>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE and we're here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Group. Happen to have on the program one of the users here at the event, Andrew Baxter, who's the Director of Systems Engineering with Commonwealth Financial Network. Andrew, thanks so much for joining me. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, tell us a little bit about your organization and your role there. >> Certainly, Commonwealth Financial Network is an independent broker-dealer. We have a network of roughly 2,000 advisors throughout the country, just based in the U.S right now and we, that's what we do. We're a clearing house for them. We provide all their IT infrastructure for them. >> Okay, the good news is that financial, like most industries, isn't going through any change today, right, Andrew? >> Oh, yeah, absolutely no. We've got the Department of Labor is our big bugaboo right now. >> Yep. So what are some of the biggest challenging? Is it regulation? Is it uncertainty? Is it, you know, technology? What are some of the drivers of the business? >> It's a combination of both. We have a lot of issues with regulation because of such people as Enron and whatnot. >> Smartest people in the room, right? >> Exactly. And it's not, the regulation's not a bad thing. It's just, can be problematic to work with. So the most recent one is the Department of Labor where they have decided how your retirement funding can be managed and to make sure that there is no conflict of interest. >> Okay, so. (laughs) It, yeah, we're not going to get political here. >> No, nope, no, absolutely. >> And go into how much government and all everything like that. >> What does that mean to your all? Tell us a little bit about what you manage >> Sure >> and really from that standpoint. >> So my group is responsible for our virtualization, our server platform, all of our storage, our data protection be it back up, antivirus, things like that. So we've got several different systems from a performance standpoint, and then we've got also have things from a compliance standpoint, a lot of WORM drives in the form of Centera or Hitachi Content Platform, and then the storage that goes around it and the applications that go with them. >> Alright. Well, you've got one of the hot button topics, security. >> Yeah. >> Tell us a little bit about, you know, there's the compliance and the security, how is that impacting what you're doing these days? >> So they're sort of two different things. Compliance is one thing, >> Yeah. maintaining your compliance with the security level. You know, we have a whole group, two groups actually, independent of each other, that sort of check each other, and then check us to make sure that, one, we're keeping the patch levels up, but also that we're following best practices to try to keep the bad guys out. We, I think everybody knows that you can't keep them out if they really want in. It really comes down to how you're going to react and so we've got to make sure that we have the tools in place to be able to react appropriately. >> Yeah, one of the things we've been looking at is, you know, security used to just be ah let the networking people take care of it. >> Right. >> We put up some firewalls. We do some things. Now, security, a lot of times, getting up to the board level type of discussion. What's the dynamic in your organization? >> Yeah, so, we do have the traditional on the network side. But we have a group within that that is specifically focused on that and it's more than just the network side of it. And then we have the information security group and that's more the board level where they're helping to define what types of data are critical, you know, personally identifiable information. We have HIPAA, other regulations like that, FINRA, the SEC, that we have to make sure we secure your information as well as possible. >> Okay, what brings you to this event? >> So, we've been a customer or partner with Winslow. I like to think of my vendors, for lack of a better word, as partners. I don't want to just use them as somebody I call when I need something. I want them to be somebody who is involved in the process, whatever that may be. And in this case, right now we're currently using them for all of our virtual desktop infrastructure, from the storage, the server standpoint. We're using some Dell products for wireless and things like that. And then, as time goes on, we start to do more refresh of equipment, then we're going to be looking at all of the vendors and not just the traditional ones. So, you know, you got the big three, sort of, HP, Dell and Lenovo in the server market or UCS as well. So we're going to make sure we look at all of them to see who has the best offering for us, for what we need. >> Okay. What about a cloud? How does that fit into your organization? Do you have, you know, cloud means many things to many people. >> Sure. >> But what does it mean to your organization? What's the strategy look like today? >> So we have two situations. One, we are actually a cloud for all of our advisors. We provide them with their exchange, their active directory, their antivirus, their patching, things like that. And then we're also looking at the Azure and the AWS offerings. We had to be very careful as we move to those offerings because we have to make sure that we retain this security level when that data leaves our hands, as it were. The financial markets tend to be a little slow moving to that kind of stuff because we've got very sensitive data that we've got to make sure that doesn't go away, doesn't get breached, and doesn't become generally available to the world. >> Yeah. Talk to us a little bit about what data means to your organization >> Sure. >> Of course, securities piece. How are you, are there initiatives to leverage data more, you know, you look almost like a service provider. >> Sure. >> We've seen many organizations that leverage that kind of technology. >> So, one of the, there's a couple different ways we do that. One of them is the actual software we've written for our advisors to use. So we're providing them with all the information they could ever want about their clients, their performance of the portfolios, things like that. But then there's also, on the other side, we're starting to look more into the power of BI and that kind of information so that we can start leveraging, sort of, paying more attention to how our products are being used in a more proactive manner instead of reactive. >> Okay, Curious how things like Hyperledger and Blockchain, you know, play into, does it play into anything you're doing today? What does your organization look at? >> Not currently. It will be down the road, I'm sure. But at this point it's not something we, because we really just haven't moved anything out to that area yet. >> Okay, great. I want to give you, really, the last word. What do you, kind of, when you come into an event like this, what are you looking for? What do you hope to take away from this? >> I'm looking for what's new, what's coming. I want, I need to make sure that I'm trying to stay ahead of things because part of what we have to do is we have to set the tone for what's going to be coming in the coming years. And so, I don't want to just see the same old thing. And that's one thing I like about Winslow. They do keep on the cutting edge. They do keep on forward. They've got cloud, you know, for lack of a better term, as part of their portfolio. And I feel that they actually know what they're doing. I have worked with some vendors that, they could spell the word, but that was about it. >> Absolutely. The cloud washing if you will. >> Yes. >> Alright, well, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate the updates on where all of this technology fits into your environment and you've been watching theCUBE.

>>Mhm. Mhm. >>We're here with the Cube covering Calm Vault Connections 21. We're gonna look at the data protection space and how cloud computing has advanced the way we think about backup recovery and protecting our most critical data. Ranga Rajagopalan, who is the vice president of products at Con vault and Stephen Orban, who's the General manager of AWS marketplace and control services gents. Welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Thank you. Always A pleasure to see you here >>steve. Thanks for having us. Very >>welcome, Stephen, let's start with you. Look the cloud has become a staple of digital infrastructure. I don't know where we'd be right now without being able to access enterprise services I. T. Services remotely. Um But specifically how our customers looking at backup and recovery in the cloud, is it a kind of a replacement for existing strategies? Is it another layer of protection? How are they thinking about that? >>Yeah. Great question. David again, thank thanks for having me. And I think you know, look if you look back to 15 years ago when the founders of AWS had the hypothesis that many enterprises governments and developers we're gonna want access to on demand pay as you go I. T. Resources in the cloud. Uh None of us would have been able to predict that it would have Matured and um you know become the staple that it has today over the last 15 years. But the reality is that a lot of these enterprise customers, many of whom have been doing their own IT infrastructure for the last 10, 20 or multiple decades do have to kind of figure out how they deal with the change management of moving to the cloud. And while a lot of our customers um will initially come to us because they're looking to save money or costs, almost all of them decided to stay and go big because of the speed at which they are able to innovate on behalf of their customers and when it comes to storage and backup, that just plays right into where they're headed. And there's a variety of different techniques that customers use, whether it be, you know, a lift and shift for a particular set of applications or a data center where they do very much. Look at how can they replace the backup and recovery that they have on premises in the cloud using solutions like, but we're partnering with console to do or completely reimagining their architecture for net new developments that they can really move quickly for their customers. Um and and completely developing something brand new, where it is really a, you know, a brand new replacement and innovation for for for what they've done in the past. >>Great, thank you, Stephen Rachael, I want to ask you about the d were digital. Look, if you're not a digital business today, you're basically out of business. So, my question to you is how have you seen customers change the way they think about data protection during what I call the forced March to digital over the last 18, 19 months or customers, you know, thinking about data protection differently today >>definitely Dave and and thank you for having me and steven. Pleasure to join you on this cube interview first going back to stevens comments can't agree more. Almost every business that we talked with today has a cloud first strategy, a cloud transformation mandate and you know, the reality is back to your digital comment. There are many different paths to the hybrid multi cloud and different customers. You know, there are different parts of the journey. So I still was saying most often customers at least in the data protection perspective start the conversation by thinking here have all these tips. Can I start using cloud as my air gap long term retention target and before they realized they start moving their workloads into the cloud and none of the backup and record yesterday's are going to change. So you need to continue protecting the clothes, which is where the cloud native data protection comes in and then they start innovating around er, can I use cloud as media sites so that you know, I don't need to meet in the other side. So this year is all around us. Cloud transformation is all around us and and the real essence of this partnership between AWS and calm vault is essentially to dr and simplify all the paths to the club regardless of whether you're going to use it as a storage started or you know, your production data center, all your dear disaster recovery site. >>Yeah, it really is about providing that optionality for customers. I talked to a lot of customers and said, hey, our business resilience strategy was really too focused on D. R. I've talked to all the customers at the other end of the spectrum said we don't even have a D. R. Strategy now, we're using the cloud for that. So it's really all over the map and you want that optionality. So steven and then go ahead. >>Please, ransomware plays a big role in many of these considerations that greatly. It's unfortunately not a question of whether you're going to be hit by ransomware, it's almost we can like, what do you do when you're hit by ransomware and the ability to use the clothes scaled immediately, bring up the resources, use the cloud backups has become a very popular choice simply because of the speed with which you can bring the business back to normal our patients. The agility and the power that cloud brings to the table. >>Yeah, ransomware is scary. You don't, you don't even need a high school diploma to be a ransomware ist you can just go on the dark web and by ransomware as a service and do bad things and hopefully you'll end up in jail. Uh Stephen we know about the success of the AWS marketplace, uh you guys are partnering here. I'm interested in how that partnership, you know, kind of where it started and how it's evolving. >>Yeah, happy to highlight on that. So, look when >>we when we started >>Aws or when the founders of aws started aws, as I said 15 years ago we we realized very early on that while we were going to be able to provide a number of tools for customers to have on demand access to compute storage, networking databases that many, particularly enterprise and government government customers still use a wide range of tools and solutions from hundreds, if not in some cases thousands of different partners. I mean I talked to enterprises who literally use thousands of of different vendors to help them deliver their solutions for their customers. So almost 10 years ago, we're almost at our 10 year anniversary for AWS marketplace, we launched the first substantiation of AWS marketplace which allowed builders and customers to find try buy and then deploy third party software solutions running on amazon machine instances also noticed as armies natively right in their AWS and cloud accounts to complement what they were doing in the cloud. And over the last nearly 10 years we've evolved quite a bit to the point where we support software and multiple different packaging types, whether it be amazon machine instances, containers, machine learning models and of course SAS and the rise of software as a service. So customers don't have to manage the software themselves. But we also support data products through the AWS Data exchange and professional services for customers who want to get services to help them integrate the software into their environments. And we now do that across a wide range of procurement options. So what used to be pay as you go amazon machine instances now includes multiple different ways to contract directly, customer can do that directly with the vendor with their channel partner or using kind of our public e commerce capabilities. And we're super excited, um, over the last couple of months we've been partnering with calm vault to get their industry leading backup and recovery solutions listed on AWS marketplace, which is available for our collective customers now. So not only do they have access to convulse awesome solutions to help them protect against ransomware as we talked about and to manage their backup and recovery environments, but they can find and deploy that directly in one click right into their AWS accounts and consolidate their building relationship right on the AWS and voice. And it's been awesome to work with with Rhonda and the product teams and convo to really, um, expose those capabilities where converts using a lot of different AWS services to provide a really great native experience for our collective customers as they migrate to the cloud. >>Yeah, the marketplace has been amazing. We've watched it evolve over the past decade and, and, and it's a, it's a key characteristic of everybody has a cloud today. We're a cloud to butt marketplaces unique uh, in that it's the power of the ecosystem versus the resources of one and Ringo. I wonder from, from your perspective, if you could talk about the partnership with AWS from your view and then specifically you've got some hard news, I wonder if you could talk about that as well. >>Absolute. So the partnership has been extended for more than 12 years. Right. So aws and Commonwealth have been bringing together solutions that help customers solve the data management challenges and everything that we've been doing has been driven by the customer demand that we seek. Right customers are moving their workloads in the cloud. They're finding new ways of deploying their workloads and protecting them. Um, you know, earlier we introduced cloud native integration with the EBS API which has driven almost 70% performance improvements in backup and restores. And when you look at huge customers like coca cola who have standardized on AWS um, combo. That is the scale that they want to operate in. You manage around 1 50,000 snapshots 1200 ec, two instances across six regions. But with just one resource dedicated for the data management strategy. Right? So that's where the real built in integration comes into play and we've been extending it to make use of the cloud efficiencies like our management and auto scale and so on. Another aspect is our commitment to a radically simple customer experience and that's, you know, I'm sure Stephen would agree it's a big month for at AWS as well. That's really together with the customer demand which brought us together to introduce com ball into the AWS marketplace exactly the way Stephen described it. Now the heart announcement is coming back up and recovery is available in native this marketplace. So the exact four steps that Stephen mentioned, find, try buy and deploy everything simplified through the marketplace So that our aws customers can start using far more back of software in less than 20 minutes. A 60 year trial version is included in the product through marketplace and you know, it's a single click buy, we use the cloud formation templates to deploy. So it becomes a super simple approach to protect the AWS workloads and we protect a lot of them. Starting from easy to rds dynamodb document DB um, you know, the containers, the list just keeps going on. So it becomes a very natural extension for our customers to make it super simple to start using convert data protection for the w >>well the con vault stack is very robust. You have extremely mature stack. I want, I'm curious as to how this sort of came about and it had to be customer driven. I'm sure where your customers saying, hey, we're moving to the cloud, we had a lot of workloads in the cloud, we're calm vault customer. That intersection between calm vault and AWS customers. So again, I presume this was customer driven. but maybe you can give us a little insight and add some color to that. >>Everything in this collaboration has been customer driven. We were earlier talking about the multiple paths to chlorine vapor example and still might probably add more color from his own experience at our jones. But I'll bring it to reference Parsons who's a civil engineering leader. They started with the cloud first mandate saying we need to start moving all our backups to the cloud but we have wanted that bad actors might find it easy to go and access the backups edible is um, Conwell came together with the security features and com well brought in its own authorization controls and now we have moved more than 14 petabytes of backup data into the club and it's so robust that not even the backup administrator and go and touch the backups without multiple levels of authorization. Right. So the customer needs, whether it is from a security perspective performance perspective or in this case from a simplicity perspective is really what is driving this. And and the need came exactly like that. There are many customers who have no standardized on it because they want to find everything through the AWS marketplace. They want to use their existing, you know, the AWS contracts and also bring data strategy as part of that so that that's the real um, driver behind this. Um, Stephen and I hope actually announced some of the customers that I actively started using it. You know, many notable customers have been behind this uh, innovation, don't even, I don't know, I wanted to add more to that. >>I would just, I would, I would just add Dave, you know, look if I look back before I joined a W S seven years ago, I was the C I O at dow jones and I was leading a a fairly big cloud migration there over a number of years. And one of the impetus is for us moving to the cloud in the first place was when Hurricane Sandy hit, we had a real disaster recovery scenario in one of our New Jersey data centers um, and we had to act pretty quickly convert was, was part of that solution. And I remember very clearly Even back then, back in 2013, they're being options available to help us accelerate are moved to the cloud and just to reiterate some of the stuff that Rhonda was talking about consoles, done a great job over the last more than a decade, taking features from things like EBS and S three and EC two and some of our networking capabilities and embedding them directly into their services so that customers are able to more quickly move their backup and recovery workloads to the cloud. So each and every one of those features was as a result of, I'm sure combo working backwards from their customer needs just as we do at >>AWS >>and we're super excited to take that to the next level to give customers the option to then also by that right on their AWS invoice on AWS marketplace. >>Yeah, I mean, we're gonna have to leave it there steven, you've mentioned several times the sort of the early days of back then we were talking about gigabytes and terabytes and now we're talking about petabytes and beyond. Guys. Thanks so much. I really appreciate your time and sharing the news with us. >>Dave. Thanks for having us. >>All right. Keep it right there more from combat connections. 21. You're watching the >>cube. Mm hmm.

>>Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. >>We're back with the notion there to wrap up conv all connections. 2021 the virtual edition. Okay, let's do this. You ready? >>Absolutely. >>All right. I'll get a starting .1. Data. You ain't seen nothing yet. You just wait. We're gonna look back on the big data era of the 20 tens and joke about how trivial was compared to the next 10 years. You know, what are your thoughts on data value and data exposures? >>The data has never been more valuable. Right? The new oil your most critical asset and neither has it been more vulnerable. So you kind of get these two things value increasing. Obviously it becomes more attractive to the to the bad actors and that's the era that we're living in and really, you know what organizations are needed. You know, you kind of think about business resilience and all that. You need the ability to as someone said the anti fragile right? Keep testing it. See, you know, if if your data defenses are now ready to a point where your data is not a liability, but you can make it something that becomes a business advantage. So kind of that business resilience gap that we've been talking about. The business integrity gap uh is really you know what we had focused on. So our customers can really start just taking advantage of the value equation of the data. >>And I think you know, I'm gonna I'm gonna push my community here a little bit and I'm gonna I think we need a new new metaphor because you know why? Because data minnows it's actually more valuable than oil it's not scarce like oil we're never gonna run out of data. So I'm trying to come up with a new a new one but we'll work on that. The cloud. The 2nd point is the cloud is expanding. It's moving to the data center. We got hybrid connections were going across clouds, we got edge nodes, we got new workloads, real time streaming and ai influencing microservices and containers and Ai and all this R. P. A. And hyper automation. All the crazy buzzwords that combined your digital business stack. But the point is data is not only exploding, it's exploding everywhere. You know it's not just in one place anymore. >>Absolutely. And that's that's you know part of the challenge here that our customers space you know unless you know you're a company that was born yesterday you have applications everywhere. Your your pace is different, every customer's journey and the transformation is different. So you might take different directions, different ways. What do you do you have some sass applications you might start there or you start with some public cloud. Maybe you start using some stories in public cloud. So as you transform and as you are now creating more sprawl and that sprawl as we talked about before this is like swiss cheese you got lights that you know people can take advantage of. On the other hand because of that lack of a single unified data services platform. What you lose is the ability to take advantage of all your data, your application, mobility and people die. Let's take the example of containers and kubernetes. What is the point of having you know transportation and ability to move these containers to any cloud if your data is not available in all those clocks. What's the strategy for that? So the problems are also changing their more business centric than just that, you know, what I call the active data management era is really upon us and that's really what's gonna help take it full advantage of all of the other technologies around us. Ai microservices edge, you know, IOT you need to make sure you have a unified data services and intelligent data services platform. >>So what I see is is calm vault is essentially building that that data protection cloud or you might want to call it the data management cloud that starts to get into database and some other areas but but the concept of an abstraction layer that hides that underlying complexity of all the clouds and allows you to protect your data irrespective of location. That's to me that's how you get control of your data which is kind of point number three. And we heard Sandy this morning talking about embrace, manage and protect your data properly. It can be the defining disruptive difference for an organization, which I agree. However, I want to play devil's advocate in the sense that I think the only way you can get control of your data is do you have to embrace that sprawl in that complexity and admit you're not gonna shove it all into a single monolithic source of truth that those days are over. You have to you have to realize that the world is decentralized, It's coming it's here. So we have to implement automation and software to Federated governance and policy and security and privacy and data protection across that abstraction layer that I just just describe someone. Let's talk about that. What are your thoughts? >>Yeah. And I said that earlier too and Sonya is absolutely right. You have to embrace that. You figure out how to make it a competitive advantage. No workload left behind Commonwealth customers are able to protect everything from S 400 to dynamics 3 65 in the cloud and everything in between. Right. So microservices app multi cloud today we're top solution provider for the top clouds. We talked to Microsoft order today, AWS DCP we are driving exabytes of data and protecting exabytes of data. That is our strategic advantage. As you said, you cannot leave you know, strategies behind and say you know what that workload. Not interesting anymore with your data is in there. So that that is the approach that comprehensive platform and then I'm built on that. You start seeing protection grade, not data security, how to use tackle that intelligence from data insights from data compliance challenges my e discovery challenges. So being able to tackle those things ecosystem very key. How do I build on top of this intelligence, data services platform and ecosystem to take advantage of my data. These are all the layers that we believe. You know, it's very differentiated compared to anyone else out there. We're not forcing anyone into a single architecture and saying this is the best because you know what you have learned from 25 years, there's no such thing as one single best architecture. >>Oh, I asked 401 of the most innovative systems in the day. >>Uh but at the >>point of we talked about all the sprawl, this makes ransomware more difficult because an insidious because of the expanding supply chain, the ecosystem, the threat surface. And really the sophistication of the adversary, we've kind of talked about that and and and really new techniques are the Attackers are going mainstream. So but you know, I want to give you the last word here, I want to address two things if you would. Security. Like what's the big news there? Why the big deal and why con vault bring us home with the big picture of your differentiators? >>Absolutely. So you mentioned ransomware? Bad guys always looking to find those exit drawers and break it, Break it down security. I q we're proud to launch this today. It's kind of brings together the culmination of a lot of security that we have done allows customers to be proactive in terms of, you know, we've brought in Gamification into that security i aspect like make it easy and almost make it fun to make sure you're plugging all the holes so that your last mile of defense is secure, then you figure out how you can become more proactive. I have data intelligence that the security tools don't when the bad guys start sniffing around the data or anomaly detection and machine learning the ability to bring that intelligence a highly, you know, relevant signal into the security tools, building that bridge. And lastly, what happens when the, you know, worst case scenario happens almost like a rewind button to go back on your data. Look this is where malware came in and now you're able to just go back and delete that. So that's security, I. Q. Amazing. Or you know, customers are going to try it out and the live hands on lab that's happening and you know, there are feedback has been, this is just brilliant, they love it. So, one more, you know, innovation, we keep doing this, we go we're setting the bar a year ago, we launched them CSS, you know, air gap copy in the cloud, you know, a few weeks ago now we're saying, oh we can also do it right, well we have now innovative to the next level that's combo, you know, bringing it on why combo, 25 years of innovation, you know, it is just amazing how the company had the vision to build a distributed architecture. You talked about a distributed world are beauties, we're not forcing preference customers might have self managed applications that they want, you know, to be used software, they might have the need in some locations to have everything integrated with an appliance, you know, new workloads in the cloud. Let me see if I can start shifting to the data management as a service, which is really the next wave in the industry. And then finally, you know, what about that whole distribution that's happening again. So people will be, you know, we have that unique ability to build a platform. We have amazing ecosystem partners and the biggest companies in the world. Trust us as you heard, you know, throughout the show. So that's what's comin, you know, sustain technology differentiation to make our customers really realize their vision of, you know, leveraging their data as an asset. >>Nice job knows, I love it. Okay, that's a wrap from convoked connections 2021 this is dave vellante from an ocean air and the entire conv all team and the cube team encouraging to come back and check out the on demand videos for anything that you miss tell a friend, let us know what you think for everyone here at convoked connections. 21. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. Yeah. >>Mhm Yeah

>>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS public sector summit live in Washington D. C. A face to face event were on the ground here is to keep coverage. I'm john Kerry, your hosts got two great guests. Both cuba alumni Shannon Kellogg VP of public policy for the Americas and john would ceo tell us congratulations on some announcement on stage and congressional john being a public company. Last time I saw you in person, you are private. Now your I. P. O. Congratulations >>totally virtually didn't meet one investor, lawyer, accountant or banker in person. It's all done over zoom. What's amazing. >>We'll go back to that and a great great to see you had great props here earlier. You guys got some good stuff going on in the policy side, a core max on stage talking about this Virginia deal. Give us the update. >>Yeah. Hey thanks john, it's great to be back. I always like to be on the cube. Uh, so we made an announcement today regarding our economic impact study, uh, for the commonwealth of Virginia. And this is around the amazon web services business and our presence in Virginia or a WS as we all, uh, call, uh, amazon web services. And um, basically the data that we released today shows over the last decade the magnitude of investment that we're making and I think reflects just the overall investments that are going into Virginia in the data center industry of which john and I have been very involved with over the years. But the numbers are quite um, uh, >>just clever. This is not part of the whole H. 20. H. Q. Or whatever they call HQ >>To HQ two. It's so Virginia Amazon is investing uh in Virginia as part of our HQ two initiative. And so Arlington Virginia will be the second headquarters in the U. S. In addition to that, AWS has been in Virginia for now many years, investing in both data center infrastructure and also other corporate facilities where we house AWS employees uh in other parts of Virginia, particularly out in what's known as the dullest technology corridor. But our data centers are actually spread throughout three counties in Fairfax County, Loudoun County in Prince William County. >>So this is the maxim now. So it wasn't anything any kind of course this is Virginia impact. What was, what did he what did he announce? What did he say? >>Yeah. So there were a few things that we highlighted in this economic impact study. One is that over the last decade, if you can believe it, we've invested $35 billion 2020 alone. The AWS investment in construction and these data centers. uh it was actually $1.3 billion 2020. And this has created over 13,500 jobs in the Commonwealth of Virginia. So it's a really great story of investment and job creation and many people don't know John in this Sort of came through in your question too about HQ two, But aws itself has over 8000 employees in Virginia today. Uh, and so we've had this very significant presence for a number of years now in Virginia over the last, you know, 15 years has become really the cloud capital of the country, if not the world. Uh, and you see all this data center infrastructure that's going in there, >>John What's your take on this? You've been very active in the county there. Um, you've been a legend in the area and tech, you've seen this many years, you've been doing so I think the longest running company doing cyber my 31st year, 31st year. So you've been on the ground. What does this all mean to you? >>Well, you know, it goes way back to, it was roughly 2005 when I served on the Economic Development Commission, Loudon County as the chairman. And at the time we were the fastest-growing county in America in Loudon County. But our residential real property taxes were going up stratospherically because when you look at it, every dollar real property tax that came into residential, we lose $2 because we had to fund schools and police and fire departments and so forth. And we realized for every dollar of commercial real property tax that came in, We made $97 in profit, but only 13% of the money that was coming into the county was coming in commercially. So a small group got together from within the county to try and figure out what were the assets that we had to offer to companies like Amazon and we realized we had a lot of land, we had water and then we had, you know this enormous amount of dark fiber, unused fibre optic. And so basically the county made it appealing to companies like amazon to come out to Loudon County and other places in northern Virginia and the rest is history. If you look today, we're Loudon County is Loudon County generates a couple $100 million surplus every year. It's real property taxes have come down in in real dollars and the percentage of revenue that comes from commercials like 33 34%. That's really largely driven by the data center ecosystem that my friend over here Shannon was talking. So >>the formula basically is look at the assets resources available that may align with the kind of commercial entities that good. How's their domicile there >>that could benefit. >>So what about power? Because the data centers need power, fiber fiber is great. The main, the main >>power you can build power but the main point is is water for cooling. So I think I think we had an abundance of water which allowed us to build power sources and allowed companies like amazon to build their own power sources. So I think it was really a sort of a uh uh better what do they say? Better lucky than good. So we had a bunch of assets come together that helps. Made us, made us pretty lucky as a, as a region. >>Thanks area too. >>It is nice and >>john, it's really interesting because the vision that john Wood and several of his colleagues had on that economic development board has truly come through and it was reaffirmed in the numbers that we released this week. Um, aws paid $220 million 2020 alone for our data centers in those three counties, including loud >>so amazon's contribution to >>The county. $220 million 2020 alone. And that actually makes up 20% of overall property tax revenues in these counties in 2020. So, you know, the vision that they had 15 years ago, 15, 16 years ago has really come true today. And that's just reaffirmed in these numbers. >>I mean, he's for the amazon. So I'll ask you the question. I mean, there's a lot of like for misinformation going around around corporate reputation. This is clearly an example of the corporation contributing to the, to the society. >>No, no doubt. And you think >>About it like that's some good numbers, 20 million, 30 >>$5 million dollar capital investment. You know, 10, it's, what is it? 8000 9000 >>Jobs. jobs, a W. S. jobs in the Commonwealth alone. >>And then you look at the economic impact on each of those counties financially. It really benefits everybody at the end of the day. >>It's good infrastructure across the board. How do you replicate that? Not everyone's an amazon though. So how do you take the formula? What's your take on best practice? How does this rollout? And that's the amazon will continue to grow, but that, you know, this one company, is there a lesson here for the rest of us? >>I think I think all the data center companies in the cloud companies out there see value in this region. That's why so much of the internet traffic comes through northern Virginia. I mean it's I've heard 70%, I've heard much higher than that too. So I think everybody realizes this is a strategic asset at a national level. But I think the main point to bring out is that every state across America should be thinking about investments from companies like amazon. There are, there are really significant benefits that helps the entire community. So it helps build schools, police departments, fire departments, etcetera, >>jobs opportunities. What's the what's the vision though? Beyond data center gets solar sustainability. >>We do. We have actually a number of renewable energy projects, which I want to talk about. But just one other quick on the data center industry. So I also serve on the data center coalition which is a national organization of data center and cloud providers. And we look at uh states all over this country were very active in multiple states and we work with governors and state governments as they put together different frameworks and policies to incent investment in their states and Virginia is doing it right. Virginia has historically been very forward looking, very forward thinking and how they're trying to attract these data center investments. They have the right uh tax incentives in place. Um and then you know, back to your point about renewable energy over the last several years, Virginia is also really made some statutory changes and other policy changes to drive forward renewable energy in Virginia. Six years ago this week, john I was in a coma at county in Virginia, which is the eastern shore. It's a very rural area where we helped build our first solar farm amazon solar farm in Virginia in 2015 is when we made this announcement with the governor six years ago this week, it was 88 megawatts, which basically at the time quadruple the virginias solar output in one project. So since that first project we at Amazon have gone from building that one facility, quadrupling at the time, the solar output in Virginia to now we're by the end of 2023 going to be 1430 MW of solar power in Virginia with 15 projects which is the equivalent of enough power to actually Enough electricity to power 225,000 households, which is the equivalent of Prince William county Virginia. So just to give you the scale of what we're doing here in Virginia on renewable energy. >>So to me, I mean this comes down to not to put my opinion out there because I never hold back on the cube. It's a posture, we >>count on that. It's a >>posture issue of how people approach business. I mean it's the two schools of thought on the extreme true business. The government pays for everything or business friendly. So this is called, this is a modern story about friendly business kind of collaborative posture. >>Yeah, it's putting money to very specific use which has a very specific return in this case. It's for everybody that lives in the northern Virginia region benefits everybody. >>And these policies have not just attracted companies like amazon and data center building builders and renewable energy investments. These policies are also leading to rapid growth in the cybersecurity industry in Virginia as well. You know john founded his company decades ago and you have all of these cybersecurity companies now located in Virginia. Many of them are partners like >>that. I know john and I both have contributed heavily to a lot of the systems in place in America here. So congratulations on that. But I got to ask you guys, well I got you for the last minute or two cybersecurity has become the big issue. I mean there's a lot of these policies all over the place. But cyber is super critical right now. I mean, where's the red line Shannon? Where's you know, things are happening? You guys bring security to the table, businesses are out there fending for themselves. There's no militia. Where's the, where's the, where's the support for the commercial businesses. People are nervous >>so you want to try it? >>Well, I'm happy to take the first shot because this is and then we'll leave john with the last word because he is the true cyber expert. But I had the privilege of hosting a panel this morning with the director of the cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security agency at the department, Homeland Security, Jenness easterly and the agency is relatively new and she laid out a number of initiatives that the DHS organization that she runs is working on with industry and so they're leaning in their partnering with industry and a number of areas including, you know, making sure that we have the right information sharing framework and tools in place, so the government and, and we in industry can act on information that we get in real time, making sure that we're investing for the future and the workforce development and cyber skills, but also as we enter national cybersecurity month, making sure that we're all doing our part in cyber security awareness and training, for example, one of the things that are amazon ceo Andy Jassy recently announced as he was participating in a White house summit, the president biden hosted in late august was that we were going to at amazon make a tool that we've developed for information and security awareness for our employees free, available to the public. And in addition to that we announced that we were going to provide free uh strong authentication tokens for AWS customers as part of that announcement going into national cybersecurity months. So what I like about what this administration is doing is they're reaching out there looking for ways to work with industry bringing us together in these summits but also looking for actionable things that we can do together to make a difference. >>So my, my perspective echoing on some of Shannon's points are really the following. Uh the key in general is automation and there are three components to automation that are important in today's environment. One is cyber hygiene and education is a piece of that. The second is around mis attribution meaning if the bad guy can't see you, you can't be hacked. And the third one is really more or less around what's called attribution, meaning I can figure out actually who the bad guy is and then report that bad guys actions to the appropriate law enforcement and military types and then they take it from there >>unless he's not attributed either. So >>well over the basic point is we can't as industry hat back, it's illegal, but what we can do is provide the tools and methods necessary to our government counterparts at that point about information sharing, where they can take the actions necessary and try and find those bad guys. >>I just feel like we're not moving fast enough. Businesses should be able to hack back. In my opinion. I'm a hawk on this one item. So like I believe that because if people dropped on our shores with troops, the government will protect us. >>So your your point is directly taken when cyber command was formed uh before that as airlines seeing space physical domains, each of those physical domains have about 100 and $50 billion they spend per year when cyber command was formed, it was spending less than Jpmorgan chase to defend the nation. So, you know, we do have a ways to go. I do agree with you that there needs to be more uh flexibility given the industry to help help with the fight. You know, in this case. Andy Jassy has offered a couple of tools which are, I think really good strong tokens training those >>are all really good. >>We've been working with amazon for a long time, you know, ever since, uh, really, ever since the CIA embrace the cloud, which was sort of the shot heard around the world for cloud computing. We do the security compliance automation for that air gap region for amazon as well as other aspects >>were all needs more. Tell us faster, keep cranking up that software because tell you right now people are getting hit >>and people are getting scared. You know, the colonial pipeline hack that affected everybody started going wait a minute, I can't get gas. >>But again in this area of the line and jenny easterly said this this morning here at the summit is that this truly has to be about industry working with government, making sure that we're working together, you know, government has a role, but so does the private sector and I've been working cyber issues for a long time to and you know, kind of seeing where we are this year in this recent cyber summit that the president held, I really see just a tremendous commitment coming from the private sector to be an effective partner in securing the nation this >>full circle to our original conversation around the Virginia data that you guys are looking at the Loudon County amazon contribution. The success former is really commercial public sector. I mean, the government has to recognize that technology is now lingua franca for all things everything society >>well. And one quick thing here that segues into the fact that Virginia is the cloud center of the nation. Um uh the president issued a cybersecurity executive order earlier this year that really emphasizes the migration of federal systems into cloud in the modernization that jOHN has worked on, johN had a group called the Alliance for Digital Innovation and they're very active in the I. T. Modernization world and we remember as well. Um but you know, the federal government is really emphasizing this, this migration to cloud and that was reiterated in that cybersecurity executive order >>from the, well we'll definitely get you guys back on the show, we're gonna say something. >>Just all I'd say about about the executive order is that I think one of the main reasons why the president thought was important is that the legacy systems that are out there are mainly written on kobol. There aren't a lot of kids graduating with degrees in COBOL. So COBOL was designed in 1955. I think so I think it's very imperative that we move has made these workloads as we can, >>they teach it anymore. >>They don't. So from a security point of view, the amount of threats and vulnerabilities are through the >>roof awesome. Well john I want to get you on the show our next cyber security event. You have you come into a fireside chat and unpack all the awesome stuff that you're doing. But also the challenges. Yes. And there are many, you have to keep up the good work on the policy. I still say we got to remove that red line and identified new rules of engagement relative to what's on our sovereign virtual land. So a whole nother Ballgame, thanks so much for coming. I appreciate it. Thank you appreciate it. Okay, cute coverage here at eight of public sector seven Washington john ferrier. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm.

