>>Hello everyone. Thank you, add appreciating the studio. We're here at the cube here in cloud city telco DRS Cloud city. I'm Jeffrey Day Volonte. We're here for the next three days. Wall to wall live coverage. It's a physical event with a virtual program. It's hybrid. We're here with Daniel Royston, the Ceo of telco D. R. And the acting Ceo Toby, which is announced today. Great >>to see you. It's awesome to see you guys. >>Awesome to see how you doing, how you >>Feeling? I'm feeling congratulations. Right. 101 days ago, I didn't even think this doesn't exist. Right. And we got in contact with you guys and we said we knew there was always going to be a big virtual component and we invited you guys and here we are together. It's insane. >>Well we did the preview videos, but we're kind of walking through and document in the early stages. It all came together beautifully spectacular For the folks watching behind us is the most spectacular build out clouds. It's an ecosystem open concept. It feels like the Apple store meets paradise. Of course. We got the cube here in the set and we got the studio with all the command and control of adam there. So I gotta ask you with the connected keynotes going on right now. The connected world. Yeah. It's connected. We all know that everyone knows that what's, what's different now real quick before we get into the program, what's going on? >>Yeah. I think a big part of my messages and advocating it's more than just the network, Right? And I think telcos forever have relied on. That's all it is. That's what it's about. And I'm like, nope, you guys got to start focusing on your subscribers, right? And so the over the top players keep coming in and siphoning away their revenue and it's time for them to start focusing on us, right and making experience great. And I think that's what this is all about. >>So we're gonna get the news but I want to toss it to Katie. The roving reporter is going to give it a detail on how it all came together. So Katie take it away. >>Mhm We're here in Barcelona and so excited to be back in this beautiful city over at the convention center. The team is working hard putting the finishing touches to tell Cody are amazing cloud city booth at MwC Barcelona 2021. I'm sure you know the story of how this all came together as one of the biggest vendors Erickson pulled out of M. W. C. With just over 100 days until the start of the event. When this happened last year, it kicked off a tidal wave of departures and MwC was called off this year. We all wondered if MWC was going to be cancelled again and that's when Daniel Royston Ceo of Telco D. R. And Tito G swooped in and took over the booth all 6000 square meters of it. The plan turn the booth into cloud city, the epicenter of public cloud innovation at MWC crews have been working around the clock. Over 100 and 50 people have been on this construction site for over three weeks with covid testing every day to prevent outbreaks during the build and in 100 days, it's become just that Cloud city has over 30 vendors presenting over 70 demos with 24 private meeting areas. Cloud City Live is a virtual showcase and live broadcast studio featuring 50 guests from cloud Thought leaders around the world. They have telepresence robots for a more personalized experience and the Cloud city quest game with a chance to win more than $100,000 to gain access to live streams of our nightly concerts with rosario flores and rock legend Jon bon Jovi. And don't forget to visit cloud city dot telco D R dot com to join in on the fun Daniel Royston and Nacho Gomez, founder and Ceo of one of the key vendors in the construction of the booth gave us a behind the scenes tour of the booth. >>Nacho. We did it. Yeah, we did. It can't even touch because of Covid. Yeah, but look what we did. But right, 100 days ago I called and I said I'm taking over the Ericsson booth. What did you think? I know you were crazy but just a little bit crazy, realized that you were mortgages than I thought. So at the very, at the very beginning I thought, yeah, she's crazy. But then I couldn't sleep that night. But the next uh then I realized that it was a very good it's a great idea. Yeah super smart. So yeah we're gonna show everyone toward the booth. Yeah let's go. Let's go. Okay So how do we build such an amazing, beautiful building now? So this is we've made building inside a book. So it was very hard to find a glassful of facade. The roof is around 24 tones. Yeah so it's crazy crazy but we made it work and it's totally amazing. Yeah. Do you want to go to tragedy life? Do let's go. Okay so here we are Cloud city live. I know we're producing a whole live streaming tv show. We always knew because of covid that not everyone will be able to come to Mwc as we wanted to make sure that people can learn about the public cloud. So over here we have the keynote stage, we're gonna have awesome speakers talking all throughout M. W. C. People from AWS Microsoft, google vendors companies. So really really great content. And then over there we have the cube interviewing people again 15 minute segments, live streaming but also available on demand. And you can find all of this content on cloud city. Tell Cody are calm and it's available for anyone to you. Well, a lot of content. And what about the roberts? I never get them out. Come on. We remember 100 days ago we were locked down. So we came up with the idea of having robots for the people who cannot attend in person. I know right. We always knew that there was gonna be a big virtual component to MWC this year. So we bought 100 telepresence robots. It's a great way to have a more personal experience inside the boot. Just sign up for one on cloud city dot telco D r dot com and you can control it yourself. Right? So today we have Nikki with us, who's dialing in from the Philippines in Manila? Hello, Nicky. Hi there, how are you? I were great. Can you show us a twirl all gaining on us? Super cool. Yeah, it is. What an experience. So Nikki robots are not the only cool thing we have in cloud city. We also have super awesome concert. We have rosario flores on monday. Who's a latin grammy award winner. We have Jon bon Jovi, Jon bon Jovi on Tuesday, can't be changing telephone that a little bit of rock n roll and that's Tuesday. And on Wednesday we have DJ official, it's going to be a super party. Now if you play our cloud city quest on cloud city telco D R dot com you can participate in a live streaming concert and so I know a lot of people out there have been a lockdown. Haven't been able to be going to concerts. Things from austin texas, which is the live music capital of the world, How to have music. It would be so exciting is gonna be great. I'm getting hungry. Why don't we go to the restaurant? Let's go eat. Let's go. Yeah, Here is our awesome restaurant. I know it's called Cloud nine. Right? It's a place to come and sit down and relax now. Barcelona is known for its great food and I'm a foodie. So we had to have a restaurant. Should we go check out my secret bar? Let's go. Mhm. Yeah, here >>thanks to a R. And thank you Nacho if you're watching this at home, I'm so sorry you can't join us in person. However, let's not forget this is a hybrid event meaning we're bringing all the public cloud action right to you wherever in the world you might be. This includes the Pact cloud city live program. We've partnered with the cube Silicon angle Media's live streaming video studio to make sure that all of the keynotes, panel discussions, demos, case studies interviews and way more are available on demand so you can watch them whenever and wherever you want or you can live stream and enjoy all things cloud city as and when they happen. So for those of you not able to join us in, Barcelona, be sure to log in to cloud city live and catch all the action and don't miss the awesome concert Tuesday night with Jon bon Jovi available for free. If you participate in our cloud city quest game, I'll be here throughout MWc bringing you reports and updates. Stay >>tuned. Yeah. >>Mhm. Okay, we're back here on the cube on the floor at mobile world congress in cloud city telco DRS clouds. They were here with D. R. Of telco, D R. Danielle Rice and great to see you back, we're back. So the keynotes going on connected world, the big news here, I'll see the open shift that's happening is going open. Open ran, it's been a big thing. Open ran alliance. You're starting to see the industry come together around this clear mandate that applications are gonna be cloud native and the public cloud is just coming in like a big wave and people are gonna be driftwood or they'll be surfing the wave. Yeah, this is what's happening. >>Yeah, I think public cloud is an unstoppable megatrend. It's hit every other industry regulated industries like banking, right? Top secret industries like government. They all use the public cloud tells us the last, you know, standing old school industry and it's coming and I don't think we could have had an MWc without talking about open man. That's the other major shift. And so we're bringing both of those ideas here together in cloud city. So >>the big theme is telco transformation. Maybe we could start with the basics like paint a picture of what the telco infrastructure looks like, particularly the data center stuff because they all have big data centers >>because that's >>those are the candidates to go into the cloud explained to the audience. >>Well, do you have a time machine? I think if any of us were in tech in the late 90s and early 2000s, that's what telcos like today. Right. So for people outside of the industry don't know right there mostly still managing their own data centers, they're just sort of adopting virtualization. Some of the more advanced telcos are mostly virtualized public cloud. Is this idea that like this advanced thought and so yeah, I mean things are on premise, things are in silom, things don't use a P. I. S there all integrated with custom code. And so the transformation, we can all see it because we've lived it in other industries. And I'm bringing that to telco and say come along for the ride. It totally works and it's gonna be amazing. >>So it's hardened purpose built infrastructure. Okay. That ultimately parts of that need to go to the public cloud. Right. What parts do you see going first? >>I think all of it. Really. Yeah. And I think when you look at like dish in the W. S. Which was an announcement that came out about two months ago. Right. I mean dish was doing all these are FPs. Everyone knew about it. They were looking for a cloud native software and no one knew what they were. They knew a big part was open man. But their coupling open ran with AWS and deploying their parts of their network onto the public cloud and the whole industry is like wait we thought this was years away, right? Or number two, you're crazy. And I'm saying this is what I've been talking about guys. This is exactly what you can do, leverage the Capex over. Let's see. I think Amazon did $100 billion 2020 right, leverage that Capex for yourself. Get that infinite scalability right? It's going to, well we >>have, we have a saying here in the queue, we just made this up called D. R. That's your initial tucker. The digital revolution and the three Rs reset re platform and re factor. I think the observation we're seeing is that you're coming in with the narrative what everyone's kind of like they're waking up because they have to reset and then re platform with the cloud. But the opportunity is gonna be the re factoring, You're seeing the public cloud, do that already with the Enterprise Enterprises. Already re factoring has done that. Already done that now. Telcos the last area to be innovated by the cloud. >>Yeah, I think there's old school big, we're kind of on a hollowed ground here in the Ericsson booth that I took over, right? They bailed and I kind of made fun of them. I was like, they don't have anything to say, right, They're not going to go to the show. I'm like, this is this is a revolution that's happening in telco and I don't think the big guys are really interested in rewriting their software that frankly makes them billions and billions of dollars of revenue. And I'm like to use the public cloud. All of the software needs to be rewritten needs to be re factored and you've got to start training your teams on how to use it. They don't have any capability. The telcos, in terms of those skills hire the right people, retrain your teams, move your applications, rewrite them. And I think that's what we're talking, this is not a short journey, this is a 10 year journey. So >>let's fast forward to the future a little bit because when I look around cloud city, I see ecosystem everywhere. So as you well know, the telcos have generally done a poor job of attacking adjacent seas. So my question is can they go beyond should they go beyond connectivity or is that going to be the role of the ecosystem? >>Yeah, I think it's time that the telco starts to focus on their subscriber, right? It's been really easy for them to rely on the oligopoly of the network, Right? The network, we live in the United States, we see the 18 T Verizon T mobile five G network, five G network. Like what about us? Right. And it's really easy for the over the top players right, that come in and they're always, telcos are always complaining about being coming dumb pipes and I'm like, you don't focus on the customer, we would rather buy from an Apple and amazon if they provided a mobile service because the customer experience will be better. Right? They need to start focusing on us. They have great businesses but they want to make them better. They need to start focusing on the subscriber, so >>it's a partnership with the ecosystem then for them to go beyond just straight connectivity because you're right, those are the brands that we want to do business >>with. You know, there was a great survey, Peter Atherton who will be talking as a speaker I think um I can't remember when he's talking but he was talking about how there was a survey done, where would you rather get your mobile service from? And it had a couple of big names in telco and then of course the obvious, you know, consumer brands, the ones that we all know and it was like overwhelmingly would rather buy from an amazon or an apple. And I'm like, this is like if you guys don't change, right, if telco doesn't change they keep rolling out 60 and blah blah blah. It's about the network and I don't start making about the subscriber right? Those revenues are going to continue to erode and they just sit there and complain about the O. T. T. Players. Like it's time to fight back. Yeah, I own the subscriber >>relationship. It's a digital revolution and I think This event really encapsulates in my mind this hybrid world here because it's physical events back. It's been since 2019 winter that this event actually happened. >>Well no it was even longer than, well I guess winter it was February of 19, right? And so like you look at ericsson and some of the big names that dropped out of the show, the time they come back, three years will have passed three years, right? This is how you feel your sales funnel is how you connect with your customers right? Tokyo is a very global, you know experience and so you gotta, you gotta get in front of people and you got to talk a >>lot of change to its happened, look at just what public clouds done in 2.5 years. You imagine three years being just >>gone, right? And I think a lot of people back to edition A. W. S. I think the industry was a little bit surprised by that announcement. So I've been telling executives if you were surprised by that, if you think that's, you know, if you don't know how that's gonna work, you need to come to cloud cities, you start meeting all the vendors are here. We have over 30 vendors, 70 demos, right? People who are pushing the technology forward, you need to learn what's going on here. We have several dish vendors here. Come learn about open rand, come learn about public cloud. So >>we're tight on time today, but we're going to have you back and we want to get into the tech, Get it to open, ran a little bit, get into what 5G and beyond and how we're going to take advantage of that and monetize it and what that all means. >>And also we want to hear what's going on the hallways. I know you got a lot of your key noting, you're gonna be a lot of events, the yacht. You've got a lot of briefings, >>yep. Yeah, I've already had two meetings this morning. I shot a video. Um, I met with one of the world's largest groups and I met with a tiny little super app company. Right? So running the gamut, doing everything reporter >>now, we could be like our roaming >>reporter. You know, I love, I love talking to execs and telco getting their perspective on what is public cloud and where are they going, what are they thinking about? And you talked to people who really, really get it and you get people who are just nascent and everywhere in between and I love mwc it's going great. >>Daniel Rose and you are a digital revolution telco DDR. There's amazing. Davis has been fantastic. Again for the folks watching, this is a hybrid events, there's an online component and we're reaching out with our remote interviews to get people brought in and we're shipping this content out to the masses all over the world. It's gonna be really amazing cube coverages here. It's gonna be rocking you guys are doing great. I just want to give you a compliment that you guys just did an amazing job. And of course we've got adam in the studio with the team. So adam, I'm gonna pass it off back to you in the studio

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting innovation for good, brought to you by on shape. >>Hello, everyone, and welcome to Innovation for Good Program, hosted by the Cuban. Brought to You by on Shape, which is a PTC company. My name is Dave Valentin. I'm coming to you from our studios outside of Boston. I'll be directing the conversations today. It's a very exciting, all live program. We're gonna look at how product innovation has evolved and where it's going and how engineers, entrepreneurs and educators are applying cutting edge, cutting edge product development techniques and technology to change our world. You know, the pandemic is, of course, profoundly impacted society and altered how individuals and organizations they're gonna be thinking about an approaching the coming decade. Leading technologists, engineers, product developers and educators have responded to the new challenges that we're facing from creating lifesaving products to helping students learn from home toe how to apply the latest product development techniques and solve the world's hardest problems. And in this program, you'll hear from some of the world's leading experts and practitioners on how product development and continuous innovation has evolved, how it's being applied toe positive positively affect society and importantly where it's going in the coming decades. So let's get started with our first session fueling Tech for good. And with me is John Hirschbeck, who is the president of the Suffers, a service division of PTC, which acquired on shape just over a year ago, where John was the CEO and co founder, and Dana Grayson is here. She is the co founder and general partner at Construct Capital, a new venture capital firm. Folks, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for coming on. >>Great to be here, Dave. >>All right, John. >>You're very welcome. Dana. Look, John, let's get into it for first Belated congratulations on the acquisition of Von Shape. That was an awesome seven year journey for your company. Tell our audience a little bit about the story of on shape, but take us back to Day zero. Why did you and your co founders start on shape? Well, >>actually, start before on shaping the You know, David, I've been in this business for almost 40 years. The business of building software tools for product developers and I had been part of some previous products in the industry and companies that had been in their era. Big changes in this market and about, you know, a little Before founding on shape, we started to see the problems product development teams were having with the traditional tools of that era years ago, and we saw the opportunity presented by Cloud Web and Mobile Technology. And we said, Hey, we could use Cloud Web and Mobile to solve the problems of product developers make their Their business is run better. But we have to build an entirely new system, an entirely new company, to do it. And that's what on shapes about. >>Well, so notwithstanding the challenges of co vid and difficulties this year, how is the first year been as, Ah, division of PTC for you guys? How's business? Anything you can share with us? >>Yeah, our first year of PTC has been awesome. It's been, you know, when you get acquired, Dave, you never You know, you have great optimism, but you never know what life will really be like. It's sort of like getting married or something, you know, until you're really doing it, you don't know. And so I'm happy to say that one year into our acquisition, um, PTC on shape is thriving. It's worked out better than I could have imagined a year ago. Along always, I mean sales are up. In Q four, our new sales rate grew 80% vs Excuse me, our fiscal Q four Q three. In the calendar year, it grew 80% compared to the year before. Our educational uses skyrocketing with around 400% growth, most recently year to year of students and teachers and co vid. And we've launched a major cloud platform using the core of on shape technology called Atlas. So, um, just tons of exciting things going on a TTC. >>That's awesome. But thank you for sharing some of those metrics. And of course, you're very humble individual. You know, people should know a little bit more about you mentioned, you know, we founded Solid Works, co founded Solid where I actually found it solid works. You had a great exit in the in the late nineties. But what I really appreciate is, you know, you're an entrepreneur. You've got a passion for the babies that you you helped birth. You stayed with the salt systems for a number of years. The company that quiet, solid works well over a decade. And and, of course, you and I have talked about how you participated in the the M I T. Blackjack team. You know, back in the day, a zai say you're very understated, for somebody was so accomplished. Well, >>that's kind of you, but I tend to I tend Thio always keep my eye more on what's ahead. You know what's next, then? And you know, I look back Sure to enjoy it and learn from it about what I can put to work making new memories, making new successes. >>Love it. Okay, let's bring Dana into the conversation. Hello, Dana. You look you're a fairly early investor in in on shape when you were with any A And and I think it was like it was a serious B, but it was very right close after the A raise. And and you were and still are a big believer in industrial transformation. So take us back. What did you see about on shape back then? That excited you. >>Thanks. Thanks for that. Yeah. I was lucky to be a early investment in shape. You know, the things that actually attracted me. Don shape were largely around John and, uh, the team. They're really setting out to do something, as John says humbly, something totally new, but really building off of their background was a large part of it. Um, but, you know, I was really intrigued by the design collaboration side of the product. Um, I would say that's frankly what originally attracted me to it. What kept me in the room, you know, in terms of the industrial world was seeing just if you start with collaboration around design what that does to the overall industrial product lifecycle accelerating manufacturing just, you know, modernizing all the manufacturing, just starting with design. So I'm really thankful to the on shape guys, because it was one of the first investments I've made that turned me on to the whole sector. And while just such a great pleasure to work with with John and the whole team there. Now see what they're doing inside PTC. >>And you just launched construct capital this year, right in the middle of a pandemic and which is awesome. I love it. And you're focused on early stage investing. Maybe tell us a little bit about construct capital. What your investment thesis is and you know, one of the big waves that you're hoping to ride. >>Sure, it construct it is literally lifting out of any what I was doing there. Um uh, for on shape, I went on to invest in companies such as desktop metal and Tulip, to name a couple of them form labs, another one in and around the manufacturing space. But our thesis that construct is broader than just, you know, manufacturing and industrial. It really incorporates all of what we'd call foundational industries that have let yet to be fully tech enabled or digitized. Manufacturing is a big piece of it. Supply chain, logistics, transportation of mobility or not, or other big pieces of it. And together they really drive, you know, half of the GDP in the US and have been very under invested. And frankly, they haven't attracted really great founders like they're on in droves. And I think that's going to change. We're seeing, um, entrepreneurs coming out of the tech world orthe Agnelli into these industries and then bringing them back into the tech world, which is which is something that needs to happen. So John and team were certainly early pioneers, and I think, you know, frankly, obviously, that voting with my feet that the next set, a really strong companies are going to come out of the space over the next decade. >>I think it's a huge opportunity to digitize the sort of traditionally non digital organizations. But Dana, you focused. I think it's it's accurate to say you're focused on even Mawr early stage investing now. And I want to understand why you feel it's important to be early. I mean, it's obviously riskier and reward e er, but what do you look for in companies and and founders like John >>Mhm, Um, you know, I think they're different styles of investing all the way up to public market investing. I've always been early stage investors, so I like to work with founders and teams when they're, you know, just starting out. Um, I happened to also think that we were just really early in the whole digital transformation of this world. You know, John and team have been, you know, back from solid works, etcetera around the space for a long time. But again, the downstream impact of what they're doing really changes the whole industry. And and so we're pretty early and in digitally transforming that market. Um, so that's another reason why I wanna invest early now, because I do really firmly believe that the next set of strong companies and strong returns for my own investors will be in the spaces. Um, you know, what I look for in Founders are people that really see the world in a different way. And, you know, sometimes some people think of founders or entrepreneurs is being very risk seeking. You know, if you asked John probably and another successful entrepreneurs, they would call themselves sort of risk averse, because by the time they start the company, they really have isolated all the risk out of it and think that they have given their expertise or what they're seeing their just so compelled to go change something, eh? So I look for that type of attitude experience a Z. You can also tell from John. He's fairly humble. So humility and just focus is also really important. Um, that there's a That's a lot of it. Frankly, >>Excellent. Thank you, John. You got such a rich history in the space. Uh, and one of you could sort of connect the dots over time. I mean, when you look back, what were the major forces that you saw in the market in in the early days? Particularly days of on shape on? And how is that evolved? And what are you seeing today? Well, >>I think I touched on it earlier. Actually, could I just reflect on what Dana said about risk taking for just a quick one and say, throughout my life, from blackjack to starting solid works on shape, it's about taking calculated risks. Yes, you try to eliminate the risk Sa's much as you can, but I always say, I don't mind taking a risk that I'm aware of, and I've calculated through as best I can. I don't like taking risks that I don't know I'm taking. That's right. You >>like to bet on >>sure things as much as you sure things, or at least where you feel you. You've done the research and you see them and you know they're there and you know, you, you you keep that in mind in the room, and I think that's great. And Dana did so much for us. Dana, I want to thank you again. For all that, you did it every step of the way, from where we started to to, you know, your journey with us ended formally but continues informally. Now back to you, Dave, I think, question about the opportunity and how it's shaped up. Well, I think I touched on it earlier when I said It's about helping product developers. You know, our customers of the people build the future off manufactured goods. Anything you think of that would be manufacturing factory. You know, the chair you're sitting in machine that made your coffee. You know, the computer you're using, the trucks that drive by on the street, all the covert product research, the equipment being used to make vaccines. All that stuff is designed by someone, and our job is given the tools to do it better. And I could see the problems that those product developers had that we're slowing them down with using the computing systems of the time. When we built solid works, that was almost 30 years ago. If people don't realize that it was in the early >>nineties and you know, we did the >>best we could for the early nineties, but what we did. We didn't anticipate the world of today. And so people were having problems with just installing the systems. Dave, you wouldn't believe how hard it is to install these systems. You need toe speck up a special windows computer, you know, and make sure you've got all the memory and graphics you need and getting to get that set up. You need to make sure the device drivers air, right, install a big piece of software. Ah, license key. I'm not making this up. They're still around. You may not even know what those are. You know, Dennis laughing because, you know, zero cool people do things like this anymore. Um, and it only runs some windows. You want a second user to use it? They need a copy. They need a code. Are they on the same version? It's a nightmare. The teams change, you know? You just say, Well, get everyone on the software. Well, who's everyone? You know, you got a new vendor today? A new customer tomorrow, a new employee. People come on and off the team. The other problem is the data stored in files, thousands of files. This isn't like a spreadsheet or word processor, where there's one file to pass around these air thousands of files to make one, even a simple product. People were tearing their hair out. John, what do we do? I've got copies everywhere. I don't know where the latest version is. We tried like, you know, locking people out so that only one person can change it At the time that works against speed, it works against innovation. We saw what was happening with Cloud Web and mobile. So what's happened in the years since is every one of the forces that product developers experience the need for speed, the need for innovation, the need to be more efficient with their people in their capital. Resource is every one of those trends have been amplified since we started on shape by a lot of forces in the world. And covert is amplified all those the need for agility and remote work cove it is amplified all that the same time, The acceptance of cloud. You know, a few years ago, people were like cloud, you know, how is that gonna work now They're saying to me, You know, increasingly, how would you ever even have done this without the cloud. How do you make solid works work without the cloud? How would that even happen? You know, once people understand what on shapes about >>and we're the >>Onley full SAS solution software >>as a service, >>full SAS solution in our industry. So what's happened in those years? Same problems we saw earlier, but turn up the gain, their bigger problems. And with cloud, we've seen skepticism of years ago turn into acceptance. And now even embracement in the cova driven new normal. >>Yeah. So a lot of friction in the previous environments cloud obviously a huge factor on, I guess. I guess Dana John could see it coming, you know, in the early days of solid works with, you know, had Salesforce, which is kind of the first major independent SAS player. Well, I guess that was late nineties. So his post solid works, but pre in shape and their work day was, you know, pre on shape in the mid two thousands. And and but But, you know, the bet was on the SAS model was right for Crick had and and product development, you know, which maybe the time wasn't a no brainer. Or maybe it was, I don't know, but Dana is there. Is there anything that you would invest in today? That's not Cloud based? >>Um, that's a great question. I mean, I think we still see things all the time in the manufacturing world that are not cloud based. I think you know, the closer you get to the shop floor in the production environment. Um e think John and the PTC folks would agree with this, too, but that it's, you know, there's reliability requirements, performance requirements. There's still this attitude of, you know, don't touch the printing press. So the cloud is still a little bit scary sometimes. And I think hybrid cloud is a real thing for those or on premise. Solutions, in some cases is still a real thing. What what we're more focused on. And, um, despite whether it's on premise or hybrid or or SAS and Cloud is a frictionless go to market model, um, in the companies we invest in so sass and cloud, or really make that easy to adopt for new users, you know, you sign up, started using a product, um, but whether it's hosted in the cloud, whether it's as you can still distribute buying power. And, um, I would I'm just encouraging customers in the customer world and the more industrial environment to entrust some of their lower level engineers with more budget discretionary spending so they can try more products and unlock innovation. >>Right? The unit economics are so compelling. So let's bring it, you know, toe today's you know, situation. John, you decided to exit about a year ago. You know? What did you see in PTC? Other than the obvious money? What was the strategic fit? >>Yeah, Well, David, I wanna be clear. I didn't exit anything. Really? You >>know, I love you and I don't like that term exit. I >>mean, Dana had exit is a shareholder on and so it's not It's not exit for me. It's just a step in the journey. What we saw in PTC was a partner. First of all, that shared our vision from the top down at PTC. Jim Hempleman, the CEO. He had a great vision for for the impact that SAS can make based on cloud technology and really is Dana of highlighted so much. It's not just the technology is how you go to market and the whole business being run and how you support and make the customers successful. So Jim shared a vision for the potential. And really, really, um said Hey, come join us and we can do this bigger, Better, faster. We expanded the vision really to include this Atlas platform for hosting other SAS applications. That P D. C. I mean, David Day arrived at PTC. I met the head of the academic program. He came over to me and I said, You know, and and how many people on your team? I thought he'd say 5 40 people on the PTC academic team. It was amazing to me because, you know, we were we were just near about 100 people were required are total company. We didn't even have a dedicated academic team and we had ah, lot of students signing up, you know, thousands and thousands. Well, now we have hundreds of thousands of students were approaching a million users and that shows you the power of this team that PTC had combined with our product and technology whom you get a big success for us and for the teachers and students to the world. We're giving them