>>Hello, and welcome back to the cubes coverage of coop con cloud native con 2021. We're here in person at a real event. I'm John farrier host of the cube, but Dave Nicholson, Michael has got great guests here. Two founders of brand new startup, one week old cable on ASCII and Dave Lawrence, uh, with chain guard, former Google employees, open source community members decided to start a company with five other people on total five total. Congratulations. Welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for >>Having us. So tell us like a product, you know, we know you don't have a price. So take us through the story because this is one of those rare moments. We got great chance to chat with you guys just a week into the new forms company and the team. What's the focus, what's the vision. >>How far back do you want to go with this story >>And why you left Google? So, you know, we're a gin and tonics. We get a couple of beers I can do that. We can do that. Let's just take over the world. >>Yeah. So we both been at Google, uh, for awhile. Um, the last couple of years we've been really worried about and focused on open-source security risk and supply chain security in general and software. Um, it's been a really interesting time as you probably noticed, uh, to be in that space, but it wasn't that interesting two years ago or even a year and a half ago. Um, so we were doing a bunch of this work at Google and the open source. Nobody really understood it. People kind of looked at us funny at talks and conferences. Um, and then beginning of this year, a bunch of attacks started happening, uh, things in the headlines like solar winds, solar winds attack, like you say, it attack all these different ransomware things happening. Uh, companies and governments are getting hit with supply chain attacks. So overnight people kind of started caring and being really worried about the stuff that we've been doing for a while. So it was a pretty cool thing to be a part of. And it seemed like a good time to start a company and keep your >>Reaction to this startup. How do you honestly feel, I suppose, feeling super excited. Yeah. >>I am really excited. I was in stars before Google. So then I went to Google where there for seven, I guess, Dan, a little bit longer, but I was there for seven years on the product side. And then yeah, we, we, the open source stuff, we were really there for protecting Google and we both came from cloud before that working on enterprise product. So then sorta just saw the opportunity, you know, while these companies trying to scramble and then sort of figure out how to better secure themselves. So it seemed like a perfect, >>The start-up bug and you back in the start up, but it's the timing's perfect. I got to say, this is a big conversation supply chain from whether it's components and software now, huge attack vector, people are taking advantage of it super important. So I'm really glad you're doing it. But first explain to the folks watching what is supply chain software? What's the challenge? What is the, what is the supply chain security challenge or problem? >>Sure. Yeah, it's the metaphor of software supply chain. It's just like physical supply chain. That's where the name came from. And it, it really comes down to how the code gets from your team's keyboard, your team's fingers on those keyboards into your production environment. Um, and that's just the first level of it. Uh, cause nobody writes all of the code. They use themselves. We're here at cloud native con it's hundreds of open source vendors, hundreds of open libraries that people are reusing. So your, your trust, uh, radius and your attack radius extends to not just your own companies, your own developers, but to everyone at this conference. And then everyone that they rely on all the way out. Uh, it's quite terrifying. It's a surface, the surface area explode pretty quickly >>And people are going and the, and the targeting to, because everyone's touching the code, it's open. It's a lot of action going on. How do you solve the problem? What is the approach? What's the mindset? What's the vision on the problems solving solutions? >>Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think like you said, the first step is awareness. Like Dan's been laughing, he's been, he felt like a crazy guy in the corner saying, you know, stop building software underneath your desk and you know, getting companies, >>Hey, we didn't do, why don't you tell them? I was telling him for five years. >>Yeah. But, but I think one of his go-to lines was like, would you pick up a thumb drive off the side of the street and plug it into your computer? Probably not. But when you download, you know, an open source package or something, that's actually can give you more privileges and production environments and it's so it's pretty scary. Um, so I think, you know, for the last few years we've been working on a number of open source projects in this space. And so I think that's where we're going to start is we're going to look at those and then try to grow out the community. And we're, we're watching companies, even like solar winds, trying to piece these parts together, um, and really come up with a better solution for themselves. >>Are there existing community initiatives or open source efforts that are underway that you plan to participate in or you chart? Are you thinking of charting a new >>Path? >>Oh, it's that looks like, uh, Thomas. Yeah, the, the SIG store project we kicked off back in March, if you've covered that or familiar with that at all. But we kicked that off back in March of 2021 kind of officially we'd look at code for awhile before then the idea there was to kind of do what let's encrypted, uh, for browsers and Webster, um, security, but for code signing and open source security. So we've always been able to get code signing certificates, but nobody's really using them because they're expensive. They're complicated, just like less encrypted for CAS. They made a free one that was automated and easy to use for developers. And now people do without thinking about it in six stores, we tried to do the same thing for open source and just because of the headlines that were happening and all of the attacks, the momentum has just been incredible. >>Is it a problem that people just have to just get on board with a certain platform or tool or people have too many tools, they abandoned them there, their focus shifts is there. Why what's the, what's the main problem right now? >>Well, I think, you know, part of the problem is just having the tools easy enough for developers are going to want to use them and it's not going to get in our way. I think that's going to be a core piece of our company is really nailing down the developer experience and these toolings and like the co-sign part of SIG store that he was explaining, like it's literally one command line to sign, um, a package, assign a container and then one line to verify on the other side. And then these organizations can put together sort of policies around who they trust and their system like today it's completely black box. They have no idea what they're running and takes a re >>You have to vape to rethink and redo everything pretty much if they want to do it right. If they just kind of fixing the old Europe's sold next solar with basically. >>Yeah. And that's why we're here at cloud native con when people are, you know, the timing is perfect because people are already rethinking how their software gets built as they move it into containers and as they move it into Kubernetes. So it's a perfect opportunity to not just shift to Kubernetes, but to fix the way you build software from this, >>What'd you say is the most prevalent change mindset change of developers. Now, if you had to kind of, kind of look at it and say, okay, current state-of-the-art mindset of a developer versus say a few years ago, is it just that they're doing things modularly with more people? Or is it more new approaches? Is there a, is there a, >>I think it's just paying attention to your building release process and taking it seriously. This has been a theme for, since I've been in software, but you have these very fancy production data centers with physical security and all these levels of, uh, Preston prevention and making sure you can't get in there, but then you've got a Jenkins machine that's three years old under somebody's desk building the code that goes into there. >>It gets socially engineered. It gets at exactly. >>Yeah. It's like the, it's like the movies where they, uh, instead of breaking into jail, they hide in the food delivery truck. And it's, it's that, that's the metaphor that I like perfectly. The fence doesn't work. If your truck, if you open the door once a week, it doesn't matter how big defenses. Yeah. So that's >>Good Dallas funny. >>And I, I think too, like when I used to be an engineer before I joined Google, just like how easy it is to bring in a third party package or something, you know, you need like an image editing software, like just go find one off the internet. And I think, you know, developers are slowly doing a mind shift. They're like, Hey, if I introduce a new dependency, you know, there's going to be, I'm going to have to maintain this thing and understand >>It's a little bit of a decentralized view too. Also, you got a little bit of that. Hey, if you sign it, you own it. If it tracks back to you, okay, you are, your fingerprints are, if you will, or on that chain of >>Custody and custody. >>Exactly. I was going to say, when I saw chain guard at first of course, I thought that my pant leg riding a bike, but then of course the supply chain things coming in, like on a conveyor belt, conveyor, conveyor belt. But that, that whole question of chain of custody, it isn't, it isn't as simple as a process where someone grabs some code, embeds it in, what's going on, pushes it out somewhere else. That's not the final step typically. Yeah. >>So somebody else grabs that one. And does it again, 35 more times, >>The one, how do you verify that? That's yeah, it seems like an obvious issue that needs to be addressed. And yet, apparently from what you're telling us for quite a while, people thought you were a little bit in that, >>And it's not just me. I mean, not so Ken Thompson of bell labs and he wrote the book >>He wrote, yeah, it was a seatbelt that I grew >>Up on in the eighties. He gave a famous lecture called uh, reflections on trusting trust, where he pranked all of his colleagues at bell labs by putting a back door in a compiler. And that put back doors into every program that compiled. And he was so clever. He even put it in, he made that compiler put a backdoor into the disassembler to hide the back door. So he spent weeks and, you know, people just kind of gave up. And I think at that point they were just like, oh, we can't trust any software ever. And just forgot about it and kept going on and living their lives. So this is a 40 year old problem. We only care about it now. >>It's totally true. A lot of these old sacred cows. So I would have done life cycles, not really that relevant anymore because the workflows are changing. These new Bev changes. It's complete dev ops is taken over. Let's just admit it. Right. So if we have ops is taken over now, cloud native apps are hitting the scene. This is where I think there's a structural industry change, not just the community. So with that in mind, how do you guys vector into that in terms of a market entry? What's just thinking around product. Obviously you got a higher, did you guys raise some capital in process? A little bit of a capital raise five, no problem. Todd market, but product wise, you've got to come in, get the beachhead. >>I mean, we're, we're, we're casting a wide net right now and talking to as many customers like we've met a lot of these, these customer potential customers through the communities, you know, that we've been building and we did a supply chain security con helped with that event, this, this Monday to negative one event and solar winds and Citibank were there and talking about their solutions. Um, and so I think, you know, and then we'll narrow it down to like people that would make good partners to work with and figure out how they think they're solving the problem today. And really >>How do you guys feel good? You feel good? Well, we got Jerry Chen coming off from gray lock next round. He would get a term sheet, Jerry, this guy's got some action on it in >>There. Probably didn't reply to him on LinkedIn. >>He's coming out with Kronos for him. He just invested 200 million at CrossFit. So you guys should have a great time. Congratulations on the leap. I know it's comfortable to beat Google, a lot of things to work on. Um, and student startups are super fun too, but not easy. None of the female or, you know, he has done it before, so. Right. Cool. What do you think about today? Did the event here a little bit smaller, more VIP event? What's your takeaway on this? >>It's good to be back in person. Obviously we're meeting, we've been associating with folks over zoom and Google meets for a while now and meeting them in person as I go, Hey, no hard to recognize behind the mask, but yeah, we're just glad to sort of be back out in a little bit of normalization. >>Yeah. How's everything in Austin, everyone everyone's safe and good over there. >>Yeah. It's been a long, long pandemic. Lots of ups and downs, but yeah. >>Got to get the music scene back. Most of these are comes back in the house. Everything's all back to normal. >>Yeah. My hair doesn't normally look like this. I just haven't gotten a haircut since this also >>You're going to do well in this market. You got a term sheet like that. Keep the hair, just to get the money. I think I saw your LinkedIn profile and I was wondering it's like, which version are we going to get? Well, super relevant. Super great topic. Congratulations. Thanks for coming on. Sharing the story. You're in the queue. Great jumper. Dave Nicholson here on the cube date, one of three days we're back in person of course, hybrid event. Cause the cube.net for all more footage and highlights and remote interviews. So stay tuned more coverage after this short break.

>>from around the globe. >>It's the cube with coverage of Kublai khan and cloud Native >>Con, Europe 2021 Virtual >>brought to you by >>red hat, cloud >>Native Computing foundation >>and ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of coupon 21 cloud native con 21 part of the C N C s annual event this year. It's Virtual. Again, I'm john Kerry host of the cube and we have two great guests from the C N C. F. Cheryl Hung VP of ecosystems and Katie Manji who's the ecosystem advocate for C N C F. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you. I wish we were in person soon, maybe in the fall. Cheryl Katie, thanks for coming on. >>Um, definitely hoping to be back in person again soon, but john great to see you and great to be back on the >>cube. You know, I have to say one of the things that really surprised me is the resilience of the community around what's been happening with the virtual in the covid. Actually, a lot of people have been, um, you know, disrupted by this, but you know, the consensus is that developers have used to been working remotely and virtually in a home and so not too much disruption, but a hell of a lot of productivity. You're seeing a lot more cloud native, um, projects, you're seeing a lot more mainstreaming and the enterprise, you're starting to see cloud growth, just a really kind of nice growth. And we've been saying for years, rising tide floats, all boats, Cheryl, but this year you're starting to see real mainstream adoption with cloud native and this has really been part of the work of the community you guys have done. So what's your take on this? Because we're going to be coming out of this Covid pretty soon. There's a post covid light at the end of the tunnel. What's your view? >>Yeah, definitely, fingers crossed on that. I mean, I would love Katie to give her view on this. In fact, because she came from Conde Nast and American Express, both huge companies that were adopting have adopted cloud Native successfully. And then in the middle of the pandemic, in the middle of Covid, she joined CN CF. So Katie really has a view from the trenches and Katie would love to hear your thoughts. >>Yeah, absolutely. Uh, definitely cloud native adoption when it comes to the tooling has been more permanent in the enterprises. And that has been confirmed of my role at American Express. That is the role I moved from towards C N C F. But the more surprising thing is that we see big companies, we see banks and financial organization that are looking to adopt open source. But more importantly, they're looking for ways to either contribute or actually to direct it more into these areas. So from that perspective, I've been pretty much at the nucleus of enterprise of the adoption of cloud Native is definitely moving, it's slow paced, but it's definitely forward moving as well. Um and now I think while I'm in the role with C N C F as an ecosystem advocate and leading the end user community, there has been definitely uh the community is growing um always intrigued to find out more about the cloud Native usage is one of the things that I find quite intriguing is the fact that not one cloud native usage, like usage of covering just one platform, which is going to be called, the face is going to be the same. So it's always intriguing to find new use cases, find those extremist cases as well, that it really pushes the community forward. >>I want to do is unpack. The end user aspect of this has been a hallmark of the CNC F for years, always been a staple of the organization. But this year, more than ever it's been, seems to be prominent as people are integrating in what about the growth? I mean from last year this year and the use and user ecosystem, how have you guys seen the growth? Is there any highlights because have any stats and or observations around how the ecosystem is growing around the end user piece? >>Sure, absolutely. I mean, I can talk directly about C N C F and the C N C F. End user community, much like everything else, you know, covid kind of slowed things down, so we're kind of not entirely surprised by that, But we're still going over 2020 and in fact just in the last few months have brought in some really, really big names like Peloton, Airbnb, Citibank, um, just some incredible organizations who are, who have really adopted card native, who have seen the success and the benefits of it. And now we're looking to give back to the community, as Katie said, get involved with open source and be more than just a passive consumer of the technologies, but actually become leaders in their own right, >>Katie talk about the dynamic of developers that end user organizations. I mean, you have been there, you're now you've been on both sides of the table if you will not to the sides of the table, it's more like a round table if you will, but community driven. But traditional, uh, end user organizations, not the early adopters, not the hyper scale is, but the ones now are really embedding hybrid, um, are changing how I t to how modern applications being built. That's a big theme in these mainstream organizations. What's the dynamic going on? What's your view? >>I think for any organization, the kind of the core, what moves the organization towards cloud Native is um pretty much being ahead of your competitors. And now we have this mass of different organization of the cloud native and that's why we see more kind of ice towards this area. So um definitely in this perspective when it comes to the technology aspect, companies are looking to deploy complex application in an easier manner, especially when it comes to pushing them to production system securely faster. Um and continuously as well. They're looking to have this competitive edge when it comes to how can they quickly respond to customer feedback? And as well they're looking for this um hybrid element that has been, has been talked about. Again, we're talking about enterprise is not just about public cloud, it's about how can we run the application security and getting both an element of data centers or private cloud as well. And now we see a lot of projects which are balancing around that age but more importantly there is adoption and where there's adoption, there is a feedback loop and that's how which represents the organic growth. >>That's awesome. Cheryl like you to define what you mean when you say end user driven open source, what does that mean? >>Mm This is a really interesting dynamic that I've seen over the last couple of years. So what we see is that more and more of the open source project, our end users who who are solving their own problems and creating their own projects and donating these back to the community. An early example of this was Envoy and lift and Yeager from Uber but Spotify also recently donated backstage, which is a developer portal which has really taken off. We've also got examples from Intuit Donating Argo. Um I'm sure there are some others that I've just forgotten. But the really interesting thing I see about this is that class classically right. Maybe a few years ago, if you were an end user organization, you get involved through a vendor, you'd go to a red hat or something and say, hey, you fix this on my behalf because you know that's what I'm paying you to do. Whereas what I see now is and user saying we want to keep this expertise in house and we want to be owners of our own kind of direction and our own fate when it comes to these open source projects. And that's been a big driver for this trend of open source and user driven, open source. >>It's really the open model is just such a great thing. And I think one of the interesting thing is that fits in with a lot of people who want to work from mission driven companies, but here there's actually a business benefit as you pointed out as in terms of the dynamic of bringing stuff to the community. This is interesting. I'm sure that the ability to do more collaboration, um, either hiring or contributing kind of increases when you have this end user dynamic because that's a pretty big decision to donate and bring something into the open source. What's the playbook though? If I'm sitting in an end user organization like american express Katie or a big company, say, hey, you know, we really developed this really killer use cases niche to us, but we want to bring it to the community. What do they do? Is there like a, like a manager? Do they knock on someone's door? Zara repo is, I mean, how does someone, I mean, how does an end user get this done? >>Mm. Um, I think one of the best resources out there is called the to do group, which is a organization underneath the Linux foundation. So it's kind of a sister group to C N C F, which is about open source program offices. And how do you formalize such an open source program? Because it's pretty easy to say, oh well just put something on get hub. But that's not the end of the story, right? Um, if you want to actually build a community, if you want other people to contribute, then you do actually have to do more than just drop it and get up and walk away. So I would say that if you are an end user company and you have created something which scratches your own itch and you think other people could benefit from it then definitely come. And like you could email me, you could email Chris and chick who is the ceo of C N C F and just get in touch and sort of ask around about what are the things that you could do in terms of what you have to think about the licensing, How do you develop a community governance program, um, trademark issues, all of these things. >>It's interesting how open source is growing so much now, chris has got so much action going on. New verticals are opening up, you know, so, so much action Cheryl you had posted on the internet predictions for cloud native, which I found interesting because there's so much action going on, you have to break things out into pillars, tech devops and ecosystem, each one kind of with a slew event of key trends. So take us through the mindset, why break it out like that? You got tech devops and ecosystem tradition that was all kind of bundled in one. Why? Why the pillars? And is it because there's so much action, what's, what's the basis behind the prediction? >>Um so originally this was just a giant list of things I had seen from talking to people and reading around and seeing what people are talking about on social media. Um And when, once I invested at these 10, I thought about what, what does this actually mean for the people who are going to look at this list and what should they care about? So I see tech trends as things related to tools, frameworks. Um, perhaps architects I see develops as people who are more as a combination of process, things that a combination of process and people and culture best practices and then ecosystem was kind of anything else broader than that. Things that happened across organizations. So you can definitely go to my twitter, you can go to at boy Chevelle, O I C H E R Y L and take a look at this and This is my list of 10. I would love to hear from you whether you agree with it, whether you think there are other things that I've missed or what would your >>table. I love. I love the top. Well, first of all I think this is very relevant. The one that I would ask you on is more rust and cloud native. That's the number one item. Um, I think cross cloud is definitely totally happening, I think people are really starting to think about that and so I'd love to get your comments on that. But I think the thing that jumped out at me was the devops piece because this is a trend that I've been seeing a lot more certainly even in academic institutions, for folks in school, right? Um going to college for computer science and engineering. This idea of, sorry, large scale, cloud is not so much an IT practice, it's much more of a cloud native mindset. So I think this idea of of ops so much more about scale. I use SRE only because I can't think of a better word around it and certainly the edge pieces with kubernetes, I think this is the, I think the biggest story to me that's where all the action seems to be when I talk to people around what they're working on in terms of training new people on boarding and what not Katie, you're shaking your head, you're like Yeah, what's your thoughts? Yeah, >>I have definitely been uh through all of these stages from having a team where the develops, I think it's more of a culture of like a pattern to adopt within an organization more than anything. So I've been pre develops within develops and actually during the evolution of it where we actually added an s every team as well. Um I think having these cultural changes with an organization, they are necessary, especially they want to iterate iterate quicker and actually deliver value to the customers with minimal agency because what it actually does there is the collaboration between teams which were initially segregated. And that's why I think there is a paradigm nowadays which is called deficit ops, which actually moves security more to its left. This has been very popular, especially in the, in the latest a couple of