(active upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE's presentation of Women in Tech global event, celebrating International Women's Day. I'm John furrier, host of theCUBE. Got a great guest, Cornelia Robinson, Who's the Senior Manager of the Global Inclusion and Outreach Programs at AWS, Amazon web services. Cornelia, welcome to this cube presentation. >> Thank you, so happy to be here, John. >> So you got a very interesting background, about involving in communities, you're in outreach and inclusion, which is awesome. International Women's Day is about global celebration. What's your role at AWS? Tell us more about what you do there and we'll get into some of the background and your experiences. >> All right. Thanks John. So, I lead a program that's called Inclusion and Outreach within AWS, specifically for our global data center community. So, AWS infrastructure is all over the world and we strive to make sure that in the places where we build and operate our cloud, that we're being good neighbors and also striving to be Earth's best employer. And so my role, it ultimately aligns both of those things into both inclusion and outreach. >> One of the things that we see with the cloud is it... There's always the talk, "Oh, democratization and..." If you see what cloud has done inside the global communities, it's been interesting. As regions expand, cloud computing has actually enabled kind of new things. You're seeing a lot more diversity inclusion, women events for instance, in Bahrain was one we saw a lot. Asia Pacific and all around the world you're seeing a lot more community because of the opportunities around the new applications and the new use cases is creating economic, but also empowering opportunities. And you've had a lot of experience in there and seeing some of these trends up close, what have you seen around this? Cause this is a new thing that cloud's enabling. This new revitalization inside these communities and areas. >> Yeah, cloud is definitely an enabler and it also enables people to scale, right? In ways that you wouldn't have been able to scale in the past. With AWS, it's like flip on a switch and all of a sudden you have access to so much compute power. It's actually incredible and it's exciting to be a part of this movement. >> How did you get started with AWS? >> I guess the way that I would describe it is tech kind of found me. I have an unusual background to be in tech. So, I graduated from law school and I was looking for a job and ended up in procurement. And then some years later, I got a call from AWS and I thought that it sounded like an interesting opportunity. I'd have an opportunity to build some new things and try some new things. And so, I said, "Hey, why not?" And that's how I ended up at AWS, starting out in our Northern Virginia office. And then I moved to Seattle for about five years. And now I'm back in the Northern Virginia area. >> So you're an Amazonian, true and true then. You've seen all the growth. But I think the thing about at Amazon is just that there's so much opportunities internally. A lot of people don't know that and I'd love to get your take on what it was like moving from procurement, which probably was very structured and good fit there, to Amazon Web Services, which was at that time just growing really fast and you built a global community program. So, kind of two worlds. Take us through that. >> Yeah, you're right. Procurement and community engagement are very different in many ways, but also very similar in many ways as well. With community engagement, we were completely starting from scratch with the idea of a structured community engagement program. Even though there was an element of community engagement that was happening in our infrastructure locations. So ultimately, the way that I ended up making that shift is that I was in an offsite, which is a team meeting, where people who have different functions come together and we were discussing opportunities that we had to just do a better job overall, because as you know, that's one thing that we're always looking at as Amazonians. It's how can we be better and show up better for our customers. We're always trying to start with our customers and work backwards to meet their needs. And so, one of the things that was identified in that discussion is community engagement. We had an opportunity to be even more engaged than we already were and to do it in a structured way. And so, I shot my hand up and said, "I like trying things, let me try this." And the rest is history. It's been about four years. >> And obviously you had to go through... (voice distortion noise drowns out other sounds) And all that procedure. Amazon is pretty open about ideas. Is that true? Is that a true thing? Is that what it's like there? People say that they'd like to try things and then if it works, they double down on it. Is that kind of how this went down? >> That's exactly how it went down, John. So, when I think about the process of working backwards, it's really something that never stops. And again, community engagement was all about working backwards from the needs of our customers. And in this instance, when I think about my customer, my customer is our community members. It's community members who live and work in our data center regions. And also our employees who are living and working and raising their families in those regions. >> What was the double down moment? When did you say, "Wow, this is working." When you developed this program. When were some of those moments, where you said, "Wow, this is actually working." And take us through some of those progressions. >> Some of the moments that really stand out to me are moments where I've been in the community and I say, "AWS." And someone says, "Oh, what's AWS?" And then you'll hear someone else chime in and explain, "Oh, AWS does all of these great things in the community." So, that actually happened. It was our very first AWS Girls' Tech Day, we'd scaled it from a small program into a global program. We went from having one in one year to having eight the next year around the world. And at this particular AWS Girls' Tech Day, someone did ask that question. It was a little girl. She was standing next to her sister. And when she asked me what AWS is, her sister looked at her and said, "You don't know what AWS is? "AWS does so much in our community "and AWS has this big space in my school." And she went on and on about how much she works with our employees and how excited she is about technology. And also those are those moments where you say, "You know what? This is working." And it's really working. >> That's awesome. What advice would you give people who are developing a community program? Because you're a pioneer, this has been a top priority for people now, in all companies and all groups, all tribes, as community is becoming a really important part of our fabric of society and business. People are sourcing information, they're sourcing relationships and jobs and in products. We are seeing a lot of organic community. What advice would you give folks who are developing a community program? >> There are few things. So, for me the biggest and most important thing is working backwards. So, start with your customer, who is your customer? It's really important to listen to them and to identify their needs. In this community engagement space, you have a lot of things being thrown at you all the time. You also have your own ideas and it's like, "Oh, it'd be really cool "if we did this thing." But is that really what the community needs? Is that really what the community wants? So, when I first started in this role, that was the most important thing and it continues to be the most important thing. I started picking up the phone, talking to people, going to a region, talking to folks who actually live and work in the community, understanding their perspectives, understanding their needs. There was a lot of discovery during that time. They were able to tell me things that I never would've even thought of. Never would've known, wouldn't have been able to consider because I wasn't a part of that community at the time. And so, that's the thing about becoming a community member, you got to be able to sit down and listen. And so, the principle of working backwards, it just applies so well in that instance. And so, that's