great tools. So so many good things were also putting some PTC technology from other parts of PTC back into on shape. One area, a little spoiler, little sneak peek. Working on taking generative design. Dana knows all about generative design. We couldn't acquire that technology were start up, you know, just to too much to do. But PTC owns one of the best in the business. This frustrated technology we're working on putting that into on shaping our customers. Um, will be happy to see it, hopefully in the coming year sometime. >>It's great to see that two way exchange. Now, you both know very well when you start a company, of course, a very exciting time. You know, a lot of baggage, you know, our customers pulling you in a lot of different directions and asking you for specials. You have this kind of clean slate, so to speak in it. I would think in many ways, John, despite you know, your install base, you have a bit of that dynamic occurring today especially, you know, driven by the forced march to digital transformation that cove it caused. So when you sit down with the team PTC and talk strategy. You now have more global resource is you got cohorts selling opportunities. What's the conversation like in terms of where you want to take the division? >>Well, Dave, you actually you sounds like we should have you coming in and talking about strategy because you've got the strategy down. I mean, we're doing everything said global expansion were able to reach across selling. We got some excellent PTC customers that we can reach reach now and they're finding uses for on shape. I think the plan is to, you know, just go, go, go and grow, grow, grow where we're looking for this year, priorities are expand the product. I mentioned the breath of the product with new things PTC did recently. Another technology that they acquired for on shape. We did an acquisition. It was it was small, wasn't widely announced. It, um, in an area related to interfacing with electrical cad systems. So So we're doing We're expanding the breath of on shape. We're going Maura, depth in the areas were already in. We have enormous opportunity to add more features and functions that's in the product. Go to market. You mentioned it global global presence. That's something we were a little light on a year ago. Now we have a team. Dana may not even know what we have. A non shape, dedicated team in Barcelona, based in Barcelona but throughout Europe were doing multiple languages. Um, the academic program just introduced a new product into that space that z even fueling more success and growth there. Um, and of course, continuing to to invest in customer success and this Atlas platform story I keep mentioning, we're going to soon have We're gonna soon have four other major PTC brands shipping products on our Atlas Saas platform. And so we're really excited about that. That's good for the other PTC products. It's also good for on shape because now there's there's. There's other interesting products that are on shape customers can use take advantage of very easily using, say, a common log in conventions about user experience there, used to invest of all they're SAS based, so they that makes it easier to begin with. So that's some of the exciting things going on. I think you'll see PTC, um, expanding our lead in SAS based applications for this sector for our our target, uh, sectors not just in, um, in cat and data management, but another area. PTC's Big and his augmented reality with of euphoria, product line leader and industrial uses of a R. That's a whole other story we should do. A whole nother show augmented reality. But these products are amazing. You can you can help factory workers people on, uh, people who are left out of the digital transformation. Sometimes we're standing from machine >>all day. >>They can't be sitting like we are doing Zoom. They can wear a R headset in our tools, let them create great content. This is an area Dana is invested in other companies. But what I wanted to note is the new releases of our authoring software. For this, our content getting released this month, used through the Atlas platform, the SAS components of on shape for things like revision management and collaboration on duh workflow activity. All that those are tools that we're able to share leverage. We get a lot of synergy. It's just really good. It's really fun to have a good time. That's >>awesome. And then we're gonna be talking to John MacLean later about that. Let's do a little deeper Dive on that. And, Dana, what is your involvement today with with on shape? But you're looking for you know, which of their customers air actually adopting. And they're gonna disrupt their industries. And you get good pipeline from that. How do you collaborate today? >>That sounds like a great idea. Um, Aziz, John will tell you I'm constantly just asking him for advice and impressions of other entrepreneurs and picking his brain on ideas. No formal relationship clearly, but continue to count John and and John and other people in on shaping in the circle of experts that I rely on for their opinions. >>All right, so we have some questions from the crowd here. Uh, one of the questions is for the dream team. You know, John and Dana. What's your next next collective venture? I don't think we're there yet, are we? No. >>I just say, as Dana said, we love talking to her about. You know, Dana, you just returned the compliment. We would try and give you advice and the deals you're looking at, and I'm sort of casually mentoring at least one of your portfolio entrepreneurs, and that's been a lot of fun for May on, hopefully a value to them. But also Dana. We uran important pipeline to us in the world of some new things that are happening that we wouldn't see if you know you've shown us some things that you've said. What do you think of this business? And for us, it's like, Wow, it's cool to see that's going on And that's what's supposed to work in an ecosystem like this. So we we deeply value the ongoing relationship. And no, we're not starting something new. I got a lot of work left to do with what I'm doing and really happy. But we can We can collaborate in this way on other ventures. >>I like this question to somebody asking With the cloud options like on shape, Wilmore students have stem opportunities s Oh, that's a great question. Are you because of sass and cloud? Are you able to reach? You know, more students? Much more cost effectively. >>Yeah, Dave, I'm so glad that that that I was asked about this because Yes, and it's extremely gratified us. Yes, we are because of cloud, because on shape is the only full cloud full SAS system or industry were able to reach. Stem education brings able to be part of bringing step education to students who couldn't get it otherwise. And one of most gratifying gratifying things to me is the emails were getting from teachers, um, that that really, um, on the phone calls that were they really pour their heart out and say We're able to get to students in areas that have very limited compute resource is that don't have an I T staff where they don't know what computer that the students can have at home, and they probably don't even have a computer. We're talking about being able to teach them on a phone to have an android phone a low end android phone. You can do three D modeling on there with on shape. Now you can't do it any other system, but with on shape, you could do it. And so the teacher can say to the students, They have to have Internet access, and I know there's a huge community that doesn't even have Internet access, and we're not able, unfortunately to help that. But if you have Internet and you have even an android phone, we can enable the educator to teach them. And so we have case after case of saving a stem program or expanding it into the students that need it most is the ones we're helping here. So really excited about that. And we're also able to let in addition to the run on run on whatever computing devices they have, we also offer them the tools they need for remote teaching with a much richer experience. Could you teach solid works remotely? Well, maybe if the student ran it had a windows workstation. You know, big, big, high end workstation. Maybe it could, but it would be like the difference between collaborating with on shape and collaborate with solid works. Like the difference between a zoom video call and talking on the landline phone. You know, it's a much richer experience, and that's what you need. And stem teaching stem is hard, So yeah, we're super super. Um, I'm excited about bringing stem to more students because of cloud yond >>we're talking about innovation for good, and then the discussion, John, you just had it. Really? There could be a whole another vector here. We could discuss on diversity, and I wanna end with just pointing out. So, Dana, your new firm, it's a woman led firm, too. Two women leaders, you know, going forward. So that's awesome to see, so really? Yeah, thumbs up on that. Congratulations on getting that off the ground. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>Okay, so thank you guys. Really appreciate It was a great discussion. I learned a lot and I'm sure the audience did a swell in a moment. We're gonna talk with on shaped customers to see how they're applying tech for good and some of the products that they're building. So keep it right there. I'm Dave Volonte. You're watching innovation for good on the Cube, the global leader in digital tech event coverage. Stay right there. >>Oh, yeah, it's >>yeah, yeah, around >>the globe. It's the Cube presenting innovation for good. Brought to you by on shape. >>Okay, we're back. This is Dave Volonte and you're watching innovation for good. A program on Cuba 3 65 made possible by on shape of PTC company. We're live today really live tv, which is the heritage of the Cube. And now we're gonna go to the sources and talkto on shape customers to find out how they're applying technology to create real world innovations that are changing the world. So let me introduce our panel members. Rafael Gomez Furberg is with the Chan Zuckerberg bio hub. A very big idea. And collaborative nonprofit was initiative that was funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, and really around diagnosing and curing and better managing infectious diseases. So really timely topic. Philip Tabor is also joining us. He's with silver side detectors, which develops neutron detective detection systems. Yet you want to know if early, if neutrons and radiation or in places where you don't want them, So this should be really interesting. And last but not least, Matthew Shields is with the Charlottesville schools and is gonna educate us on how he and his team are educating students in the use of modern engineering tools and techniques. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cuban to the program. This should be really interesting. Thanks for coming on. >>Hi. Or pleasure >>for having us. >>You're very welcome. Okay, let me ask each of you because you're all doing such interesting and compelling work. Let's start with Rafael. Tell us more about the bio hub and your role there, please. >>Okay. Yeah. So you said that I hope is a nonprofit research institution, um, funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Um, and our main mission is to develop new technologies to help advance medicine and help, hopefully cure and manage diseases. Um, we also have very close collaborations with Universe California, San Francisco, Stanford University and the University California Berkeley on. We tried to bring those universities together, so they collaborate more of biomedical topics. And I manage a team of engineers. They by joining platform. Um, and we're tasked with creating instruments for the laboratory to help the scientist boats inside the organization and also in the partner universities Do their experiments in better ways in ways that they couldn't do before >>in this edition was launched Well, five years ago, >>it was announced at the end of 2016, and we actually started operation with at the beginning of 2017, which is when I joined, um, So this is our third year. >>And how's how's it going? How does it work? I mean, these things take time. >>It's been a fantastic experience. Uh, the organization works beautifully. Um, it was amazing to see it grow From the beginning, I was employee number 12, I think eso When I came in, it was just a nem P office building and empty labs. And very quickly we had something running about. It's amazing eso I'm very proud of the work that we have done to make that possible. Um And then, of course, that's you mentioned now with co vid, um, we've been able to do a lot of very cool work attire being of the pandemic in March, when there was a deficit of testing, uh, capacity in California, we spun up a testing laboratory in record time in about a week. It was crazy. It was a crazy project, Um, but but incredibly satisfying. And we ended up running all the way until the beginning of November, when the lab was finally shut down. We could process about 3000 samples a day. I think at the end of it all, we were able to test about 100 on the order of 100 and 50,000 samples from all over the state. We were providing free testing toe all of the Department of Public Health Department of Public Health in California, which at the media pandemic, had no way to do testing affordably and fast. So I think that was a great service to the state. Now the state has created that testing system that would serve those departments. So then we decided that it was unnecessary to keep going with testing in the other biopsy that would shut down. >>All right. Thank you for that. Now, Now, Philip, you What you do is mind melting. You basically helped keep the world safe. Maybe describe a little bit more about silver sod detectors and what your role is there and how it all works. >>Tour. So we make a nuclear bomb detectors and we also make water detectors. So we try and do our part thio keep the world from blowing up and make it a better place at the same time. Both of these applications use neutron radiation detectors. That's what we make. Put them out by import border crossing places like that. They can help make sure that people aren't smuggling. Shall we say very bad things. Um, there's also a burgeoning field of research and application where you can use neutrons with some pretty cool physics to find water so you could do things. Like what? A detector up in the mountains and measure snowpack. Put it out in the middle of the field and measure soil moisture content. And as you might imagine, there's some really cool applications in, uh, research and agronomy and public policy for this. >>All right, so it's OK, so it's a It's much more than, you know, whatever fighting terrorism, it's there's a riel edge or I kind of i o t application for what you guys >>do. We do both its's to plowshares. You might >>say a mat. I I look at your role is kind of scaling the brain power for for the future. Maybe tell us more about Charlottesville schools and in the mission that you're pursuing and what you do. >>Thank you. Um, I've been in Charlottesville City schools for about 11 or 12 years. I started their teaching, um, a handful of classes, math and science and things like that. But Thescore board and my administration had the crazy idea of starting an engineering program about seven years ago. My background is an engineering is an engineering. My masters is in mechanical and aerospace engineering and um, I basically spent a summer kind of coming up with what might be a fun engineering curriculum for our students. And it started with just me and 30 students about seven years ago, Um, kind of a home spun from scratch curriculum. One of my goals from the outset was to be a completely project based curriculum, and it's now grown. We probably have about six or 700 students, five or six full time teachers. We now have pre engineering going on at the 5th and 6th grade level. I now have students graduating. Uh, you know, graduating after senior year with, like, seven years of engineering under their belt and heading off to doing some pretty cool stuff. So it's It's been a lot of fun building a program and, um, and learning a lot in the process. >>That's awesome. I mean, you know, Cuba's. We've been passionate about things like women in tech, uh, diversity stem. You know, not only do we need more, more students and stem, we need mawr underrepresented women, minorities, etcetera. We were just talking to John Herstek and integrate gration about this is Do you do you feel is though you're I mean, first of all, the work that you do is awesome, but but I'll go one step further. Do you feel as though it's reaching, um, or diverse base? And how is that going? >>That's a great question. I think research shows that a lot of people get funneled into one kind of track or career path or set of interests really early on in their educational career, and sometimes that that funnel is kind of artificial. And so that's one of the reasons we keep pushing back. Um, so our school systems introducing kindergartners to programming on DSO We're trying to push back how we expose students to engineering and to stem fields as early as possible. And we've definitely seen the first of that in my program. In fact, my engineering program, uh, sprung out of an after school in Extracurricular Science Club that actually three girls started at our school. So I think that actually has helped that three girls started the club that eventually is what led to our engineering programs that sort of baked into the DNA and also our eyes a big public school. And we have about 50% of the students are under the poverty line and we e in Charlottesville, which is a big refugee town. And so I've been adamant from Day one that there are no barriers to entry into the program. There's no test you have to take. You don't have to have be taking a certain level of math or anything like that. That's been a lot of fun. To have a really diverse set of kids enter the program and be successful, >>that's final. That's great to hear. So, Philip, I wanna come back to you. You know, I think about maybe some day we'll be able to go back to a sporting events, and I know when I when I'm in there, there's somebody up on the roof looking out for me, you know, watching the crowd, and they have my back. And I think in many ways, the products that you build, you know, our similar. I may not know they're there, but they're keeping us safe or they're measuring things that that that I don't necessarily see. But I wonder if you could talk about a little bit more detail about the products you build and how they're impacting society. >>Sure, so There are certainly a lot of people who are who are watching, trying to make sure things were going well in keeping you safe that you may or may not be aware of. And we try and support ah lot of them. So we have detectors that are that are deployed in a variety of variety of uses, with a number of agencies and governments that dio like I was saying, ports and border crossing some other interesting applications that are looking for looking for signals that should not be there and working closely to fit into the operations these folks do. Onda. We also have a lot of outreach to researchers and scientists trying to help them support the work they're doing. Um, using neutron detection for soil moisture monitoring is a some really cool opportunities for doing it at large scale and with much less, um, expense or complication than would have been done. Previous technologies. Um, you know, they were talking about collaboration in the previous segment. We've been able to join a number of conferences for that, virtually including one that was supposed to be held in Boston, but another one that was held out of the University of Heidelberg in Germany. And, uh, this is sort of things that in some ways, the pandemic is pushing people towards greater collaboration than they would have been able to do. Had it all but in person. >>Yeah, we did. Uh, the cube did live works a couple years ago in Boston. It was awesome show. And I think, you know, with this whole trend toward digit, I call it the Force march to digital. Thanks to cove it I think that's just gonna continue. Thio grow. Rafael. What if you could describe the process that you use to better understand diseases? And what's your organization's involvement? Been in more detail, addressing the cove in pandemic. >>Um, so so we have the bio be structured in, Um um in a way that foster so the combination of technology and science. So we have to scientific tracks, one about infectious diseases and the other one about understanding just basic human biology, how the human body functions, and especially how the cells in the human body function on how they're organized to create tissues in the body. On Ben, it has this set of platforms. Um, mind is one of them by engineering that are all technology rated. So we have data science platform, all about data analysis, machine learning, things like that. Um, we have a mass spectrometry platform is all about mass spectrometry technologies to, um, exploit those ones in service for the scientist on. We have a genomics platform that it's all about sequencing DNA and are gonna, um and then an advanced microscopy. It's all about developing technologies, uh, to look at things with advanced microscopes and developed technologies to marry computation on microscopy. So, um, the scientists set the agenda and the platforms, we just serve their needs, support their needs, and hopefully develop technologies that help them do their experiments better, faster, or allow them to the experiment that they couldn't do in any other way before. Um And so with cove, it because we have that very strong group of scientists that work on have been working on infectious disease before, and especially in viruses, we've been able to very quickly pivot to working on that s O. For example, my team was able to build pretty quickly a machine to automatically purified proteins on is being used to purify all these different important proteins in the cove. It virus the SARS cov to virus Onda. We're sending some of those purified proteins all over the world. Two scientists that are researching the virus and trying to figure out how to develop vaccines, understand how the virus affects the body and all that. Um, so some of the machines we built are having a very direct impact on this. Um, Also for the copy testing lab, we were able to very quickly develop some very simple machines that allowed the lab to function sort of faster and more efficiently. Sort of had a little bit of automation in places where we couldn't find commercial machines that would do it. >>Um, eso Matt. I mean, you gotta be listening to this and thinking about Okay, So someday your students are gonna be working at organizations like like, like Bio Hub and Silver Side. And you know, a lot of young people they're just don't know about you guys, but like my kids, they're really passionate about changing the world. You know, there's way more important than you know, the financial angles and it z e. I gotta believe you're seeing that you're right in the front lines there. >>Really? Um, in fact, when I started the curriculum six or seven years ago, one of the first bits of feedback I got from my students is they said Okay, this is a lot of fun. So I had my students designing projects and programming microcontrollers raspberry, PiS and order we nose and things like that. The first bit of feedback I got from students was they said Okay, when do we get to impact the world? I've heard engineering >>is about >>making the world a better place, and robots are fun and all, but, you know, where is the real impact? And so um, dude, yeah, thanks to the guidance of my students, I'm baking that Maurin. Now I'm like day one of engineering one. We talk about how the things that the tools they're learning and the skills they're gaining, uh, eventually, you know, very soon could be could be used to make the world a better place. >>You know, we all probably heard that famous line by Jeff Hammer Barker. The greatest minds of my generation are trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads. I think we're really generally generationally, finally, at the point where young students and engineering a really, you know, a passionate about affecting society. I wanna get into the product, you know, side and understand how each of you are using on shape and and the value that that it brings. Maybe Raphael, you could start how long you've been using it. You know, what's your experience with it? Let's let's start there. >>I begin for about two years, and I switched to it with some trepidation. You know, I was used to always using the traditional product that you have to install on your computer, that everybody uses that. So I was kind of locked into that. But I started being very frustrated with the way it worked, um, and decided to give on ship chance. Which reputation? Because any change always, you know, causes anxiety. Um, but very quickly my engineers started loving it, Uh, just because it's it's first of all, the learning curve wasn't very difficult at all. You can transfer from one from the traditional product to entree very quickly and easily. You can learn all the concepts very, very fast. It has all the functionality that we needed and and what's best is that it allows to do things that we couldn't do before or we couldn't do easily. Now we can access the our cat documents from anywhere in the world. Um, so when we're in the lab fabricating something or testing a machine, any computer we have next to us or a tablet or on iPhone, we can pull it up and look at the cad and check things or make changes. That's something that couldn't do before because before you had to pay for every installation off the software for the computer, and I couldn't afford to have 20 installations to have some computers with the cat ready to use them like once every six months would have been very inefficient. So we love that part. And the collaboration features are fantastic, especially now with Kobe, that we have to have all the remote meetings eyes fantastic, that you can have another person drive the cad while the whole team is watching that person change the model and do things and point to things that is absolutely revolutionary. We love it. The fact that you have very, very sophisticated version control before it was always a challenge asking people, please, if you create anniversary and apart, how do we name it so that people find it? And then you end up with all these collection of files with names that nobody ever remembers, what they are, the person left. And now nobody knows which version is the right one. A mess with on shape on the version ING system it has, and the fact that you can go back in history off the document and go back to previous version so easily and then go back to the press and version and explore the history of the part that is truly, um, just world changing for us, that we can do that so easily on for me as a manager to manage this collection of information that is critical for our operations. It makes it so much easier because everything is in one place. I don't have to worry about file servers that go down that I have to administer that have to have I t taken care off that have to figure how to keep access to people to those servers when they're at home, and they need a virtual private network and all of that mess disappears. I just simply give give a person in accounting on shape and then magically, they have access to everything in the way I want. And we can manage the lower documents and everything in a way that is absolutely fantastic. >>Feel what was your what? What were some of the concerns you had mentioned? You had some trepidation. Was it a performance? Was it security? You know some of the traditional cloud stuff, and I'm curious as to how, How, whether any of those act manifested really that you had to manage. What were your concerns? >>Look, the main concern is how long is it going to take for everybody in the team to learn to use the system like it and buy into it? Because I don't want to have my engineers using tools against their will write. I want everybody to be happy because that's how they're productive. They're happy, and they enjoyed the tools they have. That was my main concern. I was a little bit worried about the whole concept of not having the files in a place where I couldn't quote unquote seat in some server and on site, but that That's kind of an outdated concept, right? So that took a little bit of a mind shift, but very quickly. Then I started thinking, Look, I have a lot of documents on Google Drive. Like, I don't worry about that. Why would I worry about my cat on on shape, right? Is the same thing. So I just needed to sort of put things in perspective that way. Um, the other, um, you know, the concern was the learning curve, right? Is like, how is he Will be for everybody to and for me to learn it on whether it had all of the features that we needed. And there were a few features that I actually discussed with, um uh, Cody at on shape on, they were actually awesome about using their scripting language in on shape to sort of mimic some of the features of the old cat, uh, in on, shaped in a way that actually works even better than the old system. So it was It was amazing. Yeah, >>Great. Thank you for that, Philip. What's your experience been? Maybe you could take us through your journey within shape. >>Sure. So we've been we've been using on shaped silver side for coming up on about four years now, and we love it. We're very happy with it. We have a very modular product line, so we make anything from detectors that would go into backpacks. Two vehicles, two very large things that a shipping container would go through and saw. Excuse me. Shape helps us to track and collaborate faster on the design. Have multiple people working a same time on a project. And it also helps us to figure out if somebody else comes to us and say, Hey, I want something new how we congrats modules from things that we already have put them together and then keep track of the design development and the different branches and ideas that we have, how they all fit together. A za design comes together, and it's just been fantastic from a mechanical engineering background. I will also say that having used a number of different systems and solid works was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Before I got using on shape, I went, Wow, this is amazing and I really don't want to design in any other platform. After after getting on Lee, a little bit familiar with it. >>You know, it's funny, right? I'll have the speed of technology progression. I was explaining to some young guns the other day how I used to have a daytime er and that was my life. And if I lost that daytime, er I was dead. And I don't know how we weigh existed without, you know, Google maps eso we get anywhere, I don't know, but, uh but so So, Matt, you know, it's interesting to think about, you know, some of the concerns that Raphael brought up, you hear? For instance, you know, all the time. Wow. You know, I get my Amazon bill at the end of the month that zip through the roof in, But the reality is that Yeah, well, maybe you are doing more, but you're doing things that you couldn't have done before. And I think about your experience in teaching and educating. I mean, you so much more limited in terms of the resource is that you would have had to be able to educate people. So what's your experience been with With on shape and what is it enabled? >>Um, yeah, it was actually talking before we went with on shape. We had a previous CAD program, and I was talking to my vendor about it, and he let me know that we were actually one of the biggest CAD shops in the state. Because if you think about it a really big program, you know, really big company might employ. 