(soft music) >> We're in Las Vegas at The Venetian for our continued coverage here of re:Invent '22, AWS's big show going on. Great success off to a wonderful start. We're in the Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. And we're going to talk about public health and the cloud, how those have come together in the great state of North Carolina. Charles Carter is going to help us do that. He's assistant secretary for technology services with the state of North Carolina's Department of Health and Human Services. Charles, good to see you. Thanks for joining us here on "theCUBE". >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Yeah, thanks for making the time. So first off, let's talk about what you do on the homefront before what you're doing here and where you're going. But in terms of kind of what your plan has been, what your journey has been from a cloud perspective and how you've implemented that and where you are right now in your journey. >> Sure, so we started. When I got there, we didn't have a cloud footprint at all. There was a- >> Host: Which was how long ago? >> I got there in 2016, so about six years. >> Host: Six, seven years, yeah. >> Yeah, five, six years. So anyways, we started off with our first module within our Medicaid expansion. And that was the first time that we went into the cloud. We worked with AWS to do our encounter processing system. And it was an incredible success. I think the ease of use was really kind of something that people weren't quite ready for. But it was really exciting to see that. And the scalability, to be able to turn that on and cover the entirety of North Carolina was awesome. So once we saw that and get a little taste of it, then we really wanted to start implementing it throughout DHHS. And we marshaled in a cloud-only cloud-first strategy where you had to actually get an exemption not to go to the cloud. And that was a first for our state. So that was really kind of the what launched us. But then COVID hit. And once COVID came in, that took us to a new level. COVID forced us to build technologies that enabled a better treatment, a better care, a better response from our team. And so we were able to stand up platforms in 48 hours. We were able to stand up COVID vaccine management systems in six weeks. And none of that would've been possible without the cloud. >> So forced your hand in a way because all of a sudden you've got this extraordinarily remote workforce, right, and people trying to- And you're doing different tasks that were totally unexpected, right, prior to that. What kind of a shock to the system was that from I get from an IT perspective? >> Yeah, so from a state government perspective, for example, you never hear you have all the money you need and you have to do it quickly. It just doesn't work like that. But this was a rare moment in time where you had this critical need. The entire country and our state population was kind of on edge. How do we move through this? How do we factor our lives into this new integration? What is this virus? Is it spreading in my county, in my city, my zip code? Where is it? And that kind of desperation really kind of focused everybody in on build me technologies that can get me the data that I need to make good healthcare decisions, good clinical decisions. And so that was our challenge. Cloud enabled it because it can scale so quickly. We can set up things, we can exchange data. We can move data around a lot easier. And the security is better from our perspective. So that COVID experience really kind of pushed us, you know, if you will, out the door. And we're never going back because it's just too good. >> Yeah, was that the aha moment then in a way because you had to do so much so fast and before capabilities that maybe you didn't have or maybe hadn't tapped? >> Yeah, yeah. >> I mean what was the accelerant there? Was COVID that big, or was it somebody who had to make a decision to say, this is where we're going with this, somebody in your shoes or somebody with whom you work? >> Yeah, no, I mean cloud at the end of the day, we knew that in order to do what we needed to do we couldn't do it on-prem. It wasn't an option. So if we wanted to build these capabilities, if we wanted to bring in technologies that really brought data to our key, our governor, our secretary, to make good decisions on behalf of our residents in North Carolina, then we were going to have to build things quickly. And the only way you can do that is in the cloud. So it was when they came back and said, "We need these things," there's only one answer. That's a good thing about technology. It's pretty binary, so it was either go with what we had, which wasn't adequate, or build to what we knew we could do and pretty short order. And because of that, we were able to actually usher in a huge expansion of cloud footprint within DHHS. And now we've actually been able to implement it in other departments simply because of our expertise. And that's been a huge asset for the state of North Carolina as a whole. >> So what's your measuring stick then for value in terms of identifying benefit? 'Cause it's not really about cost. This is about service, I assume, right? >> Right. >> So, you know, how do you quantify the values and the benefits that you're deriving from this migration over to the cloud? >> So from our perspective, it hits several different areas. I mean, you can start in security. We know that if we're in the cloud the tools that can manage and give us visibility in the cloud are 10 times better than an on-prem environment. And so if we can take a lot of these legacy systems and move them to the cloud, we'll be in a better security posture. So we have that piece of it. The other part of it is the data aspect of it, being able to- We're 33 divisions strong, right? We have a large footprint. We have a lot of siloed data elements. And cloud allows us to start integrating those data sets in a much more usable fashion so that we can see that if Charles Carter's in one area in division, a specific division with DHHS, is he somewhere else? And if he is somewhere else, then how do we provide a better clinical care for that individual? And those are conversations that we can't really have if we don't move to the cloud. So those types of- And of course there's always the OKRs, the actual measurements that you apply to things that we're doing. But at the end of the day, can we get the requirements from our business partners, bring those requirements to bear in technology, and really enable the indoctrination of these requirements throughout our clinical and healthcare kills? >> What about they're always pillars here, right? Governance, huge pillar, security, huge pillar, especially in your world, right? >> Yeah. >> So making that move over to the cloud and still recognizing that these are essentials that you have to have in place, I wouldn't say adjustments, but what kind of, I guess, recognition have you had toward that and making sure that you're still very true to those principles that are vital in the terms of public health? >> It is a great question because our secretary at the time and our governor, Roy Cooper, were very focused on enabling transparency. We had to be very transparent with what we were doing because the residents in North Carolina were just really kind of, "What's going on?" It was a scary time for a lot of us. So transparency was a key element towards our success. And in order to do that, you've got to have proper security. You got to have proper governance. You've got to have proper builds within technology that really enable that kind of visibility. One of the things that we did very early on was we set up a governance structure for our cloud environments so that as we wanted to and stand up an easy-to environment or we wanted to do some sort of work within a cloud or stand up in a different environment, we were able actually to set up a framework for how do you introduce that. Are you doing it correctly? Do you have the proper security on it? Do you have the funding for it? Like all the steps that you need to really kind of build into the scaffolding around a lot of these efforts we had to put in place and pretty quickly to get them going. But once we did that, the acceptance and the adoption of it was just tremendous. I mean, it was a light on for all of our business partners 'cause they understood I can either build on-prem, in which case I won't be able to get what I want in any kind of reasonable time period. Or I can build on cloud. And I can have it in some cases in 48 hours. >> Right, tomorrow. >> Yeah, exactly. >> You know, it was a huge difference. >> So where are you there? I mean, this is just not like a really big old lift and shift and we're all done and this is great. Cloud's taken care of all of our needs. Where are you in terms of the journey that you're undertaking? And then ultimately where do you want to go, like how far? What kind of goals have you set for yourself for the next two, three years down the road? >> Yeah, so this is an exciting part because we have actually- Like I mentioned earlier, we are a cloud-first cloud-only strategy, right? There's no reasons for us to be on-prem. It's just a matter of us kind of sunsetting legacy systems and bringing on cloud performance. We hope to be a 60% of our applications, which we have over 400 applications. So it's pretty large footprint. But we're wanting to migrate all of that to the cloud by 2025. So if we can achieve that, I think we'll be well on our way. And the momentum will carry forward for us to do that. We've actually had to do a reorganization of our whole IT structure. I think this is an important part to maintain that momentum because we've reorganized our staff, reorganized ourselves so that we can focus more on how do you adopt cloud, how do you bring in platforms which are all cloud-based, how do you use data within those systems? And that has allowed us to kind of think differently about our responsibilities, who's accountable for what, and to kind of keep those, that momentum going. So we've got some big projects that are on right now. Some of them are lift and shift, like you mentioned. We have a project with kind of a clumsy, monolithic system. It's called (indistinct). We're trying to migrate that to the cloud. We're in the process of doing that. And it's an excellent demonstration of capability once we pull that off. And then of course any new procurement that we put out there no one's making anything for on-prem anymore. Everyone's making their SaaS products for cloud-based experiences. Or if we're going to build or just use integrators then we'll build that in house. But all of it's based on cloud. >> And you mentioned SaaS. How much of this stuff are you doing on your own? And how much are you doing through managed services? >> Yeah, so like I mentioned, we have over 400 applications. So we had a pretty large footprint, right? >> Big, it's huge, right. >> So we're only who we are, and we can only build so much. So we're kind of taking- We did a application rationalization effort, which kind of identified some threats to our systems. Like maybe they're older things, FoxPro, kind of older languages that we're using. And in some cases we got people who are retiring. And there's not many people who can support that anymore. So how do we take those and migrate them to the cloud, either put them on a Salesforce or ServiceNow or Microsoft Dynamics platform and really kind of upgrade those systems? So we're in the process of kind of analyzing those elements. But yeah, that's kind of the exciting launch, if you will, of kind of taking the existing visibility of our applications and then applying it to what we're capable of with the cloud. >> And if you had advice that you could give to your colleagues who are in public health or just in public, the public sector- And your resources, they're finite. This is kind of what you have to deal with. And yet you have needs, and you're trying to stay current. You've got talent challenges, right? You've got rev or spending challenges. So if you could sit down your colleagues in a room and say, "Okay, this has been our experience. Here's what I would keep an eye out for," what kind of headlights would you beat for them? >> Yeah, so I think the biggest aha that I'd like to share with my contemporaries out there is that you've got a great ability to lower your costs, to excite your own personnel because they want to work on the new stuff. We've actually set up a whole professional development pathway within our organization to start getting people certified on AWS, certified on other platforms, to get them ready to start working in those environments. And so all of that work that we're been doing is coming together and allowing us to maintain the momentum. So what I'd recommend to people is, A, look at your own individual staff. I don't think you need to go outside to find the talent. I think you can train the talent that you have interior. I think you've got to aggressively pursue modernization because modernization enables a lot more. It's less expensive. It enables quicker adoption of business requirements and modern business requirements. And then lastly, focus on your data sharing because what you're going to find in the platforms and in the clouds is that there is a lot more opportunities for data integrations and conjoining disparate data sources. So if you can do those elements, you'll find that your capabilities on the business side are much more, much greater on the other end. >> Don't be scared, right, jump in? (laughing) >> Definitely don't be scared. Don't be, the water's warm. (host laughing) Come on in, you're fine, you're fine. (laughing) >> No little toe dipping in there. You're going to dive into the deep end, let her rip. >> Exactly, just go right in, just go right in. >> Well, it sounds like you've done that with great success. >> I'm very happy with it. >> Congratulations on that. And wish you success down the road. >> Thank you very much, I appreciate it. >> Yeah, thank you, Charles. All right, back with more. You are watching theCUBE here in Las Vegas. theCUBE of course the leader, as you know, in tech coverage. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, friends. Welcome back to The Cube's live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2022. We're in Vegas. Lovely Las Vegas. Beautiful outside, although I have only seen outside today once, but very excited to be at re:Invent. We're hearing between 50,000 and 70,000 attendees and it's insane, but people are ready to be back. This morning's keynote by CEO Adam Selipsky was full of great messages, big focus on data, customers, partners, the ecosystem. So excited. And I'm very pleased to welcome back one of our alumni to the program, David Shacochis, VP Enterprise Portfolio Strategy Product Management at Lumen. David, welcome back. >> Lisa, good to be here. The Five Timers Club. >> You are in the Five Timers Club. This is David's fifth appearance on the show. And we were talking before we went live- >> Do we do the jacket now and do we do the jacket later? >> Yeah, the jacket will come later. >> Okay. >> The Five Timers Club, like on SNL. We're going to have that for The Cube. We'll get you measured up and get that all fitted for you. >> That'd be better. >> So talk a little bit about Lumen. 'Cause last time you hear it wasn't Lumen. >> We weren't Lumen last time. So this is the first time... last time we were here on The Cube at re:Invent. This was probably 2019 or so. We were a different company. The company was called CenturyLink back then. We rebranded in 2020 to really represent our identity as a delivery of...as a solutions provider over our fiber network. So Lumen is the corporate brand, the company name. It represents basically a lot of the fiber that's been laid throughout the world and in North America and in enterprise metropolitan areas over the past 10 to 15 years. You know, companies like CenturyLink and Quest and Level 3, all those companies have really rolled up into building that core asset of the network. So Lumen is really the brand for the 21st century for the company, really focused on delivering services for the enterprise and then delivering a lot of value added services around that core network asset. >> So rebranding during the pandemic, what's been the customer feedback and sentiment? >> Yeah, I think customers have really actually appreciated it as certainly a more technology oriented brand, right? Sort of shifting away a little bit from some of the communications and telecom background of the company and the heritage. And while those assets that were built up during that period of time have been substantial, and we still build off of those assets going forward, really what a lot of the customer feedback has been is that it puts us in a posture to be a little bit more of a business solutions provider for customers, right? So there's a lot of things that we can do with that core network asset, the fiber networking a lot of the services that we launch on that in terms of public IP, you know, public internet capacity, private networking, private VPNs, VoIP and voice services. These are services that you'd expect from a company like that. But there's a lot of services inside the Lumen brand that you might surprise you, right? There's an edge computing capability that can deliver five milliseconds of latency within 95% of North American enterprise. >> Wow. >> There's a threat detection lab that goes and takes all of the traffic flowing over the public side of our network and analyzes it in a data lake and turns it into threat intelligence that we then offer off to our customers on a subscription basis. There's a production house that goes and, you know, does production networking for major sports arenas and sports events. There's a wide range of services inside of Lumen that really what the Lumen brand allows us to do is start talking about what those services can do and what networking can do for our customers in the enterprise in a more comprehensive way. >> So good changes, big brand changes for Lumen in the last couple of years. Also, I mean, during a time of such turmoil in the world, we've seen work change dramatically. You know, everybody...companies had to pivot massively quickly a couple years ago. >> Yep. >> Almost approaching three years ago, which is crazy amazing to be digital because they had to be able to survive. >> They did >> Now they're looking at being able to thrive, but now we're also in this hybrid work environment. The future of work has changed. >> Totally. >> Almost permanently. >> Yep. >> How is Lumen positioned to address some of the permanent changes to the work environments? Like the last time we were at re:Invented- >> Yeah. >> In person. This didn't exist. >> That's right. So really, it's one of the things we talk to our customers almost the most about is this idea of the future of work. And, you know, we really think about the future of work as about, you know, workers and workloads and the networks that connect them. You think about how much all of those demands are shifting and changing, right? What we were talking about, and it's very easy for all of us to conceptualize what the changing face of the worker looks like, whether those are knowledge workers or frontline workers the venues in which people are working the environments and that connectivity, predictability of those work desk environments changes so significantly. But workloads are changing and, you know we're sitting here at a trade show that does nothing but celebrate the transformation of workloads. Workloads running in ways in business logic and capturing of data and analysis of data. The changing methodologies and the changing formats of workloads, and then the changing venues for workloads. So workloads are running in places that never used to be data centers before. Workloads are running in interesting places and in different and challenging locations for what didn't used to be the data center. And so, you know, the workloads and the workloads are in a very dynamic situation. And the networks that connect them have to be dynamic, and they have to be flexible. And that's really why a lot of what Lumen invests in is working on the networks that connect workers and workloads both from a visibility and a managed services perspective to make sure that we're removing blind spots and then removing potential choke points and capacity issues, but then also being adaptable and dynamic enough to be able to go and reconfigure that network to reach all of the different places that, you know, workers and workloads are going to evolve into. What you'll find in a lot of cases, you know, the workers...a common scenario in the enterprise. A 500 person company with, you know, five offices and maybe one major facility. You know, that's now a 505 office company. >> Right. >> Right? The challenge of the network and the challenge of connecting workers and workloads is really one of the main conversations we have with our customers heading into this 21st century. >> What are some of the things that they're looking forward to in terms of embracing the future of work knowing this is probably how it's going to remain? >> Yeah, I think companies are really starting to experiment carefully and start to think about what they can do and certainly think about what they can do in the cloud with things like what the AWS platform allows them to do with some of the AWS abstractions and the AWS services allow them to start writing software for, and they're starting to really carefully, but very creatively and reach out into their you know, their base of enterprise data, their base of enterprise value to start running some experiments. We actually had a really interesting example of that in a session that Lumen shared here at re:Invent yesterday. You know, for the few hundred people that were there. You know, I think we got a lot of great feedback. It was really interesting session about the...really gets at this issue of the future of work and the changing ways that people are working. It actually was a really cool use case we worked on with Major League Baseball, Fox Sports, and AWS with the... using the Lumen network to essentially virtualize the production truck. Right? So you've all heard that, you know, the sports metaphor of, you know, the folks in the booth were sitting there started looking down and they're saying, oh great job by the guys or the gals in the truck. >> Yep. >> Right? That are, you know, that bring in that replay or great camera angle. They're always talking about the team and their production truck. Well, that production truck is literally a truck sitting outside the stadium. >> Yep. >> Full of electronics and software and gear. We were able to go and for a Major League Baseball game in...back in August, we were able to go and work with AWS, using the Lumen network, working with our partners and our customers at Fox Sports and virtualize all of that gear inside the truck. >> Wow. That's outstanding. >> Yep. So it was a live game. You know, they simulcast it, right? So, you know, we did our part of the broadcast and many hundreds of people, you know, saw that live broadcast was the first time they tried doing it. But, you know, to your point, what are enterprises doing? They're really starting to experiment, sort to push the envelope, right? They're kind of running things in new ways, you know, obviously hedging their bets, right? And sort of moving their way and sort of blue-green testing their way into the future by trying things out. But, you know, this is a massive revenue opportunity for a Major League Baseball game. You know, a premier, you know, Sunday night baseball contest between the Yankees and the Cardinals. We were able to go and take the entire truck, virtualize it down to a small rack of connectivity gear. Basically have that production network run over redundant fiber paths on the Lumen network up into AWS. And AWS is where all that software worked. The technical director of the show sitting in his office in North Carolina. >> Wow. >> The sound engineer is sitting in, you know, on his porch in Connecticut. Right? They were able to go and do the work of production anywhere while connected to AWS and then using the Lumen network, right? You know, the high powered capabilities of Lumens network underlay to be able to, you know, go and design a network topology and a worked topology that really wasn't possible before. >> Right. It's nice to hear, to your point, that customers are really embracing experimentation. >> Right. >> That's challenging to, obviously there was a big massive forcing function a couple of years ago where they didn't have a choice if they wanted to survive and eventually succeed and grow. >> Yeah. >> But the mindset of experimentation requires cultural change and that's a hard thing to do especially for I would think legacy organizations like Major League Baseball, but it sounds like they have the appetite. >> Yeah. They have the interest. >> They've been a fairly innovative organization for some time. But, you know, you're right. That idea of experimenting and that idea of trying out new things. Many people have observed, right? It's that forcing function of the pandemic that really drove a lot of organizations to go and make a lot of moves really quickly. And then they realized, oh, wait a minute. You know... I guess there's some sort of storytelling metaphor in there at some point of people realizing, oh wait, I can swim in these waters, right? I can do this. And so now they're starting to experiment and push the envelope even more using platforms like AWS, but then using a lot of the folks in the AWS partner network like Lumen, who are designing and sort of similarly inspired to deliver, you know, on demand and virtualized and dynamic capabilities within the core of our network and then within the services that our network can and the ways that our network connects to AWS. All of that experimentation now is possible because a lot of the things you need to do to try out the experiment are things you can get on demand and you can kind of pat, you can move back, you can learn. You can try new things and you can evolve. >> Right. >> Yep. >> Right. Absolutely. What are some of the things that you're excited about as, you know, here was this forcing function a couple years ago, we're coming out of that now, but the world has changed. The future of work as you are so brilliantly articulated has changed permanently. What are you excited about in terms of Lumen and AWS going forward? As we saw a lot of announcements this morning, big focus on data, vision of AWS is really that flywheel with Adams Selipsky is really, really going. What are you excited about going forward into 2023? >> Yeah, I mean we've been working with AWS for so long and have been critical partners for so long that, you know, I think a lot of it is continuation of a lot of the great work we've been doing. We've been investing in our own capabilities around the AWS partner network. You know, we're actually in a fairly unique position, you know, and we like to think that we're that unique position around the future of work where between workers, workloads and the networks that connect them. Our fingers are on a lot of those pulse points, right? Our fingers are on at really at the nexus of a lot of those dynamics. And our investment with AWS even puts us even more so in a position to go where a lot of the workloads are being transformed, right? So that's why, you know, we've invested in being one of the few network operators that is in the AWS partner network at the advanced tier that have the managed services competency, that have the migration competency and the network competency. You can count on one hand the number of network operators that have actually invested at that level with AWS. And there's an even smaller number that is, you know, based here in the United States. So, you know, I think that investment with AWS, investment in their partner programs and then investment co-innovation with AWS on things like that MLB use case really puts us in a position to keep on doing these kinds of things within the AWS partner network. And that's one of the biggest things we could possibly be excited about. >> So what does the go to market look like? Is it Lumen goes in, brings in AWS, vice versa? Both? >> Yeah, so a lot of being a member of the AWS partner network you have a lot of flexibility. You know, we have a lot of customers that are, you know, directly working with AWS. We have a lot of customers that would basically look to us to deliver the solution and, you know, and buy it all as a complete turnkey capability. So we have customers that do both. We have customers that, you know, just look to Lumen for the Lumen adjacent services and then pay, you know, pay a separate bill with AWS. So there's a lot of flexibility in the partner network in terms of what Lumen can deliver as a service, Lumen can deliver as a complete solution and then what parts of its with AWS and their platform factors into on an on-demand usage basis. >> And that would all be determined I imagine by what the customer really needs in their environment? >> Yeah, and sort of their own cloud strategy. There's a lot of customers who are all in on AWS and are really trying to driving and innovating and using some of the higher level services inside the AWS platform. And then there are customers who kind of looked at AWS as one of a few cloud platforms that they want to work with. The Lumen network is compatible and connected to all of them and our services teams are, you know, have the ability to go and let customers sort of take on whatever cloud posture they need. But if they are all in on AWS, there's, you know. Not many networks better to be on than Lumen in order to enable that. >> With that said, last question for you is if you had a bumper sticker or a billboard. Lumen's rebranded since we last saw you. What would that tagline or that phrase of impact be on that bumper sticker? >> Yeah, I'd get in a lot of trouble with our marketing team if I didn't give the actual bumper sticker for the company. But we really think of ourselves as the platform for amazing things. The fourth industrial revolution, everything going on in terms of the future of work, in terms of the future of industrial innovation, in terms of all the data that's being gathered. You know, Adam in the keynote this morning really went into a lot of detail on, you know, the depth of data and the mystery of data and how to harness it all and wrangle it all. It requires a lot of networking and a lot of connectivity. You know, for us to acquire, analyze and act on all that data and Lumen's platform for amazing things really helps forge that path forward to that fourth industrial revolution along with great partners like AWS. >> Outstanding. David, it's been such a pleasure having you back on The Cube. We'll get you fitted for that five timers club jacket. >> It sounds good. (Lisa laughs) >> I'll be back. >> Thanks so much for your insights and your time and well done with what you guys are doing at Lumen and AWS. >> Thanks Lisa. >> For David Shacochis, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube hopefully all day. This is our first full day of coverage at AWS re:Invent '22. Stick around. We'll be back tomorrow, and we know we're going to see you then. Have a great night. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Javits in the big apple, New York City. This is theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. We're here for a full day of coverage. We're talking to customers, partners, executives and analysts as well. Peder Ulander is here. He's the Chief Marketing Officer of MongoDB and he's joined by Radhika Krishnan, who's the Chief Product Officer at Hitachi Ventara. Folks, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you both again. >> Good to see you. >> Thank you David, it's good to be back again. >> Peder, first time since 2019, we've been doing a lot of these conferences and many of them, it's the first time people have been out in a physical event in three years. Amazing. >> I mean, after three years to come back here in our hometown of New York and get together with a few thousand of our favorite customers, partners, analysts, and such, to have real good discussions around where we're taking the world with regards to our developer data platform. It's been great. >> I think a big part of that story of course, is ecosystem and partnerships and Radhika, I remember I was at an event when Hitachi announced its strategy and it's name change, and really tried to understand why and the what's behind that. And of course, Hitachi's a company that looks out over the long term, and of course it has to perform tactically, but it thinks about the future. So give us the update on what's new at Hitachi Ventara, especially as it relates to data. >> Sure thing, Dave. As many, many folks might be aware, there's a very strong heritage that Hitachi has had in the data space, right. By virtue of our products and our presence in the data storage market, which dates back to many decades, right? And then on the industrial side, the parent company Hitachi has been heavily focused on the OT sector. And as you know, there is a pretty significant digital transformation underway in the OT arena, which is all being led by data. So if you look at our mission statement, for instance, it's actually engineering the data driven because we do believe that data is the fundamental platform that's going to drive that digital transformation, irrespective of what industry you're in. >> So one of the themes that you guys both talk about is modernization. I mean, you can take a cloud, I remember Alan Nance, who was at the time, he was a CIO at Philips, he said, look, you could take a cloud workload, or on-prem workload, stick it into the cloud and lift it and shift it. And in your case, you could just put it on, run it on an RDBMS, but you're not going to affect the operational models. >> Peder Ulander: It's just your mess for less, man. >> If you do that. >> It's your mess, for less. >> And so, he goes, you'll get a few, you know, you'll get a couple of zeros out of that. But if you want to have, in his case, billion dollar impact to the business, you have to modernize. So what does modernize mean to each of you? >> Maybe Peder, you can start. >> Yeah, no, I'm happy to start. I think it comes down to what's going on in the industry. I mean, we are truly moving from a world of data centers to centers of data, and these centers of data are happening further and further out along the network, all the way down to the edges. And if you look at the transformation of infrastructure or software that has enabled us to get there, we've seen apps go from monoliths to microservices. We've seen compute go from physical to serverless. We've seen networking go from old wireline copper to high powered 5G networks. They've all transformed. What's the one layer that hasn't completely transformed yet, data, right? So if we do see this world where things are getting further and further out, you've got to rethink your data architecture and how you basically support this move to modernization. And we feel that MongoDB with our partners, especially with Hitachi, we're best suited to really kind of help with this transition for our customers as they move from data centers to centers of data. >> So architecture. And at the failure, I will say this and you tell me if you agree or not. A lot of the failures of sort of the big data architectures of today are there's, everything's in this monolithic database, you've got to go through a series of hyper-specialized professionals to get to the data. If you're a business individual, you're so frustrated because the market's changing faster than you can get answers. So you guys, I know, use this concept of data fabric, people talk about data mesh. So how do you think, Radhika, about modernization in the future of data, which by its very nature is distributed? >> Yeah. So Dave, everybody talks about the hybrid cloud, right? And so the reality is, every one of our customers is having to deal with data that's straddled across on-prem as well as the public cloud and many other places as well. And so it becomes incredibly important that you have a fairly seamless framework, that's relatively low friction, that allows you to go from the capture of the data, which could be happening at the edge, could be happening at the core, any number of places, all the way to publish, right. Which is ultimately what you want to do with data because data exists to deliver insights, right? And therefore you dramatically want to minimize the friction in the process. And that is exactly what we're attempting to do with our data fabric construct, right. We're essentially saying, customers don't have to worry about, like you mentioned, they may have federated data structures, architectures, data lakes, fitting in multiple locations. How do you ensure that you're not having to double up custom code in order to drive the pipelines, in order to drive the data movement from one location to the other and so forth. And so essentially what we're providing is a mechanism whereby they can be confident about the quality of the data at the end of the day. And this is so paramount. Every customer that I talk to is most worried about ensuring that they have data that is trustworthy. >> So this is a really important point because I've always felt like, from a data quality standpoint, you know you get the data engineers who might not have any business context, trying to figure out the quality problem. If you can put the data responsibility in the hands of the business owner, who, he or she, has context, that maybe starts to solve this problem. There's some buts though. So infrastructure becomes an operational detail. Let's hide that. Don't worry about it. Figure it out, okay, so the business can run, but you need self-service infrastructure and you have to figure out how to have federated governance so that the right people can have access. So how do you guys think about that problem in the future? 'Cause it's almost like this vision creates those two challenges. Oh, by the way, you got to get your organization behind it. Right, 'cause there's an organizational construct as well. But those are, to me, wonderful opportunities but they create technology challenges. So how are you guys thinking about that and how are you working on it? >> Yeah, no, that's exactly right, Dave. As we talk to data practitioners, the recurring theme that we keep hearing is, there is just a lot of use cases that require you to have deep understanding of data and require you to have that background in data sciences and so on, such as data governance and vary for their use cases. But ultimately, the reason that data exists is to be able to drive those insights for the end customer, for the domain expert, for the end user. And therefore it becomes incredibly important that we be able to bridge that chasm that exists today between the data universe and the end customer. And that is what we essentially are focused on by virtue of leaning into capabilities like publishing, right? Like self, ad hoc reporting and things that allow citizen data scientists to be able to take advantage of the plethora of data that exists. >> Peder, I'm interested in this notion of IT and OT. Of course, Hitachi is a partner, established in both. Talk about Mongo's position in thinking. 