wrapped with the security that it needs the guardrails are in place and now we have this this X ray vision, this ability to look at the inner workings and understand the Ap is what's happening inside the application and identify anomalies. And lastly, once the thing is up and running we actually have the ability to measure we called posture and make sure that it doesn't drift from its intended configuration. All of this is done across every cloud. So this is, this is how we think we have a kind of new and very holistic approach to securing collaborative applications. >>Tom I want to ask you about telco transformation, I mean N F V kind of just barely scratched the surface in my view and now we're seeing with the edge and five G and the cloud there's some oh ransom. Really interesting opportunities going on in in telco say what you want about telcos? Yeah, there, you know the connectivity and Okay, fine. But one thing you say about the telco networks as they work, you know, and it actually did a great job during the pandemic. They had to pivot to landlines and and so when it comes to reliability and rock solid nous, those guys kinda kinda get it but they've got to be more flexible. So you see those two worlds colliding what's going on in in telco and and where does VM ware play? >>Yeah, sure thing. A huge amount of emphasis on telco, we've won some very large telco deals. Five G is not just a faster version of four G. 5G is a new take on what an edge network can do. It has the ability to run extremely high performance network connections and the ability to control the performance. So this idea of what's called network slicing, so you can guarantee a certain amount of latency or a certain amount of bandwidth. So combine that with this explosion of IOT devices. We're going to have an infinite number of devices. Every device you can imagine has a computer in it and it's spitting off giant amounts of data. We keep coming up with new and interesting ways to analyze that data to do things like, you know, control the self driving car to do things like create a customized retail experience to do things like help guide research for an oil company on the oil platform. Okay. These are all examples of edge computing. Now, the infrastructure that you need to protect those workloads is what we're defining and software. And putting it everywhere, Not just in the traditional data center where you might be in 1020 locations, we're talking about hundreds going into thousands of locations. And this is what the industry is calling sassy or secure access services. Edge. So where's your firewall? Your web proxy the controls that you need to protect those apps, where do they live? They're gonna live in the telco infrastructure And that stuff all runs on X 86 servers. So if you put in the data center services into this distributed architecture and you've got tons and tons of data that's being produced produced locally. Why would you want to remove the compute there and we think you can and will and this is this is why VM ware with our telco partners is uniquely suited to build the groundwork for this edge computing infrastructure. And I think edge computing is going to be the next big wave. So we went from private clouds to public clouds and public cloud was built on, you know, the scale out fault tolerant model as we move to edge computing, edge computing is going to be around applications that need huge amounts of data, very low latency and they're highly distributed. So they're going to run not in 10 or 20 locations but in 1000 more. And we can do all of this with our tons of kubernetes with our virtual networking infrastructure and our anywhere workspace and the secure access services, Edge, the pops that we're building and I think VM ware is probably one of the few if any companies that have all of these pieces that we can put together to make the Edge actually work. >>Yeah, exciting times and and all that data ai influencing at the edge of new processor models and you guys are thinking about all that stuff tom we got to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming back in the queue. Great conversation. >>Always a pleasure. Thanks very much. David, Take care >>Alright you to keep it right there, everybody. This is Dave Volonte. For the Cubes coverage of VM World 2021. The virtual edition will be right back.

(upbeat music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of Postgres Vision 2021, brought to you by EDB. >> Welcome back to Postgres Vision 21, where theCUBE is covering the innovations in open source trends in this new age of application development and how to leverage open source database technologies to create world-class platforms that are cost-effective and also scale. My name is Dave Vellante, and with me is Roberto Giordano, who is the End User Computing, Corporate, and Database Services Manager at Borsa Italiana, the Italian Stock Exchange. Roberto, great to have you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks Dave, and thanks to the interview friend for the invitation. >> Okay, and we're going to dig in to the great customer story here. First, Roberto, tell us a little bit more about Borsa Italiana and your role at the organization. >> Absolutely. Well, as you mentioned, Borsa is the Italian Stock Exchange. We used to be part of the London Stock Exchange, but last month we left that group, and we joined another group called Euronext, so we are now part of another group, I would say. And right now within Euronext, Euronext provide the biggest liquidity pool in Europe, just to mention something. And basically we provide the market infrastructure to our customers across Europe and the whole world. So probably if it happens for you to buy a little of, I don't know, Ferrari for instance, probably use our infrastructure. >> So I wonder if you could talk about the key drivers in the exchange business in Italy. I don't know how closely you follow what's going on in the United States, but it's crypto madness, there's the Reddit army driving up stocks that have big short positions, and of course the regulators have to look at that, and there's a big debate going on. Well, I don't know what's it like in Italy, but what are the key drivers that are really informing the priorities for your technology strategy? >> Well, you mentioned, for instance, the stereotypical cases that are a little bit of laterally to the global markets and also to our markets as a it professional running market infrastructure is our first the goal to provide an infrastructure that is reliable and be with the lowest possible latency. So we are very focused on performance and reliability just to mention the two main drivers within our systems. >> Well, and you have end-user computing in your title and we're going to get into the database discussion, but I presumably with with COVID you had to pivot and that that piece of your job was escalated in 2020, I would imagine. And you mentioned latency which is a key factor in obviously in database access but that must've been a big challenge last year. >> Well, it was really a challenge, but basically we move just within a weekend, the wall organization working remotely. And it has been like this since February, 2020. Think about the challenge of moving almost 1000 people that used to come to the office every day to start to work remotely. And as within my team of the end user computing this was really a challenge but it was a good one at the end. We, we, we succeeded and everything work. It's fine from our perspective, no news is is a good news, you know, because normally when something doesn't work, we are on newspapers. So if you didn't heard about us it means that everything worked out just fine. >> Yeah. It's amazing, Roberto. We both in the technology business that you'll be you're a practitioner observer, but I mean if you're in the tech business most companies actually pivoted quite well. You're have always been a digital business, different. I mean, if you're a Ferrari and making cars and you can't get semiconductors, but but most technology companies actually made the transition you know, quite amazingly, let's get into the, the case study a bit of it. I wonder if you could paint a picture of your organization's infrastructure and applications what it looks like and and particularly your database infrastructure what does that look like? >> Well, we are a multi-vendor shop. So we would like to pick the right technology for for the right service. This means that my database services teams currently manage several different technology where possible that plays a big role in, in, in our portfolio. And because we, we, we currently support both the open source, fully open source version of Postgres, but also the EDB distribution in particular we prefer to use EDB distribution where we did specific functionalities that just EDB provide. And we, when we need a first class level of support that EDB in recent year was able to provide to us. >> When you say full functioning, are you talking about things like acid compliance, two phase commits? I mean, all these enterprise capabilities, is that right? Or maybe you could be >> Just too much just to mention one, for instance we recently migrated our wire intrasite availability solution using the ADB fail-over manager. That is an additional component that just it'll be provide. >> Yeah. Okay. So, so par recovery obviously is, is and so that's a solution that you to get from the EDB distro as opposed to having to build it yourself with open source tooling. >> Yeah, correct. Well, basically sterically, we used to rely on OSTP clustering from, from, from that perspective. But over the years we found that even if it's a technology that works fine, it has been around for four decades. And so on. We faced some challenges internally because within my team we don't own also the operative system layers. So we want a solution that was 100% within our control and perimeter. So just few months ago we asked the EDB EDB folks if they can provide something. And after a couple of meetings also with their pre-sales engineers, we found the the right solution for us. So we launched long story short, just a quick proof of concept to a tissue test together, again using the ADB consultancy. And, and then we, beginning of this year, we, we went live with the first mission critical service using this brand new technology, well brand new technology for us. You know, it'd be created a few years ago >> And I do have some follow-up questions but I want to understand what catalyzed the, you know what was the motivation for going with an open source database? I mean, you're, you're a great example because you have your multi-vendor so you have experienced with all of it, the full spectrum. What was it about open source database generally EDB specifically that triggered the, the choice? >> Well thanks for the question. It is, this is one of the, or one of the questions that I always, like. I think what really drove us was the right combination between easy to use, so simplicity and also good value for money. So we like to pick the right database technology for the right kind of service slash budget that the survey says and, and the open source solution for a specific service. It, it, it's, it's our, you know, first, first, first choice. So we are not going to say a company that use just one technology. We like to take the best of breed that the market can offer. In some cases, the open source and Postgres in particular is, is our choice. How involved was >> The line of business in this both the decision and the implementation? Was it kind of invisible to them, or this was really more of a technology decision based on the your interpretation of the requirements I'm interested in who was involved and how you actually got it done? >> Well, I, I think this decision was transplant for, for, for, for the business at the end of the day don't really have that kind of visibility. You know, they just provide requirements in particular in terms of performance and rehabil area, the reliability. And so, so this this is something they are not really involved about. And obviously if they, if we are in opposition to save a little bit of money everybody's at the, even the business >> No. So what did you have to do? So that makes sense to me, I figured that was the case. Who would, who were the stakeholders on your