>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting accelerating automation with definite brought to you by Cisco. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with the que were in Palo Alto studio with ongoing coverage of Cisco definite create. We've been covering definite create for a number of years, I think since the very first show. And Susie, we and the team really built a practice, built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and getting Debs really to start to build applications and drive kind of the whole software defined networking thing forward. And a big part of that is partners and working with partners and developing solutions and using brain power that's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have our next guest. Ah, partner for someone is Brad Haas. He is the engineering director for Dev Ops at Presidio. Brad, great to see you. >>Hey, Jeff. Great to be here. >>Absolutely. And joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect, Francisco Definite partners. And he has been driving ah, whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, Great to see you. >>Thanks, Jeff. Great to be here. Looking forward to this conversation. >>Absolutely. So let's let's >>start >>with you, Chuck. Because I think, um, you know, you're leading this kind of partner effort and, you know, software defined networking has been talked about for a long time, and, you know, it's really seems to be maturing. And software to find everything right has been taking over, especially with with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the customer program ability, custom ability in software and taking some of that off the hardware. Talk about, you know, the programs that you guys are putting together and how important it is toe have partners to kind of move this whole thing forward versus just worrying about people that have Cisco badges. >>Yeah, Jeff, Absolutely. So along this whole journey of definite, where we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of versus co platforms, most of Cisco's business is transacted through partners, and what we hear from our customers and our partners is they wanna our customers one away to be able to identify. Does this partner have the capabilities and the skills necessary to help me go down this automation journey. I'm trying to do do a new implementation. I wanna automate that. How can I find a partner? Thio, Get there. And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices going along this definite journey with us for the last six years. They really want to say, Hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and given edge to my customers to show them that, Yes, I have these capabilities. I built a business practice. I have technology. I have technologists that really understand this capability, and they have the definite certifications to prove it helped me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what are definite partner. Specialization is all about >>right, that's great. And, Brad, you're certainly one of those partners. And I want to get your perspective because partners are often times a little bit closer to the customer because you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions and just reflect on. We know what happened back in March 15th, when basically everybody was told to go home on You can't goto work, so you know there's all the memes and social media about who you know, who pushed forward your digital transformation. The CEO of the CMO or cove it. And we all know what the answer is. Whatever you can share some information. So what happened then? And really, for your business and your customers, and then reflect now we're six months into it. Six months plus and and you know, this new normal is going to continue for a while. How is the customer? Attitudes kind of change now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment. And really, we need to put in place, um foundation to carry forward for a very long time. Potentially. >>Yeah, it was really quite interesting, actually. You know, when code first hit, we got a lot of requests. Thio help with automation of provisioning our customers. And in the whole, you know, digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there, and I'd say it became or of the workplace transformation. So we were quickly, uh, you know, migrating customers. Thio. You know, new topology is where instead of the, you know, users sitting in those offices, they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly and waited. Have a lot of success there in those beginning months with, you know, using automation and program ability building, you know, provisioning portals for our customers. Thio get up and running really fast on. But that is what it looked like in those early days. And then over time, I'd say that the the asks from our customers has started to transition a little bit, you know, Now they're asking, you know, how can I take advantage of the technology to, you know, look at my office is in a different way, You know, for example, you know how many people are coming in and out of those locations, you know, what's the usage of my e? My conference rooms are there, Uh, are there, um, situations where I can use that information like, how many people are in the building at a certain point in time and make real estate decisions on that? You know, like, do I even need this office anymore? So? So the conversations really changed in ways that you couldn't have imagined before march. >>Now, I wonder with you, Chuck, in terms of the Cisco point of view. I mean, the network is amazing. It had had co vid struck five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago. You know, clearly there's a lot of industries that are suffering badly. Entertainment, Um, restaurant, business, transportation, they, you know, hospitality. But for those of us in kind of the information industry, the switch was pretty easy. Um, you know, and and the network enables the whole thing. And so I wonder if you know, kind of from your perspective, as suddenly, you know, the importance of the network, the importance of security and the ability now to move to this new normal very quickly from a networking perspective. And then on top of that, having, you know, definite with with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space is good spaces. You could be giving this new challenge thrown at you. >>Yeah, Jeff, we completely agree with that. Uh, Cisco has always pushed the idea that the network is transformational. The network is the foundation. And as our customers have really adopted that message, it is enabled that idea for the knowledge workers to be able to continue on. So for myself. I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years this is you know, the change to the normalcy is I never get on a plane anymore. But my day to day functions are are still the same, and it's built because of the capabilities we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry as faras kind of moving to that application type of economy as we go to micro services as we go to a higher dependency upon cloud. Those things have really enabled the world really to be able to better respond to this to this covitz situation, and I think it's helped to to justify the investments that that our customers have made. A swell is what our partners have been being able to do to deliver on that multi cloud capability to take those applications, get him closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable. Thio users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional four walls, >>right, right, it's interesting. And Brad, you made a comment on another interview I was watching getting ready for this one in terms of applications. Now, being first class citizens was was what you said, and it's kind of interesting coming from an infrastructure point of view where before it was, you know, what do I have and what can I build on it now? Really, it's the infrastructure, that response back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that APS first is the way to go, because that gives people the competitive advantage that gives them the ability to react in the marketplace to innovate and move faster. So, you know, it's a It's a really interesting twist to be able to support an application first by having a software defined in a more programmable infrastructure stack. >>Yeah, yeah, no doubt. And, you know, I think that the whole push the cloud was really interesting In the early days, it was like, Hey, we're going to you change our applications to be cloud first, you know, And then I think the terminology changed over time. I've, um, team or cloud native. So when we when we look at what Cloud has done over the past five years, with customers moving, you know, there their assets into the cloud in the early days that we were all looking at it just like another data center. But what it's really become is a place thio host your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're no longer talking about you know, the assets per se. We're talking about the applications and what what did those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now, especially what with the whole move to cloud native and micro services in the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure. As code you're now able toe, bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application as infrastructure is code, the application in this the definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are all are wrapped together and you've got changed control, version control. Um, and it's all automated, you know, it's it's a beautiful thing, and I think it's something that we've all kind of hoped would happen. You know, when I look back at the early definitions of software defined networking. I think everybody was trying to figure it out, and they didn't really fully understand what that meant. Now that we can actually define what that network infrastructure could look like, as it's as it's wrapped around that application in a code template, maybe that's terror, former answerable, whatever that might be. Whatever method or tool that you're using Thio to bring it all together. It Z you know, it's really interesting. You know, I think I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than you know, when those early days of S d. N, we're out, you know, it was a positive controller. Is it the new version of S and M. P? You know, now it makes sense. It's actually something tangible, >>right? Right. But still, Chuckas, you said, right? There's still a lot of AP ice, and there's still a lot of component pieces to these applications that are all run off. The network that all have to fit, uh, have to fit together. You know, we cover pager duty summit and you know, their whole thing is trying to find out where the problems are within a very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandoned the shopping cart or whatever the particular applications. So again, the network infrastructure and the program ability. Super important. But I wonder if you could speak to the automation because there's just too much stuff going on for individual people to keep track of. And they shouldn't be keeping track of it because they need to be focusing on the important stuff, not this increasing amount of bandwidth and traffic going through the network. >>Yeah, absolutely, Jeff. So the bandwidth that's necessary in order to support everybody working from home to support this video conference? I mean, we used to do this sitting face to face. Now we're doing this over the Internet, the amount of people necessary to to be able to facilitate that type of traffic. If we're doing it the way we did 10 years ago, we would not scale. It's automation that makes that possible. That allows us to look higher up the ability to do that. Automatic provisions provisioning. Now that we're in micro services, now that everything is cloud native, we have the ability to to better to better adjust to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we could very quickly spend something up to to take that load off where traditionally it was. Open up a ticket. Let me get someone in there. Let me fix it. Now it's instantaneously identify the solution. Go to my playbook, figure out exactly what solution I need to deploy and and put that out there. And the network engineering team, the infrastructure engineering team. They just simply need to get notified that this happened. And as long as there's traceability in a point that Brad Maeda's faras you being able to go through here doing the automation of the documentation side of it, I know when I was a network engineer, one of the last things we ever did was documentation. But now that we have the A p, i s from the infrastructure and then the ability to tie that into other systems like an I p address management or a change control or a trouble ticketing system, that whole idea of I made in infrastructure changed and now I can automatically do that. Documentation up Dayton record. I know who did it. I know when they did it, and I know what they did. And I know what the test results were even five years ago. That was fantasy land. Now, today, that's just the new normal. That's just how we all operates. >>Right? Right, Right. So I want to get your take on the other trend, which is cloud Multi Cloud, Public Cloud. You know, as I think you said, Brad, When Public Cloud first came out, there was kind of this this Russian to we're gonna throw everything in there than for for different reasons. People decided. Maybe that's not the best, the best solution. But really, it's horses for courses, right? And I think it's pretty interesting that that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're gonna put their workloads. And, oh, by the way, that might not be a static place, right? It might be moving around based on, you know, maybe I do my my initial Dev and an Amazon. And then when I go into production, maybe I wanna move it into my data center, and then maybe I'm having a big promotion or something. I wanna flex capability. So from from your perspective and helping customers work through this because still, there's a lot of opinions about what is multi cloud, what is hybrid cloud? And, you know, it's horses for courses. How are you helping people navigate that? And what does having programmable infrastructure enable you to do for helping customers kind of sort through? You know, everybody talks about their journey. I think they're still, you know, kind of bumbling down, bumbling down past, trying