>>Hello, Ron. Welcome back to the manage risk across your extended attack service area with Armas asset intelligence platform. I'm Sean furier host we're here at the CSO perspective, Alex Chuck bin, who is the CSO of Colgate Colgate Palm mall of company. Alex, thanks for coming on. >>Thanks for having >>Me, you know, unified visibility across the enterprise surface area is about knowing what you gotta protect. You can't protect what you can't see. Tell me more about how you guys are able to centralize your view with network assets with Armas. >>Yeah, I think the, the most important part of any security program is really visibility. And, and that's one of, kind of the building blocks. When you're building a security program, you need to understand what's in your environment. What's what you control, what is being introduced new into the environment. And that's really what any solution that gives you full visibility to your infrastructure, to your environment, to all the assets that are there, that that's really one of your bread and butter pieces to your security program. >>What's been the impact on your business? >>You know, I, I think from, from an it point of view, running the security program, you know, our key thing is really enabling the business to do their job better. So if we can give them visibility into all the assets that are available in their individual environments, and we're doing that in an automated fashion with no manual collection, you know, that's yet another thing that they don't have to worry about. And then we're delivering because really it is an enabler for the business. And then they can focus really on what their job is, which is to, to deliver product. >>Yeah. And a lot of changes in their network. You got infrastructure, you got OT devices, OT devices. So vulnerability management becomes more important. It's been around for a while, but it's not just it devices anymore. There are gaps in vulnerability across the OT network. What can you tell us about Colgate's use of Armas as vulnerability management? What can you, can you see now what you couldn't you see before? Can you share your thoughts on this? >>Yeah, I, I think what's really interesting about the, the kind of manufacturing environments today is if you look back a number of years, most of the manufacturing equipment was really disconnected from the internet. It was really running in silos. So it was very easy to protect equipment that, that isn't internet connected. You could put a firewall, you could segment it off. And it was, it was really on an island on its own. Nowadays you have a lot of IOT devices. You have a lot of internet connected devices, sensors providing information to multiple different suppliers or vendor solutions. And you have to really then open up your ecosystem more, which of course means you have to change your security posture and you really have to embrace. If there's a vulnerability with one of those suppliers, then how do you mitigate the risk associated to vulnerability? Armas really helps us get a lot of information so that we can then make a decision with our business teams. >>That whole operational aspect of criticality is huge. How on the assets knowing what's what's key? How has that changed your, the, the security workload for you guys? >>Yeah, for us, I mean, it, it's all about being efficient. If we can have the, the visibility across our manufacturing environments, then, then my team can easily consume that information. You know, if we spend a lot of time trying to digest the information, trying to process it, trying to prioritize it, that, that, that really hurts our efficiency as, as a team where as a function, what we really like is being able to use technology to help us do that work. We're, we're not an it shop. We're a manufacturing shop, but we're a very technical shop so that we like to drive everything through automation and not be a bottleneck for any of the, the actions that take place. >>You know, the old expression is the juice worth. The squeeze. It comes up a lot when people are buying tools around vulnerability management and point, all this stuff. So SAS solution is key with no agents to deploy. They have that talk about how you operationalize Armas in your environment, how quickly did it AC achieve time to value, take us through that, that consumption of the product. And, and, and what was the experience like? >>Yeah, I I'll definitely say a in, in the security ecosystem that that's one of the, the biggest promises you hear across the industry. And when, when we started with Armas, we started with a very small deployment and we wanted to make sure if, if it was really worth the lift to your point, we implemented the, the first set of plants very quickly, actually, even quicker than we had put in our project plan, which is, is not typical for implementing complex security solutions. And then we were so successful with that. We expanded to cover more of our manufacturing plants, and we were able to get really true visibility across our entire manufacturing organization in the first year with the ability to also say that we extended that, that information, that visibility to our manufacturing organization, and they could also consume it just as easily as we could. >>That's awesome. How many assets did you guys discover? Just curious on the numbers? >>Oh, that, that's the really interesting part, you know, before we started this project, we would've had to do a, a manual audit of, of our plants, which is typical in, in our industry. You know, when, when we started this project and, and we put in estimates, we really, really didn't have a great handle on what we were gonna find. And what's really nice about the Arma solution is it it's truly giving you full visibility. So you're actually seeing, besides the servers and the PLCs and all the equipment that you're familiar with, you're also connecting it to your wireless access points. You're connecting it to see any of those IOT devices as well. And then you're really getting full visibility through all the integrations that they offer. You're amazed how many devices you're actually seeing across your entire ecosystem. >>It's like Google maps for your infrastructure. You get little street view. You wanna look at it, you get the, you know, fake tree in there, whatever, but it gives you the picture that's key, >>Correct. And with a nice visualization and an easy search engine, similar to your, your Google analogy, you know, everything is, is, is really at your fingertips. If you wanna find something, you just go to the search bar, click a couple entries and, and boom, you get your, your list of the associated devices or the, the associated locations devices. >>Well, I appreciate your time. I know you're super busy at CSIG a lot of your plate. Thanks for coming on sharing. Appreciate it. >>No problem, John. Thanks for having me. >>Okay. In a moment, Brian Inman, a sales engineer at Armas will be joining me. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech coverage. Thanks for watching.

>>Welcome everyone to our continuous coverage on the cube of AWS reinvent 2021. I'm your host, Dave Nicholson. And I am absolutely delighted to be joined by two folks from Unisys. I have a company that has been in the business of helping people with everything related to it for a very, very long time. We heard a talk about data monetization at modernization with ANU Priya, rom Raj vice president of cloud solution management at Unisys, along with ANU palms, the high VP and CTO of cloud solution engineering at UNISIS. And, uh, just so that we keep everything clear, I'm just going to call you on new and ANU Palm, and we'll all know who we're talking to. Sure. The funny thing is I'm David Nicholson or Dave Nicholson. Dave Vellante is one of the founders of Silicon angle, the cube. So usually it's two Dave's battling in >>So I get to be David and he's Dave typically. So we're completely, we're completely used to this, right? So, so tell me about what Eunice is doing UNISIS is doing in the arena of app modernization and data modernization and migration into cloud. You Unisys has a long and storied history of managing it in people's environments, you know, in the sort of on-premise world, as well as, as well as cloud now. But, uh, I knew tell us, tell us a little about what you'd assist is doing in this space. And then we'll, we'll double click and dive in. >>Um, so you, you're probably very, very familiar with the six RS of modernization, right? All the way from migration modernization, all the way from replatform rehost to, to the other side of the spectrum, refactor and rearchitect, right? So what is DASA is that it takes clients on that journey, right? So we see clients in different stages of that journey. There are clients that come to us, uh, recently brought on board a pipeline they're very early in their journey. They just talking about their first set of migrations. There are clients that have taken the leap and done 75% of their workload is on cloud, even for Unisys 95% of more than 95% of our workload actually runs on cloud public cloud. So different stages of the journey, but no matter where they are in the journey, really moving the needle on modernization. Right. And what did he mean by modernization? It's it's taking advantage of the innovation in cloud, whether it's seven containers are AI and bringing that to the client so that they can drive those business outcomes. That's what we are passionate about doing. And we can talk to you about a couple of clients where we've done this on a, but I like to unopened to add on. >>Sure. Yeah. And, and just, and before you dive in on a Palm, I want to hear specifically about the inhibitors that you're seeing, the things that causing friction, right. Movement to cloud. >>Yeah. So cloud of the transformative technology is as disruptive and it brings about lots of benefits that are very well understood, but not realized, um, lower total cost of ownership, higher security, innovation, and agility. But the challenges that you see for customers really benefit from moving and migrating to the cloud are related to security and compliance. That comes up to be the top pain point, followed by cost of ownership that are optimizations that you need to do before you can benefit from really leveraging the benefits from the cloud and then innovation and agility, how to drive that. And there are certain things around app and data about innovation, data analytics, AIML that really helps realize those values, but it needs a concerted effort and a drive and a push to transform your infrastructure from where you are today to really get to derive the true benefits from the cloud. >>And we do a cloud barometer study of about thousands of organizations from a Unisys perspective, Dave, and as a Oklahoma saying, um, more than 60% of our clients say security is the biggest inhibitor they want help with security. You >>No, you're saying the inhibitor to going to cloud is security >>To accelerating the cloud journey. They always are perceptive. >>Is that, is that hesitancy, uh, just perception or is it reality? >>That's a great question, >>Dave, and you don't have to be gentle with me. Like you might with a client, you know, you can, you can reach over and smack me and say get over it. You're going to be fine, Dave, >>Actually, I'm a new from leaned into it already. In many cases, when you, when you actually get to your cloud configuration, right. You probably be more secure in the cloud, but it's getting clients confident with that setup. That's where the rubber meets the road. Right. And that's where we come in to say, um, do you understand the shared responsibility model with cloud? What is the cloud provider do? What does being here at AWS reinvent? What has AWS bring to the table for security? This is what the client is responsible for. For example, application security is completely their client's responsibility, right? In most cases. So, um, just working with the clients so that they understand the shared responsibility model and then making sure we protect all the different layers of the stack, but security, right? Even, even as apps are developed, you need to have DevSecOps pipeline, right? So I didn't say dev ops, I said, dev sec ops, because we want to make security a part of developing your applications and deploying them in cloud as well. So that's what we bring to the table and making sure clients feel confident in, in accelerating their cloud journey. So >>You can deal with customers like me, who, who truly believed that my money is safer in a coffee, can buried in my backyard than it is in a bank, right. With all those banking people wandering around. Um, so when you start looking at an environment and you, and you look at the totality of an it infrastructure landscape, how do you go about determining what is the low hanging fruit? What makes sense to move first from is that, is that always an ROI discussion that comes into play and are your customers, I like to give like five questions at the same time to confuse you and are your customers expecting to immediately save money? And how big is the ROI conversation in this? >>Uh, great question. So a couple of things need to be considered first, just to understand where does the customer in the digital transformation journey are there green fee where they only have on premise data center and they're trying to get to the cloud, or they already have dipped their toes and move to the cloud. And in the cloud, how far in advance are they in their transformation journey, have them not have the done apps and data modernization? Do they have, uh, uh, management operations capability for day one and day two cloud ops and fin ops and security ops, and other leveraging the power of the cloud, the copious amounts of data that cloud brings to the table. Uh, the, the important thing to understand is that 80% of the tools that work in the on-prem do not work in the cloud. So you have to understand the very nature of the cloud and to deal with it differently. >>The same old tools and creeks will not work in the cloud. And I call it the three V's in the cloud, velocity volume, and variety of data is different in the cloud. So when you're talking about security, you need to look at the cloud infrastructure, posture management. You need to look at the cloud workload, pasture management. You need to look at the data that's available and analyze and harness the data using AIML and data