team? I mean, what kind of technical resources did you require an implementation resources? What take us through what the project if you will look like, wh how did you do it? >> Well, it's a combination of database expertise. I got the pleasure to run a team that is paid by very, very senior, very, very skilled database services professional that are able to support more than one more than what the county and also are very open to innovation and changes. Plus obviously we need also the development teams the relevant development teams on board, when you when you run this kind of transformations and it looks like also, they liked the idea to use PostgreSQL for for this specific service I got in mind. So it, it, it was quite, quite easy, not be discussion. You know. >> What was the, what was the elapsed time from from when you said, okay, we're in, you know signed the agreement we're going here you made the decision to actually getting into production. >> Well, as I mentioned, we, we, we were on we're on services and application that are really focused on high availability and performance. So generally speaking, we are not a peak organization. Also we run a business that is highly regulated. So as you know, as you can imagine we are an organization that don't have a lot of appetite for risk, you know, so generally speaking in order to run this kind of transformation is a matter of several months, I will say six nine months to have something delivered in that space. >> Okay. Well, that's, I mean, that's reasonable. I mean, if you could do it inside of a year that's I think quite good especially in the highly regulated industry. And then you mentioned kind of the fail over the high availability Cape Cape capabilities. Were there other specific EDB tools that that you utilize to sort of address the objectives? >> Yeah, absolutely. We were in particular, we used Postgres enterprise, AKA Pam. Okay. And very recently we were involved within ADB about per se specifically developing one functionality that, that that we needed back in the day. I think together with Bart these are the free EDB specific tools that, that we, that that we use right now. >> And, and I'm, I'm interested in, I want to get to the business impact and I know it's early days for you but the real motivation was to save money and simplify. I would actually, I would imagine your developers were happy because they get to use modern tooling and open source. But, but really though if your industry is bottom line, right, I mean that's really what the, the business case was all about. But I wonder if you could add some color there in terms of the business impact that you expect. And then, I mean I don't know how much visibility you have now but anything you can share with us. >> Well, thinking about the EFM implementation that the business impact the, was that in case of a failure or the DBA team that a services team is it is able to provide a solution that is within our 100% within our perimeter. So this means that we are fully accountable for it. So in a nutshell, when you run a service, the less people the less teams you have to involve the more control you can deliver. And in some, again, very critical services that is a great value. >> Okay. So, and, and where do you want to take this? I mean, how do you see w what's your, if you're thinking about your Postgres and, and generally an EDB you know, roadmap, where do you want it to go? >> Well, I stay to, to trends within within the organization, the, the, the, the the first one is about migrating more existing services to open source solution for database is going to be, is going to be prosperous. And other trends that I see within my organization is about designing applications, not really to be, to to use PostgreSQL as the base, as it does a base layer. I think both trends are more or less surroundings at the same state right now. >> Yeah. A lot of the audience members at Postgres vision 21 is just like you they they're managing day-to-day infrastructure. They're there they're expert practitioners. What advice would you give to somebody that is thinking about, you know taking this journey, maybe if you had to do something over again maybe what would you do differently? How can you help your peers here? >> Well, I think in particular, if you are going to say a big organization that runs a highly regulated business in some cases, you are a little bit afraid of open source because there is this, I can say general consideration about the lack of enterprise level support. I would like to say that it is just about the past because they're around bunch of companies like EDB that are we're a hundred percent capable of providing enterprise level of support, even on, on, on even on the open source distribution of Paul's presser. Obviously Dan is you're going to go with their specific distribution. The level of support is going to be even more accurate but as we know, it could be currently is they across say main contributor of the pollsters community. And I think is, is that an insurance for every organization? >> Your advice is don't be afraid. >> Yeah. My advice is done is absolutely, don't be, don't be afraid. And if, if, if I can, if we can mention about also about, you know, the cloud called technologies this is also another, another topic where if possible I would like to suggest to not being afraid EDB as every every I would say organization within the it industry is really pushing for it. And I think for a very, for, for a lot of cases not all of them, but a lot of cases, there is a great value about the design services application to be cloud native or migrating existing application into the cloud. >> Okay. But, but being a highly regulated industry and being a, you know, very much aware of the the narrative around open source, et cetera, you, you must've had just a little piece of your mind saying, okay I have to manage this risk. So there's anything specifically you did with managing the risks that you would advise? Was it, was it or is it really just about good change management? >> I think it was mainly about a good change management when you got, you know the relevant stakeholders that you need on board and we are, everybody's going the same direction. That basically is about executing. >> Excellent. Well, Roberto, I really appreciate your time and your knowledge that you share with the audience. So thanks so much for coming on the cube. >> Thank you, Dave. It was a great pleasure. >> And thank you for watching the cubes continuous coverage of Postgres vision 21. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of Postgres Vision 2021, brought to you by EDB. >> Welcome back to Postgres Vision 21, where theCUBE is covering the innovations in open source trends in this new age of application development and how to leverage open source database technologies to create world-class platforms that are cost-effective and also scale. My name is Dave Vellante, and with me is Roberto Giordano, who is the End User Computing, Corporate, and Database Services Manager at Borsa Italiana, the Italian Stock Exchange. Roberto, great to have you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks Dave, and thanks to the interview friend for the invitation. >> Okay, and we're going to dig in to the great customer story here. First, Roberto, tell us a little bit more about Borsa Italiana and your role at the organization. >> Absolutely. Well, as you mentioned, Borsa is the Italian Stock Exchange. We used to be part of the London Stock Exchange, but last month we left that group, and we joined another group called Euronext, so we are now part of another group, I would say. And right now within Euronext, Euronext provide the biggest liquidity pool in Europe, just to mention something. And basically we provide the market infrastructure to our customers across Europe and the whole world. So probably if it happens for you to buy a little of, I don't know, Ferrari for instance, probably use our infrastructure. >> So I wonder if you could talk about the key drivers in the exchange business in Italy. I don't know how closely you follow what's going on in the United States, but it's crypto madness, there's the Reddit army driving up stocks that have big short positions, and of course the regulators have to look at that, and there's a big debate going on. Well, I don't know what's it like in Italy, but what are the key drivers that are really informing the priorities for your technology strategy? >> Well, you mentioned, for instance, the stereotypical cases that are a little bit of laterally to the global markets and also to our markets as a it professional running market infrastructure is our first the goal to provide an infrastructure that is reliable and be with the lowest possible latency. So we are very focused on performance and reliability just to mention the two main drivers within our systems. >> Well, and you have end-user computing in your title and we're going to get into the database discussion, but I presumably with with COVID you had to pivot and that that piece of your job was escalated in 2020, I would imagine. And you mentioned latency which is a key factor in obviously in database access but that must've been a big challenge last year. >> Well, it was really a challenge, but basically we move just within a weekend, the wall organization working remotely. And it has been like this since February, 2020. Think about the challenge of moving almost 1000 people that used to come to the office every day to start to work remotely. And as within my team of the end user computing this was really a challenge but it was a good one at the end. We, we, we succeeded and everything work. It's fine from our perspective, no news is is a good news, you know, because normally when something doesn't work, we are on newspapers. So if you didn't heard about us it means that everything worked out just fine. >> Yeah. It's amazing, Roberto. We both in the technology business that you'll be you're a practitioner observer, but I mean if you're in the tech business most companies actually pivoted quite well. You're have always been a digital business, different. I mean, if you're a Ferrari and making cars and you can't get semiconductors, but but most technology companies actually made the transition you know, quite amazingly, let's get into the, the case study a bit of it. I wonder if you could paint a picture of your organization's infrastructure and applications what it looks like and and particularly your database infrastructure what does that look like? >> Well, we are a multi-vendor shop. So we would like to pick the right technology for for the right service. This means that my database services teams currently manage several different technology where possible that plays a big role in, in, in our portfolio. And because we, we, we currently support both the open source, fully open source version of PostgreSQL, but also the EDB distribution in particular we prefer to use DDB distribution where we did specific functionalities that just EDB provide. And we, when we need a first class level of support that ADB in in recent year was able to provide to us. >> When you say full functioning, are you talking about things like acid compliance, two phase commits? I mean, all these enterprise capabilities, is that right? Or maybe you could be >> Just too much just to mention one, for instance we recently migrated our wire intrasite availability solution using the ADB fail-over manager. That is an additional component that just it'll be provide. >> Yeah. Okay. So, so par recovery obviously is, is and so that's a solution that you to get from the EDB distro as opposed to having to build it yourself with open source tooling. >> Yeah, correct. Well, basically sterically, we used to rely on OSTP clustering from, from, from that perspective. But over the years we found that even if it's a technology that works fine, it has been around for four decades. And so on. We faced some challenges internally because within my team we don't own also the operative system layers. So we want a solution that was 100% within our control and perimeter. So just few months ago we asked the EDB EDB folks if they can provide something. And after a couple of meetings also with their pre-sales engineers, we found the the right solution for us. So we launched long story short, just a quick proof