>> It's The Cube covering Fortinet Security Summit brought to you by Fortinet. >> Hey and welcome back to the cubes coverage of Fortinets championship series. Cybersecurity summit here in Napa valley Fortinet is sponsoring the PGA tour event, kicking off the season here, and the cubes here as part of the coverage. And today is cybersecurity day where they bring their top customers in. We got Glenn Katz SVP, general manager, Comcast Enterprise Solutions. Glenn, thanks for coming on The Cube. Thanks for taking time out of your day. - Thank you no This is great. This is great. >> Interviewer: Tell me to explain what you guys do in the Comcast business enterprise group. >> That's our Comcast business. We're a part of Comcast overall. I always like to explain what Comcast really is. If you look at Comcast, it's a technology innovation company by itself that happens to focus on communications and media type of, of markets, right? And if you look at the Comcast side there on the communication side, it's really everything residential with customers. Then there's the us Comcast business and we're the fastest growing entity over the last 15 years within Comcast. And we started in small business, voice, video, and data to small businesses. Then we moved up to provide fiber ethernet type of a transport to mid-market. And then my group started in 2014. And what we do is focus on managed services. It doesn't matter who the transport layer is for enterprise Fortune 1000 type companies. And then when you layer in all these managed wider network services. So that's my business unit. >> Interviewer: Well, we appreciate it we're a customer by the way in Palo Alto >> Glen: Oh great >> So give a shout out to you guys. Let's get into the talk you're giving here about cybersecurity, because I mean, right now with the pandemic, people are working at home. Obviously everyone knows the future of work is hybrid now you're going to see more decentralized defy and or virtual spaces where people are going to want to work anywhere and businesses want to have that extension, right? What people are talking about, and it's not new, but it's kind of new in the sense of reality, right? You've got to execute. This is a big challenge. >> Glen: It is - What's your thoughts on that, >> Well it's a big challenge. And one of the things that I'll try to, I'll speak to this afternoon here, which is at least from the enterprise perspective, which includes the headquarters, the enterprise, the branch locations, the digital commerce, everywhere else, commerce is being done. It's not just at a store anymore. It's everywhere. Even if you only have a store and then you have the remote worker aspect. I mean, they do that to your point earlier. We're not in that fortress sort of security mentality anymore. There's no more DMZs it's done. And so you've got to get down to the zero trust type of network architecture. And how do you put that together? And how does that work? Not just for remote workers that have to access the enterprise applications, but also for simple, you know, consumers or the business customers of these, of these enterprises that have to do business from over the phone or in the store. >> Interviewer: What are the some of the challenges you hear from your customers, obviously, business of the defend themselves now the, the, the attacks are there. There's no parameters. You mentioned no fortress. There's more edge happening, right? Like I said, people at home, what are the top challenges that you're hearing from customers? >> So the biggest challenge, and this is, I would think this is, this is mostly focused on the enterprise side of it is that the is two interesting phenomenons going on. This is sort of beginnings before the pandemic. And then of course the pandemic, the role of the CIO has been elevated to now, they have a real seat at the table. Budgets are increasing to a point, but the expertise needed in these, in these it departments for these large enterprises, it's, it's impossible to do what you were just talking about, which is create a staff of people that can do everything from enterprise applications, e-commerce analytics, the network. How do you secure that network all the way down to the end users? Right? So it's that middle portion. That's the biggest challenge because that takes a lot of work and a lot of effort. And that's where folks like Comcast can come in and help them out. That's their biggest challenge. They can handle the enterprise, they can handle the remote workers. They can handle their own applications, which are continually trying to be, you know, have to be it's competitive out there. It's that middle area, that communications layer that their challenged with. >> Interviewer: Yeah. And John Madison's EVP, CMO Ford. It's always talking about negative unemployment in cybersecurity. Nevermind just the staff that do cyber >> Glen: That's exactly right, that's given. If you're a business, you can't hire people fast enough and you might not have the budget for you want to manage service. So how do you get cyber as a service? >> Glen: Well, so it's even bigger than that. It's not just the cyber as a service because it's now a big package. That's what SASE really is SASE is Secure Access Service Edge. But think of it where I think of it is you've got remote users, remote workers, mobile apps on one side, you've got applications, enterprise or commercial that are now moved into different cloud locations. And in the middle, you've got two real fundamental layers, the network. And, and that includes uh, the actual transport, the software defined wide area, networking components, everything that goes with that, that's the network as a service. And then you've got the secure web gateway portion, which includes everything to secure all the data, going back and forth between your remote laptop, the point of sales. And let's say the cloud based applications, right? So that's really the center stage right there. >> Interviewer: And the cloud has brought more service at the top of the stack. I mean, people thought down stack up stack is kind of like a geeky terms. You're talking about innovation. If you're down stack with network and transport, those are problems that you have to solve on behalf of your customers And make that almost invisible. And that's your job >> That's our job. That's our job is to service provider What's interesting is though back in the day, I mean, when, I mean, back in the day, it could have been 10 years ago in 20. You really, you know, you had stable networks, they were ubiquitous, they were expensive and they were slow. That's kind of the MPLS legacy TDM. Yeah. So you just put them in and you walked away and you still did all your enterprise. You still did all of your applications, but you had your own private data centers. Everything was nicer. It was that fortress mentality right now. It's different. Now everybody needs broadband. Well guess what? Comcast is a big company, but we don't have broadband everywhere. ATT doesn't have it. Verizon doesn't have it Charter doesn't have it. Right. So you need, so now to think about that from enterprise, I'm going to go, I'll give you an example. All of our customers to fulfill a nationwide network, just for the broadband infrastructure, that's, you know, redundant. If you want to think of it that way we, we source probably 200 to 300 different providers to provide an ubiquitous network nationwide for broadband. Then we wrap a layer of the SD wan infrastructure for that, as an example, over the top of that, right? You can't do that by yourself. I mean, people try and they fail. And that's the role of a managed service provider like us is to pull all that together. Take that away. We have that expertise. >> Interviewer: I think this is a really interesting point. Let's just unpack that just for a second. Yeah. In the old days, we want to do an interconnect. You had an agreement. You did, you have your own stuff, do an interconnected connect. >> Glen: Yep. >> Now this, all this mishmash, you got to traverse multiple hops, different networks. >> Glen: That's right >> Different owners, different don't know what's on that. So you guys have to basically stitch this together, hang it together and make it work. And you guys put software on the top and make sure it's cool is that how it works? >> Glen: Yeah. Software and different technology components for the SD wan. And then we would deliver the shore and manager all that. And that's, that's where I really like what's happening in the industry, at least in terminology, which is they try, you have to try to simplify that because it's very, very complicated, but I'm going to give you the network as a service mean, I'm going to give you all the transport and you have to don't have to worry about it. I'm going to rent you the, the SD wan technology. And then I'm going to have in my gateways all these security components for a firewall as a service, zero trust network access, cloud brokerage services. So I will secure all of your data as you go to the cloud and do all of that for you. That's really what we, that's what we bring to the table. And that's what is really, really hard for enterprises to do today. Just because they can't, the expertise needed to do that is just not there. >> Interviewer: Well, what's interesting is that first you have to do it now because the reality of your business now is you don't do it. You won't have customers, but you're making it easier for them. So they don't have to think about it. - [Glen] That's right. >> But now you bring in hybrid networking hybrid cloud, they call it or multi-cloud right. It's essentially a distributed computing and essentially what you're doing, but with multiple typologies, >> Glen: that's right. >> Interviewer: I got an edge device. - [Glen] That's right. If I'm a business. - [Glen] That's right. >> That's where it could be someone working at home >> Glen: That's right. - Or it could be my retail >> Or whatever it could be. So edge is just an extension of what you guys already do. And is that right? Am I getting that right? >> Glen: Yeah that's exactly right. And, and, but the point is, is to make it economic and to make it really work for the end user. If you're a branch, you may have a, a application that's still being run via VPN, but you also need wifi internet for your customers because you want to use your mobile device. They've entered into your store and you want to be able to track that right. And push something to them. And then you've got the actual store applications could be point of sales could be back of house comparing that's going up to AWS. Azura whatever. Right. And that all has to be, it all has to come from one particular branch and someone has to be able to manage that capability. >> Interviewer: It's funny, - Its so different >> Interviewer: just as you're talking, I'm just thinking, okay. Facial recognition, high, high bandwidth requirements, >> Glen: Huge high bandwidth requirements >> Processing at the edge becomes huge. >> Glen: It does. >> So that becomes a new dynamic. >> Glen: It does. It's got to be more dynamic. It's not a static IP end point. >> Glen: Well, I'll give you another an example. Let's say it's, it seems silly, but it's so important from a business perspective, your quick service restaurant, the amount of digital sales from applications are just skyrocketing. And if you yourself, and particularly in the pandemic, you order something, or that goes up to the cloud, comes back through, goes to the point of sales. And then the, the back of house network in a particular restaurant, if that doesn't get there, because one line of you only have one internet connection and it's down, which sometimes happens, right? You lose business, you lose that customer. It's so important. So what's being pushed down to the edge is, you know, reliable broadband hybrid networks, where you have a primary wire line and a secondary wire line, maybe a tertiary wireless or whatever. And then a box, a device that can manage between those two so that you can keep that 99.9, 9% availability at your branch, just for those simple types of applications. >> Interviewer: You know Glenn, you as you're talking most people, when we talk tech, like this is mostly inside the ropes, Hey, I can get it. But most people can relate with the pandemic because they've ordered with their phone on - [Glen] Exactly right >> With the QR code. - [Glen] That's exactly right >> They see the menu - [Glen] That's right >> They get now what's happening - [Glen] That's right that their phone is now connected to the service. >> Glen: That's right >> This is not going away. The new normal. >> Glen: No, it's absolutely here. And what I've seen are there are many, many companies that already knew this and understood this pre pandemic. And they were, they had already changed their infrastructure to really fit what I was calling that network as a service in the SASE model, in different ways. Then there were a bunch that didn't, and I'm not going to name names, but you can look at those companies and you can see how they're, they're struggling terribly. But then there was this. Now there's a, a much bigger push and privatization again, see, I was sending, Hey, I asked for this before. It's not like the CIO didn't know, but management said, well, maybe it wasn't important. Now it is. And so you're seeing this actual amazing surge in business requests and requirements to go to the model that we're all talking about here, which is that SASE type of implementation high-speed broadband. That's not going away for the same reason. And you need a resilient network, right? Yes. >> Interesting. Best practice. Let's just take that advice to the, to the audience. I want to get your thoughts because people who didn't do any R and D or experimentation prior to the pandemic, didn't have cloud. Wasn't thinking about this new architecture got caught flat-footed. -Exactly. >> And they're hurting and or out of business. >> Correct. >> If people who were on the right side of that took advantage as a tailwind and they got lifts. >> That's exactly right. >> So what is the best practice? How should a business think about putting their toe in the water a little bit or jumping in and getting immersed in the new, new architecture? What advice would you give? Because people don't want to be in the wrong side of history. >> No, they don't. >> What's your guy's best practice? >> I may sound biased, but I'm really not trying to be biased. And this'll be some of the I'll speak about here later today. You have to try it. You, as the end user, the enterprise customer, to, to fulfill these types of needs, you've got to really probe your managed service providers. You've got to understand which ones, not just can give you a nice technology presentation and maybe a POC, but who's going to be there for the longterm who has the economic wherewithal to be able to give the resources needed to do what I was talking about, which is you're going to outsource your entire network to me and your sh, and a good portion of your security for the network to a service provider. that service provider has to be able to provide all that has to be able to have the financial capabilities, to be able to provide you with an operating type of model, not you have to buying equipment all the time. That service provider has to be able to have teams that can deliver all of that 200 to 300 different types of providers aggregate all that, and then be there for day two. Simple thing. Like if you know, most companies, if you're not a really large location, you can't afford to, you know, double types of routers that are connected. And if one fails you have fail over, right, most of them will have one router and they'll have, but they'll have two backup paths. Well, what happens is that router or switch, single switch fails? You need to have a meantime to repair a four hours. I mean, that's kind of basic and well do that. How do you do that? You've got to have depots around the entire country. These are the types of questions that any enterprise customers should be probing their managed service provider, right? It's not just about the technology. It's about how can you deliver this and assure this going forward. >> And agility too cause when, if, if things do change rapidly, being agile... >> Exactly >> means shifting and being flexible with your business. >> That's exactly right. And that's important. That's a really important question. And the agility comes from this financial agility, right? Like new threat, new box. I want, I want this old one. I'm going to upgrade to a different type of service. The service providers should be able to do that without me having to force you to go get some more CapEx and buy some more stuff. Cause that's number one. But the other agility is every enterprise is different. Every enterprise believes that its network is the only network in the world and they have opinions and they've tested different technologies. And you're going to have to adapt a little bit to that. And if you don't, you're not going to get out of this. >> It's funny. The old days non-disruptive operations was like a benefit, we have non-disrupt- now it's a table stakes. You can't disrupt businesses. - You can't. You can't at the branch at the remote worker. If you're on a zoom call or whatever, or you're on a teams call, we've all been there. We're still doing it. If it breaks in the middle of a presentation to a customer that's problem. >> Glenn thanks for coming on the cube with great insight. >> Oh great. This was fun. >> Are you exciting and plays golf? You're going to get out there on the range? >> I played, I played golf a lot when I was younger, but I haven't. And so I have a few other things I do, but I guess I'm going to have to learn now that we're also a sponsor of PGA, so yeah, for sure. >> Great. Well, great to have you on - All right thank you and great talk. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insight. >> This was great. I appreciate okay. >> Keep coverage here. Napa valley with Fortinet's Cybersecurity Summit as part of their PGA tour event, that's happening this weekend. I'm John for the Cube. Thanks for watching.

>> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the CUBE, covering COMCAST Innovation Day, brought to you by COMCAST. >> Hey welcome back here ready Jeff Frick here with the CUBE. We're at the COMCAST Silicon Valley Innovation Center. You know there's innovation centers all over Silicon Valley we hadn't been to the COMCAST one until we came to this event, it's very very cool, I think it's like five storeys in this building, where they're developing a lot of new technologies, partnering with technologies, but today the focus is on customer experience, brought together a panel of people to talk about some of the issues, and we're excited to have a representative from a company that's really out on the edge of defining customer experience, and measuring customer experience, joined by Ganesh Subramanian. He is the senior director of product marketing for Gainsight. Ganesh, great to see you. >> Great, happy to be here. >> Yeah, so I'm a huge Nick Mehta fan, I've interviewed him before I've been following Gainsight for a long time and you know, it really struck me the first time that, that Nick said you know CRM is you know, basically order management. It's not customer relationship management, you know customer relationships are complicated, and they're multi-faceted and there's lots of touch points and you guys really try to build a solution to help customers manage, actually do manage that relationship so they have a great experience with their customer. >> Yeah that's totally right, and not to say that CRM isn't an important ingredient when you make that cake, but there's a lot of other touchpoints right? How are people interacting with your digital products? What is that customer journey across sales, services, support? How does all of that come together? So what Gainsight does is really provide the customer cloud to bring all of those solutions together so that businesses can really operate in a more customer-centric way. >> So you, you said an interesting thing earlier in the conversation about customer success being measured just by revenue, again kind of the CRMy kind of approach to worth versus measuring success and measuring lifetime value and measuring so many other things that can define a great relationship. What are some of those things that people should be thinking about? What are some of those other metrics out there beyond you know, did I get a, you know, a net increase value of my contract? >> Yeah absolutely you know one way we think about it at Gainsight is the two-by-two of customer experience and customer outcomes. So, you can think about experience just as how happy are people on a day-to-day basis interacting with you, your products, your organization, your team? The flipside's also true though. You can have the happiest customer, that isn't getting what they want out of their product or service. In a B2B context we think about it as tangible ROI or outcomes. So at Gainsight we're ultimately trying to make sure our clients are delivering on both of those vectors. They want happy, successful clients, ultimately that's going to lead to the recurring revenue cycle: retention, growth, adoption and advocacy. >> So where does that kind of tie together? 'Cause I'm sure there's a lot of people that think those are in conflict right? That if I bend over backwards and I provide this great experience and these great services and all these things that this is going to negatively impact my profitability, it's going to negatively impact my transactional value. How should they be measuring those things? How should they be balancing, 'cause 'cause, you know, you can sell dollars for 90 cents, have a really happy customer, not going to be in business very long. >> Yeah I think that's kind of the secret sauce right? True innovation, what we talked about today at COMCAST, a lot about, how do you take that next step forward? How do you improve your products and services in ways that make customers, customers for life? Right, and if you make the right investments, you actually find out that maybe it's, it's minor change, maybe it's process change in your call center or call service, maybe it's implementing AI in an appropriate way, so that you're able to deliver more value with less time, or maybe it's transformative, maybe it's something that's a new service you're offering all together, that's making customers get outsized or unrealized returns on their investment. Well, it doesn't matter what that investment was, if it's going to long term drive your company to higher valuations and greater competitive differentiation. So we don't think about customer experience on kind of below the line, what's going to get me the incremental ROI, we really think about it as a fundamental differentiator for your business. >> Right. Now you're in charge of, of kickin' off new products. >> That's right. >> And you know one of the things I think is really interesting about the COMCAST voice, which has had a lot of conversation today, is I still get emails from COMCAST telling me how I should use it! Right 'cause it's a different behavior, it's a different experience that I'm not necessarily used to. As you look forward, you know introducing new products, what are some of the, the kind of trends that you're keepin an eye on, what do you think is going to kind of change and impact some of the things you guys are bringing to market? What are some of the new things we should be thinking about in customer experience? >> Yeah absolutely. So one thing at Gainsight, one thing we've learned leading the customer success movement is that to be customer-centric is more than a given function, or a given team, customer success managers kind of took the mantle in B2B and started leading the charge, leading the way towards being more customer-centric but that team on their own can't do everything. Nor do they want to, or can they, right? So, one big change and one big innovation that we're leading the front on is how do you bring all those different teams together? Which is why we launched the Gainsight customer cloud. So what we're doing is we're bringing disparate data together, that used to be silohed in functional specific software, bring that into a single source of truth, to truly provide an actionable customer 360, one that provides meaning to different teams with the right context, and then drive action off of that. So whether it's an automated email to get, improve product adoption in the COMCAST example, or maybe it's some kind of escalation effort, where you need a cross-functional team to get together on the same page, to improve a red customer, or maybe it's something that's in the product itself, by just making the product easier to use or a little bit more intuitive, the, all of your end users will end up benefiting from that. What Gainsight's tryna do is to try figure out, how can we break down these walls across these different teams, make it easier for people to collaborate to improve the customer experience. >> So Ganesh I got to tease you right, 'cause everyone's eyes just rolled out when you said 360 view of the customer right, we've been talking about this forever. >> Yeah. >> So what's different, you know, what's different today? Not specifically for what you're tryna do with your product and share that too, but more generally, that, that we're getting closer to that vision. >> Yeah. >> That we're actually getting closer to delivering on, on the promise of a 360 view, and information from that view that will enable us to take positive action? >> I love that question, and I think whenever you hear the word 360 view or digital transformation, you're going to get a couple eye-rolls in the crowd right? And, I actually totally believe that, that, you know, to date I think we've done things in too much of a waterfall methodology. Let's spend three years, get a unified idea across all our disparate data sources, and then we're going to be customer-centric. I think we've learned our lessons over the course of time that, hey you know, the end result doesn't really materialize in the time frame and ROI you expected, so why don't we start with the other end of the spectrum? What are the gaps that customers are perceiving? If it's just, let me, go back to that example of product ease of use. Are we identifying that as a major gap? Then how do we go solve that? How do we reverse engineer that process? And by the way that doesn't just fall on the product team to make the product easier, services need to onboard customers more effectively, you need documentation so that they can access and understand the key aspects of your product in a more concrete way. So all of that needs to come together. So I think the biggest difference between what we used to talk about, with 360s and digital transformation, to where we are today, is really the context and the outcome you're trying to deliver, and then reverse engineer the 360 that's most meaningful to you. So to make that a little bit more clear, what does that mean at the grassroots level? If you're a services team member you're working on projects. Does a 360 view about the next opportunity from a financial or commercial perspective really matter to you? How far down in that 360 view do you have to scroll before you start seeing information that's relevant? So at Gainsight what we're trying to do is use a many-to-many relationship mapping so that if you're a services team member, or a sales member, the view you're accessing is curated to what you need to actually do. >> Right. >> And that'll drive adoption of the digital transformation efforts within your organization. >> Right. Which then obviously opens up the opportunity for automation and AI and ML to, as you said, context is so important to make sure the right information is getting to the right person at the right time for the context of the job that I have and building that customer relationship. >> That's right. Yeah we think about AI all the time how's that going to improve the customer experience? It starts with that data foundation and understanding hey what should we own and what should we leverage? And being very conscious about what you're about to do, and then second, thinking about those point problems and, again, reverse engineering how can we staff augment, or make the experience better, maybe make the lives of our employees a little bit better, when they're engaging with customers. Ultimately it's got to be in service of people. >> Right. Well Ganesh thanks for sharing your story. Again I think what you guys are doing, and Nick and Gainsight is so important in terms of redefining this beyond order management, and to actually customer relationship management. >> So, >> That's right. >> Thanks for spending a few minutes with us. >> Awesome. >> My pleasure. >> All - >> All right. >> Thank you. >> He's Ganesh I'm Jeff you're watching the CUBE we're at the COMCAST Innovation Center in Silicon Valley. Thanks for watching we'll see you next time.

>> Innovation Day, brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Rick, here with theCube. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale. It's a very cool space, I think it's grown up over a number of years as they've originated with some acquired companies, and now they got a huge setup here, and we had a big day today talking about customer experience, and really, if you look at the Comcast Voice Remote, and there's a lot of stuff going on that's maybe under the covers, you don't really give Comcast credit for, but they're actually doing a lot. And we're excited to, kind of dive into it a little bit deeper with our next guest, she's Annie Weskesser, she's a CMO of Uniphore. Annie, welcome. >> Yeah, thank you for having me here today. >> Absolutely. So what is Uniphore, for people that aren't familiar with the company. >> So Uniphore is a global leader in conversational service automation, and our vision is to bridge the gap between human and machine, through voice AI and automation. >> That's a mouth full. >> Yes. >> Conversational... >> Service. >> Service. >> Yes. >> So, people talk, and so you guys are heavily involved in voice. So what are the applications where people are using your voice? >> Yep, well primarily our focus is call centers. >> Okay. >> So large enterprises who have massive call centers, where we want to go in and help them with AI and automation, to help better listen to their customers, help better listen to the customers voice, and solve the problems in a faster manner. >> So I don't have to repeat my account number six different times to six different agents. >> Exactly, right. >> Or caught an in IVR cycle, or perhaps the chat that you were talking to doesn't-- The person on the phone, you have to repeat your story. This is something where the AI and automation will actually assist the agent to become a superhero. >> So, it's pretty interesting cause you know there's a lot of conversation about AI and ML, but really you know where it's going to have its impact is applied AI. >> Yes. And you said the company started out really more just on a pure voice, but now you're applying more and more kind of AI in the back end. So what kind of opportunities do you have now beyond just simply being able to do voice conversion?. >> To the first part of your question, the company started at IIT Madras back in 2008. And originally the focus of the company was really centered on voice, voice being the lowest common denominator and in Indie where the languages are 260 you know, potential languages to understand and maybe 25 at the top. We set out really to focus on voice and then realize that customer service was a large market and somewhere we can have a big impact. >> Right, right. So you reckon as you said a 100 different languages. >> A 100 different languages through our platform which is pretty incredible when you think about it. All of the different people calling in to customer service potentially or maybe through a chatbot or a voicebot to get their issues solved. >> And then you integrate in whatever the core system is that the customer services agent are using. >> Yes. >> So what are the types of tips and tricks that the call agent gets by using your guys service? >> So think about it as a platform where the customer can help they agents be more affective agents. So one of the things that call centers struggle with is something called after call work, where agents may spend two to three minutes after a call, summarizing the call. One of the things that our technology does and this is primarily for one of our customers who's a health care client. They said "Wouldn't it be great if we can automate that completely". So we've taken the after call work for one customer client, taken that two to three minutes down to 10 seconds, where that work that the agent would have done is completely summarized and the agent validates it, can correct it if needed and its completely done. So that not only saves the agent time to either pick up more calls and help other customers or it can get them of the phone in a quicker manner to save the call center more money. >> So that's doing more than just simply providing a transcript of the call which is something a different track than actually listening into to provide suggestions is actually taking it to the next level in terms of what categorizing, what type of call, the outcome etc. >> it's actually quite interesting because often times less than 1% of calls are listened to somewhere between 1 and 10% of calls are listened to in calls centers. So we can listen to a 100% of those calls in addition we offer something called that's more along the line of like a live agent coach to where the agent can concentrate on the conversation with the customer which is the primary thing listening to the customer. And our technology will serve you up coaching mechanism in terms of getting to faster resolution for the customer and getting them better insights to be almost a superhero of a agent. >> Right, and I would imagine the accuracy in terms of recording what happened in the call to go back and do the analytics and have a text base search you can do all types of analysis on those calls which was data that was probably just lost before right into (mumbles) >> You're exactly right. I think the accuracy is clearly a lot lower than if you were to have the AI and automation and Machine learning technology there. >> So the other conversation in the sit down that we had earlier today was really about driving a customer centric culture in your own company, not only just enabling it but really building it inside. I wonder if you could share some of the things that you guys have done to help make sure that everybody stays focused on the objective, which is the customer. >> Yip, I think it really starts at the top it starts with the leader of the organization. So we have a CEO whose extremely focused on customer centricity and in fact its our number one core value within the organization. So you see everyone from the CEO down to the rest of the organization completely focused on the customer and their needs. >> What about when the customer doesn't know what they need? What about you know, you bringing a new technology and your inviting a slightly different process or a slightly different change and your saying "Hey, this is actually a better way to keep text and transactions and we actually have a really coach that can help", you know, kind of guy to people. How do you help move customers to a place they don't necessarily know they want to go? >> Yeah, I mean you find that a lot, right. Its not necessarily the technology that we're providing for today but its having the innovation and having the foresight to create a platform that will be future proof. So that's critical, you know, I think that there are a lot of customers who might not know what they need today but that's our job to help them innovate and push the envelope on all things AI and automation. >> Right, I'm just curious to in terms of the impact of your technology on kind of the tracking software for those call center agents, right. So this is a group of people that have to process a lot of calls, you know everything is track to the minute and you know its funny I had a demo with Westworld and you know when Westworld's funny cause we started treating machines like machines and they wanted to be treated like people sometimes I wonder on some of these technologies You know is it enabling them to have more time to be more thoughtful, is it enabling them to have more time to get the better outcomes or is it sometimes perceived as 'oh my gosh you just trying to jam' you know, 'four more calls on in my hour by taking care of my two more minutes that I used to spend wrapping up the call". Do you think about those things and the end customer? >> The time is really the premium, right. So the number one focus is giving people time back and whether that's the customer who's calling in and you want to solve an issue and get them faster resolution or whether that's the agent that wants to free up more time in having the conversation with the customer, solving their problem and then getting of the phone I think that's the most effective way of doing it. >> Final question in terms of voice and the evolution of voice. `Cause I don't think people are really completely tuned in certainly not people old like we are. What are some of the conversations when people finally get, you know, kind of the enabler that voice communications opens up that's not necessarily available with texts or not necessarily available with other types of channels? >> Yeah, I mean I see it most easily in my children they expect everything to be voice enabled and so everything from the Comcast remote that they pick up in our living room everywhere they go when they see a remote they expect everything to be voice enabled. So that's really the future and I think a lot of customer service will be listening to your customers voice however, they want to communicate with you, whatever channel they want to communicate on. >> Great, really cool story Annie and thanks for taking the few minutes and sharing it with us. >> Yeah, thanks for inviting me. >> All right, she's Annie, I'm Jeff your watching theCube with the Comcast CX Experience Innovation day here at the Sillicon Valley Innovation Center. Thanks for watching see you next time.

>> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE covering Comcast Innovation Day. (smooth music) Brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale. Very cool facility right off the runway from Moffett. They got a ton of cool toys downstairs which I get to go play with, which I'm looking forward to, but today the conversation was all about CX, customer experience, and you know, Comcast is there. A lot of people like to watch their TVs, interacting with their cable systems for a long, long time, but there's a whole range of new and innovative things that are coming out from Comcast, and we're excited to have an engineer who's kind of down in the bowels here in the engine room building all this stuff. So like to welcome Mike Fine. He's a cable software architect for Comcast. Mike, great to see you. >> Likewise. >> So you had a really cool demo earlier, which is not a demo, right? I think this thing is-- >> Production. >> Now in production, it's called the X1 Eye Control. I think most people know what X1 is. What's X1 Eye Control? >> Yeah. X1 Eye Control is a web application that integrates with off-the-shelf accessibility hardware, so that could be a Tobii eye gaze rig, it could be something called a sip-and-puff, which let's users use their inhalation and exhalation to control the application, or any other off-the-shelf accessibility hardware that can mimic a mouse to a piece of software. >> Too, it's-- >> Yeah. The goal of the project was pretty simple. It was to let people with ALS and other conditions control their TVs independently. >> That's amazing, and you showed a great video. The gentleman on the video is using I think an eye gaze method, but you said you've got integrations to a number of different, you know, kind of ADA-approved interface devices. >> That's right, the journey that this project has taken has been interesting. We started with just the ALS use case, which was the eye gaze, but it turned out that one of our early users had control over his voice, which is somewhat unusual for ALS patients, and so he asked whether he could control it with his voice, so we did that work through he had Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which was nice, so we did that work, and then of course given that we have the voice remote we decided could we make voice work for everybody, which we did, so now the application is on par with a physical remote, and then we even went further and let people type in voice commands, so in case somebody who's perhaps mute or had a speech impediment, or some sort of speech pathology issue that prevented them from using a voice, they could do that as well. >> It's really interesting, I mean you guys have so many kind of interface points to an ecosystem broader than simply what's available at Comcast, whether it's on the front end, as you said, with some of these interfaces with ADA devices, or on the backend if I want to watch my Netflix or I want to watch YouTube, or I want to watch, you know, a different service. You guys have really taken, you know, kind of an open, integrated approach to all these, one might argue, competitive threats to really bring it in as the customer wants to experience. Why did you do that, what's kind of the philosophy driving that? >> Yeah, well, the first thought that comes to mind is that none of it's possible without the right cloud APIs, so somebody very visionary years ago made the decision that everything you can do on your TV or on the mobile app you can do through the cloud, and so a project like this couldn't happen unless it was possible for a piece of software that somebody invented well after the fact to cause a TV to change channels unless there was that underpinning, so like any other piece of software it's a bit of an iceberg. There's a lot of stuff underneath that you don't realize as a user-- >> Right. >> But it's there and that's what makes it possible. >> Right, I'm just curious about some of the challenges in terms of moving UI and UX forward into places that people are not familiar with. And I've joked about it on a number of these interviews that, you know, I still get an email, not only from Comcast, but from Google and from Alexa, suggesting to me ways in which I might use voice. You know, as you sit back from a technologist what are some of the challenges you guys, you know, kind of anticipate, what are some of the ones you didn't anticipate, and how do you help us old people, you know, find new ways to interact with the technology? >> Yeah, it's a great question. I mean there's a lot of us here that spend our days solving that exact problem, right? Part of it is is notifying you of interesting things through SMS or through mobile push, or the messages on the TV, so your team is playing in a game that you want to see, a movie that you've declared interest in has become cheaper, become free, or maybe even buyable if you wanted to do that. Obviously there's lots of AI and ML in terms of putting recommendations in front of you based on your viewing habits, based on broader trends across, you know, because you watch this, other people watch this, so we know this is probably a good solution for you as well, but yeah, we're all, there's a large number of us trying to optimize what we call "time to joy," from the time you pick up your remote to think about what you want to watch to the time you're actually watching something you want to watch; make that as seamless as possible. >> Preston said you guys get like a billion voice commands, what was the period of time? >> A month. >> A month. >> A month, yeah. (chuckles) >> So obviously a big, giant new dataset for you guys now to have at your disposal. >> What are some of the things that you're learning from that inbound, what can you do with it, how do you, you know, now use this direct touch with the customer to, again, kind of recycle and have another iteration on improved experience? >> Right, so voice is a lot like a text chat, like a bot interface in that it's an experience where users are telling you exactly what they want to do, so if a user sits in front of a traditional web application or mobile application and has trouble finding what they want to do, they can't figure out what button to press, what screen to go to, you have no idea, right? You can't infer that they're having a problem, but with voice or somebody interacting with a bot, they type exactly what they mean, or they say exactly what they mean, so we can mine those voice commands and find the popular ones that we don't at that point have implemented, and if we can iterate on that cycle fast enough we can quickly introduce new voice commands that our users are literally asking for as quickly as possible. >> Right. What about the stuff that customers are not asking for, because right? There's one line of thought, which is the customer knows best, but the customer doesn't know-- >> That's right. >> What they don't know. So how do you guys continue to look for more kind of cutting edge stuff that isn't necessarily coming back through a feedback loop? >> Right, yeah, so it's an interesting question. So we're trying to add other non-TV use cases into the mix, right, so controlling your IoT devices at home, controlling your security, seeing your cameras through the Set-Top Box, and so on. So you know, until those use cases exist nobody's asking for them, and so you do have to be a bit visionary in terms of what you want to put out there as voice commands. You know, luckily we have people who, well, we're all customers of the platform generally, so we know what it means to be a user, but you know, we have people that talk with users and have a general sense of what they want to do, and then we figure out what the right commands are. >> Right, not voice specifically, but let's unpack a little bit deeper into the impact of IoT. You know, Nest probably was the first kind of broadly accepted kind of IoT device in the home, and now you got Ring, which everybody loves to take pictures of people stealing their boxes from the front porch, but that puts you guys with the internet connectivity in a very different place than simply providing a football game or the entertainment. So as you think of your role changing in the house, specifically with now these connected devices, how do you think about new opportunities, new challenges that being the person in the middle of that is different than just sending a TV signal? >> Yeah, there's a lot of talk about trying to be the home OS. Certainly we are in a unique position being in the home, both in terms of the router and the internet, but also, you know, often frankly you know when your system's setup a human being came in and helps you understand how to best position the physical devices in your house, and so on, that other companies don't have, right? Those vendors just don't have that builtin advantage. Clearly security has become a big thing for us. Home automation, I sit very close to that group. They're doing amazing things with automating rules like, you know, "Tell me when my door's been open too long," and these sort of things, and so more and more the use cases start to converge, that, for example, when you say, "Good morning," we have this idea of scenes, all right. So when your morning starts you not only want to tune the TV, but you also want to crank up the lights and unlock the door and open the windows, or whatever, and when you go to bed, so the actions that are involved in those use cases span not just TV and not just internet, but all of it. >> Right, it's just funny because I don't think Comcast would be the first name that people would say when they're talking about voice technology and the transformational impact of voice technology, right? They're probably going to say Siri was the first and Alexa's probably the most popular, and you know-- >> Right. >> Google's got Lord knows how many inputs they have, but you guys are really sitting at a central place, and I might argue it's one of the more used voice applications-- >> Absolutely. >> Out there, so from kind of a technology leadership perspective you guys have a bunch of really unique assets in terms of where you are, what you control, what you're sitting on in terms of that internet. You know, how does that really help you and the team think about Comcast as an innovation company, Comcast as a cool tech company, not necessarily Comcast as what used to be just a cable company? >> Right, right. Well you know, as somebody in the valley with friends in the valley it's always interesting to try to differentiate reality from the view that many people have. You know, this is definitely much more than your dad's cable company. It's a consumer and electronic company as much as anything else. We very much position ourselves with all the, you know, with the FAANG companies, et cetera, so you know, when we talked about CX it's no longer the case that whatever's passable for a stodgy cable company passes as CX anymore. Now you're being compared to a set of customers, companies that are providing fantastic user experiences for their customers, and you're being held to that standard, so you know, there's a lot of pressure on us, which is great; we like that. We want to produce fantastic products, and yeah, I don't know if I have a great answer in terms of how to move forward in terms of melding it all together, but we have a lot of smart people in the hallways making that happen. (chuckles) >> So last question is really the impact of AI, because you know, we cover a lot of tech events and a lot of talk about AI, but you know, I think those of us around know that really where AI shines is applied AI in specific applications for specific U cases. So how are you guys, you know, kind of implementing AI, where are some of the opportunities that you see that you can do in the future that you couldn't do the past, whether it be just with much better datasets, whether it be with much faster connectivity and much better compute so that you can ultimately deliver a better customer experience using some of these really modern tools? >> Right, so some of the work is just making what you already do or experience better, so for example showing you recommendations, right? Just make that algorithm better, and so there's a great deal of effort, as you might expect, at a company like this on that problem, but there's also work being done to just take any interactivity between you and the system out of the picture completely. We talked a little bit about this earlier, that, for example, we're working on technology that when you turn your TV on in the morning it should probably tune to the channel that you normally tune to in the morning. That's a pretty simple problem, in a sense, but you know, if I watch your viewing patterns and I see that you turn on a particular news show in the morning, why should you have to pick up the remote and change it from what you watched the night before to that channel? It should just happen. We talked about the Smart Resume stuff, that's obviously a fantastic use case for end users, so there's, you know, it's not surprising it's being used all over the technology set. It's in the home automation world. You know, it's in A/B testing, so trying to figure out the right cohorts to try different things in front of, so it's everywhere as you would expect. >> Right, right, it's pretty amazing. I mean there's just so many things going on, you know, kind of under the covers, some that we can see, some that we can't see where you guys are really kind of progressing, you know kind of the leading edge, cutting edge customer experience with something that people interact with every single day. >> That's right. >> Yeah, cool stuff. Well Mike, thanks for taking a few minutes. Congratulations on the Eye Control; really a cool story, and look forward to more publicity around that because that's a really important piece of technology. >> Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. >> All right. He's Mike, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (smooth music)

>>from the heart of Silicon Valley. It's the Q covering Comcast Innovation Date to you by Comcast. >>Hey, welcome back it ready? Geoffrey here with the Cube were in the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale, just off the runways here. Moffett feels really cool place, a lot of fun toys and gadgets that I have not got to play with yet, but I got to do before I leave. But the conversation today is really about customer experience. We had a small panel this morning of experts talking about customer experience. What does that mean? How do we do a better job at it? And we're excited. Have an expert brought in just for this conversation. She's a net Franz, the founder and CEO of C X Journey, and it's great to see you. >>Thank you. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. Absolutely been a fun morning. >>What did you think? >>What were some of your impressions of the conversation this morning? You know >>what? It's always great to sit in a room with so many people who have been living and breathing this customer experience journey. And so it was great to hear what Comcast is doing. It was great to hear from some of the other folks in the room. What are some of the latest trends in terms of data and technology and where customer experiences headed? Yeah, it was awesome. >>So customer experiences, it's >>a little bit over. It's almost kind of digital transformation a little bit. Everyone's like experience, experience, experience. And that's a big, complicated topic. How do you help customers really kind of break it down, make it into something manageable, make it into something they can actually approach and have some success with >>us? So I spent a lot of my time working with clients who are brand new to this field, right? I had a former boss who said that they can't even spell C X. Right. So yes, so So yes. So I go in there and I really listen and understand what their pain points are and what they need help with and then get them started on that journey. Basically, soup did not see X strategy work. We typically start out making sure that the right foundation is in place in terms of the executives that they're all a line that they're all committed to this work. The culture. We've got the right culture in place. We've got, you know, some feedback from employees and from customers of what's going well and what's not. And then from there we dive right into a phase that I call understanding. And that's listening to customers listening to employees developing personas so that we can really understand who customers are and who are employees really are, and then also journey mapping to really walk in their shoes to understand the experience that they're having today and then design. Use that to design a better experience for tomorrow. So there's a lot of work that happens up front to make you know the things that we talked about in there this morning. >>Right? Happen. What's the biggest gap? Because everyone >>always talks about being customer centric. And I'm sure if you talk to any sea, of course, were customer centric and you know, we see it would like would like Amazon Andy Jassy and that team is just crazy hyper customer centric and they executed with specific behavior. So what's the part that's usually missing that they think their customer centric, but they're really not? >>Yeah, I think you just hit the nail on the head with the word execute, right? So there's a stat out there that's been out there for forever, and we know it. Every single company, every single business interviews or surveys us to death, right? So they have all this great feedback, but they do nothing with it. They just don't execute. They just don't act on it. And they've got such rich feedback and and and customers want to tell them, Hey, you're doing this well behaved. This is not going so well. So please fix it because we want to continue doing business with you. And so, yeah, it's about execution. I think that's one problem. The other problem is that they focus on the metrics and not on actually doing something with the feedback >>temporary experience. Do they just ignore it? Do they not have the systems to capture it? Are they are they kind of analysis? Paralysis? He just said they have all this great data, and I'm not doing anything about it. Why >>there it is that, too Analysis, paralysis. Let's just beat the numbers to death and and what's the What's the quote about beating the number until the beating the data until the talks >>kind of thing. You know, I don't know that something. I know I'm just mess that, >>but But yeah, they don't have the system in place to actually. Then take what they learn and go do something with it. And I think a big part of it. We talked about this in the room this morning, too. Was around having that commitment from the top, having the CEO say, Listen, we're doing this and we're going to when we listen to, our customers were going toe act on what we hear, So But they don't They don't have the infrastructure in place to actually go and then do it >>right. It's pretty interesting. You have, Ah, a deck that you shared in advance Eight Principles of customer centric city. Yes. And of the aid three are people people before products people before profits people before metrics. That sounds great, but it sounds contrary to everything we hear these days about measure, measure, measure, measure, measure. Right? It's human resource is it almost feels like we're kind of back to these kind of time. Motion studies in tryingto optimize people as if they're a machine as opposed to being a person. >>Yeah, well, it's It's not, because we have to. The way that we could think about is we have to put the human into this. That's what customer experience is all about, right? It's about putting the human in the experience. And it's interesting that you bring up that back because when I opened that talk, I'm show a comm your commercial from Acura, and it's if you've never seen it. It's called the test. If you can google it and find the video and it's really about. If we don't view them as dummies, something amazing happens. That's the tagline, right? And so it's really about people. The experience is all about people. Our business is all about people. That's why we're in business, right? It's all about the customer. It's for the customer. And who's gonna deliver that? Our employees? And so we've got to put the people first, and then the numbers will come >>right. Another one that you had in there, I just have to touch on was forget the golden rule, which which I always thought the golden rules of us. You know, he has the gold makes a >>rule. You're talking about a different golden, which is really treat. Treat others >>not the way you think they want, that you want to be treated but treat people the way that they want to be treated in such a small It's the pylons, but it's so important. >>It's so important. And I love this example that I share. Thio just recently read a book by Hal Rosenbluth called The Customer Comes Second, right, and to most people, that seems counterintuitive, but he's really referring to The employee comes more first, which I love, and I'm the example that he gives us. He's left handed and he goes into a restaurant. He frequents this restaurant all the time, and until I read this story, I never even thought about this. And now that I go to restaurants, I think about this all the time. The silverware is always on the right hand side, but he's left handed, so this restaurant that he frequents the waitress. He always seemed to have the same waitress she caught on, and so when when he would come into the restaurant, she would set the silvery down on the left hand side. for him that's treating people the way that they want to be treated. And that's what customer experience is all about, >>right? One of the topics that he talked about in the session this morning was, um, the reputation that service experiences really defined by the sum of all your interactions. And it's really important to kind of keep a ah view of that that it's not just an interaction with many, many interactions over a period of time that sounds so hard to manage. And then there's also this kind of the last experience, which is probably overweighted based on the whole. >>How do people >>keep that in mind? How did they How did they, you know, make sure that they're thinking that kind of holistically about the customer engagement across a number of fronts within the company. >>Well, you've got to think >>about it as think about it as a journey, not just touch points, not just a bunch of little touch points, because if you think about just the last experience or just a touch point, then you're thinking about transactions. You're not thinking about a relationship, and what we're trying to get at is customer relationships and not just transactional, you know, it's it's they're in, they're out, they're gone, right? So what? We want relationships. We want them to be customers for life. And and that's the only way that we're gonna do it is if we focus on the journey, >>right? What about the challenge of that which was special suddenly becomes the norm. And we talked a lot about, you know, kind of consumers ations of i t. Because as soon as I get great results on a Google search or, you know, I find exactly what I need on Amazon in two clicks and then to take that into whatever my be to be your B to C application as when Now those expectations are not being driven by what I promised to deliver. But they're being driven by all these third party app said. I have a no control up and they're probably developing at a faster pace of innovation that I can keep up housing people, you know, kind of absorb that deal with it and try to take some lessons from that in the delivery of their own application >>essay. You you brought up two things there which I want to address the 1st 1 to which was about the delighting customers. But to answer your question is really about focusing on your customers and your customers needs on. And that's why I talk a lot about customer understanding, right? It's it's about listening to your customers. It's about developing personas and really understanding who they are, what their pain points are, what their problems are, what needs. Are they trying to solve our problems? Are they trying to solve on and then walking in their shoes through journey, mapping? And that understanding allows us to design an experience for our customers, right for our customers. If we don't solve a problem up for our customers, they will go elsewhere and they'll get their problems solved elsewhere, right? So I think that's really important. The first part of your question was, our point was around delighting our customers, and you're absolutely right. We don't have to delight customers at every touch point. I know that's counter to what a lot of people might say or think, but to your point, once we delighted every touch point, now it becomes the new norm. It's an expectation that has now been set and now delight, Where does it stop? You know, Delight is here, and then it's here. And then it's here. And so So it's It's a whole different. So my thinking on that is that most businesses cannot delight at every touch point, and they certainly don't. Um, I think we need to meet expectations and the and the only way that we can do that is to listen and understand and and and then act on what we hear. And, um, most businesses are still very primitive, even when it comes to that, >>right? Okay. Give you the last word. What's what's the kind of the most consistent, easy to fix stumble that most customers are doing when you when you get engaged and you walk in, what's that one thing that you know with 90% confidence factor that when you walk in, this is gonna be, you know, one of these three or four little things that they should stop doing or that they should do just just just get off the baseline? >>Yeah, I think it's You know what I think it >>za combination of sort of speed and responsiveness. I'll give an example. I won't mean the company, but But I thought, man, in this day and age, this shouldn't be happening, right? It was a company that I contacted. I was supposed to set up an account and they said I couldn't for it just wasn't working. I tried different browsers, just wasn't working. So I sent them and eat. First. I tried to call, but I got stuck in Ivy are hell. And then I sent an email and my the email that I got back was an auto responder. That's I will reply within five business days. >>Five business days, Thio like, really, where? Why don't you just ask me to send a fax, right? You know, So So that's the kind >>of stuff that seriously I I want to solve that e mails like really in 2019. We're still responding in five business days. That's just that's just ludicrous. I think that's one of the and it's such it doesn't cost anything to respond in a timely manner and to respond at all right now. Here it is. It's been I haven't heard from them yet, so it's been like seven days now, so >>there's that just tweet tweet at the CEO going to, hopefully the >>CEO tweets and maybe doesn't tweet. >>I know, right? Yeah, well, in >>that you know nothing about opportunity for you because this is not an easy it's not an easy thing to do is it's hard to stay up with people's expectations and to drive new and innovative products when they don't necessarily even know how to engage with those things. >>Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, The field is wide open because, like I said, there's still so many companies that are still just trying to get the basics right. So >>Well, thanks for taking a few minutes of your time. Thanks for participating. Absolutely, She's in that. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube worth the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. Thanks for watching. We'll see next time.

(futuristic music) >> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube covering Comcast Innovation Day. Brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey welcome back Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale, just off the runway here at Moffett Field. Really interesting place, a lot of cool toys downstairs. But we had a conversation today about customer experience and kind of next gen customer experience, and how to drive a better customer experience so that you have a better customer relationship, and we're really excited to have our next guest. She's Kristy Schaffler, the director of customer experience for Comcast California regions. Kristy, great to see you. >> Thank you! Thanks for having me here, I appreciate it. >> Absolutely, so it's funny, we had this great little panel discussion talking about customer experience, but you kept coming back to employees, and really leading with employees before you worry about what's going on with the customer. Where does that mindset come from and how should people be prioritizing employees for the benefit of customers? >> So, you know, honestly, it all comes back to Comcast itself. It is a very strong employee culture. And so the company began as a small company, family owned, and I think that's what's permeated throughout the company as a whole. So when we started to introduced the best practices for a net promoter system overall, it was an easy grasp, I think, for employees to start looking at how is it that I'm going to be able to help overall? Because I think they're all out there trying to help each other. >> Right, well its funny, right? Because there's kind of two dynamics. There's a great dynamic of helping a teammate right? And this goes back to military rule and you fight for the person that you're with, and not necessarily some great cause or old white guys that are back thousands of miles away. But it's different in terms of getting bad news up to the boss. That's a really hard problem, and nobody wants to tell the boss bad news, and in fact, a lot of times, the bad news doesn't get up. >> Exactly. >> So how do you enable people to actually share the real bad news that they might be uncomfortable or not necessarily even addressable. >> Yeah, so what we did was we introduced our employees to the concept of elevations, and so what they do is they input an issue where they're struggling with helping out the customer. There's a barrier to them to be able to deliver the service we're expecting. And what happens is once that gets input, then that actually goes up into the region, we take a look at it and say "We can't really do anything with it here, but we can bump it up to the next level." That eventually gets to a point, especially in the case of employee tools, for example, where is has to go all the way up to the headquarters and there's a team that's ready and waiting for that to happen. So, when you tell them, "Hey, there's something broken here", they have to come back and respond within two weeks. They have to be able to get back with that employee to say "Here is what we're going to do about that" or maybe put on a map to say that we're going to eventually fix that. That communication goes directly back to the person who actually inputted. So, its a direct communication between the employee who's having the issue and the software developer who may actually own that tool. >> So it goes directly-- is it a special type of ticket, if you will? >> Exactly. >> That I want a post knowing that this is a-- I've decided its a high enough priority that I'm going to take the risk, and take the personal risk or professional risk to go ahead and escalate that up the chain of command? >> Right, so what I'm so proud about is we've gone back to the team and said "Give be your number one barrier that's holding you back?" . So they work it out amongst their peers about what they think should be the top issue. Then they get everybody else to watch that issue. Once you get a number of watchers on it, it becomes elevated into the company where it becomes a big issue, and its like Hey, there's a lot of people that look at this issue, want it resolved, and so as soon as they put that in, they assign it to the area that responsible, and that is a direction communication, because as soon as they comment, anybody who's watching that elevation gets an email in their inbox with the actual comment from the person who owns it. So, its a nice targeted communication for issues that they're having. >> So, is there any fanfare when there some big one that gets voted by the broader group that "Oh my gosh, this was a really big deal."? >> So recently, we had something that came up with our Xfinity Home, and so, as you probably know, we have the ability to have security where you can actually look at your cameras on your mobile app. And one of our technicians said "Hey guys, I'm hearing this from the customer.". So what they do is they come back in and they have a huddle with their team and have the discussion, and then that manager takes that and puts it into the system. What happened was it went straight back up to the person, they actually did a software update on it, And then our Senior Vice President of Customer Experience out of our corporate headquarters said "Hey guys, congratulations, that's fantastic! This got fixed!". Then that communication went directly back to the person who input it, so it's just a celebratory moment when you can be able to get that direct feedback from the customer, comes up through the employee. The employee's owning it as an issue that they can't solve personally, but they know to get it to the right people. >> Right. So you've talked a lot earlier today about employee tools, and so, you know, as you clearly there's something that you think is a great investment, how should people think about investment in employee tools actually manifesting itself in better customer experience with the company? >> Exactly. We actually had an elevation that was associated with that, where the employee was using a tool in the home, and when he was trying to check the health of the system, they found that there was a piece of the tool that was breaking off. And so, again, they took it back to the owner of that tool, and they worked with the manufacturer to go back and redesign that tool, so that meant that the customer was able to get better service, because of their tools aren't working, that's what they depend on to be able to serve our customers. >> Right. >> And so, it's key that we take care of them. >> So, just curious, to kind of wrap it up, what has the focus on the NPS, both the score as well as the process, you know, kind of, what's happened from then? Not only the, you know, the direct result in terms of changing in the score and execution details, but more kind of the second order and unintended consequences of that focus? >> Yeah so we've definitely seen our net promoter score increase year over year, so that's very exciting, and we're celebrating that, and we're not there yet, so we still have a ways to go. But the other thing that we're seeing is that the employees are feeling empowered. They're feeling like that they can bring back issues, but something that they share with everybody, they feel like they have a sense of "I can help direct where we need to focus our time and make sure that those issues are being addressed". So, we have an employee survey. It's actually called the ENPS, so actually, we send that out every other month, and ask for employees, you know, "How do you feel about the workplace?", "Are you motivated?". We have some of the highest scores of any company of employees that are motivated because we have set up this system to basically come back and say "Let us know where you need help", and we're coming back in and helping. So, I'm excited about it. >> Great, alright Kristy, well we need to have another followup conversation about NPS another time-- >> Definitely! >> --I need to get educated, but thanks for spending a few minutes, and inviting us to attend today's event. >> Thank you so much, I appreciate it. >> Alright, she's Kristy, I'm Jeff, you're watching the Cube. We're at Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (futuristic music)

>> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE! Covering Comcast Innovation Day. Brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey welcome back, get ready, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center, here in Sunnyvale, California. They had a really cool thing today, it was a customer experience day, brought a bunch of Comcast executives and a bunch of thought leaders in the customer experience base. We're excited to come down and sit in and talk to some of the guests, and really excited about our next guest, 'cause he's an anthropologist, he's Brian Solis, digital analyst, author, analyst, anthropologist, futurist, Brian, you've got it all going on, thanks for taking a few minutes of your day. >> Course, this is a really great conversation, so, I'm happy to be here. >> So first off, just kind of impressions of the conversation earlier today, talking about customer experience, the expectation, consumerization of IT is something we talk a lot about, where people's expectations of the way this stuff is supposed to work, change, all the time, and what was magical and almost impossible, like talking on a cell phone in your car, suddenly becomes expected and the norm, so how do you think of this, as you look at these big, sweeping changes that we're going through? >> Well today's conversation I think has been sort of, a spotlight on what's most important, which is innovation not for the sake of innovation, but innovation for the sake of pushing the customer experience forward, changing customer behaviors in a way that's going to create a new standard for experiences, and that way you become the leader in engagement. Everybody else has to catch up to you, and what was so important is that we're here at a company with all the love that wasn't the best in customer experience several years ago, and now they're sort of one of the pioneers in what customer experience needs to be, from a technological standpoint, a customer service standpoint, and an overall experience standpoint, right? >> I want to jump into the voice capability specifically, because I don't think there's really enough accolades as to what Comcast has achieved with the voice remote, I think if you don't have it you don't know it's there, and the ability to migrate across hundreds or thousands of channels, multiple services, to find the show that you want with just the ask of your voice is amazing. What's even more amazing is trying to teach people to actually navigate that way, so changing people's behavior in the way they interact with devices is not a simple thing. >> So, it's come up, and it's an expression shared in many UI and UX circles, which is the best interface is no interface, and in many ways, voice was the next frontier, that's a frontier that was pioneered, I think at a mass level by Amazon and Alexa, Apple and Siri, Google and Ok Google, we're really starting to see that voice as a UI is much more natural, what makes it so complex is all of the back end, I think Comcast has done a really nice job in the simplistic linguistic engagement of saying the name of a TV show or a genre of shows or movies, and then the back end to be reimagined in order to bring you something that's not just this long list of stuff, that is much more intuitive and helps you get to what they call time to joy, much faster. That's game changing, right, but that isn't just something that Comcast looked, for example, to just Alexa, or anything specifically, it looked, and also, especially not to other cable companies. They looked to the best-in-class experiences in every area, to pick those parts and build something altogether new that becomes the new standard, and I think voice, one of the things that you and I were talking about, Jeff, earlier, was kids, there was a time when they would walk up to a screen and they still do to some regard, where they want to do this, but I have a three year old at home who has a toy remote control, and I had to record video from afar of just watching her talk into her toy remote, "Mickey Mouse Club, Mickey Mouse Club," and just sitting there, with all the patience in the world, nothing was happening but expecting that something was going to happen. And it's just a new standard. The other thing, though, is that we're not done, we now live in an era of AI, machine learning, automation, so personalization now is really going to start to build upon voice experiences where it's just simply turning on the TV is going to give you instant options of all of the things you're most likely going to want to watch all on one nav. >> Right, it's just, we say that and yet we still have qwerty keyboards, right, which were specifically designed to slow people down and yet now we're not using arm typewriters anymore, and we still have qwerty keyboards, so changing people's behavior is not easy, and it's interesting to see kind of these generational shifts based on the devices in which they grew up using, kind of define the way in which they expect everything else to work. But it's, I still get the email, maybe, or even, they talked about here at Comcast, where instead of just saying NCAA Football, it knows I like to watch Stanford football, it suggests, maybe you should just say Stanford football, so there's still kind of a lot of education, surprising amount of education that has to happen. >> Yes and no, if you think about the conversation, I often talk about it in terms of iteration and innovation, iteration is doing the same things better, innovation is creating new value, and if you look at the evolution of the remote control, I mean just go back 50 years, it has gotten progressively worse over time, in fact on average, today's remote control has 70 buttons on it, and if you think about iteration in that regard, we've completely started to fail in the user interface, I don't know that anybody has mastered their relationship with the remote control except for some geeks, so I think if anything, voice is going to change the game for the better. >> Yeah, I was in the business for a long time, and now I know what killed the VCR, right, was the flashing 12, nobody could ever get their flashing 12, and for all the young people, look it up on the internet, you'll figure out what a VCR and a flashing 12 is. So you talk about something called Generation C, what is Generation C, why should we be paying attention? >> Look, I think voice is a good example of Generation C, so anybody who uses, you mentioned qwerty, right, I don't know that I've actually even used qwerty in a sentence in a really long time, but I'm old enough to, I trained on a manual typewriter back in the day, so it doesn't mean that I don't get it, it means that my behaviors and my expectations as a human being have changed, because of my relationship, my personal relationship, so for example, in consumerization of technology and IT, my personal relationship has changed with technology, and so what I had found in my research over the years was especially when it comes to customer experience, if you study a customer journey, and you look at demographics of these personas that we've created, you can see specifically that people who live a mobile-first lifestyle, regardless of age, will make decisions the same way, they're increasingly impatient, they're demanding, they're self-centered, I call 'em accidental narcissists, they, time, convenience are really important, they want personalization, their standards are much different than the personas that we've developed in the past, and so I gave it a name, which is Generation C, because it wasn't one, where C stood for connected, it wasn't one bound by age, or traditional demographics, education, income, it was defined by shared interests, behaviors, and shared outcomes, and it was a game changer for all things, if you're going to point innovation or customer experience or whatever it is, and you're going to aim at that growing customer segment, then they're going to have a different set of needs than your traditional customer, right? >> But it's so bizarre, again, how quickly the novel becomes expected baseline, and how the great search algorithm that we get out of Google, which is based on lots and lots and lots and lots of data, and a bunch of smart people and a whole bunch of hardware and software, suddenly now we expect that same search result if we're searching on, pick some random retailer or some other random website, when in fact, that is special, but we have this crazy sliding scale of what's expected and how can companies stay out in front of that, at least chase close behind, 'cause it's a very different world in how fast the expectations change. >> I'm sorry, I totally spaced out 'cause my attention span went away. I'm just kidding, I'm kidding. >> Well I didn't even get to the attention economy question yet. >> It's, you're competing at a much different level today, and I think that's what so disruptive for companies, is that they're still thinking that momentum and progress and experience and performance and success, I have to say that success is the worse teacher when it comes to innovation because you're basing your decisions on the future based on things that you did in the past. So what do companies need to get, is that the customers change, I'll give you an example. I think in many ways, companies compete against Uber, right, because Uber has changed the game for what it takes to get a service brought to you, and to give it to you and take you where you need to go, where time and convenience are big factors of that. So for example, one of the things I studied was how long is too long to wait for an Uber before you open Lyft in certain markets, and the reason that I wanted to do that was I wanted to show that the number went down every single year. Now, for example, Uber will advertise in Sydney that the average pickup time is three minutes and 39 seconds, because it knows it adds a competitive advantage over everybody else, because it's important, because once that experience happens to you and you get something your way fast, you're not going to suddenly realize, when you're at the Department of Motor Vehicles, that "Well, I understand that this isn't Uber, "and therefore I shouldn't expect "to have things done at a much more efficient "and personal manner." You take that mindset subconsciously to everything you do, so while it's a threat, it's also an opportunity, but you got to break that executive mindset to say, "How can we take "best-in-class experiences across the board, "and how can we apply it to what we do?" >> Yeah, again, an interesting concept in the conversation earlier today, where there was a question about ROI, and you threw it back as ROE, return on experience, so how should people start to adjust their thinking, because the thing on, return on investment implies almost a very small kind of direct impact, kind of one to one benefit, where really, return on experience implies a much broader, kind of accidental benefits, benefits across a lot of parameters that you may or may not necessarily be measuring, it's a very, a much better way to measure your investment. >> Look, it's almost impossible to get away from the ROI conversation, it's important, executives have to make decisions based on what they know the outcomes are going to be, a lot of this is, you don't know what you don't know, and so if you can tie some types of rudimentary metrics that are going to show progress and also return, it helps, but at the same time, I always say, what happens in the ROI equation if I equals ignorance, what's the return of ignorance? What's the return of not doing something, and so what I tried to demonstrate in a book I wrote about experience design, which was called X, it was, let's break it down to what we're actually trying to do, the word experience actually means an emotional reaction to a moment, and so for example, in a high sales pitch situation like a dealership for an automobile, that's not a good experience. If you have to call customer service, you've probably not had a good experience, and all of those things are emotional, so if you can design for emotional outcomes, where people are going to feel great in the moment and feel great afterwards, that is a metric that you can have a before and after state. The likelihood of attaching that emotion to things like loyalty, customer lifetime value, growth, then you can get to your ROI in a different way, but you have to first do it with intention. >> Yeah, Brian, fascinating conversation, we could go all day, but unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it there, but thanks for joining today, and thanks for spending a few minutes with us. >> Thank you, thank you, it was a pleasure. >> Absolutely, he's Brian, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, we're at the Comcast Innovation Center in Sunnyvale, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (techno music)