the first thing. It's listening, understanding your customers, knowing who they are, and then trying to get as many perspectives as you can. And the next thing I would say is think big with your customers, right? And think big on behalf of your customers, but then from there, start somewhere. Because if you try to execute on the really big thing all at once, now, it may not go as well as you'd hoped it would. And you could actually diminish trust. So, we started working on just a couple of things based on customers needs. And as we were able to prove that they were successful and constantly get that feedback from customers saying, "Yeah, this works or that doesn't work." That's how we then eventually started to scale the program. >> Yeah. That trust angle, (voice distortion noise drowns out other sounds) because you look at trust. If you overplay your idea and it blows up, then no one's going to be motivated. Take little baby steps. I Love that insight. Great call out there. What about this Think Big Space you mentioned, and that other example about in the school, because I like this idea of having this Think Big Space that you pointed out. Is that just the place that you guys could provide? Or was that something that they did? The customer did or the community did? Can you share more about the Think Big Space? >> Yes. Our Think Big Spaces. So, the Think Big Space also started as a result of sitting down in a conference room with some teachers and administrators in a local school district, actually, here in the Northern Virginia area. And the teachers were talking about the fact that as teachers, there's a lot of emerging technology and it can be difficult to keep up with, what's next? What's current? What's next? What do we need? How do we help our students prepare for jobs that may not even exist right now? And so, it just seemed to align so well with our leadership principles within Amazon, learn and be curious, think big. And initially, they threw out the idea of a Tech Lab and we started working back and forth and thinking, "Well, how do we make this "a space where students would actually "come and learn and explore "and make things and get their hands dirty "and really be creative "and tie it back to technology "and just being really disruptive." And together, we came up with the idea of, "Hey, we got to teach students to think big." So, we started working on the first Think Big Space together. The school district actually hired an instructional lead and we worked with them to design curriculum and now there's a classroom, it's got eight Amazon's leadership principles on the walls and the students come in they are engineers for the day. And we've been able to scale that program globally to other locations. We've got Think Big Spaces in Ireland and Australia and India and of course in the US. And it's been really exciting to see how students get so excited when they're able to tinker and try new things. And they know that if they break something it's okay because we can come up with a way to fix it. And in the process of fixing it, they come up with something else. And we teach them about working backwards and it's just really fun. It's an exciting program to be a part of. And I've been excited just to see the growth and the way that our community members have benefited from it. >> It's really such an amazing program if you think about it because you're training builders and you're giving them a place to be disruptive, which is a natural part for young people to do and do it in a safe environment where they can build something and have fun doing it. It's amazing. >> That's right. So congratulations, that's a great program. Let me get into the theme here, on this International Women's Day around breaking the bias it's one of the core principles of this year's event globally and for International Women's Day, break the bias is the theme. Where do you see bias? and what would you like to see change? And what does change look like? >> Yeah. So, I would say, with the experience of setting up in communities, activities, and also collaborating with schools, what we see is that bias starts early. This is not something that people show up for work and all of a sudden there's all of this bias. There's bias in the way that young people and students are socialized. And so, you start to see things at an early age where girls may be encouraged to do things that are different. So, maybe girls are not encouraged to take on leadership roles or they're getting pushed into the arts. Of course, there's nothing wrong with arts, but we should be encouraging people to pursue certain areas based on interest and not on gender. And if we want to really break bias, we've got to think about the seeds that we plant. So, we've got to be really careful about what we say, how we nurture. It's about, "You can do this. "Yes. Try it, see." Not, "Oh, no, you shouldn't do this "because you're a girl." No, you're a girl and you belong here. You should be here. We need more people like you, you're going to do really big things. Like you've got to start telling students this at an early age, because all it takes, sometimes is one person to tell a student that they can't do something. And then if they believe them, then it can change their whole trajectory. And so, for me, when it comes to breaking the bias, it starts really early. It starts really, really early. >> Yeah. And I think... (voice distortion noise drowns out other sounds) Even like the Think Big program you mentioned, which sounds so exciting, it's just providing access. And I think having an open collaboration is key, but role models matter too. You want to see people in there too. I think this comes up a lot. what's your view on that? Because when you see people in positions, they're inspiring. And I think that also comes up a lot in these conversations. >> Yeah, definitely. When you see people in positions and you see people who look like you, you see yourself in that person and you say, "Hey, maybe if they can do it, "I can do it too." And so, it is important for us to have great strong role models who can show up and who can be there for students. That's one of the things that we try to do with our programming. So, as we develop programs like the Think Big Space, it's not just, "Okay, well we have a Think Big Space "and that's the end." It's we have a Think Big Space and our employees are coming into the Think Big Space. They're engaging with the student, they're volunteering, they're taking on causes in their community. And it provides that natural mentorship and ability for students to just see themselves. Because again, if you don't see yourself reflected, then you also may be receiving a message that says, "Okay. Well, that's not for me." >> Yeah. I was talking with a leader at AWS and she's in space area and we were talking about how the younger generation are nerd native, she called it. And they're born with inherent tech now. So, unlike when we were born, we had to kind of just found us, or we stumbled into it, or we got addicted somehow to tech. Now they got the tech around them. And I think this is an interesting new dynamic that could play well for the bias issue. And would love to get your reaction to that, as the generations come in, they're seeing all the world problems, they're seeing the digital transformation it's native to them. So, I wonder what your thoughts are. How we could be better at, I don't know, shaping the paths, pathways, multiple pathways. Seems to be many opportunities. So, if people are nerd native, how do we do that? So, we had a great riff on that. I'd love to get your reaction on that. >> Yeah. I think that we have to make sure that we are fostering this idea of playing outside of the box instead of in the box. It used to be with really traditional careers. If I want to be a doctor, I go to medical school, right. If I want to be a lawyer, I go to law school. If I want to work in tech, what do I do? Well, here's the thing, with tech, you're engaging in tech so much. I remember that when my nephew and nieces were little, before they could even read, they could do things on my phone. Like, I would get my phone and all of a sudden I had all of these game apps. How did they know how to do that? It's like you can't even read a word, but you can put all of these apps on my phone. They're engaging with