analytics. So you need a new set of clicks as it were to really harness the power of the cloud to derive the benefits from increased security, lower cost of ownership and innovation and agility. >>And it makes sense. Yeah. >>I mean, I think you touched on touched on it, but fin ops, right. And you asked the question David on, is that the biggest driver in terms of savings to get to the, to the cloud. And I think it's definitely one of the bigger factors, um, because, and be believe to, to realize that we offer a fin op service. And if you know, Upserve is not just for the cloud, but choosing models at different, right. It's not like your data center planning. We talked about the tools being different. It's more than the tools, right? So you could do reserved instances or you could do spot instances, completely different ballgame with AWS, right. Or you could do AWS savings plans. Are you maximizing all of that? And even beyond that, are you thinking beyond that into like AWS container suppose, um, EKS, are you talking about seven less and that could completely change your bill and your total kind of cost of ownership. You talk Dave about past databases, right? So platform as a service, and that could completely change your total cost of ownership there as well. So are you really maximizing that? And do you have a service around that? Do you have a trusted partner who can help you with fin ops is I think an important consideration there? >>Well, I don't know. Pretty, I know you're dying to talk about a customer example, make it real for us. Give us an example of, uh, of this process inaction where UNISIS has helped a customer on the journey. >>Absolutely. Dave. So, um, uh, one example that comes to mind is a large public university and they've got about a half a million students and they've got 20 plus campuses around the U S in California, Sarah, I might've given myself away there. And, and, uh, in, into what they've done is, um, initially they are big into AWS and they are into their cloud, uh, higher into the IBM cloud journey, uh, big time. And they are a hybrid deployment at this point. And initially, uh, they, uh, when they subscribed to our fin ops service, uh, we, we brought in all the different, uh, thinking around working with different organizations, they need to like business planning, right? You need to know which is your most significant apps and what do you want to invest in them in terms of modernization and in tuning your AWS spend. And so we did that. And so we got them about a 33% cost saving and what they did was then they took, looked at all of their AWS accounts across the campuses and said, we want fin ops across all of them. Let's consolidate all of them. So that's, that's the power of a synopsis is about 33% saving right there. Well, that is >>Particularly exciting for me because I assume that they're going to be lowering my kid's tuition next year. So I'll be, I'll be looking forward to that. And now I know Palm, we know why she was kicked out of the, uh, you know, the, the intelligence agency can't keep a secret. Let's, let's, let's talk about an amusement park, uh, famous for its rodent, but I'm not going to say the name. So, so out upon talk about, uh, the technology space that we're in the midst of here at AWS reinvent, right? Um, each time we have a keynote, we're hit with an, almost a mind boggling number of announcements, right? Customers can't keep, keep this stuff straight. They're 575 different kinds of instances. It used to be, we have S3 and we have VC too. Right. Would you like, would you like one, or would you like both, right? How do you help customers make sense of this? >>Yeah, no, that's, that's a great question because, um, the cloud is, uh, I, as I said, cloud has three V's velocity, variety and volume of data and, and the new kinds of services that are available. Day-by-day, it's growing the keys to really figure out, again, map the business objectives that you as a customer or a company are trying to achieve, understand where you are in your digital transformation journey. And then based on the two, uh, and assess where you at and, and companies like Unisys can work with the customer to assess their, what I call the digital transformation posture, which will then give, uh, give us clear indications or recommendations on what are the next stages in the transformation of journey. So whether it's whether you want to improve your security posture, whether you want to improve your cost of ownership, posture, whether you want to go to go to the cloud and leverage DevSecOps to benefit from the innovation and agility, we can help you. >>Unisys has DevSecOps as a service, uh, containers as a service where we can help our customers and partners migrate to the cloud, modernize the apps. And again, based on research, that's out there, you can speed up app deployment and development by 60% by leveraging the power of the cloud. So the benefits out there for customers to get access to, it's a question of finding the right combination of people, process and technology to get you there. And Unisys being a very trusted advisor is certainly able to help you accelerate that journey and get you to meet your business outcomes. So me, >>Um, let me ask the two of you, what might be an uncomfortable question, and that is obviously Unisys is in the business of managing things that aren't in cloud. Also, you have very, very large existing customers that are spending money with you, right? And if they'll just stay still and not do anything and not change, you'll keep making money into the future. Aren't some of these things that you're doing as a trusted advisor, almost counterintuitive from a, from a finance perspective at Unisys, at least in the short term, how do you, how do you balance that? >>It's a, it's a great question, Dave, and for us, we are customer obsessed. So that's, I know one of the AWS principles and we, we live by that as well. Right? So customer comes first and doing the right thing by them, whether it is the total cost of ownership when it's getting the security posture, right. That comes first for us. And if, if moving them to a public cloud will help them achieve that. We will do that. Right. So even if it means that our bill is going to be lower, right. So we'll give you a great example there. Um, Eunice's, as you know, Dave has been in the mainstream business and we've got customers that are still on clear path, right? So even with those customers, we help them with both transitions. We can run clear path to the, on public cloud and we also help with modernization, right? So we always do the right thing by the customer. It's really the customer's tries in terms of what does the business warrant, how much business disruption are they willing to take as we do this modernization journey. And that's what determines us. And that's what makes us trusted advisers. Um, you're not looking out for the bottom line there in terms of how much our bill would be. Yup. >>Well, that's a, that's actually a great place to wrap up. Uh, I think it's hilarious that you mentioned mainframe since you were five years old, you gave me, you gave me a blank stare. When I mentioned stuff, Unisys was doing 20 years ago on a free auto Palm from Unisys. Thank you so much. It's a great point to close on. You're a trusted advisor when you're doing things that are truly in the customer's best interest and not just in your own company's best interests. I'm Dave Nicholson for the cube. We'd like to thank you for joining our continuous coverage at AWS reinvent 2021 stay tuned because we are your leader in hybrid tech event coverage.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of biz ops Manifesto unveiled Brought to you by Biz Ops Coalition >>Hey, Welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with the Cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz. Opps manifesto Unveil Something has been in the works for a little while. Today's a formal unveiling and we're excited to have three of the core founding members of the manifesto Authors of the manifesto, if you will joining us again. We've had them all on individually. Now we're gonna have a great power panel. First up, we have met Kirsten returning. He's the founder and CEO of Task Top make good to see again. Where you dialing in from? >>Great to see you again, Jeff. I'm dialing from Vancouver, Canada. >>Vancouver, Canada. One of my favorite cities in the whole wide world. Also, we've got Tom Davenport coming from across the country. He's a distinguished professor and author from Babson College. Tom, great to see. And I think you said you're a fund Exotic place on the East Coast. >>Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. >>Nice. Great to see you again. And also joining surge. Lucio. He is the VP and general manager Enterprise Software division at Broadcom Surge. Great to see you again. Where you coming in from? >>From Boston. Right next to kick off. Terrific. >>So welcome back, everybody again. Congratulations. On this day I know it's It's been a lot of work to get here for this unveil, but let's just jump into it. Biz Opps Manifesto What was the initial reason to do this? And how did you decide to do it in a kind of a coalition way, bringing together a group of people versus just making it an internal company, uh, initiative that, you know, you could do better stuff within your own company Surge. Why don't we start with you? >>Yeah, so? So I think we are really a critical juncture, right? Many large enterprises are basically struggling with their digital transformation. In fact, many recognized that the the Business Society collaboration has been one of the major impediments to drive that kind of transformation. And if we look at the industry today, many people or whether we're talking about vendors or system integrators, consulting firms are talking about the same kind of concepts but using very different language. And so we believe that bringing a lot these different players together assed part of the coalition and formalizing, uh, basically the core principles and values in a busy office manifesto. We can really start to have kind of a much bigger movement where we can all talk about kind of the same concepts. And we can really start to provide kind of a much better support for large organizations to transform eso, whether it is technology or services or trading. I think that that's really the value of bringing all of these players together >>and Mick to you. Why did you get involved in this in this effort? >>So I've been closely involved the actual movement since it started two decades ago with that manifesto, and I think we got a lot of improvement at the team level. And I think, as started just noted, we really need to improving. At the business level, every companies trying to become a software innovator trying to make sure that they can pick them, adapt quickly in the changing market economy and what everyone's dealing with in terms of needing to deliver value to customers. Sooner. However, agile practices have really focused that these metrics these measures and understanding processes that help teams be productive. Those things now need to be elevated to the business as a whole, and that just hasn't happened. Organizations are agile. Transmissions are actually failing because they're measuring activities and how they're becoming more agile. Have teams air functioning, not how much quickly they're delivering value to the customer. So we need to now move. Asked that. And that's exactly what the buzz off there's also manifested. Provides, >>right? Right And Tom to you. You've been covering tech for a very long time. You've been looking at really hard challenges and and a lot of work around analytics and data on data evolution. So there's a definitely a data angle here. I wonder if you kind of share your perspective of of what you got excited Thio to sign on to this manifesto? >>Sure. Well, I have. You know, for the past 15 or 20 years, I've been focusing on Data Analytics and AI. But before that, I was a process management guy and a knowledge management guy and a in general. I think, you know, we've just kind of optimized at too narrow a level. Whether you're talking about agile or Dev ops or, um, ml ops. Any of these kind of obs oriented movements, we're making individual project, um, performance and productivity better, But we're not changing the business effectively enough. And that's the thing that appealed to me about the biz ops idea that we're finally creating a closer connection between what we do with technology and how it changes the business and provides value to it. >>That's great, uh, surge back to you, right? I mean, people have been talking about digital transformation for a long time, and it's been, you know, kind of trucking along. And then Cove it hit, and it was instant lights, which everyone's working from home. You've got a lot more reliance on your digital tools, digital communication both within your customer base and your partner base, but also then you're employees. When if you could share how that really pushed this all along, right, because now suddenly the acceleration of digital transformation is higher. Even more importantly, you've got much more critical decisions to make into what you do next. So kind of your portfolio management of projects has been elevated significantly. When maybe revenues are down on. Do you really have Thio prioritize and get it right? >>Yeah. I mean, I'll just start by quoting city An Adele basically recently said that there's bean two years of digital transformation just last two months, and in many ways that's true. Um, but But yet when we look at large enterprises, they're still struggling with kind of a changes in culture that they really need Thio drive to be able to describe themselves. And not surprisingly, you know, when we look at certain parts of the industry, you know, we see some things which are very disturbing, right. About 40% of the personal loans today are being origin dated by Finn tax of a like of Sophie or or ah Lendingclub, right, Not your traditional brick and worked for bank. And so the while there is kind of ah, much more of an appetite, and it's it's more of a survival type driver these days. The reality is that in order for these large enterprises to truly transform and engage on these digital transformation, they need to start to really aligned the business 90 you know, in many ways and make cover that actually really emerge from the court