>> Announcer: "theCUBE" presents KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to Valencia, Spain and KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2022. I'm Keith Townsend, my co-host, Paul Gillin, Senior Editor Enterprise Architecture for SiliconANGLE. We're going to talk, or continue to talk to amazing people. The coverage has been amazing, but also the city of Valencia is beautiful. I have to eat a little crow, I landed and I saw the convention center, Paul, have you got out and explored the city at all? >> Absolutely, my first reaction to Valencia when we were out in this industrial section was, "This looks like Cincinnati." >> Yes. >> But then I got on the bus second day here, 10 minutes to downtown, another world, it's almost a middle ages flavor down there with these little winding streets and just absolutely gorgeous city. >> Beautiful city. I compared it to Charlotte, no disrespect to Charlotte, but this is an amazing city. Naina Singh, Principal Product Manager at Red Hat, and Roland Huss, also Principal Product Manager at Red Hat. We're going to talk a little serverless. I'm going to get this right off the bat. People get kind of feisty when we call things like Knative serverless. What's the difference between something like a Lambda and Knative? >> Okay, so I'll start. Lambda is, like a function as a server, right? Which is one of the definitions of serverless. Serverless is a deployment platform now. When we introduced serverless to containers through Knative, that's when the serverless got revolutionized, it democratized serverless. Lambda was proprietary-based, you write small snippets of code, run for a short duration of time on demand, and done. And then Knative which brought serverless to containers, where all those benefits of easy, practical, event-driven, running on demand, going up and down, all those came to containers. So that's where Knative comes into picture. >> Yeah, I would also say that Knative is based on containers from the very beginning, and so, it really allows you to run arbitrary workloads in your container, whereas with Lambda you have only a limited set of language that you can use and you have a runtime contract there which is much easier with Knative to run your applications, for example, if it's coming in a language that is not supported by Lambda. And of course the most important benefit of Knative is it's run on top of Kubernetes, which allows you- >> Yes. >> To run your serverless platform on any other Kubernetes installation, so I think this is one of the biggest thing. >> I think we saw about three years ago there was a burst of interest around serverless computing and really some very compelling cost arguments for using it, and then it seemed to die down, we haven't heard a lot about serverless, and maybe I'm just not listening to the right people, but what is it going to take for serverless to kind of break out and achieve its potential? >> Yeah, I would say that really the big advantage of course of Knative in that case is that you can scale down to zero. I think this is one of the big things that will really bring more people onto board because you really save a lot of money with that if your applications are not running when they're not used. Yeah, I think also that, because you don't have this vendor log in part thing, when people realize that you can run really on every Kubernete platform, then I think that the journey of serverless will continue. >> And I will add that the event-driven applications, there hasn't been enough buzz around them yet. There is, but serverless is going to bring a new lease on life on them, right? The other thing is the ease of use for developers. With Knative, we are introducing a new programming model, the functions, where you don't even have to create containers, it would do create containers for you. >> So you create the servers, but not the containers? >> Right now, you create the containers and then you deploy them in a serverless fashion using Knative. But the container creation was on the developers, and functions is going to be the third component of Knative that we are developing upstream, and Red Hat donated that project, is going to be where code to cloud capability. So you bring your code and everything else will be taken care of, so. >> So, I'd call a function or, it's funny, we're kind of circular with this. What used to be, I'd write a function and put it into a container, this server will provide that function not just call that function as if I'm developing kind of a low code no code, not no code, but a low code effort. So if there's a repetitive thing that the community wants to do, you'll provide that as a predefined function or as a server. >> Yeah, exactly. So functions really helps the developer to bring their code into the container, so it's really kind of a new (indistinct) on top of Knative- >> on top op. >> And of course, it's also a more opinionated approach. It's really more closer coming to Lambda now because it also comes with a programming model, which means that you have certain signature that you have to implement and other stuff. But you can also create your own templates, because at the end what matters is that you have a container at the end that you can run on Knative. >> What kind of applications is serverless really the ideal platform? >> Yeah, of course the ideal application is a HTTP-based web application that has no state and that has a very non-uniform traffic shape, which means that, for example, if you have a business where you only have spikes at certain times, like maybe for Super Bowl or Christmas, when selling some merchandise like that, then you can scale up from zero very quickly at a arbitrary high depending on the load. And this is, I think, the big benefit over, for example, Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaling where it's more like indirect measures of value scaling based on CPR memory, but here, it directly relates one to one to the traffic that is coming in to concurrent request. Yeah, so this helps a lot for non-uniform traffic shapes that I think this has become one of the ideal use case. >> Yeah. But I think that is one of the most used or defined one, but I do believe that you can write almost all applications. There are some, of course, that would not be the right load, but as long as you are handling state through external mechanism. Let's say, for example you're using database to save the state, or you're using physical volume amount to save the state, it increases the density of your cluster because when they're running, the containers would pop up, when your application is not running, the container would go down, and the resources can be used to run any other application that you want to us, right? >> So, when I'm thinking about Lambda, I kind of get the event-driven nature of Lambda. I have a S3 bucket, and if a S3 event is driven, then my functions as the server will start, and that's kind of the listening servers. How does that work with Knative or a Kubernetes-based thing? 'Cause I don't have an event-driven thing that I can think of that kicks off, like, how can I do that in Kubernetes? >> So I'll start. So it is exactly the same thing. In Knative world, it's the container that's going to come up and your servers in the container, that will do the processing of that same event that you are talking. So let's say the notification came from S3 server when the object got dropped, that would trigger an application. And in world of Kubernetes, Knative, it's the container that's going to come up with the servers in it, do the processing, either find another servers or whatever it needs to do. >> So Knative is listening for the event, and when the event happens, then Knative executes the container. >> Exactly. >> Basically. >> So the concept of Knative source which is kind of adapted to the external world, for example, for the S3 bucket. And as soon as there is an event coming in, Knative will wake up that server, will transmit this event as a cloud event, which is another standard from the CNCF, and then when the server is done, then the server spins down again to zero so that the server is only running when there are events, which is very cost effective and which people really actually like to have this kind of way of dynamic scaling up from zero to one and even higher like that. >> Lambda has been sort of synonymous with serverless in the early going here, is Knative a competitor to Lambda, is it complimentary? Would you use the two together? >> Yeah, I would say that Lambda is a offering from AWS, so it's a cloud server there. Knative itself is a platform, so you can run it in the cloud, and there are other cloud offerings like from IBM, but you can also run it on-premise for example, that's the alternative. So you can also have hybrid set scenarios where you really can put one part into the cloud, the other part on-prem, and I think there's a big difference in that you have a much more flexibility and you can avoid this kind of Windows login compared to AWS Lambda. >> Because Knative provides specifications and performance tests, so you can move from one server to another. If you are on IBM offering that's using Knative, and if you go to a Google offering- >> A google offering. >> That's on Knative, or a Red Hat offering on Knative, it should be seamless because they're both conforming to the same specifications of Knative. Whereas if you are in Lambda, there are custom deployments, so you are only going to be able to run those workloads only on AWS. >> So KnativeCon, co-located event as part of KubeCon, I'm curious as to the level of effort in the user interaction for deploying Knative. 'Cause when I think about Lambda or cloud-run or one of the other functions as a servers, there is no backend that I have to worry about. And I think this is where some of the debate becomes over serverless versus some other definition. What's the level of lifting that needs to be done to deploy Knative in my Kubernetes environment? >> So if you like... >> Is this something that comes as based part of the OpenShift install or do I have to like, you know, I have to... >> Go ahead, you answer first. >> Okay, so actually for OpenShift, it's a code layer product. So you have this catalog of operator that you can choose from, and OpenShift Serverless is one part of that. So it's really kind of a one click install where you have also get a default configuration, you can flexibly configure it as you like. Yeah, we think that's a good user experience and of course you can go to these cloud offerings like Google Cloud one or IBM Code Engine, they just have everything set up for you. And the idea of other different alternatives, you have (indistinct) charts, you can install Knative in different ways, you also have options for the backend systems. For example, we mentioned that when an event comes in, then there's a broker in the middle of something which dispatches all the events to the servers, and there you can have a different backend system like Kafka or AMQ. So you can have very production grade messaging system which really is responsible for delivering your events to your servers. >> Now, Knative has recently, I'm sorry, did I interrupt you? >> No, I was just going to say that Knative, when we talk about, we generally just talk about the serverless deployment model, right? And the Eventing gets eclipsed in. That Eventing which provides this infrastructure for producing and consuming event is inherent part of Knative, right? So you install Knative, you install Eventing, and then you are ready to connect all your disparate systems through Events. With CloudEvents, that's the specification we use for consistent and portable events. >> So Knative recently admitted to the, or accepted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, incubating there. Congratulations, it's a big step. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> How does that change the outlook for Knative adoption? >> So we get a lot of support now from the CNCF which is really great, so we could be part of this conference, for example which was not so easy before that. And we see really a lot of interest and we also heard before the move that many contributors were not, started into looking into Knative because of this kind of non being part of a mutual foundation, so they were kind of afraid that the project would go away anytime like that. And we see the adoption really increases, but slowly at the moment. So we are still ramping up there and we really hope for more contributors. Yeah, that's where we are. >> CNCF is almost synonymous with open source and trust. So, being in CNCF and then having this first KnativeCon event as part of KubeCon, we are hoping, and it's a recent addition to CNCF as well, right? So we are hoping that this events and these interviews, this will catapult more interest into serverless. So I'm really, really hopeful and I only see positive from here on out for Knative. >> Well, I can sense the excitement. KnativeCon sold out, congratulations on that. >> Thank you. >> I can talk about serverless all day, it's a topic that I really love, it's a fascinating way to build applications and manage applications, but we have a lot more coverage to do today on "theCUBE" from Spain. From Valencia, Spain, I'm Keith Townsend along with Paul Gillin, and you're watching "theCUBE," the leader in high-tech coverage. (gentle upbeat music)

>>Okay. Okay. Now we're gonna go into the Green Lake Power Panel. Talk about the cloud landscape hybrid cloud and how the partner ecosystem and customers are thinking about cloud hybrid cloud as a service and, of course, Green Lake. And with me or CR Houdyshell, president of Advise X. Ron Nemecek, Who's the business Alliance manager at C B. T s. Harry Zaric is president of competition, and Benjamin Clay is VP of sales and alliances at Arrow Electronics. Great to see you guys. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube. >>Thanks for having us >>would be here. >>Okay, here's the deal. So I'm gonna ask you guys each to introduce yourselves and your company's add a little color to my brief intro and then answer the following question. How do you and your customers think about hybrid cloud and think about it in the context of where we are today and where we're going? Not just the snapshot, but where we are today and where we're going. CR, why don't you start, please? >>Sure. Thanks a lot. They appreciate it. And, uh, again cr Howdy Shell President of advising. I've been with the company for 18 years the last four years as president. So had the great great opportunity here to lead a 45 year old company with a very strong brand and great culture. Uh, as it relates to advise X and where we're headed to with hybrid Cloud is it's a journey, so we're excited to be leading that journey for the company as well as HP. We're very excited about where HP is going with Green Lake. We believe it's it's a very strong solution when it comes to hybrid. Cloud have been an HP partner since since 1980. So for 40 years it's our longest standing OM relationship, and we're really excited about where HP is going with Green Lake from a hybrid cloud perspective. Uh, we feel like we've been doing the hybrid cloud solutions in the past few years with everything that we've focused on from a VM Ware perspective. But now, with where HP is going, we think really changing the game and it really comes down to giving customers at cloud experience with the on Prem solution with Green Lake, and we've had great response from our customers and we think we're gonna continue to see how that kind of increased activity and reception. >>Great. Thank you. Cr and yeah, I totally agree. It is. It is a journey. And we've seen it really come a long way in the last decade. Ron, I wonder if you could kick off your little first intro there, please? >>Sure. Dave, thanks for having me today. And it's a pleasure being here with all of you. My name is Ron Nemecek, business Alliance manager at C B. T. S. In my role, I am responsible for RHP Green Lake relationship globally. I've enjoyed a 33 year career in the I T industry. I'm thankful for the opportunity to serve in multiple functional and senior leadership roles that have helped me gather a great deal of education and experience that could be used to aid our customers with their evolving needs for business outcomes. The best position them for sustainable and long term success. I'm honored to be part of the C B. T s and Annex Canada Organization, C B T s stands for consult Bill transform and support. We have a 35 year relationship with HP or a platinum and inner circle partner. We're headquartered in Cincinnati Ohio. We service 3000 customers, generating over a billion dollars in revenue, and we have over 2000 associates across the globe. Our focus is partnering with our customers to deliver innovative solutions and business results through thought leadership. We drive this innovation VR team of the best and brightest technology professionals in the industry that have secured over 2800 technical certifications 260 specifically with HP and in our hybrid cloud business. We have clearly found the technology new market demands for instant responses and experiences evolving economic considerations with detailed financial evaluation and, of course, the global pandemic have challenged each of our customers across all industries to develop an optimal cloud strategy we have. We now play an enhanced strategic role for our customers as there Technology Advisor and their guide to the right mix of cloud experiences that will maximize their organizational success with predictable outcomes. Our conversations have really moved from product roadmaps and speeds and feeds to return on investment, return on capital and financial statements, ratios and metrics. We collaborate regularly with our customers at all levels and all departments to find an effective, comprehensive cloud strategy for their workloads and applications, ensuring proper alignment and costs with financial return. >>Great. Thank you, Ron. Yeah, Today it's all about the business value. Harry, please, >>I Dave. Thanks for the opportunity and greetings from the Great White North, where Canadian based company headquartered in Toronto, with offices across the country. We've been in the tech industry for a very long time. What we would call a solution provider hard for my mother to understand what that means. But our goal is to help our customers realize the business value of their technology investments just to give you an example of what it is we try and do. We just finished a build out of a new networking and point in data center technology for a brand new hospital is now being mobilized for covid high risk patients. So talk about are all being an essential industry, providing essential services across the whole spectrum of technology. Now, in terms of what's happening in the marketplace, our customers are confused. No question about it. They hear about cloud and cloud first, and everyone goes to the cloud. But the reality is there's lots of technology, lots of applications that actually still have to run on premises for a whole bunch of reasons. And what customers want is solid senior serious advice as to how they leverage what they already have in terms of their existing infrastructure but modernized and updated So it looks and feels a lot like a cloud. But they have the security. They have the protection that they need to have for reasons that are dependent on their industry and business to allow them to run on from. And so the Green Lake philosophy is perfect. That allows customers to actually have 1 ft in the cloud, 1 ft in their traditional data center, but modernize it so it actually looks like one enterprise entity. And it's that kind of flexibility that gives us an opportunity collectively, ourselves, our partners, HP to really demonstrate that we understand how to optimize the use of technology across all of the business applications they need to rest >>your hair. It's interesting about what you said is is cloud is it is kind of chaotic. My word not yours, but but there is a lot of confusion out there. I mean, it's what's cloud right? Is it Public Cloud is a private cloud the hybrid cloud. Now, now it's the edge. And of course, the answer is all of the above. Ben, what's your perspective on all this? >>Um, from a cloud perspective. You know, I think as an industry, you know, I think we we've all accepted that public cloud is not necessarily gonna win the day and were, in fact, in a hybrid world, there's certainly been some some commentary impress. Um, you know, that would sort of validate that. Not that necessarily needs any validation. But I think it's the linkages between on Prem, Um, and cloud based services have increased. Its paved the way for customers to more effectively deploy hybrid solutions in the model that they want that they desired. You know, Harry was commenting on that a moment ago. Um, you know, as the trend continues, it becomes much easier for solution providers and service providers to drive there services, initiatives, uh, you know, in particular managed services. So, you know, from from an arrow perspective, as we think about how we can help scale in particular from Greenland perspective, we've got the ability to stand up some some cloud capabilities through our aero secure platform. um that can really help customers adopt Green Lake. Uh, and, uh, benefit to benefit from, um, some alliances, opportunities as well. And I'll talk more about that as we go through >>that. I didn't mean to squeeze you on a narrow. I mean, you got arrows. Been around longer than computers. I mean, if you google the history of arrow, it'll blow your mind. But give us a little, uh, quick commercial. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, um, I've been with arrow for about 20 years. I've got responsibility for alliances, organization, North America for Global value, added distribution, business consulting and channel enablement Company. Uh, you know, we bring scope, scale and and, uh, expertise as it relates to the I t industry. Um, you know, I love the fast paced, the fast paced that comes with the market, that we're all all in, and I love helping customers and suppliers both, you know, be positioned for long term success. And, you know, the subject matter here today is just a great example of that. So I'm happy to be here and or to the discussion. >>All right, We got some good brain power in the room. Let's let's cut right to the chase. Ron, Where's the pain? What are the main problems that C B. T s. I love the what it stands for. Consult Bill Transform and support the What's the main pain point that that customers are asking you to solve when it comes to their cloud strategies. >>Third day of our customers' concerns and associated risk come from the market demands to deliver their products, services and experiences instantaneously. And then the challenges is how do they meet those demands because they have aging infrastructure processes and fiscal constraints. Our customers really need us now more than ever to be excellent listeners so we can collaborate on an effective map for the strategic placement of workloads and applications in that spectrum of cloud experiences, while managing their costs and, of course, mitigating risk to their business. This collaboration with our customer customers often identify significant costs that have to be evaluated, justified or eliminated. We find significant development, migration and egress charges in their current public cloud experience, coupled with significant over provisioning, maintenance, operational and stranded asset costs in their on premise infrastructure environment. When we look at all these costs holistically through our customized workshops and assessments. We can identify the optimal cloud experience for the respective workloads and applications through our partnership with HP and the availability of the HP Green Lake Solutions. Our customers now have a choice to deliver SLA's economics and business outcomes for their workloads and applications that best reside on premise in a private cloud and have that experience. This is a rock solid solution that eliminates, you know, the development costs at the experience and the egress charges that are associated with the public cloud while utilizing HP Green Lake to eliminate over provisioning costs and the maintenance costs on aging infrastructure hardware. Lastly, our customers only have to pay for actual infrastructure usage with no upfront capital expense. And now that achieves true utilization to cost economics. You know, with HP Green Lake solution from C B. T s. >>I love to focus on the business case because it's measurable. That sort of follow the money. That's where it's where the opportunity is. Okay, See, I got a question for you thinking about advise X customers. How are they? Are they leaning into Green Lake? You know, what are they telling you? Is the business impact when they when they experience Green Lake, >>I think it goes back to what Ron was talking about. We have to solve the business challenges first, and so far the reception's been positive. When I say that is, customers are open, everybody wants to. The C suite wants to hear about cloud and hybrid cloud fits, but what we're hearing, what we're seeing from our customers is we're seeing more adoption from customers that it may be their first put in, if you will. But as importantly, we're able to share other customers with our potentially new clients that that say, What's the first thing that happens with regard to Green like Well, number one, it works. It works as advertised and as a as a service. That's a big step. There are a lot of people out there dabbling today, but when you can say we have a proven solution, it's working in in in our environment today. That's key. I think the second thing is is flexibility. You know, when customers are looking for this, this hybrid solution, you've got to be flexible for again. I think Ron said it well, you don't have a big capital outlay but also what customers want to be able to. We're gonna build for growth, but we don't want to pay for it, so we'll pay as we grow. Not as not as we have to use because we used to do It was upfront of the capital expenditure, and I will just pay as we grow and that really facilitates. In another great examples, you'll hear from a customer, uh, this afternoon, but you'll hear where one of the biggest benefits they just acquired a $570 million company, and their integration is going to be very seamless because of their investment in Green Lake. They're looking at the flexibility to add the Green Lake as a big opportunity to integrate for acquisitions and finally is really we see it really brings the cloud experience and as a service to our customers bring. And with HP Green Lake, it brings best to breathe. So it's not just what HP has to offer. When you look at hyper converged, they have Nutanix kohi city, so I really believe it brings best to breathe. So, uh to net it out and close it out with our customers thus far, the customer experience has been exceptional with Green Lake Central has interface. Customers have had a lot of success. We just had our first customer from about a year and a half ago, just re up, and it was a highly competitive situation. But they just said, Look, it's proven it works and it gives us that cloud experience So I had a lot of great success thus far, looking forward to more. >>Thank you. So, Harry, I want to pick up on something, CR said, And get your perspectives. So when you when I talk to the C suite, they do all want to hear about, you know, Cloud, they have a cloud agenda and and what they tell me is it's not just about their I t transformation. They want, they want that. But they also want to transform their business. So I wonder if you could talk Harry about competence, perspective on the potential business impact of Green Lake, and and also, you know, I'm interested in how you guys are thinking about workloads, how to manage work, you know how to cost optimize in i t. But also the business value that comes out of that capability. >>Yes. So, Dave, you know, if you were to talk to CFO and I have the good fortune to talk to lots of CFOs, they want to pay the cost. When they generate the revenue, they don't want to have all the cost up front and then wait for the revenue to come through. A good example of where that's happening right now is related to the pandemic. Employees that used to work at the office have now moved to working from home, and now they have to. They have to connect remotely to run the same application. So use this thing called VD virtual interfacing to allow them to connect to the applications that they need to run in the off. Don't want to get into too much detail. But to be able to support that from an at home environment, they needed to buy a lot more computing capacity to handle this. Now there's an expectation that hopefully six months from now, maybe sooner than that people will start returning to the office. They may not need that capacity so they can turn down on the cost. And so the idea of having the capacity available when you need it, But then turning it off when you don't need it is really a benefit of a variable cost model. Another example that I would use is one in new development if a customer is going to implement and you, let's say, line of business application essay P is very, very popular, you know, it actually, unfortunately takes six months to two years to actually get that application setup installed, validated, test it and then moves through production. You know what used to happen before they would buy all that capacity at front and basically sit there for two years? And then when they finally went to full production, then they were really getting value out of that investment. But they actually lost a couple of years of technology, literally sitting almost idle. And so, from a CFO perspective, his ability to support the development of those applications as he scales it perfect Green Lake is the ideal solution that allows them to do that. >>You know, technology has saved businesses in this pandemic. There's no question about it and what Harry was just talking about with regard to VD. You think about that. There's the dialing up and dialing down piece, which is awesome from an i t perspective and then the business impact. There is the productivity of Of of the end users, and most C suite executives I've talked to said Productivity actually went up during covid with work from home, which is kind of astounding if you think about it. Ben, you know Ben, I We said Arrow has been around for a long, long time, certainly before all of us were born and it's gone through many, many industry transitions during our lifetimes. How does arrow and how do How do your partners think about building cloud experience experiences? And where does Green Lake fit in from your perspective? >>A great question. So from a narrow perspective, when you think about cloud experience and, of course, us taking a view as a distribution partner, we want to be able to provide scale and efficiency to our network of partners. So we do that through our aero screw platform. Um, just just a bit of a you know, a bit of a commercial. I mean, you get single quote single bill auto provision compared multi supplier, if you will Subscription management utilization reporting from the platform itself. So if we pivot that directly to HP, you're going to get a bit of a scoop here, Dave. So we're excited today to have Green Lake live in our platform available for our part of community to consume in particular the swift solutions that HP has announced. So we're very excited to to share that today, Um, maybe a little bit more on Green Lake. I think at this point in time, there it's differentiated, Um, in a sense that if you think about some of the other offerings in the market today and further with, um uh, having the solutions himself available in a row sphere So, you know, I would say, Do we identify the uniqueness, um, and quickly partner with HP to to work with our atmosphere platform? One other sort of unique thing is, you know, when you think about platform itself, you've got to give a consistent experience the different geographies around the world. So, you know, we're available in north of 20 countries. There's thousands of resellers and transacting on the platform on a regular basis, and frankly, hundreds of thousands and customers are leveraging today, so that creates an opportunity for both Arrow HP and our partner community. So we're excited. >>Uh, you know, I just want to open it up and we don't have much time left, but thoughts on on on differentiation. You know, when people ask me Okay, what's really different about H P E and Green Lake? As others you know are doing things that with with as a service to me, it's a I I always say cultural. It starts from the top with Antonio, and it's like the company's all in. But But I wonder from your perspective because you guys are hands on. Are there other differential factors that you would point to let me just open that up to the group? >>Yeah, if I could make a comment. You know, Green Lake is really just the latest invocation of the as a service model. And what does that mean? What that actually means is you have a continuous ongoing relationship with the customer. It's not a cell. And forget not that we ever forget about customers, but there are highlights. Customer buys, it gets installed, and then for two or three years, you may have an occasional engagement with them. But it's not continuous. When you move to a Green Lake model, you're actually helping them manage that you are in the core in the heart of their business. No better place to be if you want to be sticky and you want to be relevant, and you want to be always there for them. >>You know, I wonder if somebody else could add to and and and in your in your remarks from your perspective as a partner because, you know, Hey, a lot of people made a lot of money selling boxes, but those days are pretty much gone. I mean, you have to transform into a services mindset. But other thoughts, >>I think I think Dad did that day. I think Harry's right on right. What he the way he positioned Exactly. You get on the customer. Even another step back for us is we're able to have the business conversation without leading with what you just said. You don't have to leave with a storage solution to leave with a compute. You can really have step back, have a business conversation, and we've done that where you don't even bring up hp Green Lake until you get to the point of the customer says, So you can give me an on prem cloud solution that gives me scalability, flexibility, all the things you're talking about. How does that work then? Then you bring up. It's all through this HP Green link tool. It really gives you the ability to have a business conversation. And you're solving the business problems versus trying to have a technology conversation. And to me, that's clear differentiation for HP. Green length. >>All right, guys. CR Ron. Harry. Ben. Great discussion. Thank you so much for coming on the program. Really appreciate it. >>Thanks for having us, Dave. >>All >>right. Keep it right there for more great content at Green Lake Day. Right back? Yeah.