of concept to a tissue test together, again using the ADB consultancy. And, and then we, beginning of this year, we, we went live with the first mission critical service using this brand new technology, well brand new technology for us. You know, it'd be created a few years ago >> And I do have some follow-up questions but I want to understand what catalyzed the, you know what was the motivation for going with an open source database? I mean, you're, you're a great example because you have your multi-vendor so you have experienced with all of it, the full spectrum. What was it about open source database generally EDB specifically that triggered the, the choice? >> Well thanks for the question. It is, this is one of the, or one of the questions that I always, like. I think what really drove us was the right combination between easy to use, so simplicity and also good value for money. So we like to pick the right database technology for the right kind of service slash budget that the survey says and, and the open source solution for a specific service. It, it, it's, it's our, you know, first, first, first choice. So we are not going to say a company that use just one technology. We like to take the best of breed that the market can offer. In some cases, the open source and Pasquesi in particular is, is our choice. How involved was >> The line of business in this both the decision and the implementation? Was it kind of invisible to them, or this was really more of a technology decision based on the your interpretation of the requirements I'm interested in who was involved and how you actually got it done? >> Well, I, I think this decision was transplant for, for, for, for the business at the end of the day don't really have that kind of visibility. You know, they just provide requirements in particular in terms of performance and rehabil area, the reliability. And so, so this this is something they are not really involved about. And obviously if they, if we are in opposition to save a little bit of money everybody's at the, even the business >> No. So what did you have to do? So that makes sense to me, I figured that was the case. Who would, who were the stakeholders on your team? I mean, what kind of technical resources did you require an implementation resources? What take us through what the project if you will look like, wh how did you do it? >> Well, it's a combination of database expertise. I got the pleasure to run a team that is paid by very, very senior, very, very skilled database services professional that are able to support more than one more than what the county and also are very open to innovation and changes. Plus obviously we need also the development teams the relevant development teams on board, when you when you run this kind of transformations and it looks like also, they liked the idea to use PostgreSQL for for this specific service I got in mind. So it, it, it was quite, quite easy, not be discussion. You know. >> What was the, what was the elapsed time from from when you said, okay, we're in, you know signed the agreement we're going here you made the decision to actually getting into production. >> Well, as I mentioned, we, we, we were on we're on services and application that are really focused on high availability and performance. So generally speaking, we are not a peak organization. Also we run a business that is highly regulated. So as you know, as you can imagine we are an organization that don't have a lot of appetite for risk, you know, so generally speaking in order to run this kind of transformation is a matter of several months, I will say six nine months to have something delivered in that space. >> Okay. Well, that's, I mean, that's reasonable. I mean, if you could do it inside of a year that's I think quite good especially in the highly regulated industry. And then you mentioned kind of the fail over the high availability Cape Cape capabilities. Were there other specific EDB tools that that you utilize to sort of address the objectives? >> Yeah, absolutely. We were in particular, we used Postgres enterprise, AKA Pam. Okay. And very recently we were involved within ADB about per se specifically developing one functionality that, that that we needed back in the day. I think together with Bart these are the free EDB specific tools that, that we, that that we use right now. >> And, and I'm, I'm interested in, I want to get to the business impact and I know it's early days for you but the real motivation was to save money and simplify. I would actually, I would imagine your developers were happy because they get to use modern tooling and open source. But, but really though if your industry is bottom line, right, I mean that's really what the, the business case was all about. But I wonder if you could add some color there in terms of the business impact that you expect. And then, I mean I don't know how much visibility you have now but anything you can share with us. >> Well, thinking about the EFM implementation that the business impact the, was that in case of a failure or the DBA team that a services team is it is able to provide a solution that is within our 100% within our perimeter. So this means that we are fully accountable for it. So in a nutshell, when you run a service, the less people the less teams you have to involve the more control you can deliver. And in some, again, very critical services that is a great value. >> Okay. So, and, and where do you want to take this? I mean, how do you see w what's your, if you're thinking about your Postgres and, and generally an EDB you know, roadmap, where do you want it to go? >> Well, I stay to, to trends within within the organization, the, the, the, the the first one is about migrating more existing services to open source solution for database is going to be, is going to be prosperous. And other trends that I see within my organization is about designing applications, not really to be, to to use PostgreSQL as the base, as it does a base layer. I think both trends are more or less surroundings at the same state right now. >> Yeah. A lot of the audience members at Postgres vision 21 is just like you they they're managing day-to-day infrastructure. They're there they're expert practitioners. What advice would you give to somebody that is thinking about, you know taking this journey, maybe if you had to do something over again maybe what would you do differently? How can you help your peers here? >> Well, I think in particular, if you are going to say a big organization that runs a highly regulated business in some cases, you are a little bit afraid of open source because there is this, I can say general consideration about the lack of enterprise level support. I would like to say that it is just about the past because they're around bunch of companies like EDB that are we're a hundred percent capable of providing enterprise level of support, even on, on, on even on the open source distribution of Paul's presser. Obviously Dan is you're going to go with their specific distribution. The level of support is going to be even more accurate but as we know, it could be currently is they across say main contributor of the pollsters community. And I think is, is that an insurance for every organization? >> Your advice is don't be afraid. >> Yeah. My advice is done is absolutely, don't be, don't be afraid. And if, if, if I can, if we can mention about also about, you know, the cloud called technologies this is also another, another topic where if possible I would like to suggest to not being afraid EDB as every every I would say organization within the it industry is really pushing for it. And I think for a very, for, for a lot of cases not all of them, but a lot of cases, there is a great value about the design services application to be cloud native or migrating existing application into the cloud. >> Okay. But, but being a highly regulated industry and being a, you know, very much aware of the the narrative around open source, et cetera, you, you must've had just a little piece of your mind saying, okay I have to manage this risk. So there's anything specifically you did with managing the risks that you would advise? Was it, was it or is it really just about good change management? >> I think it was mainly about a good change management when you got, you know the relevant stakeholders that you need on board and we are, everybody's going the same direction. That basically is about executing. >> Excellent. Well, Roberto, I really appreciate your time and your knowledge that you share with the audience. So thanks so much for coming on the cube. >> Thank you, Dave. It was a great pleasure. >> And thank you for watching the cubes continuous coverage of Postgres vision 21. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe. It's The CUBE, with digital coverage of AWS public sector online, (upbeat music) brought to you by, Amazon Web Services. >> Everyone welcome back to The CUBE virtual coverage, of AWS public sector summit online. I'm John Furrier, your host of The CUBE. Normally we're in person, out on Asia-Pacific, and all the different events related to public sector. But this year we have to do it remote, and we're going to do the remote virtual CUBE, with Data Virtual Public Sector Online Summit. And we have two great guests here, about Digital Earth Africa project, Clive Charlton. Head of Solutions Architecture, Sub-Saharan Africa with AWS, Clive thanks for coming on, and Aditya Agrawal founder of D4DInsights, and also the advisor for the Digital Earth Africa project with AWS. So gentlemen, thank you for coming on. Appreciate you coming on remotely. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you for having us, John. >> So Clive take us through real quickly. Just take a minute to describe what is the Digital Earth Africa Project. What are the problems, that you're aiming to solve? >> Well, we're really aiming to provide, actionable data to governments, and organization around Africa, by providing satellite imagery, in an easy to use format, and doing that on the cloud, that serves countries throughout Africa. >> And just from a cloud perspective, give us a quick taste of what's going on, just with the tech, it's on Amazon. You got a little satellite action. Is there ground station involved? Give us a little bit more color around, you know, what's the scope of the project. >> Yeah, so, historically speaking you'd have to process satellite imagery down link it, and then do some heavy heavy lifting, around the processing of the data. Digital Earth Africa was built, from the experiences from Digital Earth Australia, originally developed by a Geo-sciences Australia and they use container services for Kubernetes's called Elastic Kubernetes Service to spin up virtual machines, which we are required to process the raw satellite imagery, into a format called a Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF. This format is used to store very large volumes of data in a format that's really easy to query. So, organizations can just use NHTTP get range request. Just a query part of the file, that they're interested in, which means, the results are served much, much quicker, from much, much better overall experience, under the hood, the store where the data is stored in the Amazon Simple Storage Service, which is S3, and the Metadata Index in a Relational Database Service, that runs the Open Data CUBE Library, which is allows Digital Earth Africa, to store this data in both space and time. >> It's interesting. I just did a, some interviews last week, on a symposium on space and cybersecurity, and we were talking about , the impact of satellites and GPS and just the overall infrastructure shift. And it's just another part of the edge of the network. Aditya, I want to get your thoughts on this, and your reaction to the Digital Earth, cause you're an advisor. Let's zoom out. What's the impact of people's lives? Give us a quick overview, of how you see it playing out because, explaining to someone, who doesn't know anything about the project, like, okay what is it about, and how does it actually impact people? >> Sure. So, you know, as, as Clive mentioned, I mean there's, there's definitely a, a digital infrastructure behind Digital Earth Africa, in a way that it's going to be able to serve free and open satellite data. And often the, the issue around satellite