desire to really improve software predictability, but we've which we have really missed is all the way. Start to aligning the software predictability to business predictability and to be able to have continuously continuous improvement and measurement off business outcomes. So by lining, but of this dis kind of inward metrics that I t is typically being using to business outcomes, we think we can start to really help different stakeholders within the organization to collaborate. So I think there is more than ever. There is an imperative to act now, um, and and results. I think it's kind of the right approach to drive that kind of transformation, >>right? I want to follow up on the culture comment with Utah because you've talked before about kind of process, flow and process flow throughout a whore, unorganized ation. And, you know, we talk about people process and tech all the time, and I think the tech is the easy part compared to actually changing the people the way they think and then the actual processes that they put in place. It's a much more difficult issue than just a tech issue to get this digital transformation in your organization. >>Yeah, you know, I've always found that the soft stuff the you know, the culture of the behavior of the values is the hard stuff to change and mawr and mawr. We we realized that to be successful with any kind of digital transformation, you have tow change, people's behaviors and attitudes. Um, we haven't made much progress in that area as we might have. I mean, I've done some surveys suggesting that most organizations still don't have data driven cultures, and in many cases, there is a lower percentage of companies that say they have that then did a few years ago. So we're kind of moving in the wrong direction, which means I think that we have to start explicitly addressing that cultural behavioral dimension and not just assuming that it will happen if we if we build a system, you know, if if we build it, they won't necessarily come right, >>right? So I want to go toe to you, Nick, because, you know, we're talking about work flows and flow. Andi, you've written about flow both in terms of, you know, moving things along a process and trying to find bottlenecks, identify bottlenecks which is now even more important again when these decisions are much more critical because you have a lot less ah, wiggle room in tough times. But you also talked about flow from the culture side on the people's side. So I wonder if you could just share your thoughts on, you know, using flow as a way to think about things to get the answers better? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I'll refer back to what Tom just said. If you're optimize, you need to optimize your system. You need to optimize how you innovate and how you deliver value to the business into the customer. Now what we've noticed in the data since that that we've learned from customers value streams, enterprise organizations, value streams is that what's taking six months and to and to deliver that value, the flow is that slow. You've got a bunch of unhappy developers. Unhappy customers, when you're innovating, have so high performing organizations we can measure their intent flow time in days. All of a sudden, that feedback loop the satisfaction your developers measurably goes up. So not only do you have people context switching last year, delivering so much more value to customers at a lower cost because you've optimized for flow rather than optimizing for these thes other approximately six that we use, which is how efficient my annual team. How quickly can we deploy software? Those are important, but they do not provide the value of agility, of fast learning, of adaptability, of the business. And that's exactly what the bishops manifesto pushes your organization to. You need to put in place this new operate model that's based on flow on the delivery of business value and on bringing value to market much more quickly than you were before, >>right? I love that. I'm gonna go back to Utah, him on that to follow up, because I think I don't think people think enough about how they prioritize what they're optimizing for. Because, you know, if you're optimizing for a vs B, you know you could have a very different product that that you kick out. You know, my favorite example with With Clayton Christensen and Innovator's Dilemma talking about the three inch our drive, if you optimize it for power, you know, is one thing. If you optimize it for vibration is another thing, and sure enough, you know they missed it on the Palm because it was the it was the game council which which drove that whole business. So when you're talking to customers and we think we're here with cloud all the time people optimizing for cost efficiency instead of thinking about it as an innovation tool, how do you help them? Kind of rethink and really, you know, forced them to to look at the at the prioritization and make sure they're prioritizing on the right thing is make just that. What do you optimizing for? >>Oh yeah, you have one of the most important aspects of any decision or attempt to resolve a problem in an organization is the framing process. And, um, you know, it's it's a difficult aspect toe of the decision toe frame it correctly in the first place. Um, there. It's not a technology issue. In many cases, it's largely a human issue. But if you frame that decision or that problem incorrectly too narrowly, say, or you frame it as an either or situation when you could actually have some of both, um, it's very difficult for the process toe work out correctly. So in many cases, I think we need to think mawr at the beginning about how we frame this issue or this decision in the best way possible before we charge off and build a system to support it. You know, it's worth that extra time to think. Think carefully about how the decision has been structured. Right? >>Surge. I wanna go back to you and talk about the human factors because we just discussed you could put in great technology. But if the culture doesn't adopt it and people don't feel good about it, you know it's not gonna be successful. And that's going to reflect poorly on the technology. Even if I had nothing to do with it. And you know, when you look at the core values of the best hopes manifesto, you know a big one is trust and collaboration. You know, learn, responded pivot. Wonder if you can share your thoughts on trying to get that cultural shift s so that you can have success with the people or excuse me with the technology in the process and helping customers, you know, take this more trustworthy and kind of proactive position. >>So I think I think at the ground level, it really starts with the realization that we were all different. We come from different backgrounds. Oftentimes we tend Thio. Blame the data. It's not uncommon my experience that we spend the first, you know, 30 minutes of any kind of one hour the conversation to debate the ability of the data on DSO, one of the first kind of probably manifestations that we've had. Our revelations as we start to engage with our customers is by just exposing high Fidelity data set two different stakeholders from their different lands. We start to enable these different stakeholders to not debate the data, but that's really collaborate to find a solution. So in many ways, when when when we think about kind of the types of changes were trying Thio truly affect around data driven decision making? It's all about bringing the data in context the context that is relevant and understandable for different stakeholders. Whether we're talking about an operator developed for a business analyst, so that's that's the first thing. The second layer, I think, is really to provide context to what people are doing in their specific silo. So I think one of the best examples I have is if you start to be able to align business k p i. Whether you are accounting, you know, with sales per hour or the engagement of your users on your mobile application, whatever it is, if you start to connect that k p I business K p I to the key piece that developers might be looking at, whether it is now the number of defects or velocity or whatever over metrics that they are used to to actually track, you start to be able to actually contextual eyes in what we are. The affecting, basically metric that that is really relevant. And what we see is that this is a much more systematic way to approach the transformation than say, You know, some organizations kind of creating some of these new products or services or initiatives to to drive engagement, right? So, you know, if you look at zoom, for instance, Zoom giving away, it's service thio education is all about. I mean, there's obviously a marketing aspect in there, but it's it's fundamentally about trying to drive also the engagement of their own teams and because now they're doing something for good, and many organizations are trying to do that. But you only can do this kind of things in a limited way. And so you really want to start to rethink? Oh, you connect everybody kind of business objective fruit data. And I always start to get people to stare at the same data from their own lands and collaborating on the data. Right? >>Right. That's good. Uh, Tom, I want to go back to you. You've been studying I t for a long time writing lots of books and and getting into it. Um, Why now? You know what? Why now? Are we finally aligning business objectives with objects? You know, why didn't this happen before? And, you know, what are the factors that are making now? The time for this. This this move with the with the biz ops. >>Well, in much of the past, I t waas sort of a back office related activity. You know, it was important for, um, producing your paychecks and, uh, capturing the customer orders, but the business wasn't built around it. Now, every organization needs to be a software business of data business. A digital business. The anti has been raised considerably. And if you aren't making that connection between your business objectives and the technology that supports it. You run a pretty big risk of, you know, going out of business or losing out to competitors. Totally so. And even if you're in a new industry that hasn't historically been terribly, um, technology oriented customer expectations flow from, you know, the digital native companies that they work with to basically every industry. So you're compared against the best in the world. So we don't really have the luxury anymore of screwing up our I T projects or building things that don't really work for the business. Um, it's mission critical that we do that well, almost every time, >>right. And I just I just wanna fall by that time, in terms of the you've talked extensively about kind of these evolutions of data analytics, from artisanal stage to the big data stage, the data economy stage the ai driven stage. What I find interesting about all the stages you always put a start date. You never put it in date. Um, so you know, is the is the big data. I'm just gonna use that generically moment in time. Finally, here. Where were, you know, off mahogany row with the data scientists, But actually could start to see the promise of delivering the right insight to the right person at the right time to make that decision. >>Well, I think it is true that in general, these previous stages never seem to go away. The three artisanal stuff is still being done, but we would like for less and less of it to be artisanal. We can't really afford for everything to be artisanal anymore. It's too labor and time consuming to do things that way. So we shift Mawr and Mawr of it to be done through automation and be to be done with a higher level of productivity. And, um, you know, at some point maybe we we reached the stage where we don't do anything artisanal e anymore. I'm not sure we're there yet, but, you know, we are We are making progress, >>right? Right. And make back to you in terms of looking at agile because you're you're such a student of agile. When when you look at the opportunity with biz ops, um, and taking the lessons from agile, you know what's been the inhibitor to stop this in the past. And what are you so excited about? you know, taking this approach will enable >>Yeah, I think both surgeon Tom hit on this. Is that in agile? What's happened is that we've been, you know, measuring tiny subsets of the value stream, right? We need to elevate the data's there, developers air working on these tools of delivering features. The foundations for for great culture are there. I spent two decades as a developer, and when I was really happy when I was able to deliver value to customers, the quicker is able to do that. The fewer impediments are in my way, the quicker was deployed and running the cloud, the happier I waas and that's exactly what's happening if we could just get the right data elevated to the business, not just to the agile teams, but really these values of ours are to make sure that you've got these data driven decisions with meaningful data that's oriented and delivering value to customers. None of these legacies that Tom touched on, which has cost center metrics from a nightie, came from where for I t being a cost center and something that provided email on back office systems. So we need thio rapidly shift to those new, meaningful metrics, their customer and business centric. And make sure that every development organization is focused on those as well as the business itself that we're measuring value. And they were helping that value flow without interruption. >>I love that because if you don't measure it, you can't improve on it. And you gotta but you gotta be measuring the right thing. So, gentlemen, thank you again for for your time. Uh, congratulations on the on the unveil of the biz ops manifesto and bringing together this coalition of industry experts to get behind this. And, you know, there's probably never been a more important time than now to make sure that your prioritization is in the right spot. And you're not wasting resource is where you're not gonna get the r. O. I. So, uh, congratulations again. And thank you for sharing your thoughts with us here on the Cube. Thank >>you. All >>right, So we have surged. Tom and Mick. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. It's a biz ops manifesto unveiled. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Yeah,

