(bright upbeat music) >> Now welcome back to theCUBE as we continue our coverage here at AWS re:Invent 22, or of course in the Venetian here in Las Vegas. It's Wednesday day, I guess two and a half of the show. Things are going really well here and we're going to move our attention now to banking and tech like so many other verticals that financial industry making huge moves with their digital plays. And we're going to talk about that with a couple of guys that know what that is all about. Ken Meyer, chief Information and Experience Officer at Truist. Ken, good to see you, sir. >> Good to have me. Thank you very much. >> It is. And Gys Hyman, who is a principal at Deloitte the lead though for a converge prosperity we'll explain that in just a second. Hi, it's good to see you as well. >> Nice, yeah. Awesome having me. >> Right, so jump in on that for a converge prosperity so we understand what the product is and or what the opportunity is for what Deloitte brought to market for what folks like Truist are putting into practice. >> Yeah, so converge prosperity is really our focus where we building solutions production reduced solutions for the financial services industry. So if you think about the demand on the bank side right now is they want to launch new products, new services those innovative products and services that they want to take to market. And they also want to modernize, a lot of their sort of legacy infrastructure and modernize some of the components within their architecture. So we, together with AWS actually, are co-investing sort of in a multi-year strategy where we're saying, let's build these solutions that we can take to market that can sort of help these banks be more agile, launch products faster to market and also help address the modernization journey for the banks. And that's really sitting within the converged prosperity business unit within Deloitte. >> And Ken, for you, what was the attraction or what is the attraction in terms of that kind of an offering? >> Well, I think when you think about the banking journey to the Cloud, a lot of folks look on the channel experiences and they've leveraged Cloud to create differentiated experiences that are just... They couldn't build before with the speed of the scale and everything else. But, the challenges that many banks have is once you get below that layer there's a lot of legacy type technology that lives in the product offerings that we all offer. So, the idea of these folks or others that are trying to make that a little bit easier to kind of connect that front end to that backend all with the true modern stack is something that's differentiated. >> Yeah, if I hear pulling this big old weight along with me right? >> That's right. >> I've got all this old stuff but I still have to use some of the old stuff. >> Well, and some of the old stuff works, right? It runs. So, why would you want to mess up anything that's running? And so even that if these folks and others can find ways to start breaking it into more modular pieces so we can consume things differently than we've done before versus take that big old elephant on every time, it's a differentiator. >> So what's the trick then in making sure that what is new is working with what is old? Because what is new these days, obviously you know, faster, sleek, or, I mean, we go on and on as opposed to what you were working with in Legacy. So what's the trick there, Gys in making sure that you're doing the right match up? >> It's part of the approach. I mean, you can either do a big bang approach which is sort of lengthy and high risk for the bank which is obviously we don't see a lot of appetite in the banks to take the big bang approach or the large transformational approach. And then the approach that we sort of take to this is to say, and that we're seeing that success in the market is around more a phased approach which we call on the edge, is really to say, how can we launch something on the side, and take that to market really quick to show the benefit to the business and demonstrate success. And at the same time have a really sort of modular architecture that you can say, you don't have to have this monolith solution that you need to plug or replace your existing one. That you can really sort of componentize that and say which are the components that we want to start replacing in a phased approach, with these new next generation technologies, which, yeah. >> The part that he mentioned there at the end on module architecture is a 100% the key, right? I mean, architecture matters probably now more than ever. When you're trying to stitch all these things to together and you can find ways to make it a little bit more seamless versus some of the monoliths that we've dealt with in the past, it's extremely helpful. >> So, give us some examples here for what your experience has been then. >> Yeah... >> 'I mean, you are as I see you're the experience officer, so, (all laughing) >> We'll leave that one alone, (all laughing loudly) but now, I mean I think some of the on the edge stuff that Gys has been talking about, we're a large bank, we have subsidiaries we have a subsidiary, which is our national lending platform and LightStream as an example. And we decided to say, Hey let's really learn from what we could do with a more modern core banking platform. And we ultimately stood that up in production and we're close to going generally available but we've got production accounts on modern core platforms that we're learning every day from. And it's not just the learning on the tech side, that tech side might be the easy part, to be honest. The change in this technology and the different technologies that are available it really is impacting how we run our operations. So moving from batch processing which has always been how banks operate to this concept of real time processing, that's a big step. And not only does it change in the operations and how we service our clients but now you got to think about compliance, right? And legal and all of the the risk elements, >> 'security changing. >> Security, all that. It's all a part of that change. So you could say that the tech is really hard and it's difficult and we got to look at the architecture but at the end of the day, it's about bringing the entire organization back to the table to say how do we do this different? And how do we create a better experience and create new value for our clients through the technology. >> All right, can you gimme an example though? I mean, about some... What's going to be the biggest change you think then? >> I think operationally is the biggest change, in my opinion. I mean, when you start thinking about the way in which we've worked for years around this concept of batch processing, so, you know, yes, you make a deposit at your branch and that's really nice and we might credit you and you do the memo post but it doesn't clear until the night runs and you finish your batch process, at 3:00 AM and then all your downstream systems run and all of that. And even the concept of collecting checks, right? And thinking about all the item processing aspects of that when you start talking about real time and it immediately you make your deposit and immediately balances your general ledger and it clears and it's all right there at that point in time, all of those processes go away, right? The batch processes change the way in which all the downstream impacts for reporting and analytics and all of those things, it all changes. And so that can be really scary, but it also can be really exciting when you think about creating new products and new services that are truly real time and changing the way in which we operate with our clients. >> So scary and exciting, right? A couple of moods or situations that maybe some folks in banking don't want to be in, right? I don't like scary. I want here... >> Well change is scary for a lot of people right? But there's an evolution in this space. >> Gys, what are you seeing with your experiences in terms of... >> 'i think that it also creates opportunity to sort of (clears throat) to lay the foundation of how do you coexist between the old world and the new world? And these modern technologies really allow you to sort of, put a event driven platform in place to say, understand that the banking world is fairly batch driven right now as Ken's comment and also the broader banking ecosystem is still batch driven but it allows us to put a platform in place to say how do we coexist with that batch environment and the real time environment? And the other thing that the banks are trying to do is they're trying to work with a number of sort of the fintechs out there in the market, these leading fintechs that are offering new products and services that they can embed into their offering and then offer as a service to their customers at the end of the day. But doing that with existing banking technology is difficult because it's not as modular, it's not as open. These next generation technologies and certainly the solution that we building with AWS is really sort of that power strip or that fabric layer where we are allowing fintechs to plug in easier into that ecosystem and into the bank's ecosystem as well. >> Yeah, I think with Goldman Sachs is that what I read is that one that comes to mind about repurposing and making it available to their client base. >> They certainly building a platform model where they're bringing other ecosystem partners into their platform and then they're offering out as business services to their customers. >> So, Ken how do you get buy in on this? I mean, because, it sure looks good on paper, right? But when it comes to time actually execute and implement, you need, you know, buy in for more than just your slice of the business, right? >> Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of different elements that come into getting that buy in and kind of making that leap and starting to experiment. One is our clients, right? So our clients are demanding new products, new services they don't expect things like maintenance windows and other, like they want what they want when they want it. So if you're listening to your clients and they want more product innovation and they want everything available when they need it that's clear. Cloud and security, we've... Everything that we've ever done when it comes to moving workloads or building experiences with the Cloud has been by continuing to increase our security posture. So we can create a more secure environment and a more available environment because we've have deployments that are spanning different regions and they're continuously available, and the automation and the speed in which we can go to market. I mean, when you can create a new product and launch a new product in weeks versus months or years in the past with all of the complexity and create simplicity while also using modern capabilities to create intelligent experiences, that's a game changer. And it's hard to argue with it but I think the other part of it that's a reality is that we're facing a really interesting time where there's not a whole lot of COBAL programmers laying around these days. And so at some point there's going to be a workforce issue. >> Skills gap. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. So looking at it with through your Deloitte lens, then I mean, that's a very real threat, right? Is it not to all of a sudden, not a regression but certainly a delay in progress, (chuckles) how do we overcome that as far as training and skills and whatever? >> We believe that this on the edge approach also, the other benefit to the bank is it allows the benefit to sort of test and learn a little bit with these new technologies. These new Cloud native, Cloud based technologies are very different, you know, different skill set that you need in the design side and the build side and also in the maintain and operate side. But it allows the bank to sort of take more of a phased approach and sort of get the training wheels around the skills, get comfortable around how these different platforms work, and how do you slowly sort of phase that into the organization, which makes a big difference. >> So what's the training part of that then? I mean, what does that look like? >> It's training at the engineering level to say there are a new set of tools. You know if you think about the Cloud the infrastructure layer, those technologies are very different from, servicing the on-prem technologies that the banks are used to servicing. So that's certainly at the engineering level there's a difference in training, but there's also a different training required at how do you configure and work with these new next generation, core platforms, which opens up a whole set of opportunities of what are the types of financial services products that the banks can take to market, but they work very differently than your sort of your traditional more monolithic technologies. And then I think the bigger area, as Ken mentioned is on the servicing side, the bank has now got a say we are now introducing a new solution together with an old solution, and how do we coexist and how do we create a servicing layer for the customer to have that sort of consistent experience across all the new but also your middle office and your back office and your front office, people have got to work on this platform and how do you not give them a broken experience in the... >> 'well, and your clients don't care about what your black end platforms look like. >> All right. That's right. >> So you want to be able to, it's kind of it's do it on the device, right? It doesn't matter what if it's a hundred years old or if it's 10 days old, it doesn't matter. >> Right, right. You talked about the modular configurations, right? Are some more critical than others? I mean, not knowing what that looks like or have you been able to give feedback on the converged prosperity side, say, you know, fine tune... >> 'i give a lot of feedback. >> Okay, (all laughing loudly). >> We won't do his review right now. >> All right, all right, good. All right, so let's not do... >> 'no, I think that we've done a lot of learning together throughout all of these processes because before they had this really fancy converge prosperity thing we were just working together, right? And we've been able to learn along the way and there's some learnings that are great for us and there's other things that they can tailor for a broader set of clients, which is great. I mean that's what the partnerships about is continuing to learn together and Gys and his team have been phenomenal partners. As we think about being very, very intentional about how we launch products on these new platforms we give a lot of feedback on, Hey these are areas that might be really important for you to think about as you look to build out your side of the platform. And some of those things we might consume some of those things we might not, and that's okay. But for us it's about truly partnering and doing that test and learn and trying to learn about how does this impact all of the downstream stuff because it's not just about technology, although we like to think it is every once in a while this is about clients. And so you got to continue to put them in the front and then similarly, our teammates that we have because they're servicing those clients on the front lines every day. >> Yeah, they'll tell you if it's working. >> 'they will tell you. >> 'you'll know right away. >> Absolutely. >> See what kind of use we have going on here and... >> 'a 100%. >> And if something's broken or not. Just real quick about the relationship going forward then, like you've launched converged prosperity, right? It's been out in the marketplace less than a year, but you got it up and running, things are going well. When you hear feedback like this from Ken and others what kind of fine tunings going on in here with you? And then from your side of the equation too what do you want more of? What do you want to see more of here in 2023? >> Yeah, I mean we work with sort of the non-traditional banks out there. So we work with FinTech that want to launch banking offerings. So there are a lot of lessons that we learn from them in terms of what are the features and capabilities that they're looking for. We work with some of the larger banks that are saying, we want to be more modular in terms of how we consume the banking suite solution. We don't want to take sort of an end-to-end proposition. We really want to take selective components of that banking suite solution and embed it into our existing or new infrastructure. And I think the lessons for us is really just around what are the new customer capabilities that their customers are looking for that we should be building for in our platform. I think the other thing that you need to look at is these next generation core banking platforms they are like any new software business they are growing, they are learning and they are maturing. So you are also looking for customers that have the appetite to grow with some of those and whose product roadmap aligns with those vendors out there. So, I guess for us, it's important to work with partners that are willing to work with us and walk that journey. But we also feel that these technologies and solutions are really.... Banks are moving past design, past thinking, they are really now thinking about how do we start implementing and making it real and how do we take that initial use case sort of to market out there. >> Yeah, I would say, if I simplify what Gys and team have done they've taken modernization of commodity services, right? So, banks don't want to just go out and build commodities all the time, right? That's not how we're going to differentiate. So we need to be thinking about what are the different ways that we can create a competitive advantage against everybody else who has, a lot of different and similar products and service offerings. So, if we can continue to look and help influence roadmaps and also consume some of those types of services that are truly commoditized, and we can go focus on the modernization of the areas that are the biggest possible competitive advantages for us then there's a lot of value in that type of value problem. >> I know we didn't have time for this, but do you have a pick by the way, in the national championship in college football? >> I'm a dog. >> I know you are, (laughing loudly). >> I'm a dog. >> How about them dogs? >> How about them dogs? >> All right, thanks for the time guys. >> Thanks much. >> Really do appreciate it much. Really great session. Talking about banking and what's going on at the bottom really is AWS, driving things and making it happen. All right, you've been watching the Cube, of course. The leader in high tech coverage. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music playing) >> Hey, all you cool cats and kittens, and welcome back to AWS re:Invent. We are live from the show floor, here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by my co-host Paul Gillian. Paul, how you doing? We're now full blown into your first day of AWS re:Invent ever. >> Overwhelmed. >> Overwhelmed! >> Drinking from the fire hose. There's so much going on here. >> Yeah. There really is, isn't there? Anything stood out to you in that fire hose? >> I think the importance of data, hearing about a lot of tools here, a lot of talk about how organizations need to take advantage of the cloud to leverage their data more effectively, that's clearly a theme in the show. Hearing a lot about vertical industries and the move of the cloud into more verticalization which we're going to be talking about here with our next guest, among other things. Monty Bhatia, who's the Vice President of Global Systems Integrators at VMware, a company that really pioneered partnerships with AWS, as well as other cloud providers. And also Ranjit Bawa, the principal, US cloud leader for Deloitte, a company that has been a leader in vertical clouds as well as in cloudefying its customers, if you will. Welcome, thank you both for joining us. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you for having us. >> We're happy to be here. >> Monty, I just have to say, I know I said it before, I think you might be the best dressed. >> You know, you may have to say it again. I've got to record this and show it to my wife, because she always says that I should wear age appropriate colors, and she thinks yellow and hot pinks are not age appropriate. So I've made a deal with her that when I'm traveling, and everybody else has heard the story, when I'm traveling and she's not around I can wear any colors I want. It is an attention grabber, it is a conversation starter, and I love it. >> I'm all for the talk trigger and you told me you have 32 different sets. >> That's right. >> And you're branded, right? Give us a little lapel peak. >> I am branded. (Monty and Ranjit chuckling) >> Brilliant. We don't always do a fashion segment to open each clip but I just, I couldn't let this pass, Monty- >> Thank you, I appreciate that. >> You're just absolutely, absolutely smashing it. Deloitte and VMware, you've got a unique strategic partnership. Ranjit can you tell me a little bit about that? >> Yeah, absolutely. We've been working together for close to a decade now with VMware. >> Nice. In Techland that might as well be a century. >> That's right. >> It is. (Savannah chuckling) >> And we've had a number of very successful large scale transformations across industries together, particularly as our clients are moving to cloud, which really in our world is a metaphor for modern engineering, modern technology, how tech shows up differently to support the business. So we're really excited about what we've done and where we are going together. >> I want to ask you about the transition that we see going on at AWS really going from being an infrastructure to provider to more of a platform provider for vertical applications for HPC, for AI, for specific uses. Is this a transition that you see your customers- are they applauding this transition? >> Yeah, most certainly, and we saw this coming a while ago, and as does AWS and VMware and others, that for more horizontal clouds we're going to start to move into vertical clouds that support industries and sectors and sub-sectors. So increasingly as we move from IIS to more PaaS and even into SaaS land, that is going to continue. The good news is that AWS has formed a really good foundation and a set of common frameworks that people can use to build upon. And then with VMware as well, we've started to build these vertical clouds and insurance and life sciences and healthcare and all kinds of other sectors, including manufacturing and you know, in our booth here, we have a demo of our manufacturing vertical clouds as well. So we certainly see that the direction of travel and our clients are really egging us on as well. >> So what is VMware's role in building these vertical clouds? Because you're not a vertical, I don't think of you as being a vertical services provider. >> Yeah, so from a VMware standpoint, we're going through a transition ourselves, right? It's a transformation happening at VMware. And while we are traditionally an infrastructure we're a plumbing company, right? We are, we provide all the horizontal space, that's where we need the partnership. So we do have some capability built around industries but that's where our partnership with Deloitte is very important to us because they have all these industry clouds. We have the tech platform that provides that. And then when partnering three way partnerships with you know, hyperscalers like AWS you know we can bring the scale and everything together to serve our customers. So it's very important for us to make use of our technology stack. We have customers in all industries, right? We have huge customer base, and we have customers in all industries, right? And so we want to really create that industry angle, working with our partners like Deloitte to serve those customers and working with, you know, our ecosystem partners ISV partners, hyperscaler partners. Obviously AWS is a big partner of ours and want to bring it all together to serve our customers you know, their journeys, basically. >> Let's hang out there for a second because you you see, you both see extraordinarily large customers across different verticals and industries. Talk about some of the trends that you might be seeing that transcend across all of them. Ranjit, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, it's a great question. You know, certainly more, you know, sort of fundamentally, we see this as a huge opportunity this decade. Many folks that I work with call this the roaring twenties all over again. You know, hopefully it won't end the same way as the last one. But in many ways, every client of ours, across every industry, is going through a huge disruption as they're thinking about the businesses they're in, the products they serve, the segments they support, the client demographics that are changing. So that's one big mega sort of trend. The other one is the rate of change. I think most everybody's dealing with the rate of change of technology, right? You come here last year and this year there are a thousand new services. Every day they release five or seven more and every other, you know, technology provider out there as well. So our clients in general are struggling with how do they embrace and adopt this change quickly. >> Right. >> And today they're not set up for that, right? >> Decision overload too, so much. >> Absolutely. >> That one, and then their ability to be able to absorb this change, right? A typical client of ours, enterprise client, has a three to four year journey to embrace new technology. That's the refresh cycle. But now we see that half life going down to three months and six months. So large part of this transformation is how do you build that muscle to be able to deal with this change that's only going to continue to accelerate. So not only are we helping them think about new products and new businesses, but also how to build this muscle and fundamentally change the way they deliver technology. And that's, I think also a place where our partnership is really valuable. >> It's like your sprint muscles versus your marathon muscles, you know? >> Right. >> You're totally fast, which is an entirely different set. >> Exactly right. >> What about you Monty? >> Yeah, and so from a technology standpoint, also one of the biggest trends that we are seeing, you know, two years ago when you looked at it, you know it was all about hyperscaler, public cloud, cloud first. Now we're seeing more of a multicloud approach, right? We're seeing that pull back in towards hybrid cloud. I know John talks about the- >> The Super cloud. >> The Super cloud, right? >> Yes, one of our favorite- >> I know Deloitte talks about Meta cloud, we talk about cross cloud services. So that's a trend that's coming up. And, and you know, we're, from a VM VMware standpoint we're very well positioned in the multicloud space, you know, our partnership with other hyperscalers, actually all cloud providers and then our partnerships with, you know, system integrators like Deloitte, it is really helping us propel, you know that solution to our customers. And so that's a big trend we're seeing around the multicloud and the modern application space. >> How, I mean the multicloud issue seem to be very hot a couple of years ago to die down, at least with, you know, the amount of coverage that's afforded to it. Is that because customers are less interested in multiple clouds or is it because that's become simply part of the landscape? >> Yeah, well, you know, I think it's there was a recent study done that over 70% of the enterprise customers are inherently multicloud, right? And multicloud just doesn't meet the hyperscalers, right? We take multicloud as the hyperscalers the private cloud, the edge cloud, the industry cloud. They've got data all over the place, right? So inherently, most enterprises are multicloud. They're realizing it now that the, when they're lock-in is an issue with them. And so, you know, over 70% of the hundred customers are actually looking at building that orchestration layer on top of the clouds which can provide them a, you know, a more meaningful and simplified decision making for their cloud workloads. >> And maybe to add to that, John, I think your point about the fascination with multicloud four or five years ago and how that tapered off I think the use case people were solving for back then was to have three different cloud options for the same workload. That they could swap between those three, maybe they could arbitrage on cost, et cetera. That in our view is a fool's errand because it's just the you know, the juice isn't worth the squeeze. But what we are seeing now is for different workloads you want to give people optionality. So you an edge computing workload you're serving a restaurant, you need that to run on a different cloud provider because they have better analytics the better geospatial data, that's fine. But your main core application, we run on a different cloud. So you're still supporting multicloud but you're not confusing the same workload to be trying to run them on multiple clouds at the same time or things of that nature. So I think that's where it's kind of moving towards. >> So I, we've talked a lot about big partnerships. One of the exciting trends at the show is all the new collaboration that's happening. I love that you've been partners for a decade. It shows a long term commitment to the community. If I'm an AWS customer who has not yet taken advantage of your fabulous partnership, what is it about it that makes it so magic? Give me a little bit of the pitch. >> So.. >> Go for it, Monty. You're rolling, I like it. (Monty chuckling) Let's go with it. >> Right. So I think for an AWS customer, so we have, VMware has an offering that we built with AWS VMC on AWS right? I think there is a real value in it. There are specific use cases that create a financial benefit an operational benefit for the customers, right? We've traditionally not done a great job of elevating that message. And that's our goal, right? That's our goal is to make sure that the VMC on AWS offering, it's not a competitive offering to AWS, it's actually a complimentary offering. It helps everybody, it helps the customer, it helps VMware it helps AWS in bringing all these pieces together to solve the customer problems. There are certain use cases that are really good for moving to a native cloud like AWS. There are definitely use cases, there are financial advantages, operational advantages that the customers will get out of doing the VMC on AWS offering. And again, our partnerships with our, you know, most strategic partners, who are bringing the industry expertise on top of it will even accelerate that even faster. >> I know you're not at liberty to talking at length about the Broadcom acquisition but can you offer our listeners any insight into what will be continued, what Broadcom's approach or attitude toward the partnerships that you've already built and how strong those are, how committed they are to continuing them. >> You know, there's things we can share, there's things we cannot share and I'll let Ranjit talk about it, but from our standpoint, I think, you know, know what Broadcom has openly stated, we'll say that again, right? They are looking at this as a very strategic acquisition. From their standpoint, they've made it clear that multicloud and modern applications are two of the big strategic initiatives they want to continue. They've also stated openly that, you know, in order for us to scale, we still need these partnerships. And so the partnerships and the ecosystem that VMware has built, you know, it's going to be looked upon as, you know, something they'll continue to do for at least for the near future. You know, what's going to happen in future, we don't know. But in the near future, they don't want to disrupt the partnership, the channel programs that we've already built, you know? And that's very important to us because that's one of our biggest go-to market routes through the partners. >> And most importantly, that logo isn't changing. So you get to wear all of your- >> Well, yes, I was worried if they change the logo then I have to reorder my T-shirts again. But now, you know, we're good for now. (Monty chuckling) >> We're good for now. You both are such wonderfully seasoned veterans so you don't look it like we talked about earlier, but both of you with 20 plus years of experience in the industry. We're doing a new thing on theCUBE this show, where we're looking for your 30 second hot take. Think of it as your thought leadership sizzle reel. What is the most important story or theme coming out of this year's show? I'll see who looks most ready. Monty looks ready. All right, let's go. >> Well, you know, I, you know, one of the things that I've seen, and I've been coming to re:Invents for quite some time you know, this is my sixth re:Ivent, but I really like the ecosystem story that is now building, right? It used to be from an Amazon standpoint, it used to be always customer obsession, which is still there, but they've added partner obsession now, right? And that's a new thing. That means now they are focusing on the ecosystem, just like we are focusing, just like Deloitte is focusing on ecosystem and that to me is a trend worth talking about. >> I love that. And very holistic and very astute. All right, Ranjit, what about you? >> Well, first I love the energy. It almost feels like there was no pandemic, right? So that's a good reminder- >> We're all ready for that feeling- >> and hopefully we're world beyond what we've been through. I also think, you know to that point, there's a lot more focus on ecosystem plays that move beyond just the less lift and shift with the cloud. But let's be thoughtful about changing the way you serve your clients, the capabilities you want to deliver. And a lot of that is through the ecosystem around client problems and working backwards from clients I think is also amazing. >> Yeah. >> And finally, I'm also always energized by the the team that's here or the folks that are here. I think it's become more pervasive, you know, earlier on it was more CIOs and, you know, senior execs. I think we're seeing a lot more across the organization, which is a great way to drive adoption and things. >> Really beautiful point. I love that. The diversity here is definitely noticeable. This is a cheeky thing to say live, but I noticed this is probably the first tech conference I've ever been to as a woman where I, there was actually a line for the restroom. Normally we're straight in at these and it's a silly thing. Yeah, now at breaks I have to allow a little extra time, but it was one of those moments where I very much noticed it earlier today and had to text to know I was going to be a little later back to the set, but I think it- I'm glad you brought that up cuz this community is special, it's inclusive, it's collaborative, it's massive companies as well as tiny startups from all over the world. It's very exciting. I really enjoyed talking with both of you. I hope we get to have you back on the show. It was fun. It was fashionable. Ranjit, Monty, thank you both so much for bringing your energy and your thoughts >> We'd love to come back. Yes, we'd love to come back in hot pink next time and talk about. >> I mean, the Deloitte consultants usually know how to thread up but (Savannah chuckling) >> I know. I'm seriously overshadowed >> And I'm wearing my neons next time. I wear a very brave pink. So generally speaking, although the sequence were- We'll definitely do it. Thank you so much for being here, and thank all of you for tuning in for our continuous live coverage here from AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas in Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson with Paul Gillian. We are theCUBE and we are the source for leading and spicy, zesty, fashionable tech coverage. (upbeat music playing)

(electronic music) (graphics whoosh) (graphics tinkle) >> Welcome to Las Vegas! It's theCUBE live at AWS re:Invent '22. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Dave, it is not only great to be back, but this re:Invent seems to be bigger than last year for sure. >> Oh, definitely. I'd say it's double last year. I'd say it's comparable to 2019. Maybe even a little bigger, I've heard it's the largest re:Invent ever. And we're going to talk data, one of our favorite topics. >> We're going to talk data products. We have some great guests. One of them is an alumni who's back with us. Justin Borgman, the CEO of Starburst, and Ashwin Patil also joins us, Principal AI and Data Engineering at Deloitte. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you. >> Together: Thank you. >> Justin, define data products. Give us the scoop, what's goin' on with Starburst. But define data products and the value in it for organizations of productizing data. >> Mm-hmm. So, data products are curated data sets that are able to span across multiple data sets. And I think that's what's makes it particularly unique, is you can span across multiple data sources to create federated data products that allow you to really bring together the business value that you're seeking. And I think ultimately, what's driving the interest in data products is a desire to ultimately facilitate self-service consumption within the enterprise. I think that's the holy grail that we've all been building towards. And data products represents a framework for sort of how you would do that. >> So, monetization is not necessarily a criterion? >> Not necessarily. (Dave's voice drowns) >> But it could be. >> It could be. It can be internal data products or external data products. And in either case, it's really intended to facilitate easier discovery and consumption of data. >> Ashwin, bringing you into the conversation, talk about some of the revenue drivers that data products can help organizations to unlock. >> Sure. Like Justin said, there are internal and external revenue drivers. So internally, a lot of clients are focused around, hey, how do I make the most out of my modernization platform? So, a lot of them are thinking about what AI, what analytics, what can they run to drive consumption? And when you think about consumption, consumption typically requires data from across the enterprise, right? And data from the enterprise is sometimes fragmented in pieces, in places. So, we've gone from being data in too many places to now, data products, helping bring all of that together, and really aid, drive business decisions faster with more data and more accuracy, right? Externally, a lot of that has got to do with how the ecosystems are evolving for data products that use not only company data, but also the ecosystem data that includes customers, that include suppliers and vendors. >> I mean, conceptually, data products, you could say have been around a long time. When I think of financial services, I think that's always been a data product in a sense. But suddenly, there's a lot more conversation about it. There's data mesh, there's data fabric, we could talk about that too, but why do you think now it's coming to the fore again? >> Yeah, I mean, I think it's because historically, there's always been this disconnect between the people that understand data infrastructure, and the people who know the right questions to ask of the data. Generally, these have been two very distinct groups. And so, the interest in data mesh as you mentioned, and data products as a foundational element of it, is really centered around how do we bring these groups together? How do we get the people who know the data the best to participate in the process of creating data to be consumed? Ultimately, again, trying to facilitate greater self-service consumption. And I think that's the real beauty behind it. And I think increasingly, in today's world, people are realizing the data will always be decentralized to some degree. That notion of bringing everything together into one single database has never really been successfully achieved, and is probably even further from the truth at this point in time, given you've got data on-prem and multiple clouds, and multiple different systems. And so, data products and data mesh represents, again, a framework for you to sort of think about data that lives everywhere. >> We did a session this summer with (chuckles) Justin and I, and some others on the data lies. And that was one of the good ol' lies, right? There's a single source of truth. >> Justin: Right. >> And all that is, we've probably never been further from the single source of truth. But actually, you're suggesting that there's maybe multiple truths that the same data can support. Is that a right way to think about it? >> Yeah, exactly. And I think ultimately, you want a single point of access that gives you, at your fingertips, everything that your organization knows about its business today. And that's really what data products aims to do, is sort of curate that for you, and provide high quality data sets that you can trust, that you can now self-service to answer your business question. >> One of the things that, oh, go ahead. >> No, no, I was just going to say, I mean, if you pivot it from the way the usage of data has changed, right? Traditionally, IT has been in the business of providing data to the business users. Today, with more self-service being driven, we want business users to be the drivers of consumption, right? So if you take that backwards one step, it's basically saying, what data do I need to support my business needs, such that IT doesn't always have to get involved in providing that data, or providing the reports on top of that data? So, the data products concept, I think supports that thinking of business-led technology-enabled, or IT-enabled really well. >> Business led. One of the things that Adam Zelinsky talked with John Furrier about just a week or so ago in their pre re:Invent interview, was talking about the role of the data analyst going away. That everybody in an organization, regardless of function, will be able to eventually be a data analyst, and need to evaluate and analyze data for their roles. Talk about data products as a facilitator of that democratization. >> Yeah. We are seeing more and more the concept of citizen data scientists. We are seeing more and more citizens AI. What we are seeing is a general trend, as we move towards self-service, there is going to be a need for business users to be able to access data when they want, how they want, and merge data across the enterprise in ways that they haven't done before, right? Technology today, through products like data products, right, provides you the access to do that. And that's why we are going to see this movement of people of seeing people become more and more self-service oriented, where you're going to democratize the use of AI and analytics into the business users. >> Do you think, when you talk to a data analyst, by the way, about that, he or she will be like, yeah, mm, maybe, good luck with that. So, do ya think maybe there's a sort of an interim step? Because we've had these highly, ZeMac lays this out very well. We've had these highly-centralized, highly-specialized teams. The premise being, oh, that's less expensive. Perhaps data analysts, like functions, get put into the line of business. Do you see that as a bridge or a stepping stone? Because it feels like it's quite a distance between what a data analyst does today, and this nirvana that we talk about. What are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I mean, I think there's possibly a new role around a data product manager. Much the way you have product managers in the products you actually build to sell, you might need data product managers to help facilitate and curate the high quality data products that others can consume. And I think that becomes an interesting and important, a skill set. Much the way that data scientist was created as a occupation, if you will, maybe 10 years ago, when previously, those