to find new things. What works, what doesn't work. And I think it's still really early days and trying to mesh all this stuff together. >>Yeah, no doubt is still early days. And you know, I e go back Thio being applications centric because, you know, being able thio understand that application. When you move to the cloud, it may not look like what it used to look like. When you when you move it over there, you may be breaking parts off of it. Some of them might be running on a platform as a service, while other pieces of it are running as infrastructure as a service, and some of it might still be in your data center. Those applications are becoming much more complex than they used to be because we're breaking them apart into different services. Those services could live all over the place. So with automation, we really gain the power of being able to combine those things. As I mentioned earlier. Those resource is wherever they are and be defined in that infrastructure is code and automation. But you know, decide from provisioning. I think we focus a lot about provisioning when we talk about automation. We also have these amazing capabilities on on the side of operations to like we've got streaming telemetry in the ability Thio gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before or at least in the, you know, in the early days of monitoring software, right? You knew exactly what that device was, where it was. It probably had a friendly name. Like, maybe it was something from the Hobbit. Right now you've got things coming up in spinning, spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place in that thing. You used to know what that waas Now you have toe quickly. Figure out where it went, so the observe ability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody, um, should be paying attention, attention to moving forward with. Regards, Thio when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers Or, you know, in your premise, um, breaking that in a micro services you really need to understand what's going on in the, you know, program ability in a p I s and, you know, yang models or tied into streaming telemetry. Now there's just so many break things coming out of this, you know? And it's all like a data structure that that people who are going down this path and the definite path they're learning these data structures and be able to rationalize and make sense of them. Once you understand that, then all of these things come together, whether it's cloud or a router or a switch. Um, Amazon. You know, it doesn't matter. You're you're all speaking a common language, which is that data structure. >>That's great, Chuck. I want to shift gears a little bit because there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about about, you know, definite really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco, um, as really more of a software software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you could put a little more color on that, Um, because clearly, as you said partners Air super important, it's your primary go to market and and Presidio's, I'm sure the best partner that you have in the whole world. That's and you know, you said, there's some There's some, you know, nontraditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner, that suddenly you guys were playing with because of really the software lead. >>Yes, Jeff, that's exactly right. So as we've been talking to folks with Devon, it's whether it be at one of the Cisco Live events in the Definite zone or the prior definite create events will have. We'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views as a as a customer because they're not in our partner ecosystem. They want to be able to deliver these capabilities to our customers, but they have no interest in being in the resale market. This what we're doing with the definite specialization gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem share them with are extremely large, definite community so they can get access to those to those potential customers. But also it allows us to do partner to partner type of integration. So Brad and Presidio, they built a fantastic networking. They always have the fantastic networking business, but they built this fantastic automation business that's there. But they may come into into a scenario where it's working with their vertical or working with the technology piece that they may not have an automation practice for. We can leverage some of these software specific partners to come in there and do a joint goto markets where so they could go where that traditional channel partner can leverage their deep Cisco knowledge in those customer relationships that they have and bring in that software partner almost as a subcontractor to help them deliver that additional business value. On top of that traditional stack that brings us to this business, outcomes of the customers are looking for a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion. >>That's terrific. Well, again, it zits unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the Cisco definite shows you know, they're still small, they're still intimate. There's still a lot of information sharing and, you know, great to see you. And like I said, we've been at the computers Museum, I think, the last couple of years. And in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together. Hope maybe, maybe for next year's event. But thank you very much for for stopping by and sharing the information. Really appreciate it. >>You have a happy to be here. All >>right, Thanks a lot. That's Brad and Chuck. I'm Jeff. You're watching Cisco. Definite live coverage on the Cube. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality symposium brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hi everybody. This is Dave Vellante and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the MIT CDOIQ 2020 event. Of course, it's gone virtual. We wish we were all together in Cambridge. They were going to move into a new building this year for years they've done this event at the Tang Center, moving into a new facility, but unfortunately going to have to wait at least a year, we'll see, But we've got a great guest. Nonetheless, Doug Laney is here. He's a Business Value Strategist, the bestselling author, an analyst, consultant then a long time CUBE friend. Doug, great to see you again. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Dave, great to be with you again as well. So can I ask you? You have been an advocate for obviously measuring the value of data, the CDO role. I don't take this the wrong way, but I feel like the last 150 days have done more to accelerate people's attention on the importance of data and the value of data than all the great work that you've done. What do you think? (laughing) >> It's always great when organizations, actually take advantage of some of these concepts of data value. You may be speaking specifically about the situation with United Airlines and American Airlines, where they have basically collateralized their customer loyalty data, their customer loyalty programs to the tunes of several billion dollars each. And one of the things that's very interesting about that is that the third party valuations of their customer loyalty data, resulted in numbers that were larger than the companies themselves. So basically the value of their data, which is as we've discussed previously off balance sheet is more valuable than the market cap of those companies themselves, which is just incredibly fascinating. >> Well, and of course, all you have to do is look to the Trillionaire's Club. And now of course, Apple pushing two trillion to really see the value that the market places on data. But the other thing is of course, COVID, everybody talks about the COVID acceleration. How have you seen it impact the awareness of the importance of data, whether it applies to business resiliency or even new monetization models? If you're not digital, you can't do business. And digital is all about data. >> I think the major challenge that most organizations are seeing from a data and analytics perspective due to COVID is that their traditional trend based forecast models are broken. If you're a company that's only forecasting based on your own historical data and not taking into consideration, or even identifying what are the leading indicators of your business, then COVID and the economic shutdown have entirely broken those models. So it's raised the awareness of companies to say, "Hey, how can we predict our business now? We can't do it based on our own historical data. We need to look externally at what are those external, maybe global indicators or other kinds of markets that proceed our own forecasts or our own activity." And so the conversion from trend based forecast models to what we call driver based forecast models, isn't easy for a lot of organizations to do. And one of the more difficult parts is identifying what are those external data factors from suppliers, from customers, from partners, from competitors, from complimentary products and services that are leading indicators of your business. And then recasting those models and executing on them. >> And that's a great point. If you think about COVID and how it's changed things, everything's changed, right? The ideal customer profile has changed, your value proposition to those customers has completely changed. You got to rethink that. And of course, it's very hard to predict even when this thing eventually comes back, some kind of hybrid mode, you used to be selling to people in an office environment. That's obviously changed. There's a lot that's permanent there. And data is potentially at least the forward indicator, the canary in the coal mine. >> Right. It also is the product and service. So not only can it help you and improve your forecasting models, but it can become a product or service that you're offering. Look at us right now, we would generally be face to face and person to person, but we're using video technology to transfer this content. And then one of the things that I... It took me awhile to realize, but a couple of months after the COVID shutdown, it occurred to me that even as a consulting organization, Caserta focuses on North America. But the reality is that every consultancy is now a global consultancy because we're all doing business remotely. There are no particular or real strong localization issues for doing consulting today. >> So we talked a lot over the years about the role of the CDO, how it's evolved, how it's changed the course of the early... The pre-title days it was coming out of a data quality world. And it's still vital. Of course, as we heard today from the Keynote, it's much more public, much more exposed, different public data sources, but the role has certainly evolved initially into regulated industries like financial, healthcare and government, but now, many, many more organizations have a CDO. My understanding is that you're giving a talk in the business case for the CDO. Help us understand that. >> Yeah. So one of the things that we've been doing here for the last couple of years is a running an ongoing study of how organizations are impacted by the role of the CDO. And really it's more of a correlation and looking at what are some of the qualities of organizations that have a CDO or don't have a CDO. So some of the things we found is that organizations with a CDO nearly twice as often, mention the importance of data and analytics in their annual report organizations with a C level CDO, meaning a true executive are four times more often likely to be using data, to transform the business. And when we're talking about using data and advanced analytics, we found that organizations with a CIO, not a CDO responsible for their data assets are only half as likely to be doing advanced analytics in any way. So there are a number of interesting things that we found about companies that have a CDO and how they operate a bit differently. >> I want to ask you about that. You mentioned the CIO and we're increasingly seeing lines of reporting and peer reporting alter shift. The sands are shifting a little bit. In the early days the CDO and still predominantly I think is an independent organization. We've seen a few cases and increasingly number where they're reporting into the CIO, we've seen the same thing by the way with the chief Information Security Officer, which used to be considered the fox watching the hen house. So we're seeing those shifts. We've also seen the CDO become more aligned with a technical role and sometimes even emerging out of that technical role. >> Yeah. I think the... I don't know, what I've seen more is that the CDOs are emerging from the business, companies are realizing that data is a business asset. It's not an IT asset. There was a time when data was tightly coupled with applications of technologies, but today data is very easily decoupled from those applications and usable in a wider variety of contexts. And for that reason, as data gets recognized as a business, not an IT asset, you want somebody from the business responsible for overseeing that asset. Yes, a lot of CDOs still report to the CIO, but increasingly more CDOs you're seeing and I think you'll see some other surveys from other organizations this week where the CDOs are more frequently reporting up to the CEO level, meaning they're true executives. Along I advocated for the bifurcation of the IT organization into separate I and T organizations. Again, there's no reason other than for historical purposes to keep the data and technology sides of the organizations so intertwined. >> Well, it makes sense that the Chief Data Officer would have an affinity with the lines of business. And you're seeing a lot of organizations, really trying to streamline their data pipeline, their data life cycles, bringing that together, infuse intelligence into that, but also take a systems view and really have the business be intimately involved, if not even owned into the data. You see a lot of emphasis on self-serve, what are you seeing in terms of that data pipeline or the data life cycle, if you will, that used to be wonky, hard core techies, but now it really involving a lot more constituent. >> Yeah. Well, the data life cycle used to be somewhat short. The data life cycles, they're longer and they're more a data networks than a life cycle and or a supply chain. And the reason is that companies are finding alternative uses for their data, not just using it for a single operational purpose or perhaps reporting