>> Commvault was an idea that incubated as a project inside of bell labs, one of the most prestigious research and development organizations in the world, back in the day. It became an official company in 1996, and Commvault just celebrated its 25th anniversary. As such, Commvault has had to reinvent itself many times over the past two and a half decades. From riding the waves of the very early PC networking era, to supporting a rich set of solutions for the evolving enterprise. This includes things like cloud computing, ransomware disaster, recovery, security compliance, and pretty much all things data protection and data management. And with me to talk about the company, its vision for the future, with also a voice of the customer. Three great guests, Isabel Geese is the Chief Marketing Officer of Commvault, Manoj Nair is the GM of Metallic, and Tim Carben is a principal systems engineer with Mitchell International. Folks, welcome to the Commvault power panel. Come inside the cube. It's awesome to have you. >> Great to be here Dave. >> All right. First of all, I got to congratulate you celebrating 25 years. That's a long time, not a lot of tech companies make it that far and are still successful and relevant. So Isabelle, maybe you could start off. What do you think has been the driving factor for your ability to kind of lead through the subsequent technological waves that I alluded to upfront? >> So well, 25 years is commendable but we are not counting success in number of years we're really counting success in how many customer we've helped over those years. And I will say what has been the driving mater for us as who that has been innovating with our customers. You know, we were there every step of the way, when they migrate to hybrid cloud. And now as they go to multi cloud in a post COVID world, where they have to win gold you know, distributed workforce, different types of workloads and devices, we are there too. We have that workload as well. So the innovation keep coming in, thanks to us listening to our customer. And then adding needs that change over the last 25 years and probably for the next 25 as well. You know, we, we want to be here for customer who think that data is an asset, not a liability. And also making sure that we offer them a broad range of use cases to book why things simple because the word is getting too complex for them. So let's take the complexity on us. >> Thank you for that. So Manoj, you riffed on the cube before about, you know putting on the, the binoculars and looking at the future. So let's talk about that. Where do you see the future for this industry? What are some of the key driving factors that matter. >> Dave it's great to be back on the Cube. You know, we see our industry no different than lots of other industries. The SAS model is rapidly being adopted. And the reason is, you know customers are looking for simplicity simplicity not just in leveraging, you know the great technology that Commvault has built but in the business model and the experience. So, you know, that's one of the fastest growing trends that started in consumer apps and other applications, other B to B apps. And now we're seeing it in core infrastructure like data management, data protection. They're also trying to leverage their data better, make sure it's not fragmented. So, how do you deliver more intelligent services? You know, securing the data insights from the beta, transforming the data and that combination, you know our ability to do that in a multi-cloud world like Isabel said, now with increasing edge work loads. Sometimes, you know, our customers say their data centers are the new edge too. So you kind of have this, you know, data everywhere, workloads everywhere, yet the desire to deliver that with a holistic experience, we call it the power of bank. The ability to manage your data and leverage the data with the simple lesson without compromise. And that's really what we're seeing as part of the future. >> Okay. Manoj I to come back to you and double click on that but I want to introduce Tim to the conversation here. You bring in the voice of the customer, as they say. Tim, my understanding is Mitchell has been a Commvault customer since the mid two thousands. So tell us why Commvault? What has kept you with the company for more than 15 years? >> Yeah! It was what, 2006 when we started and really when it all boils down to it, it's just as Isabel said, innovation. At Mitchell we're always looking to stay ahead of the trend. And, you know, just to like was mentioned earlier data is the most important part here. Commvault provides us peace of mind to protect and manage our data. And they do data protection for all of our environments, right now. We've been a partner to help enable our digital transformation including SAS and cloud adoption. When we start talking about the solutions we have, I mean we of course started in 2006. I mean, this was version six, if I remember right, this predates me at the company. Upgraded to seven, eight, nine. We brought in 10, brought in 11, brought in hyper scale and then moved on to bring in the Metallic. And Commvault provides the reason for this. I guess I should say is, Commvault provides a reliable backup but most importantly, recovery, rapid recovery. That's what gives me confidence. That's what helps me sleep better at night. So when I started looking at SAS, as a differentiator to protect our 036 environments or 065 environments. Metallic was a natural choice, and the one thing I wanted to add to that is it came out cheaper than us building it ourselves. When you take into account resources, as well as compute and storage. So again, just a natural choice. >> Yeah. As the saying goes, back up is one thing, recoveries everything. Isabel you know we've seen the SAS suffocation of the enterprise, particularly, you know from the app side. You came from Salesforce. So you, the company that is the poster child for SAS. But my question is what's catalyzing this shift and why do you think data protection is ready to make the move? >> Well, there's so many good things about SAS. You know, you remember when people started moving to the cloud and transforming their CapEx into OPEX, well SAS bring yet another level of benefits. I.T, we know always has to do more with less. And so SAS allows you to, once you set up you've got all the software upgrades automatically without you know, I think it's smart work. You can better manage your cash flow because you pay as you grow. And also you have a faster time to value. So all of this at help, the fast adoption and I will tell you today, I don't think there is a single customer who doesn't have at least one SAS application because they have things of value of this. Now, when it comes to backup and recovery, everybody's at different stages you still have on premise, you have cloud, they have SAS and workloads devices. And so what we think was the most important was to offer a raw choice of delivery model. Being able to support them if they want software subscription, if they want an integrated appliance or easy one as SAS. As a service model, and also some of our partners are actually delivering this in a more custom and managed way as well. So offering choice because everybody is at a different stage on this journey when it comes to data management and protection, I actually, you know I think team is the example of taking full advantage or this broad choice. >> Well, you mentioned Tim that you leaned into Metallic. We have seen the SAS everywhere. We used to have a email server, right? I mean, (laughing) on prem, that just doesn't happen anymore. But how was Mitchell International thinking about SAS? Maybe you could share your, from your customer perch, what you're seeing. >> Well, What's interesting about this is Mitchell is been providing SAS for a long time. We are a technology company and we do provide solutions, SAS solutions to our customers. And this makes it so important to be able to embrace it because we know the value behind it. We're providing that to our customers. And when I look at what Commvault is doing I know that Commvault is doing the same thing. They're providing the SAS model as a value to their customers. And it's so important to go with this because we keep our environments cutting edge. As GDPR says, you need to have a cutting edge environment. And if you don't, if you cannot check that box you do not move forward. Commvault has that. And this is one less thing that I have to worry about when choosing Metallic to do my backup of O365. >> So thank you for that, Tim. So Manoj, thinking about what you just heard from Isabel and Tim, you know kind of fitting into a company's cloud or hybrid cloud, more importantly strategy, you were talking before about this. And in other words, it's not an either or, it's not a zero sum game. It's simpatico, if you will. I wonder if you could elaborate. >> Yeah. The power of band Dave I'm very proud of that. You know, when I think of the power of band I think of actually folks like Tim, our customers and Commonwealth first, right. And, really that need for choice. So for example, you know customers on various different paths to the cloud, we kind of homogenize it and say, they're on a cloud journey or they're on a digital transformation journey but the journey looks different. And so part of that, and as Isabella was saying is really the ability to meet them where they are in that journey. So for example, do you, go in there and say, "Hey, you know what I'm going to be some customers 100% multi-cloud or single cloud even. And that includes SaaS applications and my infrastructure running as a service." So there's a natural fit there saying great all your data protection. You're not going to be running software appliances for that. So you've got to data protection, data management as a service that Metallic is able to offer across the whole estate. And that's, you know, that's probably a small set of customers, but rapidly growing. Then you see a lot more customers were saying I'm going to do away as you're talking about with the email server, I'm going to move to Office 365 leverage the power of Teams. And there's a shared responsibility model there which is different than an on-prem data protection use case. And so they're, they're able to just add on Metallic to the existing Commvault environment whether it's a Commvault software or hyper-scale and connect the two. So it's a single integrated experience. And then you kind of go to the other end of the spectrum and say "great" customers' all in on a SaaS delivered data protection, as you know and you hear a lot from a lot of your guests and we hear from our customers, there's still a lot of data sitting out there. you know 90 plus percent of workloads in data centers, increasing edge data workloads. And if you were to back up one of those data workloads and say that the only copy can be in the cloud, then that would take like a 10 day recovery SLA. You know, we have some competent users who say that then that's what they have. Our flexibility, our ability to kind of bring in the hyper-scale deployment and just, you know dock it into Metallic and have a local copy instant recovery, SLA, remote backup copy in the cloud for ransomware or your worst case scenario. That's the kind of flexibility. So all those are scenarios we're really seeing with our customers. And that's kind of really the power of mandates. Very unique part of our portfolio. Companies can have portfolio products but to have a single integrated offering with that flexibility, that kind of depending on the use case you can start here and grow into a different point. That's really the unique part of the power event. >> Yeah, yeah. 10 day RTO just doesn't cut it, but Tim, maybe maybe you could weigh in here. Why, what was the catalyst for you adopting Metallic and maybe you could share what was the business impact there? >> Well, the catalyst and impact obviously two different things. The catalyst, when we look at it, there was a lot of what are we going to do with this? We have an environment, we need to back it up and how are we going to approach this? So we looked at it from a few different standpoints and of course, when it boils down to it one of the major reasons was the financial. But when we started looking at everything else that we have available to us and the flexibility that Commvault has in rolling out new solutions, this really was a no brainer, at this point. We are able to essentially back up new features and new products, as soon as they're available. within our Metallic environment we are running the activate. We are running the, the self-service for the end users, to where they can actually recover their own files. We are adding the teams into it to be able to recover and perform these backups for teams. And I want to step aside really quick and mention something about this because I'd been with, you know, Metallic for a long time and I'd been waiting for this. We've been waiting for an ability to do these backups and anyone I know, Manoj knows that I've been waiting for it. And you know, Commvault came back to me a while back and they said, we just have to wait for the API. We have to wait for Microsoft to release it. Well, I follow the news. I saw Microsoft released the API and I think it may have been two days later that Commvault reached out to me and said, Hey we got it available. Are you ready to do this? And that sort of turned around, that sort of flexibility, being on top of new applications with that, with Salesforce, that is, you know just not necessarily the reason why I adopted Metallic but one of those things that puts a smile on my face because I adopted Metallic. >> Well, that's an interesting story. I mean, you get the SDKs and if you're a leader you get them, you know, you can put the resources on it and you're ready when, when the product comes to GA. Manoj, I wonder if we could talk about just the notion of backing up a SAS. Part of the announcements today included within Metallica included backup and, and offerings for dynamics 365. But my question is why support dynamics specifically in in SAS apps generally? I mean, customers might say, doesn't my SAS provider protect my data. Why do I need a third party? And, and the second part of that question is why Commvault? >> Dave, a great question as always. I'll start with the second part of the question. It's really three words, the shared responsibility model, and, you know, a lot of times our customers, as they go into the cloud model they really start understanding that there is something, that you're getting a lot of advantages that certain things you don't have to do. But the shared responsibility model is what every cloud and SAS provider will indoctrinate in it's in desolate. And certainly the application data is owned by the customer. And the meaning of that is not something that, you know some SAS provider can understand. And so that requires specialized skills. And that's a partnership where we've done this now very successfully with Microsoft and LG 65. We've added support for Salesforce, And we see a rapid customer adoption because of that shared responsibility model, If you have a, some kind of an admin issue as we have seen in the news somebody changed their team setting and then lost all their chat. Then that data is discoverable. And you, the customer, responsible for making sure that data is discoverable or ransomware attacks. Again, covering that SAS data is your responsibility because the attack could be coming in from your instance, not from the SAS provider. So those are the reasons dynamics is, you know one of the fastest growing SAS applications from a business applications perspective out there. And as we looked at our roadmap and you look at at the right compliment. What is arriving by the agency, we're seeing this part of a Microsoft's business application suite growing, you know, millions of users out there and it's rapidly growing. And it's also integrated with the rest of the Microsoft family. So we're now, you know, proud to say that we support all three Microsoft clouds by Microsoft 365 dynamics. Those applications are increasingly degraded so we're seeing commonality in customer base and that's a business critical data. And so customers are looking to manage the data, have solutions that they can be sure they can leverage, it's not just protecting data from worst-case scenarios. In the case of some of the apps like dynamics we offer a support, like setting up the staging environment. So it's improving productivity off the application admins and that's really kind of that the value we're bringing able to bring to the table. >> Yeah. You know, that shared responsibility model. I'm glad you brought that up because I think it's oftentimes misunderstood but when you talk to CSOs, they understand it well. They'll tell you the shared responsibility is my responsibility. You know, maybe the cloud provider who will secure the the object storage bucket for the physical space, but it's, it's on me. So that's really important. So thank you for that. Isabelle, last question. The roadmap, you know how do you see Commvaults, Metallic, SAS portfolio evolving? what can you tell us? >> Oh, well, it has a big strategic impact on Commvault for sure, first because all of our existing customer as you mentioned earlier, 25 years, it's a lot of customer will have somehow some workload as SaaS. And so the ability without adding more complexity without adding another vendor just to be able to protect them in one take, and as teams, they bring a smile to his face is really important for us. The second is also a lot of customer come toCommvault from Metallic. This is the first time they enter the Commvault community and Commvault family and as they start protecting their SaaS application they realize that they could leverage the same application to protect their on-premise, data as well. So back to the power of hand and without writing off their past investments, you know going to the cloud at the pace they want. So from that perspective, there is a big impact on our customer community that quickened that Metallic brings. I don't know Manojs' way too humble, but, you know he doubled his customers every quarter. And, you know, we have added 24 countries to the portfolio, to the product. So we see a rapid adoption. And so obviously back to your question, we see the impacts of Metallic growing and growing fast because of the market demand because of the rapid innovation. We can take the Commvault technology and put it in the SaaS model and our customers really like it. So I'm very excited. I think it's going to be, you know, a great innovation, a great positive impact for customers and our new customer will welcome it, which by the way I think half, Manoj correct me but I think half of the Metallic customer at Commvault and the other half are new to our family. So, so they're very bullish about this. And it's just the beginning, as you know we all 25 year old or sorry, 25 year young and looking forward to the next 25. >> Well, I can confirm, you know we have a data partner, survey partner ETR enterprise technology research, and I was looking at the Commvault data and it shows within the cloud segment, when you cut the data by cloud, you're actually accelerating the spending momentum is accelerating. And I think it's a function of, you know some of the acquisitions you've made some of the moves. You made an integration. So congratulations on 25 years and you know you're riding the correct wave. Isabel, Manoj, Tim thanks so much for coming in the cube. It was great to have you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you Dave. >> I really appreciate it. >> And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Volante for the Cube. We'll see you next time.