were statisticians, or other names. >> Right. A big risk that many clients are seeing around data products is, how do you drive governance? And to that, to the point that Justin's making, we are going to see that role evolve where governance in the world, where data products are getting democratized is going to become increasingly important in terms of how are data products being generated, how is the propensity of data products towards a more governed environment being managed? And that's going to continue to play an important role as data products evolve. >> Okay, so how do you guys fit, because you take ZeMac's four principles, domain ownership, data as product. And that creates two problems. Governance. (chuckles) Right? How do you automate, and self-service, infrastructure and automated governance. >> Yep. >> Tell us what role Starburst plays in solving all of those, but the latter two in particular. >> Yeah. Well, we're working on all four of those dimensions to some degree, but I think ultimately, what we're focused today is the governance piece, providing fine-grained access controls, which is so important, if you're going to have a single point of access, you better have a way of controlling who has access to what. But secondly, data products allows you to really abstract away or decouple where the data is stored from the business meaning of the data. And I think that's what's so key here is, if we're going to ultimately democratize data as we've talked about, we need to change the conversation from a very storage-centric world, like, oh, that table lives in this system or that system, or that system. And make it much more about the data, and the value that it represents. And I think that's what data products aims to do. >> What about data fabric? I have to say, I'm confused by data fabric. I read this, I feel like Gartner just threw it in there to muck it up. And say, no, no, we get to make up the terms, but I've read data mesh versus data fabric, is data fabric just more sort of the physical infrastructure? And data mesh is more of an organizational construct, or how do you see it? >> Yeah, I'm happy to take that or. So, I mean, to me, it's a little bit of potato potato. I think there are some subtle differences. Data fabric is a little bit more about data movement. Whereas, I think data mesh is a little bit more about accessing the data where it lies. But they're both trying to solve the similar problem, which is that we have data in a wide variety of different data sets. And for us to actually analyze it, we need to have a single view. >> Because Gartner hype cycle says data mesh is DOA- >> Justin: I know. >> Which I think is complete BS, I think is real. You talk to customers that are doing it, they're doing it on AWS, they're trying to extend it across clouds, I mean, it's a real trend. I mean, anyway, that's how I see it. >> Yeah. I feel the word data fabric many a times gets misused. Because when you think about the digitization movement that happened, started almost a decade ago, many companies tried to digitize or create digital twins of their systems into the data world, right? So, everything has an underlying data fabric that replicates what's happening transactionally, or otherwise in the real world. What data mesh does is creates structure that works complimentary to the data fabric, that then lends itself to data products, right? So to me, data products becomes a medium, which drives the connection between data mesh and data fabric into the real world for usage and consumption. >> You should write for Gartner. (all laugh) That's the best explanation I've heard. That made sense! >> That really did. That was excellent. So, when we think about any company these days has to be a data company, whether it's your grocery store, a gas station, a car dealer, what can companies do to start productizing their data, so that they can actually unlock new revenue streams, new routes to market? What are some steps and recommendations that you have? Justin, we'll start with you. >> Sure. I would say the first thing is find data that is ultimately valuable to the consumers within your business, and create a product of it. And the way you do that at Starburst is allow you to essentially create a view of your data that can span multiple data sources. So again, we're decoupling where the data lives. That might be a table that lives in a traditional data warehouse, a table that lives in an operational system like Mongo, a table that lives in a data lake. And you can actually join those together, and represent it as a view, and now make it easily consumable. And so, the end user doesn't need to know, did that live in a data warehouse, an operational database, or a data lake? I'm just accessing that. And I think that's a great, easy way to start in your journey. Because I think if you absorb all the elements of data mesh at once, it can feel overwhelming. And I think that's a great way to start. >> Irrespective of physical location. >> Yes. >> Right? >> Precisely. Yep, multicloud, hybrid cloud, you name it. >> And when you think about the broader landscape, right? For the traditionally, companies that only looked at internal data as a way of driving business decisions. More and more, as things evolve into industry, clouds, or ecosystem data, and companies start going beyond their four walls in terms of the data that they manage or the data that they use to make decisions, I think data products are going to play more and more an important part in that construct where you don't govern all the data that our entities within that ecosystem will govern parts of their data, but that data lives together in the form of data products that are governed somewhat centrally. I mean, kind of like a blockchain system, but not really. >> Justin, for our folks here, as we kind of wrap the segment here, what's the bumper sticker for Starburst, and how you're helping organizations to really be able to build data products that add value to their organization? >> I would say analytics anywhere. Our core ethos is, we want to give you the ability to access data wherever it lives, and understand your business holistically. And our query engine allows you to do that from a query perspective, and data products allows you to bring that up a level and make it consumable. >> Make it consumable. Ashwin, last question for you, here we are, day one of re:Invent, loads of people behind us. Tomorrow all the great keynotes kick up. What are you hoping to take away from re:Invent '22? >> Well, I'm hoping to understand how all of these different entities that are represented here connect with each other, right? And to me, Starburst is an important player in terms of how do you drive connectivity. And to me, as we help plans from a Deloitte perspective, drive that business value, connectivity across all of the technology players is extremely important part. So, integration across those technology players is what I'm trying to get from re:Invent here. >> And so, you guys do, you're dot connectors. (Ashwin chuckles) >> Exactly, excellent. Guys, thank you so much for joining David and me on the program tonight. We appreciate your insights, your time, and probably the best explanation of data fabric versus data mesh. (Justin chuckles) And data products that we've maybe ever had on the show! We appreciate your time, thank you. >> Together: Thank you- >> Thanks, guys. >> All right. For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (electronic music)

>> Presenter: theCUBE presents UiPath FORWARD5 brought to you by UiPath. >> Back to theCUBE's coverage of UiPath FORWARD5, 2022. This is theCUBE's 4th UiPath FORWARD. They're mining automation gold here at the conference and in the customer base and we're creating Cube Gold, Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson. Cheryln Chin is here. She's the vice president of Global Alliances at UIPATH. Sameer Bohra, who's the director of Information Technology at Deloitte. Good to see you guys. >> Great. >> Thank you. >> Now normally we would be talking about, how Deloitte's out, doing its thing with its customers, but this is actually a case study on Deloitte's use of automation and UiPath, so that's cool. You not only partner with the GSIs you actually sell to them as well. Okay. What's that all about? What's your relationship like? Why don't you start there? >> Absolutely. So we're thrilled to be here. Thanks for having us. And really appreciate Sameer being here with us. Deloitte was an early adopter of UiPath not just as a partner, driving innovations and investing in getting skilled and building the capability. They were the first to become the US and certified partner network investing in thousands and thousands of skilling up their consultants and resources to help us address our customer needs together. But it's not just about being a great partner it's being a customer with what they've done and built their own business around UiPath and the automations. We've got an amazing story to tell you about today that we'd love to share. >> All right, Sameer, let's hear it. What's the story? What was the catalyst to bring in automation, UiPath? Where are you applying it? Where'd you start? >> Fantastic, well first of all, thanks for having me here. >> You're welcome. >> I'll start this journey with the predictions that we were making at some point. So, Deloitte, as a company, we are in the business of predicting the technology trends. We have been tracking automation as a trend for quite some time, and we have been following how this industries going to come along. And we then started placing our bets not just on the technology, but on the vendor as well in this case. Right around 2017, 18 is when we started kind of implementing automation with UiPath for our internal purposes. And as it happens, different constituents in our member firms started doing it at the same time without kind of consulting with each other. But the surprising thing is that we all ended up with the same results. We all ended up with UiPath. We all ended up using the same technology set and it was good that we all made the same choice because we would then all get along with it together. So we started our journey kind of disintegrated in a way and then we came along quickly all together. We then have COEs in each of our member firms, or at least the big member firms. And around January last year is when we signed an enterprise license agreement with UiPath that really brought some of our mature COEs together. And now we are kind of utilizing the product quite well. We are exploring the benefits of that ELA brings to us. So that has been our journey so far. Just in terms of some numbers, we are more than 400 millionaires saved for our member firm. We have hundreds of processes that we have automated. I'm kind of losing count of that already. And we have a good 70, 80 member team members across our three mature COEs that are constantly automating day in and day out. So there's a lot in terms of the history and there's a lot that we are looking forward to. >> Can you paint a picture of sort of where you're applying these automations in your business and maybe double click on that a little bit? >> Absolutely. So when we started our journey, there were some candidates right off the bat there were some of our enabling areas where we were looking at for instance, finance our talent which we also called as HR. Those were some of our preliminary areas that we started doing automations for. But another surprising thing is that our first automation use cases were actually contingent solutions that we built to help some of the other big deployments that were happening in the firm. And in absence of any good solution, we said, "Let's bring in RP and let's bridge the gap." And that basically opened the door for us to use automation at a bigger scale. So it's enabling area, talent, finance, business operations. Those are the prominent areas, marketing, chief culture, those are the areas that we are applying it. And then our services on the other hand are using automation as well because we need our services people to be armed with the valuable time to be able to invest on our clients rather than, being stuck in repetitive mundane tasks. So we are pretty much applying it all over the board now. >> So as director of IT at Deloitte, I'm curious about how this process works for you. You've heard the term drinking one's own champagne. >> Yeah. >> When you are looking... >> 'or jog fooding, but okay. >> I was trying to be polite, right? One throat to choke one bat to pat, back to pat. Are you immediately and at all times under a microscope when you're deploying something internally because someone else in Deloitte is thinking, "Okay, let's see how this works for us. Because if it works well, if we gain expertise, we can turn this into a line of business to help our clients." Is that something that starts day one? Or do people come to you six months into a project and say, "Hey, I hear you have something going on. That's cool." What's that look like? >> Very interesting question. The way I would like to describe it is we have a symbiotic relationship between our internal COE and our client facing teams that are out in the market selling automation along with UiPath. And the way that symbiotic relationship work for us is when we are doing anything interesting in terms of an automation use case, and we have many that I can talk about, we do have this constant connect with our client facing folks where we tell them about the use case. We tell them about the problem that we are solving and the way in which we are solving that problem. And in many cases, it generates interest. And then we get into conversations where we see, okay is it an asset that we can build out of it? Or is it simply a client use case that we could burn and implement and apply somewhere? So that's one side of the symbolic relationship. The other side is what our client service folks are seeing in the market. So when they see it, they come to us and they tell us, "Look, we see such and such client doing this and we did it for them. We should think about doing this in Deloitte and for ourselves." And then we say, "Fantastic, let's do it." So it's both ways. >> Dave: Both ways. And the fact that it is both ways. There is not that sense of pressure or you know that I'm under a microscope. It's all one big family. >> How do you measure success? >> It's a pretty interesting question again, success is subjective, right? When it comes to automation the typical metrics that people use to define and describe success is how many hours you have saved or how many hours, at least the way we use it how many hours you have reinvested, right? So we started with that as our measure and for some time that was really our measure of success. But lately we are seeing a change in that we are now shifting more over to other matrix like cost avoidance. So for instance, your firm is growing at a certain pace. Do all your enabling areas need to grow at that pace? Maybe not. Maybe we can avoid that cost and maybe we bring in more automation to support that. So cost avoidance is kind of emerging as a bigger matrix for us now, especially given that all low hanging automation fruits have been plucked. That's a big one we are looking at. I think the other matrix which is a bit difficult to measure directly is the employee satisfaction. There's somewhere I read that if you want happy clients you need to have happy employees first, right? And one way of making your employees happy is to give them the task that they really value that they really like to do. Now, again, being a professional services firm are ours are people's, our is our currency, right? So we want to give them as much of their valuable time back so they can invest it in their client facing activities as opposed to, you know doing mundane and ones. So those are some of the matrix and measures we are looking at. >> So I'd like to dig into that a little bit. If I could Sameer. So, aren't hours saved sort of related to cost avoidance? Is that an input to the cost avoidance calculation, if you will? >> So yeah, so yes and no. And the reason I say that is because yes, if you do the math, yes, it makes sense, >> 'not that it's direct. I understand it's not a direct relationship but it's somewhere related. Is it not? >> It is related in the sense that our saved is an immediate measure of automation, right? So if me as a practitioner, if I can hand over a task to the bar, which can take off five hours out of my week, that's an hour saved right away. But cost avoidance is more like, "Hey, I have these 10 engagements that are coming up. Do I need to amp up to meet boost end engagement or I simply amp up my automation, right?" So that's more around the cost avoidance piece. >> Okay. So there's an algorithm there. >> Yeah. >> Which makes sense. Do you find, so in other words, when you save hours at some point it's going to translate it to headcount avoidance. Okay, are you finding that when you run a project if you can automate that project, that the proportion of savings is greater on that automation of the project than it is for those sort of hours saved? I'm just sort of curious as to what the balance looks like. Is it like overwhelmingly speeding up the project? Is the real benefit there? I'm just kind of curious. >> There's absolutely a benefit there. With automation, you can obviously speed up your projects, you can do more with the staff and the team that you have. So that's definitely something that helps us a lot both internally and I believe on the client facing side as well. >> Okay. And just put my CFO hat on. Let's, so are those internal resources or are there sort of out of pocket expenses? In other words, it's the hard dollars that I don't spend or is it resources that I can deploy on another project or both? Or both. >> For the most part it's the resources right? >> So it's okay. >> Yeah, it's the resources that you can now have them do more value work with more clients as opposed to have them do many task at one place. >> Okay, I'm going to just keep going. So that's a productivity measure in my mind anyway, so I just like to keep peeling the onion on the metrics. So I would at some point, so the two things the cost avoidance and the employee satisfaction I would ultimately as the CFO want to see that show up in terms of productivity increases and decreases in turnover. And you probably don't have enough experience yet to measure that. But ultimately, isn't that where you want to go? >> I think that's essentially where it's going and I think that's the way it'll probably go for pretty much everyone who is in this journey of automation at your CFO will eventually want to look at, okay what after this investment, where is it leading us? So that's definitely the direction we are also heading. >> Yeah and so productivity revenue per employee, is that a good starting point? Maybe you get more sophisticated than that, but... >> Yeah, that's probably a good starting point. >> UiPath revenue employees about 250,000, which is pretty average for software companies. Now, maybe it's because they're investing more, but at some point I'd like to see that tick to 350,000 anyway. >> Yeah. >> I Digress. >> And we are on that journey where we are essentially looking to arm everyone with a bot right? There's a philosophy and UiPath around a bot for everyone. We are pretty close to getting to that stage where everybody should be able to leverage the technology. We shouldn't be limited to a certain business unit or certain pockets within a business unit. >> I want a bot. I do, I want a bot, I'm getting a bot. >> I wish I have a bot. >> I would, yeah, I want to a bot and I want to give that bot a very clever name. That's like you're thinking of naming bots. So are your activities evaluated in completely independently as sort of your own P and L or do you get credit for some of that symbiotic relationship that's developed? Because I can imagine a situation where you deploy something intelligent automation and you get a yield that translates into a practice for your firm that brings in a bunch of revenue with a bunch of satisfied customers. Do you get credit for that? Or is it like, no, no, no, no. I wouldn't >> I would love to get credit for that. But again, it's all in the family. It's all one big family. At this time we are simply focused on bringing the right use cases forward for our client facing folks and the other way around. So we haven't got into that stage as left. >> But you need to deliver standalone value. You're evaluated that way. >> And this COE. That's what we are evaluated upon. The matrix that I talked about earlier around cost avoidance, number of our saved employee satisfaction. Those are some of area that we are being rated upon. And that's across all our COEs. >> Oh, surely congratulations on landing Deloitte as a customer and of course a partner. And I'm sure there's big things in the future. We'll give you the last word, bring it home. >> You know, the takeaway here is we are leveraging partners like this who are going way beyond just automating processes for the sake of process and our save the using this to build their business make their consultants more productive and really driving profitability for the business. So really the automation flywheel going beyond that's really trying to fuel digital transformation by taking this, they make it go faster, more profitable, more agile, and they become an amazing customer and an amazing good market partner. >> Yeah, you guys take this pretty seriously behind us there's this, I don't know what you call it but this clouds floating above it. If you walk through there, there's some really inspiring commentary. And so I encourage you to do that if you're here at the show. All right, thanks guys, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. All keep it right there Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson will be back at FORWARD5 UiPath customer event from Las Vegas. We're live right back. (soft music)

