(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special Cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE in theCUBE Studios. We've got a special video here. We love when we have startups that are launching. It's an exclusive video of a hot startup that's launching. Got great reviews so far. You know, word on the street is, they got something different and unique. We're going to' dig into it. Amit Govrin who's the CEO and co-founder of Kubiya, which stands for Cube in Hebrew, and they're headquartered in Bay Area and in Tel Aviv. Amit, congratulations on the startup launch and thanks for coming in and talk to us in theCUBE >> Thank you, John, very nice to be here. >> So, first of all, a little, 'cause we love the Cube, 'cause theCUBE's kind of an open brand. We've never seen the Cube in Hebrew, so is that true? Kubiya is? >> Kubiya literally means cube. You know, clearly there's some additional meanings that we can discuss. Obviously we're also launching a KubCon, so there's a dual meaning to this event. >> KubCon, not to be confused with CubeCon. Which is an event we might have someday and compete. No, I'm only kidding, good stuff. I want to get into the startup because I'm intrigued by your story. One, you know, conversational AI's been around, been a category. We've seen chat bots be all the rage and you know, I kind of don't mind chat bots on some sites. I can interact with some, you know, form based knowledge graph, whatever, knowledge database and get basic stuff self served. So I can see that, but it never really scaled or took off. And now with Cloud Native kind of going to the next level, we're starting to see a lot more open source and a lot more automation, in what I call AI as code or you know, AI as a service, machine learning, developer focused action. I think you guys might have an answer there. So if you don't mind, could you take a minute to explain what you guys are doing, what's different about Kubiya, what's happening? >> Certainly. So thank you for that. Kubiya is what we would consider the first, or one of the first, advanced virtual assitants with a domain specific expertise in DevOps. So, we respect all of the DevOps concepts, GitOps, workflow automation, of those categories you've mentioned, but also the added value of the conversational AI. That's really one of the few elements that we can really bring to the table to extract what we call intent based operations. And we can get into what that means in a little bit. I'll save that maybe for the next question. >> So the market you're going after is kind of, it's, I love to hear starters when they, they don't have a Gartner Magic quadrant, they can fit nicely, it means they're onto something. What is the market you're going after? Because you're seeing a lot of developers driving a lot of the key successes in DevOps. DevOps has evolved to the point where, and DevSecOps, where developers are driving the change. And so having something that's developer focused is key. Are you guys targeting the developers, IT buyers, cloud architects? Who are you looking to serve with this new opportunity? >> So essentially self-service in the world of DevOps, the end user typically would be a developer, but not only, and obviously the operators, those are the folks that we're actually looking to help augment a lot of their efforts, a lot of the toil that they're experiencing in a day to day. So there's subcategories within that. We can talk about the different internal developer tools, or platforms, shared services platforms, service catalogs are tangential categories that this kind of comes on. But on top of that, we're adding the element of conversational AI. Which, as I mentioned, that's really the "got you". >> I think you're starting to see a lot of autonomous stuff going on, autonomous pen testing. There's a company out there doing I've seen autonomous AI. Automation is a big theme of it. And I got to ask, are you guys on the business side purely in the cloud? Are you born in the cloud, is it a cloud service? What's the product choice there? It's a service, right? >> Software is a service. We have the classic, Multi-Tenancy SAAS, but we also have a hybrid SAAS solution, which allows our customers to run workflows using remote runners, essentially hosted at their own location. >> So primary cloud, but you're agnostic on where they could consume, how they want to' consume the product. >> Technology agnostic. >> Okay, so that's cool. So let's get into the problem you're solving. So take me through, this will drive a lot of value here, when you guys did the company, what problems did you hone in on and what are you guys seeing as the core problem that you solve? >> So we, this is a unique, I don't know how unique, but this is a interesting proposition because I come from the business side, so call it the top down. I've been in enterprise sales, I've been in a CRO, VP sales hat. My co-founder comes from the bottom up, right? He ran DevOps teams and SRE teams in his previous company. That's actually what he did. So, we met each other halfway, essentially with me seeing a lot of these problems of self-service not being so self-service after all, platforms hitting walls with adoption. And he actually created his own self-service platform, within his last company, to address his own personal pains. So we essentially kind of met with both perspectives. >> So you're absolutely hardcore on self-service. >> We're enabling self-service. >> And that basically is what everybody wants. I mean, the developers want self-service. I mean, that's kind of like, you know, that's the nirvana. So take us through what you guys are offering, give us an example of use cases and who's buying your product, why, and take us through that whole piece. >> Do you mind if I take a step back and say why we believe self-service has somewhat failed or not gotten off. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So look, this is essentially how we're looking at it. All the analysts and the industry insiders are talking about self-service platforms as being what's going to' remove the dependency of the operator in the loop the entire time, right? Because the operator, that scarce resource, it's hard to hire, hard to train, hard to retain those folks, Developers are obviously dependent on them for productivity. So the operators in this case could be a DevOps, could be a SecOps, it could be a platform engineer. It comes in different flavors. But the common denominator, somebody needs an access request, provisioning a new environment, you name it, right? They go to somebody, that person is operator. The operator typically has a few things on their plate. It's not just attending and babysitting platforms, but it's also innovating, spinning up, and scaling services. So they see this typically as kind of, we don't really want to be here, we're going to' go and do this because we're on call. We have to take it on a chin, if you may, for this. >> It's their child, they got to' do it. >> Right, but it's KTLOs, right, keep the lights on, this is maintenance of a platform. It's not what they're born and bred to do, which is innovate. That's essentially what we're seeing, we're seeing that a lot of these platforms, once they finally hit the point of maturity, they're rolled out to the team. People come to serve themselves in platform, and low and behold, it's not as self-service as it may seem. >> We've seen that certainly with Kubernetes adoption being, I won't say slow, it's been fast, but it's been good. But I think this is kind of the promise of what SRE was supposed to be. You know, do it once and then babysit in the sense of it's working and automated. Nothing's broken yet. Don't call me unless you need something, I see that. So the question, you're trying to make it easier then, you're trying to free up the talent. >> Talent to operate and have essentially a human, like in the loop, essentially augment that person and give the end users all of the answers they require, as if they're talking to a person. >> I mean it's basically, you're taking the virtual assistant concept, or chat bot, to a level of expertise where there's intelligence, jargon, experience into the workflows that's known. Not just talking to chat bot, get a support number to rebook a hotel room. >> We're converting operational workflows into conversations. >> Give me an example, take me through an example. >> Sure, let's take a simple example. I mean, not everyone provisions EC2's with two days (indistinct). But let's say you want to go and provision new EC2 instances, okay? If you wanted to do it, you could go and talk to the assistant and say, "I want to spin up a new server". If it was a human in the loop, they would ask you the following questions: what type of environment? what are we attributing this to? what type of instance? security groups, machine images, you name it. So, these are the questions that typically somebody needs to be armed with before they can go and provision themselves, serve themselves. Now the problem is users don't always have these questions. So imagine the following scenario. Somebody comes in, they're in Jira ticket queue, they finally, their turn is up and the next question they don't have the answer to. So now they have to go and tap on a friend, or they have to go essentially and get that answer. By the time they get back, they lost their turn in queue. And then that happens again. So, they lose a context, they lose essentially the momentum. And a simple access request, or a simple provision request, can easily become a couple days of ping pong back and forth. This won't happen with the virtual assistant. >> You know, I think, you know, and you mentioned chat bots, but also RPA is out there, you've seen a lot of that growth. One of the hard things, and you brought this up, I want to get your reaction to, is contextualizing the workflow. It might not be apparent, but the answer might be there, it disrupts the entire experience at that point. RPA and chat bots don't have that contextualization. Is that what you guys do differently? Is that the unique flavor here? Is that difference between current chat bots and RPA? >> The way we see it, I alluded to the intent based operations. Let me give a tangible experience. Even not from our own world, this will be easy. It's a bidirectional feedback loop 'cause that's actually what feeds the context and the intent. We all know Waze, right, in the world of navigation. They didn't bring navigation systems to the world. What they did is they took the concept of navigation systems that are typically satellite guided and said it's not just enough to drive down the 280, which typically have no traffic, right, and to come across traffic and say, oh, why didn't my satellite pick that up? So they said, have the end users, the end nodes, feed that direction back, that feedback, right. There has to be a bidirectional feedback loop that the end nodes help educate the system, make the system be better, more customized. And that's essentially what we're allowing the end users. So the maintenance of the system isn't entirely in the hands of the operators, right? 'Cause that's the part that they dread. And the maintenance of the system is democratized across all the users that they can teach the system, give input to the system, hone in the system in order to make it more of the DNA of the organization. >> You and I were talking before you came on this camera interview, you said playfully that the Siri for DevOps, which kind of implies, hey infrastructure, do something for me. You know, we all know Siri, so we get that. So that kind of illustrates kind of where the direction is. Explain why you say that, what does that mean? Is that like a NorthStar vision that you guys are approaching? You want to' have a state where everything's automated in it's conversational deployments, that kind of thing. And take us through why that Siri for DevOps is. >> I think it helps anchor people to what a virtual assistant is. Because when you hear virtual assistant, that can mean any one of various connotations. So the Siri is actually a conversational assistant, but it's not necessarily a virtual assistant. So what we're saying is we're anchoring people to that thought and saying, we're actually allowing it to be operational, turning complex operations into simple conversations. >> I mean basically they take the automate with voice Google search or a query, what's the score of the game? And, it also, and talking to the guy who invented Siri, I actually interviewed on theCUBE, it's a learning system. It actually learns as it gets more usage, it learns. How do you guys see that evolving in DevOps? There's a lot of jargon in DevOps, a lot of configurations, a lot of different use cases, a lot of new technologies. What's the secret sauce behind what you guys do? Is it the conversational AI, is it the machine learning, is it the data, is it the model? Take us through the secret sauce. >> In fact, it's all the above. And I don't think we're bringing any one element to the table that hasn't been explored before, hasn't been done. It's a recipe, right? You give two people the same ingredients, they can have complete different results in terms of what they come out with. We, because of our domain expertise in DevOps, because of our familiarity with developer workflows with operators, we know how to give a very well suited recipe. Five course meal, hopefully with Michelin stars as part of that. So a few things, maybe a few of the secret sauce element, conversational AI, the ability to essentially go and extract the intent of the user, so that if we're missing context, the system is smart enough to go and to get that feedback and to essentially feed itself into that model. >> Someone might say, hey, you know, conversational AI, that was yesterday's trend, it never happened. It was kind of weak, chat bots were lame. What's different now and with you guys, and the market, that makes a redo or a second shot at this, a second bite at the apple, as they say. What do you guys see? 'Cause you know, I would argue that it's, you know, it's still early, real early. >> Certainly. >> How do you guys view that? How would you handle that objection? >> It's a fair question. I wasn't around the first time around to tell you what didn't work. I'm not afraid to share that the feedback that we're getting is phenomenal. People understand that we're actually customizing the workflows, the intent based operations to really help hone in on the dark spots. We call it last mile, you know, bottlenecks. And that's really where we're helping. We're helping in a way tribalize internal knowledge that typically hasn't been documented because it's painful enough to where people care about it but not painful enough to where you're going to' go and sit down an entire day and document it. And that's essentially what the virtual assistant can do. It can go and get into those crevices and help document, and operationalize all of those toils. And into workflows. >> Yeah, I mean some will call it grunt work, or low level work. And I think the automation is interesting. I think we're seeing this in a lot of these high scale situations where the talented hard to hire person is hired to do, say, things that were hard to do, but now harder things are coming around the corner. So, you know, serverless is great and all this is good, but it doesn't make the complexity go away. As these inflection points continue to drive more scale, the complexity kind of grows, but at the same time so is the ability to abstract away the complexity. So you're starting to see the smart, hired guns move to higher, bigger problems. And the automation seems to take the low level kind of like capabilities or the toil, or the grunt work, or the low level tasks that, you know, you don't want a high salaried person doing. Or I mean it's not so much that they don't want to' do it, they'll take one for the team, as you said, or take it on the chin, but there's other things to work on. >> I want to add one more thing, 'cause this goes into essentially what you just said. Think about it's not the virtual system, what it gives you is not just the intent and that's one element of it, is the ability to carry your operations with you to the place where you're not breaking your workflows, you're actually comfortable operating. So the virtual assistant lives inside of a command line interface, it lives inside of chat like Slack, and Teams, and Mattermost, and so forth. It also lives within a low-code editor. So we're not forcing anyone to use uncomfortable language or operations if they're not comfortable with. It's almost like Siri, it travels in your mobile phone, it's on your laptop, it's with you everywhere. >> It makes total sense. And the reason why I like this, and I want to' get your reaction on this because we've done a lot of interviews with DevOps, we've met at every CubeCon since it started, and Kubernetes kind of highlights the value of the containers at the orchestration level. But what's really going on is the DevOps developers, and the CICD pipeline, with infrastructure's code, they're basically have a infrastructure configuration at their disposal all the time. And all the ops challenges have been around that, the repetitive mundane tasks that most people do. There's like six or seven main use cases in DevOps. So the guardrails just need to be set. So it sounds like you guys are going down the road of saying, hey here's the use cases you can bounce around these use cases all day long. And just keep doing your jobs cause they're bolting on infrastructure to every application. >> There's one more element to this that we haven't really touched on. It's not just workflows and use cases, but it's also knowledge, right? Tribal knowledge, like you asked me for an example. You can type or talk to the assistant and ask, "How much am I spending on AWS, on US East 1, on so and so customer environment last week?", and it will know how to give you that information. >> Can I ask, should I buy a reserve instances or not? Can I ask that question? 'Cause there's always good trade offs between buying the reserve instances. I mean that's kind of the thing that. >> This is where our ecosystem actually comes in handy because we're not necessarily going to' go down every single domain and try to be the experts in here. We can tap into the partnerships, API, we have full extensibility in API and the software development kit that goes into. >> It's interesting, opinionated and declarative are buzzwords in developer language. So you started to get into this editorial thing. So I can bring up an example. Hey cube, implement the best service mesh. What answer does it give you? 'Cause there's different choices. >> Well this is actually where the operator, there's clearly guard rails. Like you can go and say, I want to' spin up a machine, and it will give you all of the machines on AWS. Doesn't mean you have to get the X one, that's good for a SAP environment. You could go and have guardrails in place where only the ones that are relevant to your team, ones that have resources and budgetary, you know, guidelines can be. So, the operator still has all the control. >> It was kind of tongue in cheek around the editorialized, but actually the answer seems to be as you're saying, whatever the customer decided their service mesh is. So I think this is where it gets into as an assistant to architecting and operating, that seems to be the real value. >> Now code snippets is a different story because that goes on to the web, that goes onto stock overflow, and that's actually one of the things. So inside the CLI, you could actually go and ask for code snippets and we could actually go and populate that, it's a smart CLI. So that's actually one of the things that are an added value of that. >> I was saying to a friend and we were talking about open source and how when I grew up, there was no open source. If you're a developer now, I mean there's so much code, it's not so much coding anymore as it is connecting and integrating. >> Certainly. >> And writing glue layers, if you will. I mean there's still code, but it's not, you don't have to build it from scratch. There's so much code out there. This low-code notion of a smart system is interesting 'cause it's very matrix like. It can build its own code. >> Yes, but I'm also a little wary with low-code and no code. I think part of the problem is we're so constantly focused on categories and categorizing ourselves, and different categories take on a life of their own. So low-code no code is not necessarily, even though we have the low-code editor, we're not necessarily considering ourselves low-code. >> Serverless, no code, low-code. I was so thrown on a term the other day, architecture-less. As a joke, no we don't need architecture. >> There's a use case around that by the way, yeah, we do. Show me my AWS architecture and it will build the architect diagram for you. >> Again, serverless architect, this is all part of infrastructure's code. At the end of the day, the developer has infrastructure with code. Again, how they deploy it is the neuron. That's what we've been striving for. >> But infrastructure is code. You can destroy, you know, terraform, you can go and create one. It's not necessarily going to' operate it for you. That's kind of where this comes in on top of that. So it's really complimentary to infrastructure. >> So final question, before we get into the origination story, data and security are two hot areas we're seeing fill the IT gap, that has moved into the developer role. IT is essentially provisioned by developers now, but the OP side shifted to large scale SRE like environments, security and data are critical. What's your opinion on those two things? >> I agree. Do you want me to give you the normal data as gravity? >> So you agree that IT is now, is kind of moved into the developer realm, but the new IT is data ops and security ops basically. >> A hundred percent, and the lines are so blurred. Like who's what in today's world. I mean, I can tell you, I have customers who call themselves five different roles in the same day. So it's, you know, at the end of the day I call 'em operators 'cause I don't want to offend anybody because that's just the way it is. >> Architectural-less, we're going to' come back to that. Well, I know we're going to' see you at CubeCon. >> Yes. >> We should catch up there and talk more. I'm looking forward to seeing how you guys get the feedback from the marketplace. It should be interesting to hear, the curious question I have for you is, what was the origination story? Why did you guys come together, was it a shared problem? Was it a big market opportunity? Was it an itch you guys were scratching? Did you feel like you needed to come together and start this company? What was the real vision behind the origination? Take a take a minute to explain the story. >> No, absolutely. So I've been living in Palo Alto for the last couple years. Previous, also a founder. So, you know, from my perspective, I always saw myself getting back in the game. Spent a few years in AWS essentially managing partnerships for tier one DevOps partners, you know, all of the known players. Some in public, some of them not. And really the itch was there, right. I saw what everyone's doing. I started seeing consistency in the pains that I was hearing back, in terms of what hasn't been solved. So I already had an opinion where I wanted to go. And when I was visiting actually Israel with the family, I was introduced by a mutual friend to Shaked, Shaked Askayo, my co-founder and CTO. Amazing guy, unbelievable technologists, probably one the most, you know, impressive folks I've had a chance to work with. And he actually solved a very similar problem, you know, in his own way in a previous company, BlueVine, a FinTech company where he was head of SRE, having to, essentially, oversee 200 developers in a very small team. The ratio was incongruent to what the SRE guideline would tell. >> That's more than 10 x rate developer. >> Oh, absolutely. Sure enough. And just imagine it's four different time zones. He finishes day shift and you already had the US team coming, asking for a question. He said, this is kind of a, >> Got to' clone himself, basically. >> Well, yes. He essentially said to me, I had no day, I had no life, but I had Corona, I had COVID, which meant I could work from home. And I essentially programed myself in the form of a bot. Essentially, when people came to him, he said, "Don't talk to me, talk to the bot". Now that was a different generation. >> Just a trivial example, but the idea was to automate the same queries all the time. There's an answer for that, go here. And that's the benefit of it. >> Yes, so he was able to see how easy it was to solve, I mean, how effective it was solving 70% of the toil in his organization. Scaling his team, froze the headcount and the developer team kept on going. So that meant that he was doing some right. >> When you have a problem, and you need to solve it, the creativity comes out of the woodwork, you know, invention is the mother of necessity. So final question for you, what's next? Got the launch, what are you guys hope to do over the next six months to a year, hiring? Put a plug in for the company. What are you guys looking to do? Take a minute to share the future vision and get a plug in. >> A hundred percent. So, Kubiya, as you can imagine, announcing ourselves at CubeCon, so in a couple weeks. Opening the gates towards the public beta and NGA in the next couple months. Essentially working with dozens of customers, Aston Martin, and business earn in. We have quite a few, our website's full of quotes. You can go ahead. But effectively we're looking to go and to bring the next operator, generation of operators, who value their time, who value the, essentially, the value of tribal knowledge that travels between organizations that could be essentially shared. >> How many customers do you guys have in your pre-launch? >> It's above a dozen. Without saying, because we're actually looking to onboard 10 more next week. So that's just an understatement. It changes from day to day. >> What's the number one thing people are saying about you? >> You got that right. I know it's, I'm trying to be a little bit more, you know. >> It's okay, you can be cocky, startups are good. But I mean they're obviously, they're using the product and you're getting good feedback. Saving time, are they saying this is a dream product? Got it right, what are some of the things? >> I think anybody who doesn't feel the pain won't know, but the folks who are in the trenches, or feeling the pain, or experiencing this toil, who know what this means, they said, "You're doing this different, you're doing this right. You architected it right. You know exactly what the developer workflows," you know, where all the areas, you know, where all the skeletons are hidden within that. And you're attending to that. So we're happy about that. >> Everybody wants to clone themselves, again, the tribal knowledge. I think this is a great example of where we see the world going. Make things autonomous, operationally automated for the use cases you know are lock solid. Why wouldn't you just deploy? >> Exactly, and we have a very generous free tier. People can, you know, there's a plugin, you can sign up for free until the end of the year. We have a generous free tier. Yeah, free forever tier, as well. So we're looking for people to try us out and to give us feedback. >> I think the self-service, I think the point is, we've talked about it on the Cube at our events, everyone says the same thing. Every developer wants self-service, period. Full stop, done. >> What they don't say is they need somebody to help them babysit to make sure they're doing it right. >> The old dashboard, green, yellow, red. >> I know it's an analogy that's not related, but have you been to Whole Foods? Have you gone through their self-service line? That's the beauty of it, right? Having someone in a loop helping you out throughout the time. You don't get confused, if something's not working, someone's helping you out, that's what people want. They want a human in the loop, or a human like in the loop. We're giving that next best thing. >> It's really the ratio, it's scale. It's a scaling. It's force multiplier, for sure. Amit, thanks for coming on, congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> See you at KubeCon. Thanks for coming in, sharing the story. >> KubiyaCon. >> CubeCon. Cube in Hebrew, Kubiya. Founder, co-founder and CEO here, sharing the story in the launch. Conversational AI for DevOps, the theory of DevOps, really kind of changing the game, bringing efficiency, solving a lot of the pain points of large scale infrastructure. This is theCUBE, CUBE conversation, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> The next normal is upon us. And the way we run corporate communications, brand accelerators and events has changed inextricably from 12 months ago. Will this last? Welcome to theCUBE. My name is Samme Allen. It's great to have you with us. Joining me today to discuss what looks like success for us all in terms of communications and events, we have long time industry analyst, TV host, entrepreneur and of course, many other accolades, please welcome co-founder and CEO of theCUBE, Dave Vellante. Dave, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hey Samme, thank you very much. I've been in theCUBE a lot, but really not often in this format, so thanks for having me. >> It is a pleasure to be interviewing you today. How does it feel being in the hot seat about to be grilled about the future of events? >> A little weird, little uncomfortable. But bring it on. >> So we talk about this next normal. Some people called it the new normal. We're coming out of the world of pandemic. Thank God. We are seeing returning to live events. We are seeing returning to travel. But what do you think this looks like for the big brands in terms of how they start building out their communications strategy, including events for, say, the next 12 months, the immediate strategy for the future? >> Well, that's a great question. And it's interesting when you look back in the last 12, 13, 14 months, and you compare, let's say, last April to this April in terms of the quality of the events that not only the production value, but also the content and the formats and the intensive attempt to engage with people, you're seeing people, big organizations especially, really raised the bar quite dramatically. And now just as they've sort of become comfortable with virtual events, they're trying to figure out, okay, what's next? So we've seen with theCUBE, we're getting demand now for hybrid events. We're going to be at Mobile World Congress. We're seeing other events that people are asking us to attend. We've got some events in the fall. Smatterings, you know. It's not huge. But when you talk to people, pretty much everybody now is planning on some type of physical activity in 2021. So there's huge pent-up demand. We would expect, Samme, to have these, let's call'em VIP events, where you might have an audience of, local audience, maybe it's 20, maybe it's 25 people, selected audience of CEOs or CTOs or business executives, and then broadcast that to a much wider audience. I personally think this notion of virtual events, which nobody really wanted, you know, a couple of years ago, everybody wanted belly-to-belly, I think it's here to stay, because the long tail of consumption post-event is actually paying dividens, even though it's taking much, much longer to see those results. >> And we're seeing here in the UK. As you know, I'm based in our London studio. We are, you know, we're hearing from Sir David Attenborough who pretty much everyone around the globe knows as the global voice of sustainability saying that actually what we do in the next 5 to 10 years could potentially have a much bigger impact on the world than Corona virus has done so far. Do you think brands are taking this seriously in terms of the evolution of how they communicate, how they attend events, where things like theCUBE will be placed in the future? Are you seeing that from your clients, Dave? >> You know, that's a really tough question. Because on the one hand, and I often joke that, you know, it used to be the case that, you know, the only goal of a public company was to make profit. And now, you're seeing companies from IBM and Cisco and Salesforce, name a company, a large company, they're standing up and saying ESG, diversity, inclusion, these are not only the right thing to do, but they're good business. And so tie that into your question, which is, you know, can we affect the environment, for example, maybe by, you know, being more productive with travel? And the reason I think it's such a tough question is because I think the sales people who are under such pressure to perform, and the companies are under pressure to perform, clearly can be more productive face-to-face, and they can accelerate time to close, for example. At the same time, nobody's really excited to get back on a plane on a Sunday night every week and fly back on a Friday and see their family, maybe, you know, for a day or two. So I think we've got to figure that out. And I think to answer your question specifically, I think there's no question that we can do much more virtually. And I think we will, over the next 10 years, learn how to do that in a much more productive way. >> You hit quite a true point from the brands that we've been speaking with in terms of the desire to see people, to hug people, to be in a room. I think the one thing we hear all the time is that you can't network. Well, we know you can network, because we have algorithms, we have AI and big data. But actually, that socialization. Do you think once we've all got to that first conference and then actually, we have maybe, exactly as you said, that fatigue of not being with our families when the world has changed so much, so after this initial rush, do you think that then that blend of the world of hybrid will remain stable? >> Another really tough question. I think, you know, having, for myself, I'm not fully baked. I've had my second vaccine. And so when I see people, I'm really confident. I'm kind of a, you know, chest pumper, a handshaker, a hugger, whatever. So I'm much more comfortable doing that. But we don't know what we don't know. You know, do we need a booster shot in six months? You know, what is the data telling us? The science, I mean. Everybody says follow the science. But the Alzheimer, the science doesn't know what's happening. I would say this. I think unquestionably, from a business standpoint, that this notion of being able to expose your brand to many, many more, a much, much larger audience, is going to continue. That has legs. And I think people are very comfortable that, if you do that, you're not going to limit the number of people who actually, you know, show up live. It's like when TED decided to actually broadcast, the brand went through the roof. I think the same thing will happen here that you're going to see a slow return of the face-to-face. And I think the virtual will stay. And I think they'll be related, but different teams. I mean, we've talked about this, you and I. There's different skillsets for virtual. So I can see organizations, at least I think smart ones, will invest in both. And I think we're going to see a new era of events that are going to combine virtual and physical. >> Talking about theCUBE, you know. We talked about theCUBE being, you know, they're front and center at an event to offer those expert insights. Can you see in that, well, give us your crystal ball, where's theCUBE going to be in five years time? Do you hope? And do you, where do you think it's going to be strategically wise? >> You know, the awesome thing for theCUBE is that we started in virtual events and hybrid events back in 2015. And so, but it was interesting is we sort of try to push that on our clients, and nobody wanted it. It's like I was saying before, everybody wanted physical. So when COVID hit, we were in a really good position to extend our portfolio into virtual. And that's exactly what we did with our two studios and our software stack. What was a little tricky for us was we had to retrain people. And it was like training by fire. So that took some time. And so you start to see, okay, who's, who really enjoys the virtual, who enjoys the physical. So where I see theCUBE in five years time is that hybrid combination. Very clearly, people want theCUBE at their events, because it's light. It's lights, camera, action. You know, the sports-center-like vibe with the live production, you know. But at the same time, we've got this great capability and team that can reach a much, much wider audience. And then what we've learned, the big learning or one of the big learnings from COVID in virtual was the post-event consumption, that long tail is actually quite amazing, especially if you keep nurturing it. And by the way, a lot of our clients still miss this, a lot of brands move on to the next one, move on to the next one, whereas you can see the consumption continuing. And so I think people are going to continue to fine tune that and really take advantage. So I see theCUBE in both places. And it's just, we're really excited, because it's just a great expansion of our business. >> And I think that strategy, as you said, that, you know, building out a 365 strategy when it comes down to communications and bringing people on a journey with you, which is what you're doing at theCUBE, I think that's the future. And it's an exciting future. My last question for you. You've been locked down like we all have here in the UK, You're in the US. What are you most looking forward to now you've had your second shot, the world is opening up? What's the first thing that you're going to be doing sort of post-lockdown? >> You know, I'll say this. I, again, I don't miss flying every week and dragging my big, heavy backpack through airports. What I have missed is that interaction post-event. So theCUBE is intense. You go to an event. You're doing 10 to 12 interviews a day. Sometimes three or four days. You're exhausted at the end of the day. But then you get to sit back. And that's when you go to the evening events. And you see people, for instance, that were on theCUBE. And people were pointing to you, "hey, you're theCUBE guys." And you build a really intimate relationship with them that is long lasting. And I really do miss that. We, John Furrier, my business partner and co-CEO, we've made some great business friendships that will last a lifetime. And you only form those with these face-to-face interactions. You just, as you know, Samme, you can't do it. You can't get that level of intimacy in a video call. You just can't. So I'm really looking forward to that. And maybe a little better life balance. That's what I'm most looking forward to. >> I think that's a wonderful way to close this out. So I'm looking forward to also seeing you in person, raising that glass, building those relationships. Thank you, Dave, so much for being with us today. Thank you all for watching. Stay tuned to theCUBE for breaking insights, expert insights front and center when you need them. Keep safe. And see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Hello, and welcome to today's event, dealing government emergency responses beyond the pandemic. This is Bob Wooley, senior fellow for the center for digital government and formerly the chief tech clerk for the state of Utah. I'm excited to serve as moderator for today's event. And just want to say, thank you for joining us. I know we're in for an informative session over the next 60 minutes before we begin a couple of brief housekeeping notes or recording of this presentation will be emailed to all registrants within 48 hours. You can use the recording for your reference or feel free to pass it along to colleagues. This webcast is designed to be interactive and you can participate in Q and a with us by asking questions at any time during the presentation, you should see a Q and a box on the bottom left of the presentation panel. >>Please send in your questions as they come out throughout the presentation, our speakers will address as many of these questions as we can during the Q and a portion of the close of our webinar today, if you would like to download the PDF of the slides for this presentation, you can do so by clicking the webinar resources widget at the bottom of the console. Also during today's webinar, you'll be able to connect with your peers by LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Please use the hashtag gov tech live to connect with your peers across the government technology platform, via Twitter. At the close of the webinar, we encourage you to complete a brief survey about the presentation. We would like to hear what you think if you're unable to see with us for the entire webinar, but we're just like to complete the survey. As much as you're able, please click the survey widget at the bottom of the screen to launch the survey. Otherwise it will pop up once the webinar concludes at this time, we recommend that you disable your pop-up blockers, and if you experiencing any media player issues or have any other problems, please visit our webcast help guide by clicking on the help button at the bottom of the console. >>Joining me today to discuss this very timely topic are Karen revolt and Tim Burch, Kim Berge currently serves as the administrator of human services for Clark County Nevada. He's invested over 20 years in improving health and human service systems of care or working in the private public and nonprofit sectors. 