(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Fal.Con 2022. My name is Dave Vallante. We're here with my co-host Dave Nicholson. On the last earnings call George Kurts made a really big emphasis on the relationship with managed service providers. CrowdStrike has announced a new service provider capability. The powered service provider program. Jason Cook is here. He is the president of cyber defense labs. He's joined by Mike Riolo. Who's the vice president of global system integrators and service providers at CrowdStrike gents. Welcome to TheCube. Good to see you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you >> Jason, tell us about cyber defense labs. What do you guys do? Give us the bumper sticker, please. >> Cyber defense labs uses the best technology in the world to put together services that help protect our clients >> Simple. Like it. What's XDR? (people laughing) >> I've not heard of that before, sorry. >> So Mike, we've seen the rise of service providers. I saw a stat, I don't know, six, seven months ago that 50% of us companies don't even have a SOC. We're talking about mid to large companies. So service providers are crucial. What's the CrowdStrike powered service provider program all about? >> Well, it's an evolution for us. We've been dealing with this market for some time. And the idea is, is like how do we expand the opportunity to stop reaches? I mean, that's what it's all about. Like how more routes to market, more partners like cyber defense labs that can really go in and bring our technology coupled with their services to power their offerings to their customers and just help us reach every end user out there, to stop reaches. >> So Jason, how do you guys differentiate? Cause I see, you know, as an analyst, I'll look back, I'll read the press releases and they'll see, okay. They just look so similar. So how do you differentiate from the competition? What do you tell customers? >> So when it comes to our selection of technology we test it, we work it, we literally put it into real world situations with our clients. And then we differentiate ourselves with expert services. It's a white glove service from us. We embed ourselves right in with our clients. That's why we call 'em our client partners. And they see us as part of their team and extension of their team. They don't have the time to play with technology and work out what's best. They don't know the time to select it or even then the expertise to use it effectively in the environment. So that's where the trust comes in with us. And then for us, likewise, we are the technology provider such as CrowdStrick, we need to know the technology works and it does what it says. >> I always ask CISOs; What's your number one challenge? And they'll say lack of talent. The only time I didn't get that answer was at... The Mongo DB CISO at reinforced. I'm like yeah, it's cause you're Mongo, I guess reinforced or AWS doesn't have the same problem, but do you... Obviously you see that problem. And you compliment that, is that a fair? >> Yeah, absolutely. Many, many companies mid-market enterprises are really struggling to find talent and then retain the talent. So for us where that's all we are about and then we are there to enable your business to do what your business does. It is just working and I think more and more so you're going to see an industry clearly CrowdStrike's going in that direction. That it's the service provider that becomes a critical element of that trusted circle. >> Does that translate into a market segment by size of organization typically or? You mentioned the ever never ending quest for talent which is critical regardless of size but what does your target market look like? >> So I, I think the biggest gap in the market frankly, is still the mid-market. Many smaller companies still are really just struggling with 'what is the problem.' At least in the mid-market, in the enterprises they really beginning to understand the problem and want to invest and lean in. And here's the irony. They now want to partner to solve the problem cause they recognize they can't do it on their own. >> So Mike, what are the critical aspects of this program? I mean, got the press release out there, but put some meat on the bone for us. >> So if you look at what we were doing to enable managed service providers to go in and, and be powered by CrowdStrike before it was in a corporate market segment it was a specific set of product from us to really enable MDR, you know, sort of that, that generation of services that a lot of customers looked at MSPs for. And what the big message about this is is we are now expanding that. We're taking it out of corporate, we're going upmarket, we're going enterprise. We can leverage partners like cyber defense labs to package our software into their offering and help them power them more than just endpoint. Right? We've had a lot of exciting announcements and probably more to come around identity, you know XDR, the new buzz, right? Like what does it mean? And in, if you look at our approach, it's a very platform centric approach and that's something that partners can monetize. That's something that partners can really help clients grow with is that it's not just about endpoint. It's more about how do I make sure that I'm in a position with a partner that allows me to grow as a market decides it's necessary. So things like identity, cloud on and on and on, that we're investing in and continuing to grow. We are making that available to the CrowdStrike powered service about our marketplace. >> So Jason, service providers historically outsourcing, okay. And it used to be a lot of; 'okay, you know, I'll take over your mess for less kind of thing.' Right? And so the pattern was you would have one of everything and then, that limited your scale. The bigger you got, you had this economies of scale. So am I hearing that, like how do you partner with CrowdStrike? Are you kind of standardizing on that platform or not necessarily cause you have to be agnostic. What's your posture on that? >> So there's a level of, you have to be technology agnostic. We pride ourselves in just using the best technology that's out there. But at the same time, very much with the Fal.Con platform they're building out and maturing in a way that's making significant risk mitigation abilities for a solution provider like us to say we'll take one of those, one of those and put our service around it because that's the best fit service to reduce the risk of this particular client. And having that flexibility for us to do that really allows us then to stay within the same sort of product suite rather than going outside when integration is still one of the biggest challenges that you have. >> So you're one of those organizations that's consolidating a bevy of point tools. Is that right? I mean, you're going through that transformation now. Have you already gone through that? What's your journey look like there? >> Oh, we help companies do that. That's how they mitigate and reduce their risk. >> Okay. But you're using tools as, as well. Are you not? So I mean, you've got to also I mean you're like an extension of those clients. >> Absolutely. So it comes down to a lot of the time do you have the right team? We have a team of experts that deliver expert services. You get to a level of skillset and experience, which goes what's just the best tool out there. And it becomes that's our insight. So one of the reasons why we like the Fal.Con product is because regardless of what the mess is, that's happening you can rapidly deploy stuff to make a difference. And then you then work out how to fix the mess which is quite a change from how traditionally things are done, which is let's analyze the problem. Let's look at options around it. And by the time you've done that time has passed and you can't afford to just allow time to pass these days. So having the right technology allows you to rapidly deploy. Of course, we use what we sell. So we are proud to say that we use a number of the Fal.Con products to protect ourselves and consolidate onto that technology as we then offer that out as a service to our clients. >> So Mike, I'm thinking about the program in general and specifically how you are implementing this program thinking about the path to bringing the customer on board. There are a finite number of strategic seats at any customer's table. So who is at the customer's table? Is it CDL saying; 'Hey, I'm going to bring in my folks from CrowdStrike to have a conversation with you.' Is it CrowdStrike saying; 'Hey, it looks like a service provider might be the best solution for you. Let's go talk to CDL.' How does that work? >> It's a great question. And I think we talk a lot about how there's a gap in people to support cyber efforts inside of companies. But we don't talk about the gap in like experts that can go in and actually sit down with CISOs, with CIOs, with CFOs. And so for us, like it's all about the flexibility. It's it's what do you need in the moment? Because at the end of the day, it comes down to the people. If Jason has a great trusted relationship, he's like; 'Hey I just need some content.' 'Help me push why we're powered by CrowdStrike in this moment.' Great, go run. If we have an opportunity where we know that cyber defense labs has a presence then we go in together, right? Like that flexibility is there. We've done a lot. When you build a program like this, like it's easy to tell the market what they need. It's easy to tell everybody, but it's also you're looking at a cultural shift and how CrowdStrike goes to market, right? Like this is all about how do we get every possible route to market to stop reaches for customers of all size. >> I would echo that. there's three ways that that's working for our two companies at the moment. Many times a lot of the relationships that we have are trusted advisor at the owner or board level of these mid-market and enterprise companies. They're looking to ask for a number of things. And one of the things that we then say is, Hey for your technology roadmap, hey we want to bring in co-present coded us, co-discuss co-strategize with you what your roadmap is. And so we often bring CrowdStrike into the conversations that cyber defense lab is having at the board level. Then on the other side, CrowdStrike obviously has a significant sales force and trusted advisors. They go in with the product and then it's apparent that the you know, the client wants way more than just the product. They say, this is great. I love it. I've made my decision, but I can't operate it effectively. And so we then get pulled in from that perspective >> You get to all the time from product companies, right? It's like, okay, now what? How do I do this? And you go, oh, I'll call somebody. So this is going to accelerate. You go to market. >> Well, and everybody looks at it like, you know how does your sales play with their sales, right? Everyone's going after the same thing. And I'm, you know, that's important, but you have to look at CrowdStrike as more than sales, right? We have an amazing threat intel group that are helping clients understand the risk factors and what bad people are trying to do to them. We can bring so many experts to the side of a cyber defense labs in, in that realm. You know, we've been doing this a long time. >> This is what's interesting to me when I think about your threat hunting, because you guys are experts and you guys are experts. But the... Correct me if I'm wrong. But the advantage I see at the CrowdStrike has is your cloud platform allows you to have such a huge observation space. You got a ton of data and you bring that to the relationship as well and then you benefit from that? >> It's two way. It's absolutely two way. CrowdStrike has a whole bunch of experts and expertise in this space. So do cyber defense labs. We call it for us because we're providing a service to multiple clients. Many of them have a global presence. We call it our global threat view. And absolutely we are exchanging real time threat telemetry data with, with our friends at CrowdStrike Which is impacting the value that we have and the ability to respond extremely quickly when something's happening to one of our clients. >> Well, I just add to that, you know if you look at all of our alliances, right? We've got solution providers, tech reliant, everything. The one thing that's really interesting about the CrowdStrike powered service provider program; it lives in alliances, It's a partnership program, but they're our customer. They have chosen to standardize on our platform, right. To help drive the best results for their customers. And so we treat them like a partner because it's not for internal use. There's unlimited aspect to it. And so as that treating like partnership we have to enable them with more than just product. Right? We want to bring the right experts. We want to bring the right, you know, vision of where the market's going the threats out there, things of that nature. And that's something that we do every day with you guys. >> And it was even expressed earlier with the keynote speech that George gave. Look there's an ecosystem of very good technologies, very good providers. And there there's that sort of friend-of-me view here. You put the best thing together for the client at the end of the day. And if we all acknowledge, which I think is the maturity of our partnership, that one plus one equals, I always say at 51 now, if you play it right, then the partner sees... That the client sees the value of the partnership. And so they want more of that. >> So it sounds like... We got to wrap, but I wonder if we could close on this. It sounds like this was happening just organically in the field. Now you've codified it. So my question to each of you is; What's your vision for the future? Where do you guys want to take this thing? >> What a wrap question right there. I love it. Honestly, like we look at it in... Look at what does it mean to be a CrowdStrike powered service provider. It is more than just the platform. It's the program in general, offering them tools to go in and do early assessments. One thing about service providers, they're in there before vendors, right? We're still a vendor at the end of the day. And so they have that relationship, like how do we enable them to leverage our platform leverage our tools, leverage our programs in order to help a client understand, like, what is your risk factor Could a breach come, things of that nature. And so it's really building in really enabling a partner like cyber defense labs to take on the full suite of programs, services, platform that we can provide to them as a customer, treated them like a partner. >> And Jason, from your perspective, bring us on if you would. >> So our partnership with CrowdStrike is really enabling cyber defense labs to increase our share of wallet, our presence in very specific market segments; The mid-market to enterprise especially around banking, financial services auto dealerships, healthcare, manufacturing, where last year we saw a significant progress there. And we think we're going to double it between this year and next year. >> Jason Cook, Mike Riolo. thanks for coming in TheCube. Great story. >> Thank you for having us >> Alright, thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Dave Vallante and Dave Nicholson will be back right after this short break from Fal.Con 22. You're watching TheCube. (soft electronic music)

>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. Day three of Dell tech world cubes live coverage in Las Vegas are down on the floor live event hybrid event as well online. If you're interested in seeing some of the replays, I'm John furrier with the cube with Dave LAN next guest, she cook senior vice president global channel at Dell tech know is Cub alumni. Great to see you in person. >>Thank you. Great to see you both in, in person. How >>Are you? We had a virtual virtual last year, but this year in person, a lot of action, a lot of big announcements. The big story is the snowflake deal. You're seeing the new architecture by design multi-cloud by design of variety. Everything. Cyber is huge. Now the partners are playing a huge role. So the notion channel and partner value add is really at an all time high. Could you share your, your thoughts on where you see it, where we are today and where's it going? >>Thank you. I absolutely couldn't agree more and I'm an optimist by nature, but I actually think the timing for the partner community and the partner ecosystem en large has never been brighter. So a lot of the themes we've been discussing is just the inherent complexity that our customers are trying to navigate through multi-cloud and multiple business models, consumption models that is so uniquely well positioned for what our partners do. So our partners help navigate those complexities for our customers. They bring a lot of expertise in not just infrastructure in multiple stacks and workloads, but also in verticals and industry expertise. And everything's moving use case workload industry centric. And I think our partners are incredibly well positioned. >>You know, you know, the game still remains the same, but the world changes in indirect and partner relationships. And, you know, we use words like ISV VA, a reseller at the end of the day, they're helping customers with solutions and the game has changed. Could you share your thoughts on what's different now because we're seeing a rise of more managed services plugging into your, your relationships and the value you guys bring. So it's still the same game value creation, helping customers making money. >>Absolutely. And I think, you know, the one trend that we're definitely seeing is everybody is overwhelmed with the complexity. And I think we all can acknowledge that one size doesn't fit all for every workload, whether it's a deployment model in a public cloud on premise, a private cloud, some customers wanna go asset light. How do I put, put it in a co-location facility? So customers are in charge right now. It's actually about their choice. And what we're trying to do with a lot of these partnerships and announcements is really enable and empower our partners to be able to meet their needs and offer the right solution for what they have, where they need to need to spend it. And I just think it's an incredible opportunity and the lines are blurring frankly, in the ecosystem. So many of these partners are participating in multiple business models already. So our notion of an MSP, a CSP, a reseller, it's kind of, yes, they're all doing it. <laugh> it's >>Called cloud. John John mentioned the snowflake deal. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit in the, in the old days, it would've been Dell go into snowflake saying, Hey, your software can run really fast on our box. Yeah. You know, so we should go to market and do something together. It's a totally different dynamic. Now can, can you explain kind of how that deal came about and what the dynamic was like? Yeah. >>We're actually really excited about the snowflake partnership because I think it's a fabulous example and an expression of what the true partner ecosystem can represent. And what it really showed is we've got out a fabulous piece of technology and so innovative with snowflake in their analytics platform. And it was, cloud-based only, we have a lot of customers that for sovereignty reasons, security reasons, policies, what have you that have a lot of on-premise on Dell storage, quite frankly. So what this partnership enabled was the ability to export and take data off premise into their cloud for analytics and get it back. But as importantly for their customers, it now gives them the ability to take their IP and their snowflake analytics platform on premise to where the Dell storage is. And that's an incredibly strong example of how a, it's a really strong win-win partnership between Dell and snowflake, but it's a great win for our partners and customers to be able to leverage the best of both IP where it's appropriate. >>Oh. And by the way, to run really fast. Absolutely. But completely different discussion and dynamic in terms of going into that deal. Interesting. >>Absolutely. Absolutely. So >>That's a good example of the services that are emerging. So also highlights that that didn't exist before that, that use case. So as partners come in and want to make more money, there's tons of margin for them to build solutions and they're in multiple business models. Can you give an example of some of the hot trends? Is it as a service? Is it what models do you see kind of like evolving as kind of like the lead play for most of the, >>I, I would say, you know, the reason I think our partners are so incredibly well positioned is like some of our strongest partners. They all have relationships with the hyperscalers too. So they have practices built around AWS and as Azure and the like, and right now workloads can't live in one single place partner are so uniquely well positioned to advise and counsel their customers and do all the value added services you mentioned on where is the best fit in place for that workload. And what we're aiming to do is empower those partners and give them consistency in operating experiences, management experiences. So though that no matter where the data or the workload goes, those partners deep investments in their skills and their expertise is leveragable and extendable across wherever it lands. >>Yeah. Cheryl, we always have great conversations around the channel, the relationship and the value opportunities for them to make money and serve customers. But I wanna get your thoughts on, on what's just happened over the past three years, the pandemic has really shined the light on the value of partners, um, in, in, in a time where everyone's working at home and, and COVID has happened with the pandemic partners stepped up. Oh, and so can you share what was some of the highlights and, and, and different success trends you saw at the pandemic? Because they had to move fast with technology, people who weren't on the front end had to catch up fast, but yet were handicapped by the, by the pandemic. >>Yeah. You know, it's really revealed just so many inspirational stories actually. But I think what we learned and what we saw is PA partners are local partners are intimate with customers. They understand their business and they understand their need. And then when they leaned into a relationship with Dell, it was everybody focused on the customer. And at first it was business continuity, right? I mean, resiliency, how do we do it? How do we enable them to get their worker productive and working remote? And I think customers just needed help and they reach local, right. And the partners that are there have the expertise, as we know, it's not the first time they've done these deployments and they had the reach and scale. And I honestly think some of the joint success we enjoyed through that crazy phenomenal period <affirmative> is frankly, a Testament to let's just stay focused on the customer. I think our supply chain showed up, frankly. I think we helped navigate that and be responsive, but the opportunity was incredible. >>I heard people say the internet and partners saved, um, companies from going under with the pandemic. Can you give an example of, of what's changed for Dell because you who has had to rely on partners, what new learnings and changes came out of the pandemic because they had to solve the problems fast for customers. Did it change how you operate and how you run your business? >>So well, I'll tell you, I mean, I'll give you a real world example. What we kind of mobilized real quickly was all about digital selling and virtual selling and digital demand creation. And, you know, nobody could hold an event anymore and that's the way we all build pipeline and drive demand. And we have learned at a necessity how productive and efficient virtual opportunities can be. And we can also learn when, you know, Michael calls it zoom airlines, right. That we were on, you know, we could take our best experts and our most technical resources and engage them in five or 10 customer engagements. We opened that to our partners. We took our executive briefing center, made that virtual and all of that just unlocked the ability to one, meet the demand. And then as we've learned, we were just describing, I think it's gonna be hybrid. You know, some of those lessons learned and how fabulously efficient they were, are gonna continue. And we can't wait to get back in person too. It really makes >>The digital piece really work. We're calling it cube plus digital on our side, but we're now integrating digital. You have to have that first class citizen digital into your physical operations. >>Absolutely. We called it digital first. And I think, you know, we have so much evidence and data on buyer behavior changing. You know, the two years we all spent at home, we're all bringing, you know, our all online preferences to our B2B life and existence. And people want that simplified, elegant, responsive experience even where we are now. And we learned through the pandemic, frankly, that, you know, the MDF resources we extended to our partners, the work we did on digital activities was far more profit efficient. The returns are, I mean, the evidence speaks for itself. So it's phenomenal partner >>Partnership by definition implies a two-way relationship. And so what's your secret to scaling partnerships and making sure that you can give all your partners the attention, maybe not equally, obviously there's tier, but what's your, what's your trick there? >>Well, I think, you know, one size doesn't fit all. And I think that applies to our partner ecosystem. We've been talking about deployment models and clouds, et cetera. And we're gonna have a traditional partner program where we're gonna have coverage and resources and some of our largest partners. But then we lean into ISV relationships, distribution relationships that help extend and cascade the experience with Dell, our training and enablement the opportunity. And I think one of the trends we're also seeing is we're gonna have multiple partners engaging on single opportunities and that's where they're gonna play to their strengths. And we're gonna continue to have to enable that, you >>Know, that brings a good point. Just wanna riff on this real quick, if you don't mind, the local angle that you mentioned partners are local, um, partners are servicing. They're changing with you. Look at the edge. Jeff Clark was talking about the future, how the edge, uh, and data is so important and new personas like data engineerings, emerging data as code Caitlin was talking about you can't get more local than a 5g tower with absolutely with boxes there. And if you look at the hyperscalers trying to do these regional, uh, areas, Dell's actually positioned well with their partners to actually do what you've been doing, all your, all your, the company's history, deploying solutions, absolutely. At the edge. Absolutely. Which is essentially the customers, your reaction to that. Well, >>Like I said, I'm so bullish on the opportunity for partners going forward, but specific to edge, if you look at our OEM business, for example, there's a lot of edge solutions and deployments that have been conducted through that business. Our partners participate in our OEM capabilities and resale capabilities today that I think is only gonna continue. And if you look at almost as a 'em from all the way to custom design and embedded solutions that we can do up to, and including just working with ISVs, where we can help build purpose built technology around their software or the telcos as we've discussed, that's a great example of where we're gonna build purpose built hardware that actually has commercial applications that we've opened up more locally. So I think this edge >>And, and the deliveries there, >>Absolutely. And it's inherently use case centric. So when you start talking edge year by default, kind of into an industry, vertical conversation, and the unique opportunity for the win-win in partnership is really leveraging what we do well, which is horizontal consistency scale with their vertical industry, intimate expertise, it a nominal opportunity in a win-win. So >>You'll bring engineering resources to, for example, a retail, uh, opportunity that is a large enough Tam that you can go after and multiple partners can add value along the way. Absolutely. >>And because of our strength, our scale, our market share our presence. We're an attractive partner for a lot of ISVs to partner with. So when you think of the ecosystem partners, wanna partner with people that have strong partnerships. So when we have more snowflake like partnerships and we build out capabilities where we're putting services in AWS and the hyperscalers, and we have traditional relationships with Alliance partners and resellers it's compelling, and ultimately partners and customers are all trying to simplify the number of vendors they're working with. You can come and work with Dell across a large continuum of both portfolio and services. >>I think about three years ago, when we were in person with Dell tech world 2019, it was the same message core, um, cloud core edge. Yeah. And now with edge is everything in was part of that. So interesting. In fact, Chuck whi on his keynote said, um, multi-cloud by default multi-cloud by design. Absolutely. You might want to add in your commentary edge by default converting to edge by design >>Edge by design. I think, you know, Michael used to, to a statistic that I think it's, it's selling out of the data center. Right. You know, know we've seen this trend on having to sell to the line of business as opposed to the it department that inherently pulls you to the edge. And I think Michael said, even with the hyperscalers, there's 600 data centers in the world for all of 'em there's 6 million cell towers. And each of those are an opportunity to have these micro little mini edge deployment. >>I'm smiling because Dave and I have been saying for years, the edge data center is the edge. And now we have edges being data centers. Now you have data centers aren't going away. They're actually expanding, multiplying. Exactly, >>Exactly. <laugh> >>What is what's on your mind these days? What's what are you into, what are you watching and trends what's, uh, what's in the network that you like in terms of partners, what are some of the things you wanna share with the folks out there that you think's important to watch? >>I, I think the fascinating thing I see is this notion of multiple partners engaging and how do we get that simplified? How, you know, what's our role? How do we help enable that? How do we help orchestrate it? Because the market's moving so fast and the need, frankly, for time to revenue, time to competitive advantage, customers need us all to kind of work better together on their behalf to help solve those SIM. So I'm fascinated with this idea of what used to be a competitive or a Cooper competi is now a partner. And we're all actually kind of looking at things with a little longer term vision and should with the customer's outcome in mind. And frankly, that is just unlocking so much opportunity for multiple partners. So it's less about the traditional landscape of is it can competitive or complimentary. There's so much opportunity for everybody now. It's like, how do we just lean on each other and play to our own strengths to be able to satisfy the opportunity quickly? >>It's like a partner operating system absolutely. Coming together. Yeah. How about business performance? How's the scorecard look for you guys on the business side doing well. >>Oh, you know, we just, we couldn't be more delighted and humbled who would've the coming out of the last couple years, you know, Dell would've had record performance. So when our earnings and we closed our fiscal year, we're using adjectives like historic epic record breaking <laugh> and the partner performance inside those results is just phenomenal. It's growing faster than the overall business. And I think continue. So I see incredible consistency globally consistency across our whole partner ecosystem, whether that's traditional channel OEM alliances. And I'm frankly just see that continuing a hundred billion. I think the market's coming to them hundred >>Billion growing at 17%. You can't do that without partners in an ecosystem. Absolutely. >>And the partner of business for us right now is 59 billion. It's pushing 60% of Dell's revenue. >>It's only gonna get better, I think, faster. >>So I think that's gonna continue. >>Well, sure. Always great to chat with. You're awesome. Glad data insights. Thanks for sharing the update and the partner and more. Yeah. We'll have you on our digital program this year. We'll get you back on. Absolutely. >>Well, thanks for being here and it's fabulous to be back in person. Great >>To see you. Oh, great. To have you share cook SVP of global partnerships and channels at Dell technologies. Q we right back with more coverage after this short break.