data, especially within the context of Africa, and other parts of the world is that there's a level of capacity that's required, in order to be able to use that data. But there's also all kinds of access issues, because, traditionally satellite data is heavy. There's the old model of being able to download the data and then being able to do something with it. And then often about 80% of the time, that you spend on satellite data is spent, just pre processing the data, before you can actually, do any of the fun analysis around it, that really sort of impacts the kinds of decisions and actions that you're looking for. And so that's why Digital Earth Africa. And that's why this partnership, with Amazon is a fantastic partnership, because it really allows us, to be able, to scale the approach across the entire continent, make it easy for that data to be accessed and make it easier for people to be able to use that data. The way that Digital Earth Africa is being operationalized, is that we're not just looking at it, from the perspective of, let's put another infrastructure into Africa. We want this program, and it is a program, that we want institutionalized within Africa itself. One that leverages expertise across the continent, and one that brings in organizations across the continent to really sort of take the leadership and ownership of this program as it moves forward. The idea of it is that, once you're able to have this information, being able to address issues like food security, climate change, coastal resilience, land degradation where illegal mining is, where is the water? We want to be able to do that, in a way that it's really looking at what are the national development priorities within the countries themselves, and how does it also then support regional and global frameworks like Africa's Agenda 2063 and the sustainable development goals. >> No doubt in my mind, obviously, is that huge benefits to these kinds of technologies. I want to also just ask you, as a follow up is a huge space race going on, right now, explosion of availability of satellite data. And again, more satellites going up, There's more congestion, more contention. Again, we had a big event on that cybersecurity, and the congestion issue, but, you know, satellite data was power everyone here in the United States, you want an Uber, you want Google Maps you've got your everywhere with GPS, without it, we'd be kind of like (laughing), wondering what's going on. How do we even vote these days? So certainly an impact, but there's a huge surge of availability, of the use of satellite data. How do you explain this? And what are some of the challenges, from the data side that's coming, from the Digital Earth Africa project that you guys hope to resolve? >> Sure. I mean, that's a great question. I mean, I think at one level, when you're looking at the space race right now, satellites are becoming cheaper. They're becoming more efficient. There's increased technology now, on the types of sensors that you can deploy. There's companies like Planet, that are really revolutionizing how even small countries are able to deploy their own satellites, and the constellation that they're putting forward, in terms of the frequency by which, you're able to get data, for any given part of the earth on a daily basis, coupled with that. And you know, this is really sort of in climbs per view, but the cloud computing capabilities, and overall computing power that you have today, then what you had 10 years, 15 years ago is so vastly different. What used to take weeks to do before, for any kind of analysis on satellite data, which is heavy data now takes, you know, minutes or hours to do. So when you put all that together, again, you know, I think it really speaks, to the power of this partnership with Amazon and really, what that means, for how this data is going to be delivered to Africa, because it really allows for the scalability, for anything that happens through Digital Earth Africa. And so, for example, one of the approaches, that we're taking us, we identify what the priorities, and needs are at the country level. Let's say that it's a land degradation, there's often common issues across countries. And so when we can take one particular issue, tested with additional countries, and then we can scale it across the whole continent because the infrastructure is there for the whole continent. >> Yeah. That's a great point. So many storylines here. We'll get to climb in a second on sustainability. And I want to talk about the Open Data Platform. Obviously, open data, having data is one thing, but now train data, and having more trusted data becomes a huge issue. Again, I want to dig into that for a second, but, Clive, I want to ask you, first, what region are we in? I mean, is this, you guys actually have a great, first of all, we've been covering the region expansion from Bahrain all the way, as moves around the world, probably soon in space. There'll be a region Amazon space station region probably, someday in the future but, what region are you running the project out of? Can you, and why is it important? Can you share the update on the regional piece? >> Well, we're very pleased, that Digital Earth Africa, is using the new Africa region in Cape Town, in South Africa, which was launched in April of this year. It's one of 24 regions around the world and we have another three new regions announced, what this means for users of Digital Earth Africa is, they're able to use region closest to them, which gives them the best user experience. It's the, it's the quickest connection for them. But more importantly, we also wanted to use, an African solution, for African people and using the Africa region in Cape Town, really aligned with that thinking. >> So, localization on the data, latency, all that stuff is kind of within the region, within country here. Right? >> That's right, Yeah >> And why is that important? Is there any other benefits? Why should someone care? Obviously, this failover option, I mean, in any other countries to go to, but why is having something, in that region important for this project? >> Well, it comes down to latency for the, for the users. So, being as close to the data, as possible is, is really important, for the user experience. Especially when you're looking at large data sets, and big queries. You don't want to be, you don't want to be waiting a long lag time, for that query to go backwards and forwards, between the user and the region. So, having the data, in the Africa region in Cape Town is important. >> So it's about the region, I love when these new regions rollout from Amazon, Cause obviously it's this huge buildup CapEx, in this huge data center servers and everything. Sustainability is a huge part of the story. How does the sustainability piece fit into the, the data initiative supported in Africa? Can you share some updates on that? >> Well, this, this project is also closely aligned with the, Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, which looks to accelerate sustainability research. and innovation, really by minimizing the cost, and the time required to acquire, and analyze large sustainability datasets. So the initiative supports innovators, and researchers with the data and tools, and, and technical experience, that they need to move sustainability, to the next level. These are public datasets and publicly available to anyone. In addition, to that, the initiative provides cloud grants to those who are interested in exploring, exploring the use of AWS technology and scalable infrastructure, to serve sustainability challenges, of this nature. >> Aditya, I want to hear your thoughts, on this comment that Clive made around latency, and certainly having a region there has great benefits. You don't need to hop on that. Everyone knows I'm a big fan of the regional model, but it brings up the issue, of what's going on in the country, from an infrastructure standpoint, a lot of mobility, a lot of edge computing. I can almost imagine that. So, so how do you see that evolving, from a business standpoint, from a project standpoint data standpoint, can you comment and react to that edge, edge angle? >> Yeah, I mean, I think, I think that, the value of an open data infrastructure, is that, you want to use that infrastructure, to create a whole data ecosystem type of an approach. And so, from the perspective of being able. to make this data readily accessible, making it efficiently accessible, and really being able to bring industry, into that ecosystem, because of what we really want as we, as the program matures, is for this program, to then also instigate the development of new businesses, entrepreneurship, really get the young people across Africa, which has the largest proportion of young people, anywhere in the world, to be engaged around what you can do, with satellite data, and the types of businesses that can be developed around it. And, so, by having all of our data reside in Cape Town on the continent there's obviously technical benefits, to that in terms of, being able to apply the data, and create new businesses. There's also a, a perception in the fact that, the data that Digital Earth Africa is serving, is in Africa and residing in Africa which does have, which does go a long way. >> Yeah. And that's a huge value. And I can just imagine the creativity cloud, if you can comment on this open data platform idea, because some of the commentary that we've been having on The CUBE here, and all around the world is data's great. We all know we're living with a lot of data, you starting to see that, the commoditization and horizontal scalability of data, is one thing, but to put it into software defined environments, whether, it's an entrepreneur coding up an app, or doing something to share some transparency, around some initiatives going on within the region or on the continent, it's about trusted data. It's about sharing algorithms. AI is also a consumer of data, machines consume data. So, it's not just the technology data, is part of this new normal. What's this Open Data Platform, And how does that translate into value in your opinion? >> I, yeah. And you know, when, when data is shared on, on AWS anyone can analyze it and build services on top of it, using a broad range of compute and data to data analytics products, you know, things like Amazon EC2, or Lambda, which is all serverless compute, to things like Amazon Elastic MapReduce, for complex extract and transformation processes, but sharing data in the cloud, lets users, spend more time on the data analysis, rather than, than the data acquisition. And researchers can analyze data shared on AWS, without needing to pay to store their own copy, which is what the Open Data Platform provides. You only have to pay for the compute that you use and you don't need to purchase storage, to start a new project. So the registry of the open data on AWS, makes it easy to find those datasets, but, by making them publicly available through AWS services. And when you share, share your data on AWS, you make it available, to a large and growing community of developers, and startups, and enterprises, all around the world. And you know, and we've been talking particularly around, around Africa. >> Yeah. So it's an open source model, basically, it's free. You don't, it doesn't cost you anything probably, just started maybe down the road, if it gets heavy, maybe to charging but the most part easy for scientists to use and then you're leveraging it into the open, contributing back. Is that right? >> Yep. That's right. To me getting, getting researchers, and startups, and organizations growing quickly, without having to worry about the data acquisition, they can just get going and start building. >> I want to get back to Aditya, on this skill gap issue, because you brought up something that, I thought was really cool. People are going to start building apps. I'm going to start to see more innovation. What are the needs out there? Because we're seeing a huge onboarding of new talent, young talent, people rescaling from existing jobs, certainly COVID accelerated, people looking for more different kinds of work. I'm sure there's a lot of (laughing) demand to, to do some innovative things. The question I always get, and want to get your reaction is, what are the skills needed to, to get involved, to one