(Upbeat Music) >> Commvault was an idea that incubated as a project inside of Bell Labs, one of the most prestigious research and development organizations in the world, back in the day. It became an official company in 1996, and Commvault just celebrated its 25th anniversary As such, Commvault has had to reinvent itself many times over the past two and a half decades from riding the waves of the very early PC networking era to supporting a rich set of solutions for the evolving enterprise. This includes things like cloud computing, ransomware, disaster recovery, security compliance, and pretty much all things data protection and data management. And with me to talk about the company, its vision for the future with also a voice of the customer are three great guests. Isabelle Guis is the Chief Marketing Officer of Commvault, Manoj Nair is the GM of Metallic, and Tim Carben is a Principal Systems Engineer with Mitchell International. Folks, welcome to the Commvault power panel. Come inside theCUBE. It's awesome to have you. [Isabelle] Great to be here today. >> All right. First of all, I got to congratulate you celebrating 25 years. That's a long time, not a lot of tech companies make it that far and are still successful and relevant. So Isabelle, maybe you could start off. What do you think has been the driving factor for your ability to kind of lead through the subsequent technological waves that I alluded to upfront? >> So well, 25 years is commendable but we are not counting success in number of years. We're really counting success in how many customers we've helped over those years. And I will say what has been the driving matter for us as who that, has been innovating with our customers. You know, we were there every step of the way when they migrate to hybrid cloud. And now as they go to multi-cloud in a post COVID world where they have to win gold you know, distributed workforce, different types of workloads and devices, we all there too. We assess workload as well. So the innovation keep coming in, thanks to us listening to our customer and then, adding needs that change over the last 25 years and probably for the next 25 as well. You know, we want to be here for customer was thinking that data is an asset, not a liability. And also making sure that we offer them a broad range of use cases to quote why things simple because the world is getting too complex for them. So let's take the complexity on us. >> Thank you for that. So Manoj, you've riffed on the cube before about, you know putting on the binoculars and looking at the future. So, let's talk about that. Where do you see the future for this industry? What are some of the key driving factors that matter? >> It's great to be back on theCUBE. You know, we see our industry no different than lots of other industries. The SaaS Model is rapidly being adopted. And the reason is, you know customers are looking for simplicity, simplicity not just in leveraging, you know the great technology that Commvault has built, but in the business model and the experience. So, you know, that's one of the fastest growing trends that started in consumer apps and other applications, other B to B apps. And now we're seeing it in core infrastructure like data management, data protection. They're also trying to leverage their data better. Make sure it's not fragmented. So how do you deliver more intelligent services? You know, securing the data, insights from the data, transforming the data, and that combination, you know, our ability to do that in a multi-cloud world like Isabelle said, now with increasing edge work loads. Sometimes, you know, our customers say their data centers has a new edge too. So you kind of have this, you know, data everywhere workloads everywhere, yet the desire to deliver that with a holistic experience, we call it the 'power of bank'; the ability to manage your data and leverage the data with the simple lesson without compromise. And that's really what we're seeing as part of the future. >> Okay. I don't know if all want to come back to you and double click on that, but I want to introduce Tim to the conversation here. You bring in the voice of the customer, as they say. Tim, my understanding is Mitchell has been a Commvault customer since the mid-2000s. So, tell us why Commvault, what has kept you with the company for more than 15 years? >> Yeah, we are, it was what, 2006 when we started. And really what it all boils down to it, it's just as Isabel said, innovation. At Mitchell, we're always looking to stay ahead of the trend. And, you know, just to like was mentioned earlier, data is the most important part here. Commvault provides us peace of mind to protect and manage our data. And they do data protection for all of our environments right now. We've been a partner to help in navel our digital transformation including SaaS and cloud adoption. When we start talking about the solutions we have, I mean we of course started in 2006. I mean, this was version version 6 if I remember right. This predates me at the company. Upgraded to seven, eight, nine, we brought in ten, brought in eleven, brought in HyperScale, and then moved on to bring in the Metallic. And Commvault provides the reason for this. I guess I should say is, Commvault provides a reliable backup but most importantly, recovery. Rapid recovery. That's what gives me confidence. That's what helps me sleep better at night. So when I started looking at SaaS as a differentiator to protect our 036 environments or 065 environments, Metallic was a natural choice. And the one thing I wanted to add to that is, it came out cheaper than us building it ourselves. When you take into account resources as well as compute and storage. So again, just a natural choice. >> Yeah. As the saying goes back up as one thing, recovery's everything. Isabelle. Yeah, we've seen the SaaSification of the enterprise. Particularly, you know from the app side. You came from Salesforce. So you, the company that is the poster child for SaaS. But my question is what's catalyzing this shift and why do you think data protection is ready to make the move? >> Well, there's so many good things and that's that. As you know, you remember when people started moving to the cloud and transforming their CAPEX into OPEX. Well SaaS bring yet another level of benefits. IT, we know always has to do more with less. And so SaaS allows you to, once you set up, you've got all the software upgrades automatically without you know, I think it's, why it works. You can better manage your cash flow, because you pay as you grow. And also you have a faster time to value. So all of this at help, the fast adoption and I will tell you today I don't think there is a single customer who doesn't have at least one SaaS application because they have things of value of this. Now, when it comes to backup and recovery everybody's at different stages. You still have On-Premises, you have cloud, there's SaaS, there's Workloads devices. And so what we think was the most important was to offer a broad choice of delivery model being able to support them if they want a software subscription, if they want an integrated appliance, or if they want SaaS as a service model, and also some of our partners actually delivering this in a more custom and managed way as well. So offering choice, because everybody is at a different stage on this journey. When it comes to data management and protection, I actually, you know, I think team is the example of taking full advantage of this bold choice. >> Well, you mentioned Tim that you leaned into Metallic. We have seen the SaaS everywhere. We used to have a email server, right? I mean, you know, On-Prem, that just doesn't happen anymore. But how was Mitchell International thinking about SaaS? Maybe you could share your, from your customer perch, what you're seeing. >> Well, what's interesting about this is, Mitchell is been providing SaaS for a long time. We are a technology company and we do provide solutions, SaaS solutions, to our customers. And this makes it so important to be able to embrace it because we know the value behind it. We're providing that to our customers. And when I look at what Commvault is doing I know that Commvault is doing the same thing. They're providing the SaaS Model as a value to their customers. And it's so important to go with this because we keep our environments cutting edge. As GDPR says, You need to have a cutting edge environment. And if you don't, if you cannot check that box you do not move forward. Commvault has that. And this is one less thing that I have to worry about when choosing Metallic to do my backup of O365. >> So thank you for that, Tim. So Manoj, thinking about what you just heard from Isabelle and Tim, you know, kind of fitting into a company's cloud or hybrid cloud, more importantly, strategy, you were talking before about this. "And", in other words, it's not an either or it's not a zero sum game. It's simpatico, if you will. I wonder if you could elaborate. >> Yeah, no The Power of And, Dave, I'm very proud of that. You know, when I think of The Power of And I think of actually folks like Tim, our customers and Commonwealth first, right. And, and really that, that need for choice. So for example, you know, customers on various different paths to the cloud we kind of homogenize it and say, they're on a cloud journey or they're on a digital transformation journey, but each journey looks different. And so part of that, "And", as Isabella was saying, is really the ability to meet them where they are in that journey. So for example, you know, do you, go in there and say, Hey, you know what, I'm going to be some customers 100% multi-cloud or single cloud even. And that includes SaaS applications and my infrastructure running as a service. So there's a natural fit there saying great all your data protection. You're not going to be running software appliances for that. So you've got to data protection, data management as a service that Metallic is the able to offer across the whole S state. And that's, you know, that's probably a small set of customers, but rapidly growing. Then you see a lot more customers were saying I'm going to do away as you're talking about but the emails are where I'm going to move to office 365, leverage the power of teams. And there's a Shared Responsibility Model there which is different than an On-Prem data protection use case. And so they're, they're able to just add on Metallic to the existing Commonwealth environment, whether it's a Commonwealth software or HyperScale, and connect the two. So it's a single integrated experience. And then you kind of go to the other end of the spectrum and say, great customers all in on a SaaS delivered data protection, as you know, and you hear a lot from a lot of your guests and we hear from our customers, there's still a lot of data sitting out there, you know, 90 plus percent of workloads and data centers increasing edge data workloads. And if you were to back up one of those data workloads and say that the only copy can be in the cloud, then that would take like a 10 day recovery isolation. You know, we have some competitors who say that then that's what they have. Our flexibility, our ability to kind of bring in the Hyper-Scale deployment and just, you know, dock it into Metallic, and have a local copy, instant recovery, SLA, remote, you know, backup copy in the cloud for ransomware, or your worst case scenario. That's the kind of flexibility. So all those are scenarios we're really seeing with our customers. And that's kind of really the power advantage. A very unique part of our portfolio, but, you know, companies can have portfolio products, but to have a single integrated offering with that flexibility, that kind of, depending on the use case, you can start here and grow into a different point. That's really the unique part of the power event. Yeah, 10 day RTO just doesn't cut it, but Timmy, maybe you could weigh in here. Why, What was the catalyst for you adopting Metallic and maybe you could share what was the business impact there? >> Well, the catalyst and impact, obviously two different things. The catalyst, when we look at it, there was a lot of what are we going to do with this? We have an environment, we need to back it up, and how are we going to approach this? So we looked at it from a few different standpoints, and of course, when it boils down to it, one of the major reasons was the financial. But when we started looking at everything else that we have available to us and the flexibility that Commvault has in rolling out new solutions, this really was a no brainer at this point. We are able to essentially back up new features and new products, as soon as they're available. Within our Metallic environment, we are running the activate. We are running the the self-service for the end users to where they can actually recover their own files. We are adding the teams into it to be able to recover and perform these backups for teams. And I want to step aside really quick and mentioned something about this because I'd been with, you know, Metallic for a long time and I'd been waiting for this. We've been waiting for an ability to do these backups and anyone I know Manoj knows that I've been waiting for it. And you know, Commvault came back to me a while back and they said, we just have to wait for the API. We have to wait for Microsoft releases. Well, I follow the news. I saw Microsoft released the API, and I think it may have been two days later. Good. Commvault reached out to me and said, Hey we got it available. Are you ready to do this? And that sort of turned around that sort of flexibility being on top of new applications with that, with Salesforce, that is, you know, just not necessarily the reason why I adopted Metallic but one of those things that puts a smile on my face because I adopted Metallic. >> Well, that's an interesting story. I mean, you get the SDKs and if you're a leader you get them, you know, you can put the resources on it and you're ready when, when the product, you know, comes to GA. Manoj, I wonder if we could talk about just the notion of backing up SaaS, part of the announcements today included within Metallic included backup and offerings for Dynamics 365. But my question is why support Dynamics specifically in SaaS apps generally? I mean, customers might say, doesn't my SaaS provider protect my data? Why do I need a third party? And, and the second part of that question is why Commvault? >> Dave a great question as always. I'll start with the second part of the question. It's really three words the Shared Responsibility Model. And, you know, a lot of times our customers as they go into the cloud model they really start understanding that there is something that you're getting a lot of advantages the certain things you don't have to do, but the Shared Responsibility Model is what every cloud and SaaS provider will indoctrinate in its S&As. And certainly the application data is owned by the customer. And the meaning of that is not something that, you know, some SaaS provider can understand. And so that requires specialized skills. And that's a partnership. We've done this now very successfully with Microsoft and LG 65, we've added support for Salesforce, and we see a rapid customer adoption because of that Shared Responsibility Model. If you have, some kind of, an admin issue as we have seen in the news somebody changed their team setting and then lost all their chat. And then that data is discoverable. And you, the customer is responsible for making sure that data is discoverable or ransomware attacks. Again, recovering that SaaS data is your responsibility because the attack could be coming in from your instance not from the SaaS provider. So those are the reasons. Dynamics is, you know, one of the fastest growing SaaS applications from a business applications perspective out there. And as we looked at our roadmap, and you look at at the right compliment, what is the right adjacency, we're seeing this part of Microsoft's Business Application Suite growing, you know, as millions of users out there and it's rapidly growing. And it's also integrated with the rest of the Microsoft family. So we're now, you know, proud to say that we support all three Microsoft clouds, Microsoft Azure, or 365, Dynamics. Those applications are increasingly integrated so we're seeing commonality in customer base and that's a business critical data. And so customers are looking to manage the data, have solutions that they can be sure they can leverage. It's not just protecting data from worst-case scenarios. In the case of some of the apps like Dynamics, we offer a support, like setting up the staging environment. So it's improving productivity of the application admins, and that's really kind of that the value we're bringing able to bring to the table. >> Yeah. You know, that Shared Responsibility Model. I'm glad you brought that up because I think it's oftentimes misunderstood but when you talk to CSOS, they understand it well. They'll tell you the shared responsibility is my responsibility. You know, maybe the cloud provider will secure the object storage bucket for the physical space, but it's on me. So that's really important. So thank you for that. Isabelle, last question, the roadmap, you know, how do you see Commvault's, Metallic SaaS portfolio evolving? What can you tell us? >> Oh, well, it's, it has a big strategic, you know, impact on Commvault for sure on the first portfolio first because of all of our existing customers as you mentioned earlier, 25 years, it's a lot of customers are somehow some workload as SaaS. And so the ability without, you know, adding more complexity without adding another vendor just to be able to protect them in one take, and as teams they bring a smile to his face is really important for us. The second is also a lot of customers come to Commvault for Metallic. This is the first time enter the Commvault community and Commvault family. And as they start protecting their assessed application they realize that they could leverage the same application to protect their own premised data as well. So back to The Power of And, and without writing off their past investments, you know, going to the cloud at the pace they want. So from that perspective, there is a big impact on our customer community the thing is that Metallic it brings I don't know Manoj is way too humble, but, you know, he don't go to this customer every quarter. And, you know, we have added 24 countries to the portfolio, to the product. So we see a rapid adoption. And so obviously back to your question, we see the impacts of Metallic growing and growing fast because of the market demand, because of the rapid innovation we can take the Commvault technology and put it in the SaaS model and our customers really like it. So I'm very excited. I think it's going to be, you know, a great innovation, a great positive impact for customers, and our new customers we're welcoming, which by the way I think half, Manoj correct me, but I think half of the Metallic customer at Commvault and the other half are new to our family. So, they're very bullish about this. And it's just the beginning, as you know, we are 25 years old, or sorry, 25 years young, and looking forward to the next 25. >> Well, I can confirm, you know, we have a data partner survey, partner ETR, Enterprise Technology Research, and I was looking at the Commvault data and it shows within the cloud segment, when you cut the data by cloud, you're actually accelerating, the spending momentum is accelerating. And I think it's a function of, you know, some of the acquisitions you've made, some of the moves you made in integration. So congratulations on 25 years and you know, you're riding the correct wave, Isabelle, Manoj, Tim, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you Dave. >> I really appreciate it. >> And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (Upbeat Music)

>>From around the globe, it's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>We continue our coverage here on the cube of AWS reinvent 2020 I'm John Wallace, glad to be with you here and glad that you've joined us for an important discussion. You know, a lot of companies and many industries are making a very concerted effort toward promoting greater diversity and inclusion within their various workforces. And the renewable energy industry is certainly a big part of that movement. And here to talk about how AWS is supporting that and what the industry itself is doing. I'm proud to and pleased to welcome three guests. We have Shannon Kellogg with us from AWS. He's the vice president of public policy for the Americas. Shannon, thanks for being with us here on the cube. >>You back. Thank you. And great >>Whetstone, who is the president and CEO of the American council on renewable energy. We're going to call it a core from here on out, and also joining us Colleen Pickford, who was the EVP at ACOR, and welcome to both of you. Glad we could have it here on the cube. Glad to be here. John's great. You bet. Absolutely looking forward to this discussion first off, Shannon, let me, let me turn it over to you. I know, uh, AWS had some fairly significant announcements, uh, very recently about renewable and, um, you know, launching that on, around reinvent 2020, if he would take us through that a little bit about that commitment and what exactly that news was all about. >>Well, thank you on, uh, Amazon overall, uh, made a very, uh, significant announcement, uh, last week of 26, uh, renewable energy projects around the world. Uh, so many of those here in the U S but also, uh, many of those, uh, internationally and, um, the announcements, uh, collectively last week, along with what we've already announced previously in renewable energy projects now makes us the largest, uh, corporate, uh, buyer of renewable energy in the world. And so we're really excited about that. Um, this is part of our longterm, uh, efforts, uh, to be a hundred percent renewable, um, in our, uh, uh, footprint around the AWS infrastructure, uh, footprint, uh, but also a part of the broader, uh, commitment that we have at Amazon, including around climate and sustainability. So, uh, we were really super excited about last week from now. >>Yeah. Can you give me an idea of the flavor of the projects? I mean, you're talking about more than two dozen, uh, and as you said there around the world, so I assumed pretty wide variety of impacts and, and of, uh, initiatives as well, but maybe just to give those watching at home and idea of what the scale at this point. >>Well, it's a mix of, uh, solar and wind, uh, projects. Uh, like I said, both in the U S and abroad. Um, we had previously announced, uh, uh, several, um, solar projects in the Commonwealth of Virginia. For example, with last week's announcements, we added more, uh, solar, uh, in Virginia, we had previously, uh, uh, announced, uh, wind projects in Ohio and we added more, uh, wind, uh, and, um, uh, you know, large scale utility scale projects in Ohio. And so we also included other States of course, are in the U S and in countries as well, including, uh, one of the first offshore, uh, projects, uh, offshore wind projects that we've done, uh, with, uh, in this case with, uh, off of the coast of Germany. >>All right, Greg, when you hear about that kind of commitment that AWS is making, uh, in terms of, uh, not only from a geographical standpoint, but from a variety of standpoint, we're talking about when we're talking about solar, um, I mean, what is, what stands out to you with regard to the, the impact of that kind of commitment and that kind of initiative >>Kale it's really impactful. It's such an impressive thing to be able to bring that many new renewable projects that are that big online in a single year, that the total amount of new clean generation is on the order of 4,000 megawatts. It wasn't that long ago. That would be a great year for the renewable sector as a whole in the United States. If you go back 10, 12 years. So the idea that one company is now procuring so much renewable power is phenomenally exciting, and we're just so proud of Amazon and it's big progress toward Amazon. So a hundred percent goal, uh, and really, uh, toward the broader effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions rapidly enough to stay within shouting distance of what scientists say we need to do in order to protect our planet's climate. >>Right. Great point. Uh, Colleen, I know you made an interesting point recently, you were talking about the accelerated membership program, which is, uh, an initiative that you've just launched, uh, in terms of trying to create greater diversity and equity and inclusion within the renewable energy, uh, workforce, uh, AWS big sponsor of that, um, founding partner. Uh, if you would tell us a little bit more about that program, uh, and, and what you see is what you hope it's near term or short term impact might be. And then maybe the long tail of that, you know, what kind of impact you can have eventually? >>Yeah, absolutely a core like toward like many in our industry, we've been looking at how we can play a role in creating a more equitable and just future. Um, and we were lucky because we have board members who went during our normal boring board meetings, and we're looking at our membership, asked me, they said, what are you doing to bring more diversity into a core membership? And I had to say, not enough, and that's really the Genesis for the accelerate program. And we were really fortunate to have Shannon and Amazon and our other board members work with us to develop a program that will create opportunities for companies that are owned or led by women or people of color to access a core in all of our benefits for two years and create additional resources for them to really grow their businesses in a way that they may not otherwise be able to. >>Yeah. Shannon did point out that you are board members, Colleen just, just mentioned, um, uh, of a core. What is it about this particular initiative that you think that has peaked the AWS entrust? >>This is Colleen said, uh, we were discussing at the board level, you know, ways that we could, um, do more as a or, uh, in this companies in this sector, promote diversity and inclusion. And we were brainstorming one day and came up with this, uh, with this idea, you know, it's, I'm really excited about it because, um, we're basically going out and offering a core membership and other services, uh, to entrepreneurs and small businesses in the sector led by, uh, minorities and, um, uh, women leaders. And this is just a fantastic opportunity to assist companies and organizations that are just getting started, uh, in an encourages innovation and encourages obviously diversity and inclusion. And so we're super excited about this effort. >>Is this, is this something that you can direct toward a company of any specific size? I mean, Shannon just touched on it, small business, um, but is, is this applicable? The, the, the accelerate program is this geared toward just the small businesses, larger >>Turn in Britain. Uh, we want to bring more diversity in the sector. We want to help. And it's really the smaller companies that need assistance and making those connections and participating, uh, and gaining the access, uh, and maybe mentoring pro bono services. Uh, we want to help those small companies become bigger, grow this sector and, and help enhance the diversity, the leadership in this sector from underrepresented communities. We want, you know, like much of the economy we recognize the renewable energy sector does not yet look like America looks and that's something we're all fighting to achieve. And it's, uh, incredibly helpful to have an Amazon is really the founding supporter of this program. And after Amazon stepped up, uh, seen a number of other companies join in and helping make this a reality. And we've got a lot of momentum now, very excited about the accelerate program. >>Colleen, I like to hear a little bit more from you on the partnership with AWS in general. Um, I know this isn't the first time that you all have partnered together. So if you would maybe fill in some of the blanks about that history that led us to this initiative, and then for them being the one of the founding partners along with the Berkshire Hathaway foundation. >>Sure. I mean, Amazon's been a member of our board for a number of years now, their commitment to the industry is clear and, you know, Shannon and his whole team actively participate across a core providing us with guidance and with insights like these. I think when you look at what we've done with the accelerate program, you know, it's not the first stop for a new small company organization like eight core, but we can have a measurable impact on their go to market strategies and their ability to grow their business. And Shannon and Amazon gave us that insight and they gave us some additional insights about what we could provide through the accelerate program that could really help make a difference for those companies. >>Hmm. You know, Greg, um, if I could just flip the script just a little bit here or, or, uh, get you back on to the discussion about climate change in general. I know that's just obviously, uh, the, the, a key driver to your organization's mission. Just your thoughts about, you know, where we stand, that you talked about trying to be within shouting distance of certain goals. I know there's been discussion about United States for joining the Paris accord, um, and committing to voluntary, uh, uh, emissions controls, just, I mean, where are we in your mind in terms of, of trying to seriously address the problem >>We're behind? I mean, the surprising thing is the renewable sector has been growing at a booming pace. We had over $60 billion in investment last year and wind and solar power, uh, one of the most important economic drivers for the country. Um, we're going to end up despite all of the difficulties presented by 2020 with a pandemic, we're going to have record renewable energy growth in 2020, we're going to bust through the old record, which was about 23,000 megawatts. And we'll be more like 27,000 megawatts. So that's great, but to get our arms around the climate issue, we know we have to grow much more rapidly. We've set a goal at a core of achieving a trillion dollars and investment by 2030, starting when we launched that program back in 2018, uh, and we made a lot of headway, but we're behind. We need to be investing closer to 90, a hundred billion a year in order to see that growth in logging at growth at a much higher rate, we feel really optimistic about getting a tailwind from the new administration, the desire to build back that, or, uh, the clear focus on policies and that value the ability to generate power, to make our economy grow and grow dramatically without greenhouse emissions, without adding to, uh, climate change. >>So, uh, um, I'm optimistic we can get there, but we know we gotta step it up as much as we've been growing as successful as we've been. It's not enough. And we know that >>Colleen, how does your organization in ACOR trumpet that, um, I know you talked about the nexus of finance and policy and technology. Obviously policy is what, uh, is at the center of this particular discussion, but, but how, how can you in the coming year, especially, um, be a, a key driver in that discussion? >>Well, I think, you know, we bring together a really unique stakeholder group from all across the renewable energy industry. And we take those stakeholders and it gives us a magnified voice to share the message of what's needed to really drive more Watts of renewable energy onto the grid. And what are those barriers in policy to making that possible? So, I mean, that's really how we do it is we bring together the most unique group together, >>But we appreciate the work. Uh, no question about that. It is a dire need that needs to be addressed. And we certainly thank you for that. Uh, Shannon, we thank AWS for their support, not only of this initiative, but of all that you're doing around the world. And, uh, we certainly wish you all the best of success with the accelerate membership program and creating these better hiring opportunities within your industry. So thank you all very much for joining us here on the cube.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of PegaWorld iNspire, brought to you by Pegasystems. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PegaWorld iNspire 2020. And now that the dust has settled on the event, we wanted to have a little postmortem power panel, and I'm really excited to have three great guests here today. Adrian Swinscoe is a customer service and experience advisor and the best-selling author of a couple of books: "How to Wow" and "Punk CX." Adrian great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Hey Dave. >> And Shelly Kramer's a principal, analyst, and a founding partner at Futurum Research, CUBE alum. Shelly, good to see you. >> Hi, great to see you too. >> And finally, Don Schuerman who is the CTO of Pegasystems and one of the people that was really highlighting the keynotes. Don, thanks for your time, appreciate you coming on. >> Great to be here. >> Guys, let's start with some of the takeaways from the event, and if you don't mind I'm going to set it up. I had some, I had many many notes. But I'll take a cue from Alan's keynote, where he talked about three things: rethinking the customer engagement, that whole experience, that as a service, I'm going to say that certainly the second part of last decade came to the front and center and we think is going to continue in spades. And then new tech, we heard about that. Don we're going to ask you to chime in on that. Modern software, microservices, we've got machine intelligence now. And then I thought there were some really good customer examples. We heard from Siemens, we heard from the CIO and head of digital at Aflac, the Bank of Australia. So, some really good customer examples. But Shelly, let me start with you. What were your big takeaways of PegaWorld iNspire 2020, the virtual edition? >> You know, what I love is a focus, and we have talked a lot about that here at Futurum Research, but what I love is the thinking that what really is important now is to think about rethinking and kind of tearing things apart. Especially when we're in a time, we're in difficult economic times, and so instead of focusing on rebuilding and relaunching as quickly as possible, I think that now's the time to really focus on reexamining what is it that our customers want? How is it that we can best serve them? And really sort of start from ground zero and examine our thinking. And I think that's really at the heart of digital transformation, and I think that both in this virtual event and in some interviews I was lucky enough to do in advance with some of the Pega senior team, that was really a key focus, is really thinking about how we can re-architect things, how we can do things in ways that are more efficient, that impact people more effectively, that impact the bottom line more effectively. And to me that's really exciting. >> So Adrian, CX is obviously your wheelhouse. A lot of the conversation at PegaWorld iNspire was of course about customer experience, customer service. How do you think the content went? What were some of the highlights for you? And maybe, what would you have liked to hear more of? >> Well I think, thanks Dave, I actually really enjoyed it. I actually kind of thought was, first of all I should say that I've been to a bunch of virtual summits and I thought this was one of the best ones I've done in terms of its pace and its interactivity. I love the fact that Don was bouncing around the screen, kind of showing us around the menu and things. I thought that was great. But the things that I thought really stood out for me was this idea of the context around accelerating digital transformation. And that's very contextual, it's almost being forced upon us. But then this idea of also the center-out thinking and the Process Fabric. Because it really reminded me of, and Don you can maybe correct me if I'm wrong here, is taking a systems-thinking approach to delivering the right outcomes for customers. Because it's always struck me that there's a contradiction at the heart of the rhetoric around customer-centricity where people say they want to do the right things by customers but then they force them down this channel-centric or process-centric way of thinking. And so actually I thought it was really refreshing to hear about this center-out and Process Fabric platform that Pega's building. And I thought it's really exciting because it felt like actually we're going to start to take a more systemic look and take to delivering great service and great experience. So I thought that was really great. Those were my big headlines out of the summit. >> So Don, one of the-- >> Adrian I think-- >> Go ahead, please. >> Yeah, I think the whole idea, you know, and Alan referred to center-out as a business architecture, and I think that's really an important concept because this is really about the intersection of that business goal. How do I truly become customer-centric? And then how do I actually make my technology do it? And it's really important for that to work where you put your business logic in the technology. If you continue to do it in the sort of channel-centric way or really data-centric, system-centric way that historically has been the approach, I don't think you can build a sustainable platform for great customer engagement. So I think that idea of a business architecture that you clued in on a little bit is really central to how we've been thinking about this. >> Let's stay on that for a second. But first of all, I just want to mention, you guys did a good job of not just trying to take a physical event and plug in into virtual. So congratulations on that. The virtual clicker toss, and you know, you were having some fun eating your eggs. I mean that was, that's great. And the Dropkick Murphys couldn't be live, but you guys still leveraged that, so well done. One of the better ones that I've seen. But I want to stay on your point there. Alan talked about some of the mistakes that are made, and one of the questions I have for you guys is, what is the state of customer experience today, and why the divergence between great, and good, and pretty crappy? And Alan talked about, well, people try to impose business process top-down, or they try to infuse logic in the database bottom-up. You really got to do that middle-out. So, Don I want to come back to you. Let's explore that a little bit. What do you really mean by middle-out? Where am I putting the actual business logic? >> Yeah, I think this is important, right. And I think that a lot of time we have experiences as customers. And I had one of these recently with a cable provider, where I spent a bunch of time on their website chatting with a chatbot of some kind, that then flipped me over to a human. When the chatbot flipped me to the human, the human didn't know what I was doing with the chatbot. And that human eventually told me I had to call somebody. So I picked up the phone, I made the phone call. And that person didn't know what I was doing on chat with the human or with the chatbot. So every time there's a customer, I'm restarting. I'm reexplaining where I am. And that to me is a direct result of that kind of channel-centric thinking, where all of my business logic ends up embedded in, "Well hey, we're going to build a cool chatbot. "And now we're going to build a cool chat system. "And by the way, "we're going to keep our contact centers running." But I'm not thinking holistically about the customer experience. And that's why we think this center-out approach is so important, because I want to go below the channel. And I want to think about that customer journey. What's the outcome I'm trying to get to? In the case of my interaction, I was just trying to increase my bandwidth so that I could do events like this, right? What's that outcome that I'm trying to get to and how do I get the customer to that outcome in a way that's as efficient for the business and as easy for the customer as possible regardless of what channel they're on. And I think that's a little bit of a new way of thinking. And again, it means thinking not just about the customer goal, but having an opinion, whether you are a business leader or an IT person, about where that logic belongs in your architecture. >> So, Adrian. Don just described the sort of bot and human experience, which mimics a lot of the human experience that we've all touched in the past. So, but the customer journey that Don talked about isn't necessarily one journey. There's multiple journeys. So what's your take on how organizations can do better with that kind of service. >> Well I think you're absolutely right, Dave. I mean, actually during the summer I was talking, I was listening to Paul Greenberg talk about the future of customer service. And Paul said something that I think was really straightforward but really insightful. He said, "Look, organizations think about customer journeys "but customers don't think about journeys "in the way that organizations do. "They think discontinuously." So it's like, "I'm going to go to channel one, "and then channel three, and then channel four, "and then channel five, and then back to channel two. "And then back to channel five again." And they expect those conversations to be picked up across those different channels. And so I think what we've got to do is develop, as Don said, build an architecture that is, that works around trying to support the different journeys but allows that flexibility and that adaptability for customers to jump around and to have one of those continuous but disconnected conversations. But it's up to us to try and connect them all, to deliver the service and experience that the customers actually want. >> Now Shelly, a lot of the customer experience actually starts with the employees, and employees don't like when the customer is yelling at them saying, "I just answered all those questions. "Why do I have to answer them again?" So you've, at your firm, you guys have written a lot about this, you've thought a lot about it, you have some data I know you shared on theCUBE one time that 80% of employees are disengaged. And so, that affects the customer experience, doesn't it? >> Yeah it does, you know. And I think that when I'm listening to Don's explanation about his cable company, I'm having flashbacks to what