'Cause you've got on-prem customers, you're running now across all clouds. I call it super cloud connecting all these things. But part of that is the edge. Is Mongo running there? Can Mongo run there, sort of a lightweight version? How do you see that evolve? Give us some details there. >> So I think first and foremost, we were born on-prem, obviously with the origins of MongoDB, a little over five years ago, we introduced Atlas and today we run across a hundred different availability zones around the globe, so we're pretty well covered there. The third bit that I think people miss is we also picked up a product called Realm. Realm is an embedded database for mobile devices. So if you think about car companies, Toyota, for example, building connected cars, they'll have Realm in the car for the telemetry, connects back into an Atlas system for the bigger operational side of things. So there's this seamless kind of, or consistency that runs between data center to cloud to edge to device, that MongoDB plays across all the way through. And then taking that to the next level. We talked about this before we sat down, we're also building in the security elements of that because obviously you not only have that data in rest and data in motion, but what happens when you have that data in use? And announced, I think today? We purchased a little company, Aroki, experts in encryption, some of the smartest security minds on the planet. And today we introduce query-able encryption, which basically enables developers, without any security background, to be able to build searchable capabilities into their applications to access data and do it in a way where the security rules and the privacy all remain constant, regardless of whether that developer or the end user actually knows how that works. >> This is a great example of people talk about shift left, designing security in, for the developer, right from the start, not as a bolt-on. It's a great example. >> And I'm actually going to ground that with a real life customer example, if that's okay, Dave. We actually have a utility company in North Carolina that's responsible for energy and water. And so you can imagine, I mean, you alluded to the IO to use case, the industrial use case and this particular customer has to contend with millions of sensors that are constantly streaming data back, right. And now think about the challenge that they were encountering. They had all this data streaming in and in large quantities and they were actually resident on numerous databases, right. And so they had this very real challenge of getting to that quality data that I, data quality that I talked about earlier, as well, they had this challenge of being able to consolidate all of it and make sense of it. And so that's where our partnership with MongoDB really paid off where we were able to leverage Pentaho to integrate all of the data, have that be resident on MongoDB. And now they're leveraging some of the data capabilities, the data fabric capabilities that we bring to the table to actually deliver meaningful insights to their customers. Now their customers are actually able to save on their electricity and water bills. So great success story right there. >> So I love the business impact there, and also you mentioned Pentaho, I remember that acquisition was transformative for Hitachi because it was the beginning of sort of your new vector, which became Hitachi Ventara. What is Lumada? That's, I presume the evolution of Pentaho? You brought in organic, and added capabilities on top of that, bringing in your knowledge of IOT and OT? Explain what Lumada is. >> Yeah, no, that's a great question, Dave. And I'll say this, I mentioned this early on, we fundamentally believe that data is the backbone for all digital transformation. And so to that end, Hitachi has actually been making a series of acquisitions as well as investing organically to build up these data capabilities. And so Pentaho, as you know, gives us some of that front-end capability in terms of integrations and so forth. And the Lumada platform, the umbrella brand name is really connoting everything that we do in the data space that allow customers to go through that, to derive those meaningful insights. Lumada literally stands for illuminating data. And so that's exactly what we do. Irrespective of what vertical, what use case we're talking about. As you know very well, Hitachi is very prominent in just about every vertical. We're in like 90% of the Fortune 500 customers across banking and financial, retail, telecom. And as you know very well, very, very strong in the industrial space as well. >> You know, it's interesting, Peder, you and Radhika were both talking about this sort of edge model. And so if I understand it correctly, and maybe you could bring in sort of the IOT requirements as well. You think about AI, most of the AI that's done today is modeling in the cloud. But in the future and as we're seeing this, it's real-time inferencing at the edge and it's massive amounts of data. But you're probably not, you're going to persist some, I'm hearing, probably not going to persist all of it, some of it's going to be throwaway. And then you're going to send some back to the cloud. I think of EVs or, a deer runs in front of the vehicle and they capture that, okay, send that back. The amounts of data is just massive. Is that the right way to think about this new model? Is that going to require new architectures and hearing that Mongo fits in. >> Yeah. >> Beautifully with that. >> So this is a little bit what we talked about earlier, where historically there have been three silos of data. Whether it's classic system of record, system of engagement or system of intelligence and they've each operated independently. But as applications are pushing in further and further to the edge and real time becomes more and more important, you need to be able to take all three types of workloads or models, data models and actually incorporate it into a single platform. That's the vision we have behind our developer data platform. And it enables us to handle those transactional, operational and analytical workloads in real time, right. One of the things that we announced here this week was our columnar indexing, which enables some of that step into the analytics so that we can actually do in-app analytics for those things that are not going back into the data warehouse or not going back into the cloud, real time happening with the application itself. >> As you add, this is interesting, as basically Mongo's becoming this all-in-one database, as you add those capabilities, are you able to preserve, it sounds like you've still focused on simplicity, developer product productivity. Are there trade off, as you add, does it detract from those things or are you able to architecturally preserve those? >> I think it comes down to how we're thinking through the use case and what's going to be important for the developers. So if you look at the model today, the legacy model was, let's put it all in one big monolith. We recognize that that doesn't work for everyone but the counter to that was this explosion of niche databases, right? You go to certain cloud providers, you get to choose between 15 different databases for whatever workload you want. Time series here, graph here, in-memory here. It becomes a big mess that is pushed back on the company to glue back together and figure out how to work within those systems. We're focused on really kind of embracing the document model. We obviously believe that's a great general purpose model for all types of workloads. And then focusing in on not taking a full search platform that's doing everything from log management all the way through in-app, we're optimizing for in-app experiences. We're optimizing analytics for in-app experiences. We're optimizing all of the different things we're doing for what the developer is trying to go accomplish. That helps us maintain consistency on the architectural design. It helps us maintain consistency in the model by which we're engaging with our customers. And I think it helps us innovate as quickly as we've been been able to innovate. >> Great, thank you. Radhika, we'll give you the last word. We're seeing this convergence of function in the data based, data models, but at the same time, we're seeing the distribution of data. We're not, you're clearly not fighting that, you're embracing that. What does the future look like from Hitachi Ventara's standpoint over the next half decade or even further out? >> So, we're trying to lean into what customers are trying to solve for, Dave. And so that fundamentally comes down to use cases and the approaches just may look dramatically different with every customer and every use case, right? And that's perfectly fine. We're leaning into those models, whether that is data refining on the edge or the core or the cloud. We're leaning into it. And our intent really is to ensure that we're providing that frictionless experience from end to end, right. And I'll give a couple of examples. We had this very large bank, one of the top 10 banks here in the US, that essentially had multiple data catalogs that they were using to essentially sort through their metadata and make sense of all of this data that was coming into their systems. And we were able to essentially, dramatically simplify it. Cut down on the amount of time that it takes to deliver insights to them, right. And it was like, the metric shared was 600% improvement. And so this is the kind of thing that we're manically focused on is, how do we deliver that quantifiable end-customer improvement, right? Whether it's in terms of shortening the amount to drive the insights, whether it's in terms of the number of data practitioners that they have to throw at a problem, the level of manual intervention that is required, so we're automating everything. We're trying to build in a lot of security as Peder talked about, that is a common goal for both sides. We're trying to address it through a combination of security solutions at varying ends of the spectrum. And then finally, as well, delivering that resiliency and scale that is required. Because again, the one thing we know for sure that we can take for granted is data is exploding, right? And so you need that scale, you need that resiliency. You need for customers to feel like there is high quality, it's not dirty, it's not dark and it's something that they can rely upon. >> Yeah, if it's not trusted, they're not going to use it. The interesting thing about the partnership, especially with Hitachi, is you're in so many different examples and use cases. You've got IT. You've got OT. You've got industrial and so many different examples. And if Mongo can truly fit into all those, it's just, the rocket ship's going to continue. Peder, Radhika, thank you so much for coming back in theCUBE, it's great to see you both. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Thank you, my pleasure. >> All right. Keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante from the Javits Center in New York City at MongoDB World 2022. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>>Hello, and welcome to today's event, dealing government emergency responses beyond the pandemic. This is Bob Wooley, senior fellow for the center for digital government and formerly the chief tech clerk for the state of Utah. I'm excited to serve as moderator for today's event. And just want to say, thank you for joining us. I know we're in for an informative session over the next 60 minutes before we begin a couple of brief housekeeping notes or recording of this presentation will be emailed to all registrants within 48 hours. You can use the recording for your reference or feel free to pass it along to colleagues. 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We would like to hear what you think if you're unable to see with us for the entire webinar, but we're just like to complete the survey. As much as you're able, please click the survey widget at the bottom of the screen to launch the survey. Otherwise it will pop up once the webinar concludes at this time, we recommend that you disable your pop-up blockers, and if you experiencing any media player issues or have any other problems, please visit our webcast help guide by clicking on the help button at the bottom of the console. >>Joining me today to discuss this very timely topic are Karen revolt and Tim Burch, Kim Berge currently serves as the administrator of human services for Clark County Nevada. He's invested over 20 years in improving health and human service systems of care or working in the private public and nonprofit sectors. 18 of those years have been in local government in Clark County, Las Vegas, where you served in a variety of capacities, including executive leadership roles as the director of department of social services, as well as the director for the department of family services. He has also served as CEO for provider of innovative hosted software solutions, as well as chief strategy officer for a boutique public sector consulting firm. Karen real-world is the social program management offering lead for government health and human services with IBM Watson health. Karen focuses delivering exciting new offerings by focusing on market opportunities, determining unmet needs and identifying innovative solutions. >>Much of her career has been in health and human services focused on snap, TANIF, Medicaid, affordable care act, and child welfare prior to joining IBM. Karen was the senior director of product management for a systems integrator. She naturally fell in love with being a project manager. She can take her user requirements and deliver offerings. Professionals would use to make their job easier and more productive. Karen has also found fulfillment in working in health and human services on challenges that could possibly impact the outcome of people's lives. Now, before we begin our discussion of the presentation, I want to one, we'd like to learn a little more about you as an audience. So I'm going to ask you a polling question. Please take a look at this. Give us an idea of what is your organization size. I won't bother to read all these to you, but there are other a range of sizes zero to 250 up to 50,000. Please select the one that is most appropriate and then submit. >>It looks like the vast majority are zero to two 50. Don't have too many over 250,000. So this is a very, very interesting piece of information. Now, just to set up our discussion today, what I want to do is just spend just a moment and talk about the issue that we're dealing with. So when you look the COVID-19 pandemic, it's put immense pressure on States. I've been a digital state judge and had been judging a lot of the responses from States around the country. It's been very interesting to me because they bifurcate really into two principle kinds of reactions to the stress providing services that COVID environment present. One is we're in a world of hurt. We don't have enough money. I think I'm going to go home and engage as little as I have to. Those are relatively uncommon. Thankfully, most of them have taken the COVID-19 pandemic has immense opportunity for them to really do a lot more with telework, to do more with getting people, employees, and citizens involved with government services. >>And I've done some really, really creative things along the way. I find that to be a really good thing, but in many States systems have been overloaded as individuals and families throughout the country submitted just an unprecedented number of benefit applications for social services. At the same time, government agencies have had to contend with social distance and the need for a wholly different approach to engage with citizens. Um, overall most public agencies, regardless of how well they've done with technology have certainly felt some strain. Now, today we have the opportunity to go into a discussion with our speakers, have some wonderful experience in these areas, and I'm going to be directing questions to them. And again, we encourage you as you hear what they have to say. Be sure and submit questions that we can pick up later at the time. So Tim, let's start with you. Given that Las Vegas is a hub for hospitality. An industry hit severely as a result of this pandemic. How's the County doing right now and how are you prioritizing the growing needs of the County? >>Thanks Bob. Thanks for having me. Let me start off by giving just a little, maybe context for Clark County too, to our audience today. So, uh, Clark County is, you know, 85% of the state of Nevada if we serve not just as a regional County by way of service provision, but also direct municipal services. Well, if, uh, the famous Las Vegas strip is actually in unincorporated Clark County, and if we were incorporated, we would be the largest city in the state. So I say all of that to kind of help folks understand that we provide a mix of services, not just regional services, like health and human services, the direct and, and missable, uh, services as well as we work with our other five jurisdiction partners, uh, throughout the area. Uh, we are very much, um, I think during the last recession we were called the Detroit of the West. >>And, uh, that was because we're very much seen as a one industry town. Uh, so most like when the car plants, the coal plants closed back East and in the communities fuel that very rapidly, the same thing happens to us when tourism, uh, it's cut. Uh, so of course, when we went into complete shutdown and March, uh, we felt it very rapidly, not just on, uh, uh, tax receipts and collectibles, but the way in which we could deliver services. So of course our first priority was to, uh, like I think you mentioned mobilized staff. We, we mobilized hundreds of staff overnight with laptops and phones and cars and the things they needed to do to get mobile and still provide the priority services that we're mandated to provide from a safety standpoint. Um, and then we got busy working for our clients and that's really where our partnership with IBM and Watson, uh, came in and began planning that in July. And we're able to open that portal up in October to, to really speed up the way in which we're giving assistance to, to our residents. Um, re focus has been on making sure that people stay housed. We have, uh, an estimated, uh, 2.5 million residents and over 150,000 of those households are anticipated to be facing eviction, uh, as of January one. So we, we've got a, a big task ahead of us. >>All of this sounds kind of expensive. Uh, one of the common threads as you know, runs throughout government is, ah, I don't really have the money for that. I think I'd be able to afford that a diaper too, as well. So what types of funding has been made available for counties, a result of a pandemic, >>Primarily our funding stream that we're utilizing to get these services out the door has been the federal cares act. Uh, now we had some jurisdictions regionally around us and even locally that prioritize those funds in a different way. Um, our board of County commissioners, uh, took, um, a sum total of about $85 million of our 240 million that said, this will go directly to residents in the form of rental assistance and basic needs support. No one should lose their home or go hungry during this pandemic. Uh, so we've really been again working through our community partners and through our IBM tools to make sure that happens. >>So how does, how does, how does the cares act funding then support Clark County? Cause it seems to me that the needs would be complex, diverse >>Pretty much so. So as you, as folks may know him a call there's several tronches of the cares act, the original cares act funding that has come down to us again, our board, uh, identified basic needs or rental assistance and, and gave that the department of social service to go to the tunicate, uh, through the community. We then have the cares act, uh, uh, coronavirus relief funds that have, uh, impacted our CDBG and our emergency solutions grants. We've taken those. And that's what we was going to keep a lot of the programs and services, uh, like our IBM Watson portal open past January one when the cares act dollars expire. Uh, our initial response was a very manual one, uh, because even though we have a great home grown homeless management information system, it does not do financials. Uh, so we had 14 local nonprofits adjudicating, uh, this rental assistance program. >>And so we could get our social service visitor portal up, uh, to allow us to take applications digitally and run that through our program. Uh, and, uh, so those partners were obviously very quickly overwhelmed and were able to stand up our portal, uh, which for the reason we were driving so hard, even from, uh, beginning of the conversations where after going into lockdown into contracting in July and getting the portal open in October, which was an amazing turnaround. Uh, so the kudos that IBM team, uh, for getting us up and out the door so quickly, uh, was a tie in, uh, to our, uh, Curam IBM, uh, case management system that we utilize to adjudicate benefits on daily basis in Clark County for all our local indigent population, uh, and high needs folks. Uh, and then that ties into our SAP IBM platform, which gets the checks out the door. >>So what, what we've been able to do with these dollars is created in Lucian, uh, that has allowed us in the last 60 days to get as much money out the door, as our nonprofits were able go out the door in the first six months pandemic. So it really has helped us. Uh, so I'm really grateful to our board of County commissioners for recognizing the investment in technology to, to not only get our teams mobile, but to create ease of access for our constituents and our local residents to give them the help they need quickly and the way that they need it. >>Just to follow up question to that, Tim, that I'm curious about having done a lot of work like this in government, sometimes getting procurement through in a timely way is a bit challenging. How were you able to work through those issues and getting this up and provision so quickly? >>Uh, yeah, so we, we put together a, what we call a pandemic playbook, which is kind of lessons learned. And what we've seen is the folks who were essential workers in the first 60 days of the, uh, pandemic. We were able to get a lot done quickly because we were taking full advantage of the emergency. Uh, it may sound a little crass to folks not inside the service world, but it was, uh, you know, don't want you to crisis. It was things we've been planning or trying to do for years. We need them yesterday. We should have had them yesterday, but let's get them tomorrow and get it moving very quickly. Uh, this IBM procurement was something we were able to step through very quickly because of our longstanding relationship. Our countywide, uh, system of record for our financials is SAP. Uh, we've worked with Curam, uh, solution, uh, for years. >>So we've got this long standing relationship and trust in the product and the teams, which helped us build the business case of why we did it, no need to go out for competitive procurement that we didn't have time. And we needed something that would integrate very quickly into our existing systems. Uh, so that part was there. Now when the folks who were non essential came back in June and the reopening, it was whiplash, uh, the speed at which we were moving, went back to the pace of normal business, uh, which feels like hitting a wall, doing a hundred miles an hour when you're used to having that, uh, mode of doing business. Uh, so that's certainly been a struggle, uh, for all of those involved, uh, in trying to continue to get things up. Um, but, uh, once again, the teams have been great because we've probably tripled our licensure on this portal since we opened it, uh, because of working with outside vendors, uh, to, uh, literally triple the size of our staff that are processing these applications by bringing on temporary staff, uh, and short-term professionals. Uh, and so we've been able to get those things through, uh, because we'd already built the purchasing vehicle during the early onset of the crisis. >>That's very helpful. Karen, IBM has played a really pivotal role in all of this. Uh, IBM Watson health works with a number of global government agencies, raging from counties like Clark County to federal governments. What are some of the major challenges you've seen with your clients as a result of the pandemic and how is technology supporting them in a time of need and give us some background Watson health too. So we kind of know a little more about it because this is really a fascinating area. >>Yeah. Thank you, Bob. And thanks Tim for the background on Clark County, because I think Clark County is definitely also an example of what federal governments and global governments are doing worldwide today. So, um, Watson health is our division within IBM where we really focus on health and human services. And our goal is to really focus in on, um, the outcomes that we're providing to individuals and families and looking at how we use data and insights to really make that impact and that change. And within that division, we have our government health and human services area, which is the focus of where we are with our clients around social program. But it also allows us to work with, um, different agencies and really look at how we can really move the ball in terms of, um, effecting change and outcomes for, um, really moving the needle of how we can, uh, make an impact on individuals and families. >>So as we look at the globe globally as well, you know, everything that Tim had mentioned about how the pandemic has really changed the way that government agencies operate and how they do services, I think it's amazing that you have that pandemic playbook because a lot of agencies in the same way also had these set of activities that they always wanted to go and take part on, but there was no impetus to really allow for that to happen. And with the pandemic, it allowed that to kind of open and say, okay, we can try this. And unfortunately I'm in a very partial house way to do that. And, um, what Tim has mentioned about the new program that they set up for the housing, some of those programs could take a number of years to really get a program online and get through and allowing, uh, the agencies to be able to do that in a matter of weeks is amazing. >>And I think that's really gonna set a precedent as we go forward and how you can bring on programs such as the housing and capability in Canada with the economic, uh, social, um, uh, development and, and Canada need that the same thing. They actually had a multi benefit delivery system that was designed to deliver benefits for three programs. And as part of the department of fisheries and oceans Canada, the, um, the state had an emergency and they really need to set up on how they could provide benefits to the fishermen who had been at that impacted, um, from that. And they also did set up a digital front-end using IBM citizen engagement to start to allow the applications that benefits, um, and they set it up in a matter of weeks. And as I mentioned, we, uh, Clark County had a backend legacy system where they could connect to and process those applications. And this case, this is a brand new program and the case management system that they brought up was on cloud. And they had to set up a new one, but allow them to set up a, what we used to call straight through processing, I think has been now turned, turned or coined contact less, uh, processing and allowing us to really start to move those benefits and get those capabilities out to the citizens in even a faster way than has been imagined. Uh, pre pandemic. >>Karen, I have one follow-up question. I want to ask you, having had a lot of experience with large projects in government. Sometimes there's a real gap between getting to identified real requirements and then actions. How do you, how do you work with clients to make sure that process time to benefit is shortened? >>So we really focus on the user themselves and we take a human centered design focus and really prioritizing what those needs are. Um, so working with the clients, uh, effectively, and then going through agile iterations of brain, that capability out as, um, in, in a phased approach to, so the idea of getting what we can bring out that provides quality and capability to the users, and then over time starting to really roll out additional functions and, um, other, uh, things that citizens or individuals and families would need >>Very helpful. Tim, this is an interesting partnership. It's always good to see partnerships between private sector and government. Tell us a little bit about how the partnership with IBM Watson health was established and what challenges or they were brought into assist, where they brought into assist with back to requirements. Again, within the requirements definitely shifted on us. You know, we had the con looking at, uh, Watson on our child welfare, uh, side of the house that I'm responsible for and how that we could, uh, increase access to everything from tele-health to, to, uh, foster parent benefit, uh, kinship, placement benefits, all those types of things that, that right now are very manual, uh, on the child welfare side. Uh, and then the pandemic kid. And we very quickly realized that we needed, uh, to stand up a, um, a new program because, uh, a little bit for context, uh, the park County, we don't administer TANIF or Medicaid at the County level. >>It is done at the state level. So we don't have, uh, unemployment systems or Medicaid, 10 of snap benefits systems to be able to augment and enroll out. We provide, uh, the indigent supports the, the homelessness prevention, referee housing continuum of care, long-term care, really deep emergency safety net services for our County, which is a little bit different and how those are done. So that was really our focus, which took a lot of in-person investigation. We're helping people qualify for disability benefits so they can get into permanent supportive housing, uh, things that are very intensive. And yet now we have a pandemic where we need things to happen quickly because the cares act money expires at the end of December. And people were facing eviction and eviction can help spread exposure to, to COVID. Uh, so, uh, be able to get in and very rapidly, think about what is the minimal pelvis to MVP. >>What's the minimum viable product that we can get out the door that will help people, uh, entrance to a system as contactless as possible, which again was a complete one 80 from how we had been doing business. Um, and, uh, so the idea that you could get on and you have this intelligent chat bot that can walk you through questions, help you figure out if you look like you might be eligible, roll you right into an application where you can upload the few documents that we're going to require to help verify your coat would impact and do that from a smartphone and under, you know, 20 minutes. Um, it, it, it is amazing. And the fact that we've stood that up and got it out the door in 90 days, it's just amazing to me, uh, when it shows the, uh, strength of partnership. Um, I think we can, we have some shared language because we had that ongoing partnership, but we were able to actually leverage some system architects that we had that were familiar with our community and our other products. So it really helped expedite, uh, getting this, uh, getting this out to the citizens. >>So, uh, I assume that there are some complexities in doing this. So overall, how has this deployment of citizen engagement with Watson gone and how do you measure success other than you got it out quick? How do you know if it's working? >>Yeah. Right. So it's the adage of, you know, quick, fast and good, right. Um, or fast, good and cheap. So, uh, we measure success in this way. Um, how are we getting access as our number one quality measurement here? So we were able to collect, uh, about 13,000 applications, uh, manual NRC, manually folks had to go onto our website, download a PDF, fill it out, email it, or physically drop it off along with their backup. One of their choice of 14 non-profits in town, whichever is closest to them. Um, and, uh, and then wait for that process. And they were able to get 13,000 of those, uh, process for the last six months. Uh, we have, I think we had about 8,000 applications the first month come into the portal and about an equal amount of folks who could not provide the same documentation that it was needed. >>And self-selected out. If we had not had the, the tool in place, we would have had 16,000 applications, half of which would have been non-eligible would have been jamming up the system, uh, when we don't have the bandwidth to deal to deal with that, we, we need to be able to focus in on, uh, Judy Kenny applications that we believe are like a 95% success rate from the moment our staff gets them, but because we have the complex and he was on already being dependent upon the landlord, having to verify the rent amount and be willing to work with us, um, which is a major hurdle. Um, but, uh, so w we knew we could not do is go, just reinvent the manual process digitally that that would have been an abject failure on our behalf. So, uh, the ideas that, uh, folks had can go on a very, had this very intuitive conversation to the chat bot, answer some questions and find out if they're eligible. >>And then self-select out was critical for us to not only make sure that the citizens got the help they needed, but not so burnt out and overload our workforce, which is already feeling the strain of the COVID pandemic on their own personal lives and in their homes and in the workplace. Um, so that was really critical for us. So it's not just about speed, ease of access was important. Uh, the ability to quickly automate things on the fly, uh, we have since changed, uh, the area median income, a qualifier for the rental assistance, because we were able to reallocate more money, uh, to the program. So we were able to open it up to more people. We were able to make that, uh, change to the system very quickly. Uh, the idea that we can go on the home page and put updates, uh, we recognized that, uh, some of our monolingual Hispanic residents were having difficulty even with some guidance getting through the system. >>So we're able to record a, a Spanish language walkthrough and get done on the home page the next day, right into the fordable, there'll be a fine, so they could literally run the YouTube video while they're walking through their application. Side-by-side so things like that, that those are how we are able to, for us measured success, not just in the raw dollars out the door, not just in the number of applications that have come in, but our ability to be responsive when we hear from our constituents and our elected officials that, Hey, I want, I appreciate the 15,000 applications as you all, a process and record time, I've got three, four, five, six, 10 constituents that having this type of problem and be able to go back and retool our systems to make them more intuitive, to do, be able to keep them responsive for us is definitely a measure of success and all of this, probably more qualitative than here we're looking >>For, but, uh, that's for us, that's important. Actually the qualitative side is what usually gets ignored. Uh, Karen, I've got a question that's a follow up for you on the same topic. How does IBM facilitate reporting within this kind of an environment given the different needs of stakeholders, online managers and citizens? What kinds of things do you, are you able to do >>So with, um, the influx of digitalization? I think it allows us to really take a more data-driven approach to start looking at that. So, as, as Tim was mentioning, you can see where potentially users are spending more time on certain questions, or if they're stuck on a question, you can see where the abandoned rate is. So using a more data-driven approach to go in to identify, you know, how do we actually go and, um, continue to drive that user experience that may not be something that we drive directly from the users. So I would say that analytics is really, uh, I think going to continue to be a driving force as government agencies go forward, because now they are capturing the data. But one thing that they have to be careful of is making sure that the data that they're getting is the right data to give them the information, to make the right next steps and decisions. >>And Tim, you know, use a really good example with, um, the chatbot in terms of, you know, with the influx of everything going on with COVID, the citizens are completely flooded with information and how do they get the right information to actually help them decide, can I apply for this chap program? Or should I, you know, not even try and what Tim mentioned just saved the citizens, you know, the people that may not be eligible a lot of time and going through and applying, and then getting denied by having that upfront, I have questions and I need answers. Um, so again, more data-driven of how do we provide that information? And, you know, we've seen traditionally citizens having to go on multiple website, web pages to get an answer to the question, because they're like, I think I have a question in this area, but I'm not exactly sure. And they, then they're starting to hunt and hunt and hunt and not even potentially get an answer. So the chocolate really like technology-wise helps to drive, you know, more data-driven answers to what, um, whether it's a citizen, whether it's, um, Tim who needs to understand how and where my citizens getting stuck, are they able to complete the application where they are? Can we really get the benefits to, um, this individual family for the housing needs >>Too many comments on the same thing. I know you have to communicate measures of success to County executives and others. How do you do that? I mean, are you, do you have enough information to do it? Yeah, we're able to, we actually have a standup meeting every morning where the first thing I learn is how many new applications came in overnight. How many of those were completed with full documentation? How many will be ported over into our system, assigned the staff to work, where they're waiting >>On landlord verification. So I can see the entire pipeline of applications, which helps us then determine, um, Oh, it's, it's not, you know, maybe urban legend is that folks are having difficulty accessing the system. When I see really the bottleneck there, it got gotten the system fine, the bottlenecks laying with our landlord. So let's do a landlord, a town hall and iterate and reeducate them about what their responsibilities are and how easy it is for them to respond with the form they need to attest to. And so it lets us see in real time where we're having difficulties, uh, because, uh, there's a constant pressure on this system. Not just that, uh, we don't want anyone to lose their home, uh, but these dollars also go away within a December. So we've got this dual pressure of get it right and get it right now. >>Uh, and so th the ability to see these data and these metrics on, on a daily basis is critical for us to, to continue to, uh, ModuLite our response. Um, and, and not just get comfortable are baked into well, that's why we developed the flowchart during requirements, and that's just the way things are gonna stay. Uh, that's not how you respond to a pandemic. Uh, and so having a tool and a partner that helps us, uh, stay flexible, state agile, I guess, to, to, to leverage some terminology, uh, is important. And, and it's, it's paid dividends for our citizens. Karen, again, is another up to the same thing. I'm kind of curious about one of the problems of government from time to time. And Tim, I think attest to this is how do you know when Dunn has been reached? How did you go about defining what done would look like for the initial rollout with this kind of a customer? >>So I think Doug, I guess in this case, um, is, is this, isn't able to get the benefits that they're looking for and how do we, uh, you know, starting from, I think what we were talking about earlier, like in terms of requirements and what is the minimum viable, um, part of that, and then you start to add on the bells and whistles that we're really looking to do. So, um, you know, our team worked with him to really define what are those requirements. I know it's a new program. So some of those policy decisions were still also being worked out as the requirements were being defined as well. So making sure that you are staying on top of, okay, what are the key things and what do we really need to do from a compliance standpoint, from a functionality, and obviously, um, the usability of how, uh, an assistant can come on and apply and, um, have those, uh, requirements, make sure that you can meet that, that version before you start adding on additional scope. >>Very helpful. Jim, what's your comment on this since I know done matters to you? Yeah. And look, I I've lived through a, again, multiple, uh, county-wide it implementations and some department wide initiatives as well. So I think we know that our staff always want more so nothing's ever done, uh, which is a challenge and that's on our side of the customer. Um, but, uh, for this, it really was our, our experience of recognizing the, the time was an essence. We didn't have a chance. We didn't have, uh, the space to get into these endless, uh, conversations, uh, the agile approach, rather than doing the traditional waterfall, where we would have been doing requirements tracking for months before we ever started coding, it was what do we need minimally to get a check in the hands of a landlord on behalf of a client, so they don't get evicted. >>And we kept just re honing on that. That's nice. Let's put that in the parking lot. We'll come back to it because again, we want to leverage this investment long term, uh, because we've got a we, and we've got the emergency solutions and CDBG, and then our, uh, mainstream, uh, services we brought on daily basis, but we will come back to those things speed and time are of the essence. So what do we need, uh, to, to get this? So a chance to really, um, educate our staff about the concepts of agile iteration, um, and say, look, this is not just on the it side. We're gonna roll a policy out today around how you're doing things. And we may figure out through data and metrics that it's not working next week, and we'll have to have that. You want it. And you're going to get the same way. >>You're getting updated guidance from the CDC on what to do and what not to do. Uh, health wise, you're getting the same from us, uh, and really to helping the staff understand that process from the beginning was key. And, uh, so, and, and that's, again, partnering with, with our development team in that way was helpful. Um, because once we gave them that kind of charter as I am project champion, this is what we're saying. They did an equally good job of staying on task and getting to the point of is this necessary or nice. And if it wasn't necessary, we put it in the nice category and we'll come back to it. So I think that's really helpful. My experience having done several hundred sheet applications also suggest