(upbeat jazzy music) >> Announcer: From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE studios for another CUBE conversation. Here where we go in depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm Donald Klein, today I'm here with Tom Stepien, CEO of Primus Power. We're going to talk about the state of clean tech. Tom, welcome to the show. >> Great to be here, thank you very much, Don. >> Okay, great, well look, we're going to kind of get into the state of climate change, and what's happening and why the solutions that you provide are kind of important, but first just why don't you just give a quick overview of Primus Power and what you guys do. >> Sure, so Primus Power is a stationary energy storage company. Our flow batteries work on both sides of the meter, the utility side, the guys who are supplying electricity, and the behind the meter side, the folks who use electricity, like this studio. And what we do is offer a solution that allows that allows you to optimize your electricity use. You charge the batteries typically when the price of electricity is low, and the usage is low, and then you pull from those batteries, instead of the grid, when the grid prices are high, and the cost is high. >> Donald: Okay. >> And that allows our customers to save money on both sides. >> Excellent, and so just quickly, who's the you, who's the customers here, who are the primary focus that you're selling to? >> Sure, sure, so the utilities are PG&E, the utility that's putting electrons to this studio, to smaller utilities, there's several thousand utilities in the US and then worldwide, of course. Folks who are supplying electricity. Also think about renewable plants, right, Solar-Plus storage, wind farms have curtailment problems because wind is gusty, tends to show up at the wrong time sometimes. You can save wind when it's extra, and then dispatch it when timers low. So renewables projects are customers. And then homeowners are customers. I lost power on the way here this morning, if I had a battery in my garage or by the side of my house I would have been able to keep the lights on and the garage door open. >> Okay, excellent, okay, all right. Well, lets, lets talk about kind of clean tech, right? So everybody's interested in what's happening with climate change, it's kind of front and center in the news cycle these days. California's actually been a real leader in implementing legislation to accelerate the adoption of Grid-tied storage solutions to make better use of renewable energy, correct? >> They sure have, absolutely. The California Energy Commission has been a leader in this space, the CPUC that governs the three investor owned utilities in California, initially 8-10 years ago put out a very important law that Nancy Skinner lead, relative to using storage and mandating storage in chunks for the three IOU's over the next 10 years. >> Interesting. >> We have exceeded those goals, I think it has helped drive down the cost of storage. It's helped companies like Primus blossom because it's created a market. Other states have jumped on that bandwagon, New York has, you know, done that, Oregon has storage goals, and many other states also, and it's helped improve the technology for sure. >> Interest, but so California's really been leading the charge since 2010 in this area? >> Yes, yes, I travel a lot, I've been to China, and Europe, and Kazakhstan, and all places. Everyone asks me, "What's happening in California?" If you look at Bloomberg numbers about energy storage, California is broken out and often the leader. South Korea did a lot last year, but within the US, California leads for sure, and will continue to do so. >> Interesting, and then they doubled up on those numbers again back in 2016, is that right? >> They are, they're continuing to up the goals, right? As a state we now have a carbon free goal. Wisconsin just this morning I read is also moving to carbon free goals under Energy Mix. So California has led for sure, but other cities, Chicago has a goal, other states are following, but it all has started here, for sure. >> And just talk about this connection between, kind of, a carbon free energy solution and grid-tied battery solutions, what is the connection? How do the batteries help with making states carbon free? >> Yeah, for sure, so solar is the least expensive way of generating electricity, full stop, right? What Germany did years ago with Feed-in Tariff and has driven down the cost is actually somewhat similar to what California did and helped drive down the cost and improve the technology. It is now at a point where it is the cheapest form, it is less expensive to put in a new solar plant than to run some of these gas plants. >> Interesting. >> California has no coal, got rid of that years ago, but has a lot of gas. Point in fact, in earlier this year in the Southern California Edison district the California Public Utility Commission, the guys who rule the utilities, said, "No, no, no, lets not put a couple hundred million dollars "to update and refurbish some of these gas plants, stop, "instead lets move that toward energy storage." >> Interesting. >> So here's how it's going to look in the future, you have solar, right? And we all know the low, low cost of that, right? Next Era Energy, using some of their numbers, because their the largest, one of the largest developers in the US, has the 20 year power purchase agreement price of solar by itself, is $25 to $35 a megawatt hour, right? Really low, so two and a half cents a kilowatt hour, right? I pay 10, 12, 18 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity at my home, depending on the uses. So, wow, right, it's an order of magnitude less than that. And then we all know what solar looks like, right? It's great during the day, but there's two dynamics that are important with solar. One are clouds, right? If you lose power because clouds go over, that intermittency is a problem. Quick acting batteries can take that out. The second one that everyone knows is the solar parabola tends to fall down when the sun sets, well what do you do for the other, either 12 or 18 hours of the day? And that's where batteries of a different type come in that gets charged in the middle of the day with that extra electricity from the peak and dissipated at night. >> Okay. >> That is the grid of the future, for sure. >> And you can do this both at a residential level, right? But also at a distribution center, replacing an older, kind of, you know, peak generation plant? >> Absolutely, right, and if you look at the refurbishments that are happening up and down the coast here in California, that's exactly what they're moving towards, and here in California we have a utility that got into a bit of trouble because of some of the wildfires and not maintaining some of the lines as we all have read about. Now they are publishing and turning off parts of the grid, if there are wildfire concerns. That is going to drive the use of storage at home, and the tariffs also are going to encourage that, right? Where you are encouraged economically to save extra electricity if you have panels on your roof, and then use that at night. So it's helping drive that market, and it's the right way to go. >> Interesting, so both in terms of houses that are in, sort of, forested areas, right, they're going to need this type of local energy storage solution. You've also got replacing the, kind of, peaker plants with using grid-tied storage to be able to push out energy over the grid, right? So these are going to be increasing use cases, so we're going to see battery installations both at plants and also in homes, but all of these battery solutions they're all tied to the cloud, correct? They're all tied to the internet, they're effectively functioning as IOT devices at the edge. Maybe talk a little bit about how that works and how, what the benefits are from a leveraging those types of technologies. >> Sure, yeah, so yes you're absolutely right, they are at all points of the grid, and different types of batteries for different functions. And it's fascinating, there is a whole class of companies that, of course, are emerging on the battery scene, right? Lithium-ion batteries, flow batteries like Primus, etc., and other types, really long thermal batteries are going to be coming, but then there's the class of the software companies that are helping manage these assets because you need to smartly charge and discharge. Sometimes driven by weather signals. Okay, it's going to be really windy tonight so I want to enter tonight with an empty battery if I'm a wind farm down in Palm Springs so I can take that extra wind and put it into the battery. Sometimes they're driven by economic signals, right? Because it's a really hot day and the prices of producing electricity are going to be high, so therefore I can take a different type of action. >> Interesting. >> And they will control those assets, batteries, on either side of the grid and make intelligent choices, driven by economics to provide the best outcome for, again, either the utility or the homeowner, maybe even the neighbors, right? At some point we're going to be able to share electricity. Why can't I use my neighbors panels if they're out of town for two weeks, and they can do the same when I'm out of town? So that will all come here over time. >> And that's all being enabled by a new class of software companies that are really treating these energy solutions as, kind of, you know, IOT devices. >> Absolutely, and they, it's a great model because it's just another IP address, right, and there's some attributes that it has and you understand the batteries and you can make economic decision. So think of it like a trading platform if you will. So those are emerging, you know, there's some really fascinating companies that are young and starting but off to a great start on those tasks. >> Excellent, okay, so why don't we just talk a little bit about Primus Power itself for a second. So you're in particular type of energy solution. Why don't you talk about that, and how you differ from some of the other providers that are out there? >> Sure, so there's lots of different types of batteries, right, and one thing to mention, that there's no perfect battery. There's always trade offs on batteries, right?. You always, of course, get less out than you put in, because you can't create energy. So there's efficiency differences. We're probably all familiar, the audience here is, with lithium ion batteries, with the Powerwall and Sonin and some, you know famous companies. SolarEdge has done a great job putting batteries with solar, or just having batteries by themselves. Those batteries today, most of the market is lithium ion. Lithium ion is 20-30 years old, first showed up on the Sony Handycam, very bankable, very proven, but like all batteries, have trade offs. We know the fade that we've experienced with our laptops and our cell phones-- >> Absolutely. >> Which is lithium ion. That's okay, because you can buy a new iPhone every three years, but if you have that on the grid, not so good, you don't want to go out to the substation every three years with a new set of batteries. Well, there's also fire concerns. There were 30-40 fires in South Korea last year, lithium ion based, and there was a big one earlier this year in Surprise, Arizona, bit of a Surprise down there, it sent some firefighters to the hospital. So that's some of the strengths and weaknesses of lithium ion. A flow battery, like ours, gets its name because we flow a liquid electrolyte, and a typical flow battery has two tanks and you're moving liquid from one tank to the other take through a reaction chamber, that's a stack of electrodes, and you plate a metal, we plate Zinc, other people plate iron, or you're playing tennis with electrons. This is high school chemistry coming back to haunt all of us, you're changing valance states of Vanadium, for example, Primus, if I talk about that difference, is unique in that it only has a single tank because we exploit the density differences in our electrolyte, kind of got a oil and vinegar separation going on, and we don't have a membrane in our stack of electrodes, so it's about half the cost, half of the price compared to other batteries. It's earlier, right? That's our biggest detriment is that we're not quite at bankable scale yet, we'll get there, right? As a young company you have to earn your stripes and get the UL certification and get enough things out there to do that. But there will be a number of winners in this space. Lithium ion is really good for certain applications, flow generally is good for daily discharges, think solar plus storage, deep discharge, multiple hour 4, 5, 6, 8 hour storage, and then there's going to be week long batteries that might be thermal based. There's a company that's moving, got a nice round of funding last week that's blocks of concrete around because you can, just like the pumped hydro you can move water up and down depending on the price of electricity and the use, you can move concrete blocks up and down. Spend energy moving it up, and then use gravity as your friend when you need electricity from the concrete battery. >> So, so in terms of future battery economy, like with multiple types of solutions for different sort of use cases right? >> Exactly. >> Whether sort of transportation or handheld, right, to residential, to grid-tied, etc.-- >> Absolutely, sure, and it will be drive by economics and then, you can't have a concrete battery in downtown San Francisco but you could in the middle of the Mojave-- >> Understood. >> So it would be-- >> Understood-- >> Absolutely-- >> Okay, so in order to kind of let you go here why don't you just talk a little bit about Primus, how you, where you guys are at in terms of your own evolution. How much deploy battery pods do you have out there in the world today? >> Sure, so Primus is at a stage now where we are growing. We're trying to grow at the right rate, because you don't want to get too far ahead of yourselves. We have systems up and down California, at some projects that have been put at waste water treatment centers, right, where we can help optimize the economics of the waste water treatment centers. They have components that are spending electricity they have solar, okay, batteries can help improve those economics. We have them at utilities that are testing them to see, "Okay, how well do these work?" Many of these new battery companies are where we are, where our customers are a try before you buy or a test before you invest type of a situation. We have a battery in China at one of China's largest wind turbine provider. Wind curtailment is acute in certain provinces in China. In fact in one of the provinces, Qinghai, in northwest China they passed a law a couple years ago that said "every new wind turbine has to have "a battery with it," so that's created a market there. >> Okay. >> There's also, we will be coming out with a residential version for some of the same reasons we mentioned about the wildfire concerns. >> Excellent, and so just give a sense how big, you talked about your pipeline and how many kind of quoted sales you've got out there. Just give us, the audience, a rough idea of what kind of pipeline you're looking at. >> Sure, so as a company we're moving from single digit million type of revenue that we did last year, to double digit million that we want to do next year. That translates into roughly 200-300 of our systems. Our systems, by the way, are think of a large washing machine, two meters, by two meters, by two meters. We have, in our pipeline of projects that we've quoted, more than a billion dollars worth of projects, a lot of solar-plus storage, a couple years from now. We won't get them all, for sure, but it shows the really strong interest in solutions like ours. >> Excellent, well exciting stuff Tom. Thank you for coming into TheCUBE and having a conversation with us. Appreciate you taking the time. >> Don, thank you very much, it was wonderful, really appreciate it! >> Donald Klein, thank you for joining us for another CUBE conversation, we'll see you next time. (upbeat jazzy music)

