>> Announcer: Live from downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Chief Data Officers Strategy Summit 2018, brought to you by IBM. >> We're back in San Francisco, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and we're here covering exclusive coverage of IBM's Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit. This is the summit, as I said, they book in at each coast, San Francisco and Boston. Intimate, a lot of senior practitioners, chief data officers, data folks, people who love data. Caitlyn Halferty is back. She's the Client Engagement Executive and the Chief Data Officer office at IBM. Great. And, Allen Crane, Vice President at USAA. >> Thank you. >> Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. All right. >> Thanks for having us. >> You're welcome. Well, good day today, as I said, a very intimate crowd. You're here as a sort of defacto CDO, learning, sharing, connecting with peers. Set up your role, Allen. Tell us about that. >> At USA, we've got a distributed data and analytics organization where we have centralized functions in our hub, and then each of the lines of business have their own data offices. I happen to have responsibility for all the different ways that our members interact with us, so about 100 million phone calls a year, about a couple billion internet and digital sessions a year, most of that is on mobile, and always lookin' at the ways that we can give back time to our membership, as well as our customer service reps, who we call our member service reps, so that they can serve our members better. The faster and more predictive we can be with being able to understand our members better and prompt our MSRs with the right information to serve them, then the more they can get on to the actual value of that conversation. >> A lot of data. So, one of the things that Inderpal talked about the very first time I met him, in Boston, he talked about the Five Pillars, and the first one was you have to understand as a CDO, how your organization gets value out of data. You said that could be direct monetization or, I guess, increased revenue, cut costs. That's value. >> Right. >> That's right. >> That's the starting point. >> Right. >> So, how did you start? >> Well, actually, it was the internal monetization. So, first off, I want to say USA never sells any of our member data, so we don't think of monetization in that framework, but we do think of it terms of how do we give something that's even more precious than money back to our company and to our members and the MSRs? And, that is really that gift of time. By removing friction from the system, we've been able to reduce calls per member, through digitization activities, and reduced transfers and reduced misdirects by over 10% every year. We're doing work with AI and machine learning to be able to better anticipate what the member is calling about, so that we can get them to the right place at the right time to the right set member service representatives. And, so all these things have resulted in, not just time savings but, obviously, that translates directly to bottom line savings, but at the end of the day, it's about increasing that member service level, increasing your responsiveness, increasing the speed that you're answering the phone, and ultimately increasing that member satisfaction. >> Yeah, customer satisfaction, lowers churn rates, that's a form of monetization, >> Absolutely. >> so it's hard dollars to the CFO, right? >> Absolutely, yeah. >> All right, let's talk about the role of the CDO. This is something that we touched on earlier. >> Yes. >> We're bringing it home here. >> Yes. >> Last segment. Where are we at with the role of the CDO? It was sort of isolated for years in regulated industries, >> Correct. >> permeated to mainstream organizations. >> Correct. >> Many of those mainstream organizations can move faster, 'cause their not regulated, so have we sort of reached parody between the regulated and the unregulated, and what do you discern there in terms of patterns and states of innovation? >> Sure. I think when we kicked off these summits in 2014, many of our CDOs came from CIO type organizations, defensive posture, you know, king of the data warehouse that we joke about, and now annuls reports of that time were saying maybe 20% of large organizations were investing in the CDO or similar individual responsible for enterprise data, and now we see analysts reports coming out to say upwards of 85, even 90%, of organizations are investing in someone responsible for that role of the CDO type. In my opening remarks this morning, I polled the room to say who's here for the first time. It was interesting, 69, 70% of attendees were joining us for the first time, and I went back, okay, who's been here last year, year before, and I said who was here from the beginning, 2014 with us, and Allen is one of the individuals who's been with us. And, as much as the topics have changed and the role has grown and the purview and scope of responsibilities, some topics have remained, our attendees tell us, they're still important, top-of-mind, and data monetization is one of those. So, we always have a panel on data monetization, and we've had some good discussions recently, that the idea of it's just the external resell, or something to do with selling data externally is one view, but really driving that internal value, and the ways you drive out those efficiencies is another perspective on it. So, fortunate to have Allen here. >> Well, we've been able to, for that very reason, we've been able to grow our team from about six or seven people five years ago to well over a hundred people, that's focused on how we inefficiency out of the system. That mere 10%, when your call-per-member reduction, when you're taking 30 million calls in the bank, you know, that's real dollars, three million calls out of the system that you can monetize like that. So, it's real value that the company sees in us, and I think that, in a sense, is really how you want to be growing in a data organization, because people see value in you, are willing to give you more, and then you start getting into those interesting conversations, if I gave you more people, could you get me more results? >> Let's talk about digital transformation and how it relates to all this. Presumably, you've got a top down initiative, the CEO says, he or she says, okay, this is important. We got to do it. Boom, there's the North Star. Let's go. What's the right regime that you're seeing? Obviously, you've got to have the executive buy-in, you've got the Chief Data Officer, you have the Chief Digital Officer, the Chief Operating Officer, the CFO's always going to be there, making sure things are on track. How are you seeing that whole thing shake out, at least in your organization? >> Well, one thing that we've been seeing is digital digitization or the digital transformation is not about just going only digital. It's how does all this work together. It can't just be an additive function, where you're still taking just as many calls and so forth, but it's got to be something that that experience online has got to do something that's transformative in your organization. So, we really look at the member all the way through that whole ecosystem, and not just through the digital lens. And, that's really where teams like ours have really been able to stitch together the member experience across all their channels that they're interacting with us, whether that's the marketing channels or the digital channels or the call channel, so that we can better understand that experience. But, it's certainly a complementary one. It can't just be an additive one. >> I wonder if we could talk about complacency, in terms of digital transformation. I talk to a lot of companies and there's discussion about digital, but you talk to a lot of people who say, well, we're doing fine. Maybe not in our industry. Insurance is one that hasn't been highly disruptive, financial services, things like aerospace. I'll be retired by the time this all, I mean, that's true, right? And, probably accurate. So, are you seeing a sense of complacency or are you seeing a sense of urgency, or a mix or both? What are you seeing, Caitlyn? >> Well, it's interesting, and people may not be aware, but I'm constantly polling our attendees to ask what are top-of-mind topics, what are you struggling with, where are you seeing successes, and digital was one that came up for this particular session, which is why tomorrow's keynote, we have our Chief Digital Officer giving the morning keynote, to show how our data office and digital office are partnering to drive transformation internally. So, at least for our perspective, in the internal side of it, we have a priority initiative, a cognitive sales advisor, and it's essentially intended to bring in disparate part of customer data, obtained through many different channels, all the ways that they engage with us, online and other, and then, deliver it through sales advisor app that empowers our digital sellers to better meet their revenue targets and impact, and develop more of a quality client relationship and improve that customer experience. So, internally, at least, it's been interesting to see one of our strongest partnerships, in terms of business unit, has been our data and digital office. They say, look, the quality of the data is at the core, you then enable our digital sellers, and our clients benefit, for a better client experience. >> Well, about a year ago, we absolutely changed the organization to align the data office with the digital office, so that reports to our executive counsel level, so their peers, that reporting to the same organization, to ensure that those strategies are connected. >> Yeah, so as Caitlyn was saying, this Chief Data Officer kind of emerged from a defensive posture of compliance, governance, data quality. The Chief Digital Officer, kind of new, oftentimes associated with marketing, more of an external, perhaps, facing role, not always. And then, the CIO, we'll say, well, wait a minute, data is the CIO's job, but, of course, the CIO, she's too busy trying to keep the lights on and make everything work. So, where does the technology organization fit? >> Well, all that's together, so when we brought all those things together at the organizational level, digital, data, and technology were all together, and even design. So, you guys are all peers, reporting into the executive committee, essentially, is that right? Yes, our data, technology, and design, and digital office are all peers reporting to the same executive level. And then, one of the other pillars that Inderpal talks about is the relationship with the line of business. So, how is that connective tissue created? Well, being on the side that is responsible for how all of our members interact, my organization touches every product, every line of business, every channel that our members are interacting with, so our data is actually shared across the organization, so right now, really my focus is to make sure that that data is as accessible as it can be across our enterprise partners, it's as democratized as it can be, it's as high as quality. And then, things that we're doing around machine learning and AI, can be enabled and plugged into from all those different lines of business. >> What does success look like in your organization? How do you know you're doing well? I mean, obviously, dropping money to the bottom line, but how are you guys measuring yourselves and setting objectives? What's your North Star? >> I think success, for me, is when you're doing a good job, to the point that people say that question, could you do more if I gave you more? That, to me, is the ultimate validation. It's how we grew as an organization. You know, we don't have to play that justification game When people are already coming to the table saying, You're doing great work. How can you do more great work? >> So, what's next for these summits? Are you doing Boston again in the fall? Is that right? Are you planning >> We are, we are, >> on doing that? >> and you know, fall of last year, we released the blueprint, and the intent was to say, hey, here's the reflection of our 18 months, internal journey, as well as all our client interactions and their feedback, and we said, we're coming back in the spring and we're showing you the detail of how we really built out these internal platforms. So, we released our hybrid on-prem Cloud showcase today, which was great, and to the level of specificity that shows that the product solutions, what we're using, the Flash Storage, some of the AI components of machine learning models. >> The cognitive systems component? >> Exactly. And then, our vision, to your question to the fall, is coming back with the public Cloud showcases. So, we're already internally doing work on our public Cloud, in particular respect to our backup, some of our very sensitive client data, as well as some initial deep learning models, so those are the three pieces we're doing in public Cloud internally, and just as we made the commitment to come back and unveil and show those detail, we want to come back in the fall and show a variety of public Cloud showcases where we're doing this work. And then, hopefully, we'll continue to partner and say, hey, here's how we're doing it. We'd love to see how you're doing it. Let's share some best practices, accelerate, build these capabilities. And, I'll say to your business benefit question, what we've found is once we've built that platform, we call it, internally, a one IBM architecture, out our platform, we can then drive critical initiatives for the enterprise. So, for us, GVPR, you know, we own delivery of GVPR readiness across the IBM corporation, working with senior executives in all of our lines of business, to make sure we get there. But, now we've got the responsibility to drive out initiatives like that cross business unit, to your question on the partnerships. >> The evolution of this event seems to be, well, it's got a lot of evangelism early on, and now it's really practical, sort of sharing, like you say, the blueprint, how to apply it, a lot of people asking questions, you know, there's different levels of maturity. Now, you guys back tomorrow? You got to panel, you guys are doing a panel on data monetization? >> We're doing a panel on data monetization tomorrow. >> Okay, and then, you've got Bob Lord and Inderpal talking about that, so perfect juxtaposition and teamwork of those two major roles. >> And, this is the first time we've really showcased the data/digital partnership and connection, so I'm excited, want to appeal to the developer viewpoint of this. So, I think it'll be a great conversation about data at the core, driving digital transformation. And then, as you said, our data monetization panel, both external efforts, as well as a lot of the internal value that we're all driving, so I think that'll be a great session tomorrow. >> Well, and it's important, 'cause there's a lot of confusing, and still is a lot of confusion about those roles, and you made the point early today, is look, there's a big organizational issue you have to deal with, particularly around data silos, MyData. I presume you guys are attacking that challenge? >> Absolutely. >> Still, it's still a-- >> It's an ongoing-- >> Oh, absolutely. >> I think we're getting a lot better at it, but you've got to lean in, because if it's not internal, it's some of the external challenges around. Now we're picking Cloud vendors and so forth. Ten years ago, we had our own silos and our own warehouses, if we had a warehouse, and then, we were kind of moving into our own silos in our own databases, and then as we democratized that, we solved the one problem, but now our data's so big and compute needs are so large that we have no choice but to get more external into Cloud. So, you have to lean in, because everything is changing at such a rapid rate. >> And, it requires leadership. >> Yep. >> Absolutely. >> The whole digital data really requires excellent leadership, vision. IBM's catalyzing a lot of that conversation, so congratulations on getting this going. Last thoughts. >> Oh, I would just say, we were joking that 2014, the first couple of summits, small group, maybe 20-30 participants figuring out how to best organize from a structural perspective, you set up the office, what sort of outcomes, metrics, are we going to measure against, and those things, I think, will continue to be topics of discussion, but now we see we've got about 500 data leaders that are tracking our journey and that are involved and engaged with us. We've done a lot in North America, we're starting to do more outside the geographies, as well, which is great to see. So, I just have to say I think it's interesting to see the topics that continue to be of interest, the governance, the data monetization, and then, the new areas around AI, machine learning, data science, >> data science >> the empowering developers, the DevOps delivery, how we're going to deliver that type of training. So, it's been really exciting to see the community grow and all the best practices leveraged, and look forward to continuing to do more of that this year as well. >> Well, you obviously get a lot of value out of these events. You were here at the first one, you're here today. So, 2018. Your thoughts? >> I think the first one, we were all trying to figure out who we are, what's our role, and it varied from I'm a individual contributor, data evangelist in the organization to I'm king of the warehouse thing. >> Right. >> And, largely, from that defensive standpoint. I think, today, you see a lot more people that are leaning in, leading data science teams, leading the future of where the organizations are going to be going. This is really where the center of a lot of organizations are starting to pivot and look, and see, where is the future, and how does data become the leading edge of where the organization is going, so it's pretty cool to be a part of a community like this that's evolving that way, but then also being able to have that at a local level within your own organization. >> Well, another big take-away for me is the USAA example shows that this can pay for itself when you grow your own organization from a handful of people to a hundred plus individuals, driving value, so it makes it easier to justify, when you can demonstrate a business case. Well, guys, thanks very much for helping me wrap here. >> Absolutely. >> I appreciate you having us here. >> Thank you. >> It's been a great event. Always a pleasure, hopefully, we'll see you in the fall. >> Sounds good. Thank you so much. >> All right, thanks, everybody, for watching. We're out. This is theCUBE from IBM CDO Summit. Check out theCUBE.net for all of the videos, siliconangle.com for all the news summaries of this event, and wikibon.com for all the research. We'll see you next time. (techy music)

