>>Welcome to the Cube's special program series Women of the Cloud, brought to you by aws. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to welcome my next guest, Courtney Kissler joins me, the SVP of tech and CTO at Zli. Courtney, welcome to the program. >>Thank you. Thanks for having me. >>Our pleasure to have you Talk to me a little bit about your career path in tech and about your role that you're doing right now. >>Yeah, so I have spent most of my career in retail. So I spent 14 years at Nordstrom, which is where I learned a lot about what it takes to be, you know, a technology leader. And really that's where I started kind of my cloud transformation journey. And then after 14 years at Nordstrom, I ended up going to Starbucks as the VP of retail technology there. And really enjoyed working at a global scale, very different, learned a lot there as well. And also had cloud transformation there too. And then I went to Nike as the VP of Digital Platform Engineering and learned a lot there as well. Different scale and very different retail situation. And two years ago, almost two years, it'll be two years in January, I joined Zuli as SVP and cto. And what I love about Zulily is, I mean, we were really born digital first. And so cloud is a big part of our ecosystem and I love that we are innovators, we are data driven, we're about experimentation, and we leverage cloud in a variety of ways. >>I love that you have an amazing pedigree background of companies that you've worked for. I can imagine all the experiences that you've had and how they've shaped you into the leader that you are today. What are some, for people that are either in maybe starting a little bit farther back in their careers or early in tech, what are some of the recommendations that you have for those that really want to grow their career and invest? What do you, what do you tell them? >>Yeah, so I would say the biggest piece of advice I can give is be a lifelong learner. The thing about technology is the technology is gonna change and evolve, and the way you respond and react to that is what's critical. And so figuring out how to be somebody who could be a problem solver and learning all the time. I, I try really hard to surround myself with people who I can learn from and really grow and, and how might I continue to engage in the technology, you know, landscape, but really make sure that I have a way to continuously learn. >>That's so important to be able to, to have the confidence to raise your hand and say, I, I wanna try something new, or I don't understand something. You know, we, I, I was reading this some stats recently. I want women in tech and I saw that women won't apply for a job, say on LinkedIn unless they meet 100% of the job requirements. Whereas men will apply if they meet only 40%. And I think more women need to know and others that you don't have to meet all those job requirements. There's so much on the job learning. You have to have the appetite, you have to have good mentors, good sponsors, but raise your hand, right. Lean into the conversation. There's amazing things that can happen as a result. >>Absolutely. And that, I love that you touched on, you know, the leaning in and also like this is an industry term, it's not mine, but I love it. Called have a personal board of directors, have people who can help you navigate and network. I would say that's one of the biggest learnings that I had throughout my career was build a community and lean on that community. And often the encouragement that you get from that will also put you in a position to be okay with not having all of the boxes checked before you pursue your next opportunity. >>Right. I love that you talked about having a personal board of directors. I wish, I wish that's advice you probably do too. That, that we had 20 years ago when we started in our careers. But it's, it's such important advice. You know, technology makes it so easy for us to connect these days, whether, you know, you're on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or Twitter, leverage that network, but really create that personal board of directors, I think is sage advice for anybody at any stage in their career. I don't think you have to be a newbie to be able to, to see the value in that. I think there can be value in it along the way. I'd love to hear some of your successes where you've solved problems related to cloud in your career. Tell me about some of those. Yeah, >>Yeah, so one just, you know, brief set of context. So I started my career in security infrastructure and operations. So I was learning how to support data centers. I mean, that was part of the landscape when I started my career. And then this thing called the cloud came in to like the environment. And all of us, I think who started as infrastructure, whether you are a CIS admin or those type of traditional roles, thought, what is this gonna do to me? Like as a, as someone who's been in infrastructure for a long time. And what I really appreciated about the leadership at Nordstrom is we said, let's embrace it. Let's figure out how to learn and let's figure out what this might look like for us. And at the time we weren't, we weren't in the cloud, but we said we are going to be, you know, and a lot of companies say this, you know, cloud first. Now it's easy to say, >>Right, >>What does it look like internally? And I think there's multiple dimensions. One is, are you really designing and architecting your applications and capabilities to take advantage of the cloud? I will share that there was a lot of debate internally, and I think a lot of organizations do this where they say, avoid vendor lock in, make sure you have flexibility and it's important to be intentional about the use of cloud. Also super important to leverage the capabilities because one of the things that, you know, I believe in is that cloud can create a way for you to free up your technologists mind share to focus on things that are more strategic. And over time, cloud has become commodity. It's something that you can adopt and leverage to avoid spending time on provisioning servers and doing things that are now automated and part of the cloud offering. >>Right. >>Yeah, >>Go ahead. Sorry. >>Oh, I was gonna say, and also I think skill. So it does take a different skillset. So I do think it's important for organizations to invest and also lean on your cloud partner. So one thing I really appreciate about AWS is that there's a lot of learning and lots of ways to get certified and understand how to be successful in a cloud environment. So I think it's important to also know that, that there is another skill set that needs to be developed in order to be successful. >>What are some of the, the innovations that excite you that are coming down the pipe with respect to cloud that you may adopt at Zil? >>Yeah, that's a great question. You know, we're constantly looking at, you know, what can we, what, what can we take advantage of? And I think what I get excited about is really the ongoing innovation when it comes to data driven insights and how do you incorporate the knowledge of your customers and the broader kind of, I'll call it retail landscape, into continuing to put relevant experiences in front of your customer. And I think doing that at scale is, I mean, you can achieve it in other ways. I think a great way to achieve it is leveraging cloud and the, the scale and performance and speed to, I'll call it like speed to data insights. Like you can get so much out of that and learn. And so for me, I think it's really anything that has to do with data. >>Every company has to be a data company these days. Whether you're in retail or automotive or or manufacturing, you have to become a data driven company. You have to be able to derive those insights you talked about, you know, in the retail space, I always think, oh, I'm such a demanding consumer because I, I've been trained thanks to the cloud that I could get whatever I want, whatever I'm looking for. And these companies will start to learn me in a non-car way, hopefully, and serve up relevant personalized content that, oh yeah, that's right. I need one of those. We ex we have that expectation in our personal lives and I think we bring it into our professional lives as well. And so every company needs to be able to, to be that data company, to deliver what the end user is more and more these days, expecting that the demands are gonna be met. >>Absolutely. And I, I really appreciated what you said too about there's that innovation and expectation of your customer. There's also some really amazing innovation that can happen for your internal developer community, leveraging the cloud. There's tooling, there's data driven insights as well. Like how long is it taking us to deploy software? Well, that's a learning moment. And often cloud can help you solve for speed to delivery, having high confidence in your ability to deliver, because many of the cloud tools allow you to, you know, do a canary deployment. I'm only gonna expose this to a percentage of my customers and then I'll bring it live to everybody else. There's ways to leverage cloud technology that also makes it innovative for the internal developer. And you might even say internal customers. >>That's a great point. I always think the, the internal customer experience and the external customer experience are linked strongly hand in hand. And, and one of the things that we're seeing more and more, I think a lot this year is how influential the developer role is becoming in the, in the decisions and the technologies and what to deliver to the end user customers. So that internal experience and external experience need to be hand in hand for them both to be successful. >>Agree. And you hear a lot of movement in the industry around like platforms and developer experience and DevOps is, is an area that I'm super passionate about. And really ultimately what it is, is how are we all delivering value as fast as possible to our customers with high quality? Cuz you know, if you're doing, if you're doing speed right, you're not compromising quality. And I think this again, is a recognition of where the industry has evolved to. You can use cloud as a platform to accelerate those capabilities. >>Yes, it needs to be that accelerant really for things to be successful. I'd love to get your thoughts on over the last few years, what are some of the biggest changes that you've seen in the workforce and innovation that come to mind? >>Wow. So I think, you know, what I've seen is really the shift in, you mentioned, you know, data, every company is data driven. So the expectation of technology is to also be data driven. And I often think sometimes that many technologists think of, of technology's too complicated. Like we don't, it's too hard to be data driven. And in reality we were kind of wired for being data driven. And so infusing that into how we think about everything we do and making sure that that's part of kind of the, the DNA of the organization. I'm also a big believer in observability. So like really having good knowledge of how are the things that you're building really performing? And that's another area where cloud can help. Where you can, you can really instrument the end to end journey and have transparency to that so that your, your teams are set up for success. They can understand the help, they can see it quickly, and they can respond quickly. >>You know, I always think the horizon for technology is, is infinite. The innovation, the capabilities we need to have good strong teams, diverse teams, teams that bring in different thoughts, different perspectives, different backgrounds. My last question for you is, is on diversity in terms of the tech workforce, what are some of the things that you are seeing and maybe some advice you would give for organizations to be able to really embody diversity, equity and inclusion? >>Yeah, so I'm a big believer in, in inclusion, like I think that it often doesn't get as much focus as it should. So it's, it's very similar to a customer funnel. If you attract a bunch of diverse talent but you can't retain them, then you're gonna continue to have a challenge. So my, my focus is often on am I creating an environment where diverse talent can thrive? Now, Zuli and our broader company Q rate, like we believe passionately in diversity, equity, and inclusion, and it shows up in everything we do. So I I also think actions matter. So it's one thing to say it's important, but it's it like leaders need to demonstrate the commitment. So we've done some pretty, i, I consider to be investments in how do we continue develop our internal talent and grow diverse leaders and leaders from any position. It doesn't mean that you move into management. If we have leaders that are in engineering roles and product management roles, it's like, how do we continue to invest and also create inclusive leadership opportunities where our leaders are learning what does it look like to operate as an inclusive leader? >>So important. But to your point, action, action is so important. Sounds like you guys are doing an amazing job at Zoo Lil, not only in terms of embracing cloud first being born in the cloud, but also from a DEI perspective. I, I love that. Courtney, thank you so much for sharing your journey with us, your recommendations and thoughts. I know the audience found a lot of value in it, as did I. >>Thanks again for having me. >>Oh, my pleasure. For Courtney Kissler, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube Special Program series, women of the Cloud, brought to you by aws. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> My name's Courtney Pallota, I'm the Vice President of Marketing at ChaosSearch. We've partnered with theCUBE team to take every one of those assets, tailor them to meet whatever our needs were, and get them out and shared far and wide. And theCUBE team has been tremendously helpful in partnering with us to make that a success. >> theCUBE has been fantastic with us. They are thought leaders in this space. And we have a unique product, a unique vision, and they have an insight into where the market's going. They've had conference with us with data mesh, and how do we fit into that new realm of data access. And with our unique vision, with our unique platform, and with theCUBE, we've uniquely come out into the market. >> What's my overall experience with theCUBE? Would I do it again, would I recommended it to others? I said, I recommend theCUBE to everyone. In fact, I was at IBM, and some of the IBM executives didn't want to go on theCUBE because it's a live interview. Live interviews can be traumatic. But the fact of the matter is, one, yeah, they're tough questions, but they're in line, they're what clients are looking for. So yes, you have to be on ball. I mean, you're always on your toes, but you get your message out so crisply. So I recommend it to everyone. I've gotten a lot of other executives to participate, and they've all had a great example. You have to be ready. I mean, you can't go on theCUBE and not be ready, but now you can get your message out. And it has such a good distribution. I can't think of a better platform. So I recommended it to everyone. If I say ChaosSearch in one word, I'd say digital transformation, with a hyphen.