(upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everyone. It's theCUBE's coverage here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE with re:MARS. Amazon re:MARS stands for machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. Lot of great content, accomplishment. AI meets meets robotics and space, industrial IoT, all things data. And we've got two great guests here to unpack the AI side of it. Manoj Suvarna, Managing Director at AI Ecosystem at Deloitte and Arte Merritt, Conversational AI Lead at AWS. Manoj, it's great to see you CUBE alumni. Art, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. >> So AI's the big theme. Actually, the big disconnect in the industry has been the industrial OT versus IT, and that's happening. Now you've got space and robotics meets what we know is machine learning and AI which we've been covering. This is the confluence of the new IoT market. >> It absolutely is. >> What's your opinion on that? >> Yeah, so actually it's taking IoT beyond the art of possible. One area that we have been working very closely with AWS. We're strategic alliance with them. And for the past six years, we have been investing a lot in transformations. Transformation as it relate to the cloud, transformation as it relate to data modernization. The new edge is essentially on AI and machine learning. And just this week, we announced a new solution which is more focused around enhancing contact center intelligence. So think about the edge of the contact center, where we all have experiences around dealing with customer service and how to really take that to the next level, challenges that clients are facing in every part of that business. So clearly. >> Well, Conversational AI is a good topic. Talk about the relationship with Deloitte and Amazon for a second around AI because you guys have some great projects going on right now. That's well ahead of the curve on solving the scale problem 'cause there's a scale and problem, practical problem and then scale. What's the relationship with Amazon and Deloitte? >> We have a great alliance and relationship. Deloitte brings that expertise to help folks build high quality, highly effective conversational AI and enterprises are implementing these solutions to really try to improve the overall customer experience. So they want to help agents improve productivity, gain insights into the reasons why folks are calling but it's really to provide that better user experience being available 24/7 on channels users prefer to interact. And the solutions that Deloitte is building are highly advanced, super exciting. Like when we show demos of them to potential customers, the eyes light up and they want those solutions. >> John: Give an example when their eyes light up. What are you showing there? >> One solution, it's called multimodal interfaces. So what this is, is when you're call into like a voice IVR, Deloitte's solution will send the folks say a mobile app or a website. So the person can interact with both the phone touching on the screen and the voice and it's all kept in sync. So imagine you call the doctor's office or say I was calling a airline and I want to change my flight or sorry, change the seat. If they were to say, seat 20D is available. Well, I don't know what that means, but if you see the map while you're talking, you can say, oh, 20D is the aisle. I'm going to select that. So Deloitte's doing those kind of experiences. It's incredible. >> Manoj, this is where the magic comes into play when you bring data together and you have integration like this. Asynchronously or synchronously, it's all coming together. You have different platforms, phone, voice, silo databases potentially, the old way. Now, the new ways integrating. What makes it all work? What's the key to success? >> Yeah, it's certainly not a trivial feat. Bringing together all of these ecosystems of relationships, technologies all put together. We cannot do it alone. This is where we partner with AWS with some of our other partners like Salesforce and OneReach and really trying to bring a symphony of some of these solutions to bear. When you think about, going back to the example of contact center, the challenges that the pandemic posed in the last couple of years was the fact that who's a humongous rise in volume of number of calls. You can imagine people calling in asking for all kinds of different things, whether it's airlines whether it is doctor's office and retail. And then couple with that is the fact that there's the labor shortage. And how do you train agents to get them to be productive enough to be able to address hundreds or thousands of these calls? And so that's where we have been starting to, we have invested in those solutions bringing those technologies together to address real client problems, not just slideware but actual production environments. And that's where we launched this solution called TrueServe as of this week, which is really a multimodal solution that is built with preconceived notions of technologies and libraries where we can then be industry agnostic and be able to deliver those experiences to our clients based on whatever vertical or industry they're in. >> Take me through the client's engagement here because I can imagine they want to get a practical solution. They're going to want to have it up and running, not like a just a chatbot, but like they completely integrated system. What's the challenge and what's the outcome first set of milestones that you see that they do first? Do they just get the data together? Are they deploying a software solution? What's the use cases? >> There's a couple different use cases. We see there's the self-service component that we're talking about with the chatbots or voice IVR solutions. There's also use cases for helping the agents, so real-time agent assist. So you call into a contact center, it's transcribed in real time, run through some sort of knowledge base to give the agents possible answers to help the user out, tying in, say the Salesforce data, CRM data, to know more about the user. Like if I was to call the airline, it's going to say, "Are you calling about your flight to San Francisco tomorrow?" It knows who I am. It leverages that stuff. And then the key piece is the analytics knowing why folks are calling, not just your metrics around, length of calls or deflections, but what were the reasons people were calling in because you can use that data to improve your underlying products or services. These are the things that enterprise are looking for and this is where someone like Deloitte comes in, brings that expertise, speeds up the time to market and really helps the customers. >> Manoj, what was the solution you mentioned that you guys announced? >> Yeah, so this is called Deloitte TrueServe. And essentially, it's a combination of multiple different solutions combinations from AWS, from Salesforce, from OneReach. All put together with our joint engineering and really delivering that capability. Enhancing on that is the analytics component, which is really critical, especially because when you think about the average contact center, less than 10% of the data gets analyzed today, and how do you then extract value out of that data and be able to deliver business outcomes. >> I was just talking to some of the other day about Zoom. Everyone records their zoom meetings, and no one watches them. I mean, who's going to wade through that. Call center is even more high volume. We're talking about massive data. And so will you guys automate that? Do you go through every single piece of data, every call and bring it down? Is that how it works? >> Go ahead. >> There's just some of the things you can do. Analyze the calls for common themes, like figuring out like topic modeling, what are the reasons people are calling in. Summarizing that stuff so you can see what those underlying issues are. And so that could be, like I was mentioning, improving the product or service. It could also be for helping train the agents. So here's how to answer that question. And it could even be reinforcing positive experiences maybe an agent had a particular great call and that could be a reference for other folks. >> Yeah, and also during the conversation, when you think about within 60 to 90 seconds, how do you identify the intonation, the sentiments of the client customer calling in and be able to respond in real time for the challenges that they might be facing and the ability to authenticate the customer at the same time be able to respond to them. I think that is the advancements that we are seeing in the market. >> I think also your point about the data having residual values also excellent because this is a long tail of value in this data, like for predictions and stuff. So NASA was just on before you guys came on, talking about the Artemis project and all the missions and they have to run massive amounts of simulations. And this is where I've kind of seen the dots connect here. You can run with AI, run all the heavy lifting without human touching it to get that first ingestion or analysis, and then iterating on the data based upon what else happens. >> Manoj: Absolutely. >> This is now the new normal, right? Is this? >> It is. And it's transverse towards across multiple domains. So the example we gave you was around Conversational AI. We're now looking at that for doing predictive analytics. Those are some examples that we are doing jointly with AWS SageMaker. We are working on things like computer vision with some of the capabilities and what computer vision has to offer. And so when you think about the continuum of possibilities of what we can bring together from a tools, technology, services perspective, really the sky is the limit in terms of delivering these real experiences to our clients. >> So take me through a customer. Pretending I'm a customer, I get it. I got to do this. It's a competitive advantage. What are the outcomes that they are envisioning? What are some of the patterns you're seeing with customers? What outcomes are they expecting and what kind of high level upside you see them envisioning coming out of the data? >> So when you think about the CxOs today and the board, a lot of them are thinking about, okay, how do you build more efficiency in those system? How do you enable a technology or solution for them to not only increase their top line but as well as their bottom line? How do you enhance the customer experience, which in this case is spot on because when you think about, when customers go repeat to a vendor, it's based on quality, it's based on price. Customer experience is now topping that where your first experience, whether it's through a chat or a virtual assistant or a phone call is going to determine the longevity of that customer with you as a vendor. And so clearly, when you think about how clients are becoming AI fuel, this is where we are bringing in new technologies, new solutions to really push the art to the limit and the art of possible. >> You got a playbook too to do this? >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We have done that. And in fact, we are now taking that to the next level up. So something that I've mentioned about this before, which is how do you trust an AI system as it's building up. >> Hold on, I need to plug in. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> I put this here for a reason to remind me. No, but also trust is a big thing. Just put that trustworthy. This is an AI ethics question. >> Arte: It's a big. >> Let's get into it. This is huge. Data's data. Data can be biased from coming in >> Part of it, there are concerns you have to look at the bias in the data. It's also how you communicate through these automated channels, being empathetic, building trust with the customer, being concise in the answers and being accessible to all sorts of different folks and how they might communicate. So it's definitely a big area. >> I mean, you think about just normal life. We all lived situations where we got a text message from a friend or someone close to us where, what the hell, what are you saying? And they had no contextual bad feelings about it or, well, there's misunderstandings 'cause the context isn't there 'cause you're rapid fire them on the subway. I'm riding my bike. I stop and text, okay, I'm okay. Church response could mean I'm busy or I'm angry. Like this is now what you said about empathy. This is now a new dynamic in here. >> Oh, the empathy is huge, especially if you're say a financial institution or building that trust with folks and being empathetic. If someone's reaching out to a contact center, there's a good chance they're upset about something. So you have to take that. >> John: Calm them down first. >> Yeah, and not being like false like platitude kind of things, like really being empathetic, being inclusive in the language. Those are things that you have conversation designers and linguistics folks that really look into that. That's why having domain expertise from folks like Deloitte come in to help with that. 'Cause maybe if you're just building the chat on your own, you might not think of those things. But the folks with the domain expertise will say like, Hey, this is how you script it. It's the power of words, getting that message across clearly. >> The linguistics matter? >> Yeah, yeah. >> It does. >> By vertical too, I mean, you could pick any the tribe, whatever orientation and age, demographics, genders. >> All of those things that we take for granted as a human. When you think about trust, when you think about bias, when you think about ethics, it just gets amplified. Because now you're dealing with millions and millions of data points that may or may not be the right direction in terms of somebody's calling in depending on what age group they're in. Some questions might not be relevant for that age group. Now a human can determine that, but a bot cannot. And so how do you make sure that when you look at this data coming in, how do you build models that are ethically aware of the contextual algorithms and the alignment with it and also enabling that experience to be much enhanced than taking it backwards, and that's really. >> I can imagine it getting better with as people get scaled up a bit 'cause then you're going to have to start having AI to watch the AI at some point, as they say. Where are we in the progress in the industry right now? Because I know there's been a lot of news stories around, ethics and AI and bias and it's a moving train actually, but still problems are going to be solved. Are we at the tipping point yet? Are we still walking in before we crawl or crawling before we walk? I should say, I mean, where are we? >> I think we are in between a crawling or walk phase. And the reason for that is because it varies depending on whether you're regulated industry or unregulated. In the regulated industry, there are compliance regulations requirements, whether it's government whether it's banking, financial institutions where they have to meet Sarbanes-Oxley and all kinds of compliance requirements, whereas an unregulated industry like retail and consumer, it is anybody's gain. And so the reality of it is that there is more of an awareness now. And that's one of the reasons why we've been promoting this jointly with AWS. We have a framework that we have established where there are multiple pillars of trust, bias, privacy, and security that companies and organizations need to think about. Our data scientists, ML engineers need to be familiar with it, but because while they're super great in terms of model building and development, when it comes to the business, when it comes to the client or a customer, it is super important for them to trust this platform, this algorithm. And that is where we are trying to build that momentum, bring that awareness. One of my colleagues has written this book "Trustworthy AI". We're trying to take the message out to the market to say, there is a framework. We can help you get there. And certainly that's what we are doing. >> Just call Deloitte up and you're going to take care of them. >> Manoj: Yeah. >> On the Amazon side, Amazon Web Services. I always interview Swami every year at re:Invent and he always get the updates. He's been bullish on this for a long time on this Conversational AI. What's the update on the AWS side? Where are you guys at? What's the current trends that you're riding? What wave are you riding right now? >> So some of the trends we see in customer interest, there's a couple of things. One is the multimodal interfaces we we're just chatting about where the voice IVA is synced with like a web or mobile experience, so you take that full advantage of the device. The other is adding additional AI into the Conversational AI. So one example is a customer that included intelligent document processing as part of the chatbot. So instead of typing your name and address, take a photo of your driver's license. It was an insurance onboarding chatbot, so you could take a photo of your existing insurance policy. It'll extract that information to build the new insurance policy. So folks get excited about that. And the third area we see interest is what's called multi-bot orchestration. And this is where you can have one main chatbot. Marshall user across different sub-chatbots based on the use case persona or even language. So those things get people really excited and then AWS is launching all sorts of new features. I don't know which one is coming out. >> I know something's coming out tomorrow. He's right at corner. He's big smile on his face. He wouldn't tell me. It's good. >> We have for folks like the closer alliance relationships, we we're able to get previews. So there a preview of all the new stuff. And I don't know what I could, it's pretty exciting stuff. >> You get in trouble if you spill the beans here. Don't, be careful. I'll watch you. We'll talk off camera. All exciting stuff. >> Yeah, yeah. I think the orchestrator bot is interesting. Having the ability to orchestrate across different contextual datasets is interesting. >> One of the areas where it's particularly interesting is in financial services. Imagine a bank could have consumer accounts, merchant accounts, investment banking accounts. So if you were to chat with the chatbot and say I want to open account, well, which account do you mean? And so it's able to figure out that context to navigate folks to those sub-chatbots behind the scenes. And so it's pretty interesting style. >> Awesome. Manoj while we're here, take a minute to quickly give a plug for Deloitte. What your program's about? What customers should expect if they work with you guys on this project? Give a quick commercial for Deloitte. >> Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, Deloitte has been continuing to lead the AI field organization effort across our client base. If you think about all the Fortune 100, Fortune 500, Fortune 2000 clients, we certainly have them where they are in advanced stages of multiple deployments for AI. And we look at it all the way from strategy to implementation to operational models. So clients don't have to do it alone. And we are continuing to build our ecosystem of relationships, partnerships like the alliances that we have with AWS, building the ecosystem of relationships with other emerging startups, to your point about how do you continue to innovate and bring those technologies to your clients in a trustworthy environment so that we can deliver it in production scale. That is essentially what we're driving. >> Well, Arte, there's a great conversation and the AI will take over from here as we end the segment. I see a a bot coming on theCUBE later and there might be CUBE be replaced with robots. >> Right, right, right, exactly. >> I'm John Furrier, calling from Palo Alto. >> Someday, CUBE bot. >> You can just say, Alexa do my demo for me or whatever it is. >> Or digital twin for John. >> We're going to have a robot on earlier do a CUBE interview and that's Dave Vellante. He'd just pipe his voice in and be fun. Well, thanks for coming on, great conversation. >> Thank you. Thanks for having us. >> CUBE coverage here at re:MARS in Las Vegas. Back to the event circle. We're back in the line. Got re:Inforce and don't forget re:Invent at the end of the year. CUBE coverage of this exciting show here. Machine learning, automation, robotics, space. That's MARS, it's re:MARS. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Oh, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got a great story here. Navigating COVID-19 with Watson advertising and weather channel conversations, Sheri Bachstein, who's the GM of Watson Advertising in the weather company. Sheri, thanks for coming on theCUBE. My favorite part of IBM Think is to talk about the tech and also the weather company innovations. Thanks for coming on. >> Hi, happy to be here John. >> So COVID-19 obviously some impact for people that working at home. Normally you guys have been doing a lot of innovation around weather, weather data, certainly huge part of it. And so lots been changing with AI and the weather company and IBM, so let's first start before we jump in just a little background about what your team has created because a lot of fascinating things here. Go ahead. >> Yeah, so when the pandemic started, we looked at the data that we were seeing and of course in weather accuracy and accurate data is really important trusted data. And so we created a COVID-19 hub on our weather channel app and on weather.com and essentially what it was is an aggregated area where consumers could get the most up-to-date information on COVID cases, deaths in their area, trends see heat maps, information from the CDC. And what was unique about it, it was to a local level, right? So state level information is helpful, but we know that consumers me included. I need information around what's happening around me. And so we were able to bring this down to a County level which we thought was really helpful for consumers >> Sheri's watching sports on TV. And recently a few months ago, the masters was on and you saw people getting back into real life. It's almost like a weather forecast. Now you want to know what's going on in the pandemic. People are sharing that they're getting the vaccine, really interesting. And so I want to understand how this all came together with you guys. Was it something that as a weather data and a bunch of geeks saying, Hey, we should do this for companies but take us to thought process 113. Was it like you saw this as value? How did you get to this? Because this is an interesting user benefit. I want to know the weather. I want to know if it's safe. These are kind of a psychology of a user expectation. How did you guys connect the dots here for this project? >> Well, we certainly do have a very passionate team of people some weather geeks included and you're absolutely right. Watching the masters a few months ago was amazing to see some sense of normality happening here. But we looked at IBM and the weather company like how do we help during this pandemic? And when we thought about it we looked at there's an amazing gap of information. And as the weather channel, what we do is bring together data give people insights and help them make decisions with that. And so it was really part of our mission. It's always been that way to give information to keep people safe. And so all we did is took a different data set and provided the same thing. And so in this case, the COVID data set which we actually had to aggregate from different sources whether it was the CDC, the world health organization, a state governments, our County governments to provide this to consumers. But it was really, really natural for us because we know what consumers want. We all want information around where we live, right? And then we want to see like where our friends live, where our relatives live to make sure that they're okay. And then if that enables people to make the decisions that are right for their family. And so it was really, really natural for us to do that. And then of course we have the technology to be able to scale to hundreds of millions of people, which is really important. >> Yeah, it's not obvious until you actually think about it, then it's so obvious. Congratulations, what a great innovation what were the biggest challenges you guys had to face and how did you overcome it? Because I'm curious, I see you got a lot of large scale data dealing with diversity of data with weather. What was the challenges with COVID and how did you overcome it? >> So again, without a doubt it was the data, because you're looking at one, we wanted that County level data. So you're looking at multiple sources. So how do we aggregate this data? So first finding that trusted source that we could use but then how do you pull it in, in an automated way? And the challenge was it with the state departments, the County departments, that data came in, all kinds of formats. Some counties used maps, some use charts some use PDFs to get that information. So we had to pull all this unstructured data and then that data was updated at different times. So some counties did it twice a day some did it once a day, different time zones. So that really made it challenging. And so then, so what we did is this is where the power of AI really helps, because AI can take all of that data bring it in, organize it, and then we could put it back out to the consumer in a very digestible way. And so we were able to do that. We built an automated pipeline around that so we can make sure that it was updated. It was fresh and timely, which was really important but without a doubt, looking at that structured data and unstructured data and really helping it to make sense to the consumer was the biggest challenge. And I'll, what's interesting about it. Normally it would take us months to do something like that. I challenged the team to say, we don't have months. We have days. They turned that around in eight days which was just an amazing Herculean feat but that's really just the power of as you said, passionate people coming together to do something so meaningful. >> I love the COVID-19 success stories when people rally around their passion and also their expertise, what was the technology did the team use? Because the theme here at IBM Think is, transformation, innovation, scale. How did you move so fast to make that happen? >> So we moved fast by our AI capabilities and then using IBM cloud. And so really there's four key components or like four teams that worked on it. So first there was the weather company team. And because we are a consumer division of IBM we know what consumers want. So we understand the user experience and the design but we also know how the build an API that can scale because you're talking about being able to scale not only in a weather platform. So in the midst of COVID weather still happen. So we still had severe weather record breaking hurricane season. And so those APIs have to scale to that volume. Then the second team was the AI team. So that used the Watson AI team mixed with the weather AI team to again bring in that data to organize that data. And we use Watson NLP. So natural language processing in order to create that automated pipeline. Then we had the collateral infrastructure. So that platform team that built that architecture and that data repository on IBM cloud. And then the last team was our data privacy office. So making sure that that data was trusted that we have permission to use it and just really that data governance. So it was all of that technology and all of those teams coming together to build this hub for consumers. And it worked, I mean we would have about 4 million consumers looking at that hub every single day. And even like a year later, we still have a couple million people that access that information. So it's really kind of become more like the weather checking the weather, that daily habit. >> That's awesome. And I got to imagine that these discoveries and these innovations that was part of this transformation that scale I've helped other ways outside of the pandemic. Can you share how this is connected to other benefits outside the pandemic? >> Yeah, so absolutely, AI for business is part of IBM strategy. And so really helping organizations to help predict, to help take workloads and automate them. So they're high valued employees can work on other work and also to bring that personalization to customers is really AI. When I look at it for my own part of a IBM with the weather company, three things where I'm using this technology. So the first one is around advertising. So the advertising industry is at a really pivotal part right now, a lot of turmoil and challenges because of privacy legislation because big tech companies are getting rid of tracking pixels that we normally use to drive the business. So we've created a suite of AI solutions for publishers, for different players within the ad tech space which is really important because it protects the open web. So like getting COVID information or weather information all of that is free information to the public. We just ask that you underwrite it by saying advertising so we can keep it free. So those products protect the open read. So really, really important. Then on the consumer side of my business within the weather channel we actually use Watson AI to connect health with weather. So we know that there's that connection. Some health issues that people have can be impacted by weather like allergies and flu. So we've actually used Watson AI to build a risk of flu that goes 15 days out. So we can tell people in your local area this one actually goes down to the zip code level the risk of flu in your area or the risk of allergies. So it help to manage your symptoms, take your prescription. So that's a really interesting way we're using AI and of course, weather.com and our apps are an IBM cloud. So we have this strong infrastructure to support that. And then lastly our weather forecasting has always been rooted in AI. You take a hundred different weather models you apply AI to that to get the best and most accurate forecast that you deliver. And so we are using these technologies every day to move our business forward and to provide weather services for people. >> I just love the automation as users have smartphones and more instrumentation on their bodies, whether it's wearables, people will plan their day around the weather and retail shops will have a benefit knowing what to stock or not have on hand and how to adjust that this the classic edge computing paradigm, fascinating impact. You wouldn't think about that, but that's a pretty big deal. People are planning around the weather data and making that available as critical. >> Oh, absolutely. Every business needs a weather strategy because whether it impacts your supply chain, agriculture should I be watering today or not, even around if you think about energy and power lines, the vegetation growth of our power lines can bring power lines down and it's a disruption, to customers and power. So there's just, when you start thinking about it you're like, wow, weather really impacts every business not to say just consumers in general and their daily life. >> Yeah, and there's a lot of cloud scale too, that can help companies whether it's be part of better planet or smarter planet as it's been called and help with, with global warming. I mean, you think about this is all kind of been contextually relevant now more than ever super exciting, great stuff. I want to get your take on outside of the IBM response to the pandemic, more broadly outside of the weather. What are you guys doing to help? Are you guys doing anything else with industry? How could you, talk a little bit more about IBM's response more broadly to the pandemic? >> Yeah, so IBM has been working with government academia industries really from the beginning in several different ways. The first, one of the first things we did is it opened up our intellectual property. So our IP and our technology, our super computing to help researchers, really try to understand COVID-19, some of the treatments and possible cures. So that's been really beneficial as it relates to that. Some other things though that we're doing as well is we created a Chatbot that companies and clients could use. And this Chatbot could either be used to help train teachers because they have to work remotely or help other workers as well. And also the Chatbot was helping as companies started to reenter back to the workforce and getting back to the office. So the Chatbot has been really helpful there. And then one of the things that we've been doing on the advertising side is we actually have helped the ad council with their vaccine campaign. It's up to you as the name of the campaign. And we delivered a ad unit that can dynamically assemble a creative in real time to make sure that the right message was getting out the right time to the right person. So it's really helped to maximize that campaign to reach people. And they encourage them if it's the right thing for them, where the vaccines are available and that they could take those. So a lot of great work that's going on within IBM and actually the most recent thing just actually in the past month is we released the digital health pass in cooperation with the state of New York. And this is a fantastic tool because it is a way for individuals to keep their private information around their vaccines, or some of the COVID tests they've been having on a mobile device that's secure. And we think that this is going to be really important as cities start to reopen to have that information easily accessible. >> Awesome Sheri, great insight, great innovation navigating COVID-19, lots of innovation transformation at IBM and obviously Watson and the weather company using AI. And also, when we come out of COVID post COVID, as real life comes back, we're still going to be impacted. We're going to have new innovations, new expectations, tracking, understanding what's going on not just the weather. So thanks for doing that great work. Awesome, thank you. >> Great, thanks John. Good to see you. >> This is theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think, I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's theCUBE covering IBM Think, brought to you by IBM. >> Hey, welcome back everybody to theCUBE's continuing coverage of IBM Think 2020, I'm Jeff Frick. We're in our studios in Palo Alto, and this year, IBM Think is digital, so unfortunately we're not all together at Moscone or the Stands or one of your favorite convention sites. We're bringing to you this all from people's homes, and we're excited to have our very next guest. She is Maria Winans, the CMO of North America for IBM. Maria, great to see you. >> Yeah, great to see you, thank you for having me. >> Absolutely, so let's jump into it. IBM Think 2020, the digital experience. You know, we've been going to so many IBM events for so many years, and you used to have them, you would inherit them when you brought in new companies, so there was many, many IBM events, there's a long history of IBM events. It's a really important part of your mix, but then suddenly, in mid-March, you wake up one day, and are told, "Guess what? "You can't do IBM Think in a physical event anymore." So give us a little background on what IBM thinks of events, and how important they are what you use them for, and then a little of the behind the scenes, what happened in mid-March when suddenly this thing had to go digital? >> Yeah, thank you for having me here again. theCUBE has been an integral part of many of our events, from our conferences way back when. So let me start by saying that events are at the core of our marketing strategy for driving value, for driving probe. I mean, they really are about helping us build the brand, events help us foster and nurture relationships for you and existing clients, they help us really establish that leadership. They help shape business and society, and it's a great opportunity for us to showcase our best of features, our new announcements, our product, our functionality through amazing demonstrations and labs, and more importantly, it's a great opportunity for our sellers to progress conversations and to close business. And we do all kinds of variety of events, from breakfasts to what we called roadshows, on the road, impression events, and our premier flagship event, which is Think 2020, it's the one time of year where IBM comes together, and it's a great opportunity to really showcase one idea. And that's what the Think 2020 is about. >> That's awesome. So when you guys, again, woke up mid-March, we got to change this thing, good for IBM to actually hold the date. Most of the people that we work with, which are numerous, either flat out canceled the date, postponed it to some future date where maybe things are a little bit more back to normal, or went with the digital, but even with the digital, they postponed. So as you think about what digital means, what a digital event kind of affords you, I think there's way too much conversation about what digital isn't, vis-a-vis the physical, it just isn't, it's not the same as being together. And yet on the other hand, there's a whole lot of new things you can do on digital, that you just can't do with a physical conference, so how did you guys search those things out, define what a digital event is, and then really get in a position to deliver on that promise? >> Yeah, so let me talk about that in a couple of forms. First of all, we know that our attendees perceive value our event if this really heavily depended on the in-person interactions. So as you think about that, we've had to step back and say, how do we reimagine how we deliver this meaningful, one-to-one engagement that our clients know that in a value, to really now through a digital environment, and really reimagine that whole interaction, while still maintaining that very personalized, best in class experience that our clients value, and that's what really excites me about Think 2020. First of all, we are, so let me just highlight a couple of things of why I think, and I personally am excited about Think 2020. First of all, we have broadened our reach. We are hosting over 50,000 attendees. That's clients, partners, IBMers, influencers, and we reaping a much broader set of roles and influencers who may have not had the ability to travel before to attend an in-person event. Second, complimentary. This will be our first event that of this size, that is free. So we have many more new accounts joining us to learn about IBM for the first time. And this really opens up the doors to new business and opportunities for us. Very targeted agenda. So what we've done is we've taken an event that was going to span over five days to now two days, and we went from over 2,000 sessions that we were going to run to really now, think about how do we feature 200 sessions that are very focused, that are very targeted and very much on point in messaging of really dealing with what our clients are experiencing today with the recent world crisis. Another very exciting thing is lots in media platform. We are leveraging our very own media and AI platform that can host over a million users at once, and really increases the opportunity for engagement. So very interactive experience, you know our labs are sold out. We are completely sold out of our labs, some of our sessions are wait listed, and we're also running the opportunity to do one-on-one meetings for these two days. So while we're not in person, we have a tremendous opportunity to really offer a very interactive experience by introducing live chat throughout the sessions, and really engaging clients with each other and with their sellers during the event. And then for those that cannot attend, or cannot attend all the sessions throughout the day, we are going to have what basically we're calling content on demand. The content will live on, it will live on in different platforms, and we will be delivering the content to our clients, making it accessible at any time whenever it's convenient for them. So super excited about what the teams have done to really step back and reimagine this whole experience maintaining the interactivity, the personal engagement, and really the value add that our clients look for. >> Right, you touched on so many good themes there, and I just want to unpack them a little bit more. The first one that you talked about right off the bat was democratization. And as you said, there are many people that just can't get up and go to a conference, whether it's just bad timing for the week, they've got to run their own business, they just can't get away. So for people to be able to attend digitally, as you said, opens up an entire new pallet of participation for people that maybe couldn't come before. Another thing I think that's lost is this kind of separation of content creation, content delivery, and content consumption which is consistent with how we consume a lot of things today in our media, and very few people sit down, even for big television events, it's like the Super Bowl has really appointment television, we're creating this content now, right, it's going to be going up in the middle of IBM Think, and people might watch it on May 5th, or May 6th, they