purpose, but finding that there are new value streams that can be generated from data. There are value streams that can be generated internally. There are a variety of value streams that can be generated externally. So we work with companies to identify what are those variety of value streams? And then test their feasibility, are they ethically feasible? Are they legally feasible? Are they economically feasible? Can they scale? Do you have the technology capabilities? And so we'll run through a process of assessing the ideas that are generated. But the bottom line is that companies are realizing that data is an asset. It needs to be not just measured as one and managed as one, but also monetized as an asset. And as we've talked about previously, data has these unique qualities that it can be used over and over again, and it generate more data when you use it. And it can be used simultaneously for multiple purposes. So companies like, you mentioned, Apple and others have built business models, based on these unique qualities of data. But I think it's really incumbent upon any organization today to do so as well. >> But when you observed those companies that we talk about all the time, data is at the center of their organization. They maybe put people around that data. That's got to be one of the challenge for many of the incumbents is if we talked about the data silos, the different standards, different data quality, that's got to be fairly major blocker for people becoming a "Data-driven organization." >> It is because some organizations were developed as people driven product, driven brand driven, or other things to try to convert. To becoming data-driven, takes a high degree of data literacy or fluency. And I think there'll be a lot of talk about that this week. I'll certainly mention it as well. And so getting the organization to become data fluent and appreciate data as an asset and understand its possibilities and the art of the possible with data, it's a long road. So the culture change that goes along with it is really difficult. And so we're working with 150 year old consumer brand right now that wants to become more data-driven and they're very product driven. And we hear the CIO say, "We want people to understand that we're a data company that just happens to produce this product. We're not a product company that generates data." And once we realized that and started behaving in that fashion, then we'll be able to really win and thrive in our marketplace. >> So one of the key roles of a Chief Data Officers to understand how data affects the monetization of an organization. Obviously there are four profit companies of your healthcare organization saving lives, obviously being profitable as well, or at least staying within the budget, depending upon the structure of the organization. But a lot of people I think oftentimes misunderstand that it's like, "Okay, do I have to become a data broker? Am I selling data directly?" But I think, you pointed out many times and you just did that unlike oil, that's why we don't like that data as a new oil analogy, because it's so much more valuable and can be use, it doesn't fall because of its scarcity. But what are you finding just in terms of people's application of that notion of monetization? Cutting costs, increasing revenue, what are you seeing in the field? What's that spectrum look like? >> So one of the things I've done over the years is compile a library of hundreds and hundreds of examples of how organizations are using data and analytics in innovative ways. And I have a book in process that hopefully will be out this fall. I'm sharing a number of those inspirational examples. So that's the thing that organizations need to understand is that there are a variety of great examples out there, and they shouldn't just necessarily look to their own industry. There are inspirational examples from other industries as well, many clients come to me and they ask, "What are others in my industry doing?" And my flippant response to that is, "Why do you want to be in second place or third place? Why not take an idea from another industry, perhaps a digital product company and apply that to your own business." But like you mentioned, there are a variety of ways to monetize data. It doesn't involve necessarily selling it. You can deliver analytics, you can report on it, you can use it internally to generate improved business process performance. And as long as you're measuring how data's being applied and what its impact is, then you're in a position to claim that you're monetizing it. But if you're not measuring the impact of data on business processes or on customer relationships or partner supplier relationships or anything else, then it's difficult to claim that you're monetizing it. But one of the more interesting ways that we've been working with organizations to monetize their data, certainly in light of GDPR and the California consumer privacy act where I can't sell you my data anymore, but we've identified ways to monetize your customer data in a couple of ways. One is to synthesize the data, create synthetic data sets that retain the original statistical anomalies in the data or features of the data, but don't share actually any PII. But another interesting way that we've been working with organizations to monetize their data is what I call, Inverted data monetization, where again, I can't share my customer data with you, but I can share information about your products and services with my customers. And take a referral fee or a commission, based on that. So let's say I'm a hospital and I can't sell you my patient data, of course, due to variety of regulations, but I know who my diabetes patients are, and I can introduce them to your healthy meal plans, to your gym memberships, to your at home glucose monitoring kits. And again, take a referral fee or a cut of that action. So we're working with customers and the financial services firm industry and in the healthcare industry on just those kinds of examples. So we've identified hundreds of millions of dollars of incremental value for organizations that from their data that we're just sitting on. >> Interesting. Doug because you're a business value strategist at the top, where in the S curve do you see you're able to have the biggest impact. I doubt that you enter organizations where you say, "Oh, they've got it all figured out. They can't use my advice." But as well, sometimes in the early stages, you may not be able to have as big of an impact because there's not top down support or whatever, there's too much technical data, et cetera, where are you finding you can have the biggest impact, Doug? >> Generally we don't come in and run those kinds of data monetization or information innovation exercises, unless there's some degree of executive support. I've never done that at a lower level, but certainly there are lower level more immediate and vocational opportunities for data to deliver value through, to simply analytics. One of the simple examples I give is, I sold a home recently and when you put your house on the market, everybody comes out of the woodwork, the fly by night, mortgage companies, the moving companies, the box companies, the painters, the landscapers, all know you're moving because your data is in the U.S. and the MLS directory. And it was interesting. The only company that didn't reach out to me was my own bank, and so they lost the opportunity to introduce me to a Mortgage they'd retain me as a client, introduce me to my new branch, print me new checks, move the stuff in my safe deposit box, all of that. They missed a simple opportunity. And I'm thinking, this doesn't require rocket science to figure out which of your customers are moving, the MLS database or you can harvest it from Zillow or other sites is basically public domain data. And I was just thinking, how stupid simple would it have been for them to hire a high school programmer, give him a can of red bull and say, "Listen match our customer database to the MLS database to let us know who's moving on a daily or weekly basis." Some of these solutions are pretty simple. >> So is that part of what you do, come in with just hardcore tactical ideas like that? Are you also doing strategy? Tell me more about how you're spending your time. >> I trying to think more of a broader approach where we look at the data itself and again, people have said, "If you tortured enough, what would you tell us? We're just take that angle." We look at examples of how other organizations have monetized data and think about how to apply those and adapt those ideas to the company's own business. We look at key business drivers, internally and externally. We look at edge cases for their customers' businesses. We run through hypothesis generating activities. There are a variety of different kinds of activities that we do to generate ideas. And most of the time when we run these workshops, which last a week or two, we'll end up generating anywhere from 35 to 50 pretty solid ideas for generating new value streams from data. So when we talk about monetizing data, that's what we mean, generating new value streams. But like I said, then the next step is to go through that feasibility assessment and determining which of these ideas you actually want to pursue. >> So you're of course the longtime industry watcher as well, as a former Gartner Analyst, you have to be. My question is, if I think back... I've been around a while. If I think back at the peak of Microsoft's prominence in the PC era, it was like windows 95 and you felt like, "Wow, Microsoft is just so strong." And then of course the Linux comes along and a lot of open source changes and low and behold, a whole new set of leaders emerges. And you see the same thing today with the Trillionaire's Club and you feel like, "Wow, even COVID has been a tailwind for them." But you think about, "Okay, where could the disruption come to these large players that own huge clouds, they have all the data." Is data potentially a disruptor for what appear to be insurmountable odds against the newbies" >> There's always people coming up with new ways to leverage data or new sources of data to capture. So yeah, there's certainly not going to be around for forever, but it's been really fascinating to see the transformation of some companies I think nobody really exemplifies it more than IBM where they emerged from originally selling meat slicers. The Dayton Meat Slicer was their original product. And then they evolved into Manual Business Machines and then Electronic Business Machines. And then they dominated that. Then they dominated the mainframe software industry. Then they dominated the PC industry. Then they dominated the services industry to some degree. And so they're starting to get into data. And I think following that trajectory is something that really any organization should be looking at. When do you actually become a data company? Not just a product company or a service company or top. >> We have Inderpal Bhandari is one of our huge guests here. He's a Chief-- >> Sure. >> Data Officer of IBM, you know him well. And he talks about the journey that he's undertaken to transform the company into a data company. I think a lot of people don't really realize what's actually going on behind the scenes, whether it's financially oriented or revenue opportunities. But one of the things he stressed to me in our interview was that they're on average, they're reducing the end to end cycle time from raw data to insights by 70%, that's on average. And that's just an enormous, for a company that size, it's just enormous cost savings or revenue generating opportunity. >> There's no doubt that the technology behind data pipelines is improving and the process from moving data from those pipelines directly into predictive or diagnostic or prescriptive output is a lot more accelerated than the early days of data warehousing. >> Is the skills barrier is acute? It seems like it's lessened somewhat, the early Hadoop days you needed... Even data scientist... Is it still just a massive skill shortage, or we're starting to attack that. >> Well, I think companies are figuring out a way around the skill shortage by doing things like self service analytics and focusing on more easy to use mainstream type AI or advanced analytics technologies. But there's still very much a need for data scientists and organizations and the difficulty in finding people that are true data scientists. There's no real certification. And so really anybody can call themselves a data scientist but I think companies are getting good at interviewing and determining whether somebody's got the goods or not. But there are other types of skills that we don't really focus on, like the data engineering skills, there's still a huge need for data engineering. Data doesn't self-organize. There are some augmented analytics technologies that will automatically generate analytic output, but there really aren't technologies that automatically self-organize data. And so there's a huge need for data engineers. And then as we talked about, there's a large interest in external data and harvesting that and then ingesting it and even identifying what external data is out there. So one of the emerging roles that we're seeing, if not the sexiest role of the 21st century is the role of the Data Curator, somebody who acts as a librarian, identifying external data assets that are potentially valuable, testing them, evaluating them, negotiating and then figuring out how to ingest that data. So I think that's a really important role for an organization to have. Most companies have an entire department that procures office supplies, but they don't have anybody who's procuring data supplies. And when you think about which is more valuable to an organization? How do you not have somebody who's dedicated to identifying the world of external data assets that are out there? There are 10 million data sets published by government, organizations and NGOs. There are thousands and thousands of data brokers aggregating and sharing data. There's a web content that can be harvested, there's data from your partners and suppliers, there's data from social media. So to not have somebody who's on top of all that it demonstrates gross negligence by the organization. >> That is such an enlightening point, Doug. My last question is, I wonder how... If you can share with us how the pandemic has effected your business personally. As a consultant, you're on the road a lot, obviously not on the road so much, you're doing a lot of chalk talks, et cetera. How have you managed through this and how have you been able to maintain your efficacy with your clients? >> Most of our clients, given that they're in the digital world a bit already, made the switch pretty quick. Some of them took a month or two, some things went on hold but we're still seeing the same level of enthusiasm for data and doing things with data. In fact some companies have taken our (mumbles) that data to be their best defense in a crisis like this. It's affected our business and it's enabled us to do much more international work more easily than we used to. And I probably spend a lot less time on planes. So it gives me more time for writing and speaking and actually doing consulting. So that's been nice as well. >> Yeah, there's that bonus. Obviously theCUBE yes, we're not doing physical events anymore, but hey, we've got two studios operating. And Doug Laney, really appreciate you coming on. (Dough mumbles) Always a great guest and sharing your insights and have a great MIT CDOIQ. >> Thanks, you too, Dave, take care. (mumbles) >> Thanks Doug. All right. And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, our continuous coverage of the MIT Chief Data Officer conference, MIT CDOIQ, will be right back, right after this short break. (bright music)

