>>from around the globe. It's the >>Cube with digital >>coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, >>AWS and >>our community partners. >>Welcome back to the cubes ongoing coverage of this year's AWS reinvent. You know, normally we'd be in the middle of the San Sands Convention Center. We have two sets and 50,000 of our closest friends. We'd be deking out on cloud. Seems like a long time ago, but the show must go on. And it does. Joe Duffy is here. He's the co founder and CEO of Gloomy, and Justin Fits you is the vice president engineering for Cloud Engineering for snowflake. Welcome, gentlemen. Good to see you. >>It's good to be here, >>Joe. I love what you guys are doing. You know, leading your customers to the cloud and really attacking that I t labor problem that we've dealt with for years and years by playing a role in transforming what I would say is I t ops into cloud ups with programmable infra infrastructure practices. So take >>a >>moment to tell us. Why did you and your co founder start the company how you got it off the ground? People are always interested in how you got it funded. You got a couple of Seattle VCs, Madrona and Tola involved. Any a just got involved. So congrats on that. What's the story of your company? >>Yeah. So my background and my co founder Eric's background. You know, we spent multiple decades at Microsoft just really obsessing over developer platforms and productivity and trying to make you know developers lives as as as as productive as possible. You know, help them harness the power of software >>toe create, >>you know, innovative new applications and really spent time on technologies like Visual Studio and Ahmed. And and, you know, it really struck us that the cloud is changing everything about how we develop software. And yet from our perspective, coming from developer landed had almost changed nothing. You know, most of our customers were still, you know, developing software like they did 15 years ago, where it was a typical enter your application, they'd kind of write the code and then go to their I t team and say, Hey, we need to run this somewhere. Can you provisioned a few virtual machines? Can you prevision You know, maybe a database or two and and And so And then we went and talked Thio, you know, infrastructure teams and found out Hey, you know, folks were really toiling away with tools that air a pale in comparison when it comes to the productivity that we we were accustomed Thio on the developer side. And then frequently we heard from leaders that there were silos between the organizations. They couldn't build things quickly enough. They couldn't move quickly enough in cloud Native and the new public cloud capabilities just really were pushed pushing on that, really, you know. But the most innovative companies we kept hearing were the ones who figured this out, who really figured out how to move faster in the cloud. Companies like Snowflake really are leveraging the cloud toe transform entire businesses. You look at uber lyft Airbnb, these companies that really harnessed the cloud toe not just from a technical productivity standpoint, but really transform the business. Eh? So that was the opportunity that we saw Kalemie was Let's take a step back. We call this cloud engineering. Let's imagine a world where every developers, a cloud developer and infrastructure teams are enabling that new way of building. >>Great. So you mentioned cloud engineering. Now, Justin, you've done a bit a bit of cloud engineering yourself in your day. You know, the Cube has been following Snowflake very closely since it launched really mid last decade. And we've we've covered your novel, architectural approach and your cloud only mantra. Talk about that. And have there been any changes in how you're thinking about cloud adoption and how that's as that's increased and you've seen new use cases emerged. >>Yeah, so I think, you know, obviously Snowflake was was built on the foundation of cloud first, and in fact, cloud Onley are only platform and only infrastructure is is based on the cloud. But, you know, for us, it was absolutely key on. How do you develop a platform and a product that's completely elastic? Lee, scalable on drily, really allows for kind of the paper use and paper consumption model. We didn't really it would be very difficult for us to offer this and Thio offer a product in this way. On def, you start to think about kind of from a cloud engineering perspective. Um, we don't have the typical network engineers. A typical data center engineers that you that you might have seen previously. Instead, we're shifting our model in our what we do include engineering away from kind of an operations model or even devotes model towards the software engineering model. E. I think that's the That's the big shift to cloud engineering is that we're looking to hire and we're building a team of software engineers to build systems and platforms and and tooling Thio have the system self managed as much as possible, and it changes to our infrastructure that we look at any changes in our platform are all through, commits and and deployed via pipelines, as opposed to having Operator's log on and make these changes. And so that's the shift that I think we're seeing. And that's to kind of match the overall stuff like Model of Cloud, first and on and where the product is like just going. >>Like you said in cloud only, Justin, you use Pollux me in your own engineering and also in your product externally. Is that correct? And how so? >>Yeah, we actually use it in, specifically and, um, in our platform, in order to kind of deployed to manage and, uh, just operate a kind of our overall cloud infrastructure. We specifically use it more focused on the good days and and continue ization side of things. But that use cases kind of rapidly expanding across the organization. >>So I'm curious of what do you guys we're seeing in the market place? Joe, you know, thinking about cloud broadly, What's the impact that you're seeing on businesses? Who are the big players that you see out there? Maybe you could talk about some of the differentiation that you've noticed. >>Yeah, I think this notion of plot engineering, you know, even 3.5 years ago when we got started was in its infancy. You know, we definitely saw that. Hey, you know, the world is moving and shifting left, you know, it's just was saying and really, people are looking for new ways to empower developers, but that empowerment has to come with guard rails, right? And so what we're seeing is oftentimes, teams are now modernizing their entire platform infrastructure platform, and they're looking to technologies like kubernetes to do that. But increasingly, you know, aws, Azure gp. You know, when we started, um, there weren't any great managed kubernetes clusters. And now today, fast forward. You know Onley 3.5 years and and many of our customers are using flew me to help them get up and running with the chaos in AWS, for example, you look at a lot of folks transforming on Prem as well again many times, adopting kubernetes is sort of a if they intend to stay on Prem. You know, Thio, at least modernize their approach to application infrastructure delivery. That's where Pollux me really can help. It could be a bridge. Thio hate from on Prem to the public cloud. There's certainly a lot of folks doing great work in the space, you know, I think VM Ware has really kind of emerged as sort of vanguard thought leader in this in this space, especially with, you know, hep dio and now kind of pivotal joining the story. We see other, you know, great companies like hash in court, for we're doing good work in this space. Um, certainly we integrate with a lot of their technologies on you. Combine those with the public cloud providers. There's also a lot of just smaller startups in the space which you know, strikes in my heart. I love I love supporting the startup ecosystem. You know, whether that's for cell or net lif I or server list. You know, really trying to help developers harness more of the cloud. I think that's an emerging trend that we're gonna see accelerating in the coming years. >>Yeah. Thank you. You've mentioned a number of interesting emerging tools companies in the ecosystem. I mean, Justin talked about kubernetes. Are there other tooling that you're using that that might be, you know, some of your customers might like toe to know about. >>Yeah, I think so. So one thing I wanted to actually follow up with what Joe said here is is around kind of the multi cloud nature of what we do is is the tools, like gloomy are critical for us to be able to abstract away specific cloud provider AP ice and such and so given Snowflake operates on all three major public clouds and offers a seamless experience amongst all three of them. We have to have something that abstracts some of that complexity and some of those technical details away. Andi, that's why I kind of blew me, made sense in in this case and has helped us kind of achieved that cloud neutrality piece. Um, in terms of other tools that that you're thinking that we're talking about, I think Bellamy is doing a great job kind of on some of these on some of the kind of that interaction and infrastructure and sensation. But we're looking for tooling to kind of look for the overall workflow automation piece on orchestration. So what sits on top of say, you're using intervals using terra form? You may be using Polonia's well, but what kind of orchestrates all these pieces together? Onda, How do you kind of build workflow automation? And I think there's a lot of companies and technology providers that air starting up in this area to kind of stitch all these pieces together so that you kind of have a seamless kind of work flow across across your infrastructure. >>Got it. So, Joe, I'm kind of curious you talked a little bit about your background at Microsoft, and you're even a TMC where you're helping, you know, people manage Luns. It was a sort of skill set that is not in high demand today. Early. Shouldn't be people really need to transform? I've said that a lot in the queue, but But, you know, maybe talk a little bit about the experiences that you've had in the past that informed the direction that Pollux me is taking and where you see it going specifically. I mean, I've been talking a lot about the next decade of cloud is not gonna be the same as the last decade of the cloud. How did you How do you see it? >>Yeah, I think I recognize a clear trend, you know, in with cloud computing. Uh, you know, back I can't remember 13 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, When, when When the Azure project started. You know Dave Cutler, who actually founded the anti project at Microsoft, Actually, was was one of the first engineers that started Azure. And he called it a cloud operating system. And, you know, I think that vision of hey, the cloud is the new operating system is something that we're still just chipping away at. And that was that was a clear trend, you know, having seen these transformations in the past, you know the shift from, you know, dos to windows from windows to mobile Thio, client server thio now the cloud every step of the way. We always transform the way we build applications. And I think where we're at now is horse, really in the midst of a transition that I think we'll look back. You never know when it's happening right? But you can always look back in hindsight and see that it did happen. And I think the trend that we're going through now with service meshes and just, you know, micro services and service list is really we're building distributed applications. These clouds made of applications, they're distributed applications. And that was the trend that I, I recognized, also recognizes another trend, which is, you know, we spent 30 years building