>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi and welcome to a special production of theCUBE. We're talking to the Amazon web services public sector, their partner awards program. I'm your host Stu Miniman, and we're digging in on education. It's one of the sectors, of course, public sector looks at nonprofits, it looks at the government sectors and the education, and of course, when we talk about remote learning is such a huge, important topic, especially right now in 2020 with the global pandemic. So happy to welcome to the program, we have two guests. First of all, representing the award winning-company, Mohammad Haque. He is the co-founder and senior vice president of architecture and engineering with eLumin. And joining is one of his customers, Damian Doyle, who is the associate vice president of enterprise infrastructure solutions at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, or UMBC, as it's known. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. Thanks for having us here. >> All right, first of all, Mohammad, congratulations. As I said in my intro, such an important topic. I have two children that are dealing with remote learning. I have lots of friends that work in higher education and new in the technology space. So your company is the 2020 AWS public sector award winner for best remote learning. I'm sure there is a space that has a lot of competition. And of course, leveraging public cloud is a great way to be able to ramp this sort of thing up rather fast. Give us a little bit, you know, you are the co=founder, so we'd love to hear a little bit of the origin story, your background, and tell us about what differentiates eLumin. >> Sure. eLumin, we provide managed products and services around end user compute with a focus on education for providing access to applications and other technology resources, course content, course applications in the public cloud, so that users are able to use whatever device they have wherever they are, and have access to those applications that are required for completing that course coursework. They can be in, at home, in their dorms, at a corner coffee shop, on the side of a mountain in the middle East, wherever they may be, but leveling that playing field so that they can access and have access to any of the demanding applications on any device is what we're, what our goal is, is to make sure that we're not having technology be a barrier to their learning. >> Fantastic. Damian, if we could turn to you, then. At UMBC, maybe if you could give our audience a thumbnail of the university, and I have some idea of the challenge that was put in front of you when you talk about e-learning, but maybe you could give us a little bit of the pre-COVID and what you were faced and what you were looking at when it came to dealing with the current situation. >> Sure. Be happy to. So we're, UMBC is a midsize public institution. We're sort of suburban, about 14,000 students, and we have undergrad, graduate, and doctoral programs, and we have a heavy focus on a lot of the STEM disciplines. And so pre-COVID, very based in collaborative environments, active learning, but hands-on, so a lot of our programs really do have a lot of that, and we leverage technology very heavily, even if it's in, whether it's in engineering, biology, any of those kinds of programs. As you said, the challenge became how do you very quickly pivot into an entirely online model when you sort of scattershot all of your students and you don't really have a great sense of what they're going to have access to and the abilities and connectivity they're going to have. So this kind of thing was really critical for us as we made that transition. >> Excellent. Mohammad, were you working with UMBC before the current move to go remote? Give us a little bit about the relationship and how that started. >> I believe actually that the pandemic was the impetus to kind of drive this forward. Damian and his team reached out to eLumin looking for a solution that would allow them to kind of have students access the applications that they normally would have access to in their physical computer labs, but with the change and not having access to those labs anymore, needed a remote learning solution, a remote access solution for being able to access those high compute, high graphics processing, memory-intensive applications through the cloud and taking into account the fact that students won't have the highest end computer laptop. They'll probably be working on a Chromebook or a lower-end machine, but need that compute power. And then we had to kind of provide a solution pretty quickly because it was, schools were shutting down, essentially, physically shutting down and needing to continue on with their coursework. >> Yeah, Damian, I'd like to understand from your side. Can you share with us a little bit the timeframes? How fast did you go from, oh my gosh, we need this, we need proposals, we need to roll this out, and we need to have students and teachers back up and running? >> Well, I think the one thing from our side, we had already known of eLumin and we had been looking at that pre-COVID. We knew we needed product that provided us this kind of agility and really gave the students some better access to the computing tools that they needed. So once we identified that, the thing that was amazing to me is we moved from our existing system over to production eLumin in, I think it was about two and a half weeks sort of start to finish, and to get all the images, to get all the technology running, tested, and everything up and running in two and a half weeks for a full solution for a campus is, was pretty amazing. And that was one of the real benefits we saw as going to the cloud. We also looked at this outside of COVID as something that really provided a major benefit to the students so that they could work from anywhere at any time, rather than be sort of tethered to that physical lab. >> Well, I'm glad you raised that. So if you could, Damian, a little bit help us understand how much were you using a cloud before? And it sounds like you believe that in the, I guess if we say post-COVID world, you will probably have some hybrid model. Would that be fair to say? >> Yeah, I think before we did have a different solution that was still cloud-based. It was part of our business continuity. So we still had some semblance of a virtual computing solution in the cloud, but it wasn't that extensive, and a lot of our individual programs, chemical engineering, geography, and others were using physical labs that the students would sort of schedule times and be able to work in as part of their coursework. Coming out of this, we fully expect if we're going an extended period of time where students are able to access these materials and these demanding software packages at any time from any kind of device coming out of COVID, they're not going to want to go back to that model where they're asking, they have to get permission and go in in limited hours into a physical lab and sit there. This is going to be the expectation going forward is that they have this kind of access and this kind of flexibility from now on. >> Yeah, this is, I mean, they've gotten a taste, essentially, and so they see how easy it is to complete their coursework without actually having to trek across campus into a lab and kind of fight with the population to find a seat. This basically will become an expectation of an offering. >> Yeah, Mohammad, what I'd love if you could drill in a little bit for us there. Architecturally speaking, of course, the cloud is built to be able to scale and move fast. So if you need capacity and need to scale up fast, that's great. If in the future, you still want to leverage this solution, but you can scale down, that should be possible. So maybe give us a little bit of a how AWS architecturally supports what you're doing, and just from a pricing solution standpoint, how you'll be able to support the customer in today's environment and however that path goes down the road, you'll be able to support that too. >> Right, I mean, so with AWS cloud, we're able to, as you said, scale up or down as demand is needed, but we've taken that even a little bit further where we're scaling based off of student scheduling. So if we've got a course that we know that is running from >> 10: 00 AM to 11:00 AM, prior to that course starting, we'll scale the environment up so that it's available for those students if it's more of a in course lab session and then spin things back down after the course is done so that we don't have those many, many machines sitting there running and burning the hours and running up the bill. Physical environment, once you've installed it, it's there. It's always running. You cannot do that. But with the power of the cloud, we're able to go up and down. We're able to take things, scale things down off hours. If we look at the patterns for student usage, off hours, overnight, take things down because you don't need those machines sitting there running all the time. >> And this is one of the biggest differentiators. So many times in higher ed, we struggle to have to explain to companies and vendors and providers what our needs are and how we're very different from corporations and other verticals. With the eLumin solution and the capabilities in AWS, we're really having this tailor to our students' schedules, to the class schedules, and that kind of flexibility makes the product economically viable for us, but it also means that we don't get nearly the kind of pushback from the academic side, because it is really tailored to meet their needs versus just something we're kind of shoehorning in. So that makes a huge difference in terms of adoption and the way it's perceived from a marketing and acceptance standpoint. >> Yeah, Damian, I'm curious, once you did that initial rollout, how much of an on ramp is there for both the education, the educator side, as well as the student side? And you talked about having some flexibility as to how and when students use things. That sounds great, but do you have to change office hours or the hours that the staff are leveraging that? I'm just trying to understand the ripple effect of what you're doing. >> No, it's a fair point. We have done fairly extensive training. The students picked it up very quickly. What we, with students, if there's a tool that they can use to do their work more effectively, they're going to use it, whether it's something we provide or something they find through other means. But what we've done is reached out to all of our faculty that we're training, that we're teaching in our physical labs and tried to work with them to understand what this solution is, how they can sort of rethink some of their classes. And a couple of our departments have actually taken an approach of rather than sit everybody in a virtual lab the same way they would sit people in a physical lab, they're moving some of this to more asynchronous so that the students can sort of work at their own pace and sort of