18 of those years have been in local government in Clark County, Las Vegas, where you served in a variety of capacities, including executive leadership roles as the director of department of social services, as well as the director for the department of family services. He has also served as CEO for provider of innovative hosted software solutions, as well as chief strategy officer for a boutique public sector consulting firm. Karen real-world is the social program management offering lead for government health and human services with IBM Watson health. Karen focuses delivering exciting new offerings by focusing on market opportunities, determining unmet needs and identifying innovative solutions. >>Much of her career has been in health and human services focused on snap, TANIF, Medicaid, affordable care act, and child welfare prior to joining IBM. Karen was the senior director of product management for a systems integrator. She naturally fell in love with being a project manager. She can take her user requirements and deliver offerings. Professionals would use to make their job easier and more productive. Karen has also found fulfillment in working in health and human services on challenges that could possibly impact the outcome of people's lives. Now, before we begin our discussion of the presentation, I want to one, we'd like to learn a little more about you as an audience. So I'm going to ask you a polling question. Please take a look at this. Give us an idea of what is your organization size. I won't bother to read all these to you, but there are other a range of sizes zero to 250 up to 50,000. Please select the one that is most appropriate and then submit. >>It looks like the vast majority are zero to two 50. Don't have too many over 250,000. So this is a very, very interesting piece of information. Now, just to set up our discussion today, what I want to do is just spend just a moment and talk about the issue that we're dealing with. So when you look the COVID-19 pandemic, it's put immense pressure on States. I've been a digital state judge and had been judging a lot of the responses from States around the country. It's been very interesting to me because they bifurcate really into two principle kinds of reactions to the stress providing services that COVID environment present. One is we're in a world of hurt. We don't have enough money. I think I'm going to go home and engage as little as I have to. Those are relatively uncommon. Thankfully, most of them have taken the COVID-19 pandemic has immense opportunity for them to really do a lot more with telework, to do more with getting people, employees, and citizens involved with government services. >>And I've done some really, really creative things along the way. I find that to be a really good thing, but in many States systems have been overloaded as individuals and families throughout the country submitted just an unprecedented number of benefit applications for social services. At the same time, government agencies have had to contend with social distance and the need for a wholly different approach to engage with citizens. Um, overall most public agencies, regardless of how well they've done with technology have certainly felt some strain. Now, today we have the opportunity to go into a discussion with our speakers, have some wonderful experience in these areas, and I'm going to be directing questions to them. And again, we encourage you as you hear what they have to say. Be sure and submit questions that we can pick up later at the time. So Tim, let's start with you. Given that Las Vegas is a hub for hospitality. An industry hit severely as a result of this pandemic. How's the County doing right now and how are you prioritizing the growing needs of the County? >>Thanks Bob. Thanks for having me. Let me start off by giving just a little, maybe context for Clark County too, to our audience today. So, uh, Clark County is, you know, 85% of the state of Nevada if we serve not just as a regional County by way of service provision, but also direct municipal services. Well, if, uh, the famous Las Vegas strip is actually in unincorporated Clark County, and if we were incorporated, we would be the largest city in the state. So I say all of that to kind of help folks understand that we provide a mix of services, not just regional services, like health and human services, the direct and, and missable, uh, services as well as we work with our other five jurisdiction partners, uh, throughout the area. Uh, we are very much, um, I think during the last recession we were called the Detroit of the West. >>And, uh, that was because we're very much seen as a one industry town. Uh, so most like when the car plants, the coal plants closed back East and in the communities fuel that very rapidly, the same thing happens to us when tourism, uh, it's cut. Uh, so of course, when we went into complete shutdown and March, uh, we felt it very rapidly, not just on, uh, uh, tax receipts and collectibles, but the way in which we could deliver services. So of course our first priority was to, uh, like I think you mentioned mobilized staff. We, we mobilized hundreds of staff overnight with laptops and phones and cars and the things they needed to do to get mobile and still provide the priority services that we're mandated to provide from a safety standpoint. Um, and then we got busy working for our clients and that's really where our partnership with IBM and Watson, uh, came in and began planning that in July. And we're able to open that portal up in October to, to really speed up the way in which we're giving assistance to, to our residents. Um, re focus has been on making sure that people stay housed. We have, uh, an estimated, uh, 2.5 million residents and over 150,000 of those households are anticipated to be facing eviction, uh, as of January one. So we, we've got a, a big task ahead of us. >>All of this sounds kind of expensive. Uh, one of the common threads as you know, runs throughout government is, ah, I don't really have the money for that. I think I'd be able to afford that a diaper too, as well. So what types of funding has been made available for counties, a result of a pandemic, >>Primarily our funding stream that we're utilizing to get these services out the door has been the federal cares act. Uh, now we had some jurisdictions regionally around us and even locally that prioritize those funds in a different way. Um, our board of County commissioners, uh, took, um, a sum total of about $85 million of our 240 million that said, this will go directly to residents in the form of rental assistance and basic needs support. No one should lose their home or go hungry during this pandemic. Uh, so we've really been again working through our community partners and through our IBM tools to make sure that happens. >>So how does, how does, how does the cares act funding then support Clark County? Cause it seems to me that the needs would be complex, diverse >>Pretty much so. So as you, as folks may know him a call there's several tronches of the cares act, the original cares act funding that has come down to us again, our board, uh, identified basic needs or rental assistance and, and gave that the department of social service to go to the tunicate, uh, through the community. We then have the cares act, uh, uh, coronavirus relief funds that have, uh, impacted our CDBG and our emergency solutions grants. We've taken those. And that's what we was going to keep a lot of the programs and services, uh, like our IBM Watson portal open past January one when the cares act dollars expire. Uh, our initial response was a very manual one, uh, because even though we have a great home grown homeless management information system, it does not do financials. Uh, so we had 14 local nonprofits adjudicating, uh, this rental assistance program. >>And so we could get our social service visitor portal up, uh, to allow us to take applications digitally and run that through our program. Uh, and, uh, so those partners were obviously very quickly overwhelmed and were able to stand up our portal, uh, which for the reason we were driving so hard, even from, uh, beginning of the conversations where after going into lockdown into contracting in July and getting the portal open in October, which was an amazing turnaround. Uh, so the kudos that IBM team, uh, for getting us up and out the door so quickly, uh, was a tie in, uh, to our, uh, Curam IBM, uh, case management system that we utilize to adjudicate benefits on daily basis in Clark County for all our local indigent population, uh, and high needs folks. Uh, and then that ties into our SAP IBM platform, which gets the checks out the door. >>So what, what we've been able to do with these dollars is created in Lucian, uh, that has allowed us in the last 60 days to get as much money out the door, as our nonprofits were able go out the door in the first six months pandemic. So it really has helped us. Uh, so I'm really grateful to our board of County commissioners for recognizing the investment in technology to, to not only get our teams mobile, but to create ease of access for our constituents and our local residents to give them the help they need quickly and the way that they need it. >>Just to follow up question to that, Tim, that I'm curious about having done a lot of work like this in government, sometimes getting procurement through in a timely way is a bit challenging. How were you able to work through those issues and getting this up and provision so quickly? >>Uh, yeah, so we, we put together a, what we call a pandemic playbook, which is kind of lessons learned. And what we've seen is the folks who were essential workers in the first 60 days of the, uh, pandemic. We were able to get a lot done quickly because we were taking full advantage of the emergency. Uh, it may sound a little crass to folks not inside the service world, but it was, uh, you know, don't want you to crisis. It was things we've been planning or trying to do for years. We need them yesterday. We should have had them yesterday, but let's get them tomorrow and get it moving very quickly. Uh, this IBM procurement was something we were able to step through very quickly because of our longstanding relationship. Our countywide, uh, system of record for our financials is SAP. Uh, we've worked with Curam, uh, solution, uh, for years. >>So we've got this long standing relationship and trust in the product and the teams, which helped us build the business case of why we did it, no need to go out for competitive procurement that we didn't have time. And we needed something that would integrate very quickly into our existing systems. Uh, so that part was there. Now when the folks who were non essential came back in June and the reopening, it was whiplash, uh, the speed at which we were moving, went back to the pace of normal business, uh, which feels like hitting a wall, doing a hundred miles an hour when you're used to having that, uh, mode of doing business. Uh, so that's certainly been a struggle, uh, for all of those involved, uh, in trying to continue to get things up. Um, but, uh, once again, the teams have been great because we've probably tripled our licensure on this portal since we opened it, uh, because of working with outside vendors, uh, to, uh, literally triple the size of our staff that are processing these applications by bringing on temporary staff, uh, and short-term professionals. Uh, and so we've been able to get those things through, uh, because we'd already built the purchasing vehicle during the early onset of the crisis. >>That's very helpful. Karen, IBM has played a really pivotal role in all of this. Uh, IBM Watson health works with a number of global government agencies, raging from counties like Clark County to federal governments. What are some of the major challenges you've seen with your clients as a result of the pandemic and how is technology supporting them in a time of need and give us some background Watson health too. So we kind of know a little more about it because this is really a fascinating area. >>Yeah. Thank you, Bob. And thanks Tim for the background on Clark County, because I think Clark County is definitely also an example of what federal governments and global governments are doing worldwide today. So, um, Watson health is our division within IBM where we really focus on health and human services. And our goal is to really focus in on, um, the outcomes that we're providing to individuals and families and looking at how we use data and insights to really make that impact and that change. And within that division, we have our government health and human services area, which is the focus of where we are with our clients around social program. But it also allows us to work with, um, different agencies and really look at how we can really move the ball in terms of, um, effecting change and outcomes for, um, really moving the needle of how we can, uh, make an impact on individuals and families. >>So as we look at the globe globally as well, you know, everything that Tim had mentioned about how the pandemic has really changed the way that government agencies operate and how they do services, I think it's amazing that you have that pandemic playbook because a lot of agencies in the same way also had these set of activities that they always wanted to go and take part on, but there was no impetus to really allow for that to happen. And with the pandemic, it allowed that to kind of open and say, okay, we can try this. And unfortunately I'm in a very partial house way to do that. And, um, what Tim has mentioned about the new program that they set up for the housing, some of those programs could take a number of years to really get a program online and get through and allowing, uh, the agencies to be able to do that in a matter of weeks is amazing. >>And I think that's really gonna set a precedent as we go forward and how you can bring on programs such as the housing and capability in Canada with the economic, uh, social, um, uh, development and, and Canada need that the same thing. They actually had a multi benefit delivery system that was designed to deliver benefits for three programs. And as part of the department of fisheries and oceans Canada, the, um, the state had an emergency and they really need to set up on how they could provide benefits to the fishermen who had been at that impacted, um, from that. And they also did set up a digital front-end using IBM citizen engagement to start to allow the applications that benefits, um, and they set it up in a matter of weeks. And as I mentioned, we, uh, Clark County had a backend legacy system where they could connect to and process those applications. And this case, this is a brand new program and the case management system that they brought up was on cloud. And they had to set up a new one, but allow them to set up a, what we used to call straight through processing, I think has been now turned, turned or coined contact less, uh, processing and allowing us to really start to move those benefits and get those capabilities out to the citizens in even a faster way than has been imagined. Uh, pre pandemic. >>Karen, I have one follow-up question. I want to ask you, having had a lot of experience with large projects in government. Sometimes there's a real gap between getting to identified real requirements and then actions. How do you, how do you work with clients to make sure that process time to benefit is shortened? >>So we really focus on the user themselves and we take a human centered design focus and really prioritizing what those needs are. Um, so working with the clients, uh, effectively, and then going through agile iterations of brain, that capability out as, um, in, in a phased approach to, so the idea of getting what we can bring out that provides quality and capability to the users, and then over time starting to really roll out additional functions and, um, other, uh, things that citizens or individuals and families would need >>Very helpful. Tim, this is an interesting partnership. It's always good to see partnerships between private sector and government. Tell us a little bit about how the partnership with IBM Watson health was established and what challenges or they were brought into assist, where they brought into assist with back to requirements. Again, within the requirements definitely shifted on us. You know, we had the con looking at, uh, Watson on our child welfare, uh, side of the house that I'm responsible for and how that we could, uh, increase access to everything from tele-health to, to, uh, foster parent benefit, uh, kinship, placement benefits, all those types of things that, that right now are very manual, uh, on the child welfare side. Uh, and then the pandemic kid. And we very quickly realized that we needed, uh, to stand up a, um, a new program because, uh, a little bit for context, uh, the park County, we don't administer TANIF or Medicaid at the County level. >>It is done at the state level. So we don't have, uh, unemployment systems or Medicaid, 10 of snap benefits systems to be able to augment and enroll out. We provide, uh, the indigent supports the, the homelessness prevention, referee housing continuum of care, long-term care, really deep emergency safety net services for our County, which is a little bit different and how those are done. So that was really our focus, which took a lot of in-person investigation. We're helping people qualify for disability benefits so they can get into permanent supportive housing, uh, things that are very intensive. And yet now we have a pandemic where we need things to happen quickly because the cares act money expires at the end of December. And people were facing eviction and eviction can help spread exposure to, to COVID. Uh, so, uh, be able to get in and very rapidly, think about what is the minimal pelvis to MVP. >>What's the minimum viable product that we can get out the door that will help people, uh, entrance to a system as contactless as possible, which again was a complete one 80 from how we had been doing business. Um, and, uh, so the idea that you could get on and you have this intelligent chat bot that can walk you through questions, help you figure out if you look like you might be eligible, roll you right into an application where you can upload the few documents that we're going to require to help verify your coat would impact and do that from a smartphone and under, you know, 20 minutes. Um, it, it, it is amazing. And the fact that we've stood that up and got it out the door in 90 days, it's just amazing to me, uh, when it shows the, uh, strength of partnership. Um, I think we can, we have some shared language because we had that ongoing partnership, but we were able to actually leverage some system architects that we had that were familiar with our community and our other products. So it really helped expedite, uh, getting this, uh, getting this out to the citizens. >>So, uh, I assume that there are some complexities in doing this. So overall, how has this deployment of citizen engagement with Watson gone and how do you measure success other than you got it out quick? How do you know if it's working? >>Yeah. Right. So it's the adage of, you know, quick, fast and good, right. Um, or fast, good and cheap. So, uh, we measure success in this way. Um, how are we getting access as our number one quality measurement here? So we were able to collect, uh, about 13,000 applications, uh, manual NRC, manually folks had to go onto our website, download a PDF, fill it out, email it, or physically drop it off along with their backup. One of their choice of 14 non-profits in town, whichever is closest to them. Um, and, uh, and then wait for that process. And they were able to get 13,000 of those, uh, process for the last six months. Uh, we have, I think we had about 8,000 applications the first month come into the portal and about an equal amount of folks who could not provide the same documentation that it was needed. >>And self-selected out. If we had not had the, the tool in place, we would have had 16,000 applications, half of which would have been non-eligible would have been jamming up the system, uh, when we don't have the bandwidth to deal to deal with that, we, we need to be able to focus in on, uh, Judy Kenny applications that we believe are like a 95% success rate from the moment our staff gets them, but because we have the complex and he was on already being dependent upon the landlord, having to verify the rent amount and be willing to work with us, um, which is a major hurdle. Um, but, uh, so w we knew we could not do is go, just reinvent the manual process digitally that that would have been an abject failure on our behalf. So, uh, the ideas that, uh, folks had can go on a very, had this very intuitive conversation to the chat bot, answer some questions and find out if they're eligible. >>And then self-select out was critical for us to not only make sure that the citizens got the help they needed, but not so burnt out and overload our workforce, which is already feeling the strain of the COVID pandemic on their own personal lives and in their homes and in the workplace. Um, so that was really critical for us. So it's not just about speed, ease of access was important. Uh, the ability to quickly automate things on the fly, uh, we have since changed, uh, the area median income, a qualifier for the rental assistance, because we were able to reallocate more money, uh, to the program. So we were able to open it up to more people. We were able to make that, uh, change to the system very quickly. Uh, the idea that we can go on the home page and put updates, uh, we recognized that, uh, some of our monolingual Hispanic residents were having difficulty even with some guidance getting through the system. >>So we're able to record a, a Spanish language walkthrough and get done on the home page the next day, right into the fordable, there'll be a fine, so they could literally run the YouTube video while they're walking through their application. Side-by-side so things like that, that those are how we are able to, for us measured success, not just in the raw dollars out the door, not just in the number of applications that have come in, but our ability to be responsive when we hear from our constituents and our elected officials that, Hey, I want, I appreciate the 15,000 applications as you all, a process and record time, I've got three, four, five, six, 10 constituents that having this type of problem and be able to go back and retool our systems to make them more intuitive, to do, be able to keep them responsive for us is definitely a measure of success and all of this, probably more qualitative than here we're looking >>For, but, uh, that's for us, that's important. Actually the qualitative side is what usually gets ignored. Uh, Karen, I've got a question that's a follow up for you on the same topic. How does IBM facilitate reporting within this kind of an environment given the different needs of stakeholders, online managers and citizens? What kinds of things do you, are you able to do >>So with, um, the influx of digitalization? I think it allows us to really take a more data-driven approach to start looking at that. So, as, as Tim was mentioning, you can see where potentially users are spending more time on certain questions, or if they're stuck on a question, you can see where the abandoned rate is. So using a more data-driven approach to go in to identify, you know, how do we actually go and, um, continue to drive that user experience that may not be something that we drive directly from the users. So I would say that analytics is really, uh, I think going to continue to be a driving force as government agencies go forward, because now they are capturing the data. But one thing that they have to be careful of is making sure that the data that they're getting is the right data to give them the information, to make the right next steps and decisions. >>And Tim, you know, use a really good example with, um, the chatbot in terms of, you know, with the influx of everything going on with COVID, the citizens are completely flooded with information and how do they get the right information to actually help them decide, can I apply for this chap program? Or should I, you know, not even try and what Tim mentioned just saved the citizens, you know, the people that may not be eligible a lot of time and going through and applying, and then getting denied by having that upfront, I have questions and I need answers. Um, so again, more data-driven of how do we provide that information? And, you know, we've seen traditionally citizens having to go on multiple website, web pages to get an answer to the question, because they're like, I think I have a question in this area, but I'm not exactly sure. And they, then they're starting to hunt and hunt and hunt and not even potentially get an answer. So the chocolate really like technology-wise helps to drive, you know, more data-driven answers to what, um, whether it's a citizen, whether it's, um, Tim who needs to understand how and where my citizens getting stuck, are they able to complete the application where they are? Can we really get the benefits to, um, this individual family for the housing needs >>Too many comments on the same thing. I know you have to communicate measures of success to County executives and others. How do you do that? I mean, are you, do you have enough information to do it? Yeah, we're able to, we actually have a standup meeting every morning where the first thing I learn is how many new applications came in overnight. How many of those were completed with full documentation? How many will be ported over into our system, assigned the staff to work, where they're waiting >>On landlord verification. So I can see the entire pipeline of applications, which helps us then determine, um, Oh, it's, it's not, you know, maybe urban legend is that folks are having difficulty accessing the system. When I see really the bottleneck there, it got gotten the system fine, the bottlenecks laying with our landlord. So let's do a landlord, a town hall and iterate and reeducate them about what their responsibilities are and how easy it is for them to respond with the form they need to attest to. And so it lets us see in real time where we're having difficulties, uh, because, uh, there's a constant pressure on this system. Not just that, uh, we don't want anyone to lose their home, uh, but these dollars also go away within a December. So we've got this dual pressure of get it right and get it right now. >>Uh, and so th the ability to see these data and these metrics on, on a daily basis is critical for us to, to continue to, uh, ModuLite our response. Um, and, and not just get comfortable are baked into well, that's why we developed the flowchart during requirements, and that's just the way things are gonna stay. Uh, that's not how you respond to a pandemic. Uh, and so having a tool and a partner that helps us, uh, stay flexible, state agile, I guess, to, to, to leverage some terminology, uh, is important. And, and it's, it's paid dividends for our citizens. Karen, again, is another up to the same thing. I'm kind of curious about one of the problems of government from time to time. And Tim, I think attest to this is how do you know when Dunn has been reached? How did you go about defining what done would look like for the initial rollout with this kind of a customer? >>So I think Doug, I guess in this case, um, is, is this, isn't able to get the benefits that they're looking for and how do we, uh, you know, starting from, I think what we were talking about earlier, like in terms of requirements and what is the minimum viable, um, part of that, and then you start to add on the bells and whistles that we're really looking to do. So, um, you know, our team worked with him to really define what are those requirements. I know it's a new program. So some of those policy decisions were still also being worked out as the requirements were being defined as well. So making sure that you are staying on top of, okay, what are the key things and what do we really need to do from a compliance standpoint, from a functionality, and obviously, um, the usability of how, uh, an assistant can come on and apply and, um, have those, uh, requirements, make sure that you can meet that, that version before you start adding on additional scope. >>Very helpful. Jim, what's your comment on this since I know done matters to you? Yeah. And look, I I've lived through a, again, multiple, uh, county-wide it implementations and some department wide initiatives as well. So I think we know that our staff always want more so nothing's ever done, uh, which is a challenge and that's on our side of the customer. Um, but, uh, for this, it really was our, our experience of recognizing the, the time was an essence. We didn't have a chance. We didn't have, uh, the space to get into these endless, uh, conversations, uh, the agile approach, rather than doing the traditional waterfall, where we would have been doing requirements tracking for months before we ever started coding, it was what do we need minimally to get a check in the hands of a landlord on behalf of a client, so they don't get evicted. >>And we kept just re honing on that. That's nice. Let's put that in the parking lot. We'll come back to it because again, we want to leverage this investment long term, uh, because we've got a we, and we've got the emergency solutions and CDBG, and then our, uh, mainstream, uh, services we brought on daily basis, but we will come back to those things speed and time are of the essence. So what do we need, uh, to, to get this? So a chance to really, um, educate our staff about the concepts of agile iteration, um, and say, look, this is not just on the it side. We're gonna roll a policy out today around how you're doing things. And we may figure out through data and metrics that it's not working next week, and we'll have to have that. You want it. And you're going to get the same way. >>You're getting updated guidance from the CDC on what to do and what not to do. Uh, health wise, you're getting the same from us, uh, and really to helping the staff understand that process from the beginning was key. And, uh, so, and, and that's, again, partnering with, with our development team in that way was helpful. Um, because once we gave them that kind of charter as I am project champion, this is what we're saying. They did an equally good job of staying on task and getting to the point of is this necessary or nice. And if it wasn't necessary, we put it in the nice category and we'll come back to it. So I think that's really helpful. My experience having done several hundred sheet applications also suggest the need for MBP matters, future stages really matter and not getting caught. My flying squirrels really matters. So you don't get distracted. So let's move on to, let's do a polling question before we go on to some of our other questions. So for our audience, do you have a digital front ends for your benefit delivery? Yes, no. Or we're planning to a lot of response here yet. There we go. Looks like about half, have one and half note. So that's an interesting question. What's going to one more polling question, learn a little more here. Has COVID-19 >>Accelerated or moved cloud. Yes, no. We already run a majority of applications on cloud. Take a moment and respond if you would, please. So this is interesting. No real acceleration was taken place and in terms of moving to cloud is not what I was expecting, but that's interesting. So let's go onto another question then. And Karen, let me direct this one to you, given that feedback, how do you envision technologies such as citizen engagement and watching the system will be used, respond to emergency situations like the pandemic moving forward? I mean, what should government agencies consider given the challenges? This kind of a pandemic is brought upon government and try to tie this in, if you would, what, what is the role of cloud in all of this for making this happen in a timely way? Karen, take it away. >>Okay. Thanks Bob. So as we started the discussion around the digital expansion, you know, we definitely see additional programs and additional capabilities coming online as we continue on. Um, I think, uh, agencies have really seen a way to connect with their citizens and families and landlords, um, in this case an additional way. And he prepared them like there were, uh, presuppose assumptions that the, um, the citizens or landlords really wanted to interact with agency face-to-face and have that high touch part. And I think, um, through this, the governments have really learned that there is a way to still have an impact on the citizen without having a slow, do a face to face. And so I think that's a big realization for them to now really explore other ways to digitally explain, expand their programs and capabilities. Another area that we touched on was around the AI and chat bot piece. >>So as we start to see capabilities like this, the reason why Clark County was able to bring it up quickly and everything was because it was housed on cloud, we are seeing the push of starting to move some of the workloads. I know from a polling question perspective that it's been, um, lighter in terms of getting, uh, moving to the cloud. But we have seen the surge of really chatbots. I think we've been talking about chatbots for a while now. And, um, agencies hadn't really had the ability to start to implement that and really put it into effect. But with the pandemic, they were able to bring things up and, you know, very short amount of time to solve, um, a big challenge of not having the call center be flooded and have a different way to direct that engagement between the citizen and the government. >>So really building a different type of channel for them to engage rather than having to call or to come into an office, which wasn't really allowed in terms of, um, the pandemic. Um, the other thing I'll touch on is, um, 10 mentioned, you know, the backlog of applications that are coming in and we're starting to see the, um, the increase in automation. How do we automate areas where it's administratively highly burdened, but it's really a way that we can start to automate those processes, to give our workers the ability to focus on more of those complex situations that really need attention. So we're starting to see where the trends of trying to push there of can we automate some of those processes, um, uh, uploading documents and verification documents is another way of like, trying to look at, is there a way that we can make that easier? >>Not only for the applicant that's applying, but also for the caseworker. So there's not having to go through that. Um, does the name match, um, the applicant, uh, information and what we're looking on here, and Bob, you mentioned cloud. So behind the scenes of, you know, why, uh, government agencies are really pushing the cloud is, um, you heard about, I mean, with the pandemic, you see a surge of applicants coming in for those benefits and how do we scale for that kind of demand and how do you do that in an inappropriate way, without the huge pressures that you put on to your data center or your staff who's already trying to help our citizens and