>>from the heart of Silicon Valley. It's the Q covering Comcast Innovation date. You want to You by Comcast. >>Hey, welcome back already. Jeffrey here with the Cube worth the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. It's right in Sunnyvale, not too far from Moffitt. And they had a special day today, really all about customer experience and invited. Ah, lot of industry people around to dig into the issues and find out What is it that's all about customer experience. We're excited to have our next guest. He's ripped Gerber, the chief marketing and innovation officer from Velocity Rip. Great to see you. >>Thanks, Jeff. Thanks for having me here. >>Absolutely. Shade. It's over. People aren't familiar with velocity. Give us the give us the overview. >>A terrific velocity builds mobile and cloud applications 100% on Salesforce. To extend the customer experience into deep into industries such as communications, media, health insurance, government, energy and utilities, we extend the power of the cloud that power of sales force to help these companies compete to transform on to win and improve their customer experiences. >>So what's the tie with Comcast >>tied with Comcast? Well, Comcast is certainly a very innovative media company and of itself in a big sales force customer and some things that they're doing and that we learned about today and some of the technologies that we saw very exciting in terms of how they're integrating you knew content displays and products new ai ai technologies wth the assisted your voice activation modules that we saw others very exciting. So you're a Comcast, like many of us here in Silicon Valley, Certainly are on ah, on some amazing journeys with taking these enabling technologies in making our lives as consumers and customers. And business is so much better, >>right? So you talked about, you know, digital transformation. And he called them the Big Four for your customers, you know, Social Cloud, Mobile and Analytics. How are you seeing those things, Matt? Back? The digital transformation. It's such a big, chewy term. How do you help people kind of zero in on specific, actionable things and initiatives that they can start to see success? >>Right, Right. So we're about a decade in in terms of those transformation technologies that I listed earlier today in our panel, Social Cloud Mobile and Analytics, and we were about 10 years into these, and so many might say we're in a post digital world now and entering what we call a customer engagement world. I mean, so you take these technologies which are amazing in of themselves. You combine them together. Ah, and then you start creating the kinds of experiences that new companies that are cropping up disrupting industries and existing organizations are taking to do things better, faster, less expensive. So one of things that we talked about today is there's a lot of legacy technology. A stack. Let's take C R M, for example, where you have very old technologies that are there that are keeping companies back that are holding back those experiences because of the way that the on premise software has been customized. And it's kind of sticking their and new companies like Salesforce, which is, in fact, a new company. If you think in Silicon Valley, timelines have come in and created this amazing experience level on top that and that we work with Salesforce. It extended even further in those industries to create these these amazing technologies. Ah, pulling up the data from the legacy systems bringing in Social Mobile analytics. Aye aye, and creating an experience that is seamless, almost invisible to you as a consumer or as a business. And so that's when we talk about digital transformation. It's not just the digital part of it. It's the transformation of the entire technology stack inside of an organization of the processes that they're following, sometimes the teams and the people. And it's sometimes the entire industry and of itself, >>right? But is it is it hard to get a B to B vendor to think about delivering their product in the form of inexperience? Right. We hear it all the time, obviously, and and B to C, and everyone's trying to sell experiences and everybody wants experiences, and Gen X wants experiences. But if you think of a sales force application and delivering kind of CR and capability to some sales person on the line, how did they rethink that delivery in the form of an experience for that user? >>Sure, many of the existing ah metrics or benchmarks that you might have as a consumer Ah, business is air now being held to a CZ well, so Comcast is a terrific example where there's a B to see as well as it be to be sales organization on divisions and whether it's the contracting process that you might have with Comcast as a business or the sign up process you might have as a consumer, your expectations are growing exponentially in terms of seamless, fast, intuitive, personal. In those technologies that we work with, the velocity and salesforce together help enable that kind of experiences for companies. Media companies like Comcast, >>for example, right? The other piece of it, we talked about a lot in the in the room before we got out here is driving it internally with your own employees and really driving kind of, ah, customer centric culture and attitude and two degree experience within your own culture so that those people are then able to deliver that to your customer. How are you doing that at velocity? What are some of the priorities that you set in this area? Right >>velocities Five years old, we are one of the fastest ah growing clout, cos actually, in the world today, one of the reasons for that key driver is our core values. We say where values lead company, our 1st 2 values out of our seven, our customers first. And people are the core. And so you can't take. You can't do what we're doing Ah, and grow how we're growing and serve the customers with the results that they're getting the way that we're doing without those two customer first, customer centric strategy. Ah, and emphasis. But then people are People are at the very core of that, and they combine to basically deliver the kinds of results that we're delivering. Whether it's building innovative technologies, helping our customers with Salesforce implement those technologies and helping the leadership of those of those customers that we have you measure, benchmark and demonstrate. Ah, to they're consistencies the results that they're getting from those investments. >>Awesome. Well, thanks for Ah, for joining us today and you're at the event and taking a few minutes on the Cube. >>Awesome. Thank you so much. >>All right, he's rip. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Q worth the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center in Sunnyvale. See you next time. Thanks for watching

>> Of Silicon Valley. It's the Cube, covering Comcast innovation day brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the cube. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. It's a really cool space right off of Buffet. And they're doing a lot of new technologies here. It's not the only Innovation Center in the country but it's one here in our backyard. And we're excited to be here. Comcast is having a special event talking about really CX, customer experience. They brought together a bunch of super smart people invited us to stop by and we're going to share some of that with you. And we're excited for our very first guest he's Preston Smalley, the VP of product management of Comcast, Preston great to meet you. >> Good to meet you too, Jeff. >> So really cool event today. We talked about a lot of different things about customer experience and really all the applications that are on the front edge that define that customer experience. And you guys are doing a ton of innovation there. >> No, we are I mean I think it's, we were talking just this morning about all the different ways that we're trying to meet customers, where they're at and building products really around those needs, right? >> Yes, so I think the one of the ones that doesn't get enough credit not enough conversation is the voice. And I've got the voice remote at home. And it's really fascinating, especially in the context of there's so many places that what I'm looking for might be and I don't really know what the licensing and arrangements are that you guys have set up with Hulu or with Netflix or with HBO or if it's on HBO on demand or HBO live. So to be able to have kind of a single point of reference to just push that button and say, "Stanford football," and have it show up, it's amazing. >> No, it really is and I think you know, the voice remote has been one of those big hits where you know, people always love their TV remote but, you know, a number years back we started exploring, could we put a voice you know, search capability directly into that remote. And I think what's great is people they're really leaning into it. So we're seeing a billion voice commands happening a month, >> Billion? >> A billion, one b. Through the remote and I think it's just become a part of their life. Right? And I think it's everything from the simple to saying NBC into the remote to the more complicated things like Notre Dame football or what's my WiFi password? or whatever the things they might be asking out of their device. >> So curious on the development side was like about features, but what were some of the real hurdles that you guys knew you had to overcome? And what were some of the surprise hurdles that you didn't necessarily anticipate? >> Sure. I mean, I think the ones you knew about were we've got to be able to translate speech to text and you know, there's there's existing infrastructure that allows for that and doing that with high accuracy. But the good news is we actually had a head start in organizing the content. And so we already had dealt with text based searching of all the different TV shows and movies and such. And so we had all that base of knowledge that we could then tap into. We're now at a stage where that kind of covers the basics but we're trying to understand how do you both increase the breadth and depth of the kinds of commands that you will do through the voice remote. And so you mentioned some at the beginning things like being able to search, not just the content that we bring but things like Netflix or Amazon Prime or soon Hulu. And so partnering with those companies, you get all that information in a way that works very well with the voice remote. >> Right and then you even have it bilingual, right? You even have Spanish and English. >> That's right. >> And it can flip it can switch back and forth on the fly. >> That's right, yeah, so we support both those languages, including a combo a mixed mode where in households where you're seeing both Spanish and English be interwoven, it'll actually even work in those contexts. And then recently, we've also introduced Canadian French and so we license our technology to Rogers and video Tron up in Canada. And so we've now introduced that capability as well. >> That's great, So a long time ago we interviewed Domino's and it's when they first introduced app ordering. And at first you think well app ordering but there was all this like second order benefits that Domino's replied in terms of accuracy of the orders and supply chain impact. So I'm curious if there's some, you know, kind of second order benefits that you guys are realizing with voice that maybe you didn't think, you know, what are some of the surprises that have come out of that? >> Well, that's a good, good question. I think in terms of surprises, it's the types of things that people are looking for you now have, you now have the ability to figure out what kinds of things people are interested in which you wouldn't have been able to know in a typical browse setting. So for example, we support now over 150 apps on X1 as far as third party streaming apps but we know the ones that we don't support because people are saying and into the remote, whereas we wouldn't have got that information prior. >> Right. >> And so now we can actually go and try and meet those needs. >> Now ,it's interesting. You talk about meeting people where they are and you know, one of the things that's happening today is people have all these options, right? They can get it through their Comcast service if they're doing that but you know they may want to have a direct relationship with Hulu is one that you picked out or with Netflix or this historical ones, you guys now are enabling an option for those people that choose to directly engage with those content providers and just use Comcast, as an internet provider. Tell us a little bit about what you guys are doing there. >> Yeah, sure. So obviously, we've had strength in the, in the TV space, and being able to organize and aggregate all that streaming content with your traditional television content. What we've done now is take that investment in X1 and pivot it into a new product this year, we call Xfinity flex. And what that product does is it's a streaming device that should be comfortable for an internet only subscriber that they hook up to their TV. It's 4K, HDR, wireless. And through that device, they're able to aggregate all of that streaming content in one place. So whether it's app content that they may already have an existing subscription from or it's ad supported internet content or maybe they want to buy some more content from us right? And so we'll bundle and sell those subscriptions directly and include that as well. And we've actually been pretty surprised, you know, you take something like Netflix which is highly penetrated in the United States we're pretty surprised how many people are still signing up new as a Netflix subscriber in our service and so by just making it easy and just one click away we found that people are they're opting to do that. >> Right, I'm sure they're happy to hear that in Los Gatos just down the road >> Exactly. No, they're a great partner and either way we're helping them >> Right, right >> They're trying to reach what they call kind of the Netflix nevers people that maybe just hadn't gotten Netflix prior, right? And so we're helping them with that. >> Well, it's really interesting, you know, kind of the you know, kind of TV versus computer you speeding the TV's kind of your passive experience, you're sitting on the couch and you just kind of watching where the computer was more two way and then there was dual screen kind of activity, but you guys are bringing a lot of the stuff that was only available on your pc or your phone now directly into the Comcast experience, you know whether it's YouTube or whatever. So it really it's kind of blurring those lines. But I want to shift gears a little bit about, you know, kind of the role of the internet in homes today, has now expanded beyond entertainment. It's expanded beyond information and IoT now is entering the home probably the biggest one is nested, connected thermostats and connected door bells and ring and you know, we're seeing videos from people's rings all over the place. You guys are sitting again, right in the middle of that ecosystem. So how does IoT and connected devices and thermostats and refrigerators and doorbells impacted the way you guys think about delivering internet into the home? >> Well, I think it's really been a watershed moment for the company, moving from, if you go years back to bringing internet to the wall and making it available in the home to saying look, we've got to actually really control the coverage of that WiFi in the home and make sure that it reaches all the corners of the home but then also providing the control that people want of the devices in there we know that for power users we're seeing today, 20 connected devices on the home network. And I know my house, I'm up to 50, right? And I think what customers don't have and don't want is an IT person directly in their home. They want it to just work naturally and easily. >> Right. >> And so one measurement of success that I know is how often my mother in law gives me a call saying, "Hey, Preston, yeah, this thing's not working in my house." It's got to be really easy and straightforward. >> Right and then just in terms of just being a backhauler and the internet traffic that you guys are hearing because all those connected device or your kids devices, they all want 4k streaming, they're watching movies, you know, come down and watch TV on the big screen, no, no, no, you know, I'm watching it in the room. How does that kind of change the way you guys think about delivering bandwidth cause 4K is a lot more, go to NAB, you're just going to soon be 8K's and 12K's and all kinds of crazy stuff. So your role in actually just delivering bandwidth has changed significantly over the last over a year. >> Absolutely, I mean, there was a stat on bandwidth that surprised me even just to look at it, which is in, in the last 18 years, Comcast has increased bandwidth 17 times. And it's just every, you know, we just keep increasing that because the demand is there, you know, 4K takes, you know, more than your 1080p then did your SD and the more streaming that's happening, it's just, it's requiring more bandwidth, so we're happy to provide that. You know, we now offer one gig internet across all of our homes, we reached 56 million homes, I think it's the most in the United States as far as one gig availability. And so regardless of how much bandwidth you want to take, we're going to bring that to you. And I think recognizing that we also need that coverage in the home and out of the home through Xfinity WiFi hotspots, just trying to bring that there. But you mentioned kids too, I wanted to build on that which is, you know, I'm a parent and being able to control how and where my kids go in the internet is important. And so, you know, being able to put limits, whether it's bed time limits on their devices or we've recently introduced in our testing app base limits. So you could say they can't use Instagram or they can only use it 30 minutes a day. And so being able to have that kind of control puts you in the driver's seat as the parent of kids in the home. >> Preston, I think you're going to be busy for a little while here at the innovations center. >> We are for sure. >> All right, well, thanks for spending a few minutes we could talk all day but we'll have to leave it there. >> All right, thanks Jeff. >> Thanks a lot. He's Preston, I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center in Sunnyvale. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (distinct music)

(inspirational music) >> theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (uplifting electronic music) (crowd chattering in background) >> Hi everybody. We're back at the Fira in Barcelona. Winding up our four day wall-to-wall coverage of MWC23 theCUBE has been thrilled to cover the telco transformation. Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. Really excited to have NTT on. Shahid Ahmed is the Group EVP of New Ventures and Innovation at NTT in from Chicago. Welcome to Barcelona. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me over. >> So, really interesting title. You have, you know, people might not know NTT you know, huge Japan telco but a lot of other businesses, explain your business. >> So we do a lot of things. Most of us are known for our Docomo business in Japan. We have one of the largest wireless cellular carriers in the world. We serve most of Japan. Outside of Japan, we are B2B systems, integration, professional services company. So we offer managed services. We have data centers, we have undersea cables. We offer all kinds of outsourcing services. So we're a big company. >> So there's a narrative out there that says, you know, 5G, it's a lot of hype, not a lot of adoption. Nobody's ever going to make money at 5G. You have a different point of view, I understand. You're like leaning into 5G and you've actually got some traction there. Explain that. >> So 5G can be viewed from two lenses. One is just you and I using our cell phones and we get 5G coverage over it. And the other one is for businesses to use 5G, and we call that private 5G or enterprise grade 5G. Two very separate distinct things, but it is 5G in the end. Now the big debate here in Europe and US is how to monetize 5G. As a consumer, you and I are not going to pay extra for 5G. I mean, I haven't. I just expect the carrier to offer faster, cheaper services. And so would I pay extra? Not really. I just want a reliable network from my carrier. >> Paid up for the good camera though, didn't you? >> I did. (Dave and Dave laughing) >> I'm waiting for four cameras now. >> So the carriers are in this little bit of a pickle at the moment because they've just spent billions of dollars, not only on spectrum but the infrastructure needed to upgrade to 5G, yet nobody's willing to pay extra for that 5G service. >> Oh, right. >> So what do they do? And one idea is to look at enterprises, companies, industrial companies, manufacturing companies who want to build their own 5G networks to support their own use cases. And these use cases could be anything from automating the surveyor belt to cameras with 5G in it to AGVs. These are little carts running around warehouses picking up products and goods, but they have to be connected all the time. Wifi doesn't work all the time there. And so those businesses are willing to pay for 5G. So your question is, is there a business case for 5G? Yes. I don't think it's in the consumer side. I think it's in the business side. And that's where NTT is finding success. >> So you said, you know, how they going to make money, right? You very well described the telco dilemma. We heard earlier this week, you know, well, we could tax the OTT vendors, like Netflix of course shot back and said, "Well, we spent a lot of money on content. We're driving a lot of value. Why don't you help us pay for the content development?" Which is incredibly expensive. I think I heard we're going to tax the developers for API calls on the network. I'm not sure how well that's going to work out. Look at Twitter, you know, we'll see. And then yeah, there's the B2B piece. What's your take on, we heard the Orange CEO say, "We need help." You know, maybe implying we're going to tax the OTT vendors, but we're for net neutrality, which seems like it's completely counter-posed. What's your take on, you know, fair share in the network? >> Look, we've seen this debate unfold in the US for the last 10 years. >> Yeah. >> Tom Wheeler, the FCC chairman started that debate and he made great progress and open internet and net neutrality. The thing is that if you create a lane, a tollway, where some companies have to pay toll and others don't have to, you create an environment where the innovation could be stifled. Content providers may not appear on the scene anymore. And with everything happening around AI, we may see that backfire. So creating a toll for rich companies to be able to pay that toll and get on a faster speed internet, that may work some places may backfire in others. >> It's, you know, you're bringing up a great point. It's one of those sort of unintended consequences. You got to be be careful because the little guy gets crushed in that environment, and then what? Right? Then you stifle innovation. So, okay, so you're a fan of net neutrality. You think the balance that the US model, for a change, maybe the US got it right instead of like GDPR, who sort of informed the US on privacy, maybe the opposite on net neutrality. >> I think so. I mean, look, the way the US, particularly the FCC and the FTC has mandated these rules and regulation. I think it's a nice balance. FTC is all looking at big tech at the moment, but- >> Lena Khan wants to break up big tech. I mean for, you know, you big tech, boom, break 'em up, right? So, but that's, you know- >> That's a whole different story. >> Yeah. Right. We could talk about that too, if you want. >> Right. But I think that we have a balanced approach, a measured approach. Asking the content providers or the developers to pay for your innovative creative application that's on your phone, you know, that's asking for too much in my opinion. >> You know, I think you're right though. Government did do a good job with net neutrality in the US and, I mean, I'm just going to go my high horse for a second, so forgive me. >> Go for it. >> Market forces have always done a better job at adjudicating, you know, competition. Now, if a company's a monopoly, in my view they should be, you know, regulated, or at least penalized. Yeah, but generally speaking, you know the attack on big tech, I think is perhaps misplaced. I sat through, and the reason it's relevant to Mobile World Congress or MWC, is I sat through a Nokia presentation this week and they were talking about Bell Labs when United States broke up, you know, the US telcos, >> Yeah. >> Bell Labs was a gem in the US and now it's owned by Nokia. >> Yeah. >> Right? And so you got to be careful about, you know what you wish for with breaking up big tech. You got AI, you've got, you know, competition with China- >> Yeah, but the upside to breaking up Ma Bell was not just the baby Bells and maybe the stranded orphan asset of Bell Labs, but I would argue it led to innovation. I'm old enough to remember- >> I would say it made the US less competitive. >> I know. >> You were in junior high school, but I remember as an adult, having a rotary dial phone and having to pay for that access, and there was no such- >> Yeah, but they all came back together. The baby Bells are all, they got all acquired. And the cable company, it was no different. So I don't know, do you have a perspective of this? Because you know this better than I do. >> Well, I think look at Nokia, just they announced a whole new branding strategy and new brand. >> I like the brand. >> Yeah. And- >> It looks cool. >> But guess what? It's B2B oriented. >> (laughs) Yeah. >> It's no longer consumer, >> Right, yeah. >> because they felt that Nokia brand phone was sort of misleading towards a lot of business to business work that they do. And so they've oriented themselves to B2B. Look, my point is, the carriers and the service providers, network operators, and look, I'm a network operator, too, in Japan. We need to innovate ourselves. Nobody's stopping us from coming up with a content strategy. Nobody's stopping a carrier from building a interesting, new, over-the-top app. In fact, we have better control over that because we are closer to the customer. We need to innovate, we need to be more creative. I don't think taxing the little developer that's building a very innovative application is going to help in the long run. >> NTT Japan, what do they have a content play? I, sorry, I'm not familiar with it. Are they strong in content, or competitive like Netflix-like, or? >> We have relationships with them, and you remember i-mode? >> Yeah. Oh yeah, sure. >> Remember in the old days. I mean, that was a big hit. >> Yeah, yeah, you're right. >> Right? I mean, that was actually the original app marketplace. >> Right. >> And the application store. So, of course we've evolved from that and we should, and this is an evolution and we should look at it more positively instead of looking at ways to regulate it. We should let it prosper and let it see where- >> But why do you think that telcos generally have failed at content? I mean, AT&T is sort of the exception that proves the rule. I mean, they got some great properties, obviously, CNN and HBO, but generally it's viewed as a challenging asset and others have had to diversify or, you know, sell the assets. Why do you think that telcos have had such trouble there? >> Well, Comcast owns also a lot of content. >> Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. >> And I think, I think that is definitely a strategy that should be explored here in Europe. And I think that has been underexplored. I, in my opinion, I believe that every large carrier must have some sort of content strategy at some point, or else you are a pipe. >> Yeah. You lose touch with a customer. >> Yeah. And by the way, being a dump pipe is okay. >> No, it's a lucrative business. >> It's a good business. You just have to focus. And if you start to do a lot of ancillary things around it then you start to see the margins erode. But if you just focus on being a pipe, I think that's a very good business and it's very lucrative. Everybody wants bandwidth. There's insatiable demand for bandwidth all the time. >> Enjoy the monopoly, I say. >> Yeah, well, capital is like an organism in and of itself. It's going to seek a place where it can insert itself and grow. Do you think that the questions around fair share right now are having people wait in the wings to see what's going to happen? Because especially if I'm on the small end of creating content, creating services, and there's possibly a death blow to my fixed costs that could be coming down the line, I'm going to hold back and wait. Do you think that the answer is let's solve this sooner than later? What are your thoughts? >> I think in Europe the opinion has been always to go after the big tech. I mean, we've seen a lot of moves either through antitrust, or other means. >> Or the guillotine! >> That's right. (all chuckle) A guillotine. Yes. And I've heard those directly. I think, look, in the end, EU has to decide what's right for their constituents, the countries they operate, and the economy. Frankly, with where the economy is, you got recession, inflation pressures, a war, and who knows what else might come down the pipe. I would be very careful in messing with this equilibrium in this economy. Until at least we have gone through this inflation and recessionary pressure and see what happens. >> I, again, I think I come back to markets, ultimately, will adjudicate. I think what we're seeing with chatGPT is like a Netscape moment in some ways. And I can't predict what's going to happen, but I can predict that it's going to change the world. And there's going to be new disruptors that come about. That just, I don't think Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple are going to rule the world forever. They're just, I guarantee they're not, you know. They'll make it through. But there's going to be some new companies. I think it might be open AI, might not be. Give us a plug for NTT at the show. What do you guys got going here? Really appreciate you coming on. >> Thank you. So, you know, we're showing off our private 5G network for enterprises, for businesses. We see this as a huge opportunities. If you look around here you've got Rohde & Schwarz, that's the industrial company. You got Airbus here. All the big industrial companies are here. Automotive companies and private 5G. 5G inside a factory, inside a hospital, a warehouse, a mining operation. That's where the dollars are. >> Is it a meaningful business for you today? >> It is. We just started this business only a couple of years ago. We're seeing amazing growth and I think there's a lot of good opportunities there. >> Shahid Ahmed, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. Really a pleasure. >> Thanks for having me over. Great questions. >> Oh, you're welcome. All right. For David Nicholson, Dave Vellante. We'll be back, right after this short break, from the Fira in Barcelona, MWC23. You're watching theCUBE. (uplifting electronic music)