rethink how they structure some of those classes because of the flexibility being provided. But it does take a lot of training from the instructional side and some rethinking of this, but the end solution is something that reaches the students where they are and the way they want to learn, which is a really powerful thing we're always trying to do. >> Excellent. Mohammad, I'm wondering just broadly learnings that you have from what's been happening. Obviously I'm sure you've been quite busy in responding to things. What's been the impact on your business? How has AWS been as a partner to be able to support the needs of what you're doing? >> Well, as you can imagine, things have just really blown up in terms of demand and being able to, again, through the power of the cloud, just being able to scale up and rapid deployment. As we spoke about earlier, this deployment was two and a half weeks from start to finish, being able to do that, being able to do that with AWS tools have been critical in moving things forward. >> Excellent. Damian, back to you on this. Obviously if you had had more time to be able to plan this out, there might be some things that you would do differently. But what have your learnings been with this? And if you've been talking to your peers, any advice that you would give as you've moved through this rapid acceleration of the move to remote? >> Certainly, I think we would've certainly done some things differently, but we had been talking about this move for three or four months ahead of COVID, so for us, it wasn't quite as rushed as the actual deployment wound up being. I think the big thing is having a vendor and having a partner where you can understand all the options. So the good and bad of the cloud is there's 100 different ways to do almost anything you want to accomplish, and taking the time to understand what the different features and the ramifications of how you deploy and how you think through that. For us, we deployed one way because we could do it very quickly, and then we took the rest of the semester and part of this summer to do some more thorough evaluations to really ask our constituents, do you like this method, or do you like some of the other possibilities, and see which user experience they liked more, and then we're able to work with eLumin, and they've been able to be very nimble in adjusting the services to meet what we've gotten our feedback on. So I think if I had to do it again, I would've done that testing ahead of time, but that's a very minor thing. These are really sort of small tweaks to just make life a little easier, not fundamental differences in what we're providing. >> Yeah, Damian, one last question, if I could. Sorry, Mohammad. Just, I'm curious from the financial standpoint how much you felt that you understood what costs would be and some of the levers as to what you were using and the impact there. We've seen great maturation over the last handful of years as to transparency and understanding how cloud actually is built. But just curious if you have any final comments on the financial piece of things, seeing that it probably wasn't something that was in your budget for the last quarter. >> It wasn't, that's very true, but we also knew that it was essential. So what we realized was we didn't know how often a lot of our physical labs and these classes were being used. So we knew there was going to be some unknowns. We'd move to this, we'd have to see what adoption was. But being able to get the reporting out and working with Mohammad and others to really start customizing in the cloud. That's the beauty of it is we recognize, we saw some really fascinating patterns where during the week people would use this sort of as you'd expect, but on the weekends, it was in the evenings. Nobody's logging on Saturday or Sunday morning, but boy, at eight p.m., there's a good bit of usage. So we could tailor and do some of that off-hours work and really slows things down. Having that visibility has made the economic piece much more viable, and really being able to tweak the computing power with two different needs of the different classes. So it's actually been fairly easy to understand, but it was a ramp up where we had to sort of guess at first and then understand our own processes. But that's more sort of the, if you don't have good data coming in, it's hard to get it out. >> Excellent. And Mohammad, I want to let you kind of give your lessons learned. Obviously it's a technology space you've been in and it's just been an acceleration of some of the things you're working on. So lessons learned, advice you would give to other companies, other universities and educational facilities out there. >> Right, and this is, again, speaking to the power of the cloud, right? Some of the, one of the biggest lessons learned here is you don't necessarily need to get it right the first time. As Damian was saying, we went back, kind of analyzed what we were seeing, and after the initial deployment, took a look at the actual usage and kind of adjusted based off of that, according to that, taking in feedback from faculty members on how they were using the system and tweaking the presentation or tweaking applications on the back end for accommodating those needs. That's the power of the cloud, being able to adjust on the fly. You're not, you don't have to be committed to every single bit there, and being able to change it on the fly is just something that is kind of natural in the cloud these days. >> Excellent. Well, thank you both so much for joining us, Damian, thank you for joining and moving forward, sharing your story, wish you the best of luck going forward. And Mohammad, big congratulations on winning. Super important category, especially here in 2020. Congratulations to you and the team. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, thank you. >> All right, stay tuned for more coverage here from the AWS public sector. It's their partner awards program. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright music)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders >>all around the world. >>This is a cube conversation. Hi, and welcome to a special production of the Cube. We're talking to the Amazon Web services, public sector, their partner awards program. I'm your host stew minimum, and we're digging in on education is one of the sectors. Of course, public sector looks at non profits. It looks at the government sectors. Education, Of course, when we talk about remote learning is such a huge, important topic, especially right now in 2020 with a global pandemic so happy to welcome to the program. We have two guests. First of all, we're representing the award winning company Mohammad. He is the co founder and senior vice president of architecture and engineering with Lumen and joining his one of his customers, Damien Doyle, who is the associate vice president of Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, or UMBC. As it's known, gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. Thanks for having us. >>Alright. First of all, Mohammed, congratulations. As I said in my intro, you know, such an important topic and I have two Children that are, you know, dealing with remote learning have lots of friends that were in higher education and, you know, in the technology space. So your company is the 2020 AWS Public Sector Award winner for best remote learning. I'm sure there is a space that has a lot of competition on. Of course, leveraging public cloud is a great way to be able to ramp this sort of thing up rather fast. Give us a little bit. You know, you are the co founder. So would love to hear a little bit of the origin story, your background and Ellis about what differentiates the looming >>sure loom in we provide ah manage products and services around end user compute with a focus on education for providing access to applications and other technology. Resource is, of course, content course applications in the public cloud, so that users are able to use, you know, whatever device they have wherever they are, um so and have access to those applications that are required for completing that force work they could be in, you know, in at home, in their dorms, at a corner coffee shop on the side of a mountain in the Middle East wherever they may be. But leveling that playing fears playing field so that they could access, um, have access to any of the demanding applications on any device is what we're You know, What our goal is is to make sure that we're not having technology be a barrier to their learning. >>Fantastic. Damien, If if we could turn to you, then atyou NBC, maybe if you could give our audience Ah, thumbnail of you know, the university and I have some idea of the challenge that was put in front of you when you talk about the learning. But maybe you could give us a little bit of the pre cove it and, uh, you know what? What you were faced in and what you were looking at when it came to dealing with the current situation. >>Sure be happy to So where you? NBC is a mid sized public institution. We're sort of suburban, about 14,000 students, and we have undergrad, graduate and doctoral programs, and we have a heavy focus on a lot of the stem disciplines. And so pre cove, it very based in collaborative environments, active learning but but hands on. So a lot of our programs really do have a lot of that. We leverage technology very heavily, even if it's in whether it's an engineering biology, any of those kinds of programs. Uh huh. As you said that the challenge became how do you very quickly pivot into an entirely online model when you sort of scatter shot all of your students and you don't really have a great sense of what they're gonna have access to and, um, and the abilities and connectivity they're gonna have. So this this kind of thing was really critical for us as we made that transition. >>Excellent. Mohammed, Were you working with you, NBC before the current move toe Go, go remote. Give us a little bit about the relationship and how that started. >>I believe, actually that the pandemic was the impetus to kind of drive this forward. Damien and his team reached out to loom in looking for a solution that would allow them to kind of have students access the applications that they normally would have access to in their physical computer labs. But with ah the change and not having to access those labs anymore needed a remote learning solution. A remote access solution for being able to access those high compute high graphics processing or memory intensive applications through the cloud. Taking into account the fact that you know, students won't have you know, that the highest end computer laptop, you know, they probably be working on a chromebook or a lower and machine, but need that compute power on. And then we had to kind of provide a solution pretty quickly because it was, you know, schools were shutting down, essentially physically started shutting down and needing to continue on with their coursework. Coursework? >>Yeah, Dave and I like to understand from your