(bright upbeat music) >> Announcer: We are entering an age of insight where data moves freely between environments to work together powerfully, from wherever it lives. A new era driven by next generation cloud services. It's freedom that accelerates innovation and digital transformation, but it's only for those who dare to propel their business toward a new future that pushes beyond the usual barriers. To a place that unites all information under a fluid yet consistent operating model, across all your applications and data. To a place called HPE GreenLake. HPE GreenLake pushes beyond the obstacles and limitations found in today's infrastructure because application entanglements, data gravity, security, compliance, and cost issues simply aren't solved by current cloud options. Instead, HPE GreenLake is the cloud that comes to you, bringing with it, increased agility, broad visibility, and open governance across your entire enterprise. This is digital transformation unlocked, incompatibility solved, data decentralized, and insights amplified. For those thinkers, makers and doers who want to create on the fly scale up or down with a single click, stand up new ideas without risk, and view it all as a single agile system of systems. HPE GreenLake is here and all are invited. >> The definition of cloud is evolving and now clearly comprises hybrid and on-prem cloud. These trends are top of mind for every CIO and the space is heating up as every major vendor has been talking about as-a-Service models and making moves to better accommodate customer needs. HPE was the first to market with its GreenLake brand, and continues to make new announcements designed to bring the cloud experience to far more customers. Come here from HPE and its partners about the momentum that they're seeing with this trend and what actions you can take to stay ahead of the competition in this fast moving market. (bright soft music) Okay, we're with Keith White, Senior Vice President and General Manager for GreenLake at HPE, and George Hope, who's the Worldwide Head of Partner Sales at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Welcome gentlemen, good to see you. >> Awesome to be here. >> Yeah. Thanks so much. >> You're welcome, Keith, last we spoke, we talked about how you guys were enabling high performance computing workloads to get green-late right for enterprise markets. And you got some news today, which we're going to get to but you guys, you put out a pretty bold position with GreenLake, basically staking a claim if you will, the edge, cloud as-a-Service all in. How are you thinking about its impacts for your customers so far? >> You know, the impact's been amazing and, you know, in essence, I think the pandemic has really brought forward this real need to accelerate our customer's digital transformation, their modernization efforts, and you know, frankly help them solve what was amounting to a bunch of new business problems. And so, you know, this manifests itself in a set of workloads, set of solutions, and across all industries, across all customer types. And as you mentioned, you know GreenLake is really bringing that value to them. It brings the cloud to the customer in their data center, in their colo, or at the edge. And so frankly, being able to do that with that full cloud experience. All is a pay per use, you know, fully consumption-based scenario, all managed for them so they get that as I mentioned, true cloud experience. It's really sort of landing really well with customers and we continue to see accelerated growth. We're adding new customers, we're adding new technology. And we're adding a whole new set of partner ecosystem folks as well that we'll talk about. >> Well, you know, it's interesting you mentioned that just cause as a quick aside it's, the definition of cloud is evolving and it's because customers, it's the way customers look at it. It's not just vendor marketing. It's what customers want, that experience across cloud, edge, you know, multiclouds, on-prem. So George, what's your take? Anything you'd add to Keith's response? >> I would, you've heard Antonio Neri say it several times and you probably saying it for yourself. The cloud is an experience, it's not a destination. The digital transformation is pushing new business models and that demands more flexible IT. And the first round of digital transformation focused on a cloud first strategy. For our customers we're looking to get more agility. As Keith mentioned, the next phase of transformation will be characterized by bringing the cloud speed and agility to all apps and data, regardless of where they live, According to IDC, by the end of 2021, 80% of the businesses will have some mechanism in place to shift the cloud centric, infrastructure and apps and twice as fast as before the pandemic. So the pandemic has actually accelerated the impact of the digital divide, specifically, in the small and medium companies which are adapting to technology change even faster and emerging stronger as a result. You know, the analysts agree cloud computing and digitalization will be key differentiators for small and medium business in years to come. And speed and automation will be pivotal as well. And by 2022, at least 30% of the lagging SMBs will accelerate digitalization. But the fair focus will be on internal processes and operations. The digital leaders, however, will differentiate by delivering their customers, a dynamic experience. And with our partner ecosystem, we're helping our customers embrace our as-a-Service vision and stand out wherever they are. on their transformation journey. >> Well, thanks for those stats, I always liked the data. I mean, look, if you're not a digital business today I feel like you're out of business only 'cause.... I'm sure there's some exceptions, but you got to get on the digital bandwagon. I think pre-pandemic, a lot of times people really didn't know what it meant. We know now what it means. Okay, Keith, let's get into the news when we do these things. I love that you guys always have something new to share. What do you have? >> No, you got it. And you know, as we said, the world is hybrid and the world is multicloud. And so, customers are expecting these solutions. And so, we're continuing to really drive up the innovation and we're adding additional cloud services to GreenLake. We just recently went to General AVailability of our MLOps, Machine Learning Operations, and our containers for cloud services along with our virtual desktop which has become very big in a pandemic world where a lot more people are working from home. And then we have shipped our SAP HEC, customer edition, which allows SAP customers to run on their premise whether it's the data center or the colo. And then today we're introducing our new Bare Metal capabilities as well as containers on Bare Metal as a Service, for those folks that are running cloud native applications that don't require any sort of hypervisor. So we're really excited about that. And then second, I'd say similar to that HPC as a Service experience we talked about before, where we were bringing HPC down to a broader set of customers. We're expanding the entry point for our private cloud, which is virtual machines, containers, storage, compute type capabilities in workload optimized systems. So again, this is one of the key benefits that HPE brings is it combines all of the best of our hardware, software, third-party software, and our services, and financial services into a package. And we've workload optimized this for small, medium, large and extra-large. So we have a real sort of broader base for our customers to take advantage of and to really get that cloud experience through HPE GreenLake. And, you know, from a partner standpoint we also want to make sure that we continue to make this super easy. So we're adding self-service capabilities we're integrating into our distributors marketplaces through a core set of APIs to make sure that it plugs in for a very smooth customer experience. And this expands our reach to over 100,000 additional value-added resellers. And, you know, we saw just fantastic growth in the channel in Q1, over 118% year over year growth for GreenLake Cloud Services through the channel. And we're continuing to expand, extend and expand our partner ecosystem with additional key partnerships like our colos. The colocation centers are really key. So Equinix, CyrusOne and others that we're working with and I'll let George talk more about. >> Yeah, I wonder if you could pick up on that George. I mean, look, if I'm a partner and and I mean, I see an opportunity here.. Maybe, you know, I made a lot of money in the old days moving iron. But I got to move, I got to pivot my business. You know, COVID's actually, you know, accelerating a lot of those changes, but there's a lot of complexity out there and partners can be critical in helping customers make that journey. What do you see this meaning to partners, George? >> So I completely agree with Keith and through and with our partners we give our customers choice. Right, they don't have to worry about security or cost as they would with public cloud or the hyperscalers. We're driving special initiatives via Cloud28 which we run, which is the world's largest cloud aggregator. And also, in collaboration with our distributors in their marketplaces as Keith mentioned. In addition, customers can leverage our expertise and support of our service provider ecosystem, our SI's, our ISV's, to find the right mix of hybrid IT and decide where each application or workload should be hosted. 'Cause customers are now demanding robust ecosystems, cloud adjacency, and efficient low latency networks. And the modern workload demands, secure, compliant, highly available, and cost optimized environments. And Keith touched on colocation. We're partnering with colocation facilities to provide our customers with the ability to expand bandwidth, reduce latency, and get access to a robust ecosystem of adjacent providers. We touched on Equinix a bit as one of them, but we're partnering with them to enable customers to connect to multiple clouds with private on-demand interconnections from hundreds of data center locations around the globe. We continue to invest in the partner and customer experience, you know, making ourselves easier to do business with. We've now fully integrated partners in GreenLake Central, and could provide their customers end to end support and managing the entire hybrid IT estate. And lastly, we're providing partners with dedicated and exclusive enablement opportunities so customers can rely on both HPE and partner experts. And we have a competent team of specialists that can help them transform and differentiate themselves. >> Yeah, so, I'm hearing a theme of simplicity. You know, I talked earlier about this being customer-driven. To me what the customer wants is they want to come in, they want simple, like you mentioned, self-serve. I don't care if it's on-prem, in the cloud, across clouds, at the edge, abstract, all that complexity away from me. Make it simple to do, not only the technology to work, you figure out where the workload should run and let the metadata decide and that's a bold vision. And then, make it easy to do business. Let me buy as-a-Service if that's the way I want to consume. And partners are all about, you know, reducing friction and driving that. So, anyway guys, final thoughts, maybe Keith, you can close it out here and maybe George can call it timeout. >> Yeah, you summed it up really nice. You know, we're excited to continue to provide what we view as the largest and most flexible hybrid cloud for our customers' apps, data, workloads, and solutions. And really being that leading on-prem solution to meet our customer's needs. At the same time, we're going to continue to innovate and our ears are wide open, and we're listening to our customers on what their needs are, what their requirements are. So we're going to expand the use cases, expand the solution sets that we provide in these workload optimized offerings to a very very broad set of customers as they drive forward with that digital transformation and modernization efforts. >> Right, George, any final thoughts? >> Yeah, I would say, you know, with our partners we work as one team and continue to hone our skills and embrace our competence. We're looking to help them evolve their businesses and thrive, and we're here to help now more than ever. So, you know, please reach out to our team and our partners and we can show you where we've already been successful together. >> That's great, we're seeing the expanding GreenLake portfolio, partners key part of it. We're seeing new tools for them and then this ecosystem evolution and build out and expansion. Guys, thanks so much. >> Yeah, you bet, thank you. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> You're welcome. (bright soft music) >> Okay, we're here with Jo Peterson the VP of Cloud & Security at Clarify360. Hello, Jo, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hello. >> Great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome, all right, let's get right into it. How do you think about cloud where we are today in 2021? The definitions evolve, but where do you see it today and where do you see it going? >> Well, that's such an interesting question and is so relevant because the labels are disappearing. So over the last 10 years, we've sort of found ourselves defining whether an environment was public or whether it was private or whether it was hybrid. Here's the deal, cloud is infrastructure and infrastructure is cloud. So at the end of the day cloud in whatever form it's taking is a platform, and ultimately, this enablement tool for the business. Customers are consuming cloud in the best way that works for their businesses. So let's also point out that cloud is not a destination, it's this journey. And clients are finding themselves at different places on that road. And sometimes they need help getting to the next milestone. >> Right, and they're really looking for that consistent experience. Well, what are the big waves and trends that you're seeing around cloud out there in the marketplace? >> So I think that this hybrid reality is happening in most organizations. Their actual IT portfolios include a mix of on-premise and cloud infrastructure, and we're seeing this blurred line happening between the public cloud and the traditional data center. Customers want a bridge that easily connects one environment to the other environment, and they want end-to-end visibility. Customers are becoming more intentional and strategic about their cloud roadmaps. So some of them are intentionally and strategically selecting hybrid environments because they feel that it affords them more control, cost, balance, comfort level around their security. In a way, cloud itself is becoming borderless. The major tech providers are extending their platforms in an infrastructure agnostic manner and that's to work across hybrid environments, whether they be hosted in the data center, whether it includes multiple cloud providers. As cloud matures, workload environments fit is becoming more of a priority. So forward thinking where the organizations are matching workloads to the best environment. And it's sort of application rationalization on this case by case basis and it really makes sense. >> Yeah, it does makes sense. Okay, well, let's talk about HPE GreenLake. They just announced some new solutions. What do you think it means for customers? >> I think that HPE has stepped up. They've listened to not only their customers but their partners. Customers want consumable infrastructure, they've made that really clear. And HPE has expanded the cloud service portfolio for clients. They're offering more choices to not only enterprise customers but they're expanding that offering to attract this mid-market client base. And they provided additional tools for partners to make selling GreenLake easier. This is all helping to drive channel sales. >> Yeah, so better granularity, just so it increases the candidates, better optionality for customers. And this thing is evolving pretty quickly. We're seeing a number of customers that we talked to interested in this model, trying to understand it better and ultimately, I think they're going to really lean in hard. Jo, I wonder if you could maybe think about or share with us which companies are, I got to say, getting it right? And I'm really interested in the partner piece, because if you think about the partner business, it's really, it's changing a lot, right? It's gone from this notion of moving boxes and there was a lot of money to be made over the decades in doing that, but they have to now become value-add suppliers and really around cloud services. And in the early days of cloud, I think the channel was a little bit freaked out, saying, uh-oh, they're going to cut out the middleman. But what's actually happened is those smart agile partners are adding substantial value, they've got deep relationships with customers and they're serving as really trusted advisors and executors of cloud strategies. What do you see happening in the partner community? >> Well, I think it's been a learning curve and everything that you said was spot on. It's a two way street, right? In order for VARs to sell residual services, monthly recurring services, there has to have been some incentive to do that and HPE really got it right. Because they, again listened to that partner community, and they said, you know what? We've got to incentivize these guys to start selling this way. This is a partnership and we expect it to be a partnership. And the tech companies that are getting right are doing that same sort of thing, they're figuring out ways to make it palatable to that VAR, to help them along that journey. They're giving them tools, they're giving them self-serve tools, they're incentivizing them financially to make that shift. That's what's going to matter. >> Well, that's a key point you're making, I mean, the financial incentives, that's new and different. Paying, you know, incentivizing for as-a-Service models versus again, moving hardware and paying for, you know, installing iron. That's a shift in mindset, isn't it? >> It definitely is. And HPE, I think is getting it right because I didn't notice but I learned this, 70% of their annual sales are actually transacted through their channel. And they've seen this 116% increase in HPE GreenLake orders in Q1, from partners. So what they're doing is working. >> Yeah, I think you're right. And you know, the partner channel it becomes super critical. It's funny, Jo, I mean, again, in the early days of cloud, the channel was feeling like they were going to get disrupted. I don't know about you, but I mean, we've both been analysts for awhile and the more things get simple, the more they get complicated, right? I mean the consumerization of IT, the cloud, swipe your credit card, but actually applying that to your business is not easy. And so, I see that as great opportunities for the channel. Give you the last word. >> Absolutely, and what's going to matter is the tech companies that step up and realize we've got this chance, this opportunity to build that bridge and provide visibility, end-to-end visibility for clients. That's what going to matter. >> Yeah, I like how you're talking about that bridge, because that's what everybody wants. They want that bridge from on-prem to the public cloud, across clouds, going to to be moving out to the edge. And that is to your point, a journey that's going to evolve over the better part of this coming decade. Jo, great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE today. >> Thanks for having me. (bright soft music) >> Okay, now we're going to into the GreenLake power panel to talk about the cloud landscape, hybrid cloud, and how the partner ecosystem and customers are thinking about cloud, hybrid cloud as a Service and of course, GreenLake. And with me are C.R. Howdyshell, President of Advizex. Ron Nemecek, who's the Business Alliance Manager at CBTS. Harry Zarek is President of Compugen. And Benjamin Klay is VP of Sales and Alliances at Arrow Electronics. Great to see you guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> Good to be here. >> Okay, here's the deal. So I'm going to ask you guys each to introduce yourselves and your companies, add a little color to my brief intro, and then answer the following question. How do you and your customers think about hybrid cloud? And think about it in the context of where we are today and where we're going, not just the snapshot but where we are today and where we're going. C.R., why don't you start please? >> Sure, thanks a lot, Dave, appreciate it. And again, C.R. Howdyshell, President of Advizex. I've been with the company for 18 years, the last four years as president. So had the great opportunity here to lead a 45 year old company with a very strong brand and great culture. As it relates to Advizex and where we're headed to with hybrid cloud is it's a journey. So we're excited to be leading that journey for the company as well as HPE. We're very excited about where HPE is going with GreenLake. We believe it's a very strong solution when it comes to hybrid cloud. Have been an HPE partner since, well since 1980. So for 40 years, it's our longest standing OEM relationship. And we're really excited about where HPE is going with GreenLake. From a hybrid cloud perspective, we feel like we've been doing the hybrid cloud solutions, the past few years with everything that we've focused on from a VMware perspective. But now with where HPE is going, we think, probably changing the game. And it really comes down to giving customers that cloud experience with the on-prem solution with GreenLake. And we've had great response for customers and we think we're going to continue to see that kind of increased activity and reception. >> Great, thank you C.R., and yeah, I totally agree. It is a journey and we've seen it really come a long way in the last decade. Ron, I wonder if you could kickoff your little first intro there please. >> Sure Dave, thanks for having me today and it's a pleasure being here with all of you. My name is Ron Nemecek, I'm a Business Alliance manager at CBTS. In my role, I'm responsible for our HPE GreenLake relationship globally. I've enjoyed a 33 year career in the IT industry. I'm thankful for the opportunity to serve in multiple functional and senior leadership roles that have helped me gather a great deal of education and experience that could be used to aid our customers with their evolving needs, for business outcomes to best position them for sustainable and long-term success. I'm honored to be part of the CBTS and OnX Canada organization. CBTS stands for Consult Build Transform and Support. We have a 35 year relationship with HPE. We're a platinum and inner circle partner. We're headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio. We service 3000 customers generating over a billion dollars in revenue and we have over 2000 associates across the globe. Our focus is partnering with our customers to deliver innovative solutions and business results through thought leadership. We drive this innovation via our team of the best and brightest technology professionals in the industry that have secured over 2,800 technical certifications, 260 specifically with HPE. And in our hybrid cloud business, we have clearly found that technology, new market demands for instant responses and experiences, evolving economic considerations with detailed financial evaluation, and of course the global pandemic, have challenged each of our customers across all industries to develop an optimal cloud strategy. We now play an enhanced strategic role for our customers as their technology advisor and their guide to the right mix of cloud experiences that will maximize their organizational success with predictable outcomes. Our conversations have really moved from product roadmaps and speeds and feeds to return on investment, return on capital, and financial statements, ratios, and metrics. We collaborate regularly with our customers at all levels and all departments to find an effective comprehensive cloud strategy for their workloads and applications ensuring proper alignment and cost with financial return. >> Great, thank you, Ron. Yeah, today it's all about the business value. Harry, please. >> Hi Dave, thanks for the opportunity and greetings from the Great White North. We're a Canadian-based company headquartered in Toronto with offices across the country. We've been in the tech industry for a very long time. We're what we would call a solution provider. How hard for my mother to understand what that means but what our goal is to help our customers realize the business value of their technology investments. Just to give you an example of what it is we try and do. We just finished a build out of a new networking endpoint and data center technology for a brand new hospital. It's now being mobilized for COVID high-risk patients. So talk about our all being in an essential industry, providing essential services across the whole spectrum of technology. Now, in terms of what's happening in the marketplace, our customers are confused. No question about it. They hear about cloud, I mean, cloud first, and everyone goes to the cloud, but the reality is there's lots of technology, lots of applications that actually still have to run on premises for a whole bunch of reasons. And what customers want is solid senior serious advice as to how they leverage what they already have in terms of their existing infrastructure, but modernize it, update it, so it looks and feels a lot like the cloud. But they have the security, they have the protection that they need to have for reasons that are dependent on their industry and business to allow them to run on-prem. And so, the GreenLake philosophy is perfect. That allows customers to actually have one foot in the cloud, one foot in their traditional data center but modernize it so it actually looks like one enterprise entity. And it's that kind of flexibility that gives us an opportunity collectively, ourselves, our partners, HPE, to really demonstrate that we understand how to optimize the use of technology across all of the business applications they need to run. >> You know Harry, it's interesting about what you said is, the cloud it is kind of chaotic my word, not yours. But there is a lot of confusion out there, I mean, what's cloud, right? Is it public cloud, is it private cloud, the hybrid cloud? Now, it's the edge and of course the answer is all of the above. Ben, what's your perspective on all this? >> From a cloud perspective, you know, I think as an industry, I think we we've all accepted that public cloud is not necessarily going to win the day and we're in fact, in a hybrid world. There's certainly been some commentary and press that was sort of validate that. Not that it necessarily needs any validation but I think is the linkages between on-prem and cloud-based services have increased. It's paved the way for customers more effectively, deploy hybrid solutions in in the model that they want or that they desire. You know, Harry was commenting on that a moment ago. As the trend continues, it becomes much easier for solution providers and service providers to drive their services initiatives, you know, in particular managed services. >> From an Arrow perspective is we think about how we can help scale in particular from a GreenLake perspective. We've got the ability to stand up some cloud capabilities through our ArrowSphere platform that can really help customers adopt GreenLake and to benefit from some alliances opportunities, as well. And I'll talk more about that as we go through. >> And Ben, I didn't mean to squeeze you on Arrow. I mean, Arrow has been around longer than computers. I mean, if you Google the history of Arrow it'll blow your mind, but give us a little quick commercial. >> Yeah, absolutely. So I've been with Arrow for about 20 years. I've got responsibility for Alliance organization in North America, We're a global value added distribution, business consulting and channel enablement company. And we bring scope, scale and and expertise as it relates to the IT industry. I love the fast pace that comes with the market that we're all in. And I love helping customers and suppliers both, be positioned for long-term success. And