great tools. You know, I d s test frameworks sharing and reuse package managers. We figured out static analysis and how to fix security problems in this in in programming languages that we've got today. Let's not go rebuild all that. Let's leverage that, and and so that's what Eric and I said they want, you know, Let's stand on the shoulders of giants. Let's leverage all this good work that has come before us. Let's just apply that to the infrastructure domain and really try toe smooth things out. Give us a new sort of level playing field to build on. From here is we go forward and I'm excited that Parliament gives us that foundation that we can now build on top of >>Great and Justin, of course, were covered. Aws reinvent you guys. It was kind of your your first platform. It's your largest, the largest component of your business. And I have been saying, Ah lot that, you know the early days of cloud was about infrastructure last 32 throw in some database. But really, there's a new workload that's emerging. And you guys are at the heart of that where people are putting governed data giving access to that data, making it secure, uh, sharing that data across an ecosystem so that new workload is really driving new innovation. I wonder how you see that what you see the next half a decade or decades looking like in terms of innovation? >>Yeah, I think I think it za valid point, which is, um, it's less about infrastructure and more about the services that you're providing with that infrastructure. And what what value are you able to add and So I think that's it, Snowflake. The thing that we're really focused on, which is abstract away, all these tunes and all these knobs and such, and the how much remember you have on a specific and a piece of infrastructure or describes or anything like that. So what's the business value? And how can we present that business value in a uniform way, regardless of kind of the underlying service provider on baby to a different class of business users, someone who wants a low data and just two analysts against that they really don't want to understand what's happening underneath. And I think that's that's where this club engineering piece comes in. Um, and what my team is doing is really focused on How do we abstract away that kind of lower level infrastructure and scalability pieces and allow the application developers to develop this application that is providing business value in a transparent and seamless way and in elastic way such that we can scale up and down we can. We have the ability, obviously, to replicate both within regions and clouds, but also across different clouds. So from a business resiliency and and up time point of view. That's that's something that's been really important. Um, and I think also how do we security is? Becoming is obviously a huge, huge importance, given the classifications type of day that people are putting within our platform. So how are we able Thio ensure that there is a pipeline where developers have reviews and commits of any kind of changes going into the system and their arm's length away, and could be fully audited for various clients and regular regulatory needs? And that's something that kind of this suffer engineering cloud engineering concept has really helped develop and allowed us Thio obviously be successful with various different types of industries. >>Joe, we're almost out of time. I wonder if you could bring us home. I mean, some of the things Justin was talking about I mean, I definitely see a lot of potential disruption coming from the world of developers. Uh, he was talking. He was talking about consumption models different than many of the SAS pricing models. And how do you How do you see it? Developers air kind of the really the new source of innovation. Your final thoughts. >>Yeah. I think we're democratizing access to the cloud for everybody. I think you know it's not just about developers, but it's It's really all engineers of all backgrounds, its developers, its infrastructure engineers, its operations engineers, its security engineers. You know, Justin's mentioning compliance and security. These air really critical elements of how we deliver software into the cloud. So I think you know what you're going to see is you're gonna see a lot of new, compelling experiences built thanks to cloud capabilities. You know, the fact that you've got a I and M l and all these infinitely scalable data services like snowflake and, you know, just an arm's length away that you can use as building blocks in your applications. You know, application developers love that. You know, if we can just empower them to run fast, they will run fast, and we'll build great applications. And infrastructure teams and security engineers will be central to enabling that that new future. I think you also see that you know infrastructure and cloud services will become accessible to an entirely new audience. You know, kids graduating from college, they understand Java script. They understand python now they can really just harness the cloud to build amazing new experiences. So I think we're still, you know, still early days on the transition to the cloud. I know where many years on the journey, but we've got many, many years, you know, in our future. And it's very exciting. >>Well, thank you, guys, Joe and Justin. I really appreciate it. Congratulations on your respective success. I know is Joe said you got a lot more work to do, but I really appreciate you coming on the Cube. >>Awesome. Thank you. You're >>welcome. All right, so we're here covering reinvent 2020. The virtual edition. Keep it right there for more great content. Were unpacking the cloud and looking to the future. You're watching the cube?

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco It's theCUBE. Covering RSA Conference 2020, San Francisco. Brought to you by Silicon Angled Media >> Hi everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage here at RSA Conference 2020. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE We're on the floor getting all the data, sharing it with you here, Cube coverage. Got the best new generation shift happening as cloud computing goes to the whole other level. Multi-cloud, hybrid cloud changing the game. You're seeing the companies transition from an on-premises to cloud architecture. This is forcing all the companies to change. So a new generation of security is here and we've got a great guest, so a hot start-up. Masha Sedova, co-founder of Elevate Security. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you so much for having me, John. >> So the next generation in what will be a multi-generational security paradigm, is kind of happening right now with the beginning of, we're seeing the transition, Palo Alto Networks announced earnings yesterday down 13% after hours because of the shift to the cloud. Now I think they're going to do well, they're well positioned, but it highlights this next generation security. You guys are a hot start-up, Elevate Security. What is the sea change? What is going on with security? What is this next generation paradigm about? >> Yeah, so it's interesting that you talk about this as next generation. In some ways, I see this as a two-prong move between, yes, we're moving more into the cloud but we're also going back to our roots. We're figuring out how to do asset management right, we're figuring out how to do patching right, and for the first time, we're figuring how to do the human element right. And that's what where we come in. >> You know, the disruption of these new shifts, it also kind of hits like this, the old expression, 'same wine, new bottle', all this, but it's a data problem. Security has always been a data problem, and we've seen some learnings around data. Visualization, wrangling, there's a lot of best practices around there. You guys are trying to change the security paradigm by incorporating a data-centric view with changing the behavior of the humans and the machines and kind of making it easier to manage. Could you share what you guys are doing? What's the vision for Elevate? >> Yeah, so we believe and we've seen, from our experience being practitioners, you can't change what you can't measure. If you don't have visibility, you don't know where you're going. And that's probably been one of the biggest pain-point in the security awareness space traditionally. We just roll out training and hope it works. And it doesn't, which is why human error is a huge source of our breaches. But we keep rolling out the same one-size fits all approach without wanting to measure or, being able to. So, we've decided to turn the problem on its head and we use existing data sets that most organizations who have a baseline level of maturity already have in place. Your end point protections, your DLP solutions, your proxies, your email security gateways and using that to understand what your employees are doing on the network to see if user generated incidents are getting better over time or getting worse. And using that as the instrumentation and the level of visibility into understanding how you should be orchestrating your program in this space. >> You know, that's a great point. I was just having a conversation last night at one of the cocktail parties here around RSA and we were debating on, we talk about the kind of breaches, you mentioned breaches, well there's the pure breach where I'm going to attack and penetrate the well fortified network. But then there's just human error, an S3 bucket laying open or some configuration problem. I guess it's not really a breach, it's kind of an open door so the kind of notion of a breach is multifold. How do you see that, because again, human error, insider threats or human error, these are enabling the hackers. >> Yeah >> This is not new. >> Yeah. >> How bad is the problem? >> It depends on what report you read. The biggest number I've seen so far is something like 95% of breaches have human error. But I honestly, I couldn't tell you what the 5% that don't include it because if you go far enough back, it's because a patch wasn't applied and there is a human being involved there because there is vulnerability in code, that's probably a secure coding practice when you're a development organization. Maybe it's a process that wasn't followed or even created in the first place. There's a human being at the core of every one of these breaches and, it needs to be addressed as holistically as our technologies and our processes right now in the space. >> The evolution of human intelligence augmented by machines will certainly help. >> That's it, yeah. >> I mean, I've got to ask you, obviously you're well-funded. Costanova Ventures well known in the enterprise space, Greg Sands and the team there, really strong, but you guys entered the market, why? I mean you guys, you and your founder both at Salesforce.com. Salesforce gurus doing a lot of work there. Obviously you've seen the large scale, first wave of the cloud. >> Yeah >> Why do the start-up? What was the problem statement you guys were going after? >> So, my co-founder and I both came from the world of being practitioners and we saw how limited the space was and actually changing human behavior, I was given some animated PowerPoints, said use this to keep the Russians out of your network, which is a practical joke unless your job is on the line, so I took a huge step back and I said, there are other fields that have figured this out. Behavioral science being one of them, they use positive reinforcement, gamification, marketing and advertisements have figured out how to engage the human element, just look around the RSA floor, and there's so many learnings of how we make decisions as human beings that can be applied into changing people's behaviors in security. So that's what we