months. Lots of talks around it and even there is like a security co located event of Yukon just going to focus on that mainly. Um, but as well within the Devil's area, um, one of the models that has been quite permanent has been get ups as well, which pretty much uses the power of gIT repositories to describe the state of the applications, how it actually should be within the production system and within the cloud native ecosystem. There are two main tools that pretty much leave this area and there's going to be Argo City which has been donated by, into it, which is our end user And we have flux as well, which has been donated by we've works and both of these projects currently are within the incubation stage, which pretty much by default um showcases there is a lot of adoption from the organizations um more than 100 of for for some of them. So there is a wider adoption um, and everything I would like to mention is the get ups working group which has emerged I think between que con europe and north America last year and that again is more to define a manifest of how exactly get expert and should be adopted within organizations. So there is a lot of, I would say initiatives and this is further out they confirmed with the tooling that we have within the ecosystem. >>That's really awesome insight. I want to just, if you don't mind follow up on that, why is getups so important right now, Is it because the emphasis of security is that the emphasis of more scale, Is it just because it's pretty much kid was okay just because storing it over there, Is it because there's so much more inspections are going on around it? I mean code reviews have been going on for a long time. What's what's the big deal? Why is it so hot right now? In your opinion? >>I think there is definitely a couple of aspects that are quite important. You mentioned security, that's definitely one of them with the get ups battery. And there is a pool model rather than a push model. So you have the actual tool, for example, our great city of flux watching for repository and if any changes are identified is going to pull those changes automatically. So the first thing that we actually can see from this model is that we always will have a delta between what's within our depositors and the production system. Usually if you have a pool model, you can pull it uh can push the changes towards death staging environment but not always the production because you have the change window sometimes with the get ups model, you'll always be aware of what's the Dell. Can you have quite a nice way to visualize that especially for your city, which has the UI as well as well with the get ups pattern, there is less necessity to share the credentials with the actual pipeline tool. All of because Argo flux there are natively build around communities, all the secrets are going to be residing within the cluster. There is no need to share any extra credentials or an extra permissions with external tools as well. There are scale, there is again with kids who have historical data points which allows us to easily revert um to stable points of the applications in the past. So multiple, multiple benefits I would say, but definitely secured. I think it's one of the main one and it has been talked about quite a lot as well. >>A lot of these end user stories revolve around these dynamics and the ones you guys are promoting and from your members as well as in the community at large is I hate to use the word day two operations, but that really is the issue like okay, we're up and running. I want more automation. This is again tops kind of vibe here where it's like okay we gotta go troubleshoot all this, but it should be working as more stuff comes in. This becomes more and more the dynamic is that is that because of just more edges, more things, more devices, what's what's the what's the push behind all these stories around this automation and day to operation things? What do you guys think? >>I think, I think the expectations are getting higher and higher to be honest, a few years ago it was enough to use containers and start using the barest minimum, you know, to orchestrate those containers. But now what we see is that, you know, it's easy to choose the technology, it's easy to install it and even configure it. But as you said, john those data operations are really, really hard. For example, one of the ones that we've seen up and coming and we care about from CNCF is kubernetes on the edge. And we see this as enabling telco use cases and 5G and IOT and really, really broad, difficult use cases that just a few years ago would have been nice on impossible, Katie, your zone, Katie Katie, you also talk about edge. Right? >>Absolutely. I think I I really like to watch some of the talks that keep going, especially given by the big organizations that have to manage thousands or tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of customers. And they have to deliver a cluster to these to these teams. Now, from their point of view, they pretty much have to manage clusters at scale. There is definitely the edge out there and they really kind of pushing the technology towards how can we get closer to the physical devices within the customers? Kind of uh, let's say bubble or area in surface. So age has been definitely something which has been moving a lot when it comes to the cloud native ecosystem. We've had a lot of projects moving to towards the incubation stage, carefree as has been there, um, for for a while and again, has a lot of adoption is known for its stability. But another thing that I would like to mention is that now currently we have a lot of projects that are age focus but within some box, so there is again, a lot of potential if there's gonna be a higher demand for this, I would expect this tools move from sandbox to incubation and even graduation. So that's definitely something which, uh, it's moving and there is dynamism around it. >>Well, Cheryl kid, you guys are awesome, love the work you're doing. I gotta ask the final question since you brought it up about the expectations. Cheryl, if you guys could both end the segment with the comment around expectations as the industry and companies and developers and participants continue to grow. What, what's changed with C N C F koo Kahne cloud, native khan as the expectation has been growing and the stakes are higher too, frankly, I mean you've got security, you mentioned these things edge get up, so you start to see the maturation of this ecosystem, what's new and what's expected of you guys, What do you see and how are you guys organizing? >>I think we can definitely say the ecosystem has matured a lot compared to a few years ago. Same with CNTF, same with Cuba con, I think the very first cubic on I went to was Berlin, which was about 1800 people. Um, the kind of mind boggling to see how much, how much it's grown since then. I mean one of the things that we try and do is to expand the number of people who can reach the community. So for example, we launched kubernetes community days and we launched, that means community organized events in africa, for example, for people who couldn't come to large events in north America or europe, um we also launching things to help students. I actually love talking to students because quite often now you talk to them and they say, oh, I've never run software in anything other than a container. You're like, yeah, well this was a new thing, this is brand new a few years ago and now you can be 18 and have never tried anything else. So it's pretty amazing. But yeah, there's definitely, there's always space to go to the community. >>Yeah, once you go cloud native, it's like, you know, like you've never load Lennox on them server before. I mean, what, what's going on? Get your thoughts as expectations go higher And certainly there's more in migration, not only for young folks because they're jumping into this was that engineering meets computer science is now cross discipline. You're seeing scale, you mentioned scaling up those are huge factors, you've got younger, you got cross training, you got cybersecurity and you've got Fin tech ops that's chris is working on so much is happening. What, what, what you guys keep up with your, how you gonna raise the ball? >>Absolutely. I think there's definitely technology moving forward, but I think nowadays there is a more need for actual end user stories while at the beginning of cube cons there is a lot of focus on the technical aspects. How can you fix this particular problem of deploying between two clusters are deploying at scale. There is like a lot of technical aspects nowadays they're looking for the stories because as I mentioned before, not one platform is gonna be the same when it comes to cloud native and I think there's still, the community is still trying to look for some patterns or some standards and we actually can see like especially when it comes to the open standards, we can see this moving within um the observe abilities like that application delivery will have for example cross plane and Que Bella we have open metrics and open tracing as well, which focuses on observe ability and all of the interfaces that we had around um, Cuban directory service men and so forth. All of these pretty much try to bring a benchmark, making it easier to integrate these special use cases um when it comes to actual extreme technology kind of solutions that you need to provide and um, I was mentioning the end user stories that are there more in demand nowadays mainly because these are very, very necessary from the community like for example the six or the project maintainers, they require feedback to actually move forward. And as part of that, I would like to mention that we've recently soft launched the injuries lounge, which really focuses on this particular aspect of end user stories. We try to pretty much question our end users and really understand what really moved them to adopt, coordinative, what keeps them on this path and what like future challenges they would like to um to tackle or are they facing the moment I would like to solve in the future. So we're trying to create the speed back home between the inducers and the projects out there. So I think this is something which needs to be a bit more closely together these two spheres, which currently are segregated, but we're trying to just solve that. >>Also you guys do great work, great job. Cheryl wrap us up real, take a minute to put a plug in for the C. N. C. F. In the ecosystem. What's the fashion this year? What's hot? What's the trend? What are you guys doing? Share some quick update on what's going on the ecosystem from your perspective? >>Yeah, I mean the ecosystem, even though I just said that we're maturing, you know, the growth has not stopped now, what we're seeing is these as Casey was saying, you know, more specific use cases, even bigger, even more demanding environments, even more kind of crazy use cases. I mean I love the story from the U. S. Department of Defense about putting kubernetes on their fighter jets and putting ston fighter jets, you know, it's just absurd to think about it, but I would say definitely come and be part of the community, share your stories, share what you know, help other people um if you are end user of these technologies then go to see NCF dot io slash and user and just come and be part of our community, you know, meet your peers and hear what everybody else is doing >>well. Having kubernetes and stu on jets, that's the Air Force, I would call that technical edge Katie to you know, bring, bring back the edge carol kitty, thank you so much for sharing the inside ecosystem is robust. Rising tide is floating all the boats as we always say here in the cube, it's been great to watch and continue to watch the rise. I think it's just the beginning, we're starting to see post pandemic visibility cloud native, more standards, more visibility into the economics and value and great to see the ecosystem rising up with the end users as well. So congratulations and thanks for coming up. >>Thank you so much, john it's a pleasure, appreciate >>it. Thank you for having us, john >>Great to have you on. I'm john for with the cube here for Coop Con Cloud, Native Con 21 virtual soon we'll be back in real life. Thanks for watching. Mhm.

>>From London, England. It's the cube covering Kupa inspire 19 PVR after you by Cooper. >>Hi. Welcome to the cube Lisa Martin on the ground in London at Kupa inspire 19 please do welcome back to the cube Ravi talker, the SVP, a business acceleration that Cooper won't be welcome back. It's great to be back. Thanks for having me. Likewise. So lots of, lots of buzz around us. Everyone's eating lunch, but there's a lot of folks here in London, a lot of exciting news coming out in this morning. Lot of customers and fused in Rob's keynote. I lost count of how many great customer examples were showed. Talk to us a little bit about Kupa pay and some of the innovations that you guys are delivering now. >>Yeah, absolutely. So pay pays a great new area for Coupa. We call it the fourth pillar and Rob's analogy of the pipe procurement, invoicing, payment and expenses. And so actually we started this journey a really last year at this event where we announced virtual card for purchase orders and a strategic relationship with Barclaycard. And over that past year we've done some amazing things with relationships with JP Morgan, Citibank, and we just announced a great relationship with American express to provide American express virtual cards on the Coupa pay platform. So we've been working hard at it. We've seen some really good success early success with customers. Uh, we announced some other great innovations in our Vegas conference just a few months ago where we announced invoice payments is generally available along with partnerships with Stripe and PayPal. So it's been really busy. >>It has been the B2B payments space. It's a big market, 1.2, I think trillion global and global volume. But it's also challenging because on the consumer side, on the BDC side, it's so easy for us to do transactions right on our phone, tablet watches, and we had this expectation that we can pay for anything. We can find anything, we can pay bills so easily. But on the B2B side there's a lot more complexity. The BDB hasn't, payments hasn't been able to innovate nearly as quickly as on the consumer side. But I'd love to get your thoughts on what is Cooper able to leverage with Coupa pay that's maybe going to start meeting some of the demands of those business folks who in their consumer lives have this expectation of a swipe or a click to do a transaction. >>Yeah, it's a completely different ball game consumer versus B2B, whole avenues around risk profiles of your suppliers. You know if you pay a supplier that's doing illegal business are doing place and where the government doesn't allow it puts your brand and your reputation at risk. Very serious risks. And so we incorporate a lot of what we do with the community. So you heard Rob talk about that in his keynote. A lot of things around community intelligence. So for us being able to rely on thousands of customers of data, millions of transactions, being able to see things across all of our customers and really create alerts and transactional efficiencies for our customers in B2B payments. That's a big change for our customers and we're just starting to get to see some of those transactional elements. I think the second thing that we've seen with B2B payments, and it's interesting money, 2020 is one of the largest, uh, payment conferences, uh, in the world. And it happened I think last week or the week before in Vegas. And this year has been a lot of talk about B2B payments, whereas last year is mostly B to C. and so we feel we've been making an impact in the entire payments area because to us it's bringing together all of the different payment rails, whether it's virtual card or bank transfers or cross border, but being able to do it across dozens and hundreds of countries and it global fashion. That's a big game changer for large enterprises. >>So one of the things that was a theme this morning during the keynote was trust. I had the opportunity to speak with Rachel Botsman trust expert who did a keynote this morning. And as we look at some of the numbers that Rob shared, you mentioned a few of over a thousand plus customers using Coupa. I think he's shared over 5 million suppliers on the platform. You talked about this community, this massive community that you are co creating with. Talk to me about Coupa pay and its ability to help deliver that trust so that Coupa can be that trusted advisor that it wants to be with. It's not just its customers but as partners too. >>No, absolutely. And Rachel's presentation this morning was fantastic. Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, uh, my background actually I Kupa for a decade I ran customer success. So I engaged with C level executives at all of our customers. And as part of that process, a trust was a big factor in that when we said something we would deliver that. And over the course of the years that coop has been around about 1314 years we've held very true. That stands in our number one core value of ensuring customer success. And when you look at all of the customers that are willing to put their six, what we call success metrics, how much they've spent saved the spend that they have under management when they are publicly talking about it. That's trust that we've created with them in this partnership because they believe in what our ability to deliver says we decided to go into payments or we're trust and payments is a very big deal as mentioned earlier. Right? You don't get necessarily fired for screwing up our purchase order or an invoice, but if you send money to the wrong supplier to the wrong country, you know, there's a lot of risk associated with that. So we take that very, very seriously and how we've been developing and creating solutions around Kupa pay. And so it's just the overall Avenue that we work with our, we treat them as partners, not as a vendor supplier relationship. And because of that we have this mutual trust that we're both in this together in this large community. >>Yeah. And Rachel Botsman talk about sort of that balance between, uh, trust and risk. Yeah. Which was very interesting concept. Um, talk to me about, I'm just thinking like even from a fraud on a supplier perspective, one of the things I know that Cuba is able to do is alert a customer, Hey, there's a supplier that has a history of whatever it happens to me that's, that's my inflict risk on that customer. Tell me a little bit about that. From a trust risk kind of balanced perspective, what you guys are delivering there. >>It's a great area that we're just really starting to get into as well. And so being able to leverage the community of buyers and suppliers and having everything in a single code system code platform allows us to do a number of these things. And so for providing our customers, not the necessarily the, the exact thing that they should do, but providing them the relevant information in order for them to make the right decisions. Yeah. There's an old adage that I go by which is trust but verify. And so it's the same similar concept here. It's our goal to provide these prescriptions to our customers on what is the supplier doing or how can you improve your processes. And with these prescriptions, as Rob mentioned this morning, it's, it's up to our customers to choose what they want to do with those prescriptions. Sometimes they may take it, sometimes they may not >>and he gave a number, I want to say 22,000 prescriptions and he gave a time period in the past 12 months. That's what I thought as well. So a lot of insight literally coming out of that community. Love to chat though about the community in terms of the B2B payment space, not only we talked about how it's being influenced by consumers, but the changing role of procurement and finance. Yeah, a lot of just disruption there. We talked about that a few months ago and didn't get a lot of opportunity for financial leaders to become much more strategic and a lot of the examples that Rob shared showed how impactful company wide the impact that procurement folks, finance folks can make. Talk to me about how the Coupa is leveraging that community to help them get more visibility on how that procurement role is changing and how Coupa can help it be much more strategic. You know what I, that's a great question. And >>what I respond with that is, what's the name of our conference? It's inspire, right? We want to inspire this community to really go to that next level and really look deep inside themselves. It, Rob talks about all these different adjectives of Brown, all the different, what we call spend setters. It's a great initiative that we've created because we're giving our community of voice and that's always the biggest thing in how you affect change. How do you give people a voice? How do you give someone a story that they can grasp onto such that they can make it their own, such as they can take those facts and that relevance and apply it to their own day to day jobs. And that's a big thing that we're looking to do. But it requires going back to trust. It requires a little bit of trust in what we're doing. And by providing those stories, it gives these, our customers, our champions, uh, the ability to fall back on those, have that foundation for how to make change, how to disrupt their organizations. You know, Rob gave that great example of Telenor. You know, their seep, their chief procurement officer created a blueprint and a plan to provide mobile service. I think it was an India is a great example of what an individual can do and when you're that individual and you have visibility and tall your supply base into all of the spend going across your company, it's very, very powerful. >>I saw a survey that Cuba did recently have, I think 253 financial decision makers in the U K and some of the stats were quite shocking that 96% I believe said we do not have complete visibility over our entire spend. Right. Wow. Right. That's because one, some of the things that Rob shared this morning was the massive, massive savings that companies can achieve, but not having that visibility. You've got blinders on. There's a lot of risk there. There's a lot of expenses that probably should be going into procurement, but that was really 96% saying we don't have complete visibility. What's Cooper's answer to that? >>You know, it's, it's an interesting statistic. Right? And I, I gave a presentation I think seven, eight years ago, and I started off that presentation with saying, you know, if you are an HR and you didn't have track of all your employees, you'd be fired. If you're a head of sales and you didn't have an understanding of all of your open opportunities for business, you'd be fired. So why is that different for spend? Right? Why not have visibility and have access to all of the different spin that's happening across your company? And your Rob said it best in his keynote. We talked about what's actually happening in the world today. It's not necessarily around customer relationship management software, CRM, right? It's not necessarily around human capital management, but it's the well capitalized businesses of the world today. And today's day and age and this uncertainty of Brexit, uncertainty of the global climate, us, China trade relations, who's well capitalized to make and withstand what could be some, you know, unsettling times. Now there's another very interesting thing we saw with that same survey. Excuse me. Along with some of the things we saw with the wall street journal with some surveys we did with them, these finance professionals, they want to have that visibility and our answer to them come talk to us. >>So speaking of influence, inspiring, tell me a little bit about how the Coupa community influenced or is influencing the evolution of Coupa pay for example was Hey, we've got to have Amex virtual cards integrated with Coupa pay. Was that something that came from the voice of the community? Yeah, so we, >>you know, all across Koopa ever since the inception of the company, it's always around partnering with our customers, with our community to really listen and understand what they, what they're looking for. But doing it in the guy in the, within the framework of our core values as a customer, as a company. And the first one that I mentioned earlier, ensuring customer success. So we want to listen to our customers, we want to better understand them. So around virtual cards, you know, how do we choose to do an Amex or a Barclaycard? And to us it's actually pretty simple. We wanted to make sure that we're able to cover 80 to 90% of our customers with these large issuers. And we've been able to do that over the past year in negotiating these agreements, figuring out the technology components. And so we've been executing and delivering on that over the past, uh, over the past year. >>And if I understand that the press release correctly, KUKA pay with Amex virtual court integration is launching first in the UK and Australia. Correct. Can you tell me a little bit about those markets and what were some of the deciding factors? They said, Hey, well we'll go, we'll parlay on your title of acceleration. Is this, are these the right markets to launch and to accelerate copay? >>Yeah. Um, you know, there's obviously a lot of different ways and opportunities that American express has to go to market, massive company, great company to partner with. And so what we saw with them is from a technology standpoint, starting off in the UK and Australia made the most sense. We also have existing demand with customers that are ready to get going and really help us make sure that we create the right experience. You know, we expect this partnership to be really big and so as part of that, we want to make sure that we're able to deliver in certain markets first before we expand this and make this a much bigger thing. American express has a very prestigious brand. We want to respect and support that and we have our own brand that we want to support with our customers. We want to make sure we do it right. >>Well, Ravi, last question. I know that you're keynoting tomorrow. Yes. What are the couple of takeaways that you're going to leave the audience with tomorrow during your keynote? >>Yeah, it's a great, good question. I think the, the takeaways for tomorrow is we want to share some stories. You know, going back to inspiration, it's all about storytelling. Do we have stories to tell our customers such that they can relate to it and fall back on that? So we have three great customer speakers tomorrow. Really excited about the stories that they're going to share about Cooper pay and their journey with it. And my take away for our are the audiences. How do those stories relate to your business and is there a way that we can help you streamline your payment process? >>Awesome. Robbie, it's been a pleasure. You back on the cube. Best of luck at your keynote tomorrow and we'll see you at the next inspire. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. All right. For Ravi talker, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube from London. Coupa inspire 19.