the need for MBP matters, future stages really matter and not getting caught. My flying squirrels really matters. So you don't get distracted. So let's move on to, let's do a polling question before we go on to some of our other questions. So for our audience, do you have a digital front ends for your benefit delivery? Yes, no. Or we're planning to a lot of response here yet. There we go. Looks like about half, have one and half note. So that's an interesting question. What's going to one more polling question, learn a little more here. Has COVID-19 >>Accelerated or moved cloud. Yes, no. We already run a majority of applications on cloud. Take a moment and respond if you would, please. So this is interesting. No real acceleration was taken place and in terms of moving to cloud is not what I was expecting, but that's interesting. So let's go onto another question then. And Karen, let me direct this one to you, given that feedback, how do you envision technologies such as citizen engagement and watching the system will be used, respond to emergency situations like the pandemic moving forward? I mean, what should government agencies consider given the challenges? This kind of a pandemic is brought upon government and try to tie this in, if you would, what, what is the role of cloud in all of this for making this happen in a timely way? Karen, take it away. >>Okay. Thanks Bob. So as we started the discussion around the digital expansion, you know, we definitely see additional programs and additional capabilities coming online as we continue on. Um, I think, uh, agencies have really seen a way to connect with their citizens and families and landlords, um, in this case an additional way. And he prepared them like there were, uh, presuppose assumptions that the, um, the citizens or landlords really wanted to interact with agency face-to-face and have that high touch part. And I think, um, through this, the governments have really learned that there is a way to still have an impact on the citizen without having a slow, do a face to face. And so I think that's a big realization for them to now really explore other ways to digitally explain, expand their programs and capabilities. Another area that we touched on was around the AI and chat bot piece. >>So as we start to see capabilities like this, the reason why Clark County was able to bring it up quickly and everything was because it was housed on cloud, we are seeing the push of starting to move some of the workloads. I know from a polling question perspective that it's been, um, lighter in terms of getting, uh, moving to the cloud. But we have seen the surge of really chatbots. I think we've been talking about chatbots for a while now. And, um, agencies hadn't really had the ability to start to implement that and really put it into effect. But with the pandemic, they were able to bring things up and, you know, very short amount of time to solve, um, a big challenge of not having the call center be flooded and have a different way to direct that engagement between the citizen and the government. >>So really building a different type of channel for them to engage rather than having to call or to come into an office, which wasn't really allowed in terms of, um, the pandemic. Um, the other thing I'll touch on is, um, 10 mentioned, you know, the backlog of applications that are coming in and we're starting to see the, um, the increase in automation. How do we automate areas where it's administratively highly burdened, but it's really a way that we can start to automate those processes, to give our workers the ability to focus on more of those complex situations that really need attention. So we're starting to see where the trends of trying to push there of can we automate some of those processes, um, uh, uploading documents and verification documents is another way of like, trying to look at, is there a way that we can make that easier? >>Not only for the applicant that's applying, but also for the caseworker. So there's not having to go through that. Um, does the name match, um, the applicant, uh, information and what we're looking on here, and Bob, you mentioned cloud. So behind the scenes of, you know, why, uh, government agencies are really pushing the cloud is, um, you heard about, I mean, with the pandemic, you see a surge of applicants coming in for those benefits and how do we scale for that kind of demand and how do you do that in an inappropriate way, without the huge pressures that you put on to your data center or your staff who's already trying to help our citizens and applicants, applicants, and families get the benefits they need. And so the cloud, um, you know, proposition of trying, being able to be scalable and elastic is really a key driver that we've seen in terms of, uh, uh, government agencies going to cloud. >>We haven't really seen during a pandemic, the core competencies, some of them moving those to cloud, it's really been around that digital front end, the chat bot area of how do we start to really start with that from a cloud perspective and cloud journey, and then start to work in the other processes and other areas. Um, security is also huge, uh, focus right now with the pandemic and everything going online. And with cloud allows you to be able to make sure that you're secure and be able to apply the right security so that you're always covered in terms of the type of demand and, um, impact, uh, that is coming through >>Very helpful. Tim, I'm going to ask to follow up on this of a practical nature. So you brought this up very quickly. Uh, there's a certain amount of suspicion around state government County government about chatbots. How did you get a chat much and be functional so quickly? And were you able to leverage the cloud in this process? Yeah, so on the trust is important. Uh, and I'll go back to my previous statement about individuals being able to see upfront whether they believe they're eligible or not, because nothing will erode trust more than having someone in hours applying and weeks waiting to find out they were denied because they weren't eligible to begin with, uh, that erodes trust. So being able to let folks know right up front, here's what it looks like to be eligible, actually help us build some of that, uh, cause they don't feel like, uh, someone in the bureaucracy is just putting them through the ringer for no reason. >>Um, now in regard to how do we get the chat bot out? I will say, uh, we have a, uh, dynamic it and leadership, uh, team at the highest level of County government who we have been already having conversations over the last year about what it meant to be smart government, uh, the department of social service and family services that I'm responsible for. We're already, uh, hands up first in line, you know, Guinea pigs volunteering to be on the front end of, uh, certain projects. So w we have primed ourselves for, for some of this readiness in that aspect. Um, but for citizen trust, um, the timeliness of application right now is the biggest element of trust. Uh, so I've applied I've I feel like I put my housing future in your hands. Are you going to deliver and having the ability for us to rapidly scale up? >>Uh, we typically have 120 staff in the department of social service that, that are adjudicating benefits for programs on daily basis. We've doubled that with temporary staff, uh, through some partnerships, uh, we're, we're gonna, as of next week, probably have more temporary per professional staff helping an adjudicator applications. No, do full-time County staff, because again, this rush to get the dollars out, out the door. So having a system where I can easily, uh, ramp on new users and manage them without having to be solely dependent upon an already, uh, overworked it staff who were trying to support 37 other departments in the County, um, around infrastructure needs has been greatly helpful. Sounds to me like a strong outcome focus and one that seems to work. Let's move on now to our audience questions. We're getting close to the end of our time. So let's jump into some questions from the audience. A number of you have been asking about getting copies of today's presentation within the next 48 hours. Government technology will provide all attendees with the link to the recording for your reference, or to share with colleagues. Well, let's go to our first question. So this is an interesting one. And Karen, this is for you did IBM work with other counties and States to provide digital engagement portals. >>We did Bob, uh, we've worked, um, so globally we've provided guidance on this. We work closely with New York city. They've been the integral part of the development also with our citizen engagement offering. Um, we work closely with the States. So we worked with New York city. Um, North Carolina was also another state who, um, improved their, uh, citizen engagement piece, bring up their Medicaid and snap, um, applications along with Medicaid. COVID testing along that. And I mentioned, um, the economic and social development in Canada as well. And we also work with the ministry of social development in Singapore. So a number of our customers had put up, uh, a global, uh, or sorry, a citizen engagement frontend. And during this timeframe, >>Very helpful. I don't know how much did you hear your mom provide you, but how much did it cost for initial deployment and what are the ongoing costs in other words, is this thing going to be sustainable over time? >>Yeah, absolutely. So total, uh, to date, we've spent about a $1.8 million on development implementations and licensure. A big chunk of that again has been the rapid extended of licensure, uh, for this program. Um, I think over a third of that is probably licensing because again, we need to get the dollars out and we need staff to do that and making the short term several hundred thousand dollar investment in a professional support staff and having them be able to work this portal is much cheaper than the long-term investment of bringing on a staff, printing a job, uh, during a financial difficulty that we're facing, uh, the single largest fiscal cliff let's get into that us history. Um, so it's not smart to create jobs that have a 30 year, one way to retirement, uh, inside our in unionized government environment here. So having this, the staff that would come on and do this and get out the door on these federal dollars was critical for us. Um, and there is a $800,000 a year, I believe so ongoing costs associated with licensure and, and the programming support. Uh, but once again, we're going to be moving, um, our traditional services into this digital front end. We'll be continuing this because we're, we're, we're facing, it took us, I think, six and a half, seven years to come back from the previous recession. Undoubtedly, take a little longer to get back >>From this one. Here's another interesting question, I guess really primarily Tim Tim was the solution on primarily on premise or in the cloud. >>So we'll, we've done a mix. Uh, the, and I'm starting a lot of feedbacks. I don't know if you all can hear that or not, but the, uh, I think we went on prem for, uh, some people because of the, uh, bridge into our service case manager system, which is on prem. So we did some management there. I do believe the chat bot piece of it though is in the cloud. So we're bringing it down to, from one system to the other. Uh, and, and part of that was a student negotiations and costs and worrying about what long-term is that we have a very stated goal of moving, uh, our Curam platform, which is on-prem, this is the backend. So how are we? We, we set our IBM Watson, uh, portal up, uh, and moving all of that on cloud, uh, because I mean, we've got, uh, a workforce who, uh, has the ability to retire at a very high rate over the next five years. >>And, uh, having 24 seven support in the cloud is, is as a, someone who would be called to respond to emergency situations like the is, is a much better Cod deal for, for myself and the citizen. So migrating, uh, and, um, our typical on-prem stuff up into the cloud, uh, as we continue on this, uh, evolution of what IBM Watson, uh, and the plug into our Curam, uh, system looks like Karen related question for another user is the portal provided with Clara County and others linked to other third-party backend office apps, or can it be, >>Yeah, the answer is it can be it's interoperable. So through APIs, uh, rest, uh, however, um, assistance that they need to be integrated with can definitely be integrated with, uh, like, uh, Tim mentioned, we, we went to the case management solution, but it can be integrated with other applications as well. >>Tim, did you use some other backend third party apps with yours? Uh, we did not. Uh, again, just for speed of getting, uh, this MVP solution out the door. Uh, now what we do with that on the go forward, it is going to look different and probably will include some, another practical question. Given the cares funding should be expended by December. Can this application even be employed at this late date? And you want to take a cut at that? Yeah, for us, uh, once again, we brought up earlier, um, the emergency solutions grants and the community development block grants, which have a Corona virus, uh, CV traunch, each one of those, and those have two to three year expenditure timeframes on them. Uh, so we were going to leverage those to keep this system and some of these programs going once again, that the housing needs, uh, will outstrip our capacity for years to come. >>I guess probably I should have said upfront Las Vegas has one of the worst affordable housing inventories in the nation. Uh, so we know we're going to be facing a housing issue, um, because of this for, for a long time. So we'll be using those two traunches of dollars, ESE, ESPs, uh, CV CDBG, CB funds, uh, in addition to dollars earmarked through some, uh, recreational marijuana license fees that have been dedicated to our homelessness. And when you consider this housing, uh, stability program was part of that homelessness prevention. That's our funding mix locally. Very helpful. So questions maybe for bolts for you on this one, you can probably also teach respond is the system has been set up helping the small business community. Um, this user's been canvassing and the general feeling is that small businesses have been left behind and they've been unable to access funds. What's your response on that? Karen, do you want to take that first? >>Um, yes. So in terms of, uh, the security and sorry. Um, but, uh, can you repeat the last part of that? I just missed the last part when you >>Behind it, but unable to access funds. >>Uh, yeah, so I think from a funding perspective, there's different types of, I think what Tim mentioned in terms of the cares funding, there was different types of funding that came out from a government perspective. Uh, I think there were also other grants and things that are coming out one, uh, that we're still looking at. And I think as we go into the new year, it'll be interesting to see, you know, what additional funding, um, hopefully is, is provided. Uh, but in terms of creativity, we've seen other creative ways that organizations come together to kind of, uh, help with the different agencies, to provide some, some guidance to the community, um, and helping to, uh, provide efforts and, uh, maybe looking at different ways of, um, providing, uh, some of the capabilities that the, either at the County or at the state level that they're able to leverage. But Tim happy to maybe have you chime in here too. >>Yeah. So I'll first start with my wheelhouse and I'll expand out to, to some of my partners. Uh, so the primary, small business, we knew the idea was a daily basis inside this realm is going to be landlords. Uh, so actually this afternoon, we're doing a town hall with folks to be able to roll out, uh, which they will go to our portal to find a corporate landlord program. Uh, so that I seem a landlord for Camille the application pack and on behalf of a hundred residents, rather than us having to adjudicate a hundred individual applications and melon a hundred checks. Uh, so that is because we were listening to that particular segment of the, uh, the business community. Now I know early on, we were, we were really hoping that the, the paycheck protection program federally would have, uh, been dispersed in a way that helped our local small businesses. >>Uh, more we did a, our economic development team did a round of small business supports through our cares act. Uh, our quarterly unfortunate was not open yet. It was just about 15, 20 days shy. So we use, uh, another traditional grant mechanism that we have in place to dedicate that. Uh, but on a go forward board, willing to Congress passes something over the next 30 days, um, that if there's a round two of cares or some other programs, we absolutely now have a tool that we know we can create a digital opening for individuals to come figure out if they're eligible or not for whatever program it is, the it housing, the it, uh, small business operations supports, uh, and it would apply through that process and in a very lightweight, so we're looking forward to how we can expand our footprint to help all of the needs that are present in our community. This leads to another question which may be our last one, but this is an interesting question. How can agencies use COVID-19 as a proof point providing a low cost configurable solutions that can scale across government. Karen, do you want to respond to that? And then Tim also, >>Thanks, Bob. So I believe like, you know, some of the things that we've said in terms of examples of how we were able to bring up the solution quicker, I definitely see that scaling as you go forward and trying to really, um, focus in on the needs and getting that MVP out the door. Uh, and then Tim alluded to this as well. A lot of the change management processes that went into re-imagining what these processes look like. I definitely see a additional, you know, growth mindset of how do we get better processes in place, or really focusing on the core processes so that we can really move the ball forward and continuing to go that path of delivering on a quicker path, uh, leveraging cloud, as we mentioned of, um, some, some of the capabilities around the chat bot and other things to really start to push, um, uh, the capabilities out to those citizens quicker and really reduce that timeline that we have to take on the backend side, um, that that would be our hope and goal, um, given, you know, sort of what we've been able to accomplish and hoping using that as a proof point of how we can do this for other types of, uh, either programs or other processes. >>Yeah, I think, um, the, you know, the tool has given us capability now there, whether we use local leaders leverage that to the fullest really becomes a coming upon us. So do we take a beat, uh, when we can catch our breath and then, you know, work through our executive leadership to say, look, here's all the ways you can use this tool. You've made an enterprise investment in. Um, and I know for us, uh, at Clark County, we've stood up, uh, enterprise, uh, kind of governance team where we can come and talk through all of our enterprise solutions, uh, encourage our other department head peers, uh, to, to examine how you might be able to use this. Is there a way that, um, you know, parks and rec might use this to better access their scholarship programs to make sure that children get into youth sports leagues and don't get left out, uh, because we know youth suicide on the rise and they need something positive to do when this pandemic is clear, I'm there for them to get out and do those things. >>So the possibilities really are out there. It really becomes, um, how do we mind those internally? And I know that being a part of listservs and, uh, you know, gov tech and all the magazines and things are out there to help us think about how do we better use our solutions, um, as well as our IBM partners who are always eager to say, Hey, have you seen how they're using this? Um, it is important for us to continue to keep our imaginations open, um, so that we continue to iterate through this process. Um, cause I, I would hate to see the culture of, um, iteration go away with this pandemic. >>Okay. We have time for one final question. We've already addressed this in part two, and this one is probably for you and that you've used the cares act to eliminate some of the procurement red tape that's shown up. Well, how do you somehow that's been very positive. How do you see that impacting you going forward? What happens when the red tape all comes back? >>Yeah, so I think I mentioned a little bit, uh, about that when some of the folks who are deemed non essential came back during our reopening phases and they're operating at the speed of prior business and red tape where we had all been on this, these green tape, fast tracks, uh, it, it was a bit of a organizational whiplash. Uh, but it, for us, we've had the conversation with executive management of like, we cannot let this get in the way of what our citizens need. So like keep that pressure on our folks to think differently. Don't and, uh, we've gone so far as to, uh, even, uh, maybe take it a step further and investigate what had been done in, in, in Canada. Some other places around, um, like, like going right from in a 48 hour period, going from a procurement statement through a proof of concept and doing purchasing on the backside, like how can we even get this even more streamlined so that we can get the things we need quickly, uh, because the citizens don't understand, wait, we're doing our best, uh, your number 3000 and queue on the phone line that that's not what they need to hear or want to hear during times of crisis. >>Very helpful. Well, I want to be respectful of our one hour commitment, so we'll have to wrap it up here in closing. I want to thank everyone for joining us for today's event and especially a big, thank you goes to Karen and Tim. You've done a really great job of answering a lot of questions and laying this out for us and a special thanks to our partners at IBM for enabling us to bring this worthwhile discussion to our audience. Thanks once again, and we look forward to seeing you at another government technology event,

>> Announcer: From the theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Alto studios. Today we're going to have a CUBE conversation really about this kind of ongoing evolution of cloud, and it was a huge deal, and AWS came on the scene and really launched kind of the public cloud evolution, which not only was a different technology stack, but really a different way to think about things, a different way to think about workloads. And that has evolved to hybrid cloud and multicloud, and it just continues to evolve over time. So we're going to get some of the experts in from IBM to talk about their perspective and what they're doing all about it. So we're excited to invite our next guest. She is Briana Frank. She's the director of product management for IBM. Briana, good to see you. Where are you joining us from today? >> I am joining you from Wake Forest, North Carolina. And as you can see, I'm from my home office, but always busy working and fun doing things in the cloud and thinking about new technologies even when we're at home. >> Excellent. And also joining us, many-time CUBE alumni Jason McGee, IBM fellow, vice president and CTO of IBM Cloud Platform. Jason, great to see you again. I looked it up before we turned on the cameras. I think you've been on, like, eight times. So you're definitely a VIP in the CUBE alumni world. Where are you joining us from today? >> Yeah, I mean, I'm in Apex, which is outside of Raleigh, and great to be here again. It's always fun to talk to you guys. It's been a little while, but great to be back. >> Yeah, so let's just jump into it, right? You've all seen the memes revolving around what's driving your digital transformation. Is it the CEO, the CIO, or COVID? And we all know the answer to the question. It's really been an interesting time, right? It was kind of a light switch moment in mid-March. And then people are saying, you know, years and years of digital transformation kind of suddenly compressed into this light switch moment. But now we're months and months and months later, we're in October, and it's clear that this is not just a a one-time fix and wait till we all go back to work. This is going to continue for a while. And cloud is such a huge enabler. Had this happened five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, the ability for information workers, like the businesses that we're in, would've been much more difficult. So acknowledging that there's still a lot of people hurting, a lot, hospitality industry, restaurant industry, sports places that aggregate people, concerts. We're fortunate we're in the information industry. And I'd just love to get your perspective, Jason, on cloud as an enabling platform and really an enabling way of thinking about things that have made this transition a little bit less painful than it otherwise would've been. >> Yeah, that's a great point, Jeff, and I think on one hand it's been pretty amazing to see how much our industry in technology and IT has been able to kind of adapt to COVID, adapt to working at home, adapt to these kinds of changing models. But what's been really interesting is as someone who spends all their time thinking about cloud every day, it's been really incredible to see how much it's accelerated people's adoption of cloud. Like, obviously everyone was leveraging cloud. They had plans to move more and more workloads to cloud. But I think over the last six months we've really seen a massive acceleration, and I also think kind of a mindset shift that maybe before there was some hesitation and conversation about what things move to cloud and what things don't, and that seems to have kind of gone away, and everyone's like, this is the model that not only will carry us through moments like this, but we have newfound confidence that it's the right model for us to move the majority of our businesses to. >> Right. >> So really massive acceleration. >> Massive acceleration. And Briana, get your take, 'cause you're a product manager, so you're in the weeds on the speeds and feeds and the features and functions. Cloud as a concept sounds kind of simple, but the execution is not so simple. And we've seen kind of this morphing from moving your test dev maybe to a public cloud, IBM has a cloud, to there's some stuff that just can't go on the cloud or shouldn't go to the cloud or I'm not sure if it should go in the cloud. So now we're hearing talk of hybrid cloud and multicloud, and we're hearing pieces of public cloud in my own data center and pieces of my own data center in a public cloud. It's a pretty complicated space. I wonder if you can kind of share your perspective as this thing morphs from kind of a simple concept and a beautiful little icon to a much more complex execution in the real world. >> Well, great question and insights. And I think, building off of what Jason said, I think the most important shift I've seen is really a mind shift, a mindset shift. And there's so much more empathy that I'm seeing across the board, whether it's children running in the background or cats and pets, there's a lot more tolerance for work-life balance and a lot more empathy for how people are getting through this really challenging pandemic. And what I think is interesting is that kind of carries over into the technology. And so now where some of our clients were solving problems like keeping their workforce safe by using video analytics to see if someone's using or wearing maybe a hard hat in a construction zone. Now that use case has sort of shifted, and now it's is someone wearing a mask? Do they have a temperature? How do we make sure that the office areas are sanitized and clean so that when people go back to work, they'll be working in a safe environment? So I think that the mindset shift is really driving a lot of these technology innovations. And then of course you need cloud to make those real. So I think that's the kind of aha moment I've seen is that people are leading with empathy and that's driving kind of the next wave of innovation that I'm seeing. >> I have to say I've been doing these many, many years, and Briana, I don't think anyone has brought up empathy at the at the head end of the open. And I love that 'cause I think that's a way to think about it, right? 'Cause these are people trying to execute business activities, and it's not easy. And that's a really great take. Jason, I want to go back to you and talk about one of the things we talked about the cloud, but really it's about enabling applications, right? And really, the application now has become this first class citizen where it's, this is the app I want. Cloud enables me to use whatever infrastructure I need versus this is the infrastructure I have. Hm, what can I put on this app? So I'd love to get your take. As you said, you think about cloud all the time, but really, cloud is an app enabler. And how has, as that capability has been gifted to people, how has that made the the cloud execution a lot more complex? >> Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think you're hitting on a really key transformation that's happened in cloud over the last few years, which is that it's gone from infrastructure kind of cost optimization to an application delivery accelerator. And what I think that's caused is everyone's starting to kind of move their thinking up the stack in cloud, and you see the rise of technologies like Kubernetes and OpenShift as a platform that enables application developers to build applications and deliver them more quickly. I think the acceleration that we've been talking about here has cemented that. At the end of the day, we're all trying to figure out in our businesses how to adapt to change. We have some new changes this year that maybe we didn't predict we would have last year. We're trying to figure out how to adapt to those to deliver new capabilities, to maybe build a digital experience for something that we didn't have a digital experience for before, 'cause now nobody is face to face. And that requires cloud to be much more application-centric. It requires cloud, you alluded to this kind of evolution. I think it's starting to drive cloud into more places. Cloud isn't about just getting into some big cloud data center somewhere. Cloud is about a style of working and a set of technologies that I want to be able to consume wherever I need them. So that kind of application-centric capability and the rise of cloud-native technologies I think go hand in hand. >> Right, so it got to us from a simple dev swiping a credit card to do a little project on Amazon to now enterprising having very complex ecosystems, right? Very complex situation because they've got lots of different clouds and lots of different apps running on lots of different clouds, and the application and the control of those is now much more complicated than probably when you just had it all in your own data center or if you're some cloud data organization and you grew up on the public cloud and you really are kind of a single app that happens to be a big one in hyperscale. So I'm curious, Briana, you guys have a ton of customers. What are they telling you about what they're doing with hybrid cloud, managing hybrid cloud, trying to get back to some of the simplicity and kind of the simplistic vision and execution when what's happening is probably increasing complexity as different apps are running on different clouds, different places. >> Yeah, great question. You know, I think that what we're hearing from our clients is really a couple of things. One is that they have to find ways to unburden their teams. They only have limited resources and the sky's the limit in terms of what's possible. So they need to be able to innovate faster, but they have to unburden the team. So the rise of "as a service" I think is really coming into its own because teams don't have time to manage things like Kubernetes. They have to go higher in the stack and really start to build and innovate for their own business differentiation. But another I think really important thing that we're hearing from our clients is that we have to meet them where they are in their journey. So what you said was great. A lot of our clients are using five to nine different clouds today, and that's extraordinarily fragmented, and being able to manage and have one way to see what workload is running where and what is running on that workload is really important. And having kind of one single pane of glass where they can manage everything is one of the single most important features that I hear that is needed. And I think the other thing that I hear a lot from clients is they need flexibility. They need flexibility for, you know, where they are in their journey. Some folks, they need to be able to deploy to existing infrastructure that they have in their data center, and others need to be able to deploy to another public cloud. And having the flexibility to run anywhere is one of the more common themes that I'm seeing. >> Right, so, and you guys built something to help with that, right? It's the IBM cloud satellite. So you just basically outlined the customer challenge, so what did you have to do to enable them to have a single pane of glass, to have more control across these disparate projects running in disparate clouds. >> Well, so one of the things that we found is our clients really, all of the agility that they need to adopt cloud data best practices, really comes from the public cloud. The public cloud services, DevOps, all the tools that allow you to really run and move faster and innovate faster, but they needed that ability to consume those public cloud services anywhere. So at the edge, on another public cloud, or in their existing infrastructure. And of course there's tons of infrastructure options. We have infrastructure for our clients that they can use. We have turnkey appliances. But really having that public cloud, cloud-native agility, but really bringing that anywhere that our clients want to run it is the key to satellite. >> Right, right. So it's not kind of what would be typically thought of as a hybrid cloud solution per se, but it's really almost kind of a level up, if I'm hearing you correctly, in controlling all the different kind of instances or instantiations of your cloud execution. That'd be accurate, Jason? >> Yeah, well, or maybe another way to think about it is it's a way of consuming hybrid, right? It's a way of consuming these hybrid cloud capabilities. Hybrid starts with a common platform, and this idea that we are using things like OpenShift as that common technology platform that enables customers to build applications once and run them anywhere. What satellite brings to the table is it takes that base technology platform and it delivers it as a cloud service, and a cloud service that's flexible enough to be anywhere. And so you kind of combine the best of both. You combine a common technology approach and you combine the as a service API-based consumption model of public cloud to get a hybrid strategy that's super flexible, right? And now really lets customers focus on the work that they're doing going faster. And at IBM, we've been pretty clear that we think the future of hybrid cloud computing is rooted in technologies like Kubernetes and OpenShift, that that's the platform of the future. The acquisition of Red Hat was motivated by that strategy. Our public cloud for the last three-plus years has been built internally on top of the same technologies. And so what we've done with satellite from a technology perspective is we've taken the things that we do in our cloud and we've used the power of of Kubernetes and OpenShift to deliver those anywhere, right? And to give customers that same experience on their infrastructure or on some other public cloud. >> Right. I love it because it's kind of cloud on cloud, if you will, but it really supports this notion of the customer experience, and even more importantly in some ways, the developer experience to make sure that your developers inside the house are feeling good, have a great productive environment so they can do a better job with what they're working on. And that that sounds like something they would really, really enjoy and be native to the way they're used to working already. >> It's interesting too, one of the kind of interesting, I don't know, adoption trends we're starting to see with approaches like satellite is if you think about cloud, I'll oversimplify, but you could say there's kind of two big transformations. One is move my workload to a public cloud, and the other is change how my team works, right? Adopt cloud-native, agile best practices. And often to get to the culture change of the team, you had to start with moving the app, but that's hard, especially for the kind of 80% of workloads that we're seeing move to cloud now where they're complex. They have lots of ties into data that you have in your data center. So it's hard to move them sometimes. So with approaches like satellite, you can kind of flip the order. You can bring the cloud in house, if you will. You can start to adopt self-service and API-based consumption and DevOps and change how your teams work and make them more efficient without moving the applications. And then later, if it makes sense to move them, you can, right? And I think that's really powerful. >> Right, right. Briana, I want to go back to you on kind of the nuts and bolts. 