you know, the subject matter here today is just a great example of that. So I'm happy to be here and look forward to the discussion. >> All right, we got some good brain power in the room. Let's cut right to the chase. Ron, where's the pain? What are the main problems that CBTS I love what it stands for, Consult Build Transform and Support. What's the main pain point that customers are asking you to solve when it comes to their cloud strategies? >> Sure, Dave. Our customers' concerns and associated risks come from the market demands to deliver their products, services, and experiences instantaneously. And then the challenge is how do they meet those demands because they have aging infrastructure, processes, and fiscal constraints. Our customers really need us now more than ever to be excellent listeners so we can collaborate on an effective map with the strategic placement of workloads and applications in that spectrum of cloud experiences while managing their costs, and of course, mitigating risks to their business. This collaboration with our customers, often identify significant costs that have to be evaluated, justified or eliminated. We find significant development, migration, and egress charges in their current public cloud experience, coupled with significant over provisioning, maintenance, operational, and stranded asset costs in their on-premise infrastructure environment. When we look at all these costs holistically, through our customized workshops and assessments, we can identify the optimal cloud experience for the respective workloads and applications. Through our partnership with HPE and the availability of the HPE GreenLake solutions, our customers now have a choice to deliver SLA's, economics, and business outcomes for their workloads and applications that best reside on-premise in a private cloud and have that experience. This is a rock solid solution that eliminates, the development costs that they experience and the egress charges that are associated with the public cloud while utilizing HPE GreenLake to eliminate over provisioning costs and the maintenance costs on aging infrastructure hardware. Lastly, our customers only have to pay for actual infrastructure usage with no upfront capital expense. And now, that achieves true utilization to cost economics, you know, with HPE GreenLake solutions from CBTS. >> I love focus on the business case, 'cause it's measurable and it's sort of follow the money. That's where the opportunity is. Okay, C.R., so question for you. Thinking about Advizex customers, how are they, are they leaning into GreenLake? What are they telling you is the business impact when they experience GreenLake? >> Well, I think it goes back to what Ron was talking about. We had to solve the business challenges first and so far, the reception's been positive. When I say that is customers are open. Everybody wants to, the C-suite wants to hear about cloud and hybrid cloud fits. But what we hear and what we're seeing from our customers is we're seeing more adoption from customers that it may be their first foot in, if you will, but as important, we're able to share other customers with our potentially new clients that say, what's the first thing that happens with regard to GreenLake? Well, number one, it works. It works as advertised and as-a-Service, that's a big step. There are a lot of people out there dabbling today but when you can say we have a proven solution it's working in our environment today, that's key. I think the second thing is,, is flexibility. You know, when customers are looking for this hybrid solution, you got to be flexible for, again, I think Ron said (indistinct). You don't have a big capital outlay but also what customers want to be able to do is we want to build for growth but we don't want to pay for it. So we'll pay as we grow not as we have to use, as we used to do, it was upfront, the capital expenditure. Now we'll just pay as we grow, and that really facilitates in another great example as you'll hear from a customer, this afternoon. But you'll hear where one of the biggest benefits they just acquired a $570 million company and their integration is going to be very seamless because of their investment in GreenLake. They're looking at the flexibility to add to GreenLake as a big opportunity to integrate for acquisitions. And finally is really, we see, it really brings the cloud experience and as-a-Service to our customers. And with HPE GreenLake, it brings the best of breed. So it's not just what HPE has to offer. When you look at Hyperconverged, they have Nutanix, they have Cohesity. So, I really believe it brings best of breeds. So, to net it out and close it out with our customers, thus far, the customer experience has been exceptional. I mean, with GreenLake Central, as interface, customers have had a lot of success. We just had our first customer from about a year and a half ago just reopened, it was a highly competitive situation, but they just said, look, it's proven, it works, and it gives us that cloud experience so. Had a lot of great success thus far and looking forward to more. >> Thank you, so Harry, I want to pick up on something C.R. said and get your perspectives. So when I talk to the C-suite, they do all want to hear about, you know, cloud, they have a cloud agenda. And what they tell me is it's not just about their IT transformation. They want that but they also want to transform their business. So I wonder if you could talk, Harry, about Compugen's perspective on the potential business impact of GreenLake. And also, I'm interested in how you guys are thinking about workloads, how to manage work, you know, how to cost optimize in IT, but also, the business value that comes out of that capability. >> Yeah, so Dave, you know if you were to talk to CFO and I have the good fortune to talk to lots of CFOs, they want to pay the costs when they generate the revenue. They don't want to have all the costs upfront and then wait for the revenue to come through. A good example of where that's happening right now is you know, related to the pandemic, employees that used to work at the office have now moved to working from home. And now, they have to connect remotely to run the same application. So use this thing called VDI, virtual interfacing to allow them to connect to the applications that they need to run in the office. I don't want to get into too much detail but to be able to support that from an an at-home environment, they needed to buy a lot more computing capacity to handle this. Now, there's an expectation that hopefully six months from now, maybe sooner than that, people will start returning to the office. They may not need that capacity so they can turn down on the costs. And so, the idea of having the capacity available when you need it, but then turning it off when you don't need it, is really a benefit of the variable cost model. Another example that I would use is one in new development. If a customer is going to implement a new, let's say, line of business application. SAP is very very popular. You know, it actually, unfortunately, takes six months to two years to actually get that application set up, installed, validated, tested, then moves through production. You know, what used to happen before? They would buy all that capacity upfront, and it would basically sit there for two years, and then when they finally went to full production, then they were really value out of that investment. But they actually lost a couple of years of technology, literally sitting almost sidle. And so, from a CFO perspective, his ability to support the development of those applications as he scales it, perfect. GreenLake is the ideal solution that allows him to do that. >> You know, technology has saved businesses in this pandemic. There's no question about it. When Harry was just talking about with regard to VDI, you think about that, there's the dialing up and dialing down piece which is awesome from an IT perspective. And then the business impact there is the productivity of the end users. And most C-suite executives I've talked to said productivity actually went up during COVID with work from home, which is kind of astounding if you think about it. Ben, we said Arrow's been around for a long, long time. Certainly, before all of us were born and it's gone through many many industry transitions during our lifetimes. How does Arrow and how do your partners think about building cloud experiences and where does GreenLake fit in from your perspective? >> Great question. So from an Arrow perspective, when you think about cloud experience in of course us taking a view as a distribution partner, we want to be able to provide scale and efficiency to our network of partners. So we do that through our ArrowSphere platform. Just a bit of, you know, a bit of a commercial. I mean, you get single quote, single bill, auto provision, multi supplier, if you will, subscription management, utilization reporting from the platform itself. So if we pivot that directly to HPE, you're going to get a bit of a scoop here, Dave. And we're excited today to have GreenLake live in our platform available for our partner community to consume. In particular, the Swift solutions that HPE has announced so we're very excited to share that today. Maybe a little bit more on GreenLake. I think at this point in time, that it's differentiated in a sense that, if you think about some of the other offerings in the market today and further with having the the solutions themselves available in ArrowSphere. So, I would say, that we identify the uniqueness and quickly partner with HPE to work with our ArrowSphere platform. One other sort of unique thing is, when you think about platform itself, you've got to give a consistent experience. The different geographies around the world so, you know, we're available in North of 20 countries, there's thousands of resellers and transacting on the platform on a regular basis. And frankly, hundreds of thousands end customers. that are leveraging today. So that creates an opportunity for both Arrow, HPE and our partner community. So we're excited. >> You know, I just want to open it up. We don't have much time left, but thoughts on differentiation. Some people ask me, okay, what's really different about HPE and GreenLake? These others, you know, are doing things with as-a-Service. To me, I always say cultural, it starts from the top with Antonio, and it's like the company's all in. But I wonder from your perspectives, 'cause you guys are hands on. Are there other differentiable factors that you would point to? Let me just open that up to the group. >> Yeah, if I could make a comment. GreenLake is really just the latest invocation of the as-a-Service model. And what does that mean? What that actually means is you have a continuous ongoing relationship with the customer. It's not a sell and forget. Not that we ever forget about customers but there are highlights. Customer buys, it gets installed, and then for two or three years you may have an occasional engagement with them but it's not continuous. When you move to our GreenLake model, you're actually helping them manage that. You are in the core, in the heart of their business. No better place to be if you want to be sticky and you want to be relevant and you want to be always there for them. >> You know, I wonder if somebody else could add to it in your remarks. From your perspective as a partner, 'cause you know, hey, a lot of people made a lot of money selling boxes, but those days are pretty much gone. I mean, you have to transform into a services mindset, but other thoughts? >> I think to add to that Dave. I think Harry's right on. The way he positioned it it's exactly where he did own the customer. I think even another step back for us is, we're able to have the business conversation without leading with what you just said. You don't have to leave with a storage solution, you don't have to lead with compute. You know, you can really have step back, have a business conversation. And we've done that where you don't even bring up HPE GreenLake until you get to the point where the customer says, so you can give me an on-prem cloud solution that gives me scalability, flexibility, all the things you're talking about. How does that work? Then you bring up, it's all through this HPE GreenLake tool. And it really gives you the ability to have a business conversation. And you're solving the business problems versus trying to have a technology conversation. And to me, that's clear differentiation for HPE GreenLake. >> All right guys, C.R., Ron, Harry, Ben. Great discussion, thank you so much for coming on the program. Really appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us, Dave. >> Appreciate it Dave. >> All right, keep it right there for more great content at GreenLake Day, be right back. (bright soft music) (upbeat music) (upbeat electronic music)

>> Welcome to this IBM Watson Health client conversation. And we're probing the dynamics of the relationship between IBM and it's clients. We're going to look back at some of the challenges of 2020 and look forward to, you know, present year's priorities. We'll also touch on the future state of healthcare. My name is Dave Vellante. I'll be your host and I'm from theCUBE. And with me are Doctor Alex Towbin, who's Associate Chief Clinical Operations and Informatics at Cincinnati ChilDoctoren's Hospital and John Chrisman of course from IBM Watson health. Welcome gentlemen, Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Yeah I know from talking to many clients around the world, of course virtually this past year, 11 months or so that relationships with technology partners they've been critical over during the pandemic to really help folks get through that. Not that we're through it yet but, we're still through the year now, there's I'm talking professionally and personally and Doctor Towbin, I wonder if you could please talk about 2020 and what role the IBM partnership played in helping Cincinnati children's, you know press on in the face of incredible challenges? >> Yeah, I think our story of 2020 really starts before the pandemic and we were fortunate to be able to plan a disaster and do disaster drill scenarios. And so, as we were going through those disaster drill scenarios, we were trying to build a solution that would enable us to be able to work if all of our systems were down and we worked with IBM Watson Health to design that solution to implement it, it involves using other solutions from our primary one. And we performed that disaster drill in the late January, early February timeframe of 2020. And while that drill had nothing to do with COVID it got us thinking about how to deal with a disaster, how to prepare for a disaster. And so we've just completed that and COVID was coming on the horizon. I'm starting to hear about it coming into the U.S for the first time. And we took that very seriously on our department. And so, because we had prepared for this this disaster drill had gone through the entire exercise and we built out different scenarios for what could happen with COVID what would be our worst case scenarios and how we would deal with them. And so we were able to then bring that to quickly down to two options on how our department and our hospital would handle COVID and deal with that within the radiology department and like many other sites that becomes options of working from home or working in a isolated way and an and an office scenario like where I'm sitting now and we planned out both scenarios and eventually made the decision. Our decision at that point was to work in our offices. We're fortunate to have private offices where we can retreat to and something like that. And so then our relationship with IBM was helpful and that we needed to secure more pieces of hardware. And so even though IBM is our PACS vendor and our enterprise imaging vendor, they also help us to secure the high resolution monitors that are needed. And we needed a large influx of those during the pandemic and IBM was able to help us to get those. >> Wow! So yeah you were able to sort of test your organization resilience before the pandemic. I mean, John, that's quite an accomplishment for last year. I'm sure there are many others. I wonder if one of you could pick it up from here and bring your perspectives into it and, you know maybe ask any questions that you would like to ask them. >> Yeah, sure, Doctor Towbin, that's great that we were able to help you with the hardware and procure things. So I'm just curious before the pandemic how many of the radiologists ever got to read from home, was that a luxury back then? And then post pandemic, are you guys going to shift to how many are on-site versus remote? >> Yeah, so we have a couple of scenarios. We've had talk about it both from our PACS perspective as well as from our VNA enterprise imaging perspective from PACS perspective we always designed our solution to be able to work from a home machine. Our machines, people would access that through a hospital-based VPN. So they would log in directly to VPN and then access the PACS that way. And that worked well. And many of our radiologists do that particularly when they're on call works best for our neuroradiologist who are on call a little bit more frequently. And so they do read from home in that scenario. With enterprise imaging and are used to the enterprise viewer and iConnect access. We always wanted that solution to work over the internet. And so it's set up securely through the internet but not through the VPN. And we have radiologists use that as a way to view studies from home, even not from home, so it can be over one of their mobile devices, such as an iPad and could be at least reviewing studies then. We, for the most part for our radiologist in the hospital that's why we made the decision to stay in the hospital. At COVID time, we have such a strong teaching mission in our department in such a commitment to the education of our trainees. We think that hospital being in the hospital is our best way to do that, it's so hard. We find to do it over something like zoom or other sharing screen-sharing technology. So we've stayed in and I think we'll continue to stay in. There will be some of those needs from a call perspective for example, reading from home, and that will continue. >> And then what's your success been with this with the technology and the efficiency of reading from home? Do you feel like you're just as efficient when you're at home versus onsite? >> The technology is okay. The, our challenges when we're reading from the PACS which is the preferred way to do it rather than the enterprise archive, the challenge is we have to use the PACS So we have to be connected through VPN which limits our bandwidth and that makes it a little bit slower to read. And also the dictation software is a little bit slower when we're doing it. So moving study to study that rapid turnover doesn't happen but we have other ways to make, to accelerate the workflow. We cashed studies through the worklist. So they're on the machine, they load a little bit more rapidly and that works pretty well. So not quite as fast, but not terrible. >> We appreciate your partnership. I know it's been going on 10 years. I think you guys have a policy that you have to look at the market again every 10 years. So what do you think of how the market's changed and how we've evolved with the VNA and with the zero footprint viewers? A lot of that wasn't available when you initially signed up with Amicas years ago, so. >> Yeah, we signed up so we've been on this platform and then, you know now the IBM family starting in 2010, so it's now now 11 years that we're, we've been on as this version of the PACS and about eight, seven or eight years from the iConnect platform. And through that, we've seen quite an evolution. We were one of the first Amicas clients to be on version six and one of the largest enterprises. And that went from, we had trouble at the launch of that product. We've worked very closely with Amicas then to merge. And now IBM from the development side, as well as the support side to have really what we think is a great product that works very well for us and drives our entire workflow all the operations of our department. And so we've really relished that relationship with now IBM. And it's been a very good one, and it's allowed us to do the things like having disaster drill planning that we talked about earlier as far as where I see the market I think PACS in particular is on the verge of the 3.0 version as a marketplace. So PACSS 1 one was about building the packs, I think, and and having electronic imaging digital imaging, PACS 2.0 is more of web-based technology, getting it out of those private networks within a radiology department. And so giving a little bit more to the masses and 3.0 is going to be more about incorporating machine learning. I really see that as the way the market's going to go and to where I think we're at the infancy of that part of the market now about how do you bring books in for machine learning algorithms to help to drive workflow or to drive some image interpretation or analysis, as far as enterprise imaging, we're on the cusp of a lot there as well. So we've been really driving deep with enterprise imaging leading nationally enterprise imaging and I have a role in the MSAM Enterprise Imaging Community. And through all of that work we've been trying to tackle works well from enterprise imaging point of view the challenges are outside of radiology, outside of cardiology and the places where we're trying to deal with medical photos, the photographs taken with a smart device or a digital camera of another type, and trying to have workflow that makes sense for providers not in those specialty to that don't have tools like a DICOM modality workloads store these giant million-dollar MRI scanners that do all the work for you, but dealing with off the shelf, consumer electronics. So making sure the workflow works for them, trying to tie reports in trying to standardize the language around it, so how do we tag photos correctly so that we can identify relevancy all of those things we're working through and are not yet standard within our, within the industry. And so we're doing a lot there and trying and seeing the products in the marketplace continuing to evolve around that on the viewer side, there's really been a big emergence as you mentioned about the zero footprint viewers or the enterprise viewer, allowing easy access easy viewing of images throughout the enterprise of all types of imaging through obtained in the enterprise and will eventually incorporate video pathology. The market is also trying to figure out if there can be one type of viewer that does them all that and so that type of universal viewer, a viewer that cardiologists can use the same as a radiologist the same as a dermatologist, same as a pathologist we're all I think a long way away from that. But that's the Marcus trying to figure those two things out. >> Yeah, I agree with you. I agree with your assessment. You talked about the non DICOM areas, and I know you've you've partnered with us, with ImageMover and you've got some mobile device capture taking place. And you're looking to expand that more to the enterprise. Are you also starting to use the XDS registry? That's part of the iConnect enterprise archive, or as well as wrapping things in DICOM, or are you going to stick with just wrapping things in DICOM? >> Yeah, so far we've been very bunched pro DICOM and using that throughout the enterprise. And we've always thought, or maybe we've evolved to think that there is going to be a role for XDS are I think our early concerns with XDS are the lack of other institutions using it. And so, even though it's designed for portability if no one else reads it, it's not portable. If no one else is using that. But as we move more and more into other specialties things like dermatology, ophthalmology, some of the labeling that's needed in those images and the uses, the secondary uses of those images for education, for publication, for dermatology workflow or ophthalmology workflow, needs to get back to that native file and the DICOM wrap may not make sense for them. And so we've been actively talking about switching towards XDS for some of the non DICOM, such as dermatology. We've not yet done that though. >> Given the era children's hospital has the impact on your patient load, then similar to what regular adult hospitals are, or have you guys had a pretty steady number of studies over the last year? >> In relay through the pandemic, we've had, it has been decreased, but children fortunately have not been as severely affected as adults. There is definitely disease in children and we see a fair amount of that. There are some unique things that happen in kids but that fortunately rare. So there's this severe inflammatory response that kids can get and can cause them to get very sick but it is quite rare. Our volumes are, I think I'm not I think our volumes are stable and our advanced imaging things like CT, MRI, nuclear medicine, they're really most decreased in radiography. And we see some weird patterns, inpatient volumes are relatively stable. So our single view chest x-rays, for example, have been stable. ER, visits are way down because people are either wearing masks, isolating or not wanting to come to the ER. So they're not getting sick with things like the flu or or even common colds or pneumonias. And so they're not coming into the ER as much. So our two view x-rays have dropped by like 30%. And so we were looking at this just yesterday. If you follow the graphs for the two we saw a dip of both around March, but essentially the one view chest were a straight line and the two view chest were a straight line and in March dropped 30 to 50% and then stayed at that lower level. Other x-rays are on the, stay at that low level side. >> Thanks, I know in 2021 we've got a big upgrade coming with you guys soon and you're going to stay in our standalone mode. I understand what the PACSS and not integrate deeply to the VNA. And so you'll have a couple more layers of storage there but can you talk about your excitement about going to 8.1 and what you're looking forward to based on your testimony. >> Yeah we're actually in, we're upgrading as we're talking which is interesting, but it's a good time for talking. I'm not doing that part of the work. And so our testing has worked well. I think we're, we are excited. We, you know, we've been on the product as I mentioned for over 10 years now. And for many of those years we were among the first, at each version. Now we're way behind. And we want to get back up to the latest and greatest and we want to stay cutting edge. There've been a lot of reasons why we haven't moved up to that level, but we do. We're very careful in our testing and we needed a version that would work for us. And there were things about previous versions that just didn't and as you mentioned, we're staying in that standalone mode. We very much want to be on the integrated mode in our future because enterprise imaging is so important and understanding how the comparisons fit in with the comparison in dermatology or chest wall deformity clinic, or other areas how those fit into the radiology story is important and it helped me as a radiologist be a better radiologist to see all those other pictures. So I want them there but we have to have the workflow, right. And so that's the part that we're still working towards and making sure that that fits so we will get there. It'll probably be in the next year or two to get to that immigrating mode. >> As you, look at the number of vendors you have I think you guys prefer to have less vendor partners than than more I know in the cardiology area you guys do some cardiology work. What has been the history or any, any look to the future of that related to enterprise imaging? Do you look to incorporate more of that into a singular solution? >> Cardiology is entirely part of our enterprise imaging solution. We all the cardiology amendments go to our vendor neutral archive on the iConnect platform. All of them are viewed across the enterprise using our enterprise viewer. They have their unique specialty viewer which is, you know, fine. I'm a believer that specialty, different specialties, deserve to have their specialty viewers to do theirs specialty reads. And at