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone. We are here in Orlando, Florida, theCUBE for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Stu Miniman is my co-host, for the next three days, our next segment is the Meraki team, we have Joe Hainline, who is with WWT's product manager, and Courtney Batiste, who is the Meraki solutions architect, welcome to theCUBE, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us.>> Great to be here. >> So, we got the engineering, we got the application,we got the use cases, Meraki's really reallypicking up a lot of steam, it's very cloud-scale, very cloud-native, bringing the enterprise perspective to it, which is a really big challenge right now, around how do I getenterprise into the cloud. If you're a startup on the cloud, it's really easy, you justprovision some servers, you're up and running. If you wanna really do the hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud, it's really complicated, Meraki's been doing really really well. What is the big takeaway, why should people careabout Meraki's success, and what does it mean to them? >> So, I think it'simportant to understand, why's Meraki been leading the way? We started out cloud-based, and that's what was important, and that's what's been leading for the past couple of years, and we look forward to pushing ourselves above and beyond that. So we also work with partners such as WWT that also embrace the samephilosophy and technology. And you can see that basedon the things that WWT has done up to this day. >> What's some things youguys have done, with Meraki? >> Yeah, I mean, what we love about Meraki for enterprise is beingable to leverage APIs, to be able to do thingsthat scale, and quickly, so we've done some of thelargest Meraki deployments, I would say, to date, in North America. You know, hundreds of Meraki networks, hundreds of site locations a night, with, leveraging some of theAPIs that Meraki's built, obviously, and someplatform innovations that we've done on top of that. >> Expand on that, giveus some color on that, so what does that mean, hundreds of sites, I mean, is it just offices,is it full networks, what's the density of it, could you just kind ofunpack that a little bit? >> Yeah, so we had a customerthat we were deploying, retail locations, so, 10 to15 Meraki devices per site, and being able to dothat at scale, you know, be able to deploy those really, I think our max wasabout 200 on one night, that we cut over,leveraging APIs, so yeah. >> What's the big walkaway from Meraki, obviously simplicity'sone, but you're seeing IOT becoming a big thing, where you don't want to have to hire someone to go out and actually turn stuff on, these networks need tobe self-provisioned, self managed, selfhealing, that seems to be the trend that everyone wants, right? >> Right. >> So that's obviously,getting stuff up and running, but then actually having it operating, connecting to the network, it seems to be, to me, the hard part. Is that where the magic is, Courtney? Where's the secret sauce? I mean, where is it, in all of this? >> So, the beauty aboutMeraki is that you can use that infrastructure to build a solution. And that's the goal. I mean, we've been doingnetworking for years, and there's no doubt aboutwhere the future holds, we want you to know that there's different solutions that you can build on top of your Meraki infrastructure. Whether you're focusing on provisioning, or you're looking at doingany kind of scanning APIs, those are things thatare leading the future. We're also trying tohelp you find innovative ways to bring otherbusiness units into the IT business, so for instance,marketing is huge, they have huge budgets, they want to invest intheir IT infrastructure, and if we're able to givevalue by showing them what they could extract from the network, that's where the APIs are key, to tie in. >> So integration is really critical. >> Absolutely. >> Is that, you said, APIswere used to the critical vantage for you guys, how are you guys doing your API, are you just slingingyour APIs with Meraki's, are you connecting them,are you writing code integration, where is the touchpoint? >> Yeah, that's a greatquestion, I would say that the power that Worldwidebrings to the table especially after acquiring Asynchrony Labs three years ago now, which is a software development arm, of Worldwide Now, is being ableto take those conversations, those integration conversations, and say what's the business outcome you're trying to achieve? So, if a customer, or amarketing, or a line of business person says these are the things we're trying to accomplish, a lot of those are gonna beenabled by infrastructure. And enabled at scale,you know, for enterprise customers really only via APIs. But there's more to that conversation too, I mean, it might be, what'sthe marketing campaign we wanna do, or whatdigital innovation are we gonna try to do that'sgonna make us competitive in this space, where we can take ourbusiness innovation practice, and our practice aroundmobile and web development and tie it in to the business outcome we're creating for a customer, leveraging the Meraki infrastructure, leveraging the capabilitiesthat Meraki brings to the table, leveraging APIs around, you know, who's in your store, youknow, traffic analytics, things like that, and pullingthose all into a solution, whether it's a consumer-facing solution, or a back-end solutionfor sales associates that helps give them insightabout what's happening, it's kind of knowing the business outcome you're trying to achieve, and putting the right pieces in place. >> Joe, wonder if youexpand could a little bit on you know, the transformation that WWT is going through, and your customers, you know, we're here in the debut zone, you know, I've known WWT for years, and moving up the stack andAPIs, and things like that, isn't the traditionalposition that I think of WWT, longtime Cisco partner,done lots of great solutions over the years, but it wasat the infrastructure level, which, not to say that's a bad thing, so, talk a little bit aboutmore that those transformations, for you and your customers, and partnering with Cisco even further. >> Yeah, I think, so, likeI said, we got acquired, I'm part of Asynchrony Labs actually, originally, and we gotacquired by Worldwide three years ago, and I think it was a really smart move,'cause Jim Cavanaugh saw the spaces moving towards software, defined everything,basically, and being able to have that capability built in, I think it's really changedthe way we go to market. We can have conversations now, conversations that doinclude infrastructure, infrastructure is stillcore to our business, but conversations that can start at the marketing or line of business side, or the digital transformation space, or really whatever business outcome that a customer's hoping to achieve. We now have the abilityto have that conversation at any level. Everything from you know,our skills and expertise, traditionally at Worldwide, and deploying infrastructure at worldwide scale, and supply chain management, and just top-notch integration skills, and solution delivery, and now with Asynchrony,being able to apply our best-in-class you know, business innovation,digital transformation, mobile development, webdevelopment skills into that mix. We can really provide fully customized solutions delivered to a customer. >> Take us through what that means for the customer, and useit as a way to compare five years ago, let'sjust go back in time. Pretend it was five, roll back five years. No Meraki, what's the road look like? And then what's the roadlook like with Meraki? If you had to do this five years ago, what would you have to do? Get a project team, have an assessment with the customer, I mean,much different world. >> Yes. >> Take us through what,in your mind's eye, kind of what that road would look like. >> So as someone from Asynchrony on the software side, I can tell you what it looked like five years ago, before we were acquired by Worldwide, when we had conversations with some of our big retail customers for example, we would only be able to go so far in the conversation, we could do the app development, we could take a mobile appand bring it up to par, make sure it integrated well, with back-end systems, but when it came to what does it take to actually deploy a new customer experience at scale across four thousand retail locations? We would have to have partners, and now with Worldwide, wecan have that conversation, we can integrate throughour ATC Labs base, our Advanced Technology Center Labs, we can integrate our retail location in our lab, six months before we deploy it in the real world, and have it be exactly the same hardware and software that we're gonna deploy in the real world, so we can now have conversations where we're working with infrastructure, ahead of the game to make sure that there's a seamless rollout, rather than there being sort of a line of business versus IT conversation where line of business says, hey we have this new digital innovation, but it's not working, because the network isn't solid. >> It's a two step process in the old way. >> Yeah. >> Which long creates more risk, a lot of moving parts. >> Yeah, and now wehave someone seamlessly connecting those piecesacross the spectrum. >> And you do it up front. And then you just deploy. >> And we know what'sa good network strategy to make this scale at enterprise scale, and then what's a good digital strategy to say how are we gonnaintegrate with that, what beacon technology are we gonna use, what network APIs we're gonna connect to, what analytics do we want to achieve, through this transformation, to measure it's success, and have that builtinto the infrastructure, from the beginning, so. >> Tell what the DI management style, the intelligent dashboarding is big, the machine learning, they have a lot of that in their products, it's only gonna get better in talking to the lead executives of the group, for you on the front lines of customers, you want to have thatawareness of what's happening, the instrumentation, how is that working for you, good? >> Yeah, it's-- >> Is that working out,what's your view on that? >> I'd say that it'sbeen really good working with Meraki because of the APIs, but we've also openedup some new offerings around Meraki lately, from a managed service perspective, so, we now have, I would say, a digital transformation engine, called Branch of the Future, which is designed around not just managing Meraki at scale, but it does have that component, but really the whole ecosystem of what does it take to doa digital innovation, leveraging Meraki at enterprise scale, and it includes, like I mentioned already, our Advanced Technology Center Labs, it includes a managed service, it includes branch service capabilities, to be able to roll out, you know, hundreds of sites a night, at scale, but it also includes platform innovations, like Thelios, which is what I'm the Product Manager for, which is really a platform for digital innovation, that leverages Meraki APIs, leverages other technologies that are gonna be in a space like a retail space, pulls those together, to provide an analytics capability, to provide provisioning, to provide other commonlyneeded capabilities, and really just gives customers a way that they can engage with Worldwide, and, in a continuous mannerthat's gonna give them an engine for innovation, where they can make a network upgrade, for example, rather than taking four years and rolling something out slowly, that they're trying todo a transformation, and not getting thebenefits of that technology for four years, leveragingBranch of the Future, we can do that same thing in four months, and that big investment they've made in infrastructure, theycan actually get an ROI on that immediately, but it doesn't stop there, because then we can say, alright,what's working, what's not, based on the analytics we're taking, what's the next step, and build in that continual evolving of the offering for the customer. >> Four years to four months. >> Courtney, what are youhearing from customers, how are their needs evolving, you know, what's driving them from the business, and from some of the new technologies? >> Well, so they'relooking at what's next, what's the trends, what are customers wanting, what exactly are their guests' experience that they're wanting to have? So it varies based on the vertical. They want more intelligence, they want more out oftheir infrastructure, and that's where I feellike we've definitely filled that void, andcreating this partnership with WWT has been amazing to see what customers are taking from it. They see the advantages of more than just a regular infrastructure running, they're getting to the point of truly embracing intelligent networking. >> On the future of you guys with Meraki, you know, you're doingdeployments overnight, massive numbers, we hear, and it goes from Todd Nightingale, customers are giving hugs to each other, things that have never happened before are happening, and this is the cloud scale, and the CEO of Cisco is in Kenya, talking about a scale,is really the new normal. How are you guys, whatare some of the projects you're working on that you could share, that give an indicator ofsome of the cool things, and relevant things that are going on, what are some of theprojects you're working on, right now? >> Yeah, I'm not allowedto talk about specific customer names, but we can, some of the things that we're building are enhanced customer-centric views of network health, forexample, so building systems that show network healthfrom the perspective of the business, in simple ways, that customers can understand, not just at the IT level,but at the CEO level, or the marketing level, so a lot of customization,leveraging APIs, and leveraging platform technology. >> So you have othercustomers that are out there, that might be a Cisco customer, or new to Meraki, what's your takeaway,what would you say to them if they say, you know, what is this Meraki thing, what does this mean to me? What would your advice be to your peers, or someone watching, whatwould you say to them, to kind of sum it upinto a bumper sticker? >> Yeah, I would say that you need to have those APIs for scale, you need to have acloud-managed platform that can really scale to the solution you're trying to offer, especially if you'rean enterprise customer, and you need to have apartner that understands how to manage to the business outcome you're trying to achieve, not just managed at the technology level. You really need a conversation, you need to be able tocreate a conversation between your business stakeholders, and your IT stakeholders, and your marketing and other stakeholders, infrastructure stakeholders, and say, what are we trying toachieve as a business, and I think Worldwideis uniquely positioned to be able to help havethose conversations with customers throughour business innovation practice, through ourchief digital advisors, and chief technical advisors practice, and just start a deep and rich experience with being able to do this at scale. >> Courtney, same questionto you, say someone bumps into you, you know, a friend sees you on the street, hey Courtney, what's this Meraki thing about, what would you say to them? >> I would tell them it'sthe way of the future. I had to shift even mymindset when I joined the team, and it was a great shift, I finally was able to havethat work-life balance that we all dream of as network engineers, so that's what I would say to someone. They're able to gather somuch intelligence from it. >> Yeah, it's really awesome. This is cloud-scale,do it right it's magic, more time on your hands to have more fun and do other things, it's theCUBE, live coverage here, in Orlando, Florida, for Cisco Live 2018,we'll be back with more, stay with us, day one iscontinuing of three days of wall-to-wall livecoverage, we'll be right back, stay with us, thanks for watching. (light music)