'Cause I don't know if you've read "Innovator's Dilemma" by Christian Clayton. You should if you haven't. But one of the things is how do you prioritize what you're building? How do you prioritize your feature stack? Because you have to, right? You have to put one in front of the other, and it's going to drive your design decisions and what you ultimately ship. So as you were thinking about satellite, what were kind of your top-level design priorities that you're really building this towards that you wanted to make sure you really nailed? >> Oh, what a great question. I love that question. I'm so passionate about product and design and I think we take it very seriously at IBM, and it's, we have an amazing design department, if you will, at IBM. And one of the things we do is just relentlessly interview our clients, and we really try to understand what their main issues are. And one of the first use cases that we we looked at was actually in the financial industry, which was, in the financial services industry, the differentiation is really all about the technology itself, and so they're constantly having to innovate at a faster pace so they can bring new features and functions to their clients but they have this dilemma where they have to, in some cases, in many cases, keep the data on-prem in a specific location. And that starts to get really interesting, because sometimes the regulations, it could be country, it could be a compliance thing, but for whatever reason, there is a specific requirement, and sometimes that comes with a fine if that data doesn't reside in that location. So having the ability to move at an incredibly fast pace and keep innovating, but keep that data on-prem and offload the management of Kubernetes and the services that allow them to move fast. That was one of the first use cases that we tackled. And I think that's a pretty important one, because if you can get that right, that starts to permeate all other industries, because you want to, you have to be secure. You have to make sure that the data resides and is on-prem and in a specific location and that it's auditable. So I think that was one of our first use cases, and that has served us really well. We also, one of the things that we do inside of IBM is that we co-develop using our own internal workloads. And so we use the data and AI team within IBM will GA with us when we GA IBM Cloud Satellite, and so their workloads are running on top of satellite. And I think that's a great way to come to market because when you're delivering an MVP, but if you can deliver an MVP that's already running a really complex AI workload, that's a pretty impressive MVP, if you ask me. So we try to do that whenever we release new products, and I think that has served us very well because it really forces us to solve the really hard problems first. We don't have a choice. We have to be able to make some pretty strategic choices upfront to be able to deliver something like that. >> That's great. Jason, I want to go back to you and talk about a little bit beyond the cloud, but things that are really interesting and happening, right? You already talked about this big enabler with containers and Kubernetes, but this next thing that's coming, right, is just edge, which is an extension of the cloud, an outpost to the cloud, but this whole concept of getting outside of the data center but actually now starting to bring the compute to the devices that generate the data as well as need that. How do you see that kind of impacting your cloud thoughts? I love that you're thinking cloud all the time. And the other piece, keying off of what Briana just said, is applied AI, right? I mean, I think we all would agree that AI and machine learning as kind of a standard, generic thing is okay, but really the application of the AI and the machine learning for specific use cases is where we're seeing huge, huge benefit. And I would imagine there's many, many kind of areas within cloud execution that AI and machine learning can start to add even more and more and more efficiencies and automation. >> Sure, sure. So maybe a couple comments. I mean, I think the edge thing is so interesting because if you really kind of step back and think about what we were talking about with cloud, what is a cloud is becoming much more diverse. Started as it's these three regions and it's becoming everybody's data centers plus on-prem, and then it's becoming edge, large edge locations, and then it's becoming devices. So clouds are becoming pervasive as a concept across all IT consumption models. And there's core technologies, even, like containers that we think apply at all those levels. They apply in the core cloud, in the data center, at the edge, in a device. And so things like satellite certainly give us a mechanism to push that boundary, to push closer to the end user. And there's a ton of scenarios motivating that. 5G telecommunications and high-speed networking for mobile devices is necessitating pushing closer to where the data's getting generated. IoT, same thing. If you think about the IoT edge case, that's massive data generation. You don't necessarily want to backhaul that all the way back to a central cloud. You want to be able to do AI and training and inferencing on that data close to where it lives. And so you need this whole idea of cloud to kind of expand, and if it doesn't, then what happens is all of these different use cases become like different technology stacks or different operational models and you get tons of complexity. So it's this really interesting intersection, and I think we're getting much more complex in how we deploy, but we're trying to put common ideas over the top of it to simplify, and I think that's pretty interesting. On the AI question, you're right, there's tons of places where AI, applied AI will come into the picture. At IBM, we're doing a ton of work on AI for IT operations and how do we apply AI modeling to monitoring, to resiliency, even to workload placement. I mean, just think about the world we just described. As a customer, maybe I have IBM cloud and I have 20 satellite locations in all our fun places in the world, and now I have to make decisions about what runs where and where should I deploy my workloads and what's the most efficient way to place workloads to get availability or better performance, and AI plays a role there. So I see a really bright future as we build out this infrastructure to then use AI as a mechanism to further simplify the customer's consumption of cloud. >> Yeah, that's great. So I want to give you both the last word before we sign off, and that was a good summary, Jason. Cloud's been around for a while and it gets tossed around, and again, now we have hybrid and multi and all these different flavors. You guys are in the weeds and you're seeing down the road a little bit. What is it about cloud that most people probably aren't talking about when you kind of look in your crystal ball, obviously don't share any secrets that you can't share, that gets you excited and makes you think, wow, we're still really, hard to believe, but really in the early days of what this really, the kind of opportunities that this opens up. And I'll go with you first, Briana. >> Well, that's a great question. I think we're already starting to see that with the example of all of the work that we're seeing in the COVID space. It just feels like whatever challenge that might lie ahead in our future, we have an ability to quickly iterate and change and adapt. It's so interesting to see how fast we can roll out new technologies and new ideas. Things that would take years to put together you can kind of put together in a week or so with a quick POC. And that's really an exciting kind of place to be that you can adapt and change so quickly. So I think that's one. And I do think your point about edge is really an important one. There's more and more opportunities to distribute workloads closer to, compute goes closer to where the users are, so therefore you're reducing latency, so you're getting instant feedback. And I think that's really going to be interesting. And then I think the third element, again, is like security and compliance. How do you know exactly that your data stays exactly where you want it to, and you can have proof and you can audit that data. I think that's really where the future's headed. >> Yeah, that's great. And Jason, to you, what's getting you up in the morning today? >> Oh, you don't want to know what gets me up today. But if we talk about what's coming, so for me, my whole career, I've really been thinking about applications. And I think one of the kind of macro trends that everyone doesn't always see that's going on in cloud is we're switching from an IT infrastructure-centric view of computing to an application-centric view. And all of these things we've been talking about are kind of steps along that journey. We're getting to a point where I can build applications, I can build them in a consistent way, I can deploy them anywhere in the world on this incredibly diverse infrastructure. As a developer, I have simple, immediate access to world-class capabilities, to specialized hardware. We are really in the midst of a transformation on how we build computing technology and really a democratization of that technology that 10 or 15 years ago you wouldn't have had the, most people would not have had the funds to stand up the technology they needed to build these things. And that's what really gets me excited, because I think about, well, then what's all the innovation that's going to come from that? As more and more developers have access to this powerful infrastructure in these diverse ways, what are they going to create? And that's what's, I think, going on under the covers. I think we're in the middle of a generational transformation of technology that will result in things we can't predict today because we'll open up so many people's ability to leverage that platform. >> What a great thought to close on, Jason, 'cause I think we hear that consistently all the time. What's the key to innovation? Give more people the access to the tools, give more people access to the data and more people the power to do something with it and create. And we hear all the time about the disadvantaged classes of people that just didn't get the opportunity, and if all those people had the same school, the same education, and now the same basically infinite compute power at their disposal, what are they going to invent? And I think it's an exciting future, and I think that's a great place to close. So we'll leave it at that. I want to thank you both for checking in. Briana, great to meet you, and Jason, always good to see you, as well. >> Yeah, nice to meet you. >> Yeah, great to be here, thank you. >> All right, thanks a lot and have a great day. >> Thank you. >> All right, that was Briana and Jason. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (bright music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with coverage of coop con and cloud native con North America, 2020 virtual brought to you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody Jeffrey here with the cube coming to you from our Palo Alto studios today with our ongoing coverage of coupon cloud native con North America, 2020. It's not really North America, it's virtual like everything else, but you know that the European show earlier in the summer, and this is the, this is the late fall show. So we're excited to welcome in our very next two guests. Uh, first joining us from Madrid. Spain is Miguel Perez, Kaleena. He is a principal product manager from red hat, Miguel. Great to see you. >>Good to see you happy to be in the cube. >>Yes. Great. Well welcome. And joining us from North Carolina is rich Sharples. He is a senior director, product management of red hat. Rich. Great to see you. >>Yeah, likewise, thanks for inviting me again. >>So we're talking about Java today and before we kind of jump into it, you know, in preparing for this rich, I saw an interview that you did, I think earlier about halfway through the year, uh, celebrating the 25th anniversary of Java and talking about the 25th anniversary Java. And before we kind of get into the future, I think it's worthwhile to take a look back at, you know, kind of where Java came from and how it's lasted for 25 years of such an important enterprise, you know, kind of application framework, because we always hear jokes about people looking for COBOL programmers or, you know, all these old language programmers, because they have some old system that's that needs a little assist. What's special about Java. Why are we 25 years into it? And you guys are still excited about Java yesterday, today and in the future. >>Yeah. And I should add that, um, in terms of languages, uh, twenty-five is actually still pretty young. Java's, uh, kind of middle aged, I guess. Um, you know, things like CC plus bus rrr you're 45, 50 years old Python, I think is about the same as Java in terms of years. So, you know, the languages do tend to move at a, um, at a, they do tend to stick around, uh, uh, a bit, well what's made Java really, really important for enterprises building business critical applications is it started off with a very large ecosystem of big vendors supporting it. Um, it was open in a sense from the very start and it's remained open as in open source and an open community as well. So that's really, really helped, um, you know, keep the language innovating and moving along and attracting new developers. And, um, it's, it's still a fairly modern language in terms of some of the new features it's advancing with the industry taking on new kinds of workloads and new kinds of per program paradigms as well. So, you know, it's, it's evolved very well and has a huge base out somewhere between 11 and 13 million developers still use it as a primary development language in professional settings. Yeah. >>What struck me about what you said though in that interview was kind of the evolution and how Java has been able to continue to adapt based on kind of what the new frameworks are. So whether it was early days in a machine, like you talked about being in a set top box, or, you know, kind of really lightweight kind of almost IOT applications then to be calming, you know, this really a great application to deliver enterprise applications via a web browser and that, you know, and it continues to morph and change and adapt over time. I thought that was pretty interesting given the vast change in the way applications are delivered today versus what they were 25 years ago. >>Yeah, absolutely. It's, you know, the very early days were around embedded devices, uh, intelligent toasters and, you know, whatever. Um, and, and then where it really, really took off was, but the building supporting big backend systems, big transactional workloads, whether you're a bank or an airline you're running both the scale, but also running really, really complex transactional systems that were business critical. And that's that's for the last, you know, 15 years has been, um, where it's, it's really shown building backend, um, systems. Now, as we kind of move forward, you know, the idea of, uh, um, like server side, uh, server side application versus a front end is kind of changed. You know, now we're talking microservices, we're talking about running in containers. So really the focus of where we run Java and the kinds of applications we're building with Java as this has radically changed. And as such the language has to change as well, which is, you know, one, I'm pretty excited to talk about caucus today. >>So let's, let's jump into it and talk about corcus cause the other big trend, you know, along with, with, with obviously, uh, uh, browsers being great enterprise applications, delivery vehicles is this thing called containers, right? And, and specifically more recently Kubernetes is the one that's grabbing all the attention and grabbing all the, all the momentum. Um, so I wonder Miguel, if you could talk about, you know, kind of as, as the popularity of containerized applications and containerized to everything right, containerized storage, or you even talked about containerizing networking, troll, how that's impacted, uh, what you guys are doing and the impact of Java, uh, and making it work with kind of a containerized Kubernetes world. >>Well, what we found is that the paradigm of development has teeth. So we have this top up, uh, uh, paradigm that the people are following to be able to do the best with containers, to the best with Kubernetes on the, this has worked quite fine in Greenfield on for, for many cases has been a way to develop applications faster, to be able to obtain variably salts. And the thing is that for many, uh, users, for many companies that we work with, uh, they also want to bring some of their stuff that the applications that are currently are running into this world. And, uh, I mean, we, we walk especially a lot in helping these customers be able to adopt those obligations, but we try to do it, uh, as we say, the N pixie dust, you know, we really dig into the code, we'll review the code with modernize. The application will help their customer with that application. We provide the tools are open for anyone to be able to review it and to be able to take it. So we are moving away from Greenfield into brownfield and not a way we are evolving together to say we more precise, you know, all these Greenfield applications keep coming, but also the current applications want to be more organized. >>Right. Right. So it's pretty interesting. Cause that's always the big conversation. There's, it's, it's all fine. And good if you're just building something new, uh, to use the latest tools. But as you mentioned, there's a whole lot of conversation about application modernization and this is really an opportunity to apply some of these techniques to do that. So quirky. So I wonder if you just give, let's just jump into it. What is it at the highest level? Uh, what's it all about? What should people know? >>Yeah. So, so Corker says I'm reading an attempt by red hat to ensure Java is a first-class citizen in containerized environments, but building reactive applications, uh, cloud native applications, uh, functions, Java is an incredible piece of engineering. It does some incredible things. It sudden can self optimize. As it's running in line code, it can do some really amazing things the longer it runs, but in a containerized environment, you're likely not going to be running huge amounts of code. You'd likely be running microservices and your, your services are likely to have a kind of limited life cycle as we you're able to deploy more frequently or in a function environment where, you know, you've been bought once and then you're done, um, you know, during all those long, um, kind of, um, those optimizations over time, don't really, um, make a lot of sense. So what we can do is remove a lot of the, um, the weights of Java, a lot of the complexity of Java, and we can optimize for an environment where your code is maybe just running for a few microseconds as in the case of the function or something running in native, cause you scale up and scale down. >>So we move a lot of the op side. We move a lot of the, um, the, the efforts within the application, uh, to compile time, we pre compile all of your, of your config and initialization, so that doesn't have to happen in your, um, your, your, your runtime or your production environment. Um, and then we can optimize the code week. We can, we can remove that code. We can remove, you know, whole, uh, trees and class libraries and really slimmed down the memory footprint and radically, um, slim, the Maddie memory footprint, um, increase the startup time as well. So, you know, you have less downtime in your applications. Um, and we've recently done a S a study with ADC that shows some pretty stunning results compared to, you know, some existing frameworks. And, you know, we get, um, you know, sort of like, you know, overall cost savings of, you know, 60, 64%. >>Um, we can get eight times better density. You're running more in a, in a, in a cluster and, um, you know, reduction in memory up to 90% as well. So it's, these are significant changes now. That's all good, you know, saving, saving 60, 60% on your operational costs is significant. But what we find is that most organizations, they come for the performance and the optimizations, but what actually stay for is the speed of development. So I think, I think caucus real silver bullets is, um, the developer productivity, you know, for organizations, the cost of development is still one of the major costs. I mean, the operational costs, the hosting costs a significant, but development costs, time to market will always be top of mind for organizations that are trying to move faster than the competition. And I think that's really where, um, um, caucus special and coupled in, uh, in, uh, OpenShift or Coobernetti's environment really, really does shine. Yeah, >>It's pretty interesting. So people can go to corcus.io and see a lot of the statistics that you just referenced in terms of memory usage and speed and, and whole bunch of stuff. But what struck me when I went to the site was that was this big, uh, uh, two words that jumped out developer joy. And it's funny that you talked on that just now about really, um, the benefits that come to the developer directly to make them happier. I mean, really calling out their joy. So they're more productive and ultimately that's what you said. That's where the great value is in terms of speed of deployment, happy developers, and productive developers. You know, Miguel, you get your, you get down into the weeds of this stuff. Again, the presentations on your LinkedIn, everyone needs to go look and you talk a lot about at migration and you lot talk a lot about app modernization. So without going through all 120 some odd slides that I think you have, which is good, phenomenal information, what are some of the top things that people need to think about and consider both for app modernization as well as at migration? >>Um, that's, that's, that's an interesting question. Uh, the thing is that, um, the tolling is important on the current code is, and the thing is that normally when, when we started migration project, we tried to find architects in the applications to be able to find patterns. You know, you find parents is much easier because, uh, once you solve one part on the same part on can be solved in a very similar way. So this is one of the parts of that. We focus a lot, but before getting to that point, it's very important how you stop, you know, so the assessment phase is, is very important to be able to review well, what is the status of the applications, the context of the applications. And with that, I mean, things like, for example, the requirements that they have, there's the maintenance that they take in their resiliency and so on. >>So you have to prepare very well, the project by starting with a good assessment, you have to check which applications makes more, make more sense to start with and see which, how to group them together by similarities. And then you can start with the project that saying, okay, let's go for these set of applications that make more sense that are more likely to be containerized because of the way we are developing them because of the dependencies that they have because of the resiliency that is already embedded into them and so on. So that, that the methodology is important. And we normally, for example, when we, when we help partners do a application migration, one of the things that we stress is that this is the methodology that we follow and in the website for my vision, totally for application, you can find also, um, methodology, uh, part that, uh, could help, uh, people understand, okay, these, these are the stages that we normally follow to be successful with migrating applications. >>Yeah. Let go. You don't, we're not friends. We don't hang out a lot, but if we did, you would know I never ever recommend PowerPoint for anything. So, so the fact that I'm calling out your PowerPoint actually means something. Cause I think it's the worst application ever built, but you got some tremendous, tremendous information in there and people do need to go in and look, and again, it's all from your LinkedIn work, but I wanted to shift gears a little bit, right? We're at CubeCon cloud native con. Um, obviously it's virtual is 2020. That's the way the world today. But I just curious to get your guys' take on, on what does this, uh, event mean for you obviously really active, open source community, you know, red hat has a long open-source history. Um, what does CubeCon cloud native con mean for you guys? What do you hope to get out of it? What should people hope to, uh, to learn from red hat? >>Yeah, we, um, yeah, we're, we're buying your DNA. We're very, very collaborative. Uh, we, we love to learn from our customers, users of the technologies, um, in the communities that we support. Um, speaking as a, you know, we're both product guys, there's nothing better than getting with, um, people that actually use the products, um, in anger, in real life, whether they're products are upstream technologies, learning, learning, what they're doing, understanding where, um, some of the gaps are there's. Um, yeah, we just couldn't do our jobs without engaging with developers, users in these kind of conferences. Yeah. A lot of the, um, love interest we've seen with coworkers is, is in the community, you know, um, like I'd been part of many, many successful open source projects, um, um, over red hat. And it's great when your customers, you know, like, uh, Vodafone, Greece or Carrefour in Spain are openly publicly talking about how good your technology is, what they're using it for. And that's really good. So it's just nothing, there's no alternative that, you know, whether it be virtual virtually or physically sitting down with, uh, with users of your technology, >>How about you, Miguel? What are you hoping to get out of, uh, out of the show this year? >>Um, we are working a lot with, on Kubernetes in red hat, on, uh, as part of the community, of course. And, um, I mean, there are so many new stuff that is coming around, Kubernetes that, uh, it's mostly about it, about all the capabilities that were arming, especially for example, several lists, you know, several lessons, there is an important topic with crackers, because for example, as you make the application stopped so much faster and react so much faster, you could have known of them running and just waiting for an event to happen, which saves a lot of resources and makes us super efficient. So this is one of the topics, for example, that we wanted to cover in this edition, you know, how we are implementing serverless with Kubernetes and OpenShift and many other things like pipelines. Like, I don't know, we just had quite a visit in the, uh, uh, video, uh, life of what is coming up. I see for the six. And I recommend people to take a look at it, to get everything that's new because there's a lot. Yeah, >>Yeah. You guys are technical people. You've been doing this for a long time. Why is Kubernetes so special? W Y Y you know, there's been containers in the past, right. And we've seen other kind of branded open source projects that got a lot of momentum, but Kubernetes just seems to be blowing everybody out of the out of its path. Why, what should people know about Kubernetes that aren't necessarily developers? >>Yeah, there's really nothing interesting about a single container or a single microservice, right? That's not, that's not the kind of environment that, um, real organizations live in. They live in organizations where they're going to have hundreds of services, um, who just containers and you need a technology to orchestrate and manage that in that complex environment. And Kubernete's has just quickly become the, the district per standard. Um, yeah, folks are red hat jumped on my very, very early, um, I mean, one of the advantages around her have is where we're embedded with developers and open source communities. We often have a pretty good, it gives us a pretty good crystal ball. So we're often quick to jump on the emerging technologies that are coming out of open source. And that's exactly what happened with Cubanetis. It was clear. It was, um, you're going to be sophisticated for our, you know, most, um, most sophisticated customers running at scale. Um, but, but also, you know, great for development environments as well. So it really a good fit for, uh, where we were headed and, you know, just very, very quickly became the fact that standard. And you, you just gotta go with the de facto standard. Right, right. >>Right. Well, the another thing that you mentioned rich in that other interview that I was watching is it came up the conversation in terms of managing open source projects. And at some point, you know, they kind of start, and then, you know, I think this one, if I go to corcus and look at the bottom of the page sponsored by red hat, but you talked about, you know, at some point, do you move it over to a foundation, um, you know, and kind of what are the things that kind of drive that process, that decision, um, and, you know, I would imagine that part of it has to do with popularity and scale, is that something, you know, potentially down the road, how do you think that you said you've been in lots of open source projects, when does it move from, you know, kind of single point of origin to more of a foundational support? >>Yeah. I mean, in fact the foundation's owner was necessary. Um, you know, when you have a, yeah. If you, if you have a, an open, very open project with, um, um, clear, clear rules for collaboration and kind of the encouragement or others to collaborate and be able to, you know, um, move the project and, you know, the foundation as low as necessarily what we've seen, I've been part of the no GS world where, you know, the, the community reached Belden to keep no GS moving forward. Um, we had to go from a, what we call a benevolent dictator for life, somebody who's well-intentioned, but, um, yeah, we're on stone, the technology, so a foundation, which is much more inclusive and, um, you know, greater collaboration and you can move even quicker. So, you know, um, I think what's required is, is open governance for open source projects and where that doesn't happen. You know, maybe a foundation is, is the right way forward. Right, right now with, with caucus, um, you know, the, the non red hat developers seem pretty happy with the way they can get, uh, get engaged and contribute. Um, but if we get to a point where the community is demanding a foundation and we'll absolutely consider it, that's the best project we'll do. >>So, so we're, we're coming to the end of our time. I want to give you each the last word, really with two questions, one again, you know, just kind of a summary of, of, uh, of CubeCon cloud, native con, you know, what should people be looking for, uh, find you, and, and, and I don't know if you guys are sponsoring any sessions, I'm sure there's a lot of great content. If you want to highlight one or two things. And then most importantly, as we turn the calendars, we come to the end of 2020, uh, thankfully, um, as you look ahead to 2021, you know, what are some of your priorities, uh, as, as we get ready to turn the turn, the calendar, and Miguel let's start with you. >>So, um, I mean, we have been working very hard this year on the migration, took it for applications to help her every user that is using Java to bring the two containers. You know, whether it is data IE or these crackers, but we're putting like a lot of effort in crackers. And now we are bringing in new rules. And, uh, by the, by December, we expect to have the new version of the migration looking for applications that is going to include the, all the bulls to help developers bring their, their code to the Java code, to, to carcass. And, uh, on this, this is the main goal for us right now. We are moving forward to the next year to include more, more capabilities in that project. Everything's up on site. You can go to the conveyor, uh, project and ticket on, uh, on the up capabilities for the assessment phase. So whenever any partner, any, any of our consultants are working on, on migration or anyone that would like to go and try it themselves on adopted, would like to do these migrations to the cloud native world, uh, will feel comfortable with, with this tool. So that is our main goal in, in my, in my team. >>All right. And how about you rich? >>Yeah, I think we're going to see this, um, um, kind of syllabus solidification kind of web of, um, microservices. Um, you know, if you like hate that, I'm sorry, but I'm just going to next generation microservice. There's going to be, as Miguel mentioned, is gonna be based around, um, uh, native, um, advancing, um, serverless functions. I think that's really the, the, the ideal architecture, the building March services, um, on, on Coobernetti's and caucus plays really, really well there. Um, I think there's, there's a, there's a kind of backlog of projects, um, within organizations that, um, you know, hopefully next year, everything really does start to crank up. And I think, um, yeah, I think a lot of the migration that Miguel has talked about is going to be, is going to rise in terms of importance. So app modernization, taking those existing applications, maybe taking aspects of those and, you know, doing some kind of decomposition in some microservices using caucus and a native, I think we'll see a lot of that. So I think we'll see a real drive around both the kind of Greenfield, um, applications, uh, you know, this next generation of microservices, as well as pulling those existing applications forward into these new environments, don't give an answers. So it's going to be excellent. >>Awesome. Well, thank you both for taking a few minutes with us and sharing the story of corcus, uh, and have a great show. Great to see you and a really good the conversation. All right. He's Miguel, he's rich. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cubes ongoing coverage of CubeCon cloud native con 2020 North America. Virtual. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the CUBE, coming to you from our Palo Alto studios today for a CUBE conversation. we've got a couple of a CUBE alumni veterans who've been on a lot of times. They've got some exciting announcements to tell us today, so we're excited to jump into it, So let's go. First we're joined by Eric Herzog. He's the CMO and VP worldwide storage channels for IBM Storage, made his time on theCUBE Eric, great to see you. >> Great, thanks very much for having us today. >> Jeff: Absolutely. And joining him, I think all the way from North Carolina, Sam Werner, the VP of, and offering manager business line executive storage for IBM. Sam, great to see you as well. >> Great to be here, thank you. >> Absolutely. So let's jump into it. So Sam you're in North Carolina, I think that's where the Red Hat people are. You guys have Red Hat, a lot of conversations about containers, containers are going nuts. We know containers are going nuts and it was Docker and then Kubernetes. And really a lot of traction. Wonder if you can reflect on, on what you see from your point of view and how that impacts what you guys are working on. >> Yeah, you know, it's interesting. We talk, everybody hears about containers constantly. Obviously it's a hot part of digital transformation. What's interesting about it though is most of those initiatives are being driven out of business lines. I spend a lot of time with the people who do infrastructure management, particularly the storage teams, the teams that have to support all of that data in the data center. And they're struggling to be honest with you. These initiatives are coming at them, from application developers and they're being asked to figure out how to deliver the same level of SLAs the same level of performance, governance, security recovery times, availability. And it's a scramble for them to be quite honest they're trying to figure out how to automate their storage. They're trying to figure out how to leverage the investments they've made as they go through a digital transformation and keep in mind, a lot of these initiatives are accelerating right now because of this global pandemic we're living through. I don't know that the strategy's necessarily changed, but there's been an acceleration. So all of a sudden these storage people kind of trying to get up to speed or being thrown right into the mix. So we're working directly with them. You'll see, in some of our announcements, we're helping them, you know, get on that journey and provide the infrastructure their teams need. >> And a lot of this is driven by multicloud and hybrid cloud, which we're seeing, you know, a really aggressive move to before it was kind of this rush to public cloud. And that everybody figured out, "Well maybe public cloud isn't necessarily right for everything." And it's kind of this horses for courses, if you will, with multicloud and hybrid cloud, another kind of complexity thrown into the storage mix that you guys have to deal with. >> Yeah, and that's another big challenge. Now in the early days of cloud, people were lifting and shifting applications trying to get lower capex. And they were also starting to deploy DevOps, in the public cloud in order to improve agility. And what they found is there were a lot of challenges with that, where they thought lifting and shifting an application will lower their capital costs the TCO actually went up significantly. Where they started building new applications in the cloud. They found they were becoming trapped there and they couldn't get the connectivity they needed back into their core applications. So now we're at this point where they're trying to really, transform the rest of it and they're using containers, to modernize the rest of the infrastructure and complete the digital transformation. They want to get into a hybrid cloud environment. What we found is, enterprises get two and a half X more value out of the IT when they use a hybrid multicloud infrastructure model versus an all public cloud model. So what they're trying to figure out is how to piece those different components together. So you need a software-driven storage infrastructure that gives you the flexibility, to deploy in a common way and automate in a common way, both in a public cloud but on premises and give you that flexibility. And that's what we're working on at IBM and with our colleagues at Red Hat. >> So Eric, you've been in the business a long time and you know, it's amazing as it just continues to evolve, continues to evolve this kind of unsexy thing under the covers called storage, which is so foundational. And now as data has become, you know, maybe a liability 'cause I have to buy a bunch of storage. Now it is the core asset of the company. And in fact a lot of valuations on a lot of companies is based on its value, that's data and what they can do. So clearly you've got a couple of aces in the hole you always do. So tell us what you guys are up to at IBM to take advantage of the opportunity. >> Well, what we're doing is we are launching, a number of solutions for various workloads and applications built with a strong container element. For example, a number of solutions about modern data protection cyber resiliency. In fact, we announced last year almost a year ago actually it's only a year ago last week, Sam and I were on stage, and one of our developers did a demo of us protecting data in a container environment. So now we're extending that beyond what we showed a year ago. We have other solutions that involve what we do with AI big data and analytic applications, that are in a container environment. What if I told you, instead of having to replicate and duplicate and have another set of storage right with the OpenShift Container configuration, that you could connect to an existing external exabyte class data lake. So that not only could your container apps get to it, but the existing apps, whether they'll be bare-metal or virtualized, all of them could get to the same data lake. Wow, that's a concept saving time, saving money. One pool of storage that'll work for all those environments. And now that containers are being deployed in production, that's something we're announcing as well. So we've got a lot of announcements today across the board. Most of which are container and some of which are not, for example, LTO-9, the latest high performance and high capacity tape. We're announcing some solutions around there. But the bulk of what we're announcing today, is really on what IBM is doing to continue to be the leader in container storage support. >> And it's great, 'cause you talked about a couple of very specific applications that we hear about all the time. One obviously on the big data and analytics side, you know, as that continues to do, to kind of chase history of honor of ultimately getting the right information to the right people at the right time so they can make the right decision. And the other piece you talked about was business continuity and data replication, and to bring people back. And one of the hot topics we've talked to a lot of people about now is kind of this shift in a security threat around ransomware. And the fact that these guys are a little bit more sophisticated and will actually go after your backup before they let you know that they're into your primary storage. So these are two, really important market areas that we could see continue activity, as all the people that we talk to every day. You must be seeing the same thing. >> Absolutely we are indeed. You know, containers are the wave. I'm a native California and I'm coming to you from Silicon Valley and you don't fight the wave, you ride it. So at IBM we're doing that. We've been the leader in container storage. We, as you know, way back when we invented the hard drive, which is the foundation of almost this entire storage industry and we were responsible for that. So we're making sure that as container is the coming wave that we are riding that in and doing the right things for our customers, for our channel partners that support those customers, whether they be existing customers, and obviously, with this move to containers, is going to be some people searching for probably a new vendor. And that's something that's going to go right into our wheelhouse because of the things we're doing. And some of our capabilities, for example, with our FlashSystems, with our Spectrum Virtualize, we're actually going to be able to support CSI snapshots not only for IBM Storage, but our Spectrum Virtualize products supports over 500 different arrays, most of which aren't ours. So if you got that old EMC VNX2 or that HPE, 3PAR or aNimble or all kinds of other storage, if you need CSI snapshot support, you can get it from IBM, with our Spectrum Virtualize software that runs on our FlashSystems, which of course cuts capex and opex, in a heterogeneous environment, but gives them that advanced container support that they don't get, because they're on older product from, you know, another vendor. We're making sure that we can pull our storage and even our competitor storage into the world of containers and do it in the right way for the end user. >> That's great. Sam, I want to go back to you and talk about the relationship with the Red Hat. I think it was about a year ago, I don't have my notes in front of me, when IBM purchased Red Hat. Clearly you guys have been working very closely together. What does that mean for you? You've been in the business for a long time. You've been at IBM for a long time, to have a partner you know, kind of embed with you, with Red Hat and bringing some of their capabilities into your portfolio. >> It's been an incredible experience, and I always say my friends at Red Hat because we spend so much time together. We're looking at now, leveraging a community that's really on the front edge of this movement to containers. They bring that, along with their experience around storage and containers, along with the years and years of enterprise class storage delivery that we have in the IBM Storage portfolio. And we're bringing those pieces together. And this is a case of truly one plus one equals three. And you know, an example you'll see in this announcement is the integration of our data protection portfolio with their container native storage. We allow you to in any environment, take a snapshot of that data. You know, this move towards modern data protection is all about a movement to doing data protection in a different way which is about leveraging snapshots, taking instant copies of data that are application aware, allowing you to reuse and mount that data for different purposes, be able to protect yourself from ransomware. Our data protection portfolio has industry leading ransomware protection and detection in it. So we'll actually detect it before it becomes a problem. We're taking that, industry leading data protection software and we are integrating it into Red Hat, Container Native Storage, giving you the ability