technology. And so, how do we take that and nurture it and say, "Hey, just embrace it." Just put more technology in front of students, let them break things, let them fix things. I remember being a part of a panel with a woman who is an engineer and she said she became an engineer because she liked to break things though. So, she'd break her computer and she would get in trouble for it. She would be told, "Hey, figure out "how to put it back together." And so, if we can create more environments and encourage students that it's not about perfection, let's be inventive here. Let's try new things. Let's think outside the box. Think big, go find a solution. Go find an issue and work backwards from the issue that someone is having to come up with a solution that works and then get feedback. That process, that can start early. It doesn't have to be, once you're in a full fledged career, you can start that at any age. >> Cornelia, great insights. (voice distortion noise drowns out other sounds) My final question, what's new for you? What are you going to be up to? What's next? What are you going to break next? What are you going to do? >> So, what's new for me. I now lead Inclusion and Outreach within AWS for our data center community. And so, I'm back really to square one when it comes to doing a lot of listening, trying to understand. Understanding what the things are that are pain points within and outside of the organization. And I'll be working with employees and community members to continue iterating, and to continue solving problems and working together on those solutions. And so, I'm really excited about it. Hopefully, at some point we'll be able to come back together and I'll be able to give you some insight and how that's going. >> Well, we certainly will. We appreciate your time and thanks for joining our cube community. We really appreciate it. You're now cube alumni. Our door is always open here at theCUBE, and we want to hear more of those stories. We're going to do a lot more coverage, a lot more sharing of stories, certainly in this area, that's important and we're committed to it. Thank you for your time today and sharing the insights and your experience on the Women in Tech celebration of International Women's Day. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. Happy International Women's Day. >> Okay. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrie, your host. Thanks for watching the presentation of Women in Tech global event, celebrating International Women's Day. This is the season one episode one, of our ongoing program that we're going to have here on theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soft instrumental music)

[lively music] >> Man: Live from Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCube, covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation and Pivotal. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost, John Troyer. Happy to welcome back to the program, actually a former colleague of mine, Cornelia Davis, Senior Director of Technology at Pivotal. Cornelia, it's great to see you. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> All right, so why don't you fill in our audience a little bit about your role at Pivotal, you've been involved since before the foundation in early days of everything happening. >> Yeah, and in fact I have been working with Cloud Foundry for longer than the Pivotal Company's existed. As you know, Stu, you and I used to work together at EMC in the corporate CTO office. >> Yeah, I remember a company named EMC. [Laughing] >> Yep. And I worked in the architecture group and we did architecture in emerging tech. And about five years ago, my boss, who you know, Tom McGuire, said, "You know, this platform as a service thing, I think is going to be pretty disruptive, and I want you to start looking at it. And so naturally we were EMC, VMware was incubating Cloud Foundry already, so I started playing with Cloud Foundry. So that was way back in the days of Cloud Foundry version 1.0. I'm one of those people who got to raise my hand and say, "Yes, I've been to every single Cloud Foundry Summit." [Stu Laughing] But fast forward then we had the Pivotal spin-off, and since the Pivotal spin-off, I joined the Cloud Foundry team proper, and I've been in a role working the product organization, working with James Waters, who I know you spoke to earlier today, and helping our customers kind of get their arms wrapped around what this...this isn't just the next application platform. How really, it's radically different, and how the applications, it enables a completely different style of application. And so really helping customers grok the differences about that. >> Yeah, Cornelia, I want you to help us dig into this a little bit, because when we look at any of these massive changes, a lot of times we say, you know, the technology is the easy part. It's really the change in mindset, the change in the structure, new skillsets. What are you seeing, what's different now than it was, say, three or five years ago, and what are those customer discussions that you're having? >> Yeah, and that's a great question, and I will say, and thanks for the opportunity to say this, is that the technology isn't always the easy part. [Stu laughs] So let me give you an example. So just earlier today I was on a call where somebody was talking about some user interviews that they had done with some programmers, and what they concluded at the end of that was that programmers really weren't comfortable with the "asynch" model for this particular API, and that they really wanted to just deal with the synchronous stuff. And the answer there is not that we say, "Oh, okay, we'll let you keep doing synchronous." The answer is that yes, there's a technology thing here that's hard, which is starting to think asynchronously and changing the way that we design our applications. So the technology's not always easy, but we have to go there, because in the cloud, where things are so extraordinarily distributed in a way, and the cloud is constantly changing in ways that it never did before, we have to adopt new technology models. So that's the first thing I'll say, is that we definitely, the technology parts are sometimes hard. That said, certainly over the course of the last four years, as I've worked with those customers, in the beginning, I spent a lot of time, as you know, I'm a technologist, so I spent a lot of time at the whiteboard, and sketching out architectures and talking about changes in the architecture of the platform or changes in the architecture of the application, but then I very quickly found myself talking to customers about the other things that are going to need to change around the edges. So if, for example, you want to start deploying software multiple times a day, you're going to have to change your processes, because you can't have the security office have to do a full audit of every change before it goes into production if it's going to happen three or four times a day. And if you do that, then does that imply organizational changes? So I spend a great deal of my time really talking about the whole DevOps and the people and process side of the equation as well. So last week, I was just - I'm part of the programming committee of the DevOps Enterprise Summit, and we just held that last week in London. And there we spent a lot of time talking about those elements as well. >> I spoke with somebody who was at that conference, and they said it was a little bit sobering, because there are people who have adopted a lot of these practices, and then there are people who are trying and then probably people who have not started yet. >> Cornelia: Yeah. >> As Coté calls them "the donkeys without the unicorn horns yet. >> Cornelia: Ah. >> But as you go out to the customer base, obviously part of what Pivotal is doing is really this huge Pivotal Apps push about showing people the culture. I mean, do you feel like it's a push or a pull, does the technology come first, and then the culture, does the CIO yell, or do the developers say, "We want this"? >> So we definitely get a little bit of both. I would say that I have had the great opportunity to work with a great number of these customers, so Allstate, for example, we've seen Allstate here at CF Summit year after year, and Opal spoke about Andy Zitney talking about