from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation welcome everybody to this cube conversation my name is Dave Volante and we're here in our Palo Alto studios Medusa doc R is here he's an investor and entrepreneur and a friend we're do great to see you again thanks so much for coming in thank you it's a head too long it is you and I sat down and had a conversation on the cube so it's been well yeah yeah well you've been on the cube a bunch and you've a I've seen some great conversations that you had with with with Peter and John so thanks for making the time and coming back in thank you so I want to start with when I go around and talk to executives every CEO is trying to get digital right you know whatever that means you know they know it's important and they're trying to figure it out they know it relates to data they know they have to leverage data they know this buzzword of digital transformation what are you seeing when you talk to executives and companies how real is this digital transformation is it a fad or is it a substantive good question to look from my view point of view digital transformation is the word people use but at the end of the day CIOs have to disrupt their businesses every CEO has to figure out am i cutting the cost I'm a helping companies grow in revenue from a look at from a board perspective and what people are looking at the investor perspective most CEOs are CEOs are looking at somehow looking running their operations on a day-to-day basis to that point I think most CEOs are expecting see I was to do the new innovative things at you probably hearing that people are adding CDO as a title yeah so it's up to see I were to see will it be the innovate to CIO it's like you have two kids like in your case your four kids you have two how do you make sure that all four kids are given the equal responsibility so Ciara has to decide look I have budget X X by two goes to my existing business X by two goes to the new business that decision making is not happening with the see I was today and that's what the distal transformation has to be is going on in a what I call not in a disruptive manner but the CEOs who have figure out how to disrupt it I really taking the next stage the next thing that people are interested there is where do I start right you have all should I start with my CRM supply chain should I start with my IT you got to figure out what all the but start someplace you pick one the area but that has to be disruptive in the sense we are living in the age of where I call it autonomous everything right there's a data there is cloud and there's AI our mission like what are you these three are such a large disruption in our industry see us how to figure out and say what can I do in terms of cost saving in terms of revenue growth but that can't be incremental it has to be revolutionary so I often say we've decades we've marched to the cadence of Moore's law in this industry that's where innovation came from no longer it's as you said it's data now for the last 10 years and you were involved in this we were collecting all this data we lowered the cost of collecting data and and and in running data warehouses with Hadoop but now data's plentiful insights aren't so you have data you have to apply machine intelligence to that data and then cloud gives you scale so that's like the new innovation cocktail so you agree that digital I agree digital transformation is real and the other dynamic mudo is you see companies are because it's data are able to traverse industries used to be you're in an industry if you're in financial services that's it if you're in healthcare that's it now you see Amazon's and content apples into financial services so people are afraid of getting disrupted you've got this new innovation cocktail so your point was really get started so you've got a shift resources you don't have unlimited budget right so how do people do that how are they taking cost out of the business and how are they reapportioning that cost for innovation really good so I'll give you two examples from Megan again thinking of where I see it one is for CIOs has something called IT operations IT operation is a very big piece that people need to figure out how to get the cost out of it the IT operations cannot be developed we've been running IT for last 30 years I mean what are the word they used I know Gartner uses the word called AAA Hobbs I don't care what the word is but the key is you have to run your 18 autonomous manner we are living in the age of your trading is autonomous your my your four on game by four on K is being traded through hedge funds your add technologies autonomous with Facebook Google and Amazon with all data when I saw with with Casper and Splunk we made cybersecurity autonomous to whatever extent threat detection but when it came to IT operations and IT customer support today manual if I may see over right now I'll invest on customer service and support to start as a point of what can I do to make my service agents better or what can I do to make the end users or the users experience better without going to a human can I eliminate the human in the equation here the mileage may vary it's like the driverless consequence you have level 1 to level 5 they may like to have autopilot some people may have a fully autonomous car depending on the organization you got to have a right amount of autonomous City in your organization both for IT operations and IT Service Management that hasn't happened and that will be happen in the next 4 5 years so let's talk about that you were at ServiceNow for a period of time