>> from New York City. It's the cue covering automation anywhere. Imagine, brought to you by automation anywhere you >> were in midtown Manhattan, at the automation anywhere. Imagine Crawford's twenty nineteen really psyched to be here. Fifteen hundred people talking about our P A. But really, the Rp story is much more than just robotic process. Automation is really a new way to work, which we hear about all over the place and really reimagining what this technology can do. We're excited to have our next guest. She's Shelly Kramer, an analyst and partner for feature research. Shelley, great to see you. >> Great to see you, too. And you got it. >> I got a right. >> You got it. >> Well, you're a very busy lady. Got all kinds of stuff going on, which is what we like. So first off, just kind of Have you been here before? General impressions of the show. >> This is my first, Uh, this is my first, uh, automation anywhere event. And so it's exciting. I write a lot about our PPA and about the future of work and work force transformation. So it's great to be >> here. Yeah. And you just wrote not a super uplifting article linked in about, you know, employee dissatisfaction and some of the issues with employee retention. We talked before. We turn the cameras on about things like calling him human resource is, you know, and human capital there, they're people. And I thought my here really touched on it. Well, in the keynote today that this is not a rip and replace technology for people. This is a tool to help us do our jobs better, just like our laptops and our mobile phones and our application. So are you excited about the opportunity? See, it is this transformative. >> I do see this transformative. And I think that before you talk about what we talked about, the technology that we have to talk about people and Simpson and I'm pulling this out of my memory banks. So on average, about eighty two percent of employees within any organization are disengaged. OK, eighty two percent. >> So the ping pong tables and the tables are not doing it. >> And so when you think about it and engaged workforce are people who wake up in the morning or whatever it is, they go to work and who are excited about what they're doing excited about their company. They're working for love, the culture that they're working within. I love all those things that they're doing. And so when you realize that eighty two percent of people are disengaged, that's problematic. Right then, you're talking about the toughest talent acquisition markets that we've had in a really long time. So we're all fighting for top talent, not just top tech talent but any kind of talent. And so focusing on how we can make the workforce better and create better cultures and put systems and processes in place that can make people do their jobs more efficiently, more productively and actually like them. That's to me. That's the beginning of where we get to this technology piece and what our P a Khun Dio How? Aye aye plays a role in there and how you can. How employees can partner you think of technology as a partner, as opposed to worrying about technology replacing them. So I think it's an exciting time in the workforce, and when you think about it that way, it makes a lot of sense. >> Do you think the difference in kind of the expectations that people have when they Goto work to be engaged as a function of the millennials who are looking for something that's more mission lead. Is it a function of just the competition? It's so robust that before people could get away with having, you know, maybe a less compelling work experience. What do you think is driving? The changer hasn't changed, and maybe now we're just paying more attention to it. >> You know, I think it's changed in a little bit. I think that you and I are old enough that when we were coming of age and we were working our way up the corporate ladder, you know, you kind of sold a little bit of your soul to the company store. No matter. I mean, I gripped in advertising, right, and, you know, I work crazy hours, and I loved it. But I never questioned that there were dues that I had to pay, and that's what you think. And I think that people don't necessarily expect the world on a platter. But I think especially the more skilled you are, whether it's a knowledge of tack or whatever it is in today's market, I think that ueno and again it could be someone my age. It could be someone that's twenty five. It could be someone that's forty. I can find something else. So minute, this isn't doing it for me, right? I can go find something else right now. That said, there are also people who are punching a clock. You know what I'm saying? And I don't mean ship workers. Necessarily. As much as I need to pay the mortgage, I need to get my kid's bed. You know, I don't love this job. Maybe it's a path to something. One of my daughters works for an insurance company. She has a very non glamorous job. She doesn't love it, but she knows she has to do it for X amount of time before she can be considered for this different promotion. And she is watching the clock on literally. I'm getting to that milestone and asking for her promotion. And if that doesn't happen, she'LL leave. So so I think that when you can, people don't feel like they need to be stuck, right? So I think that way. As a CZ leaders and his executives in the workforce, I think you always have to be mindful about what the work environment that you're creating is and focus on. How do we keep how do we get people? And how do we build the value props that we used when we entice them to say yes to our offer? How do we get them to stay? >> S o many things there, But But, you know, what things you just mentioned is is I don't think they accept it like we did. Maybe when we're coming up, which is, you know, you hire somebody and you hire them for the act tributes that they're bringing in the organization than it used to be. Then you give him the employee rulebook and you basically squash, you know, kind of all the individual creativity and ingenuity and enthusiasm, which is why you hired him in the first place. And we don't see that as much anymore. But at the same token, you know, not everyone's worried about robots taken their job at the same time. There's so many unfulfilled Rex out there. And as you said, it's the most competitive labor market out there. How our employers supposed to kind of square that circle because they need to bring the automation they want to keep the people happy. It's a hyper competitive market, and they need mission. But, you know, we gotta pay the bills and get the products out. >> I think that So I think that we can never forget that people that work for our companies need to pay the bills too. Right? So when you can give them something that they could be excited about, Tio dio that helps. Right? But it just kind of like I'm thinking back Teo, uh, presentation and I can't remember his name. But the V p of product did a presentation about today on a loan mortgage loan application. Okay, that has to be like one of the most boring things, right? If you're in that mortgage loan processing, do this. Do this. Do this villain this spreadsheet love about, By the way, I hate creating spreadsheets. I just want to look at a finished one. But anyway, it was so cool to just look at this, and I shot a video of it, shared it on Twitter. If you want to see what I'm talking about, but which is so cool that you can do this and do this and do this and you know you create this process. And in no time the technology has done all the work and all the calculations, and you've got a recommendation approved, not approved. And so if you're in the mortgage loan business, way to think about that leased, the way that I think to think about it is, doesn't mean that your job is going to go away. It's just like my daughter doing that not very exciting job that she's doing. If automation could fuel some of the mundane, repeatable, banal tasks so that she could focus on the other part of the equation where it's more interesting and more exciting, I think then that's really the value equation there. But I think as I think, what businesses have todo is be transparent and very honest with their employees and tell them, you know, this is our This is why we're doing this. This is what our means, and this is how it's going to add value. It we're not doing this to necessarily replace humans. This is so that we can make this work better, efficient more, you know. And I think that you know, I'll step back and say for a personal example. We went through a process last year where we evaluated all of our business processes, and we looked at how much time our employees were spending sweet track time doing certain tasks. And then we were realizing, you know, the value there. We were actually paying too much in terms of the time, investment or tasks that didn't make sense to. Then we set out integrating automation into our processes, and it was it was a big project, right? And people were kind of worried, you know, and they were kind of worried about it. But one of the things that way told them early on with, like, This is not so that we don't have work for you. This is so that we can make what it is you're doing more efficient and you could do things you like better, >> right? Right. >> And so and that has happened and way didn't lose any of our team. And a lot of those task that they were doing are now automated. They're doing stuff that they like more. So I think that I think that's really the challenge for businesses. Two is the messaging right and then involving your teams in the process, appointment of any kind of >> technology. I think it's just the soul crushing. You know, expression is so it's so valid for for these types of activities. And I think again may hear had a great stat. Four percent of US jobs required a medium level of creativity, which you know people want to get out from under that. But if we can define it as a tool and is a thinking like personal digital assistants, my body will. That used to be just my palm three was my p d. A. Right wow how no. One No one was threatened by the Palm taking the job away. So I think you know, you're right. If we can put it in the context of it's just another tool that's just gonna help you get your job done. That's a very different way to frame the problem versus kind of just ripping replace narrative, which we hear kind of over and over again. >> Well, and I think it also goes beyond Jeff. It's goes beyond, and I think that employees at every level have to understand this. It goes beyond just helping you get your job done. It really is about, you know, cos that survived today and tomorrow are the companies who transformed. And, you know, we talk a lot about digital transformation. And you know, I'm out there on the front lines all day, every day, and I can promise you there are many, many companies who are far from really understanding and embracing this and understanding what it takes from a technology standpoint and the value, that data ad and how to use that data and and the impact that that has on customer experience and all that sort of thing. So So I think it's really is about much more than this will make your jobs suck less >> right, right, Right. >> I think it's about this is how our company stay successful. This is how you helped make your job in the role you play within our organization, what you want it to be, right? And I think that you could probably telling, you know, I've been marketing because I'm always thinking about you know how I know how you spend something and I don't mean in a spin like a PR way, but I think we all have to step back and think about it in terms of the whole equation. And there are a whole lot of companies that don't exist anymore, right? You know whether you're talking about the financial services sector and you know and every business everywhere is being disrupted. I told this story. I was I was talking with me here earlier this morning and I was telling him a story about how my husband, I just bought a new car and we expected to get a loan for that car from our community. It's not a community from our our local bank local. Our local bank has been recently purchased by a bigger bank in the last couple of years, but we run all of our corporate money. I mean, everything that we've ever done is here in this way. You know your spell. ITA loan application. No problem. Give us an interest rate. No problem. But they made every part. My husband I vote travel a lot for business, and they're every part of the process required us to be somewhere together to have an official closing. To do this, to do that and it was just like way could never purchased this car because they were making it so difficult for us. So we enter death talking with the car dealer who said I'm not God. We can fix you up, financed it through their banking partner, which is a huge