>>Welcome back everyone to the cubes coverage here live in San Francisco for VMware Explorer. Formerly got it. World. We've been to every world since 2010. Now is VMware Explorer. I'm John furier host with Dave ante with Dave lium here. He's the chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte. Welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate your time. >>Thanks for having me. It's >>Epic keynote today on stage all seven minutes of your great seven minutes >>Performance discussion. Yes. Very, very, very, very quick to the order. I brought everybody up to speed and left. >>Well, Dave's great to have you on the cube one. We follow your work. We've been following for a long time. Thank you. A lot of web services, a lot of SOA, kind of in your background, kind of the old web services, AI, you know, samples, RSS, web services, all that good stuff. Now it's, it's now we're in kind of web services on steroids. Cloud came it's here. We're NextGen. You wrote a great story on Metacloud. You've been following the Supercloud with Dave. Does VMware have it right? >>Yeah, they do. Because I'll tell you what the market is turning toward. Anything that sit above and between the clouds. So things that don't exist in the hyperscaler, things that provide common services above the cloud providers are where the growth's gonna happen. We haven't really solved that problem yet. And so there's lots of operational aspects, security aspects, and the ability to have some sort of a brokering service that'll scale. So multi-cloud, which is their strategy here is not about cloud it's about things that exist in between cloud and making those things work. So getting to another layer of abstraction and automation to finally allow us to make use out of all these hyperscaler services that we're signing on today. Dave, >>Remember the old days back in the eighties, when we were young bucks coming into the business, the interoperability wave was coming. Remember that? Oh yeah, I got a deck mini computer. I got an IBM was gonna solve that unex. And then, you know, this other thing over here and lands and all and everything started getting into this whole, okay. Networking. Wasn't just coax. You started to see segment segments. Interoperability was a huge, what 10 year run. It feels like that's kind of like the vibe going on here. >>Yeah. We're not focused on having these things interop operate onto themselves. So what we're doing is putting a layer of things which allows them to interop operate. That's a different, that's a different problem to solve. And it's also solvable. We were talking about getting all these very distinct proprietary systems to communicate one to another and interate one to another. And that never really happened. Right? Cause you gotta get them to agree on interfaces and protocols. But if you put a layer above it, they can talk down to whatever native interfaces that are there and deal with the differences between the heterogeneity and abstract yourself in the complexity. And that's, that's kind of the different that works. The ability to kind of get everybody, you know, clunk their heads together and make them work together. That doesn't seem to scale couple >>And, and people gotta be motivated for that. Not many people might not >>Has me money. In other words has to be a business for them in doing so. >>A couple things I wanna follow up on from work, you know, this morning they used the term cloud chaos. When you talk to customers, you know, when they have multiple clouds, do they, are they saying to you, Hey, we have cloud chaos are, do they have cloud chaos? And they don't know it or do they not have cloud chaos? What's the mix. >>Yeah. I don't think the word chaos is used that much, but they do tell me they're hitting a complexity wall, which you do here out there as a term. So in other words, they're getting to a point where they can't scale operations to deal with a complexity and heterogeneity that they're, that they're bringing into the organization because using multiple clouds. So that is chaotic. So I guess that, you know, it is another way to name complexity. So there's so many services are moving from a thousand cloud services, under management to 3000 cloud services under management. They don't have the operational team, the skill, skill levels to do it. They don't have the tooling to do it. That's a wall. And you have to be able to figure out how to get beyond that wall to make those things work. So >>When, when we had our conversation about Metacloud and Supercloud, we we've, I think very much aligned in our thinking. And so now you've got this situation where you've got these abstraction layers, but, and there, but my question is, are we gonna have multiple abstraction layers? And will they talk to each other or are standards emerging? Will they be able to, >>No, we can't have multiple abstraction layers else. We just, we don't solve the problem. We go from complexity of exists at the native cloud levels to complexity of exists, that this thing we're dealing with to deal with complexity. So if you do that, we're screwing up. We have to go back and fix it. So ultimately this is about having common services, common security, layers, common operational layers, and things like that that are really reduced redundancy within the system. So instead of having a, you know, five different security layers and five different cloud providers, we're layering one and providing management and orchestration capabilities to make that happen. If we don't do that, we're not succeeding. >>What do you think about the marketplace? I know there's a lot of things going on that are happening around this. Wanna get your thoughts on obviously the industry dynamics, vendors preserving their future. And then you've got customers who have been leveraging the CapEx, goodness of say Amazon and then have to solve their whole distributed environment problem. So when you look at this, is it really solving? Is it is the order of operations first common layer abstraction because you know, it seems like the vendor, I won't say desperation move, but like their first move is we're gonna be the control plane or, you know, I think Cisco has a vision in their mind that no, no we're gonna have that management plane. I've heard a lot of people talking about, we're gonna be the management interface into something. How do you see that playing out? Because the order of operations to do the abstraction is to get consensus, right, right. First not competition. Right. So how do you see that? What's your reaction to that? And what's your observation. >>I think it's gonna be tough for the people who are supplying the underlying services to also be the orchestration and abstraction layers, because they're, they're kind of conflicted in making that happen. In other words, it's not in their best interest to make all these things work and interoperate one to another, but it's their best interest to provide, provide a service that everybody's going to leverage. So I see the layers here. I'm certainly the hyperscalers are gonna play in those layers and then they're welcome to play in those layers. They may come up with a solution that everybody picks, but ultimately it's about independence and your ability to have an objective way of, of allowing all these things to communicate together and driving this, driving this stuff together, to reduce the complexity again, to reduce. >>So a network box, for instance, maybe have hooks into it, but not try to dominate it >>Or that's right. Yeah, that's right. I think if you're trying to own everything and I get that a lot when I write about Supercloud and, and Metacloud they go, well, we're the Metacloud, we're the Supercloud you can't be other ones. That's a huge problem to solve. I know you don't have a solution for that. Okay. It's gonna be many different products to make that happen. And the reality is people who actually make that work are gonna have to be interdependent independent of the various underlying services. They're gonna, they can support them, but they really can't be them. They have to be an interate interop. They have to interoperate with those services. >>Do you, do you see like a w three C model, like the worldwide web consortium, remember that came out around 96, came to the us and MIT and then helped for some of those early standards in, in, in the internet, not DNS, but like the web, but DNS was already there and internet was already there, but like the web standards HTML kind of had, I think wasn't really hardcore get you in the headlock, but at least it was some sort of group that said, Hey, intellectually be honest, you see that happening in this area. >>I hope not. And here's >>Why not. >>Yeah. >>Here's, here's why the reality is is that when these consortiums come into play, it freezes the market. Everybody waits for the consortium to come up with some sort of a solution that's gonna save the world. And that solution never comes because you can't get these organizations through committee to figure out some sort of a technology stack that's gonna be working. So I'd rather see the market figure that out. Not a consortium when >>I, you mean the ecosystem, not some burning Bush. >>Yeah. Not some burning Bush. And it just hasn't worked. I mean, if it worked, it'd be great. And >>We had a, an event on August 9th, it was super cloud 22 and we had a security securing the super cloud panel. And one of my was a great conversation as you remember, John, but it was kind of depressing in that, like we're never gonna solve this problem. So what are you seeing in the security front? You know, it seems to like that's a main blocker to the Metacloud the Supercloud >>Yeah. The reality is you can't build all the security services in, in the Metacloud. You have to basically leverage the security services on the native cloud and leverage them as they exist. So this idea that we're gonna replace all of these security services with one layer of abstraction, that's gonna provide the services. So you don't need these underlying security systems that won't work. You have to leverage the native security systems, native governance, native operating interfaces, native APIs of all the various native clouds using the terms that they're looking to leverage. And that's the mistake. I think people are going to make, you don't need to replace something that's working. You just may need to make it easier to >>Use. Let's ask Dave about the, sort of the discussion that was on Twitter this morning. So when VMware announced their, you know, cross cloud services and, and the whole new Tansu one, three, and, and, and, and aria, there was a little chatter on Twitter basically saying, yeah, but VMware they'll never win the developers. And John came and said, well, hi, hang on. You know, if, if you've got open tools and you're embracing those, it's really about the ops and having standards on the op side. And so my question to you is, does VMware, that's >>Not exactly what I said, but close enough, >>Sorry. I mean, I'm paraphrasing. You can fine tune it, but, but does VMware have to win the developers or are they focused on kind of the right areas that whole, you know, op side of DevOps >>Focused on the op side, cuz that's the harder problem to solve. Developers are gonna use whatever tools they need to use to build these applications and roll them out. And they're gonna change all the time. In other words, they're gonna change the tools and technologies to do it in the supply chain. The ops problem is the harder problem to solve the ability to get these things working together and, and running at a certain point of reliability where the failure's not gonna be there. And I think that's gonna be the harder issue and doing that without complexity. >>Yeah. That's the multi-cloud challenge right there. I agree. The question I want to also pivot on that is, is that as we look at some of the reporting we've done and interviews, data and security really are hard areas. People are tune tuning up DevOps in the developer S booming, everyone's going fast, fast and loose. Shifting left, all that stuff's happening. Open source, booming Toga party. Everyone's partying ops is struggling to level up. So I guess the question is what's the order of operations from a customer. So a lot of customers have lifted and shift. The, some are going all in on say, AWS, yeah, I got a little hedge with Azure, but I'm not gonna do a full development team. As you talk to customers, cuz they're the ones deploying the clouds that want to get there, right? What's the order of operations to do it properly in your mind. And what's your advice as you look at as a strategy to, to do it, right? I mean, is there a playbook or some sort of situational, you know, sequence, >>Yes. One that works consistently is number one, you think about operations up front and if you can't solve operations, you have no business rolling out other applications and other databases that quite frankly can't be operated and that's how people are getting into trouble. So in other words, if you get into these very complex architectures, which is what a multicloud is, complex distributed system. Yeah. And you don't have an understanding of how you're gonna operationalize that system at scale, then you have no business in building the system. You have no business of going in a multicloud because you are going to run into that wall and it's gonna lead to a, an outage it's gonna lead to a breach or something that's gonna be company killing. >>So a lot of that's cultural, right. Having, having the cultural fortitude to say, we're gonna start there. We're gonna enforce these standards. >>That's what John CLE said. Yeah. CLE is famous line. >>Yeah, you're right. You're right. So, so, so what happens if the, if that as a consultant, if you, you probably have to insist on that first, right? Or, I mean, I don't know, you probably still do the engagement, but you, you're gonna be careful about promising an outcome aren't you, >>You're gonna have to insist on the fact they're gonna have to do some advanced planning and come up with a very rigorous way in which they're gonna roll it out. And the reality is if they're not doing that, then the advice would be you're gonna fail. So it's not a matter of when it's, when it's gonna happen. We're gonna, but at some point you're gonna fail either. Number one, you're gonna actually fail in some sort of a big disastrous event or more likely or not. You're gonna end up building something that's gonna cost you $10 million more a month to run and it's gonna be underoptimized. And is >>That effective when you, when you say that to a client or they say, okay, but, or do they say yes, you're >>Right. I view my role as a, someone like a doctor and a lawyer. You may not want to hear what I'm telling you. But the thing is, if I don't tell you the truth and I'm not doing my job as a trusted advisor. And so they'll never get anything but that from us, you know, as a firm and the reality is they can make their own decisions and will have to help them, whatever path they want to go. But we're making the warnings in place to make. >>And, and also also situationally it's IQ driven. Are they ready? What's their makeup. Are they have the kind of talent to execute. And there's a lot of unbeliev me. I totally think agree with on the op side, I think that's right on the money. The question I want to ask you is, okay, assume that someone has the right makeup of team. They got some badass people in there, coding away, DevOps, SREs, you name it. Everyone lined up platform teams, as they said today on stage, all that stuff. What's the CXO conversation at the boardroom that you, you have around business strategy. Cuz if you assume that cloud is here and you do things right and you get the right advisors in the next step is what does it transform my business into? Because you're talking about a fully digitalized business that converges it's not just, it helps you run an app back office with some terminal it's full blown business edge app business model innovation is it that the company becomes a cloud on their own and they have scale. And they're the super cloud of their category servicing a power law of second place, third place, SMB market. So I mean, Goldman Sachs could be the service provider cloud for financial services maybe. Or is that the dream? What, what's the dream for the, the, the CXO staff take us through the, >>What they're trying to do is get a level of automation with every able to leverage best breed technology to be as innovative as they possibly can. Using an architecture that's near a hundred percent optimized. It'll never be a hundred percent optimized. Therefore it's able to run, bring the best value to the business for the least amount of money. That's the big thing. If they want to become a cloud, that's, that's not a, not necessarily a good idea. If they're finance company be a finance company, just build these innovations around how to make a finance company be innovative and different for them. So they can be a disruptor without being disrupted. I see where see a lot of companies right now, they're gonna be exposed in the next 10 years because a lot of these smaller companies are able to weaponize technology to bring them to the next level, digital transformations, whatever, to create a business value. That's gonna be more compelling than the existing player >>Because they're on the CapEx back of Amazon or some technical innovation. Is that what the smaller guys, what's the, what's the lever that beats the >>It's the ability to use whatever technology you need to solve your issues. So in other words, I can use anything that exists on the cloud because it's part of the multi-cloud I'm I able to find the services that I need, the best AI system, the best database systems, the fastest transaction processing system, and assemble these syncs together to solve more innovative problems in my competitor. If I'm able to do that, I'm gonna win the game. So >>It's a buffet of technology. Pick your yes, your meal, come on, >>Case spray something, this operations, first thing in my head, remember Alan NA, when he came in the Cub and he said, listen, if you're gonna do cloud, you better change the operating model or you you're gonna make, you know, you'll drop millions to the bottom line. He was at CIO of Phillips at the time. You're not gonna drop billions. And it's all about, you know, the zeros, right? So do you find yourself in a lot of cases, sort of helping people rearchitect their operating model as a function of, of, of what cloud can, can enable? >>Yeah. Every, every engagement that we go into has operating model change op model changes, and typically it's gonna be major surgery. And so it's re reevaluating the skill sets, reevaluating, the operating model, reevaluating the culture. In fact, we have a team of people who come in and that's all they focus on. And so it used to be just kind of an afterthought. We'd put this together, oh, by the way, I think you need to do this and this and this. And here's what we recommend you do. But people who can go in and get cultural changes going get the operating models systems, going to get to the folks where they're gonna be successful with it. Reality. If you don't do that, you're gonna fail because you're not gonna have the ability to adapt to a cloud-based a cloud-based infrastructure. You can leverage this scale. >>David's like a masterclass here on the cube at VMware explore. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for spending the valuable time. Just what's going on in your world right now, take a quick minute to plug what's going on with you. What are you working on? What are you excited about? What what's happening, >>Loving life. I'm just running around doing, doing things like this, doing a lot of speaking, you know, still have the blog on in info world and have that for the last 12 years and just loving the fact that we're innovating and changing the world. And I'm trying to help as many people as I can, as quickly as I can. What's >>The coolest thing you've seen this year in terms of cloud kind of either weirdness coolness or something that made you fall outta your chair. Wow. That >>Was cool. I think the AI capabilities and application of AI, I'm just seeing use cases in there that we never would've thought about the ability to identify patterns that we couldn't identify in the past and do so for, for the good, I've been an AI analyst. It was my first job outta college and I'm 60 years old. So it's, it's matured enough where it actually impresses me. And so we're seeing applications >>Right now. That's NLP anymore. Is it? >>No, no, not list. That's what I was doing, but it's, we're able to take this technology to the next level and do, do a lot of good with it. And I think that's what just kind of blows me on the wall. >>Ah, I wish we had 20 more minutes, >>You know, one, one more masterclass sound bite. So we all kind of have kids in college, David and I both do young ones in college. If you're coming outta college, CS degree or any kind of smart degree, and you have the plethora of now what's coming tools and unlimited ways to kind of clean canvas up application, start something. What would you do if you were like 22? Right now, >>I would focus on being a multi-cloud architect. And I would learn a little about everything. Learn a little about at the various cloud providers. And I would focus on building complex distributed systems and architecting those systems. I would learn about how all these things kind of kind of run together. Don't learn a particular technology because that technology will ultimately go away. It'll be displaced by something else, learn holistically what the technologies is able to do and become the orchestrator of that technology. It's a harder problem to solve, but you'll get paid more for it. And it'll be more fun job. >>Just thinking big picture, big >>Picture, how everything comes together. True architecture >>Problems. All right, Dave is on the queue masterclass here on the cube. Bucha for Dave ante Explorer, 2022. Live back with our next segment. After this short break.