>>I want to welcome back to the cubes coverage. We're here at another event in person I'm John furrier, host of the cube. We've got to CNCF coop con cloud native con for in-person 2021. And we're back. It's a hybrid event and we're streaming lives on all channels, as well as all the folks watching a great guest kicking off the show here from the co-chairs from cataract coast. Is that right? Danielle Cook. Who's the vice president at Fairwinds and John Foreman director at Accenture. Thanks for coming on your co-chair. Your third co-chair is not here, but you guys are here to talk about the cloud maturity model. Pretty mature funding is flowing tons of announcements. We're going to have a startup on $200 million. They're announcing in funding and observability of all of all hot spaces. Um, so the maturity is it's the journey in the cloud native space now is crossed over to mainstream. That's the we've been telling that story for a couple of years. Now, you guys have been working on this. Tell us about the cloud maturity model you guys worked on. >>So we got together earlier this year because we, um, four of us had been working on maturity models. So Simon Forester, who is one of the co-chairs, who isn't here, he had worked on a maturity model that looked at your legacy journey, all the way to cloud native, um, myself, I had been part of the Fairwinds team working on the Kubernetes maturity model. So, and then, um, we have Robbie, who's not here. And John Foreman, who we all got together, they had worked on a maturity model and we put it together and I've been working since February to go, what is cloud native maturity and what are the stages you need to go through to achieve maturity. So put this together and now we have this great model that people can use to take them from. I have no idea what cloud native is to the steps they can take to actually be a mature organization. >>And, you know, you've made it when you have a book here. So just hold that up to the camera real quick. So you can see it. It's very much in spirit of the community, but in all seriousness, it book's great, but this is a real need. What was the pain point? What was jumping out at you guys on the problem? Was it just where people like trying to get more cloud native, they want to go move faster. It was a confusing, what were the problems you solve in? >>Well, and if anything is, if we start at the beginning, right, there was during the cloud journey DevSecOps and the Kootenays being a thing that then there's journeys to DevSecOps tributaries as well. But everything is leading to cloud native. It's about the journey to cloud native. So everybody, you know, we're taught to go John, the ecosystem's an eyesore man. If I look at, you know, landscape, >>The whole map I >>Need, it's just like in trend map, it's just so confusing what we do. So every time we go to, I revert the wheel and I get them from zero to hero. So we just put together a model instead that we can re reuse yeah. As a good reference architecture. So from that is a primary, how we built because the native trademark you have with us today. So it's a five scale model from one to five what's twice today, or how to, to, you know, what our job is getting to a five where they could optimize a really rocket rolling. >>You know, it's interesting. I love these inflection points and, you know, being a student of history and the tech business there's moments where things are the new thing, and they're really truly new things like first-time operationalized dev ops. I mean the hardcore dev ops or early adopters we've been doing that, you know, we know that, but now mainstream, like, okay, this is a real disruption in a positive way. So the transformation is happening and it's new, new roles, new, new workflows, new, uh, team formations. So there's a, it's complicated in the sense of getting it up and running so I can see the need. How can you guys share your data on where people are? Because now you have more data coming in, you have more people doing dev ops, more cloud native development, and you mentioned security shepherds shifting left. Where's the data tell you, is it, as you said, people are more like a two or more. What's the, what's the data say? >>So we've had, so part of pulling this model together was your experience at Accenture, helping clients, the Fairwinds, um, experience, helping people manage Kubernetes. And so it's from out dozens of clusters that people have managed going, okay, where are people? And they don't even know where they are. So if we provide the guidelines from them, they can read it and go, oh, I am at about two. So the data is actually anecdotal from our experiences at our different companies. Um, but we, you know, we we've made it so that you can self identify, but we've also recognized that you might be at stage two for one application, but five for another application. So just because you're on this journey, doesn't mean everything is in, >>It's not boiler plate. It's really unique to every enterprise because they everyone's different >>Journey. Put you in journey with these things. A big part of this also torn apart one to five, your clients wants to in denial, you know? So, so Mr. CX level, you are level two. We are not, there's no way we would deal with this stuff for years. You've got to be a five. No, sorry. You're too. >>So >>There's use denial also about this. People think they do a cloud-native director rolling, and I'm looking at what they're doing and go, okay, do you do workups security? And they go, what's that? I go, exactly. So we really need to peel back the onion, start from seed year out and we need to be >>All right. So I want to ask more about the, um, the process and how that relates to the themes are involved. What are some of the themes around the maturity model that you guys can share that you see that people can look at and say, how do I self identify? What's the process will come to expect? >>Well, one of the things we did when we were putting it together was we realized that there were themes coming out amongst the maturity model itself. So we realized there's a whole people layer. There's a whole policy layer process and technology. So this maturity model does not just look at, Hey, this is the tech you need to do. It looks at how you introduce cloud native to your organization. How do you take the people along with it? What policies you need to put in place the process. So we did that first and foremost, but one of the things that was super important to all of us was that security was ever present throughout it. Because as everything is shifting left, you need to be looking at security from day one and considering how it's going to happen and roll out from your developers all the way to your compliance people. Um, it's super important. And one of the themes throughout. >>So, so it would be safe to say, then that security was a catalyst for the maturity models because you gotta be mature. I mean, security, you don't fool around security. >>About the last year when I created the program for, since I worked with Cheryl Holland, from CCF, we put together the community certification, her special program. I saw a need where security was a big gap in communities. Nobody knew anything about it. They wanted to use the old rack and stack ways of doing it. They wanted to use their tray micro tombs from yesteryear, and that doesn't work anymore. You need a new set of tools for Kubernetes. It's the upgrade system. It's different way of doing things. So that knowledge is critical. So I think you're part of this again, on this journey was getting certifications out there for people to understand how to do better. Now, the next phase of that now it's how do we put all these pieces together and built this roadmap? >>Well, it's a great group. You guys have the working groups hard to pronounce the name, but, uh, it's a great effort because one of the things I'm hearing and we've been reporting this one, the Cubans looking angle is the modern software developers want speed, and they don't want to wait for the old slow groups now and security, and it are viewed as blockers and like slow things down. And so you start to see a trend where those groups could provide policy and then start putting, feeding up, uh, data models that allow the developers in real time to do their coding, to shift left and to be efficient and move on and code not be waiting for weeks or days >>Comes to play. So today is the age of Caleb's right now, get up this emerging we're only to have now where everything is code policies, code, securities, code policies, cookie figures, code. That is the place for, and then again, walk a fusion more need for a cargo office. >>Okay. What's your thoughts on that? >>So I think what's really important is enabling service ownership, right? You need the developers to be able to do security, see policy, see it live and make sure that, you know, you're not your configuration, isn't stopping the build or getting into production. So, you know, we made sure that was part of the maturity model. Like you need to be looking continuous scanning throughout checking security checking policy. What is your process? Um, and we, you know, we made that ever present so that the developers are the ones who are making sure that you're getting to Kubernetes, you're getting to cloud native and you're doing it. >>Well, the folks watching, if you don't know the cloud native landscape slide, that ecosystem slide, it's getting bigger and bigger. There's more new things emerging. You see role of software abstractions coming in, automation and AI are coming in. So it makes it very challenging if you want to jump right in lifting and shifting to the clouds, really easy check, been there, done that, but companies want to refactor their applications, not just replatform refactoring means completely taking advantage of these higher level services. So, so it's going to be hard to navigate. So I guess with all that being said, what you guys advice to people who are saying, I need the navigation. I need to have the blueprint. What do I do? How do I get involved? And how do I leverage this? >>We want people to, you can go on to get hub and check out our group and read the maturity model. You can understand it, self identify where you're at, but we want people to get involved as well. So if they're seeing something that like, actually this needs to be adjusted slightly, please join the group. The cardiograph is group. Um, you can also get copies of our book available on the show. So if you, um, if you know, you can read it and it takes you line by line in a really playful way as to where you should be at in the maturity model. >>And on top of that, if you come Thursday was Sonia book. And of course, a lot of money, one day, I promise >>You guys are good. I gotta ask, you know, the final question is like more and more, just more personal commentary. If you don't mind, as teams start to change, this is obviously causing a lot of positive transformation if done, right? So the roles and the teams are starting to change. Hearing SRS are now not just the dev ops guys provisioning they're part of the, of the scale piece, the developers shifting left, new kind of workflows, the role of certain engineers and developers now, new team formations. Why were you guys seeing that evolve? Is there any trends that you see around how people are reconfiguring their team makeup? >>I think a lot of things is going to a single panic last tonight, where I'm taking dev and ops and putting them one panel where I can see everything going on in my environment, which is very critical. So right now we're seeing a pre-training where every client wants to be able to have the holy grail of a secret credit class to drive to that. But for you to get there, there's a lot of work you've got to do overnight that will not happen. And that's where this maturity model, I think again, will enhance that ability to do that. >>There's a cultural shift happening. I mean, people are changing there's new skillsets and you know, obviously there's a lot of people who don't have the skill. So it's super important that people work with Kubernetes, get certified, use the maturity model to help them know what skills they need. >>And it's a living document too. It's not, I mean, a book and I was living book. It's going to evolve. Uh, what areas you think are going to come next? So you guys have to predict if you had to see kind of where the pieces are going. Uh, obviously with cloud, everything's getting, you know, more Lego blocks to play with more coolness you have in the, in this world. What's coming next with Sue. Do you guys see any, any, uh, forecasts or >>We're working with each one of the tag groups within the CNCF to help us build it out and come up with what is next based on their expertise in the area. So we'll see lots more coming. Um, and we hope that the maturity grows and because of something that everybody relies on and that they can use alongside the landscape and the trail map. And, um, >>It's super valuable. I think you guys need a plug for any people want to, how they join. If I want to get involved, how do I, what do I do? >>Um, you can join the Carter Garfish group. You can check us out on, get hub and see all the information there. Um, we have a slack channel within the CNCF and we have calls every other Tuesday that people can see the pools. >>Awesome. Congratulations, we'll need it. And super important as people want to navigate and start building out, you know, you've got to edge right around the corner there it's happening real fast. Data's at the edge. You got cloud at the edge. Azure, AWS, Google. I mean, they're pushing really hardcore 5g, lot changes. >>Everybody wants to cloud today. Now one client is, one is more cloud. At least both the cloud is comfortable playing everywhere. One pump wife had DevOps. >>It's distributed computing back in the modern era. Thank you so much for coming on the keep appreciating. Okay. I'm Jennifer here for cube con cloud native con 2021 in person. It's a hybrid event. We're here live on the floor show floor, bringing you all the coverage. Thanks for watching station all day. Next three days here in Los Angeles. Thanks for watching. >>Thank you.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, actually, CUBE virtual coverage of Dell Technology World Digital Experience 2020. I'm your host John Furrier with theCUBE. We're not in person this year. Normally we're on the floor, we're talking to all the guests. This year, obviously, because of the pandemic we're going to be doing remote and of course, I'm proud to have a CUBE alumni back on the program. Cheryl Cook, senior vice president, global partner marketing for Dell Technologies. Cheryl, great to see you remotely, bummer we couldn't be in person, thanks for coming on. >> I know, thank you John. It's great to be with you virtually again. >> You know, I just want to just point out that obviously we're not face to face. Normally Dell Technology World is a real celebration. It's the, it's a culmination of all the announcements, all the community, all the partners, it's, it's actually a huge partner event as well as a customer event. You're running global partners. How has this pandemic changed your world? People still got to do business. More pressure for modern apps, programmable infrastructure Hybrid Cloud. The world's not stopping. What is your take on this? Because it's been a real challenge but it's an also an opportunity for the folks who can get through it. What's your take? >> Yeah, it's just been remarkable. You know, I tell people in some ways I find this the great equalizer because it has all of us around the world in the exact same place but our partners have just been remarkable. You know, we see inspirational work all over the place. They're so resilient and they have just been focused on the customer. And so together we have just been really focused on helping all of our customers as we know, in the early weeks and months of this now, you know, it was pivoting to support business continuity and enabling their employees to work remotely. And our partners just rallied to the cause. You know, they bring their expertise and their capabilities and their services. And you know, we've all been talking about digital transformation and the need to modernize all of our infrastructures. And I think we're all seeing it just accelerate. So in so many ways, it's just pushed it to the forefront and a lot of us, because we don't have an alternative, we're all engaging in modalities like this, but we're getting business done, right? We're helping our customers really respond to the needs of the business. And I think in the early stages of this, you know, we've been characterizing it as there was a lot of go fast, go light. Now we're seeing, you know, that we're all recognizing we're going to be in this circumstance for the foreseeable future, a little longer than maybe we all intended and now it's do it right. So we see a lot of just good work around hardening infrastructure, working on security vulnerabilities. How do we harden a VPN environment? So to be candid, you know, the breadth of our portfolio and a lot of the infrastructure solutions, our partnership with VMware has never been more relevant. And a lot of those capabilities our partners are leveraging to be able to support their customers needs and demands. >> Yeah, that's a great point about the VMware and I want to bring that up because I've been doing a lot of interviews and one of the themes for Dell Tech World Digital Experience this year has been the VMware integration. And what's interesting is is that that investment of being tightly coupled with VMware and your other partners is paying off now because as people need to be truly agile and flexible because of the disruption, the way the work environment, the workforce, workloads and the workplace has been changed they really need to lean on Dell. And you guys have that slogan, the power of partnering with Dell Technologies. I want to dig into what that means because the customers, your partners, end user customer there's kind of two spectrums. There's the, this is a tailwind, I have to go faster and put this modern app, I'm going to double down and solve problems. Whether it's a call center is getting stuff built quickly to solve needs. Two, well, this is a pandemic that's integral. So we're going to retool while we're kind of downtime. I won't say downtime, but like, while they're not truly active, whether you're in airlines or whatever, there's different spectrums and everything in between. You guys are bringing a lot to the table through these partnerships and the integrations. Can you talk about how that's paying off and two, how you guys are helping your partners and give some examples? >> Yeah, well, thank you John. And, you know, we have been saying for some time that we really do think the cross sell up, sell opportunity is a differentiated opportunity for our partners teaming with Dell Technologies. You know, even in the last several months while we've all been kind of working from home, our innovation engine hasn't stopped. I mean, we've launched nine new products in nine weeks all of which are just innovations that continue to represent areas where partners can team with us to bring those modernized applications to bear. And to your point, many of our partners and our customers are using this time when we're all remote and you can't go onsite, they're doubling down on their training. You know, we've seen an unbelievable demand in our competency training and our certification capabilities, clearly with the product launches. I just mentioned, there's new training to enable them around the new offerings. Our PowerStore product was just launched. So unbelievable opportunities. And as you said with VMware, you know, we have been for some time, when we talk about cross sell our partners that sell two and three lines of business, their revenues are multiples higher than partners that don't and candidly partners that sell three lines of business and sell VMware are selling like 148 times the revenue and I think it's a reflection of their engaging in strategic sticky services, rich deployments of hybrid cloud implementations with their customers, and the customers need their help and expertise like never before. So I think the results are showing true. And I also think in this dynamic of everything's gone digital, everything's pivoted to digital, you know, our partners have been asking how can we help them be more effective and successful in their digital marketing efforts and activities? How can we assist them in virtual selling? You know, everybody's accustomed to face to face sales contacts and we've all learned how to use your platform and Zoom and teams and all these other modalities that allow us to frankly be highly effective and efficient. And our partners candidly are leaning into some of our services and tools and capabilities that honestly have been there for some time, but like remote diagnostics, for example, remote capabilities so that you don't have to go on the data center floor and you can still be doing assessments and provisioning and orchestration and deployment for your customers in this time. And you're right, some customers and partners are using this as an opportunity to invest so that, you know, when the world opens up, this will end at some point, they are incredibly well positioned to move forward and take advantage of what's already been a fast moving market. And I just think this environment it's accelerated, the move and adoption, like never before. >> Yeah, and to your point, I think the thing we're seeing is that the vendors and the customers that have been prepared, suppliers and customers that have been thinking about it, you can see them having performance. Even in the challenging handcuffed environment that they're in with the whole, you know, disruption working at home to the data center because the edge and the data center are now connecting and you've got hybrid public, multi-cloud developing and everyone's got to learn and build out at the same time. So it's interesting, I want to get your thoughts on this because you know, the word virtual event has been kicked around. We have our own virtual event thing and everyone's doing it. This is theCUBE virtual but they don't use the word digital, but we say digital transformation. Is it digital, virtual transformation? So you've got virtual, I guess, reality virtual spaces, digital as digital, explain this from your perspective, how you see digital and virtual marketing and, or learning as a critical part of your program offerings because people still got to get the new things, they got to learn. >> I honestly, I think it's gone from a nice to have, and we all acknowledge that it's a transformation in the world of marketing to a, now it's a must have, right? I mean, when you no longer can do in person events, and many of our partners would have looked at that as a demand generation activity, they'd be capturing the leads from all the conversations we'd be having on a solution expo floor. We'd be having our in person events to now, we're going to convey our information and knowledge and maybe a virtual setting but that pivot to digital marketing, your online presence, the personalization at scale, making sure we acknowledged and understand that we have to meet our buyers and acknowledge the buyer journey has changed. And I think it's a must have now. So it's no longer a nice to have and we've all been describing the pace of change. But I think when you couple some of the trends in the industry with just the reality of this pandemic, that's making each of us be more resourceful than ever. You know, we, for example, I've seen our partners pivot the utilization of their MDF dollars into digital alternatives. They are certainly doing these Zoom experiences but they're also investing in their web properties and their search and making sure that as we pivot to digital we, for example, on the marketing side, we pivoted quickly to kind of stand up what we're calling an agile pod and it was a digital first agile pod that was frankly all aimed at training, enablement, social media guides, webinars on expertise on how we as a company were responding. What was our internal communication strategy, our external communication strategy. And I just think this appetite for training, knowledge. Some of it was necessity and some of it is we're all home and we have time and we want to hone our skills to ensure that we're ready. So I've never been busier as much as we're all working from home. We have never been busier on supporting the great and innovative work that our partners are doing but also really focused on the training, best practice sharing, enablement and webinars on how we're in it together, right? How can we help each other really respond in a sustaining way? Honestly, not just an interim way of our new digital capabilities, marketing capabilities. And I think we're experiencing, you know, what I think the opportunity of this digital trend in marketing is the handshake between marketing and sales has never been tighter. And I think really done well, we are going to provide a more personalized experience for our prospects and our customers. We're going to make our sellers more productive. We're going to be engaging along that continuum. We kind of it a digital heartbeat. We're going to be responding to where they are online and then we're also going to be meeting in person or over a virtual Zoom. And you're going to be accelerating in a highly relevant, much more personalized way to drive to the outcome of these solutions. It's a richer experience. So it's less about is marketing creating a bunch of leads that I can hand over to my sellers as much as what's the overall customer experience? And that experience needs to be a rich, personalized one that kind of transcends over marketing and sales. >> Yeah, Cheryl, you have an amazing vision, I think that is so spot on, you're on point. And I think you bring up a whole kind of sea change. It's really transformational just in the thinking, you mentioned, oh, just put out leads, also just, it's not about just standing up events either. You mentioned sustainability, how to have that heartbeat. This is a whole new level of thinking. I mean, every company the adage used to be, every company used to be a data company, every company will be a data company, true. Now you're seeing every company becoming a media company. Where you are probably doing more hosting of things. You're on camera more. So this new media API is developing where you want the command control, you want the truth, you want the community, you want the authenticity. This is the new, this is the new digital marketing, real time, agile and fast and relevant and cool too. What's your, expand more on your vision? >> And test and learn, you know, is a word we use a lot because instead of, you know, having to build something, go put it out, let's have some metrics and measures on how effective it was. The speed with which you can garner real time feedback. You know, everything needs to be more modular in natures, you know, snackable, if you will in nature, so that you can adapt and respond to what your customers are telling you, right? And I mean, I think we've been talking about consumerization of IT for some time. And I think