(exciting music) >> From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello and welcome to this special CUBE Conversation, here in Palo Alto, CA CUBE Studios. I'm John Furrier your host of the CUBE. We're here with James Segil President and Co-Founder of Openpath Security. Hot start-up in a very cutting edge area that everyone can relate to physical security. But as that grows with the internet, the convergence of physical security with how people work online. It's been a huge issue, we've been covering IOT, we've been covering cloud security, we've been covering internet security. James, thanks for joining me today. >> It's great to be here, John. >> So, you guys are a young company in a very hot area. Great investors, you have a great background, we interviewed in the CUBE before, CUBE Alumni. Before we get into it, this is a super important area, I wanted you to take a minute to explain what you guys do. How long you've been around, what is Openpath? >> Sure, so you know, my partners and I are serial tech entrepreneurs out of L.A. this is our fourth company together over the last twenty years. You interviewed me when we were running EdgeCast. So, it's great to be back. You know, Openpath came from our own frustration. We're an Access Control company so we allow folks to enter office buildings, physical space, work space, using a security tool. That is not a badge. So, this is how we used to enter our prior buildings. So, this is actually my business partners badge pack just to get in and out of our offices, and we were basically tired of wearing dog tags or dog collar, however you want to call it, right? The whole idea was you can use your phone, your phone is your key. So, the credential to get into the office, into the building is on your phone, and mobile was a technology that hadn't really been introduced into the physical, sort of, property technology space before. And by bringing mobile to Bear as well as cloud technology, 'cause all the software's in the cloud. We were able to improve this value proposition and offer a cool solution. >> So, just quickly how, how long have you guys been out with the product and when was the company founded? >> So, we started the company three years ago and launched commercially about a year ago. You know, we spent two years building the technology, getting our patents, really getting everything, figured out. We have software and hardware, it's part of our solution. And so, when we launched a year ago, it was kind of like drinking from a fire hose. We literally had people coming and saying, finally, somebody figured out how to get rid of the badge and use my phone just so it will let me in. And since then we've raised a good amount of money and have been, you know just selling to basically everyone, yeah. >> Congratulations, this is a hot story, so I want to get into it. So, the origination story is, obviously you had to be a successful entrepreneur in the past. Being a serial entrepreneur has it's ups and downs, but you know, with the cloud, everyone thinks, Oh, Security is just a cloud problem. You guys are attacking a physical property, physical security, kind of bringing a DevOps ethos to this. I mean, when you hold those badges up, reminds me of the old janitor key ring. This is the digital ring. You know, all your access. So, clearly an opportunity to automate. >> Yeah. >> So clearly, kind of, obviously, the cloud mentality here. But, your impact is to, kind of, the kind of older industry. Explain this trend of property technology. I mean, most people can relate to their office space. >> Yeah. >> You know, waving the badge to get in, maybe VDI on the desktop or whatever's happening. I mean, talk about the the market place and the trend. >> So, you know, buildings, real estate for the most part, are very slow to move in adopting new technology. And I think, you've seen that in a lot of different industries. Certainly in real estate, there was a sort of slowness or unwillingness to move on past old techs. So, this works, it's an RFID badge. And you can use it and people are comfortable with it. It's worked for forty years. Prop-tech, Property Technology, is really a focus around innovating how you work with, interact with, and spend time at work, in office buildings. But it extends well beyond office, it extends into multi-family residential, health care, any building you really go to. And so, there is a lot money and there is a lot of entrepreneurs who are focused on, how do I improve the quality of every experience we have? When I go into an apartment building, when I got into a hospital, when I go to school, when I go to work and that's really what were focused. We're sort of thinking about that whole experience and reducing the friction in every step of how you interact with that building. >> You know, this used to be an IT problem, if your with big company you sign in, you on board, you get your laptop, you get your badge, someone probably enters your name into a database. And then if you leave it has to be deleted. Is you guys addressing that area? Talk about that piece of it because I think this is more real time, more person without the phone, for instance, your bridging the physical and the logical. Talk about the IT versus the old way of doing it. >> Yeah, so, you know, typically in the real estate world, there's an office manager, a facilities person, maybe, a physical security person, or even like real estate person and they're in charge, at least within the enterprise, of thinking about physical security. But what's happened is, there is a lot of exposure that we have to our data, to our personal safety, to everything really in the office. If you don't protect the physical space, from the thieves or bad actors who want to steal your data or hurt you. And so, all this money has gone into Cyber Security, the chief security officer, the IT department, they have unlimited budgets to go out and solve that problem, to protect the network. But they are literally leaving the front door open. And so, a lot of what is happening today in the enterprise is that the CISO, the Chief Security Team, the IT Team is starting to really gain denomination over this real estate and facilities space, and sort of say, hey, these systems need to work together. If I have a single source of truth to hold all my users and my employees in a single database, I want that to connect, not just to my salesforce.com instance but I want it to connect my Access Control system and how people enter the the building. >> Access Control also an IOT problem, Industrial IOT, we hear that area. Clearly a use case for that opportunity so clearly why you got some funding and I want to cover that in a second on origination story. But the question I have for you is, when you guys started the company and now that you are in market with customers, what's the main problem that you solve? What's like, I mean, you have to solve that one problem, what problem do you solve and where is the growth from there? >> So, I have two groups of sort of customers who I talk to. The first group are tenants or enterprise customers, and these folks who need to move into an office, and most of the choice around when to buy Access Control comes because you're building out space or your moving into an office. You need Access Control. It's not on the list of nice to haves, you need to be able to lock the door. So, when you move into a new office, you need to have internet connectivity, alright, you need to have Access Control, maybe an alarm system, sparkletts water or whatever it's going to be. And we're on that list. So, when people are investing in that capital infrastructure. They're going to future proof that investment, they're are going to choose Openpath. The second group we talk to are folks that are building buildings or renovating buildings. And that's asset managers, developers, property managers, landlords. And those constituents are looking to build a physical space that's both safe but allows them to attract folks to their building as tenants. And so, if you offer amenities, you offer a gym, a cool, sort of, you know, work space, and Access Control Technology it becomes an incentive for folks to want to come and office in your space. >> So, you know, you and I are techies. We love to buy that shinny new toy. The property type tech world, they not as innovative or have a propensity to just at the next thing because, they're about security, they're about that, locking doors. So, I got to ask you, what are some of the things, and they're getting more savvy now, I can see that, so it's clear. You can see most of the digital amenities. First, a start with WIFI, we don't have WIFI, you're done. Now, you're starting to see much more app, centric things happening on these locations. What are some of the areas that people are gravitating in terms that they like, in terms of features with Access Control? What is it enabling from a value stand point? Is it differentiate services, is it access to certain amenities, you mentioned some of that. What is some of the new things that are being created? >> Well, I think the first thing is that we're reducing some level of friction in interacting with you workspace. So, the fact that you can basically, keep your phone in your pocket or keep talking on your phone or keep it in your purse and just walk up to the door and have the door unlock because it knows you're there. That's not just kind of cool that's really just helping out the quality of your day to day experience. You know, ever since 9/11 when we upgraded the security experience almost everywhere. Whether you're entering an arena, a plane or a building that friction is something we are used to now and there is a push back that people want a little bit less friction even though they want that higher level of security. >> Not that I want to get doom day scenario. You mentioned 9/11, they were told to stay in their buildings when they could have been evacuated, everyone in New York knows that tragic story. Huge active shooter environment right now, it's just my kids went to an event in San Francisco. Literally, what is on the mind of people is, oh my God, is there going to be an active shooter? These are examples of things that could go wrong and in security this becomes an Apocalypse scenario that we've been talking about it takes that to get people to take action. So, can you help in those scenarios? How do you help someone either thwart those kinds of security attacks or help them get through them if somethings happening? Let's just say an active shooter comes into a building? >> Yeah, so we've thought a lot about that. And we have kids in schools and we actually have a lot of schools and houses of worship that are buying and installing our system. So, we have a couple different capabilities, lockdown is our latest release. And this is the capability from anyone, anywhere on any mobile phone in that building to enable a lockdown procedure. What I think is particularly valuable here is that if you're basically no where near the fire alarm which is where the lock down button might be as well, and you're stuck in a closet and or hidden away tryna to make sure you're not going to get shot. If you have your phone on you can enable a lockdown and because our plans are kind customized, you can enable a lockdown that let's say locks all the doors in the zone. But lifts up the garage gate so that first responders can get there. And we've seen proven the faster the first responders can get to the problem, whether it's, you know, an EMS person that's tryna to stem the bleeding on someone who is injured or whether it's a SWAT team-- >> Well that's actually proven you saw Gilroy, you saw the response in Dayton. Literally minutes taking those active shooter. >> Well, every second counts, so being able to have a lockdown that works fast, that's effective and that allows people to get through and the bad guys to sort of be isolated is important. The second thing is, we actually have integration with video systems, so you can send a live video feed instantly of every door that's locked down to the first responders. And they can actually see it right there on their iPhone where the bad guy is, what he is doing, real time, from the video systems. They can take over the video system, so it's a pretty-- >> So, it augments the security environment for good and bad scenarios. So, let's get a kind of more realistic scenario. Doomsday scenarios is kind of depressing, but it's real. Our people are planning and are protecting around that. One basic concept, and I got reprimanded at VMware was, I've been at the VMware campuses since they've been building it. But recently I was going to a meeting, and I knew it was building number four, or whatever it was. And I'm sitting there waiting at the door. Someone comes out and I went in and they call it tailgating. Turns out I didn't have a badge and the new person who was there really kind of got in my face and said, You tailgated, I'm like, I do it all the time, I'm like, okay, stop. So, okay, you don't tailgate a VMware anymore and I now know that. But this happens all the time. This is another common problem, I could be stealing laptops, I could be getting the plans at VMworld. I mean, whatever's going on. And this, bad things are