>> from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering M I T. Chief data officer and information quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back to M I. T. Everybody. This is the Cube. The leader in live coverage. My name is David wanted. I'm here with my co host, Paul Gill, in this day to coverage of the M I t cdo I Q conference. A lot of acronym stands for M I. T. Of course, the great institution. But Chief Data officer information quality event is his 13th annual event. Lars to Maria's here is the managing partner of Brass Rat Capital. Cool name Lars. Welcome to the Cube. Great. Very much. Glad I start with a name brass around Capitol was That's >> rat is reference to the M I t school. Okay, Beaver? Well, he is, but the students call it a brass rat, and I'm third generation M i t. So it's just seen absolutely appropriate. That is a brass rods and capital is not a reference to money, but is actually referenced to the intellectual capital. They if you have five or six brass rats in the same company, you know, we Sometimes engineers arrive and they could do some things. >> And it Boy, if you put in some data data capital in there, you really explosions. We cause a few problems. So we're gonna talk about some new regulations that are coming down. New legislation that's coming down that you exposed me to yesterday, which is gonna have downstream implications. You get ahead of this stuff and understand it. You can really first of all, prepare, make sure you're in compliance, but then potentially take advantage for your business. So explain to us this notion of open government act. >> Um, in the last five years, six years or so, there's been an effort going on to increase the transparency across all levels of government. Okay, State, local and federal government. The first of federal government laws was called the the Open Data Act of 2014 and that was an act. They was acted unanimously by Congress and signed by Obama. They was taking the departments of the various agencies of the United States government and trying to roll up all the expenses into one kind of expense. This is where we spent our money and who got the money and doing that. That's what they were trying to do. >> Big picture type of thing. >> Yeah, big picture type thing. But unfortunately, it didn't work, okay? Because they forgot to include this odd word called mentalities. So the same departments meant the same thing. Data problem. They have a really big data problem. They still have it. So they're to G et o reports out criticizing how was done, and the government's gonna try and correct it. Then in earlier this year, there was another open government date act which said in it was signed by Trump. Now, this time you had, like, maybe 25 negative votes, but essentially otherwise passed Congress completely. I was called the Open as all capital O >> P E >> n Government Data act. Okay, and that's not been implemented yet. But there's live talking around this conference today in various Chief date officers are talking about this requirement that every single non intelligence defense, you know, vital protection of the people type stuff all the like, um, interior, treasury, transportation, those type of systems. If you produce a report these days, which is machine, I mean human readable. You must now in two years or three years. I forget the exact invitation date. Have it also be machine readable. Now, some people think machine riddle mil means like pdf formats, but no, >> In fact, what the government did is it >> said it must be machine readable. So you must be able to get into the reports, and you have to be able to extract out the information and attach it to the tree of knowledge. Okay, so we're all of sudden having context like they're currently machine readable, Quote unquote, easy reports. But you can get into those SEC reports. You pull out the net net income information and says its net income, but you don't know what it attaches to on the tree of knowledge. So, um, we are helping the government in some sense able, machine readable type reporting that weaken, do machine to machine without people being involved. >> Would you say the tree of knowledge You're talking about the constant >> man tick semantic tree of knowledge so that, you know, we all come from one concept like the human is example of a living thing living beast, a living Beeston example Living thing. So it also goes back, and they're serving as you get farther and farther out the tree, there's more distance or semantic distance, but you can attach it back to concept so you can attach context to the various data. Is this essentially metadata? That's what people call it. But if I would go over see sale here at M I t, they would turn around. They call it the Tree of Knowledge or semantic data. Okay, it's referred to his semantic dated, So you are passing not only the data itself, but the context that >> goes along with the data. Okay, how does this relate to the financial transparency? >> Well, Financial Transparency Act was introduced by representative Issa, who's a Republican out of California. He's run the government Affairs Committee in the House. He retired from Congress this past November, but in 2017 he introduced what's got referred to his H R 15 30 Um, and the 15 30 is going to dramatically change the way, um, financial regulators work in the United States. Um, it is about it was about to be introduced two weeks ago when the labor of digital currency stuff came up. So it's been delayed a little bit because they're trying to add some of the digital currency legislation to that law. >> A front run that Well, >> I don't know exactly what the remember soul coming out of Maxine Waters Committee. So the staff is working on a bunch of different things at once. But, um, we own g was asked to consult with them on looking at the 15 30 act and saying, How would we improve quote unquote, given our technical, you know, not doing policy. We just don't have the technical aspects of the act. How would we want to see it improved? So one of the things we have advised is that for the first time in the United States codes history, they're gonna include interesting term called ontology. You know what intelligence? Well, everyone gets scared by the word. And when I read run into people, they say, Are you a doctor? I said, no, no, no. I'm just a date. A guy. Um, but an intolerant tea is like a taxonomy, but it had order has important, and an ontology allows you to do it is ah, kinda, you know, giving some context of linking something to something else. And so you're able Thio give Maur information with an intolerant that you're able to you with a tax on it. >> Okay, so it's a taxonomy on steroids? >> Yes, exactly what? More flexible, >> Yes, but it's critically important for artificial intelligence machine warning because if I can give them until ology of sort of how it goes up and down the semantics, I can turn around, do a I and machine learning problems on the >> order of 100 >> 1000 even 10,000 times faster. And it has context. It has contacts in just having a little bit of context speeds up these problems so dramatically so and it is that what enables the machine to machine? New notion? No, the machine to machine is coming in with son called SP R M just standard business report model. It's a OMG sophistication of way of allowing the computers or machines, as we call them these days to get into a standard business report. Okay, so let's say you're ah drug company. You have thio certify you >> drugged you manufactured in India, get United States safely. Okay, you have various >> reporting requirements on the way. You've got to give extra easy the FDA et cetera that will always be a standard format. The SEC has a different format. FERC has a different format. Okay, so what s p r m does it allows it to describe in an intolerant he what's in the report? And then it also allows one to attach an ontology to the cells in the report. So if you like at a sec 10 Q 10 k report, you can attach a US gap taxonomy or ontology to it and say, OK, net income annual. That's part of the income statement. You should never see that in a balance sheet type item. You know his example? Okay. Or you can for the first time by having that context you can say are solid problem, which suggested that you can file these machine readable reports that air wrong. So they believe or not, There were about 50 cases in the last 10 years where SEC reports have been filed where the assets don't equal total liabilities, plus cheryl equity, you know, just they didn't add >> up. So this to, >> you know, to entry accounting doesn't work. >> Okay, so so you could have the machines go and check scale. Hey, we got a problem We've >> got a problem here, and you don't have to get humans evolved. So we're gonna, um uh, Holland in Australia or two leaders ahead of the United States. In this area, they seem dramatic pickups. I mean, Holland's reporting something on the order of 90%. Pick up Australia's reporting 60% pickup. >> We say pick up. You're talking about pickup of errors. No efficiency, productivity, productivity. Okay, >> you're taking people out of the whole cycle. It's dramatic. >> Okay, now what's the OMG is rolling on the hoof. Explain the OMG >> Object Management Group. I'm not speaking on behalf of them. It's a membership run organization. You remember? I am a >> member of cold. >> I'm a khalid of it. But I don't represent omg. It's the membership has to collectively vote that this is what we think. Okay, so I can't speak on them, right? I have a pretty significant role with them. I run on behalf of OMG something called the Federated Enterprise Risk Management Group. That's the group which is focusing on risk management for large entities like the federal government's Veterans Affairs or Department offense upstairs. I think talking right now is the Chief date Officer for transportation. OK, that's a large organization, which they, they're instructed by own be at the, um, chief financial officer level. The one number one thing to do for the government is to get an effective enterprise worst management model going in the government agencies. And so they come to own G let just like NIST or just like DARPA does from the defense or intelligence side, saying we need to have standards in this area. So not only can we talk thio you effectively, but we can talk with our industry partners effectively on space. Programs are on retail, on medical programs, on finance programs, and so they're at OMG. There are two significant financial programs, or Sanders, that exist once called figgy financial instrument global identifier, which is a way of identifying a swap. Its way of identifying a security does not have to be used for a que ce it, but a worldwide. You can identify that you know, IBM stock did trade in Tokyo, so it's a different identifier has different, you know, the liberals against the one trading New York. Okay, so those air called figgy identifiers them. There are attributes associated with that security or that beast the being identified, which is generally comes out of 50 which is the financial industry business ontology. So you know, it says for a corporate bond, it has coupon maturity, semi annual payment, bullets. You know, it is an example. So that gives you all the information that you would need to go through to the calculation, assuming you could have a calculation routine to do it, then you need thio. Then turn around and set up your well. Call your environment. You know where Ford Yield Curves are with mortgage backed securities or any portable call. Will bond sort of probabilistic lee run their numbers many times and come up with effective duration? Um, And then you do your Vader's analytics. No aggregating the portfolio and looking at Shortfalls versus your funding. Or however you're doing risk management and then finally do reporting, which is where the standardized business reporting model comes in. So that kind of the five parts of doing a full enterprise risk model and Alex So what >> does >> this mean for first? Well, who does his impact on? What does it mean for organizations? >> Well, it's gonna change the world for basically everyone because it's like doing a clue ends of a software upgrade. Conversion one's version two point. Oh, and you know how software upgrades Everyone hates and it hurts because everyone's gonna have to now start using the same standard ontology. And, of course, that Sarah Ontology No one completely agrees with the regulators have agreed to it. The and the ultimate controlling authority in this thing is going to be F sock, which is the Dodd frank mandated response to not ever having another chart. So the secretary of Treasury heads it. It's Ah, I forget it's the, uh, federal systemic oversight committee or something like that. All eight regulators report into it. And, oh, if our stands is being the adviser Teff sock for all the analytics, what these laws were doing, you're getting over farm or more power to turn around and look at how we're going to find data across the three so we can come up consistent analytics and we can therefore hopefully take one day. Like Goldman, Sachs is pre payment model on mortgages. Apply it to Citibank Portfolio so we can look at consistency of analytics as well. It is only apply to regulated businesses. It's gonna apply to regulated financial businesses. Okay, so it's gonna capture all your mutual funds, is gonna capture all your investment adviser is gonna catch her. Most of your insurance companies through the medical air side, it's gonna capture all your commercial banks is gonna capture most of you community banks. Okay, Not all of them, because some of they're so small, they're not regularly on a federal basis. The one regulator which is being skipped at this point, is the National Association Insurance Commissioners. But they're apparently coming along as well. Independent federal legislation. Remember, they're regulated on the state level, not regularly on the federal level. But they've kind of realized where the ball's going and, >> well, let's make life better or simply more complex. >> It's going to make life horrible at first, but we're gonna take out incredible efficiency gains, probably after the first time you get it done. Okay, is gonna be the problem of getting it done to everyone agreeing. We use the same definitions >> of the same data. Who gets the efficiency gains? The regulators, The companies are both >> all everyone. Can you imagine that? You know Ah, Goldman Sachs earnings report comes out. You're an analyst. Looking at How do I know what Goldman? Good or bad? You have your own equity model. You just give the model to the semantic worksheet and all turn around. Say, Oh, those numbers are all good. This is what expected. Did it? Did it? Didn't you? Haven't. You could do that. There are examples of companies here in the United States where they used to have, um, competitive analysis. Okay. They would be taking somewhere on the order of 600 to 7. How 100 man hours to do the competitive analysis by having an available electronically, they cut those 600 hours down to five to do a competitive analysis. Okay, that's an example of the type of productivity you're gonna see both on the investment side when you're doing analysis, but also on the regulatory site. Can you now imagine you get a regulatory reports say, Oh, there's they're out of their way out of whack. I can tell you this fraud going on here because their numbers are too much in X y z. You know, you had to fudge numbers today, >> and so the securities analyst can spend Mme. Or his or her time looking forward, doing forecasts exactly analysis than having a look back and reconcile all this >> right? And you know, you hear it through this conference, for instance, something like 80 to 85% of the time of analysts to spend getting the data ready. >> You hear the same thing with data scientists, >> right? And so it's extent that we can helped define the data. We're going thio speed things up dramatically. But then what's really instinct to me, being an M I t engineer is that we have great possibilities. An A I I mean, really great possibilities. Right now, most of the A miles or pattern matching like you know, this idea using face shield technology that's just really doing patterns. You can do wonderful predictive analytics of a I and but we just need to give ah lot of the a m a. I am a I models the contact so they can run more quickly. OK, so we're going to see a world which is gonna found funny, But we're going to see a world. We talk about semantic analytics. Okay. Semantic analytics means I'm getting all the inputs for the analysis with context to each one of the variables. And when I and what comes out of it will be a variable results. But you also have semantics with it. So one in the future not too distant future. Where are we? We're in some of the national labs. Where are you doing it? You're doing pipelines of one model goes to next model goes the next mile. On it goes Next model. So you're gonna software pipelines, Believe or not, you get them running out of an Excel spreadsheet. You know, our modern Enhanced Excel spreadsheet, and that's where the future is gonna be. So you really? If you're gonna be really good in this business, you're gonna have to be able to use your brain. You have to understand what data means You're going to figure out what your modeling really means. What happens if we were, You know, normally for a lot of the stuff we do bell curves. Okay, well, that doesn't have to be the only distribution you could do fat tail. So if you did fat tail descriptions that a bell curve gets you much different results. Now, which one's better? I don't know, but, you know, and just using example >> to another cut in the data. So our view now talk about more about the tech behind this. He's mentioned a I What about math? Machine learning? Deep learning. Yeah, that's a color to that. >> Well, the tech behind it is, believe or not, some relatively old tech. There is a technology called rd F, which is kind of turned around for a long time. It's a science kind of, ah, machine learning, not machine wearing. I'm sorry. Machine code type. Fairly simplistic definitions. Lots of angle brackets and all this stuff there is a higher level. That was your distracted, I think put into standard in, like, 2000 for 2005. Called out. Well, two point. Oh, and it does a lot at a higher level. The same stuff that already f does. Okay, you could also create, um, believer, not your own special ways of a communicating and ontology just using XML. Okay, So, uh, x b r l is an enhanced version of XML, okay? And so some of these older technologies, quote unquote old 20 years old, are essentially gonna be driving a lot of this stuff. So you know you know Corbett, right? Corba? Is that what a maid omg you know, on the communication and press thing, do you realize that basically every single device in the world has a corpus standard at okay? Yeah, omg Standard isn't all your smartphones and all your computers. And and that's how they communicate. It turns out that a lot of this old stuff quote unquote, is so rigidly well defined. Well done that you can build modern stuff that takes us to the Mars based on these old standards. >> All right, we got to go. But I gotta give you the award for the most acronyms >> HR 15 30 fi G o m g s b r >> m fsoc tarp. Oh, fr already halfway. We knew that Owl XML ex brl corba, Which of course >> I do. But that's well done. Like thanks so much for coming. Everyone tried to have you. All right, keep it right there, everybody, We'll be back with our next guest from M i t cdo I Q right after this short, brief short message. Thank you

>> Woman: From the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. It's the Cube. Covering Coupa Inspire 2019. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey you, welcome to the Cube. Lisa Martin coming to you from Las Vegas Coupa Inspire '19. I'm excited to be welcoming to the Cube for the first time, Ravi Thakur. The SVP of Business Acceleration from Coupa. Ravi welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you Lisa. Appreciate it. So day one, everybody had started the day off. The general session was lots of information from Rob. We heard from Malcolm Gladwell. One of my favorite storytellers. If I could master telling a story the way he does that would be awesome. We've also heard from some customers today. We had the Lululemon staples, KPMG, Deloitte. People are excited about the innovations and how Coupa is really helping to transform the CPO, the CFO and help these guys and girls become much more strategic. >> Ravi: Right >> Lots of change and lots of forcing functions too like consumerization and pricing pressures and and all these things. But something that you guys announced back in, I believe November 2018. Just about six months ago, was Coupa Pay. Talk to us a little bit about Coupa Pay in the spirit of this events theme of Spend Smarter. Together. What is Coupa Pay? What were some of the gaps in the market that you guys saw? And thought we can help B2B customers uncripple themselves. >> Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for those questions Lisa. I've been with Coupa for over 12 years now and throughout that time I've have had thousands of conversations with Spend management professionals across all different topics. But whenever payments would come up there's always a sense of it's kind of a nightmare, it's a mess for us let's not talk about that. (laughing) And what we've seen is that. A lot of large companies have multiple ERP systems and when you have multiple ERP systems trying to get a hold of the data and be able to control the funds going out can be a little bit of a challenge. Then when you start mixing in that there's so many different ways to pay suppliers. Weather it's a credit card or a digital cheque or cross-border payment. Whatever it may be. It becomes a big conglomeration of a big nightmare. And so when we started looking at payments. We wanted to figure out well, how can we simplify this experience for our customers? Because we already have best in class procurement best in class AP automation. Adding payments was kind of an easy decision. >> Lisa: Natural evolution. >> A natural evolution of how we were progressing or kind of move into business spend manager categorization of Business Spend Management. And so when we started the journey we made the decision maybe about 18 months ago to actually start getting into this a little bit. And we started off as you mentioned last November with announcing virtual cards on purchase orders. We've started adding other things like early pay discounts. Which are kind of a financing type of solution and just yesterday, actually just today Rob announced general availability for invoice payments. Which is really the workhorse of payments. It's taking all of your invoices that you have as a company and how do you pay your different suppliers. >> Lisa: I can imagine a company would have multiple banks that they're dealing with to pay different suppliers different suppliers, probably had different preferences and then what's the percentage of invoices that are being paid by cheque by paper cheque still. >> Ravi: Yeah, I mean in the U.S. I think I had a statistic from 2016. It's a couple of years dated but it said 51% of payments in the U.S. is still via cheque. It's crazy. And I