to solve one of the biggest challenges in this digital transformation which is backing up your data. Now that you're moving towards, stateful containers and persistent storage. So that's one area we're collaborating. We're working on ensuring that our storage arrays, that Eric was talking about, that they integrate tightly with OpenShift and that they also work again with, OpenShift Container Storage, the Cloud Native Storage portfolio from, Red Hat. So we're bringing these pieces together. And on top of that, we're doing some really, interesting things with licensing. We allow you to consume the Red Hat Storage portfolio along with the IBM software-defined Storage portfolio under a single license. And you can deploy the different pieces you need, under one single license. So you get this ultimate investment protection and ability to deploy anywhere. So we're, I think we're adding a lot of value for our customers and helping them on this journey. >> Yeah Eric, I wonder if you could share your perspective on multicloud management. I know that's a big piece of what you guys are behind and it's a big piece of kind of the real world as we've kind of gotten through the hype and now we're into production, and it is a multicloud world and it is, you got to manage this stuff it's all over the place. I wonder if you could speak to kind of how that challenge you know, factors into your design decisions and how you guys are about, you know, kind of the future. >> Well we've done this in a couple of ways in things that are coming out in this launch. First of all, IBM has produced with a container-centric model, what they call the Multicloud Manager. It's the IBM Cloud Pak for multicloud management. That product is designed to manage multiple clouds not just the IBM Cloud, but Amazon, Azure, et cetera. What we've done is taken our Spectrum Protect Plus and we've integrated it into the multicloud manager. So what that means, to save time, to save money and make it easier to use, when the customer is in the multicloud manager, they can actually select Spectrum Protect Plus, launch it and then start to protect data. So that's one thing we've done in this launch. The other thing we've done is integrate the capability of IBM Spectrum Virtualize, running in a FlashSystem to also take the capability of supporting OCP, the OpenShift Container Platform in a Clustered environment. So what we can do there, is on-premise, if there really was an earthquake in Silicon Valley right now, that OpenShift is sitting on a server. The servers just got crushed by the roof when it caved in. So you want to make sure you've got disaster recovery. So what we can do is take that OpenShift Container Platform Cluster, we can support it with our Spectrum Virtualize software running on our FlashSystem, just like we can do heterogeneous storage that's not ours, in this case, we're doing it with Red Hat. And then what we can do is to provide disaster recovery and business continuity to different cloud vendors not just to IBM Cloud, but to several cloud vendors. We can give them the capability of replicating and protecting that Cluster to a cloud configuration. So if there really was an earthquake, they could then go to the cloud, they could recover that Red Hat Cluster, to a different data center and run it on-prem. So we're not only doing the integration with a multicloud manager, which is multicloud-centric allowing ease of use with our Spectrum Protect Plus, but incase of a really tough situation of fire in a data center, earthquake, hurricane, whatever, the Red Hat OpenShift Cluster can be replicated out to a cloud, with our Spectrum Virtualize Software. So in most, in both cases, multicloud examples because in the first one of course the multicloud manager is designed and does support multiple clouds. In the second example, we support multiple clouds where our Spectrum Virtualize for public clouds software so you can take that OpenShift Cluster replicate it and not just deal with one cloud vendor but with several. So showing that multicloud management is important and then leverage that in this launch with a very strong element of container centricity. >> Right >> Yeah, I just want to add, you know, and I'm glad you brought that up Eric, this whole multicloud capability with, the Spectrum Virtualize. And I could see the same for our Spectrum Scale Family, which is our storage infrastructure for AI and big data. We actually, in this announcement have containerized the client making it very simple to deploy in Kubernetes Cluster. But one of the really special things about Spectrum Scale is it's active file management. This allows you to build out a file system not only on-premises for your, Kubernetes Cluster but you can actually extend that to a public cloud and it automatically will extend the file system. If you were to go into a public cloud marketplace which it's available in more than one, you can go in there click deploy, for example, in AWS Marketplace, click deploy it will deploy your Spectrum Scale Cluster. You've now extended your file system from on-prem into the cloud. If you need to access any of that data, you can access it and it will automatically cash you on locally and we'll manage all the file access for you. >> Yeah, it's an interesting kind of paradox between, you know, kind of the complexity of what's going on in the back end, but really trying to deliver simplicity on the front end. Again, this ultimate goal of getting the right data to the right person at the right time. You just had a blog post Eric recently, that you talked about every piece of data isn't equal. And I think it's really highlighted in this conversation we just had about recovery and how you prioritize and how you, you know, think about, your data because you know, the relative value of any particular piece might be highly variable, which should drive the way that you treated in your system. So I wonder if you can speak a little bit, you know, to helping people think about data in the right way. As you know, they both have all their operational data which they've always had, but now they've got all this unstructured data that's coming in like crazy and all data isn't created equal, as you said. And if there is an earthquake or there is a ransomware attack, you need to be smart about what you have available to bring back quickly. And maybe what's not quite so important. >> Well, I think the key thing, let me go to, you know a modern data protection term. These are two very technical terms was, one is the recovery time. How long does it take you to get that data back? And the second one is the recovery point, at what point in time, are you recovering the data from? And the reason those are critical, is when you look at your datasets, whether you replicate, you snap, you do a backup. The key thing you've got to figure out is what is my recovery time? How long is it going to take me? What's my recovery point. Obviously in certain industries you want to recover as rapidly as possible. And you also want to have the absolute most recent data. So then once you know what it takes you to do that, okay from an RPO and an RTO perspective, recovery point objective, recovery time objective. Once you know that, then you need to look at your datasets and look at what does it take to run the company if there really was a fire and your data center was destroyed. So you take a look at those datasets, you see what are the ones that I need to recover first, to keep the company up and rolling. So let's take an example, the sales database or the support database. I would say those are pretty critical to almost any company, whether you'd be a high-tech company, whether you'd be a furniture company, whether you'd be a delivery company. However, there also is probably a database of assets. For example, IBM is a big company. We have buildings all over, well, guess what? We don't lease a chair or a table or a whiteboard. We buy them. Those are physical assets that the company has to pay, you know, do write downs on and all this other stuff, they need to track it. If we close a building, we need to move the desk to another building. Like even if we leasing a building now, the furniture is ours, right? So does an asset database need to be recovered instantaneously? Probably not. So we should focus on another thing. So let's say on a bank. Banks are both online and brick and mortar. I happened to be a Wells Fargo person. So guess what? There's Wells Fargo banks, two of them in the city I'm in, okay? So, the assets of the money, in this case now, I don't think the brick and mortar of the building of Wells Fargo or their desks in there but now you're talking financial assets or their high velocity trading apps. Those things need to be recovered almost instantaneously. And that's what you need to do when you're looking at datasets, is figure out what's critical to the business to keep it up and rolling, what's the next most critical. And you do it in basically the way you would tear anything. What's the most important thing, what's the next most important thing. It doesn't matter how you approach your job, how you used to approach school, what are the classes I have to get an A and what classes can I not get an A and depending on what your major was, all that sort of stuff, you're setting priorities, right? And the dataset, since data is the most critical asset of any company, whether it's a Global Fortune 500 or whether it's Herzog Cigar Store, all of those assets, that data is the most valuable. So you've got to make sure, recover what you need as rapidly as you need it. But you can't recover all of it. You just, there's just no way to do that. So that's why you really ranked the importance of the data to use sameware, with malware and ransomware. If you have a malware or ransomware attack, certain data you need to recover as soon as you can. So if there, for example, as a, in fact there was one Jeff, here in Silicon Valley as well. You've probably read about the University of California San Francisco, ended up having to pay over a million dollars of ransom because some of the data related to COVID research University of California, San Francisco, it was the health care center for the University of California in Northern California. They are working on COVID and guess what? The stuff was held for ransom. They had no choice, but to pay them. And they really did pay, this is around end of June, of this year. So, okay, you don't really want to do that. >> Jeff: Right >> So you need to look at everything from malware and ransomware, the importance of the data. And that's how you figure this stuff out, whether be in a container environment, a traditional environment or virtualized environment. And that's why data protection is so important. And with this launch, not only are we doing the data protection we've been doing for years, but now taking it to the heart of the new wave, which is the wave of containers. >> Yeah, let me add just quickly on that Eric. So think about those different cases you talked about. You're probably going to want for your mission critically. You're going to want snapshots of that data that can be recovered near instantaneously. And then, for some of your data, you might decide you want to store it out in cloud. And with Spectrum Protect, we just announced our ability to now store data out in Google cloud. In addition to, we already supported AWS Azure IBM Cloud, in various on-prem object stores. So we already provided that capability. And then we're in this announcement talking about LTL-9. And you got to also be smart about which data do you need to keep, according to regulation for long periods of time, or is it just important to archive? You're not going to beat the economics nor the safety of storing data out on tape. But like Eric said, if all of your data is out on tape and you have an event, you're not going to be able to restore it quickly enough at least the mission critical things. And so those are the things that need to be in snapshot. And that's one of the main things we're announcing here for Kubernetes environments is the ability to quickly snapshot application aware backups, of your mission critical data in your Kubernetes environments. It can very quickly to be recovered. >> That's good. So I'll give you the last word then we're going to sign off, we are out of time, but I do want to get this in it's 2020, if I didn't ask the COVID question, I would be in big trouble. So, you know, you've all seen the memes and the jokes about really COVID being an accelerant to digital transformation, not necessarily change, but certainly a huge accelerant. I mean, you guys have a, I'm sure a product roadmap that's baked pretty far and advanced, but I wonder if you can speak to, you know, from your perspective, as COVID has accelerated digital transformation you guys are so foundational to executing that, you know, kind of what is it done in terms of what you're seeing with your customers, you know, kind of the demand and how you're seeing this kind of validation as to an accelerant to move to these better types of architectures? Let's start with you Sam. >> Yeah, you know I, and I think i said this, but I mean the strategy really hasn't changed for the enterprises, but of course it is accelerating it. And I see storage teams more quickly getting into trouble, trying to solve some of these challenges. So we're working closely with them. They're looking for more automation. They have less people in the data center on-premises. They're looking to do more automation simplify the management of the environment. We're doing a lot around Ansible to help them with that. We're accelerating our roadmaps around that sort of integration and automation. They're looking for better visibility into their environments. So we've made a lot of investments around our storage insights SaaS platform, that allows them to get complete visibility into their data center and not just in their data center. We also give them visibility to the stores they're deploying in the cloud. So we're making it easier for them to monitor and manage and automate their storage infrastructure. And then of course, if you look at everything we're doing in this announcement, it's about enabling our software and our storage infrastructure to integrate directly into these new Kubernetes, initiatives. That way as this digital transformation accelerates and application developers are demanding more and more Kubernetes capabilities. They're able to deliver the same SLAs and the same level of security and the same level of governance, that their customers expect from them, but in this new world. So that's what we're doing. If you look at our announcement, you'll see that across, across the sets of capabilities that we're delivering here. >> Eric, we'll give you the last word, and then we're going to go to Eric Cigar Shop, as soon as this is over. (laughs) >> So it's clearly all about storage made simple, in a Kubernetes environment, in a container environment, whether it's block storage, file storage, whether it be object storage and IBM's goal is to offer ever increasing sophisticated services for the enterprise at the same time, make it easier and easier to use and to consume. If you go back to the old days, the storage admins manage X amount of gigabytes, maybe terabytes. Now the same admin is managing 10 petabytes of data. So the data explosion is real across all environments, container environments, even old bare-metal. And of course the not quite so new anymore virtualized environments. The admins need to manage that more and more easily and automated point and click. Use AI based automated tiering. For example, we have with our Easy Tier technology, that automatically moves data when it's hot to the fastest tier. And when it's not as hot, it's cool, it pushes down to a slower tier, but it's all automated. You point and you click. Let's take our migration capabilities. We built it into our software. I buy a new array, I need to migrate the data. You point, you click, and we automatic transparent migration in the background on the fly without taking the servers or the storage down. And we always favor the application workload. So if the application workload is heavy at certain times a day, we slow the migration. At night for sake of argument, If it's a company that is not truly 24 by seven, you know, heavily 24 by seven, and at night, it slows down, we accelerate the migration. All about automation. We've done it with Ansible, here in this launch, we've done it with additional integration with other platforms. So our Spectrum Scale for example, can use the OpenShift management framework to configure and to grow our Spectrum Scale or elastic storage system clusters. We've done it, in this case with our Spectrum Protect Plus, as you saw integration into the multicloud manager. So for us, it's storage made simple, incredibly new features all the time, but at the same time we do that, make sure that it's easier and easier to use. And in some cases like with Ansible, not even the real storage people, but God forbid, that DevOps guy messes with a storage and loses that data, wow. So by, if you're using something like Ansible and that Ansible framework, we make sure that essentially the DevOps guy, the test guy, the analytics guy, basically doesn't lose the data and screw up the storage. And that's a big, big issue. So all about storage made simple, in the right way with incredible enterprise features that essentially we make easy and easy to use. We're trying to make everything essentially like your iPhone, that easy to use. That's the goal. And with a lot less storage admins in the world then there has been an incredible storage growth every single year. You'd better make it easy for the same person to manage all that storage. 'Cause it's not shrinking. It is, someone who's sitting at 50 petabytes today, is 150 petabytes the next year and five years from now, they'll be sitting on an exabyte of production data, and they're not going to hire tons of admins. It's going to be the same two or four people that were doing the work. Now they got to manage an exabyte, which is why this storage made simplest is such a strong effort for us with integration, with the Open, with the Kubernetes frameworks or done with OpenShift, heck, even what we used to do in the old days with vCenter Ops from VMware, VASA, VAAI, all those old VMware tools, we made sure tight integration, easy to use, easy to manage, but sophisticated features to go with that. Simplicity is really about how you manage storage. It's not about making your storage dumb. People want smarter and smarter storage. Do you make it smarter, but you make it just easy to use at the same time. >> Right. >> Well, great summary. And I don't think I could do a better job. So I think we'll just leave it right there. So congratulations to both of you and the teams for these announcement after a whole lot of hard work and sweat went in, over the last little while and continued success. And thanks for the, check in, always great to see you. >> Thank you. We love being on theCUBE as always. >> All right, thanks again. All right, he's Eric, he was Sam, I'm I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We'll see you next time, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Hello, my name is Petar Bojovic, director of technology infrastructure from Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina. I have been with this organization for over three years and I own system engineering across private and public cloud, virtualization, OS, backup, storage, OpenShift platform, and automation. I have been implementing significant change improving our operating model since I arrived. Blue Cross Blue Shield North Carolina is transforming healthcare by changing the current model. We are focusing on something called value-based healthcare. Traditionally, healthcare model is typically a fee for service or capitated approach in which providers are paid based on the amount of health care services they deliver. Fee for service versus outcome. So when you go to a doctor and you do an office visit, they charge you for every item that they see you with. Based on that, they send that to my organization to adjudicate those claims. Value-based healthcare, on the other hand is a healthcare delivery model in which providers, including hospitals and physicians, are paid based on patient health outcomes. The value in value-based healthcare is derived from measuring health outcomes against the cost of delivering those outcomes. Well, we want to do the same and derive value out of IT as well. Significant value can be attained through automation on all levels. Just like most journeys, mine began with motivation. Let's talk about how I got here, how did I get started and how you can do it too. But first let's talk about Ansible. The automation engine is designed to provide an easy, reusable and platform-independent vehicle to automate complex and repetitive tasks. First off, Ansible is an open-source tool. It is very simple to use and set up. Even better, it's extremely powerful and flexible. You can orchestrate the entire application environment, no matter where it's deployed. You can also customize it based on your needs. Back in 2018, we had to build 150 jump server VMs in under 24 hours. Well, we leveraged some of the cobbled automation tools and scripts to get this done within that timeline. Without leveraging these tools and automation, this would have taken at least a week to facilitate the build. So a couple key takeaways from that exercise. Number one, this was awesome. All right, number two. We saw amazing potential in automation. Number three, we ran into network and other related build issues. Number four, we were unsure what to do next and where to focus within the realm of automation. So fast forward to May, 2019. My infrastructure engineering team introduced infrastructure automation software, you guessed it, Ansible to Blue Cross North Carolina to reduce overall IT costs, increase agility, productivity, and delivery while reducing delays and reliance on outside managed service providers or those repetitive manual tasks. So in the past, to provision a single server or virtual machine would take a minimum of 10 business days. That's not the overall process. That is just the deployment, would take 10 business days and over 20 hours of work, resulting in a cost of approximately $3,300 in charges per build. That's over $3,000 per build per server. However, with the automation platform provided by Ansible, this effort was significantly reduced. Reduced to under one business day, a half-hour worth of work and zero managed service provider charges. Let's fast forward a bit, to middle to late 2019. Blue Cross North Carolina decided to re-host the Facets application platform in-house within our co-locations. Well, Facets is a claim adjudication platform. After a medical claim is submitted, the insurance company Blue Cross determines their financial responsibility for the payment to the provider. This process is referred to as claims adjudication. Blue Cross was faced with the requirement to create roughly 1000 virtual machines as quickly as possible across all regions. Development, tests, training, QA, UAT, P stage, a staging environment, production, NDR. Well, our current managed service provider projected requiring 12 dedicated staff members and 16 weeks to process this request. Nope. There had to be a better way. By leveraging automation, the existing infrastructure engineering team was able to successfully provision all the required servers across three business days, in a total of 16 hours as well as nine weeks ahead of the project plan schedule, resulting in a cost avoidance of over $850,000. That's amazing, isn't it? Well, since then, the infrastructure engineering team has continued to use automation to assist teams both inside and outside of IT by reducing hours spent on repetitive tasks. Automation has increased the speed and accuracy of account creation, security hardening, and remediations, environment-wide configuration changes and software agent installations, just to name a few. This implementation had a significant positive impact on cost savings and cost avoidance and how quickly we can deliver and deploy infrastructure for projects. How were we able to implement this meaningful change? Well, I'll tell you, we started to evangelize and convert those naysayers to the wonderful world of automation. "Automate everything" was our mantra, even automate the automation. We'll eventually get there. It took a top-down approach to really accelerate use and adoptions. I spoke to anyone and everyone I could, my VP did the same, and even my CIO, Jo Abernathy. She started touting how important automation will be to the organization, its value, and how we can stay competitive and deploy faster and deliver at the speed of innovation. Wow, just wow. With a top-down approach for automation, we are empowering teams throughout the business to focus on those areas that are ripe for automation. Repetitive mundane tasks, those that are time delays are ideal candidates and allow these teams to focus on their core workload, versus time spent on those repetitive tasks. We are flaunting our automation successes within IT infrastructure to other departments in IT and the business at large. These conversations are opening up new possibilities to empower team members to leverage automation to deploy and deliver more quickly to meet the demand of enterprise projects and initiatives. Since its inception, the team has delivered on every project request ahead of schedule for infrastructure build, think about that. Every project request has been delivered ahead of schedule from an infrastructure perspective. That's fantastic. Well, automation is not new to the company, my company, nor yours. There's many tools, we use scripting, there's a lot available, but with Ansible and the way we've been able to implement it and make meaningful impact quickly, is new to the industry. We have been able to automate and reap significant cost avoidance in a short amount of time. Other similarly-sized companies are leveraging the same tool for longer and are not able to accomplish as much as we did in a short of time. We had motivation. Since starting this initiative, we are averaging cost avoidances in excess of $250,000 monthly. As difficult as it is to implement something new in most companies, the team implemented this capability and way of thinking within months. The sheer dedication to the business objective and the can-do attitude allowed us to be extremely successful. Thank you very much for your time and allowing me to tell my story.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this a CUBE conversation. >> Hello, and welcome to this CUBE conversation, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here, in our Palo Alto, California studios, here with our quarantine crew. We're getting all the remote interviews during this time of COVID-19. We've got two great remote guests here, Rachini Moosavi who's the Executive Director of Analytical Services and Data Governance at UNC Healthcare, and Sonya Jordan, Enterprise Analytics Manager of Data Governance at UNC Health. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, I'm super excited. University of North Carolina, my daughter will be a freshman this year, and she is coming, so hopefully she won't have to visit UNC Health, but looking forward to having more visits down there, it's a great place. So, thanks for coming on, really appreciate it. Okay, so the conversation today is going to be about how data and how analytics are helping solve problems, and ultimately, in your case, serve the community, and this is a super important conversation. So, before we get started, talk about UNC Health, what's going on there, how you guys organize, how big is it, what are some of the challenges that you have? >> SO UNC Health is comprised of about 12 different entities within our hospital system. We have physician groups as well as hospitals, and we serve, we're spread throughout all of North Carolina, and so we serve the patients of North Carolina, and that is our primary focus and responsibility for our mission. As part of the offices Sonya and I are in, we are in the Enterprise Analytics and Data Sciences Office that serves all of those entities and so we are centrally located in the triangle area of North Carolina, which is pretty central to the state, and we serve all of our entities equally from our Analytics and Data Governance needs. >> John: You guys got a different customer base, obviously you've got the clinical support, and you got the business applications, you got to be agile, that's what it's all about today, you don't need to rely on IT support. How do you guys do that? What's the framework? How do you guys tackle that problem of being agile, having the data be available, and you got two different customers, you got all the compliance issues with clinical, I can only imagine all the regulations involved, and you've got the business applications. How do you handle those? >> Yeah, so for us in the roles that we are in, we are fully responsible for more of the data and analytics needs of the organization, and so we provide services that truly are balanced across our clinician group, so we have physicians, and nurses, and all of the other ancillary clinical staff that we support, as well as the operational needs as well, so revenue cycle, finance, pharmacy, any of those groups that are required in order to run a healthcare system. So, we balance our time amongst all of those and for the work that we take on and how we continuously support them is really based on governance at the end of the day. How we make decisions around what the priorities are and what needs to happen next, and requires the best insights, is really how we focus on what work we do next. As for the applications that we build, in our office, we truly only build analytical applications or products like visualizations within Tableau as well as we support data governance platforms and services and so we provide some of the tools that enable our end users to be able to interact with the information that we're providing around analytics and insights, at the end of the day. >> Sonya, what's your job? Your title is Analytics Manager of Data Governance, obviously that sounds broad but governance is obviously required in all things. What is your job, what is your day-to-day roles like? What's your focus? >> Well, my day-to-day operations is first around building a data governance program. I try to work with identifying customers who we can start partnering with so that we can start getting documentation and utilizing a lot of the programs that we currently have, such as certification, so when we talk about initiatives, this is one of the initiatives that we use to partner with our stakeholders in order to start bringing visibilities to the various assets, such as metrics, or universes that we want to certify, or dashboards, algorithm, just various lists of different types of assets that we certify that we like to partner with the customers in order for them to start documenting within the tools, so that we can bring visibility to what's available, really focusing on data literacy, helping people to understand what assets are available, not only what assets are available, but who owns them, and who own the asset, and what can they do with it, making sure that we have great documentation in order to be able to leverage literacy as well. >> So, I can only imagine with how much volume you guys are dealing from a data standpoint, and the diversity, that the data warehouse must be massive, or it must be architected in a way that it can be agile because the needs, of the diverse needs. Can you guys share your thoughts on how you guys look on the data warehouse challenge and opportunity, and what you guys are currently doing? >> Well, so- >> Yeah you go ahead, Rachini. >> Go ahead, Sonya. >> Well, last year we implemented a tool, an enterprise warehouse, basically behind a tool that we implemented, and that was an opportunity for Data Governance to really lay some foundation and really bring visibility to the work that we could provide for the enterprise. We were able to embed into probably about six or seven of the 13 initiatives, I was actually within that project, and with that we were able to develop our stewardship committee, our data governance council, and because Rachini managed Data Solutions, our data solution manager was able to really help with the architect and integration of the tools. >> Rachini, your thoughts on running the data warehouse, because you've got to have flexibility for new types of data sources. How do you look at that? >> So, as Sonya just mentioned, we upgraded our data warehouse platform just recently because of these evolving needs, and like a lot of healthcare providers out there, a lot of them are either one or the other EMRs that are top in the market. With our EMR, they provide their own data warehouse, so you have to factor almost the impact of what they bring to the table in with an addition to all of those other sources of data that you're trying to co-mingle and bring together into the same data warehouse, and so for us, it was time for us to evolve our data warehouse. We ended up deciding on trying to create a virtual data warehouse, and in doing so, with virtualization, we had to upgrade our platform, which is what created that opportunity that Sonya was mentioning. And by moving to this new platform we are now able to bring all of that into one space and it's enabled us to think about how does the community of analysts interact with the data? How do we make that available to them in a secure way? In a way that they can take advantage of reusable master data files that could be our source of truth within our data warehouse, while also being able to have the flexibility to build what they need in their own functional spaces so that they can get the wealth of information that they need out of the same source and it's available to everyone. >> Okay, so I got to ask the question, and I was trying to get the good stuff out first, but let's get at the reality of COVID-19. You got pre-COVID-19 pandemic, we're kind of in the middle of it, and people are looking at strategies to come out of it, obviously the world will be changed, higher with a lot of virtualization, virtual meetings, and virtual workforce, but the data still needs to be, the business still needs to run, but data will be changing different sources, how are you guys responding to that crisis because you're going to be leaned on heavily for more and more support? >> Yeah it's been non-stop since March (laughs). So, I'm going to tell you about the reporting aspects of it, and then I'd love to turn it over to Sonya to tell you about some of the great things that we've actually been able to do to it and enhance our data governance program by not wasting this terrible event and this opportunity that's come up. So, with COVID, when it kicked off back in March, we actually formed a war room to address the needs around reporting analytics and just insights that our executives needed, and so in doing so, we created within the first week, our first weekend actually, our first dashboard, and within the next two weeks we had about eight or nine other dashboards that were available. And we continuously add to that. Information is so critical to our executives, to our clinicians, to be able to know how to address the evolving needs of COVID-19 and how we need to respond. We literally, and I'm not even exaggerating, at this very moment we have probably, let's see, I think it's seven different forecasts that we're trying to build all at the same time to try and help us prepare for this new recovery, this sort of ramp up efforts, so to your point, it started off as we're shutting down so that we can flatten the curve, but now as we try to also reopen at the same time while we're still meeting the needs of our COVID patients, there's this balancing act that we're trying to keep up with and so analytics is playing a critical factor in doing that. >> Sonya, your thoughts. First of all, congratulations, and action is what defines the players from the pretenders in my mind, you're seeing that play out, so congratulations for taking great action, I know you're working hard. Sonya, your thoughts, COVID, it's putting a lot of pressure? It highlights the weaknesses and strengths of what's kind of out there, what's your thoughts? >> Well, it just requires a great deal of collaboration and making sure that you're documenting metrics in a way where you're factoring true definition because at the end of the day, this information can go into a dashboard that's going to be visualized across the organization, I think what COVID has done was really enhanced the need and the understanding of why data governance is important and also it has allowed us to create a lot of standardization, where we we're standardizing a lot of processes that we currently had in correct place but just enhancing them. >> You know, not to go on a tangent, but I will, it's funny how the reality has kind of pulled back, exposed a lot of things, whether it's the remote work situation, people are VPNing, not under provision with the IT side. On the data side, everyone now understands the quality of the data. I mean, I got my kids talking progression analysis, "Oh, the curves are all wrong," I mean people are now seeing the science behind the data and they're looking at graphs all the time, you guys are in the visualization piece, this really highlights the need of data as a story, because there's an impact, and two, quality data. And if you don't have the data, the story isn't being told and then misinformation comes out of it, and this is actually playing out in real time, so it's not like it's just a use case for the most analytics but this again highlights the value of proposition of what you guys do. What's your personal thoughts on all this because this really is playing out globally. >> Yeah, it's been amazing how much information is out there. So, we have been extremely blessed at times but also burdened at times by that amount of information. So, there's the data that's going through our healthcare system that we're trying to manage and wrangle and do that data storytelling so that people can drive those insights to very effective decisions. But there's also all of this external data that we're trying to be able to leverage as well. And this is where the whole sharing of information can sometimes become really hard to try and get ahead of, we leverage the Johns Hopkins data for some time, but even that, too, can have some hiccups in terms of what's available. We try to use our State Department of Health and Human Services data and they just about updated their website and how information was being shared every other week and it was making it impossible for us to ingest that into our dashboards that we were providing, and so there's really great opportunities but also risks in some of the information that we're pulling. >> Sonya, what's your thoughts? I was just having a conversation this morning with the Chief of Analytics and Insight from NOA which is the National Oceanic Administration, about weather data and forecasting weather, and they've got this community model where they're trying to get the edges to kind of come in, this teases out a template. You guys have multiple locations. As you get more democratized in the connection points, whether it's third-party data, having a system managing that is hard, and again, this is a new trend that's emerging, this community connection points, where I think you guys might also might be a template, and your multiple locations, what's your general thoughts on that because the data's coming in, it's now connected in, whether it's first-party to the healthcare system or third-party. >> Yeah, well we have been leveraging our data governance tool to try to get that centralized location, making sure that we obtain the documentations. Due to COVID, everything is moving very fast, so it requires us to really sit down and capture the information and when you don't have enough resources in order to do that, it's easy to miss some very important information, so really trying to encourage people to understand the reason why we have data governance tools in order for them to leverage, in order to capture the documentation in a way that it can tell the story about the data, but most of all, to be able to capture it in a way so that if that person happened to leave the organization, we're not spending a lot of time trying to figure out how was this information created, how was this dashboard designed, where are the requirements, where are the specifications, where are the key elements, where does that information live, and making sure we capture that up front. >> So, guys, you guys are using Informatica, how are they helping you? Obviously, they have a system they're getting some great feedback on, how are you using Informatica, how is it going, and how has that enabled you guys to be successful? >> Yeah, so we decided on Informatica after doing a really thorough vetting of all of the other vendors in the industry that could provide us these services. We've really loved the capabilities that we've been able to provide to our customers at this point. It's evolving, I think, for us, the ability to partner with a group like Prominence, to be able to really leverage the capabilities of Informatica and then be really super, super hyper focused on providing data literacy back to our end users and making that the full intent of what we're doing within data governance has really enabled us to take the tools and make it something that's specific to UNC Health and the needs that our end users are verbalizing and provide that to them in a very positive way. >> Sonya, they talk about this master catalog, and I've talked to the CEO of Informatica and all their leaders, governance is a big part of it, and I've always said, I've always kind of had a hard time, I'm an entrepreneur, I like to innovate, move fast, break things, which is kind of not the way you work in the data world, you don't want to be breaking anything, so how do you balance governance and compliance with innovation? This has been a key topic and I know that you guys are using their enterprise data catolog. Is that helping? How does that fit in, is that part of it? >> Well, yeah, so during our COVID initiatives and building these telos dashboards, these visualizations and forecast models for executive leaders, we were able to document and EMPower you, which we rebranded Axon to EMPower, we were able to document a lot of our dashboards, which is a data set, and pretty much document attributes and show lineage from EMPower to EDC, so that users would know exactly when they start looking at the visualization not only what does this information mean, but they're also able to see what other sources that that information impacts as well as the data lineage, where did the information come from in EDC. >> So I got to ask the question to kind of wrap things up, has Informatica helped you guys out now that you're in this crisis? Obviously you've implemented before, now that you're in the middle of it, have you seen any things that jumped out at you that's been helpful, and are there areas that need to be worked on so that you guys continue to fight the good fight, come out of this thing stronger than before you came in? >> Yeah, there is a lot of new information, what we consider as "aha" moments that we've been learning about, and how EMPower, yes there's definitely a learning curve because we implemented EDC and EMPower last year doing our warehouse implementation, and so there's a lot of work that still needs to be done, but based on where we were the first of the year, I can say we have evolved tremendously due to a lot of the pandemic issues that arised, and we're looking to really evolve even greater, and pilot across the entire organization so that they can start leveraging these tools for their needs. >> Rachini you got any thoughts on your end on what's worked, what you see improvements coming, anything to share? >> Yeah, so we're excited about some of the new capabilities like the marketplace for example that's available in Axon, we're looking forward to being able to take advantage of some of these great new aspects of the tool so that we can really focus more on providing those insights back to our end users. I think for us, during COVID, it's really been about how do we take advantage of the immediate needs that are surfacing. How do we build all of these dashboards in record-breaking time but also make sure that folks understand exactly what's being represented within those dashboards, and so being able to provide that through our Informatica tools and service it back to our end users, almost in a seamless way like it's built into our dashboards, has been a really critical factor for us, and feeling like we can provide that level of transparency, and so I think that's where as we evolve that we would look for more opportunities, too. How do we make it simple for people to get that immediate answers to their questions, of what does the information need without it feeling like they're going elsewhere for the information. >> Rachini, thank you so much for your insight, Sonya as well, thanks for the insight, and stay safe. Sonya, behind you, I was pointing out, that's your artwork, you painted that picture. >> Yes. >> Looks beautiful. >> Yes, I did. >> You got two jobs, you're an artist, and you're doing data governance. >> Yes, I am, and I enjoy painting, that's how I relax (laughs). >> Looks great, get that on the market soon, get that on the marketplace, let's get that going. Appreciate the time, thank you so much for the insights, and stay safe and again, congratulations on the hard work you're doing, I know there's still a lot more to do, thanks for your time, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> It's theCUBE conversation, I'm John Furrier at the Palo Alto studios, for the remote interviews with Informatica, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a special CUBE conversation. I'm coming from the Boston area studio. We were supposed to have a KubeCon Europe in Amsterdam. First in the spring, they pushed it off to the summer, and, of course, the decision due to the global pandemic is it's making it virtual. But happy to welcome to the program two guests that I was planning to have on in person, but couldn't wait for our virtual coverage of the event, though. Happy to welcome the co-founders of TriggerMesh. Sitting in the middle is Mark Hinkle, who is the CEO of the company, and to the other side is Sebastien Goasguen, who is also the co-founder and the Chief Product Officer. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us, Stu. >> Thanks, Stu. >> All right, so, it's interesting, we've been covering the cloud native space for a number of years, and especially at KubeCon, there's always some of those discussions of does cloud kill on-premises, does this new thing kill that old thing. And in some of the early days of KubeCon, it was like, well, containers are really interesting, and there was all the buzz for years about Docker but, hey, the next thing is going to be serverless. And serverless, we don't need to think about any of that stuff, it's the nirvana of what developers wanted. So therefore, let's not worry about containers, but you sit in that space really helping to connect between some of the various pieces. So, I guess, Sebastien, maybe if I could start with you, 'cause you've built some of these various projects, when you go through and look at your background, you've been involved in the co-business space, uBLAS, and now for TriggerMesh but, you know, give us some of that background as to how, from a technological under pinnings, the community's been thinking about how these worlds fit together. >> Yeah sure, it's very interesting because first, the container rejuvenation started with Docker obviously and then Kubernetes appeared, and the entire community started building this. And this was really an evolution from the virtual machine orchestration, right. People needing a better way to package applications, deploy them, and they said, "You know what, "virtual machines are not that great for this. "Can't we have a better vehicle to do this" and that's where, really, containers took over. And it made total sense and so we saw this switch from, craziness about open stack and even cloud stack that Mark and I worked on, and putting all the focus on containers. And then comes AWS always innovating, always in the lead, and AWS saying, "Hey, you know what? "Actually, we need to go serverless. "We need to forget about the infrastructure. "What people want is really deploy applications "without worrying about the infrastructure. "They want things that are going to auto scale. "They want to pay very little, even pay per function call "and not pay when your VM is up." So AWS really pushed this mindset of serverless, but then what was the meaning in that realm of containers, and that's when I started Kubeless and I said, "You know what, if you would need to build function "as a service, you should build it on Kubernetes, "and use Kubernetes as a platform." And from there we started started seeing this fight, a little bit, between people, saying "Hey, forget containers, go serverless." So in TriggerMesh, we're not really taking that stance. We really see on-premises has, it's always going to be here, we have worked clouds on-premises, we have our own data centers but definitely there is more and more cloud usage, and when you start using the cloud you don't want to care about the infrastructure in the cloud, right. So, you want as much serverless as possible in the cloud, but you know you have to deal with your on-premises, data bases and some work loads and so on. So you have to be a pragmatic and you have to pick the best of both worlds and keep moving to modernize your stack and your IT in general. >> Excellent, alright so Mark, at the CNCF I'd seen the Knative project come out and it was talking about how we can connect containers and serverless, and one of the questions I'd been asking is "Well look, there are a lot "of open source projects for serverless." But when I talk to the community, when I talk to users, you say serverless, I think AWS. Sebastien was just talking about, so, I was sitting at the KubeCon shows and talking to the vendors and a lot of really big vendors were working on Knative, Oracle, IBM, RedHat and others and I said if this doesn't connect with AWS first and Azure second, I don't understand what we're doing. Yes, there's probably a place for on-premises but that was when, I think you and I had a conversation, we'd been looking at this space, so how did the ideas that Sebastien talked about turn into an initiative and a company of TriggerMesh. >> Well, early on we latched onto the Knative announcement that Google made. Google had given Sebastien some insight into where they were going with serverless, and the Knative project before it launched. And then they actually quoted him in the release which started interest in our company which was the only company in name at that point. But we really didn't know where Knative and Kubernetes together were going and the serverless movement, but we thought at first that there would need to be management capabilities to do lifecycle management around serverless functions, but what we realized, or Sebastien realized, early on was that it's not so much the management of serverless, because the whole idea of serverless is to abstract away all of the severs and architecture so that all you're really dealing with is the run time. So the problem that we saw early on was not managing but actually integrating applications across serverless framework, so the name TriggerMesh, that came from the idea that you trigger serverless functions and that you would mesh architectures whether they be legacy applications or they be file services or other serverless clouds across the fabric of the internet. So that's Triggermesh and that's really where we're going and we see that there's a couple of proof points in our industry for that already and people having the desire to do that. >> All right excellent, so that integration that you're talking about. Help Sebastien explain, there's some news I believe its the EveryBridge Cloud Native Integration Platform that's just announced. Help us understand what that is and what should we be kind of comparing it to other solutions in the industry today. >> Yeah so, you know we are very happy about the EveryBridge announcement and it's really, we're getting beta, we are doing a beta release of EveryBridge available in our SaaS cloud, the Triggermesh.io and really to first piggy back on what Mark was saying, is that a lot of people still believe serverless is just functions, right. And for us serverless is much more than this. Serverless is about building event driven applications. We see it with AWS, with things like they are doing with EventBridge, for example, but we really believe in this mindset. What we are trying to do is to help people build applications, build cloud native applications, that fundamentally are event driven and they are linking cloud services in the public cloud providers and also on-premises work load, right. So EveryBridge allows people to do this, to build those cloud native apps as basic event flows that connect event sources wherever they are, could be events that are on-prem from an eCommerce application, ERP application, could be events that are circulating through a Kafka infrastructure on-prem, and people can connect those event sources with what we call targets. So those targets could be on-premises, they would be OpenShift work loads for example or they could be in the cloud at AWS lambda functions, Google cloud run, or even dedicated SaaS like Twilio, SendGrid, and so on, so that's when we saw really over the last 18 to almost two years now, is that serverless is more of an integration problem, more like traditional IPaaS that we've seen, right. So basically we are building a new IPaaS solution at the frontier of serverless offerings from the public clouds, traditional messaging systems like Kafka, Remittent, Q and so on, plus the, I would say, the old IPaaS solution and we're doing all of this backed by Kubernetes and Knative. >> Excellent, so Mark I heard Sebastien talking about, he mentioned OpenShift, talked about Google, speak a little bit to really the ecosystems, the market places that TriggerMesh fits into. What are the use cases that you are seeing customers using. >> Yeah, I think a couple of the, to the dive into the on-prem triggers we have capabilities to trigger oracle database changes that could actually pick off cloud based ETL transactions. We're seeing that users are going through digital transformation and really to be more specific given the global climate right now, it's remote work, and the idea of lifting and shifting all of your infrastructure into the cloud is pretty daunting and long ask, but if you can front end those systems with new cloud native architecture and you have a way to create those event flows to tie in your existing systems to new portals for your employees to get their work done, automate workflows to provision new systems, like Zoom for example, and other conferencing systems, you can use the serverless front ends and work flows that actually integrate with all of your existing infrastructure and give you a way to extend your life of your applications and modernize them. >> Yeah, the long pole on attending modernization is that application. Sebastien maybe I'd come to you on this is, I think about iPaaS, when you look at that space they talk about all the integration that they need to work on, usually there are certifications involved, you mentioned Oracle databases, these are things that we need to go in there with a engineering effort and make sure that it is tested and certified by the ISV out there. Does containerization, Kubernetes, and serverless, does this change it at all, does this make it easier to move along these environments? I guess the question is for the enterprise, normally this change is rather slow. Mark was just alluding to the fact that we need to do some of these things faster, to try to react from what's happening in the world. >> Yeah, I think that's the entire premise of containers. It's speeding up the software life cycle and the speed at which we can deliver new features, for all our applications and so on. So, a big part of the job, when Docker started and then Kubernetes has been, if you adopt that type of infrastructure and that type of artifact, containers, you're going to speed up your software management and software delivery. So now what happens is that you have slow moving pieces, maybe pieces that you've had in your data center for 10, 20 years, for quite a while, and then you have these extremely fast moving environment, which is containerized and running Kubernetes plus the cloud. That's even, we could say even faster moving, and you can, that's definitely the challenge, that's where we see the value and that's where we see the struggle, is that you have all those big companies that have those slow moving pieces Oracle DB, IBM MQ, and so on and they need to make those pieces relevant in a fast moving containerized world and in a cloud native world, right. So how do you bridge that gap? Well that's what we do, we provide bridges. We provide integration bridges with every bridge, there you go. So we connect the event sources from Oracle DB and MQ and we bring that to a more fast moving cloud native environment, whether it's managed Kubernetes on Google GKE or whether its still on-prem in OpenShift. >> Mark, want to get your view point, just being a start up in today's global environment, obviously, you look at the cloud data space, many of the companies are distributed. We're talking to Sebastien from over in Europe, you're down in North Carolina, but give us your view point as a startup. How is the current economic environment impacting you, impacting your partners, impacting your customers. >> So, our partners and customers are probably moving more slowly than we do as a startup because they had physical brick and mortar offices and now they are coming into our world. We're 100% virtual, we're in 3 continents across over 12 time zones. That kind of work versus where they're at, I think everybody is consciously moving ahead, the one thing that I will say is that their interest in being more like the startups that are virtual, don't have brick and mortar, are really good at online collaboration. They look at us for sort of inspiration on how they are going to do business going forward or at least for the foreseeable future. So, overall I think that, not only are we teaching them about cloud native technologies but we're just teaching them about distributed work forces in a quarantined world. >> Absolutely, and I think those are some of the key learnings that you look at that are diversity consistent in the cloud native space. Want to give you both a final word and-- >> And Stu if I just add something. Mark and I have been working from home for quite a while, eight to 10 years, and definitely right now this is not the normal working from home, right, we all have, most of us have kids at home 24/7. The cognitive load in the news is huge, this is not the normal environment. So we are extremely careful, we help each other definitely internally in the team, you know, India, Vietnam, Germany, Spain, U.S. We have to be extremely careful that everybody is not falling down and putting too much on the nerves and their spirits right, so not a normal environment and even though we know how to do it we have to be careful. >> Yeah Sebastien, I'm so glad you brought that up 'cause this is not just a, how do we move to a distributed system. There is the rest of the impact on that. All right so lets give you both final words. Hopefully, we absolutely will be gathering together even if we are remote for the KubeCon event for Europe, other event later on this year, but Sebastien let's start with you, final take aways. >> Yeah, so we are very excited to build a startup. It's fast moving, its an exciting industry and really seeing the beta release of EveryBridge for us. We are trying to bring the future of event driven application to everybody, event sources to targets for everyone, not just on AWS and taking all of the strength of Kubernetes with us. It's going to be a familiar system for all Kubernetes lovers. >> Great, and Mark. >> Well as we talked about today, we are very excited about the EveryBridge announcement, and if you are interested in a cloud native, serverless, digital transformation we think we have great tools for you. But on a more personal and global note, I think Sebastien hit something that's really important, it's that even though we are not all together it's really important to check in. Even these virtual sessions have been, it's nice to interact with your colleagues and friends in the industry but be kind to each other and don't just take it for granted. that everything is good at the other end of the wire so reach out to each other and we'll all get through this together. >> Well Mark and Sebastien, thank you so much for joining us. Absolutely the personal pieces as well as TriggerMesh. You're helping to pull some of those technology communities together so congratulations on the progress and definitely look forward to tracking where you go from here. >> Thanks Stu. >> Thanks a lot. >> We appreciate it. >> All right be sure to check out theCUBE.net, we will be covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe as it goes virtual as well as lots of others in the cloud developer space. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hey welcome back here writer jeff rick here with the cube we're in our Palo Alto studios you know kind of continuing our leadership coverage reaching out to the community for people that we've got in our community to get their take on you know how they're dealing with the Kovach crisis how they're helping to contribute back to the community to to bring their resources to bear and you know just some general good tips and tricks of getting through these kind of challenging times and we're really excited to have one of my favorite guests he's being used to come on all the time we haven't had them on for three years which I can't believe it sabi Mehta the CEO of true SATA founder to say to obby I checked the record I can't believe it's been three years since we last that down great to see you Jeff there's well first of all it's always a pleasure and I think the only person to blame for that is you Jeff well I will make sure that it doesn't happen again so in just a check-in how's things going with the family the company thank you for asking you know family is great we have I've got two young kids who have become video conferencing experts and they don't teach me the tricks for it which I'm sure is happening a lot of families around the world and the team is great we vent remote at this point almost almost two months ago down and can't complain I think their intellectual property business like you are so it's been a little easier for us to go remote compared to a lot of other businesses in the world and in America but no complaints it'll be very fortunate we are glad that we have a business and a company that can withstand the the economic uncertainty and the family's great I hope the same for the queue family I haven't seen Dave and John and it's good to see you again and I hope all of you guys are helped happy and healthy great I think in we're good so thank you for asking so let's jump into it you know one of the things that I've always loved about you is you know really your sense of culture and this kind of constant reinforcing of culture in your social media posts and the company blog post at true SATA you know celebrating your interns and and you really have a good pulse for that and you know I just I think we may even talked about it before about you know kind of the CEOs and leadership and and social media those that do and that and those that don't and you know I think it's it's probably from any kind of a risk reward trade-off you know I could say something group it versus what am I getting at it but really it's super important and in these times with the distributed workforce that the the importance and value of communicating and culture and touching your people frequently across a lot of different mediums and topic areas is is more important than ever before share with us kind of your strategy why did you figure this out early how have you you know kind of adjusted you know your method of keeping your team up and communicating absolutely like I guess I owe you guys a little bit of gratitude for it which is we launched our company and you know I'm showing a member on the cube it was a social media launch you know if you say that say it like that I think there are two or three things that are very important Jeff and you hit on all of them one is the emphasis on information sharing it becomes more important than times like these and we as as a society value the ability to share a positive conversation of positive perspective and a positive outlook more but since day zero at the seder we've had this philosophy that there are no secrets it is important to be open and transparent both inside and outside the company and that our legacy is going to be defined by what we do for the community and not just what we do for our shareholders and by its very nature the fact that you know I grew up in a different continent now live and call America now a different continent my home I guess I was it's very important for me to stay connected to my roots it is a good memory or reminder that the world is very interconnected unfortunately the pandemic is the is the best or worst example of it in a really weird way but I think it's also a very important point Jeff that I believe we learned early and I hope coming out from this is something that we don't lose the point you made about kindness social media and social networking has a massively in my opinion massively positive binding force for the world at the same time there were certain business models it tried to capitalize on the negative aspects of it you know whether they are the the commercialized versions of slam books or not so nice business models that capitalize on the ability for people to complain I hope that people society and us humans coming out of it learn from people like yourself or you know the small voice that I have on social media or the messages we share and we are kinda in what we do online because the ability to have networks that are viral and can propagate or self propagate is a very positive unifying force and I hope out of this pandemic we all realize the positive nature's of it more than the negative nature's of it because unfortunately as you know that our business models built on the negative forces of social media and I really really hope they're coming out of this are positive voices drown out the negative voices that's great point and and it's a great I want to highlight a quote from one of your blog's again I think you're just a phenomenal communicator and in relationship to what's going on with kovat and and I quote we are fighting fear pain and anxiety as much as we are fighting the virus this is our humble attempt to we'll get into what you guys did to help the thousands of first responders clerks rockstars but I just really want to stick with that kindness theme you know I used to or I still joke right that the greatest smile in technology today is our G from signal FX the guys are gonna throw up a picture of him he's a great guy he looks like everybody's favorite I love that guy but therefore signal effects and actually it's funny signal FX also launched on the cube at big data a big data show I used to say the greatest smile intact is avi Mehta I mean how can I go wrong and and what I when I reached out to you I I do I consciously thought what what more important time do we have than to see people like you with a big smile with the great positive attitude focusing on on the positives and and I just think it's so important and it segues nicely into what we used to talk about it the strata shows and the big data shows all the time everyone wanted to talk about Hadoop and big data you always stress is never about the technology it's about the application of the technology and you focus your company on that very where that laser focus from day one now it's so great to see is we think you know the bad news about kovat a lot of bad news but one of the good news is is you know there's never been as much technology compute horsepower big data analytics smart people like yourself to bring a whole different set of tools to the battle than just building Liberty ships or building playing planes or tanks so you guys have a very aggressive thing that you're doing tell us a little bit about is the kovat active transmission the coat if you will tell us about what that is how did it come to be and what are you hoping to accomplish of course so first of all you're too kind you know thank you so much I think you also were the first people to give me a hard time about my new or Twitter picture I put on and he said what are you doing RV you know you have a good smile come on give me the smile die so thank you you're very kind Jeff I think as I as we as you know and I know I think you've a lot to be thankful for in life and there's no reason why we should not smile no matter what the circumstance we have so much to be thankful for and also I am remiss happy Earth Day you know I'm rocking my green for Earth Day as well as Ramadan Kareem today is the first day of Ramadan and you know I I wish everybody in the world Ramadan Kareem and on that friend right on that trend of how does do we as a community come together when faced with crisis so Court was a very simple thing you know it's I'm thank you for recognizing the hard work of the team that led it it was an idea I came up with it you know in the shower I'm like there are two kinds of people or to your you can we have we as humans have a choice when history is being made which I do believe I do believe history is being made right whether you look at it economically and a economic shock and that we have not felt as humanity since the depression so you look at it socially and again something we haven't seen sin the Spanish blue history is being made in in these times and I think we as humans have a choice we can either be witnesses to it or play our part in helping shape it and coat was our humble tiny attempt to when we look back when history was being made we chose to not just sit on the sidelines but be a part of trying to be part of the solution so all riddled with code was take a small idea I had team gets the entire credit read they ran with it and the idea was there was a lot of data being open sourced around co-ed a lot of work being done around reporting what is happening but nothing was being done around reporting or thinking through using the data to predict what could happen with it and that was code with code we try to make the first code wonder oh that came out almost two weeks ago now when you first contacted us was predicting the spread and the idea around breaking the spread wasn't just saying here is the number of cases a number of deaths and know what to be very off we wanted to provide like you know how firefighters do can we predict where it may go to next at a county by county level so we could create a little bit of a firewall to help it from stop you know have the spread of it to be slower in no ways are we claiming that if you did port you can stop it but if he could create firewalls around it and distribute tests not just in areas and cities and counties where it is you know spiking but look at the areas and counties where it's about to go to so we use a inner inner in-house Network algorithm we call that Orion and we were able to start predicting where the virus is gonna go to we also then quickly realize that this could be an interesting where an extra you know arrow and the quiver in our fight we should also think about where are there green shoots around where can recovery be be helped so before you know the the president email announced this it was surrender serendipitous before the the president came and said I want to start finding the green shoes to open the country we then did quote $2 which we announced a week ago with the green shoots around a true sailor recovery index and the recovery index is looking at its car like a meta algorithm we're looking at the rates of change of the rates of change so if you're seeing the change of the rates of change you know the meta part we're declining we're saying there are early shoots that we if as we plan to reopen our economy in our country these are the counties to look at first that was the second attempt of code and the third attempt we have done is we calling it the odd are we there yet index it got announced yesterday and now - you're the first public announcement of it and the are we there yet index is using the government's definition of the phase 1 phase 2 phase 3 and we are making a prediction on where which are the counties that are ready to be open up and there's good news everywhere in the country but we we are predicting there are 73 different counties that ask for the government's definition of ready to open are ready to open that's all you know we were able to launch the app in five days it is free for all first responders all hospital chains all not-for-profit organizations trying to help the country through this pandemic and poor profit operations who want to use the data to get tests out to get antibodies out and to get you know the clinical trials out so we have made a commitment that we will not charge for code through - for any of those organizations to have the country open are very very small attempt to add another dimension to the fight you know it's data its analytics I'm not a first responder this makes me sleep well at night that I'm at least we're trying to help you know right well just for the true heroes right the true heroes this is our our humble attempt to help them and recognize that their effort should not go to its hobby that that's great because you know there is data and there is analytics and there is you know algorithms and the things that we've developed to help people you know pick they're better next purchase at Amazon or where they gonna watch next on Netflix and it's such a great application no it's funny I just finished a book called ghost Bob and is a story of the cholera epidemic in London in like 1850 something or other about four but what's really interesting at that point in time is they didn't know about waterborne diseases they thought everything kind of went through the air and and it was really a couple of individuals in using data in a new and more importantly mapping different types of datasets on top of it and now this is it's as this map that were they basically figured out where the the pump was that was polluting everybody but it was a great story and you know kind of changing the narrative by using data in a new novel and creative way to get to an answer that they couldn't and you know they're there's so much data out there but then they're so short a date I'm just curious from a data science point of view you know um you know there there aren't enough tests for you know antibodies who's got it there aren't enough tests for just are you sick and then you know we're slowly getting the data on the desk which is changing all the time you know recently announced that the first Bay Area deaths were actually a month were they before they thought they were so as you look at what you're trying to accomplish what are some of the great datasets out there and how are you working around some of the the lack of data in things like you know test results are you kind of organizing pulling that together what would you like to see more of that's why I like talking to you so I missed you you are these good questions of me excellent point I think there are three things I would like to highlight number one it doesn't take your point that you made with the with the plethora of technical advances and this S curve shift that these first spoke at the cube almost eleven years ago to the date now or ten years ago just the idea of you know population level or modeling that cluster computing is finally democratized so everybody can run complicated tests and a unique segment or one and this is the beauty of what we should be doing in the pandemic I'm coming I'm coming I'm quite surprised actually and given the fact we've had this S curve shift where the world calls a combination of cloud computing so on-demand IO and technical resources for processing data and then the on-demand ability to store and run algorithms at massive scale we haven't really combined our forces to predict more you know that the point you made about the the the waterborne pandemic in the eighteen eighteen hundreds we have an ability as humanity right now to actually see history play out rather than write a book about it you know it has a past tense and it's important to do are as follows number one luckily for you and I the cost of computing an algorithm to predict is manageable so I am surprised why the large cloud players haven't come out and said you know what anybody who wants to distribute anything around predictions lay to the pandemic should get cloud resources for free I we are running quote on all three cloud platforms and I'm paying for all of it right that doesn't really make sense but I'm surprised that they haven't really you know joined the debate or contribute to it and said in a way to say let's make compute free for anybody who would like to add a new dimension to our fight against the pandemic number one but the good news is it's available number two there is luckily for us an open data movement you know that was started on the Obama administration and hasn't stopped because you can't stop open movements allows people companies like ours to go leverage know whether it's John Hancock Carnegie Mellon or the new data coming out of you know California universities a lot of those people are opening up the data not every single piece is at the level we would like to see you know it's not zip plus 4 is mostly county level it's available the third innovation is what we have done with code but not it's not an innovation for the world right which is the give get model so we have said we will curate everything is available lie and boo cost anybody is used but they're for purposes and computations you want to enrich it every organization who gives code data will get more out of it so we have enabled a data exchange keep our far-off purple form and the open up the rail exchange that my clients use but you know we've opened up our data exchange part of our software platform and we have open source for this particular case a give get model but the more you give to it the more you get out of there and our first installations this was the first week that we have users of the platform you know the state of Nevada is using it there are no our state in North Carolina is using it already and we're trying to see the first asks for the gift get model to be used but that's the three ways you're trying to address the that's great and and and and so important you know in this again when this whole thing started I couldn't help but think of the Ford plant making airplanes and and Keiser making Liberty ships in in World War two but you know now this is a different battle but we have different tools and to your point luckily we have a lot of the things in place right and we have mobile phones and you know we can do zoom and well you know we can we can talk as we're talking now so I want to shift gears a little bit and just talk about digital transformation right we've been talking about this for ad nauseam and then and then suddenly right there's this light switch moment for people got to go home and work and people got to communicate via via online tools and you know kind of this talk and this slow movement of getting people to work from home kind of a little bit and digital transformation a little bit and data-driven decision making a little bit but now it's a light switch moment and you guys are involved in some really critical industries like healthcare like financial services when you kind of look at this not from a you know kind of business opportunity peer but really more of an opportunity for people to get over the hump and stop you can't push back anymore you have to jump in what are you kind of seeing in the marketplace Howard you know some of your customers dealing with this good bad and ugly there are two towers to start my response to you with using two of my favorite sayings that you know come to mind as we started the pandemic one is you know someone very smart said and I don't know who's been attributed to but a crisis is a terrible thing to waste so I do believe this move to restoring the world back to a natural state where there's not much fossil fuels being burnt and humans are not careful about their footprint but even if it's forced is letting us enjoy the earth in its glory which is interesting and I hope you don't waste an opportunity number one number two Warren Buffett came out and said that it's only when the tide goes out you realize who's swimming naked and this is a culmination of both those phenomenal phrases you know which is one this is the moment I do believe this is something that is deep both in the ability for us to realize the virtuosity of humanity as a society as social species as well as a reality check on what a business model looks like visa vie a presentation that you can put some fancy words on even what has been an 11-year boom cycle and blitzscale your way to disaster you know I have said publicly that this the peak of the cycle was when mr. Hoffman mr. Reid Hoffman wrote the book bit scaling so we should give him a lot of credit for calling the peak in the cycle so what we are seeing is a kind of coming together of those two of those two big trends crises is going to force industry as you've heard me say many for many years now do not just modernize what we have seen happen chef in the last few years or decades is modernization not transformation and they are different is the big difference as you know transformation is taking a business model pulling it apart understanding the economics that drive it and then not even reassembling it recreating how you can either recapture that value or recreate that value completely