>>Hey everyone, welcome to this event, HPE Compute Security. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Kevin Dee joins me next Senior director, future Surfer Architecture at hpe. Kevin, it's great to have you back on the program. >>Thanks, Lisa. I'm glad to be here. >>One of the topics that we're gonna unpack in this segment is, is all about cybersecurity. And if we think of how dramatically the landscape has changed in the last couple of years, I was looking at some numbers that H P V E had provided. Cybercrime will reach 10.5 trillion by 2025. It's a couple years away. The average total cost of a data breach is now over 4 million, 15% year over year crime growth predicted over the next five years. It's no longer if we get hit, it's when it's how often. What's the severity? Talk to me about the current situation with the cybersecurity landscape that you're seeing. >>Yeah, I mean the, the numbers you're talking about are just staggering and then that's exactly what we're seeing and that's exactly what we're hearing from our customers is just absolutely key. Customers have too much to lose. The, the dollar cost is just, like I said, staggering. And, and here at HP we know we have a huge part to play, but we also know that we need partnerships across the industry to solve these problems. So we have partnered with, with our, our various partners to deliver these Gen 11 products. Whether we're talking about partners like a M D or partners like our Nick vendors, storage card vendors. We know we can't solve the problem alone. And we know this, the issue is huge. And like you said, the numbers are staggering. So we're really, we're really partnering with, with all the right players to ensure we have a secure solution so we can stay ahead of the bad guys to try to limit the, the attacks on our customers. >>Right. Limit the damage. What are some of the things that you've seen particularly change in the last 18 months or so? Anything that you can share with us that's eye-opening, more eye-opening than some of the stats we already shared? >>Well, there, there's been a massive number of attacks just in the last 12 months, but I wouldn't really say it's so much changed because the amount of attacks has been increasing dramatically over the years for many, many, many years. It's just a very lucrative area for the bad guys, whether it's ransomware or stealing personal data, whatever it is, it's there. There's unfortunately a lot of money to be made into it, made from it, and a lot of money to be lost by the good guys, the good guys being our customers. So it's not so much that it's changed, it's just that it's even accelerating faster. So the real change is, it's accelerating even faster because it's becoming even more lucrative. So we have to stay ahead of these bad guys. One of the statistics of Microsoft operating environments, the number of tax in the last year, up 50% year over year, that's a huge acceleration and we've gotta stay ahead of that. We have to make sure our customers don't get impacted to the level that these, these staggering number of attacks are. The, the bad guys are out there. We've gotta protect, protect our customers from the bad guys. >>Absolutely. The acceleration that you talked about is, it's, it's kind of frightening. It's very eye-opening. We do know that security, you know, we've talked about it for so long as a, as a a C-suite priority, a board level priority. We know that as some of the data that HPE e also sent over organizations are risking are, are listing cyber risks as a top five concern in their organization. IT budgets spend is going up where security is concerned. And so security security's on everyone's mind. In fact, the cube did, I guess in the middle part of last, I did a series on this really focusing on cybersecurity as a board issue and they went into how companies are structuring security teams changing their assumptions about the right security model, offense versus defense. But security's gone beyond the board, it's top of mind and it's on, it's in an integral part of every conversation. So my question for you is, when you're talking to customers, what are some of the key challenges that they're saying, Kevin, these are some of the things the landscape is accelerating, we know it's a matter of time. What are some of those challenges and that they're key pain points that they're coming to you to help solve? >>Yeah, at the highest level it's simply that security is incredibly important to them. We talked about the numbers. There's so much money to be lost that what they come to us and say, is security's important for us? What can you do to protect us? What can you do to prevent us from being one of those statistics? So at a high level, that's kind of what we're seeing at a, with a little more detail. We know that there's customers doing digital transformations. We know that there's customers going hybrid cloud, they've got a lot of initiatives on their own. They've gotta spend a lot of time and a lot of bandwidth tackling things that are important to their business. They just don't have the bandwidth to worry about yet. Another thing which is security. So we are doing everything we can and partnering with everyone we can to help solve those problems for customers. >>Cuz we're hearing, hey, this is huge, this is too big of a risk. How do you protect us? And by the way, we only have limited bandwidth, so what can we do? What we can do is make them assured that that platform is secure, that we're, we are creating a foundation for a very secure platform and that we've worked with our partners to secure all the pieces. So yes, they still have to worry about security, but there's pieces that we've taken care of that they don't have to worry about and there's capabilities that we've provided that they can use and we've made that easy so they can build su secure solutions on top of it. >>What are some of the things when you're in customer conversations, Kevin, that you talk about with customers in terms of what makes HPE E'S approach to security really unique? >>Well, I think a big thing is security is part of our, our dna. It's part of everything we do. Whether we're designing our own asics for our bmc, the ilo ASIC ILO six used on Gen 11, or whether it's our firmware stack, the ILO firmware, our our system, UFI firmware, all those pieces in everything we do. We're thinking about security. When we're building products in our factory, we're thinking about security. When we're think designing our supply chain, we're thinking about security. When we make requirements on our suppliers, we're driving security to be a key part of those components. So security is in our D N a security's top of mind. Security is something we think about in everything we do. We have to think like the bad guys, what could the bad guy take advantage of? What could the bad guy exploit? So we try to think like them so that we can protect our customers. >>And so security is something that that really is pervasive across all of our development organizations, our supply chain organizations, our factories, and our partners. So that's what we think is unique about HPE is because security is so important and there's a whole lot of pieces of our reliance servers that we do ourselves that many others don't do themselves. And since we do it ourselves, we can make sure that security's in the design from the start, that those pieces work together in a secure manner. So we think that gives us a, an advantage from a security standpoint. >>Security is very much intention based at HPE e I was reading in some notes, and you just did a great job of talking about this, that fundamental security approach, security is fundamental to defend against threats that are increasingly complex through what you also call an uncompromising focus to state-of-the-art security and in in innovations built into your D N A. And then organizations can protect their infrastructure, their workloads, their data from the bad guys. Talk to us briefly in our final few minutes here, Kevin, about fundamental uncompromising protected the value in it for me as an HPE customer. >>Yeah, when we talk about fundamental, we're talking about the those fundamental technologies that are part of our platform. Things like we've integrated TPMS and sorted them down in our platforms. We now have platform certificates as a standard part of the platform. We have I dev id and probably most importantly, our platforms continue to support what we really believe was a groundbreaking technology, Silicon Root of trust and what that's able to do. We have millions of lines of firmware code in our platforms and with Silicon Root of trust, we can authenticate all of those lines of firmware. Whether we're talking about the the ILO six firmware, our U E I firmware, our C P L D in the system, there's other pieces of firmware. We authenticate all those to make sure that not a single line of code, not a single bit has been changed by a bad guy, even if the bad guy has physical access to the platform. >>So that silicon route of trust technology is making sure that when that system boots off and that hands off to the operating system and then eventually the customer's application stack that it's starting with a solid foundation, that it's starting with a system that hasn't been compromised. And then we build other things into that silicon root of trust, such as the ability to do the scans and the authentications at runtime, the ability to automatically recover if we detect something has been compromised, we can automatically update that compromised piece of firmware to a good piece before we've run it because we never want to run firmware that's been compromised. So that's all part of that Silicon Root of Trust solution and that's a fundamental piece of the platform. And then when we talk about uncompromising, what we're really talking about there is how we don't compromise security. >>And one of the ways we do that is through an extension of our Silicon Root of trust with a capability called S Spdm. And this is a technology that we saw the need for, we saw the need to authenticate our option cards and the firmware in those option cards. Silicon Root Prota, Silicon Root Trust protects against many attacks, but one piece it didn't do is verify the actual option card firmware and the option cards. So we knew to solve that problem we would have to partner with others in the industry, our nick vendors, our storage controller vendors, our G vendors. So we worked with industry standards bodies and those other partners to design a capability that allows us to authenticate all of those devices. And we worked with those vendors to get the support both in their side and in our platform side so that now Silicon Rivers and trust has been extended to where we protect and we trust those option cards as well. >>So that's when, when what we're talking about with Uncompromising and with with Protect, what we're talking about there is our capabilities around protecting against, for example, supply chain attacks. We have our, our trusted supply chain solution, which allows us to guarantee that our server, when it leaves our factory, what the server is, when it leaves our factory, will be what it is when it arrives at the customer. And if a bad guy does anything in that transition, the transit from our factory to the customer, they'll be able to detect that. So we enable certain capabilities by default capability called server configuration lock, which can ensure that nothing in the server exchange, whether it's firmware, hardware, configurations, swapping out processors, whatever it is, we'll detect if a bad guy did any of that and the customer will know it before they deploy the system. That gets enabled by default. >>We have an intrusion detection technology option when you use by the, the trusted supply chain that is included by default. That lets you know, did anybody open that system up, even if the system's not plugged in, did somebody take the hood off and potentially do something malicious to it? We also enable a capability called U EFI secure Boot, which can go authenticate some of the drivers that are located on the option card itself. Those kind of capabilities. Also ilo high security mode gets enabled by default. So all these things are enabled in the platform to ensure that if it's attacked going from our factory to the customer, it will be detected and the customer won't deploy a system that's been maliciously attacked. So that's got >>It, >>How we protect the customer through those capabilities. >>Outstanding. You mentioned partners, my last question for you, we've got about a minute left, Kevin is bring AMD into the conversation, where do they fit in this >>AMD's an absolutely crucial partner. No one company even HP can do it all themselves. There's a lot of partnerships, there's a lot of synergies working with amd. We've been working with AMD for almost 20 years since we delivered our first AM MD base ProLiant back in 2004 H HP ProLiant, DL 5 85. So we've been working with them a long time. We work with them years ahead of when a processor is announced, we benefit each other. We look at their designs and help them make their designs better. They let us know about their technology so we can take advantage of it in our designs. So they have a lot of security capabilities, like their memory encryption technologies, their a MD secure processor, their secure encrypted virtualization, which is an absolutely unique and breakthrough technology to protect virtual machines and hypervisor environments and protect them from malicious hypervisors. So they have some really great capabilities that they've built into their processor, and we also take advantage of the capabilities they have and ensure those are used in our solutions and in securing the platform. So a really such >>A great, great partnership. Great synergies there. Kevin, thank you so much for joining me on the program, talking about compute security, what HPE is doing to ensure that security is fundamental, that it is unpromised and that your customers are protected end to end. We appreciate your insights, we appreciate your time. >>Thank you very much, Lisa. >>We've just had a great conversation with Kevin Depu. Now I get to talk with David Chang, data center solutions marketing lead at a md. David, welcome to the program. >>Thank, thank you. And thank you for having me. >>So one of the hot topics of conversation that we can't avoid is security. Talk to me about some of the things that AMD is seeing from the customer's perspective, why security is so important for businesses across industries. >>Yeah, sure. Yeah. Security is, is top of mind for, for almost every, every customer I'm talking to right now. You know, there's several key market drivers and, and trends, you know, in, out there today that's really needing a better and innovative solution for, for security, right? So, you know, the high cost of data breaches, for example, will cost enterprises in downtime of, of the data center. And that time is time that you're not making money, right? And potentially even leading to your, to the loss of customer confidence in your, in your cust in your company's offerings. So there's real costs that you, you know, our customers are facing every day not being prepared and not having proper security measures set up in the data center. In fact, according to to one report, over 400 high-tech threats are being introduced every minute. So every day, numerous new threats are popping up and they're just, you know, the, you know, the bad guys are just getting more and more sophisticated. So you have to take, you know, measures today and you have to protect yourself, you know, end to end with solutions like what a AM MD and HPE has to offer. >>Yeah, you talked about some of the costs there. They're exorbitant. I've seen recent figures about the average, you know, cost of data breacher ransomware is, is close to, is over $4 million, the cost of, of brand reputation you brought up. That's a great point because nobody wants to be the next headline and security, I'm sure in your experiences. It's a board level conversation. It's, it's absolutely table stakes for every organization. Let's talk a little bit about some of the specific things now that A M D and HPE E are doing. I know that you have a really solid focus on building security features into the EPIC processors. Talk to me a little bit about that focus and some of the great things that you're doing there. >>Yeah, so, you know, we partner with H P E for a long time now. I think it's almost 20 years that we've been in business together. And, and you know, we, we help, you know, we, we work together design in security features even before the silicons even, you know, even born. So, you know, we have a great relationship with, with, with all our partners, including hpe and you know, HPE has, you know, an end really great end to end security story and AMD fits really well into that. You know, if you kind of think about how security all started, you know, in, in the data center, you, you've had strategies around encryption of the, you know, the data in, in flight, the network security, you know, you know, VPNs and, and, and security on the NS. And, and even on the, on the hard drives, you know, data that's at rest. >>You know, encryption has, you know, security has been sort of part of that strategy for a a long time and really for, you know, for ages, nobody really thought about the, the actual data in use, which is, you know, the, the information that's being passed from the C P U to the, the, the memory and, and even in virtualized environments to the, the, the virtual machines that, that everybody uses now. So, you know, for a long time nobody really thought about that app, you know, that third leg of, of encryption. And so a d comes in and says, Hey, you know, this is things that as, as the bad guys are getting more sophisticated, you, you have to start worrying about that, right? And, you know, for example, you know, you know, think, think people think about memory, you know, being sort of, you know, non-persistent and you know, when after, you know, after a certain time, the, the, you know, the, the data in the memory kind of goes away, right? >>But that's not true anymore because even in in memory data now, you know, there's a lot of memory modules that still can retain data up to 90 minutes even after p power loss. And with something as simple as compressed, compressed air or, or liquid nitrogen, you can actually freeze memory dams now long enough to extract the data from that memory module for up, you know, up, up to two or three hours, right? So lo more than enough time to read valuable data and, and, and even encryption keys off of that memory module. So our, our world's getting more complex and you know, more, the more data out there, the more insatiable need for compute and storage. You know, data management is becoming all, all the more important, you know, to keep all of that going and secure, you know, and, and creating security for those threats. It becomes more and more important. And, and again, especially in virtualized environments where, you know, like hyperconverged infrastructure or vir virtual desktop memories, it's really hard to keep up with all those different attacks, all those different attack surfaces. >>It sounds like what you were just talking about is what AMD has been able to do is identify yet another vulnerability Yes. Another attack surface in memory to be able to, to plug that hole for organizations that didn't, weren't able to do that before. >>Yeah. And, you know, and, and we kind of started out with that belief that security needed to be scalable and, and able to adapt to, to changing environments. So, you know, we, we came up with, you know, the, you know, the, the philosophy or the design philosophy that we're gonna continue to build on those security features generational generations and stay ahead of those evolving attacks. You know, great example is in, in the third gen, you know, epic C P U, that family that we had, we actually created this feature called S E V S N P, which stands for SECURENESS Paging. And it's really all around this, this new attack where, you know, your, the, the, you know, it's basically hypervisor based attacks where people are, you know, the bad actors are writing in to the memory and writing in basically bad data to corrupt the mem, you know, to corrupt the data in the memory. So s e V S and P is, was put in place to help, you know, secure that, you know, before that became a problem. And, you know, you heard in the news just recently that that becoming a more and more, more of a bigger issue. And the great news is that we had that feature built in, you know, before that became a big problem. >>And now you're on the fourth gen, those epic crosses talk of those epic processes. Talk to me a little bit about some of the innovations that are now in fourth gen. >>Yeah, so in fourth gen we actually added, you know, on top of that. So we've, we've got, you know, the sec the, the base of our, our, what we call infinity guard is, is all around the secure boot. The, you know, the, the, the, the secure root of trust that, you know, that we, we work with HPE on the, the strong memory encryption and the S E V, which is the secure encrypted virtualization. And so remember those s s and p, you know, incap capabilities that I talked about earlier. We've actually, in the fourth gen added two x the number of sev v s and P guests for even higher number of confidential VMs to support even more customers than before. Right? We've also added more guest protection from simultaneous multi threading or S M T side channel attacks. And, you know, while it's not officially part of Infinity Guard, we've actually added more APEC acceleration, which greatly benefits the security of those confidential VMs with the larger number of VCPUs, which basically means that you can build larger VMs and still be secured. And then lastly, we actually added even stronger a e s encryption. So we went from 128 bit to 256 bit, which is now military grade encryption on top of that. And, you know, and, and that's really, you know, the de facto crypto cryptography that is used for most of the applications for, you know, customers like the US federal government and, and all, you know, the, is really an essential element for memory security and the H B C applications. And I always say if it's good enough for the US government, it's good enough for you. >>Exactly. Well, it's got to be, talk a little bit about how AMD is doing this together with HPE a little bit about the partnership as we round out our conversation. >>Sure, absolutely. So security is only as strong as the layer below it, right? So, you know, that's why modern security must be built in rather than, than, you know, bolted on or, or, or, you know, added after the fact, right? So HPE and a MD actually developed this layered approach for protecting critical data together, right? Through our leadership and, and security features and innovations, we really deliver a set of hardware based features that, that help decrease potential attack surfaces. With, with that holistic approach that, you know, that safeguards the critical information across system, you know, the, the entire system lifecycle. And we provide the confidence of built-in silicon authentication on the world's most secure industry standard servers. And with a 360 degree approach that brings high availability to critical workloads while helping to defend, you know, against internal and external threats. So things like h hp, root of silicon root of trust with the trusted supply chain, which, you know, obviously AMD's part of that supply chain combined with AMD's Infinity guard technology really helps provide that end-to-end data protection in today's business. >>And that is so critical for businesses in every industry. As you mentioned, the attackers are getting more and more sophisticated, the vulnerabilities are increasing. The ability to have a pa, a partnership like H P E and a MD to deliver that end-to-end data protection is table stakes for businesses. David, thank you so much for joining me on the program, really walking us through what am MD is doing, the the fourth gen epic processors and how you're working together with HPE to really enable security to be successfully accomplished by businesses across industries. We appreciate your insights. >>Well, thank you again for having me, and we appreciate the partnership with hpe. >>Well, you wanna thank you for watching our special program HPE Compute Security. I do have a call to action for you. Go ahead and visit hpe com slash security slash compute. Thanks for watching.

(bright music) >> Hello everyone, welcome today's session for the "AWS Startup Showcase" presented by theCUBE, featuring ThoughtSpot for this track and data and analytics. I'm John Furrier, your host. Today, we're joined by Victor Chang, VP of ThoughtSpot Everywhere and Corporate Development for ThoughtSpot. Victor, thanks for coming on and thanks for presenting. Talking about this building interactive data apps through ThoughtSpot Everywhere. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, it's my pleasure to be here. >> So digital transformation is reality. We're seeing it large-scale. More and more reports are being told fast. People are moving with modern application development and if you don't have AI, you don't have automation, you don't have the analytics, you're going to get slowed down by other forces and even inside companies. So data is driving everything, data is everywhere. What's the pitch to customers that you guys are doing as everyone realizes, "I got to go faster, I got to be more secure," (laughs) "And I don't want to get slowed down." What's the- >> Yeah, thank you John. No, it's true. I think with digital transformation, what we're seeing basically is everything is done in the cloud, everything gets done in applications, and everything has a lot of data. So basically what we're seeing is if you look at companies today, whether you are a SaaS emerging growth startup, or if you're a traditional company, the way you engage with your customers, first impression is usually through some kind of an application, right? And the application collects a lot of data from the users and the users have to engage with that. So for most of the companies out there, one of the key things that really have to do is find a way to make sense and get value for the users out of their data and create a delightful and engaging experience. And usually, that's pretty difficult these days. You know, if you are an application company, whether it doesn't really matter what you do, if you're hotel management, you're productivity application, analytics is not typically your strong suit, and where ThoughtSpot Everywhere comes in is instead of you having to build your own analytics and interactivity experience with a data, ThoughtSpot Everywhere helps deliver a really self-service interactive experience and transform your application into a data application. And with digital transformation these days, all applications have to engage, all applications have to delight, and all applications have to be self-service. And with analytics, ThoughtSpot Everywhere brings that for you to your customers and your users. >> So a lot of the mainstream enterprises and even businesses from SMB, small businesses that are in the cloud are scaling up, they're seeing the benefits. What's the problem that you guys are targeting? What's the use case? When does a potential customer or customer know they get that ThoughtSpot is needed to be called in and to work with? Is it that they want low code, no code? Is it more democratization? What's the problem statement and how do you guys turn that problem being solved into an opportunity and benefit? >> I think the key problem we're trying to solve is that most applications today, when they try to deliver analytics, really when they're delivering, is usually a static representation of some data, some answers, and some insights that are created by someone else. So usually the company would present, you know, if you think about it, if you go to your banking application, they usually show some pretty charts for you and then it sparks your curiosity about your credit card transactions or your banking transactions over the last month. Naturally, usually for me, I would then want to click in and ask the next question, which transactions fall into this category, what time, you know, change the categories a bit, usually you're stuck. So what happens with most applications? The challenge is because someone else is asking the questions and then the user is just consuming static insights, you wet their appetite and you don't satisfy it. So application users typically get stunted, they're not satisfied, and then leave application. Where ThoughtSpot comes in, ThoughtSpots through differentiation is our ability to create an interactive curiosity journey with the user. So ThoughtSpot in general, if you buy a standalone, that's the experience that we really stand by, now you can deliberate your application where the user, any user, business user, untrained, without the help of an analyst can ask their own questions. So if you see, going back to my example, if it's in your banking app, you see some kind of visualization around expense actions, you can dig in. What about last month? What about last week? Which transactions? Which merchant? You know, all those things you can continue your curiosity journey so that the business user and the app user ask their questions instead of an analyst who's sitting in the company behind a desk kind of asking your questions for you. >> And that's the outcome that everyone wants. I totally see that and everyone kind of acknowledges that, but I got to then ask you, okay, how do you make that happen? Because you've got the developers who have essentially make that happen and so, the cloud is essentially SaaS, right? So you got a SaaS kind of marketplace here. The apps can be deployed very quickly, but in order to do that, you kind of need self-service and you got to have good analytics, right? So self-service, you guys have that. Now on the analytics side, most people have to build their own or use an existing tool and tools become specialists, you know what I'm saying? So you're in this kind of like weird cycle of, "Okay, I got to deploy and spend resource to build my own, which could be long and tiresome." >> Yeah. >> "And or rely on other tools that could be good, but then I have too many tools but that creates specialism kind of silos." These seems to be trends. Do you agree with that? And if customers have this situation, you guys come in, can you help there? >> Absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, if you think about the two options that you just laid out, that you could either roll your own, kind of build your own, and that's really hard. If you think about analyst industry, where 20, $30 billion industry with a lot of companies that specialize in building analytics so it's a really tough thing to do. So it doesn't really matter how big of a company you are, even if you're a Microsoft or an Amazon, it's really hard for them to actually build analytics internally. So for a company to try to do it on their own, hire the talent and also to come up with that interactive experience, most companies fail. So what ends up happening is you deliver the budget and the time to market ends up taking much longer, and then the experience is engaging for the users and they still end up leaving your app, having a bad impression. Now you can also buy something. They are our competitors who offer embedded analytics options as well, but the mainstream paradigm today with analytics is delivering. We talked about earlier static visualizations of insights that are created by someone else. So that certainly is an option. You know, where ThoughtSpot Everywhere really stands out above everything else is our technology is fundamentally built for search and interactive and cloud-scale data kind of an experience that the static visualizations today can't really deliver. So you could deliver a static dashboard purchase from one of our competitors, or if you really want to engage your users again, today is all about self-service, it's all about interactivity, and only ThoughtSpot's architecture can deliver that embedded in a data app for you. >> You know, one of the things I'm really impressed with you guys at ThoughtSpot is that you see data as I see strategic advantage for companies and people say that it's kind of a cliche but, or a punchline, and some sort of like business statement. But when you start getting into new kinds of workflows, that's the intellectual property. If you can enable people to essentially with very little low-code, no-code, or just roll their own analysis and insights from a platform, you're then creating intellectual property for the company. So this is kind of a new paradigm. And so a lot of CIO's that I talked to, or even CSOs on the security side of like, they kind of want this but maybe can't get there overnight. So if I'm a CIO, Victor, who do I, how do I point to on my team to engage with you guys? Like, okay, you sold me on it, I love the vision. This is definitely where we want to go. Who do I bring into the meeting? >> I think that in any application, in any company actually, there's usually product leaders and developers that create applications. So, you know, if you are a SaaS company, obviously your core product, your core product team would be the right team we want to talk to. If you're a traditional enterprise, you'd be surprised actually, how many traditional enterprises that been around for 50, 100 years, you might think of them selling a different product but actually, they have a lot of visual applications and product teams within their company as well. For example, you know, we have customers like a big tractor company. You can probably imagine who they might be. They actually have visual applications that they use ThoughtSpot to offer to the dealers so that they can look at their businesses with the tractors. We also have a big telecom company, for example, that you would think about telecom as a whole service but they have a building application that they offer to their merchants to track their billing. So what I'm saying is really, whether you're a software company where that's your core product, or you're a traditional enterprise that has visual applications underneath to support your core product, there's usually product teams, product leaders, and developers. Those are the ones that we want to talk to and we can help them realize a better vision for the product that they're responsible for. >> I mean, the reality is all applications need analytics, right, at some level. >> Yes. >> Full instrumentation at a minimum log everything and then the ability to roll that up, that's where I see people always telling me like that's where the challenge seems to be. Okay, I can log everything, but now how do I have a... And then after the fact that they say, "Give me a report, what's happening?" >> That's right. >> They get stuck. >> They get stuck 'cause you get that report and you know, someone else asked that question for you and you're probably a curious person. I'm a curious person. You always have that next question, and then usually if you're in a company, let's just say, you're a CIO. You're probably used to having a team of analysts at your fingertip so at least if you have a question, you don't like the report, you can find two people, five people they'll respond to your request. But if you're a business application user, you're sitting there, I don't know about you, but I don't remember the last time I actually went through and really found a support ticket in my application, or I really read a detailed documentation describing features in application. Users like to be self-taught, self-service and they like to explore it on their own. And there's no analyst there, there's no IT guy that they can lean on so if they get a static report of the data, they'll naturally always want to ask more questions, then they're stuck. So it's that kind of unsatisfying where, "I have some curiosity, you sparked by questions, I can't answer them." That's where I think a lot of companies struggle with. That's why a lot of applications, they're data intensive but they don't deliver any insights. >> It's interesting and I like this anywhere idea because you think about like what you guys do, applications can be, they always start small, right? I mean, applications got to be built. So you guys, your solution really fits for small startups and business all the way up to large enterprises which in a large enterprise, they could have hundreds and thousands of applications which look like small startups. >> Absolutely, absolutely. You know, that's a great thing about the sort of ThoughtSpot Everywhere which takes the engine around ThoughtSpot that we built over the last eight or nine years and could deliver in any kind of a context. 'Cause nowadays, as opposed to 10, 15, 20 years ago, everything does run in applications these days. We talk about visual transformation at the beginning of the call. That's really what it means is today, the workflows of business are conducted in applications no matter who you're interacting with. And so we have all these applications. A lot of times, yes, if you have big analytical problems, you can take the data and put into a different context like ThoughtSpot's own UI and do a lot of analytics, but we also understand that a lot of times customers and users, they like to analyze in the context the workflow of the application they're actually working in. And so with that situation, actually having the analytics embedded within right next to their workflow is something that I think a lot of, especially business users that are less trained, they'd like to do that right in the context of their business productivity workflow. And so that's where ThoughtSpot Everywhere, I know the terminology is a little self-serving, but ThoughtSpot Everywhere, we think ThoughtSpot could actually be everywhere in your business workflow. >> That's great value proposition. I'm going to put my skeptic hat on challenge you and say, Okay, I don't want to... Prove it to me, what's in it for me? And how much is it going to cost me, how do I engage? So, you know- >> Yeah. >> What's in it for me as the buyer? If people want to buy this, I want to use it, I'm going to get engaged with ThoughtSpot and how much does it cost and what's the engagements look like? >> So, what's in it for you is easy. So if you have data in the cloud and you have an application, you should use ThoughtSpot Everywhere to deliver a much more valuable, interactive experience for your user's data. So that's clear. How do you engage? So we have a very flexible pricing models. If your data's in the cloud, we can either, you can purchase with us, we'll land small and then grow with your consumption. You know, that's always the kind of thing, "Hey, allow us to prove it to you, right?" We start, and then if a user starts to consume, you don't really have to pay a big bill until we see the consumption increase. So we have consumption and data capacity-based types of pricing models. And you know, one of the real advantages that we have for cloud applications is if you're a developer, often, even in the past for ThoughtSpot, we haven't always made that development experience very easy. You have to embed a relatively heavy product but the beauty for ThoughtSpot is from the beginning, we were designed with a modern API-based kind of architecture. Now, a lot of our BI competitors were designed and developed in the desktop server kind of era where everything you embed is very monolithic. But because we have an API driven architecture, we invest a lot of time now to wrap a seamless developer SDK, plus very easy to use REST APIs, plus an interactive kind of a portal to make that development experience also really simple. So if you're a developer, now you really can get from zero to an easy app for ThoughtSpot embedded in your data app in just often in less than 60 minutes. >> John: Yeah. >> So that's also a very great proposition where modern leaders is your data's in the cloud, you've got developers with an SDK, it can get you into an app very quickly. >> All right so bottom line, if you're in the cloud, you got to get the data embed in the apps, data everywhere with ThoughtSpot. >> Yes. >> All right, so let's unpack it a little bit because I think you just highlighted I think what I think is the critical factor for companies as they evaluate their plethora of tools that they have and figuring out how to streamline and be cloud native in scale. You mentioned static and old BI competitors to the cloud. They also have a team of analysts as well that just can make the executives feel like the all of the reports are dynamic but they're not, they're just static. But look at, I know you guys have a relation with Snowflake, and not to kind of bring them into this but to highlight this, Snowflake disrupted the data warehouse. >> Yes. >> Because they're in the cloud and then they refactored leveraging cloud scale to provide a really easy, fast type of value for their product and then the rest is history. They're public, they're worth a lot of money. That's kind of an example of what's coming for every category of companies. There's going to be that. In fact, Jerry Chen, who was just given the keynote here at the event, had just had a big talk called "Castles In The Cloud", you can build a moat in the cloud with your application if you have the right architecture. >> Absolutely. >> So this is kind of a new, this is a new thing and it's almost like beachfront property, whoever gets there first wins the category. >> Exactly, exactly. And we think the timing is right now. You know, Snowflake, and even earlier, obviously we had the best conference with Redshift, which really started the whole cloud data warehouse wave, and now you're seeing Databricks even with their Delta Lake and trying to get into that kind of swim lane as well. Right now, all of a sudden, all these things that have been brewing in the background in the data architecture has to becoming mainstream. We're now seeing even large financial institutions starting to always have to test and think about moving their data into cloud data warehouse. But once you're in the cloud data warehouse, all the benefits of its elasticity, performance, that can really get realized at the analytics layer. And what ThoughtSpot really can bring to the table is we've always, because we're a search-based paradigm and when you think about search. Search is all about, doesn't really matter what kind of search you're doing, it's about digging really deep into a lot of data and delivering interactive performance. Those things have always... Doesn't really matter what data architecture we sit on, I've always been really fundamental to how we build our product. And that translates extremely well when you have your data in a Snowflake or Redshift have billions of rows in the cloud. We're the only company, we think, that can deliver interactive performance on all the data you have in a cloud data warehouse. >> Well, I want to congratulate you, guys. I'm really a big fan of the company. I think a lot of companies are misunderstood until they become big and there was, "Why didn't everyone else do that search? Well, I thought they were a search engine?" Being search centric is an architectural philosophy. I know as a North Star for your company but that creates value, right? So if you look at like say, Snowflake, Redshift and Databricks, you mentioned a few of those, you have kind of a couple of things going on. You have multiple personas kind of living well together and the developers like the data people. Normally, they hated each other, right? (giggles) Or maybe they didn't hate each other but there's conflict, there's always cultural tension between the data people and the developers. Now, you have developers who are becoming data native, if you will, just by embedding that in. So what Snowflake, these guys, are doing is interesting. You can be a developer and program and get great results and have great performance. The developers love Snowflake, they love Databricks, they love Redshift. >> Absolutely. >> And it's not that hard and the results are powerful. This is a new dynamic. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, no, I absolutely believe that. I think, part of the beauty of the cloud is I like your kind of analogy of bringing people together. So being in the cloud, first of all, the data is accessible by everyone, everywhere. You just need a browser and the right permissions, you can get your data, and also different kind of roles. They all kind of come together. Things best of breed tools get blended together through APIs. Everything just becomes a lot more accessible and collaborative and I know that sounds kind of little kumbaya, but the great thing about the cloud is it does blur the lines between goals. Everyone can do a little bit of everything and everyone can access a little bit more of their data and get more value out of it. >> Yeah. >> So all of that, I think that's the... If you talk about digital transformation, you know, that's really at the crux of it. >> Yeah, and I think at the end of the day, speed and high quality applications is a result and I think, the speed game if automation being built in on data plays a big role in that, it's super valuable and people will get slowed down. People get kind of angry. Like I don't want to get, I want to go faster, because automations and AI is going to make things go faster on the dev side, certainly with DevOps, clouds proven that. But if you're like an old school IT department (giggles) or data department, you're talking to weeks not minutes for results. >> Yes. >> I mean, that's the powerful scale we're talking about here. >> Absolutely. And you know, if you think about it, you know, if it's days to minutes, it sounds like a lot but if you think about like also each question, 'cause usually when you're thinking about questions, they come in minutes. Every minute you have a new question and if each one then adds days to your journey, that over time is just amplified, it's just not sustainable. >> Okay- >> So now in the cloud world, you need to have things delivered on demand as you think about it. >> Yeah, and of course you need the data from a security standpoint as well and build that in. Chances is people shift left. I got to ask you if I'm a customer, I want to just run this by you. You mentioned you have an SDK and obviously talking to developers. So I'm working with ThoughtSpot, I'm the leader of the organization. I'm like, "Okay, what's the headroom? What's going to happen as a bridge, the future gets built so I'm going to ride with ThoughtSpot." You mentioned SDK, how much more can I do to build and wrap around ThoughtSpot? Because obviously, this kind of value proposition is enabling value. >> Yes. >> So I want to build around it. How do I get started and where does it go? >> Yeah, well, you can get started as easy as starting with our free trial and just play around with it. And you know, the beauty of SDK and when I talk about how ThoughtSpot is built with API-driven architecture is, hey, there's a lot of magic and features built into ThoughtSpot core pod. You could embed all of that into an application if you would like or you could also use our SDK and our APIs to say, "I just want to embed a couple of visualizations," start with that and allow the users to take into that. You could also embed the whole search feature and allow users to ask repetitive questions, or you can have different role-based kind of experiences. So all of that is very flexible and very dynamic and with SDK, it's low-code in the sense where it creates a JavaScript portal for you and even for me who's haven't coded in a long time. I can just copy and paste some JavaScript code and I can see my applications reflecting in real time. So it's really kind of a modern experience that developers in today's world appreciate, and because all the data's in the cloud and in the cloud, applications are built as services connected through APIs, we really think that this is the modern way that developers would get started. And analysts, even analysts who don't have strong developer training can get started with our developer portal. So really, it's a very easy experience and you can customize it in whichever way you want that suits your application's needs. >> Yeah, I think it's, you don't have to be a developer to really understand the basic value of reuse and discovery of services. I think that's one of these we hear from developers all the time, "I had no idea that Victor did that code. Why do I have to rewrite that?" So you see, reuse come up a lot around automation where code is building with code, right? So you have this new vibe and you need data to discover that search paradigm mindset. How prevalent is that on the minds of customers? Are they just trying to like hold on and survive through the pandemic? (giggles) >> Well, customers are definitely thinking about it. You know, the challenge is change is always hard, you know? So it takes time for people to see the possibilities and then have to go through especially in larger organizations, but even in smaller organizations, people think about, "Well, how do I change my workflow?" and then, "How do I change my data pipeline?" You know, those are the kinds of things where, you know, it takes time, and that's why Redshift has been around since 2012 or I believe, but it took years before enterprises really are now saying, "The benefits are so profound that we really have to change the workflows, change the data pipelines to make it work because we can't hold on to the old ways." So it takes time but when the benefits are so clear, it's really kind of a snowball effect, you know? Once you change a data warehouse, you got to think about, "Do I need to change my application architecture?" Then, "Do I need to change the analytics layer?" And then, "Do I need to change the workflow?" And then you start seeing new possibilities because it's all more flexible that you can add more features to your application and it's just kind of a virtuous cycle, but it starts with taking that first step to your point of considering migrating your data into the cloud and we're seeing that across all kinds of industries now. I think nobody's holding back anymore. It just takes time, sometimes some are slower and some are faster. >> Well, all apps or data apps and it's interesting, I wrote a blog post in 2017 called, "Data Is The New Developer Kit" meaning it was just like a vision statement around data will be part of how apps, like software, it'll be data as code. And you guys are doing that. You're allowing data to be a key ingredient for interactivity with analytics. This is really important. Can you just give us a use case example of how someone builds an interactive data app with ThoughtSpot Everywhere? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think there are certain applications that when naturally things relates to data, you know, I talk about bending or those kinds of things. Like when you use it, you just kind of inherently know, "Hey, there's tons of data and then can I get some?" But a lot of times we're seeing, you know, for example, one of our customers is a very small company that provides software for personal trainers and small fitness studios. You know, you would think like, "Oh well, these are small businesses. They don't have a ton of data. A lot of them would probably just run on QuickBooks or Excel and all of that." But they could see the value is kind of, once a personal trainer conducts his business on a cloud software, then he'll realize, "Oh, I don't need to download any more data. I don't need to run Excel anymore, the data is already there in a software." And hey, on top of that, wouldn't it be great if you have an analytics layer that can analyze how your clients paid you, where your appointments are, and so forth? And that's even just for, again like I said, no disrespect to personal trainers, but even for one or two personal trainers, hey, they can be an analytics and they could be an analyst on their business data. >> Yeah, why not? Everyone's got a Fitbits and watches and they could have that built into their studio APIs for the trainers. They can get collaboration. >> That's right. So there's no application you can think that's too simple or you might think too traditional or whatnot for analytics. Every application now can become a very engaging data application. >> Well Victor, it's great to have you on. Obviously, great conversation around ThoughtSpot anywhere. And as someone who runs corp dev for ThoughtSpot, for the folks watching that aren't customers yet for ThoughtSpot, what should they know about you guys as a company that they might not know about or they should know about? And what are people talking about ThoughtsSpot, what are they saying about it? So what should they know that know that's not being talked about or they may not understand? And what are other people saying about ThoughtSpot? >> So a couple of things. One is there's a lot of fun out there. I think about search in general, search is generally a very broad term but I think it, you know, I go back to what I was saying earlier is really what differentiates ThoughtSpot is not just that we have a search bar that's put on some kind of analytics UI. Really, it's the fundamental technical architecture underlying that is from the ground up built for search large data, granular, and detailed exploration of your data. That makes us truly unique and nobody else can really do search if you're not built with a technical foundation. The second thing is, we're very much a cloud first company now, and a ton of our over the past few years because of the growth of these highly performing data warehouses like Snowflake and Redshift, we're able to really focus on what we do best which is the search and the query processing performance on the front end and we're fully engaged with cloud platforms now. So if you have data in the cloud, we are the best analytics front end for that. >> Awesome, well, thanks for coming on. Great the feature you guys here in the "Startup Showcase", great conversation, ThoughtSpot leading company, hot startup. We did their event with them with theCUBE a couple of months ago. Congratulations on all your success. Victor Chang, VP of ThoughtSpot Everywhere and Corporate Development here on theCUBE and "AWS Startup Showcase". Go to awsstartups.com and be part of the community, we're doing these quarterly featuring the hottest startups in the cloud. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. >> Victor: Thank you so much. (bright music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Actifio data driven 2020 brought to you by Actifio. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman. This is the cubes coverage of Actifio data driven, happy to welcome to the program, the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer David Chang with Actifio. Thanks so much for joining us. Great to have you back on theCUBE. >> Great to be here, Stu, thank you. >> All right, so the big theme of the event is the next normal, of course, we've been talking about transformation of data for many years, but the global pandemic has put a real emphasis on some of the transformations that customers are going through and alluding to that next normal because definitely things have changed a bit. What, give us if you could kind of a high level, you know what you've been seeing, you've been there since the start for Actifio. So, you know, what is that next normal for customers? >> Yeah, absolutely, so I would say over the span of the last two years, we've seen definitely a accelerated ramp into the Clouds. But I think this whole pandemic has really accelerated. I mean, this really telltale sign came in, we actually, prior to the pandemic hit, we closed a large European customer. And within a span of two weeks, they were saying, you know, "I can't get access to my data center for all the important work that I have to do." And with Actifio like to move everything into the Cloud. So within the span of three weeks, we were able to move a lot of their critical workloads with them. So I think that gave us the telltale sign that this thing is really truly accelerating. >> Yeah, it absolutely there's that acceleration. It's tough to move data, though. It's not like we can just say, "Okay, hey, you know, we've got petabytes, you know, that the laws of physics still are in place." And also with that move to Cloud, you know, backup and recovery, you know, disaster recovery, you know, still critically important so and any learnings that you've had this year or things where you've had to, you know, help out customers, as they say, "We need to move fast, but we also need to stay secure. And we need to make sure that our data is safe." >> Absolutely, so I think there's a major difference between the lift and shift model in terms of your way at your application infrastructure, and then the actual foundation, building block you're using those pieces are very difficult to lift and shift, because Cloud fundamentally present different set of building blocks. A great example here is that object storage, you know, it's the most scalable and lowest cost storage available in the public sort of Cloud hyperscaler infrastructure. And without that, trying to move to the Cloud would be very difficult indeed, trying to make the infrastructure match. >> So let's dig in and talk a little bit about how Cloud really transforms storage, you know, back in the storage industry, we've talked for a long time that you know, object was the future and that's, what Cloud was built on. So you've got large scalability, you've got some great cost efficiencies. You know, what does that mean for the Actifio solutions and your customer? >> Yeah, I think from the very beginning, I would say recall this conversation three or four years ago, when we were looking at what are some of the next generation architecture we want to build the Actifio technology on? It was very clearly that object storage needs to be front and center in everything we do. It's not a it's a maybe a little known fact. But Amazon AWS service initially started with the S3 architecture and that was the very first service they brought live within the AWS sort of product portfolio. So it is as fundamental to the Cloud as you know, EC2 more so than containers and so on and so forth. And the fact that you have this almost linear scalability horizontally to exabytes of storage and the fact that you can essentially leverage all the performance you need to get out the object storage that's all built into the environment. Those are some of the critical pieces and obviously, the low cost, you know, compared with SSD or spinning drives on the on the EC2 environment, those are all some of the critical elements on why object storage is so critical in this whole Cloud migration, if you will. >> Yeah, I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the application sort of things because of course, the architecture matters, but it's really the the outcomes, it's the reason we have infrastructures for the applications and of course one of the most mission critical applications. We've talked about data, it's those databases. We've seen a lot of transformation in the database world. Most customers I talked to now, it's not their one central source of truth. They now have many databases, especially in the Cloud we've seen that kind of Cambrian explosion of options out there. What does that meant for your customers? You know, take us inside, you know, that most important database world. >> Yeah, I think any customer with their interest to go into the Cloud or minimize the on premise environment anyway, the very first thing they think about is what are I most critical application I need to move right? Database are typically it. You know, there are companies that has a lot of, I would say, projects around migrating some of the traditional databases into NoSQL, or even hosted services like RDS. But I would say the vast majority of the database population that's in fact, that's essentially in production today are some of the traditional databases. So that tend to be also tend to be the most difficult problem in terms of trying to migrate the workload to the Cloud or DR or business continuity into the Cloud. >> So David, how about you know what is new from Actifio now? What should customers be looking at when we talk about the storage capabilities? >> So I would say the first thing is that Actifio allow our customers to kind of maintain the legacy databases they use. And by using Actifio, we normalize the entire Cloud infrastructures. So you can get all the same RPOs and RTOs that you're used to on premise into the Cloud. And through the adoption or of object storage down deep into their foundation blocks of our architecture, now, you can have sort of the best of both world. You can have this on demand capability or using from the public Clouds. You are, you know, getting capability as you need them. But also you can leverage sort of object storage without changing your application architecture, to get that performance and get to the sort of the cost point that you need to make that entire business viable. I think relatively recently, we did ESG sort of project that really validated that you can get 95 to 97% of the performance of SSD, but rather on object storage. And from a cost saving perspective, that cost say that cost actually went down by 88%. So it is indeed the best of both worlds, if you will. >> Yeah, you know, maybe explain that more a little bit more, if you could, yeah. Because, right, you want that scalability, you want high performance, but, you know, there's always been those architectural trade offs. So what is it that Actifio does, you're talking about the object storage that pairing with the Cloud capabilities? Help us understand, you know, what is differentiated about that solution? >> Yeah, absolutely, so I think in some ways, object storage has been getting a bad rap in terms of people's perception of slow performance and so on, so forth. But I think the real reason is because other vendors aren't using it incorrectly if you will. A lot of things we've seen in the past has, like legacy backup vendors taking sort of a looking at object storage as they tape replacement. With all object storage system, there is a fundamental limit on a per object performance you can get out the entire object infrastructure. But really the secret sauce Actifio came up with is to design an infrastructure that natively translate block or file storage that for example, Oracle SQL consumes, and then taking that data, sort of, if you will, from the application perspective, and divided into hundreds of thousands if not millions of objects and that can be spread across the entire object storage infrastructure. And this is how we get you get the performance if you will. That's very very similar if not almost identical to SSD even on object storage. >> Yeah, I saw a blog post on the Actifio site making a comparison to the SnowFlake database, of course, you know, super hot company lots of adoption in their Cloud service, help us understand a little bit, you know that that comparison that your team is making? >> Yeah, absolutely, I think it's a very interesting insight. I think both Actifio and SnowFlake probably independently arrived at the same conclusion about four or five years ago, that object storage is the foundation building block. And this is how you scale massive infrastructure at a cost that's effective for our business models, right? So I think, in many ways, if you look at how SnowFlakes works is they leverage this almost infinite scalability of object storage to consume sort of this data lake to store this data lake, and therefore they can effectively offer that basic service to your customer at a very low cost point. And then when they actually decide, the customer decide to use that information, this is where the business model works and they actually did start charging the customer. So that foundation building block of object storage on, you know, in terms of the fundamental building block for the SnowFlake service, I would argue is also the reasons why they're so popular today. >> Yeah, and David, you know, we've seen, you know, quite a change in the landscape since the early days of Actifio, it's interesting to hear you talk about those analogies with some of those, you know, Cloud native solutions. Give us a little bit of inside, you're the Chief Product officer. You know, what's the biggest change you'd say of Actifio today versus, you know, maybe how, when people first heard of their copy data management, you know, technology? >> Yeah, I would say I think we were kind of fortunate that when we started the company, the fundamental premise of being very efficient, very scalable, and instant reuse is a sort of fundamental premise of our product and architecture that has held true through technology evolution, you know, three or four different waves in the last, I would say 10 years. So I think what's currently the biggest difference between I would say, now versus Actifio five years ago, is that everything with everything we do, we're thinking Cloud first. This is how, you know, essentially, the Actifio platform has evolved into this normalization platform for enterprise customer to achieve the same RPOs and RTO the same applications and be able to using the some of the same building blocks across both their you know, hybrid infrastructure and also public Cloud infrastructure. >> Yeah, absolutely, that hybrid discussion has really dominated a lot of discussion the last couple of years. A challenge for, you know, the engineering teams is architecting into those environments. It's not just once you've got Amazon, you've got Azure, you've got Google, you've got others out there. What do you say? It doesn't feel like we have a standardization. And there's specific work that you need to do. But your ultimate customer, they want to be able to do it the same way no matter where they are. Give us a little bit of what you know, what you're seeing is some of the challenges and how Actifio is facing that. >> Yeah, I think there are fundamentally two ways to go to the Cloud. I think one is to entirely consume a log or higher log of functionality that Amazon Google and Azure has, right? That mean that does mean rewriting your application from scratch to take advantage of that. I think some of the benefit there is you have some very low entry cost and you don't have to worry about operationally how to keep that going. But I think more commonly, what we're seeing customer enterprise customer do is to taking their existing stack, rewriting portions of this and kind of build it on EC2 you know, and a container environment. And those are sort of I think, more of the more popular choices that people are making in terms of making the move to the Cloud at least from my enterprise customer perspective. And that is an area that Actifio could really help, by again, normalizing what they're familiar with on premise to the Cloud and we can provide the same service level and provide really this level of flexibility for you to shift workloads back and forth to make that work for your business case. >> Yeah, I'm curious, I remember back you talked about Actifio five years ago, and some of the early days it was like, "Well, you know, the traditional storage companies might not like Actifio because at the end of the day, they're going to sell less capacity. And that's really how they price things." Feels like the Cloud providers, think about it very different, you don't really think as much about, you know, "I don't buy capacity, I have scalability, I build out my applications in a certain way." Do you see that Cloud model taking over any other comparisons you'd make kind of the Cloud world versus the data center world? >> Yeah, I think it really I think that really the switches is very, very telling, right? It's very, I would say in some ways surprised a lot of people at the pace and and that it has happened. But I think it is, that pace is pretty solid at this point. I mean, we are seeing broad adoption of sort of that strategy all over the world, and it's only accelerating. >> All right, final question I have let's bring it on home that next normal, what do you want customers to have as their takeaway from this year's data driven event? >> I think they are, I think the probably the most important thing we want to communicate to our customer and potential prospect is that you can have the best of both world, right? It's not a one or two or other decision you have to make, you could be in the Cloud and enjoy a lot of the same benefits and saw a lot of the same service level that you're used to, but taken advantage of that, you know, there is a separate, very large company running world class operations for you in the Cloud. The elasticity of that capability is very important as well. But with Actifio without having to rewrite your application per se, you can have advantage if you will to of the new world, still maintaining the presence of the old and you can manage both environment in the same way. >> David Chang, thank you so much for the updates. Great to catch up with you and thanks for having us at the event. >> Thank you, Stu for having me. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

from around the globe it's thecube with digital coverage of actifio data driven 2020 brought to you by actifio hi everybody my name is david chang i'm the chief product officer and co-founder of actifio extremely excited to have you join actifio's data driven where it's the only event customer essentially is on the center stage telling you what they're using actifio for excited to have you looking forward to the event

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Actifio data driven 2020 brought to you by Actifio. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman. This is the cubes coverage of Actifio data driven, happy to welcome to the program, the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer David Chang with Actifio. Thanks so much for joining us. Great to have you back on theCUBE. >> Great to be here, Stu, thank you. >> All right, so the big theme of the event is the next normal, of course, we've been talking about transformation of data for many years, but the global pandemic has put a real emphasis on some of the transformations that customers are going through and alluding to that next normal because definitely things have changed a bit. What, give us if you could kind of a high level, you know what you've been seeing, you've been there since the start for Actifio. So, you know, what is that next normal for customers? >> Yeah, absolutely, so I would say over the span of the last two years, we've seen definitely a accelerated ramp into the Clouds. But I think this whole pandemic has really accelerated. I mean, this really telltale sign came in, we actually, prior to the pandemic hit, we closed a large European customer. And within a span of two weeks, they were saying, you know, "I can't get access to my data center for all the important work that I have to do." And with Actifio like to move everything into the Cloud. So within the span of three weeks, we were able to move a lot of their critical workloads with them. So I think that gave us the telltale sign that this thing is really truly accelerating. >> Yeah, it absolutely there's that acceleration. It's tough to move data, though. It's not like we can just say, "Okay, hey, you know, we've got petabytes, you know, that the laws of physics still are in place." And also with that move to Cloud, you know, backup and recovery, you know, disaster recovery, you know, still critically important so and any learnings that you've had this year or things where you've had to, you know, help out customers, as they say, "We need to move fast, but we also need to stay secure. And we need to make sure that our data is safe." >> Absolutely, so I think there's a major difference between the lift and shift model in terms of your way at your application infrastructure, and then the actual foundation, building block you're using those pieces are very difficult to lift and shift, because Cloud fundamentally present different set of building blocks. A great example here is that object storage, you know, it's the most scalable and lowest cost storage available in the public sort of Cloud hyperscaler infrastructure. And without that, trying to move to the Cloud would be very difficult indeed, trying to make the infrastructure match. >> So let's dig in and talk a little bit about how Cloud really transforms storage, you know, back in the storage industry, we've talked for a long time that you know, object was the future and that's, what Cloud was built on. So you've got large scalability, you've got some great cost efficiencies. You know, what does that mean for the Actifio solutions and your customer? >> Yeah, I think from the very beginning, I would say recall this conversation three or four years ago, when we were looking at what are some of the next generation architecture we want to build the Actifio technology on? It was very clearly that object storage needs to be front and center in everything we do. It's not a it's a maybe a little known fact. But Amazon AWS service initially started with the S3 architecture and that was the very first service they brought live within the AWS sort of product portfolio. So it is as fundamental to the Cloud as you know, EC2 more so than containers and so on and so forth. And the fact that you have this almost linear scalability horizontally to exabytes of storage and the fact that you can essentially leverage all the performance you need to get out the object storage that's all built into the environment. Those are some of the critical pieces and obviously, the low cost, you know, compared with SSD or spinning drives on the on the EC2 environment, those are all some of the critical elements on why object storage is so critical in this whole Cloud migration, if you will. >> Yeah, I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the application sort of things because of course, the architecture matters, but it's really the the outcomes, it's the reason we have infrastructures for the applications and of course one of the most mission critical applications. We've talked about data, it's those databases. We've seen a lot of transformation in the database world. Most customers I talked to now, it's not their one central source of truth. They now have many databases, especially in the Cloud we've seen that kind of Cambrian explosion of options out there. What does that meant for your customers? You know, take us inside, you know, that most important database world. >> Yeah, I think any customer with their interest to go into the Cloud or minimize the on premise environment anyway, the very first thing they think about is what are I most critical application I need to move right? Database are typically it. You know, there are companies that has a lot of, I would say, projects around migrating some of the traditional databases into NoSQL, or even hosted services like RDS. But I would say the vast majority of the database population that's in fact, that's essentially in production today are some of the traditional databases. So that tend to be also tend to be the most difficult problem in terms of trying to migrate the workload to the Cloud or DR or business continuity into the Cloud. >> So David, how about you know what is new from Actifio now? What should customers be looking at when we talk about the storage capabilities? >> So I would say the first thing is that Actifio allow our customers to kind of maintain the legacy databases they use. And by using Actifio, we normalize the entire Cloud infrastructures. So you can get all the same RPOs and RTOs that you're used to on premise into the Cloud. And through the adoption or of object storage down deep into their foundation blocks of our architecture, now, you can have sort of the best of both world. You can have this on demand capability or using from the public Clouds. You are, you know, getting capability as you need them. But also you can leverage sort of object storage without changing your application architecture, to get that performance and get to the sort of the cost point that you need to make that entire business viable. I think relatively recently, we did ESG sort of project that really validated that you can get 95 to 97% of the performance of SSD, but rather on object storage. And from a cost saving perspective, that cost say that cost actually went down by 88%. So it is indeed the best of both worlds, if you will. >> Yeah, you know, maybe explain that more a little bit more, if you could, yeah. Because, right, you want that scalability, you want high performance, but, you know, there's always been those architectural trade offs. So what is it that Actifio does, you're talking about the object storage that pairing with the Cloud capabilities? Help us understand, you know, what is differentiated about that solution? >> Yeah, absolutely, so I think in some ways, object storage has been getting a bad rap in terms of people's perception of slow performance and so on, so forth. But I think the real reason is because other vendors aren't using it incorrectly if you will. A lot of things we've seen in the past has, like legacy backup vendors taking sort of a looking at object storage as they tape replacement. With all object storage system, there is a fundamental limit on a poor object performance you can get out the entire object infrastructure. But really the secret sauce Actifio came up with is to design an infrastructure that natively translate block or file storage that for example, Oracle SQL consumes, and then taking that data, sort of, if you will, from the application perspective, and divided into hundreds of thousands if not millions of objects and that can be spread across the entire object storage infrastructure. And this is how we get you get the performance if you will. That's very very similar if not almost identical to SSD even on object storage. >> Yeah, I saw a blog post on the Actifio site making a comparison to the SnowFlake database, of course, you know, super hot company lots of adoption in their Cloud service, help us understand a little bit, you know that that comparison that your team is making? >> Yeah, absolutely, I think it's a very interesting insight. I think both Actifio and SnowFlake probably independently arrived at the same conclusion about four or five years ago, that object storage is the foundation building block. And this is how you scale massive infrastructure at a cost that's effective for our business models, right? So I think, in many ways, if you look at how SnowFlakes works is they leverage this almost infinite scalability of object storage to consume sort of this data lake to store this data lake, and therefore they can effectively offer that basic service to your customer at a very low cost point. And then when they actually decide, the customer decide to use that information, this is where the business model works and they actually did start charging the customer. So that foundation building block of object storage on, you know, in terms of the fundamental building block for the SnowFlake service, I would argue is also the reasons why they're so popular today. >> Yeah, and David, you know, we've seen, you know, quite a change in the landscape since the early days of Actifio, it's interesting to hear you talk about those analogies with some of those, you know, Cloud native solutions. Give us a little bit of inside, you're the Chief Product officer. You know, what's the biggest change you'd say of Actifio today versus, you know, maybe how, when people first heard of their copy data management, you know, technology? >> Yeah, I would say I think we were kind of fortunate that when we started the company, the fundamental premise of being very efficient, very scalable, and instant reuse is a sort of fundamental premise of our product and architecture that has held true through technology evolution, you know, three or four different waves in the last, I would say 10 years. So I think what's currently the biggest difference between I would say, now versus Actifio five years ago, is that everything with everything we do, we're thinking Cloud first. This is how, you know, essentially, the Actifio platform has evolved into this normalization platform for enterprise customer to achieve the same RPOs and RTO the same applications and be able to using the some of the same building blocks across both their you know, hybrid infrastructure and also public Cloud infrastructure. >> Yeah, absolutely, that hybrid discussion has really dominated a lot of discussion the last couple of years. A challenge for, you know, the engineering teams is architecting into those environments. It's not just once you've got Amazon, you've got Azure, you've got Google, you've got others out there. What do you say? It doesn't feel like we have a standardization. And there's specific work that you need to do. But your ultimate customer, they want to be able to do it the same way no matter where they are. Give us a little bit of what you know, what you're seeing is some of the challenges and how Actifio is facing that. >> Yeah, I think there are fundamentally two ways to go to the Cloud. I think one is to entirely consume a log or higher log of functionality that Amazon Google and Azure has, right? That mean that does mean rewriting your application from scratch to take advantage of that. I think some of the benefit there is you have some very low entry cost and you don't have to worry about operationally how to keep that going. But I think more commonly, what we're seeing customer enterprise customer do is to taking their existing stack, rewriting portions of this and kind of build it on EC2 you know, and a container environment. And those are sort of I think, more of the more popular choices that people are making in terms of making the move to the Cloud at least from my enterprise customer perspective. And that is an area that Actifio could really help, by again, normalizing what they're familiar with on premise to the Cloud and we can provide the same service level and provide really this level of flexibility for you to shift workloads back and forth to make that work for your business case. >> Yeah, I'm curious, I remember back you talked about Actifio five years ago, and some of the early days it was like, "Well, you know, the traditional storage companies might not like Actifio because at the end of the day, they're going to sell less capacity. And that's really how they price things." Feels like the Cloud providers, think about it very different, you don't really think as much about, you know, "I don't buy capacity, I have scalability, I build out my applications in a certain way." Do you see that Cloud model taking over any other comparisons you'd make kind of the Cloud world versus the data center world? >> Yeah, I think it really I think that really the switches is very, very telling, right? It's very, I would say in some ways surprised a lot of people at the pace and and that it has happened. But I think it is, that pace is pretty solid at this point. I mean, we are seeing broad adoption of sort of that strategy all over the world, and it's only accelerating. >> All right, final question I have let's bring it on home that next normal, what do you want customers to have as their takeaway from this year's data driven event? >> I think they are, I think the probably the most important thing we want to communicate to our customer and potential prospect is that you can have the best of both world, right? It's not a one or two or other decision you have to make, you could be in the Cloud and enjoy a lot of the same benefits and saw a lot of the same service level that you're used to, but taken advantage of that, you know, there is a separate, very large company running world class operations for you in the Cloud. The elasticity of that capability is very important as well. But with Actifio without having to rewrite your application per se, you can have advantage if you will to of the new world, still maintaining the presence of the old and you can manage both environment in the same way. >> David Chang, thank you so much for the updates. Great to catch up with you and thanks for having us at the event. >> Thank you, Stu for having me. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the cue with digital coverage of active Eo data driven 2020 Brought to you by activity. >>Hi, everybody. My name is David Chang. I'm the chief product officer and co founder of Active Fio. Extremely excited to have you joined Active feels data driven where it's the only event. Customer essentially is on the center stage telling you what they're using active before, excited to have you looking forward to the event.