applicants, applicants, and families get the benefits they need. And so the cloud, um, you know, proposition of trying, being able to be scalable and elastic is really a key driver that we've seen in terms of, uh, uh, government agencies going to cloud. >>We haven't really seen during a pandemic, the core competencies, some of them moving those to cloud, it's really been around that digital front end, the chat bot area of how do we start to really start with that from a cloud perspective and cloud journey, and then start to work in the other processes and other areas. Um, security is also huge, uh, focus right now with the pandemic and everything going online. And with cloud allows you to be able to make sure that you're secure and be able to apply the right security so that you're always covered in terms of the type of demand and, um, impact, uh, that is coming through >>Very helpful. Tim, I'm going to ask to follow up on this of a practical nature. So you brought this up very quickly. Uh, there's a certain amount of suspicion around state government County government about chatbots. How did you get a chat much and be functional so quickly? And were you able to leverage the cloud in this process? Yeah, so on the trust is important. Uh, and I'll go back to my previous statement about individuals being able to see upfront whether they believe they're eligible or not, because nothing will erode trust more than having someone in hours applying and weeks waiting to find out they were denied because they weren't eligible to begin with, uh, that erodes trust. So being able to let folks know right up front, here's what it looks like to be eligible, actually help us build some of that, uh, cause they don't feel like, uh, someone in the bureaucracy is just putting them through the ringer for no reason. >>Um, now in regard to how do we get the chat bot out? I will say, uh, we have a, uh, dynamic it and leadership, uh, team at the highest level of County government who we have been already having conversations over the last year about what it meant to be smart government, uh, the department of social service and family services that I'm responsible for. We're already, uh, hands up first in line, you know, Guinea pigs volunteering to be on the front end of, uh, certain projects. So w we have primed ourselves for, for some of this readiness in that aspect. Um, but for citizen trust, um, the timeliness of application right now is the biggest element of trust. Uh, so I've applied I've I feel like I put my housing future in your hands. Are you going to deliver and having the ability for us to rapidly scale up? >>Uh, we typically have 120 staff in the department of social service that, that are adjudicating benefits for programs on daily basis. We've doubled that with temporary staff, uh, through some partnerships, uh, we're, we're gonna, as of next week, probably have more temporary per professional staff helping an adjudicator applications. No, do full-time County staff, because again, this rush to get the dollars out, out the door. So having a system where I can easily, uh, ramp on new users and manage them without having to be solely dependent upon an already, uh, overworked it staff who were trying to support 37 other departments in the County, um, around infrastructure needs has been greatly helpful. Sounds to me like a strong outcome focus and one that seems to work. Let's move on now to our audience questions. We're getting close to the end of our time. So let's jump into some questions from the audience. A number of you have been asking about getting copies of today's presentation within the next 48 hours. Government technology will provide all attendees with the link to the recording for your reference, or to share with colleagues. Well, let's go to our first question. So this is an interesting one. And Karen, this is for you did IBM work with other counties and States to provide digital engagement portals. >>We did Bob, uh, we've worked, um, so globally we've provided guidance on this. We work closely with New York city. They've been the integral part of the development also with our citizen engagement offering. Um, we work closely with the States. So we worked with New York city. Um, North Carolina was also another state who, um, improved their, uh, citizen engagement piece, bring up their Medicaid and snap, um, applications along with Medicaid. COVID testing along that. And I mentioned, um, the economic and social development in Canada as well. And we also work with the ministry of social development in Singapore. So a number of our customers had put up, uh, a global, uh, or sorry, a citizen engagement frontend. And during this timeframe, >>Very helpful. I don't know how much did you hear your mom provide you, but how much did it cost for initial deployment and what are the ongoing costs in other words, is this thing going to be sustainable over time? >>Yeah, absolutely. So total, uh, to date, we've spent about a $1.8 million on development implementations and licensure. A big chunk of that again has been the rapid extended of licensure, uh, for this program. Um, I think over a third of that is probably licensing because again, we need to get the dollars out and we need staff to do that and making the short term several hundred thousand dollar investment in a professional support staff and having them be able to work this portal is much cheaper than the long-term investment of bringing on a staff, printing a job, uh, during a financial difficulty that we're facing, uh, the single largest fiscal cliff let's get into that us history. Um, so it's not smart to create jobs that have a 30 year, one way to retirement, uh, inside our in unionized government environment here. So having this, the staff that would come on and do this and get out the door on these federal dollars was critical for us. Um, and there is a $800,000 a year, I believe so ongoing costs associated with licensure and, and the programming support. Uh, but once again, we're going to be moving, um, our traditional services into this digital front end. We'll be continuing this because we're, we're, we're facing, it took us, I think, six and a half, seven years to come back from the previous recession. Undoubtedly, take a little longer to get back >>From this one. Here's another interesting question, I guess really primarily Tim Tim was the solution on primarily on premise or in the cloud. >>So we'll, we've done a mix. Uh, the, and I'm starting a lot of feedbacks. I don't know if you all can hear that or not, but the, uh, I think we went on prem for, uh, some people because of the, uh, bridge into our service case manager system, which is on prem. So we did some management there. I do believe the chat bot piece of it though is in the cloud. So we're bringing it down to, from one system to the other. Uh, and, and part of that was a student negotiations and costs and worrying about what long-term is that we have a very stated goal of moving, uh, our Curam platform, which is on-prem, this is the backend. So how are we? We, we set our IBM Watson, uh, portal up, uh, and moving all of that on cloud, uh, because I mean, we've got, uh, a workforce who, uh, has the ability to retire at a very high rate over the next five years. >>And, uh, having 24 seven support in the cloud is, is as a, someone who would be called to respond to emergency situations like the is, is a much better Cod deal for, for myself and the citizen. So migrating, uh, and, um, our typical on-prem stuff up into the cloud, uh, as we continue on this, uh, evolution of what IBM Watson, uh, and the plug into our Curam, uh, system looks like Karen related question for another user is the portal provided with Clara County and others linked to other third-party backend office apps, or can it be, >>Yeah, the answer is it can be it's interoperable. So through APIs, uh, rest, uh, however, um, assistance that they need to be integrated with can definitely be integrated with, uh, like, uh, Tim mentioned, we, we went to the case management solution, but it can be integrated with other applications as well. >>Tim, did you use some other backend third party apps with yours? Uh, we did not. Uh, again, just for speed of getting, uh, this MVP solution out the door. Uh, now what we do with that on the go forward, it is going to look different and probably will include some, another practical question. Given the cares funding should be expended by December. Can this application even be employed at this late date? And you want to take a cut at that? Yeah, for us, uh, once again, we brought up earlier, um, the emergency solutions grants and the community development block grants, which have a Corona virus, uh, CV traunch, each one of those, and those have two to three year expenditure timeframes on them. Uh, so we were going to leverage those to keep this system and some of these programs going once again, that the housing needs, uh, will outstrip our capacity for years to come. >>I guess probably I should have said upfront Las Vegas has one of the worst affordable housing inventories in the nation. Uh, so we know we're going to be facing a housing issue, um, because of this for, for a long time. So we'll be using those two traunches of dollars, ESE, ESPs, uh, CV CDBG, CB funds, uh, in addition to dollars earmarked through some, uh, recreational marijuana license fees that have been dedicated to our homelessness. And when you consider this housing, uh, stability program was part of that homelessness prevention. That's our funding mix locally. Very helpful. So questions maybe for bolts for you on this one, you can probably also teach respond is the system has been set up helping the small business community. Um, this user's been canvassing and the general feeling is that small businesses have been left behind and they've been unable to access funds. What's your response on that? Karen, do you want to take that first? >>Um, yes. So in terms of, uh, the security and sorry. Um, but, uh, can you repeat the last part of that? I just missed the last part when you >>Behind it, but unable to access funds. >>Uh, yeah, so I think from a funding perspective, there's different types of, I think what Tim mentioned in terms of the cares funding, there was different types of funding that came out from a government perspective. Uh, I think there were also other grants and things that are coming out one, uh, that we're still looking at. And I think as we go into the new year, it'll be interesting to see, you know, what additional funding, um, hopefully is, is provided. Uh, but in terms of creativity, we've seen other creative ways that organizations come together to kind of, uh, help with the different agencies, to provide some, some guidance to the community, um, and helping to, uh, provide efforts and, uh, maybe looking at different ways of, um, providing, uh, some of the capabilities that the, either at the County or at the state level that they're able to leverage. But Tim happy to maybe have you chime in here too. >>Yeah. So I'll first start with my wheelhouse and I'll expand out to, to some of my partners. Uh, so the primary, small business, we knew the idea was a daily basis inside this realm is going to be landlords. Uh, so actually this afternoon, we're doing a town hall with folks to be able to roll out, uh, which they will go to our portal to find a corporate landlord program. Uh, so that I seem a landlord for Camille the application pack and on behalf of a hundred residents, rather than us having to adjudicate a hundred individual applications and melon a hundred checks. Uh, so that is because we were listening to that particular segment of the, uh, the business community. Now I know early on, we were, we were really hoping that the, the paycheck protection program federally would have, uh, been dispersed in a way that helped our local small businesses. >>Uh, more we did a, our economic development team did a round of small business supports through our cares act. Uh, our quarterly unfortunate was not open yet. It was just about 15, 20 days shy. So we use, uh, another traditional grant mechanism that we have in place to dedicate that. Uh, but on a go forward board, willing to Congress passes something over the next 30 days, um, that if there's a round two of cares or some other programs, we absolutely now have a tool that we know we can create a digital opening for individuals to come figure out if they're eligible or not for whatever program it is, the it housing, the it, uh, small business operations supports, uh, and it would apply through that process and in a very lightweight, so we're looking forward to how we can expand our footprint to help all of the needs that are present in our community. This leads to another question which may be our last one, but this is an interesting question. How can agencies use COVID-19 as a proof point providing a low cost configurable solutions that can scale across government. Karen, do you want to respond to that? And then Tim also, >>Thanks, Bob. So I believe like, you know, some of the things that we've said in terms of examples of how we were able to bring up the solution quicker, I definitely see that scaling as you go forward and trying to really, um, focus in on the needs and getting that MVP out the door. Uh, and then Tim alluded to this as well. A lot of the change management processes that went into re-imagining what these processes look like. I definitely see a additional, you know, growth mindset of how do we get better processes in place, or really focusing on the core processes so that we can really move the ball forward and continuing to go that path of delivering on a quicker path, uh, leveraging cloud, as we mentioned of, um, some, some of the capabilities around the chat bot and other things to really start to push, um, uh, the capabilities out to those citizens quicker and really reduce that timeline that we have to take on the backend side, um, that that would be our hope and goal, um, given, you know, sort of what we've been able to accomplish and hoping using that as a proof point of how we can do this for other types of, uh, either programs or other processes. >>Yeah, I think, um, the, you know, the tool has given us capability now there, whether we use local leaders leverage that to the fullest really becomes a coming upon us. So do we take a beat, uh, when we can catch our breath and then, you know, work through our executive leadership to say, look, here's all the ways you can use this tool. You've made an enterprise investment in. Um, and I know for us, uh, at Clark County, we've stood up, uh, enterprise, uh, kind of governance team where we can come and talk through all of our enterprise solutions, uh, encourage our other department head peers, uh, to, to examine how you might be able to use this. Is there a way that, um, you know, parks and rec might use this to better access their scholarship programs to make sure that children get into youth sports leagues and don't get left out, uh, because we know youth suicide on the rise and they need something positive to do when this pandemic is clear, I'm there for them to get out and do those things. >>So the possibilities really are out there. It really becomes, um, how do we mind those internally? And I know that being a part of listservs and, uh, you know, gov tech and all the magazines and things are out there to help us think about how do we better use our solutions, um, as well as our IBM partners who are always eager to say, Hey, have you seen how they're using this? Um, it is important for us to continue to keep our imaginations open, um, so that we continue to iterate through this process. Um, cause I, I would hate to see the culture of, um, iteration go away with this pandemic. >>Okay. We have time for one final question. We've already addressed this in part two, and this one is probably for you and that you've used the cares act to eliminate some of the procurement red tape that's shown up. Well, how do you somehow that's been very positive. How do you see that impacting you going forward? What happens when the red tape all comes back? >>Yeah, so I think I mentioned a little bit, uh, about that when some of the folks who are deemed non essential came back during our reopening phases and they're operating at the speed of prior business and red tape where we had all been on this, these green tape, fast tracks, uh, it, it was a bit of a organizational whiplash. Uh, but it, for us, we've had the conversation with executive management of like, we cannot let this get in the way of what our citizens need. So like keep that pressure on our folks to think differently. Don't and, uh, we've gone so far as to, uh, even, uh, maybe take it a step further and investigate what had been done in, in, in Canada. Some other places around, um, like, like going right from in a 48 hour period, going from a procurement statement through a proof of concept and doing purchasing on the backside, like how can we even get this even more streamlined so that we can get the things we need quickly, uh, because the citizens don't understand, wait, we're doing our best, uh, your number 3000 and queue on the phone line that that's not what they need to hear or want to hear during times of crisis. >>Very helpful. Well, I want to be respectful of our one hour commitment, so we'll have to wrap it up here in closing. I want to thank everyone for joining us for today's event and especially a big, thank you goes to Karen and Tim. You've done a really great job of answering a lot of questions and laying this out for us and a special thanks to our partners at IBM for enabling us to bring this worthwhile discussion to our audience. Thanks once again, and we look forward to seeing you at another government technology event,

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Welcome to the cubes coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020 the digital edition. It wouldn't be a Dell Technologies world on the Cube without our next guest. Tim Crawford, CEO, Strategic Advisor from a boa. Tim, welcome back to the Cube. It's great to talk to you. >>Thanks, Lisa. Thanks for having me on the Cube today. >>A lot has changed since we last got to sit down with you in person. We think of the last Dell Technologies world is a year and a half ago. But we've seen dramatic changes in the enterprise the last 67 months. Talk to me about some of the things that you're seeing. >>Yeah. You know, Lisa, you couldn't put, um, or sustained way around what we've seen over the last 10 months or less. Even theater prices change for Monster Blue. You know, we've gone from having a pretty clear strategy of how we're going to move forward in the technology is we're gonna use to setting all that aside the strategies and plans that we had in the end of 2019 no longer apply the way we engage with customers, the way we run our business, the way who our customers are. The markets we go after all of that is now up for grabs. All of that has changed. And so, therefore, technology and the underpinnings of how we use data has to change accordingly. And so I think we'll talk a little more about that, too. >>I'd like to get your perspective on this acceleration of digital transformation that happened this year. We've seen that we've seen the companies that weren't ready. We've seen the companies that were pretty decently able to pivot quickly. What's your advice for those who are still struggling? Because here we are seven months in. One thing we know for sure is this uncertainty is going to continue for a while. >>Yeah, you're absolutely right. The uncertainty is going to continue for a while. We don't know what the new normal is gonna look like. We don't know how our customers are going to engage with us in the future. And so all the more reason why we need to be thinking very differently about how we operate our companies and how we remain flexible, how we stay in touch with our customers and how that translates into the choices we make in terms of the partners and technologies data that we use. You know, one of the great things about the coronavirus that has come out. If you can say that there is a great thing that's come out of it is it's really accelerated the need to transform companies. And I'm talking about business transformation, not digital transformation. Digital transformation is a downstream component of business transformation. And so a lot of the hurdles that companies were having that I T organizations were having to move to the cloud toe leverage, data toe leverage, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Ah, lot of those hurdles have since dropped by the wayside because companies are realizing if they don't start to adopt some of this new technology, it's available and has been available for some time. They will die, and it it really is that dramatic for companies. And so the Kobe 19 virus has really kind of thrown everything into into the muck, and we've had toe kind of sort things out, but at the same time, it's really given companies an opportunity to say we have. We have a single opportunity here to do something that we will probably never see again. What I mean by that is now we have the lowest level of risk that our company will will observe, probably over our career lifetimes. And what I mean by that is just imagine if you're a commercial airline, you have the lowest passenger loads right now, If >>you need >>to change core operational systems, now is the time to do it. Not when you're operating at Peak, and this is playing out right now across all of the different industries, and that's a huge opportunity. >>That's a great point. And you're right. There are opportunities. There are pluses that are coming out of this. If you think of the I love the opportunity that you just described it, there's the lowest risk right now for, say, an airline to be able to rapidly pivot. Of course, one of the things that you know what happened during that is the customers that consumers would. We react in many different ways. The customer experience is almost under on even higher resolution microscope. The last seven months talk to me about what some of the things you're seeing, how companies need to react to preserve customer relationships because brand is at stake. >>Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, Brand is at stake. The livelihood of your company is at stake, and at the core of that is technology and data. So all we have to do to answer that question is really look in the mirror. Look at how we have changed. Look at how our buying habits have changed. Now that's more of a B two C relationship. But even in the B two b space, those relationships have changed demonstrably. And so we have to think about how our customers air needing to change and how their business is changing, and then how we can accommodate that. And so what that means is we have to tap into data whether it's on the customer experience side or the business operation side of it. We have to tap into that data and use it in a more meaningful way than we ever have in the past. We have to remain more flexible. We have toe leverage it in ways that that we can do things and change on a moments notice. And that's something that we generally haven't architected our organizations or or our technology architectures for, for that matter. But now is the time to do it, and we have to be in touch with our customers in order to do it so again comes back to data, comes back to technology and architectures. Flexibility is the key here. >>I think consumers are far more demanding in the last seven months just because we have this expectation set for the last few years that we could go on Amazon to get anything we want. Anytime we could go on Netflix and watch any movie from any number of years ago anytime we want. And so when this happened and people were so used thio that speed of delivery and things were delayed, I just started seeing much more uproar from the consumer. I thought, Man, we've been conditioned for so long, but one of things I'm curious about when you're talking to the C suite is budget shifting. I mean, we know companies, some of them those enterprises that are in good shape have d our plans. They have business continuity plans. Probably. Nobody had a pandemic plan. So how do you help advise these enterprises to shift budget rapidly enough to be able thio implement the technologies that can harness insights from that data to drive a stupid earlier differentiated customer experience? >>Yeah, so let's kind of break that a part of it and unpack it. So on the pandemic, planning companies did have pandemic planning. I mean, 15 years ago, when I was leading I t. At Stanford University, we had a pandemic response plan that went with R D. R and B C plans. I think that most folks, though, they they struggled through that D R and B C process, and they never get to the pandemic end of that spectrum. And that's a really hard problem to solve for but kind of getting back to how that customer has changed and how we can accommodate that. Changed your right. Budgets have changed, technology has changed, and so we have to think about how we do things differently. I think from a budgetary standpoint, one of the first things we saw is just extreme spending and productivity tools, right? More laptops, more screens, more webcams, Mawr lights. Who would have thought that I would have needed Ah, lighting system for my home, right? Maybe a laptop was enough. We have to think about how our processes air different. How do we push patches out to people's computers out at their home? You know, that may sound somewhat trivial, but the reality is it's really hard to do because you're dealing with all kinds of different bandwidth requirements. Andi. It's not just me in the house. I have my wife, who is an executive on on video all day. I've got two teenage kids when in high school, when a middle school there on video all day. So we're taxing these networks within people's homes as well, in ways that we never have. And so all of these pieces kind of come together and cause us to rethink how we allocate our budgets within the I T organization. So the first thing is there was a lot of productivity tools that were being purchased. There was a lot of preservation of cash that companies kind of went into. How do we start to control, spend and kind of pull back on the reins? But the smart ones started to look at the opportunities to accelerate their innovation programs. And those are the folks that are really doing well right now. How do I start to use this opportunity again, not trying to suggest that the code 19 or the coronavirus is a great thing for us. But how do we start toe leverage that in the best way possible, and take advantage of it in such a way that it could benefit us on the long run? And this is where innovation and accelerating some of those changes really comes into play. And as I mentioned things like cloud artificial intelligence machine learning, leveraging data to understand your customers more intimately, being flexible to change your company's your business operations, how you engage with your customers, you know, instead of just a website, maybe you need thio move Mawr to a focus on a mobile device or mobile application, or vice versa. All of those start to come into play, but at the heart of it is data and data is what ultimately will drive the decisions down the path. >>So you talked about the work from home thing, and I kept thinking of the proliferation of endpoint devices at the edge you're right. How many of us tried to get a webcam months ago and couldn't? Because suddenly that became a tool that was essential for folks to continue their operations and and maintain their productivity. How are enterprises, in your opinion this year addressing the edge and understanding how they need to be able to take advantage of that? But also understand where all those devices are, to your point, pushing out patches, ensuring that there's a secure environment? What's their view of the edge? >>Yeah, the the edges incredibly complicated, and it's important to differentiate a couple of pieces here. So when you talk about the productivity devices, whether it's the laptops, the Webcams, the lighting, all of those I p connected components that we interface with, that's one aspect. And you're right. I mean, I can remember I t leaders that were telling their staff. Goto every office supply store, every big box store by every laptop keyboard, mouse, webcam you can get your hands on. I don't care what brand it is. I don't care what specs are. Just do it because they didn't have access to those. Resource is for their entire employee base. And so That's one aspect. And that's a whole another, um, consideration as we start to think about cybersecurity, and now we're talking about non non traditional, um, platforms that are in the environment in the enterprise environment, versus your standard kind of image and standard product. But aside from that, we also have data coming from the edge, whether it's from sensors and video cameras and other types of devices that we have to bring into the mix, too. Right understanding that Tim Crawford has now entered into a store and that Tim Crawford has now left the store but hasn't purchased. But we know that Tim Crawford is a loyal customer based on his loyalty at how do we start to gauge that? Or how do we start to gauge the number of folks that are moving through a given area and especially in light of coronavirus? I mean, there there's some aspect that air coming up where companies are starting to look at. How do we measure the number of people that are in a given room and do that in an automated way, and maybe alert people to say, Hey, you know, is there a way you can stand out or reminds people gently, Um, you know, keep your distance, make sure you're wearing your mask, etcetera. There are a lot of ways that edge comes into play, but at the core of this is data. And so that's where it becomes really important to understand that the amount of data, not just the sources of data but the amount of data that we're gonna have to deal with and we're dealing with today at the edge is just incredible. And it's on Lee going to grow exponentially. And so it's important to understand that your customer engagement pieces are going to be a source of data as well as a consumer of data. Let's not forget that people with the edge they need to be able to consume data and not in a batch way, they need to be able to do it in real time, which then gets back to flexibility and speed and algorithms at the edge. But understanding all of that data at the edge, being able to analyze it, whether it's for business operations or customer engagement and then providing that through the continuum from edge to cloud is really, really critical. It's a very complicated problem to solve for, but every single enterprise across the industries is already heading down this path. >>You're right. It is an incredibly complex problem to solve. So here we are, virtually at Dell Technologies World 2020. Talk to me about Dell Technologies Landscape. How do you think it fits into addressing some of these challenges in the complexities that you just talked >>about? Yeah, you know, Dell has been on this path for a while. I mean, through the partnerships through the ecosystem that Don't has is well as their portfolio of hardware and software. I think Della's position really well to be able to address both the customer experience as well as the business operations. The key here is you have to think about edge to Klag. You have to think about data. You have to think about analytics and then, from a nightie perspective, how do you start toe layer in the management and the algorithms on top of that to be able to manage that landscape? Because that landscape is getting increasingly more complicated on I think Dell starting to come up with the software pieces that actually make the connection between back those points on the continuum, and that's a really important piece here for I t. Organizations to understand. I think, you know, with the new announcements around Apex, I think that will will shine really well for dealt. I think if you look at the partnerships and the ecosystem and the connections that they're making both with public cloud providers as well as with other partners in the ecosystem, I think that's, ah, positive place. But the place that I would actually watch most closely with Dell is what is that? Software Later, They already have a really good hardware platform to build on top of them that portfolio. What is that software layer that connects or create that connective tissue for them? And I think that's the big piece, and I think we're going to hear more of that. Here is Dell Technologies World. >>I'm also curious. I read your posts and and listen to podcasts on the difference between a traditional CEO and a transformational CEO. If I think is such an important thing to discuss because part of that is cultural right, it's it's got, too. It's not just about a company being able to transform It's got to be the person with the right mindset with that flexible, agile mindset. But your advice to businesses who are still pivoting or pivoting multiple times and trying to become not just a survivor but a winner of tomorrow. From a cultural perspective, >>you know, culture is the hardest thing to change. It really is. You know, the technology is easy. Relatively speaking. We can swap out one technology for another. It's relatively straightforward to dio, and it always has been, Um, the real challenge here is how do you create the underpinnings and the foundation for that culture? What I mean by that is changing, like within the I T organization, and it starts with the CEO, but then also kind of branches out into the rest of the I T organization to the most junior levels of the I T staff. What I mean by that is you have to look at how you become less text centric and more business centric. And so my post about the change in the differentiation from the traditional CEO to transformational CEO is just about that. It's about how do you start to make that shift where you start focusing on business first and that ultimately becomes our context regardless of what organization you're in. I t marketing HR engineering product support. It doesn't matter. You start with the business context and then you flow down from that. And so part of that move to being the transformational CEO or the transformational organization is really shifting to be more business focused. And using that is your North Star and then from it, you start to understand how the different technology pieces fit into place. And so, for example, a traditional CEO would typically focus on business operations. More of the back end pieces, right? The underlying technology, the back end systems. But the transformational CEO is going to be incredibly more customer focused. They're actually gonna be out with the customer they're going to be doing right alongs will probably not right now in the absence of Corona virus, but they're going to be engaging firsthand with customers, understanding firsthand what they're dealing with, understanding what the business challenges are that they're having and then being able to translate that into where does technology fit in? And where does technology not fit in kind of going back to what I was saying earlier around the importance of customer experience. And so that's really where this transformational bent comes from. Is shifting from just being back office focused to moving toward understanding that front office or that customer focus. And that's the rial differentiator for companies. Here is when you can start to think about how tech enology plays. That's central role in changing your business. That's gold. That's absolute gold. >>Gold, but hard, hard Thio Dig for that gold. One last question, Tim, You talked about a number of the opportunities that Cove in 19 is bringing. And I completely agree with you. Not that any of us loves being stuck at home and isolated in the same walls, but there are opportunities that are going to come. We're gonna learn things from that if we're open minded and and flexible and agile in our thinking. But other things that that you think we haven't heard about yet that you see as a kind of maybe some north stars to come. >>Yeah, there there are a couple things that I think we generally are missing, and I kind of touched on one of from earlier, which is how do you start, Thio, accelerate some of that innovation now. And so you know, I used the airplane example of you know you've got the lowest passenger loads. Now is the time to implement that innovative technology. Because if something does go wrong, if something does go wrong, the impact to your customers is relatively low. And quite frankly, a lot of folks Aer giving out hall passes to say, You know what we understand Coronaviruses. Hard for all of us. Something went sideways here. Fine, go fix it, go fix it and then come back to us. And so I think customers are definitely more apt to hand out that whole past now versus when, where it full capacity. And that kind of leads me to. The second piece that I think people are missing is that companies are organized and built around operating efficiently at 80% utilization or 100% utilization. What I mean by that is they tend not to make money until they get to that level of utilization. But yet in the coronavirus era, what if we had a company that was organized in such a way that it could be profitable at 25% utilization that would cause us to think very differently about how we use technology, how we're able to scale technology, how we leverage data were thinking in more meaningful ways about the customer. And so what that means is that it gives us the ability to scale our business up and down. God forbid, if we ever run into another situation like this ever again in our lifetimes. But if we ever hit another patch of negativity around economic growth, it allows a company to be able to scale down and back up as needed for their customers. And that's another piece. I don't think people are thinking about their thinking about the big picture they're thinking about. How do we build for growth? But what they're not thinking about is what if we need to scale this back, and I think a great example of where this touches in we're here. A Dell Technologies world is Look at the way that companies are starting to shift towards this as a service model, right? We're able to scale technology up use it is, we need it, give it back when we don't need it. And so when you start to move into that more flexible mode. I talked about flexibility in other ways earlier, but as you start to get into a different consumption boat, it gives you a lot of opportunity to do a lot of different things in a lot of different ways. And that's ultimately what companies need to be thinking about today. >>Sounds like it's going to be some of the big differentiators between the winners and the losers of tomorrow. Will Tim, Thank you for joining us on the Cube virtually from your home. It's not a Dell Technologies world on the Cube without talking to you, Tim. And I appreciate we all appreciate your time and the insight that you shared today. >>Thanks, Lisa. Thanks for having me on the Cube. >>Our pleasure for Tim Crawford. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes. Coverage of Dell Technologies, World 2020