>> Announcer: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCube's first day of coverage of MWC 23 from Barcelona, Spain. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson. I'm literally in between two Daves. We've had a great first day of coverage of the event. There's been lots of conversations, Dave, on disaggregation, on the change of mobility. I want to be able to get your perspectives from both of you on what you saw on the show floor, what you saw and heard from our guests today. So we'll start with you, Dave V. What were some of the things that were our takeaways from day one for you? >> Well, the big takeaway is the event itself. On day one, you get a feel for what this show is like. Now that we're back, face-to-face kind of pretty much full face-to-face. A lot of excitement here. 2000 plus exhibitors, I mean, planes, trains, automobiles, VR, AI, servers, software, I mean everything. I mean, everybody is here. So it's a really comprehensive show. It's not just about mobile. That's why they changed the name from Mobile World Congress. I think the other thing is from the keynotes this morning, I mean, you heard, there's a lot of, you know, action around the telcos and the transformation, but in a lot of ways they're sort of protecting their existing past from the future. And so they have to be careful about how fast they move. But at the same time if they don't move fast, they're going to get disrupted. We heard some complaints, essentially, you know, veiled complaints that the over the top guys aren't paying their fair share and Telco should be able to charge them more. We heard the chairman of Ericsson talk about how we can't let the OTTs do that again. We're going to charge directly for access through APIs to our network, to our data. We heard from Chris Lewis. Yeah. They've only got, or maybe it was San Ji Choha, how they've only got eight APIs. So, you know the developers are the ones who are going to actually build out the innovation at the edge. The telcos are going to provide the connectivity and the infrastructure companies like Dell as well. But it's really to me all about the developers. And that's where the action's going to be. And it's going to be interesting to see how the developers respond to, you know, the gun to the head. If you want access, you're going to have to pay for it. Now maybe there's so much money to be made that they'll go for it, but I feel like there's maybe a different model. And I think some of the emerging telcos are going to say, you know what, here developers, here's a platform, have at it. We're not going to charge you for all the data until you succeed. Then we're going to figure out a monetization model. >> Right. A lot of opportunity for the developer. That skillset is certainly one that's in demand here. And certainly the transformation of the telecom industry is, there's a lot of conundrums that I was hearing going on today, kind of chicken and egg scenarios. But Dave, you had a chance to walk around the show floor. We were here interviewing all day. What were some of the things that you saw that really stuck out to you? >> I think I was struck by how much attention was being paid to private 5G networks. You sort of read between the lines and it appears as though people kind of accept that the big incumbent telecom players are going to be slower to move. And this idea of things like open RAN where you're leveraging open protocols in a stack to deliver more agility and more value. So it sort of goes back to the generalized IT discussion of moving to cloud for agility. It appears as though a lot of players realize that the wild wild west, the real opportunity, is in the private sphere. So it's really interesting to see how that works, how 5G implemented into an environment with wifi how that actually works. It's really interesting. >> So it's, obviously when you talk to companies like Dell, I haven't hit HPE yet. I'm going to go over there and check out their booth. They got an analyst thing going on but it's really early days for them. I mean, they started in this business by taking an X86 box, putting a name on it, you know, that sounded like it was edged, throwing it over, you know, the wall. That's sort of how they all started in this business. And now they're, you know, but they knew they had to form partnerships. They had to build purpose-built systems. Now with 16 G out, you're seeing that. And so it's still really early days, talking about O RAN, open RAN, the open RAN alliance. You know, it's just, I mean, not even, the game hasn't even barely started yet but we heard from Dish today. They're trying to roll out a massive 5G network. Rakuten is really focused on sort of open RAN that's more reliable, you know, or as reliable as the existing networks but not as nearly as huge a scale as Dish. So it's going to take a decade for this to evolve. >> Which is surprising to the average consumer to hear that. Because as far as we know 5G has been around for a long time. We've been talking about 5G, implementing 5G, you sort of assume it's ubiquitous but the reality is it is just the beginning. >> Yeah. And you know, it's got a fake 5G too, right? I mean you see it on your phone and you're like, what's the difference here? And it's, you know, just, >> Dave N.: What does it really mean? >> Right. And so I think your point about private is interesting, the conversation Dave that we had earlier, I had throughout, hey I don't think it's a replacement for wifi. And you said, "well, why not?" I guess it comes down to economics. I mean if you can get the private network priced close enough then you're right. Why wouldn't it replace wifi? Now you got wifi six coming in. So that's a, you know, and WiFi's flexible, it's cheap, it's good for homes, good for offices, but these private networks are going to be like kickass, right? They're going to be designed to run whatever, warehouses and robots, and energy drilling facilities. And so, you know the economics I don't think are there today but maybe they can be at volume. >> Maybe at some point you sort of think of today's science experiment becoming the enterprise-grade solution in the future. I had a chance to have some conversations with folks around the show. And I think, and what I was surprised by was I was reminded, frankly, I wasn't surprised. I was reminded that when we start talking about 5G, we're talking about spectrum that is managed by government entities. Of course all broadcast, all spectrum, is managed in one way or another. But in particular, you can't simply put a SIM in every device now because there are a lot of regulatory hurdles that have to take place. So typically what these things look like today is 5G backhaul to the network, communication from that box to wifi. That's a huge improvement already. So yeah, my question about whether, you know, why not put a SIM in everything? Maybe eventually, but I think, but there are other things that I was not aware of that are standing in the way. >> Your point about spectrum's an interesting one though because private networks, you're going to be able to leverage that spectrum in different ways, and tune it essentially, use different parts of the spectrum, make it programmable so that you can apply it to that specific use case, right? So it's going to be a lot more flexible, you know, because I presume the needs spectrum needs of a hospital are going to be different than, you know, an agribusiness are going to be different than a drilling, you know, unit, offshore drilling unit. And so the ability to have the flexibility to use the spectrum in different ways and apply it to that use case, I think is going to be powerful. But I suspect it's going to be expensive initially. I think the other thing we talked about is public policy and regulation, and it's San Ji Choha brought up the point, is telcos have been highly regulated. They don't just do something and ask for permission, you know, they have to work within the confines of that regulated environment. And there's a lot of these greenfield companies and private networks that don't necessarily have to follow those rules. So that's a potential disruptive force. So at the same time, the telcos are spending what'd we hear, a billion, a trillion and a half over the next seven years? Building out 5G networks. So they got to figure out, you know how to get a payback on that. They'll get it I think on connectivity, 'cause they have a monopoly but they want more. They're greedy. They see the over, they see the Netflixes of the world and the Googles and the Amazons mopping up services and they want a piece of that action but they've never really been good at it. >> Well, I've got a question for both of you. I mean, what do you think the odds are that by the time the Shangri La of fully deployed 5G happens that we have so much data going through it that effectively it feels exactly the same as 3G? What are the odds? >> That's a good point. Well, the thing that gets me about 5G is there's so much of it on, if I go to the consumer side when we're all consumers in our daily lives so much of it's marketing hype. And, you know all the messaging about that, when it's really early innings yet they're talking about 6G. What does actual fully deployed 5G look like? What is that going to enable a hospital to achieve or an oil refinery out in the middle of the ocean? That's something that interests me is what's next for that? Are we going to hear that at this event? >> I mean, walking around, you see a fair amount of discussion of, you know, the internet of things. Edge devices, the increase in connectivity. And again, what I was surprised by was that there's very little talk about a sim card in every one of those devices at this point. It's like, no, no, no, we got wifi to handle all that but aggregating it back into a central network that's leveraging 5G. That's really interesting. That's really interesting. >> I think you, the odds of your, to go back to your question, I think the odds are even money, that by the time it's all built out there's going to be so much data and so much new capability it's going to work similarly at similar speeds as we see in the networks today. You're just going to be able to do so many more things. You know, and your video's going to look better, the graphics are going to look better. But I think over the course of history, this is what's happening. I mean, even when you go back to dial up, if you were in an AOL chat room in 1996, it was, you know, yeah it took a while. You're like, (screeches) (Lisa laughs) the modem and everything else, but once you were in there- >> Once you're there, 2400 baud. >> It was basically real time. And so you could talk to your friends and, you know, little chat room but that's all you could do. You know, if you wanted to watch a video, forget it, right? And then, you know, early days of streaming video, stop, start, stop, start, you know, look at Amazon Prime when it first started, Prime Video was not that great. It's sort of catching up to Netflix. But, so I think your point, that question is really prescient because more data, more capability, more apps means same speed. >> Well, you know, you've used the phrase over the top. And so just just so we're clear so we're talking about the same thing. Typically we're talking about, you've got, you have network providers. Outside of that, you know, Netflix, internet connection, I don't need Comcast, right? Perfect example. Well, what about the over the top that's coming from direct satellite communications with devices. There are times when I don't have a signal on my, happens to be an Apple iPhone, when I get a little SOS satellite logo because I can communicate under very limited circumstances now directly to the satellite for very limited text messaging purposes. Here at the show, I think it might be a Motorola device. It's a dongle that allows any mobile device to leverage direct satellite communication. Again, for texting back to the 2,400 baud modem, you know, days, 1200 even, 300 even, go back far enough. What's that going to look like? Is that too far in the future to think that eventually it's all going to be over the top? It's all going to be handset to satellite and we don't need these RANs anymore. It's all going to be satellite networks. >> Dave V.: I think you're going to see- >> Little too science fiction-y? (laughs) >> No, I, no, I think it's a good question and I think you're going to see fragments. I think you're going to see fragmentation of private networks. I think you're going to see fragmentation of satellites. I think you're going to see legacy incumbents kind of hanging on, you know, the cable companies. I think that's coming. I think by 2030 it'll, the picture will be much more clear. The question is, and I think it's come down to the innovation on top, which platform is going to be the most developer friendly? Right, and you know, I've not heard anything from the big carriers that they're going to be developer friendly. I've heard "we have proprietary data that we're going to charge access for and developers are going to have to pay for that." But I haven't heard them saying "Developers, developers, developers!" You know, Steve Bomber running around, like bend over backwards for developers, they're asking the developers to bend over. And so if a network can, let's say the satellite network is more developer friendly, you know, you're going to see more innovation there potentially. You know, or if a dish network says, "You know what? We're going after developers, we're going after innovation. We're not going to gouge them for all this network data. Rather we're going to make the platform open or maybe we're going to do an app store-like model where we take a piece of the action after they succeed." You know, take it out of the backend, like a Silicon Valley VC as opposed to an East Coast VC. They're not going to get you in the front end. (Lisa laughs) >> Well, you can see the sort of disruptive forces at play between open RAN and the legacy, call it proprietary stack, right? But what is the, you know, if that's sort of a horizontal disruptive model, what's the vertically disruptive model? Is it private networks coming in? Is it a private 5G network that comes in that says, "We're starting from the ground up, everything is containerized. We're going to go find people at KubeCon who are, who understand how to orchestrate with Kubernetes and use containers in microservices, and we're going to have this little 5G network that's going to deliver capabilities that you can't get from the big boys." Is there a way to monetize that? Is there a way for them to be disrupted, be disruptive, or are these private 5G networks that everybody's talking about just relegated to industrial use cases where you're just squeezing better economics out of wireless communication amongst all your devices in your factory? >> That's an interesting question. I mean, there are a lot of those smart factory industrial use cases. I mean, it's basically industry 4.0 use cases. But yeah, I don't count the cloud guys out. You know, everybody says, "oh, the narrative is, well, the latency of the cloud." Well, not if the cloud is at the edge. If you take a local zone and put storage, compute, and data right next to each other and the cloud model with the cloud APIs, and then you got an asynchronous, you know, connection back. I think that's a reasonable model. I think the cloud guys figured out developers, right? Pretty well. Certainly Microsoft and, and Amazon and Google, they know developers. I don't see any reason why they can't bring their model to the edge. So, and that's really disruptive to the legacy telco guys, you know? So they have to be careful. >> One step closer to my dream of eliminating the word "cloud" from IT lexicon. (Lisa laughs) I contend that it has always been IT, and it will always be IT. And this whole idea of cloud, what is cloud? If AWS, for example, is delivering hardware to the edge where it needs to be, is that cloud? Do we go back to the idea that cloud is an operational model and not a question of physical location? I hope we get to that point. >> Well, what's Apex and GreenLake? Apex is, you know, Dell's as a service. GreenLake is- >> HPE. >> HPE's as a service. That's outposts. >> Dave N.: Right. >> Yeah. >> That's their outpost. >> Yeah. >> Well AWS's position used to be, you know, to use them as a proxy for hyperscale cloud. We'll just, we'll grow in a very straight trajectory forever on the back of net new stuff. Forget about the old stuff. As James T. Kirk said of the Klingons, "let them die." (Lisa laughs) As far as the cloud providers were concerned just, yeah, let, let that old stuff go away. Well then they found out, there came a point in time where they realized there's a lot of friction and stickiness associated with that. So they had to deal with the reality of hybridity, if that's the word, the hybrid nature of things. So what are they doing? They're pushing stuff out to the edge, so... >> With the same operating model. >> With the same operating model. >> Similar. I mean, it's limited, right? >> So you see- >> You can't run a lot of database on outpost, you can run RES- >> You see this clash of Titans where some may have written off traditional IT infrastructure vendors, might have been written off as part of the past. Whereas hyperscale cloud providers represent the future. It seems here at this show they're coming head to head and competing evenly. >> And this is where I think a company like Dell or HPE or Cisco has some advantages in that they're not going to compete with the telcos, but the hyperscalers will. >> Lisa: Right. >> Right. You know, and they're already, Google's, how much undersea cable does Google own? A lot. Probably more than anybody. >> Well, we heard from Google and Microsoft this morning in the keynote. It'd be interesting to see if we hear from AWS and then over the next couple of days. But guys, clearly there is, this is a great wrap of day one. And the crazy thing is this is only day one. We've got three more days of coverage, more news, more information to break down and unpack on theCUBE. Look forward to doing that with you guys over the next three days. Thank you for sharing what you saw on the show floor, what you heard from our guests today as we had about 10 interviews. Appreciate your insights and your perspectives and can't wait for tomorrow. >> Right on. >> All right. For Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's day one wrap from MWC 23. We'll see you tomorrow. (relaxing music)

>>In 2011, early Facebook employee and Cloudera co-founder Jeff Ocker famously said the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to get people to click on ads. And that sucks. Let's face it more than a decade later organizations continue to be frustrated with how difficult it is to get value from data and build a truly agile data-driven enterprise. What does that even mean? You ask? Well, it means that everyone in the organization has the data they need when they need it. In a context that's relevant to advance the mission of an organization. Now that could mean cutting cost could mean increasing profits, driving productivity, saving lives, accelerating drug discovery, making better diagnoses, solving, supply chain problems, predicting weather disasters, simplifying processes, and thousands of other examples where data can completely transform people's lives beyond manipulating internet users to behave a certain way. We've heard the prognostications about the possibilities of data before and in fairness we've made progress, but the hard truth is the original promises of master data management, enterprise data, warehouses, data marts, data hubs, and yes, even data lakes were broken and left us wanting from more welcome to the data doesn't lie, or doesn't a series of conversations produced by the cube and made possible by Starburst data. >>I'm your host, Dave Lanta and joining me today are three industry experts. Justin Borgman is this co-founder and CEO of Starburst. Richard Jarvis is the CTO at EMI health and Theresa tongue is cloud first technologist at Accenture. Today we're gonna have a candid discussion that will expose the unfulfilled and yes, broken promises of a data past we'll expose data lies, big lies, little lies, white lies, and hidden truths. And we'll challenge, age old data conventions and bust some data myths. We're debating questions like is the demise of a single source of truth. Inevitable will the data warehouse ever have featured parody with the data lake or vice versa is the so-called modern data stack, simply centralization in the cloud, AKA the old guards model in new cloud close. How can organizations rethink their data architectures and regimes to realize the true promises of data can and will and open ecosystem deliver on these promises in our lifetimes, we're spanning much of the Western world today. Richard is in the UK. Teresa is on the west coast and Justin is in Massachusetts with me. I'm in the cube studios about 30 miles outside of Boston folks. Welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us. Let's get right into it. You're very welcome. Now here's the first lie. The most effective data architecture is one that is centralized with a team of data specialists serving various lines of business. What do you think Justin? >>Yeah, definitely a lie. My first startup was a company called hit adapt, which was an early SQL engine for hit that was acquired by Teradata. And when I got to Teradata, of course, Teradata is the pioneer of that central enterprise data warehouse model. One of the things that I found fascinating was that not one of their customers had actually lived up to that vision of centralizing all of their data into one place. They all had data silos. They all had data in different systems. They had data on prem data in the cloud. You know, those companies were acquiring other companies and inheriting their data architecture. So, you know, despite being the industry leader for 40 years, not one of their customers truly had everything in one place. So I think definitely history has proven that to be a lie. >>So Richard, from a practitioner's point of view, you know, what, what are your thoughts? I mean, there, there's a lot of pressure to cut cost, keep things centralized, you know, serve the business as best as possible from that standpoint. What, what is your experience show? >>Yeah, I mean, I think I would echo Justin's experience really that we, as a business have grown up through acquisition, through storing data in different places sometimes to do information governance in different ways to store data in, in a platform that's close to data experts, people who really understand healthcare data from pharmacies or from, from doctors. And so, although if you were starting from a Greenfield site and you were building something brand new, you might be able to centralize all the data and all of the tooling and teams in one place. The reality is that that businesses just don't grow up like that. And, and it's just really impossible to get that academic perfection of, of storing everything in one place. >>Y you know, Theresa, I feel like Sarbanes Oxley kinda saved the data warehouse, you know, right. You actually did have to have a single version of the truth for certain financial data, but really for those, some of those other use cases, I, I mentioned, I, I do feel like the industry has kinda let us down. What's your take on this? Where does it make sense to have that sort of centralized approach versus where does it make sense to maybe decentralized? >>I, I think you gotta have centralized governance, right? So from the central team, for things like star Oxley, for things like security for certainly very core data sets, having a centralized set of roles, responsibilities to really QA, right. To serve as a design authority for your entire data estate, just like you might with security, but how it's implemented has to be distributed. Otherwise you're not gonna be able to scale. Right? So being able to have different parts of the business really make the right data investments for their needs. And then ultimately you're gonna collaborate with your partners. So partners that are not within the company, right. External partners, we're gonna see a lot more data sharing and model creation. And so you're definitely going to be decentralized. >>So, you know, Justin, you guys last, geez, I think it was about a year ago, had a session on, on data mesh. It was a great program. You invited Jamma, Dani, of course, she's the creator of the data mesh. And her one of our fundamental premises is that you've got this hyper specialized team that you've gotta go through. And if you want anything, but at the same time, these, these individuals actually become a bottleneck, even though they're some of the most talented people in the organization. So I guess question for you, Richard, how do you deal with that? Do you, do you organize so that there are a few sort of rock stars that, that, you know, build cubes and, and the like, and, and, and, or have you had any success in sort of decentralizing with, you know, your, your constituencies, that data model? >>Yeah. So, so we absolutely have got rockstar, data scientists and data guardians. If you like people who understand what it means to use this data, particularly as the data that we use at emos is very private it's healthcare information. And some of the, the rules and regulations around using the data are very complex and, and strict. So we have to have people who understand the usage of the data, then people who understand how to build models, how to process the data effectively. And you can think of them like consultants to the wider business, because a pharmacist might not understand how to structure a SQL query, but they do understand how they want to process medication information to improve patient lives. And so that becomes a, a consulting type experience from a, a set of rock stars to help a, a more decentralized business who needs to, to understand the data and to generate some valuable output. >>Justin, what do you say to a, to a customer or prospect that says, look, Justin, I'm gonna, I got a centralized team and that's the most cost effective way to serve the business. Otherwise I got, I got duplication. What do you say to that? >>Well, I, I would argue it's probably not the most cost effective and, and the reason being really twofold. I think, first of all, when you are deploying a enterprise data warehouse model, the, the data warehouse itself is very expensive, generally speaking. And so you're putting all of your most valuable data in the hands of one vendor who now has tremendous leverage over you, you know, for many, many years to come. I think that's the story at Oracle or Terra data or other proprietary database systems. But the other aspect I think is that the reality is those central data warehouse teams is as much as they are experts in the technology. They don't necessarily understand the data itself. And this is one of the core tenants of data mash that that jam writes about is this idea of the domain owners actually know the data the best. >>And so by, you know, not only acknowledging that data is generally decentralized and to your earlier point about SAR, brain Oxley, maybe saving the data warehouse, I would argue maybe GDPR and data sovereignty will destroy it because data has to be decentralized for, for those laws to be compliant. But I think the reality is, you know, the data mesh model basically says, data's decentralized, and we're gonna turn that into an asset rather than a liability. And we're gonna turn that into an asset by empowering the people that know the data, the best to participate in the process of, you know, curating and creating data products for, for consumption. So I think when you think about it, that way, you're going to get higher quality data and faster time to insight, which is ultimately going to drive more revenue for your business and reduce costs. So I think that that's the way I see the two, the two models comparing and contrasting. >>So do you think the demise of the data warehouse is inevitable? I mean, I mean, you know, there Theresa you work with a lot of clients, they're not just gonna rip and replace their existing infrastructure. Maybe they're gonna build on top of it, but what does that mean? Does that mean the E D w just becomes, you know, less and less valuable over time, or it's maybe just isolated to specific use cases. What's your take on that? >>Listen, I still would love all my data within a data warehouse would love it. Mastered would love it owned by essential team. Right? I think that's still what I would love to have. That's just not the reality, right? The investment to actually migrate and keep that up to date. I would say it's a losing battle. Like we've been trying to do it for a long time. Nobody has the budgets and then data changes, right? There's gonna be a new technology. That's gonna emerge that we're gonna wanna tap into. There's going to be not enough investment to bring all the legacy, but still very useful systems into that centralized view. So you keep the data warehouse. I think it's a very, very valuable, very high performance tool for what it's there for, but you could have this, you know, new mesh layer that still takes advantage of the things. I mentioned, the data products in the systems that are meaningful today and the data products that actually might span a number of systems, maybe either those that either source systems for the domains that know it best, or the consumer based systems and products that need to be packaged in a way that be really meaningful for that end user, right? Each of those are useful for a different part of the business and making sure that the mesh actually allows you to use all of them. >>So, Richard, let me ask you, you take, take Gemma's principles back to those. You got to, you know, domain ownership and, and, and data as product. Okay, great. Sounds good. But it creates what I would argue are two, you know, challenges, self-serve infrastructure let's park that for a second. And then in your industry, the one of the high, most regulated, most sensitive computational governance, how do you automate and ensure federated governance in that mesh model that Theresa was just talking about? >>Well, it absolutely depends on some of the tooling and processes that you put in place around those tools to be, to centralize the security and the governance of the data. And I think, although a data warehouse makes that very simple, cause it's a single tool, it's not impossible with some of the data mesh technologies that are available. And so what we've done at emus is we have a single security layer that sits on top of our data match, which means that no matter which user is accessing, which data source, we go through a well audited well understood security layer. That means that we know exactly who's got access to which data field, which data tables. And then everything that they do is, is audited in a very kind of standard way, regardless of the underlying data storage technology. So for me, although storing the data in one place might not be possible understanding where your source of truth is and securing that in a common way is still a valuable approach and you can do it without having to bring all that data into a single bucket so that it's all in one place. And, and so having done that and investing quite heavily in making that possible has paid dividends in terms of giving wider access to the platform and ensuring that only data that's available under GDPR and other regulations is being used by, by the data users. >>Yeah. So Justin, I mean, Democrat, we always talk about data democratization and you know, up until recently, they really haven't been line of sight as to how to get there. But do you have anything to add to this because you're essentially taking, you know, do an analytic queries and with data that's all dispersed all over the, how are you seeing your customers handle this, this challenge? >>Yeah. I mean, I think data products is a really interesting aspect of the answer to that. It allows you to, again, leverage the data domain owners, people know the data, the best to, to create, you know, data as a product ultimately to be consumed. And we try to represent that in our product as effectively a almost eCommerce like experience where you go and discover and look for the data products that have been created in your organization. And then you can start to consume them as, as you'd like. And so really trying to build on that notion of, you know, data democratization and self-service, and making it very easy to discover and, and start to use with whatever BI tool you, you may like, or even just running, you know, SQL queries yourself, >>Okay. G guys grab a sip of water. After this short break, we'll be back to debate whether proprietary or open platforms are the best path to the future of data excellence, keep it right there. >>Your company has more data than ever, and more people trying to understand it, but there's a problem. Your data is stored across multiple systems. It's hard to access and that delays analytics and ultimately decisions. The old method of moving all of your data into a single source of truth is slow and definitely not built for the volume of data we have today or where we are headed while your data engineers spent over half their time, moving data, your analysts and data scientists are left, waiting, feeling frustrated, unproductive, and unable to move the needle for your business. But what if you could spend less time moving or copying data? What if your data consumers could analyze all your data quickly? >>Starburst helps your teams run fast queries on any data source. We help you create a single point of access to your data, no matter where it's stored. And we support high concurrency, we solve for speed and scale, whether it's fast, SQL queries on your data lake or faster queries across multiple data sets, Starburst helps your teams run analytics anywhere you can't afford to wait for data to be available. Your team has questions that need answers. Now with Starburst, the wait is over. You'll have faster access to data with enterprise level security, easy connectivity, and 24 7 support from experts, organizations like Zolando Comcast and FINRA rely on Starburst to move their businesses forward. Contact our Trino experts to get started. >>We're back with Jess Borgman of Starburst and Richard Jarvis of EVAs health. Okay, we're gonna get to lie. Number two, and that is this an open source based platform cannot give you the performance and control that you can get with a proprietary system. Is that a lie? Justin, the enterprise data warehouse has been pretty dominant and has evolved and matured. Its stack has mature over the years. Why is it not the default platform for data? >>Yeah, well, I think that's become a lie over time. So I, I think, you know, if we go back 10 or 12 years ago with the advent of the first data lake really around Hudu, that probably was true that you couldn't get the performance that you needed to run fast, interactive, SQL queries in a data lake. Now a lot's changed in 10 or 12 years. I remember in the very early days, people would say, you you'll never get performance because you need to be column there. You need to store data in a column format. And then, you know, column formats we're introduced to, to data apes, you have Parque ORC file in aro that were created to ultimately deliver performance out of that. So, okay. We got, you know, largely over the performance hurdle, you know, more recently people will say, well, you don't have the ability to do updates and deletes like a traditional data warehouse. >>And now we've got the creation of new data formats, again like iceberg and Delta and Hodi that do allow for updates and delete. So I think the data lake has continued to mature. And I remember a, a quote from, you know, Kurt Monash many years ago where he said, you know, know it takes six or seven years to build a functional database. I think that's that's right. And now we've had almost a decade go by. So, you know, these technologies have matured to really deliver very, very close to the same level performance and functionality of, of cloud data warehouses. So I think the, the reality is that's become a line and now we have large giant hyperscale internet companies that, you know, don't have the traditional data warehouse at all. They do all of their analytics in a data lake. So I think we've, we've proven that it's very much possible today. >>Thank you for that. And so Richard, talk about your perspective as a practitioner in terms of what open brings you versus, I mean, look closed is it's open as a moving target. I remember Unix used to be open systems and so it's, it is an evolving, you know, spectrum, but, but from your perspective, what does open give you that you can't get from a proprietary system where you are fearful of in a proprietary system? >>I, I suppose for me open buys us the ability to be unsure about the future, because one thing that's always true about technology is it evolves in a, a direction, slightly different to what people expect. And what you don't want to end up is done is backed itself into a corner that then prevents it from innovating. So if you have chosen a technology and you've stored trillions of records in that technology and suddenly a new way of processing or machine learning comes out, you wanna be able to take advantage and your competitive edge might depend upon it. And so I suppose for us, we acknowledge that we don't have perfect vision of what the future might be. And so by backing open storage technologies, we can apply a number of different technologies to the processing of that data. And that gives us the ability to remain relevant, innovate on our data storage. And we have bought our way out of the, any performance concerns because we can use cloud scale infrastructure to scale up and scale down as we need. And so we don't have the concerns that we don't have enough hardware today to process what we want to do, want to achieve. We can just scale up when we need it and scale back down. So open source has really allowed us to maintain the being at the cutting edge. >>So Jess, let me play devil's advocate here a little bit, and I've talked to Shaak about this and you know, obviously her vision is there's an open source that, that the data meshes open source, an open source tooling, and it's not a proprietary, you know, you're not gonna buy a data mesh. You're gonna build it with, with open source toolings and, and vendors like you are gonna support it, but to come back to sort of today, you can get to market with a proprietary solution faster. I'm gonna make that statement. You tell me if it's a lie and then you can say, okay, we support Apache iceberg. We're gonna support open source tooling, take a company like VMware, not really in the data business, but how, the way they embraced Kubernetes and, and you know, every new open source thing that comes along, they say, we do that too. Why can't proprietary systems do that and be as effective? >>Yeah, well, I think at least with the, within the data landscape saying that you can access open data formats like iceberg or, or others is, is a bit dis disingenuous because really what you're selling to your customer is a certain degree of performance, a certain SLA, and you know, those cloud data warehouses that can reach beyond their own proprietary storage drop all the performance that they were able to provide. So it is, it reminds me kind of, of, again, going back 10 or 12 years ago when everybody had a connector to Haddo and that they thought that was the solution, right? But the reality was, you know, a connector was not the same as running workloads in Haddo back then. And I think similarly, you know, being able to connect to an external table that lives in an open data format, you know, you're, you're not going to give it the performance that your customers are accustomed to. And at the end of the day, they're always going to be predisposed. They're always going to be incentivized to get that data ingested into the data warehouse, cuz that's where they have control. And you know, the bottom line is the database industry has really been built around vendor lockin. I mean, from the start, how, how many people love Oracle today, but our customers, nonetheless, I think, you know, lockin is, is, is part of this industry. And I think that's really what we're trying to change with open data formats. >>Well, that's interesting reminded when I, you know, I see the, the gas price, the tees or gas price I, I drive up and then I say, oh, that's the cash price credit card. I gotta pay 20 cents more, but okay. But so the, the argument then, so let me, let me come back to you, Justin. So what's wrong with saying, Hey, we support open data formats, but yeah, you're gonna get better performance if you, if you keep it into our closed system, are you saying that long term that's gonna come back and bite you cuz you're gonna end up, you mentioned Oracle, you mentioned Teradata. Yeah. That's by, by implication, you're saying that's where snowflake customers are headed. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think this is a movie that, you know, we've all seen before. At least those of us who've been in the industry long enough to, to see this movie play over a couple times. So I do think that's the future. And I think, you know, I loved what Richard said. I actually wrote it down. Cause I thought it was an amazing quote. He said, it buys us the ability to be unsure of the future. Th that that pretty much says it all the, the future is unknowable and the reality is using open data formats. You remain interoperable with any technology you want to utilize. If you want to use spark to train a machine learning model and you want to use Starbust to query via sequel, that's totally cool. They can both work off the same exact, you know, data, data sets by contrast, if you're, you know, focused on a proprietary model, then you're kind of locked in again to that model. I think the same applies to data, sharing to data products, to a wide variety of, of aspects of the data landscape that a proprietary approach kind of closes you in and locks you in. >>So I, I would say this Richard, I'd love to get your thoughts on it. Cause I talked to a lot of Oracle customers, not as many te data customers, but, but a lot of Oracle customers and they, you know, they'll admit, yeah, you know, they're jamming us on price and the license cost they give, but we do get value out of it. And so my question to you, Richard, is, is do the, let's call it data warehouse systems or the proprietary systems. Are they gonna deliver a greater ROI sooner? And is that in allure of, of that customers, you know, are attracted to, or can open platforms deliver as fast in ROI? >>I think the answer to that is it can depend a bit. It depends on your businesses skillset. So we are lucky that we have a number of proprietary teams that work in databases that provide our operational data capability. And we have teams of analytics and big data experts who can work with open data sets and open data formats. And so for those different teams, they can get to an ROI more quickly with different technologies for the business though, we can't do better for our operational data stores than proprietary databases. Today we can back off very tight SLAs to them. We can demonstrate reliability from millions of hours of those databases being run at enterprise scale, but for an analytics workload where increasing our business is growing in that direction, we can't do better than open data formats with cloud-based data mesh type technologies. And so it's not a simple answer. That one will always be the right answer for our business. We definitely have times when proprietary databases provide a capability that we couldn't easily represent or replicate with open technologies. >>Yeah. Richard, stay with you. You mentioned, you know, you know, some things before that, that strike me, you know, the data brick snowflake, you know, thing is, oh, is a lot of fun for analysts like me. You've got data bricks coming at it. Richard, you mentioned you have a lot of rockstar, data engineers, data bricks coming at it from a data engineering heritage. You get snowflake coming at it from an analytics heritage. Those two worlds are, are colliding people like PJI Mohan said, you know what? I think it's actually harder to play in the data engineering. So I E it's easier to for data engineering world to go into the analytics world versus the reverse, but thinking about up and coming engineers and developers preparing for this future of data engineering and data analytics, how, how should they be thinking about the future? What, what's your advice to those young people? >>So I think I'd probably fall back on general programming skill sets. So the advice that I saw years ago was if you have open source technologies, the pythons and Javas on your CV, you commander 20% pay, hike over people who can only do proprietary programming languages. And I think that's true of data technologies as well. And from a business point of view, that makes sense. I'd rather spend the money that I save on proprietary licenses on better engineers, because they can provide more value to the business that can innovate us beyond our competitors. So I think I would my advice to people who are starting here or trying to build teams to capitalize on data assets is begin with open license, free capabilities, because they're very cheap to experiment with. And they generate a lot of interest from people who want to join you as a business. And you can make them very successful early, early doors with, with your analytics journey. >>It's interesting. Again, analysts like myself, we do a lot of TCO work and have over the last 20 plus years. And in world of Oracle, you know, normally it's the staff, that's the biggest nut in total cost of ownership, not an Oracle. It's the it's the license cost is by far the biggest component in the, in the blame pie. All right, Justin, help us close out this segment. We've been talking about this sort of data mesh open, closed snowflake data bricks. Where does Starburst sort of as this engine for the data lake data lake house, the data warehouse fit in this, in this world? >>Yeah. So our view on how the future ultimately unfolds is we think that data lakes will be a natural center of gravity for a lot of the reasons that we described open data formats, lowest total cost of ownership, because you get to choose the cheapest storage available to you. Maybe that's S3 or Azure data lake storage, or Google cloud storage, or maybe it's on-prem object storage that you bought at a, at a really good price. So ultimately storing a lot of data in a deal lake makes a lot of sense, but I think what makes our perspective unique is we still don't think you're gonna get everything there either. We think that basically centralization of all your data assets is just an impossible endeavor. And so you wanna be able to access data that lives outside of the lake as well. So we kind of think of the lake as maybe the biggest place by volume in terms of how much data you have, but to, to have comprehensive analytics and to truly understand your business and understand it holistically, you need to be able to go access other data sources as well. And so that's the role that we wanna play is to be a single point of access for our customers, provide the right level of fine grained access controls so that the right people have access to the right data and ultimately make it easy to discover and consume via, you know, the creation of data products as well. >>Great. Okay. Thanks guys. Right after this quick break, we're gonna be back to debate whether the cloud data model that we see emerging and the so-called modern data stack is really modern, or is it the same wine new bottle? When it comes to data architectures, you're watching the cube, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. >>Your data is capable of producing incredible results, but data consumers are often left in the dark without fast access to the data they need. Starers makes your data visible from wherever it lives. Your company is acquiring more data in more places, more rapidly than ever to rely solely on a data centralization strategy. Whether it's in a lake or a warehouse is unrealistic. A single source of truth approach is no longer viable, but disconnected data silos are often left untapped. We need a new approach. One that embraces distributed data. One that enables fast and secure access to any of your data from anywhere with Starburst, you'll have the fastest query engine for the data lake that allows you to connect and analyze your disparate data sources no matter where they live Starburst provides the foundational technology required for you to build towards the vision of a decentralized data mesh Starburst enterprise and Starburst galaxy offer enterprise ready, connectivity, interoperability, and security features for multiple regions, multiple clouds and everchanging global regulatory requirements. The data is yours. And with Starburst, you can perform analytics anywhere in light of your world. >>Okay. We're back with Justin Boardman. CEO of Starbust Richard Jarvis is the CTO of EMI health and Theresa tongue is the cloud first technologist from Accenture. We're on July number three. And that is the claim that today's modern data stack is actually modern. So I guess that's the lie it's it is it's is that it's not modern. Justin, what do you say? >>Yeah. I mean, I think new isn't modern, right? I think it's the, it's the new data stack. It's the cloud data stack, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's modern. I think a lot of the components actually are exactly the same as what we've had for 40 years, rather than Terra data. You have snowflake rather than Informatica you have five trend. So it's the same general stack, just, you know, a cloud version of it. And I think a lot of the challenges that it plagued us for 40 years still maintain. >>So lemme come back to you just, but okay. But, but there are differences, right? I mean, you can scale, you can throw resources at the problem. You can separate compute from storage. You really, you know, there's a lot of money being thrown at that by venture capitalists and snowflake, you mentioned it's competitors. So that's different. Is it not, is that not at least an aspect of, of modern dial it up, dial it down. So what, what do you say to that? >>Well, it, it is, it's certainly taking, you know, what the cloud offers and taking advantage of that, but it's important to note that the cloud data warehouses out there are really just separating their compute from their storage. So it's allowing them to scale up and down, but your data still stored in a proprietary format. You're still locked in. You still have to ingest the data to get it even prepared for analysis. So a lot of the same sort of structural constraints that exist with the old enterprise data warehouse model OnPrem still exist just yes, a little bit more elastic now because the cloud offers that. >>So Theresa, let me go to you cuz you have cloud first in your, in your, your title. So what's what say you to this conversation? >>Well, even the cloud providers are looking towards more of a cloud continuum, right? So the centralized cloud, as we know it, maybe data lake data warehouse in the central place, that's not even how the cloud providers are looking at it. They have news query services. Every provider has one that really expands those queries to be beyond a single location. And if we look at a lot of where our, the future goes, right, that that's gonna very much fall the same thing. There was gonna be more edge. There's gonna be more on premise because of data sovereignty, data gravity, because you're working with different parts of the business that have already made major cloud investments in different cloud providers. Right? So there's a lot of reasons why the modern, I guess, the next modern generation of the data staff needs to be much more federated. >>Okay. So Richard, how do you deal with this? You you've obviously got, you know, the technical debt, the existing infrastructure it's on the books. You don't wanna just throw it out. A lot of, lot of conversation about modernizing applications, which a lot of times is a, you know, a microservices layer on top of leg legacy apps. How do you think about the modern data stack? >>Well, I think probably the first thing to say is that the stack really has to include the processes and people around the data as well is all well and good changing the technology. But if you don't modernize how people use that technology, then you're not going to be able to, to scale because just cuz you can scale CPU and storage doesn't mean you can get more people to use your data, to generate you more, more value for the business. And so what we've been looking at is really changing in very much aligned to data products and, and data mesh. How do you enable more people to consume the service and have the stack respond in a way that keeps costs low? Because that's important for our customers consuming this data, but also allows people to occasionally run enormous queries and then tick along with smaller ones when required. And it's a good job we did because during COVID all of a sudden we had enormous pressures on our data platform to answer really important life threatening queries. And if we couldn't scale both our data stack and our teams, we wouldn't have been able to answer those as quickly as we had. So I think the stack needs to support a scalable business, not just the technology itself. >>Well thank you for that. So Justin let's, let's try to break down what the critical aspects are of the modern data stack. So you think about the past, you know, five, seven years cloud obviously has given a different pricing model. De-risked experimentation, you know that we talked about the ability to scale up scale down, but it's, I'm, I'm taking away that that's not enough based on what Richard just said. The modern data stack has to serve the business and enable the business to build data products. I, I buy that. I'm a big fan of the data mesh concepts, even though we're early days. So what are the critical aspects if you had to think about, you know, paying, maybe putting some guardrails and definitions around the modern data stack, what does that look like? What are some of the attributes and, and principles there >>Of, of how it should look like or, or how >>It's yeah. What it should be. >>Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, in, in Theresa mentioned this in, in a previous segment about the data warehouse is not necessarily going to disappear. It just becomes one node, one element of the overall data mesh. And I, I certainly agree with that. So by no means, are we suggesting that, you know, snowflake or Redshift or whatever cloud data warehouse you may be using is going to disappear, but it's, it's not going to become the end all be all. It's not the, the central single source of truth. And I think that's the paradigm shift that needs to occur. And I think it's also worth noting that those who were the early adopters of the modern data stack were primarily digital, native born in the cloud young companies who had the benefit of, of idealism. They had the benefit of it was starting with a clean slate that does not reflect the vast majority of enterprises. >>And even those companies, as they grow up mature out of that ideal state, they go buy a business. Now they've got something on another cloud provider that has a different data stack and they have to deal with that heterogeneity that is just change and change is a part of life. And so I think there is an element here that is almost philosophical. It's like, do you believe in an absolute ideal where I can just fit everything into one place or do I believe in reality? And I think the far more pragmatic approach is really what data mesh represents. So to answer your question directly, I think it's adding, you know, the ability to access data that lives outside of the data warehouse, maybe living in open data formats in a data lake or accessing operational systems as well. Maybe you want to directly access data that lives in an Oracle database or a Mongo database or, or what have you. So creating that flexibility to really Futureproof yourself from the inevitable change that you will, you won't encounter over time. >>So thank you. So there, based on what Justin just said, I, my takeaway there is it's inclusive, whether it's a data Mar data hub, data lake data warehouse, it's a, just a node on the mesh. Okay. I get that. Does that include there on Preem data? O obviously it has to, what are you seeing in terms of the ability to, to take that data mesh concept on Preem? I mean, most implementations I've seen in data mesh, frankly really aren't, you know, adhering to the philosophy. They're maybe, maybe it's data lake and maybe it's using glue. You look at what JPMC is doing. Hello, fresh, a lot of stuff happening on the AWS cloud in that, you know, closed stack, if you will. What's the answer to that Theresa? >>I mean, I, I think it's a killer case for data. Me, the fact that you have valuable data sources, OnPrem, and then yet you still wanna modernize and take the best of cloud cloud is still, like we mentioned, there's a lot of great reasons for it around the economics and the way ability to tap into the innovation that the cloud providers are giving around data and AI architecture. It's an easy button. So the mesh allows you to have the best of both worlds. You can start using the data products on-prem or in the existing systems that are working already. It's meaningful for the business. At the same time, you can modernize the ones that make business sense because it needs better performance. It needs, you know, something that is, is cheaper or, or maybe just tap into better analytics to get better insights, right? So you're gonna be able to stretch and really have the best of both worlds. That, again, going back to Richard's point, that is meaningful by the business. Not everything has to have that one size fits all set a tool. >>Okay. Thank you. So Richard, you know, talking about data as product, wonder if we could give us your perspectives here, what are the advantages of treating data as a product? What, what role do data products have in the modern data stack? We talk about monetizing data. What are your thoughts on data products? >>So for us, one of the most important data products that we've been creating is taking data that is healthcare data across a wide variety of different settings. So information about patients' demographics about their, their treatment, about their medications and so on, and taking that into a standards format that can be utilized by a wide variety of different researchers because misinterpreting that data or having the data not presented in the way that the user is expecting means that you generate the wrong insight. And in any business, that's clearly not a desirable outcome, but when that insight is so critical, as it might be in healthcare or some security settings, you really have to have gone to the trouble of understanding the data, presenting it in a format that everyone can clearly agree on. And then letting people consume in a very structured, managed way, even if that data comes from a variety of different sources in, in, in the first place. And so our data product journey has really begun by standardizing data across a number of different silos through the data mesh. So we can present out both internally and through the right governance externally to, to researchers. >>So that data product through whatever APIs is, is accessible, it's discoverable, but it's obviously gotta be governed as well. You mentioned you, you appropriately provided to internally. Yeah. But also, you know, external folks as well. So the, so you've, you've architected that capability today >>We have, and because the data is standard, it can generate value much more quickly and we can be sure of the security and, and, and value that that's providing because the data product isn't just about formatting the data into the correct tables, it's understanding what it means to redact the data or to remove certain rows from it or to interpret what a date actually means. Is it the start of the contract or the start of the treatment or the date of birth of a patient? These things can be lost in the data storage without having the proper product management around the data to say in a very clear business context, what does this data mean? And what does it mean to process this data for a particular use case? >>Yeah, it makes sense. It's got the context. If the, if the domains own the data, you, you gotta cut through a lot of the, the, the centralized teams, the technical teams that, that data agnostic, they don't really have that context. All right. Let's send Justin, how does Starburst fit into this modern data stack? Bring us home. >>Yeah. So I think for us, it's really providing our customers with, you know, the flexibility to operate and analyze data that lives in a wide variety of different systems. Ultimately giving them that optionality, you know, and optionality provides the ability to reduce costs, store more in a data lake rather than data warehouse. It provides the ability for the fastest time to insight to access the data directly where it lives. And ultimately with this concept of data products that we've now, you know, incorporated into our offering as well, you can really create and, and curate, you know, data as a product to be shared and consumed. So we're trying to help enable the data mesh, you know, model and make that an appropriate compliment to, you know, the, the, the modern data stack that people have today. >>Excellent. Hey, I wanna thank Justin Theresa and Richard for joining us today. You guys are great. I big believers in the, in the data mesh concept, and I think, you know, we're seeing the future of data architecture. So thank you. Now, remember, all these conversations are gonna be available on the cube.net for on-demand viewing. You can also go to starburst.io. They have some great content on the website and they host some really thought provoking interviews and, and, and they have awesome resources, lots of data mesh conversations over there, and really good stuff in, in the resource section. So check that out. Thanks for watching the data doesn't lie or does it made possible by Starburst data? This is Dave Valante for the cube, and we'll see you next time. >>The explosion of data sources has forced organizations to modernize their systems and architecture and come to terms with one size does not fit all for data management today. Your teams are constantly moving and copying data, which requires time management. And in some cases, double paying for compute resources. Instead, what if you could access all your data anywhere using the BI tools and SQL skills your users already have. And what if this also included enterprise security and fast performance with Starburst enterprise, you can provide your data consumers with a single point of secure access to all of your data, no matter where it lives with features like strict, fine grained, access control, end to end data encryption and data masking Starburst meets the security standards of the largest companies. Starburst enterprise can easily be deployed anywhere and managed with insights where data teams holistically view their clusters operation and query execution. So they can reach meaningful business decisions faster, all this with the support of the largest team of Trino experts in the world, delivering fully tested stable releases and available to support you 24 7 to unlock the value in all of your data. You need a solution that easily fits with what you have today and can adapt to your architecture. Tomorrow. Starbust enterprise gives you the fastest path from big data to better decisions, cuz your team can't afford to wait. Trino was created to empower analytics anywhere and Starburst enterprise was created to give you the enterprise grade performance, connectivity, security management, and support your company needs organizations like Zolando Comcast and FINRA rely on Starburst to move their businesses forward. Contact us to get started.