feels like hundreds of my own experiences. And you're just thinking, "This does not have to be this complicated!" You know, ten years ago that same thing that Don just described happened with phone calls. You know, you called one person and they passed you off to somebody else, and they passed you off to somebody else, and you were equally as frustrated as a customer. Now what's happening a lot of times is that we're plugging technology in, like a chat bot, that's supposed to make things better but we're not developing a system and processes throughout our organization, and also change management, what do I want to say, programs within the organization and so we're kind of forgetting all of those things. So what's happening is that we're still having customers having those same experiences that are a decade old, and technology is part of the mix. And it really shouldn't be that way. And so, one thing that I really enjoyed, speaking about employees, was listening to Rich Gilbert from Aflac. And he was talking about when you're moving from legacy processes to new ones, you have to plan for and invest in change management. And we talk about this all the time here at Futurum, you know technology alone is never the answer. It's technology plus people. And so you have to invest in people, you have to invest in their training in order to be able to support and manage change and to drive change. And I think one really important part of that equation is also listening to your employees and getting their feedback, and making them part of the process. Because when they are truly on your front lines, dealing with customers, many times dealing with stressed, upset, frustrated customers, you know, they have a lot of insights. And sometimes we don't bring them into those conversations, certainly early enough in the process to help, to let them help guide us in terms of the solutions and the processes that we put in place. I think that's really important. >> Yeah, a lot of-- >> Shelly, I think-- >> If I may, a lot of the frustration with some employees sometimes is those processes change, and they're unknown going into it. We saw that with COVID, Don. And so, your thoughts on this? >> Yeah, I mean, I think the environment employees are working in is changing rapidly. We've got a customer, a large telecommunications company in the UK where their customer service requests are now being handled by about 4,000 employees pulled from their marketing department working distributed because that's the world that we're in. And the thing I was going to say in response to Shelly is, Alan mentioned in his keynote this idea of design thinking. And one of the reasons why I think that's so important is that it's actually about giving the people on the front lines a voice. It's a format for engaging the employees who actually know the day-to-day experiences of the customers, the day-to-day experiences of a customer service agent, and pulling them into the solution. How do we develop the systems, how do we rethink our processing, how does that need to plug into the various channels that we have? And that's why a lot of our focus is not just on the customer service technology, but the underlying low code platform that allows us to build those processes and those chunks of the customer journey. We often refer to them as "microjourneys" that lead to a specific outcome. And if you're using a low code based platform, something that allows anybody to come in and define that process, you can actually pull employees from the front lines and put them directly on your project teams. And all of a sudden you get better engagement but you also get this incredible insight flowing into what you're doing because you're talking to the people who live this day in and day out. >> Well and when you have-- >> So let's stay on this for a second, if we can. Shelly, go ahead please. >> Sure. When you have a chance to talk with those people, to talk with those front line employees who are having an opportunity to work with low code, no code, they get so excited about it and their jobs are completely, the way they think about their jobs and their contribution to the company, and their contribution to the customer, and the customer experience, is just so wonderful to see. And it's such an easy thing to do, so I think that that's really a critical part of the equation as it relates to success with these programs. >> Yeah, staying close to the customer-- >> Can I jump in? >> Yeah, please Adrian. >> Can I jump in on that a little, a second. I think Shelly, you're absolutely right. I think that it's a really simple thing. You talk about engagement. And one of the key parts of engagement, it seems to me, is that, is giving people a voice and making them feel important and feel heard. And so to go and ask for their opinion and to help them get involved and make a difference to the work that they do, the outcomes that their customers receive, and the overall productivity and efficiency, can only have a positive impact. And it's almost like, it feels self-evident that you'd do that but unfortunately it's not very common. >> Right. It does feel self-evident. But we miss on that front a lot. >> So I want to ask, I'm going to come back to, we talked about people process, we'll come back to that. But I want to talk about the tech. You guys announced, the big announcement was the Pega Process Fabric. You talked about that, Don, as a platform for digital platforms. You've got all these cool microservices and dynamic APIs and being able to compose on the fly, so some pretty cool stuff there. I wonder, with the virtual event, you know, with the physical event you've got the hallway traffic, you talk to people and you get face-to-face reactions. Were you able to get your kind of real-time reactions to the announcement? What was that like? Share with us please. >> Yeah, so, we got well over 1,000 questions in during the event and a lot of them were either about Process Fabric or comments about it. So I think people are definitely excited about this. And when you strip away all of the buzzwords around microservices and cloud, et cetera, I think what we're really getting at here is that work is going to be increasingly more distributed. We are living proof of that right now, the four of us all coming here from different studios. But work is going to be distributed for a bunch of reasons. Because people are more distributed, because organizations increasingly are building customer journeys that aren't just inside their walls, but are connected to the partners and their ecosystem. I'm a bank but I may, as part of my mortgage process, connect somebody up to a home insurer. And all of a sudden the home buying process goes beyond my four walls. And then finally, as you get all of these employees engaged with building their low code apps and being citizen developers, you want to let the 1,000 flowers to bloom but you also need a way to connect that all back together. And Process Fabric is about putting the technology in place to allow us to take these distributed bits of work that we need to do and weave them together into experiences that are coherent for a customer and easy for an employee to navigate. Because I think it's going to be really really important that we do that. And even as we take our systems and break them up into microservices, well customers don't interact with microservices. Customers interact with journeys, with experiences, with the processes you lay out, and making sure we can connect that up together into something that feels easy for the customer and the employee, and gets them to that result they want quickly, that's what the vision of Process Fabric is all about. >> You know, it strikes me, I'm checking my notes here. You guys talked about a couple of examples. One was, I think you talked about the car as sort of a mobility experience, maybe, you know, it makes me wonder with all this AI and autonomous vehicle stuff going on, at what point is owning and driving your own vehicle really going to be not the norm anymore? But you talked about this totally transformed, sorry to use that word, but experience around autos. And certainly financial services is maybe a little bit more near-term. But I wonder Shelly, Futurum, you know, you guys look ahead, how far can we actually go with AI in this realm? >> Well, I think we can go pretty far and I think it'll happen pretty fast. And I think that we're seeing that already in terms of what happened when we had the Coronavirus COVID-19, and of course we're still navigating through that, is that all of a sudden things that we talked about doing, or thought about doing, or planned doing, you know later on in this year or 2021, we had to do all of those things immediately. And so again, it is kind of like ripping the Bandaid off. And we're finding that AI plays a tremendously important role in relieving the workload on the frontline workers, and being able to integrate empathy into decision making. And you know, I go back to, I remember when you all first rolled out the empathy part of your platform, Don, and just watching a demo on that of how you can slide this empathy meter to be warmer, and see in true dollars and cents over time the impact of treating your customers with more empathy, what that delivers to a company. And I think that AI that continues to build and learn and again, what we're having right now, is we're having this gigantic volume of needs, of conversation, of all these transactions that need to happen at once, and great volumes make for better outcomes as it relates to artificial intelligence and how learning can happen more quickly over time. So I think that it's, we're definitely going to see more use of AI more rapidly than we might've seen it before, and I don't think that's going to slow down, at all. Certainly, I mean there's no reason for it to slow down. The benefits are tremendous. The benefits are tremendous, and let me step back and say, following a conversation with Rob Walker on responsible AI, that's a whole different ball of wax. And I think that's something that Pega has really embraced and planted a flag in. So I think that we'll see great things ahead with AI, and I think that we'll see the Pega team really leading as it relates to ethical AI. And I think that's tremendously important as well. >> Well that's the other side of the coin, you know. I asked how far can we go and I guess you're alluding to how far should we go. But Adrian, we also heard about agility and empathy. I mean, I want an empathic service provider. Are agility and empathy related to customer service, and how so? >> Well, David, I think that's a great question. I think that, you talk about agility and talk about empathy, and I think the thing is, what we probably know from our own experience is that being empathetic is sometimes going to be really hard. And it takes time, and it takes practice to actually get better at it. It's almost like a new habit. Some people are naturally better at it than others. But you know, organizationally, I talk about that we need to almost build, almost like an empathetic musculature at an organizational level if we're going to achieve this. And it can be aided by technology, but we, when we develop new muscles it takes time. And sometimes you go through a bit of pain in doing that. So I think that's where the agility comes in, is that we have to test and learn and try new things, be willing to get things wrong and then correct, and then kind of move on. And then learn from these kind of things. And so I think the agility and empathy, it does go hand in hand and it's something that will drive growth and increasing empathetic interactions as we go forward. But I think it's also, just to build on Shelly's point, I think you're absolutely right that Pega has been leading the way in this sort of dimension, in terms of its T-switch and its empathetic advisor. But now the ethical AI testing or the ethical bias testing adds a dimension to that to make sure it's not just about all horsepower, but being able to make sure that you can steer your car. To use your analogy. >> So AI's coming whether we like it or not. Right, Shelly? Go ahead. >> It is. One real quick real world example here is, you know, okay so we have this time when a lot of consumers are furloughed. Out of work. Stressed about finances. And we have a lot of Pega's customers are in the financial services space. Some of the systems that they've established, they've developed over time, the processes they've developed over time is, "Oh, I'm talking with Shelly Kramer and she has a "blah-blah-blah account here. "And this would be a great time to sell her on "this additional service," or whatever. And when you can, so that was our process yesterday. But when you're working with an empathic mindset and you are also needing to be incredibly agile because of current circumstances and situations, your technology, the platform that you're using, can allow you to go, "Okay I'm dealing "with a really stressed customer. "This is not the best time "to offer any additional services." Instead what we need to ask is this series of questions: "How can we help?" Or, "Here are some options." Or whatever. And I think that it's little tweaks like that that can help you in the customer service realm be more agile, be more empathetic, and really deliver an amazing customer experience as a result. And that's the technology. >> If I could just add to that. Alan mentioned in his keynote a specific example, which is Commonwealth Bank of Australia. And they were able, multiple times this year, once during the Australian wildfires and then again in response to the COVID crisis, to completely shift and turn on a dime how they interacted with their customer, and to move from a prioritization of maybe selling things to a prioritization of responding to a customer need. And maybe offering payment deferrals or assistance to a customer. But back to what we were talking about earlier, that agility only happened because they didn't have the logic for that embedded in all their channels. They had it centralized. They had it in a common brain that allowed them to make that change in one place and instantly propagate it to all of the 18 different channels in which they touch their customer. And so, being able to have agility and that empathy, to my mind, is explicitly tied to that concept of a center-out business architecture that Alan was talking about. >> Oh, absolutely. >> And, you know, this leads to discussion about automation, and again, how far can we go, how far should we go? Don, you've been interviewed many many times, like any tech executive, about the impact of AI on jobs. And, you know, the typical response of course is, "No, we want augmentation." But the reality is, machines have always replaced humans it's just, now it's the first time in terms of cognitive function. So it's a little different for us this time around. But it's clear, as I said, AI is coming whether we like it or not. Automation is very clearly on the top of people's minds. So how do you guys see the evolution of automation, the injection of automation into applications, the ubiquity of automations coming in this next decade? Shelly, let's start with you. >> You know, I was thinking you were going to ask Don that question so I'm just listening and listening. (laughing) >> Okay, well we can go with Don, that's-- >> No I'm happy to answer it. It's fine, it just wasn't what I expected. You know, we are really immersed in the automation space. So I very much see the concerns that people on the front line have, that automation is going to replace them. And the reality of it is, if a job that someone does can be automated, it will be automated. It makes sense. It makes good business sense to do that. And I think that what we are looking at from a business agility standpoint, from a business resilience standpoint, from a business survival standpoint, is really how can we deliver most effectively to serve the needs of our customers. Period. And how we can do that quickly and efficiently and without frustration and in a way that is cost effective. All of those things play into what makes a successful business today, as well as what keeps employees, I'm sorry, as well as what keeps customers served, loyal, staying around. I think that we live in a time where customer loyalty is fleeting. And so I think that smart businesses have to look at how do we deepen the relationships that we have with customers? How can we use automation to do that? And the thing about it, you know, I'll go back to the example that Don gave about his cable company that all of us have lived through. It's just like, "Oh my gosh. "There's got to be a better way." So compare that to, and I'm sure all of us can think of an experience where you had to deal with a customer service situation in some way or another, and it was the most awesome thing ever. And you walked away from it and you just went, "Oh my gosh. I know I was talking to a bot here or there." Or, "I know I was doing this, but that solved my problem. "I can't believe it was so easy! "I can't believe it was so easy! "I can't wait to buy something from this company again!" You know what I'm saying? And that's really, I think, the role that automation can play. Is that it can really help deepen existing relationships with our customers, and help us serve them better. And it can also help our employees do things that are more interesting and that are more relevant to the business. And I think that that's important too. So, yes, jobs will go. Yes, automation will slide into places where we've done things manually and repetitive processes before, but I think that's a good thing. >> So, we've got to end it shortly here but I'll give you guys each a last opportunity to chime in. And Adrian, I want to start with you. I invoked the T-word before, transformation, a kind of tongue-in-cheek joking because I know it's not your favorite word. But it is the industry's favorite word. Thinking ahead for the future, we've talked about AI, we've talked about automation, people, process and tech. What do you see as the future state of customer experience, this mix of human and machine? What do we have to look forward to? >> So I think that, first of all, let me tackle the transformation thing. I mean, I remember talking about this with Duncan Macdonald who is the CIO across at UPC, which is one of Pega's customers, on my podcast there the other week. And he talked about, he's the cosponsor of a three year digital transformation program. But then he appended the description of that by saying it's a transformation program that will never end. That's the thing that I think about, because actually, if you think about what we're talking about here, we're not transforming to anything in particular, you know. It's not like going from here to there. And actually, the thing that I think we need to start thinking about is, rather than transformation we actually need to think about an evolution. And adopting an evolutionary state. And we talked about being responsive. We talked about being adaptable. We talked about being agile. We talk about testing and learning and all these different sort of things, that's evolutionary, right? It's not transformational, it's evolutionary. If you think about Charles Darwin and the theory of the species, that's an evolutionary process. And there's a quote, as you've mentioned I authored this book called "Punk CX," there's a quote that I use in the book which is taken from a Bad Religion song called "No Control" and it's called, "There is no vestige of a beginning, "and no prospect of an end." And that quote comes from a 1788 book by James Hutton, which was one of the first treaties on geology, and what he found through all these studies was actually, the formation of the earth and its continuous formation, there is no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end. It's a continuous process. And I think that's what we've got to embrace is that actually change is constant. And as Alan says, you have to build for change and be ready for change. And have the right sort of culture, the right sort of business architecture, the right sort of technology to enable that. Because the world is getting faster and it is getting more competitive. This is probably not the last crisis that we will face. And so, like in most evolutionary things, it wasn't the fittest and the strongest that survived, it was the ones that were most adaptable that survived. And I think that's the kind of thing I want to land on, is actually how, it's the ones that kind of grasp that, grasp that whole concept are the ones that are going to succeed out of this. And, what they will do will be... We can't even imagine what they're going to do right now. >> And, thank you. And Shelly, it's not only responding to, as Adrian was saying, to crisis, but it's also being in a position to very rapidly take advantage of opportunities and that capability is going to be important. You guys are futurists, it's in the name. Your thoughts? >> Well I think that, you know, Adrian's comments were incredibly salient, as always. And I think that-- >> Thank you. >> The thing that this particular crisis that we are navigating through today has in many ways been bad, but in other ways, I think it's been incredibly good. Because it has forced us, in a way that we really haven't had to deal with before, to act quickly, to think quickly, to rethink and to embrace change. Oh, we've got to work from home! Oh, we've got 20 people that need to work from home, we have 20,000 people that need to work from home. What technology do we need? How do we take care of our customers? All of these things we've had to figure out in overdrive. And humans, generally speaking, aren't great at change. But what we are forced to do as a result of this pandemic is change. And rethink everything. And I think that, you know, the point about transformation not being a beginning and an end, we are never, ever, ever done. It is evolutionary and I think that as we look to the future and to one of your comments, we are going faster with more exciting technology solutions out there, with people who are incredibly smart, and so I think that it's exciting and I think that all we are going to see is more and more and more change, and I think it will be a time of great resilience, and we'll see some businesses survive and thrive, and we'll see other businesses not survive. But that's been our norm as well, so I think it's really, I think we have some things to thank this pandemic for. Which is kind of weird, but I also try to be fairly optimistic. But I do, I think we've learned a lot and I think we've seen some really amazing exciting things from businesses who have done this. >> Well thanks for sharing that silver lining, Shelly. And then, Don, I'm going to ask you to bring us to the finish line. And I'm going to close my final question to you, or pose it. You guys had the wrecking ball, and I've certainly observed, when it comes to things like digital transformations, or whatever you want to call it, that there was real complacency, and you showed that cartoon with the wrecking ball saying, "Ehh not in my life, not on my watch. "We're doing fine." Well, this pandemic has clearly changed people's thinking, automation is really top of mind now at executive. So you guys are in a good spot from that standpoint. But your final thoughts, please? >> Yeah, I mean, I want to concur with what Adrian and Shelly said and if I can drop another rock quote in there. This one is from Bob Dylan. And Dylan famously said, "The times they are a changing." But the quote that I keep on my wall is one that he tossed off during an interview where he said, "I accept chaos. "I'm not sure if it accepts me." But I think digital transformation looks a lot less like that butterfly emerging from a cocoon to go off happy to smell the flowers, and looks much more like accepting that we are in a world of constant and unpredictable change. And I think one of the things that the COVID crisis has done is sort of snapped us awake to that world. I was talking to the CIO of a large media company who is one of our customers, and he brought up the fact, you know, like Croom said, "We're all agile now. "I've been talking about five years, "trying to get this company to operate in an agile way, "and all of a sudden we had to do it. "We had no choice, we had to respond, "we had to try new things, we had to fail fast." And my hope is, as we think about what customer engagement and automation and business efficiency looks like in the future, we keep that mindset of trying new things and continuously adapting. Evolving. At the end of the day, our company's brand promise is, "Build for change." And we chose that because we think that that's what organizations, the one thing they can design for. They can design for a future that will continue to change. And if you put the right architecture in place, if you take that center-out mindset, you can support those immediate needs, but set yourself up for a future of continuous change and continuous evolution and adaptation. >> Well guys, I'll quote somebody less famous. Jeff Frick, who said, "The answer to every question "lives somewhere in a CUBE interview." and you guys have given us a lot of answers. I really appreciate your time. I hope that next year at PegaWorld iNspire we can see each other face-to-face and do some live interviews. But really appreciate the insights and all your good work. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Absolutely. >> And thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Vellante and our coverage of PegaWorld iNspire 2020. Be right back, right after this short break. (lighthearted music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, host of theCUBE here in our Palo Alto office for remote interviews during this time of COVID-19. We're here with the quarantine crew here in our studio. We've got a great guest here from Google, Will Grannis, managing director, head of the office of the CTO with Google Cloud. Thanks for coming on, Will. Appreciate you spending some time with me. >> Oh, John, it's great to be with you. And as you said, in these times, more important than ever to stay connected. >> Yeah, and I'm really glad you came on because a couple of things. One, congratulations to Google Cloud for the success you guys had. Saw a lot of big wins under your belt, both on the momentum side, on the business side, but also on the technical side. Meet is available now for folks. Anthos is doing very, very well. Partner ecosystem's developing. Got some nice use cases in vertical markets, so I want to get in and unpack with you. But really, the bigger story here is that the world has seen the future before it was ready for it. And that is the at-scale challenge that the COVID-19 has shown everyone. We're seeing the future has been pulled forward. We're living in a virtualized environment. It's funny to say that, virtualization (laughs). Server virtualization is a tech term, but that enabled a lot of things. We're living in a virtualized world now 'cause we have to, but this is going to set in motion a series of new realities that you guys have been experiencing and supporting for many, many years. But now as a provider of Google Cloud, you guys have to operate at scale, you have. And now the whole world realizes that scale is a big deal. And so you guys have had some successes. I want to get your thoughts on the this at scale problem that the world now realizes. I mean, everyone's at home. That's a disruption that was unforecasted. Whether it's under-provisioning VPNs in IT to a surface area for security, to just work and play. And activities are now confined, so people aren't convening anymore and it's a huge issue. What's your take on all this? >> Well, I mean, to your point just now, the fact that we can have this conversation and we can have it fluidly from our respective remote locations just goes to show you the power of information technology that underlies so many of the things that we do today. And for Google Cloud, this is not a new thing. And for Google, this is not a new thing. For Google Cloud, we had a mission of trying to help companies accelerate their transformation and enable them in these new digital environments. And so many companies that we've been working with, they've already been on the path to operating in environments that are digital, that are fluid. And when you think about the cloud, that's one of the great benefits of cloud, is that scalability in common with the business demand. And it also helps the scale situation without having to do the typical, "Oh wait, "you need to find the procurement people. "We need to find the server vendors. "We need to get the storage lined up." It really allows a much more fluid response to unexpected and unforecasted situations. Whether that's customer demand or in this case a global pandemic. >> Yeah, one of the things I want to get in with you on, you have explained what your job is there 'cause obviously Google's got a new CEO now for over a year. Thomas Kurian came from Oracle, knows the enterprise up and down. You had Diane Greene before that. Again, another enterprise leader. Google Cloud has essentially rebuilt itself from the original Google Cloud to be very enterprise centric. You guys have great momentum, and this is a world where cloud-native is going to be required. I mean, everyone now sees it. The tide has been pulled out, everything's exposed, all the gaps in business from a tech standpoint is kind of exposed. And so the smart managers and companies are looking at things and saying, "Double down on that. "Let's kill that. "We don't want to pay that supplier. "They're not core to our business." This is going to be a very rapid acceleration of what I call a vetting of the new set of players that are going to emerge because the folks who don't adapt to this new cloud-native reality, whether it's app workloads for banking to whatever are going to have to reinvent themselves now and reset and tweak to come out of this crisis. So it's going to be very cloud-native. This is a big deal. Can you share your reaction to that? >> Absolutely. And so as you pointed out, there are kind of two worlds that exist right now. Companies that are moving to become more digital and transform, and you mentioned the momentum in Google Cloud just over the last year, greater than 50% revenue growth. And in a greater than $10 billion run rate business and adding customers at a really quick clip, including just yesterday, Splunk, and along the way, Telecom Italia, Major League Baseball, Vodafone, Lowe's, Wayfair, Activision Blizzard. This transformation and this digitization is not just for a few or just for any one industry. It's happening across the board. And then you add that to the implementations that have been happening across Shopify and the Spotify and HSBC, which was a early customer of ours in the cloud and it already has a little bit of a headstart into this transformation. So you see these new companies coming in and seeing the value of digital transformation. And then these other companies that have kind of lit the path for others to consider. And Shopify is a really good example of how seeing drastic uptick in demand, they're able to respond and keep roughly half a million shops up and running during a period of time where many retailers are trying to figure out how to stay online or even get online. >> Well, what is your role at Google? Obviously, you're the managing director. Title is managing director, head of the office of the CTO. We've seen these roles before, head of the CTO, obviously a technical role. Is it partnering with the CEO on strategy? Is it you're tire kicking new things? Are you overseeing any strategic initiatives? What is your role? >> So a little bit of all of those things combined into one. So I spent the first couple of decades of my career on the other side of the fence in the non-tech community, both in the enterprise. But we were still building technology and we were still digitally minded. But not the way that people view technology in Silicon Valley. And so spending a couple of decades in that environment really gave me insights into how to take technology and apply them to a specific problem. And when I came to Google five years ago, selfishly, it was because I knew the potential of Google's technology having been on the other side. And I was really interested in forming a better bridge between Google's technology and people like me who were CTOs of public companies and really wanted to leverage that technology for problems that I was solving. Whether it was aerospace, public sector, manufacturing, what have you. And so it's been great. It's the role of a lifetime. I've been able to build the team that I wanted as an enterprise technologist for decades and the entire span of technologies at our disposal. And we do two things. One is we help our most strategic customers accelerate their path to cloud. And two, we create these signals by working with the top companies moving to the cloud and digitally transforming. We learned so much, John, about what we need to build as an organization. So it also helps balance out the Google driven innovation with our customer driven innovation. >> Yeah, and I can attest. I've been watching you guys from day one. Hired a lot of great enterprise people that I personally know. So you get in the enterprise chops and stuff and you've seen some progress. I have to ask you though, because first of all, big fan of Google at scale from knowing them from when they were just a little search engine to what they are now. There was an expression a few years ago I heard from enterprise customers. It goes along the lines like this. "I want to be like Google," because you guys had a great network, you had large scale. You had all these things that were like awesome. And then they realized, "Well, we can't be like Google. "We don't have SREs. "We don't have large scale data centers." So there was a little bit of a translation, and I want to say a little bit of a overplay of the Google hand, and you guys had since realized that it wasn't just people are going to bang at your doorstep and be adopting Google Cloud because there was a little bit of a cultural disconnect from wanting to be like Google, then leveraging Google in their business as they transform. So as you guys have moved from that, what's changed? They still want to be like Google in the sense you have great security, got a great network, and you've got that scale. Enterprises are a little bit slower to adopt that, which you're focused on now. What is the story there? Because I think that's kind of the theme that I'm hearing. Okay, Google now understands me. They know I'm not as fast as Google. They got super great people (laughs). We are training our people. We're retraining them. This is the transformation that they're going through. So you might be a little bit ahead of them certainly, but now they need to level up. How do you respond to that? >> Well, a lot of this is the transformation that Thomas has been enacting over the last year plus. And it comes in kind of three very operational or tactical pillars that I think of. First, we expanded our customer and we continue to expand our customer facing teams. Three times what they were before because we need to be there. We need to be in those situations. We need to hear from the customer. We need to learn more about the problems they're trying to solve. So we don't just take a theoretical principle and try to overlay it onto a problem. We actually get very visceral understanding of what they're trying to solve. But you have to be there to gain that empathy and that understanding. And so one is showing up, and that has been mobilizing a much larger engine of customer facing personnel from Google. Second, it's also been really important that we evolve our own. Just as Google brought SRE principles and principles of distributed systems and software design out to the world, we also had a little bit to learn about transitioning from typical customer support and moving to more customer experience. So you've seen that evolution under Thomas as well with cloud changing... Moving from talking about support to talking about customer experience, that white glove experience that our customers get and our partners get from the beginning of their journey with us all the way through. And then finally making sure that our product roadmap has the solutions that are relevant across key priority industries for us. Again, that only comes from being present from having a focus in those industries and then developing the solutions that progress those companies. This isn't about taking a principle and trying to apply it blindly. This is about adding that connection, that really deep connection to our customers and our partners and letting that connection manifest the things that we have to do as a product company to best support them over a long period of time. I mean, look at some of these deals we've been announcing. These are 10-year, five-year, multi-year strategic partnerships that go across the canvas of all of Google. And those are the really exciting scaled partnerships. But to your point, you can't just take SRE from Google and apply it to company X, but you can things like error budgets or how we think about the principles of SRE, and you can apply them over the course of developing technology, collaborating, innovating together. >> Yeah, and I think cloud-native is going to be a key thing. It's just my opinion, but I think one of those situations where the better mouse trap will win. If you're cloud-native and you have APIs and you have the kind of services, people will beat it to your doorstep. So I got to ask you, with Thomas Kurian on board, obviously, we've been following his career as well at Oracle. He knows what he's doing. Comes into Google, it's being built out. It's like a rocket ship at this point. What bet is he making and what bet are you guys making on behalf of your customers? If you had to boil it down to Google Cloud's big bet, what is the bet on the technology side? And what's the bet on the business side? >> Sure. Well, I've already mentioned... I've already hinted at the big strategy that Thomas has brought in. And that's, again, those three pillars. Making sure that we show up and that we're present by having a scaled customer facing organization. Again, making sure that we transition from a typical support mindset into more of a customer experience mindset and then making sure that those solutions are tailored and available for our priority industries. If I was to add more color to that, I think one of the most important changes that Thomas has personally been driving is he's been converting us to a partner-led business and a partner-led organization. And this means a lot of investments in large global systems integrators like Accenture and Deloitte. But this also means that... Like the Splunk announcement from yesterday, that isn't just a sell to. This is a partnership that goes deep across go-to market product and sell to. And then we also bring in very specific partners like Temenos in Europe for financial services or a CETA or a Rackspace for migrations. And as a result, already, we're seeing really incredible lifts. So for example, nearly 200% year over year increase in partner influenced revenue in Google Cloud and almost like a 13X year over year increase in new customers won by partners. That's the kind of engine that builds a real hyper-scale business. >> Interesting you mentioned Splunk. I want to get to that in a second, but I also noticed there was a deal with TELUS Group on eSIM subscriptions, which kind of leads me into the edge piece. There's a real edge component here with Google Cloud, and I think I had a conversation with Jennifer Lynn a few years ago, really digging into the built-in security and the value of the Google network. I mean, a lot of the scuttlebutt around the Valley and the industry is Google's got an amazing network. Software-defined networking is going to be a hot programmable area. So you got programmable networking and you got edge and edge security. These are killer areas that need innovation. Could you comment on what you guys are doing there and do you agree? Obviously, you have a killer network and you're leveraging it. Can you just give some insight into what's going on in those two areas? Network and then the edge. >> Yeah, I think what you're seeing is the manifestation of the progression of cloud generally. And what do I mean by that? It started out as like get everything to the data center. We kind of had this thought that maybe we could take all the workloads and we could get them to these centralized hubs and that we could redistribute out the results and drive the latency down over time so we can expand the portfolio of applications and services that would become relevant over time. And what we've seen over the last decade really in cloud is an evolution to more of a layered architecture. And that layered architecture includes kind of core data centers. It includes CDN capacity, points of presence, it includes edge. And just in that list of customers over the last year I mentioned, there were at least three or four telcos in there. And you've also probably heard and seen quite a bit of telco momentum coming from us in recent announcements. I think that's an indication that a lot of us are thinking about, how can we take technology like Anthos, for example, and how could we orchestrate workloads, create a common control plane, manage services across those three shells, if you will, of the architecture? And that's a very strategic and important area for us. And I think generally for the cloud industry, is expanding beyond the data center as the place where everything happens. And you can look at Google Fi, you can look at Stadia. You can look at examples within Google that go well beyond cloud as to how we think about new ways to leverage that kind of criteria. >> All right, so we saw some earnings come out on Amazon side as Google, both groups and Microsoft as well, all three clouds are crushing it on the cloud side. That's a tailwind, I get that. But as it continues, we're expecting post-COVID some redistribution of development dollars in projects. Whether it's IT going cloud-native or whatever new workloads. We are predicting a Cambrian explosion of new things from core to edge. And this is going to create some lifts. So I want to get your thoughts on you guys' strategy with go-to market, as