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP. Discover Virtual experience Brought to you by HP. >>Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of HP Discover. 2020. The virtual experience. The Cube. The Cube has been virtualized. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Stuart Minuteman and our good friend Tim Crawford is here. He's a strategic advisor to see Io's with boa. Tim, Great to see you. Stuart. Thanks for coming on. >>Great to see you as well, Dave. >>Yes. So let's unpack. What's going on in that Discover Antonio's, He notes, Maybe talk a little bit about the prospects for HP of coming forward in this decade. You know, last decade was not a great one for HP, HP. I mean, there was a lot of turmoil. There was a botched acquisitions. There was breaking up the company and spin merges and a lot of distractions. And so now that companies really and you hear this from Antonio kind of positioning for innovation for the next decade. So So I think this is probably a lot of excitement inside the company, but I want to touch on a couple of points and then you get your guys reaction, I guess, you know, to start off. Obviously, Antonio's talking about Cove in the role that they played in that whole, you know, pandemic and the transition toe the the isolation economy. But so let me start with you, Tim. I mean, what is the sort of posture amongst cios that you talk to? How strategic is HB H B two? The folks that you talk to in your community? >>Well, I think if you look at how CIOs are thinking, especially as we head into covert it into Corona virus and kind of mapping through that, that price, um, it really came down to Can they get their hands on technology? Can they get people back to work working from home? Can they do it in a secure fashion? Um, keeping people productive. I mean, there was a lot of block and tackling, and even to this day, there's still a fair amount of that was taking place. Um, we really haven't seen the fallout from the cybersecurity impact of expanding our foot print. Um, quite. But we'll see that, probably in the coming months. There are some initial inklings there when it comes to HP specifically I think it comes back to just making sure that they had the product on hand, that they understood that customers are going through dramatic change. And so all bets are off. You have to kind of step back and say, Okay, those plans that I had 60 9100 and 20 days ago those strategies that I may have already started down the path with those are up for grabs. I need to step back from those and figure out What do I do now? And I think each company, HP included, needs to think about how do they start to meld themselves, to be able to address those changing customer needs? And I think that's that's where this really kind of becomes the rubber hits the road is is HP capable of doing that? And are they making the right changes? And quite frankly, that starts with empathy. And I think we've heard pretty clearly from Antonio that he is sympathetic to the plight of their customers and the world >>on the whole. >>Yeah, and I think culturally 10 minutes do I mean I think you know HP is kind of getting back to some of its roots, and Tony has been there for a long time. I think people I think is very well liked. Andi, I think, ease of use, and I'm sure he's tough. But he's also a very fair individual, and he's got a vision and he's focused. And so, you know, I think again, as they said, looking forward to this decade, I think could be one that is, you know, one of innovation. Although, you know, look, you look at the stock price, you know, it's kind of piqued in November 19. It's obviously down like many stocks, so there's a lot of work to do there, and it's too. We're certainly hearing from HP. This notion of everything is a service that we've talked about green like a lot. What's your sense of their prospects going forward in this, you know, New Era? >>Yeah, I mean, Dave, one of the biggest attacks we've heard about H E in the last couple of years, you know the line Michael Dell would use is you're not going to grow by, say, abstraction. But as a platform company, HP is much more open. From what I've seen in the HP that I remember from, you know, 5 to 10 years ago. So you look at their partner ecosystem. It's robust. So, you know, years ago, it seemed to be if it didn't come out of HP Labs, it wasn't a product, you know. That was the services arm all wanted to sell HP here. Now, in this software defined world working in a cloud environment, they're much more open to finding that innovation and enabling it. So, you know, we talk about Green Lake Day. Three lakes got about 1000 customers right now, and a big piece of that is a partner. Port Police, whether it's VM Ware Amazon Annex, were H B's full stack themselves. They have optionality in there, and that's what we hear from from users is that they want flexibility they don't want. You know, you look at the cloud providers, it's not, you know, here's a solution. You look at Amazon. There's dozens of databases that you can use from Amazon or, if you use on top of Amazon, so H p e. You know, not a public cloud provider, but looking more like that cloud experience. They've done so many acquisitions over the years. Many of them were troubled. They got rid of some of the pieces that they might have over paid for. But you look at something like CTP them in this multi cloud world in the networking space, they've got a really cool, open source company, the company behind spiffy, inspire. And, you know, companies that are looking at containers and kubernetes, you know, really respond to say, Hey, these are projects that were interesting Oh, who's the company that that's driving that it's HP so more open, more of a partner ecosystem definitely feels that there's a lot there that I respect and like that hp >>well, I mean, the intent of splitting the company was so that HP could be more focused but focused on innovation was the intent was to be the growth company. It hasn't fully played out yet. But Tim, when you think about the conversations that CIOs are having with with HPI today versus what they were having with hpe HP, the the conglomerate of that the Comprising e ds and PCs, I guess I don't know, in a way, more more Dell like so Certainly Michael Dell's having strategic conversations, CIOs. But you got to believe that the the conversations are more focused today. Is that a good thing or a jury's still out? >>No, it absolutely is a good thing. And I think one of the things that you have to look at is we're getting back to brass tax. We're getting back to that focus around business objectives. So no longer is that hey, who has the coolest tech? And how can we implement that tax? Kind of looking from a tech business? Ah, spectrum, you're now focused squarely is a C i. O. You have to be squarely focused on what are the business objectives that you are teamed up for, and if you're not, you're on a very short leash and that doesn't end well. And I think the great thing about the split of HP HP e split and I think you almost have to kind of step back for a second. Let's talk about leadership because leadership plays a very significant role, especially for CIOs that are thinking about long term decisions and strategic partners. I don't think that HP necessarily had the right leadership in place to carry them into that strategic world. I think Antonio really makes a change there. I mean, they made some really poor decisions. Post split. Um, that really didn't bode well for HP. Um, and frankly, I talked a bit about that I know wasn't really popular within HP, but quite frankly, they needed to hear it. And I think that actually has been heard. And I think they are listening to their customers. And one of the big changes is they're getting back into the software business. And when you talk about strategic initiatives, you have to get beyond just the hardware and start moving up the proverbial stack, getting closer to those business initiatives. And that is software. >>Yeah, well, Antonio talked about sort of the insights. I mean, something I've said a lot about borrowed from the very Meeker conversations that that data is plentiful. Something I've always said. Insights aren't. And so you're right. You've seen a couple of acquisitions, you know, Matt bahr They picked up, I think pretty inexpensively. Kind of interesting cause, remember, HP hp had an investment in Horton works, which, of course, is now Cloudera and Blue Data. Ah Kumar Conte's company, you know, kind of focusing on maybe automating data, you know, they talked about Ed centric, cloud enabled, data driven. Nobody's gonna argue with those things. But you're right, Tim. I mean, you're talking more software than kind of jettisons the software business and now sort of have to rebuild it. And then, of course, do this cloud. What do you make of HP ease Cloud play? >>Yeah, well, I >>mean, >>Dave, you the pieces. You were just talking about math bar and blue data, where HP connects it together is, you know, ai ops. So you know, where are we going with infrastructure? There needs to be a lot more automation. We heard a great quote. I love from automation anywhere. Dave was, if you talk about digital transformation without automation, it's hallucination. So, you know, HP baking that into what they're doing. So, you know, I fully agree with Tim software software software, you know, is where the innovation is. So it can't just be the infrastructure. How do you have eyes and books into the applications? How are you helping customers build those new pieces? And what's the other software that you build around that? So, you know, absolutely. It's an interesting piece. And you know, HP has got a lot of interesting pieces. You know, you talk about the edge. Aruba is a great asset for that kind of environment and from a partnership, that is a damn point. Dave. They have. John Chambers was in the keynote. John, of course. Long time partners. He's with Cisco for many years Intel. Cisco started eating with HP on the server business, but now he's also the chairman of pensando. HP is an investor in pensando general availability this month of that solution, and that's going to really help build out that next generation edge. So, you know, a chip set that HP E can offer similar to what we see how Amazon builds outpost s. So that is a solution both for the enterprise and beyond. Is as a B >>yeah course. Do. Of course, it's kind of, but about three com toe. Add more fuel to that tension. Go ahead, Tim. >>Well, I was going to pick apart some of those pieces because you know, at edge is not an edge is not an edge. And I think it's important to highlight some of the advantages that HP is bringing to the table where Pensando comes in, where Aruba comes in and also we're really comes in. I think there are a number of these components that I want to make sure that we don't necessarily gloss over that are really key for HP in terms of the future. And that is when you step back and you look at how customers are gonna have to consume services, how they're going to have to engage with both the edge and the cloud and everything in between. HP has a great portfolio of hardware. What they haven't necessarily had was the glue, that connective tissue to bring all of that together. And I think that's where things like Green Lake and Green Lake Central really gonna play a role. And even their, um, newer cloud services are going to play a role. And unlike outposts and unlike some of the other private cloud services that are on the market today, they're looking to extend a cloud like experience all the way to the edge and that continuity creating that simplicity is going to be key for enterprises. And I think that's something that shouldn't be understated. It's gonna be really important because when I look at in the conversations I'm having when we're looking at edge to cloud and everything in between. Oh my gosh, that's really complicated. And you have to figure out how to simplify that. And the only way you're going to do that is if you take it up a layer and start thinking about management tools. You start thinking about autumn, and as companies start to take data from the edge, they start analyzing it at the edge and intermediate points on the way to cloud. It's going to be even more important to bring continuity across this entire spectrum. And so that's one of the things that I'm really excited about that I'm hearing from Antonio's keynote and others. Ah, here at HP Discover. >>Yeah, >>well, let's let's stay on that stupid. Let's stay on that for a second. >>Yeah, I wanted to see oh interested him because, you know, it's funny. You think back. You know, HP at one point in time was a leader in, you know, management solutions. You know, HP one view, you know, in the early days, it was really well respected. I think what I'm hearing from you, I think about outpost is Amazon hasn't really put management for the edge. All they're doing is extending the cloud piece and putting a piece out of the edge. It feels like we need a management solution that built from the ground up for this kind of solution. And do I hear you right? You believe that to be as some of those pieces today? >>Well, let's compare and contrast briefly on that. I think Amazon and the way Amazon is well, is Google and Microsoft, for that matter. The way that they are encompassing the edge into their portfolio is interesting, but it's an extension of their core business, their core public cloud services business. Most of the enterprise footprint is not in public cloud. It's at the other end of that spectrum, and so being able to take not just what's happening at the edge. But what about in your corporate data center in your corporate data center? You still have to manage that, and that doesn't fall under the purview of Cloud. And so that's why I'm looking at HP is a way to create that connective tissue between what companies are doing within the corporate data center today, what they're doing at the edge as well as what they're doing, maybe in private cloud and an extension public cloud. But let's also remember something else. Most of these enterprises, they're also in a multi cloud environment, so they're touching into different public cloud providers for different services. And so now you talk about how do I manage this across the spectrum of edge to cloud. But then, across different public cloud providers, things get really complicated really fast. And I think the hints of what I'm seeing in software and the new software branding give me a moment of pause to say, Wait a second. Is HP really gonna head down that path? And if so, that's great because it is of high demand in the enterprise. >>Well, let's talk about that some more because I think this really is the big opportunity and we're potentially innovation is. So my question is how much of Green Lake and Green Lake services are really designed for sort of on Prem to make that edge to on Prem? No, I want to ask about Cloud, how much of that is actually delivering Cloud Native Services on AWS on Google on Azure and Ali Cloud etcetera versus kind of creating a cloud like experience for on Prem in it and eventually the edge. I'm not clear on that. You guys have insight on how much effort is going into that cloud. Native components in the public cloud. >>Well, I would say that the first thing is you have to go back to the applications to truly get that cloud native experience. I think HP is putting the components together to a prize. This to be able to capitalize on that cloud like experience with cloud native APS. But the vast majority of enterprise app they're not cloud native. And so I think the way that I'm interpreting Green Lake and I think there are a lot of questions Greenland and how it's consumed by enterprises there. There was some initial questions around the branding when it first came out. Um, and so you know it's not perfect. I think HP definitely have some work to do to clarify what it is and what it isn't in a way that enterprises can understand. But from what I'm seeing, it looks to be creating and a cloud like experience for enterprises from edge to cloud, but also providing the components so that if you do have applications that are shovel ready for cloud or our cloud native, you can embrace Public Cloud as well as private cloud and pull them under the Green Lake >>Rela. Yeah, ostensibly stew kubernetes is part of the answer to that, although you know, as we've talked about, Kubernetes is necessary containers and necessary but not sufficient for that experience. And I guess the point I'm getting to is, you know we do. We've talked about this with Red Hat, certainly with VM Ware and others the opportunity to have that experience across clouds at the Edge on Prim. That's expensive from an R and D standpoint. And so I want to kind of bring that into the discussion. HP last year spent about 1.8 billion in R and D Sounds like a lot of money. It's about 6% of its of it's revenues, but it's it's spread thin now. It does are indeed through investments, for instance, like Pensando or other acquisitions. But in terms of organic R and D, you know, it's it's it's not at the top of the heap. I mean, obviously guys like Amazon and Google have surpassed them. I've written about this with regard to IBM because they, like HP, spend a lot on dividends on share buybacks, which they have to do to prop up the stock price and placate Wall Street. But it But it detracts from their ability to fund R and d student your take on that sort of innovation roadmap for the next decade. >>Yeah, I mean, one of the things we look at it in the last year or so there's been what we were talking about earlier, that management across these environments and kubernetes is a piece of it. So, you know, Google laid down and those you've got Microsoft with Azure, our VM ware with EMS. Ooh! And to Tim's point, you know, it feels like Green Lake fits kind of in that category, but there's there's pieces that fall outside of it. So, you know, when I first thought of Green Lake, it was Oh, well, I've got a private cloud stack like an azure stack is one of the solutions that they have there. How does that tie into that full solution? So extending that out, moving that brand I do here, you know good things from the field, the partners and customers. Green Lake is well respected, and it feels like that is, that is a big growth. So it's HB 50 from being more thought of, as you know, a box seller to more of that solution in subscription model. Green Lake is a vehicle for that. And as you pointed out, you know, rightfully so. Software so important. And I feel when that thing I'd say HPI ee feels toe have more embracing of software than, say, they're closest competitors. Which is Dell, which, you know, Dell Statement is always to be the leading infrastructure writer, and the arm of VM Ware is their software. So, you know, just Dell alone without VM ware, HP has to be that full solution of what Dell and VM ware together. >>Yeah, and VM Ware Is that the crown jewel? And of course, HP doesn't have a VM ware, but it does have over 8000 software engineers. Now I want to ask you about open source. I mean, I would hope that they're allocating a large portion of those software engineers. The open source development developing tooling at the edge, developing tooling from multi cloud certainly building hooks in from their hardware. But is HP Tim doing enough in open source? >>Well, I don't want to get on the open source bandwagon, and I don't necessarily want to jump off it. I think the important thing here is that there are places where open source makes sense in places where it doesn't, um, and you have to look at each particular scenario and really kind of ask yourself, does it make sense to address it here? I mean, it's a way to to engage your developers and engage your customers in a different mode. What I see from HP E is more of a focus around trying to determine where can we provide the greatest value for our customers, which, frankly, is where their focus should be, whether that shows up in open source for software, whether that shows up in commercial products. Um, we'll see how that plays out. But I think the one thing that I give HP e props on one of several things I would say is that they are kind of getting back to their roots and saying, Look, we're an infrastructure company, that is what we do really well We're not trying to be everything to everyone. And so let's try and figure out what are customers asking for? How do we step through that? I think this is actually one of the challenges that Antonio's predecessors had was that they tried to do jump into all the different areas, you know, cloud software. And they were really X over, extending themselves in ways that they probably should. But they were doing it in ways that really didn't speak to their four, and they weren't connecting those dots. They weren't connecting that that connective tissue they needed to dio. So I do think that, you know, whether it's open source or commercial software, we'll see how that plays out. Um, but I'm glad to see that they are stepping back and saying Okay, let's be mindful about how we ease into this >>well, so the reason I bring up open source is because I think it's the mainspring of innovation in the industry on that, but of course it's very tough to make money, but we've talked a lot about H B's strength since breath is, we haven't talked much about servers, but they're strong in servers. That's fine We don't need to spend time there. It's culture. It seems to be getting back to some of its roots. We've touched on some of its its weaknesses and maybe gaps. But I want to talk about the opportunities, and there's a huge opportunity to the edge. David Flores quantified. He says that Tam is four. Trillion is enormous, but here's my question is the edge Right now we're seeing from companies like HP and Dell. Is there largely taking Intel based servers, kind of making a new form factor and putting them out on the edge? Is that the right approach? Will there be an emergence of alternative processors? Whether it's our maybe, maybe there's some NVIDIA in there and just a whole new architecture for the edge to authority. Throw it out to you first, get Tim Scott thoughts. >>Yeah, So what? One thing, Dave, You know, HP does have a long history of partnering with a lot of those solutions. So you see NVIDIA up on stage when you think about Moonshot and the machine and some of the other platforms that they felt they've looked at alternative options. So, you know, I know from Wicky Bon standpoint, you know, David Foyer wrote the piece. That arm is a huge opportunity at the edge there. And you would think that HP would be one of the companies that would be fast to embrace that >>Well, that's why I might like like Moonshot. I think that was probably ahead of its time. But the whole notion of you know, a very slim form factor that can pop in and pop out. You know, different alternative processor architecture is very efficient, potentially at the edge. Maybe that's got got potential. But do you have any thoughts on this? I mean, I know it's kind of Yeah, any hardware is, but, >>well, it is a little hardware, but I think you have to come back to the applicability of it. I mean, if you're taking a slim down ruggedized server and trying Teoh essentially take out, take off all the fancy pieces and just get to the core of it and call that your edge. I think you've missed a huge opportunity beyond that. So what happens with the processing that might be in camera or in a robot or in an inch device? These are custom silicon custom processors custom demand that you can't pull back to a server for everything you have to be able to to extend it even further. And, you know, if I compare and contrast for a minute, I think some of the vendors that are looking at Hey, our definition of edge is a laptop or it is this smaller form factor server. I think they're incredibly limiting themselves. I think there is a great opportunity beyond that, and we'll see more of those kind of crop up, because the reality is the applicability of how Edge gets used is we do data collection and data analysis in the device at the device. So whether it's a camera, whether it's ah, robot, there's processing that happens within that device. Now some of that might come back to an intermediate area, and that intermediate area might be one of these smaller form factor devices, like a server for a demo. But it might not be. It might be a custom type of device that's needed in a remote location, and then from there you might get back to that smaller form factor. Do you have all of these stages and data and processing is getting done at each of these stages as more and more resources are made available. Because there are things around AI and ML that you could only do in cloud, you would not be able to do even in a smaller form factor at the edge. But there are some that you can do with the edge and you need to do at the edge, either for latency reasons or just response time. And so that's important to understand the applicability of this. It's not just a simple is saying, Hey, you know, we've got this edge to cloud portfolio and it's great and we've got the smaller servers. You have to kind of change the vernacular a little bit and look at the applicability of it and what people are actually doing >>with. I think those are great points. I think you're 100% right on. You are going to be doing AI influencing at the edge. The data of a lot of data is going to stay at the edge and I personally think and again David Floor is written about this, that it's going to require different architectures. It's not going to be the data center products thrown over to the edge or shrunk down. As you're saying, That's maybe not the right approach, but something that's very efficient, very low cost of when you think about autonomous vehicles. They could have, you know, quote unquote servers in there. They certainly have compute in there. That could be, you know, 2344 $5000 worth of value. And I think that's an opportunity. I'd love to see HP Dell, others really invest in R and D, and this is a new architecture and build that out really infuse ai at the edge. Last last question, guys, we're running out of time. One of the things I'll start with you. Still what things you're gonna watch for HP as indicators of success of innovation in the coming decade. As we said last decade, kind of painful for HP and HP. You know, this decade holds a lot of promise. One of the things you're gonna be watching in terms of success indicators. >>So it's something we talked about earlier is how are they helping customers build new things, So a ws always focuses on builders. Microsoft talks a lot. I've heard somethin double last year's talk about building those new applications. So you know infrastructure is only there for the data, and the applications live on top of it. And if you mention Dave, there's a number of these acquisitions. HP has moved up the stack. Some eso those proof points on new ways of doing business. New ways of building new applications are what I'm looking for from HP, and it's robust ecosystem. >>Tim. Yeah, yeah, and I would just pick you back right on. What's do was saying is that this is a, you know, going back to the Moonshot goals. I mean, it's about as far away as HP ease, and HP is routes used to be and that that hardware space. But it's really changing business outcomes, changing business experiences and experiences for the customers of their customers. And so is far cord that that eight p e can get. I wouldn't expect them to get all the way there, although in conversations I am having with HP and with others that it seems like they are thinking about that. But they have to start moving in that direction. And that's actually something that when you start with the builder conversation like Microsoft has had, an Amazon has had Google's had and even Dell, to some degree has had. I think you missed the bigger picture, so I'm not saying exclude the builder conversation. But you have to put it in the right context because otherwise you get into this siloed mentality of right. We have solved one problem, one unique problem, and built this one unique solution. And we've got bigger issues to be able to address as enterprises, and that's going to involve a lot of different moving parts. And you need to know if you're a builder, you've it or even ah ah, hardware manufacturer. You've got to figure out, How does your piece fit into that bigger picture and you've got to connect those dots very, very quickly. And that's one of the things I'll be looking for. HP as well is how they take this new software initiative and really carry it forward. I'm really encouraged by what I'm seeing. But of course the future could hold something completely different. We thought 2020 would look very different six months ago or a year ago than it does today. >>Well, I wanna I want to pick up on that, I think I would add, and I agree with you. I'm really gonna be looking for innovation. Can h P e e get back to kind of its roots? Remember, H B's router invents it was in the logo. I can't translate its R and D into innovation. To me, it's all about innovation. And I think you know cios like Antonio Neri, Michael Dell, Arvind Krishna. They got a They have a tough, tough position because they're on the one hand, they're throwing off cash, and they can continue Teoh to bump along and, you know, placate Wall Street, give back dividends and share buybacks. And and that's fine. And everybody would be kind of happy. But I'll point out that Amazon in 2007 spent spend less than a $1,000,000,000 in R and D. Google spent about the back, then about the same amount of each B E spends today. So the point is, if the edge is really such a huge opportunity, this $4 trillion tam is David Foyer points out, there's a There's a way in which some of these infrastructure companies could actually pull a kind of mini Microsoft and reinvent themselves in a way that could lead to massive shareholder returns. But it was really will take bold vision and a brave leader to actually make that happen. So that's one of things I'm gonna be watching very closely hp invent turn r and D into dollars. And so you guys really appreciate you coming on the Cube and breaking down the segment for ah, the future of HP be well, and, uh and thanks very much. Alright. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for Tim Crawford and Stupid men. Our coverage of HP ease 2020 Virtual experience. We'll be right back right after this short break. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with coverage of Susic on digital brought to you by Susan. >>Right? Hi. I'm Stew Minuteman. And welcome to the Cube's coverage of Susic on Digital 20. Rather than gathering together in Dublin, we have a larger audience online watching everything digitally, really helping a happy to have on the program. Back to the program. One of our cube alumni. She is fresh off the keynote stage. Melissa DiDonato. She is the CEO of Tuesday. Melissa. So good to see you. Wish it could all be in person. But, you know, thanks for having the Cube in. Ah, >>thank you very much for joining us as well. My third time on the show. I'm really, really pleased to be an important part of our digital experience with Susie. Conditional. So still what? Nice to see you. >>All right. So last time you were on the program, you spoke to Dave. Dave a lot today about how you know you're keeping your employees safe and keeping them productive. The note I heard clearly from you in your keynote presentation is really a sense of optimism. So, like, if you could bring us a little bit inside. You know, I'm sure you're talking to a lot of your customers. What is it even then in these unprecedented Well, I'm giving you that sense of optimism. >>Yeah, there's no denying where we are in the world with Kobe. 19. We have a whole different way of looking at the world. Every business in every industry has been impacted, and not just the working life but our family life. The way we communicate, the way we run our homes, our environments at work is it's been very much integrated now. It's a very different way of adding a whole different level of stress that we didn't have in our business life just a couple of months ago. And I think, as I told Dave, the most important thing for me is number one to make sure that our employees remain self safe and healthy. That's number one, And I think that as we experience negativity across the world of news and social media, etcetera, that my hope is that the community and the Susan family remain optimistic and you know, why do we have the ability to remain optimistic when everyone else is experiencing a lot of doom and gloom. One White House, because you rightly so said, Let me talk about Sousa and how we wouldn't in our community. Our thesis is the power of many. This power of many in a virtual community really drives innovation. We're not like proprietary software and many other tech companies where you have to resign the building to make sure that we maintain and evangelize innovation that you live and deliver to your customers. For us, it's very different. Our community is the basis for innovation. It's the pillar of our community, of our company, our ethos in our value. So it's Susa. This spirit of collaboration and integration is live today more than ever before, with 99% of our employees working from home being engaged a very different way than maybe they're used to. But not so unlike engaging the innovation that we get out of our community. I think you mentioned something else do that's really important. That's productivity. We've moved away as of the first of March and measuring productivity in exchange for measuring the way that we integrate and elaborate and engage with our place. So instead of productivity, we're measuring engagement. Our employees are becoming much more engaged with each other with our customers and our communities. And of course, our partners they're giving back to their community. They're measuring the engagement they're successful means of delivering or how much they can give back to their communities. So we've seen a huge rise and are employees giving back to their communities around them. For example, I met an employee who is donating a very big part of his bonus percentage to a hospital to pay for lunches for frontline health workers near his his home, our nerve of Germany office. They're giving their lunch vouchers and donating that to all of the homeless people around their community. And then we've got employees around Italy, one in particular that's created a virtual classroom for a son school and the community around him. So you know, everyone's really pitching in, I think finally, from a community perspective, we're also sponsoring a numerous amount of hackathons. For example, in Germany, the government has recently held a hackathon for community based solutions to combat code. In 19 our employees participated in engaged with their one day off. We give every employee one day off a year to engage for charitable cause and the results of this hackathon is a better understanding of the data per states about code in 19 across the country. So I think all in all, everything that we're doing is really trying to, you know, utilize the community as we always have, is open source. Open source is developed in a community that often times does not sit together. And now we're trying to really engage with that community as much as possible to keep innovation alive, to keep collaboration alive and not just for the purpose of innovation, but for the purpose of combating the virus and giving hope and first gratitude to this community and across all of our population across the world. I really do believe that in challenging times like today, it's the best way to realize the innovation that we can put together, triggering innovation for good. But also bringing out the best in humanity is it's amazing to see what you know. Thousands and thousands of people in the open source world are giving and delivering and collaborating in which to solve the worlds Problems Cove in 19 but also innovation problems for today and tomorrow >>Yeah, Melissa said some great stories that you have there, you know, we, of course, are huge supporters of communities in general. I've had a great pleasure not only recently but over the last 20 years, watching Linux communities on what's happening in open source. One of the key constituencies, obviously, to your audience, our developers. There are quite a few announcements that I talked about on the keynote stage was wondering if you could help walk through Ah, for our audience. You know, the primary announcements and especially, you know, the impact that it will have on the developer developer community. >>Yeah, that's right. So the developers are entranced, obviously, as part of Susa, where deep open source roots and they're ingrained in our culture. So we just recently focused on a new developer community with content specifically targeted to developer use cases for application platform offering. So over the next couple of months, we're gonna roll out content analytics, open source, Dev >>ops. All >>these things that you are sure loves to micro services, containers, kubernetes edge and and the like. So a lot of innovative technologies as our content. Now what we are offering in the developer community is the SuSE Cloud application platform developer sandbox. We wanted to make it easy for these developers who just spoke of to benefit from the best practices that evolved from the cloud native application delivery that we offer every day. Of course, the customers and now for free to our developers, we want them to be able to easier, easily