>>In 2011, early Facebook employee and Cloudera co-founder Jeff Ocker famously said the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to get people to click on ads. And that sucks. Let's face it more than a decade later organizations continue to be frustrated with how difficult it is to get value from data and build a truly agile data-driven enterprise. What does that even mean? You ask? Well, it means that everyone in the organization has the data they need when they need it. In a context that's relevant to advance the mission of an organization. Now that could mean cutting cost could mean increasing profits, driving productivity, saving lives, accelerating drug discovery, making better diagnoses, solving, supply chain problems, predicting weather disasters, simplifying processes, and thousands of other examples where data can completely transform people's lives beyond manipulating internet users to behave a certain way. We've heard the prognostications about the possibilities of data before and in fairness we've made progress, but the hard truth is the original promises of master data management, enterprise data, warehouses, data marts, data hubs, and yes, even data lakes were broken and left us wanting from more welcome to the data doesn't lie, or doesn't a series of conversations produced by the cube and made possible by Starburst data. >>I'm your host, Dave Lanta and joining me today are three industry experts. Justin Borgman is this co-founder and CEO of Starburst. Richard Jarvis is the CTO at EMI health and Theresa tongue is cloud first technologist at Accenture. Today we're gonna have a candid discussion that will expose the unfulfilled and yes, broken promises of a data past we'll expose data lies, big lies, little lies, white lies, and hidden truths. And we'll challenge, age old data conventions and bust some data myths. We're debating questions like is the demise of a single source of truth. Inevitable will the data warehouse ever have featured parody with the data lake or vice versa is the so-called modern data stack, simply centralization in the cloud, AKA the old guards model in new cloud close. How can organizations rethink their data architectures and regimes to realize the true promises of data can and will and open ecosystem deliver on these promises in our lifetimes, we're spanning much of the Western world today. Richard is in the UK. Teresa is on the west coast and Justin is in Massachusetts with me. I'm in the cube studios about 30 miles outside of Boston folks. Welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us. Let's get right into it. You're very welcome. Now here's the first lie. The most effective data architecture is one that is centralized with a team of data specialists serving various lines of business. What do you think Justin? >>Yeah, definitely a lie. My first startup was a company called hit adapt, which was an early SQL engine for hit that was acquired by Teradata. And when I got to Teradata, of course, Teradata is the pioneer of that central enterprise data warehouse model. One of the things that I found fascinating was that not one of their customers had actually lived up to that vision of centralizing all of their data into one place. They all had data silos. They all had data in different systems. They had data on prem data in the cloud. You know, those companies were acquiring other companies and inheriting their data architecture. So, you know, despite being the industry leader for 40 years, not one of their customers truly had everything in one place. So I think definitely history has proven that to be a lie. >>So Richard, from a practitioner's point of view, you know, what, what are your thoughts? I mean, there, there's a lot of pressure to cut cost, keep things centralized, you know, serve the business as best as possible from that standpoint. What, what is your experience show? >>Yeah, I mean, I think I would echo Justin's experience really that we, as a business have grown up through acquisition, through storing data in different places sometimes to do information governance in different ways to store data in, in a platform that's close to data experts, people who really understand healthcare data from pharmacies or from, from doctors. And so, although if you were starting from a Greenfield site and you were building something brand new, you might be able to centralize all the data and all of the tooling and teams in one place. The reality is that that businesses just don't grow up like that. And, and it's just really impossible to get that academic perfection of, of storing everything in one place. >>Y you know, Theresa, I feel like Sarbanes Oxley kinda saved the data warehouse, you know, right. You actually did have to have a single version of the truth for certain financial data, but really for those, some of those other use cases, I, I mentioned, I, I do feel like the industry has kinda let us down. What's your take on this? Where does it make sense to have that sort of centralized approach versus where does it make sense to maybe decentralized? >>I, I think you gotta have centralized governance, right? So from the central team, for things like star Oxley, for things like security for certainly very core data sets, having a centralized set of roles, responsibilities to really QA, right. To serve as a design authority for your entire data estate, just like you might with security, but how it's implemented has to be distributed. Otherwise you're not gonna be able to scale. Right? So being able to have different parts of the business really make the right data investments for their needs. And then ultimately you're gonna collaborate with your partners. So partners that are not within the company, right. External partners, we're gonna see a lot more data sharing and model creation. And so you're definitely going to be decentralized. >>So, you know, Justin, you guys last, geez, I think it was about a year ago, had a session on, on data mesh. It was a great program. You invited Jamma, Dani, of course, she's the creator of the data mesh. And her one of our fundamental premises is that you've got this hyper specialized team that you've gotta go through. And if you want anything, but at the same time, these, these individuals actually become a bottleneck, even though they're some of the most talented people in the organization. So I guess question for you, Richard, how do you deal with that? Do you, do you organize so that there are a few sort of rock stars that, that, you know, build cubes and, and the like, and, and, and, or have you had any success in sort of decentralizing with, you know, your, your constituencies, that data model? >>Yeah. So, so we absolutely have got rockstar, data scientists and data guardians. If you like people who understand what it means to use this data, particularly as the data that we use at emos is very private it's healthcare information. And some of the, the rules and regulations around using the data are very complex and, and strict. So we have to have people who understand the usage of the data, then people who understand how to build models, how to process the data effectively. And you can think of them like consultants to the wider business, because a pharmacist might not understand how to structure a SQL query, but they do understand how they want to process medication information to improve patient lives. And so that becomes a, a consulting type experience from a, a set of rock stars to help a, a more decentralized business who needs to, to understand the data and to generate some valuable output. >>Justin, what do you say to a, to a customer or prospect that says, look, Justin, I'm gonna, I got a centralized team and that's the most cost effective way to serve the business. Otherwise I got, I got duplication. What do you say to that? >>Well, I, I would argue it's probably not the most cost effective and, and the reason being really twofold. I think, first of all, when you are deploying a enterprise data warehouse model, the, the data warehouse itself is very expensive, generally speaking. And so you're putting all of your most valuable data in the hands of one vendor who now has tremendous leverage over you, you know, for many, many years to come. I think that's the story at Oracle or Terra data or other proprietary database systems. But the other aspect I think is that the reality is those central data warehouse teams is as much as they are experts in the technology. They don't necessarily understand the data itself. And this is one of the core tenants of data mash that that jam writes about is this idea of the domain owners actually know the data the best. >>And so by, you know, not only acknowledging that data is generally decentralized and to your earlier point about SAR, brain Oxley, maybe saving the data warehouse, I would argue maybe GDPR and data sovereignty will destroy it because data has to be decentralized for, for those laws to be compliant. But I think the reality is, you know, the data mesh model basically says, data's decentralized, and we're gonna turn that into an asset rather than a liability. And we're gonna turn that into an asset by empowering the people that know the data, the best to participate in the process of, you know, curating and creating data products for, for consumption. So I think when you think about it, that way, you're going to get higher quality data and faster time to insight, which is ultimately going to drive more revenue for your business and reduce costs. So I think that that's the way I see the two, the two models comparing and contrasting. >>So do you think the demise of the data warehouse is inevitable? I mean, I mean, you know, there Theresa you work with a lot of clients, they're not just gonna rip and replace their existing infrastructure. Maybe they're gonna build on top of it, but what does that mean? Does that mean the E D w just becomes, you know, less and less valuable over time, or it's maybe just isolated to specific use cases. What's your take on that? >>Listen, I still would love all my data within a data warehouse would love it. Mastered would love it owned by essential team. Right? I think that's still what I would love to have. That's just not the reality, right? The investment to actually migrate and keep that up to date. I would say it's a losing battle. Like we've been trying to do it for a long time. Nobody has the budgets and then data changes, right? There's gonna be a new technology. That's gonna emerge that we're gonna wanna tap into. There's going to be not enough investment to bring all the legacy, but still very useful systems into that centralized view. So you keep the data warehouse. I think it's a very, very valuable, very high performance tool for what it's there for, but you could have this, you know, new mesh layer that still takes advantage of the things. I mentioned, the data products in the systems that are meaningful today and the data products that actually might span a number of systems, maybe either those that either source systems for the domains that know it best, or the consumer based systems and products that need to be packaged in a way that be really meaningful for that end user, right? Each of those are useful for a different part of the business and making sure that the mesh actually allows you to use all of them. >>So, Richard, let me ask you, you take, take Gemma's principles back to those. You got to, you know, domain ownership and, and, and data as product. Okay, great. Sounds good. But it creates what I would argue are two, you know, challenges, self-serve infrastructure let's park that for a second. And then in your industry, the one of the high, most regulated, most sensitive computational governance, how do you automate and ensure federated governance in that mesh model that Theresa was just talking about? >>Well, it absolutely depends on some of the tooling and processes that you put in place around those tools to be, to centralize the security and the governance of the data. And I think, although a data warehouse makes that very simple, cause it's a single tool, it's not impossible with some of the data mesh technologies that are available. And so what we've done at emus is we have a single security layer that sits on top of our data match, which means that no matter which user is accessing, which data source, we go through a well audited well understood security layer. That means that we know exactly who's got access to which data field, which data tables. And then everything that they do is, is audited in a very kind of standard way, regardless of the underlying data storage technology. So for me, although storing the data in one place might not be possible understanding where your source of truth is and securing that in a common way is still a valuable approach and you can do it without having to bring all that data into a single bucket so that it's all in one place. And, and so having done that and investing quite heavily in making that possible has paid dividends in terms of giving wider access to the platform and ensuring that only data that's available under GDPR and other regulations is being used by, by the data users. >>Yeah. So Justin, I mean, Democrat, we always talk about data democratization and you know, up until recently, they really haven't been line of sight as to how to get there. But do you have anything to add to this because you're essentially taking, you know, do an analytic queries and with data that's all dispersed all over the, how are you seeing your customers handle this, this challenge? >>Yeah. I mean, I think data products is a really interesting aspect of the answer to that. It allows you to, again, leverage the data domain owners, people know the data, the best to, to create, you know, data as a product ultimately to be consumed. And we try to represent that in our product as effectively a almost eCommerce like experience where you go and discover and look for the data products that have been created in your organization. And then you can start to consume them as, as you'd like. And so really trying to build on that notion of, you know, data democratization and self-service, and making it very easy to discover and, and start to use with whatever BI tool you, you may like, or even just running, you know, SQL queries yourself, >>Okay. G guys grab a sip of water. After this short break, we'll be back to debate whether proprietary or open platforms are the best path to the future of data excellence, keep it right there. >>Your company has more data than ever, and more people trying to understand it, but there's a problem. Your data is stored across multiple systems. It's hard to access and that delays analytics and ultimately decisions. The old method of moving all of your data into a single source of truth is slow and definitely not built for the volume of data we have today or where we are headed while your data engineers spent over half their time, moving data, your analysts and data scientists are left, waiting, feeling frustrated, unproductive, and unable to move the needle for your business. But what if you could spend less time moving or copying data? What if your data consumers could analyze all your data quickly? >>Starburst helps your teams run fast queries on any data source. We help you create a single point of access to your data, no matter where it's stored. And we support high concurrency, we solve for speed and scale, whether it's fast, SQL queries on your data lake or faster queries across multiple data sets, Starburst helps your teams run analytics anywhere you can't afford to wait for data to be available. Your team has questions that need answers. Now with Starburst, the wait is over. You'll have faster access to data with enterprise level security, easy connectivity, and 24 7 support from experts, organizations like Zolando Comcast and FINRA rely on Starburst to move their businesses forward. Contact our Trino experts to get started. >>We're back with Jess Borgman of Starburst and Richard Jarvis of EVAs health. Okay, we're gonna get to lie. Number two, and that is this an open source based platform cannot give you the performance and control that you can get with a proprietary system. Is that a lie? Justin, the enterprise data warehouse has been pretty dominant and has evolved and matured. Its stack has mature over the years. Why is it not the default platform for data? >>Yeah, well, I think that's become a lie over time. So I, I think, you know, if we go back 10 or 12 years ago with the advent of the first data lake really around Hudu, that probably was true that you couldn't get the performance that you needed to run fast, interactive, SQL queries in a data lake. Now a lot's changed in 10 or 12 years. I remember in the very early days, people would say, you you'll never get performance because you need to be column there. You need to store data in a column format. And then, you know, column formats we're introduced to, to data apes, you have Parque ORC file in aro that were created to ultimately deliver performance out of that. So, okay. We got, you know, largely over the performance hurdle, you know, more recently people will say, well, you don't have the ability to do updates and deletes like a traditional data warehouse. >>And now we've got the creation of new data formats, again like iceberg and Delta and Hodi that do allow for updates and delete. So I think the data lake has continued to mature. And I remember a, a quote from, you know, Kurt Monash many years ago where he said, you know, know it takes six or seven years to build a functional database. I think that's that's right. And now we've had almost a decade go by. So, you know, these technologies have matured to really deliver very, very close to the same level performance and functionality of, of cloud data warehouses. So I think the, the reality is that's become a line and now we have large giant hyperscale internet companies that, you know, don't have the traditional data warehouse at all. They do all of their analytics in a data lake. So I think we've, we've proven that it's very much possible today. >>Thank you for that. And so Richard, talk about your perspective as a practitioner in terms of what open brings you versus, I mean, look closed is it's open as a moving target. I remember Unix used to be open systems and so it's, it is an evolving, you know, spectrum, but, but from your perspective, what does open give you that you can't get from a proprietary system where you are fearful of in a proprietary system? >>I, I suppose for me open buys us the ability to be unsure about the future, because one thing that's always true about technology is it evolves in a, a direction, slightly different to what people expect. And what you don't want to end up is done is backed itself into a corner that then prevents it from innovating. So if you have chosen a technology and you've stored trillions of records in that technology and suddenly a new way of processing or machine learning comes out, you wanna be able to take advantage and your competitive edge might depend upon it. And so I suppose for us, we acknowledge that we don't have perfect vision of what the future might be. And so by backing open storage technologies, we can apply a number of different technologies to the processing of that data. And that gives us the ability to remain relevant, innovate on our data storage. And we have bought our way out of the, any performance concerns because we can use cloud scale infrastructure to scale up and scale down as we need. And so we don't have the concerns that we don't have enough hardware today to process what we want to do, want to achieve. We can just scale up when we need it and scale back down. So open source has really allowed us to maintain the being at the cutting edge. >>So Jess, let me play devil's advocate here a little bit, and I've talked to Shaak about this and you know, obviously her vision is there's an open source that, that the data meshes open source, an open source tooling, and it's not a proprietary, you know, you're not gonna buy a data mesh. You're gonna build it with, with open source toolings and, and vendors like you are gonna support it, but to come back to sort of today, you can get to market with a proprietary solution faster. I'm gonna make that statement. You tell me if it's a lie and then you can say, okay, we support Apache iceberg. We're gonna support open source tooling, take a company like VMware, not really in the data business, but how, the way they embraced Kubernetes and, and you know, every new open source thing that comes along, they say, we do that too. Why can't proprietary systems do that and be as effective? >>Yeah, well, I think at least with the, within the data landscape saying that you can access open data formats like iceberg or, or others is, is a bit dis disingenuous because really what you're selling to your customer is a certain degree of performance, a certain SLA, and you know, those cloud data warehouses that can reach beyond their own proprietary storage drop all the performance that they were able to provide. So it is, it reminds me kind of, of, again, going back 10 or 12 years ago when everybody had a connector to Haddo and that they thought that was the solution, right? But the reality was, you know, a connector was not the same as running workloads in Haddo back then. And I think similarly, you know, being able to connect to an external table that lives in an open data format, you know, you're, you're not going to give it the performance that your customers are accustomed to. And at the end of the day, they're always going to be predisposed. They're always going to be incentivized to get that data ingested into the data warehouse, cuz that's where they have control. And you know, the bottom line is the database industry has really been built around vendor lockin. I mean, from the start, how, how many people love Oracle today, but our customers, nonetheless, I think, you know, lockin is, is, is part of this industry. And I think that's really what we're trying to change with open data formats. >>Well, that's interesting reminded when I, you know, I see the, the gas price, the tees or gas price I, I drive up and then I say, oh, that's the cash price credit card. I gotta pay 20 cents more, but okay. But so the, the argument then, so let me, let me come back to you, Justin. So what's wrong with saying, Hey, we support open data formats, but yeah, you're gonna get better performance if you, if you keep it into our closed system, are you saying that long term that's gonna come back and bite you cuz you're gonna end up, you mentioned Oracle, you mentioned Teradata. Yeah. That's by, by implication, you're saying that's where snowflake customers are headed. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think this is a movie that, you know, we've all seen before. At least those of us who've been in the industry long enough to, to see this movie play over a couple times. So I do think that's the future. And I think, you know, I loved what Richard said. I actually wrote it down. Cause I thought it was an amazing quote. He said, it buys us the ability to be unsure of the future. Th that that pretty much says it all the, the future is unknowable and the reality is using open data formats. You remain interoperable with any technology you want to utilize. If you want to use spark to train a machine learning model and you want to use Starbust to query via sequel, that's totally cool. They can both work off the same exact, you know, data, data sets by contrast, if you're, you know, focused on a proprietary model, then you're kind of locked in again to that model. I think the same applies to data, sharing to data products, to a wide variety of, of aspects of the data landscape that a proprietary approach kind of closes you in and locks you in. >>So I, I would say this Richard, I'd love to get your thoughts on it. Cause I talked to a lot of Oracle customers, not as many te data customers, but, but a lot of Oracle customers and they, you know, they'll admit, yeah, you know, they're jamming us on price and the license cost they give, but we do get value out of it. And so my question to you, Richard, is, is do the, let's call it data warehouse systems or the proprietary systems. Are they gonna deliver a greater ROI sooner? And is that in allure of, of that customers, you know, are attracted to, or can open platforms deliver as fast in ROI? >>I think the answer to that is it can depend a bit. It depends on your businesses skillset. So we are lucky that we have a number of proprietary teams that work in databases that provide our operational data capability. And we have teams of analytics and big data experts who can work with open data sets and open data formats. And so for those different teams, they can get to an ROI more quickly with different technologies for the business though, we can't do better for our operational data stores than proprietary databases. Today we can back off very tight SLAs to them. We can demonstrate reliability from millions of hours of those databases being run at enterprise scale, but for an analytics workload where increasing our business is growing in that direction, we can't do better than open data formats with cloud-based data mesh type technologies. And so it's not a simple answer. That one will always be the right answer for our business. We definitely have times when proprietary databases provide a capability that we couldn't easily represent or replicate with open technologies. >>Yeah. Richard, stay with you. You mentioned, you know, you know, some things before that, that strike me, you know, the data brick snowflake, you know, thing is, oh, is a lot of fun for analysts like me. You've got data bricks coming at it. Richard, you mentioned you have a lot of rockstar, data engineers, data bricks coming at it from a data engineering heritage. You get snowflake coming at it from an analytics heritage. Those two worlds are, are colliding people like PJI Mohan said, you know what? I think it's actually harder to play in the data engineering. So I E it's easier to for data engineering world to go into the analytics world versus the reverse, but thinking about up and coming engineers and developers preparing for this future of data engineering and data analytics, how, how should they be thinking about the future? What, what's your advice to those young people? >>So I think I'd probably fall back on general programming skill sets. So the advice that I saw years ago was if you have open source technologies, the pythons and Javas on your CV, you commander 20% pay, hike over people who can only do proprietary programming languages. And I think that's true of data technologies as well. And from a business point of view, that makes sense. I'd rather spend the money that I save on proprietary licenses on better engineers, because they can provide more value to the business that can innovate us beyond our competitors. So I think I would my advice to people who are starting here or trying to build teams to capitalize on data assets is begin with open license, free capabilities, because they're very cheap to experiment with. And they generate a lot of interest from people who want to join you as a business. And you can make them very successful early, early doors with, with your analytics journey. >>It's interesting. Again, analysts like myself, we do a lot of TCO work and have over the last 20 plus years. And in world of Oracle, you know, normally it's the staff, that's the biggest nut in total cost of ownership, not an Oracle. It's the it's the license cost is by far the biggest component in the, in the blame pie. All right, Justin, help us close out this segment. We've been talking about this sort of data mesh open, closed snowflake data bricks. Where does Starburst sort of as this engine for the data lake data lake house, the data warehouse fit in this, in this world? >>Yeah. So our view on how the future ultimately unfolds is we think that data lakes will be a natural center of gravity for a lot of the reasons that we described open data formats, lowest total cost of ownership, because you get to choose the cheapest storage available to you. Maybe that's S3 or Azure data lake storage, or Google cloud storage, or maybe it's on-prem object storage that you bought at a, at a really good price. So ultimately storing a lot of data in a deal lake makes a lot of sense, but I think what makes our perspective unique is we still don't think you're gonna get everything there either. We think that basically centralization of all your data assets is just an impossible endeavor. And so you wanna be able to access data that lives outside of the lake as well. So we kind of think of the lake as maybe the biggest place by volume in terms of how much data you have, but to, to have comprehensive analytics and to truly understand your business and understand it holistically, you need to be able to go access other data sources as well. And so that's the role that we wanna play is to be a single point of access for our customers, provide the right level of fine grained access controls so that the right people have access to the right data and ultimately make it easy to discover and consume via, you know, the creation of data products as well. >>Great. Okay. Thanks guys. Right after this quick break, we're gonna be back to debate whether the cloud data model that we see emerging and the so-called modern data stack is really modern, or is it the same wine new bottle? When it comes to data architectures, you're watching the cube, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. >>Your data is capable of producing incredible results, but data consumers are often left in the dark without fast access to the data they need. Starers makes your data visible from wherever it lives. Your company is acquiring more data in more places, more rapidly than ever to rely solely on a data centralization strategy. Whether it's in a lake or a warehouse is unrealistic. A single source of truth approach is no longer viable, but disconnected data silos are often left untapped. We need a new approach. One that embraces distributed data. One that enables fast and secure access to any of your data from anywhere with Starburst, you'll have the fastest query engine for the data lake that allows you to connect and analyze your disparate data sources no matter where they live Starburst provides the foundational technology required for you to build towards the vision of a decentralized data mesh Starburst enterprise and Starburst galaxy offer enterprise ready, connectivity, interoperability, and security features for multiple regions, multiple clouds and everchanging global regulatory requirements. The data is yours. And with Starburst, you can perform analytics anywhere in light of your world. >>Okay. We're back with Justin Boardman. CEO of Starbust Richard Jarvis is the CTO of EMI health and Theresa tongue is the cloud first technologist from Accenture. We're on July number three. And that is the claim that today's modern data stack is actually modern. So I guess that's the lie it's it is it's is that it's not modern. Justin, what do you say? >>Yeah. I mean, I think new isn't modern, right? I think it's the, it's the new data stack. It's the cloud data stack, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's modern. I think a lot of the components actually are exactly the same as what we've had for 40 years, rather than Terra data. You have snowflake rather than Informatica you have five trend. So it's the same general stack, just, you know, a cloud version of it. And I think a lot of the challenges that it plagued us for 40 years still maintain. >>So lemme come back to you just, but okay. But, but there are differences, right? I mean, you can scale, you can throw resources at the problem. You can separate compute from storage. You really, you know, there's a lot of money being thrown at that by venture capitalists and snowflake, you mentioned it's competitors. So that's different. Is it not, is that not at least an aspect of, of modern dial it up, dial it down. So what, what do you say to that? >>Well, it, it is, it's certainly taking, you know, what the cloud offers and taking advantage of that, but it's important to note that the cloud data warehouses out there are really just separating their compute from their storage. So it's allowing them to scale up and down, but your data still stored in a proprietary format. You're still locked in. You still have to ingest the data to get it even prepared for analysis. So a lot of the same sort of structural constraints that exist with the old enterprise data warehouse model OnPrem still exist just yes, a little bit more elastic now because the cloud offers that. >>So Theresa, let me go to you cuz you have cloud first in your, in your, your title. So what's what say you to this conversation? >>Well, even the cloud providers are looking towards more of a cloud continuum, right? So the centralized cloud, as we know it, maybe data lake data warehouse in the central place, that's not even how the cloud providers are looking at it. They have news query services. Every provider has one that really expands those queries to be beyond a single location. And if we look at a lot of where our, the future goes, right, that that's gonna very much fall the same thing. There was gonna be more edge. There's gonna be more on premise because of data sovereignty, data gravity, because you're working with different parts of the business that have already made major cloud investments in different cloud providers. Right? So there's a lot of reasons why the modern, I guess, the next modern generation of the data staff needs to be much more federated. >>Okay. So Richard, how do you deal with this? You you've obviously got, you know, the technical debt, the existing infrastructure it's on the books. You don't wanna just throw it out. A lot of, lot of conversation about modernizing applications, which a lot of times is a, you know, a microservices layer on top of leg legacy apps. How do you think about the modern data stack? >>Well, I think probably the first thing to say is that the stack really has to include the processes and people around the data as well is all well and good changing the technology. But if you don't modernize how people use that technology, then you're not going to be able to, to scale because just cuz you can scale CPU and storage doesn't mean you can get more people to use your data, to generate you more, more value for the business. And so what we've been looking at is really changing in very much aligned to data products and, and data mesh. How do you enable more people to consume the service and have the stack respond in a way that keeps costs low? Because that's important for our customers consuming this data, but also allows people to occasionally run enormous queries and then tick along with smaller ones when required. And it's a good job we did because during COVID all of a sudden we had enormous pressures on our data platform to answer really important life threatening queries. And if we couldn't scale both our data stack and our teams, we wouldn't have been able to answer those as quickly as we had. So I think the stack needs to support a scalable business, not just the technology itself. >>Well thank you for that. So Justin let's, let's try to break down what the critical aspects are of the modern data stack. So you think about the past, you know, five, seven years cloud obviously has given a different pricing model. De-risked experimentation, you know that we talked about the ability to scale up scale down, but it's, I'm, I'm taking away that that's not enough based on what Richard just said. The modern data stack has to serve the business and enable the business to build data products. I, I buy that. I'm a big fan of the data mesh concepts, even though we're early days. So what are the critical aspects if you had to think about, you know, paying, maybe putting some guardrails and definitions around the modern data stack, what does that look like? What are some of the attributes and, and principles there >>Of, of how it should look like or, or how >>It's yeah. What it should be. >>Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, in, in Theresa mentioned this in, in a previous segment about the data warehouse is not necessarily going to disappear. It just becomes one node, one element of the overall data mesh. And I, I certainly agree with that. So by no means, are we suggesting that, you know, snowflake or Redshift or whatever cloud data warehouse you may be using is going to disappear, but it's, it's not going to become the end all be all. It's not the, the central single source of truth. And I think that's the paradigm shift that needs to occur. And I think it's also worth noting that those who were the early adopters of the modern data stack were primarily digital, native born in the cloud young companies who had the benefit of, of idealism. They had the benefit of it was starting with a clean slate that does not reflect the vast majority of enterprises. >>And even those companies, as they grow up mature out of that ideal state, they go buy a business. Now they've got something on another cloud provider that has a different data stack and they have to deal with that heterogeneity that is just change and change is a part of life. And so I think there is an element here that is almost philosophical. It's like, do you believe in an absolute ideal where I can just fit everything into one place or do I believe in reality? And I think the far more pragmatic approach is really what data mesh represents. So to answer your question directly, I think it's adding, you know, the ability to access data that lives outside of the data warehouse, maybe living in open data formats in a data lake or accessing operational systems as well. Maybe you want to directly access data that lives in an Oracle database or a Mongo database or, or what have you. So creating that flexibility to really Futureproof yourself from the inevitable change that you will, you won't encounter over time. >>So thank you. So there, based on what Justin just said, I, my takeaway there is it's inclusive, whether it's a data Mar data hub, data lake data warehouse, it's a, just a node on the mesh. Okay. I get that. Does that include there on Preem data? O obviously it has to, what are you seeing in terms of the ability to, to take that data mesh concept on Preem? I mean, most implementations I've seen in data mesh, frankly really aren't, you know, adhering to the philosophy. They're maybe, maybe it's data lake and maybe it's using glue. You look at what JPMC is doing. Hello, fresh, a lot of stuff happening on the AWS cloud in that, you know, closed stack, if you will. What's the answer to that Theresa? >>I mean, I, I think it's a killer case for data. Me, the fact that you have valuable data sources, OnPrem, and then yet you still wanna modernize and take the best of cloud cloud is still, like we mentioned, there's a lot of great reasons for it around the economics and the way ability to tap into the innovation that the cloud providers are giving around data and AI architecture. It's an easy button. So the mesh allows you to have the best of both worlds. You can start using the data products on-prem or in the existing systems that are working already. It's meaningful for the business. At the same time, you can modernize the ones that make business sense because it needs better performance. It needs, you know, something that is, is cheaper or, or maybe just tap into better analytics to get better insights, right? So you're gonna be able to stretch and really have the best of both worlds. That, again, going back to Richard's point, that is meaningful by the business. Not everything has to have that one size fits all set a tool. >>Okay. Thank you. So Richard, you know, talking about data as product, wonder if we could give us your perspectives here, what are the advantages of treating data as a product? What, what role do data products have in the modern data stack? We talk about monetizing data. What are your thoughts on data products? >>So for us, one of the most important data products that we've been creating is taking data that is healthcare data across a wide variety of different settings. So information about patients' demographics about their, their treatment, about their medications and so on, and taking that into a standards format that can be utilized by a wide variety of different researchers because misinterpreting that data or having the data not presented in the way that the user is expecting means that you generate the wrong insight. And in any business, that's clearly not a desirable outcome, but when that insight is so critical, as it might be in healthcare or some security settings, you really have to have gone to the trouble of understanding the data, presenting it in a format that everyone can clearly agree on. And then letting people consume in a very structured, managed way, even if that data comes from a variety of different sources in, in, in the first place. And so our data product journey has really begun by standardizing data across a number of different silos through the data mesh. So we can present out both internally and through the right governance externally to, to researchers. >>So that data product through whatever APIs is, is accessible, it's discoverable, but it's obviously gotta be governed as well. You mentioned you, you appropriately provided to internally. Yeah. But also, you know, external folks as well. So the, so you've, you've architected that capability today >>We have, and because the data is standard, it can generate value much more quickly and we can be sure of the security and, and, and value that that's providing because the data product isn't just about formatting the data into the correct tables, it's understanding what it means to redact the data or to remove certain rows from it or to interpret what a date actually means. Is it the start of the contract or the start of the treatment or the date of birth of a patient? These things can be lost in the data storage without having the proper product management around the data to say in a very clear business context, what does this data mean? And what does it mean to process this data for a particular use case? >>Yeah, it makes sense. It's got the context. If the, if the domains own the data, you, you gotta cut through a lot of the, the, the centralized teams, the technical teams that, that data agnostic, they don't really have that context. All right. Let's send Justin, how does Starburst fit into this modern data stack? Bring us home. >>Yeah. So I think for us, it's really providing our customers with, you know, the flexibility to operate and analyze data that lives in a wide variety of different systems. Ultimately giving them that optionality, you know, and optionality provides the ability to reduce costs, store more in a data lake rather than data warehouse. It provides the ability for the fastest time to insight to access the data directly where it lives. And ultimately with this concept of data products that we've now, you know, incorporated into our offering as well, you can really create and, and curate, you know, data as a product to be shared and consumed. So we're trying to help enable the data mesh, you know, model and make that an appropriate compliment to, you know, the, the, the modern data stack that people have today. >>Excellent. Hey, I wanna thank Justin Theresa and Richard for joining us today. You guys are great. I big believers in the, in the data mesh concept, and I think, you know, we're seeing the future of data architecture. So thank you. Now, remember, all these conversations are gonna be available on the cube.net for on-demand viewing. You can also go to starburst.io. They have some great content on the website and they host some really thought provoking interviews and, and, and they have awesome resources, lots of data mesh conversations over there, and really good stuff in, in the resource section. So check that out. Thanks for watching the data doesn't lie or does it made possible by Starburst data? This is Dave Valante for the cube, and we'll see you next time. >>The explosion of data sources has forced organizations to modernize their systems and architecture and come to terms with one size does not fit all for data management today. Your teams are constantly moving and copying data, which requires time management. And in some cases, double paying for compute resources. Instead, what if you could access all your data anywhere using the BI tools and SQL skills your users already have. And what if this also included enterprise security and fast performance with Starburst enterprise, you can provide your data consumers with a single point of secure access to all of your data, no matter where it lives with features like strict, fine grained, access control, end to end data encryption and data masking Starburst meets the security standards of the largest companies. Starburst enterprise can easily be deployed anywhere and managed with insights where data teams holistically view their clusters operation and query execution. So they can reach meaningful business decisions faster, all this with the support of the largest team of Trino experts in the world, delivering fully tested stable releases and available to support you 24 7 to unlock the value in all of your data. You need a solution that easily fits with what you have today and can adapt to your architecture. Tomorrow. Starbust enterprise gives you the fastest path from big data to better decisions, cuz your team can't afford to wait. Trino was created to empower analytics anywhere and Starburst enterprise was created to give you the enterprise grade performance, connectivity, security management, and support your company needs organizations like Zolando Comcast and FINRA rely on Starburst to move their businesses forward. Contact us to get started.

