(upbeat music) >> Today more than ever before, organizations are striving to gain a competitive advantage, deliver more value to customers, reduce risk, and respond more quickly to the needs of businesses. Now, to achieve these goals, organizations need easy access to a single view of accurate, consistent and very importantly, trusted data. If it's not trusted, nobody's going to use it and all in near real time. However, the growing volumes and complexities of data make this difficult to achieve in practice. Not to mention the organizational challenges that have evolved as data becomes increasingly important to winning in the marketplace. Specifically as data grows, so does the prevalence of data silos, making, integrating and leveraging data from internal and external sources a real challenge. Now, in this final segment, we'll hear from Joe Lichtenberg who's the global head of product and industry marketing, and he's going to discuss how smart data fabrics can be applied to different industries. And by way of these use cases, we'll probe Joe's vast knowledge base and ask him to highlight how InterSystems, which touts a next gen approach to Customer 360, how the company leverages a smart data fabric to provide organizations of varying sizes and sectors in financial services, supply chain, logistics and healthcare with a better, faster and easier way to deliver value to the business. Joe welcome, great to have you here. >> Thank you, it's great to be here. That was some intro. I could not have said it better myself, so thank you for that. >> Thank you. Well, we're happy to have you on this show now. I understand- >> It's great to be here. >> You you've made a career helping large businesses with technology solutions, small businesses, and then scale those solutions to meet whatever needs they had. And of course, you're a vocal advocate as is your company of data fabrics. We talked to Scott earlier about data fabrics, how it relates to data mesh big discussions in the industry. So tell us more about your perspective. >> Sure, so first I would say that I have been in this industry for a very long time so I've been like you, I'm sure, for decades working with customers and with technology, really to solve these same kinds of challenges. So for decades, companies have been working with lots and lots of data and trying to get business value to solve all sorts of different challenges. And I will tell you that I've seen many different approaches and different technologies over the years. So, early on, point to point connections with custom coding, and I've worked with integration platforms 20 years ago with the advent of web services and service-oriented architectures and exposing endpoints with wisdom and getting access to disparate data from across the organization. And more recently, obviously with data warehouses and data lakes and now moving workloads to the cloud with cloud-based data marts and data warehouses. Lots of approaches that I've seen over the years but yet still challenges remain in terms of getting access to a single trusted real-time view of data. And so, recently, we ran a survey of more than 500 different business users across different industries and 86% told us that they still lack confidence in using their data to make decisions. That's a huge number, right? And if you think about all of the work and all of the technology and approaches over the years, that is a surprising number and drilling into why that is, there were three main reasons. One is latency. So the amount of time that it takes to access the data and process the data and make it fit for purpose by the time the business has access to the data and the information that they need, the opportunity has passed. >> Elapsed time, not speed a light, right? But that too maybe. >> But it takes a long time if you think about these processes and you have to take the data and copy it and run ETL processes and prepare it. So that's one, one is just the amount of data that's disparate in data silos. So still struggling with data that is dispersed across different systems in different formats. And the third, is data democratization. So the business really wants to have access to the data so that they can drill into the data and ask ad hoc questions and the next question and drill into the information and see where it leads them rather than having sort of pre-structured data and pre-structured queries and having to go back to IT and put the request back on the queue again and waiting. >> So it takes too long, the data's too hard to get to 'cause it's in silos and the data lacks context because it's technical people that are serving up the data to the business people. >> Exactly. >> And there's a mismatch. >> Exactly right. So they call that data democratization or giving the business access to the data and the tools that they need to get the answers that they need in the moment. >> So the skeptic in me, 'cause you're right I have seen this story before and the problems seem like they keep coming up, year after year, decade after decade. But I'm an optimist and so. >> As am I. >> And so I sometimes say, okay, same wine new bottle, but it feels like it's different this time around with data fabrics. You guys talk about smart data fabrics from your perspective, what's different? >> Yeah, it's very exciting and it's a fundamentally different approach. So if you think about all of these prior approaches, and by the way, all of these prior approaches have added value, right? It's not like they were bad, but there's still limitations and the business still isn't getting access to all the data that they need in the moment, right? So data warehouses are terrific if you know the questions that you want answered and you take the data and you structure the data in advance. And so now you're serving the business with sort of pre-planned answers to pre-planned queries, right? The data fabric, what we call a smart data fabric is fundamentally different. It's a fundamentally different approach in that rather than sort of in batch mode, taking the data and making it fit for purpose with all the complexity and delays associated with it, with a data fabric where accessing the data on demand as it's needed, as it's requested, either by the business or by applications or by the data scientists directly from the source systems. >> So you're not copying it necessarily to that to make that you're not FTPing it, for instance. I've got it, you take it, you're basically using the same source. >> You're pulling the data on demand as it's being requested by the consumers. And then all of the data management processes that need to be applied for integration and transformation to get the data into a consistent format and business rules and analytic queries. And with Jess showed with machine learning, predictive prescriptive analytics all sorts of powerful capabilities are built into the fabric so that as you're pulling the data on demand, right, all of these processes are being applied and the net result is you're addressing these limitations around latency and silos that we've seen in the past. >> Okay, so you've talked about you have a lot of customers, InterSystems does in different industries supply chain, financial services, manufacturing. We heard from just healthcare. What are you seeing in terms of applications of smart data fabrics in the real world? >> Yeah, so we see it in every industry. So InterSystems, as you know, has been around now for 43 years, and we have tens of thousands of customers in every industry. And this architectural pattern now is providing value for really critical use cases in every industry. So I'm happy to talk to you about some that we're seeing. I could actually spend like three hours here and there but I'm very passionate about working with customers and there's all sorts of exciting. >> What are some of your favorites? >> So, obviously supply chain right now is going through a very challenging time. So the combination of what's happening with the pandemic and disruptions and now I understand eggs are difficult to come by I just heard on NPR. >> Yeah and it's in part a data problem and a big part of data problem, is that fair? >> Yeah and so, in supply chain, first there's supply chain visibility. So organizations want a real time or near real time expansive view of what's happening across the entire supply chain from a supply all the way through distribution, right? So that's only part of the issue but that's a huge sort of real-time data silos problem. So if you think about your extended supply chain, it's complicated enough with all the systems and silos inside your firewall, before all of your suppliers even just thinking about your tier one suppliers let alone tier two and tier three. And then building on top of real-time visibility is what the industry calls a control tower, what we call the ultimate control tower. And so it's built in analytics to be able to sense disruptions and exceptions as they occur and predict the likelihood of these disruptions occurring. And then having data driven and analytics driven guidance in terms of the best way to deal with these disruptions. So for example, an order is missing line items or a cargo ship is stuck off port somewhere. What do you do about it? Do you reroute a different cargo ship, right? Do you take an order that's en route to a different client and reroute that? What's the cost associated? What's the impact associated with it? So that's a huge issue right now around control towers for supply chain. So that's one. >> Can I ask you a question about that? Because you and I have both seen a lot but we've never seen, at least I haven't the economy completely shut down like it was in March of 2020, and now we're seeing this sort of slingshot effect almost like you're driving on the highway sometimes you don't know why, but all of a sudden you slow down and then you speed up, you think it's okay then you slow down again. Do you feel like you guys can help get a handle on that product because it goes on both sides. Sometimes you can't get the product, sometimes there's too much of a product as well and that's not good for business. >> Yeah, absolutely. You want to smooth out the peaks and valleys. >> Yeah. >> And that's a big business goal, business challenge for supply chain executives, right? So you want to make sure that you can respond to demand but you don't want to overstock because there's cost associated with that as well. So how do you optimize the supply chains and it's very much a data silo and a real time challenge. So it's a perfect fit for this new architectural pattern. >> All right, what else? >> So if we look at financial services, we have many, many customers in financial services and that's another industry where they have many different sources of data that all have information that organizations can use to really move the needle if they could just get to that single source of truth in real time. So we sort of bucket many different implementations and use cases that we do around what we call Business 360 and Customer 360. So Business 360, there's all sorts of ways to add business value in terms of having a real-time operational view across all of the different GOs and parts of the business, especially in these very large global financial services institutions like capital markets and investment firms and so forth. So around Business 360, having a realtime view of risk, operational performance regulatory compliance, things like that. Customer 360, there's a whole set of use cases around Customer 360 around hyper-personalization of customers and in realtime next best action looking to see how you can sell more increase share of wallet, cross-sell, upsell to customers. We also do a lot in terms of predicting customer churn. So if you have all the historical data and what's the likelihood of customers churning to be able to proactively intercede, right? It's much more cost effective to keep assets under management and keep clients rather than going and getting new clients to come to the firm. A very interesting use case from one of our customers in Latin America, so Banco do Brasil largest bank in all of Latin America and they have a very innovative CTO who's always looking for new ways to move the needle for the bank. And so one of their ideas and we're working with them to do this is how can they generate net new revenue streams by bringing in new business to the bank? And so they identified a large percentage of the population in Latin America that does no banking. So they have no banking history not only with Banco do Brasil, but with any bank. So there's a fair amount of risk associated with offering services to this segment of the population that's not associated with any banks or financial institutions. >> There is no historical data on them, there's no. >> So it's a data challenge. And so, they're bringing in data from a variety of different sources, social media, open source data that they find online and so forth. And with us running risk models to identify which are the citizens that there's acceptable risk to offer their services. >> It's going to be huge market of unbanked people in vision Latin America. >> Wow, that's interesting. >> Yeah, yeah, totally vision. >> And if you can lower the risk and you could tap that market and be first >> And they are, yeah. >> Yeah. >> So very exciting. Manufacturing, we know industry 4.0 which is about taking the OT data, so the data from the MES systems and the streaming data, real-time streaming data from the machine controllers and integrating it with the IT data, so your data warehouses and your ERP systems and so forth to have not only a real-time view of manufacturing from supply and source all the way through demand but also predictive maintenance and things like that. So that's very big right now in manufacturing. >> Kind of cool to hear these use cases beyond your healthcare, which is obviously, your wheelhouse, Scott defined this term of smart data fabrics, different than data fabrics, I guess. So when we think about these use cases what's the value add of so-called smart data fabrics? >> Yeah, it's a great question. So we did not define the term data fabric or enterprise data fabric. The analysts now are all over it. They're all saying it's the future of data management. It's a fundamentally different approach this architectural approach to be able to access the data on demand. The canonical definition of a data fabric is to access the data where it lies and apply a set of data management processes, but it does not include analytics, interestingly. And so we firmly believe that most of these use cases gain value from having analytics built directly into the fabric. So whether that's business rules or predictive analytics to predict the likelihood of a customer churn or a machine on the shop floor failing or prescriptive analytics. So if there's a problem in the supply chain, what's the guidance for the supply chain managers to take the best action, right? Prescriptive analytics based on data. So rather than taking the data and the data fabric and moving it to another environment to run those analytics where you have complexity and latency, having tall of those analytics capabilities built directly into the fabric, which is why we call it a smart data fabric, brings a lot of value to our customers. >> So simplifies the whole data lifecycle, data pipelining, the hyper-specialized roles that you have to have, you can really just focus on one platform, is that? >> Exactly, basically, yeah. And it's a simplicity of architecture and faster speed to production. So a big differentiator for our technology, for InterSystems, Iris, is most if not all of the capabilities that are needed are built into one engine, right? So you don't need to stitch together 10 or 15 or 20 different data management services for relational database in a non-relational database and a caching layer and a data warehouse and security and so forth. And so you can do that. There's many ways to build this data fabric architecture, right? InterSystems is not the only way. >> Right? >> But if you can speed and simplify the implementation of the fabric by having most of what you need in one engine, one product that gets you to where you need to go much, much faster. >> Joe, how can people learn more about smart data Fabric some of the use cases that you've presented here? >> Yeah, come to our website, intersystems.com. If you go to intersystems.com/smartdatafabric that'll take you there. >> I know that you have like probably dozens more examples but it would be cool- >> I do. >> If people reach out to you, how can they get in touch? >> Oh, I would love that. So feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. It's Joe Lichtenberg I think it's linkedin.com/joeLichtenberg and I'd love to connect. >> Awesome. Joe, thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate it. >> It was great to be here. Thank you, Dave. >> All right, I hope you've enjoyed our program today. You know, we heard Scott now he helped us understand this notion of data fabrics and smart data fabrics and how they can address the data challenges faced by the vast majority of organizations today. Jess Jody's demo was awesome. It was really a highlight of the program where she showed the smart data fabrics inaction and Joe Lichtenberg, we just heard from him dug in to some of the prominent use cases and proof points. We hope this content was educational and inspires you to action. Now, don't forget all these videos are available on Demand to watch, rewatch and share. Go to theCUBE.net, check out siliconangle.com for all the news and analysis and we'll summarize the highlights of this program and go to intersystems.com because there are a ton of resources there. In particular, there's a knowledge hub where you'll find some excellent educational content and online learning courses. There's a resource library with analyst reports, technical documentation videos, some great freebies. So check it out. This is Dave Vellante. On behalf of theCUBE and our supporter, InterSystems, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's Special Program Series: Women of the Cloud, brought to you by AWS. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to welcome Ashley Gaare to the program, Global Extended Executive Board Member and President, North America at SoftwareONE. Ashley, welcome, it's great to have you here. >> Hi Lisa, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. >> Talk to us a little bit about you, about SoftwareONE, about your role, give us that context. >> So SoftwareONE is a global services provider for end-to-end software cloud management. We operate in over 90 countries. Our headquarters globally are in Zurich, Switzerland. Our North American headquarters are in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And I run the North American region with scales from the US, Canada, we have parts in Costa Rica, in Mexico. And our primary purpose and to serve our clients is to help them really understand the restraints in cloud management, everything from licensing used rights to financial operations to workload migrations, to help them drive better outcomes for their business. >> It's all about outcomes for the business. Every conversation we have always goes back to outcomes, but I want to learn a little bit more actually about you. Talk a little bit about your career path and then give us some recommendations that you would have for others who are looking to really kind of step the ladder in their tech careers. >> Yeah, so I've been very fortunate and blessed to be able to be at SoftwareONE for 15 years. So I came up through inside sales. I had no idea how the tech world operated, didn't even know what a server was. And I learned on the job, and this was before even cloud was really relevant. And I think for me, I get asked a lot, "How did you work your way up," so to speak, and it's really about understanding where your strengths sit and investing in those strengths, building a brand of yourself and what your identity is like within the workplace. What do you want people to know of you? Do they want to, "Oh, I got to get Ashley on this project because she accelerates and executes cleanly," right? Or, "I need Ashley to do this because she can collaborate with peers and bring people along." So really understanding where you want to sit, what your skills are, and your strengths, and then asking for mentorship, getting career advice, raising your hand, take on more, and don't ever be afraid to ask questions and admit stuff when you don't know, that humble is part of our core value within SoftwareONE, and it's really, really helped me grow in my own career. >> Ashley, I love that you talked about creating your own personal brand. Another thing that I hear often from women in this situation is creating your own personal board of directors, of mentors, and sponsors who can help guide you along that path. You also talk about investing in you, and I think that is such pertinent advice for those to be able to create success stories within their career. I would love to then know about some of the successes that you've had, where you've helped solve problems relating to cloud computing for organizations, internal, external. >> Yeah, it's a great question. That's why we're here, right? Women of the Cloud. Yeah, SoftwareONE in particular, took the approach early on that we were going to go cloud first in our services portfolio offering, right? We saw the writing on the wall. There was no reason to invest backwards and build (indistinct) and data center consulting practices. So for us, everything we built from the ground up has been cloud native. And so some of the amazing client stories that we've had are really I think, I know it's a silver lining coming out of the pandemic when you had industries hit so hard but hit so differently. And technology was at the core on how they address those problems. So you had the healthcare space that had to get protection and be able to meet with their patients face to face but virtual at the same time. So they had to be able to take the data and still governance with HIPAA laws, keep it secure but then move it to the cloud and shift it fast, right? And then you had manufacturing who had employees who had to stay on site, right? To keep the supply chain running, but at the same time you had office workers that had to move home and completely be 100% remote. And so what we've been able to do really with AWS and our certifications in that practice is AWS differentiates itself with its agility, its framework, it allows for true development in the the PaaS space. It provides a really, really secure robust end to end solution for our clients. And when you have to be able to be nimble that quickly it's created this new expectation in the industry that it could happen again. So are you set up for the next recession? Are you set up for the next pandemic? God willing, there isn't one, but you never know. And so investing in the right infrastructure there in the cloud is critical. And then having the framework, to manage it and go it is second in line and importance. >> Being able to be just aware of the situations that can happen. In hindsight, it's, that's a silver lining coming at a COVID cheer point, being able to prepare for disasters of different types or the need to establish business continuity. I mean, we saw so many organ, well every, almost that survived every surviving organization pivot to cloud during the last couple of years that had no choice to one, survive and two, to be able to be competitive in our organization. And so we've seen so many great stories of successes. And it sounds like SoftwareONE has really been at the forefront of enabling a lot of businesses, I would imagine. Can the industry be successful in that migration and that quick pivot to being competitive advantage competitively, competitive? >> Yeah. Yeah. And I think our differentiator which comes from our core strength of this licensing and asset financial management piece. So with COVID, right? When you had this great acceleration to the cloud whether it was remote workplace or it was IaaS you then had no choice but to pay what you had to pay. It was all about keeping the lights on and running the business and thriving as much as you could. And so cost wasn't a concern. And then you had the impact in certain industries where it became a concern pretty quick. And so now we're seeing this over pendulum kind of this pendulum swing back where it's like, okay we're in the cloud, now we got to go back in time and kind of fix the processes and the financial piece and the components and the compliance that we didn't really address or have time to sit and think because we were in survival mode. And that's where SoftwareONE really comes in with this end to end view on everything from what should you move to the cloud? How does it impact your budget, your bottom line should you capitalize it? Can you capitalize it? And so the CFO and the CEO and that CIO suite have to be working end to end on how to do this effectively, right? So that they can continue to thrive in the business and not just run in survival mode anymore. >> Absolutely, we're past that point of running in survival mode. We've got to be able to thrive to be able to be agile and nimble and flexible to develop new products, new services to get them to market faster than our competition. So much has changed in the last couple of years. I'm wondering what your perspective is on diversity. We've talked about it a lot in technology. We talk about DEI often. >> Yeah. >> A lot's gone on in the last couple of years thought there's so much value in thought diversity alone. But talk to me about some of the things that you're seeing through the diversity lens and what are some of the challenges that are still there that organizations need help to eradicate? >> Yeah, topic I'm very passionate about. So there's a couple of big bullets, right? That are big rocks that we have to move. There's a gender gap, we know this. There's a wage gap, we know this. Statistics state, essentially that women make 82 cents for every $1 a man makes. Men hold 75% of the US tech jobs and working mothers, for example. 34% of them do not return to the workforce. It's mind blowing, fun facts and SoftwareONE is we actually have a hundred percent return working mothers come back and stay for at least a year, yeah. And it requires really intentional investment in making sure that they have an environment that they can be successful as they transition back making diligent choices on the benefits that you provide those women so that they don't feel that they have to make some of the tough choices that they feel pressured to do. And then you have this talent shortage, right? So on top of gender, on top of pay, then you have this all up shortage of underrepresented groups, right? And you also have, in the tech space there's just a lack of talent all up. And I think looking back, hindsight's always 2020 but as a community and as a vertical in the tech space, the organizations didn't do enough good job of reaching into high schools, understanding early on in elementary and middle school to provide equal opportunity to make the computer coding classes a requirement and not an elective to give everybody exposure to how tech works in the real world, right? As opposed to offering it as an elective. It should be a requirement. I mean, it's like financial management. It's how the world runs today is on tech. So something that SoftwareONE has done to really address that is we built this academy it's only two years in its infancy, so it's young but we go intentionally to schools and we hand select and we create a program, right? To get them exposed to the industries that they're interested in. Personally though, I think we need to start way earlier on and I think that's something that we all can work better at and is exposing the next generation to setting an expectation that tech is going to be in your life. And so let's learn about it and not be afraid of it and turn it into a career, right? >> Absolutely, every company these days has to be a data company. They have to be a tug company whether it's your grocery store, a retailer, a manufacturer, a car dealer. So that kind of choice isn't really there anymore that's just the direction that these companies have to go in. You mentioned something that I love because I've been hearing it a lot from women in this series. And that is, with respect to diversity organizations need to be intentional. It has to be intentional, really from the get go. And it sounds like SoftwareONE has done a great job with intention about creating the program and looking at how can we go after and solve some of the challenges that we have today but really go after some of these younger groups who might not understand the impact and the influence that tech is having in their lives. >> Yeah, and the only way to be intentional with the right outcome is to ensure that you have diversity of thought in the leadership teams that make those decisions, right? So you can put your best foot forward in being intentional with trying to keep women in the workforce but if you don't have women on your leadership team where are you getting that feedback from? And so it starts by this getting the talent into the company at the very bottom level from an inclusion standpoint, keeping them, but also intentionally selecting the right diversity of thought at the leadership levels where they make decisions. Because that's where the magic happens Where, I have the privilege to be able to choose and work with my HR partner on what benefits we provide. And you have to have a team that's all inclusive in understanding the needs of all the groups, right? Otherwise you end up intentionally in with the best intent of heart creating benefits that don't really help women. I think it takes a lot of work and and time, but it's something that's very important. >> Very, very important. The fact that you mentioned thought diversity, the amount of value that can come from thought diversity alone is huge. I've seen so many different data points that talk about when there are females or people of color in the executive positions at organizations they are x percent say 20% more profitable. So the data is there to demonstrate the power and the business value that can come from thought diversity alone. >> Yep. Exactly. Yep. >> So moving on, we've got a couple minutes left. I want to understand what you are seeing in your crystal ball or maybe it's a magic ball about what's next in cloud. How do you see your role evolving in the industry? >> So, well, what I think what's next in cloud both from an industry and a SoftwareONE standpoint is expanding outside of this infrastructure as a service mindset where cloud was there to run your business. And the beauty of it now is that cloud is there to also drive your business and create new products and capabilities. And so one of the biggest trends we're seeing is all organizations at some form or at some point in time will become a service provider or have an application that they host that they provide to their clients, right? And so they're a tech company. And so it's not just using tech to run it's using tech to build and innovate and be able to create a profit center to be able to drive back those to meet your clients' needs. And in order for you to make the appropriate decisions on financial strategy and budget management you have to know the cost to go into, to building the product, right? And if you don't know the cost to go into the building the product then you don't know the profit margins to set and you don't have a strategy to go sell it, at market value. And so it really becomes this linchpin in all of the areas of the business where you're not only running but you're also developing and building. So you have to have a very good, strong investment in the financial operations component of cloud. And I think that's where FinOps is coming in. You'll hear that phrase a lot, right? And so the end to end ability to financially manage cloud while secure, but also with visibility is that is this next generation, and it's going to include SaaS, right? 'Cause they're going to be plugging in it's going to include governance because it's not just the CIO making decisions anymore. It's business line leaders. And so how do you have this cloud center of excellence to be able to provide the data to the decision makers so that they can drive the business? >> And that's what it's all about, is data being able to be be used, extracting insights from it in a fast real time manner to create those business decisions that help organizations to be successful to pivot when needed and to be able to meet consumer demand. Last question for you, Ashley is, if you think about in the last say five years what are some of the biggest changes in terms of the tech workforce and innovation that you've seen? And what excites you about the direction that we're going in? >> Oh, I think that, well I think the biggest change over the last five years is the criticality of the space. It used to be like, well we're not so mature in cloud. We'll eventually get there, we'll dabble in it, we'll dip our toes in it, eventually, we'll move everything. And it's like, well, we're there.(laughs) So if you're not in it, you're behind. And I think what is really important for people who want to get into this space is it doesn't mean you have to be super techy, right? The number of times people are like can you help me with my computer? And I'm like, "No, I don't even know how." Like, "No, I not can help you with your computer." I consult and I help drive, business decisions with clients. And so there's all these peripheral roles that people can get involved in, whether it's marketing or it's sales or it's product design. It's not just engineering anymore. And I think that's what's really exciting about what's to come in this space. >> The horizon is infinite. Ashley, thank you so much for joining me on the program, talking about your role, what you're doing at SoftwareONE, some of the great successes that you've had in the cloud and some of your recommendations for organizations and people to grow their careers and really increase diversity in tech. We so appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Lisa. Thanks for having me. >> My pleasure. For Ashley Gaare, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE special program series; Women of the Cloud, brought to you by AWS. Thanks so much for watching. (soft upbeat music)