this point I don't think the universal viewer works or makes sense until we have that. And so all the cardiology images are there. They're all of our historical cardiology images are migrated and part of our enterprise solution. So they're part of the entire reference the challenge is they're just not all in PACSS. And so that's where, you know, an example, great example, why we need to get to this to the integrated mode to be able to see those. And the reason we didn't do that is the cardiology archive is so large to add a storage to the PACS archive. Didn't make sense if we knew we were going to be in an integrated mode eventually, and we didn't want to double our PACS storage and then get rid of it a couple of years later. >> So once you're on a new version of merge PACS and you're beyond this, what are your other goals in 2021? Are you looking to bring AI in? Are you using anybody else's AI currently? >> Yeah, we do have AI clinical it's phone age, so it's not not a ton of things but we've been using it clinically, fully integrated, it launches. When I open a study, when I opened a bone age study impacts it launches we have a bone age calculator as well that we've been using for almost two decades now. And so that we have to use that still but launching that automatically includes the patient's sex and birth date, which are keys for determining bone age, and all that information is there automatically. But at the same time, the images are sent to the machine learning algorithm. And in the background the machine determines a bone age that in the background it sends it straight to our dictation system and it's there when we opened the study. And so if I agree with that I signed the report and we're done. If I disagree, I copy it from my calculator and put it in until it takes just a couple of clicks. We are working on expanding. We've done a lot of research in artificial intelligence and the department. And so we've been things are sort of in the middle of translation of moving it from the research pure research realm to the clinical realm, something we're actively working on trying to get them in. Others are a little bit more difficult. >> That's the question on that John, Doctor, when you talk about injecting, you know machine intelligence into the equation. >> Yeah. >> What, how do you sort of value that? Does that give you automation? Does it improve your quality? Does it speed the outcome and maybe it's all of those but how do you sort of evaluate the impact to your organisation? >> I there's a lot of ways you can do it. And you touched on one of my favorite one of my favorite talking points, in a lot of what we've been doing and early machine learning is around image interpretation helping me as a radiologist to see a finding. Unfortunately, most of the things are fairly simple tasks that it's asking us to do. Like, is there a broken bone? Yes or no, I'm not trying to sound self-congratulatory or anything, but I'm really good at finding broken bones. I get, I've been doing it for a long time and, and radio, you know so machines doing that, they're going to perform as well as I can perform, you know, and that's the goal. Maybe they'll perform a little bit better maybe a little bit worse but we're talking tiny increments there they're really to me, not much value of that it's not something I would want. I don't value that at a time where I think machine learning can have real value around more on some of the things that you mentioned. So can it make me more efficient? Can it do the things that are so annoying that and they'd take, they're so tedious that they make me unhappy. A lot of little measurements for example are like that an example. So in a patient with cancer, we measure a little tumors everywhere and that's really important for their care, but it's tedious and so if a machine could do that in an automated way and I checked it that, you know, patient when because he or she can get that good quality care and I have a, you know, a workflow efficiency game. So that one's important. Another one that would be important is if the machine can see things I can't see. So I'm really good at finding fractures. I'm not really good at understanding what all the pixels mean and, you know in that same patient with cancer, oh what do all the pixels mean in that tumor? I know it's a tumor. I can see the tumor, I can say it's a tumor but sometimes those pixels have a lot of information in them and may give us prognosis, you know, say that this patient may, maybe this patient will do well with this specific type of chemotherapy or a specific or has a better prognosis with one with one drug compared to another. Those are things that we can't usually pick out. You know, it's beyond the level of that are I can perceive that one is really the cutting edge of machine learning. We're not there yet and then the other thing are things that, you know just the behind the scenes stuff that I don't necessarily need to be doing, or, you know so it's the non interpretive artificial intelligence. >> Dave: Right. >> And that's what I've been also trying to push. So an example of when the algorithms that we've been developing here we check airways. And this is a little bit historical in our department, but we want to make sure we're not missing a severe airway infection. That can be deadly, it's incredibly rare. Vaccines have made it go away completely but we still check airways. And so what happens is the technologist takes the x-ray. They come in to ask us if it's okay, we are interrupted from what we're doing. We open up the study, say yes or no. Okay, not okay, if it's not okay they go back, take another study. Then come back to us again and say, is it okay or not? And we repeat this a couple of times it takes them time that they don't need to spend and takes us time. And so we have, we've built an algorithm where the machine can check that and their machine is as good or a little bit worse than us, but give can give that feedback. >> Dave: Got it. >> The challenge is getting that feedback to the technologist quickly. And so that's, that's I think part for us to work on stuff. >> Thank you for that. So, John, we've probably got three or four minutes left. I'll let you bring it home and appreciate that Doctor Towbin >> I think one of the biggest impacts probably I knew this last year with the pandemic, Doctor Towbin is this, I know you're a big foodie. So having been to some good restaurants and dinners with the hot nurse in a house how's the pandemic affected you personally. And some of the things you like to do outside of work. >> Everything is shut down. And everything has changed. I have not left the house since March besides come to work and my family hasn't either. And so we're hardcore quarantining and staying you know, staying out and keeping it home. So we've not gone out to dinner or done much else. >> So its DoorDash and Uber Eats or just learned to cook at home. >> It's all cooking at home. We're fortunate, my wife loves to cook. My kids love to cook. I enjoy cooking, but I don't have the time as often. So we've done a lot of different are on our own experimenting. Maybe when the silver lining one of the things I've really relished about all this is all this time I get to spend with my family. And that closeness that we've been able to achieve because of being confined in our house the whole time. And so I've played get to play video games with my kids every night. We'd been on a big Fortnite Keck lately since it's been down making. So we've been playing that every night since we've watched movies a lot. And so as a family, we've, I it's something I'll look back fondly even though it's been a very difficult time but it's been an enjoyable time. >> I agree, I've enjoyed more family time this year as well, but final question is in 2021, beyond the PACS upgrade what are the top other two projects that you want to accomplish with us this year? And how can we help you? >> I think our big one is are the big projects are unexpanded enterprise imaging. And so we want to continue rolling out to other areas that will include eventually incorporating scopes, all the images from the operating room. We need to be able to get into pathology. I think the pathology is really going to be a long game. Unfortunately, I've been saying that already for 10 years and it's still probably another 10 years ago but we need to go. We can start with the gross pathology images all the pictures that we take for tumor boards and get those in before we start talking about whole slide scanning and getting in more of the more of the photographs in the institution. So we have a route ambulatory but we need inpatient and ER. >> All right one last question. What can IBM do to be a better partner for you guys? >> I think it's keep listening keep listening and keep innovating. And don't be afraid to be that innovative partner sort of thinking as the small company that startup, rather than the giant bohemoth that can sometimes happen with large companies, it's harder. It is fear to turn quickly, but being a nimble company and making quick decisions, quick innovations. >> Great, quick question. How would you grade IBM, your a tough grader? >> It depends on what I am a tough grader but it depends on what, you know as the overall corporate partnership? >> Yeah the relationship. >> I'd say it's A minus. >> Its pretty good. >> I think, I mean, I, we get a lot of love from IBM. I'm talking specifically in the imaging space. I not, maybe not, I don't know as much on the hardware side but we, yeah, we have a really good relationship. We feel like we're listened to and we're valued. >> All right, well guys, thanks so much. >> So even if it's not an A plus- >> Go ahead. >> I think there's some more to, you know, from the to keep innovating side there's little things that we just let you know we've been asking for that we don't always get but understand the company has to make business decisions not decisions on what's best for me. >> Of course got to hold that carrot out too. Well thanks guys, really appreciate your time. Great conversation. >> Yeah, thank you. >> All right and thank you for spending some time with us. You're watching client conversations with IBM Watson Health.

>> Welcome to this IBM Watson Health "Client Conversation." We're probing the dynamics of the relationships between IBM and its clients. And we're going to look back, we're going to explore the present situation and we're going to discuss the future state of healthcare. My name is Dave Vellante from theCUBE and with me are Dr. David Huelsman, who is a radiologist at TriHealth, which is a provider of healthcare in hospitals and John Kritzman who is with of course IBM Watson Health. Gentlemen welcome. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> Doctor let me say you're welcome. Let me start with you. As an analyst and a TV host in the tech industry, we often focus so much on the shiny new toy, the new widget, the new software. But when I talk to practitioners, almost to a person, they tell me that the relationship and trust are probably the most important elements of their success, in terms of a vendor relationship. And over the last year, we've relied on both personal and professional relationships to get us through some of the most challenging times any of us have ever seen. So, Dr. Huelsman, let me ask you, and thinking about the challenges you faced in 2020, what does partnership mean to you and how would you describe the relationship with IBM? >> Well, it is exactly the reason why when we started our journey on this enterprise imaging project at TriHealth, that we very early on made the decision We only wanted one vendor. We didn't want to do it piecemeal, like say get a vendor neutral archive from one organization, and the radiology viewer from another. We wanted to partner with the chosen vendor and develop that long-term relationship, where we learn from each other and we mutually benefit each other, in sort of not just have a transactional relationship, but that we share the same values. We share the same vision. And that's what stood out to us is Watson Health imagings vision, mirrored TriHealth's in what we were trying to achieve with our enterprise imaging project. >> You know, let me follow up with that if I could. A lot of times you hear the phrase, "Single throat to choke" and it's kind of a pejorative, right? It's a really negative term. And the way you just described that Dr. Huelsman is you were looking for a partnership. Yeah, sure. Maybe it was more manageable and maybe it was a sort of Singletree, but it was really about the partnership, going forward in a shared vision and really shared ownership of the outcome. Is that a fair characterization? >> Yeah, how about more positive is "One hand to shake." >> Wow, yeah, I love it. (chuckles) One hand to shake. I'm going to steal that line. That's good. I like it. Keep it positive. Okay, John, when you think about the past 12 months and I know you have history with TriHealth, and more recently have rejoined the account, but how would you kind of characterize that relationship and particularly anything you can add about the challenges of the 2020? What stands out to you? >> Yeah, I think going back to your one hand to shake or one vendor to hug all that's not allowed during COVID, but we're excited to be back working with you, I am in particular. And at the beginning of this sales process and RFP when you guys were looking for that vendor partner, we did talk to you about the journey, the journey with AI that we already had mature products on the vendor neutral archive side and all the product pieces that you were looking for. And I know you've recently went live over the last year and you've been working through, crawling through and learning to walk and starting to run, hopefully. And at some point we'll get to the end of the marathon, where you'll have all the AI pieces that you're looking for. But this journey has been eyeopening for all of us, from using consultants in the beginning, to developing different team members to help make you successful. So I think I've been tracking this from the outside looking in, and I'm happy to be back, more working direct with you this year to help ensure your longterm success. >> Yeah, that's great John. You have some history there. I'm going to probe that a little bit. So doctor, you talked about this enterprise imaging project. I presume that's part of, that's one of the vectors of this journey that you're on. What are you trying to accomplish in the sort of near term and midterm in 2021? John mentioned AI, is there a data element to this? Are there other, maybe more important pressing things? What are your main goals for 2021? >> Sure. Well, where we are, where we've started, the first step was getting all of our imaging stored consistently in the same place and in the same way. We had like many health system, as you grow, you acquire facilities, you acquire physician practices and they all have their own small packs system, different ways of storing the data. And so it becomes very unwieldy to be a large organization and try to provide a consistent manner of your physicians interacting with the data, with the imaging in the same way. And so it was a very large dissatisfier in our EMR to, oh if you wanted to see cardiovascular imaging, it's this tab. If you wanted to see radiology, it was this tab. If you wanted to see that, oh you got to go to the media tab. And so our big goal is, okay, let's get the enterprise archive. And so the Watson enterprise archive is to get all of our imaging stored in the same place, in the same way. And so that then our referring physicians and now with our patients as well, that you can view all the imaging, access it the same way and have the same tools. And so that's the initial step. And we're not even complete with that first step, that's where COVID and sort of diverting resources, but it's there, it's that foundation, it's there. And so currently we have the radiology, cardiology, orthopedics and just recently OB-GYN, all of those departments have their images stored on our Watson Enterprise Archive. So the ultimate goal was then any imaging, including not just what you typically think of radiology, but endoscopy and arthroscopy and those sort of images, or wound care images, in that any image, any picture in our organization will be stored on the archive. So that then when we have everything on that archive, it's easier to access consistently with the same tools. But it's also one of the large pieces of partnering with with Watson Health Imaging, is the whole cognitive solutions and AI piece. Is that, well now we're storing all the data in a consistent manner, you can access it in a consistent manner, well then we hope to analyze it in a consistent manner and to use machine learning, and the various protocols and algorithms that Watson Health Imaging develops, to employ those and to provide better care. >> Excellent, thank you for that. John, I wonder if you could add to that? I mean, you've probably heard this story before from other clients, as well as TriHealth, I call it EMR chaos. What can you add to this conversation? I'm particularly interested in what IBM Watson Health brings to the table. >> Sure, we've continued to work with TriHealth. And like we said earlier, you do have to walk before you can run. So a lot of this solution being put in place, was getting that archive stood up and getting all the images transferred out of the legacy systems. And I think that we're nearly done with that process. Doing some find audits, able to turn off some of the legacy systems. So the data is there for the easier to do modalities first, the radiology, the cardiology, the OB, as Dr. Huelsman mentioned and the ortho. And now it's really getting to the exciting point of really optimizing everything and then starting to bring in other ologies from the health system, trying to get everything in that single EMR view. So there was a lot of activity going on last year with optimizing the system, trying to fine tune hanging protocols, make the workflow for everybody, so that the systems are efficient. And I think we will continue on that road this year. We'll continue down further with other pieces of the solution that were not implemented yet. So there's some deeper image sharing pieces that are available. There are some pieces with mobile device image capture and video capture that can be deployed. So we look forward to working in 2021 on some of those areas, as well as the increased AI solutions. >> So Dr. Huelsman I wonder if you could double click on that. I mean if you're talking to IBM, what are the priorities that you have? What do you, what do you really need from Watson Health to get there? >> So I spoke with Daniel early last week, and sort of described it as now we have the foundation, we sort of have the skeleton and now it's time to put meat on the bones. And so what we're excited about is the upcoming patient synopsis would be the first piece of AI cognitive solutions that Watson Health Imaging provides. And it's sort of that partnership of we're not expecting it to be perfect, but is it better than we have today? There is no perfect solution, but does it improve our current workflow? And so we'll be very interested of when we go live with patients synopsis of does this help? Is this better than what we have today? And the focus then becomes partnering with Watson Health Imaging is how do we make it better for ourselves? How do we make it better for you? I think we're a large health organization and typically we're not an academic or heavy research institution, but we take care of a lot of patients. And if we can work together, I think we'll find solutions. It's really that triple aim of how to provide better care, at cheaper costs, with a better experience. And that's what we're all after. And what's your version of patient, the current version of patients synopsis, and okay does it work for us? Well, even if it does, how do we make it better? Or if it doesn't, how do we make it work? And I think if we work together, make it work for TriHealth, you can make it work at all your community-based health organizations. >> Yeah. So, John that brings me to, Dr. Huelsman mentioned a couple of things in terms of the outcomes. Lower costs, better patient experience, et cetera. I mean, generally for clients, how do you measure success? And then specifically with regard to TriHealth, what's that like? What's that part of the partnership? >> Yes, specifically with TriHealth, the measure of success will be when Dr. Huelsman is able to call and be a super reference for us, and have these tools working to his satisfaction. And when he's been able to give us great input from the customer side, to help improve the science side of it. So today he's able to launch his epic EMR in context and he has to dig through the data, looking for those valuable nuggets and with using natural language processing, when he has patients synopsis, that will all be done for him. He'll be able to pull up the study, a CT of the head for instance and he'll be able to get those nuggets of information using natural language processing that Watson services and get the valuable insights without spending five or 10 minutes interrogating the EMR. So we look forward to those benefits for him, from the data analytics side, but then we also look forward to in the future, delivering other AI for the imaging side, to help him find the slices of interest and the defects that are in that particular study. So whether that's with our partner AI solutions or as we bring care advisers to market. So we look forward to his input on those also. >> Can you comment on that Dr. Huelsman? I would imagine that you would be really looking forward to that vision that John just laid out, as well as other practitioners in your organization. Maybe you could talk about that, is that sort of within your reach? What can you tell us? >> Well, absolutely. That was sort of the shared vision and relationship that we hope for and sort of have that shared outlook is we have all this data, how do we analyze it to improve, provide better care cheaper? And there's no way to do that without you harnessing technology. And IBM has been on the cutting edge of technology for my lifetime. And so it's very exciting to have a partnership with WHI and IBM. There's a history, there's a depth. And so how do we work together to advance, because we want the same things. What impressed me was sure, radiology and AI has been in the news and been hyped and some think over-hyped, and what have you. Everyone's after that Holy grail. But it's that sense of you have the engineers that you talk to, but there is an understanding that don't design the system for the engineers, design it for the end user. Design it for the radiologist. Talk to the end user, because it can be the greatest tool in the world, but I can tell you as a radiologist, if it interrupts my workflow, if it interrupts my search pattern for looking at images, it doesn't help me and radiologists won't use it. And so just having a great algorithm won't help. It is how do you present it to the end user? How do I access it? How can I easily toggle on and off, or do I have to minimize and maximize, and log into a different system. We talked earlier is one throat to choke, or one vendor to hug, we only want one interface. Radiologists and users just want to look at their... They have the radiology viewer, they have their PACS, we look at it all day and you don't want to minimize that and bring up something else, you want to keep interacting with what you're used to. And the mouse buttons do the same thing, it's a mouse click away. And that's what the people at Watson Health Imaging that we've interacted with, they get it. They understand that's what a radiologist would want. They want to continue interacting with their PACS, not with a third vendor or another program or something else. >> I love that. That ton of outside in thinking, starting with the radiologist, back to the engineer, not the reverse. I think that's something that IBM, and I've been watching IBM for a long time, it's something that IBM has brought to the table with its deep industry expertise. I maybe have some other questions, but John I wanted to give you an opportunity. Is there anything that you would like to ask Dr. Huelsman that maybe I haven't touched on yet? >> Yeah. Being back on your account this year, what do you see as a success? What would you count as a success at the end of 2021, if we can deliver this year for you? >> The success would be say, at the end of the year, we've got the heavy hitters, all stored on the archive. Do we pick up all the little, we've got the low hanging fruit, now can we go after the line placement imaging and the arthroscopy and dioscomy, and all those smaller volume in pickups, that we truly get all of our imaging stored on that archive. And then the even larger piece is then do we start using the data on the archive with some cognitive solution? I would love to successfully implement, whether it's patient synopsis or one of the care advisors, that we start using sort of the analytics, the machine learning, some AI component that we successfully implement and maybe share good ideas with you. And sure we intend to go live with patient synopsis next month. I would love it by the end of the year, if the version that we're using patients synopsis and we find it helpful. And the version we use is better than what we went live with next month, because of feedback that we're able to give you. >> Great we looked forward to working with you on that. I guess, personally, with the pandemic in 2020, what have you become, I guess in 2020 that maybe you weren't a year ago before the pandemic, just out of curiosity? >> I'm not sure if we're anything different. A mantra that we've used in the department of radiology at TriHealth for a decade, "Improved service become more adaptable." And we're a service industry, so of course we want to improve service, but be adaptable, become more adaptable. And COVID certainly emphasize that need to be adaptable, to be flexible and the better tools we have. It was great early in the COVID when we had the shutdowns, we found ourselves, we have way more radiologists than we had studies that needed interpreted. So we were flexible all often and be home more. Well, the referring physicians don't know like, well is Dr. Huelsman working today? We don't expect them to look up our schedules. If I get a page that, Hey, can you take a look at this? It was great that at that time I didn't have a home workstation, but I had iConnect access. Before there was no way for me to access the images without getting on a VPN and logging on, it takes 10, 15 minutes before I'm able. Instead I could answer the phone, and I'm not going to say, "Oh, I'm sorry, I'm not at the hospital day, call this number someone else will help you." I have my iPad, go to ica.trihealth.com logged on, I'm looking at the images two minutes later. And so the ease of use, the flexibility, it helped us become adaptable. And I anticipate with we're upgrading the radiology viewer and the iConnect access next month as well, to try to educate our referring physicians, of sort of the image sharing capabilities within that next version of our viewer. Because telehealth has become like everywhere else. It's become much more important at TriHealth during this pandemic. And I think it will be a very big satisfier for both referring physicians and patients, that those image sharing capabilities, to be able to look at the same image, see the annotation that either the radiologist or the referring physician, oncologist, whoever is wanting to share images with the patient and the patient's family, to have multiple parties on at the same time. It will be very good. >> With the new tools that you have for working from home with your full workstation, are you as efficient reading at home? >> Yes. >> And having full access to the PACS as in-house? >> Absolutely. >> That's great to hear. Have you been able to take advantage of using any of the collaboration tools within iConnect, to collaborate with a referring physician, where he can see your pointer and you can see his, or is that something we need to get working? >> Hopefully if you ask me that a year from now, the answer will be yes. >> So does that exit a radiologist? Does that help a