>>Okay. And welcome back to the cubes live coverage here in San Francisco, California for 80 us summit 2022 Amazon web services summit 2020 New York city is coming up in the summer will be there. Check us out the cube.net. Our next guest here is Jim long. The CEO of dig also known as local. BTV a very interesting AWS customer doing some really progressive things around video and, uh, challenging the status quo in code cutting and all kinds of broadcast models. Jim, welcome to the cube. Great to see you. >>Thank you, John. Great to be here. Okay. >>So first of all, before we get into some of the disrupt option, take a minute to explain what is dig and local BTV. >>Uh, dig is all about, uh, providing, uh, edge video networking for broadcast television, basically modernizing local television and hopefully extending it to hyper local content like high schools and community government and community channels and things like that. So essentially free bringing, using the internet as an antenna to bring broadcast television to your phone, your laptop you're connected TVs. >>So if I understand it correctly, if I UN and I look at the, the materials of your site, you basically go into each market, Metro areas like New York Philly bay area, grab the tee signal out of the air. >>Yep. >>Local TV, and then open that up to everyone. Who's got, um, an >>Correct. And, uh, what, we've, where we're essentially building a hybrid network with AWS. Uh, I like to say we got all the smart and account stuff, you know, in the cloud at AWS. And we have all the dumb, fast stuff in the actual TV market. We have servers and transcoding there we work with, uh, of course, um, uh, AWS on that centrally as well. But basically that hybrid cloud allows us to be the fastest simplest and lowest cost way to get a local video. Any type could be an antenna or an IP stream to a local house. So we're, so are the local pickup and delivery people. We're not building a brand, we're not building content. We're delivering the local content to the local views. You >>Like the pipes. >>We are, we're essentially an infrastructure company. Um, we're right at that wonderful intersection of the, uh, the infrastructure and the content where I always like to play. >>I like, I love the store. I think the cost of that nature, how you're using Amazon, it's really impressive. Um, what are some of the cool things you're doing on AWS that you think's notable? >>Well, of course the, the standard issue stuff where you want to store all your data in the cloud. Right? So we, uh, and we use a quick site to, to get to that. And obviously we're using S3 and we're using media tailor, which we really like, which is cuz we first actual company on the planet. I believe that's inserting digital ads, impression based ads into local broadcast streams. So that's, that's fun because the advertisers, they like the fact that they could still do traditional TV buys and they could spice it up with digital impressions based, but ads on us. Yeah. And, and we're adding to it a real fun thing called clip it, which is user clipping. It's an app that's been running on AWS for years. It's had over half a million plays in social media. Yeah. We're combining those together and, and AWS makes it very simple to do that. >>Well, I've been using your app on my Firestick and uh, download local BTV on the app store. Um, I gotta say the calendar's awesome. And the performance is 10 times better than, than some of the other streaming apps because the other performance they crash all the time. The calendar's weird. So congratulations. Clearly you're running the cloud technology. I gotta ask you what's going on in the market? Netflix missed their earnings. The stock was down big time. Um, obviously competition what's up going on with Netflix? >>Well, what's, it's a big shift. >>What does it mean for the streaming market? >>Well, what it means is, is, is a consumer choice. It's really the golden age of consumer choice. Uh, originally back when I was a kid, it was all antenna TV. We didn't even have DBRS right. And then, uh, the cable companies and the satellite companies, the phone companies came in and took over and all of a sudden everyone started paying for TV for just linear TV. Right? And then the next thing, you know, streaming comes around, uh, Netflix shows up for, for VOD or, or SVOD, they call it cuz it's payt TV and uh, and the whole, uh, that ecosystem starts to melt down. And now you have a consumer choice market where you can pay, pay for VAD or pay for, for linear. And everyone does linear and everyone does VAD or you can use free TV. Now we correctly guessed that free TV was gonna have a huge comeback. You know, know what is it about free even obviously gen Z smarter than us boomers. They love free too. Uh, targeted advertising makes the ads less, uh, painful or less of a distraction. Uh, so we knew that free ad supported TV was gonna happen. Lots of stuff happened. And then, then the, uh, major media companies started doing their own subscription apps. Right? They're all cool. >>We like paramount plus >>Paramount plus Disney pluses, PN peacock, uh, time Warner's doing something. I mean, it's all cool, but you know, people only have so much of a big pocketbook. So what it's doing is pay TV has now become much more complicated, but also you, you know, you gotta trade off. So you saw it with Netflix, right? Yeah. Netflix is suffering from there's too much pay TV. So where are you gonna put your money on Comcast? On YouTube TV paramount plus Netflix. >>Yeah. I mean, I love the free thing. I gotta bring up something. I wanna get your reaction to a company called low cast went under, they got sued out of their deal. They were the free TV. Are you guys have issues like them? What's the cast most people don't know got was, was >>Doing same. So we started before low cast and we're uh, what we would call a permissions based system, legal system. The broadcast Mar industry, uh, is, uh, is the wild wild west. I mean, I like to say antenna TV is a direct to consumer. The antenna is a direct to consumer device and it's controlled by the channel. People it's not controlled by a platform like Comcast, right? It's not controlled by a stick. >>When you say channel, do you mean like CBS or >>Yeah, CBS or the local Korean religious cooking channel or, uh, Spanish channels or local independent to television, which is really a national treasure for us. The United States really should be making sure that local content, local channels, uh, do well local businesses, you know, with targeted advertising, Janes nail salon can, can now advertise just in San Jose and not the entire San Francisco TV market. Um, so you ha you have, have all that going on and we recognize, you know, that, that local content, but you have to have permission from the channel stuff. It's not easy because you got channels on stations. You have syndicators, it's hard to keep track of. And sometimes you, you, uh, you, you know, you have to shift things around, but, uh, low cast, uh, like another kind before it just went hog wild, illegal, trying to use a loophole, uh, didn't quite work out for 'em and, uh, >>You see, they have put out of business by the networks, the names, the big names. Yes. Content people, >>Correct. I mean the big, the big guys, but I mean, because they weren't following the rules, um, >>The rules, meaning license, the content, right. >>Well correct. Or yes, >>Basically they, they were stealing the content in the eyes of the, >>Well, there is, there is, it is a little of, a bit of a gray area between the FCC and the copyright laws that Congress made. So, um, there are people certainly out there that think there is a path there, low cast, didn't find it. We're not trying to find it. Uh, we just want to get all the free TV, uh, the bottom line. And you've seen fast channels explode recently, Pluto, uh, Samsung TV. >>And what does that all mean? >>Well, what it means is people love free TV and the best free TV out there is your local TV. So putting that on the internet and those comp, but the media companies, they have trouble with this new stuff. What's, >>What's your >>They're overthinking it. What's >>Some of this CBS, NBC, all these big guys. >>Well, those guys have a little less trouble than the people that actually, uh, they're affiliates, right? So there's 210 TV markets and the, uh, your major networks, you know, they have their own stations. And in a bit, you know, in about 39% of the population, which is about 15 to 20, is it >>Cultural or is a system system problem? >>No, it's a, it's a problem of all the, the media companies are just having trouble moving towards the new technology and, and they're, I think they're siloing it. >>So why not? You gonna let 'em die. Are you trying to do deals with em? >>Oh no, no, absolutely. For us, if we don't make money, unless stations make money, we want local TV to, to flourish. It is local TV is Neilson, just report yesterday, you know, uh, that, uh, local TV is growing. We're taking advantage of that. And I think the station groups are having a little trouble realizing that they have the original, fast channels before Pluto, before Tubi did it in movies. And, and, and what >>Are people understanding in the, in the industry? I know NA's coming up a show. Yeah, >>That's right. >>National associated of broadcasters. What's going on in that industry right now. And you're, if you get to put it down the top three problems that are opportunities to be solved, what would they be? >>Well, I think, you know, I think the, the, the, the last, the, the best one that's left is what we're doing. I have to say it, uh, I think it's worth billions. >>You free TV over the air free and stream >>O TV. Oh yeah. Over the air TV that also works with the internet, right. Public internet connected to public television stations so that everybody, including homeless people, et cetera, that, you know, they don't have a TV, they don't have an antenna, they can't afford comp. They got an >>IPhone though. >>They an iPhone. For sure. And, and so it's, it's, uh, it's a wonderful thing. It's, you know, our national broadcasting and I don't think the station groups or the major networks are taking advantage of it they're as much as they should. Yeah. And, and I don't think, you know, obviously NBC and CBS with their new apps, they're sort of done with that. They did mergers, they got, they got the virtual pay guys. I mean, YouTube TV off the ground, the only thing left is suck another shitload of good, uh, eyeballs and, and advertising. >>Well, I mean, yeah, I think that, that, and what you said earlier around subscription fatigue, I mean, nobody wants to have 20 subscriptions. >>Well, that brings up a whole new other war. That's going on that, thank goodness. We're not part of it's the platforms versus the cable companies. Right. Versus whatever. Right. Everyone's trying to be your open garden or your closed garden. They're trying to get your subscriptions in bundle self bundling it's. But I mean, it's wonderful for consumers, if you can navigate through it. Uh, we wanna, we think we'll have one of the gems in any of that everyone's want local TV. And so we'll supply that we're already doing that. We're supplying it to a couple companies, uh, free cast as a company, uh, app, a universal streaming, you know, manager, your all, all your, uh, streaming, a streaming aggregation, put your paid stuff in, put your free stuff in. They do that. And, and as, as does Roku try trying to do that fire TV, Xfinity's trying to do it. So it's all, it's a new war for the platform and hopefully we'll be on everyone. >>Well, you've been in this industry for a long time, you know, the streaming market, you know, the TV market. Um, so it's, it's good. I think it's a new battle, the shift's happening. Um, what should people know about dig local? BTV what are some of your goals for the next year or two? What are you trying to do? >>Well, what we're really trying to do is make sure that local, uh, local television thrives so that it can support wider communities. It could support hyper local content. So if you're, if you're, and we love the old paradigm and channel change, right? Forget, you know, every other app has all these boxes going by on different rows and stuff. And, and yeah, you can search and find stuff, but there's nothing like just changing channels, whether a commercial's on or, or you, you wanna see what else is on. You know, you're gonna go from local television and maybe all of a sudden, you'll see the local high school play over on another part of the, of the spectrum. And, and what we're trying to do is get those communities together. And the local high school people come over and find the local, you know, uh, Spanish, uh, Nova channel or something like that. >>So local is the new hot. >>It is. Absolutely. And by the way, it's where this high CPMs are gonna go. And the more targeted you get >>Ad revenue, >>I mean, that's for us is, is, is our number one, re we have a number of revenue streams, but targeted ads are really great for local, right? And, and so we're, we're gonna make an announce. We've >>Lost that we've lost that local, I've seen local things that local Palo Alto paper, for instance, just shut down this local sports high school coverage, our youth sports, because they don't budget, right? There's no TV community channels, like some Comcast throwaway channel. Um, we lost, we, we lo we're losing >>Local. No, I think that's a real national shame. And so I think if we can strengthen local television, I think it'll strengthen all local media. So we expect to help local radio and local newspapers. That's a bigger part of the vision. Uh, but I it's gonna happen. There's >>An education angle here too. >>There is an education angle because the bottom line is you can use linear television as a way to augment. Uh, we have a really exciting project going on in New York, uh, uh, with, uh, some of the housing, uh, projects, uh, in Harlem and, and, and the Bronx, uh, their I idea is to have the, the homework channel and they can, and literally when you have a, and both swiping and everything you can have, I mean, literally you can have a hundred schools that, that have things well, >>We know zoom schooling sucks. I mean, that didn't work. So I think you're gonna see a lot of augmentation, right. >>Amazon. >>I was just talking to some people here, AI training, machine learning, training, all here could be online in linear format. >>Yeah. And exactly. And then I think about the linear format is it's discovery television, and you can also, um, you know, you can also record it. Yeah. Right. If you see a program and you want to record it, you sit >>Record. So final minute we have left. I want to just get your thoughts on this one thing and, and ask your question. Are you looking for content? Are you, I outreach at the content providers who, >>Well, we're, we're PRI our primary mission is to get more channel local channels on which really means station groups and independence. We have a number, I mean, basically 50% of the channels in any market. When we move into it are like, this is a no-brainer. I want more eyeballs. We're Nielsen, uh, RA, uh, rated mean we support. And so we, >>How many markets are you in right now? >>We're in 21 now. And we hope to be in, uh, over 50 by the end of the year, covering more than half the United States. >>So, all right, Jim, thanks for coming on the queue. Really appreciate it. >>My pleasure. Good luck >>Recognition. Very disruptive disrupting media, um, combination of over the air TV, local with I internet. Obviously we love that with a cube. We want a cube channel anywhere possible. I'm John furry host of the queue here at AWS summit. Highing all the big trends and technologies in cloud and media back with more coverage after this short break,