(orchestral music) (energetic music) >> Narrator: Live from Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. It's the Cube! Covering IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit, Spring 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hey, welcome back everybody! Jeff Frick here with the Cube. I am joined by Peter Burris, the Chief Research Officer at Wikibon. We are in downtown San Francisco at the IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit 2017. It's a lot of practitioners. It's almost 200 CDOs here sharing best practices, learning from the IBM team and we're excited to be here and cover it. It's an ongoing series and this is just one of many of these summits. So, if you are a CDO get involved. But, the most important thing is to not just talk to the IBM folks but to talk to the practitioners. And, we are really excited for our next segment to be joined by Allen Crane. He is the assistant VP from USAA. Welcome! >> Thank you. >> Jeff: And also Glenn Finch. He is the Global Managing Partner Cognitive and Analytics at IBM. Welcome! >> Thank you, thank you both. >> It's kind of like the Serengeti of CDOs here, isn't it? >> It is. It's unbelievable! >> So, the overview Allen to just kind of, you know, this opportunity to come together with a bunch of your peers. What's kind of the vibe? What are you taking away? I know it's still pretty early on but it's a cool little event. It's not a big giant event in Vegas. You know, it's a smaller of an affair. >> That's right. I've been coming to this event for the last three years since they had it and started it when Glenn started this event. And, truly it's probably the best conference I come to every year because it's practitioners. You don't have a lot of different tracks to get lost in. This is really about understanding from your own peers what they are going through. Everything from how are you organizing the organization? What are you focused on? Where are you going? And all the way through talent discussions and where do you source these jobs? >> What is always a big discussion is organizational structure which on one hand side is kind of, you know, who really cares? But is vitally important as to how it is executed, how the strategy gets implemented in the business groups. I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about how it works at USAA, your role specifically and how does a Chief Data Officer eat it, work his way into the business bugs trying to make better decisions. >> Absolutely, we are a 27 billion dollar 95 year old company that focuses on the military and their members and their families. And our members, we offer a full range of financial services. So, you can imagine we've got lots of data offices for all of our different lines of business. Because of that, we have elected to go with what we call a hub and spoke model where we centralize certain functions around governance, standards, core data assets, and we subscribe to those things from a standard standpoint so that we're in the spokes like I am. I run all of the data analytics for all of our channels and how our members interact with USAA. So, we can actually have standards that we can apply in our own area as does the bank, as does the insurance company, as does the investments company. And so, it enables the flexibility of business close to the business data and analytics while you also sort of maintain the governance layer on top of that. >> Well, USAA has been at the vanguard of customer experience for many years now. >> Yes >> And the channel world is now starting to apply some of the lessons learned elsewhere. Are you finding that USAA is teaching channels how to think about customer experience? And if so, what is your job as an individual who's, I presume, expected to get data about customer experience out to channel companies. How is that working? >> Well, it's almost like when you borrow a page back from history and in 1922 when we were founded the organization said service is the foundation of our industry. And, it's the foundation of what we do and how we message to our membership. So, take that forward 95 years and we are finding that with the explosion in digital, in mobile, and how does that interact with the phone call. And, when you get a document in the mail is it clear? Or do you have to call us, because of that? We find that there's a lot of interplay between our channels, that our channels had tended to be owned by different silo leaders that weren't really thinking laterally or horizontally across the experience that the member was facing. Now, the member is already multichannel. We all know this. We are all customers in our own right, getting things in the mail. It's not clear. Or getting things in an e-mail. >> Absolutely. >> Or a mobile notice or SMS text message. And, this is confusing. I need to talk to somebody about this. That type of thing. So, we're here to really make sure that we're providing as direct interaction and direct answers and direct access with our membership to make those as compelling experiences as we possibly can. >> So, how is data making that easier? >> We're bringing the data altogether is the first thing. We've got to be able to make sure that our phone data is in the same place as our digital data, is in the same place as our document data, is in the same place as our mobile data because when you are not able to see that path of how the member got here, you're kind of at a loss of what to fix. And so, what we're finding is the more data that we're stitching together, these are really just an extension of a conversation with the membership. If someone is calling you after being online within just a few minutes you kind of know that that's an extension of the same intent that they had before. >> Right. >> So, what was it upfront and upstream that caused them to call. What couldn't you answer for the member upstream that now required a phone call and possibly a couple of transfers to be able to answer that phone interaction. So, that's how we start with bringing all the data together. >> So, how are you working with other functions within USAA to ensure that the data that the channel organizations to ensure those conversations can persist over time with products and underwriters and others that are actually responsible for putting forward the commitments that are being made. >> Yeah. >> How is that coming together? >> I think, simply put it, it's a pull versus push. So, showing the value that we are providing back to our lines of business. So, for example, the bank line of business president looks to us to help them reduce the number of calls which affects their bottom line. And so, when we can do that and show that we are being more efficient with our member, getting them the right place to the right MSR the first time, that is a very material impact in their bottom line. So, connecting into the things that they care about is the pull factor that we often called, that gets us that seat at the table that says we need this channel analyst to come to me and be my advisor as I'm making these decisions. >> You know what, I was just going to say what Allen is describing is probably what I think is the most complicated piece of data analytics, cognitive, all that stuff. That last mile of getting someone whether it's a push or pull. >> Right. >> Fundamentally, you want somebody to do something different whether it's an end consumer, whether it's a research analyst, whether it's a COO or a CFO, you need to do something that causes them to make a different decision. You know, ten years ago as we were just at the dawn of a lot of this new analytical techniques, everybody was focused on amassing data and new machine learning and all that stuff. Now, quite honestly, a lot of that stuff is present and it's about how do we get someone who adapts something that feels completely wrong. That's probably the hardest. I mean, and I joke with people, but you know that thing when your spouse finds something in you and says something immediately about it. >> No, no. >> That's right. (laughs) That's the first thing and you guys are probably better men than I am. The first I want to do is say "prove them wrong". Right? That's the same thing when an artificial intelligence asset tries to tell a knowledge worker what to do. >> Right, right. >> Right? That's what I think the hardest thing is right now. >> So, is it an accumulative kind of knock down or eventually they kind of get it. Alright, I'll stop resisting. Or, is it a AHA moment where people come at 'cause usually for changing behavior, usually there's a carrot or a stick. Either you got to do it. >> Push or pull. >> And the analogy, right. Or save money versus now really trying to transform and reorganize things in new, innovative ways that A. Change the customer experience, but B. Add new revenue streams and unveil a new business opportunity. >> I think it's finding what's important to that business user and sometimes it's an insight that saves them money. In other cases, it's no one can explain to me what's happening. So, in the case of Call Centers for example, we do a lot of forecasting and routing work, getting the call to the right place at the right time. But often, a business leader may say " I want to change the routing rules". But, the contact center, think of it as a closed environment, and something that changes over here, actually ultimately has an effect over here. And, they may not understand the interplay between if I move more calls this way, well those calls that were going there have to go some place else now, right? So, they may not understand the interplay of these things. So, sometimes the analyst comes in in a time of crisis and sometimes it's that crisis, that sort of shared enemy if you will, the enemy of the situation, that is, not your customer. But, the enemy of the shared situation that sort of bonds people together and you sort of have that brothers in arms kind of moment and you build trust that way. It comes down to trust and it comes down to " you have my best interest in mind". And, sometimes it's repeating the message over and over again. Sometimes, it's story telling. Sometimes, it's having that seat at the table during those times of crisis, but we use all of those tools to help us earn that seat at the table with our business customer. >> So, let me build on something that you said (mumbles) 'Cause it's the trying to get many people in the service experience to change. Not just one. So, the end goal is to have the customer to have a great experience. >> Exactly. >> But, the business executive has to be part of that change. >> Exactly. >> The call center individual has to be part of that change. And, ultimately it's the data that ensures that that process of change or those changes are in fact equally manifest. >> Right. >> You need to be across the entire community that's responsible for making something happen. >> Right. >> Is that kind of where your job comes in. That you are making sure that that experience that's impacted by multiple things, that everybody gets a single version of the truth of the data necessary to act as a unit? >> Yeah, I think data, bringing it all together is the first thing so that people can understand where it's all coming from. We brought together dozens of systems that are the systems of record into a new system of record that we can all share and use as a collective resource. That is a great place to start when everyone is operating of the same fact base, if you will. Other disciplines like process disciplines, things that we call designed for measurability so that we're not just building things and seeing how it works when we roll it out as a release on mobile or a release on .com but truly making sure that we are instrumenting these new processes along the way. So, that we can develop these correlations and causal models for what's helping, what's working and what's not working. >> That's an interesting concept. So, you design the measurability in at the beginning. >> I have to. >> As opposed to kind of after the fact. Obviously, you need to measure-- >> Are you participating in that process? >> Absolutely. We have and my role is mainly more from and educational standpoint of knowing why it's important to do this. But, certainly everyone of our analysts is deeply engaged in project work, more upstream than ever. And now, we're doing more work with our design teams so that data is part of the design process. >> You know, this measurability concept, incredibly important in the consultancy as well. You know, for the longest time all the procurement officers said the best thing you can do to hold consults accountable is a fixed priced, milestone based thing, that program number 32 was it red or green? And if it's green, you'll get paid. If not, I am not paying you. You know, we in the cognitive analytics business have tried to move away from that because if we, if our work is not instrumented the same way as Allen's, if I am not looking at that same KPI, first of all I might have project 32 greener than grass, but that KPI isn't moving, right? Secondly, if I don't know that KPI then I am not going to be able to work across multiple levels in an organization, starting often times at the sea suite to make sure that there is a right sponsorship because often times somebody want to change routing and it seems like a great idea two or three levels below. But, when it gets out of whack when it feels uncomfortable and the sea suite needs to step in, that's when everybody's staring at the same set of KPIs and the same metrics. So, you say "No, no. We are going to go after this". We are willing to take these trade offs to go after this because everybody looks at the KPI and says " Wow. I want that KPI". Everybody always forgets that "Oh wait. To get this I got to give these two things up". And, nobody wants to give anything up to get it, right? It is probably the hardest thing that I work on in big transformational things. >> As a consultant? >> Yeah, as a consultant it's to get everybody aligned around. This is what needle we want to move, not what program we want to deliver. Very hard to get the line of business to define it. It's a great challenge. >> It's interesting because in the keynote they laid out exactly what is cognitive. And the 4 E's, I thought they were interesting. Expert. Expression. It's got to be a white box. It's got to be known. Education and Evolution. Those are not kind of traditional consulting benchmarks. You don't want them to evolve, right? >> Right. >> You want to deliver on what you wrote down in the SOW. >> Exactly. >> It doesn't necessarily have a white box element to it because sometimes a little hocus pocus, so just by its very definition, in cognitive and its evolutionary nature and its learning nature, it's this ongoing evolution of it or the processes. It's not a lock it down. You know, this is what I said I'd deliver. This is what we delivered 'cause you might find new things along the path. >> I think this concept of evolution and one of the things we try to be very careful with when you have a brand and a reputation, like USAA, right? It's impeccable, it's flawless, right? You want to make sure that a cognitive asset is trained appropriately and then allowed to learn appropriate things so it doesn't erode the brand. And, that can happen so quickly. So, if you train a cognitive asset with euphemisms, right? Often times the way we speak. And then, you let it surf the internet to get better at using euphemisms, pretty soon you've got a cognitive asset that's going to start to use slang, use racial slurs, all of those things (laughs) because-- No, I am serious. >> Hell you are. >> That's not good. >> Right, that's not bad so, you know, that's one of the things that Ginni has been really, really careful with us about is to make sure that we have a cognitive manifesto that says we'll start here, we'll stop here. We are not going to go in the Ex Machina territory where full cognition and humans are gone, right? That's not what we're going to do because we need to make sure that IBM is protecting the brand reputation of USAA. >> Human discretion still matters. >> Absolutely. >> It has to. >> Alright. Well, we are out of time. Allen, I wanted to give you the last word kind of what you look forward to 2017. We're already, I can't believe we're all the way through. What are some of your top priorities that you are working on? Some new exciting things that you can share. >> I think one of the things that we are very proud of is our work in the text analytics space and what I mean by that is we're ingesting about two years of speech data from our call center every day. And, we are mining that data for emergent trends. Sometimes you don't know what you don't know and it's those unknown unknowns that gets you. They are the things that creep up in your data and you don't really realize it until they are a big enough issue. And so, this really is helping us understand emerging trends, the emerging trend of millennials, the emerging trend of things like Apple Pay, and it also gives us insight as to how our own MSRs are interacting with our members in a very personal level. So, beyond words and language we're also getting into things like recognizing things like babies crying in the background, to be able to detect things like life events because a lot of your financial needs center around life events. >> Right, right. >> You know, getting a new home, having another child, getting a new car, those types of things. And so, that's really where we're trying to bring the computer more as an assistant to the human, as opposed to trying to replace the human. >> Right. >> But, it is a very exciting space for us and areas that we are actually able to scale about 100 times faster than we were fast before. >> Wow. That's awesome. We look forward to hearing more about that and thanks for taking a few minutes to stop by. Appreciated. >> Peter: Thanks, guys. >> Allen: Thank you. >> Alright. Thank you both. With Peter Burris, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching the Cube from the IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit, Spring 2017. Thanks for watching. We'll be back after the short break. (upbeat music)

>> 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.