5, 10, 15, 20 cad guys, right? I mean, when I worked for a large defense contractor, I think there were probably 20 of us as the cad guys. I now have about 300 students doing cat. So there's probably more students with more hours of cat under their belt in my building than there were when I worked for the big defense contractor. Um, but like you mentioned, uh, probably our biggest hurdle is just re sources. And so we want We want one of things I've always prided myself and trying to do in this. Programs provide students with access two tools and skills that they're going to see either in college or in the real world. So it's one of the reason we went with a big professional cad program. There are, you know, sort of K 12 oriented software and programs and things. But, you know, I want my kids coding and python and using slack and using professional type of tools on DSO when it comes to cat. That's just that That was a really hurt. I mean, you know, you could spend $30,000 on one seat of, you know, professional level cad program, and then you need a $30,000 computer to run it on if you're doing a heavy assemblies, Um and so one of my dreams And it was always just a crazy dream. And I was the way I would always pitcher in my school system and say, someday I'm gonna have a kid on a school issued chromebook in subsidized housing, on public WiFi doing professional level bad and that that was a crazy statement until a couple of years ago. So we're really excited that I literally and you know, March and you said the forced march, the forced march into, you know, modernity, March 13th kids sitting in my engineering lab that we spent a lot of money on doing cad March 14th. Those kids were at home on their school issued chromebooks on public WiFi, uh, keeping their designs going and collaborating. And then, yeah, I could go on and on about some of the things you know, the features that we've learned since then they're even better. So it's not like this is some inferior, diminished version of Academy. There's so much about it. Well, I >>wanna I wanna ask you that I may be over my skis on this, but we're seeing we're starting to see the early days of the democratization of CAD and product design. It is the the citizen engineer, I mean, maybe insulting to the engineers in the room, But but is that we're beginning to see that >>I have to believe that everything moves into the cloud. Part of that is democratization that I don't need. I can whether you know, I think artists, you know, I could have a music studio in my basement with a nice enough software package. And Aiken, I could be a professional for now. My wife's a photographer. I'm not allowed to say that I could be a professional photographer with, you know, some cloud based software, and so, yeah, I do think that's part of what we're seeing is more and more technology is moving to the cloud. >>Philip. Rafael Anything you Dad, >>I think I mean, yeah, that that that combination of cloud based cat and then three d printing that is becoming more and more affordable on ubiquitous It's truly transformative, and I think for education is fantastic. I wish when I was a kid I had the opportunity to play with those kinds of things because I was always the late things. But, you know, the in a very primitive way. So, um, I think this is a dream for kids. Teoh be able to do this. And, um, yeah, there's so many other technologies coming on, like Arduino on all of these electronic things that live kids play at home very cheaply with things that back in my day would have been unthinkable. >>So we know there's a go ahead. Philip, please. >>We had a pandemic and silver site moved to a new manufacturing facility this year. I was just on the shop floor, talking with contractors, standing 6 ft apart, pointing at things. But through it all, our CAD system was completely unruffled. Nothing stopped in our development work. Nothing stopped in our support for existing systems in the field. We didn't have to think about it. We had other server issues, but none with our, you know, engineering cad, platform and product development in support world right ahead, which was cool, but also a in that's point. I think it's just really cool what you're doing with the kids. The most interesting secondary and college level engineering work that I did was project based, taken important problem to the world. Go solve it and that is what we do here. That is what my entire career has been. And I'm super excited to see. See what your students are going to be doing, uh, in there home classrooms on their chromebooks now and what they do building on that. >>Yeah, I'm super excited to see your kids coming out of college with engineering degrees because, yeah, I think that Project based experience is so much better than just sitting in a classroom, taking notes and doing math problems on day. I think it will give the kids a much better flavor. What engineering is really about Think a lot of kids get turned off by engineering because they think it's kind of dry because it's just about the math for some very abstract abstract concept on they are there. But I think the most important thing is just that hands on a building and the creativity off, making things that you can touch that you can see that you can see functioning. >>Great. So, you know, we all know the relentless pace of technology progression. So when you think about when you're sitting down with the folks that on shape and there the customer advisor for one of the things that that you want on shape to do that it doesn't do today >>I could start by saying, I just love some of the things that does do because it's such a modern platform. And I think some of these, uh, some some platforms that have a lot of legacy and a lot of history behind them. I think we're dragging some of that behind them. So it's cool to see a platform that seemed to be developed in the modern era, and so that Z it is the Google docks. And so the fact that collaboration and version ing and link sharing is and like platform agnostic abilities, the fact that that seems to be just built into the nature of the thing so far, That's super exciting. As far as things that, uh, to go from there, Um, I don't know, >>Other than price. >>You can't say >>I >>can't say lower price. >>Yeah, so far on P. D. C. S that work with us. Really? Well, so I'm not complaining. There you there, >>right? Yeah. Yeah. No gaps, guys. Whitespace, Come on. >>We've been really enjoying the three week update. Cadence. You know, there's a new version every three weeks and we don't have to install it. We just get all the latest and greatest goodies. One of the trends that we've been following and enjoying is the the help with a revision management and release work flows. Um, and I know that there's more than on shape is working on that we're very excited for, because that's a big important part about making real hardware and supporting it in the field. Something that was cool. They just integrated Cem markup capability. In the last release that took, we were doing that anyway, but we were doing it outside of on shapes. And now we get to streamline our workflow and put it in the CAD system where We're making those changes anyway when we're reviewing drawings and doing this kind of collaboration. And so I think from our perspective, we continue to look forward. Toa further progress on that. There's a lot of capability in the cloud that I think they're just kind of scratching the surface on you, >>right? I would. I mean, you're you're asking to knit. Pick. I would say one of the things that I would like to see is is faster regeneration speed. There are a few times with convicts, necessities that regenerating the document takes a little longer than I would like. It's not a serious issue, but anyway, I I'm being spoiled, >>you know? That's good. I've been doing this a long time, and I like toe ask that question of practitioners and to me, it It's a signal like when you're nit picking and that's what you're struggling to knit. Pick that to me is a sign of a successful product, and and I wonder, I don't know, uh, have the deep dive into the architecture. But are things like alternative processors. You're seeing them hit the market in a big way. Uh, you know, maybe helping address the challenge, But I'm gonna ask you the big, chewy question now. Then we maybe go to some audience questions when you think about the world's biggest problems. I mean, we're global pandemics, obviously top of mind. You think about nutrition, you know, feeding the global community. We've actually done a pretty good job of that. But it's not necessarily with the greatest nutrition, climate change, alternative energy, the economic divides. You've got geopolitical threats and social unrest. Health care is a continuing problem. What's your vision for changing the world and how product innovation for good and be applied to some of the the problems that that you all are passionate about? Big question. Who wants toe start? >>Not biased. But for years I've been saying that if you want to solve the economy, the environment, uh, global unrest, pandemics, education is the case. If you wanna. If you want to, um, make progress in those in those realms, I think funding funding education is probably gonna pay off pretty well. >>Absolutely. And I think Stam is key to that. I mean, all of the ah lot of the well being that we have today and then industrialized countries. Thanks to science and technology, right improvements in health care, improvements in communication, transportation, air conditioning. Um, every aspect of life is touched by science and technology. So I think having more kids studying and understanding that is absolutely key. Yeah, I agree, >>Philip, you got anything to add? >>I think there's some big technical problems in the world today, Raphael and ourselves there certainly working on a couple of them. Think they're also collaboration problems and getting everybody to be able to pull together instead of pulling separately and to be able to spur the ideas on words. So that's where I think the education side is really exciting. What Matt is doing and it just kind of collaboration in general when we could do provide tools to help people do good work. Uh, that is, I think, valuable. >>Yeah, I think that's a very good point. And along those lines, we have some projects that are about creating very low cost instruments for low research settings, places in Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, so that they can do, um, um, biomedical research that it's difficult to do in those place because they don't have the money to buy the fancy lab machines that cost $30,000 an hour. Um, so we're trying to sort of democratize some of those instruments. And I think thanks to tools like Kahn shape then is easier, for example, to have a conversation with somebody in Africa and show them the design that we have and discuss the details of it with them on. But it's amazing, right to have somebody, you know, 10 time zones away, Um, looking really life in real time with you about your design and discussing the details or teaching them how to build a machine, right? Because, um, you know, they have a three D printer. You can you can just give them the design and say like, you build it yourself, uh, even cheaper than and, you know, also billing and shipping it there. Um, so all that that that aspect of it is also super important. I think for any of these efforts to improve some of the hardest part was in the world for climate change. Do you say, as you say, poverty, nutrition issues? Um, you know, availability of water. You have that project at about finding water. Um, if we can also help deploy technologies that teach people remotely how to create their own technologies or how to build their own systems that will help them solve those forms locally. I think that's very powerful. >>Yeah, the point about education is right on. I think some people in the audience may be familiar with the work of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the second machine age where they sort of put forth the premise that, uh, is it laid it out. Look, for the first time in history, machines air replacing humans from a cognitive perspective. Machines have always replaced humans, but that's gonna have an impact on jobs. But the answer is not toe protect the past from the future. The answer is education and public policy that really supports that. So I couldn't agree more. I think it's a really great point. Um, we have We do have some questions from the audience. If if we could If I can ask you guys, um, you know, this one kind of stands out. How do you see artificial intelligence? I was just talking about machine intelligence. Um, how do you see that? Impacting the design space guys trying to infuse a I into your product development. Can you tell me? >>Um, absolutely, like, we're using AI for some things, including some of these very low cost instruments that will hopefully help us diagnose certain diseases, especially this is that are very prevalent in the Third World. Um, and some of those diagnostics are these days done by thes armies of technicians that are trained to look under the microscope. But, um, that's a very slow process. Is very error prone and having machine learning systems that can to the same diagnosis faster, cheaper and also little machines that can be taken to very remote places to these villages that have no access to a fancy microscope. To look at a sample from a patient that's very powerful. And I we don't do this, but I have read quite a bit about how certain places air using a Tribune attorneys to actually help them optimize designs for parts. So you get these very interesting looking parts that you would have never thought off a person would have never thought off, but that are incredibly light ink. Earlier, strong and I have all sort of properties that are interesting thanks to artificial intelligence machine learning in particular >>yet another. The advantage you get when when your work is in the cloud I've seen. I mean, there's just so many applications that so if the radiology scan is in the cloud and the radiologist is goes to bed at night, Radiologist could come in in the morning and and say, Oh, the machine while you were sleeping was using artificial intelligence to scan these 40,000 images. And here's the five that we picked out that we think you should take a closer look at. Or like Raphael said, I can design my part. My, my, my, my, my you know, mount or bracket or whatever and go to sleep. And then I wake up in the morning. The machine has improved. It for me has made it strider strider stronger and lighter. Um And so just when your when your work is in the cloud, that's just that's a really cool advantage that you get that you can have machines doing some of your design work for you. >>Yeah, we've been watching, uh, you know, this week is this month, I guess is AWS re invent and it's just amazing to see how much effort is coming around machine learning machine intelligence. You know Amazon has sage maker Google's got, you know, embedded you no ML and big query. Uh, certainly Microsoft with Azure is doing tons of stuff and machine learning. I think the point there is that that these things will be infused in tow R and D and in tow software product by the vendor community. And you all will apply that to your business and and build value through the unique data that your collecting, you know, in your ecosystems. And and that's how you add value. You don't have to be necessarily, you know, developers of artificial intelligence, but you have to be practitioners to apply that. Does that make sense to you, Philip? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think your point about value is really well chosen. We see AI involved from the physics simulations all the way up to interpreting radiation data, and that's where the value question, I think, is really important because it's is the output of the AI giving helpful information that the people that need to be looking at it. So if it's curating a serious of radiation alert, saying, Hey, like these air the anomalies. You need to look at eyes it, doing that in a way that's going to help a good response on. In some cases, the II is only as good as the people. That sort of gave it a direction and turn it loose. And you want to make sure that you don't have biases or things like that underlying your AI that they're going to result in less than helpful outcomes coming from it. So we spend quite a lot of time thinking about how do we provide the right outcomes to people who are who are relying on our systems? >>That's a great point, right? Humans air biased and humans build models, so models are inherently biased. But then the software is hitting the market. That's gonna help us identify those biases and help us, you know? Of course. Correct. So we're entering Cem some very exciting times, guys. Great conversation. I can't thank you enough for spending the time with us and sharing with our audience the innovations that you're bringing to help the world. So thanks again. >>Thank you so much. >>Thank you. >>Okay. Welcome. Okay. When we come back, John McElheny is gonna join me. He's on shape. Co founder. And he's currently the VP of strategy at PTC. He's gonna join the program. We're gonna take a look at what's next and product innovation. I'm Dave Volonte and you're watching innovation for good on the Cube, the global leader. Digital technology event coverage. We'll be right back. >>Okay? Okay. Yeah. Okay. >>From around >>the globe, it's the Cube. Presenting innovation for good. Brought to you by on shape. >>Okay, welcome back to innovation. For good. With me is John McElheny, who is one of the co founders of On Shape and is now the VP of strategy at PTC. John, it's good to see you. Thanks for making the time to come on the program. Thanks, Dave. So we heard earlier some of the accomplishments that you've made since the acquisition. How has the acquisition affected your strategy? Maybe you could talk about what resource is PTC brought to the table that allowed you toe sort of rethink or evolve your strategy? What can you share with us? >>Sure. You know, a year ago, when when John and myself met with Jim Pepperman early on is we're we're pondering. Started joining PTC one of things became very clear is that we had a very clear shared vision about how we could take the on shape platform and really extended for, for all of the PTC products, particular sort of their augmented reality as well as their their thing works or the i o. T business and their product. And so from the very beginning there was a clear strategy about taking on shape, extending the platform and really investing, um, pretty significantly in the product development as well as go to market side of things, uh, toe to bring on shape out to not only the PTC based but sort of the broader community at large. So So So PTC has been a terrific, terrific, um, sort of partner as we've we've gonna go on after this market together. Eso We've added a lot of resource and product development side of things. Ah, lot of resource and they go to market and customer success and support. So, really, on many fronts, that's been both. Resource is as well a sort of support at the corporate level from from a strategic standpoint and then in the field, we've had wonderful interactions with many large enterprise customers as well as the PTC channels. So it's been really a great a great year. >>Well, and you think about the challenges of in your business going to SAS, which you guys, you know, took on that journey. You know, 78 years ago. Uh, it's not trivial for a lot of companies to make that transition, especially a company that's been around as long as PTC. So So I'm wondering how much you know, I was just asking you How about what PCP TC brought to the table? E gotta believe you're bringing a lot to the table to in terms of the mindset, uh, even things is, is mundane is not the right word, but things like how you compensate salespeople, how you interact with customers, the notion of a service versus a product. I wonder if you could address >>that. Yeah, it's a it's a really great point. In fact, after we had met Jim last year, John and I one of the things we walked out in the seaport area in Boston, one of things we sort of said is, you know, Jim really gets what we're trying to do here and and part of let me bring you into the thinking early on. Part of what Jim talked about is there's lots of, you know, installed base sort of software that's inside of PTC base. That's helped literally thousands of customers around the world. But the idea of moving to sass and all that it entails both from a technology standpoint but also a cultural standpoint. Like How do you not not just compensate the sales people as an example? But how do you think about customer success? In the past, it might have been that you had professional services that you bring out to a customer, help them deploy your solutions. Well, when you're thinking about a SAS based offering, it's really critical that you get customers successful with it. Otherwise, you may have turned, and you know it will be very expensive in terms of your business long term. So you've got to get customers success with software in the very beginning. So you know, Jim really looked at on shape and he said that John and I, from a cultural standpoint, you know, a lot of times companies get acquired and they've acquired technology in the past that they integrate directly into into PTC and then sort of roll it out through their products, are there just reached channel, he said. In some respects, John John, think about it as we're gonna take PTC and we want to integrate it into on shape because we want you to share with us both on the sales side and customer success on marketing on operations. You know all the things because long term, we believe the world is a SAS world, that the whole industry is gonna move too. So really, it was sort of an inverse in terms of the thought process related to normal transactions >>on That makes a lot of sense to me. You mentioned Sharon turns the silent killer of a SAS company, and you know, there's a lot of discussion, you know, in the entrepreneurial community because you live this, you know what's the best path? I mean today, You see, you know, if you watch Silicon Valley double, double, triple triple, but but there's a lot of people who believe, and I wonder, if you come in there is the best path to, you know, in the X Y axis. If if it's if it's uh, growth on one and retention on the other axis. What's the best way to get to the upper right on? Really? The the best path is probably make sure you've nailed obviously the product market fit, But make sure that you can retain customers and then throw gas on the fire. You see a lot of companies they burn out trying to grow too fast, but they haven't figured out, you know that. But there's too much churn. They haven't figured out those metrics. I mean, obviously on shape. You know, you were sort of a pioneer in here. I gotta believe you've figured out that customer retention before you really, You know, put the pedal to the >>metal. Yeah, and you know, growth growth can mask a lot of things, but getting getting customers, especially the engineering space. Nobody goes and sits there and says, Tomorrow we're gonna go and and, you know, put 100 users on this and and immediately swap out all of our existing tools. These tools are very rich and deep in terms of capability, and they become part of the operational process of how a company designs and builds products. So any time anybody is actually going through the purchasing process. Typically, they will run a try along or they'll run a project where they look at. Kind of What? What is this new solution gonna help them dio. How are we gonna orient ourselves for success? Longer term. So for us, you know, getting new customers and customer acquisition is really critical. But getting those customers to actually deploy the solution to be successful with it. You know, we like to sort of, say, the marketing or the lead generation and even some of the initial sales. That's sort of like the Kindle ing. But the fire really starts when customers deploy it and get successful. The solution because they bring other customers into the fold. And then, of course, if they're successful with it, you know, then in fact, you have negative turn which, ironically, means growth in terms of your inside of your install. Bates. >>Right? And you've seen that with some of the emerging, you know, SAS companies, where you're you're actually you know, when you calculate whatever its net retention or renew ALS, it's actually from a dollar standpoint. It's up in the high nineties or even over 100%. >>So >>and that's a trend we're gonna continue. See, I >>wonder >>if we could sort of go back. Uh, and when you guys were starting on shape, some of the things that you saw that you were trying to strategically leverage and what's changed, you know, today we were talking. I was talking to John earlier about in a way, you kinda you kinda got a blank slate is like doing another startup. >>You're >>not. Obviously you've got installed base and customers to service, but But it's a new beginning for you guys. So one of the things that you saw then you know, cloud and and sas and okay, but that's we've been there, done that. What are you seeing? You know today? >>Well, you know, So So this is a journey, of course, that that on shape on its own has gone through it had I'll sort of say, you know, several iterations, both in terms of of of, you know, how do you How do you get customers? How do you How do you get them successful? How do you grow those customers? And now that we've been part of PTC, the question becomes okay. One, There is certainly a higher level of credibility that helps us in terms of our our megaphone is much bigger than it was when we're standalone company. But on top of that now, figuring out how to work with their channel with their direct sales force, you know, they have, um, for example, you know, very large enterprises. Well, many of those customers are not gonna go in forklift out their existing solution to replace it with with on shape. However, many of them do have challenges in their supply chain and communications with contractors and vendors across the globe. And so, you know, finding our fit inside of those large enterprises as they extend out with their their customers is a very interesting area that we've really been sort of incremental to to PTC. And then, you know, they they have access to lots of other technology, like the i o. T business. And now, of course, the augmented reality business that that we can bring things to bear. For example, in the augmented reality world, they've they've got something called expert capture. And this is essentially imagine, you know, in a are ah, headset that allows you to be ableto to speak to it, but also capture images still images in video. And you could take somebody who's doing their task and capture literally the steps that they're taking its geo location and from their builds steps for new employees to be, we'll learn and understand how todo use that technology to help them do their job better. Well, when they do that, if there is replacement products or variation of of some of the tools that that they built the original design instruction set for they now have another version. Well, they have to manage multiple versions. Well, that's what on shape is really great at doing and so taking our technology and helping their solutions as well. So it's not only expanding our customer footprint, it's expanding the application footprint in terms of how we can help them and help customers. >>So that leads me to the tam discussion and again, as part of your strategist role. How do you think about that? Was just talking to some of your customers earlier about the democratization of cat and engineering? You know, I kind of joked, sort of like citizen engineering, but but so that you know, the demographics are changing the number of users potentially that can access the products because the it's so much more of a facile experience. How are you thinking about the total available market? >>It really is a great question, You know, it used to be when you when you sold boxes of software, it was how many engineers were out there. And that's the size of the market. The fact that matter is now when, When you think about access to that information, that data is simply a pane of glass. Whether it's a computer, whether it's a laptop, UH, a a cell phone or whether it's a tablet, the ability to to use different vehicles, access information and data expands the capabilities and power of a system to allow feedback and iteration. I mean, one of the one of the very interesting things is in technology is when you can take something and really unleash it to a larger audience and builds, you know, purpose built applications. You can start to iterate, get better feedback. You know there's a classic case in the clothing industry where Zara, you know, is a fast sort of turnaround. Agile manufacturer. And there was a great New York Times article written a couple years ago. My wife's a fan of Zara, and I think she justifies any purchases by saying, You know, Zara, you gotta purchase it now. Otherwise it may not be there the next time. Yet you go back to the store. They had some people in a store in New York that had this woman's throw kind of covering Shaw. And they said, Well, it would be great if we could have this little clip here so we can hook it through or something. And they sent a note back toe to the factory in Spain, and literally two weeks later they had, you know, 4000 of these things in store, and they sold out because they had a closed loop and iterative process. And so if we could take information and allow people access in multiple ways through different devices and different screens, that could be very specific information that, you know, we remove a lot of the engineering data book, bring the end user products conceptually to somebody that would have had to wait months to get the actual physical prototype, and we could get feedback well, Weaken have a better chance of making sure whatever product we're building is the right product when it ultimately gets delivered to a customer. So it's really it's a much larger market that has to be thought of rather than just the kind of selling A boxes software to an engineer. >>That's a great story. And again, it's gonna be exciting for you guys to see that with. The added resource is that you have a PTC, Um, so let's talk. I promise people we wanna talk about Atlas. Let's talk about the platform. A little bit of Atlas was announced last year. Atlas. For those who don't know it's a SAS space platform, it purports to go beyond product lifecycle management and you You're talking cloud like agility and scale to CAD and product design. But John, you could do a better job than I. What do >>we need to know about Atlas? Well, I think Atlas is a great description because it really is metaphorically sort of holding up all of the PTC applications themselves. But from the very beginning, when John and I met with Jim, part of what we were intrigued about was that he shared a vision that on shape was more than just going to be a cad authoring tool that, in fact, you know, in the past these engineering tools were very powerful, but they were very narrow in their purpose and focus. And we had specialty applications to manage the versions, etcetera. What we did in on shape is we kind of inverted that thinking. We built this collaboration and sharing engine at the core and then kind of wrap the CAD system around it. But that collaboration sharing and version ING engine is really powerful. And it was that vision that Jim had that he shared that we had from the beginning, which was, how do we take this thing to make a platform that could be used for many other applications inside of inside of any company? And so not only do we have a partner application area that is is much like the APP store or Google play store. Uh, that was sort of our first Stan Shih ation of this. This this platform. But now we're extending out to broader applications and much meatier applications. And internally, that's the thing works in the in the augmented reality. But there'll be other applications that ultimately find its way on top of this platform. And so they'll get all the benefits of of the collaboration, sharing the version ing the multi platform, multi device. And that's an extremely extremely, um, strategic leverage point for the company. >>You know, it's interesting, John, you mentioned the seaport before. So PTC, for those who don't know, built a beautiful facility down at the Seaport in Boston. And, of course, when PTC started, you know, back in the mid 19 eighties, there was nothing at the seaport s. >>So it's >>kind of kind of ironic, you know, we were way seeing the transformation of the seaport. We're seeing the transformation of industry and of course, PTC. And I'm sure someday you'll get back into that beautiful office, you know? Wait. Yeah, I'll bet. And, uh and but I wanna bring this up because I want I want you to talk about the future. How you how you see that our industry and you've observed this has moved from very product centric, uh, plat platform centric with sass and cloud. And now we're seeing ecosystems form around those products and platforms and data flowing through the ecosystem powering, you know, new innovation. I wonder if you could paint a picture for us of what the future looks like to you from your vantage point. >>Yeah, I think one of the key words you said there is data because up until now, data for companies really was sort of trapped in different applications. And it wasn't because people were nefarious and they want to keep it limited. It was just the way in which things were built. And, you know, when people use an application like on shape, what ends up happening is there their day to day interaction and everything that they do is actually captured by the platform. And, you know, we don't have access to that data. Of course it's it's the customer's data. But as as an artifact of them using the system than doing their day to day job, what's happening is they're creating huge amounts of information that can then be accessed and analyzed to help them both improve their design process, improve their efficiencies, improve their actual schedules in terms of making sure they can hit delivery times and be able to understand where there might be roadblocks in the future. So the way I see it is companies now are deploying SAS based tools like on shape and an artifact of them. Using that platform is that they have now analytics and tools to better understand and an instrument and manage their business. And then from there, I think you're going to see, because these systems are all you know extremely well. Architected allow through, you know, very structured AP. I calls to connect other SAS based applications. You're gonna start seeing closed loop sort of system. So, for example, people design using on shape, they end up going and deploying their system or installing it, or people use the end using products. People then may call back into the customers support line and report issues, problems, challenges. They'll be able to do traceability back to the underlying design. They'll be able to do trend analysis and defect analysis from the support lines and tie it back and closed loop the product design, manufacture, deployment in the field sort of cycles. In addition, you can imagine there's many things that air sort of as designed. But then when people go on site and they have to install it. There's some alterations modifications. Think about think about like a large air conditioning units for buildings. You go and you go to train and you get a large air conditioning unit that put up on top of building with a crane. They have to build all kinds of adaptors to make sure that that will fit inside of the particulars of that building. You know, with on shape and tools like this, you'll be able to not only take the design of what the air conditioning system might be, but also the all the adapter plates, but also how they installed it. So it sort of as designed as manufactured as stalled. And all these things can be traced, just like if you think about the transformation of customer service or customer contacts. In the early days, you used to have tools that were PC based tools called contact management solution, you know, kind of act or gold mine. And these were basically glorified Elektronik role in Texas. It had a customer names and they had phone numbers and whatever else. And Salesforce and Siebel, you know, these types of systems really broadened out the perspective of what a customer relationship? Waas. So it wasn't just the contact information it was, you know, How did they come to find out about you as a company? So all of the pre sort of marketing and then kind of what happens after they become a customer and it really was a 3 60 view. I think that 3 60 view gets extended to not just to the customers, but also tools and the products they use. And then, of course, the performance information that could come back to the manufacturer. So, you know, as an engineer, one of the things you learn about with systems is the following. And if you remember, when the CD first came out CDs that used to talk about four times over sampling or eight times over sampling and it was really kind of, you know, the fidelity the system. And we know from systems theory that the best way to improve the performance of a system is to actually have more feedback. The more feedback you have, the better system could be. And so that's why you get 16 60 for example, etcetera. Same thing here. The more feedback we have of different parts of a company that a better performance, The company will be better customer relationships. Better, uh, overall financial performance as well. So that's that's the view I have of how these systems all tied together. >>It's a great vision in your point about the data is I think right on. It used to be so fragmented in silos, and in order to take a system view, you've gotta have a system view of the data. Now, for years, we've optimized maybe on one little component of the system and that sometimes we lose sight of the overall outcome. And so what you just described, I think is, I think sets up. You know very well as we exit. Hopefully soon we exit this this covert era on John. I hope that you and I can sit down face to face at a PTC on shape event in the near term >>in the seaport in the >>seaport would tell you that great facility toe have have an event for sure. It >>z wonderful >>there. So So John McElhinney. Thanks so much for for participating in the program. It was really great to have you on, >>right? Thanks, Dave. >>Okay. And I want to thank everyone for participating. Today we have some great guest speakers. And remember, this is a live program. So give us a little bit of time. We're gonna flip this site over toe on demand mode so you can share it with your colleagues and you, or you can come back and and watch the sessions that you heard today. Uh, this is Dave Volonte for the Cube and on shape PTC. Thank you so much for watching innovation for good. Be well, Have a great holiday. And we'll see you next time. Yeah.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting innovation for good. Brought to you by on shape. >>Okay, we're back. This is Dave Volonte and you're watching innovation for good. A program on Cuba 3 65 made possible by on shape of BTC company. We're live today really live TV, which is the heritage of the Cuban. Now we're gonna go to the sources and talkto on shape customers to find out how they're applying technology to create real world innovations that are changing the world. So let me introduce our panel members. Rafael Gomez Fribourg is with the Chan Zuckerberg bio hub. A very big idea. And collaborative nonprofit was initiative that was funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, and really around diagnosing and curing and better managing infectious diseases. So really timely topic. Philip Tabor is also joining us. He's with silver side detectors which develops neutron detective detection systems. Yet you want to know if early if neutrons and radiation or in places where you don't want them, so this should be really interesting. And last but not least, Matthew Shields is with the Charlottesville schools and is gonna educate us on how he and his team are educating students in the use of modern engineering tools and techniques. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cuban to the program. This should be really interesting. Thanks for coming on. >>Hi. Or pleasure >>for having us. >>You're very welcome. Okay, let me ask each of you because you're all doing such interesting and compelling work. Let's start with Rafael. Tell us more about the bio hub and your role there, please. >>Okay. Yes. As you said, the Bio Hope is a nonprofit research institution, um, funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Um and our main mission is to develop new technologies to help advance medicine and help, hopefully cure and manage diseases. Um, we also have very close collaborations with Universe California, San Francisco, Stanford University and the University California Berkeley on. We tried to bring those universities together, so they collaborate more of biomedical topics. And I manage a team of engineers in by joining platform. Um, and we're tasked with creating instruments for the laboratory to help the scientist boats inside the organization and also in the partner universities do their experiments in better ways in ways that they couldn't do before >>in this edition was launched five years ago. It >>was announced at the end of 2016, and we actually started operations in the beginning of 2017, which is when I joined um, so this is our third year. >>And how's how's it going? How does it work? I mean, these things >>take time. It's been a fantastic experience. Uh, the organization works beautifully. Um, it was amazing to see it grow from the beginning. I was employee number 12, I think eso When I came in, it was just a nem p off his building and MP labs. And very quickly we had something running about from anything. Eso I'm very proud of the work that we have done to make that possible. Um And then, of course, that's you mentioned now, with co vid, um, we've been able to do a lot of very cool work, um, very being of the pandemic In March, when there was a deficit of testing, uh, capacity in California, we spun up a testing laboratory in record time in about a week. It was crazy. It was a crazy project. Um, but but incredibly satisfying. And we ended up running all the way until the beginning of November, when the lab was finally shut down, we could process about 3000 samples a day. I think at the end of it all, we were able to test about 100 on the road, 150,000 samples from all over the state. We were providing free testing toe all of the Department of Public Health Department of Public Health in California, which, at the media pandemic, had no way to do testing affordably and fast. So I think that was a great service to the state. Now the state has created a testing system that will serve those departments. So then we decided that it was unnecessary to keep going with testing in the other biopsy that would shut down, >>right? Thank you for that. Now, Now, Philip, you What you do is mind melting. You basically helped keep the world safe. Maybe you describe a little bit more about silver side detectors and what your role is there and how it all works. >>Tour. So we make a nuclear bomb detectors and we also make water detectors. So we try and do our part. Thio Keep the world from blowing up and make it a better place at the same time. Both of these applications use neutron radiation detectors. That's what we make. Put them out by a port border crossing Places like that they can help make sure that people aren't smuggling, shall we say, very bad things. Um, there's also a burgeoning field of research and application where you can use neutrons with some pretty cool physics to find water so you can do things like but a detector up in the mountains and measure snowpack. Put it out in the middle of the field and measure soil moisture content. And as you might imagine, there's some really cool applications in, uh, research and agronomy and public policy for this. >>All right, so it's OK, so it's It's much more than you know, whatever fighting terrorism, it's there's a riel edge, or I kind of i o t application for what you guys do. >>You do both Zito shares. You might >>say a mat. I I look at your role is kind of scaling the brain power for for the future. Maybe tell us more about Charlottesville schools and in the mission that you're pursuing and what you do. >>Thank you. Um, I've been in Charlottesville city schools for about 11 or 12 years. I started their teaching, Um, a handful of classes, math and science and things like that. But Thescore board and my administration had the crazy idea of starting an engineering program about seven years ago. My background is an engineering is an engineering. My masters is in mechanical and aerospace engineering. And, um, I basically spent a summer kind of coming up with what might be a fun engineering curriculum for our students. And it started with just me and 30 students about seven years ago, Um, kind of a home spun from scratch curriculum. One of my goals from the outside was to be a completely project based curriculum, and it's now grown. We probably have about six or 700 students, five or six full time teachers. We now have pre engineering going on at the 5th and 6th grade level. I now have students graduating. Uh, you know, graduating after senior year with, like, seven years of engineering under their belt and heading off to doing some pretty cool stuff. So it's It's been a lot of fun building up a program and, um, and learning a lot in the process. >>That's awesome. I mean, you know, Cuba's. We've been passionate about things like women in tech, uh, diversity stem. You know, not only do we need more more students in stem, we need mawr underrepresented women, minorities, etcetera. We were just talking to John her stock and integrate Grayson about this is do you do you feel is though you're I mean, first of all, the work that you do is awesome, but but I'll go one step further. Do you feel as though it's reaching, um, or, you know, diverse base and And how is that going? >>That's a great question. I think research shows that a lot of people get funneled into one kind of track or career path or set of interests really early on in their educational career. And sometimes that that funnels kind of artificial. And so that's one of the reasons we keep pushing back. Um, so our school systems introducing kindergartners to programming on DSO. We're trying to push back how we expose students to engineering and to stem fields as early as possible, and we've definitely seen the fruits of that in my program. In fact, my engineering program, uh, sprung out of an after school in Extracurricular Science Club that actually three girls started at our school. So I think that actually has helped that three girls started the club That eventually is what led our engineering programs that sort of baked into the DNA and also are a big public school. And we have about 50% of the students are under the poverty line, and we should I mean, Charlottesville, which is a big refugee town. And so I've been adamant from Day one that there are no barriers to entry into the program. There's no test you have to take. You don't have to have be taking a certain level of math or anything like that. That's been a lot of fun. To have a really diverse set of kids and or the program and be successful, >>that's phenomenal. That's great to hear. So, Philip, I wanna come back to you. You know, I think about maybe some day we'll be able to go back to a sporting events, and I know when I when I'm in there, there's somebody up on the roof looking out for me, you know, watching the crowd. And they have my back. And I think in many ways, the products that you build, you know, our similar I may not know they're there, but they're keeping us safe or they're measuring things that that that I don't necessarily see. But I wonder if you could talk about a little bit more detail about the products you build and how they're impacting society. >>Sure, So there are certainly a lot of people who are who are watching, trying to make sure things were going well in keeping you safe that you may or may not be aware of. And we try and support ah lot of them. So we have detectors that are that are deployed in a variety of variety of uses with a number of agencies and governments that dio like I was saying, ports and border crossing some other interesting applications that are looking for looking for signals that should not be there and working closely to fit into the operations these folks do Onda. We also have ah lot of outreach to researchers and scientists trying to help them support the work they're doing, um, using neutron detection for soil moisture monitoring is a some really cool opportunities for doing it at large scale and with much less, um, expense or complication then would have been done previous technologies. Mhm. You know, they were talking about collaboration in the previous segment. We've been able to join a number of conferences for that, virtually including one that was supposed to be held in Boston. But another one that was held, uh, of the University of Heidelberg in Germany. And, uh, this is sort of things that in some ways, the pandemic is pushing people towards greater collaboration than there would have been able to do. Had it all but in person. >>Yeah, we did. Uh, the cube did live works a couple years ago in Boston. It was awesome show. And I think, you know, with this whole trend toward digit, I call it the forced march to digital. Thanks to cove it I think that's just gonna continue. Thio grow Raphael one. If you could describe the process that you used to better understand diseases and what's your organization's involvement? Been in more detail, addressing the cove in pandemic. >>Um, so so we have the bio be structured in, Um um, in a way that foster So the combination of technology and science. So we have to scientific tracks, one about infectious diseases and the other one about understanding just basic human biology how the human body functions and especially how the cells in the human body function on how they're organized to create teachers in the body. Um, and then it has the set of platforms. Um, mind is one of them by engineering that are all technology. Read it. So we have data science platform, all about data analysis, machine learning, things like that. Um, we have a mass spectrometry platform is all about mass spectrometry technologies to, um, exploit those ones in service for the scientists on. We have a genomics platform. That is all about sequencing DNA in our DNA. Um, and then an advanced microscopy. It's all about developing technologies, uh, to look at things with advanced microscopes and the little technologies to marry computation on microscope. So, um, the scientists said the agenda and the platforms we just serve their needs, support their needs, and hopefully develop technologies that help them do their experiments better, faster, or allow them to the experiment that they couldn't do in any other way before. Um And so with cove, it because we have that very strong group of scientists that work on. I have been working on infectious disease before, and especially in viruses, we've been able to very quickly pivot to working on that s O, for example, my team was able to build pretty quickly a machine to automatically purified proteins, and it's being used to purify all these different important proteins in the cove. It virus the SARS cov to virus on Dwyer, sending some of those purified proteins all over the world. Two scientists that are researching the virus and trying to figure out how to develop vaccines, understand how the virus affects the body and all that. So some of the machines we built are having a very direct impact on this. Um, Also for the copy testing lab, we were able to very quickly develop some very simple machines that allowed the lab to function sort of faster and more efficiently. Sort of had a little bit of automation in places where we couldn't find commercial machines that would do it. >>Um, God s o mat. I mean, you gotta be listening to this in thinking about, Okay? Some. Someday your students are gonna be working at organizations like Like like Bio Hub and Silver Side. And you know, a lot of young people that just have I don't know about you guys, but like my kids, they're really passionate about changing the world. You know, there's way more important than, you know, the financial angles and that z e I gotta believe you're seeing that you're right in the front lines there. >>Really? Um, in fact, when I started the curriculum six or seven years ago, one of the first bits of feedback I got from my students is they said Okay, this is a lot of fun. So I had my students designing projects and programming microcontrollers raspberry, PiS and order We nose and things like that. The first bit of feedback I got from students was they said Okay, when do we get to impact the world? I've heard engineering is about making the world a better place, and robots are fun and all, but, you know, where is the real impact? And so, um do Yeah, thanks to the guidance of my students, I'm baking that Maurin. Now I'm like Day one of engineering one. We talk about how the things that the tools they're learning and the skills they're gaining eventually you know, very soon could be could be used to make the world a better place. >>You know, we all probably heard that famous line By Jeff Hammond Barker. The greatest minds of my generation are trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads. E. I think we're really generally generationally finally, at the point where you know young students and engineering and really you know it passionate about affecting society. I wanna get into the product, you know, side and understand how each of you are using on shape and and the value that that it brings. Maybe Raphael, you could start how long you've been using it. You know, what's your experience with it? Let's let's start there. >>I begin for about two years, and I switched to it with some trepidation. You know, I was used to always using the traditional product that you have to install on your computer, that everybody uses that. So I was kind of locked into that, but I started being very frustrated with the way it worked, um, and decided to give on ship chance. Which reputation? Because any change always, you know, causes anxiety. But very quickly my engineers started loving it. Uh, just because it's it's first of all, the learning curve wasn't very difficult at all. You can transfer from one from the traditional product to entree very quickly and easily. You can learn all the concepts very, very fast. It has all the functionality that we needed, and and what's best is that it allows to do things that we couldn't do before or we couldn't do easily. Um, now we can access the our cat documents from anywhere in the world. Um, so when we're in the lab fabricating something or testing a machine, any computer we have next to us or a tablet or on iPhone, we can pull it up and look at the cad and check things or make changes that something that couldn't do before because before you had to pay for every installation off the software for the computer, and I couldn't afford to have 20 installations to have some computers with the cat ready to use them like once every six months would have been very inefficient. So we love that part. And the collaboration features are fantastic. Especially now with Kobe, that we have to have all the remote meetings, eyes fantastic, that you can have another person drive the cad while the whole team is watching that person change the model and do things and point to things that is absolutely revolutionary. We love it. The fact that you have very, very sophisticated version control before it was always a challenge asking people, please, if you create anniversary and apart, how do we name it so that people find it? And then you end up with all these collection of files with names that nobody remembers, what they are, the person left and now nobody knows which version is the right one m s with on shape on the version ING system it has, and the fact that you can go back in history off the document and go back to previous version so easily and then go back to the press and version and explore the history of the part that is truly, um, just world changing for us, that we can do that so easily on for me as a manager to manage this collection of information that is critical for our operations. It makes it so much easier because everything is in one place. I don't have to worry about file servers that go down that I have to administer that have to have I t taken care off that have to figure how to keep access to people to those servers when they're at home. And they need a virtual private network and all of that mess disappears. I just simply give give a personal account on shape. And then, magically, they have access to everything in the way I want. And we can manage the lower documents and everything in a way, that is absolutely fantastic. >>Rafael, what was your what? What were some of the concerns you had mentioned? You had some trepidation. Was it a performance? Was it security? You know, some of the traditional cloud stuff and I'm curious as to how How whether any of those act manifested were they really that you had to manage? What were your concerns? >>Look, the main concern is how long is it going to take for everybody in the team? to learn to use the system like it and buy into it because I don't want to have my engineers using tools against their will write. I want everybody to be happy because that's how they're productive. They're happy and they enjoyed the tools they have. That was my main concern. I was a little bit worried about the whole concept of not having the files in a place where I couldn't quote unquote seat in some serving on site, but that that's kind of an outdated concept, right? So that took a little bit of a mind shift. But very quickly. Then I started thinking, Look, I have a lot of documents on Google Drive like I don't worry about that. Why would I worry about my cat on on shape? Right is the same thing. So I just needed to sort of put things in perspective that way. Um, the other, um, you know, their concern was the learning curve right is like how is he will be for everybody to and for me to learn it on whether it had all of the features that we needed and there were a few features that I actually discussed with, um uh, Cody at on shape on. They were actually awesome about using their scripting language in on shape to sort of mimic some of the features of the old cat, uh, in on shaped in a way that actually works even better than the old system. So it was It was amazing. Yeah. >>Great. Thank you for that, Phillip. What's your experience been? Maybe you could take us through your journey with on shape? >>Sure. So we've been we've been using on shaped Silver Side for coming up on about four years now, and we love it. We're very happy with it. We have a very modular product line, so and we make anything from detectors that would go into backpacks? Two vehicles, two very large things that a shipping container would go through and saw. Excuse me. Shape helps us to track and collaborate faster on the design, have multiple people working a same time on a project. And it also helps us to figure out if somebody else comes to us and say, Hey, I want something new. How we congrats modules from things that we already have. Put them together and then keep track of the design development and the different branches and ideas that we have, how they all fit together. A za design comes together and it's just been fantastic from a mechanical engineering background. I will also say that having used a number of different systems and solid works was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Before I got using on shape, I went, Wow, this is amazing. And I really don't want to design in any other platform after after getting on Lee a little bit familiar with it. >>You know, it's funny, right? I will have the speed of technology progression. I was explaining to some young guns the other day how e used to have a daytime er and that was my life. And if I lost that day, timer, I was dead. And I don't know how we weigh existed without, you know, Google Maps. Eso did we get anywhere? I don't know, but, uh, but so So, Matt, you know, it's interesting to think about, um, you know, some of the concerns that Raphael brought up, you hear? For instance, you know, all the time. Wow. You know, I get my Amazon bill at the end of the month It's through the roof in. But the reality is that Yeah, well, maybe you are doing more, but you're doing things that you couldn't have done before. And I think about your experience in teaching and educating. I mean, you so much more limited in terms of the resource is that you would have had to be able to educate people. So what's your experience been with With on shape and what is it enabled? >>Um, yeah, it was actually talking before we went with on shape. We had a previous CAD program and I was talking to my vendor about it, and he let me know that we were actually one of the biggest CAD shops in the state. Because if you think about it a really big program, you know, really big company might employ 5, 10, 15, 20 cad guys, right? I mean, when I worked for a large defense contractor, I think there were probably 20 of us as the cad guys. I now have about 300 students doing cat. So there's probably more students with more hours of cat under their belt in my building than there were when I worked for the big defense contractor. Um, but like you mentioned, uh, probably our biggest hurdle is just re sources. And so we want We want one of things I've always prided myself and trying to do in this programs provide students with access two tools and skills that they're going to see either in college or in the real world. So it's one of the reason we went with a big professional cad program. There are, you know, sort of k 12 oriented software and programs and things. But, you know, I want my kids coding and python and using slack and using professional type of tools on DSO when it comes to cat. That's just that that was a really hurt. I mean, you know, you could spend $30,000 on one seat of, you know, professional level cad program, and then you need a $30,000 computer to run it on if you're doing a heavy assemblies, Um, and so one of my dreams and it was always just a crazy dream. And I was the way I would always pitcher in my school system and say someday I'm gonna have a kid on a school issued chromebook in subsidized housing on public WiFi doing professional level bad and that that was a crazy statement until a couple of years ago. So we're really excited that I literally and, you know, march in, um, you said the forced march the forced march into, you know, modernity, March 13th kids sitting in my engineering lab that we spent a lot of money on doing. Cad March 14th. Those kids were at home on their school shoot chromebooks on public WiFi, uh, keeping their designs going and collaborating. And then, yeah, I could go on and on about some of the things you know, the features that we've learned since then they're even better. So it's not like this is some inferior, diminished version of the cat. And there's so much about it, E >>wanna I wanna ask you that I may be over my skis on this, but we're seeing we're starting to see the early days of the democratization of CAD and product design. It is the the citizen engineer. I mean, maybe insulting to the engineers in the room, but but is that we're beginning to see that >>I have to believe that everything moves into the cloud. Part of that is democratization that I don't need. I can whether you know, I think artists, you know, I could have a music studio in my basement with a nice enough software package. And Aiken, I could be a professional for now. My wife's a photographer. I'm not allowed to say that I could be a professional photographer with, you know, some cloud based software. And so, yeah, I do think that's part of what we're seeing is more and more technology is moving to the cloud >>Philip or Rafael anything. Your dad, >>I think I mean yeah, that that that combination of cloud based cat and then three D printing that is becoming more and more affordable on ubiquitous It's truly transformative, and I think for education is fantastic. I wish when I was a kid I had the opportunity to play with those kinds of things because I was always the late things. But, you know, the in a very primitive way. So, um, I think there's a dream for kids Thio to be able to do this. And, um, yeah, there's so many other technologies coming on, like Arduino and all of these electronic things that live. Kids play at home very cheaply with things that back in my day would have been unthinkable. >>So we know there's a go ahead. Philip Way >>had a pandemic and silver site moved to a new manufacturing facility this year. I was just on the shop floor, talking with contractors, standing 6 ft apart, pointing at things. But through it all, our CAD system was completely unruffled. Nothing stopped in our development work. Nothing stopped in our support for existing systems in the field. We didn't have to think about it. We had other server issues, but none with our, you know, engineering cad, platform and product development and support world right ahead, which was cool, but also a That's point. I think it's just really cool what you're doing with the kids. The most interesting secondary and college level engineering work that I did was project based. It's an important problem to the world. Go solve it and that is what we do here. That is what my entire career has been. And I'm super excited to see See what your students are gonna be doing, uh, in there home classrooms on their chromebooks now and what they do. Building on that. >>Yeah, I'm super excited to see your kids coming out of college with engineering degrees because yeah, I think that project based experience is so much better than just sitting in a classroom, taking notes and doing math problems on. And I think he will give the kids a much better flavor What engineering is really about. Think a lot of kids get turned off by engineering because they think it's kind of dry because it's just about the math for some very abstract abstract concept, and they are there. But I think the most important thing is just that. Hands on a building and the creativity off, making things that you can touch that you can see that you can see functioning. >>Great. So you know, we all know the relentless pace of technology progression. So when you think about when you're sitting down with the folks that on shape and there the customer advisor for one of the things that you want on shape to do that it doesn't do today >>I could start by saying, I just love some of the things that does do because it's such a modern platform and I think some of these, uh, some some platforms that have a lot of legacy and a lot of history behind them. I think we're dragging some of that behind them. So it's cool to see a platform that seemed to be developed in a modern era. And so that's, you know, it is the Google docks. And so the fact that collaboration and version ing and link sharing is, and, like, platform agnostic abilities the fact that that seems to be just built into the nature of the thing so far, that's super exciting as far as things that it to go from there, Um, I don't know. >>Other than price, >>you can't say I >>can't say lower price. >>Yeah, so far on a PTC s that worked with us. Really well, so I'm not complaining. There. You there? >>Yeah. Yeah. No Gaps, guys. Whitespace, Come on. >>We've been really enjoying the three week update Cadence. You know, there's a new version every three weeks and we don't have to install it. We just get all the latest and greatest goodies. One of the trends that we've been following and enjoying is the the help with a revision management and release work flows. Um, and I know that there's more than on shape is working on that we're very excited for, because that's a big important part about making real hardware and supporting it in the field. Um, something that was cool. They just integrated Cem markup capability In the last release that took, we were doing that anyway, but we were doing it outside of on shapes, and now we get to streamline our workflow and put it in the CAD system where we're making those changes anyway, when we're reviewing drawings and doing this kind of collaboration. And so I think from our perspective, we continue to look forward toa further progress on that. There's a lot of capability in the cloud that I think they're just kind of scratching the surface on you. >>I would. I mean, you're you're asking to knit. Pick. I would say one of the things that I would like to see is is faster regeneration speed. There are a few times with comics necessities that regenerating the document takes a little longer than I would like to. It's not a serious issue, but anyway, I'm being spoiled, >>you know. That's good. I've been doing this a long time and I like toe Ask that question of practitioners and to me, it it's a signal like when you're nit picking and that you're struggling to knit. Pick that to me is a sign of a successful product. And And I wonder, I don't know, uh, have the deep dive into the architecture, But are things like alternative processors? You're seeing them hit the market in a big way. Uh, you know, maybe a helping address the challenge, But I'm gonna ask you the big, chewy question now, then would maybe go to some audience questions when you think about the world's biggest problems. I mean, we're global pandemics. Obviously top of mind. You think about nutrition, you know, feeding the global community. We've actually done a pretty good job of that. But it's not necessarily with the greatest nutrition climate change, alternative energy, the economic divides. You've got geopolitical threats and social unrest. Health care is a continuing problem. What's your vision for changing the world and how product innovation for good can be applied to some of the the problems that that you all are passionate about? Big question. But who wants toe start >>not biased. But for years I've been saying that if you want to solve the economy, the environment, uh, global unrest, pandemics education is the case If you wanna if you want to, um, make progress in those in those realms, I think funding funding education is probably gonna pay off pretty well. >>Absolutely. And I think stem is key to that. I mean, all of the, ah lot of the well being that we have today and then industrialized countries, thanks to science and technology, right, improvements in health care, improvements in communication, transportation, air conditioning. Um, every aspect of life is touched by science and technology. So I think having more kids studying and understanding that is absolutely key. Yeah, I agree, >>Philip, you got anything they had? >>I think there's some big technical problems in the world today, Raphael and ourselves there certainly working on a couple of them. Think they're also collaboration problems and getting everybody doing ableto pull together instead of pulling, pulling separately and to be able to spur the idea is onwards. So that's where I think the education side is really exciting. What Matt is doing and and it just kind of collaboration in general when we could do provide tools to help people do good work? Uh, that is, I think, valuable. >>Yeah, I think that's a very good point. And along those lines, we have some projects that are about creating very low cost instruments for low research settings places in Africa, Southeast Asia, South America so that they can do, um, um, biomedical research that it's difficult to do in those place because they don't have the money to buy the fancy lab machines that cost $30,000 an hour. Um, so we're trying to sort of democratize some of those instruments. And I think thanks to tools like Kahn shaped and is easier, for example, to have a conversation with somebody in Africa and show them the design that we have and discuss the details of it with them. Andi, that's amazing. Right? To have somebody you know, 10 time zones away, Um, looking really life in real time with you about your design and discussing the details or teaching them how to build a machine. Right? Because, um, you know, they have a three d printer. You can you just give them the design and say, like, you build it yourself, uh, even cheaper than and, you know, also billing and shipping it there. Um, so all that that that aspect of it is also so super important, I think, for any of these efforts to improve, um, some of the hardest part was in the world from climate change. Do you say, as you say, poverty, nutrition issues? Um, you know, availability of water. You have that project at about finding water. Um, if we can also help deploy technologies that teach people remotely how to create their own technologies or how to build their own systems that will help them solve those forms locally. I think that's very powerful. >>Yeah, that point about education is right on. I think some people in the audience may be familiar with the work of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the second machine age where they sort of put forth the premise that, uh, is it laid it out. Look, for the first time in history, machines air replacing humans from a cognitive perspective. Machines have always replaced humans, but that's gonna have an impact on jobs. But the answer is not toe protect the past from the future. Uh, the answer is education and public policy. That really supports that. So I couldn't agree more. I think it's a really great point. Um, we have We do have some questions from the audience. If if we can. If I can ask you guys, um, you know, this one kind of stands out. How do you see artificial intelligence? I was just talking about machine intelligence. Um, how do you see that? Impacting the design space guys trying to infuse a I into your product development. What can you tell me? >>Um, absolutely. Like, we're using AI for some things, including some of these very low cost instruments that will hopefully help us diagnose certain diseases, especially this is that are very prevalent in the Third World. Um, and some of those diagnostics are these days done by thes armies of technicians that are trained to look under the microscope. But, um, that's a very slow process. Is very error prone and having machine learning systems that can, to the same diagnosis faster, cheaper and also little machines that can be taken to very remote places to these villages that have no access to a fancy microscope to look at a sample from a patient that's very powerful, and I we don't do this. But I have read quite a bit about how certain places air, using a Tribune attorneys to actually help them optimize designs for parts. So you get these very interesting looking parts that you would have never thought off. A person would have never thought off, but that are incredibly light ink earlier strong and I have all sort of properties that are interesting thanks to artificial intelligence machine learning in particular, >>yet another, uh, advantage you get when when your work is in the cloud I've seen. I mean, there's just so many applications that so if the radiology scan is in the cloud and the radiologist is goes to bed at night, radiologist could come in in the morning and and say, Oh, the machine while you were sleeping was using artificial intelligence to scan these 40,000 images. And here's the five that we picked out that we think you should take a closer look at or like Raphael said. I can design my part. My, my, my, my, my you know, mount or bracket or whatever and go to sleep. And then I wake up in the morning. The machine has improved. It for me has made it strider strider stronger and lighter. Um And so just when your when your work is in the cloud, that's just that's a really cool advantage that you get that you can have machines doing some of your design work for you. >>Yeah, we've been watching, uh, you know, this week is this month, I guess is aws re invent and it's just amazing to see how much effort is coming around machine learning machine intelligence. You know, Amazon has sage maker Google's got, you know, embedded you no ML and big query. Certainly Microsoft with Azure is doing tons of stuff and machine learning. I think the point there is that that these things will be infused in tow R and D and in tow software products by the vendor community. And you all will apply that to your business and and build value through the unique data that your collecting you know, in your ecosystems. And and that's how you add value. You don't have to be necessarily, you know, developers of artificial intelligence, but you have to be practitioners to apply that. Does that make sense to you, Philip? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think your point about value is really well chosen. We see AI involved from the physics simulations all the way up to interpreting radiation data, and that's where the value question, I think, is really important because it's is the output of the AI giving helpful information that the people that need to be looking at it. So if it's curating a serious of radiation alert, saying, Hey, like these are the anomalies you need to look at eyes it, doing that in a way that's going to help a good response on. In some cases, the II is only as good as the people. That sort of gave it a direction and turn it loose. And you want to make sure that you don't have biases or things like that underlying your AI that air going to result in, uh in less than helpful outcomes coming from it. So we spend quite a lot of time thinking about how do we provide the right outcomes to people who are who are relying on our systems? >>That's a great point, right? Humans, air biased and humans build models, so models are inherently biased. But then software is hitting the market. That's gonna help us identify those biases and help us, you know? Of course. Correct. So we're entering Cem some very exciting times, guys. Great conversation. I can't thank you enough for spending the time with us and sharing with our audience the innovations that you're bringing to help the world. So thanks again. >>Thank you so much. >>Thank you. >>Okay. You're welcome. Okay. When we come back, John McElheny is gonna join me. He's on shape. Co founder. And he's currently the VP of strategy at PTC. He's gonna join the program. We're gonna take a look at what's next and product innovation. I'm Dave Volonte and you're watching innovation for good on the Cube, the global leader. Digital technology event coverage. We'll be right back

