>>from >>around the >>globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of pager duty. Summit 2020. Brought to you by pager duty. Hey, welcome back to Brady. Jeffrey here with the Cube in Palo Alto studios today. And we're talking about an upcoming event. It's one of our favorites. This will be the fourth year that we've been doing it. And it's pager duty summit. And we're excited to have from the pager duty team. She's Caroline Gus, the VP of corporate marketing from pager duty. Caroline, Great to see you. >>Hi, Jeff. Great to see you again. >>Absolutely. So, you know, I was thinking before we turn on the cameras we've been doing pager duty for I think this will be like, say, our fourth year that first year was in the cool, um, cruise ship terminal pier. I gotta written appear 27 which was which was nice. And then the last two years, you've been in the, you know, historic Westin ST Francis in downtown San Francisco, which is a cool old venue, but oh, my goodness. You guys were busting at the seams last year. So this year, year to go virtual. There's a whole bunch of new things that that you could do in virtual that you couldn't do in physical space. At least when you're busting out of the seems so First off, Welcome and >>talk a little >>bit about planning for virtual versus planning for a physical event from, you know, head of marketing perspective. >>Absolutely. I mean, the first thing that's changed for us is the number of people that can come. It's five x the number of people that were able to join us, the Western last year. So we have, uh, we we expect to have 10,000 people registered on attending age duty summit. The second thing is thea share number of sessions that we can put on. Last year, I think we had around 25 sessions. This year we have between 40 and 50 on again. That's because we're not constrained by space and physical meeting rooms, so it's being a really exciting process for us. We've built a fantastic agenda on. It's very much personalized, you know, developers come to our event. They love our event for the opportunity to learn mixed with their peers, get best practices and hands on experience. So we have many more of those types of sessions when we have done previously, and that things like labs and Bird of Feather Sessions and Emma's. But we've also built a whole new track of content this year for executives. Page Julie has, um, many of the Fortune 500 on 4100 customers. We work very closely with CEO CTO, so we have built sessions that are really designed specifically for that audience on I think for us it's really opened up. The potential of this event made it so much broader and more appealing than we were able to do when we were, As you say, you know, somewhat confined by the location in downtown San Francisco. >>I think it's such an interesting point. Um, because before you were constrained, right, If you have X number of rooms over a couple of days, you know you've got to make hard decisions on breakouts and what could go in and what can't go in. And, you know, will there be enough demand for these for this session versus another session? Or from the perspective of an attendee, you know, do they have to make hard tradeoffs? I could only attend one session at one oclock on Tuesday and I got to make hard decisions. But this is, you said really opens up the opportunities. I think you said you doubled. You doubled your sessions on and you got five X a number of registrations. So I think, you know, way too many people think about what doesn't happen in digital vs talking about the things that you can do that are impossible in physical. >>Yeah, I think at the very beginning. Well, first of all, we held our Amir summit events in London in July. So that was great because we got Thio go through this experience once already. And what we learned was the rial removal of hurdles in this process. So, to your point about missing the session because you're attending another session, we were calling this sort of the Pelton version of events where you have live sessions. It's great to be there, live participate in the live Q and A, but equally you have an entire on demand library. So if you weren't able to go because there was something else at the same time, this is available on demand for you. So we are actually repeating live sessions on two consecutive day. So on the Monday we're on everything on the Tuesday I ask because show up again for life Q and A at the end of their sessions. But after that it's available forever on an on demand library. So for us, it was really removing hurdles in terms of the amount of content, the scheduling of the content on also the number of people that content in attend, no geographical boundaries anymore. It used to be that a customer of ours would think, Well, I'll send one or two people to the page duty summit. They could learn all the great innovation from page duty, and they'll bring it back to the team that's completely changed. You know, we have tens of 20 signing up on. All of them are able to get that experience firsthand. >>That's really interesting. I didn't didn't even think about, you know, kind of whole teams being able to attend down instead of just certain individuals because of budget constraints, or you can't send your whole team, you know, a way for a conference in a particular area. But the piece to that you're supporting that were over and over is that the net new registrants goes up so dramatically in terms of the names and and and who those individuals are because a lot of people just couldn't attend for for various reasons, whether it's cost, whether it's, uh, geography, whether it's they just can't take time off from from from leaving their primary job. So it's a really interesting opportunity to open up, um, the participation to such a much bigger like you said five x five X, and increase in the registration. That's pretty good number. >>That's right. Yeah. I mean, that crossed boundaries gone away. This event is free on DWhite. That's actually meant is, as I say, you know, larger teams from the same company are attending. Uh, In addition, we have a number of attendees who are not actually paid to duty customers right now to previously. This was very much a community event for, you know, our page duty users on now we actually have a large number of I asked, interested future customers that will be coming to the event. So that's really important for us. And also, I think, for our sponsor partners as well, because it's bordering out the audience for both of us. So let's >>talk about sponsors for a minute, because, um, one of the big things in virtual events that people are talking about quite often is. Okay, I can do the keynotes, and I could do the sessions. And now I have all these breakout sessions for, um, you know, training and certification and customer stories, etcetera. But when it comes to sponsors, right sponsors used, you know, go to events to set up a booth and hand out swag and wander badge. Right? And it really was feeding kind of a top level down funnel. That was really important. Well, now those have gone away. Physical events. So from the sponsor perspective, you know, what can they expect? What? What do you know the sponsor experience at pager duty Summit. Since I don't have a little tiny booth at the Westin ST Francis given out swag this year. >>Yeah. So one important thing is the agenda and how we're involving our sponsors in our agenda this time, something that we learned is we used to have very long keynotes. You know, the keynote