(bright music) >> "Supermetafragilisticexpialadotious." What's in a name? In an homage to the inimitable Charles Fitzgerald, we've chosen this title for today's session because of all the buzz surrounding "supercloud," a term that we introduced last year to signify a major architectural trend and shift that's occurring in the technology industry. Since that time, we've published numerous videos and articles on the topic, and on August 9th, kicked off "Supercloud22," an open industry event designed to advance the supercloud conversation, gathering input from more than 30 experienced technologists and business leaders in "The Cube" and broader technology community. We're talking about individuals like Benoit Dageville, Kit Colbert, Ali Ghodsi, Mohit Aron, David McJannet, and dozens of other experts. And today, we're pleased to welcome David Linthicum, who's a Chief Strategy Officer of Cloud Services at Deloitte Consulting. David is a technology visionary, a technical CTO. He's an author and a frequently sought after keynote speaker at high profile conferences like "VMware Explore" next week. David Linthicum, welcome back to "The Cube." Good to see you again. >> Oh, it's great to be here. Thanks for the invitation. Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. Okay, so this topic of supercloud, what you call metacloud, has created a lot of interest. VMware calls it cross-cloud services, Snowflake calls it their data cloud, there's a lot of different names, but recently, you published a piece in "InfoWorld" where you said the following. "I really don't care what we call it, "and I really don't care if I put "my own buzzword into the mix. "However, this does not change the fact "that metacloud is perhaps the most important "architectural evolution occurring right now, "and we need to get this right out of the gate. "If we do that, who cares what it's named?" So very cool. And you also mentioned in a recent article that you don't like to put out new terms out in the wild without defining them. So what is a metacloud, or what we call supercloud? What's your definition? >> Yeah, and again, I don't care what people call it. The reality is it's the ability to have a layer of cross-cloud services. It sits above existing public cloud providers. So the idea here is that instead of building different security systems, different governance systems, different operational systems in each specific cloud provider, using whatever native features they provide, we're trying to do that in a cross-cloud way. So in other words, we're pushing out data integration, security, all these other things that we have to take care of as part of deploying a particular cloud provider. And in a multicloud scenario, we're building those in and between the clouds. And so we've been tracking this for about five years. We understood that multicloud is not necessarily about the particular public cloud providers, it's about things that you build in and between the clouds. >> Got it, okay. So I want to come back to that, to the definition, but I want to tie us to the so-called multicloud. You guys did a survey recently. We've said that multicloud was mostly a symptom of multi-vendor, Shadow Cloud, M&A, and only recently has become a strategic imperative. Now, Deloitte published a survey recently entitled "Closing the Cloud Strategy, Technology, Innovation Gap," and I'd like to explore that a little bit. And so in that survey, you showed data. What I liked about it is you went beyond what we all know, right? The old, "Our research shows that on average, "X number of clouds are used at an individual company." I mean, you had that too, but you really went deeper. You identified why companies are using multiple clouds, and you developed different categories of practitioners across 500 survey respondents. But the reasons were very clear for "why multicloud," as this becomes more strategic. Service choice scale, negotiating leverage, improved business resiliency, minimizing lock-in, interoperability of data, et cetera. So my question to you, David, is what's the problem supercloud or metacloud solves, and what's different from multicloud? >> That's a great question. The reality is that if we're... Well, supercloud or metacloud, whatever, is really something that exists above a multicloud, but I kind of view them as the same thing. It's an architectural pattern. We can name it anything. But the reality is that if we're moving to these multicloud environments, we're doing so to leverage best of breed things. In other words, best of breed technology to provide the innovators within the company to take the business to the next level, and we determine that in the survey. And so if we're looking at what a multicloud provides, it's the ability to provide different choices of different services or piece parts that allows us to build anything that we need to do. And so what we found in the survey and what we found in just practice in dealing with our clients is that ultimately, the value of cloud computing is going to be the innovation aspects. In other words, the ability to take the company to the next level from being more innovative and more disruptive in the marketplace that they're in. And the only way to do that, instead of basically leveraging the services of a particular walled garden of a single public cloud provider, is to cast a wider net and get out and leverage all kinds of services to make these happen. So if you think about that, that's basically how multicloud has evolved. In other words, it wasn't planned. They didn't say, "We're going to go do a multicloud." It was different developers and innovators in the company that went off and leveraged these cloud services, sometimes with the consent of IT leadership, sometimes not. And now we have these multitudes of different services that we're leveraging. And so many of these enterprises are going from 1000 to, say, 3000 services under management. That creates a complexity problem. We have a problem of heterogeneity, different platforms, different tools, different services, different AI technology, database technology, things like that. So the metacloud, or the supercloud, or whatever you want to call it, is the ability to deal with that complexity on the complexity's terms. And so instead of building all these various things that we have to do individually in each of the cloud providers, we're trying to do so within a cross-cloud service layer. We're trying to create this layer of technology, which removes us from dealing with the complexity of the underlying multicloud services and makes it manageable. Because right now, I think we're getting to a point of complexity we just can't operate it at the budgetary limits that we are right now. We can't keep the number of skills around, the number of operators around, to keep these things going. We're going to have to get creative in terms of how we manage these things, how we manage a multicloud. And that's where the supercloud, metacloud, whatever they want to call it, comes that. >> Yeah, and as John Furrier likes to say, in IT, we tend to solve complexity with more complexity, and that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about simplifying, and you talked about the abstraction layer, and then it sounds like I'm inferring more. There's value that's added on top of that. And then you also said the hyperscalers are in a walled garden. So I've been asked, why aren't the hyperscalers superclouds? And I've said, essentially, they want to put your data into their cloud and keep it there. Now, that doesn't mean they won't eventually get into that. We've seen examples a little bit, Outposts, Anthos, Azure Arc, but the hyperscalers really aren't building superclouds or metaclouds, at least today, are they? >> No, they're not. And I always have the predictions for every major cloud conference that this is the conference that the hyperscaler is going to figure out some sort of a multicloud across-cloud strategy. In other words, building services that are able to operate across clouds. That really has never happened. It has happened in dribs and drabs, and you just mentioned a few examples of that, but the ability to own the space, to understand that we're not going to be the center of the universe in how people are going to leverage it, is going to be multiple things, including legacy systems and other cloud providers, and even industry clouds that are emerging these days, and SaaS providers, and all these things. So we're going to assist you in dealing with complexity, and we're going to provide the core services of being there. That hasn't happened yet. And they may be worried about conflicting their market, and the messaging is a bit different, even actively pushing back on the concept of multicloud, but the reality is the market's going to take them there. So in other words, if enough of their customers are asking for this and asking that they take the lead in building these cross-cloud technologies, even if they're participating in the stack and not being the stack, it's too compelling of a market that it's not going to drag a lot of the existing public cloud providers there. >> Well, it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out, David, because I never say never when it comes to a company like AWS, and we've seen how fast they move. And at the same time, they don't want to be commoditized. There's the layer underneath all this infrastructure, and they got this ecosystem that's adding all this tremendous value. But I want to ask you, what are the essential elements of supercloud, coming back to the definition, if you will, and what's different about metacloud, as you call it, from plain old SaaS or PaaS? What are the key elements there? >> Well, the key elements would be holistic management of all of the IT infrastructure. So even though it's sitting above a multicloud, I view metacloud, supercloud as the ability to also manage your existing legacy systems, your existing security stack, your existing network operations, basically everything that exists under the purview of IT. If you think about it, we're moving our infrastructure into the clouds, and we're probably going to hit a saturation point of about 70%. And really, if the supercloud, metacloud, which is going to be expensive to build for most of the enterprises, it needs to support these things holistically. So it needs to have all the services, that is going to be shareable across the different providers, and also existing legacy systems, and also edge computing, and IoT, and all these very diverse systems that we're building there right now. So if complexity is a core challenge to operate these things at scale and the ability to secure these things at scale, we have to have commonality in terms of security architecture and technology, commonality in terms of our directory services, commonality in terms of network operations, commonality in term of cloud operations, commonality in terms of FinOps. All these things should exist in some holistic cross-cloud layer that sits above all this complexity. And you pointed out something very profound. In other words, that is going to mean that we're hiding a lot of the existing cloud providers in terms of their interfaces and dashboards and things like that that we're dealing with today, their APIs. But the reality is that if we're able to manage these things at scale, the public cloud providers are going to benefit greatly from that. They're going to sell more services because people are going to find they're able to leverage them easier. And so in other words, if we're removing the complexity wall, which many in the industry are calling it right now, then suddenly we're moving from, say, the 25 to 30% migrated in the cloud, which most enterprises are today, to 50, 60, 70%. And we're able to do this at scale, and we're doing it at scale because we're providing some architectural optimization through the supercloud, metacloud layer. >> Okay, thanks for that. David, I just want to tap your CTO brain for a minute. At "Supercloud22," we came up with these three deployment models. Kit Colbert put forth the idea that one model would be your control planes running in one cloud, let's say AWS, but it interacts with and can manage and deploy on other clouds, the Kubernetes Cluster Management System. The second one, Mohit Aron from Cohesity laid out, where you instantiate the stack on different clouds and different cloud regions, and then you create a layer, a common interface across those. And then Snowflake was the third deployment model where it's a single global instance, it's one instantiation, and basically building out their own cloud across these regions. Help us parse through that. Do those seem like reasonable deployment models to you? Do you have any thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I mean, that's a distributed computing trick we've been doing, which is, in essence, an agent of the supercloud that's carrying out some of the cloud native functions on that particular cloud, but is, in essence, a slave to the metacloud, or the supercloud, whatever, that's able to run across the various cloud providers. In other words, when it wants to access a service, it may not go directly to that service. It goes directly to the control plane, and that control plane is responsible... Very much like Kubernetes and Docker works, that control plane is responsible for reaching out and leveraging those native services. I think that that's thinking that's a step in the right direction. I think these things unto themselves, at least initially, are going to be a very complex array of technology. Even though we're trying to remove complexity, the supercloud unto itself, in terms of the ability to build this thing that's able to operate at scale across-cloud, is going to be a collection of many different technologies that are interfacing with the public cloud providers in different ways. And so we can start putting these meta architectures together, and I certainly have written and spoke about this for years, but initially, this is going to be something that may escape the detail or the holistic nature of these meta architectures that people are floating around right now. >> Yeah, so I want to stay on this, because anytime I get a CTO brain, I like to... I'm not an engineer, but I've been around a long time, so I know a lot of buzzwords and have absorbed a lot over the years, but so you take those, the second two models, the Mohit instantiate on each cloud and each cloud region versus the Snowflake approach. I asked Benoit Dageville, "Does that mean if I'm in "an AWS east region and I want to do a query on Azure West, "I can do that without moving data?" And he said, "Yes and no." And the answer was really, "No, we actually take a subset of that data," so there's the latency problem. From those deployment model standpoints, what are the trade-offs that you see in terms of instantiating the stack on each individual cloud versus that single instance? Is there a benefit of the single instance for governance and security and simplicity, but a trade-off on latency, or am I overthinking this? >> Yeah, you hit it on the nose. The reality is that the trade-off is going to be latency and performance. If we get wiggy with the distributed nature, like the distributed data example you just provided, we have to basically separate the queries and communicate with the databases on each instance, and then reassemble the result set that goes back to the people who are recording it. And so we can do caching systems and things like that. But the reality is, if it's distributed system, we're going to have latency and bandwidth issues that are going to be limiting us. And also security issues, because if we're removing lots of information over the open internet, or even private circuits, that those are going to be attack vectors that hackers can leverage. You have to keep that in mind. We're trying to reduce those attack vectors. So it would be, in many instances, and I think we have to think about this, that we're going to keep the data in the same physical region for just that. So in other words, it's going to provide the best performance and also the most simplistic access to dealing with security. And so we're not, in essence, thinking about where the data's going, how it's moving across things, things like that. So the challenge is going to be is when you're dealing with a supercloud or metacloud is, when do you make those decisions? And I think, in many instances, even though we're leveraging multiple databases across multiple regions and multiple public cloud providers, and that's the idea of it, we're still going to localize the data for performance reasons. I mean, I just wrote a blog in "InfoWorld" a couple of months ago and talked about, people who are trying to distribute data across different public cloud providers for different reasons, distribute an application development system, things like that, you can do it. With enough time and money, you can do anything. I think the challenge is going to be operating that thing, and also providing a viable business return based on the application. And so why it may look like a good science experiment, and it's cool unto itself as an architect, the reality is the more pragmatic approach is going to be a leavitt in a single region on a single cloud. >> Very interesting. The other reason I like to talk to companies like Deloitte and experienced people like you is 'cause I can get... You're agnostic, right? I mean, you're technology agnostic, vendor agnostic. So I want to come back with another question, which is, how do you deal with what I call the lowest common denominator problem? What I mean by that is if one cloud has, let's say, a superior service... Let's take an example of Nitro and Graviton. AWS seems to be ahead on that, but let's say some other cloud isn't quite quite there yet, and you're building a supercloud or a metacloud. How do you rationalize that? Does it have to be like a caravan in the army where you slow down so all the slowest trucks can keep up, or are the ways to adjudicate that that are advantageous to hide that deficiency? >> Yeah, and that's a great thing about leveraging a supercloud or a metacloud is we're putting that management in a single layer. So as far as a user or even a developer on those systems, they shouldn't worry about the performance that may come back, because we're dealing with the... You hit the nail on the head with that one. The slowest component is the one that dictates performance. And so we have to have some sort of a performance management layer. We're also making dynamic decisions to move data, to move processing, from one server to the other to try to minimize the amount of latency that's coming from a single component. So the great thing about that is we're putting that volatility into a single domain, and it's making architectural decisions in terms of where something will run and where it's getting its data from, things are stored, things like that, based on the performance feedback that's coming back from the various cloud services that are under management. And so if you're running across clouds, it becomes even more interesting, because ultimately, you're going to make some architectural choices on the fly in terms of where that stuff runs based on the active dynamic performance that that public cloud provider is providing. So in other words, we may find that it automatically shut down a database service, say MySQL, on one cloud instance, and moved it to a MySQL instance on another public cloud provider because there was some sort of a performance issue that it couldn't work around. And by the way, it does so dynamically. Away from you making that decision, it's making that decision on your behalf. Again, this is a matter of abstraction, removing complexity, and dealing with complexity through abstraction and automation, and this is... That would be an example of fixing something with automation, self-healing. >> When you meet with some of the public cloud providers and they talk about on-prem private cloud, the general narrative from the hyperscalers is, "Well, that's not a cloud." Should on-prem be inclusive of supercloud, metacloud? >> Absolutely, I mean, and they're selling private cloud instances with the edge cloud that they're selling. The reality is that we're going to have to keep a certain amount of our infrastructure, including private clouds, on premise. It's something that's shrinking as a market share, and it's going to be tougher and tougher to justify as the public cloud providers become better and better at what they do, but we certainly have edge clouds now, and hyperscalers have examples of that where they run a instance of their public cloud infrastructure on premise on physical hardware and software. And the reality is, too, we have data centers and we have systems that just won't go away for another 20 or 30 years. They're just too sticky. They're uneconomically viable to move into the cloud. That's the core thing. It's not that we can't do it. The fact of the matter is we shouldn't do it, because there's not going to be an economic... There's not going to be an economic incentive of making that happen. So if we're going to create this meta layer or this infrastructure which is going to run across clouds, and everybody agrees on, that's what the supercloud is, we have to include the on-premise systems, including private clouds, including legacy systems. And by the way, include the rising number of IoT systems that are out there, and edge-based systems out there. So we're managing it using the same infrastructure into cloud services. So they have metadata systems and they have specialized services, and service finance and retail and things like doing risk analytics. So it gets them further down that path, but not necessarily giving them a SaaS application where they're forced into all of the business processes. We're giving you piece parts. So we'll give you 1000 different parts that are related to the finance industry. You can assemble anything you need, but the thing is, it's not going to be like building it from scratch. We're going to give you risk analytics, we're giving you the financial analytics, all these things that you can leverage within your applications how you want to leverage them. We'll maintain them. So in other words, you don't have to maintain 'em just like a cloud service. And suddenly, we can build applications in a couple of weeks that used to take a couple of months, in some cases, a couple of years. So that seems to be a large take of it moving forward. So get it up in the supercloud. Those become just other services that are under managed... That are under management on the supercloud, the metacloud. So we're able to take those services, abstract them, assemble them, use them in different applications. And the ability to manage where those services are originated versus where they're consumed is going to be managed by the supercloud layer, which, you're dealing with the governance, the service governance, the security systems, the directory systems, identity access management, things like that. They're going to get you further along down the pike, and that comes back as real value. If I'm able to build something in two weeks that used to take me two months, and I'm able to give my creators in the organization the ability to move faster, that's a real advantage. And suddenly, we are going to be valued by our digital footprint, our ability to do things in a creative and innovative way. And so organizations are able to move that fast, leveraging cloud computing for what it should be leveraged, as a true force multiplier for the business. They're going to win the game. They're going to get the most value. They're going to be around in 20 years, the others won't. >> David Linthicum, always love talking. You have a dangerous combination of business and technology expertise. Let's tease. "VMware Explore" next week, you're giving a keynote, if they're going to be there. Which day are you? >> Tuesday. Tuesday, 11 o'clock. >> All right, that's a big day. Tuesday, 11 o'clock. And David, please do stop by "The Cube." We're in Moscone West. Love to get you on and continue this conversation. I got 100 more questions for you. Really appreciate your time. >> I always love talking to people at "The Cube." Thank you very much. >> All right, and thanks for watching our ongoing coverage of "Supercloud22" on "The Cube," your leader in enterprise tech and emerging tech coverage. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Boston. The CUBE's coverage of AWS Re-inforce 2022. This is our second live Re-inforce. We did two in the middle that were all digital. Aaron Brown is here as US AWS cyber leader for Deloitte and Ryan Orsi the cloud foundation leader for partners for Amazon Web Services. Jen, welcome to The CUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks. >> Nice to see you. Tell us about the story of Deloitte in cyber and then we'll get it to Deloitte cyber on AWS, or maybe even start there. >> Yeah, sure. I mean, obviously Deloitte, one of the largest cyber consultancies in the world, we've been working with AWS for a very long time. 2013, I was involved with, you know, the first Alliance agreement with them. And then we've been in cloud managed services about five years delivering workloads for clients. We have over 200 clients on that platform and then about a year and a half ago or so, the MSSP program came and it made a ton of sense to us, right? To really level the playing field and gave us a chance to really come out and demonstrate, you know, our capability around MSSP. >> The MSSP program, I saw a slide yesterday in keynote and in the analyst program was, you know, there's technology partners, there's MSSP partners. Explain the MSSP partner. >> Sure, sure. So at the Database Partner Network, we break it down. The program is called the level one MSSP Competency Program. And it is for both those companies that are sort of more of a software company with a managed service and those that are more of a pure service company, it's for both, but it's the general concept, it hosts the community of partners like Deloitte with a concentrated talent pool around 24 by 7 monitoring and response of AWS security events. >> So what is Deloitte? Deloitte's not a pure software play. It's not a pure services play anymore. It's sort of a mixture. >> Yeah, you know, asset enabled services, right? It's the way that we look at it. So, yeah, we're definitely not trying to compete with software companies out there, but we do have assets, right? So we do everything as infrastructure as code and that allows us to deploy our solutions into client environments really quickly. So where you might spend months on third party tool integrations, we leverage all native AWS tools in our standard offering and we can deploy into a client and get those services up and running in a couple of weeks. >> So you sell your software as an integrated service, is that correct? You don't- >> It's service, it's really is service. We sell a metered service. >> You don't sell your software separately? >> No. >> I should say it differently. You include your software as part of the service, is that right? >> Yeah, it is. But actually there's another element. There are obviously some clients who don't want to be in a managed service in perpetuity. And so those same assets that I talked about that we use for MSSP, you know, for the right clients, we don't just give away everything to anybody but for the right clients, for the right engagement, we will work with clients to help them build the capability that they need to run it themselves. And our solution is built in a way where they can do that. Right? We have a base component and a variable component to the solution and we will impart those assets to a client, you know, if the situation is right. >> Okay. So you'll actually transfer the software, but would you charge for that? >> Yeah, certainly, but there's obviously a big service component that goes into it. Right? >> And that's really where your expertise is. >> Yeah, we don't have like a standard, you know, list price but we'll work with clients to basically help them build out that capability because frankly the the market moves so fast that you need a constant capability and engine to update that solution. It's not something that, you know, you're going to sell and someone's just going to use that out of the box for the next five years. >> But a lot of the value that seems that Deloitte brings is you don't run from customization. You welcome that. You, you know, if a client says, hey, I need this special and that special, or whatever it is you'll go attack. You have the staff, the talent to attack that problem. And you use software in areas where you can have repeatability and it helps you scale and be more productive. Is that a fair way to think about it? >> Yeah, that's right. I mean, I guess one of the phrases that we use is we like big hairy problems, right? That's sort of our sweet spot. The, you know, the very simple, hey, I need a couple of guys to do a couple of things, typically, we're not the right firm for that. So, yes, we use the assets cause we realize like, hey, you know, out of everything that needs to be done, there's a significant portion of this that everybody needs more or less the same way. And then we build that, we build the automation to get it in and then we have that variable component working with clients to say, hey, let's make this work in your environment. We use a combination of AWS Native services, but then, you know, some clients have investments in third party tools and we can work with that. >> So it's a perfect match for AWS cause you guys are all about providing tools for builders and here's some primitives, some APIs and Go, we don't want that highly customized snowflake for every single client. >> Exactly. I mean, that's what I feel like the partnership with Deloitte is really bringing to the table for everybody and our mutual customers and builders out there that we both work with is again, they don't run from complexity or customization that security can be complex. It can be hard, Deloitte's helping making it much easier. The AWS partner network is helping kind of bring the ecosystem together and of software service, architectures that AWS recommend for like a security best practice around what to monitor, how to respond, what kind of enriched data should be added to that security finding and kind of pushing that out through our partnerships with it such as Deloitte. >> One of the things that, I mean, certainly big takeaway from this event, the security tracks that reinvent, previous Re-inforce events is AWS imparting, educating its customers on best practice and how tos and things that they should be thinking about, you know, do this, don't do that. In 2019, it was a lot about, hey guys, there's this shared responsibility model and kind of explaining that, we're way, way beyond that now, should we think about Deloitte sort of as an extension of that best practice AWS expertise that can be applied at your clients? I'll go to Deloitte because I don't have the talent to deal with that. I mean, I got talented people, but I just don't have enough of them. >> Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And that's really, you know, our offerings tend to be comprehensive across all the domains. And like I said, the full life cycle of security operations all the way from, you know, identify the issue to resolve it and recover from it. And, you know, when we look at the shared responsibility model, you know, we like to say, hey, we will take you really far up that stack, that customer responsibility area, you know, for our service, we cover a significant portion of that landscape on our client's behalf cause, you know, what do they care about? Deploying workloads, getting the application running, right? Security is just another one of those important, necessary things, but it just sort of standing between you and the business value of your workload. >> And your ideal target customer would be a large medium up to a large enterprise or is all exclusively large or? >> Definitely not exclusively large. You know, the fact that we have all the automation that we do, we have a significant portion of our security operations folks are offshore allows us to be really competitive. And so we're able to serve clients that maybe, you know, in years past wouldn't have been what you'd think of as traditional. So like clients leveraging the marketplace, you know, we're able to serve that market segment. >> So billion dollar up kind of revenue? Odes that sound about right? >> Yeah. Even south of that a bit. >> Okay. So maybe half a billion or 500 million up. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So thinking about that ideal sort of profile, if you don't know, you don't know, I'm going to ask you to guess. >> Yeah. >> What percent of those target companies, enterprises, have a SOC? Is it 100%, 50%, you know, or are you- >> 75, 75% most so. >> Okay. So let's say 3/4. >> Yeah. >> So you compliment the SOC, right? You're not the SOC, but you may be in some cases? >> Depending, now we're talking about it's a function of what their IT enterprise landscape looks like. If they're 100% AWS, yeah. If you're born in the cloud startup and, you know, you don't do anything else and we have, you know, we have a few of those. Right. And they want to give us everything. They're like, you know, our security guys just going to kind of understand what you guys are doing and feel good about it. Yeah. We do that. But for the most, there is an existing SOC. Right. And so what we do is we leverage, you know, an ITSM software to e-bond with our clients service management functions so that when we're generating tickets, they have full visibility to what's going on. We're still resolving things on their behalf, we need to communicate with some clients, right? Cause a lot of security issues that need to get resolved require engagement with the asset owner. So we're not just a black box. So we do have to talk to folks on the ground at the client to resolve issues. >> And that's actually one thing that really impressed me to getting to know Aaron and his team more and more throughout this journey together in the partnership is they're not throwing alerts over the fence to the customers SOC team saying, well, here's some recommended remediation steps, they're actually rolling up their sleeves and doing some remediation themselves and informing the customer. This was taken care of for you. I think that's really unique. >> Yeah. In addition to, you know, our solution obviously has a bunch of auto-remediations, you know, that we do as part of the solution. >> So what's the engagement like? What's the conversation like when people come to you? Say I have a problem, it's blank, right? What are the typical blank- >> You know, a lot of it has been organizations where there's either a business unit that has kind of maybe off run and doing their own thing. And, you know, it's only sort of come to light with the compliance and security organization inside the client that like, hey, these guys maybe need some help. And boy, we're really strapped. We don't have the people cause talent's so tight to go help these guys and make them get it right. We're going to go ahead and keep them kind of off to the side. And you know, we'll do this managed service to help get that addressed. And then another typical scenario is when companies are acquired. So, you know, organization buys a company and they've got a preexisting. Again, they look under the covers and they're like, oh, these guys really need some help because of the way that we deploy everything as infrastructure as code really very quickly, it's a great way to just kind of get it sorted. It's a metered service. So it's not some massive investment that they have to make. We could just get it sorted out until maybe they get a chance to process and actually onboard that new entity into their enterprise structure. So as part of the MSSP program within AWS, you got to be really good at understanding how to utilize the AWS portfolio of cyber security services natively. So you do that, does that check the box on everything you need or do clients typically say, no, no, you got to integrate with all this other mess that I have there. Can you sweep that mess aside and say, hey, I can do this all in the cloud or what's that dynamic like? >> The answer is, yes, both. Right? So, you know, typically clients will have significant investments in existing third party tools and then either politically because of the investment or from a practical standpoint it makes sense to integrate those. Now that does slow down, you know, the deployment and the customization a bit, but, you know, and a lot of times that makes sense for the client. >> Well, it gets hairy. Like you said, you love these kind of hairy problems, right? >> Yeah, that's right. >> You run towards that. >> That's right. We run towards fire >> And, Ryan, your focus on partners is all partners or is it really the MSSPs or? >> All partners, all kinds of partners in the security space, right? >> Right, right. Yeah. Of course. >> Software companies, professional services, managed services. And we're focused on trying to make the security easier for both of our mutual customers here. Right? So that what you mentioned about best practices and, you know, how do you tell what best practices are per AWS service or third party software that's operating in an AWS environment? That's part of what our team does is we create these partner programs. There's a very detailed, very prescriptive technical checklist that out internal security experts are going through with Deloitte folks, for example, as a part of their membership and the level one MSSP program to make sure that, right? Those best practices which could be fresh off the AWS documentation truck are built into their services. And the reason those best practices exist is for a for a good reason. They're built, tried and tested, you know, in our own environments before they reach the documentation website. But all of that is incorporated into that whole kind of validated checklist that we do together. So it's a great way to make sure that operations from partners like Deloitte, software delivered, customization delivered, aligns with what we're able to see from just our Amazon culture of being so customer obsessed and really listening to all of those very specific challenges they might have that the customer will have at different points in their cloud journey. Those challenges are baked directly into key technical requirement criteria that Deloitte's teamed up with us to go achieve. >> What are you seeing at the macro, Aaron? When we talked to practitioners where we'll survey, we have a survey partner called ETR and they'll do spending surveys coming into the year of CIOs and IT buyers, we're expecting 8%, eight to 8 1/2% budget growth, post Ukraine, inflation, Fed tightening, you know, the tech lash, all that. It's dialed down a bit, it's still pretty robust it's 6% and security still remains the number one priority. And we've seen a little bit of momentum deceleration even in security spend across the board, but not anything, you know, tragic. Are you seeing the same or are you seeing security budgets kind of where they were expected to be at the beginning of the year? >> Yeah, you know, I haven't seen it decline. I mean, I think the fact of the matter is for all the things that we talked about before, right? Basically the skill shortages and just the coordination with other cloud programs, there's a tremendous backlog of stuff that needs to be done. And, you know, enterprises have more appreciation now for the need for all, you know, all the various, you know, ransomware things that have happened and others that, hey, they need to get a handle on the security and their environment. And so I think a lot of what's been going on in the last year, the reason it hasn't been faster, hasn't been for a lack of appetite. It's just been a lack of skills and process to do it. >> Has the business case changed? And the variables maybe the same, but it used to be, hey, if you don't do this, you're exposed. Okay. Here's the fear of getting, you know, infiltrated and then it's going to became if you want to quantify it, it's like, okay, what's the expected loss with, and without, you know, the kind of think of insurance terms. Is the business case shifting with digital toward this is a fundamental component of monetization in order to be able to monetize, you have to ensure this level security. Are we there yet? >> Yeah, I think so. I don't think anyone's arguing whether it's, you know, needed or not. Right. So now it's a question of, hey, and I think CJ Moses had a good slide in the opening yesterday where he was saying, you know, was it, make the secure path, the path of least resistance. Right? And so that's a big part of, you know, how we deliver our solution. We really want to make it easy for the enterprise to absorb the security services that we have. Right? And that's really critical. I think that's where the focus is, is make it easier to do security because the value comes right along with it. >> All right. I'll give you each the final word, Ryan, you go first then Aaron kind of put a bumper sticker on Re-inforce 2022. >> It's not slowing down. It's only picking up in terms of innovation, software tools, operational processes, and some of the unique ways that all these tools are tied together. Third party, Native AWS, consulting, the way these services come together, it's only accelerating. It's been pretty exciting to see some of the innovation here this time at this Re-inforce. >> Right, Aaron, what do you say? >> Yeah, I would agree. I mean, just the breadth of capabilities, the new announcements by AWS of the capabilities in their solution stack. I mean, for me, you know, I just kind of wonder like when does it narrow or when does it settle down and I know that that's not now. >> Keep waiting. >> Yeah. >> But, yeah, I think, you know, we will continue to see you know, just rapid acceleration and new features and services that... >> I often say the next decade at cloud ain't going to to be like the last. So gentlemen, thanks for coming on The CUBE. It's great to see you. >> Thanks for having us. Thank you everything. >> All right, thank you for watching. Keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante for The CUBE. We'll be back right after this short break from Boston AWS Re-inforce 2022. (soft music)