side. Can you share with us a little bit that time frames, you know, how fast did you go from? Oh, my gosh, We need this. We need proposals. We need to roll this out, and we need to have students. Ah, in teachers back up and running. >>Well, you know, I think the one thing from our side we had already known of element and we've been looking at that pre cove it. We knew we needed a product that that provided us this kind of agility and really gave the students some better access to the computing tools that they need it. So once we identify that, the thing that was amazing to me is is we moved from our existing system over to production illumination. It was about 2.5 weeks sort of start to finish and, you know, to get all the images to get all the technology running tested and everything up and running in 2.5 weeks for a full solution for a campus is was pretty amazing. And that was one of the real benefits we saw was going to the cloud. We also looked at this outside of code as something that really provided a major benefit to the students so that they could work from anywhere at any time rather than be sort of tethered to that physical lab. >>Well, I'm glad you raised that. So if you could Damien a little bit, you know, help us understand. How much are you using A cloud before? And it sounds like you believe that, you know, in the you know, I guess if we say postcode world, you would probably have some hybrid model. Would that be fair to say, >>Yeah, I think before we did have a different solution that was still cloud based. It was part of our business continuity. So we still had some semblance of virtual computing solution in the cloud. But it wasn't that extensive. And a lot of our individual programs chemical engineering, geography and others were using physical labs that the students would sort of scheduled times and be able to work in as part of their coursework. Uh, coming out of this, we fully expect if, if we're going on extended period of time where students are able to access these materials and these demanding software packages at any time from any kind of device coming out of cove it they're not gonna want to go back to that model where they're asking, you know, they have to get permission and go in and limited hours into a physical lab and sit there. This is going to be the expectation going forward is that they have this kind of access and this kind of flexibility from now. >>Yeah, this is I mean, they've gotten a taste essentially, and so, you know, they they see how easy it is to complete their coursework without actually having to trek across campus into a lab and kind of fight with the population to find a seat. This basically will become an expectation of an offering. >>Mohammed, what I'd love if you could drill in a little bit for us there, Architecturally speaking, of course, the cloud is built to be able to scale and move fast. So if you need capacity and need to scale up fast, that's great if in the future you still want to leverage the solution. But you can scale down, that should be possible. So maybe give us a little bit of you know how aws arc. It actually supports what you're doing and, you know, just from a pricing solution standpoint, how you'll be able to support the customer in today's environment. And however that path goes down the road, you'll be able to support that, >>right? I mean, so, you know, with the AWS cloud, we're able to, as you said, scale up or down as demand is needed. But we we've taken that even a little bit further where we're scaling based off of, um, students scheduling. So if we've got, of course, that we know that is running from 10 AM to 11 AM Your prior to that core starting will scale the environment up so that it's available for those students. If it's not, you know, more of, ah, in course, lab session, um, and then spin things back down after the course is done so that we don't have that those many, many machines sitting there running and burning the hours and running up the bill. You know, physical environment. You know, once you've installed it, it's there. It's always running. You cannot do that. But with the power of the cloud, we're able to go up and down. We're able to take things. Uh, you know, scale things down off hours. If we look at the patterns for a student usage, you know, off hours overnight take things down because you don't need those machines sitting there running, running all the time. >>And this is one of the biggest differentiators so many times in higher ed. We struggle to have to explain to companies and vendors and providers what our needs are and how we're very. We're very different from corporations and other other verticals with the bloomin solution and the capabilities in AWS. But we're really having this Taylor to our students schedules to the class schedules, and that kind of flexibility makes the product economically viable for us. But it also means that we don't get nearly the kind of push back from the academic side because it is really Taylor to meet their needs versus just something we're kind of shoehorning in. So that makes a huge difference in terms of adoption and the way it's perceived from a marketing, marketing and acceptance standpoint. Yeah, >>Dave and I'm curious. Once you did that initial rollout, how much of an on ramp is there for both the education, the educators side as well as student side? And you talked about having some flexibility as to how and when students use thing. That sounds great, but do you have to change, you know, office hours or the hours that the staff are leveraging that I'm just trying to understand the you know, the ripple effect of what you're doing? >>No, it's It's a fair point. We have done fairly extensive training. The students picked it up very quickly. What we with students? If there is a tool that they can use to do their work more effectively. They're going to use it, whether it's something we provide or something they find through other means. But what we've done is is reached out to all of our faculty that were training, that we're teaching in our physical labs and try to work with them to understand what the solution is, how they can sort of rethink some of their classes. And a couple of our departments have actually taking a approach of rather than said everybody in a virtual lab the same way they would sit people in a physical lab. They're moving some of this team or a synchronous so that the students can serve, work at their own pace and rethink how they structure some of those classes because of the flexibility being provided. But it does take a lot of training from the instructional side and some rethinking off this. But it the end solution is something that reaches the students where they are and the way they want to learn, which is a really powerful thing. We're always trying to do >>excellent, Mohammed. I'm wondering just broadly learnings that you have from what what's been happening Obviously, I'm sure you've been quite busy and responding to things. You know, what's been the impact on your business, how as a ws been as a partner to support the needs of what you're doing. >>Well, as you can imagine, the other things that just really blown up, Um, in terms of demand and being able to again through the plant power of the cloud, just being able to scale up and rapid deployment, you know, as we talk about earlier this deployment was, you know, 2 2.5 weeks from start to finish. Being able to do that, being able to do that with AWS tools have been, um, critical and moving things forward. >>Excellent. Uh, Damien, it's a sit back to you on this. You know, obviously, if you had had, you know, more time be able to plan this out if there might be some things that you would do differently. But what have your learnings been with this? And if you've been talking to your peers, any advice that you would give, uh, you know, as you've moved through this this rapid acceleration of the move to remote >>you Certainly. I think we would have certainly done some things differently. But we have been talking about this move for three or four months ahead of Covitz. So for us it wasn't. It wasn't quite as rushed as the actual deployment wound up being. I think the big thing is having having a vendor and having a partner where you can understand all the options. So the good and bad of the cloud is there's 100 different ways to do almost anything you want to accomplish and taking the time to understand what the different features and the ramifications of how you how you deploy and how you think. Think through that for us. We deployed one way because we could do it very quickly. And then we took the rest of the semester and part of this summer to do some more thorough evaluations to really ask our constituents you like this method or do you like some of the other, possibly some of the other possibilities and see which user experience they liked more? And then we're able to work with illumination, and they've been ableto very nimble in adjusting the services to meet what we've gotten our feedback on. So I think if I had to do it again, I would have done that testing ahead of time. But that's a very minor thing. These air really sort of small tweaks to just make life a little easier. Not fundamental differences in the what we're providing. >>Yeah, I'm Damien. What? One last question if I could, um sorry. Sorry, Mohammed. Just I'm curious from the financial standpoint, you know how much you felt that you understood what costs would be in some of the levers as to what are you using in the impact there? We've seen, you know, great maturation over the last handful of years. As toe. Yeah, you know, transparency and understanding how cloud actually is build. But I'm just curious if you have any final comments on the financial piece things, seeing that, it probably wasn't something that was in your budget for the last quarter. Yeah, >>it wasn't. That's very true. But we also knew that it was essential so that what we realized was we didn't know how often a lot of our physical labs and these classes were being used. So we knew there was going to be some unknowns. We've moved to this would have to see what adoption was but be able to get the reporting out and working with Mohammed and others to really start customizing in the cloud. That's the beauty of it is we recognize we saw some really fascinating patterns where during the week people would use this sort of as you'd expect. But on the weekends it was in the evenings. Nobody, nobody is logging on Saturday or Sunday morning. But boy at eight PM there's a good bit of usage so we could tailor and do some of that off hours work and really slows things down. Having that visibility has made the economic piece much more viable and really being able to tweak the computing power with two different needs of the different classes. So it's actually been fairly easy to understand, but it was a ramp up where we have to sort of guess at first and then understand our own processes. But that's more sort of the If you don't have good data coming in, it's hard to get it. Get it out. Excellent. Mohammad, I >>want you to kind of give your lessons learned. Obviously, it's a technology space. You've been in. Ah, and it's just been an acceleration of some of the things you're working on. So lessons learned advice you would give Teoh, you know, other companies of the universities and education No facilities out there, >>Right? And, you know, this is again speaking to the power of the cloud, right? Some of that one of the biggest lessons learned here is you don't necessarily need to get it right the first time. It's name and saying was saying, You know, we went back kind of analyze what we were staying in after the initial deployment, took a look at the actual usage and kind of adjusted, based based off of that. According to that, taking and feedback from faculty members on how they were using a system in tweaking the presentation or tweaking applications on the back end for accommodating those needs. That's the power of the cloud being able to adjust on the fly. You're not. You don't have to be committed to every single bit there. Uh, and being able to change it on the fly is is just something that is kind of natural in the cloud these days. >>Excellent. Well, thank you both. So much for joining us, Damien. Thank you for joining and moving forward. Sharing your story. I wish you the best of luck going forward. And Mohammed Big. Congratulations on winning. You know, super important category. Especially here in 20. Funny congratulations to you and the team. >>Thank you. >>Yeah, Thank you. Alright, stay tuned for more coverage here from the AWS public sector is their partner awards program. I'm Stew men a man And thank you for watching the Cube. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

(fast intro music) >> Narrator: From London England, it's the Cube, covering Coupa Inspire 19 EMEA. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey, welcome to The Cube. Lisa Martin coming to you from Coupa Inspire 19 in London. Pleased to welcome one of Coupa's spend setters, joining me now is James Wagstaff, the chief procurement officer of Provident. James, welcome to the Cube. >> Hello, Lisa, nice to be here. >> So you had a very busy day. Thank you for taking some time to talk to me about Provident, what you doing with Coupa. But give our audience an overview of Provident and what you guys do and deliver to your customers. >> Very good, so Provident is a ftse 250 UK financial services business. It lends money to people without access to mainstream lending. Um, so it's real focus is to do that in a responsible, caring way. So if you can't borrow money from Barclays or HSBC, then Provident is a company that will help you get back to access to that mainstream market. >> Individuals as well as like small businesses? >> Consumers, around two million people in the UK currently use Provident, either the credit card or our home credit or our car leasing business. >> Okay, so how long have you been there? >> I have been at Provident now since April of 2018. >> Okay. >> So we're coming up now to, I think 19 months, and we put Coupa into the bank, which is the credit card business in April or April/May. >> Okay talk to me, though, about about your journey in business and finance. One of the things I read about you is that you were encouraged from an early age to really understand all aspects of a business from operations to finance to marketing to truly provide value through procurement. Talk to me about the history there that you have. >> So I'm a big fan of mentor programs. So I think everyone should have a mentor, and I lucked into mine, a chap called Terry, who, for reasons best known to him, took me under his wing. I was quite old when I came to procurement. I was around late 20s, maybe 30, and he had a vision about what great procurement looked like, and it was a holistic view. So procurement at its worst can be very tactical, very cost focused, and Terry was very focused on the bigger picture, about top-line growth not just bottom line, and right from day one, he seeded that in me, and it's been the strength of my career. So I owe Terry, Terry Western, if he's watching, I owe Terry, I owe Terry everything for that. And then I spent the last 10 years as an expat. So prior to Provident, I had three years as the group CPI for VimpelCom, which is the Russian equivalent of Vodafone or AT&T, who have businesses throughout Soviet Union, CIS, and Asia-Pac. And then seven years with Huawei, who are China's largest private company, telecoms company, and I was traveling around the world on the sales side facing procurement. So that was a very sobering enlightening experience to see procurement from the supplier side of the table, and I think it's made me a different procurement person as a result in terms of the way the I treat people and relate to people. So that holistic nature combined with, I think, a very business-centric view of what procurement should do. >> Interesting, though, that you that you said, I got a late start in procurement, but your start was founded upon someone giving you very solid advice of look beyond that because this is an element of the business that can, somebody that clearly was seeing how transformative, but also how it was important for procurement to partner and understand different requirements and needs within each division within an organization, so it sounds like you didn't really grow up in that traditional siloed approach of procurement. >> I did not, and I think that for me it makes my life interesting. So I think if you're in procurement and the danger is you become quite siloed, you're very narrow, and I did my MBA quite recently while I was traveling just to get that bigger perspective. It makes the job fun. I mean, I think you know you can negotiate contract after contract after contract, but it's the context of what that's doing for the business. And I think when I looked at Coupa as a system, it was with that in mind. So looking at Coupa, not from the perspective of what it did for procurement, but how it was for end-user customers. So as a service, was it really, really simple to use? Did it feel like an Amazon shopping experience? Because that drives adoption, and if you can get people wanting to use the system because it's easy, then the data's in the system, and then the data's in the system you can do something with it. So you're not, you're not fighting that adoption issue that you would be on a lot of systems. So if you go to some of the big ERP systems, they can be really hard for people to change and adopt, and Coupa's not been like that. It's been relatively easy. >> Interesting that you talk about it as it needs to be as simple as an Amazon marketplace. As consumers we're so used to that, right. I mean, people transact daily and get fulfillment of whatever product or service they're ordering from Amazon within... Sometimes it's within an hour or two. So we have this expectation and this demand. To your point, though, about wanting to have software that would be as easy for your teams to take up, that consumer effect. Talk to me about that as an influence. Because you know, kind of right away experience with other systems that might be bigger legacy systems that are challenging to get folks to use because they're not that intuitive. Did you know right away when you came into Provident that I need to have something that is more consumer-like. >> I knew that we needed a system and because as a regulated industry, we had to control our spend. So the fact that we needed a procurement system was a given, so then the choice is what do you buy? I think you don't really need a big ERP unless you really want to spend a lot of money on assistant inspirations and complexity. So your then into the mid-market space. And, um, there's a lot of vendors out there that have had an on-premise model, been around a long time, but you can feel that when you use it. So I didn't do a paper-based RFP. I think this is probably a terrible way of evaluating systems because you can get a function list on paper, but that doesn't really tell you what it's like to use. So the procurement process was around video online demos. So getting users into the room, three hours for an online demo walk through the system. So it's a very non-traditional procurement process to buy a procurement system. And I think at the end of that, I think it was a more valuable process for it. >> Was that something that was driven by you or was that something that was driven by Coupa? Is that how they deliver that type of experience? >> It was driven by me, but I think it was welcomed by Coupa. I think, I think from the sales guys I think they do an awful lot of paper-based RFP, and I think it's a challenge because it's very hard to differentiate on paper. Actually, a lot of the systems kind of do the same stuff, but it's not what they do. It's how they do it. And you can't, you can't get that out of the paper. You have to see it and feel it and touch it. >> Exactly. One of the things that Rob Bernshteyn talks about, and he spoke about it this morning, is that the best UI is no UI. And he really talked about what they've done to be user-centric and talked proudly about the adoption that they've had. And you know, it's... We all know whatever software you're putting in an organization, all these, you know, whether its marketing, finance, operation, sales, if people aren't going to use it, it's not going to be able to deliver the value that whoever purchased it and brought it on needs it to do. Talk to me about that user-centric. Did you see and feel that right away in those demos? >> I think if you're a procurement guy, you have suppliers every day send you certain messages, and those messages are fairly consistent around, you know, delivering value and solutions. I mean, Rob's great. He's a bit of a force of nature. Um, you got to say that. But what I like about it is that he's got a very clear sense of vision about what the system should be, and I think he's done a great job of getting that throughout the company, top to bottom. And to date we've felt that. So normally what happens is you buy the software license, you sign the agreement, there's lots of love and care, and then kind of the vendor disappears a little bit, and you're on your own. And to date, Coupa done a great job. We got Damian Pinnell, who's our success manager. I get the sense that he really cares about whether the system is going to do what it promised to do. And how do we get more value out of it? Some of it is about selling more licenses because Coupa have got other modules they want you to buy, but that's kind of okay if the modules are delivering more value, then you don't mind paying for them. But even the modules we own, there is a real sense of are you exploiting it to the max? And that's pretty cool. >> What are some of the key values that you have gleaned so far in just the, what, maybe six months or so that you guys have been using the platform? >> So I'm getting, I'm quite surprised at the extent to the insights, the value I'm getting out of the insights. So