did. >> And what was the behavior you're trying to change? >> Yeah, so the top one's always that our attackers are getting into organizations, so, reducing phishing click-throughs an obvious one, increasing reporting rates, reducing malware infection rates, improving sensitive data handling, all of which have ties back to, as I was mentioning earlier, security data sources. So, we get to map those and use that data to then drive behavior change that's rooted in concepts like social proof, how are you doing compared to your peers? We make dinner decisions on that and Amazon buying decisions on that, why not influence security like that? >> So building some intelligence into the system, is there a particular market you're targeting? I mean, here people like to talk in segments, is there a certain market that you guys are targeting? >> Yeah, so the amazing thing about this is, and probably no surprise, the human element is a ubiquitous problem. We are in over a dozen different industries and we've seen this approach work across all of those industries because human beings make the same mistakes, no matter what kind of company they're in. We really work well with larger enterprises. We work well with larger enterprises because they tend to have the data sets that really provides insights into human behavior. >> And what's the business model you guys envision happening with your service product? >> We sell to enterprises and security, the CISO and the package as a whole, gives them the tools to have the voice internally in their organization We sell to Fortune 1000 companies, >> So it's a SAAS service? >> Yeah, SAAS service, yeah. >> And so what's the technology secret sauce? (laughing) >> Um, that's a great question but really, our expertise is understanding what information people need at what time and under what circumstances, that best changes their behavior. So we really are content diagnostic, we are much more about the engine that understands what content needs to be presented to whom and why. So that everyone is getting only the information they need, they understand why they need it and they don't need anything extra-superfluous to their... >> Okay, so I was saying on theCUBE, my last event was at, CIO's can have good days and bad days. They have good days, CISOs really have good days, many will say bad days, >> Masha: Yeah, it's a hard job. >> So how do I know I need the Elevate Solution? What problem do I have, what's in it for me? What do I get out of it? When do I know when to engage with you guys? >> I take a look at how many user generated incidents your (mumbles) responding to, and I would imagine it is a large majority of them. We've seen, while we were working at Salesforce and across our current customers, close to a 40% reduction rate in user generated incidents, which clearly correlates to time spent on much more useful things than cleaning up mistakes. It's also one of the biggest ROI's you can get for the cheapest investment. By investing a little bit in your organization now, the impact you have in your culture and investing in the future decision, the future mistakes that never get made, are actually untold, the benefit of that is untold. >> So you're really kind of coming in as a holistic, kind of a security data plane if you will, aggregating the data points, making a visualization in human component. >> You've got it. >> Now, what's the human touchpoint? Is it a dashboard? Is it notifications? Personalization? How is the benefit rendered for the customer? >> So we give security teams and CSOs a dashboard that maps their organization's strengths and weaknesses. But for every employee, we give personalized, tailored feedback. Right now it shows up in an email that they get on an ongoing basis. We also have one that we tailor for executives, so the executive gets one for their department and we create an executive leaderboard that compares their performance to fellow peers and I'll tell you, execs love to win, so we've seen immense change from that move alone. >> Well, impressive pedigree on your entrepreneurial background, I see Salesforce has really kind of, I consider real first generation cloud before cloud actually happened, and there's a lot of learn, it was always an Apple case, now it's AWS, but it's it's own cloud as we all know, what are the learnings that you saw from Salesforce that you said hey, I'm going to connect those dots to the new opportunity? What's the real key there? >> So, I had two major aha's that I've been sharing with my work since. One, it's not what people know, but it's what they do that matters, and if you can sit with a moment and think about that, you realize it's not more training, because people might actually know the information, but they just choose not to do it. How many people smoke, and they still know it kills them? They think that it doesn't apply to them, same thing with security. I know what I need to do, I'm just not incentivized to do it, so there's a huge motivation factor that needs to be addressed. That's one thing that I don't see a lot of other players on the market doing and one thing we just really wanted to do as well. >> So it sounds like you guys are providing a vision around using sheet learning and AI and data synthesis wrangling and all that good stuff, to be an assistant, a personal assistant to security folks, because it sounds like you're trying to make their life easier, make better decisions. Sounds like you guys are trying to distract away all these signals, >> You're right. >> See what to pay attention to. >> And make it more relevant, yeah. Well think about what Fitbit did for your own personal fitness. It curates a personal relationship based on a whole bunch of data. How you're doing, goals you've set, and all of a sudden, a couple of miles walk leads to an immense lifestyle change. Same thing with security, yeah. >> That's interesting, I love the Fitbit analogy because if you think about the digital ecosystem of an enterprise, it used to be siloed, IT driven, now with digital, everything's connected so technically, you're instrumenting a lot of things for everything. >> Yeah. >> So the question's not so much instrumentation, it's what's happening when and contextually why. >> That's it, why, that's exactly it. Yeah, you totally got it. >> Okay. I got it. >> Yeah, I can see the light bulb. >> Okay, aha, ding ding. All right, so back to the customer pain point. You mentioned some data points around KPI's that they might or things that they might want to call you so it's incidents, what kind of incidents? When do I know I need to get you involved? Will you repeat those again? >> There's two places where it's a great time to involve. Now, because of the human element is, or think about this as an investment. If you do non-investor security culture, one way or another, you have security culture. It's either hurting you or it's helping you and by hurting you, people are choosing to forego investing security processes or secure cultures and you are just increasing your security debt. By stepping in to address that now, you are actually paying it forward. The second best time, is after you realize you should have done that. Post-breaches or post incidents, is a really great time to come in and look at your culture because people are willing to suspend their beliefs of what good behavior looks like, what's acceptable and when you look at an organization and their culture, it is most valuable after a time of crisis, public or otherwise, and that is a really great time to consider it. >> I think that human error is a huge thing, whether it's as trivial as leaving an S3 bucket open or whatever, I think it's going to get more acute with service meshes and cloud-native microservices. It's going to get much more dynamic and sometimes services can be stood up and torn down without any human knowledge, so there's a lot of blind spots potentially. This brings up the question of how does the collaboration piece, because one of the things about the security industry is, it's a community. Sharing data's important, having access to data, how do you think about that as the founder of a start-up that has a 20 mile steer to the future around data access, data diversity, blind spots, how do you look at that and how do you advise your clients to think about that? >> I've always been really pro data sharing. I think it's one of the things that has held us back as an industry, we're very siloed in this space, especially as it relates to human behavior. I have no idea, as a regular CISO of a company, if I am doing enough to protect my employees, is my phishing click (mumbles), are my malware download rates above normal, below or should I invest more, am I doing enough? How do I do compared to my peers and without sharing industry stats, we have no idea if we're investing enough or quite honestly, not enough in this space. And the second thing is, what are approaches that are most effective? So let's say I have a malware infection problem, which approach, is it this training? Is it a communication? Is it positive reinforcement, is it punishment? What is the most effective to leverage this type of output? What's the input output relation? And we're real excited to have shared data with Horizon Data Breach Report for the first time this year, to start giving back to the communities, specifically to help answer some of these questions. >> Well, I think you're onto something with this behavioral science intersection with human behavior and executive around security practices. I think it's going to be an awesome, thanks for sharing the insights, Miss Masha on theCUBE here. A quick plug for your company, (mumbles) you're funded, Series A funding, take us through the stats, you're hiring what kind of positions, give a plug to the company. >> So, Elevate Security, we're three years old. We have raised ten million to date. We're based in both Berkeley and Montreal and we're hiring sales reps on the west coast, a security product manager and any engineering talent really focused on building an awesome data warehouse infrastructure. So, please check out our website, www.elevatesecurity.com/careers for jobs. >> Two hot engineering markets, Berkeley I see poaching out of Cal, and also Montreal, >> Montreal, McGill and Monterey. >> You got that whole top belt of computer science up in Canada. >> Yeah. >> Well, congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, sharing your story. >> Thank you. >> Security kind of giving the next generation all kinds of new opportunities to make security better. Some CUBE coverage here in San Francisco, at the Moscone Center. I'm John Furrier, we'll be right back after this break. (upbeat music)

