>>Yeah, >>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston. It's the Cube covering IBM. Think brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome back, everybody. This is Dave Volante of the Cube. You're watching our continuous coverage of IBM stink 2020. The digital version of it. De Bug is here. She's the HR VP and Chief leadership learning and inclusion officer at IBM. Good to see you. >>Great to see you as well. Thanks for having me. >>You're very welcome. While we're in the same region of New England, you know which we're face to face at Mosconi. But, you know, we're doing the best we can, right? Absolutely. So I got to ask you So one of your roles is you're responsible for executive leadership succession. So I remember I was in ah, lobby hotel in Barcelona when I heard that Arvind Krishna was taking over, is the CEO of IBM and I have sat there and wrote a blogger tapped out of log on my mobile phone, but a little did you know. And, you know, at that time we had a glimpse of what was coming, but I don't think we really fully understood. Ah, and and So I'm wondering, how do you prepare for that type of succession? >>Well, you know, I think our leaders now are all encountering unexpected circumstances where we have big plans and big actions. We plan. But the front contact is asking us to rethink them in all kinds of ways. So, of course, IBM is the kind of company who had a very well thought through kind of world class succession process. But none of us thought that we would be integrating Arvind and launching him into his new role as the CEO working from home. So we had to do what every leader at IBM is doing right now, which is starting from a position of resilience, taking a deep breath, thinking through what's really happening to me, to my work, to my situation right now. Um, a lot of us are working from home. A lot of us are adjusting to physical distancing. There are many leaders here who are deeply worried about their families, their their lives, their situation. And so you're starting from a position of personal resilience, making sure we put our own oxygen mask ons. We can, I think clearly and make decisions was an important first step. Second, focus on empathy. Leaders across IBM right now are really focused on making sure they understand the situation people are in, that they understand the physical, emotional, mental health and needs and requirements of every IBM are, uh, so that they can make really good decisions about priorities. And then it's time to focus on what's mission critical. What's urgent to compartmentalize and relentlessly prioritize. So we can all be successful. All of those lessons of by two succession, like they do to every other work and let us Teoh reimagine and create really interesting digital intimacy opportunities to connect Arvin with every IBM around the world through new kinds of social channels. And overall, I think it's been a really incredible experience. >>Yeah, yoga breaths are a good thing that this is his time, aren't they? Oh, >>I want to ask. Depressed for sure, >>right? No doubt. Um, so and you know, you guys probably had a little bit of ah, canary in a coal mine leading sort of visibility on this cause you've obviously got a presence in China and throughout the world, and so you probably a little bit ahead of of other U S. Based Is that fair? >>Well, we certainly are a global company. And so you know the idea that everyone is going through this in the same way? Same time? It's just not accurate. We have people all over the world, and I think we did have our, you know, early lessons from our colleagues in China who are incredibly resilient, who showed us the way with great social distancing discipline and really working hard together to help each other be successful in challenging times. And we've learned that in every community around the world that's been impacted, and I think that's been one of the most surprising and amazing things about the school experience is the way we've been able to leverage digital technologies at scale, to connect with one another, learn from one another and support each other through a very, very challenging experience. >>So, Deb, you've got inclusion in your title. Um, and so that z relatively new thing. Um, I wonder if you could address sort of what that means you to IBM And why is it so important right now? >>Inclusion is, you know, sort of the core of what makes it possible for us to benefit from each other's incredible talents. I like to say, you know, diversity is important to make sure you have the right people the table. But inclusion is how you turn that talent that's at the table into magic. Inclusion is what allows every one of us bring our uniqueness to the tip. Want to contribute, And it couldn't be more important than right now. Inclusion is the most important ingredient to helping people thrive and difficult times. It allows team members to quickly orient to new ways of being together on an inclusive leader, is able to manage it in a digitally distributed environment and create a new context for people to connect with one another. Ask the right questions to allow team members to manage the competing priorities of homeschooling working, living all in the same environment. Eso inclusive leaders really create a context for each other's contribution and success. You'll hear again and again in the description of how IBM leaders are thriving in this time. How we're stepping up and stepping in Where are the embers, our communities and our clients on finding ways to include, learn, take the best insights and accelerate productivity and the right solutions in this challenging environment. Inclusion is one of IBM's biggest assets right now. >>Well, you mentioned that you kind of connecting Arvin digitally with, you know, the broader IBM community. So that's kind of interesting, right? I mean, leading digitally. He has no choice, you know, other than he is not the only leader at IBM, obviously is the top leader, but there are many, many leaders at IBM. So how is this sort of we're talking today through the Cube's digital? How is this digital revolution really affecting people's ability to lead? How are they stepping up to that challenge? >>Sure. Well, IBM, like all our clients, have been on a journey of digital transformation for the last several years that this is really putting it to test in it a very different way. You know, it's presenting new challenges and new opportunities. The opportunities are incredible. New tools like we're using, you know, WebEx and Trillo and slack and your role and your all based in the in the IBM Cloud, really enabling full digital collaboration at a whole different scale than ever before and leveraging new kinds of leadership insights and new kinds of leadership mindsets. To benefit from all that great ability to collaborate, a synchronously Teoh create digitally distributed creative conversations and then as leaders, knowing how to harness all that creativity and provide the right context for people to share, to move product quickly, be more agile in our production of outcomes and solutions. That's right at home. In my group, for example, we're creating new digital communities and coming up with new solutions with our, you know, includes inclusion communities, new solutions with our teams to help enable leadership and new learning solutions all over the company. It also working digitally presents a new challenge. Is trying to figure out, um, how to help people balance the challenges of being at home and things that we might have relied on face to face contact for, to create different levels of trust and interactivity. Learn new skills, etcetera. Some leaders have recognizing some of those challenges gotten together and, you know, taking a work from home pledge, helping each other figure out and co create with parents were working at home. How Teoh navigate this new digital, totally distributed remote work situation we're in or, um, you know, figuring out how to teach each other how to use new tools. So I think, uh, you know, if I were going to give advice to any leader now, I would say it's a good time to assess your digital presence in your digital savviness and then think about how you're showing up in these digital forums. Are you trying to do things in the same way you were doing them just doing them online? Or have you really rethought your digital present? And are you really using that environment to create the maximum context of creativity and inclusion? >>You have your theme. >>You know, Dave, I was having a conversation earlier with an IBM executive and a Cisco executive, and I kind of joke that you know what people need right now. They don't need people selling them Stuff II D practitioners. They're putting out fires and, you know, changes in some industries where you're just trying to keep the company's alive. And I joked, That's kind of what they need is some adult supervision. And what do you see as IBM is role in this sort of during this crisis and maybe even post this prices? How would you define that. >>Absolutely so look. IBM is a trusted partner to the companies of the world who are facing the same challenge we're facing and trying to digitally transform themselves and thrive as the world continues to grow and change. And certainly this current context. What's the whole thing in a different, different relief? But fundamentally, IBM is the most important technology company in the world because we have the technology that industry expertise and the position of trust with our clients they don't need. What they need from IBM is not selling them something. But they need our partnership to imagine themselves in the future, reinvent themselves toward that future, too, to thrive during this incredible challenge and maintain business continuity while they become who they're going to be in the next terrorist. So, you know, it's a challenge for all of us. We are a huge global company and 173 countries and, you know, 350,000 people uniquely positioned to help. We have, you know, incredible technology. We have, you know, the call for code with our developers all over the world helping to solve these issues, we have, you know, many ways in which IBM is positioned socially to make a difference in helping with skill, acquisition, super compute capacity in many, many ways that we can help as a business. But closer to home, we're also able to help companies imagine how they can emerge stronger by re inventing their digitally reinventing their business processes and their leadership and talent cultures for how they can thrive in that in the New America. >>Rob Thomas and I were talking about how you know things most coveted. Maybe maybe they change. Maybe they don't, but but that's certainly is gonna be an acceleration. Ah t some things you're mentioning, you know, digital transformation. Um, certainly people are more willing to look at the cloud. You know, this whole work from home infrastructure seems to be some thing that has legs. Do you think inclusion is going to be one of these things that gets accelerated as a result of this pandemic? >>Absolutely. Do I mean, I think we have lived in an era where this kind of concept was sort of nice, tohave or viewed as a Z important, but maybe not essential. I think that's really being transformed by the current environment, and people are expecting their companies to provide a context that is psychologically safe, inclusive and on helps them do their best work when it matters most. Those are the companies that are going to emerge from this challenge stronger. And so IBM is culturally. Last year we talked a lot at think about the compelling call to action. To be equal that comes from IBM is deep commitment to diversity and inclusion and in every era challenging ourselves to doom or to create a context of full inclusion and equality. Well, this year we're expanding that concept to include all forms of equality. We started with gender equality. Now we're looking at full inclusion for all, and in this circumstance it could not be more important. And so I do think, you know, you said it well, you know, there are all kinds of capabilities that will be transformed and scaled. As a result of this. Our technology environment will be different or commitment to infrastructure working from home. Lots of things will be different. I think one of them is a call to action for leaders to be more inclusive and to to create the context where everyone can be. >>Well, I think it's important that companies like IBM lead in this regard. Sometimes, you know, it's harder for smaller companies they may not have. The resource is they've been out of the network. Uh, and so, you know, setting the example as IBM is very important. But thank you so much for coming on the Cube and sharing your philosophy IBM philosophy in your best practice, etcetera with us on the Cube. Appreciate it. >>Thanks so much for having me be safe and be Well, >>yeah, back at you. You too. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for the Cube's continuous coverage of IBM. Think 2020 The digital thing. Keep right there. Right back. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward. Five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of UI Path Forward. Five from Las Vegas. We're inside. The formerly was The Sands, now it's the Venetian Convention Center. Dave Nicholson. David, Deb. I've never seen it set up like this before. UI Path's. Very cool company. So of course the setup has to be cool, not like tons of concrete. James Furlong is here, the Vice President of Supply Chain Management and projects at Puma. And Derek Weimer is the CEO of Robo, who's an implementation partner, expert at Intelligent Automation. Folks, welcome to the Cube. Good to see you. Great to have you on. >>Thank you. It's a pleasure. >>So what's happening at Puma these days? I love your sneakers, but you guys probably do more than that, but let's tell us about, give us the update on Puma. >>Yeah, absolutely. Puma's one of the world's leading sports, sports brands. So we encompass all things sports. We do footwear, we do apparel, we do accessories. Cobra, Puma golf is underneath our umbrella as well. So we get the added benefit of having that category as well. And yeah, trade, trade all over the world and it's an exciting, exciting brand to be with. >>And di Robo Atlanta based really specialists in intelligent automation. That's pretty much all you do, is that right? >>Yeah, we are a pure play intelligence automation professional services firm. That's all we do. We're the world's largest firm that focuses only on automation headquarter in Germany, but with a large presence here in Americas. >>So we hear from a lot of customers. We've heard from like with the journey it started, you know, mid last decade, Puma James is just getting started. We April you mentioned. So take us through that. What was the catalyst as you're exiting the, the pandemic, the isolation economy we call it? Yeah. What was the catalyst tell, take us through the sort of business case for automation. >>Sure, absolutely. So Puma, our mission is forever faster. It's, it's our mantra and something we live and breathe. So naturally we have an intense focus on innovation and, and automation. So with that mindset, the way this all kicked off is that I had the opportunity to go into some of our distribution facility and I was unbelievably impressed with the automation that I saw there. So how automation augmented the employee workforce. And it was just very impressive to see that some of our state of the art technology and automation at the same time. Then I went back to the office with that excitement and that passion and I saw that we had the opportunity to take that to our employee base as well. We sort of lacked that same intense focus on how do we take automation and technology like I saw at the distribution facilities and bring it to our employees because picture a large workforce of talented, dedicated employees and they just couldn't keep up with the explosive growth who's seen explosive growth over the last couple of years and they just couldn't keep up with it. So I said that that's it. We need to, to take that same passion and innovation and enter in hyper hyper automation. So we went to the leadership team and no surprise they were all in. We went with them with the idea of bringing hyper automation, starting with RPA to, to our office employees. And they were in, they support innovation and they said, Great, what do you need? Really? Go for it. >>The first question wasn't how much, >>Actually the first question I will say that the funny part is, is they said, Well I like this, it sounds too good to be true. And because it, it really does. If you're new to it like we were and I'm pitching all the benefits that RPA could bring, it does sound too good to me. True. So they said, All right, you know, we trust you and, and go for it. What do you need? Resources, just let us know. So sure enough, I had a proof of concept, I had an idea, but now what? I didn't know where to go from there. So that's where we did some intensive research into software suppliers, but also implementation partners because now we knew what we wanted to do. We had excitement, we had leadership buy-in now, now what do I do? So this is when we entered our partnership to figure out, okay, help Puma on this journey. >>How'd you guys find each other? You know, >>Just intensive research and spoke with a lot of people here. Is there a lot of great organizations? But at the end of the day, they really supported everything that Houma stood for, what we're looking to do and had a lot of trust in the beginning and Dirk and his team and how he could help us on this journey. Yeah. >>Now James, your, your job title system for supply chain management. It is, but I understand that you have had a variety of roles within the organization. Now if we're talking about another domain, artificial intelligence, machine learning. Yeah. There's always this concept of domain expertise. Yeah. And how when you're trying to automate things in that realm, domain expertise is critical. Yeah. You have domain expertise outside of your job title. Yeah. So has that helped you with this journey looking at automation, being able to, being able to have insight into those other organizations? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think when we were pitching it to the leadership team in the beginning, that enabled me to look at each one sitting at the table and saying, alright, and on the sales, on a commercial side, I was a head of sales for one of the trade channels. I could speak directly to him in the benefits it could have with not with tribal knowledge and with an expertise. So it wasn't something that, it was just, oh, that's supply chain. I could sit, you know, with the, our CFO and talk to him about the, the benefits for his group merchandising and legal so on. I was really able to kind of speak to each one of them and how it would support, because I had that knowledge from being blessed of 15 years experience at, at Puma. So yeah, I was able to take all of that and figure out how do I make sure not just supply chain benefits from rpa, but how does the whole organization benefit from not only RPA but the hyper automation strategy. >>So what's an engagement look like? You start, I presume you, you gotta do some type of assessment and, and you know, of some upfront planning work. Yeah. What does that look like? How, what's the starting point? Take us through that >>Journey. Yeah, so exactly. So the, the key when you're trying to get value from Intel automation is finding the right opportunities, right? And you can automate a lot of things, but which are the things that are gonna drive the most value and, and the value that actually matters to the company, right? So where are you trying to get to from a strategic level, your objectives and how do you actually use automation to help you get to there? So the first thing is, what are the opportunities gonna help you do that? And then once you identify, what we recommend is start with something that's gonna be, you know, accessible, small, You're gonna get a quick win. Cuz then the important thing is once you get that out there, you build the momentum and excitement in the organization that then leads to more and more. And then you build a proper pipeline and you and you get that the, the engagement. >>So what was that discovery like? Was it you fly up there and do a, a chalk talk? Or did you already know James, like where you wanted to focus? >>Yeah, I knew I had a solid proof of concept with the disruptions in supply chain we couldn't keep up with, with all the changes and supply. So right away I knew that I have a very substantial impact on the organization and it would be a solid proof of concept. It was something that not only would supply chain steal, but our customers would feel that we would be servicing them better. Our sales team, the commercial team, marketing impacted everybody. But at the same time it was tangible. I saw two people that just physically couldn't get their, their work done despite how talented and hardworking they were. So I, I was in on that proof of concept and then I just took that idea with some strong advice from Dirk and and his team on, okay, well how do I take that? But then also use that to evangelize through the organization. What are some pitfalls to avoid? Because as a proof of concept, they just told me it's too good to be true. I believe in it. So it was so important to me that it >>Was successful. >>It get your neck out. Oh, I sure was. Which is a little scary, but I had confidence that we would >>Do it. But your poc you had to have a systems view. Yes. Right? Cuz you were trying to, I think you, I'm inferring that you had two people working really hard, but they couldn't get their job done. Yeah, for sure. They were just sitting on their hands. Right. Waiting. Okay. So you kind of knew where the bottlenecks were. Yes. And that's what you attacked and or you helped James and her the team think through that or, >>Yeah, exactly. So, so a couple points you were asking about her domain model of knowledge earlier, and I think that's really key to the puma's success with it, is that they've come at it from a business point of view, what matters to the business. And at the point, you know, supply chain challenges, how do we use automation to address that? And then, you know, and then it's gonna, it's actually gonna, you know, pick opportunities that are gonna matter to the business. Yeah, >>Yeah. At the same time, we, we knew this could be a scary thing, right? If it's not done right, you know, automation definitely can, can take a, a wrong path. So what we relied on them for is tell us how to make this successful. We wanted structure, we wanted oversight, we wanted to balance that with speed and really, you know, developing our pipeline, but at the same time, tell us how to do this right? How do we set up a center, our first ever center of excellence? They help us set that up. Our steerco, our process definition documents are like, they really helped us add that structure to how to make this successful, sustainable and make sure that we were standing things up the right way versus launching into a strong proof, proof of concept. But then it's not gonna be scalable if we didn't really take their strong advice on how to make this something, you know, that had the right oversight, the right investment. So that was, that was key as >>Well for us. So when you looked at the POC and James was saying there were potential pitfalls, what were those pitfalls? Like what did you tell Puma, Hey, watch out for this, watch out for that. What was sort of the best advice there? >>Yeah, so I think one is understanding complexity, right? So a lot of opportunities sound good, but you want to make sure that it's, it's feasible with the right tool set. And also that you're not bit off too much in the beginning is really important. And so some of that is that bringing that expertise to say, Okay, yeah, look, that does something, a good process. You're gonna get value out. It's not gonna be overly complicated. It's a good place to start. And then also, I guess the thing too to mention is it's more than just a technology project. And that's the thing that we also really focus on is it's actually as much about the change management, it's much about, you know, what is the right story, the business case around it, the technology actually in a way is the easy part and it's all the stuff around it that really makes the POC effective, >>Obviously the process. Yeah. Been the people I presume getting to adopt, >>Right? And I think, again, with our, our brand mantra forever faster, we, we get that support that the buy-in from the top is is there from, from the beginning. So that's a benefit that some companies don't, they don't have, right? They have a little resistance maybe from the top. We're trying to get everyone's buy in it. And we had that. So we had, you know, the buy-in the engagement, we were ready to go. So now we just needed someone to kind of help us. >>One more if I may. Yeah, yeah. Gabe, six months in. Yes. That's the business impact that, can >>You tell you? That was tremendous. Yeah. >>Really already six months. Wow. >>Yeah, >>Absolutely. Cfo, CFO's dream. Yeah. >>And again, and, and we had a CFO change mid, mid project. So the new CFO comes in, not new to Puma, the same thing. Super, super smart guy. And I had to sit and again pitch, you know, pitch what it is and the support that I needed by way of investment. And he saw the results and he was all in, you know, what do you need, what's next? And instantly was challenging his departments, Why don't he got competitive, right? We're a competitive bunch, so why don't you know, you should have more in the pipeline. And he was, he was bought in. So there was that fear of a new CFO coming in and how do you show value? Because some of it is, it's very easy to show right away, You know, we were able to refocus those two full-time employees on, on higher value chain activity and you know, they're doing a tremendous job and they're, you know, they have the, the bot and the automation supporting them. So he saw that right away. And we can show him that. But he also understands, as does the whole leadership team, the concept of downstream impacts that you can't necessarily, you know, touch and, and put on paper. So he sees some, but then he also recognizes all the other upstream and downstream impacts that it's had and he's all in and supports whatever, whatever we need. >>Yeah. New CFOs like George Seaford taking over for bill walls. >>Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We >>Have, we have to keep showing results and it has to be sustainable. So that's, again, we'll rely on our partnership to say, okay, this is the beginning, you know, what's next? Keep us, you know, honest on oversight and, and any pitfalls that we should avoid because he's excited. But at the same time, we need to make sure that we sustain those results and, and show what's next. Now they all gotta taste to the apple and they're very eager to see what's next in, in, in this hyper automation journey. >>Well, Dirk, you've partnered on this journey, this specific journey with, with, with Puma. But from your perspective in the broader marketplace, what would be the perfect low hanging fruit opportunity that you would like to have somebody call you and say, Hey, we've got, we've got this perspective engagement with a client. What would be the, what would be the like, Oh yeah, that's easy, that's huge roi really quickly, What does that look like? >>Yeah, I think there's, there's a few areas, right? You know, one task automation RPA is a, is a really good entry point, right? Because it's, it's, it's not overly complex. It doesn't involve a lot of complicated technologies. And I'd say the, the usual starting areas, you know, you, you finance back office, you know, shared service, invoice processing, you know, payables is a very good opportunity area. HR is also an area I would look at, you know, in new, new employee onboarding process or you know, payroll, et cetera. And then supply chain is actually becoming more and more, more common, right? So those would be I guess, top three areas I would mention. And >>Then, and then kind of follow onto that, what's the tip of this sphere? What's the sort of emerging market Yeah. >>For >>This kind of technology? >>I think there's two things. One, it's taking a holistic into end view and leveraging multiple, you know, technology, you know, beyond just rpa, right? You know, intelligent document processing, iml, you know, bringing all this to bear to actually do a true digital transformation. That's, that's number one. And then I'd say the second is going from focusing on cost and efficiency to actually getting into the front office and how do you, how do you actually increase revenue? How do you increase margin? How do you actually, you know, help with that, that top line growth. I think that's really, and that's where you're leveraging technologies, you know, like the, the AI as an example to really help you understand how do you optimize. >>So James, that's, that becomes then an enterprise wide initiative. Yeah. That's, that's, is that your vision? Maybe maybe lay that out for >>Us a bit. Yeah, ab absolutely. The, the vision is now that we've seen what, what it can do, how do we take it from being managed by just, you know, supply chain and this proof of concept cuz I manage projects, but now it's bigger than just a supply chain project. And how do we sort of evangelize that through the whole organization And you know, they mentioned on main stage this, the creation of new jobs and, and roles and how a, a company might set out their strategic directive now is, is changing and evolving. So you know that that's our idea now and that what we'll need support next is how should we structure now for success. And so that it's across the whole enterprise. But that's, that's the vision for >>Sure. What worries you do, you worried about it like taking off and getting outta control and not being governed and so you have to be a little bit careful there. >>Yeah, for sure. That was really important to us. And we actually got to leverage a lot of heavy lifting that Puma Global had done at the same time that we were coming up and, and thinking of the idea of rpa. They were having the same thoughts and they did a lot of heavy lifting again, about not only the software providers but also what does the structure look like, the oversight, a center of excellence globally. So we were able to really leverage a lot of best practices and SOPs that they had set out and we were able to kind of leverage those, bring those to Puma North America so that we didn't face that fear cuz that would be a limiting factor for us. So because we were so disciplined and we could leverage the work that they had done, that fear wasn't, wasn't there. Now we have to stay, you know, on top of it. And as people get excited, how do you kind of mirror the excitement and with it at the same time that the oversight and not getting, you know, too, too big, too fast. So that's the balance that we'll, we'll work through now. It's a good problem to have. >>Well, exactly. It is super exciting. Great story. Congratulations on, on the success and good luck. Thank you. Yeah, you very much for coming to the, Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. All right. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Dave Nicholson Andante right back, the cube live from Las Vegas UI path forward. Five.

>>from the cube studios in Palo alto >>in boston >>connecting with thought leaders all around the >>world. This >>is a cute conversation. Hello and welcome to today's session of the AWS Global Public sector Partner Awards. I'm your host Natalie ehrlich. Today we're going to focus on the following award for best partner transformation. I'm pleased to introduce our guests, josh door smith, vice president of public sector at Effectual and jeremy Yates, deputy technology architect at jenny May. Welcome gentlemen so glad to have you on our show. >>Hi there. Very nice to be here. Thank you so much for having me >>terrific. Well josh, I'd like to start with you. How can companies leverage cloud native solutions to deliver higher quality services? >>So Natalie, that's a great question. And in the public sector and our our government customers, we run into this all the time. It's kind of our bread and butter. What what they can do is the first thing they need to be aware of is you don't have to be afraid of the cloud as some very obscure technology that is just emerging. It's been out for 10, 11 years now, customers across government space are using it lock stock and barrel to do everything from just managing simple applications, simple websites all the way through hosting their entire infrastructure, both in production and for disaster recovery purposes as well. So the first thing to note is just don't be afraid of the cloud. Um secondly, it's, it's imperative that they select the right partner who is able to kind of be there Sherpa to go into however far they want to dip their toe into the, into the proverbial cloud waters. Um to select somebody who knows whatever it is that they need to go do. So if they want to go Aws as we are talking about today, pick a partner who has the right experience, past performance designations and competencies with the cloud that they're interested in. >>Terrific. Well, you know, Jeremy, I'd love to move to you. What does modern modernization mean to jenny May? >>Sure, Thanks Natalie, great to be here. Thanks josh as well, you know. So for jenny May, modernization is really, it's not just technology is holistic across the organization. So that includes things like the business, um not just you know, the the I. T. Division. So we're looking at the various things to modernize like our culture and structural changes within the organization. Um moving to implement some, some proven practices like def sec ops and continuous integration and continuous delivery or deployment. Uh and then, you know, our overall overarching goal is to give the best and most secure technology to the business that we can to meet the Jeannie Mai mission and the needs of our customers >>terrific. Well josh, how is Effectual planning to support jenny Maes modernization plans? >>So we have been supporting jenny May for about 14 months now. Uh and back in september of last year, we rewarded a co prime 10 year contract for Jeannie Mai to do exactly that. It's to provide all things cloud to Jeannie Mai for 10 years on AWS and that's including reselling AWS. That's including providing all sorts of professional services to them. And it's, it's providing some third party software applications to help them support their applications themselves. So what Effectual is doing is kind of a threefold. We are supporting the modernization of their process, which jeremy mentioned a moment ago and that includes in stan shih ating a cloud center of Excellence for jenny May, which enables them to modernize the way they do cloud governance while they're modernizing their technology stack. We're also providing a very expert team of cloud architects and Dempsey cops engineers to be able to, to design the Jeannie Mai environment, collaborating with our co prime uh to ensure that it meets the security requirements, the compliance requirements that jerry mentions. Uh, Jeannie Mai is a federal entity, but it also has to adhere to all the finance industry uh compliance requirements as well. So very strenuous from that perspective. And then the third thing that we're doing to help them kind of along their modernization journey is in stan shih aging infrastructure as code. So in the cloud, rather than building everything in the AWS management console, we script everything to build it automatically, so it improves consistency, it improves the customer experience regardless of which resource is working on it. And it improves disaster recovery capability as well. And also, just quite frankly, the speed by which they can actually deploy things. >>And jeremy, how is this transition helping your security really enhancing it now? >>Uh From a security perspective we're implementing a number of various tools um both, you know, a W. S based as well as other software that josh mentioned. Um So we're able to utilize those in a more scalable manner than we could previously in the traditional data center. Um we've got a number of things such as we're looking at multiple vulnerability management products like 10 of Ohio and Wallace. Um we're using uh tools such as Centra fi for our our pam or privileged access management capabilities. Um Splunk a pretty industry standard. Um software for log and data correlation and analysis um will also be using that for some system and application monitoring. Um as well as uh the Mcafee envision product for endpoint and other cloud service security. So being able to pull all those in in a more scalable and more cost efficient way as well from cloud based services. Uh, it's really helped us be able to get those services and integrate them together in a way that, you know, we may not previously been able to. >>Yeah, terrific. Well, josh, let's move back to you and talk further about compliance. You know, any insight here, how Effectual is building a modern cloud infrastructure to integrate AWS services with third party tools to really achieve compliance with the government requirements. Just any further insight on that >>front? That's a great question. Natalie and I'm gonna tag team with Jeremy on this one if you don't mind, but I'll start off so jenny may obviously I mentioned earlier has federal requirements and financial requirements so focused right now on on those federal aspects. Um, so the tools that Jeremy mentioned a moment ago, we are integrating all of them with a W. S native meaning all of the way we do log aggregation in the various tools within AWS cloudwatch cloud trail. All of those things were implementing an AWS native, integrating them with Splunk to aggregate all of that information. But then one of the key requirements that's coming up with the federal government in the very near future is tick three dot or trusted internet connection. Basically in the first iteration a decade or so ago, the government wanted to limit the amount of points of presence that they have with the public facing internet fast forward several versions to today and they're pushing that that onus back on the various entities like jenny May and like hud, which Jeannie Mai is a part of but they still want to have that kind of central log repository to where all of the, all of the security logs and vulnerability logs and things like that. Get shipped to a central repository and that will be part of DHS. So what effectual has done in partnership with jenny May is create a, a W. S native solution leveraging some of those third party tools that we mentioned earlier to get all of those logs aggregated in a central repository for Ginny MaE to inspect ingest and take action from. But then also provide the mechanism to send that to DHS to do that and correlate that information with everything coming in from feeds across the government. Now that's not required just yet. But we're future proofing jenny Maes infrastructure in order to be able to facilitate adherence to those requirements when it becomes uh required. Um, and so jeremy, I'll pass it over to you to talk a little bit further about that because I know that's one of the things that's near and dear to your sister's heart as well as jenny may overall. >>Yeah, absolutely. Thanks josh. Um, so yeah, we, as you mentioned, we have implemented um, uh, sort of a hybrid tech model right now, um, to to handle compliance on that front. Um, so we're still using a, you know, some services from the legacy or our existing T two dot x models. That that josh was mentioning things such as m tips, um, uh, the Einstein sensors, etcetera. But we're also implementing that take 30 architecture on our own. As josh mentioned that that will allow us to sort of future proof and and seamlessly really transitioned to once we make that decision or guidance comes out or, you know, mandates or such. Um, so that effort is good to future proof house from a compliance perspective. Um, also, you know, the tools that I mentioned, uh, josh reiterated, those are extremely important to our our security and compliance right. Being able to ensure, you know, the integrity and the confidentiality of of our systems and our data is extremely important. Not both, not just both on the r not only on the government side, but as josh mentioned, the finance side as well. >>Terrific. Well, I'd love to get your insight to on AWS workspaces. Um, if either one of you would like to jump in on this question, how did they empower the jenny May team to work remotely through this pandemic? >>That's a great question. I guess I'll start and then we'll throw it to jeremy. Um, so obviously uh effectual started working with jenny May about three weeks after the pandemic formally started. So perfect timing for any new technology initiative. But anyway, we, we started talking with Jeremy and with his leadership team about what is required to actually facilitate and enable our team as well as the government resources and the other contractors working for jenny May to be able to leverage the new cloud environment that we were building and the very obvious solution was to implement a virtual desktop infrastructure uh type solution. And obviously Jeannie Mai had gone all in on amazon web services, so it became the national natural fit to look first at AWS workspaces. Um, so we have implemented that solution. There are now hundreds of jenny May and jenny make contractor resources that have a WS workspaces functioning in the GovCloud regions today and that's a very novel approach to how to facilitate and enable not only our team who is actually configuring the infrastructure, but all the application developers, the security folks and the leadership on the jenny may side to be able to access, review, inspect, check log etcetera, through this remote capability. It's interesting to note that Jeannie Mai has been entirely remote since the pandemic initiated. Jeremy's coming to us from, from west Virginia today, I'm coming to us from national harbor Maryland And we are operating totally remotely with a team of 60 folks about supporting this specific initiative for the cloud, not to mention the hundreds that are supporting the applications that Jamie runs to do its day to day business. So jeremy, if you wouldn't mind talking about that day to day business that jenny may has and, and kind of what the, the mission statement of Jeannie Mai is and how us enabling these workspaces uh facilitates that mission >>or you know, so the part of the overall mission of jenny Maes to, to ensure affordable housing is, is made available to uh, the american public. Um that's hud and, and jenny may as part of that and we provide um mortgage backed securities to help enable that. Um, so we back a lot of V A. Loans, um, F H A, those sort of loans, um, workspaces has been great in that manner from a technology perspective, I think because as you mentioned, josh, it's really eliminated the need for on premise infrastructure, right? We can be geographically dispersed, We can be mobile, um, whether we're from the east coast or west coast, we can access our environment securely. Uh, and then we can, you know, administer and operate and maintain the technology that the business needs to, to fulfill the mission. Um, and because we're able to do that quickly and securely and effectively, that's really helpful for the business >>Terrific. And um, you know, I'd like to shift gears a bit and uh you know, discuss what you're looking ahead toward. What is your vision for 2021? How do you see this partnership evolving? >>Yeah, you >>Take that 1/1. >>Sure. Yeah. Um you know, definitely some of the things we look forward to in 2021 as we evolve here is we're going to continue our cloud journey um you know, through practices like Deb said cops, you realize that uh that journey has never done. It's always a continual improvement process. It's a loop to continually work towards um a few specific things or at least one specific thing that we're looking forward to in the future, as josh mentioned earlier was our arctic three Oh Initiative. Um, so with that we think will be future proofed. Um as there's been a lot of um a lot of recent cyber security activity and things like that, that's going to create um opportunities I think for the government and Jeannie Mai is really looking forward to to leading in that area. >>Mhm and josh, can you weigh in quickly on that? >>Absolutely. Uh First and foremost we're very much looking forward to receiving authority to operate with our production environment. We have been preparing for that for this last year plus. Uh but later on this summer we will achieve that 80 oh status. And we look forward to starting to migrate the applications into production for jenny May. And then for future proof, it's as jerry jerry mentioned, it's a journey and we're looking forward to cloud optimizing all of their applications to ensure that they're spending the right money in the right places uh and and ensuring that they're not spending over on any of the one given area. So we're very excited to optimize and then see what the technology that we're being able to provide to them will bring to them from an idea and a conceptual future for jenny may. >>Well thank you both so very much for your insights. It's been a really fantastic interview. Our guests josh duggar smith as well as jeremy Gates. Really appreciate it. >>Thank you very much. >>Thank you so much. >>Terrific. Well, I'm your host for the cube Natalie or like to stay tuned for more coverage. Thanks so much for watching.