contribute, but also benefit from it, whether it's the data satellite, data or just how to get involved skill-wise >> Sure. >> Yes. >> Yeah. So most recently we've created a six week training course. That's really kind of taken users from understanding, the basics of Earth Observation Data, to how to work, with Python, to how to create their own Jupyter notebooks, and their own Use cases. And so there's a, there's a wide sort of range of skill sets, that are required depending on who you are because, effectively, what we want to be able to do is get everyone from, kind of the technical user, that might have some remote sensing background to the developer, to the policy maker, and decision maker, to understand the value of this infrastructure, whether you're the one who's actually analyzing the data. If you're the one who's developing new applications, or you're taking that information from a managerial or policy level discussion to actually deliver the action and sort of impact that you're looking for. And so, you know, in, in that regard, we're working with ITC in the Netherlands and again, with institutions across Africa, that already have a mandate, and expertise in this particular area, to create a holistic capacity development program, that will address all of those different factors. >> So I guess the follow up question I want to have is, how do you ensure the priorities of Africa are addressed, as part of this program? >> Yeah, so, we are, we've created a governance model, that really is both top down, and bottom up. At the bottom up level, We have a technical advisory committee, that has over 15 institutions, many of which are based across Africa, that really have a good understanding of the needs, the priorities, and the mandate for how to work with countries. And at the top down level, we're developing a governing board, that will be inclusive, of the key continental level institutions, that really provide the political buy-in, the sustainability of the program, and really provide overall guidance. And within that, we're also creating an operational models, such that these institutions, that do have the capacity to support the program, they're actually the ones, who are also going to be supporting, the implementation of the program itself. >> And there's been some United Nations, sustained development projects all kinds of government involvement, around making sure certain things would happen, within the country. Can you just share, some of the highlights, or some of the key initiatives, that are going on, that you're supporting, to make it a better, better world? >> Yeah. So this is, this program is very closely aligned to a sustainable development agenda. And so looking after, looking developing methods, that really address, the sustainable development goals as one facet, in Africa, there's another program looking overall, overall national development priorities and sustainability called the Agenda 2063. And really like, I think what it really comes down to this, this wouldn't be happening, without the country level involvement themselves. So, this started with five countries, originally, Senegal, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, and the government of Kenya itself, has really been, a kind of a founding partner for, how Digital Earth Africa and it's predecessor of Africa Regional Data Cube, came to be. And so without high level support, and political buying within those governments, I mean, it's really because of that. That's why we're, we're where we are. >> I need you to thank you for coming on and sharing that insight. Clive will give you the final word, for the folks watching Digital Earth Africa, processes, petabytes of data. I mean the satellite data as well, huge, you mentioned it's a new region. You're running Kubernetes, Elastic Kubernetes Service, making containers easy to use, pay as you go. So you get cutting edge, take the one minute to, to share why this region's cutting edge. Does it have the scale of other regions? What should they know about AWS, in Cape Town, for Africa's new region? Take a minute to, to put plugin. >> Yeah, thank you for that, John. So all regions are built in the, in the same way, all around the world. So they're built for redundancy and reliability. They typically have a minimum of three, what we call Availability Zones. And each one is a contains a, a cluster of, of data centers, and all interconnected with fast fiber. So, you know, you can survive, you know, a failure with with no impact to your services. And the Cape Town region is built in exactly the same the same way, we have most of the services available in the, in the Cape Town region, like most other regions. So, as a user of AWS, you, you can have the confidence that, You can deploy your services and workloads, into AWS and run it in the same in the same way, with the same kind of speed, and the same kind of support, and infrastructure that's backing any region, anywhere else in the world. >> Well great. Thanks for that plug, Aditya, thank you for your insight. And again, innovation follows cloud computing, whether you're building on top of it as a startup a government or enterprise, or the big society better, in this case, the Digital Earth Africa project. Great. A great story. Thank you for sharing. I appreciate it. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us, John >> I'm John Furrier with, The CUBE, virtual remote, not in person this year. I hope to see you next time in person. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music) (upbeat music decreases)

>>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. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz. Opps manifesto Unveil Something has been in the works for a little while. Today's a formal unveiling and we're excited to have three of the core founding members of the manifesto Authors of the manifesto, if you will joining us again. We've had them all on individually. Now we're gonna have a great power panel. First up, we have met Kirsten returning. He's the founder and CEO of Task Top make good to see again. Where you dialing in from? >>Great to see you again, Jeff. I'm dialing from Vancouver, Canada. >>Vancouver, Canada. One of my favorite cities in the whole wide world. Also, we've got Tom Davenport coming from across the country. He's a distinguished professor and author from Babson College. Tom, great to see. And I think you said you're a fund Exotic place on the East Coast. >>Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. >>Nice. 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 you coming in from? >>From Boston. Right next to kick off. 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. Biz Opps Manifesto What was the initial reason to do this? And how did you decide to do it in a kind of a coalition way, bringing together a group of people versus just making it an internal company, uh, initiative that, you know, you could do better stuff within your own company Surge. Why don't we start with you? >>Yeah, so? So I think we are really a critical juncture, right? Many large enterprises are basically struggling with their digital transformation. In fact, many recognized that the the Business Society collaboration has been one of the major impediments to drive that kind of transformation. And if we look at the industry today, many people or whether we're talking about vendors or system integrators, consulting firms are talking about the same kind of concepts but using very different language. And so we believe that bringing a lot these different players together assed part of the coalition and formalizing, uh, basically the core principles and values in a busy office manifesto. We can really start to have kind of a much bigger movement where we can all talk about kind of the same concepts. And we can really start to provide kind of a much better support for large organizations to transform eso, whether it is technology or services or trading. I think that that's really the value of bringing all of these players together >>and Mick to you. Why did you get involved in this in this effort? >>So I've been closely involved the actual 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 started just noted, we really need to improving. At the business level, every companies trying to become a software innovator trying to make sure that they can pick them, adapt quickly in the changing market economy and what everyone's dealing with in terms of needing to deliver value to customers. Sooner. However, agile practices have really focused that 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. Organizations are agile. Transmissions are actually failing because they're measuring activities and how they're becoming more agile. Have teams air functioning, not how much quickly they're delivering value to the customer. So we need to now move. Asked that. And that's exactly what the buzz off there's also manifested. Provides, >>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 and a lot of work around analytics and data on data evolution. So there's a definitely a data angle here. I wonder if you kind of share your perspective of of what you got excited Thio to sign on to this manifesto? >>Sure. Well, I have. You know, for the past 15 or 20 years, I've been focusing on Data Analytics and AI. But before that, I was a process management guy and a knowledge management guy and a in general. I think, you know, we've just kind of optimized at too narrow a level. Whether you're talking about agile or Dev ops or, um, ml ops. Any of these kind of obs oriented movements, we're making individual project, um, performance and productivity better, But we're not changing the business 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. >>That's 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 Cove it 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 both within your customer base and your partner base, but also then you're employees. When 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've 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 on. Do you really have Thio prioritize and get it right? >>Yeah. I mean, I'll just start by quoting city An Adele basically recently said that there's bean two years of digital transformation just last two months, and in many ways that's true. Um, but But yet when we look at large enterprises, they're still struggling with kind of a changes in culture that they really need Thio drive to be able to describe 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. About 40% of the personal loans today are being origin dated by Finn tax of a like of Sophie or or ah Lendingclub, right, Not your traditional brick and worked for bank. And so the while there is kind of ah, much more of an appetite, and it's it's more of a survival type driver these days. The reality is that in order for these large enterprises to truly transform and engage on these digital transformation, they need to start to really aligned the business 90 you know, in many ways and make cover that actually really emerge from the court desire to really improve software predictability, but we've which we have really missed is all the way. Start to aligning the software predictability to business predictability and to be able to have continuously continuous improvement and measurement off business outcomes. So by lining, but of this dis kind of inward metrics that I t is typically being using to business outcomes, we think we can start to really help different stakeholders within the organization to collaborate. So I think there is more than ever. There is an imperative to act now, um, and and results. I think it's kind of the right approach to drive that kind of transformation, >>right? I want to follow up on the culture comment with Utah because you've talked before about kind of process, flow and process flow throughout a whore, unorganized ation. 