(upbeat music) >> (Narrator) From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. Soon we'll be back in person in real life, but this year again it's a virtual conference. I'm John Furrier, your host of the cube for more cube coverage. We've got a great guest here, Debbie Vavangas, Global Garage Lead for IBM Services. Global Garage, great program. Debbie, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, we've covered the Garage a lot on theCUBE in the past, and a success, everyone loves the Garage. Things are born in the Garage, entrepreneurship, innovation, has been kind of categorically known for, kind of, the Garage startup. >> Absolutely. >> But also, it's become known for, really, agility, which has been a cloud phenomenon, DevOps. Now we're seeing dev SecOps as a big trend this year with hybrid cloud. So, I've got to ask you, how is Garage doing with the pandemic? Obviously, I can almost imagine people at home kind of disrupted from the office, but maybe more creativity, maybe more energy online? What's going on with the Garage? How has your transformation journey been with COVID? >> Well, John, COVID has been the leveler for us all, right? There isn't a person who hasn't had some challenge or some complexity to And that includes our clients. And I'm incredibly proud to be able to say that IBM Garage, because it is so digitally native, when the COVID pandemic has struck around the world every single one of our Garages was able to switch to being virtual without fail, without a single days lost productivity. And that's hugely beneficial to clients who are on an incredibly time-sensitive journey. And so, we've seen as a result of COVID actually there are a huge acceleration in Garages, for two reasons. So, number one, from a virtualization perspective, actually it's much easier when everybodies together in the same space. So everybody's together virtually in the same space, and we've seen, you know, acceleration in our velocity, in our collaboration, because everybody is really learning how to work in that same space. But two, because of the pandemic, because of the pressure on our client's needs to make decisions fast, know not guess, really be focused on their outcomes, not just doing stuff, the Garage really plays to that objective for them. And so we've seen a huge rise, you know, we've gone from in 2019 to just a few hundred garages, to finishing 2020 with over two and a half thousand garages. And it being embedded across services and with the goal of being the primary way our clients experience it. So COVID has been a big accelerator. >> Sorry, Debbie, can you repeat the numbers again? I just want to capture that, I missed that. >> Sure, sure. >> I did a double take on the numbers. (Debbie laughs) >> So then, we finished 2019 with just under 300 garages, and we finished 2020 with just over two and a half thousand. So, we've had a huge growth, and it isn't just the number of garages, it's the range of garages and what we're serving with our clients, and how we're collaborating with our clients, and the topics we're unpacking that has really broadened. >> Yeah, I mean I covered, and we've reported on the Garage on theCUBE and also on www.siliconangle.com in the past things and through your news coverage, but that's amazing growth. I got to believe the tailwind from COVID and just the energy around it has energized you. I want to get your thoughts on that because, you know, what we've reported on in the past has been about design thinking, human-centered design, all of those beautiful things that come with cloud-scale, right? You know, you're moving faster, you're innovating, and so that's been kind of there. But what you're getting at with this growth is, and with COVID has proven, and again, we've been pointing this out, you're seeing the pattern, it's clear. Companies are either retrenching, okay, which is refactoring, redesigning, doing those things to kind of get ready to come out of COVID with a growth strategy, and you're seeing other companies build net new innovations. So, they're building new capabilities, because COVID's shown them, kind of pulled back the curtain if you will on where the action is. So, this means there's two threads going on. You've got, "Okay, I've got to transform my business, and I got to refactor', or 'Hey, we got net new business models'. These are kind of two different things and not mutually exclusive. What's your comment on that? >> And I think that my comment on it is that is the sweet spot that Garage comes into its own, right? You mentioned lots of things in there. You talked about design thinking, and agility, and, you know, these other buzzwords that are used all the time, and Garage of course is synonymous with those. Of course, Garage uses the best design thinking, and AGILE practices, and all of those things that absolutely call to what we do. DevOps, even through down to DesignOps. You know, we have the whole range depending on what the client objective is. But, I think what is really happening now is that innovation being something separate is no longer how to accelerate your outcomes, and your business outcomes. Regardless of whether that is in refactoring and modernizing your existing estate, or diversifying, creating new ecosystems, new platforms, new offerings. Regardless of what that is, you can't do it separate to your core business. I mean, it's a well known fact, John, right? Like 75% of transformation programs fail to deliver an impact to the business performance, right? And in the same period of time there's been huge cuts in innovation funding, and that's because for the same reason, because they don't deliver the impact to the business performance. And that's why Garage is unique, because it is entirely focused on the outcome, right? We're using user research, through design thinking of course, using agile to deliver it at speed, and all of those other things. But, it's focused on value, on benefits realization and driving to your outcome. And we do that by putting that innovation at the heart of your enterprise in order to drive that transformation, rather than it being something separate. >> Debbie, I saw you gave a talk called 'Innovation is Dead'. Obviously, that's a provocative title, that's an attention-getter. Tell me what you mean by that. Because it seems to be a setup. >> I mean, if the innovation is dead, >> Of course. was it with a question mark? Were you, kind of, trying to highlight that innovation is transformation? >> So, the full title was 'Innovation is dead and transformation is pointless'. And, of course, it's meant to be an eye-catching title so people show up and listen to my pitch rather than somebody else's. But, the reality is I mean it most sincerely, it's back to that stat. 75% of these transformation programs fail to deliver the impact, and I speculate that that is for a few reasons. Because, the idea itself wasn't a good one, or wasn't at the right time. Because, you were unable to understand what the measure of good looked like, and therefore just being able to create that path. And, in order to transform a company, you must transform the individuals within a company. And so that way of working becomes incredibly holistic. And it's those three things, that I think amongst the whole myriad of others, that are the primary reasons why those programs fail. And what Garage does, is it breaks that. By putting innovation at the heart of your enterprise, and by using data-driven value orchestration, that means that we don't guess where the value to be gained is, we know. It's no longer chucking ideas at the wall to see what sticks, it's meaningful research. This is my favorite quote from my dear friend, Courtney Noll, who says, "It's not about searching for the innovation needle in the proverbial haystack, it's using your research in order to de-risk your investment, and drive your innovation to enable your outcomes." And so, if you do innovation without a view to how it's going to yield your business outcomes, I agree, I fundamentally agree that it's pointless. >> Yeah, exactly. And, you know, of course we're on the writing side, we love titles like, 'Innovation is dead, long live innovation'. So, it's classic, you know, to get your attention. >> Exactly, exactly. And of course, what I really mean is that innovation is a separate entity. >> Totally. >> There's no longer relevance for a company to make sure they achieve their business outcomes. >> Well, this is what I wanted to just double-click on that with you on is that you look at transformation. You guys are essentially saying transformation meets innovation with the Garage philosophy, if I get that right. >> Yep >> And it's interesting, and we've experienced this here with theCUBE, we're theCUBE virtual, we're not at IBM Think, there is no physical game day like some of us normally do. >> Well, as you can see, I'm at my house. (Debbie laughs) And so, I was talking to a CEO and I said, "Hey, you guys are doing really, really good. We had to pivot with the cube", and he goes, "You guys did a good pivot yourself". He goes, "No, John, we did not pivot. We actually put our business on hold because of the pandemic. We actually created a line extension, so, technically, we're going to bring that business back when COVID has gone and come back to real life, so it's technically not a pivot, we're not pivoting our business, we've created new functionality." Through the innovations that they were doing. So, this is kind of like, this is the real deal here. Share your thoughts on that. >> To me, it's about people get so focused on the output that they lose track of the outcome, right? And so, be really clear on what you're doing, and why. And the outcomes can be really broad, so instead of saying, "We're all going to implement a new ERP, or build a new mobile app". That's not an outcome, right? What we should be saying is, "What we're trying to achieve is a 10 percent growth in net promoter score in China, right? In this group." Or whatever it is we were trying to achieve, right? Or, "We want to make a 25% reduction in our operating cost base by simplifying our estate". Whatever those outcomes are, that's the starting point, and then driving that to use as the vehicle for what is the right innovation, what is going to deliver that value, and fast, right? Garage delivers three to five times faster than other models and at a reduced delivery cost, and so it's all about that speed. Speed of decision, speed of insight, speed of culture and training, speed of new skills, and speed to outcomes. >> Well, Debbie, you did a great job, love what you're doing, and Garage has got a great model. Congratulations on the growth, love this intersection, or transformation meets innovation because innovation is transformation, and vice versa, this interplay going on there. >> Exactly. >> I think COVID has proven that. Let me dig into a little bit more about the garage, what's going on. How many practitioners do you guys have there now at IBM? You've got growth, are you adding more people in? Obviously, Virtual First, COVID, is there still centers of design? Take us through what's going on at Garage. >> Certainly, so like, I think I mentioned it right up front. Our goal is to make IBM Garage the primary way our clients experience us. We've proven in that it delivers higher value to our clients and they get a really rich and broad set of outcomes. And so, in order for us to deliver on that promise we have to be enabled across IBM to deliver to it, right? So, over the last 18 months or so we've had a whole range of training programs in Enable, we've had a whole badging and certification program, we have all the skills, and the pathways, and the career pathways to find. But Garage is for everybody, right? And so, it isn't about creating a select group that can do this across IBM. This is about making all of services capable. So, in 2020 we trained over 28,000 people, in all the different skills that are needed, from selling, to execution, to QA, to user research, whatever it is. And this year we're launching our Garage Skills Academy, which will take that across all of services and make it easily available. So, you know, we've got hundreds of thousands. >> And talk about the footprint on the global side, because, again, not to bring up global, but global is what is in your title. >> Yep. >> Companies need to be global, because now with virtual workforces you're seeing much more tapped creativity and ability to execute from global teams. How does that impact you? >> Well, so it's global in two perspectives, right? So, number one, we have Garages all around the world, right? It isn't just the market of, you know, our most developed nations in Americas and Europe, it is everywhere, we see it in all emerging markets. From Latin America, through to all parts of eastern Europe, which are really beginning to come into their own. So, we see all these different Garages at different scales and opportunities. So, definitely global from that image. But, what virtualization has also enabled is truly global teams. Because, it's really easy to go, "Oh, I need one of those. Okay, I need a supply chain expert, and I need an AI expert, and I need somebody who's got industry experience in whatever it is." And you can quickly gather them around the virtual table, you know, faster than you can in a physical table. But, we still leverage the global communities with those physical. >> It's an expert network. You have an expert network there at IBM. >> We have a huge network, yeah. And both within IBM, and of course a growing network of ecosystem partners that we continue to work with. >> Well, Debbie, I'm really excited. Congratulations on the growth. I'm looking forward to partnering with you on your ecosystem as that develops. I can almost imagine you must be getting a lot of outside IBM practitioners and experts coming in to collaborate in a social construct. >> Absolutely. >> It's a great program, thanks for sharing. >> My pleasure, it's been great to be here, thank you. >> Okay, IBM's Global Garage Lead, Debbie Vavangas, who's here on theCUBE with IBM Services. A phenomenon, it's a social construct that's helping companies with digital transformation. Intersecting, with innovation. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe, it's the >>Cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2020 >>one brought to you >>by IBM. Hello, welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual soon we'll be back in person in real life. But this year again it's a virtual conference. I'm john for your host of the cube for more cube coverage. You got a great guest here Debbie Viviendas Global garage lead for IBM Services Global garage great program. Ah Debbie, great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thanks for having me. >>So we've covered the garage a lot on the cube in the past and the success, Everyone loves the garage things are born in the garage, entrepreneurship innovation has been kind of categorically known for kind of the garage start up um but also it's become um known for really agile agility and which has been a cloud phenomenon, devops and now we're seeing Deb sec apps as a big trend this year with hybrid cloud. So I gotta ask you, how is garage doing with the pandemic? I was I can almost imagine people at home kind of disrupted from the office, but maybe more creativity, maybe more energy online. What's going on with the garage? How has your transformation journey been with Covid? >>Well, don't I mean it's Covid has been the level of for us. All right, there isn't a person who hasn't had some challenge or some complexity to Yeah, and that includes our clients and I'm incredibly proud to be able to say that IBM garage because it is so digitally native. When the covid pandemic has struck around the world, every single one of our garages was able to switch to being virtual without fail without a single days lost productivity. And that I mean that's hugely beneficial to clients who are on an incredible time sensitive journey. And so we've seen as a result of Covid actually there are a huge acceleration in garages from two reasons. The number one from a virtualization perspective. Actually it's much easier when everybody's together in the same space, everybody's together virtually in the same space. And we've seen acceleration in our velocity and our collaboration because everybody is really learning how to work in that century. But to because of the pandemic, because of the pressure on our client's needs to make decisions fast. No, not guess really, be focused on their outcomes, not just doing stuff, the garage really plays to that objective for them. And so we've seen a huge rise. We've gone from 2019 to just a few 100 garages to finishing 2020 with over 2.5 1000 garages and being embedded across services and the goal of being the primary way our clients experiencing COVID has been a big accelerator. >>Sorry Debbie, can you repeat the numbers again? I just want to capture that. I missed that. >>Sure. Sure. So we finished >>training on the numbers. >>Yeah. So that we finished 2019 with just under 300 garages and we finished 2020 with just over 2.5 1000. So we've had a huge growth in the in the rain and it isn't just the number of garages, it's the range of garages and what we're what we're serving with our clients and how we're collaborating with our clients and the topics were unpacking. That is is really broadened. >>Yeah. I mean I I covered and we've reported on the garage on the Cuban also in silicon angle dot com. And the past thinks and through your your news coverage. That's amazing growth. Um I gotta believe the tailwind from Covid and just the energy around it has energized. You wanna get your thoughts on that because you know what we've reported the past, it's been about design, thinking human centered design, all those beautiful things that come with cloud, cloud scale, right? You know, you're moving faster, you're innovating. Um and so that's been kind of there, but what you're getting at with this growth is with and what Covid has proven. And again, we've been pointing this out, you're seeing the pattern, It's clear companies are either retrenching okay. Which is re factoring, redesigning, doing those things to kind of get ready to come out to cope with a growth strategy and you're seeing other companies um build net new innovations so they're building new capabilities because Covid shown them kind of pulled back the curtain if you will on where the action is. So this means there's two threads going on. You got okay, I got to transform my business and I gotta re factor and then, or hey, we got net new business models, these are kind of two different things and not mutually exclusive. What's your comment on that? >>Uh, and I think that my comment on is that is the sweet spot that garage comes into its own right. You mentioned lots of things in that, you talked about design thinking and agility and you know, these other buzzwords that are used all the time and garage of course is synonymous with those of course, you know, it's Gap uses the best design thinking and agile practices and all of those things that absolutely core to what we do, devops, even through down to design up, we have the whole range depending on what the client objective is, but I think what is really happening now is the innovation, you know, being something separate. It is no longer how to accelerate your outcomes and your business outcomes regardless of whether that is in re factoring and modernizing your existing estate or diversifying creating new ecosystems and new platforms and new offerings. Regardless of what that is, you can't do it separate to your, To your core business. I mean it's a well known fact John right, like 75 of transformation programmes failed to deliver an impact on the business performance. Right? And in the same period of time there's been huge cuts in innovation funding and that's because for the same reason because they don't deliver the impact of the business performance and that's why garage is unique because it is entirely focused on the outcome, right? But using user research through design thinking of course using agile to deliver it at speed and all of those other things, but it's focused on value, on benefits, realization and driving to your outcome. And we do that by putting that innovation at the heart of your enterprise in order to drive that transformation rather than it being something separate. >>Debbie, I saw you gave a talk uh called Innovation Is Dead. Um obviously that's a provocative title. That's an attention getter. Um tell me what you mean by that because it seems to be a setup. I mean many mentions dead. Was it with a question mark? What you're kind of trying to highlight that innovation is transformation? Or were you trying >>to do the full title? The full title was Innovation is Dead and transformation is pointless. And of course, it's meant to be an eye catching title. So people show up and listen to my pitch rather than somebody else's. But But the reality is I mean that most sincerely it's back to that step, 75 of these transformation programmes failed to deliver the impact. And I and I speculate that that is for a few reasons because the idea itself wasn't a good one or wasn't at the right time because you were unable to understand what the measure of good looked like and therefore him just be able to create that path. And in order to transform a company, you must transform the individuals within a company. And so that way of working becomes incredibly holistic and it's those three things, I think amongst the whole myriad of others are the primary reasons why those programs fail. And what garage does is it breaks this by putting innovation at the heart of your enterprise and by using data driven value orchestration. That means that we don't no, we don't guess where the value to be gained is. We know it's no longer checking ideas at the wall to see what sticks it's meaningful research. It's not searching. This is my favorite quote from my dear friend Courtney, know, who says it's not about searching for the innovation needle in the proverbial haystack. It's using your research in order to de risk your investment and drive your innovation to enable your outcomes. So if you do innovation without a view to how it's going to yield your business outcomes, I agree. I fundamentally agree that it's pointless. >>Exactly. Of course, we're on the writing side. We love titles like innovation is dead long live innovation, so that's classic. Get your attention. But I think >>Exactly, and of course what I really mean is that innovation is a separate entity, >>totally. >>There is no longer relevant for company to make sure they achieve their business >>outcome. Well, this is what I wanted to just double click on that with you on is that you look at transformation, you guys essentially saying transformation meets innovation with the garage philosophy if I get that right. Um, and, and, and it's interesting I had, and we've experienced here with the cube where the cube virtual, we're not at IBM think there is no physical game day, like >>my house. >>And, and so I was talking to a Ceo and he said, I said, hey you guys are doing really, really good. You know, we had to pivot with the cube and he goes, you guys did a good pivot yourself because no, john we did not pivot, we actually put our business on hold because of the pandemic. We actually created a line extension. So technically we're going to bring that business back when Covid is gone and we come back to real life. So it's technically not a pivot. We're not pivoting our business. We've created new functionality through the innovations that they were doing. So this is kind of like, this is the real deal here. This is like depends proven what's your share your thoughts on that? >>Well, it's just to me it's about people get so focused on the output that they lose track of the outcome, right? And so being really clear on what you're doing and why and the outcomes can be really broad that, you know, so instead of saying, you know, we're all going to implement the new E. R. P. Or build a new mobile app. That's that's that's not an outcome, right? What we should be saying is what we're trying to achieve is a 10% growth in net promoter score in china, Right in this group or whatever it is we were trying to achieve right, we want to make a 25 reduction in our operating cost base by simplifying our estate whatever those outcomes are. I mean that's the starting point and then driving that use to use as the vehicle for what is the right innovation, what is going to deliver that value and fast right garage delivers 3-5 times faster than other models and reduced delivery costs. And so it's all about that speed, speed of decision, speed of insight, speed of culture and training, speed of new skills and speed to outcomes. >>You got a great job, love what you're doing in Karaj got a great model, congratulations on the growth. Love this intersection or transformation meets innovation because innovation is transformation advice versus interplay going on there I think has proven that. Let me dig into a little bit more about the garage. What's going on? How many practitioners you guys have there now at IBM? Um, you've got growth. Are you adding more people in? I'll see virtual first. Covid. Is there still centers of design take us through what's going on at garage? >>Certainly. So I think I mentioned it right up front. Right. So our goal is to make IBM guards the primary way our clients experiences. We've proven that it delivers higher value to our clients and they get really rich and broad set of outcomes. And so in order for us to deliver on that promise, we have to be unable to cross IBM to deliver to it. Right? So over the last 18 months or so we've had a whole range of training programs and enable we have a whole badging and certification program. We have all the skills and the pathways and the career pathways to find. But garages for everybody. Right? And so it isn't about creating a selected group that can do this across IBM, this is about making all of services capable. So in 2020 we we trained over 28,000 people right? In in all the different skills that are needed from selling to execution to QA to use a research, whatever it is. And this year we're launching our garage skills academy which will take that across all of services and make it easily available. So we will, you've got to >>talk about the footprint of the global side because again, not to bring up global, but global is what yours in your title companies need to be global because now with virtual workforce is you're seeing much more tapped creativity and execution ability to execute from global teams. How does that impact you? >>Well, so garages as in its global in two perspectives. Right, So number one, we have garages all around the world. Right? It isn't it isn't just the market of you are most developed nations in the Americas and europe. It is everywhere. We see it in all emerging markets, from latin America through to you all parts of eastern europe which are really beginning to come into their own. So we see all these different garages of different different scales and opportunity. So definitely global from that image. But what what what virtualization has also enabled these truly global teams because it's really easy to go, I need one of those. Okay, I need a supply chain expert and I need an Ai expert and I need somebody who's got industry experience in whatever it is and you can quickly gather them around the virtual table faster than you can in a physical table. But we still leverage the global community >>for the network. You have an expert network there at IBM. >>You have a huge network. Yeah. And both both within IBM and of course a growing network of ecosystem partners that we continue to work >>with. Debbie. I'm really excited. Congratulations. Growth. I'm looking forward to partnering with you on your ecosystem as that develops. I can almost imagine you must be getting a lot of outside IBM practitioners and experts coming in to collaborate. It is a social construct. It's a great program. Thanks for sharing >>my pleasure. It's been great to be here. Thank >>you. Okay, IBM's global garage. Lee Debbie Vegas who's here on the queue with IBM services, a phenomenon. This is social construct is helping companies with digital transformation intersecting with innovation. I'm john for your host. Thanks for watching

>>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.