this digital marketing is just the expression within marketing of how each of us come to work. And we're all at home as consumers engaging in this digital way as a consumer every day. So now when we bring it to work we bring our own preferences and in a B2B setting and a B2B context, we want to engage and it accelerates just the learning cycle. So I think it's a combination of the tools, the automation that exists now. So when you talk about leveraging AI and machine learning in the context of marketing automation, it's just putting to use all these technical trends that we've been discussing for some time in the context of customer experience. So I think this, like I said, the handshake between marketing and sales it's all about staying customer centric, listening to what the customers are telling you, their interests and preferences are. How do we respond in the most, highly relevant way around how we can help them, and done well, it's a positive experience but it's also an accelerated experience. You can get to the answer faster. And as long as we get to the answer faster, that's what the customer is looking for. Then it's a win, win for everybody. >> That's awesome, I love, I love that conversation because this brings up kind of the future for that, for your organization and your customers as you guys have this global partner network. Okay, and one of the things that the pandemic has shown is that with these digital technologies and virtual technologies, it's not a physical event, it's global. I mean, instantly Dell Technologies World you'd have to fly there, certainly from overseas, you could certainly do that. But now with one click of a button, you're in The programs that you have are global in nature. I'm sure there's some regional segmentation that's done with cloud and all that good stuff but you aren't going to have to recast your partner programs. Can you share how you're helping partners with their digital transformation? Didn't just give a couple examples of specifics of if I'm a partner what's in for me, Cheryl, what's going on? How is Dell helping me today? >> Yeah, well, I commented a little bit about this digital first kind of agile pod work we did. Some of that is selling guides, social media guides, how to actually do social selling, how to pivot some best practices around, you know, what activities can you put your MDF to good use that is showing really positive returns in the short term. So it's a lot of best practice sharing. And then candidly, we as a company, as we put campaigns in market, or we're giving marketing assets, collateral, social opportunities to our partners, it's all about how to help them get educated and use what we're already providing for them. So we recognize that, you know, partner's capabilities will vary across the board and certainly regionally, as you said but we definitely are helping them with, you know, here's what we're seeing around industry solutions. Here are certain industry verticals we know are responding or, you know, coming out of this environment faster than others. Here's campaigns that you can leverage both modularly or full-term key to be able to drive that. So to your point, the handshake, the support, the overall engagement of our partner community has never been higher. I mean, I'll give you a good example. You know, we talked about training and this opportunity to reach more people through these forums than in person. You know, we conduct trainings of presale technical teams around the world. We call it our heroes events, and these are in, you know, typically in person, but now they've gone virtual. We've trained over 18,000 presales technical engineers just in the first half alone to be able leverage our remote tools lean in and leverage the integration around VMware like we were just discussing. What are the new capabilities that have launched around, you know, VxRail with VCF Foundation and how they can go deploy. So in many ways we actually are touching and addressing the audience much wider than we might have otherwise. And I can put my subject matter experts, my best experts in the company on a Zoom forum like this. And I can have him in Sydney, Australia, Paris. I can have them in San Francisco on the same day and they never leave their home. So it's actually, we've all been very resilient, but are finding I think in the go-forward world, it'll be a hybrid model. We're going to leverage some of these best practices and tools. Even when the world reopens, we certainly will be doing in person events, again, that's going to come back but I do think it will be forever changed. And we're going to leverage this hybrid model with our partners and they're bringing their expertise to bear. And a lot of the vertical industry capabilities they bring, they're able to reach an audience broader over capabilities like this. >> You know, it's going to be a lot of fun too, all this new learning and all this headroom from asynchronous progressions that are nonlinear. As you mentioned training, people are getting trained faster to made for TV experiences. You're going to start to see, and then when hybrid events come back, they're going to be different. They may be more intimate. All new opportunities to learn and move fast and that's something that you guys have done. So congratulations, Cheryl, thanks for that great insight. My final question for you, this year for the partners watching who are there in person, 'cause we're not, we're remote. What should they take away from the Dell Technology World Digital Experience event this year? What's your, what's your, what's your summary here? >> Well, I hope they enjoy the couple of days and you certainly have heard, you know, Michael and Jeff and Pat and others talk about the innovation engine at Dell Technologies is not slowing down. You know, the tight partnership we have with VMware and the level of capabilities that we're bringing in this as a service, Hybrid Cloud, 5G, world of Hybrid Cloud deployments. We absolutely have our foot on the gas and are going to continue to be that partner to provide the world's best infrastructure and capabilities. And when you look at the power of partnership and to your point on what we're describing with our global alliance partners, the innovative and inspirational work, some of our OEM customers and partners have done is just remarkable. And like I said, we are growing faster than the competition, even in this environment. So we just really appreciate the partnership very much. And I want them to lean in with Dell Technologies because it's not going to slow down as we've just been discussing. I think it's going to continue to move fast and we absolutely are committed for the longterm to continue to innovate and bring new capabilities to market. >> Well, certainly people who have good business performance in this environment certainly are relevant and have the right product mix, made the right moves and it's paying off, a lot more to do. Cheryl, congratulations for all the success and the you're a great leader heading up the global partner marketing group over there. Congratulations, you've got a great vision, we totally agree. Thanks for coming, I appreciate it. >> Thank you, John, it's been a pleasure. >> I'm John Furrier here with Cheryl Cook, senior vice president, global partner marketing at Dell Technologies, theCUBE virtual covering Dell Technology World Digital Experience 2020. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering A W s reinforce 2019 brought to you by Amazon Web service is and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone to Cubes. Live coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts for eight of us reinforced Amazon Web service is inaugural event around Cloud Security. I'm Jeffrey Day Volante. Two days of coverage. We're winding down Day two. We're excited to have a year in The Cube Special guest, part of Big and that one of the big announcements. Well, I think it's big. Nerdy Announcement is the automated reasoning. Byron Cook, director of the Automated Reasoning Group within AWS. Again, this is part of the team that's gonna help figure out security use automation to augment humans. Great to have you on big part of show here. Thanks very much to explain the automated reasoning group. Verner Vogel had a great block post on All things distributed applies formal verification techniques in an innovative way to cloud security and compliance for our customers. For our own there's developers. What does that mean? Your math? >> Yeah, let me try. I'll give you one explanation, and if I puzzle, you all try to explain a different way. 300 So do you know the Pythagorean Theorem? Yeah, sure, Yeah. So? So that the path I agree in theory is about all triangles that was proved in approximately B. C. It's the proof is a finite description in logic as to why it's true and holds for all possible triangles. So we're basically using This same approach is to prove properties of policies of networks of programs, for example, crypto virtualization, the storage, et cetera. So we write software. This finds proofs in mathematics and this the proofs are the same as what you could found for thuggery and should apply into >> solve problems that become these mundane tasks of checking config files, making sure things are that worries kind of that's I'll give you an example. So so that's two in which is the T. L s implementation used, for example, in history. But the large majority >> of AWS has approximately 12,000 state holding elements, so that with if you include the stack of the heat usage, so the number >> of possible >> states it could reach us to to the 12,000. And if you wanted to show that the T. L s handshake Implementation is correct or the H Mac implementation is correct. Deterministic random bit generator implementation is correct, which is what we do using conventional methods like trying to run tests on it. So you would need, if you have, like, 1,000,000 has, well, microprocessors and you would need many more lifetimes in the sun is gonna admit light at 3.4 $4,000,000,000 a year to test to exhaustively test the system. So what we do is we rather than just running a bunch of inputs on the code, we we represent that as the mathematical system and then we use proof techniques, auto automatically search for a proof and with our tools, we in about 10 minutes or able to prove all those properties of s two in the way of your intimidates. And then we apply that to pieces of s three pieces of easy to virtual ization infrastructure on. Then, uh, what we've done is we've realized that customers had a lot of questions about their networks and their policies. So, for example, they have a complicated network worldwide different different availability zones, different regions on. They want to ask. Hey, does there exist away for this machine to connect to this other machine. Oh, are you know, to do all this all SS H traffic coming in that eventually gets to my Web server, go through a bastion host, which is the best, best practice. And then we can answer that question again, using logic. So we take the representation that semantics of easy to networking the policy, the network from the customer, and then the question we're asking, expressing logic. And we throw a big through their call ifthere improver, get the answer back. And then same for policy. >> So you're analyzing policies, >> policies, networks, programs, >> networks, connections. Yeah, right. And it to the tooling is sell cova. Eso >> eso eso basically way come with We come with an approach and then we have many tools that implement the approach on different, different problems. That's how you apply Volkova all underneath. It's all uses of a kind of tool called SMT inside. So there's a south's over, uh, proves theorems about formula and proposition. A logic and SMT is sat modular theories. Those tools can prove properties of problems expressed in first order logic. And so what we do is we take the, for example, if you have a question about your policies answering, answering semantic level questions about policies is actually a piece space problem. So that's harder than NP complete. We express the question in logic and then call the silvery and they get their answer back on Marshall it back. And that's what Volkova does. So that's calling a tool called CVC four, which is which is an open source. Prove er and we wenzel Koval. We take the policy three question encoded to logic. Call a Silver and Marshall answer back. >> What's the What's the root of this? I mean, presumably there's some academic research that was done. You guys were applying it for your specific use case, But can you share with this kind of He's the origination of this. >> So the first Impey complete problem was discovered by a cook and not not me. Another cook the early seventies on. So he proved that the proposition a ll satisfy ability problem is impeccably and meanwhile, there's been a lot of research from the sixties. So Davis and Putnam, for example, I think a paper from the mid sixties where they were, we're trying to answer the question of can we efficiently solved this NP complete problem proposition will satisfy ability on that. Researchers continue. There have been a bunch of breakthroughs, and so now we're really starting to see very from. There's a big breakthrough in 2001 on, then some and then some further breakthroughs in the 5 4008 range. So what we're seeing is that the solvers air getting better and better. So there's an international competition of Let's Save, usually about 30 silvers. And there's a study recently where they took all of the winners from this competition each year 2001 5 4008 30 2002 to 2011 and compared them on the same bench marks and hardware, and the 2002 silver is able to solve 1/4 of the benchmarks in the 2011 solved practically all of them and then the the 2019 silvers, or even better. Nowadays they can take problems and logic that have many tens of millions of variables and solve them very efficiently. So we're really using the power of those underlying solvers and marshaling the questions to those to those overs, codifying thinking math. And that's the math. The hour is you gave a talk in one sessions around provable security. Kind of the title proves provable. >> What's what is that? What is that? Intel. Can you just explain that concept and sure, in the top surfaces. So, uh, uh, >> so mathematical logic. You know, it's 2000 years old, right? So and has refined Sobule, for example, made logic less of a philosophical thing and more of a mathematical thing. Uh, and and then automated reasoning was sort of developed in the sixties, where you take algorithms and apply algorithms to find proofs and mathematical logic. And then provable security is the application of automated reasoning to questions and security and compliance. So we you wanna prove absence of memory, corruption errors and C code You won't approve termination of of event handling routines that are supposed to handle security events. All of those questions, their properties of your program. And you can use these tools to automatically or uh oh, our find proofs and then check The proofs have been found manually. That's what that's >> where approvable security fix. What was the makeup of the attendee list where people dropping this where people excited was all bunch of math geeks. You have a cross section of great security people here, and they're deep dive conversations Not like reinvent this show. This is really deep security. What was some of the feedback and makeup of the attendees? >> Give you two answers because I actually gave to talks. And the and the answers are a little bit different because the subject of the talk So there was one unprovable security, which was a basically the foundation of logic And how we how Cheers since Volkova and our program, because we also prove correctness of crypto and so on. So those tools and so that was largely a, uh uh, folks who had heard about it. And we're wanting to know more, and we're and we're going to know how we're using it and trying to learn there was a second talk, which was about the application of it to compliance. So that was with Tomic, Andrew, who is the CEO of Coal Fire, one of the third party auditors that AWS uses in a lot of customers used and also Chad Wolf, who's vice president of security, focused on compliance. And so the three of us spoke about how we're using it internally within eight of us to automate, >> uh, >> certification compliance, sort of a commission on. So that crowd was really interesting mixture of people interested in automated reasoning and people interested in compliance, which are two communities you wouldn't think normally hang together. But that's sort of like chocolate and peanut butter. It turns out to be a really great application, >> and they need to work together to, because it is the world. The action is they don't get stuck in the compliance and auditing fools engineering teams emerging with old school compliance nerds. So there's a really interesting, uh, sort of dynamic to proof that has a like the perfect use casing compliance. So the problem of like proving termination of programs is undecided ble proving problems and proposition a logic is np complete as all that sounds very hard, difficult and you use dearest six to solve this problem. But the thing is that once you've found a proof replaying, the proof is linear and size of the proof, so actually you could do extremely efficiently, and that has application and compliance. So one could imagine that you have, for example, PC I hip fed ramp. You have certain controls that you want to prove that the property like, for example, within a W s. We have a control that all data dressed must be encrypted. So we are using program verification tools, too. Show that of the code base. But now, once we've run that tool that constructs a proof like Euclid founded the sectarian serum that you can package up in a file hand to an auditor. And then a very simple, easy to understand third party open source tool could replay that proof. And so that becomes audit evidence. It's a scale of total examples >> wth e engineering problem. You're solving a security at scale. The business problem. You're solving it. Yeah. His customers are struggling. Just implementing There just >> aren't enough security professionals to hire right? So the old day is, the talk explains. It's out there all on YouTube's. The people watching the show can go check it out. But I am by the way I should I should make a plug for if you Google a W s provable security. There's a Web page on eight of us that has papers and videos and lots of information, so you might wanna check that out. I can't remember what I was answering now, but >> it's got links to the academic as >> well. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. That was the point that Tommy Kendra is pointing out, as in the old days, you would do an audit would come in to be a couple minutes box that we win this box. You check a few things to be a little network. Great. But now you have machines across the world, extremely complex networks, interaction between policies, networks, crypto, etcetera. And so there's There's no way a human or even a team of human could come in and have any reasonable chance of actually deeply understanding the system. So they just sort of check some stuff and then they call it success. And these tools really allow you to actually understand the entire system buyer and you guys doing some cutting edge work, >> folks watching and want to know how math translates into the real world with all your high school kids out their parents. This is stuff you learn in school like you could be played great work. I think I think this is cutting edge. I think math and the confidence of math intersects with groups. The compliance example audited example shows that world's gonna come together with math. I think this is a big mega trend. It's gonna not eliminate the human element. It's going augment that so great stuff, its final question just randomly. And while you're here, since your math guru we're always interested, we always covering our favorite topic of Blockchain, huh? We believe that a security conference is gonna soon have a Blockchain component because because of the mutability of it, there's a lot of math behind it. So as that starts to mature certainly Facebook entering him at their own currency. Whole nother conversation you don't want to have here is bring a lot of attention. So we see the intersection of security being a supply chain problem in the future. Your thoughts on that just generally. So So the problem of proving programs is undecided, and that means that you can't build a general solution. What you're gonna have to do is look >> for niche areas like device drivers, networks, policies, AP, I used to dream crypto et cetera, and then make the tools work for that area, and you will have to be comfortable with the idea that occasionally the tools aren't gonna be able to find an answer. And so the Amazon culture of being customer obsessed and working as closely as possible with the customer has been really helpful to my community of of logic, uh, full methods, practitioners, because they were really forced to work with a customer, understand the problem. So what I've been doing is listening to the customer on finding out what the problems with concerns. They are focusing my attention on that. And I haven't yet heard of, uh, of customers asking for mathematical proof on crypto currency Blockchain sorts of stuff. But I'm I I await further and you're intrigued. Yeah, I'm s I always like mathematics, but where we have been hearing customers asked for help is for Temple. We're working on free Our toss s o i o T applications Understand the networks that are connecting up the coyote to the cloud, understanding the correctness of machine learning. So why, why So I reused. I've done some machine learning. I've constructed a model. How do I know what it does? And is it compliant? Does it respect hip fed ramp PC, i et cetera, and some other issues like that. >> There's a lot of talk in the industry about quantum computing and creating nightmares for guys like you. How much thought given that you have any thing that you can share with us? >> Yes. Oh, there's there's work in the AWS crypto team preparing for the post quantum world. So imagine Adversary has quantum computer. And so there are proposals on eight of us has a number of proposals, and we've and those proposals have been implemented. So their standards and we've our team has been doing proof on the correctness of those. So, actually, in the one of my talks, I think the talk not with Chad and Tom. I show a demo of our work to prove the correctness of someplace quantum code. >> So, Byron, thank you for coming on the inside. Congratulations on the automated reason. Good to see it put in the practice and appreciate the commentary. Thank you very much. Thank you. Here for the first inaugural security cloud security event reinforced AWS is putting on cube coverage. I'm John Fairy with Day Volonte. Thanks for watching

(digital music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Kay, welcome back everyone. Live Cube coverage here in Las Vegas for Dell Technology World 2019. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Dave Vellante. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Cheryl Cook, senior vice president of Global Partner Marketing in Dell Technologies joining us. We just reminiscing about the old days of how computing was going on, cloud computing, Sun Microsystems to now, Dell Technologies is doing extremely well. Congratulations. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. It's a fantastic time. Thanks for being here and having me. >> And what a time to be in tech. Michael is on stage. This is just a pre-game show of what's coming. Kind of teasing out like best is yet to come. A lot of things are going on in tech. Certainly the business performance for Dell is strong but you guys have a huge partner ecosystem, huge global channel. That's changing and transforming. That's your wheelhouse. Tell us what's going on in the channel because you have partners that are making money with you. How's that going? What's happening? >> Thank you. Actually, we are thrilled with the momentum we've seen in the partner community and thanks to a lot of their engagement and support and solutions that they're developing around Dell Technologies. I mean our channel business has just hit fifty billion dollars in orders this year, growing faster than the market, growing faster than our competition and I honestly think it's an expression and a reflection of just the opportunity they see in the family of companies and just the assets of the technology that we have. >> One of the things that's happening with cloud and data is that these trends are kind of rising tides. There's no zero sum game anymore, this verses that, it's like a whole new shift. What are some of the trends going on that's impacting the channel specifically, that allows the partners to take advantage of the trends and either serve customers, have happy customers, and ultimately make more profit. Cash. >> Absolutely. You know, I kind of call it the art of the and. I think there Is a lot of traditional consumption that's still happening right now, while at the same time they're increasingly being asked by customers for as a service business model. So I think our partners are realizing that opportunity and meeting that demand right now. That's why you see the growth figures we have, frankly, in the channel in our traditional server and storage business, but also in our Dell Financial Services and really meeting these dynamic consumption model request as a cloud, as a service, manage services opportunities. We actually think some of the announcements we've made here this week, it's going to allow our partners to really enable and build services capabilities for their businesses that are highly lucrative, high margin service capabilities around these cloud offerings, these integrated solutions, really leaning in and leveraging their expertise across Dell, EMC, VMware and the rest of the family of businesses. >> Take a minute to explain some of the notable announcements here at Dell Technology World and what'll be the impact to the partners? >> Well, I think one of the most exciting things is we've been on an evolution as a company and we unveiled the new name of our partner program. We're now the Dell Technologies Partner Program. In many ways just simplifying the ability for the partners to lean in and realize the advantage of the offers, solutions, and capabilities of the family of companies. So all of the requirements for their tier attainment and tier status go unchanged. The strategically aligned businesses, such as VMware, will continue to have their own independent programs but the opportunity for the partners is it really empowers them to now be able to get access to these integrated offers, more access to the strategically aligned businesses, and go build out services that, as I said, that allow them to really bring those customer solutions at the level of expertise, either in a verticle or an industry, that their customers are struggling with their own transformations. >> How are they transforming, specifically? What are partners doing? I mean I always, you know we love selling boxes but if you're a box seller you just can't keep doing that. So you've got to change your business model. What are some of the things that they're doing? >> What I've seen, actually in the community, is I've seen certainly M & A. There's been some mergers and acquisitions where you'll see traditional integrators or solution providers investing and augmenting their capabilities with application development expertise. So they understand that not only do we have to modernize infrastructure, but it's about the work load. And we have to modernize the application. So, we've seen those kind of mergers happen. We've seen alliances form, where you have different partners that may not possess security capabilities, for example, they team and they partner. So I think the community in the ecosystem is evolving and they're leaning on their strengths and really trying to best position themselves to realize the opportunity. >> So you think about trends like converged infrastructure, hyperconverged, some of the stuff you guys announced. Ten years ago I remember when the modern CI first came on the scene. A lot of the channel partners didn't like that. They were like, no we want to screw the bolts in, we make money doing that. That has completely changed, hasn't it? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think it's less about, how do I integrate the bag of parts and the piece parts of the infrastructure, and it's much more about the work load and the outcome. So, I think where partners are really savvy and where they're uniquely advantaged and positioned well to help customers is in those complex work loads, in those inventory and assessment services of which work load is best served in a public cloud, which is best served in a private cloud, and helping their customers navigate that journey. It's richer services but they have to monetize their Value-Ad in those type services than traditional system integration-type services. >> How to secure it, how to manage it... >> Absolutely. How to migrate it, how to modernize it. Absolutely. >> So those services used to be reserved for a unique qualification of partner. Highly technical solution architect. Now someone says, I need to multicloud architecture, if you go back a couple years in DevOps you'd be like, okay got to get a alpha geek and we got to lay out architecture, you know, usually a higher priced person, but kind of what we're seeing now is almost a democratization or an increase aperture of opportunity capture for partners because the tools and technologies are, I won't say totally turn-key, but they're composable so as you don't need to have an advanced computer scientist degree to be a solution architect. You can be more of a composer of solutions, not the tech lead. So this is a trend we're seeing. Do you agree with that and if so how's that increasing your capabilities? >> Well I do and I think, frankly, we at Dell Technologies are uniquely positioned and one of our aims is to simplify the access to that type technology. So when you look at the announcements around our Dell Technologies cloud platform and the integration with VMware, it really is to provide that seamless, simple, common management layer, operational and orchestration layer, to be able to migrate and move your work loads to public, on-premise so the skills in our partners are really leverageable, so their VMware expertise, it really is about the work load, less about the infrastructure and how to go standup a virtualized environment. >> Cheryl, talk about the impact it's had on your job because I can only imagine the complexity involved in soft dollar programs, incentive programs, compensation programs, how to get more training, skill gaps closed down, and now that's hard in and of itself so I'm sure there's a lot going on there that you're spending and working on but when you start overlaying, oh VMware's got a program, I got this program, it's like, are you wiring up a bunch of programs or is it just first... Take us through the stages of your evolution because you now have to be agile with how you market globally. >> Absolutely. And we're trying to be as thoughtful as possible with an outside in perspective to be fair. So across the family of companies we're actively engaged with my peers at VMware and Pivotal and we're really looking at, how do we take the investment that our partners are making into their capabilities and make that leverageable and protect that investment across the offers. So we, for example, are offering reciprocal recognition within the credentials, for like credentials so the VMware capabilities they earn with VMware we'll recognize in our Dell Tech cloud competency. We want to try and offer an easier path for them to engage across the companies and to be honest, incentives, capabilities, they're on their own evolution and we're trying to help just to ensure that we can externalize a lot of the training that we create internally for our people. How can we leverage the strategically aligned companies, jointly, for what we're doing in the program, so that it at least holistically can be common and make sense for the partners to engage. >> So training's important to you? >> Sure, absolutely. >> Partners now account for over half the revenue of the company. You've said that you're growing faster than the competition. That's something that we've heard a lot this week. (Cheryl laughs) A two-part question. One is, how is it that you guys, it's almost like you're being set up by a great coach to win and everybody seems to be growing faster than the competition. That's what we're hearing as a theme. So, how does that happen? Why is that? And then the second is, do you set targets for how much of your business you want to be through the channel, or is it just, let the business go as it may? >> Well, first of all, I would say we are really clear inside the company on what the strategy and vision is of the company and as we take that to market, both on the direct side and through the partner community, we try and listen to the partners and gain feedback from them on what they need to be most successful, but then again, we are really ruthless in aligning our strategies, our goals, our metrics, our measures, our rewards, to ensure that we can go deliver those results and the outcome and I think frankly, the success we've been seeing and enjoying is, I think it's resonating. Our partners are responding with the strategy and the enablement that we're bringing to market and it's combination of good strategy, good vision, relentless execution, and commitment. And we listen. Right? There's always more to do. We know we're not perfect. We have a lot of advisory capacities with our partner community, our distributors, our system integrators, for them to tell us how they can monetize and realize the maximum value out of what we're bringing to market and we adapt, we adapt, we adapt. >> Cheryl, final question for you. Over the past three years it's been an interesting journey. EMC comes in, you guys went public, got the VMware relationship clicking, you've got the things going on. So you got the end-to-end operational consistency as a big land grab. We see that as a big strategic opportunity for Dell, as well as specialism up to the top of the stack around vertical industries with data. Clean strategy, we've been saying that in The Cube for years. That's the killer form, you guys are doing it. But without learnings along the way, take us through personal observations that you've had inside Dell around just getting the ship tightened up to keep executing going. What's it been like? Share some stories. >> I'll have to say, a merger as large as we did and certainly as large as we are now, growing at the pace we are, is never easy, and I think we have an amazing culture in the company and I think it starts with Michael from the top down, and I think as we came together as teams and we started really decomposing and working on what we needed to strategize we quickly found ourselves very like-minded. Really like-minded. Very complimentary. So it allowed us to move faster. So I would say my learnings are you've got to be really authentic, you've got to have a lot of trust, you got to lean on the culture which is a bit of an intangible, and then there's all the obvious strategy and execution. But I would say one of the enjoyable learnings out of this has been, you have to just trust and we've been very like-minded. We've been very fortunate. Really good talent. Amazing talent. >> Now the plantation of brands has got some fruit coming off the tree, business performance is coming out, you're seeing some results. >> Yeah. Well, I think we're realizing the vision of the mutual R & D and I think we're so uniquely positioned for the level of R & D in innovation going forward, the expression of bringing those technologies together is now coming to market. You're really seeing the work of the joint innovation bear fruit. >> Cheryl Cook, senior vice president of the Global Partner Marketing in Dell Technologies, here in The Cube sharing her insight and observations and learnings over the past couple years and what's happening. They're doing great. This is The Cube bringing you all the content from Dell Technology World, three days of coverage, day two. We'll be right back with more after this short break. Stay with us. (digital music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Boomi World 2018. Brought to you by Dell Boomi. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at the Encore in Las Vegas, I'm Lisa Martin with John Furrier. We're at Dell Boomi World 2018, second annual Dell Boomi World, and we're here with one of Dell Boomi and Dell's biggest GSIs. We've got Jason Cook, the Global Client Account Lead at Accenture serving Dell. Jason, thanks for joining John and me today. >> Thank you. >> So, second annual Dell Boomi World, bigger than last year. They were talking today, a lot of interesting numbers. 7,500 plus customers to date. They're adding five new customers everyday. I saw the Gartner Magic Quadrant from earlier this year and iPaaS, they are right up there in that strong leader category. Talk to us about the relationship that you have with Dell Technologies and the business heat of Dell Boomi. >> Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting one. So, Accenture has become very big. I think we now have 470,000 global employees, and our brand and presence is technology advisory and delivery, it predominates what we did. What's interesting about Dell and, specifically, Boomi is being so central to the technology ecosystem, there's much opportunity for partnership. Where Dell is present with enterprise clients, we're present too. And we tend to have long-running relationships with those clients. Most of our clients are tenured over 15 years. So it gives us an opportunity to have the type of longstanding relationship that Dell has with clients and advise on technology trends, and change, and break into the best thinking of the marketplace in their clients as they look to solve problems, of course, Dell is central to that solution set, as Boomi is too. >> And yesterday, they announced a new technology partner program. Dell Boomi has a broad partner ecosystem that it partners, implementation, GSIs, talk to us about that and the maybe new business opportunities that it will give to Accenture. >> Yeah, so we've enjoyed a relationship over the past several years in Europe working with Boomi. And we incubated a program over there called Eccentric Growth Partnerships, where with emerging companies such as Boomi, we've gone to market, leveraged the Accenture channel, and then brought scale to those technologies to deliver at enterprise level for their expectations. It's been very successful, you know, seen on both sides is a real win. And we're now transferring that into the North American market, so we're based on the heels of that success. We're looking to formalize some of the things we've been doing internationally in North America. A larger market for both of us, and so it's expanded opportunity in both places. >> Jason, talk about Accenture's own transformation. We've been following you guys for, I've been following Accenture when they changed their name. But recently you guys have invested, in the past decade, really early in data science. You guys have been on the public cloud very early. You've been partnering with your customers. And so that's all great, you guys do a good job with that. But what's interesting is you're actually helping them change their business model. >> Yes. >> So how has your own transformation within Accenture dealing with Dell, he's been doing a trillion dollars in business. Millions and millions of servers sold. His customers are changing. You guys are in that business model, enablement business, you're helping customers. What's the big business model impact that's happening in the market right now. >> Well, I think you know, as it pertains to Accenture, yeah, we've grown. I would say one of the hallmarks of the growth has been around digital, and I think 60% of our revenues are now digitally oriented, which are in the areas you described. So that's become our brand and presence, and the majority of what we do in the marketplace. I think the things that we're doing to serve clients, which are several of the things we've done internally, have been around all sorts of digitally-enabled journeys, whether it's the intelligent enterprise, the connected customer, the adoption of platforms, and the expanded use as a service within enterprises. There are plays within all those spaces where we end up bringing enablement to those clients. You know, examples would be, in the retail space, you know, growth and expansion of omnichannel techniques, so that the same customer experience exists across anywhere in retail. Programs around single views of customer are very, very common for us globally. Traditionally, less technical areas of the business, like a supply chain operating that's dominated by manufacturing and fulfillment and brick and mortar in the retail space. The real time visibility challenges that have historically been there are only now being able to be solved by technologies, and so there's several different. >> And the cloud certainly is horizontally scaled, so it impacts all industries that you play in, so, good for business. But the challenge that the CIOs have that we talked to, we hear and want to get your reaction to is, okay, I loved technology scale. I need to have proof points. I got to have mile markers that are going to be attainable with time-to-value. But the number one thing they say is I got to bring a competitive advantage into I.T., in a cloud construct that's horizontally scalable and work with partners in areas that aren't core. So, leverage supplier relationships, but build a core intellectual property or competitive advantage with I.T. How do you guys help them? What are some trends? What are those I.P. moments for your large and medium-sized customers? >> Yeah, I think that because we have the heritage of both advising on and delivering technology, where we tend to work closely with CIOs is around the speed-to-value, delivering on programs. We represent a wealth of experience and work in the marketplace, and those learnings can be brought to different clients, and fundamentally that's what's valuable to them. So I think that when we talk about cloud enablement, it's often a matter, too of thinking through, what are the specific business outcomes that can be delivered from the use of technology. And so, clients for example, I can think of some clients, that one company that has 1,400 legacy applications in a cloud footprint. And yet the business initiatives that come into the IT-- >> They must use containers a lot. >> Yeah, well exactly. The questions that come into the I.T. organization are often ones around how can we improve our visibility to product line profitability, as an example. And so, the use of cloud, the use of integration technologies like Boomi accelerates the ability to connect information from that disparate environment and deliver outcomes. >> And specifically more tactical, to get those outcomes, what specific things do you see? Is the cloud native? Is it the role of data? How are CIOs getting down and dirty, saying okay, I'm going to lock in on this as territory, we're going to build around and build on top of. Data, cloud, and IoT's new, and everyone knows what IoT is, it's going to be part of, either physical and/or low-hanging fruit. But what are they building on from an I.T. standpoint? Is it the data, is it the network? Is it the storage? So what do you see there? >> Yeah, I think it is the data. I think that's where we see, data-led seems to be the thinking in most of these cases around getting information consistently consumed throughout. 'Cause the world has become so data intensive that access to data is not the problem. It's the integration, and the derivation of value from it that's-- >> And scale, too, I mean. >> And scale, right, yeah. >> Hello cloud, so cloud and data seem to be. >> And it's become more distributed, too. And so dealing with distributed data sources and normalizing has been a-- >> That's where Boomi comes in, integrating all that stuff in, so cloud and data seem to be the pattern across the board generically speaking. I mean, obviously certain industries financial, service, oil, and gas have unique requirements. >> They all have their own cases for it, whether you're a distributed bank, or whether you're a distributed retailer, or whether you're dealing with oil wells in distributed locations, you run into common problems across all industries. >> And integration is so much more, as the iPaaS market has evolved, it's so much more than integrating applications. It's integrating applications, data from existing sources, from new sources, the API economy is essential for that. To enable an organization to create a customer experience that's going to allow them to use that data, and continue to get more customers, more data, and evolve faster than their competition. But transformation is a big challenge, right? And here, well, and even Dell Technologies were, the theme was about making it real, making it real for digital transformation, security transformation, huge priority, workforce. How, when Accenture is going in to integrate at, whether it's a retailer or an oil and gas company, how do you help them start? What's that start of a transformation? >> Well, it often is the transformations you were just referring to. Our typical engagement profile ranges from how do I engage my workforce in a new way? Or how do I improve visibility across a distributed network of retail stores, or banks, or what have you? And so those are the transformations, and then inevitably, the connection of information across those things become the enabling source. If you take, as an example, a customer experience program where, let's talk about a government example where they want a single view of a citizen, a tax payer, whatever it may be. There's so much information on that person in so many disparate places that has to be brought together in a cohesive way. Not only that, but brought together and then used effectively in serving that person. And that's where you see a lot of value. >> Jason, I want to pick your brain while you're here, 'cause Accenture's always got the smart people who know what's going on. And you got big customers, big examples. There's a dynamic right now between two kind of personas. Kind of making it generic for the conversation now. Persona one is the business executive who is responsible and chartered to drive the digital transformation with new and improved applications. Taking advantage of the legacy, bringing in the new, managing them either on their own schedule. And the second persona is the person deploying cloud. So how are companies organizing around these personas? One's got to be under the hood, I got to do multicloud I got to do Kubernetes, I got to do all these things. Stateless applications, stateful applications, integrate them all together. I'm deploying it. And then the business persona, hey, take that hill, more apps, more outcomes. So how are companies organizing around these dynamics? What's the best practice? >> Yeah, along the lines you describe. So, specifically, the business functions are becoming aligned with application domains, and those tend to be programmatically managed. And so we see structures around that programmatic management. To be very responsive to business needs, and particularly as clock speeds accelerate on delivery, maintaining that partnership is very, very important. Likewise, on the infrastructural side, we see alignment there too to take advantage of creating platforms, and enablement, and infrastructure, and delivery capabilities that can deliver on that promise. >> So they're working together on pizza teams, or like agile teams? >> So it's a customer-focused model for the programmatic work and it's an industrialization and an acceleration on the infrastructural side. And that's, again, where there's a strong fit with some of these-- >> Do you have a favorite example, speaking of that? So many departments, lines of business, need to have access to the same data to be able to develop new products and services, tune things, make things better, faster than their competition. So there's this sort of democratization and this need to be able to share the information so that the entire business can grow together. Do you have a favorite example of an organization of any industry that you've worked with that you've seen really do that well, so that business, at the end of the day, everyone's playing well together because they have to. The business now is connecting customers, vendors, partners, and delivering experiences that are truly differentiating. >> Integration programs, data programs, data lake programs, data science programs often have a governance mechanism out in front of them to prioritize the needs of their business. Both in the back, in terms of enablement of different sources of information being accessed, but also the uses on the front end. And so that is a practice that we're seeing grow exponentially. The other thing that's interesting, I think, in terms of best practice is that as intelligence accelerates and companies become more analytically driven, the traditional process of continuous improvement which used to be defined in terms of Six Sigma events and other things, where once in a while a function would be evaluated for efficiencies becomes a continuous capability. So in this governance model, the ability to refine, and tune, and improve things like integration, AI, analytics on a continuous cycle as opposed to having it be event-driven is certainly an emerging trend and a best practice that we see a lot of. >> Well, Jason, thanks so much for joining the program with John and me today, and sharing with us what's new with Accenture and Dell Boomi and how you're helping customers globally truly transform. >> It's a pleasure, thank you for having me. >> And for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Boomi World 2018 in Las Vegas. John and I will be right back with our next guest. (electronic music)

>> From the Amazon Meeting Center, in downtown Seattle, it's theCUBE. Covering Imagine a Better World, a global education conference, sponsored by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown Seattle at AWS Imagine Education. About 900 people from 20 countries really coming together for the first ever AWS summit from public sector group, really focused just on education. We've got a little bit of a twist here, our next guest really coming from more of the artsy side of the house, which is always great to hear from. We've got Linda Drew, she's the Vice Chancellor, and Andy Cook, the Chief Operations Officer, both from Ravensbourne University in London. Welcome. >> We're really pleased >> Thank you. to be here, really excited. >> For the people that aren't familiar with Ravensbourne, give us a little overview of the school. >> We're in the center of London in Greenwich, which is right by the river. We have about two-and-a-half-thousand students and about 250 faculty. We specialize in design, media, and technology, and the interaction, and all that kind of stuff. >> Pretty fun space to be right now. >> Absolutely gorgeous place to be. >> There's so much talk about IT and the tech and IT in operations, but there's so much neat stuff happening really more on the creative side and in the arts. Leveraging technology in all different, new ways. >> Absolutely, it's kind of hand and glove, really. All the innovation that's happening is happening with the way that tech is disrupting what's happening in the creative workspace, and vice versa really. The two things are effecting each other. >> The channels of distribution now, being so open, there's no greater time to be an artist, a creator, because your path to publishing, your path to your audience is really, really short and direct, assuming you can get their attention. >> Absolutely, I think we recognize there's a huge opportunity there for us in terms of developing a competitive advantage in the sector using new, emerging technologies to forge a new path for the institution and help educate and bridge the skills gap for industry. >> What are the things you guys do, one of the classes is broadcast production, and we were talking to all of our guys behind the cameras that nobody can see, and that again is an evolving space and you guys, it's kind of an interesting play, on one hand you're talking about Shakespearian plays, on the other hand you're looking at the newest, latest, greatest way to get that out to consumers, to viewers, to schools, while training the people in the middle with the latest and greatest tools. You guys have started a AWS Elemental Experiment. I wonder if you can give us a little bit of color on that project. >> I can start, and I'll tell you about the impact that it has, and Andy might be able to follow up on some of the technical stuff. We've had a project going with the Royal Shakespeare Company in England, and it's one of their education programs where what we do is a three-way relationship between them, their plays being shot in Stratford-upon-Avon or in London, and one aspect of what happens is that what we do is host the live program that is shot in our TV production studio and jointly the recorded program and the live action is streamed to schools, several hundred schools at a time. Some of our recent shows have been reaching upwards of 85,000 school students at a time. >> 85,000? >> Absolutely. >> That is great reach. We'd been using the more traditional technology before and that was having some issues with school teachers and others that were saying they weren't getting a great service out of the live stream, and our students were a bit frustrated with what they were learning about the streaming technologies. Since having moved to AWS Elemental, that's really increased the satisfaction both of what our students are learning but also in what they're delivering in terms of the live streamed program and because they're streaming more than one thing, because we know that they're also streaming not just the content but also the British sign language. They're also streaming signed content as well. >> Great, great. Andy, you're on the hook for actually getting