differently or by the way blow up the value create even more value that hasn't happened yet digital transformation you know data and analytics AI cloud have been modernizing trends for the last ten years not transformative trends in fact I've also gone and said publicly that today the very definition of technology transformation is run a sequel engine in the cloud and you get a big check off as a technology organization saying I'm good I've transformed how I look at data analytics I'm doing what I was doing on Prem in the cloud there's still sequel in the cloud you know there's a big a very successful company it has made a businessman out of it you don't need to talk about the company today but I think this becomes that moment where those business models truly truly get a chance to transform number one number two I think there's going to be less on the industry side on the new company side I think the the error of anointing winners by saying grow at all cost economics don't matter is fundamentally over I believe that the peak of that was the book let's called blitzscaling you know the markets always follow the peaks you know little later but you and I in our lifetimes will see the return to fundamentals fundamentals as you know never go out of fashion Jeff whether it's good conversations whether it's human values or its economic models if you do not have a par to being a profitable contributing member of society whether that is running a good balance sheet individually and not driven by debt or running a good balance sheet as a company you know we call it financial jurisprudence financial jurisprudence never goes out of fashion and the fact that even men we became the mythical animal which is not the point that we became a unicorn we were a profitable company three years ago and two years ago and four years ago and today and will end this year as a profitable company I think it's a very very nice moment for the world to realize that within the realm of digital transformation even the new companies that can leverage and push that trend forward can build profitable business models from it and if you don't it doesn't matter if you have a billion users as my economic professor told me selling a watermelon that you buy for a dollar or fifty cents even if you sell that a billion times you cannot make it up in volume I think those are two things that will fundamentally change the trend from modernization the transformation it is coming and this will be the moment when we look back and when you write a book about it that people say you know what now Jeff called it and now and the cry and the pandemic is what drove the economic jurisprudence as much as the social jurisprudence obvious on so many things here we can we're gonna be we're gonna go Joe Rogan we're gonna be here for four hours so hopefully hopefully you're in a comfortable chair but uh-huh but I don't I don't sit anymore I love standing on a DD the stand-up desk but I do the start of my version of your watermelon story was you know I dad a couple of you know kind of high-growth spend a lot of money raised a lot of money startups back in the day and I just know finally we were working so hard I'm Michael why don't we just go up to the street and sell dollars for 90 cents with a card table and a comfy chair maybe some iced tea and we'll drive revenue like there's nobody's business and lose less money than we're losing now not have to work so hard I mean it's so interesting I think you said everyone's kind of Punt you know kind of this pump the brakes moment as well growth at the ethic at the cost of everything else right there used to be a great concept called triple-line accounting right which is not just shareholder value to this to the sacrifice of everything else but also your customers and your employees and-and-and your community and being a good steward and a good participant in what's going on and I think that a lot of that got lost another you know to your point about pumping the brakes and the in the environment I mean we've been kind of entertaining on the oil side watching an unprecedented supply shock followed literally within days by an unprecedented demand shock but but the fact now that when everyone's not driving to work at 9:00 in the morning we actually have a lot more infrastructure than we thought and and you know kind of goes back to the old mob capacity planning issue but why are all these technology workers driving to work every morning at nine o'clock it means one thing if you're a service provider or you got to go work at a restaurant or you're you're carrying a truck full of tools but for people that just go sit on a laptop all day makes absolutely no sense and and I'd love your point that people are now you know seeing things a little bit slowed down you know that you can hear birds chirp you're not just stuck in traffic and into your point on the digital transformation right I mean there's been revolution and evolution and revolution people get killed and you know the fact that digital is not the same as physical but it's different had Ben Nelson on talking about the changes in education he had a great quote I've been using it for weeks now right that a car is not a is not a mechanical horse right it's really an opportunity to rethink the you know rethink the objective and design a new solution so it is a really historical moment I think it is it's real interesting that we're all going through it together as well right it's not like there quake in 89 or I was in Mount st. Helens and that blew up in in 1980 where you had kind of a population that was involved in the event now it's a global thing where were you in March 20 20 and we've all gone through this indeed together so hopefully it is a little bit of a more of a unifying factor in kind of the final thought since we're referencing great books and authors and quotes right as you've all know Harare and sapiens talked about what is culture right cultures is basically it's it's a narrative that we all have bought into it I find it so ironic that in the year 2020 that we always joke is 20/20 hindsight we quickly found out that everything we thought was suddenly wasn't and the fact that the global narrative changed literally within days you know really a lot of spearhead is right here in Santa Clara County with with dr. Sarah Cody shutting down groups of more than 150 people which is about four days before they went to the full shutdown it is a really interesting time but as you said you know if you're fortunate enough as we are to you know have a few bucks in the bank and have a business that can be digital which you can if you're in the sports business or the travel business the hotel business and restaurant business a lot of a lot of a lot of not not good stuff happening there but for those of us that can it is an opportunity to do this nice you know kind of a reset and use the powers that we've developed for recommendation engines for really a much more power but good for good and you're doing a lot more stuff too right with banking and in in healthcare telemedicine is one of my favorite things right we've been talking about telemedicine and electronic medicine for now well guess what now you have to cuz the hospitals are over are overflowing Jeff to your point three stories and you know then at some point I know you have you I will let you go you can let me go I can talk to you for four hours I can talk to you for but days my friend you know the three stories that there have been very relevant to me through this crisis I know one is first I think I guess in a way all are personal but the first one you know that I always like to remind people on there were business models built around allowing people to complain online and then using that as almost like a a stick to find a way to commercialize it and I look at that all of our friends I'm sure you have friends have lots of friend the restaurant is big and how much they are struggling right they are honest working the hardest thing to do in life as I've been told and I've witnessed through my friends is to run a restaurant the hours the effort you put into it making sure that what you produce this is not just edible but it's good quality is enjoyed by people is sanitary is the hard thing to do and there was yet there were all of these people you know who would not find in their heart and their minds for two seconds to go post a review if something wasn't right and be brutal in those reviews and if they were the same people were to look back now and think about how they assort the same souls then anything to be supportive for our restaurant workers you know it's easy to go and slam them online but this is our chance to let a part of the industry that we all depend on food right critical to humanity's success what have we done to support them as easy as it was for us to complain about them what have we done to support them and I truly hope and I believe they're coming out of it those business models don't work anymore and before we are ready to go on and online on our phones and complain about well it took time for the bread to come to my table we think twice how hard are they working right number one that's my first story I really hope you do tell me about that my second story is to your have you chained to baby with Mark my kids I'm sure as your kids get up every morning get dressed and launch you know their online version of a classroom do you think when they enter the workforce or when they go to college you and me are going to try and convince them to get in a oil burning combustion engine but by the way can't have current crash and breakdown and impact your health impact the environment and show up to work and they'll say what do you talk about are you talking about I can be effective I can learn virtually why can't I contribute virtually so I think there'll be a generation of the next class of you know contribute to society who are now raised to live in an environment where the choice of making sure we preserve the planet and yet contribute towards the growth of it is no longer a binary choice both can be done so I completely agree with you we have fundamentally changed how our kids when they grew up will go to work and contribute right my third story is the thing you said about how many industries are suffering we have clients you know in the we have health care customers we have banking customers you know we have whoever paying the bills like we are are doing everything they can to do right by society and then we have customers in the industry of travel hospitality and one of my most humbling moments Jeff there's one of the no sea level executives sent us an email early in this in this crisis and said this is a moment where a strong David can help AV Goliath and just reading that email had me very emotional because they're not very many moments that we get as corporations as businesses where we can be there for our customers when they ask us to be their father and if we as companies and help our customers our clients who area today are flying people are feeding people are taking care of their health and they're well if V in this moment and be there for them we we don't forget those moments you know those as humans have long-term memories right that was one of the kindest gentlest reminders to me that what was more important to me my co-founder Richard you know my leadership team every single person at Reseda that have tried very hard to build automations because as an automation company to automate complex human process so we can make humans do higher order activities in the moment when our customers asked us to contribute and be there for them I said yes they said yes you said yes and I hope I hope people don't forget that that unicorns aren't important there are mythical animals there's nothing all about profits there's nothing mythical about fortress balance sheet and there's nothing mythical about a strong business model that is built for sustainable growth not good at all cost and those are my three stories that you know bring me a lot of lot of calm in this tremendous moment of strife and and in the piece that wraps up all those is ultimately it's about relationships right people don't do business I mean companies don't do business with companies people do business with people and it's those relationships and and in strong relationships through the bad times which really set us up for when things start to come back I me as always it's I'm not gonna let it be three years to the next time I hear me pounding on your door great to catch up you know love to love to watch really your your culture building and your community engagement good luck I mean great success on the company but really that's one thing I think you really do a phenomenal job of just keeping this positive drumbeat you always have you always will and really appreciate you taking some time on a Friday to sit down with us well first of all thank you I wish I could tell you I just up to you but we celebrate formal Fridays that to Seder and that's what this is all so I want to end on a good on a positive bit of news I was gonna give you a demo of it but if you want to go to our website and look at what everything we're doing we have a survival kit around a data survival kit around kovat how am I using buzzwords you know a is let's not use that buzzword right now but in your in your lovely state but on my favorite places on the planet when we ran the algorithm on who is ready as per the government definition of opening up we have five counties that are ready to be open you know between Santa Clara to LA Sacramento Kern and San Francisco the metrics today the data today with our algorithm there are meta algorithm is saying that those five counties those five regions look like I've done a lot of positive activities if the country was to open under all the right circumstances those five look you know the first as we were men at on cream happy Earth Day a pleasure to see you so good to know your family is doing well and I hope we see we talk to each other soon thanks AVI great conversation with avi Mehta terrific guy thanks for watching everybody stay safe have a good weekend Jeff Rick checking out from the cube [Music]

one thing i'd point out is well flashblade one of our products is scale out flasharray our first product is not scale out um you know scale out isn't a capability for a customer it's an architecture in how you build the product uh you know when i scale out i have more complicated software i have more components more components lead to more failures right if i have a piece of memory and it's going to fail at a certain annual failure rate and i have 10 pieces of memory i'm going to fail at 10 times that same rate so scale out introduces complexity it introduces more components and then you have to say what do you get from it so if our customers needed a lot more performance than we're delivering if they needed a lot more scale than we're delivering in the flash array product we then react to that and go build scale out where the flash array sells we don't see that as a major market need it's more of a niche where flashblade sells then there is much more of a need for that and that's why flashblade would scale out from day one the tam expansion really is following where solid state takes us you know we've gone from um a world that was where believe it or not most computers still had mechanical systems operating them it's sort of like having a mechanical calculator rather than an electronic calculator right we had mechanical disks in our computers literally spinning rust right and it's only been in the last decade where a semiconductor you know where solid state has taken uh the place of that called flash right well as that continues to get less expensive we now can bring not only flash performance into disk economics but more importantly now we can finally have modern software that is driving the need for having greater flexibility with our data as data grows it now we say it has gravity that is it gets heavy it gets hard to manage hard hard to move uh between different environments and now a lot of infrastructure operators are spending much more time managing their data managing the storage systems for their data than they are managing anything else in the data center environment we want to eliminate all that we want to automate all of that you know on the theme of decades two decades ago every application had its own individual communication stack there were dozens of different protocols and a dozen different networks in every company one decade ago ago every application had its own um custom hardware stack and and custom operating systems stack well today there's one network it's called the internet uh today everything every application every server is virtualized allowing mobility and yet storage is still static we we want this decade a bit to be about making storage and data dynamic and really responsive to the needs of the application environment sure so it's a it's a deep relationship that's only getting deeper and it's really at all levels it starts with the executive alignment you think about charlie giancarlo from cisco we've got a lot of just common cross-pollination there but now it extends certainly the field level tom and i are doing a lot of planning together in terms of having our teams go after common use cases but now it extends to engineering as well we had a ucs director plug-in that we've had for some time now uh but but pure is now first in terms of having integration into cisco intersight so we are first and only to have storage integration at the cisco intersight so that cisco and pure customers can really manage their uh environment from from one console so a lot of simplicity uh the single sas interface for managing everything tom why pure why first with that well you know nathan he articulated it well you can look at the executive level we talked about charlie but even you know all of our cisco executives but also to the engineering this the we started really strong uh with the field sales teams but even if you look at the little things that our customers notice but a lot of people may not like the internal development of validated design guides use cases we churn them out um with pure as uh you know our top ecosystem partner more than anybody and there's a lot of work being done our customers see that and it's really helped drive you know our go to market together it's really a very strong strategy and what is the type of data that's going to be the best fit for it there are a lot of common patterns for consumption in a.i uh speech recognition image recognition places where you have a lot of unstructured data or it's unstructured to a computer it's not unstructured to you when you look at a picture you see a lot of things in it that a computer can't see right because you recognize what the patterns are and the whole point about ai is it's going to help us get structure out of these unstructured data sets so the computer can recognize more things you know the speech and emotions that that we as humans just take for granted it's about having computers being able to process and respond to that in a way that they're not really capable of doing today absolutely absolutely yeah no i mean i think it's been a really exciting conference for us so far like you said a lot of payload coming out um you know as far as the building the bridge of the hybrid cloud this has been you know we this has been i would say a long time coming right we've been working down this path for uh for a couple years we started by bringing some of the cloud-like capabilities that customers really wanted and were able to achieve into the cloud back into the data center right so you saw us do this in terms of making our on-prem products easier to manage easier to use easier to automate you know but what working with customers over the last couple of years you know we realized is that as the cloud hype kind of subsided and people were taking a more measured view of where the cloud fits into their strategies what tools it brings you know we realized that we could add value in the in the public cloud environment the same types of enterprise capabilities the same type of features rich data services uh feature sets things like that that we do on premise in the cloud and so what we're looking to achieve is actually quite simple all right we want to give customers the choice whether whether customers want to run on premise or in the cloud that's just a choice of we wanted to we wanted to make an environmental choice we don't want to we don't want to put customers in a position where they have to make that choice and feel trapped in one location or another because of lack of features lack of capabilities um you know or or economics and so the way that we do that is by building the same types of capabilities that we do on-prem in the cloud giving customers the freedom and flexibility to be agile sure well we're a two-year-old uh startup uh headquartered out of bellevue washington and we really focus on two primary uh businesses we have a blockchain business and we have an ai business uh in blockchain we are one of the largest blockchain cryptocurrency hosting companies in north america uh we've got uh you know facilities uh uh four facilities in north carolina south carolina georgia and kentucky and you know really the the business there is helping companies to be able to take advantage of blockchain and then position them for uh the future you know um and then on the ai side of our business uh really you know we we operate that in two ways one is we can also co-locate and host people uh just like we do on the blockchain side but primarily we're focused on uh creating a public cloud focused on gpu-centric computing and artificial intelligence and we're there to help you know really usher in the new age of ai how does pure actually take that word simple from a marketing concept into reality for your customers yeah you know i i think i think simple is um the most underappreciated but biggest differentiator that pure has um i was recalling for someone you talked to cause earlier today i had a conversation about three weeks into the existence of pure excuse me with cause and we were just debating i mean this is before we wrote any code at all about what would be pure's long-term differentiator and i was kind of like i will be you know the flash people or high performance or whatever he's like no no we're going to be simple we are going to deliver a culture that drives some plus into our products and that will be game changing and i thought he was a little crazy at the time um but he's absolutely turned out to be right and if you if you look over the years that started with just an appliance experience a tent card install you know just a really easy environment but that's manifested itself into every product we create and it's really hard to reverse engineer that you know it's an engineering discipline thing that you have to build in the dna of the company so how do you see the partnership with splunk just in terms of supporting that tam expansion the next 10 years so analytics particularly log analytics have really taken off for us in the last year as we put more focus on it um we want to double down on our investments as we go through the end of this year and in the next year with with a focus on splunk um as well as other alliances um we think we are in a unique position because the uh rollout of smart store right customers are always on a different scale in terms of when they want to adopt a new architecture right it is a significant uh decision that they have to make and so we believe between the combination of flash array for the hot tier and flashblade for the cold is a nice way for customers with classic splunk architecture to modernize their platform leverage the benefits of data reduction to drive down some of the cost leverage the benefits of flash to increase the rate at which they can ask questions and get answers is a nice stepping stone and when customers are ready because flashblade is one of the few storage platforms in the market that is scale out bandwidth optimized for both nfs and object they can go through a rolling non-disruptive upgrade to smart store have you know investment protection and and if they can't repurpose that flash rate they can use pure as a service to have the flash raise the hots here today and drop it back off to us when they're done

>>Live from Seattle, Washington. It's the cube covering Smartsheet engage 2019 brought to you by Smartsheet. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Smartsheet engaged here in Seattle, Washington. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, coasting alongside Jeff Frick. We are joined by Mark Mader. He is the CEO of Smartsheet. Thank you so much for coming on the show. So great job up there on the keynote a bit. We know this is the third annual conference, uh, 4,000 people from 39 different countries. The theme is achieved more and the theme is actually tied to a very special announcement you you've made today about the, about the achieved as one Alliance. So can you tell our viewers a little bit about that? >>Yeah. The cheapest one Alliance is really figuring out how to take the cultural changes that are in flight right now and marrying those with the people and the technology. And we think that it's important as things like concepts that are intimidating people, AI and ML worker replacement. It's like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. These are things where we actually think technology and people should work together as opposed to being a replacement for. And I think there's a lot of education that needs to take place. So we plan on doing is doing research through this Alliance and then publishing that work. Cause I think a huge part of this is educating the market and giving them confidence to take that step. It's a different way to treat people. We're in this weird spot where where there's super low unemployment and yet so many things are services and a lot of your assets walk out the door every single night. >>You hope they come back the next day. So you're trying to give them meaning. You're trying to do more than just kind of the core function of the business. He had a great hackathon, uh, yesterday for good. So it's a really challenging people, challenging time for employers to keep the workforce engaged and you're really trying to help them kind of move some of the roadblocks and made it easier for them to keep those folks engaged. It is Jeff. And what we're seeing is, and you see the studies come out where there's never been a higher percentage of people who feel disconnected from their work. And I don't think that's just giving them good tooling. They actually want to know who is being benefited ultimately, what's the endpoint benefit. And if they can somehow feel connected to something purposeful, that is a mechanism for feeling connected to work. So we want our team, we want our customers showing up to their offices every day or organizations feeling motivated. And I think absent that human dimension, absent knowing who you're helping, I think it makes it feel a bit hollow. So that's one of things about engagement brings this together and you see it firsthand. Very invigorating. >>So talk a little bit about the customers that you had up on the main stage telling their Smartsheet stories. And what are the ones that you find most inspiring and, and most sort of life affirming to you as the CEO of this company? >>Well, the thing that that never gets old for me, Rebecca, is when somebody felt something one day was completely unattainable and then they have that unlocked moment like Holy smokes. I pulled it off and it was even more exciting is when they pull that off with very few resources. They didn't have to go to it at every turn. They didn't have to mobilize on a big budget ask. They just got it done. So one of the real memorable moments from me this year was when I visited Syngenta out in North Carolina and I spoke with the head of health and safety and she said we mobilized on Smartsheet. We enabled all of our team members to submit issues, safety concerns they had. How do you simplify that process of taking a picture of a potential issue, getting into a queue, getting it responded to, they saw a 500% increase in the number of people who were saying, I think that could have use improvement. >>I think that could use improvement and a 65% faster resolution times. So she is convinced that people's lives are being materially impacted to the positive. Because of this. I mean, how can she not feel empowered? That is a pretty big, that's a pretty amazing feeling. So that's one that really stands out to me. In terms of the other customer stories that, you know, one of the things that also struck me was just how adrenaline pumping the main stage show was. Yeah. Talk a little bit about what it means to put up the customers who have these very compelling visually interesting stories from outdoor Clothiers to travel destinations, and also what it means for Smartsheet employees to be in the audience. Hearing these stories about what they're doing to help their customers. I think, I think we all want to wake up every day feeling like whatever we do matters, right? >>Whether that's individually or with your family or with your business, and when you see someone like an arc Terrix or a Spartan race or a Vulcan, which is helping do census on elephants, elephants, and preserving that species coupled right alongside it was Cisco that is protecting our networks, which are more complex than ever before and you're participating in that site. Okay. That can again back to that connectedness. Right. And I think, I think the diversity in who we serve also keeps it interesting. You never know who you're gonna serve next one day at Cisco, the next day it's agriculture, the next day it's saving elephants. That diversity keeps things fresh. >>Mark, one of the things that struck me in the keynote is is there was a story of, of this guy gets his going to fly around the world and England and plane in five days or eight days. Um, but on the, what are the test flights are a significant change. He was trying to fly to Y, there was an equipment failure and he had to divert and you know when you see the screen grabs and people working in Smartsheet, it looks super detailed. It's like a project plan and there's resources that are tied research utilization. But in this case they had to be able to flip on a dime. They had to be completely agile and I think she said that eight teams around the world, I presume where the stops are. That's a really interesting dichotomy of, of the tool that you guys are delivering to, to have the detail to be, you know, numbers focused and AI focused, but at the same time be real in the real world. Stuff doesn't always go as planned, be >>real and do it instantly. So if we have an issue with the plane, we're not going to host a summit to talk about with how to get back on track. We've got to do it now. So the thing that sets also need that example is you're talking about eight to 10 people across multiple continents who have to work right now. There is no mobilization. There is note, as I said, summit and I think being able to do meaningful things quickly, that is a fairly rare combination, right? Very often meaningful stuff is heavy, complex takes time. So again, I'm, I'm this, that constant pursuit of faster, more meaningful, more depth, more value, right? In this kind of cross silo collaboration. You, I mean that's a theme that comes up over and over again is that you need contributions from lots of people and lots of no formerly siloed departments as is maybe what they're going to be called in the future to get to resolution so that you can move forward. >>And I think the thing that we spoke to in one of the product announcements was we are so inundated with information and Rebecca, Mark, I needed faster, I need a faster yet again and saying, Holy Rebecca, I can't actually process it all. So one of the things we're trying to do is how do you also improve the context within P within which people see things? Right? So if you asked me question and I don't have to tap out to another application, I can actually see your question in the context of that work. And that's when I think we were one of the real big breakthroughs where we're releasing this, this engaged, >>I mean, when you think about the, the, the current status of, of work and you really, and you really see it, I mean, from, from where you sit, I mean, is it almost shockingly abysmal about how bad things can get at companies in terms of how many silos there are, how the, the number of communication breakdowns, uh, the way the communication breaks down because as you said, you could just be working on a different version for someone. >>Shockingly, business, because we've been doing this for years, it's like it's the norm base, the cost of doing business. So what our job is to, how do we get people to get that spark to elevate a Busick, Oh my goodness, there is a better way. And it takes a lot to change people's behavior. You can't just say, well, there's a better way they have to experience it. Right? So we're in that, in that pursuit of how do you get more people to clear that hurdle the first time? Because the norm is, it's hard. The norm is, is distributed. The norm is, I don't know what version. So that's who we're trying to unlock for folks. >>And you said in the keynote once they get that spark and then achievement becomes the new norm that that has its own momentum too. >>Yes, it's the, you know, Jeff does something amazing and I'm like I want in, it's like well Jeff doesn't have a monopoly on that and that is, that's the viral effect and it's not so much a vendor saying, Hey Jeff did something now you should be motivated. You should feel that way. Rebecca. And that's what we see at this conference. This is 4,000 people who weren't told to go to the conference. These are 4,000 people who want in. And that is a really special part of the conference for us. Shift gears a little bit on AI, artificial intelligence, machine learning. Cause we hear about >>it all the time and I think everyone now has kind of figured out that it's not, it's not going to be a company delivering AI and ML. It's really applied a I in ML within an application. When you guys look at the opportunities, especially with the data flow that you have and you know your SAS application, where do you see some of the short term wins and opportunities using AI to even better, you know, eliminate some of this redundant, painful work? >>I think part of it starts with educating people on the potential benefits of it. And then I'm an experiential learner. I think many people are. So instead of talking about the theory, demonstrate how it could help. So we've already started doing sings things like recommending to people certain things based on actions they take. It's also very important as a vendor we have made a commitment to being very clear that for more advanced types of AI, people need to opt in. So again, part of this, what's happening to my data, who's working at we that that's part of our platform, right? And when I look at the future, it's the first step I think is really how do you drive convenience improvement recommendation. How do you let someone take better advantage of the systems they're already using? And what people don't have to appreciate today is by exhibiting this behavior, by intaking information, structuring and reporting out this system. >>We'll observe a pattern and ultimately should they choose to opt in the system. We'll get to a point where we'll be able to make recommendations, recommendations and derive insights. But again, a lot of this is fairly theoretical. We're in the early innings of this, Jeff. People are just starting to figure out I can automate something. So you know, I think there's a much like people said 10 years ago, the future is now. The future is kind of showing up today and then the next phase is still a couple of years out. But it's a very exciting, it's a very exciting prospect. >>So those recommendations then can become best practices because I'd like to get it back to this, this achieve as one Alliance and sort of how you're going to take that research and educate the market and then use it to implement these new technologies and best practices of this is how we can get more done and achieve more together >>by showing examples of how AI and ML can contribute to someone's performance as opposed to you did these 10 things. The machine is taking over those 10 things like, well, what's my role in it? That's not a very exciting conversation to have. So I think by demonstrating how somebody's game can, in a sense, slow down. So if the machine can help me further inspect more deeply assess, have that next moment of insight that's contributing, not taking away. And again, we need to show examples as an industry that happening until we show it. It's sort of off or not. So I'm really excited about about helping our customers through that journey. >>Yeah, there's so much opportunity in the ed. The other one that comes up in a other times is unplanned downtime. Right. So a lot of talk always about unplanned downtime of machines, right? It's completely disruptive. You don't want to schedule maintenance, but no one really talks about unplanned downtime of people, not necessarily in the way of being sick, but being distracted by often mundane, often roads, often an anticipated task, I won't even call it work that suddenly get dumped into your lap that you have to take care of. And those really, I think huge opportunities to add some automation and get those things kind of off the plate. >>Yeah. You think about the breakthrough ideas you've had in your lives, does it happen when you're like feverously working waste? No. It's usually when there's a moment of just peace where you're able to process. That's when the breakthrough happens. So one of the things we talked about today was how also as leaders, we need to empower our teams to not just drive for more yield and throughput, take that extra benefit and actually look at the board, process the board and think about what we're going to do next. And I think, again, you need to exhibit, you need to give people the permission to work that way because we're all feeling this, this pressure to innovate. You gotta give people time to do it and do more with less too. I mean, yeah. Do you think it's realistic? Do you think leaders are going to be able to, to do that? And I think the leaders of successful companies will do that and role model that too because they can't also be worried about their own true pled as you said. Right? Right. Yeah. I mean, as Gabby, as Gabby, a reset at the end of her talk, you have to exhibit the behavior. You want others to practice. Right. So I think that was a wise, a wise statement. >>Well, I really loved the, uh, the outdoor clothing company who, you know, specifically said, we want our people out doing the things that our customers are doing, experiencing what they're experiencing and really baking that into the culture. Not just saying it, but get outside and go run around, uh, and, and do what we want our customers to do and what our customers do. Do very different approach. >>It is. It is. I think, again, back to back to us understanding what our customers are doing. This is equivalent to our super bowl every year, right? We get 4,000 these people coming in here and there is no substitute for that in the flesh interaction and that's again one of the reasons why it's everyone's such a positive engaged mood right now. So they're not only interacting with the Smartsheet folks, but they're interacting with each other and learned how each company uses Smartsheet. Yeah, I mean when you think that one half of all collaboration that takes place on our platform is cross company. It's not a surprise that people interact with one another. Here it is. It is happening. We have companies who interact with hundreds of brands outside of their own, so we serve as that cross connect for companies and that's the modern company. I don't know of a company that is completely insular, so if you can help promote that safely, that's a, that's a, that's a real advantage for a company. >>Yeah. Wrapping up. What do you, what do you think you're going to be the themes for next year's conference? What is, what are sort of what's on your plate? What are you thinking about? What are the big challenges that you're knowing on right now? Yeah, I think the, I think the continued shift from efficiency to effectiveness. People. I think most people are still measured on the output goal. How many units did I do, how many sales and and while that may serve you well in the quarter and the next quarter, it does not prepare you for years two and three so you have to be very committed to the investments today. That may not pay off in that six to 12 month window. You have to, and I think stories will come out as people are learning new ways to work of examples of here's what we did in 2019 which ended up being a home run in 2021 so it's back to effectiveness, effectiveness versus efficiency. That is going to be, I think one of the themes we speak to next year. Thanks Mark. A pleasure having you on the show. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. Stay tuned. Have more of the cubes live coverage of Smartsheet. Engage.