as an example, and I'll be honest. Coupa told me that said your, your spend-through catalog is 27% and your industry top quartile is 95. And I kind of went, "Nah, I don't believe you." And then they said, "Your electronic invoicing could be 77%, and you're currently single digits." And I went, "Nah, I don't believe you." And then through the community we spoke to Co-Oper, another Coupa customer, and Marley there was saying, "No, we're doing it. We're at this. "We're at 95% or 97% even." And I went "Well, how are you doing it?" And she just talked me through how they sell it to suppliers and how, in my head, the reluctance to adopt actually evaporated because she was able to sell the idea to suppliers, sell the value as. She didn't force them to do it. She just said this is what you're going to get out of it if you do it this way, and she's genuinely got to 97. So what it's done for me is it's remove my own blockers in my own mind, you know, in my own head "You can't do this." Well, insights and speaking to other communities. Yes, I can. So it's opened my, changed my targets, changed what I think is possible. And I think that's cool. >> You look back to the beginning of your journey in procurement, business, and finance, when you were given this great advice, like "Be open-minded, understand how different parts of the business work," from then to where you are now and what you're able to deliver, in just a short time, leveraging Coupa, would have believed you'd been able to go from there to there? >> Uh, yeah, so Terry would always say to me, you know, if you're going to negotiate a deal, before you even pick up a contract, you would spend an hour with the business owner or the techie or whoever it is, and you just white board, at a technical level, what the solution is. I think that, years and years and years of doing that, of going deeper into technology and software and integration and through deal after deal after deal, when you come to run the project, to implement Coupa, you have that as a foundation. So you're not just at the surface and relying on other technical people because you're lost when you get to this level of detail. You've already got a little bit more depth. So I think that was the big spin-off, in a way. That you're able to have more in-depth conversations at a technical level, which you need to unblock stuff. >> So some of the news that came out today. They talked about what they're doing to expand Coupa Pay with American Express. I was just talking with Barclays. Barclays card been on that for a little while. Looking at the payment space for instance, on the BDC side, we have this expectation as consumers. We can do any transaction, we can pay bills. It hasn't been as... On the B2B side, it hasn't been as innovative. Some technology gaps, large scale. Where do you see Coupa in that respect with what they're doing with Coupa Pay? Do you see that influence from the consumer side that might eventually become an important part of what you're able to do at Provident? >> We haven't enabled Coupa Pay, so I'm in a position to talk authoritatively about it. >> In terms of taking the consumer and demand? >> So I look at the one-time-use credit cards, and I'm really quite excited about what that could do, and I kind of get the business sense and the use case behind that. So that's certainly on our radar. I like the risk-aware products as well, using the big data and AI stuff. So, there's a few things in the road map I've got my eye on. We're deploying expenses module in December/January, so that'll keep us busy on that. And then we'll need to route six months of data through Coupa so that we've got enough of a data pool to do the analytics. So we've got a busy road map, that's for sure. >> For a last question for you, James, for peers of yours, whether they're in financial services industry or not that are facing similar challenges and opportunities to transform procurement, what's you're best advice? >> Mmm, go and spend a few years as a supplier. I think procurement suffers a little bit from people who have only ever been in procurement. And I think that different perspective would be enormously powerful. So I think if we could get more marketing people, more lawyers, more different people and different professions into procurement, I think it would give you a broader perspective rather than a "I've grown up in procurement the last 20 years" sort of perspective. So go and get that holistic, global view would be my suggestion. >> Well, James, that's great advice for anybody, anywhere, and I'm sure Terry would be proud to hear you say that. >> I'm sure he would. >> Thank you so much for joining me on The Cube and sharing with us what Provident is doing with Coupa. We appreciate your time. >> It's been a real pleasure. Thank you, Lisa. >> Excellent. To James Wagstaff, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching The Cube from Coupa Inspire 19. Thanks for watching. (computerized tune)

>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It's theCUBE covering DevNet Create 2018, brought to you by Cisco. (techy music playing) >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're here live at theCUBE here in Mountain View in the heart of California, the Silicon Valley. I'm John Furrier, my cohost Lauren Cooney. Our next guest is Riaz Raihan, who's the global VP and general manager of Cisco, IOT, CUBE alumni, back... Last on at Cisco Live in Barcelona. We got Cisco Live coming up, but we're here at DevNet Create developer... Develop our ecosystem for Cisco and external cloud native developers, great to see you. >> Thank you, John, pleasure to be back. >> What's a Cisco guy like you doing at a hoody show like this, IOT... >> You know, IOT is so topical and there's so much interest around it, so just happy to be here with the developers and just get to meet a few people out here and just be part of this whole event. >> So, IOT, we last time, and all joking aside is really hot because you have now, you know, the cloud is a foundation, on-premise data, hybrid cloud going on, but the Edge of the network's certainly very relevant. So, you've got a lot of new things happening. So, the question for you is what industries are early adopting... What industries do you see that are adopting IOT in the programmable way? I'm not so much as censored networks, they're out there, but as they bring them into, the IOT into the technology, IT world, which industries are the most adoptive for you guys? >> I talk about, you know, a handful of industries that are really leading the charge, right. Number one I'd say is manufacturing. We see a lot of activity out there primarily because for the first time manufacturers have an opportunity to really converge their data and put it on an IP network, which is exciting. The other big one is energy, both oil and gas as well as utility. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> And then we're seeing huge amount of interest in transportation, both in actually the roadways as well as well as the fleet that run on the roadways. In addition to those I'd say retail and general public sector and cities are big adopters of IOT. >> So, on the IOT side with, say... Let's take transportation, so as we know, we know that Uber happened with Uber. They had a death, now the censor, they sort of argued latency matters, right, so you've got to have a network, support it. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> Is smart cities truly happening in a way that's, in your opinion, moving the ball down the field. Where is the smart cities with IOT respect to cities I mean, is it still early, are they moving the ball down the field, your thoughts? >> You know, I'm asked this question pretty often and I can tell you that moving a city towards a smart city is actually a massive endeavor. What we find is the cities that are doing this successfully, they kind of start small with a few use cases. Let's say parking, maybe lighting, and then they've got to expand out the number of use cases but also geographic spread of where they'll deploy, and specifically, you know, when they work with us one of the big advances we're making is something called the FOG Appliance. Building this easy-to-install appliance that can be used at intersections and at various points to enable cities to go smart. >> So, Lauren, you and I were talking the other day about this, is that, you know, in the cloud, you bring cloud together with the developers. >> Lauren: Yep. >> It's interesting because they have to actually figure out that software going to be powering the Edge-- >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And you know, Kubernetes is in one example, and then when you start looking at what Kubernetes is doing to the network layer you say, "Okay, I've got to write software." >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> But most of the Edge applications, oil and gas, they're like facilities guys. These guys are hardware people. They're deploying cameras, they're not-- >> Well, there has to be their software that actually runs on that as well to enable things for people, places, and things at the Edge and I think you all have to look at the Edge when you are talking about IOT, especially. >> Software, that's the key, what do you say to all those guys that have to relearn software? (laughing) Come to DevNet Create, I mean, this is a real issue. >> Yeah, you know, if you look at software in general, right, software's playing a bigger and bigger role in these applications, not to diminish the role of hardware or networking or any of the other elements, but what software's certainly playing a bigger role, like let me give you an example. Let's talk about the FOG Appliance. You know, one of the things we've been working on quite diligently is building out a single software framework that can sit on a number of different hardware devices depending on what the use case is, and the use case is defined by the customer, it's defined by the industry. It's also defined by the price point, so what we're seeing more and more, John, is having a single software framework but being able to deploy across different platforms, if you will, and therefore building different appliances to solve different problems. >> Lauren: Great. >> Yeah, and one of the things that I think is huge, and I want to get your thoughts on this, I think we should do a deep dive on it, and that is is that video is becoming much more of a bigger app. We use video a lot, as seen on theCUBE. Thank you for watching, but there's a lot of data in the video apps. It's not just do the video to communicate a message. >> Riaz: Yep. >> There's a digital artifact-- >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> That's beyond what it's for. It's now digitized-- >> Riaz: Yeah. >> So, that's now data, your thoughts? >> You know, when we were talking before you mentioned video is a data asset, completely agree. What we're finding is video is now transitioning from just being something that we thought about for safety and security to becoming more of an intelligent asset. Video's also now getting integrated more with the business process. So, let me give you an example. We're working with the manufacturer of nylon, and this is a process industry that works 24/7, and they're using video to actually monitor the output as it comes out of the machines. Because when the temperature rises above a certain limit, and this is obviously a manufacturing defect, it tends to blob up the nylon, which then reduces the value of the nylon from something that's high grade and high margin to low grade and low margin. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And video's helping solve the problem. So, the video creates an alert that's part now of the manufacturing process and manufacturing control, allowing management to intervene quickly to kind of at least cut their losses. So, that's an example of how video's now becoming very much a part of the business process. Not just safety and security but well beyond that. >> Well beyond surveillance. >> Riaz: Yeah. >> Lauren: Yeah. >> This is more than just normal use cases. So, new value activities are going on with video. >> Absolutely, the other big one is traffic, and I'm talking about road traffic. Whether you look at tunnels or you look at parkways and so on, we're now seeing video being used to monitor the flow patterns of cars-- >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> On highways and on parkways-- >> Lauren: Yeah. >> And then not just using that to predict traffic jams, but in some cases predict accidents. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> Because once you take these data labels and data assets through video and compute them, it's a stream of information that can be analyzed mathematically using an algorithm, and then fortunately we are able to now use that-- >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> To prevent accidents potentially, right? >> Lauren: Yeah. >> So, that's the kind of thing we see video in. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And this is just the cusp. You'll see a lot more of use cases where video and IOT get very integrated and again, very happy that Cisco's leading the charge on that. >> Mm-hmm. >> So, Lauren, I want to ask you a question because I know you and I have been talking about this, and that is is that the developer role around this is not obvious... I mean, it's obvious, "Oh, got to write software." >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> But now you've got to create ecosystems. So, let's just say businesses want to integrate video, they have a buy/build decision to make. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> Do they build it from scratch or they integrate it in. So, if you take Riaz's next level of conversation is video is a service, it's a microservice. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> If it's a data asset, if you believe that it's a microservice. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> So, it's not trivial now, you've got to figure out how to codify it. What do you guys think about that? You guys are the experts in the software, what's your thoughts? >> So, you know, I can jump in. I think this is an important trend. You know, especially if you look at three industries that I personally work with: manufacturing, you look at energy, and then you look at retail. These are three industries that I think are leading the charge on how they're using video, you know, in this context, and how the video's actually provided I think is less important. What's more important, as you said, is the microservice that has video as a component, and then consuming that and integrating it with a whole value stream within that industry. The other important element, I believe, is the use of video in conjunction with other types of sensors. So, let me give you an example. We're working with a large telco and you know, they have these cell towers placed all across the country and they actually video, they have video to monitor the cell towers and that's great, but the problem is it gives them a lot of false positives. So, they solved the problem by using human form recognition, still-- >> Like what's a false positive, give me an example. >> A false positive is, you know, a leaf, branch blowing. >> John: Oh, okay. >> And that gives you a positive reading, right. Now, they've kind of used, they've used some technology and they've reduced that down, but they still have too many false positives. So, they decided to combine the video feed with some of the sensors that they have. For example, when someone tries to pull a copper plate from the cell phone tower there's a sensor that tracks that. So, now combining the video input and the sensor input they get, you know, much fewer false positives. >> John: Yeah. >> And are able to take action much more expeditiously. >> The co-occurring incidents are a huge, huge opportunity for the IP. So, the thing I want to ask you, because I think this is much more business oriented, so want to get your thoughts on it... Okay, video's a data asset, people say it. I believe that, now I want to operationalize that in my company. Talk about a new process improvement, that's hard to do because they've never done it before. How are you guys engaging customers and what are some best practices to get them to operationalize a new, not just new technology or service, but actually integrate it into a preexisting or changing value chain? >> One of the things we do, John, is we'll engage with customers to do what we call a value management analysis. So, we actually sit down with them, work out, you know, what their existing process looks like, what an improved process might look like, and importantly, what kind of cost they can take out of the process, out of the system, or what kind of new value they can drive for their customers. So, it's either an increase in revenue, it's a decrease in cost, or an improvement in process efficiencies. Once we've done that it really allows us to then pair up that new process with our technology, and then actually track how much of the value they've received. We've found this approach kind of grounds everything in a very strong ROI, so instead of guessing as to what the output will be and does it actually move the needle on a value basis. We're actually able to document that up front and then actually track the results against what we thought would be. The other advantage of this process is it allows us to improve incrementally. So, the first version of a video enabled business process might give us a certain amount of value, but as we improve on that you could see incremental values and other processes being added on. Very similar to starting small and then adding on incrementally-- >> John: Yeah. >> Kind of a designed way. >> But you got to be open minded. Just let me throw a wrench into the equation here, which is okay, new data source... >> Riaz: Yeah. >> You mentioned the co-occurring identity on the cell tower, for example. There could be, like, multiple data inputs that are new. How does a customer figure that out? >> Different customers are different, and again, as I mentioned-- >> John: Or in generally speaking, because you've got to be prepared for the unknown. >> Yeah, some industries I think are more open to this because they have seen... They have felt this problem before. Going back to manufacturing as an example, monitoring, visually monitoring the output of a manufacturing process is a very labor intensive, you know, proposition. Manufacturers have struggled doing that for a long time. >> John: Yeah. >> Now having used video and getting just a very high level of efficiency-- >> John: Yeah. >> And combining different types of inputs is something they're very open to. >> John: Yeah. >> So, we see them very open to it. Other industries, I think, are coming along, but it all goes back to how important a problem are you solving and what's the payoff of solving the problem? >> John: Yeah. >> The bigger the problem, the more the willingness. >> Great conversation-- >> Lauren: Yeah. >> We had the devops guy on early. Damian, who's with Rundeck and he's saying, you know, bringing down silos and tickets is killing operations. >> Lauren: Yep. >> It's an old paradigm. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> You guys are going down a new road, and we talked about this at Cisco Live in Barcelona. You got tail wind for you guys as this, but you got a clean sheet of paper but you got some preexisting stuff, but it's not like baggage. It's just opportunity, in my opinion. So, I got to ask you how is the business going, what are you guys doing? What are some of the recent successes you've had? Share some insight into the-- >> Yeah, and I think just to add to that, I think what are the revenue opportunities that you see that, you know, you're providing these services to these customers. They must see new revenue opportunities as well. Wondering what those are. >> Absolutely. So, I'll kind of cover both, both sides of my business. I'll start with Jasper, Cisco Jasper. Our Cisco Jasper business is doing fabulously well. We added almost 10,000 devices last month alone, or last quarter, and we are on track to keep adding devices at a very fast pace, so very excited about that. We've just crossed 75 million. So, 75 million devices on Jasper. The last time we spoke, John, the number was 60 million. In addition, we've also seen many more enterprises adopting Jasper. >> John: Yeah. >> The last time we spoke it was 14,000, now it's over 16,400. (laughing) So, that number keeps growing. >> You'll see next month it'll be 20,000. (laughing) >> So, that number just keeps growing-- >> John: Yes. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And that allows us to broaden our reach-- >> John: Yeah. >> Get into different use cases and drive incremental value for our customers. On the Kinetic side, as I mentioned we're seeing a lot of traction in the verticals that I laid out earlier, but specifically what we're finding now is customers are getting serious-- >> Take a minute to explain Kinetic for a second. >> Riaz: Sure. >> Just one minute and then get into it. >> Sure, so Kinetic our data fabric. It's our platform that allows us to extract data from all kinds of IT devices that are sitting on a corporate or a private network. It allows us to process that data at the Edge and then it allows us to transport the data to wherever the customer wants it to be. So, it's really our IOT platform, our data fabric at the core. The Kinetic business is doing great. We've had lots of update, there's actually a booth out here where they're demoing Kinetic. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> I see a lot of people coming in and trying to understand it and we see people deploying Kinetic in more and more unique ways. We're working, for example, with a German manufacturer, a very prestigious German manufacturer that's now launching a pretty large project with Kinetic where they're using Kinetic to monitor the health of not just all their new machines, but also all the Braunfeld machines that they have installed over the past decade, right. So, we're very excited about that and very excited about the future. >> Well, great job, congratulations. Always great to talk with you. I think it's one of the exciting bright spots within Cisco with the IOT, certainly the DevNet developer program has been a huge success and that's only going to help you guys, and obviously the DevNet, create. You want some more software developers, you know, working on Kinetic and also Meraki and all these cool tools. So, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> More live coverage here, DevNet Creates, theCUBE in Silicon Valley in Mountain View, California. We'll be right back after this short break. (techy music playing)