>>Partnerships in the technology business, they take many forms. For example, technology engineering partnerships, they drive value in terms of things like integration and simplification for customers. There are product partnerships. They fill gaps to create more comprehensive portfolios and more fluid relationships. Partner ecosystems offer high touch services. They offer managed services, specialty services, and other types of value based off of strong customer knowledge and years of built up trust partner. Ecosystems have evolved quite dramatically over the last decade with the explosion of data and the popularity of cloud models. Public, private, hybrid cross clouds. You know, yes it's true. Partnerships are about selling solutions, but they're also about building long term sustainable trust, where a seller learns the ins and outs of a customer's organization and can anticipate needs that are gonna drive bottom line profits for both sides of the equation, the buyer and the seller. >>Hello and welcome to our program. My name is Dave Ante and along with Lisa Martin, we're going to explore how Hitachi Van Tara drives customer success with its partners. First up, Lisa speaks with Kim King. She's the senior vice president of Strategic Partners and Alliances at Hitachi Van. And they'll set the table for us with an overview of how Hitachi is working with partners and where their priorities are focused. Then Russell Kingsley, he's the CTO and global VP of Technical sales at Hitachi Van Tara. He joins Lisa for a discussion of the tech and they're gonna get into cloud generally and hybrid cloud specifically in the role that partners play in the growing as a service movement. Now, after that I'll talk with Tom Christensen, he's the global technology advisor and executive analyst at Hitachi Vitara. And we're gonna talk about a really important topic, sustainability. We're gonna discuss where it came from, why it matters, and how it can drive bottom line profitability for both customers and partners. Let's get right to it. >>Where for the data driven, for those who understand clarity is currency. Believe progress requires precision and no neutral is not an option. We're for the data driven. The ones who can't tolerate failure, who won't put up with downtime or allow access to just anyone. We're for the data driven who act on insight instead of instinct. Bank on privacy instead of probabilities and rely on resilience instead of reaction. We see ourselves in the obsessive, the incessant, progressive, and the meticulously engineered. We enable the incredible identify with the analytical and are synonymous with the mission critical. We know what it means to be data driven because data is in our dna. We were born industrial and and we breathe digital. We speak predictive analytics so you can keep supply chains moving. We bleed in store and online insights so you can accurately predict customer preferences. We sweat security and digital privacy so you can turn complex regulations into competitive advantage. We break down barriers and eliminate silos. So you can go from data rich to data driven because it's clear the future belongs to the data driven. >>Hey everyone, welcome to this conversation. Lisa Martin here with Kim King, the SVP of Strategic Partners and Alliances at Hitachi Ventera. Kim, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you so much for joining me today. >>Thanks Lisa. It's great to be here. >>Let's talk about, so as we know, we talk about cloud all the time, the landscape, the cloud infrastructure landscape increasingly getting more and more complex. What are some of the biggest challenges and pain points that you're hearing from customers today? >>Yeah, so lot. There are lots, but I would say the, the few that we hear consistently are cost the complexity, right? Really the complexity of where do they go, how do they do it, and then availability. They have a lot of available options, but again, going back to complexity and cost, where do they think that they should move and how, how do they make that a successful move to the cloud? >>So talk to me, Hitachi Ventura has a great partner ecosystem. Where do partners play a role in helping customers to address some of the challenges with respect to the cloud landscape? >>Yeah, so part, our partners are really leading the way in the area of cloud in terms of helping customers understand the complexities of the cloud. As we talked about, they're truly the trusted advisor. So when they look at a customer's complete infrastructure, what are the workloads, what are the CRI critical applications that they work with? What's the unique architecture that they have to drive with that customer for a successful outcome and help them architect that? And so partners are truly leading the way across the board, understanding the complexities of each individual customer and then helping them make the right decisions with and for them. And then bringing us along as part of that, >>Talk to me a little bit about the partner landscape, the partner ecosystem at Hitachi Ventura. How does this fit into the overall strategy for the company? >>So we really look at our ecosystem as an extension of our sales organization and and really extension across the board, I would say our goal is to marry the right customer with the right partner and help them achieve their goals, ensure that they keep costs in check, that they ensure they don't have any security concerns, and that they have availability for the solutions and applications that they're trying to move to the cloud, which is most important. So we really, we really look at our ecosystem as a specialty ecosystem that adds high value for the right customers. >>So Kim, talk to me about how partners fit into Hitachi van's overall strategy. >>So I think our biggest differentiators with partners is that they're not just another number. Our partner organization is that valued extension of our overall sales pre-sales services organization. And we treat them like an extension of our organization. It's funny because I was just on a call with an analyst earlier this week and they said that AWS has increased their number of partners to 150,000 partners from, it was just under a hundred thousand. And I'm really not sure how you provide quality engagement to partners, right? And is how is that really a sustainable strategy? So for us, we look at trusted engagement across the ecosystem as a def differentiation. Really our goal is to make their life simple and profitable and really become their primary trusted partner when we go to market with them. And we see that paying dividends with our partners as they engage with us and as they expand and grow across the segments and then grow globally with us as well. >>And that's key, right? That synergistic approach when you're in customer conversations, what do you articulate as the key competitive differentiators where it relates to your partners? >>So really the, that they're the trusted advisor for that partner, right? That they understand our solutions better than any solution out there. And because we're not trying to be all things to our customers and our partners that we being bring best breaths of breed, best of breed solutions to our customers through our partner community, they can truly provide that end user experience and the successful outcome that's needed without, you know, sort of all kinds of, you know, crazy cha challenges, right? When you look at it, they really wanna make sure that they're driving that co-developed solution and the successful outcome for that customer. >>So then how do you feel that Hitachi Ventura helps partners really to grow and expand their own business? >>Wow, so that's, there's tons of ways, but we've, we've created a very simplified, what we call digital selling platform. And in that digital selling platform, we have allowed our partners to choose their own price and pre-approve their pricing and their promotions. They've actually, we've expanded the way we go to market with our partners from a sort of a technical capabilities. We give them online what we call Hitachi online labs that allow them to really leverage all of the solutions and demo systems out there today. And they have complete access to any one of our resources, product management. And so we really have, like I said, we actually provide our partners with better tools and resources sometimes than we do our own sales and pre-sales organization. So we, we look at them as, because they have so many other solutions out there that we have to be one step ahead of everybody else to give them that solution capability and the expertise that they need for their customers. >>So if you dig in, where is it that Hiti is helping partners succeed with your portfolio? >>Wow. So I think just across the board, I think we're really driving that profitable, trusted, and simplified engagement with our partner community because it's a value base and ease of doing business. I say that we allow them to scale and drive that sort of double digit growth through all of the solutions and and offerings that we have today. And because we've taken the approach of a very complex technical sort of infrastructure from a high end perspective and scale it all the way through to our mid-size enterprise, that allows them to really enter any customer at any vertical and provide them a really quality solution with that 100% data availability guarantee that we provide all of our customers. >>So then if we look at the overall sales cycle and the engagement, where is it that you're helping cus your partners rather succeed with the portfolio? >>Say that again? Sorry, my brain broke. No, >>No worries. So if we look at the overall sales cycle, where is it specifically where you're helping customers to succeed with the portfolio? >>So from the sales cycle, I think because we have the, a solution that is simple, easy, and really scaled for the type of customer that we have out there, it allows them to basically right size their infrastructure based on the application, the workload, the quality or the need that application may have and ensure that we provide them with that best solution. >>So then from a partner's perspective, how is it that Hitachi van is helping them to actually close deals faster? >>Yeah, so lots of great ways I think between our pre-sales organization that's on call and available a hundred percent of the time, I think that we've seen, again, the trusted engagement with them from a pricing and packaging perspective. You know, we, you know, two years ago it would take them two to three weeks to get a pre-approved quote where today they preapproved their own quotes in less than an hour and can have that in the hands of a customer. So we've seen that the ability for our partners to create and close orders in very short periods of time and actually get to the customer's needs very quickly, >>So dramatically faster. Yes. Talk about overall, so the partner relationship's quite strong, very synergistic that, that Hitachi Ventura has with its customers. Let's kind of step back out and look at the cloud infrastructure. How do you see it evolving the market evolving overall in say the next six months, 12 months? >>Yeah, so we see it significantly, we've been doing a lot of studies around this specifically. So we have a couple of different teams. We have our sort of our standard partner team that's out there and now we have a specialty cloud service provider team that really focuses on partners that are building and their own infrastructure or leveraging the infrastructure of a large hyperscaler or another GSI and selling that out. And then what we found is when we dig down deeper into our standard sort of partner reseller or value added reseller market, what we're seeing is that they are want to have the capability to resell the solution, but they don't necessarily wanna have to own and manage the infrastructure themselves. So we're helping both of them through that transition. We see that it's gonna, so it's funny cuz you're seeing a combination of many customers move to really the hyperscale or public cloud and many of them want to repatriate their infrastructure back because they see costs and they see challenges around all of that. And so our partners are helping them understand, again, what is the best solution for them as opposed to let's just throw everything in the public cloud and hope that it works. We're we're really helping them make the right choices and decisions and we're putting the right partners together to make that happen. >>And how was that feedback, that data helping you to really grow and expand the partner program as a whole? >>Yeah, so it's been fantastic. We have a whole methodology that we, we created, which is called PDM plan, develop monetize with partners. And so we went specifically to market with cloud service providers that'll, and we really tested this out with them. We didn't just take a solution and say, here, go sell it, good luck and have, you know, have a nice day. Many vendors are doing that to their partners and the partners are struggling to monetize those solutions. So we spend a lot of time upfront planning with them what is not only the storage infrastructure but your potentially your data resiliency and, and everything else that you're looking at your security solutions. How do we package those all together? How do we help you monetize them? And then who do you target from a customer perspective so that they've built up a pipeline of opportunities that they can go and work with us on and we really sit side by side with them in a co-development environment. >>In terms of that side by side relationship, how does the partner ecosystem play a role in Hitachi Venturas as a service business? >>So our primary go to market with our, as a service business is with and through partners. So our goal is to drive all, almost all of of our as a service. Unless it's super highly complex and something that a partner cannot support, we will make sure that they really, we leverage that with them with all of our partners. >>So strong partner relationships, very strong partner ecosystem. What would you say, Kim, are the priorities for the partner ecosystem going forward? The next say year? >>Yeah, so we have tons of priorities, right? I think really it's double digit growth for them and for us and understanding how a simpler approach that's customized for the specific vertical or customer base or go to market that they have that helps them quickly navigate to be successful. Our goal is always to facilitate trusted engagements with our partners, right? And then really, as I said, directionally our goal is to be 95 to a hundred percent of all of our business through partners, which helps customers and then really use that trusted advisor status they have to provide that value base to the customer. And then going back on our core tenants, which are, you know, really a trusted, simplified, profitable engagement with our partner community that allows them to really drive successful outcomes and go to market with us. And the end users >>Trust is such an important word, we can't underutilize it in these conversations. Last question. Sure. From a channel business perspective, what are some of the priorities coming down the pi? >>Oh, again, my biggest priority right, is always to increase the number of partner success stories that we have and increase the value to our partners. So we really dig in, we, we right now sit about number one or number two in, in our space with our partners in ease of doing business and value to our channel community. We wanna be number one across the board, right? Our goal is to make sure that our partner community is successful and that they really have those profitable engagements and that we're globally working with them to drive that engagement and, and help them build more profitable businesses. And so we just take tons of feedback from our partners regularly to help them understand, but we, we act on it very quickly so that we can make sure we incorporate that into our new program and our go to markets as we roll out every year. >>It sounds like a great flywheel of communications from the partners. Kim, thank you so much for joining me today talking about what Hitachi Vanta is doing with its partner ecosystem, the value in IT for customers. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you very much. >>Up next, Russell Kingsley joins me, TTO and global VP of technical sales at Hitachi van you watch in the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. Hey everyone, welcome back to our conversation with Hitachi van Tara, Lisa Martin here with Russell Skillings Lee, the CTO and global VP of technical sales at Hitachi Van Russell. Welcome to the program. >>Hi Lisa, nice to be here. >>Yeah, great to have you. So here we are, the end of calendar year 2022. What are some of the things that you're hearing out in the field in terms of customers priorities for 2023? >>Yeah, good one. Just to, to set the scene here, we tend to deal with enterprises that have mission critical IT environments and this has been been our heritage and continues to be our major strength. So just to set the scene here, that's the type of customers predominantly I'd be hearing from. And so that's what you're gonna hear about here. Now, in terms of 20 23, 1 of the, the macro concerns that's hitting almost all of our customers right now, as you can probably appreciate is power consumption. And closely related to that is the whole area of ESG and decarbonization and all of that sort of thing. And I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on that one because that would be a whole session in itself really, but sufficient to say it is a priority for us and we, we are very active in, in that area. >>So aside from from that one that that big one, there's also a couple that are pretty much in common for most of our customers and, and we're in areas that we can help. One of those is in an exponential growth of the amount of data. It's, it's predicted that the world's data is going to triple by 2025 as opposed to where it was in 2020. And I think everyone's contributing to that, including a lot of our customers. So just the, the act of managing that amount of data is, is a challenge in itself. And I think closely related to that, a desire to use that data better to be able to gain more business insights and potentially create new business outcomes and business ideas are, is another one of those big challenges in, in that sense, I think a lot of our customers are in what I would kind of call, I affectionately call the, the post Facebook awakening era. >>And that, and what I mean by that is our traditional businesses, you know, when Facebook came along, they kind of illustrated, hey, I can actually make some use out of what is seemingly an enormous amount of useless data, which is exactly what Facebook did. They took a whole lot of people's Yeah. The minutia of people's lives and turned it into, you know, advertising revenue by gaining insights from, from those, you know, sort of seemingly useless bits of data and, you know, right. And I think this actually gave rise to a lot of digital business at that time. You know, the, this whole idea of what all you really need to be successful and disrupt the business is, you know, a great idea, you know, an app and a whole bunch of data to, to power it. And I think that a lot of our traditional customers are looking at this and wondering how do they get into the act? Because they've been collecting data for decades, an enormous amount of data, right? >>Yes. I mean, every company these days has to be a data company, but to your point, they've gotta be able to extract those insights, monetize it, and create real value new opportunities for the business at record speed. >>Yes, that's exactly right. And so being able to, to wield that data somehow turn it, it kind of turns out our customer's attentions to the type of infrastructure they've got as well. I mean, if you think about those, those companies that have been really successful in leveraging that data, a lot of them have, especially in the early days, leverage the cloud to be able to build out their capabilities. And, and the reason why the cloud became such a pivotal part of that is because it offered self-service. IT and, you know, easy development platforms to those people that had these great ideas. All they needed was access to, to, you know, the provider's website and a credit card. And now all of a sudden they could start to build a business from that. And I think a lot of our traditional IT customers are looking at this and thinking, now how do I build a similar sort of infrastructure? How do I, how do I provide that kind of self-service capability to the owners of business inside my company rather than the IT company sort of being a gatekeeper to a selected set of software packages. How now do I provide this development platform for those internal users? And I think this, this is why really hybrid cloud has become the defacto IT sort of architectural standard, even even for quite traditional, you know, IT companies. >>So when it comes to hybrid cloud, what are some of the challenges the customers are facing? And then I know Hitachi has a great partner ecosystem. How are partners helping Hitachi Ventura and its customers to eliminate or solve some of those hybrid cloud challenges? >>Yeah, it's, it, it's a great question and you know, it's, it's not 1975 anymore. It's not, it's not like you're going to get all of your IT needs from, from one, from one vendor hybrid by sort of, it's, you know, by definition is going to involve multiple pieces. And so there basically is no hybrid at all without a partner ecosystem. You really can't get everything at, at a one stop shop like you used to. But even if you think about the biggest public cloud provider on the planet, aws even, it has a marketplace for partner solutions. So, so even they see, even for customers that might consider themselves to be all in on public cloud, they are still going to need other pieces, which is where their marketplace come comes in. Now for, for us, you know, we are, we're a company that, we've been in the IT business for over 60 years, one of one of the few that could claim that sort of heritage. >>And you know, we've seen a lot of this type of change ourselves, this change of attitude from being able to provide everything yourself to being someone who contributes to an overall ecosystem. So partners are absolutely essential. And so now we kind of have a, a partner first philosophy when it comes to our routes to market on, you know, not just our own products in terms of, you know, a resale channel or whatever, but also making sure that we are working with some of the biggest players in hybrid infrastructure and determining where we can add value to that in our, in our own solutions. And so, you know, when it comes to those, those partner ecosystems, we're always looking for the spaces where we can best add our own capability to those prevailing IT architectures that are successful in the marketplace. And, you know, I think that it's probably fair to say, you know, for us, first and foremost, we, we have a reputation for having the biggest, most reliable storage infrastructure available on the planet. >>And, and we make no apologies for the fact that we tout our speeds and feeds and uptime supremacy. You know, a lot of our, a lot of our competitors would suggest that, hey, speeds and feeds don't matter. But you know, that's kind of what you say when, when you're not the fastest or not the most reliable, you know, of course they matter. And for us, what we, the way that we look at this is we say, let's look at who's providing the best possible hybrid solutions and let's partner with them to make those solutions even better. That's the way we look at it. >>Can you peel the, the onion a little bit on the technology underpinning the solutions, give a glimpse into that and then maybe add some color in terms of how partners are enhancing that? >>Yeah, let me, let me do that with a few examples here, and maybe what I can do is I can sort of share some insight about the way we think with partnering with, with particular people and why it's a good blend or why we see that technologically it's a good blend. So for example, the work we do with VMware, which we consider to be one of our most important hybrid cloud partners and in, and in fact it's, it's my belief, they have one of the strongest hybrid cloud stories in the industry. It resonates really strongly with, with our customers as well. But you know, we think it's made so much better with the robust underpinnings that we provide. We're one of the, one of the few storage vendors that provides a 100% data availability guarantee. So we, we take that sort of level of reliability and we add other aspects like life cycle management of the underpinning infrastructure. >>We combine that with what VMware's doing, and then when you look at our converged or hyper-converged solutions with them, it's a better together story where you now have what is one of the best hybrid cloud stories in the industry with VMware. But now for the on premise part, especially, you've now added a hundred percent data, data availability guarantee, and you've made managing the underlying infrastructure so much easier through the tools that we provide that go down to that level A level underneath where VMware are. And so that's, that's VMware. I've got a couple, couple more examples just to sort of fill, fill that out a bit. Sure. Cisco is another part, very strong partner of ours, a key partner. And I mean, you look at Cisco, they're a 50 billion IT provider and they don't have a dedicated storage infrastructure of their own. So they're going to partner with someone. >>From our perspective, we look at Cisco's, Cisco's customers and we look at them and think they're very similar to our own in terms of they're known to appreciate performance and reliability and a bit of premium in quality, and we think we match them them quite well. They're already buying what we believe are the best converge platforms in the industry from Cisco. So it makes sense that those customers would want to compliment that investment with the best array, best storage array they can get. And so we think we are helping Cisco's customers make the most of their decision to be ucs customers. Final one for, for you, Lisa, by way of example, we have a relationship with, with Equinix and you know, Equinix is the world's sort of leading colo provider. And the way I think they like to think of themselves, and I too tend to agree with them, is their, they're one of the most compelling high-speed interconnect networks in the world. >>They're connected to all of the, the, the significant cloud providers in most of the locations around the world. We have a, a relationship with them where we find we have customers in common who really love the idea of compute from the cloud. Compute from the cloud is great because compute is something that you are doing for a set period of time and then it's over you. Like you have a task, you do some compute, it's done. Cloud is beautiful for that. Storage on the other hand is very long lived storage doesn't tend to operate in that same sort of way. It sort of just becomes a bigger and bigger blob over time. And so the cost model around public cloud and storage is not as compelling as it is for compute. And so our, with our relationship with Equinix, we help our customers to be able to create, let's call it a, a data anchor point where they put our arrays into, into an Equinix location, and then they utilize Equinix as high speeding interconnects to the, to the cloud providers, okay. To take the compute from them. So they take the compute from the cloud providers and they own their own storage, and in this way they feel like we've now got the best of all worlds. Right. What I hope that illustrates Lisa is with those three examples is we are always looking for ways to find our key advantages with any given, you know, alliance partners advantages, >>Right? What are, when you're in customer conversations, and our final few minutes here, I wanna get, what are some of the key differentiators that you talk about when you're in customer conversations, and then how does the partner ecosystem fit into Hitachi vans as a service business? We'll start with differentiators and then let's move into the as service business so we can round out with that. >>Okay. Let's start with the differentiators. Yeah. Firstly and I, and hopefully I've kind of, I've hit this point hard, hard enough. We do believe that we have the fastest and most reliable storage infrastructure on the planet. This is kind of what we are known for, and customers that are working with us already sort of have an appreciation for that. And so they're looking for, okay, you've got that now, how can you make my hybrid cloud aspirations better? So we do have that as a fundamental, right? So, but secondly I'd say, I think it's also because we go beyond just storage management and, and into the areas of data management. You know, we've got, we've got solutions that are not just about storing the bits. We do think that we do that very well, but we also have solutions that move into the areas of enrichment, of the data, cataloging of the data, classification of the data, and most importantly, analytics. >>So, you know, we, we think it's, some of our competitors just stop at storing stuff and some of our competitors are in the analytics space, but we feel that we can bridge that. And we think that that's a, that's a competitive advantage for us. One of the other areas that I think is key for us as well is, as I said, we're one of the few vendors who've been in the marketplace for 60 years and we think this, this, this gives us a more nuanced perspective about things. There are many things in the industry, trends that have happened over time where we feel we've seen this kind of thing before and I think we will see it again. But you only really get that perspective if you are, if you are long lived in the industry. And so we believe that our conversations with our customers bear a little bit more sophistication. It's not just, it's not just about what's the latest and greatest trends. >>Right. We've got about one minute left. Can you, can you round us out with how the partner ecosystem is playing a role in the as service business? >>They're absolutely pivotal in that, you know, we, we ourselves don't own data centers, right? So we don't provide our own cloud services out. So we are 100% partner focused when it comes to that aspect. Our formula is to help partners build their cloud services with our solutions and then onsell them to their customers as as as a service. You know, and by what quick way of example, VMware for example, they've got nearly 5,000 partners selling VMware cloud services. 