these systems up and working, right? >> (laughs) Well, I'm not sure about that, but I think Linda said it all, I think the previous stack of technology that we were using in this area were not reliable, we were getting a lot of jump outs with the streams, lots of complaints from our schools. This shift to Elemental has been transformational. Lots of really complimentary feedback from the schools that are taking part in this exercise. It's been really good. >> That's good, the story over and over with cloud basically anything is that the amount of scale and resources and expertise and hardware and software that Amazon can bring to bear on your behalf compared to what you can do on you own, it's just not the same and you're a relatively small school. It's that same scale delta whether it's a medium-size company, a big company, or multi-national. These guys have that massive scale across so many customers, and you get that delivered to your doorstep. >> As you well know, there's a massive shift taking place in the broadcast industry away from the, towards IP-driven technologies, so we see this as a real opportunity to develop our curriculum, add cloud technologies in to our existing courses and go on that journey away from the more traditional technologies to a cloud-based approach. >> I'm just curious if you've adopted cloud stuff in more your standard IT practices, or where are you on that journey? Or was the client satisfaction issue on these broadcasts what accelerated that adoption faster than your normal stuff? >> I think it's been quite closely related, in some ways. It's a bit kind of chicken and egg. We were already looking at ways of enhancing our infrastructure and this kind of stuff came along at the same time, so we just say how quickly can we get to move some of this stuff for our standard operational focus. >> I think most universities are in some sort of hybrid state running on premise services with some, putting their feet gently into the water of cloud technologies, but I think we're looking at really accelerating that journey towards AWS now for our infrastructure. >> I'm curious, were you here for the keynote this morning? >> Yeah, definitely. >> Did you see the Alexa movie with the kids in the dorm room? >> Yeah. >> Really exciting. Very exciting. >> I think one of the slides really sums up our journey and thoughts around working with Amazon. It's the IT transformation piece, then there's a adoption of machine learning in terms of improving the student experience, and then there's adopting cloud courses into our curriculum, so those three areas are really where we're looking to build a relationship with Amazon. >> It's interesting to see what defines this new education experience, because the kids have different expectations, they've all grown up with apps and mobile. To your point on the attention, if something's not working, they're used to flipping to another channel, switching to another input, so if it doesn't work, you only have their attention for a short period of time. I think it is really interesting to rethink what are the actual activities that define this new engagement and this new student experience while they're in your institution, and I thought that was a really pretty slick demo. >> That was a great example, really good demo. Some of the really exciting things that have come out of us adopting this technology thus far includes some students coming to us with ideas of setting up our very own television channel that we can broadcast on campus using this technology and a way of streaming it to students' phones and tablets so that they've got content about the university and it's activities on a regular basis. >> The ROI calculation for you to execute that when it's cloud-based is very, very different, right? >> Absolutely, yes >> It's pretty simple. (all laughing) Just buy a new rack of servers and the whole to-do. I'll give you the last word, what are you hoping to get out of these couple days here, what have you seen so far, any hallway conversations that are really getting your attention? >> Hopefully, not just a deeper relationship with AWS, but the traction to help us work towards innovating on creativity and technology into the future. >> Great. >> Brilliant. >> Andy goes I'm going to go with the Chancellor, smart man. (all laughing) >> Absolutely. >> Linda and Andy, thanks again for taking a few minutes-- >> Thank you very much. >> Absolute pleasure. and hope you enjoy the rest of your time here. >> Thank you. >> (mumbles) thank you. >> She's Linda, he's Andy, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, we're at AWS Imagine Education in downtown Seattle. Thanks for watching. (electronic tones)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are theCUBE. We are the leader in live tech coverage. I'm joined by Landon Cook. He is a director of Customer Service for the State of Tennessee. It's your first time on theCUBE. You're going to live it. >> Okay, great, I hope so. Brand new. >> So, you're a director of Customer Service, before the cameras were rolling, we were talking. Does every state have such a department? >> Not exactly, and even in our department, the idea of customer service being a focal point and the creation of an office for us, it's all brand new. So, my office of customer service didn't even exist until five years ago, and I've had one predecessor in that time. And this all came from a new focus and state government on the Customer Service Delivery Model. And usually we had been focused on federal rules and regulations, audit findings, always being good stewards of taxpayers dollars, but service delivery hadn't come from the mouth of the governor, usually itself. So, this is all pretty new for us, and from peers I talk with in other areas, I may have a contact who is maybe the lead of customer service in their area, but the idea of an office that exclusively exists to improve customer service throughout our department, and eventually throughout the state, I believe we're in new territory here. >> So this is really the baby of your governor, Bill Haslam, who has really said he wanted, what was it, Customer Focus Government. So what does that mean? >> So, Customer Focus Government started right after Governor Haslam came to office, in 2011. The idea behind it, he created an initiative, and he stated that our goal was to provide the best possible customer service, at the lowest possible cost. And again, that may not seem that new in many industries, but in state government, state operations, that was kind of ground breaking. And that's what's led to us talking, actually, about the customer experience, the agent experience, and how can we actually redefine customer service in government? And my department, we are one of 47 state agencies. In my department, I talked just briefly about the history, going back there five years, and you see this slowly popping up in all these different departments, and the idea is that we're all going to, at some point, be able to come together and deliver customer service as a state, instead of as each individual department. We're actually going to be able to share the scope of services, and really tailor service delivery to each citizen's need through a log in portal, there's all sorts of stuff we talk about now that's brand new, I'm sorry. >> So it's helping citizens do their citizenship duties. So this is helping them register to vote, registering at the DMV, getting fishing licenses, building permits, that kinds of thing. So, how do you do it? How do you service now? >> So, we're babies, here. So ServiceNow is, the new CSM solution, for the entire enterprise, for the state of Tennessee. My department, the Department of Human Services, we are the pilot agency for all those 47 I described. And we're about seven months in, so it's all been pretty fresh for us. But how this works right now, is we're using it primarily for inquiry management, phone calls, emails, web forms and chat, things people typically think of as customer service. And so, what we're doing with service now, and we started very carefully, very small, we had a very tiny pilot to start with, but once we launched, after October, we very quickly realized that ServiceNow was so collaborative and cooperative with us, and they were just as engaged in our success as we were, that we were building a partnership with CSM. It's kind of new to ServiceNow, too, right? So, it was new to us, new to them, and we're really kind of intertwining and growing together here. Even though we're using it, just now, for inquiry management and typical customer service delivery, once our department has it fully integrated through all of our various, we have 12 divisions just within our department, once we have it integrated there, we're going to take that model, and we're going to go to other state agencies. We've actually already had, there are three other state agencies that are probably going to be joining on board, if they haven't already. This has been a very fast standup for us. And we're going to, eventually it's going to go from, "Well, wow, DHS delivers great customer service," and then instead, DHS is partnering with the Department of Health to deliver customer service to people who need it. And we'll start, slowly, just putting everyone together so in the future citizens of Tennessee can just ask for assistance with something, and the state knows what they need, and the state knows how to deliver it, and can do all that assignment and sharing in the responsibilities behind the scenes, through ServiceNow. >> Anything you can do to improve the DMV experience. So, I mean, that is the thing. You're trying to make people's lives easier, better, simpler, more streamlined, but what was Haslam's goal? What was his impetus for starting this? >> You know, that's actually a hard one for me to say. I've gathered that, you know, he came from a corporate background. I think he had a different perspective on customer service than what is typical of state government. So he brought something new along with all of his prior experience. And I think he was the first who really made it a priority, because I think he understood that the expectation of the customer is different nowadays, and it's different today than it was yesterday and last year, and it's always growing and changing. And people of my generation, and the generation following me, they're always expecting something to be simpler, faster, and more based on their needs, right? And we, state agencies, have been so slow to react, we still use a log of legacy systems, before we launched with ServiceNow, all of our inquiry management was through Excel spreadsheets and Outlook emails. Those are great tools, but their not designed for CSM. And so, we had done a really deep dive within DHS and within state government, to look at okay, where does customer service need to be focused on? Is it the people? It's not the people, we found out very quickly we have passionate people in the state of Tennessee. It's not the processes, because people are doing what they can, but we needed a tool. So, with Governor Haslam's initiative, and our understanding that we had to find a tool to better deliver service, we came on to ServiceNow, just a year ago. So, I've been smiling ever since. I feel it in my face. >> You're a good advertisement. So, what are some of the improvements that you have seen? >> Even when we were doing just our pilot phase, we launched on October 2nd, and I was talking with a lot of people from ServiceNow then, and from the governor's office, and they said, "Try "to get a snapshot of the before, "and be sure to compare it with the snapshot of afterwards." So I figured two months would be actually sufficient, and we were still in our kind of test and pilot stages, but we knew pretty quickly we wanted to continue on with ServiceNow. So, the two months prior, we were averaging inquiry assignment time, so if you filled out an application or you submitted an inquiry to my unit, the Office of Customer Service, the amount of time it would take to get from the time you submitted it, to a person in the field, or in program, who could actually help with it, that was taking about 36 hours average. Some were faster, some were slower, some reached up to three days, and that's not even a resolution. Sometimes that's just for us to even acknowledge that we got it, that someone's working on it. Afterwards, I looked at those two months following, so October and November, and we were at like eight or nine minute average. And it's because, we knew we wanted something enterprise wide, but we didn't quite anticipate the difference that workflow management would provide us. So all the parts that normally were all these handoffs, and I looked at it last Friday, it was 100 seconds. You know, we've entered new measurement criteria, every time I go back and look at it. >> So it's lightening speed, lightening fast changes. >> Yes, and our resolution time on this has come right on board along side that. We've cut it down to about 30% of what it used to be. We're able to just do our jobs faster, so we can get back to what people coming to DHS to do is, they come here to serve, they come here to try to help people, and this has taken away all that administrative responsibility, so we can do what we're actually good at. >> Well, we're going to look forward to hearing what it is, next year at Knowledge19. Thanks so much for joining us, Landon it was great having you on theCUBE >> I appreciate it >> I'm Rebecca Knight. We'll have more from ServiceNow Knowledge18, and theCUBE's live coverage just after this. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Los Vegas it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018 (relaxed music) brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. (relaxed music) >> Welcome to theCUBE. We are live on day two at Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost the one and only @Stu, Stu Miniman. We are here in Vegas with about 14,000 attendees, the biggest event ever. Not just 14,000 people here but about 35,000 also engaging with the video experiences, live streaming, and the on-demand. Also going on here is a big event with partners. We're excited to welcome back to theCUBE Cheryl Cook, Senior Vice President of Global Channel Marketing from Dell EMC. Hi, Cheryl! >> Hi, thanks for havin' me! Welcome back! >> Yeah. So 6,500 partners. >> Absolutely. >> Wow, that's up from last year! >> We have record attendants. We just are really, really excited about the engagement and how we're resonating with our partners, so we just had a fantastic kick-off to our Global Partner Summit yesterday. >> So some big news regarding the Channel. One of the things I'd like to start with is the name of the event this year. The first time it's Dell Technologies World. Last year was Dell EMC World. >> Absolutely. Kind of indicative of the EMC Federation companies being absorbed into Dell, companies with their own channel programs. Talk to us about what you announce regarding the Dell Technologies Advantage framework. What is the framework, and how does it make it easier for channel partners to sell Dell products of- >> Well, thank you. You know, as you said, we've really elevated this event to the Dell Technologies World, and many of our partners today already participate in VMware's program or in Dell EMC's program, and really what we're doing with the Advantage is we're taking a lot of the messaging, the story, a lot of the marketing collateral that we candidly educated our internal employees on so that we can best differentiate and articulate to our customers the value and the power of all these strategically aligned businesses. So for the Partner community, we're bringing IT transformational campaigns to them, we're bringing a lot of the messaging and the story on how to enable and share with their team members and their customers, and we're also working on enablement and really driving more cross-functional, inclusive competencies and trainings to really enable them and their team members to be more effective. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Cheryl, maybe you could explain to us some of those, the training and the cross-competencies and things like that. You know, I'm sure there's people on the Dell Channel side that need to be educated on other products and vice versa, and there's new products all the time, new changing. You know, Jeff Clark walk-through, you know interesting things with like AI and IoT that are coming in the future. So maybe bring us inside some of that training. >> Yeah, absolutely. So we're very mindful of trying to develop either reference architectures or some of our curriculum around training that would include, you know, vSphere from VMware for example along with the Dell EMC infrastructure or even on our client initiatives a Windows 10 refresh effort that includes AirWatch from VMware. So really looking at the outcome-based opportunity that we know we have to engage in those conversations with our customers so that we can stitch together the training and the availability, and we want to on a future state develop these training so our partners wouldn't have to take them multiple times. It would be credited and eligible in both, VMware's program as well as Dell EMC. So we're really striving to give commonality and be efficient with speed, time to market, and really leveraging all the capabilities across the strategic landline businesses. >> What about some of the feedback that you've gotten from, you know, legacy EMC partners, Dell partners, in terms of how to make this complimentary. Was that, being that the partners are on the front lines talking with customers about all their transformation needs, how have the partners really helped to create this new framework? >> Well, you know, we're always listening, and we host a number of advisory boards, and we listen to our partners, and we've heard very, very common: "We love the product marketing, "but we want you to give us solution marketing. "Can you help enable us "in the outcome-based conversation and dialogue?" One of the things we announced this week is an IT transformation marketing campaign which we're going to put in market with Dell EMC. It's available simultaneously for the partners that essentially really does map together all the technologies and componentry across the strategic landline businesses to the business outcomes that they're talkin' to their customers about. We also launched an IoT Competency for the first time this week which again is really driving at some of those emerging technologies you heard Jeff talk about like AI and getting to machine learning and analytics to really help them engage and be more competent and effective in those technologies. >> Yeah. Cheryl, how's the Channel doing? You know, there's been (Cheryl laughs) so much change going on. I remember back when, you know, converged infrastructure first launched. It was like, "Oh, we need to create data center practices "because they were server or storage people." When Cloud rolled out, it was like, "Well, we're workin' with Microsoft. "How do we figure this out?" How is the Channel transforming? How do they look at their business? How do they look at where they add value? >> Absolutely, and I'll tell ya, Stu, I've been in this business a long time, and I don't know a more exciting time when it's moving faster, and that's also true in the partner ecosystem, in the partner community. So we're still going to transact a lot of business the traditional way that we do now, but increasingly I'm hearin' from the partners they're looking at forming new alliances, they're looking at acquisitions, they're buying new skills and capabilities. We really want to help chart that map for them on kind of where the vision is heading and how we can help align with them. So if it's possible, we want to try and help align new alliances and introductions for them with other partners, or as I said continue to bring solutions, reference architectures, to market that can help them enable around it. >> Can you tell us a little bit about what was announced regarding the Dell EMC Ready Stack for Channel Partners and reference architectures? >> So that's a great example of where we're going to always continue to work to bring engineered systems together like a VxRail or a VxBlock. But the Dell EMC Ready Stack is really a certified and tested reference architecture for those partners in those instances where they want to go build it. So we'll tell them, "Here's all the buildin' materials and all the capabilities. "It'll be a completely inclusive Dell Technology stack," but it's a way to give them confidence, mitigate risk, and they can build it and integrate it rather than buying a system that's been pre engineered. >> Cheryl, how has the Dell Technologies World experience different for the Channel partners? You know, one of the feedbacks I always get is, I was like aw, well, I mean everybody from Dell is really busy, and there's certain things you can tell the customers, but the Channel people it's like, "Well, tell us more about the future. "Give us some of that NDA stuff." How do you manage that and, you know, maybe give us a little bit of flavor of what the week is like for them that are attending. >> Well, you've certainly seen the scale of this event, so we call our Global Partner Summit an event inside an event, but we have everything from technical training, where the partners are able to take their exams and certifications. We certainly have Heroes exposition and Heroes going for the Pre-Sales technical community, and we also have an Executive Briefing Center where we're hosting. Right behind me, we have our partner lounge. We're hosting over 800 one-on-one meetings in that partner lounge where the partners get to meet either with customers. They've certainly brought a lot of customers here. They get to meet with Dell EMC executives or the partner executives, and it's really around collaborating, networking. In many ways it accelerates sales opportunities here, so it's a combination of technical training, networking, executive meetings, obviously product launches and announcements that we're bringing to market, the opportunity to really cultivate and work globally in our Global Partner Summit. So it's a pretty active week, but we have everybody rather busy. >> Talk to us about some of the ways that you are incentivizing and rewarding partners for their loyalty. >> Yeah, well thanks for asking. One of the things we announced this week actually is a My Rewards program, and think of this as a way to accelerate incentives to our partners, sales reps and their Pre-Sale SE community. So it's a platform that's going to allow them to redeem points, so you earn these points. You can either get cash cards, gifts, trips, and it really does go directly to their sales reps and their SEs. So we've launched a really comprehensive loyalty program around our storage offerings. This is an excellent sales tool that our partners can leverage with their customers, but it comes with it a host of incentives and rewards for competitive take-out and displacement, growth of new business and new logos. I mean, our partner community in the last year brought 54,000 new customers to Dell EMC, many of those if they're targeting these competitive takeouts, they're eligible for those incentives, and it's a win-win. >> Cheryl, how is the competitive landscape out there? You know, it's always a balance between, "Well, I want to incent you for loyalty, "but it's a diverse market, "and there's a partner you might grow with "that might end up being more competitive "somewhere down the road." How do ya balance that? How do you work through some of those issues in the field? >> Well, you know, we're very focused on tryin' to earn their business and earn the opportunity in the marketplace. We're incredibly fortunate right now that we've been experiencing double-digit growth. Many of our partners would tell us that they're growing faster with us than others, and to be completely honest, when you look at the categories we compete in, we enjoy market leadership positions whether it's in our servers or in storage or all-flash or hyper-converged. So when you really bring that together, it's an opportunity, candidly, for our partners. We're going to have to earn it every day. We recognize and know that they're business people and they work with other companies, but we're just trying to make sure that we bring simple, predictable, and profitable opportunities in both technology and platforms but also in our program and engagement. >> So the transformation theme has been really predominately woven throughout yesterday and today as well, digital transformation, IT transformation, security and workforce transformation. And in fact, Jeff talked about that during his keynote this morning. What are some of the expectations as the partners being on the front lines with customers, and customers are now looking at leaders like Dell Technologies to say, "How do we start utilizing emerging new technologies?" You mentioned IoT, campaign. How are you, what are your expectations for the Channel to be able to help customers build infrastructures that allow them to take advantage of artificial intelligence, machine learning, IoT, to really be able to then transform their businesses to be competitive? >> You know, I am impressed every day when I meet with our partner community. In many ways they're leading the charge. So the natural engagement of some of these leading edge and emerging new technologies, our partners are doing amazingly innovative work on embedding their intellectual property around these. But for our part, what we want to do is certainly make sure that they're aware of use cases. Here's business outcomes, many of which were kind of shown in the keynote, in the big stage earlier this morning, and we'll just drive competencies, we'll give them demo gear, we'll put them in labs in our Executive Briefing Centers. We actively encourage our partners to take advantage of our Solution Centers and our Executive Briefing Centers. It's a fantastic way for them to come into a sandbox and really immerse themselves in the technology and do proof-of-concepts with their customers. So we're going to continue to be focused on doing market research for them. Must of the marketing material that we're bringing out on these transformational campaigns, the partners can benefit and leverage the research that we've done with companies like ESG and IDC and Forbes to really substantiate and build assessments and use cases for business outcomes with their customers. >> Yeah. Cheryl, we've watched since the acquisition, Dell has been very, you know, focused on, "How do we merge these companies? "How do we put this Channel program together?" Would you say are we at kind of a 1.5 version of that now? How when you would talk to the channel, how much more change did they expect kind of throughout the year? And there's always feedback and learning, of course, but (mumbles). >> Well, we're moving fast, but we're also genuinely committed to predictability and consistency with our partners. So one piece of pretty honest feedback we receive is don't change it all the time, right? Don't change it frequently. And we couldn't be more delighted with the success we've had in our inaugural year. I mean, when you just look at the fact that we unified and brought the program together, the success we're both enjoying, it's not completely broken. So we want to make sure that we can make refinements, we can adapt and be responsive to some of these new technologies and new transformations without really being disruptive and have wholesale change. So you'll see us really listen and continue to take feedback from our partners, but frankly, we feel like we're winning right now, and we want to continue to just try and earn it and keep goin' fast. >> The word that comes to mind in summary is symbiosis. >> Yes, yes. >> Thank you, Cheryl, so much for comin' by, >> Absolutely. and congratulations on growing the partner community this year and having over 800 meetings. Wow, that's a lot! >> I know. >> We're busy. Thank you! >> You are busy, thanks so much. We want to thank you for watchin' theCUBE. We are live in Los Vegas, day two of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman! We'll be right back after a short break. (upbeat music)