happening with tailgating. That's a big thing isn't it? >> It is a big thing. Security experts are telling us it is one of the top three physical security challenges that enterprise CISO's are running into, tailgating. And what's happening is, people just like you, are well meaning are sneaking in. But, there's some bad actors that are sneaking in as well. So, we've got technology that have deployed with partners that actually count the people that are coming in through the door. And if there's two entries when you're only supposed to have one, we can actually track that and instantly make the meter go beep, beep, beep, beep and send an email alert to a security desk or to the individual themself with a video and a picture of the person who snuck in behind you. >> That is a great example, and I mentioned VMware in all seriousness. That actually had happened. There's a huge campus and the reason why, I just didn't want to go to the front I parked at the wrong garage and I didn't want to walk five buildings over. A little bit lazy but that's the point of the large buildings, where the security access comes in. For large campuses, whether it's Universities or corporate, that's the big challenge, right? Not just Access Control but management. >> It's management and so the idea, of sort giving and empowering people to be able to really quickly change, configure and access places. The fact that from your phone you can actually, as a manager change access privileges and give someone who's visiting a temporary pass. That's not one of these, but it's actually a virtual pass on your phone. That's really empowering. So, if you were coming to visit me at VMware, I'd send you a guest pass that gives you one hour access to five different doors and so that you wouldn't have to sneak in. You would basically be able to just use your phone to get in as a visitor for one hour. And after an hour you're not going to be able to get in. >> All right, so let's talk about the company. Openpath Security, you guys obviously targeting the physical space, Access Control, logical physical coming together seamless frictionless environment. Business model? How much funding did you get? What kind of investors do you have? Employee count? Product shipping status? Give us through the numbers. Give us the data. >> Sure, so we started the company three years ago, we came out a stealth mode a year ago and launched commercially, we had actually done our series A internally, we led that ourselves as the founders. And then, when we came out of stealth mode, we had a lot of great attention in the space. Emergence Capital is our lead investor in our series B. We raised $27 millions total. We've got a great team of folks, just under 16 employees. We are based in Los Angeles but we have offices in Indianapolis as well 'cause why not? It's the best place to be. And we're growing fast. We actually sell focused on commercial real estate, but have expanded to multi-family residential. Also, to schools, churches, houses of worship. And we are here in the U.S. now and we're growing internationally over the next two or three years. >> And the product is the a SaaS, managed service, physical? What's the story of the product? >> Yeah, so there's a combination of physical hardware but there is a 100% attached software to it. So, you install a reader at the door, a panel in the IT closet and it's wired as most traditional Access Control systems are but our software is all hosted in the cloud. As well, as the credential that is on the phone. And so, we sort of sell the hardware upfront and then you buy sort of a recurring annual fee associated with the number of doors you own. >> And so you get on the spec that be on the new building, so you do a little go to, you go to market as it is, getting on the design side, suppliers to the building. >> Yup, so, there's the developers, the architects, who put us into the spec. There the system integrators, these are the folks who are low voltage electricians, security system integrators who go out and actually deploy all the wiring you have in this building. They'll go ahead and do the WIFI network, the CCTV camera system, the alarm system and the Access Control system. And so, we have a national network of certified installers who go out, and that's actually how we go to market. We sell through them. >> And you have the software, it's a nice margin. And is there a cloud play here too? Is data stored in the cloud? >> Yeah. >> How are you guys handling some of the backend stuff? >> So, yeah, all the information is stored in the cloud. What's kind of important in a life safety environment is that you have a cloud system that runs it but that you can work if the internet is down. 'Cause imagine if the Internet's down and you can't even get into the office to fix the internet. So, our system works offline as well as online. We store all the credentials locally. >> I remember interviewing Ring's founder at an Amazon event. Simple concept use the cloud. Same thing for you? Not a simple concept but you're in the spec use the cloud with a hundred percent attach rate. >> Exactly. >> All right, so what's the coolest thing that you see happening in this market for you guys? What's going on that you would say that's notable that you would think is important that people should pay attention to. >> There is a number of big trends. You know, we talked about one, right? Which is the whole change of, you know, combining physical security with cyber security and having those two really come together. I'd say the transition of IOT from just the home into the workspace is another big trend we are watching. People are just used to having an NEST on their wall or a Ring on their doorbell and the want Openpath on their door at work. And that's something else that we've seen as a big transition. People are getting used to having an easier experience and I think the final thing is how people use the workspace, right? People work all over the space now. It's not just at their cubicle and that's impacting. >> I got to get some commentary and understanding around the name Openpath because most people in these kind of areas that you're in have closed systems. You know, the HVAC system, I'm running an IOT like an operational technology. Information technology is a protocol based OSI model, open source. So, those worlds are colliding, we're covering that in the whole IOT, industrial IOT trend. Openpath Security? If it's open can I hack it, what's going the Openpath name? Tell us why Openpath? How are you open? Tell us the story behind the name? >> I'm really glad you asked. We were really frustrated when we analyzed the space, as investors and entrepreneurs in this category. We saw that all the systems that are out there, are incredibly closed. Their proprietary systems, they work on old protocols and they're not open. Ours is open. It's built on open API's. Every element of our technology can be connected to, right? And we have tons of developers who are integrating, just like they do in the web, with Openpath. And that's something you can't really do in the old physical Access Control World. So open is just correlating that. >> So, you that's from an ecosystems stand point, you guys enabling others to build on top of your stuff. >> Oh yeah, we've got Envoy the visitor management company. They've got an integration with our Access Control. Density, which is a really cool people counting tool. We've got Camo, a video integration tool. All these folks are integrating with us because it's open and it's really easy to do. >> Okay, so I got to ask the question. I'm now, I'm a building person designing the specs for the new campus, open? That sounds insecure. How do you guarantee that you're going to to be secure? I'm worried about security. How can a hacker get in, take over the physical space, shut it down, that's my concern. How do you address that? >> Yeah, no it's legit. So, what I often say to people is, let's see. You can have a badge, like this, right? And you can pick up my badge and find it anywhere you want, right? And now you're James, right? You can go take that, and you can get in anywhere you want. But I challenge you to try to use my phone. Try to unlock right now, right? >> There it is. (laughs) >> That super computer is encrypted, there's no way you're going to break that. This is the most secure way to enter anywhere. >> But if I get, that's an iPhone but with an Android I'd get some Malware on there. >> But the Malware that you get on your Android isn't necessarily going to allow you to authenticate our system. >> So, you're content, even though you might be on an open device, you guys are containing the app, security app on the device. >> Yeah, so the same protocols that we use on the internet to have secure HTTPS communication between any kind of client, your computer and a website. We're using that same hand off. Where we have rotating security certificates on this, as well as in the cloud, as well as on the panel. So, everything is fully encrypted end to end. And that gives us a level of security that's unmatched and unrivaled actually, in the Access Control space. >> James, thanks for coming on theCUBE, final just give a plug for the company. What's new, what's happening? What's going on Openpath? What's next for you guys? >> Well, if it's a plug openpath.com that's an easy one. But, I think for us, we're really growing in a way that people are excited about. I want to change the work day experience. So, everybody who's out there, who's tired of using a keycard and a badge, I want them to go to their boss and say, why can't we upgrade to Openpath? Go to your landlord and say, hey, I'm negotiating this into my tenant improvement. I want Openpath as a part of how I sort of access the building. The trends that we're really excited about, this lockdown technology, the Anti-Tailgating Technology. Those are really cool, sort of advantages that we give the enterprise and we're just excited to be helping people improve the quality of the workday. >> And what's the reason why you're winning deals? What's the one factor or two factors? Ease of use, open-ness, convince features? What's your-- >> I love it, you're selling my product for me. It's ease of use, it's the fact that it reduces a number of steps in the friction you experience personally everyday. And that the enterprise or the landlord experiencing managing a system, is less expensive and more secure. Kind of all the things you want. Plus, I mean, how much sense does it make that you don't have to carry around ten badges that you can actually just have it all on your phone. It just makes sense. >> Soon series C funding around the corner. (laughs) >> If you're interested, we should have a conversation. >> TheCUBE fund's not yet setup but when we get theCUBE venture capital fund will be in. >> That's good, you let me invest in your company, I'll let you invest in mine. >> We'll talk. James Segil, entrepreneur President, Co-Founder Openpath Security, hot start up here inside theCUBE. Featured startup here. Thanks for watching. I'm John Furrier. (exciting music)

>> Live from Washington, DC, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit, here in our nation's capital. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting with John Furrier. We have two guests for this segment, we have George Gagne, he is the Chief Information Officer at Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. Welcome, George. And we have Christopher McDermott, who is the CDO of the POW/MIA Accounting Agency. Welcome, Chris. >> Thank you. >> Thank you both so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you. >> So, I want to start with you George, why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about the POW/MIA Accounting Agency. >> Sure, so the mission has been around for decades actually. In 2015, Secretary of Defense, Hagel, looked at the accounting community as a whole and for efficiency gains made decision to consolidate some of the accounting community into a single organization. And they took the former JPAC, which was a direct reporting unit to PACOM out of Hawaii, which was the operational arm of the accounting community, responsible for research, investigation, recovery and identification. They took that organization, they looked at the policy portion of the organization, which is here in Crystal City, DPMO and then they took another part of the organization, our Life Sciences Support Equipment laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, and consolidated that to make the defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Under the Office of Secretary Defense for Policy. So that was step one. Our mission is the fullest possible accounting of missing U.S. personnel to their families and to our nation. That's our mission, we have approximately 82,000 Americans missing from our past conflicts, our service members from World War II, Korea War, Korea, Vietnam and the Cold War. When you look at the demographics of that, we have approximately 1,600 still missing from the Vietnam conflict. We have just over a 100 still missing from the Cold War conflict. We have approximately 7,700 still missing from the Korean War and the remainder of are from World War II. So, you know, one of the challenges when our organization was first formed, was we had three different organizations all had different reporting chains, they had their own cultures, disparate cultures, disparate systems, disparate processes, and step one of that was to get everybody on the same backbone and the same network. Step two to that, was to look at all those on-prem legacy systems that we had across our environment and look at the consolidation of that. And because our organization is so geographically dispersed, I just mentioned three, we also have a laboratory in Offutt, Nebraska. We have detachments in Southeast Asia, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and we have a detachment in Germany. And we're highly mobile. We conduct about, this year we're planned to do 84 missions around the world, 34 countries. And those missions last 30 to 45 day increments. So highly mobile, very globally diverse organization. So when we looked at that environment obviously we knew the first step after we got everybody on one network was to look to cloud architectures and models in order to be able to communicate, coordinate, and collaborate, so we developed a case management system that consist of a business intelligence software along with some enterprise content software coupled with some forensics software for our laboratory