>>Hello and welcome to the cubes coverage of dr khan 2021. I'm john Kerry, host of the cube agent I own L. C. Ceo and co founder chairman of Morantes cube alumni Adrian Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube here for dr khan coverage. Good to see you. Hey >>john nice to see. You gotta do. >>So obviously open source innovation continues. You guys are at the forefront of it. Great to see you what's new Miranda's, give us the update on what's happening. >>Well, I mean what's, what's interesting is we've had one of the best years ever last year and it's very much more continuous, you know, into this year. It's pretty fantastic. We wanted about 160 new customers. Kubernetes is definitely on a tear. We see customers doing bigger and bigger and more exciting things, which is absolutely great to say lens is getting tremendous destruction and I think we have a five fold increase in user base within a year. So it's a lot of fun Right now, customers are definitely pushing the boundaries of what benefits can do. And they want to get the cloud native infrastructure and they want to get there faster and they want to be big and exciting things. And we are so happy to be part of the right. >>You guys are investing in brand new open source solutions for customers. Give us an update on on why and why do they matter for your customer? >>Well, there are, let me unpack this a little bit and there are really two elements to this. One is wide. Open Source and what's new. What matters. So the open source is not new, but open source is being embraced more and more heavily. Bye bye companies everywhere because just a very flexible and cost efficient and highly innovative way to to use innovation and to continue software and a lot of innovation these days is happening the open source communities, which is why it's super exciting for many, many users now. What's new with us? I think there are two really terrific things that we brought the market that we see, get a lot of interest and attention from our customers and create value. One is this idea of delivering, including the infrastructure that's been in space as a service for some of the largest news cases out there. Very large enterprises. We want to have a cloud experience on prime just like they have it in public clouds. That is absolutely fantastic. And that's new and different and very, very exciting. Customs. The second thing that's new and compelling and exciting is the is lands which is this kubernetes, i. e. that has empowered in the meantime, close to 180,000 communities, developers around the world to make it much much easier to take advantage of genetics. So you can think of it as a I. D. And a D. Bugger for anybody who is using genetics on public clouds or on on private infrastructure. That is getting tremendous traction and adoption. >>The interest in kubernetes has been unbelievable. I mean in coop con we saw kubernetes almost become boring in the sense of like it's everyone's using it and there's still now it's enabling a lot more cloud native development. Why does that lens matter what is the benefit? Because that's that's a killer opportunity because kubernetes is actively being adopted. The general consensus is it's delivering the value. >>Yeah. So let me unpack this in two aspects why Wise Bennett is important, why people adopting it and then how it lands adding value on top of it for people who want to use humanity's common. It is tremendously important is because it solves some very, very fundamental problems for developers and operators when building cloud native applications. These are problems that are very essential to actually operating in production but are really unpleasant people to solve, like availability, scalability, reusability of services. So all of that with amenities comes right out of the box and developers no longer have to worry about it. And at the same time, the benefits gives you a standard where you can build apps on public clouds and then move them on prem or build them on trend with them on public clouds and anywhere in between. So it gives a kind of this universal cloud native standard that you as a developer can rely on. And that's extremely valuable for developers. We all remember from the java times when java came online, people really value this idea of white ones run anywhere and that's exactly what benefits does for you in a clown in the world. So it's extremely screaming valuable for people. Um now how does let's add value in this context is also very exciting. So what's happening when you build these applications on a minute? This is that you have many, many services which interact with each other in fairly complex and sometimes unpredictable ways and they're also very much interact with the infrastructure. So you have you can you can imagine kind of this jungle this label building of many different cloud native services working together to build your app, run your app well, how are you going to navigate that and debug that as a developer as you build and optimize your code. So what lengths does it gives you kind of like a real time poppet of pounds of console. You can imagine like you're a fighter pilot in this jet and you have all these instruments kind of coming out here and gives you like this fantastic real time situational awareness. So you can very quickly figure out what is it that you need to do? Either fixing a bug in your application or optimize the performance of the code of making more your rival fixing security issues. And it makes it extremely easy for developers to use. Right? But this tradition has been hard to use complicated, this makes it super fast, easy, have a lot of fun. >>You know, that is really the great theme about this conference this year and your point exactly is developer experience making it simpler and easier. Okay. And innovative is really hits the mark on productivity. I mean and that's really been a key part. So I think that's why I think people are so excited about kubernetes because it's not like some other technologies that had all the setup requirement and making things easier to get stood up and manage. Its huge. So congratulations. A great point, great call out there, great insight. The next question to ask you is you guys have coined the term software factory. Um, yeah, this kind of plays into this. If you have all the services, you can roll them up together with lens and those tools, it's gonna be easier, more productive. So that means it's more software, open source is the software factory to what does that term mean? And how >>it is leverage. Yeah, So here's what it means to us. And so, as you know, today, Soft is being produced by two groups working together to build software, uh, certainly the poor people are the developments, these are the people who create the core functionality. Imagine all the software should be architected and ultimately ship the code right? And maintain the code, but the developers today don't operate just by themselves. They have their psychics, they have their friends for often platform engineering and platform engineers. These are the people who are helping developers, you know, make some of the most important choices as to which platform states we should use, which services they should use, how they should think about governance. How should they think about cloud infrastructure they should use, which open source libraries they should use. How often they should be fresh those libraries and support. So this platform engineers create if you want the factory, the substrate and the automation, which allows these developers to be highly productive. And the analogy want to make is the chip design, right. If you imagine ship design today, you take advantage of a lot of software, a lot of tooling and a lot of free package libraries. You get your job done, you're not doing it by yourself. Uh just wiring transistors together or logical elements. You do it using a massive amount of automation and software, like recent polls. So that's that's what we aim to provide you to customers because what we discovered is that customers, I don't want to be in the business of buildings off the factories, They don't want to be in the business or building platform engineering teams. If they can avoid it, they just do it because they have no choice. But it's difficult for them to do. It's cumbersome, it's expensive. It's a one off. It really doesn't create any unique business value because the platform engineering for a bank is very similar to the platform engineering for, let's say, an oil gas company or the insurance company. Um So we do it for them turnkey as a service. So they can be focusing on what Madison's for that. >>That's a great inside. I love that platform engineering, enabling software developers because, you know, look at sas throwing features together. Being a feature developer is cool. And and and the old days of platform was the full stack developer. And now you have this notion of platform as a service in a way, in this kind of new way. What's different agents? You've seen these waves of innovation? Certainly an open source that we've been covering your career for over a decade uh with more Anderson and open stick and others. This idea of a platform that enables software. What's changed now about this new substrate, you mentioned what's different than the old platform model? >>Uh That's a wonderful question. Uh a couple of things are different. So the first thing that's different is the openness and uh, and that everything is based on open source frameworks as opposed to platforms that we that are highly opinionated and, and I lock in. So I think that's that's a very, very fundamental difference. If you're looking at the initial kind of platform as a service approaches, there were there were extremely opinionated and very rigid and not always open source or just a combination between open source and proprietary. So that's one very big difference. The second very big difference is the emphasis on, and it goes along with the first one, the emphasis on um, multi cloud and infrastructure independence, where a platform is not wedded to a particular stack, where it's a AWS stack or a uh, an Azure stack or the EMR stack. And, and but it's truly a layer above. That's completely open source center. >>Yeah. >>And the third thing that is different is the idea that it's not just the software, the software alone will not do the job, you need the software and the content and the support and the expertise. If you're looking at how platform engineering is done at the large company like Apple, for example, facebook, it's really always the combination of those three things. It's the automation framework, the software, It's the content, the open source libraries or any other libraries that you create. And then it's the expertise that goes all this together and it's being offered to developers to be able to take advantage of this like soft factory. So I think these are the major differences in terms of where we are today was five years ago, 10 years ago. >>Thank you for unpacking that for I think that's a great uh great captures the shift and value. This brings up my next uh question for you because you know, you take that to the next level. DeVOps is now also graduating to a whole another level. The future of devops uh and software engineering more and more around kubernetes and your tools like lens and others managing the point. What is the new role of devops? Obviously Deb see cops but devops is now changing to What's the future of devops in your opinion? >>Well, I believe that there is going to become more and more integrated where our option is going to become uh something like Zero Arts, where are you going to be fully automated And something that's being delivered entirely through software and developers will be able to focus entirely, on, on creating and shipping code. I think that's the major, that's a major change that's happening. The problem is still yet I think to be solved like 100% correctly is the challenge of the last mile. like deploying that code on on on the infrastructure and making sure that he's performing correctly to the sls and optimizing everything. I also believe that the complexity veneta is very powerful by the same time offers a lot of room for complexity. There are many knobs and dials that you can turn in these microservices based architecture. And what we're discovering now is that this complexity kind of exceeds the ability of the individual developer or even a group of developers who constantly optimize things. So I believe what we will see is a I machine learning, taking charge of optimizing a lot of parameters, operating parameters around the applications and that unemployment benefits to ensure those applications perform to the expectations of the illness. And that might mean performing to a very high standard security. Or it might mean performing to a very a low latency in certain geography. Might mean performing too a very low cost structure that you can expect and those things can change over time. Right? So this challenge of operating an application introduction Burnett is substrate is I think dramatically higher than on just additional cloud infrastructure or virtualization. Because you have so many services inter operating with each other and so many different parameters you can set for machine learning and Ai >>I love the machine learning. Ai and I'd love to just get your thoughts on because I love the Zero ops narrative Because that's day one zero ops now that you're here day to being discussed and people are also hyping up, you know, ai Ops and other things. But you know this notion of day to, okay, I'm shipping stuff in the cloud and I have to have zero ops on day 234 et cetera. Uh, what's your take on that? Because that seems to be a hot air that customers and enterprises are getting in and understanding the new wave, writing it and then going, wait a minute pushing new code that's breaking something over there I built months ago. So this is just notion of day to obstacle. But again, if you want to be zero ops, it's gonna be every day. >>Oh, I think you hit the nail on the head. I don't think there's going to be a difference between they want the zero they want and today chair, I think every day is going to be the zero. And the reason for that is because people will be shipping all the time. So your application will change all the time. So the application will always be fresh, so it will always be there zero. So zero ops has to be there all the time. Not just in the birthday. >>Great slogan! Every day is day zero, which means it's going well. I mean there's no no problems. So I gotta ask you the question was one of the big things that's coming up as well as this idea of an SRE not new to devops world, but as enterprises start to get into an SRE role where with hybrid and now edge becoming people not just industrial, um there's been a lot of activity going on a distributed basis. So you're gonna need to have this kind of notion of large scale and 00 ops, which essentially means automation, all those things you mentioned, >>not everyone can >>afford that. Um Not every company can afford to have you know hardcore devops groups to manage and their release process, all that stuff. So how are you helping customers and how do you see this problem being solved? Because this is the accelerant people want, they want the the easy button, they want the zero ops but they just they don't they can't pipeline people fast enough to do this role. >>Yeah. What you're describing is the central differentiator we bring to customers is this idea of as a service experience with guaranteed outcomes. So that's what makes us different versus the traditional enterprise infrastructure software model where people just consume software vendors and system integrate themselves and then are in charge of operations themselves and carrying the technical risks themselves. We deliver everything as a service with guaranteed outcomes through the through cloud native experience. That means guaranteed as L. A. Is predictable outcomes, continuous updates, continuous upgrades. Your on prem infrastructure or your edge infrastructure is going to look and feel and behave exactly like a public cloud experience where you're not going to have to worry about sRS or maintaining the underlying being delivered to you as a service. That's a big part, that's a central part of what makes us different in this space. >>That's great value proposition. Can you just expand give an example of a use case where you guys are doing that? Because this is something that I'm seeing a lot of people looking to go faster. You know speed is good but also it could kill right? So you can break things if you go to a. >>Yeah absolutely. I can give you several examples where we're doing this um very exciting company. So one companies booking dot com booking dot com as a massive on from infrastructure but they also massive public cloud consumer. And they decided they want to bring their own infrastructure to the cloud level of automation, cloud level Sophistication, in other words, they want to have their Aws on brand, they wanted to the old, so eccentric and we're delivering this to them with very high in the cell is exactly as a service turnkey Where there is nothing for them to system in grade or to tune and optimize and operate is being really operating 24/7 guaranteed sls and outcomes by us. Well, combination of soft film expertise that we have at massive scale and to the standards of booking dot com. This is one example, another example and this is a very large company um is the opposite side of the spectrum. You know, because they're not called Mexico super successful. Soft as a service company in the security space, growing in leaps and bounds in very high technical demands and security demands. And they want to have an on prem and cloud infrastructure to complement public clouds. Why? Because security is very important to them. Latency is very important to them. Control the customer experience is very important to them. Cost is very important to them. So for that reason they want that in a network of data centers around the globe And we provide that for them. Turnkey as a service than before seven, which enables them to focus 100% on building their own sense on their the functionality which matters to their customers and not have to worry about the underlying cloud infrastructure in their data centers. All of that gets provided to them has guaranteed about experience to their end users. So this would be the examples where we're doing a >>great service. People are looking for a great job. Adrian, Great to see you. Thank you for coming on the cube here, doc are gone 2021. Um, take a minute to put a plug in for the company. What are you guys up to? What you're looking for hiring? I'll see. You got great tracks with customers, congratulates on lens. Um give a quick update on what's going >>on. Happy happy to give it up in the company. So he, here are the highlights. It was super excited about about what we achieved last year and then what we're up to this year. So last year, what we're proud of is despite Covid, we haven't laid off a single person. We kept all the staff and we hired staff. We have gained 160 new customers, many of them, some of the world's largest and best companies and 300 of all existing customers have expanded their business with us last year, which is fantastic. We also had a very strong financial physical cash flow positive. It was a tremendous, tremendous here for us. Uh, this year is very much growth here for us and we would incredible focus on customer outcomes and customer experience. So what we are really, really digging in super hard on is to give the customers the technology and the services that enable them to get to ship software faster and easier to dramatically increase the productivity of dissolved the development efforts on any cloud infrastructure on crime and public clouds using containers and is and to do that as scale. So we're extremely focused on customer outcomes, custom experience and then the innovation is required to make that happen. So you will continue to see a lot of innovation around lens. So the last better release of lens that we brought about has now a cloud service and have a lot of feature where you can share all your cloud automation with your bodies, in, in uh, in uh, in your development team. So the lens used to be a single user product. Now it's a multi user and team based product, which is fantastic, continues to grow very quickly. And then container cloud as a service. Uh, it's a very big part that we're meeting on the infrastructure side. Are you get quite >>the open source cloud company. Adrian. Congratulations. We've been again following even on the many waves of innovation. Open stack, large scale open source software. Congratulations. >>Uh chris >>Thank you very much for coming on the cube. >>Yeah. >>Okay. Dr khan 2021 cube coverage. I'm john furrier here where the Gi Enel Ceo, co founder and chairman of Miranda's sharing his perspective on the open source innovation with their process and also key trends in the industry that is changing the game in accelerating cloud value cloud scales. Cloud native applications. Thanks for watching. Mhm.

>> Presenter: From around the globe. It's theCUBE present a future cloud one event a world of opportunities brought to you by Cisco. >> We're here with Vikas Ratina, who's the director of product management for ECS at Cisco and James Leach is the director of business development for UCS at Cisco as well. We're going to talk about computing in the age of hybrid cloud. Welcome gentlemen. Great to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Vikas let's start with you and talk about a little bit about computing architectures. We know that they're evolving they're supporting new data intensive and other workloads especially as high-performance workload requirements. What's Cisco's point of view on all this and we're specifically interested in your thoughts on fabrics. I mean, it's kind of your wheelhouse, you've got accelerators. What are the workloads that are driving these evolving technologies and how is it impacting customers? What are you seeing? >> Sure, Deb, first of all, very excited to be here today. You're absolutely right. The pace of innovation and foundational platform ingredients have just been phenomenal in recent years. The fabric, the accelerators, the drives, the processing power, the core density, all have been evolving at just an amazing pace and the pace will only pick up further. But ultimately it is all about applications and the way applications levels those innovations. And we do see applications evolving quite rapidly. The new classes of applications are evolving to absorb those innovations and deliver much better business values, very very exciting timestamp, but talking about the impact on the customers. Well these innovations have helped them pretty positively. We do see significant challenges in the data center with a point product based approach of delivering these platform innovations to the applications. What has happened is, these innovations today are being packaged as one point products, to meet the needs of a specific application. And as you know the different applications have different needs. Some applications need more tributes, others need more memory, yet others need, you know more course, some need different kinds of fabrics. As a result, if you walk into a data center today, it is pretty common to see many different point products in the data center. This creates a manageability challenge. Imagine the aspect of managing, you know several different form factors one you to you, a purpose-built servers the variety of, you know, ablate form factor. You know, this reminds me of the situation we had before smartphones arrived. You remember the days when you when we used to have a GPS device for navigation system. A cool music device for listening to the music. A phone device for making a call, camera for taking the photos that we were all excited about it. It's when smartphones arrived, that we realized all those cool innovations could be delivered in a much simpler, much convenient and easy to consume way through one device. And you know that could completely transform our experience. So we see the customers who are benefiting from these innovations, to have a way to consume those things in a much more simplistic way than they are able to do today. >> And I liked I mean it's always been about the applications but to your point, the applications are not moving at a much faster pace. The customer experience is his expectation is way escalated and when you combine all these, I love your analogy there Vikas because when you combine all these capabilities it allows us to develop new applications, new capabilities, new customer experiences. So that's, I always say that the next 10 years they ain't going to be like the last. And James' public cloud obviously is heavily influencing compute design and customer operating models. You know, it's funny when the public cloud first hit the market, everyone was swooning about oh low cost, standard off the shelf servers you know, and storage devices but it quickly became obvious that that customers needed more. So I wonder if you could comment on this. How are the trends that we've seen from the hyper scalers? How are they filtering into on-prem infrastructure and maybe, you know maybe there's some differences there as well that you could address. >> Absolutely. So, you know I'd say first of all, quite frankly, you know public cloud has completely changed the expectations of how our customers want to consume compute, right? So customers, especially in a public cloud environment they've gotten used to or you know, come to accept that they should consume from the application out, right? They want a very application focused view a services focused view of the world. They don't want to think about infrastructure, right? They want to think about their application. They want to move outward, right? So the, this means that the infrastructure basically has to meet the application where it lives. So what that means for us is that, you know we're taking a different approach. We've decided that, you know we're not going to chase this, you know, single pane of glass view of the world, which, you know, frankly our customers don't want. They don't want a single pane of glass. What they want is a single operating model. They want an operating model that's similar to what they can get with the public cloud, but they want it across all of their cloud options. They want it across private cloud, across hybrid cloud options as well. So what that means is they don't want to just consume infrastructure services, they want all of their cloud services from this operating model. So that means that they may want to consume infrastructure services for automation orchestration but they also need Kubernetes services. They also need virtualization services. They may need Terraform, workload optimization. All of these services have to be available from within the operating model, a consistent operating model, right? So it doesn't matter whether you're talking about private cloud, hybrid cloud, anywhere, where the application lives doesn't matter. What matters is that we have a consistent model that as we think about it from the application out and frankly I'd say, you know, this has been the stumbling block for private cloud. Private cloud is hard, right? This is why it hasn't been really solved yet. This is why we had to take a brand new approach. And frankly, it's why we're super excited about X series. and intersite as that you know operating model that fits the hybrid cloud better than anything else we've seen. >> There's theCUBE's first times a technology vendor has ever said, that it's not about a single pane of glass cause I've been hearing for decades we're going to deliver a single pane of glass. It's going to be seamless and it never happens. It's like a single version of the truth. It's aspirational and it's just not reality. So can we stay on the X series for a minute, James. >> Sure. >> And maybe in this context but in the launch that we saw today it was like a fire hose of announcement. So how does the X series fit into the strategy with intersite, in hybrid cloud and this operating model that you're talking about? >> Right, so I think it goes hand in hand, right? The two pieces go together very well. So we have, you know, this idea of a single operating model that is definitely, you know, something that our customers demand, right? It's what we have to have, but at the same time we need to solve the problems Vikas was talking about before. We need a single infrastructure to go along with that single operating model. So no longer do we need to have silos within the infrastructure that give us different operating models or different sets of benefits, we need one infrastructure that can kind of do all of those configurations, all those applications and then, you know, the operating model was very important because that's where we abstract the complexity that could come with just throwing all that technology at the infrastructure. So that, you know, this is, you know, the way that we think about it as the data center is not centered, right? It's no longer centered. Applications live everywhere, infrastructure lives everywhere. And, you know we need to have that consistent operating model but we need to do things within the infrastructure as well to take full advantage, right? So we want all the SaaS benefits of a CICD model of you know, the intersite can bring we want all of that, you know, proactive recommendation engine with the power of AI behind it. We want the connected support experience. We want all of that but we want to do it across a single infrastructure. And we think that that's how they tie together. That's why one or the other doesn't really solve the problem, but both together, that's why we're here that's why we're super excited. >> So Vikas I, I make you laugh a little bit. When I was an analyst at IDC, I was a bit deep in infrastructure and then when I left, I was doing, I was working with application development heads and like you said, a infrastructure it was just a roadblock. But with, so the target cheek is when Cisco announced UCS a decade ago, I totally missed it. I didn't understand it. I thought it was Cisco getting into the traditional server business and it wasn't until I dug in then I realized that your vision was really to transform infrastructure deployment and management and it changed the model. I was like, okay, I got that wrong. But so let's talk about the ecosystem and the joint development efforts that are going on there. X series, how does it fit into this converged infrastructure business that you've built and grown with partners. You've got storage partners like NetApp and pure. You got ISV partners in the ecosystem. We see Cohesity has been a while since we hung out with all these companies at the Cisco live hopefully next year but tell us what's happening in that regard. >> Now, absolutely. I'm looking forward to seeing you in the Cisco live next year. Absolutely. You brought up a very good point. UCS is about the ecosystem that it brings together. It's about making our customers bring up the entire infrastructure from the core foundational hardware all the way to the application level so that they can all go off and running pretty quick. The converged infrastructure has been one of the cornerstones of our strategy as you pointed out in the last decade. And I'm very glad to share that converged infrastructure continues to be very popular architecture for several enterprise applications even today. In fact, it is the preferred architecture for mission critical applications, where performance, resiliency, latency are the critical you know requirements. They are almost a de facto standards for large scale deployments of virtualize and business critical databases and so forth. With x-series, with our partnerships, with our storage partners, those architectures will absolutely continue and will get better. But in addition, it's a hybrid cloud world. So we are now bringing in the benefits of converged infrastructure to the world of hybrid cloud. We'll be supporting the hybrid cloud applications now with the CI infrastructure that we have built together with our strong partnership with our storage partners to deliver the same benefits to the new AEs applications as well. >> Yeah and that's customers want, they want that cloud operating model, right? Go ahead, please. >> I was just going to say the x series model will continue to thrive. It will transition our, it will expand the use cases now for the newer use cases that we were beginning to, you know say to if it absolutely right. >> Great. Thank you for that. And James, I said earlier today, we heard this this huge announcement, a lot of parts to it. And we heard, you know, KD talk about this initiative is it's really computing built for the next decade. I mean, I like that because it shows some vision and you've got, you know a roadmap that you've thought through the coming changes in workloads and infrastructure management and some of the technology that you can take advantage of beyond just the you know, one or two product cycles. So, but I want to understand what you've done here specifically that you feel differentiates you from other competitive architectures in the industry. >> Sure. You know, that's a great question, number one. Number two, I'm frankly a little bit concerned at times for customers in general for our customers customers in general because if you look at what's in the market, right? These rinse and repeat systems that were effectively just rehashes of the same old design, right? That we've seen since before 2009 when we brought UCS to market, these are what we're seeing over and over and over again that's not really going to work anymore, frankly. And I think that people are getting lulled into a false sense of security by seeing those things continually putting in the market. We rethought this from the ground up because frankly you know, future-proofing starts now, right? If you're not doing it right today, future-proofing isn't even on your radar because you're not even today proofed. So we've rethought the entire chassis, the entire architecture from the ground up. Okay, if you look at other vendors, if you look at other solutions in the market, what you'll see is things like, you know management inside the chassis. That's a great example. Daisy chaining them together, like who needs that? Who wants that? Like that kind of complexity is first of all, it's ridiculous. Second of all, if you want to manage across clouds you have to do it from the cloud, right? It's just common sense. You have to move management where it can have the scale and the scope that it needs to impact, you know your entire domain, your world which is much larger now than it was before. We're talking about true hybrid cloud here, right? So we had to solve certain problems that existed in the traditional architecture. You know, I can't tell you how many times I heard you know, talk about, you know, the mid-plane is a great example. We, you know, the mid and a chassis is a limiting factor. It limits us on how much we can connect or how much bandwidth we have available to the chassis. It limits us on air flow and other things. So how do you solve that problem? Simple, just get rid of it. Like we just, we took it out, right? It's no longer a problem. We designed an architecture that doesn't need it. It doesn't rely on it. No forklift upgrades. So as we start moving down the path of needing liquid cooling or maybe we need to take advantage of some new high-performance low-latency fabrics, we can do that with almost no problem at all, right? So we don't have any forklift upgrades, parker forklift on the side. You won't need it anymore because you can upgrade gradually. You can move along as technologies come in to existence that maybe don't even exist today. They may not even be on our radar today to take advantage of but I like to think of these technologies they're really important to our customers. These are, you know we can call them disruptive technologies. The reality is that we don't want to disrupt our customers with these technologies. We don't want to give them these technologies so they can go out and be disruptive themselves, right? And this is the way that we've designed this from the ground up to be easy consume and to take advantage of what we know about today and what's coming in the future that we may not even know about. So do we think this is a way to give our customers that ultimate capability, flexibility and future-proofing. >> I like, I like that phrase true hybrid cloud. It's one that we've used for years. And but to me, this is all about that horizontal infrastructure that can support that vision of what true hybrid cloud is. You could support the mission, critical applications. You could develop on the system and you can support a variety of workloads. You're not locked into, you know, one narrow stovepipe and that does have legs. Vikas and James thanks so much for coming on the program. Great to see you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE the leader in digital event coverage. (upbeat music)

>>mhm >>Yes, >>everyone welcome back to the cubes coverage of Red Hat summit 2021. I'm john for your host of the cube, we've got a great segment here on how Red Hat is working with telcos and the disruption in the telco cloud. We've got a great guest cube alumni Darrell Jordan smith, senior vice president of industries and global accounts at Red Hat, uh Darryl, great to see you. Thanks for coming back on the cube. >>It's great to be here and I'm really excited about having the opportunity to talk to you >>today. Yeah, we're not in person in real life is coming back soon, although I hear mobile world congress might be in person this year looking like it's good a lot of people gonna be virtual activating. I know a lot to talk about this is probably one of the most important topics in the industry because when you talk about telco industry, you're really talking about um the edge, talking about five G talking about industrial benefits for business because it's not just Edge for connectivity access. We're talking about internet of things from self driving cars to business benefits. It's not just consumer, it's really bringing that together, you guys are really leading with the cloud native platform from rail, open shift men and services. Everything about the cloud native underpinnings you guys have been successful as a company but now in your area, telco is being disrupted. Absolutely. Give us your take on this is super exciting. >>Well, it's actually one of the most exciting times I've been in the industry for 30 years are probably aging myself now. But in the telecommunications industry, this, for me is the most exciting. It's where technology is actually going to visibly change the way that everyone interacts with the network and with the applications that are being developed out there on our platform and as you mentioned IOT and a number of the other ai and Ml innovations that are occurring in the market place. We're going to see a new wave of applications and innovation. >>What's the key delivery workloads you're seeing with Five G environment? Um, obviously it's not just, you know, five G in the sense of thinking about mobile phones or mobile computers as they are now. Um, it's not just that consumer, hey, surf the web and check your email and get an app and download and communicate. It's bigger than that. Now, can you tell us Where you see the workloads coming in on the 5G environment? >>You hit the nail on the head, The the the, the killer application isn't the user or the consumer and the way that we traditionally have known it, because you might be able to download a video in that take 20 seconds less, but you're not going to pay an awful lot more money for that. The real opportunity around five years, the industrial applications, things that I connected car, automotive, driving, um factory floor automation, how you actually interface digitally with your bank, how we're doing all sorts of things more intelligently at the edge of the network using artificial intelligence and machine learning. So all of those things are going to deliver a new experience for everyone that interacts with the network and the telcos are at the heart of it. >>You know, I want to get into the real kind of underpinnings of what's going on with the innovations happening. You just kind of laid out kind of the implications of the use cases and the target application workloads. But there's kind of two big things going on with the edge in five G one is under the hood, networking, you know, what's going on with the moving the packets around the workload, throughput, bandwidth etcetera, and all that goes on under the hood. And then there's the domain expertise in the data where AI and machine learning have to kind of weaving. So let's take the first part first. Um open shift is out there. Red hat's got a lot of products, but you have to nail the networking requirements and cloud Native with container ization because at large scales, not just packaged, it's all kinds of things going on security, managing a compute at the edge. There's a lot of things under the hood, if you will from a networking perspective, could you share what red hats doing in that area? >>So when we last spoke with the cube, we talked a lot about GMOs and actually people living Darryl, >>can I Cause you really quickly? I'm really sorry. Keep your answer in mind. We're gonna >>go right from that question. >>We're just kidding. Um, are you, is anything that you're >>using or touching running into the desk? We're just getting >>a little bit of shakiness on your camera >>and I don't want to. >>So anyway, >>that is my, my elbows. No worries. So no >>worries. Okay, so take your answer. I'll give you like a little >>321 from behind the scenes >>and and we'll go right as if >>john just ask >>the questions, we're gonna stay running. >>So I think, uh, >>can you ask the question just to get out of my mind? Perfect. Well let's, let's do >>from that. So we'll stay on your shot. So you'll hear john, but it'll be as if >>he just asked the question. So jOHn >>team up. Here we go. I'm just gonna just jimmy and just keep my other question on the okay, here we go. So Darryl, open shift is optimized for networking requirements for cloud native. It's complex into the hood. What is red hat doing under the hood to help in the edge in large complex networks for large scale. >>Yeah. So, so that's a very good question in that we've been building on our experience with open stack and the last time I was on the cube, I talked about, you know, people virtualizing network applications and network services. We're taking a lot of that knowledge that we've learned from open stack and we're bringing that into the container based world. So we're looking at how we accelerate packets. We're looking at how we build cloud native applications on bare metal in order to drive that level of performance. We're looking at actually how we do the certification around these applications and services because they may be sitting in different app lets across the cloud, but in some instances running on multiple clouds at the same time. So we're building on our experience from open stack, we're bringing all of that into open shipping, container based environment with all of the tallinn necessary to make that effective. >>It's interesting with all the automation going on. Certainly with the edge developing nicely the way you're describing it, certainly disrupting the Telco cloud, you have an operator mindset of cloud Native operator thinking, kind of, it's distributed computing, we know that, but it's hybrid. So it's essentially cloud operations. So there's an operator mindset here that's just different. Could you just share quickly before we move on to the next segment? What's different about this operating model for the, these new kinds of operators? As you guys been saying, the C I O is the new cloud operator, That's the skill set they have to be thinking and certainly to anyone else provisioning and managing infrastructure has to think like an operator, what's your >>view? They certainly do need anything like an operator. They need to look at how they automate a lot of these functions because they're actually deployed in many different places will at the same time they have to live independently of each other. That's what cloud native actually really is. So the whole, the whole notion of five nines and vertically orientated stacks of five nines availability that's kind of going out the window. We're looking at application availability across a hybrid cloud environment and making sure the application can live and sustain itself. So operators as part of open shift is one element of that operations in terms of management and orchestration and all the tooling that we actually also providers red hat but also in conjunction with a big partner ecosystem, such as companies like net cracker, for example, or IBM as another example or Erickson bringing their automation tool sets and their orchestration tool sets of that whole equation to address exactly that problem >>you bring up the ecosystem. And this is really an interesting point. I want to just hit on that real quick because reminds me of the days when we had this massive innovation wave in the nineties during that era. The client server movement really was about multi vendor, right. And that you're starting to see that now and where this ties into here I think is when we get your reaction to this is that, you know, moving to the cloud was all about 2 2015. Move to the cloud moved to the cloud cloud native. Now it's all about not only being agile and better performance, but you're gonna have smaller footprints with more security requires more enterprise requirements. This is now it's more complicated. So you have to kind of make the complications go away and now you have more people in the ecosystem filling in these white spaces. So you have to be performance and purpose built if you will. I hate to use that word, but or or at least performing an agile, smaller footprint grade security enabling other people to participate. That's a requirement. Can you share your reaction to that? >>Well, that's the core of what we do. A red hat. I mean we take open source community software into a hardened distribution fit for the telecommunications marketplace. So we're very adapt to working with communities and third parties. That ecosystem is really important to us. We're investing hundreds of engineers, literally hundreds of engineers working with our ecosystem partners to make sure that their applications services certified, running on our platform, but but also importantly is certified to be running in conjunction with other cloud native applications that sit over the same cloud. So that that is not trivial to achieve in any stretch of the imagination. And a lot of 80 technology skills come to bear. And as you mentioned earlier, a lot of networking skills, things that we've learned and we've built with a lot of these traditional vendors, we bring that to the marketplace. >>You know, I've been saying on the cube, I think five years ago I started talking about this, it was kind of a loose formulation, I want to get your reaction because you brought up ecosystem, you know, saying, you know, you're gonna see the big clouds develop out. The amazon Microsoft came in after and now google and others and I said there's gonna be a huge wave of of what I call secondary clouds and you see companies like snowflake building on on top of amazon and so you start to see the power law of new cloud service providers emerging that can either sit and work with across multiple clouds. Either one cloud or others that's now multi cloud and hybrid. But this rise of the new more C. S. P. S, more cloud service providers, this is a huge part of your area right now because some call that telco telco cloud edge hits that. What is red hat doing in this cloud service provider market specifically? How do you help them if I'm a cloud service provider, what do I get in working with Red Hat? How do I be successful because it's very easy to be a cloud service provider now more than ever. What do I do? How do you help? How do you help me? >>Well, we we we offer a platform called open shift which is a containerized based platform, but it's not just a container. It involves huge amounts of tooling associated with operating it, developing and around it. So the concept that we have is that you can bring those applications, developed them once on 11 single platform and run it on premise. You can run it natively as a service in Microsoft environment. You can actually run it natively as a service in amazon's environment. You can running natively on IBM's Environment. You can build an application once and run it in all of them depending on what you want to achieve, who actually provide you the best, owning the best terms and conditions the best, the best tooling in terms of other services such as Ai associated with that. So it's all about developing it once, certifying it once but deploying it in many, many different locations, leveraging the largest possible developing ecosystem to drive innovation through applications on that common platform. >>So assumption there is that's going to drive down costs. Can you why that benefits the economics are there? We talk about the economics. >>Yeah. So it does drive down costs a massive important aspect but more importantly it drives up agility. So time to market advantages actually attainable for you so many of the tell coast but they deploy a network service traditionally would take them literally maybe a year to roll it all out. They have to do it in days, they have to do updates in real time in data operations in literally minutes. So we were building the fabric necessary in order to enable those applications and services to occur. And as you move into the edge of the network and you look at things like private five G networks, service providers or telcos in this instance will be able to deliver services all the way out to the edge into that private five G environment and operate that in conjunction with those enterprise clients. >>So open shit allows me if I get this right on the CSP to run, have a horizontally scalable organization. Okay. From a unification platform standpoint. Okay, well it's 5G and other functions, is that correct? That's correct. Ok. So you've got that now, now I want to come in and bring in the top of the stack or the other element. That's been a big conversation here at Redhead Summit and in the industry that is A I and the use of data. One of the things that's emerging is the ability to have both the horizontal scale as well as the special is um of the data and have that domain expertise. Uh you're in the industries for red hat. This is important because you're gonna have one industry is going to have different jargon, different language, different data, different KPI S. So you've got to have that domain expertise to enable the ability to write the apps and also enable a I can, you know how that works and what were you doing there? >>So we're developing open shift and a number of other of our technologies to be fit for the edge of the network where a lot of these Ai applications will reside because you want them closer to the client or the the application itself where it needs to reside. We're creating that edge fabric, if you like. The next generation of hybrid cloud is really going to be, in my view at the edge we're enabling a lot of the service providers to go after that but we're also igniting by industry, You mentioned different industries. So if I look at, for example, manufacturing with mind sphere, we recently announced with Seaman's how they do at the edge of the network factory automation, collecting telemetry, doing real time data and analytics, looking at materials going through the factory floor in order to get a better quality results with lower, lower levels of imperfections as they run through that system and just one industry and they have their own private and favorite Ai platforms and data sets. They want to work with with their own data. Scientists who understand that that that ecosystem inherently you can move that to health care and you can imagine how you actually interface with your health care professionals here in north America, but also around the world, How those applications and services and what the Ai needs to do in terms of understanding x rays and looking at common errors associated with different x rays to. A practitioner can make a more specific diagnosis faster saving money and potentially lives as well. So different different vertical markets in this space have different AI and Ml requirements and needs different data science is different data models. And what we're seeing is an ecosystem of companies that are starting up there in that space that we have, what service part of IBM. But you have processed the labs of H T H 20 and a number of other very, very important AI based companies in that ecosystem. >>Yeah. And you get the horizontal scalability of the control plane and in the platform if you will, that gives you cross organizational leverage uh and enable that than vertical expertise. >>Exactly. And you want to build an Ai application that might run on a factory floor for for certain reasons to its location and what they're actually physically building. You might want to run their on premise, you might actually want to put it into IBM cloud or in Zur or into AWS, You develop, it wants to open shift, you can deploy it in all of those as a service sitting natively in those environments. >>Darrell, great chat. I got a lot going on telco cloud, There's a lot of cloud, native disruption going on. It's a challenge and an opportunity and some people have to be on the right side of history on this one if they're going to get it right. Well, no, and the scoreboard will be very clear because this is a shift, it's a shift. So again, you hit all the key points that I wanted to get out. But I want to ask you to more areas that are hot here at red hat summit 21 as well again and as well in the industry and get your reaction and thoughts on uh, and they are def sec ops and automation. Okay. Two areas. Everyone's talking about DEV ops which we know is infrastructure as code programming ability under the hood. Modern application development. All good. Yeah, the second their security to have sex shops. That's critical automation is continuing to be the benefits of cloud native. So Deb see cops and automation. What you're taking has that impact the telco world in your world. >>You can't you can't operate a network without having security in place. You're talking about very sensitive data. You're talking about applications that could be real time chris pickling mrs actually even life saving or life threatening if you don't get them right. So the acquisition that red hat recently made around stack rocks, really helps us make that next level of transition into that space. And we're looking about how we go about securing containers in a cloud native environment. As you can imagine, there will be many, many thousands tens of thousands of containers running if one is actually misbehaving for what one of a better term that creates a security risk in a security loophole. Were assuring that up that's important for the deployment, open shift in the Tokyo domain and other domains in terms of automation. If you can't do it at scale and if you look at five G and you look at the radios at the edge of the network and how you're gonna provision of those services. You're talking about hundreds of thousands of nodes, hundreds of thousands. You have to automate a lot of those processes, otherwise you can't scale to meet the opportunity, you can't physically deploy, >>you know, Darryl, this is a great conversation, you know, as a student of history and um development and I always kind of joke about that and you you've been around the industry for a long time. Telcos have been balancing this um evolution of digital business for many, many decades. Um and now with Cloud Native, it's finally a time where you're starting to see that it's just the same game now, new infrastructure, you know, video, voice, text data all now happening all transformed and going digital all the way, all aspects of it in your opinion. How should telcos be thinking about as they put their plans in place for next generation because you know, the world is now cloud Native. There's a huge surface here of opportunities, different ecosystem relationships, the power dynamics are shifting. It's it's really a time where there will be winners and there will be losers. What's your, what's your view on on how the telco industry needs to clarify and how they be positioned for success. >>So, so one of the things I truly believe very deeply that the telcos need to create a platform, horizontal platform that attracts developer and ecosystems to their platform because innovation is gonna sit elsewhere, then there might be a killer application that one telco might create. But in reality most of those innovations that most of those disruptors are going to occur from outside of that telco company. So you want to create an environment where you're easy to engage and you've got maximum sets of tools and versatility and agility in order to attract that innovation. If you attract the innovation, you're going to ignite the business opportunity that 5G and 60 and beyond is going to actually provide you or enable your business to drive. And you've really got to unlock that innovation and you can only unlock in our view, red hat innovation. If you're open, you follow open standards, you're using open systems and open source is a method or a tool that you guys, if you're a telco, I would ask you guys need to leverage and harness >>and there's a lot, there's a lot of upside there if you get that right, there's plenty of upside, a lot of leverage, a lot of assets to advantage the whole offline online. Coming back together, we are living in a hybrid world, certainly with the pandemic, we've seen what that means. It's put a spotlight on critical infrastructure and the critical shifts. If you had to kind of get pinned down Darryl, how would you describe that learnings from the pandemic as folks start to come out of the pandemic? There's a light at the end of the tunnel as we come out of this pandemic, companies want a growth strategy, wanna be positioned for success what you're learning coming out of the pandemic. >>So from my perspective, which really kind of 11 respect was was very admirable. But another respect is actually deeply uh a lot of gratitude is the fact that the telecommunications companies because of their carrier, great capabilities and their operational prowess were able to keep their networks up and running and they had to move significant capacity from major cities to rural areas because everyone was working from home and in many different countries around the world, they did that extremely and with extremely well. Um and their networks held up I don't know and maybe someone will correct me and email me but I don't know one telco had a huge network outage through this pandemic and that kept us connected. It kept us working. And it also what I also learned is that in certain countries, particularly at a time where they have a very large prepaid market, they were worried that the prepaid market in the pandemic would go down because they felt that people would have enough money to spend and therefore they wouldn't top up their phones as much. The opposite effect occurred. They saw prepaid grow and that really taught me that that connectivity is critical in times of stress that we're also everyone's going through. So I think there are some key learnings that >>yeah, I think you're right on the money there. It's like they pulled the curtain back of all the fun and said necessity is the mother of invention and when you look at what happened and what had to happen to survive in the pandemic and be functional. Your, you nailed it, the network stability, the resilience, but also the new capabilities that were needed had to be delivered in an agile way. And I think, you know, it's pretty much the forcing function for all the projects that are on the table to know which ones to double down on. So I think you pretty much nailed it. Darrell Jordan smith, senior vice president of industries and global accounts for red hat kibble, unnatural. Thanks for that insight. Thanks for sharing great conversation around telcos and telco clouds and all the edge opportunities. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you john >>Okay. It's the cubes coverage of Red Hat summit 21. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. Mhm mhm