radiologist communicate with a referring physician? Or do you feel that that's going to be a- >> Absolutely. We still have our old school physicians that we love who come to the reading room, who come to the department of radiology and go over studies together. But it's dwindling, it's becoming fewer and fewer as certain individuals retire. And it's just different. But the more direct interaction we can have with referring physicians, the better information they can give us. And the more we're interacting directly, the better we are. And so I get it, they're busy, they don't want to, they may not be at the hospital. They're seeing patients at an outpatient clinic and a radiologist isn't even there, that's where that technology piece. This is how we live. We're an instantaneous society. We live through our phone and so great it's like a FaceTime capability. If you want to maintain those personal relationships, we're learning we can't rely on the orthopedist or whomever, whatever referring physician to stop by our reading room, our department. We need to make ourselves available to them and make it convenient. >> That market that you working in Cincinnati, we have a luxury of having quite a few customers with our iConnect solutions. There's been some talk between the multiple parties, of potentially being able to look across the other sites and using that common tool, but being able to query the other archives. Is that something that you'd in favor of supporting and think would add value so that the clinicians can see the longitudinal record? >> Yes And we already have that ability of we can view care everywhere in our EMR. So we don't have the images right away, but we can see other reports. Again, it's not convenient. It's not a click away, but it's two, three, four clicks away. But if I see, if it's one of my search patterns of I just worked the overnight shift last week and then you get something through the ER and there's no comparisons, and it's an abnormal chest CT. Well, I look in Care Everywhere. Oh, they had a chest CT at a different place in the city a year ago, and I can see the report. And so then at that time I can request, and it can take an hour or so, but look back and the images will be accessible to me. But so how do we improve on that? Is to make the images, that I don't have to wait an hour for the images. If we have image sharing among your organizations that can be much quicker, would be a big win. >> As you read in your new environment, do you swivel your chair and still read out of any other specialty systems, for any types of studies today? >> No, and that was a huge win. We used to have a separate viewing system for mammography and we were caught like there were dedicated viewing stations. And so even though we're a system, the radiologist working at this hospital, had to read the mammograms taken at that hospital. And one at the other hospital could only read the ones taken at that hospital. And you couldn't share the workload if it was heavy at one site and light at the other. Well, now it's all viewed through the radiology viewer if you merge PACS, in not just general radiology, but impressed. It has been so much better world that the workflow is so much better, that we can share the work list and be much more efficient. >> Do you feel that in your, your new world, that you're able to have less cherry picking between the group, I guess? Do you feel like there's less infighting or that the exams are being split up evenly through the work list? Or are you guys using some sort of assignment? >> No. And I'm curious with our next version of PACS, the next version of merge packs of 008. I forget which particular >> John: 008. >> It's 008, yeah. I know there's the feature of a smart work list to distribute the exams. Currently, we just have one. It's better than what we have before. It's one large list. We've subdivided, teased out some things that not all of the radiologist read of like MSK and cardiac and it makes it more convenient. But currently it is the radiologist choose what study they're going to open next. To me how I personally attack the list is I don't look at the list. Some radiologists can spend more time choosing what they're going to read next than they do reading. (chuckles) And so if you don't even look, and so the feature I love is just I don't want to take my eyes off my main viewer. And I don't want to swivel my chair. I don't want to turn my head to look at the list, I want everything right in front of me. And so currently the way you can use it is I never look at the list. I just use the keyboard shortcuts of, okay, well I'm done with that study. I mark it, there's one button I click on my mouse that marks it dictated, closes it and brings up the next study on the list. >> Hey guys, I got to jump in. We're running up against the clock, but John if you've got any final thoughts or Dr. Huelsman, please. >> Sure. Dr. Huelsman, I guess any homework for me? What are the top two or three things I can help you with in 2021 to be successful? >> Keep us informed of what you're working on, of what's available now. What's coming next, and how soon is it available? And you let us see those things? And we'll give you a feedback of hey, this is great. And we'll try to identify things, if you haven't thought of them, hey, this would be very helpful. >> Gents, great conversation. Gosh we could go on for another 45 minutes. And John you really have a great knowledge of the industry. And Dr. Huelsman, thanks so much for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome >> And thanks for spending some time with us. You're watching "Client Conversations" with IBM Watson Health.

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

>>live from Orlando, Florida It's the cue covering Microsoft Ignite Brought to you by Cohee City. >>Welcome back, everyone to the Cubes Live coverage of Microsoft IC night here at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, coasting along side of stew. Minutemen >>were joined by Patrick Moorehead. He is the founder and principal principal analyst. Atmore Insights and strategy Thank you so much for returning to the Cube. You're a good friend of the queue. >>Thanks for having me on. I mean, it's a great show, and I literally look for the Cube everywhere. >>Very nice. You >>do about 40 events year, and I'm pretty sure you're in >>about exactly, exactly. >>We've got a few more for you to cut. Come Thio. Yeah, in the other place. Year is >>not over. So so many announcements. Today, an 87 page book from From the Microsoft comes team. One of the things that is getting a lot of attention is azure arc. Satya Nadella himself said, I am so excited about this. This marks the beginning of hybrid computing. What are your first impressions of it, and are you able to see the immediate of differences between Stack and an arc >>S o. I think I would say completely expected. Uh, we're out of this drunken sailor mode where everything's going to the public cloud. Oh, my gosh. And everybody is toast. Who's not doing this? Okay, And now we're in this somewhat sober right where 80% of the workloads are still on Prem. And 20 of those have gone on to either SAS or I as or pass, but it's expected now. Microsoft already had a full stack i e azure stack, but this takes it up a notch because you been deployed arc anywhere on anybody's cloud. They even showed a demo of doing backups to eight of us. So whether it's on Prem, and I'm sure they're gonna show it running on GC, Pia's well >>so Patrick, For for a number years we've been saying, When you line up the big hyper scale er's and say who's doing well, a hybrid. Microsoft's been at the top of the list there because they have a strong footprint in my data center. Microsoft gave everyone the green light to go. Do sass is much you can because they're pushing everybody toe. 03 65. And, of course, Azure is growing in, You know, one of the leaders in Public Cloud. The announcements this week were compelling, but it may be kind of rethink is that I think you laid it out well and said, But we've been talking about hybrid cloud your number years, but we're not really there. So you are. It's a first piece. It's only in tech preview. I think you're saying for a singular application, which is databases. That's right. When you look out there and you see you know the VM wear on AWS Azure, Google, Oracle, IBM, you look a AWS with outposts and those things. How is Microsoft doing today at delivering for what customers need, you know today and moving forward on their cloud journey? >>So Microsoft was first out of the gate with azure stack, right? They were doing hybrid before it was cool. It was interesting for about two years when they were rolling in outer building it they weren't talking about it. So I was thinking, Wait a second, is it not catching on, or do they want to put more on the big cloud azure? But in fact they have been diligently working behind the scenes. And while they had to show Wall Street this Hayward, the public cloud, they were actively building out their hybrid opportunities. And I do believe that when it comes to the slice of hybrid they are leading right now. Now it depends on where you start. I guess where I do is their leading if you have a major public cloud. Okay, eight of us, obviously there were the outposts, and everybody in the audience were all in the audience. We gasped when Andy Jassy brought that out. We kind of knew something was being worked on and focus a CZ well. And I think to be a credible player you have tohave both implementations, going one way and going the other, being able to work with other people's clouds but also noticed everybody has their single pane of glass strategy. If you want to go all in on Microsoft, you have arc on dhe. That's really the classic Microsoft embrace and extend. >>Yeah, Patrick, you said, all in on Microsoft. And if I if I look at the enterprise, you've obviously got some Microsoft. There's probably some things you're doing. An azure right, You're you're running. 03 65. You know, there's lots of pieces in the more Microsoft portfolio, but most people aren't all in on anything today. That's right, The same thing. I looked at Antos and said in Google Cloud or in my data center shore. But anthros on AWS And >>no Veum no, no virtualized applications on Antos either. >>So the same question for Microsoft is if I'm in a W s, you know, have a big footprint of AWS. Is this gonna fly or you know what? What? What's your what's your take >>s? So it's funny where I've wound up after 30 years of doing this stuff is there's always gonna be a lock in. You just have to pick the lock and that you want. Some people are comfortable with an A p. I lock in. Some are comfortable with a hardware lock. In some people are comfortable with a development environment, and you're gonna pick one. Just what is it gonna be? The reality is in a Fortune 500. You're gonna have multiple panes of glass using to determine which two or which three are you comfortable with? Maybe all the panic last for deployment. Maybe we'll have a panic glass for ops. The interesting thing that I'm really looking for, though, is where this heads with multi cloud. Because I believe at least to my definition, multi cloud is kind of fiction if you talk about actually managing it because Dev ops are cool. But you know, when you got a multi cloud, you break Dev and you break ups. So this is a way Arc is a way to keep. If you buy into their Dev and the Rapps and their security, you would go all in on our. >>So I'm actually interested in what you were talking about with Microsoft going sort of working behind the scenes to Wall Street, presenting this one thing but really working behind the scenes and then talking about being at the conference in everyone, gasping at Andy Jassy how much our company's really paying attention to every birth of these companies in terms of their competition with each other to to be number one. >>Oh, they'll all say that they don't track the competition, but they all say they all have these massive competitive teams that are operating in a real time and I guarantee you all of Microsoft's competitors Aire watching all these are are here on doing that. Now I think the best companies are looking forward trying to change the game if they have to change the game. Trench vendors are really have been playing catch up mode, right? If you were 100% on Prem and you were talking about the public cloud, you're gonna be in trouble. I think, actually, oracles a great example of they're in trouble, particularly with I s I c databases of service. But it's like too little, too late. And I think they're paying the price right >>now. Patrick A Thanks for teeing up the Oracle piece because one of one of the topics that saga repeatedly talked about in the keynote was trust. It's actually the exponential t to the environment. If you talk about the ecosystem. Microsoft. If you look at the hyper scale, er's is probably more trust in others. We talk about people wanting to break up cos well, you know, we tried to break up Microsoft back years ago way know what happened there, and Oracle was up on stage it Oracle openworld saying you want to run or go on the cloud. Here's Azure. There are partner. We actually think that was a keep east of the jet ideal eyes enabling that environment. So the question I have for you is first, Do you agree that the ecosystem believes that Microsoft is more trusted? But what about customers? I think you actually made a tweet about it, right? Because I wonder, you know, historically speaking, Microsoft was not the most trusted. It was the one that, you know, I was right behind Oracle esta who I spent the most. Licensing money to Microsoft has changed. Are they trusted partner for companies building their strategy? >>I have to say, based on the last, we'll call it five years level of Microsoft Trust has raised. And there are other players who make Microsoft look like the super trust zone. Okay, I mean, in what they're maybe what they're doing in a breaking consumer privacy, Let's say, 95% of your businesses advertising right. >>Let's just say what you imagine this right? >>Having commercial offerings that are SAS offerings out there. I think you do have to ask the question, but But listen, I think, um, nobody's mother Theresa here. Okay, Everybody's trying to get business, but I do believe particularly Cincinnati has been here. Level has trust has has gone up, and I hear it from clients that I that I meet with all the time other people are on the naughty list for sure. Even those 95% advertising companies who haven't, let's say, done something. That's horrible. But it's just the notion that something could go wrong. I mean, enterprises, they're slow to adopt their very conservative and makes great fun. >>Exactly So. Well, one of the other big announcement is power platform, not water. What are you What are your impressions of this? I mean, is it is it just semantics? I mean, is this just really the umbrella of a lot of things we've seen before? Or is it something new and different? >>So we wait, did see some brand changes of name changes, but we did did see Cem Cem riel movement here. I like to put even though they're different. I like to put a B I dynamics 3 65 and power kind of in the same region because it's Hey, I'm teeing up. Um, hr at for you or C R Ram, But then you're gonna build APS on top of that. And that's what where power comes into play, I think the r p a portion was relatively new and what they brought out. But I wouldn't say this was the big news rollout for, uh, for power. I do think, interestingly enough, is it is it is their largest growth area. If you think about what? Let's a sales force tracking up. What s a P is doing out there? Even a work day? That is, if I look at the cubic dollars that are available, that is their first or second business driver. So I was expecting a little bit more news here. How about you? >>Well, I mean, I I'm I'm just the host here. You're the analyst. You know what you're talking about? I think that how I mean, what do you think? Do? >>Yeah. No, Patrick, you know, from people I've been talking to, there's a mixture of some of it was pulling everything together, but there is a rapid movement. You know, when I talked to the r p. A vendor's out there, it's not right. It's not like they're all quaking in their boots. They're still partner with Microsoft shirt. We see IBM in S A p. Everybody's going after that environment. Come on. Our P a is the gateway drug to a I ITT. It's Rebecca was at exactly show recently talking about that so back to that trust. Their Microsoft is not usually making announcements that you walk across the booth and there's a few people you know saying, Can we roll out the beer early? Because we think our business is ruined. That's where some of that trust isn't Microsoft. But that being said, you know, it was curious to me that they didn't have any big partnerships announcement last year. McDermott was up on stage on Dhe. You know he's changed companies since then, but there was a couple of small open source announcements, but not any large partnership announcement. So ecosystem majorly important. Any commentary from you how Microsoft is doing in that grand battle for you? >>So if I look the past couple of years when some of the biggest players CEOs were on stage right, it was about OD I Hey, let's share our data s a P, probably one of the bigger one even though they're doing with Salesforce's. Well, and I think that was a giant giant leap for folks and second of all way, working to see Larry on stage. Because by the way, that I agree with you on Jen. I That was a huge deal to me. Was Oracle outsourcing? I asked Asher, right, That would have been newsworthy. Okay, if I look at what could have been up here, not that there aren't more strategic deals that could be done. I think they're I think people are busy executing at this point. But if you look at who's gonna share the data without the eye that was the biggest. Working with different clouds. Well, we're not gonna get eight of us to get up on stage here, right? We're not gonna get G c. P here on stage, although, although we could have gotten WebEx up stage because apparently WebEx at a Cisco and teams are becoming friends. And maybe we'll see that on a slightly smaller stage >>enterprise connect kind of launch than it is a Microsoft show. >>Exactly. But I was surprised, you know, and I think it's a testament to how powerful teams actually is on. It's funny when, um um teams, which everybody thought was dead after Slack was announced and hang out with Google has actually ended up being the darling off the enterprise. And not just because it comes free with your M one subscription, right? It's really it's a good product. It's a shockingly good product. You don't have to do any of the any security. If you have any security challenges of anything in Microsoft, you'll avenues you here. But that's not the case. It all uses the back and of Microsoft for security and and regulatory. So anyways, I know I'm veering off here. But there was one partner announcement that I saw. It was Cisco WebEx being friends with teams. >>Can't we all just get along? I mean, there we go. When there's money, everybody exactly every continually we can't. It's too >>expensive to go out on your own. >>Patrick always so much fun to have you and I should having you. I'm Rebecca Knight. For Sue Mittleman, >>stay tuned For more of the cubes, live coverage of Microsoft ignite

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering Adobe Summit twenty nineteen. Brought to you by X Ensure Interactive. >> Welcome back, everyone. Cube Live coverage here in Las Vegas for Adobe Summit. Twenty nineteen. I'm John. For whichever Frick. My Coast. This week. Two days of wall to wall coverage. Our next guest is Janine Falcone. Is the marketing agency lead in North America for a center in Iraq? Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. Thanks for having >> me love having the conversation just talking on before we came on camera around the role of the agencies. You guys are doing a lot of big work for big brands. B to C B to B. There's a big shift going on with Cloud computing. We've seen that movie is happening right now. Amazon, as you are all going on, but that what? The marketing world. It's not just about marketing. Cloud is a lot more going on there. The impact to the marketing world and the agency relationships are impacted. That's what's going on. Give us >> the state of >> the market, >> happy to sew an extension. Interactive. You know, a lot of clients come to us and they're living in this world. I talk with my hands. Sorry, living in this world of, like chaos, as I like to call it, because there's so many things going on the technology landscape that you described. It's crazy out there. Remember, the landscape used to be this big announces big. So there's all that sort of market buzz and chaos around. I should buy this technology in that technology, and marketers and CEOs they've all been out there doing, that's that's one piece. The second piece is the customer affectation, right? All that is evolving and changes a customer's always expect. I don't really carry our retailer bank whatever. They kind of have that uber experience that they all expect regardless of product or service or anything like that. So marketers have always tried to deal with that in the way they knew how. But then the third component is business climate and what's happening in their worlds with either shrinking budgets or aging workforce. I don't even mean age necessarily as much a skill set. Aging skill sets things that used to matter. Don't they've got that they've got organizational silos, they've got all these things. So those three things, plus I'm a marketer. I still have to deliver that old brand promise that they're told to dio, It's a crazy crazy time. >> All theaters air on massive change over chips happening. Marketers and CMOS also relied on agencies for help. Tell them they have domain expertise in certain areas, A and agencies and the other thing. But now that the value equations shifting in the economics underlying economics behind it are getting some visibility around its digital different new ballgame, you got a I and Machine Learning has caused that shift. So the question is, How should your customer how are your customers dealing with agency relation? Because in today's value exchange, >> totally and that's all >> don't often come ask us that so not only they have all those silos and all those things. They could have seventeen different agencies across multiple product lines that may have been doing a great job in their own silo. But who's bringing all that together? And then it's not even and my just not spending my money right with these agencies, like What are they delivering for that? So when they come to us, tow holistically, look across all of that and help them. We start with the customer in the center of all those siloed crazy areas. You've got to start with the customer, and what do they expect and how do you deliver to them? So, yes, we're seeing this crazy world in the agency space two of brandade disease desolate all the different kinds of agency >> toss another piece of fruit in the blender makes it all. So I was talking with the sea so that the chief information security officer at some chief security officer at Microsoft reports to the board in cybersecurity, going through the same transformation that it's happening, marking where now you have technology and AP eyes and and tools technical tools. So he's shrinking his supplier base down because he doesn't want his skills gas to get widened by having to learn new tools. So there's now a new forcing function on the tech side, and now we see that kind of creeping into the adobe conversation where it's like this techno involved. Yes, we now have toes, shrink suppliers even more so how do you get from seventeen to three years at the train? So there seems to be a discussion around the impact attack your thoughts. >> Yeah, well, absolutely. That was one of the areas I talked about. So what happens? There is they'LL need marketers to understand technology which today many do. Let's be honest, right? Like, ten, fifteen years ago. They didn't. Today they do. But it also requires you both internally and externally, tohave multiple skill sets. And sometimes they'LL say, Should I be bringing this in house shivering that in house? What do I do with this technology? And there's never one answer. There's never like you should enforce this or that. And so technology has had that massive impact on Oh, I could do this myself and then they realise that can and then back to the But do I have the right skill sets internally externally to be able to do that. And it's often seventeen different still skill sets to do one thing where it used to be. A lot >> of Jeff and I talked on the cue before about you know, the classic business school conversation around core competency should be in house Horak outsource your non core competencies. How did you see that evolved? Because at some point there has to be a core concert on data and things of that nature. So what's your thoughts? How do you advise clients on Okay, if you're going to go in house and start putting a toe in the water and building it out, it's an investment. And all I think about, what's the core competency? >> I mean core competence to me or anything related specifically to your industry that people have to continue to get skilled in an expert in. And they want to do just that. One thing. Sometimes people that are broader generalists in marketing and data, they might get bored doing that. But if someone is like, I want to be really good at this and I'm going to continue to hone my skills in that one thing Data Analytics, whatever, then that may be. And you live in the right market. You don't live in kind of a part of the country where it be hard to find those skills. Be honest. I mean some parts of the country, it's easier than others, so that is one way to look at it. But anything that requires generalist knowledge across industry knowledge or or things that are constantly evolving and you want someone else to pay for the training. >> What's the CMO conversation like for you in clients these days is actually lets a lot of stuff going on. We just illustrated the game is still the same. They gotta pride that brand promise. Now they got the text taxing always new things. Hopefully, Ball will move down the field faster. But what is the CMO conversation that you have? How they stay ahead of the curve? What's their edge? >> Yeah, >> how they posturing right now? >> I mean, I think it's an amazing time to be in marketing. So CM owes to me that are the pioneering. CMO is the ones that are really focusing back is in on the customer and developed, you know, delivering those relevant experiences. They're the ones that are being ex successful because they try toe, not certainly not. Ignore all of us chaos that's surrounding, but stay focused and then they don't worry about Oh, this isn't in my silo. I have to kind of reach across, and I have to make sure I get this first. They have to be the leaders. They have to lead the industry like knowledge and business would be the leader in the organization, whether or not they are and just be the pioneer to get that done, that makes them successful. The ones that are excited about that they're the future, writes >> funny. We interviewed a guy from Clorox while ago, and you think of CPG has been data driven forever right there coming out of there coming out of Cincinnati. They all got trained Teo G. But this is a whole different level of kind of, of data, of data driven execution's been than what they've been doing for years and years and years. That's >> right, because potentially they were product centric. So they dealt with their product in CPD, and I'm going to sell toilet paper. That's I'm going to be the best market or there is. But the customer expectations surrounding that have changed, and they expect you to know them in a relevant, non creepy way. And product marketing to customer marketing is a big shift, and potentially I know a lot. I know a little about a lot of industries. CPG has been very product focused, which is difficult when you now have to be customer centric, regardless of product right that your company is trying to >> send the >> changing rule of distribution, especially in cpt. Anywhere