>> Hey Jeff Rick here with the cube. We're here in Palo Alto at the Chertoff event, its called security in the boardroom. We're talking about the security conversations that need to happen in the boardroom not just at the IT department and locking down your phone and your VPN. Its really how do we elevate the conversation, especially as things continue to change, digital transformation is forcing people to move quickly and everyone's becoming a digital company. All our assets are becoming digital. So it needs to get elevated. We're excited to have, our next guest, he's Paul Farrell, he's the CEO of Nehemiah. Paul welcome. >> Thank you. >> And joining us again, Jason Cook from the Chertoff Group. Good to see you again. >> Hi. Alright so lets jump into it, so you're CEO... Well before you get it, first tell people about Nehemiah, you are familiar with the company. >> Nehemiah has a cyber security suite where we know, manage and help protect organizations and the knowing part is what we're probably going to talk more about today which is our risk quantifier software. >> Well lets jump in what is risk quantifier software? >> We take a bottoms up look at the organization to get a high fidelity copy of the corporate network and then we layer business applications on top of it so boards can get a look at what the business exposure is to the cyber security risk. >> So the network and the application. So very techy piece of it, how much of it, in terms of the process and the people get filled into that piece as well. >> We call that process BIA or Business Impact Analysis and a lot of the Fortune 500 firms have already been doing this to be compliant with Sarbanes Oxley and other regulations. And its being able to work with them to take some of that information out of the system and combine it with the cyber information we have, to give them a good look at risk. So if I'm looking to invest $2 million dollars, what's my risk buy down. Is it 10 million? Is it two million? Is it nothing? I just need to do it. So these are some of the questions we're trying to help boards answer. >> I'm just curious, from a why do we need to do this point of view. How much of it is compliance and governance and regulation? And how much of it is not? Its just, we need to protect ourselves from the bad guys. I would imagine especially financial services and healthcare, a lot of it was driven by compliance before but is that percentage going down? >> Go ahead. >> So, no not at all. >> Not at all, still mainly governance, compliance regulation. >> And what you have to bring together now is security risk and compliance. Its all the one thing. And at the board level, you don't have those as separate agenda topics anymore and that's why we talk about a risk management program. Especially the Fortune 500 boards becoming very educated and also actioning and taking forward and that's really where that stuff comes together. Compliance, especially if you look at the finance industry, health care industry for example, its always going to be there cause its a duty of care as to the industry, how to run the business and to all of the consumers at the end of the day at the end of that. So you need a bit of (indistinct talking) and its a very useful tool, if you apply risk management to it, if you're applying security to it and bring those things together. Many CSOs will talk about situational awareness and one of things they need to do, if they've got a seat at the board table, is, what do I have, what's my assets? And that's no longer just purely from a technical perspective. You hear the phrase, many organizations have technology silos, that don't talk, that don't come together, perhaps different business units that are running those silos. And at the board level how do you ascertain what you've got when you have an issue and that situational awareness then, is also going to help drive, what parties do I take when I have to take action. So that's something that Nehemiah's security is really focusing on. So they're saying let us put together for you and work with you to assemble your silos of IT network and everything else there. Essentially underpinning your digital footprint as you go on that digital journey. But then how do you have actionable business intelligence that's going to help you prioritize how to run that, how to secure it but also how to invest and run your business through this journey. >> You're going to say summn? >> I think its the word that Jason used a lot is the journey and there's a lot of things we should be doing just because its cyber hygiene and its intelligence, is what we should do to run our business by taking the business information and marrying what we got up and then communicate it in language that the board knows. Which is key, don't be talking about WannaCry viruses and all that and SNB ports. That doesn't make any sense to them, they make business decisions every day, so its we're investing X and you take a risk profile overtime and you say, this will help reduce our exposure here, but its good and we need to do it. Whether compliance says it or not, we need to be protecting our data. That's one of the things that... Compliance is a checklist and we need to check, make sure that's done and everybody does audited financial statements and that's great, we should do it every year but there's somethings that are basic we should do basic stuff in finance, we should do basic stuff in cyber hygiene as well as updating our systems, keeping them current, educating our employees on scams and stuff that happen. These are things that need to happen over time and so its a journey for the board and for the senior management but for every employee, to be able to know these things and to actually integrate it as part of their everyday job, in my opinion. >> It sounds like the cyber hygiene stuff is still just not (laughs), we're not hygienic enough (laughs) as we should be. Its amazing that just continues to be a recurring thing. >> One of the ethos approaches that Nehemiah is taking to this is, they call it know. What do you know about your environment and it starts there. To say so, especially for an organization, as many are on a digital journey. Well what is underpinning all of our digital footprint. Do you know that? And unfortunately so many organizations out there have bits of it but they don't maintain that. So when you have, for example, the famous WannaCry incident, they kicked off very very large organizations as well as many small one were impacted. Why? Well cause they didn't actually understand what they had and they didn't have the business intelligence and the business analytics to make a prioritization to say, we need to invest our focus and time and effort here to respond to this activity from a hygiene perspective. And until those things are addressed, you're not actually going to truly be able to go on your digital journey as an organization. So if anything, what this is doing is heightening the awareness at the board level that you need to have an articulated dialogue, where at the board level you can understand the impact to the business of what's going on here but then take all of that and take all the knowledge that you're building to then drive actionable intelligence, business as well as technology coming together, which underpins risk management in that context. >> And I would imagine those types of incidents are helpful in terms of helping to define what is that risk. >> Tragically helpful. >> Yeah tragically helpful but still without those types of things its probably harder or harder to really monetize what is the risk so that I can come up with a portfolio that then I can validate my investment. >> Its about being prepared. Its about thinking about what are your critical business systems. And so when you got something happening, no matter what it is, lets make sure that critical business systems are protected first and then we'll get to the the less priority systems. Its not that they're not all important, its just that there're some that are more critical. Inventory systems or sales at the end of the quarter, it tends to be we find to be, not only the systems but also the time of the year. If you're selling seeds, March and April, North America is really big. If you're Amazon its Christmas time. The inventory system and order entry system has got to be going so but its taking that step back now and saying; what are our critical business systems, what are the risks and then, the only thing we also look at that we've talked to Jason about is, we know what the risks are but what's the probability those risks are going to hit you. Everybody's not a 100%, some people are 20%. So when you go to the board you got to give them a true idea of, this is the true risk that we're seeing and we've tempered it down by saying if it was a 100 million at risk but you only have a 20% chance of getting that exploit then its really just $20 million that we're talking about not 100 cause the days are gone where we slam our hand on the board that you must do this, you must do this. Boards are more cyber aware now than ever and they don't want to just pay people throw information at them they want to understand it to be able to respond properly and not react. >> Right. So really the Net Nat is speaking a language, boil it down into language in the decision making process in which they're use to doing. Cause its not a zero sum game, it not a one or zero anymore, its really a probability decision and the risk assessment. >> Yeah that happens over time. That's the whole thing. There's ebbs and flows of the year and you look at things over time and I think that's the other thing that we'd like to talk about. And its renassessing, and one of the things that we talk is, we talk with a lot of people and the chief information security officers are embracing us because they're looking for new ways to be able to communicate properly and succinctly to the boards and that's one of the big things that we see. >> Good cause when they get bumped up the agenda items on the board that's what you want to see right. (laughing) >> Absolutely. >> Well Paul and Jason thanks for stopping by really appreciate your time >> Thank you. >> I'm Jeff Rick you're watching the cube, we'll see you next time, thanks for watching.

(clicking) >> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Freck here with theCUBE. We're in Palo Alto, California at the Chertoff Event. It's called Security in the Boardroom and it's really about elevating the security conversation beyond the IT folks and the security folks out in the application space and out on the edge and really, what's the conversation going on at the boardroom, 'cause it's an important conversation. And one you want to have before your name shows up in the Wall Street journal on a Monday morning for not all the right reasons. So we're excited to have a real practitioner, Rich Baich. He's a chief information security officer for Wells Fargo. Welcome Rich. And in the company of Jason Cook who's the managing director with the Chertoff group. Great to see you Jason. So we talked a little bit off camera Rich. You've been in a lot of different seats in this game from consulting to now you're at Wells Fargo, and a few more that you ripped on this, but I can't remember them all. From your perspective, integrating this multi-dimensional approach. How do you see this conversation changing at the boardroom? >> Well I think most importantly, the board is a topic of discussion, one of the top discussions over the last couple of years. There's been a lot of guidance recently that's been put out to board directors through the National Association for Corporate Directors, as well as various consulting firms providing guidance. Board members need to be able to take this complex topic and simplify it down so that they can do their jobs. It's expected of them, and sometimes that can be a language barrier. So I think what I see happening is boards are beginning to hire individuals with some cybersecurity expertise. My example at Wells Fargo, we hired a retired general Suzanne Vautrino to come in as one of our cybersecurity, obviously experts in the board. And it's great having her in that board seat because often times, she can help me translate some of the issues and gain a different perspective from the board. >> So that's a pretty interesting statement. So they're actually putting security expertise in a formal board seat. >> Yes. >> That's a pretty significant investment in the space. >> But if you think about this. I mean why? >> Right. >> Right. >> Well most institutions today when you break them down are really technology companies that's just a business platform rolls on. So security is becoming part of not only the institution today but the institution of the future as organizations move towards digitalization. So having that ability to have someone who understands risk management side of cybersecurity as well as the practitioner side will only make, I think a boardroom that much stronger. So what's your experience in terms of trying to communicate the issues to a board? Just down and dirty. Where do you find the balance as to what they can absorb? What can they not absorb? How do you outlay the risks if you will and how they should think about driving investment in these areas? >> Well great points, the first and most important thing with boards is gaining trust. Did you have the expertise and you had the information. By no means could I bring all my data to a board meeting because it's just not digestible. So there's a little bit of an art of taking that down and building the trust and focusing on certain areas. But a point you made I think it's really important is one you have to help them understand what are the top risks and why. But when you're talking to a board, you have to be able to say, and this is what we're doing to address them and here is the time frame and here is the risk associated with this. Because in their minds, they're thinking what can I do to help you? And then secondly, Stu point was the decisioning regarding prioritization. in this particular space, there's always going to be risks but it's really the art of deciding which ones are more important. I'll talk to the board and I'll highlight things like probability of occurrence. So the higher the probability of occurrence of something happening really drives our prioritization. >> Then Jason from your perspective. You're coming in from outside the board trying to help out. How have you seen the security conversation and priority change over time, especially in the context of this other hot topic that everybody is jumping on, which is probably the agenda item, just before Rich comes in the room, which is digital transformation. We got to go, we got to go, we got to go. Everybody is evolving. We got to go, we're getting left behind, and then oh by the way. We're just going to come on afterwards and tell us what some of these risks are. >> Yeah and I think actually Rich started to touch on it. All organizations especially when you're looking at the Fortune 500 and around that shape and size are global. And they're all on a digital journey, whether they acknowledge they're actually a digital product company. All of them now, digitizing is happening. So as a result of that security is an absolute critical component of anything linked to that for all of the reasons that you can just read the headlines around. And actually at the boardroom level, it's more now, hopefully becoming a conversation that's about how do we as board members take responsibility and accountability for how to protect our organization. And it's framed now more and more so in a risk management conversation. Rather than just saying security 'cause security is like outside. But actually the reality is security and cyber activity because you're a digital organization. It's embedded into everything whether you realize it or not so the board needs to be education to what that means. How do you take risks in the context of digital activity and assign it to a risk management program approach rather than just saying it's the security guy that's got to come in and do that. And the security guy is most probably going to be the guy that absolutely has to understand that boardroom issue, and then execute upon it and bring options to the table every time in and around that space. But the main message I would say is take this from a risk management perspective and start using the language like that. And that's probability the other point that we were discussing just earlier in the security series today, that actually it's about risk management, and educating everyone very clearly as to what do we mean. What are we actually protecting. How are we protecting it and what are we doing as a set of board members, and as a leadership team to actually take forward enablement of the business. From a security perspective, understanding it but then also protecting the business. >> Right, so are you building models then for them to help them assign a value to that risk, so now they know how much that they have to invest. 'Cause the crazy thing about security, I'm sure you could always invest more right. You can always use a little bit more budget. There's a little bit more that you can do to make yourself a little bit more secure than you were without that investment. But nobody has infinite resources so as you said bad things can happen, it's really risk mitigation and knowing the profile and what to do about it. So how do help them model that? >> I can answer that and I know Rich can jump in, so what you're seeing is a brand new leader role emerging from the traditional IT security guy to now, the guy that isn't or person should I say more accurately that's engaged at the boardroom. That's there to talk about risks in the context of how the board sees it. And so what does that means? It means that absolutely, you need to know what you've got from a digital perspective. Everything from the traditional network to all of the IT assets and everything there. The key thing is you need to know what you've got, but you have then contextualize all of that against business risks. And pulling those two things together is the challenge that you see across the industry today 'cause there have been silos. And usually underneath that silos and many other silos so bringing that together is really important. And I think if you look at how we're going to see disrupt it is and how things are managed in the risk management perspective. Actually, that's what you're going to see come together. How do you bring those models together to give actionable intelligence that the board can react to or predict against, and that's not an easy thing to pull together. >> Yeah, and to take it more down to a tactical arena so you know at some point, like you said, you can't asking for more money. Because you're not practicing good business attributes because everybody can ask for more money. So I think as organizations mature their security programs, they're going to go to the board with issues like this. Endpoint security, there's so many different Endpoints security products out there that you could buy. But if you're practicing good risk management. You're starting off by saying what is the risk. Let's just talk about malware. So malware is the risk, well how much malware gets to your Endpoint. Unless just say in this particular instance, you're here. You go into a program where you're enhancing your tools, your techniques, you're shutting down USB ports. You're not allowing people to connect to the internet unless they go through the VPN. You're buying endpoint solutions to put on there. You're encrypting the endpoint, you're doing all these things and you suddenly see your monthly average of malware go from here to here. And then when you do that and you walk into a boardroom, and you can show them that and you say this is kind of our risk appetite. 'Cause we're never going to be able to reduce it but I could go spend some more money. I could go spend five million more dollars that I'm going to move it this much. I'd rather take that five million move it over to this risk which is right here to reduce it to that area. So I think that goes hand in hand with what Jason's saying but when you can get to that level to the board to help them understand their decision. They have a greater comfort level that the money is being spent and prioritization is occurring. >> Yeah, so if I may so that one of the things that you just touch on, I think is really useful for us kind of expand upon more. One of the advise points Chertoff Group had in our series session was around bringing cybersecurity experts to the boardroom. I know obviously, you're very active in the whole finance sector, providing advice and direction in that space. Can you tell us more about that? >> Sure so, what's particular in my world also as the chair or the financial services sector coordinating council. What we do is we work closely with the government, with policy and doctrine and then the FSI sector, financial services sector, analysis center is the group that really goes out, and kind of operationalize it through information sharing and that sort. But what we've seen is a desire to have, honestly more security professionals on boards. So CISOs potentially being asked to sit on public and private company boards to provide that expertise back to the company. So that the boardroom can help understand and transcend what is going on. Again from my standpoint, I feel very privileged to have one of them on my board today. And she's been just a wonderful addition, not only does she bring cyber expertise, but being a retired general brings a lot it to other additional. So I would predict, we'll see more and more CISOs being asked to sit on public and private boards. They bring that perspective as the business models move to digitalization. >> We can go on forever, forever and ever but we can't unfortunately, but I have one more question for you Rich. Is kind of this change in attitude amongst the CISO community and other people ideal security in terms sharing information. You mentioned on this group and you use to be, we didn't want to share if we got attacked for a lot of different reasons, but there's a real benefit to sharing information even across industries about the profile of some of these things that are happening. How are we seeing that kind of change and how much more valuable is it to have some other input from some other peers, than just kind of you with you're jewels that they're trying to protect. >> Sure so in general, from an industry standpoint, the financial services are much further ahead than a lot of the other industries 'cause we've been doing it along time. So sharing occurs officially through the FSI site but also you'll pick you phone up and call a friend right a way, and say hey, I've just seen some of you're IP space associated with so and so. So that informal sharing is there. It's a very tight community, in particularly from the financial services. You don't think of security as a differentiator necessarily because the reality of it is when an adversary chooses to point their direction at you. It's just a matter of time before they get around to your institution. So sharing occurs and secondly, the government been doing a great job of trying to break down those barriers. Work through all the issues that are related with sharing of classified, unclassified information. So there exists a model today, it seems to be working pretty well. Formal as well as informal and if you look at some of the past history. That sharing has really helped a lot of organizations. I see they only getting better and better as time goes by. >> And the point, I'd add to that is the financial services I said for example is one of the most mature out there. In fact, it is probably the most mature or global even out there. But that's taken time to establish the trust and the collaboration there. And the one recommendation that we would all give out to the industry as a whole is you need to be getting those types of things stood up. And you have to invest time into them to generate the collaboration and trust. You're not going to get it over night but you have to start somewhere in doing the same. Because really what good work is happening here, needs to be happening across the global industry as a whole. >> Right, alright Rich and Jason, we'll have to leave it there unfortunately. Really great insight and thanks for sharing your insight with us. >> Rich: And thank you. >> Alright, I'm Jeff Freck. You're watching theCUBE. We're at Security in the Boardroom at the Chertoff event, Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. (clicking)