>>from >>around the globe. It's the cube with >>Digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Hello and welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM think 2021 virtual. I'm john for your host of the cube. We're here with two great guests. Andrew cowards. GM Software defined networking at IBM and Caroline chappelle Research director, cloud and platform services at analysis mason folks. Thanks for coming on Caroline. Good to see you Andrew. Thanks for coming on. Uh, thank you. >>Welcome. Nice to >>begin. So >>software defined networking love it suffered to find data center suffered to find cloud. All that has been pointing to what is now a reality which is hybrid cloud and the edge and soon to be multi cloud. This kind of makes networking again at the center pieces has been this way for now at least for five hardcore years at the center of the value proposition and discussion and certainly networking is super relevant. Why is networking now more important than ever for IBM? >>Well, to your point, I think networking is weaved into pretty much everything we touch from red hot limits to analytics, machine learning tools, security card services and so on. And the networking business is changing very radically. At the moment we're going through a massive shit um, not just the cloud, but the desegregation of networking products that you know, you think of being very tight and integrated are actually being separated into their constituent parts, distribution of applications and data across multiple clouds, ensuring that the products really have industry leading capabilities so that networking is weaved into into what they do. Um, the other thing is, you know, this is kind of scary numbers, right? But there's now over 15 billion um, network capable devices out there with general compute capabilities. So I don't mean like really dumb things but things that are now we call smart, like a smart car, a medical center that's that's got application, even your fridge now has general compute capabilities and all of those are expected to connect into public or private cloud and so how they connect where data moves across that really on critical concern to to everything that we had IBM do. >>So I have to ask you love the word radical change, gets my attention for certain for certain um what specifically are you referring to in radical change? Because I mean I would mean I've pretty radical. The COVID has hit everybody and I think everyone woke up and never thought 100 of the workforce would be working remotely. So you know, there is radical kind of macro conditions. What specifically though about networking, would you say is radical? How is that impact enterprise >>Well, right. I think it's about how computers is shifting and how network has to follow. Um We've been speaking with lots of enterprise accounts customers and um you know, through covid and over the last year we've seen that the ongoing migration into not just one cloud, but many clouds. Um and you think that enterprises can stop saying to clouds is enough going to be here on the other there, That's not happening. There is no limit to the number of clouds that um each enterprises going into and it's not a coordinated decisions. So the radical list of this is that the network guys, the cloud architects are being left to pick up the pieces um and their job now is to kind of join together applications and data that might be spread in three or four different locations. Um and and that's really, really challenging and nobody's thinking about things like latency connectivity, um data portability when when these decisions are made. Um It's kind of like the business units are allowed to make their own decisions here. But the corporate itself then has to figure out how all this stuff works and that's creating a lot of headaches >>Carolina. If you can chime in on this because this is kind of like what we're hearing, what's your thoughts? Because I mean the platform shifting five years ago, so go move to the cloud lift and shift now. The conversation is hyper focused on cloud integration at scale with kind of the features that enterprise really need. That's that's the confusion. What's your take on all this radical change? >>Well, I'd like to talk about another aspect of the sort of radical change here, which I think is part of the story, which is the radical change for the network itself. So the network itself is, as Andrew said, becoming desegregated into hardware and software and really becoming a software application, if you think about it that runs on the cloud itself, and that means you can distribute the network in a very different way than you could in the past. And what that's really affecting is who can provide a network, how they can provide it and what services, what network services they can provide. And I think that is changing the decision points for operate for enterprises. They're being, they're being faced with a very big choice about who do they, who do they, who will provide their connectivity services, will it be an SD one and then who's not necessarily a traditional operator? Will it be a will it be a sassy player that's basically just operating out of the cloud? And if you look at the services themselves, I mean there's there's the opportunity for enterprises to build really kind of rich bespoke connectivity on demand and in in a in a way that they've never had before. Uh and I think that choice is obviously wonderful in one sense, but in another sense it's pretty scary and as and you said it's not these decisions are not being taken particularly in a coordinated way. You know, you'll have your traditional network guys often very embedded with the lines of business and then you'll have the I. T. Guys all going to the cloud and these two parts of an enterprise don't necessarily even talk to each other in terms of how they're procuring their network services. So a lot of choice, a lot of moving parts, a lot of change and I think that's that's contributing to the situation we're finding ourselves in. >>So you first great insight, I want to just double down on that one point around radical change because what you just laid out is kind of the institutional lock in or the way they've been operating things before, you mentioned lines of business being embedded with the network guys. So you have radical change, So that's a disruption. So what's the disruption look like from your perspective, because now you've got more choice, but this has been operationalized, one of the best practices. This is news that net new. How do I do security? This is all now new questions. So I gotta ask you what's the disruption and what's it mean for the enterprise networks over the next couple of years going forward? >>Well, I think that there are a lot of disruptions, but I think one of the uh and ones that I haven't even mentioned, so I think a lot of things are going to go, for example, I think that the idea of the network is being something fixed, persistent with fixed persistent connections um is changing. So a lot of enterprises I've talked to have said that uh corporate networks of course they will need corporate networks with fixed VPNS between locations because they've got an awful lot of legacy they've got to support, but a lot of the new stuff that's coming along, a lot of the IOT driven stuff, a lot of the changes around the edge and an operation operational process automation and that kind of thing will actually be be more on demand. We'll ask for on demand connectivity. A lot of it is uh it will the applications themselves run on the cloud and not just on one cloud, but as Andrew said on many, many distributed clouds. So you've got to think about zero trust security because you are basically spinning up these connections on demand, a lot of mobile will come in five G, we know is going to be very important to operators in in the future. So I think enterprises have got to deal with those data, that data and security and all their best practices have got to shift to a much more dynamic uh, connectivity world where they've got a playoff, what's deterministic and what's, what's a network that's just going to be on demand there when they need it and shut down when they don't. >>That's a great point. Andrew. I want you to weigh in on the IBM impact because what we just heard was application driven, that's devops, that's program ability, that's what we had hoped. Now you got Deb sec. Ops, all this is now the requirements. What's the bet on IBM side? You gotta gotta make it happen. You gotta bring the customers a solution and make it, make it scale and be responsive to those, you know, new dynamically flexible agile networks. >>Well, that's right. So, so the better is that these applications that are being split up there in containerized and they're being separated into these clouds and connecting those is what we as IBM has has to do. And so kind of an example of that kind of looking in the medical world, right? You think of an application that would today monitor a patient, uh what's going on with our patients in all of the senses and so on. Well, the way we see it, the monitor itself, uh that might be monitoring temperature and heart rate etcetera. That what actually happens on that device might change moment to moment depending on the patient's condition. That's one part of the application, another part of the application. They live in private data center, a third part of that application. They live in the cloud. And depending on what's going on with that patient and what's going on with the war and everything else, those things may shift and move around. So where does that data? Where's that data allowed to move to and from? And what are the boundary points for that? How is the the, the reliability resiliency of that system guaranteed across many disparate parts of what's going on there, All of those things end up being a very vertically integrated solution. But fundamentally, we've got a very different way. A new ways of being able to react dynamically to both the network, the application and ultimately, the unusual patient in this case is uh use case and that and that's what is the vanishing of the outcome, if you like, from moving to this new world. >>So, what are the implications, then, of the changes? These are massive changes for the better? Um We're seeing that kind of innovation come from this transformational change. Um Hybrid, Cloud and Edge is coming. You mentioned Caroline talked about that too. What do you guys think about the implications and how enterprises specifically can prepare for these changes? >>Okay, well, I I can pick that up. I think uh what enterprises uh looking for at the moment is how do they get a holistic view of everything that's underneath them? I mean, I think the cloud providers individually are abstracting away as much of the network as they possibly can. They want it to appear to developers just as some kind of plumbing. Um and it's very easy now for enterprises to through a P. I. S. You know, we've got a very api driven world so it's very easy to say okay I want this service and I'm just going to go through the A. P. I. And connect to it. And that's why you get to the situation of multiple multiple clouds. Now you've got, you've got this situation where you've got some, some companies are talking about needing 50-10,000 uh micro data centers, broom closet data centers if you like to support some of the things that they want to do, like telemetry to pick up telemetry from rental cars, for example. So what they really need is to look at all that connectivity just as plumbing, just as we don't worry about how electricity is being delivered to us, that's kind of how they want to do connectivity. So I think they want that view, they want that, okay, I want to treat my network as one virtual thing no matter how many different points of plumbing there are underneath. And it's getting to that point that I think they've really got to think about and plan for how do we get that view, what's going to provide us with that holistic way and we can put a policy into the into our plumbing and it it proliferates across all our applications and so on. I think that's a very difficult thing to achieve at the moment but it's certainly the way enterprises need to start thinking about things >>and you know when Caroline's talking I can't help but kind of throwback to my days of the telephone closet, you know back in the analog switches but we're talking about a footprint radical footprint change to you. You need plumbing. I'll see that's a network, it's distributed. We just talked about that the top of this interview now you have the plumbing, you've got the footprint of data center could be in a closet A. K. A. You know a couple devices powering an edge and the edge could be big small medium extra large. Right? I mean it's all now radically changed. This is reality now. What's your take on these implications and how do people prepare? >>Well that's right. It's really the computers generalist and it's everywhere and yes it's in the closet but it's also in your fridge is also a new medical sensor and what loads and what runs on that is it's very intertwined with the network and the lament if you like. That. The network architects the architects have today is that they feel like they've lost control um They feel like lost control of exactly what different business groups are doing. How these applications are playing out and shout out to them I guess for them is really that they need to be involved in the very early um date of how these services is supposed to look just the latest implications. The data where the data is supposed to live, where it's allowed to move to. All of those are deeply regulated and deeply control and so making sure that that's aligned with how these applications will actually live and work uh on the basis of something that has to be thought about now um and planned for so that we can we can get to the there and then not trip up along the way. And if it's bad enough now with all the different clouds it's going to be much worse when when everything can run a different workload on a minute by minute basis. Right? That's what that's that's the the world we have to find. >>Okay. Andrew Caroline. Thank you for your insight. Really appreciate it coming on the cube. Thanks for coming. I really appreciate it. >>Thanks very much. Okay. >>Okay. This is the Cube coverage of IBM think 2021 um, John for your host. Thanks for watching. >>Mm.

>>from around the globe. It's the cube with >>Digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual were not yet in real life. We're doing another remote interviews with two great guests cube alumni of course, I'm john for your host of the cube. We've got Jason McGee, IBM fellow VP and CTO of IBM cloud platform and octavian Tennessee. Senior Vice president Hybrid Cloud Engineering at Netapp. Both cube alumni. It's great to see you both. Thanks for coming on. Thank >>you. Great to be here. Thanks for having us. >>So we were just talking before we came on camera that you know what it feels like. We've had this conversation, you know, a long time ago we have Hybrid cloud has been on a trajectory for both of you guys many times on the cube. So now it's mainstream, it's here in the real world, everyone gets it. It's not, there's no real debate now. Multi cloud, that's that. People are debating that. Which means that's right around the corner. So Hybrid cloud is here and now, um, Jason this is really the focus and this is also brings together Netapp in your partnership and talk about the relationship first with hybrid cloud. >>Yeah, I mean, you know, look, we've talked to a number of times together I think in the industry, uh, maybe, maybe a few years ago people were debating whether Hybrid cloud was a real thing. We don't have that conversation anymore. I think, um, you know, enterprises today, especially maybe in the face of Covid and kind of how we work differently now realize that their cloud journey is going to be a mix of on prem and off premise systems. Probably going to be a mix of multiple public cloud providers, um, and what they're looking for now is how do I do that and how do I manage that hybrid environment? How do I have a consistent platform across the different environments I want to operate in. Um, and then how do I get more and more of my work into those environments? And it's been interesting. I think the first, the first waves of cloud, we're infrastructure centric and externally application focused, they were easier things. And now we're moving into more mission critical, more state fel more data oriented workloads. And that brings with it new challenges on where applications run and and how we leverage the club >>Octavia. You guys had a great relationship with IBM over the years, uh, data centric company that it has always been great engineering team. You're on the cloud. Hybrid cloud engineering. What's the current status of the relationship? Give us an update on how the it's vectoring into the hybrid clouds this year? Senior Vice President. Hybrid cloud engineering. >>Well, so first of all, I want to recognize 20 years of a successful partnership with IBM I think uh that happened. IBM have been companies that have embraced digital transformation and technology trends to enable that digital transformation for our customers. And we've been very successful. I think there is a very strong um joint hydrochloric value proposition for customers. Netapp storage and data services complement what IBM does in terms of products and solutions, both for on premise deployments in the cloud. I think together we can build more complete solutions solutions that span data mobility to the governance for the new workloads that Jason has talked about. >>And how are some of the customer challenges that you're seeing? Obviously software defined networking, software defined storage, uh, deVOps has now turned into Deb's sec ops. So you have now that program ability requirement with four dynamic applications, application driven infrastructure, all these buzzwords point to one thing the infrastructure has to be resilient and respond to the applications. >>Yeah, I would say uh infrastructure, you know, will continue to be uh you know, top of mind for everybody whether they're building a private uh you know, cloud or whether there um you know, trying to leverage, you know, something like IBM cloud, I think people want to consume, you know, infrastructure is an A P I I think they want simplicity, you know, security, I I think they want to manage their cost, you know very well. I think we're very proud to be partnering with IBM cloud to build such capabilities. >>Jason what's how are you guys help on some of these customers as they look at new things and sometimes retrofitting and re factoring previous stuff don't transforming but also innovating at the same time as a lot of that going on. What are you guys doing to help with the Hybrid challenges? >>Yeah, I mean, you know, there's a lot of dimensions of that problem, but the one that that I think has been kind of most interesting over the last year has been how um kind of the consumption model of public cloud, you know, api driven self service capabilities operated for you, how that consumption model is starting to spread because I think one of the challenges with hybrid and one of the challenges as customers are looking at these more mission critical data centric kind of workloads was well, I can't always move that applications of public cloud data center or I need that application to live out on the network closer to my end users out where data is being generated maybe in an IOT context. And when you had those requirements, you had to kind of switch operating models, you had to kind of move away from a public cloud service consumption model to a software deployment model. And you know, we have a common platform and things like open shift that can run everywhere. But the missing piece was how do I consume everything as a service everywhere. And so recently we launched this thing called have been brought satellite, which we've been working with the T V. And his team on on how we can actually extend the public cloud experience back into the data center out to the edge and allow people to kind of mix both locational flexibility with public consumption. When you do that, you of course running a much more diverse infrastructure environment. You have to integrate with different storage environments and you wind up with multi tier applications, you know, some stuff on the edge and some stuff in the core. And so data replication and data management start to become really interesting because you're kind of distributing your workloads across this. No complex environment. >>We've seen that relationship between compute and storage change a lot over the past decade. As the evolution goes okay, I gotta ask you this is critical path for companies. They want the storage ready infrastructure. You guys have been doing that for many, many decades party with IBM for sure. But now they're all getting a hybrid cloud big time and it's not it's attributed computing is what it is. It's an operating model. When someone asked you guys what your capabilities are, how do you answer that? In today's world? Because you have storage is well known. You got a great product, people know that, but what is net apps capabilities? When I say I'm going all in and hybrid cloud, complete changeover. >>So what we have been doing is basically rewriting a lot of our software with a few design points in mind. Um the software defined has been definitely, you know, one of the key design points. The second is the um, the hybrid cloud and the internalization of our operating system so they can run both in traditional environments as well as in the cloud. I think the last thing that we wanted to do, it's enabled the speed of scale and that has been by building um, you know, intrinsically in the, in the, in the product, both support or, and also using kubernetes as an infrastructure to achieve that agility that that scale >>talk about this data fabric vision because to me that comes up all the time in my conversations with practitioners. The number one problem that there is a problem that we're solving to solve and the conversation tends to I here was a control playing kubernetes horizontally scalable. This all points to data being available. So how do you create that availability? What does data fabric mean? What does all this mean in hybrid context? >>Well, if you if you think about it data fabric, it's a hybrid cloud, you know, concept, right. This is about enabling data governance, data mobility, data security in an environment where some of the applications will run on premises or at the edge of the smart edge and many of the, you know, perhaps data lakes and analytics, um, you know, and services rich services will be in a central locations or on many or perhaps some large, you know, data centers. So you need to have, you know, the type of, you know, capabilities, data services, you know, to enable that mobility, that governments governance, that that security across this continuum that spans the edge the core and the cloud, >>Jason, you mentioned satellite before. Cloud satellite. Can you go into more detail on it? I know it's kind of a new product, uh what is that about? And tell me what's the benefits and why does it exist and what problems does it solve? >>Yeah. So so in the most simple terms, cloud satellite is the capability to extend iBMS public cloud into on prem infrastructure infrastructure at the edge or in a multi cloud context to other public cloud infrastructures. And so you can consume all the services in the public cloud that you need to to build your application of open shift as a service databases. Deb tools, aI capabilities. Instead of being limited to only being able to consume those services in IBM's cloud regions, you can now add your private data center or add your metro provider or add your AWS or Azure account and now consume those services consistently across all those environments. Um and that really allows you to kind of combine the benefits of public ill with kind of location independence, you see in hybrid and let's solve new problems like, you know, it's really interesting, we're seeing like a I and data being a primary driver. I need my application to live in a certain country or to live next to my mainframe or to live like you know in a metro because all of my, I'm doing like video analytics on a bunch of cameras and I'm not going to stream all that data back to halfway across the country to some cloud region and so lets you extend out in that way and when you do that of course you now move the cloud into a more diverse infrastructure environment. And so like we've been working with Netapp on, how do we then expose um Netapp storage into this environment when I'm running in the data center where I'm running at the edge and I need to store that data replicate the data, secure it. Well how do I kind of plug those two things together? I think john at the beginning you kind of alluded to this idea of you know, things are becoming more application centric, Right? And we're trying to run an I. T. Architecture that's more centered around the application well by combining um clouds, knowledge of kind of where everything is running with a common platform like open shift with a kubernetes aware data fabric in storage layer, you really can achieve that. You can have an application centric kind of management that spans those environments. >>Yeah, I want to come back to that whole impact on I. T. Because this has come up as a major theme here. Think that the I. T. Transformation is going to be more about cloud scale but I want to get octavian on the satellite on Netapp role and how you complement that. How do you guys fit in? He just mentioned that you guys are playing with clouds satellite, obviously this was like an operating model, How does that fit in? >>Um simply put we extend and enable the capabilities that uh IBM satellite uh you know, platform provides, I think Jason referred to the storage aspects um and you know what we are doing, it's enabling not only storage but rich data services around tearing based on temperature or you know, replicated snapshots or you know, capabilities around, you know cashing, you know, high availability encryption and and so forth. So we believe that our our technology integrates very well with red hat open shift um and uh the kubernetes aspect enable the application mobility and in that translation of really distributed computing at scale, you know from you know from the traditional data center um to the edge and uh you know to the massive hubs that IBM is building, >>you know, I gotta say but watching you guys worked together for many decades now and and covering you with the queue for the past 10 years or 11 years now um been a great partnership. I gotta say one thing that's obviously too obvious to me and our team and mainly mainly the world is now you got a new Ceo over at IBM you have a cloud focus that's on unwavering Arvin loves the cloud. We all know that um ecosystems are changing with that. You have already had a big ecosystem and partnerships now it seems to be moving to a level where you gotta have that ecosystem really thrive in the cloud. So I guess we'll use the last couple of minutes if you guys don't mind explaining how the IBM Netapp relationship in the new context of this new partnership, new ecosystem or a new kind of world helps customers and how you guys are working together. >>Yeah, I mean I could start, I mean I think you're right that that cloud is all about platforms and about kind of the overall environment, people operating in the ecosystem is really critical and I think things like satellite have given us new ways to work together. I mean I'd be a minute up, as we said, I've been working together for a long time. We rely on them a lot in our public cloud, for example in our storage tiers but with with the kind of idea of distributed cloud and the boundaries of public cubs spreading to all these new environments. Those are just new places where we can build really interesting, valuable integrations for our clients so that they can deal with day to deal with these more complex apps, you know, in all the places that they exist. So I think it's gonna actually really exciting um to kind of leverage that opportunity to find new ways to work together and and uh and deliver solutions to our clients >>Octavia, >>I would say that data is the ecosystem and we all know that there is more data right now being created outside of the traditional data center, beat in the cloud or at the edge. Um so our mission is, you know, to enable that, you know, hybrid cloud or or that uh, you know, data mobility um and enable, you know, persistence rich data, you know, storage services, whatever data is being created. I think IBM's new satellite platform um you know, comes in and broadens the aperture of people being able to consume IBM services at the edge and or or the remote office. And I think that's very exciting. >>You guys are both experts and solely seasoned executives. Devops DEP sec ops, DEV data Ops whatever you wanna call, data's here. Ecosystems guys, thanks for coming on the key. Really appreciate the insight. >>Thank you. Thank >>you. Okay. IBM think cute coverage jOHN for your host. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage, a BizOps manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz ops manifesto. Unveil. Something has been in the works for a little while. Today's the formal unveiling, and we're excited to have three of the core founding members of the manifesto authors of the manifesto. If you will, uh, joining us again, we've had them all on individually. Now we're going to have a great power panel. First up. We're gonna have Mitt Kirsten returning he's the founder and CEO of Tasktop mic. Good to see you again. Where are you dialing in from? >>Great to see you again, Jeff I'm dialing from Vancouver, >>We're Canada, Vancouver, Canada. One of my favorite cities in the whole wide world. Also we've got Tom Davenport come in from across the country. He's a distinguished professor and author from Babson college, Tom. Great to see you. And I think you said you're at a fun, exotic place on the East coast >>Realm of Memphis shoes. That's on Cape Cod. >>Great to see you again and also joining surge Lucio. He is the VP and general manager enterprise software division at Broadcom surge. Great to see you again, where are you coming in from? >>Uh, from Boston right next to Cape Cod. >>Terrific. So welcome back, everybody again. Congratulations on this day. I know it's been a lot of work to get here for this unveil, but let's just jump into it. The biz ops manifesto, what was the initial reason to do this? And how did you decide to do it in a kind of a coalition, a way bringing together a group of people versus just making it an internal company, uh, initiative that, you know, you can do better stuff within your own company, surge, why don't we start with you? >>Yeah, so, so I think we were at a really critical juncture, right? Many, um, large enterprises are basically struggling with their digital transformation. Um, in fact, um, many recognized that, uh, the, the business side, it collaboration has been, uh, one of the major impediments, uh, to drive that kind of transformation. That, and if we look at the industry today, many people are, whether we're talking about vendors or, um, you know, system integrators, consulting firms are talking about the same kind of concepts, but using very different language. And so we believe that bringing all these different players together, um, as part of the coalition and formalizing, uh, basically the core principles and values in a BizOps manifesto, we can really start to F could have a much bigger movement where we can all talk about kind of the same concepts and we can really start to provide, could have a much better support for large organizations to, to transform. Uh, so whether it is technology or services or, um, or training, I think that that's really the value of bringing all of these players together, right. >>And mic to you. Why did you get involved in this, in this effort? >>So I've been closely involved the agile movement since it started two decades with that manifesto. And I think we got a lot of improvement at the team level, and I think that was just no. Did we really need to improve at the business level? Every company is trying to become a software innovator, trying to make sure that they can pivot quickly and the changing market economy and what everyone's dealing with in terms of needing to deliver value to customers sooner. However, agile practices have really focused on these metrics, these measures and understanding processes that help teams be productive. Those things now need to be elevated to the business as a whole. And that just hasn't happened. Uh, organizations are actually failing because they're measuring activities and how they're becoming more agile, how teams are functioning, not how much quickly they're delivering value to the customer. So we need to now move past that. And that's exactly what the manifesto provides. Right, >>Right, right. And Tom, to you, you've been covering tech for a very long time. You've been looking at really hard challenges and a lot of work around analytics and data and data evolution. So there's a definitely a data angle here. I wonder if you could kind of share your perspective of what you got excited to, uh, to sign onto this manifesto. >>Sure. Well, I have, you know, for the past 15 or 20 years, I've been focusing on data and analytics and AI, but before that I was a process management guy and a knowledge management guy. And in general, I think, you know, we've just kind of optimize that to narrow a level, whether you're talking about agile or dev ops or ML ops, any of these kinds of ops oriented movements, we're making individual project, um, performance and productivity better, but we're not changing the business, uh, effectively enough. And that's the thing that appealed to me about the biz ops idea, that we're finally creating a closer connection between what we do with technology and how it changes the business and provides value to it. >>Great. Uh, surge back to you, right? I mean, people have been talking about digital transformation for a long time and it's been, you know, kind of trucking along and then covert hit and it was instant Lightswitch. Everyone's working from home. You've got a lot more reliance on your digital tools, digital communication, uh, both within your customer base and your partner base, but also then your employees when you're, if you could share how that really pushed this all along. Right? Because now suddenly the acceleration of digital transformation is higher. Even more importantly, you got much more critical decisions to make into what you do next. So kind of your portfolio management of projects has been elevated significantly when maybe revenues are down, uh, and you really have to, uh, to prioritize and get it right. >>Yeah. Maybe I'll just start by quoting Satina Nello basically recently said that they're speeding the two years of digital preservation just last two months in any many ways. That's true. Um, but yet when we look at large enterprises, they're still struggling with a kind of a changes in culture. They really need to drive to be able to disrupt themselves. And not surprisingly, you know, when we look at certain parts of the industry, you know, we see some things which are very disturbing, right? So about 40% of the personal loans today are being, uh, origin data it's by fintechs, uh, of a like of Sophie or, uh, or a lending club, right? Not to a traditional brick and mortar for BEC. And so the, well, there is kind of a much more of an appetite and it's a, it's more of a survival type of driver these days. >>Uh, the reality is that's in order for these large enterprises to truly transform and engage on this digital transformation, they need to start to really align the business nightie, you know, in many ways and make cover. Does agile really emerge from the core desire to truly improve software predictability between which we've really missed is all the way we start to aligning the software predictability to business predictability, and to be able to have continual sleep continuous improvement and measurement of business outcomes. So by aligning that of these, uh, discuss inward metrics, that's, it is typically being using to business outcomes. We think we can start to really ELP, uh, different stakeholders within the organization to collaborate. So I think there is more than ever. There's an imperative to acts now. Um, and, and resolves, I think is kind of the right approach to drive that kind of transformation. Right. >>I want to follow up on the culture comment, uh, with you, Tom, because you've talked before about kind of process flow and process flow throughout a whore and an organization. And, you know, we talk about people process and tech all the time. And I think the tech is the easy part compared to actually changing the people the way they think. And then the actual processes that they put in place. It's a much more difficult issue than just the tech issue to get this digital transformation in your organization. >>Yeah. You know, I've always found that the soft stuff about, you know, the culture of a behavior, the values is the hard stuff to change and more and more, we, we realized that to be successful with any kind of digital transformation you have to change people's behaviors and attitudes. Um, we haven't made as much progress in that area as we might have. I mean, I've done some surveys suggesting that most organizations still don't have data driven cultures. And in many cases there is a lower percentage of companies that say they have that then, um, did a few years ago. So we're kind of moving in the wrong direction, which means I think that we have to start explicitly addressing that, um, cultural, behavioral dimension and not just assuming that it will happen if we, if we build system, if we build it, they won't necessarily come. Right. >>Right. So I want to go to you Nick. Cause you know, we're talking about workflows and flow, um, and, and you've written about flow both in terms of, um, you know, moving things along a process and trying to find bottlenecks, identify bottlenecks, which is now even more important again, when these decisions are much more critical. Cause you have a lot less, uh, wiggle room in tough times, but you also talked about flow from the culture side and the people side. So I wonder if you can just share your thoughts on, you know, using flow as a way to think about things, to get the answers better. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I'll refer back to what Tom has said. If you're optimized, you need to optimize your system. You need to optimize how you innovate and how you deliver value to the business and the customer. Now, what we've noticed in the data, since that we've learned from customers, value streams, enterprise organizations, value streams, is that when it's taking six months at the end to deliver that value with the flow is that slow. You've got a bunch of unhappy developers, unhappy customers when you're innovating half so high performing organizations, we can measure third and 10 float time and dates. All of a sudden that feedback loop, the satisfaction your developer's measurably goes up. So not only do you have people context, switching glass, you're delivering so much more value to customers at a lower cost because you've optimized for flow rather than optimizing for these other approximate tricks that we use, which is how efficient is my agile team. How quickly can we deploy software? Those are important, but they do not provide the value of agility of fast learning of adaptability to the business. And that's exactly what the biz ops manifesto pushes your organization to do. You need to put in place this new operating model that's based on flow on the delivery of business value and on bringing value to market much more quickly than you were before. Right. >>I love that. And I'm going back to you, Tom, on that to follow up. Cause I think, I don't think people think enough about how they prioritize what they're optimizing for. Cause you know, if you're optimizing for a versus B, you know, you can have a very different product that you kick out and let you know. My favorite example is with Clayton Christianson and innovator's dilemma talking about the three inch hard drive. If you optimize it for power, you know, is one thing, if you optimize it for vibration is another thing and sure enough, you know, they missed it on the poem because it was the, it was the game console, which, which drove that whole business. So when you, when you're talking to customers and we think we hear it with cloud all the time, people optimizing for cost efficiency, instead of thinking about it as an innovation tool, how do you help them kind of rethink and really, you know, force them to, to look at the, at the prioritization and make sure they're prioritizing on the right thing is make just said, what are you optimizing for? >>Oh yeah. Um, you have one of the most important aspects of any decision or, um, attempt to resolve a problem in an organization is the framing process. And, um, you know, it's, it's a difficult aspect of the decision to frame it correctly in the first place. Um, there, it's not a technology issue. In many cases, it's largely a human issue, but if you frame that decision or that problem incorrectly to narrowly say, or you frame it as an either or situation where you could actually have some of both, um, it, it's very difficult for the, um, process to work out correctly. So in many cases that I think we need to think more at the beginning about how we bring this issue or this decision in the best way possible before we charge off and build a system to support it. You know, um, it's worth that extra time to think, think carefully about how the decision has been structured, right >>Surgery. I want to go back to you and talk about the human factors because as we just discussed, you can put it in great technology, but if the culture doesn't adopt it and people don't feel good about it, you know, it's not going to be successful and that's going to reflect poorly on the technology, even if it had nothing to do with it. And you know, when you look at the, the, the core values, uh, of the Bezos manifesto, you know, a big one is trust and collaboration, you know, learn, respond and pivot. I wonder if you can share your thoughts on, on trying to get that cultural shift, uh, so that you can have success with the people or excuse me, with the technology in the process and helping customers, you know, take this more trustworthy and kind of proactive, uh, position. >>So I think, I think at the ground level, it truly starts with the realization that we're all different. We come from different backgrounds. Um, oftentimes we tend to blame the data. It's not uncommon my experiments that we spend the first 30 minutes of any kind of one hour conversation to debate the validity of the data. Um, and so, um, one of the first kind of, uh, probably manifestations that we've had or revelations as we start to engage with our customers is spike, just exposing, uh, high-fidelity data sets to different stakeholders from their different lens. We start to enable these different stakeholders to not debate the data. That's really collaborate to find a solution. So in many ways, when, when, when we think about kind of the types of changes we're trying to, to truly affect around data driven decision making, it's all about bringing the data in context, in the context that is relevant and understandable for, for different stakeholders, whether we're talking about an operator or develop for a business analyst. >>So that's, that's the first thing. The second layer I think, is really to provide context to what people are doing in their specific cycle. And so I think one of the best examples I have is if you start to be able to align business KPI, whether you are counting, you know, sales per hour, or the engagements of your users on your mobile applications, whatever it is, you can start to connect that PKI to the business KPI, to the KPIs that developers might be looking at, whether it is the number of defects or a velocity or whatever, you know, metrics that they are used to to actually track you start to, to be able to actually contextualize in what we are the effecting, basically a metric that is really relevant in which we see is that DC is a much more systematic way to approach the transformation than say, you know, some organizations kind of creating, uh, some of these new products or services or initiatives, um, to, to drive engagements, right? >>So if you look at zoom, for instance, zoom giving away a it service to, uh, to education, he's all about, I mean, there's obviously a marketing aspect in therapists. It's fundamentally about trying to drive also the engagement of their own teams. And because now they're doing something for good and the organizations are trying to do that, but you only can do this kind of things in a limited way. And so you really want to start to rethink how you connect to, everybody's kind of a business objective fruit data, and now you start to get people to stare at the same data from their own lens and collaborate on all the data. Right, >>Right. That's a good, uh, Tom, I want to go back to you. You've been studying it for a long time, writing lots of books and getting into it. Um, why now, you know, what w why now are we finally aligning business objectives with, with it objectives? You know, why didn't this happen before? And, you know, what are the factors that are making now the time for this, this, this move with the, uh, with the biz ops? >>Well, and much of the past, it was sort of a back office related activity. And, you know, it was important for, um, uh, producing your paychecks and, uh, um, capturing the customer orders, but the business wasn't built around it now, every organization needs to be a software business, a data business, a digital business, the auntie has been raised considerably. And if you aren't making that connection between your business objectives and the technology that supports it, you run a pretty big risk of, you know, going out of business or losing out to competitors. Totally. So, um, and, uh, even if you're in a, an industry that hasn't historically been terribly, um, technology oriented customer expectations flow from, uh, you know, the digital native, um, companies that they work with to basically every industry. So you're compared against the best in the world. So we don't really have the luxury anymore of screwing up our it projects or building things that don't really work for the business. Um, it's mission critical that we do that well. Um, almost every time, I just want to follow up by that, Tom, >>In terms of the, you've talked extensively about kind of these evolutions of data and analytics from artismal stage to the big data stage, the data economy stage, the AI driven stage and what I find diff interesting that all those stages, you always put a start date. You never put an end date. Um, so you know, is the, is the big data I'm just going to use that generically a moment in time finally here, where we're, you know, off mahogany row with the data scientists, but actually can start to see the promise of delivering the right insight to the right person at the right time to make that decision. >>Well, I think it is true that in general, these previous stages never seemed to go away. The, um, the artisinal stuff is still being done, but we would like for less than less of it to be artisinal, we can't really afford for everything to be artisinal anymore. It's too labor and time consuming to do things that way. So we shift more and more of it to be done through automation and B to be done with a higher level of productivity. And, um, you know, at some point maybe we reached the stage where we don't do anything artisanally anymore. I'm not sure we're there yet, but, you know, we are, we are making progress. Right, >>Right. And Mick, back to you in terms of looking at agile, cause you're, you're such a, a student of agile when, when you look at the opportunity with ops, um, and taking the lessons from agile, you know, what's been the inhibitor to stop this in the past. And what are you so excited about? You know, taking this approach will enable. >>Yeah. I think both Sergeant Tom hit on this is that in agile what's happened is that we've been measuring tiny subsets of the value stream, right? We need to elevate the data's there. Developers are working on these tools that delivering features that the foundations for, for great culture are there. I spent two decades as a developer. And when I was really happy is when I was able to deliver value to customers, the quicker I was able to do that the fewer impediments are in my way, that quicker was deployed and running in the cloud, the happier I was, and that's exactly what's happening. If we can just get the right data, uh, elevated to the business, not just to the agile teams, but really these values of ours are to make sure that you've got these data driven decisions with meaningful data that's oriented around delivering value to customers. Not only these legacies that Tom touched on, which has cost center metrics from an ITK, from where, for it being a cost center and something that provided email and then back office systems. So we need to rapidly shift to those new, meaningful metrics that are customized business centric and make sure that every development the organization is focused on those as well as the business itself, that we're measuring value and that we're helping that value flow without interruptions. >>I love that mic. Cause if you don't measure it, you can't improve on it and you gotta, but you gotta be measuring the right thing. So gentlemen, uh, thank you again for, for your time. Congratulations on the, uh, on the unveil of the biz ops manifesto and together this coalition >>Of, of, uh, industry experts to get behind this. And, you know, there's probably never been a more important time than now to make sure that your prioritization is in the right spot and you're not wasting resources where you're not going to get the ROI. So, uh, congratulations again. And thank you for sharing your thoughts with us here on the cube. Alright, so we had surge, Tom and Mick I'm. Jeff, you're watching the cube, it's a biz ops manifesto and unveil. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of BizOps manifesto, unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition and welcome back Friday, Jeff Frick here with the cube we're in our Palo Alto studios. And we'd like to welcome you back to our continuing coverage of biz ops manifesto, unveil exciting day to really, uh, kind of bring this out into public. There's been a little bit of conversation, but today's really the official unveiling and we're excited to have our next guest to share a little bit more information on it. He's Patrick tickle. He's a chief product officer for planned view. Patrick. Great to see you. Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for the invite. So why the biz ops manifesto, why the biz optical edition now when you guys have been at it, it's relatively mature marketplace businesses. Good. What was missing? Why, why this, uh, why this coalition? >>Yeah, so, you know, again, why is, why is biz ops important and why is this something I'm, you know, I'm so excited about, but I think companies as well, right. Well, you know, in some ways or another, this is a topic that I've been talking to, you know, the market and our customers about for a long time. And it's, you know, I really applaud, you know, this whole movement, right. And, um, in resonates with me, because I think one of the fundamental flaws, frankly, of the way we've talked about technology and business literally for decades, uh, has been this idea of, uh, alignment. Those who know me, I occasionally get off on this little rant about the word alignment, right. But to me, the word alignment is, is actually indicative of the, of the, of the flaw in a lot of our organizations and biz ops is really, I think now trying to catalyze and expose that flaw. >>Right. Because, you know, I always say that, you know, you know, alignment implies silos, right. Instantaneously, as soon as you say there's alignment, there's, there's obviously somebody who's got a direction and other people that have to line up and that, that kind of siloed, uh, nature of organizations. And then frankly, the passive nature of it. Right. I think so many technology organizations are like, look, the business has the strategy you guys need to align. Right. And, and, you know, as a product leader, right. That's where I've been my whole career. Right. I can tell you that I never sit around. I almost never use the word alignment. Right. I mean, whether I never sit down and say, you know, the product management team has to get aligned with Deb, right. Or the dev team has to get aligned with the delivery and ops teams. I mean, what I say is, you know, are we on strategy, right? >>Like we've, we have a strategy as a, as a full end to end value stream. Right. And that there's no silos. And I mean, look, every on any given day we got to get better. Right. But the context, the context we operate is not about alignment. Right. It's about being on strategy. And I think I've talked to customers a lot about that, but when I first read the manifesto, I was like, Oh yeah, this is exactly. This is breaking down. Maybe trying to eliminate the word alignment, you know, from a lot of our organizations, because we literally start thinking about one strategy and how we go from strategy to delivery and have it be our strategy, not someone else's that we're all aligning to it. And it's a great way to catalyze that conversation. That I've, it's been in my mind for years, to be honest. Right. >>So, so much to unpack there. One of the things obviously, uh, stealing a lot from, from dev ops and the dev ops manifesto from 20 years ago. And as I look through some of the principles and I looked through some of the values, which are, you know, really nicely laid out here, you know, satisfy customers, do continuous delivery, uh, measure, output against real results. Um, the ones that, that jumps out though is really about, you know, change, change, right? Requirements should change frequently. They do change frequently, but I'm curious to get your take from a, from a software development point, it's easy to kind of understand, right. We're making this widget and our competitors, beta widget plus X, and now we need to change our plans and make sure that the plus X gets added to the plan. Maybe it wasn't in the plan, but you talked a lot about product strategy. So in this kind of continuous delivery world, how does that meld with, I'm actually trying to set a strategy, which implies the direction for a little bit further out on the horizon and to stay on that while at the same time, you're kind of doing this real time continual adjustments. Cause you're not working off a giant PRD or MRD anymore. >>Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. You know, one of the terms, you know, that we use internally a lot and even with my customers, our customers is we talked about this idea of rewiring, right. And I think, you know, it's kind of a, now an analogy for transformation. And I think a lot of us have to rewire the way we think about things. Right. And I think at Planview where we have a lot of customers who live in that, you know, who operationalize that traditional PPM world. Right. And are shifting to agile and transforming that rewire is super important. And, and to your point, right, it's, you've just, you've got to embrace this idea of, you know, just iterative getting better every day and iterating, iterating, iterating as to building annual plans or, you know, I get customers occasionally who asked me for two or three year roadmap. >>Right. And I literally looked at them and I go, there's no, there's no scenario where I can build a two or three year roadmap. Right. You, you, you think you want that, but that's not, that's not the way we run. Right. And I will tell you the biggest thing that for us, you know, that I think is matched the planning, uh, you know, patents is a word I like to use a lot. So the thing that we've like, uh, that we've done from a planning perspective, I think is matched impedance to continuous delivery is instituting the whole program, implement, you know, the program, increment planning, capabilities and methodologies, um, in the scaled agile world. Right. And over the last 18 months to two years, we really have now, you know, instrumented our company across three value streams. You know, we do quarterly PI program increment 10 week planning, you know, and that becomes, that becomes the Terra firma of how we plant. >>Right. And it's, what are we doing for the next 10 weeks? And we iterate within those 10 weeks, but we also know that 10 weeks from now, we're going to, we're going to adjust iterate again. Right. And that shifting of that planning model, you know, to being as cross-functional is that as that big room planning kind of model is, um, and also, uh, you know, on that shorter increment, when you get those two things in place, all sudden the impedance really starts to match up, uh, with continuous delivery and it changes, it changes the way you plan and it changes the way you work. Right? >>Yeah. Their thing. Right. So obviously a lot of these things are kind of process driven, both within the values, as well as the principles, but there's a whole lot, really about culture. And I just want to highlight a couple of the values, right? We already talked about business outcomes, um, trust and collaboration, uh, data driven decisions, and then learn, respond and pivot. Right. A lot of those are cultural as much as they are process. So again, is it the, is it the need to really kind of just put them down on paper and you know, I can't help, but think of, you know, the hammering up the, uh, the thing in the Lutheran church with their, with their manifesto, is it just good to get it down on paper? Because when you read these things, you're like, well, of course we should trust people. And of course we need an environment of collaboration and of course we want data driven decisions, but as we all know saying it and living, it are two very, very different things. >>Yeah. Good question. I mean, I think there's a lot of ways you bring that to life you're right. And just hanging up, you know, I think we've all been through the hanging up posters around your office, which these days, right. Unless you're going to hang a poster and everybody's home office. Right. You can't even, you can't even fake it that you think that might work. Right. So, um, you know, you really, I think we've attacked that in a variety of ways. Right. And you definitely have to, you know, you've got to make the shift to a team centric culture, right. Empowered teams, you know, that's a big deal. Right. You know, a lot of, a lot of the people that, you know, we lived in a world of quote unquote, where we were lived in a deep resource management world for a long, long time. >>And right. A lot of our customers still do that, but you know, kind of moving to that team centric world is, uh, is really important and core the trust. Um, I think training is super important, right. We've, you know, we've internally, right. We've trained hundreds employees over the last a year and a half on the fundamentals really of safe. Right. Not necessarily, you know, we've had, we've had teams delivering in scrum and the continuous delivery for, you know, for years, but the scaling aspect of it, uh, is where we've done a lot of training and investment. Um, and then, you know, I think, uh, leadership has to be bought in. Right. You know? And so when we pie plan, you know, myself and Cameron and the other members of our leadership, you know, we're NPI planning, you know, for, for four days. Right. I mean, it's, it's, you've got to walk the walk, you know, from top to bottom and you've got to train on the context. Right. And then you, and then, and, and then once you get through a few cycles where you've done a pivot, right. Or you brought a new team in, and it just works, it becomes kind of this virtuous circle where he'll go, man, this really works so much better than what we used to do. Right. >>Right. The other really key principle to this whole thing is, is aligning, you know, the business leaders and the business prioritization, um, so that you can get to good outcomes with the development and the delivery. Right. And we, we know again, and kind of classic dev ops to get the dev and the production people together. So they can, you know, quickly ship code that works. Um, but adding the business person on there really puts, puts a little extra responsibility that they, they understand the value of a particular feature or particular priority. Uh, they, they can make the, the, the trade offs and that they kind of understand the effort involved too. So, you know, bringing them into this continuous again, kind of this continuous development process, um, to make sure that things are better aligned and really better prioritize. Cause ultimately, you know, we don't live in an infinite resources situation and people got to make trade offs. They got to make decisions as to what goes and what doesn't go in for everything that goes. Right. I always say you pick one thing. Okay. That's 99 other things that couldn't go. So it's really important to have, you know, this, you said alignment of the business priorities as well as, you know, the execution within, within the development. >>Yeah. I think that, you know, uh, you know, I think it was probably close to two years ago. Forester started talking about the age of the customer, right. That, that was like their big theme at the time. Right. And I think to me what that, the age of the customer actually translates to and Mick, Mick and I are both big fans of this whole idea of the project and product shift, mixed book, you know, it was a great piece on a, you're talking about, you know, as part of the manifesto is one of the authors as well, but this shift from project to product, right? Like the age of the customer, in my opinion, the, the embodiment of that is the shift to a product mentality. Right. And, and the product mentality in my opinion, is what brings the business and technology teams together, right? >>Once you, once you're focused on a customer experience is delivered through a product or a service. That's when I that's, when I started to go with the alignment problem goes away, right. Because if you look at software companies, right, I mean, we run product management models yeah. With software development teams, customer success teams, right. That, you know, the software component of these products that people are building is obviously becoming bigger and bigger, you know, in an, in many ways, right. More and more organizations are trying to model themselves over as operationally like software companies. Right. Um, they obviously have lots of other components in their business than just software, but I think that whole model of customer experience equaling product, and then the software component of product, the product is the essence of what changes that alignment equation and brings business and teams together because all of a sudden, everyone knows what the customer's experiencing. Right. And, and that, that, that makes a lot of things very clear, very quickly. >>Right. I'm just curious how far along this was as a process before, before COBIT hit, right. Because serendipitous, whatever. Right. But the sudden, you know, light switch moment, everybody had to go work from home and in March 15th compared to now we're in October and this is going to be going on for a while. And it is a new normal and whatever that whatever's going to look like a year from now, or two years from now is TBD, you know, had you guys already started on this journey cause again, to sit down and actually declare this coalition and declare this manifesto is a lot different than just trying to do better within your own organization. >>Yeah. So we had started, uh, you know, w we definitely had started independently, you know, some, some, you know, I think people in the community know that, uh, we, we came together with a company called lean kit a handful of years ago, and I give John Terry actually one of the founders LeanKit immense credit for, you know, kind of spearheading our cultural change and not, and not because of, we were just gonna be, you know, bringing agile solutions to our customers, but because, you know, he believed that it was going to be a fundamentally better way for us to work. Right. And we kind of, you know, we started with John and built, you know, out of concentric circles of momentum and, and we've gotten to the place where now it's just part of who we are, but, but I do think that, you know, COVID has, you know, um, I think pre COVID a lot of companies, you know, would, would adopt, you know, the would adopt digital slash agile transformation. >>Um, traditional industries may have done it as a reaction to disruption. Right. You know, and in many cases, the disruption to these traditional industries was, I would say a product oriented company, right. That probably had a larger software component, and that disruption caused a competitive issue, uh, or a customer issue that caused companies and tried to respond by transforming. I think COVID, you know, all of a sudden flatten that out, right. We literally all got disrupted. Right. And so all of a sudden, every one of us is dealing with some degree of market uncertainty, customer uncertainty, uh, and also, you know, none of us were insulated from the need to be able to pivot faster, deliver incrementally, you know, and operate in a different, completely more agile way, uh, you know, post COVID. Right. Yeah. That's great. >>So again, a very, very, very timely, you know, a little bit of serendipity, a little bit of planning. And, you know, as, as with all important things, there's always a little bit of lock in, uh, and a lot of hard work involved. So a really interesting thank you for, for your leadership, Patrick. And, you know, it really makes a statement. I think when you have a bunch of leaderships across an industry coming together and putting their name on a piece of paper, uh, that's aligned around us some principles and some values, which again, if you read them who wouldn't want to get behind these, but if it takes, you know, something a little bit more formal, uh, to kind of move the ball down the field, and then I totally get it and a really great work. Thanks for, uh, thanks for doing it. >>Oh, absolutely. No. Like I said, the first time I read it, I was like, yep. Like you said, this is all, it's all makes complete sense, but just documenting it and saying it and talking about it moves the needle. I'll tell you as a company, you gotta, we're pushing really hard on, uh, you know, on our own internal strategy on diversity and inclusion. Right. And, and like, once we wrote the words down about what, you know, what we aspire to be from a diversity and inclusion perspective, it's the same thing. Everybody reads the words that goes, why wouldn't we do this? Right. But until you write it down and kind of have again, a manifesto or a Terra firma of what you're trying to accomplish, you know, then you can rally behind it. Right. As opposed to it being something that's, everybody's got their own version of the flavor. Right. And I think it's a very analogous, you know, kind of, uh, initiative. Right. And, uh, and it's happening, both of those things right. Are happening across the industry these days. Right. >>And measure it too. Right. And measure it, measure, measure, measure, get a baseline. Even if you don't like to measure, even if you don't like what the, even if you can argue against the math, behind the measurement, measure it. And at least you can measure it again and you can, and you've got some type of a comp and that is really the only way to, to move it forward. We're Patrick really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for, uh, for taking a few minutes out of your day. >>It's great to be here. It's an awesome movement and we're glad to be a part of it. >>All right. Thanks. And if you want to check out the biz ops, Manifesta go to biz ops, manifesto.org, read it. You might want to sign it. It's there for you. And thanks for tuning in on this segment will continuing coverage of the biz op manifesto unveil you're on the cube. I'm Jeff, thanks for watching >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody Jeffrey here with the cube. We're coming to you from our Palo Alto studios. And welcome back to this event is the biz ops manifesto unveiling. So the biz ops manifesto and the biz ops coalition had been around for a little while, but today's the big day. That's kind of the big public unveiling, or we're excited to have some of the foundational people that, you know, have put their, put their name on the dotted, if you will, to support this initiative and talk about why that initiative is so important. And so the next guest we're excited to have is dr. Mick Kirsten. He is the founder and CEO of Tasktop mic. Great to see you coming in from Vancouver, Canada, I think, right? Yes. Great to be here, Jeff. Thank you. Absolutely. I hope your air is a little better out there. I know you had some of the worst air of all of us, a couple, a couple of weeks back. So hopefully things are, uh, are getting a little better and we get those fires under control. Yeah. >>Things have cleared up now. So yeah, it's good. It's good to be close to the U S and it's going to have the Arabic cleaner as well. >>Absolutely. So let's, let's jump into it. So you you've been an innovation guy forever starting way back in the day and Xerox park. I was so excited to do an event at Xerox park for the first time last year. I mean, that, that to me represents along with bell labs and, and some other, you know, kind of foundational innovation and technology centers, that's gotta be one of the greatest ones. So I just wonder if you could share some perspective of getting your start there at Xerox park, you know, some of the lessons you learned and what you've been able to kind of carry forward from those days. >>Yeah. I was fortunate to join Xerox park in the computer science lab there at a fairly early point in my career, and to be working on open source programming languages. So back then in the computer science lab, where some of the inventions around programming around software development games, such as object programming, and a lot of what we had around really modern programming levels constructs, those were the teams I had the fortunate of working with, and really our goal was. And of course, there's, as, as you noticed, there's just this DNA of innovation and excitement and innovation in the water. And really it was the model that was all about changing the way that we work was looking at for how we can make it 10 times easier to white coat. But this is back in 99. And we were looking at new ways of expressing, especially business concerns, especially ways of enabling people who are wanting to innovate for their business to express those concerns in code and make that 10 times easier than what that would take. >>So we create a new open source programming language, and we saw some benefits, but not quite quite what we expected. I then went and actually joined Charles Stephanie, that former to fucking from Microsoft who was responsible for, he actually got Microsoft word as a sparking into Microsoft and into the hands of bill Gates and that company that was behind the whole office suite and his vision. And then when I was trying to execute with, working for him was to make PowerPoint like a programming language to make everything completely visual. And I realized none of this was really working, that there was something else, fundamentally wrong programming languages, or new ways of building software. Like let's try and do with Charles around intentional programming. That was not enough. >>That was not enough. So, you know, the agile movement got started about 20 years ago, and we've seen the rise of dev ops and really this kind of embracing of, of, of sprints and, you know, getting away from MRDs and PRDs and these massive definitions of what we're going to build and long build cycles to this iterative process. And this has been going on for a little while. So what was still wrong? What was still missing? Why the biz ops coalition, why the biz ops manifesto? >>Yeah, so I basically think we nailed some of the things that the program language levels of teams can have effective languages deployed to soften to the cloud easily now, right? And at the kind of process and collaboration and planning level agile two decades, decades ago was formed. We were adopting and all the, all the teams I was involved with and it's really become a self problem. So agile tools, agile teams, agile ways of planning, uh, are now very mature. And the whole challenge is when organizations try to scale that. And so what I realized is that the way that agile was scaling across teams and really scaling from the technology part of the organization to the business was just completely flawed. The agile teams had one set of doing things, one set of metrics, one set of tools. And the way that the business was working was planning was investing in technology was just completely disconnected and using a whole different set of measures. Pretty >>Interesting. Cause I think it's pretty clear from the software development teams in terms of what they're trying to deliver. Cause they've got a feature set, right. And they've got bugs and it's easy to, it's easy to see what they deliver, but it sounds like what you're really honing in on is this disconnect on the business side, in terms of, you know, is it the right investment? You know, are we getting the right business ROI on this investment? Was that the right feature? Should we be building another feature or should we building a completely different product set? So it sounds like it's really a core piece of this is to get the right measurement tools, the right measurement data sets so that you can make the right decisions in terms of what you're investing, you know, limited resources. You can't, nobody has unlimited resources. And ultimately you have to decide what to do, which means you're also deciding what not to do. And it sounds like that's a really big piece of this, of this whole effort. >>Yeah. Jeff, that's exactly it, which is the way that the agile team measures their own way of working is very different from the way that you measure business outcomes. The business outcomes are in terms of how happy your customers are, but are you innovating fast enough to keep up with the pace of a rapidly changing economy, roughly changing market. And those are, those are all around the customer. And so what I learned on this long journey of supporting many organizations transformations and having them try to apply those principles of agile and dev ops, that those are not enough, those measures technical practices, uh, those measured sort of technical excellence of bringing code to the market. They don't actually measure business outcomes. And so I realized that it really was much more around having these entwined flow metrics that are customer centric and business centric and market centric where we need it to go. Right. >>So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about your book because you're also a bestselling author from project to product and, and, and you, you brought up this concept in your book called the flow framework. And it's really interesting to me cause I know, you know, flow on one hand is kind of a workflow and a process flow and, and you know, that's how things get done and, and, and embrace the flow. On the other hand, you know, everyone now in, in a little higher level existential way is trying to get into the flow right into the workflow and, you know, not be interrupted and get into a state where you're kind of at your highest productivity, you know, kind of your highest comfort, which flow are you talking about in your book? Or is it a little bit of both? >>That's a great question. It's not one I get asked very often cause to me it's absolutely both. So that the thing that we want to get, that we've learned how to master individual flow, that there's this beautiful book by me, how you teaches me how he does a beautiful Ted talk by him as well about how we can take control of our own flow. So my question with the book with question replies, how can we bring that to entire teams and really entire organizations? How can we have everyone contributing to a customer outcome? And this is really what if you go to the biz ops manifesto, it says, I focus on outcomes on using data to drive whether we're delivering those outcomes rather than a focus on proxy metrics, such as, how quickly did we implement this feature? No, it's really how much value did the customer go to the future? >>And how quickly did you learn and how quickly did you use that data to drive to that next outcome? Really that with companies like Netflix and Amazon have mastered, how do we get that to every large organization, every it organization and make everyone be a software innovator. So it's to bring that, that concept of flow to these end to end value streams. And the fascinating thing is we've actually seen the data. We've been able to study a lot of value streams. We see when flow increases, when organizations deliver value to a customer faster, developers actually become more happy. So things like that and point out promoter scores, rise, and we've got empirical data for this. So that the beautiful thing to me is that we've actually been able to combine these two things and see the results and the data that you increase flow to the customer. Your developers are more, >>I love it. I love it, right, because we're all more, we're all happier when we're in the flow and we're all more productive when we're in the flow. So I, that is a great melding of, of two concepts, but let's jump into the, into the manifesto itself a little bit. And you know, I love that you took this approach really of having kind of four key values and then he gets 12 key principles. And I just want to read a couple of these values because when you read them, it sounds pretty brain dead. Right? Of course. Right. Of course you should focus on business outcomes. Of course you should have trust and collaboration. Of course you should have database decision making processes and not just intuition or, you know, whoever's the loudest person in the room, uh, and to learn and respond and pivot. But what's the value of actually just putting them on a piece of paper, because again, this is not this, these are all good, positive things, right? When somebody reads these to you or tells you these are sticks it on the wall, of course. But unfortunately of course isn't always enough. >>No. And I think what's happened is some of these core principles originally from the agile manifesto in two decades ago, uh, the whole dev ops movement of the last decade of flow feedback and continue learning has been key. But a lot of organizations, especially the ones undergoing digital transformations have actually gone a very different way, right? The way that they measure value, uh, in technology and innovation is through costs for many organizations. The way that they actually are looking at that they're moving to cloud is actually as a reduction in cost. Whereas the right way of looking at moving to cloud is how much more quickly can we get to the value to the customer? How quickly can we learn from that? And how quickly can we drive the next business outcome? So really the key thing is, is to move away from those old ways of doing things of funding projects and cost centers, to actually funding and investing in outcomes and measuring outcomes through these flow metrics, which in the end are your fast feedback and how quickly you're innovating for your customer. >>So these things do seem very obvious when you look at them. But the key thing is what you need to stop doing to focus on these. You need to actually have accurate realtime data of how much value you fund to the customer every week, every month, every quarter. And if you don't have that, your decisions are not driven on data. If you don't know what your bottleneck is. And this is something that in decades of manufacturing, a car manufacturers, other manufacturers, master, they always know where the bottom back in their production processes. You ask a random CIO when a global 500 company where their bottleneck is, and you won't get a clear answer because there's not that level of understanding. So have to actually follow these principles. You need to know exactly where you fall. And I guess because that's, what's making your developers miserable and frustrated, then having them context, which I'm trash. So the approach here is important and we have to stop doing these other things, >>Right? There's so much there to unpack. I love it. You know, especially the cloud conversation because so many people look at it wrong as, as, as a cost saving a device, as opposed to an innovation driver and they get stuck, they get stuck in the literal. And I, you know, I think at the same thing, always about Moore's law, right? You know, there's a lot of interesting real tech around Moore's law and the increasing power of microprocessors, but the real power, I think in Moore's laws is the attitudinal change in terms of working in a world where you know that you've got all this power and what you build and design. I think it's funny to your, your comment on the flow and the bottleneck, right? Cause, cause we know manufacturing, as soon as you fix one bottleneck, you move to your next one, right? You always move to your next point of failure. So if you're not fixing those things, you know, you're not, you're not increasing that speed down the line, unless you can identify where that bottleneck is or no matter how many improvements you make to the rest of the process, it's still going to get hung up on that one spot. >>That's exactly it. And you also make it sound so simple, but again, if you don't have the data driven visibility of where the bottom line is, and these bottlenecks are adjusted to say, it's just whack-a-mole right. So we need to understand is the bottleneck because our security reviews are taking too long and stopping us from getting value for the customer. If it's that automate that process. And then you move on to the next bottleneck, which might actually be that deploying yourself into the cloud was taking too long. But if you don't take that approach of going flow first, rather than again, that sort of cost reduction. First, you have to think of that approach of customer centricity and you only focused on optimizing costs. Your costs will increase and your flow will slow down. And this is just one of these fascinating things. Whereas if you focus on getting back to the customer and reducing your cycles on getting value, your flow time from six months to two weeks or two, one week or two event, as we see with, with tech giants, you actually can both lower your costs and get much more value that for us to get that learning loop going. >>So I think I've seen all of these cloud deployments and one of the things that's happened that delivered almost no value because there was such big bottlenecks upfront in the process and actually the hosting and the AP testing was not even possible with all of those inefficiencies. So that's why going float for us rather than costs where we started our project versus silky. >>I love that. And, and, and, and it, it begs repeating to that right within the subscription economy, you know, you're on the hook to deliver value every single month because they're paying you every single month. So if you're not on top of how you're delivering value, you're going to get sideways because it's not like, you know, they pay a big down payment and a small maintenance fee every month, but once you're in a subscription relationship, you know, you have to constantly be delivering value and upgrading that value because you're constantly taking money from the customer. So it's such a different kind of relationship than kind of the classic, you know, big bang with a maintenance agreement on the back end really important. Yeah. >>And I think in terms of industry shifts that that's it that's, what's catalyzed. This interesting shift is in this SAS and subscription economy. If you're not delivering more and more value to your customers, someone else's and they're winning the business, not you. So one way we know is to delight our customers with great user experiences. Well, that really is based on how many features you delivered or how much, how big, how many quality improvements or scalar performance improvements you delivered. So the problem is, and this is what the business manifesto, as well as the full frame of touch on is if you can't measure how much value you delivered to a customer, what are you measuring? You just backed again, measuring costs and that's not a measure of value. So we have to shift quickly away from measuring cost to measuring value, to survive in the subscription economy. >>We could go for days and days and days. I want to shift gears a little bit into data and, and, and a data driven, um, decision making a data driven organization cause right day has been talked about for a long time, the huge big data meme with, with Hadoop over, over several years and, and data warehouses and data lakes and data oceans and data swamps, and can go on and on and on. It's not that easy to do, right? And at the same time, the proliferation of data is growing exponentially. We're just around the corner from, from IOT and 5g. So now the accumulation of data at machine scale, again, this is going to overwhelm and one of the really interesting principles, uh, that I wanted to call out and get your take right, is today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence. I wonder if you can, again, you've got some great historical perspective, um, reflect on how hard it is to get the right data, to get the data in the right context, and then to deliver it to the decision makers and then trust the decision makers to actually make the data and move that down. You know, it's kind of this democratization process into more and more people and more and more frontline jobs making more and more of these little decisions every day. >>Yeah. I definitely think the front parts of what you said are where the promises of big data have completely fallen on their face into the swamps as, as you mentioned, because if you don't have the data in the right format, you've cannot connect collected at the right way. You want that way, the right way you can't use human or machine learning effectively. And there've been the number of data warehouses in a typical enterprise organization. And the sheer investment is tremendous, but the amount of intelligence being extracted from those is, is, is a very big problem. So the key thing that I've noticed is that if you can model your value streams, so yes, you understand how you're innovating, how you're measuring the delivery of value and how long that takes. What is your time to value these metrics like full time? You can actually use both the intelligence that you've got around the table and push that down as well, as far as getting to the organization, but you can actually start using that those models to understand and find patterns and detect bottlenecks that might be surprising, right? >>Well, you can detect interesting bottlenecks when you shift to work from home. We detected all sorts of interesting bottlenecks in our own organization that were not intuitive to me that had to do with, you know, more senior people being overloaded and creating bottlenecks where they didn't exist. Whereas we thought we were actually an organization that was very good at working from home because of our open source roots. So that data is highly complex. Software value streams are extremely complicated. And the only way to really get the proper analyst and data is to model it properly and then to leverage these machine learning and AI techniques that we have. But that front part of what you said is where organizations are just extremely immature in what I've seen, where they've got data from all their tools, but not modeled in the right way. Right, right. >>Right. Well, all right. So before I let you go, you know, let's say you get a business leader, he buys in, he reads the manifesto, he signs on the dotted line and he says, Mick, how do I get started? I want to be more aligned with, with the development teams. You know, I'm in a very competitive space. We need to be putting out new software features and engaging with our customers. I want to be more data-driven how do I get started? Well, you know, what's the biggest inhibitor for most people to get started and get some early wins, which we know is always the key to success in any kind of a new initiative. >>Right? So I think you can reach out to us through the website, uh, there's the manifesto, but the key thing is just to get you set up it's to get started and to get the key wins. So take a probably value stream that's mission critical. It could be your new mobile and web experiences or, or part of your cloud modernization platform or your analytics pipeline, but take that and actually apply these principles to it and measure the end to end flow of value. Make sure you have a value metric that everyone is on the same page on the people, on the development teams, the people in leadership all the way up to the CEO. And one of the, what I encourage you to start is actually that content flow time, right? That is the number one metric. That is how you measure it, whether you're getting the benefit of your cloud modernization, that is the one metric that Adrian Cockcroft. When the people I respect tremendously put into his cloud for CEOs, the metric, the one, the one way to measure innovation. So basically take these principles, deploy them on one product value stream, measure, sentiment, flow time, and then you'll actually be well on your path to transforming and to applying the concepts of agile and dev ops all the way to, to the business, to the way >>You're offering model. >>Well, Mick really great tips, really fun to catch up. I look forward to a time when we can actually sit across the table and, and get into this. Cause I just, I just love the perspective and, you know, you're very fortunate to have that foundational, that foundational base coming from Xerox park and they get, you know, it's, it's a very magical place with a magical history. So to, to incorporate that into, continue to spread that well, uh, you know, good for you through the book and through your company. So thanks for sharing your insight with us today. >>Thanks so much for having me, Jeff. >>All right. And go to the biz ops manifesto.org, read it, check it out. If you want to sign it, sign it. They'd love to have you do it. Stay with us for continuing coverage of the unveiling of the business manifesto on the cube. I'm Jeff. Rick. Thanks for watching. See you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the cube come due from our Palo Alto studios today for a big, big reveal. We're excited to be here. It's the biz ops manifesto unveiling a thing's been in the works for awhile and we're excited to have our next guest. One of the, really the powers behind this whole effort. And he's joining us from Boston it's surge, Lucio, the vice president, and general manager enterprise software division at Broadcom surge. Great to see you. >>Hi, good to see you, Jeff. Glad to be here. >>So you've been in this business for a very long time. You've seen a lot of changes in technology. What is the biz ops manifesto? What is this coalition all about? Why do we need this today and in 2020? >>Yeah. So, so I've been in this business for close to 25 years, right? So about 20 years ago, the agile manifesto was created. And the goal of the agile manifesto was really to address the uncertainty around software development and the inability to predict the efforts to build software. And, uh, if you, if you roll that kind of 20 years later, and if you look at the current state of the industry, uh, the product, the project management Institute, estimates that we're wasting about a million dollars, every 20 seconds in digital transformation initiatives that do not deliver on business results. In fact, we were recently served a third of the, uh, a number of executives in partnership with Harvard business review and 77% of those executives think that one of the key challenges that they have is really at the collaboration between business and it, and that that's been kind of a case for, uh, almost 20 years now. >>Um, so the, the, the key challenge we're faced with is really that we need a new approach and many of the players in the industry, including ourselves, I've been using different terms, right? Some are being, are talking about value stream management. Some are talking about software delivery management. If you look at the site, reliability engineering movement, in many ways, it embodies a lot of these kind of concepts and principles. So we believed that it became really imperative for us to crystallize around, could have one concept. And so in many ways, the, uh, the BizOps concept and the business manifesto are bringing together a number of ideas, which have been emerging in the last five years or so, and, and defining the key values and principles to finally help these organizations truly transform and become digital businesses. And so the hope is that by joining our forces and defining public key principles and values, we can help the industry, uh, not just, uh, by, you know, providing them with support, but also, uh, tools and consulting that is required for them to truly achieve the kind of transformation that everybody's seeking. >>Right, right. So COVID now we're six months into it, approximately seven months into it. Um, a lot of pain, a lot of bad stuff still happening. We've got a ways to go, but one of the things that on the positive side, right, and you've seen all the memes and social media is, is a driver of digital transformation and a driver of change. Cause we had this light switch moment in the middle of March and there was no more planning. There was no more conversation. You've suddenly got remote workforces, everybody's working from home and you got to go, right. So the reliance on these tools increases dramatically, but I'm curious, you know, kind of short of, of the beginnings of this effort in short of kind of COVID, which, you know, came along unexpectedly. I mean, what were those inhibitors because we've been making software for a very long time, right? The software development community has, has adopted kind of rapid change and, and iterative, uh, delivery and, and sprints, what was holding back the connection with the business side to make sure that those investments were properly aligned with outcomes. >>Well, so, so you have to understand that it is, is kind of a its own silos. And traditionally it has been treated as a cost center within large organizations and not as a value center. And so as a result could have a traditional dynamic between it and the business is basically one of a kind of supplier up to kind of a business. Um, and you know, if you, if you go back to, uh, I think you'll unmask a few years ago, um, basically at this concept of the machines to build the machines and you went as far as saying that, uh, the machines or the production line is actually the product. So, um, meaning that the core of the innovation is really about, uh, building, could it be engine to deliver on the value? And so in many ways, you know, we have missed on this shift from, um, kind of it becoming this kind of value center within the enterprises. >>And, and he talks about culture. Now, culture is a, is a sum total of beavers. And the reality is that if you look at it, especially in the last decade, uh, we've agile with dev ops with, um, I bring infrastructures, uh, it's, it's way more volatile today than it was 10 years ago. And so the, when you start to look at the velocity of the data, the volume of data, the variety of data to analyze this system, um, it's, it's very challenging for it to actually even understand and optimize its own processes, let alone, um, to actually include business as sort of an integral part of kind of a delivery chain. And so it's both kind of a combination of, of culture, um, which is required as well as tools, right? To be able to start to bring together all these data together, and then given the volume variety of philosophy of the data, uh, we have to apply some core technologies, which have only really, truly emerged in the last five to 10 years around machine learning and analytics. And so it's really kind of a combination of those freaks, which are coming together today to really help organizations kind of get to the next level. Right, >>Right. So let's talk about the manifesto. Let's talk about, uh, the coalition, uh, the BizOps coalition. I just liked that you put down these really simple, you know, kind of straightforward core values. You guys have four core values that you're highlighting, you know, business outcomes, over individual projects and outputs, trust, and collaboration, oversight, load teams, and organizations, data driven decisions, what you just talked about, uh, you know, over opinions and judgment and learned, respond and pivot. I mean, surgery sounds like pretty basic stuff, right? I mean, aren't, isn't everyone working to these values already. And I think he touched on it on culture, right? Trust and collaboration, data driven decisions. I mean, these are fundamental ways that people must run their business today, or the person that's across the street, that's doing it. It's going to knock them out right off their blog. >>Yeah. So that's very true. But, uh, so I'll, I'll mention in our survey, we did, uh, I think about six months ago and it was in partnership with, uh, with, uh, an industry analyst and we serve at a, again, a number of it executives to understand how many we're tracking business outcomes I'm going to do with the software executives. It executives we're tracking business outcomes. And the, there were less than 15% of these executives were actually tracking the outcomes of a software delivery. And you see that every day. Right? So in my own teams, for instance, we've been adopting a lot of these core principles in the last year or so, and we've uncovered that 16% of our resources were basically aligned around initiatives, which are not strategic for us. Um, I take, you know, another example, for instance, one of our customers in the, uh, in the airline industry and Harvard, for instance, that a number of, uh, um, that they had software issues that led to people searching for flights and not returning any kind of availability. >>And yet, um, you know, the, it teams, whether it's operations, software environments were completely oblivious to that because they were completely blindsided to it. And so the connectivity between kind of the inwards metrics that RT is using, whether it's database time, cycle time, or whatever metric we use in it are typically completely divorced from the business metrics. And so at its core, it's really about starting to align the business metrics with what the, the software delivery chain, right? This, uh, the system, which is really a core differentiator for these organizations. It's about connecting those two things and, and starting to, um, infuse some of the agile culture and principles. Um, that's emerged from the software side into the business side. Um, of course the lean movement and other movements have started to change some of these dynamic on the, on the business side. And so I think this, this is the moment where we are starting to see kind of the imperative to transform. Now, you know, Covina obviously has been a key driver for that. The, um, the technology is right to start to be able to weave data together and really kind of, uh, also the cultural shifts, uh, Prue agile through dev ops through, uh, the SRE movement, uh frulein um, business transformation, all these things are coming together and that are really creating kind of the conditions for the BizOps manifesto to exist. >>So, uh, Clayton Christianson, great, uh, Harvard professor innovator's dilemma might still my all time favorite business books, you know, talks about how difficult it is for incumbents to react to, to disruptive change, right? Because they're always working on incremental change because that's what their customers are asking for. And there's a good ROI when you talk about, you know, companies not measuring the right thing. I mean, clearly it has some portion of their budget that has to go to keeping the lights on, right. That that's always the case, but hopefully that's an, an ever decreasing percentage of their total activity. So, you know, what should people be measuring? I mean, what are kind of the new metrics, um, in, in biz ops that drive people to be looking at the right things, measuring the right things and subsequently making the right decisions, investment decisions on whether they should do, you know, move project a along or project B. >>So there, there are only two things, right? So, so I think what you're talking about is portfolio management, investment management, right. And, um, which, which