>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Miami Beach, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vallante with Stu Miniman. This is our one day coverage of UiPath. UiPath Forward Americas. UiPath does these events all over the world. They've reached about 14,000 customers to date and about 1,500 here, Stu. A great show, a lot of energy. We're watching the ascendancy of robotic process automation, the simplification of software robots. Courtney Dominiguez is here, she's the Vice President of World Fuel Services and she's joined by Ashim Gupta who's the UiPath's Chief Customer Success Officer. Welcome folks, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. >> So, Courtney, let's start with you. World Fuel Services: what's that all about? >> So we're a logistics company, an energy logistics company. We're actually based here in Miami, Florida so it was a short commute over to the Fountain Blue for the day. >> Lucky you. >> Yes, exactly. So, yeah, we do fuel globally, all over the world. So we do for aviation, marine, and land. We also focus on renewable energy and we're really developing over in Europe as well. >> So, interesting, a lot of interesting drivers and dynamics in your business, fast moving, a lot of change, sometimes hard to predict. >> Yes. >> In terms of your role, talk about your role and what some of the key business drivers are that force you to be on top of your game. >> Yeah, so, I'm in charge of shared services and automation for the company so it's really my role to help us operate more efficiently and do things smarter. You know everybody's being challenged to do more with less and as you grow the business, your transaction accounts grow as well so we're really in charge of transforming and providing solutions. UiPath is a component, a big component, of what we're going to be rolling out and helping to really do transformation. >> So, Ashim, Courtney saying, do more with less, that's got to be music to your ears. Your job is to make, Courtney, her company, successful. So, talk about your role and how you actually make your success. >> Sure, so, one, I was a former customer. So you look at Daniel Dines' strategy and UiPath's strategy and it's bringing people in who really have a passion for the industry and have that experience to go and try and operationalize a lot of our mission. As a former customer, I know a lot of times you get sold software and you don't get a lot of the tools or you got to go buy another set of tools to make the first set of tools work. So customer success is about giving technical talent and really great experts and put them in the hands of our best customers to answer the questions that are out there as they embark on their RPA journey. That can go from anything from infrastructure, technical hurdles that they may face to how to really think about RPA, how to eventualize it within their areas. And by doing that, we get people to up that adoption curve, they start seeing the benefits of RPA and it becomes a no-brainer, both for the company to invest in and employees to understand the value that RPA brings. >> So, Courtney, was RPA kind of a no-brainer for you? Was it a, "What is this technology?" How did you go about sort of bringing RPA into your organization? >> Yeah, I think all of the above. So, it seems very intuitive. You know, you want to do things smarter and do things more efficiently but that makes people nervous too so there's a lot of people that say, "I like what I do" "and if you do it smarter and more efficient," "do you still need me?" And I also think that, from the top, it's easy to say robots, and that sounds really cool but really putting it into the water supply is a different story. So, one of the things that we did, we hosted a RPA awareness day, partnered with UiPath. They came in and worked with us on that. And then after that we hosted a bot-a-thon. So, we went out and we had our whole enterprise download the community version of UiPath and just had them start experimenting and coming up with their own ideas and honestly, it was a great crowd-sourcing engine for us. And we just came up with an instant pipeline of ideas and people really caught on and bought into it at that point. So it was fantastic. >> Courtney, I want you to expand a little bit on that. In my career, I've always said, "I know next quarter," "next year, I'm going to have more to do." When I managed a group in operations it was, "You need to figure out what you can get rid of," "you know, what you can," I mean automated a decade ago was quite different than what you do today but I like what you said about how you engaged everybody and got them to, kind of, get over that fear of the unknown. How long's the process going to take? Did you have senior management involvement in the planning? >> Yeah honestly, this was a great, ground roots kind of a way of getting it out and it didn't take long at all. I mean we've only been on this journey a couple of months quite honestly and it's caught on like wildfire and we're really excited about it. So you know, I think it's great that we were able to partner some of our great, younger talent with some of our more, people who've been doing it for a long time. And we partnered together, we partnered them together and then they came up with their own ideas. It's easy for me to, Monday morning, quarterback, and stand on the other side and say, "Oh, you should do this or do that" but the people that are doing it everyday are the ones who have the best ideas. They know what they don't want to do. They know what they want to spend their time working on. So they're the best ones to figure out how to make that other stuff that's not quite as fun go away. So, yeah, it's been fantastic. >> So, Ashim, if I could ask, how do you help your customers figure out what the right metric is? What is success for them? You've been on the customer side, you've been talking to users, it's often like, "Oh, I think I'm going to be able" "to save money but maybe it's growing revenue." There's a lot of pieces there. >> I mean, a lot of it starts with listening because I don't think there's one right answer. You know, a lot of software companies come in and say, "It is just about cost", or, "It is just about X". We think about it very differently. Some of our customers think about it in terms of cost equality, getting accurate data, getting things done 100% accurate and getting data quality up. Some of them, it is a productivity game, right? It's important to get that cost down. We have customers in Japan who are using it to augment their workforce because they need more workers than the market can supply and RPA gets it. So I would say the first is listening to our customers. The second piece of it is, then, there are some standard things across our customer base that we're all learning together. You know, one of our customers started looking at the time, the run time of a bot. Or how long, how much infrastructure does it consume? So we're able to get best practices across to be able to figure out what are the right metrics that suits our customers' needs. >> Courtney, I'm trying to understand if it was a top-down initiative or a bottoms-up or both? >> It's both, yeah I think it's really both. So I think it's that top level setting the direction and saying, "This is what we want to do." One of the things we have at World Fuel is, a lot of people have the mantra, and Dan said this this morning as well, is, "We don't want to touch the keyboard." Right? We want to be no-touch. We want things to come through seamlessly. So that's getting great data quality at the beginning with customer onboarding and then getting it all the way through and out the door because, at the end of the day, we need to get the invoices out and the money back in, right? And I need accurate data to do that and do things efficiently. So, I think it's from the top saying, "We want to be no-touch", and then it's up to my team to help provide solutions and work with the businesses and figure out how to make that happen. >> So it sounds like you had this ideation initiative and did you just pick one or two or did you say, "Okay, guys, go?" Where did you start, what did you have to do to really prove out the value? >> We did, we definitely picked one or two. It went with quick wins but when you go with quick wins and you say, "This is what we did in a really short" "amount of time with minimal effort," "think of the art of the possible, think of what we can do?" And now our focus is not on quick wins. Our focus is on, "How do we transform our business? "How do we take this tool and really apply it" "and transform the way we work?" So I think it's important to have those quick wins initially and just kind of set the stage because that gets everybody thinking, "Wow, this can be really big." >> What kind of person was required to build the robots? Somebody who's fairly technical or was it a business person, was it a team, two people team? >> I have the best team ever and I really think we got a lot of them internally. Really, citizen, kind of data, scientist people. Not anybody that was necessarily trained in it. Now we're getting more and more data scientists added to the team. So we're getting more developer-type skills. We also have BAs, so we've got some people who are great at looking at process and how can we make things more efficient? It's a combination but I do really think that some of our best resources have just been people that are really eager to learn. I mean, UiPath does an amazing job of putting the certification and the academy, and so many online tools it's free. I mean, it's so easy to work with them and really pick it up. You know you don't need a lot of training and that's one of the reasons we selected UiPath you don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure this stuff out. And they really make it all so readily available. >> A lot of the customers we talked to today on theCUBE have gone through a business case, some rigorous, some sort of back-of-napkin, What kind of business case and justification did you go through? >> So we started small with the bots. So we said, "Lets prove it out with a small number of bots" "and if we can do that, then we can scale". And we were just chatting earlier that now we really want to look at it and say, "Over the next three", "six, 12 months, how can we really scale this" "and what do we think that looks like?" Again, start small and then, now okay now we know what's out there and we know what we can get so let's go big and we're ready to do that now. >> So did you go through a rigorous, sort of, quantification of the business value or was it more like, "Hey, it's low risk. Let's try it, see what we get." >> Yeah, yeah, it's low risk, let's just do it. >> I mean what was the result, what was the business event? >> Honestly, it's been fantastic. I mean the results back that we've had have been savings of 100,000s of dollars with minimal, again, minimal effort and minimal, really unsure of what we were going to get out of it. So, it's phenomenal. >> And the denominator, and I say denominator I'm talking about benefit divided by cost-- >> Yeah. >> Sounds like the denominator was pretty low. >> Pretty low, yeah. >> One of the best ways to get our eyes, lower the denominator. I always talk to my kids about this when it comes to college cost so you know what I mean, (laughing) And really, with the community version, getting that out there and free and just having people start playing around with it? I mean, that right there keeps your cost pretty low because they're funneling and putting ideas in the pipeline and then when it comes time to develop it and make it production ready, that's where our effort is involved but to just get that into the pipeline with a little bit of effort and a little bit of cost is a no-brainer. >> So it's clear, your strategy as a company is to lower the barriers to entry for your clients, train them, free training, get them hooked, and then let the rest of it soar. >> Yeah, I mean, one is we share that, our CEO talked about that today, we share that joy that automation brings to a lot of people's work. That's what drives them. So for us, it's not about nickel and diming people every step of the way, it is arming them with what they need to fulfill the mission for what we sold them automation or RPA for. And that's a huge part of it so it goes beyond just the academy, just the training, you know, it's the intimacy that we want to keep with our customers. So we're growing very fast in our number of employees. So, even though, I think we're getting close to 2,000 customers, our goal is to get to 2,000 employees here very quickly. And our CEO really stresses customer first in that equation so we learn and we do little pivot points along the way. An example could be internal marketing, helping people drive awareness. You know, the bot-a-thon that Courtney had for her team, we want to be able to sponsor those things. You know, be partners in getting that name of RPA out there. So it's everything they need to try to get up that curve. >> Courtney, your enthusiasm is palpable, as much of the feedback that we've had from customers, but if you had to do it over again, would you change anything, would you go faster? Would you have done anything differently if you'd had a mulligan? >> One of the concerns is that I feel like we've got a lot of momentum and I want to keep it going. So I want to, like Ashim, we need to scale our team as well so that we're able to handle that pipeline of work coming in and that we don't stall out because I really see a lot of enthusiasm for what we're developing and we want to be able to keep up with that. I love moving fast, I wish we could move faster, I push my team to say, "How much faster can we go?", because there's commitments as well at the board level saying, you know, "What are you guys doing and how are you transforming?" But I wouldn't do anything over so far. So far it's been fantastic. >> You know It strikes me that when you put in a robot, and automate a process, you're saving for an individual, and arm or a leg, you know, Lots of arms and legs. How have you thought about virtualizing those arms and legs into a team that can really drive this to your last point, through the organization, to keep that momentum going? >> Yeah, that's what we're looking in now, right? We want to look at that digital roadmap and say, not arms and legs, but we actually want to look at real resources and that doesn't necessarily mean a resource reduction, it just means being able to scale and do things more efficiently and hopefully, redeploy those resources to do stuff that requires a brain, right? >> Ashim, I'm curious. Do you have some tools to help customers as to how they scale and grow and keep the momentum going? It reminds me of a rocket going on, you've got those booster levels, and you want to reach escape velocity but then probably, keep accelerating. >> Yeah, so you'll start seeing our platform expanding this. At this conference, and Daniel must have talked about it, we launched UiPath Go. Getting openness and collaboration within organizations and across organizations, that's really what our Go platform will enable people to do. Sharing automations, learning best practices, being able to connect with different companies, different partners at a fast pace, that's so important because there's not a cookie cutter approach to this, we need collective knowledge to ramp up the speed and then, slowly by slowly, the features that we're starting to do: sharable libraries within the platform, you're going to see other process discovery type automations come out or tools that we're starting to roll out to our customers. And then we have events. Yesterday, Courtney was a part of our customer advisory counsel. It is incredible, when you put customers like Courtney in a room, who are so passionate and are incredible, sharing what's working and what's not and everybody leaves saying, "Okay, these are the two things that I'm either" "going to look out for or that I'm going" "to do differently to make sure the journey happens ahead." Those are just a few. >> Courtney, Daniel was on earlier today and we were asking him to give some advice to these young people, you know, he's kind of inspirational. He talked about this morning in his keynote about people laughed him out of their office and so forth. And one of the things he said is, "I didn't think big enough," "I started to think bigger, you got to think bigger." So as you put on your think-big hat, where do you think this could go? >> So I really see UiPath and RPA collaborating, right? I mean, we were investing in a lot of smart tools and I want to see how all of those tools can work together. I don't want it to be just UiPath or just another tool, or workflow tool. I want to see how they can all, because to me, that's where the value really comes in. I mean if you're leveraging best-of-breed options and best-of-breed tools and then we can say, "How do all of these work together?" That's transformational. So, really, at the end of next year, what I want my team and what I want my leaders to say is, "Wow. They have really transformed the way that we work" "and the way that we do business." To me, that's a win. If Ashim can make me successful in that, I'll be a happy camper. >> Awesome, guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, we really appreciate it. We're seeing some of these trends that we talked about: the productivity gap, we have more jobs than we have employees to fill those jobs. The productivity line's not moving. RPA and the ascendancy of RPAs promises to change that and we'll be covering that ongoing. You're watching theCUBE live from UiPath Forward Americas. Stu Miniman And Dave Vellante. We will be right back.