before they would. They would ship the the toilet paper, whatever they were doing, and it goes out the door and they don't know anything else about it to the next. Word comes in correct. Now they know how the products are being used. They got a direct connection to the to the customer, and they need to establish a relationship beyond just the actual execution of the purchase of a very different >> kind of a chance. Crazy. I love it. I think it's a crazy time >> to be able to do that. And again, the blurring between marketing and commerce and sales and service. There's all sorts of debates on where marketing ends commerce sales service begins because it's all clustered together now. Then there's creativity and technology and data and analytics all converging. So to me, people that understand all of those things at a high enough level and are good collaborators and orchestrators that know how to get things done, they will be successful. >> Do you take a lot of people tried to buy their way out of the problem because you know Martek technology has been around for a long time. Arguably, you know, kind of leading edge in a lot of the the things in terms of a web experience. But this, you know, so many of them. >> You can't buy your way out of the problem. Yeah, Yeah, except that. And >> buy it quickly, right? I'm going to buy it, and I'm gonna plug the sand. I mean, I feel like that might have happened years ago, and now you're right there seeing that. Oh, my God. Now, that, too, is like its own silo. Now they have a technology silo to, in addition to potentially some organizational silos that they have to break down. So But, you know, the good news is that everybody sort of sees this now and kind of gets it. And if people are just sort of focused on to do the right thing for the customer because if you don't, someone else will. And sometimes going back to what used to work works like Now, if I call a company, I have no expectation they're going to answer the phone. And when they do, you're like, Wow, that was a great experience. I scheduled a vacation. It was It ended up being non refundable. And I'm like, I'm just going to try to call. It was one of the online. It wasn't Airbnb was one of those like services I caught. They answer the phone. If seven o'Clock on a Thursday night, >> no problem. You can count. Like this is the greatest experience I've had. I'm going to use them again because I didn't expect >> that. So it's not like what used to work doesn't work anymore, but has to work on the right. >> Pleasant surprises. Exactly. Relevancy. That's healthy. And you got it. Yeah. And then they >> said I said, Okay, well, I mean, they're like, we don't need your information, you know, I have your cell phone, so I don't >> know. And I wasn't creeped out by that. I don't >> thank God. Now I don't have to fill out a form >> I need to do mother's maiden name, like, six different times. >> And then, you know what? I saw how you guys make >> money. Like I was so fascinated by this that I just had to sort of figure out the business model because I'm a marker there. And my point is that was. I don't know how much it costs them to do that, but that was a positive experience, >> President. People call in >> there, Bryan. Nobody call it. And I don't know how they got around the company for all I know. So I gotta ask you, I gotta ask >> you with all these new changes you mentioned in one of the great example of how the world's changing KP eyes also change around what's really what's relevant. Because these new things air going on where may or may not have KP I. So how does the CMO get out in front of that? How did they evolve their skill set to either either grok that understand all this new k p I potential? Yeah, and have that front and center and working through the marketing mix. >> Yeah, you can have KP I overload to write. So remember, old school still works. Brand matters. Brandt. No one worried about measuring that stuff years ago, and part of that is still relevant. I had a session earlier today and people talked about CP eyes like customer related influence and things like that, because that matters and some things you absolutely I know This is a Dobie a mike in trouble. You maybe can't necessarily measure. But, you know, it matters to your brand, and some of that matters to know how much you spend on that, how you sort of track that and maybe track I'm all about, like, mixing gray and mixing, you know, qualitative and quantitative stuff. That's part of the trick >> on these signals. Their market, their data signals totally put on the agency front. Go back to the agency for second because with sass, APS and these new things, people answer the phone, which has blended kind of channels. Is there a new agency model emerging around cloud and sass applications that that this doesn't feel like an agency but acts like an agency? Because if you're an agency you're providing a service, you have software service models out there. Self service is there in the evolution of change over and how ages new agencies looked like. And how does the CMO know if someone's a new agency is going to be relevant or not? >> I mean, it totally depends on the kind of agents, and I would tell C Motor not necessarily worry about that. I wouldn't worry about. Do I need a new kind of agency at all? It's like, What am I getting? What are they delivering for me? I would go back to the first question and what do I need to keep as a core competency? And inside versus outside I wouldn't worry about it. Might be the technology question. Right now, I'm gonna have even the others other crazy agencies in What I would worry about is what do I know? I need toe outsource and have people help me with that are going to come up with the best ideas. And I mean, agencies still do that because to come up with a creative idea, you need that expertise that is outside of your industry. So I don't see that ever changing >> don't ask in terms of because, he said, cause brand matters. And I always like a Harley Davidson is kind of the extreme brand loyalty where people tattoo it on their bodies and there's a whole ecosystem outside of the motorcycle. That's a really, you know, passionate group of people. Should everybody strive for that kid everybody. I mean they can't get quite where every tattoo and brands on their arm. But you know where we're kind of the limits And is it, you know, kind of appropriate based on what the product is, how people think about that. Specter. >> Yeah, I might be a little biased on that. I always think brand matters. I always think that when you think of something, if you don't in your head, know what that stands for, whether or not it's a positive or negative is not really relevant. It's yes, I think it does now. Should they strive to be that? No. But they have to be differentiated, and they have to have people know what they do quickly, because if you have to figure it out like mean, people struggle with that today in terms of knowing where to go for what, So without a clear value proposition, differentiation and a brand that matches that and a brand you can live up to with every experience, it's going to be rough. You might have some early success, but it won't. I don't know that it lasts their time and strong brands kind of carry through some tough times, too, You know, if sales are down on the market changes, >> we'LL keep doing our and our interviews on events and get smart people really smart people. And all the answers come out community. Thanks >> so much for coming on, sharing these awesome insights. Final question. What's going on? The show for you? What? Some of the hallway conversations here. You're speaking. What's the top story line for you here at this show? >> It's two things. It's what's going on. The market with our clients is as we just talked about. It's what's going on in our own industry. I mean, there's craziness in our own industry, which is kind of fun. You know what players do, what and who's going to do what and you know, where's this all going? And it's fun. I mean, it's it's really, really fun and exciting to be part of this industry. >> Well, thanks for coming on, Mr. Q. Where we're extracting the signal from the noise at this event. Adobe Summit twenty nineteen Talking the smartest people bringing it to you. Bring that data to you. We right back with more coverage after this short break

Sand Hill Road to the heart of Silicon Valley it's the cute presenting the people first Network insights from entrepreneurs and tech leaders when I'm John Ferrari with the cube I'm the co-host also the founder of Silicon angle me we are here on Sand Hill Road at Mayfield for the people first conversations I'm John furry with the cube weird Allen being global CTO and IT of innovation at Procter & Gamble formerly the same position at coca-cola has done a lot of innovations over the years also a reference account back in the day for web methods when they call on the financing of that one of the most famous IPOs which set the groundwork for web services and has a lot of history going back to the 80s we were just talking about it welcome this conversation on people first network thank you for inviting me so the people first network is all about people and it's great to have these conversations you're old school you were doing some stuff back on the 80s talking about doing RPA 3270 you've been old school here yeah I go back to APL as my first programming language went through the the third generation languages and of course the old 30 to 70 emulation which is what we know today is our PA one of the cool things I was excited to hear some of your background around your history web methods you were a reference call for venture financing of web methods which was financed on the credit card for the two founders husband and wife probably one of the most successful I appeals but more importantly at the beginning of the massive wave that we now see with web services this is early days this was very early days when I was at DHL we were looking at what we're gonna do for the future and in fact we built one of the first object-oriented frameworks in C++ at the time because that was all that was available to us or the best was available we rejected Corbis and we said look if we're gonna go this direction and one of my developers found web methods found philip merrick it was literally at the time working out of his garage and had this technology that was going to allow us to start moving into this object-oriented approach and I remember the day Robin Vasan form a field called and said hey I'm thinking about investing in web methods what do you think about it and not only was it one of the first startups that I ever worked with but it's actually the first time I met anybody in the venture community way back in nineteen I think 1997 is what had happened and that was a computing time in computer science and then the rest is history and then XML became what it became lingua franca for the web web services now Amazon Web Services you see in cloud computing micro services kubernetes service meshes this is a new stack that's being developed in the cloud and this is the new generation you've seen many waves and at Procter & Gamble formerly coca-cola you're the same role you have to navigate this so what's different now what's different say 15 20 years ago how are you looking at this market how you implementing some of the IT and infrastructure and software development environments I think what's change is you know when we got into the the early 2000s Nicolas car came out and said IT doesn't matter and I think anybody that was an IT had this very objectionable response initially but when you step back and you looked at it what she realised was in many cases IT didn't matter and those were those areas that were non-competitive those things that could be commoditized and it was completely right the reality is IT has always mattered that technology does give you a competitive advantage in certain markets and certain capabilities for a company but back then we had to go out and we had to purchase equipment we had to configure the equipment there was a lot of heavy lifting in corporations just did not want to invest the capital so they outsource the stuff wholesale I think General Motors was the first one that just out sourced everything and was followed by other companies including Procter & Gamble the decision at that time was probably right but as we go forward and we see what's happened with corporations we see the valuations of corporations the amount of return on equity based on the on the capital that's being invested we can see that data is important we can see that agility flexibility is key to competing in the future and therefore what's changing is we are now moving into an age of away from ERP so we're moving into an age away from these outsource providers on a wholesale basis and using it selectively to drive down costs and allowing us to free up money in order to invest in those things that are most important to the company so you're saying is that the folks naturally the server consolidation they've bought all this gear all this software over you know 18-month rollouts before they even see the first implementation those are the glory days of gravy trains for the vendor's yeah not good for the practitioners but you're saying that the folks who reinvested are investing in IT as a core competency are seeing a competitive advantage they certainly are you know I think I made the statement front of a number of the vendors and a few years ago and people were not comfortable with it but what I said was like you gone are the ears of these 10 20 million dollar deals gone are the ears of the million two million dollar deals we're in the ear of throwaway technology I need to be able to use and invest in technology for a specific purpose for a specific period of time and be able to move on to the next one it's the perfect time for startups but startups shouldn't be looking at the big picture they should be looking at the tail on these investments let me try things let me get out in the market let me have a competitive advantage in marketing which is most important to me or in supply chain those are the areas that I can make a difference with my consumers and my customers and that's where the investments have to go so just in constant of throwaway technology and you know you'd also be said of you know being more agile though interesting to look at the cloud SAS business model if Amazon for us I think that's the gold standard where they actually lower prices on a per unit basis and increase more services and value but in the aggregate you're still paying more but you have more flexibility and that's kind of a good tell sign so that you're seeing that ability to reuse either the infrastructure that's commoditized to shift the value this is are people having a hard time understanding this so I want to get your reaction to how should I tea leaders understand that the wave of cloud the wave of machine learning what a I can bring to the table these new trends how how should leaders figure this out is there a playbook as there are things that you've learned that you could share you know that there's really a playbook it's still early on everyone's looking for one cloud fits all the reality is whether it's Google whether it's Amazon whether it's Microsoft whether it's IBM all clouds are different all clouds have our special are purpose-built for different solutions and I think as an IT leader you have to understand you're not going to take everything and lift and shift that's what we used to do we're now in the position where we have to deconstruct our business we have to understand the services the capabilities that we want to bring to market and not lock ourselves in its building blocks its Legos we're in the period of Legos putting these things together in different manners in order to create new solutions if we try to lock ourselves in the past of how we've always financed things how we've always built things then we're not going to be any better off in the new world than we were in the old alan i want to get your reaction to to two words our PA and containers well as i said earlier our PA is 3270 emulation from the 1980s and for those of us that are old enough to remember that i I still remember scraping the the old green screens and and putting a little process around it it what's nice though is that we have moved forward machine learning and AI and other other capabilities are now present so that we can do this I actually played around with neural nets probably back in 1985 with an Apollo computer so that tells you how far back I go but technologies change processing speeds change everything the technology trends are allowing us to now to do these things the question that we have is also a moral dilemma is are we trying to replace people or are we trying to make improvements and I think that you don't look at our PA as a way simply to replace work it's a way to enhance what we're doing in order to create new value for the customer or for the consumer in our case I think in the in the area of containers you know again been around for a while been around for a while it's just another another approach that we're not we don't want lock in we don't want to be dependent on specific vendors we want the portability we want the flexibility and I think as we start moving containers out to the edge that's where we're gonna start seeing more value as the business processes and the capabilities are spread out again the idea of centralized cloud computing is very good however it doesn't need to be distributed what's interesting I find about the conversation here is that you mentioned a couple things earlier you mentioned the vendors locking you in and saying here's the ERP buy this and with this you have to have a certain process because this is our technology you got to use it this way and you were slave to their their tech on your process serve their tech with containers and say orchestration you now the ability to manage workloads differently and so an interesting time there's that does that change the notion of rip and replace lift and shift because if I a container I could just put a container around it and not have to worry about killing the old to bring in the new this is on the fundamental kind of debate going on do you have to kill the old to bring in the new well you need to kill the old sometimes just because it's old it's time to go other times you do need to repackage it and other times I hate to say it you do need to lift and shift if you're a legacy organization they have a long history such as most of the manufacturing companies in the world today we can't get rid of old things that quickly we can't afford to a lot of the processes are still valid as we're looking to the future we certainly are breaking these things down into services we're looking to containerize these things we're looking to move them into areas where we can compute where we want to when we want to at the right price we're just at the beginning of that journey in the industry I still think there's about five to seven years to go to get there now I'll talk about the role of the edge role of cloud computing as it increases the surface area of IT potentially combined with the fact that IT is a competitive advantage bring those two notions together what's the role of the people because you used to have people that would just manage the rack and stack I'm provisioning some storage I'm doing this as those stovepipes start to be broken down when the service area of IT is bigger how does that change the relationship of the people involved you know you win with people at the end of the day you don't win with technology you know a company of such as Proctor and Gamble and I think what's happened if you look at historically the ERP vendors came out probably 99 2000 and it used to be and remember these I'm old to be honest with you but I remember that we used to have to worry about the amount of memory we were managing we had to be able to tune databases in all of this and the vendors went ahead and they started automating all those processes with the idea that we can do it better than a human and a lot of people a lot of the technology talent then started leaving the organizations and organizations were left with people that we're focusing on process and people a process excuse me process and the the the business which is very good because you need the subject matter experts going forward we have to reinvest in people our people have the subject matter expertise they have some technology skills that they've developed over the years and they've enhanced it on their own but we're in this huge change right now where we have to think different we have to act different and we have to behave differently so doubling down on people is the best thing that you can do and the old outsource model of outsourcing everything kind of reduces the core competency of the people yeah now you got to build it back up again exactly I mean we when we left at P&G 15 years ago about 5,000 people left the organization when we outsource them when we outsource the technology to our partner at that time now it's time we're starting to bring it back in we've brought the network team back in and stood up our own sock in our own NOC for the first time in years just this past year we're doing the same thing by moving things out to the cloud more and more is moving to the cloud we're setting up our own cloud operations and DevOps capabilities I can tell you having been on both sides of it it's a lot harder to be able to bring it back in than it is to take it out and you know interesting proctoring games well known as being a very intimate with the data very data-driven company the data is valuable and having that infrastructure NIT to support the data that's important what's your vision on the data future of the data in the world well I think data is has a value to itself but when you tie it to products you tie it to your customers and consumers it's even more valuable and we're in the process now of things that we used to do completely internally with our own technology or technology partners we're now moving all of that out into the cloud now and I must say cloud its clouds plural again going back to certain clouds are better for certain things so you're seeing a dramatic shift we have a number of projects underway that are in the cloud space but for customers and consumers number of cloud projects in the way for our own internal employees it's all about collecting the data processing the data protecting that data because we take that very seriously and being able to use it to make better decisions I want to get your reaction on two points and two quite lines of questioning here because I think it's very relevant on the enterprise side you're a big account for the big whales the old ERP so the big cloud providers so people want to sell you stuff at the same time you're also running IT innovation so you want to play with the new shiny new toys and experiments start up so if startups want to get your attention and big vendors want to sell to you the tables have kind of turned it's been good this is a good it's a good buyers market right now in my opinion so what's your thoughts on that so you know start with the big companies what do they got to do to win you over well they got to look like how they got to engage and for startups how do they get your attention I think the biggest thing for either startup or large companies understanding the company you're dealing with whether it's Procter & Gamble whether it's coca-cola whether it was DHL if you understand how I operate if you understand how decisions are made if you understand how I'm organized that's gonna give you an a competitive advantage now the large corporations understand this because they've been around through the entire journey of computing with these large corporations the startups need to step back and take a look and see where do I add that competitive advantage many times when you're selling to a large corporate you're not selling to a large corporate you're selling two divisions you're selling two functions and that's how you get in I've been working with startups as I said back since web methods and it was just a two-person company but we brought them in for a very specific capability I then took web methods with me when I left DHL I took them to GE when I left GE I took them to ing because I trusted them and they matured along the way I think finding that right individual that has the right need is the key and working it slowly don't think you're gonna close the deal fast if you're start-up know it's gonna take some time and decide if that's in your best interest or not slow things down focus don't try to boil the ocean over too many of them try to boy you're right Jimmy people try to boil the ocean get that win one win will get you another one which will get you another win and that's the best way to succeed get that beachhead Ellen so if you could go back and knowing what you know now and you're breaking into the IT leadership's position looking forward what would you do differently can do a mulligan hey what would you do differently well you know I think one of the one of the dangers of being an innovator in IT is that you really are risk taker and taking risks is counterculture to corporations so I think I would probably try to get by in a little bit more I mean someone once told me that you know you see the force through the trees before anybody else does your problem is you don't bring people along with you so I think I would probably slow down a little bit not in the adoption of technology but I'd probably take more time to build the case to bring people along a lot faster so that they can see it and they can take credit for it and they can move that needle as well yeah always sometimes early adopters and pioneers had the arrows on the back as they say I've had my share now thanks for sharing your experience what's next for you what's the next mountain you're going to climb well I think that as we're looking forward latency is still an issue you know we have to find a way to defeat latency we're not going to do it through basic physics so we're gonna have to change our business models change our technology distribution change everything that we're doing consumers and customers are demanding instant access to enhanced information through AI and m/l right at the point where they want it and that means we're now dealing with milliseconds and nanoseconds of having to make decisions so I'm very interested in looking at how are we going to change consumer behavior and customer behavior by combining a lot of the new technology trends that are underway and we have to do it also with the security in mind now before we security was secondary now as we're seeing with all of the hacks and the malware and everything that's going on in the world we have to go in and think a little bit different about how we're gonna do that so I'm very much engaged in working with a lot of startups I live here in the Silicon Valley I commute to Cincinnati for Procter & Gamble I'm spending time and just flew in from tel-aviv literally an hour ago I'm in the middle of all the technology hotspots trying to find that next big thing and it's a global it's global innovation happens everywhere and anywhere the venture community if you look at the amount of funds it used to be invested out of the Silicon Valley versus the rest of the world it continues to be on a downward trend not because the funding isn't here in the Silicon Valley but because everyone is recognizing that innovation and technology is developed everywhere in the world Alan Bain was the CTO global CTO and IT innovator there at the cube conversation here in San Hill Road I'm John for a year thanks for watching you