had a meeting earlier today with a pretty large customer. And they're telling me about how their treasury the woman that runs treasury for them. She walks around with the key fob of 12 different key fobs, for two-factor authentication to log in to 12 different banks, all over the world. And a lot of that is very painful it opens themselves up to a lot of inefficiencies to risk, to potential fraud and with the payment solutions that we're offering that we're actually now generally available with. We're able to solve a lot of those challenges it's really exciting for us. >> Absolutely. And driving up the efficiency of accounts payable by having all of these options. Can imagine from a customer's perspective all of the elements in that business they're going to get tighter going to get more simple and where it's going to really be an enabler of an organization's overall digital business transformation >> Right, it's one of the last areas of transformation we see in Business Spend Management. We've already as mentioned the procurement process AP automation, where we handle expense reporting and now when you're starting to look at payments and doing it at the scale that we're looking at doing. There are a lot of payment solutions out there a lot of payment providers. But none of them have the backing of the procurement process None of them have the rich invoice data that we bring to the table. Let alone the ability for us to send payments due payments domestically, across the globe. Which is a very unique differentiator for us. Along with being able to pay out cross-border payments in hundreds of countries. Now the other thing that we've seen from organizations especially as the the way that the economy and organizations have evolved. You're not just paying a supplier that has ACH information They're not willing to provide you with their bank account information. Might be a five-person flower shop that you need to buy flowers from occasion. It may be temp labour that you have hired for certain projects. Or contingent workforce for certain projects. Or maybe even paying back your employees through expense reports. And so as we've architected our payment solutions we've looked at all of these together and figure it out what are the different optimal ways to do that. As a matter of fact we're announcing a partnership with PayPal. So in order to now send payments via PayPal from a business PayPal account from our customer to the PayPal accounts of their some of their smaller suppliers. So that's a unique way that we're thinking about what are the common use cases scenarios in the consumer world and bringing that into the business environment. >> Yeah, that consumerization effect is so interesting because we're all consumers every day. Weather we're shopping for some beach wear for a backyard barbecue or something on Amazon or whatever happens to be. We have this expectation, culturally we're trained we can find anything. We get anything, we can see all the suppliers and the different prices and select. Read all these reviews. Because we're so conditioned to that in our everyday lives those people that are doing that then have buying decisions and buying roles and their company's expect the same experience. >> Ravi: Right >> And you guys are listening to your customers and enabling that which is huge hugely impactful to every industry, right? Manufacturing, Retail, Health Care you name it. >> Any business that has employees which is every business in the world. It's a great point. I mean just a consumerization of all of these different aspects of business and that's where, when we started Coupa and as we've continued to grow throughout our expansion it's just really listening to our customers listening to the vibrant community that we've created. I met a lot of meetings today and I met with another customer a couple of hours ago and he was super excited about how he's been on our Coupa Community. We have a portal for our customers. They can put in their ideas and talk about and have conversations. He just loves the way that we've been able to react and be able to implement a number of his solutions that have made his life easier along with the broader community of buyers that we have. >> All the marketing material talks about this BSM community that is developing together and that was one of the themes I felt that I heard from Rob this morning during his general session is this. Not only is this community incredibly rich with data 1.2 trillion dollars of spend they are going through this which is a 5X multiplier from I think you should have said this at 2016. But it's also encouraging, suppliers that are in there customers that are in there are able to to learn and save from each other. The collaboration element was really, I thought quite potent and it sounded like quite a differentiator to me. >> Right, absolutely. I think Rob talked about what we're calling prescriptions. >> Yes, 18'000 so far? >> Exactly, and you know the ability to take a look at it's not just $1.2 trillion worth of spend. It's 5 million suppliers. It's not all of them have catalog items but a lot of them do have catalog items. It's looking across millions of purchase order millions of invoices across the system and being able to rationalize and look at data and look at all of these different trends that no one's able to do and really it's just the beginning of the power of what we're doing. We've introduced our business spend index. Which is a leading indicator of how the economy and businesses are operating. We're really just starting to scratch the surface in this area, I mean a thousand customers is great. But as we continue to grow and expand and multiply our customer base. We're going to be able to help things around broader supply chain initiatives. Help things around sustainability. Help organizations figure out are they working with suppliers that are not only suppliers that are risky which we do today. But what about tier two suppliers or tier three suppliers that have a potential risk in their supply chain. And as we start to accumulate lot more data we're able to do things that really no one's ever been able to do, ever. >> Lisa: Thinking back that the 12 years that you have at Coupa and the massive transformation that you've seen in every industry. All of these different disruptors. Like we talked about earlier, all of the changes that are really forcing CPO's and CFO's to become sort of those fraud detectors and those strategic thinkers. Because they can see there this isn't just about buying and sourcing. There is tremendous business potential by having that visibility where all your Spend is in one platform. That's absolutely transformational. >> What do businesses do? They spend money or they sell goods or services and we have half of that equation and we're doing it at a scale that hasn't been seen before. So yeah, the ability for us to over what we've seen over the past 12 years. Not just what's happening at a macro economic level that's a big part of it. But just in general. What's the thinking of the CPO's? What's the thinking of the CFO's? How are they starting to look at things? How are they starting to feel the empathy for their employees. The empathy for their suppliers and making business decisions. And we're now part of that conversation. We're part of that equation as these companies are looking at these things. >> And have you seen the roles of the CPO and the CFO start to change, to start embracing emerging technologies embracing AI and machine learning and understanding how that can really once they have the data and they can apply intelligence and train the machines, how much potential they have. Are they receptive now? >> Ravi: It's just a start. it's just a start. I mean, when I joined Coupa 12 years ago Salesforce is really just starting to get going with the whole SAS thing and it's been a phenomenal change. We had the opportunity of lunch with Malcolm Gladwell today as an executive team and one of the things that we talked about was Silicon Valley and what's happening in general with technology. And he put it very clear, he said we're in the first minute of the technology revolution. It's still super early and how things are moving and transforming in this world We're at the forefront today and we want to continue to be there as the world changes. >> Lisa: So lots of exciting news today you mentioned PayPal. What are some of the other things that are going to be coming out this week that are exciting to you and your customers? >> So a lot of things that are coming out for payments specifically, we're going to be announcing a number of partnerships in the morning. I'll be announcing a number of partnerships on the main stage. We're doing, as mentioned, something with PayPal. We're going to announce that Citibank has joined as a virtual card issuer on the Coupa Pay platform. They're one of the largest global issuers in the world. We're introducing TransferMate as a strategic partner for money movement. And kind of one of the more unique things is when you think about payments and when you think about our community of buyers and suppliers. It's buyers and it's suppliers. And so we want to start spending more time and more focus at least from a payment standpoint on how can we make it easier for suppliers to do business with our customers. We're also going to announce an integration with Stripe. So Stripe is one of the, the bigger Fintechs in the world One of the darling Fintech companies around. And what they're doing is because of their capabilities around the card processing standpoint. Not to get into too much the details but we can now enable a super or a higher level of efficiency for card acceptance for suppliers that hasn't been seen before through our Virtual Card capabilities. So we're really excited about these partnerships and there's a lot more to come over the next several months here. >> To borrow this from Malcolm Gladwell the fact that he thinks we're in the first minute of this technology revolution, is like oh! Shocking. But all I've heard all day today is customer centricity, supplier centricity. Ravi thank you so much, for stopping by the Cube and giving us some of your time on this very exciting day. I know day two will be, probably as action-packed. Tomorrow, but we appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. >> My pleasure >> Appreciate it. For Ravi Thakur, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from Coupa Inspire '19. Thanks for watching (upbeat music)

>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering A W s reinforce 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and its ecosystem partners. >> Well, welcome back. Everyone's Cube Live coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts, for AWS. Reinforce Amazon Web sources. First inaugural conference around security. It's not Osama. It's a branded event. Big time ecosystem developing. We have returning here. Cube Alumni Bill Jeff for VP of strategy and the partnerships that Iron Net Cyber Security Company. Welcome back. Thanks. General Keith Alexander, who was on a week and 1/2 ago. And it was public sector summit. Good to see you. Good >> to see you. Thanks for >> having my back, but I want to get into some of the Iran cyber communities. We had General Qi 1000. He was the original commander of the division. So important discussions that have around that. But don't get your take on the event. You guys, you're building a business. The minute cyber involved in public sector. This is commercial private partnership. Public relations coming together. Yeah. Your models are sharing so bringing public and private together important. >> Now that's exactly right. And it's really great to be here with eight of us were really close partner of AWS is we'll work with them our entire back in today. Runs on AWS really need opportunity. Get into the ecosystem, meet some of the folks that are working that we might work with my partner but to deliver a great product, right? And you're seeing a lot of people move to cloud, right? And so you know some of the big announcement that are happening here today. We're willing. We're looking to partner up with eight of us and be a first time provider for some key new Proactiv elves. AWS is launching in their own platform here today. So that's a really neat thing for us to be partnered up with this thing. Awesome organization. I'm doing some of >> the focus areas around reinforcing your party with Amazon shares for specifics. >> Yes. So I don't know whether they announced this capability where they're doing the announcement yesterday or today. So I forget which one so I'll leave that leave that leave that once pursued peace out. But the main thing is, they're announcing couple of new technology plays way our launch party with them on the civility place. So we're gonna be able to do what we were only wanted to do on Prem. We're gonna be able to do in the cloud with AWS in the cloud formation so that we'll deliver the same kind of guy that would deliver on prime customers inside their own cloud environments and their hybrid environment. So it's a it's a it's a sea change for us. The company, a sea change for a is delivering that new capability to their customers and really be able to defend a cloud network the way you would nonpregnant game changer >> described that value, if you would. >> Well, so you know, one of the key things about about a non pregnant where you could do you could look at all the flows coming past you. You look at all the data, look at in real time and develop behavior. Lana looks over. That's what we're doing our own prime customers today in the cloud with his world who looked a lox, right? And now, with the weight of your capability, we're gonna be able to integrate that and do a lot Maur the way we would in a in a in a normal sort of on Prem environment. So you really did love that. Really? Capability of scale >> Wagon is always killed. The predictive analytics, our visibility and what you could do. And too late. Exactly. Right. You guys solve that with this. What are some of the challenges that you see in cloud security that are different than on premise? Because that's the sea, So conversation we've been hearing. Sure, I know on premise. I didn't do it on premises for awhile. What's the difference between the challenge sets, the challenges and the opportunities they provide? >> Well, the opportunities air really neat, right? Because you've got that even they have a shared responsibility model, which is a little different than you officially have it. When it's on Prem, it's all yours essential. You own that responsibility and it is what it is in the cloud. Its share responsible to cloud provider the data holder. Right? But what's really cool about the cloud is you could deliver some really interesting Is that scale you do patch updates simultaneously, all your all your back end all your clients systems, even if depending how your provisioning cloud service is, you could deliver that update in real time. You have to worry about. I got to go to individual systems and update them, and some are updated. Summer passed. Some aren't right. Your servers are packed simultaneously. You take him down, you're bringing back up and they're ready to go, right? That's a really capability that for a sigh. So you're delivering this thing at scale. It's awesome now, So the challenge is right. It's a new environment so that you haven't dealt with before. A lot of times you feel the hybrid environment governed both an on Prem in sanitation and class sensation. Those have to talkto one another, right? And you might think about Well, how do I secure those those connections right now? And I think about spending money over here when I got all seduced to spend up here in the cloud. And that's gonna be a hard thing precisely to figure out, too. And so there are some challenges, but the great thing is, you got a whole ecosystem. Providers were one of them here in the AWS ecosystem. There are a lot here today, and you've got eight of us as a part of self who wants to make sure that they're super secure, but so are yours. Because if you have a problem in their cloud, that's a challenge. Them to market this other people. You talk about >> your story because your way interviews A couple weeks ago, you made a comment. I'm a recovering lawyer, kind of. You know, we all laughed, but you really start out in law, right? >> How did you end up here? Yeah, well, the truth is, I grew up sort of a technology or myself. My first computer is a trash 80 a trs 80 color computer. RadioShack four k of RAM on board, right. We only >> a true TRS 80. Only when I know what you're saying. That >> it was a beautiful system, right? Way stored with sword programs on cassette tapes. Right? And when we operated from four Keita 16 k way were the talk of the Rainbow Computer Club in Santa Monica, California Game changer. It was a game here for 16. Warning in with 60 give onboard. Ram. I mean, this is this is what you gonna do. And so you know, I went from that and I in >> trouble or something, you got to go to law school like you're right >> I mean, you know, look, I mean, you know it. So my dad, that was a chemist, right? So he loved computers, love science. But he also had an unrequited political boners body. He grew up in East Africa, Tanzania. It was always thought that he might be a minister in government. The Socialist came to power. They they had to leave you at the end of the day. And he came to the states and doing chemistry, which is course studies. But he still loved politics. So he raised at NPR. So when I went to college, I studied political science. But I paid my way through college doing computer support, life sciences department at the last moment. And I ran 10 based. He came on climate through ceilings and pulled network cable do punch down blocks, a little bit of fibrous placing. So, you know, I was still a murderer >> writing software in the scythe. >> One major, major air. And that was when when the web first came out and we had links. Don't you remember? That was a text based browser, right? And I remember looking to see him like this is terrible. Who would use http slash I'm going back to go for gophers. Awesome. Well, turns out I was totally wrong about Mosaic and Netscape. After that, it was It was it was all hands on >> deck. You got a great career. Been involved a lot in the confluence of policy politics and tech, which is actually perfect skill set for the challenge we're dealing. So I gotta ask you, what are some of the most important conversations that should be on the table right now? Because there's been a lot of conversations going on around from this technology. I has been around for many decades. This has been a policy problem. It's been a societal problem. But now this really focus on acute focus on a lot of key things. What are some of the most important things that you think should be on the table for techies? For policymakers, for business people, for lawmakers? >> One. I think we've got to figure out how to get really technology knowledge into the hands of policymakers. Right. You see, you watch the Facebook hearings on Capitol Hill. I mean, it was a joke. It was concerning right? I mean, anybody with a technology background to be concerned about what they saw there, and it's not the lawmakers fault. I mean, you know, we've got to empower them with that. And so we got to take technologist, threw it out, how to get them to talk policy and get them up on the hill and in the administration talking to folks, right? And one of the big outcomes, I think, has to come out of that conversation. What do we do about national level cybersecurity, Right, because we assume today that it's the rule. The private sector provides cyber security for their own companies, but in no other circumstance to expect that when it's a nation state attacker, wait. We don't expect Target or Wal Mart or any other company. J. P. Morgan have surface to air missiles on the roofs of their warehouses or their buildings to Vegas Russian bear bombers. Why, that's the job of the government. But when it comes to cyberspace, we expect Private Cummings defending us everything from a script kiddie in his basement to the criminal hacker in Eastern Europe to the nation state, whether Russia, China, Iran or North Korea and these nation states have virtually a limited resource. Your armies did >> sophisticated RND technology, and it's powerful exactly like a nuclear weaponry kind of impact for digital. >> Exactly. And how can we expect prices comes to defend themselves? It's not. It's not a fair fight. And so the government has to have some role. The questions? What role? How did that consist with our values, our principles, right? And how do we ensure that the Internet remains free and open, while still is sure that the president is not is not hampered in doing its job out there. And I love this top way talk about >> a lot, sometimes the future of warfare. Yeah, and that's really what we're talking about. You go back to Stuxnet, which opened Pandora's box 2016 election hack where you had, you know, the Russians trying to control the mean control, the narrative. As you pointed out, that that one video we did control the belief system you control population without firing a shot. 20 twenties gonna be really interesting. And now you see the U. S. Retaliate to Iran in cyberspace, right? Allegedly. And I was saying that we had a conversation with Robert Gates a couple years ago and I asked him. I said, Should we be Maur taking more of an offensive posture? And he said, Well, we have more to lose than the other guys Glasshouse problem? Yeah, What are your thoughts on? >> Look, certainly we rely intimately, inherently on the cyber infrastructure that that sort of is at the core of our economy at the core of the world economy. Increasingly, today, that being said, because it's so important to us all the more reason why we can't let attacks go Unresponded to write. And so if you're being attacked in cyberspace, you have to respond at some level because if you don't, you'll just keep getting punched. It's like the kid on the playground, right? If the bully keeps punching him and nobody does anything, not not the not the school administration, not the kid himself. Well, then the boy's gonna keep doing what he's doing. And so it's not surprising that were being tested by Iran by North Korea, by Russia by China, and they're getting more more aggressive because when we don't punch back, that's gonna happen. Now we don't have to punch back in cyberspace, right? A common sort of fetish about Cyrus is a >> response to the issue is gonna respond to the bully in this case, your eggs. Exactly. Playground Exactly. We'll talk about the Iran. >> So So if I If I if I can't Yeah, the response could be Hey, we could do this. Let them know you could Yes. And it's a your move >> ate well, And this is the key is that it's not just responding, right. So Bob Gates or told you we can't we talk about what we're doing. And even in the latest series of alleged responses to Iran, the reason we keep saying alleged is the U. S has not publicly acknowledged it, but the word has gotten out. Well, of course, it's not a particularly effective deterrence if you do something, but nobody knows you did it right. You gotta let it out that you did it. And frankly, you gotta own it and say, Hey, look, that guy punch