>> It's the Cube covering IBM cheap Data Officer Strategy Summit brought to you by IBM. Now, here are your hosts Day villain day and still minimum. >> Welcome back to Boston, everybody. This is the Cube, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. We here at the Chief Data Officers Summit that IBM is hosting in Boston. I'm joined by Courtney Abercrombie. According your your title's too long. I'm just gonna call you a cognitive rockstar on >> Alec Crane is >> here from Yusa. System by President, Vice President at that firm. Welcome to the Cube. Great to see you guys. Thank you. So this event I love it. I mean, we first met at the, uh, the mighty chief data officer conference. You were all over that networking with the CEO's helping him out and just really, I think identified early on the importance of this constituency. Why? How did you sort of realize and where have you taken it? >> It's more important than it's ever been. And we're so grateful every time that we see a new chief data officer coming in because you just can't govern and do data by committee. Um, if you really hope to be transformational in your company. All these huge, different technologies that are out there, All this amazing, rich data like weather data and the ability to leverage, you know, social media information, bringing that all together and really establishing an innovation platform for your company. You can't do that by committee. You really have to have a leader in charge of it. and that’s what chief data officers are here to do. And so every time we see one, we're so grateful >> that just so >> that we just heard from Inderpal Bhandari on his recommendation for how you get started. It was pretty precise and prescriptive. But I wonder, Alan. So tell us about the chief data officer role at USAA. Hasn't been around for a while. Of course, it's a regulated business. So probably Maur, data oriented are cognizant than most businesses. But tell us about your journey. >> We started probably about 4 or 5 years ago, and it was a combination of trying to consolidate data and analytics operations and then decentralized them, and we found that there was advantages and pros and cons of doing both. You'd get the efficiencies, but once you got the efficiencies, you'd lose the business expertise, and then we'd have to tow decentralize. So we ended up landing a couple of years ago. What we call a hub and spoke system where we have centralized governance and management of key data assets, uh, data modelling data science type work. And then we still allow the, uh, various lines of business to have their own data offices. And the one I run for USAA is our distribution channels office for all of the data and analytics. And we take about 100,000,000 phone calls a year. About 2,000,000,000 webb interactions. Mobile interactions. We take about 18,000 hours. That's really roughly two years of phone conversation data in per day. Uh, we take about 50,000,000 lines of, uh, Web analytic traffic per day as well. So trying to make sense of that to nurture remember, relationships, reinforce trust and remove obstacles >> for your supporting the agent systems. Is that right? >> I support the agent systems as well as the, um, digital >> systems. Okay. And so the objective is obviously toe to grow the business, keep it running, keep the customers happy. Very operate, agent Just efficient. Okay. Um and so when you that's really interesting. This sort of hub and spoke of decentralization gets you speed and closer to the business. Centralization get you that that efficiency. Do you feel like you found that right balance? I mean, if you think so. I >> think you know, early on, we it was mme or we had more cerebral alignment, you know, meaning that it seemed logical to us. But actually, once the last couple of years, we've had some growing pains with roles, responsibilities, overlaps, some redundancy, those types of things. But I think we've landed in a good place. And that's that's what I'm pretty proud of because we've been able to balance the agility with the governance necessary toe, have good governance and put in place, but then also be able to move at the speed the businessmen. >> So Courtney, one of things we heard one of the themes this morning within IBM it's of the role of the chief Data officer's office is to really empower the lines of business with data so that you can empower your customers is what Bob Tatiana was telling us, right? With data. So how are you doing? That is you have new services. You have processes or how is that all working >> right? We dio We have a lot of things, actually, because we've been working so much with people like Allen's group who have been leaders at, quite frankly, in establishing best practices on even how to set up these husbands votes. A lot of people are, you know, want to talk, Teo, um, the CDO and they've spun off even a lot of CEOs into other organizations, in fact, but I mean, they're really a leader in this area. So one of the things that we've noticed is you know, the thing that gives everybody the biggest grief is trying to figure out how to work with unstructured data. Um, and all this volume of data, it's just insane. And just like I was saying in the panel earlier, only about 5% of your actual internal data is enough to actually create a context around your customers. You really have to be able to go with all this exogenous data to understand what were the bigger ramifications that were going on in any customer event, whether it's a call in or whether it's, uh, you know, I'm not happy today with something that you tried to sell me or something that you didn't respond too fast enough, which I'm sure Alan could, you know, equate to. But so we have this new data as a service that we've put together based on the way the weather data has, the weather company has put their platform together. We're using a lot of the same kind of like micro services that you saw Bob put on the screen. You know, everything from, I mean, open source. As much open sources we can get, get it. And it's all cloud based. So and it's it's ways to digest and mix up both that internal data with all of that big, voluminous external data. >> So I'm interested in. So you get the organizational part down. Least you've settled on approach. What are some of the other big challenges that you face in terms of analytics and cognitive projects? Your organization? How are you dealing with those? >> Well, uh, >> to take a step back, use a We're, uh, financial services company that supports the military and their families. We now have 12 million members, and we're known for our service. And most of the time, those moments of truth, if you will, where our service really shines has been when someone talks to you, us on the phone when those member service reps are giving that incredible service that they're known for on the reason being is that the MSR is the aggregator of all that data. When you call in, it's all about you. There's two screens full of your information and the MSR is not interested in anything else but just serving you, our digital experiences more transactional in orientation. And it was It's more utilitarian, and we're trying to make it more personal, trying to make it more How do we know about you? And so one of the cues that were that were taking from the MSR community through cognitive learning is we like to say the only way to get into the call is to get into the call, and that is to truly get into the speech to text, Then do the text mining on that to see what are the other topics that are coming out that could surface that we're not actually capturing. And then how do we use those topics at a member level two then help inform the digital experience to make it more personal. How do I detect life events? Our MSR's are actually trained to listen for things like words like fiance, marriage moving, maybe even a baby crying in the background. How do we take that knowledge and turn that into something that machine learning can give us insights that can feedback into our digital transact actions. So >> this's what our group. >> It's a big task. So So how are >> you doing that? I mean, it's obviously we always talk about people processing technology. Yeah, break that down for us. I mean, how are you approaching that massive opportunity? >> Part of it is is, uh, you know, I look at it. It is like a set of those, you know, Russian nesting dolls. You know, every time you solve one problem, there's another problem inside of it. The first problem is getting access to the data. You know, where and where do you store? We're taking in two years of data per day of phone call data into a system where you put all that right and then you're where you put a week's worth a month's worth a quarter's worth of data like that. Then once you solve that problem, how do you read Act all that personal information So that that private information that you really don't need that data exhaust that would actually create a liability for you in our in our world so that you can really stay focused on what of the key themes that the member needs? And then the third thing is now had. Now that you've got access to the data, it's transcribed for you. It's been redacted from its P I I type work well, now you need the horse power and of analysts on, we're exploring partnerships with IBM, both locally and in in the States as well as internationally to look at data science as a service and try to understand How can we tap into this huge volume of data that we've got to explore those types of themes that are coming up The biggest challenges in typical transaction logging systems. You have to know what your logging You have to know what you're looking for before you know what to put the date, where to put the data. And so it's almost like you kind of have to already know that it's there to know how much you're acquiring for it and what we need to do more as we pivot more towards machine learning is that we need the data to tell us what's important to look at. And that's really the vat on the value of working with these folks. >> So obviously, date is increasingly on structure we heard this morning and whatever, 80 90% is structured. So here you're no whatever. You're putting it into whatever data fake swamp, ocean, everything center everywhere, and you're using sort of machine learning toe both find signal, but also protected yourself from risk. Right. So you've got a T said you gotta redact private information. So much of that information could be and not not no schema? Absolutely. Okay, So you're where are you in terms of solving that problem in the first inning or you deeper than that, >> we're probably would say beyond the first inning, but we so we've kind of figured out what that process is to get the data and all the piece parts working together. We've made some incredible insights already. Things that people, you know, I had no idea that was there. Um, but, uh, I'd say we still have a long way to go. Is particularly terms of scaling scaling the process, scaling the thie analytics, scaling the partnerships, figuring out how do we get the most throughput? I would say it's It's one of those things. We're measuring it on, maybe having a couple of good wins this year. A couple of really good projects that have come across. We want to kind of take that tube out 10 projects next year in this space. And that's how we're kind of measuring the velocity and the success >> data divas. I walked away and >> there was one of them Was breakfast this morning. Data divas. You hold this every year. >> D'oh! It's growing. Now we got data, >> dudes. So I was one of the few data dudes way walked in >> one of the women chief date officers. I got no problem with people calling me a P. >> I No. Yeah, I just sell. Sit down. Really? Bath s o. But also, >> what's the intent of that? What learning is that you take out of those? >> I think it's >> more. It's You know, you could honestly say this isn't just a data Debo problem. This is also, you know, anybody who feels like they're not being heard. Um, it's really easy to get drowned out in a lot of voices when it comes to data and analytics. Um, everybody has an opinion. I think. Remember, Ursula is always saying, Ah, all's fair in love, war and data. Um and it feels like, you know, sometimes you go, I'll come to the table and whoever has the loudest voice and whoever bangs their test the loudest, um, kind of wins the game. But I think in this case, you know, a lot of women are taking these roles. In fact, we saw, you know, a while back from Gardner that number about 25% of chief data officers are actually women because the role is evolving out of the business lines as opposed Thio more lines. And so I mean, it makes sense that, you know, were natural collaborators. I mean, like the biggest struggle and data governance isn't setting up frameworks. It's getting people to actually cooperate and bring data to the table and talk about their business processes that support that. And that's something that women do really well. But we've got to find our voice and our strength and our resolve. And we've got to support each other in trying to bring more diverse thinking to the table, you know? So it's it's all those kinds of issues and how do you balance family? I mean, >> we're seeing >> more and more. You know, I don't know if you know this, but there's actual statistics around millennials and that males are actually starting to take on more more role of being the the caregiver in the family. So I mean as we see that it's an interesting turnabout because now all the sudden, it's no longer, you know, women having that traditional role of, you know, I gotta always be home. Now we're actually starting to see a flip of that, which is which is, >> You know, I think it's kind of welcome. My husband's definitely >> I say he's a better parent than me. >> Friday. It's >> honest he'll watch this and he >> can thank me later that it was >> a great discussion this morning. Alan, I want to get your feedback on this event and also you participate in a couple of sessions yesterday. Maybe you could share with our audience Some of the key takeaways in the event of general and specific ones that you worked on yesterday. >> Well, I've been fortunate to come to the event for a couple of years now. And when we were just what 50 or so of us that were showing up? So, you know, I see that the evolution just in a couple of years time conversations have really changed. First meeting that we had people were saying, Where do you report in the organization? Um, how many people do you have? What do you do for your job? They were very different answers to any of that everywhere. From I'm an independent contributor that's a data evangelist to I run legions of data analysts and reporting shops, you know, and so forth and everything in between. And so what I see what it's offers in first year was really kind of a coalescing of what it really means to be a data officer in the company that actually happened pretty quickly in my mind, Um, when by seeing it through through the lens of