this three or four years ago. Well, that was IT saying, "Hey," and that was more from the operations side saying, "Hey, we're going to build you a new platform," and then will they come? Now, they of course had to couple that together with, "Okay, we're not just going to build the platform, we have to put things in place to enable people to use it properly. So there's certainly- and that came a little bit more from Andy Zitney's vision. So it was a little bit more from the top, "Hey, we understand there's a better way, we're going to start making this available to you, and we'll teach you along the way." We absolutely see the opposite as well, though. Where we see the groundswell, which sometimes comes from a bunch of really smart people starting to play with the open source things. And saying, "Hey, there's got to be a better way," or the shadow IT. They're frustrated with the three-month cycles, and those things. So it isn't one answer, it's really both. It comes from both sides. >> All right. So Cornelia, you're good at understanding some of those next generation things. One of the terms that we've been talking about for the last couple of years is "cloud-native." Could you help us really kind of tease apart what that means in your customer base, and the way you approach and explain that? >> Yeah. So the term "cloud-native" is brilliant from the perspective of having a term for it that has really taken ahold. Because I would say that three years ago, I used to say to people, "Hey, cloud is not about where you're computing, it's about how you're computing." But in fact, that's not exactly accurate. And so, now that cloud-native is a term that's taken hold, I have modified my statement. And the statement that I like to make now is that, cloud, in fact, is where you compute. It could be a public cloud, it could be a private cloud, but it is more of a location. Cloud-native is the how. So I like to also characterize the cloud and cloud-native, really cloud-native applications, as two fundamental things. One is that cloud-native has reached levels of distribution that we have not seen before. We've been dealing with distributed systems and heck, in universities, there have been courses on distributed systems for 40 years. But even when I started my career 30 years ago, I started my career in aerospace doing embedded systems, and I remember working on a system where we had three processors. You know, that was as distributed as we got. And we actually mapped out on a whiteboard, okay, we're going to run this on this process and parallel with this on this process, and the point there is it was distributed, but we knew exactly what we had, and we could count on that being there. Now, it's reached a completely different, many many orders of magnitude more, in terms of the number of distributed components, as we go to microservices and those types of things. So that's one of the things that I characterize cloud and cloud-native, is highly distributed like we've never seen before. Couple that together with the other thing I just talked about with the embedded systems, that's very different from that, is constantly changing. Always changing. And whether that change is happening because of some catastrophe or that change is happening because we are doing an upgrade, a planned upgrade, it's constantly in flux. And so we have to do things differently for that. And so that, I think really, is what cloud-native is about, is the how, and like I said, highly distributed, constantly changing. >> All right. And what about the role of data, when we talk about that? Distributed architectures, storage is really tough in that kind of environment. >> Cornelia: Yep. >> And therefore, how does data play into it? >> Cornelia: Yeah, so cloud-native apps were really, as an industry starting, and here at CF Summit, people are really kind of grokking what that means. Highly distributed, small, loosely coupled components that we've put together, we'll talk about that collective in just a moment. But they're generally stateless and so on. So we understand cloud-native apps, but cloud-native involves data as well, as you said, now most of our customers that have, as you said, some of them are a little bit further along whether it's DevOps or it's cloud-native architectures, they're a little further along. And those that are quite far along, have a lot of microservices, and so you look at them, and if you look just at the microservices, you think, "Ah, beautiful. Loosely coupled, independent teams, and so on," and then you pull back the curtain, and you realize that those microservices are all tied to a shared database. There's this monolithic Oracle database or SQL server, something at the back end, that they're all tied to. And so in fact, when a team wants to make a rev on a microservice, they might still have to go through some of that planning and lockstep with lots of other teams, because, "Hey, I want to change something in the data." So the data, remember we just talked about highly distributed? Well, on the data side, it's not so highly distributed. Yes, we've got multi data centers, but we have, again, a predictable number of nodes. We know what we've got deployed. We have very rigid architectures and configurations and so on. So when we start to apply cloud-native to data, we look at the same goals we had with cloud-native applications, which is autonomy, so being able to have the different cloud-native components evolve independently, resilience, so that we have bulkheads and air gaps between them, all of those same goals, let's start to apply those to data. >> And you feel that that's not happening today yet. We're earlier in the process yet? >> It hasn't been happening. That's right. We're far far far earlier in the process. And so what we want to start to do is take that monolith that's sitting behind the curtain and we want to start breaking it apart. Now, the industry has definitely gotten to the point where they're starting to tackle this. And that was, I kind of had an epiphany about a year ago, I was working with a customer, talking to them about DevOps, talking about all these cloud-native patterns and practices, and the punch line was it was the data team of this organization. So they didn't understand the solutions, but they were understanding that they had pain points that were very reminiscent of the pain points that their colleagues in the application server teams had had, had been tackling for three or four years. So the types of technologies that we're starting to see emerge and the types of patterns we're starting to see emerge are things like unified logs, like applying Kafka to that problem of having a unified log and that be the source of record. And event-driven systems and those types of things. Every microservice gets its own database, which, yeah, we'll get some of that, but that's a kind of purist and not pragmatic way of looking at things. Caching plays a pretty big role in that, so caching in the past has been all about performance, but now when we start to look at patterns, how can we use caches to help us create those bulkheads and those air gaps so we get additional resilience in our microservices architecture? If we can put caches and there are companies like Netflix, like Twitter, who have done that, who have embedded caching deeply through their entire architecture. >> Well, do you think these technologies will come from the database or, well, let's call it the database projects and vendors themselves, or is that something, those patterns can get built into a platform, say, like Cloud Foundry? >> I think it's going to probably come more from the platform community, which is not to say that database vendors aren't thinking about that, but again, they are keeping the lights on with their existing product, so they have those quintessential business school constraints that are holding them back. >> A quick question on nomenclature. So a few years back as cloud-native was being coined, you also heard about 12-Factor apps, and that was one particular manifesto, and certainly the ops folks, I would call it at the time, said, "Well, wait a minute, that's great for your front end, but where are you storing your state?" >> Cornelia: Exactly. And so I love this conversation about >> Yep. cloud-native data. So that is what we're talking about here? >> That's exactly