well as your customers as they now have the ability to build workloads and apps with AI and data. There seems to be a trend towards the verticalization of whether it's sales and go-to market and/or specialism because you have horizontal scalability with cloud and you now have data that has distinct (chuckles) value in these verticals. So it's really seems to be... I won't say ratification, but in a way, that seems to be the norm. Whether you come into a market and you have specialization, but the data is there so apps can be more agile. Are you guys seeing that? And is that something that you guys are considering from an organization standpoint? And how do customers think about targeting vertical industries and their customers? >> Yeah, I bring this to... And where you started going there at the end of the question is exactly the way that we think about it as well. Which is we've moved from, "Here are storage offers for everybody, "and here's basic infrastructure for everybody." And now we've said, "How can we make sure "that we have solutions that are tailored "to the very specific problems that customers "are trying to solve?" And we're getting to the point now where performance and variety of technologies are available to be able to impose very specific solutions. And if you think about the substrate that has to be there, we mentioned you have to have some really great partners, and you have to have a roadmap that is focused on priority solution. So for example, at Google Cloud, we're very focused on six priority vertical areas. So retail, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and industrials, healthcare life sciences, public sector. And as a result of being very focused in those areas, we can make more targeted investments and also align our entire go-to market system and our entire partner ecosystem... Excuse me, ecosystem around those bare specific priority areas. So for example, we work with CETA and HDA Healthcare very recently to develop and maintain a national response portal for COVID-19. And that's to help better inform communities and hospitals. We can use Looker to help with like a Commonwealth Care Alliance nonprofit and that helps monitor patient symptoms and risk factors. So we're using a very specific focus in healthcare and a partner ecosystem to develop very tailored solutions. You can also look at... I mentioned Shopify earlier. That's another great example of how in retail, they can use something like Google Meet, inherent reliability, scalability, security, to connect their employees during these interesting times. But then they can also use GCP, Google Cloud Platform to scale out. And as they come up with new apps and experiences for their shoppers, for their shops, they can rapidly deploy, to your point. And those solutions and how the database performs and how those tiers perform, that's a very tight-knit feedback loop with our engineering teams. >> Yeah, one of the things I'm seeing obviously with the virtualization of the COVID is that when the world gets back to normal, it'll be a hybrid. And it'll be a hybrid between reality, not physical and a hundred percent virtual, hybrid. And that's going to impact events too, media, to everything. Every vertical will be impacted. And I want to point out the Splunk deal and bring that back in because I want you to comment on the relevance of the Splunk deal in context to Splunk has a cloud. And they've got a great slogan, "Data for everywhere." "Data to everywhere," I think it is. But theCUBE, we have a cloud. Every company will have a cloud scale. At some level, we'll progress to having some sort of cloud because they have data. How are you guys powering those clouds? Because I think the Splunk deal is interesting. Their partner, their stock price was up out on the news of the deal. Nice bump there for Splunk, shout out to those guys. But they're a data company and now they're cross-platform. But they're not Google, but they have a cloud. So you know what I'm saying? So they need to play in all the clouds, but they need infrastructure (laughs), they need support. So how do you guys talk to that customer that says, "Hey, the next pandemic that comes, "the next crisis that's going to cause some "either social disruption or workflow disruption "or supply chain disruption. "I need to be agile. "I need to have full cloud scale. "And so I need to talk to Google." What do you say to them? What's the pitch? And does the Splunk deal mirror some of those capabilities? Or tie that together for us, the Splunk deal and how it relates to how to proof themselves for the future. Sorry. >> For example, with the Splunk cloud deal, if you take a look at what Google is already really good at, data processing at scale, log analytics, and you take a look at what Splunk is doing with their events and security incident monitoring and the rest, it's a really great mashup because they see by platforming on Google Cloud, not only do they get highly performing infrastructure. But they also get the opportunity to leverage data tools, data analytics tools, machine learning and AI that can help them provide enhanced services. So not just about capacity going up and down through periods of demand, but also enhancing services and continuing to offer more value to their customers. And we see that as a really big trend. And this gets at something, John, a little bit bigger, which is kind of the two views of the world. And we talked about very tailored, focused solutions. Splunk is an example of taking a very methodical approach to a partnership, building a solution specifically with partners. And in this case, Splunk on the security event management side. But we're always going to provide our data processing platform, our infrastructure for companies across many different industries. And I think that addresses one part of the topic, which is, how do we make sure that in periods of demand rapidly changing, and this goes back to the foundational elements of infrastructure as a service and elasticity. We're going to provide a platform and infrastructure that can help companies move through periods of... It's hard to forecast, and/or demand may rise and fall in very interesting ways. But then there's going to be times where we... Because we're not necessarily a focused use case where it may just be generalized platform versus a focused solution. So for example, in the oil and gas industry, we don't develop custom AI, ML solutions that facilitate upstream extraction, for example. But what we do do is work with renewable energy companies to figure out how they might be able to leverage some of our AI machine learning algorithms from our own data centers to make their operations more efficient and to help those renewable energy companies learn from what we've learned building out what I consider to be a world leading renewable energy strategy and infrastructure. >> It's a classic enablement model where you're enabling your platform for your customers. Okay, so I've got to ask the question. I asked this to the Microsoft guys as well because Amazon has their own SaaS stuff. But really more of end to end. The better product's usually on the ecosystem side. You guys have some killer SaaS. G Suite, we're a customer. We use the G Suite really deeply. We also use some Bigtable as well. I want to build a cloud, we have a cloud, CUBE cloud. But you guys have Meet. So I want to build my product on Google Cloud. How do I know you're not going to compete with me? Do you guys have those conversations around the trade-off between the pure Google services, which provide great value for the areas where the ecosystem needs to develop those new areas that are going to be great markets, potentially huge markets that are out there. >> Well, this is the power of partnership. I mentioned earlier that one of the really big moves that Thomas has made has been developing a sense of partners. And it kind of blurs the line between traditional, what you would call a customer and what you would call a partner. And so having a really strong sense of which industries we're in, which we prioritize, plus having a really strong sense of where we want to add value and where our customers and partners want to add that value. That's the foundational, that's the beginning of that conversation that you just mentioned. And it's important that we have an ability to engage not just in a, "Here's the cloud infrastructure piece of the puzzle." But one of the things Thomas has also done and a key strategy of his has been to make sure that the Google Cloud relationship is also a way to access all amazing innovation happening across all of Google. And also help bring a strategic conversation in that includes multiple properties from across Google so that an HSBC and Google and have a conversation about how to move forward together that is comprehensive rather than having to wonder and have that uncertainty sit behind the projects that we're trying to get out and have high velocity on because they offer so much to retail bank, for example. >> Well, I've got a couple more questions and then I'll let you go. I know you got some other things going on. I really appreciate you taking the time, sharing this great insight and updates. As a builder, you've been on the other side of the table. Now you're at Google heading up the CTO. Also working with Thomas, understanding the go-to market across the board and the product mix. As you talk to customers and they're thinking... The good customers are thinking, "Hey, "I want to come out of this COVID on an upward trajectory "and I want to use this opportunity "to reset and realign for the future." What advice do you have for those enterprises? They could be small, medium-sized enterprises to the full large big guys. And obviously, cloud-native, we've talked some of that already, but what advice would you have for them as they start to really prioritize, as some things are now exposed? The collaboration, the tooling, the scale, all these things are out there. What have you seen and what advice would you give a CXO or CSO or a leader in the industry to think about and how they should come out of this thing, how they should plan, execute, and move forward? >> Well, I appreciate the question because this is the crux of most of my day job, which is interacting with the C-suite and boards of companies and partners around the world. And they're obviously very interested to learn or get a data point from someone at Google. And the advice generally goes in a couple of different directions. One, collaboration is part of the secret sauce that makes Google what it is. And I think you're seeing this right now across every industry, and whether you're a small, medium-sized business or you're a large company, the ability to connect people with each other to collaborate in very meaningful ways, to share information rapidly, to do it securely with high reliability, that's the foundation that enables all of the projects that you might choose to... Applications to build, services to enable, to actually succeed in production and over the long haul. Is that culture of innovation and collaboration. So absolutely number one is having a really strong sense of what they want to achieve from a cultural perspective and collaboration perspective and the people because that's the thing that fuels everything else. Second piece of advice, especially in these times where there's so much uncertainty, is where can you buy down uncertainty with...? You can learn without a high penalty. This is why cloud I think is really, really finding super scale. It was already on the rise, but what you're seeing now as you've laid back to me during this conversation, we're seeing the same thing, which is a high increase in demand of, "Let's get this implemented now. "How can we do this more? "This is clearly one way to move through uncertainty." And so look for those opportunities. I'll give you a really good example. Mainframes, (chuckles) one of the classic workloads of the on-premise enterprise. There are all sorts of potential magic solves for getting mainframes to the cloud and getting out of mainframes. But a practical consideration might be maybe you just front-end it with some Java. Or maybe you just get closer to other data centers within a certain amount of milliseconds that's required to have a performant workload. Maybe you start chunking at art and treat the workload a little bit differently rather than just one thing. But there are a lot of years and investments in our workload that might run on a mainframe. And that's a perfect example of how biting off too much might be a little bit dangerous, but there is a path to... So for example, we brought in a company called Cornerstone to help with those migrations. But we also have partnerships with data center providers and others globally plus our own built infrastructure to allow even a smaller step per se for more close proximity location of the workload. >> It's great. Everything kind of has a technical metaphor connection these days when you have a internet, digitally connected world. We're living in the notion of a digital business, was a research buzzword that's been kicked around for years. But I think now COVID-19, you're seeing the virtual or digital, it's really digital, but virtual reality, augmented reality is going to come fast too. Really get people to go, "Wow. "Virtualization of my business." So we've been kind of kicking around this term business virtualization just almost as a joke, but it's really more about, okay, this is about a new world, new opportunity to think about when we come out of this, we're going to still go back to our physical world. Now, the hybrid now kicks in. This kind of connects all aspects of business in every vertical. It's not like, "Hey, I'm targeting this industry." So there might be unique solutions in those industries, but now the world is virtualized. It's connected, it's a digital environment. These are huge concepts that I think has kind of been a lunatic fringe idea, but now it's brought mainstream. This is going to be a huge tailwind for you guys as well as developers and entrepreneurs and application software. This is going to be, we think, a big thing. What's your reaction to that? Based on your experience, what do you see happening? Do you agree with it? And do you have anything you might want to add to that? >> Maybe one kind of philosophical statement and then one more... I bruised my shins a lot in this world and maybe share some of the black and blue coloration. First from a philosophical standpoint, the greater the crisis, the more open-minded people become and the more creative people get. And so I'm really excited about the creativity that I'm seeing with all of the customers that I work with directly, plus our partners, Googlers. Everybody is rallying together to think about this world differently. So to your point, a shift in mindset, there are very few moments where you get this pronounced change and everyone is going through it all at the same time. So that creates an opportunity, a scenario where you're bold thinking new strategies, creativity. Bringing people in in new ways, collaborating in new ways and offer a lot of benefits. More practically speaking and from my experience, building technology for a couple decades, it has an interesting parallel to building tightly coupled, really large maybe monoliths versus microservices and the debate around, "Do we build small things "that can be reconfigured and built out by others "or built upon by others more easily? "Or do we create a golden path and a more understood development environment?" And I'm not here to answer the question of which one's better because that's still a raging debate. But I can tell you that the process of going through and taking a service or an application or a thing that we want to deliver to a customer, that one of our customers wants to deliver to their customer. And thinking about it so comprehensively that you're able to think about it in, what are its core functions? And then thinking methodically about how to enable those core functions. That's a real opportunity, and I think technology to your point is getting to the place where if you want to run across multiple clouds, this is the Anthos conversation were recently GA'ed. Global scale platform, multicloud platform, that's a pretty big moment in technology. And that opens up the aperture to think differently about architectures and that process of taking an application service and making it real. >> Well, I think you're right on the money. I think philosophically, it's a flashpoints opportunity. I think that's going to prove to be accelerating and to see people win faster and lose faster. You're going to to see that quickly happen. But to your point about the monolith versus service or decoupled based systems, I think we now live in a world where it's a systems view now. You can have a monolith combined with decoupled systems. That's distributed computing. I think this is the trend, it's a system. It's not one thing or the other. So I think the debate will continue just like VI versus Emacs (chuckles). We don't know, right? People are going to have the debate, but if you think about it as a system, the use case defines your architecture. That's the beautiful thing about the cloud. So great insight, I really appreciate it. And how's everything going over there at Google Cloud? You've got Meet that's available. How's your staff? What's it like inside the Googleplex and the Google Cloud team? Tell us what's going on over there. People still working, working remote? How's everyone doing? >> Well, as you can tell from my scenario here, my backdrop, yes, still part at work. And we take this as a huge responsibility. These moments as a huge responsibility because there are educators, loved ones, medical professionals, critical life services that run on services that Google provides. And so I can tell you we're humbled by the opportunity to provide the backbone and the platform and the people and the curiosity and the sincere desire to help. And I mentioned a couple of ways already just in this conversation where we've been able to leverage some of our investments technology to help form people that really gets at the root of who we are. So while we just like any other humans are going through a process of understanding our new reality, what really fires us up and what really charges us up is because this is a moment where what we do really well is very, very important for the world in every geo, in every vertical, in every use case, in every solution type. We're taking that responsibility very seriously. And at the same time, we're trying to make sure that all of our teams as well as all of the teams that we work with and our customers and partners are making it through the human moment, not just the technology moment. >> Well, congratulations and thanks for spending the time. Great insight, Will. Appreciate, Will Grannis, managing director, head of technology office of the CTO at Google Cloud. This certainly brings to the mainstream what we've been in the industry been into for a long time, which is DevOps, large scale, role of data and technology. Now we think it's going to be even more acute around societal benefits. And thank God we have all those services for the frontline workers. So thank you so much for all that effort and thanks for spending the time here in theCUBE Conversation. Appreciate it. >> Thanks for having me, John. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto studios for remote CUBE Conversation with Google Cloud, getting the update. Really looking at the future as it unfolds. We are going to see this moment in time as an opportunity to move to the next level, cloud-native and change not only the tech industry but society. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation run welcome to this cube conversation I'm John Fourier with the cube host the cube here in our Palo Alto office for remote interviews during this time of covin 19 we're here with the quarantine crew here in our studio we got a great guest here from Google we'll Grannis managing director head of the office of the CTO with Google cloud thanks for coming on we'll appreciate you you spend some time with me Oh John's great to be with you and as you said in these times more important than ever to stay connected yeah and I'm really glad you came on because a couple things one congratulations to Google cloud for the success you guys had so a lot of big wins under your belt both on the momentum side on the business side but also on the technical side meat is available now for folks anthos is doing very very well partner ecosystem is developing got some nice used cases in vertical marker so I want to get in and unpack with you but really the bigger story here is that the world has seen the future before was ready for it and that is the at scale challenge that the Cova 19 has shown everyone we're seeing you know the future has been pulled forward we're living in a virtualized environment it's funny to say that virtualization has a server virtualization is a tech term but that enabled a lot of things we're living in a virtualized world now because we have to but this is gonna set in motion a series of new realities that you guys have been experiencing and supporting for many many years but now as a provider of Google cloud you guys have to operate at scale you have and now the whole world realizes that scale is a big deal and so you guys have had some successes I want to get your thoughts on the this at scale problem that the world now realizes I mean everyone's at home that's a disruption that was unfortunate whether it's under provisioning VPNs NIT to a surface area for security to just work and play and activities are now confined so people aren't convening anymore and it's a huge issue what's your take on all this well I mean to your point just now the fact that we can have this conversation we can have it blue idli from our respective remote locations just goes to show you the power of information technology that underlies so many of the things that we say and for Google Cloud this is not a new thing and for Google this is not a new thing for Google cloud we add a mission of trying to help companies accelerate their transformation and enable them in these new digital environments and so many companies that we've been working with they've already been on the path to operating an environments that are digital that are fluid and you think about the cloud that's one of the great benefits loud is that scalability income with the business demand and it also helps the scale situation without having to you know do the typical what you need to find the procurement people we need to find server vendors we need to get the storage lined up it really allows a much more fluid response to unexpected and unfortunate situations whether that's customer demand or you know in this case the global endemic yeah one of the things I want to get in with you I want to get you have explained your job is there because I see Google's got a new CEO now for over a year Tom's Korean came from Oracle knows the enterprise up and down you had Diane Greene before that again another enterprise leader Google Cloud has essentially rebuilt itself from the original Google cloud to be very enterprise centric you guys have great momentum and and this is a world where cloud native is going to be required I mean everyone now sees it the the tide has been pulled out there everything's exposed all the gaps in business from a tech standpoint it's kind of exposed and so the smart managers and companies are looking at things and saying double down on that let's kill that we don't want to pay that supplier they're not core to our business this is going to be a very rapid acceleration of what I call a vetting of the new the new set of players that are going to emerge because the folks who don't adapt to this new cloud native reality whether it's app workloads for banking to whatever they're gonna have to have to reinvent themselves now and reset and tweek to come out of this crisis so it's gonna be very cloud native this is a big deal can you share your your reaction to that absolutely and so as you pointed out there are kind of two worlds that exist right now companies that are moving to become more digital and transform and you mentioned the momentum I mean in Google cloud just over the last year greater than 50 percent revenue growth and you know and I greater than 10 billion dollar run rate business and adding customers that are really quick flip you know including you know just yesterday slung and you know along the way Telecom Italia Major League Baseball Vodafone Lowe's Wayfarer Activision Blizzard's so this is not you this transformation and this digitization is not just for you know a few or just for any one industry it's happening across the board and then you add that to the implementations that have been happening across you know Shopify and the Spotify and HSBC which was a early customer of ours in the cloud and it you know already has a little bit of a head start of this transformation so you see these new companies coming in and seeing the value of digital transformation and then these other companies that have kind of lit the path for others to consider and you know Shopify is a really good example of how seeing you know drastic uptick in demand they're able to responding you know roughly half a million shops up and running you know during a period of time where many retailers are trying to figure out how to stay online or you can get online well what is your role at Google I see you're the managing director title is managing director ahead of the office of the CTO we've seen these roles before you know head of this CTO you're off see technical role is it partnering with the CEO on strategy is it you kick tire kicking new things are you overseeing any strategic initiatives what is what is your role so a little bit of all those things combined into one so I I spent the first couple decades of my career on the other side of the in the non-tech you know community no in the enterprise where we were still building technology and we were still you know digitally minded but not the way that people view technology in Silicon Valley and so you know spending a couple decades in that environment really gave me insights into how to take technology and apply them to a specific problem and when I came to Google five years ago yeah selfishly it was because I knew the potential of Google's technology having been on the other side and I was really interested in forming a better bridge between Google's technology and people like me who were CTOs of public companies and really wanted the leverage that technology for problems that I was solving whether it was aerospace public sector manufacturing what-have-you and so it's been great it's the it's the role of a lifetime I've been able to build the team that I wanted as an enterprise technologist for decades and the entire span of technologies at our disposal and we do two things one is we help our most strategic customers accelerate their path loud and 2 we create these signals by working with the top companies moving to the cloud and digitally transforming we learned so much John about what we need to build as an organization so it also helps balance out the Google driven innovation with our customer driven innovation yeah and I could I can attest that we didn't watching you guys from the from day one hired a lot of great enterprise people that I personally know so you getting the enterprise chops and staff and getting you seeing some progress I have to ask you though because I first of all a big fan of Google at the scale from knowing them from when they were just a little search engine to what they are now the there was an expression a few years ago I heard from enterprise customers it was goes along the lines like this I want to be like Google because you guys had a great network you had large-scale you've had all these things that were like awesome and then they realized what we can't be like Google we don't have that sorry we don't have large-scale data centers so there was a little bit of a translation and I want to say a little bit of a overplay of the Google hand and you guys had since realized that you didn't it wasn't just people gonna bang your doorstep and be adopting Google cloud because there was a little bit of a cultural disconnect from wanting to be like Google then leveraging Google in their business as they transform so as you guys have moved from that what's changed they still want to be like Google in the sense you have great security got a great network you got that scale and it prizes a little bit slower to adopt that which you're focused on now what is that the story there because I think that's kind of the theme that I'm hearing okay Google now understands me they know I'm not as fast as Google they got super great people we are training our people we're treating you know retrain them this is the transformation that they're going through so you might be a little bit ahead of them certainly but now they need to level up how do you respond to that well a lot of this is the transformation that Thomas has been enacting you know over the last year plus and it comes in kind of three very operation or technical pillars that I think the first we expanded our customer and we continue to expand our customer facing themes you know three times what they were before because we need to be there we need to be in those situations we need to hear from the customer mean to learn more about the problems they're trying to solve so we don't just take a theoretical principle and try to overlay it onto a problem we actually get very visceral understanding of what trying to solve but you have to be there the game that empathy and that understanding and so one is showing up and that you know has been mobilizing a much larger engine the customer facing out personnel from Google second it's also been really important that we evolve our own you know just as Google brought sre principles and principles of distributed systems and software design out for the world we also had a little bit to learn about transitioning from typical customer support and moving to more customer experience so you've seen you know that evolution under on this as well with cloud changing you know moving from talking about support to talking about customer experience that white glove experience that our customers get our partners get from the beginning of their journey with us all the way through and then finally making sure that our product roadmap has the solutions that are relevant across be priority industries for us and you know that's again that only comes from being present from having a focus in those industry and then developing the solutions that progress those companies so again not this isn't about taking you know a principle and trying to apply it blindly this is about adding that connection that really deep connections to our customers and our partners and letting that connection manifest the things that we have to do as a product company the best support them over a long period some of these deals we've been announcing these are 10-year five-year multi-year strategic partnerships they go across the campus of you know all of you and you know those are the really exciting scaled partnerships but you know to your point you can't just take SR re from Google and apply it to company X but you can take things like error budgets or how we think about the principles of sree and you can apply them over the course of developing technology collaborating innovating together yeah and I think cloud native is gonna be a key thing and yeah I think what it's just my opinion but I think one of those situations where the better mousetrap will win if your cloud native and you have api's and you have the kind of services that people will will know beaded to your doorstep so I have to ask you with Thomas Korean on board obviously we've been following his career as well at Oracle he knows what he's doing comes in to Google it's being built out it's like a rocket ship at this point what bet is he making and what bet are you guys making on behalf of your customers what's the if you have to boil it down to Google clouds big bet what is the bet on the technology side and what's the bet on the business side sure well I've already mentioned you know I've already Internet's you know the big strategy that Thomas is brought in and you know that is the that's again those three pillars making sure that we show up and that we're present by having a scaled customer facing organization and making sure that we transitioned from you know a typical support mindset into more of customer experience mindset and then making sure that those solutions are tailored and available for our priority industries if I was to add you know more color to that I think one of the most important changes that Thomas has personally been driving as he's been converting us to a partner LED is and a partner led organization and this means a lot of investments in large mobile systems integrators like Accenture and Deloitte but this also means that like the Splunk announcement from yesterday that isn't just the cell >> this is a partnership it goes deep across go-to-market product and self do and then we also bring in very specific partners like Temenos in Europe for financial services or a SATA or a rack space for migrations and as a result the already we're seeing really incredible lifts so for example nearly 200 percent year-over-year increase in partner influenced revenue Google cloud and almost like a 13 X year-over-year increase in new customers one-bite partners that's the kind of engine that builds a real hyper scale does it's just saying you mentioned Splunk I want to get that in a second but I also notice there was a deal with Dallas group on ECM subscriptions which kind of leads me into the edge piece there's a real edge component here with Google cloud and I think I'd Akashi edge with Jennifer Lynn a few years ago really digging into the built-in security and the value of the Google Network I mean a lot of the scuttlebutt around the valley and the industry is you know Google's got an amazing network store a software-defined networking is gonna be a hot program programmable area so you got programmable networking and you got edge and edge security these are killer areas that need innovation could you comment on what you guys are doing there and do you agree I'm out see with you have a killer Network and you're leveraging it what's the can you just give some insight into what's going on those those two areas network and then the edge yeah I think what you're seeing is the manifestation of an of the progression of cloud generally what do I mean by that you know started out as like get everything to the data center you know we kind of had this thought that maybe we could take all the workloads and we could get them to these centralized hubs and they could redistribute out the results and you know drive the latency down over time so we span the portfolio of applications and services that would be relevant over time and what we've seen over the last decade really in cloud is an evolution >> more of a layered architecture and that layered architecture includes you know poor data centers that includes CDN capacity points of presence that includes edge and just in that list of customers over the last year I there were at least three or four telcos in there and you've also probably heard and seen quite a bit of telco momentum coming from asks in recent announcements I think that's an indication that a lot of us are thinking about how can we pick big technology like anthos for example and how could we orchestrate workloads create a common control play and you know manage services across those three shells if you will of the architecture and that's a that's a very strategic and important area for us and I think generally for the cloud industry easy it was expanding beyond the data center as the place where everything happens and you can look at you know Google Phi you look at stadia you can look at examples within Google they go well beyond cloud as to how we think about new ways to leverage that kind of creature all right so we saw some earnings come out on Amazon side as Google both groups and Microsoft well all three clouds are crushing it on the cloud side that's a tailwind I get that but as it continues we're expecting post kovat some you know redistribution of development dollars and projects whether it's IT going cloud native or whatever new workloads we are predicting a Cambrian explosion of new things from core to edge and this is gonna create some lift so I want to get your thoughts on you guys strategy with go-to market as well as your customers as they now have the ability to build workloads and apps with ai and data there seems to be a trend towards the vertical ization of whether its sales and go to market and/or specialism because you have horizontal scalability with cloud and you now have data that has distinct value in these verticals so it really seems to be a I won't say ratification but in a way that seems to be the norm whether you come into a market you have specialization but the date is there so apps can be more agile do you are you guys seeing that and is that something that you guys are considering from from an organization standpoint and how do customers think about targeting vertical industries and their customers yeah I I bring this to and where you started going there at the end of the question is exactly the way that we think about it as well which is we've moved from you know here are storage offers for everybody and here's you know basic infrastructure everybody and now we've said how can we make sure that we have solutions that are tailored with very specific problems that customers are trying to solve and we're getting to the point now where your performance and variety of technologies are available to be able to compose very specific solutions and if you think about the substrate that has to be there you know we mentioned you have to have some really great partners and you have to have you know roadmap that is focused on priority solution area so for example at Google cloud you know we're very focused on six priority vertical areas so retail financial services health care manufacturing and industrials health care life sciences public sector and you know as a result of being very focused in those areas we can make more target investments and also align our entire go-to-market system and our entire partner ecosystem ecosystem around those beers specific priority areas so for example we worked with SATA and HDA Healthcare Rob very recently to develop and maintain a national response portal Berko vat19 and that's to help better inform communities and hospitals we can use looker to help with like a Commonwealth Care Alliance on nonprofit and that helps monitor patient system symptoms and risk factors so you know we're using you know a very specific focus in healthcare and a partner ecosystem - you know ferry tailored solutions you know you can also look at I mentioned Shopify earlier that's another great example of how in retail they can use something like Google meat inherent reliability scalability security to connect their employees during these interesting times but then they can also use GCP at Google cloud platform to scale out and as they come up with new apps and experiences for their shoppers for their shops they can rapidly deploy to your point and those you know those solutions and you know how the database performs and how those tiers perform you that's a very tight-knit feedback loop with our engineering teams yeah one of the things I'm seeing obviously with the virtualization of the kovat is that you know when the world gets back to normal it'll be hybrid and it'll be a hybrid between reality not physical and 100% virtual hybrid and that's going to impact events to media to everything every vertical will be impacted and I want to point out the Splunk team bring that back in because I want you to comment on the relevance of the Splunk to you and in context to Splunk has a cloud they got a great slogan data for every everywhere everywhere dated to everywhere I think it is but the cube we have a cloud every company will have a cloud scale at some level will progress to having some sort of cloud because they have data how are you guys powering those clouds because I think the Splunk deal is interesting their partner their stock price was up out on the news of the deal a nice bump their first Blunk shout out to those guys but they're a data company now they're cross-platform but they're not Google but they have a cloud so you know saying so they need to play in all the clouds but they need infrastructure they need support so how do you guys talk to that customer and that says hey the next pandemic that comes the next crisis that's going to cause some either social disruption or workflow disruption or work supply chain disruption I need to be agile I need have full cloud scale and so I need to talk to Google what do you say to them what's the pitch and as does a Splunk deal Samir some of those capabilities or tie that together for us the spunk deal and how it relates to sure for example proof themselves for the future sorry for example with the cloud deal you take a look at what Google is already really good at data processing at scale log analytics you take a look at what Splunk is doing you know with their events and security incident monitoring and the rest it a really great mashup because they see by platforming on Google cloud not only they get highly performant infrastructure but they also get the opportunity to leverage data tools data analytics tools machine learning and AI that can help them provide enhance services so not just about acity going up and down your periods of band but also enhancing services and continuing to offer more value to their customers and we see that you know it's a really big trend and you know this gets it something you know John a little bit bigger which is the two views of the world and we talked about very tailored focused solutions Splunk is an example of making a very methodical approach to a partnership developing a solution specifically you know with partners and you know in this case Splunk on the security event management side but we're always going to provide our data processing platform our infrastructure for companies across many