might watch it on May 10th, they might watch it May 10th 2025. So I think it's a really different way to think about it, and I'm sure as a marketer, at some point you're going to feel a little bit more freedom rather than try to force fit all the product groups and all the announcements and all the sessions, all this stuff that's got to line up for these, well it was three days in Vegas or San Francisco, now can kind of be broken up, and if it makes more sense for some information to get out earlier, it can go out earlier, it can go out later, but you know, a conference is defined by the bounds of that physical location for three days and how much can you guys get in there, where now suddenly, you don't have those binds anymore, and it really opens up a much broader opportunity for you to communicate your messages, keynote messages, product information, training in a very, very different and in some ways, I would bet liberating way. >> Yeah, I think this, what's happening here is an opportunity to really rethink in so many ways how we do marketing and what we talk about when we say digital engagement. You know, we did a recent CMO survey, which we call our C-Suite Survey, and we interviewed over 2000 CMOs, and one of the big conclusions that came out of it was that digital engagement is the future, and the way that really, what it really lands on is the fact that really digital engagement is the fair trade off of information and the exchange of value. So when you really think about that, for us, as marketers, digital engagement and value exchange comes in many forms. How we show up on our own platform, like we're doing here with Watson Media, how we show up during an event, whether it's Webinars or third parties. Even more importantly, the way that our sellers are going to engage virtually. Think about virtual sullying and Webex meetings which is really how they're having to communicate with clients today, and then how we engage socially, and that's really through all the social channels in the work that we do with the influencers. So we're going to learn a lot, we are learning a lot, we're going to test, we're going to iterate, but this whole new normal has given us an opportunity as marketers to really connect the digital and the physical in new ways. And in that, we have to really consider all the multiple facets and elements when we're thinking about digital marketing, and that to me is a tremendous opportunity because digital engagement, there are many elements, and it's going to be super important for all the marketers to really kind of step back and think about, what are those multiple elements that are going to make us, as we think about, how do we stay essential? How do we stay essential with our clients? And that is providing information when they need it, how they want to consume it, and then how do we stay relevant? I think also, when you think about digital engagement, is you got to show flexibility. The ability to pivot strategically and quickly, which is really what we've done with Think. We were ready to move forward on a physical event, amazing event the teams have been working on, and with everything going on, we wanted to maintain May 5th and 6th, we had made a commitment to our clients, and we had to pivot very quickly and be flexible of how do we reimagine Think from physical to now digital. In a digital world, user first experience is a must. It has to be compelling. It has to be an incredible user experience, and the entire experience has to be digitally connected. You know, content, as you said before, content needs to be delivered in unique ways, and where the clients are, not where you want the clients to come, so how does the content find the clients? The relationships. How do we continue to incorporate the human connection? The human connection and build those relationships with the clients, and interacting with them in meaningful ways. And I think one of the things that we've really, over the last couple of years in IBM is grounded in leverage really our data and analytics to better understand behaviors and determine what is that best digital investment, that best touch point at that best time. Very targeted. >> Frick: If it. >> Yeah. >> I'm sorry. >> No go ahead. >> I was going to say, it's just, is it a hook or crook or circumstance, but just kind of an ironic, right, that when you guys were forced to make this pivot, and I think it's a nice statement to IBM that you were able to successfully make this pivot, again, one of the interesting things about COVID is nobody saw it coming, nobody really had time to prep, nobody put in plans, there was no slow transition, it was this light switch moment. But at the same moment in time, you just got a brand new CEO who is extremely social, and Arvind announced his kind of welcome to the world and his leadership changes and some promotions and stuff via a LinkedIn post, which I found really fascinating that he's leveraging the social medium in a way that wasn't necessarily done before at IBM in the leadership suite, and then the fact that you guys are making this quick switch, you took the challenge to keep that date the same, but reinvent Think, again, is a testament to kind of a shift in IBM's culture and ability to move quickly in the face of this new challenge which nobody really saw coming to the degree and speed in which we've had to react, so it's a very, it's a very nice statement on your guys ability to execute. >> Yeah, and it's exciting, I mean I think, when I think about marketing and I've been in marketing most of my career at IBM, it's an opportunity for us to really kind of lean in and put our creative juices to work, really team together and embrace, embrace the opportunity to kind of think differently, and I think when we look at how marketing will progress, and the leadership that we can provide in this digital era, we're going to see a lot more opportunity to get much more personalized, we're going to see ChatBot being used very strategically, as we're seeing them today. We're going to look at opportunities to infuse AI in the experience to augment it, to personalize it, dynamic content delivery. We're experimenting with many platforms to really do that more effectively and recommendation engines and really continue to automate the marketing process and marketing experience all the way through to make it as compelling and as personalized as we can. So a huge opportunity for every marketer in the world, and a huge opportunity that we've embraced in IBM. >> It's just, wow, just the forcing function, just automation, we've been talking about that for a long time, taking away boring tasks so people can focus on higher level activities. But it all kinds of come back to something I want to kind of close on, and that's leadership. And Michelle Peluso had a post a couple of days ago talking about leadership. You responded to it, and we've been reaching out to a lot of the leaders in our community to get their take on, from a leadership perspective, 'cause I think the cream really rises to the top in challenging times, and this is, again, cast upon us, no preparation, ready, set, go. And it is really a call to leadership, it's leading your own people, it's really putting a voice of confidence out to your customer base, as well as just your broader community, so that's partners and all of the constituents that play. So I wonder, we've been in it for a number of weeks now, as you kind of think back on adjusting your own leadership style, as down as well as the leadership within the IBM senior team, great example, being able to pull this Think together and completely flip it on its head, if you will. Wonder if you can share what are you trying to do different, what are some best practices, who are some of the folks you're looking to to give you kind of some tips and tricks to lead in basically from your home office? >> I think challenging times like this, and I've always said it, it is with the opportunity for every leader to step up and rise to the top. Leaders are made during challenging times, leaders become during these, turning challenges into opportunities. So for me, you know as I think about my own leadership style, number one, is you put the people first. Especially during these times, act with compassion and empathy. Focus on the team's help, focus on wellness, focus on making sure that you keep everybody motivated. Lead with energy. And this is back to Michelle's article in LinkedIn, she talked about team matters an awful lot now, and connecting people and making sure that everybody's well being, it's their mind, their wellness, their activity, and they're staying connected. I think the second is productivity, is we have to keep the business going, we have to make sure that the work from home environment is safe and productive and everybody's work environment differently. Everybody has their own challenges and opportunities, and we have to acknowledge that. So productivity is important, but everybody is in their own, and you've got to be aware as a leader of those circumstances. You can't expect everything to be the same for everyone, and you've got to be ready for interruptions. You got to be ready for those kids in the background and dogs barking and certain routines that have to be adjusted to. And I think the third is around staying connected. We have various tools, and we're very fortunate in IBM, and especially in marketing, that we've really embraced the new as far as the way that we communicate using Slack, looking at how do we leverage up our tools to inform our actions in marketing, and staying connected is more important than ever. And we're doing, we're touching teammates more often, I know that I am doing one-on-one calls with my team more often than I would have done otherwise. And then being agile. Whether it's the tools, the process, the culture, for us, embracing agile has been at the core of our marketing transformation, and it's more important than ever that we stay agile, that we continue to work in feedback, in learning, in testing, and in the ways that we know best. And it's an amazing opportunity to try new things. There is no bad idea, be open to innovation, try fast, learn, ready to pivot, you know, and really what's happening in the world has given us an opportunity to really step out of our normal and some amazing ideas are coming forward and at a very fast pace, and we have to be agile and we have to be authentic to our environment. And I'll close with one thing. One of the things that we did as IBMers is we all specifically as leaders, from Arvind to Michelle to every leader at IBM, we've made a pledge. A work from home pledge, that we will support each other, and we are each given examples of the things that we are taking forward to support each other as we're living through this new normal and digital engagement. So, an incredible opportunity for every IBMer and really a prideful moment to stay strong as an IBMer, to stay strong as an individual and a leader. >> Well very good, well it shows that you've been able to accomplish this feat in pull off this really big event in the same time window that you had allocated, and completely flipped it on its mind, so it's a great testament to you, as well as the leadership team and everybody executing up and down the line. So Maria, great to catch up, thanks for your time, and really a pleasure. >> Thank you, thank you. >> All right, she's Maria, I'm Jeff, it's theCUBE's continuing coverage of IBM Think 2020, the digital experience. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (inspirational digital music)

>> Live, from Bellevue, Washington. It's theCUBE. Covering, Smartsheet Engage 18. Brought to you by, Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Smartsheet Engage 2018. I am Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. We are in Bellevue, Washington or, as I like to call it, not Vegas. Excited to welcome to theCUBE, Robin Sherwood, the Senior Director of Product Management at Smartsheet. Hey Robin. >> Hi, how's it goin? >> Great. This is, been a very buzzy morning, for Jeff and I here on this side. Lot's of people, this event has doubled in size. This is your second annual, so... >> Big growth in just a year. There's a, I think, Mark Mader, your CEO, shared some sats this morning. There are 1100 companies represented here customers. >> Correct. >> From twenty countries, there are more than fifty customer speakers, which is, I think there's no more validating voice, than the voice of a customer using the technology. When I was doing some research on Smartsheet, was looking at, you guys are partners with, some of your competitors. One of things I wanted to understand is, where do you have integrations with technology, versus where do you have connectors? What's the difference between those two, and how does is work >> Yeah. >> In a Smartsheet world. >> You know, I think, the integrations really are, where you're going to, you're really interacting with that other product directly, right? So, maybe it's, I want my outbound messages and notifications to go into a Slack channel, right? That's an integration. Or, I want to be able to connect to Google Drive, or 03 Secure, One Drive document, in those native stores. So, that's where we really see an integration. It's something that the end user themselves, is really interacting with. Where you see connectors is more around where I've got big systems of record in my organization, and I need data to flow between those tools. >> Like a Sales Force. >> Like a Sales Force, or a JEAR, or something like that. Microsoft Dynamics, right? I've got data there, when something happens in that system, I need it to flow magically into Smartsheet, or when something happens in Smartsheet, I need it to flow back into those systems. Cause, those are the systems of record, that my company cares about. >> So, a connection is a much bigger step in integration? >> They're just different. >> Connectors are really about the flow of data back and forth between systems of record and integrations are more about user content and user direct interactions. So, things like Drive and Box and Dropbox, and Slack and Teams and, stuff like that. Or, the web content, which we just announced. We want to be able to embed a Youtube video in a dashboard. That's not integrations, it's not, there's no data flowing back and forth, it's just a link, right? >> Got it, thank you. >> Yeah. >> So, lot of customer's we have, I think fifty customer's presenting, which is amazing out of 2,000 people in the whole conference. I don't know what the percentage is, but it's, (laughs), >> Yeah. >> Awfully large. So, just some of the all chatter here. You've been here for a couple of day now, you guys had some early training yesterday. What is some of the things you're picking up? You obviously love to hear back from the customer's. Kind of, what's the buzz on some of the new offerings, and what are you hearing, amongst the constituent here? >> I mean, it's always, you know, this is only our second year. But the energy from them is always amazing. And, you know, people were, I was talking to someone earlier and they were just blown away. By just the big list of things that we shipped, this week. And, as I was reflecting, like, I don't remember doing all that much. But then, when you see it all on one big slide, with everything listed out, it's incredible. So, it's hard to say if anybody latched on to one thing or another. Obviously, there was lots of applause during the product... >> Yes. >> Session, and we're really excited to have shipped, the multi-assign to feature, which has been our number one customer request for a while. But, it's not a, game-changing feature. Whereas, I think some of the Automation Rules ,and Updates there, and Workflow Builder, are really. People are going to go back and it's going to to change the way that they work. And, so people are really excited about that. But, really excited about Dynamic View. And being able to really, taylor the information that is shared across their organization. >> The word collaboration, like symbionic or bi-directional collaboration, popped into my mind. When Gene Pharaoh, your SVP of Product, who we had on earlier, was talking about some of the features and it was a really interesting dynamic with the audience. In that, number of times, you mentioned, the audience broke into applause. And, it probably feels pretty good. Like, yes, we're listening to you, we're doing this. Enabling, them to have technology that allows them to collaborate with and amongst teams and functions within an organization. But, you're also taking their feedback, directly and collaborating with customer's, to further innovate your product. With the spirit of collaboration, we had, Margo Visitacion on from Forrester. And she was talking about the collaborative work management CW as an emerging market. With respect to collaboration, you guys can enable sharing. I can be a licensed user, and share it with you who's not. How is that type of collaboration a differentiator for Smartsheet? >> Well, you know, I think there's a lot of tools where they're collaborative where you can comment on them. Google Doc, and that's great. But, I think where Smaresheet really excels, is really in this free collaborator model. That's not bounded by your particular organization or your team. And it really allows you to create, to spread, and create connections across customer's and vendors and other orgs within your team. And, this is where you're starting to see this these sort of step function changes in these organizations. Where, you know, you see this Office Depot example. And, he talks about, you know, taking a workflow in their organization they, going from, you know, four to six weeks, down to twenty-four hours. And, enabling people who are putting in budget request, to take action on that request, the next day. And, those are the kinds of things, that are going to fundamentally change those businesses. And so, that's where I think the collaboration piece is really powerful. You can't get that kind of compression in time. Unless, you can really span those traditional business hours. >> So Robin, one of the great things that happens always is, with tech companies is the application versus the platform exchange, right? Everybody wants to have a platform, it's really important. You get an ecosystem, lot of stuff going on, but nobody's got a line item in their budget for 2019 to buy a new platform, right? >> It's always, >> Correct >> Application centric, right. I got a problem, I've got to fix it. At the same time, you guys, you do have a platform. Meaning, you can go across a lot of different applications. So, when you're trying to balance out your priorities with the platform. Priority, in terms of more of, kind of a general purpose underly, versus and app priority, like you said, multi, how do you call... >> Multi-assignment. Yeah. >> Multi-assignment, you assign two people to the (laughs). To the no correct product management protocol, but everybody wants it, cause it's the real world. How do you kind of prioritize that? How do yo kind of look at the world when you're deciding, what are you going to roll out next, what are you going to roll out next, ware are you going to roll out next? >> It starts and ends with having conversations with real people. We've taken lots of data and we have enhancement request and usage data on how people use the product. Multi-assigning, actually, was less than 3% of all answered request in the last couple of years. But, it's our number one request. And so, it sort of. >> Oh, Wait, wait wait. So it was less than 3%. >> Of all enhancement request. >> But it was number one? >> But it's our number one. >> So you've got a giant laundry list. >> Giant laundry list of things, right. So, we can't just look at some metric and go, these are the next features we should build because we have this really strong signal. We actually, have a very, very weak signal when we look at it from a quantitative standpoint. So what we have to do is we really have to dig into these customer use cases. We have to meet with them. All of our project teams have dedicated researchers, and dedicated user experience. People that are going out, we're actually talking to people. We're testing stuff with them and we're trying to understand what commonalities exist between multiple cases across all of these different use cases. Because, there're so many different ways people use the product. There not enough people asking for one thing. >> Right. >> They're all asking for slightly different things. So, we really have to dig in and have a real, qualitative conversation with them. To understand, and