>>Live from the Mandalay convention center in Las Vegas, Nevada it's doc cube at IBM insight, 2014. Here are your hosts, John furrier and Dave Volante. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. We are here. Live in Las Vegas for IBM impact. This is the cube special presentation at IBM insight inside the digital experience. IBM insight go. Social media lounge. Uh, the social media gurus are here. John furry with David. Um, that's playing off the joke. We're just sharing on Twitter, but seriously, we're here. If I didn't see this on the noise, my coast, Dave latte, next guest Marsha Cola year. Who's the managing director of impact ingenuity at Marsha Marsha. Yes, that's your Twitter handle is awesome. Welcome. Welcome back. Welcome back. >>Well, thanks. It's thrilled to be here. >>So we were just joking about Halloween and we're going to be a social media guru. It's a little bit of a meme going around the internet. I mean, there is no social media guru. I mean, you can't really be a guru with developing technology. You can be a practitioner. I mean, I mean, guru, what is a social media? What is a social media guru? This, >>This is where, because I offered that. I would answer any question you ask me, you can ask me those things. Sure. Well, I think that's the problem. I think that's why it'd be a fabulous Halloween costume. I'm going to think about doing that one too, because people seem to be know to these folks. So following them to the ends of the earth, because of something that they sit on, social media, I mean that, that's a kind of a scary concept, but Google glass >>As well. I mean, I mean, I'm not going to go there. Um, but let's talk, let's go in into that, that theme. I mean, honestly, you know, Jeff Jonas was just on he's awesome. We always get in the weeds. He's a fun character to talk to, but he's super smart as we're on this G2 thing, observation space, but we're all internet of things, right? I mean, it reminds me of that book is to read to my kids thing one and thing two, you know, we, all things we're all in another thing. So what do you see as that impact to, uh, this digital transformation where not only are the humans connected to the machines, the data that they're exhausting or sharing or streaming, but the machines are connected and collecting as well. How is that going to change? What's your view on all this? >>While I have been in the technology sector, most of my, uh, most of my life, uh, and I appreciate and enjoy the technology. I never lose sight of the fact that this is about the people it's about us actually working together of actually learning together, doing whatever the hell it is we're needing to do. So if all of my appliances are actually then taking care of the mundane, if my water softener system is actually getting the water put in and getting delivered on the right day, you know, all, all the better. If the, if the toaster is alerting me to some sort of news, I'm thrilled. I love the idea of the technology. Actually being able to take care of all that stuff that we never wanted to do in the first place, but the technology has been so lousy over the last couple of years, actually forever, uh, that we've had to do this stuff because the technology isn't doing it for us. >>Sure. I was a patient out in the customer space because that's, you know, that's more of the home example, but even business now seems to be early innings. I mean, people are kicking the tires. You know, we've talked to all the gurus coming up here who are the tech side, IBM and customers. And the reality is we're all pro data, which we all kind of see that obvious social data and, you know, big data analytics, certainly helpful, but this transformation people are now really changing how to operate, operationalize their business with it. It's a huge daunting task and it's scary. Um, some people are like, whoa, I don't want to do it. Or, Hey, I'm jumping in. I'm cool. Is there a cool factor? Is there a scared factor? What's your, what's your observation from mountain talking to everyone out in the, in the marketplace? >>Well, first I would, I'll totally bash the, the idea that this is only a consumer play or that it doesn't apply to businesses. Think of all the, uh, the mundane and ridiculous things we have to do at work because they're not being taken care of us. We aren't taken care of for us by our desks. If you want to look at that way or our computers, I loved hearing about the, the new, uh, uh, pairing of, uh Wayblazer and, you know, Watson and the idea of the travel being taken care of us, what we discover because of the data that we're putting off each and every moment is their systems around us all the time that actually know our preferences, know how we would be handling this, but yet they don't do anything about it. So the idea that we can actually move forward in that way should be just as applicable to our business. Uh, a manager should not have to actually be asking some of the questions that they're asking the HR department is need to be asking how you're doing. It's evident by all the things that you put out into the world. And by just actually attending to what's going on, we have a huge opportunity to get back all that time that we've been wasting all these years. I'm just a stupid >>And just to what's. So what's the bottleneck is a fear security, oh, we don't want privacy. Marcia will get offended. If we tweet her, she knows that we know that she tweeted that. I mean, that's, that's a concern. People have, it seems to be, is it? Yeah. Well, look, go back up, >>But why is it a concern? It's because the people who've been doing it early are doing it horribly. I mean, they're doing it in not respectful ways. There isn't actually a real thought about how would I be okay with this doing? And then those are we're. So ahead of the curve, maybe because of the guru status, some of these social media, maybe that maybe that's the reason, >>Just look at the government, they were big data gurus and they screwed up that that whole Snowden thing was all like, Hey, just ask us, we'll give you our email addresses. You can search my email, have a nice day. >>It's a very different message. It's a very different conversation. It's a very different question. It's a very different level of respect that we have from one person working with another. I'm actually talking with people as opposed to at them. And instead of just making assumptions of actually participating, I mean, the idea that engagement is goal just implies that we haven't been engaged all these years. We haven't been thinking we haven't been doing, I haven't met. I personally, haven't met a really dumb person. It, you know, and years, and yet everything I do at would imply that we're, we're too stupid to be able to really think and act and, and be thoughtful about it. >>So you're an influencer. Um, you're out here in the digital sphere and you are, you're hearing influencer. Um, I mean, whatever you define it. Well, it's, I guess if they say so, if you are a VIP influencer, we'll go with that. Um, >>Digging on your Twitter stream here. Fantastic. >>Working on it. So share this law, you know, we'd love, we'd love to hear your stories cause you last year you were awesome with the cube. We'd love, love JV. Give us the update. What's going on with, sorry. We started together Ted at IBM conference. You super busy. Um, what's going on share with the folks out there. Some of the things you've been even into what your what's working show some, you know, some stuff that didn't work, what's going on, what's happening? What are you, what are you doing? What are you worried? All right, >>John, if you're going to ask them, I'm telling you you're really, if you're really ready, Don Damian, probably a little after I saw you last time after I was visiting here that, uh, our world's falling apart. And if all of us actually don't get on that. If we don't actually start figuring out how to use the precious time we have the, the precious money we have, the, the roles we have in our organizations, the resources at our disposal, our brains for good, not evil. I'm not so sure about the world that my son is going to be inheriting for example. And, uh, I'm, I'm at a point in my life where I realize, I, I know a heck of a lot in the world. I have a lot of skills, everybody. I know. I look at these people around me having tremendous skills. And instead of us just sort of churning out the butter one more year, uh, we best, we best be thinking about what can I do given what I have of my time and my resources, my skills, or whatever that is and apply that to what I have influence over and be able to make as much difference. >>Are we talking about God's last offer here, the sustainable world, or what's actually on all? >>Oh, you're not at the time that the timing is perfect too. If you think about it, don't seriously. >>What are we talking about? The deterioration of our planet? We're talking about social condition. Yes, >>I, well, I mean, I can go on and >>On about money return. I can, I can entertain for hours. You just made. The comment >>I made is that no matter where we look, that that scientists have pointed out that we're past the point of no return with our climate. We, uh, we look at the, uh, at the deterioration of the planet around us. I happen to live in the woods and I mean, deep in the woods and you can, you can see the change of how much rain is coming down. That didn't, I mean, I, I'm not, my intent here is not to talk about all the, that the problems around us. We all actually feel them, even if we're not acknowledging them, what I see is the wasted opportunity of us, not actually, re-examining what we're choosing to do and figure out how, whatever it is we're capable of doing could actually be helping instead of bringing it up. So how should people, let's say, people want to know that's good, but I just wanted to frame it. So let's >>Take people want to, so let's say that resonates to somebody in the audience. What should they do? How should they start pick a passion? And they >>Have, um, I mean, I, my, my approach to all the change work I do and have been doing with corporations for the last 20 years is actually not additive. It's not asking the question. What more could I do? Because that's usually what