staff that make up what we call our case management system that cloud hosted. >> So business challenges, the consolidation, the reset or set-up for the mission, but then the data types, it's a different kind of data problem to work, to achieve the outcomes you're looking for. Christopher, talk about that dynamic because, >> Sure. >> You know, there are historical different types of data. >> That's right. And a lot of our data started as IBM punchcards or it started from, you know, paper files. When I started the work, we were still looking things up on microfiche and microfilm, so we've been working on an aggressive program to get all that kind of data digitized, but then we have to make it accessible. And we had, you know as George was saying, multiple different organizations doing similar work. So you had a lot of duplication of the same information, but kept in different structures, searchable in different pathways. So we have to bring all of that together and make and make it accessible, so that the government can all be on the same page. Because again, as George said, there's a large number of cases that we potentially can work on, but we have to be able to triage that down to the ones that have the best opportunity for us to use our current methods to solve. So rather than look for all 82,000 at once, we want to be able to navigate through that data and find the cases that have the most likelihood of success. >> So where do you even begin? What's the data that you're looking at? What have you seen has had the best indicators for success, of finding those people who are prisoners of war or missing in action? >> Well, you know, for some degrees as George was saying, our missions has been going on for decades. So, you know, a lot of the files that we're working from today were created at the time of the incidents. For the Vietnam cases, we have a lot of continuity. So we're still working on the leads that the strongest out of that set. And we still send multiple teams a year into Vietnam and Laos, Cambodia. And that's where, you know, you try to build upon the previous investigations, but that's also where if those investigations were done in the '70s or the '80s we have to then surface what's actionable out of that information, which pathways have we trod that didn't pay off. So a lot of it is, What can we reanalyze today? What new techniques can we bring? Can we bring in, you know, remote sensing data? Can we bring GIS applications to analyze where's the best scenario for resolving these cases after all this time? >> I mean, it's interesting one of the things we hear from the Amazon, we've done so many interviews with Amazon executives, we've kind of know their messaging. So here's one of them, "Eliminate the undifferentiated heavy lifting." You hear that a lot right. So there might be a lot of that here and then Teresa had a slide up today talking about COBOL and mainframe, talk about punch cards >> Absolutely. >> So you have a lot of data that's different types older data. So it's a true digitization project that you got to enable as well as other complexity. >> Absolutely, when the agency was formed in 2015 we really begin the process of an information modernization effort across the organization. Because like I said, these were legacy on-prem systems that were their systems' of record that had specific ways and didn't really have the ability to share the data, collaborate, coordinate, and communicate. So, it was a heavy lift across the board getting everyone on one backbone. But then going through an agency information modernization evolution, if you will, that we're still working our way through, because we're so mobilely diversified as well, our field communications capability and reach back and into the cloud and being able to access that data from geographical locations around the world, whether it's in the Himalayas, whether it's in Vietnam, whether it's in Papua New Guinea, wherever we may be. Not just our fixed locations. >> George and Christopher, if you each could comment for our audience, I would love to get this on record as you guys are really doing a great modernization project. Talk about, if you each could talk about key learnings and it could be from scar tissue. It could be from pain and suffering to an epiphany or some breakthrough. What was some of the key learnings as you when through the modernization? Could you share some from a CIO perspective and from a CDO perspective? >> Well, I'll give you a couple takeaways of what I thought I think we did well and some areas I thought that we could have done better. And for us as we looked at building our case management system, I think step one of defining our problem statement, it was years in planning before we actually took steps to actually start building out our infrastructure in the Amazon Cloud, or our applications. But building and defining that problem statement, we took some time to really take a look at that, because of the different in cultures from the disparate organizations and our processes and so on and so forth. Defining that problem statement was critical to our success and moving forward. I'd say one of the areas that I say that we could have done better is probably associated with communication and stakeholder buy-in. Because we are so geographically dispersed and highly mobile, getting the word out to everybody and all those geographically locations and all those time zones with our workforce that's out in the field a lot at 30 to 45 days at a time, three or four missions a year, sometimes more. It certainly made it difficult to get part of that get that messaging out with some of that stakeholder buy-in. And I think probably moving forward and we still deal regarding challenges is data hygiene. And that's for us, something else we did really well was we established this CDO role within our organization, because it's no longer about the systems that are used to process and store the data. It's really about the data. And who better to know the data but our data owners, not custodians and our chief data officer and our data governance council that was established. >> Christopher you're learnings, takeaways? >> What we're trying to build upon is, you define your problem statement, but the pathway there is you have to get results in front of the end users. You have get them to the people who are doing the work, so you can keep guiding it toward the solution actually meets all the needs, as well as build something that can innovate continuously over time. Because the technology space is changing so quickly and dynamically that the more we can surface our problem set, the more help we can to help find ways to navigate through that. >> So one of the things you said is that you're using data to look at the past. Whereas, so many of the guests we're talking today and so many of the people here at this summit are talking about using data to predict the future. Are you able to look your data sets from the past and then also sort of say, And then this is how we can prevent more POW. Are you using, are you thinking at all, are you looking at the future at all with you data? >> I mean, certainly especially from our laboratory science perspective, we have have probably the most advanced human identification capability in the world. >> Right. >> And recovery. And so all of those lessons really go a long ways to what what information needs to be accessible and actionable for us to be able to, recover individuals in those circumstances and make those identifications as quickly as possible. At the same time the cases that we're working on are the hardest ones. >> Right. >> The ones that are still left. But each success that we have teaches us something that can then be applied going forward. >> What is the human side of your job? Because here you are, these two wonky data number crunchers and yet, you are these are people who died fighting for their country. How do you manage those two, really two important parts of your job and how do you think about that? >> Yeah, I will say that it does amp up the emotional quotient of our agency and everybody really feels passionately about all the work that they do. About 10 times a year our agency meets with family members of the missing at different locations around the country. And those are really powerful reminders of why we're doing this. And you do get a lot of gratitude, but at the same time each case that's waiting still that's the one that matters to them. And you see that in the passion our agency brings to the data questions and quickly they want us to progress. It's never fast enough. There's always another case to pursue. So that definitely adds a lot to it, but it is very meaningful when we can help tell that story. And even for a case where we may never have the answers, being able to say, "This is what the government knows about your case and these are efforts that have been undertaken to this point." >> The fact there's an effort going on is really a wonderful thing for everybody involved. Good outcomes coming out from that. But interesting angle as a techy, IT, former IT techy back in the day in the '80s, '90s, I can't help but marvel at your perspective on your project because you're historians in a way too. You've got type punch cards, you know you got, I never used punch cards. >> Put them in a museum. >> I was the first generation post punch cards, but you have a historical view of IT state of the art at the time of the data you're working with. You have to make that data actionable in an outcome scenario workload work-stream for today. >> Yeah, another example we have is we're reclaiming chest X-rays that they did for induction when guys were which would screen for tuberculosis when they came into service. We're able to use those X-rays now for comparison with the remains that are recovered from the field. >> So you guys are really digging into history of IT. >> Yeah. >> So I'd love to get your perspective. To me, I marvel and I've always been critical of Washington's slowness with respect to cloud, but seeing you catch up now with the tailwinds here with cloud and Amazon and now Microsoft coming in with AI. You kind of see the visibility that leads to value. As you look back at the industry of federal, state, and local governments in public over the years, what's your view of the current state of union of modernization, because it seems to be a renaissance? >> Yeah, I would say the analogy I would give you it's same as that of the industrial revolutions went through in the early 20th century, but it's more about the technology revolution that we're going through now. That's how I'd probably characterize it. If I were to look back and tell my children's children about, hey, the advent of technology and that progression of where we're at. Cloud architecture certainly take down geographical barriers that before were problems for us. Now we're able to overcome those. We can't overcome the timezone barriers, but certainly the geographical barriers of separation of an organization with cloud computing has certainly changed. >> Do you see your peers within the government sector, other agencies, kind of catching wind of this going, Wow, I could really change the game. And will it be a step function into your kind of mind as you kind of have to project kind of forward where we are. Is it going to a small improvement, a step function? What do you guys see? What's the sentiment around town? >> I'm from Hawaii, so Chris probably has a better perspective of that with some of our sister organizations here in town. But, I would say there's more and more organizations that are adopting cloud architectures. It's my understanding very few organizations now are co-located in one facility and one location, right. Take a look at telework today, cost of doing business, remote accessibility regardless of where you're at. So, I'd say it's a force multiplier by far for any line of business, whether it's public sector, federal government or whatever. It's certainly enhanced our capabilities and it's a force multiplier for us. >> And I think that's where the expectation increasingly is that the data should be available and I should be able to act on it wherever I am whenever the the opportunity arises. And that's where the more we can democratize our ability to get that data out to our partners to our teams in the field, the faster those answers can come through. And the faster we can make decisions based upon the information we have, not just the process that we follow. >> And it feeds the creativity and the work product of the actors involved. Getting the data out there versus hoarding it, wall guarding it, asylumming it. >> Right, yeah. You know, becoming the lone expert on this sack of paper in the filing cabinet, doesn't have as much power as getting that data accessible to a much broader squad and everyone can contribute. >> We're doing our part. >> That's right, it's open sourcing it right here. >> To your point, death by PowerPoint. I'm sure you've heard that before. Well business intelligence software now by the click of a button reduces the level of effort for man-power and resources to put together slide decks. Where in business intelligence software can reach out to those structured data platforms and pull out the data that you want at the click of a button and build those presentations for you on the fly. Think about, I mean, if that's our force multiplier in advances in technology of. I think the biggest thing is we understand as humans how to exploit and leverage the technologies and the capabilities. Because I still don't think we fully grasp the potential of technology and how it can be leveraged to empower us. >> That's great insight and really respect what you guys do. Love your mission. Thanks for sharing. >> Yeah, thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Ferrer. We will have much more coming up tomorrow on the AWS Public Sector Summit here in Washington, DC. (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Francisco. It's the cube covering IBM thing twenty nineteen brought to you by IBM. >> Okay. Welcome back, everyone. He live in San Francisco. Here on Mosconi St for the cubes. Exclusive coverage of IBM. Think twenty nineteen. I'm Jeffrey David Long. Four days of coverage bringing on all the action talking. The top executives, entrepreneurs, ecosystem partners and everyone who can bring the signal from the noise here on the Q and excuses. Rob Thomas, general manager, IBM Data and a I with an IBM Cube Alumni. Great to see you again. >> Great. There you go. >> You read a >> book