>> from the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. It's the Cube covering Cooper inspired. 2019. Brought to you by Cooper. >> Welcome to the Cube. Lisa Martin on the ground at Cooper Inspire 19 at the Cosmopolitan, the chic Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas. Very pleased to be joined by my friend David Chang, the VP of business from Hello. Sign a drop box company. David, Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you for having me on. >> Great to have you here. It is a lot of fun. You could really geek out talking technology all day >> too much. So, >> yeah, there's that >> play that you gotta gamble. It'll keep it real. >> You know, I have no skills in that whatsoever, but maybe I'll try it. I'll take your advice. Give her audience an overview of Hello. Sign. Sure. Drop box Company. What? You guys are what you do. All that good stuff. >> Great. Great. So hello. Sign is today one of the fastest growing, if not the fastest growing electronic signature company in market place today and today we host, I think, over 100,000 paying businesses that use one of our products and over 150 different countries. today we actually were acquired by Dropbox. Sure, everybody's familiar Dropbox or one of the biggest brands in the Internet industry today by the leader in consumer and business files Thinking chair. So John Box actually purchased this, you know, for a number of reasons. First of all, even amazing product and cultural fit with them. But also, Electronic Signature Day is an enormous market. It is one piece of the overall digital transformation, but Elektronik, six year alone, analysts view, is probably a $25,000,000,000 industry, which we've only barely scratched the surface. So it's a huge opportunity, absolutely, and it's that big. That's exactly the you know. That's actually what's shocking about how big it is, because if you think about almost in every business, there are not just one, but probably dozens of different use cases where you need to sign documents. So electronic signature honestly is relevant for everything from all your sales agreements to all of your HR and offer letter and on boarding agreement. It's relevant specifically for all of your procurement and buying agreements, all your vendors contracts that need to be signed, your supply agreements that needs to be signed and D A s o purchase orders. All these documents need to be signed. And today you know, only a few of these use cases have been brought into the digital arena. So there's a whole huge area to grow. And with Dropbox being a leader and content management, where you normally store your documents, >> right, it's >> a natural workflow extension two haven't signed by. Hello, son. >> Excellent. Well, one of the things that we've been talking a lot about we talk about this in every show is the effects of consumer is Asian. And we talked about this yesterday with Rob Bernstein, Cooper's CEO in a number of gas yesterday and today is that we're consumers every day, even when we're at work. Oh, I forgot. I gotta buy this when we go on Amazon, we know we could get it in a day, but now we have the same expectations whether we're buying business, you know, software or what not? And we also want to be able to do things from our mobile phone, including sign. Hey, I got this new job offer or whatever happens to be without having out. Oh my God, there's a pdf. I have to go home, get to my desktop, talk to me about PDS because I can imagine when people either fill them out manually, then they scanning back in and somebody's gotta print it out or fax it. That date is stuck in Pdf. How does hello sign work to free dot data in a Pierre? >> Sure, our design philosophy really is about, you know, make making a superior user experience both for the person who needs to get a document, a document side, but also somebody who's actually gonna be signing it. So when we designed our products, you might as easy as possible for user's to sign that and recognizing some of the difficulties with P D EFS and signing on your mobile phone. We've made our products specifically Mobley responsive, so they don't have to pension, screen, pension, pension scan and all that kind of stuff and typing data. We make it very easy walking through the data entry process to streamline the whole process. We just want to make user customer satisfaction first and foremost >> moving the friction, probably getting documents signed much faster. >> Absolutely. I mean the base, you know, benefits associated the signature. Overall you know, our honestly getting your documents signed significantly faster and more efficiently. We have customers that used to take up to two weeks to get a contract signed. And, you know, as a salesperson, that gets your real nervous, right? So we've seen those contracts now get signed in less than a day. Also, Elektronik senator provides a tonic transparency. So throughout the process, we can actually provide notifications that let the sales people know that somebody's opened up the the >> end. Lt >> looked at the document, reviewed it, signed it, completed it. And even if the document has been signed, the consent of reminders to make sure to sign it. And the third thing is, you know you can't can't emphasize this enough. The value associate with productivity increases. Come on. Everyone's gone out. Printed out the document, walked it over to the scanning machine, you know, then uploading it back in your computer, you know that that whole step, you know, should be completely digital and automated as >> much as >> possible. So we see productivity increases to some of our customers between two x three x for X right in the number in reducing the number of man hours people have to spend to get >> documents only. Is that a cost savings? But all of the you can think of all the other benefits like we're talking about, even for the procurement officers were talking about it at Kuba inspires. It's not just saving money. It's all of the other ripple effects that cost savings, resource, reallocations, speed. All enable this digital transformation, which then enables the business Thio capture new customers. Increased customer, lifetime value, shareholder value. There's a lot of upside to this, >> especially for a company like Cooper. First of all, it's an incredible fit for what we do. Procurement documents. That whole host, um, they need to be signed but by, you know, utilizing Hello, son. We really facilitate that whole experience, and we're very excited to expand our partnership today. We're Cooper Advantage partner. >> Tell me about the Cooper Advantage program benefits. Who wins your >> coop? Advantage is this very unique marketplace that Cooper's brought together. They're pulling together both their customers, some of their lead customers and their matching them with some of the suppliers selected suppliers that provide their customers. Ah, whole host of service is that they need so it could be everything from goods and office supplies. All the way to service is like travel service is, and staffing service is all the way to software key software that their customers would utilize in conjunction with their procurement business. Spend management So companies like close on. So by matchmaking it for the suppliers, they get some pre negotiated discounts that offer them immediate savings off of buying direct from retail and then from ah, supplier side. We get huge benefits because we get to meet some of the most targeted companies that we want. So Cooper effectively is one of our favorite matchmakers. >> Nice. So, yeah, there's a tremendous amount of suppliers in their program. I forget the number and I don't want to misquote it. But I can imagine Cooper customer that's using them for procurement and expenses and invoices and payments. I talked a lot about Cooper pains of new things today. Well, then have the opportunity through the Cooper Advantage program to do prick human contract Scorpios with Hello sign as the e signature. >> Exactly, really, exactly. And that that is, like I said, a great match for what their customers need and by being virtue of a coupe advantage part. Sorry. Keep advantage Supplier. We've been pre vetted by Cooper have also worked out some special pre negotiated discounts with Cooper to make sure we passed that value on to their customers. >> So some of the things that came out today regarding yesterday as well with the Amazon extension you and I talked about the consumer ization affect a few minutes ago. What opportunities is that? Open up to Hello, sign for Cooper paid to be able to enable I t folks to have this visibility for the entire software from search to management. With this consume arised approach, open up doors for Hello Sign. >> Well, I think you know, if you look at the total life cycle of any purchase right from from beginning to end from everything from identifying the products that you want to being able to, you know, negotiate and secure a price that is good for you, you know that whole process. There's always tradition, but a lot of friction there. So the same way that there's friction on the e commerce side, we'll check out and purchase right and getting lining up your payment and Internet payment information Cooper. Streamlining that whole thing for the customer so long without sod is if there's documents they're associated with that with that workflow than by using companies like Hello Sign and our products were able to continue that process of digital izing the end and purchase cycle. >> And I imagine, from an information security perspective, everything >> Come on the old >> days usedto signed >> a contract and I thought, Oh, my boss's desk, Anybody could come by and pick that up So nowadays we you know nowadays we keep it stored securely in the cloud. We have some of the highest security requirements of any signature company out there, and that really matches Cupid's philosophy as well. They go overboard on security, which we really appreciate. That mission is completely lard with each other. >> Awesome. So last few seconds here. I know that you guys are early in the acquisition with Dropbox. What's exciting You for the rest of the calendar. 19. Since all these fiscal years are different. And what's next with you guys in Cuba? Yeah, >> So first of all, with Dropbox, we're just excited to be part of an enormous community of over 500,000,000 users globally So it's It's It's the reach is insane. >> I know >> my mom. Yeah, I think everybody has a DROPBOX account on >> eso getting introduced to their segments, whether it's a consumer segment, SMB and increasingly, the business segment offers huge brand recognition and the potential for new customers with Dropbox. So there's a great synergy from a go to market perspective, and with Cooper, we're very excited about the next stage of our partnership is entering the Cooper Link program. So, uh, you know said Now Cooper customers will be able to sign and send for signature from within the Cooper clr module. Eso any of their contracts vendor agreements that are stored within Cooper without ever having to leave Cooper. You consent for signature and seek the document back. And for a company like Cooper, this is a great strategic value. A because of the benefit it brings its customers, but also with all the great features that Cooper's coming out with leading edge. They want to keep a cz much of that procurement experience from within Cooper. They want Cooper to be that system of record per se and system of transaction for all your business. Ben Management So now you don't have to leave Cooper to perform to get your contract signed. You can do it from all within one place within Cooper, and we enable that. >> That's awesome. That's that's what we want. Keep him. In the experience of that, they actually adopted. They get it done. They're more efficient and and and well, David, it's been such a pleasure to >> have you on >> the Cube. Thank you for joining me today. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> All right, we'll see you next. Time for David Chang. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from Cooper Inspired 19. Thanks for watching.

>> from Palo Alto, California It's the Cube covering the EM Where women transforming technology twenty nineteen. Brought to you by V. M. Where. >> Lisa Martin on the ground at the end. Where in Palo Alto, California for the fourth annual Women Transforming Technology event. W. Squared one of my favorite events, and I'm pleased to welcome back to the Cube, one of the leader female leaders at being where Lily Chang, the VP of of the strategic transformation office. Lily, it's so great to have you on the program again. >> Thank you. It's my pleasure and honor to be here. >> So this event, one of my favorites, as I mentioned, even just walking up to registration this morning. The energy, the excitement, the supports >> is in the air. >> Yes, And then you walk into the keynote, and it was kicked off this morning with such an incredible presentation, and number was actually mentioned earlier. That was about fifteen hundred people just in person today, not even mentioning the live stream. So the momentum in just four years that you guys are creating is huge. >> Yes, Well, where is a great place for diversity and inclusion that is one of our companies. Strategic Motif Way believed that in order to basically create the best technology in the world, today was the evolution and the advancement >> off. All these technology working together, we're servicing all genders origin globally. So that means the creation of this. We >> need to bring all these culture aspect to bring into our design thinking. So when we saw the problem, we are not solving in in a mo no fashion way actually can look at multiple facets. So having this event is part of our passion is really part of our DNA. Now >> I think that's fantastic. That's inspirational for other companies to really look it. It's not just an event that Veum were put on. This is really changing the anywhere from within as well. >> Yes, this a change process has started quite a while ago. I would say inherently Arjun Attic nature off of'em were is that we actually >> do believe in all genders are original founder and CEO was a woman, right? And so we pioneered a virtual ization and we believe in woman leadership. We believe in all levels off woman innovation, together with man and all the origin globally in the >> world That's fantastic. So I wanted last year we talked with you, which was fantastic. We're happy to have you back. I want to talk about something that you guys recently launching aboutthe last year helping women return to work. Tell us about Tara and just >> helping women how they are able to get back into technology. >> Yes, so this is one of my favorite topic. Basically, we talked about glasses, ceilings for decades, about woman in terms of how you break two classes ceiling, how you identified, how you work around it and all the things. There is a huge transparent glasses ceiling being view worldwide for a long time, and that is basically woman care about the society. Women care about the family, so, so, so so all the genders as well. However, there's a lot of the woman were forced. They may be technically very achieving in terms with their career or academic side. They have to basically take care ofthe parenthood, take care of family for various personal reasons. After a couple of years, their passion for the technology still exist. They want to join the war force to propel the world, and basically especially now, was the technology is put to a lot of technology for good, to help sustainability, to help medical field, to help disabled people. All these >> things right, but they're having a little bit of >> difficulty to read. Enter the work face and that's a glass is silly because their technology knowledge may be a little bit dated because just away how in the past ten years how you were in all >> the other Giants has propelled technology so quickly changes so quickly like three months >> is almost like a decade nowadays, right is moving in that quantum speed. So what >> we have done is basically we decided to create a Tara project. Is a woman returned to work initiative and we're basically >> launching specifically, focus on India region, right? And basically we are funding fifteen thousand woman, and we are training them and brought him up to speed about technology. Especially, was our software different data center in virtual ization? Networking storage? Right. So we are giving them a certification program, and that is something in some part of the world. That certificate moves a lot. It's like a pedigree indicate that you not only believe you actually know all this you've got evidence that you really know it and they're people. I certify you so with that, that enable them to be able to jump back into the workforce was full qualification and was a virtual ization being dominant in the world, right? Basically, it's like something that it's really hot and really relevant and were also helping them to basically connect with our customers in India so that they actually could be interview for future positions as well. How so, basically, is a into end strategy transformation to break the huge glasses ceiling >> here. Thick glass ceilings. So you fifteen thousand women this >> has just >> launched last year. How long is the certification program that they >> go through? We want to be able to achieve that. Go in the next couple years, starting this year >> starting this year, fifteen thousand women in the next couple of years. >> In the next couple years >> way, I should have >> got a few thousands already. So in the beginning for the first quarter, two were making very decent progress and Wei have a community partner. Happens to be a woman who co because they have a worldwide organization and they're sending the community message out to promote this. We also working really closely with the Indian government to push for this, to get their recognition for this as well, because we believe that will be beneficial for these woman we brought back to the war force. There's multiple aspect is not just touching the hearts in the soul ofthe many, many family, but is also basically injecting quality, highly qualified, incompetent technical talent back into the India community and industry, so that actually can proliferate and elevate the entire India technology level. >> Two shaves >> Transformative. I feel like that word isn't even strong enough, Lulu. That's remarkable. The potential that has on you mentioned the involvement of women who could have been on the board there for quite a while >> for more than three years now. >> And I was looking at >> some numbers with growth of that community alone is incredible. Over one hundred eighty thousand members in twenty countries So far you've done over eight thousand training's workshops. Hackathons conferences over two point five million dollars has been awarded in developer school in conference scholarships. >> Wow, the momentum moment is very high. It is very hard, you >> said you're even launching another country this year. >> We So we're not sitting on saying OK, we're satisfied. We're never satisfied because the world goes on right? So does the word expand. Thus the technology excel itself. We want to basically leap ahead with all this. So we're not stopping. So this year will Mexico and being where we're launching Costa Rica za So we believe we actually opened a lot of the region of the world and unlock the energy and the innovation and the community's oh gender to work together in India, China, Sofia. And we worked really closely with a lot of the industry technical giants and woman Wilco propelling this tech woman community in us and also in Europe. Now we will leave Costa Rica. It's a very strategic side for bm where >> tell us a >> little bit more about why is it sister team is a >> strategic for a couple reasons we are doing also world we are working together was a global community and the global clock. So Costa Rica is tine zone wise very nicely either bridge in between the other time zone with us and also it's overlapping very well with us times. Oh, so they actually could do a lot of the key business execution, including operation and IT and customer support. Technical support. So we do have technical people over there, but not enough technical woman Momenta way also believe the country can really use some help from us. So we're working with a woman who co and this is a decision will be assessing for awhile. But we believe that ranch in Costa Rico Ashley make it a blossom in that region off the world, not just Costarica. We're kind of looking that we hope it becomes a hub >> That's incredible, just but also not just what you're doing with Tara and with expanding women who code to Costa Rica. It's also the opportunity for actual economic benefits to these countries. But what I also I'm hearing is that, for example, with Tara, you're No, it's not just it's a the end where myopic. We want more women to come back to the workforce the way we want them too injured to be introduced to our customer base so that they can network, >> and it tends to establish report >> other opportunities for employment. >> That's right, even though they do not get a particular position when they are connected to a customer that is a relationship, and that is something that will stay with that woman in that talent for walk. And that is something that we feel is very important to connect all these critical stakeholders together. So Tara has that faucet ahs well, >> and you mentioned that there's already been about a thousand or a couple of thousand >> of thousands already gone morning. >> Twenty five hundred, I believe, >> any favorite success stories that come to mind. >> Yes, my favorites is says Story is >> the very first Tara Certify Woman is a woman who co member, so we're very, very proud of that because that shows the partnership actually works. That means a lot of the technical curriculum and a monthly meet up and all these technical conference. That woman who was trying to do the scholarship they try to handle all those are kind of a cumulatively paying off. Was Tara being the major critical push to push them over that glass ceiling limit? Right? >> I just think that's fantastic. I was looking at the woman who could website just the other day, and I saw that your event it was sold out >> you connect >> twenty nineteen? >> That's right. >> But just the moment on the excitement, the support in this community that is growing, as we mentioned earlier, one hundred eighty thousand plus tell us about the connect event >> Connected is a technical conference. We do talk a little bit about. The leadership in this office is skilled, but it has motive. All technology track. In fact, this year what we want to do is we want to start basically elevating into technology domain track because we now have a very successful who created leadership role like a city director. City Italy. They incubated from Weston ten thousand member in the past three and a half years. Two hundred eighty thousand member. A lot of the kudos and credit go to them, but as a result, we have wealth, body off woman talent that are highly technical and highly versatile in many, many fields. Right, because we believe today, for a poor talent to be successful in technology field, you cannot just specialize in one. If you look at Coyote, you look at a blockchain, all these emerging stuff. It's not just about a Iot machine. Learning is also about virtual ization about how well you can do the logic and the analytics and the data mining and the algorithms. Right? So basically we want to have multiple technology track, and that would include things like cloud like Blough Chan. And then that gives also a possibility for one who quote to create a individual contributor volunteer track, like we want to basically launched a notion off a cloud architect, right? So give basically people away to aspire to growth and so they can actually measure the growth, which is very good in the sense off that you know where you stand, you know, you can't plan for the next step. And so this isn't something that we want to be able to do, and we're basically launching that as well. Um connect also via were hosted open the Global Connect in India. This year we had a breakthrough. We actually have more than a thousand attendees. Wow, so that's like more than twice to jump from last year. Last year was about maybe three hundred. Niche, right? So this is a tremendous growth, and basically it's wonderful to see that there's a lot of technology track and the woman coming in sharing very openly about what they know and the sharing and the learning. And the coaching is part of the whole overall energy as well. >> So if we look at impact so far, the various impact that you talked about with both Tara, which is quite really in its history women who code w. T squared and we look at, say, even in the US alone, fifty percent of the population is female. It's a tremendous amount of women who are just women in general who are technologically savvy but are passed over for these positions. Then he kind of factor in into that fifty percent. How many of them are women who have had to leave the workforce for various reasons that we talked about earlier? There's a tremendous amount of of women out there with skills who aren't being looked at. Where is women who code? And Tara, where are you on changing those numbers from fifty percent too, you know, forty seven percent of forty five percent. Do you have any sort of strategic goals in your office? Numbers wise? Well, for me personally >> and the forewoman who co we wanted basically be able to change the world way. Want to offer all the technical woman in the world a choice for their career letter? So Tara is a >> way to do it to break one particular glasses. Silly, right? And there's also a lot of these scholarships. And olders is to help women to be able to do career, transform native patient change change, for example, Woman Ochoa's part of comeback. We actually handle five awards to recognize five outstanding woman leaders, in our opinion, one of them, she started with a woman who co was a individual member. She was just a junior engineer. But in less than two years periods, she is actually now a VP. Let's fast track. It's very fast track. So we believe in human power and potential way, especially believe in a woman that basically is under representative in a lot of the technology sectors. Our job is to unlock these potential and their barriers and roadblocks in various forms, right big and small. So the job is really to unlock all this way. Want to be able to move the needle up to towards the right direction with all these things that we're doing >> last thing here, let's finish with how you yourself have broken through many, many levels of glass ceilings to get where you are tonight. Share with us a little bit about your career journey. >> Micro Journey is recently about two and a half years ago, I moved from our indie world to strategy transformation office. It's a it's a one of these moments, I would say, is a glass a cliff, Right? You're standing at the edge of this glasses ceiling house and you're just about to plunge it in. That was the feeling I got two and a half years ago. But you know what? I am so loving it. It is basically the best occur decision I've ever made because there was a dimension that I could never have the experience and seeing before because I spent that case in R and D. A beautiful. A lot of these no hot and competency, and I just work with the business world. But in the transformation office, we do nto way actually bridged to world together. So basically, for me it was a fantastic learning journey, and it's just empowerment and the trust I got from the awards executives and all Michael workers, I feel like that is probably >> the most a transformative decision I ever made. It's not just your shifting technology field with the technical world. I literally shift >> into a buy one hundred eighty degree to a difference by truck. But my job is to connect Tonto and stretch together, which is something that I feel has profound impact for the company. And I just love every minute of it. Oh, >> and I love that. That's that's a great story. And it sounds like what you're doing. You're just at the beginning of all of what? Your transformation. So I can't wait. You know you next year. Thank you. Every great thing that happened to the rest of twenty nineteen. Really? Thank you so much. >> Thank you so much for having me. My pleasure. Thanks. >> I'm Lisa Martin here, watching the Cube coming to you from women Transforming technology. Fourth annual BMO. Thanks for watching