me, I punch it back in the teeth. So you better not come after me, right? We don't do that in part because these cables grew up in the intelligence community at N S. A and the like, and we're very sensitive about that But the truth is, you have to know about your highest and capabilities. You could talk about your abilities. You could say, Here are my red lines. If you cross him, I'm gonna punch you back. If you do that, then by the way, you've gotta punch back. They'll let red lines be crossed and then not respond. And then you're gonna talk about some level of capabilities. It can't all be secret. Can't all be classified. Where >> are we in this debate? Me first. Well, you're referring to the Thursday online attack against the intelligence Iranian intelligence community for the tanker and the drone strike that they got together. Drone take down for an arm in our surveillance drones. >> But where are we >> in this debate of having this conversation where the government should protect and serve its people? And that's the role. Because if a army rolled in fiscal army dropped on the shores of Manhattan, I don't think Citibank would be sending their people out the fight. Right? Right. So, like, this is really happening. >> Where are we >> on this? Like, is it just sitting there on the >> table? What's happening? What's amazing about it? Hi. This was getting it going well, that that's a Q. What's been amazing? It's been happening since 2012 2011 right? We know about the Las Vegas Sands attack right by Iran. We know about North Korea's. We know about all these. They're going on here in the United States against private sector companies, not against the government. And there's largely been no response. Now we've seen Congress get more active. Congress just last year passed to pass legislation that gave Cyber command the authority on the president's surgery defenses orders to take action against Russia, Iran, North Korea and China. If certain cyber has happened, that's a good thing, right to give it. I'll be giving the clear authority right, and it appears the president willing to make some steps in that direction, So that's a positive step. Now, on the back end, though, you talk about what we do to harden ourselves, if that's gonna happen, right, and the government isn't ready today to defend the nation, even though the Constitution is about providing for the common defense, and we know that the part of defense for long. For a long time since Secretary Panetta has said that it is our mission to defend the nation, right? But we know they're not fully doing that. How do they empower private sector defense and one of keys That has got to be Look, if you're the intelligence community or the U. S. Government, you're Clinton. Tremendous sense of Dad about what you're seeing in foreign space about what the enemy is doing, what they're preparing for. You have got to share that in real time at machine speed with industry. And if you're not doing that and you're still count on industry to be the first line defense, well, then you're not empowered. That defense. And if you're on a pair of the defense, how do you spend them to defend themselves against the nation? State threats? That's a real cry. So >> much tighter public private relationship. >> Absolutely, absolutely. And it doesn't have to be the government stand in the front lines of the U. S. Internet is, though, is that you could even determine the boundaries of the U. S. Internet. Right? Nobody wants an essay or something out there doing that, but you do want is if you're gonna put the private sector in the in the line of first defense. We gotta empower that defense if you're not doing that than the government isn't doing its job. And so we gonna talk about this for a long time. I worked on that first piece of information sharing legislation with the House chairman, intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger from Maryland, right congressman from both sides of the aisle, working together to get a fresh your decision done that got done in 2015. But that's just a first step. The government's got to be willing to share classified information, scaled speed. We're still not seeing that. Yeah, How >> do people get involved? I mean, like, I'm not a political person. I'm a moderate in the middle. But >> how do I How do people get involved? How does the technology industry not not the >> policy budgets and the top that goes on the top tech companies, how to tech workers or people who love Tad and our patriots and or want freedom get involved? What's the best approach? >> Well, that's a great question. I think part of is learning how to talk policy. How do we get in front policymakers? Right. And we're I run. I run a think tank on the side at the National Institute at George Mason University's Anton Scalia Law School Way have a program funded by the Hewlett Foundation who were bringing in technologists about 25 of them. Actually. Our next our second event. This Siri's is gonna be in Chicago this weekend. We're trained these technologies, these air data scientists, engineers and, like talk Paul's right. These are people who said We want to be involved. We just don't know how to get involved And so we're training him up. That's a small program. There's a great program called Tech Congress, also funded by the U. A. Foundation that places technologists in policy positions in Congress. That's really cool. There's a lot of work going on, but those are small things, right. We need to do this, its scale. And so you know, what I would say is that their technology out there want to get involved, reach out to us, let us know well with our partners to help you get your information and dad about what's going on. Get your voice heard there. A lot of organizations to that wanna get technologies involved. That's another opportunity to get in. Get in the building is a >> story that we want to help tell on be involved in David. I feel passion about this. Is a date a problem? So there's some real tech goodness in there. Absolutely. People like to solve hard problems, right? I mean, we got a couple days of them. You've got a big heart problems. It's also for all the people out there who are Dev Ops Cloud people who like to work on solving heart problems. >> We got a lot >> of them. Let's do it. So what's going on? Iron? Give us the update Could plug for the company. Keith Alexander found a great guy great guests having on the Cube. That would give the quick thanks >> so much. So, you know, way have done two rounds of funding about 110,000,000. All in so excited. We have partners like Kleiner Perkins Forge point C five all supporting us. And now it's all about We just got a new co CEO in Bill Welshman. See Scaler and duo. So he grew Z scaler. $1,000,000,000 valuation he came in to do Oh, you know, they always had a great great exit. Also, we got him. We got Sean Foster in from from From Industry also. So Bill and Sean came together. We're now making this business move more rapidly. We're moving to the mid market. We're moving to a cloud platform or aggressively and so exciting times and iron it. We're coming toe big and small companies near you. We've got the capability. We're bringing advanced, persistent defense to bear on his heart problems that were threat analytics. I collected defence. That's the key to our operation. We're excited >> to doing it. I call N S A is a service, but that's not politically correct. But this is the Cube, so >> Well, look, if you're not, if you want to defensive scale, right, you want to do that. You know, ECE knows how to do that key down here at the forefront of that when he was in >> the government. Well, you guys are certainly on the cutting edge, riding that wave of common societal change technology impact for good, for defence, for just betterment, not make making a quick buck. Well, you know, look, it's a good business model by the way to be in that business. >> I mean, It's on our business cards. And John Xander means it. Our business. I'd say the Michigan T knows that he really means that, right? Rather private sector. We're looking to help companies to do the right thing and protect the nation, right? You know, I protect themselves >> better. Well, our missions to turn the lights on. Get those voices out there. Thanks for coming on. Sharing the lights. Keep covers here. Day one of two days of coverage. Eight of us reinforce here in Boston. Stay with us for more Day one after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco it's theCUBE. Covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Pure Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We're here in San Francisco at the really cool historic Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. We've been here all day talking with lots of great folks, and we're happy to welcome back another Pure customer, Patrick Welch, the network services manager for the Mississippi Department of Revenue. Welcome Patrick. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Tell us a little bit about the Department of Revenue. What do you guys do? What kind of information do you collect? >> Okay, we bring in all tax revenue for the state of Mississippi, including vehicle services. We register all the car tags in Mississippi. Income tax, corporate tax, any revenue that's generated in Mississippi comes through us. >> Tax refunds too? Or do you just take, you give? >> We take and give. I have to do it too. (laughing) >> So talk to us about some of the challenges that you had in your environment. I was reading your case study and what you guys are taking in is totalling $7.8 billion a year. As we just identified, some of it's being given back, but what were some of the, what was the infrastructure like to support that before you became a Pure Storage customer? >> We used an internal Mississippi, they're called ITS, they handle all internal infrastructure, that kind of thing. They were using a mixture of Dell, EMC, Compel that type of thing. We use a third party vendor who has an office shelf software package. And they have about 50 to 60 customers in different states and municipalities and countries around the world. In that environment of Dell, EMC, Compel we were about 47th on their list of productive sites. So we were way far down. We were not performing, latency across the board was horrible. The user experience was the worst. If you've ever been on a website and click the button and seen the spinning wheel, we had that in droves. And not just tax payers, but our internal people that worked DOR were not able to work efficiently. We came in and evaluated, and I looked at the infrastructure, and I said my team can do it better. Then when they said, we'll do it better I was like okay now I have to go out and actually do it better. I started researching other companies, and Pure kind of rose to the top of the list. We talked with other customers and partners, kind of how they tackle those type of challenges. We went through a lot of POC process talked with a lot of vendors, things like that. We ended up buying Pure. We are now number three. We went from almost 50 to three. Out of 50, to three. The only two sites that are ahead of us are smaller sites, their transactions aren't nearly as high as ours. >> Okay hang on, how much of that effect could be attributed to the storage infrastructure? Do you have a sense of that? >> 99% >> Really? >> Yeah because before we had, to be fair Pure is all-flash storage, right? And with Compel and EMC or hybrid arrays, at the end of the day, the latency that we saw was due to read and write input being very low. We implemented Pure, through the roof. Storage is not something we would ever look at if we had a problem. We know that that is performing well above capacity. >> Okay I got another follow up. I asked this earlier to another customer, so you're basically comparing an all-flash array to a sort of previous generation hybrid. So it could have been three, four, five, six years old, it could have been 10 years old, so, you had the option obviously of bringing in an all-flash array from the competition. >> We did. >> And you had processes and procedures tied to that, your data protection and you know those products well, but you chose to switch vendors. Why, you could have gotten comparable all-flash, but you chose Pure. Why did you choose that switch and that disruption? What business benefit did that bring you? >> There were several things that led to that. One of the things that we really liked was the proactive support, in terms of every three years they swap out your controller as part of your support and maintenance agreement. Which is huge for us because we don't have a lot of money, our budget is very small for IT, so I can't afford to replace equipment as often as some people can. Their proactive support model, not just in terms of swapping out equipment, but personnel, our sales team that we deal with, our engineering team that we deal with, we're on a personal basis with these people. I have cellphone numbers, I know who to call. We found that out through talking to other customers that, hey you call these guys, they're going to be there for you. Coming from not having that before, we knew that the people we had before, were not going to perform that same level of service. Even if we went to their all-flash product, we were going to have the same support, that we had had before, which was not good. >> And you didn't have that previously because, why? You weren't like a big bank or you just didn't spend enough? >> Because you're a number and in our business, we didn't spend near enough money to be considered. That's a theory of mine, I'm not sure exactly what the actual issue was, but it felt like we were not big enough to get that kind of attention. >> You're the little guy. Pure makes you feel like you're the big guy. >> We think we're doing okay. We have six arrays now, so were not tiny tiny, but we're not also we're not Citibank. But I've never felt any different than a Citibank type customer with Pure Accelerate. >> You're in two years you said? >> A little over two years, yeah. >> You've had enough experience to, you know when you first buy something, you go on Amazon you see the reviews this is great, you wonder if it's still great two years in. >> Patrick: Oh absolutely. >> You would still give a five star rating? >> Oh absolutely, I've done a case study, customers call me and I'm happy to talk about Pure to anybody. I have a lot of friends in state government, I try to head them off from making bad decisions. I'm like if you like your job, you want to keep your job, buy this. >> It's interesting to me, now one of the things that the customers tell us is they love a lot about Pure, but they really like the simplicity. You mentioned Compellent before, Compellent, in its day, was known for simplicity, compared to the old main frame storage. It's interesting to note how technology has changed in whatever 10, 12 years, comments? >> Yeah Compellent was a great product. Back in the day when it came time to evaluate products, they had not performed along the same track as a company like Pure, which consistently innovates its products. If this is again about feeling like the big guy, even though you're a small guy, they keep us in the loop of what they're bringing down the pipe, and it really makes us feel like we're invested in that ecosystem, and we know exactly how they're transforming, how they're going to develop their business going forward. It helps keep us as a happy partner. >> So it's, from what I'm hearing, Patrick, better experience all around, very happy. Did it save you any time? Are you able to now do things differently, add more value to your organization as a result of bringing in Pure? I wonder if you can talk about that. >> Oh absolutely, we spent a good chunk of time troubleshooting issues directly related to storage before whether it was storage creep where we had too much data versus the capacity of the array, or the input output problems in terms of IO, latency those types of issues. We don't see any of that anymore. So that frees our engineers up to work on other problems in the environment. >> What workloads are you running on Flashdeck? >> Mostly production sequel, high sequel workloads mostly. >> You mentioned the dreaded spinning color wheel or whatever kind of computer we're running, and that was affecting not just employees, but also Mississippi citizens. Problem gone? >> The problem is gone from the aspect of our side of things, now this is Mississippi so you still got a lot of rural customers who are still on some dial up internet, so we can't solve that problem for them, but in terms of our side of the fence, we know they're not going to see any latency because of us. We're delivering the application as best you can. Like I said, we're number three in the list of their sites, and we came 44 spots down. >> How quickly in the last couple of years alone? >> Patrick: Immediately, yeah. >> You have to wear a neck brace from the whiplash. >> Yeah we put it in and I'm just crossing my fingers, 'cause if I told them I could do this, and we're 45th, what did we really solve? We didn't solve the problem really, but we came from that high up to all the way down to three, it like felt my team had accomplished something really great. >> And pretty dramatic improvements to your database. I was reading the case study, within the context of your IT transformation, that you improved database transaction performance by as much as 20X. Big, also data reduction rates. So I want to get your perspective on the impact of TCO, and why that's so important for a public agency. >> A lot of things go into TCO. I think user experience is one of those things, downtime for the state. The biggest cost we had was not really something you could see before because our system went down all the time due to not being able to meet the requirements of the taxpayers and the people that work at the Department of Revenue. We don't have that problem anymore. We would spend days of downtime before, that's revenue lost for us. So TCO in that instance is kind of hard to calculate, but I know that the number is big. I know we've saved a lot of time and money. >> Why not just forget all this IT stuff, and throw everything into the cloud. I know as an IT pro, them might be fighting words, but it's talked about in the industry all the time. Why the decision to stay on Pram, and was that discussed? >> We definitely look at the cloud, we definitely have Azure workloads that are in testing right now. Unfortunately it's not just as simple as us saying okay let's go to the cloud, 'cause if it was up to me, with limited funding and that type of thing, I would love to move workloads into the cloud. Where it was applicable. The problem for us is IRS. We have a lot of IRS regulations around cloud. So the core infrastructure that we have, has to remain on premise. There's some things that we can do, but the regulations are a mile long. So we have to make sure that we always stay in compliance with the IRS. That limits our mobility a little bit in the cloud, but we're getting there slowly but surely. I feel like in the next 60 years we'll be there. I joke, but everything we do, we have to go through compliance measures, and we have to make sure we're checking all the boxes. There's one thing you don't want to have, and that's the IRS to write you up for non-compliance. If you're attacked or hit by some vector afterwards, then you're on the hook. You weren't in compliance that's why you were vulnerable. We just have to be very careful, but we're definitely interested. And we'll look into the future with the cloud. >> A lot of talk at this show every show we go to about artificial intelligence, machine intelligence. What do you make of it? How does it apply to your organization? Can you use it? Do you plan on using machine intelligence, whether it's fraud detection or tax evasion, et cetera? What's the state of AI in your world? >> I'd say infancy, but we know that due to the fact that the state hasn't kept up in terms of pay and that type of thing with the private industry. We're going to have to rely on artificial intelligence and automation and things like that to remain ahead of the curve in terms of compliance, performance all the metrics we've talked about. You have to have either a very talented and well paid staff or you're going to have to leverage these types of technologies to stay ahead of the game. >> So you have made some big impacts from an IT transformation perspective we talked about a minute ago. Where are you on this journey of digital transformation? What does that digital transformation mean to the Mississippi Department of Revenue? And what stage would you say you're at? >> We're getting there. Like I said before some of Mississippi is still very rural, for the first time ever, we had more online returns processed than mail. Believe it or not, Mississippians still like to mail their returns in. A lot of that is rural location, internet access that type of thing. We're getting there slowly but surely. I feel like in the next five years, we'll be probably 75% to 80% online refund based. I hope anyway, I hope we're still not at 50%. It's a slow crawl, but we're getting there. We do things a little slower than most people, but we get there eventually. >> You're friendlier down in Mississippi. >> We are definitely, you got to have something. >> You do, so in terms of next steps, you've solved the performance challenges, you're kind of on this road to digital transformation. How have you improved the efficiency of your IT team? >> Say that one more time. >> How have you improved the efficiency within network services? >> I think most of it comes down to not having to worry about the equipment and the environment. We have more time to focus on each other, the tasks we have in front of us. Before it was tackling issues that we knew were related to either vendor or product or storage or server. And now we're focused on expanding the skill set of the current staff. It allows us to leverage things like cloud and automation. We didn't have time to look at that stuff before. So when you ask me where we at with automation, we're still in the infancy because before all we did was fight issues related to previous vendors, previous products, that kind of thing. And this, while it's not a magic bullet, we still have, you're always going to have challenges it frees us up to be able to work on those types of-- >> Dave: Close to firefighting and whack-a-mole. >> That's all we did before. This guy is fighting this problem, he's fighting this one, then they don't get time to learn and grow as employees and as people. >> So automation is big priority, what kind of other fun projects you working on? Or techs that you're researching that get you excited? >> So right now we've deployed both of our major applications using Pure. Our big projects are kind of done. Now we're leveraging towards disaster recovery, modern day DR, BCDR, business continuity that type of thing. How do we recover in case of a disaster? That's kind of where my focus lays right now, to make sure the Department of Revenue, if we are affected by some type of disaster, that we're ready for the taxpayers of Mississippi to come up and running in a sister site and be ready to go. >> Okay that's a combination of infrastructure, probably going to use snapshots, remote replication, but there's also got to be a software component as well. What are you thinking about whether if you don't have a specific vendor product, but just architecturally what are you thinking about? >> So we absolutely right now leverage Zerto with Pure. Which is a very good combination, they work very well together and we have a co-low facility, it's about 200 miles north of us. We'd like to get more geographically diverse as budget frees up and that kind of thing, maybe move out into the Colorados or something like that. But our sister site, all of our data is replicated using Zerto. We're on, I believe, every 15 seconds we're tracking journal history. In the event of a disaster, and we've test fail overs. 