bring that back and say okay, these things are related. We can build something that solves, all of these problems in a compelling way. >> Well, it's definitely more than 3% of the people cheer. When, when that. (laughs) >> Yes. >> When the feature was announced, that's for sure. So the other, kind of (mumbles), that you've got to wrestle with is, kind of a low code, no code, we want to be for everybody, yet at the same time, you want a sophisticated application. You want integrations and connectors to all these other applications. So, again, that's kind of a delicate, balancing act as well. Cause, you want to let everyone have access to be able to manipulate the tool, work with the tool, set up the tool, but at the same time, you got to keep it, pretty sophisticated to connect to all these other things. How do you kind of balance those. >> Well we... >> Priorities. >> We just try to hide as much of that as possible. You know, Smartsheets always been this tool, where it's like, it sort of looks like a spreadsheet, and it sort of looks like project management. But it's got this underlying flexibility built into it. We don't force you to, you know, if you've got a date column, we don't force you to put a date in there. If you don't know the answer, you can type in TBD. Whereas, a lot of purpose built applications, their like, this is a date, you have to enter it in the proper date format, or it doesn't work. We've always had this, sort of, flexibility and complexity trade off. The trade off is, if you give us real data, if you give us something that looks like a date, we'll draw a Gantt Chart for you. We don't need much more, it doesn't need to be more (mumbles) than that. We just won't draw the bar if you type in TBD. And so, we've always sort of danced this line, with making the tool super flexible and assume the users know what they're doing. When they're interacting withhe tool we assume they an intention and they're trinna do something. And, we shouldn't force them down a particular path. And that, sort of, plays out in all these features. The other thing that we do, is like I mentioned earlier, we do a lot of user research and we get in front of a lot of customers. And we put stuff out there, well in advance in releasing it. In a situation like this, we announced a bunch a capabilities around workflow and multi-step approvals and multi-step workflows. And, I think that's a complex feature set. That's gone through more iterations of design and review and scrapping it and back to the drawing board, than any feature I've seen at this company. But, it's probably one of the more complex features we've ever build, as well. And so that's what we would expect, right? We're not going to get this right, by just having a bunch of designers and engineers sit in a room and go, oh, we know that perfect solution to workflow management. >> Right. >> Most of our customer's don't even necessarily, use the term workflow. >> And if you look in the app, it doesn't even say. It says words and actions. You know? And little things with words matter. We have technical writers that are very specific on what we label something. It's not an if statement. It's when this happens, do this. And there's a lot of nuance and subtlety into all of this. To try and drive the complexity out of it as much as possible. >> Right. >> You can't avoid it, but you know. >> So, in hiding it, the last thing which your going to do, going forward is machine learning and artificial intelligence. Which we hear about all the time, but really the great opportunity in the field, is for you to leverage that under the covers. To hide. >> Absolutely. >> The nasty complexity to help suggest the right answer. To help suggest the right path. So, that's got to be a huge part of your roadmap. Integrating those types of capabilities, underneath the covers. >> Yeah and, there's been a lot of, we've have had tons of discussions and obviously we bought the Converse Chatbot Company back in January. And, that's been a huge sort of arrow in our quiver, so to speak, right, in that regard. We feel that we have a lot of really good information. But, at the same time, there's a lot of talk about machine learning and AI. And, the reality is, that relies on huge data sets. And it relies on a lot of analysis. And that data is not something that we can just look at, right? We take our customer's data, security data privacy very seriously. And we don't have access to that kind of information. So we need to look at this, the machine learning and the AI capabilities from a very different lens, then say a consumer product. That's sort of, you're getting to use it for free, they sort of do whatever they want with your data. And you don't really have a lot of recourse, other than leave the product. We don't start from that, we start from, your data is yours, you own it, we can't look at it. But we want to enable you, to turn these types of features on. So, we need to look at more of like an off-end model, where a customer can say oh, if I'm a big enterprise user at Smartsheet, I can turn certain capabilities on for my users, knowing that that information is going to stay in our, is going to comply with our data governance, and our data privacy rules. That our IT team puts forward. >> So the spirit of talking about abstraction, abstracting complexity, Hiding it, (mumbles). I'm curious, when you walk into a customer. Cause here we are in Bellevue, we're not in Vegas, But, we're neighors with AWS, with Microsoft, Microsoft announced Teams, about eighteen months, or so, ago. You partner with both, you compete, but you, also, you're competing with Teams. When you walk into a customer and an enterprise, likely has a mixture of, tons of different software appications, right. But they probably have, 360, Office 365, Para Bi, Excel... Why would a customer, who has such a familiarity with, say a Microsoft, work with Smartsheet versus, well we'll just extend our Microsoft expertese and bring in something like Teams? >> Yeah. >> I'm just curious, what...You've seen in that? >> Well, you know, I think it's that Smartsheet's always been good at sort of, orchestrating the actual work that's being done. And, there's a lot of tools out there where, you're having conversations and tools out there where you're creating content, and there's not a lot of tools out there, that are sort of bringing the conversation and the content together. In an actionable and accountable way, right? And that's the sort of, Gene will, you'll sometimes here hims say, use this term, shared fabric. The Smartsheet, really provides this shared fabric, that ties a bunch of these tool together. And we really, we want to partner with all these people, because every organization is different. Every organization has a different set of tools that they've already embraced. They have a different set of goals around how many tools they're going to embrace. You talk to some customer, they're like, I love Smartsheet, it's going to allow me to get rid of ten apps. And, you talk to another customer that's equal size or equal complexity two minutes later, then they'll be like, I love Smartsheet, it allows me to work with all the tools that I've already got. Very different, and they just have to different coperate goals and objectives there. And so, I think that the reason people like Smartsheet, is it doesn't, it's back to that kind of, hey, you don't have to put a date in a date cell. It's flexible. It's going to work with you and not force you to adopt the Smartsheet way about things. It's going to say look, oh, if you want to use, if you want to us Teams for your communications vehicle, and One Drive for all of your document storage, great. You want to embed a PowerPoint document in a dashboard in Smartsheet, great. We want that to be the case. We do that internally, right, we use all those. If you look at us internally, we're just like every other mordern company. We have a dozen tools or two dozen tools that we're using. And it's different from team to team and department to department. So, it's all about just embracing the reality, that as modern business and modern application, the ecosystem of applications that we all deal with on a day-to-day basis. >> So that flexibility is key. So we said about 1100 companies represented here, at this event. 2,000 people or so, fifty plus customer speakers. Is there one customer example that comes to mind, whether they're speaking here or not, that really is a great demonstrator of, we have a plethora of applications in our environment. We want to work with Smartsheet because it enables us to integrate and use these tools so much better? I didn't mean to put you on the spot. >> Yeah, no. I'm trinna think of a good. I don't know that I have a good standout example. I think that we hear little tidbits of that from everyone. And it's not, it's a very common theme. So, I don't know that. It's sort of back to the 3% thing, right? Nobody really stands out because everyone is doing that. Everyone is, I hear things, I'm going to replace this tool because you did this. Or, I'm going to now pull, integrate with this tool because, you've added this. So, you sort of take some and give some, on the same sentence almost. >> Yeah. You can do both. >> Yeah. >> Well Robin, thanks so much for stopping by. We appreciate your time. We're excited to be here. This is our first Smartsheet event. And we have some customers coming up, so looking forward to hearing some more these cases in action. >> Great, thanks a lot. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. You're watching us from Smartsheet Engage, in Bellevue, Washington. Stick around, Jeff and I will be right back, with our next guest. (tech music) (tech music) (tech music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity. And theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by David Willis, he is the corporate VP US One Commercial Partner at Microsoft. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> My pleasure, thanks for inviting me today. >> So, congrats on a great show. This has been a lot of fun. We've been here three days. It's our first time here, it's been a great show. >> Yeah, yeah we're really excited about it. There's I mean a lot of energy from our customers and our partners. Talking a lot to partners and customers. Everybody's going through digital transformation right now. They're either being disrupted or they plan to disrupt. They know that, they know they have to get ahead of that. And so, digital transformation's a big theme we're hearing today. And then some of the technology's that we're really driving hard. Artificial Intelligence is a very hot topic this week and as I meet with partners I run the partner for the US, but actually meeting with a lot of customers here this week. And what we're seeing is a lot of our customers are actually looking to Microsoft to become partners, as they leverage the Cloud solutions to bring value to market. And that can be IT companies that are either delivering services and MSP or on premise that now with the Cloud they can go to the market with us. But sometimes it's a company that say makes equipment for manufacturers, and they see an opportunity to turn on an IoT device with that product. Deliver more value to the customer, and as a result we can go to market with that customer to those manufacturing companies. So there's some really interesting evolutions that we're seeing in the business. At this specific event, I've been meeting back to back with customers, talking about how we can partner together and go to market, it's really exciting. >> David I feel like you watched our intro talking about they keynote on day one. Because we said Microsoft itself is going through a digital transformation. And the question we had coming in is well, how does that transformation line up with your customers and partners. So you've been with the company almost 26 years now. >> That's right yeah. >> I want you to talk about digital transformation but before, questions we ask a lot of the Microsoft guests is, what's the same and what's different about the Satya Nadella Microsoft compared to what you've done in the past? >> Yeah we've gone through a lot of changes over the years since I joined in 1992 for sure and a lot of it's fun. I got to say, I'm more excited now then I ever have been. Part of it is just the momentum we have with our Cloud solutions and the opportunity that's available to us and our partners and quite frankly our customers as well. And Satya talks about our mission, empowering every person, every organization on the planet to achieve more. But loosely translated the way I see it it's all about customer success, and when Satya got up in front of our new hirers. We have this mock program which is kind of, new employees coming out of school. And he said, listen you don't join Microsoft to be cool, you join Microsoft to make others cool, which is our customers and so, that's a radical change in how we think and how just the culture is at Microsoft, and it's really exciting. But then add to that, the technology we're lining up. We got four key solution areas and not sure how familiar we're from a modern workplace around office, seeing some amazing take-up with teams right now and as I talk to partners, they're really excited about the momentum around teams. Dynamics as well. We're seeing some great take-up from customer experience right through to finance and operations scenarios. And of course Azure, I mean the growth and momentum we're seeing across apps and infrastructure data and AI is just fantastic. But at the end if they day again, it's all around using that technology and those solutions to enable digital transformation for our customers so that they can succeed. >> Azure is having tremendous momentum, talk to our viewers a little bit about what you're seeing. >> Yeah so Azure I think I guess the biggest differentiators we hear from our partners that I'm meeting and our customers quite frankly are many dimensions. One is around just how we're focused on developers to make them more productive, 'cause it's for them it's all about how can I be more agile, develop applications faster for my business or just to bring to market. So that's one key piece. The fact that we have a hybrid solution as well. We're consistent from on-premise to cloud, is very big for customers because very few customers are willing to go 100% into Cloud right away. They got a vision, they want to get there, but knowing they can balance that with a consistent management approach and security infrastructure as well. Intelligence is big too. So as I said, being able to as you have all this data and the accumulation of big data that's happening. Being able to apply machine learning. Apply cognitive services solutions like Chatbot and other agents. And of course A.I. is a big one. And then lastly trust, and that was a key, Satya talked a lot about that at our, at his keynote around trust, and really differentiating ourselves from that perspective in the sense that we got over 70 certifications to meet various compliance standards. And GDPR on privacy is a big focus for us, it's while it started in the EU it's actually pretty high in our North America customer list as well from a priority stand point, so that's helping. But quite frankly, when I meet with partners, what they love is this go-to-market approach. So we've got a large sales force, that our partners can plug into and take advantage of as we go to marker together. And obviously technology one key element, pricing is another key element. But knowing that they can work with us to go to market. We're not going to compete with them in any way. You know we're really clear on what our proposition is and how we go to market, it's a big value proposition as well. >> David we can throw down a bit on the partner ecosystem, because there are some partners that have been going through that digital transformation like with Microsoft. There's other that started out, Cloud-Native if you will. Cloud first and talk a little bit about the changes that at Amex that you see in the ecosystem. How many of them start out their businesses on Azure versus the other options. >> Sure, yeah I mean partners have always been a big part of our business model at Microsoft since day one. And in many ways it's been a large part of our success being able to scale and reach a broad audience. But I would say now with Cloud services partners are more important now than ever before. And as we focus on customer success, not just delivering technology, not just licensing technology, but actually focus on customer success. We need partner solutions. Like what Cohesity provides, to provide that last mile of functionality and capability that customer are looking for, and that's why this ecosystem is really growing at a rapid pace for us, which is really exciting. And then the other piece that we're putting a lot more emphasis on now particularly as many of our partners are becoming more focused with specialized I.P. and really, we're encouraging partners to just really be clear on what you do best. It's creating this opportunity for partners to partner with other partners. And so we're developing this whole ecosystem, which provides great opportunities for a partner like Cohesity to work with say one of our service delivery partners to go to market together, and achieve 1 plus 1 equals more than just two, which was really exciting. And then the value brought up to customers is that we can just provide that many more solutions, and then solutions that they can provide us. They make all about Microsoft and so the value prop there is super high. >> So I mean this is what we, it's been a continual theme of this conference and also here on theCUBE is the breadth and depth of this ecosystem. I mean, and you've just described how partners are partnering with others and I mean, what's sort of the end point? Is it just going to get, that ever vaster? I mean I don't even know if that the right word but-- >> I believe so, I mean we estimate that total digital transformation opportunity on a global level to be $4.5 trillion. You look at the size of Microsoft and our competitors we're nowhere close to that, so that's why I say this opportunity is just tremendous, and new solutions are being developed all the time that we hadn't even thought of or dreamt of before. And partners are just, I mean that's what I love about our partners. They're so innovative, and they bring these new solutions to market and so, hey as far as I'm concerned, it's infinite. I mean, there's just so much opportunity out there and some of the opportunity we don't even know about just yet. >> David one of the challenges is just the pace of change is just keeps increasing, it's the only this constant in our industry I think. Talk about how you work with your partners, how training is involved, is there any things you've done from certification towards levels, you usually hear the gold platinum and like that has changed in the last few years to enable this. >> Yeah I would say we're really focused on simplifying how to work with Microsoft, it's been a big focus for us, a year ago we went through a major field re-organization you may be aware of. Where we lined up our sales teams by industry as an example so they can really drive value to customers. And one thing we do with partners was we were highly fragmented. So we had enterprise partners in with our enterprise sales teams. We had SMB partners over with small medium business groups. We had ISVs kind of over here so, that's why we call the one commercial partner group in my title, in my org. As we pulled all that together into one organization so we could really simplify how to engage with Microsoft from a partner perspective. And then we clarified, we really have three primary functions that within my team the partners plug into. I build-with, I go to market, and I sell with. Pretty straight forward. Build with, was hey, you want to build an application or solution or develop a new practice area. I've got tactical resources and other resources that can help partners build that solution or practice. On the go to market side I've got a whole marketing team that can sit down with a partner who may not 'cause a lot of our partners actually don't have marketing expertise. They're great at technology, great solution, but they need help, and so I get marketing people who are assigned to help them build a marketing campaign and go-to-market. We got lots of great funded programs as well. And then I've got this, this sell-with team and they're actually aligned to out field sales teams and they plug partners into our field sales teams. So, you can imagine