>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to Entities Summit. My name is Ellen Komarovsky and I will talk about sparks So simple realizable arguments of knowledge. This talk is based on the joint work No, me, Frank, Cody, Freytag and Raphael past. Let me start by telling you what's the same documents are that's the same argument is a special type of interactive protocol between the prove prove er and the verifier who share some instance X, >>which is allegedly in some language. And the goal of the protocol is for the proper toe convince the very far that access indeed in the language for completeness, the guarantees that their guarantees that if X is indeed in the language, the verifier will in the end of the protocol indeed be convinced. On the other hand, for sadness we require that if X is not in the language, that no matter what the proper does, as long as it is bounded to run in polynomial time, the verifier will not be convinced. There is a stronger notion of sadness called an argument of knowledge, which says that the only way for the approval to continue the verifier is by knowing some witness there is a mathematical way to formalize this notion, but I will not get into it for efficiency. And what makes this protocol succinct is that we require the very far is running time and communication complexity between the program, the verifier Toby, both mounted by some political written function in T, where T is the time to verify the empty statement. In terms of the proof is running time, we don't require anything except that it's, for example, in normality. The goal of this work is to improve this polygonal overhead of the prove er, to explain why this is an important task. Let me give you a motivating example, which is just the concept of delegation of computation. So considering some small device, like a laptop or smartphone, that we used to perform some complicated computation which it cannot do. Since it is a big device, it wishes to delegate the computation to some service or cloud to perform the computation for it. Since the small device does not fully trust the service, it may want to ask the device the service to also issue a proof for correctness of the computation. And the problem is that if the proof it takes much more time than just performing the computation. It's not clear that this is something that will be useful in practice thinking. Think off an overhead, which is square of the time it takes to perform the computation. This will become, very quickly a very big number or very, very large delay for generating the We're not the >>first to study this problem. It has been studied for several decades, and at least from a theoretical point of view, the problem is almost solved or essentially solved. We have constructions off argument systems is great overhead, just bottle of arrhythmic multiplicity of overhead. This is obtained by combining efficient disappears. Together with Killian's arguments is there's a >>huge open problem in complexity. Theory of constructing PCP is with constant over namely, running just in linear time in the running, in the running time off just running the computation. But we argued that even if we had such a PCP and the constant was great, let's say it was just too. This would already be too much, because if you delegate the computation to takes a month toe complete, then waiting another month just for the proof might not be so reasonable. There is a solution in the literature for this problem in what we call using what we call a reliable PCP medicine. And I'll show that there is a recipe construction that has the following very useful property. Once you perform the computation itself without the just the computation and write down the computation to blow, then there is the way to generate every simple off the PCP in just only logarithmic time. So this means that you can, in parallel after computing the function itself, you can empire led, compute the whole PCP in just falling over it. Next time this gives you this gives us a great argument system with just t plus Polly locked parallel time instead of three times for luck tea time. But for this we need about the process service, which is prohibitively large. This is where sparks come in. We introduced the notion, or the paradigm off, computing the proof in part to the computation, not after the computation is done slightly more formally. What spark is it's just a succinct argument of knowledge, like what we said before, with the very fired and communication of Leslie being small but now we also require approval for which is super efficient. Namely, it can be paralyzed able. And it has to finish the proof together with the computation in Time T plus volatility, which essentially the best you can hope for. And we want to prefer to do so only with political rhythmic number off processors. You can also extend the definition to handling computations, which are to begin with a paralyze herbal. But I will not touch upon this. In the stock, you can see the paper. For the >>girls, we have two main results. The first main result is the construction of an interactive spark. It's just four rounds, and it is assumes Onley collisions is not hash functions. The second result is a non interactive spark. This result also assumes career resistant hash functions and in addition, the existence off any snark and namely succinct, non interactive argument of college that does not have to be a super efficient in terms of programming time. Slightly more generally, the two theories follow from >>combined framework, which takes essentially any argument of knowledge and turns it into a spark by assuming on a collision system, hash functions and maybe the multi behind the construction could be viewed as a trade off between computation time and process. Source. Winston. She ate theorem one using Killings protocol, which is an argument of knowledge, which is a four round argument of knowledge. And we insensate you're into using its not which is an argument knowledge. Just by definition, let me tell you what are the main ideas underlying our construction before telling you to control the ideas. Let me make some simplifying assumptions. The first assumption I will only be talking about the non interactive regime. The second example assumption is that I'm going to assume snark, which is a non interactive 16 argument of knowledge. And then we'll assume that's not the snark which is super efficient. So it will consumed other time to t for computation that takes 20 so almost what we want, but just not yet, not not yet there. I will assume that the computation that we want to perform a sequential and additionally I will assume that the computation has no >>space, namely its ah, or it has very low space. So think about the sequential computation, which MM doesn't have a lot of space or even zero for the for the time being, I would like to discuss how to simplify, how to remove this simplifying assumptions. So the starting idea is based on two works off a nettle and duckling. It'll from a couple of years ago. And here's how it works. So >>remember, we want toe performative time. Computation generated proof and we need to finish roughly by time. T. So the idea is to run half of the computation, which is what we can afford because we have a snark that can generate a proof in additional to over two steps so we can run the complete half of the computation and prove that half of the computation all in time T. And the idea is that now we can recursive Lee computer improve the rest of the computation in Parliament. Here's how it looks like. So you run half of the computation, started proof, and then you run a quarter of the remaining half of the remaining computation, which is a quarter of the original one, and prove it. And in parallel again, you take another eighth of the computation, which is one half of what's left and so on. And so forth. As you can see, that eventually will finish the whole computation. And you only need something like logarithmic Lee. Many parallel processors and the communication complexity and verifies running time only grow by algorithmic >>factor. So this is the main idea. Let's go back to the simplifying assumptions we have. So the first one was that I'm only gonna talk about the new interactive regime. You have to believe me that the same ideas extend to the interactive case, which is a little bit more massive with notation. But the ideas extent so I will not talk about it anymore. The second assumption I had was that I have a super efficient start, so it had over had two T >>40 time computation again. You have to believe me that if you work out the math, then the ideas extend to starts with quasi linear overhead. Namely, starts that working time tee times, Polly locked e and then the result extends to any snark because of a result because of a previous work will be tense. Kettle, who showed that a snark with the proof it runs in polynomial time can be generically translated into a snark where the programs in quasi linear with quasi linear overhead. So this gives a result from any stark not only from pretty efficient starts. The last bullet was about the fact that we're dealing with only with sequential Ram computations. And again, you have to believe me that the ideas can be extended toe tyrants And the last assumption which is the focus of this work is how to get rid of the small space assumption. This is what I'm gonna be talking next. Let's see what goes wrong. If the if the computation has space, remember what we did in the previous. In a couple of slides ago, the construction was toe perform. Half of the computation prove it and then half of the remaining computation prove it. And >>so on. If you write down the statement that each of these proofs proofs, it's something like that a machine m on input X executed for some number of steps starting from some state ended at some other state. And if you notice the statement itself depends on the space of the computation, well and therefore, if the space of the computation is nontrivial, the statements are large and therefore the communication will be large and therefore the very fire will have toe be running time, proportional to the space and so on. So we don't even get a saint argument if we do it. Neighborly. Here's a solution for this problem. You can say, Well, you don't have to include the space in the whole space. In the statement, you can include only a digest of the space. Think about some hash function of the space. So indeed, you can modify the statement to not include the space, but only a digest. And now the statement will be a little bit more complicated. It will be that there exists some initial state end state such that there hush is consistent with digest in the statement. And if you run the machine M for K state and for K steps starting from the initial space, you end up with the final space. So this is great. It indeed solves the communication complexity problem in the very far complexity problem. But notice that from the proof for site, we didn't actually do anything because we just move, pushed the complexity in tow. The weakness. So the proof is running. Time is still very large with this solution. Yeah. Our final solution, if in a very high level, is to compress the witness. So instead of using the whole space is the witness. We will be using the computation itself in the computation that we ran as the witness. So now the statement will be off the same form, so it will still be. It will still consist off to digests and machine. But now the the witness will be not the whole state. But it will be the case steps that we performed. Namely, it will be that there exists case steps that I performed such that if I run >>the machine m on this case steps and I started with a digest and I just start and I applied this case steps on the digest. I will end up with the Final Digest. In order to implement this, we need some sort off a nap. Datable digest. This is not really hard, not so hard to obtain because you could just do something like a miracle tree. It's not hard to see that you can add the locations in the medical tree quite efficiently. But the problem is that we need toe toe to compute those updates. Not only not only we need toe be ableto update the hash browns, the hush or the largest which don't also be able to compute the updates in parallel to the computation. And to this end, we introduce a variant of Merkle trees and show how to perform all of those updates level by level in the in the Merkel tree in a pipeline in fashion. So namely, we push the updates off the digest in toe the Merkel tree, one after the other without waiting for the previous ones to end. And here we're using the tree structure off Merkle trees. So that's all I'm gonna say about the protocol. I'm just gonna end with showing you how the final protocol looks like We run case steps of computations. Okay, one steps of computation and we compute the K updates for those case steps in violent the computation. So every time we run a step of computation, we also update start an update off our digest. And once we are finished computing all the updates, we can start running a proof using those updates as witness and were forcibly continuing this way as a conclusion this results with the spark namely 1/16 argument system with the proof is running Time t plus for you Look, team and no times and all we need is something like quality of arrhythmic number of processors. E would like to mention that this is a theoretical result and by no means should be should be taken as a za practical thing that should be implemented. But I think that it is important to work on it. And there is a lot of interesting questions on how to make this really practical and useful. So with that, I'm gonna end and thank you so much for inviting me and enjoy the sandwich.

>>from around the globe. It's the cue with digital coverage of out systems. Next Step 2020 Brought to you by out systems. I'm stupid, man. And welcome back to the cubes Coverage of out systems Next step course. One of the items that we've been talking a lot in the industry is about how artificial intelligence, machine learning or helping people is. We go beyond what really human scale can do and we need to be ableto do things more machine scale. Help us really dig into this topic. Happy to welcome to the program First time guest Antonio Alegria. He is the head of artificial intelligence at out systems. Tonio, thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. So I'm really happy to be here and and really talk a little bit about what? We're doing it out systems to help our customers and our leverage eai to get to those goals. >>Wonderful. So I I saw ahead of the event a short video that you did and talked about extreme agility with no limits. So, you know, before we drink, dig into the product itself. Maybe if you could just how should we be thinking about a I you know, there's broad spectrum. Is that machine learning that there's various components in there? Listen to the big analyst firms. You know, the journey. It's big steps and something that that is pretty broad. So when we're talking about A I, you know, what does that mean to you? What does that mean to your customers? >>Eso So AI out systems really speaks to division and the core strategy we have for our product, which is, you know, if you saw the keynote, no, we talk about no, really enabling every company, even those that you know, that existed for decades, perhaps have a lot of legacy to become. You know, leading elite cloud software development companies and really can develop digital solutions at scale really easily. But one thing we see and then this is a big statistic. One of the things that limits limits CEOs the most nowadays is really the lack of town lack of engineering, a softer engineering, you know, ability and people that that that could do that. And there's a statistic that was reported by The Wall Street Journal. I saw it recently, perhaps last year, that said that according to federal jobs dating the U. S. By the end of 2. 2020 there would be about a million unfilled I E. T s after development jobs available. Right? So there's this big problem All of these companies really need to scale, really need to invest in digital systems and so horribly fed out systems. We've already been abstracting and we've been focusing automating as much as possible the softer development tools and applications that use. We've already seen amazing stories of people coming from different backgrounds really starting to develop, really leading edge applications. And we want to take this to the next level. And we believe that artificial intelligence with machine learning but also with other AI technologies that were also taking advantage of can really help us get to a next stage of productivity. So from 10 x productivity to 100 x productivity and we believe AI plays a rolling three ways. We believe II by learning from all of this data that we not collect in terms of, you know, projects are being developed. We're essentially trying to embed a tech lead, so to speak, inside a product and attack Lee that can help developers by guiding them got in the most junior ones by automating some of the boring, repetitive tasks were by validating their work. Making sure that they're using the best practice is making sure that it helps them as they scale to re factor on their code to automatically designed architectures. Things like that >>Wonderful. Antonio Gonzalo stated it quite clearly in the interview that I had with him. It's really about enabling that next you know, 10 million developers. We know that there is that skill gap, as you said, and you know everybody right now how can I do more? How can I react faster? Eso that's where you know, the machine learning artificial intelligence should be able to help. So bring us inside. I know the platform itself has had, you know, guidance and and the whole movement. You know, what we used to call low code was about simplifying things and allowing people to, you know, build faster. So bring us inside the product. You know what? The enhancements? One of the new pieces. Some of the key key items, >>Yes, So 11 interesting thing. And I think one thing that I think out system is really proud of being able to achieve is if you look at how out system has been using a AI within the platform. We started with introducing AI assistance within the Our Software Development Environment Service studio. Right? And so this capability, we've been generating it a lot. We've been evolving it, and now it's really able to accelerate significantly and guide novices, but also help pros dealing through software development process and coding by essentially trying to infer understanding their context and trying to infer their intent and then automating the steps afterwards. And we do this by suggesting you the most likely let's say function or or code p sexual one you need. But then, at the next step, which we're introducing this year, even better, which is we're trying to auto fill most of them. Let's see the variables and all of that in the data flow that you need to collect. And so you get a very delightful frictionless experience as you are coating, so you're closer to the business value even more than before. Now this is the This was just the first step, what you're seeing now and what we're announcing, and we're showing up at this next step that we show that the keynote is that we're trying to fuse starting to fuse AI across the out systems products and across this after development life cycle. So he took this core technology that we used to guide developers and assistant automate their work. Um, and we use the same capability to help developers. Tech leads an architect's to analyze the code, learning from the bad patterns that exist, learning from and receiving runtime information about crashes and performance and inside the product recall architecture, dashboard were really able to give recommendations to these architects and tech leads. Where should they evolve and improve their code? And we're using AI refusing AI in this product into very specific ways. Now that we're releasing today, which is one is to automatically collect and design and defined the architecture. So we call this automated architecture discovery. So if you have a very large factory, you can imagine, you know have lots of different modules, lots of different applications, and if you need to go and manually have to label everything so this is ah, front, and this is the back end. That would take a lot of time. So we use machine learning, learning from what architects have already done in the past, classifying their architecture. And we can map out your architecture completely automatically, which is really powerful. Then we also use our AI engine to analyze your factory and weaken detect the best opportunities for re factoring. Sorry. Factoring is one of the top problems in the top smells and technical depth problems that large factories have. Right, So we can completely identify and pinpoint. What are these opportunities for re factory and we guide you through it, which held you okay, all of these hundreds of functions and logic patterns that we see in your code Could you re factor this into a single function and you can save a lots and lots of code because, as you know, the best code the fastest coast easiest to maintain is the Cody. Don't ride. You don't have. So we're trying to really eliminate Kurt from these factories with these kids ability. >>Well, it's fascinating. You're absolutely right. I'm curious. You know, I think back to some of the earliest interactions I had with things that give you guys spell checkers. Grammar check. How much does the AI that you work on. Does it learn what specific for my organization in my preferences? Is there any community learning over time? Because there are industry breast pack that best practices out there that are super valuable. But, you know, we saw in the SAS wave when I can customize things myself were learned over time. So how does that play into kind of today in the road map for a I that you're building >>that? That's a good question. So our AI let's say technology that we use it actually uses to two different big kinds of AI. So we use machine learning definitely to learn from the community. What are the best practices and what are the most common pattern that people use? So we use that to guide developers, but also to validate and analyze their code. But then we also use automated reasoning. So this is more logic based reasoning based AI and repair these two technologies to really create a system that is able to learn from data but also be able to reason at a higher order about what are good practices and kind of reach conclusions from there and learn new things from there now. We started by applying these technologies to more of the community data and kind of standard best practices. But our vision is to more and more start learning specifically and allowing tech leads an architect even in the future. To Taylor. These engines of AI, perhaps to suggest these are the best practices for my factory. These patterns perhaps, are good best practices in general. But in my factory, I do not want to use them because I have some specificities for compliance or something like that. And our vision is that architects and techniques can just provide just a few examples of what they like and what they don't like in the engine just automatically learns and gets tailor to their own environment. >>So important that you're able to, uh, you know, have the customers move things forward in the direction that makes sense on their end. I'm also curious. You talk about, um, you know what what partnerships out systems has out there, you know, being able to tie into things like what the public cloud is doing. Lots of industry collaboration. So how does health system fit into the kind of the broader ai ecosystem. >>Yes. So one thing I did not mention and to your point is eso were have kind of to, um Teoh Complementary visions and strategies for a I. So one of them is we really want to improve our own product, improve the automation in the product in the abstraction by using AI together with great user experience and the best programming language for software on automation. Right, So that's one. That's what we generally call AI assisted development. And if using AI across this software development life cycle, the other one is We also believe that you know, true elite cloud software companies that create frictionless experiences. One of the things that they used to really be super competitive and create this frictionless experiences is that they can themselves use AI and machine learning to to automate processes created really, really delightful experiences. So we're also investing and we've shown and we're launching, announcing that next step we just showed this at at the keynote one tool that we call the machine learning builder ml builder. So this essentially speaks to the fact that you know, a lot of companies do not have access to data science talent. They really struggle to adopt machine learning. Like just one out of 10 companies are able to go and put a I in production. So we're essentially abstracting also that were also increasing the productivity for you for customers to implement an AI and machine learning we use. We use partners behind the scenes and cloud providers for the core technology with automated machine learning and all of that. But we abstract all of the experience so developers can essentially just pick of the data they have already in the inside the all systems platform, and they want to just select. I want to trade this machine learning model to predict this field, just quickly click and it runs dozens of experiments, selects the best algorithms, transforms that the data for you without you needing to have a lot of data science experience. And then you can just drag and drop in the platform integrating your application. And you're good to go. >>Well, it sounds comes Ah, you know, phenomenal. You mentioned data scientists. We talked about that. The skill gap. Do you have any statistics? You know? Is this helping people you know? Higher, Faster. Lower the bar the entry for people to get on board, you know, increased productivity. What kind of hero numbers do your customers typically, you know, how do they measure success? >>Yes, So we know that in for machine learning adoption at cos we know that. Sorry, This is one of the top challenges that they have, right? So companies do not. It's not only that they do not have the expertise to implement machine learning at in their products in their applications. They don't even have a good understanding of what are the use cases in or out of the technology opportunities for them to apply. Right? So this has been listed by lots of different surveys that this is the top problem. These other 22 of the top problems that companies have to adopt a ice has access to skilled. They decided skill, understanding of the use case. And that's exactly what we're trying to kind of package up in a very easy to use product where you can see the use cases you have available, we just select your data, you just click train. You do not need to know that many greedy details and for us, a measure of success is that we've seen customers that are starting to experiment with ML Builder is that in just a day or a few days that can iterating over several machine learning models and put them in production. We have customers that have, you know, no machine learning models and production ever, and they just now have to, and they're starting to automate processes. They're starting to innovate with business. And that, for us, is we've seen it's kind of the measure of success for businesses initially, what they want to do is they want to do. POC is and they want to experiment and they want to get to production stopped. Getting to field for it and generate from >>a product standpoint, is the A. I just infused in or there's there additional licensing, how to customers, you know to take advantage of it. What's the impact on that from the relationship without systems? >>Yes. So for for for a I in machine learning that is fused into our product and for automation, validation and guidance, there's no extra charge is just part of the product. It's what we believe is kind of a core building block in a course service for everything we do in our product for machine learning services and components that customers can use to in their own applications. We allow you to integrate with cloud providers, and the building is is done separately on. That's something that that we're working towards and building great technical partnerships and exploring other avenues for deeper integration so that developers and customers do not really have to worry about those things. Well, >>it's it's It's such a great way to really democratize the use of this technology platform that they're used to. They start doing it. What's general feedback from your customers? Did they just like, Oh, it's there. I start playing with it. It's super easy. It makes it better there any concerns or push back. Have we gotten beyond that? What? What? What do you hear any any good customer examples you can share us toe general adoption? >>Yes. So, as I said, as we re reduce the friction for adopting these technologies, we've seen one thing that's very interesting. So we have a few customers that are present more in the logistics site of industry and vertical, and so they they have a more conservative management, like take time to adopt and more of a laggard in adopting these kinds of technologies, the businesses more skeptical. But I want to spend a lot of time playing around right and whence they saw. Once they saw what they could do with a platform, they quickly did a proof of concept. They show to the business and the business had lots of ideas. So they just started interacting a lot more with I t, which is something we see without systems platform not just for a I machine learning, but generally in the jib. Digital transformation is when the I teak and can start really being very agile in iterating and innovating, and they start collaborating a lot with the business. And so what we see is customers asking us for even more so customers want more use cases to be supported like this. Customers also the ones that are more mature than already, have their centers of excellence and they have their data scientists, for example. They want to understand how they can also bring in perhaps their use of very specialized tool talking in it. Integrate that into the platform so that you know, for certain use cases. Developer scan very quickly trained their own models. But so specialized data science teams can also bring in. And developers can integrate their models easily and put them into production, which is one of the big barriers we see in a lot of companies people working on yearlong projects. They develop the models that they struggle to get them to production. And so we really want to focus on the whole into in journey. Either you're building everything within the octopus platform or you're bringing it from a specialized pro tool. We want to make that whole journey frictionless in school. >>And Tony a final question I have for you. Of course, this space we're seeing maturing, you know, rapid Ah, new technologies out there gives a little look forward. What should we be expecting to see from out systems or things even a little broader? If you look at your your partner ecosystem over kind of the next 6, 12 18 months, >>Yes. So, um, what you're going to continues to see a trend, I think, from from the closer providers of democratization of the AI services. So this is during that just starting to advanced and accelerate as these providers started packaging. It's like what out systems also doing, starting to packaging Cem some specific, well defined use cases and then making the journey for training these models and deploying Super super simple. That's one thing that's continued to ramp up, and we're going to move from A I services more focused on cognitive, pre trained models, right, that which is kind of the status quo to custom ai models based on your data. That's kind of the train we're going to start seeing in that out systems also pushing forward generally from the AI and machine learning application and technology side of thing. I think one thing that we're leading leading on is that you know, machine learning and deep learning is definitely one of the big drivers for the innovation that we're seeing in a I. But you're start seeing more and more what is called hybrid I, which is taking machine learning and data based artificial intelligence with more logic based automated reasoning techniques, impairing these two to really create systems that are able to operate at a really higher level, higher cognitive level of which is what out systems investing internally in terms of research and development and with partnerships with institutions like Carnegie Mellon University and >>rely Antonio, who doesn't want, you know, a tech experts sitting next to them helping get rid of some of the repetitive, boring things or challenges. Thank you so much for sharing the update. Congratulations. Definitely Look forward to hearing war in the future. >>Thank you. Do have a good day >>Stay tuned for more from out systems. Next step is to minimum and thank you for watching.