could be an hour long on involved multiple components and people would stay in that room for a now er on did really stay and watch sessions all day. So we learned in the virtual format that we need to be shorter and more precise in our sessions on that opened up the opportunity to bring in more of our partners, our sponsorship partners. So zendesk Salesforce, Microsoft some examples. So they actually get to have their piece of both of our keynote sessions and of our technical product sessions. I'm really explain both the partnership with pager duty, but also they're called technology and the value that they provide customers. So I think that the presence of sponsors in content is much higher than it was before on we are still repeating the Expo format, so we actually do have on Expo Hall that any time there's breaking between sessions, you could go over to the Expo ball, and it actually runs throughout as well, and you can go in and you can talk to the teams. You can see product demos, so it's very much a virtual version of the Expo Hall where you went and you want around and you picked up a bit of swag, >>so you mentioned keynotes and and Jennifer and and the team has always had a fantastic keynotes. I mean, I just saw Jennifer being interviewed with Frank's Luqman and and Eric Juan from Zoom By by Curry, which was pretty amazing. I felt kind of jealous that I didn't get to do that. But, um, talk tell us a little bit about some of the speakers I know there'll be some some, you know, kind of big rally moment speakers as well as some that are more down to technical track or another track. Give us some highlights on on some of the people. I will be sharing the stage with Jennifer. >>Absolutely, I said. I think what's really unique about Page duty Summit is that we designed types of content for different types of attendees. So if you're a developer, your practitioner, we have something like this from Jones of Honeycombs, who's talking about who builds the tools that we all rely on today, and how do they collaborate to build them together in this virtual world? Or we have J. Paul Reed from Netflix talking about how to handle the stress of being involved in incidents, So that's really sessions for our core audience of developers who are part of our community and pager duty really helps them day to day with with that job. And then we have the more aspirational senior level speakers who could really learn from a ZA leader. So Bret Taylor, president and CEO of Salesforce, will be joining us on the main stage. You'll be talking about innovation and trust in today's world on. Then we have Derrick Johnson. He is president of N A A. C P, and he'll be talking about community engagement and particularly voter engagement, which is such an important topic for us right now. Aan den. We have leaders from within our customers who are really talking about the way they use pager duty thio drive change in their organization. So an example would be porches, bro. He runs digital for Fox on, and he's gonna be talking about digital acceleration. How large organization like Fox can really accelerate for this digital first world that we find ourselves living in right now, >>right? Well, you guys have such a developer focus because pager duty, the product of solution, has to integrate with so many other, um, infrastructure, you know, monitoring and, uh, and all of all those different systems because you guys were basically at the front line, you know, sending them the signals that go into those systems. So you have such a broad, you know, kind of ecosystem of technology partners. I don't know if people are familiar with all the integrations that you guys have built over the years, which is such a key piece of your go to market. >>That's right. I mean, we we like to say we're at the center of the digital ecosystem. We have 203 170 integrations on. That's important because we want anyone to be able to use page duty no matter what is in their technology stack technology stacks today are more complex than they've ever been before, particularly with businesses having to shift to this digital first model since we all began shelter in place, you know, we all are living through digital on working and learning through digital on DSO. The technology stacks that power that are more complicated than ever before. So by having 370 integrations, we really know that we conserve pretty much any set of services that your business. It's using. >>Yeah, we've all seen all the means right about who's who's pushing your digital transformation. You know, the CEO, the CEO or or covert. And we all know the answer to toe what's accelerated that whole process. So okay, but so before I let you go, I don't even think we've mentioned the date. So it's coming up Monday, September, September 21st through Thursday, September 24th not at the West End Online and again. What air? What are you hoping? You're kind of the key takeaways for the attendees after they come to the summit? >>Yeah, a couple of things. I mean, first of all, I think will be a sense of belonging. Three attendees, the uses, a pager duty. They are really the teams that are at the forefront of keeping our digital services working on. But what that means is responding to incidents we've actually seen. Ah, 38% increase in the volume of incidents on our platform since covert and shelter in place began. Wait 30 >>38% increase in incidents since mid March. >>That's correct. Since the beginning of on bear in mind incidents. Prior to that in the six months prior, they were pretty flat. There wasn't instant growth. But what we've also seen is a 20% improvement in the time that it takes to resolve an incident from five minutes down to four minutes. So what that really means is that the pager duty community is working really hard. They're improving their practices. Hopefully our platform, our platform is a key part of how, but these are some people under pressure, so I hope that people can come and they can experience a sense of belonging. They can learn from each other about experiences. How do you manage the stress of that situation on what are some of the great innovations that make your job easier in the year ahead? The second thing that we don't for that community is that we are offering certification for P. D. You page due to university for free this year. It's of course, with a value of $7500. Last year, you would attend page duty summit on you would sit through your sessions and you would learn and you would get certified. So this year it's offered for free. You take the course during summit. But you can also carry on if you miss anything for 30 days after. So we're really feeling that, you know, we're giving back there, offering a great program for certification and improved skills completely free to help our community in this in this time of pressure, >>right? Right. Well, it is a very passionate community, and, you know, we go to so many events and you can you can really tell it's palatable, you know, kind of what the where the tight communities are and where people are excited to see each other and where they help each other, not necessarily only at the event, but you know, throughout the year. And I think you know a huge shout out to Jennifer on the culture that she's built there because it is very warm. It's very inclusive, is very positive. And and that energy, you know, kind of goes throughout the whole company and ice the teaser. You know this in something that's built around a device that most of the kids today