every now forecasting meeting that happens or pipeline review with our sales teams. I've got somebody sitting at that table representing partners and plugging partners into our Go-to-Market focus and so, partners are living that, and our one of the metrics we track is partner attached to pipeline. A year ago when we started on this journey, 25% was a partner attached to a pipeline. We're up to almost 90% now in terms of partner attached to a pipeline as a result of having that direct connection into our field team. So it's really, again that simplifying how you build with or be clear on how we do that, how we go to market together then how we co-sale together. >> Yeah, as I look for and I hear the places where Microsoft is leading towards the future, talk about A.I., talk about IoT, I mean I heard about Microsoft even creating products down to some of the Edge device. That's going to propose even more challenges to the broadening and deepening of the ecosystem. What should we look to see from Microsoft? How do you plan, for kind of that future of even more diversity? >> In terms of more partner and more capability yeah I mean we've got a major partner recruitment effort. But quite frankly a lot of our new solutions actually comes from our existing partners. So they're looking to round out, set-up new practice areas. So we're always willing and open to sit down with partners to help them map-out that future as well and then, we got a whole lot of partners out there including partners outside the U.S that want to come to the U.S to help partner with us so we try to be as welcoming as possible because there is so much opportunity, to your question earlier that we can all go after together. >> I want to ask about cultures. So, Satya Nadella up on the main stage and in various media reports and interviews. He talks about Microsoft's culture, the culture he wants to create and cultivate. Creativity, collaboration, inclusiveness, a real embracing of diverse perspectives. >> Right. >> So, that sounds great especially in an industry where the tech culture has pretty much a bad reputation as not being diverse, being relentless and competitive. What's it like to work there? I mean you've been there nearly three decades. >> Yeah, as I said it's, well actually it really starts in what we call the growth mind-set. I think Satya talked about that on Monday, we talk about it all the time so I can't remember when it's talked about or not but this approach is different. It's not that we know what we're doing, we're growing really well, stocks flying all this kind of stuff. It's not about kind of just getting excited about those accomplishments. It's all around, hey how can I learn more, and how can I do more and capture those learnings and just grow in the market. So it's really founded in this growth mind-set. But then the three key elements that sit on top of that, are around customer obsession, so I talked about that, putting the customer first. It's around one Microsoft, where we can't operate in silos we need to work together, and be selfless as possible, so that we can achieve greatness together. And then diversity and inclusion is a big focus for us. We put a lot of emphasis on that. And that includes, bringing in a diverse workforce. We got a really big focus on that. And there's good business reasons for that as well. Our customers are diverse. We want to make sure we're developing products and interacting with our customers from that perspective as well. But then inclusion's important as well. One of the ways we look at it and say, diversity is being invited to the party. Inclusion actually feeling welcomed while you're at the party. And so, that's why this reinforcement of inclusion of not just race and gender and other things like that, but it's you're backgrounds, what's on your resumes or just how you think or how your personal style as well. And that's a big cultural change we've been going through the last few years I wouldn't have said was around as strong in the early part of my career at Microsoft. >> So how do you do it? How do you make sure I mean the hiring as you said the numbers are bearing out, then how do you make sure people do feel comfortable and that they have a seat at the table? >> Yeah I think, I mean in starts at the top. So we got the best cheerleader with Satya, I mean he reinforced this throughout and his leadership team and down and I lead a large organization as well. And it's a top priority for me. We review that regularly. And it's not even just within Microsoft as well. Um, so we're actually doing a lot with our channel. We believe our channel could be a lot more diverse as well. So, as an example we started up this Women in Cloud initiative within the U.S., and we've got, led by Gretchen O'Hara who runs my go-to-market marketing team. Doing a great job, literally up to hundreds now of women that are in our channel that are learning from each other, sharing from each other, supporting each other. But also people like myself and other males and others getting involved to help nurture that environment and make sure that everybody feels really comfortable that hey this diversity and inclusion thing it's really really good for all of us. It's not only, the right thing, it's also good for business. >> Right, exactly. Yeah, great. Well thank you so much David for coming on theCUBE. It was great talking to you. Great conversation. >> Yeah my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

live from San Francisco it's the cube covering Google cloud next 2018 brought to you by Google cloud and its ecosystem partners ok welcome back everyone we're live here in San Francisco this is the cubes exclusive coverage of Google clouds event next 18 Google next 18 s the hashtag we got two great guests talking about services kubernetes sto and the future of cloud aparna scene how's the group product manager of kubernetes and we have hen goldberg director of engineering of google cloud - amazing cube alumni x' really awesome guests here to break down why kubernetes why is Google cloud really doubling down on that is do a variety of other great multi cloud and on-premise activities guys welcome to the queue great to see you guys again thank you always a pleasure and again you know we love kubernetes the CN CF and we've talked many times about you know we were riffing and you know Luke who Chuck it was on Francisco who loves sto we thought service meshes are amazing you guys had a great open source presence with cube flow and a variety of other great things the open source contribution is recognized by Diane green and the whole industry as number one congratulations why is this deal so important we're seeing the big news at least for me this kind of nuances one datos available you get general availability we're supposed to be kind of after kubernetes made it but now sto is now happening faster why so what we've seen in the industry is that it only becomes too easy to create micro services or services overall but we still want to move fast so with the industry today how can you make sure that you have the right security policies how do you manage those services at scale and what if tio does really in one sense is to expand it it's decoupled the service development from the service operations so developers are free they don't need to take care of monitoring audit logging network traffic for example but instead the operation team has really sophisticated tool to manage all of that on behalf of the developers in a consistent way you know Penn and I did a session yesterday a spotlight session and it covered cloud services platform including ISTE oh we had a guest from eBay and eBay has been with Google kubernetes engine for a long time and they're also a contributor to the kubernetes open source project they talked about how they have hundreds of micro services and they're written in different languages so they're using gold Python Ruby everything under the Sun and as an operator how do you figure out how the services are communicating with each other how do you know which ones are healthy so they I asked him you know so how did you solve that complexity problem and he said boom you assist EO and I deployed this deal it deploys as just kind of like a sidecar proxy and it's auto injected so none of your developers have to do anything and then it's available in every service and it gives you so much out of the box it gives you traffic management it gives you security it gives you observability it gives you the ability to set quotas and to have SL o--'s and and that's really you know something that operators haven't had before describe SL lows for a second what is why is that important objectives so you can see an example so you can have an availability objective that this service should always always be available you know 99.9 percent of the time that's an SLO or you know the response rate needs to be have a certain type of latency so you can have a latency SLO but the key here with this deal is that as an operator previously Jeff was working Jeff from eBay he was working at the at the VM or container or network port level now he's working at the service level so he understands intelligence about the parts of the application that weren't there before and that has two things it makes him powerful right and more intelligent and secondly the developer doesn't need to worry about those things and I think one of the things for network guys out there is that it's like policy breeze policy to the equation now I want to ask course on the auto injections what's the role of the how much coding is involved in doing this zero coding how much how much developer times involved in injecting the sidecar proxies zero from a developer perspective that's not something that you need to worry about you you can focus on you know the chatbot your writing or the webpage your writing or whatever logic you're developing that's critical for your business that's gonna make you more competitive that's why you were hired as a developer right so you don't have to worry about the auto injection of sto and what we announced was really managed it's d1 gke so that's something that Google will manage for you in the future oh go ahead I want less thing about sto I think it also represented changing the transformation because before we were all about kubernetes and containers but definitely when we see the adoption the complexity is much broader so in DCP were actually introducing new solutions that are appropriate for that so easier for example works on both container eyes applications and VM based applications cloud build that we announced right it also works across applications of all types doesn't have to be only containers we introduced some tools for multi cluster management because we know all customers have multi cluster the large ones so really thinking about it how is in a holistic way we are solving those problems we've seen Google evolve its position in the enterprise clearly when we John and I first started talking to Google about cloud is like everything's going to cloud now we're seeing a lot of recognition of some of the challenges that enterprises face we heard a lot of announcements today that are resonating or going to resonate with the enterprise can you talk about the cloud services platform is that essentially your hybrid strategy is it encompass that maybe you could talk about that little bit closer services platform is a big part of our hybrid cloud strategy I mean for as a Google platform we also have networking and compute and we bridge private and public and that's a foundation but cloud services platform it comes from our heritage with open source it comes from our engagement with many large enterprises banks healthcare institutions retailers do so many of them here you know we had HSBC speaking we had target speaking we know that there are large portions of enterprise IT that are going to remain on premise that have to remain on premise because you know they're in a branch office or they have some sort of regulatory compliance or you know that's just where their developers are and they want to have a local environment so so we're very very sensitive and and knowledgeable about that and that's why we introduced cloud services platform as Google's technology in your environment on Prem so you can modernize where you are at your own pace so some of the things we heard today in the keynote we heard support for Oracle RAC and Exadata and sa P that's obviously traditional enterprises partnership with NetApp cloud armor shielded VMs these are all you know traditional enterprise things what enterprise grade features should we be looking for from cloud services platform so the first one which I actually love the most is the G key policy management one of the things we've heard from our customers they say okay portability is great consistency great but we want security portability right they now have those all of those environment how can they ensure that they're combined with the gtp are in all of their environments how they manage tenants in all of their environments in the same way and G key policy measurement is exactly that okay we're allowing customers to apply the same policy while not locking them in okay we're fully compatible with the kubernetes approach and the primitives of our bug enrolls but it is also aligned with G CPI M so you can actually manage it once and apply it to all your environment including clusters kubernetes cluster everywhere you have so I expect we'll have more and more effort in this area I'm making sure that everything is secured and consistent auto-scaling is that enterprise greed auto-scaling yes yes I mean auto-scaling is a inherent part of kubernetes so kubernetes scales your pods automatically that's a very mature I mean it's been stable for more than a year or probably two years and it's used everywhere so auto skip on auto scaling is something that's used and everywhere the thing about gke is that we also do cluster auto scaling cluster auto scaling is actually harder and we not only do it for CPU as we do it for GPUs which is innovative you know so we can scale an auto scale and auto implements Auto provision your GPUs if you machine learning we're gonna bring that on-prem - it's not in the first version but that's something that with the approach that we've taken to GK on Prem we're gonna be adding those kinds of capabilities that gonna be the go on parameters it's just an extension just got to get the job done or what time frame we look API that we've built it's a downward API that works with some sort of hardware clustering technology right now it's working with vSphere right and so it basically if you're under an underlying technology has that capability we will auto scale the cluster in the future you know I got to say you guys are like the dynamic duo of kubernetes seen you in the shows you had Linux Foundation events talk about the relationship between you guys you have an engineering your product management how were you guys organizer you're moving fast I mean just the progress since we've been interviewing you to CN CF segoe all just been significant since we started talking on the cube you see in kubernetes obviously you guys have some inside knowledge of that but it's really moving fast how is the team organized what's the magic internal formula that you guys are engineering and you guys are working as a team I've seen you guys opens is it just open stores is the internal talk about some of the dynamics we're working as one team one thing I love mostly about the Google culture is about doing the right thing for the user like the announcements you've seen yesterday on the on the keynote there are many many teams and I've been working together you know to get that done but you cannot see that right you don't see that there are so many different teams and different product managers and different engineering managers all working together but well I I think where we are right now I know is that really Google is backing up kubernetes and you can see it everywhere right you can see with ours our announcement about key native yeah for example so the idea of portability the idea of no lock-in is really important for us the idea of open cloud freedom of choice so because we're all aligned to that direction and we all agree about the principles is actually super easy to the she's very modest you know this type of thing doesn't just happen by itself right I mean of course google has a wonderful culture and we have a great team but I you know I really enjoy working with hen and she is an amazing leader she is the leader of the engineering team she also brings together these other teams you know every large company has many teams and the announcement at the scale that we made it and the vision that you see the cohesiveness of it right it comes from collaboration it comes from thinking as a team and you know the management and leadership depend has brought to the kubernetes project and to kubernetes and gke and cloud services platform is phenomenal it's an inspiration I really enjoy the progress congratulate and it's been great progress so I hear a lot of customers talk about things like hey you know they evaluate vendors you know those guys have done the work and it's kind of a categorical way of saying it's complete they're working hard they're doing the right things as you guys continue this mission what's some of the work that you're continuing to what's the work that you guys are doing the work we see some of that evidence if it does ascribe to someone says hey have you done the work to earn the cred in the crowd cloud what would it be how would you describe the work that you've done and the work that you're doing and continue to do what does that work what would you say that I mean I hope that we have done the work to you know to earn the credit I think we're very very conscientious you know in the kubernetes open source project I can say we have 300 plus contributors we are working not just on the future functionality but we work on the testing and the we work on the QA we work on all the documentation stuff we work on all the nitty-gritty details so I think that's where we earn the credit on the open source side I think in cloud and in Enterprise do well you're seeing a lot of it here today you know the announcements that you mentioned we're very very cognizant and I think the thing I like about one of the things that Diane said I liked very much as I think the industry underestimates us well when you talk about well we look at the kubernetes if I can call it a playbook it took the world by storm obviously solving some of your own problems you open source it develop the community should we think about it Co the same it's still the same way are you going to use that sort of similar approach it seems to be working yes doing open source is not easy okay managing and investing and building something like kubernetes requires a lot of effort by the way not just from Google we have a lot of people that working full time just on kubernetes the way we look at that we we look about the thing that we have valued the most like portability for example if there is anything that you would like to make a standard like with K native those are kind of thing that we really want to bring to the industry as open source technologies because we want to make sure that they will work for customers everywhere right we need we need to be genuine and really stand behind what we were saying to our customers so this is the way we look at things again another example you can see about Q flow right so we actually have a lot of examples or we want to make sure that we give those options so that's one it's one is for the customer the second thing I want actually the emphasize is the ecosystem and partners yeah we know that innovation not a lot of innovation will come from Google and we want to make sure that we empower our powders and the ecosystem to build new solutions and is again another way to do it yes I mean because we're talking before we came on camera about the importance of ecosystems Dave and I have covered many industries within you know enterprise and now cloud and big data and I see blockchain on the horizon another part of our coverage area ecosystems are super important when you have openness and you have inclusion inclusion Airy culture around building together and co-creation this is the ethos of open source but people need to make money right so at the end of the day we're you guys are not you're not a non-profit you know it's gonna make profit so instead of the partners so as the world turns to cloud there's going to be new value opportunities how do you guys