>>from around the globe. It's the cube with coverage of Kublai >>Khan and Cloud Native Con, Europe 2021 >>virtual brought to you by red hat. The cloud Native >>computing foundation >>and ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage everyone of Coop Con 2021 Cloud Native Con 21 virtual europe. I'm john for your host of the cube. We've got two great guests here, James Labaki, senior Director of Product management, Red Hat and Richer Puree. IBM fellow and chief scientist at IBM Gentlemen, thanks for coming on the cube, appreciate it. >>Thank you for having us. >>So, um, got an IBM fellow and Chief scientist, Senior Director Product management. You guys have the keys to the kingdom on cloud Native. All right, it's gonna be fun. So let's just jump into it. So I want to ask you before we get into some of the questions around the projects, what you guys take of cube con this year, in terms of the vibe, I know it's virtual in europe north America, we looked like we might be in person but this year with the pandemic cloud native just seems to have a spring to its step, it's got more traction. I've seen the cloud native piece even more than kubernetes in a way. So scott cooper diseases continues to have traction, but it's always about kubernetes now. It's more cloud native. I what do you guys think about that? >>Yeah, I'm sure you have thoughts and I could add on >>Yes, I I think well I would really think of it as almost sequential in some ways. Community is too cold now there's a layer which comes above it which is where all our, you know, clients and enterprises realize the value, which is when the applications really move. It's about the applications and what they can deliver to their end customers. And the game now is really about moving those applications and making them cloud native. That's when the value of that software infrastructure will get realized and that's why you are seeing that vibe in the, in the clients and enterprises and at two corners. Well, >>yeah, I mean, I think it's exciting. I've been covering this community since the beginning as you guys know the cube. This is the enablement moment where the fruit is coming off the tree is starting to see that first wave of you mentioned that enablement, it's happening and you can see it in the project. So I want to get into the news here, the conveyor community. What is this about? Can you take a minute to explain what is the conveyor community? >>Yeah, yeah. I think uh, you know, uh, what, what we discovered is we were starting to work with a lot of end users and practitioners. Is that what we're finding is that they kind of get tired of hearing about digital transformation and from multiple vendors and and from sales folks and these sorts of things. And when you speak to the practitioners, they just want to know what are the practical implications of moving towards a more collaborative architecture. And so, um, you know, when you start talking to them at levels beyond, uh, just generic kind of, you know, I would say marketing speak and even the business cases, the developers and sys admins need to know what it is they need to do to their application architecture is the ways they're working for to successfully modernize their applications. And so the idea behind the conveyor community was really kind of two fold. One was to help with knowledge sharing. So we started running meetups where people can come and share their knowledge of what they've done around specific topics like strangling monoliths or carving offside containers or things that sidecar containers are things that they've done successfully uh to help uh kind of move things forward. So it's really about knowledge sharing. And then the second piece we discovered was that there's really no place where you can find open source tools to help you re host re platform and re factor your applications to kubernetes. And so that's really where we're trying to fill that void is provide open source options in that space and kind of inviting everybody else to collaborate with us on that. >>Can you give an example of something uh some use cases of people doing this, why the need the drivers? It makes sense. Right. As a growing, you've got, you have to move applications. People want to have um applications moved to communities. I get that. But what are some of the use cases that were forcing this? >>Yeah, absolutely, for sure. I don't know if you have any you want to touch on um specifically I could add on as well. >>Yeah, I think some of the key use cases, I would really say it will be. So let let me just, I think James just talked about re host, re hosting, re platform ng and re factoring, I'm gonna put some numbers on it and then they talk about the use case a little bit as well. I would really say 30 virtual machines movement. That's it. That's the first one to happen. Easy, easier one, relatively speaking. But that's the first one to happen. The re platform in one where you are now really sort of changing the stack as well but not changing the application in any major way yet. And the hardest one happened around re factoring, which is, you are, you know, this is when we start talking about cloud native, you take a monolithic application which you know legacy applications which have been running for a long time and try to re factor them so that you can build microservices out of them. The very first, I would say set of clients that we are seeing at the leading edge around this will be around banking and insurance. Legacy applications, banking is obviously finances a large industry and that's the first movement you start seeing which is where the complexity of the application in terms of some of the legacy code that you are seeing more onto the, into the cloud. That for a cloud native implementation as well as their as well as a diversity of scenarios from a re hosting and re platform ng point of view. And we'll talk about some of the tools that we are putting in the community uh to help the users and uh and the developer community in many of these enterprises uh move into a cloud native implementation lot of their applications. And also from the point of view of helping them in terms of practice, is what I describe as best practices. It is not just about tools, it's about the community coming together. How do I do this? How do I do that? Actually, there are best practices that we as a community have gathered. It's about that sharing as well, James. >>Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. Right. So you re hosting like for example, you might have uh an application that was delivered, you buy an SV that is not available containerized yet. You need to bring that over as a VM. So you can bring that into Q Bert, you know, and actually bring that and just re hosted. You can, you might have some things that you've already containerized but they're sitting on a container orchestration layer that is no longer growing, right? So the innovation has kind of left that platform and kind of kubernetes has become kind of that standard one, the container orchestration layer, if you want become the de facto standard. And so you want to re platform that that takes massaging and transforming metadata to do that to create the right objects and so on and so forth. So there's a bunch of different use cases around that that kind of fall into that re host tree platform all the way up to re factoring >>So just explain for the audience and I know I love I love the three things re hosting re platform in and re factoring what's the difference between re platform NG and re factoring specifically, what's the nuance there? >>Yeah, yeah, so so a lot of times I think people have a lot of people, you know, I think obviously amazon kind of popularized the six hours framework years ago, you know, with, with, with, with that. And so if you look at what they kind of what they popularize it was replied corn is really kind of like a lift tinker and shift. So maybe it's, I, I'm not just taking my VM and putting it on new infrastructure, I'm gonna take my VM, maybe put on new infrastructure, but I'm gonna switch my observer until like a lighter weight observer or something like that at the same time. So that would fall into like a re platform or in the case, you know, one of the things we're seeing pretty heavily right now is the move from cloud foundry to kubernetes for example, where people are looking to take their application and actually transform it and run it on kubernetes, which requires you to really kind of re platform as well. And re factoring >>is what specific I get the >>report re factoring is, I think just following on to what James said re factoring is really about um the complexity of the application, which was mainly a monolithic large application, many of these legacy applications which have so many times, actually hundreds of millions of dollars of assets for these uh these enterprises, it's about taking the code and re factoring it in terms of dividing it into uh huh different pieces of court which can themselves be spun as microservices. So then it becomes true, it takes starting advantage of agility or development in a cloud native environment as well. It's not just about either lift and shift of the VM or or lift tinker and shift from a, from a staff point of view. It's really about not taking applications and dividing them so that we can spin microservices and it has the identity of the development of a cloud. >>I totally got a great clarification, really want to get that out there because re platform ng is really a good thing to go to the cloud. Hey, I got reticent open source, I'll use that, I can do this over here and then if we use that vendor over there, use open source over there. Really good way to look at it. I like the factory, it's like a complete re architecture or re factoring if you will. So thank you for the clarification. Great, great topic. Uh, this is what practitioners think about. So I gotta ask the next question, what projects are involved in in the community that you guys are working? It seems like a really valuable service uh and group. Um can you give an overview and what's going on in the community specifically? >>Yeah, so there's really right now, there's kind of five projects that are in the community and they're all in different, I would say different stages of maturity as well. So, um there's uh when you look at re hosting, there's two kind of primary projects focused on that. One is called forklift, which is about migrating your virtual machines into cuba. So covert is a way that you can run virtual machines orchestrated by kubernetes. We're seeing kind of a growth in demand there where people want to have a common orchestration for both their VMS and containers running on bare metal. And so forklift helps you actually mass migrate VMS into that environment. Um The second one on the re hosting side is called Crane. So Crane is really a tool that helps you migrate applications between kubernetes clusters. So you imagine you have all your you know, you might have persistent data and one kubernetes cluster and you want to migrate a name space from one cluster to another. Um That's where Crane comes in and actually helps you migrate between those um on the re platforms that we have moved to cube, which actually came from the IBM research team. So they actually open source that uh you sure you want to speak about uh moved to >>cube. Yeah, so so moved to cuba is really as we discuss the re platform scenario already, it is about, you know, if you are in a docker environment or hungry environment uh and you know, kubernetes has become a de facto standard now you are containerized already, but you really are actually moving into the communities based environment as the name implies, It's about moved to cuba back to me and this is one of the things we were looking at and as we were looking, talking to a lot of, a lot of users, it became evident to us that they are adapting now the de facto standard. Uh and it's a tool that helps you enable your applications in that new environment and and move to the new stuff. >>Yeah. And then the the the only other to our tackle which is uh probably like the one of the newest projects which is focused on kind of assessment and analysis of applications for container reservation. So actually looking at and understanding what the suitability is of an application for being containerized and start to be like being re factored into containers. Um and that's that's uh, you know, we have kind of engineers across both uh Red hat IBM research as well as uh some folks externally that are starting to become interested in that project as well. Um and the last, the last project is called Polaris, which is a tool to help you measure your software delivery performance. So this might seem a little odd to have in the community. But when you think about re hosting re platform and re factoring, the idea is that you want to measure your software delivery performance on top of kubernetes and that's what this does. It kind of measures the door metrics. If you're familiar with devops realization metrics. Um so things like, you know, uh you know, your change failure rate and other things on top of their to see are you actually improving as you're making these changes? >>Great. Let me ask the question for the folks watching or anyone interested, how do they get involved? Who can contribute, explain how people get involved? Is our site, is there up location slack channel? What's out there? >>Yeah, yeah, all of the above. So we have a, we have, we have a slack channel, we're on slack dot kubernetes dot io on town conveyor, but if you go to www dot conveyor dot io conveyor with a K. Uh, not like the cube with a C. Uh, but like cube with a K. Uh, they can go to a conveyor to Ohio and um, there they can find everything they need. So, um, we have a, you know, a governance model that's getting put in place, contributor ladder, all the things you'd expect. We're kind of talking into the C N C F around the gap delivery groups to kind of understand if we can um, how we can align ourselves so that in the future of these projects take off, they can become kind of sandbox projects. Um and uh yeah, we would welcome any and all kind of contribution and collaboration >>for sure. I don't know if you have >>anything to add on that, I >>think you covered it at the point has already um, just to put a plug in for uh we have already been having meetups, so on the best practices you will find the community, um, not just on convert or die. Oh, but as you start joining the community and those of meet ups and the help you can get whether on the slack channel, very helpful on the day to day problems that you are encountering as you are taking your applications to a cloud native environment. >>So, and I can see this being a big interest enterprises as they have a mix and match environment and with container as you can bring and integrate old legacy. And that's the beautiful thing about hybrid cloud that I find fascinating right now is that with all the goodness of stade Coubertin and cloud native, if you've got a legacy environments, great fit now. So you don't have to kill the old to bring in the news. So this is gonna be everything a real popular project for, you know, the class, what I call the classic enterprise, So what you guys both have your companies participated in. So with that is that the goal is that the gulf of this community is to reach out to the classic enterprise or open source because certainly and users are coming in like, like, like you read about, I mean they're coming in fast into the community. >>What's the goal for the community really is to provide assistant and help and guidance to the users from a community point of view. It's not just from us whether it is red hat or are ideal research, but it's really enterprises start participating and we're already seeing that interest from the