5,000 blows me away. And many of them are our partners too. So we kind of see this as a virtuous cycle. We've got product, we've got an an alliance with VMware and we work together with partners in common for the delivery of an as a service business. >>Got it. So the, as you said, the partner ecosystem is absolutely pivotal. Russell, it's been a pleasure having you on the program talking about all things hybrid cloud challenges, how Hitachi van is working with its partner ecosystems to really help customers across industries solve those big problems. We really appreciate your insights and your time. >>Thank you very much, Lisa. It's been great. >>Yeah, yeah. For Russell Stingley, I'm Lisa Martin. In a moment we're gonna continue our conversation with Tom Christensen. Stay tuned. >>Sulfur Royal has always embraced digital technology. We were amongst the first hospitals in the UK to install a full electronic patient record system. Unfortunately, as a result of being a pioneer, we often find that there's gaps in the digital solutions. My involvement has been from the very start of this program, a group of us got together to discuss what the problems actually were in the hospital and how we could solve this. >>The digital control center is an innovation that's been designed in partnership between ourselves, anti touch, and it's designed to bring all of the information that is really critical for delivering effective and high quality patient care. Together the DCC is designed not only to improve the lives of patients, but also of our staff giving us information that our demand is going to increase in the number of patients needing support. The technology that we're building can be replicated across sulfur, the NCA, and the wider nhs, including social care and community services. Because it brings all of that information that is essential for delivering high quality efficient care. >>The DCC will save time for both staff and more importantly our patients. It will leave clinicians to care for patients rather than administrate systems and it will allow the system that I work with within the patient flow team to effectively and safely place patients in clinically appropriate environments. >>But we chose to partner with Hitachi to deliver the DCC here at Sulfur. They were willing to work with us to co-produce and design a product that really would work within the environment that we find ourselves in a hospital, in a community setting, in a social care setting. >>My hopes for the DCC is that ultimately we will provide more efficient and reliable care for our patients. >>I do believe the digital control center will improve the lives of staff and also the patients so that we can then start to deliver the real change that's needed for patient care. >>Okay, we're back with Tom Christensen, who's the global technology advisor and executive analyst at Hitachi Van Tara. And we're exploring how Hitachi Van Tower drives customer success specifically with partners. You know Tom, it's funny, back in the early part of the last decade, there was this big push around, remember it was called green it and then the oh 7 0 8 financial crisis sort of put that on the back burner. But sustainability is back and it seems to be emerging as a mega trend in in it is, are you seeing this, is it same wine new label? How real is this trend and where's the pressure coming from? >>Well, we clearly see that sustainability is a mega trend in the IT sector. And when we talk to CIOs or senior IT leaders or simply just invite them in for a round table on this topic, they all tell us that they get the pressure from three different angles. The first one is really end consumers and end consumers. Nowaday are beginning to ask questions about the green profile and what are the company doing for the environment. And this one here is both private and public companies as well. The second pressure that we see is coming from the government. The government thinks that companies are not moving fast enough so they want to put laws in that are forcing companies to move faster. And we see that in Germany as an example, where they are giving a law into enterprise companies to following human rights and sustainability tree levels back in the supply chain. >>But we also see that in EU they are talking about a new law that they want to put into action and that one will replicate to 27 countries in Europe. But this one is not only Europe, it's the rest of the world where governments are talking about forcing companies to move faster than we have done in the past. So we see two types of pressure coming in and at the same time, this one here starts off at the CEO at a company because they want to have the competitive edge and be able to be relevant in the market. And for that reason they're beginning to put KPIs on themself as the ceo, but they're also hiring sustainability officers with sustainability KPIs. And when that happens it replicates down in the organization and we can now see that some CIOs, they have a kpi, others are indirectly measured. >>So we see direct and indirect. The same with CFOs and other C levels. They all get measured on it. And for that reason it replicates down to IT people. And that's what they tell us on these round table. I get that pressure every day, every week, every quarter. But where is the pressure coming from? Well the pressure is coming from in consumers and new laws that are put into action that force companies to think differently and have focus on their green profile and doing something good for the environment. So those are the tree pressures that we see. But when we talk to CFOs as an example, we are beginning to see that they have a new store system where they put out request for proposal and this one is in about 58% of all request for proposal that we receive that they are asking for our sustainability take, what are you doing as a vendor? >>And in their score system cost has the highest priority and number two is sustainability. It waits about 15, 20 to 25% when they look at your proposal that you submit to a cfo. But in some cases the CFO say, I don't even know where the pressure is coming from. I'm asked to do it. Or they're asked to do it because end consumers laws and so on are forcing them to do it. But I would answer, yeah, sustainability has become a make trend this year and it's even growing faster and faster every month we move forward. >>Yeah, Tom, it feels like it's here to stay this time. And your point about public policy is right on, we saw the EU leading with privacy and GDPR and it looks like it's gonna lead again here. You know, just shifting gears, I've been to a number of Hitachi facilities in my day. OWA is my favorite because on a clear day you can see Mount Fuji, but other plants I've been to as well. What does Hitachi do in the production facility to reduce CO2 emissions? >>Yeah, I think you're hitting a good point here. So what we have, we have a, a facility in Japan and we have one in Europe and we have one in America as well to keep our production close to our customers and reduced transportation for the factory out to our customers. But you know, in the, in the, in the May region back in 2020 13, we created a new factory. And when we did that we were asked to do it in an energy, energy neutral way, which means that we are moving from being powered by black energy to green energy in that factory. And we build a factory with concrete walls that were extremely thick to make it cold in the summertime and hot in the winter time with minimum energy consumption. But we also put 17,000 square meters of solar panel on the roof to power that factory. >>We were collecting rain waters to flush it in the toilet. We were removing light bulbs with L E D and when we sent out our equipment to our customers, we put it in a, instead of sending out 25 packages to a customer, we want to reduce the waste as much as possible. And you know, this one was pretty new back in 2013. It was actually the biggest project in EA at that time. I will say if you want to build a factory today, that's the way you are going to do it. But it has a huge impact for us when electricity is going up and price and oil and gas prices are coming up. We are running with energy neutral in our facility, which is a big benefit for us going forward. But it is also a competitive advantage to be able to explain what we have been doing the last eight, nine years in that factory. We are actually walking to talk and we make that decision even though it was a really hard decision to do back in 2013, when you do decisions like this one here, the return of investment is not coming the first couple of years. It's something that comes far out in the future. But right now we are beginning to see the benefit of the decision we made back in 2013. >>I wanna come back to the economics, but before I do, I wanna pick up on something you just said because you know, you hear the slogan sustainability by design. A lot of people might think okay, that's just a marketing slogan, slogan to vector in into this mega trend, but it sounds like it's something that you've been working on for quite some time. Based on your last comments, can you add some color to that? >>Yeah, so you know, the factory is just one example of what you need to do to reduce the CO2 emission and that part of the life of a a product. The other one is really innovating new technology to drive down the CO2 emission. And here we are laser focused on what we call decarbonization by design. And this one is something that we have done the last eight years, so this is far from you for us. So between each generation of products that we have put out over the last eight years, we've been able to reduce the CO2 emission by up to 30 to 60% between each generation of products that we have put into the market. So we are laser focused on driving that one down, but we are far from done, we still got eight years before we hit our first target net zero in 2030. So we got a roadmap where we want to achieve even more with new technology. At its core, it is a technology innovator and our answers to reduce the CO2 emission and the decarbonization of a data center is going to be through innovating new technology because it has the speed, the scale, and the impact to make it possible to reach your sustainability objectives going forward. >>How about recycling? You know, where does that fit? I mean, the other day it was, you know, a lot of times at a hotel, you know, you used to get bottled water, now you get, you know, plant based, you know, waters in a box and, and so we are seeing it all around us. But for a manufacturer of your size, recycling and circular economy, how does that fit into your plans? >>Yeah, let me try to explain what we are doing here. Cause one thing is how you produce it. Another thing is how you innovate all that new technology, but you also need to combine that with service and software, otherwise you won't get the full benefit. So what we are doing here, when it comes to exploring circular economics, it's kind of where we have an eternity mindset. We want to see if it is possible to get nothing out to the landfill. This is the aim that we are looking at. So when you buy a product today, you get an option to keep it in your data center for up to 10 years. But what we wanna do when you keep it for 10 years is to upgrade only parts of the system. So let's say that you need more CBU power, use your switch the controller to next generation controller and you get more CPU power in your storage system to keep it those 10 years. >>But you can also expand with new this media flash media, even media that doesn't exist today will be supported over those 10 years. You can change your protocol in the, in the front end of your system to have new protocols and connect to your server environment with the latest and greatest technology. See, the benefit here is that you don't have to put your system into a truck and a recycle process after three years, four years, five years, you can actually postpone that one for 10 years. And this one is reducing the emission again. But once we take it back, you put it on the truck and we take it into our recycling facility. And here we take our own equipment like compute network and switches, but we also take competitor equipment in and we recycle as much as we can. In many cases, it's only 1% that goes to the landfill or 2% that goes to the landfill. >>The remaining material will go into new products either in our cycle or in other parts of the electronic industry. So it will be reused for other products. So when we look at what we've been doing for many years, that has been linear economics where you buy material, you make your product, you put it into production, and it goes into land feed afterwards. The recycling economics, it's really, you buy material, you make your product, you put it into production, and you recycle as much as possible. The remaining part will go into the landfill. But where we are right now is exploring circle economics where you actually buy material, make it, put it into production, and you reuse as much as you can. And only one 2% is going into the landfill right now. So we have come along and we honestly believe that the circular economics is the new economics going forward for many industries in the world. >>Yeah. And that addresses some of the things that we were talking about earlier about sustainability by design, you have to design that so that you can take advantage of that circular economy. I, I do wanna come back to the economics because, you know, in the early days of so-called green, it, there was a lot of talk about, well, I, I, I'll never be able to lower the power bill. And the facilities people don't talk to the IT people. And that's changed. So explain why sustainability is good business, not just an expense item, but can really drive bottom line profitability. I, I understand it's gonna take some time, but, but help us understand your experience there, Tom. >>Yeah, let me try to explain that one. You know, you often get the question about sustainability. Isn't that a cost? I mean, how much does it cost to get that green profile? But you know, in reality when you do a deep dive into the data center, you realize that sustainability is a cost saving activity. And this one is quite interesting. And we have now done more than 1,200 data center assessment around the world where we have looked at data centers. And let me give you just an average number from a global bank that we work with. And this one is, it is not different from all the other cases that we are doing. So when we look at the storage area, what we can do on the electricity by moving an old legacy data center into a new modernized infrastructure is to reduce the electricity by 96%. >>This is a very high number and a lot of money that you save, but the CO2 mission is reduced by 96% as well. The floor space can go up to 35% reduction as well. When we move down to the compute part, we are talking about 61% reduction in electricity on the compute part just by moving from legacy to new modern infrastructure and 61% on the CO2 emission as well. And see this one here is quite interesting because you save electricity and you and you do something really good for the environment. At the same time, in this case I'm talking about here, the customer was paying 2.5 million US dollar annually and by just modernizing that infrastructure, we could bring it down to 1.1 million. This is 1.4 million savings straight into your pocket and you can start the next activity here looking at moving from virtual machine to containers. Containers only use 10% of the CPU resources compared to a virtual machine. Move up to the application layer. If you have that kind of capability in your organization, modernizing your application with sustainability by design and you can reduce the C, the CO2 emission by up to 50%. There's so much we can do in that data center, but we often start at the infrastructure first and then we move up in the chain and we give customers benefit in all these different layers. >>Yeah, A big theme of this program today is what you guys are doing with partners do, are partners aware of this in your view? Are they in tune with it? Are they demanding it? What message would you like to give the channel partners, resellers and, and distributors who may be watching? >>So the way to look at it is that we offer a platform with product, service and software and that platform can elevate the conversation much higher up in the organization. And partners get the opportunity here to go up and talk to sustainability officers about what we are doing. They can even take it up to the CEO and talk about how can you reach your sustainability KPI in the data center. What we've seen this round table when we have sustainability officers in the room is that they're very focused on the green profile and what is going out of the company. They rarely have a deep understanding of what is going on at the data center. Why? Because it's really technical and they don't have that background. So just by elevating the conversation to these sustainability officers, you can tell them what they should measure and how they should measure that. And you can be sure that that will replicate down to the CIO and the CFO and that immediately your request for proposal going forward. So this one here is really a golden opportunity to take that story, go out and talk to different people in the organization to be relevant and have an impact and make it more easy for you to win that proposal when it gets out. >>Well really solid story on a super important topic. Thanks Tom. Really appreciate your time and taking us through your perspectives. >>Thank you Dave, for the invitation. >>Yeah, you bet. Okay, in a moment we'll be back. To summarize our final thoughts, keep it right there. >>Click by click. The world is changing. We make sense of our world by making sense of data. You can draw more meaning from more data than was ever possible before, so that every thought and every action can build your path to intelligent innovation to change the way the world works. Hitachi Van Tara. >>Okay, thanks for watching the program. We hope you gained a better understanding of how Hitachi Ventura drives customer success with its partners. If you wanna learn more about how you can partner for profit, check out the partner togetherPage@hitachiventera.com and there's a link on the webpage here that will take you right to that page. Okay, that's a wrap for Lisa Martin. This is Dave Valante with the Cube. You a leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

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

>>We're back at Supercomputing 22 in Dallas, winding down day four of this conference. I'm Paul Gillan, my co-host Dave Nicholson. We are talking, we've been talking super computing all week and you hear a lot about what's going on in the United States, what's going on in China, Japan. What we haven't talked a lot about is what's going on in Europe and did you know that two of the top five supercomputers in the world are actually from European countries? Well, our guest has a lot to do with that. Florian, bearish, I hope I pronounce that correctly. My German is, German is not. My strength is the operations director for price, ais, S B L. And let's start with that. What is price? >>So, hello and thank you for the invitation. I'm Flon and Price is a partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe. It's a non-profit association with the seat in Brussels in Belgium. And we have 24 members. These are representatives from different European countries dealing with high performance computing in at their place. And we, so far, we provided the resources for our European research communities. But this changed in the last year, this oral HPC joint undertaking who put a lot of funding in high performance computing and co-funded five PET scale and three preis scale systems. And two of the preis scale systems. You mentioned already, this is Lumi and Finland and Leonardo in Bologna in Italy were in the place for and three and four at the top 500 at least. >>So why is it important that Europe be in the top list of supercomputer makers? >>I think Europe needs to keep pace with the rest of the world. And simulation science is a key technology for the society. And we saw this very recently with a pandemic, with a covid. We were able to help the research communities to find very quickly vaccines and to understand how the virus spread around the world. And all this knowledge is important to serve the society. Or another example is climate change. Yeah. With these new systems, we will be able to predict more precise the changes in the future. So the more compute power you have, the better the smaller the grid and there is resolution you can choose and the lower the error will be for the future. So these are, I think with these systems, the big or challenges we face can be addressed. This is the climate change, energy, food supply, security. >>Who are your members? Do they come from businesses? Do they come from research, from government? All of the >>Above. Yeah. Our, our members are public organization, universities, research centers, compute sites as a data centers, but But public institutions. Yeah. And we provide this services for free via peer review process with excellence as the most important criteria to the research community for free. >>So 40 years ago when, when the idea of an eu, and maybe I'm getting the dates a little bit wrong, when it was just an idea and the idea of a common currency. Yes. Reducing friction between, between borders to create a trading zone. Yes. There was a lot of focus there. Fast forward to today, would you say that these efforts in supercomputing, would they be possible if there were not an EU super structure? >>No, I would say this would not be possible in this extent. I think when though, but though European initiatives are, are needed and the European Commission is supporting these initiatives very well. And before praise, for instance 2008, there were research centers and data centers operating high performance computing systems, but they were not talking to each other. So it was isolated praise created community of operation sites and it facilitated the exchange between them and also enabled to align investments and to, to get the most out of the available funding. And also at this time, and still today for one single country in Europe, it's very hard to provide all the different architectures needed for all the different kind of research communities and applications. If you want to, to offer always the latest technologies, though this is really hardly possible. So with this joint action and opening the resources for other research groups from other countries, you, we, we were able to, yeah, get access to the latest technology for different communities at any given time though. And >>So, so the fact that the two systems that you mentioned are physically located in Finland and in Italy, if you were to walk into one of those facilities and meet the people that are there, they're not just fins in Finland and Italians in Italy. Yeah. This is, this is very much a European effort. So this, this is true. So, so in this, in that sense, the geography is sort of abstracted. Yeah. And the issues of sovereignty that make might take place in in the private sector don't exist or are there, are there issues with, can any, what are the requirements for a researcher to have access to a system in Finland versus a system in Italy? If you've got a EU passport, Hmm. Are you good to go? >>I think you are good to go though. But EU passport, it's now it becomes complicated and political. It's, it's very much, if we talk about the recent systems, well first, let me start a praise. Praise was inclusive and there was no any constraints as even we had users from US, Australia, we wanted just to support excellence in science. And we did not look at the nationality of the organization, of the PI and and so on. There were quotas, but these quotas were very generously interpreted. So, and if so, now with our HPC joint undertaking, it's a question from what European funds, these systems were procured and if a country or being country are associated to this funding, the researchers also have access to these systems. And this addresses basically UK and and Switzerland, which are not in the European Union, but they were as created to the Horizon 2020 research framework. And though they could can access the systems now available, Lumi and Leono and the Petascale system as well. How this will develop in the future, I don't know. It depends to which research framework they will be associated or not. >>What are the outputs of your work at price? Are they reference designs? Is it actual semiconductor hardware? Is it the research? What do you produce? >>So the, the application we run or the simulation we run cover all different scientific domains. So it's, it's science, it's, but also we have industrial let projects with more application oriented targets. Aerodynamics for instance, for cars or planes or something like this. But also fundamental science like the physical elementary physics particles for instance or climate change, biology, drug design, protein costa, all these >>Things. Can businesses be involved in what you do? Can they purchase your, your research? Do they contribute to their, I'm sure, I'm sure there are many technology firms in Europe that would like to be involved. >>So this involving industry though our calls are open and is, if they want to do open r and d, they are invited to submit also proposals. They will be evaluated and if this is qualifying, they will get the access and they can do their jobs and simulations. It's a little bit more tricky if it's in production, if they use these resources for their business and do not publish the results. They are some, well, probably more sites who, who are able to deal with these requests. Some are more dominant than others, but this is on a smaller scale, definitely. Yeah. >>What does the future hold? Are you planning to, are there other countries who will be joining the effort, other institutions? Do you plan to expand your, your scope >>Well, or I think or HPC joint undertaking with 36 member states is quite, covers already even more than Europe. And yeah, clearly if, if there are other states interest interested to join that there is no limitation. Although the focus lies on European area and on union. >>When, when you interact with colleagues from North America, do you, do you feel that there is a sort of European flavor to supercomputing that is different or are we so globally entwined? No. >>So research is not national, it's not European, it's international. This is also clearly very clear and I can, so we have a longstanding collaboration with our US colleagues and also with Chap and South Africa and Canada. And when Covid hit the world, we were able within two weeks to establish regular seminars inviting US and European colleagues to talk to to other, to each other and exchange the results and find new collaboration and to boost the research activities. So, and I have other examples as well. So when we, we already did the joint calls US exceed and in Europe praise and it was a very interesting experience. So we received applications from different communities and we decided that we will review this on our side, on European, with European experts and US did it in US with their experts. And you can guess what the result was at the meeting when we compared our results, it was matching one by one. It was exactly the same. Recite >>That it, it's, it's refreshing to hear a story of global collaboration. Yeah. Where people are getting along and making meaningful progress. >>I have to mention you, I have to to point out, you did not mention China as a country you were collaborating with. Is that by, is that intentional? >>Well, with China, definitely we have less links and collaborations also. It's also existing. There, there was initiative to look at the development of the technologies and the group meet on a regular basis. And there, there also Chinese colleagues involved. It's on a lower level, >>Yes, but is is the con conversations are occurring. We're out of time. Florian be operations director of price, European Super Computing collaborative. Thank you so much for being with us. I'm always impressed when people come on the cube and submit to an interview in a language that is not their first language. Yeah, >>Absolutely. >>Brave to do that. Yeah. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. We'll be right back after this break from Supercomputing 22 in Dallas.