what we're talking about, is doing that. And so it allows us, it's interesting, because as soon as we take a model where we say, "Okay, every microservice gets its own microdatabase," then of course everybody in any large enterprise says, "Wait a minute, what about my data compliance, my data governance, how do I keep a customer that's stored in this database over here from diverging from the customer record that's stored in this other database?" I mean, we've spent decades talking about the 360 view of customers, because we've already been somewhat more fragmented than we wanted, and our knee-jerk reaction over the last several decades was, let's consolidate everything into one database. But with that comes slowness. It's the proverbial large, large ship that's hard to turn and hard to move. But what's different now is that we're starting to come up with some different patterns of doing that, what we call master data management in the past, we're applying completely different patterns now, where those individual microservice databases are really just seen as a materialized view of some source of record, and that source of record is just a time series of events, and you can always rebuild. You know, it's very interesting, because databases have had a log as a part of their architecture forever. For a very, very long time. And in fact, the log, arguably, is more important than any of the database tables that are stored on disk, because you can always recreate the database tables from the log. Now take that concept and distribute it. That's what cloud-native data is all about. To take what has been a single fabric, and now create a highly distributed, constantly changing fabric for data. And figuring out what those patterns are. >> Cornelia, I want to give you the final word. You've been to all the Cloud Foundry Summits. Either the customers or the event itself, what are some of the things that are kind of new and changing, that people that aren't at the show should know about? >> You know, I was walking down the hallway this afternoon, one thing I'll note that has changed, like I said, I was walking down the hallway with a colleague of mine, and he said, "I have 12 people from a single one of my customers here. 12 people." I spoke with somebody else who said, "Yep, another customer - not a vendor, but a customer - sent 30 people here." So we have- Cloud Foundry Summit in the beginning was a whole bunch of people who were the hobbyists, if you will. So I think we've reached that inflection point where we have the users, not just the hobbyists, but the true users that are going to leverage the platform. That's one thing that's changed. Some of the things- the other interesting thing I think that is really brilliant is the touch that the Cloud Foundry Foundation has. So I'll tell you, I submitted several papers here three years ago, when it was still the Pivotal Show. I could talk about whatever I wanted. I don't always get my papers accepted here now. And that is a good thing. That's a really good thing, so we have really democratized the community, so it truly is a community event. I think that's another thing that's happened, is kind of the democratization of Cloud Foundry, and I love that. >> Cornelia Davis, it's a pleasure to catch up with you, thank you so much for joining us. And John and I will be back with a couple of customers, actually, here at the Cloud Foundry Summit. So stay tuned and thanks for watching theCube. [lively music]

>> Commentator: Live from Palo Alto, it's theCUBE, covering Women Transforming Technology 2017, brought to you by VMware. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Women Transforming Technology held at VMware. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Joining me today is Cornelia Davis. She is the Senior Director of Technology at Pivotal which is the Palo Alto-based company that provides Agile development services on an open source platform. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here. >> So before the cameras were rolling, you started telling me a little bit about your personal story. You're a woman in tech who loves the tech, but you said for the past three years, you've also become an activist and an evangelist for getting more women into this business. Tell us about that transformation. >> Yes, I'll tell you a little bit about that story. I have the gray hair to prove it. I've been doing this for some time. I actually was a woman studying computer science back in the day where we were getting close to equity. >> Rebecca: There was a time when it was-- >> Yeah, there was so back in the '80s, I was majoring in computer science and I think that we were close to 40% at the time, although I have to say even before I was in college, I was always the girl who was out playing soccer with the boys at lunch time. Gender never really seemed to make much of a difference to me but anyway, I got a degree in computer science and then I spent 25 years in the industry and sure, there were times where I would notice that I was the only woman in the room. Actually I would say maybe three or four years ago, I went to a customer opening where they were catering to the developer community and in the room there were 250 developers, I was the only woman. I mean seriously, I was the only woman of 250 and I was like wow. But other than notice it and chuckle about it and even have some of those experiences where maybe somebody assumed that I was the HR person and not the technologist, those types of things, I never really did anything about it. And then about three years ago, I had the great fortune of meeting Robin Hauser Reynolds and Stacy Hartmann who are the two women behind the movie Code: Debugging the Gender Gap, you've seen it? >> Rebecca: Yes, yes. >> A fantastic film, a fantastic piece and had this opportunity to meet them and got involved in the film and Pivotal became a sponsor. They did some of the filming. They did some interviewing of people at Pivotal and it was through that experience and then I got to go to some of the screenings and participate in panels and so on and it was through that experience that I started to understand that it wasn't just curiosity, that it was actually declining, the numbers were declining and that it was a real serious problem. And so after being in the industry for 25 years and not really doing anything about it, I've become an activist and so I spend a lot of time jabbing on about this. I'll give you another example. Last year in January, Pivotal brought most of the company together here in the Bay Area. We brought about 1,200 people into the Bay Area for worldwide kickoff. And the very first talk that they had after our CEO spoke was a talk on diversity and they actually invited me to come up and speak about gender diversity or lack thereof in technology and talked about the Girls Who Code and some of those great programs out there. >> I want to get back to Girls Who Code because I know that you're passionate about it, but I want to also just get back to the moment that you described where you went from chuckling about being the only woman in the room and saying, "Oh it's not silly," to really feeling, "Hey this isn't right. "I want things to be different." What was that moment? Are you trying to recreate that moment for other women as a wake up call? How would you describe your activism? >> I don't know that it was a moment, but the thing that catalyzes me, the thing that makes me really passionate about doing this is that I have this tremendous opportunity. The way that I came into computing personally was at the end of my sophomore year in high school when we were signing up for classes the following year, I was looking at what might I sign up for and I signed up for a computer programming class and then I went off and I joked around that I went off and had a bitchin' summer. That's the stuff we said in the '80s. I went off and had a bitchin' summer. >> We should bring that word back. Let's do it, Cornelia. >> It's a good word. And I came back and had this computer class on my schedule and I was like, "Uh no, no, no, no. "There is no way I'm doing this." And I skipped class for the first two or three days and then I finally went and curiosity got the better of me. I tried it out and I was hooked. Literally that was the moment, not for my activism, but that was the moment