view that ecosystem because is it yeah is it more educational is it more just keep up a lot of people want to be on the right side of history with cloud and begin a lot of things are changing how do you guys view that ecosystem in terms of nurturing it identifying it working with it building it sharing what's your thoughts sure you know I I believe that new technology comes with lots of opportunity we've seen this with kubernetes and I think going forward we see it it's not a zero-sum game you know there's a huge ecosystem that's grown up around kubernetes and now we see actually around sto a huge ecosystem as well the types of opportunities in the value chain I think that it changes it's not what it used to be right it's not so much I think taking care of hardware racking and stacking hardware it's higher level when we talked about SEO and how that raises the level of management I think there's a huge role for operators it's a transformative role you know and we've seen it at Google we have this thing called site reliability engineering sre it's a big thing like those people are God you know when it comes to your services I think that's gonna happen in the enterprise that's gonna be a real role that's an Operations role and then of course developers their life changes and I think even like for regular people you know for kids for you and I and normal people they can become developers and start writing applications so I think there's a huge shift that's a huge thing you're touching on a lot of areas of IT transformation you know talking about the operations piece we've touched upon some of the application development how do you guys look at IT transformation and what are some of your customers doing IT transformation is enabled by you know this raising of the level of abstraction by having a multi cluster multi cloud environment what I see in in the customer base is that they don't want to be limited to one type of cloud they don't want to be limited to just what's on Prem or just what's in one you know in any one cloud they want to be able to consume best-of-breed they want to be able to take what they have and modernize it even if it's even if they can't completely rewrite or even if they can't completely transform it they want to be able they wanted to be able to participate so they even they want their mainframes to be able to participate but yeah I had one customers say you know I I don't want to have two platforms a slow platform and a fast platform I want just a fast platform know about the future now as we end the segment here I want to get your thoughts we're gonna see CN CF s coming up to Seattle in a couple months and also his ST O's got great traction with I'll see with the support and and general availability but what's the impact of the customers because gke Google Cabernets engine is evolving to be the single in her face it's almost as ease of use because that's a real part of what you guys are trying to do is make it easy the abstraction layer is gonna create new business models obviously we see that with the transformation fee she were just mentioning the end of the day I got to operate something I'm a network guy I'm now gonna might be a operating the entire environment I'm gonna enable my developers to be modern fast or whatever they want to be in the day you got to run things got to manage it so what does gke turn into what's the vision can you share your thoughts on on how this transforms and what's the trajectory look like so our goal is actually to help automate that for our customers so they can focus elsewhere as we said from the operations perspective making things more reliable defining the SLO understanding what kind of service they want to provide their customers and our hope you know you can again you can see in other things that we are building like Auto ml okay actually giving more tools to provide those capabilities to the application I think that's really see more and more so the operators will manage services and they will do it across clusters and across environments this is this is a new skill set you know it's the sre skill set but but even bigger because it's not just in one cloud it's across clouds yeah it's not easy they're gonna do it with centralized policy centralized control security compliance all of that so you see us re which is site reliability engineers at Google term but you see that being a role in enterprises and it's also knowing what services to use when what's going to be the most cost effective the right service for the right job that's really an important point I agree I think yeah I think security I think cost perspective was something definitely that will see enterprises investing more in and understanding and how they can leverage that right for their own benefit the admin the operator is gonna say okay I've got this on Prem I've got these three different regions I have to be that traffic coordinator to figure out who can talk to who where should this traffic go there's who should have how much quota all of that right that's the operator role that's the new roles so it's a it's an opportunity for operations people who might have spent their lives managing lawns to really transform their careers yes there's no better time to be an operator I mean you can I want to be an operator and I can't tell you how my dear sorry impacts our team like the engineering team how much they bring the focus on customer the service we are giving to our customers thinking about our services in different ways I think that actually is super important for any engineering team to have that balance okay final questions just put you on the spot real quick answer great stuff congratulations on the work you guys are doing great to follow the progress but I'm a customer I'll put my customer hat on par in ahead I can get that on Amazon Microsoft's got kubernetes why Google cloud what makes Google cloud different if kubernetes is open why should I use Google Cloud so you're right and the wonderful thing is that Google is actually all in kubernetes and we are the first public cloud that actually providing a managed kubernetes on-prem well the first cloud provider to have a GCP marketplace with a kubernetes application production-ready with our partners so if you're all in kubernetes I would say that it's obvious yeah III see most of the customers wanting to be multi cloud and to have choice and that is something that you know is very aligned with what we're look at this crowd win open source is winning great to have you on a part of hend thanks for coming on dynamic duo and kubernetes is - a lot of new services are happening we're bringing all those services here in the cube it's our content here from Google cloud Google next I'm Jennifer and David Lonnie we'll be right back stay with us for more day two coverage after this short break thank you

(vibrant orchestral music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burns and welcome to another CUBE Conversation from our beautiful studios in Palo Alto, California. I'm actually very excited about today's conversation because we'll be talking about the potential of human beings, of people within organizations, given this tumultuous change in this digital transformation. And to help talk about some of these crucial issues we've got, Emily He from, who is senior vice president of HCM Cloud marketing from Oracle. Emily, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> So let's just jump right into it. Let's start by, I mean Oracle's got to interesting approach. Cloud a customer, the idea of bringing the Cloud or forming applications into Cloud services. So why don't we start, what is going on with HCM Cloud at Oracle? >> You said exactly the right thing: which is, we have a very unique approach to the cloud. So we spent the last few years completely rewriting our HCM application for the Cloud. And when I think about 11 years ago when iPhone first came into being, a lot of the HR, HCM vendors rushed to embrace the mobile interface because they think that's the panacea for user adoption. As long as HR software as existed, we've always had issues with user adoptions. The early Cloud vendors really just moved their applications to the Cloud and their focus is to simplify the user interfaces by delivering this modern user experience. The problem is, that didn't really solve the fundamental user adoption problem. There data quality issues, data security issues. The work flow was cumbersome and the user interface wasn't friendly enough, right? So when Oracle started rewriting the Cloud a few years back, we took a very different approach because we already had hundreds of thousands of customers. And they had real business problems. They had complex business problems. So we're asking fundamentally very different questions. The questions we're asking is: How can we use the Cloud, and move our customers data to the Cloud by allowing them to manage the data autonomously? So we can insure data quality, data security. And how can we make the work flow so flexible that they can adjust their business processes to meet the ever changing market conditions. And lastly, how can we push our user experience to the next frontier by embracing Chatbot, voice UI, AI and deliver that really human experience. And that's exactly what we have in Oracle HCM Cloud. We have the Auntie Anne solution, and we're doing really interesting things to push the user experience to the new frontier. >> Well, that's one of the reasons why I'm so fascinated by this topic is 'cause in many respects, as you said, HCM used to be just a set of HR processes: pay roll, hiring, separating. There was just a set of processes you had to do to comply with local employment laws. >> Exactly. >> But now we're talking about using technology to do much more, to actually mediate the activities of human beings in more complex ways, incorporating a different ways of thinking about incentives so that human facing systems, supported by AI, augmented by AI allow this incredible resource, that exist with most organizations to be more productive, more fulfilled, happier and ultimately a better resource to customers. Have I got that right? >> That's such a great point. And that's why I'm so excited about the possibility AI brings to the world of business applications. If you think back on the way we approach applications in the past, we architected business processes and we used technology to deliver to those business processes. So it's an input based system and a predictable output will come out. With AI, now you have all these data from different sources and you can get insight from the data, but more importantly, the system is now suggesting actions, it's suggesting decisions, and human beings can use those insight to create more solutions. And we're also in a situation where potentially robots are working alongside humans. So what is the definition of workforce anymore? Do we include machines in our workforce management solutions and how do we think about that? And I'm personally fascinated by the possibility of having machines augment human tasks and look at the world in a completely different way. >> Well, I think you brought up this interesting point earlier, this essential point earlier that there's been an adoption problem associated with some of these complex people-oriented applications. It might very well be that as we rethink these applications and we focus more on how AI and other types of things can augment the way people work. Because a lot of employees are saying, wait a minute, I'm not process driven. I have a set of responsibilities. I have some agency within this business to serve customers. So how can we bring together those things so that the people can do what they're suppose to do. It might actually increase the likelihood that these HCM applications get adopted. Whaddya think? >> Yah, exactly. If you think about the way we're using enterprise software now, it's actually not very natural, fun or human. Every time you go through the same process, you fill out the form and some outcome will come out. Now I don't think anyone is thrilled to come to work and use enterprise software application. It's almost like you have a coworker and every time you see him, you're having the same conversation. What's your name, what's your address, what's your phone number, right? And in contrast, the way people are engaging with consumer technology is totally different. I use Siri, and I use Google Maps to navigate my traffic. And my kids have hour long conversations with Alexa. Telling jokes and ask science questions. My son is getting Siri to do his homework, math homework, which is very distressing for me. But that's a different conversation all together. And I think that's the way humans want you engaged with enterprise technology. It's already happening, so it's really our collective work, organizations responsibility to bring that type of technology to work, but like you said, there are many open questions we have to answer. >> And not the least of which, it's just not mediate, having an interaction with a machine. But also having conversations and having machinery be able to pick that up. Be able to turn that into subsequent tasks and actions so that human beings are spending more time on the creative side. And I know you have some great examples of this. Companies that are rethinking, so how they go from a human being attended to a customer problem and how that person, perhaps far away from a normal IT process, can actually quickly translate that into something that can scale within the business. >> Yeah, exactly. Yesterday, I think I mentioned this to you before, I was listening to a podcast about how Airbnb is architecting their customer experience and the way they do it is when they think about their ideal customer experience, they have one customer in mind and they really focus on re-imagining how they can deliver this wow experience, but once they nail the experience, then they got good feedback from the customer. They use machines to scale that to millions of customers. And I think that's going to be the way people want to work in the future. Human beings are uniquely good at being creative, problem solving and that's what they enjoy doing. So if we can have them focus on those tasks and have the machines help us scale things that we know will work and use them to get insight to further fine tune the experience, that'll be such a better way to work. >> I totally agree and I think that one of the important derivatives of that is the idea that increasingly we're talking about more collaboration, recognizing and amplifying the strengths of individuals and bringing them into a work force so that everybody is more confident, more comfortable and capable of working together. Certainly that's something HCM wants to do. But it also creates a new question and we spent a lot of time on theCUBE working with executives, like yourself, talking about this. How are we going to incorporate additional diversity into the workforce with an attacking with other worlds, how do you see this whole process coming together? So technology can make it easier, can liberate the potential of a lot of diverse people within a workforce. Yah, I am a huge believer in diversity. I think diversity is good for the workforce and I personally spend a lot of time promoting diversity in the leadership rank. And there are a couple of things: One is, we definitely can use software to foster more diversity in the work place. For example, if we use software to screen resumes, we can eliminate some of the demographic data to reduce bias and the software also has the ability to, for example, help us identify the ideal candidate from looking at our existing employees and come up with the right criteria, so we can get the right candidates on board. But I also think, in this new world we still have more work to do to psychologically set ourselves up for leadership positions. And I talk to a lot of women and this is the advice I usually give them: The first thing is, this applies to both men and women. You need to, really be conscious of the kind of the personal brand you're building and when I talk about personal brand, I don't mean that you go on Twitter and tweet about your personal life and tweet sheer content. It's really about being conscious about the value you are trying to exhibit at work and use your day to day actions to demonstrate those values, and that will help you create a reputation that will have a stronger impact on your career than anything else. The other thing I notice about women is, the strength for women is, women are naturally empathetic so we're very collaborative, we want to help each other, but at the same time, sometimes that can hold us back because you don't want to hurt other people's feelings by stepping forward and taking on leadership position. And men are usually much better at raising their hands and saying, "I'm ready for this position." So I think women can learn from men, and the way to do it is something I call Micro Bravery. And that is, I believe courage is a muscle you can exercise. The more you use it, the better you'll be at it and if everyday you can push yourself to do something that you're uncomfortable with, maybe it's giving someone performance feedback or maybe it's standing up and presenting, maybe it's coming here and having a conversation with you on tv. The more you do that, the more you are going to take risks and the more comfortable you will be in stepping into those leadership positions. The other thing that I noticed about a lot of women is when they have a family, they hesitate to take leadership positions. Because they think they're part is now the family and they can't do both. I firmly believe we can do both. As a matter of fact, I think being a parent makes you a really good leader because there's so many lessons you can learn from being a parent. One of the things I find helpful is, now that I have children, every time I make a tough decision I always ask myself: If I make this decision and I tell my kids, would they proud of me? If they told me, they make this decision would I be proud of them. So it kind of help you bring humanity to work and really strengthen your moral compass. So those are things I usually tell women to be more effective at work place and hopefully they, more women will assume the leadership roles. >> I love hearing that in theCUBE. So just to quickly summarize. We've talked about how women in particular, but overall, we're going to get an increasingly diverse workforce that's going to be applied to increasingly complex problems and the powerful role that software can play if it's set up right to facilitate collaboration, facilitate interaction, augment the human experience, so we can do more, do more productively, make everyone more happy. >> Exactly, I couldn't have said it better. >> Emily He, the senior vice president of marketing at Oracle HCM. Thank you very much for being on theCube. >> Thank you so much for having me. (dramatic music)