is a key challenge, right? Um, in my own experience, right? Uh, driving strategy or a large scale kind of software organization for years, um, it's very difficult to even get kind of a base data as to who is doing what, uh, um, I mean, some of our largest customers we're engaged with right now are simply trying to get a very simple answer, which is how many people do I have and that specific initiative at any point in time, and just tracking that information is extremely difficult. So, and again, back to a product project management Institute, um, there, they have estimated that on average, it organizations have anywhere between 10 to 20% of their resources focused on initiatives, which are not strategically aligned. >>So, so that's one dimensional portfolio management. I think the key aspect though, that we are, we're really keen on is really around kind of the alignment of a business metrics to the it metrics. Um, so I'll use kind of two simple examples, right? And my background is around quality and I've always believed that the fitness for purpose is really kind of a key, um, uh, philosophy if you will. And so if you start to think about quality as fitness for purpose, you start to look at it from a customer point of view, right. And fitness for purpose for a core banking application or mobile application are different, right? So the definition of a business value that you're trying to achieve is different. Um, and so the, and yeah, if you look at our, it, operations are operating there, we're using kind of a same type of, uh, kind of inward metrics, uh, like a database off time or a cycle time, or what is my point of velocity, right? >>And so the challenge really is this inward facing metrics that it is using, which are divorced from ultimately the outcome. And so, you know, if I'm, if I'm trying to build a poor banking application, my core metric is likely going to be uptight, right? If I'm trying to build a mobile application or maybe your social, a mobile app, it's probably going to be engagement. And so what you want is for everybody across it, to look at these metric and what are the metrics within the software delivery chain, which ultimately contribute to that business metric. And some cases cycle time may be completely irrelevant, right? Again, my core banking app, maybe I don't care about cycle time. And so it's really about aligning those metrics and be able to start to, um, Charles you mentioned, uh, around the, the, um, uh, around the disruption that we see is, or the investors is the dilemma now is really around the fact that many it organizations are essentially applying the same approaches of, for innovation, like for basically scrap work, then they would apply to kind of over more traditional projects. And so, you know, there's been a lot of talk about two-speed it, and yes, it exists, but in reality are really organizations, um, truly differentiating, um, all of the operate, their, their projects and products based on the outcomes that they're trying to achieve. And this is really where BizOps is trying to affect. >>I love that, you know, again, it doesn't seem like brain surgery, but focus on the outcomes, right. And it's horses for courses, as you said, this project, you know, what you're measuring and how you define success, isn't necessarily the same as, as on this other project. So let's talk about some of the principles we talked about the values, but, you know, I think it's interesting that, that, that the BizOps coalition, you know, just basically took the time to write these things down and they don't seem all that super insightful, but I guess you just got to get them down and have them on paper and have them in front of your face. But I want to talk about, you know, one of the key ones, which you just talked about, which is changing requirements, right. And working in a dynamic situation, which is really what's driven, you know, this, the software to change in software development, because, you know, if you're in a game app and your competitor comes out with a new blue sword, you got to come out with a new blue sword. >>So whether you had that on your Kanban wall or not. So it's, it's really this embracing of the speed of change and, and, and, and making that, you know, the rule, not the exception. I think that's a phenomenal one. And the other one you talked about is data, right? And that today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be generated by machine learning and AI, and, you know, in the, the big data thing with Hadoop, you know, started years ago, but we are seeing more and more that people are finally figuring it out, that it's not just big data, and it's not even generic machine learning or artificial intelligence, but it's applying those particular data sets and that particular types of algorithms to a specific problem, to your point, to try to actually reach an objective, whether that's, you know, increasing the, your average ticket or, you know, increasing your checkout rate with, with, with shopping carts that don't get left behind in these types of things. So it's a really different way to think about the world in the good old days, probably when you got started, when we had big, giant, you know, MRDs and PRDs and sat down and coded for two years and came out with a product release and hopefully not too many patches subsequently to that. >>It's interesting. Right. Um, again, back to one of these surveys that we did with, uh, with about 600, the ITA executives, and, uh, and, and we, we purposely designed those questions to be pretty open. Um, and, and one of them was really wrong requirements and, uh, and it was really a wrong, uh, kind of what do you, what is the best approach? What is your preferred approach towards requirements? And if I were to remember correctly, over 80% of the it executives set that the best approach they'll prefer to approach these core requirements to be completely defined before software development starts, let me pause there we're 20 years after the agile manifesto, right? And for 80% of these idea executives to basically claim that the best approach is for requirements to be fully baked before salt, before software development starts, basically shows that we still have a very major issue. >>And again, our hypothesis in working with many organizations is that the key challenge is really the boundary between business and it, which is still very much contract based. If you look at the business side, they basically are expecting for it deliver on time on budget, right. But what is the incentive for it to actually delivering on the business outcomes, right? How often is it measured on the business outcomes and not on an SLA or on a budget type criteria? And so that's really the fundamental shift that we need to, we really need to drive up as an industry. Um, and you know, we, we talk about kind of this, this imperative for organizations to operate that's one, and back to the, the, um, you know, various Doris dilemna the key difference between these larger organization is, is really kind of, uh, if you look at the amount of capital investment that they can put into pretty much anything, why are they losing compared to, um, you know, startups? What, why is it that, uh, more than 40% of, uh, personal loans today or issued not by your traditional brick and mortar banks, but by, um, startups? Well, the reason, yes, it's the traditional culture of doing incremental changes and not disrupting ourselves, which Christiansen covered the length, but it's also the inability to really fundamentally change kind of a dynamic picture. We can business it and, and, and partner right. To, to deliver on a specific business outcome. >>All right. I love that. That's a great, that's a great summary. And in fact, getting ready for this interview, I saw you mentioning another thing where, you know, the, the problem with the agile development is that you're actually now getting more silos. Cause you have all these autonomous people working, you know, kind of independently. So it's even a harder challenge for, for the business leaders to, to, as you said, to know, what's actually going on, but, but certainly I w I want to close, um, and talk about the coalition. Um, so clearly these are all great concepts. These are concepts you want to apply to your business every day. Why the coalition, why, you know, take these concepts out to a broader audience, including either your, your competition and the broader industry to say, Hey, we, as a group need to put a stamp of approval on these concepts, these values, these principles. >>So first I think we, we want, um, everybody to realize that we are all talking about the same things, the same concepts. I think we were all from our own different vantage point, realizing that things after change, and again, back to, you know, whether it's value stream management or site reliability engineering, or biz ops, we're all kind of using slightly different languages. Um, and so I think one of the important aspects of BizOps is for us, all of us, whether we're talking about, you know, consulting agile transformation experts, uh, whether we're talking about vendors, right, provides kind of tools and technologies or these large enterprises to transform for all of us to basically have kind of a reference that lets us speak around kind of, um, in a much more consistent way. The second aspect is for, to me is for, um, DS concepts to start to be embraced, not just by us or trying, or, you know, vendors, um, system integrators, consulting firms, educators, thought leaders, but also for some of our old customers to start to become evangelists of their own in the industry. >>So we, our, our objective with the coalition needs to be pretty, pretty broad. Um, and our hope is by, by starting to basically educate, um, our, our joint customers or partners, that we can start to really foster these behaviors and start to really change some of dynamics. So we're very pleased at if you look at, uh, some of the companies which have joined the, the, the, the manifesto. Um, so we have vendors such as desktop or advance, or, um, uh, PagerDuty for instance, or even planned view, uh, one of my direct competitors, um, but also thought leaders like Tom Davenport or, uh, or cap Gemini or, um, um, smaller firms like, uh, business agility, institutes, or agility elf. Um, and so our goal really is to start to bring together, uh, fall years, people would have been LP, large organizations, do digital transformation vendors. We're providing the technologies that many of these organizations use to deliver on this digital preservation and for all of us to start to provide the kind of, uh, education support and tools that the industry needs. Yeah, >>That's great surge. And, uh, you know, congratulations to you and the team. I know this has been going on for a while, putting all this together, getting people to sign onto the manifesto, putting the coalition together, and finally today getting to unveil it to the world in, in a little bit more of a public, uh, opportunity. So again, you know, really good values, really simple principles, something that, that, uh, shouldn't have to be written down, but it's nice cause it is, and now you can print it out and stick it on your wall. So thank you for, uh, for sharing this story and again, congrats to you and the team. >>Thank you. Thanks, Jeff. Appreciate it. >>Oh, my pleasure. Alrighty, surge. If you want to learn more about the BizOps manifest to go to biz ops manifesto.org, read it and you can sign it and you can stay here for more coverage. I'm the cube of the biz ops manifesto unveiled. Thanks for watching. See you next >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of this ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by bill. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody Jeffrey here with the cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz ops manifesto unveiling. It's been in the works for awhile, but today's the day that it actually kind of come out to the, to the public. And we're excited to have a real industry luminary here to talk about what's going on, why this is important and share his perspective. And we're happy to have from Cape Cod, I believe is Tom Davenport. He is a distinguished author and professor at Babson college. We could go on, he's got a lot of great titles and, and really illuminary in the area of big data and analytics Thomas. Great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Happy to be here with you. >>Great. So let's just jump into it, you know, and getting ready for this. I came across your LinkedIn posts. I think you did earlier this summer in June and right off the bat, the first sentence just grabbed my attention. I'm always interested in new attempts to address longterm issues, uh, in how technology works within businesses, biz ops. What did you see in biz ops, uh, that, that kind of addresses one of these really big longterm problems? >>Well, yeah, but the longterm problem is that we've had a poor connection between business people and it people between business objectives and the, it solutions that address them. This has been going on, I think since the beginning of information technology and sadly it hasn't gone away. And so biz ops is a new attempt to deal with that issue with, you know, a new framework, eventually a broad set of solutions that increase the likelihood that we'll actually solve a business problem with an it capability. >>Right. You know, it's interesting to compare it with like dev ops, which I think a lot of people are probably familiar with, which was, you know, built around, uh, agile software development and a theory that we want to embrace change that that changes. Okay. Uh, and we want to be able to iterate quickly and incorporate that. And that's been happening in the software world for, for 20 plus years. What's taken so long to get that to the business side, because as the pace of change has changed on the software side, you know, that's a strategic issue in terms of execution on the business side that they need now to change priorities. And, you know, there's no PRDs and MRDs and big, giant strategic plans that sit on the shelf for five years. That's just not the way business works anymore. It took a long time to get here. >>Yeah, it did. And you know, there have been previous attempts to make a better connection between business and it, there was the so called alignment framework that a couple of friends of mine from Boston university developed, I think more than 20 years ago, but you know, now we have better technology for creating that linkage. And the, you know, the idea of kind of ops oriented frameworks is pretty pervasive now. So I think it's time for another serious attempt at it. Right. >>And do you think doing it this way, right. With the, with the biz ops coalition, you know, getting a collection of, of, of kind of likeminded individuals and companies together, and actually even having a manifesto, which we're making this declarative statement of, of principles and values, you think that's what it takes to kind of drive this kind of beyond the experiment and actually, you know, get it done and really start to see some results in, in, uh, in production in the field. >>I think certainly, um, no one vendor organization can pull this off single handedly. It does require a number of organizations collaborating and working together. So I think our coalition is a good idea and a manifesto is just a good way to kind of lay out what you see as the key principles of the idea. And that makes it much easier for everybody to understand and act on. >>I think it's just, it's really interesting having, you know, having them written down on paper and having it just be so clearly articulated both in terms of the, of the values as well as, as the, uh, the principles and the values, you know, business outcomes matter trust and collaboration, data driven decisions, which is the number three or four, and then learn, respond and pivot. It doesn't seem like those should have to be spelled out so clearly, but, but obviously it helps to have them there. You can stick them on the wall and kind of remember what your priorities are, but you're the data guy. You're the analytics guy, uh, and a big piece of this is data and analytics and moving to data-driven decisions. And principle number seven says, you know, today's organizations generate more data than humans can process and informed decisions can be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence right up your alley. You know, you've talked a number of times on kind of the mini stages of analytics. Um, and how has that's evolved over, over time, you know, as you think of analytics and machine learning, driving decisions beyond supporting decisions, but actually starting to make decisions in machine time. What's that, what's that thing for you? What does that make you, you know, start to think, wow, this is, this is going to be pretty significant. >>Yeah. Well, you know, this has been a longterm interest of mine. Um, the last generation of AI, I was very interested in expert systems. And then, um, I think, uh, more than 10 years ago, I wrote an article about automated decision-making using what was available then, which was rule-based approaches. Um, but you know, this addresses an issue that we've always had with analytics and AI. Um, you know, we, we tended to refer to those things as providing decision support. The problem is that if the decision maker didn't want their support, didn't want to use them in order to make a decision, they didn't provide any value. And so the nice thing about automating decisions, um, with now contemporary AI tools is that we can ensure that data and analytics get brought into the decision without any possible disconnection. Now, I think humans still have something to add here, and we often will need to examine how that decision is being made and maybe even have the ability to override it. But in general, I think at least for, you know, repetitive tactical decisions, um, involving a lot of data, we want most of those, I think to be at least recommended if not totally made by an algorithm or an AI based system, and that I believe would add to the quality and the precision and the accuracy of decisions and in most organizations, >>No, I think, I think you just answered my next question before I, before Hey, asked it, you know, we had dr. Robert Gates on a former secretary of defense on a few years back, and we were talking about machines and machines making decisions. And he said at that time, you know, the only weapon systems, uh, that actually had an automated trigger on it were on the North Korea and South Korea border. Um, everything else, as you said, had to go through a sub person before the final decision was made. And my question is, you know, what are kind of the attributes of the decision that enable us to more easily automated? And then how do you see that kind of morphing over time, both as the data to support that as well as our comfort level, um, enables us to turn more and more actual decisions over to the machine? >>Well, yeah, it's suggested we need, um, data and, um, the data that we have to kind of train our models has to be high quality and current. And we, we need to know the outcomes of that data. You know, um, most machine learning models, at least in business are supervised. And that means we need to have labeled outcomes in the, in the training data. But I, you know, um, the pandemic that we're living through is a good illustration of the fact that, that the data also have to be reflective of current reality. And, you know, one of the things that we're finding out quite frequently these days is that, um, the data that we have do not reflect, you know, what it's like to do business in a pandemic. Um, I wrote a little piece about this recently with Jeff cam at wake forest university, we called it data science quarantined, and we interviewed with somebody who said, you know, it's amazing what eight weeks of zeros will do to your demand forecast. We just don't really know what happens in a pandemic. Um, our models maybe have to be put on the shelf for a little while and until we can develop some new ones or we can get some other guidelines into making decisions. So I think that's one of the key things with automated decision making. We have to make sure that the data from the past and that's all we have of course, is a good guide to, you know, what's happening in the present and the future as far as we understand it. Yeah. >>I used to joke when we started this calendar year 2020, it was finally the year that we know everything with the benefit of hindsight, but it turned out 20, 20 a year. We found out we actually know nothing and everything thought we knew, but I wanna, I wanna follow up on that because you know, it did suddenly change everything, right? We got this light switch moment. Everybody's working from home now we're many, many months into it, and it's going to continue for a while. I saw your interview with Bernard Marr and you had a really interesting comment that now we have to deal with this change. We don't have a lot of data and you talked about hold fold or double down. And, and I can't think of a more, you know, kind of appropriate metaphor for driving the value of the BizOps when now your whole portfolio strategy, um, these to really be questioned and, and, you know, you have to be really, uh, well, uh, executing on what you are, holding, what you're folding and what you're doubling down with this completely new environment. >>Well, yeah, and I hope I did this in the interview. I would like to say that I came up with that term, but it actually came from a friend of mine. Who's a senior executive at Genpact. And, um, I, um, used it mostly to talk about AI and AI applications, but I think you could, you could use it much more broadly to talk about your entire sort of portfolio of digital projects. You need to think about, well, um, given some constraints on resources and a difficult economy for a while, which of our projects do we want to keep going on pretty much the way we were and which ones are not that necessary anymore? You see a lot of that in AI, because we had so many pilots, somebody told me, you know, we've got more pilots around here than O'Hare airport and AI. Um, and then, but the ones that involve double down they're even more important to you. They are, you know, a lot of organizations have found this out in the pandemic, on digital projects. It's more and more important for customers to be able to interact with you, um, digitally. And so you certainly wouldn't want to, um, cancel those projects or put them on hold. So you double down on them and get them done faster and better. >>Right, right. Uh, another, another thing that came up in my research that you quoted, um, was, was from Jeff Bezos, talking about the great bulk of what we do is quietly, but meaningfully improving core operations. You know, I think that is so core to this concept of not AI and machine learning and kind of the general sense, which, which gets way too much buzz, but really applied right. Applied to a specific problem. And that's where you start to see the value. And, you know, the, the BizOps, uh, manifesto is, is, is calling it out in this particular process. But I'd love to get your perspective as you know, you speak generally about this topic all the time, but how people should really be thinking about where are the applications where I can apply this technology to get direct business value. >>Yeah, well, you know, even talking about automated decisions, um, uh, the kind of once in a lifetime decisions, uh, the ones that, um, ag Lafley, the former CEO of Procter and gamble used to call the big swing decisions. You only get a few of those. He said in your tenure as CEO, those are probably not going to be the ones that you're automating in part because, um, you don't have much data about them. You're only making them a few times and in part, because, um, they really require that big picture thinking and the ability to kind of anticipate the future, that the best human decision makers, um, have. Um, but, um, in general, I think where they are, the projects that are working well are, you know, when I call the low hanging fruit ones, the, some people even report to it referred to it as boring AI. >>So, you know, sucking data out of a contract in order to compare it to a bill of lading for what arrived at your supply chain companies can save or make a lot of money with that kind of comparison. It's not the most exciting thing, but AI, as you suggested is really good at those narrow kinds of tasks. It's not so good at the, at the really big moonshots, like curing cancer or, you know, figuring out well what's the best stock or bond under all circumstances or even autonomous vehicles. Um, we, we made some great progress in that area, but everybody seems to agree that they're not going to be perfect for quite a while. And we really don't want to be driving around on them very much unless they're, you know, good and all kinds of weather and with all kinds of pedestrian traffic and you know, that sort of thing, right? That's funny you bring up contract management. >>I had a buddy years ago, they had a startup around contract management and was like, and this was way before we had the compute power today and cloud proliferation. I said, you know, how, how can you possibly build software around contract management? It's language, it's legal, ease. It's very specific. And he's like, Jeff, we just need to know where's the contract. And when does it expire? And who's the signatory. And he built a business on those, you know, very simple little facts that weren't being covered because their contracts contractor in people's drawers and files and homes, and Lord only knows. So it's really interesting, as you said, these kind of low hanging fruit opportunities where you can extract a lot of business value without trying to, you know, boil the ocean. >>Yeah. I mean, if you're Amazon, um, uh, Jeff Bezos thinks it's important to have some kind of billion dollar projects. And he even says it's important to have a billion dollar failure or two every year. But I think most organizations probably are better off being a little less aggressive and, you know, sticking to, um, what AI has been doing for a long time, which is, you know, making smarter decisions based on, based on data. >>Right? So Tom, I want to shift gears one more time before, before we let you go on on kind of a new topic for you, not really new, but you know, not, not a, the vast majority of, of your publications and that's the new way to work, you know, as, as the pandemic hit in mid March, right. And we had this light switch moment, everybody had to work from home and it was, you know, kind of crisis and get everybody set up. Well, you know, now we're five months, six months, seven months. A number of companies have said that people are not going to be going back to work for a while. And so we're going to continue on this for a while. And then even when it's not what it is now, it's not going to be what it was before. So, you know, I wonder, and I know you, you, uh, you teased, you're working on a new book, you know, some of your thoughts on, you know, kind of this new way to work and, and the human factors in this new, this new kind of reality that we're kind of evolving into, I guess. >>Yeah. I missed was an interest of mine. I think, um, back in the nineties, I wrote an article called, um, a coauthored, an article called two cheers for the virtual office. And, you know, it was just starting to emerge. Then some people were very excited about it. Some people were skeptical and, uh, we said two cheers rather than three cheers because clearly there's some shortcomings. And, you know, I keep seeing these pop up. It's great that we can work from our homes. It's great that we can accomplish most of what we need to do with a digital interface, but, um, you know, things like innovation and creativity and certainly, um, uh, a good, um, happy social life kind of requires some face to face contact every now and then. And so I, you know, I think we'll go back to an environment where there is some of that. >>Um, we'll have, um, times when people convene in one place so they can get to know each other face to face and learn from each other that way. And most of the time, I think it's a huge waste of people's time to commute into the office every day and to jump on airplanes, to, to, um, give every little, um, uh, sales call or give every little presentation. Uh, we just have to really narrow down what are the circumstances where face to face contact really matters. And when can we get by with, with digital, you know, I think one of the things in my current work I'm finding is that even when you have AI based decision making, you really need a good platform in which that all takes place. So in addition to these virtual platforms, we need to develop platforms that kind of structure the workflow for us and tell us what we should be doing next, then make automated decisions when necessary. And I think that ultimately is a big part of biz ops as well. It's not just the intelligence of an AI system, but it's the flow of work that kind of keeps things moving smoothly throughout your organization. >>Yeah. I think such, such a huge opportunity as you just said, cause I forget the stats on how often we're interrupted with notifications between email texts, Slack, a sauna, Salesforce, the list goes on and on. So, you know, to put an AI layer between the person and all these systems that are begging for attention, and you've written a book on the attention economy, which is a whole nother topic, we'll say for another day, you know, it really begs, it really begs for some assistance because you know, you just can't get him picked, you know, every two minutes and really get quality work done. It's just not, it's just not realistic. And you know what? I don't think that's a feature that we're looking for. I agree. Totally. Alright, Tom. Well, thank you so much for your time. Really enjoyed the conversation. I gotta dig into the library. It's very long. So I might start at the attention economy. I haven't read that one in to me. I think that's the fascinating thing in which we're living. So thank you for your time and, uh, great to see you. >>My pleasure, Jeff. Great to be here. >>All right. Take care. Alright. He's Tom I'm Jeff. You are watching the continuing coverage of the biz ops manifesto and Vale. Thanks for watching the cube. We'll see you next time.

>>Around the globe presenting accelerating automation with Deb brought to you by Cisco >>We're back. This is Dave Vellante and TKK Anini is here. He's a distinguished engineer at Cisco TK, my friend. Good to see you again. >>How are you? >>Good. I mean, you and I were in Barcelona in January and, you know, we knew we saw this thing coming, but we didn't see it coming this way. Did we? >>No, that no one did, but yeah, it, uh, that was right before everything happened. >>Well, it's weird. Right? I mean, we were, you know, we, we, it was in the back of our minds in January, we sort of had Barcelona's hasn't really been hit yet. It looked like it was really isolated in China, but, uh, but wow, what a change and I guess, I guess I'd say I'd start with the, we're seeing really a secular change in, in your space and security identity, access management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden these things have exploded as the work from home pivot has occurred. Uh, and, and it feels like these changes are permanent or semi-permanent what are you seeing out there? >>Yeah, I don't, I don't think anybody thinks the world's going to go back the way it was. Um, to some degree it's, it's changed forever. Um, you know, I, I, I do a lot of my work remotely. Um, and, and so, you know, being a remote worker, isn't such a big deal for me, but for some, it was a huge impact. And like I said, you know, um, remote work, remote education, you know, everybody's on the opposite side of a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect. And the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. >>Yeah. And when you see that, you know, that work from home pivot, I mean, you know, our estimates are, are along with our partner DTR about 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to COVID and now it's, you know, North of 70% plus, and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next, next six months. We'll see what happens with the fall surge, but what people essentially accept, expect that to, you know, at least double that 16%, you know, going forward indefinitely. So what does that, what kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and how, how organizations are approaching security? >>Yeah, I just think, uh, from a mindset standpoint, you know, what was optional, uh, maybe, um, last year, uh, is no longer optional and I don't think it's going to go back. Um, I think, I think a lot of people, uh, have changed the way, you know, they live and the way they work. Um, and they're doing it in ways, hopefully that, you know, in some cases, uh, yield more productivity, um, again, um, you know, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is it frankly works just as well for the bad guys. And so that's, that's the balance we need to keep, which is we need to be extra diligent, uh, on how we go about securing infrastructure, uh, how we go about securing even our social channels, because remember all our social channels now are digital. So that's, that's become the new norm. >>No, you've helped me understand over the years. I remember a line you shared with me in the cube one time is that the adversary is highly capable, is sort of the phrase that you used. And, and essentially the way you describe it, as you know, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease their, the bad guy's return on investment, you know, increase their costs, increase the numerator. But as, as work shifts from home, I'm in my house, you know, my wifi in my, you know, router with my dog's name is the password. You know, it's much, much harder for me to, to increase that denominator at home. So can you help? >>Yeah. I mean, it's, it is, it is truly, um, when you think, when you get into the mind of the adversary and, and, uh, you know, the cyber crime out there, they're honestly just like any other business they're trying to, you know, operate with high margin. And so if you can get there, if you can get in there and erode their margin, they'll frankly go find something else to do. Um, and, and again, you know, you know, the shift we experience day to day is it's not just our kids are online in school and, uh, our work is online, but all the groceries we order, um, you know, this Thanksgiving and holiday season, uh, a lot more online shopping is going to take place. So, you know, everything's gone digital. And so the question is, you know, how, how do we up our game there so that, um, we can go about our business, uh, effectively and make it very expensive for the adversary to operate, uh, and take care of their business. Cause it's nasty stuff. >>I want to ask you about automation, you know, generally, and then specifically how it applies to security. So we, I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyperscalers and of course they really attacked the it labor problem. We learned a lot from that and an it organizations have applied much of that thinking. And the it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace, the technology scales today, how does that apply to security and specifically, how is automation affecting a security? >>Yeah, it's, it's, it's the topic these days. Um, you know, businesses, I think, realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like AI and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand, uh, and operate at machine scale. Now, I mean that for, for businesses, I mean that for, you know, education and everything else now, so are the adversaries, right? So it's expensive for them to operate at Cuban scale and they are going to machine scale, going to machine scale, uh, a necessity is that you're going to have to harness some level of automation, have the machines, uh, work on your behalf, have the machines carry your intent. Um, and when you do that, um, you can do it safely or you could do it dangerously. And that that's really kind of your choice. Um, you know, just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should, um, you, you wanna make sure that frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's, it's a tricky thing because, you know, if when you take the phrase, you know, uh, how do we, how do we automate security? Well, you actually have to take care of, of securing the automation first. >>Yeah. We talked about this in Barcelona, where you were explaining that, you know, the, the bad guys, the adversaries are essentially, you know, weaponizing using your own tooling, which makes them appear safe because it's, they're hiding in plain sight, right? >>Yeah. Well, there's, they're clever, uh, giving them that, um, you know, there's this phrase that they, they always talk about called living off the land. Um, there's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools and, uh, and being detective, you know, if they can use the tools that's already there, then they have, uh, a higher degree of, of evading, uh, your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob, who's already been credentialed and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not marked as the adversary. So again, you know, having the detection methods available to find their behavioral anomalies and things like that become a paramount, but it also you having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to, you know, minimize their effectiveness, um, without it, I mean, ideally without human interaction, cause you, you just, can you move faster, you move quicker. Um, and I see that with an asterisk because, um, if done wrong, frankly, um, you're just making their job more effective. >>I wonder if we could talk about the market a little bit, uh, it's I'm in the security space, cybersecurity 80 plus billion, which by the way, is just a little infant testable component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that, that massive, uh, GDP, but guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them, what's your, what's your biggest challenge? They'll say lack of talent. And, and so what this chart shows is from ETR, our, our, our survey partner and on the vertical axis is net score. And that's an indication of spending momentum on the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence, a pervasiveness, if you will, inside the data sets. And so there's a couple of key points here. I wanted to put forth to our audience and then get your reactions. >>So you can see Cisco, I highlighted in red Cisco's business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter. It's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the, on the conference call. And so you can see on the horizontal axis, you've got a big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere, but you're right there, uh, in that, in that dataset. And then you've got for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. But the other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here. And that just adds to the complexity. This is of course only a subset of what's in the security space. You know, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is how can Cisco help simplify this picture? Is it automation? Is it, you know, you guys have done some really interesting tuck in acquisitions and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left there it's, um, I had a customer tell me once that, you know, I, I came to this trade show looking for transportation and these people are trying to sell me car parts. Um, that's the frustration customers have, you know, and I think what Cisco has done really well is to really focus on outcomes. Um, what is the customer outcome? Cause ultimately that's, that is what the customer wants. You know, there might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closest you can closer, you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think, I think security in general has just year over year been just written with, um, you need to be an expert. Um, you need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself. And I think, I think those days are behind us, but particularly as, as security becomes more pervasive and we're, you know, we're selling to the business, we're not selling to the, you know, t-shirt wearing hacker anymore. >>Yeah. So, well, well, how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about cloud people that God put my data in the cloud I'm safe, but you know, of course we know it's a shared responsibility model. So I'm interested in your, your thoughts on that. Is it really, is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way, say, Oh, the state of security is great in the cloud. Whereas many of us out there saying, wow, it's, it's not so great. Uh, so what, what are your thoughts on that, that whole narrative and what Cisco's play in cloud? >>I think cloud, um, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern, which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible. Um, you know, no data center required, no distract required, you just get storage, you know, it's, it's, it's all of those things that are again, closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud two is it's really been, it's really punctuated the way we go about building systems. Um, again at machine scale. So, you know, before, when I write code and I think about, Oh, what computers are gonna run on or, you know, what servers are going to is you're going to run on those. Those thoughts never crossed my mind anymore. You know, I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do and the machines then figure it out. So, you know, for instance, on Tuesday, if the entire internet shows up, uh, the, the system works without fail. And if on Wednesday, if only North America shows up, you know, so, but, but, but there's no way you could staff that, right. There's just no human scale approach that gets you there. And that's, that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff is, um, it really is, uh, the next level of how we do computer science. >>So you're talking about infrastructure as code and that applies to security as code. That's what, you know, dev net is really all about. I've said many times, I think Cisco of the, the large established enterprise companies is one of the few, if not the only, that really has figured out, you know, that developer angle, because it's practical, you're not trying to force your way into developers, but, you know, I wonder if you could, you could talk a little bit about that trend and where you see it going. >>Yeah, no, that is, that is truly the trend. Every time I walk into dev net, um, the big halls at Cisco live, it is Cisco as code. Um, everything about Cisco is being presented through an API. It is automation ready. And, and frankly, that is, um, that is the, the love language of cloud. Um, it's, it's machines, it's the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So, uh, you know, it is the, the, uh, I think, I think necessary, maybe not sufficient but necessary for, um, you know, doing all the machine scale stuff. What what's also necessary, uh, is to, um, to secure if infrastructure is code therefore, um, what, what secure, uh, what security methodologies do we have today that we use to secure code? While we, we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, right? Those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So then when I, when I talk about how do you do, uh, automation securely, you do it the same way you secure your code, you test it, you, you threaten model, you, you, you say, you know, can my adversary, uh, exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intend it to go. Um, so all of those practices apply. It's just, everything is code these days. >>I've often said that security and privacy are sort of two sides of the same coin. And I want to ask you a question and it's really, you know, to me, it's not necessarily Cisco and company like companies like Cisco's responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you can help. And of course, there's this Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma. I don't know if you have a chance to see it, but basically dramatizes the way in which companies are appropriating our data to sell us ads and, you know, creating our own little set of facts, et cetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy and admin. It's good from the standpoint of awareness, you know, you may or may not care if you're a social media user. I love tick-tock, I don't care, but, but, but they, they sort of laid out. This is pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that and you'll consist go play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy. I mean, beyond GDPR and California, consumer privacy act, um, what do you think? >>Yeah. Um, uh, I'll give you my, you know, my humble opinion is you, you fix social problems with social tools, you fixed technology problems with technology tools. Um, I think there is a social problem, um, uh, that needs to be rectified the, you know, um, we, we, weren't built as human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. It's just pretty wrong. So yeah, that, that, that, um, that series that really kind of wake up a lot of people it is, is, you know, it's probably every day I hear somebody asked me if I saw it. Um, but I do think it also, you know, with that level of awareness, I think we, we overcome it or we compensate by what number one, just being aware that it's happening. Um, number two, you know, how you go about solving it, I think maybe come down to an individual or even a community's, um, solution and what might be right for one community might be, you know, not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >>Yeah. So it's, it's, it's almost, I think if I could, you know, play back, what I heard is, is yeah. Technology, you know, maybe got us into this problem, but technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic AI bot is going to solve this. It's got to be, you know, society has to really, really take this on as your, your premise. >>When I, when I first started, um, playing online games, I'm going back to the text based adventure stuff, like muds and moves. I did a talk at, at MIT one time and, um, this old curmudgeon in the back of the room, um, we were talking about democracy and we were talking about, you know, the social processes that we had modeled in our game and this and that. And this guy just gave us the SmackDown. He basically walked up to the front of the room and said, you know, all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes. He says, democracy is a completely the opposite, which is you need to sleep on it. In fact, you shouldn't be scared if somebody can decide in a minute, what is good for the community? It is two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community. So it almost has the opposite dynamic. And that was super interesting to me. >>That's really interesting, you know, you read the, like the, the Lincoln historians and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long, you know, to make certain decisions, but, you know, ultimately when he acted acted with, with confidence. Um, so to that point, but, um, so what, what else are you working on these days that, uh, that are, that is interesting that maybe you want to share with our audience? Anything that's really super exciting for you or you, >>Yeah. You know, generally speaking, I'm trying to try and make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's a general theme making it simpler for the common person to use, uh, tools. Um, again, you know, it, all of these security tools, no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity, it's that we're moving the complexity away from the user so that they can thrive at human scale. And we can do things at machine scale and kind of working those two together is, is sort of the, the magic recipe is, is not easy, but, um, but it is, it is fun. So that's, that's what keeps me engaged. I'm definitely >>Seeing, I wonder if you see it as just sort of a, obviously a heightened organization awareness, but I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. You know, the, you know, it used to be a sec ops team and an Island. Okay, it's your problem? You know, the, the, the CSO cannot report into the, to the CIO because that's like the Fox in the hen house, a lot of those structures are, are, are changing. It seems, and be becoming this responsibility is coming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there and what are you? >>Yeah, no, and it's so familiar to me because, you know, um, I started out as a musician. So, you know, bands bands are a great analogy. You know, you play bass, I big guitar. You know, somebody else plays drums, everybody knows their role and you create something that's larger than, you know, the sum of all parts. And so that, that analogy I think, is coming to, you know, we, we saw it sort of with dev ops where, you know, the developer, doesn't just throw their coat over the wall and it's somebody else's problem. They move together as a band. And, and that's what I think, um, organizations are seeing is that, you know, why, why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business? Not just here's the product and here's the rest of the business. That's, that's, that's pretty awesome. Um, I think, uh, we see a lot of those patterns, uh, particularly for the highly high performance businesses. >>You know, in fact, it's interesting you for great analogy, by the way. And you actually see in that within Cisco, you're seeing sort of a, and I know sometimes you guys don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you've got a leadership structure now. I I've talked to many of them. They seem to really be more focused on how they're connect, connecting, you know, across organizations. And it's increasingly critical in this world of, you know, of silo busters, isn't it? >>Yeah, no, I mean, you almost, as, as you move further and further away, you know, you can see how ridiculous it was before it would be like acquiring a band and say, okay, all your guitar players go over here. All your bass Blair is over there. I'm like what happened to the band? So that's, that's what I'm talking about is, you know, moving all of those disciplines, moving together, um, and servicing the same backlog and, and, and achieving the same successes together is just so awesome. >>Well, I always, I always feel better after talking to you. You know, I remember I remember art. Coviello used to put out his, his letter every year and I was reading. I'd get depressed. We spend all this money now we're less secure. But when I talked to you TK, I feel like much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on the cube. It's, it's awesome to have you as a guest. >>I love these, I love >>Things. Thanks for inviting me and I miss you. I, you know, hopefully, you know, next year we can get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird. Uh, like the sign says to get Kenny, thanks so much for coming to the queue. We, uh, we really appreciate it. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante. We break back with our next guest, this short break.