enterprises because there was a big gap in this area, a lot of vendor. Exactly when you start on this journey, there will be 100 people who will be telling you all you have to do is this Yeah, that's easy. All you have to do. I know there is a red flag goes up, >>it's easy just go cloud native all the way everything is a service. It's just so easy. Just you know, just now I was going to brian gracefully, you get right on that. I want to just quickly town tangent here, brian grazer whose product strategist at red hat, you're gonna like this because he's like, look at the cloud native pieces expanding because um, the enterprises now are, are in there and they're doing good work before you saw projects like envoy come from the hyper scales like lift and you know, the big companies who are building their own stuff, so you start to see that transition, it's no longer the debate on open source and kubernetes and cloud native. It's the discussion is integration legacy. So this is the big discussion this week. Do you guys agree with that? And what would, what would be your reaction? >>Yeah, no, I, I agree with you. Right. I mean, I think, you know, I think that the stat you always here is that the 1st 20 of kind of cloud happened and now there's all the rest of it. Right? And, and modernization is going to be the big piece right? You have to be able to modernize those applications and those workloads and you know, they're, I think they're gonna fall in three key buckets, right? Re host free platform re factor and dependent on your business justification and you know, your needs, you're going to choose one of those paths and we just want to be able to provide open tools and a community based approach to those folks too to help that certainly will have and just, you know, just like it always does, you know, upstream first and then we'll have enterprise versions of these migration tool kits based on these projects, but you know, we really do want to kind of build them, you know, and make sure we have the best solution to the problem, which we believe community is the way to do that. >>And I think just to add to what James said, typically we are talking about enterprises, these enterprises will have thousands of applications, so we're not talking about 10 40 number. We're talking thousands or 20% is not a small number is still 233 400. But man, the work is remaining and that's why they are getting excited about cloud negative now, okay, now we have seen the benefit but this little bit here, but now, let's get, you know serious about about that transformation and this is about helping them in a cloud native uh in an open source way, which is what red hat. XL Sad. Let's bring the community together. >>I'm actually doing a story on that. You brought that up with thousands of applications because I think it's, it's under underestimate, I think it's going to be 1000s and thousands more because businesses now, software driven everywhere and observe ability has pointed this out. And I was talking to the founder of uh Ravana project and it's like, how many thousands of dashboards you're gonna need? Roads are So so this is again, this is the problems and the opportunities are coming together, the abstraction will get you to move up the stack in terms of automation. So it's kind of fascinating when you start thinking about the impact as this goes the next level. And so I have to ask your roaches since you're an IBM fellow and chief scientist, which by the way, is a huge distinction. Congratulations. Being an IBM fellow is is a big deal. Uh IBM takes that very seriously. Only a few of them. You've seen many waves and cycles of innovation. How would you categorize this one now? Because maybe I'm getting old and and loving this right now. But this seems like everything kind of coming together in one flash 10.1 major inflection point. All the other waves combined seemed to be like in this one movement very fast. What's your what's your take on this wave that we're in? >>Yes, I would really say there is a lot of technology has been developed but that technology needs to have its value unleashed and that's exactly where the intersection of those applications and that technology occurs. Um I'm gonna put in yet another. You talked about everything becoming software. This was Anderson I think uh Jack Lee said the software is eating the world another you know, another wave that has started as a i eating software as well. And I do believe these two will go inside uh to uh like let me just give you a brief example re factoring how you take your application and smart ways of using ai to be able to recommend the right microservices for you is another one that we've been working towards and some of those capabilities will actually come in this community as well. So when we talk about innovations in this area, We are we are bringing together the best of IBM research as well. As we are hoping the community actually uh joints as well and enterprises are already starting to join to bring together the latest of the innovations bringing their applications and the best practices together to unleash that value of the technology in moving the rest of that 80%. And to be able to seamlessly bridge from my legacy environment to the cloud native environment. >>Yeah. And hybrid cloud is gonna be multi cloud really is the backbone and operating system of business and life society. So as these apps start to come on a P i is an integration, all of these things are coming together. So um yeah, this conveyor project and conveyor community looks like a really strong approach. Congratulations. Good >>job bob. >>Yeah, great stuff. Kubernetes, enabling companies is enabling all kinds of value here in the cube. We're bringing it to you with two experts. Uh, James Richard, thanks for coming on the Cuban sharing. Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Okay, cube con and cloud native coverage. I'm john furry with the cube. Thanks for watching. Yeah.

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum, World 2019 brought to you by the M Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. Live Cube coverage of the emerald 2019 were here in San Francisco, California Mosconi North Lobby. Two sets Our 10th year covering the emerald in our 20th year of Of of our seasons of covering Me to be enterprised Tech. I'm Jeffrey Day Volonte student Justin Warren breaking down day to Cube insights segment. Dave's Do You Do You're on Set Valley set this the meadow set because it's got the steamboat chirping birds behind us. Justin, you've been doing some interviews out on the floor as well. Checking the story's out. All the news is out. Day one was all the big corporate stuff. Today was the product technology news stew. I'll go to you first. What's the assessment on your take on the M, where obviously they're reinventing themselves? Jerry Chen, who we interviewed, said this is Act three of'em where they keep on adding more and more prostitute their core, your thoughts on what's going on. >> So the biggest whore I've seen is the discussion of Tom Zoo, which really talking those cloud native applications. And if you break down VM wear, it's like many companies that said, There's the, you know, core product of the company. It is vey sphere. It is the legacy for what we have and it's not going anywhere, and it's changing. But, you know, then there's the modernization project Pacific howto a bridge to the multi cloud world. How do I bridge Kubernetes is going to come into the sphere and do that? But then there's the application world into the thing I've been. You know, the existential threat to VM, where I've been talking about forever is if we sas if I and cloud If I and all the APS go away, the data centers disappear in Vienna, where dominant, the data center is left out in the cold. So, you know, Pivotal was driving down that that path. They've done a lot of acquisitions, so love directionally where towns who's going time will tell whether they can play in that market. This is not a developer conference. We go to plenty of developer events, so, you know, that's you know, some of the places. I see you know, and and still, you know, >> narrator conference. You're right. Exactly Right. And just I want to get your thoughts, too, because you've been blocking heavily on this topic as well. Dev Ops in general, commenting on the Cube. You know, the reality and the reality, Uh, and the reality of situation from the the announcement. That's a vapor. They're doing some demos. They're really product directions. So product directions is always with VM. Where does it? It's not something that their shameful love, that's what they do. That's what they put out. It's not bakery >> company. It's a statement, A statement of >> direction. We were talking hybrid cloud in 2012 when I asked Pet guess it was a halfway house. He blew a gasket. And now, five years later, the gestation period for hybrid was that. But the end was happy to have the data center back in the back. In the play here, your thoughts on >> Yeah. So this conference is is, I think, a refreshing return to form. So, Vienna, where is as you say, this is an operators conference in Vienna. Where is for operators? It's not Four Dev's. There was a period there where cloud was scary And it was all this cloud native stuff in Vienna where tried to appeal to this new market, I guess tried to dress up and as something that it really wasn't and it didn't pull it off and we didn't It didn't feel right. And now Veum Way has decided that Well, no, actually, this is what they and where is about. And no one could be more Veum where than VM wear. So it's returning to being its best self. And I think you >> can software. They know software >> they know. So flick. So the addition of putting predict Enzo in and having communities in there, and it's to operate the software. So it's it's going to be in there an actual run on it, and they wanna have kubernetes baked into the sphere. So that now, yeah, we'll have new a new absent. Yeah, there might be SAS eps for the people who are consuming them, but they're gonna run somewhere. And now we could run them on van. Wait. Whether it's on Silent at the edge could be in the cloud your Veum wear on eight of us. >> David David so I want to get your thoughts just don't want to jump into because, you know, I love pivotal what they've done. I've always felt as a standalone company they probably couldn't compete with Amazon to scale what's going on in the other things. But bring it back in the fold in VM, where you mentioned this a couple of our interviews yesterday, Dave, and still you illuminate to to the fact of the cloud native world coming together. It's better inside VM wear because they can package pivotal and not have to bet the ranch on the outcome in the marketplace where this highly competitive statements out there so you get the business value of Pivotal. The upside now can be managed. Do your thoughts first, then go to date >> about Pivotal. Yeah, as >> an integrated, integrated is better for the industry than trying to bet the ranch on a pier play >> right? So, John, yesterday we had a little discussion about hybrid and multi cloud and still early about there, but the conversation of past five years ago was very different from the discussion. Today, Docker had a ripple effect with Containers and Veum. Where is addressing that and it made sense for Pivotal Cut to come home, if you will. They still have the Pivotal Labs group that can work with customers going through that transformation and a number of other pieces toe put together. But you ve m where is doing a good enough job to give customers the comfort that we can move you forward to the cloud. You don't have to abandon us and especially all those people that do VM Where is they don't have to be frozen where they are >> a business value. >> Well, I think you've got to start with the transaction and provide a historical context. So this goes back to what I used to call the misfit toys. The Federation. David Golden's taking bits and pieces of of of Dragon Pearl of assets in side of E, M. C and V M wear and then creating Pivotal out of whole cloth. They need an I P O. Michael Dell maintained 70% ownership of the company and 96% voting shares floated. The stock stock didn't do well, bought it back on 50 cents on the dollar. A so what the AIPO price was and then took a of Got a Brit, brought back a $4 billion asset inside of the M wear and paid $900 million for it. So it's just the brilliant financial transaction now, having said all that, what is the business value of this? You know, when I come to these shows, I'd liketo compare what they say in the messaging and the keynotes to what practitioners are saying in the practitioners last night were saying a couple of things. First of all, they're concerned about all the salmon. A like one. Practitioners said to me, Look, if it weren't for all these acquisitions that they announced last minute, what would we be hearing about here? It would have been NSX and V san again, so there's sort of a little concerns there. Some of the practitioners I talked to were really concerned about integration. They've done a good job with Nasasira, but some of the other acquisitions that they may have taken longer to integrate and customers are concerned, and we've seen this movie before. We saw the DMC. We certainly saw the tell. We're seeing it again now, at the end where Veum where? Well, they're very good at integrating companies. Sometimes that catches up to you. The last thing I'll say is we've been pushing You just mentioned it, Justin. On Dev's not a deaf show. Pivotal gives VM where the opportunity to whether it's a different show are an event within the event to actually attract the depths. But I would say in the multi cloud world, VM wears sitting in a good position. With the exception of developers pivotal, I think it's designed to solve that problem. Just tell >> your thoughts. >> Do you think that Veum, where is, is at risk of becoming a portfolio company just like a M A. M. C. Watts? Because it certainly looks at the moment to me like we look at all the different names for things, and I just look at the brand architecture of stuff. There are too many brands. There are too many product names, it's too confusing, and there's gonna have to be a culottes some point just to make it understandable for customers. Otherwise, we're just gonna end up with this endless sprawl, and we saw what the damage that did it. At present, I am saying >> it's a great point and Joseph Joe to cheese used to say that overlap is better than gaps, and I and I agree with him to appoint, you know better until it's not. And then Michael Dell came in and Bar came and said, Look, if we're gonna compete with Amazon's cost structure, we have to clean this mess up and that's what they've been doing it a lot of hard work on that. And so, yeah, they do risk that. I think if they don't do that integration, it's hard to do that. Integration, as you know, it takes time. Um, and so I have Right now. All looks good, right? Right down the middle. As you say, John, are >> multi cloud. Big topic gestation period is going to take five years to seven years. When the reality multi cloud a debate on Twitter last night, someone saying, I'm doing multi cloud today. I mean, we had Gelsinger's layout, the definition of multi cloud. >> Well, he laid out his definition definition. Everyone likes to define its. It's funny how, and we mentioned this is a stew and I earlier on the other set, cloud were still arguing about what cloud means exit always at multi cloud, which kind of multi cloud is a hybrid bowl over. And then you compare that to EJ computing, which computing was always going on. And then someone just came along and gave it a name and everyone just went, huh? OK, and go on with their lives. And so why is cloud so different and difficult for people to agree on what the thing