>>live from Seattle, Washington. It's the key nude covering smartsheet engaged 2019. Brought to you by smartsheet. >>Welcome back, everyone to the cubes Live coverage of smartsheet engaged here in Seattle, Washington. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight coasting alongside Jeff. Rick. We're joined by Mark Mater. He is the CEO of smartsheet. Thank you so much for coming, Warren. Thank you. So great job up there on the keynote way. No, this is the third annual conference of 4000 people from 39 different countries. The theme is achieved more, and the theme is actually tied to a very special announcement you made today about the about the achieve as one alliance. What can you tell our viewers a little bit about that? Yeah. The chief is >>one alliance is really figuring out how to take the cultural changes that Aaron flight right now and marrying those with the people in the technology. And we think that it's important as things like concepts that are intimidating people. Aye, aye. And ml worker replacement say whoa, whoa, whoa. These are things where we actually think technology and people should work together as opposed to being a replacement for and I think there's a lot of education that needs to take place. So we plan on doing is doing research through this alliance and then publishing that work is I think a huge part of this is educating the market and giving them confidence and take that step. It's a >>different way to treat people. We're in this weird spot where you know, the super low unemployment. And yet in that you know so many things. Air service is and a lot of your assets walk out the door every single night. You hope they come back the next day. So you're trying to give them meaning. You're trying to do more than just kind of the core function of the business. You had a great hackathon yesterday for good. So it's a really challenging, people challenging time for employers to keep the workforce engaged. And you're really trying to help them kind of move some of the roadblocks and may be easier for them to keep those folks and gay >>it is Jeff and what we're seeing is and you see the studies come out where there's never been a higher percentage of people who feel disconnected from their work, and I don't think that's just giving them good tooling. They actually want to know who is being benefited. Ultimately, what's the endpoint benefit? And if they can somehow feel connected to something purposeful, that is a mechanism for feeling connected to work. So we want our team. We want our customers showing up to their offices, everyday organizations feeling motivated. And I think absent that human dimension absent knowing who you're helping, I think makes it feel a bit hollow. That's one of these about engaging Brings this together. You see it firsthand, very invigorating. >>Talk a little bit about the customers that you had upon the main stage, telling their smartsheet stories and one of the ones that you find most inspiring and and most sort of life affirming to you as the CEO of this company. >>Well, the thing that that never gets old for me, Rebecca, is when somebody felt something one day was completely unattainable. And then they have that unlocked moment like Holy smokes. I pulled it off, and what's even more exciting when they pull that off with very few resource is they didn't have to go to I t. At every turn. They didn't have to mobilize on a big budget ass. They just got it done. So one of the real memorable moments from me this year was when I visited Syngenta out in North Carolina and I spoke with a head of health and safety and she said we mobilized on Smarty. We enabled all of our team members to submit issues safety concerns they had. How do you simplify the process of taking a picture of a potential issue getting into a queue getting it responded to? They saw a 500% increase in the number of people who are saying, I think that you could use improvement. I think that could use improvement. And it's 65% faster resolution time. So she is convinced that people's lives are being materially impacted to the positive. Because of this, I mean, how can she not feel empowered that it's a pretty big? That's a pretty amazing feeling, so that's one that really stands out to me >>in terms of the other customer stories. One of the things that also struck me was just how adrenaline pumping the main stage show talk a little bit about what it means to put up the customers who have these very compelling, visually interesting stories, from outdoor clothier Sze to travel destinations, and also what it means for smartsheet employees to be in the audience hearing these stories about what they're doing to help their customers. I >>think I think we all want to wake up every day feeling like whatever we do matters right, whether that's individually or with your family or with your business. And when you see someone like an Arc Terex or a Spartan race, or a Vulcan, which is helping do census on elephants, elephants and preserving that species coupled right alongside it with Cisco that is protecting our networks, which are more complex than ever before on your participating in that site. Okay, that can again back to that connectedness, right? Andi, I think I think diversity and who we serve also keeps it interesting. You never know who you're going to serve next. One day at Cisco the next day, it's agriculture. The next day it's saving elephants. That diversity keeps things fresh. >>One of the things that struck me in the keynote is there was a story of this guy. I guess it's gonna fly around the world in London plane in five days or eight days, but on the one of the test flights are a significant change. Was trying to fly to why there was equipment failure and he had to divert. And, you know, when you see the screen grabs and people working and smart, she looks super detailed. It's like a project plan, and there's resource is that died research, legalization. But in this case, they had to be able to flip on a dime. They had to be completely at around. I think she said, that eight teams around the world, I presume, where the stops are. That's a really interesting dichotomy of the tool that you guys were delivering to, to have the detail to be. Numbers focus. Okay, I focused, but at the same time be really right. In the real world, stuff doesn't always go as planned, >>be Rio and do it instantly. So if we have an issue with the plane, we're not gonna host a summit to talk about with how to get back on track way got to do it now. So the thing that's that's also need that example is you're talking about 8 to 10 people across multiple continents who have to work Right now. There is no mobilization. There is note, as they said, Summit and I think being able to do meaningful things quickly. That is a fairly rare combination, right? Very often meaningful stuff is heavy, Complex taste time. Eso again. I'm this constant pursuit of faster, more meaningful, more depth, more value >>in this kind of cross silo collaboration to I mean, that's the theme that comes up over and over again. Is that you need contributions from loss of people and lots of know, formally silo departments is maybe what they're gonna be called in the future to get to resolution so that you can move forward >>on. I think the thing that we spoke to in one of the product announcements was We're so inundated with information and Mark, I need a faster I need a faster yet again. It's a holy Rebecca. I can't actually process it. Also, one of the things we're trying to do is how do you also improve the context within within which people see things, right? So if you ask me a question and I don't have toe tab out to another application. I can actually see your question in the context of that work. And that's when I think one of the real big breakthroughs were releasing this This engaged. >>I mean, when you think about the the current status of work and you really and you really see it from where you sit, I mean, is it almost shockingly abysmal about how bad things can get at companies in terms of how many silos there are, how the number of communication breakdowns, the way the communication breaks down? Because, as you said, you could just be working >>on a different version. Great question, Rebecca. And the reason I would say it's not shockingly business because we've been doing this for years. It's like it's the norm >>Bates, >>the cost of doing business. So what our job is to how do we get people to get that spark to elevate a basic? Oh, my goodness, there is a better way, and it takes a lot to change people's behavior. You can't just say, Well, there's a better way. They have to experience it, right? So we're in that in that pursuit of how do you get more people to clear that hurdle the first time. Because the norm is it's hard. The Norma's is distributed enormous. I don't know what. So that's what we're trying to unlock for folks. >>And you said in the Kino, once they get that spark, and then achievement becomes the new norm that that has its own momentum to >>Yes, it's the you know Jeff does something amazing and I'm I I want in. Jeff doesn't have a monopoly on that on that. That's the viral effect. And it's not so much a vendor saying, Hey, Jeff did something now you should be motivated. You should feel that way, Rebecca And that's what we see at this conference. This is 4000 people who weren't told to go to the conference. These air 4000 people who want in, and that is a really special part >>of the conference for us. Shift gears a little bit on a on artificial intelligence machine, learning. We hear about it all the time, and I think everyone now has kind of figured out that it's not going to be a company delivering an ML. It's really applied a i N M l within an application When you guys look at the opportunities, especially with the data flow that you have and you know your sass application, where do you see some of the the short term winds and opportunities using A. I even better, you know, eliminate some of this redundant, painful work. >>I think part of it starts with educating people on the potential benefits of it. And then I'm an experiential learner. I think many people are so instead of talking about the theory, demonstrate how it could help. So we've already started doing saying things like recommending to people certain things based on actions they take. It's also very important. As a vendor, we have made a commitment to be very clear that for more advanced types of a I people need to opt in. So again, part of this what's happening to my data? Who's working it well, that's part of our platform. And when I look at the future, it's the first step I think is really how do you drive? Convenience improvement recommendation? How do you let someone take better advantage of the systems they're already using? And what people don't have to appreciate today is by exhibiting this behavior. But in taking information, structuring and reporting out, the system will observe a pattern. And ultimately, should they choose to opt in, the system will get to a point where we'll be able to make recommendations, recommendations and derive insights. Um, but again, a lot of this is fairly theoretical. We're in the early innings of this, Jeff. People are just starting to figure out I can automate something. So, you know, I think there's a much like people said 10 years ago. You know, the future is now. The future is kind of showing up today, and then the next phase is still a couple of years out, but it's a very exciting. It's a very exciting prospect. >>So those recommendations then, can become best practices because I'd like to get it back to this. This achieve as one alliance and sort of how you're going to take that research and educate the market and then use it to implement these new technologies. And best practices of this is how we can get more done and achieve more together. You and >>I think by showing examples of how a I n. M. L can contribute to someone's performance as opposed to you. Did these 10 things the machine is taking over those 10 things? What's my role in it? That's not a very exciting conversation to have. So I think, by demonstrating how somebody's game can innocence slow down. So if that machine can help me further inspect more deeply, assess have that next moment of insight that's contributing, not taking away. And again we need to show examples as an industry that happening until we show it. It's sort of all for not so. I'm really excited about about helping our customers through that journey. >>Yeah, there's so much opportunity, and the the other one that comes up in other times is unplanned downtime, Right? So a lot of talk always about unplanned, unplanned downtime machines, right? It's completely disruptive. You don't want it scheduled maintenance, but no one really talks about unplanned downtime of people not necessarily in the way being sick but being distracted by often mundane, often road often anticipated task. I won't even call it work that suddenly get dumped into your lap that you have to take care of, and those really think huge opportunities to add some automation and get those things kind of off the plate. >>You think about the breakthrough ideas you've had in your lives? Does it happen when you're like feverishly working ways? No. It's usually when there's a moment of just peace before you're able to process. That's when the breakthrough happens. So one of the things we talked about today was how, also his leaders. We need to empower our teams to not just drive for more yielding throughput. Take that extra benefit in. Actually, look at the board, process the board and think about what we're going to do next. And I think again, you need to exhibit. You need to give people the permission to work that way because we're all feeling this this pressure to innovate. You got to give people time to do it >>and do more with less to do you think it's realistic? Do you think leaders are going to be able to do that? And >>I think the leaders of successful companies will do that >>and role model. That, too, because they can also be worried about their own throughput. As you said, >>right, Right? Yeah. I mean, as Gabby, have you reset at the end of her talk. You have to exhibit the behavior. You want others to practice. So I think that was a wise, wise statement. >>Well, I really loved the outdoor clothing company who, you know, specifically said, We want our people out doing the things that our customers are doing, experiencing what they're experiencing and really bacon that into the culture, not just saying it, but get outside and go run around on and do what we want our customers to do and what our customers do do a very different approach. >>It is, It is. I think, again, back to back toe us, understanding what our customers are doing. This is equivalent to our Super Bowl every year, right, we get 4000 these people coming in here and there is no substitute for that in the flesh interaction. And that's again one of the reasons why it's everyone's such a positive, engaged mood right now, >>so they're not only interacting with a smartsheet folks, but they're interacting with each other at learning how each company uses smart cheat. >>I mean, when you think that 1/2 of all collaboration that takes place on our platform is cross company, it's not a surprise that people interact with another. It is it is happening. We have companies who interact with hundreds of brands outside of their own. So we service that cross connect for companies, and that's the modern company. I don't know of a company that is completely insular. So if you can help promote that safely, that za real advantage for company >>wrapping up, what do you think you're going to be? The themes for next year's conference? What is what are sort of what's on your plate? What are you thinking about? What are the big challenges that you're gnawing on right now? >>Yeah, I think the I think the continue shift from efficiency to effectiveness people. I think most people are still measured on the output goal. How many units did I do? And while that may serve you well in the quarter in the next quarter, it does not prepare you for years two and three. So you have to be very committed to the investments today that may not pay off in that 6 to 12 month window. You have to, and I think stories will come out as people are learning new ways. Toe work of examples of Here's what we did in 2019 which ended up being a home run in 2021. So it's back to effectiveness, effectiveness versus efficiency. That is gonna be, I think, one of the themes we speak to next year. >>Thanks, Mark. A pleasure having you on the show. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff. Rick. Stay tuned of more of the cubes. Live coverage of smartsheet engage.

>>live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the Q covering answerable best 2019. Brought to you by Red hat. >>Welcome back, everyone to the Cube. Live coverage in Atlanta, Georgia for answerable fest. This is Red Hats Event where all the practices come together. The community to talk about automation anywhere. John Kerry with my coast to Minutemen, our next two guests arrive. And Bergeron, principal community architect for answerable now Red Hat and Greg Dankers Berg, senior director, Community Ansel's. Well, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >>Thank you. >>Okay, So we were talking before camera that you guys had. This is a two day event. We're covering the Cube. You guys have an awful fast, but you got your community day yesterday. The day before the people came in early. The core community heard great things about it. Love to get an update. Could you share just what happened yesterday? And then we'll get in some of the community. Sure. >>We s o uh, for all of our answer professed for a while now we've started them with ah, community contributor conference. And the goal of that conference is to get together. Ah, lot of the people we work with online right people we see is IRC nicks or get hub handles rights to get them together in the same room. Ah, have them interact with, uh, with core members of our team. Uh, and that's where we really do, uh, make a lot of decisions about how we're gonna be going forward, get really direct feedback from some of our key contributors about the decisions were making The things were thinking about, uh, with the goal of, you know, involving our community deeply in a lot of decisions we make, that's >>a working session, meets social, get together. That's >>right, Several working sessions and then, you know, drinks afterward for those who want the drinks and just hang out time that >>way. Drinks and their last night was really good. I got the end of it. I missed the session, but >>they have the peaches, peaches, it on the >>table. That was good. But this is the dynamic community. This is one things we notice here. Not a seat open in the house on the keynote Skinny Ramon Lee, active participant base from this organic as well Be now going mainstream. How >>you >>guys handling it, how you guys ride in this way? Because certainly you certainly do. The communities which is great for feedback get from the community. But as you have the commercial eyes open sores and answerable, it's a tough task. >>Well, I'd like to think part of it is, I guess maybe it's not our first rodeo. Is that what we'd say? I mean, yeah, uh, for Ansel. I worked at ELASTICSEARCH, uh, doing community stuff. Before that, I worked at Red Hat. It was a fedora. Project leader, number five. And you were Fedora project Leader. What number was that? Number one depends >>on how you count, but >>you're the You're the one that got us to be able to call it having a federal project leader. So I sort of was number one. So we've been dealing with this stuff for a really long time. It's different in Anselm that, you know, unlike a lot of, you know, holds old school things like fedora. You know, a lot of this stuff is newer and part of the reason it's really important for us to get You know, some of these folks here to talk to us in person is that you know especially. And you saw my keynote this morning where they talked about we talked about modularity. Lot of these folks are really just focused on. They're one little bit and they don't always have is much time. People are working in lots of open source projects now, right, and it's hard to pay deep attention to every single little thing all the time. So this gives them a day of in case you missed it. Here's the deep, dark dive into everything that you know we're planning or thinking about, and they really are. You know, people who are managing those smaller parts all around answerable, really are some of our best feedback loops, right? Because they're people who probably wrote that model because they're using it every single day and their hard core Ansel users. But they also understand how to participate in community so we can get those people actually talking with the rest of us who a lot of us used to be so sad. Men's. I used to be a sis admin, lots of us. You know. A lot of our employees actually just got into wanting to work on Ansel because they loved using it so much of their jobs. And when you're not, actually, since admitting every day, you you lose a little bit of >>the front lines with the truth of what's around. Truth is right there >>and putting all these people together in room make sure that they all also, you know, when you have to look at someone in the eye and tell them news that they might not like you have a different level of empathy and you approach it a little bit differently than you may on the Internet. So, >>Robin So I lived in your keynote this morning. You talked about answerable. First commit was only back in 2012. So that simplicity of that modularity and the learnings from where open source had been in the past Yes, they're a little bit, you know, what could answerable do, being a relatively young project that it might not have been able to dio if it had a couple of decades of history? >>Maybe Greg should tell the story about the funk project >>way. There was a There was a project, a tread hat that we started in 2007 in a coffee shop in Chapel Hill, North Carolina is Ah, myself and Michael the Han and Seth the doll on entry likens Who still works with this with us? A danceable Ah, and we we put together Ah, an idea with all the same underpinnings, right? Ah, highly modular automation tool We debated at the time whether it should be based on SSL or SS H for funk. We chose SSL Ah, and you know, after watching that grow to a certain point and then stagnates and it being inside of red Hat where, you know, there were a lot of other business pressures, things like that. We learned a lot from that experience and we were able to take that experience. And then in 2012 there there's the open source community was a little different. Open source was more acceptable. Get Hubbell was becoming a common plat platform for open source project hosting. And so a lot of things came together in a short pier Time All that experience, although, >>and also market conditions, agenda market conditions in 2007 Cloud was sort of a weird thing that not really everyone was doing 2012 rolls around. Everyone has these cloud images and they need to figure out how to get something in it. Um, and it turns out that Hansel's a really great way to actually do that. And, you know, even if we had picked SS H back in the beginning, I don't know, you know, not have had time projects grow to a certain point. And I could point a lots of projects that were just It's a shame they were so ahead of their time. And because of that, you know, >>timing is everything with the key. I think now what I've always admired about the simplicity is automation requires that the abstract, the way, the complexities and so I think you bring a cloud that brings up more complexity, more use cases for some of the underlying paintings of the plumbing. And this is always gonna This is a moving train that's never going to stop. What was the feedback from the community this year around? As you guys get into some of these analytical capabilities, so the new features have a platform flair to it. It's a platform you guys announced answerable automation platform that implies that enables some value. >>You know, I >>think in >>a way. We've always been a platform, right, because platform is a set of small rules and then modules that attached to it. It's about how that grows, right? And, uh, traditionally, we've had a batteries included model where every module and plug in was built to go into answerable Boy, that got really big bright and >>we like to hear it. I don't even know how many I keep say, I'll >>say 2000. Then it'll be 3000 say 3000 >>something else, a lot of content. And it's, you know, in the beginning, it was I can't imagine this ever being more than 202 150 batteries included, and at some point, you know, it's like, Whoa, yeah, taking care of this and making sure it all works together all the time gets >>You guys have done a great You guys have done a great job with community, and one of the things that you met with Cloud is as more use cases come, scale becomes a big question, and there's real business benefits now, so open source has become part of the business. People talk about business, models will open source. You guys know that you've been part of that 28 years of history with Lennox. But now you're seeing Dev Ops, which is you'll go back to 78 2009 10 time frame The only the purest we're talking Dev ops. At that time, Infrastructures Co was being kicked around. We certainly been covering the cubes is 2010 on that? But now, in mainstream enterprise, it seems like the commercialization and operational izing of Dev ops is here. You guys have a proof point in your own community. People talk about culture, about relationships. We have one guest on time, but they're now friends with the other guy group dowels. So you stay. The collaboration is now becoming a big part of it because of the playbook because of the of these these instances. So talk about that dynamic of operational izing the Dev Ops movement for Enterprise. >>All right, so I remember Ah, an example at one of the first answer professed I ever went thio There were there were a few before I came on board. Ah, but it was I >>think it was >>the 1st 1 I came to when I was about to make the jump from my previous company, and I was just There is a visitor and a friend of the team, and there was an adman who talked to me and said, For the first time, I have this thing, this playbook, that I can write and that I can hand to my manager and say this is what we're going to D'oh! Right? And so there was this artifact that allowed for a bridging between different parts of the organization. That was the simplicity of that playbook that was human readable, that he could show to his boss or to someone else in the organ that they could agree on. And suddenly there was this sort of a document that was a mechanism for collaboration that everyone could understand buy into that hadn't really existed before. Answerable existed after me. That was one of the many, you know, flip of the light moments where I was like, Oh, wow, maybe we have something >>really big. There were plenty of other infrastructures, code things that you could hand to someone. But, you know, for a lot of people, it's like I don't speak that language right? That's why we like to say like Ansel sort of this universal automation language, right? Like everybody can read it. You don't have to be a rocket scientist. Uh, it's, you know, great for your exact example, right? I'm showing this to my manager and saying This is the order of operations and you don't have to be a genius to read it because it's really, really readable >>connecting system which connects people >>right. It's fascinating to May is there was this whole wave of enterprise collaboration tools that the enterprise would try to push down and force people to collaborate. But here is a technology tool that from the ground up, is getting people to do that collaboration. And they want to do it. And it's helping bury some >>of those walls. And it's interesting you mention that I'm sure that something like slack is a thing that falls into that category. And they've built around making sure that the 20 billion people inside a company all sign up until somebody in the I T departments like, What do you mean? These random people are just everyone's using it. No one saving it isn't secure, and they all freak out, and, um, well, I mean, this is sort of, you know, everybody tells her friend about Ansel and they go, Oh, right, Tool. That's gonna save the world Number 22 0 wait, actually, yeah. No, this is This actually is pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get started. >>Well, you know, sometimes the better mouse trap will always drive people to that solution. You guys have proven that organic. What's interesting to me is not only does it keep win on capabilities, it actually grew organically. And this connective tissue between different groups, >>right? Got it >>breaks down that hole silo mentality. And that's really where I tease been stuck? Yes. And as software becomes more prominent and data becomes more prominent, it's gonna just shift more power in the hands of developer and to the, uh, just add mons who are now being redeployed into being systems, architects or whatever they are. This transitional human rolls with automation, >>transformation architect >>Oh my God, that's a real title. I don't >>have it, but >>double my pay. I'll take it. >>So collections is one of the key things talked about when we talk about the Antelope Automation platform. Been hearing a lot discussion about how the partner ecosystems really stepping up even more than before. You know, 4600 plus contributors out there in community, But the partners stepping up Where do you see this going? Where? Well, collections really catalyze the next growth for your >>It's got to be the future for us that, you know, there there were a >>few >>key problems that we recognize that the collections was ultimately the the dissolution that we chose. Uh, you know, one key problem is that with the batteries included model that put a lot of pressure on vendors to conform to whatever our processes were, they had to get their batteries in tow. Are thing to be a part of the ecosystem. And there was a huge demand to be a part of our ecosystem. The partners would just sort of, you know, swallow hard and do what they needed to d'oh. But it really wasn't optimized Tol partners, right? So they might have different development processes. They might have different release cycles. They might have different testing on the back end. That would be, you know, more difficult to hook together collections, breaks a lot of that out and gives our partners a lot of freedom to innovate in their own time. Uh, >>release on their own cycle, the down cycle. We just released our new version of software, but you can't actually get the new Ansel modules that are updated for it until answerable releases is not always the thing that you know makes their product immediately useful. You know, you're a vendor, you really something new. You want people to start using it right away, not wait until, you know answerable comes around so >>and that new artifact also creates more network effects with the, you know, galaxy and automation hub. And you know, the new deployment options that we're gonna have available for that stuff. So it's, I think it's just leveling up, right? It's taking the same approach that's gotten us this foreign, just taking out to, uh, to another level. >>I certainly wouldn't consider it to be like that. Partners air separate part of our They're still definitely part of the community. It's just they have slightly different problems. And, you know, there were folks from all sorts of different companies who are partners in the contributor summit. Yesterday >>there were >>actually, you know, participating and you know, folks swapping stories and listening to each other and again being part of that feedback. >>Maybe just a little bit broader. You know, the other communities out there, I think of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the Open Infrastructure Foundation. You're wearing your soul pin. I talk a little bit of our handsome How rentable plays across these other communities, which are, you know, very much mixture of the vendors and the end users. >>Well, I mean and will certainly had Sorry. Are you asking about how Ansel is relating to those other communities? Okay, Yeah, because I'm all about that. I mean, we certainly had a long standing sort of, ah fan base over in the open stacks slash open infrastructure foundation land. Most of the deployment tools for all of you know, all the different ways. So many ways to deploy open stack. A lot of them wound up settling on Ansel towards the end of time. You know, that community sort of matured, and, you know, there's a lot of periods of experimentation and, you know, that's one of the things is something's live. Something's didn't but the core parts of what you actually need to make a cloud or, you know, basically still there. Um And then we also have a ton of modules, actually unanswerable, that, you know, help people to operationalize all their open stack cloud stuff. Just like we have modules for AWS and Google Cloud and Azure and whoever else I'm leaving out this week as far as the C N. C f stuff goes, I mean again, we've seen a lot of you know how to get this thing up and running. Turns out Cooper Daddy's is not particularly easy to get up and running. It's even more complicated than a cloud sometimes, because it also assumes you've got a cloud of some sort already. And I like working on our thing. It's I can actually use it. It's pretty cool. Um, cube spray on. Then A lot of the other projects also have, you know, things that are related to Ansel. Now there's the answer. Will operator stuff? I don't know if you want to touch on that, but >>yeah, uh, we're working on. We know one of the big questions is ah, how do answerable, uh, and open shift slash kubernetes work together frequently and in sort of kubernetes land Open shift land. You want to keep his much as you can on the cluster. Lots of operations on the cluster. >>Sometimes you got >>to talk to things outside of the cluster, right? You got to set up some networking stuff, or you gotta go talk to an S three bucket. There's always something some storage thing. As much as you try to get things in a container land, there's all there's always legacy stuff. There's always new stuff, maybe edge stuff that might not all be part of your cluster. And so one of the things we're working on is making it easier to use answerable as part of your operator structure, to go and manage some of those things, using the operator framework that's already built into kubernetes and >>again, more complexity out there. >>Well, and and the thing is, we're great glue. Answerable is such great glue, and it's accessible to so many people and as the moon. As we move away from monolithic code bases to micro service's and vastly spread out code basis, it's not like the complexity goes away. The complexity simply moves to the relationship between the components and answerable. It's excellent glue for helping to manage those relationships between. >>Who doesn't like a glue layer >>everyone, if it's good and easy to understand, even better, >>the glue layers key guys, Thanks for coming on. Sharing your insights. Thank you so much for a quick minute to give a quick plug for the community. What's up? Stats updates. Quick projects Give a quick plug for what's going on the community real quick. >>You go first. >>We're big. We're 67 >>snow. It was number six. Number seven was kubernetes >>right. Number six out of 96 million projects on Get Hub. So lots of contributors. Lots of energy. >>Anytime. I tried to cite a stat, I find that I have to actually go and look it up. And I was about to sight again. >>So active, high, high numbers of people activity. What's that mean? You're running the plumbing, so obviously it's it's cloud on premise. Other updates. Projects of the contributor day. What's next, what's on the schedule. >>We're looking to put together our next contributor summit. We're hoping in Europe sometime in the spring, so we've got to get that on the plate. I don't know if we've announced the next answer will fast yet >>I know that happens tomorrow. So don't Don't really don't >>ruin that for everybody. >>Gradual ages on the great community. You guys done great. Work out in the open sores opened business. Open everything these days. Can't bet against open. >>But again, >>I wouldn't bet against open. >>We're here. Cube were open. Was sharing all the data here in Atlanta with the interviews. I'm John for his stupid men. Stayed with us for more after this short break.