>>live from Washington, D. C. It's the Cube covering Bumi World 19 Do you buy movie? >>Welcome back to the Cubes. Coverage of Bumi World 19 I'm Lisa Martin with John Ferrier. John and I have a couple of gents joining us. To my right is Jeff Emerson, the global managing director for Custom Application Engineering Ethics Center. Hey, just hey, welcome. Thank you were glad to tell you, and we've got Steve would back with us. The CPO up. Hey, Steve, >>Hayley says. Ages >>minutes. You sticking into some research about that? The history of Bumi and Ipads and just looking at how the consumer ization effect has infected by a bad word has really infiltrated has that every industry organizations went from having enterprise applications. Legacy applications, cloud applications, custom applications. Let's talk about custom applications. What are you seeing in the customer marketplace for the demand for having this level of customization, whether it's a retail or or, you know, utilities company, >>it really doesn't matter what industry it is these days. Custom applications were going through a renaissance. It is. It is truly the renaissance of custom, where there was once a swing towards enterprise applications and the packages and so on. And now it's realized that oh gosh t separate ourselves from our competition. We have two great something that doesn't exist well, that is, by its nature, a custom application. And so these air coming up, Maura and Maur across the industry, and it's really starting to dominate the value chain for software. >>You were here in D. C. And public sector is going through a modernization as well. He looked at government procurement. I mean, essentially with data, everything's instrumental. You have unlimited resource with cloud computing. So essentially personalization. Hot trend. So applications air being personalized. They're customized. So every app should be not general purpose unless it's either under the covers. So this is the country's We've been having you guys. Bumi has a platform. You enable APS? You guys are deploying it. How are customers responded to this? Because to me they might go Will custom haps me, feels expensive. It feels one off the old adage. It's a one off, but it seems to be coming back. >>It does end. Fact is, you're able to do things so much more quickly today than you ever have been able to in the fast in the past and three ability to create new experiences quickly and react in an agile fashion to how those applications are being received in the marketplace. React to the data that is generated both as the primary data and the data exhaust from those systems to determine what your customers need, what they want, how they're going to act, what they're going to buy. All of those things are things that we can pull together so much more quickly today than we could ever in the past. And so it's great. >>Steve, We were talking earlier about how the data's real big part of the equation. Now everything about the application world it used to be the infrastructure would dictate what you could build. Yeah, now you have application developers saying, This is what I want now the infrastructures so programmable it's kind of flipped around that they're dictating kind of terms. >>Well, there's suddenly being this sort of emergence of these low code platforms to kind of help manage that. I mean, and they're kind of taking care of a lot of the infrastructure so you can kind of skill them is needed, but yeah, I mean, there's been a him. It's been a huge birthday. I couldn't agree more. There's like the demand for applications. We're seeing a lot. Sure there's the mega applications. We tend to leave those to our sister company Pivotal toe code those with this whole other ecosystem of applications everywhere. The personalization sze of the line of business needs to improve. Their business processes were going after that layer. We have to do it in the right way to make it super easy to do on the infrastructure that people expected to be with the architecture they expect to see. So they're highly customizable, so get exactly what they want. >>Jeff, you know, we always talk on the industry joke on the Cube, and the game is changed, but it's still the same. And every time a new trend comes, you know it's the death of something. A meteorite media to say something's dying when something new starts right. But nothing really changes everything about applications. It's the same gain just with a different twist. Do it with cloud. How are customers were spouting this? Because obviously his benefits business benefits cost benefits lot of mount up line with how they're attacking the application development. Then they got a data tsunami happening. But they gotta build APS, right, Not anything, right? >>It was once said that absolute in the world, and now it's really that data is feeding the world right? And so the amount of data that's out there and accessible and usable within applications is absolutely incredible. And so, with the emergence of the cloud in order, Thio support those massive amounts of data and Dr Rapid Development and then lo code to make that development much easier. These things all time come together, and you talked about the death of X, y or Z. We talk now about living systems, right on living systems are things that are easy to modify, their absolutely attainable and usable and expandable for for any kind of use and ultimately adaptable. >>So John mentioned the word one off a minute ago, and it reminded me of something where, you know, whatever industry that you're in, Not too long ago it was customers got some one off. Whether it's an application or part of the infrastructure, that's expensive, and it's not something that can be monetized but down to your point it's it's really custom. Applications are a big part of a business. Is competitive advantage. So what is it about the customized app? Is it Is it the fact that it's driven by an A P I? That's programmable that allows it to be customized at scale toe, where it's not a one off from a support perspective, it's something that really a company can use as that competitive leg up. >>Right in the this livings living systems world. We really have agile engineering, agile methods and so that we're doing development quickly. And we're doing this in an engineering fashion that has micro service's and small pieces of functionality that could be grabbed and plugged and played together. Thio great, different experiences. And so that granular ization of software is something that drives his flexibility and enables us to make modifications and updates quickly. >>Actually, ive your customer example that it was something we'd done, which is absence of term it like how the oil and gas industry saved nurses in Africa are saved people in Africa, which is we built, a solution that allowed them nurses in sub Saharan Africa to visit patients out in the field. They built it on a loco pa from witches. Flow part of me connected through a P eyes connected to all the infrastructure. But a lot of the work was on, uh, android tablets offline. So with the loco PA from that could deliver this solution with all offline capabilities, all the connectivity, all the integration, all built in without writing. Really any code? The only code there rose to customize the look and feel so looked exactly what they want. They delivered that on early version of our offline framework and then latterly the oil and gas industry origin energy deployed a similar solution to their rigs. The lot of you seem really complicated things of form, validation and better validation rules and better data synchronization that really forced us to improve our offline framework to something which is a Steve a big jump ahead of where it was before. And then lo and behold, the nurses nafta came back to us and said, Well, actually went up, Did or are we gonna run on desktops as well as ipads? Funnily enough, and we're like, Well, good news. We've actually already added that support. And so literally from three days of that phone call to them going live within our laptops and ipads. That was all it took. They didn't have to write any CO. They literally We just give them access to the new you. I will find framework. They installed it, turn off the wet. And that's kind of the power of this kind of next gen of up building that for this kind of line of business applications where you just need to innovate, how you work, you don't have to spend three years rebuilding those for iPad and >>Jeff houses. That dynamic, which is pretty much, I think, consisted a lot of these new APS. How's it changed your business? Because you know the theme that we've been identifying the mega trend is that there's more project work going on fast time to value, agile. You guys been doing exceptional work there and following Madu Center's been doing talking to Paul Doherty amongst others. Get a huge data science team you guys are on. I know you guys have transformed but big project and now a bunch of little projects going on, so it's kind of have to make you guys more agile as a practice because you've got to go out and solve the business problems with the customers. How is this dynamic changed? >>You're right. We absolutely do. And we have to assume muchas anything. It's helping our customers get into that mode of thinking as well. What was once a six months of gathering and documenting requirements is now done in a handful of ours. At first to get the first small bit of what's gonna be valuable functionality to put out there. And you keep doing that irritably. Overtime is instead of in a six month period, but then gets thrown over the wall. Thio have other people do this for another build stuff for six or nine >>months. I mean, the federation and getting those winds early gets proof points, gets mo mentum validation. You're not waiting for a gestation period. >>You make good decisions about what to do next on DDE. What to not do that you were planning on doing but turns out, doesn't mean >>I want to get your thoughts on something important you mentioned humanization. We see that big trend because Avery people centric and you're thinking at Bumi and we've had this debate in the queue we? We didn't come in on either side yet, but you know it orations great, great, fast. But the old days of software was a lot of craftsmanship involved, you know, crafting the product, getting it right now it's ship be embarrassed, ship it fast and then injury, which is great for efficiency. But there's a trend coming back to crafting product. They're absolutely. What is your thoughts on this? Because craft Manship is now design thinking. Would it be calling in different names? But this is a new thing. It's happening all the time. >>That software software craftsmanship is something that is more important today than it ever has been. Because you're going fast. And because you're putting things out into the market very quickly, you can't afford to make big mistakes, right? You could make functional decision mistakes, right? Oh, that wasn't the right thing for the customer, but having it not work or creating it bad experiences, right? Very bad, right? And so that craftsmanship building in all the Dev Ops pipelines and the error check in the testing and gateways and security checking all that happens automatically every time you check in code that is critical and it drives that craftsmanship back to the developer, right? Pushing left so that you make a mistake. You fix it within minutes, as opposed to >>you. Run private engineering, Smile on your face. Come on, What's your angle on this >>time? And craftsmanship is obviously huge mean? When we thought about like Bumi, we kind of wanted to make sure that yeah, that way we used to talk a little bit. No code platforms. And I think that what they did was they left out the craftsmanship that developers could do. And I've kind of thought it was like, Hey, if you can put like the business or the person who really understands the process of the application into the beating heart of the creation process so they could be on the right side of the soft waiting the world like they could be a creator and producer as much as they could be a consumer of applications, you allow them to do that and then let developers have radiate that that out with new engage with models, coding out new experiences that really hyper specific to the EU's case of the user. That's kind of the ultimate you get the core business value, and then you get the craftsmanship of the engineers together, I think, >>and I'm glad you said that because there's so many cases where here, we want to push it so that we don't even need software engineers for our software. And that's an interesting idea. Yeah, but it's actually not a good idea. Ll know or idea, Yes, simply because you there's an important aspect of software and and how I t runs that even if you have low coach, uh, components in order