(upbeat music) (logo swooshing) >> Good morning and welcome back to Dallas, ladies and gentlemen, we are here with theCUBE Live from Supercomputing 2022. David, my cohost, how are you doing? Exciting, day two, feeling good? >> Very exciting. Ready to start off the day. >> Very excited. We have two fascinating guests joining us to kick us off. Please welcome Pete and Armando. Gentlemen, thank you for being here with us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> I'm excited that you're starting off the day because we've been hearing a lot of rumors about Ethernet as the fabric for HPC, but we really haven't done a deep dive yet during the show. You all seem all in on Ethernet. Tell us about that. Armando, why don't you start? >> Yeah, I mean, when you look at Ethernet, customers are asking for flexibility and choice. So when you look at HPC, InfiniBand's always been around, right? But when you look at where Ethernet's coming in, it's really our commercial in their enterprise customers. And not everybody wants to be in the top 500, what they want to do is improve their job time and improve their latency over the network. And when you look at Ethernet, you kind of look at the sweet spot between 8, 12, 16, 32 nodes, that's a perfect fit for Ethernet in that space and those types of jobs. >> I love that. Pete, you want to elaborate? >> Yeah, sure. I mean, I think one of the biggest things you find with Ethernet for HPC is that, if you look at where the different technologies have gone over time, you've had old technologies like, ATM, Sonic, Fifty, and pretty much everything is now kind of converged toward Ethernet. I mean, there's still some technologies such as InfiniBand, Omni-Path, that are out there. But basically, they're single source at this point. So what you see is that there is a huge ecosystem behind Ethernet. And you see that also the fact that Ethernet is used in the rest of the enterprise, is used in the cloud data centers, that is very easy to integrate HPC based systems into those systems. So as you move HPC out of academia into enterprise, into cloud service providers, it's much easier to integrate it with the same technology you're already using in those data centers, in those networks. >> So what's the state of the art for Ethernet right now? What's the leading edge? what's shipping now and what's in the near future? You're with Broadcom, you guys designed this stuff. >> Pete: Yeah. >> Savannah: Right. >> Yeah, so leading edge right now, got a couple things-- >> Savannah: We love good stage prop here on the theCUBE. >> Yeah, so this is Tomahawk 4. So this is what is in production, it's shipping in large data centers worldwide. We started sampling this in 2019, started going into data centers in 2020. And this is 25.6 terabytes per second. >> David: Okay. >> Which matches any other technology out there. Like if you look at say, InfinBand, highest they have right now that's just starting to get into production is 25.6 T. So state of the art right now is what we introduced, We announced this in August, This is Tomahawk 5, so this is 51.2 terabytes per second. So double the bandwidth, out of any other technology that's out there. And the important thing about networking technology is when you double the bandwidth, you don't just double the efficiency, actually, winds up being a factor of six efficiency. >> Savannah: Wow. >> 'Cause if you want, I can go into that, but... >> Why not? >> Well, what I want to know, please tell me that in your labs, you have a poster on the wall that says T five, with some like Terminator kind of character. (all laughs) 'Cause that would be cool. If it's not true, just don't say anything. I'll just... >> Pete: This can actually shift into a terminator. >> Well, so this is from a switching perspective. >> Yeah. >> When we talk about the end nodes, when we talk about creating a fabric, what's the latest in terms of, well, the nicks that are going in there, what speed are we talking about today? >> So as far as 30 speeds, it tends to be 50 gigabits per second. >> David: Okay. >> Moving to a hundred gig PAM-4. >> David: Okay. >> And we do see a lot of nicks in the 200 gig Ethernet port speed. So that would be four lanes, 50 gig. But we do see that advancing to 400 gig fairly soon, 800 gig in the future. But say state of the art right now, we're seeing for the end node tends to be 200 gig E based on 50 gig PAM-4. >> Wow. >> Yeah, that's crazy. >> Yeah, that is great. My mind is act actively blown. I want to circle back to something that you brought up a second ago, which I think is really astute. When you talked about HPC moving from academia into enterprise, you're both seeing this happen, where do you think we are on the adoption curve and sort of in that cycle? Armando, do you want to go? >> Yeah, well, if you look at the market research, they're actually telling you it's 50/50 now. So Ethernet is at the level of 50%, InfinBand's at 50%, right? >> Savannah: Interesting. >> Yeah, and so what's interesting to us, customers are coming to us and say, hey, we want to see flexibility and choice and, hey, let's look at Ethernet and let's look at InfiniBand. But what is interesting about this is that we're working with Broadcom, we have their chips in our lab, we their have switches in our lab. And really what we're trying to do is make it easy to simple and configure the network for essentially MPI. And so the goal here with our validated designs is really to simplify this. So if you have a customer that, hey, I've been InfiniBand but now I want to go Ethernet, there's going to be some learning curves there. And so what we want to do is really simplify that so that we can make it easy to install, get the cluster up and running and they can actually get some value out the cluster. >> Yeah, Pete, talk about that partnership. what does that look like? I mean, are you working with Dell before the T six comes out? Or you just say what would be cool is we'll put this in the T six? >> No, we've had a very long partnership both on the hardware and the software side. Dell's been an early adopter of our silicon. We've worked very closely on SI and Sonic on the operating system, and they provide very valuable feedback for us on our roadmap. So before we put out a new chip, and we have actually three different product lines within the switching group, within Broadcom, we've then gotten very valuable feedback on the hardware and on the APIs, on the operating system that goes on top of those chips. So that way when it comes to market, Dell can take it and deliver the exact features that they have in the current generation to their customers to have that continuity. And also they give us feedback on the next gen features they'd like to see again, in both the hardware and the software. >> So I'm fascinated by... I always like to know like what, yeah, exactly. Look, you start talking about the largest supercomputers, most powerful supercomputers that exist today, and you start looking at the specs and there might be two million CPUs, 2 million CPU cores. Exoflap of performance. What are the outward limits of T five in switches, building out a fabric, what does that look like? What are the increments in terms of how many... And I know it's a depends answer, but how many nodes can you support in a scale out cluster before you need another switch? Or what does that increment of scale look like today? >> Yeah, so this is 51.2 terabytes per second. Where we see the most common implementation based on this would be with 400 gig Ethernet ports. >> David: Okay. >> So that would be 128, 400 gig E ports connected to one chip. Now, if you went to 200 gig, which is kind of the state of the art for the nicks, you can have double that. So in a single hop, you can have 256 end nodes connected through one switch. >> Okay, so this T five, that thing right there, (all laughing) inside a sheet metal box, obviously you've got a bunch of ports coming out of that. So what's the form factor look like for where that T five sits? Is there just one in a chassis or you have.. What does that look like? >> It tends to be pizza boxes these days. What you've seen overall is that the industry's moved away from chassis for these high end systems more towardS pizza boxes. And you can have composable systems where, in the past you would have line cards, either the fabric cards that the line cards are plug into or interfaced to. These days what tends to happen is you'd have a pizza box and if you wanted to build up like a virtual chassis, what you would do is use one of those pizza boxes as the fabric card, one of them as the line card. >> David: Okay. >> So what we see, the most common form factor for this is they tend to be two, I'd say for North America, most common would be a 2RU, with 64 OSFP ports. And often each of those OSFP, which is an 800 gig E or 800 gig port, we've broken out into two 400 gig ports. >> So yeah, in 2RU, and this is all air cooled, in 2RU, you've got 51.2 T. We do see some cases where customers would like to have different optics and they'll actually deploy 4RU, just so that way they have the phase-space density. So they can plug in 128, say QSFP 112. But yeah, it really depends on which optics, if you want to have DAK connectivity combined with optics. But those are the two most common form factors. >> And Armando, Ethernet isn't necessarily Ethernet in the sense that many protocols can be run over it. >> Right. >> I think I have a projector at home that's actually using Ethernet physical connections. But, so what are we talking about here in terms of the actual protocol that's running over this? Is this exactly the same as what you think of as data center Ethernet, or is this RDMA over converged Ethernet? What Are we talking about? >> Yeah, so RDMA, right? So when you look at running, essentially HPC workloads, you have the NPI protocol, so message passing interface, right? And so what you need to do is you may need to make sure that that NPI message passing interface runs efficiently on Ethernet. And so this is why we want to test and validate all these different things to make sure that that protocol runs really, really fast on Ethernet. If you look at NPIs officially, built to, hey, it was designed to run on InfiniBand but now what you see with Broadcom, with the great work they're doing, now we can make that work on Ethernet and get same performance, so that's huge for customers. >> Both of you get to see a lot of different types of customers. I kind of feel like you're a little bit of a looking into the crystal ball type because you essentially get to see the future knowing what people are trying to achieve moving forward. Talk to us about the future of Ethernet in HPC in terms of AI and ML, where do you think we're going to be next year or 10 years from now? >> You want to go first or you want me to go first? >> I can start, yeah. >> Savannah: Pete feels ready. >> So I mean, what I see, I mean, Ethernet, what we've seen is that as far as on, starting off of the switch side, is that we've consistently doubled the bandwidth every 18 to 24 months. >> That's impressive. >> Pete: Yeah. >> Nicely done, casual, humble brag there. That was great, I love that. I'm here for you. >> I mean, I think that's one of the benefits of Ethernet, is the ecosystem, is the trajectory the roadmap we've had, I mean, you don't see that in any of the networking technology. >> David: More who? (all laughing) >> So I see that, that trajectory is going to continue as far as the switches doubling in bandwidth, I think that they're evolving protocols, especially again, as you're moving away from academia into the enterprise, into cloud data centers, you need to have a combination of protocols. So you'll probably focus still on RDMA, for the supercomputing, the AI/ML workloads. But we do see that as you have a mix of the applications running on these end nodes, maybe they're interfacing to the CPUs for some processing, you might use a different mix of protocols. So I'd say it's going to be doubling a bandwidth over time, evolution of the protocols. I mean, I expect that Rocky is probably going to evolve over time depending on the AI/ML and the HPC workloads. I think also there's a big change coming as far as the physical connectivity within the data center. Like one thing we've been focusing on is co-packed optics. So right now, this chip is, all the balls in the back here, there's electrical connections. >> How many are there, by the way? 9,000 plus on the back of that-- >> 9,352. >> I love how specific it is. It's brilliant. >> Yeah, so right now, all the SERDES, all the signals are coming out electrically based, but we've actually shown, we actually we have a version of Tomahawk 4 at 25.6 T that has co-packed optics. So instead of having electrical output, you actually have optics directly out of the package. And if you look at, we'll have a version of Tomahawk 5. >> Nice. >> Where it's actually even a smaller form factor than this, where instead of having the electrical output from the bottom, you actually have fibers that plug directly into the sides. >> Wow. Cool. >> So I see there's the bandwidth, there's radix's increasing, protocols, different physical connectivity. So I think there's a lot of things throughout, and the protocol stack's also evolving. So a lot of excitement, a lot of new technology coming to bear. >> Okay, You just threw a carrot down the rabbit hole. I'm only going to chase this one, okay? >> Peter: All right. >> So I think of individual discreet physical connections to the back of those balls. >> Yeah. >> So if there's 9,000, fill in the blank, that's how many connections there are. How do you do that many optical connections? What's the mapping there? What does that look like? >> So what we've announced for Tomahawk 5 is it would have FR4 optics coming out. So you'd actually have 512 fiber pairs coming out. So basically on all four sides, you'd have these fiber ribbons that come in and connect. There's actually fibers coming out of the sides there. We wind up having, actually, I think in this case, we would actually have 512 channels and it would wind up being on 128 actual fiber pairs because-- >> It's miraculous, essentially. >> Savannah: I know. >> Yeah. So a lot of people are going to be looking at this and thinking in terms of InfiniBand versus Ethernet, I think you've highlighted some of the benefits of specifically running Ethernet moving forward as HPC which sort of just trails slightly behind super computing as we define it, becomes more pervasive AI/ML. What are some of the other things that maybe people might not immediately think about when they think about the advantages of running Ethernet in that environment? Is it about connecting the HPC part of their business into the rest of it? What are the advantages? >> Yeah, I mean, that's a big thing. I think, and one of the biggest things that Ethernet has again, is that the data centers, the networks within enterprises, within clouds right now are run on Ethernet. So now, if you want to add services for your customers, the easiest thing for you to do is the drop in clusters that are connected with the same networking technology. So I think one of the biggest things there is that if you look at what's happening with some of the other proprietary technologies, I mean, in some cases they'll have two different types of networking technologies before they interface to Ethernet. So now you've got to train your technicians, you train your assist admins on two different network technologies. You need to have all the debug technology, all the interconnect for that. So here, the easiest thing is you can use Ethernet, it's going to give you the same performance and actually, in some cases, we've seen better performance than we've seen with Omni-Path, better than in InfiniBand. >> That's awesome. Armando, we didn't get to you, so I want to make sure we get your future hot take. Where do you see the future of Ethernet here in HPC? >> Well, Pete hit on a big thing is bandwidth, right? So when you look at, train a model, okay? So when you go and train a model in AI, you need to have a lot of data in order to train that model, right? So what you do is essentially, you build a model, you choose whatever neural network you want to utilize. But if you don't have a good data set that's trained over that model, you can't essentially train the model. So if you have bandwidth, you want big pipes because you have to move that data set from the storage to the CPU. And essentially, if you're going to do it maybe on CPU only, but if you do it on accelerators, well, guess what? You need a big pipe in order to get all that data through. And here's the deal, the bigger the pipe you have, the more data, the faster you can train that model. So the faster you can train that model, guess what? The faster you get to some new insight, maybe it's a new competitive advantage, maybe it's some new way you design a product, but that's a benefit of speed, you want faster, faster, faster. >> It's all about making it faster and easier-- for the users. >> Armando: It is. >> I love that. Last question for you, Pete, just because you've said Tomahawk seven times, and I'm thinking we're in Texas, stakes, there's a lot going on with that. >> Making me hungry. >> I know, exactly. I'm sitting out here thinking, man, I did not have big enough breakfast. How did you come up with the name Tomahawk? >> So Tomahawk, I think it just came from a list. So we have a tried end product line. >> Savannah: Ah, yes. >> Which is a missile product line. And Tomahawk is being kind of like the bigger and batter missile, so. >> Savannah: Love this. Yeah, I mean-- >> So do you like your engineers? You get to name it. >> Had to ask. >> It's collaborative. >> Okay. >> We want to make sure everyone's in sync with it. >> So just it's not the Aquaman tried. >> Right. >> It's the steak Tomahawk. I think we're good now. >> Now that we've cleared that-- >> Now we've cleared that up. >> Armando, Pete, it was really nice to have both you. Thank you for teaching us about the future of Ethernet and HCP. David Nicholson, always a pleasure to share the stage with you. And thank you all for tuning in to theCUBE live from Dallas. We're here talking all things HPC and supercomputing all day long. We hope you'll continue to tune in. My name's Savannah Peterson, thanks for joining us. (soft music)

>>You can put this in a conference. >>Good morning and welcome back to Dallas. Ladies and gentlemen, we are here with the cube Live from, from Supercomputing 2022. David, my cohost, how you doing? Exciting. Day two. Feeling good. >>Very exciting. Ready to start off the >>Day. Very excited. We have two fascinating guests joining us to kick us off. Please welcome Pete and Armando. Gentlemen, thank you for being here with us. >>Having us, >>For having us. I'm excited that you're starting off the day because we've been hearing a lot of rumors about ethernet as the fabric for hpc, but we really haven't done a deep dive yet during the show. Y'all seem all in on ethernet. Tell us about that. Armando, why don't you start? >>Yeah. I mean, when you look at ethernet, customers are asking for flexibility and choice. So when you look at HPC and you know, infinite band's always been around, right? But when you look at where Ethernet's coming in, it's really our commercial and their enterprise customers. And not everybody wants to be in the top 500. What they want to do is improve their job time and improve their latency over the network. And when you look at ethernet, you kinda look at the sweet spot between 8, 12, 16, 32 nodes. That's a perfect fit for ethernet and that space and, and those types of jobs. >>I love that. Pete, you wanna elaborate? Yeah, yeah, >>Yeah, sure. I mean, I think, you know, one of the biggest things you find with internet for HPC is that, you know, if you look at where the different technologies have gone over time, you know, you've had old technologies like, you know, atm, Sonic, fitty, you know, and pretty much everything is now kind of converged toward ethernet. I mean, there's still some technologies such as, you know, InfiniBand, omnipath that are out there. Yeah. But basically there's single source at this point. So, you know, what you see is that there is a huge ecosystem behind ethernet. And you see that also, the fact that ethernet is used in the rest of the enterprise is using the cloud data centers that is very easy to integrate HPC based systems into those systems. So as you move HPC out of academia, you know, into, you know, into enterprise, into cloud service providers is much easier to integrate it with the same technology you're already using in those data centers, in those networks. >>So, so what's this, what is, what's the state of the art for ethernet right now? What, you know, what's, what's the leading edge, what's shipping now and what and what's in the near future? You, you were with Broadcom, you guys design this stuff. >>Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. So leading edge right now, I got a couple, you know, Wes stage >>Trough here on the cube. Yeah. >>So this is Tomahawk four. So this is what is in production is shipping in large data centers worldwide. We started sampling this in 2019, started going into data centers in 2020. And this is 25.6 tets per second. Okay. Which matches any other technology out there. Like if you look at say, infin band, highest they have right now that's just starting to get into production is 25 point sixt. So state of the art right now is what we introduced. We announced this in August. This is Tomahawk five. So this is 51.2 terabytes per second. So double the bandwidth have, you know, any other technology that's out there. And the important thing about networking technology is when you double the bandwidth, you don't just double the efficiency, it's actually winds up being a factor of six efficiency. Wow. Cause if you want, I can go into that, but why >>Not? Well, I, what I wanna know, please tell me that in your labs you have a poster on the wall that says T five with, with some like Terminator kind of character. Cause that would be cool if it's not true. Don't just don't say anything. I just want, I can actually shift visual >>It into a terminator. So. >>Well, but so what, what are the, what are the, so this is, this is from a switching perspective. Yeah. When we talk about the end nodes, when we talk about creating a fabric, what, what's, what's the latest in terms of, well, the kns that are, that are going in there, what's, what speed are we talking about today? >>So as far as 30 speeds, it tends to be 50 gigabits per second. Okay. Moving to a hundred gig pan four. Okay. And we do see a lot of Knicks in the 200 gig ethernet port speed. So that would be, you know, four lanes, 50 gig. But we do see that advancing to 400 gig fairly soon. 800 gig in the future. But say state of the art right now, we're seeing for the end nodes tends to be 200 gig E based on 50 gig pan four. Wow. >>Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, >>That is, that is great. My mind is act actively blown. I wanna circle back to something that you brought up a second ago, which I think is really astute. When you talked about HPC moving from academia into enterprise, you're both seeing this happen. Where do you think we are on the adoption curve and sort of in that cycle? Armand, do you wanna go? >>Yeah, yeah. Well, if you look at the market research, they're actually telling it's 50 50 now. So ethernet is at the level of 50%. InfiniBand is at 50%. Right. Interesting. Yeah. And so what's interesting to us, customers are coming to us and say, Hey, we want to see, you know, flexibility and choice and hey, let's look at ethernet and let's look at InfiniBand. But what is interesting about this is that we're working with Broadcom, we have their chips in our lab, we have our switches in our lab. And really what we're trying to do is make it easy to simple and configure the network for essentially mpi. And so the goal here with our validated designs is really to simplify this. So if you have a customer that, Hey, I've been in fbe, but now I want to go ethernet, you know, there's gonna be some learning curves there. And so what we wanna do is really simplify that so that we can make it easy to install, get the cluster up and running, and they can actually get some value out of the cluster. >>Yeah. Peter, what, talk about that partnership. What, what, what does that look like? Is it, is it, I mean, are you, you working with Dell before the, you know, before the T six comes out? Or you just say, you know, what would be cool, what would be cool is we'll put this in the T six? >>No, we've had a very long partnership both on the hardware and the software side. You know, Dell has been an early adopter of our silicon. We've worked very closely on SI and Sonic on the operating system, you know, and they provide very valuable feedback for us on our roadmap. So before we put out a new chip, and we have actually three different product lines within the switching group within Broadcom, we've then gotten, you know, very valuable feedback on the hardware and on the APIs, on the operating system that goes on top of those chips. So that way when it comes to market, you know, Dell can take it and, you know, deliver the exact features that they have in the current generation to their customers to have that continuity. And also they give us feedback on the next gen features they'd like to see again in both the hardware and the software. >>So, so I, I'm, I'm just, I'm fascinated by, I I, I always like to know kind like what Yeah, exactly. Exactly right. Look, you, you start talking about the largest super supercomputers, most powerful supercomputers that exist today, and you start looking at the specs and there might be 2 million CPUs, 2 million CPU cores, yeah. Ex alop of, of, of, of performance. What are the, what are the outward limits of T five in switches, building out a fabric, what does that look like? What are the, what are the increments in terms of how many, and I know it, I know it's a depends answer, but, but, but how many nodes can you support in a, in a, in a scale out cluster before you need another switch? What does that increment of scale look like today? >>Yeah, so I think, so this is 51.2 terras per second. What we see the most common implementation based on this would be with 400 gig ethernet ports. Okay. So that would be 128, you know, 400 giggi ports connected to, to one chip. Okay. Now, if you went to 200 gig, which is kind of the state of the art for the Nicks, you can have double that. Okay. So, you know, in a single hop you can have 256 end nodes connected through one switch. >>So, okay, so this T five, that thing right there inside a sheet metal box, obviously you've got a bunch of ports coming out of that. So what is, what does that, what's the form factor look like for that, for where that T five sits? Is there just one in a chassis or you have, what does that look >>Like? It tends to be pizza boxes these days. Okay. What you've seen overall is that the industry's moved away from chassis for these high end systems more towards pizza, pizza boxes. And you can have composable systems where, you know, in the past you would have line cards, either the fabric cards that the line cards are plugged into or interface to these days, what tends to happen is you'd have a pizza box, and if you wanted to build up like a virtual chassis, what you would do is use one of those pizza boxes as the fabric card, one of them as the, the line card. >>Okay. >>So what we see, the most common form factor for this is they tend to be two, I'd say for North America, most common would be a two R U with 64 OSF P ports. And often each of those OSF p, which is an 800 gig e or 800 gig port, we've broken out into two 400 gig quarts. Okay. So yeah, in two r u you've got, and this is all air cooled, you know, in two re you've got 51.2 T. We do see some cases where customers would like to have different optics, and they'll actually deploy a four U just so that way they have the face place density, so they can plug in 128, say qsf P one 12. But yeah, it really depends on which optics, if you wanna have DAK connectivity combined with, with optics. But those are the two most common form factors. >>And, and Armando ethernet isn't, ethernet isn't necessarily ethernet in the sense that many protocols can be run over it. Right. I think I have a projector at home that's actually using ethernet physical connections. But what, so what are we talking about here in terms of the actual protocol that's running over this? Is this exactly the same as what you think of as data center ethernet, or, or is this, you know, RDMA over converged ethernet? What, what are >>We talking about? Yeah, so our rdma, right? So when you look at, you know, running, you know, essentially HPC workloads, you have the NPI protocol, so message passing interface, right? And so what you need to do is you may need to make sure that that NPI message passing interface runs efficiently on ethernet. And so this is why we want to test and validate all these different things to make sure that that protocol runs really, really fast on ethernet, if you look at NPI is officially, you know, built to, Hey, it was designed to run on InfiniBand, but now what you see with Broadcom and the great work they're doing now, we can make that work on ethernet and get, you know, it's same performance. So that's huge for customers. >>Both of you get to see a lot of different types of customers. I kind of feel like you're a little bit of a, a looking into the crystal ball type because you essentially get to see the future knowing what people are trying to achieve moving forward. Talk to us about the future of ethernet in hpc in terms of AI and ml. Where, where do you think we're gonna be next year or 10 years from now? >>You wanna go first or you want me to go first? I can start. >>Yeah. Pete feels ready. >>So I mean, what I see, I mean, ethernet, I mean, is what we've seen is that as far as on the starting off of the switch side, is that we've consistently doubled the bandwidth every 18 to 24 months. That's >>Impressive. >>Yeah. So nicely >>Done, casual, humble brag there. That was great. That was great. I love that. >>I'm here for you. I mean, I think that's one of the benefits of, of Ethan is like, is the ecosystem, is the trajectory, the roadmap we've had, I mean, you don't see that in any other networking technology >>More who, >>So, you know, I see that, you know, that trajectory is gonna continue as far as the switches, you know, doubling in bandwidth. I think that, you know, they're evolving protocols. You know, especially again, as you're moving away from academia into the enterprise, into cloud data centers, you need to have a combination of protocols. So you'll probably focus still on rdma, you know, for the supercomputing, the a AIML workloads. But we do see that, you know, as you have, you know, a mix of the applications running on these end nodes, maybe they're interfacing to the, the CPUs for some processing, you might use a different mix of protocols. So I'd say it's gonna be doubling a bandwidth over time evolution of the protocols. I mean, I expect that Rocky is probably gonna evolve over time depending on the a AIML and the HPC workloads. I think also there's a big change coming as far as the physical connectivity within the data center. Like one thing we've been focusing on is co-pack optics. So, you know, right now this chip is all, all the balls in the back here, there's electrical connections. How >>Many are there, by the way? 9,000 plus on the back of that >>352. >>I love how specific it is. It's brilliant. >>Yeah. So we get, so right now, you know, all the thirties, all the signals are coming out electrically based, but we've actually shown, we have this, actually, we have a version of Hawk four at 25 point sixt that has co-pack optics. So instead of having electrical output, you actually have optics directly out of the package. And if you look at, we'll have a version of Tomahawk five Nice. Where it's actually even a smaller form factor than this, where instead of having the electrical output from the bottom, you actually have fibers that plug directly into the sides. Wow. Cool. So I see, you know, there's, you know, the bandwidth, there's radis increasing protocols, different physical connectivity. So I think there's, you know, a lot of things throughout, and the protocol stack's also evolving. So, you know, a lot of excitement, a lot of new technology coming to bear. >>Okay. You just threw a carrot down the rabbit hole. I'm only gonna chase this one. Okay. >>All right. >>So I think of, I think of individual discreet physical connections to the back of those balls. Yeah. So if there's 9,000, fill in the blank, that's how many connections there are. How do you do that in many optical connections? What's, what's, what's the mapping there? What does that, what does that look like? >>So what we've announced for TAMA five is it would have fr four optics coming out. So you'd actually have, you know, 512 fiber pairs coming out. So you'd have, you know, basically on all four sides, you'd have these fiber ribbons that come in and connect. There's actually fibers coming out of the, the sides there. We wind up having, actually, I think in this case, we would actually have 512 channels and it would wind up being on 128 actual fiber pairs because >>It's, it's miraculous, essentially. It's, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, so, you know, a lot of people are gonna be looking at this and thinking in terms of InfiniBand versus versus ethernet. I think you've highlighted some of the benefits of specifically running ethernet moving forward as, as hpc, you know, which is sort of just trails slightly behind supercomputing as we define it, becomes more pervasive AI ml. What, what are some of the other things that maybe people might not immediately think about when they think about the advantages of running ethernet in that environment? Is it, is it connecting, is it about connecting the HPC part of their business into the rest of it? What, or what, what are the advantages? >>Yeah, I mean, that's a big thing. I think, and one of the biggest things that ethernet has again, is that, you know, the data centers, you know, the networks within enterprises within, you know, clouds right now are run on ethernet. So now if you want to add services for your customers, the easiest thing for you to do is, you know, the drop in clusters that are connected with the same networking technology, you know, so I think what, you know, one of the biggest things there is that if you look at what's happening with some of the other proprietary technologies, I mean, in some cases they'll have two different types of networking technologies before they interface to ethernet. So now you've got to train your technicians, you train your, your assist admins on two different network technologies. You need to have all the, the debug technology, all the interconnect for that. So here, the easiest thing is you can use ethernet, it's gonna give you the same performance. And actually in some cases we seen better performance than we've seen with omnipath than, you know, better than in InfiniBand. >>That's awesome. Armando, we didn't get to you, so I wanna make sure we get your future hot take. Where do you see the future of ethernet here in hpc? >>Well, Pete hit on a big thing is bandwidth, right? So when you look at train a model, okay, so when you go and train a model in ai, you need to have a lot of data in order to train that model, right? So what you do is essentially you build a model, you choose whatever neural network you wanna utilize, but if you don't have a good data set that's trained over that model, you can't essentially train the model. So if you have bandwidth, you want big pipes because you have to move that data set from the storage to the cpu. And essentially, if you're gonna do it maybe on CPU only, but if you do it on accelerators, well guess what? You need a big pipe in order to get all that data through. And here's the deal. The bigger the pipe you have, the more data, the faster you can train that model. So the faster you can train that model, guess what? The faster you get to some new insight, maybe it's a new competitive advantage. Maybe it's some new way you design a product, but that's a benefit of speed you want faster, faster, faster. >>It's all about making it faster and easier. It is for, for the users. I love that. Last question for you, Pete, just because you've said Tomahawk seven times, and I'm thinking we're in Texas Stakes, there's a lot going on with with that making >>Me hungry. >>I know exactly. I'm sitting up here thinking, man, I did not have a big enough breakfast. How do you come up with the name Tomahawk? >>So Tomahawk, I think you just came, came from a list. So we had, we have a tri end product line. Ah, a missile product line. And Tomahawk is being kinda like, you know, the bigger and batter missile, so, oh, okay. >>Love this. Yeah, I, well, I >>Mean, so you let your engineers, you get to name it >>Had to ask. It's >>Collaborative. Oh good. I wanna make sure everyone's in sync with it. >>So just so we, it's not the Aquaman tried. Right, >>Right. >>The steak Tomahawk. I >>Think we're, we're good now. Now that we've cleared that up. Now we've cleared >>That up. >>Armando P, it was really nice to have both you. Thank you for teaching us about the future of ethernet N hpc. David Nicholson, always a pleasure to share the stage with you. And thank you all for tuning in to the Cube Live from Dallas. We're here talking all things HPC and Supercomputing all day long. We hope you'll continue to tune in. My name's Savannah Peterson, thanks for joining us.