Okay. We're back at AWS reinforced 2022. My name is Dave Vellante, and this is the cube we're here in Boston, home of lobster and CDA. And we're here, the convention center where the cube got started in 2010, Shariq Qureshi is here the senior manager at Deloitte and two LL P and merit bear is back on the cube. Good to see >>You guys can't keep me away, >>Right? No. Well, we love having you on the cube shark set up your role at, at Deloitte and toosh what do you actually, what's your swim lane, if you will. >>Yeah, sure. You know, I spend, I wear a lot of hats. I spend a lot of time in the assurance, the controls advisory audit type of role. So I spend our time, a lot of time working with our clients to understand, you know, regulatory requirements, compliance requirements, and then controls that they need to have in place in order to address risks, technology risks, and ultimately business risks. >>So I like to put forth premise, you know, when I walk around a show like this and come up with some observations and then I like to share 'em and then people like me. Well, you know, maybe so help me course correct. My epiphany at this event is the cloud is becoming the first line of defense. The CISO at your customers is now the second line of defense. I think audit is maybe the th third line of defense. Do, do you buy that the sort of organizational layered approach? >>No, because in fact, what we're here to talk about today is audit manager, which is integrated, right? Like if you're doing so the whole notion of cloud is that we are taking those bottom layers of the stack, right? So the concrete floors up through layer for the hypervisor, the, the racks and stacks and HVAC and guards and gates up through the hypervisor, right? Our, our proprietary hardware nitro ecosystem, which has security inheritance is okay upon that. We are then virtualized. Right? And so what we're really talking about is the ways that audit looks different today, that you can reason about what you're doing. So you're doing infrastructure as code. You can do securities code, you can do compliances code, and that's the beauty of it. So like for better, or in your case for worse in your analogy, you know, these are integrated, these are woven together and they are an API call >>Seamless. >>It, it is like easy to describe, right? I mean, like you can command line knowledge about your resources. You can also reason about it. So like, this is something that's embedded, for example, an inspector you can do network reachability know whether you have an internet facing endpoint, which is a PCI, you know, requirement, but that'll be dashboarded in your security hub. So there's the cloud is all the stuff we take away that you don't have to deal with. And also all the stuff that we manage on top of it that then you can reason about and augment and, and take action on. >>Okay. So at the same time you can't automate the audit entirely. Right? So, but, but talk about the challenges of, of, of, of automating and auditing cloud environment. >>Yeah. I mean, when I look at cloud, you know, organizations move to take advantage of cloud characteristics and cloud capabilities, right? So elasticity, scalability is one of them. And, you know, for market conditions, business, business outcomes, you know, resources expand and contract. And one of the questions that we often get as an auditor is how do you maintain a control environment for resources that weren't there yesterday, but are there today, or that are, that are no longer there and that are there today. So how do you maintain controls and how do you maintain security consistently uniformly throughout an audit environment? It's not there. So that's a challenge auditors, you know, historically when you look at the on-prem environment, you have servers that are there, it's a physical, it's a physical box. You can touch it and see it. And if it goes down, then, you know, it's still there. You can hug >>It if you're some people >>It's still there. So, but you know, with, you know, with cloud things get torn down that you don't see. So how do you maintain controls? That's, you know, it, one challenges, it >>Sounds like you're describing a CMDB for audit. >>I mean, that's a, that's an outcome of having, you know, getting good controls of having a CMDB to keep track and have an inventory of your assets. >>But the problem with CMDB is they're out of date, like so, so quickly, is it different in the cloud world? >>Yeah, exactly. I mean, yes. And yes, they are outta date. Cuz like anything static will be manual and imprecise, like it's gonna be, did John go calculate, like go count how many servers we have. That's why I was joking about server huggers versus like virtualizing it. So you put out a call and you know, not just whether it exists, but whether it's been patched, whether it's, you know, like there are ways that we can reason about what we've done, permissioning pruning, you know, like, and these, by the way, correspond to audit and compliance requirements. And so yes, we are not like there, it's not a click of a, whatever, a snap of the fingers, right. It takes work to translate between auditors and us. And it also takes work to have customers understand how they can augment the way that they think about compliance. But a lot of this is just the good stuff that they already need to be doing, right? Knowing internet facing endpoints or whatever, you know, like pruning permissioning. And there's a lot of ways that, you know, access analyzer, for example, these are automated reasoning tools that come from our formal reasoning group, automated reason group that's in identity. Like they, computers can reason about things in ways that are more complex, as long as it can be resolved. It's like EEU utility in mathematics. You don't go out and try to count every prime number. We accept the infinitude of primes to be true. If you believe in math, then we can reason about it. >>Okay. So hearing that there's a changing landscape yeah. In compliance shift from a lot of manual work to one that's much more highly automated, maybe not completely integrated and seamless. Right. But, but working in that direction, right. Yeah. Is that right? And maybe you could describe that in a little bit more detail, how that, you know, journey has progressed. >>I mean, just the fact alone that you have, you know, a lot of services, a lot of companies that are out there that are trying to remove the manual component and to automate things, to make things more efficient. So then, you know, developers can develop and we can be more agile and to do the things that, you know, really what the core competencies are of the business to remove those manual, you know, components to take out the human element and there's a growing need for it. You know, like we always look at security as, you know, like a second class citizen, we don't take advantage of, you know, the, you know, the opportunities that we need to, to do to maintain controls. So, you know, there's an opportunity here for us to look at and, and automate compliance, to automate controls and, and to make things, you know, seamless >>As a fun side benefit, you will actually hopefully have improved your actual security and also retain your workforce because people don't wanna be doing manual processes. You know, they wanna be doing stuff that humans are designed for, which is creative thinking, innovation, you know, creating ways to make new pathways instead of just like re walking these roads that a computer can analyze, >>You mentioned audit manager, what is that? I mean, let's give a plug for the product or the service. What's that all about what problems does it solve? Let's get >>Into that. Yeah. I mean, audit manager is a first of its kind service. You're not gonna find this offered through any other hyperscaler it's specifically geared and tailored towards the second line, which is security and compliance and a third line function, which is internal audit. So what is it looking to do and what is it looking to address some of those challenges working in a cloud space working, and if you have a cloud footprint. So for example, you know, most organizations operate in a multi account strategy, right? You don't just have one account, but how do you maintain consistency of controls across all your accounts? Auto manager is a service that can give, you know, kind of that single pane of view that to see across your entire landscape, just like a cartographer has a map to see, you know, the entire view of what he's designing auto managers does the same thing only from a cloud perspective. So there's also other, you know, features and capabilities that auto managers trying to integrate, you know, that presents challenges for those in compliance those in the audit space. So, you know, most companies, organizations they have, you know, not just one framework like SOC two or GDPR, high trust, HIPAA PCI, you know, you can select an industry accepted framework and evaluate your cloud consumption against, you know, an industry accepted framework to see where you stand in terms of your control posture, your security hygiene, >>And that's exclusive to AWS. Is that what you're saying? You won't find that on any other hyper scale >>And you'll find similarities in other products, but you won't find something that's specifically geared towards the second line and third line. There's also other features and capabilities to collect evidence, which is, I don't see that in the marketplace. >>Well, the only reason I ask that is because, you know, you, everybody has multiple clouds and I would love, I would love a, you know, an audit manager that's, that's span that transcends, you know, one cloud, is that possible? Or is that something that is just not feasible because of the, the, the deltas between clouds? >>I mean, anything's possible with the APIs right now, the way that, you know, you have to ingrain in, right. There's, you know, a, a feature that was introduced recently for audit manager was the ability to pull in APIs from third party sources. So now you're not just looking, looking exclusively at one cloud provider, you're looking at your entire digital ecosystem of services, your tools, your SA solutions that you're consuming to get a full, comprehensive picture of your environment. >>So compliance, risk, audit security, they're like cousins that are all sort of hanging out on the same holiday, but, but they're different. Like what help us understand and squint through those different disciplines. >>Yeah. I mean, each of them have, you know, a different role and a hat to wear. So internal audit is more of your independent arm of management working or reporting directly towards, you know, to the audit committee or to the board to give an independent view on company control and posture security and compliance works with management to help design the, that there that are intended to prevent, detect, or even correct, you know, controls, breakdowns, you know, those action, those action verb items that you wanna prevent unauthorized access, or you wanna restrict changes from making its way into production unless it's approved and, and documented and tracked and so on and so forth. So each, you know, these roles they're very similar, but they're also different in terms of what their function is. >>How are customers dealing with regional differences? You mentioned GDPR, different regulations, data sovereignty, what are the global nuances and complexities that, that, that cloud brings. And how are you addressing those? >>Yeah. Merit, I don't know if you had any thoughts on that one. >>I mean, I think that a lot of what, and this will build off of your response to the sort of Venn diagrams of security and risk and compliance and audit. I think, you know, what we're seeing is that folks care about the same stuff. They care about privacy. They care about security. They care about incentivizing best practices. The form that that takes when it's a compliance framework is by definition a little bit static over time. Whereas security tends to be more quickly evolving with standards that are like industry standards. And so I think one of the things that, you know, all these compliance frameworks have in, in mind is to go after those best practices, the forms that they take may take different forms. You know what I mean? And so I, I see them as hopeful in the motivation sense that we are helping entities get the wherewithal, they need to grow up or mature or get even more security minded. I think there are times that they feel a little clunky, but you know, that's just Frank. Yeah. >>It, it, it can audit manager sort of help me solve that problem. Is that the intent? And I see what you're saying, merit, that there security is at a different pace than, than, you know, GDPR, a privacy, you know, person, >>Right. I mean, like security says, we want this outcome. We want to have, you know, data be protected. The compliance may say, it must be this particular encryption standard. You know what I mean? Like the form I see things taking over time will evolve and, and feels dynamic. Whereas I think that sometimes when we think about compliance and it's exactly why we need stuff like audit manager is to like help manage exactly what articulation of that are we getting in this place at this time for this regulated industry? And like almost every customer I have is regulated. If you're doing business, you're probably in PCI, right. >>And there's never just one silver bullet. So security is, is a number of things that you're gonna do, the number of tools that you're gonna have. And it's often the culture in, in what you develop in your people, your process and technology. So auto manager is one of the components of robust strategy on how to address security. >>But it's also one of those things where like, there are very few entities, maybe Deloitte is one that are like built to do compliance. They're built to do manufacturing, automotive hospitality. Yeah. You know, like they're doing some other industry as their industry. Right. And we wanna let them have less lag time as they make sure that they can do that core business. And the point is to enable them to move our, I mean like sure. I think that folks should move to the pod because of security, but you don't have to, you should move because it enables your business. And this is one of the ways in which it just like minimizes, you know, like whatever our tailwinds lagging or push it anyway, it pushes you. Right. I mean, like it minimizes the lag >>Definitely tailwind. So are you suggesting merit that you can inject that industry knowledge and specificity into things like audit manager and, and actually begin to automate that as, and of course Deloitte has, you know, industry expertise char, but, but, but how should we think about that? >>I mean, you're gonna, you're gonna look at your controls comprehensively a across the board. So if you operate in an industry, you're gonna look to see like, what's, what's important for you. What do you have to, you know, be mindful of? So if you have data residency concerns, you wanna make sure that you've tailored your controls based on the risks that you're addressing. So if there's a framework >>And remember that you can go in the console and choose what region you're, you know, like we never remove your data from your region that you have chosen, you know, like this is, there's an intentionality and an ability to do this with a click of a mouse or with an API call that's, you know, or with a cloud formation template. That's like, there is a deliberateness there. There's not just like best wishes. >>You know, >>ESG is in scope. I presume, you know, helping the CISO become more green, more diverse. Increasingly you're seeing ESG reports come out from major organizations. I presume that's part of the compliance, but maybe not, maybe it hasn't seeped in yet. Are you seeing >>For that? I think it's still a new service auto manager. It's still, you know, being developed, but, you know, continuous feedback to make sure that, you know, we're covering a, a broad range of services and, and, and those considerations are definitely in the scope. Yeah. >>I mean, are you hearing more of that from >>Clients? So, I mean, we have an internal commitment to sustainability, right. That has been very publicly announced and that I'm passionate about. We also have some other native tools that probably, you know, are worth mentioning here, like security hub that does, you know, CIS benchmarking and other things like that are traffic lighted in their dashboard. You know, like there are ways a lot of this is going to be the ways that we can take what might have been like an ugly ETL process and instead take the managed ness on top of it and, and consume that and allow your CISO to make high velocity decision, high velocity, high quality decisions. >>What's the relationship between your two firms? How do you work >>To I'm like we just met. >>Yeah. I sense that, so is it, is it, how do you integrate, I guess is >>A question. Yeah. I mean, I mean, from the audit perspective, our perspective, working with clients and understanding, you know, their requirements and then bringing the service audit manager from the technical aspect and how we can work together. So we have a few use cases, one we've working with the tech company who wanted to evaluate, you know, production workload that had content, you know, critical client information, client data. So they needed to create custom controls. We were working with them to create custom controls, which auto manager would evaluate their environment, which would, you know, there's a reporting aspect of it, which was used to, you know, to present to senior leadership. So we were working together with AWS and on helping craft what those custom controls were in implement at the customer. >>Yeah. I mean, among other things, delight can help augment workforce. It can help folks interpret their results when they get outputs and act upon them and understand industry standards for responsiveness there. I mean, mean like it's a way to augment your approach by, you know, bringing in someone who's done this before. >>Yeah. Cool, cool. Collaboration on a topic that's generally considered, sorry. Don't, don't hate me for saying this boring, but really important. And the fact that you're automating again makes it a lot more interesting guys. Excellent. Thanks for your sharp first time on the cube. Thank you. Absolutely on, appreciate it. Rapidly. Becoming a VIP. Thanks. Coming on. Hey, I'll take it. All right. Keep it right there. Thank you. This is Dave ante for the cube. You're watching our coverage of AWS reinforce 2022 from Boston. We'll be right back.