>>Welcome to this cube conversation which is part of our third Aws startup showcase of this year. I'm your host lisa martin and I'm pleased to welcome to the cube ceo and co founder of White Source Romney Sasse Rami, Welcome to the program. >>Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. >>I'm excited for our audience to hear about White Source, give us that high level overview of what the company is and what you how you're helping organizations. >>Sure. So we have software engineering teams keep track of their use of open source components sometimes referred to as dependencies and primarily focused on security aspect of those dependencies and are able to very natively and very quickly identify one all of the dependencies that are being used in a certain software that's being developed and alert to any known vulnerabilities that exist in those dependencies and then nick our users through the journey of finding them prioritizing them and fixing the vulnerability is such that their software when it gets released is not at risk, >>not at risk. And one of the things we've talked so much about In the last 18 months is the threat landscape. It's changed dramatically. We've seen a huge increase in ransom where huge increase in Ddos attacks. We also are in the fifth consecutive year of a cybersecurity skills gap. It's been there for a while. We know that there have been barriers between developers and security. How does White Source help address that cybersecurity skills gap. >>So we focus on automating as much of the security practices possible. Right. So basically our main premise is that we want to be the security expert for the engineering team so that they don't have to right? So we provide tools that automate the entire process of remediating the vulnerability so that we can save the developers effort and time in becoming security expert basically saying they don't need to become security expert, they can keep doing what they do best, which is developed software and provide more business value to their employer. And we will take care of anything that has to do with security in their software for them. So basically we're trying to alleviate the need for developers to develop any kind of security related skill set. >>I got to ask you how does that address? We talked about the skills gap but also the cultural shift required for developers to then kind of exhale and and put their trust in you guys and that's a big challenge to change cultures within organizations. How do you help influence that? >>Sure. So look, when you're talking about cultural shift, it always takes time. Like these things do not happen overnight And its gradual and so we are very well aware of it and we do not expect people to have 100% confidence in us immediately in day one. Okay, so our tools and and practices account for it and we help our users uh increasingly trust us more by proving ourselves to them by first starting with providing advice and allowing them to control the pace at which they automate more of the process. Right? So initially we will just tell them what they need to do and let them do it themselves until they are, they have gained enough experience without tools to just allow us to take the full cycle for them. That's one which maybe is even more important is that we rely very heavily on crowd sourcing, Right? So we have a very extensive customer base that is made up of some of the world's leading enterprise organizations that have very complex and a large environments and across those environments, combined with our ongoing and monitoring of everything that's going on in the large world of open source projects, we have compiled a very extensive crowd source database or knowledge base, if you will, that basically gives you intel on what others are doing with those vulnerable open stores dependencies, Right? And we can give you a lot of confidence when we see that the broader community of both commercial and free opens those users have upgraded a vulnerable dependency to a safe version and are speaking to the new version, right? They're not pulling it back there, not undoing that change. And so we give you a lot of visibility into all of that information and also, you know, when when things go bad, right? If we see that many people roll back some change and uh avoiding some dependency version, then we will warn you away from upgrading that version. So I think that the fact that we are establishing our recommendations on a lot of crowd sourced data is another way for us to provide more confidence, automating actions for our users. >>The C word confidence is absolutely critical. I got to ask you though Romney, something that you you mentioned, I was always, I always like to ask start ups, you know, what was the impetus to start the company? You're the Ceo and co founder? What were some of the gaps that were missing? Was it crowdsourcing? And was it the the lack of that community to really provide that visibility to developers that you guys saw as an opportunity to fix in the market? >>Alright. So at the risk of exposing my real age, Uh tell you that the company started over 10 years ago and was actually based on previous experience that as founders had in another company when when it was time to sell it. Right? So when we sold our previous company, we had to go through a two diligence process where we were required to provide a very detailed report of all the open source dependencies that we were using and we didn't have such a report and sort of caught us off guard and we had to spend a lot of time during, you know, the most stressful part of the due diligence, finding out which open source we were using and documenting it and coming up with the report. And so that was a very personal experience we had, but it was very obvious that it's not something that we did special. Right? Everyone is developing software is relying very heavily on open source and usually doesn't track it everywhere. Soon it initially started from just the very basic need for transparency, visibility and the ability to provide a, you know, simple bill of material that's now become a big thing right around S bahn Uh, but 10 years ago it was very difficult, it was very like manually laborious task to be able to come up with your bill of material and that's sort of the experience that big. Uh, the foundation of white suits >>got it and then talk to me about your relationship with AWS and mentioned in the beginning of this segment that this is part of our third AWS startup showcase of the year. Give us an overview of your relationship with AWS from a technology partnership perspective cells marketing product. >>Sure. So we've been working with us for a very long time and they are a wonderful partner to work with. It started right at the beginning where we are a cloud native company. Right? So we're staff solution provider and from the beginning we chose aws to be the infrastructure on which to no solution and we grew together with them over time over the last 10 years. We've been scaling again and again our environment and you know, the services that we provide and have been consuming more and more on AWS services, both for infrastructure and but also and very importantly for securing our runtime environment, which they do a great job at. But then it went even further and we are now integrated with a lot of AWS services and products and technologies. So our offering is very much integrated with several AWS offerings. And even beyond that, we are working closely as they go to market partner with AWS. So we have several co marketing initiatives with them and we are part of the startup coastal program. Such that AWS sales people can coastal white source to their customers. >>I imagine that is an advantage the partnership and the deep relationship that you have with a W. S in terms of getting those customers meetings and and helping them achieve the confidence in the technologies and the power of the two companies in 10 years. We're looking at 1000 customers and some big names. I saw from your website Microsoft Comcast, uh, Splunk 23% of the Fortune 100. Tell me how the aws partnership helps you give those developers the confidence that they need to trust in your technologies. >>Sure. So, first I think the synergy is very apparent, very obvious because both AWS and us sell to the engineering departments into the devil's people. All right. So we are catering to the same users the same customers the same, even decision makers. And so it's very easy to understand. It's also very easy to tell the better together story. Right? So, it's very easy for the the the THE AWS sales people to explain to their customers why it's easily integrate Herbal and it makes the sales motion easier and transparent and fluid and it makes the customer's consumption of the joint services easier. Right? So it's for them, it's easier to work with AWS is a window knowing that they can get all these added security features from them and gained the confidence of having this solution vetted by amazon and get us as a reference for us as a vendor also makes it easier for them to trust us and to use our services uh, with peace of life. >>Sounds like a synergistic cultures as well. I want to dig into something that I saw in the notes that you guys provided that white sources enabling organizations to eliminate up to 85% of security alerts. That's a big number. How do you do that? >>Okay. First, to clarify, we're talking about open source vulnerability or its rights are not in general. Not all security for open source security alliance. We've developed a deeper analysis that goes beyond just looking at your bill of material and identifying which dependencies are vulnerable and analyzes the way in which the developers are using those dependencies and what we've found over the last three years of running that technology with real customers? over many tens of thousands of development projects. Is that on average, 85% of the vulnerabilities in open source dependencies. I'll not reachable from your code. All right. So they are still there. You're still using the dependency but you're using some other function of it, which is not vulnerable. And the vulnerable function is never actively called in your code base. So this is like very specific. It's not some generic analysis. We had to analyze your code and figure that out. And so again, the average statistics statistics, is That just 15% of vulnerabilities are quote unquote, reachable form your code and makes your software vulnerable. Right? All the others are simply not exploitable. And so it can easily be eliminated for the need to remediate. Right? So you don't have to >>got it. How are you guys helping customers? There's been a lot of data that shows companies are spending millions uh annually using multiple web app and a P. I. Security tools on average but are still having problems with those tools being effective. How does white source help customers not waste time and resources and get right to being able to identify and remediate those vulnerabilities >>short. So look again in our philosophy, is that just detecting the problem? The security issues doesn't fix anything. Right. Doesn't help you solve your problem. Right, paramount to going to visit your dentist and having them find the cavity and maybe they do an x ray and they tell you exactly which tooth it's on and how deep it is. And then just send you home and you did you need to deal with it yourself. Right? So it doesn't really solve the problem. Your your mouth still painful. You have to fix the problem in order to get any kind of value for the security service of tool, you have to, you know, close the loop, finish the process and fix the vulnerability. And so by investing a lot in automating the remediation in enabling our tools to close that cycle right to finish the job and fix the vulnerability. We enable you to actually gain the value from the various tools that you're using and make sure that your software is not exposed and not vulnerable and not just give you a report with the vulnerabilities, right? Not just find them for you. >>Got It. Last question for you is if we look at your recommendations when you're talking to customers, especially as I mentioned earlier in the conversation, the threat landscape has changed dramatically in the last 18 months when you're in customer conversations, how do you advise them to start? You start with the developers. Do you start with security or do you start by saying you've got to bring everybody together. >>So we would normally start with security uh and you know, not necessarily the developers themselves, but the engineering managers. The heads of engineering again because our main effort is to leave the developers alone. Right. We want to get as little developer involvement as possible so that they can be free to do what they need to do. Security is something they have to right? It's a sure it's not, it doesn't add business value, it just protects the business from being exposed to greater risk. And so our approach and our practice is to be a sort of exception based tool for developers and only get them involved when you absolutely have to have them chime in and do something. Otherwise, we can fully take ownership and automate the entire process of identification, prioritization and remediation for the organization and just provide reports on, you know, how many vulnerabilities we fix this month and and give them better visibility into their security posture. Yeah, but you know, we invest most of our innovation attention resources as a company to automate as much of that process as possible so that the developers don't have to spend their time on security issues. We will do it for it. >>And I imagine developer productivity goes way up for your customers? I do have one more question for you, given that here we are in the fall of 2021, what are some of the things that you're looking forward to as we go into the new year? >>I love you in the new jewish year or then you >>Uh maybe both. I was thinking, you know, just as we go into 2020 to some of the things that you're excited about. >>Sure, so look, it's it's a little difficult to be happy about something that's a problem for other people, right? Because there is a growing threat for application security and there is more and more attacks going on in the world. But I'm really looking forward to helping more people be more protected while not wasting their time. All right. So it what drives me is the ability for us as a company to provide real value for customers and not be some shelf will not be a tool that just produces reports that no one knows what to do with. And the fact that we are able to steal our users and our customers away from risk and save them. The the hassle of being attacked, being hacked, having their data stolen or having the system broken into is what I mostly look >>and there's plenty of opportunities for you guys to do just that and really add that value for those developers And the company is like I said, big brands Microsoft Comcast block Romney, thank you for joining me on the program today, talking to us about white source and how you're really feeling the gaps in the cybersecurity skills landscape and helping really transform developer productivity where security is concerned. We appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on the show. >>My pleasure for a missus I'm lisa martin. You're watching this cube conversation. Mhm mm mm.

(upbeat techno music) >> Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm Lisa Martin; I am joined by the CEO and co-founder of Privacera, Balaji Ganesan. Balaji, it's great to have you on theCUBE. >> Great to great to see you, Lisa. Good to see you again, and thanks for the opportunity. >> So tell our audience about Privacera. How do you help balance data security, data sharing? >> Absolutely. At Privacera we are on a mission to help enterprises unlock their data, but do it in a secure and a compliant way. We are in this balance between, we call it a dual mandate, where we see enterprise data teams, on one hand, they are being asked to democratize data and make this data available to all parts of the organization. So everybody in the organization is looking forward to get access to the data faster. On the other hand, governance, privacy, and compliance mandates have become more stringent. And it has come from regulations such as GDPR or California Privacy, but in general, the environment and the culture has changed where, from a board level, there's more owners who are making sure that you have visibility on what data you're bringing in, but also make sure that right people have access to the right data. And that notion is no longer in textbooks or in books, right? It's being actually, an onus is on making it happen. And it's really hard for these data teams do that, as the platforms are very diverse. And again, driven by data democratization today, companies are running very diverse platforms. Even in a single cloud like AWS, they have choices between Snowflake or Databricks and Amazon's native tools and other other services, which are really cropping up and being available in the cloud. But if you need to make sure right people have access to the right data, in that paradigm it's really, really hard. And this is where a tool like Privacera comes in, where we can help them get visibility on their data, but also make sure that we can help them with building a unified layer where they can start managing these tools more cohesively. And the end result is they can get access to the data faster, but you're compliant, you're governed, and you have visibility around who's doing what. And that's the big enabler in their data strategy. >> So, we talk about the need for data monetization, for organizations to be able to give enterprise-wide access across business units, to identify new sources of revenue and new opportunities. That's a big challenge to do. You mentioned the security and governance front at the board level. I imagined that the data-sharing is as well. How are you helping customers navigate multiple platforms, multiple clouds, to be able to get access that is actually secure, that the CEO can go back to the board and say we've got everything, you know, all I's dotted and T's crossed here? >> Absolutely, absolutely. I think this is one of the biggest challenges that we have the CIOs face today, is on one hand, they have to be agile to the business and make sure that they're present in the cloud, but they are enabling multiple services that the business needs for agility. And data is being one of the business drivers today, And most companies are becoming data companies. And it is to make decisions to serve your customer better, bring more revenue, cut costs. Even in the midst of COVID, we have seen our customers go in and leverage data to find out how they can shift to a different paradigm of doing business. Now, we had a customer which was primarily in retail stores, but they had to go and shift and analyze data on how they can pivot into a more online world in the COVID paradigm, how they can make supply chain decisions faster. So every company is becoming a data-driven business. The data is becoming the currency. So more units want faster access to the data as possible. But on the other hand, you cannot forget about governance. You can not forget about security, it's becoming a table stakes as part of it. And traditionally, this has been a zero-sum game, where, you know, in order to maintain more security, you cannot give more access to the data or you will make copies of the data, and that creates redundancy. The newer paradigm, in our belief, is that you can do both. And that's how Privacera has built toward. And this is how we are helping our customers in their journey where, you know, if you take Comcast, for example, they're building a massive infrastructure on top of AWS to serve the digital analytics part of it. And they are collecting a lot of data and making decisions based on that. But on the other hand, in order for them to achieve compliance and privacy, there needs to be an approach, a more unified layer, which is not innovating from using the data. And this is where a solution like Privacera is coming in, where we have built an approach, we have built an architecture, where they can enable governance and policies, and these policies are being implemented across the data infrastructure. So it doesn't matter which application you use, where you're coming from, you're governed by the same rules and policies. And that uniformity, that consistency is something we can bring in, of being in horizontal layer and having built those integrations, prebuilt those integrations in. So with Comcast, what the end result they're saying is they can be faster to the market, right? Before us, they would be spending a lot of time with manual processes to build that governance. But with an automated layer, with an automated governance, which has prebuilt integrations into all the layers, they are now able to go to market faster, but now they're going into the market with the governance and the compliance built in, so they can have both. So again, our belief is it's not zero-sum. Your governance, security can be built in with this business agility. And we are helping customers do that. >> You mentioned that retail customer and COVID-19, and we saw a massive pivot about a year and a half ago. And some companies did a great job of pivoting from brick and mortar to curbside delivery, for example, which is table stakes. But we saw so much acceleration of digital transformation last year. How has COVID-19 impacted governance? And what are some of the things that you're helping customers achieve there as they're accelerating their digital journeys? >> Again, going back to the drivers, we are seeing our customers, right? So on one hand, digitization and cloud journey, that accelerated during COVID right? So more companies where they were doing their cloud journey, they accelerated, because they can unlock data faster. And, to my earlier examples, they want to make decisions, leveraging data. And COVID brought that, even accelerated some of these initiatives. So there has been more data initiatives than before. Digitalization has accelerated; cloud migration has accelerated. But COVID also brought in the fact that you are not physically located. You can't sit in a room and trust each other and say, "I trust all of you and I'll give you all equal access." You are now sitting in disparate locations, without the traditional securities you would have, a physical boundary, having that. You're now remote. All of a sudden, the CIOs have to think how we can be more agile? How do you build in security, governance in that layer where you have to think start from bottom staff and then say, are you governing and protecting your data wherever it is stored and being accessed, Rather than relying on perimeter or relying on a physical boundary or being in a physical location. So those traditional paradigms are getting shattered. And most companies have recognized, most forward-looking companies, are recognizing that. They accelerated those trends. And from what we have seen from our point of view is we are able to help in that transformation, both in enabling companies to become digital and democratize data faster, but also building this bottom-up layer where they can be sure that they have visibility on what data they have, but also making sure right people have access to the right data, irrespective of what tool they use, irrespective of where they are set, they're always getting that part of it. And that's a sea change we are seeing in the companies now. So COVID in our industry, in our world, has brought in massive transformation and massive opportunities to set a new paradigm for how organizations treat governance, as well as the data initiative. >> A lot of change that it's brought. Some good, as you've mentioned. Talk to me about, so Privacera is built on Apache Ranger; how are you guys helping AWS customers from a cloud migration perspective? Because we know cloud migration is continuing to accelerate. >> Our foundation, given our work in open source, has always been building around open standards and interoperability, and we believe an enterprise solution needs to be built around these standards that we can talk to. You're not the only solution that enterprises will have. There needs to be interoperability, especially around governance and where we exchanging information, and with other tools. And given a legacy of Ranger, it helps us build those standards. And Ranger as a project today is supported from the likes of Cloudera or in the cloud, Microsoft, AWS, and Google, and most of the forward-looking standards and tools, like Presto and Spark. It has been a de facto standard used by some of these analytical engines. The wide adoption around that, and being built on Ranger gives us that standard of interoperability. So when we go and work with other tools, it makes it easier for us to talk. It makes it easier for organizations to transition in their cloud journey, where they can now very easily move the governance and policies of, even if they are running Ranger on premise, they can easily move those standards, those policies, easily into the cloud. For example, with Sun Life, it was the same case, where they built a lot of these rules and policies in their on-premise environment. Being an insurance company, they always had governance and compliance at top of their mind. Very strict rules around who can access what data and what portions of data, because this data is governed by federal laws, by a lot of the industry laws and mandates and compliance. And they always had this notion in on-premise. Now when they're migrating to the cloud, one of the bottlenecks is how do you move this governance and do you have to build it from scratch? But with our tool and the standards we have built in, we can migrate that in days rather than months. So for them, we help in the overall cloud migration. To my earlier point, we are helping customers achieve faster time to market by enabling this governance and making it easier. And by having this open standard, it makes it easier for customers to migrate and then cooperate, rather than having to build it again, having to reinvent the wheel when they migrate to the cloud. Because, the governance and compliance mandates are not changing when you go from prem to cloud. In fact cloud, in some cases, it's more diverse. So by helping organizations do that, we are helping them achieve a faster acceleration, which is the case happened in Sun Life. >> That time to market is absolutely imperative. If anything, we've learned in the last 18 months, it's businesses that needed to pivot overnight multiple times. And they need to be able to get to market faster, whether it's pivoting from being a brick and mortar, to being able to deliver a curbside delivery. The time to market, people don't have that time, regardless of industry, because there's competitors in the rear-view mirror who might be smaller, more agile, and able to get to market faster. So these bigger companies, and any company, needs to have a faster time to market. >> Yeah, absolutely. And that's what we are seeing. And that's big driver for journey into the cloud is to bring that agility. In the earlier paradigm, you're going to have a monolithical technology standard, and you can adopt changes faster when you are reliant on the IT team. What cloud brings in is, you can now move data into the cloud and enable any service and any team faster than ever before. You can enable a team on Snowflake, you can enable a team on a different machine learning tool, all having access to the same data, without it being the need for the data to be copied and servers built out. The cloud is really bringing that digital transformation, but it's also bringing in the agility of being faster and nimble and as part of it. But the challenge for cloud is it's happening at the same time governance, privacy has become real. And organizations no longer can be assuming that, you know, they can just move data into the cloud and be done with it. You have to really think about all layers of the cloud and say, how do you make sure that data is protected on all layers, in all consumption? How do you make sure that right people have access to the right data? And that's a much comprehensive problem, given the world that we are now not sitting in a physical office anymore, we are distributed. How do you do that? So while cloud brings that business agility, it's also happening, not because of cloud, but because of the climate we are in, that governance and compliance is real. And most forward-looking organizations are thinking about how they can build a foundation that can handle both. How they can build, institutionalize these governance frameworks in the newer paradigms of cloud. We are seeing the companies implementing what is called a data mesh, which is essentially a concept of how the data could be decentralized and owned by business owners and teams. But how do you bring governance in that? How do you make sure that a layer of that, and then a newer paradigm most forward-looking organizations are adopting is, governance doesn't need to be managed by one team. It can be a distributed function. But can you institutionalize a foundation or a framework, and you have pools which can be used by different teams. So they are bound by the same rules, but they're operating in their own independent way. And that's the future for us, is how the organizations can figure out how in the cloud, they can have a more distributed, delegated, decentralized governance that aligns with their business strategy of self-service analytics and use of data across multiple teams, but all bound by the same framework, all bound by common rules so that you're not building your own; the tools and the methods are all common, but each team is able to operate independently. And that's where the agility, true agility, will come in, when organizations are able to do that. And I think we are in probably step one or two of the journey. It's fascinating to see some of the organizations take leaps in that. But for us, the future is how if some organizations can build those foundations in from processes and people, they can truly unlock the power of the cloud. >> You brought in technology and people; last question is, how do you advise customers when you're in conversations? We talked about data access, governance, security, being a board-level conversation, the ability for an organization to monetize their data; but how do you talk about that balance when you're with customers? That's a tricky line. >> And what we say to the customer, it's a journey. You don't have to think of solving this on day one. What we really think about is foundational steps you need to do to achieve that journey. And what are the steps you can do today? And add onto it, rather than trying to solve for everything on day one. And that's what most of the focus areas goes in, is how we can help our customers put together a program which achieves both their data strategy and aligns their governance with it. And most forward-looking organizations are already doing that, where they have a multi-year journey that they're already working on. They are thinking about some of the things that we help with. And in some cases, when organizations are not thinking about it, we come and help and advise with that. Our advice always is, start thinking about today and what your next two or three years is going to look like. We put together a program. And that involves tools, that involves people, and that involves organization structure. And we are a cog in the wheel, but we also recommend them to look at, holistically, all the aspects. And that's our job at the end of the day as vendors in this industry, to help collectively learn from customers what we are learning and can help the next set of customers coming. But we believe, again, going back to my point, if organizations are able to set up this paradigm where they're able to set structures, where they can delegate governance, but they build those common rules and frameworks upfront, they are set up to succeed in the future. They can be more agile than their competitors. >> And that is absolutely table stakes these days. Balaji, thank you so much for joining, telling our audience about Privacera, what you're doing, how you're helping customers, particularly AWS customers, migrate to the cloud in such a dynamic environment. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much. It was a pleasure talking to you and I appreciate it. >> Likewise. For Balaji Ganesan, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this CUBE Conversation. (upbeat music)