(upbeat music) >> Sustainability has become one of the hottest topics, not just in enterprise tech, but across all industries. The relentless pace of technology improvement over the decades and orders of magnitude increases in density have created heat, power and cooling problems that are increasingly challenging to remediate. Intense efforts have been implemented over the years around data center design techniques to dissipate heat, use ambient air, liquid cooling and many other approaches that have been brought to bear to get power usage effectiveness, PUE, as close to one as possible. Welcome to Better Together Sustainability, presented by the CUBE and brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and AMD. In this program we'll lay out today's challenges and how leading companies are engineering solutions to the problems just introduced, along with some recommendations, best practices and resources as to how you can initiate or enhance your sustainability journey. First up to help us better understand this important topic are John Fry, senior technologist IT efficiency and sustainability at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Terry Richardson, North America channel chief for AMD. Gents, welcome. >> Great to be here. >> (indistinct). >> John, let's start at the high level here. Why is sustainability such an important topic today? Why now? Why is it such a challenge for customers and, and how are you guys approaching the solutions? >> The topic has been an important topic for a number of years, but what we're seeing across the world is more and more corporations are putting in place climate targets and sustainability goals. And at the same time, boards and CEOs are starting to be asked about the topic as well, making this topic much more important for technology leaders across the globe. At the same time, technology leaders are fighting with space, power and cooling constraints that caused them to rethink their approach to IT. To get a better sense of how wide this challenge is, we did a survey last year and we asked 500 technology leaders across the globe if they were implementing sustainable IT goals and metrics and programs within their infrastructure. Personally, I thought the answer would be about 40% of them had these programs. Actually it turned out to be 96% of them. And so when we asked them why they were implementing these programs and what was the primary driver, what we heard from them was three things. Those of them that were the early adopters and the ones that move were moving the fastest told us they were putting these programs in place to attract and retain institutional investors. If they're a publicly traded company, their investors were already asking their boards, their CEOs, wanting to know what their company was doing to drive efficiency within their technology operations. Those companies in the middle, the ones that were just moving along at the same pace as many other companies around the world, told us they were putting these programs in place to attract and retain their customers. Customers are increasingly asking the companies they do business with about their sustainability aspirations specifically how technology contributes to their carbon emissions and their sustainability goals. And so these customers want to make sure that they can keep their own customers. And finally, a third group, the digital followers, that group of companies that's a little slower adopting programs, more conservative in nature. They said they were implementing these programs to attract and retain employees. In fact, over the last year or so, every customer we've talked to when they describe their pain points and their challenges that we can try to help them meet, has had a difficulty in finding employees. And so what we know is these younger employees coming into the workforce, if you can show them how what they are going to be doing connects to the purpose of their company and connects to making the world a better place, you can attract them easier and you can retain them longer. So a variety of business reasons why companies are looking at these programs, but what we know is when they implement these programs they often reduce over-provisioning. They save money, they have a lower environmental footprint, and again they have an easier time attracting and retaining employees. So for all of these reasons, driving sustainability into your IT operations is a great thing to do. >> Yeah, I never would've expected 96%. And of course, investors, customers and employees. I mean, this is the big three. Terry what's AMD's perspective on this topic? In other words, what do you bring to the table and the partnership? I mean, I know processors, but what's unique about AMD's contribution? >> Yeah. Thanks Dave. And, and John, great to be with you. Appreciate the opportunity and the partnership. You know, we too are very focused on sustainability and enjoy our partnership with HPE very much in this area. You know, since 2017, when AMD introduced its epic processor family, there's been a couple of core design elements in that technology. One has to do with performance. And the second has to do with efficiency. Both are critically important to today's topic of sustainability because increasingly, customers are understanding and measuring performance per watt and fortunately, AMD really excels in this area. So whether we're talking about the larger super computers in the world, or even general purpose servers, customers can fundamentally do more with fewer AMD servers than competitive alternatives. And so, so we, we really bring a technology element on the processor side, CPU and GPU, to play a role in delivering real ability for customers to meet some of their core sustainability goals. And of course, in partnership with HPE, together we have really a compelling story. >> Great. Thank you, Terry. And, and John, wonder if you could talk to the differentiation that you bring from HPE's perspective, the total package. >> Yeah, of course. The first thing as partnership. As Terry mentioned, AMD and HPE have been working together since HPE was founded actually, to drive power efficiency up to meet the demands of our customers. At the same time, as our customers have asked more and more questions around technology sustainability, we've realized that we needed to not only develop a point of view on that from an HPE perspective, but actually write the white papers that give the customer guidance for sustainable IT strategies, for tech refresh cycles, give them some guidance on what are the right questions to ask technology vendors when they're buying technology equipment. So a series of white papers and you might not appreciate why, but this is a topic that you can't go get a college degree in and frankly can't even buy a book on. So for customers to get that knowledge, they want to get it from experienced professionals around the globe. And in fact, in the survey that I mentioned earlier, we asked customers, where's the number one place that you expect to get your sustainable IT information from? And they said, our technology vendors. So for us, it's really about driving that point of view, sharing it with customers, helping customers get better and even pointing out some of the unintended consequences. So a great example, Dave, you mentioned PUE earlier. Many customers have been driving PUE down for a number of years, but often the way that they did that was optimizing the data center building infrastructure. They got PUE pretty low. Now, one of the things that happens and customers need to be aware of this, particularly if they're focused on PUE as their primary metric, is when they optimize their IT stack and make that smaller, PUE actually goes up. And at first they think, well, wait a minute, that metric is going in the wrong direction. But when you remember it's a ratio, if you get that IT stack component smaller, then you're driving efficiency even if PUE goes the wrong direction. So part of the conversation then is you might want to look at PUE internally, but perhaps you've outgrown PUE and now have an opportunity to look at other metrics like carbon emissions per workload, or or power consumption per piece of equipment or rack. So all of this drives back to that upward trajectory that Terry was talking about where customers are really interested in power performance. So as we share those stories with customers, share the expertise how to move along this journey, that really provides great differentiation for HPE and AMD together. >> So that's interesting. So PUE is not necessarily the holy grail metric. There are other metrics that you, you should look at. Number one, and number two the way you interpret PUE is changing for the better. So thank you for that context. I wonder Terry, do, do you have any like proof points or examples that you can share? >> Yeah, so one that immediately comes to mind that was a manifestation of some terrific collaboration between AMD and HPE was their recently announced implementation of the Frontier supercomputer. That was a project that we collaborated on for a long time. And, and where we ended up was turning over to the government a supercomputer that is currently the highest performing in the world, broke the exaFLOP barrier. And probably even more importantly is number one on the Green500 list of the top super computers. And, and together we enjoy favorable rankings in other systems, but that's the one that, that really stands out in terms of at scale implementation to shine really a spotlight on what we can do together. Certainly for other customers doesn't have to be the world's largest super computer. It's not uncommon that we see customers just kind of in general purpose business applications in their data centers to be able to do more with less, you know, meaning, you know, you know a third of the servers oftentimes delivering not only a very strong TCO but the environmental benefit that gets associated with significantly reduced energy that can be expressed in reduction in, in overall CO2 emissions and other, other ways to express the benefit, whether it's, you know the equivalent of, of planting you know, acres of forest or whatever. So we're really proud of the proof points that we have and and look forward to the opportunity to together explain this more fully to customers and partners. >> Right? So John, Terry sort of alluded to this being more broad based. I know HPE has a very strong focus on HPC. Sorry for all the acronyms, but high performance computing. But the, so this is more broad based than just the super computing business, right John? >> Yeah, absolutely. We see these performance benefits for customers and industry standard servers as well. In fact, many customers, that's the primary type of equipment they use and they want better power performance. They either want to as Terry alluded to, use less equipment to do the same amount of work, or if they've run into a space or power or cooling constraint in their data centers, they want to be able to increase workloads in the same footprint. So it allows them to take better use of their data centers. And for some customers even the data center enclosure that they started with they can actually use a much smaller amount of space. In fact, we have some that even move over to co-location facilities as they improve that performance per watt, and can do more work in the smaller space. So it starts an industry standard server, but increasingly we're seeing customers considering liquid cooling solutions and that generally moves them into the high performance compute space as well right now. So those performance improvements exist across that entire spectrum. >> So since you brought up liquid cooling John, I mean can you share any best practices? I mean, like what do you do with all that heated liquid? >> Yeah, it's a great, great question. And we have seen a lot more interest from customers in liquid cooling and there's a variety of things that you can do, but if you're considering liquid cooling the opportunities to think broader than just the IT stack. So if you're going to use a cooling loop anyhow and you're going to generate warm liquid coming off the it equipment as waste, think about what you can do with that. We have a, a government customer here in the United States that designed their high performance computer while they were designing the building it went in. So they're able to use that hot air, hot water, excuse me coming off the IT equipment to heat the entire building. And that provides a great use of that warm water. In many parts of the world, that warm water can either be used on a hot water utility grid or it can even be used on a steam grid if you can get it warm enough. Other places we're aware of customers (indistinct) and greenhouses next to data centers and using both the warm air and the warm water from the data center to heat the greenhouse as well. So we're encouraging customers to take a step back, look at the entire system, look at anything coming out of that system that once was waste and start to think about how can we use that what was waste now as an input to another process. >> Right, that's system thinking and some, some pragmatic examples there. Can, can you each summarize, maybe start Terry, with you AMD's and HPE's respective climate goals that may, Terry then John chime in please. >> Yeah, I'll go first. We actually have four publicly stated goals. The first one is I think very aggressive but we've got a track record of doing something similar in our client business. And, and so kind of goal number one is a 30 X increase in energy efficiency for AMD processors and accelerators powering servers for AI and HPC by 2025. The second is broad based across the corporation is a 50% absolute reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from AMD operations by 2030. And then the third is 100% of AMD manufacturing suppliers will have published greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals by 2025. And we've declared that 80% or greater of our manufacturing suppliers will source renewable energy by 2025. Those are the, those are the four big publicly stated goals and objectives that we have in this area. >> You know what I like about those Terry? A lot of, a lot of these sustainability goals these moonshot goals is like by 2050, it's like, okay. But I, I like the focus on '25 and then of course there's one in there at the end of the decade. All right, John, maybe you could share with us HPE's approach. >> Yeah, absolutely. And we've had almost two decades of emissions reduction goals and our current goals, which we accelerated by 10 years last year, are to be carbon new or excuse me, net zero by 2040. And that's a science based target-approved goal. In fact, one of the first in the world. And we're doing that because we believe that 2050 is too long to wait. And so how we reach that net zero goal by 2040, is by 2030, an interim step is to reduce our scopes one and two, our direct and energy related emissions by 70% from 2020. And that includes sourcing 100% renewable energy across all of our operations. At the same time, the bigger part of our footprint is in our supply chain and when our customers use our products, so we're going to leverage our as a service strategy HPE GreenLake and our energy efficient portfolio of products to reduce our scope three carbon emissions 42% over that 2020 baseline by 2030, and as with AMD as well, we have a goal to have 80% of our suppliers by spend have their own science based targets so that we know that their commitments are scientifically validated. And then the longer step, how we reach net zero by 2040 is by reducing our entire footprint scopes one, two and three by 90% and then balance the rest. >> Yeah. So again, I mean, you know 2030 is only eight years away, a little more. And so if, if, if you have a, a target of 2030 you have to figure out, okay, how are you going to get there? The, if you say, you know, longer, you know in the century you got this balloon payment, you know that you're thinking about. So, so great job, both, both companies and and really making more specific goals that we can quantify you know, year by year. All right, last question, John. Are there any resources that you can share to help customers, you know, get started maybe if they want to get started on their own sustainability strategy or maybe they're part way through and they just want to see how they're doing. >> Yeah, absolutely much of what Terry and I have talked about are available in an executive workbook that we wrote called "Six Steps For Implementing a Sustainable IT Strategy" and that workbook's freely available online and we'll post the URL so that you can get a copy of it. And we really developed that workbook because what we found is, although we had white papers on a variety of these topics, executives said we really need a little bit more specific steps to work through this and implement that sustainable IT strategy. And the reason for that, by the way is that so many of our customers when they start this sustainable IT journey, they take a a variety of tactical steps, but they don't have an overarching strategy that they're really trying to drive. And often they don't do things like bring all the stakeholders they need together. Often they make improvements without measuring their baseline first. So in this workbook, we lead them step by step how to gather the right resources internally, how to make the progress, talk about the progress in a credible way, and then make decisions on where they go next to drive efficiencies. >> Yeah, really that system thinking is, is, is critical. Guys. Thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Okay guys, thanks for your time today. I really appreciate it. In a moment, We're going to toss it over to Lisa Martin out of our Palo Alto studio and bring in Dave Faffel, chief technology officer at WEI, along with John and Terry, to talk about what WEI is doing in this space to address sustainability challenges. You're watching Better Together Sustainability brought to you by HPE and AMD in collaboration with the CUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (lilting music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage here at re:MARS. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. It's the event where it's part of the "re:" series: re:MARS, re:Inforce, re:Invent. MARS stands for machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. And a lot of conversation is all about AI machine learning. This one's about AI and business transformation. We've got Stepan Pushkarev CTO, CEO, Co-Founder of Provectus. Welcome to theCUBE. And Russ Lamb, eCommerce Retail Data Engineering Lead at PepsiCo, customer story. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Great to be here, John. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> I love the practical customer stories because it brings everything to life. This show is about the future, but it's got all the things we want, we love: machine learning, robotics, automation. If you're in DevOps, or you're in data engineering, this is the world of automation. So what's the relationship? You guys, you're a customer. Talk about the relationship between you guys. >> Sure, sure. Provectus as a whole is a professional services firm, premier, a AWS partner, specializing in machine learning, data, DevOps. PepsiCo is our customer, our marquee customer, lovely customer. So happy to jointly present at this re:Invent, sorry, re:MARS. Anyway, Russ... >> I made that mistake earlier, by the way, 'cause re:Invent's always on the tip of my tongue and re:MARS is just, I'm not used to it yet, but I'm getting there. Talk about what are you guys working together on? >> Well, I mean, we work with Provectus in a lot of ways. They really helped us get started within our e-commerce division with AWS, provided a lot of expertise in that regard and, you know, just hands-on experience. >> We were talking before we came on camera, you guys just had another talk and how it's all future and kind of get back to reality, Earth. >> Russ: Get back to Earth. >> If we're on earth still. We're not on Mars yet, or the moon. You know, AI's kind of got a future, but it does give a tell sign to what's coming, industrial change, full transformation, 'cause cloud does the back office. You got data centers. Now you've got cloud going to the edge with industrial spaces, the ultimate poster child of edge and automation safety. But at the end of the day, we're still in the real world. Now people got to run businesses. And I think, you know, having you here is interesting. So I have to ask you, you know, as you look at the technology, you got to see AI everywhere. And the theme here, to me, that I see is the inflection point driving all this future robotics change, that everyone's been waiting for by the way, but it's like been in movies and in novels, is the machine learning and AI as the tipping point. This is key. And now you're here integrating AI into your company. Tell us your story. >> Well, I think that every enterprise is going to need more machine learning, more, you know, AI or data science. And that's the journey that we're on right now. And we've come a long way in the past six years, particularly with our e-commerce division, it's a really data rich environment. So, you know, going from brick and mortar, you know, delivering to restaurants, vending machines and stuff, it's a whole different world when you're, people are ordering on Amazon every couple minutes, or seconds even, our products. But they, being able to track all that... >> Can you scope the problem statement and the opportunity? Because if I just kind of just, again, I'm not, you're in, it's your company, you're in the weeds, you're at the data, you're everything, But it just seems me, the world's now more integration, more different data sources. You've got suppliers, they have their different IT back ends. Some are in the cloud, some aren't in the cloud. This is, like, a hard problem when you want to bring data together. I mean, API certainly help, but can you scope the problem, and, like, what we're talking about here? >> Well, we've got so many different sources of data now, right? So we used to be relying on a couple of aggregators who would pull all this data for us and hand us an aggregated view of things. But now we're able to partner with different retailers and get detail, granular information about transactions, orders. And it's just changed the game, changed the landscape from just, like, getting a rough view, to seeing the nuts and bolts and, like, all the moving parts. >> Yeah, and you see in data engineering much more tied into like cloud scale. Then you got the data scientists, more the democratization application and enablement. So I got to ask, how did you guys connect? What was the problem statement? How did you guys, did you have smoke and fire? You came in solved the problem? Was it a growth thing? How did this, how did you guys connect as a customer with Provectus? >> Yeah, I can elaborate on that. So we were in the very beginning of that journey when there was, like, just a few people in this new startup, let's call it startup within PepsiCo. >> John: Yeah. >> Calling like a, it's not only e-commerce, it was a huge belief from the top management that it's going to bring tremendous value to the enterprise. So there was no single use case, "Hey, do this and you're going to get that." So it's a huge belief that e-commerce is the future. Some industry trends like from brand-centric to consumer-centric. So brand, product-centric. Amazon has the mission to build the most customer-centric customer company. And I believe that success, it gets a lot of enterprises are being influenced by that success. So I remember that time, PepsiCo had a huge belief. We started building just from scratch, figuring out what does the business need? What are the business use cases? We have not started with the IT. We have not started with this very complicated migrations, modernizations. >> John: So clean sheet of paper. >> Yeah. >> From scratch. >> From scratch. >> And so you got the green light. >> Yeah. >> And the leadership threw the holy water on that and said, "Hey, we'll do this."? >> That's exactly what happened. It was from the top down. The CEO kind of set aside the e-commerce vision as kind of being able to, in a rapidly evolving business place like e-commerce, it's a growing field. Not everybody's figured it out yet, but to be able to change quickly, right? The business needs to change quickly. The technology needs to change quickly. And that's what we're doing here. >> So this is interesting. A lot of companies don't have that, actually, luxury. I mean, it's still more fun because the tools are available now that all the hyper scales built on their own. I mean, back in the day, 10 years ago, they had to build it all, Facebook. You didn't know, I had people on here from Pinterest and other companies. They had to build all of that from scratch. Now cloud's here. So how did you guys do this? What was the playbook? Take us through the AI because it sounds like the AI is core, you know, belief principle of the whole entire system. What did you guys do? Take me through the journey there. >> Yeah. Beyond management decisions, strategic decisions that has been made as a separate startup, whatever- >> John: That's great. >> So some practical, tactical. So it may sound like a cliche, but it's a huge thing because I work with many enterprises and this, like, "center of excellence" that does a nice technology stuff and then looks for the budget on the different business units. It just doesn't go anywhere. It could take you forever to modernize. >> We call that the Game of Thrones environment. >> Yes. >> Yeah. Nothing ever gets done 'till it blows up at the end. >> Here, these guys, and I have to admit, I don't want to steal their thunder. I just want to emphasize it as an external person. These guys just made it so differently. >> John: Yeah. >> They even physically sat in a different office in a WeWork co-working and built that business from scratch. >> That's what Andy Jackson talked about two years ago. And if you look at some of the big successes on AWS, Capital One, all the big, Goldman Sachs. The leadership, real commitment, not like BS, like total commitment says, "Go." But enough rope to give you some room, right? >> Yeah. I think that's the thing is, there was always an IT presence, right, overseeing what we were doing within e-commerce, but we had a lot of freedoms to make design choices, technology choices, and really accelerate the business, focus on those use cases where we could make a big impact with a technology choice. >> Take me through the stages of the AI transformation. What are some of the use cases and specific tactics you guys executed on? >> Well, I think that the supply chain, which I think is a hot topic right now, but that was one use case where we're using, like, data real time, real time data to inform our sales projections and delivery logistics. But also our marketing return on investment, I feel like that was a really interesting, complex problem to solve using machine learning, Because there's so much data that we needed to process in terms of countries, territories, products, like where do you spend your limited marketing budget when you have so many choices, and, using machine learning, boil that all down to, you know, this is the optimal choice, right now. >> What were some of the challenges and how did you overcome them in the early days to get things set up, 'cause it takes a lot of energy to get it going, to get the models. What were some of the challenges and how did you overcome them? >> Well, I think some of it was expertise, right? Like having a partner like Provectus and Stepan really helped because they could guide us, Stepan could guide us, give his expertise and what he knows in terms of what he's seen to our budding and growing business. >> And what were the things that you guys saw that you contributed on? And was there anything new that you had to do together? >> Yeah, so yeah. First of all, just a very practical tip. Yes, start with the use cases. Clearly talk to the business and say, "Hey, these are the list of the use cases" and prioritize them. So not with IT, not with technology, not with the migration thing. Don't touch anything on legacy systems. Second, get data in. So you may have your legacy systems or some other third party systems that you work with. There's no AI without data. Get all the pipelines, get data. Quickly boat strap the data lake house. Put all the pipelines, all the governance in place. And yeah, literally took us three months to get up and running. And we started delivering first analytical reports. It's just to have something back to business and keep going. >> By the way, that's huge, speed. I mean, this is speed. You go back and had that baggage of IT and the old antiquated systems, you'd be dragging probably months. Right? >> It's years, years. Imagine you should migrate SAP to the cloud first. No, you don't do don't need to do that. >> Pipeline. >> Just get data. I need data. >> Stream that data. All right, where are we now? When did you guys start? I want to get just going to timeline my head 'cause I heard three months. Where are we now? You guys threw it. Now you have impact. You have, you have results. >> Yeah. I mean that for our marketing ROI engine, we've built it and it's developed within e-commerce, but we've started to spread it throughout the organization now. So it's not just about the digital and the e-commerce space. We're deploying it to, you know, regionally to other, to Europe, to Latin America, other divisions within PepsiCo. And it's just grown exponentially. >> So you have scale to it right now? >> Yeah. Well- >> How far are you in now? What, how many years, months, days? >> E-commerce, the division was created six years ago, which is, so we've had some time to develop this, our machine learning capabilities and this use case particular, but it's increasingly relevant and expansion is happening as we speak. >> What are you most proud of? You look back at the impact. What are you most proud of? >> I think the relationship we built with the people, you know, who use our technology, right. Just seeing the impact is what makes me proud. >> Can you give an example without revealing any confidential information? >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there was an example from my talk about, I was approached recently by our sales team. They were having difficulty with supply chain, monitoring our fill rate of our top brands with these retailers. And they come up to me, they have this problem. They're like, "How do we solve it?" So we work together to find a data source, just start getting that data in the hands of people who can use it within days. You know, not talking like a long time. Bring that data into our data warehouse, and then surface the data in a tool they can use, you know, within a matter of a week or two. >> I mean, the transformation is just incredible. In fact, we were talking on theCUBE earlier today around, you know, data warehouses in the cloud, data meshes of different pros and cons. And the theme that came out of that conversation was data's a product now. >> Yes. >> Yes. >> And what you're kind of describing is, just gimme the product or find it. >> Russ: Right. >> And bring it in with everything else. And there's some, you know, cleaning and stuff people do if they have issues with that. But, if not, it's just bring it in, right? It's a product. >> Well, especially with the data exchanges now. AWS has a data exchange and this, I think, is the future of data and what's possible with data because you don't have to start from, okay, I've got this Excel file somebody's been working with on their desktop. This is a, someone's taken that file, put it into a warehouse or a data model, and then they can share it with you. >> John: So are you happy with these guys? >> Absolutely, yeah. >> You're actually telling the story. What was the biggest impact that they did? Was it partnering? Was it writing code, bringing development in, counseling, all the above, managed services? What? >> I think the biggest impact was the idea, you know, like being able to bring ideas to the table and not just, you know, ask us what we want, right? Like I think Provectus is a true partner and was able to share that sort of expertise with us. >> You know, Andy Jackson, whenever I interview on theCUBE, he's now in charge of all Amazon. But when he was at (inaudible). He always had to use their learnings, get the learnings out. What was the learnings you look back now and say, Hey, those were tough times. We overcome them. We stopped, we started, we iterated, we kept moving forward. What was the big learning as you look back, some of the key success points, maybe some failures that you overcome. What was the big learnings that you could share with folks out there now that are in the same situation where they're saying, "Hey, I'd rather start from scratch and do a reset." >> Yeah. So with that in particular, yes, we started this like sort of startup within the enterprise, but now we've got to integrate, right? It's been six years and e-commerce is now sharing our data with the rest of the organization. How do we do that, right? There's an enterprise solution, and we've got this scrappy or, I mean, not scrappy anymore, but we've got our own, you know, way of doing. >> Kind of boot strap. I mean, you were kind of given charter. It's a start up within a big company, I mean- >> But our data platform now is robust, and it's one of the best I've seen. But how do we now get those systems to talk? And I think Provectus has came to us with, "Here, there's this idea called data mesh, where you can, you know, have these two independent platforms, but share the data in a centralized way. >> So you guys are obviously have a data mesh in place, big part of the architecture? >> So it is in progress, but we know the next step. So we know the next step. We know the next two steps, what we're going to do, what we need to do to make it really, to have that common method, data layer. between different data products within organization, different locations, different business units. So they can start talking to each other through the data and have specific escalates on the data. And yeah. >> It's smart because I think one of the things that people, I think, I'd love to get your reaction to this is that we've been telling the story for many, many years, you have horizontally scalable cloud and vertically specialized domain solutions, you need machine learning that's smart, but you need a lot of data to help it. And that's not, a new architecture, that's a data plane, it's control plane, but now everyone goes, "Okay, let's do silos." And they forget the scale side. And then they go, "Wait a minute." You know, "I'm not going to share it." And so you have this new debate of, and I want to own my own data. So the data layer becomes an interesting conversation. >> Yeah, yes. Meta data. >> Yeah. So what, how do you guys see that? Because this becomes a super important kind of decision point architecturally. >> I mean, my take is that there has to be some, there will always be domains, right? Everyone, like there's only so much that you can find commonality across, like in industry, for example. But there will always be a data owner. And, you know, kind of like what happened with rush to APIs, how that enabled microservices within applications and being sharing in a standardized way, I think something like that has to happen in the data space. So it's not a monolithic data warehouse, it's- >> You know, the other thing I want to ask you guys both, if you don't mind commenting while I got you here, 'cause you're both experts. >> We just did a showcase on data programmability. Kind of a radical idea, but like data as code, we called it. >> Oh yeah. >> And so if data's a product and you're acting on, you've got an architecture and system set up, you got to might code it's programmable. You need you're coding with data. Data becomes like a part of the development process. What do you guys think of when you hear data as code and data being programmable? >> Yeah, it's a interesting, so yeah, first of all, I think Russ can elaborate on that, Data engineering is also software engineering. Machine learning engineering is a software. At the end of the day, it's all product. So we can use different terms and buzz words for that but this is what we have at the end of the day. So having the data, well I will use another buzz word, but in terms of the headless architecture- >> Yes. >> When you have a nice SDK, nice API, but you can manipulate with the data as your programming object to build reach applications for your users, and give it, and share not as just a table in Redshift or a bunch of CSV files in S3 bucket, but share it as a programmable thing that you can work with. >> Data as code. >> Yeah. This is- >> Infrastructure code was a revolution for DevOps, but it's not AI Ops so it's something different. It's really it's data engineering. It's programming. >> Yeah. This is the way to deliver data to your consumers. So there are different ways you can show it on a dashboard. You can show it, you can expose it as an API, or you can give it as an object, programmable interface. >> So now you're set up with a data architecture that's extensible 'cause that's the goal. You don't want to foreclose. You must think about that must keep you up at night. What's going to foreclose that benefit? 