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCube. We're at San Francisco International Gate 54B, at the Alaska Elevated Experience Event. It's pretty exciting, they're really used the opportunity on the Virgin integration, to kind of rebrand everything. Redo the planes, add a lot of new technology, and we're really happy to have our next guest , she's Annabel Chang, she's the vice president of the Bay area for Alaska. Annabelle great seeing you. >> Thank you for having me. >> So congratulations on the event,-- >> Yes. >> I'm sure there's a lot of work that went into this thing. >> Just to say the least, yes. >> So in your remarks during the pressor you spent a lot of time talking about the community involvement >> Yes >> I think you said that you guys invested over a million dollars in kind of local community >> Yes >> Types of activity. So highlight a couple of those organizations and why is it important for Alaska to play in the community that has nothing to do with me getting on an airplane and flying to Seatag. >> Ah, well it actually has everything to do with that. For example, last year we partnered up with the San Jose Mayor's office and the San Jose Public Library Foundation to offer the first ever free coding camp for girls. It was a week long coding camp. Parents didn't have to worry about providing breakfast or lunch. We had it all taken care of. Why does it matter to Alaska Airlines? We also need engineers to help create the apps, to help run the planes and it is super important that we have a diverse workforce that represents our community. Whether we fly and all of the focus that are onboard, as well. >> Right, so that's pretty interesting. Cause I don't think most people would think of you doing that, right? That's a little bit outside the seat mile, kind of calculation and really investing in the community. >> Yes >> A lot of conversation too about the investment in this terminal. You guys are at all 3 Bay Area airports thank you very much. I like to be able to hop on a plane if I'm delayed. >> Yeah >> But you guys are making a big investment here at SFO. >> Yes, so actually I will add a couple of things. We actually are at 6 Northern California airports. So in addition to our big Bay Area airports, we have flights out of Santa Rosa, right into wine country, Monterey and Sacramento. >> Flights out of Santa Rosa? >> Yes. You can bring that wine right onboard. Not, not a problem. Which is really exciting. But last week we just announced that we are going to be opening up a San Francisco lounge. 8500 sq ft. in 2020 on the third floor. You'll have stunning views of the runway. It'll be like nothing else. It'll be the highest domestic lounge at SFO. >> Right. I was wondering if you could just talk about, a little bit about, thinking about the entire customer experience. I had really interesting interview at GE Aviation. >> Yes >> Years ago, where even GE was thinking about kind from the time you leave your door at your house to the arrive at your destination, and all kind of that whole experience between. When you guys talk about lounges, and terminals, and gates, you really are trying to take a much more wholistic view then simply the travel of actual miles in the air. >> 100 percent. It is all about the guest experience. We are trying to be your favorite airline. And we have to earn that loyalty. So from the moment that you are thinking about booking the flight, we already want that to be as easy of a process as possible. From the moment that you deplane and get your bags. And hopefully, we are always looking for ways to be innovative. So, you know many years ago, Alaska Airlines was the first ever to have the kiosks and mobile check-in. And we continue to look for ways to be top in the field. And actually in flight, I'm proud to share that we have the most free movies in the sky, of any airlines. All I tend to watch a few of the same movies over and over again But literally you could scroll, scroll, scroll. It goes from A to Z. Most people kind of get stuck in like the Gs. >> They don't make it past the Gs. >> Yeah, but I promise there's some goodies in the back of the alphabet. >> Right, to just kind of close. You know you talk about WiFi, and you talked about movies, about kind of the role of technology and how Alaska continues to be innovative, leveraging technology with that, with the lounge, with the new C configurations. >> Yeah >> How important to you guys to be able to execute your vision. >> So we want to be your top west coast airline. And the west coast is obviously the tech hub of the entire world. So we know that our travelers care very much about technology. So we're looking ways creative, to make sure that everyone has power. As I always say ABC, always be charging. >> Right, right. >> So we want to make sure your tablets, your phone, your laptop is always available to charge. And we are looking for ways to be creative. So, for example, we know that everyone has personal mobile phones or laptops now. And we're looking for ways to make sure we can take advantage of that technology and offer it to you. >> Right. >> I know, number 1, fast WiFi is going to be key to our success. >> Well Annabel, thanks for taking a few minutes. We look forward to getting on the plane here >> Yeah. >> In a few minutes and >> We're going to have some ice cream aren't we. >> Oh we're going to have ice cream? Yes >> Salt and straw, you don't have to wait in line hopefully. >> Yeah, thank you. >> She's Annabel, I'm Jeff >> Thank you. >> You're watching theCube, we're here at SFO, Gate 54B. Soon we'll be at 35,000 feet. Thanks for watching. >> Awesome >> Catch you next time >> (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From the VMware Campus in Palo Alto California, it's The Cube covering Women Transforming Technology. (upbeat music) >> I'm Lisa Martin with the Cube and we are on the ground in Palo Alto with VMware for the third annual, Women Transforming Technology event. Excited to welcome back to the Cube, Lily Chang, VP of strategic transformation here at VMware. Lily it's great to have you back. >> Thank you, it's fantastic to have this event again, for the third time in the history. >> Yes, in fact, I read online that it was sold out within hours and the keynote this morning was... >> Lily: Fantastic >> Fantastic >> And very inspiring. >> Very inspiring. For those of you who don't know, Laila Ali was the keynote this morning. What a great analogy, not just being a sports star, but being someone, a woman, in a very male dominated industry who just had this sort of natural confidence that she just knew what her purpose was. I thought that was a very inspiring message for those of us in tech as well. >> Yeah, and it's also very key that women leaders, such as herself, is willing to come out and share the story, and be the role model and set a path and show the example for the younger generation to follow and to look up to. That is incredible. >> I love for one of the things she said, Lily, when she said she still sometimes kind of loses sight and has to reignite that inner warrior. I thought that was a really important and empowering message too that even really strong women who are naturally confident still have times where they have to kind of remind themselves of what their purpose is. I just thought that was a very impactful statement and I think regardless of any industry you're in. >> That is absolutely true. I mean, we're only human, right? So every one of us experiences challenges in life so there are times even all genders, you're going to bump into road blocks, you're going to bump into challenges and then you need to self motivating and lift yourself up and rise to the ocassions of the challenge. A lot of times these changes, and I'm sure it's true for her as well, that actually make her a better leader. >> Definitely. So you are one of the board members of Women Who Code. This is something that's very near and dear to VMwear's heart. VMwear got involved in 2016 when it was about a 10,000 person organization. >> Actually, a little bit less than that. >> A little less than 10,000? And now it's? >> We were very young. >> And now how large is it? >> It's 137,000 members globally, 20 counties, 60 cities. >> So what's the mission of Women Who Code? >> The mission is very simple. Basically we want to basically help all women that inspire and excel in their technical career journey and in their career development. So that's basically the simple mission statement and for that a very critical thrust that Women Who Code has and kind of coincide with VMware's community vision, is basically technical woman community. So they were very young but we saw the passion, we saw the commitment, and we believed that this is a great mutual opportunity because we want to be a global company. We want to not only view leadership within U.S., we wanted it to be in NIA, to be in APJ, We have R & D research offices everywhere and so we basically collaborated with Women Who Code and that has been a very successful leadership program which only work with them. And they basically blossomed under the collaboration and we're not the only company but we are the one of two founding partner in sponsor for Women Who Code. >> It's grown dramatically as you said. >> Lily: Dramatically. >> Yeah, just a couple of years since you've been involved with VMware. What are a some of things that have surprised you about, not just the growth, but about some of the lesson that maybe you've learned by watching some of these other women come into this organization and be inspired and impact their careers? >> So I see the story, both in VMware woman leadership, and also in outside community woman leadership. Right? So what I see is all these woman basically have the passion but they were a little bit worried about let it come out but when you're actually in a community you're supporting one and other and you have that platform where they feel very comfortable to communicate, network, share, and learn, and so basically that is a very powerful thing and I see the growth and the booster of the potential, it's kind of like we lift them up all of a sudden. Right? One of the stories recently is that, for example, on the external side, We have basically a Canada city director is all volunteer positions. Right. And within a year, she actually moved from a line management position to basically to a director position because the city director role basically expose you to basically get the community view out and that encourage you and challenge you to basically has hands on soft leadership skill and so a lot of the technical woman have a lot of technology and a lot of the technologist mentality but you need to accompany that with a lot of the soft skill. And then the combination of the two that makes a perfect combination. And we see a lot of that in our VMware women as well. So we set out to do basically cities in China, we actually opened China for Women Who Code. It was zero member, and now it has like 3,000-4,000 members. It's actually in China. It's a little bit of a difficult mysterious place. Right? But we made it happen in Beijing. We made it happen in Shanghai. And it's basically participate by a lot of the local company, not just multi-national company. And in India we actually open it up, and in India now is blossomed like crazy so there are like since VMware's opening up in Bangalore basically there are three other cities that joined in. India is like basically a rose in blossoming peak point right now. And we also opened up a Sophia, so basically we work with women who go to do a corporate leadership program. And within the first year, where we appointed some of the city directors from our women, basically we have experience about a 50% promotion rate and pretty much 100% retention rate. >> Lisa: Wow. >> Yeah. >> 50% promotion and 100% retention is incredible. >> It is incredible, so I see that miracle happening and then I become very convinced after year one and then I've also learned that I'm not the only leader in the world that believes in this. That's the reason why they blossom like crazy. >> I imagine growing up in China, I was reading a little bit about your story, that the expansion in China must mean something a bit personal for you as well. It sounds like you were a bit fortunate though, with your parents saying "hey," you had two choices when you graduated from college, flight attendant, or secretary and your parents thought "she should have more options that that." So maybe kind of full circle, how was that for you when those two in Shanghai and Beijing opened? >> To me, I feel like, that is what is 21st century supposed to be. I wish it were true in the 19th century and but bottom line is, minor correction, actually I did interview for those two positions. I was rejected. I was not qualified. >> Lisa: Lucky VMware. >> Yeah. (laughing) Actually lucky United State. >> There you go. >> So basically my dad and my mom, they basically raised me up very differently in that era. They basically feel that they give me kind of almost a virtual space where I do not feel there is any difference between genders. They always made me feel like I'm a equal citizen in the family. I have the same speaking right, my dad, my mom both foster me that so when they learned that I could not get those two possible jobs and I was very well educated, graduated from the best university in the island, quoting my dad, he basically "invested on me," right? So he basically said "well" what he needs to do is "continue to invest in me." So that's the reason why he exported me to United States and then basically I went to the graduate school here and then since then I been very blessed. So this is almost like the Beijing and Shanghai success of the Women Who Code. It's almost like I'm giving it back to my origin. Right? And I'm bringing a lot of the blend between the western and eastern culture together. Right? To open that up which is fantastic and basically in the global environment to make it very diverse and inclusive at the same time. >> So you had really strong parents who instilled this belief in you that you could do anything. When we look at some of the statistics that show that less than 25% of technical roles are held by women and then we also look at the retention, the attrition is so high in tech. What were some of the things that kept you kind of focused on your dreams? How did you kind of foster that persistence? And I'm wondering what your advice is for women who are in tech and might be thinking of leaving. >> Well, very interesting, so first advice I have is, basically believe in yourself and dream very big. Because that, and the second this is never afraid of change. Change is always a good thing and that has been throughout my growth in a foreign country as well as here. Right? And I remember when I was in the university, even thought it was the best university, and I actually changed department and major twice and the third time I attempted to do it, because at that time I told my dad, say "hey, I heard there's this cool computer science thing I really want to go do" he did some calculation and said "look, if you transfer again, the third time, it will take you five to six years to graduate" so he said "no, just stick with it and then later on you want to move, go ahead." Right? So in grad school I changed again and I was very blessed that there are a lot of sponsors and mentors. Not just my parents. Throughout my growth and throughout my journey in the career basically really foster and help me, supported me, give me a lot of advice, so I'm a big believer in mentorship and sponsorship and that's what I believe the technical woman community will offer. It's kind of a genetically built it within that philosophy in the community. Right? It doesn't matter which forum. It is basically bringing in the common belief and the vision together and it's basically peer to peer mentorship and because there are different walks and different levels of women and technologist in that community then you actually could do the tiering and peering and basically help people to either inspire, basically move into new career journey, or elevating themselves. So I'm a very big believer in mentorship and sponsorship. >> Speaking of change, we talked about the changes you've made previously. You've made a big change from R & D to financier. >> Lily: That's correct. >> The very first at VMware to do that? >> Lily: Yes, very first... >> Tell us about kind of the impetus and what excited you and what you are benefiting from. >> Well, I'd been in the R & D career for a couple decades and so every ten years I look at my resume and then I kind of try to have an out of body experience to basically advise myself and say, what would you do differently, so that you actually are setup for the growth for the next ten years. Right? So when I look at my career about a year ago I basically said to myself and said "well, you've got enough R & D experience, you made enough investment. For you to be in the next journey you really need to have the business experience." And even though I have basically with VMware's support and sponsorship I did go back to the business school and got kind of the Berkeley business certificate and I got lots of great executives supporting me. But the reality is if you don't do that role, day in and day out, and really experience it blended into your DNA, it's not going to come natural. Right? And I don't want to be an imposter, so essentially I made a fairly major determination that I want to basically switch into business world. So I'm kind of a unique case in the sense that I'm both over-qualified and under-qualified at the same time. I'm very lucky that I have a lot of the executive sponsorship that I was able to find a perfect role that allowed me to learn and excel and basically be inspired basically in my role today and that is something fantastic. Only after I transfer that's where I learn that I'm actually the first employee in VMware's history that moved from R & D to finance and I still remain as the only one so far and I hope that my success can actually inspire more R & D people because I truly believe that a lot of times when you can actually can look at from the other lens it would just simply make you be able to do your original job better. Like right now, I would tell my old R & D self that some of the decision I made I would have debated and petitioned and argued and thought about it in a completely different way because my thinking has shift which I think is a very healthy shift. >> I agree, and you know, one of the things that Laila Ali said this morning was basically encouraging people to get uncomfortable, to be comfortable and that's, you talked about change, absolutely there's so many opportunities and we know that on one level but it can be pretty intimidating to change something. But I love also what you said. I think there's a parallel with saying now that you have this business experience looking through that other lens at R & D, you would have made decisions differently and I think that is very reflective and an opportunity for organizations to invest in creating a more diverse executive team. When you bring in that though diversity. >> Lily: Exactly. >> And it just opens the door, not just seeing things through different lenses and perspectives whether we're talking about gender or what not, but the profitability that can come from that alone is tremendous. >> Yeah, so for example one of the things that there is a statistics actually based on McKinsey for company that basically has reasonable percentage blend of woman leadership actually grows better and makes much sounder decision and so the experience I have moving from R & D to business and then now I work still very closely with R & D community and the product business unit, basically that's kind of a testemonial for that because the decision making all of a sudden is multi facet. And you always will be able to make a better decision and a sound decision. Now, you will be able to see a different risk at a different level, and we will be communicating in a more common language, like I used to not be able to speak the business tone and the business language, now I actually can be that effective communication bridge, which I find it very powerful and very exciting and very illuminating in terms of just the whole shift, make it a very worth while actually. It's just a very fantastic personal and professional experiences so far. >> You studied that Mckinsey report and that was actually mentioned this morning that the press release that VMwear did with the Stanford Institute investing 15 million in building a womens innovation lab to study the barriers, identify how to remove those barriers, but in that press release McKinsey report found that, and this is shocking, that companies that have more diversity at the executive level, are 21% more profitable. >> Lily: Exactly. >> That's a huge number. >> That's because you actually, for business, right? The technology moves so fast and there are so many different factors will be coming in hitting the business, giving business decision, you just go down a unique lane and not basically bringing all the different facets of perspective, you tend to basically gradually work yourself into a corner or you may just believe what you want to believe. Right? So that's where the other genders perspective or even the inclusive culture will bring you, basically. So this is my firm belief. Right? It's just in a different dimension basically. >> And I think that's great advice for all walks of life Lily. Thank you so much for stopping by The Cube and sharing with us what you're doing with Women Who Code and congratulations on being the first VMware to successfully transition from R & D to finance. >> Yeah, I actually hit my one year anniversary. >> Oh congratulations and thanks so much for your time. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching the cube. I'm Lisa Martin, on the ground at Women Transforming Technology VMware. Thanks for watching. (digital music)

(upbeat dramatic music) >> Hello, everyone, welcome to the Cube Conversation, here in Palo Alto Studios, for The Cube. I'm John Furrier, the cohost of The Cube, co-founder of Silicon Angle Media. We are here for Thought Leader Thursday, with Mitzi Chang. She's a securities attorney and partner at Goodwin. Formerly Goodwin Proctor, Goodwin Proctor's the name. Again, great to have you on. Thanks for coming in and talking about some of the securities around Blockchain ICO's. You guys doing a lot of work, thanks for coming in. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, obviously, Blockchain is the hottest thing we're seeing. AI, obviously, is hot as well, IOT, all of this about a new, decentralized internet. And it's the wild west. And we know because we're looking at doing our Blockchain and tokens for The Cube and all that good stuff. So we're totally love the new environment. Everyone, all the light tier one entrepreneurs are licking their chops and going, ah, man, good action. And a lot of the thought leaders are saying this is a fundamental shift. So it's cool, we get that. But now, okay, is the technology ahead of the law? And, just today, the news is breaking that the SEC is now putting a clampdown on a new thing, celebrity endorsements, into ICO's initial coin offering. So, yeah, you're a securities attorney. You have to sit back there and, like, wire these deals together. >> Right. >> What's going on, I mean, is the law behind the tech? How are you guys managing it, what's the flow look like for you? >> Yeah, I mean, I think that the law is almost always behind the technology, right. That's just how it works. I mean, from our perspective, you know, we represent tons of companies on normal securities law, or securities issuances. And this can be similar, depending on how the token is structured. So, you know, the SEC said in its July guidance that tokens can be securities, depending on the facts. A part of what we do, as lawyers, is review the facts of the token, right. What does the token do, how do you treat the token, how are you issuing the token, how are you marketing the token? Are there securities-like features of the token? So, for example. Does it have profit sharing features? Does it have voting features? Those are pretty obviously more security-like features. But, also, you know, in the token ecosystem, are you treating it like you would equity? So, for example, you know, are you putting vesting conditions on there? Are you marketing it to VC's who may never use your network? Those are some factors that make it look like more security. Versus a utility. >> You guys also, I mean, I've been in Silicon Valley now 18 years, and been an entrepreneur for longer, and entrepreneurs are always three feet in a cloud of dust, breaking things in the bowl in the China shop, as they say, and have to get the lawyers to kind of clean things up or set things straight. Securities is a known practice, but now there's some kind of bumps in the road but still people are moving forward. So I got to ask you, what's the test? I mean, we hear things like the Howey Test. >> Mm hmm. >> What are some of the things that entrepreneurs should know around where to pay attention? Kind of where to put their head down and drive because there are known practices, on the security site you mentioned, a few of them, but where's the test? What's the one thing, is it the Howey Test? What is this Howey Test concept? And what other things should entrepreneurs know about? >> Right, so I think, you know, the Howey Test is a test that was in CaseLab that basically explains what is an investment contract. And an investment contract is what is considered a security. So, basically, the payment of money, you know, based on the efforts of others, where you kind of have the reasonable expectation of obtaining profits, right, from those efforts of others, versus yourself. So that's the general gist of it. So I think, from a securities law perspective, that's really important. Because there has been so much focus from the SEC. But there's also other regulatory agencies who are focused on this. Some of those are, you know, money transmitter laws. You know, there's potential commodities law issues. So there's definitely other regulatory regimes that could implicate the token. Or the token could be implicated in that regime. But I think the securities law one is one that I focus on. >> Yeah. >> And it's important to look at. >> Alright, so the first test is, okay, obviously, new internet infrastructure, different conversation, but the real law test is, is this token going to be an investment making money. >> Right. >> Or is it going to be a utility. One that provides values to the participants. Did I get that right? >> Yes, I would say, generally speaking, right. Is the token, you know, is it a use case? Or is it an investment? Am I expecting profits from that token? Or am I using it like an access fee or a membership? Or to obtain services. >> An arcade game, as Grant Fonda would say. >> Exactly. An arcade game is probably your best example. >> Yeah. Okay, so then the next test is I've heard of some things I'd like to get you to explain. What anti-money laundering or AML is. And KYC, Know Your Customer. And, obviously, Bitcoin has been kind of, you know, we've heard Silk Road stories, underbelly, a lot of bad things are happening, but anonymous is good. But here, financially, Know Your Customer is a specific thing that means something and then AML, anti-money laundering, how does that factor into this whole thing? >> Yeah, so I think for, you know, when you open a bank account, for example, right, your bank wants to know who you are. They'll obtain certain information from you. Whether it's your drivers license or passport. Where you obtained your funds. I mean, that's part of the Know Your Customer, anti-money laundering activity, right. >> And identity behind the, before you sign the thing. >> Right. So part of it is because cryptocurrency can be very anonymous, right. There are anonymous wallets that you're sending cryptocurrency to and from, you don't know who these people are. So part of it is making sure that you understand who your purchasers are. You don't want to run afoul of, you know, an anti-terrorist type, you know, regulations. The US government has several lists that they have online that you can search for names of folks that you don't need to be doing business with. So there's a lot of structures already in place. And part of that is just understanding who your purchasers are. >> And these are requirements on certain things, and the anti-money laundering exposes just audit trailing and certain things that you got to have as compliance things. >> Correct, correct. And so I think, in America, we don't normally, I would say if you were kind of outside of the US, this is probably a little bit more normal, right. People are used to doing it. I think, in America, maybe we're not as used to it. But these are not kind of new guidelines. This has always existed. >> Alright, so sometimes entrepreneurs are fast and loose with their, ah, screw the anti-money laundering thing. Or they get, I don't understand, that's too much work, I don't understand it. >> Yeah. >> So they blow it off. When do they have to not blow it off? When do you have to worry about, like, all these anti-money laundering things? Cause you have to, obviously, do more work. >> Right. >> Got to make sure you're checking the boxes, complying. That probably has overhead, costs money, or maybe write some new software. So we've been recommending that all of our clients who are in the token space and kind of obtaining, you know, digital currency, go through KYC and AML. Some of the digital currency exchanges, right. So in order, when you're receiving your digital currency and you need an account, >> Mm hmm. >> in order to exchange the digital currency into US dollars, for example, it's essentially like opening a bank account. So they're going to ask for all of the information with respect to how did you receive your digital currency. So part of that is you need to have that in place prior to actually launching your token sale so that you can kind of follow the flow of funds. >> So I was trying to find this image I would put up but I can't find it cause I'm on this computer, but I saw a thing on a conference, might have been Block Con, that you guys were at. I think you guys sponsored that event. Where the cost of doing an ICO can range from, they said, on the cheap end, they use the word cheap, not inexpensive, cheap, probably implying not get a good lawyer, a hundred K up to 750 thousand dollars. So, range of cost between hundred thousand and 750 thousand. From cheap to done right. >> Right. Right. >> Or expensive. Is that right or is that, what's the cost ranges? >> Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of players in the ecosystem, right. So there's the lawyers. And typically lawyers bill by the hour, so that's kind of how much time, you know, we're kind of looking at documents and things and helping you structure. There's the tax accountants. So part of that is also, you know, how much time they're spending. But some of it can be very complicated from a tax structuring perspective. Then there's the technical people, right. Unless you have that in house. To actually build your Blockchain network. Kind of help you with all of that, you know, the technical aspects of it. So software engineers, for example. Then there's the ICO consultants. Someone to kind of help you manage, quarterback the process, maybe help you with marketing the tokens to certain different websites, or help you with that. So, all of those together, I mean, yes, it can be very expensive, it kind of depends on how much of that you want to outsource. And how much of that you can do yourself. Obviously, you can't really do all that stuff yourself. >> So it's in the ranges. It could be in the ranges. >> Yeah. I mean, tax alone could kill you if you're looking at all kinds of complicated schemes or licensing agreements. >> Right. >> I mean. >> So all that, you want to make sure you're structuring the entity appropriately before you start it. >> Okay, so where do you get involved? So let's just say that, let's just walk through the day and day operations of, say, Goodwin. Okay, I've got to client. >> Yep. >> And, okay, you come in for the securities component. What does that mean? You just make sure they're incorporated properly? All the laws on the stock and then the tokens treatment? What specific things do you do? >> Sure, so, you know, once we kind of have brought the client in, after our conflicts procedures, and we've agreed to the engagement, part of depends on where they are. If they don't have a company, we'll help you form the company, right. And make sure that all of those startup documents have been appropriately done. Sometimes people have already, they're, you know, an actual company, right. We don't need to form them, they're already in existence. So then we look at pass the formation items and we look at the token issuance. So we'll look at your white paper. The white paper typically describes how the token works in the ecosystem and kind of what the company. >> You get involved in that, just to kind of check if it sounds. >> From a structuring perspective, right. Do we think this is a security? Or do we think it is leaning towards utility? And the SEC obviously has not said, what is a utility and what is a security. >> So that's the gray area? >> Yes. >> So the gray area is watch the language, be careful what you say. >> But also what you do, right. It's not just what you say, it's also what you do. So part of it is talking to the clients about what are you thinking, how are you envisioning this? Where can we help you kind of restructure or decrease your risks? >> And you guys become a safety net and help defend that too, obviously, as attorneys. But the clients still own, >> Correct. I mean, part of it is we give you advice. And the clients can take or not take our advice. But that's what we're here for. >> Do you guys offer a legal opinions behind these? I'm sure you don't. (laughs) >> We don't offer legal opinions. You know, we do do research memos on kind of where we think your token lies. But we don't do legal opinions. >> So have you guys talked to the SEC at Goodwin? I mean, do you guys have conversations? I don't know what goes on behind the curtain of the big law firms but I'm assuming that you guys are up to speed on all the notes and everything, but do you guys actually talk to people at the SEC? Is that how it works? Cause this is a cutting edge area, I'm sure you guys have to be on the cutting edge. >> Yeah, I mean we haven't had any clients, knock on wood, that have had to go through any of the SEC investigations on this. So, you know, we have not had, on behalf of our clients, had to talk to them about it. >> So that's good news, you guys doing good. >> Yeah. >> I know you guys doing over close to 30 plus ICO's, so congratulations. Is there a pattern that you've seen, from a legal standpoint, that you've seen emerging? Obviously, it's pretty clear, out in the market place, certainly the celebrity endorsement, Paris Hilton to the boxer dude and all kinds of stuff was going on where people were endorsing >> Right. >> things, so. Kind of, I don't want to say pump and dump, but that's a word that's been used in the dot com bubble, but people are saying a lot of these things are scams. And the majority of them aren't going to work out. So we've said, editorially here on The Cube and Silicon Angle, that failure doesn't mean scams. We had some failures, but certainly there are some scams. So has that caused people to pull back a little bit? And say, whoa, we're not going to go forward fast enough? Or is nothing stopping this, what's the pattern? >> Yeah, I would say, compared to a year ago, where there was no SEC guidance, right, there was no guidance from other regulator agencies, people were definitely going very quickly. I think now what we're seeing are more sophisticated clients. Clients who really want to make sure that they're following all of the legal requirements to the best that they can, given the grayness in the securities laws and other regimes. And a lot more of a thoughtfulness about, well, let's make sure that this works, right, we're not going to get into trouble. >> Have you seen any co-mingling between some of the traditional VC, venture capital investors or hedge funds, they're emerging, who want to come in and participate on the pure equity side, or