different industries and I think that addresses one part of the topic which is you know how do we make sure that in periods of demand rapidly changing this deals back to the foundational elements of like AI infrastructure as a service and elasticity and we're gonna provide a platform infrastructure that can help companies move through periods of you know it's hard to forecast and/or demand may rise and fall you know in very interesting ways but then there's going to be funds where you know we we because they're not a necessarily a focused use case where it may just be generalized platform versus a focused solution so for example like in the oil and gas industry we don't develop custom AI ml solutions the facility upstream extraction for example but what we do do is work with renewable energy companies to figure out how they might be able to leverage some of our AI machine learning algorithms from our own data centers to make their operations more efficient and to help those renewable energy companies learn from what we've learned building out the but I consider to be a world leading renewable energy strategy and so classic and able mint model where you're enabling your platform for your customers okay so I got to ask the question I asked this to the Microsoft guys as well because Amazon you know has their own sass stuff but but really more of an tend the better products usually on the ecosystem side you guys have some killer sass cheap tree-sweet where customer if we use the g sqweep really deeply we also use some BigTable as well I want to build a cloud we have a cloud cube cloud but you guys have meat so I want to build my product on Google cloud how do I know you're not going to compete with me do you guys have those conversations around the trade-off between you know the pure Google services which provide great value for the areas where the ecosystem needs to develop those new areas that are gonna be great markets potentially huge markets that are out there well this is the power of partnership I mentioned earlier that one of the really big moves that Thomas is made has been developing a sense of partners and it kind of blurs the line between traditional what you would call a customer what you would call a partner and so having a really strong sense of which industries were in which we prioritize Plus having a really strong sense of where we want to add value and where you know our customers and partners want to add that value that's that's the foundational that's the beginning of that conversation that you just mentioned it's important that we have an ability to engage not just in a you know here's the cloud infrastructure piece of the puzzle but one of the things Thomas has also done in the East rata jia is has been to make sure that you know the Google cloud relationship is also a way to access all amazing innovation happening across all of Google and also help bring a strategic conversation in that includes multiple properties from across Google so that an HSBC and Google and have a conversation about how to move forward together that is comprehensive rather than you know having to wonder and have that uncertainty sit behind the projects that we're trying to get out and have high velocity on because they offer so much to retail bank for example well I got a couple more questions and then I'll let you go I know you got some other things going I really appreciate you digging the time sharing this great insight and updates as a builder you've been on the other side of the table now you're at Google heading up the CTO I was working with Thomas understanding them go to market across the board and the product mix as you talk to customers and they're thinking the good customers are thinking hey you know I want to come out of this Cove in on an upward trajectory and I want to use this opportunity to reset and realign for the future what advice do you have for those enterprises there could be small medium sized enterprises to the full large big guys and obviously cloud native we talked some of that already but what advice would you have for them as they start to really prioritize as some things are now exposed the collaboration the tooling the scale all these things are out there what have you seen and what advice would you give a CX o or C so or leader in the industry to think about and how they should come out of this thing how they should plan execute and move forward well I appreciate the question because this is the crux of most of my day job which is interacting with the c-suite and boards of you know companies and partners around the world and they're obviously very interested to learn or you know get a data point from someone at Google and the the advice generally goes in a couple of different directions out one collaboration is part of the secret sauce that makes Google what it is and I think you're seeing this right now across every industry and it you know whether you're a small medium-sized business or you're a large company if the ability to connect people with each other to collaborate in very meaningful ways to share information rapidly to do it securely with high reliability that that's the foundation that enables all of the projects that you might choose to you know applications to build services to enable actually succeed in production and over the long haul is that culture of innovation and collaboration so absolutely number one is you're having a really strong sense of what they want to achieve from a cultural perspective a collaboration perspective and the and the people because that's the thing that fuels everything else second piece of the you know advice especially in these times where there's so much uncertainty is where can you buy down uncertainty with vets that aren't you know that art you can you can learn without a high penalty and this is a this is why cloud I think is really really you know finding you know super scale it was our it was already on the rise but what you're seeing now and you know as you've linked back to me during this conversation we're seeing the same thing which is a high increase in demand of let's get this implemented now how can we do this more this is you know clearly one way to move through uncertainty and so look for those opportunities I'll give you a really good example mainframes one of the classic workloads of the you know on-premise enterprise and you know there's all sorts of there are all sorts of potential magic solves for getting mainframes to the cloud and getting out of mainframes but a practical consideration might be maybe you just front-end it with some Java or maybe you just get closer to other data centers within a certain amount of milliseconds that's required to have performant workload maybe you start chunking at a part and treat the workload a little bit differently rather than you know just one thing but there are a lot of years and investments in a workload that might run on a mainframe and that's a perfect example of out you know biting off too much it might be a little bit dangerous but there is a path to and so for example like we brought in a company called cornerstone to help with those migrations but we also have you know partnerships with you know data center providers and others globally from us our own built infrastructure to allow even you know a smaller stuff per site or more like post proximity location in the workload it's great you know everything had as a technical metaphor connection these days when you have a Internet digitally connected world we're living in you know the notion of a digital business was a research buzzword that's been kicked around for years but I think now kovat 19 you're seeing the virtual or digital it's really digital but you know virtual reality augmented reality is going to come fast to really get people to go WOW virtual virtualization of my business so you know we've been kind of kicking around this term business virtualization just almost as a joke but it's really more about okay this is about a new world a new opportunity to think about when we come out of this we're gonna still go back to our physical world now the hybrid now kicks in this kind of connects all aspects of business in every verticals not leahey I'm targeting like the this industry so there might be unique solutions in those industries but now the world is virtualized it's connected it's a digital environment these are huge concepts that I think has kind of been a fringe lunatic fringe idea but now it's brought mainstream this is gonna be a huge tailwind for you guys as well as developers and entrepreneurs and app application software this is gonna be we think a big thing what's your reaction to that which your based on your experience what do you see happening do you agree with it and you have any thing you might want to add maybe you know one kind of philosophical statement and then one more you know I bruised my shins a lot in this world and maybe share some of the black and blue coloration first from a philosophical standpoint the greater the crisis the more open-minded people become and the more creative people get and so I'm really excited about the creativity that I'm seeing you know with all of the customers that I work with directly plus our partners you know Googlers everybody's rallying together to think about this world differently and so to your point you know a shift in mindset you know there are there are very few moments where you get this pronounced a change and everyone is going through it all at the same time so that creates a you know an opportunity a scenario where the old thinking new strategies creativity you know bringing people in in new ways collaborating a new way and offer a lot of benefits more you know practically speaking and from my experience you know building technology for a couple decades you this is a it has an interesting parallel to you know building like tightly coupled really large maybe monoliths versus micro services and debate around you know do we build small things that can be reconfigured and you know built out by others or built on by others more easily or do we credit Golden Path and a more understood you know development environment and I'm not here to answer the question of which one's better is that's what's still a raging debate and I can tell you that the process of going through and taking a service or an application or a thing that we want to deliver the customer that one of our customers wants to deliver to their cost and thinking about it so comprehensively that you're able to think about it in its what its power its core functions and then thinking methodically about how to enable those core functions that is a you know that's a real opportunity and I think technology to your point is getting to the place where you know if you want to run across multiple clouds yeah this is the anthos conversation where you know recently g8 you know a global scale platform you know multi cloud platform that's a pretty big moment in technology and that opens up the aperture to think differently about architectures and that process of taking you know an application service and making it real well I think you're right on the money I think philosophically it's a flashpoints opportunity I think that's going to prove to be accelerating gonna see people win faster and lose faster you can see that quickly happen but to your point about the monolith versus you know service or decoupled based systems I think we allow a live in a world where it's a systems of you now you can have a monolith combined with decoupled systems that's distributed computing I think this is that the trend it's a system it's not one thing or the other so I think the debate will continue just like you know VI versus Emacs we know you don't know right so you know if people gonna have this debate but it's just if you think about as a system the use case defines the architecture that's the beautiful thing about the cloud so great insight I really appreciate it and how's everything going over there Google Cloud you got meat that's available how's your staff what's it like inside the Googleplex and the Google cloud team tell us what's going on over there people still working working remote how's everyone doing well as you can as you can tell from my scenario here my my backdrop yes still hard at work and we take this as a huge responsibility you know these moments is a huge responsibility because there are you know educators loved ones medical professionals you know critical life services that run on services that Google provides and so I can tell you were humbled by the opportunity to provide you know the backbone and the platform and the people and the curiosity and the sincere desire to help and I mentioned a couple of ways already just in this conversation where we've been able to leverage some of our investment in technology to help or people that really gets at the root of who we are so while we just like any other humans are going through a process of understanding our new reality what really fires us up and what really a chart is because is that this is a moment where what we do really well is very very important for the world in every geo in every vertical in every use case and every solution type so we're just take we're taking that responsibility very seriously and at the same time we're trying to make sure that you know all of our teams as well as all the teams that we work with our customers and partners are making it a human moment not just the technology moment well congratulations and thanks for spending the time great insight will appreciate will Grannis Managing Director head of Technology office of the CTO at Google cloud this certainly brings to the mainstream what we've been in the industry been into for a long time which is DevOps large-scale role of data and technology now we think it's going to be even more acute around societal benefits and thank God we have all those services for the frontline workers so thank you so much for all that way effort and thanks for spending the time here in the cube conversation appreciate it thanks for having John okay I'm John Farah here in Palo Alto Studios for remote cube conversation with Google cloud get in the update really looking at the future as it unfolds we are going to see this moment in time as an opportunity to move to the next level cloud native and change not only the tech industry but society I'm John Fourier thanks for watching

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. (smooth music) >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome. As you know, I've been interviewing a number of CEOs throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. I'm really excited to have Alan Trefler here. He's the founder and CEO of Pegasystems. Alan, thanks for being part of the program. >> Oh, thanks for having me, Dave. >> So let's get into it. I mean when you were 27 years old, 37 years ago, 1983, you started Pega. Now you've seen a lot of cycles. Never seen anything like this, I know, but certainly there was the '87 crash. You saw, you know, the banking crisis in the late '80s, early '90s, the dotcom bubble, 2008, 2009, and now this. I want to ask you sort of how have you responded to crises in the past? I mean the hallmark of your company, the book you wrote is being able to manage through change. How did you manage through this one? What was your first move? >> Well, you know, what I'll tell you is from the inception we've always been a scrappy company. You know, we never took any venture capital. We bootstrapped this firm. I went public in the late '90s, and you know, we've now got a firm that will do over a billion in revenue this year and has 5,400 staff. So we've built, I think, a cohesive team around a set of principles that really have matched the way the software and technology have evolved, but has still taken a pretty radically different approach to how it should be used by businesses and business users. >> Well, so talk about some of the big waves that you've been riding over the years. I mean you set out to help business people really communicate better with IT. You laid out in your book some of the challenges there, and as you've pointed out many, many times, it gets more complex, people try to understand the customer better with terminology like customer relationship management. People don't necessarily want a relationship, right? Talk about some of the observations that you've made around customer behavior and channels, and how you've approached things a little bit differently as an entrepreneur. >> So I think organizations, when they think about how they want to engage with their customers, typically make a couple of serious mistakes. One is they say they want to do a good job for their clients, but especially if they're a big company they then devolve into actually doing the work in their channel. I mean they have a mobile group that builds the mobile app, which is different than the group that handles the call center, which is different than the group that handles the website, and all this business logic, it's baked into that. And that just destroys their ability to implement change rapidly, which particularly in this COVID era is so important for the organizations that are going to be successful. Now on the other side sometimes they get overly focused on their backend system. They're worrying about how they're going to put in the perfect ERP system or accounting system, that that will somehow support customer engagement better, but frankly it never does. We think you need to think about your business from the center out. How do I apply AI to what I want to do for and with my client? And then how do I apply workflow and work management capability to ensure that those decisions are done optimally and effectively? That's what Pega worked on from our inception, and now as we've gone into our fifth complete generation of software I think we've really crossed some boundaries that are pretty remarkable. >> So I mean, well what you've built is actually quite amazing. Since you've written your book the stock's exploded. I don't know if that's cause and effect, but nonetheless some of the things that you talk about again in the book, you talk about, you know, people looking at data the wrong way. What's impressed me is you've always taken a systems view. You're not trying to optimize, to your point, on one little either technology or maybe optimizing on cost. If you look at the whole system and think about outcomes, that is going to, you know, yield ultimately better businesses. And so I want to ask you-- >> Well, thinking about an end to end way of understanding how the technology should be applied is exactly what we've always believed, but the key is to be able to do this incrementally, iteratively, not monolithically, because no businesses can afford to rip out things. So you need to be able to do this what we call, say, "One microjourney at a time." One set of things that are good for a customer. In today's era it might send, as we do with many of our clients now under stress, we help them help their customers around things like loan forbearing. How do you give people a payment plan because they just don't have the money to pay their loan today. >> Right. >> And how do you do that while you keep them as customers, as opposed to, well, situations that could be far worse. >> Let's talk a little bit about machine intelligence. When you started Pega it was the same year I started in the industry at IDC, and AI was all the rage, and then, you know, it just never happened. You had the very long AI winter, but now it's, you know, starting to come back. You're seeing, you know, obviously there are certain technical capabilities, the amount of data, the processing power, et cetera, and the cost are much more aligned. You're seeing trends like AI. You're seeing things like RPA, you know, which you've brought in to your platform. Talk a little bit about that sort of incremental change that you're adding in to your platform and how you go about doing that. And I want to ask you about some of your thoughts on those trends. >> Certainly. Well, AI has been, from our point of view, a really big thing for the last decade. There was a set of false starts, and we actually saw that they were false starts, so we didn't get sucked into it, but come around 2010 we made an enormous push to bring machine learning and decisioning into our work management platform, and it's in there beautifully and it's doing amazing things. You know, I just saw one of our customers, Commonwealth Bank in Australia, their CEO in his quarterly earnings announcement led by talking about what the Pegasystem, what our system, which they call a customer engagement engine, is doing for them. During the fires that earlier this year were ravaging Australia, they used that to send personalized, not just messages, but also relief to people whose homes were burned out, so they weren't going to be able to pay their credit card bill. They didn't have to call the contact center. We reached out through the brilliant work that they did using our technology, reached out to preemptively make those customers feel great, and now with the COVID epidemic that organization is doing the same types of things, which really both endears them with their customers but also gets tied into that efficiency layer because you stop doing needless work because you're being smart as a result of using AI to figure out what to do, and to learn from the outcomes that come from that. >> So we've seen, you know, the playbook of you see, you know, startups, they get out, they're well-funded, and they point to the large established companies and they say, "Oh, that's an old stack." They can't respond, innovator's dilemma, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. One of the things about Pega is you've been able to transform yourselves over the years. You know, build for change, I guess. An example, for instance, going from perpetual to an ARR type of model, which you very successfully have done, and now, you know, as I said, bringing in RPA, but I want to ask you about RPA. A lot of competitors out there, big valuations kind of pointing at you guys as the incumbent. You have RPA, but what do you see within that space specifically? >> I see a lot of delusional behavior. The ability to put robots in to do little pieces of task work can make sense in some situations, particularly if you don't have a good API, a good application programming interface, to get data in and out. A robot in that sort of situation can be a very, very helpful stopgap, but you really need an engine driven by AI and driven by process, process automation, that has to be at the heart. That's the dog to the robotic process automation tail, and a lot of these RPA vendors are running around saying, "You know, all you need's the tail." I'll tell you that in the last week two of the "biggest leaders" have both had massive layoffs. A little google work you can find out exactly who they are, and it's because their stuff isn't working well. >> I want to ask you about entrepreneurship during and coming out of a pandemic. Is it a good time to do a startup? Not that you're thinking about doing a startup, but you know, advice to entrepreneurs. >> Well, I think it's a terrific time to have a startup mentality. You know, part of why I think we've been able to reinvent our technology literally five times over our years is that we're always prepared to look from a new angle and apply that sort of entrepreneurial thinking and scrappiness. However, in terms of starting something right now, it's a very uncertain time. It's uncertain as to when customers will be back in the market. It's uncertain as to exactly how hard certain industry segments would be hit. And so whereas I think that even during recessions it can be a fine time to launch a startup, and in fact that's when I launched Pega was during a time when the economy was not doing that great, I would wait a little bit right now to see exactly when things are going to stabilize. I think that it's just a little too uncertain, but that time will emerge again. >> So I want to ask you, so again, in your book you talked about big data, big problems. I always joke to my friends who have little kids, little kids, little problems, (chuckling) and so little companies, little problems. You're now a billion dollar company, and you're bringing in new talent. You've set your sights on becoming a multibillion dollar company. You've got a great track record. I want you to talk about sort of how you see the future and what your aspirations are. You don't have to give specific numbers, but just frame that for us. >> Well, first of all, just to be clear the numbers in terms of a billion, that's an actual revenue number, as opposed to some of these valuations which we've seen with companies like WeWork might be a little bit tentative. What we see as being central to our growth and value prop are a couple of things. First, we've made our software tremendously easier to use, particularly our last release, which came out about six months ago, really, really straightforward for business people even to take ownership of their projects and work really collaboratively with IT. So that's one aspect of how we grow and want to accelerate the growth. The second aspect is Pega Cloud. Last year Pega Cloud grew enormously. It's now more than half our business, and for people to come on Pega Cloud where we do all of the database work, we do all the heavy lifting for them from a technology point of view, also provides a route to growth, though we also support what we call client cloud, which is where one of our customers wants to run it on their own cloud. And I think the third thing that we're doing that we're hoping is going to allow us to accelerate our growth is to broaden our go-to-market function, make our go-to-market function just larger by continuing to hire, and by the way, this is a great time for a company with a half a billion dollars of cash in the bank to be out looking to hire talent. Looking to hire and broaden and deepen our go-to-market and how we work, especially with those awesome customers, some of whom are suffering but are going to come back, and they're going to increasingly need to change their digital infrastructure. Their digital transformation, we think, is going to benefit from platforms like ours in unique ways. >> Well, Alan, I love the story. As you just pointed out, you just tapped the credit market. You've got a fantastic balance sheet. You've got a lot of tailwinds, you know, despite this pandemic, and as we often say, you've got a founder as the CEO and we've seen how that really culturally makes huge differences at companies. Alan, thanks so much for coming on our CEO series. Really appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Dave. It's been a real pleasure. >> All right. And thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (smooth music)

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. Hey, >>I'll come back to the cube date to have our coverage of Combalt go. 19 Lisa Martin with Stu. Met a man. We are in Colorado. Please welcome to the cube Sandy Hamilton, the VP of customer success. Been a convo four and a half months. So welcome to the Q book and the call. Sandy, thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity to sit here with you this morning and share a little bit about what's going on at Commonwealth and it's been great. You guys are here. It's been fantastic. We had a great day yesterday. We got to speak with Sanjay, with Rob, Don foster, Mercer, a whole bunch of your customers. Well exactly the vibe, the positivity from the channel to the customer to the course. Even the OJI calm ball guys that I worked a couple of 10 years ago that are still here, it does really feel like a new combo and you're part of that on. >>Sanjay probably brought you in and the spring of 2019 and we've seen a lot of progress and a lot of momentum from comm vault in terms of leadership changes, sills structured new programs for channel. Exciting stuff. You kicked off this morning's keynote and you had the opportunity to introduce Jimmy Chen who if you haven't seen free solo, I haven't seen it. I'm watching it as soon as they get home from us. Amazing. But what a great way to introduce failure and why it's important to be prepared because it is going to happen. I just thought that was a great tone. Especially talking with you. Who leads customer success. >> Absolutely. Thank you Lisa very much and good morning Sue. Appreciate it. You know it's interesting cause when I think about customer success here at Comvalt, there's so many different facets to it. There really is all about engaging with our customers across everything that they do and we want to make sure our customers are prepared for something that will likely happen to them someday. >>Right. We have one of our customers talking about a cyber attack down there on their environment and how we were actually able to help them recover. So it's also that preparedness that Jimmy talked about, right? And making sure that you are training as much as you can, being prepared for what may come and knowing how to recover from that as he, as he talked about. I also think one of the things that we do really well is we listened to our customers when they give us feedback. So it's about how did those customers use what we did differently or how did they try it? And it wasn't exactly what they thought. And so how do we continue to innovate with the feedback from our customers? >>Sandy, one of the things we're hearing loud and clear from your customers is they're not alone. They're ready. I love, we have, Matthew is coming on a little bit later talking about, he's like, I'm here and my other person that does disaster, he's here too. So you know, I'm doing my own free solo. We've been talking about in tech, it's the technology and the people working together. You talked a little bit in your keynote about automated workflows, machine learning, talk about some of those pieces as to how the innovation that Combolt's bringing out is going to enable and simplify the lives of, >>yeah, I mean I think it, I think it does come down to how are we really taking care of the backend, if you will, from a technology perspective and what can we make more automated, you know, more secure. You know, you think about things like, I was even talking about new automated workflows around scheduling, even your backup windows, right? And if you think about, you know, the complexity that goes into scheduling all of that across all of your environments, we have the ability to actually have you just set what your windows should be and we'll manage all the complexities in the background, which allows you to go do things like this for customers to come to do things like this. >>So Sandy, I tell you, some of us, there's that little bit of nervousness around automation and even customers talking about, Oh well I can just do it over text. And I'm just thinking back to the how many times have I responded to the wrong text thread and Oh my gosh, what if that was my, you know, data that I did the wrong thing with. >>Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, one of the things that I love about this company, and again I've been here for a short period of time, but our worldwide customer support organization is just, you know, one of the hallmarks I think of this company, right? And how we're actually there for those customers at any point in time whenever they need any type of um, you know, help and support. And it isn't just the, you know, when you actually need that, when something goes wrong, it's also proactively we have professional services people, you know, we have all kinds of folks in between. Our partners play a huge role in making sure that our customers are successful with what they have going on. Let's dig into and dissect the customer life cycle. Help us understand what that's like for one and existing combo customer. Cause we talked to a couple of yesterday who've been combo customers for you know, a decade. >>So walk us through a customer life cycle for an incumbent customer as well as a new customer who is like Sanjay said yesterday, one of the things that surprised him is that a lot of customers don't know Combolt so what's the life cycle like for the existing customers and those new ones? >> Yeah, so you know, our fantastic install base of customers that we have today, one of the things that we are striving to continue to do is to make sure we're engaged with them from the beginning to the end. And the end isn't when they end, it's when you know, we're then fully deployed helping them do what they need to go in their environment. I think one of the great things about where we are with Comvalt right now is we actually have new products, new technologies, right? Have you guys had been exposed to, how are we making sure that the customers that we've had for a while are truly understanding what those new capabilities are? >>So if you think about it for us, it's how are we helping them to actually do more with their existing Convolt investment and potentially leverage us in other ways across their environment. Um, so we have, you know, our team of, you know, great, uh, you know, sales reps as well as our fantastic, you know, sales engineers, um, all the way through. Again, you know, PS and support, those people are always in contact with our customers, helping them to understand what we can really do across that life cycle and if they need to make changes along the way, we're here to help them, you know, do that as well. For a newer customer. One of the things that we're really focused on right now is that initial sort of onboarding for them and what set experience like for those customers. So having more of a, of a programmatic touch with those customers to make sure that we're more consistent in what we're doing. So they are actually receiving a lot of the same information at the same time and we're able to actually help them actually frankly in a more accelerated fashion, which is I think really important for them to get up and running as well. >>And when we talked about metallic yesterday with Rob and some other folks and I think a gentleman from Sirius, one of your launch partners, yes, Michael Gump. And you know the fact that that technology has the ability for partners to evaluate exactly what is going on with their customers so that they can potentially be even predictive to customers in terms of whether they're backing up end points or O three 65 I thought that was a really interesting capability that Colombo now has. It's giving that insights and the intelligence even to the partners to be able to help those customers make better decisions before they even know what to do makes exactly. >>They and their son, our partners are such a key part here to everything that we're really trying to do. And especially with the metallic, it's all through partners, right? And so we're really trying to drive that behavior and that means we've really have to ensure that we are bringing all of those partners into the same fold. They should have the same, you know, capabilities that we do. It's one of the, one of the also things that I'm trying to work on right now is how are we making sure our partners are better enabled around the things that we have in the capability. So we're working on, as part of those partner programs that you mentioned is do they have the right tools, if you will, and knowledge to go do what they need to go do to help our customers as well because it really is a partnership. >>Yeah. So Sandy, we've been looking at various different aspects of the change required to deliver metallic, which is now a SAS offering from a services and from a support standpoint, I think of a different experience from SAS as opposed to enterprise software. So bring, bring us, bring us your perspective. Yeah. This >>comes back a little bit to the onboarding experience, right? Where it's got to be much more digital touch. It's gotta be much more hands off cause that's the way the are thinking about buying metallic in the first place. Right? They don't have to have a sales rep, they can go by metallic, you know, frankly on their website right now, metallic.io, you know, you can go there, you can get everything you need to get started. Um, and so we want to make sure that the customers have different ways of engaging. And so some of that could very much be digital. Some of that can be, you know, different avenues of how they're working. They're wanting to work with us. But when you also then think about that type of a model, you start to think about consumption matters, right? And how much they're using and are they using everything that they purchased. >>And so we actually have a small team of customer success managers right now in the organization that are working with all of the new customers that we have in the SAS world to say, how are you doing? How's that going? You know, how's your touch? Is there anything that's presenting a challenge for you? Making sure they really do fully understand the capabilities end to end of that technology so that we can really get them onboarded super quick. As you probably know from talking to those guys, we're not having any services really around metallic cause it's not designed to need those services, which is huge. You know, I think in not only the SAS space but for Convolt as well. I think it's a new era and it also provides, frankly an opportunity for our partners to continue to engage with those customers going forward as well. >>One of the first things that I reacted to when I saw metallic, a Combalt venture was venture. I wanted to understand that. And so as we were talking yesterday with some of the gentlemen I mentioned, it's a startup within Combalt. Yeah. So coming from puppet but shoot dead in which Sonjay Mirchandani ran very successfully. Got puppet global. Your take on going from a startup like puppet to an incumbent like convo and now having this venture within it. Yeah. You know, I think it's one of the brilliant things that Sanjay and the team did very early on to recognize what Rob Calu, Ian and the rest of the folks were doing around this idea of what is now metallic. And they had been noodling it and Sanjay's like, that's got a really good opportunity. However we got to go capitalize on that now and bring that to market for our customers now. >>And if we had continued on in the way that we were, which is where it was night jobs and we didn't necessarily have all the dedicated people to go do it, you know, we may not have metallic right now. And so it was, it was really a great thing within the company to really go pull those resources out of what they were doing and say, you guys are a little startup, you know, here you go do it. And we actually had a little celebratory toast the other night with that team because of what, just a fantastic job that they've done. And one of the common threads in something everybody said was the collaboration that it really brought, not only within that team but across Combalt because there's a singular goal in bringing this to market for our customers. So it's been a great experience. I think we're going to leverage it and do more. So Sandy, >>before we let you go, need to talk a little bit about the. >>Fabulous. If I had one here I would, but I don't. So, um, a couple of months ago at VMworld, I don't know if you guys were there, you guys were probably there. Um, we actually started this thing called the D data therapy dog park. And there we had a number of puppies and they were outside. Folks came by, you know, visited. They stopped, they distressed, they got to pet a puppy. I mean, the social media was just out of this world, right? And we had San Francisco policemen there. It was, it was, it was great. Even competitors, I will say even competitors were there. It was, it was pretty funny. But, um, by the end of it, over 50% of the dogs that were there actually got adopted out, um, you know, into homes where they otherwise wouldn't have. Um, since then there've been a couple of people that have actually copied this little idea and you know, P places are springing up. >>So we have a, what we call it, data therapy dog park here where you can go in and get your puppy fix, you know, sit with the dogs and relax for a bit. But you know, we're super excited about it as well because, you know, it's sort of a fun play on what we do, but, but it's also, I think, you know, a great thing for the community and something that is near and dear to my heart. I have four dogs. Um, and so I'm not planning on taking another one home, but I'm doing my best to get some of these adopted. So if anybody out there is interested, just let me know. >>Oh, that was adoptable. All of them cheese. I'm picking up a new puppy and about eight days. So other ones of friends. I've got to have dogs enough for you. Do you need a third? We'll have a friend that has two puppies at the same time and said it's not that much more. I have had one before. You're good to go. We can, we can hook you up. Oh no. But one of the great things is it also, first of all, imitation is the highest form of flattery or for other competitors that are doing something similar, but you also just speak to the fact that we're all people, right? We are. We're traveling, especially for people that go to a lot of conferences and it's just one of those nice human elements that similar with the stories that customers share about, Hey, this is a failure that we had and this is how it helped us to recover from that. It's the same thing with, you can't be in a bad mood with, I think puppies, cupcakes and balloons. So if there were, I know that I could finish a show today >>that's like I took one of the little puppies when I was rehearsing yesterday on main stage. I took one of them with me out there and I was just holding it the whole time, you know? It was really, >>this was great. I'm afraid to venture back into the data therapy document. You're proud taking another one home OU was. Andy. It's been a pleasure to have very much. I appreciate it. Appreciate the time. Thank you and hope you have a great rest of the event. If you need anything, let us know. I'm sure we will and I can't wait to talk to you next year when you've been a comm vault for a whole like 16 months and hearing some great stories we do as well. All right. Take care. First two men, a man, Sandy Hamilton, the puppies, and I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cue from Convault go and 19 thanks for watching.