apply their skills to create applications that can run anywhere, anywhere from on Prem Private Public Cloud and the access is and the developers to get access and hands on experience. That SuSE cloud application platform without having to spend all of their own environment is it is a big test or commitment to the developer community that can explore tests and develop without having any hardware services themselves. It's a really I've signed up myself. Hopefully, you will, too, and join the community and give some feedback and engage in this open source community. For developers, it's really important for everybody. You can find it at developer dot cisco dot com, in addition to the sandbox is I just mentioned you'll also find there are developer forums. It's got getting started guides and other useful examples of how to accelerate the adoption of the cloud application platform and all of the demo tools you can use. It's I can't express the importance enough that we put in place in our developers. Our developer community is a really important part to reach the innovation that we so hoped and live for every day. So we need to provide them the tools to be successful. So I think when you're gonna see Studio is a lot more engagement with our developer community and a lot more integration with them, a collaboration with them. As time goes on, it's a big part of our focus coming in now to 2020 and, of course, the second half of the year. >>So, Melissa, one of the other point that you made in your keynote is that Souza is now, you know, fully independent. It's always been an open source company, a long history there. But what does this one year of independence mean for your customers and that partner ecosystem? >>Yeah, it's a big deal for us, so it's a really big deal. We swung away from micro focus a year ago and mark so just now, Pastor, one year we're now in control of our destiny and the future is very, very bright. I think going forward in the next year, what you can expect from Susan is continued focus and support our customers, of course, the digital transformation efforts that we need to put into helping them go through this transformation. I saw a cartoon, You know, the other day everyone probably saw who's leading your digital transformation. Experts efforts your CEO, your see Iot or Corona virus. And I think we all agree that Corona viruses, but a new effort and focus on the digital transformation of our companies and our customers need to go through. So I think we need to be sure that with this new independence that we focus on that digital transformation effort. Couple that with our open source innovation and no matter where our customers are on their journey, that we give them the enabling tools to get there. We start with simplifying, modernizing and accelerating our customers journey, and you're gonna hear a lot about that in the keynote that I just did, um, simplifying first. So simplifying and optimizing our customer's applications and the data to exist in I T Environment. That's going to help them go on the journey to modernize, modernizing everything about the I T infrastructure as well as their legacy applications, to utilize modernizing, modernized technologies like containers or edge or cloud, or for the like. By simplifying and modernizing, our customers can then begin to accelerate. They can accelerate innovation. They can accelerate growth. They can accelerate delivery of whatever services and applications they want to deliver, for example, capabilities around AI and edge. And they can scale their companies to bring markets product to market faster and even at a lower cost. So I think when you think about Susan our independence, I want our customers to know and understand that our focus will always be to simplify, modernize and accelerate, but also to remain nimble, how our customers, our partners, our community, innovate faster based on customer business requirements and to solve problems of today and tomorrow, not just what we knew before. So we're much more connected with our customers and ever before, and we want to be able to offer them the flexibility that they heard that learned to love it. Enjoy from Susa more some now than ever our customers agenda. Su is our only agenda in a world where everyone wants to be the best at everything. The only thing we want to be number one with is customer satisfaction. We will say number one in the market because we love servicing our customers. We love being maniacally focused on our customers, needs their business problems and creating solutions that are tailored with services that make them more successful. I think you can expect Souza to enter new markets like powering, for example, autonomous vehicles with safety certified legs and other really innovative technologies that were developed every single day in our community with our developers to solve customer business problems. I say to the teams every day, you know, we're big enough for scale, and we're small enough to be nimble and to be flexible to service our customers first. So expecting that from Susa in our independence, but always, of course. >>Yeah, Melissa, you talk about things like ai and Ed and innovation, and you just brought up autonomous vehicles. So, you know, not only is a cool area, but really highlights uh, you know, a lot of these waves coming together. You announced up onstage. Really cool looking company. Electro bit. I noticed there, Green almost matched. Your companies do So. Tell us about this. This is a partnership. Why? It's important. And you know what? What others can learn about it. >>Yeah, sure. So Electra bit. We just partnered with that. Made the announcement today in the keynote there, the leading Internet global international provider of embedded software solutions for automotive. So it's a whole new area for US safety certified Linux is the first for Susan in this industry. I recently met virtually with Alexander coaching the CEO Electra bit to learn more about his company innovation, that we're gonna drive together. We've got a whole session at Susan Con Digital in the platform to talk about what we're doing with safety certified Lennox and what we're doing with Elektra bit. I can't wait to tell you more about, and I've got a 1 to 1 fireside chat with Alex, and I think you're gonna love to learn more about, you know, maybe something else. Wei mentioned in the keynote they may want to know about. And that's the artificial intelligence solution that I specifically talked about launching next quarter. This is I'm super excited about as well. I mean, it's really easy to be excited here, Susan, when you have constant rolling innovation in our community and delivering that to our customers. But this is also an exciting space. The solution that we're launching next quarter is going to benefit both data scientists and I t operations teams by simplifying the integration of key AI building blocks that are going to be required to develop quickly test and then deploy the next generation of intelligence solutions. So keep your eyes open for that to we're gonna have some game changing solutions for Susan and all of our customer promise ai solution next quarter. So two big announcements for us here exclusively. It's music on digital. I can't wait to share all the details Next order with AI, but also with Alex in the fireside chat I had with him during the week. >>Alright, So great, Melissa, A couple of big announcements that you talked about give >>us a >>little bit of a look forward. So, you know, you talked about what? One year of it, and it means what should people be looking at? What goals do you have for the community and the company actually look through the rest of 2020 >>as we look to the rest of 2020. I think, um, it's been a hard year already, and I couldn't have predicted when I took over a CEO of this great company nearly 10 months ago that we'd be having the hard times that we currently have. I can honestly say that there's no place I'd rather be. The fact that we are in the best company in the best industry, with open source at our roots at our heart that will never change but you can expect from us is consistent and constant innovation. You could look for us to be nimble, dependable. You can look for us for growth and there ever were a recession proof company that delivers the best solutions to our customers. I think Susie's in fact, I know it is. We're going to double in size and three years, so we're going to go from just under 1/2 a 1,000,000,000 to a 1,000,000,000 in revenue and what in three years time and we've got the constant trajectory and the means of which to do it. We're really looking from a strategic perspective. The rest of this year. How can we simplify, modernize, accelerate the solutions delivered to our customers to ensure we constantly focus on innovative technologies, keeping open source of value's and ethos to our core? And then also consider how do we ensure a safe, stable quality environment that's building on tools such as optimizing and automating their environment to get the best out of their technology stack? And that's when you should expect to see from some of the rest of this year as we go obviously into 2021. You're gonna want to watch the space to stay tuned for the look at Susa. We're growing like a rocket ship, and we have still intention of going through the crisis and, of course, going into the back half of 2020. But we're accelerating with pace going into 2021. >>Alright, well, Melissa, I'm definitely looking forward to talking to some of your customers, some of your partners in some of your team. So thanks again for joining us, definitely looking forward to catching up with you further down the line. >>I look forward to it. Thank you so much for the time today, and obviously the focus on, Susan. We're super excited to share where we're going, where we've come from and what the journey looks like Ahead. So thanks for the excitement that you're sharing with us throughout this week. Really appreciate you. Thank you. >>Alright. And be sure to stay with us. We've got wall to wall coverage Susic on digital money. Even if we're not at a physical event, we get to do them all remotely digitally. That global digital experience. I'm stew Minimum. And thank you for watching the Cube. >>Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>Yeah, >>from The Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston. It's the Cube covering IBM. Think brought to you by IBM. >>Hi, everybody. We're back. And you're watching the Cube's coverage of the IBM think digital event for 2020. This is that he's socially distant and socially responsible. You? My name is Dave a lot. David Larose. Who's the general manager of the IBM partner ecosystem? David, Good to see you. >>Likewise. Great to be here. >>Yes, it is. Your first year in running the the ecosystem. You probably don't expect to be managing through the this world crisis this novel Corona virus. But what was your first move? Your outreach to partners? How are you communicating to them? Maybe you could share with us how that's all going. >>It certainly wasn't in the break. So when I took this job, you're right. But, you know, we have a very strong relationship with with our partners, and what we have is we have a global advisory board. So about 25 or 30 of our largest customers across the world, we engaged with them very, very quickly. That's all of the CIOs presidents, vice presidents of styles, um, and we engage with them on a survey and said, How are you thinking about it's what are the what are your big concerns and, you know, not unusually. They came back with a couple of key things. Number one was, and their primary concern is how do they support their clients? That was probably number one on their list of things followed very closely. By enabling their firms that have a financial stability that was number two and then probably number three. I would say it was, you know, managing their work. But they're moving to a digital only type of environment, similar to what IBM has done ever kind of the three, the three big concerns. And then we spent some time talking to them about how we could help, then really deal with that and address some of those problems. And earlier this week, we we announced so therefore very key things around. How do we help them? One. How do we adapt our programs and our incentives and, uh, really looking at providing them with, you know, extension of things like loyalty program. So don't worry about you know, your ability to re validate and recertify. We gotta protect your loyalty for 2020. We added a lot of incentives in the hardware systems program in the second quarter, so we've increased by half a percent off their based incentive from the first dollar that a lot of areas around programs in terms. Then we sort of really tried to address that point of view around digital. Um, some companies were digitally ready, but there are many companies that weren't actually know a digital platform, but also we very quickly rolled out what we call it my digital marketing platform, where partners can come in and download content and curate content from IBM and then wrap their own campaigns around that and get that out and continue to engage with their clients and their partners. Um, and we funding all of that 100% from an IBM perspective on using our car marketing goals. We used to have a 50 50 funding model without with their partners. But in this particular scenario, that's a digital program that they're running with funding at 100%. And then we're also opening up to provide consultancy on how to optimize digital. So I think you know the thing that we've done here is just their programs in terms quickly, um, or money back into the into the program during the second quarter and protect the ability for our partners and then really trying to help them and enable them to get Teoh Digital our workforce and the digital program. >>Yeah, a couple things there. I mean, we were talking earlier to the the folks from IBM Global Finance, and that's a key part that you mentioned liquidity. You know, certainly these partners air obviously very much concerned about the uncertainty ahead. So having a partner like IBM that can, whether it's, you know, pass on, you know, lease terms, etcetera and provide that sort of blacking is this key? I think the other thing, too we've heard from a lot of executives, is you've got to stay close to your clients during we always do, but especially during times like this, And that's where partners are so crucial in IBM huge company, you know, massive direct sales force, but you can't cover everything. And so having the partner who's got intimate relationships, I mean, I was on a call earlier this week with a partner in Minneapolis I mean, he knows everybody in that region. And so you just that level of intimacy, I think becomes very, very important in times like this, doesn't it? >>Absolutely. And stay connected with with that. So we have about, you know, just a lot of, Ah, 21,000 active planners across across the world and staying close to the senior members of our largest partners is is really important to us. We had a We hosted a call earlier this week actually, with with their advisory council to test the programs that we've gotten in the market, Are they getting where they need, where they need the help the most? We take a lot of feedback with adjusted our programs. We're looking at this on a literally a daily basis right now on don't envisage that we would we would update pretty agile in terms of how we move that. But you know, to your point, having a partner network that we do have around by the hardware and software only on and is right, so learn what were wrong. You know what they're hearing from their pot from their clients and, you know, it allows us to more easily and quickly address needs across all of the IBM client set. >>So we interview a lot of partners, and, you know, when you talk to the familiar, they've got to make money. They have. The margin is very important to them, but it's almost it's table stakes. I mean, again, they can make money a lot of different ways. So what differentiates the suppliers is all these other things that you're talking about? Um, So I want to ask you when you came in to this this role, what you're doing priorities in terms of, you know, partner outreach, retaining that, that loyalty And what do you see changing a za result of this pandemic? >>Yeah, it's a great question. So look, four key priorities that we declared very early on and, by the way, you know, took over from John Touched at the time. And John has spent the last two years really transforming, um, your channel and the way we engage with channel. And so there was a lot of hard lifting that was already done, but it was sort of four. Things that we focused in on one was obviously, how do we continue? Accelerate IBM drive into the hybrid multi cloud market, particularly now with the integration of Red Hat into the organization. That's a very different, you know, sales motion that Wei had so accelerating that was one of the key parties, the 2nd 1 waas. And how do we continue to differentiate on the value and so ensuring that that our programs are staying up to speed and that they're being modernized? You know, the IBM possible program is being a program predominantly built on Recile over the last 10 years. Now the microchip that we're now talking about platforms not talking about consumption. And this week during Partner World, we're gonna talk about how we are going to evolve the part of the program to move into the rest partners who are building on platforms. And how about they're moving to consumption again, all around hybrid, multi, multi cloud. That's kind of the second thing skills, skills and expertise for out for a channel. We kind of have declared that we want our channel to be the most skilled channel in the industry, and it's really interesting, Dave, during this period of the pandemic, it's one of these times where we seem to have more recent and more time, and the partners have been giving us a lot of feedback to say during this time around. Workforce is home and is connected digitally. Why don't we? Wasn't IBM help with in enhancing the enablement programme certification? And so we're doing a lot around that. We see a Z great opportunity to CIO to really develop certifications and skills and expertise during this period. Um, and then the full thing is around winning in what we call out selective segments. And so we want our partners to operate across the IBM portfolio and across our client set. But where we really need the help and where we're putting the money in the programs is around the mid size organizations where they can bring the portfolio into places that it doesn't have this today, new clients or existing clients with with IBM. But the Jason like server was that kind of the four priorities and what we're seeing is and this situation that we're going through this pandemic going through, it's actually accelerating the areas around moving. My partner multi cloud cloud is becoming a differentiator for us and accelerating. I need to get a program that is relevant beyond just resell. But you know this, this concept of platforms and building. But as they build with their own light beyond platform and consumption, So I think it's it's actually accelerating what we've seen and have it moving forward. >>It's interesting what you're saying about resale. We've talked many, many years now on the Cube about the partner ecosystem. It really used to be about resale. You know, we have a majority of his box selling, and you could make a lot of money doing that, you know, a decade or two ago. But when Cloud came, partners really started to underst and that that there was a sea change happening in I T. For a while there, they thought, Wow, you know, this is really going to be challenging. Cloud's going to kill us. But what they realized after a while is with five exactly complex hybrid Cloud is it's not simple to cure and create a seamless experience across clouds on prime etcetera. So the huge opportunities open up, add value. So there's been a massive change in the mindset. Uh, and it sounds like particularly with digital, that the pandemic is going to accelerate that on. People are going to come out of this, um, almost having done some exercises, maybe in a little bit better shape than they came into it. You buy that premise? >>My question is no question about it. I mean, if you think about, you know, IBM portfolio for a minute. Um, and over the last really 6 to 9 months, we have containerized out our software portfolio. It's based on the, you know, the kubernetes container ization and an open ship. So we're ready from a portfolio perspective. And, you know, now we're catching up from a program perspective we're introducing this week and out in the world this concept of a build program and a service program, and so that is their will preserve and continue to evolve the cell program that resell. But you know this concept of the build program and the service programs and only extend the reach that we have to the data and the ecosystem that we're operating in new sets of partners. But is that one of transition, that business from recent consumption? We're going to support that. But then you have to your point around this whole digital everything from digital capabilities around, generating amount of opportunity and a little bit about that earlier with my program and the funding that we've got behind that the experience that we're we're offering as consultants, but also this concept of digital selling. You know, there's not all about partners are savvy around digital selling. So we've been doing that for many, many years. And, uh and so we're opening up digital selling Enablement sessions, Webinars consultancy and a bunch of assets that that IBM has and has invested in for many, many years and opening that up to you want to add channel? >>Yes, There was some great opportunities there for our partners. I mean, we The Cube has been covering the Red Hat Summit we had Jim Whitehurst on. We're in the process of scheduling Arvin so great to see, you know, kind of connect the dots between those franchises and identify the opportunities, and they're significant. I mean, Red Hat has a lot of momentum in the market. IBM has a huge presence, great opportunity to modernize applications, And then your point about the hardware side we just saw on IBM s latest earnings, released at the Fisher running in hardware right now on, uh, you know, obviously tailwind of the Z cycle, but other parts of the portfolio storage from 19%. So so some exciting times for partners, even though there's so much uncertainty in the market again, staying close to customers, you know, doing doing right by your employees, leveraging the IBM relationship where you're obviously providing a lot of backdrop in support. David, I wonder if you could just sort of wrap a bow around. You know, think 2020 is the virtual trucks are pulling away away from the virtual digital Mosconi. What's the take? Aways will give us the bumper sticker. >>Look, the bumper sticker is that it's never been a better time to be an idea. We've got a leading portfolio that is now ready for the new world. Will the consumption and the world building on um, we are, you know, we're modernizing our programs to ensure that you can make money here. There's a lot of money to be made as we as we get into this thing, this new world and we are behind you right now to support you financially and to get you develop digitally enabled guy. So never been a time to be an IBM partner right now. >>David. Great message. Thank you very much for coming on the Cube. And best of luck to you. Stay safe and ah, again, really appreciate your time. >>You too, Dave. Thanks very much. Bye. Site. >>You know, uh, and you're watching the Cube here at IBM? Think 2020. Our digital coverage. We'll be right back right after this short break. I'm Dave Volante, and you're watching the Cube? >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation CIOs and CISOs of industries that have been hard hit see significant near term and many permanent shifts to their IT and security strategies this was the consensus of four technology executives at leading companies that are feeling the brunt of the corona virus pandemic welcome to this week's cube insights powered by ETR my name is Dave Volante and in this breaking analysis we want to accomplish three things first we want to tap into a new piece of research from ETR it involves an intimate focus group like set up via an open discussion with leading technology executives we interviewed Eric Bradley the managing director of et ours then program and we'll bring him into this discussion the next thing we want to do is we want to drill in to the various sector commentaries from the four leaders third we're gonna comment an hour take try to add some color and then share with you some of the specific vendor commentary that was called out by the executives let's start by looking at what et our event is et our van is a roundtable discussion it applies a tried-and-true methodology similar to a focus group or in-depth interviews what we sometimes in the research business call ID is ETR invites execs in from its community to participate in a private but open conversation et our clients get to listen in the names of the execs and their companies are transparent but the cube is only allowed to refer to them generically as shown on this slide now we can validate these participants they are legit CIOs and CISOs some and very well-known firms now what I want to do is summarize the CIO and seaso sentiment from this then discussion the overall budget impact for these four organizations is very very severe essentially large project projects are being put on hold although digital transformation initiatives remain a priority there were really four significant areas of emphasis that were cited by these execs cloud-first on-prem is losing out to cloud SAS and of course remote access solutions in fact the best comment on the panel was as a service is saving our SAS traditional networking is shifting to SD win especially rigid MPLS networks securing endpoints and zero trust solutions are the winners and there are a number of vendors rising to the occasion that will talk about it let's see how Eric Bradley of ETR summarizes the venn to summarize what we're seeing here was the real winners and losers are clear not everyone was prepared to have it work from home strategy not everyone was prepared to send their workers out there VPN wasn't didn't have enough bandwidth so there was a real quick uptick in spending but longer-term we're starting to see that these changes will be become more permanent so the real winners and losers right now we're going to see on the losers side traditional networking the MPLS networking isn't a lot of trouble according to all the data and the commentary that we see it's expensive it's difficult to ramp up bandwidth as quickly as you need and it doesn't support remote ok what I want to do now is I want to take a look at some of the verbatim comments and I'll just I'll read them from this slide all spending is shut down 70% of big projects are cut all next-gen projects have been shelled the relationship with our SAS vendor has been a miracle we're accelerating from MPLS to sd when on top of secure gateway technologies these will win this was interesting our business continuity plans were way too DR focused essentially we weren't prepared now let's unpack the cloud first commentary and give you some additional color I feel like all we do around here sometimes is talk about the cloud but it's clear from the data in the ETR data set surveys and the venn that in other data from the cube that that the cloud is only going to be accelerated we said this in 2008 in the 2009 downturns have been good to cloud one of the execs literally said I would like to see my data centers completely deleted Wow let's listen to Erik Bradley's take on this comment I was also shocked about that comment that gentleman also stated that his executives outside of the eyeteeth area the CEO the CFO had never ever ever wanted to discuss cloud they did not want to discuss work from home they did not want to discuss remote access he said that conversation has changed immediately so we've been talking a lot about those aspects of people and process and technology that might be permanent post kovat and clearly you see c-level execs as having a bit of an awakening for things like cloud and work from home not that they didn't see them before but these things are gonna accelerate in our view I want to spend a minute talking about networks SAS and bring cloud again into the discussion I gotta say the panel members really trashed MPLS networks in a big way let me explain MPLS stands for multi-protocol label switching you find this type of infrastructure in big telecom networks and it's there to route traffic and pls is used to create dedicated and and essentially reliable connections it enables things like VPNs quality a service management traffic engineering or shaping but well MPLS is definitely cheaper than t1 it's more expensive than Ethernet now I came into prominence well before the cloud and these execs see it is as outdated and inflexible and this is where SD wind comes into play software-defined wide area networks they're gaining popularity especially with the Sassa fication of applications and of course the general trend toward cloud here's Eric Bradley again explaining what the panel members said from his perspectives winners there or in the SD web space it's gonna be impossible to ignore that going forward and some of our CIO and even CISO panelists said that change will be also we're seeing at the same time what they were calling a on on SAS and cloud now we know these trends obviously were already happening but there be they're being exacerbated they're happening even more quickly and more strong and I don't see that changing anytime soon that of course is at the expense of network sorry data centers whether it be your own or hosted which has huge ramifications on from on from Hardware even the firewall providers so and it really seems as if as networking refresh starts to come up and it's coming up with a lot of large in writes when your network refresh comes up people are going to do an RFP for SD web they are sick and tired of paying MPLS network vendors and they really want to look at something else that was even prior to this situation now what we're hearing is this is a permanent change I particularly had one person say I wanted to find this quote real quickly by then but basically they were basically saying that from a permanency perspective the freedom from MPLS will reduce our network spend by over half while more than doubling or tripling or bandwidth now the challenge of course is customers have multiple MPLS contracts with several different vendors and often they just rubber-stamp the renewal but what customers are gonna start doing is layering in SD win and letting those agreements expire ok I want to talk about secure endpoints in this notion of zero trust solutions as I've said in the cube many many times the idea of digging a moat around the castle doesn't protect your queen anymore because the Queen ie the data has left the castle so companies that can secure gateways and secure endpoints they are going to have more momentum during and post kovat now in the panel Z scalar came up a lot in this context as well as fortunate who as I've reported has done a good job in getting its cloud products to market and of course the et our data shows that fortunate and Z scalar both have strong net scores or spending momentum and fort net especially has really strong pervasiveness in the et our dataset as I've reported previously I've also analyzed that there's been evaluation divergence between Palo Alto Networks and fortunate and house II scalar as well is a disruptor in this space I want you to listen to what Eric Bradley said specifically about Z scalar in Palo Alto Networks roll the clip yes it is and I'm glad you brought up Z scalar to very recently by client request we did a very in-depth research on Z scale and versus Palo Alto charisma access and they were very interested this is before all this happened you know does Palo Alto have a chance of catching up taking share from Z scalar and I've had the pleasure myself personally hosting J the CEO of Z scalar at an event here at City and I have nothing but incredible respect for the company but what we found out through this research is Z scalar at the moment their technology is still ahead according to their and there is no doubt however there doesn't seem to be any real secret sauce that will stop palo alto from inching up so if I had to choose that in a year from now Palo Alto might have had a better chance so in this panel as you brought up Z scalar was mentioned numerous times as just the wave of the future along with Cosby brokers right whether you're talking about a net scope or a force point they're all those people that also play in The Cosby space to secure your access zero Trust is no longer a marketing hype term it is real and it is becoming more real by the week now I personally agree with Eric that palo alto is is definitely going to be in the mix customers that we've talked to they want to work with palo alto networks but there's a sea change going on and it's being driven by sass and cloud and now accelerating because a co vid of course that the trend of remote workers is we think here to stay now i want to end by talking about some specific vendor mentions in addition to the ones we've talked about already and this chart shows some of the vendors and their logos that were called out as either being really really helpful during the this pandemic or super important to the CIOs and CISOs these executives really stressed how thankful they are to these companies and that the fact that these companies have worked very closely with them they've been flexible on pricing and payments and they also specifically mentioned how off-put they were by you know this notion of ambulance-chasing for example trials that required them to make some kind of commitment or swipe a credit card they just don't have time for that right now and then of the patience for it now let me call out a few of the companies that were cited in a positive light look at microsoft is all for the ETR data set in so many sectors Microsoft teams security solutions cloud really came up a lot on on this ven IBM was mentioned as being a great partner as what's oracle many many times we talked about fortunate and Z scalar already Cisco was called out as a strategic vendor was very helpful both the networking and with Cisco teams for collaboration CrowdStrike came up a number of times from CISOs as did Trend Micro and carbon black got a mention that's the VMware acquisition insecurity of course MobileIron that makes sense as well because they're securing and managing remote worker devices now finally interesting Lee Salesforce was brought up many times as a critical vendor one exec said that before coronavirus multiple workers could share a Salesforce license by you know sharing passwords but with the spike and work from home they had to purchase more licenses now one last thing that I want to bring up is start ups I got this question the other day from a client who said how a start-ups fair you might think that in this climate especially among for hard-hit customers that there might be risk-averse as it pertains to using startups once cio however said the following paraphrasing you always hear about the guy that says we'll pick three companies in the upper right hand corner the Gartner Magic Quadrant will test them out and this C so said that one of the things that he's always done is picked two from the upper right and one from the lower left one of the emerging techs and he gives them a shot let's listen to how Eric Bradley describes this dynamic roll the clip it's a great comment and honestly if you're in charge of procurement you'd be stupid not to do that not only just to see what the technology is but now I can play you off the big guys because I have negotiating leverage and I could say oh well I could always just take their contract so it's silly not to do it from a business perspective so it's really interesting and somewhat non-intuitive these comments on startups which of course means despite all the consolidation and acquisitions that you see in the industry you know there's still gonna be a lot of fragmentations a fragmentation especially as I've said many many times in the security space people still want best to breed and innovation and if it can drive business value they're gonna they're gonna go for it ok so look I realize that these are narrow comments from for CIOs and CISOs but they give us some added texture and flavor and color to the core ETR data set and we're going to continue to report on these trends and share more details as they become available both from the ETR data set and from other vents and remember we're gonna be digging into the latest ETR survey over the over the coming weeks as ETR exits its self-imposed quiet period so you can always check out ETR dot plus I publish weekly on wiki bang calm and on Silicon angle calm and of course our YouTube library has all these videos that's youtube.com slash silicon angle by the way these segments are also available as podcasts you can DM me or tweet me at devil ante and please by all means comment on my LinkedIn posts or email me at David Galante at Silicon angle com always appreciate the feedback thanks for watching everybody this is breaking analysis brought to you by the cube powered by ETR this is Dave Volante and we'll see you next time thanks for watching [Music]