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 a tech issue to get this digital transformation in your organization. >>Yeah, you know, I've always found that the soft stuff the you know, the culture of the behavior of the values is the hard stuff to change and mawr and mawr. We we realized that to be successful with any kind of digital transformation, you have tow change, people's behaviors and attitudes. Um, we haven't made much progress in that area as we might have. I mean, I've done some surveys suggesting that 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 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 cultural behavioral dimension and not just assuming that it will happen if we if we build a system, you know, if if we build it, they won't necessarily come right, >>right? So I want to go toe to you, Nick, because, you know, we're talking about work flows and flow. Andi, you've written about flow both in terms of, 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 because you have a lot less ah, wiggle room in tough times. But you also talked about flow from the culture side on the people's side. So I wonder if you could 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 just said. If you're optimize, you need to optimize your system. You need to optimize how you innovate and how you deliver value to the business into the customer. Now what we've noticed in the data since that that we've learned from customers value streams, enterprise organizations, value streams is that what's taking six months and to and to deliver that value, the flow is that slow. You've got a bunch of unhappy developers. Unhappy customers, when you're innovating, have so high performing organizations we can measure their intent flow time in days. All of a sudden, that feedback loop the satisfaction your developers measurably goes up. So not only do you have people context switching last year, delivering so much more value to customers at a lower cost because you've optimized for flow rather than optimizing for these thes other approximately six that we use, which is how efficient my annual team. How quickly can we deploy software? Those are important, but they do not provide the value of agility, of fast learning, of adaptability, of the business. And that's exactly what the bishops manifesto pushes your organization to. You need to put in place this new operate 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. I'm gonna go back to Utah, him on that to follow up, because 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 vs B, you know you could have a very different product that that you kick out. You know, my favorite example with With Clayton Christensen and Innovator's Dilemma talking about the three inch our 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 Palm because it was the it was the game council which which drove that whole business. So when you're talking to customers and we think we're here with cloud all the time people optimizing for cost efficiency instead of thinking about it as an innovation tool, how do you help them? Kind of rethink and really, you know, forced them to to look at the at the prioritization and make sure they're prioritizing on the right thing is make just that. What do you optimizing for? >>Oh yeah, 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 toe of the decision toe frame 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 too narrowly, say, or you frame it as an either or situation when you could actually have some of both, um, it's very difficult for the process toe work out correctly. So in many cases, I think we need to think mawr at the beginning about how we frame this issue or this decision in the best way possible before we charge off and build a system to support it. You know, it's worth that extra time to think. Think carefully about how the decision has been structured. Right? >>Surge. I wanna go back to you and talk about the human factors because we just discussed you could put in great technology. But if the culture doesn't adopt it and people don't feel good about it, you know it's not gonna be successful. And that's going to reflect poorly on the technology. Even if I had nothing to do with it. And you know, when you look at the core values of the best hopes manifesto, you know a big one is trust and collaboration. You know, learn, responded pivot. Wonder if you can share your thoughts on trying to get that cultural shift s 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 position. >>So I think I think at the ground level, it really starts with the realization that we were all different. We come from different backgrounds. Oftentimes we tend Thio. Blame the data. It's not uncommon my experience that we spend the first, you know, 30 minutes of any kind of one hour the conversation to debate the ability of the data on DSO, one of the first kind of probably manifestations that we've had. Our revelations as we start to engage with our customers is by just exposing high Fidelity data set two different stakeholders from their different lands. We start to enable these different stakeholders to not debate the data, but that's really collaborate to find a solution. So in many ways, when when when we think about kind of the types of changes were trying Thio truly affect around data driven decision making? It's all about bringing the data in context the context that is relevant and understandable for different stakeholders. Whether we're talking about an operator developed 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. So I think one of the best examples I have is if you start to be able to align business k p i. Whether you are accounting, you know, with sales per hour or the engagement of your users on your mobile application, whatever it is, if you start to connect that k p I business K p I to the key piece that developers might be looking at, whether it is now the number of defects or velocity or whatever over metrics that they are used to to actually track, you start to be able to actually contextual eyes in what we are. The affecting, basically metric that that is really relevant. And 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 to to drive engagement, right? So, you know, if you look at zoom, for instance, Zoom giving away, it's service thio education is 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 a limited way. And so you really want to start to rethink? Oh, you connect everybody kind of business objective fruit data. And I always start to get people to stare at the same data from their own lands and collaborating on the data. Right? >>Right. That's good. Uh, Tom, I want to go back to you. You've been studying I t for a long time writing lots of books and and getting into it. Um, Why now? You know what? Why now? Are we finally aligning business objectives with objects? 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 with the biz ops. >>Well, in much of the past, I t waas sort of a back office related activity. You know, it was important for, um, 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 of data business. A digital business. The anti 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. And even if you're in a new industry that hasn't historically been terribly, um, technology oriented customer expectations flow from, you know, the digital native 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 I T projects or building things that don't really work for the business. Um, it's mission critical that we do that well, almost every time, >>right. And I just I just wanna fall by that time, in terms of the you've talked extensively about kind of these evolutions of data analytics, from artisanal stage to the big data stage, the data economy stage the ai driven stage. What I find interesting about all the stages you always put a start date. You never put it in date. Um, so you know, is the is the big data. I'm just gonna use that generically moment in time. Finally, here. Where were, you know, off mahogany row with the data scientists, But actually could 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 seem to go away. The three artisanal stuff is still being done, but we would like for less and less of it to be artisanal. We can't really afford for everything to be artisanal anymore. It's too labor and time consuming to do things that way. So we shift Mawr and Mawr of it to be done through automation and be to be done with a higher level of productivity. And, um, you know, at some point maybe we we reached the stage where we don't do anything artisanal e anymore. I'm not sure we're there yet, but, you know, we are We are making progress, >>right? Right. And make back to you in terms of looking at agile because you're you're such a student of agile. When when you look at the opportunity with biz ops, um, 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 surgeon Tom hit on this. Is that in agile? What's happened is that we've been, you know, measuring tiny subsets of the value stream, right? We need to elevate the data's there, developers air working on these tools of delivering features. The foundations for for great culture are there. I spent two decades as a developer, and when I was really happy when I was able to deliver value to customers, the quicker is able to do that. The fewer impediments are in my way, the quicker was deployed and running the cloud, the happier I waas and that's exactly what's happening if we could just get the right data elevated to the business, not just to the agile teams, but really these values of ours are to make sure that you've got these data driven decisions with meaningful data that's oriented and delivering value to customers. None of these legacies that Tom touched on, which has cost center metrics from a nightie, came from where for I t being a cost center and something that provided email on back office systems. So we need thio rapidly shift to those new, meaningful metrics, their customer and business centric. And make sure that every development organization is focused on those as well as the business itself that we're measuring value. And they were helping that value flow without interruption. >>I love that because 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, thank you again for for your time. Uh, congratulations on the on the unveil of the biz ops manifesto and bringing together this coalition of 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 resource is where you're not gonna get the r. O. I. So, uh, congratulations again. And thank you for sharing your thoughts with us here on the Cube. Thank >>you. All >>right, So we have surged. Tom and Mick. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. It's a biz ops manifesto unveiled. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Yeah,

>>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 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 gonna have 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 shoes. That's 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 Cape Cod. >>Terrific. So welcome back, everybody again. Congratulations on this day. I know 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 recognized that, uh, the, the business side, it collaboration has been, uh, one of the major impediments, uh, to drive that kind of transformation. That, 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, to transform. Uh, so whether it is technology or services or, um, or training, I think that that's really the value of bringing all of these players together, right. >>And mic to you. Why did you get involved in this, in this effort? >>So I've been closely involved the agile movement since it started two decades with that manifesto. And I think we got a lot of improvement at the team level, and I think that was just no. Did we really need to improve at the business level? Every company is trying to become a software innovator, trying to make sure that they can pivot quickly and the changing market economy and what everyone's dealing with in terms of needing to deliver value to customers 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 manifesto 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 optimize 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 Lightswitch. 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 yet when we look at large enterprises, they're still struggling with a kind of a changes in culture. 