the preferred stock or, more common, mostly prefer we see them. But, also, play in the tokens. Is there co-existence between participation? Or is it mostly they line up on the preferred and then let the tokens go here? Is there a pattern there that you see around how those securities are playing out? >> Yeah, I think a lot of people see value in the token ecosystem and they want to participate in that. And a lot of our venture capital clients, or our token clients who have VC investors, they want to participate. So we are definitely seeing people are very excited about it and want to kind of be a part of it. >> What about the presale concept? We're seeing a lot of people jump on the presale bandwagon because it allows them to, you know. It's not an inexpensive process. You guys, obviously, don't work for free. You guys have deals where, obviously, startups can come in. And you guys have a great startup program, I could testify that. You guys do have a good community participation there. But, at the end of the day, this is a legitimate process now. >> Mm Hmm. >> It costs money. You guys have to get paid. And service provides, like the tax attorneys got to get paid. So there's a lot, we see a lot of entrepreneurs doing that's presale. Where they try to offer this kind of discount. How is that working out and has that been going well? >> Yeah, I mean I think, you know, while the SEC has not commented on this, the practitioners and kind of the ecosystem, most people, I think, are considering that presale agreement prior to a network actually being live as a security. And, so, people are going out to accredited investors, sometimes that's VC, sometimes that's high net worth individuals. That's usually done through a SAFT, which is, it stands for Simple Agreement for Future Tokens, or a presale contribution agreement. So part of that is it's like a, you can liken it to a preferred stock financing. >> It's a known process. >> But it's not preferred stock. >> But it's a known vehicle for financing. >> Correct. >> It's not like it's tied to the ICO in a new vehicle. It's just like, okay, we're going to do something down the road, there's risks associated, all that stuff. >> Right, it's an investment contract. I'm giving you a million dollars to invest, to build up the platform. At the end of, when the platform launches, and, hopefully, when the network has utility and your token has utility, then you'll receive tokens. >> And this is good for innovation, because it gets everyone rolling a little bit. Is that, that kind of seems to be the pattern that I'm seeing. It's like, you know. >> It's basically like a seed round, alright. That's probably a really good example, is it's a seed round to get something started. That thing is not your company, it is your network. >> And it also sets the community. I've noticed on the Blockchain, these ICO communities are a very bit part of it. Goodwin's got a great reputation, certainly here in Silicon Valley, and around the world, as a law firm. This is a big part of it. So the presale's also kind of a gesture of credibility for the opportunity and I think, I mean, you know, people I talk to are like, hey, I look at what's going on in the presale, kind of as an indicator of who's involved, judged by the company that you keep kind of thing. So that's interesting. Have you seen that presale dominating more than just going right to the ICO, given the market conditions of all the ICO's? >> Yeah, I mean I think it depends, right. Some of our clients have existing businesses, right. Where this is very complimentary. The Blockchain network is complimentary to their existing business and, so, they may not need to have this big presale, right. Part of the presale could be two weeks before your general crowd sale. You have folks who kind of get in early. To me, that is not necessarily, I mean, it really depends, obviously, fact-specific, but that's a little big different that doing a, quote, presale agreement. Like a year before or six months before your token launch. That's a little bit different. >> Yeah, so also you brought up a good point. Existing businesses versus kind of like people who just need the cash to get going. >> Right. >> We're seeing a lot of companies that either have a successful business, like Kik and then Kik Kin Token was once example, we talk about all the time. The other one is pivots. We're seeing a lot of entrepreneurs take companies that were pivots, AKA, going out of business, where the token timing of a token in decentralized Blockchain actually is great for their business model. And they have to, essentially, go recap or do some securities, you know, resetting. That's your world, right? You got to get involved in those areas. >> Yeah, I mean, I think anything that has to do with kind of changing your capital structure, right, you should have your securities lawyer or your corporate lawyer involved. Because that'll obviously impact your securities law. You know, exemptions that you're taking, you know, typically from a private placement exemption, for most of our private company clients. >> Is there any new trends that are popping out of that kind of pivot or, wow, this is really, you know, I was out there, I got some funding from Y Combinator, or some sort of venture, and we're kind of just barely staying alive. This Blockchain could really accelerate, there's now momentum. Is there any trends that you see, from your work standpoint, where you have, that are happen, that are obvious new things that are coming out of this? Or is it a standard recap to cap table, normal corporate work? >> I think there is a tension, right, between doing a normal stock finance, preferred stock, or common stock financing that, you know, whatever you would typically do. Whether that's a convertible security or a convertible note. And then raising funds through a token sale. And so, from my perspective, it's obviously cleaner to do it the traditional way. Because you're not dealing with unclear SEC rules, right. It's very clear how you do a preferred stock financing. We do that every day. So to the extent that companies are in that position where they can choose, it's certainly cleaner to do it the traditional way. >> If you pull off an ICO, god bless you. It's certainly equity-free, tokens. There's no equity to token, if you're a utility token. >> Right. >> Okay, so I was reading about the Delaware, Delaware was allowing companies to use Blockchain. >> Mm hmm. >> This is right up your alley. So, they're not doing ICO's. So can you clarity the Delaware situation relative to Blockchain, cause they're using a Blockchain from a ledger standpoint, but it's not an ICO haven yet. So talk about the Delaware situation. >> Correct, so the Delaware amendments, which I believe are now approved, as of a couple of months ago, over the summer, essentially allow the cap table ledger to be on the Blockchain. So they're kind of ahead of everything, right. Because, you know. So, for like, for example, a few years ago, no one had uncertificated stock certificates. Everybody wanted the physical stock certificates. And now most companies, that we represent, >> They want digital. >> Exactly, digital, uncertificated stock certificates. But there is a ledger and there is a record of it. You just don't have the fancy paper with the pretty legend on it. So I think technology is moving and the law needs to as well. So part of that is Delaware kind of getting onboard. >> Delaware's got a great opportunity, they can nail the ICO's. Well, Mitzi, thanks for coming, I really appreciate it. Any other observations that you'd like, that you see in the market that you'd like to share? Take a minute to talk about what you're doing at Goodwin, as well. What's going on, what's happening? >> Yeah, I mean I think it's a really exciting time, we're really excited to be a part of it. It's cutting edge work. I think that there's a lot of, I guess, what I would call kind of your more traditional clients that we have, that we take calls from every day. Whether that's investment banks, or VC funds, private equity funds, or just our venture backed companies that are curious as to what is this all about. >> Yeah. >> So I think it's really exciting and I'm glad to be a part of it. I don't think that it is going to stop. I think that certainly there's likely to be more regulation about how you do one of these ICO's, one of these token generation events, you know, within the confines of the law. But I don't see it stopping. >> You don't see it stopping at all? >> No, I mean I think once there's more regulation, there'll be more clarity about how to do it. And how to do it within the confines of the law, which we try to do, obviously, you know, given that there's not a ton of clear guidance. But I think that, I think the ship has sailed. >> Yeah, well this is a great conversation here with Goodwin, formerly Goodwin Proctor, Mitzi Chang, partner, she's a securities attorney. We should call this show Billable Hours. Because we're getting some free legal opinions and conversations, thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Thanks for having me. >> Blockchain is hot, entrepreneurs are using it. All the top tier one entrepreneurs are looking at this. Great opportunity, similar with the Web One dato, the TC IP era of the internet, Blockchain. It's fundamental infrastructure for the future of decentralization, so. Great opportunities, causing lots of innovation. Check with your attorneys, obviously Goodwin, and a few others all doing great ICO's. Great potential fundraising, but also great business opportunities. Thanks again, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> So Cube Conversations here, in Palo Alto, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (electronic music)

(energetic music) >> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back and we are here live in Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay Convention Center for Oracle's Modern C-EX, Modern Customer Experience Event. Part of Oracle Marketing Cloud, I am John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. My co-host Peter Burris, head of research at Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Adrian Chang, director of customer programs at Oracle Marketing Cloud, also emcee of the Markie and big part of that program. Congratulations on the success of the Markie's awards, which were given out last night. I read your blog post on the site this morning. >> Thank you >> Great to see you again and welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, always great to be here and I love Modern Customer Experience and that marketing is a part of it. >> It's really been a great transformation this year. The simplification of just now narrowing it down to one simple value president, Modern Customer Experience, which encapsulates a lot of stuff. Quickly review what that is and then let's talk about the Markies. >> Absolutely, so I start with the Markies and so we have a history of celebrating excellence in data-driven modern marketing. So, this program has grown tremendously over the past 11 years. When I look at the submissions, they're customers that are focusing on acquisition and loyalty retention. And they read these stories all the time and spend weeks preparing the submissions. So this event is all about how can we share our intent to have our customers have a good experience as part of Oracle and then how can we help them delight their customers in delivering experiences and create value at every touch point. >> One of the thing I really like about the change in the name from Modern Marketing Experience to Modern Customer Experience is you move from the process, the function, to the outcome and the result. So how are the Markies reflecting that this year? >> Absolutely. So if you think about where we started, again it was six categories celebrating excellence in B2B marketing and reaching folks behind a single device, their laptop computer. So cut to 2017, the customers' preferences, their activities are fluid. So great marketing requires you to use a series of channels to reach them everywhere. And so, marketers have to balance brand with action, and then also deliver on intent. So the Markies have had to evolve to think about the habits. So the account-based marketing team of the year was a new award that we gave out that really represented the intent. Are people actually doing this, we have tons of great stories. So we have to balance out a bit of the usage of the product and the technology and embracing the new strategies and what's current within the marketplace. >> So the future of marketing as it goes into data, that's been the theme here. All of our interviews, day one. And certainly the key notes, even Mark was giving a great specific example. Now data is at the heart of it. Adaptive intelligence is the theme. You can see the dots are connecting the convergence of where the Markies are showing traction are some pretty interesting use cases. Any notables you'd like to share that kind of highlight that data piece? >> Absolutely. So our winner for best email campaign was from Jetstar and they're an airline in Austraila. What's great is they have been able to find ways to-- so when you get an email about travel, sometimes you book at one particular point and your preferences and relationship with that airline may change. Your travel destinations may change. So the fact that they can optimize the information at the time of send, sending the weather, curing you to maybe upsell and look at other opportunities to have a pleasant experience, that's amazing. So Laura Ipsen spent some time talking about how we at Oracle are looking to evolve preferences, so going from one to many, to one to one, and the hallmark which is one to you. And I think the Jetstar campaign, they use Oracle responses as a perfect example of that. The first award that we gave out was to Covance for account-based team of the year and by doing, setting up an account-based marketing strategy, putting it in place, getting all the stakeholders in sales in place, getting the discipline on the content. They were able to increase their engagement with key accounts by a significant margin. And they were delighted to be among those that are partners to celebrate that achievement. >> Adrian, I want you to talk about, for the folks that are watching who aren't here, the buzz in the hallways, because the hallways is always a good conversation, certainly the lunch table as well. I'll include that technically at the hallway, but people sitting down. >> Absolutely. >> AI has been front and center, but it's not being painted over, white-washed, "Oh! AI! It's hot so let's jump on the bandwagon." There's some real tech involved. What has been the reaction from customers in used cases that you hear in the hallways? >> Customers are excited about it. I think for a lot of our customers had the opportunity to hear Mark Heard talk about it. Where he embraced and said, "If you think about AI at the core, it's computing done real fast to help people make really rich decisions about what to do next." And so, I think our customers are still grappling with all the technology and how to get value out of their core platforms, how do they deliver on their initial objective and then we have a subset of our most mature, most excited, who are starting to put those data plots together, and start getting more predictive and allow the machine to do the work for you. But in order for you to have, to even think about it, you've got to have great, you've got to fill the cup with great data. And I think people are still getting there so that the machine isn't biased and you don't make the wrong decision about how to treat your customers. >> So just notable trending tweets I wanted to share with you, and again, get your reactions, because this is speaking to the customer in used case. One was from a part from our digitizing panel, Mark wrote "According to digitize, if you're not looking to use chatbots and AI, you're going to be out of business hashtag MME17", a little bit of that, legacy there. And then hashtag Modern CX. And the other one is, "Netflix is a great example of a company creating content combined with powerful AI targeting programs." Little bit of sample of some of the things we're seeing. Chatbots. It's a new interface. It's a new way to use data. Netflix content, which modern marketers need content in this platform. Picking a Netflix approach. So, kind of begs a question. Chatbots? Netflix? Kind of modern. Email? Old? So how do you get a marketer to get you to use the reliability of hardened critical infrastructure, like email, not going away anytime soon but, it's going to be one dimension of Netflix. Content marketing. Binge watching. All this content out there. Netflix and chatbots interface. Your thoughts? >> So my thought is I am, so I was in the room when I watched the chatbot piece and I loved the fact of the, we could live in a world where we could have a fluid customer experience anywhere. You can ask a question. I also support our communities where you ask a question and know you're automatically going to get an answer to the algorithm. So that delivers on that one to you scenario. So I'm super excited about it. When I look at the Netflix example, even to get the information on what the recommendation engine should be, you still need a lot of data. And you still need to know what are the habits of your customers who even land on that decision tree. So I love the fact that folks are thinking Netflix and thinking content, but that chatbot thing, oh my goodness. When people start doing that I can't wait to see those customers that win those Markies. >> Peter: But they have to do it right. >> They have to do it right. >> One of the dangers that marketing always faces is the idea that it's all about collecting information, having the customer give something to me and not giving something valuable in return. >> Adrian: Absolutely >> And the challenge that I see with chatbots is, and I think you agree John, is are chatbots going to be used to further automate information collection at the expense of really presenting value. The new marketing, the Modern Customer Experience, has to be focused on are we delivering value with the customer at every single interaction, not is the customer doing more for us inside of marketing. What do you think about that? >> So I agree. Cause if we do not know that we are creating value and that we're not, that we're adding friction into the problem, you pour that into your algorithm, there's going to bias. And so then, you can't make a decision about how to feed information into the machine and not have the right information that says we don't have the right region, we don't understand the behavior across all products. You can't have bias in the model at all. It has to be complete for you to then look at your customer base holistically. >> Yeah, we don't want to better automate bad marketing practices. >> Adrian: Absolutely. >> We want to use these technologies to continuously drive to use a famous person's parlance a more perfect union between this marketer and the buyer. >> Adrian: Absolutely. >> John: Well you got a great article up on Martechseries, "This year has gone above and beyond, fully leverage and most innovative marketing technology to create customer centric campaigns that deliver outstanding results that Laurie has spent, Senior Vice President Chairman." Okay that's obviously marketing packaging for the quote, from PR, but what she's getting at is customer centric. Again this is the theme, multitude of technologies now in the platform. Very interesting. Are customers responding well to this platform and are they seeing the need to stand up thing quickly in these campaigns? >> Adrian: Absolutely. They are finding that there's more pressure to get interim value. They are absolutely buying into the platform message and we have quite a few customers who also were recognized for the use of multiple products and multiple partner related applications. And so we're actually seeing a nice trend in both. To do great marketing, part of the messaging, or part of Laura's talk track from today was people are freaked out about the data but if you find a way to harness it, you'll create experiences where you'll stop chasing the customers. They'll start chasing you cause you'll find the right way to have the conversation with them. >> And word of mouth gets around too. I'm going to ask you to pick your favorite child of the awards. Was there one that jumps out, without alienating all the winners. Is there one that you like? >> This is a really, really hard question for me. As you know I read all the submissions, I play a heavy role in writing the speech. So it's really hard. >> John: Here we go, the preamble, not picking one. Here we go! I don't like to pick my favorite child. No parent likes to do that. >> I don't like to pick my favorite child. This is a really, really hard thing. >> Okay, audience favorite? >> How are they different this year from last year? How about that? Or is there something general that shows, that kind of reinforces some of this customer experience or are you seeing a progress in how the Markies are evolving? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So I'm happy to answer that one. And so for the first time since 2012, we brought back the dinner. And so having the Markies and our customer celebration, it shows our intent as Oracle Marketing Cloud, for our customers as well. That we love and want them to have a great week and want to celebrate their accomplishments and get other people to the winning circle. So being at a table and feeling that energy, getting that opportunity to sit with an executive or sit with a member of a team is a really, really great lift to then come to an event with over 4,000 people and feel warm and feel included. So I think that was an important part, that was a huge feel. I mentioned that we added a account-based team of the year award. Again, you couldn't be in B2B marketing and hide from account-based marketing. It's everywhere. We also delivered an overall customer experience award, so we had two customer-related awards and we created one category. I personally the videos, so our best video submission categories won where the viewers got to pick. And I would say the reaction of Juniper taking home two trophies last night, if I had to pick one, because that one had bit of a go to it. >> Peter: Juniper? >> Juniper Networks. >> Really? >> John: Two awards. >> They won two awards last night. I loved their reaction as well as the reaction of our folks from Brazil. You know, really, really great stories from their use of data. We also had Chris Diaz, our leader of the year, who not only led really strong customer experience transformations across marketing, sales, and service. >> This is the CMO of Time Warner? >> Uh no, that's Kristin. >> Kristi? >> Uh yeah, that's Kristin at Time Warner. I'm talking about Chris Diaz who is also driving sustainability efforts in Africa. It's really transformational. Huge, huge advocate of Oracle. As is the team at Kenya Airways. There's some really feel good moments. There are really exciting moments, you can feel it. People were hugging each other. People were laughing. People brought their own noise cannons and sparklers. >> Who doesn't love an awards show? When you're giving out great trophies? >> You know, we always get the comparison to the Oscars, and so this year it felt like the Golden Globes. >> So you handed out the wrong award. >> So you had a couple of times when the winner, when the wrong winner was >> We actually did not have that but we actually did joke about it. We embraced it. So Kayla Sullivan helped us with the awards distribution. And that was fun. The trophy itself is actually made by the same designer who makes the Emmy. And I believe I said that last year. But the feel was more like the Golden Globes. There was refreshments and opportunity to have there. >> John: It was well done. It looked great on photos. Big crowd. You had the jibs and all the cameras. Great camera angles. >> We had a drone do the delivery so we played with some new drone deliveries >> John: That's the next one up on Amazon delivering your packages by drone, you know, dropping in. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. So we had one delivered via tweet and then we had one that was delivered via drone and so we covered all their risk management pieces in advance. And I'm just super happy that InVision, who partnered with us in hosting and producing the event, were able to get some of these things cleared. So our intent was let's be futuristic, let's be digital, let's be now. And they managed to incorporate that into the show for us. >> Well, Adrian. Congratulations on all the great work with the Markies and continued success. What's next next year? What do you guys look, I know, processing, you got to have a little fun now. Relax a little bit. But as you look forward to next year's Markies, you're watching, you've got your submission. It's kind of like the college admissions. You want to know who the judge is. Here he is. What are you looking for for next year? Have you though about it, any ideas? Random thoughts? >> Yeah, it's a great question. It takes us about seven months to actually plan. To sit down and actually plan our calendar from submission peer, the content. And so, we tend to create the categories that are aspirational. So we likely will figure out what's the best way to incorporate the trend. Get them out early to drive customers to get really excited about what's next. We're talking about AI now. What will we be talking about in six months? I'm looking forward to to hearing more customers share about the value their getting from Marketing Cloud, the new channels that they're using, how they've overcome barriers within their organizations to do new and great things. And really focus on taking these stories and telling them all year. >> And that's speed and empowerment. >> Yes. Absolutely. >> Adrian Chang. Here in theCUBE back with Markies update with great commentary. Great to see you. Looking great, love the outfit. Lookin' good, as always. Thank you for taking the time and sharing your perspective. >> Thanks for having me. >> Peter: Took me a while to figure out what that was though The flower. What is that thing? From here it's like >> It's good. Looks good on you. Adrian Chang, here inside theCUBE bringing all the Markie action, all the great coverage. It's theCUBE. We'll have more live coverage after the short break. (energetic music)

>> Announcer: Life from Palo Alto. It's theCUBE, covering Women Transforming Technology 2017. Brought to you by VMware. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Women Transforming Technology Conference held at VMware here in beautiful Palo Alto, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. I'm joined by Lily Chang. She is the VP R&D/Office of CTO VMware. Thanks so much for joining us, Lily. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're also a board member. You started out on the advisory board, but now you're a board member on Women Who Code. >> Lily: Yes, recently. >> What is the organization? I mean, it's such a powerful and important organization. Can you tell us a little bit more about it? >> Women Who Code has a mission, which is very similar like today's conference you were seeing. It's to propel the technical women and R&D women across the globe. Basically no boundary of region, cities, or countries. So they're spanning about 50 plus countries and many cities, and we being a founding partner ... We, VMware, have been a founding partner since middle of 2015. They have gone through a rapid growth. I think we bet on the right horse ... (both laugh) Using the business term, and interestingly, they have gone through, in the past 18 months, a tremendous growth of the membership, and because it resonates with a lot of the technical women across the countries over the world, in China, in India, in eastern Europe, based in United States and Europe as well. Basically, right now their membership is about 87,000. They started with 10,000 members back about 18 months ago. >> So it's propelling the women who are already in the industry, but also bringing in new people, new young women into the industry, too. >> It's more than that. We focus on very much mid-range ... >> Okay. >> And early-stage career as well, but the professional bell curve, that golden bell curve, where in the middle of your career, or you're in the career for about two, three years, you're thinking about expanding your career horizon to be a different technical area. You just need that technical skills, and you need a way to be in a non-intimidating environment in a very gender-friendly environment and a very supporting and sponsoring setting where you're learning from each other and sharing all the knowledge, like different programming language, big data, algorithms, mobile technology, how that's involved. And that's really the key value proposition from Women Who Code, and that's what we subscribe to as well. >> Well, Lily, you talked about that sweet spot of a woman's career ... >> Lily: Right. >> And that also happens to be when a lot of women get stuck, or they leave ... >> Lily: Exactly. >> Or they have children, or they pull back and work part-time ... What will it take ... What are you doing with Women Who Code to get them over that, and as you said, help them gain those next skills to help them move up? >> So we basically establish a strategic partnership with Women Who Code, and we offer together with them a monthly meetup or sometimes bi-weekly meetup. We actually opened to several countries in the world. That's where we believe R&D, innovation, are also key. For example, we opened to China. We basically expanded to India and elevated it. In fact, Women Who Code has a annual technology conference for tech women in that particular region, like US is coming in April. We, VMware, are working with Women Who Code later this week to actually launch the first international Connect conference in India. And basically we got huge support and passion and commitment, and we also find it's a very good thing for women to basically learn about leadership and basically be able not to share just their technology with one another, about what they're good at. It's also a way for them to do networking, to learn how to communicate more effectively, and how to basically build the team, sustain the team. So we work out a global leadership initiative through this collaboration with Women Who Code. So we're driving China, we're driving India, we're driving Sofia. We collaborated on the Silicon Valley as well. >> And are the issues the same across the board? >> Yes, we have found the issue is very similar globally. It's where a woman needs encouragement, and a woman needs a very specific setting about how they learn from one another. These technical meetups and these chat over the woman technology community basically are helping that, and then we're also, in a non-profit way, sponsoring Women Who Code through their job board, and that's a non-profit way of helping, opening opportunities and possibility for technical women that basically want to expand their career or finding different avenue in their progression as well. So, basically, for ... You early on talked about, this is age where you're choosing between, do I want to have kids? Do I want to focus more on that? >> These are real things, yes! >> There's a sense of guilt, right. >> Right, right. >> Like, am I going to be so selfish, not to be a working mother? And what we found is that these technical meetings or conferences is not only just a way for women in the appropriate setting to learn about new technology without a very unnecessary peer competition, and they also can basically start sharing what they know, and they can learn together and grow together, and so for example, we offer all this with no charge. If you're a mom, I still remember, with young kids, basically, you will probably want that one or two hours to just spend ... (Rebecca laughs) >> In a bath. >> Yeah, not that you don't love your kids, right? >> Yes. >> But it's just you need that one or two hours. Your brain needs that kind of a chemistry balance as well. >> Yes, yes. >> And you're more rejuvenated, and then when you go back to work, you don't feel like, God, I am missing so many months of work, right? >> Right. >> Reality is you're spending a lot of time rejuvenating your knowledge, and you're keeping pace with the industry growth. We find a lot of other companies that are basically sharing the same vision as we are. >> And that is exactly what this conference is doing. >> Lily: Yes. >> There is a mix of technical breakout sessions, the hard skills, mixed in with the professional tips ... >> Lily: Exactly. >> Of how to give a better presentation and things like that. >> Exactly. So in some of the meetups, for example, if you're a woman that has an upcoming conference and usually there's the stage fright, right, and I kid you not ... >> Rebecca: But men face it too! >> Yeah, exactly. >> It's not ... But then how can we create a more nurturing environment to help the woman to curate her contents without fear and without intimidation. So that's basically the ... Sometimes the meetup is devoted to do things like that, or to just do a programming hackathon, but you're basically collaborating across the genders and the age group ... And your career span as well. Basically, it created a lot of this more collaborative and nurturing environment. >> One of the stereotypes about women in the workplace is that they are very competitive and don't help each other, and there's a real queen bee syndrome, a bitchiness that takes place. >> Lily: Yes, I'm aware of that. >> Yeah, well, what's your experience? Because it's ... There are some women, sure, but what's your experience? >> My experience is it's a matter of perspective and how you actually set up the environment. If you set up the environment where women can actually collaborate, I believe that is actually one of the gender's strength. A lot of the women leaders are into details, and some of the women are into strategic thinking and orientation. We found that if you can blend that together, especially in the global sense, that helps not only learning technology and advancing technology ... Like, one of the most popular thread of technical discussion is the algorithms. When you're talking about innovation, and when you talk about creativity, when you talk about the science, and that's where things has no boundary. >> Yes. >> And it's only yourself that's imposing that kind of thing. So we believe the sponsorship of this, or like the conference today, is breaking down a lot of those barriers. >> That's the theme of the day! >> Bringing the more kind side of the gender onto the table. >> And a camaraderie, too, around solving problems. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So let's actually talk about what you're doing at VMware. You're leading a joint venture in China. Can you tell us more about it? >> Yeah, China is full of myth. >> Rebecca: It's full of ...? >> It's a very mythical country, and so there's a lot of talk about how Chinese does business. I was born and raised in one part of the greater China, and so I was very fortunate to be brought up by a very loving father and a mother. My mom, in those days... In those days, women have to really fight for anything, even education. There wasn't really good career for any technical women that graduated from the best university in the island. So the job I was kind of really encouraged to look for was like a secretary job or an airline stewardess job. My mom is not one of those types. She believed I need to come overseas and study and propel myself. She believes in lifelong learning. She's a career woman, and she coached my dad, who owns his own business, and he cultivated me a lot about this business best practice. How do you do business in China, and how do you work through the generation gaps and communicate more effectively? So I'm very blessed that I'm bilingual, and logically, I can debate and think basically in both language and both cultural mode, and so that helps a lot, in terms of doing a successful job in China. And the joint venture is really VMware's way to do it the right way in China, and we're not trying to brag about, we're a multinational company. We're trying to basically say, this is a good economy and a good part of the world that we want to be able to have our technology to make a difference. So we collaborated with a local China company called Qù Guàng and formed a private joint venture that's focusing on basically cloud management system, and we're bringing a lot of the virtualization and combining the technology and innovation from both cultures together. So that's really the mission of this company. >> And would you say that the Chinese customers are similar to the western customers in terms of what their needs are and where they want their businesses to go? >> At the very high level, absolutely. Relatively speaking, how do you get to that end target, that's where culture difference and social difference and how you orient your habits of doing business is where that difference comes in. But we focus on ... We were very fortunate to have this company that works with us. We have the same mission, same vision, and the same strategy. So we're basically co-founding this and marrying the best technology from both sides of the region together to basically offer to advance the data centers for all of China. For example, China has a very major initiative to revamp a lot of their data center across all provinces. That includes your very rich town like the Beijing and very, very far away regions, and we're very proud that the software can make anything happen. We believe this is a magical combination to basically help the economy and the society. >> And do you think ... Because this is so important, this joint venture, and as you said, we're coming in and doing this the right way in China ... >> Lily: Yes. >> Will this be the blueprint from now on for how VMware sets up its joint ventures? >> Well, this will be the first joint venture we do in greater China, and so far, it's been pretty successful. We are basically writing the blueprint as we go. So one of the key things I love about VMware is just we love creativity and we choose and bet on the right innovation, and we propel and drive and push for that, and we inspire all the country and the regions and the people and the teams around us to do it. So I think this is showing that spirit, meaning that, regardless what the policymaker may say, we believe business and technology, when you marry them in the right way, it's going to make a difference, and will make a revolutionary difference. So we're writing the blueprint as to how to do that. >> How would you describe the differences in the technology cultures of China and the US? Kara Swisher, in her keynote, took Silicon Valley to task a little bit and made fun the buzzy words about how people brag and failing and disruptor and other kind of buzzy things. Innovation, pivot. How would you describe the way the Chinese business culture thinks about creativity and innovation? >> So there is some similarity with western culture, or what you see in Silicon Valley, like what she was talking about. Young generation. They don't understand there is any limit. In fact, that is across genders. I notice a lot of the technology women actually are leading companies and starting companies, and basically, for example, in November, we did a pitch competition with Women Who Code in Beijing, and we focused only on women C-level in the China startup, and we're basically collaborating with local venture company and the VC company to basically choose the most innovative woman leaders in the startup industry, because the country is so entrepreneur, and to some extent, China is growing, and they're basically learning how to basically be really big, and scalability it a big thing. And this is where our technology can come in and our culture, working with them. To basically together make it a better place also comes in as well. So that portion, entrepreneurship is the same. The desire and aspiration, that undying commitment to basically propel the society, those are all the same. I do see a lot of young people, but I also see a lot of the generation, like in my age, basically are coming in with very much a mentoring and a sponsoring attitude to basically help cultivate a younger generation, and very forgiving on that, and so that is something I see, and it does remind me a lot about the focus on the family and the focus on this team working together. >> And is that having an impact on your western colleagues, seeing ... >> Yes, I think it's a little bit of a culture difference, a lot less about yourself. A lot more about, how do I make this work? There's a little bit of a pride in some of these young startup, or even in the age group like me, saying, I am going to help this country to be stronger. I'm going to help the people to be stronger. So they take pride in that as well. And that reminds me a little bit about ... I heard about made in USA, so China talk about made in China, but in essence, it's all the same. You want to take pride with your family. >> A national pride, yes. >> Yeah, you want to take pride with your family, with your national pride, but it doesn't mean you don't want to do business internationally. You still value your international collaboration. Then the key is, how do you go across that culture boundary and focus on the right business problem and the right social phenomenon to solve the problem and the challenges, and just propel the society and the people altogether. >> But that is a good point, that the pride that you feel in your country, someone else from another country feels that same degree of pride for their country, and that's the ... >> Exactly. And sometimes I feel doing this job is not just a technologist job or an R&D job. It's almost like blending the DNA between the two countries and the two cultures together, and how to figure out working together. I know it sounds like a cliche. But when you go ... >> Rebecca: Or a great campaign slogan. >> Yeah, but it's really something that's actually a big challenge, especially with some of the political environment nowadays. But what I notice is when we work together as a group of engineers, we don't talk about those kinds of things. We talk about technology, and we talk about products. We talk about innovation. We talk about customer problems. We talk about how to make the place better. And that's basically what we focus on. Day in, day out. >> Well, Lily Chang, thank you so much for talking to us today. It's been great. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, and we'll be right back with theCUBE's coverage of Women Transforming Technology. (upbeat techno music)

>>Hey guys. Welcome back to the Cubes coverage of Ansible Fast 2022. This is day two of our wall to wall coverage. Lisa Martin here with John Ferer. John, we're seeing this world where companies are saying if we can't automate it, we need to, The automation market is transforming. There's been a lot of buzz about that. A lot of technical chops here at Ansible Fest. >>Yeah, I mean, we've got a great guest here coming on Cuba alumni, Dean Newman, future room. He travels every event he's got. He's got his nose to the grindstone ear to the ground. Great analysis. I mean, we're gonna get into why it's important. How does Ansible fit into the big picture? It's really gonna be a great segment. The >>Board do it well, John just did my job for me about, I'll introduce him again. Daniel Newman, one of our alumni is Back Principal Analyst at Future and Research. Great to have you back on the cube. >>Yeah, it's good to join you. Excited to be back in Chicago. I don't know if you guys knew this, but for 40 years, this was my hometown. Now I don't necessarily brag about that anymore. I'm, I live in Austin now. I'm a proud Texan, but I did grow up here actually out in the west suburbs. I got off the plane, I felt the cold air, and I almost turned around and said, Does this thing go back? Yeah. Cause I'm, I've, I've grown thin skin. It did not take me long. I, I like the warm, Come on, >>I'm the saying, I'm from California and I got off the plane Monday. I went, Whoa, I need a coat. And I was in Miami a week ago and it was 85. >>Oh goodness. >>Crazy. So you just flew in. Talk about what's going on, your take on, on Ansible. We've talked a lot with the community, with partners, with customers, a lot of momentum. The flywheel of the community is going around and round and round. What are some of your perspectives that you see? >>Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's you know, I'm gonna take a quick step back. We're entering an era where companies are gonna have to figure out how to do more with less. Okay? We've got exponential data growth, we've got more architectural complexity than ever before. Companies are trying to discern how to deal with many different environments. And just at a macro level, Red Hat is one of the companies that is almost certainly gonna be part of this multi-cloud hybrid cloud era. So that should initially give a lot of confidence to the buying group that are looking at how to automate their environments. You're automating workflows, but really with, with Ansible, we're focused on automating it, automating the network. So as companies are kind of dig out, we're entering this recessionary period, Okay, we're gonna call it what it is. The first thing that they're gonna look at is how do we tech our way out of it? >>I had a wonderful one-on-one conversation with ServiceNow ceo, Bill McDermott, and we saw ServiceNow was in focus this morning in the initial opening session. This is the integration, right? Ansible integrating with ServiceNow. What we need to see is infrastructure automation, layers and applications working in concert to basically enable enterprises to be up and running all the time. Let's first fix the problems that are most common. Let's, let's automate 'em, let's script them. And then at some point, let's have them self resolving, which we saw at the end with Project Wisdom. So as I see it, automation is that layer that enterprises, boards, technologists, all can agree upon are basically here's something that can make our business more efficient, more profitable, and it's gonna deal with this short term downturn in a way that tech is actually gonna be the answer. Just like Bill and I said, let's tech our way out of it. >>If you look at the Red Hat being bought by ibm, you see Project Wisdom Project, not a product, it's a project. Project Wisdom is the confluence of research and practitioners kind of coming together with ai. So bringing AI power to the Ansible is interesting. Red Hat, Linux, Rel OpenShift, I mean, Red Hat's kind of position, isn't it? Kind of be in that right spot where a puck might be coming maybe. I mean, what do you think? >>Yeah, as analysts, we're really good at predicting the, the recent past. It's a joke I always like to make, but Red Hat's been building toward the future. I think for some time. Project Wisdom, first of all, I was very encouraged with it. One of the things that many people in the market probably have commented on is how close is IBM in Red Hat? Now, again, it's a $34 billion acquisition that was made, but boy, the cultures of these two companies couldn't be more different. And of course, Red Hat kind of carries this, this sort of middle ground layer where they provide a lot of value in services to companies that maybe don't use IBM at, at, for the public cloud especially. This was a great indication of how you can take the power of IBM's research, which of course has some of the world's most prolific data scientists, engineers, building things for the future. >>You know, you see things like yesterday they launched a, you know, an AI solution. You know, they're building chips, semiconductors, and technologies that are gonna power the future. They're building quantum. Long story short, they have these really brilliant technologists here that could be adding value to Red Hat. And I don't know that the, the world has fully been able to appreciate that. So when, when they got on stage and they kind of say, Here's how IBM is gonna help power the next generation, I was immediately very encouraged by the fact that the two companies are starting to show signs of how they can collaborate to offer value to their customers. Because of course, as John kind of started off with, his question is, they've kind of been where the puck is going. Open source, Linux hybrid cloud, This is the future. In the future. Every company's multi-cloud. And I said in a one-on-one meeting this morning, every company is going to probably have workloads on every cloud, especially large enterprises. >>Yeah. And I think that the secret's gonna be how do you make that evolve? And one of the things that's coming out of the industry over the years, and looking back as historians, we would say, gotta have standards. Well, with cloud, now people standards might slow things down. So you're gonna start to figure out how does the community and the developers are thinking it'll be the canary in the coal mine. And I'd love to get your reaction on that, because we got Cuban next week. You're seeing people kind of align and try to win the developers, which, you know, I always laugh cuz like, you don't wanna win, you want, you want them on your team, but you don't wanna win them. It's like a, it's like, so developers will decide, >>Well, I, I think what's happening is there are multiple forces that are driving product adoption. And John, getting the developers to support the utilization and adoption of any sort of stack goes a long way. We've seen how sticky it can be, how sticky it is with many of the public cloud pro providers, how sticky it is with certain applications. And it's gonna be sticky here in these interim layers like open source automation. And Red Hat does have a very compelling developer ecosystem. I mean, if you sat in the keynote this morning, I said, you know, if you're not a developer, some of this stuff would've been fairly difficult to understand. But as a developer you saw them laughing at jokes because, you know, what was it the whole part about, you know, it didn't actually, the ping wasn't a success, right? And everybody started laughing and you know, I, I was sitting next to someone who wasn't technical and, and you know, she kinda goes, What, what was so funny? >>I'm like, well, he said it worked. Do you see that? It said zero data trans or whatever that was. So, but if I may just really quickly, one, one other thing I did wanna say about Project Wisdom, John, that the low code and no code to the full stack developer is a continuum that every technology company is gonna have to think deeply about as we go to the future. Because the people that tend to know the process that needs to be automated tend to not be able to code it. And so we've seen every automation company on the planet sort of figuring out and how to address this low code, no code environment. I think the power of this partnership between IBM Research and Red Hat is that they have an incredibly deep bench of capabilities to do things like, like self-training. Okay, you've got so much data, such significant size models and accuracy is a problem, but we need systems that can self teach. They need to be able self-teach, self learn, self-heal so that we can actually get to the crux of what automation is supposed to do for us. And that's supposed to take the mundane out and enable those humans that know how to code to work on the really difficult and hard stuff because the automation's not gonna replace any of that stuff anytime soon. >>So where do you think looking at, at the partnership and the evolution of it between IBM research and Red Hat, and you're saying, you know, they're, they're, they're finally getting this synergy together. How is it gonna affect the future of automation and how is it poised to give them a competitive advantage in the market? >>Yeah, I think the future or the, the competitive space is that, that is, is ecosystems and integration. So yesterday you heard, you know, Red Hat Ansible focusing on a partnership with aws. You know, this week I was at Oracle Cloud world and they're talking about running their database in aws. And, and so I'm kind of going around to get to the answer to your question, but I think collaboration is sort of the future of growth and innovation. You need multiple companies working towards the same goal to put gobs of resources, that's the technical term, gobs of resources towards doing really hard things. And so Ansible has been very successful in automating and securing and focusing on very certain specific workloads that need to be automated, but we need more and there's gonna be more data created. The proliferation, especially the edge. So you saw all this stuff about Rockwell, How do you really automate the edge at scale? You need large models that are able to look and consume a ton of data that are gonna be continuously learning, and then eventually they're gonna be able to deliver value to these companies at scale. IBM plus Red Hat have really great resources to drive this kind of automation. Having said that, I see those partnerships with aws, with Microsoft, with ibm, with ServiceNow. It's not one player coming to the table. It's a lot of players. They >>Gotta be Switzerland. I mean they have the Switzerland. I mean, but the thing about the Amazon deal is like that marketplace integration essentially puts Ansible once a client's in on, on marketplace and you get the central on the same bill. I mean, that's gonna be a money maker for Ansible. I >>Couldn't agree more, John. I think being part of these public cloud marketplaces is gonna be so critical and having Ansible land and of course AWS largest public cloud by volume, largest marketplace today. And my opinion is that partnership will be extensible to the other public clouds over time. That just makes sense. And so you start, you know, I think we've learned this, John, you've done enough of these interviews that, you know, you start with the biggest, with the highest distribution and probability rates, which in this case right now is aws, but it'll land on in Azure, it'll land in Google and it'll continue to, to grow. And that kind of adoption, streamlining make it consumption more consumable. That's >>Always, I think, Red Hat and Ansible, you nailed it on that whole point about multicloud, because what happens then is why would I want to alienate a marketplace audience to use my product when it could span multiple environments, right? So you saw, you heard that Stephanie yesterday talk about they, they didn't say multiple clouds, multiple environments. And I think that is where I think I see this layer coming in because some companies just have to work on all clouds. That's the way it has to be. Why wouldn't you? >>Yeah. Well every, every company will probably end up with some workloads in every cloud. I just think that is the fate. Whether it's how we consume our SaaS, which a lot of people don't think about, but it always tends to be running on another hyperscale public cloud. Most companies tend to be consuming some workloads from every cloud. It's not always direct. So they might have a single control plane that they tend to lead the way with, but that is only gonna continue to change. And every public cloud company seems to be working on figuring out what their niche is. What is the one thing that sort of drives whether, you know, it is, you know, traditional, we know the commoditization of traditional storage network compute. So now you're seeing things like ai, things like automation, things like the edge collaboration tools, software being put into the, to the forefront because it's a different consumption model, it's a different margin and economic model. And then of course it gives competitive advantages. And we've seen that, you know, I came back from Google Cloud next and at Google Cloud next, you know, you can see they're leaning into the data AI cloud. I mean, that is their focus, like data ai. This is how we get people to come in and start using Google, who in most cases, they're probably using AWS or Microsoft today. >>It's a great specialty cloud right there. That's a big use case. I can run data on Google and run something on aws. >>And then of course you've got all kinds of, and this is a little off topic, but you got sovereignty, compliance, regulatory that tends to drive different clouds over, you know, global clouds like Tencent and Alibaba. You know, if your workloads are in China, >>Well, this comes back down at least to the whole complexity issue. I mean, it has to get complex before it gets easier. And I think that's what we're seeing companies opportunities like Ansible to be like, Okay, tame, tame the complexity. >>Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree with you. I mean, look, when I was watching the demonstrations today, my take is there's so many kind of simple, repeatable and mundane tasks in everyday life that enterprises need to, to automate. Do that first, you know? Then the second thing is working on how do you create self-healing, self-teaching, self-learning, You know, and, and I realize I'm a little broken of a broken record at this, but these are those first things to fix. You know, I know we want to jump to the future where we automate every task and we have multi-term conversational AI that is booking our calendars and driving our cars for us. But in the first place, we just need to say, Hey, the network's down. Like, let's make sure that we can quickly get access back to that network again. Let's make sure that we're able to reach our different zones and locations. Let's make sure that robotic arm is continually doing the thing it's supposed to be doing on the schedule that it's been committed to. That's first. And then we can get to some of these really intensive deep metaverse state of automation that we talk about. Self-learning, data replication, synthetic data. I'm just gonna throw terms around. So I sound super smart. >>In your customer conversations though, from an looking at the automation journey, are you finding most of them, or some percentage is, is wanting to go directly into those really complex projects rather than starting with the basics? >>I don't know that you're, you're finding that the customers want to do that? I think it's the architecture that often ends up being a problem is we as, as the vendor side, will tend to talk about the most complex problems that they're able to solve before companies have really started solving the, the immediate problems that are before them. You know, it's, we talk about, you know, the metaphor of the cloud is a great one, but we talk about the cloud, like it's ubiquitous. Yeah. But less than 30% of our workloads are in the public cloud. Automation is still in very early days and in many industries it's fairly nascent. And doing things like self-healing networks is still something that hasn't even been able to be deployed on an enterprise-wide basis, let alone at the industrial layer. Maybe at the company's on manufacturing PLAs or in oil fields. Like these are places that have difficult to reach infrastructure that needs to be running all the time. We need to build systems and leverage the power of automation to keep that stuff up and running. That's, that's just business value, which by the way is what makes the world go running. Yeah. Awesome. >>A lot of customers and users are struggling to find what's the value in automating certain process, What's the ROI in it? How do you help them get there so that they understand how to start, but truly to make it a journey that is a success. >>ROI tends to be a little bit nebulous. It's one of those things I think a lot of analysts do. Things like TCO analysis Yeah. Is an ROI analysis. I think the businesses actually tend to know what the ROI is gonna be because they can basically look at something like, you know, when you have an msa, here's the downtime, right? Business can typically tell you, you know, I guarantee you Amazon could say, Look for every second of downtime, this is how much commerce it costs us. Yeah. A company can generally say, if it was, you know, we had the energy, the windmills company, like they could say every minute that windmill isn't running, we're creating, you know, X amount less energy. So there's a, there's a time value proposition that companies can determine. Now the question is, is about the deployment. You know, we, I've seen it more nascent, like cybersecurity can tend to be nascent. >>Like what does a breach cost us? Well there's, you know, specific costs of actually getting the breach cured or paying for the cybersecurity services. And then there's the actual, you know, ephemeral costs of brand damage and of risks and customer, you know, negative customer sentiment that potentially comes out of it. With automation, I think it's actually pretty well understood. They can look at, hey, if we can do this many more cycles, if we can keep our uptime at this rate, if we can reduce specific workforce, and I'm always very careful about this because I don't believe automation is about replacement or displacement, but I do think it is about up-leveling and it is about helping people work on things that are complex problems that machines can't solve. I mean, said that if you don't need to put as many bodies on something that can be immediately returned to the organization's bottom line, or those resources can be used for something more innovative. So all those things are pretty well understood. Getting the automation to full deployment at scale, though, I think what often, it's not that roi, it's the timeline that gets misunderstood. Like all it projects, they tend to take longer. And even when things are made really easy, like with what Project Wisdom is trying to do, semantically enable through low code, no code and the ability to get more accuracy, it just never tends to happen quite as fast. So, but that's not an automation problem, That's just the crux of it. >>Okay. What are some of the, the next things on your plate? You're quite a, a busy guy. We, you, you were at Google, you were at Oracle, you're here today. What are some of the next things that we can expect from Daniel Newman? >>Oh boy, I moved Really, I do move really quickly and thank you for that. Well, I'm very excited. I'm taking a couple of work personal days. I don't know if you're a fan, but F1 is this weekend. I'm the US Grand Prix. Oh, you're gonna Austin. So I will be, I live in Austin. Oh. So I will be in Austin. I will be at the Grand Prix. It is work because it, you know, I'm going with a number of our clients that have, have sponsorships there. So I'll be spending time figuring out how the data that comes off of these really fun cars is meaningfully gonna change the world. I'll actually be talking to Splunk CEO at the, at the race on Saturday morning. But yeah, I got a lot of great things. I got a, a conversation coming up with the CEO of Twilio next week. We got a huge week of earnings ahead and so I do a lot of work on that. So I'll be on Bloomberg next week with Emily Chang talking about Microsoft and Google. Love talking to Emily, but just as much love being here on, on the queue with you >>Guys. Well we like to hear that. Who you're rooting for F one's your favorite driver. I, >>I, I like Lando. Do you? I'm Norris. I know it's not necessarily a fan favorite, but I'm a bit of a McLaren guy. I mean obviously I have clients with Oracle and Red Bull with Ball Common Ferrari. I've got Cly Splunk and so I have clients in all. So I'm cheering for all of 'em. And on Sunday I'm actually gonna be in the Williams Paddock. So I don't, I don't know if that's gonna gimme me a chance to really root for anything, but I'm always, always a big fan of the underdog. So maybe Latifi. >>There you go. And the data that comes off the how many central unbeliev, the car, it's crazy's. Such a scientific sport. Believable. >>We could have Christian, I was with Christian Horner yesterday, the team principal from Reside. Oh yeah, yeah. He was at the Oracle event and we did a q and a with him and with the CMO of, it's so much fun. F1 has been unbelievable to watch the momentum and what a great, you know, transitional conversation to to, to CX and automation of experiences for fans as the fan has grown by hundreds of percent. But just to circle back full way, I was very encouraged with what I saw today. Red Hat, Ansible, IBM Strong partnership. I like what they're doing in their expanded ecosystem. And automation, by the way, is gonna be one of the most robust investment areas over the next few years, even as other parts of tech continue to struggle that in cyber security. >>You heard it here. First guys, investment in automation and cyber security straight from two analysts. I got to sit between. For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube Live from Chicago, Ansible Fest 22. John and I will be back after a short break. SO'S stick around.