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's Cuban sites, powered by ET are in this breaking analysis, we want to accomplish three things. First thing I'll do is we'll recap the current spending outlook. Next, we want to share some of the priorities and sentiments and the outlook that we're hearing from leading tech execs that we've been interviewing in the past couple of weeks on the remote cube. And finally, we'll take a look at really what's going on in the market place, a little bit of a look forward and what we expect in the coming weeks and months ahead. Now, as you know, E. T. R was really the first to quantify with real survey data the impact of covert 19 on I t spend. So I just want to review that for a moment. This CTR graphic right here shows that results from more than 1200 CIOs and I T practitioners. That shows that they expect their I t spending how they're they're spending on the change in 2020 now, look at the gray bar shows a very large number of organizations that they're plowing ahead without any change. In overall, I spend about 35% now shown in the green bars before 21% of respondents are actually increase their budgets this year. And the red bars, of course, they show the carnage. Really, 28% of customers are expecting a decrease of more than 10% year on year. Now, as we've reported, the picture would look a lot worse were it not for the work from home infrastructure, offset by E spending on collaboration tools and related networking security. VPN, VD I interest infrastructure, etcetera. Now remember each year launched this survey on March 11th and ran it through early April. So it caught the change in sentiment literally in real time on a daily basis. And that's what I'm showing here in this graphic. What it does is it overlays key events that occurred during that time frame and what E. T. R did was they modeled and rear end the data excluding the responses prior to each event. So, of course, the forecast got progressively worse over time. But as you can see on the Purple Line. There was a little bit of an uptick in sentiment from the stimulus package, and it looked like, you know, there's another. It looks like there's another economic cash injection coming soon. Now, as we've reported, the card forecast calls for around 4% decline in I t spend from 2020. That's down from plus 4% prior to Corona virus. It's ER has now entered its self imposed quiet period for two weeks. But what we're doing here is showing some of the sectors that we're watching closely for big changes. We're gonna drill into these over the next several weeks. Now, of course, is we've reported we're seeing a substantial cut in I t spend across the board. Capex will be down. We would expect sectors like I t consulting and outsourcing to be way, way down as organizations put a lot of projects on the back burner. But there are bright spots is shown here in the green. One that we really haven't highlighted to date is cloud really haven't dug into that and also data center related services around Cloud Cloud, we think, is definitely going to remain strong and these related services to get connect clouds via Coehlo services and really reducing latency across clouds and on Prem, we think will remain strong. Now I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about some of the learnings and takeaways from our conversations with CSOs over the past couple of weeks. One of the great things about the Cube is we get to build relationships with many, many people. Over the past 10 years, I've probably personally interviewed close to 5000 people, so we've reached out to a number of those execs over the last couple of weeks to really try and understand how they're managing through this cove in 19 Crisis. So let me summarize just some of the things that we heard. And then I'll let the execs speak to you directly first, of course, like tech execs, are there half full people perpetual optimist, if you will. It was interesting to hear how many of the people that I spoke with, that they actually had early visibility on this crisis. Why? Because a lot of our operations, we're actually in China and other parts of Asia, so they saw this coming to an extent, and they saw it coming to the U. S. And so you know, there were somewhat ready and you're here. They all had on air of confidence about their long term viability and putting their put their employees ahead of profits. But the same time, once they see that their employees are okay, they want to get them focused and productive. Now what they've also done is they've increased the cadence and the frequency of their communications. Yeah, and most, if not all, are trying to get back with a free no strings attached software and other similar programs. But the bottom line is, they really don't know what's coming. They don't know when this thing will end. They don't know what a recovery really is gonna look like when people are going to feel safe traveling again what the overall economic impact is gonna be. So I think it's best summarized to say they're hoping for the best, but planning for the worst. But let's listen to this highlight clip that we put together of five execs that I talked to along with John Furrier Melissa DiDonato of Susa. Frank Sluman, who had snowflake and he's formerly the chairman and CEO of service. Now Jeremy Burton is the CEO of a company called Observe. He used to be the CMO of Dell and EMC. Before that, brand products Sanjay Poonam as the CEO of VM Ware and ST ST Vossen heads up Cisco's collaboration business. Roll the clip. >>What keeps me up at night now and how I wake up every morning is wondering about the health of my employees, that a couple of employees, one that was quite ill in Italy. We were phoning him and calling and emailing him from his hospital bed. And that's what's really keeping me going. What's inspiring me to leave this incredible company is the people and the culture that they built that I'm honoring and taking forward as part of the open source value system. My first movers, Let's not overreact. Take a deep breath. Let's really examine what we know. Let's not jump to conclusions. Let's not try to project things that were not capable of projecting death hard because, you know, we tend to have sort of levels off certainty about what's gonna happen in the next week in the next month, and so on. All of a sudden that's out of the window creates enormous anxiety with people. So, in other words, you've got a sort of a reset to Okay, what do we know? What can we do? What we control, Um, and and not let our minds sort of, you know, go out of control. So I talk to are people time of maintain a sense of normalcy focused on the work. Stay in the state in the moment. And ah, I don't turn the news feed off. Right, Because the hysteria you get through that through the media really not helpful. Just haven't been through, you know, a couple of recessions where, you know, we all went through 9 11 You know, the world just turn around and you come out the other side. And so the key thing is, you said it very much is a cliche, but you gotta live in the moment. What can I do right now? What can I affect right now? How can I make sure that you know what I'm working on is a value for when we come out the other side. And when you know more code balls come along. I think you'd better reason about that with the best information you have at the time. I always tell people the profits of VM Ware wheat. If you are not well, if your loved ones not well, if you take a picture of that first, we will be fine. You know this to show fast, but if you're healthy, let's turn our attention because we're not going to just sit in a little mini games. We're gonna so, customers, How do we do that? A lot of our customers are adjusting to this pool, and as a result they have to, you know, either order devices, but the laptop screens things were the kinds to allow work for your environment to be as close to productive as they're working today. I do see some, some things coming. Problem right? Do I expect the volumes off collaboration to go down? You know, it's never going to go back to the same level. The world as we know it is going to change forever. We are going to have a post code area, and that's going to be changed for the better. There's a number of employees who have been skeptical, reticent, working from home were suddenly going to say just work from home. Thing is not so bad after all. >>So you can hear from the execs who all either currently or one point of lead large companies in large teams. They're pretty optimistic now. The other thing that's Lukman told me, by the way, is he approves investments in engineering with no qualms because that's the future of the company. But he's much more circumspect with regard to go to market investments because he wants to see a high probability of yield from the sales teams before making investments there. I also want to share some perspectives that I've learned from small early stage companies, and we've all seen the Sequoia Black Swan memo and you might remember there onerous rest in peace, good times the alert that they put out in 2008. It basically they're essentially advising companies to stop spending on non essential items. By the way, another slew of society also somewhat scoffed at this advice, and he told me on the Cube, you should always stop spending money on non essential items. At any rate, I've talked to a number of early stage investors and portfolio companies, and I'll share a little bit of their play Bach playbook that they're using during this crisis, and it might have some value to the cut, cut cut narrative that you're hearing out there. I think the summary for these early stage startups is first focus on those customers that got you to where you are today. In other words, don't lose sight of your core. The second thing is, try to hone your go to market and align it with current conditions. In other words, paint a picture of the ideal customer and the value proposition that you deliver specifically in the context of the current market. The third thing is, they're updating their forecast more frequently and running sensitivity analysis much more often so that they can better predict outcomes. I e. Reset. You're likely best case and worst case models. The third is essentially reset your near term and midterm plans and those goals and re balance your expense portfolio to reflect these new targets. And this is important by the way, to communicate to your investors. When I've seen is those companies with annual recurring revenue there actually in pretty good shape, believe it or not, in almost all cases, I've seen targets lowered. But there are some examples of startups that are actually increasing their outlook. Think, Zoom, even those who is not a startup anymore. But generally I've seen resets of between 5 to 10% downward, which you know what often is in pretty much in line with the board level goals. And I've seen more drastic reductions as well of up to 50% now. So we've heard some pretty good stories from larger tech companies and some of these VC funded startups. Now I want to talk about small business broadly and what we're hearing from small business owners and also the banks that serve them. Look, I'm not going to sugar coat this many small businesses, as you well know, in deep trouble. They're gonna go out of business. They're laying off people on. There are a number of unemployed the aid package that the government's putting forth the small businesses. It's not working its way through the banking system. Not nearly fast enough, despite the Treasury secretaries efforts, The bottom line is banks don't want to make these loans to small businesses. Right now, there's too much that they don't understand. They're making no money on these loans they're being overwhelmed with. Volume will give you some examples. Bank of America, when the small business payroll program first hit signal that would Onley help companies with both ah banking relationship and an existing lending relationship with the bank UPS is another example said it was only gonna directly help companies with over 500 employees. And for small businesses, it was outsourcing that relationship to another firm, which, of course, meant you had to go through a new rectal exam, if you will, with that new firm. In a way, you can't blame the banks. They're being asked to execute on these programs without clear guidance on how they're supposed to enforce guidelines. And what happens if they make a mistake? Is the federal government gonna pull their guaranteed backing? What are those guidelines? They seem to be changing all the time. And what's the banks, liability and authority to enforce them? Why don't I spend time talking about this? Well, nearly half of US employees work for small businesses, and nearly 17 million workers as of this date have filed for unemployment, and I'll say the banks got bailed out in the financial crisis of 2008 and they need to step up, period, and the government needs to help them, all right. The other buzz kill data that I want to bring up is our national debt. Now many have invoked that there's no such thing as a free lunch, including the famous Milton Friedman, the Economist who I'm gonna credit. Others have said it, but I'll give it to him. Why? Because he espoused controlling the money supply and letting the market's fix themselves bailouts. The banks, airlines, Boeing, automakers, etcetera, those air antithetical to his underlying philosophy. Currently, the U. S national debt is $24 trillion. That's $194,000. Protects player Americans. Personal debt is now 20 trillion. Our unfunded liabilities, like Social Security, Medicare, etcetera now stands at a whopping 139 trillion. And that equates to about 422,000 per citizen. Think about this. The average liquid savings for US family is 15 K, and the U. S debt is now 111% of GDP. So we've been applying Kenzie and Economics for a while now. I'm gonna say it seems to have been working. Think about the predictions of inflation after the 8 4000 and nine crisis. They proved to be wrong. But my concern is I don't see how we grow our way out of this debt, and I worry about that. I've worried about this for a long time, but look, we're knee deep into it and it looks like there's no turning back so well, I'll try to keep my rhetoric to a minimum and stay positive here because I think there is light at the end of the tunnel. We're starting to see some some good opportunities emerging here just in terms of flattening the curve and the like. One of the things that pretty positive about is there gonna be some permanent changes from Cove it. It's kind of ironic that this thing hit as we're entering a new decade decade and as I said before, I expect digital transformations to be accelerated because of this crisis and the many companies that have talked digital from the corner office. But I haven't necessarily really walked the walk, I think will now I think is going to be more cloud more subscription less wasted labor, more automation, more work from home unless big physical events, at least in the next couple of years. So that's kind of the new expectation. As always, we're going to continue to report from our studios in Palo Alto and Boston, and we really welcome and appreciate your feedback. Remember, these segments are all available as podcasts, and we're publishing regularly on silicon angle dot com and on wiki bond dot com. Check out ctr dot plus for all the spending action, and you can feel free to comment on my LinkedIn post or DME at development or email me at David Volante Wiki. Sorry, David Vellante is silicon angle dot com. This is Dave Volante for the Cube Insights powered by CTR. Thanks for watching everyone. We'll see you next time. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>from the Cube Studios in >>Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. Everybody welcome this special digital presentation where we're covering the topic of data ops and specifically how IBM is really operationalize ing and automating the data pipeline with data office. And with me is Interpol Bhandari, who is the global chief data officer at IBM and Paul. It's always great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>My pleasure. >>So, you know the standard throwaway question from guys like me And you know what keeps the chief data officer up at night? Well, I know what's keeping you up that night. It's coverted 19. How you >>doing? It's keeping keeping all of us. >>Yeah, for sure. Um, So how are you guys making out as a leader I'm interested in, You know, how you have responded would whether it's communications. Obviously you're doing much more stuff you remotely You're not on airplanes. Certainly like you used to be. But But what was your first move when you actually realized this was going to require a shift? >>Well, I think one of the first things that I did wants to test the ability of my organization, You work remotely. This was well before the the recommendations came in from the government just so that we wanted to be sure that this is something that we could pull off if there were extreme circumstances where even everybody was. And so that was one of the first things we did along with that. I think another major activity that's being boxed off is even that we have created this Central Data and AI platform for idea using our hybrid, multi cloud approach. How could that the adaptive very, very quickly help them look over the city? But those were the two big items that my team and my embarked on and again, like I said, this is before there was any recommendations from the government or even internally, within IBM. Have any recommendations be? We decided that we wanted to run ahead and make sure that we were ready to ready to operate in that fashion. And I believe a lot of my colleagues did the same. Yeah, >>there's a there's a conversation going on right now just around productivity hits that people may be taking because they really weren't prepared it sounds like you're pretty comfortable with the productivity impact that you're achieving. >>Oh, I'm totally comfortable with the politics. I mean, in fact, I will tell you that while we've gone down this spot, we've realized that in some cases the productivity is actually going to be better when people are working from home and they're able to focus a lot more on the work, you know, And this could. This one's the gamut from the nature of the jaw, where you know somebody who basically needs to be in the front of the computer and is remotely taking care of operations. You know, if they don't have to come in, their productivity is going to go up Somebody like myself who had a long drive into work, you know, which I would use a phone calls, but that that entire time it can be used a lot more productivity, locked in a lot more productive manner. So there is. We realized that there's going to be some aspect of productivity that will actually be helped by the situation. Why did you are able to deliver the services that you deliver with the same level of quality and satisfaction that you want Now there were certain other aspect where you know the whole activity is going to be effective. So you know my team. There's a lot off white boarding that gets done there lots off informal conversations that spot creativity. But those things are much harder to replicate in a remote and large. So we've got a sense off. You know where we have to do some work? Well, things together. This is where we're actually going to be mobile. But all in all, they're very comfortable that we can pull this off. >>That's great. I want to stay on Cove it for a moment and in the context of just data and data ops, and you know why Now, obviously, with a crisis like this, it increases the imperative to really have your data act together. But I want to ask you both specifically as it relates to covert, why Data office is so important. And then just generally, why at this this point in time, >>So, I mean, you know, the journey we've been on. Thank you. You know, when I joined our data strategy centered around cloud data and ai, mainly because IBM business strategy was around that, and because there wasn't the notion off AI and Enterprise, right, there was everybody understood what AI means for the consumer. But for the enterprise, people don't really understand. Well, what a man. So our data strategy became one off, actually making IBM itself into an AI and and then using that as a showcase for our clients and customers who look a lot like us, you make them into AI. And in a nutshell, what that translated to was that one had two in few ai into the workflow off the key business processes off enterprise. So if you think about that workflow is very demanding, right, you have to be able to deliver. They did not insights on time just when it's needed. Otherwise, you can essentially slow down the whole workflow off a major process within an end. But to be able to pull all that off you need to have your own data works very, very streamlined so that a lot of it is automated and you're able to deliver those insights as the people who are involved in the work floor needed. So we've spent a lot of time while we were making IBM into any I enterprise and infusing AI into our key business processes into essentially a data ops pipeline that was very, very streamlined, which then allowed us to do very quickly adapt do the over 19 situation and I'll give you one specific example that will go to you know how one would someone would essentially leverage that capability that I just talked about to do this. So one of the key business processes that we have taken a map, it was our supply chain. You know, if you're a global company and our supply chain is critical, you have lots of suppliers, and they are all over the globe. And we have different types of products so that, you know, has a multiplication factors for each of those, you have additional suppliers and you have events. You have other events, you have calamities, you have political events. So we have to be able to very quickly understand the risks associated with any of those events with regard to our supply chain and make appropriate adjustments on the fly. So that was one off the key applications that we built on our central data. And as Paul about data ops pipeline. That meant we ingest the ingestion off those several 100 sources of data not to be blazingly fast and also refresh very, very quickly. Also, we have to then aggregate data from the outside from external sources that had to do with weather related events that had to do with political events. Social media feeds a separate I'm overly that on top off our map of interest with regard to our supply chain sites and also where they were supposed to deliver. We also leave them our capabilities here, track of those shipments as they flowed and have that data flow back as well so that we would know exactly where where things were. This is only possible because we had a streamline data ops capability and we have built this Central Data and AI platform for IBM. Now you flip over to the Coleman 19 situation when Corbyn 19 merged and we began to realize that this was going to be a significant significant pandemic. What we were able to do very quickly wants to overlay the over 19 incidents on top of our sites of interest, as well as pick up what was being reported about those sites of interests and provide that over to our business continuity. So this became an immediate exercise that we embark. But it wouldn't have been possible if you didn't have the foundation off the data office pipeline as well as that Central Data and AI platform even plays to help you do that very, very quickly and adapt. >>So what I really like about this story and something that I want to drill into is it Essentially, a lot of organizations have a really tough time operational izing ai, infusing it to use your word and the fact that you're doing it, um is really a good proof point that I want to explore a little bit. So you're essentially there was a number of aspects of what you just described. There was the data quality piece with your data quality in theory, anyway, is going to go up with more data if you can handle it and the other was speed time to insight, so you can respond more quickly if it's talk about this Covic situation. If you're days behind for weeks behind, which is not uncommon, sometimes even worse, you just can't respond. I mean, the things change daily? Um, sometimes, Certainly within the day. Um, so is that right? That's kind of the the business outcome. An objective that you guys were after. >>Yes, you know, So Rama Common infuse ai into your business processes right over our chain. Um, don't come metric. That one focuses on is end to end cycle time. So you take that process the end to end process and you're trying to reduce the end to end cycle time by several factors, several orders of magnitude. And you know, there are some examples off things that we did. For instance, in my organ organization that has to do with the generation of metadata is data about data. And that's usually a very time consuming process. And we've reduced that by over 95%. By using AI, you actually help in the metadata generation itself. And that's applied now across the board for many different business processes that, you know IBM has. That's the same kind of principle that was you. You'll be able to do that so that foundation essentially enables you to go after that cycle time reduction right off the bat. So when you get to a situation like over 19 situation which demands urgent action. Your foundation is already geared to deliver on that. >>So I think actually, we might have a graphic. And then the second graphic, guys, if you bring up a 2nd 1 I think this is Interpol. What you're talking about here, that sort of 95% reduction. Ah, guys, if you could bring that up, would take a look at it. So, um, this is maybe not a cove. It use case? Yeah. Here it is. So that 95% reduction in the cycle time improvement in data quality. What we talked about this actually some productivity metrics, right? This is what you're talking about here in this metadata example. Correct? >>Yeah. Yes, the metadata. Right. It's so central to everything that one does with. I mean, it's basically data about data, and this is really the business metadata that you're talking about, which is once you have data in your data lake. If you don't have business metadata describing what that data is, then it's very hard for people who are trying to do things to determine whether they can, even whether they even have access to the right data. And typically this process is being done manually because somebody looks at the data that looks at the fields and describe it. And it could easily take months. And what we did was we essentially use a deep learning and natural language processing of road. Look at all the data that we've had historically over an idea, and we've automated metadata generation. So whether it was, you know, you were talking about the data relevant for 19 or for supply chain or far receivable process any one of our business processes. This is one of those fundamental steps that one must go through. You'll be able to get your data ready for action. And if you were able to take that cycle time for that step and reduce it by 95% you can imagine the acceleration. >>Yeah, and I like you were saying before you talk about the end to end concept, you're applying system thinking here, which is very, very important because, you know, a lot of a lot of clients that I talk to, they're so focused on one metric maybe optimizing one component of that end to end, but it's really the overall outcome that you're trying to achieve. You may sometimes, you know, be optimizing one piece, but not the whole. So that systems thinking is very, very important, isn't it? >>The systems thinking is extremely important overall, no matter you know where you're involved in the process off designing the system. But if you're the data guy, it's incredibly important because not only does that give you an insight into the cycle time reduction, but it also give clues U N into what standardization is necessary in the data so that you're able to support an eventual out. You know, a lot of people will go down the part of data governance and the creation of data standards, and you can easily boil the ocean trying to do that. But if you actually start with an end to end, view off your key processes and that by extension the outcomes associated with those processes as well as the user experience at the end of those processes and kind of then work backwards as one of the standards that you need for the data that's going to feed into all that, that's how you arrive at, you know, a viable practical data standards effort that you can essentially push forward so that there are multiple aspect when you take that end to end system view that helps the chief legal. >>One of the other tenants of data ops is really the ability across the organization for everybody to have visibility. Communications is very key. We've got another graphic that I want to show around the organizational, you know, in the right regime, and it's a complicated situation for a lot of people. But it's imperative, guys, if you bring up the first graphic, it's a heritage that organizations, you know, find bringing the right stakeholders and actually identify those individuals that are going to participate so that this full visibility everybody understands what their roles are. They're not in silos. So, guys, if you could show us that first graphic, that would be great. But talk about the organization and the right regime there. Interpol? >>Yes, yes, I believe you're going to know what you're going to show up is actually my organization, but I think it's yes, it's very, very illustrative what one has to set up. You'll be able to pull off the kind of impact that I thought So let's say we talked about that Central Data and AI platform that's driving the entire enterprise, and you're infusing AI into key business processes like the supply chain. Then create applications like the operational risk in size that we talked about that extended over. Do a fast emerging and changing situation like the over 19. You need an organization that obviously reflects the technical aspects of the right, so you have to have the data engineering on and AI on. You know, in my case, there's a lot of emphasis around deep learning because that's one of those skill set areas that's really quite rare, and it also very, very powerful. So uh huh you know, the major technology arms off that. There's also the governance on that I talked about. You have to produce the set off standards and implement them and enforce them so that you're able to make this into an impact. But then there's also there's a there's an adoption there. There's a There's a group that reports into me very, very, you know, Empowered Group, which essentially has to convince the rest of the organization to adopt. Yeah, yeah, but the key to their success has been in power in the sense that they're on power. You find like minded individuals in our key business processes. We're also empowered. And if they agree that just move forward and go and do it because you know, we've already provided the central capabilities by Central. I don't mean they're all in one location. You're completely global and you know it's it's It's a hybrid multi cloud set up, but it's a central in the sense that it's one source to come for for trusted data as well as the the expertise that you need from an AI standpoint to be able to move forward and deliver the business out. So when these business teams come together, be an option, that's where the magic happens. So that's another another aspect of the organization that's critical. And then we've also got, ah, Data Officer Council that I chair, and that has to do with no people who are the chief data officers off the individual business units that we have. And they're kind of my extended teams into the rest of the organization, and we levers that bolt from a adoption off the platform standpoint. But also in terms of defining and enforcing standards. It helps them stupid. >>I want to come back over and talk a little bit about business resiliency people. I think it probably seen the news that IBM providing supercomputer resource is that the government to fight Corona virus. You've also just announced that that some some RTP folks, um, are helping first responders and non profits and providing capabilities for no charge, which is awesome. I mean, it's the kind of thing. Look, I'm sensitive companies like IBM. You know, you don't want to appear to be ambulance chasing in these times. However, IBM and other big tech companies you're in a position to help, and that's what you're doing here. So maybe you could talk a little bit about what you're doing in this regard. Um, and then we'll tie it up with just business resiliency and importance of data. >>Right? Right. So, you know, I explained that the operational risk insights application that we had, which we were using internally, we call that 19 even we're using. We're using it primarily to assess the risks to our supply chain from various events and then essentially react very, very quickly. Do those doodles events so you could manage the situation. Well, we realize that this is something that you know, several non government NGOs that they could essentially use. There's a stability because they have to manage many of these situations like natural disaster. And so we've given that same capability, do the NGOs to you and, uh, to help that, to help them streamline their planning. And there's thinking, by the same token, But you talked about over 19 that same capability with the moment 19 data over layed on double, essentially becomes a business continuity, planning and resilience. Because let's say I'm a supply chain offers right now. I can look at incidents off over night, and I can I know what my suppliers are and I can see the incidents and I can say, Oh, yes, no, this supplier and I can see that the incidences going up this is likely to be affected. Let me move ahead and stop making plans backup plans, just in case it reaches a crisis level. On the other hand, if you're somebody in revenue planning, you know, on the finance side and you know where you keep clients and customers are located again by having that information over laid that those sites, you can make your own judgments and you can make your own assessment to do that. So that's how it translates over into business continuity and resolute resilience planning. True, we are internally. No doing that now to every department. You know, that's something that we're actually providing them this capability because we build rapidly on what we have already done to be able to do that as we get inside into what each of those departments do with that data. Because, you know, once they see that data, once they overlay it with their sights of interest. And this is, you know, anybody and everybody in IBM, because no matter what department they're in, there are going to decide the interests that are going to be affected. And they haven't understanding what those sites of interest mean in the context off the planning that they're doing and so they'll be able to make judgments. But as we get a better understanding of that, we will automate those capabilities more and more for each of those specific areas. And now you're talking about the comprehensive approach and AI approach to business continuity and resilience planning in the context of a large IT organization like IBM, which obviously will be of great interest to our enterprise, clients and customers. >>Right? One of the things that we're researching now is trying to understand. You know, what about this? Prices is going to be permanent. Some things won't be, but we think many things will be. There's a lot of learnings. Do you think that organizations will rethink business resiliency in this context that they might sub optimize profitability, for example, to be more prepared crises like this with better business resiliency? And what role would data play in that? >>So, you know, it's a very good question and timely fashion, Dave. So I mean, clearly, people have understood that with regard to that's such a pandemic. Um, the first line of defense, right is is not going to be so much on the medicine side because the vaccine is not even available and will be available for a period of time. It has to go through. So the first line of defense is actually think part of being like approach, like we've seen play out across the world and then that in effect results in an impact on the business, right in the economic climate and on the business is there's an impact. I think people have realized this now they will honestly factor this in and do that in to how they do become. One of those things from this is that I'm talking about how this becomes a permanent. I think it's going to become one of those things that if you go responsible enterprise, you are going to be landing forward. You're going to know how to implement this, the on the second go round. So obviously you put those frameworks and structures in place and there will be a certain costs associated with them, and one could argue that that would eat into the profitability. On the other hand, what I would say is because these two points really that these are fast emerging fluid situations. You have to respond very, very quickly. You will end up laying out a foundation pretty much like we did, which enables you to really accelerate your pipeline, right? So the data ops pipelines we talked about, there's a lot of automation so that you can react very quickly, you know, data injection very, very rapidly that you're able to do that kind of thing, that meta data generation. That's the entire pipeline that you're talking about, that you're able to respond very quickly, bring in new data and then aggregated at the right levels, infuse it into the work flows on the delivery, do the right people at the right time. Well, you know that will become a must. But once you do that, you could argue that there's a cost associated with doing that. But we know that the cycle time reductions on things like that they can run, you know? I mean, I gave you the example of 95% 0 you know, on average, we see, like a 70% end to end cycle time where we've implemented the approach, and that's been pretty pervasive within IBM across the business. So that, in essence, then actually becomes a driver for profitability. So yes, it might. You know this might back people into doing that, but I would argue that that's probably something that's going to be very good long term for the enterprises and world, and they'll be able to leverage that in their in their business and I think that just the competitive director off having to do that will force everybody down that path. But I think it'll be eventually ago >>that end and cycle time. Compression is huge, and I like what you're saying because it's it's not just a reduction in the expected loss during of prices. There's other residual benefits to the organization. Interpol. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube and sharing this really interesting and deep case study. I know there's a lot more information out there, so really appreciate your done. >>My pleasure. >>Alright, take everybody. Thanks for watching. And this is Dave Volante for the Cube. And we will see you next time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, Host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California, for a special conversation with an industry analyst who's been, who travels a lot, does a lot of events, covers the industry, up and down, economically and also some of the big trends, to talk about how the at scale problem that the COVID-19 is causing. Whether it's a lot of people are working at home for the first time, to at scale network problems, the pressure points that this is exposing for what I would call the mainstream world is a great topic. Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research, friend of theCUBE. Zeus, welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you remotely. We're, as you know, working in place here. I came to the studio for, with our quarantine crew here, to get these stories out, 'cause they're super important. Thanks for spending the time. >> Hi, yeah, thanks, it's certainly been an interesting last couple months and we're probably, maybe half way through this, I'm guessing. >> Yeah, and no matter what happens the new reality of this current situation or mess or whatever you want to call it is the fact that it has awakened what us industry insiders have been seeing for a long time, big data, new networks, cloud native, micro-services, kind of at scale, scale out infrastructure, kind of the stuff that we've been kind of covering is now exposed for the whole world to see on a Petri dish that is called COVID-19, going, "Wow, this world has changed." This is highlighting the problems. Can you share your view of what are some of those things that people are experiencing for the first time and what's the reaction, what's your reaction to it all? >> Yeah, it's been kind of an interesting last couple of months when I talk to CIO's about how they're adapting to this. You know, when, before I was an analyst, John, I was actually in corporate IT. I was part of a business continuity plans group for companies and the whole definition of business continuity's changed. When I was in corporate IT, we thought of business continuity as being able to run the company with a minimal set of services for a week or a month or something like that. So, for instance, I was in charge of corporate technology and financial services firm and we thought, "Well, if we have 50 traders, can we get by with 10", right? Business continuity today is I need to run the entire organization with my full staff for an indefinite period of time, right? And that is substantially different mandate than thinking of how I run a minimal set of services to just maintain the bare minimum business operations and I think that's exposed a lot of things for a lot of companies. You know, for instance, I've talked to so many companies today where the majority of their employees have never worked remote. For you or I, we're mobile professionals. We do this all the time. We travel around. We go to conferences. We do this stuff all, it's second nature. But for a lot of employees, you think of contact center agents, in store people, things like that, they've never worked from home before. And so, all of a sudden, the new reality is they've got to set up a computer in the kitchen or their bedroom or something like that and start working from home. Also for companies, they've never had to think about a world where everybody worked remotely, right? So the VP in Infrastructure would have, the cloud apps they have, the remote access technology they have was set up for a subset of users, maybe 10%, maybe 15%, but certainly not everybody. And so now we're seeing corporate networks get crushed. All the cloud providers are getting crushed. I know some of the conferencing companies, the video companies are having to double, triple capacity. And so I think to your point when you started this, we would have seen this eventually with all the data coming in and all the new devices being connected. I think what COVID did was just accelerate it just to the point where it's exposed to everything at once. >> Yeah, and you know, I have a lot of, being an entrepreneur and done a lot of corporate legal contracts. The word force majeure is always a phrase that's a legal jargon, which means act of God or so to speak, something you can't control. I think what's interesting to your point is that the playbook in IT, even some of the most cutting edge IT, is forecasting some disruption, but never like this. And also disaster recovery and business continuity, as you mentioned, have been practices, but state of the art has been percentages of overall. But disaster recovery was a hurricane, or a power outage, so generators, fail over sites or regions of your cloud, not a change in a new vector. So the disruption is not disruption. It's an amplification of a new work stream. That's the disruption. That's what you're saying. >> Yeah, you know, that's correct. Business continuity used to be very data center-focused. It was, how do I get my power? How do I create some, replicate my office and have 50 desks in here, instead of 500? But now it's everybody working remotely, so I got to have ways for them to collaborate. I have to have ways for them to talk to customers. I have to have ways for them to deliver services. I have to enable people to do what they did in the office, but not in the office, right? And so that's been the big challenge and I think it's been an interesting test for CIO's that have been going through digital transformation plans. I think it's shifted a lot of budgets around and made companies look at the way they do things. There's also the social aspect of a job. People like to go to the office. They like to interact with co-workers. And I've talked to some companies where they're bringing in medical doctors, they're bringing in psychologists to talk to their employees, because if you're never worked from home before, it's quite a big difference. The other aspect of this that's underappreciated, I think, is the fact that now our kids are home, right? >> John: Yeah. (laughter) >> So we've got to contend with that. And I know that the first day that the shelter in place order got put in place for the San Francisco area, a new call, I believe a new version of Call of Duty had just come out. You know, we had some new shows pop up in Netflix, some series continuances. So now these kids who are at home are bored. They're downloading content. They're playing games. At the same time, we're trying to work and we're trying to do video calls and we're trying to bring in multiple video streams or even if they're in classrooms, they're doing Zoom-based calls, that type of thing, or using WebEx or an application like that, and it's played havoc on corporate networks, not just company networks, and so... >> Also Comcast and the providers, AT&T. You've got the fiber seems to be doing well, but Comcast is throttling. I mean, this is the crisis. It's a new vector of disruption. But how do you develop... >> Yeah, YouTube said that they're going to throttle down. Well, I think what this is is it makes you look at how you handle your traffic. And I think there's plenty of bandwidth out there. And even the most basic home routers are capable of prioritizing traffic and I think there's a number of IT leaders I've talked who have actually gone through the steps of helping their employees understand how you use your home networking technology to be able to prioritize video and corporate voice traffic over top. There are corporate ways to do that. You know, for instance, Aruba and Extreme Networks both offer these remote access points where you just plug 'em in and you're connected through a corporate network and you pick up all the policies. But even without that, there's ways to do with home. So I think it's made us rethink networking. Instead of the network being a home network, a WiFi network, a data center network, right, the Internet, we need to think about this grand network as one network and then how we control the quality of a cloud app when the person's home to the cloud, all the way back to the company, because that's what drives user experience. >> I think you're highlighting something really important. And I just want to illustrate and have you double down on more commentary on this, because I think, you know, the one network where we're all part of one network concept shows that the perimeter's dead. That's what we've been saying about the cloud, but also if you think about just the crimes of opportunity that are happening. You've got the hacker and hacking situation. You have all kinds of things that are impacted. There's crimes of opportunity, and there's disruption that's happening because of the opportunity. Can you just share more and unpack that concept of this one network? What are some of the things that business are thinking about now? You've got the VPN. You've got collaboration tools that sometimes are half-baked. I mean, I love Zoom and all, but Zoom is crashing too. I mean, WebEx is more corporate-oriented, but not really as strong as what Zoom is for the consumer. But still they have an opportunity, but they have a challenge as well. So all these work tools are kind of half-baked too. (laughing) >> Well, the thing is they were never designed... I remember seeing in an interview that Chuck Robbins had on CNBC where he said, "We didn't design WebEx to support everybody working from home". It just, that wasn't even a thought. Nowhere did he ever go to his team and say, build this for the whole world to connect, right? And so, every one of the video providers and the cloud collaboration providers have problems, and I don't really blame them, because this is a dynamic we were never expecting to see. I think you brought up a good point on the security side. We, a lot has been written about how more and more companies are moving to these online tools, like Zoom and WebEx and applications like that to let us communicate, but what does that mean from a security perspective? Now`all of sudden I have people working from home. They're using these Web-based applications. I remember a conversation I had about six months ago with one of the world's most famous hackers who does nothing but penetration tests now. He said that the cloud-based applications are his number one entry point into companies and to penetrate them, because people's passwords and things like that are fairly weak. So, now we're moving everything to the cloud. We're moving everything to these SaaS apps, right? And so now it's creating more exposure points. We've got fishers out there that are using the term COVID or Corona as a way to get people to click on links they shouldn't. And so now our whole security paradigm has blown up, right? So we used to have this hard shell we could drop around our company. We can't do that anymore. And we have to start worrying about things on an app-by-app basis. And it's caused companies to rethink security, to look at multi-factor authentication tools. I think those are a lot better. We have to look at Casb tools, the cloud access tools, kind of monitor what apps people are using, what they're not using. Trying to cut down on the use of consumer tools, right? So it's a lot for the security practice to take ahold of too. And you have to understand, even from a company standpoint, your security operations center was built on the concept they pull all their data into one location. SOC engineers aren't used to working remotely as well, so that's a big change as well. How do I get my data analyzed and to my SOC engineers when they're working from home? >> You know, we have coined the term Black Friday for the day after, you know, Thanksgiving. >> Thanksgiving, yeah. >> You know, the big surge, but that's a term to describe that first experience of, holy shit, everyone's going to the websites and they all crashed. So we're kind of having that same moment now, to your point earlier. So I want to read a statement that was on Nima Baidey's LinkedIn. He's at Google now, former Pivotal guy. You probably know him. He had a little graphic that says, "Who led the digital transformation of your company?" It's got a poll with a question mark. "A) Your CEO, B) your CTO, or C) COVID-19"? And it circles COVID-19 and that's the image and that's the meme that's going around. But the reality is it is highlighting it and I want to get your thoughts on this next track of thinking around how people may shift their focus and their spend, because, hey, hybrid cloud's great and multicloud's the next big wave, but screw multicloud. If I can't actually fix my current situation, maybe I'll push off some of the multicloud stuff or maybe I won't. So, how do you see the give and get of project prioritization, because I think this is going to wake everyone up. You mentioned security, clearly. >> Yeah, well, I think it has woken everybody up and I think companies now are really rethinking how they operate. I don't believe we're going to stop traveling. I think once this is over, people are going to hop back on planes. I also don't believe that we'll never go back into the office. I think the big shift here though, John, is we will see more acceptance to hire people out of region. I think that it's proved that you don't have to be in the office, right, which will drive these collaboration tools. And I also think we'll see less use of desktop phones and more use of video means. So now that people are getting used to using these types of tools, I think they're starting to like the experience. And so voice calls get replaced by video calls and that is going to crush our networks in buildings. So we've got WiFi 6 coming. We've got 5G coming, right. We've got lots of security tools out there. And I think you'll see a lot of prioritization to the network and that's kind of an interesting thing, because historically, the network didn't get a lot of C level time, right? It was those people in the basement. We didn't really know what they did. I'm a former network engineer. I was treated that way. (laughing) But most digital organizations now have to come to the realization that they're network-centric, and then so the network is the business and that's not something that anybody's ever put a lot of focus on. But if you look at the building blocks of digital IoT, mobility, cloud, the writing's been on the wall for a while, and I've written this several times. But you need to pay more attention to the network. And I think we're finally going to see that transition, some prioritization of dollars there. >> Yeah, I will attest you have been very vocal and right on point on that, so props to that. I do want to also double amplify your point. The network drives everything, that's clear. I think the other thing that's interesting and used to be kind of a cliche in a pejorative way is the user is the product. I think that's a term that's been coined to Facebook. You know, you're data. You're the product. If you're the product, that's a problem, you know. To describe Facebook as the app that monetizes you, the user. I think this situation has really pointed out that yes, it's good to be the product. The user value and the network are two now end points of the spectrum. The network's got to be kick ass from the ground up, but the user is the product now, and it should be, in a good way, not exploiting. So I think if you're thinking about user-centric value, how my kid can play Call of Duty, how my family can watch the new episode on Netflix, how I can do a kick ass Zoom call, that's my experience. The network does its job. The application service takes advantage of making me happy. So I think this is interesting, right. So we're getting a new thing here. How real do you think that is? Where are we on the spectrum of that nirvana? >> I think we're rapidly approaching that. I think it's been well documented that 2020 was the year that customer experience become the number one brand differentiate, right. In fact, I think it was actually 2018 that that happened, but Walker and Gartner and a few other companies would be 2020. And what that means is that if you're a business, you need to provide exemplary customer service in order to gain share. I think one of the things that was lost in there is that employee experience has to be best in class as well. And so I think a lot of businesses over-rotated the spin away from employee experience to customer experience, and rightfully so, but now they got to rotate back to make sure their workers have the right tools, have the right services, have the right data, to do their jobs better, because when they do, they can turn around and provide customers better experience. So this isn't just about training your people to service customers well. It's about making sure people have the right data, the right information to do their jobs, to collaborate better, right. And there's really a tight coupling now between the consumer and the employee, or the customer and the employee. And, you know, Corona kind of exposed to that, 'cause it shows that we're all connected, in a way. And the connection of people, whether they're the customers or employees or something, that businesses have to focus on. So I think we'll see some dollars sign back to internal, not just customer facing. >> Yeah, well, great insight. And, first of all, we all connect to your great CUBE alumni. But you're also right up the street in California. We're in Palo Alto. You're in San Mateo. You literally could have driven here, but we're sheltering in place. >> We're sheltered in place. >> Great insight and, you know, thanks for sharing that and I think it's good content for people, you know, be aware of this. Obviously they're living in it right now, but I think the world is going to be back to business soon, but it's never going to be the same. I think it's digital... >> No, it'll never be the same. I think this is a real watershed point for the way we work and the way we treat our employees and our customers. I think you'll see a lot of companies make a lot of change. And that's good for the whole industry, 'cause it'll drive innovation. And I think we'll have some innovation come out of this that we never saw before. >> Quick final word for the folks that are on this big wave that's happening. It's reality. It's the current situation now. What's your advice for them as they get on their surfboard, so to speak, and ride this wave? What's your advice to them? >> Yeah, I think use this opportunity to find those weak points in your networks and find out where the bottlenecks are, because I think having everybody work remotely exposes a lot of problems in processes and where a lot of the hiccups happen. But I do think my final word is invest in the network. I think a lot of the networks out there have been badly under-invested in, which I think is why people get frustrated when they're in stadiums or hotels or casinos. I think the world is shifting. Applications and people are becoming network-centric. And if those don't work, nothing works. And I think that's really been proven over the last couple months. If our networks can't handle the traffic and our networks can't handle what we're doing, nothing works. >> You know, you and I could do a podcast show called "No Latency"... >> (mumbles) so it'll be good. >> Zeus, thanks for coming on. I appreciate taking the time. >> No problem, John. >> Stay safe. And I want to follow up with you and get a check in further down the road, in a couple days or maybe next week, if you can. >> Yeah, looking forward to it. >> Thanks a lot. Okay, I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto Studios doing the remote interviews, getting the quick stories that matter, help you out, and (mumbles) great guest there. Check out ZK Research, a great friend of theCUBE, cutting edge, knows the networking. This is an important area. The network, the users' experience is critical. Thanks for coming and watching today. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (lighthearted music)

>>Yeah, it's the queue covering the virtual vertical Big Data Conference 2020. Brought to you by vertical. >>Hi, everybody. And welcome to this cube special presentation of the vertical virtual Big Data conference. The Cube is running in parallel with Day One and day two of the vertical of Big Data event. By the way, the Cube has been every single big data event in It's our pleasure to be here in the virtual slash digital event as well. Gabriel Chapman is here. He's the director of Flash Blade Products Solutions Marketing at Pure Storage. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Great to see you too. How's it going? >>It's going very well. I mean, I wish we were meeting in Boston at the Encore Hotel, but, uh, you know, and hopefully we'll be able to meet it, accelerate at some point, future or one of the sub shows that you guys are doing the regional shows, but because we've been covering that show as well. But I really want to get into it. And the last accelerate September 2019 pure and vertical announced. Ah, partnership. I remember a joint being ran up to me and said, Hey, you got to check this out. The separation of compute and storage by EON mode now available on Flash Blade. So, uh and and I believe still the only company that can support that separation and independent scaling both on Prem and in the cloud. So I want to ask, what were the trends and analytical database and cloud led to this partnership? You know, >>realistically, I think what we're seeing is that there's been a kind of a larger shift when it comes to modern analytics platforms towards moving away from the traditional, you know, Hadoop type architecture where we were doing on and leveraging a lot of directors that storage primarily because of the limitations of how that solution was architected. When we start to look at the larger trends towards you know how organizations want to do this type of work on premises, they're looking at solutions that allow them to scale the compute storage pieces independently and therefore, you know, the flash blade platform ended up being a great solution to support America in their transition Tian mode. Leveraging essentially is an S three object store. >>Okay, so let's let's circle back on that you guys in your in your announcement of the flash blade, you make the claim that Flash Blade is the industry's most advanced file and object storage platform ever. That's a bold statement. So defend that What? >>I would like to go beyond that and just say, you know, So we've really kind of looked at this from a standpoint of, you know, as as we've developed Flash Blade as a platform and keep in mind, it's been a product that's been around for over three years now and has been very successful for pure storage. The reality is, is that fast file and fast object as a combined storage platform is a direction that many organizations are looking to go, and we believe that we're a leader in that fast object best file storage place in realistically, which we start to see more organizations start to look at building solutions that leverage cloud storage characteristics. But doing so on Prem for a multitude of different reasons. We've built a platform that really addresses a lot of those needs around simplicity around, you know, making things this year that you know, fast matters for us. Ah, simple is smart. Um we can provide, you know, cloud integrations across the spectrum. And, you know, there's a subscription model that fits into that as well. We fall that that falls into our umbrella of what we consider the modern day takes variance. And it's something that we've built into the entire pure portfolio. >>Okay, so I want to get into the architecture a little bit of flash blade and then understand the fit for, uh, analytic databases generally, but specifically for vertical. So it is a blade, so you got compute and network included. It's a key value store based system. So you're talking about scale out. Unlike, unlike, uh, pure is sort of, you know, initial products which were scale up, Um, and so I want on It is a fabric based system. I want to understand what that all means to take us through the architecture. You know, some of the quote unquote firsts that you guys talk about. So let's start with sort of the blade >>aspect. Yeah, the blade aspect of what we call the flash blade. Because if you look at the actual platform, you have, ah, primarily a chassis with built in networking components, right? So there's ah, fabric interconnect with inside the platform that connects to each one of the individual blades. Individual blades have their own compute that drives basically a pure storage flash components inside. It's not like we're just taking SSD is and plugging them into a system and like you would with the traditional commodity off the shelf hardware design. This is very much an engineered solution that is built towards the characteristics that we believe were important with fast filing past object scalability, massive parallel ization. When it comes to performance and the ability to really kind of grow and scale from essentially seven blades right now to 150 that's that's the kind of scale that customers are looking for, especially as we start to address these larger analytics pools. They are multi petabytes data sets, you know that single addressable object space and, you know, file performance that is beyond what most of your traditional scale up storage platforms are able to deliver. >>Yes, I interviewed cause last September and accelerate, and Christie Pure has been attacked by some of the competitors. There's not having scale out. I asked him his thoughts on that, he said Well, first of all, our flash blade is scale out. He said, Look, anything that adds complexity, you know we avoid. But for the workloads that are associated with flash blade scale out is the right sort of approach. Maybe you could talk about why that is. Well, >>realistically, I think you know that that approach is better when we're starting to work with large, unstructured data sets. I mean, flash blade is unique. The architected to allow customers to achieve superior resource utilization for compute and storage, while at the same time, you know, reducing significantly the complexity that has arisen around this kind of bespoke or siloed nature of big data and analytics solutions. I mean, we're really kind of look at this from a standpoint of you have built and delivered are created applications in the public cloud space of dress, you know, object storage and an unstructured data. And for some organizations, the importance is bringing that on Prem. I mean, we do see about repatriation coming on a lot of organizations as these data egress, charges continue to expand and grow, um, and then organizations that want even higher performance and what we're able to get into the public cloud space. They are bringing that data back on Prem They are looking at from a stamp. We still want to be able to scale the way we scale in the cloud. We still want to operate the same way we operate in the cloud, but we want to do it within control of our own, our own borders. And so that's, you know, that's one of the bigger pieces to that. And we start to look at how do we address cloud characteristics and dynamics and consumption metrics or models? A zealous the benefits and efficiencies of scale that they're able to afford but allowing customers to do that with inside their own data center. >>So you're talking about the trends earlier. You have these cloud native databases that allowed of the scaling of compute and storage independently. Vertical comes in with eon of a lot of times we talk about these these partnerships as Barney deals of you know I love you, You love me. Here's a press release and then we go on or they're just straight, you know, go to market. Are there other aspects of this partnership that they're non Barney deal like, in other words, any specific engineering. Um, you know other go to market programs? Could you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, >>it's it's It's more than just that what we consider a channel meet in the middle or, you know, that Barney type of deal. It's realistically, you know, we've done some first with Veronica that I think, really Courtney, if they think you look at the architecture and how we did, we've brought to market together. Ah, we have solutions. Teams in the back end who are, you know, subject matter experts. In this space, if you talk to joy and the people from vertical, they're very high on our very excited about the partnership because it often it opens up a new set of opportunities for their customers to leverage on mode and get into some of the the nuance task specs of how they leverage the depot depot with inside each individual. Compute node in adjustments with inside their reach. Additional performance gains for customers on Prem and at the same time, for them, that's still tough. The ability to go into that cloud model if they wish to. And so I think a lot of it is around. How do we partner is to companies? How do we do a joint selling motions? How do we show up in and do white papers and all of the traditional marketing aspects that we bring to the market? And then, you know, joint selling opportunities exist where they are, and so that's realistically. I think, like any other organization that's going to market with a partner on MSP that they have, ah, strong partnership with. You'll continue to see us, you know, talking about are those mutually beneficial relationships and the solutions that we're bringing to the market. >>Okay, you know, of course, he used to be a Gartner analyst, and you go to the vendor side now, but it's but it's, but it's a Gartner analyst. You're obviously objective. You see it on, you know well, there's a lot of ways to skin the cat There, there their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, etcetera for every vendor. So you have you have vertical who's got a very mature stack and talking to a number of the customers out there who are using EON mode. You know there's certain workloads where these cloud native databases makes sense. It's not just the economics of scaling and storage independently. I want to talk more about that. There's flexibility aspect as well. But Vertical really has to play its its trump card, which is Look, we've got a big on premise state, and we're gonna bring that eon capability both on Prem and we're embracing the cloud now. There obviously have been there to play catch up in the cloud, but at the same time, they've got a much more mature stack than a lot of these other cloud native databases that might have just started a couple of years ago. So you know, so there's trade offs that customers have to make. How do you sort through that? Where do you see the interest in this? And and what's the sweet spot for this partnership? You know, we've >>been really excited to build the partnership with vertical A and provide, you know, we're really proud to provide pretty much the only on Prem storage platform that's validated with the yang mode to deliver a modern data experience for our customers together. You know, it's ah, it's that partnership that allows us to go into customers that on Prem space, where I think that there's still not to say that not everybody wants to go there, but I think there's aspects and solutions that worked very well there. But for the vast majority, I still think that there's, you know, the your data center is not going away. And you do want to have control over some of the many of the assets with inside of the operational confines. So therefore, we start to look at how do we can do the best of what cloud offers but on prim. And that's realistically, where we start to see the stronger push for those customers. You still want to manage their data locally. A swell as maybe even worked around some of the restrictions that they might have around cost and complexity hiring. You know, the different types of skills skill sets that are required to bring applications purely cloud native. It's still that larger part of that digital transformation that many organizations are going for going forward with. And realistically, I think they're taking a look at the pros and cons, and we've been doing cloud long enough where people recognize that you know it's not perfect for everything and that there's certain things that we still want to keep inside our own data center. So I mean, realistically, as we move forward, that's, Ah, that better option when it comes to a modern architecture that can do, you know, we can deliver an address, a diverse set of performance requirements and allow the organization to continue to grow the model to the data, you know, based on the data that they're actually trying to leverage. And that's really what Flash was built for. It was built for a platform that could address small files or large files or high throughput, high throughput, low latency scale of petabytes in a single name. Space in a single rack is we like to put it in there. I mean, we see customers that have put 150 flash blades into production as a single name space. It's significant for organizations that are making that drive towards modern data experience with modern analytics platforms. Pure and Veronica have delivered an experience that can address that to a wide range of customers that are implementing uh, you know, particularly on technology. >>I'm interested in exploring the use case. A little bit further. You just sort of gave some parameters and some examples and some of the flexibility that you have, um, and take us through kind of what the customer discussions are like. Obviously you've got a big customer base, you and vertical that that's on Prem. That's the the unique advantage of this. But there are others. It's not just the economics of the granular scaling of compute and storage independently. There are other aspects of take us through that sort of a primary use case or use cases. Yeah, you >>know, I mean, I could give you a couple customer examples, and we have a large SAS analyst company which uses vertical on last way to authenticate the quality of digital media in real time, You know, then for them it makes a big difference is they're doing their streaming and whatnot that they can. They can fine tune the grand we control that. So that's one aspect that that we address. We have a multinational car car company, which uses vertical on flash blade to make thousands of decisions per second for autonomous vehicle decision making trees. You know, that's what really these new modern analytics platforms were built for, um, there's another healthcare organization that uses vertical on flash blade to enable healthcare providers to make decisions in real time. The impact lives, especially when we start to look at and, you know, the current state of affairs with code in the Corona virus. You know, those types of technologies, we're really going to help us kind of get of and help lower invent, bend that curve downward. So, you know, there's all these different areas where we can address that the goals and the achievements that we're trying to look bored with with real time analytics decision making tools like and you know, realistically is we have these conversations with customers they're looking to get beyond the ability of just, you know, a data scientist or a data architect looking to just kind of driving information >>that we're talking about Hadoop earlier. We're kind of going well beyond that now. And I guess what I'm saying is that in the first phase of cloud, it was all about infrastructure. It was about, you know, uh, spin it up. You know, compute and storage is a little bit of networking in there. >>It >>seems like the next new workload that's clearly emerging is you've got. And it started with the cloud native databases. But then bringing in, you know, AI and machine learning tooling on top of that Ah, and then being able to really drive these new types of insights and it's really about taking data these bog this bog of data that we've collected over the last 10 years. A lot of that is driven by a dupe bringing machine intelligence into the equation, scaling it with either cloud public cloud or bringing that cloud experience on Prem scale. You know, across organizations and across your partner network, that really is a new emerging workloads. You see that? And maybe talk a little bit about what you're seeing with customers. >>Yeah. I mean, it really is. We see several trends. You know, one of those is the ability to take a take this approach to move it out of the lab, but into production. Um, you know, especially when it comes to data science projects, machine learning projects that traditionally start out as kind of small proofs of concept, easy to spin up in the cloud. But when a customer wants to scale and move towards a riel you know, derived a significant value from that. They do want to be able to control more characteristic site, and we know machine learning, you know, needs toe needs to learn from a massive amounts of data to provide accuracy. There's just too much data retrieving the cloud for every training job. Same time Predictive analytics without accuracy is not going to deliver the business advantage of what everyone is seeking. You know, we see this. Ah, the visualization of Data Analytics is Tricia deployed is being on a continuum with, you know, the things that we've been doing in the long in the past with data warehousing, data Lakes, ai on the other end. But this way, we're starting to manifest it and organizations that are looking towards getting more utility and better elasticity out of the data that they are working for. So they're not looking to just build apps, silos of bespoke ai environments. They're looking to leverage. Ah, you know, ah, platform that can allow them to, you know, do ai, for one thing, machine learning for another leverage multiple protocols to access that data because the tools are so much Jeff um, you know, it is a growing diversity of of use cases that you can put on a single platform I think organizations are looking for as they try to scale these environment. >>I think it's gonna be a big growth area in the coming years. Gable. I wish we were in Boston together. You would have painted your little corner of Boston orange. I know that you guys have but really appreciate you coming on the cube wall to wall coverage. Two days of the vertical vertical virtual big data conference. Keep it right there. Right back. Right after this short break, Yeah.