is? >> There's a lot of money being made and lost, That's why >> right day the thing I've said is for multi cloud to be a real thing, it needs to be more valuable to a customer than the sum of its pieces on. And, you know, we know we're gonna be an Amazon reinvent later this year we will be talking, you know? Well, they will not be talking multi cloud. We might be talking about it, but >> they'll be hinting to hybrid cloud may or may not say >> that, you know, hybrid is okay in their world with outpost and everything they're doing in there partnering with VM wear. But you know, the point I've been looking at here is you know, management of multi vendor was atrocious. And, you know, why do we think we're going to any better. David, who hired me nine years ago. It was like I could spend my entire career saying, Management stinks and security needs to be, >> you know, So I want to share lawyers definition. They published in Wicked Bon on Multiply Multi Cloud Hybrid Cloudy, Putting together True Hybrid Cloud Multiply Any application application service can run on any node of the hybrid cloud without rewriting, re compiling or retesting. True hybrid cloud architectures have a consistent set of hardware. Software service is a P I is with integrated network security data and control planes that are native to and display the characteristics of public cloud infrastructure is a service. These attributes could be identically resident on other hybrid nodes independent of location, for example, including on public clouds on Prem or at the edge. That ain't happening. It's just not unless you have considered outposts cloud a customer azure stack. Okay, and you're gonna have collections of those. So that vision that he laid out, I just I think it's gonna >> be David. It's interesting because, you know, David and I have some good debates on this. I said, Tell me a company that has been better at than VM wear about taking a stack and letting it live on multiple hardware's. You know, I've got some of those cars are at a big piece last weekend talking about, you know, when we had to check the bios of everything and when blade Service rolled out getting Veum whereto work 15 years ago was really tough. Getting Veum were to work today, but the >> problem is you're gonna have outposts. You're gonna have project dimensions installed. You're gonna have azure stacks installed. You're gonna have roll your own out there. And so yeah, VM where is gonna work on all >> those? And it's not gonna be a static situation because, you know, when I talk to customers and if they're using V M where cloud on AWS, it's not a lift and shift and leave it there, Gonna modernize their things that could start using service is from the public cloud and they might migrate some of these off of the VM where environment, which I think, is the thing that I am talking to customers and hearing about that It's, you know, none of these situations are Oh, I just put it there and it's gonna live there for years. It's constantly moving and changing, and that is a major threat to VM wears multi clouds, >> Traffic pushes. Is it technically feasible without just insanely high degrees of homogeneity? That's that's the question. >> I I don't think it is and or not. I don't think it's a reasonable thing to expect anyway, because any enterprise you have any M and a activity, and all of a sudden you've got more than one that's always been true, and it will always be true. So if someone else makes a different choice and you buy them, then we'll have both. >> So maybe that's not a fair definition, but that's kind of what what? One could infer that. I think the industry is implying that that is hybrid multi club because that's the nirvana that everybody wants. >> Yeah, the only situation I can see where that could maybe come true would be in something like communities where you're running things on as an abstraction on top off everything else, and that that is a common abstraction that everyone agrees on and builds upon. But we're already seeing how that works out in real life. If >> I'm >> using and Google Antos. I can't easily move it to P. K s or open shift. There's English Kubernetes, as Joe Beta says, is not a magic layer, and everybody builds. On top of >> it, is it? Turns out it's actually not that easy. >> Well, and plus people are taken open source code, and then they're forking it and it building their own proprietary systems and saying, Hey, here's our greatest thing. >> Well, the to the to the credit of CNC, if Kubernetes. Does have a kind of standardized, agreed to get away away from that particular issue. So that's where it stands a better chance and say unfortunately, open stack. So because we saw a bit of that change of way, want to go this way? And we want to go that way. So there's a lot of seeing and zagging, at least with communities. You have a kind of common framework. But even just the implementation of that writing it, >> I love Cooper. I think I've been a big fan of committed from Day one. I think it's a great industry initiative. Having it the way it's rolling out is looking very good. I like it a lot. The comments that we heard on the Cube of Support. Some of my things that I'm looking at is for C N C s Q. Khan Come coop con Coming up is what happened with Kay, native and SDO because that's what I get to see the battleground for above Goober Netease. You see, that's what differentiates again. That's where that the vendors are gonna start to differentiate who they are. So I think carbonates. It could be a great thing. And I think what I learned here was virtualization underneath Kubernetes. It doesn't matter if you want to run a lot. Of'em Furat scale No big deal run Cooper's on top. You want to run in that bare metal? God bless you, >> Go for it. I think this use cases for both. >> That's why I particularly like Tenzer is because for those customers who wanna have a bit of this, cupidity is I don't want to run it myself. It's too hard. But if I trust Vienna where to be able to run that in to upgrade it and give me all of the goodness about operating it in the same way that I do the end where again we're in and I'll show. So now I can have stuff I already know in love, and I can answer incriminating on top of it. >> All right, But who's gonna mess up Multi clouds do. Who's the vendor? I'm not >> even saying it s so you can't mess up something that >> who's gonna think vision, this vision of multi cloud that the entire industry is putting forth who's gonna throw a monkey? The rich? Which vendor? Well, screw it. So >> you know, licensing usually can cause issues. You know, our friend Corey Crane with a nice article about Microsoft's licensing changes there. You know, there are >> lots of Amazon's plays. Oh, yeah. Okay. Amazon is gonna make it. >> A multi clock is not in the mob, >> but yet how could you do multi cloud without Amazon? >> They play with >> control. My the chessboard on my line has been Amazon is in every multi cloud because if you've got multiple clouds, there's a much greater than likely chance >> I haven't been. You know, my feeling is in looking at the history of how multi vendor of all from the I T industry from proprietary network operating systems, many computers toe open systems, D c P I P Web, etcetera. What's going on now is very interesting, and I think the sea so ce of the canary in the coal mine, not Cee Io's because they like multi vendor. They want multiple clouds. They're comfortable that they got staff for that si sos have pressure, security. They're the canary in the coal mine and all the seasons lights, while two are all saying multi clouds b s because they're building stacks internally and they want to create their own technology for security reasons and then build a P eyes and make a P. I's the supplier relationship and saying, Hey, supplier, if you want to work with me, me support my stack I think that is an interesting indication. What that means is that the entire multi cloud thing means we're pick one clown build on, have a backup. We'll deal with multiple clouds if there's workloads in there but primary one cloud, we'll be there. And I think that's gonna be the model. Yes, still be multiple clouds and you got azure and get office 3 65 That's technically multi cloud, >> but I want to make a point. And when pats on we joke about The cul de sac is hybrid cloud a cul de sac, and you've been very respectful and basically saying Yap had okay, But But But you were right, Really. What's hybrid would show me a hybrid cloud. It's taken all this time to gestate you where you see Federated Applications. It's happening. You have on prim workloads, and you have a company that has public cloud workloads. But they're not. Hybrid is >> the region. Some we'll talk about it, even multi. It is an application per cloud or a couple of clouds that you do it, but it's right. Did he follow the sun thing? That we might get there 15 years ago? Is >> no. You're gonna have to insist that this >> data moving around, consistent >> security, governance and all the organizational edicts across all those platforms >> the one place, like all week for that eventually and this is a long way off would be if you go with Serverless where it's all functions and now it's about service composition and I don't care where it lives. I'm just consuming a service because I have some data that I want to go on process and Google happens to have the best machine learning that I need to do it on that data. Also use that service. And then when I actually want to run the workload and host it somewhere else, I drop it into a CD in with an application that happens to run in AWS. >> Guys wrapping up day to buy It's just gonna ask, What is that animal? It must be an influence because hasn't said a word. >> Thistles. The famous blue cow She travels everywhere with me, >> has an INSTAGRAM account. >> She used to have an instagram. She now she doesn't. She just uses my Twitter account just in time to time. >> I learned a lot about you right now. Thanks for sharing. Great to have you. Great as always, Great commentary. Thanks for coming with Bay three tomorrow. Tomorrow. I want to dig into what's in this for Del Technologies. What's the play there when I unpacked, that is tomorrow on day three million. If there's no multi cloud and there's a big tam out there, what's in it for Michael Dell and BM where it's Crown Jewel as the main ingredient guys, thanks for coming stupid in Manchester words, David Want them? John, Thanks for watching day, too. Inside coverage here are wrap up. Thanks for watching

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Informatica World 2019. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World 2019. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host John Furrier. We are joined by Tracey Newell, she is the President Global Field Operations at Informatica. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, for coming back on theCUBE. >> Coming back on theCUBE, it's great to be here. >> So the last time you were on, you had just taken over as the president of Global Field Operations. Give our viewers a catch up on exactly what you've been doing over these past two years, and what the journey's been like. >> Yeah, no that's great, thanks so much. As a reminder the last time we were together, I had just joined the company. I was literally two weeks in, and yet I actually did join Informatica three years ago. So I joined on the board of directors, and I was on the board for two years, and the company was doing so extremely well that after a couple of years we all agreed that I would step off the board and join the management team. >> I got to get in on this! >> I know, exactly. I've got to get off the sidelines and get into the game. >> Both sides of the table, literally. >> Exactly. >> So that's really interesting that you were on the board watching this growth and seeing, obviously participating in it, too, as a board member, but then you said, "I want to be here, I want to be doing this." What was it about the opportunity that so excited you that you felt that way? >> Well, it's funny, because when I did join the management team I spent two months on a listening tour, and the first question from all the employees and our partners was, "Why'd you do that?" Usually it goes the other way around, you go from the management team to the board. And the answer was really simple in that my hypothesis in joining the board was that digital transformation is an enterprise board of director's decision, that governments and large organizations are trying to figure this out with the CEO, the board, the management team, because it's critical, and yet it's also really hard. It's complicated, the data is everywhere. And so when you have something that's important and really complicated, you need a thought leader. And so my belief was that Informatica should be that thought leader. And two years in we were doing so phenomenally well with the platform play that we had been driving from an R&D standpoint, it just seemed like such an amazing opportunity to literally get off the sidelines and get into the game. And it's just been fabulous. >> And you have experience, obviously, doing field organizations so you've been there, done that. Also you have some public sector experience, so also being on the board was a time when Informatica went private. And that was a good call because they don't have to deal with the shot clock of the public markets and doing all those mandatory filings, and a lot of energy, management energy goes into being public company. >> That's right. >> At the time where they could get the product development and reposition some of the assets, and the thing that was interesting with you guys, they had customers already. So they didn't have to go out and get new customers to test new theses. >> That's right. >> They had existing customers. >> Oh no, we serve the biggest companies and governments on the planet. Globally, a very large percentage of the global 2000, is kind of our sweet spot. And yet thousands and thousands of customers in the mid market. And so to your point, John, exactly we had built out this platform that included all things on-premise, we're almost synonymous, PowerCenter and ETL, that's kind of been our sweet spot. And MDM data quality, but adding in all of the focus on big data, all the area of IPAAS, all the work that everybody's doing with AWS, with Azure, with Salesforce.com, with Google Cloud, and suddenly we've got this platform play, backed by AI and machine learning, and it's a huge differentiator. >> So you've seen a lot of experience, again you worked in the industry for a long time, you know what the field playbook is, VCs say the enterprise playbook. It's changing, though, you're seeing some shifts and Bruce Chizen was talking to me yesterday about this, there's a shift back to technology advantage and openness. It used to be technology advantage, protect it, that's your competitive advantage, hold it, lock in, but it's changing from that to technology, but open. This is the new equation, what's your take on that? >> Our strategy's been really simple, that we want to be best of breed in everything that we do. And Gartner seems to agree with us. In all five categories we play in we are up and to the right. And yet we want you to get a benefit that if you do decide to buy one product, and then add a second, or a third, or a fourth family, you're going to get the benefit of all that being backed by a platform play, and by AI and machine learning. And so this concept of we'll work with everybody, a customer called us Switzerland of Data, and that's certainly true, we partner with everybody. Where you do see synergies to leverage your entire data platform, you're going to get a real advantage that no one else will have. >> You've got a lot of customers, this is a very intimate conference here at Informatica, this is our fourth year