keeps people from doing it. I asked the question, what's keeping me from doing what I've always known needed to be done. So in, in our communities, you know, my experience is everybody knows who it is that could use some assistance, not in a handout sort of way in a reaching out and caring way of asking of, of having a conversation, a participating, and to be able to step back and ask that question. What's keeping me from doing that. We know what needs to be done, but we're not doing it. So how can I say, oh, well, what's keeping me from doing it. I don't have time to do it. Okay. Well, what can I do to actually just get a little bit more time to do something that matters in the world? So that that's the most, very, >>Very basic level. It could be slowly be that it's, >>It's less Twitter. It could also be a re-evaluating how much time I'm spending at work on stuff that could be automated. I mean, going back to this whole conversation about automation, it is to ask those questions. What I can do. That's just about time. Um, >>I, yeah, that is one of the biggest objections I don't have time. Right? >>Yeah. So what I find is when I talk about, uh, global health actually, is that when we look at the idea of health, not as in just exercising more or just eating, right, we're talking about fiscal health, we're talking about, uh, creating a world that is just, uh, a healthier place. When I ask people those questions, most of them can say, well, yeah, this isn't, this is important to me, but I don't know what to do about it. So one is, as you absolutely said, is finding, finding those passions and be able to figure out what you're going to do. But more importantly, to ask yourself that question, when am I going to do this? If not now, I feel like I'm, I'm falling. Like I, uh, I'm Mike is falling out. Let me, let me get that. >>Well, we chit chat a lot of hair. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, okay. So we're talking about different ways to find time. >>Um, Dave, I mean, I think it's a great time. I mean, the passionate thing, passionate thing is where the keyword is contributing, right? So like, I think it's a good time because I have, we, I, we both Dave and I both have four kids. So we see the new generation in their minds all the time because we're driving around, but they're impressionable right now is the old expression is you can grab the play though, and you can shape it. You can act, we can actually, as leaders and mature experience, instant people that have some skills in computing, we can influence like stem. We can influence women in tech. We can influence computer science curriculums or get influenced modern society because the new generation is coming in and they're natives, they're adopting and they're thirsty for leadership, but I don't think that they're seeing it. So I think there's really a good time. You've seen the Kickstarter crowdsourcing stuff is really becoming a part of this new tribe. So I believe the gravity around making things happen is participation, collaboration and data. Data is knowledge, endorsement, social proof. These are concepts that are easily transferable. If you can just, if you just wake up and do it. So I think, you know, >>If you just wake up and do it everywhere about, so Y Y if you wake up every day, why aren't you doing it today? >>We have Craig brown on earlier, he's doing $25,000 investments for kids to start companies, you know, whether the inner city kids. And that's pretty cool. I mean, so, you know, this is, this is the democratization piece, but in a connected network, it's frictionless communication. I mean, hell Twitter, overthrew governments. So you can have solidarity, peaceful solidarity as well as other rev revolution. So I think that's a very doable thing versus just checking the Basel. I volunteer to do something. And I think that has been more of like a peace Corps. I helped people. >>Uh, and I'm personally, I asked this question of everybody that I asked her, actually asked two questions of everybody I work with now. Uh, one of them is what can you not do? What can you not, not do actually. So if you, if you think to yourself, if I look back on my life, if I look back on my life, what is it that I thought to myself, oh, I didn't have time for that. Or I couldn't do it. You we've all heard that, you know, what do you want on your tombstone? However, that works. But I find that everybody, I know, think it has a burning need to be doing something useful in their lives. It's not just mission driven. It absolutely. It's a purpose. It's a connecting with, with connecting with people who are helping to move the world forward. And I just stopped. And I said, even in a business context, I say, you know, now it's time. We're kind of out of time. Get on with it, >>Please. The clock is ticking. Well, Jeff Jones was talking about the asteroid thing to geospatial smart geeky conversation. But the key thing out of that was better focus of finite resources. And that really comes down to the fundamental better decision-making. I mean, we, my wife says, so our kids will make better decisions. I mean, that's a mother talking to the kids, but that's our life now. So like, if we can make better decisions, that ultimately is the big data opportunity from social change to play to business. >>And then the second question absolutely, absolutely agree. Everything you said. I, the next big question I asked is what are you doing to improve the world? Now? I would say 50% of the people I say, just give me this completely deer in the headlights. Look, what do you mean to save the world or to improve the world, to change world? However you want to frame that. But I haven't met anybody in years that isn't interested in truly contributing, leaving the world a better place than they came into. And that's no matter what their, their demographic makeup is. That's no matter the community they live in, no matter what they're doing, people have a fundamental desire to do better. And so I asked that of every business person, every corporation I work with. And that's one of the things I love about this whole idea of, you know, building a smarter planet that should tie to every single thing we do. And, and when we lose sight of that, we see that, no, I think >>This is a really great conversation to have because it's, it's something that's emerging. And, you know, again, there's some obvious examples, oh, pebble watch crowdfunding. But if you look at really impactful things like open source software, you are seeing the playbook. I mean, the playbook is, you know, people can participate at any level. So the, the fear of getting this kind of group going is that I'm too busy or, you know, you can, the contribution doesn't have to be game changing for an individual could be one small piece of the puzzle. It could be small contribution. Someone might do more heavy lifting than the other. That's an open source concept. We've seen that work huge. A lot of leverage, a lot of participation. Um, so I think that's something that I really haven't seen get applied to at a large scale. I mean, you see the protest in Hong Kong are interesting. That's an indicator. What does that mean? Right. So what's your take on all? What do you think needs to happen to get more people tied into these shared missions? >>It's a little little over there off >>The ranch. A little bit more honesty. More honesty. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, not, not something that we talk about these sorts of events is that I I've gotten to the point where I do these large talks in front of thousands of people. And I ask everybody to turn to the person next to them and introduce themselves, honestly, like, why are you here? And why do you care? We've all gotten so wrapped up in the >>Who we are as well. And that's why I say, I love the idea of you being >>A social media guru for Halloween. It's just become, so it's so about the role that we've lost the connection with our humanity. And so I just, I asked people just to step back. So it's as simple. So yeah, I am all for the large initiatives. >>Yes. Self-aware is a really interesting concept. And that really what you're talking about here is, I mean, I make fun of myself. I put that out there. Probably gonna get some hate mail for that tweet, but no, it is what it is. I mean, I'm making fun of myself and us because we have to, because it's really not moving fast enough in the writer in my mind, at least I think, I mean, I think social media is a real, real game changer. I'm pro pro social media, but I mean, come on, if you can't make fun of yourself then, >>But what is social media do you mean? What is our untapped desire that why we're all participating in social media, where we've missed the opportunity for all these years to be human in everything that we're doing? Yeah. I mean, the idea that you can be, you know, wherever you are and be able to reach the people who have answers to be able to help you make better decisions is something that we've had that desire for a very long time. We've just been, not able to do that for so long that it's now it's time we get on >>With that. I would do the cube to Dave and I talk all the time. We want to broadcast out the data because I think people want to be part of something. And I think at the end of the day, it's human psychology is that being part of something makes psychology of the soul work better. It's like, okay, I want to be part of a group. I want to belong. It's a yearning, it's a tribe. Whatever that kind of collective group is, whether you know, the clown or the, or the guru or whatever, I think that's a people are yearning for that collectiveness of Griff groups. And I think the data gap is gravity. Like how do you a joke? It could be a serious conversation. It could be something provocative. I think content is a nice piece of gravity to kind of bring people together versus, you know, tweeting, Hey, look, how big I am. I got a zillion followers. >>Okay. So let's back up though. So content, so we can talk about the, the, the, the, the concept that has content. That's a lovely thing to do at a data conference, talking about the content it's about things we care about. That's what content is. So if we take that a step further and we actually extrapolate and say, how does this impact me? It's not because it's content it's because we're talking about topics that matter to each of us. And so the more we get back to that sort of conversation, the more we get back to that sort of point, I think we have a bigger opportunity to have conversations that matter and not be able to be. We are wasting our time doing the silly stuff. >>Okay. I'm getting the hook here, Marcia conversations that matter. That's really what it's all about. Changing the world. Thanks for calling the cube. Great to see you again. And, uh, we'll be right back after this short break live in Las Vegas date, you continues wall-to-wall coverage here, inside the cube, inside the digital experience in psycho with IBM social lounge. We right back after this short break,