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 are 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 on this digital transformation, they need to start to really align the business nightie, you know, in many ways and make cover. Does agile really emerge from the core desire to truly improve software predictability between which we've really missed is all the way 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 that of these, uh, discuss inward metrics, that's, it is typically being using to business outcomes. We think we can start to really ELP, uh, different stakeholders within the organization to collaborate. So I think there is more than ever. There's an imperative to acts now. Um, and, and resolves, I think is kind of the right approach to drive that kind of transformation. Right. >>I want to follow up on the culture comment, uh, with you, Tom, 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 a 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 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 system, if we build it, they won't necessarily come. Right. >>Right. So I want to go 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 half so high performing organizations, we can measure third and 10 float time and dates. All of a sudden that feedback loop, the satisfaction your developer's measurably 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 other approximate tricks that we use, which is how efficient is my agile 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 going 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. Cause you know, if you're optimizing for a versus B, you know, you can have a very different product that you kick out and let 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, when you're talking to customers and we think we hear it with cloud all the time, people optimizing for 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 said, what are you optimizing for? >>Oh yeah. Um, you have one of the most important aspects of any decision or, um, attempt to resolve a problem in an organization is the framing process. And, um, you know, it's, it's a difficult aspect of the decision to frame 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 that 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 >>Surgery. 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 it had nothing to do with it. And you know, when you look at 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. I 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. Um, 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 spike, 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, it's all about bringing the data in context, in 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 cycle. 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 the business KPI, to the KPIs that developers might be looking at, whether it is the number of defects or a velocity or whatever, you know, metrics that they are used to to actually track you start to, to be able to actually contextualize in what we are the effecting, basically a metric that is really relevant in which we see is that DC is a much more systematic way to approach the transformation than say, you know, some organizations kind of creating, uh, 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 therapists. It's fundamentally about trying to drive also the engagement of their own teams. And because now they're doing something for good and the organizations are trying to do that, but you only can do this kind of things in a 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 w 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 the past, it was sort of a back office related activity. And, you know, it was important for, um, uh, producing your paychecks and, uh, um, 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, uh, even if you're in a, 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 follow up 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 than less of it to be artisinal, we can't really afford for everything to be artisinal anymore. It's too labor 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, you know, 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, a student of agile when, when you look at the opportunity with ops, um, 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 Sergeant 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 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 from an ITK, 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 we're helping 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. Congratulations on the, uh, on the unveil of the biz ops manifesto and together this coalition >>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. Alright, so we had surge, Tom and Mick I'm. Jeff, you're watching the cube, it's a biz ops manifesto and unveil. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of BizOps manifesto, unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition and welcome back Friday, 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 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 to 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 optical edition now when you guys have been at it, it's relatively mature marketplace businesses. Good. What was missing? Why, why this, uh, why this coalition? >>Yeah, so, you know, again, why is, why is biz ops important and why is this something I'm, you know, I'm so excited about, but I think companies as well, right. Well, you know, in some ways or another, this is a topic that I've been talking to, you know, the market and our customers about for a long time. And it's, you know, I really applaud, you know, this whole movement, right. And, um, in resonates with me, because I think one of the fundamental flaws, frankly, of the way we've 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, that kind of siloed, uh, nature of organizations. And 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 I never sit down and say, you know, the product management team has to get aligned with Deb, 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 it. 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 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 customers, 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. Cause 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 talked 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 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 plant. >>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 going to, we're going to adjust iterate again. Right. And that shifting of that planning model, 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, all sudden 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 hammering up the, uh, the thing in the Lutheran church with their, 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 you 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 and 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, where we were 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 the trust. Um, I think training is super important, right. 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 and investment. Um, and then, you know, I think, uh, 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, 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 got to make trade offs. They got to 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 and product shift, mixed book, you know, it was a great piece on a, you're talking about, 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 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 is 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 yeah. 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 COBIT hit, right. Because serendipitous, whatever. Right. But 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 LeanKit immense credit for, you know, kind of spearheading our cultural change and not, and not because of, we were just gonna 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, 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 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, uh, 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 so all of a sudden, every one of us is dealing with some degree of market uncertainty, customer uncertainty, uh, and also, you 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 planning. And, you know, as, as with all important things, there's always a little bit of lock in, uh, 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, yep. Like you said, this is all, it's 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 and 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 that goes, why wouldn't we do this? Right. But until you write it down and kind of have again, a manifesto or a Terra firma 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 it's 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. We're 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 to be a 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 you're 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 we're 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. Great to be here, Jeff. 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 fairly 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 games, such as object programming, and a lot of what we had around really modern programming levels constructs, those were the teams I had the fortunate of working with, and really our goal was. And of course, there's, as, as you noticed, there's just this DNA of innovation and excitement and innovation in the water. And really it was the model that was all about changing the way that we work was looking at for how we can make it 10 times easier to white coat. 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 wanting 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 from Microsoft who was responsible for, he actually got Microsoft word as a sparking into Microsoft and into the hands of bill Gates and that company that 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 to make everything completely visual. And I realized none of this was really working, 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 biz ops 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 to 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 the 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 measures. Pretty >>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, nobody has unlimited resources. And ultimately you 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, roughly 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, uh, 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 from project to 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 of both? >>That's a great question. It's not one I get asked very often cause to me it's absolutely both. So that the thing that we want to get, that we've learned how to master individual flow, that there's this beautiful book by me, how you 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 question 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 future? >>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, that concept of flow to these end to end 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 that and point out promoter scores, rise, and we've got empirical data for this. So that the beautiful thing to me is that we've actually been able to combine these two things and see the results and the data that you increase flow to the customer. Your developers are more, >>I love it. 