they've obviously disrupted the old-line helpdesk and you know they really did a job on BMC and hewlett-packard etc are they in a position to take that next step in when you go to service now analogy here folks talk about AI and infusing AI obviously there's a lot of data being collected is that the right model I mean if they've automated forms but you think you're talking about something more I help us understand that sure looks abused know is in a great position they'll continue to do well it's a great company right I think what's going to happen next is how can companies like ServiceNow take her to the next stage right either become a partner with ServiceNow or service now itself we'll do it a little bit new companies will be for me one angle is forces enterprises is this game going to be for enterprises same playbook as a playbook for the cloud so imagine an apps that are born on the cloud their IT operations data their ticketing data where will that go to that means we think through enterprise data which is enterprise apps and so as they need to figure out so if I am a company today if I'm daring I need to decide what will I do for my enterprise applications and services what do I do it for my cloud Orion services so that is addition you have to make it at the top once it goes down the next level then able to decide is it for IT support customer support or IT operations what can I do in terms of augmenting there if I do is just to make my agents better you can take the cost out of the equation the cost should be is can I automate to the point I can eliminate 50% of my DevOps 50% of my SR ease my role of the come is in the next four five years this 70 80 % of devops I tell you when I study jobs will be gone that should be automated it should be a driverless IT autonomous IT people should have him that's not even a moonshot goal we all in America let's make great our great again this is our time it's IT if we don't do it some other country will do it Chile is going to eat us for lunch so he basically putting forth the scenario a DevOps was essentially a stepping stone and you see that largely going away it has to be it has been automated I'm not going to hide hundreds of tunas I called Manuel tuners right yes I'll need some DevOps people I need some IT admin things that system cannot do it algorithmically should go to humans at some point but there are enough things like if you want to install something in your laptop why should I talk to somebody else if I want to upgrade to Microsoft Office if I want to buy a CRM license if I want to get a zoom provisioning why do I need to talk to a human being in this equation can I oughta mater complete autonomous can I get to a level five autonomous in IT right that's what I'm looking towards robotic process automation play a role here can our PA we've done some some events with automation anywhere new iPad you're seeing huge valuations uipath as supposedly as another six billion dollar evaluation I mean you know amazing unicorn plus plus plus can those technologies be applied to solve this problem yes or no I think it depends on what the HRP are under star doing IP is a great topic right not be resolved very successful what I'm talking about is our IT operations and IT support and customer support automation can our PA guys take their technology their substrate a platter sure they can try it but these are all have to be grown organically doing this in nit going for customer service and support doing it for the cloud has its own its own skin its own platform like you and me were talking earlier if I'm doing this thing on Amazon why wait and launch a VM I won't even do it like if a new ticket comes in I should be doing through kinases I should be doing through my lambda functions I shouldn't be my cost of goods with so much that I want it should not cost me anything until the point Dave generates a ticket to me first all why should Dave generate a ticket right look at the very much extreme model of the test laws just like our today tells me when should I service my car why should you do the same thing like I should be coming and telling your SharePoint is going to go down they have today your Kube application you cannot do an interview with me too unless you fix it that is what the world wants to go so back to service management for minutes so in the old days our service manager was too cumbersome we really didn't have a single CMDB it just really didn't work that well it didn't change anything a lot of tickets that's what it did service now obviously solved that that that problem but what I'm inferring from what you're saying is it's still too expensive the entire infrastructure it needs to be more streamlined and automation is the answer absolutely so I think if you take it'll add layers and layers the first is in the support starting women from CMDB most organizers say my CMD that I still all are stale that's never accurate how can I get a dynamic view of Dave's ink right I should know when and that has to be done at the level of services and apps and at kubernetes level 2 container level once I have a blueprint of what my organization is then I need to know how do I handle the tickets against it then I can I do a health monitoring for all my CIS right I should be telling the outage put it at the another what business carries is my business running correctly you do have a downtime what is going to happen even though if I am false positives few times people are expecting saying that tell me proactively what services will impact and who will be impacted so I can take a corrective action and that