don't even know what a pager is, and just the whole concept of carrying a pager and being on call right and being responsible. It's a very different way to kind of look at the world when you're the one that has that thing on your hip and it's buzzing and someone's expecting, Ah, return call and you gotta fix something So you know, a huge shout out to keep a positive and you're smiling nice and big culture in a job where you're basically fixing broken things most of the time. >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's, I think, a joke that we make you know these things only break on Friday night or your wedding anniversary or Thanksgiving. But one of the announcements we're most excited about this year is the level of automation on artificial intelligence that we're building into our platform that is really going to reduce the number of interruptions that developers get when they are uncle. >>Yeah, I look forward to more conversations because we're gonna be doing a bunch of Cube interviews like Normal and, uh, you know, applied artificial intelligence, I think, is where all the excitement is. It's not a generic thing. It's where you applied in a specific application to get great business outcomes. So I look forward to that conversation and hopefully we'll be able to talk again and good luck to you and the team in the last few weeks of preparation. >>Thanks so much, Jeff. I've enjoyed talking to you. Thanks for having me. >>Alright. You too. And we'll see you later. Alright. She is Caroline. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, we are here at Dell EMC World. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Paul Gillin. This is going to be a great segment, I'm so excited to have you both on the program. We're here welcoming Carolyn Rodz, she is the founder of Circular Board, and Elizabeth Gore, who is an entrepreneur in residence here at Dell. Welcome both to the program. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Thanks for having us. >> So this week you unveiled Alice. This is the first AI based virtual advisor for women entrepreneurs. I want get to talking about Alice, meeting Alice, but first I want to just ask you Elizabeth, you're an entrepreneur in residence at Dell, explain to us how that program works. >> Sure, so it's my great pleasure to have worked the last almost three years now with Dell and now Dell Technologies. Every couple of years Michael Dell and his leadership team choose an individual who have a very specific focus to support eco-systems for entrepreneurs. So we use all of the muscle we have across Dell Technologies to support policy for entrepreneurs, in the 180 countries that we live and work. Also what are the best eco-systems and platforms that help entrepreneurs scale. And one of them is the Circular Board and we've been really proud to partner with them for the last two years because they use a digital platform that is very scalable and women are only getting 3% of venture capital in the US. So access to capital, mentorship, networks is really critical and so we're really excited to partner with, what you'll hear about Alice, to help solve that problem. >> So Carolyn, Elizabeth just laid out the problem, that women are just not getting a lot of easy dollars, there's not a lot of support, not a lot of encouragement, there's just a lack of community. So talk about Alice and how she fills this gap. >> Yeah so we hear a lot about the problem, and realized it was time to find a solution. And that's what Alice is all about, so Alice was started as, really the answer to what I wish I would've had when I started my first company years ago and what we saw over and over again with women everywhere. And that was integration into the existing start-up eco-system, and connectivity to resources like events, experts, content and tools to help their companies grow. And that's exactly what Alice does, is connect them based on their unique company profile and their real time needs. >> And you can go to helloalice.com and you can start using it right away. >> Exactly. >> So what does it do? How does it work? >> Yeah so a founder enters in their profile based on their industry, stage of growth and their location. Alice curates needs based on what they're looking for today. So if they're looking for a technology solution to a problem that they're having it will connect her to the right resources for her company to grow. If she needs an attorney to help her, who is the right attorney based on where she is and the industry that she's in. So for every person the answers are different, and as Alice populates she gets smarter and smarter about a founder's needs and starts to use predictive learning to make smarter responses for her. >> How do you ensure Alice will be used only by women? I mean, can anybody access this resource? >> Yeah she's open to everybody, she was really coded with gender in mind so from the start we looked at what were the unique needs of women, how did they learn and absorb information best. And that was were we started to create the platform but certainly she's open to everybody. The more the merrier. >> So give us some use cases. I know that you just unveiled her yesterday, a big deal. But talk about how you see an entrepreneur in, say, a small town somewhere in America using Alice and finding success. >> Well you look at what's happening today, it's a very fragmented eco-system. So there are great events, there are wonderful accelerators and programs around the world happening. But if you're in a place that doesn't have these resources you're certainly removed from the eco-system, or even if you are in a city that has great resources, lots of times when you're starting a company you aren't familiar with what exists and so it's a huge learning curve to just start to navigate that space. And that's where Alice comes in. It's how to help founders navigate the eco-system and also connect with expertise that may not be in their own location. So if you're in New York and working on a technology platform there are great resources available in Silicon Valley that you're missing out on and our goal is to bridge that gap. >> You mentioned Carolyn, Alice is something you wish you had had when you were starting your business. As entrepreneurs can you talk about some of the biggest challenges that you faced. >> Sure, one of the things that when you're launching a company is there are, as Carolyn said, a lot of resources out there but you're time poor as an entrepreneur. Your heads are down, you're just trying to get profitable, make sure your product is correct. So what is really critical is that this is curated exactly for that moment in the life cycle of a business. So am I just getting started, am I raising my series A or am I pre-IPO entrepreneur? I want the resources in that moment that are right for me. And what has not worked, Dell has really focused on a lot of platforms but you can't just take an existing platform and turn it pink for women, that just doesn't work. So we actually were really proud that Pivotal, one of our family of companies within Dell, did thousands of hours of user testing with the Circular Board team and actually looked at how do women access information, how do they access capital, why aren't so many of them integrating into existing systems? So all the way down to the code they've been really thinking about how to integrate women into these existing systems so they will raise their capital, get the mentorship, tap into supplier diversity