>> Narrator: Live from San Jose, California in the heart of silicon valley, it's theCUBE! Covering QuickBooks Connect 2016. Sponsored by Intuit QuickBooks. Now here are your hosts Jeff Frick and John Walls. >> Welcome back to San Jose, California. We continue here on theCUBE our coverage of QuickBooks Connect 2016. Of course theCube is the flagship broadcast here on SiliconANGLE TV where we extract the signal from the noise and I tell you what, with our next guest, we have a lot of signal to bring you. Scott Cook, the founder and the chairman of the executive committee at Intuit. Scott, thank you for being with us. We really appreciate the time and have been looking forward to this for quite some time once we knew you were going to be on theCube. It's good to have you. >> Good to be here. >> Let's talk about just first off, look at where you are now, right? 30-some odd years. It's been quite a ride I would assume for you. >> Yeah, it started, you know Tom and I got together and then there were two of us and then we eventually had seven of us in a basement. Well they called it the garden level. But the only part of the garden you could see would be the roots and the gophers. (laughter) And then we hit bad times and the things ... We just couldn't get money. We couldn't get sales so we shrunk down to four people. Couldn't pay salaries. It was pretty ugly. And from that, to look at 5,000 people here today. 8,000 employees in the company. When I started the biggest PC software company was 160 employees, and they were huge! Oh these giants! (laughter) >> How do I manage all this? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Well a quote that we've heard a couple of times today. We heard on the keynote stage. About the corporate philosophy of we fall in love with your problems, not our solutions. And is that the driving force you think? I mean, why you've made it through 33 years? >> I think yeah. Yeah, I actually think that's pretty important not just to the success of Intuit and QuickBooks and Mint and TurboTax, but to business in general. My theory is what great entrepreneurs do is they find the intersection of two circles. So think of a Venn diagram and the intersection. One circle is what are people's biggest, most important unsolved problems? Not the problems that are already solved by someone else. Find the ones that aren't solved yet. And then look for the ones that we can solve. Cause you can't solve everything. But look where we can apply the best technologies in the world. What's in that intersection? And focus there. >> And in some of the research to get ready for this. You've talked about really focusing on the important stuff. You gave a great example in that Khan Academy talk about there's really only 1 1/2 things that you should really be focusing on to really move the ship forward. And that was a very great insight. >> Yeah, you know all of of us have the desire to do too many things. You get groups. You've got 10 people in a room, they each have their ideas and it's tempting to shoot at too many targets. And those 10 targets are not of equal importance. You got to go through and kind of rigorously and be disciplined and say what's the 1 1/2 most important? And stay relentlessly focused on that. >> And then how is your role changed? As time has passed and you're no longer the CEO. Now you're chairman head of the executive board. How have you kind of learned to still keep your hands on it but in kind of a little bit more of a distant role? >> Well, first of all, thank goodness for leaders like Brad Smith, Sasan Goodarzi who heads up our small business group, that's really the host of this show. Thank goodness for great leaders like that. So my role's changed a ton. I work really on two areas now which is strategy and coaching our entrepreneurs. So strategy over to Brad and our other leaders. I'm trying to help our leaders see the future and make the big strategic calls. What's really most important? How do we know? And then work with our entrepreneurs. We're a collection of entrepreneurs basically. We've got a couple hundred entrepreneurial projects going on inside the company at any one time. And each one of those is like a little startup. I mean, they've got a customer in mind. They've got a problem they're trying to solve to improve people's lives so fundamentally. And there are challenges. So helping grow our entrepreneurs and then grow the culture around them to allow great entrepreneurs to invent things to change the world and do that from within Intuit with a huge reach to be able to get the inventions out in the hands of millions. And change the lives of tens of millions of people. >> So, over the course of the run of the company, they haven't all been home runs. >> Scott: Oh yeah. >> Right. So how have you learned from those swings and misses? And applied them to the small businesses that you're serving? Who are swinging and missing on a regular basis and you're trying to narrow that margin, right? Trying to make them more successful. >> Scott: Yeah. >> So what did you learn you think maybe through your attempts about that culture of trying basically. >> I think maybe the most important thing really dovetails with what you just said. Early on, when the company was, before we even had our first product out, we'd build a version of it and then we would bring in test audiences of it and have them test it to see if they could figure it out without us saying anything. And they couldn't. So then we'd redesign it and then we'd test again. And then we'd redesign it and test again. Over time kind of lost some of that dedication to running experiments. And it became whose opinion? And you'd build, and it was the loudest opinion in the room. Or the boss' opinion. And that produced a number of failures. Things that just didn't work. Customers didn't buy it. Or they bought it and it didn't it didn't produce the desired effect when they bought it. So the thing I've learned about life and companies is to set up a culture where you make decisions based on fast cheap experiments. That very thing you were talking about. If you got an idea, figure out, okay, what's a leap of faith assumption, let's go try it. And don't debate it. Try it. And then we learned from trying. Oh, a bunch of those don't work. And then we learned from the things. Why didn't it work? And that teaches us something we didn't know before. That maybe the fulcrum, the pivot, to a new idea. And some of those do work or most of it worked. But other pieces didn't. And we learned by doing. Not by debating in a conference room. So to set up your company so that people throughout the company can take their idea and run the experiment. That produces great entrepreneurs and great learning. A continuous stream of learning. I guess the learning begins when you first get real people trying your idea for real. >> Let me follow up. Cause the other thing you talk about is that often comes from the youngest and the newest employees. Which is completely antithesis to a kind of hierarchical structure. Where these are the people that you should be listening and giving them the opportunity within this comfortable framework to do these experiments. >> Absolutely. Sometimes the very freshest ideas come from the people farthest from the boss. Newest in the company. Closest to the customer. But typically in a hierarchy, whose got the least clout? Whose ideas are the least listened to? It'd be the new person, the young person. >> Jeff: Right. >> And so part of the genius of running a company of decision by experiment is that everyone's ideas can be run as an experiment. The boss' idea. The CEO's idea. And the person that's new. We should be testing each of those. Except in a crisis where you got to make snap decisions. And hopefully those aren't very often. You should run the company so that each good idea can be tested, regardless of where it comes from. And then the great thing is, then you get the best ideas from all your folks and they learn from doing. If their idea doesn't work, now they learn from that. Ooh, okay. I thought it was going to do X, it did Y. Why? What didn't I know? That's where learning comes from. Learning doesn't tend to come from the successes, learning comes from the things that didn't work. >> So, I think we've all seen good executives. How they operate. They hire good people, right? That's ... You have a vision and then you hire people who surround that and amplify that vision. So when you're looking for people or when you've been looking for people to work with you. What's that common thread? Or what are the traits that you've looked for the most to think that's a good fit? Or this is the person that I want on my team. In order to carry on this vision to where it's expanded to where it is today. >> Let me break that into two buckets. There are a set of things which are unique to particular career paths. So certain things from engineers might be different than certain things from a salesperson or a marketer or a finance person. So let's set that aside. Let's cover the commonalities. I think there's a few things. When you think about the people you've most loved working with or for. There are people who are great creative problem solvers. Instead of seeing a problem or barrier and giving up or being unglued by it. Can figure out okay, how're we going to solve that problem? And then there's people who are there to serve. Where it's not all about them. I've got a thing that I tell our folks that others won't care how much you know until they first know how much you care. So if one of our speakers today said it. If your first job is to serve yourself you're not going to go very far. Because who wants to work with someone who's self serving? Who wants to buy from a company that's only looking after its own front P&L? Job one is you got to serve who you're serving. The customer or the person of the company who you serve. So we look for people who are really motivated by the outside to try to do right by the customer. I think you look for people who are achievement oriented. Who get stuff done. Who make things happen. Do you want to work with somebody who always needs to be dragged along? No. You want to work with somebody who's pulling you along. Who's getting a lot done. So you go, wow, that person gets a lot done. So I think those are pretty core. Solve the creative problems. Have the passion and energy to serve, do what's right for the customer. And then get a lot done. >> And then you've talked about the curse of success. And avoiding the curse of success. And you guys have done that, obviously. So what are the kind of the lessons to say fresh? This started as a checkbook register and now the future of payments and mobile and the options are just tremendous. Bitcoin, who knows where that's going. So, as the future keeps evolving, how do you stay fresh? How do you keep the team fresh? How do you not rest on your laurels even though you have 5,000 fans walking around San Jose convention center today? >> This is a real challenge for companies. Because success turns organizations. It makes them dumb and slow. It's tempting, the thing I would avoid is it's tempting to look at your achievements. To look through the rear view mirror. And look at boy, how much we've achieved. But that only makes you self satisfied. In fact, with an organization you need to do the opposite. Look to where we want to be. Look to where we should be. And we're here. And then say, well shoot we are not very far. So for example, and I define these in customer terms. For example, we started our first product helped somebody manage a checkbook and pay bills. If you look at it really, the problem of paying bills has gotten worse. It used to be all bills came in the mail. So you had a little physical reminder. Some come in the mail, some you get by e-mail with invoices from some people. Some you go online and find a website. You pay some at a bank website. Maybe you go to the biller, you pay some. You write checks for some. It's much harder now. We have not actually got to the point. When our nirvana is you never worry about a bill. And you're never late. And you're never overdraft. The overdraft rate in the country is around 30% of households have a late payment during the year from which they get fees. And the overdraft rates, the overdraft charges can be $30, $35. We have not solved that yet. We got to look and say with all that we've done, that's what we should have done. So we've got a team working on that right now. Because we got re-focused on it. So we'll be coming out in December with stuff in there. Look at tax. Tax many people would say is one of our best businesses. And it is. Look at all we've achieved. But, look at the reality. People are still spending a lot of time on tax. Who wants to be spending time typing stuff into tax software? Does anybody? (laughter) No. There's not an accountant, there's not a consumer. We haven't solved that yet guys. There are still a hundred million people in the country typing stuff in to systems to do taxes every February, March and April. That's where we want to be. Is ultimately there is no typing in. All that information you have that goes in your tax return goes in automatically. And if you're an accountant, it all goes in for your clients automatically. So that you can focus on the high level stuff and not the drudgery. So, viewed from the lens of really what life should be. What's our aspiration? Our ideal? Keep people focused on that. And it sure has helped motivate us. I mean, we should be finding a lot of money for small businesses. And we're launching, announcing today ways that we help small businesses find more money. We should be eliminating the drudgery of running a small business. Nobody wants to do the book work. Instead, they want to do what they love to do in business. It could be working with clients. It could be the craft of doing the business. It could be selling new business. Every business person has something they love to do. And it's not doing the books. And that yet, people still have to do it. We want to have it on your phone so you don't have to do the books. It's done automatically. And you got a question, boop boop, there's the answer. >> So you mentioned the phone. Is that the next big growth opportunity? Mobile this is top priority with so many different sectors right now. >> Yeah, yeah. It's the growth today. In fact, every new feature and new benefit that Sasan Goodarzi showed today in his keynote address. Every one of 'em, he showed it on a mobile phone. Every one. It's the fastest growing. TurboTax the great consumer business. It's the fastest growing platform by far. So yeah, if you can take stuff off a desktop and put it so automatically that you can just get on your phone, say, okay, yep, do it. >> Right, right. >> Yeah, so that's where we're aiming a lot of our innovation. And these are amazing platforms. A simple example, the fastest growing form of employment in the United States and in fact, in the world is self employed. Where you think of an Uber driver or someone like that. People who work as consultants, contractors, they work for themselves. They've got to keep track of all their business expenses. Or they lose that money on their tax returns. Money out of their pocket. They got to keep track of every individual business expense which of course, they co-mingle with their personal checking, personal credit card. And they got to keep track of every mile they drive for business. And keep it separate with contemporaneous records that the IRS requires with the starting odometer reading, the ending odometer reading, and the destination and what it was for. Well you can imagine that's such a pain in the butt. So many independent business people, freelancers fail. Or they do some but not others. And that's money right out of their pocket. Thousands of dollars they don't get. They should get that they deserve. So we've devised and a team really creative work, QuickBooks Self Employed. It sits on your phone in your pocket. It reads what's coming from your bank and your credit cards and anytime you're stopped at a stop light or you've got two minutes before a meeting starts. You can go through and say oh, that was a business expense, business, business. That was personal, personal. It's that fast. And then you get complete records for your taxes. Oh then mileage. There's lots of software out there that'll track your mileage but it does by pinging the GPS. GPS takes battery. You ping the GPS all day long, what happens? Zhoom. >> Goodbye phone. >> Bye bye phone. So it's worthless. Our guys we launched that. Quickly found out that people stopped using it because it drained their battery just like everyone else. So, three clever engineers. Together with a couple others came up with a really clever idea which we've patented now. And it tracks your location without pinging your GPS all day long. So it doesn't drain your battery. So now you had complete records. It can detect when you're driving and where you started, where you finished. How many miles. Keeps perfect record, just as the IRS requires. And then you just have to tell it which are business, which are personal. And then it learns. Which one are business trips. So that over time, it knows when you're driving on business and you don't have to do anything. You get complete tax records. We've got businesses using it who get on average $7,000 of tax deductions. $7,000 of tax deductions. Because of the way it tracks. >> And you're taking advantage of the platform. You're taking advantage of the accelerometer. >> Yes. >> More importantly I think. The thing about mobile that most people don't maybe consciously think of is the way we interact with it as you said is little bits of time here, there, and everywhere. >> Scott: Yes. >> It's not the sit down thing. But I think what I think is most exciting about this show is it's a lot of talk about technology. But at the end of the day, it's really more about business. And small business. And small medium size business. And getting business done. >> Scott: Yes. >> And letting people do those dreams like the gal that was on the keynote. >> Scott: Yes. >> Letting her build her company and her franchise. And not have to worry about am I getting all the right deductions. >> That's right. I think the technology is the enabler. But it's all to enable what? What are we trying to deliver? And you saw it, in the kind of lead of slides. We're trying to fuel the success of small business. This is all about success. The technology's an enabler but that's not the center, the star of the show. The star of the show are small businesses and how they succeed. And how the suite of things that hundreds of developers and hundreds of software entrepreneurs who all build for the QuickBooks ecosystem. The new methods, and new ways to drive small business success. And at the end of the day, we don't measure ourselves with software. We measure ourselves with how much more money did we make small businesses? How much time did we save them so they could do what they love? How did we help them grow their business? Running a small business is a, and I know from starting Intuit, it absorbs who you are. You identify with that business. It is your representation to the world. To your spouse, to your in-laws. And if that business is successful, it's something about you that's irreplaceably positive. If that business is struggling, it strikes to the core. I mean, you feel bad. You look bad. So helping businesses succeed. And move them from mediocrity to success is such a home run for the psychology of this growing part of our economy. For each individual, it's your report card on yourself. And we can help make those report cards much better. That's our mission. That's how we're going to change the world so, so dramatically. People can't imagine going back. >> I'd say that you've already changed it dramatically. And it is exciting to hear about the next steps but this whole blend of strategy and execution and culture you're being commended for. It's just a great example of all those factors coming together and make great things happen for a lot of people around the globe so congratulations for that and thank you for being with us Scott. We appreciate the time here on theCube. >> Jeff, John thank you very much. This was a pleasure. >> Jeff: Thank you. >> You bet. Back with more from San Jose in just a bit. You're watching theCube here on SiliconANGLE TV. (techno music)

>>Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Supercomputing Conference 2022, otherwise known as SC 22 here in Dallas, Texas. This is day three of our coverage, the final day of coverage here on the exhibition floor. I'm Dave Nicholson, and I'm here with my co-host, tech journalist extraordinaire, Paul Gillum. How's it going, >>Paul? Hi, Dave. It's going good. >>And we have a wonderful guest with us this morning, Dr. Panda from the Ohio State University. Welcome Dr. Panda to the Cube. >>Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot to >>Paul. I know you're, you're chopping at >>The bit, you have incredible credentials, over 500 papers published. The, the impact that you've had on HPC is truly remarkable. But I wanted to talk to you specifically about a product project you've been working on for over 20 years now called mva, high Performance Computing platform that's used by more than 32 organ, 3,200 organizations across 90 countries. You've shepherded this from, its, its infancy. What is the vision for what MVA will be and and how is it a proof of concept that others can learn from? >>Yeah, Paul, that's a great question to start with. I mean, I, I started with this conference in 2001. That was the first time I came. It's very coincidental. If you remember the Finman Networking Technology, it was introduced in October of 2000. Okay. So in my group, we were working on NPI for Marinette Quadrics. Those are the old technology, if you can recollect when Finman was there, we were the very first one in the world to really jump in. Nobody knew how to use Infin van in an HPC system. So that's how the Happy Project was born. And in fact, in super computing 2002 on this exhibition floor in Baltimore, we had the first demonstration, the open source happy, actually is running on an eight node infinite van clusters, eight no zeros. And that was a big challenge. But now over the years, I means we have continuously worked with all infinite van vendors, MPI Forum. >>We are a member of the MPI Forum and also all other network interconnect. So we have steadily evolved this project over the last 21 years. I'm very proud of my team members working nonstop, continuously bringing not only performance, but scalability. If you see now INFIN event are being deployed in 8,000, 10,000 node clusters, and many of these clusters actually use our software, stack them rapid. So, so we have done a lot of, like our focuses, like we first do research because we are in academia. We come up with good designs, we publish, and in six to nine months, we actually bring it to the open source version and people can just download and then use it. And that's how currently it's been used by more than 3000 orange in 90 countries. And, but the interesting thing is happening, your second part of the question. Now, as you know, the field is moving into not just hvc, but ai, big data, and we have those support. This is where like we look at the vision for the next 20 years, we want to design this MPI library so that not only HPC but also all other workloads can take advantage of it. >>Oh, we have seen libraries that become a critical develop platform supporting ai, TensorFlow, and, and the pie torch and, and the emergence of, of, of some sort of default languages that are, that are driving the community. How, how important are these frameworks to the, the development of the progress making progress in the HPC world? >>Yeah, no, those are great. I mean, spite our stencil flow, I mean, those are the, the now the bread and butter of deep learning machine learning. Am I right? But the challenge is that people use these frameworks, but continuously models are becoming larger. You need very first turnaround time. So how do you train faster? How do you do influencing faster? So this is where HPC comes in and what exactly what we have done is actually we have linked floor fighters to our happy page because now you see the MPI library is running on a million core system. Now your fighters and tenor four clan also be scaled to to, to those number of, large number of course and gps. So we have actually done that kind of a tight coupling and that helps the research to really take advantage of hpc. >>So if, if a high school student is thinking in terms of interesting computer science, looking for a place, looking for a university, Ohio State University, bruns, world renowned, widely known, but talk about what that looks like from a day on a day to day basis in terms of the opportunity for undergrad and graduate students to participate in, in the kind of work that you do. What is, what does that look like? And is, and is that, and is that a good pitch to for, for people to consider the university? >>Yes. I mean, we continuously, from a university perspective, by the way, the Ohio State University is one of the largest single campus in, in us, one of the top three, top four. We have 65,000 students. Wow. It's one of the very largest campus. And especially within computer science where I am located, high performance computing is a very big focus. And we are one of the, again, the top schools all over the world for high performance computing. And we also have very strength in ai. So we always encourage, like the new students who like to really work on top of the art solutions, get exposed to the concepts, principles, and also practice. Okay. So, so we encourage those people that wish you can really bring you those kind of experience. And many of my past students, staff, they're all in top companies now, have become all big managers. >>How, how long, how long did you say you've been >>At 31 >>Years? 31 years. 