my peers here, the other thing was when you when you think about the topics the topics are getting a lot more pointed. They're getting more pointed around the monetization of data communicating data through visualization, storytelling, key insights that you, you know, using different technologies. And we talked a lot yesterday about storytelling and storytelling is not through visual days in storytelling is not just about like who has the most, you know, colors on on a slide or or ah you know, animation of your bubble charts and things like that. But sometimes the best stories are told with the most simple charts because they resonate with your customers. And so what I think is it's almost like kind of getting a back to the basics when it comes to taking data and making it meaningful. We're only going to grow our organizations and data and data scientists and analysts. If we can communicate to the rest of the organization, our value and the key to creating that value is they can see themselves in our data. >> Yeah, the visit is we like to call it sometimes is critical to that to that storytelling. Sometimes I worry and we go onto these conferences and you go into a booth and look what we can do with machine learning, and we would just be looking at just this data. So what do I do? What >> I do with all this? Yeah. >> I don't know how it would make sense of it. So So is there a special storyteller role within your organization or you all storytellers? Do you cross train on that? Or >> it's funny you'd ask that one of the gentlemen of my team. He actually came to me about six months ago, and he says I'm really good at at the analysis part, but I really have a passion for things like Photoshopped things like, uh uh, uh the various, uh, video and video editing type software. He says I want to be your storyteller. I want to be creating a team of data and analytics storytellers for the rest of the organization. So we pitched the idea to our central hub and spoke leadership group. They loved it. They loved the idea. And he is now, um, oversubscribed. You would say in terms of demand for how do you tell the data? How do you tell the data story and how it's moving the business forward? And that takes the form kind of everything from infographics tell you also about how do you make it personal when, when? Now 7,000 m s. Ours have access to their own data. You know, really telling that at a at a very personal level, almost like a vignette of animus are who's now able to manage themselves using the data that they were not able able tto have before we're in the past, only managers had access to their performance results. This video, actually, you know, pulls on the heartstrings. But it it not only does that, but it really tells the story of how doing these types of things and creating these different data assets for the rest of your organization can actually have a very meaningful benefit to how they view work and how they view autonomy and how they view their own personal growth. >> That's critical, especially in a decentralized organization. Leased a quasi decentralized organization, getting everybody on the same page and understand You know what the vision is and what the direction is. It s so often if you don't have that storytelling capability, you have thousands of stories, and a lot of times there's dissonance. I mean, I'm not saying there's not in your in your organization, but have you seen the organization because of that storytelling capability become Mohr? Yeah, Joe. At least Mohr sort of effective and efficient, moving forward to the objectives. Well, >> you know, as a as a data person, I'm always biased thatyou know data, you know, can win an argument if presented the right way. It's the The challenge is when you're trying to overcome or go into a direction. And in this case, it was. We wanted to give more autonomy. Toothy MSR community. Well, the management of that call center were 94 year old company. And so the management of that of that call center has been doing things a certain way for many, many, many, many years. And the manager's having access to the data. The reps not That was how we did things, you know. And so when you make a change like that, there's a lot of hesitation of what is this going to do to us? How is this going to change? And what we're able to show with data and with through these visualizations is you really don't have anything to worry about? You're only gonna have upside, you know, in this conversation because at the end of the day, what's going to empower people this having access and power of >> their own destiny? Yeah, access is really the key isn't because we've all been in the meetings where somebody stands up and they've got some data point in there pounding the table, >> right? Oftentimes it's a man, all right. It >> is a powerful pl leader on jamming data down your throats, and you don't necessarily know the poor sap that he's, you know, beating up. Doesn't think Target doesn't have access to the data. This concept of citizen data scientists begins to a level that playing field doesn't want you seeing that >> it does. And I want to actually >> come back to what you're saying because there's a larger thought there, which is that we don't often address, and that's this change banishment concept. I mean, we we look at all these. I mean, everybody looks at all these technologies and all this information, and how much data can you possibly get your >> hands on? But at the end of >> the day, it's all about trying to create an outcome. A some joint outcome for the business and it could be threatening. It could be threatening to the C suite people who are actually deploying the use of these data driven tools because >> it may go >> against their gut. And, you >> know, oftentimes the poor messenger of that, >> When when you have to be the one that stands up and go against that, that senior vice presidents got it, the one who's pounding and saying No, but I know better >> That could be a >> tough position to be in without having some sort of change management philosophy going on with the introduction of data and analytics and with the introduction of tools, because there's a whole reframing that, Hey, my gut instinct that got me here all the way to the top doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to continue to scale in this new world with all of all of our competitors and all these, you know, massive changes going on in the market place right now. My guts not going to get me there anymore. So it's hard, it's hard, and I think a lot of executives don't really know to invest in that change management, if you know that goes with it that you need to change philosophies and mindsets and slowly introduced visualizations and things that get people slowly onboard, as opposed to just throwing it at him and saying here, believe it. >> Think I mean, it wasn't that >> long ago. Certainly this this millennium, where you know, publications like Harvard Business Review had, uh, cover stories on why gut feel, you know, beats, you know, analysis by paralysis. >> That seems to be changing. And >> the data purists would say the data doesn't lie. It was long as you could interpret it correctly. Let the data tell us what to do, as opposed to trying to push an agenda. But they're still politics. >> There's just things out >> there that you can't even perceive of that air coming your way. I mean, like, Blockbuster Netflix, Alibaba versus standard retailers. I mean, >> there's just things out >> there that without the use of things like machine learning and being comfortable with the use, the things like mission learning a lot of people think of that kind of stuff is >> Well, don't get your >> hoodoo voodoo into my business. You know, I don't know what that algorithm stuff does. It's >> going Yeah, I mean, e. I mean to say, What the hell is this? And now, yeah, it's coming and >> you need to get ready. >> There's an >> important role, though I think instinct, you know, you don't want to dismiss a 20 year leader in a particular operations because they've they've they've getting themselves where they're at because in large part, maybe they didn't have all the data. But they learned through a lot of those things, and I think it's when you marry those things up. And if you kenbrell in a kind of humble way to that kind of leader and win them over and show how it may be validating some of their, um uh yeah, that some of their points Or maybe how it explains it in a different way. Maybe it's not exactly what they want to see, but it's helping to inform their business, and you come into him as a partner, as opposed to gotcha, you know. Then then you know you can really change the business that way. And >> what is it? Was Linda Limbic brain is it just doesn't feel right. Is that the part of the brain that informs you that? And so It's hard to sometimes put, but you're right. Uh, there there is a component of this which is gut feel instinct and probably relates to to experience. So it's It's like, uh, when, when, uh, Deep blue beat Garry Kasparov. We talk about this all the time. It turns out that the best chess player in the world isn't a machine. It's a It's a human in the machine. >> That's right. That's exactly right. It's always the training that people training these things, that's where it gets its information. So at the end of the day, you're right. It's always still instinct to some >> level. I could We gotta go. All right. Last word on the event. You know what's next? >> Don't love my team. Data officer. Miss, you guys. It is good >> to be here. We appreciate it. All right, We'll leave it there. Thank you, guys. Thank you. All right, keep right. Everybody, this is Cuba. Live from IBM Chief Data Officer, Summit in Boston Right back. My name is Dave Volante.

>> wait. >> Okay, We're back. Live a V M. World twenty twelve. I'm John for the founder's silicon angle dot com. This is the Cube silicon angle dot TV's flagship telecast. We go out to the events and extracted signal from the noise CEOs, entrepreneurs, analysts, marketing people, developers, whoever has the signal, we want extract that share that with you. We have a special guest today. Frank's Leutnant is a sea of service. Now again, I'm John Furry. I'm joined my co host >> of Dave Alonso, a wicked bond dog. Frank, Last time we saw Europe on the stage, you had these glasses on the hat. Remember that, Elwood? So, uh, welcome to the Cube. First time on Thank you. Too many of'Em worlds. I'm sure. A little different angle now. Yeah, Service now. Very exciting. Just went public solving a big problem on DH. Added again? Yes. So tell us. How do you feel? >> That's interesting. A lot of people ask me, how did you end up in, you know, in a in an application software tap a category you spent all this time in storage. The reality is that most of my life, you know, being in the application, development, dusting and system management. So this is actually close to my wheelhouse. Stories was actually a pretty good diversion for me. Careerwise >> service now, relatively, you know, not not a household name but solving that problem. Really, There's no system of record for i t. What activities air doing? Whether it's finance, it's whether it's application portfolio project portfolio. You guys were attacking that whole nut with a software service model. I mean, it used to be a lot of point tools to do that. And you guys seem to be having a lot of success bringing that all to the cloud. >> Yeah, the irony is, is that you look at all the corporate functions, you know, finance, sales, marketing HR, I sort of ranks, you know, last or near last in terms of management sophistication, right compared to the other functional areas, because the most mighty organization have to show for themselves. They helped US management system for their work. For right now, they are to keep track of what's running in their their operation, and that service model is typical of infrastructure providers. Right? You see it, you know, with tell coast like looking t you see it with power. You tell these, like PG and E their infrastructure providers first and the service model. It is not particularly compelling, right? So what we tried to dio it's really take it from a D M V style service model standing in line waiting to be helped. Do you want this more like amazon dot com, where I help myself, It's into it. If it's online, it's productive. It's where I want to go. Teo to make requests as well. Let's receive service >> So you're selling primarily to the organization. Who you sell to in the theory is that the CEO is that the project management offices all the above >> as the servicers management is a very well defined center of responsibility in i t organization. So there's always a group of people who is in charge of that that disciplined. They're easy to find, But CEOs are always involved, and the reason is these air very high profile system rollout because everybody in it is an actor or participant, the workflow as well as the broader employee population, the enterprise, touchy systems, So you better believe that people are sensitive about this being a successful practical and it looks more like a neo system. Dan. It does an infrastructure type system >> without the AARP complexity of it. >> Yes, it's it's a mixed >> metaphor, but so So here are your roughly a hundred fifty million dollar company, you know, annualized, you nice market. >> Either way, we've we've guided to about two. Thirty five, >> thirty five this year. Okay, Great. That's >> want to make sure that their investors don't get >> background. We're sorry about that. Es to thirty five, which is why your market cap about three point six billion. I think >> way had about ninety eight percent growth and buildings in the last quarter. So the high growth, obviously it's what drives >> what's driving that. So how big is the business that you guys playing? What's your tan? >> So we think that the tam just for the narrow definition around service management is a is a multi billion dollar opportunity Because of the nature ofthe work flows, we're also expanding into the operations management area. Right? This is this is where HP lives and BMC and IBM and CIA with these very large open view Tivoli Well, because their work flows between services system management are all becoming integrator that used to be suffered spheres. Not anymore. >> And that's an enormous market. >> It i d. C. Thanks. It's about a thirteen fourteen doing dollar market, and then you have the platform is a service opportunity because our customers have just gone wild, building all kinds of spoke applications on a platform just because they could. So >> you kind of betting on the intersection of systems management, operations, management >> and the platform. >> Okay, and it's kind of jump ball, really, with the dynamic of the cloud coming in, isn't it? In terms of the competitive, it's >> Ah, it's interesting because we look another assassin categories like HR marketing. You see a whole host of players you're looking in our category on the only breakout play