'Cause you've got RPO and RTO. Real time objective and recovery point objective. It's important for us to be under 10 minutes, in terms of how quickly we can recover the environment. It's a real time objective. The last time we did a test fail over, we were about four minutes. So our business has completely transformed. Before if we had a disaster, we would be lucky to have data available to us number one and within three to five days. Now we are being able to turn around and operate in another location within minutes. >> And your RPO you said was 15 minutes, did I hear that right? >> Recovery point objectives, that is 15 seconds. Recovery points are every 15 seconds. Our recovery times, the total time it takes us to come back up and running, we hope to be under 10 and we got it around four. Now that depends on a lot of different things. Every situation is not the same. >> Very tight RPO. >> Patrick: Oh yeah, absolutely. >> 'Cause you're moving money, I guess. >> We're moving money. And it's very important that we stay up at all times. Obviously there is going to be a little bit of downtime, but we want to minimize that as much as we can. >> Patrick last question before we wrap here, this is your first time at Pure Storage Accelerate. A whole bunch of announcements this morning, anything that you've heard that excites you for expanding this foundation that you have with Flashtech? >> A lot of the stuff we talked about around automation and that kind of thing. We're definitely interested in how Pure is going to evolve to the cloud because we know you all we be ahead of us I say you all, so you all will be ahead of us whenever we do get ready, and that's another big benefit for us. We know that when we get ready to transition to the cloud, you guys are going to have your ducks in a row, and be ready for us to do that. >> You all as in Pure? We all aren't Pure. >> You know what I meant. >> We're the blue guys. >> It's real exciting to hear about automation, And where they're going with the cloud, and storage as a service and that type of thing is very neat. I love reading about and hearing about that stuff, we can't always be there like I said because of compliance issues, but as we can, we will if it makes sense for us. >> How important is it to you, I was asking a couple of the Pure execs what their thoughts were on staying independent. You see a lot of storage companies get bought, they get consolidated. EMC, 20 plus billion they got acquired. How important is it to you as a customer to have a company like Pure be an independent storage company? >> I mean, it's enormous. I can give you an example. We were a SimpliVity customer so HP bought SimpliVity, our experience before the merger, fantastic. We would give them very high marks in every category. After the merger, not so much. Support dropped off for us after SimpliVity was bought by HP. For us it's huge that Pure is, now that's not to say, we know that this is a business, and that things may happen, but we hope that if they don't stay independent, somebody that has the same level of focus and effort and determination and support keeps that going. >> We hope so too, we love the competition on theCUBE. We love the growth that drives innovation. Pure seems to be leading the way. We talked about this earlier, what they're doing with NVME a lot of good marketing, but still they're throwing down the gauntlet. What they've done with Evergreen. Obviously first with AllFlash or at least early on with AllFlash, so got a leader. >> That's what you worry about too, the Evergreen type things are the things you worry about going away. If they get bought by somebody, is that the first casualty? That's the kind of things that happen to companies when they get bought. We do love the fact that they are independent, but we know it's a business at the end of the day. But hopefully that remains the same. >> Keep that feedback coming, I'm sure they appreciate that. And Patrick thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing the impact that you guys are making at the Mississippi Department of Revenue. >> Sure, thanks for having me, appreciate it. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante from Pure Accelerate 2018. Stick around we'll be right back with our next guest.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from San Jose, it's theCUBE presenting Big Data Silicon Valley brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partner. >> What am I going to spend time, next 15, 20 minutes or so, talking about. I'm going to answer three things. Our research has gone deep into where are we now in the big data community. I'm sorry, where is the big data community going, number one. Number two is how are we going to get there and number three, what do the numbers say about where we are? So those are the three things. Now, since when we want to get out of here, I'm going to fly through some of these slides but again there's a lot of opportunity for additional conversation because we're all about having conversations with the community. So let's start here. The first thing to know, when we think about where this is all going is it has to be bound. It's inextricably bound up with digital transformation. Well, what is digital transformation? We've done a lot of research on this. This is Peter Drucker who famously said many years ago, that the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. That's what a business is. Now what's the difference between a business and a digital business? What's the business between Sears Roebuck, or what's the difference between Sears Roebuck and Amazon? It's data. A digital business uses data as an asset to create and keep customers. It infuses data and operations differently to create more automation. It infuses data and engagement differently to catalyze superior customer experiences. It reformats and restructures its concept of value proposition and product to move from a product to a services orientation. The role of data is the centerpiece of digital business transformation and in many respects that is where we're going, is an understanding and appreciation of that. Now, we think there's going to be a number of strategic capabilities that will have to be built out to make that possible. First off, we have to start thinking about what it means to put data to work. The whole notion of an asset is an asset is something that can be applied to a productive activity. Data can be applied to a productive activity. Now, there's a lot of very interesting implications that we won't get into now, but essentially if we're going to treat data as an asset and think about how we could put more data to work, we're going to focus on three core strategic capabilities about how to make that possible. One, we need to build a capability for collecting and capturing data. That's a lot of what IoT is about. It's a lot of what mobile computing is about. There's going to be a lot of implications around how to ethically and properly do some of those things but a lot of that investment is about finding better and superior ways to capture data. Two, once we are able to capture that data, we have to turn it into value. That in many respects is the essence of big data. How we turn data into data assets, in the form of models, in the form of insights, in the form of any number of other approaches to thinking about how we're going to appropriate value out of data. But it's not just enough to create value out of it and have it sit there as potential value. We have to turn it into kinetic value, to actually do the work with it and that is the last piece. We have to build new capabilities for how we're going to apply data to perform work better, to enact based on data. Now, we've got a concept we're researching now that we call systems of agency, which is the idea that there's going to be a lot of new approaches, new systems with a lot of intelligence and a lot of data that act on behalf of the brand. I'm not going to spend a lot of time going into this but remember that word because I will come back to it. Systems of agency is about how you're going to apply data to perform work with automation, augmentation, and actuation on behalf of your brand. Now, all this is going to happen against the backdrop of cloud optimization. I'll explain what we mean by that right now. Very importantly, increasingly how you create value out of data, how you create future options on the value of your data is going to drive your technology choices. For the first 10 years of the cloud, the presumption is all data was going to go to the cloud. We think that a better way of thinking about it is how is the cloud experience going to come to the data. We've done a lot of research on the cost of data movement and both in terms of the actual out-of-pocket costs but also the potential uncertainty, the transaction costs, etc, associated with data movement. And that's going to be one of the fundamental pieces or elements of how we think about the future of big data and how digital business works, is what we think about data movement. I'll come to that in a bit. But our proposition is increasingly, we're going to see architectural approaches that focus on how we're going to move the cloud experience to the data. We've got this notion of true private cloud which is effectively the idea of the cloud experience on or near premise. That doesn't diminish the role that the cloud's going to play on industry or doesn't say that Amazon and AWS and Microsoft Azure and all the other options are not important. They're crucially important but it means we have to start thinking architecturally about how we're going to create value of data out of data and recognize that means that it, we have to start envisioning how our organization and infrastructure is going to be set up so that we can use data where it needs to be or where it's most valuable and often that's close to the action. So if we think then about that very quickly because it's a backdrop for everything, increasingly we're going to start talking about the idea of where's the workload going to go? Where's workload the dog going to be against this kind of backdrop of the divorce of infrastructure? We believe that and our research pretty strongly shows that a lot of workloads are going to go to true private cloud but a lot of big data is moving into the cloud. This is a prediction we made a few years ago and it's clearly happening and it's underway and we'll get into what some of the implications are. So again, when we say that a lot of the big data elements, a lot of the process of creating value out of data is going to move into the cloud. That doesn't mean that all the systems of agency that build or rely on that data, the inference engines, etc, are also in a public cloud. A lot of them are going to be distributed out to the edge, out to where the action needs to be because of latency and other types of issues. This is a fundamental proposition and I know I'm going fast but hopefully I'm being clear. All right, so let's now get to the second part. This is kind of where the industry's going. Data is an asset. Invest in strategic business capabilities to appreciate, to create those data assets and appreciate the value of those assets and utilize the cloud intelligently to generate and ensure increasing returns. So the next question is well, how will we get there? Now. Right now, not too far from here, Neil Raden for example, was on the show floor yesterday. Neil made the observation that, as he wandered around, he only heard the word big data two or three times. The concept of big data is not dead. Whether the term is or is not is somebody else's decision. Our perspective, very simply, is that the notion is bifurcating. And it's bifurcating because we see different strategic imperatives happening at two different levels. On the one hand, we see infrastructure convergence. The idea that increasingly we have to think about how we're going to bring and federated data together, both from a systems and a data management standpoint. And on the other hand, we're going to see infrastructure or application specialization. That's going to have an enormous implication over next few years, if only because there just aren't enough people in the world that understand how to create value out of data. And there's going to be a lot of effort made over the next few years to find new ways to go from that one expertise group to billions of people, billions of devices, and those are the two dominant considerations in the industry right now. How can we converge data physically, logically, and on the other hand, how can we liberate more of the smarts associated with this very, very powerful approach so that more people get access to the capacities and the capabilities and the assets that are being generated by that process. Now, we've done at Wikibon, probably I don't know, 18, 20, 23 predictions overall on the role that or on the changes being wrought by digital business. Here I'm going to focus on four of them that are central to our big data research. We have many more but I'm just going to focus on four. The first one, when we think about infrastructure convergence we worry about hardware. Here's a prediction about what we think is going to happen with hardware and our observation is we believe pretty strongly that future systems are going to be built on the concept of how do you increase the value of data assets. The technologies are all in place. Simpler parts that it more successfully bind specifically through all its storage and network are going to play together. Why, because increasingly that's the fundamental constraint. How do I make data available to other machines, actors, sources of change, sources of process within the business. Now, we envision or we are watching before our very eyes, new technologies that allow us to take these simple piece parts and weave them together in very powerful fabrics or grids, what we call UniGrid. So that there is almost no latency between data that exists within one of these, call it a molecule, and anywhere else in that grid or lattice. Now again, these are not systems that are going to be here in five years. All the piece parts are here today and there are companies that are actually delivering them. So if you take a look at what Micron has done with Mellanox and other players, that's an example of one of these true private cloud oriented machines in place. The bottom line though is that there is a lot of room left in hardware. A lot of room. This is what cloud suppliers are building and are going to build but increasingly as we think about true private cloud, enterprises are going to look at this as well. So future systems for improving data assets. The capacity of this type of a system with low latency amongst any source of data means that we can now think about data not as... Not as a set of sources that have to be each individually, each having some control over its own data and sinks woven together by middleware and applications but literally as networks of data. As we start to think about distributing data and distributing control and authority associated with that data more broadly across systems, we now have to think about what does it mean to create networks of data? Because that, in many respects, is how these assets are going to be forged. I haven't even mentioned the role that security is going to play in all of this by the way but fundamentally that's how it's likely to play out. We'll have a lot of different sources but from a business standpoint, we're going to think about how those sources come together into a persistent network that can be acted upon by the business. One of the primary drivers of this is what's going on at the edge. Marc Andreessen famously said that software is eating the world, well our observation is great but if software's eating the world, it's eating it at the edge. That's where it's happening. Secondly, that this notion of agency zones. I said I'm going to bring that word up again, how systems act on behalf of a brand or act on behalf of an institution or business is very, very crucial because the time necessary to do the analysis, perform the intelligence, and then take action is a real constraint on how we do things. And our expectation is that we're going to see what we call an agency zone or a hub zone or cloud zone defined by latency and how we architect data to get the data that's necessary to perform that piece of work into the zone where it's required. Now, the implications of this is none of this is going to happen if we don't use AI and related technologies to increasingly automate how we handle infrastructure. And technologies like blockchain have the potential to provide a interesting way of imagining how these networks of data actually get structured. It's not going to solve everything. There's some people that think the blockchain is kind of everything that's necessary but it will be a way of describing a network of data. So we see those technologies on the ascension. But what does it mean for DBMS? In the old way, in the old world, the old way of thinking, the database manager was the control point for data. In the new world these networks of data are going to exist beyond a single DBMS and in fact, over time, that concept of federated data actually has a potential to become real. When we have these networks of data, we're going to need people to act upon them and that's essentially a lot of what the data scientist is going to be doing. Identifying the outcome, identifying the data that's required, and weaving that data through the construction and management, manipulation of pipelines, to ensure that the data as an asset can persist for the purposes of solving a near-term problem or over whatever duration is required to solve a longer term problem. Data scientists remain very important but we're going to see, as a consequence of improvements in tooling capable of doing these things, an increasing recognition that there's a difference between a data scientist and a data scientist. There's going to be a lot of folks that participate in the process of manipulating, maintaining, managing these networks of data to create these business outcomes but we're going to see specialization in those ranks as the tooling is more targeted to specific types of activities. So the data scientist is going to become or will remain an important job, going to lose a little bit of its luster because it's going to become clear what it means. So some data scientists will probably become more, let's call them data network administrators or networks of data administrators. And very importantly as I said earlier, there's just not enough of these people on the planet and so increasingly when we think about again, digital business and the idea of creating data assets. A central challenge is going to be how to create the data or how to turn all the data that can be captured into assets that can be applied to a lot of different uses. There's going to be two fundamental changes to the way we are currently conceiving of the big data world on the horizon. One is well, it's pretty clear that Hadoop can only go so far. Hadoop is a great tool for certain types of activities and certain numbers of individuals. So Hadoop solves problems for an important but relatively limited subset of the world. Some of the new data science platforms that we just talked about, that I just talked about, they're going to help with a degree of specialization that hasn't been available before in the data world, will certainly also help but it also will only take it so far. The real way that we see the work that we're doing, the work that the big data community is performing, turned into sources of value that extend into virtually every single corner of humankind is going to be through these cloud services that are being built and increasingly through packaged applications. A lot of computer science, it still exists between what I just said and when this actually happens. But in many respects, that's the challenge of the vendor ecosystem. How to reconstruct the idea of packaged software, which has historically been built around operations and transaction processing, with a known data model and an unknown or the known process and some technology challenges. How do we reapply that to a world where we now are thinking about, well we don't know exactly what the process is because the data tells us at the moment that the actions going to be taking place. It's a very different way of thinking about application development. A very different way of thinking about what's important in IT and very different way of thinking about how business is going to be constructed and how strategy's going to be established. Packaged applications are going to be crucially important. So in the last few minutes here, what are the numbers? So this is kind of the basis for our analysis. Digital business, role of data is an asset, having an enormous impact in how we think about hardware, how do we think about database management or data management, how we think about the people involved in this, and ultimately how we think about how we're going to deliver all this value out to the world. And the numbers are starting to reflect that. So why don't you think about four numbers as I go through the two or three slides. Hundred and three billion, 68%, 11%, and 2017. So of all the numbers that you will see, those are four of the most important numbers. So let's start by looking at the total market place. This is the growth of the hardware, software, and services pieces of the big data universe. Now we have a fair amount of additional research that breaks all these down into tighter segments, especially in software side. But the key number here is we're talking about big numbers. 103 billion over the course of next 10 years and let's be clear that 103 billion dollars actually has a dramatic amplification on the rest of the computing industry because a lot of the pricing models associated with, especially the software, are tied back to open source which has its own issues. And very importantly, the fact that the services business is going to go through an enormous amount of change over the next five years as service companies better understand how to deliver some of these big data rich applications. The second point to note here is that it was in 2017 that the software market surpassed the hardware market in big data. Again, for first number of years we focused on buying the hardware and the system software associated with that and the software became something that we hope to discover. So I was having a conversation here in theCUBE with the CEO of Transwarp which is a very interesting Chinese big data company and I asked what's the difference between how you do things in China and how we do things in the US? He said well, in the US you guys focus on proof of concept. You spend an enormous amount of time asking, does the hardware work? Does the database software work? Does the data management software work? In China we focus on the outcome. That's what we focus on. Here you have to placate the IT organization to make sure that everybody in IT is comfortable with what's about to happen. In China, were focused on the business people. This is the first year that software is bigger than hardware and it's only going to get bigger and bigger over time. It doesn't mean again, that hardware is dead or hardware is not important. It's going to remain very important but it does mean that the centerpiece of the locus of the industry is moving. Now, when we think about what the market shares look like, it's a very fragmented market. 