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube presenting, accelerating automation with dev net brought to you by Cisco, >>Everybody Jeffery here with the Q we're in our Palo Alto studio with ongoing coverage of Cisco dev net create we've been covering dev net create for a number of years. I think since the very first show and Susie, we and the team really built, uh, a practice built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and getting devs 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, and developing solutions and, you know, using brain power. That's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have, uh, our next guest, uh, a partner for someone is Brad Hoss. He is the engineering director for dev ops at Presidio, Brad. Great to see you. >>Hey Jeff, great to be here, >>Julie and joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect for Cisco dev net partners, and he has been driving a whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Great to be here and looking forward to this conversation. >>So let's, let's start with you Chuck, because I think, um, you know, you're leading this kind of partner effort and, 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 defined everything right. Has been taking over, especially with, with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the customer program ability customability in software and Mo 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 to 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 dev net where we're, we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of our Cisco platforms, most of Cisco's business is transacted through partners. And what we hear from our customers and our partners is they want to, our customers want a way 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 want to automate that. How can I find a partner to, to get there? And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices going along this step, in that journey with us for the last six years, they really want to say, Hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and give an edge to my customers to show them that, yes, I have these capabilities. I've built a business practice. I have technology, I have technologists that really understand this capability and they have the double net certifications to prove it, help me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what our Danette partner specialization is all about. Right. >>It's great. And Brad, you're certainly one of those partners and I want to get your perspective because partners are oftentimes a little bit closer to the customer cause you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions and just reflect on, we know what happened, uh, back in March 15th, when basically everybody was told to go home and you can't go to work. So, you know, there's all the memes and social media about who, you know, who pushed forward your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO, or COVID. And we all know what the answer is, whatever you can share some information as to 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's the customer attitudes kind of changed now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment and really we need to put in place some foundation to carry forward for a very long time, potentially. >>Yeah, it's really quite interesting actually, you know, when code first hit, we got a lot of requests to help with automation of provisioning, our customers and the whole digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there. And I'd say it became more of, of the workplace transformation. So we were quickly, uh, you know, migrating customers to, you know, new typologies where instead of the, the, you know, users sitting in those offices, they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly in, uh, we, we didn't have a lot of success there in those beginning months with, you know, using automation and programmability, um, building, you know, provisioning portals for our customers to get up and running really fast. Um, and that, that was what it looked like in those early days. And then over time, I'd say that 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 offices 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 conference rooms. Um, are there, uh, are there, um, situations where I can use that information? Like how many people are in the building in a, 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 have really changed in, in, in ways that you couldn't have imagined before March. Right. >>Right. And I wonder with, with you Chuck, in terms of the Cisco point of view, I mean, the network is amazing. It had had, COVID 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, as 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, dev net with, with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space as good as space as you could be given 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, uh, for myself, I've, I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years, this is, you know, the, the change to the normalcy is I never get on a plane anymore, but my day to day functions are still the same. And it's built because of the capabilities that we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry, as far as kind of moving to that application type of economy, as we go to microservices, 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 COVID situation. And I think it's helped to, to justify the investments that our customers have made, as well as what our partners have been, being able to do to deliver on that multicloud capability, to take those applications, get them closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable to, to users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional four walls. >>Right. Right. It's interesting that Brad, you, you made a comment on another interview. I was watching getting ready for this one in terms of, uh, 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, I really it's the infrastructure that responds back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of, of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that apps first is the way to go, because that gives people a competitive advantage, that it gives them the ability to react in the marketplace and to innovate and move faster. So, you know, it's, 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, no doubt. And, you know, I think that the whole push to cloud was really interesting in the early days, it was like, Hey, we're going to change our applications to be cloud first. You know? And then I think the terminology changed over time, um, to more cloud native. So when we, when we look at what cloud has done over the past five years with customers moving, you know, their, 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 place to host >>Your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're, we're no longer talking about the assets per se. We're talking about the applications and what, what do those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now, especially with the whole move to cloud native and microservices in the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure as code. You're now able to bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application, as infrastructure, as code the application in the definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are, all are wrapped together and you've got change 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 Terraform or Ansible, whatever that might be, whatever method or tool that you're using to, to bring it all together. >>It's, it's, you know, it's really interesting now, I think, I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than, you know, those early days of SDN, uh we're out, you know, it was, was it a controller or is it the new version of SNMP? You know, now it makes sense it's actually something tangible. >>Right, right. But still check, as you said, right. There's still a lot of API APIs 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, that have to fit together. You know, we cover PagerDuty summit and you know, their whole thing is trying to find out where the, where the problems are within the very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandoned their shopping cart or whatever the particular application. 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 said the bandwidth that's necessary in order to support everybody working from home to support this video conference. I mean, we, 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 up >>The ability to do that automatic provisional provisioning. Now that we're in microservices now that everything is cloud native, we have the ability to better, to better adjust to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we can very quickly spend something up to take that load off where, you know, 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 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 made, as far as 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 API is from the infrastructure. And then the ability to tie that into other systems like an IP address management or a change control, or a trouble ticketing system, that whole idea of I made an infrastructure change. And now I can automatically do that documentation update and 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 operate. >>Right. Right, right. So I want to get your take on the other >>Hybrid cloud, multi cloud >>Public cloud. You know, as, as I think you said Brad, when public cloud first came out, there was kind of this, this rush into, we're going to throw everything in there then for, for, for different reasons. People decided maybe that's not the best, the best solution, but really it's horses for courses. Right. And, and I think it was pretty interesting that, that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're going to 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 initial dev and, and, and Amazon. And then when I go into production, maybe I want to move it into my data center. And then maybe I'm having a big promotion or something I want to flex capability. So from, from your perspective and helping customers work through this, cause still, there's a lot of opinions about what is multicloud, 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 there's still kind of bumbling down, bumbling down paths, 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, >>Yeah. No doubt. It is still early days. And you know, I, I, I go back to it being application centric because you know, being able to 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 and 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 >>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 resources, wherever they are, can be defined in that infrastructure as code and automation. But you know, the side 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 too. Like we've got streaming telemetry in the ability to gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before, or at least in the, in, 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, uh, something from the Hobbit right now. >>You've got things coming up and spinning and spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place. And that thing you used to know what that was. Now, you have to quickly figure out where it went. So the observability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody should be paying attention to attention, to moving forward with regards to when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers or, you know, in your premise, I'm breaking that into microservices. You really need to understand what's going on in the, you know, programmability and API APIs and, you know, yang models are tied into streaming telemetry. Now there's just so many great 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 dev net path, they're learning these data structures and being 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 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. Check. I want to shift gears a little bit. Cause there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about, about Deb, not really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco, um, as, as really more of a software, a software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you can put a little more color on that. Um, because clearly as you said, partners are super important. It's your primary go to market and, and Presidios, 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 non traditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner that suddenly you guys are playing with because of really the software lead. >>Yeah. Jeff that's exactly right. So as we've been >>Talking to folks with dev nets and whether it'd be at one of the Cisco live events in the dev net zone or at the prior dev net create events, we'll have, we'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views us 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 resell market. This, what we're doing with the dev net specialization gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem, share them with our extremely large dev net 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 a con into a scenario where it's working with a 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, go to markets where, so they can 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 and a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion. >>That's terrific. Well, again, it's a, it's, it's unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the, the Cisco DevNet shows, you know, they're still small, they're still intimate. There's still a lot of, uh, 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, in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together. I hope maybe, maybe for next year's event, but, uh, thank you very much for stopping by and sharing the information. Really appreciate it. Happy to be here. All right. Thanks a lot. That's Brad and Chuck. I'm Jeff. You're watching Cisco dev net live coverage on the cube. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>>welcome to our session on security titled Securing Your Cloud. Everywhere With Me is Brian Langston, senior solutions engineer from Miranda's, who leads security initiatives from Renta's most security conscious customers. Our topic today is security, and we're setting the bar high by talking in some depth about the requirements of the most highly regulated industries. So, Brian four Regulated industries What do you perceive as the benefits of evolution from classic infra za service to container orchestration? >>Yeah, the adoption of container orchestration has given rise to five key benefits. The first is accountability. Think about the evolution of Dev ops and the security focused version of that team. Deb. SEC ops. These two competencies have emerged to provide, among other things, accountability for the processes they oversee. The outputs that they enable. The second benefit is audit ability. Logging has always been around, but the pervasiveness of logging data within container or container environments allows for the definition of audit trails in new and interesting ways. The third area is transparency organizations that have well developed container orchestration pipelines are much more likely to have a higher degree of transparency in their processes. This helps development teams move faster. It helped operations teams operations teams identify and resolve issues easier and help simplify the observation and certification of security operations by security organizations. Next is quality. Several decades ago, Toyota revolutionized the manufacturing industry when they implemented the philosophy of continuous improvement. Included within that philosophy was this dependency and trust in the process as the process was improved so that the quality of the output Similarly, the refinement of the process of container orchestration yields ah, higher quality output. The four things have mentioned ultimately points to a natural outcome, which is speed when you don't have to spend so much time wondering who does what or who did what. When you have the clear visibility to your processes and because you can continuously improve the quality of your work, you aren't wasting time in a process that produces defects or spending time and wasteful rework phases. You can move much faster than we've seen this to be the case with our customers. >>So what is it specifically about? Container orchestration that gives these benefits, I guess. I guess I'm really asking why are these benefits emerging now around these technologies? What's enabling them, >>right? So I think it boils down to four things related to the orchestration pipelines that are also critical components. Two successful security programs for our customers and related industry. The first one is policy. One of the core concepts and container orchestration is this idea of declaring what you want to happen or declaring the way you want things done? One place where declarations air made our policies. So as long as we can define what we want to happen, it's much easier to do complementary activities like enforcement, which is our second enabler. Um, tools that allow you to define a policy typically have a way to enforce that policy. Where this isn't the case, you need to have a way of enforcing and validating the policies objectives. Miranda's tools allow custom policies to be written and also enforce those policies. The third enabler is the idea of a baseline. Having a well documented set of policies and processes allows you to establish a baseline. Um, it allows you to know what's normal. Having a baseline allows you to measure against it as a way of evaluating whether or not you're achieving your objectives with container orchestration. The fourth enabler of benefits is continuous assessment, which is about measuring constantly back to what I said a few minutes ago. With the toilet away measuring constantly helps you see whether your processes and your target and state are being delivered as your output deviates from that baseline, your adjustments can be made more quickly. So these four concepts, I think, could really make or break your compliance status. >>It's a really way interesting way of thinking about compliance. I had thought previously back compliance, mostly as a as a matter of legally declaring and then trying to do something. But at this point, we have methods beyond legal boilerplate for asserting what we wanna happen, as you say, and and this is actually opening up new ways to detect, deviation and and enforce failure to comply. That's really exciting. Um, so you've you've touched on the benefits of container orchestration here, and you've provided some thoughts on what the drivers on enablers are. So what does Miranda's fit in all this? How does how are we helping enable these benefits, >>right? Well, our goal and more antis is ultimately to make the world's most compliant distribution. We we understand what our customers need, and we have developed our product around those needs, and I could describe a few key security aspects about our product. Um, so Miranda's promotes this idea of building and enabling a secure software supply chain. The simplified version of that that pertains directly to our product follows a build ship run model. So at the build stage is doctor trusted registry. This is where images are stored following numerous security best practices. Image scanning is an optional but highly recommended feature to enable within D T R. Image tags can be regularly pruned so that you have the most current validated images available to your developers. And the second or middle stage is the ship stage, where Miranda's enforces policies that also follow industry best practices, as well as custom image promotion policies that our customers can write and align to their own internal security requirements. The third and final stages to run stage. And at this stage, we're talking about the engine itself. Docker Engine Enterprise is the Onley container, run time with 51 40 dash to cryptography and has many other security features built in communications across the cluster across the container platform are all secure by default. So this build ship stage model is one way of how our products help support this idea of a secure supply chain. There are other aspects of the security supply chain that arm or customer specific that I won't go into. But that's kind of how we could help our product. The second big area eso I just touched on the secure supply chain. The second big area is in a Stig certification. Um, a stick is basically an implementation or configuration guide, but it's published by the U. S government for products used by the US government. It's not exclusive to them, but for customers that value security highly, especially in a regulated industry, will understand the significance and value that the Stig certification brings. So in achieving the certification, we've demonstrated compliance or alignment with a very rigid set of guidelines. Our fifth validation, the cryptography and the Stig certification our third party at two stations that our product is secure, whether you're using our product as a government customer, whether you're a customer in a regulated industry or something else, >>I did not understand what the Stig really Waas. It's helpful because this is not something that I think people in the industry by and large talk about. I suspect because these things are hard to get and time consuming to get s so they don't tend to bubble up to the top of marketing speak the way glitzy new features do that may or may not >>be secure. >>The, uh so then moving on, how has container orchestration changed? How your customers approach compliance assessment and reporting. >>Yeah, This has been an interesting experience and observation as we've worked with some of our customers in these areas. Eso I'll call out three areas. One is the integration of assessment tooling into the overall development process. The second is assessment frequency and then the third is how results are being reported, which includes what data is needed to go into the reporting. There are very likely others that could be addressed. But those are three things that I have noticed personally and working with customers. >>What do you mean exactly? By integration of assessment tooling. >>Yeah. So our customers all generally have some form of a development pipeline and process eso with various third party and open source tools that can be inserted at various phases of the pipeline to do things like status static source would analysis or host scanning or image scanning and other activities. What's not very well established in some cases is how everything fits within the overall pipeline framework. Eso fit too many customers, ends up having a conversation with us about what commands need should be run with what permissions? Where in the environment should things run? How does code get there that does this scanning? Where does the day to go? Once the out once the scan is done and how will I consume it? Thies Real things where we can help our customers understand? Um, you know what? Integration? What? Integration of assessment. Tooling really means. >>It is fascinating to hear this on, baby. We can come back to it at the end. But what I'm picking out of this Ah, this the way you speak about this and this conversation is this kind of re emergence of these Japanese innovations in product productivity in in factory floor productivity. Um, like, just in time delivery and the, you know, the Toyota Miracle and, uh, and that kind of stuff. Fundamentally, it's someone Yesterday, Anders Wahlgren from cloud bees, of course. The C I. C D expert told me, um, that one of the things he likes to tell his, uh consult ease and customers is to put a GoPro on the head of your code and figure out where it's going and how it's spending its time, which is very reminiscent of these 19 fifties time and motion studies, isn't it that that that people, you know pioneered accelerating the factory floor in the industrial America of the mid century? The idea that we should be coming back around to this and doing it at light speed with code now is quite fascinating. >>Yeah, it's funny how many of those same principles are really transferrable from 50 60 70 years ago to today. Yeah, quite fascinating. >>So getting back to what you were just talking about integrating, assessment, tooling, it sounds like that's very challenging. And you mentioned assessment frequency and and reporting. What is it about those areas that that's required? Adaptation >>Eso eso assessment frequency? Um, you know, in legacy environments, if we think about what those look like not too long ago, uh, compliance assessment used to be relatively infrequent activity in the form of some kind of an audit, whether it be a friendly peer review or intercompany audit. Formal third party assessments, whatever. In many cases, these were big, lengthy reviews full of interview questions, Um, it's requests for information, periods of data collection and then the actual review itself. One of the big drawbacks to this lengthy engagement is an infrequent engagement is that vulnerabilities would sometimes go unnoticed or unmitigated until these reviews at it. But in this era of container orchestration, with the decomposition of everything in the software supply chain and with clearer visibility of the various inputs to the build life cycle, our customers can now focus on what tooling and processes can be assembled together in the form of a pipeline that allows constant inspection of a continuous flow of code from start to finish. And they're asking how our product can integrate into their pipeline into their Q A frameworks to help simplify this continuous assessment framework. Eso that's that kind of addresses the frequency, uh, challenge now regarding reporting, our customers have had to reevaluate how results are being reported and the data that's needed in the reporting. The root of this change is in the fact that security has multiple stakeholder groups and I'll just focus on two of them. One is development, and their primary focus, if you think about it, is really about finding and fixing defects. That's all they're focused on, really, is there is there pushing code? The other group, though, is the Security Project Management Office, or PMO. This group is interested in what security controls are at risk due to those defects. So the data that you need for these two stakeholder groups is very different. But because it's also related, it requires a different approach to how the data is expressed, formatted and ultimately integrated with sometimes different data sources to be able to appease both use cases. >>Mhm. So how does Miranda's help improve the rate of compliance assessment? Aziz? Well, as this question of the need for differential data presentation, >>right, So we've developed on exposed a P I S that helped report the compliance status of our product as it's implemented in our customers on environment. So through these AP eyes, we express the data and industry standard formats using plastic out Oscar is a relatively new project out of the mist organization. It's really all about standardizing a set of standards instead of formats that expresses control information. So in this way our customers can get machine and human readable information related to compliance, and that data can then be massaged into other tools or downstream processes that our customers might have. And what I mean by downstream processes is if you're a development team and you have the inspection tools, the process is to gather findings defects related to your code. A downstream process might be the ticketing system with the era that might log a formal defect or that finding. But it all starts with having a common, standard way of expressing thes scan output. And the findings such that both development teams and and the security PMO groups can both benefit from the data. So essentially we've been following this philosophy of transparency, insecurity. What we mean by that is security isn't or should not be a black box of information on Lee, accessible and consumable by security professionals. Assessment is happening proactively in our product, and it's happening automatically. We're bringing security out of obscurity by exposing the aspects of our product that ultimately have a bearing on your compliance status and then making that information available to you in very user friendly ways. >>It's fascinating. Uh uh. I have been excited about Oscar's since, uh, since first hearing about it, Um, it seems extraordinarily important to have what is, in effect, a ah query capability. Um, that that let's that that lets different people for different reasons formalize and ask questions of a system that is constantly in flux, very, very powerful. So regarding security, what do you see is the basic requirements for container infrastructure and tools for use in production by the industries that you are working with, >>right? So obviously, you know, the tools and infrastructure is going to vary widely across customers. But Thio generalize it. I would refer back to the concept I mentioned earlier of a secure software supply chain. There are several guiding principles behind us that are worth mentioning. The first is toe have a strategy for ensuring code quality. What this means is being able to do static source code analysis, static source code analysis tools are largely language specific, so there may be a few different tools that you'll need to have to be able to manage that, um, second point is to have a framework for doing regular testing or even slightly more formal security assessments. There are plenty of tools that can help get a company started doing this. Some of these tools are scanning engines like open ESCAP that's also a product of n'est open. ESCAP can use CS benchmarks as inputs, and these tools do a very good job of summarizing and visualizing output, um, along the same family or idea of CS benchmarks. There's many, many benchmarks that are published. And if you look at your own container environment, um, there are very likely to be many benchmarks that can form the core platform, the building blocks of your container environment. There's benchmarks for being too, for kubernetes, for Dr and and it's always growing. In fact, Mirante is, uh, editing the benchmark for container D, so that will be a formal CSCE benchmark coming up very shortly. Um, next item would be defining security policies that line with your organization's requirements. There are a lot of things that come out of box that comes standard that comes default in various products, including ours, but we also give you through our product. The ability to write your own policies that align with your own organization's requirements, uh, minimizing your tax surface. It's another key area. What that means is only deploying what's necessary. Pretty common sense. But sometimes it's overlooked. What this means is really enabling required ports and services and nothing more. Um, and it's related to this concept of least privilege, which is the next thing I would suggest focusing on these privileges related to minimizing your tax service. It's, uh, it's about only allowing permissions to those people or groups that excuse me that are absolutely necessary. Um, within the container environment, you'll likely have heard this deny all approach. This denial approach is recommended here, which means deny everything first and then explicitly allow only what you need. Eso. That's a very common, uh uh, common thing that sometimes overlooked in some of our customer environments. Andi, finally, the idea of defense and death, which is about minimizing your plast radius by implementing multiple layers of defense that also are in line with your own risk management strategy. Eso following these basic principles, adapting them to your own use cases and requirements, uh, in our experience with our customers, they could go a long way and having a secure software supply chain. >>Thank you very much, Brian. That was pretty eye opening. Um, and I had the privilege of listening to it from the perspective of someone who has been working behind the scenes on the launch pad 2020 event. So I'd like to use that privilege to recommend that our listeners, if you're interested in this stuff certainly if you work within one of these regulated industries in a development role, um, that you may want to check out, which will be easy for you to do today, since everything is available once it's been presented. Matt Bentley's live presentation on secure Supply Chain, where he demonstrates one possible example of a secure supply chain that permits image. Signing him, Scanning on content Trust. Um, you may want to check out the session that I conducted with Andres Falcon at Cloud Bees who talks about thes um, these industrial efficiency factory floor time and motion models for for assessing where software is in order to understand what policies can and should be applied to it. Um, and you will probably want to frequent the tutorial sessions in that track, uh, to see about how Dr Enterprise Container Cloud implements many of these concentric security policies. Um, in order to provide, you know, as you say, defense in depth. There's a lot going on in there, and, uh, and it's ah, fascinating Thio to see it all expressed. Brian. Thanks again. This has been really, really educational. >>My pleasure. Thank you. >>Have a good afternoon. >>Thank you too. Bye.

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation LeBron's special conversation I'm John Tory here in the cube I'm not in the studio I'm at home we're sheltering in place the studio quarantine crew is there we've got a great guest here to break down and Alice in the tech industries for vallah who's this principle of zk research Aziz great to check in with you for our check-in last time we chatted you broke down entire industry a lot to talk about now we have the Cisco earnings just came out and a lot of other great things are happening thanks for joining me well what's your take on what's going on yeah I think so thanks John it's uh it's been heard about tumultuous last few months I think one of the takeaways I had from Cisco's earnings actually was that it's not as bad as you think I know if you read a lot of what's going on the media we get everything from doomsday and the world's ending or whatever but I think what Cisco's earnings showed and in Cisco I know they have a lot of enemies and a lot of competitors out there but they're really still a bellwether for the industry and so everyone should rejoice in the fact that they actually had a pretty good quarter I think what was was telling about that was security was up the services business was up the margins were good and what that shows me is that there's still room for innovation customers relax are still buying things and they're willing to pay for things that actually help drive their business forward and so Cisco's put a lot of energy into their services group to make sure that customers are able to adapt their technology and change their business right and so from an overall market perspective Cisco is you know they're the quarters are the court has shifted from almost everybody else's and so they're generally a leading indicator of where things are going so I think the fact that they showed some strength they guided up from where the street thought I think that's a good thing for the entire industry and I think I'm not saying we're out of this yet but I think businesses are starting to spend money where they need to in order to put themselves in a position to come on strong after well once we start going back to work whoever knows what that'll be I think the other sort of interesting pivot here is that I think the overall role the network has changed with income right we've covered networking technologies a long time it gets a little bit of interest sometimes from sea level certainly not as much as it should from CEOs and CIOs a lot of people think of it as the plumbing and the pipes it's hard to understand it's a very complicated technology sometimes but when you look at what's happened with digital transformation initiatives and now covent we've got more people at home or adopting cloud services we use video for connecting more things with IOT initiatives so the overall value of the network is increased that I think that was also reflected in Cisco's numbers I think this transition had started when you look at a lot of the building blocks and digital transformation IOT cloud mobility things like that they're all Network centric in nature and so for the first time in history I think business leaders actually need to look at their network strategies because if that's without a sound network strategy as we sort of come out of this and the companies that have a good one will be able to really step on the gas and do what they want with their business the ones that don't I think I'd a really struggle to survive because I'm not gonna be able to do a lot of these advanced things yeah great point one of the things Brazil the new cisco has a new leadership new c has been in place for a while positioning they're going after and you know with the cloven crisis it really puts more pressure knock the move of the network because it's a core staple of an organization yet the transformation journey is going to be accelerated this gives Cisco it's a lucky strike for Cisco because it'll move packets around and the multi cloud conversation comes in and the enablement of application development all being five to the network is what cisco has been preparing on and this has kind of been a nuance point then that everyone understands but coming out of Cova to have a growth strategy if you're not programming up and down the stack with DevOps and Nets a cops or whatever you want to call it people working at home a new perimeter is now emerged that's everything everything is the premise is this a tailwind for Cisco your thoughts on that your face oh yeah the big time tailwind francisco i think what's happened gentlemen you look at network evolution over the last five years we can do much more with our network that's coming to cost and that cost us complexity so trying to tie all these things together SP Winn Sassie datacenter Sdn right we've got Wi-Fi six coming we've got 5g coming so we've got all these great things that we're gonna let our networks be faster than ever before and run applications we can never run before right you look at some of the demos on 5g we're able to wear untethered Wi-Fi our virtual reality headsets complete creating completely new shopping experiences educational experiences but you need a lot of bandwidth that but not only you need bandwidth I think the one thing that Kovac has taught us is do you have any weakness in the network anywhere right from the user's hand all the way to the cloud that weak point at the time and so now you have to start thinking of your network not in pieces of having a campus network Wi-Fi network data center network and that a single network right and so cisco is really one of the few companies maybe the only company that can actually deliver that end and network that starts in the company extends to people's homes goes out to the cloud and with what they've done masterfully under Chuck Robbins is they've been able to pile those things together to create a much simpler way of operating this complicated network so you look at what they're doing you know with a CI and intent based networking what that is is you can think of it almost as a software overlay that masks the complexity of the network that's underneath it yeah talking about cisco over the past decade and a half and i'm with the stack guys you gotta move up the stack this has been this is now their opportunity and with multi cloud on the horizon or here this is going to give cisco a path but I got to ask you what is your take and advice to Cisco when you're out there talking to them you're talking to of the customers all the time and practitioners you're the analyst what do they need to do better because you can't just wish a multi cloud upon the marketplace it's coming but it's not clearly not the use case yet so that's a time lag between a CI intent based networking to true multi-cloud what if Cisco do in the meantime yeah well I think what's this go has to do is is think about what they're doing with a CI and multi cloud and actually help their customers implement it in in pieces and what the description I'd use is is the paths this goes on and the path customers are on actually in this world of you think if the end state is true hybrid multi-cloud right we have to get there in ship shots and not moon shots and what I mean by that is if you were to say to a customer this is your end state right the path to get there is so donkey and it's like a moon shot that it paralyzes the customer if you break this down into a set of chip shots right that gets much easier so so put the infrastructure in place to be able to just have the visibility across applause then maybe automate movement from hi private the public cloud right then automate some of the processes that give you the most headaches then move to a bigger Ottoman Ottoman automation framework right so yeah areas like security network configuration right things like that those are those are very difficult for customers to do manually those are the things they should be automating today so what they want to do is almost take through their intent-based network to almost as a lighthouse the road to a visionary state and then help customers get there in pieces because if they try and rush them along too fast I think they'll lose the customer because the complexity is too high the other area they should really be focused on is continuing to mature the services business I think that's something under Chuck Robbins that's night and day different than what it was the services business - Cisco prior to Chuck was a lot of break fix you know their TAC is well renowned as being a great pack but now they've gotten more of the pro services they've gotten more into adoption services and I think the more subscription they sell what Cisco needs to really understand is that customers tend not to renew things they don't use right so making sure that the services group helps customers and use the things that they're paying for and that'll pay dividends for them multiple dividends for them down the road I want to get the silken one on that opportunity to upsell and do a refresh because what refreshes are not gonna be on the docket early on unless discuss business value so let's hold that for a second John Chambers has been on the cube recently in his new role as a coach and investor and he says to us on the cube you know transitions versus transformation Cisco and the big companies are expected to win the transitions but now with coming out of this there's real transformation so you got to look at things like collaboration hey guys get better this is not just win the enterprise with a better web max zoom is they can ask Bob teams is out there so you know Cisco's that's a huge collaboration piece and a bunch of other business so where's their transition wins and where's their transformational opportunity in Europe in well I think the entire company is kind of going through transformations right even on the network side so it's right it's like you know the industry has been calling Francisco to get commoditized for years right and if you look the product gross margins are actually the strongest they've been in a decade right so I remember when I fell below 60% they everybody thought the world was falling this quarter I think was a little over 65 on the product side and so my belief is nothing is really a commodity if you can drive innovation that's what's this has been doing so from a transition standpoint I think they've done a lot of that they've transitioned the company to software and services they've transitioned the company more terrain model they've actually decoupled software from the hardware so customers can buy differently and you brought up the fact that we may not have a hardware refresh but that's okay as long as they keep the software a newa cycles forth where the transformations has to come is completely change the dynamics of how something works and so with intent-based networking you think of the old way that network engineers to work like the way I used to work when I was an engineer a lot of hunting pecking and at a CLI doing a lot of cutting and pasting and using homegrown tools that doesn't scale anymore my research shows that on average takes companies about four months the implemented change network-wide far too slow for digital company right so Francisco's done is they've accelerated that by letting customers automate more things and so Francisco the transformation comes in allowing customers to new new things I think you read in the collaboration side there's more work to do nobody's got a bigger collaboration portfolio than Cisco they got endpoints they got rooms just right they've got software they were a cloud on Prem but they got to take that and tie it together and I think the other area that's is gonna need improving is on they've they've got a lot of management tools that that look at different things they have at the ACI manager and a whole bunch of different security consoles in fact they funded them sometimes and said that the market leader in single panes of glass because they have more than anybody right I think eventually they got to be able to tie that information together and help customers understand what it means from a cross domain perspective because they still build a product's wireless campus data center but as I mentioned before we just have one network and so Cisco can aggregate this data up apply machine learning to it and help customers what that means they see insight across the entire network that would really be powerful because they they've got the footprint now they just have to be able to deliver the machine learning based insights some customers understand what that data means and they have a unique opportunity in the short term no one's going to be kidding Cisco out anytime soon there's a safety rating and using the big companies I think what what Cisco is able to bring is a there's a level of financial stability that other companies may not have and so they can weather the storm for a long time so you know I it's easy to say going to Cisco is the safe bet it has been for a long time but but i but I think it's also the smart bet I think they're they're able to continue to invest in things maybe smaller companies more people do yeah my question on Cisco a big fan of their strategy have been vocal about that for a while my question on Cisco want to be critical is to say how fast can you get that development going show the software value in market show customers a growth trajectory that they can execute on it can advantage the network policy intelligence if they could do that they're gonna be in good shape you agree yeah I think one of the challenges though is the transformation of their customer base do and that's where the work Suzy we've been doing in the dev that teams so important like if if they were to shift their whole strategy over at the developer folks talk word today I think that would largely put them in a position or trouble because the engineers that work with the stuff and the resellers that work with the stuff aren't they don't really have the skill sets they advantage that right so last year Suzy we she really talked a lot about the growth a definite this year they came out with in Barcelona this year they they came up with a bunch of certifications for dev net now there they were actually coming out with a number of a partner certifications as well so the resellers can get certified but I think it's important that they continue to push their engineer base into gaining these new skills I'll give you an interesting data point for my research and that's you know that only about a quarter of networking engineers has ever made an API call right and so you look at all Cisco's new gear it's all API driven and so if you want to do something as simple as say get all the IP addresses in your network you can just use an API call for that right the other way to do it is you do a show command and the CLI your screen scrape and you take a visual basic trip that you parse it you know and you get it that way right so the API map using those is a lot easier and so I think Cisco's got a good strategy with Deb net they've grown that face a lot it's still relatively small you know it's under a million people and you think of the overall size the Cisco customer user base point that's where they gonna put some effort right more and more out driving adoption to them now well I think you're smarter than I think you're researching them they must be listening to you because they haven't really tried to jam that down their throats they've been very humble about it and I think a million is pretty damn good number I think Cisco again to your point they're bringing people into the water the low end first before you you go to the deep end so swim with the bubble if you will with definite what they did was they assumed the engineer had no knowledge of software because I think at first when they put the lot of the programs a place they assumed people would have some knowledge of how to code right and and I also think the industry did them a bit of a disservice we used her there was a lot of stuff written in the media how every network engineer needs to become a software developer well they don't have to summer get make them software developers but they at least have to come software power ease right so do your job through software but you don't have to be a developer and that's where definite really when it really matured is that diverge down to past developer engineer who's your saw common software skills and then you break down a specialist after that and so they've they've actually helped with the maturity of that they've changed their certification programs for reflect that and I think Devin that really is a big be and if they can transition that engineer base then it helps the adoption of the new on these I want to get your final thoughts on this segment on multi-cloud obviously it would be a really great win for it creates of interoperability strictly with the network intelligence cisco could bring to the table and others you got startups out there like aviatrix and others and vmware with nsx trying to get that for the security fabric a lot of action going on with multi cloud and networking your thoughts what does your research tell you what's gonna transpire how do you see that market playing out in my research shows that little R ad percent of companies prior to Co vid had multi-cloud on the roadmap and I'm assuming that's that's gone up I haven't actually done a survey since then um one of the I think it's funny koban exposed a lot of things from a lot of vendors right and I think one of the things that is is shown cracks in the cloud yeah you look at some of the the data and how many outages Microsoft had Google had some strains AWS has held up pretty well under the strain of of a lot of the higher utilization when coated but they've been building a lot of capacity into theirs as well so I think from a customer perspective it makes sense you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket some cloud providers are stronger in some regions they each have different their own different cloud platforms other private cloud platforms and the problem is is if you decide if you decide to go multi-cloud you can't use the cloud providers tools right so if I use an AWS load balancer that works great in AWS but it's not gonna help me with Azure or GCE similarly if I use GCP tools I can't extend that out the azure so something needs to connect those and be able to five security and policy and that's where multi cloud comes from and you're right there's some good startups there I think um the difference with Cisco this time versus the Sdn world was when as the ends came about I think Cisco didn't want that to happen and I think they actually actively worked against us the end and I've talked to chuck Robbins about that he said you'll never ever see Cisco do that again if something is good for the customers they want to lead that transition and so Cisco's been very active in multi focking and given they've got the install base already I do think they will help bring this long but there are some good stir yeah it's interesting Sdn really wasn't ready for primetime even when VMware bought in this era hey when it was still there I didn't have a lot of revenue it had a future VMware claims that's the saves and NSX was saved by a Sdn some people say was completely rewritten final thoughts on outlook and you see coming out of Ovid obviously it's been well reported we've been reporting VPNs have been under provision that was a blind spot bought a blind spots and disruption that wasn't forecasted in the classic sense there was no there was no you know hurricane there was no flood it was a covin invisible disruption yeah and there's no impact right like even with when you think of what happened with the the floods in New York and 9/11 people knew that they'd eventually go back and so business continuity and disaster recovery was a temporary thing and I can I set up a data center to work for a couple months so I can go back to New York that's not the case with koban where we're trying to manage for an undefined endpoint which is extremely difficult for an IT perspective I do think that Kogan again has highlighted the value of the network I think we'll see a lot of transition from VPN to sd when I think that's that's certainly good I think the rise in video will also cause a Wi-Fi upgrade cycle we'll get back to the office and I think you'll see a lot of focus on programmability and agility because I don't believe we're gonna see everybody return to the office was like one big bang John I think we're more likely to see is the future work to be almost like when you and I were in college we do a bunch of stuff at home we go to the campus when we have classes and when we want to meet people similarly we'll go to work when we have meetings and then in between meetings we'll go find an open place to work but in general we'll do a lot of work a lot more work from home in fact my research shows 93 percent of the business leaders I interviewed said they expect to see at least a 30 percent increase in the work from home post Kovan right so we're gonna have a lot more people doing that but it's not gonna be everyone working for home everybody work in the office it's gonna be a hybrid of the two people are gonna come and go and that bribes the need for agility and today's networks really not that agile and so I need I want to go back to college if we do thirsty happy hours do I mean have the whole week or the stupid stuff it's the final point you mentioned SP when I was talking with Dave Volante SP Minutemen just last week and I said you know this SD win today is not your grandfather's sdn meaning SP where it's changed a lot it's basically the internet now so what was the modern update definition of SD grin I mean it used to be you connect the wide area network you can have some campus you'd do some networking what is it now what's the same name but it's yeah what is it your journey the technology if you look at the adoption of anything right the first wave of stuff is to make the new stuff look like the old stuff so we put VoIP in we made it look a lot like TDM when we had cloud we lifted and shift it and how did we didn't really enjoy wraps and then we eventually get smart and think what can I do with the new thing that I can't do the old thing and so a lot of early SD win deployments were simply just replacements for MPLS and they were put in to save a bit of money but now companies are getting smarter they're thinking about what can I do with my SD win that I couldn't do before so there's a lot more tighter integration with security I think as companies but SD win in and and think about what the win is today John it used to be corporate offices and data centers I think it's everybody's house right and so being able to extend your win at the single people out to planes trains and automobiles you remember that movie but those are all getting connected as well people's back acts fan kiosk those are all becoming way endpoints right so that's where you need to embed more security in the network and so I think that's a transition we've seen into that see you and I think the technology has matured to the point where it's getting easier to deploy faster to flow and you're right we can use the internet for transport in some cases some will still keep there still be a lot of MPLS out there but I do think we wind up in this hybrid world but clearly then the time has never been better for for SD win I will see a rule of curve for that because it's the only way to extend the win the people's homes the things the cars and really anything that's connected you know that's such a great point and I think this is a real new once in the industry it's a whole nother rebirth of the category because the aperture is brighter you got policy you've got reliability and get security built in this is key key Johnny H salt key yeah yeah whole concept the AI ops becomes real because we're collecting data and we're able to use AI to automate operations so Z's we call it s T win 2.0 that's what you got to do we got making an acronym out of this come on we can't just saw s T when it is SD win - righto because it's the next it's that it's it's the second wave of it we're actually thinking about how to transform our companies so the the John Chambers quote of transition for transversus transformation is apropos because the like I said a lot of the waves that that Cisco went through early on was we transition the market and then we transform right and so SD win so far has been transitional moving away from the old thing but now in strength and defense formed where our entire network operates these gradients that always a pleasure to talk to you get the straight scoop for the signal right there from all the noise in the industry now more than ever people are gonna be focused on critical project so thanks for your insight as DK now can research great stuff and we'll keep keep following you in great guest thank you come on thanks John first burger okay cute conversation here remote we're doing our part either at home and studio quarantine in this is the cube virtual virtualization has come to the cube will do will do whatever it takes to get the content out there Z's thanks so much for coming I appreciate thanks for watching on John Currier [Music]