to drive the functionality right, these things that have to be done. But frankly, professional software engineers know how to do. >>It's better and faster and easier to do it that way. >>I think the federation certainly makes the problem that you're trying to solve. Solvable, right? Don't take your eye off the main ball, which is saw the problem, but get it elegantly designed all right, but I think that's a good This is a big discussion. You're seeing a lot with loco. So again, this is back. The custom maps custom APS just means a targeted app that solves a specific problem because it is a unique problem and it's different than the other one, right? That's the speed game. It's a speed game to nose in it that fast, fast, fast. >>And the engineering methods have changed really over the last couple of decades. While I've been doing this. Where way talked a moment about ago about the waterfall ways and then the agile ways. And the simple fact of the matter is that you're developing small pieces of software to get out into the market quickly, and you can do this in a matter of days and weeks. A supposed to months and quarters >>right, which many businesses don't have that time for company competitors gonna get in there. I'm curious as the development methods have changed so dramatically have the customer conversations like Are you guys talking more with business leaders vs You know the Guys and Girls and Dev Ops is that is this movie business little conversation that a CEO CFO, a CEO is involved in? >>So from our perspective at Accenture that the technology is always there to drive a business need, and so that conversation is first with the business owners, and that was true 20 years ago as well. The a CZ much as we do. I t transformation. It's a business lead. I transformation and, more often, technology supported business transformation. >>Excellent. Well, guys, thank you for joining John and me on the program today. Talking about all the things that you guys are seeing out in the field. Exciting stuff. >>Thanks for having us. >>We appreciate your time. Thank you for John Ferrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from Bhumi World 19. Thanks for watching.

>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering Inforum DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Good afternoon and welcome back to Inforum 2018. Our coverage here on theCUBE as we start to wrap up our two days of coverage here at the show. We're in Washington, D.C. at the Walter Washington Convention Center, along with Dave Vellante, John Walls here. We're joined now by Mayumi Hiramatsu, who is the SVP of Cloud Operations Engineering and Security at Infor. Mayumi, how are you doing? >> Great to be here, thanks for coming. >> And a recent honoree by the way, Woman of the Year at the Women in IT Awards, so congratulations on that. (clapping) >> Awesome! >> Thank you. >> Very nice honor. >> Great. >> Tell us... big picture here, cloud strategy as far as Infor is concerned and why that separates you from the pack. What makes that stand out, you think, from your peers? >> I think there are a couple of things. One is that when I think of cloud, a lot of people will think about cloud as, it's a software running in the cloud, but it's more than that. It's about the solution and the capabilities that we're building on the cloud. And Infor is perfect, in that we're building enterprise software solutions. So if you look at Infor and compare us to the competition, we may have multiple of competition wrapped together in a solution. And that's really powerful, and you can only do that, really well, in the cloud because it's already built for that. It's integrated and the power of data is really amazing, because when you think about cloud, it's not just the software, it's the data, what you can do with it. And with the latest technologies around artificial intelligence and machine learning, there is so much insight we can give to our enterprise customers to make them successful in their business. So, I think of cloud as not only the technology, which I love, because I'm actually an engineer, but it's really the business transformation, digital transformation that the cloud enables, with the technologies like artificial intelligence, data analytics, data science, machine learning. There's just so much bolted on, that you can really only do in the cloud. >> Can you help us understand that competitive nuance? >> Yeah. >> I'm not sure I fully understand, 'cause others will say, well, we have cloud too. What's different between the way in which you provide solutions in the cloud and... pick a company. >> Yeah. >> Another company says, we have cloud, all of our SaaS is in the cloud. >> Right, so I think the first thing is, Infor's always focused on solutions, which means that our competition may have one of, let's say, a dozen things that we put together. So, if you're using our competition, they may have a cloud and some of them were born in the cloud, but then you have to figure out, how do I integrate it with the rest of the world? Because if you think about it, ERP. It's running your business. And it might be your HR and about your employees. It might be CRM and customer information. It could be supply chain and figuring out what parts I need to buy. It could be billing and figuring out how do I bill my customers. All these different solutions today, if you look at our competition, they may solve one, two, three different portions, but certainly not a dozen of these all together and then tailored towards the industry. So, we can pretty much bolt on and get started pretty quickly, if you think about, for example, healthcare. We already have a healthcare solution ready to go, so you don't have to figure out how do I put 12, 15 different software, glue it together and make it work? And maybe some of it is running in the cloud, maybe some of it is not running in the cloud, then the integration and making it work gets really complex. But ours is already pre-built, ready for that, whether it's healthcare, manufacturing, food & beverage, fashion. We have a lot of these already ready to go, so then you just have to customize it, as opposed to starting from scratch, figuring out how to integrate all these different software, making sure they work together and then harnessing the data, and then adding all these different, artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities that is so powerful today. You can't do that without the cloud and you certainly can't do it if you're trying to glue together different solutions. It's just really not easy. And I'll add one more thing, I was talking to a customer about this today, which I thought was brilliant. The other thing is security. Most people worry about security in the cloud and I run our security as well, the Chief Information Security Officer reports in to me and the whole security team does. And I can tell you, if you're combining 12, 15 different types of software and trying to have consistent security all across? Oh, that's a very difficult thing to do. But we've already figured it out. So all you have to do is buy the package, the solution, it' already working together. You already have security overlay on it. They have consistency in terms of how we manage the security, whether it's single sign-on and who has access, and making sure that that gets all the way through, all the way up to the data lake, where all of the data gets captured, all the way up to the artificial intelligence. So, if you think about security and how important that is, and how difficult it might be to do on one software, let alone a dozen software, the fact that we've already built that, is a big differentiator. >> So it's all there, and when you talked about, all you have to do is customize it, you're talking about, you're not talking about hardcore coding, you're talking about things like naming and setting it up. Is that right? >> Yeah, and-- >> Or are you talking about deeper levels of custom mods? >> In our multi-tenant cloud, we don't do mods, but instead, we have extensions. And extensibility is really important because now those are, again, essentially plug-and-play. We already built it for you, so it's so much easier than creating each piece of code every single time. Again, it's about, how do you make sure that you can integrate these very important sets of business processes together. Not only how quickly can you use it, how secure is it? And ensuring that you can actually focus on your business value, right, because trying to assemble all of this together and making it work, it's an enormous amount of work and I think, as an enterprise, you want to focus on actually giving customer value instead of trying to figure out, the mechanics underneath the hood. >> I mean, you certainly get the value of cloud software, right, and cloud ERP. Who doesn't? Like out of the industries that you're trying to, get in front of or whose attention you're trying to get. Where's the, if there's someone that's kicking and screaming a little bit, who might that be or what might that be? >> I don't think that there's a specific industry, if you will, I think some industries, in fact, and when I think about it, all industries are getting disrupted, right? If they don't, they're actually getting left behind. So, I think some industries feel it more, as in, they might be behind the curve. And I wouldn't necessarily say industry, maybe some of the companies in that industry. >> Companies within? >> Yeah, are waking up to it. I went to a Gartner Supply Chain Conference a couple years ago and they were talking about bimodal supply chain, right. You have the teams that are doing the old way and then companies that are doing the new way. And companies are literally going through this shift. And I had this interesting conversation that it's really not bimodal. Companies are essentially somewhere in that spectrum and what they need to do is figure out from point A to point B and how you make that transition. It's a huge transition. I would also say that there's a cultural element as well, and so one of the key things that, especially for companies that are moving from on-prem to cloud. As a provider, it's really important to realize it's a completely different business model. And it's not always talked about, again, a lot of times people think, oh well, you know, Infor, you just moved the software into AWS and you're calling it SaaS. It's more than that. Besides the capabilities, its a huge cultural shift that even Charles talked about on-stage, which is that, software companies you focus on the product, versus, as a SaaS, the last 'S', Software as a Service, you are focusing on the service. So, the analogy I use a lot is, maybe we were actually a food company, we'd build beautiful food, delicious food, nutritious food, maybe it was a rotisserie chicken, right? But now I switch to a restaurant. Food is only table stakes. And you know, restaurant reviews is about services, the ambiance, how quickly you respond, how clean it is, all these other elements matter. And if you think about Infor or any other company for that matter, that we're focused on product and software, to then becoming a SaaS service provider, it's a huge transformation for a company, and I can tell you we're going through that, right? Infor as an on-prem company moving to the SaaS, and there's so much focus now on customer experience, is because realizing that we're no longer a software company, we're a Software as a Service company. And there's a lot more we need to put in, in terms of making sure the customer experience is good. As our customers go through the same journey, they also need to realize, it's no longer about providing that product, but the experience that they're providing to the customers, and we see our customers