60%, 68% of the market is still other. This is a highly immature market that's going to go through a number of changes over the next few years. Partly catalyzed by that notion of infrastructure convergence. So in four years our expectation is that, that 68% is going to start going down pretty fast as we see greater consolidation in how some of these numbers come together. Now IBM is the biggest one on the basis of the fact that they operate in all these different segments. They operating the hardware, software, and services segment but especially because they're very strong within the services business. The last one I want to point your attention to is this one. I mentioned earlier on, that our expectation is that the market increasingly is going to move to a packaged application orientation or packaged services orientation as a way of delivering expertise about big data to customers. Splunk is the leading software player right now. Why, because that's the perspective that they've taken. Now, perhaps we're a limited subset. It's perhaps for a limited subset of individuals or markets or of sectors but it takes a packaged application, weaves these technologies together, and applies them to an outcome. And we think this presages more of that kind of activity over the course of the next few years. Oracle, kind of different approach and we'll see how that plays out over the course of the next five years as well. Okay, so that's where the numbers are. Again, a lot more numbers, a lot of people you can talk to. Let me give you some action items. First one, if data was a core asset, how would IT, how would your business be different? Stop and think about that. If it wasn't your buildings that were the asset, it wasn't the machines that were the asset, it wasn't your people by themselves who were the asset, but data was the asset. How would you reinstitutionalize work? That's what every business is starting to ask, even if they don't ask it in the same way. And our advice is, then do it because that's the future of business. Not that data is the only asset but data is a recognized central asset and that's going to have enormous impacts on a lot of things. The second point I want to leave you with, tens of billions of users and I'm including people and devices, are dependent on thousands of data scientists that's an impedance mismatch that cannot be sustained. Packaged apps and these cloud services are going to be the way to bridge that gap. I'd love to tell you that it's all going to be about tools, that we're going to have hundreds of thousands or millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of data scientists suddenly emerge out of the woodwork. It's not going to happen. The third thing is we think that big businesses, enterprises, have to master what we call the big inflection. The big tech inflection. The first 50 years were about known process and unknown technology. How do I take an accounting package and do I put on a mainframe or a mini computer a client/server or do I do it on the web? Unknown technology. Well increasingly today, all of us have a pretty good idea what the base technology is going to be. Does anybody doubt it's going to be the cloud? We got a pretty good idea what the base technology is going to be. What we don't know is what are the new problems that we can attack, that we can address with data rich approaches to thinking about how we turn those systems into actors on behalf of our business and customers. So I'm a couple minutes over, I apologize. I want to make sure everybody can get over to the keynotes if you want to. Feel free to stay, theCUBE's going to be live at 9:30. If I got that right. So it's actually pretty exciting if anybody wants to see how it works, feel free to stay. Georgia's here, Neil's here, I'm here. I mentioned Greg Terrio, Dave Volante, John Greco, I think I saw Sam Kahane back in the corner. Any questions, come and ask us, we'll be more than happy. Thank you very much for, oh David Volante. >> David: I have a question. >> Yes. >> David: Do you have time? >> Yep. >> David: So you talk about data as a core asset, that if you look at the top five companies by market cap in the US, Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. They're data companies, they got data at the core which is kind of what your first bullet here describes. How do you see traditional companies closing that gap where humans, buildings, etc at the core as we enter this machine intelligence era, what's your advice to the traditional companies on how they close that gap? >> All right. So the question was, the most valuable companies in the world are companies that are well down the path of treating data as an asset. How does everybody else get going? Our observation is you go back to what's the value proposition? What actions are most important? what's data is necessary to perform those actions? Can changing the way the data is orchestrated and organized and put together inform or change the cost of performing that work by changing the cost transactions? Can you increase a new service along the same lines and then architect your infrastructure and your business to make sure that the data is near the action in time for the action to be absolute genius to your customer. So it's a relatively simple thought process. That's how Amazon thought, Apple increasingly thinks like that, where they design the experience and they think what data is necessary to deliver that experience. That's a simple approach but it works. Yes, sir. >> Audience Member: With the slide that you had a few slides ago, the market share, the big spenders, and you mentioned that, you asked the question do any of us doubt that cloud is the future? I'm with Snowflake, I don't see many of those large vendors in the cloud and I was wondering if you could speak to what are you seeing in terms of emerging vendors in that space. >> What a great question. So the question was, when you look at the companies that are catalyzing a lot of the change, you don't see a lot of the big companies being at the leadership. And someone from Snowflake just said, well who's going to lead it? That's a big question that has a lot of implications but at this point time it's very clear that the big companies are suffering a bit from the old, from the old, trying to remember what the... RCA syndrome. I think Clay Christensen talked about this. You know, the innovators dilemma. So RCA actually is one of the first creators. They created the transistor and they held a lot of original patents on it. They put that incredible new technology, back in the forties and fifties, under the control of the people who ran the vacuum tube business. When was the last time anybody bought RCA stock? The same problem is existing today. Now, how is that going to play out? Are we going to see a lot of, as we've always seen, a lot of new vendors emerge out of this industry, grow into big vendors with IPO related exits to try to scale their business? Or are we going to see a whole bunch of gobbling up? That's what I'm not clear on but it's pretty clear at this point in time that a lot of the technology, a lot of the science, is being done in smaller places. The moderating feature of that is the services side. Because there's limited groupings of expertise that the companies that today are able to attract that expertise. The Googles, the Facebooks, the AWSs, etc, the Amazons. Are doing so in support of a particular service. IBM and others are trying to attract that talent so they can apply it to customer problems. We'll see over the next few years whether the IBMs and the Accentures and the big service providers are able to attract the kind of talent necessary to diffuse that knowledge into the industry faster. So it's the rate at which that the idea of internet scale computing, the idea of big data being applied to business problems, can diffuse into the marketplace through services. If it can diffuse faster that will have both an accelerating impact for smaller vendors, as it has in the past. But it may also again, have a moderating impact because a lot of that expertise that comes out of IBM, IBM is going to find ways to drive in the product faster than it ever has before. So it's a complicated answer but that's our thinking at this point time. >> Dave: Can I add to that? >> Yeah. (audience member speaking faintly) >> I think that's true now but I think the real question, not to not to argue with Dave but this is part of what we do. The real question is how is that knowledge going to diffuse into the enterprise broadly? Because Airbnb, I doubt is going to get into the business of providing services. (audience member speaking faintly) So I think that the whole concept of community, partnership, ecosystem is going to remain very important as it always has and we'll see how fast those service companies that are dedicated to diffusing knowledge, diffusing knowledge into customer problems actually occurs. Our expectation is that as the tooling gets better, we will see more people be able to present themselves truly as capable of doing this and that will accelerate the process. But the next few years are going to be really turbulent and we'll see which way it actually ends up going. (audience member speaking faintly) >> Audience Member: So I'm with IBM. So I can tell you 100% for sure that we are, I hired literally 50 data scientists in the last three months to go out and do exactly what you're saying. Sit down with clients and help them figure out how to do data science in the enterprise. And so we are in fact scaling it, we're getting people that have done this at Google, Facebook. Not a whole lot of those 'cause we want to do it with people that have actually done it in legacy fortune 500 Companies, right? Because there's a little bit difference there. >> So. >> Audience Member: So we are doing exactly what you said and Microsoft is doing the same thing, Amazon is actually doing the same thing too, Domino Data Lab. >> They don't like they're like talking about it too much but they're doing it. >> Audience Member: But all the big players from the data science platform game are doing this at a different scale. >> Exactly. >> Audience Member: IBM is doing it on a much bigger scale than anyone else. >> And that will have an impact on ultimately how the market gets structured and who the winners end up being. >> Audience Member: To add too, a lot of people thought that, you mentioned the Red Hat of big data, a lot of people thought Cloudera was going to be the Red Hat of big data and if you look at what's happened to their business. (background noise drowns out other sounds) They're getting surrounded by the cloud. We look at like how can we get closer to companies like AWS? That was like a wild card that wasn't expected. >> Yeah but look, at the end of the day Red Hat isn't even the Red Hat of open source. So the bottom line is the thing to focus on is how is this knowledge going to diffuse. That's the thing to focus on. And there's a lot of different ways, some of its going to diffuse through tools. If it diffuses through tools, it increases the likelihood that we'll have more people capable of doing this in IBM and others can hire more. That Citibank can hire more. That's an important participant, that's an important play. So you have something to say about that but it also says we're going to see more of the packaged applications emerge because that facilitates the diffusion. This is not, we haven't figured out, I don't know exactly, nobody knows exactly the exact shape it's going to take. But that's the centerpiece of our big data researches. How is that diffusion process going to happen, accelerate, and what's the resulting structure going to look like? And ultimately how are enterprises going to create value with whatever results. Yes, sir. (audience member asks question faintly) So the recap question is you see more people coming in and promising the moon but being incapable of delivering because they are, partly because the technology is uncertain and for other reasons. So here's our approach. Or here's our observation. We actually did a fair amount of research on this. When you take a look at what we call a approach to doing big data that's optimized for the costs of procurement i.e. let's get the simplest combination of infrastructure, the simplest combination of open-source software, the simplest contracting, to create that proof of concept that you can stand things up very quickly if you have enough expertise but you can create that proof of concept but the process of turning that into actually a production system extends dramatically. And that's one of the reasons why the Clouderas did not take over the universe. There are other reasons. As George Gilbert's research has pointed out, that Cloudera is spending 53, 55 % of their money right now just integrating all the stuff that they bought into the distribution five years ago. Which is a real great recipe for creating customer value. The bottom line though is that if we focus on the time to value in production, we end up taking a different path. We don't focus as much on whether the hardware is going to work and the network is going to work and the storage can be integrated and how it's going to impact the database and what that's going to mean to our Oracle license pool and all the other things that people tend to think about if they're focused on the technology. And so as a consequence, you get better time to value if you focus on bringing the domain expertise, working with the right partner, working with the appropriate approach, to go from what's the value proposition, what actions are associated with a value proposition, what's stated in that area to perform those actions, how can I take transaction costs out of performing those actions, where's the data need to be, what infrastructure do I require? So we have to focus on a time to value not the time to procure. And that's not what a lot of professional IT oriented people are doing because many of them, I hate say it, but many of them still acquire new technology with the promise to helping the business but having a stronger focus on what it's going to mean to their careers. All right, I want to be really respectful to everybody's time. The keynotes start in about five minutes which means you just got time. If you want to stay, feel free to stay. We'll be here, we'll be happy to talk but I think that's pretty much going to close our presentation broadcast. Thank you very much for being an attentive audience and I hope you found this useful. (upbeat music)

(bouncy electronic music) [Narrator] Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE. Covering InterConnect 2017 brought to you by IBM. >> Hey welcome back everyone, we are live in Las Vegas for IBM InterConnect 2017. This is the CUBE's coverage of IBM's Cloud and data show. I'm John Furrier, with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Abby Kearns, Executive Director of Cloud Foundry Foundation. Welcome to the CUBE! >> Welcome, thank you! >> Thanks for joining us, so Cloud Foundry, you're new as the executive role, Sam had moved on to Microsoft? >> Abby: Google. >> Google, I'm sorry, Google, he was formerly at Microsoft, former Microsoft employee, but Google, Google Cloud Next was a recent show. >> Yeah. >> So, you're new. >> I'm new. >> John: To the reins but you're not new, new to the community. >> I've been a part of the community for several years prior to joining the foundation a year ago I was at Pivotal for a couple of years so I've been part of the Cloud Foundry community for several years and it's a technology that's near and dear to my heart and it's a community that I am very passionate about. >> And the emergence of Cloud Foundry if you think about it has really kind of changed the game it's really lifted all the boats, if you will, rising tide floats all boats. IBM uses it, you've got a lot of customers. Just go down the list of the notable folks working with Cloud Foundry. >> Well, look no further than those that are on our board and those that represent the strategic vision around the Cloud Foundry, so IBM, Pivotal, but, Dell EMC, and Cisco and SAP and VMware and Allianz and Swisscom. And of course, Pivotal. I think all of them really bring such a broad perspective to the table. But then broadening beyond that community, our community has grown so much. A lot of people don't realize that Cloud Foundry has only been an open-source project for just a little over two years, so January 2015 marked when it became an official open-source project. Prior to that it was part of Pivotal. And in that little-over-two years, we've grown to nearly 70 members in our community and are just excited to continue to grow and bring more perspectives to the table. >> So what has been the differences, a lot of people have been taking a different approach on for Bluemix, for instance, they have a good core at Cloud Foundry. Is it going the way you guys had thought as a community, that this was the plan all along? Because you see people really kind of making some good stuff out of the Cloud Foundry. Was that part of the plan, this open direction? >> Well I think part of the plan was really coalescing around the single vision of that abstraction And what's the whole vision of Cloud Foundry, it's to allow developers to create code faster. And whatever realm that takes. Our industry is evolving and it's evolving so quickly and exciting, all of these enterprise organizations that are becoming software companies. I mean how exciting is that? As we think about the abstraction that Cloud Foundry can provide for them and the automation it can provide, it allows them to focus on one thing and one thing only, creating code that changes their business. We're really focused myopically on ensuring that developers have the ability to quickly and easily create code and innovate quickly as an organization. >> So on the development side, sometimes standards can go fall down by forcing syntax or forcing certain things. You guys had a different approach, looking back now, what were the key things that were critical for Cloud Foundry to maintain its momentum? >> I think a couple of things. It's a complex distributed system but it is put together amazingly well. Quality was first and foremost, part of its origins. And it's continued to adhere to that quality and that control around the development process and around the release process. So Cloud Foundry as an open-source project is very much a governance by contribution. So we look for those in the organizations and different communities to be part of it and contribute. So we have the full-time committers that are basically doing this all day, every day, and then we have the contributors that are also part of the community providing feedback and value. >> And there was a big testimonial with American Airlines on stage, that's a big win. >> Abby: Yes, it is a big win. >> Give us some color on that deal. >> I can't give you any details on the deal that IBM has-- >> But that's a Cloud Foundry, IBM-- >> But it is Cloud Foundry, yes. >> You guys were part of the Bluemix thing? >> Yes. And American Airlines is a company that I have a lot of history with, They were a customer of mine for many years in the early 2000s, so I'm thrilled to see them innovating and taking advantage of a platform. >> So, help us unpack this conversation that's going on around PaaS, right? >> Some people say, "oh, PaaS is pase," but it's development tools and it's programming and it's a platform that you've created, so what do you make of that conversation? What implications does it have to your strategy and your ecosystem strategy? >> Well, I for one don't like the term PaaS anyway, so I'm happy to say PaaS is pase. Because I do think it's evolved, so when I talk about Cloud Foundry, I talk about it as a Cloud application platform. Because at the end of the day, our goal is to help organizations create code faster. The high degrees of automation, the abstraction that the platform brings to the table, it isn't just a platform, it is an enabler for that development. So we think about what that means, it's, can I create applications faster and do I have a proliferation of services to your ecosystem point that enable applications to grow and to scale and to change the way that organization works. Because it's a technology-enabled business transformation for many of these organizations. >> John: It's app-driven, too, that's the key to success. >> It's app-driven, which is why we talk so much about developers, is because that's the key, if I'm going to become a software company, what does that mean? I am writing code, and that code is changing the way I think about my business and my consumers. >> And the app landscape has certainly changed with UX creativity, but now you've got IoT, there's a real functional integration going on with the analog world going digital, it's like, "Whoa, "I've got all this stuff that's now instrumented "connected to the internet!" IoT, Internet of Things. That's going to be interesting, Cloud has to power that. >> I think it does, because what is IoT reliant on? Applications that take advantage of that data. That's what you're looking to gain, you're looking to have small applications streaming large amounts of data from sensors, be it from cars, or be it from a manufacturing plant, if you're thinking industrial IoT, so Cloud Foundry provides the platform for many of these applications to be developed, created, and scaled at the level that companies like GE, and Siemens, and others are looking to build out and tackle that IoT space. >> It's open, I mean we can all agree that Cloud Foundry's the most open platform to develop applications on, but developers have choices. You're seeing infrastructure as a service, plus you're seeing SAS kind of minus emerge. How should we be thinking about the evolution, you said earlier it evolved, where is it evolving to? Obviously you bet on open, good bet. Other more propriet... I don't even know what open is anymore sometimes (Abby laughs) >> But we can agree that Cloud Foundry's open. But how should we be thinking about the evolution going forward? >> Well that's the beauty of open, right? What is open-source, open-source brings together a diverse set of perspective and background to innovate faster. And that's where we are, we're seeing a lot of technology evolve. I mean, just think about all of the things that evolved the last two years. Where we've had technologies come