where I had like, "Oh my gosh, this is going to change everything. "This is what want to I do." And that's what brought me to computing and that's what makes me an activist now because I didn't realize for those 25 years that other people didn't have those opportunities, that they were actually systemically being discouraged from having those opportunities and so I think that's at the core of my activism is I want people to have the opportunity because I love what I do so much and I think I was mentioning before before we started rolling the cameras that I've been a technologist my whole career. Occasionally I've branched off and tried to do maybe a little bit more leadership or a little bit more of that, but I love the tech so much and it's such a great wonderful career to be in, self-sustaining and all of those things, I want other people to have that opportunity. That's what gets me going. >> I was reading a bio where you're a self-described propeller head and you can find her knee deep in the code and now you want to inspire the next generation and so you've gotten involved with Girls Who Code. Tell us more. >> Yes so it wasn't actually through the film. I think it was just simply, it was serendipitous, right around the time that I was starting to awaken to what was going on in the industry. Working for Pivotal, Pivotal in our San Francisco office, it's a very cool office. It's very different from what I saw in most of my career which was cube farms. It's a very open floor plan, very hip, just a cool place to be. >> What the rest of us East Coasters envisions Silicon Valley to be. >> Yeah, it's really pretty cool. And so the Girls Who Code, for those of you who might be watching that don't know about the Girls Who Code, it's an organization that really targets high school girls and their flagship program is in the summer they have a seven-week immersion program where they bring girls in and they basically code, they learn to code from nine to five every day for seven weeks. It's a pretty intensive program. Well about three years ago, we weren't sponsoring at that level, but we would be a field trip location. One of our close partners, investors, customers, is General Electric. They hosted a group of these 20 girls in their San Ramon office. They came to us for a couple of summers as a field trip location and of course the girls loved it. They walk off the elevator there's snacks, there's drinks. We parent programmed with them. It's a really cool experience. And then last summer, we actually took the next step and hosted our own groups so we had a group of 20 young women who were here in our Palo Alto office for seven weeks learning to code and I had the wonderful opportunity to spend time with them several times throughout the summer and I actually commute to the Bay Area, not everyday but I commute to the Bay Area and the days that I was coming up here in part to see the girls, I'd wake up at four in the morning for my flight and I'd be like, "I get to spend time with the girls today," and I saw it. I saw the girls who in the first week were clearly there because their parents made them be there and they're sitting there like this and they've got the same attitude that I had when I was in high school the first three days like I am not doing this and the same people are standing up at the graduation ceremony at the end of the seven weeks saying, "This changed my life." And one of those young women I'm spending a little bit more time with is now a computer science major at Northwestern, early decision. It's just fantastic to see that light up. That's what gets me going. >> Now why high school? I get high school in the sense that they're old enough to take on a summer job like internship, but what is it about that age do you think that is so critical? >> Yeah so that age, I'll be honest with you, I think is almost too late for a lot of girls because we are able to reach, I just mentioned, that there were girls in there whose parents forced them into that. They had already self-selected out. Just like I had when I was in high school. I had self-selected out. I was way too cool to be in computing and so in some ways high school is a little bit too late. However, I think you nailed it, is that there's an opportunity there that they're mature enough that you can do something as immersive as a seven-week program and these girls are tremendous. These girls after a seven-week program are going back to their high schools and being the president of their Girls Who Code after school clubs and teaching them and I was just spending some time, we had a hangout with them recently where they said when their friends are asking, "What are you going to do this summer?" And the girls said, "I have no idea, "but you know what you should do "is you should do Girls Who Code." She said, "That's all I want to do. "I just want to do Girls Who Code all over again." And so I think you're right, I think it's opportunistic in that they're ready, but unfortunately I think it, like I said, it self-selects a lot of people out. I think fundamentally the thing that we need to do to reach the younger grades, the younger students, is it needs to be part of the curriculum. It absolutely 100% needs to be part of primary school curriculum so that they can get hooked and understand what it is before they self-select out because they're self-selecting out based on a perception and the image that they have of what it is, the Silicon Valley show, that's a perception. Sure it's satyr but young people see that and they don't see it as that. It just looks like something where there's a whole bunch of misbehaving men treating women poorly. >> So on that actually Cornelia, what do you make of the really distressing news that we're hearing that's not necessarily new, there has been the Uber bombshell of last week, but what we know about the culture here and maybe why there were so many women and it was almost 50/50 and then we started to see a drastic change and lower numbers of women in computer science and a lot of women just saying, "Ew, I don't want to be part of that. "I don't want that for my career." What do you say to them and what do you say to the men who are not even knowingly discouraging them from that kind of career? >> Oh, I love what you just said, not even knowingly. One of the things that I spend a lot of time talking with folks about every chance I get is implicit bias. I think that there's definitely overt sexism and in the last week we've seen that big in the news and that is a huge problem. I think I've heard statistics of whatever 60% of women have some level of relatively overt sexism, 100% of us get the implicit, the non-overt, and people who are well-meaning saying things, when they say for example, I was just chatting with a young lady a couple of weeks ago. She's a sophomore in college and she was telling me that last summer during her internship, within the first week or two, her boss was talking to her about her career plans moving forward and was already encouraging her to go more into management than into technology. This person was not evil, wasn't trying to keep women out of technology or keep women out of the most technical parts of a technology career, but he really genuinely believed that, "Maybe women are better at that and not so good at this," and it's really just our implicit biases. So I think that's a big part of it. And for the last year or two, I've been talking about implicit bias and I've been talking about the compensating mechanisms so first of all recognizing your implicit biases and then being conscious about them and then consciously combating them. I've become in the last several months, I would say six months, I've become more and more interested in the idea of how do we actually change those implicit biases. >> And this is men and women. It's not just the men here. >> No question because when I've had conversations where I've spoken for example on implicit bias, I've had women come up to me afterward and say, "I signed my son up for a coding camp. "I never even thought about signing up my daughter." >> Rebecca: Oh, that hurts. >> And I was like, "So you're signing her up now, right?" She's like, "Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah." And so I think it's really interesting to start thinking about how do we actually get rid of them? It's one