actually going through that journey. Some might be harder to move within whatever industry, because maybe they have legacy product, legacy machines, right, to be able to lift and ship to quickly. But there's definitely a path, and if you think about some of these industries that's been around for a long time, they're definitely going through this transition, and in fact, I think they have to. >> So how did you set priorities in terms of, you come to that recognition that we're services, in the cloud. Luckily, you don't have to manage data centers, so you could take that off the table, so what were your priorities and where did you start, and what are you focused on now? >> One of the first things that I did was really pushing this cultural shift for the company, because a lot of people, some people may think, okay, it's software, I'm putting in the AWS, it's cloud. But all the other service elements, like that restaurant analogy, it wasn't mature in terms of where we needed to be and therefore you hear a lot about customer experience and customer success and a lot of these elements that we really have to put more emphasis on. But the other areas that I focused, so I came in, I focused on cloud operations, security, tooling, and architecture, that was the set that I was focused on. What I did was essentially transformation, right, it's People Process Technology in addition to culture, so culture we already talked about, the sense of urgency is very different as well. On-prem, maybe you don't have to respond in two seconds, but in cloud, you do, and so making sure that we had crisp KPIs, which are different than on-prem, making sure that processes were completely redefined. I've actually done benchmark with our competition to see that our SLAs and KPIs are either on par or better. I'm a big proponent of engineering and technology, so we built a lot of technology monitoring, tooling, so that we can do a lot more in terms of self-service and automation, that's really the only to scale, and execute consistently. Spent a lot of time over the last year, literally re-defining the identity of our jobs to how do we make sure we have the right skillset, and retraining some of the folks who may have a new identity and they need to learn new skills, to coming up with new tools and technologies that they can use, to changing our processes so we can up our SLA and make sure that we're either meeting or beating our customers' SLAs, complete transformation in the last year. >> You must be exhausted. (laughs) >> When do you sleep? >> I don't sleep much, but... >> You must not. >> So, new metrics, this is intriguing to me. Can you give us an example of sort of this, new KPIs as a result of this cloud, SaaS world? >> Yeah, for sure. I think every company has their own sort of core KPIs that are public, and cloud is usually uptime, right? If you have support, it could be how quickly you respond, we call it mean time to respond. Underneath the hood, I've created key KPIs for, what I call, critical cloud qualities. One is, of course, reliability, so that would be in addition to uptime, like 99.7%, which is two hours and 11 minutes by the way, per month downtime, so making sure that we're actually meeting that. >> Sorry, just to interrupt. >> Yeah. >> You're measuring from the application view right, not the green light on the server, is that fair? >> That's a great question, because that is exactly the evolution we want as well, so when I talk about the transformation at my organization, we were measuring the hardware first. We are now measuring, essentially, outages. So I don't care if the server's still running, but if the customers can't log in, it's an outage, right? But that's not something you can monitor by looking at a server because sometimes the server's up and running. But maybe a process went down. >> System's fine. >> Exactly. So that's the monitoring-- >> Okay, so slight adjustment in the typical metrics, sorry to interrupt, but please carry on. >> That was a perfect question. >> Okay. >> So KPIs, so underneath the hood, so here are some examples of metrics for availability. Mean time to detect, that's an internal metric, and my internal metric is five minutes, meaning, if you don't know we have an issue in five minutes, it's probably not automated and monitored, so we better hook up some additional monitoring as an example. Mean time to respond, that's a very public one, a lot of times, customers demand that, and if you look at competition, that is the only metric that's actually public, potentially even on a contract, right? So we have mean time to respond, we also have mean time to resolution, that's usually an internal metric. I'm sure competition has that as well, but making sure that we have that response right away, because it's one thing to respond, but if it's not resolved as quickly, it's not good. Other metrics when it comes to reliability, mean time to communicate. And this is really interesting. One of the things that I found was, we could be working on something but we're not telling the customers, so they're wondering if we're actually sleeping on the job, even though we're actually actively working in the background, right? >> Did they get the message, right? >> Right, so mean time to communicate, as an example of reliability metrics. So reliability is one of the core tenets. The other tenets? Performance, how quickly do you respond, right? And I always say that if performance is too long, it's equivalent of being down. Imagine if you're using Google and you put a search in, and it takes you three minutes to get a response time, you probably have left by then. So that performance, page load time, page response time, these response times actually matter. So we have actually metrics around that and we monitor and manage them. Security, we have a boatload of security KPIs, whether it's number of critical vulnerabilities, how quickly we respond to security incidents, a boatload of those as well, and then, last but not least, agility. So how quickly we can respond if we have to do a deployment. So what that means is, let's say, every software company has a bug, and let's say we actually had to quickly respond to that, can we do it within 24 hours if we needed to? Security is a perfect example. A mature company should be able to say, okay, there was a security alert that got to the industry, right? We should be able to quickly respond to that and apply a patch immediately and address it. A company that may not be so mature, it might take them months to go through thousands of machines. So I call that time to market, how quickly can we actually deploy something, and that's not just deploying it, but testing it and making sure it's not going to break anything and be able to test it and verify it. So these are examples of metrics-- >> Great examples. Are your SLAs... for a SaaS company, your SLAs presumably have to be more strict than you'll contractually agree to, but maybe not, then your typical SLA out of AWS or Google, or Microsoft Azure. Is that true? >> Yes. >> So you guys will commit contractually to these types of SLAs that you would expect in an enterprise, versus kind of the standard, off-the-shelf AWS SLA, and how do you reconcile the gap or do you have a different agreement with AWS? >> We do have a... The SLA is pretty much standard when it comes to AWS specifically, right? >> 'Cause they want-- >> Yeah. >> Homogeneity. >> Exactly. So I think the challenge is, every SaaS provider needs to architect around it and when you think about it, hardware failure rate is usually 4% industry-wide. You can expect the hardware will go down, right? >> Yep. >> Network goes down, various things go down. So then it's our job that sits on top of it, to make sure that we build it for reliability. Perhaps we actually have redundancy built-in, and we can actually go from one side to the other, we have that, for example. So if AWS goes down, and they do, all right? I ran data centers for many, many years, it happens. It's our job to make sure that we can fail over it, and not have that customer experience, so it's an overlay availability that we have to build-- >> You're architecting recovery into the system, I know we're tight on time, but I got to ask you, 'cause Pam couldn't make it today. You're part of the WIN, the Women Infor Network, I presume, right? >> Yes. >> So maybe we can just talk a little about that-- >> Yeah. >> It's a great topic. >> Women in technology, right? >> I got some of the best interviews at Infor shows with women, Deborah Norville came on, Naomi Tutu, Lara Logan. Just some awesome folks, but so-- >> So your thoughts, we know you're passionate about the role of women in technology, so how you feel about that, if you want, and Infor, what's being done, or what can be done about that? >> Great questions. So I'm a big proponent of women in technology. Partly because I went through my pain, right, I've always been a small percentage in terms of engineering role as female in technology. I'm also a board member of Girls in Tech, and I channel my energy that way as well as I try to mentor and help others, for example, mentoring engineering students at Berkeley. I'm a Berkeley alum. And I think it's really important that we get more women in technology and keep in them in technology, and candidly, our latest trend is actually going down. So the reason why I think it's important, besides making sure that everybody has a chance, and all those good reasons, we have statistics that actually show, the more diversity you have, the better your product is going to be, and the better it's actually going to hit your top line revenue. And over and over again, whether it's women in the board seat, or women executives, or women engineers, no matter where, by getting women's input into technology, you're actually representing 50% of the consumer base. >> The user base, right. >> Right and so, if we don't do that as a company, we're actually not going to be able to get the user base feedback and I think it's so really important, not only for the economy to have those wonderful workforce in the job, but also for the company products to actually reflect the user's needs and actually improve the revenue, right? So from that perspective, I think it's really important, I love the fact that at Infor, we do a couple of things when it comes to diversity. So one, is WIN, as you know, Women Infor Network. I think it's a fabulous program, and in fact, I get a lot of male colleagues saying they want to join WIN, and they do. My last session, there were actually women and men joining it, because it's really about leadership and how do we cultivate our next, next talented workforce to be successful. The other one is EAP, the Infor Education Alliance Program, so that not only looks at women, but just diversity, right, and bringing students into this workforce. I think it's a great way to help the economy, help the products, help the company. And at the end of the day, why not? >> You're awesome, super impressive and articulate, and really self-confident, and hopefully an inspiration for young women out there watching, so thank you so much, really appreciate it. >> And hope you get some sleep sometime too. (laughing) >> Thank you. >> Busy, busy schedule. All right, thank you. Thank you Mayumi. We're back with more here on theCUBE, you are watching us live in Washington, D.C., and we'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas It's theCube covering Dell Technologies World 2018 brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCube's live coverage of the Inaugural Dell Technologies World 2018 here in Las Vegas. Getting to the end of three days of wall-to-wall live coverage from two sets I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host John Troyer, and for those of you that