>>what? Hello, I'm john free with the cube. I want to welcome Conrad Feldman, the founder and Ceo of Kwan cast here to kick off the quan cast industry summit on the demise of third party cookies. The events called the cookie conundrum, a recipe for success. The changing advertising landscape, super relevant conversation just now. More than ever. Conrad welcome to your own program kicking this off. Thanks for holding this event. It's a pleasure. Great to chat with you today. So a big fan been following your company since the founding of it. Been analytics is always the prize of any data driven company. Media. Anything's all data driven now. Um, talk about the open internet because now more than ever it's under siege. As I, as I mentioned in my open, um, we've been seeing the democratization, a new trend of decentralization. We're starting to see um, you know, everyone's present online now, Clay Shirky wrote a book called, here comes everyone in 2005. Well everyone's here. Right? So you know, we're here, it's gonna be more open. But yet people are looking at as close right now. You're seeing the big players, um, or in the data. What's your vision of this open internet? >>Well, an open internet exists for everyone. And if you think about the evolution of the internet, when the internet was created for the first time really in history, anyone that had access to the internet could publish the content, whatever they were interested in and could find an audience. And of course that's grown to where we are today, where five billion people around the world are able to engage in all sorts of content, whether that's entertainment or education, news, movies. What's perhaps not so widely understood is that most of that content is paid for by advertising and there's a lot of systems that support advertising on the open Internet and some of those are under siege today certainly. >>And what's the big pressure point? Is it just more control the data? Is it just that these walled gardens are wanting to, you know, suck the audience in there? Is that monetization driving it? What's where's the friction? >>Well, the challenges is sort of the accumulation of power into a really small number of now giant corporations who have actually reduced a lot of the friction that marketers have in spending their money effectively. And it means that those companies are capturing a disproportionate spend of the ad budgets that fund digital content. So the problem is if more of the money goes to them, less of its going to independent content creators. It's actually getting harder for independent voices to emerge and be heard. And so that's the real challenges. That has more power consolidates into just a limited number of tech giants. The funding path for the open Internet becomes constrained and there'll be less choice for consumers without having to pay for subscriptions. >>Everyone knows the more data you have the better and certainly, but the centralized power when the trend is going the other way, the consensus is everyone wants to be decentralized more truth, more trust all this is being talked about on the heels of the google's news around, you know, getting rid of third party cookies and others have followed suit. Um, what does this mean? I mean, this cookies have been the major vehicle for tracking and getting that kind of data. What is gonna be replaced with what is this all about? And can you share with us what the future will look like? >>Sure, Well, just as advertising funds the open Internet is advertising technology that supports that advertising spend. It supports sort of the business of advertising that funds the open Internet. And within all of that technology is the need for different systems to be able to align around um the identification of for example, a consumer, Have they been to this site before? Have they seen an ad before? So there's all of these different systems that might be used for advertising for measurement, for attribution, for creating personalization. And historically they've relied upon the third party cookie as the mechanism for synchronization. Well, the third party cookie has been in decline for some time. It's already mostly gone from actually apple safari browser, but google's chrome has so much control over how people access the internet. And so it was when Google announced that chrome was going to deprecate the third party cookie, that it really sort of focus the minds of the industry in terms of finding alternative ways to tailor content and ultimately to just simply measure the effectiveness of advertising. And so there's an enormous amount of um innovation taking place right now to find alternative solutions. >>You know, some are saying that the free open internet was pretty much killed when, you know, the big comes like facebook and google started bringing all this data and kind of pulls all sucks all the auction in the room, so to speak. What's this mean with cookies now getting, getting rid of um, by google has an impact publishers because is it helpful? I mean hurtful. I mean, where's the where is that, what the publisher impact? >>Well, I don't think anyone really knows right now. So first of all, cookies weren't necessarily a very good solution to the sort of the challenge of maintaining state and understanding those sorts of the delivery of advertising and so on. It's just the one that's commonly used, I think for different publishers it may mean different things. But many publishers need to be able to demonstrate the value and the effectiveness of the advertising solutions that they deliver. So they'll be innovating in terms of how they use their first party data. They'll be continuing to use contextual solutions that have long been used to create advertising relevant, relevant. I think the big question of course is how we're going to measure it that any of this is effective at all because everyone relies upon measuring advertising effectiveness to justify capturing those budgets in the first place. >>You know, you mentioned contextual come up a lot also in the other interviews we've done with the folks in the around the internet around this topic of machine learning is a big 12 What is the impact of this with the modernization of the solution? You mentioned cookies? Okay cookies, old technology. But the mechanisms in this ecosystem around it or not, it funds the open internet. What is that modern solution that goes that next level? Is it contextual metadata? Is that shared systems? What's the it's the modernization of that. >>It's all of those and and more. There's no there's no single solution to replace the third party cookie. There'll be a combination of solutions. Part of that will be alternative identity mechanisms. So you know, you will start to see more registration wars to access content so that you have what's called a deterministic identify there will be statistical models so called probabilistic models, contextual has always been important. It will become more important and it will be combined with we use contextual combining natural language processing with machine learning models to really understand the detailed context of different pages across the internet. You'll also see the use of first party data and there are discussions about shared data services as well. I think there's gonna be a whole set of different innovations that will need to inter operate and it's going to be an evolutionary process as people get used to using these different systems to satisfy the different stages of the media fulfillment cycle from research and planning to activation to measurement. >>You know, you put up walled gardens. I want to just touch on the on on this kind of concept of walled gardens and and and and compare and contrast that with the demand for community, open internet has always fostered a community vibe. You see network effects mostly in distinct user communities or subnets of sub networks. If you will kind of walled gardens became that kind of group get together but then became more of a media solution to make the user is the product, as they say, facebook's a great example, right? People talk about facebook and from that misinformation abuse walled garden is not the best thing happening right now in the world, but yet is there any other other choice? That's how they're going to make money? But yet everyone wants trust, truth community. Are they usually exclusive? How do you see this evolving, what's your take? >>Well, I think the open internet is a, is a forum where anyone can have their voice, uh, put their voice out there and have it discovered and it's in that regard, it's a it's a force for good look. I think there are there are challenges, obviously in terms of some of the some of the optimization that takes place with inside the walled gardens, which is, is sort of optimized to drive engagement can have some unintended consequences. Um obviously that's something that's, that's broadly being discussed today and the impact on society, but sort of more at a more pointed level, it's just the absorption of advertising dollars. There's a finite amount of money from advertisers. It's estimated to be $400 billion this year in digital advertising. So it's a huge amount of money in terms of funding the open Internet, which sounds great except for its increasingly concentrated in a tiny number of companies. And so, you know, our job at Quan cast as champions of the free and open Internet is to help direct money effectively to publishers across the open internet and give advertisers a reliable, repeatable way of accessing the audiences that they care about in the environment they care about and delivering advertising results. >>It's a publisher, we care a lot about what our audience wants and try to serve them and listen to them. If we could get the data, we want that data and then also broker in the monetization with advertisers, who might want to reach that audience in whatever way. So this brings up the question of, you know, automation and role of data. You know, this is a huge thing to having that data closed loop, if you will for for publishers. But yet most publishers are small, some niche. And even as they can become super large, they don't have all the data and more, the more data, the better the machine learning. So what's the answer to this as it goes forward? How do we get there? What's the dots that that we need to connect to get that future state? >>So I think it takes it takes companies working together effectively. I think a really important part of it is, is a more direct conversation with consumers. We've seen that change beginning to happen over the past few years with the introduction of regulations that require clear communication to consumers about the data that's captured. And y and I think that creates an opportunity to explain to your audience is the way in which content is funded. So I think that consumer that consumer conversation will be part of the collective solution. >>You know, I want to as we wind down this kickoff segment, get your thoughts and vision around um, the evolution of the internet and you guys have done some great work at quan Cast is well documented, but everyone used to talk about traffic by traffic, then it became cost of acquisitions. PPC search. This is either mechanisms that people have been using for a long, long time, then you know, your connections but audience is about traffic, audience traffic. If this if my family is online, doesn't it become about networks and the people. So I want to get your thoughts and your vision because if community is going to be more important than people agree that it is and things are gonna be decentralized, more openness, more voices to be heard. You need to dress ability. The formation of networks and groups become super important. What's your vision on that? >>So my vision is to create relevance and utility for consumers. I think that's one of the things that's often forgotten is that when we make advertising more relevant and useful for consumers, it automatically fulfils the objectives that publishers and marketers have, everyone wins when advertising is more relevant. And our vision is to make advertising relevant across the entire open internet so that that ad supported model can continue to flourish and that five billion and hopefully many more billions in the future, people around the world have access to high quality, diverse content. >>If someone asked you Conrad, what is quant cast doing to make the open internet viable now that cookies are going away? What's the answer? >>So well, the cookie pieces is a central piece of it in terms of finding solutions that will enable sort of planning activation and measurement post cookies and we have a lot of innovation going on. There were also working with a range of industry bodies and our and our partners to build solutions for this. What we're really trying to do is to make buying the open internet as straightforward for marketers as it is today and buying the walled gardens. The reason the walled gardens capture so much money is they made it really easy for marketers to get results, marketers would like to be able to spend their money across all of the diverse publishes the open internet. You know, our job at Comcast is to make it just as easy to effectively spend money in funding the content that they really care about in reaching the audiences that they want. >>Great stuff. Great Mission. Conrad, thanks for coming on. Conrad Feldmann founder and Ceo here at the cookie conundrum recipe for success event, Quant Cast Industry summit on the demise of third party cookies. Thank you. Conrad appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, I'm john ferrier, stay with us for more on the industry event around the middle cookies. Mhm Yeah, yeah, thank you. Mhm. Welcome back to the Qantas industry summit on the demise of third party cookies, the cookie conundrum, a recipe for success. I'm john furrier host of the cube, the changing landscape of advertising is here and shit Gupta, founder of you of digital is joining us chief. Thanks for coming on this segment. Really appreciate, I know you're busy, you've got two young kids as well as providing education to the digital industry, you got some kids to take care of and train them to. So welcome to the cube conversation here as part of the program. >>Yeah, thanks for having me excited to be here. >>So the office of the changing landscape of advertising really centers around the open to walled garden mindset of the web and the big power players. We know the big 34 tech players dominate the marketplace so clearly in a major inflection point and we've seen this movie before Web mobile revolution which was basically a reply platform NG of capabilities. But now we're in an error of re factoring the industry, not re platt forming a complete changing over of the value proposition. So a lot at stake here as this open web, open internet, global internet evolves. What are your, what's your take on this, this industry proposals out there that are talking to this specific cookie issue? What does it mean? And what proposals are out there? >>Yeah, so, you know, I I really view the identity proposals and kind of to to kind of groups, two separate groups. So on one side you have what the walled gardens are doing and really that's being led by google. Right, so google um you know, introduce something called the privacy sandbox when they announced that they would be deprecating third party cookies uh as part of the privacy sandbox, they've had a number of proposals unfortunately, or you know, however you want to say they're all bird themed for some reason, I don't know why. Um but the one, the bird theme proposal that they've chosen to move forward with is called flock, which stands for Federated learning of cohorts. And essentially what it all boils down to is google is moving forward with cohort level learning and understanding of users in the future after third party cookies, unlike what we've been accustomed to in this space, which is a user level understanding of people and what they're doing online for targeting tracking purposes. And so that's on one side of the equation, it's what google is doing with flock and privacy sandbox now on the other side is, you know, things like unified I. D. Two point or the work that I. D five is doing around building new identity frameworks for the entire space that actually can still get down to the user level. Right? And so again, unified I. D. Two point oh comes to mind because it's the one that's probably got the most adoption in the space. It's an open source framework. So the idea is that it's free and pretty much publicly available to anybody that wants to use it and unified, I need to point out again is user level. So it's it's basically taking data that's authenticated data from users across various websites you know that are logging in and taking those authenticated users to create some kind of identity map. And so if you think about those two work streams right, you've got the walled gardens and or you know, google with flock on one side and then you've got unified I. D. Two point oh and other I. D. Frameworks for the open internet. On the other side, you've got these two very differing type of approaches to identity in the future. Again on the google side it's cohort level, it's going to be built into chrome. Um The idea is that you can pretty much do a lot of the things that we do with advertising today, but now you're just doing it at a group level so that you're protecting privacy, whereas on the other side of the open internet you're still getting down to the user level. Um And that's pretty powerful. But the the issue there is scale, right? We know that a lot of people are not logged in on lots of websites. I think the stat that I saw is under five of all website traffic is authenticated. So really if you if you simplify things you boil it all down, you have kind of these two very differing approaches. >>I guess the question it really comes down to what alternatives are out there for cookies and which ones do you think will be more successful? Because I think, you know, the consensus is at least from my reporting, in my view, is that the world agrees. Let's make it open, Which one is going to be better. >>Yeah, that's a great question, john So as I mentioned, right, we have we have to kind of work streams here, we've got the walled garden work streams, work stream being led by google and their work around flock, and then we've got the open internet, right? Let's say unified I. D to kind of represents that. I personally don't believe that there is a right answer or an endgame here. I don't think that one of them wins over the other, frankly, I think that, you know, first of all, you have those two frameworks, neither of them are perfect, they're both flawed in their own ways. There are pros and cons to both of them. And so what we're starting to see now is you have other companies kind of coming in and building on top of both of them as kind of a hybrid solution. Right? So they're saying, hey, we use, you know, an open I. D. Framework in this way to get down to the user level and use that authenticated data and that's important. But we don't have all the scale. So now we go to google and we go to flock to kind of fill the scale. Oh and hey, by the way, we have some of our own special sauce, right? We have some of our own data, we have some of our own partnerships, we're gonna bring that in and layer it on top. Right? And so really where I think things are headed is the right answer, frankly, is not one or the other. It's a little mishmash of both. With a little extra something on top. I think that's that's what we're starting to see out of a lot of companies in the space. And I think that's frankly where we're headed. >>What do you think the industry will evolve to, in your opinion? Because I think this is gonna, you can't ignore the big guys on this because these programmatic you mentioned also the data is there. But what do you think the market will evolve to with this, with this conundrum? >>So, so I think john where we're headed? You know, I think we're right now we're having this existential existential crisis, right? About identity in this industry, because our world is being turned upside down, all the mechanisms that we've used for years and years are being thrown out the window and we're being told they were gonna have new mechanisms, Right? So cookies are going away device ids are going away and now we got to come up with new things and so the world is being turned upside down and everything that you read about in the trades and you know, we're here talking about it, right? Like everyone's always talking about identity right now, where do I think this is going if I was to look into my crystal ball, you know, this is how I would kind of play this out. If you think about identity today. Right? Forget about all the changes. Just think about it now and maybe a few years before today, Identity for marketers in my opinion has been a little bit of a checkbox activity. Right? It's been hey, um, okay, uh, you know ad tech company or a media company, do you have an identity solution? Okay. Tell me a little bit more about it. Okay, Sounds good. That sounds good. Now can we move on and talk about my business and how are you going to drive meaningful outcomes or whatever for my business? And I believe the reason that is, is because identity is a little abstract, right? It's not something that you can actually get meaningful validation against. It's just something that, you know. Yes, You have it. Okay, great. Let's move on, type of thing. Right. And so that, that's, that's kind of where we've been now, all of a sudden The cookies are going away, the device ids are going away. And so the world is turning upside down in this crisis of how are we going to keep doing what we were doing for the last 10 years in the future. So everyone's talking about it and we're trying to re engineer right? The mechanisms now if I was to look into the crystal ball right 2 3 years from now where I think we're headed is not much is going to change. And what I mean by that john is um uh I think that marketers will still go to companies and say do you have an ID solution? Okay tell me more about it. Okay uh Let me understand a little bit better. Okay you do it this way. Sounds good. Now the ways in which companies are going to do it will be different right now. It's flock and unified I. D. And this and that right. The ways the mechanisms will be a little bit different but the end state right? Like the actual way in which we operate as an industry and kind of like the view of the landscape in my opinion will be very simple or very similar, right? Because marketers will still view it as a tell me you have an ID solution. Make me feel good about it. Help me check the box and let's move on and talk about my business and how you're going to solve for my needs. So I think that's where we're going. That is not by any means to discount this existential moment that we're in. This is a really important moment where we do have to talk about and figure out what we're going to do in the future. My just my viewpoint is that the future will actually not look all that different than the present. >>And I'll say the user base is the audience. Their their data behind it helps create new experiences, machine learning and Ai are going to create those and we have the data you have the sharing it or using it as we're finding shit Gupta great insight dropping some nice gems here. Founder of you of Digital and also the Adjunct professor of Programmatic advertising at Levi School of Business and santa Clara University professor. Thank you for coming dropping the gems here and insight. Thank you. >>Thanks a lot for having me john really appreciate >>it. Thanks for watching. The cooking 100 is the cube host Jon ferrier me. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Hello welcome back to the cookie conundrum recipe for success and industry conference and summit from Guanacaste on the demise of third party cookies. Got a great industry panel here to break it down chris Gunther Senior Vice president Global Head of programmatic at news corp chris thanks for coming on Zal in Managing Director Solutions at Z axis and Summer Simpson. Vice president Product at quan cast stellar panel. Looking forward to this conversation. Uh thanks for coming on and chatting about the cookie conundrum. Thank you for having us. So chris we'll start with you at news corp obviously a major publisher deprecation of third party cookies affects everyone. You guys have a ton of traffic, ton of audience across multiple formats. Um, tell us about the impact to you guys and the reliance he has had on them. And what are you gonna do to prepare for this next level change? >>Sure. I mean, I think like everyone in this industry there's uh a significant reliance and I think it's something that a lot of talk about audience targeting but obviously that reliance on third party cookies pervasive across the whole at tech ecosystem Martek stack. And so you know, we have to think about how that impact vendor vendors, we work with what it means in terms of use cases across marketing, across advertising, across site experience. So, you know, without a doubt, it it's it's significant, but you know, we look at it as listen, it's disruptive, uh, disruption and change is always a little scary. Um, but overall it's a, it's a long overdue reset. I mean, I think that, you know, our perspective is that the cookies, as we all know was it was a crutch, right sort of a technology being used in way it shouldn't. Um, and so as we look at what's going to happen presumably after Jan 2022 then it's, it's a good way to kind of fix on some bad practices practices that lead to data leakage, um, practice or devalue for our perspective, some of the, you know, we offered as as publishers and I think that this is a key thing is that we're not just looking to as we look at the post gender world, not just kind of recreating the prior world because the prior world was flawed or I guess you could say the current world since it hasn't changed yet. But the current world is flawed. Let's not just not, you know, let's not just replicate that. Let's make sure that, you know, third party cookie goes away. Other work around like fingerprinting and things like that. You know, also go away so philosophically, that's where our heads at. And so as we look at how we are preparing, you know, you look at what are the core building blocks of preparing for this world. Obviously one of the key ones is privacy compliance. Like how do we treat our users with consent? Yeah, obviously. Are we um aligned with the regulatory environments? Yeah. In some ways we're not looking just a Jan 2022, but Jan 23 where there's gonna be the majority of our audiences we covered by regulation. And so I think from regulation up to data gathering to data activation, all built around an internal identifier that we've developed that allows us to have a consistent look at our users whether they're logged in or obviously anonymous. So it's really looking across all those components across all our sites and in all in a privacy compliant way. So a lot of work to be done, a lot of work in progress. But we're >>excited about what's going on. I like how you framed at Old world or next gen kind of the current situation kind of flawed. And as you think about programmatic, the concept is mind blowing and what needs to be done. So we'll come back to that because I think that original content view is certainly relevant, a huge investment and you've got great content and audience consuming it from a major media standpoint. Get your perspective on the impact because you've got clients who want to get their their message out in front of the audience at the right time, at the right place and the right context. Right, So your privacy, you got consent, all these things kind of boiling up. How do you help clients prepare? Because now they can go direct to the consumer. Everyone, everyone has a megaphone, now, everyone's, everyone's here, everyone's connected. So how are you impacted by this new notion? >>You know, if if the cookie list future was a tic tac, dance will be dancing right now, and at least into the next year, um this has been top of mind for us and our clients for quite some time, but I think as each day passes, the picture becomes clearer and more in focus. Uh the end of the third party cookie does not mean the end of programmatic. Um so clients work with us in transforming their investments into real business outcomes based on our expertise and based on our tech. So we continue to be in a great position to lead to educate, to partner and to grow with them. Um, along this uh cookie list future, the impact will be all encompassing in changing the ways we do things now and also accelerating the things that we've already been building on. So we take it from the top planning will have a huge impact because it's gonna start becoming more strategic around real business outcomes. Uh where Omni channel, So clients want to drive outcomes, drew multiple touch points of a consumer's journey, whether it has programmatic, whether it has uh cookie free environment, like connected tv, digital home audio, gaming and so forth. So we're going to see more of these strategic holistic plans. Creative will have a lot of impact. It will start becoming more important with creative testing. Creative insights. You know, creative in itself is cookie list. So there will be more focused on how to drive uh brand dialogue to connect to consumers with less targeting. With less cookies, with the cohesiveness of holistic planning. Creative can align through multiple channels and lastly, the role of a. I will become increasingly important. You know, we've always looked to build our tech our products to complement new and existing technology as well as the client's own data and text back to deliver these outcomes for them. And ai in its core it's just taking input data uh and having an output of your desired outcome. So input data could be dSP data beyond cookies such as browser such as location, such as contextual or publisher taking clients first party data, first party crm data like store visitation, sales, site activity. Um and using that to optimize in real time regardless of what vendor or what channel we're on. Um So as we're learning more about this cookie list dance, we're helping our clients on the steps of it and also introducing our own moves. >>That's awesome. Data is going to be a key value proposition, connecting in with content real time. Great stuff. Somewhere with your background in journalism and you're the tech VP of product at quan cast. You have the keys to the kingdom over there. It's interesting Journalism is about truth and good content original content. But now you have a data challenge problem opportunity on both sides, brands and publishers coming together. It's a data problem in a way it's a it's a tech stack, not so much just getting the right as to show up at the right place the right time. It's really bigger than that now. What's your take on this? >>Um you know, >>so first >>I think that consumers already sort of like except that there is a reasonable value exchange for their data in order to access free content. Right? And that's that's a critical piece for us to all kind of like understand over the past. Hi guys, probably two years since even even before the G. D. P. R. We've been doing a ton of discovery with customers, both publishers and marketers. Um and so you know, we've kind of known this, this cookie going away thing has been coming. Um And you know, Google's announcement just kind of confirmed it and it's been, it's been really, really interesting since Google's announcement, how the conversations have changed with with our customers and other folks that we talked to. And I've almost gone from being like a product manager to a therapist because there's such an emotional response. Um you know, from the marketing perspective, there's real fear there. There's like, oh my God, how you know, it's not just about, you know, delivering ads, it's about how do I control frequency? How do I, how do I measure, you know, success? Because the technology has has grown so much over the years to really give marketers the ability to deliver personalized advertising, good content, right. The consumers um and be able to monitor it and control it so that it's not too too intrusive on the publisher perspective side, we see slightly different response. It's more of a yes, right. You know, we're taking back control and we're going to stop the data leakage, we're going to get the value back for our inventory. Um and that both things are a good thing, but if it's, if it's not managed, it's going to be like ships passing in the night, right? In terms of um of, you know, they're there, them coming together, right, and that's the critical pieces that they have to come together. They have to get closer, you got to cut out a lot of that loom escape in the middle so that they can talk to each other and understand what's the value exchange happening between marketers and publishers and how do we do that without cookies? >>It's a fascinating, I love love your insight there. I think it's so relevant and it's got broader implications because, you know, if you look at how data's impact, some of these big structural changes and re factoring of industries, look at cyber security, you know, no one wants to share their data, but now if they share they get more insight, more machine learning, benefit more ai benefit. So now we have the sharing notion, but that goes against counter the big guys that want to wall garden, they want to hoard all the data and and control that to provide their own personalization. So you have this confluence of, hey, I want to hoard the data and then now I want to share the data. So so christmas summer you're in the, in the wheelhouse, you got original content and there's other providers out there. So is there the sharing model coming with privacy and these kinds of services? Is the open, come back again? How do you guys see this uh confluence of open versus walled gardens, because you need the data to make machine learning good. >>So I'll start uh start off, I mean, listen, I think you have to give credit to the walled gardens have created, I think as we look as publishers, what are we offering to our clients, what are we offering to the buy side? We need to be compelling. We shouldn't just be uh yeah, actually as journalists, I think that there is a case of the importance of funding journalism. Um but ultimately we need to make sure we're meeting the KPI is and the business needs of the buy side. And I think around that it is the sort of three core pillars that its ease of access, its scope of of activation and targeting and finally measurable results. So as I think is us as an individual publishers, so we have, we have multiple publications. So we do have scale. But then in partnership with other publishers perhaps to organizations like pre bid, you know, I think we can, you know, we're trying to address that and I think we can offer something that's compelling um, and transparent in terms of what these results are. But obviously, you know, I want to make sure it's clear transparent terms of results, but obviously where there's privacy in terms of the data and I think the form, you know, I think we've all heard a lot like data clean rooms, a lot of them out there flogging those wears. I think there's something valuable but you know, I think it's the right who is sort of the right partner or partners um and ultimately who allows us to get as close as possible to the buy side. And so that we can share that data for targeting, share it for perhaps for measurement, but obviously all in a privacy compliant >>way summer, what's your take on this? Because you talk about the future of the open internet democratization, the network effect that we're seeing in Vire al Itty and across multiple on the on the channels. Is that pointed out what's happening? That's the distribution now. So um that's almost an open garden model. So it's like um yeah, >>yeah, it's it's um you know, back in the day, you know, um knight ridder who was who was the first group that I that I worked for, um you know, each of those individual properties, um we're not hugely valuable on their own from a digital perspective, but together as a unit, they became valuable, right, and got scale for advertisers. Now we're in a place where, you know, I kind of think that each of those big networks are going to have to come together and work together to compare in size to the, to the world gardens. Um, and yeah, this is something that we've talked about before and an open garden. Um, I think that's the, that's the definitely the right route to take. And I and I agree with chris it's, it's about publishers getting as close to the market. Is it possible working with the tech companies that enable them to do that and doing so in a very privacy centric >>way. So how do we bring the brands and agencies together to get ready for third party cookies? Because there is a therapist moment here of it's gonna be okay. The parachute will open. The future is not gonna be as as grim. Um, it's a real opportunity. But if managed properly, what's your take on this is just more first party data strategy and what's your assessment of this? >>So we collaborated right now with ball grants on how did this still very complex cookie list future. Um, you know what's going to happen in the future? 2, 6 steps that we can take right now and market should take. Um, The first step is to gather intel on what's working on your current campaign, analyzing the data sets across cookie free environment. So you can translate those tactics eventually when the cookies do go away. So we have to look at things like temperature or time analysis. We could look at log level data. We could look at site analytics data. We can look at brand measurement tools and how creative really impacts the campaign success. The second thing we can look at is geo targeting strategies. The geo target strategy has been uh underrated because the granularity and geo data could go down all the way to the local level, even beyond zip code. So for example the census black data and this is especially important for CPG brands. So we're working closely with the client teams to understand not only the online data but the offline data and how we can utilize that in the future. Uh We want to optimize investments around uh markets that are working so strong markets and then test and underperforming markets. The third thing we can look at is contextual. So contextual by itself is cookie free. Uh We could build on small scale usage to test and learn various keywords and content categories based sets. Working closely with partners to find ways to leverage their data to mimic audiences that you are trying to target right now with cookies. Um the 4th 1 is publisher data or publisher targeting. So working with your publishers that you have strong relationships with who can curate similar audiences using their own first party data and conducting RFs to understand the scale and reach against your audience and their future role maps. So work with your top publishers based on historical data to try to recreate your best strategies. The 15 and I think this is very important is first party data, you know, that's going to matter more than ever. In the calculus future brands will need to think about how to access and developed the first party data starting with the consumers seeing a value in exchange for the information. It's a gold mine and understanding of consumer, their intent, the journey um and you need a really great data science team to extract insights out of that data, which will be crucial. So partner with strategic onboarding vendors and vet their ability to accept first party data into a cleaner environment for targeting for modeling for insight. And lastly, the six thing that we can do is begin to inform prospect prospecting by dedicating test budget to start gaining learnings about cookie list 11 place that we can start and it is under invested right now is Safari and Firefox. They have been calculus for quite some time so you can start here and begin testing here. Uh work with your data scientist team to understand the right mix is to to target and start exploring other channels outside of um just programmatic cookies like CTV digital, out of home radio gaming and so forth. So those are the six steps that we're taking right now with our clients to uh prepare and plan for the cookie list future. >>So chris let's go back to you. What's the solution here? Is there one, is there multiple solutions? What's the future look like for a cookie was future? >>Uh I think the one certain answers, they're definitely not just one solution. Um as we all know right now there there seems to be endless solutions, a lot of ideas out there, proposals with the W three C uh work happening within other industry bodies uh you know private companies solutions being offered and you know, it's a little bit of it's enough to make everyone's head spin and to try to track it to understand and understand the impact. And as a publisher were obviously a lot of people are knocking on our door. Uh they're saying, hey our solution is one that is going to bring in lots of money, you know, the all the buy side is going to use it. This is the one like I ma call to spend um, and so expect here and so far is that none of these solutions are I think everyone is still testing and learning no one on the buy side from our, from our knowledge is really committed to one or a few. It's all about a testing stage. I think that, you know, putting aside all that noise, I think what matters the most to us as publisher is actually something summer mentioned before. It's about control. You know, if we're going to work with a again, outside of our sort of, you know, internal identifier work that we're doing is we're going to work with an outside party or outside approach doesn't give us control as a publisher to ensure that it is, we control the data from our users. There isn't that data leakage, it's probably compliant. What information gets shared out there. What is it, what's released within within the bid stream? Uh If it is something that's attached to a somewhat declared user registered user that if that then is not somehow amplified or leverage off on another site in a way that is leveraging bit stream data or fingerprinting and going against. I think that the spirit of what we're trying to do in a post third party cookie world so that those controls are critical and I think they have those controls, his publisher, we have collectively be disciplined in what solutions that we we test out and what we eventually adopt. But even when the adoption point arrives, uh definitely it will not be one. There will be multiple because it's just too many use cases to address >>great, great insight there from, from you guys, news corp summer. Let's get back to you. I want to get your thoughts. You've been in many waves of innovation ups and downs were on a new one. Now we talked about the open internet democratization. Journalism is under a lot of pressure now, but there's now a wave of quality people really leaning in towards fighting misinformation, understanding truth and community and date is at the heart of it. What do you see as the new future for journalists, reward journalism is our ways their path forward. >>So there's uh, there's what I hope is going to happen. Um, and then I'm just gonna ignore what could write. Um, you know, there's there's a trend in market right now, a number of fronts, right? So there are marketers who are leaning into wanting to spend their marketing dollars with quality journalists, focusing on bipac owned and operated, really leaning into into supporting those businesses that have been uh, those publishers that have been ignored for years. I really hope that this trend continues. Um We are leaning into into helping um, marketers curate that supply right? And really, uh, you know, speak with their dollars about the things that that they support. Um, and uh, and and value right in market. So I'm hoping that that trend continues and it's not just sort of like a marketing blip. Um, but we will do everything possible to kind of like encourage that behavior and and give people the information they need to find, you know, truly high quality journalism. >>That's awesome chris Summer. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insight on this panel on the cookie list future. Before we go, just quick summary each of you. If you don't mind just giving a quick sound bite or bumper sticker of what we can expect. If you had to throw a prediction For what's going to happen in the next 24 months Chris We'll start with you. >>Uh it's gonna be quite a ride. I think that's an understatement. Um I think that there, I wouldn't be surprised if if google delays the change to the chrome by a couple of months and and may give the industry some much needed time, but no one knows. I guess. I guess I'm not except for someone somewhere deep within chrome. So I think we all have to operate in a way that changes to happen, changes to happen quickly and it's gonna cover across all facets of the industry, all facets of from advertising, marketing. So just be >>prepared. >>Yeah, along the same lines, be prepared, nobody knows what's going to happen in the future. Uh You know, while dancing in this together. Uh I think um for us it's um planning and preparing and also building on what we've already been working on. Um So omni channel ai um creative and I think clients will uh lean more into those different channels, >>awesome. So we'll pick us home, last word. >>I think we're in the throwing spaghetti against the wall stage. Right, so this is a time of discovery of leaning in trying everything out, Learning and iterating as fast as we possibly >>can. Awesome. And I love the cat in the background over your shoulder. Can't stop staring at your wonderful cat. Thanks for coming on chris, Thanks for coming on. This awesome panel industry breakdown of the cookie conundrum. The recipe for success data ai open. Uh The future is here, it's coming, it's coming fast. I'm john fryer with the cube. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Mhm. Welcome back to the Quant Cast industry summit on the demise of third party cookies. The cookie conundrum, a recipe for success. We're here peter day. The cto of quad cast and crew T cop car, head of product marketing quad cast. Thanks for coming on talking about the changing advertising landscape. >>Thanks for having us. Thank you for having >>us. So we've been hearing this story out to the big players. Want to keep the data, make that centralized control, all the leverage and then you've got the other end. You got the open internet that still wants to be free and valuable for everyone. Uh what's what are you guys doing to solve this problem? Because cookies go away? What's going to happen there? How do people track things you guys are in this business first question? What is quan cast strategies to adapt to third party cookies going away? What's gonna be, what's gonna be the answer? >>Yeah. So uh very rightly said, john the mission, the Qantas mission is the champion of free and open internet. Uh And with that in mind, our approach to this world without third party cookies is really grounded in three fundamental things. Uh First as industry standards, we think it's really important to participate and to work with organizations who are defining the standards that will guide the future of advertising. So with that in mind, we've been participating >>with I. A. B. >>Tech lab, we've been part of their project Triarc. Uh same thing with pre bid, who's kind of trying to figure out the pipes of identity. Di di di di di pipes of uh of the future. Um And then also is W three C, which is the World Wide Web Consortium. Um And our engineers and our engineering team are participating in their weekly meetings trying to figure out what's happening with the browsers and keeping up with the progress they're on things such as google's block. Um The second uh sort of thing is interoperability, as you've mentioned, there are lots of different uh I. D. Solutions that are emerging. You have you I. D. Two point oh, you have live RAM, you have google's flock. Uh And there will be more, there are more and they will continue to be more. Uh We really think it is important to build a platform that can ingest all of these signals. And so that's what we've done. Uh The reason really is to meet our customers where they are at today. Our customers use multiple different data management platforms, the mps. Um and that's why we support multiple of those. Um This is not going to be much different than that. We have to meet our customers where we are, where they are at. And then finally, of course, which is at the very heart of who contrast is innovation. Uh As you can imagine being able to take all of these multiple signals in including the I. D. S. And the cohorts, but also others like contextual first party um consent is becoming more and more important. Um And then there are many other signals, like time, language geo location. So all of these signals can help us understand user behavior intent and interests um in absence of 3rd party cookies. However, uh there's there's something to note about this. They're very raw, their complex, they're messy all of these different signals. Um They are changing all the time, they're real time. Um And there's incomplete information isolation. Just one of these signals cannot help you build a true and complete picture. So what you really need is a technology like AI and machine learning to really bring all of these signals together, combine them statistically and get an understanding of user behavior intent and interests and then act on it, be it in terms of providing audience insights um or responding to bid requests and and so on and so forth. So those are sort of the three um fundamentals that our approach is grounded in which is industry standards, interoperability and and innovation. Uh and you know, you have peter here, who is who is the expert So you can dive much deeper into >>it. Is T. T. O. You've got to tell us how is this going to actually work? What are you guys doing from a technology standpoint to help with data driven advertising in a third party cookie list world? >>Well, we've been um This is not a shock, you know, I think anyone who's been close to his space has known that the 3rd Party Cookie has been um uh reducing inequality in terms of its pervasiveness and its longevity for many years now. And the kind of death knell is really google chrome making a, making the changes that they're gonna be making. So we've been investing in the space for many years. Um and we've had to make a number of hugely diverse investment. So one of them is in how as a marketer, how do I tell if my marketing still working in the world without >>computers? The >>majority of marketers completely reliant on third party cookies today to tell them if they're if they're marketing is working or not. And so we've had to invest heavily and statistical techniques which are closer to kind of economic trick models that markets are used to things like out of home advertising, It's going to establishing whether they're advertising is working or not in a digital environment actually, >>just as >>often, you know, as is often the case in these kind of times of massive disruption, there's always opportunity to make things better. And we really think that's true. And you know, digital measurement has often mistaken precision for accuracy. And there's a real opportunity to kind of see the wood for the trees if you like. And start to come with better methods of measuring the affections of advertising without third party cookies. And in fact to make countless other investments in areas like contextual modeling and and targeting that third party cookies and and uh, connecting directly to publishers rather than going through this kind of bloom escape that's gonna tied together third party cookies. So if I was to enumerate all the investments we've made, I think we'll be here till midnight but we have to make a number of vestments over a number of years and that level investments only increasing at the moment. >>Peter on that contextual. Can you just double click on that and tell us more? >>Yeah, I mean contextual is unfortunately these things, this is really poorly defined. It can mean everything from a publisher saying, hey, trust us, this dissipated about CVS to what's possible now and has only really been possible the last couple of years, which is to build >>statistical >>models of the entire internet based on the content that people are actually consumed. And this type of technology requires massive data processing capabilities. It's able to take advantage of the latest innovations in there is like natural language processing and really gives um computers are kind of much deeper and richer understanding of the internet, which ultimately makes it possible to kind of organize, organized the Internet in terms of the types of content of pages. So this type of technology has only been possible the last two years and we've been using contextual signals since our inception, it's always been massively predictive in terms of audience behaviours, in terms of where advertising is likely to work. And so we've been very fortunate to keep the investment going um and take advantage of many of these innovations that have happened in academia and in kind of uh in adjacent areas >>on the ai machine learning aspect, that seems to be a great differentiator in this day and age for getting the most out of the data. How is machine learning and ai factoring into your platform? >>I think it's, it's how we've always operated right from our interception when we started as a measurement company, the way that we were giving our customers at the time, we were just publishers, just the publisher side of our business insights into who their audience was, were, was using machine learning techniques. And that's never really changed. The foundation of our platform has always been, has always been machine learning from from before. It was cool. A lot of our kind of, a lot of our core teams have backgrounds in machine learning phds in statistics and machine learning and and that really drives our our decision making. I mean, data is only useful if you can make sense of it and if you can organize it and if you can take action on it and to do that at this kind of scout scale, it's absolutely necessary to use machine learning technology. >>So you mentioned contextual also, you know, in advertising, everyone knows in that world that you've got the contextual behavioural dynamics, the behavior that's kind of generally everyone's believing is happening. The consensus is undeniable is that people are wanting to expect an environment where there's trust, there's truth, but also they want to be locked in. They don't wanna get walled into a walled garden, nobody wants to be in the world, are they want to be free to pop around and visit sites is more horizontal scalability than ever before. Yet, the bigger players are becoming walled garden, vertical platforms. So with future of ai the experience is going to come from this data. So the behavior is out there. How do you get that contextual relevance and provide the horizontal scale that users expect? >>Yeah, I think it's I think it's a really good point and we're definitely this kind of tipping point. We think, in the broader industry, I think, you know, every published right, we're really blessed to work with the biggest publishers in the world, all the way through to my mom's vlog, right? So we get to hear the perspectives of publishers at every scale. I think they consistently tell us the same thing, which is they want to more directly connected consumers, they don't wanna be tied into these walled gardens, which dictate how they must present their content and in some cases what content they're allowed to >>present. >>Um and so our job as a company is to really provide level >>the playing field a little bit, >>provide them the same capabilities they're only used to in the walled gardens, but let's give them more choice in terms of how they structure their content, how they organize their content, how they organize their audiences, but make sure that they can fund that effectively by making their audiences in their environments discoverable by marketers measurable by marketers and connect them as directly as possible to make that kind of ad funded economic model as effective in the open Internet as it is in social. And so a lot of the investments we've made over recent years have been really to kind of realize that vision, which is, it should be as easy for a marketer to be able to understand people on the open internet as it is in social media. It should be as effective for them to reach people in the environment is really high quality content as it is on facebook. And so we invest a lot of a lot of our R and D dollars in making that true. We're now live with the Comcast platform, which does exactly that. And as third party cookies go away, it only um only kind of exaggerated or kind of further emphasizes the need for direct connections between brands and publishers. And so we just wanna build the technology that helps make that true and gives the kind of technology to these marketers and publishers to connect and to deliver great experiences without relying on these kind of walled >>gardens. Yeah, the Director Director, Consumer Director audience is a new trend. You're seeing it everywhere. How do you guys support this new kind of signaling from for for that's happening in this new world? How do you ingest the content and just this consent uh signaling? >>Uh we were really fortunate to have an amazing, amazing R and D. Team and, you know, we've had to do all sorts to make this, you need to realize our vision. This has meant things like, you know, we have crawlers which scan the entire internet at this point, extract the content of the pages and kind of make sense of it and organize it uh, and organize it for publishers so they can understand how their audiences overlap with potential competitors or collaborators. But more importantly, organize it for marketers. So you can understand what kind of high impact opportunities are there for them there. So, you know, we've had to we've had to build a lot of technology. We've had to build analytics engines, which can get answers back in seconds so that marketers and publishers can kind of interact with their own data and make sense of it and present it in a way that's compelling and help them drive their strategy as well as their execution. We've had to invest in areas like consent management because we believe that a free and open internet is absolutely reliant on trust and therefore we spend a lot of our time thinking about how do we make it easy for end users to understand who has access to their data and easy for end users to be able to opt out. And uh and as a result of that, we've now got the world's most widely adopted adopted consent management platform. So it's hard to tackle one of these problems without tackling all of them. Were fortunate enough to have had a large enough R and D budget over the last four or five years, make a number investments, everything from consent and identity through context, your signals through the measurement technologies, which really bring advertisers >>and Publishers places together great insight. Last word for you is what's the what's the customer view here as you bring these new capabilities of the platform, uh what's what are you guys seeing as the highlight uh from a platform perspective? >>So the initial response that we've seen from our customers has been very encouraging, both on the publisher side as well as the marketer side. Um I think, you know, one of the things we hear quite a lot is uh you guys are at least putting forth a solution, an actual solution for us to test Peter mentioned measurement, that really is where we started because you cannot optimize what you cannot measure. Um so that that is where his team has started and we have some measurement very, very uh initial capabilities still in alpha, but they are available in the platform for marketers to test out today. Um so the initial response has been very encouraging. People want to engage with us um of course our, you know, our fundamental value proposition, which is that the Qantas platform was never built to be reliant on on third party data. These stale segments like we operate, we've always operated on real time live data. Um The second thing is, is our premium publisher relationships. We have had the privilege of working like Peter said with some of the um biggest publishers, but we also have a very wide footprint. We have first party tags across um over 100 million plus web and mobile destinations. Um and you know, as you must have heard like that sort of first party footprint is going to come in really handy in a world without third party cookies, we are encouraging all of our customers, publishers and marketers to grow their first party data. Um and so that that's something that's a strong point that customers love about us and and lean into it quite a bit. Um So yeah, the initial response has been great. Of course it doesn't hurt that we've made all these are in the investments. We can talk about consent. Um, and you know, I often say that consent, it sounds simple, but it isn't, there's a lot of technology involved, but there's lots of uh legal work involved as it as well. We have a very strong legal team who has expertise built in. So yeah, very good response. Initially >>democratization. Everyone's a publisher. Everyone's a media company. They have to think about being a platform. You guys provide that. So I congratulate Peter. Thanks for dropping the gems there. Shruti, thanks for sharing the product highlights. Thanks for, for your time. Thank you. Okay, this is the quan cast industry summit on the demise of third party cookies. And what's next? The cookie conundrum. The recipe for success with Kwan Cast. I'm john free with the cube. Thanks for watching. Mm