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 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 in 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 undergoing digital transformations have actually gone a very different way, right? The way that they measure value, uh, 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 of funding projects and cost centers, 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 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 you fund 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 bottleneck 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 have to 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, then having them context, which I'm trash. So 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 a device, as opposed to an innovation driver and they get stuck, they get stuck in the literal. And I, 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 the bottom line is, and these bottlenecks are adjusted to say, it's just whack-a-mole 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 was 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 that 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 back to the customer and reducing your cycles on getting value, your flow time from six months to two weeks or two, one week or two event, as we see with, with tech giants, you actually can both lower your costs and get much more value that for us to get that learning loop going. >>So I think I've seen all of these cloud deployments and one of the things that's 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 for us rather than costs where 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, you know, 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 interesting 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 experiences. Well, that really is based on how many features you delivered or how much, how big, how many quality improvements or scalar performance improvements you delivered. So the problem is, and this is what the business manifesto, as well as the full frame of touch on is if you can't measure how much value you delivered 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 cost to measuring value, to survive 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, and a data driven, um, 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 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 5g. So now the accumulation of data at machine scale, again, this is going to 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 at the right way. You want that way, the right way you can't use human or machine learning effectively. And there've been the number of data warehouses 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 yes, you understand how you're innovating, how you're measuring the delivery of value and how long that takes. What is your time to value 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 had 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 that data is highly complex. Software value streams are extremely complicated. And the only way to really get the proper analyst 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 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, with the development teams. You know, I'm in a very competitive space. We need to be putting out new software features and engaging 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, there's the manifesto, but the key thing is just to get you set up it's to get started and to get the key wins. So take a probably value stream that's mission critical. It could be your new mobile and web experiences or, or part of your cloud modernization platform or 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 the people, on the development teams, the people in leadership all the way up to the CEO. And one of the, what I encourage you to start is actually that content 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 Adrian Cockcroft. 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, sentiment, flow time, 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 business, 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. >>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 of biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the cube come due 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 awhile 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. >>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, uh, 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, uh, 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 at 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 we're faced with is really that we need a new approach and many of the players in the industry, including ourselves, I've 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, uh, the BizOps concept and the business manifesto are bringing together a number of ideas, which have 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, uh, tools and consulting that is required for them to truly achieve the kind of transformation that everybody's seeking. >>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 could have a 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, 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 machines or the production line is actually the product. So, um, 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 have missed on this shift from, um, kind of it becoming this kind of value center within the enterprises. >>And, and he talks about culture. Now, culture is a, is a sum total of beavers. 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 this 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 as well as tools, right? To be able to start to bring together all these data together, and then given the volume 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 to really help 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 blog. >>Yeah. So that's very true. But, uh, so I'll, I'll mention in our 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 how many we're tracking business outcomes I'm going to do with 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 a 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, you know, 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 operations, 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 what 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, 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 dynamic on the, 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 manifesto to exist. >>So, uh, Clayton Christianson, great, uh, Harvard professor innovator's dilemma might still 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 because 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, 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 again, back to a product project management Institute, um, there, they have estimated that on average, it organizations have anywhere between 10 to 20% of their resources 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 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 I've always believed that the 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 a 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 yeah, if you look at our, it, operations are operating there, we're using kind of a same type of, uh, kind of inward metrics, uh, like a database off time or a cycle time, or what is my point of velocity, right? >>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 uptight, right? If I'm trying to build a mobile application or maybe your social, a 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 are 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, um, Charles 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, like 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 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 super insightful, but I guess you just got to 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 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 in 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 wrong requirements and, uh, and it was really a wrong, uh, kind of what do you, what is the best approach? What is your preferred approach towards requirements? And if I were to remember correctly, over 80% of the it executives set that the best approach they'll prefer to approach these core requirements to be completely defined before software development starts, let me pause there we're 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 on 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'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, the, um, you know, various Doris dilemna the key difference between these larger organization is, is really kind of, uh, 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 the 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. >>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, the problem with the agile development is that you're actually now getting more silos. Cause 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, 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 either your, 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. >>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 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, DS 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 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 such as 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 goal really is to start to bring together, uh, fall years, people would have been LP, large organizations, do digital transformation vendors. We're providing the technologies that many of these organizations use to deliver on this 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, 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. Thanks, Jeff. Appreciate it. >>Oh, my pleasure. Alrighty, surge. If you want to learn more about the BizOps manifest to 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 >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of this ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by bill. >>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 is 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, you know, a new framework, eventually a broad set of solutions that increase the likelihood that we'll 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. Uh, 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 on 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 have been previous attempts to make a better connection between business and it, there was the so called 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. Right. >>And do you think doing it this way, right. With the, with the biz ops 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, um, 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 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 or 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's 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 is 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. 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 recommended if not totally made by an algorithm or an AI based system, and that I believe would add to 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 Hey, asked it, you know, we had dr. Robert Gates on a 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, it's suggested we need, um, data and, um, the data that we have to kind of train our models has to be high quality and current. And we, 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 called 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 it turned out 20, 20 a year. We found out we actually know nothing and everything thought we knew, but I wanna, I wanna follow up on that because you know, it did suddenly change everything, right? We 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 BizOps 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 AI. Um, and then, but the ones that involve double down they're even more important to you. They are, you know, a lot of organizations have found this out 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, um, 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 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 are, the projects that are working well are, you know, when 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 circumstances 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 them 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 was like, and this was way before we had the compute power today and cloud proliferation. I said, you know, how, 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 contractor 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 projects. 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 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 accomplish 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, 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. >>Yeah. 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, and you've written a book on the attention economy, which is a whole nother topic, we'll say for another day, you know, 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. Alright, Tom. Well, thank you so much for your time. Really enjoyed the conversation. I gotta dig into the library. It's very long. So I might start at the attention economy. I haven't read that one in 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. Take care. Alright. He's Tom I'm Jeff. You are watching the continuing coverage of the biz ops manifesto and Vale. Thanks for watching the cube. We'll see you next time.