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hey welcome back here writer jeff rick here with the cube we're in our Palo Alto studios you know kind of continuing our leadership coverage reaching out to the community for people that we've got in our community to get their take on you know how they're dealing with the Kovach crisis how they're helping to contribute back to the community to to bring their resources to bear and you know just some general good tips and tricks of getting through these kind of challenging times and we're really excited to have one of my favorite guests he's being used to come on all the time we haven't had them on for three years which I can't believe it sabi Mehta the CEO of true SATA founder to say to obby I checked the record I can't believe it's been three years since we last that down great to see you Jeff there's well first of all it's always a pleasure and I think the only person to blame for that is you Jeff well I will make sure that it doesn't happen again so in just a check-in how's things going with the family the company thank you for asking you know family is great we have I've got two young kids who have become video conferencing experts and they don't teach me the tricks for it which I'm sure is happening a lot of families around the world and the team is great we vent remote at this point almost almost two months ago down and can't complain I think their intellectual property business like you are so it's been a little easier for us to go remote compared to a lot of other businesses in the world and in America but no complaints it'll be very fortunate we are glad that we have a business and a company that can withstand the the economic uncertainty and the family's great I hope the same for the queue family I haven't seen Dave and John and it's good to see you again and I hope all of you guys are helped happy and healthy great I think in we're good so thank you for asking so let's jump into it you know one of the things that I've always loved about you is you know really your sense of culture and this kind of constant reinforcing of culture in your social media posts and the company blog post at true SATA you know celebrating your interns and and you really have a good pulse for that and you know I just I think we may even talked about it before about you know kind of the CEOs and leadership and and social media those that do and that and those that don't and you know I think it's it's probably from any kind of a risk reward trade-off you know I could say something group it versus what am I getting at it but really it's super important and in these times with the distributed workforce that the the importance and value of communicating and culture and touching your people frequently across a lot of different mediums and topic areas is is more important than ever before share with us kind of your strategy why did you figure this out early how have you you know kind of adjusted you know your method of keeping your team up and communicating absolutely like I guess I owe you guys a little bit of gratitude for it which is we launched our company and you know I'm showing a member on the cube it was a social media launch you know if you say that say it like that I think there are two or three things that are very important Jeff and you hit on all of them one is the emphasis on information sharing it becomes more important than times like these and we as as a society value the ability to share a positive conversation of positive perspective and a positive outlook more but since day zero at the seder we've had this philosophy that there are no secrets it is important to be open and transparent both inside and outside the company and that our legacy is going to be defined by what we do for the community and not just what we do for our shareholders and by its very nature the fact that you know I grew up in a different continent now live and call America now a different continent my home I guess I was it's very important for me to stay connected to my roots it is a good memory or reminder that the world is very interconnected unfortunately the pandemic is the is the best or worst example of it in a really weird way but I think it's also a very important point Jeff that I believe we learned early and I hope coming out from this is something that we don't lose the point you made about kindness social media and social networking has a massively in my opinion massively positive binding force for the world at the same time there were certain business models it tried to capitalize on the negative aspects of it you know whether they are the the commercialized versions of slam books or not so nice business models that capitalize on the ability for people to complain I hope that people society and us humans coming out of it learn from people like yourself or you know the small voice that I have on social media or the messages we share and we are kinda in what we do online because the ability to have networks that are viral and can propagate or self propagate is a very positive unifying force and I hope out of this pandemic we all realize the positive nature's of it more than the negative nature's of it because unfortunately as you know that our business models built on the negative forces of social media and I really really hope they're coming out of this are positive voices drown out the negative voices that's great point and and it's a great I want to highlight a quote from one of your blog's again I think you're just a phenomenal communicator and in relationship to what's going on with kovat and and I quote we are fighting fear pain and anxiety as much as we are fighting the virus this is our humble attempt to we'll get into what you guys did to help the thousands of first responders clerks rockstars but I just really want to stick with that kindness theme you know I used to or I still joke right that the greatest smile in technology today is our G from signal FX the guys are gonna throw up a picture of him he's a great guy he looks like everybody's favorite I love that guy but therefore signal effects and actually it's funny signal FX also launched on the cube at big data a big data show I used to say the greatest smile intact is avi Mehta I mean how can I go wrong and and what I when I reached out to you I I do I consciously thought what what more important time do we have than to see people like you with a big smile with the great positive attitude focusing on on the positives and and I just think it's so important and it segues nicely into what we used to talk about it the strata shows and the big data shows all the time everyone wanted to talk about Hadoop and big data you always stress is never about the technology it's about the application of the technology and you focus your company on that very where that laser focus from day one now it's so great to see is we think you know the bad news about kovat a lot of bad news but one of the good news is is you know there's never been as much technology compute horsepower big data analytics smart people like yourself to bring a whole different set of tools to the battle than just building Liberty ships or building playing planes or tanks so you guys have a very aggressive thing that you're doing tell us a little bit about is the kovat active transmission the coat if you will tell us about what that is how did it come to be and what are you hoping to accomplish of course so first of all you're too kind you know thank you so much I think you also were the first people to give me a hard time about my new or Twitter picture I put on and he said what are you doing RV you know you have a good smile come on give me the smile die so thank you you're very kind Jeff I think as I as we as you know and I know I think you've a lot to be thankful for in life and there's no reason why we should not smile no matter what the circumstance we have so much to be thankful for and also I am remiss happy Earth Day you know I'm rocking my green for Earth Day as well as Ramadan Kareem today is the first day of Ramadan and you know I I wish everybody in the world Ramadan Kareem and on that friend right on that trend of how does do we as a community come together when faced with crisis so Court was a very simple thing you know it's I'm thank you for recognizing the hard work of the team that led it it was an idea I came up with it you know in the shower I'm like there are two kinds of people or to your you can we have we as humans have a choice when history is being made which I do believe I do believe history is being made right whether you look at it economically and a economic shock and that we have not felt as humanity since the depression so you look at it socially and again something we haven't seen sin the Spanish blue history is being made in in these times and I think we as humans have a choice we can either be witnesses to it or play our part in helping shape it and coat was our humble tiny attempt to when we look back when history was being made we chose to not just sit on the sidelines but be a part of trying to be part of the solution so all riddled with code was take a small idea I had team gets the entire credit read they ran with it and the idea was there was a lot of data being open sourced around co-ed a lot of work being done around reporting what is happening but nothing was being done around reporting or thinking through using the data to predict what could happen with it and that was code with code we try to make the first code wonder oh that came out almost two weeks ago now when you first contacted us was predicting the spread and the idea around breaking the spread wasn't just saying here is the number of cases a number of deaths and know what to be very off we wanted to provide like you know how firefighters do can we predict where it may go to next at a county by county level so we could create a little bit of a firewall to help it from stop you know have the spread of it to be slower in no ways are we claiming that if you did port you can stop it but if he could create firewalls around it and distribute tests not just in areas and cities and counties where it is you know spiking but look at the areas and counties where it's about to go to so we use a inner inner in-house Network algorithm we call that Orion and we were able to start predicting where the virus is gonna go to we also then quickly realize that this could be an interesting where an extra you know arrow and the quiver in our fight we should also think about where are there green shoots around where can recovery be be helped so before you know the the president email announced this it was surrender serendipitous before the the president came and said I want to start finding the green shoes to open the country we then did quote $2 which we announced a week ago with the green shoots around a true sailor recovery index and the recovery index is looking at its car like a meta algorithm we're looking at the rates of change of the rates of change so if you're seeing the change of the rates of change you know the meta part we're declining we're saying there are early shoots that we if as we plan to reopen our economy in our country these are the counties to look at first that was the second attempt of code and the third attempt we have done is we calling it the odd are we there yet index it got announced yesterday and now - you're the first public announcement of it and the are we there yet index is using the government's definition of the phase 1 phase 2 phase 3 and we are making a prediction on where which are the counties that are ready to be open up and there's good news everywhere in the country but we we are predicting there are 73 different counties that ask for the government's definition of ready to open are ready to open that's all you know we were able to launch the app in five days it is free for all first responders all hospital chains all not-for-profit organizations trying to help the country through this pandemic and poor profit operations who want to use the data to get tests out to get antibodies out and to get you know the clinical trials out so we have made a commitment that we will not charge for code through - for any of those organizations to have the country open are very very small attempt to add another dimension to the fight you know it's data its analytics I'm not a first responder this makes me sleep well at night that I'm at least we're trying to help you know right well just for the true heroes right the true heroes this is our our humble attempt to help them and recognize that their effort should not go to its hobby that that's great because you know there is data and there is analytics and there is you know algorithms and the things that we've developed to help people you know pick they're better next purchase at Amazon or where they gonna watch next on Netflix and it's such a great application no it's funny I just finished a book called ghost Bob and is a story of the cholera epidemic in London in like 1850 something or other about four but what's really interesting at that point in time is they didn't know about waterborne diseases they thought everything kind of went through the air and and it was really a couple of individuals in using data in a new and more importantly mapping different types of datasets on top of it and now this is it's as this map that were they basically figured out where the the pump was that was polluting everybody but it was a great story and you know kind of changing the narrative by using data in a new novel and creative way to get to an answer that they couldn't and you know they're there's so much data out there but then they're so short a date I'm just curious from a data science point of view you know um you know there there aren't enough tests for you know antibodies who's got it there aren't enough tests for just are you sick and then you know we're slowly getting the data on the desk which is changing all the time you know recently announced that the first Bay Area deaths were actually a month were they before they thought they were so as you look at what you're trying to accomplish what are some of the great datasets out there and how are you working around some of the the lack of data in things like you know test results are you kind of organizing pulling that together what would you like to see more of that's why I like talking to you so I missed you you are these good questions of me excellent point I think there are three things I would like to highlight number one it doesn't take your point that you made with the with the plethora of technical advances and this S curve shift that these first spoke at the cube almost eleven years ago to the date now or ten years ago just the idea of you know population level or modeling that cluster computing is finally democratized so everybody can run complicated tests and a unique segment or one and this is the beauty of what we should be doing in the pandemic I'm coming I'm coming I'm quite surprised actually and given the fact we've had this S curve shift where the world calls a combination of cloud computing so on-demand IO and technical resources for processing data and then the on-demand ability to store and run algorithms at massive scale we haven't really combined our forces to predict more you know that the point you made about the the the waterborne pandemic in the eighteen eighteen hundreds we have an ability as humanity right now to actually see history play out rather than write a book about it you know it has a past tense and it's important to do are as follows number one luckily for you and I the cost of computing an algorithm to predict is manageable so I am surprised why the large cloud players haven't come out and said you know what anybody who wants to distribute anything around predictions lay to the pandemic should get cloud resources for free I we are running quote on all three cloud platforms and I'm paying for all of it right that doesn't really make sense but I'm surprised that they haven't really you know joined the debate or contribute to it and said in a way to say let's make compute free for anybody who would like to add a new dimension to our fight against the pandemic number one but the good news is it's available number two there is luckily for us an open data movement you know that was started on the Obama administration and hasn't stopped because you can't stop open movements allows people companies like ours to go leverage know whether it's John Hancock Carnegie Mellon or the new data coming out of you know California universities a lot of those people are opening up the data not every single piece is at the level we would like to see you know it's not zip plus 4 is mostly county level it's available the third innovation is what we have done with code but not it's not an innovation for the world right which is the give get model so we have said we will curate everything is available lie and boo cost anybody is used but they're for purposes and computations you want to enrich it every organization who gives code data will get more out of it so we have enabled a data exchange keep our far-off purple form and the open up the rail exchange that my clients use but you know we've opened up our data exchange part of our software platform and we have open source for this particular case a give get model but the more you give to it the more you get out of there and our first installations this was the first week that we have users of the platform you know the state of Nevada is using it there are no our state in North Carolina is using it already and we're trying to see the first asks for the gift get model to be used but that's the three ways you're trying to address the that's great and and and and so important you know in this again when this whole thing started I couldn't help but think of the Ford plant making airplanes and and Keiser making Liberty ships in in World War two but you know now this is a different battle but we have different tools and to your point luckily we have a lot of the things in place right and we have mobile phones and you know we can do zoom and well you know we can we can talk as we're talking now so I want to shift gears a little bit and just talk about digital transformation right we've been talking about this for ad nauseam and then and then suddenly right there's this light switch moment for people got to go home and work and people got to communicate via via online tools and you know kind of this talk and this slow movement of getting people to work from home kind of a little bit and digital transformation a little bit and data-driven decision making a little bit but now it's a light switch moment and you guys are involved in some really critical industries like healthcare like financial services when you kind of look at this not from a you know kind of business opportunity peer but really more of an opportunity for people to get over the hump and stop you can't push back anymore you have to jump in what are you kind of seeing in the marketplace Howard you know some of your customers dealing with this good bad and ugly there are two towers to start my response to you with using two of my favorite sayings that you know come to mind as we started the pandemic one is you know someone very smart said and I don't know who's been attributed to but a crisis is a terrible thing to waste so I do believe this move to restoring the world back to a natural state where there's not much fossil fuels being burnt and humans are not careful about their footprint but even if it's forced is letting us enjoy the earth in its glory which is interesting and I hope you don't waste an opportunity number one number two Warren Buffett came out and said that it's only when the tide goes out you realize who's swimming naked and this is a culmination of both those phenomenal phrases you know which is one this is the moment I do believe this is something that is deep both in the ability for us to realize the virtuosity of humanity as a society as social species as well as a reality check on what a business model looks like visa vie a presentation that you can put some fancy words on even what has been an 11-year boom cycle and blitzscale your way to disaster you know I have said publicly that this the peak of the cycle was when mr. Hoffman mr. Reid Hoffman wrote the book bit scaling so we should give him a lot of credit for calling the peak in the cycle so what we are seeing is a kind of coming together of those two of those two big trends crises is going to force industry as you've heard me say many for many years now do not just modernize what we have seen happen chef in the last few years or decades is modernization not transformation and they are different is the big difference as you know transformation is taking a business model pulling it apart understanding the economics that drive it and then not even reassembling it recreating how you can either recapture that value or recreate that value completely differently or by the way blow up the value create even more value that hasn't happened yet digital transformation you know data and analytics AI cloud have been modernizing trends for the last ten years not transformative trends in fact I've also gone and said publicly that today the very definition of technology transformation is run a sequel engine in the cloud and you get a big check off as a technology organization saying I'm good I've transformed how I look at data analytics I'm doing what I was doing on Prem in the cloud there's still sequel in the cloud you know there's a big a very successful company it has made a businessman out of it you don't need to talk about the company today but I think this becomes that moment where those business models truly truly get a chance to transform number one number two I think there's going to be less on the industry side on the new company side I think the the error of anointing winners by saying grow at all cost economics don't matter is fundamentally over I believe that the peak of that was the book let's called blitzscaling you know the markets always follow the peaks you know little later but you and I in our lifetimes will see the return to fundamentals fundamentals as you know never go out of fashion Jeff whether it's good conversations whether it's human values or its economic models if you do not have a par to being a profitable contributing member of society whether that is running a good balance sheet individually and not driven by debt or running a good balance sheet as a company you know we call it financial jurisprudence financial jurisprudence never goes out of fashion and the fact that even men we became the mythical animal which is not the point that we became a unicorn we were a profitable company three years ago and two years ago and four years ago and today and will end this year as a profitable company I think it's a very very nice moment for the world to realize that within the realm of digital transformation even the new companies that can leverage and push that trend forward can build profitable business models from it and if you don't it doesn't matter if you have a billion users as my economic professor told me selling a watermelon that you buy for a dollar or fifty cents even if you sell that a billion times you cannot make it up in volume I think those are two things that will fundamentally change the trend from modernization the transformation it is coming and this will be the moment when we look back and when you write a book about it that people say you know what now Jeff called it and now and the cry and the pandemic is what drove the economic jurisprudence as much as the social jurisprudence obvious on so many things here we can we're gonna be we're gonna go Joe Rogan we're gonna be here for four hours so hopefully hopefully you're in a comfortable chair but uh-huh but I don't I don't sit anymore I love standing on a DD the stand-up desk but I do the start of my version of your watermelon story was you know I dad a couple of you know kind of high-growth spend a lot of money raised a lot of money startups back in the day and I just know finally we were working so hard I'm Michael why don't we just go up to the street and sell dollars for 90 cents with a card table and a comfy chair maybe some iced tea and we'll drive revenue like there's nobody's business and lose less money than we're losing now not have to work so hard I mean it's so interesting I think you said everyone's kind of Punt you know kind of this pump the brakes moment as well growth at the ethic at the cost of everything else right there used to be a great concept called triple-line accounting right which is not just shareholder value to this to the sacrifice of everything else but also your customers and your employees and-and-and your community and being a good steward and a good participant in what's going on and I think that a lot of that got lost another you know to your point about pumping the brakes and the in the environment I mean we've been kind of entertaining on the oil side watching an unprecedented supply shock followed literally within days by an unprecedented demand shock but but the fact now that when everyone's not driving to work at 9:00 in the morning we actually have a lot more infrastructure than we thought and and you know kind of goes back to the old mob capacity planning issue but why are all these technology workers driving to work every morning at nine o'clock it means one thing if you're a service provider or you got to go work at a restaurant or you're you're carrying a truck full of tools but for people that just go sit on a laptop all day makes absolutely no sense and and I'd love your point that people are now you know seeing things a little bit slowed down you know that you can hear birds chirp you're not just stuck in traffic and into your point on the digital transformation right I mean there's been revolution and evolution and revolution people get killed and you know the fact that digital is not the same as physical but it's different had Ben Nelson on talking about the changes in education he had a great quote I've been using it for weeks now right that a car is not a is not a mechanical horse right it's really an opportunity to rethink the you know rethink the objective and design a new solution so it is a really historical moment I think it is it's real interesting that we're all going through it together as well right it's not like there quake in 89 or I was in Mount st. Helens and that blew up in in 1980 where you had kind of a population that was involved in the event now it's a global thing where were you in March 20 20 and we've all gone through this indeed together so hopefully it is a little bit of a more of a unifying factor in kind of the final thought since we're referencing great books and authors and quotes right as you've all know Harare and sapiens talked about what is culture right cultures is basically it's it's a narrative that we all have bought into it I find it so ironic that in the year 2020 that we always joke is 20/20 hindsight we quickly found out that everything we thought was suddenly wasn't and the fact that the global narrative changed literally within days you know really a lot of spearhead is right here in Santa Clara County with with dr. Sarah Cody shutting down groups of more than 150 people which is about four days before they went to the full shutdown it is a really interesting time but as you said you know if you're fortunate enough as we are to you know have a few bucks in the bank and have a business that can be digital which you can if you're in the sports business or the travel business the hotel business and restaurant business a lot of a lot of a lot of not not good stuff happening there but for those of us that can it is an opportunity to do this nice you know kind of a reset and use the powers that we've developed for recommendation engines for really a much more power but good for good and you're doing a lot more stuff too right with banking and in in healthcare telemedicine is one of my favorite things right we've been talking about telemedicine and electronic medicine for now well guess what now you have to cuz the hospitals are over are overflowing Jeff to your point three stories and you know then at some point I know you have you I will let you go you can let me go I can talk to you for four hours I can talk to you for but days my friend you know the three stories that there have been very relevant to me through this crisis I know one is first I think I guess in a way all are personal but the first one you know that I always like to remind people on there were business models built around allowing people to complain online and then using that as almost like a a stick to find a way to commercialize it and I look at that all of our friends I'm sure you have friends have lots of friend the restaurant is big and how much they are struggling right they are honest working the hardest thing to do in life as I've been told and I've witnessed through my friends is to run a restaurant the hours the effort you put into it making sure that what you produce this is not just edible but it's good quality is enjoyed by people is sanitary is the hard thing to do and there was yet there were all of these people you know who would not find in their heart and their minds for two seconds to go post a review if something wasn't right and be brutal in those reviews and if they were the same people were to look back now and think about how they assort the same souls then anything to be supportive for our restaurant workers you know it's easy to go and slam them online but this is our chance to let a part of the industry that we all depend on food right critical to humanity's success what have we done to support them as easy as it was for us to complain about them what have we done to support them and I truly hope and I believe they're coming out of it those business models don't work anymore and before we are ready to go on and online on our phones and complain about well it took time for the bread to come to my table we think twice how hard are they working right number one that's my first story I really hope you do tell me about that my second story is to your have you chained to baby with Mark my kids I'm sure as your kids get up every morning get dressed and launch you know their online version of a classroom do you think when they enter the workforce or when they go to college you and me are going to try and convince them to get in a oil burning combustion engine but by the way can't have current crash and breakdown and impact your health impact the environment and show up to work and they'll say what do you talk about are you talking about I can be effective I can learn virtually why can't I contribute virtually so I think there'll be a generation of the next class of you know contribute to society who are now raised to live in an environment where the choice of making sure we preserve the planet and yet contribute towards the growth of it is no longer a binary choice both can be done so I completely agree with you we have fundamentally changed how our kids when they grew up will go to work and contribute right my third story is the thing you said about how many industries are suffering we have clients you know in the we have health care customers we have banking customers you know we have whoever paying the bills like we are are doing everything they can to do right by society and then we have customers in the industry of travel hospitality and one of my most humbling moments Jeff there's one of the no sea level executives sent us an email early in this in this crisis and said this is a moment where a strong David can help AV Goliath and just reading that email had me very emotional because they're not very many moments that we get as corporations as businesses where we can be there for our customers when they ask us to be their father and if we as companies and help our customers our clients who area today are flying people are feeding people are taking care of their health and they're well if V in this moment and be there for them we we don't forget those moments you know those as humans have long-term memories right that was one of the kindest gentlest reminders to me that what was more important to me my co-founder Richard you know my leadership team every single person at Reseda that have tried very hard to build automations because as an automation company to automate complex human process so we can make humans do higher order activities in the moment when our customers asked us to contribute and be there for them I said yes they said yes you said yes and I hope I hope people don't forget that that unicorns aren't important there are mythical animals there's nothing all about profits there's nothing mythical about fortress balance sheet and there's nothing mythical about a strong business model that is built for sustainable growth not good at all cost and those are my three stories that you know bring me a lot of lot of calm in this tremendous moment of strife and and in the piece that wraps up all those is ultimately it's about relationships right people don't do business I mean companies don't do business with companies people do business with people and it's those relationships and and in strong relationships through the bad times which really set us up for when things start to come back I me as always it's I'm not gonna let it be three years to the next time I hear me pounding on your door great to catch up you know love to love to watch really your your culture building and your community engagement good luck I mean great success on the company but really that's one thing I think you really do a phenomenal job of just keeping this positive drumbeat you always have you always will and really appreciate you taking some time on a Friday to sit down with us well first of all thank you I wish I could tell you I just up to you but we celebrate formal Fridays that to Seder and that's what this is all so I want to end on a good on a positive bit of news I was gonna give you a demo of it but if you want to go to our website and look at what everything we're doing we have a survival kit around a data survival kit around kovat how am I using buzzwords you know a is let's not use that buzzword right now but in your in your lovely state but on my favorite places on the planet when we ran the algorithm on who is ready as per the government definition of opening up we have five counties that are ready to be open you know between Santa Clara to LA Sacramento Kern and San Francisco the metrics today the data today with our algorithm there are meta algorithm is saying that those five counties those five regions look like I've done a lot of positive activities if the country was to open under all the right circumstances those five look you know the first as we were men at on cream happy Earth Day a pleasure to see you so good to know your family is doing well and I hope we see we talk to each other soon thanks AVI great conversation with avi Mehta terrific guy thanks for watching everybody stay safe have a good weekend Jeff Rick checking out from the cube [Music]

(upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey welcome back already, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios today having a Cube conversation. You know nobody can really travel, conference seasons are all kind of on hold, or going to digital, so there's a lot of interesting stuff going on. But thankfully we've got the capability to invite some of our community in. We're really interested in hearing from some of the leaders that we have in the community about what's going on in their world and you know, what they're telling their people. And what can we learn. So we're excited to have a good friend of mine who went to business school together, God it seems like it was over 20 years ago. He's Ben Nelson, the chairman and CEO of the Minerva Project. Ben great to see you and welcome. >> Thanks so much, great to be here. >> Yeah. So, you have always been kind of a trailblazer, I mean way back in the day I think that you've only had like two jobs in all this time, you know. (laughing) You know kind of changing the world of digital photography. >> Yeah three or four, three or four. >> Three or four. >> Yeah. (laughing) >> And after a really long run, you made this move to start something new in education. >> Yeah. >> Education's a big hairy monster. There's a lot of angles. And you started the Minerva Project, and I can't believe I looked before we got on today that that was nine years ago. So tell us about the Minerva Project, how you got started, kind of what's the mission, and then we'll get into it. >> Yeah so Minerva exists and it sounds somewhat lofty for an organization, but we do exist to serve this mission which is to nurture critical wisdom for the sake of the world. We think a wiser world is a better world. We think that really wisdom is the core goal of education and we decided that higher education is the area that is both most in need of transformation and also one that we're most capable of influencing. And so we set about actually creating our own university demonstrating an example of what a university can do. And then, helping tool other institutions to follow in those footsteps. >> Yeah it's a really interesting take. There's often times we're told if a time traveler came here from 1776, right, and walked around and would look at the way we drive, look at the way we communicate, look at the way we transact business. All these things would be so new and novel inventive. If you walked them over to Stanford or Harvard he'd feel right at home, you know. >> Yeah. >> So the education is still kind of locked in to this way that it's always been. So for you to kind of take a new approach, I mean I guess it did take actually starting your own school to be able to execute and leverage some of these new methods and tools, versus trying to move what is a pretty, you know, kind of hard to move institutional base. >> Yeah absolutely. And it's also you know, because we have to remember that universities as an institution started before the printing press. So if you go and talk to pretty much any university president, and ask him or her what is the mission of a university, generically, forget you know your university or what have you. They'll say, "Well generically universities exist "to create and disseminate knowledge." That's why they've been founded 1000 years ago and that's why they exist today. And you know, creation of knowledge I think there's a good argument to be made that the research mission of a university is important for the advancement of society and that it needs to be supported. Certainly directly in that regard. So much of you know the innovation that we benefit from today came from university labs and research. That's an important factor. But the dissemination of knowledge is a bit of an odd thing. I guess before the printing press, sure, yeah, I mean kind of hard to disseminate knowledge except for if you gather a whole bunch of people in a room and talk at them. Maybe they scribble notes very quickly. Well that's a decent way of disseminating knowledge because they can you know, one mouth and many pieces of paper and then they can read it later or study it. I guess that makes sense it's somewhat efficient. But after the printing press and certainly after the internet, the concept of a university needing to disseminate knowledge as it's core mission seems kind of crazy. It can't be that that's what universities are for. But effectively they're still structured in that way. And I don't think any university president when actually challenged in that way would argue the point. They would say, "Oh yes of course, "well what we really need to do is teach people "how to use knowledge or evaluate knowledge "or make sure that we communicate effectively "or understand how that knowledge can interact "with other pieces of knowledge and you know, "create new ways of thinking, et cetera." But that isn't the dissemination of knowledge. And that isn't the way that universities are actually structured. >> But it's funny that you say that. Even before you get to whether they should be still trying to disseminate knowledge, they're not even using the new tools now that they had the printing press that come along. (laughing) To disseminate knowledge. You know it's really interesting as we're going through this time right now with the coronavirus and a lot of things that were kind of traditional are moving in to digital and this new tool called Zoom which never fails to amaze me how many people are having their first Zoom call ever, right. >> Right, right. >> Ever, right I mean how long ago was Skype, how long ago was WebX. These tools have been around for a really interesting time, a long time. But now, you know, kind of a critical mass of technology that anybody can flip their laptop up, or their phone and go. You know you guys just in terms of a pure kind of tools play you know took advantage of the things that are available here in 2020 and 2019. So I wonder if you can share with the folks that don't have experience kind of using remote learning and remote access, you know what are some of the lessons you learned what are some of the best practice. What should people kind of think about what's capable and the things you can do with digital tools that you can't do when you're trying to get everybody in a classroom together at the same time. >> Right, so I think first and foremost, there's kind of the nuts and bolts. The basics. Right. So one of the things that you know, education environments have always been able to get away with is when you've got everyone in a room and you know, you're kind of cutting them off from the rest of life, you sometimes don't realize that you're talking into thin air, right. That maybe speaking students are not listening, they're not absorbing what you're saying. But you know they have to show up, at least in K 12, and higher ed they don't bother showing up and so the 15 people who do wind up showing up from the 100 person lecture I guess you do you say, "Oh at least they're listening." But the reality is that when you're online, you're competing with everything. You're competing with the next tab, you're competing with just not showing up. It's so much easier to just, you know, open up some game or something, some YouTube video. And so you've got to make this engaging. And making it engaging isn't about being entertaining. And that's actually one of the major problems of assessing who is a good professor and who isn't. You know people look at student reviews, right. They say, "Oh, you know such and such "was such a great professor." But when you actually track student reviews of professors to learning outcomes, there's a slight negative correlation. Right which means that the better the students believe the professor is actually that is an indicator that they've learned a little bit less. >> Right. >> That's really bizarre, intuitively. But when you actually think about it deeply, you realize that entertaining students isn't the job of a professor. It's actually teaching them. It's actually getting them to think through the material. And learning is hard, it's not easy. So you have to bring some of those techniques of engagement into online. And you can do that but it requires a lot of interactivity. So that's aspect number one. But really the much bigger idea isn't that you just do what you do offline and then put it online, right. Technology isn't at it's best when it mimics what you do without it, right. Technology didn't build an exact replica of the horse. >> Right, right. >> And said you know, ride that. Right. It doesn't make any sense, right. Instead, what technology should do is things you cannot do offline. One of the things that worked 300, 400 years ago is that you could study a subject matter in full. One professor, one teacher could teach you pretty much everything that people needed to know in a given field. In fact, the fields themselves were collapsed, right. Science, mathematics, you know, ethics were all put under this idea called philosophy. Philosophy was everything. Right. And so there's really we didn't have much to learn. But today, because we have so much information and so many tools to be able to process through that information, what happens is that education gets atomized. And you know you go through a college education you're you know, being taught by 25, 30 some different professors. But one professor really has no idea what you've learned previously. Even when they're in a 101, 102 sequence. How many times have we been in kind of the 102 class where in the first month all the professor did was repeat what happened in the 101 class because they didn't feel comfortable that you actually learned it. Or if the professor before them taught it the way they wanted it taught. >> Right, right. >> And that's because education is done offline with no data. If you actually have education in a data rich environment you can actually design cross cutting curriculum. You can shift the professor's role from disseminating knowledge to actually having students or mentoring students and guiding them in how to apply that knowledge. And so, once you have institutional views of curricula, you can use technology to deliver an institution wide education. Not by teaching you a way of thinking or a set of content, but giving you a set of tools that broadly any professor can agree on, and then apply them to whatever context professors want to present. And that creates a much more holistic education, and it's one that only can be done using technology. >> Ben that was a mouthful. You got into all kinds of good stuff there. (laughing) So let's break some of it down. That was fascinating. I mean I think you know the asynchronous versus synchronous opportunity if you will, to as you said kind of atomize education to the creation of content right the distribution of content and more importantly the consumption of content. Because why should I have to change my day if the person I want to hear is only available next Tuesday at noon pacific, right. It makes no sense anymore. And the long tail opportunities for this content that lives out there forever is pretty interesting. But it's a very interesting you know, kind of point of view if you assume that all the knowledge is already out there and now your job as an educator is to help train people to critically think about what's out there. How do I incorporate that, what are the things I should be thinking about when I'm integrating that into my decision. It's a very different way. And as you said, everything is an alt tab away. Literally the whole world is an alt tab away from that webinar. (laughing) Very good stuff. >> Exactly right. >> And the other piece I want to get your take on is really kind of lifetime learning. And I didn't know that you guys were you know kind of applying some of your principles oh my goodness where you actually measure effectiveness of teaching. And measure how long people hang out in the class. And measure whether it's good or not. But you're applying this really now in helping companies do digital transformation. And I think, you know, coming at that approach from a shift in thinking is really a different approach. I was just looking at an Andy Jassy keynote from a couple years ago yesterday, and he talked about the A number one thing in digital transformation is a buy in at senior leadership and a top down priority. So you know, what do you see in some of your engagements, how are you applying some of this principles to help people think about change differently? >> Yeah you know I think recessions are a very telling time for corporate learning. Right. And if you notice, what is the first budget that gets cut when economic times get tough it's the you know employee learning and development. Right. Those budgets just get decimated. Right off the bat. And that's primarily because employees don't see much value out of it, and employers don't really measure the impact of those things. No one's saying, "Oh my God, 'this is such an incredible program. "My employees were able to do x before this program, 'and then they were able to do one point five x afterward." You know, if people had that kind of training program in the traditional system, then they would be multi-billion dollar behemoths in the space. And there really are not. And that's because again, most of education is done in content land. And it's usually very expensive, and the results are not very good. Instead, if you actually think about learning tools as opposed to information, and then applying those tools in your core business, all of a sudden you can actually see transformation. And so when we do executive education programs as an example, you know we ask our learner how much of what you've learned can you apply to your job tomorrow? Right. And we see an overwhelming majority of our students are saying something like more than 80 to 90% of what they learned they can apply immediately. >> Wow, that's impressive. >> That's useful. >> Right. And why do you think is it just kind of institutional stuck in the mud? Is it the wrong incentive structure? I mean why you're talking about very simple stuff right. >> Yeah. >> Why don't you actually measure outcomes and adjust accordingly, you know. Use a data centric methodology to improve things over time, you know. Use digital tools in way that they can get you more than you can do in a physical space. I mean is it just inertia? I mean I really think this is a watershed moment because now everybody is forced into using these tools. Right. And there's a lot of, you know kind of psychology around habits and habit forming. >> Right, exactly. >> And if you do something for a certain amount of time every single day you know it becomes a habit. And if these stay in place orders which in my mind I think we are going to be doing it for a while, kind of change people's behavior and the way they use technology to interact with other folks. You know it could be a real, you know, kind of turning point in everyone's opening eyes that digital is different than physical. It's not exactly the same. There are some things in physical that are just better, but, you know there's a whole realm of things in digital that you cannot do when you're bound by time, location, and space. >> Exactly right. That's right. And I think the reason that it's so difficult to shift the system is because the training of people in the system, and I'm speaking specifically about higher education, really has nothing to do with education. Think about how a university professor becomes a university professor. How do they show up in a classroom? They get a bachelor's degree, where they don't learn anything about how to teach or how the mind works. They get a PhD, in which they learn nothing about how to teach or how the mind works. They do a post-doctoral research fellowship where they research in their field, right. Then they become an associate professor or an assistant professor and non-tenure, right. And in order to get tenure they've got seven years in order to make it on a publishing track, because how they teach is irrelevant. And they don't get any formal training on how to teach or how the brain works, right. Then they become you know, a junior tenured professor. A full tenured professor, right. And then maybe they become an administrator. Right. And so if you think about it, all they know is their field. And I've had conversations with academics which are to me befuddling, in the sense that you know they'll say, "Oh, you know, "everyone should learn how to think "like a historian. "Oh no everybody should learn to think "like an economist. "Everyone should learn to think "like a physicist." And you kind of unpack it, you say, "Well why?" And it's, "Oh well because we deploy pools "that nobody else deploys and it's so great." Right. And so it's OK give me an example. I had this conversation with a university president who was a historian. And that president said, "Look, you know, "what we do is we look at you know, "primary source materials hundreds of years ago "and learn to interpret what they say to us "and ascertain truth from that. "That's an incredibly important skill." I said, "OK, so what you're saying is you "examine evidence and evaluate that evidence "to see what it can actually tell you. "Isn't that what every single scientist, "social scientist, no matter what field they're in does? "Isn't that what a physicist does? "Isn't that what an economist does? "Isn't that what a psychologist does? "Right, isn't that what an English professor does?" Right actually thinking about I remember I took a mini module when I was an undergraduate with Rebecca Bushnell who is a literature professor, eventually became the dean of the college of arts and science at the University of Pennsylvania. And, we basically looked at a text written 400 years before, and tried to figure out what parts of the text were written by the author, what were transcription errors, and what was censored. That's looking at evidence. >> Right, right. >> This was an English professor. It's the exact same process. But because people know about it in their field and they think the only way to get to it is through their field, as opposed to teaching the tool, it can't get out of their own way. >> Yeah. >> And that's why I think education is so stuck right now. >> Yeah. That's crazy. And you know we're all victims of kind of the context in which we look through everything, and the lens in which we apply to everything that we see which is you know one of my things that there isn't really a kind of a truth it's what is your interpretation. And that's really you know, what is in your head. But I want to close it out. And Ben I really appreciate your time today. It's been a great conversation. And really kind of take it back to your mission which is around critical thinking. You know there's a lot of conversation lately, you know, this kind of rush to STEM as the thing. And there's certainly a lot of great job opportunities coming out of school if you're a data scientist and you can write in R. But what I think is a more interesting conversation is to get out of your own way. You know is the critical thinking as you know the AI and RPA and all these other things kind of take over more of these tasks and really this higher order need for people to think through complex problems. >> Right. >> I mean like we're going through today. Thank God people who are qualified and can see ahead and saw an exponential curve potential just really causing serious damage when we're still to head into this thing to take aggressive action. Dr. Sarah Cody here locally here you know, telling the San Jose Sharks you can't play. You know that is not an easy decision. But thankfully they did and they had the data. But really just your kind of thoughts on why you prioritize on critical thinking and you know can what you see with your students when they get out into the real world applying critical thinking not necessarily equations. >> Yeah look I think there's no better demonstration of how important critical thinking is than when you look at the kinds of advances that STEM is trying to make. Right. What happens any time we get a demonstration of the power of artificial intelligence, right. You remember a few years ago when Microsoft released it's AI engine. Right. Smartest engineers working on it, and all of a sudden it you know spat back misogynist racist types of perspectives. Why? The training set was garbage. It wasn't that the technology was bad, actually it was amazing technology. But the people who were writing it couldn't think. They didn't know how to think two steps ahead and say, "Wait a second, if we train "the information, kind of the random comments "we see on the internet, you know, "who bothers to write anonymomys comments?" Trolls, right. And so if we train it on a troll data set, it'll become an artificial intelligent troll. Right. It doesn't take a lot of critical thinking to actually realize that, but it takes some. >> Right. >> Right. And when you focus merely on those technical skills what you wind up doing is wasting it. Right. And so if you ground people in critical thinking, and we see this with our graduate. You know we graduated our very first class in May. And we had what as far as I can tell is the best graduate school placement of any graduating class in the country. As far as the quality of offers they got. We had a 94% placement rate in jobs in graduate positions. Which I think is tied with the very best ivy league institutions. And the kinds of jobs that the students are getting and six months into them the kinds of reviews that their employers are giving us looks nothing like a recent undergraduate. These are oftentimes types of jobs that are unavailable to recent undergraduates. And you know we had one student recently actually just told me, fresh in my mind, even though he was the youngest person in his company, when the CEO of his company has a strategic question he comes to him. And when he's in a meeting, full of PhDs, everybody looks to him to run the meeting and set the agenda. He's six months out of undergrad, right. And you know I can give you story after story after story about each and every one of these graduate. And it's not because they were born with it. They actually had a wise education. >> Yeah. Ben well that's a great story. And we'll leave it there. Congratulations again to you and the team at Minerva and what you've built and your first graduating class. Great accomplishment and really great to catch up, it's been too long. And when this is all over we'll have to get together and have an adult beverage. >> That would be wonderful. >> All right Ben thanks a lot. >> Thanks so much Jeff. >> All right. You've been watching theCUBE. Great check in with Ben Nelson. Thanks for watching. Everybody stay safe and we'll see you next time. (upbeat electronic music)

>>Ply from Barcelona, Spain pits the cube covering Cisco live 2020 Ratu by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >>Hey, welcome back live to Cisco live in 2020 in Barcelona. We're in Europe, Barcelona. I'm John Ferrara, Dave Alante. We've got a great guest here and the whole theme of the show is not about the infrastructure is about the applications and the applications being powered by an infrastructure powered by Cisco. We've got a great guest, senior vice president, general manager, team collaboration, Shri Travaasa of Cisco. You run all the big products, WebEx on steroids, new announcements. You had a really killer announcements, the pack booth. We'll get into that. Welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming. Thank you for having me. What's the quick news? You're on stage giving the keynote quickly share the news. We can get into it. So we are obviously >>coming out with a set of updates to our great portfolio. We reach out to about 300 million users across the enterprise today who use us for all the way from meetings to team collaboration to calling to powering meeting rooms. So in a sense, what we have as a products that, uh, is either in the meeting room or on the desktop or on a mobile phone. So any one of those methods and mechanisms. And in the past couple of years we've seen massive adoption of video, uh, whether it'd be on the mobile phone, whether it be in your desktop or in a meeting room itself. >>So video is the key. You had an announcement with Mike, uh, Microsoft teams explain that because don't they? Don't they compete with you? >>Yes, we, we, so the best way to describe it as is it's compatibility and competition. So it's competitive to compete, um, for the sake of our end users. So end user choice pretty much drives, uh, the types of integrations we do these days. You can't leave it to an it organization to do that integration. You've got to make sure these products work. So we integrate quite a bit with our competitors, spar, Slack, Microsoft teams, zoom. We do integrate with all of those guys. And the Microsoft teams integration, um, is prefaced on providing the best real time media experience into the Microsoft ecosystem. So if a customer is using office three 65 for document collaboration and chooses us for real time collaboration, they get >>the best experience comes from. So this has been a sleepy space for awhile and then all of a sudden you've mentioned Slack, zoom comes out, big IPOs, high valuations, Microsoft kind of transitioning and gets, it's based to to teams. There's a lot of excitement all of a sudden. And I was thinking in the last year out, geez, I wonder if Cisco is asleep at the wheel, but today you had all these announcements, so obviously not asleep at the wheel. Describe what you see going on in the space and what excites you from a standpoint of what you've just announced. So I think >>over the past two years, rightfully so, there's been a ton of movement in this space and I think it's driven by, it's, it's important to talk about why it's driven by globalization of the workforce. So that globalization of the workforce has, has, has, has gotten caught steam in the past few years and you pretty much see folks being employed across the globe. Whoever has the skill gets employed in a sentence. And what we see within the confines of WebEx is an increase in user engagement. So the same user is using WebEx a lot more and we wonder why we're seeing basically cross time zone meetings go up and team collaboration as we know it is no longer across the table. It's actually across time zones, across geographies, across language boundaries. So you're seeing that happen and the power of team collaboration is not just bringing people together, it's the data in heading to within the conversation becomes the new currency. >>It's the new frontier. And you can do a whole bunch of analytics on that. You can provide information on that. You can basically bring what I would call uninterrupted work streams in the myths, which is, you know, how do you take a conversation, take a part of a set of action items out of it and basically take it all the way so that there's automation, there's least amount of transmission loss and transmission loss in a sense. So that's, that's what's causing, um, this, this industry to wake up because it's a productivity gain in knowledge worker population. >>I don't know why it's off the charts on these systems, you know, low denominator and it's so easy to justify. I mean to me this is the biggest way that people are kind of talking about, but not really specifically addressing it. And to me, I always like to look at the startup world because the startup world is ultimately the Canary in the coal mine. Cody cloud native was before cloud hit, the startups were in there wipe clean sheet of paper, all cloud. Now that's mainstream. I had a conversation with Mitchell, the founder of Hashi Corp and we were talking about the concept of virtual first. And his startup was all virtual. They didn't have an office, they could afford one, but their teams were remote. This is the new dynamic that works. And so I believe that this is going to be an enterprise requirement because this has been validated. >>You seeing people work virtually, development teams, marketing to any team, they're remote, they're at home. So this is a trend. This is real. And designing a product for virtual first versus saying, Oh, if your virtual uses Proctor was designed for this, this is really where it's coming to in my opinion. How are you guys addressing that? Because in that video is not easy. Totally not. You guys been doing video Cisco for a lot them. I know from the cable companies to make a deep packet inspection and managing packets, QoS and mean policy basis, the perfect storm for making video work better. So explain the whole virtual first and the video. Start by sharing a small little secret. I run this business and yet I'm a remote worker. Cisco's based in San, I live in Seattle. >>I live in a small town called mamasan. I'm, I'm a perfect example of who we are. It's all the. So without a doubt, what has also spurred this is the bandwidth to trust the globe, not just in the U S uh, I find that, you know, parts of Asia have very good connectivity. If you go into Korea, Singapore, it's just fantastic, right? If you go into the Western Europe, Scandinavian countries, it's just fabulous. So I think the, the fact of the matter is you, the act of working together across the table and the act of these collaboration tools bringing people together need to be the same. That's pretty much where we are all headed. We're all trying to achieve that Nirvana, making sure there's no dissonance when you bring people across video that's key. That requires not only the ability to see and hear people, but to be able to whiteboard, to be able to have a very rich and immersive conversation on biblical creation so that, you know, using like stickies on a whiteboard for example, how well can you do it? >>So those are the types of things that we are headed towards. Uh, and I w I would pretty much say you guys said it in your question. You have to design for a remote worker for a virtual work environment, which basically is all about optimizing for team collaboration and optimizing for information that's consistent across different communication types. Whether you pick up the phone, whether you are on a meeting in a persistent chat, all that transcription should look and feel the same. This is the convergence really of networking and software because software is where the action is, but the network controls the routes. So, you know, give you an example, we were doing a live broadcast in our studio in Palo Alto had Ken Jennings on from jeopardy and it was, I was so excited. It was a good interview. We had multiple guests on about AI and you know, and he was kind of our celebrity guests and he had terrible bandwidth with his house. >>I don't know, maybe his kids were playing games on it or he was downloading some Netflix, who knows, but he had a horrible visual. We couldn't control that. This is where the network optimization comes in. What are you guys doing there? You guys run the networks, you guys have access to some of the routes and looking for, you know, best route, best quality. So I think without a doubt, you know, the, your lowest common denominator leg in your network kind of decides the quality per se. Uh, but we, we continue to do things like a compression of bits on the wire so that you need the smallest amount of pipe. But at the end of the day for high Raz video, you still need a decent amount of bandwidth. And what ends up happening is it's not just bandwidth, it's uh, you know, understanding what kind of packet loss profile you have on that network. >>So what we are doing across nearly nearly every vendor today is figuring out how we can optimize for these Laci networks. So if you're talking to any collaboration engineer, um, the first interview question will inadvertently be, tell me your experience on Laci networks. What have you done, how many patents do you have? You know, that's kind of the, the discussion per se. So I think without a doubt the advent of 5g and its expansion will lead to Ken Jennings potentially having a much better experience. Right. Can you auto scale, not auto scale, but auto detect? Yes. That cause that's something that could be automated. And we, we automatically, we call it graceful degradation. So we start with aspiring for the 10 ADP. Then we'll bring it down to seven 2360 and no video. And that happens automatically and we let the end user know you're having a network blip and hence, uh, we have, we are degrading it or today's product. Yes. >>So years ago when you, there's video conferencing, you just have to show 15 minutes beforehand just to make sure everybody get on. Okay. So simplicity is another big adoption theme, whether it's one push phone calling or call me or whatever it is. At the same time, you've got to add functionality. You've had a transcription, you've had a translation, you've got the split screen. And when I stand up, the camera follows me. So are those counterpoints simplicity and functionality, how do you integrate those together? >>I think the, the, all of this is done in the quest to simplicity, right? Um, one of the key things we've done across the Cisco WebEx portfolio, we've been known as the stodgy characters. Um, you know guys who don't move fast, which is exactly the opposite, to be honest with you. We worked on making sure we get rid of, I'm going to use the word here, nerd knobs in the product optimized for the simple in a meeting, there are three things that matter. Three big use cases, scheduling, joining in, meeting quality. Those are the only three things matter. The rest doesn't matter, right? So if you look at our devices, if you look at everything, we have this consistent green button that shows up everywhere. Whether you bring up outlook, whether you bring up an iPhone calendar, whether you bring up a desktop in one of our devices, all of those things will have this consistent green bar. We don't, we never want the end user to miss it. See it hit it. It'll show up at the right time. Basically shows up between six minutes and the 40 minute Mark before the meeting. >>And by that in meeting quality, you mean the experience overall, how hard it is to share something or >>actually can you see that person? Can you hear that person, you know, things of that sort of, right. You know, how do you avoid echos in a meeting? Like, what if I turn on both audio multiple times in a particular echo, right. As I mentioned in our last interview, Sri about um, uh, the previous guests around, they want API APIs cause it was like API APIs. It's kind of a trend towards a thin, I won't say thin client cause that's some kind of an old, old word. But um, more efficient source code on the client side, not bloated >>software in the sense of having all these bells and whistles. I mean, I mean at some point you're going to use, right? It could be an advanced version. Maybe you have a tiered thing, but at the base set, how do you create software in this modern error so that you can have really fast software managing front end with the powerful backend. You think about, Hey Siri, you know, there's the front end, there's a back end. So you starting to see this kind of decoupling. How do you guys look at that as it changed the development thesis? Is that something that you guys are thinking about? What's your take on all that? >>Yeah, without a doubt. Right? So we, we, we constantly optimize media is a very different workload than for example, a commanding tool. Right? Yeah. Uh, and I don't mean to trivialize city or any other assistant media is hard when you're doing video. The app needs to have some intelligence to be able to disintegrate audio and video streams and content sharing, right? So these apps tend to have a bigger footprint on the desktop, on the mobile phone than other traditional apps. So there is a constant quest for that additional bit of optimization to reduce, you know, substantially reduce the juice you use out of the laptop. Uh, and with laptops becoming more and more powerful, mobile phones becoming more and more, more powerful, we are only able to bring more, more into that big tree. >>Yes. And the rich media is only getting more and more robust with video. Look at the gaming world. My kids got their rig set up, multiple monitors. I mean, it's a lifestyle experience, consumption of video. It's all, it put more pressure on you guys. It's hard. We know we do it. How, what's the, in your mind, what's your guiding principle for future innovation? Whether you're hiring, designing around video, what do you guys chasing that Nirvana? What is it? Is it the software, the hardware? It's a chips. >>I think it's a combination of them, right? If you look at Cisco, our inherent differentiation is we know, we know how to do software. We know a thing or two about networks. I mean no hardware. How do you bring these three together and there's a four to dimension, I'm going to call it quad. And it's security. You can't ignore security. You know, it's, it's something that you have to intrinsically think about. It's not a check by check box after you don't want somebody peeping Toms in their meeting. For example, everybody is simply >>back in the cams. Jeff Bezos has got hacked on video on his WhatsApp embedded malware. So are all kinds of weird things that come through. You don't know. >>I think it's, it's the amalgamation of all of these things. How do you maximize every single element of the pipe? Um, so we are working with, for example, our own DNA center methods and mechanisms by which we're saying based on our workload, how do we optimize the next look for our workload. When we find an issue within let's say WebEx, how do we automatically self heal the network? That is basically where we are headed. So we want to make sure we are constantly stack up and down the stairs, down the stack. And the other, you know you've talked about simplicity of use case. I'll give you an example. What we're doing with our devices now as it has face recognition, we don't store any, any images in the cloud. So as soon as you walk into a meeting room, we've got an IOT sensor that it recognizes your face. >>It says, Hey, let me pull up your meetings. It starts to track who all have joined your meeting. And then let's assume you forget to join the meeting. It wakes up and it says, would you like to join the meeting? Two of two of your colleagues have joined so you don't even have to hit the button. It is germaphobe friendly. So you don't have to touch. It binds you in basic automation. So that level of automation is coming in. So you're talking about the future. The future is about simplicity. That spans generations. So you're pretty much worn the human to come back and for the tech to fade away in the back of them. If you don't want them to be reliant on this app that you have to learn, right, it should be discernible, relatable, easy to use. >>Works like the movies in history. You're a rock star. I'm great to have you. In fact, now we know you live in Seattle. We're going to have you in our studio remotely and we're gonna make sure that bandwidth and that video is of highest quality., the SVP, senior vice president, general manager of the collaboration group of Cisco. Big part of the future of Cisco. This group is going to be really driving some of those network benefits. The applications are big part of the focus, changing the business models, business outcomes. This is the conversation is the cube coverage from Barcelona. We'll be right back after this short break.