(upbeat music) >> Live from Washington D.C., it's TheCUBE. Covering InForum, D.C. 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Well, good morning and welcome to day two here on theCUBE at Inforum 2018. We are in the nation's capital, the Walter Washington Convention Center, and thank goodness the sun's come out today. Everybody's got big smile and cheery faces, it's good to see. Dave Vellante, John Walls here. We're just on top of the show floor. You'll see a lot of activity a little bit later on in the day. And it's a pleasure to welcome our first guest of the day, Billy Southerland who's the CEO of IronRoad. Billy, good morning to you. >> Good morning, thank you guys for having me on. >> Great to see you. >> Yeah, great to see you. >> How's the show been for you so far? >> It's been great. Yeah, it's been great. Outside of the fact that we got bumped from our hotel when we first showed up so (chuckles) No, but show's been fantastic, always great to network, learn what other folks have going on and yeah, been phenomenal. >> Tell us about IronRoad. What you do and why you're here. >> Yeah, so we're an HR and outsourcing company. And we've been doing HR and payroll since 1997. Company started really just with an idea. So as we have grown through the years, working with mostly small to medium size businesses, we had an opportunity with Infor just a couple years ago to partner with them on the payroll side of things. And so it's been a new opportunity for us, one that our team is incredibly excited about. Just great opportunity to partner with some phenomenal software and so yeah, that's-- >> So, services that you guys provide, so HR, payroll, you've got a portal, onboarding. Take us through that. Is that full suite of-- full complement of services? >> It is, yeah. So our typical client is a smaller to medium sized employer and we'll go in and so many of the things that they've got to do internally that have nothing to do with why they got into business, they can outsource to us. So, anything from the beginning to the end of an employee's life cycle is what we manage. You name it and we do it for them so that they can go and focus on what they do. >> So let me probe that a little bit. So if I have-- let's say I have an HR issue with an employee. Maybe they're a little older and I'm concerned that I am going through the right steps giving that employee the right guidance. I don't want to expose my company to any lawsuits or whatever. Can I call you up and say, hey, give me some guidance on how I should handle this from an HR perspective? What do I have to document? You would help me with that? >> David, that's the perfect example, right? And so the whole liability of being an employer is something that they can share with us, right? So, somebody that focuses on HR knows those laws and rules and regs. They can pick up the phone, they call us, they say, hey Billy, got an issue, can you come out? One of our folks will go out, consult with them, make sure that everything's documented, managed properly. And yeah, that's exactly what we would do. >> Okay, so with healthcare compliance, Obamacare, PTO policies. I'm a small company. I want to make sure that I'm not killing my cash flow with balance sheets stuff. I mean all that stuff, you can help with? >> You got it. Yeah, absolutely. You bring up healthcare. I don't know any employee, employer regardless of the size who's not dealing with that, right? So the whole ACA compliance with Obamacare has been a tremendous boom for our business because people are looking left and right, how do we deal with this? What do we do? It's so complex for them, they're looking for experts to manage it. >> I mean that's kind of the tip of the spear. That's why, particularly small, mid-size businesses, it's healthcare first because it's so expensive and it's so important to the employees, right? >> It is, yeah and I would say most folks that we deal with it's number two line item right after payroll, right? I mean they're dealing with healthcare and everybody's looking for answers. It's like, how do we do this? And the employees are asking the same question, right? And they're looking at the employers saying, give me a solution. There is no real solution outside of being able to maybe aggregate with some other smaller employers so we can go to the large healthcare companies that are out there and say, okay I tell you what, we got about 5,000 people here now. What do you think about our buying power at this point? >> You get some scale and then do the works. >> That's it, you just scale it, exactly right. >> Okay, 1997. Well, first of all, you're Cincinnati-based, I'll come back and talk about that. But 1997, just coming into the dot come boom, the state of software was, back then PeopleSoft was the gold standard. There was no cloud, really, you had these software companies doing, forget what they even called it now, but it was like software as a service pre-SAS. Kind of clunky software and now you fast-forward to today, you know, you're all cloud, you're agile but so how'd you get started? Take us through kind of the technology progression. >> Yeah, so the start was an interesting one. I wish we could tell you we had a great idea but it was a complete accident, right? We were trying to, I was trying to help out two different friends who were in two separate businesses. They both had done extremely well in their separate businesses. So they started what is now IronRoad and after about 12 months, both of them had done so well in their other businesses, they looked at each and said, they each thought the other one was going to be pulling the wagon, right? And so neither one of them wanted to do it. So one of the guys came to me and said, hey Billy, you want to buy 50% of this? And I said, well, what is it? And he explained it to me and I said, I love this concept, it's a great idea. And so I said, how much? He said, $8,000. (laughing) >> It's like a lawnmower. >> I bought half a lawnmower, right? >> Such a great idea, you sure you don't want to charge more? >> Yeah, I said, $8,000? But he had no clients, right? They had a little bit of software that they purchased to be able to do the payroll. So that's really where we started. So kind of caveman like you said, David. And so-- >> What's your client base now? What do you have? >> So we're using the Infor Cloud base. The human management capital system. >> As far as the number of organizations that you're serving. How have you grown the business? >> Pardon. Yeah, so you know really, it's just been good old-fashioned hard work for us. We've not made any purchases, no acquisitions. And so we got some amazing people that have a real passion about what we do and we do it really well. The differentiator between us and some of the big guys that are out there really is our people. Your people talk about that but our people are really focused on it. So you know-- and pretty soon, that reputation begins to spread. Like you said, we're in Cincinnati, Ohio and currently we're operating in 38 different states. So little bit at a time, year after year, we've been digging and digging and digging. In regards to the question you asked, David, right? So we start with the lawnmower and here we end up sitting with you guys talking about Infor and this cloud-based suite that we've been able to manage and bring in and so really exciting for somebody like us. >> So talk a little bit more about the CloudSuite, how you use it, how you use it to differentiate from the competition, you know why it's maybe better than some of the other alternatives you see? >> That's a great question. Because most our businesses' professional employer organization. Most of the PEO softwares are fairly limited in what they can offer the employers that they're working with. And so we vetted, we had Anka Kalp... Our CIO was vetting five different systems a couple years ago. And in the midst of vetting those five different systems, we were introduced to Infor, right? As we began to see what this software could do, we started getting really excited. You talk about a differentiator in the workplace, nobody else has it, right? And so we started learning more and more the human capital management system for us, we started thinking, man if we could take this to employees-- employers, that have anywhere between 500 and 5,000 employees, this is a real differentiator for us, right? And so nope, like I said, nobody else in the PEO space has this software and it's been a tremendous opportunity for us to take to the marketplace. >> So that's kind of your sweet spot, 500 to 5,000? So not under 100, right? True SMB is kind of not your sweet spot? >> Well, actually we'll go all the way down to 20 employees. But the 20 employer companies, the resources that they have internally to be able to integrate the systems is a little more challenging. But we get it done. And so anywhere between 20 and probably 5,000 employees are the typical employer that we're working with. >> So what kind of integration items does a customer have to think about, specifically? >> So by integration-- >> You said, small companies don't have the resources to do the integration so what has to be done to do that integration? >> Yeah, so it's a lot of lifting, right? I mean, there's lots of work to be able to establish the systems with the employers that we're taking, you know, the software to. Just a lot of hands on between IronRoad and the companies that we're dealing with so the smaller companies are really focused on, you know, going out and doing whatever it is whether they're contractor, doctor's office. So to be able to have a resource that can dedicate the time, to be able to activate the system and make it do what they want it to do is somewhat challenging for the smaller employers. >> But wouldn't they have to do that with any outsource HR provider? >> They would. They may not be able-- they probably are not taking the software to the depth of its utilization or potential utilization. So they're kind of doing without it. >> So the bigger guy's getting more business value out of your offer. >> There's no doubt about it or the smaller guys, it just takes a little bit longer to get 'em there. That's really the challenge. They both get the same value, just takes a little bit longer. >> 21 years you been doing this. So, you've obviously seen business change. >> Not that old, I don't know how that happened. >> Well, you started very young. (laughing) >> I'm glad you said that. I wondered why they skipped me with the makeup. I thank you guys. >> Don't need it. We do. (laughs) So you been 21 years. >> Yes. >> So you've seen business change, right? >> Yes. >> You've seen technology change, right? >> Oof, night and day. >> So where now? Where are the pain points now? Because it seems like, oh we've solved all these problems, right? Automation, things are much easier. Well, there's always a, yeah, but. So what's the but now for your folks? >> Yeah, I think the biggest thing for us in our industry is getting the message out. When we look at PEOs in Ohio, for example, about 2% of the workforce is working with the PEO. Because they're so few of 'em out there doing it really well, getting that message out to the employer because once we get 'em, once they come in and they see, you know you said they got to do this if they're outsourcing HR anyhow. Once they become aware of what's available to them, they don't leave, right? >> So their pain's still the same. >> Pain's still the same. >> You're just trying to get out, to let them know, you can help. >> That's it, that's it. I think that's probably our biggest pain point is how do you get this message out and different parts of the country, obviously, you've got different attitudes towards or people move at different paces. In Ohio, there's still, I'm looking at David saying, what is PEO? I've never heard of it. I don't know if I trust you. And so overcoming that is probably our biggest obstacle. >> Billy, you talk a little bit about Infor, it's products. If I understand it correctly, you're both a consumer and essentially a reseller of the services, which means you're running on the Amazon Cloud so talk about your relationship there, why Infor, why the product, how does it compare? Because you probably evaluated everything. >> We did, yeah. Yeah, we did. You know, for us, like I said, we vetted five different companies that we were looking at. And when we had a chance to look at the Infor proposal, the differentiator for us not only was the software, from our perspective, far and above better than anything else that we were looking at. They provided us with an opportunity since we were purchasing the software to be able to provide an in-tenant solution for current clients that Infor has. So an Infor client that looks at the software and says, hey, I want this, and yet they're still outsourcing their payroll, now has the ability to buy the software and outsource the payroll to IronRoad. And so you're taking the best in class cloud suite services from a human capital management system to the marketplace. And partnering with a company like Infor that really is a dream come true for us. >> So what makes it best in class? I mean, you know, Oracle's got good software. You got SAP out there, Workday's the hot company. Why is Infor, you said, better? Why is it better? >> Yeah, I think for us, just the ease of the employer being able to utilize the system. You can have the best thing in the world and people are people are people are people, right? They got to be able to get on there and use the stuff. And so I think the ease of being able to just the user-friendly side of what Infor does. They certainly have every option you can imagine. The capability, the software is as good, if not better, than any. But the ability for people to pick it up quickly and be able to use and make it real for their small business, to me that's the key, right? >> Was the use of AWS Cloud a factor? >> Um... >> Was that kind of transparent to you? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not really. Yeah, yeah. >> Is there an aha moment when you're out there when you are pitching? And when you look up people and the processes they go through and they been doing it the same way for decades? So when you break through, how do you know you've broken through? What is it that you use to break through? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah and for them, once we're able to articulate what this system actually does, there is an aha moment. And it's almost disbelief. It's because there's so many years of doing it the old way, right? And then they look and see it's kind of like me looking at the software that your company's created that was phenomenal, right? They're looking at it and go, come on, really? It really does that? And it's, yeah, it really does that. (chuckles) And we can do this different and you can go sell more widgets, right? >> Showing Billy our video search software, so I appreciate that. >> Amazing! I mean, it's unbelievable. >> It is. >> Yeah, Star Trek. >> So I want to ask-- >> Baiting myself. >> We're all in the same boat. >> I want to ask you about the resources that are required for you to do integration with Infor. Actually, so outside funding, other than the $8,000 that you put in, have you guys raised outside funding? >> David, that was a lot of money at the time, man. >> Yeah, no doubt. >> (laughs) A lot of money. >> You could do a lot with $8,000, but you can't build a full software suite so have you taken outside capital, or? >> We haven't. >> So, self-funded. >> Yeah, we're self-funded and frankly, fortunately, we've been able to manage through it. This partnership with Infor for us is a big big step for us, right? But at this point, we've been able to manage that without any funding outside and... >> Okay so it's not like an intense engineering effort, right? You're turnkey-ing this stuff largely. So you put more of your effort on onboarding clients from what I understand, right? >> Right and working with other Infor partners. Bails, for example, was our implementation manager and so our folks working with Bails to make sure because we've got hundreds of clients that in lots of different industries that we've got to go out and roll this implementation out into, right? And so it's a little different than the typical Infor arrangement because they're so many different industries represented just through IronRoad. >> And you guys dog food this? They don't like when I say dog food. Do you drink your own champagne? So you're utilizing your-- >> Much better. (chuckles) >> You're utilizing the Infor software in-house, correct? >> We are, we are, yeah, yeah. If, you know, from an implementation standpoint, easy to do that, right? You have somebody like Bails and Cyndian that has helped us, phenomenal at what they do, great partners for Infor. But then we've got to turn around and take that out to hundreds of different employers. So scaling that is a bit of a challenge. And again, depending upon the amount of resources that the different clients have, which all changes depending upon their size. But it's been great, yeah. So far so good, thank you so much Yeah, appreciate it. >> Well, Billy thanks for your time. We do appreciate it and I assume at Cincinnati, that you might be one of those long-suffering Bengals fans. >> Hey, time out! Hey, two in one. >> I know. >> Two in one, Andy Dalton. We're not big Carolina fans right now. >> One in two here in New England. >> You guys are trouble. >> Well, we'll see after this week. >> The 40-something maybe hit the big Tom. >> Alright. That discussion to continue off the air. Billy Southerland, IronRoad CEO. >> Thank you guys so much, yeah, enjoyed it. >> We'll continue. We are live here in Washington D.C. at Inforum 2018. Back with more on theCUBE in just a bit. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studio this morning for a CUBE Conversation talking about content marketing, attention economy, a lot of really interesting topics that should be top of mind for marketers, that we're in very interesting times on the B2C side and even more, I think, on the B2B side. So we're excited to have Randy Wootton, he's the CEO of Percolate. Randy, great to see you. >> Thanks very much for having me. A real pleasure to be here. >> Absolutely, so for those who aren't familiar, give us kind of the quick and dirty on Percolate. >> Percolate has been around for about seven years. It started as a social media marketing platform. So helping people, helping brands, build their brands on the social landscape, and integrating campaigns to deploy across the different social channels. Over the last couple of years, it's been moving more into the space called content marketing, which is really an interesting new area that marketers are coming to terms with. How do you put together content and orchestrate it across all the different channels. >> And it's interesting, a lot of vocabulary on the website around experiences and content not a lot about products. So how should marketers think and how does experience and content ultimately map back to the products and services you're trying to sell. >> Well, I do think that's a great point. And the distinction between modern brands, who are trying to create relationships with their consumers, rather than pushing products, especially if you're B2B, or technology pushing speeds and feeds. Instead, you are trying to figure out what is going to enable you to create a brand that consumers pull through versus getting pushed at. And so I think the idea around content marketing is that in some ways advertising isn't working anymore. People aren't paying attention to display ads, they're not clicking, they aren't processing the information. But, they are still buying. So the idea for marketers is, how do you get the appropriate content at the right time, to the right person, in their purchase journey. >> Right, and there's so many different examples of people doing new things. There's more conversations kind of, of the persona of the company, of the purpose, purpose driven things, really trying to appeal to their younger employees as well as a younger customer. You have just crazy off the wall things, which never fail to entertain. Like Geico, who seems to break every rule of advertising by having a different theme every time you see a Geico ad. So people are trying humor, they're trying theater, they're trying a lot of things to get through because the tough thing today is getting people's attention. >> I think so, and they talk a lot about the attention economy. That we live in a world of exponential fragmentation. All the information that we are processing across all these different devices. And a brand trying to break through, there's a couple of challenges, one is you have to create a really authentic voice, one that resonates with who you are and how you show up. And then, I think the second point is you recognize that you are co-building the brand with the consumers. It's no longer you build the Super Bowl ad and transmit it on T.V., and people experience your brand. You have this whole unfolding experience in real time. You've seen some of the airlines, for example, that have struggled with the social media downside of brand building. And so how do control, not control, but engage with consumers in a way that feels very authentic and it continues to build a relationship with your consumers. >> Yeah, it's interesting, a lot of things have changed. The other thing that has changed now is that you can have a direct relationship with that consumer whether you want it or not, via social media touches, maybe you were before, that was hidden through your distribution, or you didn't have that, that direct connect. So, you know, being able to respond to this kind of micro-segmentation, it's one thing to talk about micro-segmentation on the marketing side, it's a whole different thing with that one individual, with the relatively loud voice, is screaming "Hey, I need help." >> That's right, and I think there are a couple of things on that point. One is, I've been in technology for 20 years. I've been at Microsoft, I was at Salesforce, I was at AdReady, Avenue A, and Quantive. And now, Rocket Fuel before I came to Percolate. And I've always been wrestling with two dimensions of the digital marketing challenge. One is around consumer identity, and really understanding who the consumer is, and where they've been and what they've done. The second piece is around the context. That is, where they are in the moment, and which device they're on. And so, those are two dimensions of the triangle. The third is the content, or in advertising it's the creative. And that's always been the constraint. You never have enough creative to be able to really deliver on the promise of personalization, of getting the right message to the right person at the right time. And that now is the blockade. That now is the bottleneck, and that now is what brands are really trying to come to terms with. Is how do we create enough content so that you can create a compelling experience for each person, and then if there's someone who is engaging in a very loud voice, how do you know, and how do you engage to sort of address that, but not loose connections with all your other consumers. >> Right, it's interesting, you bring up something, in some of the research, in micro-moments. And in the old days, I controlled all of the information, you had to come for me for the information, and it was a very different world. And now, as you said, the information is out there, there's too much information. Who's my trusted conduit for the information. So by the time they actually get to me, or I'm going to try to leverage these micro-moments, it's not about, necessarily direct information exchange. What are some of these kind of micro-moments, and how are they game changers? >> Well, I think the fact that we can make decisions in near real time. And when I was at Rocket Fuel, we were making decisions in less than 20 milliseconds, processing something like 200 billion bid transactions a day, and so I just think people are not yet aware of the amount, the volume and the velocity of data that is being processed each and every day. And, to make decisions about specific moments. So the two moments I give as examples are: One, I'm sitting at home watching the Oakland Raiders with my two boys, I'm back on the couch and we're watching the game, and Disney makes an advertisement. I'm probably open to a Disney advertisement with my boys next to me, who are probably getting an advertisement at the same time by Disney. I'm a very different person in that moment, or that micro-moment than when I'm commuting in from Oakland to San Francisco on BART, reading the New York Times. I'm not open to a Disney ad at that moment, because I'm concentrating on work, I'm concentrating on the commute. And I think the thing that brands are coming to terms with is, how much am I willing to pay to engage with me sitting on the couch versus me sitting on BART. And that is where the real value comes from, is understanding which moments are the valuable ones. >> So there's so much we can learn from Ad Tech. And I don't think Ad Tech gets enough kind of credit for operating these really large, really hyper speed, really sophisticated marketplaces that are serving up I don't even know how many billions of transactions per unit time. A lot of activity going on. So, you've been in that world for a while. As you've seen them shift from kind of people driving, and buyers driving to more automation, what are some of the lessons learned, and what should learn more from a B2B side from this automated marketplace. >> Well, a couple of things, one is the machines are not our enemies, they are there to enable or enhance our capabilities. Though I do think it's going to require people to re-think work, specifically at agencies, in terms of, you don't need people to do media mixed modeling on the front end in Excel files, instead, you need capacity on the back end after the data has come out, and to really understand the insights. So there is some re-training or re-skilling that's needed. But, the machines make us smarter. It's not artificial intelligence, it's augmented intelligence. I think for B2B in particular what you're finding is, all the research shows that B2B purchasers spend something like 70 or 80% of their time in making the purchase decision before they even engage with the sales rep. And as a B2B company ourselves, we know how expensive our field reps are. And so to make sure that they are engaging with people at the right time, understanding the information that they would have had, before our sales cycle starts, super important. And I think that goes back to the content orchestration, or content marketing revolution that we are seeing now. And, you know, I that there is, when you think about it, most marketers today, use PowerPoint and Excel to have their marketing calendar and run their campaigns. And we're the only function left where you don't have an automated system, like a sales force for marketers, or a service now for marketers. Where a chief of marketing or a SVP of marketing, has, on their phone the tool of record, they system of record that they want to be able to oversee the campaigns. >> Right, although on the other hand, you're using super sophisticated A/B testing across multiple, multiple data sets, rather than doing that purchase price, right. You can test for colors, and fonts, and locations. And it's so different than trying to figure out the answer, make the investment, blast the answer, than this kind of DevOps way, test, test, test, test, test, adjust, test, test, test, test, adjust. >> You're absolutely right, and that's what, at Rocket Fuel, and any real AI powered system, they're using artificial intelligence as the higher order, underneath that you have different categories, like neural networks, deep learning and machine learning. We were using a logistic regression analysis. And we were running algorithms 27 models a day, every single day, that would test multiple features. So it wasn't just A/B testing, it was multi variant analysis happening in real time. Again, the volume and velocity of data is beyond human comprehension, and you need the machine learning to help you make sense of all that data. Otherwise, you just get overwhelmed, and you drown in the data. >> Right, so I want to talk a little bit about PNG. >> I know they're close and dear to your heart. In the old days, but more recently, I just want to bring up, they obviously wield a ton of power in the advertising spin campaign. And they recently tried to bring a little bit more discipline and said, hey we want tighter controls, tighter reporting, more independent third party reporting. There's this interesting thing going now where before, you know, you went for a big in, 'causethen you timed it by some conversion rating you had customers at the end. But now people it seems like, are so focused on the in kind of forgetting necessarily about the conversion because you can drive promoted campaigns in the social media, that now there's the specter of hmm, are we really getting, where we're getting. So again, the PNG, and the consumer side, are really leading kind of this next revolution of audit control and really closer monitoring to what's happening in these automated ad marketplaces. >> Well, I think what you're finding is, there's digital transformation happening across all functions, all industries. And, I think that in the media space in particular, you're also having an agency business model transformation. And what they used to provide for brands has to change as you move forward. PNG has really been driving that. PNG because of how much money they spend on media, has the biggest stick in the fight, and they've brought a lot of accountability. Mark Pritchard, in particular, has laid down these gauntlets the last couple of years, in terms of saying, I want more accountability, more visibility. Part of the challenge with the digital ecosystem is the propensity for fraud and lack of transparency, 'cause things are moving so quickly. So, the fact, that on one side the machines are working really well for ya, on the other side it's hard to audit it. But PNG is really bringing that level of discipline there. I think the thing that PNG is also doing really well, is they're really starting to re-think about how CPG brands can create relationships with their consumers and customers, much like we were talking about before. Primarily, before, CPG brands would work through distributors and retailers, and not really have a relationship with the end consumer. But now as they've started to build up their first party profiles, through clubs and loyalty programs, they're starting to better understand, the soccer mom. But it's not just the soccer mom, it's the soccer mom in Oakland at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, as she goes to Starbucks, when she's picked up her kids from school. All of those are features that better help PNG understand who that person is, in that context, and what's the appropriate engagement to create a compelling experience. That's really hard to do at the individual level. And when you think about the myriad of brands, that PNG has, they have to coordinate their stories and conversations across all of those brands, to drive market share. >> Yeah, it's a really interesting transformation, as we were talking earlier, I used to joke always, that we should have the underground railroad, from Cincinnati to Silicone Valley to get good product managers, right. 