31 years. So, so you, you've had people who weren't alive when you were already doing this stuff? That's correct. They then were born. Yes. They then grew up, yes. Went to university graduate school, and now they're on, >>Now they're in many top companies, national labs, all over the universities, all over the world. So they have been trained very well. Well, >>You've, you've touched a lot of lives, sir. >>Yes, thank you. Thank >>You. We've seen really a, a burgeoning of AI specific hardware emerge over the last five years or so. And, and architectures going beyond just CPUs and GPUs, but to Asics and f PGAs and, and accelerators, does this excite you? I mean, are there innovations that you're seeing in this area that you think have, have great promise? >>Yeah, there is a lot of promise. I think every time you see now supercomputing technology, you see there is sometime a big barrier comes barrier jump. Rather I'll say, new technology comes some disruptive technology, then you move to the next level. So that's what we are seeing now. A lot of these AI chips and AI systems are coming up, which takes you to the next level. But the bigger challenge is whether it is cost effective or not, can that be sustained longer? And this is where commodity technology comes in, which commodity technology tries to take you far longer. So we might see like all these likes, Gaudi, a lot of new chips are coming up, can they really bring down the cost? If that cost can be reduced, you will see a much more bigger push for AI solutions, which are cost effective. >>What, what about on the interconnect side of things, obvi, you, you, your, your start sort of coincided with the initial standards for Infin band, you know, Intel was very, very, was really big in that, in that architecture originally. Do you see interconnects like RDMA over converged ethernet playing a part in that sort of democratization or commoditization of things? Yes. Yes. What, what are your thoughts >>There for internet? No, this is a great thing. So, so we saw the infinite man coming. Of course, infinite Man is, commod is available. But then over the years people have been trying to see how those RDMA mechanisms can be used for ethernet. And then Rocky has been born. So Rocky has been also being deployed. But besides these, I mean now you talk about Slingshot, the gray slingshot, it is also an ethernet based systems. And a lot of those RMA principles are actually being used under the hood. Okay. So any modern networks you see, whether it is a Infin and Rocky Links art network, rock board network, you name any of these networks, they are using all the very latest principles. And of course everybody wants to make it commodity. And this is what you see on the, on the slow floor. Everybody's trying to compete against each other to give you the best performance with the lowest cost, and we'll see whoever wins over the years. >>Sort of a macroeconomic question, Japan, the US and China have been leapfrogging each other for a number of years in terms of the fastest supercomputer performance. How important do you think it is for the US to maintain leadership in this area? >>Big, big thing, significantly, right? We are saying that I think for the last five to seven years, I think we lost that lead. But now with the frontier being the number one, starting from the June ranking, I think we are getting that leadership back. And I think it is very critical not only for fundamental research, but for national security trying to really move the US to the leading edge. So I hope us will continue to lead the trend for the next few years until another new system comes out. >>And one of the gating factors, there is a shortage of people with data science skills. Obviously you're doing what you can at the university level. What do you think can change at the secondary school level to prepare students better to, for data science careers? >>Yeah, I mean that is also very important. I mean, we, we always call like a pipeline, you know, that means when PhD levels we are expecting like this even we want to students to get exposed to, to, to many of these concerts from the high school level. And, and things are actually changing. I mean, these days I see a lot of high school students, they, they know Python, how to program in Python, how to program in sea object oriented things. Even they're being exposed to AI at that level. So I think that is a very healthy sign. And in fact we, even from Ohio State side, we are always engaged with all this K to 12 in many different programs and then gradually trying to take them to the next level. And I think we need to accelerate also that in a very significant manner because we need those kind of a workforce. It is not just like a building a system number one, but how do we really utilize it? How do we utilize that science? How do we propagate that to the community? Then we need all these trained personal. So in fact in my group, we are also involved in a lot of cyber training activities for HPC professionals. So in fact, today there is a bar at 1 1 15 I, yeah, I think 1215 to one 15. We'll be talking more about that. >>About education. >>Yeah. Cyber training, how do we do for professionals? So we had a funding together with my co-pi, Dr. Karen Tom Cook from Ohio Super Center. We have a grant from NASA Science Foundation to really educate HPT professionals about cyber infrastructure and ai. Even though they work on some of these things, they don't have the complete knowledge. They don't get the time to, to learn. And the field is moving so fast. So this is how it has been. We got the initial funding, and in fact, the first time we advertised in 24 hours, we got 120 application, 24 hours. We couldn't even take all of them. So, so we are trying to offer that in multiple phases. So, so there is a big need for those kind of training sessions to take place. I also offer a lot of tutorials at all. Different conference. We had a high performance networking tutorial. Here we have a high performance deep learning tutorial, high performance, big data tutorial. So I've been offering tutorials at, even at this conference since 2001. Good. So, >>So in the last 31 years, the Ohio State University, as my friends remind me, it is properly >>Called, >>You've seen the world get a lot smaller. Yes. Because 31 years ago, Ohio, in this, you know, of roughly in the, in the middle of North America and the United States was not as connected as it was to everywhere else in the globe. So that's, that's pro that's, I i it kind of boggles the mind when you think of that progression over 31 years, but globally, and we talk about the world getting smaller, we're sort of in the thick of, of the celebratory seasons where, where many, many groups of people exchange gifts for varieties of reasons. If I were to offer you a holiday gift, that is the result of what AI can deliver the world. Yes. What would that be? What would, what would, what would the first thing be? This is, this is, this is like, it's, it's like the genie, but you only get one wish. >>I know, I know. >>So what would the first one be? >>Yeah, it's very hard to answer one way, but let me bring a little bit different context and I can answer this. I, I talked about the happy project and all, but recently last year actually we got awarded an S f I institute award. It's a 20 million award. I am the overall pi, but there are 14 universities involved. >>And who is that in that institute? >>What does that Oh, the I ici. C e. Okay. I cycle. You can just do I cycle.ai. Okay. And that lies with what exactly what you are trying to do, how to bring lot of AI for masses, democratizing ai. That's what is the overall goal of this, this institute, think of like a, we have three verticals we are working think of like one is digital agriculture. So I'll be, that will be my like the first ways. How do you take HPC and AI to agriculture the world as though we just crossed 8 billion people. Yeah, that's right. We need continuous food and food security. How do we grow food with the lowest cost and with the highest yield? >>Water >>Consumption. Water consumption. Can we minimize or minimize the water consumption or the fertilization? Don't do blindly. Technologies are out there. Like, let's say there is a weak field, A traditional farmer see that, yeah, there is some disease, they will just go and spray pesticides. It is not good for the environment. Now I can fly it drone, get images of the field in the real time, check it against the models, and then it'll tell that, okay, this part of the field has disease. One, this part of the field has disease. Two, I indicate to the, to the tractor or the sprayer saying, okay, spray only pesticide one, you have pesticide two here. That has a big impact. So this is what we are developing in that NSF A I institute I cycle ai. We also have, we have chosen two additional verticals. One is animal ecology, because that is very much related to wildlife conservation, climate change, how do you understand how the animals move? Can we learn from them? And then see how human beings need to act in future. And the third one is the food insecurity and logistics. Smart food distribution. So these are our three broad goals in that institute. How do we develop cyber infrastructure from below? Combining HP c AI security? We have, we have a large team, like as I said, there are 40 PIs there, 60 students. We are a hundred members team. We are working together. So, so that will be my wish. How do we really democratize ai? >>Fantastic. I think that's a great place to wrap the conversation here On day three at Supercomputing conference 2022 on the cube, it was an honor, Dr. Panda working tirelessly at the Ohio State University with his team for 31 years toiling in the field of computer science and the end result, improving the lives of everyone on Earth. That's not a stretch. If you're in high school thinking about a career in computer science, keep that in mind. It isn't just about the bits and the bobs and the speeds and the feeds. It's about serving humanity. Maybe, maybe a little, little, little too profound a statement, I would argue not even close. I'm Dave Nicholson with the Queue, with my cohost Paul Gillin. Thank you again, Dr. Panda. Stay tuned for more coverage from the Cube at Super Compute 2022 coming up shortly. >>Thanks a lot.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome to the cubes coverage of PagerDuty summit 22. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm on the ground with Michael cooky, the VP of product and marketing at PagerDuty. Michael. It's great to have you on the program. There is great momentum right now at PagerDuty. The company's fourth quarter fiscal 22 financials showed a revenue rise of 34% year over year with figures of 85.4 million for the quarter, for the first time ever. Awesome stuff. Let's talk Michael, about what some of the great things are that, um, attendees can expect from this year's summit. You know, automation has been always at the forefront of PagerDuty's focus on managing critical work, but it's a big focus for this year's summit. Let's unpack why that is. >>Sure, absolutely. Thanks so much for having me, Lisa. It's great to be here. Um, we did just finish a grade quarter. We're super excited about it. I think Summit's a good example. It kind of is aligned around the areas that we've been seeing a lot of success and momentum with our customer base. Um, and automation is definitely one of those pillars without a doubt. Um, you know what we've seen, uh, we've been at this now, uh, for over well over a decade, uh, and we've been investing in automation in kind of two major areas and I'll, and I'll explain why, um, we study our customers and what they need. And I think we can all talk about the limited time that everybody has to get their jobs done today, limited people, right? The, you know, the great rotation or the great resignation is definitely hit hitting, you know, every single industry. >>And so it results in limited skills, uh, and a lot of strain on the people that are trying to get their jobs done every day. Um, we also saw that the more you interrupt someone, so you have a very skilled worker, let's say it's a developer for example, and you're constantly interrupting them to try and get them to help you fix something. Uh, they get super unhappy and we actually on our platform prove they quit their jobs more often when they are interrupted more often. Uh, so you know, that is an area where we think automation can have huge impacts and huge returns to take limited resources and really stretch them a lot further, um, by taking care of repeat work, but also taking some of those higher skilled capabilities and handing them to more people across the enterprise. So the work could be shared across the enterprise. >>That's critical to share that work, but I also find it fascinating that you studied that and actually saw direct correlation of, of developers actually resigning from their jobs. And as you mentioned, the great resignation, something that many companies in every industry are dealing with. Let's talk a little bit about some of the things that we're announced recently. I know you guys are weaving automation actions everywhere to empower more users, to be able to, to be, to take action, to resolve issues faster, which is critical for the customer experience. It's critical for revenue. Talk a little bit about automation actions. What are some of the key things that, that delivers and enables PagerDuty to do for its customers? >>Yeah, great. So, you know, two years ago we acquired an automation company named Rundeck and we got right to work integrating their technology across the PagerDuty operations cloud and automation actions is, is the ability to execute automation from wherever you are. And so that is, um, you know, I think there's two directions to talk about automation. One is kind of what can we automate inside of an incident response? So when something's going wrong, what can we automate? What can we automate inside of our own platform? And then there's, what can we automate out in the customer's environment? So whether that's fixing something that's going wrong on a cloud or in a data center, or, uh, provisioning new resources out on the cloud so that, uh, people can scale their applications more rapidly. Um, all of that is done with automation actions, which you just mentioned. >>And so it's not enough to just be able to send work, to be done somewhere else. You have to kind of do it E everywhere. And so at summit this year, we announced that you'll be able to fire off that automation in real time using event intelligence, which is our machine learning product. So as machine learning learns something, it can then run off and try and take action based on it. And then we're delivering it to all of our users. So inside of, you know, for a responder, who's responding to a problem for a customer service representative who might be working with a customer who's having a problem, giving them automation can totally change the customer experience because now the customer service person is actually empowered, uh, to do diagnostics and try and solve problems. So, so that's right. Automation actions being delivered both in real time and to every different, uh, type of user that that leverages PagerDuty today, >>That's really quite transformative. Michael, it sounds like getting the first line responders, the corrective information that in an automated fashion, because as we know, one of the things that's been in short supply the last couple of years is patients. And one of the risks, several of the risks associated with that are customer churn, you know, poor customer experience, brand reputation, et cetera. What are some of the expected outcomes, um, with, with, uh, automation actions and one obviously speeding, mean time to repair, lowering interruptions, getting problems fixed faster, but from a customer's perspective, what are some of the outcomes that they can expect? >>Awesome. Um, great question. The there's a lot of different ways you can leverage automation, right? You just mentioned a bunch of super high return ones when something's broken and your company's actually losing customer experience or, or revenue, uh, or you're unable to deliver a service to your employees or your users. That is obviously a moment of massive return for automation in those cases. Like you said, you're gonna see a reduction in the requirements to escalate, which means that the first responder can actually solve the problem themselves. Uh, and they're not gonna have to go interrupt that more higher skilled employee. Like we talked about, uh, we see that over 50% of the time, we're actually reducing escalations by using this technology. That also means the problems are getting solved a lot faster, which you also mentioned. Um, so using automation actions to both diagnose what's going wrong, but then actually try and remediate it. >>Um, and as I mentioned earlier, we can do that before you even have to get a human being at all. We can do that with machine learning in real time, which is, uh, super powerful. And then there's a long tail of other ways to leverage, uh, automation in an environment from service provisioning and redundant tasks that are used, that are done for maintenance across an environment or provisioning, uh, provisioning services to developers so that they can get to work faster. So there's a lot to do there. Um, and, and then we're also exploring ways to, to automate, uh, outside of just technical use cases, um, which we talked a little bit about in the product keynote as well. >>One of the things that, that you mentioned earlier is that the, the data that PagerDuty has that demonstrates, um, from a resignation perspective, what happens when developers are, are really taken away from their core job? Is there any data that shows that auto, uh, automation actions, you mentioned, um, a big reduction, 50% reduction in time to respond there is that, is there a direct correlation in actually helping the folks on the front lines stay in the front lines? >>That's right. So, um, and, and also those that are coding coding, right? So, um, the, that 50% reduction means 50% time given back for them to do their primary function, which in this case is building amazing new digital services, whether that's a new customer experience, uh, or a piece of, uh, uh, digital service to drive the business and business efficiency. And so driving this automation access kind of a shock absorber for your business and for the people in your business that are, that are super taxed. And we actually release something called the state, uh, state of digital operations. And, uh, we are updating all that data actually, and announced, uh, today that that is now available on our website as well. So you can hop on there and actually see live statistics off of our platform that we culminate, uh, along with some survey statistics that are trending all of this information you're mentioning in terms of people being interrupted and then, uh, you know, churning actually from their job because they've been interrupted so many times. And so that's right, this will directly impact that. Um, and, and as we bring automation out from just developers, we hope to have an impact across the rest of the business in a very similar way, >>Absolutely transformative. I mean, you know, we, when we think about churn, it impacts to revenue. I always think the customer experience and the employee experience are inextricably linked. And, and I think what you're talking about really demonstrates that you need to be able to empower the right employees to resolve incidents, to absorb that shock as you talked about. And that's really something that for any organization in any industry globally, is no longer a nice to have. It's really something that I think sounds like a competitive differentiator that PagerDuty can help organizations really uncover and bring to the surface. >>Yeah, you're, you're hitting on one of my favorite topics, I think in, in the service of the customer in service of like customer delight and customer obsession, all of the business is now centered on the customer, which, which means that the back office is the front office they're coming together. And, um, and with the pandemic and kind of the transition that we all took into dependency on digital services, it's all starting to look very similar. And so, um, because of that, we're able to now expand our impact at PagerDuty across so much more of a business, uh, out to, uh, everything, including employee experience, um, and also accelerating the time to productivity for your, for your business, so that you can serve your customer faster. Um, we, we acquired a company recently, uh, named catalytic and, uh, their help, their technology helped us kind of accelerate a couple of pieces to market that are just the tip of the iceberg, uh, for kind of being able to rapidly automate and configure workflows for anyone at the enterprise, whether that's for a customer, uh, experience or whether it's, uh, it's to keep your business productive or efficient, uh, for business users. >>So unpack those incident workflows, you talked about the, the catalytic acquisition that was just from March. Talk to me about the incident workflows and what were customers asking for that really kind of generated this new capability that PagerDuty recently announced. >>So, you know, people lean on PagerDuty at, at all types of times, but as we've already kind of talked about the most critical time is when something is broken for the business that is vital to their business. And so when those moments happen, you know, we call those major incidents and when you're responding to a major incident across a business, you really have to do everything you can because every second really matters. And so, um, we, you know, Catalytics technology enables flexible, automated workflows of behavior when certain conditions exist. And so the first thing you're seeing from that technology is called incident workflows, which when something's going wrong, enables you to kind of automate steps of processes very, very quickly that can be carried out company wide. So this could be something like when we see that, uh, critical service is impacted, we wanna automatically send out updates across the business. >>We wanna automatically create a, an area to go troubleshoot on a, on a collaborative, you know, collab, ops platform. We wanna automatically invite the right people into that room and automatically deliver diagnostics to them and automation to them. So they can troubleshoot faster instead of a human having to take those steps in terms of firefighting and trying to re, trying to pull those coordination steps together. Now we can configure that quickly and have it, you know, happen automatically and it, and it can actually happen without a human having to trigger it. So again, this is about something's broken, we're responding. We need to be as fast as possible. You can't rely on a human anymore. You really need, you know, the, what the earlier automation we talked about was automating off our platform. Incident workflows is automating on the operations cloud. So taking steps to solve the problem when it goes wrong without needing a human being to take those steps, >>When you're in customer conversations, Michael, and you, you talk about these capabilities. What are some of the things that, that you talk to the customers about, about why automation is going to be, I wouldn't even say critical for, or, I mean, business critical table stakes for organizations it's no longer okay. To just default to depend on humans. You know, the, the customers on the other end don't want to, you know, a couple seconds delay is hugely impactful. >>Yeah. We, we call that the abandonment threshold, but that's absolutely right. So we've already talked a lot about why you have, why the, why our businesses and our employees depend on digital. I think we've covered that what's important to understand is what is digital. So contemporary applications and digital services, there, there are tens and hundreds of microservices that are powering these things. And then there's thousands of different dependencies between those services. Um, and so supporting these and understanding these is difficult. So, so being able to interpret are they operating correct correctly? And if not, what do we do about it? It's actually a problem that humans can't calculate. Um, then you throw into change, right? So everybody's now competing with the digital service. So they want to innovate as fast as possible, get new capabilities out, keep that customer excited and happy with your offering. >>And so we need to push change on that complex environment. Very often, it's a pretty hairy mess to try and solve and to do that in real time. So we, we use two arms of an area that, that we call AIOps. One is using machine learning to interpret all of those signals and figure out is what is going on? Is it happening correctly? Is something going wrong? Is, is something looking like it's going wrong. And also to determine how to fix it, if it is going wrong, do we need a person to do this or not? And then that other side is, is what we've talked about today, which is you can't bring a human in to do all the work. So you have to know how to solve the problem. So the combination of is, is what we call AIOps it's it's event intelligence, which is machine learning to understand the situation. And then it's automation to actually go out and react to it and solve the problem. That's that's this branch of our, of our platform. >>Got it. You guys have PagerDuty has 19,000 customers, including 60% of the fortune 100. Is there a customer example that, that jumps to mind to you that really articulates the value of AI ops for example, and what it is at PagerDuty is able to allow its customers to do >>Sure. Um, and, and now a million users on this platform, which is just phenomenal. And so that, that actually helps us design better machine learning, because we have so many people using this platform. Um, you know, there's, there's a great example that was just shown on in our kickoff. So if you haven't seen the product, uh, keynote, you really have to see it. We run what are called, uh, day in the life demos. And in this case, this kind of hit close to home for us, because a lot of us have been sitting in delays in airports around the globe, as we get back to our travel, uh, and, and get back to seeing people face to face. Um, but, but what we showed there is, is, uh, very, very, uh, close to real world example where, um, you know, a, a ticketing, uh, service goes down for a travel agency and it impacts everything from directly their end users, customer satisfaction, but also partner engagements and employee behaviors. >>And whether they can get the right people booked to staff, that flight, et cetera, it really throws logistical chaos on the entire business. And it's all based on digital systems. And in that you can see our, our platform helps them react and manage customers at the customer service layer. It gets the developers and the infrastructure, and it teams reacting to solve the problem instantly. They use automation to solve the problem, and they actually learn some new things in that situation. And they bring that back to the flexible workflows. So it's a, it's basically what I call a virtuous loop as they solve a problem, and they realize they could do it faster, better, quicker, or automate more of it. You're now able to bake that back into the platform so that you're basically getting better and better and better every single time you are called to solve a problem. And so over time, we like to bring our customers up. We what we call the operational maturity model. And, uh, it, in, in, in, at the end of that journey, you should really be focused on critical work for you and for your business. And the rest of it should really be handled by our platform. >>An operational flywheel that is constantly learning is impactful. As you described in that example across an entire enterprise. So many different facets there, last question, Michael, as we're running out of time, here, you, as I mentioned in the very beginning, PagerDuty is coming off amazing momentum from FY 22. What are some of the things that you're seeing, uh, for the year ahead that, that you're excited about or that we can expect? >>Uh, great question. Um, so you just saw us release automation in every area for every user. Um, I think what you're gonna see us do across automation is bring faster and more powerful value out of the box with our automation capability. Some of that will be, for example, finding homogeneous, what we call runbooks or automation calls that you can make shared across all platforms. One of our recent announcements was the ability to host process automation, either in the PagerDuty operations cloud or behind your own firewall. We also have a hosted SAS offering for process automation. And what we're gonna do is enable the very common set of automation capabilities across all of those. So it's a homogeneous environment, no matter how you are hosting or scaling your automation. So that's one, and I think number two is this workflow stuff we touched on very, very much just the tip of the iceberg, uh, leveraging kind of a no code rapid interface to build workflows, to solve the highest ROI problem, but then we're gonna take that technology. We're gonna apply it to every downstream, repetitive service in your environment. So everything from employee onboarding to critical sales processes, or legal contract management, um, you know, anything that is time critical, you're gonna be able to build these rapid workflows around, um, and PagerDuty's gonna help you keep your business, uh, you know, healthy and, and operating around them. And so that's, that's where we're gonna be focused, uh, is for the, for the next 12, uh, months I would say. And, uh, it's gonna be an exciting run. >>It is gonna be exciting run. I better let you get back to work as VP of product and marketing. You got a lot to do Michael >>That's right. Well, I'll get back to it. I appreciate the time though. Thanks for so much for the chat, Lisa, >>Thank you so much for Michael Cook. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes on the ground coverage of PagerDuty summit 22.