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music] [Applause] [Music] live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 rot to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners come back this is the cubes coverage of Cisco live 2020 here in Barcelona doing about three and a half days of wall-to-wall coverage here I'm Stu minim and my co-host for this segment is Dave Volante John furs also here scouring the floor and really happy to welcome to the program to first-time guests I believe so Ron Daris is the product manager of product marketing for cloud computing with Cisco and sitting to his left is Matt Ferguson who's director of product development also with the Cisco cloud group Dave and I are from Boston Matt is also from the Boston area yes and Costas is coming over from London so thanks so much for joining us thanks IBPS all right so obviously cloud computing something we've been talking about many years we've really found fascinating the relationship Cisco's had with its customers as well as through the partner ecosystem had many good discussions about some of the announcements this week maybe start a little bit you know Cisco's software journey and you know positioning in this cloud space right now yes oh so it's a it's a really interesting dynamic when we start transitioning to multi cloud and we actually deal with cloud and compute coming together and we've had whether you're looking at the infrastructure ops organization or whether you're looking at the apps operations or whether you're looking at you know your dev environment your security operations each organization has to deal with their angle at which they view you know multi cloud or they view how they actually operate within those the cloud computing context and so whether you're on the infrastructure side you're looking at compute you're looking at storage you're looking at resources if you're an app operator you're looking at performance you're looking at visibility assurance if you are in the security operations you're looking at maybe governance you're looking at policy and then when you're a developer you really sort of thinking about CI CD you're talking about agility and there's very few organizations like Cisco that actually is looking at from a product perspective all those various angles of multi-cloud yeah definitely a lot of piece of cost us maybe up level it for us a little bit there's there's so many pieces you know we talked for so long you know you don't talk to any company that doesn't have a cloud strategy doesn't mean that it's not going to change over time and it means every company's got at home positioning but talk about the relationship cisco has with its customer and really the advisory position that you want to have with them it's actually a very relevant question to what to what Matt is talking about because we talk a lot about multi cloud as a trend and hybrid clouds and this kind of relationship between the traditional view of looking at computing data centers and then expanding to different clouds you know public cloud providers have now amazing platform capabilities and if you think about it the the it goes back to what Matt said about IT ops and the development kind of efforts why is this happening really you know there's there's the study that we did with with an analyst and there was an amazing a shocking stat around how within the next three years organizations will have to support 50% more applications than they do now and we have been trying to test this stat our events that made customer meetings etc that is a lot of a lot of change for organizations so if you think about why are they use why do they need to basically what go and expand to those clouds is because they want to service IT Ops teams want ER servers with capabilities their developers faster right and this is where you have within the IT ops kind of theme organization you have the security kind of frame the compute frame the networking where you know Cisco has a traditional footprint how do you blend all this how do you bring all this together in a linear way to support individual unique application modernization efforts I think that's what are we hearing from customers in terms of the feedback and this is what influences our strategy to converts the different business units and engineering engineering efforts right couple years ago I have to admit I was kind of a multi cloud skeptic I always said I thought it was more of a symptom than actually a strategy a symptom of you know shadow IT and different workloads and so forth but now I'm kind of buying in because I think IT in particular has been brought in to clean up the crime scene I often say so I think it is becoming a strategy so if you could help us understand what you're hearing from customers in terms of their strategy toward the multi cloud and how Cisco that was mapping into that yeah so so when we talk to customers it comes back to the angle at which they're approaching the problem in like you said the shadow IT has been probably around for longer than anybody won't cares to admit because the people want to move faster organizations want to get their product out to market sooner and and so what what really is we're having conversations now about you know how do I get the visibility how do I get you know the policies and the governance so that I can actually understand either how much I'm spending in the cloud or whether I'm getting the actual performance that I'm looking for that I need the connectivity so I get the bandwidth and so these are the kinds of conversations that we have with customers is is is going I realize that this is going on now I actually have to now put some you know governance and controls around that is their products is their solutions is their you know they're looking to Cisco to help them through this journey because it is a journey because as much as we talk about cloud and you know companies that were born in the cloud cloud native there is a tremendous number of IT organizations that are just starting that journey that are just entering into this phase where they have to solve these problems yeah I agree and it's just starting the journey with a deliberate strategy as opposed to okay we got this this thing but if you think about the competitive landscape its kind of interesting and I want to try to understand where Cisco fits because again you you initially had companies that didn't know in a public cloud sort of pushing multi cloud and you'd say oh well okay so they have to do that but now you see anthos come out with Google you see Microsoft leaning in we think eventually AWS is going to lean in and then you say I'm kind of interested in working with someone whose cloud agnostic not trying to force now now Cisco a few years ago you didn't really think about Cisco as a player now so this goes right in the middle I have said often that Cisco's in a great position John Fourier as well to connect businesses and from a source of networking strength making a strong argument that we have the most cost-effective most secure highest performance network to connect clouds that seems to be a pretty fundamental strength of yours and does that essentially summarize your strategy and and how does that map into the actions that you're taking in terms of products and services that you're bringing to market I would say that I can I can I can take that ya know it's a chewy question for hours yeah so I I was thinking about a satellite in you mentioned this before and you're like okay that's you know the world is turning around completely because we we seem to talk about satellite e is something bad happening and now suddenly we completely forgot about it like let let free free up the developers gonna let them do whatever they want and basically that is what I think is happening out there in the market so all the solutions you mentioned in the go to market approaches and the architectures that the public cloud providers at least are offering out there certainly the big three have differences have their strengths and I think those strengths are closer to the developer environment basically you know if you're looking into something like a IML there's one provider that you go with if you're looking for a mobile development framework you're gonna go somewhere else if you're looking for a dr you're gonna go somewhere else maybe not a big cloud but your service provider that you've been dealing with all these all these times and you know that they have their accreditation that you're looking for so where does Cisco come in you know we're not a public cloud provider we offer products as a service from our data centers and our partners data centers but at the - at the way that the industry sees a cloud provider a public cloud like AWS a sure Google Oracle IBM etc we're not that we don't do that our mission is to enable organizations with software hardware products SAS products to be able to facilitate their connectivity security visibility observability and in doing business and in leveraging the best benefits from those clouds so we we kind of we kind of moved to a point where we flip around the question and the first question is who is your cloud provider what how many tell us the clouds you work with and we can give you the modular pieces you can put we can put together for you so there's so that you can make the best out of your plan it's been being able to do that across clouds we're in an environment that is consistent with policies that are consistent that represent the edicts of your organization no matter where your data lives that's sort of the the vision in the way this is translated into products into Cisco's product you naturally think about Cisco as the connectivity provider networking that's that's really sort of our you know go to in what we're also when we have a significant computing portfolio as well so connectivity is not only the connectivity of the actual wire between geographies point A to point B in the natural routing and switching world there's connectivity between applications between cute and so this week you know the announcements were significant in that space when you talk about the compute and the cloud coming together on a single platform that gives you not only the ability to look at your applications from a experience journey map so you can actually know where the problems might occur in the application domain you can actually then go that next level down into the infrastructure level and you can say okay maybe I'm running out of some sort of resource whether it's compute resource whether it's memory whether it's on your private cloud that you have enabled on Prem or whether it's in the public cloud that you have that application residing and then why candidly you have the actual hardware itself so inter-site it has an ability to control that entire stack so you can have that visibility all the way down to the hardware layer I'm glad you brought up some of the applications wonderful we can you know stay there for a moment and talk about some of the changing patterns for customers a lot of talk in the industry about cloud native often it gets conflated with you know microservices containerization and lots of the individual pieces there but you know one of our favorite things that been talked about this week is the software that really sits at the application layer and how that connects down through some of the infrastructure pieces so help us understand what you're hearing from customers and and where how you're helping them through this transition to constants as you were saying absolutely there's going to be lots of new applications more applications and they still have the the old stuff that they need to continue to manage because we know an IT nothing ever goes away that's that's definitely true I was I was thinking you know there's there's a vacuum at the moment and and there's things that Cisco is doing from from technology leadership perspective to fill that gap between the application what do you see when it comes to monitoring making sure your services are observable and how does that fit within the infrastructure stack you know everything upwards network the network layer base again that is changing dramatically some of the things that Matt touched upon with regards to you know being able to connect the the networking the security in the infrastructure the computer infrastructure that the developers basically are deploying on top so there's a lot of there's a lot of things on containerization there's a lot of in fact it's you know one part of the of the self-injure side of the stack that you mentioned and one of the big announcements you know that there's a lot of discussion in the industry around ok how does that abstract further the conversation on networking for example because that now what we're seeing is that you have huge monoliths enterprise applications that are being carved down into micro services ok they you know there's a big misunderstanding around what is cloud native is it related to containers different kind of things right but containers are naturally the infrastructure de facto currency for developers to deploy because of many many benefits but then what happens you know between the kubernetes layer which seems to be the standard and the application who's gonna be managing services talking to each other that are multiplying you know things like service mesh network service mess how is the network evolving to be able to create this immutable infrastructure for developers to deploy applications so there's so many things happening at the same time where cisco has actually a lot of taking a lot of the front seat this is where it gets really interesting you know it's sort of hard to squint through because you mentioned kubernetes is the de facto standard but it's a de-facto standard that's open everybody's playing with but historically this industry has been defined by you know a leader who comes out with a de facto standard kubernetes not a company right it's an open standard and so but there's so many other components than containers and so history would suggest that there's going to be another de facto standard or multiple standards that emerge and your point earlier is you you got to have the full stack you can't just do networking you can't just do certain few so you guys are attacking that whole pie so how do you think this thing will evolve I mean you guys are obviously intend to put out as Casta as wide a net as possible capture not only your existing install base but attractive attract others and you're going aggressively at it as are as are others how do you see it shaking out deep do you see you know four or five pockets do you see you know one leader emerging I mean customers would love all you guys to get together come up with standards that's not going to happen so we're it's jump ball right now well yeah and you think about you know to your point regarding kubernetes is not a company right it is it is a community driven I mean it was open source by a large company but it's but it's community driven now and that's the pace at which open source is sort of evolving there is so much coming at IT organizations from a new paradigm a new software something that's you know the new the shiny object that sort of everybody sort of has to jump on to and sort of say that is the way we're going to function so IT organizations have to struggle with this influx of just every coming at them and every angle and I think what's starting to happen is the management and the you know that stack who controls that or who is helping IT organizations to manage it for them so really what we're trying to say is there's elements that you have to put together that have to function and kubernetes is just one example docker the operating system that associated with it that runs all that stuff then you have the application that goes rides IDEs on top of it so now what we have to have is things like what we just announced this week HX ap the application platform for HX so you have the compute cluster but then you have the on top of that that's managed by an organization that's looking at the security that's looking at the the actual making opinions about what should go in the stock and managing that for you so you don't have to deal with that because you can just focus on the application development yeah I mean Cisco's in a strong position to do there's no question about it and to me it comes down to execution if you guys execute and deliver on the the products and services that you say you know your nouns for instance this week and previously and you continue on a roadmap you're gonna get a fair share of this marketplace I think there's no question so last topic before we let you go is love your viewpoint on customers what's separating kind of leaders from you know the followers in this space you know there's so much data out there you know I'm a big fan of the state of DevOps report yeah focus you know separate you know some but not the not here's the technology or the piece but the organizational and you know dynamics that you should do so it sounds like Matt you you like that that report also love them what are you hearing from customers how do you help guide them towards becoming leaders in the cloud space yeah the state of DevOps report was fascinating and I mean they've been doing that for what a number of years yeah exactly and really what it's sort of highlighting is two main factors that I think that are in this revolution or this this this paradigm shift or journey we're going through there's the technology side for sure and so that's getting more complex you have micro services you have application explosion you have a lot of things that are occurring just in technology that you're trying to keep up but then it's really about the human aspect that human elements the people about it and that's really I think what separates you know the the elites that are really sort of you know just charging forward in the head because they've been able to sort of break down the silos because really what you're talking about in cloud native DevOps is how you take the journey of that experience of the service from end to end from the development all the way to production and how do you actually sort of not have organizations that look at their domain their data set their operations and then have to translate that or have to sort of you know have another conversation with another organization that it doesn't look at that that has no experience of that so that is what we're talking about that end-to-end view is that in addition to all the things we've been talking about I think Security's a linchpin here now you guys are executing on security you got a big portfolio and you've seen a lot of M&A and a lot of companies now trying to get in and it's gonna be interesting to see how that plays out but that's going to be a key because organizations are going to start there from a strategy standpoint and then build out yeah absolutely if you follow the DevOps methodology its security gets baked in along the way so that you're not having to sit on after do anything Custis give you the final word I was just as follow-up with regard what what Mark was saying there's so many there's what's happening out there is this just democracy around standards which is driven by communities and we will love that in fact cisco is involved in many open-source community projects but you asked about customers and and just right before you were asking about you know who's gonna be the winner there's so many use cases there's so much depth in terms of you know what customers want to do with on top of kubernetes you know take AI ml for example something that we have we have some some offering the services around there's the customer that wants to do AML there their containers that their infrastructure will be so much different to someone else's doing something just hosting yeah and there's always gonna be a SAS provider that is niche servicing some oil and gas company you know which means that the company of that industry will go and follow that instead of just going to a public law provider that is more organized if there's a does that make sense yeah yeah this there's relationships that exist the archer is gonna get blown away that add value today and they're not gonna just throw them out so exactly right well thank you so much for helping us understand the updates where your customers are driving super exciting space look forward to keeping an eye on it thank you thank you so much all right there's still lots more coming here from Cisco live 20/20 in Barcelona people are standing watching all the developer events lots of going on the floor and we still have more so thank you for watching the cute [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music] live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 rot to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners welcome back over 17,000 in attendance here for Cisco live 2020 in Barcelona ops to Minh and my co-host is Dave Volante and to help us to dig into of course one of the most important topic of the day of course that security we're thrilled to have back a distinguished engineer Francisco one of our cube alumni TK Kia Nene TK thanks so much for joining us ideal man good good all right so TK it's 2020 it's a new decade we know the bad actors are still out there they're there the the question always is you know it used to be you know how do you keep ahead of them then I've here Dave say many times well you know it's not you know when it's it's not if it's when you know you probably already have been okay you know compromised before so it gives latest so you know what you're seeing out there what you're talking to customers about in this important space yeah it's uh it's kind of an innovation spiral you know we we innovate we make it harder for them and then they innovate they make it harder for us right and round and round we go that's been going on for for many years I think I think the most significant changes that have happened recently have to deal with not essentially their objectives but how they go about their objectives and Defenders topologies have changed greatly instead of just your standard enterprise you now have you know hybrid multi cloud and all these new technologies so while while all that innovation happens you know they get a little clever and they find weaknesses and round and round we go so we talked a lot about the sort of changing profile of the the threat actors going from hacktivists took criminals now is a huge business and nation-states even what's that profile look like today and how has that changed over the last decade or so you know that's pretty much stayed the same bad guys are bad guys at some point in time you know just how how they go about their business their techniques they're having to like I said innovate around you know we make it harder for them they you know on Monday we're safe on Tuesday we're not you know and then on Wednesday it switches again so so it talked about kind of this multi-cloud environment when we talk to customers it's like well I want the developer to be able to build their application and not really have to think too much underneath it that that has to have some unique challenges we know security we knew long ago well I just go to the cloud it doesn't mean they take care of it some things are there some things they're gonna remind you now you need to make sure you set certain things otherwise you could be there but how do we make sure that Security's baked in everywhere and is up as a practice that everybody's doing well I mean again some of the practices hold true no matter what the environment I think the big thing was cognitive is in back in the day when when you looked at an old legacy data center you were part sort of administrator in your part detective and most people don't even know what's running on there that's not true in cloud native environments some some llamó file some some declaration it's it's just exactly what productions should look like right and then the machines instantiate production so you're doing things that machine scale forces the human scale people to be explicit and and for me I mean that's that's a breath of fresh air because once you're explicit then you take the mystery out of what you're protecting how about in terms of how you detect threats right phishing for credentials has become a huge deal but not just you know kicking down the door or smashing a window using your your own credentials to get inside of your network so how is that affected the way in which you detect yeah it's it's a big deal you know a lot of a lot of great technology has a dual use and what I mean by that is network cryptology you know that that whole crypto on the network has made us safer for us to compute over insecure networks and unfortunately it works just as well for the bad guys so you know all of their malicious activity is now private to so it you know for us we just have to invent new ways of detecting direct inspection for instance I think it's a thing of the past I mean we just can't depend on it anymore we have to have tools of inference and not only that but it's it's gave rise in a lot of innovation on behavioral science and as you say you know it's it's not that the attacker is breaking into your network anymore they're logging in ok what do you do then right Alice Alice's account it's not gonna set off the triggers so you have to say you know when did Alice start to behave differently you know she's working in accounting why is she playing around with the source code repository that's that's a different thing right yes automation is such a big trend you know how do we make sure that automation doesn't leave us more vulnerable that's rarity because we need to be able automate we've gone beyond human scale for most of these configurations that's exactly right and and how do how do we I always say just with security automation in particular just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should and you really have to go back and have practices you know you could argue that that this thing is just a you know machine scale automation you could do math on a legal pad or you can use a computer to do it right what so apply that to production if you mechanized something like order entry or whatever you're you're you're automating part of your business use threat modeling you use the standard threaten modeling like you would your code the network is code now right and the storage is code and everything is code so you know just automate your testing do your threat modeling do all that stuff please do not automate for your attacker matrix is here I want to go back to the Alice problem because you're talking about before you have to use inference so Alice's is in the network and you're observing her moves every day and then okay something anomalous occurs maybe she's doing something that normally she wouldn't do so you've got to have her profile in her actions sort of observed documented stored the data has got to be there and at the same time you want to make sure it's always that balance of putting handcuffs on people you know versus allowing them to do their job and be productive at the same time as well you don't want to let the bad guys know that you know that alice is doing something that she didn't be doing is actually not Alice so all that complexity how are you dealing with it and what's the data model look like doing it machines help let's say that machines can help us you know you and I we have only so many sense organs and the cognitive brain can only store so many so much state machines really help us extend that and so you know looking at not three dimensions of change but 7000 dimensions have changed right something in the machine is going to say there's an outlier here that's interesting and you can get another machine to say that's that's interesting maybe I should focus on that and you build these analytical pipelines so that at the end of it you know they may argue with each other all the way to the end but at the end you have a very high fidelity indicator that might be at the protocol level it might be at the behavioral level it might be seven days back or thirty days back all these temporal and spatial dimensions it's really cheap to do it with a machine yeah and if we could stay on that for a second so it try to understand I know that's a high-level example but is it best practice to have the Machine take action or is it is it an augmentation and I know it depends on the use case but but how is that sort of playing out again you have to do all of this safely okay a lot of things that machines do don't return back to human scale stuff that returns back to human scale that humans understand that is as useful so for instance if machines you know find out all these types of in assertions even in medical you know right now if if you've got so much telemetry going into the medical field see the machine tells you you have three weeks to live I mean you better explain what the heck you know how you came about that assertion it's the same with security you know if I'm gonna say look we're gonna quarantine your machine or we're gonna readjust machine it's not I'm not like picking movies for you or the next song you might listen to this is high stakes and so when you do things like that your analytics needs to have what is called entailment you have to explain what it is how you got to that assertion that's become incredibly important in how we measure our effectiveness in in doing analytics that's interesting because because you're using a lot of machine intelligence to do this and in a lot of AI is blackbox you're saying you cannot endure that blackbox problem in security yeah that black boxes is is very dangerous you know I you know personally I feel that you know things that should be open sourced this type of technology it's so advanced that the developer needs to understand that the tester needs to understand that certainly the customer needs to understand it you need to publish papers and be very very transparent with this domain because if it is in fact you know black box and it's given the authority to automate something like you know shut down the power or do things like that that's when things really start to get dangerous so good TK what wondered you know give us the latest on stealthWatch there you know Cisco's positioning when it when it comes to everything we've been talking about here you know stealthWatch again is it's been in market for quite some time it's actually been in market since 2001 and when I when I look back and see how much has changed you know how we've had to keep up with the market and again it's not just the algorithms rewrite for detection it's the environments have changed right but when did when did multi-cloud happen so so operating again cusp it's not that stealthWatch wants to go their customers are going there and they want the stealthWatch function across their digital business and so you know we've had to make advancements on the changing topology we've had to make advancements because of things like dark data you know the the network's opaque now right we have to have a lot of inference so we've just you know kept up and stayed ahead of it you know we've been spending a lot of time talking to developer communities and there's a lot of open-source tooling out there that that's helping enable developers specifically in security space you were talking about open-source earlier how does what you've been doing the self watch intersect with that yeah that's always interesting too because there's been sort of a shift in let's call them the cool kids right the cool kids they want everything is code right so it's not about what's on glass or you know a single pane of glass anymore it's it's what stealth watches code right what's your router as code look at dev net right yeah yeah I mean definite is basically Cisco as code and it's beautiful because that is infrastructure as code I mean that is the future and so all the products not just stealthWatch have beautiful api's and that's that's really exciting I've been saying for a while now it's do you I think you agree is that that is a big differentiator for Cisco I think you you're one of the few if not the only large established player and the enterprise that has figured out that sort of infrastructure is code play others have tried and are sort of getting there but you know start/stop you use a term that really cool is like living off the land you know bear bear grylls like the guy who lives down so bad so and and and threat actors are doing that now they're using your own installed software and tooling to hack you and and steal from you how were you dealing with that problem yeah it's a tough one and like I said you know much respect the the adversary is talented and they're patient they're well funded okay that's that's where it starts and so you know why why bring why bring an interpreter to a host when there's already one there right why right all this complicated software distribution when I can just use yours and so that's that's where the the play the game starts and and the most advanced threats aren't leaving footprints because the footprints are already there you know they'll get on a machine and behaviorally they'll check the cache to see what's hot and what's hot in the cache means that behaviorally it's a path they can go they're not cutting a new trail most of the time right so living off the land is not only the tools that they're using the automation your automation they're using against you but it's also behavioral and so that that makes it you know it makes it harder it's it impossible no can we make it harder for them yes so yeah no I'm having fun and I've been doing this for over twenty five years every week it's something new well it's a hard problem you're attacking and you know Robert Herjavec who came on the cube sort of opened my eyes and you think about what are we securing we're securing everything I mean a critical infrastructure were essentially exerted securing the entire global economy and he said something that really struck me it's an 86 trillion dollar economy we spend point zero one four percent on securing that economy and it's nothing now of course he's an entrepreneur and he's pimping for his is his business but it's true we are barely scratching the surface of this problem yeah I'm and it's changing I mean it's changing it could it be better yes it is changing his board awareness you know twenty years ago then right me to a dinner party they you know what does your husband do I'd say you know cyber security or something they'd roll their eyes and change the subject now they asked me the same question so oh you know my computer's running really slow right these are not this is everyone I'm worried about a life hack yeah how do I protect myself or what about these coming off the bank I mean that's those guys a dinner table cover every party so now now you know I just make something up I don't do cybersecurity I just you know a tort or a jipner's you've been to this business forever I can't remember have I ever asked you the superhero question what is that your favorite superhero that's a tough one there's all the security guys I know they like it's always dreamed about saving the world [Laughter] you're my superhero man I love what you do I think you've a great asset for Cisco and Cisco's customers really thanks TK give us a final word if people want to you know find out more about about what Cisco's doing read more of what you're working on but what's some of the best resource I have to go do you know just drop by the web pages I mean everything's published out that like I said even even for the super nerdy you know we published all our our laurs security analytics papers I think we're over 50 papers published in the last 12 years TK thank you so much always a pleasure to catch alright yeah and a travels thank you so much for de Villante I'm Stu Mittleman John furrier is also in the house we will be back with lots more coverage here from Cisco live 20/20 in Barcelona thanks for watching the keys [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020s brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners hello and welcome back to the cubes live coverage it's our fourth day of four days of coverage here in Barcelona Spain for Cisco live 2020 I'm John Faria my co-host to many men to great guests here in the dev net studio where the cube is sitting all week long been packed with action mindy Whaley senior director developer experiences but dev net and partner a senior director welcome back to this cube good to see you guys glad to be here so we've had a lot of history with you guys what from day one yes watching def net from an idea of hey we should develop earthing you also have definite create yes separate more developer focused definite is Cisco's developer environment we've been here from the beginning what a progression congratulations on the success thank you thank you so much it's great to be here in Barcelona with everybody here you know learning in the workshops and we just love these times to connect with our community at Cisco live and it definitely ate what you mentioned which is coming up in March so it's right around the corner def net zone which we're in it's been really robust spins it's been the top of the show every year and it gets bigger and the sessions are packed because people are learning developers new developers as well as Cisco engineers who were certified coming in getting new skills as the modern cloud hybrid environments are new skills is a technology shift yeah exactly and what we have in the definite zone are different ways that the engineers and developers can engage with that technology shift so we have demos around IOT and security and showing how you know to prevent threats from attacking the Industrial routers and things like that we have coding workshops from you know beginning intro to Python intro to get all the way up through advanced like kubernetes topics and things like that so people can really dive in with what they're looking for and this year we're really excited because we have the new definite certifications with those exams coming out right around the corner in February so a lot of people are here saying I'm ready to skill up for those exams I'm starting to dive into this topic well Susie we was on she's the chief of deaf net among other things and she said there's gonna be a definite 500 the first 500 certifications of deaf net are gonna be kind of like the Hall of Fame or you know the inaugural or founder certifications so can you explain what this it means it's not a definite certification badge it's a series of write different sir can you deeper in then yeah just like we have our you know existing network certifications which are so respected and loved around the world people get CCIE tattoos and things just like there's an associate and professional and expert level on the networking truck there's now a definite associate a definite professional and coming soon definite expert and then there's also specialist badges which help you add specific skills like data center automation IOT WebEx so it's a whole new set of certifications that are more focused on the software so there are about 80 80 % software skills 20 percent knowledge of networking and then how you really connect up and down the stock so these are new certifications not replacing anything all the same stuff they're new they're part of the same program they have the same rigor the same kind of tests they actually have ways to enter weave with the existing networking certifications because we want people to do both skill paths right to build this new IT team of the future and so it's a completely new set of exams the exams are gonna be available to take February 24th and you can start signing up now so with the definite 500 you know that's gonna be a special recognition for the first 500 people who get dead note certifications it'll be a lifetime achievement they'll always be in the definite 500 right and I've had people coming up and telling me you know I'm signed up for the first day I'm taking my exams on the first day I'm trying to get into them you and I only always want to be on the lift so I think we might be on them and what's really great is with the certifications we've heard from people in the zone that they've been coming and taking classes and learning these skills but they didn't have a specific way to map that to their career path to get rewarded at work you know to have that sort of progression and so with the certifications they really will have that and it's also really important for our partners and par is doing a lot of work with certifications and partners yeah definitely that would love to hear a little bit we've interviewed on the cube over the years some of the definite partners from a technology standpoint of course the the channels ecosystem hugely important to Cisco's business gives the update as to you know definite partnering as well as what will these certifications mean to both the technology and go to market partners yeah the wonderful thing about this is it really demonstrates Cisco's embracement of software and making sure that we're providing that common language for software developers and networkers to bring the two together and what we've found is that our partners are at different levels of maturity along that progression of program ability and this new definite specialization which is anchored in the individuals that are now certified at that partner allow them to demonstrate from a go-to-market standpoint from a recognition standpoint that as a practice they have these skills and look at the end of the day it's all about delivering what our customers need and our customers are asking us for significant help in automation digital transformation they're trying to drive new business outcomes and this this will provide that recognition on on who to partner with in the market it's so important I remember when Cisco helped a lot of the partner ecosystem build data center practices went from the silos and now embracing you've got the hardware the software we're talking multi cloud it's the practice that is needed today going forward to help customers with where they're going it really is and and another benefit that we're finding and talking to our partners is we're packaging this up and rolling it out is not only will it help them from a recognition standpoint from a practice standpoint and from a competitive differentiation standpoint but it'll also help them attract challenge I mean it's no secret there is a talent shortage right now if you talk to any CEO that's top of mind and how these partners are able to attract these new skills and attract smart people smart people like working on smart things right and so this has really been a big traction point for them as well it's also giving ways to really specifically train for new job roles so some of the ways that you can combine the new definite certifications with the network engineering certifications we've looked at it and said you know there's there's a role of Network automation developer that's a new role everyone we ask in one of our sessions who needs that person on their team so many customers partners raise their hands like we want the network Automation developer on our team and you can combine you know your CCNP Enterprise with a definite certification and build up the skills to be that Network automation developer certainly has been great buzz I got to get your guys thoughts because certainly it's for careers and you guys are betting on the the people and the people are betting on Cisco mm-hmm yes this is what's going on submit surety of Devin it almost it's like a pinch me moment for you guys because you continue to grow I got to ask you what are some of the cool things that you're showing here as you mature you still have the start here session which is intro to Python and other things pretty elementary and then there's more advanced things what are some of the new things that's going on yeah that you could share so some of the new things we've got going on and one of my favorites is the IOT insecurity demonstration there's a an industrial robot arm that's picking and placing things and you can see how it's connected to the network and then something goes wrong with that robot alarm and then you can actually show how you can use the software and security tools to see was there code trying to access you know something that that robot was it was using it's getting in the way of it working so you could detect threats and move forward on that we also have a whole automation journey that starts from modeling your network to testing to how you would deploy automation to a deep dive on telemetry and then ends with multi domain automation so really helping engineers like look at that whole progression that's been that's been really popular Park talked about the specialization which ones are more popular or entry-level which ones are people coming into getting certified first network engineering automation first or what's the yeah so we're so the program is going to roll out with three different levels one is a specialized level the second is an advanced level and then we'll look to that third level again they're anchored in the in the individual certs and so as we look for that entry level it's really all about automation right I mean some things you take for granted but you still need these new skills to be able to automate and scale and have repeatable scalable benefits from that this the second tier will be more cross-domain and that's where we're really thinking that an additional skill set is needed to deliver dashboard experience compliance experiences and then that next level again we'll anchor towards the expert level that's coming out but one thing I want to point out is in addition to just having the certified people on staff they also have to demonstrate that they have a practice around it so it's not just enough to say I've passed an exam as we work with them to roll out the practice and they earn the badge they're demonstrating that they have the full methodology in place so that it really there's a lot behind it that means we can't be in the 500 list then even if a 500 list I don't know that the cube would end up being specialized its advertising no seriously all fun it's all fun it's Cisco live in Europe is there a difference between European and USD seeing any differences in geographic talent you know in the first couple years we did it I think there was a bigger difference it felt like there were different topics that were very popular in the US slightly different in Europe last year and this year I feel like they have converged it's it's the same focus on DevOps automation security as a huge focus in both places and it also feels like the the interest and level of the people attending has also converged it's really similar congratulations been fun to watch the rise and success of Devon it continues to be strong how see in the hub here and the definite zone behind us pact sessions yes what's the biggest surprise for you guys in terms of things that you didn't expect or some of the success what's what's jumped out yeah I think you know one of the points that I want to make sure we also cover and it has been an added benefit we're hoping it would happen we just didn't realize it would happen this soon we're attracting new companies new partners so the specialization won't just be available for our traditional bars this is also available for our non resale and we are finding different companies accessing definite resources and learning these skills so that's been a really great benefit of Deb net overall definitely my favorite surprises are when I show up at the community events and I hear from someone I met last year what the what they went back and did and the change that they drove and they come in their company and I think we're seeing those across the board of people who start a grassroots movement take back some new ideas really create change and then they come back and we get to hear about that from them those are my favorite surprises and I tell you we've known for years how important the developer is but I think the timing on this has been perfect because it is no longer just oh the developer has some tools that they like in the corner the developer connected to the business and driving things forward exactly so perfect timing congratulations on this certification their thing that's been great is that our at Cisco itself we now have API is across the whole portfolio and up and down the stock so that's been a wonderful thing to see come together because it opens up possibilities for all these developers so Cisco's API first company we are building it guys everywhere we can and and that the community is is taking them and finding creative things to build it's been fun to watch you guys change Cisco but also impact customers has been great to watch far many thanks for coming up yeah games live coverage here in Barcelona for Cisco live 20/20 I'm John Ford Dave Dave Alon face to many men we right back with more after this short break [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners hello and welcome back to the cubes live coverage here at Cisco live 20/20 and partial into Spain I'm John first evening men cube coverage we've got a lot of stuff going on with Cisco multi-cloud and cloud technologies of clarification of Cisco's happening in real time is happening right now cloud is here here to stay we got two great guests to unpack what's going on in cloud native and networking and applications as the modern infrastructure and software evolves we got eugene kim global product marketing and compute storage at cisco global part of marketing manager and fabio corey senior director cloud solutions marketing guys great comeback great thanks for coming back appreciate it thanks very much great to see a lot of guys so probably we've had multiple conversations and usually even out from the sales force given kind of the that the discussion and the motivation cloud is big it's here it's here to stay it's changing Cisco API first we hear and all the products it's changing everything what's the story now what's going on I would say you know the reason why we're so excited about the launch here in Barcelona it's because this time it's all about the application experience I mean the last two years we've been announcing some really exciting stuff in the cloud space right think about all the announcements with the AWS the Google's the Azure so the world but this time it really boils down to making sure that is incredibly hyper distributed world well there is an application explosion ultimately we will help for the right operations tools and infrastructure management tools to ensure that the right application experience will be guaranteed for the end customer and that's incredibly important because at the end what really really matters is that you will ensure the best possible digital experience to your customer otherwise ultimately nothing is gonna work and of course you're going to lose your brand and your customers one of the main stories that we're covering is the transformation of the industry also Cisco and one of the highlights to me was the opening keynote you had app dynamics first not networking normally it's like what's under the hood the routers and the gear no it was about the applications this is the story we're seeing it's kind of a quiet unveiling it's not yet a launch but it's evolving very quickly can you share what's going on behind this all this absolutely it's exactly along the lines of what I was saying a second ago in the end that the reason why we're driving the announcement if you want from the application experience side of the house is because without dynamics we already have a very very powerful application performance measurement tool which it's evolving extremely rapidly first of all after Amex can correlate not just the application performance to some technology kpi's but to true actual business KPIs so AB dynamics can give you for instance the real-time visibility of say a marketing funnel conversion rates transactions that you're having in your in