(bright orchestral music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome to theCUBE Conversations here in Palo Alto Studios. For theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media inc. My next guest is Bruce Arthur, who's the Vice President of engineering at Banter.ai. Good friend, we've known each other for years, VP of engineering, developer, formerly at Apple. >> Yes. >> Worked on all the big products; the iPad-- had the the tin foil on your windows back in the day during Steve Jobs' awesome run there. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, it's good to be here. >> Yeah, great, you've got a ton of experience and I want to get your perspective as a developer, VP of engineering, entrepreneur, you're doing a startup around AI. Let's have a little banter. >> Sure. >> Banter.ai is a little bit a chat bot, but the rage is DevOps. Software really models change, infrastructure as code, cloud computing. Really a renaissance of software development going on right now. >> It is, it's changing a lot. >> What's your view on this? >> Well, so, years and years ago you would work really hard on your software. You would package it up in a box and you'd send it over the wall and you hope it works. And that seems very quaint now because now you write your software, you deploy it the first day, and you change it six times that day, and you're A/B-testing it, you're driving it forward, it's so much more interactive. It does require a different skillset. It also doesn't, how do I say this carefully? It used to be very easy to be craft, to have high craft and make a very polished product, but you didn't know if it was going to work. Today you know if it's going to work, but you often don't get to making sure it's high quality, high craft, high value. >> John: So, the iteration >> Exactly, the iteration runs so fast, which is highly valuable, but you sort of just a little bit of you miss the is this really something I am proud of and I can really work with it because you know, now the product definition can change so quickly, which is awesome but it is a big change. >> And that artisan crafting thing is interesting, but now some are saying that the UX side is interesting because, if you get the back end working, and you're iterating, you can still bring that artisan flavor back. We heard that cloud computing vendors like Amazon, and I was just in China for Alibaba, they're trying to bring this whole design artisan culture back. Your thoughts on the whole artisan craft in software, because now you have two stages, you have deploy, iterate, and then ultimately polish. >> Right, so, I think it's interesting, it used to be, engineering is so expensive and time-consuming. You have to design it upfront and you make one version of it and you're done. That has changed now that engineering has gotten easier. You have better tools, we have better things, you can make six versions and that used to be, so back in the day at Apple, you would make six versions, five of which Steve would hate and throw out, and eventually they would get better and better and better and then you would have something you're proud of. Now those are just exposed. Now everybody sees those, it's a very different process. So you, I think, the idea that you. Engineering used to be this scarce resource. It's becoming easier now to have many versions and have more engineers working on stuff, so now it is much more can I have three design teams, can they compete, can they make all good ideas, and then who's going to be the editor? Who evaluates them and decides I like this from this one, I like that, and now let's put this together to make the right product. >> So, at Apple, you mentioned Steve would reject, well, that's well-documented. >> Sure. >> It's publicly out there that he would like, really look at the design-side. Was it Waterfall-based, was it Agile, Scrum, did you guys, was it like, do you lay it all out in front of him and he points at it? What were some of the work flows like with Steve Jobs? >> So, when he was really excited about something he would want to meet with them every week. He'd want to see progress every week. He'd give lots of feedback every week, there'd be new ideas. It was very Steve-focused. I think the more constructive side of it was the design teams were always thinking about What can we build, how do we put it in front of him, and I remember there was a great quote from a designer that said. It's not that Steve designs great things, it's that you show him three things, and if you throw him three bad things, he'll pick the least bad. If you show him three great things, he'll pick the most great, But it's not, it was more about the, you've got to iterate in the process, you've got to try ideas, you take ideas from different people and some of them, like, they sound like a great idea. When we talk, it sounds really good. You build it, and you're like, that's just not, that's just not right. So, you want, how do I say this? You don't want to lock yourself in up front. You want to imagine them, you want to build them, you want to try 'em. >> And that's, I mean, I've gotten to know the family over the years, too, through some of the Palo Alto interactions, and that's the kind of misperception of Steve Jobs, was that he was the guy. He enabled people, he had that ethos that-- >> He was the editor, it's an old school journalism metaphor, which is, he had ideas, he wanted, but he also, he ran the team. He wanted to have people bring their ideas and come in. And then he decided, this is good, this is not. That's better, you can do better, let's try this. Or, sometimes, this whole thing stinks. It's just not going anywhere. So, like, it was much more of that. Now it's applied to software, and he was a marketing genius, about sort of knowing what people were going to go for, but there was a little bit of a myth for it, that there's one man designing everything. That is a very saleable marketing story. >> The mythical man. (laughs) >> Well, it's powerful, but no, there's a lot of people, and getting the best work of all those people. >> I mean, he's said on some of the great videos I've watched on YouTube over the years, Hire the best people, only work with the best, and they'll bring good stuff to the table. Now, I want to bring that kind of metaphor, one step further for this great learning lesson, again it's all well-documented on YouTube. Plenty of Steve videos there, but now when you go to DevOps, you mention the whole quality thing and you got to ship fast, iterate, you know there's a lot of moving fast break stuff as Zuckerberg would say, of Facebook, although he's edited his tune to say move fast and be reliable. (laughing) Welcome to the enterprise, welcome to software and operations. This is now a scale game at the enterprise side 'cause, you know, you start seeing open source software grow so much now, where a lot of the intellectual property might be only 10% of software. >> Right. >> You might be using other pieces. You're packaging it so that when you get it to the market, how do bring that culture? How do you get that innovation of, Okay, I'm iterating fast, how do I maintain the quality. What are some of your thoughts on that? Because you've got machine learning out there, you've got these cool things happening. >> Yup. So, you want, how do I say this? You just, you really need to leave time to schedule it. It needs to be in your list. There's a lot of figuring out what are we going to build and you have to try things, iterate things, see if they resonate with consumers. See if they resonate with people who want to pay. See if they resonate with investors. You have to figure than out fast, but then you have to know that, okay, this is a good prototype. Now I have to make it work better because the first version wouldn't scale well, now it has to scale, now it has to work right for people, now you have to have a review of: here's the bugs, here's the things that are not working. Why does this chatbot stop responding sometimes? What is causing that? Now, the great story is, with good DevOps, you actually have a system that's very good at finding and tracking those problems. In the old world, so the old world with the shrink-wrap software, you'd throw it over the fence. If it misbehaves, you will never know. Today you know. You've got alerts, you've got pagers going off, you've got logs, >> It's instrumented big-time. >> Yeah, exactly, you can find that stuff. So, since you can actually make, you can make very high-quality software because you have so much more data about what's going on with it, it's nice. And actually, chatbot software has this fascinating little side effect, with, because it's all chats and it's all text, there are no irreproducible bugs. You can go back and look at exactly what happened. I have a recording, I know exactly what happened, I know exactly what came in, I know what came out, and then I know that this failure happened. So, it's very reproducible, sort of, it's nice you can, it doesn't always work this way, but it's very easy to track down problems. >> It's event-based, it's really easy to manage. >> Exactly, and it's just text. You can just read it. It's not like I have to debug hacks, it's just these things were said and this thing died. >> No core dumps. (laughs) >> No, there's nothing that requires sophisticated analysis, well the code is one thing, but like, the sequence of events is very human-readable, very understandable. >> Alright, so let's talk about the younger generation. So, we've been around the block, you and I. We've talked, certainly many times around town, about the shifts, and we love these new waves. A lot of great waves coming in, we've seen many waves. What's going on, in your mind, with the younger generation? Because this is a, some exciting things happening. Decentralized internet. >> Bruce: Yup. >> There's blockchain, getting all the attention. Outside of the hype, Alpha VCs, Alpha engineers, Alpha entrepreneurs are really honing in on blockchain because they see the potential. >> Sure. >> Early people are seeing it. Then you've got cloud, obviously unlimited compute potentially, the new, you know, kind of agile market. All these young guys, they never shipped, actually never loaded Linux on a server. (laughing) So, like, what are you seeing for the younger guys? And what do you see as someone who's experienced, looking down at the next, you know, 20 year run we see. >> So, I think what I see that's most exciting is that we now have people solving very non-technical problems with technology. I think it used to be, you could build a computer, you could write code, but then, like, your space was limited to the computer in front of you. Like, I can do input and outputs. I can put things on the screen, I can make a video game, but it's in this box. Now everyone's thinking of much bigger, Solving bigger problems. >> John: Yeah, healthcare, we're seeing verticals. >> Yeah, healthcare's a massive one. You can, operation things, shipping products. I mean, who would've thought Amazon was going to be delivering things, basically. I mean, they're using technology to solve the physical delivery of objects. That is, the space of what people are tackling is massive. It' no longer just about silicon and programming, it's sort of, any problem out there, there's someone trying to apply technology, which is awesome and I think that's because these people these youngsters, they're digital natives. >> Yeah. >> They've come to expect that, of course video conferencing works, of course all these other items work. That I just need to figure out how to solve problems with them, and I'm hopeful we're going to see more human-sized problems solved. I think, you know, we have, technology has maybe exacerbated a few things and dislocated, cost a lot of people jobs. Disconnected some people from other sort of stabilizing forces, >> Fake news. (laughs) >> Fake news, you know, we need-- >> John: It's consequences, side effects. >> I hope we get people solving those problems because fake news should now be hard to solve. They'll figure it out, I think, but, like, the idea is, we need to, technology does have a bit of a responsibility to solve, fix some of the crap that it broke. Actually, there's things that need, old structures, journalism is an old profession. >> Yeah. >> And it used to actually have all these wonderful benefits, but when the classified business went down the tubes, it took all that stuff down. >> Yeah. >> And there needs to be a venue for that. There needs to be new outlets for people to sort of do research, look things up, and hold people to account. >> Yeah, and hopefully some of our tools we'll be >> I hope so. >> pulling out at Silicon Angle you'll be seeing some new stuff. Let's talk about, like just in general, some of the fashionable coolness around engineering. Machine learning, AI obviously tops the list. Something that's not as sexy, or as innovative things. >> Sure. >> Because you have machines and industrial manufacturing plant equipment to people's devices. Obviously you worked at Apple, so you understand that piece, with the watch and everything. >> Yup, >> So you've got, that's an internet, we're things, people are things too. So, machines and people are at the edge of the network. So, you've got this new kind of concept. What gets you excited? Talk about how you feel about those trends. >> So, there's a ton going on there. I think what's amazing is the idea that all these sensors and switches and all the remote pieces can start to have smarts on them. I think the downside of that is some of the early IoT stuff, you know, has a whole open SSL stack in it. And, you know, that can be out of date, and when you have security problems with that now your light switch has access to your tax returns and that's not really what you want. So, I think there's definitely, there's a world coming, I think, at a technical level, we need to make operating systems and tools and networking protocols that aren't general purpose because general purpose tools are hackable. >> John: Yeah. >> I need to have a sensor and a switch that know how to talk to each other, and that's it. They can't rewrite code, they can't rewrite their firmware, they can't, like, I want to be able to know that, you have a nice office here, if somebody came in and tried to hack your switches, would you ever know? And the answer's like, you'd have no idea, but when you have things that are on your network and that serve you, if they're a general, if they're a little general purpose computing device, they're a mess. Like, you know, a switch is simple. A microphone, a microphone is simple. There's an output from it, it needs, I think we, >> So differentiated software for device. >> Well, let's get back to old school. You studied operating systems back in the day. >> Yeah. >> A process can do whatever the hell it wants. It can read from memory, it can write to disk, it can talk to all these buses. It's a very, it can do, it's very general purpose. I don't want that in my switch. I want my switch to be sort of, much more of these old little micro-controller. >> Bounded. >> Yeah, it's in a little box. I mean, so the phone and the Mac have something called Sandbox, which sort of says, you get a smaller view of the world. You get a little piece of the disk, you can't see everything else, and those are parts of it, but I think you need even more. You need, sort of, this really, I don't want a general purpose thing, I want a very specific thing that says I'm allowed to do this and I'm allowed to talk to that server; I don't have access to the internet. I've got access to that server. >> You mentioned operating systems. I mean, obviously I grew up in the computer science genre of the '80s and you did as well. That was a revolution around Unix. >> Yes. >> And then Berkeley, BSD, and all that stuff that happened around the systems world, operating systems, was really the pioneers in computing at that time. It's interesting with cloud, it's almost a throwback now to systems thinking. >> Bruce: It's true, yeah. >> You know, people looking at, and you're discussing it. >> Bruce: Yeah, Yeah. >> It's a systems problem. >> Yeah, it is. >> It's just not in a box. >> Right, and I think we witnessed the, let's get everyone a general purpose computer and see what they can do. And that was amazing, but now you're like I don't want everything to be a general I want very specific, I want very little thing, dedicated things that do this really well. I don't want my thermostat actually tracking when I'm in the house. You know, I want it to know, eh, maybe there's someone in the house, but I don't want it to know it's me. I don't want it reporting to Google what's going on. I want it to track my temperature and manage that. >> Our Wikibon team calls the term Unigrid, I call it hypergrid because essentially it's grid computer; there's no differentiation between on-premise and cloud. >> Right. >> It's one pool of resource of compute and things processes. >> It is, although I think, and that's interesting, you want that, but again you want it, how do I say this? I get a little nervous when all of my data goes to some cloud that I can't control. Like, I would love if, I'll put it this way. If I have a camera in my house, and imagine I put security cameras up, I want that to sort of see what's going on, I don't want it to publish the video to anywhere that's out of my control. If it publishes a summary that says, oh, like, someone came to your door, I'm like, okay, that's a good, reasonable thing to know and I would want to get that. So, Palo Alto recently added, there's traffic cameras that are looking at traffic, and they record video, but everyone's very nervous about that fact. They don't want to be recorded on video. So, the camera, this is actually really good, the camera only reports number of cars, number of bikes, number of pedestrians, just raw numbers. So you're pushing the processing down to the end and you only get these very anonymous statistics out of it and that's the right model. I've got a device, it can do a lot of sophisticated processing, but it gives nice summary data that is very public, I don't think anyone's really >> There's a privacy issue there that they've factored into the design? >> Yes, exactly. It's privacy and it's also the appropriateness of the data, you don't want, yeah, people don't want a camera watching them when they go by, but they're happy and they're like, oh, yeah, that street has a big increase in traffic, And there's a lot of, there were accidents here and there's people running red lights. That's valuable knowledge, not the fact that it's you in your Tesla and you almost hit me. No. (laughs) >> Yeah, or he's speeding, slow down. >> Exactly, yeah, or actually if you recorded speeders the fact that there's a lot of speeding is very interesting. Who's doing it, okay, people get upset if that's recorded. >> Yeah, I'm glad that Palo Alto is solving their traffic problem, Palo Alto problems, as we say. In general, security's been a huge issue. We were talking before we came on, about just the security nightmare. >> Bruce: Yes. >> A lot of companies are out there scratching their heads. There's so much of digital transformation happening, that's the buzzword in the industry. What does that mean from your standpoint? Because engineers are now moving to the front lines. Developers, engineering, because now there's a visibility to not just the software, it's an end goal. They call it outcome. Do you talk to customers a lot around, through your entrepreneurial venture, around trying to back requirements into product and yet deliver value? Do you get any insight from the field of kind of problems, you know, businesses are generally tryna solve with tech? >> So, that's interesting, I think when we try to start tech companies, we usually have ideas and then we go test that premise on customers. Perhaps I'm not as adaptable as I should be. We're not actually going to customers and asking them what they want. We're asking them if this is the kind of thing that would solve their problems. And usually they're happy to talk to us. The tough one, then, is then are they going to become paying customers, there's talking and there's paying, and they're different lines. >> I mean, certainly is validation. >> Exactly, that's when you really know that they care. It is, it's a tough question. I think there's always, there's a category of entrepreneur that's always very knowledgable about a small number of customers and they solve their problems, and those people are successful and they're often, They often are more services-based, but they're solving problems because they know people. They know a lot of people, they know what their paying point are. >> Alright, so here's the real question I want to know is, have you been back to Apple in the new building? >> Have I been to, I have not been in the spaceship. (laughing) I have not been in the spaceship yet. I actually understand that in order to have the event there, they actually had to stop work on the rest of the building because the construction process makes everything so dirty; and they did not want everyone to see dirty windows, so they actually halted the construction, they scrubbed down the trees, they had the event, and now it's, but now it's back. >> Now it's back to, >> So, I'll get there at some point. >> Bruce Arthur it the Vice President of Banter.ai, entrepreneur, formerly of Apple, good friend, Final question for you, just what are you excited about these days and as you look out at the tooling and the computer science and the societal impact that is seen with cloud and all these technologies, and open source, what do you, what are you excited about? >> I'm most excited, I think we actually have now enough computing resources and enough tools at hand that we can actually go back and tackle some harder computer science problems. I think there's things that used to be so big that you're like, well, that's just not, That's too much data, we could never solve that. That's too much, that would take, you know, that would take a hundred computers a hundred years to figure out. Those are problems now that are becoming very tractable, and I think it's been the rise of, yeah, it starts with Google, but some other companies that sort of really made these very large problems are