>> from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the queue covering active eo 2019. Data driven you by activity. >> We're back with the Cuban active FiO Data driven day one day Volante with student a man you're watching The Cube. Steve Duplessis here is the, uh, let's see. Uh, I'm going to say benevolent. Dictator of Enterprise Strategy Group. Chief analyst, Founder Welcome. Welcome back to the Cube. >> Thanks. Nice friend. Nice to be here, you fellows, and we don't Great. Congratulations. Newly newly closed. That's awesome. I want Yeah, thank you very much. >> Great. Looking good. You're here for your honeymoon. >> He said this is it? After a few marriages. This is the honeymoon. >> Yeah. That's good to know that the honeymoon's not over. So let's talk data, Tio. It's happening. >> That is a terrible question, Dave. >> So yeah, Data. Okay, everybody talks. Data you here, bro. My data is the new oil. Fate is a competitive advantage. And >> you like that. >> You do like what Data's in oil. >> So it's funny because we're I think I'm way older than you. You look better. >> God, no. >> But if you go back in time as long as we were doing this, it's been kind of hilarious, really. In retrospect, when you watch way watch these massive industries get created like the AMC just created because all they were about building bigger buckets to put data, zeros and ones. But no context, completely useless, just big buckets. So we valued Wow, you built a big fast bucket. Then IBM and her tachy whoever was gonna leap frog your next built a faster, bigger bucket. And that was with the world considered valuable. And it's now fast forward to the modern day and oh, maybe with the thing that's really valuable with those zeros and he's in contact. Maybe it's not really the bucket. It's, uh so valuable anymore. So >> So, do you think the with the bucket builders still bucket builders air they actually becoming data Insite creators? Or is it just still build a better bucket? That's cheaper. Faster >> till it's a great question. I think >> that we're first of all, you You still have to have the buckets, right? It's a relative who's going to make a smarter bucket builder. I don't know. >> You need someplace to put it, so >> you're gonna have to put it some place and you're gonna have to deliver it in the good news, you know, storage and or infrastructural say is the most brilliant business ever. From a capacity demand perspective, no one ever needs less, right. You always need Mauritz justa matter what you're gonna do with it, how you're going to address that. So it's we've propagated for 50 years and infrastructure business that build a bigger, faster bucket. Build a bigger, faster processor, build a bigger, faster. And every time you you solve one of those particular problems as long as data doesn't abate and it never does, is only is there's more versus Les. It's just every time we fix one problem way, you stick your finger in the dike and another poll springs out. So right now we're at the we've got more processing capabilities that week, ever possible. Use not true, right? We'll figure out a way to use it so that the last five years of and for the >> next five years waiting talk about analytics, wouldn't talk about io ti. We didn't talk about any of those things that are all just precursors to folk crap. We could make a whole bunch more NATO and do stuff with >> so So computers. Kind of a similar dynamic. It's sort of sensational. But is the relatively crappy business compared to storage rights? Storage is 60% plus gross margin. Business servers. I don't know. You're lucky if you get in in a low twenty's. Um, why is that? >> Hello, Number one. It's essentially monogamous. So 20% is wonderful if your intel and you get it. All right. Well, it sells. Got great gross margins, right? Everybody else's does it. You go down the supply chain. That's where you're gonna add value. So that's difficult for anything. Hard to get gross margins out of like spending. She had a box. >> So, Steve Yes, she's now 20 years old. >> I know >> when I think back 20 years ago. You know, short. You know this capacity price per dollar price per gigabyte. You know, all that stuff has changed a lot. The other thing, You know, I think back 20 years talk about automation and intelligent infrastructure. We were using those terms back that sure, one of things that they did. That that's right. Well, that's what I wanted to ask you about is like, right back then when you talked about well, how intelligent wasn't what could it do? And automation was There was a lot of times, you know, I'm just building a little script. I'm doing something like that. At least you know, from what we see, it feels like, you know, today's automation and intelligence is light times away from what we were talking about. 20 years. Sure, and it's true. What do you see in that? Well, >> so remember where we came from When we were talking originally about automation and orchestration, we were talking about how to manage a box, how to expand a box, how to manage infrastructure. Now it's data operations. Right now it's that that's the whole point of activity. Right to be in with is all right, if you are good enough and smart enoughto have the data sort of everything. What kind of matters? There you've gotta have the data and what can you up? What can you automate an orchestra from a data out perspective? Not from a box, not from a Let's scale out or scale up or something like that again, that's just a bigger bucket. It's a better bucket, but to be able to actually take data and say, You know what? I don't even know necessarily what I'm going to want to use this for, but I know that I gotta have. It's gotta be You have to be able to go click, click, click and get it. If if and when I figure out who I want to find out how lowering the price of Sharman and Seattle at a Wal Mart is going to affect my revenue or my supply chain or whatever. >> So one of the things I've talked with you in the past about is the pace of change of the industry. And, you know, I've said, you know, we know things are changing rather fast, but the average company, how much were they? Actually are they good at adopting change? And you've called me on stupid enterprises slow getting any faster, you know? Are they Are they open to change? Mohr. You know, what do you see in 2019? Is is it any different than it was in, You know, two thousand nine? >> That's a great question. So thie answer is yes, they're getting better. We are finally getting better. Problem, though, is a CZ industry insider watcher or a Boyar is ur is you see it and know what should happen 10 years. It takes 10 years in general for the world to actually catch upto the stuff that we're talking about. So it's not really that helpful to the poor schlub that's running on operation that build sneakers in Kansas, right? That's not really that helpful that we're talking about. This is what you could be doing and should be doing. The pace of change is much faster now because and give the em where most of the credit. Because once that went into place, all of the sudden and that you gotta remember there, everyone thinks vm where was an instant home run? It was 10 years of the same cold sitting in the corner in a queue, a environment before. Finally, we ran out of room in the data center, and that's the only reason they were able to come out. But once it was there, and it enabled you to stop associating the physical to the to the logical once, we could just just dis aggregate that stuff that I think opened up a tidal wave of kind of what else can we do? And people have adopted now. Now it's pervasive. So VM where's everywhere? Now? We're moving in the next level of kind of woman. Why can't I just build a containerized app that I can execute anywhere? No matter of fact, I don't even want it in my data center on. No one has to know that necessarily. So as modernization exercises have started to take off, they just they pick up, they actually pick up steam. So what we know empirically is those that are are halfway down. Call it the transformation or the modernization curve are going three times faster than those just starting. And those guys are going three times faster than the ones that are sitting there in idle doing stuff. The same >> city with the inertia going on. What do you make of this Bubblicious Back up market. Let's talk about that a little bit. You got these big install bases? The veritas, Conmebol, Delhi emcee, IBM, Tivoli install base. Everybody wants a piece of that action. Well, I guess cohesive rubric also want a piece of each other. Sure, which is kind of, you know, they get that urinary Olympics going on. I'd like to say And then you got these guys, which is kind of, you know, playing. Uh, I said to Ashleigh kind of East Coast, West Coast, There's no no, it's not East Coast, West Coast, but there's definitely more conservativism on this side of the of the flyover states. What's your take on what's going on in the landscape right now? >> So back up is awesome from the again, still probably the single most consistently line item budget thing for five decades. It's a guaranteed money in and out, and by and large it still sucks. My general rule is still it's crazy that we haven't been able to solve that particular problem. But regardless, the reason that it's so important is, besides the obvious. Yeah, you need to protect stuff, case. Something goes away and something bad happened good. But really, it's That's the inn. Just point for everything you do, you create data today. I'm backing it up on our later so that backup becomes the injust engine and it also is kicking off point. So at tapioca it started as wow, this is a better backup, most trap for lack of a better term. But really what? It was is didn't matter what with was back up or something else. It's I need tohave the data in order to do other stuff with it, and back up is just a natural, easiest way to be able to do that. So I think what's finally happening is we're moving from Christophe Would would say it's really about intelligence intelligence more so than just capturing those bits and being able to assemble and put it back together. It's understanding the context of those bits so that I can say stew in test. Dev has a different use case than Dave in whatever analytics, etcetera, etcetera. But they both need a copy of the exact scene data, the exact same state at the exact same point in time, etcetera. So if lungs backup's going to be kind of a tip of the spear in terms of going from what I will say, production or live data to the first copy, there's almost always back up. It's gonna matter. >> Christoph, Christoph Bertrand want your analyst? And so we saw, uh, c'mon, Danni Allen put a slideshow $15,000,000,000 tam and back up being a big chunk of that, probably half of it um, how does that jibe with your gut feel in terms of the opportunity beyond backup Dev ops? You know, I don't know. Ransomware insights. So you think that's low? High? Makes sense. >> I think I could justify the number. And what history has taught me is that it's probably low because we we're only talking about a handful of use cases that we've all glommed onto. But there will be remembered, like 11 years ago, there was no iPhone. You know what? How bad that changed. Everything that we do over there. And when did you know at some point during that particular journey, the phone became Who gives a shit about the phone? Excuse. But it's a text machine and it's an instagram thing, and it's a video production facility and all these other things, and the phone's almost dead. I only use it when my mom calls me kind of thing. So, you know, really, it's difficult to imagine. I certainly don't have the mental capabilities to imagine what the next 10 things after Dev Ops and this that and the other. But it's still all predicated on the same you got Somebody's gonna have a copy of that data and you're gonna be able to access it. You've got to be able to put it where you need it for whatever the reason again, a disaster is an important thing to recover from. But so is being ableto farm That data for nuggets of gold. >> Well, I guess I asked the question because, you know, it's a logical question is, is the market big enough to support all these companies that are in, You know, that gardener thing that they do? And I hope so because we love competition. >> I think I >> can answer it >> this way. Everything. Even the oldest guard Veritas, for God's sakes, 1000 years old, t sm 1000 years old con vault code base, 1000 years old. You're all big companies, right? And they're not perishing anytime soon. And I don't run. Love the startup Love the active FiOS or the cohesive sees coming in. But what they're really trying to do is not, you know, they might have started, as in a common ground, backup is a common warzone, but because there's money there like this consistent money there go get. But they soon turn in Teo other value propositions. And that's not is true with the incumbent back up guys because of their own legacy, right? It's hard to turn 1,000,000 year 1,000,000 lines of code into something. It wasn't designed, innit? >> Yeah, and it's not trivial to disrupt that base. But I guess if you get, you know, raising I don't know how much the industry is raised, but it's well over $1,000,000,000 now. I mean, activity has raised 200,000,000 and that's like chump change. Compared to some of the other races that you've seen. Cody City was to 60 and their last rubric was even, you know, crazy, crazy, even >> count the private money that beam God is that, you know, that was half 1,000,000,000 >> right? Well, that's a That's an off camera discussion. All right, we gotta go. So, Steve, thanks so much for for coming. Thank you. Great to >> have you. All right. All right, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You wanted the Cube from active field data driven from Boston, right on the harbor. Right back

>> From Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of the VTUG Winter Warmer 2019. Just had Rob Ninkovich from the New England Patriots on the program. And, happy to bring on the program, one of the co-leaders of this VTUG event, Chris Williams. Whose day job is as a cloud architect with GreenPages, but is co-leader here at VTUG, does some user groups, and many other things, and actually a CUBE alum, even. Back four years ago, the first year-- >> That's right. >> -that we did this, we had you on the program, but a few things have changed, you know... You have a little less hair. >> This got a little longer. A little less here. >> More gray hair. Things like that. We were talking, >> Funny how that works out. you know, Rob was, you know, talking about how he's 35, and we were, like, yeah, yeah, 35, I remember 35. >> A child. (laughing) >> Things like that. Just wait til you hit your 40's and stuff starts breaking. >> Oh, so much to look forward to. >> So, Chris, first of all, thank you. We love coming to an event like this. I got to talk to a few users on-air, and I talked to, you know, get a, just, great pulse of what's going on in the industry. Virtualization, cloud computing, and beyond. So, you know, we know these, you know, local events are done, you know, a lot of it is the passion of the people that do it, and therefore we know a lot goes into it. >> I appreciate it, thanks for having me on. >> Alright, so bring people up to speed. What's your life like today? What do you do for work? What do you do for, you know, the passion projects? >> Ah, so the passion projects recently have been a lot of, we're doing a Python for DevOp series on vBrownBag. For the AWS Portsmouth User Group, we're also doing a machine learning and robotics autonomous car driving project, using Python as well. And for VTUG, we're looking at a couple of different tracks, also with the autonomous driving, and some more of the traditional, like, VMware to CAS Cloud Hybrid training kind of things. >> Excellent, so in the near future, the robots will be replacing the users here, and we'll have those running around. >> I have my Skynet t-shirt on underneath here. >> Ah, yes, Skynet. (laughing) You know if you Tweet that out, anything about Skynet, there's bots that respond to you with, like, things from The Terminator movies. >> I built one of them. >> Did you? (laughter) Well, thank you. They always make me laugh, and if there's not a place for snark on Twitter, then, you know, all we have left is kind of horrible politics, so. >> That's true, that's true. >> Great, so, yeah, I mean, Cloud AI, robotics, you know, what's the pulse? When you talk to users here, you know, they started out, you know, virtualization. There's lots of people that are, "I'm rolling out my virtualization, "I'm expanding what use-cases I can use it on, "I might be thinking about how cloud fits into that, "I'm looking at, you know, VmMare and Amazon especially, "or Microsoft, how all those fit together." You know, what are you hearing, what drives some of those passion projects other than, you know, you're interested in 'em? >> So, a lot of what my passion projects are driven, it's kind of a confluence of a couple of different events. I'm passionate about the things that I work on, and when I get into a room with customers, or whatever like that, or with the end users, getting together and talking about, you know, what's the next step? So, we as users, as a user group and as a community, we're here to learn about not just what today is... what's happening today, but, what's going to keep us relevant in the future, what are the new things coming down the pipe. And, a lot of that is bending towards the things that I'm interested in, fortuitously. Learning how to take my infrastructure knowledge and parlay that into a DevOps framework. Learning how to take Python and some of the stuff that I'm learning from the devs on the AWS side, and teaching them the infrastructure stuff. So, it's a bi-directional learning thing, where we all come together to that magical DevOps unicorn in the middle, that doesn't really exist, but... >> Yeah, I tell you, we've had this conversation a few times here, and many times over the last few years especially, is that, there's lots of opportunities to learn. And, you know, >> Too many. >> is your job threatened? And, the only reason your job should be threatened, is if you think you can keep doing, year after year, what you were doing before, because chances are either you will be disrupted in the job, or if not, the people you're working for might be disrupted, because if they're not pushing you along those tracks, and the tools and the communities to be able to learn stuff is, I can learn stuff at a fraction of the cost in faster times. >> Yep. >> Might not learn as much, but I'm saying I can pick up new skills, I can start getting into cloud. You know, it's not $1000 and six months to get the first piece of it. >> Exactly. >> It might be 40 to 60 hours online. >> Yep. >> And, you know, cost you 30 to 100 bucks, so, it's... >> Yeah, the lift in training, is a lot easier because, you're basically swiping your credit card, and with AWS, you have a free tier for 12 months, that you can play with and just, you know, doodle around, and then... And figure things out. You don't have to buy a home lab, you don't have to buy NFR license, or get NFR licenses from Vmware. But, the catch to that is, you do have to do it. There's a... remember Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? >> Of course. >> Remember the dad was doing the toothpaste tubes, he was the guys screwing the toothpaste tubes onto the machines. At the end of the story, he got, you know, automated out of a job, because they had a machine screwing the toothpaste tubes on. And then, at the end, he was the guy fixing the machine that was screwing the toothpaste tubes on. >> Right. >> So, in our world, that infrastructure guy, who's been deploying manually virtual machines, there's a piece of code, there's an infrastructure code, that will do that for them now. They've got to know how to modify and refactor that piece of code, and get good. And, get good at that. >> Yeah, you know, I've talked to a couple of people, we talk about, you know, there's big, you know, vendor shows, and then there's, you know, regional user groups and meet-up's, and the like. Give us a little insight into, you know, let's start with VTUG specifically, and, you know, what you're doin' up in the Portland area. Would love to hear some of the dynamics now, you know, it feels like there's just been a ground swell for many years now, to drive those, you know, local, and many times, more specialized events, as opposed to bigger, broader events. >> Yeah, it's interesting, because we like the bigger, broader events, because it gets everybody together to talk about, things across a broad spectrum. So, here we have the infrastructure guys, and we have the DevOps guys, and we have a couple of Developers, and stuff like that. And so, getting that group think, that mind share, into one room together, gets everybody's creative juices flowing. So, people are starting to learn from each other, that the Dev's, are getting some ideas about how infrastructure works, the infrastructure guys are getting some ideas about, you know, how to, how to automate a certain piece of their job. To make that, you know, minimize and maximize a thousand times, you know, go away. So, I love... I love the larger groups because of that. The smaller groups are more specialized, more niche. So, like, when you get into a smaller version, then, it's mostly infrastructure guys, or mostly Dev's, or some mixture thereof. So, they both definitely have their place, and that's why I love doing both of them. >> Yeah, and, you know, what can you share, kind of, speeds and feeds of this show here. I know, it's usually over a thousand people >> Yep. >> You know, had, you know, bunch of keynotes going on. You know, we talked about The Patriots, in, you know, quite a number of, you know, technology companies, people that are the, kind of, SI's or VAR's in the mix. >> Yeah, so, we had, I think, 35 sponsers. We had, six different keynotes, or six general sessions. We talked about everything from Azure to AWS, to Vmware. We covered the gamate of the things that the users are interested in. >> You had... don't undersell the general sessions there. (laughing) There was one that was on, like, you know, Blockchain and Quantum computing, I heard. >> Yep, yep. >> There was, an Amazon session, that was just, geekin' out on the database stuff, I think, there. >> Yes, yeah, Graph tier, yep. >> So, I mean, you know, it's not just marketing slideware up there, I saw a bunch of code in many of the sessions. >> Oh yeah, yeah. >> You know, this definitely is, you know, I was talkin' with the Amazon... Randell earlier, here on the program, and said that-- >> The Amazon Randall. (laughing) >> Yeah, yeah, sorry, Randall from Amazon, here. >> He's a very large weber. >> Gettin' at the end of the day, I've done a few of these, but, you know, remember like, four years ago, the first, like, cloud 101 session here? >> Yeah, yep. >> And, I was like, you know, I probably could have given that session, but, everybody here was like, "Oh, my gosh", you know, I just found out about that electricity. >> Right. >> You know, that, this is amazing. And, today, most people, understand a little bit more of... We've gotten the 101, so, you know, I'm getting into more of the pieces of it, but. >> Yeah, it was really gratifiying because, the one that he gave was, all of the service, all of the new services, of which, there were like, more than 100, in 50 minutes or less. And, he talks really, really fast. And, everybody was riveted, we... I mean, people were coming in, even up until the last minute. And, they all got it. It wasn't like, what am I do... what am I going to do with this? It's, this is what I need to know, and this is valuable information. >> Yeah, we were having a lunch conversation, about, like, when you listen to a Podcast, what speed do you listen on? So, I tend to listen at about one and a half speed, normally. >> Me too, yep. >> You know, Frappe was sayin', he listens at 2x, normally. >> Does he really? >> Somebody like, Randall, I think I would, put the video up, and you can actually go into YouTube, and things like that, and adjust the speed settings, I might hit, put him down to 0.75, or something like that, >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Because absolutely, you know, otherwise, you can listen to it at full speed, and just like, pause and rewind, and then things like that. But, definitely, someone... I respect that, I'm from New Jersey, originally, I tend to talk a little faster, on camera I try to keep a steady pace, so that, people can keep up with my excitement. >> I do, I speed up too. He actually, does this everyday. He flies to a new city, does it once a day. So, he's, he's gotten... This is like rapid fire now. >> Alright, want to give you the final word, you know, VTUG, you know, I think, people that don't know it, you go to VTUG.com, A Big Winter Warmer, here. There's The Big Summer one, >> The Summer Slam. >> With the world famous, you know, Lobster Bake Fest, there, I've been to that one a few times. I know people that fly from other countries, to come to that one. What else should we know about? >> So, we're about to revamp the website, we've got some new and interesting stuff coming up on there. Now that, we also have our slack channel, everybody communicates on the backhand through that. We're going to start having some user content, for the website. So, people can start posting blog articles, and things of that nature, there. I'm going to start doing, like a little, AW... like learn AWS, on the VTUG blog, so, people can start, you know, ramping up on some of the basics and everything. And, and if, that gains traction, then, we'll maybe get into some more advanced topics, from Azure, and AwS, and Vmware of course, Vmware is always going to be there, that's... Some of the stuff that Cody is doing, Cody Jarklin is doing, over at Vmware, like the CAS stuff, where it's the shim layer, and the management of all the different clouds. That's some really, really cool stuff. So, I'm excited to showcase some of that on the website. >> Alright, wow. Chris Williams, really appreciate you coming. And, as always, appreaciate the partnership with the VTUG, to have us here. >> Thanks for havin' me. >> Alright, and thank you as always for watching. We always love to bring you the best community content, we go out to all the shows, help extract the signal for the noise. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watchin' The CUBE. (energetic music) (energetic music) (energetic music)

(light peppy electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman And I'm here with John Troyer. And you're watching theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's live production of VMworld 2017. We're in Las Vegas. Happy to have back to the program Alastair Cooke, who is the Chief Video Officer of vBrownBag. Al, great to see you, thanks so much. It is of course not only great to see you, but great to see vBrownBag here at VMworld which was for I think 24 or 48 hours, actually in question. >> It was probably the most stressful 48 hours of my life when it looked like we might not be as welcome on the floor here at VMworld as we have been for the last five years prior. >> Yeah, you know, Pat Gelsinger last year said I couldn't imagine VMworld without theCUBE. I think most of the community couldn't imagine the show without vBrownBag. So we don't need to hash through all of it. Everybody in IT knows that sometimes you get those stressful periods and you look back and say we went through it. The outcome worked. >> The outcome is awesome. So for those who have not come across what we do, vBrownBag is a community podcast. You guys have followed the rise, and John's been instrumental in part of the rise. The podcast is about education for the practitioner of IT, the person working in data centers or designing solutions to go into data centers. We focus on education, so we're a video podcast. I was looking at our stats. There's a couple of thousand videos sitting in our YouTube channel that we've produced over the last six or seven years. And in the last six years at VMworld, we've had an open stage. We sort of set a little bit of a parallel to the rise of theCUBE at VMworld, the massive estate that you have here now. We also have grown over the years, not nearly as massive, but we have an open stage for those same IT practitioners, the hands-on engineering people to come and share the things they've learned with the rest of the community. >> Could you speak a little on the breadth and depth of the offering that you'll do during this week here? One of the differences here, we get a lot of people that come take photos, they'll come watch for a few minutes. You guys have an audience coming through the entire time, participating and the like. >> Well this year, we have a big upswing in our audience because all of our sessions are listed in the schedule folder. So normal attendees at the show are seeking out our content and saying that's interesting, I want to hear about that. And that's always been previously our issue, was discoverability. Nobody knew that there were these really awesome speakers who were presenting at VMworld. Now they're in the schedule folder, and so we have a space for 50 people. We've had a few talks where pretty much every seat's been full. And the walkway past our stage has been filled with another 30 people wanting to see and consume the content that we produce. >> That's super nice. How many videos over the course of the week? >> We have 77 booked in for this week. >> I think you'll have more than us then. >> Yes, so we're already at 16. We do a much lower production standard than you do here on theCUBE. But we do a really high velocity. So as I walked away from my station to come to yours, I'd already uploaded the previous presenter's videos up onto YouTube. So as I walked away, 16 presentations were complete, 16 videos were on YouTube. My awesome crew still manning the stage while I'm away, and while I've been here I think we're now into the second video that's been produced as I've been watching you guys talking with your previous guest. >> Come on, video's all in. As long as the internet's solid, we get 'em up pretty fast too. >> Oh yeah. The key thing for us is that we do it with next to nothing. We do it on a shoestring compared to what... Your rent and people bill here is probably larger than my equipment bill. >> Well hey, that's the beautiful thing about tech, right? I started filming stuff at VMworld years ago, right? And you just buy a consumer camera and just go. And you can stream, and you built it up from there. It's a sort of affordable tech that anybody can do. And even, you use CommonWeb, GoToMeeting, and things like that on your weekly podcast. This is super. You don't need a lot of money to reach a global audience. What are some of the themes that you're seeing this year at VMworld in terms of the tech talks? >> It's a little challenging to try and work out a theme out of the 77... Because there isn't so much coherence to what we get. We don't have streams or anything like that. On the stage, we accept everything that comes in. And my acceptance criteria is chronology. The order in which you submit your session is the priority in which it's scheduled, rather than doing a lot of reviewing. I've seen quite a bit of container stuff in there. There's a lot of interest in AWS, and vSphere on AWS. And there's quite a lot of interest in free tools. So we had two sessions today on free tools for vSphere adminstrators. They're things that can get you going in your job without having to go asking cap-in-hand for money to buy a new tool. >> Which is nice, because these are things that might not be in an official session at VMworld with 800 people in it, but free tools are very relevant to the technical community. >> And that's the thing. Our audience is all about that engineer who's going to be hands on the keyboard, building things. Quite possibly you're still going to be racking and stacking hardware. And configuring the products that are being bought that are being chosen by somebody further up the management chain. >> I know some of the more popular sessions are when you touch on certification type issues. Did those happen here, or is that different pieces? Maybe speak a bit to the broader charter of vBrownBag. >> So the broader objective is that the virtualization community and the data center infrastructure community can teach one another. We all feel like we know a little tiny amount of this vast amount that everyone around us knows. The reality is that each of us has our own little island. And if I share my island of knowledge with you, and you share your island of knowledge with me, then we all learn more. And the internet and the use of podcasts and the rise of iTunes has given us the ability to do that at massive scale. We only need a very small number of people who are prepared to share their circle of knowledge, to be able to educate a vast number of people. >> But what I also think is interesting, you started with VMware certs, right? >> We did. >> That was a brownbag to learn and study for our certifications together. And now, over the years, it's brought OpenStack, it's brought AWS, containers. Can you talk about some of all the different topics that you're dealing with? >> So we absolutely cover as far as I'm aware, every released VMware certification we've got some content for. And have done since ESX 3. Those kinds of days. And that's how long the podcast has been running. We've always been helping community members to study for their VMware certifications. And then we found that VMware didn't release certifications as fast as we could produce training for them. And so we started looking broader, and started looking at, well, you work in virtualization, you need to know storage, you need to know networking. And so we started covering some elements of those. And then, oh, there are certifications in these things! And that's good for career advancement for the engineer. And so we started covering some of the Cisco certifications. And we did have the foray into OpenStack, because Cody Bunch, the guy who started the podcast, who I refer to as the Podfather, his work took him from building a product based on vSPhere, for a large hosting provider, to a product based on OpenStack. And so he was very much keen on OpenStack. Unfortunately our audience weren't so keen. So the OpenStack series went for a little while and didn't get a huge traction. But we started doing AWS last year. We covered the Solution Architect Associate certification early last year. Huge interest from the community! Really popular content. Another popular certification content is NSX. One of the top videos for a long time was Frank Buchsel doing an introduction to VMware's NSX. We're covering the VCP-NV certification. >> That's really interesting. What kind of people attend a vBrownBag? What are the characteristics? Obviously there are people who, some are of sort of driven, they want to expand their horizons, they want to advance their careers. I mean, any comments on that? >> I see a split between those of us who produce the content who are very much forward looking, getting excited about the next thing, and so now we're doing Kubernetes, and we're just starting a series on API's. Every Christmas we do a thing called Commitmas where we cover source code management in Git. With Git commits. So we've got this whole group of forward thinking, telling the infrastructure people, these are the skills we're going to need to be relevant in the future. If the cloud is eating your lunch in your data center, here's a whole set of skills that you're going to need in order to still be able to learn. What we see is there's a huge middle audience who are just starting virtualization. So crazy as it seems, there are customers who are just starting to virtualize now. And they're not all in Southeast Asia. >> Stu: Laggards! >> But the people who are coming into the industry, also younger people coming into the industry who don't have 20 years of virtualization or 200 years of virtualization in their back pockets. Using the vBrownBags is a way of getting some education and getting education that they don't need to get a purchase order for. >> John: This is all free, right? Everything you do is free. >> Everything we do is free to consume. That's one of our core principles. All the content we produce is free to consume. We do produce... in a typical month we'll produce six hours of video training content. And stack that up over a few years. >> So Al, put your consultant hat on. What so far, I mean we're only day one here. But what's your take on what VMware is saying, Pat Gelsinger gave his morning keynote, applause for Andy Jassy coming out. We spend a lot of time talking about VMware and AWS. But kind of across the board, what's your take so far? What are you liking, what aren't you liking? >> Well I'm liking that the video production on the vBrownBag stage has been really smooth so far and that I have an awesome team of volunteers there. To be honest, that's been the biggest thing because that's what I'm here for. The keynote... To an engineer the keynote's not hugely interesting because the keynote is a business-focused message. And I want to know, when I am deploying a vSphere on AWS environment, what does it look like? So there's some quiet briefings going on that you can book in for if you get the invitation to see how it's actually going to work. That's the stuff that would, if I were still doing regular day-to-day working for a company, that's the stuff I'd be wanting to get while I was here at VMworld. Yes, we've got Andy Jassy here, well that's great, there's a serious commitment from AWS to the conference. >> Pivoting back a little bit to new technology, video is really democratizing at some level. The affordability of the equipment and the ability to do it from anywhere. vBrownBag to support itself does have sponsors. You have some sponsors here. So the webinar's all free, and mostly very educational. You're here on site. You also do several tech events throughout the year, all around the world. And you've actually started a new exercise where you go and you work with a vendor or something as a technologist, and basically it's build day, where you build something with your hands, some system, some rack of something, and stream the whole thing live. Can you talk a little... Again, fascinating from a production and technology point of view. But can you talk a little bit about what you're trying to bring as a trainer and an educator and a community member with that kind of an offering. >> Sure, so vBrownBag's content is all free to consume, but it's not free to produce. And so we have wonderful sponsors that help us to be here, make sure I can bring a crew of people here to be able to make those 77 videos. And I haven't done the count of how many we're doing in Barcelona, but I'm doing an outrageous number of miles in a month because I'm going home to New Zealand in between the two VMworlds. I've got to pick up my wife and take her to Barcelona. So awesome sponsors for that, and we go to other events. This is I think the second event in Vegas where we've been making TechTalks this year. But John you're talking about the wonderful new thing we started doing this year of the vBrownBag build days. And the objective is really to show day one experience of implementing a piece of technology. And it's the engineer's day one experience. So we're very used to seeing keynote demonstrations. I'll show you this wonderful new technology, and it is an awesome piece of technology. It's just that A, you're not going to get it fr two years' time. And B, when you do get it, it's going to be possibly very difficult to deploy, or possibly really easy. A lot of vendors say, our technology's really easy. And so we put them to the test on that. We work with a vendor, they bring us in to usually their site. The two that we've done, we go to their site. I bring in a customer's vSphere environment. So I have a pelican case full of servers, and we turn up with that, and then on top of that vSphere environment we deploy whatever the technology is. Be it a hyper-converged platform, a storage platform, management platform. And we livestream that process. So the requirement for them is we need to start as it arrives to the customer from the factory. And we need to go through the actual deployment process. We need to hit the fissures that real customers are going to hit. Because I've been the engineer who turns up on site thinking he's going to deploy Product A, when the salesman said he was going to be deploying Product A, and in fact he's deploying Product Cucumber. And that's what he's got to go and push out. And that terror, of I've got to not make this go wrong, I've got to look good deploying this and give my customer a good experience, when I've not really had any preparation. Now it wouldn't help me if it was the day that I arrived, but often it's a new piece of technology. The first time we deploy it, we're rather concerned. And we don't believe what's in the marketing, and we don't necessarily believe that the steps in the installation guide are current. So vBrownBag's objective is to go through that process and take an educational approach to showing you how that first day goes. And as you mentioned John, my background is as a trainer. I taught VMware's public sector training courses for years. And so I very much like to go into this process as training. And you can see that reflected out in what we do with vBrownBag. It's all about education. That's part of what attracted me. >> One last question I have for you is vBrownBag has been doing this for many years. Any major shifts, changes... Of course the scope has broadened quite a bit, you're talking about things like NSX and everything like that. Anything else in kind of the community, in educating, and what people look for from your organization that you could share? >> So there's sort of different angles on that. We definitely have seen that move from being, I really need to get my VCP or my VCAP certifications, and then my career will be complete. Which of course we know is a little naive. Now we've seen a diversification that there are additional skills required. The other thing that we're seeing is that although VMworld is home base for this community, it's not the only place this community is. And so as I go to other conferences, I'm often surprised by the proportion of the people there that are actually my friends from the virtualization, the VMware community are at other things. And I suspect if I was to go to AWS re:Invent I would find a fair few of my friends there. >> Absolutely. Lots of them. Especially I'd say last year was where I saw a significant uptick. Are we going to see you at re:Invent this year? >> I've not had any interest from AWS to bring me there and I can't afford to come out to these conferences on my own dime until I sell a few more build days. >> I really appreciate everything that vBrownBag's been doing here with the community. Always a pleasure to catch up with you. Here on theCUBE we always love to support the community and many of those organizations. We will be at AWS re:Invent. Definitely lots of need for education there, lots of growth in what's happening there. And here, so for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here at VMworld 2017. You're watching theCUBE. (light peppy electronic music)