national bank approved in five minutes. Loan documents in five minutes. Hey, come on out. You sign this tomorrow? He consigned this when he gets, you know. And when I talked to my bank after the transaction, they said, Here's the deal. I wanted to do business with you. But when you make it difficult for a customer to give you their money, they're not gonna hesitate to give somebody else there money, Right? So So I think the banking industry is one example of the these processes that air so cumbersome that in some ways can be automated, but it just it doesn't make sense. And customers today you and I are impatient people as our people younger than we are way. No, there has to be a better way. An analogy could give us a better >> win it right, And, you know, they could use different data sets. And I mean, I've bought himself recently, and you just push the button on the phone and it takes a minute. The wheel spins and then your approved right and you're done if you're done, and it's it's a completely different experience. But the part about the digital transformation I want to follow because it came up today where a lot of times people are the integration point between these systems very similar to the example you just used and you can't digitally transform. If all these automated systems ultimately have the bottleneck through some person to take this piece Veda and stick it over there, right? So it's it's absolutely critical to get those people out of the way, right? So as you look forward twenty nineteen, what are some of the big trends beyond our P A and kind of personal digital assistants not called palm, uh, that you're seeing and that you're excited about? >> Well, I think that, you know, it's hard not to be excited about our p A. Just simply because of, you know, it's predicted to be a one point nine billion this year and to almost double by twenty twenty one. I mean, it makes sense that companies like automation anywhere doubling down on that right. It also makes sense that gigantic companies like IBM and Jo Lloyd and you know why. I mean, you >> know, hearing for >> all here, right? There's a reason for that, right? Because IBM customers want this and Microsoft's customers want this. So So I think that in general I think that technology is fueling our world. Our personal lives are business world, and I think that probably one of the biggest things that I pay attention to to that we pay attention to is that technology alone isn't the answer. It's the partnership of human beings and their skill sets and capabilities and data and automation and artificial intelligence and all those things. So I think that I think that it's an incredibly exciting time. It's kind of like, you know, you you go back to the video that we saw this morning in the bit about the Internet, and I don't know if you remember this. I don't know, probably. I don't know how much older I am than you, but, you know, I remember that Internet machine and wow, this is like I could send an email, you know? And then when you think about right how and those comments, You know that Matt Lauer and Katie Couric we're making it like that weren't down comments we didn't didn't know, right? Know the impact Internet could have would have, you know. And so I think the same is true of this kind of technology today. This this next generation of technology. So there's not just one thing I'm interested. I'm interested in Element. >> Gotta keep learning right because way have a hard time with were very linear and everything is growing exponentially. So you got a got to be willing. Teo learned the next thing because it's right around the corner, >> and I think that's so key. That's that's a great rap. I think that people who are happiest today are people who actually love change and who love learning. And I would say I would posit that most that those air not inherently things that people trades that people possess. I'm lucky because I do. You see what I'm saying? I think it's >> an interesting question, whether that's inherent. If there's just people that liked the learning, our curious all the time, and that and then they got to stick in the muds and Candice stick in the muds, change your attitude and become learners again. >> Maybe they won't. I mean, you know, I think that they're I do think that there are are people who are wired to like change and two are curious and who loved learning. And I think there are a whole bunch of people who are not. And I would I truly believe that for success in today's world and moving forward for young people and not so young people, you better get there if that's not your deal, because I don't think that I did it. And I have stumbled across conversations of people having like, you know, that's not gonna happen, you know? So I don't have to worry about it because I'm gonna be outta here by then. Or and you know what? There are a whole bunch of people that have that mindset, and that's a okay, but especially for young people making their way, >> they okay mindset. But it's not the fact that that's the problem. It's it's happening now. I mean, the future is here, and it's happening at a faster pace. Well, Shelley, we could go on and on and on, but we're going to leave it there. And I appreciate you taking a few minutes out of your day. >> Absolutely. My pleasure. >> All right. She Shelly, I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. Where? Automation anywhere. Imagine in Midtown Manhattan. Thanks for watching. See you next time.

>> Announcer: Live from Midtown Manhattan its theCUBE. Covering BigData New York City 2017. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and it's ecosystem sponsors. >> His name is Jim Kobielus. >> Jim: That right, John Furrier is actually how I pronounce his name for the record. But he is Basil Faruqui. >> Basil Faruqui who's the solutions marketing manager at BMC, welcome to theCUBE. >> Basil: Thank you, good to be back on theCUBE. >> So, first of all, I heard you guys had a tough time in Houston, so hope everything's getting better and best wishes. >> Basil: Definitely in recovery mode now. >> Hopefully that can get straightened out. What's going on BMC, give us a quick update and in context to BigData NYC what's happening, what is BMC doing in the the big data space now? The AI space now, the IoT space now, the cloud space? >> Like you said you know the data space, the IoT space. the AI space. There are four components of this entire picture that literally haven't changed since the beginning of computing. If you look at those four components of a data pipeline a suggestion, storage. processing and analytics. What keeps changing around it is the infrastructure, the types of data, the volume of data and the applications that surround it. The rate of change has picked up immensely over the last few years with Hadoop coming into the picture, public cloud providers pushing it. It's obviously created a number of challenges, but one of the biggest challenges that we are seeing in the market and we're helping customers address is the challenge of automating this. And obviously the benefit of automation is in scalability as well as reliability. So when you look at this rather simple data pipeline, which is now becoming more and more complex. How do you automate all of this from a single point of control? How do you continue to absorb new technologies and not re-architect your automation strategy every time. Whether it's Hadoop, whether it's bringing in machine learning from a cloud provider. And that is the the issue we've been solving for customers. >> All right, let me jump into it. So first of all you mention some things some things that never change, ingestion storage, and what was the third one? >> Ingestions, storage, processing and eventual analytics. >> So OK, so that's cool, totally buy that. Now if you move and say hey okay so you believe that's standard but now in the modern era that we live in, which is complex, you want breadth of data, and also you want the specialization when you get down the machine learning. That's highly bound, that's where the automation it is right now. We see the trend essentially making that automation more broader as it goes into the customer environments. >> Basil: Correct. >> How do you architect that? If I'm a CXO to I'm a CDO, what's in it for me? How do I architect this because that's really the number one thing is I know what the building blocks are but they've changed in their dynamics to the marketplace. >> So the way I look at it is that what defines success and failure, and particularly in big data projects, is your ability to scale. If you start a pilot and you spend, you know, three months on it and you deliver some results. But if you cannot roll it out worldwide, nationwide, whatever it is essentially the project has failed. The analogy often give is Walmart has been testing the pick up tower, I don't know if you seen, so this is basically a giant ATM for you to go pick up an order that you placed online. They're testing this at about hundred stores today. Now that's a success and Walmart wants to roll this out nationwide. How much time do you think their IT departments can have? Is this is a five year project, ten year project? No, the management's going to want this done six months, ten months. So essentially, this is where automation becomes extremely crucial because it is now allowing you to deliver speed to market and without automation you are not going to be able to get to an operational stage in a repeatable and reliable manner. >> You're describing a very complex automation scenario. How can you automate in a hurry without sacrificing you know, the details of what needs to be, In other words, you seem to call for re purposing or reusing prior automation scripts and rules and so forth. How how can the Walmart's of the world do that fast, but also do it well? >> So we do it we go about it in two ways. One is that out of the box we provide a lot of pre built integrations to some of the most commonly used systems in an enterprise. All the way up from the mainframes, Oracle's, SAP's Hadoop, Tableau's, of the world. They're all available out of the box for you to quickly reuse these objects and build an automated data pipeline. The other challenge we saw, and particularly when we entered the big data space four years ago, was that the automation was something that was considered close to the project becoming operational. And that's where a lot of rework happened because developers have been writing their own scripts, using point solutions. So we said all right, it's time to shift automation left and allow companies to build automation as an artifact very early in the development lifecycle. About a month ago we released what we call Control-M Workbench which is essentially a Community Edition of Control-M targeted towards developers. So that instead of writing their own scripts they can use a Control-M in a completely offline manner without having to connect to an enterprise system. As they build and test and iterate, they're using Control-M to do that. So as the application progresses the development lifecycle, and all of that work can then translate easily into an Enterprise Edition of Control-M. >> So quickly, just explain what shift-left means for the folks that might not know software methodologies, left political or left alt-right, this is software development so please take a minute explain what shift-left means, and the importance of it. >> Correct, so the if you if you think of software development and as a straight line continuum you can start with building some code, you will do some testing, then unit testing, than user acceptance testing. As it moves along this chain, there was a point right before production where all of the automation used to happen. You know, developers would come in and deliver the application to ops, and ops would say, well hang on a second all this CRON tab and all these other point solutions have been using for automation, that's not what we use in production. And we need you to now. >> To test early and often. >> Test early and often. The challenge was the developers, the tools they use, we're not the tools that were being used on the production end of the cycle. And there was good reason for it because developers don't need something really heavy and with all the bells and whistles early in the development lifecycle. Control-M Workbench is a very light version which is targeted at developers and focuses on the needs that they have when they're building and developing as the application progresses through its life cycle. >> How much are you seeing Waterfall and then people shifting-left becoming more prominent now. What percentage of your customers have moved to Agile and shifting-left percentage wise? >> So we survey our customers on a regular basis. In the last survey showed that 80% of the customers have either implemented a more continuous integration delivery type of framework, or are in the process of doing it. And that's the other. >> And getting upfront costs as possible, a tipping point is reached. >> What is driving all of that is the need from the business, you know, the days of the five year implementation timelines are gone. This is something that you need to deliver every week, two weeks, and iteration. And we have also innovated in that space and the approach we call Jobs-as-Code where you can build entire, complex data pipelines in code formats so that you can enable the automation in a continuous integration and delivery framework. >> I have one quick question, Jim, and then I'll let you take the floor and got to learn to get a word in soon. But I have one final question on this BMC methodology thing. You guys have a history obviously BMC goes way back. Remember Max Watson CEO, and then in Palm Beach back in 97 we used to chat with him. Dominated that landscape, but we're kind of going back to a systems mindset, so the question for you is how do you view the issue of the this holy grail, the promised land of AI and machine learning. Where, you know, end-to-end visibility is really the goal, right. At the same time, you want bounded experiences at root level so automation can kick in to enable more activity. So it's a trade off between going for the end-to-end visibility out of the gate, but also having bounded visibility and data to automate. How do you guys look at that market because customers want the end-to-end promise, but they don't want to try to get there too fast as a dis-economies