'Cause there's more coming. Right? >> Absolutely. There's always more coming. And I think that's why it's important to have that robust data platform to work from. And yeah, as Stepan mentioned, I'm a big believer in data engineering as software engineering. It's not some like it's not completely separate. You have to follow the best practices software engineers practice. And, you know, really think about maintainability and scalability. >> You know, we were riffing about how cloud had the SRE managing all those servers. One person, data engineering has a many, a one to many relationships too. You got a lot going on. It's not managing a database. It's millions of data points and data opportunity. So gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate it. And thanks for telling the story of Pepsi. >> Of course, >> And great conversation. Congratulations on this great customer. And thanks for >> coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks, thank you. Thanks, Russ, would you like to wrap it up with the pantry shops story? >> Oh, yeah! I think it will just be a super relevant evidence of the agility and speed and some real world applicable >> Let's go. Close us out. >> So when, when the pandemic happened and there were lockdowns everywhere, people started buying things online. And we noticed this and got a challenge from our direct to consumer team saying, "Look, we need a storefront to be able to sell to our consumers, and we've got 30 days to do it." We need to be able to work fast. And so we built not just a website, but like everything that behind it, the logistics of supply chain aspects, the data platform. And we didn't just build one. We built two. We got pantry shop.com and snacks.com, within 30 days. >> Good domains! >> The domain broker was happy on that one. Well continue the story. >> Yeah, yeah. So I feel like that the agility that's required for that kind of thing and the like the planning to be able to scale from just, you know, an idea to something that people can use every day. And, and that's, I think.- >> And you know, that's a great point too, that shows if you're in the cloud, you're doing the work you're prepared for anything. The pandemic was the true test for who was ready because it was unforeseen force majeure. It was just like here it comes and the people who were in the cloud had that set up, could move quickly. The ones that couldn't. >> Exactly. >> We know what happened. >> And I would like to echo this. So they have built not just a website, they have built the whole business line within, and launched that successfully to production. That includes sales, marketing, supply chain, e-commerce, aside within 30 days. And that's just a role model that could be used by other enterprises. >> Yeah. And it was not possible without, first of all, right culture. And second, without cloud Amazon elasticity and all the tools that we have in place. >> Well, the right architecture allows for scale. That's the whole, I mean, you did everything right at the architecture that's scale. I mean, you're scaling. >> And we empower our engineers to make those choices, right. We're not, like, super bureaucratic where every decision has to be approved by the manager or the managers manager. The engineers have the power to just make good decisions, and that's how we move fast. >> That's exactly the future right there. And this is what it's all about. Reliability, scale agility, the ability to react and have applications roll out on top of it without long timeframes. Congratulations. Thanks for being on theCUBE. Appreciate it. All right. >> Thank you. >> Okay, you're watching theCUBE here at re:MARS 2020, I'm John Furrier. Stay tuned. We've got more coverage coming after this short break. (upbeat music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of snowflake summit. 22 live from Las Vegas. We're at Caesar's forum, Lisa Martin, with Dave ante. We've been having some great conversations over the last day and a half. This guy just came from main stage interviewing the CEO, Franks Lubin himself, who joins us after our next guest here, we're gonna be talking customers and successes with snowflake Rosemary Hua joins us the global head of retail at snowflake and Patrick Kelly, the VP of product management at their customer 84 51. Welcome to the program guys. >>Thank you. It's nice to be here. So >>Patrick, 84 51. Talk to us about the business, give the audience an overview of what you guys are doing. And then we'll talk about how you're working with snowflake. >>Yeah, absolutely. Thank you both for, uh, the opportunity to be here. So 84 51 is a retail data science insights and media company. And really what that means is that we, we partner with our, uh, parent company Kroger, as well as consumer packaged goods or brands and brokers and agencies, really to understand shoppers and create relevant, personalized, and valuable experiences for shoppers in source and grocery stores. >>That relevance is key. We all expect that these days, I think the last couple of years as everyone's patience has been wearing. Yeah, very thin. I'm not, I'm not convinced it's gonna come back either, but we expect that brands are gonna interact with us and offer us the next best offer. That's actually relevant and personalized to us. How does AB 4 51 achieve that? >>Yeah, it's a great question. And you're right. That expectation is only growing. Um, and it takes data analytics, data science and all of these capabilities in order to deliver it on that promise, uh, you know, big, a big part of the relationship that retailers and brands have with consumers is about a value exchange. And it's, again, it's about that expectation that brands and retailers need to be able to meet the ever-changing needs of consumers. Uh, whether that be introducing new brands or offering the right price points or promotions or ensuring you meet them where they are, whether it be online, which has obviously been catalyzed by, um, the pandemic over the last two years or in store. So a deep understanding of, of the customer, which is founded in data and the appropriate analytics and science, and then the collaboration back with the retailers and, and the brands so that you can bring that experience to life. Again, that could be a price point on the, on the shelf, um, or it could be a personalized email or, um, website interaction that delivers the right experience for the co for the consumer. So they can see that value and really build loyalty >>In the right time in real time. That's >>One of the most Marrit I'm in real time. That's right. One goes, Mary, I love the concept of the, the actual platform of the retail data cloud. Yes. It's so unique for a technology company. Snowflake's a technology company, you see services companies do it all the time, but yeah, but to actually transform what was considered a data warehouse in the cloud to a platform for data, I call it super cloud. Yeah. Tell us how this came about, um, how you were able to actually develop this and where you are in that journey. >>Yeah, absolutely. It's been a big focus on data sharing. We saw that that's how our customers are interacting with each other is using our data sharing functionality to really bring that ecosystem to life. So that's retailers sharing with their consumer products companies selling through those retailers. And then of course the data service companies that are kind of helping both sides and that data sharing functionality is the kind of under fabric for the data cloud, where we bring in partners. We bring in customers and we bring in tech solutions to the table. Um, and customers can use the data cloud, not only with the powered by partners that we have, but also the data marketplace, getting that data in real time and making some business value out of that data. So that's really the big focus of snowflake is investing in industry to realize the business value >>And talk about ecosystem and how important that is, where, where you leave off and the ecosystem picks up and how that's evolving. >>Absolutely. And I'm sure you can join in on this, but, um, definitely that collaboration between retailers and CPGs, right? I mean, retailers have that rich first party customer data. They see all those transactions, they see when people are shopping and then the brands really need that first party data to figure out what their, how their customers are interacting with their brand. And so that collaborative nature that makes up the ecosystem. And of course, you've got the tech partners in the middle that are kind of providing enrich data assets as well. You guys at 84 51 are a huge part of that ecosystem being, you know, one of the key retailers in, in the United States. Um, have you been seeing that as well with your brands? Yeah, >>Absolutely. I mean data and data science has always been core to the identity of 84 51. Um, and historically a lot of the interaction that we have with brands were through report web based applications, right. And it's a really great seamless way to, to deliver insights to non-technical users. But as the entire market has really started to invest in data and data science and technology and capabilities, you know, we, we launched a collaborative cloud last year and it was really an opportunity for us to reimagine what that experience would look like and to ensure that we are meeting the evolving needs of the industry. And as Rosemary pointed out, you know, data sharing is, is table stakes, right? It's a capability that you don't wanna have to think about. You wanna be thinking about the strategic initiatives, the science that you're gonna create in order to drive action and personalize experiences. So what we've found at 84 51 is really investing in our collaborative cloud, um, and working with leading technology providers like snowflake to make that seamless has been, you know, the, the, the UN unlock to ensure that data and data science can be a competitive advantage for our clients and partners, not just, you know, the retailer in 84 51 >>Is the collaborative cloud built on snowflake. >>Yeah. So the collaborative cloud is really about, um, ensuring that data sharing through snowflake is done seamlessly. So we've really, we've invited our clients and partners to build their own science on 84 51 S first party data asset through Kroger. And our, our data is represents 60 million households, half of the United States, 2 billion transactions annually, the robustness of that data asset. And it's it's it's analysis ready is so impactful to the investment that brands can make in their own data science efforts, because brands wanna invest in data science, not to do data work, not to do cleaning and Muning and, and merging and, and standardizing. They wanna do analysis. That's gonna impact the strategies and ultimately the shopper's lives. So again, we're able to leverage the capabilities of snowflake to ensure data sharing is not part of our day to day conversation. Data sharing is something we can take for granted so that we can talk about the shopper and our strategies. >>So this is why I call it super cloud. So Jerry Chen wrote an article of castles in the cloud. And in there he said, he called it sub clouds. And I'm like, no, it's, uh, by the way, great article. Jerry's brilliant. But so you got AWS, you built on top of AWS. That's right. You got the snowflake data called you're building on top of that. And I was sitting at the table and my kid goes, this is super, I'm like, ah, super clouds. So I didn't really even coin it, but, and then I realized somebody else had use it before, but that is different. It's new, it's around data. It's around vertical industries. Yes. Um, I, I get a lot of heat for that term, but I feel like this look around this industry, everybody's doing that that's that is digital transformation. That's don't you see that with your customers? >>Absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of different industry trends where you can't use your own historical first party data to figure out what customers are doing. I mean, with COVID customers are behaving totally differently than they used to. And you can't use your historical data to predict out of stocks or how the customer's gonna be interacting with your brand anymore. And you need that third party macroeconomic data. You need that third party COVID data or foot traffic data to enrich what your businesses are doing. And so, yes, it, it is a super cloud. And I think the big differentiator is that we are cloud agnostic, meaning that, like you said, you can take the technology for granted. You don't have to worry about where the other person has their tech stack. It's all the same experience on the snowflake super cloud as he put it. So, >>So Patrick, talk about the, the, the impact that you have been able to have during COVID. I mean, everybody had supply chain issues, but, you know, if you took, if you took away the machine learning and the data science that you are initiating, would life have been harder? Do you have data on that? You know, the, the, what if we didn't have this capability during the >>Challenges? No, it's, it's a fantastic question. And I'll actually build on the example that Rosemary, um, offered around COVID and better understanding COVID. So, um, in the past, you know, when we talk about data sharing data collaboration, it's basically wasn't possible, right? What's your tech stack, what's mine. How do we share data? I don't wanna send you my data without go releasing governance. It was a non-starter and, you know, through technology like snowflake, as we launched the collaborative cloud, we actually had a pilot client start right at the beginning of 2020. Um, we, we had, you know, speced out it onto use cases that really impactful for their, for their organization. But of course, what happened is, uh, a pandemic hit us and it became the biggest question, CEO executive team, all the way down is what is happening, what is happening in our stores? >>How are shoppers behaving and what, what that client of ours came to realize is while we, we actually, we have access to the E 4 51 collaborative cloud. We can see half of America's behavior last week down to the basket transaction UPC level. Let's get going. So again, the conversation wasn't about, you know, what data sources, how do we scramble? How do we get it together? What technologies, how do we collaborate? It was immediately focused on building the analysis to better understand that. And, and the outcomes that drove actually were all the way from manufacturing impact to marketing, to merchandising, because that brand was able to figure out, Hey, our top selling products, they're, they're not on the shelves. What are shoppers doing? Are they going to a, another brand? Are they not buying it all together? Are they going to a different size? Are they staying within our product portfolio? Are they going to a competitor? And those insights drove everything again from what do we need to manufacture more to, how do we need to communicate and incent our, our, our shoppers, our, our loyal shoppers also what's happening to our non loyals. Are they looking for an, you know, an alternative that a need that we can serve that level of, of shopper and customer understanding going all the way up to a strategic initiatives is something that is enabled through the Supercloud >><laugh>. How do you facilitate privacy as we're seeing this proliferation of privacy legislation? Yeah. I think there's now 22 states that have individual, and California's changing to CPR a at the beginning of yes, January 23. How do you balance that need that ability to share data? Yeah. Equitably fast, quickly, but also balance consumer privacy requirements. >>I mean, I could take a stab first. I mean, at snowflake, right, there is no better place to share your data that in a governed way than with snowflake data sharing, because then you can see and understand how the other side is using your data. Whereas in traditional methods, using an API or using an FTP server, you wouldn't be able to actually see how the other side is using your data. But in addition to that, we have the clean room where you can actually join on that underlying PII data without exposing it, because you can share functions securely on, on both sides. So I think there is no better place to do it than here at snowflake. Um, and because we deeply understand those policies, I think we are kind of keeping up with the times trying to get in front of things so that our data sharing capabilities stay up to date. When you have to expunge records, identify records with CCPA and, and GDPR and, and all the rest that are coming. Um, and so, so, I mean, I think especially with 84 50 ones, um, you know, collaborative cloud also building on top of the clean room, um, in, in further road in the further roadmap, I think, uh, you're gonna see some of that privacy compliant, data sharing, coming to play as well. You >>Know, what's interesting, Patrick is we were just in that session with the Frank Q and a, and he was very candid about when he was talking about, uh, Apache, uh, I'm sorry. Apache iceberg. Yeah. Yes. And he, he basically flat out said, look, you know, you gotta put it into the snowflake data cloud. It's, it's better there, but people might, you know, want to put it outside, not get locked in, et cetera. But what I'm, I'm listening to you saying it's so much easier for you today that could evolve something open source. And, and how do you think about that in terms of placing your bets? >>Yeah, it, it's a great question and really to go back to privacy, um, as a total topic, I mean, you're right. It's extremely relevant topic. It's, it's, you know, very ever changing right now at 84 51. Privacy is, is first it's the foundation. Um, it it's table stakes and that's from a policy that's from a governance, it's from a technology capability standpoint. And it's part of our, our culture because, um, it, it, because it has to be, uh, and, and so when we, when we think about, you know, the products that we're gonna build, how we want to implement, it's, it's a requirement that we leverage technologies that enable us to secure the governance and ensure that we're privacy compliant. Um, the customer data asset that we have is, is, you know, is extremely valuable as we've talked about in this interview, it's also responsibility. And we take that very, very seriously. And so, you know, Dave, back to your question about, you know, decisions to go, you know, open source or leverage for technologies. So there's always a balance. You know, we, we love to push the, the bounds of innovation and, and we wanna be on the forefront of data, sharing data, science, collaboration for this industry. But at the same time, we balance that with making sure that our technology partners are the right ones, because we are not willing to compromise our governance and our fir and our, our privacy, uh, priorities. >>That's gonna be interesting to see how that evolves. And I, I loved that. Frank was so candid about it. I think the key for any cloud player, including a super cloud is you gotta have an ecosystem without an ecosystem. Forget it. And you see a lot of companies. I mean, we were at Dell tech world. They're kind of, they're at the beginnings of that, but the ecosystems, nothing like this, right. Which is amazing, nothing against, against Dell, they're just kind of getting started and you have to be open. You have to have optionality. Yep. You know, so I, I don't know if we'll see the day where they're including data, bricks, data lakes inside of the snowflake cloud. That will be amazing. <laugh> but you know, you never say never in the world of cloud, >>Do you stranger things, Rosemary and Patrick, thank you so much for joining us talking about what 84 51 is doing powered by snowflake and also the rise of the snowflake retail cloud and what that's doing. We'll have to have you back on to hear what's going on as I'm sure the adoption will continue to increase. Absolutely. Thank you so much to both for having us, our pleasure. You appreciate this for our guests. I'm Lisa Martin. He's Dave ante stick around Dave will be back with Frankman CEO of snowflake. Next. You won't wanna miss it.

we're back at vemma in 2022 we're here at the aria hotel in las vegas this is thecube's continuous coverage we're day two welcome to the cxo session we have ceo cto cso chief strategy officer brett diamond is the ceo justin jardina is the cto and dante orsini is the chief strategy officer for 11 11 systems recently named i guess today the impact cloud service provider of the year congratulations guys welcome thank you welcome back to the cube great to see you again thank you great likewise so okay brett let's start with you tell give us the overview of 11 1111 uh your focus area talk about the the the island acquisition what that what that's all about give us the setup yeah so we started 11-11 uh really with a focus on taking the three core pillars of our business which are cloud connectivity and security bring them together into one platform allowing a much easier way for our customers and our partners to procure those three solution sets through a single company and really focus on uh the three main drivers of the business uh which you know have a litany of other services associated with them under each platform okay so so justin cloud connectivity and security they all dramatically changed in march of 2020 everybody had to go to the cloud the rather rethink the network had a secure remote worker so what did you see from a from a cto's perspective what changed and how did 11 respond sure so early on when we built our cloud even back into 2008 we really focused on enterprise great features one of which being uh very flexible in the networking so we found early on was that we would be able to architect solutions for customers that were dipping their toe in the cloud and set ourselves apart from some of the vendors at the time so if you fast forward from 2008 until today we still see that as a main component for iaz and draz and the ability to start taking into some of the things brett talked about where customers may need a point-to-point circuit to offload data connectivity to us or develop sd-wan and multi-cloud solutions to connect to their resources in the cloud in my opinion it's just the natural progression of what we set out to do in 2008 and to couple that with the security um if you think about what that opens up from a security landscape now you have multiple clouds you have different ingress and egress points you have different people accessing workloads in each one of these clouds so the idea or our idea is that we can layer a comprehensive security solution over this new multi-cloud networking world and then provide visibility and manageability to our customer base so what does that mean specifically for your customers because i mean we saw obviously a rapid move toward endpoint um cloud security uh identity access you know people really started thinking rethinking that as opposed to trying to just you know build a moat around the castle right um what does that mean for for your customer you take care of all that you partner with whomever you need to partner in the ecosystem and then you provide the managed service how does that work right it does and that's a great analogy you know we have a picture of a hamburger in our office exploded with all the components and they say a good security policy is all the pieces and it's really synonymous with what you said so to answer your question yes we have all that baked in the platform we can offer managed services around it but we also give the consumer the ability to access that data whether it's a ui or api so dante i know you talk to a lot of customers all you do is watch the stock market go like this and like that you say okay the pandemic drove all these but but when you talk to csos and customers a lot of things are changing permanently first of all they were forced to march to digital when previously they were like we'll get there i mean a lot of customers were let's face it i mean some were serious about it but many weren't now if you're not a digital business you're out of business what have you seen when you talk to customers in terms of the permanence of some of these changes what are they telling you well i think we go through this for ourselves right the business continues to grow you've got tons of people that are working remotely and that are going to continue to work remotely right as much as we'd like to offer up hybrid workspace and things like that some folks are like hey i've worked it out i'm working out great from home right and also i think what justin was saying also is we've seen time go on that operating environment has gotten much more complex you've got stuff in the data center stuff it's somebody's you know endpoint you've got various different public clouds different sas services right that's why it's been phenomenal to work with veeam because we can protect that data regardless of where it exists but when you start to look at some of the managed security services that we're talking about we're helping those csos you get better visibility better control and take proactive action against the infrastructure um when we look at threat mitigation and how to actually respond when when something does happen right and i think that's the key because there's no shortage of great security vendors right but how do you tie it all together into a single solution right with a vendor that you can actually partner with to help secure the environment while you go focus on the things they're more strategic to the business i was talking to jim mercer at um red hat summit last week he's an idc analyst and he said we did a survey i think it was last summer and we asked customers to your point about there's no shortage of security tools how do you want to buy your security and you know do you want you know best to breed bespoke tools and you sort of put it together or do you kind of want your platform provider to do it now surprisingly they said platform provider the the problem is that's aspirational for a lot of platforms providers so they've got to look to a managed service provider so brett talk about the the island acquisition what green cloud is how that all fits together so we acquired island and green cloud last year and the reality is that the people at both of those companies and the technology is what drove us to making those acquisitions they were the foundational pieces to eleven eleven uh obviously the things that justin has been able to create from an automation and innovation perspective uh at the company is transforming this business in a litany of different ways as well so those two acquisitions allow us at this point to take a cloud environment on a geographic footprint not only throughout the us but globally uh have a security product that was given to us from from the green cloud acquisition of cascade and add-on connectivity to allow us to have all three platforms in one all three pillars so i like 11 11 11 is near and dear to my heart i am so where'd the name come from uh everybody asked me this question i think five times a day so uh growing up as a kid everyone in my family would always say 11 11 make a wish whenever you'd see it on the clock and uh during coven we were coming up with a new name for the business my daughter looked at the microwave said dad it's 11 11. make a wish the reality was though i had no idea why i'd been doing it for all that time and when you look up kind of the background origination derivation of the word uh it means the time of day when everything's in line um and when things are complex especially with running all the different businesses that we have aligning them so that they're working together it seemed like a perfect man when i had the big corner office at idc i had my staff meetings at 11 11. because the universe was aligned and then the other thing was nobody could forget the time so they gave him 11 minutes to be there now you'll see it all the time even when you don't want to so justin we've been talking a lot about ransomware and and not just backup but recovery my friend fred moore who you know coined the phrase backup is one thing recovery is everything and recovery time network speeds and and the like are critical especially when you're thinking cloud how are you architecting recovery for your clients maybe you could dig into that a little bit sure so it's really a multitude of things you know you mentioned ransomware seeing the ransomware landscape evolve over time especially in our business with backup and dr it's very singular you know people protecting against host nodes now we're seeing ransomware be able to get into an environment land and expand actually delete backups target backup vendors so the ransomware point i guess um trying to battle that is a multi-step process right you need to think about how data flows into the organization from a security perspective from a networking perspective you need to think about how your workloads are protected and then when you think about backups i know we're at veeam vmon now talking about veeam there's a multitude of ways to protect that data whether it's retention whether it's immutability air gapping data so while i know we focus a lot sometimes on protecting data it's really that hamburg analogy where the sum of the parts make up the protection so how do you provide services i mean you say okay you want immutability there's a there's a line item for that um you want faster or you know low rpo fast rto how does that all work for as a customer what what am i buying from you is it just a managed service we'll take care of everything platinum gold silver or is it if if you don't mind so i'm glad you asked that question because this is something that's very unique about us years ago his team actually built the ip because we were scaling at such an incredible rate globally through all our joint partners with veeam that how do we take all the intelligence that we have in his team and all of our solution architects and scale it so they actually developed a tool called catalyst and it's a pre-sales tool it's an application you download it you install it it basically takes a snapshot of your environment you start to manipulate the data what are you trying to do dave are you trying to protect that data are you backing up to us are you trying to replicate for dr purposes um you know what are you doing for production or maybe it's a migration it analyzes the network it analyzes all your infrastructure it helps the ses know immediately if we're a feasible solution based on what you are trying to do so nobody in the space is doing this and that's been a huge key to our growth because the channel community as well as the customer they're working with real data so we can get past all the garbage and get right to what's important for them for the outcome yeah that's huge who do you guys sell to is it is it more mid-sized businesses that maybe don't have the large teams is it larger enterprises who want to complement to their business is it both well i would say with the two acquisitions that we made the go-to-market sales strategies and the clientele were very different when you look at green cloud they're selling predominantly wholesale through msps and those msps are mostly selling to smbs right so we covered that smb market for the most part through our acquisition of green cloud island on the other hand was more focused on selling direct inbound through vars through the channel mid enterprise big enterprise so really those two acquisitions outside of the ip that we got from the systems we have every single go-to-market sale strategy and we're aligned from smb all the way up to the fortune 500. i heard a stat a couple months ago that that less than 50 of enterprises have a sock it blew me away and you know even small businesses need one they may not be able to afford but certainly a medium size or larger business should have some kind of sock is it does that stat jive with what you're seeing in the marketplace 100 if that's true the need for a managed service like this is just it's going to explode it is exploding yeah i mean 100 right there is zero unemployment in the cyberspace right just north america alone there's about a million or so folks in that space and right now you've got about 600 000 open wrecks just in north america right so earlier we talked about no shortage of tools right but the shortage of head count is a significant challenge big time right most importantly the people that you do have on staff they've got alert fatigue from the tools that they do have that's why you're seeing this massive insurgence in the managed security services provider lack of talent is number one challenge for csos that's what they'll tell you and there's no end in sight to that and it's you know another tool and and it's amazing because you see security companies popping up all the time billion dollar evaluations i mean lacework did a billion dollar raise and so so there's no shortage of funding now maybe that'll change you know with the market but i wanted to turn our attention to the keynotes this morning you guys got some serious love up on stage um there was a demo uh it was a pretty pretty cool demo fast recovery very very tight rpo as i recall it was i think four minutes of data loss is that right was that the right knit stat i was happy it wasn't zero data loss because there's really you know no such thing uh but so you got to feel good about that tell us about um how that all came about your relationship with with veeam who wants to take it sure i can i can take a step at it so one of the or two of the things that i'm um most excited about at least with this vmon is our team was able to work with veeam on that demo and what that demo was showing was some cdp-based features for cloud providers so we're really happy to see that and the reason why we're happy to see that is that with the veeam platform it's now given the customers the ability to do things like snapshot replication cdp replication on-prem backup cloud backup immutability air gap the list goes on and on and in our opinion having a singular software vendor that can provide all that through you know with a cloud provider on prem or not is really like the icing on the cake so for us it's very exciting to see that and then also coupled with a lot of the innovation that veeam's doing in the sas space right so again having that umbrella product that can cover all those use cases i'll tell you if you guys can get a that was a very cool demo if we can get a youtube of that that that demo i'll make sure we put it in the the show notes and uh of this video or maybe pop it into one of the blogs that we write about it um so so how you guys feel i mean this is a new chapter for you very cool with a couple of acquisitions that are now the main mainspring of your strategy so the first veeam on in a couple years so what's the vibe been like for you what's the nighttime activity the customer interaction i know you guys are running a lot of the back end demos so you're everywhere what's the what's the vibe like at veeamon and how does it feel to be back look at that one at dante as far as yeah you got a lot of experience here yeah let me loose on this one dave i'm like so excited about this right it's been it's been far too long to get face to face again and um veeam always does it right and i think that uh for years we've been back-ending like all the hands-on lab infrastructure here but forget about that i think the part that's really exciting is getting face-to-face with such a great team right we have phenomenal architects that we work with at veeam day in and day out they put up with us pushing them pushing and pushing them and together we've been able to create a lot of magic together right but i think it's you can't replace the human interaction that we've all been starving for for the last two years but the vibe's always fantastic at veeam if you're going to be around tonight i'll be looking forward to enjoying some of that veeam love with you at the after party yeah that's well famous after parties we'll see if that culture continues i have a feeling it will um brett where do you want to take 11 11. a new new phase in all of your careers you got a great crew out here it looks like i i love that you're all out and uh make some noise here people let's hear it all right let's see you this is the biggest audience we've had all week where do you want to take 11 11. i think you know if uh if you look at what we've done so far in the short six months since the acquisitions of green cloud and ireland obviously the integration is a key piece we're going to be laser focused on growing organically across those three pillars we've got to put more capital and resources into the incredible ip like i said earlier that just and his team have created on those front ends the user experience but you know we made two large acquisitions obviously mna is a is a key piece for us we're going to be diligent and we're probably going to be very aggressive on that front as well to be able to grow this business into the global leader of cloud connectivity and security and i think we've really hit a void in the industry that's been looking for this for a very long time and we want to be the first ones to be able to collaborate and combine those three into one when the when the cloud started to hit the steep part of the s-curve kind of early part of the last decade people thought oh wow these managed service providers are toast the exact opposite happened it created such a tailwind and need for consistent services and integration and managed services we've seen it all across the stack so guys wish you best of luck congratulations on the acquisitions thank you uh hope to have you back soon yeah thank you around the block all right keep it right there everybody dave vellante for the cube's coverage of veeamon 2022 we'll be right back after this short break