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, you welcome back to the cubes coverage of combo go 19. We're in Colorado this year. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we have a couple of gents joining us alumni of the cube. We're gonna have a really spirited conversation. Please welcome Avinash locks from the CEO of Hedvig, one of our alumni and Don Foxer, the VP of storage solutions from combo and Ann Campbell. Oh gee, Dawn, you can say that, right? Yes, yes. So guys, just a little bit of news coming out with combo and Hedvig in the last month or so, you guys announced combo, announced they were acquiring Hedvig. We last had you on the cube of an Asha DockerCon 18 talking about had veg. And here we are, the announcement comes in September. Acquisitions already closed, lots of buzz, lots of excitement. I'll finish. Let's start with you. Why Convolt >>good question. Uh, first of all, thanks for having me. Uh, C, the way I look at it, I believe the enterprises are gravitating towards complete solutions. If you look at, uh, data management and backup Conwell's clearly the leader in that space, I don't have to say it, I think the analysts have all attested to it. We bring in a very complimentary set of tools that I think coupled together could be a complete solution for a large variety of workloads in the modern data center. And hence it makes it a ideal fit. And also the cultures from an engineering perspective, being Hedwig being a small company in Cornwall is also a small company. But you know, definitely big when compared to what we are at. Um, the cultures were more or less aligned in terms of the engineering culture, so to speak. And that makes it, uh, it made it a very natural choice. Do you know, feel comfortable going into a bigger company. So it worked out really well. >>So Don way we've seen the slides given in the keynote, they talked about the two halves of the brain, the storage management and the data management. Talked to us a little bit about of Hedwig plus con vault and how that goes together. Yeah, for sure. I mean, if you start to look at the, I mean, I guess you look at the marketplace today and you can tell that, uh, kind of the, the lines of delineation of what vendor a versus vendor B versus vendor seat is doing is completely blurred, right? And you'll see that with the attachment of secondary storage, you see that with way backup companies and are driving more towards sort of, you know, uh, the app dev space. And we really start to look at where, what Combolt's doing and, and, and I always say when we talked about the acquisition of Hedvig, it's accelerating the vision that we've had on be able to provide a really super scalable backend for where you can land information that Combalt protects, but the really interesting and cool part, but as you start to realize the tool set that it has within it, it also keeps us very relevant for the future, for where it, in the shifts with applications are going. >>Then it gives us a chance to really give that complete solution from giving the storage, taking the information as it's being created and storing it in a compliance form, storing it off to the cloud, maybe re-purposing it, reusing it into the future. So that's how this really starts to come together. You have the index in control and management, the understanding of what Combolt provides the data management and you have all the flexibility and control that the Hedvig platform provides and Miriam together just gives you that much more agility for how you can use that information, that data. I want to understand what being part of Convolt will be different for Hedvig. I think back to, I've been talking to you since the company came out of stealth. We're huge proponents of the learnings that the hyperscalers had. You came from Amazon and Facebook. Bringing that to the enterprise is great, but building something that is highly scalable versus frigging something that has repeatability and scalability through thousands of deployment, like convoluted have are two separate issues. So, you know, we'll, we'll being part of Convolt, how will that impact your business and your group? >>I think the latter is what is going to make it really exciting for us. I think we added a point where the product that we are bringing into the market or we are brought into the market, it's pretty mature and most of the customers would deploy it and use it. They've been extremely happy with the way it performs and the way it has performed over time. And I think with the combo, they have a larger footprint in the enterprise, large channel infrastructure already in place makes it a lot more easy to push the product out there into the market. And uh, we will be given and VR given complete autonomy plus you what it would it is at Viva doing. And obviously, you know, when you go into any other organization that has got to be some cross-pollination, which is also something that we will be pursuing. But these two things I think, uh, make it very exciting times for us. >>Didn't you? You mentioned the word acceleration a few minutes ago. I'm just wondering from your perspective being called on as long as you have, do you and maybe customers and partners see the Hedvig acquisition as? Sanjay was saying something that's trending on Twitter today is the hashtag new comm dolls. Yep. So it's actually interesting. At first when the acquisition was announced, there were some partners that were like, Hmm, okay, I need to think about this a little bit. And then as we kind of went through the talk track and sort of explain some of the power with the head of the platform delivers, there were a number of, there was suddenly aha. Like you could just tell the light bulb went off. I get where this is going. And then you see what we're doing from Convolt metallic as well, right? The the SAS offering. And you see how we're continuing to drive all of the innovation in that core product. I don't know if you want to call it a combo to Datto, but I do think we've entered a new era of what we're delivering back to our customers from a solutions perspective. And it's really exciting because you can talk to a customer about backup and give them the best solution in the world, but we can also start to expand and get a whole heck of a lot more strategic and help be thought leaders and some of these new spaces, >>well, some of the commentary that I was reading about the acquisition from analysts say, Hey, this is a potentially, this is going to give Combalt opened the door for a bigger presence in the surge defined space, a big market. Also elevate comm vault from a Tam perspective. Talk to us about those perspectives. As some of the analysts said, when Sanjay came onboard nine months ago, Hey combo, you really got to expand your market share and get a kick out of just cultivating the large enterprises. How do you see that? >>Yeah, sure. I mean that's the easiest place to point to the secondary storage market place, right? So the secondary to storage marketplace, it's double digits in billions of market share. And that can be anything from things like object storage. It could just be scale-out, NAS. It could be, um, it could be, you know, companies like Cohesity and others that have a platform that build out secondary storage is a whole slew of people that play in that space. Uh, it also goes back to like appliances in a whole form of other storage types that are purpose built. So the secondary storage is a fairly broad sort of brush that people paint. You know, something is not running production workloads. But the interesting thing is, and this is kind of something that when the we've talked about we see those lines of private production or primary, secondary, tertiary, that's starting to really blur out. >>Um, so that market share that is in secondary storage, that market share that attaches also to object for where your, where we're going from a even a scale out backup perspective. You know, those are I going to be target areas that we can start to give customers solutions into in a really integrated and complete way. Uh, one of the customer areas that I've heard from Convolt that I'm curious if it might be applicable for your, for your team of an option is the service providers, you know, they've sold and you talk about how many end users actually leverage Convolt technology. It's like almost an order of magnitude more when you go through the service providers and when you talk about scalability and the requirements that that seems to be like it could be a fit for a. >>Yeah, you could even think of someone who is running a private cloud in their own on premise data center as being a service provider for their own internal consumption. Grateful folks working in tunnel. I guess going to an MSB or even do a larger service providers is an extrapolation of the same thing. So it'll obviously make it a very natural fit because you know, everyone understands the cap X game. Operational efficiency is the harder problem to actually crack. And with systems like this you can actually address that very simplistically. And it also allows them to kind of scale with their growth in a very effortless fashion. So it makes an agile mix a lot of natural sense. >>And that's an interesting point cause that aligns well too with the way the Combalt software themselves also attack attaches, right? We do a much better job of running that value back to the larger enterprise or those that are seeing more of that operational efficiency challenge. So it's another reason why this is a great intersection or you know, great, great marriage of the two technologies, um, what want to speak with, I think we talked about Sanjay about he of being at puppet worked a lot with dev ops in that environment. I heard from Convolt COO that five of the 45 developers that are here doing whiteboard session come from Hedvig. So speak a little bit of that, that customer base, the developer community microservices, you know, that kind of modern >>I think we have a, a demo session. I don't know what time, but we're going to give you a comprehensive overview of how, uh, you know, kind of Kubernetes orchestrated containers works with Hedwig. I think if people are here, they're hearing me, they should definitely check it out. And, uh, if you look at some of our larger customers, they deploy us in environments where they want to have practically zero touch provisioning capability, right? Which means that you got your infrastructure ought to be completely programmable, which bitches, what the DevOps movement is all about. And uh, the comprehensive set of APIs that be exposed for control and data plane, it actually makes that pipe dream a reality. >>Let's talk a little bit about the integrations. I mentioned a minute ago. The announcement was in September, the acquisitions close and you guys have already really started to buckle down into the integration between the technologies. Can you talk to us about that? And then I'd love to get your perspective on existing had big customers, you know, what door does this open for them? >>So for an existing customers, they are very happy because they now are convinced that we have a larger footprint and we have a lot more people to help to help support them as they grow and they don't have this field anymore as to how perhaps a small startup would be able to support them. So that fear factor goes away. So they're all very relieved on that front. Second, from an integration perspective, uh, there's a lot of things that we are working on from a technological perspective that is getting deep into the roadmap. I dunno if he can talk much about it at this point, but a non-technology we're all well integrated in, we are all Commonwealth employees now Gunwale badges come while emails so well integrated at this point. >>I guess maybe from a high level perspective, what we probably can say is probably number one, we want to make sure the experiences across both products are merged. So it truly views as you know, one one true company vault and providing that experience. And that's everything from installation to support to how we communicate and manage the, the ongoing relationship with the customer. So that's one there's always work to do there. Right? And the next core piece is just how we can make the two technologies basically make, you know, the had big platform, a part of the combo data platform and make sure those two integrations are as tight as possible. And that will be a longterm path, right? Because as that becomes more integrated, there's going to be new ideas, new innovations, and she's gonna come up with a whole lot of new things that we could potentially do that will meet the needs for the customer. And I think the third piece that ties back into the dev ops conversation is we've got two really solid API stacks. So bringing those together is going to be important in the future as well. So that it really is a crisp and clean sort of programmable infrastructure for customers from how the storage is delivered all the way to how it's managed and potentially even deleted out the back end. >>Well, with how quickly we're seeing Convolt move in the last nine months, I mean this year there's so much innovation from leadership changes in sales and marketing, new GTM routes, et cetera. What can, what can combo customers expect in terms of, I know you can't divulge too much on the roadmap, but you know with faster, shorter cycles of development. >>So I'll go first. I mean I think as you look at the sort of sort of where maybe the easiest way to answers is we're staying in front of where the market is heading and we're making sure we're providing solutions that can get customers to solve those challenges when they hit them. We don't want them to have to hit those challenges, have to then struggle, fight, figure out what it is they can do while everyone in their market moves past them. We want to be there with a solution that answers some of those challenges that day. They hit them more preemptive, preemptive, absolutely more preempted to react. That's a perfect way to put it. Thank you. So that's part of what they can expect from us and we do a lot of research and working with our customers and understanding where their future needs are, where they're going. We spend a lot of time with industry experts and analysts too for what they're seeing across the globe. Obviously we can only go so far and travel and talk to so many people. So we leveraged the collective of the industry to also kind of have a pretty good gauge and I'll say we've got leaders like Amash and Sanjay that are also awesome at just kind of having a really good pulse on where the industry is going and what we should be doing as a company. >>I'm just getting pickled in so too early for me to answer how that roadmap may Michio or how customers may perceive. But I think, uh, what should be very encouraging is that we bring so many, so much more capabilities. The enterprise has always been in this mindset of procuring things with a single throat to choke and this makes it very easy for them. >>What's the question of done for you is some of the things that Sue and I have talked about with guests today is from a partner perspective, there's been a lot of positive feedback in Navarro community we talked with and think we're talking with Rick de Blasio tomorrow. Want to understand, you know, some of the new partner programs, how are his Convolt traditional channel, your VARs, but also all the way up to your. Their reaction to all of the changes and the acceleration that Cohmad is driving is particularly with respect to head veg. >>For the most part it's been incredibly positive and even though the technology partner side, it's, it's fairly positive and also it forces us to have a much closer conversation on. All right, let's continue to talk about how we're successful together in the marketplace because we understand that our customers will need more than one vendor, more than two vendors to be successful as they kind of tackle the challenges that are in front of them. So you know, we're not going to stop our innovation and partnering and technology ecosystem development because that's so important to allow the customer to have the choice. We know that we're only one of many players and so we want to give them the choice to use whatever they need. We just want to help them control and manage the data >>and help them maybe simplify their operations. And especially as you know, we don't, we don't go to any event without talking about multi-cloud. It's the world that most businesses are living in. And, and I'll say, if you're not you Willy, how can what combat is doing now, not just with Hedvig but also just with some of the structural changes and directions that you guys have made it help customers embrace multicloud actually be able to protect, recover that data and >>you know, shift, sift insights from it. Yeah, sure. Please. All right, so multi-cloud, so first it starts off in tying in the ecosystems of the different cloud players offer, right? You need to be able to sort the support their platforms. You need to be able to continue to abstract out the information, the data itself that may be tied to an application or tied to a platform and give that level of portability. It's actually something that Hedvig does a fantastic job on as well and when you start to have that level of portability, well then it becomes a heck of a lot easier to either use other platforms within that cloud or a separate cloud or something you might homegrown build yourself as. That's part of the big value prop. We're doing all of these things not to have the best infrastructure but to make it easier for customers to use that data. So that means integrating and being strong partners to cloud players. It means continuing to be a really technological leader in how you can support all the platforms and services they offer and really allow the data to rise to the top as far as the value perspective goes and that's really where we continue to drive our innovation, at least on the on the data management side. >>That's a good Commonwealth perspective. The Hedvig perspective comes from a different angle. We always look at data portability, be it multicloud or even be at hybrid via met a lot of customers who went down the hybrid pot and then had to pull back. And when you pull back, you don't want to be in a situation where you're rewriting your entire application because your data is persisted in a very different way. But providing that data portability with an abstraction that sits between the application and the underlying physical infrastructure, I think is going to be a very important solution to take. You know, view often in this mix and hence together it becomes a comprehensive solution. >>Well guys, we thank you so much for stopping by joining soon and be on the program telling us a little bit more about this exciting new venture that you guys are going in together and we look forward to hearing more about it as it unfolds and maybe getting some customers on the cube next year. Absolutely. All right. Thank you. Thanks for Sumeta, man. I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube from convo. Go 19.

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering com vault go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. Hey, >>welcome to the cube at Lisa Martin in Colorado at convo go 19 I'm assuming a man and stew and I are pleased to welcome back to the cube and Alon my who hasn't visited us in awhile, but he's kind of a big deal is the CEO of Commonwealth's on Jay Mirchandani. Sanjay, welcome back. >>Thank you Lisa. Good to be a good too. >>So exciting. This is the fourth go. I love the name go and lots of stuff. So you have come onboard to combo in about about nine months ago and man, are you making some changes? You know the analysts said combo, you gotta, you gotta upgrade your sales force, you gotta expand your marketing, you've gotta shift gears and really expand your market share. And we've seen what Combolt is doing in all three of those areas along with some pretty big announcements in the last couple of days. Talk to us about this, this first nine months here. And really maybe even, I would start with the cultural change that you have brought to a company that's been run by the Bob hammer for 20 years >>right now. Firstly, I'm very fortunate to be here because the company is, it has incredible foundation. The bones of the company, if you would, are solid a great balance sheet, um, over 800 patents, no debt, cash on the books, profitable. It's just, you know, and great, great technology wrapped around some amazing people. So when I look at the, when I look at it and you go, this is this, this is an incredible asset. My role really when I came in when I transitioned with Bob and Al for a period of time was really about making sure we didn't break anything, making sure that we kept the momentum, understood the culture, took time to talk to customers, talk to partners, talk to our employees, shareholders and understand, um, what are the focus areas that we needed to go after. And the last nine months has been about, you know, a lot of learning on my part. >>But also a very receptive group of employees and partners saying, you know, we'll give you a chance. Let's get this done, let's see where it goes. So that's where the nine months had been around and it's been a, it's been fabulous. >> So that's actually one of the things I've heard from your team is you've come in loud and clear with the voice of the CIO. Having been a CIO yourself, that's something you want them to focus on. Everybody, we always talk about listening to the customers, but you know, the role of the CIO has changed an awful lot. You know, since you first became a CIO, clouds change everything in a Nicholas CARF said for a while, does it even matter? Right. Um, so you know, Ferguson side a little bit as to how you want to make sure you're delivering for what the CIO is need. >>Not necessarily what, you know, they were saying that they want. No, it's fair. And, and as much as the role of the CIO has evolved, I don't think it's changed fundamentally. They still, you know, the guardians of the data, the, you know, the compliance and everything else and of course more than anything else, the productivity and the competitive edge that businesses need, technology and business, regardless of which business you're in, are interested intrinsically tied. Your delivery of anything you do today is tied to technology. If you, if you want to be future proof. So if anything, the role of the CIO has only been elevated. I'm, I say this playfully, but I do say it. I said, if I wasn't running this great company that I am now, I'd love to be the CIO of a dysfunctional it organization at a large company because there's so much you can do. >>Many of the decisions that we would spend an inordinate amount of time on the infrastructure, the application, how do you bind it, what are the protocols? Which data center, how much, who runs it, which partner? I kind of dissipated if you're not going to the cloud in some form of fashion, come on, right? If you're not building cloud native applications, come on. If you're not using dev ops, come on. So you've got all this time back now where you're not hopefully having conversations that don't matter and you're really go and building new things. So I think it matters. That's great stuff. And absolutely we agree. We've talked many times on the cube. It definitely actually matters more than today. If anything. Not only did they need to be responsive to the business, but oftentimes it can be one of those drivers for innovation in change in the business. >>Um, I love something you said in your keynote, you said data is at the center of everything you do because right. Most CEO's, hopefully infrastructure is something they might have under their purview, but it's not what drives the business. It's the data, it's the application, it's their customers that matters. So to speak a little bit to the role of data has changed a lot. You know, you and I worked for that big storage company where we even didn't talk as much about storage back about data back in the day. Today it's the life blood of the company. It's everything like that. >> And you know that that is one of the reasons I'm at Convolt because for the past 30 years I've been in technology, I've done app side, I've done infrastructure side, I've done a mix of all of those. And the more I think of an dev ops, I've done that. >>The more I think about it. If I were, if I was sitting with a CEO today and having a conversation about what matters in technology, who's maybe a CEO is not a technologist, I would say data matters. I would say the asset of your company is the data. It's gone from something that you used to manage down, compress deduplicate and hope it went away and you wanted to minimize its footprint to something where you want to maximize its value. And those aren't just words. I mean that is what makes great companies, great companies today, the way they use data to their competitive advantage. So this is, this is exactly the mindset where the mindset, the Guppy do to convo because all we do, all we do is help our customers be data ready. As I was saying this morning, that's, I love that term because that kind of encapsulates it for me. So that's, that's where my head's at. >> Yeah. I mean, we've always said that the thing that defines a company that's gone through debt, that digital transformation is that data drives the business. >>It, it absolutely should, but we're, when you talk with customers that have, whether it's a big university, a research university, healthcare organization or whatever type of organization that has multiple departments, so much data that potentially has a tremendous amount of value that they actually aren't managing well or can't get visibility out of. When you say we want to help you be data ready, w what does that mean to them? >>It means a few things. You summed it up perfectly. That's the world, the customer, the chaos that customers could live in because fundamentally, Lisa, if I had over-simplified applications, we're intrinsically to date data that you use for tied intrinsically to the application to build. So if you had an SAP system, your data was very tightly tied to that. If an Oracle ERP system, it was very tight detail yet it'll supply chain system. You were tied to that. And once data side of getting released from the abstracted, from the system that was built on, you've got a little bit of chaos, then you had to figure out who had access, where, how, how are you replicating and how are you backing it up over the policies, your plan compliance. And then it became chaos. And what I say to customers being data ready, saying do you have a strategy and a capability, more importantly to protect, manage, control and use that information in the way you wish to for competitive advantage. >>Just protecting it is like a life insurance policy, controlling, managing and using it as where you get the value out of it. Right? And so as companies become more data driven, this is where we help them. So the whole concept of the show, what we're sort of bringing to market is the fact that we can help our customers be data ready. And some of the technologies we've talked about today lend themselves to exactly that. Alright. So Sanjay, one of the questions many of us had coming into the show is how exactly Hedvig your, your first acquisition was going to play out. You made a comment in your, your opening keynote this morning that we need to rethink primary and secondary storage. So some of us read the tea leaves and be like, well, you know, you're selling an SDS storage, your, you're in the primary storage market as we would've called it before. >>Yes, the lines are blurring. I don't think those there. So I want to give you the chance to let us know where we're going. Years primary and secondary storage as we classified them, we're looking grayer and grayer mean they'll always be primary storage because there's always a certain user use cases for, for high-performance scale up capabilities. But a lot of the stuff was getting murky. You know, is it really primary? Is is it lower end primary, is it secondary and it doesn't, it shouldn't really matter. And with that, would that segmentation game a set of other capabilities like Oh, you know, file block, object cloud, more, more segmentation, more silo and more fragmentation. And I'm a big believer that this is all about software. The magic is in the software. And if you, if you forget for a minute that it's software defined storage as we call it today, but a set of capability's, a universal plane that allows you to truly define how customers get that ubiquity between any infrastructure that they run. >>Okay. Which in turn gives them the abstraction from the data that they bill. Okay. We've just taken a lot of workload and pressure off the customer to figure all that stuff out, keep whole manage. So I wouldn't get, I wouldn't get wrapped up on the whole storage thing as much as I would on the SA on the universal data plane or the data brain as I called it, nicknamed it in the show, you know, earlier as the left and right side one size, the data management, the other sizes, you know, traditional storage management. Yeah. Maybe I was reading too much in this. There's two brains. I think you've, you turn them sideways. They look like clouds too. But uh, yeah. Yeah. Um, partners wonder if you could speak, you know, we're talking about obviously the channel hugely important, we're going to talk to a lot of your team, but from a technology standpoint, you've got a lot of those hardware providers as well as different software companies that are here in the expo hall. >>Does metallic and Hedvig in those, you know, how will that change the relationships? I mean there's one, I've never built a business in my life that wasn't partner centric and partnerships to me is where both sides feel like they won. They went together. And so I've been very clear with our team, our channel, our board, our ecosystem that we're not doing this alone. That's not my intent. And our goal is to work together. Now we have partners in across the spectrum, cloud partners, technology partners like NetApp, HPE, Cisco. We've got ecosystem partners, the up the, the startups that are building new capabilities that we want to be, they want to be part of our ecosystem and vice versa. Traditional channel. Okay. so we've got the whole run of those, of those partnerships and we've been very focused. But we've also being very clear that we're in this for the long haul with them. Hedvig is today sold through channel and will continue to and metallic is built to be only sold through the channel. >>And you guys also, I was looking at some of the strategic changes that you've implemented since you've been here. Leadership changes to the sales organization, but even on the marketing side go to market. You mentioned that the channel opportunities for Hedvig as well as metallic, but also you guys have a new partner programmed, really aimed at going after and cultivating those large global enterprises with your SIS. So in terms of of you know, partner first, it really seems like the strategic directions that you're moving in are really underscoring that. >>Absolutely. Everything we do, every single thing we do is, you know, the question, the reviews we do, the internal inspection we do with the business. The, the way I look at the, the, the go to market conversations as to uh, the, you know, the pipeline is always about which partners involved, who's the partner involved, you know, and on an exception where we don't have a partner involved. My um, my F it's a flag to me going why? Um, no, we're, I don't know if you're speaking with Ricardo today or at some point he'll, he'll, he'll let you know exactly what we're doing there and how we think about it. And then we've just hired Marissa Rowe, I don't know, you know, Mercer and so Mercer's just come on board as our sort of partner lead worldwide. Yup. >>We're going to be talking with him as well. >>It's a cultural shift folks and we're completely committed to it. 100% committed. >>So one of the things that, that Stu and I were chatting about earlier today that you guys talked about in the keynote is in terms of how quickly metallic was conceived, design built really fast. Does that come from kind of a nod to your days at puppet where you are used to much shorter cycles? And how did, how did internally, the Combolt folks kind of react and we're able to get that done so quick. >>They embraced it. And I'll tell you, I'm, people will tell you that I'm used to saying this, this, this thing. I say that competition and time are not our friends. So we have to, we have to get out there before somebody else does. And if you're coming out with something, it's gotta be better than anybody else has. And so we all agreed there was a need for world-class solution, but we also understood that we had to do a differently doing it the way we've always built something probably probably wasn't the best answer. We needed to go shake things up because it's a different audience, a different delivery capability. But the beauty of the whole thing was that we had core technology at vault that was truly multi-tenanted, truly secure, truly scalable, which we had. This was years of, of great IP, which we took and we built on top of. >>And so we ended up focusing on the user experience and the capabilities of a SAS solution, the modern SAS solution as opposed to putting a wrapper of SAS around substandard technology. So in full credit to the team, we do 90 day releases on our core technology today. Right. So yeah, I think, I think that refresh cycle is what customers expect of us. That you know the and, and then that's what we do today. Right. So something, I don't think it's, I'm not giving myself any credit for it. Yeah. And Sanjay actually we had a customer on earlier talking about that cadence release cycle and he said to Combolt's credit, they're hitting it and it makes my life more predictable when the channels yeah. You know, and so they know when to expect something. So we have a 90 day and Tom will talk to you about this when he, when he comes on, how we get our channel ready for it, how are we enabled them, our own support so we give, so we are completely buttoned up and taking advantage of that release cycle. >>All right. Great. Sunday, nine months, you've already made quite a few moves in the test board, making a lot of pieces there from what we hear, you know, this is just the beginning. Give us a little bit going forward though those people watching what does Sanjay's next nine to 12 months, you know, foretold and as much as you think it's a lot of moving parts that we've, we've changed, um, there we're all part of a, of a roadmap that and so that, and I've been very open and public about it. When I came in there was a lot we had to do and I wanted to be really focused about getting this company back to growth and really helping you realize the potential that it had with, with its heritage of great technology, great customer base, great ecosystem. So I laid out a very simple three point plan, simplify, innovate, execute and tell. >>People are tired of me talking about it and giving me proof points that I'm done. I'm going to keep talking about it. And so simplify is everything about how we use the product, the user experience with us and how you engage with us. OK. innovators innovate in everything we do, products, experiences, everything we have to, we have to challenge the status quo and say it's a smarter way of doing it. Metallic is a complete encapsulation of that, of that energy. Okay. And the last is execute. It's all about getting out there and getting it done. Doing what we say and saying what we do. Just get it out there, get it done. And um, and I think the team has been amazing. They've just rallied around it. And if I embraced it, this is what I think this is what they want. So the changes, sorry, just sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off but it, I'll sum it up by saying that, you know, the nine months have been very focused in the direction making. Now it's about really making sure we help the company and how customers realize its true potential because the technology is great. The people are great. We're a good company. People love our technology. They stay with us forever. Because it does what it's supposed to. We just think we have a lot more to offer. Now. >>I know we're only day one at the show. Things did kick off a little bit yesterday with partners. What's some of the feedback that you've heard from those customers? Either those that have been using vault for 10 years or those that are maybe newer to the bandwagon? >>Well, somebody asked me if I had 10 cups of coffee before I went on stage in the sporting, but I think it's a good proxy for what I feel on the show. I feel incredible energy. I think that the customers, the partners, our own people, it's just, there's a buzz and you've been to shows before and some of them are just, you know, some of them have that energy and some of them are flat. Well this one's just full of energy and uh, and it's, it feels like a lot of adrenaline here and this people are excited and um, you know, I'm excited to go walk the floor. >>Well, your competitors are taking notice. There was some interesting digital signage yesterday at the airport. I noticed that that wasn't okay. I didn't, I missed it. Invitation. Highest form of flattery. Sanjay, >>I got the notice that there's, there's a lot of investment that goes into this. Uh, this, this segment of the market. It's been really hot. Um, what, what's your take on all the startups in as well as the, the, the big companies that have been putting a lot of it that it's an important space, right? Um, it's, it's, it's in the top three to five depending on which study you look at data protections back because it's one thing to have data and nothing to know that it is the way you want it. It's also a testimony to the a, it's not an easy space to get into when you're telling your customer that you're protecting them. That's a big word. Okay. I believe that you earn your way there day on day release, on release. And we've done that. I mean the animals the same good things about as in half a years we had customers on stage, you know, and it, customers don't just come up on stage and they, they really believe it. We have a, we had a pretty decent turnout at the partner event yesterday. You know, I think we're, we're in a great space at a great time and we've got 20 years of, of great pedigree that I don't take for granted as much as people sort of go, Oh, you're an old company. I go, Oh, don't mistake pedigree for anything else. You know, we've got some incredible IP over 800 active. >>Yes. >>You were sharing some of those thoughts this morning. I was looking to see where I put them. How are you guys leveraging the data that you have under management to make combos technology even better and to help make some of those strategic, >>it's this deep learning. It gives as much, you know, we applying AI implicitly. I don't want it to be an AI washing my technology for my customers. It's in there. It just works for them and it's my job to make my product better so they get more value out of it as opposed to for them to bolt on something to make my product better. So I don't, I really don't care what other shit about it. What I care about is I'm building that right into, into the intelligence. We have all the data, we know we, our customers use it, how they back it up, what their expectations are, what the SLS are, what their protocols are. We know this stuff and you, you have to, you know, we've been around enough to know this stuff. So now we're taking all of that with technologies like deep learning and machine learning and making the product better. >>So Sunday, one of the toughest things to do out there is have people learn, learn about somebody again for the, for the second time, you know, you only get one chance to make a first impression. So maybe I'd love your insight. You've been on board for nine months, you know, everybody knows Combolt it has a strong pedigree as you said, has a lot of patents. There's the culture there, but anything you've learned in the last nine months that you didn't know from the outside, he was still a pretty good secret. And there's a lot of people that don't know us as long as even though we've been around in the enterprise and and have have achieved a ton, there's still a ton of customers that don't know us and you know in our chops to get it out there. And if you've looked at our digital presence, if you've looked at how we're engaging online, it's a different Convolt. In fact, one of my favorite hashtags that's a, that that's trending at the show is a hashtag new comm vault. Is that right? I like that one. >>As I say, I might have started it, I don't know. But it is, it's an opportunity, right as to said, you know, we all wish sometimes in certain situations we could make a first impression. Again, I think you have that opportunity is you're saying there's, you have I she was saying close to 80% of, I think I read the other day, 75 80% of Commonweal's revenue comes from the fortune 500 you have the big presence with Bleagh global enterprises. This sustainability initiative that you were doing with the U N that Chris talked about. So there's, there's a lot of momentum behind that as well to take and really kind of maybe even leverage the voice of those enterprises to share with the world the benefits that Convolt provides. Like you said, data protection is hot. Again, if you have the data and it's, and you don't have the insight and it's not protected and you can't recover it quickly, then what value >>or used, if you can't use that know, why does it have to be compartmentalized where you say, Oh, that is my archive. Why can't I, why can't I say that? Yes, it is my archive, but I can, I can leverage that data for other things in my business. Okay. And so our product orchestrate allows customers to discovery to do, sorry, activate, not orchestrate to do eDiscovery, to curate information to use it for R and D to have a policy on sensitive governance needs. There's so much we can do with that, with with the data that's just sitting there, that and from different sources that I believe that at some level, protecting and protecting, managing and controlling our almost table stakes. So I'm raising the stakes uses where the magic is. >>All right, raising the stakes. Well, Sanjay, thank you so much for joining Stu and me on the cube today. Can't wait to see where those stakes are going to be. Combo go 2020 hashtag new comm volt hashtag new comm vault. Thanks Lisa. Thanks. Thank you so much. Hashtag new cobalt for Stewman eman and Sanjay Mirchandani and Lisa Martin, you're watching the cube from Cannonball. Go.