haven't attended one of these shows, sometimes like "Oh, you're going to Vegas, this is some boondoggle," but I'm really happy, I've got a customer, one of the Dell EMC employees, here. A lot of stuff goes on. There's learning, there's lotsa meetings, there's, you know, you come here, you kind of, you know, get as much out of it as you can. So, first, Stephen Herzig, who's the Director of Enterprise Systems at the University of Arkansas, >> Correct, yes. >> Stu: You had a busy week so far. >> I have. >> Thank you for joining us >> You bet. >> Stu: Also, Andrew McDaniel, who's the Senior Director of Ready Solutions for VDI with Dell EMC, thank you for joining us-- >> Thanks guys >> Alright, so, Stephen, first of all, give us a little bit about your background and University of Arkansas, I think most people know the Razorbacks-- >> Stephen: That's right, the Razorbacks! >> Talk about your org and your role there. >> Yeah, I'm Director of Enterprise Systems, as you mentioned. We're an R1 University, we have about 27,000 students, about 5,000 faculty and staff in the university. And, so my organization is responsible for maintaining, as I said, all the enterprise systems, essentially everything in the data center on the floor to support all the educational activities. Now there is some distributed or commonly known as shadow IT organizations throughout the university and we work quite closely with them, too. >> Okay, you stamp out all that shadow IT stuff and pull it all back in, right? >> Stephen: (laughs) No, no! No, absolutely not. >> We'll get a, Andrew, before we get into more about the university, tell us a little bit about your role and your org, inside Dell EMC. >> So my organization basically develops the end-to-end VDI solutions that Dell EMC sell globally. So, we work with partners such as VMware and Citrix, to put together the industry leading solutions for VDI. Tested, validated, engineered, to give real good confidence in the solution the customer's going to buy. >> Okay, John and I spent many years looking at these, you know, memes in the industry, all that, you know, but uh, Stephen, before we get into the VDI piece, give us, what are some of the challenges that you're facing in the University? We've had, you know, from an IT standpoint, we know the technology requirements are more than ever. While tuitions go up, budgets are always a challenge. So, when you're talking to your peers, what are the things you're all commiserating about or, you know, working at. >> Yeah, like any IT organization, it's a challenge to do more with less. We're constantly being required to support more systems, more technology, and technology is becoming more and more an integral part of the educational process. We also have students coming from very diverse backgrounds, and so the kinds of computing devices that they're able to bring to the university with them, some can afford high-end, some not, and so, it's a challenge for us to deliver that, the applications to them, no matter what kind of device they happen to bring. >> Alright, so, sounds like VDI is something that fits there-- >> Yes >> Before we get into the actual solution, tell us, what was the struggle you were facing, what led to that, what was there, was there a mandate? How did you get to the solution that you were-- >> Well, really, we were struggling with those challenges We're a very small IT team, and as those things grew, we knew we had to find a way to reduce the number of resources that we're supporting, all the end points, all the machines in the labs, all the machines on faculty and staff desks, and again, like I said, the students bring their own devices, which we had to support as well. >> Alright, so, you ended up choosing a Dell Solution, maybe give us a little bit about that, that process and walk us through the project some. >> Yeah, we really needed a solution. We could not go out and assemble pieces, parts, from a lot of different vendors, and we needed a solution that was tailored to our needs, that fit, VDI is complex by its nature, but some vendors made it really complex. So, we had to find one that was right for our environment, for what we were trying to achieve, and of course, at the right price point. Higher education, we're not flush with cash. >> That's always been really hard, I think that's been the hard thing about VDI, right? It's always been kind of complicated and hard to do, at least back in the day, and then when you did it, half the things didn't work, and the things that didn't work were really weird, and the user was very confused. "This application works, but this one doesn't." And, "where's my cursor?" and "Everything went wonky all of a sudden and I can't login at 9am." I mean, I'm kind of curious, what is necessary maybe, from eye-level in a modern VDI solution stack, that makes it easy? You know, is it the hypervisor, the end clients? >> I think, John, you know we've seen such great advances in the software side of it, right? So, if you look at Horizon, as a broker, VMware Horizon, the advances that they've made in things like protocols, right, so Blast Extreme, for example, one of the big challenges that we've always had, is things like Link or Skype, in a VDI environment. It was, it made a disaster for many customers, right? So, that has been solved by VMware and the advances that they did, above and beyond what was capable in PC over IP. So, that's one of the things. From a hardware perspective, you know, one of the challenges we frequently had in VDI, was poor user experience, right? And it was typically because the graphics requirement for the application could not be delivered by the CPU alone, right, so GPUs, Nvidia, K1, K2's, then it went to the M10, M60's, and moving forward into the P4 and P40's, they've really helped us to improve that user experience, and it's starting to get to a point where GPUs are a standard delivery within any VDI employment. So, you get really good experience moving forward. And as you know, if you can't deliver a good user experience, the project is dead before it even starts. Alright, so that's a big challenge. >> Stephen, do you have any commentary on some of the challenges that we faced before? What was your experience like? >> Yeah, it, that's exactly right. We made the decision early on to include GPU in every session that we served up. And we weren't quite sure, 'cause it is an additional expense, but it was one of the best decisions that we've made. It really does make all the difference. >> Was there something specific from the application or user-base, and how they were using it, that led you to that? >> Well, we are all Windows 10, and Windows 10 just looks better, it runs better, the video, scrolling through a Word document, the text, some are very nuanced, but it makes a big difference in the user experience. And of course, we have higher-end users using CAD programs, things like that, you know, in the School of Engineering, they needed the GPU for what they were doing. >> Andrew, wondering if you could give us, little bit of an update on the stack, So, I think back to, on the EMC side, I watched everything from the Flash on the converge side. On the Dell side, there was the Wyse acquisition of course, EMC and VM were coming together, so, a long journey, but even the first year we did theCube, you know, Dell had some big customers doing large scale, cost-effective VDI, because, had that, you know, to give some of the marketing terms I've heard here, it's end to end, but you add the devices all the way through. So, bring us up to 2018. >> Yeah, so, I guess, you know, one of the challenges that Stephen spoke about is the, previously, the hassle of having to go and buy each of the individual components from multiple different vendors. So, you're buying your storage from one vendor, compute from another, GPUs from another, hypervisor from another, broker from another, and so on. So, it gets very complicated to manage all of that. And so, we had lots of customers who had run into scenarios where, say a BIAS firmware and a driver revision were not compatible, and so we'd run into those kinds of problems that we were talking about earlier on, right? So, I think, you know, bringing all of that together, in Dell Technologies, we can now deliver every single aspect of what you need for a VDI deployment. So, we created a bundle called VDI Complete. It uses vSAN ReadyNodes or VxRail, right? So, hyper-converged, massive from a VDI perspective, and I'll come back to that in a second. It pairs then, Horizon Advanced or Horizon Enterprise, with those base platforms, and the Dell Wyse Thin clients. So, every aspect, true end to end, is delivered by Dell Technologies, and there's simply no other vendor in the market who can do that. So, what that basically does is it gives the customer confidence that everything that has been tested can be owned, from a support perspective, by Dell Technologies. Alright, so, if you've got a problem, we're not going to hand you off to another company to go solve that issue, or lay blame with somebody else. It's fully our stack, and as a result, we take full responsibility for it. And that's one of the benefits that we have with customers like University of Arkansas. >> And that was important to us. That single point of contact for support was really important to us. >> Stephen, I wonder if you could talk about, from an operational standpoint, you said, you've got a small team. One of the challenges, at least years ago, was like "Oh, wait! I have the guy that walked around "and did the desktops, now I centralized it, "who owns it, you know, how do we sort through this? "You know, we've got a full stack there. "Simplicity's one of the big messages of HCI," but what was the reality for your team and the roles, how did you change? >> Well one of the first areas, or actually, the first area that we implemented VDI in was in the labs. Hundreds of end points across the campus. And, before VDI, you would walk into the lab, and a certain percentage of the machines would always be down. They needed updating, there was a virus, somebody spilled a coffee on the machine, you know, that kind of thing. After VDI, when you walked into the lab, 100% of the end points were always up, and there was no noise in the lab, except when somebody printed. So, the maintenance required, the resources for my team, and these distributed IT teams was reduced drastically. As a matter of fact, some of the distributed teams had 50% of their resources reduced. That could then go and do more high-value projects and deliver high-value services to their colleges. >> From the student and faculty perspective, it sounds like the uptake has been good, and the satisfaction level high. I mean, user experience is everything with VDI, right? >> Yeah, absolutely, the students came, we installed during spring break, and they came back from spring break, went into the labs with these beautiful new 27-inch monitors, sat down, logged on, and it looked almost the same as before. Which was exactly what we were after. We wanted that same high-quality experience in VDI that they had with a laptop or a desktop. >> The monitors are an important thing to consider, right, 'cause a lot of customers will think about the data center side of VDI, right, so, get lots of compute, good, high-performing storage, good network, and then they put a really poorly designed thin client or an old desktop PC, or something like that, on the end, and wonder why they're not getting good performance, right? So, we just launched yesterday the Dell Wyse 5070. It's the first thin client in the market that can have six monitors attached to it, four of those can be 4K, and two 2K, right? So, it's immense from a display perspective, and this is what our customers are demanding. Especially in financial services, for example, or in automotive design, you know, in CAD labs, for example, you need three or four really good, high-quality screens attached. >> Well, I'm saying, I'll date myself, I wish I had that when I was playing Doom when I was in college in the labs. >> That too! >> That does bring into question, your upgrade and scenarios, moving on to the future, right? You used to have all those janky old PC's that you'd kind of, maybe they'd slide out the back door, maybe they'd get recycled, or whatever, but now it's a different refreshed cycle, and maybe even different use cases. >> Yeah, the lifespan of the endpoints is much longer with the VDI solution. >> John: It's got to be good, yeah. I was curious, you mentioned the converged infrastructure, too, Andrew. I mean, how does that play into it? (muffled) >> Yeah, so I mean, you know, traditionally, a SAN infrastructure was used in VDI, alright? So, for us, that would have been Equallogic Compellent, historically. Now, we're seeing that VDI market almost totally transition to hyperconverged. Alright, so vSAN has really revolutionized VDI, okay? I'd say, you know, a good 30, 35% of all VxRail and vSan deployments that we do, are in the VDI space. So, it's really, and I would say about 90, 95% of our VDI deployments are on hyperconverged rather than a traditional SAN infrastructure. That's really where VDI has moved now. 