>> From the theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis", with Dave Vellante. >> The recent security breach of an Okta third party supplier has been widely reported. The criticisms of Okta's response have been harsh, and the impact on Okta's value has been obvious, investors shaved about $6 billion off the company's market cap during the week the hack was made public. We believe Okta's claim that the customer technical impact was, "Near zero," may be semantically correct. However, based on customer data, we feel Okta has a blind spot. There are customer ripple effects that require clear action which are missed in Okta's public statements, in our view. Okta's product portfolio remains solid, it's a clear leader in the identity space. But in our view, one part of the long journey back to credibility requires Okta to fully understand and recognize the true scope of this breach on its customers. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon "CUBE Insights", powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis", we welcome our ETR colleague, Erik Bradley, to share new data from the community. Erik, welcome. >> Thank you, Dave, always enjoy being on the show, particularly when we get to talk about a topic that's not being well covered in the mainstream media in my opinion. >> Yeah, I agree, you've got some new data, and we're going to share some of that today. Let's first review the timeline of this hack. On January 20th this year, Okta got an alert that something was amiss at one of its partners, a company called Sitel, that provides low-level contact center support for Okta. The next day, Sitel retained a forensic firm to investigate, which was completed, that investigation was completed on February 28th. A report dated March 10th was created, and Okta received a summary of that from Sitel on March 17th. Five days later, Lapsus$ posted the infamous screenshots on Twitter. And later that day, sheesh, Okta got the full report from Sitel, and then responded publicly. Then the media frenzy in the back and forth ensued. So Erik, you know, there's so much wrong with this timeline, it's been picked apart by the media. But I will say this, what appeared to be a benign incident and generally has turned into a PR disaster for Okta, and I imagine Sitel as well. Who I reached out to by the way, but they did not provide a comment, whereas Okta did. We'll share that later. I mean, where do we start on this, Erik? >> It's a great question, "Where do we start?" As you know, our motto here is opinions only exist due to a lack of data, so I'm going to start with the data. What we were able to do is because we had a survey that was in the field when the news broke, is that we were able to observe the data in realtime. So we sequestered the data up until that moment when it was announced, so before March 23rd and then after March 23rd. And although most of the responses came in prior, so it wasn't as much of an end as we would've liked. It really was telling to see the difference of how the survey responses changed from before the breach was announced to after, and we can get into a little bit more- >> So let's... Sorry, sorry to interrupt, let's bring that up, let's look at some of that data. And as followers of this program know... Let me just set it up, Erik. Every quarter, ETR, they have a proprietary net score methodology to determine customer spending momentum, and that's what we're talking about here. Essentially measuring the net number of customers spending more on a particular product or platform. So apologize for interrupting, but you're on this data right here. >> Not at all. >> So take us through this. >> Yeah, so again, let's caveat. Okta is still a premier company in our work. Top five in overall security, not just in their niche, and they still remained extremely strong at the end of the survey. However, when you kind of look at that at a more of a micro analysis, what you noticed was a true difference between before March 23rd and after. Overall, their cumulative net score or proprietary spending intention score that we use, was 56% prior. That dropped to 44% during the time period after, that is a significant drop. Even a little bit more telling, and again, small sample size, I want to be very fair about that. Before March 23rd, only three of our community members indicated any indication of replacing Okta. That number went to eight afterwards. So again, small number, but a big difference when you're talking about a percentage change. >> Yeah, so that's that sort of green line that was shown there. You know, not too damaging, but definitely a noticeable downturn with the caveat that it's a small end. But here's the thing that I love working with you, we didn't stop there. You went out, you talked to customers, I talked to a number of customers. You actually organized a panel. This week, Erik hosted a deep dive on the topic with CISOs. And we have, if we could bring up that next slide, Alex. These are some of the top CISOs in the community, and I'm going to just summarize the comments and then turn it over to you, Erik. The first one was really concerning, "We heard about this in the media," ooh, ooh, ouch. Next one, "Not a huge hit, but loss of trust." "We can't just shut Okta off like SolarWinds." So there's definitely a lock in effect there. "We may need to hire new people," i.e, "There's a business impact to us beyond the technical impact." "We're rethinking contract negotiations with Okta." And bottom line, "It's still a strong solution." "We're not really worried about our Okta environment, but this is a trust and communications issue." Erik, these are painful to read, and in the end of the day, Okta has to own this. Todd McKinnon did acknowledge this. As I said at the top, there are domino business impacts that Okta may not be seeing. What are your thoughts? >> There's a lot we're going to need to get into in a little bit, and I think you were spot on earlier, when McKinnon said there was no impact. And that's not actually true, there's a lot of peripheral, derivative impact that was brought up in our panel. Before we even did the panel though, I do want to say we went out quickly to about 20 customers and asked them if they were willing to give an opinion. And it was sort of split down the middle where about, you know, half of them were saying, "You know, this is okay. We're going to stand by 'em, Okta's the best in the industry." A few were cautious, "Opinion's unchanged, but we're going to take a look deeper." And then another 40% were just flat out negative. And again, small sample size, but you don't want to see that. It's indicative of reputational damage right away. That was what led us to say, "You know what, let's go do this panel." And as you know, from reading it and looking at the panel, well, a lot of topics were brought up about the derivative impact of it. And whether that's your own, you know, having to hire people to go look into your backend to deal with and manage Okta. Whether it's cyber insurance ramifications down the road, there's a lot of aspects that need to be discussed about this. >> Yeah now, so before I go on... And by the way, I've spent a fair amount of time just parsing, listening very carefully to Todd McKinnon's commentary. He did an interview with Emily Chang, it was quite useful. But before I go on, I reached out to Okta, and they were super responsive and I appreciate that. And I do believe they're taking this seriously, here's a statement they provided to theCUBE. Quote, "As a global leader in identity, we recognize the critical role Okta plays for our customers and our customers' end users. Okta has a culture of learning and improving, and we are taking the steps to prevent this from happening again. We know trust is earned, and building back our customers' trust in Okta through our actions and our ongoing support as their secure identity partner is our top priority." Okay, so look, you know, what are you going to say, right? I mean, I think they do own it. Again, the concern is the blind spots. So we put together this visual to try to explain how Okta is describing the impact, and maybe another way to look at it. So let me walk you through this. Here's a simple way in which organizations think about the impact of a breach. What's the probability of a breach, that's the vertical axis, and what's the impact on the horizontal. Now I feel as though business impact really is the financial, you know, condition. But we've narrowed this to map to Todd McKinnon's statements of the technical impact. And they've said the technical impact in terms of things customers need to do or change, is near zero, and that's the red dot that you see there. Look, the fact is, that Okta has more than 15,000 customers, and at most, 366 were directly impacted by this. That's less than 3% of the base, and it's probably less than that, they're just being conservative. And the technical impact which Todd McKinnon described in an interview, again, with Emily Chang, was near zero in terms of actions the customers had to take on things like reporting and changes and remediation. Basically negligible. But based on the customer feedback outside of that 366, that's what we're calling that blind spot and that bracket. And then we list the items that we are hearing from customers on things that they have to do now, despite that minimal exposure. Erik, this is new information that we've uncovered through the ETR process, and there's a long list of collateral impacts that you just referred to before, actions that customers have to take, right? >> Yeah, there's a lot, and the panel really brought that to life even more than I expected to be quite honest. First of all, you're right, most of them believe that this was a minimal impact. The true damage here was reputational, and the derivatives that come from it. We had one panelist say that they now have to go hire people, because, and I hate to say this, but Okta isn't known for their best professional support. So they have to go get people now in to kind of do that themselves and manage that. That's obviously not the easiest thing to do in this environment. We had other ones express concern about, "Hey I'm an Okta customer. When I have to do my cyber insurance renewal, is my policy going to go up? Is my premium going to go up?" And it's not something that they even want to have to handle, but they do. There were a lot of concerns. One particular person didn't think the impact was minimal, and I just think it's worth bringing up. There was no demand for ransom here. So there were only two and a half percent of Okta customers that were hit, but we don't know what the second play is, right, this could just be stage one. And I think that there was one particular person on the panel who truly believes that, that could be the case, that this was just the first step. And in his opinion, there wasn't anything specific about those 366 customers that made him feel like the bad actor was targeting them. So he does believe that this might be a step one of a step two situation. Now that's a, you know, bit of an alarmist opinion and the rest of the panel didn't really echo it, but it is something that's kind of worth bringing up out there. >> Well, you know, it just pays to be paranoid. I mean, you know, it was reported that supposedly, this hack was done by a 16-year-old in England, out of his, you know, mother's house, but who knows? You know, other actors might have paid that individual to see what they could do. It could have been a little bit of reconnaissance, throw the pawn in there and see how, you know, what the response is like. So I want to parse some of Todd McKinnon's statements from that Bloomberg interview. Look, we've always, you and I both have been impressed with Okta, and Todd McKinnon's management. His decisions, execution, leadership, super impressive individual. You know, big fans of the company. And in the interview, it looked like (chuckles) the guy hadn't slept in three weeks, so really you have to feel for him. But I think there are some statements that have to be unpacked. The first one, McKinnon took responsibility and talked about how they'll be transparent about steps they're taking in the future to avoid you know, similar problems. We talked about the near-zero technical impact, we don't need to go there anymore. But Erik, the two things that struck me as communication misfires were the last two. Especially the penultimate statement there, quote, "The competitor product was at fault for this breach." You know, by the way, I believe this to be true. Evidently, Sitel was not using Okta as its identity access platform. You know, we're all trying to figure out who that is. I can tell you it definitely was not CyberArk, we're still digging to find out who. But you know, you can't say in my view, "We are taking responsibility," and then later say it was the competitor's fault. And I know that's not what he meant, but that's kind of how it came across. And even if it's true, you just don't say that later in a conversation after saying that, "We own it." Now on the last point, love your thoughts on this, Erik? My first reaction was Okta's throwing Sitel under the bus. You know, Okta's asking for forgiveness from its customers, but it just shot its partner, and I kind of get it. This shows that they're taking action but I would've preferred something like, "Look, we've suspended our use of Sitel for the time being pending a more detailed review. We've shut down that relationship to block any exposures. Our focus right now is on customers, and we'll take a look at that down the road." But I have to say in looking at the timeline, it looks like Sitel did hide the ball a little bit, and so you can't blame 'em. And you know, what are your thoughts on that? >> Well, I'll go back to my panelists again, who unanimously agreed this was a masterclass on how not to handle crisis management. And I do feel for 'em, they're a fantastic management team. The acquisition of Auth0 alone, was just such a brilliant move that you have to kind of wonder what went wrong here, they clearly were blindsided. I agree with you that Sitel was not forthcoming quickly enough, and I have a feeling that, that's what got them in this position, in a bad PR. However, you can't go ahead and fire your partner and then turn around and ask other people not to fire you. Particularly until a very thorough investigation and a root cause analysis has been released to everyone. And the customers that I have spoken to don't believe that, that is done yet. Now, when I ask them directly, "Would you consider leaving Okta?" Their answers were, "No, it is not easy to rip and replace, and we're not done doing our due diligence." So it's interesting that Okta's customers are giving them that benefit of the doubt, but we haven't seen it, you know, flow the other way with Okta's partner. >> Yeah, and that's why I would've preferred a different public posture, because who knows? I mean, is Sitel the only partner that's not using Okta as its identity management, who knows? I'd like to learn more about that. And to your point, you know, maybe Okta's got to vertically integrate here and start, you know, supporting the lower level stuff directly itself, you know, and/or tightening up those partnerships. Now of course, the impact on Okta obviously has been really serious, big hit on the stock. You know, they're piling on inflation and quantitative tightening and rate hikes. But the real damage, as we've said, is trust and reputation, which Okta has earned, and now it has to work hard to earn back. And it's unfortunate. Look, Okta was founded in 2009 and in over a decade, you know, by my count, there have been no major incidents that are obvious. And we've seen the damage that hackers can do by going after the digital supply chain and third and fourth party providers. You know, rules on disclosure is still not tight and that maybe is part of the problem here. Perhaps the new law The House just sent over to President Biden, is going to help. But the point, Erik, is Okta is not alone here. It feels like they got what looked like a benign alert. Sitel wasn't fully transparent, and Okta is kind of fumbling on the comms, which creates this spiraling effect. Look, we're going to have to wait for the real near-term and midterm impacts, but longterm, I personally believe Okta is going to be fine. But they're going to have to sacrifice some margin possibly in the near to midterm, and go through more pain to regain the loyalty of its customers. And I really would like to hear from Okta that they understand that customers, the impact of this breach to customers, actually does go beyond the 366 that were possibly compromised. Erik, I'll give you the final word. >> Yeah, there's a couple of things there if I can have a moment, and yes, Okta... Well, there was a great quote, one of the guys said, "Okta's built like a tank, but they just gave the keys to a 16 year old valet." So he said, "There is some concern here." But yes, they are best of breed, they are the leader, but there is some concern. And every one of the guys I spoke to, all CISOs, said, "This is going to come up at renewal time. At a minimum, this is leverage. I have to ask them to audit their third parties and their partners. I have to bring this up when it comes time." And then the other one that's a little bit of a concern is data-wise. We saw Ping Identity jump big, from 9% net score to 24% net score. Don't know if it's causative or correlated, but it did happen. Another thing to be concerned about out there, is Microsoft is making absolutely massive strides in security. And all four of the panelists said, "Hey, I've got an E5 license, why don't I get the most out of it? I'm at least going to look." So for Okta to say, you know, "Hey, there's no impact here," it's just not true, there is an impact, they're saying what they need to say. But there's more to this, you know, their market cap definitely got hit. But you know, I think over time if the market stabilized, we could see that recover. It's a great management team, but they did just open the door for a big, big player like Microsoft. And you and I also both know that there's a lot of emerging names out there too, that would like to, you know, take a little bit of that share. >> And you know, but here's the thing, I want to keep going here for a minute. Microsoft got hit by lapses, Nvidia got hit by lapses. But I think, Erik, I feel like people, "Oh yeah, Microsoft, they get hit all the time." They're kind of used to it with Microsoft, right? So that's why I'm saying, it's really interesting here. Customers want to consolidate their security portfolio and the number of tools that they have, you know. But then you look at something like this and you say, "Okay, we're narrowing the blast radius. You know, maybe we have to rethink that and that creates more complexity," and so it's a very complicated situation. But you know, your point about Microsoft is ironic, right. Because you know, when you see Microsoft, Amazon, you know, customers get hit all the time and it's oftentimes the fault of the customer, or the partner. And so it seems like, again, coming back to the comms of this, is that really is the one thing that they just didn't get right. >> Yeah, the biggest takeaway from this without a doubt is it's not the impact of the breach, it was the impact of their delay and how they handled it and how they managed it. That's through the course of 25 CISOs I've spoken to now, that's unanimous. It's not about that this was a huge damaging hit, but the damage really came from their reaction or lack thereof. >> Yeah, and it's unfortunate, 'cause it feels like a lot of it was sort of, I want to say out of their control because obviously they could have audited the partners. But still, I feel like they got thrown a curve ball that they really had a, you know, difficult time, you know, parsing through that. All right, hey, we got to leave it there for now. Thank you, Erik Bradley, appreciate you coming on, It's always a pleasure to have you >> Always good talking to you too, Dave, thanks a lot. >> ETR team, you guys are amazing, do some great work. I want to thank Stephanie Chan, who helps me with background research for "Breaking Analysis". Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, help get the word out, as do some others. Alex Myerson on production, Alex, thank you. And Rob Hof, is our EIC at SiliconANGLE. Remember, all these episodes, they are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search, "Breaking Analysis podcast." I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Check out etr.ai, it's the best in the business for real customer data real-time, near real-time, awesome platform. You can reach out to me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com, or @DVellante, or comment on my LinkedIn post. This is Dave Vellante, for Erik Bradley, and "theCUBE Insights", powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, be well, and we'll see you next time. (bright music)

>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to the a day in the life of a data science talk. Uh, my name is Terry Chang. I'm a data scientist for the ASML container platform team. And with me, I have in the chat room, they will be moderating the chat. I have Matt MCO as well as Doug Tackett, and we're going to dive straight into kind of what we can do with the asthma container platform and how we can support the role of a data scientist. >>So just >>A quick agenda. So I'm going to do some introductions and kind of set the context of what we're going to talk about. And then we're actually going to dive straight into the ASML container platforms. So we're going to walk straight into what a data scientist will do, kind of a pretty much a day in the life of the data scientists. And then we'll have some question and answer. So big data has been the talk within the last few years within the last decade or so. And with big data, there's a lot of ways to derive meaning. And then a lot of businesses are trying to utilize their applications and trying to optimize every decision with their, uh, application utilizing data. So previously we had a lot of focus on data analytics, but recently we've seen a lot of data being used for machine learning. So trying to take any data that they can and send it off to the data scientists to start doing some modeling and trying to do some prediction. >>So that's kind of where we're seeing modern businesses rooted in analytics and data science in itself is a team sport. We're seeing that it doesn't, we need more than data scientists to do all this modeling. We need data engineers to take the data, massage the data and do kind of some data manipulation in order to get it right for the data scientists. We have data analysts who are monitoring the models, and we even have the data scientists themselves who are building and iterating through multiple different models until they find a one that is satisfactory to the business needs. Then once they're done, they can send it off to the software engineers who will actually build it out into their application, whether it's a mobile app or a web app. And then we have the operations team kind of assigning the resources and also monitoring it as well. >>So we're really seeing data science as a team sport, and it does require a lot of different expertise and here's the kind of basic machine learning pipeline that we see in the industry now. So, uh, at the top we have this training environment and this is, uh, an entire loop. Uh, we'll have some registration, we'll have some inferencing and at the center of all, this is all the data prep, as well as your repositories, such as for your data, for any of your GitHub repository, things of that sort. So we're kind of seeing the machine learning industry, go follow this very basic pattern and at a high level I'll glance through this very quickly, but this is kind of what the, uh, machine learning pipeline will look like on the ASML container platform. So at the top left, we'll have our, our project depository, which is our, uh, persistent storage. >>We'll have some training clusters, we'll have a notebook, we'll have an inference deployment engine and a rest API, which is all sitting on top of the Kubernetes cluster. And the benefit of the container platform is that this is all abstracted away from the data scientist. So I will actually go straight into that. So just to preface, before we go into the data as small container platform, where we're going to look at is a machine learning example, problem that is, uh, trying to predict how long a specific taxi ride will take. So with a Jupiter notebook, the data scientists can take all of this data. They can do their data manipulation, train a model on a specific set of features, such as the location of a taxi ride, the duration of a taxi ride, and then model it to trying to figure out, you know, what, what kind of prediction we can get on a future taxi ride. >>So that's the example that we will talk through today. I'm going to hop out of my slides and jump into my web browser. So let me zoom in on this. So here I have a Jupiter environment and, um, this is all running on the container platform. All I need is actually this link and I can access my environment. So as a data scientist, I can grab this link from my it admin or my system administrator. And I could quickly start iterating and, and start coding. So on the left-hand side of the Jupiter, we actually have a file directory structure. So this is already synced up to my get repository, which I will show in a little bit on the container platform so quickly I can pull any files that are on my get hub repository. I can even push with a button here, but I can, uh, open up this Python notebook. >>And with all this, uh, unique features of the Jupiter environment, I can start coding. So each of these cells can run Python code and in specific the container at the ESMO container platform team, we've actually built our own in-house lime magic commands. So these are unique commands, um, that we can use to interact with the underlying infrastructure of the container platform. So the first line magic command that I want to mention is this command called percent attachments. When I run this command, I'll actually get the available training clusters that I can send training jobs to. So this specific notebook, uh, it's pretty much been created for me to quickly iterate and develop a model very quickly. I don't have to use all the resources. I don't have to allocate a full set of GPU boxes onto my little Jupiter environment. So with the training cluster, I can attach these individual data science notebooks to those training clusters and the data scientists can actually utilize those resources as a shared environment. >>So the, essentially the shared large eight GPU box can actually be shared. They don't have to be allocated to a single data scientist moving on. We have another line magic command, it's called percent percent Python training. This is how we're going to utilize that training cluster. So I will prepare the cell percent percent with the name of the training cluster. And this is going to tell this notebook to send this entire training cell, to be trained on those resources on that training cluster. So the data scientists can quickly iterate through a model. They can then format that model and all that code into a large cell and send it off to that training cluster. So because of that training cluster is actually located somewhere else. It has no context of what has been done locally in this notebook. So we're going to have to do and copy everything into one large cell. >>So as you see here, I'm going to be importing some libraries and I'm in a, you know, start defining some helper functions. I'm going to read in my dataset and with the typical data science modeling life cycle, we're going to have to take in the data. We're going to have to do some data pre-processing. So maybe the data scientists will do this. Maybe the data engineer will do this, but they have access to that data. So I'm here. I'm actually getting there to be reading in the data from the project repository. And I'll talk about this a little bit later with all of the clusters within the container platform, we have access to some project repository that has been set up using the underlying data fabric. So with this, I have, uh, some data preprocessing, I'm going to cleanse some of my data that I noticed that maybe something is missing or, uh, some data doesn't look funky. >>Maybe the data types aren't correct. This will all happen here in these cells. So once that is done, I can print out that the data is done cleaning. I can start training my model. So here we have to split our data, set into a test, train, uh, data split so that we have some data for actually training the model and some data to test the model. So I can split my data there. I could create my XG boost object to start doing my training and XG boost is kind of like a decision tree machine learning algorithm, and I'm going to fit my data into this, uh, XG boost algorithm. And then I'm going to do some prediction. And then in addition, I'm actually going to be tracking some of the metrics and printing them out. So these are common metrics that we, that data scientists want to see when they do their training of the algorithm. >>Just to see if some of the accuracy is being improved, if the loss is being improved or the mean absolute error. So things like that. So these are all things, data scientists want to see. And at the end of this training job, I'm going to be saving the model. So I'm going to be saving it back into the project repository in which we will have access to. And at the end, I will print out the end time so I can execute that cell. And I've already executed that cell. So you'll see all of these print statements happening here. So importing the libraries, the training was run reading and data, et cetera. All of this has been printed out from that training job. Um, and in order to access that, uh, kind of glance through that, we would get an output with a unique history URL. >>So when we send the training job to that training cluster, we'll the training cluster will send back a unique URL in which we'll use the last line magic command that I want to talk about called percent logs. So percent logs will actually, uh, parse out that response from the training cluster. And actually we can track in real time what is happening in that training job so quickly, we can see that the data scientist has a sandbox environment available to them. They have access to their get repository. They have access to a project repository in which they can read in some of their data and save the model. So very quick interactive environment for the data scientists to do all of their work. And it's all provisioned on the ASML container platform. And it's also abstracted away. So here, um, I want to mention that again, this URL is being surfaced through the container platform. >>The data scientist doesn't have to interact with that at all, but let's take, it's take a step back. Uh, this is the day to day in the life of the data scientists. Now, if we go backwards into the container platform and we're going to walk through how it was all set up for them. So here is my login page to the container platform. I'm going to log in as my user, and this is going to bring me to the, uh, view of the, uh, Emma lops tenant within the container platform. So this is where everything has been set up for me, the data scientist doesn't have to see this if they don't need to, but what I'll walk through now is kind of the topics that I mentioned previously that we would go back into. So first is the project repository. So this project deposited comes with each tenant that is created on the platform. >>So this is a more, nothing more than a shared collaborative workspace environment in which data scientist or any data scientist who is allocated to this tenant. They have this politics client that can visually see all their data of all, all of their code. And this is actually taking a piece of the underlying data fabric and using that for your project depository. So you can see here, I have some code I can create and see my scoring script. I can see the models that have been created within this tenant. So it's pretty much a powerful tool in which you can store your code store any of your data and have the ability to read and write from any of your Jupiter environments or any of your created clusters within this tenant. So a very cool ad here in which you can, uh, quickly interact with your data. >>The next thing I want to show is the source control. So here is where you would plug in all of your information for your source control. And if I edit this, you guys will actually see all the information that I've passed in to configure the source control. So on the backend, the container platform will take these credentials and connect the Jupiter notebooks you create within this tenant to that get repository. So this is the information that I've passed in. If GitHub is not of interest, we also have support for bit bucket here as well. So next I want to show you guys that we do have these notebook environments. So, um, the notebook environment was created here and you can see that I have a notebook called Teri notebook, and this is all running on the Kubernetes environment within the container platform. So either the data scientists can come here and create their notebook or their project admin can create the notebook. >>And all you'd have to do is come here to this notebook end points. And this, the container platform will actually map the container platform to a specific port in which you can just give this link to the data scientists. And this link will actually bring them to their own Jupiter environment and they can start doing all of their model just as I showed in that previous Jupiter environment. Next I want to show the training cluster. This is the training cluster that was created in which I can attach my notebook to start utilizing those training clusters. And then the last thing I want to show is the model, the deployment cluster. So once that model has been saved, we have a model registry in which we can register the model into the platform. And then the last step is to create a deployment clusters. So here on my screen, I have a deployment cluster called taxi deployment. >>And then all these serving end points have been configured for me. And most importantly, this endpoint model. So the deployment cluster is actually a wrap the, uh, train model with the flask wrapper and add a rest endpoint to it so quickly. I can operationalize my model by taking this end point and creating a curl command, or even a post request. So here I have my trusty postman tool in which I can format a post request. So I've taken that end point from the container platform. I've formatted my body, uh, right here. So these are some of the features that I want to send to that model. And I want to know how long this specific taxi ride at this location at this time of day would take. So I can go ahead and send that request. And then quickly I will get an output of the ride. >>Duration will take about 2,600 seconds. So pretty much we've walked through how a data scientists can quickly interact with their notebook. They can train their model. And then coming into the platform, we saw the project repository, we saw the source control. We can register the model within the platform, and then quickly we can operationalize that model with our deployment cluster, uh, and have our model up and running and available for inference. So that wraps up the demo. Uh, I'm gonna pass it back to Doug and Matt and see if they want to come off mute and see if there are any questions, Matt, Doug, you there. Okay. >>Yeah. Hey, Hey Terry, sorry. Sorry. Just had some trouble getting off mute there. Uh, no, that was a, that was an excellent presentation. And I think there are generally some questions that come up when I talk to customers around how integrated into the Kubernetes ecosystem is this capability and where does this sort of Ezreal starts? And the open source, uh, technologies like, um, cube flow as an example, uh, begin. >>Yeah, sure. Matt. So this is kind of one layer up. We have our Emma LOBs tenant and this is all running on a piece of a Kubernetes cluster. So if I log back out and go into the site admin view, this is where you would see all the Kubernetes clusters being created. And it's actually all abstracted away from the data scientists. They don't have to know Kubernetes. They just interact with the platform if they want to. But here in the site admin view, I had this Kubernetes dashboard and here on the left-hand side, I have all my Kubernetes sections. So if I just add some compute hosts, whether they're VMs or cloud compute hosts, like ETQ hosts, we can have these, uh, resources abstracted away from us to then create a Kubernetes cluster. So moving on down, I have created this Kubernetes cluster utilizing those resources. >>Um, so if I go ahead and edit this cluster, you'll actually see that have these hosts, which is just a click and a click and drop method. I can move different hosts to then configure my Kubernetes cluster. Once my Kubernetes cluster is configured, I can then create Kubernetes tenant or in this case, it's a namespace. So once I have this namespace available, I can then go into that tenant. And as my user, I don't actually see that it is running on Kubernetes. So in addition with our ML ops tenants, you have the ability to bootstrap cute flow. So queue flow is a open source machine learning framework that is run on Kubernetes, and we have the ability to link that up as well. So, uh, coming back to my Emma lops tenant, I can log in what I showed is the ASML container platform version of Emma flops. But you see here, we've also integrated QP flow. So, uh, very, uh, a nod to, uh, HPS contribution to, you know, utilizing open source. Um, it's actually all configured within our platform. So, um, hopefully, >>Yeah, actually, Tara, can you hear me? It's Doug. So there were a couple of other questions actually about key flare that came in. I wonder whether you could just comment on why we've chosen cube flow. Cause I know there was a question about ML flow in stead and what the differences between ML flow and coop flow. >>Yeah, sure. So the, just to reiterate, there are some questions about QP flow and I'm just, >>Yeah, so obviously one of, uh, one of the people watching saw the queue flow dashboard there, I guess. Um, and so couldn't help but get excited about it. But there was another question about whether, you know, ML flow versus cube flow and what the difference was between them. >>Yeah. So with flow, it's, it's an open source framework that Google has developed. It's a very powerful framework that comes with a lot of other unique tools and Kubernetes. So with Q flow, you really have the ability to launch other notebooks. You have the ability to utilize different Kubernetes operators like TensorFlow and PI torch. You can utilize a lot of the, some of the frameworks within Q4 to do training like Q4 pipelines, which visually allow you to see your training jobs, uh, within the queue flow. It also has a plethora of different serving mechanisms, such as Seldin, uh, for, you know, deploying your, your machine learning models. You have Ks serving, you have TF serving. So Q4 is very, it's a very powerful tool for data scientists to utilize if they want a full end to end open source and know how to use Kubernetes. So it's just a, another way to do your machine learning model development and right with ML flow, it's actually a different piece of the machine learning pipeline. So ML flow mainly focuses on model experimentation, comparing different models, uh, during the training and it off it can be used with Q4. >>The complimentary Terry I think is what you're saying. Sorry. I know we are dramatically running out of time now. So that was really fantastic demo. Thank you very much, indeed. >>Exactly. Thank you. So yeah, I think that wraps it up. Um, one last thing I want to mention is there is this slide that I want to show in case you have any other questions, uh, you can visit hp.com/asml, hp.com/container platform. If you have any questions and that wraps it up. So thank you guys.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody Jeff Frick here with the cube. This is a special week it's Grace Hopper week, and Grace Hopper is the best name in tech conferences. The celebration of women in computing, and we've been going there for years we're not there this year, but one of the themes that comes up over and over at Grace Hopper is women and girls need to see women in positions that they can envision themselves being in someday. That is a really important piece of the whole diversity conversation is can I see people that I can role model after and I just want to bring up something from a couple years back from 2016 when we were there, we were there with Mimi Valdez, Christina Deoja and Dr. Jeanette Epps, Dr. Jeanette Epps is the astronaut on the right. They were there talking about "The Hidden Figures" movie. If you remember it came out 2016, it was about Katherine Johnson and all the black women working at NASA. They got no credit for doing all the math that basically keep all the astronauts safe and they made a terrific movie about it. And Janet is going up on the very first Blue Origin Space Mission Next year. This was announced a couple of months ago, so again, phenomenal leadership, black lady astronaut, going to go into space and really provide a face for a lot of young girls that want to get into that and its clearly a great STEM opportunity. So we're excited to have four terrific women today that well also are the leaders that the younger women can look up to and follow their career. So we're excited to have them so we're just going to go around. We got four terrific guests, our first one is Annabel Chang, She is the Head of State Policy and Government Regulations at Waymo. Annabel great to see you, where are you coming in from today? >> from San Francisco >> Jeff: Awesome. Next up is Inamarie Johnson. She is the Chief People and Diversity Officer for Zendesk Inamarie, great to see you. Where are you calling in from today? >> Great to be here. I am calling in from Palos Verdes the state >> Jeff: awesome >> in Southern California. >> Jeff: Some of the benefits of a virtual sometimes we can, we couldn't do that without the power of the internet. And next up is Jennifer Cabalquinto she is the Chief Financial Officer of the Golden State Warriors. Jennifer, great to see you Where are you coming in from today? >> Well, I wish I was coming in from the Chase Center in San Francisco but I'm actually calling in from Santa Cruz California today. >> Jeff: Right, It's good to see you and you can surf a lot better down there. So that's probably not all bad. And finally to round out our panelists, Kate Hogan, she is the COO of North America for Accenture. Kate, great to see you as well. Where are you coming in from today? >> Well, it's good to see you too. I am coming in from the office actually in San Jose. >> Jeff: From the office in San Jose. All right, So let's get into it . You guys are all very senior, you've been doing this for a long time. We're in a kind of a crazy period of time in terms of diversity with all the kind of social unrest that's happening. So let's talk about some of your first your journeys and I want to start with you Annabel. You're a lawyer you got into lawyering. You did lawyering with Diane Feinstein, kind of some politics, and also the city of San Francisco. And then you made this move over to tech. Talk about that decision and what went into that decision and how did you get into tech? 