thing to recognize them and then fight them, but it's another thing to get rid of them. I think the only way we can get rid of them goes back to the statistics that we talked about early on which is I am surprised when I see a woman technologist. That's just the way our brains work. We categorize things. >> We have an idea in our head of what that person looks like. >> We put things in buckets. We wouldn't be able to function in this world with so many different inputs unless we put things into buckets and we just put things into buckets largely based on statistics. And so I'm becoming increasingly interested in really amplifying the voice of women in technology because when we hear women's voices in technology, women who are up there not talking about what we're talking about today which is the gender imbalance, but talking about the tech itself, then we start to normalize, then we start to re-categorize things in our brains so that we're not surprised when we hear a woman talking about something deeply technical or somebody who's doing particle physics or something like that, we're not surprised anymore and say, "Wow she's a rocket scientist," it's normal. That's what I'm interested in doing is getting that to be the norm, not the exception. I think the first step what I would say to people, what I do say to men and women across the industry is first of all recognize it and then let's see what we can do to change it. >> Cornelia Davis, thank you so much. That's good advice, that's good advice. And we'll be right back with theCUBE's coverage of Women Transforming Technology here at VMware. (modern techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation and Pivotal. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my host, John Troyer. Really excited to welcome to the program one of the keynote speakers from this morning, Mojgan Lefebvre who is the SVP and chief information officer. We always love CIOs, from Liberty Mutual Insurance Global Specialty. Thank you for your keynote this morning and thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> So you went through a lot of data and a lot of information in your keynote. Liberty Mutual, you say spent a billion dollars in tech yearly. There's certain technology companies that spend that much. As the CIO, what are some of the biggest things on your plate and we'll get in the discussion of Cloud Foundry and cloud and everything as we go from there. >> Sure so I'd say probably the priorities differ by the business unit you're in. The specialty business has generally been a bit more manual and we have over 200 or so insurance products. So really automating it is very different from automating consumer insurance which is really focused on home and auto. So really right now, our focus is increasing the productivity and the risk assessment for a lot of our underwriters. And then I say probably analytics, pricing. Making sure that we're assessing risks correctly is definitely another point of focus for us. >> Okay with so many products, we understand the rate of change must be difficult. In your keynote you spoke about embracing cloud and agile methodology. Maybe take us back to what some of the pain points were and led to yourself and management to embrace this big change. >> Yeah, absolutely so several things are going on. One is that we see a lot of new players entering the world of insurance, and it both about new capital coming into the world of insurance. Just 'cause there's not enough investments that capital can be put towards so insurance is one place to come to and the other is technology players that are coming into our world. Companies like Metromile, Lemonade, the list goes on and on and so really our world is changing. Technology is driving a lot of that change and so we know that we've got to be a big player in that area as well. And as I said really, we've got to become one of those software companies that can actually sell insurance as opposed to the other way around. I'd say some of the other things that are happening is the fact that our employees. Our consumers now have all these other software companies that they have experience with and so their expectations are very different. They've got one experience when they're at home and then they come into the workplace and it looks like they've gone back 100 years. So that paradigm needs to change. So those are some of the things that have really made us think we have no choice but to truly change the way that deliver software. We've got to get out of this mode where everything takes multiple years and multiple millions of dollars and really at the end of the day. The people that you started the work with are no longer even there to appreciate what you've delivered to them. And usually it's not what they ask for anyway. >> As you adopted the Cloud Foundry platform. One of the things about Cloud Foundry, even very early in it's life cycle was that it was associated with digital transformation, and cloud native. And especially once it was joined up with Pivotal Labs. So how much of, as you all embark on this journey. The great thing about here at Summit, there is a lot of talk about visual transformation. A lot of talk about agile. That's what we were just talking about. Some shows you go to it's a lot about features and a lot about speeds and feeds. And a lot about the latest, greatest. So how much apart of it as you all were adopting this platform? Was that culture of digital transformation surrounding the actual tech. How important was that? >> I think that was very important because again, as I said we know that, that's what the consumers expect. They no longer want things to be manual. They want things to be at the tips of their fingers and so really transforming us from being a company that's very paper intensive to really being more and more digital was critical to us. The very first application that we actually put in the cloud which was in my business unit was for document management in our Al Fresco. And actually what we named it was we're going paperless. As something that we started about three years ago, and today I can say that yep, we are paperless and so the great thing about Al Fresco was that it was indeed cloud native, and that was very important to us. We started out looking at some of the other solutions that are out there. I won't necessarily name them but they did not lend themselves to the cloud. And so really going with a cloud native solution that would enable us to become much more digital and paperless was very critical to us. >> You talked a lot about developer adoption now in your journey. Was that a tough sell at the very beginning or did developers go wait a minute, This is going to save me a lot of time. I'm on board. >> So you mean with Cloud Foundry in general? >> John: With Cloud Foundry, in general. >> So if anything I'd it was probably the developer community that really sorted this out and so by the time that the leadership and management started to pay attention. There were pockets of developers who were just very, very bought into it, and so I would say that went a long way. And then made it easier to sell it to other developers. I say they're much more listening to what their peers are saying than what we have to say. And then really meeting with the Pivotal Labs guys. I'd say those folks have truly a magical way of selling their story and they've truly helped us. Not only sell it to our developers but also sell the story to our business. I'd say that the mindset shift from thinking I'm going to have everything in one go versus no, I'm going to get it in iterations and I'm actually going to trust the fact that the next releases are going to come is a big mind shift and Pivotal was instrumental in helping sell that to us. >> One of the benefits of Cloud Foundry is to give you flexibility as to where your applications and data live. That being said, a majority of customers that have deployed Cloud Foundry are doing it on premises. How do you manage what goes, stays in your own environment. What handles the public cloud. My understanding you're doing quite a bit of AWS today. What's your viewpoint for you and management on public cloud? >> We certainly see public cloud as the future. I know Chip mentioned something about, well it's not going to be cheaper. We're actually counting on that in the end from a total