(pleasant music) >> We're back at Veeamon 2022. We're here at the Aria hotel in Las Vegas. This is theCube's continuous coverage. We're in day two. Welcome to the CXO session. We have CEO, CTO, CSO, chief strategy officer. Brett Diamond is the CEO, Justin Giardina is the CTO, and Dante Orsini is the chief strategy officer for 11:11 Systems recently named, I guess today, the impact cloud service provider of the year. Congratulations, guys. Welcome to theCube. Welcome back to theCube. Great to see you again. >> Thank you. >> Great. >> Likewise. >> Thanks for having us. Okay, Brett, let's start with you. Give us the overview of 11:11, your focus area, talk about the Island acquisition, what that's all about, give us the setup. >> Yeah, so we started 11:11, really, with a focus on taking the three core pillars of our business, which are cloud, connectivity, and security, bring them together into one platform, allowing a much easier way for our customers and our partners to procure those three solution sets through a single company and really focus on the three main drivers of the business, which, you know, have a litany of other services associated with them under each platform. >> Okay, so Justin, cloud connectivity and security, they all dramatically changed in March of 2020. Everybody had to go to the cloud, had to rethink the network, had to secure remote workers. So what did you see, from a CTO's perspective, what changed and how did 11:11 respond? >> Sure, so early on, when we built our cloud, even back into 2008, we really focused on enterprise grade features, one of which being very flexible in the networking. So we found early on was that we would be able to architect solutions for customers that were dipping their toe in the cloud and set ourselves apart from some of the vendors at the time. So if you fast forward from 2008 until today, we still see that as a main component for IaaS and DRaaS and the ability to start taking into some of the things Brett talked about, where customers may need a point to point circuit to offload data connectivity to us, or develop SD-WAN and multi-cloud solutions to connect to their resources in the cloud. In my opinion, it's just the natural progression of what we set out to do in 2008. And to couple that with the security, if you think about what that opens up from a security landscape, now you have multiple clouds, you have different ingress and egress points, you have different people accessing workloads in each one of these clouds, so the idea or our idea is that we can layer a comprehensive security solution over this new multi-cloud networking world and then provide visibility and manageability to our customer base. >> So what does that mean specifically for your customers? Because, I mean, we saw obviously a rapid move toward end point, cloud security, identity access. You know, people really started rethinking that as opposed to trying to just, you know, build a moat around the castle. >> Right. >> What does that mean for your customer? You take care of all that? You partner with whomever you need to partner in the ecosystem and then you provide the managed service? How does that work? >> Right. It does and that's a great analogy. You know, we have a picture of a hamburger in our office, exploded with all the components and they say, a good security policy has all the pieces and it's really synonymous with what you said. So to answer your question, yes. We have all that baked in the platform. We can offer managed services around it, but we also give the consumer the ability to access that data, whether it's a UI or API. >> So Dante, I know you talked to a lot of customers. All you do is watch the stock market go like this and like that and you say, okay, the pandemic drove all these, but when you talk to CISOs and customers, a lot of things are changing permanently. First of all, they were forced to march to digital when previously, they were like, eh, we'll get there. I mean, a lot of customers were. Let's face it. I mean, some were serious about it, but many weren't. Now, if you're not a digital business, you're out of business. What have you seen when you talk to customers in terms of the permanence of some of these changes? What are they telling you? >> Well, I think, you know, we go through this ourselves, right? The business continues to grow. You've got tons of people that are working remotely and they are going to continue to work remotely, right? As much as we'd like to offer up hybrid workspace and things like that, some folks are like, hey, I've worked it out. I'm working out great from home, right? And also, I think what Justin was saying also is, as we've seen time go on, that operating environment has gotten much more complex. You've got stuff in the data center, stuff in somebody's, you know, endpoint, you've got various different public clouds, different SAS services, right? That's why it's been phenomenal to work with Veeam because we can protect that data regardless of where it exists. But when you start to look at some of the managed security services that we're talking about, we're helping those CSOs, you know, get better visibility, better control, and take proactive action against the infrastructure when we look at threat mitigation and how to actually respond when something does happen, right? And I think that's the key because there's no shortage of great security vendors, right? But how do you tie it all together into a single solution, right, with a vendor that you can actually partner with to help secure the environment while you go focus on the things that are more strategic to the business? >> I was talking to Jim Mercer at Red Hat Summit last week. He's an IDC analyst and we did a survey, I think it was last summer, and we asked customers to your point about, there's no shortage of security tools. How do you want to buy your security? And, you know, do you want, you know, best to breed bespoke tools and you sort of put it together or do you kind of want your platform provider to do it? Now surprisingly, they said platform provider. The problem is, that's aspirational for a lot of platform providers, so they got to look to a managed service provider. So Brett, talk about the Island acquisition, what Green Cloud is, how that all fits together. >> So we acquired Island and Green Cloud last year and the reality is, the people at both of those companies and the technology is what drove us to making those acquisitions. They were the foundational pieces to 11:11. Obviously, the things that Justin has been able to create from an automation and innovation perspective at the company is transforming this business in a litany of different ways, as well. So, those two acquisitions allow us at this point to take a cloud environment on a geographic footprint, not only throughout the US but globally, have a security product that was given to us from the Green Cloud acquisition of Cascade, and add on connectivity to allow us to have all three platforms in one, all three pillars in one. >> So I like 11:11. 11:11 is near and dear to my heart. So where'd the name come from? >> Everybody asked me this question, I think, five times a day. So growing up as a kid, everyone in my family would always say 11:11 make a wish whenever you'd see it on the clock. And during COVID, we were coming up with a new name for the business. My daughter looked at the microwave, said, dad, it's 11:11, make a wish. The reality was though, I had no idea why I'd been doing it for all that time and when you look up kind of the background origination, derivation of the word, it means the time of day when everything's in line and when things are complex, especially with running all the different businesses that we have, aligning them so that they're working together, it seemed like the perfect thing >> So when I had the big corner office at IDC, I had my staff meetings at 11:11. >> Yep. >> Because the universe was aligned and then the other thing was, nobody could forget the time. So they gave me 11 minutes to be there, so they were never late. >> And now you'll see it all the time, even when you don't want to. (chuckles) >> So Justin, we've been talking a lot about ransomware and not just backup, but recovery. My friend, Fred Moore, who, you know, coined the phrase backup is one thing, recovery is everything, and recovery time, network speeds and the like are critical, especially when you're thinking cloud. How are you architecting recovery for your clients? Maybe you could dig into that a little bit. >> Sure. So it's really a multitude of things. You know, you mention ransomware. Seeing the ransomware landscape evolve over time, especially in our business with backup NDR, is very singular, you know, people protecting against host nodes. Now we're seeing ransomware be able to get into an environment, land and expand, actually delete backups, target backup vendors. So the ransomware point, I guess, trying to battle that is a multi-step process, right? You need to think about how data flows into the organization from a security perspective, from a networking perspective, you need to think about how your workloads are protected, and then when you think about backups, I know we're at Veeamon now talking about Veeam, there's a multitude of ways to protect that data, whether it's retention, whether it's immutability, air gapping data. So, while I know we focus a lot sometimes on protecting data, it's really that hamburger analogy where the sum of the parts make up the protection. >> So how do you provide services? I mean, do you say, okay, do you want immutability? There's a line item for that. You want low RPO, fast RTO? How does that all work as a customer? What am I buying from you? Is it just a managed service? We'll take care of everything, platinum, gold, silver, or is it? >> If you don't mind, so I'm glad you asked that question because this is something that's very unique about us. Years ago, his team actually built the IP because we were scaling at such an incredible rate globally through all our joint partners with Veeam that, how do we take all the intelligence that we have and his team and all of our solution architects and scale it? So they actually developed a tool called Catalyst, and it's a pre-sales tool. It's an application. You download it, you install it. It basically takes a snapshot of your environment. You start to manipulate the data. What are you trying to do, Dave? Are you trying to protect that data? Are you backing up to us? Are you trying to replicate it for DR purposes? You know, what are you doing for production, or maybe it's a migration? It analyzes the network. It analyzes all your infrastructure. It helps the SEs know immediately if we're a feasible solution based on what you are trying to do. So, nobody in the space is doing this and that's been a huge key to our growth because the channel community, as well as the customer, they're working with real data. So we can get past all the garbage, you get right to what's important for them for the outcome. >> Yeah, that's huge. Who do you guys sell to? Is it more mid-size businesses that maybe don't have the large teams? Is it larger enterprises who want to compliment to their business? Is it both? >> Well, I would say with the two acquisitions that we made to go to market sales strategies and the clientele were very different, when you look at Green Cloud, they're selling predominantly wholesale through MSPs and those MSPs are mostly selling to SMBs, right? So we covered that SMB market for the most part through our acquisition of Green Cloud. Island, on the other hand, was more focused on selling direct, inbound, through VARs through the channel, mid-enterprise, big enterprise. So really, those two acquisitions outside of the IP that we got from the systems, we have every single go to market sales strategy and we're aligned from SMB all the way up to the Fortune 500. >> I heard a stat a couple months ago that less than 50% of enterprises have a SAQ. That blew me away. And, you know, even small businesses need one. They may not be able to afford, but there's certainly a medium size or a larger business should have some kind of SAQ. Does that stat jive with what you're seeing in the marketplace? >> A hundred percent. >> If that's true, the need for a managed service like this, it's going to explode. It is exploding, I mean. >> Yeah, I mean, a hundred percent, right? There is zero unemployment in the cyberspace, right? Just North America alone, there's about a million or so folks in that space and right now you've got about 600,000 open recs just in North America, right? So earlier, we talked about no shortage of tools, right? But the shortage of headcount is a significant challenge, big time, right? Most importantly, the people that you do have on staff, they've got alert fatigue from the tools that they do have. That's why you're seeing this massive surgence in the managed security services provider. >> Lack of talent is number one challenge for CISOs. That's what they'll tell you and there's no end in sight to that. And it's, you know, another tool and it's amazing 'cause you see security companies popping up all the time. I mean, billion dollar valuations, I mean, Lacework did a billion dollar raise. And so, there's no shortage of funding. Now, maybe that'll change, you know, with the market but I wanted to turn our attention to the keynotes this morning. You guys got some serious love up on stage. There was a demo. It was a pretty cool demo, fast recovery, very tight RPO, as I recall. It was, I think, four minutes of, of data loss? Is that right? Is that the right stat? I was happy it wasn't zero data loss 'cause there's really, you know, no such thing, but so you got to feel good about that. Tell us about how that all came about, your relationship with Veeam. Who wants to take it? >> Sure, I can take a stab at it. So two of the things that I'm most excited about, at least with this Veeamon, is our team was able to work with Veeam on that demo, and what that demo was showing was some CDP based features for cloud providers. So we're really happy to see that and the reason why we're happy to see that is that with the Veeam platform, it's now given the customers the ability to do things like snapshot replication, CDP replication, on-prem backup, cloud backup, immutability air gap, the list goes on and on. And in our opinion, having a singular software vendor that can provide all that, you know, with a cloud provider on-prem or not is really like, the icing on the cake. So for us, it's very exciting to see that, and then also coupled with a lot of the innovation that's Veeam's doing in the SAS space, right? So again, having that umbrella product that can cover all those use cases. >> I'll tell you, that was a very cool demo. If you can get a YouTube of that demo, I'll make sure we put it in the show notes of this video or maybe pop it into one of the blogs that we write about it. So, how do you guys feel? I mean, this is a new chapter for you. Very cool, with a couple of acquisitions that are now the main spring of your strategy, so the first Veeamon in a couple years. So what's the vibe been like for you? What's the nighttime activity, the customer interaction? I know you guys are running a lot of the backend demos, so you're everywhere. What's the vibe like at Veeamon and how does it feel to be back? >> I'll give that one to Dante as far as the vibes, so far. >> Yeah, yeah, you got a lot of experience. >> Yeah, let me loose on this one, Dave. I'm like, so excited about this, right? It's been far too long to get face to face again and Veeam always does it right. And I think that for years, we've been back ending like, all the hands on lab infrastructure here, but forget about that. I think the part that's really exciting is getting face to face with such a great team, right? We have phenomenal architects that we work with at Veeam day in and day out. They put up with us, pushing them, pushing them, pushing them and together, we've been able to create a lot of magic together, right? But I think you can't replace the human interaction that we've all been starving for, for the last two years. But the vibe's always fantastic at Veeam. If you're going to be around tonight, I'll be looking forward to enjoying some of that Veeam love with you at the after party. >> Yeah, well, famous after parties. We'll see if that culture continues. I have a feeling it will. Brett, where do you want to take 11:11? New phase in all of your careers. You got a great crew out here, it looks like. I love that you're all out and, make some noise here, people. Let's hear it! (audience cheering) You see, this is the biggest audience we've had all week. Where do you want to take 11:11? >> I think, you know, if you look at what we've done so far in the short six months since the acquisitions of Green Cloud and Island, obviously the integration is a key piece. We're going to be laser focused on growing organically across those three pillars. We've got to put more capital and resources into the incredible IP, like I said earlier, that Justin and his team have created on those front ends, the user experience. But, you know, we made two large acquisitions, obviously M and A is a key piece for us. We're going to be diligent and we're probably going to be very aggressive on that front as well, to be able to grow this business into the global leader of cloud connectivity and security. And I think we've really hit a void in the industry that's been looking for this for a very long time and we want to be the first ones to be able to collaborate and combine those three into one. >> When the cloud started to hit the steep part of the S-curve, kind of early part of last decade, people thought, oh wow, these managed service providers are toast. The exact opposite happened. It created such a tailwind and need for consistent services and integration and managed services. We've seen it all across the stacks. So guys, wish you best of luck. Congratulations on the acquisitions, >> Thank you. >> And hope to have you back soon. >> Absolutely, thanks for having us. >> All right, keep it right there everybody. Dave Vellante for theCube's coverage of Veeamon 2022. We'll be right back after this short break. (pleasant music)

>> The Cube presents Dell Technologies World brought to you by Dell. (crowd murmuring) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. It's The Cube live at Dell Technologies World 2022. This is day two of our coverage Lisa Martin, with Dave Vellante. We've had a lot of great conversations all day today half a day yesterday. We've got another great conversation coming up about ESG environmental, social and governance. Please welcome JJ Davis, the Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at Dell Technologies. Welcome to the program. >> Hi, thanks for having me. >> Hey, hey. >> It's great to be here. >> ESG is a very popular topic. >> Yes. >> It's one thing to talk about another thing to actually have a plan, have a strategy, have those 20, 30 moonshot goals and implement. Talk to us about what ESG means for Dell Technologies and some of these great things, that you have going on. >> Absolutely. So you said it, I mean it can be acronym soup. When you think about, is it social impact? Is it corporate social responsibility? Is it ESG and the beauty of having an environmental social governance strategy is we now are bringing ESG much closer to the corporate strategy and how we meet the needs of all of our stakeholders. So I'd love to just back it up for a minute and think about the purpose of Dell Technologies is to create technologies that advance human potential. Our vision is to be the most essential technology company for the data era. The way we do that is we're growing and modernizing our core businesses like PC servers and storage while we're building the technology ecosystem of the future. Well guess what? ESG is embedded in all of that because the future is more sustainable, built by people that represent our customer base with a workforce that is more diverse and a workplace that is more inclusive. We put human rights and the needs of people at the center of what we do as well as the needs of the planet. And when I get to put together purpose planet and profit and bring that strategy together in partnership with so many leaders of across the company and meeting the demands of our customers. ESG is just a part of the way we do business now >> It's part of the DNA. >> Yeah. >> Talk to us about some of the key priorities from a climate perspective, for example. >> Sure. >> What are some of Dell's key focus areas where that's concerned? >> So when we think about our ESG priorities as a whole there are four climate, circular, economy, diverse workplace and digital inclusion. And so within our sustainability pillar of our strategy or the E, we are committed to being net zero across scopes 1, 2 and 3 emissions by 2050. We are revamping our product energy goal right now to relaunch that. When we think about our customers 95% of our big customer RFPs ask about sustainability and our commitment and what we'll be doing to help them because they're going to be reliant on technology to meet their own sustainability and climate goals, whether it's green IT or IT for green and they're going to really be looking to us to help them. >> You know, I love this purpose planet profit. >> Yeah. >> You and I have talked about this a little bit. It's actually good business. Explain why ESG is good business? >> Well, I mean, used to social impact kind of sat off to the side. We might have been called do gooders or people that are passionate about things that maybe don't align to the corporate strategy. And now when you think about business round table and Michael Dell as a member and they came out with their purpose of a company statement it'll be three years in August to really redefine the purpose of a company to meet the needs of all stakeholders from employees, to customers, to shareholders as well. And so we know that new hires and new buyers demand more of their employer and of the companies they buy from. They want their own personal values to align with that of the company they work for or buy from. And so now we need to the needs of our business commitments, but also if companies don't take a leadership role, we're screwed, we're not going to be able to reverse the negative impacts. So climate change and technology plays a big role. >> Yeah. "The earth gets the last at bat," as they say. >> Yeah. >> From an accountability perspective that you mentioned 95% of RFPs are coming in and customers are looking for- >> Yes. >> Dell Technologies's commitment to ESG. Talk about the accountability to your customers to all customers where ESG is concerned and how is it measured? >> Sure. So we've been spending a lot of time over the last year, year and a half on the G of ESG the governance. And so we have been doing this for a couple decades really moving the needle on social impact. Michael talked about it in his key note, that this is in our DNA like you said. But now we have to be able to really measure. You can't manage what you can't measure. We have put a lot of governance around, what do we disclose and why Michael Dell is an active participant in the world economic forum, common metrics project because, you know, there's too many metrics and frameworks to know what companies need to be measuring and how we hold ourselves accountable and what we ultimately report to our shareholders. And so there's a lot of work to get more clarity there. You're seeing the SEC put out new rules around climate and human rights. And so when you start to get regulated that changes the game in terms of how transparent you need to be. And then what are the third party assurances that you need to have to validate the data that you're reporting on? We do have an annual ESG report that comes out every June where we report across several moonshot goals across sustainability, inclusive culture, transforming lives and ethics and privacy. Then we have sub goals. There's probably about 25 in total. And we're going to tell you our stakeholders every year how we're doing against our 20, 30 commitment. And I think it's that level of transparency and measurement that we have to hold ourselves accountable to and our customers do as well. >> Can you share a little bit about where you are on the 2030 moonshot that was announced about a couple years ago at the beginning of 20, yeah, towards the beginning of 2020. Where is Dell on the that, what's your moonscape look like? >> Yeah, sure. So we are announcing our update from calendar year 21 in June. So I'm not going to get the numbers exactly right. But if you take sustainability so one of our moonshot goals is around 100% of our packaging by 2030 will be made of recycled or renewable content. We're over 90% now. So we're going to probably restate that goal and evolve it or meet it early and set a new one. In terms of product contents. We have a goal that is 50% of our product contents will be from recycled over renewable materials. That's a little harder, plastic is easy, steel is hard. And so we're still working through how across the main components that go into our machines. How does that become more renewed and sustainable? If you think about 50% women in our workforce 25% African American or Hispanic in our US workforce we're making really good progress. And we have scaled programs that are helping us deliver on those commitments. >> Yeah. I think I'm quoting JJ Davis, correct me if I'm wrong but, "ESG marries who we are with what we do." What do you mean by that? >> So when you think about what we do, we build technology that delivers or advances human progress. We help our customers solve their biggest problems but really who we are. We are a founder-led company and Michael Dell was a purpose led driven CEO before that was even a term. And so he always wanted to have an ethical company that just did business above and beyond what the law required. And we'd been recycling PC for more than 20 years. And so we are an inclusive culture where we can bring our full selves to work and we are entrepreneurial. And, you know, if we have an idea and you raise that idea or a problem, you see then oftentimes the management will say, "Okay you go fix that." And so I think just what we do, we build technology. Who we are, is we're problem solvers for our customers. And that is good for business and good for the environment and what it is society really expects of us. And we're empowered to make a difference. Feels good. >> One of, I'm curious to get your perspective on , you know, the events of the last two years. One of the things that's happened is the great resignation. I think we all all know multiple people who have decided they're moving forward, lots of opportunity but where is Dell's ESG strategy as a differentiator for people going, I get it, I support that, that's the kind of company I want to work for? >> Our Chief Human Resources Officer Jen Saavedra calls it, "The great reshuffle." I think that's maybe a more positive way to look at it. And, you know, I've had people actually join my team because they are really positive on our mission and not just our proactive strategy around ESG but how we have handled our response to social issues. >> Yeah. >> I mean, who knew that company CEOs would be expected to speak out on voter access or LGBTQ rights and, you know. So a lot of people are coming to work for us because we are very measured in where we weigh in and what we stand for, how we speak out. But they're also really buying into our ESG strategy. I would also say our flexible work commitment. It's a big part of our DNI strategy as well and helps us attract and retain diverse talent. You can live and work wherever you want to proximity the headquarters is no longer criteria for advancement. And that's going to be a really big differentiator companies that get this right will win the talent war. And that means they'll better serve their customers. >> When you took over this role, I'm guessing you kind of did a scan to see who else was out there, what others were doing, not just in Tech. >> Sure. >> Not just in North America, but globally. What did you find? Where do you get your inspiration? Are there any organizations out there that are really models that you get inspiration from? Or is it so new? You are the model. Can you just talk about that? >> Well I mean, I think we're doing a really good job and we're pretty advanced, but nobody has this figured out and frankly, we need to do it together. This is a space where you don't actually want to compete. >> Right. >> You want to partner. And so we have our own sustainability advisory aboard and companies like Boeing or on that. I serve on a sustain the advisory board from McLaren and Unilever's chief sustainability officers there. That is a company that is really inspirational to us. And so partners like Intel, they're very involved in 50. So the next 50% that needs to get connected to the internet and participate in the digital economy. We're big partner, as you know we're their largest customer. And so there's a lot going on across our competition our customers and our partners. And we're all inspiring each other and figuring it out together. Cause it's evolving so fast. Nobody has all the answers. >> But that's a great point. The evolution is happening so quickly and every day you turn on the news and there's something else that needs to be responded to. >> Yeah. >> I mean, think that from a strategic perspective from that overall vision perspective, it sounds like what and there's been some announcements this week. >> Yeah. >> That respect to issue. What's been some of the feedback from the part of ecosystem, from customers, from investors on this laser focused vision that Dell has with respect to sustainability and ESG? >> So Cassandra Garber, our head of ESG just finished out of cycle road show with investors and had really good conversations. They're asking a lot of questions about our strategy. They're asking questions about executive compensation tied to ESG as an example. Our customers are very positive and responding. They're looking for technology solutions. As I mentioned to meet their own climate commitments. And from our channel partners they really want to partner on our initiatives and really go do good and make an impact together. And we're getting really good feedback. >> So carrot or stick, it's probably not 100% that the channel partners or even suppliers, you know, some just don't have the resource possibly or maybe they don't share your values. >> Right. >> So how do you approach that? Is it through inspiration? Is it through a little tap in the head or a little headlock? How do you deal with that? >> It's both. I mean, our suppliers have to adhere to the contract and the RSA code of conduct that they have to sign on to uphold. And so we very much hold them accountable just like we do our ourselves. And so that is more compliance driven but we do have partners like Western's Green in our supply chain who we're really involved with us in some early work around recycled gold and partners that are involved with us in setting up the ocean plastic supply chain. And so we have great partnership but there are things they have to do from a human rights perspective or commitment to the environment that are required. From a channel partner perspective, you know, we want to incent them. We want to make money together. We are for profit businesses after all. And ESG can be a part of that. And if you don't have the resources to drive your own take back initiative, then we can do that in partnership through our asset recovery services which partners can sell and then use our infrastructure to take back and recycle old equipment. >> I mean, I feel like a lot of my questions are two-way but you feel as though you're in influencing public policy or a public policy is influencing you? >> Both. I mean, early on when the SEC was looking at the climate rules that they just put out, there was, I think we submitted a six page response to their, you know, ask for inquiry and response. And so that's good. We're able to talk to each other and have conversations and shape things, but ultimately we'll be regulated in these areas and that's fine. We just got to make sure that we're ready. >> Great. >> It's always good to have that push and pull it's like with the pandemic all the silver linings that have come out of the acceleration, we talk about that all the time on this show. The acceleration of digital transformation, we were talking about the acceleration of retail in the intelligence store. >> Right. >> And as consumers, we expect that, but that push and pull sometimes those forcing functions are necessary to be able to drive forward. >> For sure. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> My last question for you is Dell just came off it's most successful year. >> Yes. >> First time hitting north of 100 billion. >> Yes. >> In the company's history. What are some of the things that we think is the moonshot goals, we're only in 2020. >> I know. >> But as time is going by so quickly, what are some of the things that you are personally looking forward to from a corporate affairs ESG perspective say the next like three to five years? >> Well, I'm really excited about some of the groundwork we've laid in digital inclusion. We just made some new hires there. We're connecting the dots, you know, and we have a lot of initiatives that can really if we can scale them, make a big impact. So we have student tech crew, it's where high school students serve as the technical support in their local high school and get certified. So they are job ready the minute they graduate. If they don't want to go to community college or university they can go right into the workforce. How do we marry that up with other skill building initiatives that we have? And if you add 1 plus 1 it equals 3. And I think this year will be a really big accelerator for us in the area of digital inclusion and how we bring connectivity, community services and support and digital skills together. Because that's what, you know, those that aren't participating in the digital economy we need to partner and really deliver on the promise of what it means to be in technology and at least have the skills to compete >> Right. Start eliminating that digital divide. JJ, thank you for joining David and me today talking about ESG- >> Thank you. >> corporate affairs, such an interesting focused efforts that Dell is really wrapped around. And it sounds like there's that push pull from the customers, from policy, but ultimately going in a great direction that can be measured. Thank you for your insights and your time. >> Thank you. >> For JJ and Dave Vellante I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube live from Las Vegas. This is the end of day 2 of our coverage of Dell Technologies World. We thank you for watching. You can find all of our content on replay on theCUBE.net. And of course, we will be here tomorrow with John Farrier and Dave Nicholson as well. Have a great night. We'll see you tomorrow. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the International Women's Showcase for 2022. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I'm really excited because for the first time in my CUBE career of six years, I have a father daughter duo maybe the first time in CUBE's history. Frank and Emma Arrigo from AWS join me guys it's great to have you on the program. >> Great to be here thank you. >> So, Emma, let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to us about how you got to AWS and a little bit about your background. >> Yes, thanks Lisa. So I've joined AWS as a recent graduate from university. So I did my masters of data science and I was going through the grad, the grad job hunt applying for all these different places. And AWS appeared on my radar for an intern program. And Frank was there at the time and so I was like, "Should I do it?" But I still applied cause it was a great program. And so I went did that internship for three months over the summer of 2019-2020, and then I went back and finished my degree. And another grad role came up for in AWS in Tech U to be an associate solutions architect. And so I was approached to apply for that. And I got through to that program and joined the team almost a year ago in March, 2021 through Tech U and yeah, that's how I ended up at AWS. >> Excellent and so Frank, this is a pretty unique situation, father daughter duo at AWS let alone Amazon, let alone probably a lot of companies. Talk to me about it the parental lens. >> Yeah, look it is unique, there's a few family connections within AWS, but you know, definitely here in Australia, it's really rare, but I think the family connection is, you know Emma and we've got four kids, I've got four kids in total. So Emma has three brothers, you know, I've lived in tech, my entire career and so they've been part of it. You know, we've lived in the States, lived in Seattle for a couple of years. And so they'd come to the office and see what dad did. And so it wasn't a big surprise for them to understand what the role was and what we did, so, you know, they kind of grew up with it. And you know, when the opportunity came up for Emma, did the internship, I was excited for it because it was in a different area. It was working in a startup team doing some interesting work that really lined up with some of the interest Emma had. And so she kind of learned what it was like to be Amazonian through that internship and that was... I call that a long audition for a job. And she was then able to join Tech U program, which is a early career bootcamp, I like to think of it, which is the six month program to help our grads learn some of the fundamental skills because the value of a solutions architect or some of these other tech roles is you need experience. You need to have been in the game a while to be a trusted advisor to a customer. And it's hard to do that when you're a grad. So the bootcamp gives them the practical experience and then they get another six months on the job experience where they develop those skills and hone it and get ready to, you know, be a trusted advisor to the customers. >> Right, and that's such a great... I'm sure that's a tremendous opportunity to learn how to become that trusted advisor, especially from peers, such as yourself and I want to go back to you. Talk to me about your interest in IT, in data science. Was this something that you were always interested in primary school or in high school? Or was this something that kind of came on later on? >> Yeah, so my interest in tech kind of emerged as I went along in my education. So when I was younger, I really wanted to be an orthodontist for some reason. I don't know why. And then you just sort of in year eight and like early school sort of didn't really know what I wanted to do. Just sort of going through just trying to survive as a teenage girl at high school at an all girls school, didn't really have many, didn't really have career aspirations, I guess, and then one year I attended a information day at a university about engineering and that just really sparked my interest, I don't know why, but I was like, I've always been obsessed with like factories and those types of things and how things are made. And so that really just sparked my interest and I never really thought of it before. And so then that put STEM engineering on my radar and then I guess spoke with it about with the parents. And then they mentioned that tech would be a like IT, Information Technology would be really useful. And so then we approached the school to ask if I could do IT in year 11. So that's sort of our second last year of high school. And they said, "No, we couldn't do IT." I couldn't go to the boys' school to do IT. That girls don't do it or that not good at it. And I wasn't allowed, and they wouldn't let me do physics either. So I moved school in for the final two of high school to be able to do IT and physics to help, you know, get to the course I wanted to do. And so that was my journey into STEM. So it wasn't really on my radar, but then events like this and at university isn't it? Organizations sparked my interest. And then still when I entered university, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to major in nor where I wanted to work would never have thought it would be where, with my father, like I was aware of the world of IT and everything, but I wouldn't, if you'd asked me in first year, it wouldn't have been that I would probably, we would've said, I don't know an academic or something. I don't know. And then, but again, as the university went on and you attend networking events or club things, you sort of learn a bit more about the ecosystem. And then that's where yeah. Tech company sort of became where I was looking for jobs and roles for when I finished up. So that was kind of my journey to... >> So what I love though, that you and Frank, this is going to be a question for you, how Emma was told. "No, you can't study IT. No, you can't study physics. You can't go to the boys school and do that either." Talk to me about that, Frank, from your perspective as a parent of a daughter, and you said, I think she's got three brothers lucky, Emma, but talk to me about that from your perspective, in terms of going, my daughter has really has an in a strong interest in this and they're telling her no we're going to pivot and actually change schools to be able give her the opportunities that she wants to pursue. >> Yeah. Look, as a parent, we were shocked. You know, it was just an unexpected response, you know, in a lot of ways, the school that she was at was more of a finishing school than anything else, you know, preparing young ladies for marriage and, you know, career as a, I don't know, I will leave it at that. So we were really disappointed. And so very quickly we looked at other alternatives and other options and we pulled Emma out of school and we knew it was like the last two years are critical in Australia. We don't have a middle school and a senior school, it's all one, you know, combined thing. But those last two years are all about getting ready for university. And so we made a really tough call and we picked her up, dropped her into a totally new school. It was co-ed school. And then when we told her previous, her girl's school. I actually spoke to the vice principal and he said, "Oh, I can't believe you're sending her to a co-ed school. She's going to struggle 'cause boys are so much better in tech." And I was totally, I was lost for words, right? Because I felt back in my career and I had some amazing female managers, leaders, role models in my time that I worked for and I followed and they were always struggling because, you know, they were in the minority, but they were incredible, you know, technologists and leaders. And I just couldn't believe it. So as parents we made the tough call. We picked Emma up. We put her into another high school and she flourished, you know, Emma started a club, she got convolved with a whole bunch of other things. When she graduated, the teachers felt that she'd been there six years, right? The whole time of it. So she really made a mark, made an impact at this school and so much so that her younger brother then followed and went to that school and completed his high school there as well. But it, we just can't believe it. And we tell it everyone, this story, you know, we name the school, we won't name. We choose not to name them here, but we name the school because we just think it's really terrible guidance and terrible advice. Like we want people to follow their passion. I tell my kids and I tell the folks when I speak to, you know, early career folks, follow your passion first, guess what the job will appear. Right? You know, there'll be the... The work will come if you do something that you love. And then the second piece that I always say is, "Every future job is going to be a tech job." Technology is embedded in everything that we do. So the fact that you say, "A girl can't do technology," you're limiting yourselves, right? You don't want to think that, you want to think about the possibilities rather than the things you can't do. It's the things you can do. And the things that you haven't even thought about doing. So that's why, you know, it was so exciting to see that experience with Emma, and just seeing her grow through that and she became a bit of a STEM advocate at a high school as well. So, she saw the value of her role model that helped her. And she wants to be a.... Continue being a role model for others as well, which again, I think is admirable, right? It's about- >> Absolutely. >> Shining a light and leading and as a parent, irrespective that we work at the same company as a parent, that's what you want to see. You want to see your kids aim high and inspire others. That's what she does. >> Well, she's already been a role model too, I mean, to your younger brother, but one of the things that we say often, and theCUBE does a lot for women in technology events. And I'm fortunate to get to host a lot of those, we say, "You can't be what you can't see." So needing to have those role models who are visible. Now, it doesn't have to be female necessarily. and Frank you mentioned that you had female mentors and role models and in your illustrious career. But the important point is being able to elevate women into positions where others can see and can identify, "Oh, there's a role model. There's somebody that might be a mentor for me, or a sponsor down the road, it's critically important." And as of course, we look at the numbers in tech, women in technical roles are still quite low, but Emma, tell me a little bit about, you've been through the program. You talked about that. What are some of the things that you feel in like the last six months that you've been able to learn that had you not had this opportunity, maybe you wouldn't have. >> You know, I think that's a great point. So as a solutions architect, I get to be both technical. So hands on building an AWS, helping customers solve their problems, whether it be a data leak or I don't know, an image recognition tool to look for garbage dumped on the street or, and also thinking from the business perspective for the customers, so that's a fun part as the, of the role, but things I get to do. So currently I'm working on a demo for the conference in Sydney. So I'm building a traffic detection model using some computer vision and IOT so I get to bring my data science background to this build and also learn about new areas like IOT, Internet Of Things; Technologies. So that's been a really fun project and yeah, just having the ability to play around on AWS, we have... >> Right. Well, the exposure in the experiences is priceless. You can't put a price on that, but being able to get into the environment, learn it from a technical perspective, learn it from a practical perspective. And then of course get all the great things about getting to interact with customers and learning how different industries work, you mentioned you were in public sector. That just must be a field of dreams, I would imagine. >> I know. >> In some senses for you, right? >> Really have lucked out. I know it's, I'm like, "Wow, this my job is to play around with some new service, just because need to know about that for the customer meeting. Like I'm building a chatbot or helping build a chatbot for a customer, at the university. So yeah, things like that make it very, yeah. It's a pretty amazing role. >> It sounds, it sure sounds like it. And sounds like you're are excelling at it tremendously. Let me ask you Emma. For young girls who might be in a similar situation to where you were not that long ago with the school telling you, "No, you can't do IT." "No, you can't do physics." So you actually switched schools. What would you tell those young girls who might be in that situation about hearing the word, "No." And would you advise them to embrace a career in technology? >> Yeah, I would say that it really..... What makes me so sad is if my family didn't know about tech and had my... Supported me through that like if I would've just gone, "Oh, okay. I won't do it." You know what I mean? Like that just makes me really sad. How many people have missed out on studying what they wanted to study. So by having those types of experiences, so what I would say as advice is, "Back yourself, find supporters, whether it be your family or a teacher that you really sort of connect with, to be able to support you and through these decisions." And yeah, I think having those sponsors in a way, your advocates to help you make those choices and help support you through those choices. >> Yeah. I agree. And I have a feeling you're going to be one of those sponsors and mentors, if you aren't already Emma, I have a feeling that's just around the corner from you. So Frank, last question to you. What's the overall lesson here, if we look at statistics, I mentioned some of the stats about, you know, women in technical roles as usually less than 25% globally. But also we see data that shows that companies are more profitable and more performant when there's at least 30% of the executive suite it's women. So from your parental perspective, and from an Amazonian perspective, Frank, what's the lesson here? >> Well, look from an Amazonian perspective, we need to make sure that we have a team that represents our customers, right? And our customers aren't all boys. You know, they're not all blokes, as we say down here. So you've got to have a team that is made up of what represents your customers. So I think that's the Amazonian view. And so diverse perspectives, diverse experience, diverse backgrounds is what does that. The other from a parent, you know, I said it earlier. I think every future job is a tech job. And I think it's really important that as kids come through, you know, primary school, high school, whatever, they're prepared for that, they're already consumers of technology. You know, they need to be creators or, or participate in that environment. And I can give you an example, a few years ago, I worked for, at a large telco here. And we actually invested in a thing called code club, which was aimed at primary school kids, kids in grade four, five and six. So elementary school for my friends in America, it's kids in grade four, five and six. And they were learning how to use scratch. Scratch is this interactive tool like building lego to write programming and believe it or not, there were more girls interested and were part of code club. It was probably 60-40 was the ratio of young girls doing it compared to boys because it was creative, it was a creative outlet, they were building stuff and assembling and making these things that they loved to make. Right. But then what we saw was there'd be a drop off at high school, whether it's curriculum related or interests or distractions, I don't know what it is, but there things get lost along the way along high school. But I see it at the primary school stage at elementary school that the interest is there. So I think part of it is, there needs to be a bit of a switch up in education or other opportunities outside of school to really foster and nurture and develop this interest because it really does take all kinds to be successful in the role. And Emma talked about a chatbot that she's building and that's a conversational thing. I can't see geek boys having being able to impact and create a interesting conversation, right. Then there's other areas that seems to be skewed and biased based on a predominantly male view of the world. So we need the tech, the industry needs these diverse perspectives and these diverse views, because, you know, to your point, it's going to impact the bottom line. It's going to also deliver a better product and it's going to reflect society. It's going to reflect the customers that are using it because we're made up of every, every race and color, creed, gender. And we need a team that represents that. >> Exactly. I couldn't agree more. Well, it sounds like the Arrigo family are quite the supporters of this, but also we need more of both of you. We need more of the sponsors and the parents who are encouraging the kids and making the right decisions to help them get along that path. And we need more folks like Emma and more women that we can see, "Wow, look what she's doing in such a short time period. We want to be just like that." So you guys are, have both been fantastic. I thank you so much for joining me at the International. Women's Showcase, more power to your family. We need more folks like you guys, so great work. Keep it up. >> Thank you. >> Thanks Lisa. >> For Frank and Emma Arrigo, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Showcase 2022. (soothing music)

(upbeat music) >> Lisa Martin: Hi, everyone. Welcome to The Cube's coverage of women in tech International Women's Day 2022. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Nicole Parafita joins me next: head of communications, people and culture at AWS Latin America. Nicole, it's great to have you on the program. >> Nicole: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. >> Tell me a little bit about your role as head of communications, people and culture. >> Super. So my role is very, very new. I've started in this role like two months ago, so really, really new. And as you said I lead the communications, people and culture team, which is dedicated to understanding people's needs, fostering leadership development, increasing diversity and inclusion, enabling employee recognition, and of course mitigating burnout, which is something we're seeing all across the world due to working from home and all of that. So it's a huge, huge task. And of course it is aligned to Amazon's 15 leadership principle which is striving to be Earth's best employer. So huge challenge. >> Lisa: So tell me a little- so this is a brand new role as you said, just a couple of months. Was the pandemic a factor? And you mentioned burnout. I mean, that's one of the things that I think we've all been struggling with. Was that an influence in creating the role that you're in? >> So there are many many things that led to creating this organization. I think that the first one is this new leadership principle which is striving to be Earth's best employer. There's - people is our top priority and we want to work with them and for them so that we generate engaging content, training materials and we work on enabling them, right? So the first one is striving to be Earth's best employer and that alignment. The second is the priority that our VP in Latin America gives its people. It's the key differentiator that we have at AWS: our culture and it's people and how our people live the culture. And the third thing would be the fact that we're growing, we're growing so fast. We're hiring so many people in the last year so, and we need to make sure we keep this day one culture alive and strong. So yes, we need to make sure that all these people that were hired since March 2020 and never set foot in a physical office, in an AWS physical office live the leadership principles, understand them deeply and can apply all these mechanisms from our culture in their day to day basis. Those are the key three things that led to the creation of this org. >> So you mentioned the leadership principles striving to be Earth's best employer. How does that, how is that connected to International Women's Day and what you're doing in terms of really bringing diversity and equality and inclusion into AWS LATAM? >> I love this question. I think, as I said before, culture and people is our top priority. We're learning a lot. We, this new leadership principle which is striving to be Earth's best employer acknowledges that we're not the best, but that we're working very hard to become Earth's best employer. And all the efforts that we're doing are related to feedback, right? We're listening a lot to our, what our employees are saying and what the market is saying to build the best employee experience we can for everybody. And first of all, I'd say that our culture and our mission is to become, or to be, the most customer-centric company in the world. And for that, we need to be super diverse and inclusive. We need to get as many backgrounds and life experiences we can so that we can invent in the name of our customers. So building this diverse team really helps our business but also, as Jeff Bezos says, "it's the right thing to do." It's what we need to do. So what do we mean when we talk about inclusion, diversity and equity? I think it's good to define these three things, these key pillars of our culture. The first one is inclusion, which about belonging, right? It's about giving the physical- the psychological, sorry, safety to people so that they feel represented. This is super important for us. How do we make people feel comfortable where they work at? And some examples of this that I wanted to share with you. First of all, there's a mechanism that we use internally at AWS, that it's called Connections. Connections is a daily live feedback tool. So at AWS, we don't believe in having an annual survey for listening to employees, to what employees have to say. We believe in having real time feedback and this tool is that, exactly that. So every day I would turn on my computer and I would see a question from this Connection system. And one of the things that we're tracking is, the team I'm on helps me feel included at work. So we would say yes, no, or different options that we give the employees. And we would track how they feel. And according to that data we would implement different initiatives. So we're working on real time feedback from the team so that we can act fast and help the team feel better, right? The other thing that I would would say about belonging is that in AWS we have 13 affinity groups. We have 90,000 Amazonians across hundreds of chapters around the world who work towards different initiatives. One of them, for example, if it's Women at Amazon, Women at Amazon is a huge organization within Amazon with more than 80 chapters worldwide. And the objective of this affinity group is attracting, developing, and retaining women in both tech and non-tech roles across all Amazon business. As an example of the kind of initiatives that they drive, we can talk about Break the Bias. I'm not sure if you heard about this, but it's a huge initiative. It's a webinar that we will be hosting in Latin America on International Women Day on the 8th of March and we will have women sharing amazing stories. We will have, for example, Marta Ferero. Marta Ferero is the founder of a startup, a Colombian startup, called Ubits, which is like the Netflix of corporate training in her own words, among others. And we will also have recruiting specialists that will give advice on how to give and accept in our careers. So those are the kind of initiatives that we're trying to do to attract and retain and develop talent. This is more like an attracting talent thing because it's an open webinar that we have that. Yeah. >> Go ahead. >> So that's about inclusion, which is belonging and how do we make people belong to certain groups within Amazon? The second thing is about diversity which is feeling, it's about feeling represented, right? And it's not about only gender. It can be about race. It can be about ethnicity, sexual orientation, age. We want everyone to feel represented. But now, if we're talking about International Women's Day let me talk a little bit about female representation. And I am very proud to share that we finished 2021 with 18% of female representation in the leadership team in the LATAM leadership team, which means people reporting to the LATAM VP, the vice president, Jaime. And we started 2022 with 35% female representation which is a huge improvement from one year to the other. So that are the numbers, right? But it's not just about numbers. It's the fact that these women that are now part of the leadership team have been given very important tasks. And as my boss always says, "don't tell me about your strategy. Tell me about where you're putting your resources and I'll tell you what your strategy is." And I love the fact that he picked very amazing women to lead very important missions within LATAM. For example, let me just give you an example, Carolina Pina, who joined us from the public sector team is leading this massive training organization. And like the name implies, this organization focuses on generating talent at a huge scale. And this is, I don't know, one of the most long term oriented tasks that we have, and it has a huge impact on Latin America, not only AWS business, but on Latin America. It's focused on really transforming our region into something different so that people can have a better quality of life. So those are the things that really amaze me. We've been given very important tasks, like this one, to really move forward in terms of cloud transformation and the transformation of the countries we operate in, which is amazing, I think. >> It is amazing. >> The last - >> Go ahead. >> The last topic, I'm sorry, I'm speaking too much, but just to close. The last thing that I want to say is equity, which is one of the key things that we have in our culture and equity is about fairness. It's about generating or giving the same amount of opportunities to everybody. The fact that we're massively training people in Latin America is about fairness about generating the skills. And the other thing that we're doing that is super important is that we're changing our interview process so that we make sure we have diverse, a diverse set of interviewers participating in the processes, right? So that people feel represented from the moment they start their journey with AWS with the first phone screen, right? So those things for me are really transformative and talk about what we're trying to do. And of course it has an impact on gender, but it also has an impact on a broader scale from a diversity, equity and inclusion perspective which I think talks about the humanity of AWS. It's not just about the technology it's about transforming people's lives and helping Latin America, or the countries we operate in, to be better, right? For the good. >> Right. That's a great focus. Is that kind of a shift in AWS' culture in terms of really focusing on diversity? Or is that something that's really kind of been there from the beginning? >> So I think it's been here from the beginning, but now, for example, in Latin America, we're growing a lot. So we have more resources that we can allocate to really focus on this initiative. So aligning to these new leadership principal that was launched in July, or published in July, we always were very committed to diversity, equity and inclusion, but now we have more resources so that we can double down on this huge bet. And I feel very proud about that. >> Lisa: Tell me a little bit about, in the few remaining minutes that we have, I'm curious about your background. Were you always interested in tech or STEM? Was that something that you gravitated towards from when you were young, or was it something that you got into a little bit later? >> So my background is communications. I studied advertising, so no. I'm not a science or engineer-focused person, but from at early age I started working in tech companies, so I learned a lot. I had the chance to live in different countries like Mexico or the UK or the US where I always had the chance to interact with many amazing men and women that were focused on technology. So, no, I'm not a technology expert but I've always been related to people who know a lot about this. And I learned a lot in that process. And, you know, I've always seen like this, I don't how to explain, but this initiative or this will to make everyone feel comfortable where they work. I've seen this at AWS. And as I said before, we started the interview I'm eight months pregnant at this point. I'm about to take a five month leave which is a lot more than what the law gives me in Argentina, for example, where I'm located. So those are the kind of things that really make me feel comfortable where I work with and really proud of where I work with. And I want everybody to have the chance to get this type of job so that they can feel the way I feel, right? And I'm talking about men, women, people with disabilities, and many other type of affinity people, right? >> Right. It's so important to be able to have that comfort because your productivity is better, your performance is better, and ultimately the company benefits as those employees feel comfortable in the environment in which they're working and that they have the freedoms to be curious. Talk to me a little bit about some of the things, you mentioned the stat of 2020 to - 2021, excuse me, to 2022, almost doubling the number of women. >> Yep. >> Talk to me about some of the things that you're looking forward to as 2022 progresses. >> Wow, I'm the, you know, every time we have a performance review at AWS you get asked this question, what are you most excited about? Right. And this year I was excited about so many things that the list, I mean I didn't have enough characters to write about that. I think we are always trying to just confirm our beliefs at AWS. And this is the, what I like the most about working here. AWS or Amazon really values people who are curious, are always learning, and always trying to listen to other opinions. And this is key for our culture. I'm very excited about the fact that we're putting, we're turning on mechanisms to have even more feedback than we used to have, not just from customers and partners, but also from our employees. So the fact that we're having real time feedback will really make us better as an organization and always with this day-one culture in mind, which is very fast, right? We're making decisions very fast. We're very dynamic, we're learning on the go. We fail, sometimes. We fail, but we learn very fast. We fail fast. We used to say that we learn, we fail fast. And failure is part of our culture of innovation. So we're learning, we're failing, at some point we're implementing changes. And it's like a very interesting flywheel, right. Of growth. And it's very fast. So my job is very dynamic and I'm very excited about this. I'm hiring a team. I have a team of four people. I already hired two people and I need one more. So I'm very excited about that. I'm very excited to see what our employees are capable of. I mean, they're always inventing on behalf of our customers and partners. And it's always amazing to see the results from the year end, right. You get to tell stories from customers and partners that you never imagined you were going to tell. So I'm very excited about all those things. >> Lisa: Excellent. Well, good luck with the baby. Thank you so much for sharing. What your role is doing and how it's really helping to drive that diversity and inclusion and equity within Amazon. It's such an important cultural element and it's exciting to hear this strategic focus that AWS has. Nicole, we appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much, Lisa, for having me. >> My pleasure. For Nicole Parafita, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching women in tech International Women's Day, 2022. (upbeat music)