(soft music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world: this is a CUBE conversation. >> Everyone, welcome to this special cube conversation. We're here in the Palo Alto studios, where I am; here during this critical time during the corona virus and this work at home current situation across the United States and around the world. We've got a great interview here today around cybersecurity and the threats that are out there. The threats that are changing as a result of the current situation. We got two great guests; Derek Manky, Chief Security Insights and Global Threat Alliances at FortiGuard labs. And Renee Tarun, deputy Chief Information Security Officer with Fortinet net. Guys, thanks for remotely coming in. Obviously, we're working remotely. Thanks for joining me today on this really important conversation. >> It's a pleasure to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> So Renee and Derek. Renee, I want to start with you as deputing CISO. There's always been threats. Every day is a crazy day. But now more than ever over the past 30 to 45 days we've seen a surge in activity with remote workers. Everyone's working at home. It's disrupting family's lives. How people do business. And also they're connected to the internet. So it's an endpoint. It's a (laughs) hackable environment. We've had different conversation with you guys about this. But now more than ever, it's an at scale problem. What is the impact of the current situation for that problem statement of from working at home, at scale. Are there new threats? What's happening? >> Yeah, I think you're seeing some organizations have always traditionally had that work at home ability. But now what you're seeing is now entire workforces that are working home and now some companies are scrambling to ensure that they have a secure work at home for teleworkers at scale. In addition some organizations that never had a work from home practice are now being forced into that and so a lot of organizations now are faced with the challenge that employees are now bringing their own device into connecting to their networks. 'Cause employees can't be bring their workstations home with them. And if they don't have a company laptop they're of course using their own personal devices. And some personal devices are used by their kids. They're going out to gaming sites that could be impacted with malware. So it creates a lot of different challenges from a security perspective that a lot of organizations aren't necessarily prepared for. It's not only from a security but also from a scalability perspective. >> When I'm at home working... I came into the studio to do this interview. So I really wanted to talk to you guys. But when I'm at home, this past couple weeks. My kids are home. My daughter is watching Netflix. My son's gaming, multiplayer gaming. The surface area from a personnel standpoint or people standpoint is increased. My wife's working at home. My daughters there, two daughters. So this is also now a social issue because there are more people on the WiFi, there's more bandwidth being used. There's more fear. This has been an opportunity for the hackers. This crime of fear using the current situation. So is it changing how you guys are recommending people protect themselves at home? Or is it just accelerating a core problem that you've seen before? >> Yeah, so I think it's not changing. It's changing in terms of priority. I mean, all the things that we've talked about before it's just becoming much more critical. I think, at this point in time. If you look at any histories that we've... Lessons we've learned from the past or haven't learned (laughs). That's something that is just front and center right now. We've seen attack campaigns on any high level news. Anything that's been front and center. And we've seen successful attack campaigns in the past owing to any sort of profile events. We had Olympic destroyer last last Olympic period, when we have them in Korea as an example, in South Korea. We've seen... I can go back 10 years plus and give a History timeline, every single there's been something dominating the news. >> John: Yeah. And there's been attack campaigns that are leveraged on that. Obviously this is a much higher focus now given the global news domination that's happening with COVID. The heightened fear and anxiety. Just the other day FortiGuard labs, we pulled up over 600 different phishing emails and scam attempts for COVID-19. And we're actively poring through those. I expect that number to increase. Everybody is trying to hop on this bandwagon. I was just talking to our teams from the labs today. Groups that we haven't seen active since about 2011, 2012. Malware campaign authors. They're riding this bandwagon right now as well. So it's really a suction if you will, for these cyber criminals. So all of the things that we recommend in the past, obviously being vigilant, looking at those links coming in. Obviously, there's a lot of impersonators. There's a lot of spoofing out there. People prefer pretending to be the World Health Organization. We wrote a blog on this a couple of weeks back. People have to have this zero trust mentality coming in. Is everyone trying to ride on this? Especially on social networks, on emails. Even phishing and voice vishing. So the voice phishing. You really have to put more... People have to put more of a safeguard up. Not only for their personal health like everyone's doing the social distancing but also virtual (laughs) social distancing when it comes to really trusting who's trying to send you these links. >> Well, I'm glad you guys have the FortiGuard guard labs there. And I think folks watching should check it out and keep sending us that data. I think watching the data is critical. Everyone's watching the data. They want the real data. You brought up a good point, Rene. I want to get your thoughts on this because the at scale thing really gets my attention because there's more people at home as I mentioned from a social construct standpoint. Work at home is opening up new challenges for companies that haven't been prepared. Even though ones that are prepared have known at scale. So you have a spectrum of challenges. The social engineering is the big thing on Phishing. You're seeing all kinds of heightened awareness. It is a crime of opportunity for hackers. Like Derek just pointed out. What's your advice? What's your vision of what's happening? How do you see it evolving? And what can people do to protect themselves? What's the key threats? And what steps are people taking? >> Yeah, I think, like Derek said, kind of similar how in the physical world we're washing our hands. We're keeping 6 feet away from people. We could distance from our adversaries, as well. Again when you're looking at your emails ensuring that you're only opening attachments from people that you know. Hovering over the links to ensure that they are from legitimate sources. And being mindful that when you're seeing these type of attacks coming in, whether they are coming through emails. Through your phones. Take a moment and pause and think about would someone be contacting me through my cell phone? Through sending me a text message? or emails asking me for personal information? Asking me for user IDs and passwords, credential and information. So you kind of need to take that second and really think before you start taking actions. And similar to opening attachments we've seen a lot of cases where someone attaches a PDF file to an email but when you open up the PDF it's actually a malware. So you need to be careful and think to yourself, was I expecting this attachment? Do I know the person? And take steps to actually follow up and call that person directly and say, "Hey, did you really send this to me? "Is this legitimate?" >> And the thing-- >> You got to to be careful what you're opening up. Which links you click on. But while I got you here, I want to get your opinion on this because there's digital attacks and then there's phone based attacks. We all have mobile phones. I know this might be a little bit too elementary, but I do want to get it out there. Can you define the difference in phishing and spear phishing for the folks that are trying to understand the difference in phishing and spear phishing techniques. >> The main difference is spear phishing is really targeting a specific individual, or within a specific role within a company. For example, targeting like the CEO or the CFO. So those are attacks that are specifically targeting a specific individual or specific role. Where phishing emails are targeting just mass people regardless of their roles and responsibilities. >> So I'm reading the blog post that you guys put out. Which I think everyone... I'll put the link on SiliconANGLE later. But it's on fortinet.com Under digital attacks you've got the phishing and spear phishing which is general targeting an email or individually spear spearing someone specifically. But you guys list social media deception, pre-texting and water holing as the key areas. Is that just based on statistics? Or just the techniques that people are using? Can you guys comment on and react to those different techniques? >> Yeah, so I think with the water holing specifically as well. The water holing attack refers to people that every day as part of their routine going to some sort of, usually a news source. It could be their favorite sites, social media, etc. Those sorts of sources because it's expected for people to go and drink from a water hole, are prime targets to these attackers. They can be definitely used for spear phishing but also for the masses for these phishing campaigns. Those are more effective. Attackers like to cast a wide net. And it's especially effective if you think of the climate that's happening right now, like you said earlier at the start of this conversation. That expanded attack surface. And also the usage of bandwidth and more platforms now applications. There's more traffic going to these sites simply. People have more time at home through telework. To virtually go to these sites. And so, yeah. Usually what we see in these water holing attacks can be definitely phishing sites that are set up on these pages. 'Cause they might have been compromised. So this is something even for people who are hosting these websites, right? There's always two sides of the coin. You got security of your client side security And your service side security-- >> So spear phishing is targeting an individual, water holing is the net that gets a lot of people and then they go from there. Can you guys, Renee or Derek talk about social media deception and pretexting. These are other techniques as well that are popular. Can you guys comment and define those? >> Yeah, so some of the pretexting that you're saying is what's happening is adversaries are either sending text, trying to get people to click on links, go to malicious sites. And they're also going setting up these fabricated stories and they're trying to call. Acting like they're a legitimate source. And again, trying to use tactics and a lot of times scare tactics. Trying to get people to divulge information, personal information. Credit card numbers, social security numbers, user IDs and passwords to gain access to either-- >> So misinformation campaigns would be an example that like, "I got a coven virus vaccine, put your credit card down now and get on the mailing list." Is that was that kind of the general gist there? >> Absolutely. >> Okay. >> And we've also seen as another example, and this was in one of our blogs I think about a couple weeks ago some of the first waves of these attacks that we saw was also again, impersonating to be the World Health Organization as part of pretexting. Saying that there's important alerts and updates that these readers must read in their regions, but they're of course malicious documents that are attached. >> Yeah, how do people just get educated on this? This is really challenging because if you're a nerd like us you can know what a URL looks like. And you can tell it's a host server or host name, it's not real. But when they're embedded in these social networks, how do you know? what's the big challenge? Just education and kind of awareness? >> Yeah, so I'll just jump in quickly on that. From my point of view, it's the whole ecosystem, right? There's no just one silver bullet. Education, cyber hygiene for sure. But beyond that obviously, this is where the security solutions pop in. So having that layered defense, right? That goes a long way of everything from anti-spam to antivirus. To be able to scan those malicious attachments. Endpoint security. Especially now in the telework force that we're dealing with having managed endpoint security from distributed enterprise angle is very important because all of these workstations that were within the corporate network before are now roaming--quote unquote--roaming or from home. So it's a multi-pronged approach, really. But education is of course a very good line of defense for our employees. And I think updated education on a weekly basis. >> Okay, before we get to the remote action steps, 'Cause I think the remote workers at scales like the critical problem that we're seeing now. I want to just close out this attack social engineering thing. There's also phone based attacks. We all have mobile phones, right? So we use such smartphones. There's other techniques in that. What are the techniques for the phone based attacks? >> Yeah, a lot of times you'll see adversaries, they're spoofing other phones. So what happens is that when you receive a call or a text it looks like it's coming from a number in your local area. So a lot of times that kind of gives you a false sense of security thinking in that it is a legitimate call when in reality they're simply just spoofing the number. And it's really coming from somewhere else in the country or somewhere else in the world. >> So I get a call from Apple support and it's not Apple support. They don't have a callback, that's spoofing? >> That's one way but also the number itself. When you see the number coming in. For example, I'm in the 410 area code. Emails coming in from my area code with my exchange is another example where it looks like it's someone that's either a close friend or someone within my community when in reality, it's not. >> And at the end of the day too the biggest red flags for these attacks are unsolicited information, right? If they're asking for any information always, always treat that as a red flag. We've seen this in the past. Just as an example with call centers, hotels too. Hackers have had access right to the switchboards to call guests rooms and say that there's a problem at the front desk and they just want to register the users information and they asked for credit card guest information to confirm all sorts of things. So again, anytime information is asked for always think twice. Try to verify. Callback numbers are a great thing. Same thing in social media if someone's messaging you, right? Try to engage in that dialect conversation, verify their identity. >> So you got-- >> That's also another good example of social media, is another form of essential engineering attacks is where people are creating profiles in say for example, LinkedIn. And they're acting like they're either someone from your company or a former colleague or friend as another way to try and make that human to human connection in order to do malicious things. >> Well, we've discussed with you guys in the past around LinkedIn as a feeding ground for spear phishing because, "Hey, here, don't tell your boss but here's "a PDF job opening paying huge salary. "You're qualified." Of course I'm going to look at that, right? So and a lot of that goes on. We see that happen a lot. I want to get your thoughts, Renee on the the vishing and phishing. Smishing is the legitimate source spoofing and vishing is the cloaking or spoofing, right? >> Yeah, smishing is really the text based attacks that you're seeing through your phones. Vishing is using more of a combination of someone that is using a phone based attack but also creating a fake profile, creating a persona. A fabricated story that's ultimately fake but believable. And to try and encourage you to provide information, sensitive information. >> Well, I really appreciate you guys coming on and talking about the attackers trying to take advantage of the current situation. The remote workers again, this is the big at scale thing. What are the steps that people can take, companies can take to protect themselves from or the at scale remote worker situation that could be going on for quite some time now? >> Yeah. So again, at that scale with people in this new normal as we call it, teleworking. Being at scale is... Everyone has to do their part. So I would recommend A from an IT standpoint, keeping all employees virtually in the loop. So weekly updates from security teams. The cyber hygiene practice, especially patch management is critically important too, right? You have a lot of these other devices connected to networks, like you said. IoT devices, all these things that are all prime attack targets. So keeping all the things that we've talked about before, like patch management. Be vigilant on that from an end user perspective. I think especially putting into the employees that they have to be aware that they are highly at risk for this. And I think there has to be... We talked about changes earlier. In terms of mentality education, cyber hygiene, that doesn't change. But I think the way that this isn't forced now, that starts with the change, right? That's a big focus point especially from an IT security standpoint. >> Well, Derek, keep that stat and keep those stats coming in to us. We are very interested. You got the insight. You're the chief of the insights and the global threat. You guys do a great job at FortiGuard guard labs. That's phenomenal. Renee, I'd like you to have the final word on the segment here and we can get back to our remote working and living. What is going on the mind of the CISO right now? Because again, a lot of people are concerned. They don't know how long it's going to last. Certainly we're now in a new normal. Whatever happens going forward as post pandemic world, what's going on in the mind of the CISO right now? What are they thinking? What are they planning for? What's going on? >> Yeah, I think there's a lot of uncertainty. And I think the remote teleworking, again, making sure that employees have secure remote access that can scale. I think that's going to be on the forefront. But again, making sure that people connecting remotely don't end up introducing additional potential vulnerabilities into your network. And again, just keeping aware. Working closely with the IT teams to ensure that we keep our workforces updated and trained and continue to be vigilant with our monitoring capabilities as well as ensuring that we're prepared for potential attacks. >> Well, I appreciate your insights, folks, here. This is great. Renee and Derek thanks for coming on. We want to bring you back in when should do a digital event here in the studio and get the data out there. People are interested. People are making changes. Maybe this could be a good thing. Make some lemonade out of the lemons that are in the industry right now. So thank you for taking the time to share what's going on in the cyber risks. Thank you. >> Thank you, we'll keep those stats coming. >> Okay, CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto with the remote guests. That's what we're doing now. We are working remotely with all of our CUBE interviews. Thanks for watching. I'm John Furrier, co-host to theCUBE. (soft music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with our leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wiki Bond CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we're changing the format a little bit, we're going right to the new data from ETR. You might recall that last week, ETR received survey results from over 1000 CIOs and IT practitioners. And they made a call at that time, which said that actually surprisingly, a large number of respondents about 40% said they didn't expect a change in their 2020 IT spending. At the same time about 20% of the survey said they're going to spend more largely related to Work From Home infrastructure. ETR was really the first to report on this. And it wasn't just collaboration tool like zoom and video conferencing. It was infrastructure around that security, network bandwidth and other types of infrastructure to support Work From Home like desktop virtualization. ETR made the call at that time, that it looked like budgets, were going to be flat for 2020. Now, you also might recall consensus estimates for 2020 came into the year at about 4%, slightly ahead of GDP. Obviously, that's all is changed. Last week, ETR took the forecast down, and we're going to update you today. We're now gone slightly negative. And with me to talk about that again, is Sagar Kadakia, who's the Director of Research at ETR. Sagar, great to see you again, thank you for coming on. >> Thanks for having me again David, really appreciate it. >> Let's get right into it. I mean, if you look at the time series chart that we showed last week, you can see how sentiment changed over time. That blue line was basically people who responded to the survey starting at 3/11. Now you've updated that, that forecast, really tracking after the COVID-19 really kicked in. Can you explain what we're seeing here in this chart? >> Yeah, no problem. The last time we spoke, we were around an N or sample size of about 1000. And we were right around that zero percent growth rate. One of the unique things that we've done is we've left this survey open. And so what that allows us to do is really track the impact on annual IP growth, essentially daily. And so as things have progressed, as you look at that blue line, you can really see the growth rate has continued to trend downwards. And as of just a day or two ago, we're now below zero. And so I think because of what's occurring right now, the overall current climate continues to slightly deteriorate. You're seeing that in a lot of the CIOs responses. >> If you bring that slide back up Andrew, I want to just sort of stay on this for a second. What I really like about what you guys are doing is you're essentially bringing event analysis in this. So if you see that blue line, you see on 3/13, a national emergency was declared and that's really when the blue line started to decline. What ETR has done is kind of reset that, reset the data since 3/13. Because it's now a more accurate reflection of what's actually happening happening in the market. Notice in the upper right, it says the US approved... The Senate last night approved a stimulus package. Actually, they're calling it an Aid Package. It's really not a stimulus package. It's an aid package that they're injecting to help. A number of our workers actually sounds like existing workers and small businesses and even large businesses like Boeing. Boeing was up significantly yesterday powering the Dow and potentially airlines. As you can see ETR is going to continue to monitor the impact, and roll this out. Really ETR is the only company that I know of anyway, that can track this stuff on a daily basis. So Sagar, that event analysis is really key, and you're going to be watching the impact of this stimulus slash aid packet. >> Yeah, so here's what we're doing on that chart. If you look at that yellow line again, effectively what you're seeing is, if we remove the first I think six or seven 100 respondents that took the survey and start tracking how budgets are changing as a 3/13, that's when the US declared a national emergency. We can recalculate the growth rate. And we can see it's around... It's almost negative one and a half. And so the beauty of doing this, really polling daily, is it allows us to be just as dynamic, as a lot of these organizations are. I think one of the things we talked about the last time was some of these budget changes are going to be temporary. And organizations are figuring out what they're doing day by day. And a lot of that is dictated based on government actions. And so uniquely here, what we're able to do is kind of give people a range and also say, "based on these events, "this is how things are changing."" And so I think we think the first biggest event was on 3/13, where the US effectively declared a national emergency over COVID-19. And now what we're going to start tracking between today and over the weekend, and Monday is: Are people getting more positive? Is there no change? Or is there further deterioration because of this aid package that got passed this morning? >> Now I want to share with our audience. I've been down to ETR's headquarters in New York, it's staffed with a number of data scientists and statistical experts. The ends here are well over 1000. I think we're over 1100 now, is that correct? What is the end that we're at today? >> That's right. Yeah, we're we're pushing right over 1200. And we're going to expect a few more hundred respondents. The good thing is it's balanced, which is important. All these events that are occurring, we want to make sure that we have at least a few hundred more CIOs and IT executives answering. And so every week as we kind of continue to do some of these breaking analysis, there are going to be a few more hundred CIOs. And we'll really be able to zero in or hone in on what they're saying. The growth rate on the IT side, it's going to continue to fluctuate. It's going to continue to be dynamic over the next few weeks, but right now versus (murmurs). We are in negative territory now. >> I want to also explain I mean, the end is important. But in and of itself, it's not the be all end all, what's important about the end, the larger it is, the more cuts you can make. And I want to share... You guys have been doing this for the better part of a decade. And so you have firm level data. And you've got indicators and markers that you've tracked over the years. For example, one of the things that ETR tracks is Giant Public and Private GDP we call it. And that's for example, I'm not saying that, that Mars is one of the companies but Mars is a huge private company, UPS before they went public, huge private company. ETR tracks firm level data, they of course anonymize that, but they can see markers and trackers and trends, and probably have, I don't know dozens of those types of segments. So the bigger the end is, the more... The higher the end within those buckets, and the better the confidence interval. And you guys are experts at really digging into that in trying to understand and read the tea leaves. >> That's right. The key to this survey is, it's not anonymous, we know who is taking the survey. Now to your point, we do anonymize and aggregate it when we display those results. But one of the unique capabilities is we're able to see all of these trend lines. The entire drill down survey that we did on COVID-19 through the lenses of different verticals so we can take a look at industrials materials manufacturing, healthcare, pharma, airlines, delivery services, health, and all these other verticals and get a feel for which ones are deteriorating the most, which ones look stable. And, we talked about last week and it continues to remain true this week. And again, the ends have gone up on all these verticals on the supply chain side. Industrials, materials manufacturing, healthcare, pharma, they continue and they also anticipate to see these things in the next few months, broken supply chains and on the demand side, it's really retail consumer airlines delivery services. That's coming down quite substantial. And I think, based on what United and some of these other airlines have done these last few days in terms of cutting capacity, that's just a reflection of what we're seeing. >> Let's dig into the data a little bit more and bring up the next chart. Last week, we're about 40% actually, exactly 40% where that gray line that said: CIOs and IT practitioners said, "no change." They're like the budget of the green. The green was actually at about 20 21%. So it's slightly up now at 22%. And you can see, most of the the green is in that one to 10% range. And you can see in the left hand side, it's obviously changing. Now we're at 37% in the gray line, slightly up in the green, and a little bit more down and in the red. So take us through what's changed Sagar. >> Yeah, to reiterate what we were talking about last week, and then I'll kind of talk about some of the change is, I think the market and a lot of our clients, they were expecting the growth rate to be more negative. Last week when we talked about zero percent. The reason that, it wasn't more negative is because we saw all these organizations accelerating spend because they had to keep employees productive. They don't want to catastrophe in productivity. And so you saw this acceleration, as you mentioned earlier in the interview around Work From Home tools, like collaboration tools, increasing bandwidth on the VPN networking side, laptops, MDM, so forth and so on. That continues to hold true today. Again, if we use the same example that we talked about last week, (mumbles) organizations, they have 40 50 60,000 employees or more working from home. You have to be able to support these individuals and that's why we're actually seeing some organizations accelerate spend and the majority organizations even though they are declining spend, some of that is still being offset by having to spend more on what we're calling kind of this Work From Home infrastructure. But I will say this: you are seeing more organizations versus last week, which is why the growth rate has come down, moving more and more towards the negative buckets. Again, there is some offset there. But the offset we talked about last week, Work From Home infrastructure is not a one-for-one when it comes to taking down your IT budget, and that continues to hold true. >> Let's talk a little bit about some of the industries retail, airlines, industrials, pharma, healthcare, what are you seeing in terms of the industry impact, particularly when it relates to supply chains, but other industry data that went through? >> I think the biggest takeaway is that healthcare pharma, industry materials, manufacturing organizations, they've indicated the highest levels of broken supply chains today. And they think in three months from now, it's actually going to get worse. And so we spoke about this last time, I don't think this is going to be a V shaped recovery from the standpoint of things are going to get better in the next few weeks or the next month or two. CIOs are indicating that they expect conditions to worsen over the next three months on the supply chain side and even demand the ones that are getting hit the hardest on the retail consumer side airlines, delivery services, they are again indicating that they anticipate demand to be worse three months from now. The goal is to continue serving and pulling these individuals over the next few weeks and months and to see if we can get a better timeline as we get into two edge but for the next few months, conditions look like they're going to get worse. >> I want to highlight some of the industries and let's make some comments here. Retail... You guys called out retail airlines, delivery services, industrials, materials, manufacturing, pharma and healthcare, there's some of the highest impact. I'll just make a few comments here. I think retail really, this accelerates the whole digital transformation. We already saw this starting, I think you'll see further consolidation and some permanence in the way in which companies are pivoting to digital. Obviously, the big guys like Walmart and the like are competing very effectively with Amazon. But, there's going to be some more consolidation there. I would say potentially the same thing in airlines that really are closely watching what the government is going to do. But, do we need this this many airlines? Do we need all this capacity? Maybe yes, maybe no. So watching that. And of course, healthcare right now, as I said last week in the braking analysis, they're just too distracted right now to buy anything. And they're overwhelmed. Now, of course, pharma, they're manufacturing, so they've got disruptions in supply chain and obviously the business. But there could be an upside down the road as COVID-19 vaccines come to the market. >> On the upside, I think you kind of hit it, right on the nail. When you get these type of events that occur. Sometimes it speeds up digital transformation. one of the things that the team and I have been talking about internally is: this is not your father's Keep The Lights On strategy so to speak. Organizations are very focused on maintaining productivity versus significantly cutting costs. What does that mean? Maybe three to five years ago, if this had occurred, you would have seen a lot of infrastructure as a service platform, as a service... A lot of these cloud providers, you'd have seen those projects decline as organization spent more on on plan. And we're not seeing that. We're seeing continued elevated budgets on the Cloud side and Micron just reported this morning and again, cited strong demand on the Cloud and data center side. That just goes to show that organizations are trying to maintain productivity. They want to continue these IT roadmaps and they're going to cut budgets where they can, but it's not going to be on the Cloud side. >> You know what, that's a really important point. This is not post Y2K, not 2008, 2007, 2008, 2009 because we've, pretended but a 10 year bull market, companies are doing pretty well, balance sheets are generally strong. They somewhat in whether, it was used to stronger companies, whether they're so they're not focused right now anyway, on cut cut cut as it was in the last few downturns. Let's go into some of the vendor data and some of the sector data, Andrew if you'd bring up the next chart. What we're showing here is really comparing the the blue is the January survey to the current survey in the yellow, and you're seeing some of the sectors that are up taking. You've identified mobile device management, big data and Cloud, some of the productivity, you mentioned DocuSign, Adobe zoom, Citrix, even VMware with the desktop virtualization. We've talked about security, you've got marketing and LinkedIn, my LinkedIn inbound is going through the roof as people are probably signing up for a LinkedIn premium. Let's talk about this a little bit. What you're seeing... Help us interpret this data. >> Yeah, sure. One of the things that everybody wants to know is, okay, so Work From Home infrastructures getting more spend for the vendors that are benefiting the most. One of the unique things that we can do is because we're kind of collecting all the DNA, from a tech stack aside from these organizations, we can overlap, how they're spending on these vendors. And also with the data that they provide in terms of whether they are increasing or decelerating their IT budgets because of COVID-19. What you're looking at here, is we isolated to all of those organizations and customers that indicated that they're increasing their budgets because of COVID-19. Because of the Work From Home infrastructure. And what we're doing is we're then isolating to vendors that are getting the most upticks in spend. This actually really nicely aligns with a lot of the themes that we were talking about collaboration tools. You see that VMware, they're all right on the virtualization side, MDM with Microsoft. And you're seeing a lot of other vendors with Citrix and Zoom and Adobe. These are the ones that we think are going to benefit from this kind of Work From home infrastructure movement. And again, it's all very... It's not just the qualitative and the commentary. This is all analytics, we really went in and analyzed every single one of these organizations that were increasing their budgets and tried to pinpoint using different data analysis techniques, and to see which vendors were really getting the majority or the largest, pie of that span. >> We had Sanjay Poonen, who's the CEO of VMware on yesterday and he was very sensitive but not trying to hear as your ambulance chasing because obviously they do desktop virtualization and VDI big workload. At the same time. I think he was also being cautious because there's probably portions of their business that are going to get hit, Michael Dell similarly, I think he was quoted in CRN as saying, "hey, are we seeing momentum in our laptop "business in our mobile business?" But as you guys pointed out, the flip side of that is their on prem business is probably going to suffer somewhat. It's a kind of like the Work From Home is a partial offset, but it's not a total offset. You're seeing that with a lot of these companies. Obviously, Microsoft, AWS, a lot of the cloud companies are very well positioned, how about some of the guys that are going to get impacted? Obviously, as I said that the on-prem folks, you guys talked about earlier it's not your father's Keep Your Lights On strategy. Okay but this... You asked the question, is this a reprieve for the legacy guys? Not quite, was your conclusion. What did you mean by that? >> I think a lot of times when you have these sub-events, the clients a lot of the market think okay, "some of the legacy vendors are going to do well "because, we're in malicious times, "and we don't want to keep on this kind "of next generation strategy." We're not seeing that and to the point that you highlighted earlier. There are... Even though these companies like Dell, like Cisco, where they're seeing some products accelerate, there are products to your point that are not doing as well The desktops, right? As an example for Dell or the storage. On the negative side or the legacy side where we're just not seeing any traction, the IBM's the Oracle on-prem, Symantec, which got acquired by Broadcom, checkpoint MicroStrategy. And there's another half dozen other vendors that we're seeing where they are not capitalizing. There is no reprieve for these legacy names. And we don't anticipate them getting additional spend, because of this Work From Home infrastructure kind of movement. >> Let's unpack that a little bit. It's interesting Symantec and checkpoint in security, security you think would get an uplift there, but what you're seeing here is... Let me just tell the audience who you called out. Symantec Teradata MicroStrategy, NET app Checkpoint Oracle and IBM, and I know there are others. But I would say this: These are companies that are getting impacted in a big way by the Cloud. Particularly like Symantec and checkpoint. That's a Cloud security companies are actually probably still doing pretty well. You take Teradata, their data is getting impact by the Cloud from folks like Snowflake and Redshift, MicroStrategy a lot of modern BI coming out. NetApp here's a company that's embraced the Cloud, but the vast majority of the business changess to be on-prem. I think IBM and Oracle are interesting. They're somewhat different. Actually a lot different IBM has services exposure, and you guys call that out, particularly around outsourcing. At the same time, it's going to be interesting to see IBM is going to get a lot of resources. Going to be interesting to see if they start coming out with corona virus related services. So watching for that, and then Oracle, their whole story is, "okay, we got Gen 2 Cloud and Mission Critical in the Cloud, but they're on-prem businesses, I think clearly going to be affected here is kind of what you guys pointed out, and I would agree with your thoughts. >> I think what we're seeing is organizations they had a Cloud roadmap, and that roadmap is continuing. The one thing that is changing in some of that roadmap is we need to be able to support employees as they work from home as we achieve this roadmap. And so that's why we're not seeing a reprieve on the legacy side. But we are seeing upticks and spin where we just wouldn't anticipate them right on maybe on Citrix, on Dell laptops, Adobe and a few other areas. Now, in terms of security side, some of the next gen security vendors like CrowdStrike APi, which is an MFA, those vendors are doing well. It makes sense, where you have more people working from home, you have more devices that are connecting to data applications. Just a component itself. And so you would expect spend to continue going up as you need more authentication, more Endpoint Protection. Cisco Meraki they do Cloud Networking. That piece is looking very good, even though Hardware networking is not looking very good at all. The Cloud Networking is looking good, which again makes sense, as you're increasing bandwidth on that side. >> Definitely stories of two sides of that coin. >> That's right >> I want to... Andrew, if you want to... If you wouldn't mind bringing up the next job, we're going to go back to the first one that we showed you with the time series. This is a very important point. Again, we can't stress it enough. We want to understand the impact of the stimulus or aid package. And ETR is going to continue to track that. What can we expect from you guys over the next week or so? >> The goal is to determine whether or not the stimulus is having an impact on how people are responding to our survey as a relates to how they're changing their budgets. The next four or five days, if we start seeing an uptick in this yellow and blue lines here, I think that's a positive. I think that shows that people are kind of wrapping their heads around, great government is taking action here. There is a roadmap in place to help us get out of this. But if the line continues coming down, it just may be that the last few weeks or the last month or so, there was just so much damage. There's not really... There's no coming back from this at least in the near term. So we are kind of watching out for that. >> Well, the Fed is definitely active. >> They're doing right what they can, they're pushing liquidity into the marketplace. People think out of bullets. I don't agree with the Fed. Fed has a quite a bit of of headroom and some dry powder, (murmurs) which is awesome. But the Fed itself, can't do it. You needed to have this fiscal stimulus. So we're excited to see that come to market. I think what I would say to our audiences, my concern is uncertainty. The markets don't like uncertainty and right now there's a lot of uncertainty. If you saw the piece on medium of The Hammer And The Dance it lays out some scenarios about what could happen to the healthcare system. You see people who say, "hey, we should shut down for 10 weeks." The president saying, "hey, we want "to get back to work by by April." The big concern that I have is: okay, maybe we can stamp it out in the near term and get back to work by late April, early May. But then what happens? Are people going to start traveling again? Are people going to start holding events again? And I think there's going to be some real question marks around that. That uncertainty I think, is something that we obviously have to watch. I think there is light at the end of the tunnel, when you look at China and some of the other things that are happening around the world, but we still don't know how long that tunnel is. I'll give you final thoughts before we wrap. >> I think and that's the biggest thing here is the uncertainty, which is why we're doing a lot of this event analysis. We're trying to figure out: after each one of these big events, is there more certainty in people's responses? And just we were talking about, sectors and verticals and vendors that are not doing well. Because the uncertainty we're seeing a lot of down ticks and spend amongst outsource IT and IT consulting vendors. And as long as the uncertainty continues, you're going to see more and more IT projects frozen, less and less spend on those outsource IT and IT consulting vendors and others. And until there's something really in place here where people feel comfortable, you're going to probably see budgets remain where they are, which right now they're negative. >> Folks as we said last week, Sagar and I, ETR is committed, theCUBE is committed to keep you updated on a regular basis. Right now on a weekly cadence. As we have new information, we will bring it to you. Sagar, thanks so much for coming on and supporting us. >> You're welcome and thanks for having me again. >> You're welcome. Thank you for watching this CUBE Insights powered by ETR. And remember all these breaking analysis available on podcast, go to etr.plus that's where all the action is in terms of the survey work. siliconangle.comm covers these breaking analysis and I published weekly on wikibond.com. Thanks for watching everybody. Stay safe. And we'll see you next time.