will happen starting from CMDB automation I actually call it cloud CMDB our dynamic CMDB in the world of cloud and dynamic let's make a good cmdbs dynamic and accurate then take it to the ultimate outage prediction right if I can give your business up time and outage prediction that would be Nirvana are you telling me that IT cannot solve it you and me are saying in Palo Alto a driverless cars are going around we are going to see it in our lifetime IT can be so complex that the car can be autonomous but IT cannot be I don't buy them well I mean you hear about all the systems are down or my systems are slow today that's that's a form of outage that costs Fortune 2000 companies and money I mean it's you know 50 60 thousand dollars a minute in this in some cases so the and I think sometimes people aren't aware as to how much how much revenue is lost to downtime or lost productivity so there's huge huge gains to be made there and it seems that the cloud is the platform on which you're going to you're gonna build these these these natural choice it has to be yeah and it has we want a cloud to you can't say we are in the eight if you are a noose new cloud you're building it I tell people bill it is a multi cloud your same code should work on GCP Amazon and Azure right and on VMware if you want to be a private cloud but should be same the same codebase should be able to compile and run on all multiple processor kubernetes micro services that's really the enabler there right right at once run it anywhere interesting conversation multi-cloud you're hearing a lot of discussion you know certainly in DC the Jedi case Oracle is contesting that when you read the rulings from the General Accounting Office that basically the the DoD determined that multi-cloud is is less secure more expensive more complex now that's the DoD everybody's gonna have multi cloud because multi-cloud is multi vendor sure but it's interesting you don't hear Amazon talking about multi cloud other than you don't want to do it because it's too expensive but everybody else is talking about multi cloud is kubernetes somewhat of a threat to that Amazon posture I don't think I think if you look at Amazon is saying they call it hybrid cloud the word may be different multi cloud or hybrid cloud yeah say they've already partnered like the best public cloud partner with the best pressure of your house is awesome announcement right so vehement software ever talk to Pat gal singer and his team and look they got VMware working with AWS vice-versa so that's it great I mean maybe even call it a two ecosystem but they got that whole thing working there yeah anything with agile is going to do with their public cloud on Azure with as you understand I'll just tack on prom yeah right everybody has 70 mgcp will figure out so then after a while if you and me as a customer I should be able to move things many times it happen is I'm not going to move things dynamically for a nibble but if I want I don't want to vendor lock it I want a code such that if tomorrow something happens I should be able to have an option to move my code base to a different cloud and that's what multi-cloud will happen as a requirement as you build it how much you exercise are not people will design software going for a formal techno so a whole new vector of conversation I would love to get your opinion on that multi-cloud opportunity obviously Cisco's going after VMware's in the strong position there certainly Microsoft is is vying for that you have a ton of startups looking at this IBM with the Red Hat acquisition now is in a in a pretty strong position you know given its open source chops how do you see that whole multi-cloud you know vendor landscape shaking out I think I got really good I have a TD for this at the end when the dust settles you won't have 100 aircraft carriers you will have only four or five yeah so it's like what happened in 90s compact went away Dec went away so same thing is going to happen here there will be four or five vendors will survive there will be Amazon's as yours maybe GCPs VMware's maybe it's Cisco and IBM talks about a I mean there's like maybe alley cloud in China you won't have hundreds of cloud so the number is already decreasing it will let be 10 will it be 5 will it before that still you will see the tall rise but it's already been the whole council isn't happening so if I'm a customer if I'm a vendor if I'm a startup or a public company I'm going to build it only for a few these multi cloud vendors I'm not going to across hundred yeah because the marginal economics of those those hyper clouds we've been saying this for years if there's just so much more compelling and at the end of the day if the economics are 10x less expensive and more attractive that they're gonna win you know and and I think even though you have thousands and thousands of service providers who call themselves cloud we're talking about a different kind of cloud it's got one of those you know it when you see it types of things and I'm going to add something so if you take this back to your earlier question about where the disruption is happening we talked about all the customer service support an IT service management industry but imagine if an app is born on the cloud call it cloud native applications you have millions of new apps that are there on this cloud platforms what is that going to do where is the data going there they want another customer service and support applicant on their platform it currently it's like I'm in your house I'm drinking your wine but when it comes to managing my customers of an operation I