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering com vault go 2019 brought to you by Combalt. >>Hey, welcome back to the cube Lisa Martin with steam and man we are live on the show floor of comm vault go 2019 fourth annual event, a couple thousand customers here and Steve and I are welcoming back the COO of combo. Chris pal. Chris, welcome back. Thanks. Great to be here. We're excited to be here. We just came out of the keynote. Some interesting news to talk about but let's, let's to talk about what's happened. Combat is a 20 year young company, tremendous amount of acceleration in the last nine months. Lot of leadership changes he must be going to hold onto the table cause you got like the whiplash, right? So tell us, here we are at the fourth annual go news in terms of sales leadership changes go to market opportunities with metallic, with a new partner programs for the enterprise. Tell us what are some of the things that are exciting to you and how come vault is really in 20 FYE 2020 position? Like, Hey, we're listening to our customers and partners. >>Yeah, yeah. Well, and a lot of the things that you're seeing here at this show is just that it's, it's, it's market-driven. It's us responding to what we're seeing in the market, working with our partners. And a show like this is all about working with partners. Our customers and the, the announcements that we're making here are really releasing a completely new combo that the brand refresh that we've done just over the last month or so is been tied to a lot of the things that are changing with regards to the product portfolio. Uh, that Hedvig acquisition and a lot of the different leadership changes that you're seeing and the leadership changes are really driving a lot of this shift of focus. And really, I shouldn't say shift really extended focus for the organization from a technological standpoint as well as from working with our partners. >>Yeah, it's interesting. The news ahead of the show of metallic Convult now a SAS providers. So it's interesting to get you give us your, your view as a marketer. On the one hand you need to be the trusted enterprise supplier with a lot of customers. And the other one, you know, they've got cloud microservices, all the latest buzz words and you know sasses the model that a lot of customers want to be able to consume their software standpoint. So, so >>I know you have Rob Kalusi and who's going to be coming on. So I'll steal some of his thunder and I'll try not to steal too much to don't tell them the what excites me so much about the metallic product when leap, when we first started down this path, it was we, we really started looking at the market and the challenge that came from Sanjay when he just first entered the building really was we have industry leading technology. A lot of folks will talk about how we have industry leading technology. But if you really took a step back, you would have to have an honest view and say, sometimes they would say, well look, if it's a, if it's a really straight forward installation, maybe Commonwealth and might be a bit bring too much to the party, so why don't you look at some of the other solutions. >>And as we were talking to different customers out there, they were looking for SAS solutions and but they at the same time, they didn't want to make any compromises. And so much of the research that Rob and team working with Janet and with David, no, we're seeing is that as they were going out there, the Seuss solutions that were available today, and this sounds like marketing spin, right? But it's really what we were hearing back, that they weren't very good there, that they weren't SAS solutions. They're supposed to be easy. The customers really didn't see them as easy. They were running into scale issues, they were running into flexibility issues. So from the standpoint of building the solution, what we quickly realized is if we could reach Sanjay's challenge to us, which is bringing this fundamentally solid technology to a broader audience with a simplified use cases that there's a great opportunity for us to bring value to more companies. So that's, that's where this went. And then the beginning reviews of this as we brought this into beta and different people were seeing at different customers, different partners, they even came into the conversation a little bit pessimistic and they all left excited about what they were seeing. It's it's, it's really good. It's really good. >>So targeted towards mid market companies with around 2,500 or 500 to 2,500 employees. Give me just a little bit of a perspective on the choice that Commonweal is now offering the midmarket with complete backup and recovery. That's one of your flagship and metallic. >>So the the metallic offerings your men for some of the most common use cases that are out there. So 65 and the what we're, what we're trying to inject into the market and the target of 500 to 2,500 employees is really just where we see the sweet spot of most of the customers of those sizes are the ones that are looking at SAS solutions right now. But that's not to say as we've talked to larger enterprises, many of them are considering the addition of metallic as into their either subsidiaries or other areas of their business. And what Sanjay talks about, he sort of refers to as the data brain is really bringing this together where you can add SAS solutions onto your existing on prem solution. So if you're running combo complete, you can also be running metallic across other aspects of your business. So that's, that's one of the things that makes it powerful upmarket, but then we're also targeting the more common use cases that are more turnkey down-market. Yeah. >>Let's switch gears a little bit. So your team had a little bit of fun opening up the keynote. You had some of the stunt doubles a for Thor from Starwood and the woman has done both star Wars and Marvel on and talking about the unsung heroes behind the scenes. Kind of like your, your customers here. But there was another connection because they were vendors and con vault is, I believe it's the global Avengers and it has to do with sustainability, which I know is something near and dear to your heart. So explain a little bit about why that's important in what it is. >>So it's definitely a passion of mine and something that we accumbent are looking to every company as we're driving this should try to stand for something bigger than themselves. And as we look at this all started two years ago when we sponsored and I joined Robert Swan's expedition to the South pole. We were the data sponsor for that expedition and it was the first expedition to rely solely on renewable energy. And what has evolved from that from different conversations, we started having discussions throughout about the carbon footprint of data and with 5g the internet of things coming and more and more data on the horizon. The people that we're speaking with. And the reality I think that tech has come to is that we can't be part of the problem. We have to be part of the solution. So through a series of connections, we ended up speaking with the folks who were responsible for the UN global goals. Um, it's the 17 global goals around the world that were endorsed by all of the UN countries five years ago and there's 10 more years of it. And Kamahl is extremely proud to be joining some of the largest companies in the world. Coca Cola, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, many in our industry and outside, obviously to sponsor one of the global global goals. But the way the program works is it 17 global goals and there's one company for each one of them in order to try to represent it and drive it forward. >>Chris, you actually took a few of us around the show floor before it opened last night. We know conferences can have a bit of an impact from a negative standpoint. So tell some of what Combolt's doing to make sure that this conference, you know, doesn't have such an impact. >>So as you mentioned before, it's about 2000 people that are here and I was shocked to learn and a lot of this is all in education. As you go through life, the, an event of this size typically will generate 25,000 pounds of rubbish of trash. So what we've done is partner with our good customer, which is the Gaylord Gaylord hotel systems and leaf put together a model where we're trying to minimize the overall footprint. So we donate a lot of what you see around here. Construction materials are donated to schools and local organizations. We're using all of the natural plants that will go back into the, uh, into the environment after this. Um, no plastic. I'm trying. And then the, uh, the cups you see here on the table are all plant based. So we're, we're trying to be very conscientious about everything that we're doing here at the show and minimize the footprint. >>When you're talking with customers, as I'm sure as cou are doing a lot, we talk, we often Sue and I and the rest of the cube crew. Sustainability is a topic that comes up at every event. We're, is that when you're talking with customers in any industry, whether it's healthcare or oil and gas, where is sustainability in >>terms of conversation? Is that one of the key things that comes up? That was also really important for Commonwealth to say, Hey, we want to be able to make sure that the technologies we're delivering are going to help our customers meet their sustainability goals. >>Absolutely. And it's, it's increasingly part of some, a number of RFPs. They will come in for Combalt. So they're there. Companies are looking to have us be able to really represent what our sustainability, what our corporate social responsibility systems are and what we put in place. And so we look at this through the lens of what do we do within our facilities? What do we do in events like this? And then also what can we do with our customers? So it's increasingly relevant and their sons of research, I'm sure you guys have seen the, the, as the millennial generation becomes more and more part of either significant influencers or decision makers, they're looking for companies that have a mission, you know, and that that stand for something all. >>So Chris, we're talking about sustainability is something you're passionate about. How does that tie into the broader brand discussion of Convolt companies going through, we talked about the executive change and you've got a lot of new products. So when people leave Combalt go 2019 how do you want them to think of Convult? >>That's a great question. I think what we're hoping that we were really using combo Alco as a combination of so many of the things that have been happening over the last couple of quarters. And certainly as I looked through what we're representing now, it's what are we as an organization, what's the story we're trying to tell? So we launched just in the last few weeks a new tagline, which is be ready. And that whole concept of data readiness is something that we're having within this show and it'll be in a lot of our messaging as we move forward. So this, I'm thinking of as the organization that enables you to be ready and then extending that should of saying, well what does that mean? And that's around how we protect the data, help you control where it resides, help you manage it for compliance and different regulatory needs, and then help you use it and get value from it. So that's the big takeaway we're hoping that people have. The other piece of this that we have each year is we expose people to such expertise here at the show. This is not combo talking about combo. 70% of our sessions in the breakout theaters are partners or customers or other influencers. So we want people to come here and really see convolve as data experts, as the people who are willing to work with them. >>Yeah. One little nugget you shared also, you've been growing. How many developers you bring from internal to the show. I have to think that Sanjay has a little bit of push from that based on his last. Yeah, yeah. >>Roll. Yeah. Certainly the DevOps community is increasingly, especially with some of the moves we've made in Hedvig, the dev community is going to be increasingly an audience for us to, to engage with. But the, we bring 45 developers to the show this year. It's about 40 from a combo and five more that have joined with Hedvig and they have 30 or 60 minute whiteboard sessions and they're completely jam packed. There's, I think last year there was over 150 whiteboard sessions over two days with customers just coming in and going through the details of this because a lot of organizations, they're there, they're faced with right now and in Sanjay's words, they have to move from something to something and they need people to be able to sit down and have honest conversations with them. Um, I joke with people sometimes that one of the terrible things that happened has happened to marketing with the advent of technology is we have to be truthful now when you know you can't, you can't just spin things. And so we're stuck having to tell the truth. But, but combo has a great truth that sets, we've got a really solid truth to tell. We just need to tell it. >>Well, and I love how marketing is so scientific these days. You're right, you have to tell the truth. But you also have, if you have the right foundation within your organization, the ability to access data actually glean insights from it, develop, whether it's a new partner program or new technologies, new routes to market. That's the power of that. Having visibility and access to the data can deliver to any type of organization. When you, when you talk with customers who've been, we've got some on the show today, Hey, we've been using Convolt for 10 years. When you talk to them today, this theme of be ready more than ready. How are they perceiving their foundation with combo and all of the changes that you've made, not just in the last 10 years, but in the last nine months alone. Which like customer feedback. Yeah, >>the customer feedback has been tremendous. I think they, they, so many customers are something that's so great about combo. Does our customers want us to succeed and they, they see this market shifting tremendously. They've been with us for a while and they want us to succeed. When they look at the changes that they're having to overcome, they're excited about really beginning to learn that as they move from something to something that we can help them on that journey. That they don't have to go somewhere else for that journey. So whether that's looking into SAS areas, whether it's modernizing their infrastructure, whether it's moving to multi-cloud and those environments, we, we have the right solutions in the right way for them to be able to make this transition for their company. So >>Chris, we're relatively early still in this show, so I hate to ask, but give us a little bit of a go forward. Lot of change in the last nine months. What should your customers be expecting from comm vault through the rest of the year? And by the time we come back to Convolt go 20, 20? >>Well, I think when you talk to Sanjay, he always says, puts me back on my heels a little bit and tells me that it's a, there's more coming, there's more coming, we're going to keep going. So it, Sanjay is a very dynamic leader and he's looking to make sure that the company isn't just driving to combo go and then it's going to sort of be smooth sailing with these things. I think this is an exciting time to be here at combo. This is an exciting time to be in the industry. So as we look forward to, um, the new leadership that's come in and some of the things they'll be able to do in terms of our go to market, I think we're going to be exciting. Avinash coming into this organization and his expertise, his skill set and all of the brilliant engineers he's, he's brought in to sort of join our industry leading engineering team. Uh, it's, it's going to be, uh, I can't wait to see what they come up with from a marketing standpoint. You know, we, we had a solid product for a number of years, but it's always challenging to sort of continue to tell a story and come up with new ways to tell it. As you get new things in your, in your box to be able to talk about, it's, it's great to be here. >>Well, Chris, we want to thank you for joining us on the queue today. We're excited about the next two days of all of the folks, leaders, new leaders, customers, partners that we're going to be talking to you and really unpacking what being ready means to them. So we thank you for your time and we look forward to a great event. Thanks very much for Steven. Amen. I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the Q from ball go 19.

>> from Seattle WASHINGTON. It's the Q covering AWS Imagine brought to you by Amazon Web service is >> Hey, welcome back already, Jeffrey. Here with the cue, we're in downtown Seattle at the AWS. Imagine, Edie, you event. It's a small conference. It's a second year, but it'll crow like a weed like everything else does the of us. And it's all about Amazon and a degree. As for education, and that's everything from K through 12 community college, higher education, retraining vets coming out of the service. It's a really big area. And we're really excited to have fresh off his keynote presentations where he changed his title on me from what it was >> this morning tow. It was the senator duties >> David Raymond, the director of what was the Virginia Cyber Range and now is the U. S. Cyber range. Virginia Tech. David, Great to see you. >> Yeah, Thank you. Thanks. So the Virginia cyber age actually will continue to exist in its current form. Okay, Well, it'll still serve faculty and students in the in the Commonwealth of Virginia, funded by the state of Virginia. Now the U. S. Cyber Angel fund will provide service to folks outside over, >> so we jumped ahead. So? So it's back up. A step ladder is the Virginia, >> So the Virginia Cyber Range provides courseware and infrastructure so students could do hands on cyber security, educational activities in Virginia, high schools and colleges so funded by the state of Virginia and, um provides this service at no charge to the schools >> and even in high school, >> even in high school. Yes, so now that there are now cybersecurity courses in the Virginia Department of Education course catalogue as of two years ago, and I mean they've grown like wildfire, >> I'm just so a ton of talk here about skills gap. And there's tremendous skills gap. Even the machine's gonna take everybody's job. There's a whole lot of jobs are filled, but what's interesting? I mean, it's the high school angle is really weird. I mean, how do you Most high school kids haven't even kind of clued in tow, privacy and security, opting in and opting out. It's gotta be a really interesting conversation when now you bring security into that a potential career into that and directly reflects on all those things that you do on your phone. >> Well, I would argue that that's exactly the problem. Students are not exposed to cyber security, you know. They don't want the curia potentials are they really don't understand what it is we talked about. We talked about teenagers being digital natives. Really? They know how to use smartphones. They know how to use computers, but they don't understand how they work. And they don't understand the security aspects that go along with using all this technology. And I would argue that by the time a student gets into college they have a plan, right? So I have a student in college. He's he's gonna be a doctor. He knows what a doctor is. He heard of that his whole life. And in high school, he was able to get certified as a nursing assistant. We need cyber security in that same realm, right? If we start students in high school and we and we expose them to cybersecurity courses, they're all elective courses. Some of the students will latch onto it, and I'll say, Hey, this is what I want to be when I grew up. And in Virginia, we have we have this dearth of cyber security expertise and this is true across the country. In Virginia, right now, we have over 30,000 cyber security jobs that are unfilled. That's about 1/3 of the cyber security jobs in this state. And I mean, that's a serious problem, not only in Virginia but nationwide. And one of the ways to fix that is to get high school students exposed to cybersecurity classes, give them some real hands on opportunities. So they're really doing it, not just learning the words and passing the test, and I mean really again in Virginia, this is this is grown like wildfire and really thinks revolutionized cybersecurity education in the state. >> And what are some of the topics that say, a high school level, where you know you're kind of getting versed on the vocabulary and the terminology vs when they go into into college and start to take those types, of course, is >> yeah, so in Virginia, there's actually cybersecurity courses across the C T E career pathways. And so SETI is the career and technical education curricula. And so there are courses like cyber security and health care, where students learn about personal health data and how to secure that specific specific kinds of data, they learn about the regulations behind that data. There's healthcare in manufacturing, where students learn about industrial control systems and you know how those things need to be secured and how they're different from a laptop or a phone. And the way those air secured and what feeds into all of those courses is an introductory course. Cyber security fundamentals, where students learn some of the very basics they learn the terminology. They learn things like the C I. A. Triad right, confidentiality, integrity and availability of the three basic components of security that you try to maintain for any system. So they start out learning the basics. But still they're doing that hands on. So they're so they're in a network environment where they see that you know that later on in the course during Capstone exercises, they might see someone trying to attack a computer that they're that they're tasked to defend and a defender of what does that look like? What are the things that I'm going to do? That computer? You know, I might install anti virus. I might have a firewall on the computer. And how do I set that up and etcetera etcetera. So high school start with the basics. As as students progressed through their high school years, there are opportunities to take further more advanced classes in the high schools. And then when they get to college, some of those students are gonna have latched onto cyber security as a potential career field. Now, now we've got him right way, get him into the right into the right majors and into the right courses. And our hope is that that's gonna sort of kick start this pipeline of students in Virginia colleges, >> right? And then I wonder if you could >> talk a little bit about the support at the state level. And it's pretty interesting that you had him from the state level we heard earlier today about supported the state level. And it was Louisiana for for another big initiative. So you know that the fact that the governor and the Legislature are basically branding this at the state level, not the individual school district level, is a pretty strong statement of the prioritization that they're putting on this >> that has been critical to our success. If we didn't have state level support, significant state level support, there's no way we could be where we are. So the previous governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, he latched on to cyber security education as one of his signature initiatives. In fact, he was the president of the State Governors Association, and in that role he cybersecurity was one of his condition. So so he felt strongly about educating K 12 education college students feeding that cybersecurity pipeline Onda Cyberangels one of one of a handful of different initiatives. So they were veterans scholarships, and there were some community college scholarships and other other initiatives. Some of those are still ongoing so far are not. But but Cyber Range has been very successful. Funded by the state provides a service at no cost to high schools and colleges on Dad's Been >> critically, I can't help. We're at our say earlier this year, and I'm just thinking of all the CEOs that I was sitting with over the course of a couple of days that are probably looking for your phone number right now. Make introduction. But I'm curious. Are are the company's security companies. I mean, Arcee is a huge show. Amazon just had their first ever security conference means a lot of money being invested in this space. Are they behind it? Have you have you looked for in a kind of private company participation to help? Because they desperately need these employees? >> Definitely. So we've just started down that road, Really? I mean, our state funding has kept us strong to this point in our state funding is gonna continue into the foreseeable future. But you're right. There are definitely opportunities to work with industry. Certainly a DBS has been a very strong partner of our since the very beginning. They really I mean, without without the help of some, some of their cloud architects and other technical folks way could not have built what we built in the eight of us. Cloud. We've also been talking to Palo Alto about using some of their virtual appliances in our network environments. So yeah, so we're definitely going down the road of industry partners and that will continue to grow, I'm sure >> So then fast forward today to the keynote and your your announcement that now you taking it beyond just Virginia. So now it's the U. S. Cyber range. Have that come apart? Come about. What does that mean? >> Yes, So we've been We've been sharing the story of the Virginia cyber range for the last couple of years, and I goto national conferences and talk about it. And, um, just to just sort of inform other states, other other school systems what Virginia's doing. How could you? How could you potentially match what we're doing and what The question that I keep getting is I don't want to reinvent the wheel. How can I buy what you have? And that's been sort of a constant drumbeat over the last couple of years. So we decided fairly early on that we might want to try to expand beyond Virginia, and it just sort of the conditions were right about six months ago. So we set a mark on the wall, he said. In Summer of 2019 we're gonna make this available to folks outside of Virginia. And so, so again, the Virginia Cyberangels still exist. Funded by the Commonwealth of Virginia, the U. S cyber range is still part of Virginia Tech. So within Virginia Tech, but we will have to we will have to essentially recoup our costs so we'll have to spend money on cloud infrastructure and We'll have to spend salary money on folks who support this effort. And so we'll recoup costs from folks that are outside of Virginia using our service. But, um, we think the costs are gonna be very competitive compared to similar efforts. And we're looking forward to some successes here. >> And do you think you're you're kind of breakthrough will be at the high school level, the You know, that underground level, you know, where do you kind of see the opportunities? You've got the whole thing covered with state support in Virginia. How does that get started in California? How's that get started here? Yeah, that's a Washington state. >> That's a great question. So really, when we started this, I thought we were building a thing for higher ed. That's my experience. I've been teaching cyber security and higher ed for several years, and I knew I knew what I would want if I was using it, and I do use it. So I teach classes at Virginia Tech Graduate program. So I I used the Virginia side in my class, and, um, what has happened is that the high schools have latched onto this as I mentioned, and Most of our users are high schools. In Virginia, we have 180. Virginia High School is using the Virgin Cyber. That's almost >> 188 1 >> 180. That's almost half the high schools in the state using the Virginia cyber age. So we think. And if you think about, you know, higher. Ed has been teaching cybersecurity classes that the faculty members who have been teaching them a lot of them have set up their own network infrastructure. They have it set up the way they want it, and it ties into their existing courseware, and you know they're going to use that, At least for now. What we provide is is something that makes it so that a high school or a community college doesn't have to figure out how to fund or figure out how to actually put this network architecture together. They just come to us. They have the flexibility of the flexibility to use, just are very basic plug and play network environments, or they have flexibility to, um, make modifications depending on how sophisticated they themselves are with with, you know, manipulating systems and many playing the network so so Our expectation is that the biggest growth is going to be in the high school market, >> right? That's great, because when you say cyber range God, finally, Donna me use it like a target range. It's like a place to go practice >> where the name comes from, right? >> Absolutely. If I finally like okay, I get it. So because it's not only the curriculum and the course where and everything else but it's actually an environment, it depends on the stage things and do things exactly >> So students could d'oh offensive, offensive and defensive cybersecurity activities. And so early on, when we were teaching students howto hack essentially in colleges, you know, there were people who were concerned about that on the military case we make for that is you can't teach somebody how to defend unless they understand how they're gonna be attacked. The same is true in this case. So all of our all of our course, where has lots of ethics and no other legal and other other discussions embedded throughout. So students understand the implications of what their actions would be if they do it somewhere else. And, um, right, these are all isolated network environments their places where students can get hands on in a place where they can essentially do whatever they want without causing trouble on the school network or on the Internet. And it's very much akin to a rifle range, >> right? Like you said, you can have different scenarios. And I would imagine there's probably gonna be competitions of you think. Fact. You know what's going on in the robotics world for lots of all these things, right? Like white hat, black hat hacker. Well, very, very exciting. David, Congratulations. And it sounds like you're well on your way. Thanks. Great. Alright, >> He's David. I'm Jeff. You're watching The Cube were at Washington State Convention Centre just across the street at a W s. Imagine. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. >> Thanks.