of scale potentially. How do you talk about that? >> And that's exactly the approach we've taken with Control-M Workbench the Community Edition. Because early on you don't need capabilities like SLA management and forecasting and automated promotion between environments. Developers want to be able to quickly build, and test and show value, OK. And they don't need something that, as you know, with all the bells and whistles. We're allowing you to handle that piece in that manner, through Control-M Workbench. As things progress, and the application progresses, the needs change as well. Now I'm closer to delivering this to the business, I need to be able to manage this within an SLA. I need to be able to manage this end-to-end and connect this other systems of record and streaming data and click stream data, all of that. So that we believe that there it doesn't have to be a trade off. That you don't have to compromise speed and quality and visibility and enterprise grade automation. >> You mention trade-offs so the Control-M Workbench the developer can use it offline, so what amount of testing can they possibly do on a complex data pipeline automation, when it's when the tool is off line? I mean it simply seems like the more development they do off line, the greater the risk that it simply won't work when they go into production. Give us a sense for how they mitigate that risk. >> Sure, we spent a lot of time observing how developers work and very early in the development stage, all they're doing is working off of their Mac or their laptop and they're not really connecting to any. And that is where they end up writing a lot of scripts because whatever code, business logic, that they've written the way they're going to make it run is by writing scripts. And that essentially becomes a problem because then you have scripts managing more scripts and as the the application progresses, you have this complex web of scripts and CRON tabs and maybe some open source solutions. trying to make, simply make, all of this run. And by doing this I don't know offline manner that doesn't mean that they're losing all of the other controlling capabilities. Simply, as the application progresses whatever automation that they've built in Control-M can seamlessly now flow into the next stage. So when you are ready take an application into production there is essentially no rework required from an automation perspective. All of that that was built can now be translated into the enterprise grade Control-M and that's where operations can then go in and add the other artifacts such as SLA management forecasting and other things that are important from an operational perspective. >> I'd like to get both your perspectives because you're like an analyst here. So Jim, I want you guys to comment, my question to both of you would be you know, looking at this time in history, obviously on the BMC side, mention some of the history. You guys are transforming on a new journey and extending that capability in this world. Jim, you're covering state of the art AI machine learning. What's your take of the space now? Strata Data which is now Hadoop World, which is, Cloudera went public, Hortonworks is now public. Kind of the big, the Hadoop guys kind of grew up, but the world has changed around them. It's not just about Hadoop anymore. So I want to get your thoughts on this kind of perspective. We're seeing a much broader picture in BigData NYC versus the Strata Hadoop, which seems to be losing steam. But, I mean, in terms of the focus, the bigger focus is much broader horizontally scalable your thoughts on the ecosystem right now. >> Let Basil answer first unless Basil wants me to go first. >> I think the reason the focus is changing is because of where the projects are in their life cycle. You know now what we're seeing is most companies are grappling with how do I take this to the next level. How do I scale, how do I go from just proving out one or two use cases to making the entire organization data driven and really inject data driven decision making in all facets of decision making. So that is, I believe, what's driving the change that we're seeing, that you know now you've gone from Strata Hadoop to being Strata Data, and focus on that element. Like I said earlier, these difference between success and failure is your ability to scale and operationalize. Take machine learning for example. >> And really it's not a hype market. Show me the meat on the bone, show me scale, I got operational concerns of security and whatnot. >> And machine learning you know that's one of the hottest topics. A recent survey I read which polled a number of data scientists, it revealed that they spent about less than 3% of their time in training the data models and about 80% of their time in data manipulation, data transformation and enrichment. That is obviously not the best use of the data scientists time, and that is exactly one of the problems we're solving for our customers around the world. >> And it needs to be automated to the hilt to help them to be more productive delivering fast results. >> Ecosystem perspective, Jim whats you thoughts? >> Yes everything that Basil said, and I'll just point out that many of the core use cases for AI are automation of the data pipeline. You know it's driving machine learning driven predictions, classifications, you know abstractions and so forth, into the data pipeline, into the application pipeline to drive results in a way that is contextually and environmentally aware of what's going on. The path, the history historical data, what's going on in terms of current streaming data to drive optimal outcomes, you know, using predictive models and so forth, in line to applications. So really, fundamentally then, what's going on is that automation is an artifact that needs to be driven into your application architecture as a re-purposeful resource for a variety of jobs. >> How would you even know what to automate? I mean that's the question. >> You're automating human judgment, your automating effort. Like the judgments that a working data engineer makes to prepare data for modeling and whatever. More and more that need can be automated because those are patterned, structured activities that have been mastered by smart people over many years. >> I mean we just had a customer on his with a glass company, GSK, with that scale, and his attitude is we see the results from the users then we double down and pay for it and automate it. So the automation question, it's a rhetorical question but this begs the question, which is you know who's writing the algorithms as machines get smarter and start throwing off their own real time data. What are you looking at, how do you determine you're going to need you machine learning for machine learning? You're going to need AI for AI? Who writes the algorithms for the algorithms? >> Automated machine learning is a hot hot, not only research focus, but we're seeing it more and more solution providers like Microsoft and Google and others, are going deep down doubling down and investments in exactly that area. That's a productivity play for data scientists. >> I think the data markets going to change radically in my opinion, so you're starting to see some things with blockchain some other things that are interesting. Data sovereignty, data governance are huge issues. Basil, just give your final thoughts for this segment as we wrap this up. Final thoughts on data and BMC, what should people know about BMC right now, because people might have a historical view of BMC. What's the latest, what should they know, what's the new Instagram picture of BMC? What should they know about you guys? >> I think what I would say people should know about BMC is that you know all the work that we've done over the last 25 years, in virtually every platform that came before Hadoop, we have now innovated to take this into things like big data and cloud platforms. So when you are choosing Control-M as a platform for automation, you are choosing a very very mature solution. An example of which is Navistar and their CIO is actually speaking at the keynote tomorrow. They've had Control-M for 15, 20 years and have automated virtually every business function through Control-M. And when they started their predictive maintenance project where there ingesting data from about 300 thousand vehicles today, to figure out when this vehicle might break and do predictive maintenance on it. When they started their journey they said that they always knew that they were going to use Control-M for it because that was the enterprise standard. And they knew that they could simply now extend that capability into this area. And when they started about three four years ago there were ingesting data from about a hundred thousand vehicles, that has now scaled over 325 thousand vehicles and they have not had to re-architect their strategy as they grow and scale. So, I would say that is one of the key messages that we are are taking to market, is that we are bringing innovation that has spanned over 25 years and evolving it. >> Modernizing it. >> Modernizing it and bringing it to newer platforms. >> Congratulations, I wouldn't call that a pivot, I'd call it an extensibility issue, kind of modernizing the core things. >> Absolutely. >> Thanks for coming and sharing the BMC perspective inside theCUBE here. On BigData NYC this is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Jim Kobielus here in New York City, more live coverage the three days we will be here, today, tomorrow and Thursday at BigData NYC. More coverage after this short break.

>> Narrator: Live from Santa Clara, California, it's The Cube. Covering Open Networking Summit 2017. Brought you to by the Linux Foundation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with The Cube, along with Scott Raynovich. We're at the Open Networking Summit 2017. Linux Foundation has taken over this show a couple years ago, it's a lot of excitement. A lot of people would say that the networking was kind of the last piece of the puzzle to get software defined, to get open. We're really excited to kick off the show with a really great representative of SDN and everything that it represents. Martin Casado, now with Andreessen Horowitz, Martin, great to see you. >> Hey, I'm super happy to be here. >> So, coming off your keynote, you said it was ten years ago almost to the day that you guys started the adventure called Nicira, which kind of put us where we are now. >> You know, you and I are growing old together here. It has been a decade. I've actually been on The Cube throughout, so I'm very happy to be here. Thanks so much for the intro. >> Absolutely. So, what were your takeaways, Scott, on that keynote? >> It was great, we had some great stuff this morning. Not only was Martin giving the history of Nicira and the origins of SDN and talking about how you made it successful after all these challenges but we also had AT&T unveiling a new incredible white box program, where they're running open networking on their entire network now, so, it was kind of a, I thought, a big day in general to show how far we've gone, right? And you talked a little about that. >> Yeah, listen having come over here since the inception of ONS, what strikes me is, it originally, it was so speculative, it was kind of like wouldn't it be nice and you had all these dreamers. It was largely academics or people from the CTO's office and if you compare those first meetings to now, we're in the industry proper now, right? If you come and you look around, there's huge representation from Telcos, from vendors, from customers, and academics. So, I think we've seen a massive maturation in general. >> I just think I could make a mash-up of all the times we've had you on the Cube table where it's coming! We're almost here! >> Martin: And we're like it's here! >> It's here! But now John Donovan said that their goal, I don't know if it's in the short term or the very near term, is to be over 50 percent software defined, so I guess that's a pretty good definition of being here. >> Yeah, I think so. I think that we're seeing, and I think that the AT&T talk was fantastic, but I think you're seeing this across the industry, which is large customers that have been traditionally conservative, have these targets, and they're actually implementing. I mean, it's one thing to have something on the roadmap. And it's one thing to have something planned. It's another thing to actually start seeing it roll out. >> Jeff: Right. >> Again, this is a process. A lot of my talk was like, how long does it take for an industry to mature? But now, there's many things you can point to that are very real, and I think that was one great example of it. >> Well, the other thing I thought was great in your talk is you mapped out the 10 year journey and you said it so discounts often the hardest part which is changing behavior of the market. That is much harder than the technology and some of the other pieces. >> Right, exactly. So, take this from a technologist standpoint. I basically made a career on making fun of hardware. I'm like, software is so much faster than hardware, and hardware is so slow. But now if I stand back and take a long view, yeah, fine hardware's slower than software, but it's nothing compared to changing organizational behavior or consumer behavior and so, for me it was actually pretty humbling going through this last decade, because you realize that even if you have product market fit, and even if you have a good technical solution, there is a natural law of market physics that you have to overcome a moment of inertia that takes probably a decade, certainly five or six years. >> And that's before things like vendor viability, when you're trying to enter the enterprise space, or legacy infrastructure which is just not getting ripped out, you know? So many hurdles. >> Strictly consumer behavior, right? Consumers are used to doing one thing. I always talk to new entrepreneurs and I say the following: You have two jobs as an entrepreneur. Job number one is you identify a constituency. That constituency wakes up, they think about everything in the world, but they don't think about your thing, so job number one is to get them to think about your thing. That's difficult. It's like Inception. It's like Leonardo DiCaprio Inception. You're putting an idea in somebody's head and then the second thing that you have to do is you have to attach a value to that. So, just