up, some go down, but there's so much happening right now, because the time is now. For these companies that are trying to develop more applications, or trying to figure out ways to not only develop these applications, but develop them at scale and really grow those out and build those and IoT, and you're getting more data, and we're capturing those data and operationalizing that data and it comes back to one thing. Applications that can take advantage of that. And so I think there's the potential, as we build out and innovate both the ecosystem but the platform will naturally evolve and take advantage of those winds from these organizations that are driving this to scale. >> So scale is the linchpin. >> Abby: Yeah. >> If you think about traditional paths, environments, if I can use that term, they're limited in scale, and obviously simplicity. Is that another way to think about it? >> I think about it this way, the platform enables you to run fast. You're not running fast with scissors. You want to be able to run fast safely. And so it provides that abstraction and those guardrails so you can quickly iterate and develop and deploy code. If I look at what... HCSE as a company. They went from developing an application, it took them 35 people and nine months to create an app, right? And now with Cloud Foundry, they're able to do it with four people and six weeks. It changes the way you work as an organization. Just imagine as you scale that out, what that means. Imagine the changes that can bring in your organization when you're software-centric and you're customer-first and you're bringing that feedback loop in. >> And you guys do a lot of heavy lifting on behalf of the customer, but you're not hardening it to the point where they can't mold it and shape it to what they want is kind of what I'm-- >> No, we want to abstract away and automate as much as possible, the things you care about. Resiliency, auto-scaling, the ability to do security and compliance, because those are things you care about as an enterprise. Let's make that happen for you, but then give the control to the developer to self provision, to scale, to quickly deploy and iterate, do continuous delivery. All of those things that allow you to go from developing an app once a year to developing an app and iterating on that app constantly, all the time. >> So I've been wanting to ask you to kind of take a step back, and look at the community trends right now. PC Open Stack has a trajectory, it's becoming more of an infrastructure, as a service, kind of settling in there. That's gone through a lot of changes. Seeing a lot of growth in IoT, which we talked about. You're starting to see some movement in the open-source community. CNCF has got traction, The Linux Foundation, Cloud Native, you've got the Kubernetes, I call it the Cold War for orchestration going on right now so it's a really interesting time, microservices are booming. This is the holy grail for developers for the next gen. It's going to be awesome, like machine learning, everyone's getting intoxicated on that these days, so super cool things coming down the pike. >> For sure, I think we're in the coolest time. >> What's going on in the communities, is there any movement, is there trends, is there a sentiment among the developer communities that you see that you could... Any patterns developing around what people are gravitating to? >> I think developers want the freedom to create. They want the ability to create applications and see those come to fruition. I think a lot of things that were new and innovative a couple of years ago and even now, are becoming table stakes. For example, five years ago, having a mobile app as a bank was new and interesting and kind of fun. Now, it's table stakes. Are you going to go bank with a bank that doesn't have one? Are you going to bank with a bank that doesn't have it? It becomes table stakes or, who doesn't, if you don't have fraud detection which is basically event driven responses, right? And so you think about what table stakes are and what, as we think about the abstraction moving up, that's really where it's going to get interesting. >> But open-source community, is it going to move to these new ground, what I'm trying to get at is to see what's happening, what's the trend in the developer community. What's hot, what's fashionable. Is there new projects popping up that you could share that you think is cool and interesting? >> Well they're all cool and interesting. >> John: You'd rather not comment. (laughs) >> I think they're all cool and interesting, I think, you know, CNCF is a sister organization underneath The Linux Foundation. >> John: They kind of inherited that from Kub Con though. Kubernetes Con. >> Yeah, I think they're doing interesting things. I think any organizations that's promoting Cloud Native application architecture and the value of that, we all deserve to be part of the same conversation because to your point earlier, a rising tide lifts all boats. And if every organizations is doing Cloud Native application architectures and Cloud Native solutions, it's going to be super interesting. >> We just had STRAD at Duke, we ran our own event last week called Big Data SV, and it's very clear to us that the big data world industry and Cloud are coming together and the forcing function is machine learning, IoT, and then AI is the appeal, that's the big trend that's kind of, puts a mental model around but IoT is driving this data and the Cloud horsepower is forcing this to move faster. It seems to be very accelerated. >> But, it also enables so much, I mean if you can operationalize this data that you're aggregating and turn it into actionable apps that do things for your business, save money, improve logistics, reach your users better and faster, you start to see the change and the shift that that can bring. You have the data married with the apps, married with the in point sensors and all of a sudden this gets to be a really interesting evolution of technology. >> So what's your hundred day plan, well you're in the hundred day plan already. So what's your plan for this year as new Executive Director for Cloud Foundry, what's on the agenda, what's your top three things you're going to chip away at this year for objectives? >> Developers, developers, developers, does that count as top three? >> More, more, more? Increase the developer count? (laughs) >> Just really, reaching out to the developers and ensuring that they're able to be successful in Cloud Foundry. So I think you'll hear more from us in the next couple of weeks about that. But, ensuring-- >> John: The proof points, basically? >> The proof points, but just ensuring they can be successful and ensuring that scale is affable for them, and then really, our summits are even changing. We've actually added developer tracks to our summit, to make them a place not only where you can learn about Cloud Foundry, but also where you can work with other developers and learn from them and learn about specific languages, but also, how to enable those into Cloud Native application architectures and I think our goal this year is to really enrich that development community and build that pipeline and help fill those gaps. >> And celebrate the wins like the American Airlines of the world, and as IBM and others are successful, then it gets to be less... You don't want to have cognitive dissonance as a developer, that's the worst thing, developers want to make sure they're on a good bus with good people. >> You've obviously got some technology titans behind you, IBM the most prominent, I would say, but obviously guys like VMware, and Cisco, and others, but you've also got [Interference] organizations, guys like Allianz, VW, Allstate I think was early-on in the program. >> JPMC, Citibank. >> Yeah, I shouldn't have started, 'cause I know I'd leave some out, but you're the Executive Director, so you have to fill in the gaps. That's somewhat unique, in a consortium like this. Somewhat, but that many is somewhat unique. Is there more traction there? What's their motivation? >> Abby: As a user? >> Yeah. >> Well, to your earlier point, we're an open-source, right? And what's the value, if I'm an enterprise and I'm looking to take advantage of a platform, but also an open-source platform, open-source allows me to be part of that conversation. I can be a contributor, I can be part of the direction, I can influence where it's going and I think that is a powerful sentiment, for many of these organizations that are looking to evolve and become more software-centric, and this is a good way for them to give back and be part of that momentum. >> And Cloud's exploding, more open-source is needed, it's just a great mission. Congratulations on the new job, and good luck this year. We'll keep in touch, and certainly see you at the Cloud Foundry Summit, that's in San Fransisco again this year? >> Santa Clara, June 13th through 15th. >> John: So every year, you guys always have the fire code problem. (laughs) >> Well I think I'm going to go on record now and officially say this, this will be our last year there, which I think everyone's excited about, 'cause I think we're all over Santa Clara right now. (laughs) >> Alright, well, we'll see you there. Abby Kearns, Executive Director of Cloud Foundry Foundation, here inside the CUBE, powering the Cloud, this is the CUBE's coverage of IBM InterConnect 2017. Stay with us, more coverage after this short break. (bouncy electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live, from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. >> Welcome back, everyone. We're live here in Las Vegas for VMworld 2016. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier and my co-host this week, Stu Minniman, for three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Our next guest is the chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, Inc., that's the first time we've actually used that. Congratulations on, I think last Thursday or Wednesday, the name officially became Dell Technology. Michael Dell, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you. Super excited to be with you and obviously super excited about the formation of Dell Technologies as we bring together Dell and EMC and VMware and Pivotal and RSA and Virtustream and SecureWorks and so many other great organizations. >> So Dell Technology, now it's official, but EMC, Dell EMC is not yet official. Quick, give us the update. That's the number one thing people are asking. What's the update with the merger and the China situation. What's the quick update there from your standpoint? >> You know, we announced this back in October of last year and we're very much on track with the original timeline that we said, which was that we'd close between May and October of this year, and on the original terms. So everything is moving along and we're making great progress. >> Chinese government not playing monkey business with you, looking at the big mega-merger and thinking, whoa, slow down. >> We're continuing to work with them, and as I said, we're on track with the original schedule and terms that we said when we announced it back in October of last year. >> Exciting things on the global landscape, we'll get to that in a second. But I want to get your thoughts on VMworld because this is a geek show and this is a technology show and on the keynote they're showing debugging ports, migrating from the cloud, I mean you don't see that. You usually see the pomp and circumstance, all the glamour. Here, I mean you're a geek, you're always getting down and dirty with the technology. Thoughts on this community, because this is, these guys roll their sleeves up. And by the way, they're very vocal on social media so you can always get the Twitter feed, but your thoughts on VMworld, the culture of this ecosystem? >> I thought the demos that Guido showed were incredibly cool, showing sort of the evolution of virtualization to the software-defined data center to the hybrid cloud to now Cross-Cloud and all the things that you can do. And as you saw, live examples with Citibank and Columbia and J & J, these are real live organizations. And of course at VMworld you have the ecosystem of VMware in all of its glory, with the whole industry coming together and, as you said, a passionate group of individuals that are excited about what they're doing and VMware is kind of a big part of how the industry is evolving. And we're thrilled be an even bigger part of it now than we have been in the past. It's not my first time to come to VMworld, of course. >> But again, with now Dell Technologies looming, and the merger is going to be a big part of that. >> Yes. >> Technologies, and I'll ask that specific question later. But I do want to get your thoughts as someone who has been in the industry as a power broker, founder, CEO, now going private, you've seen all the waves of innovation. The ecosystem has become a really important part of it in your world there was the Wintel and the developer communities during those days, for the software business, aka the computer industry per se, but now we're on a new inflection point where the computer industry-like movement is happening with cloud and data center, hyper-converged environments. What does the ecosystem mean? Because we've seen the ecosystem kind of sitting there kind of waiting for this explosion with the cloud. Your thoughts on what the ecosystem means in this new era, vis-a-vis other times in history? >> You know, I don't see them waiting. You think about the kind of armada of companies that are coming along as the ecosystem evolves. Again, you see it out there on the show floor. You take NSX as an example. There's tremendous growth in software-defined networking. And NSX is kind of leading the way. And you see all the leading networking companies in the world here at VMworld using NSX as the platform for the software-defined network. It's just another great example. The original growth in the hypervisor and then into software-defined storage, software-defined networking and you can, if you look further on the show floor, right, you'll see kind of software-defined everything. And all aspects of the network, layers four through seven, eventually being virtualized. From the cutting edge -- >> John: So, virtualized stack. >> New things all the way to the mainstream and of course there's a lot of growth in our industry around converged and hyper-converged because it's making it easy to deploy these solutions in a rapid fashion and we're right in the middle of all this. >> So Michael, you speak pretty passionately about VMware and their role in the ecosystem. There's still a lot of noise out there that people I don't think understand how you're going to finance the debt and there's many people, like still during the keynote this morning, they're like, as soon as the deal's done, VMware is going to be sold off. Really, hardware companies don't want to do software. >> Absolutely incorrect. That's totally wrong. Anybody that says that has no clue what they're talking about. So look, I think first thing is you've got do do some math. If you look at the combined cash flows of Dell and EMC and VMware, what you find is they're many, many times greater than the debt service. And so we have, in fact, an advantage capital structure that allows us to not only do what we're doing and have tremendous scale and investment in innovation, roughly $4.5 billion annually invested in R & D, the largest enterprise systems company in the world, the strongest supply chain, and also have the speed and flexibility with some of these new startup instances. You guys are familiar with what we're doing with Pivotal and Cloud Foundry and all the great things that are going on there. With SecureWorks, with Boomi, so we've got both the speed and agility of a startup plus the scale and breadth with the broadest ecosystem and access to customers, and while we're here at VMworld, we're not just about VMware, right? Dell Technologies is a company that embraces all of the major ecosystems, be it the Microsoft ecosystem, the Linux and OpenStack and container ecosystems. So the hardware platforms that we're creating allow customers the broadest set of solutions to be able to stand up against their requirements. >> So back at Dell World, Michael, you talked about, you had Satya Nadella up on stage, how Microsoft fits and understanding, you know, in many ways Dell Technologies is an arms supplier to a lot of environments. You've got the enterprise data center. You've got the public cloud. Where do you see VMware in this evolving multi-cloud very varied ecosystem? >> I think if you look at VMware's business in the first half of this year, it's done quite well. And when I look at the trends for the forward outlook and kind of growth characteristics, VMware is making a very nice transition into this emerging cloud world. And it's doing that by taking the whole virtualization and software-defined technologies beyond the hypervisor into the whole software-defined data center. And things like the VMware Cloud Foundations make it a lot easier to do that, whether you're doing it on premise in a private cloud or whether you're a service provider, a telco, an IBM, for example. And I think you'll see others as well. And customers that have embranced VMware and of course there are 500,000 plus around the world, are looking for ways to be able to extend out to the public cloud. And the kinds of announcements you saw today with IBM, with the VMware Cross-Cloud initiative, will allow for this to extend deep into the public clouds. >> We're getting some questions from Twitter. I'll read a few of them here. Two questions. Have you met Chairman Chang and what's he like? And two, what of the technologies in the portfolio are you most excited about. And I asked VMware or Dell Technologies and they asked, both. So two questions. Have you met Chairman Chang and what's he like? And what technology are you most excited about? >> I have met a number of the distinguished folks over in China for sure, whether it be in one on one meetings or in group meetings and I'm over there on a pretty regular basis. China is the second largest market in the world for Dell to sell its products. So it's also the second largest economy in the world so that shouldn't be too surprising. But we have roughly $5.5 billion business in China, a big part of our supply chain. On the second question, you know, it's kind of like saying >> John: Your favorite child. >> Which of your children do you love the most, right? So that's not, you can get in a lot of trouble with that. But when I look across the whole -- >> We need to categorize here. I'll just rephrase the question because I think that's, I mean that's a political response, I get that. But let's go into, where do you see the disruption coming from? If you had to point out a disruptive enabler that is a lever for the portfolio, where would you look at and say okay, that's going to be a real enabling technology that's going to one, propel Dell on a domestic and global basis, and two, power the ecosystem? >> I think this digital transformation is real. And I think that we are at the very beginning of this period of time where the cost to make things intelligent is approaching zero and the number of them is going to explode. And so the influence and impact that our industry has on the world will expand geometrically as a result. And so the challenge that every organization is going to have, is how do you take all this information in real time and also in time series, because I think there will be some value to the historical data, and turn it into better insights, to be able to make better decisions, to make better products and services. And we're just at the very beginning of that. So, to me, that is the most exciting thing going on and obviously, we're right in the middle of that from lots of different perspectives. >> I've got to ask you a personal question. And I want to get your thoughts on this as someone who's been in the industry and is a chess master, 3D chess player, also running a big business, global business, billions of dollars. In 1994, Bill Gates wrote The Road Ahead and he talked about the future and he completely missed the internet in his forward-looking book. And I bring that up because now we're living in a time where IOT and autonomous vehicles, looking at digital state, digital transformation is a big part of that, so I ask the question, do you worry about missing something? I don't mean FOMO, fear of missing out, but there are big moves being made like technology in autonomous vehicles, drones, all this AI going on, machine learning, do you look at that and go hmmm. Is that on your mind, like maybe you might miss something and how do you handle that? >> It's a good point. If you look at all the smartest people in the industry, whatever that means, and you say what's their ability to predict what happens in five years, 10 years, 15 years, it's actually not been very good, right? And so that has been humbling, if somebody included me in that category of people that could try to do that. But we've got a lot of smart folks. I think we have, at the core of our company, this concept of having big ears, which means we want to listen and we want to learn. And our job is to take all these things that we're learning from our customers and all of our understanding of the core molecular elements of technology, and make the magic happen in the middle that go solves the problems that customers have. >> Do you see IOT and cars and this kind of consumer experience very real for Dell Technologies to play in? >> I think there's no question that the elemental cost of computing is declining and whenever you see that happening, you see, it's like a gas, right? It expands to fit the space available. And I think you'll absolutely see this explosion, proliferation, you're already seeing it. We have hundreds of IOT projects going already within our company and we know of many, many others, so it's real. >> It's in the early phase of the hype cycle. Michael, we've got to wrap but I want to ask one final question and then kind of wrap it up. Everyone wants to know, what's the future of VMware in your words, talk to the customers that are watching and the people in the ecosystem and employees and partners. What is the future of VMware in the Dell Technologies vision? >> I think VMware has got a very bright future. I've seen this in the past where people said, Oh, you know, the PC is dead so forget about Dell. Everything's going to the cloud, so forget about all these other companies. I don't think that's quite the way it all works. So what I see in VMware is an incredibly vibrant ecosystem that's getting stronger. I see VMware remaining independent and we're obviously the majority shareholder and helping to ensure the ecosystem stays very, very strong. And I see very exciting new things, like NSX. Extending the reach of virtualization technology well beyond the core original business of VMware which was a great business and continues to actually be a great business. >> Michael, thanks for spending the time, with your busy schedule, to join us on theCUBE. I appreciate it. Great to see you. Michael Dell here inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE from SiliconANGLE Media. We'll be right back with more. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll be right back.