programs, and that's why we think helloalice.com is going to be a huge change agent. >> I think we can agree the venture capital world, particularly in Silicon Valley, is very male dominated. There's an old boy's network there. Have you sensed that there is a willingness to change? That that attitude is changing at last? >> Yeah I think so. There's certainly some unconscious bias but women are starting companies now twice as fast as their male counterparts, so anyone who's really into-- >> Woah, where'd that number come from? >> The Chamber of Commerce announced that last year. >> Wow. >> Now unfortunately their fail rates are still unusually high and only 2% are making over a million dollars, however for an enterprise company like Dell or for a venture capital firm, I want to see those companies that are coming out rapidly and have the best products. So yes, they're starting to really understand and look at how do we interact with women in their companies. However what Alice will do is provide a great pipeline for the best companies to those venture firms. And you've already thought about that a lot. >> Yeah and we've also seen there's a huge desire from all of these resources to get more women involved in their programs. There's a huge desire from the women to get more involved and what we're trying to do is filter down to who are the right women for the right programs at the right time and make those connections. >> So tell me more, when you look ahead and at what Alice could possibly do for a generation and future generations of female entrepreneurs, what's your greatest hope? What's your greatest wish? >> Re-writing the statistics around women entrepreneurs ultimately and boosting economies, creating jobs and solving the big problems of the world. But what's exciting is, you think about the process right now where you turn to experts for advice, and imagine being able to scale that expertise, not only to the people who know that person, or where those personal relationships exist, but being able to provide access to every entrepreneur whether they reside in a rural community in Africa or in the middle of Silicon Valley. >> Where does the data come from? What are you plugging into on the back end? >> We relied heavily on partnerships and experts to find the best of the best. It isn't a numbers game in terms of quantity of content, but really looking for the very best answers to specific problems that founders have. So we've partnered with organizations like The Kauffman Foundation and Case Foundation and Small Business Administration and Department of Commerce and companies like Dell who have been really supportive in terms of getting us really quality content to help solve these problems. >> Dell, as you started talking about how Michael Dell is a big believer in this and obviously he's an entrepreneur himself. But can you tell us a little bit more about what skin Dell has in this game. >> Sure, absolutely. So we look at this as a business case for us, a business imperative as well as a social and economic comparative. So it is important to us to be the in-the-end solutions provider now that we have a suite of companies that can do that, from the day I buy my first laptop and try to launch my company, all the way up to commercial and enterprise solutions. So if we are really going to be that we have to be in front of these entrepreneurs. So Alice is way for us to get in front of fast growth entrepreneurs, provide the technology, the resources and the knowledge we have to be in front of them. So for us that's really important business. For the social and economic case, women put 90% of their income back into their communities and families and so for us, Michael and I have always believed that entrepreneurs are the ones solving the major social problems out there with solutions that are even more sustainable sometimes than Government, or most time frankly. So for us it's also a social imperative and women just happen to be the ones that are getting stuff done, both for their communities, their family and their business. >> So there's a doing good element to this-- >> Sure absolutely, absolutely. >> You both talked about a lot of entrepreneurs, and there's so much start-up activity, everybody's an entrepreneur these days. What are the characteristics of the successful ones? What do you look for Elizabeth? >> So I'm a very founder first person. I see a lot of great ideas but that founder has to have the drive, the know-how and the make it happen attitude. I also think that founders, it's really important that they understand technology. Every company is a technology company now, it doesn't matter what industry you're in. So first, do they have that drive, do they have that how-to attitude, do they surround themselves with people that are going to help their company scale 'cause every founder has weaknesses, do they understand the technology eco-system? So those are part of the things that I look for. I'm sure you might have different. >> Yeah those certainly, and I think that persistence. It is really hard to be heard among a very cluttered eco-system, and where we see the greatest success are those founders that continue to put forward and keep asking the questions and keep enlisting the help that they need to find the solutions that they're looking for. >> Before we let you go, what's your piece of advice for women out there who's starting a business, maybe struggling a bit. Beyond hook up with Alice, what's your best advice for her? >> Build the right team, find a co-founder, enlist the right investors to help provide the capital that you need, get the right partners on board and really look beyond just your employees as your team, but really look, who is the circle that you're enlisting behind your business to make it happen. >> And I would say it's really important to put purpose into profit. So really understand, while you're going after that profitability, why did you start in the first place, what is the purpose that your company is going after? On those hard days put that back into your focus. So put purpose into profit. >> And let's be sure to tell people how they get in touch, how they find Hello Alice, Twitter, a website and all. >> Visit helloalice.com to register and participate in Alice. And we want to welcome everybody, not just entrepreneurs but also experts and investors and advisors as well. And then online you can follow us at Alice Connects on Twitter and Facebook. >> Carolyn, Elizabeth, thanks so much. >> Pleasure, thank you all. >> Thanks so much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Paul Gillin, we will have more from Dell EMC World just after this.