cost of ownership perspective. That it will be cheaper and we truly mean it when we say we want 75% of the people writing code. And by that I mean the staff within the IT group of course. And we don't want them to have to worry about the infrastructure and so while we've started with AWS, we absolutely have a relationship with Microsoft as well. We definitely want to be independent on this cloud and I would say something like Cloud Foundry definitely allows you to do that. >> When you're looking at that total. That full TCO, you don't have fully burden, I have gear and I have people managing that gear and all the operations there. If you can shift that piece of it. You're not differentiated on the infrastructure or at those needs. You want to focus on those thousands of products that you have and your people coding to create those next opportunities. >> Exactly. We want to focus on the value add. That's where we want our people to really be focusing and we want to let the cloud players who do it extremely well to be doing that for us. >> You put forth in your keynotes some pretty audacious metrics. I think it was 60% of the work load public cloud. More than 50% of apps to release code on daily basis and you wanted 75% of the IT staff to write code. How did you come up with those numbers. How are doing against those? >> About a year ago, once we decided that the imperative for change was so critical. The IT leadership team got together. We spent a couple of days off site and we said let's come up with what we're calling today our IT manifesto. And so we said we just have to change and there are multiple things that we're going to change. And we said we're going to put some, what we call bold, audacious moves or BAMS as they've come to be known together. And so those were just some, we knew they were out of right to some extent, but we said if we don't really put some goals that are really hard to reach, we're never going to get there. >> What are some of the head winds there? What have slowed you from meeting those and any lessons learned that you share to your peers on what you've learned going through this. >> Certainly deciding on what goes to the clouds first is one of those areas that we're learning as we're doing. We know that it's easy when you're working in a greenfield and it's something new. So yeah, you can very easily say I'll build in the cloud. When you're looking at what you're existing environment is and what you move to the cloud. One of the questions as well, if we move all of our development environment. How's that going to interact with the production environment. If you have them in different clouds. Other things are how it interacts with active directory and held app and some of those things. And I say finally would be kind of the global applications always make it much more difficult as you think. How do you replicate among different clouds in different geographies. Those are some of the blockers that we've got to tackle and make sure that we get around. >> One of the interesting parts of any management strategy in any company is skills, up skilling. So how have you been approaching that in terms of this new cloud native world. Both for the devs, is this year at Cloud Foundry Summit. Are people here learning? There's new certifications. >> I say it's a multi prong approach. We definitely have partnered with several companies to put some training together to make sure that we're training our staff. We started a program that we call go for code and so we've asked volunteers. For people who are not coding today and who want to get there that actually they go to these coding schools and they're going to spend the next two to three months actually learning how to code. It's very rigorous. >> So they might have been technical in an infrastructure way before and they want to learn how to code? >> Yeah, it may be that or they may have just been business analysts who are just doing requirements gathering or project management, and they want to learn how to code. So we've tried to be as transparent as possible because when you say I want 75% of my IT staff to be coding. Like you've got 50% who are not coding today. There's a message in that and so of course it's up to us to make sure that we're providing the tools and what's needed for that to happen. Our goal is to get anyone on our staff who really wants to get there and is willing to put the sweat in to be able to do it. 'Cause we also know it's not like software engineers are just lying out there on the streets. There is a shortage of software engineers and that's going to become more and more of a problem. So really getting our own employees that we value greatly to be able to do that transformation, I think is critical for us. >> Another great one line, you had your keynote was out with the annual, in with the weekly. I think you said it was 16 releases in five months. The counter to that and I'm curious how you deal with it and talk to your peers is how do people keep up with just all the changes that are happening? I talk to the companies that create code on just regular occasions and they can't keep up. And how do you make sure your staff doesn't get burned out? >> So great, great question again. We're at the very beginnings of our transformation. The one thing I will say is looking at the team that did this and did the 16 releases in five months versus teams that are working on annual releases. The energy, the enthusiasm, the excitement and hopefully some of it came through in the video that you saw is just phenomenal. So I'd say, I'm much less worried about them burning out than hey can we keep the others as excited. I will tell you automation and things like Cloud Foundry that actually help you automate your pipeline are critical. You can not do multiple releases or daily releases if you don't have those tools. If you truly get to the point where you do have the automated pipeline. I think a lot of that is done for you so that's what we're gearing towards and driving towards. >> One of the things that people always love to pontificate is in the future, what is the role of the CIO? We'd love to see you embracing things like cloud because it was like well, when I had gear, and I had capital budget I understood it. But I'm changing the role. I'm doing that. What have you been seeing as the changing role? Anything down the line you see and how that changes? >> You're right, so a lot of people say, well there is no need for a CIO in the future. I'd say there's probably more and more need for very business oriented, strategic CIOs who also understands technology really well and they're the epitome of someone who understands technology and is the head of engineering so to speak. But also making sure that they can work very well with the business and understands the impact of technology on the business. I'll be waiting for the day where the need for someone like that goes away. I don't see it coming too soon. >> Final question I have for you is what brings you to an event like this? Spend the time, give the keynote. What do you get out of it personally and for your company? >> One is really learning 'cause again, if you're a doctor in medicine. If you want to keep up with what's going on around you you've got to educate yourself. So certainly that aspect of go out there, see what's going on. Making sure that you're keeping up with new technology that's one thing. The other was my experience with Pivotal has been phenomenal, and so I thought it was critical to actually take the opportunity to share that. Hopefully others will learn. A lot of the tweets that I saw was well, if a big 100 year old insurance company can do this. Then nobody has an excuse and I'll say yeah of course. So it's really both to give back and to continue to learn and then to reconnect with colleagues. Cornelia and I actually worked together over 10 years ago. So just coming to here and being able to have dinner with her tonight is going to be very enjoyable. >> Absolutely a tight knit community. Really appreciate you coming on the program. We welcome you to theCUBE alumni list now, our community, >> Thank you. Of the thousands that we had on the program. From John and myself, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from the Cloud Foundry Summit. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (uptempo techno music)