yet? This year we've written ten books on a data. Your general manager. There's >> too much work. Not enough time >> for that's. Good sign. It means you're working hard. Okay. Give us give us the data here because a I anywhere in the center of the announcements we have a story up on. Slick earnings have been reported on CNBC. John Ford was here earlier talking to Ginny. This is a course centerpiece of it. Aye, aye. On any cloud. This highlights the data conversation you've been part of. Now, I think what seven years seems like more. But this is now happening. Give us your thoughts. >> Go back to basics. I've shared this with you before. There's no AI without IA, meaning you need an information architecture to support what you want to do in AI. We started looking into that. Our thesis became so clients are buying into that idea. The problem is their data is everywhere onpremise, private cloud, multiple public clouds. So our thesis became very simple. If we can bring AI to the data, it will make Watson the leading AI platform. So what we announced wtih Watson Anywhere is you could now have it wherever your data is public, private, any public cloud, build the models, run them where you want. I think it's gonna be amazing >> data everywhere and anywhere. So containers are big role in This is a little bit of a deb ops. The world you've been living in convergence of data cloud. How does that set for clients up? What are they need to know about this announcement? Was the impact of them if any >> way that we enable Multi Cloud and Watson anywhere is through IBM cloud private for data? That's our data Micro services architectural writing on Cooper Netease that gives you the portability so that it can run anywhere because, in addition Teo, I'd say, Aye, aye, ambitions. The other big client ambition is around how we modernize to cloud native architectures. Mohr compose herbal services, so the combination gets delivered. Is part of this. >> So this notion of you can't have a eye without a it's It's obviously a great tagline. You use it a lot, but it's super important because there's a gap between those who sort of have a I chops and those who don't. And if I understand what you're doing is you're closing that gap by allowing you to bring you call that a eye to the data is it's sort of a silo buster in regard. Er yeah, >> the model we use. I called the eye ladder. So they give it as all the levels of sophistication an organization needs to think about. From how you collect data, how you organize data, analyze data and then infused data with a I. That's kind of the model that we used to talk about. Talk to clients about that. What we're able to do here is same. You don't have to move your data. The biggest problem Modi projects is the first task is OK move a bunch of data that takes a lot of time. That takes a lot of money. We say you don't need to do that. Leave your data wherever it is. With Cloud private for data, we can virtualized data from any source. That's kind of the ah ha moment people have when they see that. So we're making that piece really >> easy. What's the impact this year and IBM? Think to the part product portfolio. You You had data products in the past. Now you got a eye products. Any changes? How should people live in the latter schism? A kind of a rubric or a view of where they fit into it? But what's up with the products and he changes? People should know about? >> Well, we've brought together the analytics and I units and IBM into this new organization we call Dayton ay, ay, that's a reflection of us. Seen that as two sides of the same coin. I really couldn't really keep them separate. We've really simplified how we're going to market with the Watson products. It's about how you build run Manager II watching studio Watson Machine Learning Watson Open scale. That's for clients that want to build their own. Aye, aye. For clients that wants something out of the box. They want an application. We've got Watson assistant for customer service. Watson Discovery, Watson Health Outset. So we've made it really easy to consume Watson. Whether you want to build your own or you want an application designed for the line of business and then up and down the data, stack a bunch of different announcements. We're bringing out big sequel on Cloudera as part of our evolving partnership with the new Cloudera Horn Works entity. Virtual Data Pipeline is a partnership that we've built with active fio, so we're doing things at all layers of the last. >> You're simplifying the consumption from a client, your customer perspective. It's all data. It's all Watson's, the umbrella for brand for everything underneath that from a tizzy, right? >> Yeah, Watson is the Aye, aye, brand. It is a technology that's having an impact. We have amazing clients on stage with this this week talking about, Hey, Eyes No longer. I'd like to say I was not magic. It's no longer this mystical thing. We have clients that are getting real outcomes. Who they II today we've got Rollback of Scotland talking about how they've automated and augmented forty percent of their customer service with watching the system. So we've got great clients talking about other using >> I today. You seen any patterns, rob in terms of those customers you mentioned, some customers want to do their own. Aye, aye. Some customers wanted out of the box. What? The patterns that you're seeing in terms of who wants to do their own. Aye. Aye. Why do they want to do their own, eh? I do. They get some kind of competitive advantage. So they have additional skill sets that they need. >> It's a >> It's a maker's mark. It is how I would describe it. There's a lot of people that want to make their own and try their own. Ugh. I think most organizations, they're gonna end up with hundreds of different tools for building for running. This is why we introduced Watson Open Scale at the end of last year. That's How would you manage all of your A II environments? What did they come from? IBM or not? Because you got the and the organization has to have this manageable. Understandable, regardless of which tool they're using. I would say the biggest impact that we see is when we pick a customer problem. That is widespread, and the number one right now is customer service. Every organization, regardless of industry, wants to do a better job of serving clients. That's why Watson assistant is taking off >> this's. Where? Data The value of real time data. Historical data kind of horizontally. Scaleable data, not silo data. We've talked us in the past. How important is to date a quality piece of this? Because you have real time and you have a historical date and everything in between that you had to bring to bear at low ladened psi applications. Now we're gonna have data embedded in them as a feature. Right. How does this change? The workloads? The makeup of you? Major customer services? One piece, the low hanging fruit. I get that. But this is a key thing. The data architecture more than anything, isn't it? >> It is. Now remember, there's there's two rungs at the bottom of the ladder on data collection. We have to build a collect data in any form in any type. That's why you've seen us do relationships with Mongo. D B. Were they ship? Obviously with Claude Era? We've got her own data warehouse, so we integrate all of that through our sequel engine. That thing gets to your point around. Are you gonna organize the data? How are you going to curate it? We've got data catalogue. Every client will have a data catalogue for many dollar data across. Clouds were now doing automated metadata creation using a I and machine learning So the organization peace. Once you've collected it than the organization, peace become most important. Certainly, if you want to get to self service analytics, you want to make data available to data scientists around the organization. You have to have those governance pieces. >> Talk about the ecosystem. One of the things that's been impressive IBM of the years is your partnerships. You've done good partners. Partnership of relationships now in an ecosystem is a lot of building blocks. There's more complexity requires software to distract him away. We get that. What's opportunities for you to create new relationships? Where are the upper opportunities for someone a developer or accompanied to engage with you guys? Where's the white spaces? Where is someone? Take advantage of your momentum and you're you're a vision. >> I am dying for partners that air doing domain specific industry specific applications to come have them run on IBM cloud private for data, which unleashes all the data they need to be a valuable application. We've already got a few of those data mirrors. One sensing is another one that air running now as industry applications on top of IBM Club private for data. I'd like to have a thousand of these. So all comers there. We announced a partnership with Red Hat back in May. Eventually, that became more than just a partnership. But that was about enabling Cloud Private, for data on red had open shift, So we're partnered at all layers of the stack. But the greatest customer need is give me an industry solution, leveraging the best of my data. That's why I'm really looking for Eyes V. Partners to run on Ivan clubs. >> What's your pitch to those guys? Why, why I should be going. >> There is no other data platform that will connect to all your data sources, whether they're on eight of us as your Google Cloud on premise. So if you believe data is important to your application. There's simply no better place to run than IBM. Claude Private for data >> in terms of functionality, breath o r. Everything >> well, integrating with all your data. Normally they have to have the application in five different places. We integrate with all the data we build the data catalogue. So the data's organized. So the ingestion of the data becomes very easy for the Iast V. And by the way, thirdly, IBM has got a pretty good reach. Globally, one hundred seventy countries, business partners, resellers all over the world, sales people all over the world. We will help you get your product to market. That's a pretty good value >> today. We talk about this in the Cube all the time. When the cloud came, one of the best things about the cloud wasn't allowed. People to put applications go there really quickly. Stand them up. Startups did that. But now, in this domain world of of data with the clouds scale, I think you're right. I think domain X expertise is the top of the stack where you need specially special ism expertise and you don't build the bottom half out. What you're getting at is of Europe. If you know how to create innovation in the business model, you could come in and innovate quickly >> and vertical APS don't scale enough for me. So that's why focus on horizontal things like customer service. But if you go talk to a bank, sometimes customer service is not in office. I want to do something in loan origination or you're in insurance company. I want to use their own underwriting those air, the solutions that will get a lot of value out of running on an integrated data start >> a thousand flowers. Bloom is kind of ecosystem opportunity. Looking forward to checking in on that. Thoughts on on gaps. For that you guys want to make you want to do em in a on or areas that you think you want to double down on. That might need some help, either organic innovation or emanate what areas you looking at. Can you share a little bit of direction on that? >> We have, >> ah, a unique benefit. And IBM because we have IBM research. One of their big announcement this week is what we call Auto Way I, which is basically automating the process of feature engineering algorithm selection, bringing that into Watson Studio and Watson Machine learning. I am spending most of my time figure out howto I continue to bring great technology out of IBM research and put in the hand of clients through our products. You guys solve the debaters stuff yesterday. We're just getting started with that. We've got some pretty exciting organic innovation happen in IBM. >> It's awesome. Great news for startups. Final question for you. For the folks watching who aren't here in San Francisco, what's the big story here? And IBM think here in San Francisco. Big event closing down the streets here in Howard Street. It's huge. What's the big story? What's the most important things happening? >> The most important thing to me and the customer stories >> here >> are unbelievable. I think we've gotten past this point of a eyes, some idea for the future we have. Hundreds of clients were talking about how they did an A I project, and here's the outcome they got. It's really encouraging to see what I encourage. All clients, though, is so build your strategy off of one big guy. Project company should be doing hundreds of Aye, aye projects. So in twenty nineteen do one hundred projects. Half of them will probably fail. That's okay. The one's that work will more than make up for the ones that don't work. So we're really encouraging mass experimentation. And I think the clients that air here are, you know, creating an aspirational thing for things >> just anecdotally you mentioned earlier. Customer service is a low hanging fruit. Other use cases that are great low hanging fruit opportunities for a >> data discovery data curation these air really hard manual task. Today you can start to automate some of that. That has a really big impact. >> Rob Thomas, general manager of the data and a I groupie with an IBM now part of a bigger portfolio. Watson Rob. Great to see you conventionally on all your success. But following you from the beginning. Great momentum on the right way. Thanks. Gradually. More cute coverage here. Live in San Francisco from Mosconi North. I'm John for Dave A lot. They stay with us for more coverage after this short break