covering it, it's been great to watch the journey, but also the evolution and the tailwinds you guys have. What are some of the customer conversations you're having? You're in all the top meetings here, I know you guys are busy running around, I see you doing meetings and the whole team's here. What are some of the top-level priorities and challenges and opportunities that your customers have? >> We literally have thousands of people at the conference here as you know, and it's just been phenomenal. So I've been in back-to-back meetings, meeting with some of the largest companies in retail that are trying to figure out, "How do I serve my customer base online?" "And yet when they walk into one of my stores, "I want to know that. "My salesperson needs to know exactly what that person's "been shopping for, and looking on the Internet for, "if they're on my site, "or perhaps what they've been tweeting about." So they want to know everything about their customer that there is to know. The banks want to know who their high wealth clients are. And hey want to make sure that if they call in on a checking account and have a bad customer service experience, they want to know that. If it's a hospitality company, they want to understand what's going on every time you check into a hotel. If you looked for a quote and you don't actually follow through, they want to understand that. And so there's this theme of understanding everything that there is to know about a customer. And yet at the same time, a huge requirement for governance, in the California Privacy Act, the CCPA and GDPR are changing everything. I had a large bank once say, and this was years ago, "How can I forget you?" Which is what GDPR says I have the right, you have the right to be forgotten in Europe. How can I forget you if I don't know who you are? Again that's because data's everywhere, and again we're enabling that, so it's a pretty exciting time. It literally is about companies transforming themselves. >> I remember the industry when search engines came out, when the web came out, you had Google and those greenfield opportunities, they were excellent, you type in a keyword and you get results. When people tried to do enterprise search, it was like all these different databases, so you had constraints and you had legacy. Similar today, right? So how has that changed? What's different about it now? And again you had compliance and regulation coming over the top. How does an enterprise unlock those constraints? >> It's funny, you say unlock the power of data is one of our catchphrases. I'm meeting with CIOs around the planet who sound like they're CMOs, because they're using these phrases. They're saying things like, "I need to disrupt myself before someone disrupts me." Or there was one, it was a large oil and energy, it was a CIO at this massive company said, "Data's the new goldmine, and I need a shovel." So they're using these phrases, and to your point, how do you do that? Again, we do think it is about getting the right platform that plays both on-premise and ties in everything the customers are doing in cloud. So we see partnerships as being critical here. But at the same time, one of our fastest growing solutions has been our enterprise data catalog, which is operating at the metadata level. My peer in products Amit Walia likes to say, "How come you can ask the Internet anything at all?" You're so used to it, when your kids ask you a question, you just get online, I don't know, and get the answer. But you can't do that in your own enterprise. And suddenly, because of what we're doing at the metadata level working with all of the different companies around the globe through open APIs, you can now do that inside your enterprise, and that is really unlocking the capabilities for companies to run their businesses. >> You're giving us so much great insight into the kinds of conversations you're having about this deep desire to know the customer and understand his wants and needs at every moment. And yet the technology is so often the easy part, and the hard part of the implementation are the people and the processes. Can you talk a little bit about the stumbling blocks and the challenges that you're seeing with customers as they are embarking on their digital transformations? >> That's a great question. Because one of the things that I caution our clients about is companies get so focused on, I've got to pick the right technology. And we agree with that, again, that's why we focus so much, we've got to be best in breed in every decision. We're not going to lock you into something that doesn't make sense. And yet half of the battle, if you would, in these projects, it's not about the technology, it's a people/process issue. So think about to have a comprehensive view of your data, if you're a large CPG company or a large bank, you might have 10 CIOs, 50 CIOs. We have customers that have 10 ERP systems, we have folks that talk about 50 ERP systems. These are very cross functional, complex projects, and so our focus is on customer success and customer for life. I have more people in customer success than I do in sales by design. Literally thousands of people around the world, this is all that we do, that are focused on business outcomes. And so we really give an extra guarantee, if you would, to our customers to make sure they know that we're in this to make sure that they're successful, and when we start running into challenges, we're going to raise those high so that both organizations can make sure that we get to that promise that everybody is committed to. >> Talk about the ecosystem, because you continue to get success with the catalog, which is looking good. Great that, by the way, we covered that on theCUBE, I remember those conversations like it was yesterday. That really enables a lot, so you're seeing some buzz here around obviously the big clouds, the Google announcement, Amazon, and Microsoft are all here, on-premise, you've got that covered. But the ecosystem partners have a huge economic opportunity, because with the value proposition that you guys are putting forth that's rolling out with a huge customer base, the value-to-economic shift has changed, so that the economics are changing for the better for the customer and the value's increasing. That's kind of an Amazon-like effect if you think about that flywheel. That's attracting a lot of people in to your ecosystem because there's a money making opportunity. >> That's right. >> Talk about that dynamic. >> It's been humbling. I'm really pleased with Informatica World and how things are shaping up because we've had some amazing speakers here as you mentioned, from Amazon, Thomas Crane here from Google Cloud, AWS sending their CMO. It's just been a phenomenal event, yet if you go to the show for literally dozens and dozens and dozens of other providers that are critical to our customers that we want to partner with. When we say partner, we actually do deep R&D together so that there's a true value proposition where the customer gets more and a better-together solution when they choose Informatica and their critical partners. There's another category of partners that I think you're hinting at which is the large GSIs. >> The global system integrators, yeah. >> The global systems integrators. >> Accenture, Deloitte. >> Accenture, Deloitte, Cognizant have been phenomenal partners to us. And so again, when you talk about this being a board level discussion, which literally I've met with so many CIOs who say, "I just presented to my board last week, "let me tell you about this journey that we're on." Of course the large global system integrators are in the middle of that and we are very clear, we don't want to compete with those folks that are so good at both the vision and also really good in arms and legs and execution to help drive massive workflow change for our clients. So we work together brilliantly with those folks. >> And these are meaty projects, too, so it's not like they're used to, back in the old days when these projects were massive, rolling out these big ERP systems, the CRMs, back when people were instrumenting their operation of businesses. Similar now with data, these are massive, lucrative, profitable opportunities. >> These are really strategic for the client, the global system integrator, and for us for all of the same reasons. This drives massive change in a good way for our clients to keep ahead of whoever's nipping at their heels, but certainly it's a tremendous services opportunity for the large integrators, there's no question. >> Being humble. >> One of the things that's really coming through here is Informatica's commitment to solving the skills gap, especially with the Next 25 program, and this is something your company's being really thoughtful about. I'm interested from your perspective, particularly as somebody who's been in the technology industry and was on the board for a while, how do you see the skills gap and what the technology industry is doing as a whole to combat it? And then your advice from your vantage point in terms of what you think are the next things that kids should be studying in schools? >> This reminds me, and Furrier, you're talking about the old days, so I'm going to date myself, it reminds me a lot of when the Internet first started to occur. This is a very similar type change. People have been, companies have been trying to make these changes and they're starting to realize that it does start, they've got to have a good grasp of the data in order to run all of these strategic initiatives that they've got. And so it's tremendous opportunity, to your point, for young people. So how do we think about that? Certainly we do our fair share of hiring interns trying to get them early in life, when they're sophomores, juniors coming into senior year and then hiring those folks. So we see an opportunity for our own company to bring in those young people, if you would. And then the GSIs, the global systems integrators, we partner quite a bit with them, because we see them as massive scalers, they have-- >> How about people specialize in majors, any areas of interest that someone might want to specialize in to be a great contributor in the data world? Obviously stats and math are clear on machine learning and that side. But there's affects, there's societal, business outcome challenges that have not yet been figured out. What areas do you see that someone can go after, have a career around? >> So it literally is a business and a technical problem that we're solving, and so there's going to be career opportunities for everyone that's in school. Whether it be on the business side, whether it's business management, marketing, sales, because again think about when you talk about change of management, it is a CMO trying to rethink how do they reach their clients. It is a sales leader thinking, "How do I get better analytics as to what's working "and what's not working?" And then of course it crosses over into computer science and engineering, as well, where you're actually developing these products, and developing these AI applications that are just beginning to take off. But it's in the early days, so for young folks coming out of schools this is a tremendous opportunity. >> Well, next you'll have to find what's up with the field, and your customers, and then next year, next event. >> Yeah, I can't wait, it's great. I've really enjoyed spending time with you all, and we look forward to seeing you soon. >> Indeed, well thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, Tracey. >> Okay, thank you. >> Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight, for John Furrier, you've been watching theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World, stay tuned. (upbeat music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube! (funky electronic music) Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante! >> Welcome, everybody, to this Cube conversation here in our Marlborough offices. I am very excited today, I spent a number of years at IDC, which, of course, is owned by IDG. And there's a new book out, relatively new, called Future Forward: Leadership Lessons from Patrick McGovern, the Visionary Who Circled the Globe and Built a Technology Media Empire. And it's a great book, lotta stories that I didn't know, many that I did know, and the author of that book, Glenn Rifkin, is here to talk about not only Pat McGovern but also some of the lessons that he put forth to help us as entrepreneurs and leaders apply to create better businesses and change the world. Glenn, thanks so much for comin' on theCube. >> Thank you, Dave, great to see ya. >> So let me start with, why did you write this book? >> Well, a couple reasons. The main reason was Patrick McGovern III, Pat's son, came to me at the end of 2016 and said, "My father had died in 2014 and I feel like his legacy deserves a book, and many people told me you were the guy to do it." So the background on that I, myself, worked at IDG back in the 1980s, I was an editor at Computerworld, got to know Pat during that time, did some work for him after I left Computerworld, on a one-on-one basis. Then I would see him over the years, interview him for the New York Times or other magazines, and every time I'd see Pat, I'd end our conversation by saying, "Pat, when are we gonna do your book?" And he would laugh, and he would say, "I'm not ready to do that yet, there's just still too much to do." And so it became sort of an inside joke for us, but I always really did wanna write this book about him because I felt he deserved a book. He was just one of these game-changing pioneers in the tech industry. >> He really was, of course, the book was even more meaningful for me, we, you and I started right in the same time, 1983-- >> Yeah. >> And by that time, IDG was almost 20 years old and it was quite a powerhouse then, but boy, we saw, really the ascendancy of IDG as a brand and, you know, the book reviews on, you know, the back covers are tech elite: Benioff wrote the forward, Mark Benioff, you had Bill Gates in there, Walter Isaacson was in there, Guy Kawasaki, Bob Metcalfe, George Colony-- >> Right. >> Who actually worked for a little stint at IDC for a while. John Markoff of The New York Times, so, you know, the elite of tech really sort of blessed this book and it was really a lot to do with Pat McGovern, right? >> Oh, absolutely, I think that the people on the inside understood how important he was to the history of the tech industry. He was not, you know, a household name, first of all, you didn't think of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and then Pat McGovern, however, those who are in the know realize that he was as important in his own way as they were. Because somebody had to chronicle this story, somebody had to share the story of the evolution of this amazing information technology and how it changed the world. And Pat was never a front-of-the-TV-camera guy-- >> Right. >> He was a guy who put his people forward, he put his products forward, for sure, which is why IDG, as a corporate name, you know, most people don't know what that means, but people did know Macworld, people did know PCWorld, they knew IDC, they knew Computerworld for sure. So that was Pat's view of the world, he didn't care whether he had the spotlight on him or not. >> When you listen to leaders like Reed Hoffman or Eric Schmidt talk about, you know, great companies and how to build great companies, they always come back to culture. >> Yup. >> The book opens with a scene of, and we all, that I usually remember this, well, we're just hangin' around, waitin' for Pat to come in and hand out what was then called the Christmas bonus-- >> Right. >> Back when that wasn't politically incorrect to say. Now, of course, it's the holiday bonus. But it was, it was the Christmas bonus time and Pat was coming around and he was gonna personally