because they have the idea doesn't mean that they actually value it. So, you actually have to say, listen, this is worth X amount of dollars. And it turns out that this takes a long time and that's why market category creation is such an effort. That's why it's so neat, we're standing here and we're seeing that this has actually happened, which is fantastic. >> You talked about Nicira, which today, correct me if I'm wrong, it's still the biggest success story in SDN in terms of a startup, you know, 1.3 billion. You talked about different iterations, I think you said, six or seven product iterations and being frustrated at many levels. Did you ever sit there one day and think, "uh, we're going to fail." >> Martin: (laughs) >> Was failure a common- >> Oh man, I don't think there wasn't a quarter when we're like "we're dead." (laughs) By the way, that's every startup. I mean, I'm on- >> Scott: That's just normal, right? >> There's six or seven boards right now, I mean every startup has this oscillator. When we started at Nicira, it was in 2007. And in 2008, the nuclear winter set in, if you remember. The whole economy collapsed, and I think that alone could've killed us. So absolutely, and all startups who do that. But one thing that I never lost faith in was that the problem was real. I wasn't sure we had the right solution or the right approach, and we iterated on that, but I knew there was a real problem here. And when that is kind of a guiding star and a guiding light, we just kept going towards that. I think that's why ultimately we ended up solving the problem we set out to, it was just we took a very crooked path to get there. >> What was the feedback mechanism? Was it like just talking to as many customers as possible or? You talked about the market fit versus the industry fit, how did you gather that information? >> I think in core technical infrastructure, the strategic leaders of a startup have to be piped into the nervous system of both the technology trends and the product market fit. Technology trends because, technology trends provide the momentum for what's going to get adopted and what it looks like. And the product market fit is what is the customer problems that need to be solved. And so I think it's really critical to be deeply into both of those things, which is why things like ONS are so important, because they do kind of find a convergence of both of that. What do customers need but also where's the technology going. >> And it's really neat, that's kind of like the platform versus the application. You're going down the new platform strategy, right? Which is the software-defined networking, but at the end of the day, people buy solutions to their problems that they need to get fixed today. No one's buying a new platform today. >> Yeah, so there's two issues, you're right. There's the technical directions and then the specific applications for that, and one thing I talked about and I really believe is we focus a little bit too much on the technology platform, how those are shifting, early on and less on what the customers need. I don't think you want to 100% flip that, you need to focus on both, but I think that they both should be even-handed. What do customers need and then what is the right technical approach to get there. >> And you also stuck on a couple of really interesting points about decisions. You're going to make a lot mistakes going down the road. But you said, you got to make two or three really good ones and that will make up for a whole lot of little missteps along the path. >> So in retrospect, and this was actually a big a-ha! for me and maybe it's obvious to other people, but this was a big a-ha! to me, even as I was putting together this talk. So, the way venture capital works is you make a lot of bets, but only one in ten will actually produce returns, so you're kind of swinging for the fences and almost all the returns comes from the Googles and the Facebooks and the Ubers and so forth. That's just how it is. Now, as a venture capitalist, you can have a portfolio, you can place ten of those bets in parallel. Going back through all of the slides and everything we've done, I hadn't realized before how similar doing a startup is, which is you make a lot of mistakes in startups, but a few key decisions really drive the strategy. Does that make sense? I always thought maybe you need to do 50/50, or maybe even 80/20, 80% correct and 20 wrong, but it's not that. There's a few key decisions that make it correct, and so the key is you're straddling these two pieces of human nature. On one side, you want to stick with something, you want to make sure that you're not sticking too long with something that isn't going to work, and then the other side you don't want to get rid of something before it's going to work. You want to be both honest with yourself when it's not working and you want to be patient. And if you do that long enough I think that you will find one of the critical decisions to drive the startup forward. >> Yeah, one interesting thing you said, you arrived at a conclusion that the products and individual applications were more important than the platform, and that kind of runs contrary to the meme that you have now where the Harvard Business Review is saying "build a platform, build the next Airbnb." And what you're saying is kind of contrary to that. >> Right, so I went into this with a path from Mindframe, if you look at our original slide deck, which I showed, it was a platform. Now, I think that there's two aspects for this, I think in SDN specifically, there is a reason technically why a platform doesn't work, and the reason for that is networking is about distributed state management, which is very specific to applications. So it's hard for a platform to register that, so technically, I think there's reason for that. From a startup perspective, customers don't buy platforms, customers buy products. I think if you focus on the product, you build a viable business, and then for stickiness you turn that into a platform. But most customers don't know what to do with a platform because that's still a value-add. Products before platforms, I think, is a pretty good adage to live by. >> But design your product with a platform point of view. That way so you can make that switch when that day comes and now you're just adding applications, applications. So, I want to shift gears a little bit just kind of about open source and ONS specifically. We hear time and time again about how open source is such an unbelievable driver of innovation. Think of how your story might have changed if there wasn't, and maybe there was, I wasn't there, something here and how does an open source foundation help drive the faster growth of this space? >> So, I actually think, and I'm probably in the minority of this, but I've always thought that open source does not tend to innovation. That's not like the value of open source is innovation. If you look at most successful open source projects, traditionally they've actually entered mature markets. Linux entered Unix, which is, so I'd say the innovation was Unix not Linux. I would say, Android went into Palm, and Blackberry, and iPhone. I would say MySQL went into Oracle. And so, I think the power and beauty of open source is more on the proliferation of technology and more on the customer adoption, and less on the innovation. But what it's doing is it's driving probably the biggest shift in buying that we've ever seen in IT. So, IT is a 4 trillion dollar market that's this massive market, and right now, in order to sell something, you pretty much have to make it open source or offer it as a service. And the people that buy open source, they do it very different than you traditionally do it. It allows them to get educated on it, it allows them to use it, they get a community as part of it. And that shift from a traditional direct vendor model to that model means a lot of new entrants can come in and offer new things. And so, I think it's very important to have open source, I think it's changing the way people buy things, I think building communities like this is a very critical thing to do, but I do think it's more about go-to-market and actually less about innovation. >> So what does it mean for all these proprietary networking vendors? I mean, are they dead now? >> No, here's actually another really interesting thing, which is I think customers these days like to buy things open source or as a service. Those are the two consumption models. Now, for shipping software, I think shipping closed source software, I think those days are over or they're coming to the end. Like, that's done. But, customers will view, whether it's on-prem or off-prem, an appliance as a service. So, let's say I create MartinHub. So, it's my online service, MartinHub, people like MartinHub. I can sell them that on-premise. Now, MartinHub could be totally closed source, right? Like, Amazon is totally closed source, right? But people still consume it. Because it's a service, they think it's open. And if they want something on-prem, I can deploy that and they still consume it as a service. So, I think the proprietary vendors need to move from shipping closed source software to offering a service, but I think that service can just be on-prem. And I think prem senior shift happens, so I don't think there's going to be like a massive changing of the guard. I do think we're going to see new entrants. I think we're going to see a shift in the market share, but this isn't like a thermonuclear detonation that's going to kill the dinosaurs. (laughs) >> I want to get your take, Martin, on the next big wave that we're seeing which is 5G, and really 5G as an enabler for IoT. So, you've been playing in this space for a while. As you see this next thing getting ready to crest, what are some of your thoughts, also sitting in a VC chair, you probably see all kinds of people looking to take advantage of this thing. >> That's funny. I'm actually going to answer a different question. (laughs) Which is, I-- >> Scott: That's cause 5G doesn't exist yet, right? >> No, I love the question, but it's like, this is really a space that's really near and dear to my heart, which is cellular. And I've actually started looking at it personally, and even in the United States alone, there are something like 20 million people that are under-connected. And I think the only practical way to connect them is to use cellular. And so I've been looking at this problem for about a year, I've actually created a non-profit in it that brings cellular connectivity to indigenous communities. Like, Native American tribes, and so forth. >> Jeff: As the ultimate last mile. >> As the ultimate last mile. Which is interesting, like 5G is fantastic, but if you look at the devices available to these people that have coverage, I think LTE is actually sufficient. So what I'm excited about, and I'm sorry about answering a different question, but it's such a critical point, what I'm excited about is, it used to be 150 thousand dollars to set up a cell tower. Using SDN, I can set up an LTE cell tower for about five thousand dollars and I can use existing fiber at schools as backhaul, so I think now we have these viable deployment models that are relatively cheap that we can actually connect the underprivileged with. And I don't think it's about the next new cellular technology, I think it's actually SDN's impact on the existing one. And that's an area of course that's very personal to me. >> All right, love it. It is as you said, it's repackaging stuff in a slightly different way leveraging the technology to do a new solution. >> And it's truly SDN. If you look at this, there's an LTE stack all in software running on proprietary hardware. I'm sorry, on general purpose hardware that's actually being controlled from Amazon. And again, a factor of ten reduction in the price to set up a cell tower. >> Jeff: Awesome. >> What about the opportunity with Internet of Things and connecting the things with networks' artificial intelligence? >> So, as a venture capitalist, when it comes to networking I'm interested in two areas. One area is networking moving from the machine connecting machines to connecting APIs. So, we're moving up a layer. So we've got microservices, now we need a network to connect those and there're different types of end points, and they require different types of connectivity. But I'm also interested in networks moving out. So, it used to be connecting a bunch of machines but now there's all these new problem domains, the Internet is moving out to interact with the physical world. It's driving cars. It's doing manufacturing, it's doing mining, it's doing forestry. As we reach out to these more mature industries, and different deployment environments, we have to rethink the type of networks to build. So, that's definitely an area that I'm looking at from the startup space. >> What kind of activity's there? I mean, you have guys coming in every day pitching new automated connect-the-car software. >> I think for me it's the most exciting time in IT, right? It's like, the last, say ten fifteen years of the Internet has been the World Wide Web. Which is kind of information processing, it's information in, information out. But because of recent advances in sensors due to the cellphone, the ubiquity of cellphones, the recent advances in AI, the recent advances in robotics, that Internet is now growing hands and eyes and ears. And it's manipulating the physical world. Any industry that's out there, whether it's driving, whether it's farming, is now being automated, so we see all the above. People are coming in, they're changing the way we eat food, they're changing the way we drive cars, they're changing the way we fly airplanes. So, it's almost like IT is the new control layer for the world. >> All right, Martin, thanks again for stopping by. Unfortunately we got to leave it there, we could go all day I'm sure. I'll come up with more good questions for you. >> All right, I really appreciate you taking the time. It's good to see both of you. Thanks very much. >> Absolutely, all right, he's Martin Casado from Andreessen Horowitz. I'm Jeff Frick, along with Scott Raynovich. You're watching The Cube from Open Networking Summit 2017. We'll be back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (mellow music) >> Announcer: Robert Herjavec. >> Man: People obviously know you from Shark Tank, but the Herjavec group has been really laser fo--