'Cause it gives customers the ability to scale on demand. Instead of having to go and buy another half-million dollar storage rate, add another thousand users, you can simply add in a couple of more compute nodes with the storage built in. For us, hybrid works very well. So, a hybrid-disc configuration is working very well in most VDI deployments. Some customers require all flash, it depends on the applications and the other kind of performance that they want to get from it. But for a majority of customers, hyperconverged with the hybrid configuration works brilliantly. >> So, Stephen, I want to give you the final word. Sounds like everything went really well, but one of the things we always like to understand, when you're talking with your peers, they said "Hey, what did you learn? "What would you do a little different, "either internally, or configuration-wise, or roll-out," What would you tell your peers? >> Well, when we implemented VDI it was just before VDI Complete came out. So, the work that's done in the VDI Complete solution, we didn't have. So, as we look to the future, and we want to expand, and grow our environment, VDI Complete will be a huge help. Had we had that, it only took us about four months to stand it up, which, considering what we accomplished, was very short time, but, if we had had VDI Complete, that time would've been much more compressed. So, looking to the future, we're looking to expand using VDI Complete. >> Just to, Andrew, maybe you can tie the knot on this bow for us, is sounds like this could, if I've got VDI, I don't have to start brand new, it can fit with existing environments, how does that all work? >> Absolutely, I mean we've got lots of customers who've already done Citrix or VMware deployments, right? Ideally, you want to connect with one broker. So you want to stick with one broker. But, we can bring in a hyperconverged VDI solution into your existing user estate, and merge into that. So, that's pretty common. >> Alright, well, Andrew and Stephen, thank you so much for sharing the story. Really great to always get the customer stories. We're getting towards the end of three days of live coverage here at the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, at Dell Technologies World 2018. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCube. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's the Cube covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here at the Orange County Convention Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by Aysegul Gunduz, she is a professor at the University of Florida-College of Engineering. Thanks so much for joining us. >> No, thank you for having me. >> So, congratulations are in order, because you are a ABIE Award winner, which is awards given out by the Anita Borg Institute, and you have been given the Denice Denton Emerging Leader Award. So, tell us a little about, about your award. >> Well, thank you for asking. We've heard a lot about Grace Hopper and Anita Borg throughout the conference, but Denice Denton, she was actually very close friends with Anita. And she was a leader in her field, her field was development of polymers, and she worked on the first development of RAM. But she was actually the first ever dean of a college of engineering at a major university... >> Rebecca: First ever woman. >> First woman dean, yes, so she became dean at the University of Washington, and then she actually became chancellor at University of California, but just beyond her research she really promoted and lifted the people around her, so she was a big proponent of minority issues. So, she supported females, she supported international students, and she was openly gay, so she really had a big influence on the LGBTQ community, so I just wanted to, you know, just recognize her and say that how honored I am to have my name mentioned alongside hers. This award is given to a junior faculty member that has done significant research and also has had an impact on diversity as well. >> So, let's start talking... >> Denice is a great inspiration. >> Yes! The award given an homage to Denice, so your research is about detecting neurological disorders. So, tell our viewers a little bit more about what you're doing. >> Sure, I'm an electrical engineer by training, who does brain research for a living, so this confuses a lot of people, but I basically tell them that our brains have bioelectric fields that generate biopotential signals that we can record and we're really trying to decipher what these signals are trying to tell us. So, we are really trying to understand and treat neurological disorders as well as psychiatric disorders, so I work with a lot of neurosurgical patient populations that receive electrode implants as part of their therapy, and we are trying to now improve these technologies so that we can record these brain signals and decode them in real time, so that we can adapt things like deep brain stimulation for the current pathology that these patients are having. So, deep brain stimulation, currently, is working like, think of an AC and it's working on fan mode so its current, you know, constantly blowing cold air into the room, even though the room might be just the perfect temperature, so we are basically trying to listen to the brain signals and only deliver electricity when the patient is having a pathology, so this way we are basically turning the AC onto the auto mode, so that once they are actually not having symptoms, unnecessary electrical, it is not delivered into their brains, so pace makers, when they invented were functioning that way, so people realized they could stimulate the heart, and the person would not have a cardiac arrest, but now we know that we can detect the heart pulse very easily, so someone thought about 'OK, so when we don't detect the pulse, heartbeat, let's only stimulate the pace maker then,' so that's what we're trying to adapt to the neuro-technologies. >> And what is the patient response? I mean I imagine that's incredible. So, these are people who suffer from things like Parkinson's disease, Tourette's syndrome, I mean, it's a small patient population that you're working with now, but what are you finding? >> So, first of all, our patients are very gracious to volunteer for our studies, we find that, for instance, in Tourette's syndrome we can actually detect when people are having tics, involuntary tics, that is characteristic of Tourette's syndrome. We find that we can differentiate that from voluntary movements, so we can really deliver the stimulation when they are having these symptoms, so this is a paroxysmal disorder, they really don't need continuous stimulation. So, that's one thing that we're developing. We find that in essential tremor, again, when people aren't having tremor we can detect that and stop the stimulation and only deliver it when necessary. We're working on a symptom called freezing of gaits in Parkinson's disease so people define this as the, having the will to walk, but they feel like their feet are glued to the floor so this can cause a lot of falls, and at that, really, age this can be very, very dangerous. So, we can actually tell from the brain when people are walking and then we turn the stimulation in this particular area only during that time so as to prevent any falls that might happen. >> So, it's really changing their life and how they are coping with this disease. >> Yes, true, and it really makes going to work in the morning (laughs) very, very exciting for us. >> So, another element of the ABIE Award is that you are helping improve diversity in your field and in Denice Denton, in the spirit of Denice Denton, helping young women and minorities rise in engineering. >> Yes, so, I'm going to talk about this in my keynote session tomorrow, but I really just realized that all my confidence throughout engineering school was due to the fact that I actually had a female undergraduate advisor, and once I came to that realization, I joined Association for Academic Women at the University of Florida, which was established in 1974, because these pioneering women fought for equal pay for male and female faculty on campus, and this is still honored today, so I'm very honored to be serving the Association as its president today. All of our membership dues go to dissertation awards for female doctoral students that are, you know, emerging scholars in their fields, and I also approached the National Science Foundation and they supported the funding for me to generate a new emerging STEM award for female students in the STEM fields. So, you know, that is my contribution. >> So, you're passing it on... >> I hope so. >> the help and the mentoring that you received as young faculty member. >> I truly hope so. >> I mean, (stammers) right now we're so focused on the technology companies but on campuses, on the undergraduate and graduate school campuses, how big a problem is this, would you say? >> So, I'm a faculty in biomedical engineering, so, in our field we actually have some of the highest female to male ratios compared to other engineering fields. People attribute this to the fact that females like to contribute to the society, so, they like to work on problems, they like to work on problems that have a societal impact and I think working with, basically, you know, disorders in any branch of medicine, it really fires, fires up female students, but yes, when we go to other departments such as electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, the ratio is really, really small. And it still is a problem and therefore we are really trying to mobilize, you know, all female faculty, just to be present, just the fact that you're there, that you're a successful female in this field... >> Rebecca: The role models. >> Yeah, really makes an impact, you know, I think, the most repeated quote at this meeting is that 'You can't be what you can't see." So, we're really trying to support female faculty. So, we're tying to retain female faculty, so that, you know, the younger generation of females can see that they can and the will do it as well. >> You can't be what you can see, I love that. Those are words to live by. >> Right. >> Yeah. Well, thank you so much Aysegul, this is a pleasure, pleasure meeting you, pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you so much, pleasure's mine. >> We'll be back with more from Grace Hopper just after this.