'cause we know part of the problem with diversity is a pipeline problem. You came over from the law side of the house. >> Yes, and to be honest politics and the law are pretty homogenous. So when I made the move to tech, it was still a lot of the same, but what I knew is that I could be an attorney anywhere from Omaha Nebraska to Miami Florida. But what I couldn't do was work for a disruptive company, potentially a unicorn. And I seized that opportunity and (indistinct) Lyft early on before Ride Hailing and Ride Sharing was even a thing. So it was an exciting opportunity. And I joined right at the exact moment that made myself really meaningful in the organization. And I'm hoping that I'm doing the same thing right now at Waymo. >> Great, Inamarie you've come from one of my favorite stories I like to talk about from the old school Clorox great product management. I always like to joke that Silicon Valley needs a pipeline back to Cincinnati and Proctor and Gamble to get good product managers out here. You were in the classic, right? You were there, you were at Honeywell Plantronics, and then you jumped over to tech. Tell us a little bit about that move. Cause I'm sure selling Clorox is a lot different than selling the terrific service that you guys provide at Zendesk. I'm always happy when I see Zendesk in my customer service return email, I know I'm going to get taken care of. >> Oh wow, that's great. We love customers like you., so thank you for that. My journey is you're right from a fortune 50 sort of more portfolio type company into tech. And I think one of the reasons is because when tech is starting out and that's what Zendesk was a few five years back or so very much an early stage growth company, two things are top of mind, one, how do we become more global? And how do we make sure that we can go up market and attract enterprise grade customers? And so my experience having only been in those types of companies was very interesting for a startup. And what was interesting for me is I got to live in a world where there were great growth targets and numbers, things I had never seen. And the agility, the speed, the head plus heart really resonated with my background. So super glad to be in tech, but you're right. It's a little different than a consumer products. >> Right, and then Jennifer, you're in a completely different world, right? So you worked for the Golden State Warriors, which everybody knows is an NBA team, but I don't know that everyone knows really how progressive the Warriors are beyond just basketball in terms of the new Chase Center, all the different events that you guys put on it. And really the leadership there has decided we really want to be an entertainment company of which the Golden State Warrior basketball team has a very, very important piece, you've come from the entertainment industry. So that's probably how they found you, but you're in the financial role. You've always been in the financial role, not traditionally thought about as a lot of women in terms of a proportion of total people in that. So tell us a little bit about your experience being in finance, in entertainment, and then making this kind of hop over to, I guess Uber entertainment. I don't know even how you would classify the warriors. >> Sports entertainment, live entertainment. Yeah, it's interesting when the Warriors opportunity came up, I naturally said well no, I don't have any sports background. And it's something that we women tend to do, right? We self edit and we want to check every box before we think that we're qualified. And the reality is my background is in entertainment and the Warriors were looking to build their own venue, which has been a very large construction project. I was the CFO at Universal Studios Hollywood. And what do we do there? We build large attractions, which are just large construction projects and we're in the entertainment business. And so that sort of B to C was a natural sort of transition for me going from where I was with Universal Studios over to the Warriors. I think a finance career is such a great career for women. And I think we're finding more and more women entering it. It is one that you sort of understand your hills and valleys, you know when you're going to be busy and so you can kind of schedule around that. I think it's really... it provides that you have a seat at the table. And so I think it's a career choice that I think is becoming more and more available to women certainly more now than it was when I first started. >> Yeah, It's interesting cause I think a lot of people think of women naturally in human resources roles. My wife was a head of human resources back in the day, or a lot of marketing, but not necessarily on the finance side. And then Kate go over to you. You're one of the rare birds you've been at Accenture  for over 20 years. So you must like airplanes and travel to stay there that long. But doing a little homework for this, I saw a really interesting piece of you talking about your boss challenging you to ask for more work, to ask for a new opportunity. And I thought that was really insightful that you, you picked up on that like Oh, I guess it's incumbent on me to ask for more, not necessarily wait for that to be given to me, it sounds like a really seminal moment in your career. >> It was important but before I tell you that story, because it was an important moment of my career and probably something that a lot of the women here on the panel here can relate to as well. You mentioned airplanes and it made me think of my dad. My father was in the air force and I remember him telling stories when I was little about his career change from the air force into a career in telecommunications. So technology for me growing up Jeff was, it was kind of part of the dinner table. I mean it was just a conversation that was constantly ongoing in our house. And I also, as a young girl, I loved playing video games. We had a Tandy computer down in the basement and I remember spending too many hours playing video games down there. And so for me my history and my really at a young age, my experience and curiosity around tech was there. And so maybe that's, what's fueling my inspiration to stay at Accenture for as long as I have. And you're right It's been two decades, which feels tremendous, but I've had the chance to work across a bunch of different industries, but you're right. I mean, during that time and I relate with what Jennifer said in terms of self editing, right? Women do this and I'm no exception, I did this. And I do remember I'm a mentor and a sponsor of mine who called me up when I'm kind of I was at a pivotal moment in my career and he said you know Kate, I've been waiting for you to call me and tell me you want this job. And I never even thought about it. I mean I just never thought that I'd be a candidate for the job and let alone somebody waiting for me to kind of make the phone call. I haven't made that mistake again, (laughing) but I like to believe I learned from it, but it was an important lesson. >> It's such a great lesson and women are often accused of being a little bit too passive and not necessarily looking out for in salary negotiations or looking for that promotion or kind of stepping up to take the crappy job because that's another thing we hear over and over from successful people is that some point in their career, they took that job that nobody else wanted. They took that challenge that really enabled them to take a different path and really a different Ascension. And I'm just curious if there's any stories on that or in terms of a leader or a mentor, whether it was in the career, somebody that you either knew or didn't know that was someone that you got kind of strength from kind of climbing through your own, kind of career progression. Will go to you first Annabel. >> I actually would love to talk about the salary negotiations piece because I have a group of friends about that we've been to meeting together once a month for the last six years now. And one of the things that we committed to being very transparent with each other about was salary negotiations and signing bonuses and all of the hard topics that you kind of don't want to talk about as a manager and the women that I'm in this group with span all types of different industries. And I've learned so much from them, from my different job transitions about understanding the signing bonus, understanding equity, which is totally foreign to me coming from law and politics. And that was one of the most impactful tools that I've ever had was a group of people that I could be open with talking about salary negotiations and talking about how to really manage equity. Those are totally foreign to me up until this group of women really connected me to these topics and gave me some of that expertise. So that is something I strongly encourage is that if you haven't openly talked about salary negotiations before you should begin to do so. >> It begs the question, how was the sensitivity between the person that was making a lot of money and the person that wasn't? And how did you kind of work through that as a group for the greater good of everyone? >> Yeah, I think what's really eye opening is that for example, We had friends who were friends who were on tech, we had friends who were actually the entrepreneurs starting their own businesses or law firm, associates, law firm partners, people in PR, so we understood that there was going to be differences within industry and frankly in scale, but it was understanding even the tools, whether I think the most interesting one would be signing bonus, right? Because up until a few years ago, recruiters could ask you what you made and how do you avoid that question? How do you anchor yourself to a lower salary range or avoid that happening? I didn't know this, I didn't know how to do that. And a couple of women that had been in more senior negotiations shared ways to make sure that I was pinning myself to a higher salary range that I wanted to be in. >> That's great. That's a great story and really important to like say pin. it's a lot of logistical details, right? You just need to learn the techniques like any other skill. Inamarie, I wonder if you've got a story to share here. >> Sure. I just want to say, I love the example that you just gave because it's something I'm super passionate about, which is transparency and trust. Then I think that we're building that every day into all of our people processes. So sure, talk about sign on bonuses, talk about pay parody because that is the landscape. But a quick story for me, I would say is all about stepping into uncertainty. And when I coach younger professionals of course women, I often talk about, don't be afraid to step into the role where all of the answers are not vetted down because at the end of the day, you can influence what those answers are. I still remember when Honeywell asked me to leave the comfort of California and to come to the East coast to New Jersey and bring my family. And I was doing well in my career. I didn't feel like I needed to do that, but I was willing after some coaching to step into that uncertainty. And it was one of the best pivotal moment in my career. I didn't always know who I was going to work with. I didn't know the challenges and scope I would take on, but those were some of the biggest learning experiences and opportunities and it made me a better executive. So that's always my coaching, like go where the answers aren't quite vetted down because you can influence that as a leader. >> That's great, I mean, Beth Comstock former vice chair at GE, one of her keynotes I saw had a great line, get comfortable with being uncomfortable. And I think that its a really good kind of message, especially in the time we're living in with accelerated change. But I'm curious, Inamarie was the person that got you to take that commitment. Would you consider that a sponsor, a mentor, was it a boss? Was it maybe somebody not at work, your spouse or a friend that said go for it. What kind of pushed you over the edge to take that? >> It's a great question. It was actually the boss I was going to work for. He was the CHRO, and he said something that was so important to me that I've often said it to others. And he said trust me, he's like I know you don't have all the answers, I know we don't have this role all figured out, I know you're going to move your family, but if you trust me, there is a ton of learning on the other side of this. And sometimes that's the best thing a boss can do is say we will go on this journey together. I will help you figure it out. So it was a boss, but I think it was that trust and that willingness for him to stand and go alongside of me that made me pick up my family and be willing to move across the country. And we stayed five years and really, I am not the same executive because of that experience. >> Right, that's a great story, Jennifer, I want to go to you, you work for two owners that are so progressive and I remember when Joe Lacob came on the floor a few years back and was booed aggressively coming into a franchise that hadn't seen success in a very long time, making really aggressive moves in terms of personnel, both at the coaches and the players level, the GM level. But he had a vision and he stuck to it. And the net net was tremendous success. I wonder if you can share any of the stories, for you coming into that organization and being able to feel kind of that level of potential success and really kind of the vision and also really a focus on execution to make the vision real cause vision without execution doesn't really mean much. If you could share some stories of working for somebody like Joe Lacob, who's so visionary but also executes so very, very effectively. >> Yeah, Joe is, well I have the honor of working for Joe, for Rick Welts to who's our president. Who's living legend with the NBA with Peter Guber. Our leadership at the Warriors are truly visionary and they set audacious targets. And I would say from a story the most recent is, right now what we're living through today. And I will say Joe will not accept that we are not having games with fans. I agree he is so committed to trying to solve for this and he has really put the organization sort of on his back cause we're all like well, what do we do? And he has just refused to settle and is looking down every path as to how do we ensure the safety of our fans, the safety of our players, but how do we get back to live entertainment? And this is like a daily mantra and now the entire organization is so focused on this and it is because of his vision. And I think you need leaders like that who can set audacious goals, who can think beyond what's happening today and really energize the entire organization. And that's really what he's done. And when I talked to my peers and other teams in there they're talking about trying to close out their season or do these things. And they're like well, we're talking about, how do we open the building? And we're going to have fans, we're going to do this. And they look at me and they're like, what are you talking about? And I said, well we are so fortunate. We have leadership that just is not going to settle. Like they are just always looking to get out of whatever it is that's happening and fix it. So Joe is so committed His background, he's an epidemiologist major I think. Can you imagine how unique a background that is and how timely. And so his knowledge of just around the pandemic and how the virus is spread. And I mean it's phenomenal to watch him work and leverage sort of his business acumen, his science acumen and really think through how do we solve this. Its amazing. >> The other thing thing that you had said before is that you basically intentionally told people that they need to rethink their jobs, right? You didn't necessarily want to give them permission to get you told them we need to rethink their jobs. And it's a really interesting approach when the main business is just not happening, right? There's just no people coming through the door and paying for tickets and buying beers and hotdogs. It's a really interesting talk. And I'm curious, kind of what was the reception from the people like hey, you're the boss, you just figure it out or were they like hey, this is terrific that he pressed me to come up with some good ideas. >> Yeah, I think when all of this happened, we were resolved to make sure that our workforce is safe and that they had the tools that they needed to get through their day. But then we really challenged them with re imagining what the next normal is. Because when we come out of this, we want to be ahead of everybody else. And that comes again from the vision that Joe set, that we're going to use this time to make ourselves better internally because we have the time. I mean, we had been racing towards opening Chase Center and not having time to pause. Now let's use this time to really rethink how we're doing business. What can we do better? And I think it's really reinvigorated teams to really think and innovate in their own areas because you can innovate anything, right?. We're innovating how you pay payables, we're all innovating, we're rethinking the fan experience and queuing and lines and all of these things because now we have the time that it's really something that top down we want to come out of this stronger. >> Right, that's great. Kate I'll go to you, Julie Sweet, I'm a big fan of Julie Sweet. we went to the same school so go go Claremont. But she's been super aggressive lately on a lot of these things, there was a get to... I think it's called Getting to 50 50 by 25 initiative, a formal initiative with very specific goals and objectives. And then there was a recent thing in terms of doing some stuff in New York with retraining. And then as you said, military being close to your heart, a real specific military recruiting process, that's formal and in place. And when you see that type of leadership and formal programs put in place not just words, really encouraging, really inspirational, and that's how you actually get stuff done as you get even the consulting businesses, if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. >> Yeah Jeff, you're exactly right. And as Jennifer was talking, Julie is exactly who I was thinking about in my mind as well, because I think it takes strong leadership and courage to set bold bold goals, right? And you talked about a few of those bold goals and Julie has certainly been at the forefront of that. One of the goals we set in 2018 actually was as you said to achieve essentially a gender balance workforce. So 50% men, 50% women by 2025, I mean, that's ambitious for any company, but for us at the time we were 400,000 people. They were 500, 6,000 globally. So when you set a goal like that, it's a bold goal and it's a bold vision. And we have over 40% today, We're well on our path to get to 50%, I think by 2025. And I was really proud to share that goal in front of a group of 200 clients the day that it came out, it's a proud moment. And I think it takes leaders like Julie and many others by the way that are also setting bold goals, not just in my company to turn the dial here on gender equality in the workforce, but it's not just about gender equality. You mentioned something I think it's probably at as, or more important right now. And that's the fact that at least our leadership has taken a Stand, a pretty bold stand against social injustice and racism, >> Right which is... >> And so through that we've made some very transparent goals in North America in terms of the recruitment and retention of our black African American, Hispanic American, Latinex communities. We've set a goal to increase those populations in our workforce by 60% by 2025. And we're requiring mandatory training for all of our people to be able to identify and speak up against racism. Again, it takes courage and it takes a voice. And I think it takes setting bold goals to make a change and these are changes we're committed to. >> Right, that's terrific. I mean, we started the conversation with Grace Hopper, they put out an index for companies that don't have their own kind of internal measure to do surveys again so you can get kind of longitudinal studies over time and see how you're improving Inamarie, I want to go to you on the social justice thing. I mean, you've talked a lot about values and culture. It's a huge part of what you say. And I think that the quote that you use, if I can steal it is " no culture eats strategy for breakfast" and with the social injustice. I mean, you came out with special values just about what Zendesk is doing on social injustice. And I thought I was actually looking up just your regular core mission and value statement. And this is what came up on my Google search. So I wanted to A, you published this in a blog in June, taking a really proactive stand. And I think you mentioned something before that, but then you're kind of stuck in this role as a mind reader. I wonder if you can share a little bit of your thoughts of taking a proactive stand and what Zendesk is doing both you personally, as well as a company in supporting this. And then what did you say as a binder Cause I think these are difficult kind of uncharted waters on one hand, on the other hand, a lot of people say, hello, this has been going on forever. You guys are just now seeing cellphone footage of madness. >> Yeah Wow, there's a lot in there. Let me go to the mind reader comments, cause people are probably like, what is that about? My point was last December, November timing. I've been the Chief People Officer for about two years And I decided that it really was time with support from my CEO that Zendesk have a Chief Diversity Officer sitting in at the top of the company, really putting a face to a lot of the efforts we were doing. And so the mind reader part comes in little did I know how important that stance would become, in the may June Timing? So I joked that, it almost felt like I could have been a mind reader, but as to what have we done, a couple of things I would call out that I think are really aligned with who we are as a company because our culture is highly threaded with the concept of empathy it's been there from our beginning. We have always tried to be a company that walks in the shoes of our customers. So in may with the death of George Floyd and the world kind of snapping and all of the racial injustice, what we said is we wanted to not stay silent. And so most of my postings and points of view were that as a company, we would take a stand both internally and externally and we would also partner with other companies and organizations that are doing the big work. And I think that is the humble part of it, we can't do it all at Zendesk, we can't write all the wrongs, but we can be in partnership and service with other organizations. So we used funding and we supported those organizations and partnerships. The other thing that I would say we did that was super important along that empathy is that we posted space for our employees to come together and talk about the hurt and the pain and the experiences that were going on during those times and we called those empathy circles. And what I loved is initially, it was through our mosaic community, which is what we call our Brown and black and persons of color employee resource group. But it grew into something bigger. We ended up doing five of these empathy circles around the globe and as leadership, what we were there to do is to listen and stand as an ally and support. And the stories were life changing. And the stories really talked about a number of injustice and racism aspects that are happening around the world. And so we are committed to that journey, we will continue to support our employees, we will continue to partner and we're doing a number of the things that have been mentioned. But those empathy circles, I think were definitely a turning point for us as an organization. >> That's great, and people need it right? They need a place to talk and they also need a place to listen if it's not their experience and to be empathetic, if you just have no data or no knowledge of something, you need to be educated So that is phenomenal. I want to go to you Jennifer. Cause obviously the NBA has been very, very progressive on this topic both as a league, and then of course the Warriors. We were joking before. I mean, I don't think Steph Curry has ever had a verbal misstep in the history of his time in the NBA, the guy so eloquent and so well-spoken, but I wonder if you can share kind of inside the inner circle in terms of the conversations, that the NBA enabled right. For everything from the jerseys and going out on marches and then also from the team level, how did that kind of come down and what's of the perception inside the building? >> Sure, obviously I'm so proud to be part of a league that is as progressive and has given voice and loud, all the teams, all the athletes to express how they feel, The Warriors have always been committed to creating a diverse and equitable workplace and being part of a diverse and equitable community. I mean that's something that we've always said, but I think the situation really allowed us, over the summer to come up with a real formal response, aligning ourselves with the Black Lives Matter movement in a really meaningful way, but also in a way that allows us to iterate because as you say, it's evolving and we're learning. So we created or discussed four pillars that we wanted to work around. And that was really around wallet, heart, beat, and then tongue or voice. And Wallet is really around putting our money where our mouth is, right? And supporting organizations and groups that aligned with the values that we were trying to move forward. Heart is around engaging our employees and our fan base really, right? And so during this time we actually launched our employee resource groups for the first time and really excited and energized about what that's doing for our workforce. This is about promoting real action, civic engagement, advocacy work in the community and what we've always been really focused in a community, but this really hones it around areas that we can all rally around, right? So registration and we're really focused on supporting the election day results in terms of like having our facilities open to all the electorate. So we're going to have our San Francisco arena be a ballot drop off, our Oakland facilities is a polling site, Santa Cruz site is also a polling location, So really promoting sort of that civic engagement and causing people to really take action. heart is all around being inclusive and developing that culture that we think is really reflective of the community. And voice is really amplifying and celebrating one, the ideas, the (indistinct) want to put forth in the community, but really understanding everybody's culture and really just providing and using the platform really to provide a basis in which as our players, like Steph Curry and the rest want to share their own experiences. we have a platform that can't be matched by any pedigree, right? I mean, it's the Warriors. So I think really getting focused and rallying around these pillars, and then we can iterate and continue to grow as we define the things that we want to get involved in. >> That's terrific. So I have like pages and pages and pages of notes and could probably do this for hours and hours, but unfortunately we don't have that much time we have to wrap. So what I want to do is give you each of you the last word again as we know from this problem, right? It's not necessarily a pipeline problem, it's really a retention problem. We hear that all the time from Girls in Code and Girls in Tech. So what I'd like you to do just to wrap is just a couple of two or three sentences to a 25 year old, a young woman sitting across from you having coffee socially distanced about what you would tell her early in the career, not in college but kind of early on, what would the be the two or three sentences that you would share with that person across the table and Annabel, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, I will have to make a pitch for transportation. So in transportation only 15% of the workforce is made up of women. And so my advice would be that there are these fields, there are these opportunities where you can make a massive impact on the future of how people move or how they consume things or how they interact with the world around them. And my hope is that being at Waymo, with our self driving car technology, that we are going to change the world. And I am one of the initial people in this group to help make that happen. And one thing that I would add is women spend almost an hour a day, shuttling their kids around, and we will give you back that time one day with our self driving cars so that I'm a mom. And I know that that is going to be incredibly powerful on our daily lives. >> Jeff: That's great. Kate, I think I might know what you're already going to say, but well maybe you have something else you wanted to say too. >> I don't know, It'll be interesting. Like if I was sitting across the table from a 25 year old right now I would say a couple of things first I'd say look intentionally for a company that has an inclusive culture. Intentionally seek out the company that has an inclusive culture, because we know that companies that have inclusive cultures retain women in tech longer. And the companies that can build inclusive cultures will retain women in tech, double, double the amount that they are today in the next 10 years. That means we could put another 1.4 million women in tech and keep them in tech by 2030. So I'd really encourage them to look for that. I'd encouraged them to look for companies that have support network and reinforcements for their success, and to obviously find a Waymo car so that they can not have to worry where kids are on for an hour when you're parenting in a few years. >> Jeff: I love the intentional, it's such a great word. Inamarie, >> I'd like to imagine that I'm sitting across from a 25 year old woman of color. And what I would say is be authentically you and know that you belong in the organization that you are seeking and you were there because you have a unique perspective and a voice that needs to be heard. And don't try to be anything that you're not, be who you are and bring that voice and that perspective, because the company will be a better company, the management team will be a better management team, the workforce will be a better workforce when you belong, thrive and share that voice. >> I love that, I love that. That's why you're the Chief People Officer and not Human Resources Officer, cause people are not resources like steel and cars and this and that. All right, Jennifer, will go to you for the wrap. >> Oh my gosh, I can't follow that. But yes, I would say advocate for yourself and know your value. I think really understanding what you're worth and being willing to fight for that is critical. And I think it's something that women need to do more. >> Awesome, well again, I wish we could go all day, but I will let you get back to your very, very busy day jobs. Thank you for participating and sharing your insight. I think it's super helpful. And there and as we said at the beginning, there's no better example for young girls and young women than to see people like you in leadership roles and to hear your voices. So thank you for sharing. >> Thank you. >> All right. >> Thank you. >> Okay thank you. >> Thank you >> All right, so that was our diversity panel. I hope you enjoyed it, I sure did. I'm looking forward to chapter two. We'll get it scheduled as soon as we can. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

from around the globe it's thecube with digital coverage of actifio data driven 2020 brought to you by actifio hi and welcome to the cube's coverage of actifio data driven 2020 i'm stu miniman my co-host for this event is dave vellante but joining me to help kick off this discussion is david floyer he is the co-founder and chief technology officer of wikibon of course the research arm of siliconangle media which includes also thecube david great to see you thanks so much for joining us great to see you stu all right so we we've got a really nice lineup of course last year dave and i were in boston with the actifio team they had a really good lineup uh you know analysts thought leaders and of course lots of users you know love to talk to those users uh you and i are quite familiar with actifio uh really the company that that created copy data management as a category and a solution out there so why don't we start there david you know what what's the importance of copy data management you know here in 2020 you know many years after uh when actifio had created it well this year has really uh amplified the importance of copy data management and being able to manage across different locations across different clouds manage the copies manage the the reuse of data in different places um the the the covert has really emphasized the importance for example of putting just backup onto a cloud because it's on many occasions it's not going to be possible to get into your own data centers or if you're sharing a data center so uh automation and uh use of clouds multiple clouds has really driven uh i've become of a supreme importance uh since covert had started and and that's how it's going to be from here on in that's not going to change yeah david absolutely i mean we said for many years when you you know adopt cloud you know i still need to think about my data protection i need to think about security uh those aren't just covered uh because i have you know lovely object storage or it you know spreads things out amongst the different cloud regions um and even this year's you brought up covid uh we've been having so many conversations with with companies uh in many cases they're accelerating or new groups are diving in and therefore we need to make sure that they take the proper control precautions so you know my my disaster recover me my backup is so important uh maybe flush out a little bit for us if you would you know cloud we've been looking at uh that you know hybrid and multi-cloud architectures how people should be building it and of course data the critical component uh that we look at there what what should people be looking at well absolutely if you're going to have a multi-cloud strategy you uh you have to there are several things which are really important you have to be able to operate across each cloud natively in the cloud it's not it's not good enough to uh just be an appendage if you like um so and equally important is that you have to make sure that you're taking advantage of the characteristics of the cloud in particular object storage backup has always gone to object storage but object storage itself is not that fantastic if you're trying to just recover something from a from a lot of different objects unless you put an architecture around that unless you make it such that you can uh take all the workloads and be able to address them in the cloud itself and uh in in particular what's very interesting is there are two fundamental philosophies of moving to the cloud one of which is that you migrate everything you you convert all of your databases to a database that's operating in the cloud that you go to um and the other one is to say well that type of lift and shift is not good enough what you want to be able to do is be able to use the same databases the same applications that you're using at the moment avoid that enormous expensive cost of moving everything and then be able to operate on those databases using the cloud principles the cloud object store and have the same level of performance yeah absolutely david i know i'm looking forward to uh you know dave's got uh you know ash the ceo of actifio uh on today tomorrow uh i'll be talking to david chang who's the co-founder uh also onto the product there to really understand you know how is activio building an architecture that meets what you were just talking about uh and david you know things i i've heard you talking about for many years you know uh migrations obviously are something that anybody in it dreads uh i i used to say in the storage world uh it you know upgrade came with that four-letter word it was migration because you you had to do that and you know databases of critical importance um one of the other uh discussions i have is with ibm and ibm has had a long partnership with activio um but they're also they're they're getting involved with that data usage so maybe if you could expound a little bit you know how is it just you know the early days copy data management i looked at it it was a you know financial savings it was okay hey we've got way too many copies out there how can we enable them to be used better and not have you know just lots and lots of big capacity that the the storage vendors uh as it was you know hard disk and then flash converting there so you know how are we actually unlocking the value of data in today's world well there are two aspects of that one of which is you want the the original data wherever possible you uh you you want to have be able to access that data as quickly as possible so if you have for example a system of record and you want to be able to access that system of record uh it may be one day you want to be able to bring it right to one day before the day before not have a week waiting for it coffee management is essential to be able to access that data and the same data for everybody and know that and know from a compliance point of view you have the right data so that's the first stage but then from a development point of view you want to have the flexibility of using real-time data whenever you can so you want to be able to access any data you want from anywhere and know that it's the correct data and and move your business processes from asynchronous business processes to as synchronous as you can and you can only do that with automation through uh real-time data management yeah uh absolutely david and it's even it's even more pertinent right now as everyone is you know the discussion is you know work from home is becoming work from anywhere uh so it's it's not just oh hey i can get into the data warehouse uh and know that i have uh you know a low latency connection when i'm sitting in the corporate uh internet now you know developers uh typically are dispersed people need to be able to access it um talk a little bit about uh the data pipeline the discussion we've been hearing from uh you know the cdo events that we've gone to as well as discussions you know how does you know actifio in the industry as a whole streamline that data pipeline that you started talking about yeah that that's absolutely essential uh you you you have to have processes and procedures that identify the data where it's going to go uh and and have essentially a data plane managed data plane which is taking it from where it need where it is to where it needs to go sharing the metadata across that fabric um those are the ways that you build a consistent data pipeline where people know what the provenance of that data is and the less copies that you have and the more single copies of that data a a a copy of record a single version of the truth then the less complicated the systems become and even more the the systems between the systems the the human interaction that's required to to manage that data goes down so it and it makes development so much easier so a data pipeline is absolutely essential and it's part of that data plane and it's part of the overall architecture that has to be there we've lived in silos for so long and getting out of silos is not it's not easy at all and uh you've got to have the right tools to be able to do that yeah uh the the keynote speaker uh that actifio has for the event is gene kim somebody we've had on the cube a few times and excited to have him back on at this event uh what i thought was really interesting david i read his first book uh his first fiction book i should say he's also written many non-fiction books uh the phoenix project was really the go-to book to kind of understand devops i've i've recommended so many friends uh people in the industry his new one the unicorn project is really about software development but what i found really interesting because i i didn't get to read it earlier this year because there was just no travel but made sure i did read it ahead of this event and the lesson that it called out to me was you know moving faster using these modern tools you know breaking through silos was all well and good but the the real turning point for the company was enabling that use of data and as you said that real time not looking historically but be able to react fast so you know not giving away the secrets of the book there but uh you know a retail organization that could trial things could update in real time what the inventory was and having everybody in the company get access to that so the product people the marketing people uh the field people all accessing that single source of truth and that being fed throughout the organization really invigorated and drove uh the the ability for a company to react and move fast which really is the the clarion call for business today so david yeah you know any any final word from you as to you know we've we've been beating that drum for years that you know data data data um is is critically important whether you're taking that specific example if you can take that all of that data and then start updating the pricing according to that data you've suddenly made repricing a dynamic event uh one that's going to respond to the customer and they their characteristics uh good or bad and the availability of those uh availability and the uh and the the pipeline of products if you understand all of that then suddenly your ability to increase revenue by being able to reprice more quickly uh automatically become an amazingly uh effective in terms of revenue increase yeah absolutely i i feel like uh i remember back in the early days of hadoop it was you know how can i make an ad better to increase increase click rate but the promise of unlocking data today is to really understand and customize for that environment so some of it is we can maximize profitability there will be certain clients um which are willing to pay for more premium products and others uh that you need to have that value option but when you understand the data you understand the customer you understand the need for the portfolio of solutions you have data can just be that key enabler all right well hey david floyer thank you so much for helping us kick off our coverage here i want to tell everybody make sure to you know tune in for the rest of it uh dave vellante and myself going through the interviews of course on demand with actifio as well as i'm sorry live with actifio as well as on demand on thecube.net as always for david floyer dave vellante i'm stu miniman thank you for joining us for activio data driven and thank you for watching thecube [Music] you