hi everybody we're back this is Dave vellante from Wikibon Oregon here with Jeff Frick this is silicon angles the cube the cube we go into events like this we're at knowledge service now is user conference we try to extract the signal from the noise would bring you we love sports analogies here we like to bring you the best athletes tech athletes week all them so Carolyn Hollingsworth is here she's I know Carolyn you're a fan of a football but we're going to call you a tech athlete so Karen's with Lennox internationals he's an IT practitioner there Carla thanks a lot for taking some time and coming on the cube so tell us a little bit about Lennox about the organization and what's your role there Lennox is a global manufacturer of furnace and air conditioning equipment were based in Dallas Texas and we have sales of about five billion dollars a year and i'm the senior manager of service operations ok so this conferences amazed this first knowledge conference I've been to I presume you've been to others or is this year first oh this is actually my fourth kind of okay so you were here an inning so they had a few before that I'd be close but so it's it's evolved over the years I told oh yes it seems like year-over-year it doubles yeah so it's gotten bigger and more diverse or in terms of just the content or is it still sort of focused on you know leveraging the platform and now it's got more diverse I mean they've added you know discovery and their this new orchestration which is run book that's new this year they're always adding new modules so and then to now they're really pushing platform that's the custom applications you can build outside of IT so do you they tell us it's really easy to write applications can you write applications on the platform oh yes really okay you a programmer by trader I programmed in a past life okay really don't program today but I can't go in and build screens within service now and do reporting it's very easy so I was a program of past life too and not a very good one which is why I know hosting the cube but I have an idea for an app so I'm dying to get my hands on the platform so I can play around with what they just came out with a brand new app that they say that anybody can sit down and write application app creator right yeah so I will test that anybody claims oh they said we have a hackathon going on I believe tomorrow yeah we actually come in that earlier today you're in there filming at that phone is underway there they're working till midnight I made sure that they had pizza and caffeine and I think they're gonna have a little bonus Vegas entertainment visiting at some point in time so tell us more about how you're using service i'm really interested in the sort of before and after described life before service now came in you know what was that like and how did it change and we'll get into the implementation a little bit well before service now we did have an application for the help desk to take tickets but that's about all we did nothing else within IT really had a system like service now after we brought service now and you know we it's a complete package they keep you know they say erp for IT well it truly is you can do ticketing we're doing change change management discovery of all of our assets we've built our own applications for access management even departments outside of IT are coming to us now and saying hey we see what you've done with service now we have something we think that maybe we could use it for so we've built applications for HR we're building an application for our R&D department to track the various incidents and changes that goes on with the large test cells for HVAC equipment marketing we have some small retailers that has pieces and parts for our HVAC equipment around the United States we've built an app for them to bring in new equipment and it has to go through a workflow and be approved by like a district manager pricing changes sales programs I'll have to be approved well we build an app for them that runs on service now also so prior to service now you had the collection of sperm and I've seen the spreadsheets and it's an asset spreadsheet and the spreadsheets on top of spreadsheets and that's that what that describes your environment oh yes definitely and somebody owns the spreadsheet this is totally right yeah this is before you know google doc so I chose I got it you take it you take it so you had all this sort of conversion simultaneous versions going on convictions or email email was always a big way to pass around test the various people can you take care of this can you do that now you may be very well may have had project management systems right actually we had a homegrown project management so a lot of customers right there yeah homegrown or Microsoft projects or you know whatever 37signals I mean there's there are many out there so how did ServiceNow sort of change things in other words what can you do now that you couldn't do then we have one system where everything is so there's no you know before someone would say this is the way it is and another one might be tracking the same assets or the licenses and we had 22 answers now we have one system that is the record their goal we called our golden record so everything is in service now it's connected to each other if you know if you think of erp for manufacturing is you know everything is connected to each other right so you see each other you used to have to add one plus the other divide by two and say okay that's a truth so parents can you talk a little bit about mobile I'm Mobile's impacting your business we keep hearing about we keep hearing about I think of the Linux guy out in the truck checking in on the HVAC outside the house and the commercial actually they are actually building computer controls into our units now they've announced a couple of them but it's going to be able to call home when it has a problem and it's just starting but I mean they're actually taking this mobile idea to our products and arses we're doing some plc's where our sales force is getting iPads and they're going to be doing some apps within Salesforce calm and talk about that one but it's okay you got to manage a lot of different idea I so many puzzles of that we're starting to delve into mobile we're looking at possibly replacing all of our laptops with either notebooks or tablets so we have a lot of PLC's going on right now just trying to put a strategy together as to what our mobile is going to be but it's coming towards us all different ways were there challenges in terms of would be so you bring in service now you get the single system that we call to the gold golden record record were there challenges in getting rid of stuff we have to keep army called GRS getting rid of stuff getting rid of for instance legacy systems that had sort of embedded themselves into the organization and how did that go how did that all come about well let me tell you first how ServiceNow got into our organization we had this older system and we had it for 10 years and I mean it was meeting our needs we thought I mean we didn't really have any problems with it we weren't looking for a new system and yeah I remember this is five years ago we I got an email out of the blue for with a little embedded commercial for her demo for service now and it was I mean just sort of like mind boggling what they were saying they could do and how it was all packaged in one package and basically I you know I want that just for that just for that day and what we'll use cases they that they outline that grabbed you so effectively it's just that everything you know is there erp system for IT everything was there is connected we had the system we had all we had was ticketing if you wanted problem you had to buy another module if you want to change it by another module everything you wanted was more money this was one package one subscription price and you know you got it all and but it took me a year to convince my peers and our vp that we should be looking at this now why did it take so long what was the kind of friction what was the discussion like well it's like well why didn't we you know the use case why did why do you need a new tool you know this'n seems to be you know taking stock broke right wife is it and Lennox is a very conservative company and and we have in the past run