your business operation now we're introducing an incredibly powerful new capability that takes the bar to a whole new level and that's the dynamics experience journey Maps what are those it's actually the ability of focusing not so much on front-ends and backends and databases performances but really focusing on what the user is seeing in front of his or her screen and so what really matters is capturing the journey that a given user of your application is is being and understanding whether the experience is the one that you want to deliver oh you have like a sudden drop of somewhere and you know why that is important because in the end we've been talking about is it a problem of the application performance user performance well it could be a badly designed page how do you know and so this is a very precious information is that were giving to application developers not just to the IT ops guys that is incredibly precious to get this in so you just brought up that journey so that's part of the news so just break down real quick one minute yeah what the news is yeah so we have three components the first one as you as you correctly pointed out is really introduction the application journey Maps right the experience journey Maps that's very very important the second is we are actually integrating after am it's with the inter-site action inter-site optimization manager the workload team is a workload promisor and so because there is a change of data between the two now you are in a position to immediately understand whether you have an application problem we have a workload problem or infrastructure problem which is ultimate what you really need to do as quickly as you can and thirdly we have introduced a new version of our hyper flex platform which is hyper-converged flat G flat for Cisco with a fully containerized version we tax free if you want as well there is a great platform for containerized application of parameter so you teen when I've been talking to customers last few years when they go through their transformational journey there's the modernization they need to do the patterns I've seen most successful is first you modernize the platform often HCI is you know and often for that it really simplifies the environment you know reduces the silos and has more of that operational model that looks closer to what the cloud experience is and then if I've got a good platform then I can modernize the applications on top of it but often those two have been a little bit disconnected it feels like the announcements now that they are coming together what are you seeing what are you hearing how is your solution set solving this issue yeah exactly I mean as we've been talking to our customers love them are going through different application modernisations and kubernetes and containers is extremely important to them and to build a container cloud on Prem is extremely one of their needs and so there's three distinctive requirements that they've kind of talked to us about a lot of it has to be able to it's got to be very simple very turnkey and a fully integrated ready to turn on the other one is something that's very agile right very DevOps friendly and the third being a very economic container cloud on Prem as far we mentioned high flex application platform takes our hyper-converged system and builds on top of it a integrated kubernetes platform to deliver a container as a service type capability and it provides a full stack fully supported element platform for our customers and the one of the best great aspects of is that's all managed from inside from the physical infrastructure to the hyper-converged layer to all the way to the container management so it's very exciting to have that full stack management and insight as well yeah it's great to you know John and I have been following this kubernetes wave you know since the early early days Fabio mentioned integrations with the Amazons and Google's the world because you know a few years ago you talked to customers and they're like oh well I'm just gonna build my own urbanity right back nobody ever said that is easy now just delivering at his service seems to be the way most people wanted so if I'm doing it on Amazon or Google they've got their manage service that I could do that or that they're through partners they're working with so explain what you're doing to make it simpler in the data center environment because I'm tram absolutely is a piece of that hybrid equation the customers need yes so essentially from the customer experience perspective as I mentioned it's very fairly turnkey right from the hyper flicks application platform we're taking our hyper grew software we're integrating a application virtualization layer on top of it Linux KVM based and then on top of that we're integrating the kubernetes stack on top as well and so in essence right it's a fully curated kubernetes stack right it has all the different elements from the networking from the storage elements and and providing that in a very turnkey way and as I mentioned the inner site management is really providing that simplicity that customers need for that management ok Fabio this the previous announcement you've made with the public clouds yeah this just ties into those hybrid environments that's exactly you know a few years ago people like oh is there gonna be a distribution that wins in kubernetes we don't think that's the answer but still I can't just move between kubernetes you know seamlessly yet but this is moving towards that direction so a lot of customers want to have a very simple implementation at the same time they want of course a multi cloud approach and I really care about you know marking the difference between you know multi-cloud hybrid cloud there's been a lot of confusion but if you think about it multi cloud is really rooted into the business need of harnessing innovation from whatever it comes from you know the different clouds PV different things and you know what they do today tomorrow it could even change so people want option maladie so they want a very simple implementation that's integrated with public cloud providers that simplifies their life in terms of networking security and application of workload management and we've been executing towards that goal to fundamentally simplify the operations of these pretty complex kind of hybrid environments I want you to nail that operations on ibrid that's where multi cloud comes in absolutely just a connection point absolutely you're not a shitty mice no isn't a shit so in order to fulfill your business like your I know business needs you then you have a hybrid problem and you want to really kind of have a consistent production rate environment between fins on Prem that you own and control versus things that you use and you want to control better now of course there are different school of thoughts but most of the customers who are speaking with really want to expand their governance and technology model right to the cloud as opposed to absorb in different ways of doing things from each and every clock I want to unpack a little bit of what you said earlier about the knowing where the problem is because a lot of times it's a point the finger at the other first and where's it's the application problem isn't a problem so I want to get into that but first I want to understand the hyper flex application platform Eugene if you could just share the main problem that you guys saw what did some of the pain points that customers had what problems does the AP solve yeah as I mentioned it's really the platform for our customers to modernize their applications on right and it addresses those things that they're looking for as far as the economics right really the ability to provide a full stack container experience without having to you know but you know bringing any third party hypervisor licenses as well as support cost so that's fully integrated there you have your integrated hyper-converged storage capability you have the cloud-based management and that's really developing you providing that developer DevOps simplicity from the data Julie that they're looking for internally as well as for their product production environments and then the other aspect is its simplicity to be able to manage all this right in the entire lifecycle management as well so it's the operational side of the whole yeah uncovers Papio on the application side where the problem is because this is where I'm a little bit skeptical you know normally rightfully so but I can see in a problem where it's like whose fault is it gasification is problem or the network I mean it runs into more serious workloads the banking app that's having trouble how do you know where it what the problem is and how do you solve that problem what what's going on for that specific issue absolutely and you know the name of the game here is breaking down this operational side right and I love what our app dynamics VP GM Danny winoker said you know it has this terminology beast DevOps which you know may sound like an interesting acrobatics but it's absolutely true the business has to be part of this operational kind of innovation because as you said you know developer edges you know drops their containers and their code to the IET ops team but you don't really know whether the problem a certain point is gonna be in the code or in how the application is actually deployed or maybe a server that doesn't have enough CPU so in the end it boils down to one very important thing you have to have visibility inside and take action and every layer of the stack I mean instrumentation absolutely there are players that only do it in their software overlay domain the problem is very often these kind of players assume that underneath links are fine and very often they're not so in the end this visibility inside inaction is the loop that everybody is going after these days to really get to the next if you want generational operation where you gotta have a constant feedback loop and making it more faster and faster because in the end you can only win in the marketplace right regardless of your IT ops if you're faster than your competitor well still still was questioning the GM of AppDynamics running observability and he's like no it's not to feature it's everywhere so he his comment was yeah but serve abilities don't really talk about it because it's big din do you agree with that absolutely it has to be at every layer of the stack and only if you have visibility inside an action through the entire stack from the software all the way to the infrastructure level that you can solve the problem otherwise the finger-pointing quote-unquote will continue and you will not be able to gain the speed that you need okay so the question on my mind I want to get both of you guys can weigh in on this is that you look at Cisco as a company you got a lot going on I mean a guy's huge customer base core routers - no applications there's a lot going on a lot of a lot of complexity you got IOT security Ramirez talked about that you got the WebEx rooms got totally popular it's kind of got a lot of glam to it having the WebEx kind of you know I guess what virtual presence was yeah telepresence kind of model and then you get cloud is there a mind share within the company around how cloud is baked into everything because you can't do IOT edge without having some sort of cloud operational things so there's stuff you're talking about is not just a division it's kind of gonna it's kind of threads everywhere across Cisco what's the what's the mind share right now within the Cisco teams and also customers around clarification well I would say it's it's a couple of dimension the first one is the cloud is one of the critical domains of this multi domain architecture that of course is the cornerstone of Cisco's technology strategy right if you think about it it's all about connecting users to applications wherever they are and not just the user the applications themselves like if you look at the latest stats from IDC 58% of workloads is heading to the public cloud and to the edge it's like the data center is literally exploding in many different directions so you have this highly distributed kind of fabric guess what sits in between all these applications and microservices is a secure network and that's exactly what we're executing upon now that's the first kind of consideration the second is if you look at the other silver line most of the Cisco technology innovation is also going a direction of absorbing cloud as a simplified way of managing all the components or the infrastructure you look at the IP flex ap is actually managed by inter site which is a SAS kind of component this journey started a long time ago with Cisco Meraki and then of course we have SAS properties like WebEx everything else is kind of absolutely migrants reporter we've been reporting eugen that from years ago we saw the movement where api's are starting to come in when you go back five years ago not a lot of the gear and stuff at Cisco had api's now you got api's building into all the new products that's right you see the software shift with you know you know intent-based networking to AppDynamics it's interesting it's you're seeing kind of this agile mindset this is some of you and I talk about all the time but agile now is the new model is it ready for customers I mean the normal Enterprise is still got the infrastructure and application it's separated okay how do I bring it together what are you guys seeing the customer base what's going on with with not that not the early adopters heavy-duty hardcore pioneers out there but you know the the general mainstream enterprise are they there yet have they had that moment of awakening yeah I mean I think they they are there because fundamentally it's all about that ensuring that application experience and you can only ensure that application experience right by having your application teams and your structure teams work together and that's what's exciting you mentioned the API is and what we've done there with AppDynamics integrating with inter-site workload optimizer as Fabio mentioned it's all about visibility inside action and what app dynamics is provides providing that business and end-user application performance experience visibility inner sites giving you know visibility on the underlining workload and the resources whether it's on Prem in your you know drive data center environment or in different type of cloud providers so you get that full stack visibility right from the application all the way down to the bottom and then inner side local optimizer is then also optimizing the resources to proactively ensure that application experience so before you know if we talk about someone at a checkout and they're about to have abandonment because the functions not working we're able to proactively prevent that and take a look at all that so you know in the end I think it's all about ensuring that application experience and what we're providing with app dynamics is for the application team is kind of that horizontal visibility of how that application is performing and at the same time if there's an issue the infrastructure team could see exactly within the workload topology where the issue is and insert' aeneas lee whether it be manual intervention or even automatically there's or a ops capability go ahead and provide that action so the action could be you know scaling out the VMS it's on-prem or looking at a new different type of ec2 template in the cloud that's what's very exciting about this it's really the application experience is now driving and optimizing infrastructure in real time and let me flip your question like do you even have a choice John when you think about in the next two years 50% more applications if you're a large enterprise you have 5 to 7,000 apps you have another to 3,000 applications just coming into into the the frame and then 50% of the existing ones that are gonna be refactor lifted and shifted or replace or retired by SAS application it's just like it's tsunami that's that's coming on you and oh by the way because of again the micro service is kind of affect the number of dependencies between all these applications is growing incredibly rapidly like last year we were eight average interdependencies for applications now we are 20 so imaging imaging what happens as as you are literally flooded with the way the scanner really you have to ensure that your application infrastructure fundamentally will get tied up as quickly as you can still and I have been toilet for at least five years now if not longer the networking has been the key kind of last changeover - clarification and I would agree with you guys I think I've asked the question because I wanted to get your perspective but think about it it's 13 years since the iPhone so mobile has shown people that a mobile app can change business but now if you look at the pressure the network's bringing the pressure on the network or the pressure for the network to be better than programmable is the rise of video and data I mean so you got mobile check now you've got video I mean more people doing video now than ever before videos of consumer oil as streaming you got data these two things absolutely forced yeah the customers to deal with it but what really tipped the the balance John is is actually the SAS effect is the cloud effect because as you know it's in IT sort of inflection points nothing is linear right so once you reach a certain critical mass of cloud apps and we're absolutely there already all of a sudden you're traffic pattern on your network changes dramatically so why in the world are you continuing kind of you know concentrating all of your traffic in your data center and then going to the internet you have to absolutely open the floodgates at the branch level as close to the users as possible and that implies a radical change I would even add to that and I think you guys are right on where you guys are going it may be hard to kind of tease out with all the complexity with Cisco but in the keynote the business model shifts come from SAS so you got all this technical stuff going on now you have this Asif ocation or cloud that's changes the business models so new entrants can come in and existing players can get better so I think that whole business model conversation yeah never was discussed at Cisco live before yeah in depth as well hey run your business connect your hubs campus move packets around that was applications in business model yeah but also the fact that there is increasing number of software capabilities and so fundamental you want to simplify the life of your customers through subscription models that help the customer by now using what they really need right at any given point in time all the way to having enterprise agreements I also think that's about delivering these application experiences for your business small different type experience that's really what's differentiating you from your different competitors right and so I think that's a different type of shift as well well you guys are good got some good angle on this cloud I love it I got to ask you the question what can we expect next from Cisco more progression along clarification what's next well I would say we've been incredibly consistent I believe in the last few years in executing on our cloud strategy which again is centered around helping customers really gluon this mix set of data centers and clouds to make it work as one write as much as possible and so what we really deliver is networking security and application of performance management and we're integrating there's more and more on the two sides of the equation right the the designer side and the powerful outside and more more integrating in between all of these layers again to fundamentally give you this operational capability to get faster and faster we'll continue doing so and you set up before we came on camera that you were talking to the sales teams what are they what's their vibe with the sales team they get excited by this what's that oh yeah feedback oh yeah absolutely from the inner side were claw optimizer and they have dynamics that's very exciting for them especially the conversations they're having with their customers really from that application experience and proactively insuring it and on the hyper flex application platform side this is extremely exciting with providing a container cloud to our customers and you know what's coming down is more and more capabilities for our customers to modernize their applications on hyper flex you guys are riding some pretty big waves here at Cisco I get a cloud way to get the IOT Security wave it's pretty exciting pretty big stuff thanks for coming in thanks for sharing the insights Fabio I appreciate it thank you for having us your coverage here in Barcelona I'm John Force dude Minutemen be back with more coverage fourth day of four days of cube coverage we right back after this short break [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] why Trump Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 rot to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners welcome back to Barcelona everybody we're here at Cisco live and you're watching the cube the leader in live tech coverage we got to the events and extract the signal from the noise this is day one really we started a zero yesterday Eric Hertzog is here he's the CMO and vice president of storage channels probably been on the cube more than [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 rot to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners welcome back everyone's two cubes live coverage day four of four days of wall-to-wall action here in Barcelona Spain Francisco live 2020 I'm John Ferrier with mykos Dave Volante with a very special guest here to wrap up Cisco live the president of Europe Middle East Africa and Russia Francisco Wendy Mars cube alumni great to see you thanks for coming on to kind of put a bookend to the show here thanks for joining us right there it's absolutely great to be here thank you so what a transformation as Cisco's business model of continues to evolve we've been saying brick by brick we still think is a big move coming I think there's more action I can sense the walls talking to us like let's just go live in the US and more technical announcements in the next 24 months you can see you can see where it's going it's cloud its apps yeah its policy based program ability it's really a whole nother business model shift for you and your customers the technology shift and the business model shift so I want to get your perspective of this year opening key no you let it off talking about the philosophy of the business model but also the first presenter was not a networking guy it was an application person yeah app dynamics yep this is a shift what's going on with Cisco what's happening what's the story well you know if you look for all of the work that we're doing is but is really driven by what we see from requirements from our customers the change that's happening in the market and it is all around you know if you think digital transformation is the driver organizations now are incredibly interested in how do they capture that opportunity how do they use technology to help them but you know if you look at it really there's the three items that are so important it's the business model evolution it's actually the business operations for for organisations plus their people there are people in the communities within that those three things working together and if you look at it with you know it's so exciting with application dynamics there because if you look for us within Cisco that linkage of the application layer through into the infrastructure into the network and bringing that linkage together is the most powerful thing because that's the insight and the value our customers are looking for you know we've been talking about the in the innovation sandwich you know you got you know date in the middle and you got technology and applications underneath that's kind of what's going on here but you I'm glad you brought up the year the part about business model business operations and people in communities because during your keno you had a slide that laid out three kind of pillars yes people in communities business model and business operations there was no 800 series in there there was no product discussions this is fundamentally the big shift that business models are changing I tweeted provocatively the killer app and digital the business model because you think about it the applications are the business and what's running under the covers is the technology but it's all shifting and changing so every single vertical every single business is impacted by this it's not like a certain secular thing in the industry this is a real change can you describe how those three things are operating with that constitute think if you look from you know so thinking through those three areas if you look at the actual business model itself our business models as organizations are fundamentally changing and they're changing towards as consumers we are all much more specific about what we want we have incredible choice in the market we are more informed than ever before but also we are interested in the values of the organizations that were getting the capability from as well as the products and the services that naturally we're looking to gain so if you look in that business model itself this is about you know organizations making sure they stay ahead from a competitive standpoint about the innovation of portfolio that they're able to bring but also that they have a strong strong focus around the experience that their customer gains from an application a touch standpoint that all comes through those different channels which is at the end of the day the application then if you look as to how do you deliver that capability through the systems the tools and the processes as we all evolve our businesses you have to change the dynamic within your organization to cope with that and then of course in driving any transformation the critical success factor is your people and your culture you need your teams with you the way teams operate now is incredibly different it's no longer command and control its agile capability coming together you need that to deliver on any transformation never never mind let it be smooth you know in the execution there so it's all three together what I like about that model and I have to say we this is you know ten years to do in the cube you you see that marketing in the vendor community often leads what actually happens not surprising as we entered the last decade it was a lot of talk about cloud well it kind of was a good predictor we heard a lot about digital transformations a lot of people roll their eyes and think it's a buzzword but we really are I feel like an exiting this cloud era into the digital era it feels real and there are companies that you know get it and are leaning in there are others that maybe you're complacent I'm wondering what you're seeing in in Europe just in terms of everybody talks digital yeah be CEO wants to get it right but there is complacency there when it's a services say well I'm doing pretty well not on my watch others say hey we want to be the disruptors and not get disrupted what are you seeing in the region in terms of that sentiment I would say across the region you know there will always be verticals and industries that are slightly more advanced than others but I would say that then the bulk of conversations that I'm engaged in independence of the industry or the country in which we're having that conversation in there is a acceptance of transfer digital transformation is here it is affecting my business i if I don't disrupt I myself will be disrupted and be challenged help me so I you know I'm not disputing the end state I need guidance and support to drive the transition and a risk mythic mitigated manner and they're looking for help in that and there's actually pressure in the boardroom now around a what are we doing within within organizations within that enterprise the service right of the public said to any type of style of company there's that pressure point in the boardroom of come on we need to move it speed now the other thing about your model is technology plays a role in contribute it's not the be-all end-all but plays a role in each of those the business model of business operations and developing and nurturing communities can you add more specifics what role do you see technology in terms of advancing those three spheres so I think you know if you look at it technology is fundamental to all of those spheres in regard to the innovation the differentiation technology can bring then the key challenges one of being able to reply us in a manner where you can really see differentiation of value within the business so in then the customers organization otherwise it's just technology for the sake of technology so we see very much a movement now to this conversation of talk about the use case the use cases the way by which that innovation can be used to deliver the value to the organization and also different ways by which a company will work look at the collaboration capability that we announced earlier this week of helping to bring to life that agility look at the app D discussion of helping to link the layer of the application into the infrastructure the network's to get to root cause identification quickly and to understand where you may have a problem before you thought it actually arises and causes downtime many many ways I think the agility message has always been a technical conversation a gel methodology technology software development no problem check that's ten years ago but business agility mmm it's moving from a buzzword to reality exactly that's what you're kind of getting in here and teams how teams operate how they work you know and being able to be quick efficient stand up stand down and operate in that way you know we were kind of thinking out loud on the cube and just riffing with Fabio gory on your team on Cisco's team about clarification with Eugene Kim around just just kind of real-time what was interesting is we're like okay it's been 13 years since the iPhone and so 13 years of mobile in your territory in Europe Middle East Africa mobilities been around before the iPhone so with in more advanced data privacy much more advanced in your region so you got you out you have a region that's pretty much I think the tell signs for what's going on in North America and around the world and so you think about that you say okay how is value created how the economics changing this is really the conversation about the business model is okay if the value activities are shifting and be more agile and the economics are changing with sass if someone's not on this bandwagon it's not an in-state discussion where it's done deal yeah it's but I think also there were some other conversation which which are very prevalent here is in in the region so around trust around privacy law understanding compliance you look at data where data resides portability of that data GDP are came from Europe you know and as ban is pushed out and those conversations will continue as we go over time and if I also look at you know the dialogue that you saw so you know within World Economic Forum around sustainability that is becoming a key discussion now within government here in Spain you know from a climate standpoint and many other areas as well Dave and I've been riffing around this whole where the innovation is coming from it's coming from Europe region not so much the u.s. I mean us discuss some crazy innovations but look at blockchain us is like don't touch it pretty progressive outside United States little bit dangerous to but that's where innovation is coming from and this is really the key that we're focused on I want to get your thoughts on how do you see it going next level the next level next-gen business model what's your what's your vision so I think there'll be lots of things if we look at things like with the introduction of artificial intelligence robotics capability 5g of course you know on the horizon we have Mobile World Congress here in Barcelona in a few weeks time and if you talked about with the iPhone the smartphone of course when 4G was introduced no one knew what the use case would that would be it was the smartphone which wasn't around at that time so with 5g in the capability there that will bring again yet more change to the business model for different organizations and the capability and what we can bring to market when we think about AI privacy data ownership becomes more important some of the things you were talking about before it's interesting what you're saying John and when the the GDP are set the standard and and you see in the u.s. there are stovepipes for that standard California is going to do one every state is going to have a different center that's going to slow things down that's going to slow down progress do you see sort of an extension of a GDP are like framework of being adopted across the region and that potentially you know accelerating some of these you know sticky issues and public policy issues that can actually move the market forward I think I think the will because I think there'll be more and more you know if you look at there's this terminology of data is the new oil what do you do with data how do you actually get value from that data and make intelligent business decisions around that so you know that's critical but yet if you look for all of ours we are extremely passionate about you know where is our data used again back to trust and privacy you need compliance you need regulation you know I think this is just the beginning of how we will see that evolve you know when do I get your thoughts does Dave and I have been riffing for 10 years around the death of storage long live storage and but data needs to be stored somewhere networking is the same kind of conversation just doesn't go away in fact there's more pressure now forget the smartphone that was 13 years ago before that mobility data and video now super important driver that's putting more pressure on you guys and so hey we're networking so it's kind of like Moore's law it's like more networking more networking so video and data are now big your thoughts on video and data video but if you look at the Internet of the future you know what so if you look for all of us now we are also demanding as individuals around capability and access to that and inter vetted the future the next phase we want even more so there'll be more and more - you know requirement for speed availability that reliability of service the way by which we engage and we communicate there's some fundamentals there so continuing to to grow which is which is so so exciting for us so you talk about digital transformation that's obviously in the mind of c-level executives I got to believe security is up there as a topic what other what's the conversation like in the corner office when you go visit your customers so I think that there's a huge excitement around the opportunity realizing the value of the of the opportunity you know if you look at top of mind conversations are around security around making sure that you can make tank maintain that fantastic customer experience because if you don't the custom will go elsewhere how do you do that how do you enrich at all times and also looking at markets adjacencies you know as you go in and you talk at senior levels within within organizations independent of the industry in which they're in there are a huge amount of commonalities that we see across those of consistent problems by which organizations are trying to solve and actually one of the big questions is what's the pace of change that I should operate at and when is it too fast and when is what am I too slow and trying to balance that is exciting but also a challenge for companies so you feel like sentiment is still strong even though we're 10 years into this this bull market you know you got Briggs it you get you know China tensions with the US u.s. elections but but generally you see Tennessee sentiment still pretty strong and demand so I would say that the the excitement around technology the opportunity that is there around technology in its broadest sense is greater than ever before and I think it's on all of us to be able to help organizations to understand how they can consume I see value from us but it's you know it's fantastic science it tastes trying to get some economic indicators but really the real thing I'm trying to get you is Minh set of the CEO the corner office right now is it is it we're gonna we're gonna grow short-term by cutting or do we do are we gonna be aggressive and go after this incremental opportunity and it's probably both you're seeing a lot of automation yeah and I think if you look fundamentally for organizations it's it's that the three things helped me to make money how me to save money keep me out of trouble you know so those are the pivots they all operate with and you know depending on where an organization is in its journey whether a start-up there you know in in the in the mid or the more mature and some of the different dynamics and the markets in which they operate in as well there's all different variables you know so it's it's it's mix Wendy thanks so much for spending the time to come on the cube really appreciate great keynote folks watching if you haven't seen the keynote opening sections that's a good section the business model I think it's really right on I think that's going to be a conversation it's going to continue thanks for sharing that before we look before we leave I want to just ask you a question around what you what's going on for you here at Barcelona as the show winds down you had all your activities take us in the day of the life of what you do customer meetings what were some of those conversations take us inside inside what what goes on for you here well I'd say it's been an amazing it's been an amazing few days so it's a combination of customer conversations around some of the themes we just talked about conversations with partners and there's investor companies that we invest in a Cisco that I've been spending some time with and also you know spending time with the teams as well the DEF net zone you know is amazing we have this afternoon the closing session where we've got a fantastic external guest who's coming in it's going to be really exciting as well and then of course the party tonight and we'll be announcing the next location which I'm not gonna reveal now later on today we kind of figured it out already because that's our job and there's the break news but we're not gonna break it for you you can have that hey thank you so much for coming on really appreciate Wendy Martin expecting the Europe Middle East Africa and Russia for Cisco she's got our hand on the pulse and the future is the business model that's what's going on fundamental radical change across the board in all areas this the cue bringing you all the action here in Barcelona thanks for watching [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]

>>Live from Seattle, Washington. It's the cube covering Smartsheet engage 2019 brought to you by Smartsheet. >>Welcome back everyone to Seattle, Washington. We are here at Smartsheet engaged 2019 I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Jeff Frick. You're watching the cube. We are here with a cube alum, a cube veteran, Dion Hinchcliffe, VP and principal analyst at constellation research at at Washington DC. Thank you so much for returning to the cube. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. So we're here to talk with you about the future of work, which is a huge topic but a fascinating one. I want you to start by giving sort of a broad brush of what you see are the biggest changes right now happening in the workplace is driven by the new, the rise of digital technologies. >>Sure. I mean while it digital is infusing everything in the workplace these days, right? And so we've had the past waves of productivity tools and then mobile devices came through and then eventually augmented reality and virtual reality are going to literally change how we perceive the workplace. And then we have just everyday trends like remote working. And now people can work from anywhere, right? It's fantastic. And that's, that's really revolutionized a lot of things. There are things in 2% of the workforce per year is becoming a remote work force. Companies like ADP have a quarter of their workforce working from home, right? Accenture, same thing. They're getting rid of office space and they, they work out of their house unless there's a client site. And because you can create a, create the experience that you want. And one of the really big trends is this is this trend towards being able to shape the employee experience the way that you want to, using the tools that you prefer. >>And some people call this shadow it, other people call it innovation, right? And so that's one of the, one of the big changes. And then we have things like the gig economy, which is allowing people to build the lifestyles they want doing any kind of work they want when they want to, when they feel like it on their own terms. And that's, that's really quite exciting too. So all these, this confluence of forces all enabled them driven by technology. But it's also leading to a lot of what we call cognitive overload workers that are not lifelong learners are feeling overwhelmed by this. And that's another big challenge. >>Well, you also get this tools proliferation, which they're just not, they're just not word and, and Excel anymore. But you've got a tab open with Salesforce, you've got a tab open with Slack, you've got Gmail open, you've got docs open and you've got Smartsheet open. You might have a JIRA open. I mean, so how is that gonna sort itself out as we just kind of keep adding new tabs of apps that we have to keep up >>and we need all this technology to do better work. I mean the, these apps provide value except that it's increased in the onboarding time for workers. It's making it hard for us to train people. In some companies it's hard to retain people because they feel like they have to go to work and there's this onslaught of technologies they have to have tabs open and get their jobs done. And they do. And so we're seeing things like, you know, we're at the Smartsheet conference where, you know, how can we centralize work a little bit better, streamline it by integrating the tools and creating more focus in on what we're doing. And that's a very big trend. So my latest digital workplace trends report, we say this, we're seeing these hubs form, you know like Slack is another work hub that's become very popular inside of organizations. >>They have over 1100 application integrations that allow people to spend their time in one place and kind of work through all these other systems from one hub. So we're dealing with this complexity, you know, starting to be able to do this now, but it's early days still a big challenge. So what's a, what are you seeing now? So what's the, what is the answer then? I mean we have you just described all of these trends that are taking place that are making, making the work modern workplace so much more complex, dealing with workers who have, they're dealing with cognitive overload leaders who want more with less. What are some of the answers? What are some of the most exciting tools that you're seeing right now? We talked already about Smartsheet and Slack. We see the new digital experience platforms are emerging and low code and no code is also becoming popular. >>I'd be able to take the pieces of the applications you want and create more streamline experiences. So the CIO of Accenture, Andrew Wilson, solve his problem right away there. They're knowledge workers are just being choked by all of these tools, but yet we need the value they provide. So he began to divide up the employee experience, the 100 top moments and then he built experiences that enabled, you know, project management and onboarding and all of these key activities to be friction-free built out of their existing applications, but streamlined to just what they needed to do. And he used this as his top priority as a digital leader is to say, we've got to take as much complexity away so we can get at the values with streamlining and simplification. And we now have tools that allow that shaping to happen very quickly. It's almost reminds me of kind of the competition for Deb's right now. >>It's the competition for employees. And then we've talked a lot about the consumerization of it in mobile devices for the customer experience, but there hasn't been as much talk about leveraging that same kind of expected behavior, right? Or expected inner engagement interaction with the apps on the actual employee engagement side, which is probably as fierce of a battle as it is to get customers. Cause I think there's a lot more than 2% customers out available. But yeah, we only get 2% unemployment in the Bay area. Now it's creating effectively negative unemployment, right? Anything under 3%. So this is the challenges. Employee experience is usually low on the priority list for CEOs. They usually have analytics and cloud and cybersecurity and all these things that they have to get done that are higher priority. Yet customer experience is, is one of those priorities. But how does an employee give a good customer experience when they have a poor experience to deliver it with? Right. We're seeing you can do with talented people, is expecting to do a great job. And then give them a bunch of hard to use tools, right. Which is what's happening. So we are now finally seeing that prioritization go up a little bit because employee experience is part of delivering great customer experience and it's how you, how you create that experience to begin with. So small >>and leaders are seeing that as a priority of retaining their top people because they understand that their workers need to feel satisfied with their work life. >>Yeah. And now we have data on a lot of these things we didn't have before and I'm sure you've seen the numbers that are, most employees are disengaged at work. The majority, right between 50 and 60% depending on whose data you're looking at. That's an enormous untapped investment that workers are not performing the way that they could if they had better employee experiences. And what's disengaging is, as I mentioned, you know, giving a talented person allows you tools or allows you experience, right and expect them to do great is right. It doesn't happen. >>How much do you think AAL or excuse me, AI and machine learning will be able to offload enough of the mundane to flip the bit on how engaged they are in their job. >>Yeah, it's, it's interesting cause there's, you know, there's two sides of the coin there. Some people like a, a job that they can just kind of phone in and it's kind of rote and they can come in, they don't have to think too hard and then they can go home to their family and some people are hired on that basis. Right. Um, because that's the challenge. AI and machine learning will absolutely automate most rote work. If you look at like Adobe sensei, I was at the Adobe conference and, and they were talking about how all of these creative types, you'll have all these mundane tasks automated for them. And I could see everybody looking at each other going, I get paid to do. >>Right, right. >>So you know, it, you'll see things like robotic process automation is working. I mean, I hear anecdotes all the time from CIO is how they had, they cut like 25% out of their call center because they handed it over to the box. Right. You know, as bill processing, that's one of the, and sorting and matching bills, the invoices, it's a manual job even in today's world until very recently. So we are seeing that happen about the most rote level and it just, but it's just going to climb up from there. >>What do you see down the road though? I mean in terms of those, in terms of those employees who are raising their saying hands saying weed, I kind of want that job. I are you, are you seeing what's going to happen to those people? Are they going to have to learn new skills? Are they, are they going to be invested in by their companies? >>Well you hope so. You know, it's interesting. We see that all the big vendors now have these big education programs. Salesforce has Trailhead. SAP just announced open SAP where they giveaway massively open online courses. And you know, Microsoft has done this with Microsoft developers network way back in the day, trying to educate people. I mean you can get re-skilled for nothing for free now if you want to do it. But this is the challenges. Even though every technological revolution in the past, and it looks like this one too has totally changed the employment picture. Uh, uh, by and large it creates more jobs than we lose. And that looks like it's going to happen here. But the people who lose the jobs aren't the ones that tend to gain the jobs, the new jobs, right? Yeah. The, it's hard to take somebody who's, who's sorting bills and say, I need you to develop a new AI algorithms because that's where the next strategic jobs are going to be directing the AI to do all these things. Right. And so I think the short term is going to be dislocation and it's happening so fast that unless society, government, and enterprises really intervene that to upskill these folks, we are going to have a challenge. >>Well, we're in this really weird time too, in between, I mean, the classic one is long haul trucking, right? Which is perfect for autonomous vehicles, you know, to carry a lot of that freight and everyone pretty much agrees that's going to happen. At the same time, there's, there's a huge shortage of available truck drivers today. Uh, like there never has been. So as these weird, and again, it's probably not the best thing for a young kid to get into, right? Because it's not, doesn't have a lot great long. >>Right? Right. >>Well, and you know, you look at Uber and their stated direction is, is they want to get rid of all these drivers, right? They want it, they want self-driving taxis. And you know, we're getting close to where that might actually happen, right? Uh, and so the unskilled labor is going to be hit by far the worst. You have to become skilled labor in, in the digital economy. Uh, and so a big part of the future of work is going to be finding ways to, to get the skills into people's hands. You know, like Facebook and other large organizations don't even require a college degree. What they want people, the people that can deliver, they can take these things and create the, you know, the, the great products of the future. And so, you know, those everyone has to become a knowledge worker. >>And, and as Laird Hamilton said on the main stage today, it's the, it's the, the formula of learning to really understand when you're starting from a point of, wow, I don't know much about that. I bet. I guess I'd better learn about it. And then learning a lot about it along the way. We all have to be able to adapt and adopt those new, >>no, absolutely. Now the, uh, uh, and so w we see up-skilling and cross skilling becoming more transdisciplinary. So business people are becoming it folks now and it folks really business people, you know, we've had this business, it divide for a long time and cracks me up. I still go to big companies in the it departments using its own building. Right. But those days are going away. And now seeing that, you know, now as it people over on the business side that live there now. Right. You know, so we're seeing this kind of, this blending where digital is infusing everything and so you have to become digitally competent. Uh, and this is where we have to make that simpler. This is going back to the, you know, the, the, the digital workplace, the average user has had the number of applications they have to learn double or triple in the last just the last five years. Right. So it's a big challenge. >>So what should kids be majoring in today? What's your, >>Oh, a game design. Know the gaming industry is bigger than the movie by a large, large margin. Right. And, and that, that's where all the experience of these immersive experiences in virtual reality and augmented reality really come from. And then you can go into business. Right. You know, >>even sociology majors can design games. >>Yeah. It's just, you know, it's just get, like you said, it's, it's the poor tweeners right. That get bumped on the old and aren't necessarily in a position to take care of the new, yeah. I'll have to take care of. And unfortunately, uh, not a lot of great record of retraining today, but maybe that's going to have to be a much more significant investment because there just aren't the people to fill those positions, period. Right? Yeah. Well, and there's these big market places now you can build the career of your dreams. You'd go to Upwork or Gigster. I mean, these are big job markets where you can go and find work and do it from anywhere using a tablet you bought for $50 off Amazon. Right, right. You know, it just that most of you aren't even aware of that. They can do that. Right, right, right. >>So it's this fast changing world. Put a few bucks away for insurance and you've put a few bucks away in your 401k and you, yeah. You know, not just living off the cash plus a little bit to cover your costs, which unfortunately a lot of their, like the Uber drivers and the Lyft drivers are anyway, you know, they're not really banking that thing for building a, a career. Well, I've crawled to those platforms and it's interesting, entrepreneurial activities, very common in places like Asia, right? Where if, you know, they come here, they build businesses right away. Right. And they're used to that. So w and we lost some of that, but I think we were gave a economy is giving a lot of that back to us. We have to relearn it again, you know? Right. >>Well Deon, thank you so much for coming on the cube. It was a pleasure having you. Absolutely. Thanks. So Jeff. Thanks Rebecca. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. Stay tuned to more of the cubes live coverage of NJ engaged 2019.