there has been serviced now way have predominately compete against legacy vendors, people that I just mentioned. So >> you've got some experience doing that I want >> I want to ask you about the discipline side of the market. You guys are public companies, so yeah, you're out there is all exposed and then talk about some of the product directions because out yesterday they were really showcasing the vision within VM where old way a new way, a access APS infrastructure. You know the classic in the old way. New Way, Modern era. We've been calling it in your world. You're actually replacing some pretty old stuff. I mean, I remember back in the late eighties, early nineties health testing people had that's headsets on and, you know, homegrown software developers and quit a lot of this legacy kind of mindset. So first question is, Is that true? Is there still that much baggage in that services business? From an infrastructure standpoint? And the second part, the question is, what's the new stuff that's really disrupting the market? So in the new way, what is the key features that that's happening in the services industry? >> So, you know, I already started to allude to it, right. So you want to evolve that service model from that help death centric DNP style of service experience to one that's on the line looks more consumer style. You know, the way we've learned from Apple and Yahoo and Google and people like that help yourself. If you have a problem at home with your apple TV, you're really gonna try and call Apple know you're going to go online and you find years of communities you get Teo answers ten times faster, that weight and then following these needy old models the way you reference there is an awful lot of that still living in the world off because they're focuses infrastructure, not service. That's change it, right? I mean, CEOs, I read somewhere, have a shelf life of about eighteen months, right? There's incredible impatience and dissatisfaction with how that function is running. It's costing too much money in the service is not exactly to to write home about. People are really ready to move their service malls. >> The largest answer was, Just hire someone else to do it. That was the outsourcing boom, right? So that's still brought problems, right? Legacy. So how is that still in play? So if the notion is okay, outsource it, and then the outsources has some warts on it that's got to be tweaked. What's the new version? Because you know amazon dot com and you know this new environment availability, instant access, the information we don't service etcetera is that changing it >> way believed that the move to cloud computing is really going to change the role of the CIA, all right, because infrastructure is going to become something that's behind Courtney, and it's becoming less of an infrastructure centric job. CEOs and T organizations become Mohr service engineering organizations, people that understand work flows. People understand how to automate work, flows right out. And, you know, I know how to run a database or a network or, you know, all the security dimensions and so on because we're just breaking as an industry. There just isn't enough competency and skill sets for everybody to be confident at the level that we need to be at structure. It's not scaling, right. It's sort of the way telephone switching centers were in the nineteen fifties >> means one of those things to with the CIA. Attention, I'LL get to that later. But now, with big data in real time analytics is more pressure on the service delivery side. As a business driver, you seeing that pressure as well, or is it more? We just gotta fix it now. I got to do it >> Well, nighty organizations in the lift from one crisis to the next, completely event driven, you know we haven't out its were all over it. Trying to restore service on DH. You know, we sort of live that life day in, day out. But I've never changes right So waken get ahead of this game. You know, if we start structuring, you know, the interaction model that we have with our users how we communicate with them. I mean, simple things, right when you were, you haven't out it. It would be helpful if we were able to pull status. You know, every twenty minutes us to what? What we're doing, What's going on. Right? But having infrastructure be ableto push data out? No, like that. Most organizations don't do that. They live pretty much in the dark, >> so share with our audience out there. That's watching. We have a lot of professionals and data scientists and analyst type audience that we've that we've that follows. Looking angle with Yvonne on DH. Some CEOs as well on early adopters share the folks out there. The pitch, How bad is it that their environment and how easy is it to change? It is just a norther. A magnitude sense of is a turnkey. How do you guys roll in? What's he engagement look like? It's not as hard as the things that most people might have the opinion. I don't want to get just ugly. It's painful or is it not painful? Is it quick pop now? Is it like how fast a roll in and out the infrastructure that you >> the's are extraordinarily sticky systems the system that were that we replace >> your systems of the old systems. >> The old systems are on the reason that they've been around for ten, fifteen years. They're very difficult to replace. And if you look at our girls, that's certainly testament to our compelling. The value proposition has been people have said, you know, a pain is becoming unbearable and be the view of the promised Land is looking pretty good, right? So there's both an incentive to change and to move, and secondly, there is something to move towards that is this compelling inspiring. And it really is going to change my game right, because now we tell people said, Look, if you just tryingto get to a snazzier, more modern help desk, we're not your guy, okay? Because we don't find out a compelling vision of the world. We wantto wholesale transform how you deliver service just >> take us to some of those cats you were talking before you came on about your growth tripling inside. But talk about a zoo company, which is a whole nother conversation. We could talk about it yet you have expertise in, but talk more about the customer deployments. You got some fresh funding with the AIPO. You're geared up. You go out to the market place. What are the conversations like, What are some of the stats and one of the conversation with the CIA? >> Well, the CIA is obviously are interested, first and foremost of the transformation of the service model, right? I mean, we have to get Teo service experience that's more reminiscent of people experience on the consumer side. Now we typically have to do that, that an economic equation that's very similar to what they're having right now. They're not interested in spend more. They just want to get completely refreshed, you know, platform for similar amounts of money that they're already spending because Versace, you know, we're not just taking the software, not off the after after table. We're also taking the entire infrastructure, all the operating staff, everything it takes to run that environment becomes ours, right? It's no longer in the I T department, so that looks pretty compelling to them. >> How about some of the numbers in terms of uptake with customers recently? What's the growth rate was? Can you share some numbers? >> Way have about twelve hundred price customers? We had about one hundred twenty seven the last quarter. That's that is a huge number of customers. Tio Tio ad we have. Most of our focus is on global two thousand enterprises. We have about two hundred thirty global two thousand enterprises, and they're all you know who's who names that, that people recognize Starting up Ticket's been been strong. We're running very, very hard to make sure that we have two services infrastructure. Both there's people and infrastructure to be able to accommodate that. >> Well, I'm excited to interview you because I want to ask you kind of more of a personal question. And although we just met for the first time here, your name's been kicked around as kind of a maverick operational executive who knows how to scale organization. So we're in kind of living in an era where the business value focused, whether startups and has been a lot of talk about, you know, the Facebook idea, the young kids under thirty running a billion dollar market gap, companies trying to actually move from hyped to real scale. And Palmer. It's made a comment yesterday kind of dissing Facebook of in terms of the value proposition relative to say, you know, bm where. But the question I want to ask you is, um, what's your success model for scaling an organization on DH for the younger execs out there? And for people who don't know you just chairs up on the camera? What's your philosophy as the repeatable sales, lower cost leverage model? I mean variety of different kind of ingredients. What's the Franks Lukman formula for success and scaling? Bringing a product to market and growing it? >> Well, the first order of business for for a start up venture of any sort is growth. I find that a lot of people come on a business school in trying to balance girl for profitability. Um, that mentality makes no sense to me, right? It's economics. Before accounting, accounting becomes the bastardization of economics, we run our ventures cash on booking their economic concepts, not accounting constructs, right people are trying to show profit prematurely when they can invest that money to grow. We tripled our head count over the last year. We got very far over our skis. No, we're burning a hole in our gas pals but were very clear with investors that look, we are still increasing our productivity for head. Why, when we apply to resource is to grow this franchise Growth expands our multiples, expands valuation. That's what everybody is in the business for, so so sort of summarize. Knowing your question. Most people hold back on growth, and they don't really know why they're not all out trying to drive growth and the reason that growth is so important. You need to be a breakout player. Nobody wants to be the in between player. That's neither fish nor fowl and doesn't become a dominant entity into space that it wants to be in >> and have the financing in the dry powder behind you that you were a venture capital Greylock, which no something into about investing. So that's also important part right? >> Well, you don't. That's why I said to you manage on cash you managed on bookings. Those are the economics in the business essentially, >> and you've been looking up, have some really good finances behind you, trust you who get the concepts and that's key well, continue in the right >> way went public. We also explain to investors Look, this is what we're trying to do, and this is what we need you to buy into. Otherwise, find somebody else's talk. So >> what is the going public affect? You know the perception amongst the CEO's when you chose to list on the way we had them on earlier this week? But how is that affected? The brand perception? >> That was the whole reason for us to go public, right? We didn't need to cash liquidity. Obviously, it's good for employees and investors when I pose fundamentally a branding event. You know, I used the analogy. We went from playing on Saturday to playing on Sunday. You know, all of a sudden you know you're transparent, you know, all the all the thud that gets spread about you by competition. People cannot punch you up on Iand. See what the truth is around your balance sheet. You know how abot your last quarter was? It's been three. I po was tremendous for us from a branding standpoint, >> and you've been known Teo have a reputation of really getting the product in this case, the service, right? And then really getting aggressive on the sales side. Can you talk about what you've done in the sales side? I know you've aggressively hired. >> Yeah, we You know, as I said, we tripled our head count. We went from three shells. Reasons to twelve insight. One year we spread out all over Europe today. This is a ground war. You need an army to fight it. This is not Facebook. We cannot sign up annoying people in a week. It is a business that runs over the ground so you cannot scale and drive growth business unless you have two people to run it. >> And you're selling belly to belly. That right? Absolutely. So you know, >> we're going through the front door of the elevator >> way. Okay, We're getting the hook here. We're getting hooked, but I have to quit final questions. One is just put a plug out there for service's angle dot com that Silicon Angles separate publication. We launched last year, thanks to E m. C. For helping us sponsor that but really dedicated to the new era of services. And there is some disruption. We're excited to cover you guys, so I just wanted to say Go, go check out sources angle. So Franklin asked two questions. One. What's the big disruption in the services business that most people aren't getting right now? General, you know, man and tech on the street, not the insider inside the ropes. So that's the first question. The second question. What's your goals for the year? For the business? >> Well, the interesting thing about the services business is how it's one of these areas that is sort of the least automated. Write. It runs on the concept of institutional knowledge. Phone conversations, informal communications, email and the frontier in service management is that those become software automated structure processes that is not just happening in I t able sticks. It's happening everywhere, right? What do you want to request? Food. You know, from the hotel you knew what a Virgin America, right? You know, request from your seat, something that's just, you know, on an example of how >> that's the story, you know, debate about that. >> That's how it's gonna go, right? So services it's going to become, really that I call the service fabric right? Essentially how thes processes get conducted. So we're super excited because our platform sits right in the middle of that trend and we're going to try and make that trend. >> It's eleven. Platform to the economics are fantastic and no real customs agents were brought up exactly so good margins. >> And it's just >> like the stock immediately. >> It's much more scalable in the district. Disintermediation. You know, all the all the manual effort goes into this. >> Okay, so now I know your public CEO and everything now, so you really can't be as wild as you could have you a private. But what's the outlook for year? Your personal goals for the year >> Wait, given guns from or get one quarter for years. So check with your favorite analysts. >> Okay? Growth is on the horizon. Congratulations. Frank's been great to have your leadership in the Cube. Thank you. Time Cuban great to have you. This is silicon angle dot coms. The cube will be right back with our next guest, Cynthia Stoddard from Netapp CIA, Another CIA. We're gonna get into the trenches and hear about the transformation again. We'LL be right back