a lot of old software as probably a lot of companies do if there's not a real need there you know they don't go out and look at in retrospect it was broke right in your hair to what you're doing now so how did it affect your business I mean did you get more competitive are you able to you know track better people or you out cost how we we posed it after you know I got some doubles going and everybody in the you know interested in looking at this we convinced our vp that we should go global with this because before Lennox was very structured that each locality because her global had their own IT systems and their own IT support groups so while they reported in dotted line into dallas the headquarters everybody sort of did their own thing so we came up with this program will we were going to do standard global processes with 80 and so that's where we started and then we were going to use service now as the tool of choice so we started down that path and it didn't make a big difference to the business because now most of our IT processes are the same across the globe and you know we're asking everybody to do things the same way go to service now and just work that way so you stuck with it for a year and a half I mean you don't seem like the type of person who's gonna start pounding the table and intimidating people that doesn't seem to be your style so so I bet you but at the same time you you kept at it so it was you know a year and a half before you were able to convince people so how did you go about that sell process I'm really well rhian give advice to the other position Hunter wonder you're watching the shutter say Carolyn help me my senior guys to make us make the sleep in here today thirty percent of it yeah well I till was really becoming big at the time and there was a lot of news going on about I chill and you know we do listen to you know gardener and Forester and people like that so I told was getting big and I think you know it just came at the right time with our vp to say well you know maybe this is something we should look into and you know we got all the senior management together and basically he said you know everybody's got to put their thumbs on the table that we're doing the or we're not going to do it and everybody came to the table said yes it sounds like a good thing to do so what are you most proud of the accomplishments that you've made both professionally and personally as it relates to this initiative I think that our support and operations department or groups are working the most efficiently that the most efficient that they can and I think that you know we're responding to our customers needs a lot faster we're not hearing all the complaints that we heard before that you know hey this has been broke when you're going to fix it you know we're even trying to become more proactive we've brought in some monitoring tools that we didn't have before to help us along those lines so just to be more customer-centric and you know sort of instead of saying no to the customer say okay we can do it now so all this I mean you're using the lines of indoor so all the stuff we hear about from going no to now that's not just to you that's not just marketing you're actually living that is that fair statement yes I mean like I said we started putting up our own applications and now we have all these customers who wouldn't normally come to support and ask that though they have an application built they go to our project side of the house but they're coming to us you know we're working with safety and HR and R&D and you know I could double or triple my staff just to keep up with the request we're getting from outside of our teeth and you're able to do that so the businesses and helping you fund that yes it's got to feel great it's so easy to make an application I mean the other ERP system we use is SI p and you know to get a system up in sa peas big dollars 6 8 9 10 12 months and we literally built the application for our retail stores in two weeks so I mean I've been around IT a long time and I've just seen the finger pointing and what do you spending our money on it sounds like you're you've flipped or in the process of sort of flipping that tality is that is my overstating that er no I think that's that's gotta feel great I mean good congratulations hi Carol doesn't thanks very much for coming on the cube and sharing your story the story of Lennox your personal story and really congratulations on all the great progress oh thank you there's a pleasure all right keep it right to everybody will be back our next guest is marina Levinson who's the founder former at netapp CIO we've had a couple of

(upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Women in Tech: International Women's Day, 2022. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Erin Chu joins me next. Life Sciences Lead at AWS Open Data. Erin, welcome to the program. >> Thanks so much for having me, Lisa. Tell me a little bit about you and your role at AWS. >> I would love to. So I am a life sciences lead on the AWS Open Data team, and we are really in the business of democratizing access to data. We believe that if you make high quality, high impact data openly available in the cloud, that people can start innovate, make discoveries and do science faster with those data. So we have a number of specialists with expertise in different domains. Geospatial sciences, climate sustainability, statistical regulatory and then of course myself, the life sciences lead. >> So, you have a really interesting background. You're a veterinarian by training. You have a PhD, you've worked in mobile veterinary clinics, and also in an animal genomic startup, how did you make the change from the clinical side to working for a large international, one of the biggest companies in the world? >> Yeah, I love that question because so much of, I think, anybody's career path is serendipitous and circumstantial, right? But the fact is I was working in a mobile veterinary clinics while I was finishing up a PhD in molecular genomics. And at the same time was reached out to by a professor at Cornell who had started a little dog genomic startup. And he said, "Hey, we need a veterinarian who can talk to people and who understands the genomic side of things?" And I said, "Yeah, I'm your girl." And I came on full time with that startup towards the end of my PhD, signed on after I finished, came on on as their senior veterinary geneticist. Startups a great whirlwind. You end up learning a ton. You have a huge, deep learning curve. You're wearing every possible hat you can. And after a couple years there, I wondered what else I could do. And simply said, where else could I look for work? And how else could I grow? And I decided to try the larger tech world, because I said, this is a toolkit I don't have yet. So I'd like to try and see how I can do it, and here I am. >> And you, I was reading about you that you felt empowered by the notion that I have to trust my instincts. You look at careers in biology, you decided what directions you wanted to take but how did you kind of conjure that feeling of empowerment? >> Yeah, I have to see say I have an incredibly supportive team and in supportive manager, but a lot of it was simply because I've never been afraid to fail. The worst thing that someone can ever say to you is, no or that you didn't do that well. Once you come across that once in your life, it doesn't hurt so bad the second time around. And so, I was hired for a very specific