hand a bonus, which was a substantial bonus, to every single employee at the company. I mean, and he did that, really, literally, forever. >> Forever, yeah. >> Throughout his career. >> Yeah, it was unheard of, CEOs just didn't do that and still don't do that, you were lucky, you got a message on the, you know, in the lunchroom from the CEO, "Good work, troops! Keep up the good work!" Pat just had a really different view of the culture of this company, as you know from having been there, and I know. It was very familial, there was a sense that we were all in this together, and it really was important for him to let every employee know that. The idea that he went to every desk in every office for IDG around the United States, when we were there in the '80s there were probably 5,000 employees in the US, he had to devote substantial amount-- >> Weeks and weeks! >> Weeks at a time to come to every building and do this, but year after year he insisted on doing it, his assistant at the time, Mary Dolaher told me she wanted to sign the cards, the Christmas cards, and he insisted that he ensign every one of them personally. This was the kind of view he had of how you keep employees happy, if your employees are happy, the customers are gonna be happy, and you're gonna make a lot of money. And that's what he did. >> And it wasn't just that. He had this awesome holiday party that you described, which was epic, and during the party, they would actually take pictures of every single person at the party and then they would load the carousel, you remember the 35-mm. carousel, and then, you know, toward the end of the evening, they would play that and everybody was transfixed 'cause they wanted to see their, the picture of themselves! >> Yeah, yeah. (laughs) >> I mean, it was ge-- and to actually pull that off in the 1980s was not trivial! Today, it would be a piece of cake. And then there was the IDG update, you know, the Good News memos, there was the 10-year lunch, the 20-year trips around the world, there were a lot of really rich benefits that, you know, in and of themselves maybe not a huge deal, but that was the culture that he set. >> Yeah, there was no question that if you talked to anybody who worked in this company over, say, the last 50 years, you were gonna get the same kind of stories. I've been kind of amazed, I'm going around, you know, marketing the book, talking about the book at various events, and the deep affection for this guy that still holds five years after he died, it's just remarkable. You don't really see that with the CEO class, there's a couple, you know, Steve Jobs left a great legacy of creativity, he was not a wonderful guy to his employees, but Pat McGovern, people loved this guy, and they st-- I would be signing books and somebody'd say, "Oh, I've been at IDG for 27 years and I remember all of this," and "I've been there 33 years," and there's a real longevity to this impact that he had on people. >> Now, the book was just, it was not just sort of a biography on McGovern, it was really about lessons from a leader and an entrepreneur and a media mogul who grew this great company in this culture that we can apply, you know, as business people and business leaders. Just to give you a sense of what Pat McGovern did, he really didn't take any outside capital, he did a little bit of, you know, public offering with IDG Books, but, really, you know, no outside capital, it was completely self-funded. He built a $3.8 billion empire, 300 publications, 280 million readers, and I think it was almost 100 or maybe even more, 100 countries. And so, that's an-- like you were, used the word remarkable, that is a remarkable achievement for a self-funded company. >> Yeah, Pat had a very clear vision of how, first of all, Pat had a photographic memory and if you were a manager in the company, you got a chance to sit in meetings with Pat and if you didn't know the numbers better than he did, which was a tough challenge, you were in trouble! 'Cause he knew everything, and so, he was really a numbers-focused guy and he understood that, you know, his best way to make profit was to not be looking for outside funding, not to have to share the wealth with investors, that you could do this yourself if you ran it tightly, you know, I called it in the book a 'loose-tight organization,' loose meaning he was a deep believer in decentralization, that every market needed its own leadership because they knew the market, you know, in Austria or in Russia or wherever, better than you would know it from a headquarters in Boston, but you also needed that tightness, a firm grip on the finances, you needed to know what was going on with each of the budgets or you were gonna end up in big trouble, which a lot of companies find themselves in. >> Well, and, you know, having worked there, I mean, essentially, if you made your numbers and did so ethically, and if you just kind of followed some of the corporate rules, which we'll talk about, he kind of left you alone. You know, you could, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted, you could stay in any hotel, you really couldn't fly first class, and we'll maybe talk about that-- >> Right. >> But he was a complex man, I mean, he was obviously wealthy, he was a billionaire, he was very generous, but at the same time he was frugal, you know, he drove, you know, a little, a car that was, you know, unremarkable, and we had buy him a car. He flew coach, and I remember one time, I was at a United flight, and I was, I had upgraded, you know, using my miles, and I sat down and right there was Lore McGovern, and we both looked at each other and said right at the same time, "I upgraded!" (laughs) Because Pat never flew up front, but he would always fly with a stack of newspapers in the seat next to him. >> Yeah, well, woe to, you were lucky he wasn't on the plane and spotted you as he was walking past you into coach, because he was not real forgiving when he saw people, people would hide and, you know, try to avoid him at all cost. And, I mean, he was a big man, Pat was 6'3", you know, 250 lbs. at least, built like a linebacker, so he didn't fit into coach that well, and he wasn't flying, you know, the shuttle to New York, he was flyin' to Beijing, he was flyin' to Moscow, he was going all over the world, squeezing himself into these seats. Now, you know, full disclosure, as he got older and had, like, probably 10 million air miles at his disposal, he would upgrade too, occasionally, for those long-haul flights, just 'cause he wanted to be fresh when he would get off the plane. But, yeah, these are legends about Pat that his frugality was just pure legend in the company, he owned this, you know, several versions of that dark blue suit, and that's what you would see him in. He would never deviate from that. And, but, he had his patterns, but he understood the impact those patterns had on his employees and on his customers. >> I wanna get into some of the lessons, because, really, this is what the book is all about, the heart of it. And you mentioned, you know, one, and we're gonna tell from others, but you really gotta stay close to the customer, that was one of the 10 corporate values, and you remember, he used to go to the meetings and he'd sometimes randomly ask people to recite, "What's number eight?" (laughs) And you'd be like, oh, you'd have your cheat sheet there. And so, so, just to give you a sense, this man was an entrepreneur, he started the company in 1964 with a database that he kind of pre-sold, he was kind of the sell, design, build type of mentality, he would pre-sold this thing, and then he started Computerworld in 1967, so it was really only a few years after he launched the company that he started the Computerworld, and other than Data Nation, there was nothing there, huge pent-up demand for that type of publication, and he caught lightning in a bottle, and that's really how he funded, you know, the growth. >> Yeah, oh, no question. Computerworld became, you know, the bible of the industry, it became a cash cow for IDG, you know, but at the time, it's so easy to look in hindsight and say, oh, well, obviously. But when Pat was doing this, one little-known fact is he was an editor at a publication called Computers and Automation that was based in Newton, Massachusetts and he kept that job even after he started IDC, which was the original company in 1964. It was gonna be a research company, and it was doing great, he was seeing the build-up, but it wasn't 'til '67 when he started Computerworld, that he said, "Okay, now this is gonna be a full-time gig for me," and he left the other publication for good. But, you know, he was sorta hedging his bets there for a little while. >> And that's where he really gained respect for what we'll call the 'Chinese Wallet,' the, you know, editorial versus advertising. We're gonna talk about that some more. So I mentioned, 1967, Computerworld. So he launched in 1964, by 1971, he was goin' to Japan, we're gonna talk about the China Stories as well, so, he named the company International Data Corp, where he was at a little spot in Newton, Mass.-- >> Right, right. >> So, he had a vision. You said in your book, you mention, how did this gentleman get it so right for so long? And that really leads to some of the leadership lessons, and one of them in the book was, sort of, have a mission, have a vision, and really, Pat was always talking about information, about information technology, in fact, when Wine for Dummies came out, it kind of created a little friction, that was really off the center. >> Or Wine for Dummies, or Sex for Dummies! >> Yeah, Sex for Dummies, boy, yeah! >> With, that's right, Ruth Westheimer-- >> Dr. Ruth Westheimer. >> But generally speaking, Glenn, he was on that mark, he really didn't deviate from that vision. >> Yeah, no, it was very crucial to the development of the company that he got people to, you know, buy into that mission, because the mission was everything. And he understood, you know, he had the numbers, but he also saw what was happening out there, from the 1960s, when IBM mainframes filled a room, and, you know, only the high priests of data centers could touch them. He had a vision for, you know, what was coming next and he started to understand that there would be many facets to this information about information technology, it wasn't gonna be boring, if anything, it was gonna be the story of our age and he was gonna stick to it and sell it. >> And, you know, timing is everything, but so is, you know, Pat was a workaholic and had an amazing mind, but one of the things I learned from the book, and you said this, Pat Kenealy mentioned it, all American industrial and social revolutions have had a media company linked to them, Crane and automobiles, Penton and energy, McGraw-Hill and aerospace, Annenberg, of course, and TV, and in technology, it was IDG. >> Yeah, he, like I said earlier, he really was a key figure in the development of this industry and it was, you know, one of the key things about that, a lot publications that came and went made the mistake of being platform or, you know, vertical market specific. And if that market changed, and it was inevitably gonna change in high tech, you were done. He never, you know, he never married himself to some specific technology cycle. His idea was the audience was not gonna change, the audience was gonna have to roll with this, so, the company, IDG, would produce publications that got that, you know, Computerworld was actually a little bit late to the PC game, but eventually got into it and we tracked the different cycles, you know, things in tech move in sine waves, they come and go. And Pat never was, you know, flustered by that, he could handle any kind of changes from the mainframes down to the smartphone when it came. And so, that kind of flexibility, and ability to adjust to markets, really was unprecedented in that particular part of the market. >> One of the other lessons in the book, I call it 'nation-building,' and Pat shared with you that, look, that you shared, actually, with your readers, if you wanna do it right, you've gotta be on the ground, you've gotta be there. And the China story is one that I didn't know about how Pat kind of talked his way into China, tell us, give us a little summary of that story. >> Sure, I love that story because it's so Pat. It was 1978, Pat was in Tokyo on a business trip, one of his many business trips, and he was gonna be flying to Moscow for a trade show. And he got a flight that was gonna make a stopover in Beijing, which in those days was called Peking, and was not open to Americans. There were no US and China diplomatic relations then. But Pat had it in mind that he was going to get off that plane in Beijing and see what he could see. So that meant that he had to leave the flight when it landed in Beijing and talk his way through the customs as they were in China at the time with folks in the, wherever, the Quonset hut that served for the airport, speaking no English, and him speaking no Chinese, he somehow convinced these folks to give him a day pass, 'cause he kept saying to them, "I'm only in transit, it's okay!" (laughs) Like, he wasn't coming, you know, to spy on them on them or anything. So here's this massive American businessman in his dark suit, and he somehow gets into downtown Beijing, which at the time was mostly bicycles, very few cars, there were camels walking down the street, they'd come with traders from Mongolia. The people were still wearing the drab outfits from the Mao era, and Pat just spent the whole day wandering around the city, just soaking it in. He was that kind of a world traveler. He loved different cultures, mostly eastern cultures, and he would pop his head into bookstores. And what he saw were people just clamoring to get their hands on anything, a newspaper, a magazine, and it just, it didn't take long for the light bulb to go on and said, this is a market we need to play in. >> He was fascinated with China, I, you know, as an employee and a business P&L manager, I never understood it, I said, you know, the per capita spending on IT in China was like a dollar, you know? >> Right. >> And I remember my lunch with him, my 10-year lunch, he said, "Yeah, but, you know, there's gonna be a huge opportunity there, and yeah, I don't know how we're gonna get the money out, maybe we'll buy a bunch of tea and ship it over, but I'm not worried about that." And, of course, he meets Hugo Shong, which is a huge player in the book, and the home run out of China was, of course, the venture capital, which he started before there was even a stock market, really, to exit in China. >> Right, yeah. No, he was really a visionary, I mean, that word gets tossed around maybe more than it should, but Pat was a bonafide visionary and he saw things in China that were developing that others didn't see, including, for example, his own board, who told him he was crazy because in 1980, he went back to China without telling them and within days he had a meeting with the ministry of technology and set up a joint venture, cost IDG $250,000, and six months later, the first issue of China Computerworld was being published and within a couple of years it was the biggest publication in China. He said, told me at some point that $250,0000 investment turned into $85 million and when he got home, that first trip, the board was furious, they said, "How can you do business with the commies? You're gonna ruin our brand!" And Pat said, "Just, you know, stick with me on this one, you're gonna see." And the venture capital story was just an offshoot, he saw the opportunity in the early '90s, that venture in China could in fact be a huge market, why not help build it? And that's what he did. >> What's your take on, so, IDG sold to, basically, Chinese investors. >> Yeah. >> It's kind of bittersweet, but in the same time, it's symbolic given