'Cause back in the day you still were doing PRD's and MRD's and those companies have been data driven for a long time and work with massive shares and small shifts in market percentages. But, as you said, they now, they're having to transform still data driven, but it's a completely different set of data, and much more direct set of data from the people that actually consume our products. >> And it's been a long journey, I remember when I was at Microsoft, gosh this would have been back in 2004 or 2005, we were working with PNG and they brought their brands to Microsoft. And we did digital immersions for them, to help them understand how they could engage consumers across the entire Microsoft network, and that would include X-Box, Hotmail at the time, MSN, and the brands were just coming to terms with what their digital strategy was and how they would work with Portal versus how they would work with other digital touchpoints. And I think that has just continued to evolve, with the rise of Facebook, with the rise of Twitter, and how do brands maintain relationships in that context, is something that every brand manager of today is having to do. My father, I think we were chatting a little earlier, started his career in 1968 as a brand manager for PNG. And, I remember him telling the stories about how the disciplined approach to brand building, and the structure and the framework hasn't changed, the execution has, over the last 50 years. >> So, just to bring it full circle before we close out, there's always a segment of marketing that's driven to just get me leads, right, give me leads, I need barcode scans at the conference et cetera. And then there's always been kind of the category of kind of thought leadership. Which isn't necessarily tied directly back to some campaign, but we want to be upfront, and show that we're a leading brand. Content marketing is kind of in-between, so, how much content marketing lead towards kind of thought leadership, how much lead kind of towards, actually lead conversions that I can track, and how much of it is something completely different. >> That's a great question, I think this is where people are trying to come to terms, what is content, long form, short form video. I think of content as being applied across all three dimensions of marketing. One is thought leadership, number two is demand gen, and number three is actualization or enablement in a B2B for your sales folks. And how do you have the right set of content along each of those dimensions. And I don't think they're necessarily, I fundamentally think the marketing funnel is broken. It's not you jump in at the top, and you go all the way to the bottom and you buy. You have this sort of webbed touch of experiences. So the idea is, going back to our earlier conversation, is, who is that consumer, what do you know about him, what is the context, and what's the appropriate form of content for them, where they are in their own buyer journey. So, a UGC video on YouTube may be okay for one consumer in a specific moment, but a short form video may be better for someone else, and a white paper may be better. And I think that people don't necessarily go down the funnel and purchase because they click on a search ad, they instead may be looking at a white paper at the end of the purchase, and so the big challenge, is the attribution of value, and that's one of the things that we're looking at Percolate. Is almost around thinking about it as content insight. Which content is working for whom. 'Cause right now you don't know, and I think the really interesting thing is you have a lot of people producing a lot of content. And, they don't know if it's working. And I think when we talk to marketers, that we hear their teams are producing content, and they want to know, they don't want to create content that doesn't work. They just want a better understanding of what's working, and that's the last challenge in the digital marketing transformation to solve. >> And how do you measure it? >> How do you measure, how do you define it? And categorize it, so that's one of the challenges, we were chatting a little bit before, about what you guys are doing at CUBE, and your clipper technology and how you're able to dis-aggregate videos, to these component pieces, or what in an AI world, you'd call features, that then can be loaded as unstructured data, and you can apply AI against it and really come up with interesting insights. So I think there's, as much as I say, the transformation of the internet has been huge, AI is going to transform our world more than we even can conceive of today. And I think content eventually will be impacted materially by AI. >> I still can't help but think of the original marketing quote, I've wasted half of my marketing budget, I'm just not sure which half. But, really it's not so much the waste as we have to continue to find better ways to measure the impact of all these kind of disparate non-traditional funnel things. >> I think you're right, I think it was Wanamaker who said that. I think your point is spot on, it's something we've always wrestled with, and as you move more into the branding media, they struggle more with the accountability. That's one of the reasons why direct response in the internet has been such a great mechanism, is because it's data based, you can show results. The challenge there is the attribution. But I think as we get into video, and you can get to digital video assets, and you can break it down into its component pieces, and all the different dimensions, all of that's fair game for better understanding what's working. >> Randy, really enjoyed the conversation, and thanks for taking a minute out of your busy day. >> My pleasure, always enjoy it. >> Alright, he's Randy, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE from Palo Alto Studios, thanks for watching. (digital music)

>> Welcome back to the Cuban Peterborough's chief research officer of Silicon Angle and general manager of Wicked Bond. We're as part of our continuing coverage of the arse a show. We have a great guest Z scaler amid sin. Ha! Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you for having me here. It's a pleasure to be here. >> So, um, it what exactly does Z scaler? D'oh >> Z's killer is in the business of providing the entire security stack as a service for large enterprises. We sit in between enterprise users and the Internet and various destinations they want to goto, and we want to make sure that they have a fast, nimble Internet experience without compromising any security. >> So if I can interpret what that means, that means that as Maur companies are trying to serve their employees that Air Mobile or customers who aren't part of their corporate network they're moving more. That communication in the Cloud Z scale is making it possible for them to get the same quality of security on that communication in the cloud is he would get on premise. >> Absolutely. If you look at some of the big business transformations that are happening, work lords for enterprises are moving to the cloud. For example, enterprises are adopting Office 3 65 instead, off traditional exchange based email and on your desktop applications. They might be adopting sales force for CR M Net suite for finance box for storage. So as these workloads are moving to the cloud and employees are becoming more and more mobile, you know they might be at a coffee shop. They might be on an iPad. Um, and they might be anywhere in the world. That begs the basic security question. Where should that enterprise DMC the security stack be sitting back in the day? Enterprises had a hub and spokes model, right? They might have 50 branch offices across the world. A few mobile workers, all of them, came back over private networks to a central hub, and that hub was where racks and racks of security appliances were deployed. Maybe they started off with a firewall. Later on, they added a proxy. You are l filtering some d e l P er down the road. People realized that you need to inspect us to sell. So they added some SSL offload devices. Someone said, Hey, we need to do some sand boxing for behavioral analysis. People started adding sandboxes. And so, over time the D. M. Z got cluttered and complicated and fast forward to Today. Users have become mobile. Workloads have moved to the cloud. So if I'm sitting in a San Francisco office on my laptop trying to do my regular work, my email is in the cloud. My my court applications are sitting in the cloud. Why should I have to vpn back to my headquarters in Cincinnati over a private network, you know, incurring all the Leighton see and the delays just so that I can get inspected by some legacy appliances that are sitting in that DMC, right? So we looked at that network transformation on We started this journey at Ze scale or eight years ago, and we said, Look, if users are going to be mobile and workloads are going to be in the cloud, the entire security stack should be as close as possible to where the users are. In that example, I described, I'm sitting here. I'm going to Salesforce. We're probably going to the same data center in San Francisco. Shouldn't my entire security stag be available right where I am, um, and my administrators should have full visibility, full control from a single pane of glass. I get a fast, nimble user experience. The enterprise doesn't have to compromise in any security, and that's sort of the vision that we have executing towards. >> But it's not just for some of the newer applications or some of the newer were close. We're also seeing businesses acknowledge that the least secure member of their community has an impact on overall security. So the whole concept of even the legacy has to become increasingly a part of this broad story. So if anybody accesses anything from anywhere through the cloud that those other workloads increasing, they're gonna have to come under the scrutiny of a cloud based security option. >> Absolutely. I mean, that's a brilliant point, Peter. >> I >> think of >> it this way. Despite all those security appliances that have been deployed over time, they're still security breach is happening. And why is that? That is because users are the weakest link, right? If I'm a mobile work user, I'm sitting in a branch office. It's just painful for me to go back to those headquarter facilities just for additional scanning so two things happen either I have a painful user experience. What? I bypassed security, right? Um, and more and more of the attacks that we see leverage the user as the weakest link. I send you a phishing email. It looks like it came from HR. It has a excel sheet attached to it to update some information. But, you know, inside is lurking a macro, right? You open it. It is from a squatter domain that looks very similar to the company you work for. You click on it and your machine is infected. And then that leads to further malware being downloaded, data being expatriated out. So the Z scaler solution is very, very simple. Conceptually, we want to sit between users and the destinations they goto all across the world. And we built this network of 100 data centers. Why? Because you cannot travel faster than the speed of light. So if you're in San Francisco, you better go through our San Francisco facility. All your policies will show up here. All the latest and greatest security protections will be available. We serve 5000 large enterprises. So if we discover a new security threat because of an employee from, let's say, a General Electric. Then someone from United Airlines automatically gets protection simply because the cloud is live all the time. You're not waiting for your security boxes to get, you know, the weekly patch updates for new malware indicators and so on. Right, So, um, you get your stack right where you are. It's always up to date. User experience is not compromised. Your security administrators get a global view off things. And one >> of the >> things that that I that we haven't talked about here it is the dramatic cost savings that this sort of network transformation brings for enterprises. To put that in perspective, let's say you're a Fortune 100 organization with 100,000 employees worldwide in that, huh? Been spoke model. You are forcing all those workloads to come toe a few choke points, right? That is coming over. Very expensive. NPLs circuits private circuits from service providers. You're double trombone in traffic, back and forth. You know, you and I are in a branch. We might be on. Ah, Skype session. Ah, Google Hangout session. All our traffic goes to H Q. Goes to the cloud comeback comes back to h. Q comes back to you, there's this is too much back and forth, and you're paying for those expensive circuits and getting a poor user experience. Wouldn't it be great if you and I could go straight to the Internet? And that can only be enabled if we can provide that pervasive security stack wherever you are? And for that, we built this network of 100 data centers worldwide. Always live, always up to date you. You get routed to the closest the scaler facility. All your policy show up. They're automatically and you get the latest and greatest protection. >> So it seems as though you end up with three basic benefits. One is you get the cost benefit of being able to, uh, have being able to leverage a broader network of talent, skills and resources You reduce. Your risk is not the least of which is that the cost and the challenges configuring a whole bunch of appliances has not gotten any easier over the last. No, it hasn't cheaters. And so not only do you have user error, but you also Administrator Erin, absolutely benign, but nonetheless it's there, and then finally and this is what I want to talk about. Increasingly, the clot is acknowledged as the way that companies are going to improve their portfolio through digital assets. Absolutely. Which means new opportunities, new competition, new ways of improving customer experience. But security has become the function of no within a lot of organizations. Absolutely. So How does how does AE scaler facilitate the introduction of new business capabilities that can attack these opportunities in a much more timely way by reducing doesn't reduce some of those some of those traditional security constraints. >> Absolutely right, and we call it the Department of No right. We've talked to most people in the industry. They view their I t folks there, security forces, the department of Know Why? Because there's this big push from users to adopt newer, nimble, faster cloud based ah solutions that that improved productivity. But often I t comes in the way. No, If you look at what Izzy's killer is doing, it's trying to transform the adoption of these Cloud service. Is that do improve business productivity? In fact, there is no debate now because there are many, many industries that ever doubt adopted a cloud first strategy. Well, that means is, as they think of the network and their security, they want to make sure that cloud is front and center. Words E scaler does is it enables that cloud for a strategy without any security compromise. I'll give you some specific examples. Eight out of 10 c I ose that we talk to our thinking about office 3 65 or they have already deployed it right. One of the first challenge is that happens when you try to adopt office. 3 65 is that your legacy network and security infrastructure starts to come crumble. Very simple things happen. You have your laptop. Suddenly, that laptop has many, many persistent SSL connections to the clothes. Because exchange is moved to the cloudy directory, service is are moving to the cloud. If you have a small branch office with 2000 users, each of them having 30 40 persistent connections to the cloud will your edge firewall chokes. Why? Because it cannot maintain so many active ports at the same time, we talked about the double trombone ing of traffic back and forth. If you try to not go direct to the Internet but force everyone to go through a couple of hubs. So you pay for all the excessive band with your traditional network infrastructure, and your security infrastructure might need a forklift upgrades. So a cloud transformation project quickly becomes a network in a security transformation project. And this is where you nosy scaler helps tremendously because we were born and bred in the cloud. Many of these traditional limitations that you have with appliance based security or networking, you know, in the traditional sense don't exist for the scaler, right? We can enable your branch officers to go directly to the cloud. In fact, we've started doing some very clever things. For example, we peer with Microsoft in about 20 sites worldwide. So what that means is, when you come to the scaler for security, there's a very high likelihood that Microsoft has a presence in the same data center. We might be one or two or three millisecond hops away because we're in the same equinox facility in New York or San Jose. And so not only are you getting your full security stack where you are, you're getting the superfast peered connections to the end Cloud service is that you want to goto. You don't have to work. Worry about you know your edge Firewalls not keeping up. You don't have to worry about a massive 30 40% increase in back hole costs because you were now shipping all this extra traffic to those couple of hubs. And more importantly, you know, you've adopted these transformative technologies on your users don't have to complain about how slow they are because you know, most of the millennials hitting the workforce. I used to a very fast, nimble experience on their mobile phones with consumer APS. And then they come into the enterprise and they quickly realize that, well, this is all cumbersome and old and legacy stuff >> in me s. So let's talk a little bit about Let's talk a bit about this notion of security being everywhere and increasingly is removed to a digital business or digital orientation. With digital assets being the basis for the value proposition, which is certainly happening on a broad scale right now, it means it's security going back to the idea of security being department. No security has to move from an orientation of limiting access to appropriately sharing. Security becomes the basis for defining the digital brand. So talk to us a little bit about how the how you look out, how you see the world, that you think security's gonna be playing in ultimately defining this notion of digital brand digital perimeters from a not a iittie standpoint. But from a business value standpoint, >> absolutely. I would love to talk about that. So Izzy's killer Our cloud today sees about 30,000,000,000 transactions a day from about 5000 enterprises. So we have a very, very good pulse on what is happening in large enterprises, from from a cloud at perspective or just what users are doing on the Internet. So here are some of the things that we see. Number one. We see that about 50 60% of the threats are coming inside SSL, so it's very important to inspect SSL. The second thing that we observe is without visibility. It is very different, very difficult for your security guys to come up with a Chris policy, right? If you cannot see what is happening inside an SSL connection, how are you going to have a date? A leakage policy, right? Maybe your policy is no P I information should leak out. No source code should leak out. How can you make sure that an engineer is not dropping something in this folder, which is sinking to Google Drive or drop box in an in an SSL tano, Right. How do you prioritize mission Critical business applications like office 3 65 over streaming media, Right. So for step two, crafting good policy is 100% real time visibility. And that's what happens when you adopt the Siskel a network. You can see what any user is doing anywhere in the world within seconds. And once you have that kind of visibility, you can start formulating policies, both security and otherwise that strike a good balance between business productivity that you want to achieve without compromising security. >> That's the policy's been 10 more net. You can also end that decisions. >> Yes, right. So, for example, you can you can have a more relaxed social media policy, right? You can say Well, you know, everyone is allowed access, but they can. Maybe streaming media is restricted to one hour a day. You know, after hours, or you can say, I want to adopt um, storage applications in the clothes here are some sanctioned APS These other raps were not going to allow right. You can do policies by users, by locations by departments, right? And once you have the visibility, you can. You can be very, very precise and say, Well, boxes, my sanction story, Jap other APS are not allowed right and hear other things that a particular group of users can do on box. Or they cannot do because we were seeing every transaction between the user on going to the destination and as a result, begin, you know, we can enable the enterprise administrator to come up with very, very specific policies that are tailored for that. >> You said something really interesting. I'm gonna ask you one more question, but I'm gonna make a common here. And that common is that the power of digital technology is that it can be configured and copied and changed, and it's very mutable. It's very plastic, but at the end of the day it has to be precise, and I've never heard anybody talk about the idea of precise and security, and I think it's a very, very powerful concept. But what are what's What's the scale are talking about in our say this year. >> Well, we're going to talk about a bunch of very interesting things. First, we'll talk about the scale of private access. This is a new offering on the scale of platform. We believe that VP ends have become irrelevant because of all the discussions we just had, um, Enterprises are treating their Internet as though it was the Internet, right? You know, sort of a zero trust model. They're moving the crown jewel applications to either private cloud offerings are, you know, sort of restricting that in a very micro segmented way. And the question is, how do you access those applications? Right? And the sea skill immortal is very straightforward. You have a pervasive cloud users authenticate to the cloud and based on policies, we can allow them to go to the Internet to sites that have been sanctioned and allowed. We make sure nothing good is leaking out. Nothing bad is coming in, and that same cloud model can be leveraged for private access to crown jewel applications that traditionally would have required a full blown vpn right. And the difference between a VPN and the skill of private access is VP ends basically give you full network access keys to the kingdom, right? Whether it's a contractor with, it's an employee just so that you could access, you know, Internet application. You allow full network access, and we're just gonna getting rid of that whole notion. That's one thing we're gonna stroke ISS lots of cloud white analytics, As I mentioned, you know, we process 30,000,000,000 transactions a day. To put that in perspective, Salesforce reports about four and 1 30,000,000,000 4 1/2 to 5,000,000,000 transactions. They're about three and 1/2 1,000,000,000 Google searches done daily, right? So it is truly a tin Internet scale. We're blocking over 100,000,000 threats every day for, ah, for all our enterprise user. So we have a very good pulse on you know what's what's an average enterprise user doing? And you're going to see some interesting cloud? Wait, Analytics. Just where we talk about a one of the top prevalent Claude APs, what are the top threats? You know, by vertical buy by geography, ese? And then, you know, we as a platform has emerged. We started off as a as a sort of a proxy in the cloud, and we've added sand boxing capabilities. Firewall capabilities, you know, in our overall vision, as I said, is to be that entire security stack that sits in your inbound and outbound gateway in that DMC as a pure service. So everything from firewall at layer three to a proxy at Layer seven, everything from inline navy scanning right to full sand. Boxing everything from DLP to cloud application control. Right? And all of that is possible because, you know, we have this very scalable architecture that allows you to to do sort of single scan multiple action right in that appliance model that I describe. What ends up happening is that you have many bumps in the wire. One of the examples we use is if you wanted to build a utility company, you don't start off with small portable generators and stack them in a warehouse, right? That's inefficient. It requires individual maintenance. It doesn't scale properly. Imagine if you build a turbine and ah, and then started your utility company. You can scale better. You can do things that traditional appliance vendors cannot think about. So we build this scalable, elastic security platform, and on that platform it's very easy for us to add. You know, here's a firewall. Here's a sandbox. And what does it mean for end users? You know, you don't need to deploy new boxes. You just go and say, I want to add sand boxing capabilities or I want to add private access or I want to add DLP. And it is as simple as enabling askew, which is what a cloud service offering should be. >> Right. So we're >> hardly know software. >> So we're talking about we're talking about lower cost, less likelihood of human error, which improves the quality, security, greater plasticity and ultimately, better experience, especially for your non employees. Absolutely. All right, so we are closing up this particular moment I want Thank you very much for coming down to our Pallotta studio is part of our coverage on Peter Boris. And we've been talking to the scanner amidst, huh? Thank you very much. And back to Dio Cube.