data set that my team was helping to manage. And that does take up a good deal of my time, it still does, but I also had the freedom to say, "Hey, what are the trends in biology? I am an expert in this field. What do I know is coming around the corner? What do I know my researchers need?" And I was entrusted with that, this ability to say, "Hey, these are the decisions I think we should make." And I got to see those outcomes fairly quickly. So, my managers have always put a good deal of trust in me and I don't think I've let them down. >> I'm sure you haven't. Tell me a little bit about some of your mentors or sponsors that have helped guide you along the way and really kind of feel that empowerment that you already had. >> Absolutely. Well, the first and foremost mentor in has been my mother. So, in the spirit of International Women's Day, my mom is actually the first Asian engineer to ever reach executive level. Asian female engineer to ever reach executive level at IBM. And so, I spent my life seeing what my mother could do, and watching her just succeed. And I think very early it clear, she said, "What can't you do?" And that was kind of how I approached my entire life, is what can't I do, and what's the worst thing that will happen. You fail and then you try again. So she is absolutely my first mentor, and a role model to me and hopefully to women everywhere, honestly. I've had some amazing teachers and mentors. My professor who oversaw my PhD, Dr. Paul Soloway. He's currently still at Cornell, really just said, "What decisions do you want to make?" And, "I will support you in the best way I can." And we learned a lot together. I have a professor at Cornell who I still come back. I speak at her alternate careers in veterinary medicine because she just... And she was the one who told me, "Erin, you have a really high buoyancy factor. Don't lose that." And her name is Dr. Carolyn McDaniel. And she has just been such a positive force just saying, "What else could we do?" >> Well, that's- >> And, "Never let your degrees or your training say that this is what you have to do. Think of it as a starting point." >> That's a great point. We often, especially when we're little kids, many of us, you think of these very defined, doctor, lawyer, accountants, nurse instead of having something like you do and being able to go, what else can I do with this? How can I take this education, this information and the interest that I have and parlay it into something that really can kick the door wide open. And to your point, I love how your mom was saying, "What can't you do?" That's a message that everyone needs to hear. And there's an AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program. Talk to me a little bit about that. I'm always interested in sponsorship programs. >> Oh, thanks for asking. So the Open Data Sponsorship Program or the ODP since Open Data Sponsorship Program can be a little mouthful after you say it a few times, but the ODP is a program that AWS sponsors where we will actually cover at the cost of storage transfer and egress of high impact data sets in the cloud. Basically, we know that sometimes the barrier to getting into cloud can be very high for certain providers of gold standard data sets. And when I mean gold standard data sets, I mean like NASA Sentinel-2, or the National Institutes of Health Sequence Read Archive. These are invaluable data sets that are ingested by thousands if not millions of users every day. And what we want to do is lower that barrier to cloud and efficient distribution of those data to zero. So, the program is actually open to anybody. It can be a government entity, it can be a startup, it can be nonprofit. We want to understand more about your data and help you distribute it well in the cloud. >> So this is for any type of organization regardless of industry? >> That's right. >> So, you're really allowing more organizations... One of the things that we say often when we're talking on theCUBE is that every company these days is a data company, or it has to be. Every company has to be a tech company, whether we're talking about your grocery store or AWS, for example. So helping organizations to be able to take that data, understand it, and have those personal conversations that as consumers we expect is critical, but it's challenging for organizations that say, "Well, I came up in retail and now I've got to be a tech company." Talk to me about kind of empowering organizations to be able to use that data, to grow the organization, grow the business, but also to delight customers 'cause of course we are quite picky. >> You're so right. Data is power and it doesn't matter what you are selling or who you are serving. If you have the data about your product. And also to some degree, the data about who your consumers are, you can really tailor an experience. I always tell my colleagues that data is impersonal, right? You can look at bits and bites, numbers, structured columns and rows, but you can funnel data into a truly personal experience as long as you do you it right. And hopefully, when I work with my data providers I ask them, how do you want people to use your data? What are the caveats? How can we make these data easy to work with? But also easy to draw correct insights from. >> Right, that easy to use is critical because as you know the proliferation of data just continues and it will continue. If we think of experiences. I want to go back to your experience. What's been the biggest learning curve that you've had so far? >> Oh my gosh. So, the best part of being at a large company is that you're not in the same room or even like whatever the same slack channel as all of your colleagues, right? Coming from a startup or clinical space where quite literally you are in the same room as everybody 'cause there are less than 60 of you, you could just talk to the person who might be an internal stakeholder. You had that personal relationship, and frankly, like most of the time your views were very aligned. It was sell the product, get to MVP. Moving into larger tech, the steepest curve I had other than becoming very comfortable in the cloud, in all the services that AWS has to offer, were to manage those internal relationships. You have to understand who the stakeholders are. There typically many, many of them for any given project or a company that we're serving. And you have to make sure that you're all aligned internally, make sure that everyone gets what they need and that we reach that end to ultimately serve the customer together. >> Yeah, that communication and collaboration is key. And that's something that we've seen over the last two years, is how dependent we've all become on collaboration tools. But it is a different type of relationship. You're right. Going from a clinic where you're all in the same room or the same location to everyone being distributed globally. Relationship management there is key. It's one of my favorite things about being in tech is that, I think it's such a great community. It's a small community, and I think there's so there's so much opportunity there. If you're a good person, you manage those relationships and you learn how to work with different types of people. You'll always be successful. Talk to me about what you would say, if someone's saying, "Erin, I need some advice. I want to change industries or I want to take this background that I have, and use it in a different industry." What are the three pieces of advice that you would