Pat's love for China and the Chinese people. There's been a little bit of criticism about that, I know that the US government required IDC to spin out its supercomputer division because of concerns there. I'm always teasing Michael Dow that at the next IDG board meeting, those Lenovo numbers, they're gonna look kinda law. (laughs) But what are your, what's your, what are your thoughts on that, in terms of, you know, people criticize China in terms of IP protections, etc. What would Pat have said to that, do you think? >> You know, Pat made 130 trips to China in his life, that's, we calculated at some point that just the air time in planes would have been something like three and a half to four years of his life on planes going to China and back. I think Pat would, today, acknowledge, as he did then, that China has issues, there's not, you can't be that naive. He got that. But he also understood that these were people, at the end of the day, who were thirsty and hungry for information and that they were gonna be a player in the world economy at some point, and that it was crucial for IDG to be at the forefront of that, not just play later, but let's get in early, let's lead the parade. And I think that, you know, some part of him would have been okay with the sale of the company to this conglomerate there, called China Oceanwide. Clearly controversial, I mean, but once Pat died, everyone knew that the company was never gonna be the same with the leader who had been at the helm for 50 years, it was gonna be a tough transition for whoever took over. And I think, you know, it's hard to say, certainly there's criticism of things going on with China. China's gonna be the hot topic page one of the New York Times almost every single day for a long time to come. I think Pat would have said, this was appropriate given my love of China, the kind of return on investment he got from China, I think he would have been okay with it. >> Yeah, and to invoke the Ben Franklin maxim, "Trading partners seldom wage war," and so, you know, I think Pat would have probably looked at it that way, but, huge home run, I mean, I think he was early on into Baidu and Alibaba and Tencent and amazing story. I wanna talk about decentralization because that was always something that was just on our minds as employees of IDG, it was keep the corporate staff lean, have a flat organization, if you had eight, 10, 12 direct reports, that was okay, Pat really meant it when he said, "You're the CEO of your own business!" Whether that business was, you know, IDC, big company, or a manager at IDC, where you might have, you know, done tens of millions of dollars, but you felt like a CEO, you were encouraged to try new things, you were encouraged to fail, and fail fast. Their arch nemesis of IDG was Ziff Davis, they were a command and control, sort of Bill Ziff, CMP to a certain extent was kind of the same way out of Manhasset, totally different philosophies and I think Pat never, ever even came close to wavering from that decentralization philosophy, did he? >> No, no, I mean, I think that the story that he told me that I found fascinating was, he didn't have an epiphany that decentralization would be the mechanism for success, it was more that he had started traveling, and when he'd come back to his office, the memos and requests and papers to sign were stacked up two feet high. And he realized that he was holding up the company because he wasn't there to do this and that at some point, he couldn't do it all, it was gonna be too big for that, and that's when the light came on and said this decentralization concept really makes sense for us, if we're gonna be an international company, which clearly was his mission from the beginning, we have to say the people on the ground in those markets are the people who are gonna make the decisions because we can't make 'em from Boston. And I talked to many people who, were, you know, did a trip to Europe, met the folks in London, met the folks in Munich, and they said to a person, you know, it was so ahead of its time, today it just seems obvious, but in the 1960s, early '70s, it was really not a, you know, a regular leadership tenet in most companies. The command and control that you talked about was the way that you did business. >> And, you know, they both worked, but, you know, from a cultural standpoint, clearly IDG and IDC have had staying power, and he had the three-quarter rule, you talked about it in your book, if you missed your numbers three quarters in a row, you were in trouble. >> Right. >> You know, one quarter, hey, let's talk, two quarters, we maybe make some changes, three quarters, you're gone. >> Right. >> And so, as I said, if you were makin' your numbers, you had wide latitude. One of the things you didn't have latitude on was I'll call it 'pay to play,' you know, crossing that line between editorial and advertising. And Pat would, I remember I was at a meeting one time, I'm sorry to tell these stories, but-- >> That's okay. (laughs) >> But we were at an offsite meeting at a woods meeting and, you know, they give you a exercise, go off and tell us what the customer wants. Bill Laberis, who's the editor-in-chief at Computerworld at the time, said, "Who's the customer?" And Pat said, "That's a great question! To the publisher, it's the advertiser. To you, Bill, and the editorial staff, it's the reader. And both are equally important." And Pat would never allow the editorial to be compromised by the advertiser. >> Yeah, no, he, there was a clear barrier between church and state in that company and he, you know, consistently backed editorial on that issue because, you know, keep in mind when we started then, and I was, you know, a journalist hoping to, you know, change the world, the trade press then was considered, like, a little below the mainstream business press. The trade press had a reputation for being a little too cozy with the advertisers, so, and Pat said early on, "We can't do that, because everything we have, our product is built, the brand is built on integrity. And if the reader doesn't believe that what we're reporting is actually true and factual and unbiased, we're gonna lose to the advertisers in the long run anyway." So he was clear that that had to be the case and time and again, there would be conflict that would come up, it was just, as you just described it, the publishers, the sales guys, they wanted to bring in money, and if it, you know, occasionally, hey, we could nudge the editor of this particular publication, "Take it a little bit easier on this vendor because they're gonna advertise big with us," Pat just would always back the editor and say, "That's not gonna happen." And it caused, you know, friction for sure, but he was unwavering in his support. >> Well, it's interesting because, you know, Macworld, I think, is an interesting case study because there were sort of some backroom dealings and Pat maneuvered to be able to get the Macworld, you know, brand, the license for that. >> Right. >> But it caused friction between Steve Jobs and the writers of Macworld, they would write something that Steve Jobs, who was a control freak, couldn't control! >> Yeah. (laughs) >> And he regretted giving IDG the license. >> Yeah, yeah, he once said that was the worst decision he ever made was to give the license to Pat to, you know, Macworlld was published on the day that Mac was introduced in 1984, that was the deal that they had and it was, what Jobs forgot was how important it was to the development of that product to have a whole magazine devoted to it on day one, and a really good magazine that, you know, a lot of people still lament the glory days of Macworld. But yeah, he was, he and Steve Jobs did not get along, and I think that almost says a lot more about Jobs because Pat pretty much got along with everybody. >> That church and state dynamic seems to be changing, across the industry, I mean, in tech journalism, there aren't any more tech journalists in the United States, I mean, I'm overstating that, but there are far fewer than there were when we were at IDG. You're seeing all kinds of publications and media companies struggling, you know, Kara Swisher, who's the greatest journalist, and Walt Mossberg, in the tech industry, try to make it, you know, on their own, and they couldn't. So, those lines are somewhat blurring, not that Kara Swisher is blurring those lines, she's, you know, I think, very, very solid in that regard, but it seems like the business model is changing. As an observer of the markets, what do you think's happening in the publishing world? >> Well, I, you know, as a journalist, I'm sort of aghast at what's goin' on these days, a lot of my, I've been around a long time, and seeing former colleagues who are no longer in journalism because the jobs just started drying up is, it's a scary prospect, you know, unlike being the enemy of the people, the first amendment is pretty important to the future of the democracy, so to see these, you know, cutbacks and newspapers going out of business is difficult. At the same time, the internet was inevitable and it was going to change that dynamic dramatically, so how does that play out? Well, the problem is, anybody can post anything they want on social media and call it news, and the challenge is to maintain some level of integrity in the kind of reporting that you do, and it's more important now than ever, so I think that, you know, somebody like Pat would be an important figure if he was still around, in trying to keep that going. >> Well, Facebook and Google have cut the heart out of, you know, a lot of the business models of many media companies, and you're seeing sort of a pendulum swing back to nonprofits, which, I understand, speaking of folks back in the mid to early 1900s, nonprofits were the way in which, you know, journalism got funded, you know, maybe it's billionaires buying things like the Washington Post that help fund it, but clearly the model's shifting and it's somewhat unclear, you know, what's happening there. I wanted to talk about another lesson, which, Pat was the head cheerleader. So, I remember, it was kind of just after we started, the Computerworld's 20th anniversary, and they hired the marching band and they walked Pat and Mary Dolaher walked from 5 Speen Street, you know, IDG headquarters, they walked to Computerworld, which was up Old, I guess Old Connecticut Path, or maybe it was-- >> It was actually on Route 30-- >> Route 30 at the time, yeah. And Pat was dressed up as the drum major and Mary as well, (laughs) and he would do crazy things like that, he'd jump out of a plane with IDG is number one again, he'd post a, you know, a flag in Antarctica, IDG is number one again! It was just a, it was an amazing dynamic that he had, always cheering people on. >> Yeah, he was, he was, when he called himself the CEO, the Chief Encouragement Officer, you mentioned earlier the Good News notes. Everyone who worked there, at some point received this 8x10" piece of paper with a rainbow logo on it and it said, "Good News!" And there was a personal note from Pat McGovern, out of the blue, totally unexpected, to thank you and congratulate you on some bit of work, whatever it was, if you were a reporter, some article you wrote, if you were a sales guy, a sale that you made, and people all over the world would get these from him and put them up in their cubicles because it was like a badge of honor to have them, and people, I still have 'em, (laughs) you know, in a folder somewhere. And he was just unrelenting in supporting the people who worked there, and it was, the impact of that is something you can't put a price tag on, it's just, it stays with people for all their lives, people who have left there and gone on to four or five different jobs always think fondly back to the days at IDG and having, knowing that the CEO had your back in that manner. >> The legend of, and the legacy of Patrick J. McGovern is not just in IDG and IDC, which you were interested in in your book, I mean, you weren't at IDC, I was, and I was started when I saw the sort of downturn and then now it's very, very successful company, you know, whatever, $3-400 million, throwin' off a lot of profits, just to decide, I worked for every single CEO at IDC with the exception of Pat McGovern, and now, Kirk Campbell, the current CEO, is moving on Crawford del Prete's moving into the role of president, it's just a matter of time before he gets CEO, so I will, and I hired Crawford-- >> Oh, you did? (laughs) >> So, I've worked for and/or hired every CEO of IDC except for Pat McGovern, so, but, the legacy goes beyond IDG and IDC, great brands. The McGovern Brain Institute, 350 million, is that right? >> That's right. >> He dedicated to studying, you know, the human brain, he and Lore, very much involved. >> Yup. >> Typical of Pat, he wasn't just, "Hey, here's the check," and disappear. He was goin' in, "Hey, I have some ideas"-- >> Oh yeah. >> Talk about that a little. >> Yeah, well, this was a guy who spent his whole life fascinated by the human brain and the impact technology would have on the human brain, so when he had enough money, he and Lore, in 2000, gave a $350 million gift to MIT to create the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. At the time, the largest academic gift ever given to any university. And, as you said, Pat wasn't a guy who was gonna write a check and leave and wave goodbye. Pat was involved from day one. He and Lore would come and sit in day-long seminars listening to researchers talk about about the most esoteric research going on, and he would take notes, and he wasn't a brain scientist, but he wanted to know more, and he would talk to researchers, he would send Good News notes to them, just like he did with IDG, and it had same impact. People said, "This guy is a serious supporter here, he's not just showin' up with a checkbook." Bob Desimone, who's the director of the Brain Institute, just marveled at this guy's energy level, that he would come in and for days, just sit there and listen and take it all in. And it just, it was an indicator of what kind of person he was, this insatiable curiosity to learn more and more about the world. And he wanted his legacy to be this intersection of technology and brain research, he felt that this institute could cure all sorts of brain-related diseases, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc. And it would then just make a better future for mankind, and as corny as that might sound, that was really the motivator for Pat McGovern. >> Well, it's funny that you mention the word corny, 'cause a lot of people saw Pat as somewhat corny, but, as you got to know him, you're like, wow, he really means this, he loves his company, the company was his extended family. When Pat met his untimely demise, we held a crowd chat, crowdchat.net/thankspat, and there's a voting mechanism in there, and the number one vote was from Paul Gillen, who posted, "Leo Durocher said that nice guys finish last, Pat McGovern proved that wrong." >> Yeah. >> And I think that's very true and, again, awesome legacy. What number book is this for you? You've written a lot of books. >> This is number 13. >> 13, well, congratulations, lucky 13. >> Thank you. >> The book is Fast Forward-- >> Future Forward. >> I'm sorry, Future Forward! (laughs) Future Forward by Glenn Rifkin. Check out, there's a link in the YouTube down below, check that out and there's some additional information there. Glenn, congratulations on getting the book done, and thanks so much for-- >> Thank you for having me, this is great, really enjoyed it. It's always good to chat with another former IDGer who gets it. (laughs) >> Brought back a lot of memories, so, again, thanks for writing the book. All right, thanks for watching, everybody, we'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante. You're watchin' theCube. (electronic music)