now tractable, and they're now solvable. >> And open source, your opinion on open source these days? >> Open source is great. >> Who doesn't love more code? (laughs) >> Well, I should back this up, Open source is the fastest way to share and to make progress. There are times where you need what's called proprietary, but in other words valuable, when you need valuable engineers to work on something and, you know, not knowing the providence or where something comes from is a little sticky, I think there's going to be space for both. I think open source is big, but there's going to be-- >> If you have a core competency, you really want to code it. >> Exactly, you want to write that up and you-- >> You can still participate in the communities. >> Right, and I think open source is also, it's awesome when it's following. If there's something else in front, it follows very fast, it does a very good job. It's very thorough, sometimes it doesn't know where to go and it sort of meanders, and that's when other people have advantages. >> Collective intelligence. >> Exactly. >> Bruce, thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it, good to see you. This is a Cube Conversation here in the Palo Alto studio, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (light electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco it's The Cube covering Oracle OpenWorld 2016 brought to you by Oracle. Now here's your host, John Furrier and Peter Burris. >> Hey welcome back everyone. We are live in San Francisco at Oracle OpenWorld 2016. This is SiliconANGLE, the key of our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract a signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, Co-CEO of SiliconANGLE with Peter Burris, head of Research at SiliconANGLE as well as the General Manager of Wikibon Research, our next guest is Siddhartha Agarwal, Vice-President of Product Management and Strategy of Oracle Cloud Platform. Welcome back to the Cube, good to see you. >> Yes, hi John. Great to be here. >> So I've seen a lot of great stuff. The core messaging from the corporate headquarters Cloud Cloud Cloud, but there's so much stuff going on in Oracle on all the applications. We've had many great conversations around the different, kind of, how the price are all fitting into the cloud model. But Peter and I were talking yesterday in our wrap-up about, we're the developers. >> Siddhartha: Yeah. >> Now and someone made a joke, oh they're at JavaOne, which is great. A lot of them are at JavaOne, but there's a huge developer opportunity within the Oracle core ecosystem because Cloud is very developer friendly. Devops, agile, cloud-native environments really cater to, really, software developers. >> Yeah, absolutely and that's a big focus area for us because we want to get developers excited about the ability to build the next generation of applications on the Oracle Cloud. Cloud-native applications, microservices-based applications and having that environment be open with choice of programming languages, open in terms of choice of which databases they want, not just Oracle database. NoSQL, MySQL, other databases and then choice of the computeship that you're using. Containers, bare metal, virtual environments and an open standard. So it's giving a very open, modern easy platform for developers so that they'll build on our platform. >> You know, one of the things that we always talk about at events is when we talk to companies really trying to win the hearts and minds of developers. You always hear, we're going to win the developers. They're like an object, like you don't really win developers. Developers are very fickle but very loyal if you can align with what they're trying to do. >> Siddartha: Yeah. >> And they'll reject hardcore tactics of selling and lock-in so that's a concern. It's a psychology of the developers. They want cool but they want relevance and they want to align with their goals. How do you see that 'cause I think Oracle is a great ecosystem for a developer. How do you manage that psychology 'cause Oracle has traditionally been an enterprise software company, so software's great but... Amazon has a good lead on the developers right now. You know, look at the end of the day you have to get developers realizing that they can build excellent, fun creative applications to create differentiation for their organizations, right, and do it fast with cool technologies. So we're giving them, for example, not just the ability to build with Java EE but now they can build in Java SE with Tomcat, they can build with Node, they can build with PHP and soon they'll be able to do it with Ruby and Daikon. And we're giving that in a container-based platform where they don't necessarily have to manage the container. They get automatic scalability, they get back up batching, all of that stuff taken care of for them. Also, you know, being able to build rich, mobile applications, that's really important for them. So how they can build mobile applications using Ionic, Angular, whatever JavaScript framework they want, but on the back end they have to be able to connect these mobile apps to the enterprise. They have to get location-based inside and to where the person is who's using the mobile app. They need to be able to get inside and tell how the mobile app's been used, and you've heard Larry talk about the Chatbot platform, right? How do you engage with customers in a different way through Facebook Messenger? So those are some of the new technologies that we're making very easily available and then at the end of the day we're giving them choice of databases so it's not just Oracle database that you get up and running in the Cloud and it's provision managed, automated for you. But now you can ask for NoSQL databases. You can have Cassandra, MongoDB run on our IaaS and MySQL. We just announced MySQL enterprise edition available as a service in the Public Cloud. >> Yeah one of the things that developers love, you know, being an ex-developer myself in the old days, is, and we've talked to them... They're very loyal but they're very pragmatic and they're engineers, basically they're software engineers. They love tools, great tools that work, they want support, but they want distribution of their product that they create, they're creators, so distribution ultimately means modernization but developers don't harp too much on money-making although they'd want to make money. They don't want to be abandoned on those three areas. They don't want to be disloyal. They want to be loyal, they want support and they want to have distribution. What does Oracle bring to the table to address those three things? >> Yeah, they're a few ways in which we're thinking of helping developers with distributions. For example, one is, developers are building applications that they exposing their APIs and they want to be able to monetize those APIs because they are exposing business process and a logic from their organization as APIs so we're giving them the ability to have portals where they can expose their APIs and monetize the APIs. The other thing is we've also got the Oracle Cloud Marketplace where developers can put their stuff on Oracle Cloud Marketplace so others can be leveraging that content and they're getting paid for that. >> How does that work? Do they plug it into the pass layer? How does the marketplace fit in if I'm a developer? >> Sure, the marketplace is a catalog, right, and you can put your stuff on the catalog. Then when you want to drag and drop something, you drop it onto Oracle PaaS or onto Oracle IaaS. So you're taking the application that you've built and then you got it to have something that-- >> John: So composing a solution on the fly of your customer? >> Well, yeah exactly, just pulling a pre-composed solution that a developer had built and being able to drop it onto the Oracle PaaS and IaaS platform. >> So the developer gets a customer and they get paid for that through the catalog? >> Yes, yes, yes and it's also better for customers, right? They're getting all sorts of capability pre-built for them, available for them, ready for them. >> So one of the things that's come up, and we've heard it, it was really amplified too much but we saw it and it got some play. In developer communities, the messaging on the containers and microservers as you mentioned earlier. Huge deal right now. They love that ability to have the containerization. We even heard containers driving down into the IaaS area, so with the network virtualization stuff going on, so how is that going to help developers? What confidence will you share to developers that you guys are backing the container standards-- >> Siddhartha: Absolutely. >> Driving that, participating in that. >> Well I think there are a couple of things. First of all, containers are not that easy in terms of when you have to orchestrate under the containers, you have to register these containers. Today the technology is for containers to be managed, the orchestration technology which is things like Swarm, Kubernetes, MISO, et cetera. They're changing very rapidly and then in order to use these technologies, you have to have a scheduler and things like that. So there's a stack of three or four, relatively recent technologies, changing at a relatively fast pace and that creates a very unstable stack for someone who create production level stuff for them, right? The docker container that they built actually run from this slightly shaky stack. >> Like Kubernetes or what not. >> Yeah yeah and so what we've done is we're saying, look, we're giving you container as a service so if you've already created docker containers, you can now bring those containers as is to the Oracle Public Cloud. You can take this application, these 20 containers and then from that point on we've taken care of putting the containers out, scaling the containers up, registering the containers, managing the containers for you, so you're just being able to use that environment as a developer. And if you want to use the PaaS, that's that IaaS. If you want to use the PaaS, then the PhP node, JavaSE capability that I told you was also containerized. You're just not exposed to docker there. Actually, I know he's got a question, but I want to just point out Juan Loaiza, who was on Monday, he pointed out the JSON aspect of the database was I thought was pretty compelling. From a developer's standpoing, JSON's very really popular with managing APIs. So having that in the database is really kind of a good thing so people should check out that interview. >> Very quickly, one of the historical norm for developers is you start with a data model and then you take various types of tools and you build code that operates against that development for that basic data model. And Oracle obviously has, that's a big part of what your business has historically been. As you move forward, as we start looking at big data and the enormous investment that businesses are making in trying to understand how to utilize that technology, it's not going as well as a lot folks might've thought it would in part because the developer community hasn't fully engaged how to generate value out of those basic stacks of technology. How is Oracle, who has obviously a leadership position in database and is now re-committing itself to some of these new big data technologies, how're you going to differentially, or do you anticipate differentially presenting that to developers so they can do more with big data-like technologies? >> They're a few things that we've done, wonderful question. First of all, just creating the Hadoop cluster, managing the Hadoop cluster, scaling out the Hadoop cluster requires a lot of effort. So we're giving you big data as a service where you don't have to worry about that underlying infrastructure. The next problem is how do you get data into the data lake, and the data has been generated at tremendous volume. You think about internet of things, you think about devices, et cetera. They're generating data at tremendous volume. We're giving you the ability to actually be able to use a streaming, Kafka, Sparc-based serviced to be able to bring data in or to use Oracle data intergration to be able to stream data in from, let's say, something happening on the Oracle database into your big data hub. So it's giving you very easy ways to get your data into the data hub and being able to do that with HDFS, with Hive, whichever target system you want to use. Then on top of that data, the next challenge is what do you visualize, right? I mean, you've got all this data together but a very small percentage is actually giving you insight. So how do you look at this and find that needle in the haystack? So for that we've given you the ability to do analytics with the BI Cloud service to get inside into the data where we're actually doing machine learning. And we're getting inside from the data and presenting those data sets to the most relevant to the most insightful by giving you some smart insights upfront and by giving you visualizations. So for example, you search for, in all these forms, what are the users says as they entered in the data. The best way to present that is by a tag cloud. So giving you visualization that makes sense, so you can do rich discovery and get rich insight from BI Cloud service and the data visualization cloud service. Lastly, if you have, let's say, five years of data on an air conditioner and the product manager's trying to get inside into that data saying, hey what should I fix so that that doesn't happen next time around. We're giving you the big data discovery cloud service where you don't have to set up that data lab, you don't have to set up the models, et cetera. You could just say replicate two billing rows, we'll replicate it in the cloud for you within our data store and you can start getting insight from it. >> So how are developers going to start using these tools 'cause it's clear that data scientists can use it, it's clear that people that have more of analytic's background can use it. How're developers going to start grabbing a lot of these capabilities, especially with machine learning and AI and some of the other things on the horizon? And how do you guys anticipate you're going to present this stuff to a developer community so that they can, again, start creating more value for the business? Is that something that's on the horizon? >> You know it's here, it's not on the horizon, it's here. We're helping developers, for example, build a microservice that wants to get data from a treadmill that one of the customers is running on, right? We're trying to get data from one of the customers on the treadmills. Well the developer now creates a microservice where the data from the treadmill has been ingested into a data lake. We've made it very easy for them to ingest into the data lake and then that microservice will be able to very easily access the data, expose only the portion of the data that's interesting. For example, the developer wants to create a very rich mobile app that presents the customer running with all the insight into the average daily calorie burn and what they're doing, et cetera. Now they can take that data, do analytics on it and very easily be able to present it in the mobile platform without having to work through all the plumbing of the data lake, of the ingestion, of the visualization, of the mobile piece, of the integration of the backend system. All of that is being provided so developers can really plug and play and have fun. >> Yeah, they want that fun. Building is the fun part, they want to have fun-- >> They want relevance, great tools and not have to worry about the infrastructure. >> John: They want distribution. They want their work to be showcased. >> Peter: That's what I mean about relevance, that's really about relevance. >> They want to work on the cool stuff and again-- >> And be relevant. >> Developers are starting to have what I call the nightclub effect. Coding is so much fun now, there's new stuff that comes out. They want to hack with the new codes. They want to play with some that fit the form factor with either a device or whatnot. >> Yeah and one other thing that we've done is, we've made the... All developers today are doing containers delivery because they need to release code really fast, right. It's no longer about months, it's about days or hours that they have to release. So we're giving a complete continuous delivery framework where people can leverage Git for their code depository, they can use Maven for continuous integration, they can use Puppet and Chef for stripping. The can manage the backlog of their task. They can do code reviews, et cetera, all done in the cloud for them. >> So lifestyles, hospitality. Taking care of developers, that's what you got to do. >> Exactly, that's a great analogy. You know all these things, they have to have these tools that they put together and what we're doing is we're saying, you don't have to worry about putting together those tools, just use them. But if you have some, you can plug in. >> Well we think, Wikibon and SiliconeANGLE, believe that there's going to be a tsunami of enterprise developers with the consumerization of IT, now meaning the Cloud, that you're going to see enterprise development, just a boom in development. You're going to see a lot more activity. Now I know it's different in development by it's not just pure Cloud need, it's some Legacy, but it's going to be a boom so we think you guys are very set up for that. Certainly with the products, so my final question for you Siddhartha is, what's your plans? I mean, sounds great. What're you going to do about it? Is there a venture happening? How're you guys going to develop this opportunity? What're you guys going to do? >> So the product sets are already there but we're evolving those products sets to a significant pace. So first of all, you can go to cloud.oracle.com/tryit and try these cloud services and build the applications on it, that's there. We've got a portal called developer.oracle.com where you can get resources on, for example, I'm a JavaScript developer. What's everything that Oracle's doing to help JavaScript developers? I'm a MySQL developer. what's everyone doing to help with that? So they've got that. Then starting at the beginning of next year, we're going to roll out a set of workshops that happen in many cities around the world where we go work with developers, hands on, and getting them inside an experience of how to build these rich, cloud-native, microservices-based applications. So those are some of the things and then our advocacy program. We already have the ACE Program, the ACE Directive Program. Working with that program to really make it a very vibrant, energetic ecosystem that is helping, building a sort of sample codes and building expert knowledge around how the Oracle environment can be used to build really cool microservices-based, cloud-native-- >> So you're investing, you're investing. >> Siddhartha: Oh absolutely. >> Any big events, you're just more little events, any big events, any developer events you guys going to do? >> So we'll be doing these workshops and we'll be sponsoring a bunch non-Oracle developer events and then we'll be launching a big developer event of our own. >> Great, so final question. What's in it for the developer? If I'm a developer, what's in it for me? Hey I love Oracle, thanks for spending the money and investing in this. What's in it for me? Why, why should I give you a look? >> Because you can do it faster with higher quality. So that microservices application that I was talking about, if you went to any other cloud and tried to build that microservices-based application that got data from the treadmill into a data lake using IoT and the analytics integration with backend applications, it would've taken you a lot longer. You can get going in the language of your choice using the database of your choice, using standards of your choice and have no lock-in. You can take your data out, you can take your code out whenever you want. So do it faster with openness. >> Siddhartha, thanks for sharing that developer update. We were talking about it yesterday. Our prayers were answered. (laughing) You came on The Cube. We were like, where is the developer action? I mean we see that JavaOne, we love Java, certainly JavaScript is awesome and a lot of good stuff going on. Thanks for sharing and congratulations on the investments and to continuing bringing developer goodness out there. >> Thank you, John. >> This The Cube, we're sharing that data with you and we're going to bring more signal from the noise here after this short break. You're watching The Cube. (electronic beat)