share? >> Oh, absolutely. So, the first thing that I always talk with my... I have quite a few colleagues who have approached me from all different parts of my life. And they've said, "Erin, how did you make the change? And how can I make a change?" And the first thing I say is let's look at your resume and define what your translational skills are. That is so big, right? It doesn't matter what you think you're a specialist in, it's how generalizable are those specialty skills and how can you show that to somebody who's looking at your resume. Let's call it a nontraditional resume. And the second is don't hesitate to ask question. Go for the informational interview. People want to tell you about how they've gotten to where they are and how you might be able to get there too. And so I say, get on LinkedIn and start asking questions. If one person says yes, and you get no responses I call that a success. Don't be afraid of not getting a response, that's okay. And the last thing, and I think this is the most important thing is to hold onto the things that make you happy no matter where you are in your life. It's important to realize you are more than your job. It is important to remember what makes you happy and try to hang on those. I am a gym rat. I admit that I am a gym rat. I'm in the gym five days a week. I have a horse. I go out to see him at least two or three a days. I know it's typical veterinarian, right? You just collect niches until you run out of things you want to pay for. But those are things that have been constant through 20 plus years of being in the workforce. And they've been what kept me going. Let's revise that in ten years. >> So critical because as we all know tech can be all consuming. It will take everything if you let it. So being able to have... We always talk about the balance. Well, the balance is hard. It's definitely a way to scale, right? It's going back and forth, but being able to hold onto the things that actually make you who you are, I think make you better at your job, probably more productive and happier. >> I agree. I totally agree. >> Another thing that you believe, which I love, this is an important message is that, if you look at a job, I like how you said earlier, the worst they can say is no. You have nothing to lose. And it's really true. As scary as that is same thing with raising your hand as you say, and I agree with you about that. Ask a question. It's not a dumb question. I guarantee you. If you're in a room or you're on a Zoom or even in a slack channel. A fair number of people probably have the same question. Be the one to raise your hand and say, "Maybe I missed this. Can you clarify this?" But you also think that you don't have to meet all the job requirements. If you see something that says, five years experience in this or 10 years in that or must have this degree or that degree, you're saying you don't have to meet all that criteria. >> I agree. Yeah, that's another big thing is that, I'll literally talk to people who are like, "Well, Erin, this job application, look at all these requirements and I can't fill these requirements." I'm like, "First of all, who says you can't?" Just because you don't have a certification, what has your work thus far done to reflect that? Yeah, you can meet that requirement, even if you don't have an official certification. But two, like what's the worst thing that happens. You don't get a call back from a recruiter. That's okay. I have so many friends who are afraid of failure, and I tell them, just fail once doesn't hurt. It never hurts as much as you think it's going to hurt. And then you just keep going. >> You keep going and you learn. But you've also brought up a great point about those transfer growth skills or those soft skills that are so important. Communication skills, for example. Relationship building skills that may not be in that written job description. So you may not think about actually there's a tremendous amount of importance that these skills have. That having this kind of breadth of background. I think is always so interesting we think about thought diversity, and if we're talking about women in tech. We know that the number of women in technical roles is is still pretty low, but there's so much data that shows that companies that have even 30% females on their executive staff are more performant and more profitable. So that thought diversity is important, but we need more women to be able to feel that empowerment I think that you feel. >> Yes. >> So when you think of International Women's Day with the theme of breaking the bias, what does that mean to you and where do you feel we are in terms of breaking the bias? >> Yeah, so it's interesting, I was just on a working group with some of my colleagues from our larger organization at AWS. And we were talking about, what are different kinds of bias and what our strategies to go ahead and combat them. The fact is we are all making progress and it has to be in one step at a time. I don't think that if we snapped our fingers, things would just go away. You have to take one step at a time. I also come at it from a data perspective, right? I'm a data person. I work with data. And like I said, data is, or data are, if you want to be correct. Data are impersonal, right? They are just statistics, their numbers, but you can use data to suddenly say, "Hey, where are the biases? And how can we fix them?" So I'm going to give you a great example. So my mother, again, a wonderful woman, a super amazing role model to me. She was diagnosed with breast cancer last year. And she being a smart lady, actually looked online. She went online on Google Scholar and PubMed Central. And she said, "May, look..." May is my little nickname. She goes, "Look at these numbers." She said, "My prognosis is terrible. Look at these numbers, how can you say that this is worth it. That chemotherapy is worth it." And I looked at it and I said, "Mom, I hate to break this to you. But this is a retrospective study of several thousand women from the Bavarian cancer registry." And you might guess I am not a Bavarian origin. I had a chat with her and I said, "Mom, let's look at the data. What are the data? And how can you take away stuff from this with the caveat that you may very well not have the same genetic background as some of the women or most of the women in this registry." There are biases. We know when we look at population sequencing, when we look at the people who are sequenced, the people who put in medical survey information. There are not representations of certain ethnicities of certain sexes, of certain parts of the country. One of the things I really want to do in the next three years is say, how can we support people who are trying to increase representation and research so that every single woman gets the right care and can feel like they are themselves represented in what we call precision medicine or personalized care. >> Absolutely. >> That's a long story. >> It was a great story. >> That was a long answer to answer your question. >> You talked about how your mom was a great inspiration to you and it sounds like you've been quite a great inspiration to her as well. Was a delight talking with you, Erin. Congratulations on your success on being able to be one of those people that is helping to break the bias. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> My pleasure. For Erin Chu, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching Women in Tech: International Women's Day, 2022. (upbeat music)