okay we're back here live ending up day one of IBM's information on demand exclusive coverage for SiliconANGLE and Wikibon and constellation research breaking down the day one analysis I'm John furrier and join my co-host E on the cube Dave vellante of course as usual and for this closing wrap up segment of day one we have analyst and founder of constellation research ray Wang former analyst big data guru software heading up the partner pavilion kicking off all the flying around the world your own event this month past month things going great how are you how are you doing we're going to great man there's a lot of energy in q3 q4 we've been watching people look at trying to spend down their budgets and I think people are just like worried that there's going to be nothing in 2014 right so they're just bending down we're seeing these big orders like tonight I've got to fly out to New York to close out a deal and help someone else that's basically it was a big day to deal that's going down this is how crazy it's going on and so it's been like this pretty much like for the last four or five weeks so flows budget flush I just wash this budget lunchtime what are you seeing for the deals out there give us some of the examples of some of the sizes and magnitude is it you know you know how are you up and run to get get some cash into secure what size scopes are you seeing up yeah i mean what we're seeing I mean it's anything from a quarter million into like five million dollar deals some of our platform we sing at all levels the one that's really hot we were talking about this that the tableau conference was the date of is right dative is is still really really hot but on the back end we're saying data quality pop-up we're seeing the integration piece play a role we also saw a little bit of content management but not the traditional content management that's coming in more about the text mining text analytics to kind of drive that I mean I'm not sure what are you guys seeing alone yeah so what we're seeing a lot of energy I've seen the budget flush we're not involved in the deals like you are Dave is but for me what I'm seeing is IT the cloud is being accepted I'll you know those has not talked about publicly is kind of a public secret is amazon is just destroying the value proposition of many folks out there with cloud they're just winning the developers hand over fist and you know i'm not sure pivotal with cloud family even catch up even OpenStack has really got some consume energy around we're following that so it opens stack yet amazon on the public cloud winning everything no money's pouring into the enterprise saying hey we got to build the infrastructure under the hood so you can't have the application edge if you don't have the engine so the 100 x price advantage and that's really a scary thing but I think softlayer gives IBM a shot here yeah we were talking about self leyva so you are seeing more I'm seeing it aight aight figure deals and big data right and it's starting to get up there so softly I'd love to get your take on soft layers we've been having a debate all day Oh softlayer jaws mckenna what do you what's your take you're saying it's a hosting I've been a look at first of all yeah I love putting a huge gap 9 million dollars per lock event data center hosting now if that's a footprint they can shave that and kind of give their customers some comfort I think that's the way i see it i mean just I haven't gone inside the numbers to see where it's going to be where this energy is but like we're software virtualization is going on where everyone's going on with virtualization the data center I'll give them a cloud play I just don't see ya didn't have one before I mean happy cloud I mean whistling private club Wow is their software involved I think it provides them with an option to actually deliver cloud services with a compression ratio on storage and a speed that they need to do to deliver mobile mobile data analytics right there's things that are there that are required so it gives them an option to be playing the cloud well I just saw I mean in the news coverage and the small inspection that we did I did was I just didn't reek of software innovation it's simply a data center large hosting big on you agree they didn't really have a northern wobblin driving him before this was brilliant on your Sun setting their previous all these chairs deal kind of musical chairs me for the music stops get something it was that kind of the deal no I think they are feel more like customers asking for something and they wanted IBM to have it yeah IBM works it's an irr play for IBM they're gonna make money on this team not a tuck under deal 900 million no I know but they'll make money on it that's IBM almost always does with it I'll leave it up to you guys to rip on I was your conference oh thanks hey constellation connecting enterprise was awesome we were at the half moon bay Ritz we had 220 folks that were there senior level individuals one of the shocking things for me was the fact that when we pulled the audience on day one two things happen that I would never imagine first thing as ninety percent of the folks downloaded our mobile app which was like awesome right so the network was with them the knowledge is with them when they leave the event and all the relationships the second thing that really shocked me we knew we had really good ratios but it was seventy-five percent of the audience that was line of business execs and twenty-five percent IT it was like we were we didn't have to preach to the choir it was amazing and the IT folks that were they were very very innovative on that end so it was awesome in that way so a lot like the mix the mix here is much more line of business execs the last week at hadoop world loose you know the t-shirt crowd right a lot of practitioners you know scoop I've flume hey we got the earth animals ever right oh but no this event is actually interesting IBM iod for me is like I didn't realize this when I didn't I looked at numbers when we're doing a partner event yesterday and there are thirteen thousand attendees here that actually makes that the biggest big data and analytics conference bigger than strata bigger than a whole bunch of other ones and so I mean this is pretty much the Nexus of what about open world big data over there but this is a big opera you see world any world cloud big data yeah hey the between no but so IBM's done a fantastic job of really transitioning this conference from sort of an eclectic swix db2 informix right I'm management routine fest right yeah and now it's like what are the business things I mean what are we trying to save around the world are they telling the story effectively it's a hard story to tell you got big data analytics cloud mobile in the middle and you got social business but then you got all this use case they have success stories if customers that creating business outcomes they telling the story effectively is it not enough speeds and fees is it too what's your take the stories are there we've seen like 122 case studies from the business partner side we just haven't seen them percolate out and I think they've got to do a better job evangelizing stories but what's interesting is like there's that remember we talked about this data to decision level there's that data level that was IBM right here's the database here's the structure here's the content management here's the unstructured stuff this is where it sets then there was that information management level which that they started to do which is really about cleaning the data connecting that data connecting to upstream and downstream systems getting into CRM and payroll and then they got to this level about insights which was all the Cognos stuff right so they've been building up the stat from data decisions so they got data information information to insight and then we're getting to this decision-making level which they haven't made a lot of the assets or acquisitions there but that's the predictive analytics that's the cognitive computing you can see how they're wrapping around there I mean there's a lot of vendors to buy there's a lot of opportunity out there's a lot to connect and they've been working on it for a while but I guess I got to ask you how they doing what's your report card from last year this year better better storytelling better messaging I think the stories are getting better but we're seeing them in more deals now right before we'd see a lot more SI p traditional SI p oracle you know kind of competes and a little bit of IBM Cognos now we're seeing them in a lot of end-to-end deals and what we're talking about it's not like I T deals these are line of business folks that say look I really need to change my shopping experience what do you guys have we see other things like you know the fraud examples that any was talking about those are hilarious I mean those are real I see em in every place right I mean even with Obamacare right there's gonna be massive amounts of fraud there any places that people going to want to go in and figure out how to connect or correct those kind of things yeah so so seeing the use cases emerge yeah and in particular me last week in a dupe world it was financial services you're talking risk you talk a marketing you're talking fraud protection to forecasting yep the big three and then underneath that is predicted predictive analytics so you know that's all sort of interesting what's your take on on Amazon these days you know they are crushing it on so many different unbelievable right on more billion this year maybe it's when you build a whole company which is basically on the premise of hey let's get people to offset our cost structure from November 15th to january first I mean it's pretty amazing what you can do it's like everyone's covering for it and even more funny it's like they're doing in the physical world with distribution centers I know if we talked about this before but what's really interesting is they've got last mile delivery UPS FedEx DHL can't cat can't handle their capacity so now the ability from digital to physical goods they've got that and beezus goes out and buys the post so he can make the post for example a national paper overnight again he can do home delivery things that they couldn't do before they can take digital ads bring that back in and so basically what they're doing on the cloud side they're also doing on the physical distribution side amazing isn't it they're almost the pushing towards sunday delivery right US Postal Service go into five day deliveries sort of the different directions amazon I'm Amazon's going to be the postal service by the time they're done we're all going to subsidize it so so I gotta get you take on the the Oracle early statement Larry Ellison said were the iphone for the data center that's his metaphor a couple of couple or global enrolls ago now you got open stack and though we kind of laugh at that but but amazon is like the iPhone you know it's disruptive its new its emerging like Apple was reading out of the ashes with Steve Jobs Oracle I think trying to shoehorn in an iphone positioning but if OpenStack if everyone's open and you got amazon here there is a plausible strategy scenario that says hey these guys can continue to to put the naysayers at the side of the road as they march forward to the enterprise and be the iphone they've turned the data center into an API so so we got the date as their lock in right so this sim lock in Apple has lock in so is that lock in what's your take of that scenario you think it's video in the open ecosystem world they're all false open because a walk-in also applies but but you've been even to this for a long time right and probably one of the things that you're seeing is that it's not about open versus closed it's about ubiquity right Microsoft was a closed evil empire back ten years ago now it's like oh the standard right it's like ok they're harmless Google was like open and now they're the evil empire right it just depends on the perception and the really is ubiquity Amazon's got ubiquity on it so i did is pushing their winning the developers the winning the developers they got the ecosystem they got ubiquity they've got a cost structure I mean I don't know what else could go wrong I think they could get s la's maybe and once that had I don't know what is Amazon's blind spot I mean s la's I think well a lumpy performance no one wants lumpy right they want the big Dayton who's got ever who's got better public as public cloud SL is denied well I think about what he just said us everybody no but here's think that's a public road statement not an amazon said let's crunch big data computation December fifteenth you tell me what this is all I want to know well I think I think an easy move is I mean this day you've got to do that on premise I just I just don't I just don't think that people are forecasting amazon the enterprise properly and you just set out the Washington Post that is a left-field move we can now look back and say okay I said makes sense amazon can continue to commoditize and disrupt and be innovative then shift and having some sort of on prem playing oh then it's over right then and then gets the stir days surrounded the castle but they really don't have a great arm tremblay have no on print but they could they could get one good I think they want to see well think they want to but I think with them what they figured out was let's go build some cool public service get everyone else to subsidize our main offerings right it's basically ultimate shared service everyone's subsidizing Amazon's destruction of their business right so if you're Macy is why the heck are you on amazon right you know if you're competing with them why the heck are you on Amazon you're basically digging your own grave I'm paying them to do it it's amazing I mean that's that's the brilliance of this goes invade they brag about it yeah digging your own brave like it's a you know put the compute power is great okay great but you're subsidizing Amazon's for the you know compute power so r a great shot great to have you here congratulations on your event constellation research awesome successful venues ahead last month top folks in you're doing a great job with your company and the end the day out today in the last word tell the folks what's happening with IBM what do you expect to hear from them tomorrow I know you're going to be another thing you had to fly to but what does IBM what's a trajectory coming out of the show for IBM what's your analysis I think the executives have figured out that the important audience here is really the line of business leaders and to figure out how to do couple things one democratize decision-making the second thing figure out how they can actually make it easy to consume IBM at different entry points and I think the third thing is really how can we focus on improving data visualization graphics I think you'll see something about that ray Wang on the cube cube alumni tech athlete entrepreneur new for his new firm not new anymore it's a couple years on his belt doing a great job but three years old congratulations we'll be back day two tomorrow stay with us here exclusive coverage of IBM information I'm John prairie with Dave vellante this is the cube will see you tomorrow the queue