will take your log data your even data or take indeed and put in somebody else's house even though John is your partner when you put it there it doesn't make sense it should run it inside yours so all these vendors would want a native application that is running on their platform solving their customer data which hasn't happened yet well this is interesting so obviously Oracle has its own cloud but you're seeing well see work day Salesforce service now all these SAS companies just used to build their own clouds they're building their own data centers Chuck Chuck Philips oven forces I don't friends don't let friends build data centers so maybe he's prescient maybe the trend is that these apps are going to largely predominantly run in the public cloud the Oracle IBM notwithstanding they've got the resources to maybe you know tough it out is that the scenario that you see I have take the consumer companies whether you take V work Airbnb uber all these guys you are already seeing them on to some opinion maybe they have their own datacenter but there are vastly learning and public clouds right and you have already seen that's even the big SAS vendors whether it's Adobe yeah it'll be solid partner with Microsoft Azure workday is partnering with Amazon you saw em Salesforce partnering with Google cloud and AW so you're only seeing these vendors the large SAS when there's already saying in order for me for economics wise it doesn't make sense whether it's for my marketing cloud my service cloud my ecommerce cloud I want this to run on this cloud platform to get scale cost of economics and also I need my services that are built there with a new substrate like we talked about that's lambda functions to kinases I'm not going to do it on my platform but and that trend is going on it's just accelerating so how are you spending your time these days you've had a very successful entrepreneur investor you've been CEO of multiple companies what do you do in these days I'm look I'm very happy with what I'm doing right now so I spend a lot of time with this company called I set up that's right I'm even we talked about it it's a startup company in Palo Alto their vision is to apply like what we got AI ops applying AI for digital transformation for AI customer service I trps oh I like the region look I want to spend time with companies which are taking a big bet right it's like in our IT industry nobody talks about moonshot goals let's take a bigger bet let's take a much vision of for five year ten years what can we disrupt right and I look at those companies I invest with those companies and spending time with them I'm learning a lot in the process I'm contributing back to the those companies well you know sitter I was on Twitter yesterday with with a little group we're having an interesting discussion about you know how things are changing the dynamics of where innovation comes over so we started this conversation with that sort of new innovation cocktail and there just seems to be a whole new fabric of services not only it's not just remote cloud services anymore it's these embedded services that are can think they can act they can sense and it's ubiquitous now even the edge autonomous vehicles we're entering a whole new era it's very exciting right and again one thing that we didn't talk to see Mike and son and my it again it's society has to have regulations and will come if you look at the what's happened in this whole call center customer service industry if autonomous city will happen of any level from level even if I automate 30 percent of your customer service and you don't touch a human being when you are at home for your Comcast to your nest imagine all those services inside your home from field service to if they get automated what's going to happen first of all if Sally's gonna improve your costs are going to reduce if I'm a business I can take that money and invest somewhere else but more importantly those most of those things it's it's a big disruption happening in the outsourced industry right these are your jobs in China India Philippines Vietnam my concern is dart saying that there will be a certain is going to happen people are not paying attention to that and this this strain has already left the station yeah it's going to come to a platform again some next platform but next for five years you'll see a tremendous disruption in this area of digital transformation well I remember a couple decades ago there was a lot of talk about well you people spending a lot of money on IT but that you don't see it in the productivity numbers and all of a sudden because of the PC revolution the productivity went through the roof you're hearing similar sort of discussions now we feel like productivity is about to explode because of what you're saying here absolutely and again the per back to the RP has already shown the value our peers no longer in each category it's what we talked about success renders from you iPad automation anywhere blue prism that just on the back end of the supply chain and RPF cell taking the two front office applying that to customer service facing to your crm facing that your IT hasn't happened yet can I automatically can I ought Americans right from an employee experience to customer experience that productivity if you employ it you'll get more customers doing that yeah it scares people but but it's the future so you better embrace it and lean in voodoo thanks so much oh let's go always measure to see you alright thanks for watching everybody this is David day from our studios in Palo Alto and we'll see you next time thank you [Music]