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everyone. It's theCUBE's coverage here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE with re:MARS. Amazon re:MARS stands for machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. Lot of great content, accomplishment. AI meets meets robotics and space, industrial IoT, all things data. And we've got two great guests here to unpack the AI side of it. Manoj Suvarna, Managing Director at AI Ecosystem at Deloitte and Arte Merritt, Conversational AI Lead at AWS. Manoj, it's great to see you CUBE alumni. Art, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. >> So AI's the big theme. Actually, the big disconnect in the industry has been the industrial OT versus IT, and that's happening. Now you've got space and robotics meets what we know is machine learning and AI which we've been covering. This is the confluence of the new IoT market. >> It absolutely is. >> What's your opinion on that? >> Yeah, so actually it's taking IoT beyond the art of possible. One area that we have been working very closely with AWS. We're strategic alliance with them. And for the past six years, we have been investing a lot in transformations. Transformation as it relate to the cloud, transformation as it relate to data modernization. The new edge is essentially on AI and machine learning. And just this week, we announced a new solution which is more focused around enhancing contact center intelligence. So think about the edge of the contact center, where we all have experiences around dealing with customer service and how to really take that to the next level, challenges that clients are facing in every part of that business. So clearly. >> Well, Conversational AI is a good topic. Talk about the relationship with Deloitte and Amazon for a second around AI because you guys have some great projects going on right now. That's well ahead of the curve on solving the scale problem 'cause there's a scale and problem, practical problem and then scale. What's the relationship with Amazon and Deloitte? >> We have a great alliance and relationship. Deloitte brings that expertise to help folks build high quality, highly effective conversational AI and enterprises are implementing these solutions to really try to improve the overall customer experience. So they want to help agents improve productivity, gain insights into the reasons why folks are calling but it's really to provide that better user experience being available 24/7 on channels users prefer to interact. And the solutions that Deloitte is building are highly advanced, super exciting. Like when we show demos of them to potential customers, the eyes light up and they want those solutions. >> John: Give an example when their eyes light up. What are you showing there? >> One solution, it's called multimodal interfaces. So what this is, is when you're call into like a voice IVR, Deloitte's solution will send the folks say a mobile app or a website. So the person can interact with both the phone touching on the screen and the voice and it's all kept in sync. So imagine you call the doctor's office or say I was calling a airline and I want to change my flight or sorry, change the seat. If they were to say, seat 20D is available. Well, I don't know what that means, but if you see the map while you're talking, you can say, oh, 20D is the aisle. I'm going to select that. So Deloitte's doing those kind of experiences. It's incredible. >> Manoj, this is where the magic comes into play when you bring data together and you have integration like this. Asynchronously or synchronously, it's all coming together. You have different platforms, phone, voice, silo databases potentially, the old way. Now, the new ways integrating. What makes it all work? What's the key to success? >> Yeah, it's certainly not a trivial feat. Bringing together all of these ecosystems of relationships, technologies all put together. We cannot do it alone. This is where we partner with AWS with some of our other partners like Salesforce and OneReach and really trying to bring a symphony of some of these solutions to bear. When you think about, going back to the example of contact center, the challenges that the pandemic posed in the last couple of years was the fact that who's a humongous rise in volume of number of calls. You can imagine people calling in asking for all kinds of different things, whether it's airlines whether it is doctor's office and retail. And then couple with that is the fact that there's the labor shortage. And how do you train agents to get them to be productive enough to be able to address hundreds or thousands of these calls? And so that's where we have been starting to, we have invested in those solutions bringing those technologies together to address real client problems, not just slideware but actual production environments. And that's where we launched this solution called TrueServe as of this week, which is really a multimodal solution that is built with preconceived notions of technologies and libraries where we can then be industry agnostic and be able to deliver those experiences to our clients based on whatever vertical or industry they're in. >> Take me through the client's engagement here because I can imagine they want to get a practical solution. They're going to want to have it up and running, not like a just a chatbot, but like they completely integrated system. What's the challenge and what's the outcome first set of milestones that you see that they do first? Do they just get the data together? Are they deploying a software solution? What's the use cases? >> There's a couple different use cases. We see there's the self-service component that we're talking about with the chatbots or voice IVR solutions. There's also use cases for helping the agents, so real-time agent assist. So you call into a contact center, it's transcribed in real time, run through some sort of knowledge base to give the agents possible answers to help the user out, tying in, say the Salesforce data, CRM data, to know more about the user. Like if I was to call the airline, it's going to say, "Are you calling about your flight to San Francisco tomorrow?" It knows who I am. It leverages that stuff. And then the key piece is the analytics knowing why folks are calling, not just your metrics around, length of calls or deflections, but what were the reasons people were calling in because you can use that data to improve your underlying products or services. These are the things that enterprise are looking for and this is where someone like Deloitte comes in, brings that expertise, speeds up the time to market and really helps the customers. >> Manoj, what was the solution you mentioned that you guys announced? >> Yeah, so this is called Deloitte TrueServe. And essentially, it's a combination of multiple different solutions combinations from AWS, from Salesforce, from OneReach. All put together with our joint engineering and really delivering that capability. Enhancing on that is the analytics component, which is really critical, especially because when you think about the average contact center, less than 10% of the data gets analyzed today, and how do you then extract value out of that data and be able to deliver business outcomes. >> I was just talking to some of the other day about Zoom. Everyone records their zoom meetings, and no one watches them. I mean, who's going to wade through that. Call center is even more high volume. We're talking about massive data. And so will you guys automate that? Do you go through every single piece of data, every call and bring it down? Is that how it works? >> Go ahead. >> There's just some of the things you can do. Analyze the calls for common themes, like figuring out like topic modeling, what are the reasons people are calling in. Summarizing that stuff so you can see what those underlying issues are. And so that could be, like I was mentioning, improving the product or service. It could also be for helping train the agents. So here's how to answer that question. And it could even be reinforcing positive experiences maybe an agent had a particular great call and that could be a reference for other folks. >> Yeah, and also during the conversation, when you think about within 60 to 90 seconds, how do you identify the intonation, the sentiments of the client customer calling in and be able to respond in real time for the challenges that they might be facing and the ability to authenticate the customer at the same time be able to respond to them. I think that is the advancements that we are seeing in the market. >> I think also your point about the data having residual values also excellent because this is a long tail of value in this data, like for predictions and stuff. So NASA was just on before you guys came on, talking about the Artemis project and all the missions and they have to run massive amounts of simulations. And this is where I've kind of seen the dots connect here. You can run with AI, run all the heavy lifting without human touching it to get that first ingestion or analysis, and then iterating on the data based upon what else happens. >> Manoj: Absolutely. >> This is now the new normal, right? Is this? >> It is. And it's transverse towards across multiple domains. So the example we gave you was around Conversational AI. We're now looking at that for doing predictive analytics. Those are some examples that we are doing jointly with AWS SageMaker. We are working on things like computer vision with some of the capabilities and what computer vision has to offer. And so when you think about the continuum of possibilities of what we can bring together from a tools, technology, services perspective, really the sky is the limit in terms of delivering these real experiences to our clients. >> So take me through a customer. Pretending I'm a customer, I get it. I got to do this. It's a competitive advantage. What are the outcomes that they are envisioning? What are some of the patterns you're seeing with customers? What outcomes are they expecting and what kind of high level upside you see them envisioning coming out of the data? >> So when you think about the CxOs today and the board, a lot of them are thinking about, okay, how do you build more efficiency in those system? How do you enable a technology or solution for them to not only increase their top line but as well as their bottom line? How do you enhance the customer experience, which in this case is spot on because when you think about, when customers go repeat to a vendor, it's based on quality, it's based on price. Customer experience is now topping that where your first experience, whether it's through a chat or a virtual assistant or a phone call is going to determine the longevity of that customer with you as a vendor. And so clearly, when you think about how clients are becoming AI fuel, this is where we are bringing in new technologies, new solutions to really push the art to the limit and the art of possible. >> You got a playbook too to do this? >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We have done that. And in fact, we are now taking that to the next level up. So something that I've mentioned about this before, which is how do you trust an AI system as it's building up. >> Hold on, I need to plug in. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> I put this here for a reason to remind me. No, but also trust is a big thing. Just put that trustworthy. This is an AI ethics question. >> Arte: It's a big. >> Let's get into it. This is huge. Data's data. Data can be biased from coming in >> Part of it, there are concerns you have to look at the bias in the data. It's also how you communicate through these automated channels, being empathetic, building trust with the customer, being concise in the answers and being accessible to all sorts of different folks and how they might communicate. So it's definitely a big area. >> I mean, you think about just normal life. We all lived situations where we got a text message from a friend or someone close to us where, what the hell, what are you saying? And they had no contextual bad feelings about it or, well, there's misunderstandings 'cause the context isn't there 'cause you're rapid fire them on the subway. I'm riding my bike. I stop and text, okay, I'm okay. Church response could mean I'm busy or I'm angry. Like this is now what you said about empathy. This is now a new dynamic in here. >> Oh, the empathy is huge, especially if you're say a financial institution or building that trust with folks and being empathetic. If someone's reaching out to a contact center, there's a good chance they're upset about something. So you have to take that. >> John: Calm them down first. >> Yeah, and not being like false like platitude kind of things, like really being empathetic, being inclusive in the language. Those are things that you have conversation designers and linguistics folks that really look into that. That's why having domain expertise from folks like Deloitte come in to help with that. 'Cause maybe if you're just building the chat on your own, you might not think of those things. But the folks with the domain expertise will say like, Hey, this is how you script it. It's the power of words, getting that message across clearly. >> The linguistics matter? >> Yeah, yeah. >> It does. >> By vertical too, I mean, you could pick any the tribe, whatever orientation and age, demographics, genders. >> All of those things that we take for granted as a human. When you think about trust, when you think about bias, when you think about ethics, it just gets amplified. Because now you're dealing with millions and millions of data points that may or may not be the right direction in terms of somebody's calling in depending on what age group they're in. Some questions might not be relevant for that age group. Now a human can determine that, but a bot cannot. And so how do you make sure that when you look at this data coming in, how do you build models that are ethically aware of the contextual algorithms and the alignment with it and also enabling that experience to be much enhanced than taking it backwards, and that's really. >> I can imagine it getting better with as people get scaled up a bit 'cause then you're going to have to start having AI to watch the AI at some point, as they say. Where are we in the progress in the industry right now? Because I know there's been a lot of news stories around, ethics and AI and bias and it's a moving train actually, but still problems are going to be solved. Are we at the tipping point yet? Are we still walking in before we crawl or crawling before we walk? I should say, I mean, where are we? >> I think we are in between a crawling or walk phase. And the reason for that is because it varies depending on whether you're regulated industry or unregulated. In the regulated industry, there are compliance regulations requirements, whether it's government whether it's banking, financial institutions where they have to meet Sarbanes-Oxley and all kinds of compliance requirements, whereas an unregulated industry like retail and consumer, it is anybody's gain. And so the reality of it is that there is more of an awareness now. And that's one of the reasons why we've been promoting this jointly with AWS. We have a framework that we have established where there are multiple pillars of trust, bias, privacy, and security that companies and organizations need to think about. Our data scientists, ML engineers need to be familiar with it, but because while they're super great in terms of model building and development, when it comes to the business, when it comes to the client or a customer, it is super important for them to trust this platform, this algorithm. And that is where we are trying to build that momentum, bring that awareness. One of my colleagues has written this book "Trustworthy AI". We're trying to take the message out to the market to say, there is a framework. We can help you get there. And certainly that's what we are doing. >> Just call Deloitte up and you're going to take care of them. >> Manoj: Yeah. >> On the Amazon side, Amazon Web Services. I always interview Swami every year at re:Invent and he always get the updates. He's been bullish on this for a long time on this Conversational AI. What's the update on the AWS side? Where are you guys at? What's the current trends that you're riding? What wave are you riding right now? >> So some of the trends we see in customer interest, there's a couple of things. One is the multimodal interfaces we we're just chatting about where the voice IVA is synced with like a web or mobile experience, so you take that full advantage of the device. The other is adding additional AI into the Conversational AI. So one example is a customer that included intelligent document processing as part of the chatbot. So instead of typing your name and address, take a photo of your driver's license. It was an insurance onboarding chatbot, so you could take a photo of your existing insurance policy. It'll extract that information to build the new insurance policy. So folks get excited about that. And the third area we see interest is what's called multi-bot orchestration. And this is where you can have one main chatbot. Marshall user across different sub-chatbots based on the use case persona or even language. So those things get people really excited and then AWS is launching all sorts of new features. I don't know which one is coming out. >> I know something's coming out tomorrow. He's right at corner. He's big smile on his face. He wouldn't tell me. It's good. >> We have for folks like the closer alliance relationships, we we're able to get previews. So there a preview of all the new stuff. And I don't know what I could, it's pretty exciting stuff. >> You get in trouble if you spill the beans here. Don't, be careful. I'll watch you. We'll talk off camera. All exciting stuff. >> Yeah, yeah. I think the orchestrator bot is interesting. Having the ability to orchestrate across different contextual datasets is interesting. >> One of the areas where it's particularly interesting is in financial services. Imagine a bank could have consumer accounts, merchant accounts, investment banking accounts. So if you were to chat with the chatbot and say I want to open account, well, which account do you mean? And so it's able to figure out that context to navigate folks to those sub-chatbots behind the scenes. And so it's pretty interesting style. >> Awesome. Manoj while we're here, take a minute to quickly give a plug for Deloitte. What your program's about? What customers should expect if they work with you guys on this project? Give a quick commercial for Deloitte. >> Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, Deloitte has been continuing to lead the AI field organization effort across our client base. If you think about all the Fortune 100, Fortune 500, Fortune 2000 clients, we certainly have them where they are in advanced stages of multiple deployments for AI. And we look at it all the way from strategy to implementation to operational models. So clients don't have to do it alone. And we are continuing to build our ecosystem of relationships, partnerships like the alliances that we have with AWS, building the ecosystem of relationships with other emerging startups, to your point about how do you continue to innovate and bring those technologies to your clients in a trustworthy environment so that we can deliver it in production scale. That is essentially what we're driving. >> Well, Arte, there's a great conversation and the AI will take over from here as we end the segment. I see a a bot coming on theCUBE later and there might be CUBE be replaced with robots. >> Right, right, right, exactly. >> I'm John Furrier, calling from Palo Alto. >> Someday, CUBE bot. >> You can just say, Alexa do my demo for me or whatever it is. >> Or digital twin for John. >> We're going to have a robot on earlier do a CUBE interview and that's Dave Vellante. He'd just pipe his voice in and be fun. Well, thanks for coming on, great conversation. >> Thank you. Thanks for having us. >> CUBE coverage here at re:MARS in Las Vegas. Back to the event circle. We're back in the line. Got re:Inforce and don't forget re:Invent at the end of the year. CUBE coverage of this exciting show here. Machine learning, automation, robotics, space. That's MARS, it's re:MARS. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone to theCube's coverage of AWS re:Mars here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube. Got Alexey Surkov, Partner at Deloitte joining me today. We're going to talk about AI biased AI trust, trust in the AI for the, to save the planet to save us from the technology. Alexey thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. >> So you had a line before you came on camera that describe the show, and I want you to say it if you don't mind because it was the best line that for me, at least from my generation. >> Alexey: Sure. >> That describes the show and then your role at Deloitte in it. >> Alexey: Sure. Listen, I mean, I, you know, it may sound a little corny, but to me, like I look at this entire show, at this whole building really, and like everybody here is trying to build a better Skynet, you know, better, faster, stronger, more potent, you know, and it's like, we are the only ones, like we're in this corner of like Deloitte trustworthy AI. We're trying to make sure that it doesn't take over the world. So that's, you know, that's the gist of it. How do you make sure that AI serves the good and not evil? How do you make sure that it doesn't have the risk? It doesn't, you know, it's well controlled that it does what we're, what we're asking it to do. >> And of course for all the young folks out there the Terminator is the movie and it's highly referenced in the nerd circles Skynet's evil and helps humanity goes away and lives underground and fights for justice and I think wins at the end. The Terminate three, I don't, I can't remember what happened there, but anyway. >> Alexey: I thought the good guys win, but, you know, that's. >> I think they do win at the end. >> Maybe. >> So that brings up the whole point because what we're seeing here is a lot of futuristic positive messages. I mean, three areas solve a lot of problems in the daily lives. You know, machine learning day to day hard problems. Then you have this new kind of economy emerging, you know, machine learning, driving new economic models, new industrial capabilities. And then you have this whole space save the world vibe, you know, like we discover the moon, new water sources maybe save climate change. So very positive future vibe here at re:Mars. >> Alexey: Absolutely. Yeah, and it was really exciting just watching, you know, watching the speakers talk about the future, and conquering space, and mining on the moon like it's happening already. It's really exciting and amazing. Yeah. >> Let's talk about what you guys are working at Deloitte because I think it's fascinating. You starting to see the digital transformation get to the edge. And when I say edge, I mean back office is done with cloud and you still have the old, you know, stuff that the old models that peoples will use, but now new innovative things are happening. Pushing software out there that's driving you with the FinTech, these verticals, and the trust is a huge factor. Not only do the consumers have a trust issues, who owns my data, there's also trust in the actual algorithms. >> Exactly. >> You guys are in the middle of this. What's your advice to clients, 'cause they want to push the envelope hard be cutting edge, >> Alexey: Right. >> But they don't want to pull back and get caught with their, you know, data out there that might been a misfire or hack. >> Absolutely. Well, I mean the simple truth is that, you know, with great power comes great responsibility, right? So AI brings a lot of promise, but there are a lot of risks, you know. You want to make sure that it's fair, that it's not biased. You want to make sure that it's explainable, that you can figure out and tell others what it's doing. You might want to make sure that it's well controlled, that it's responsible, that it's robust, that, you know, if somebody feeds it bad data, it doesn't produce results that don't make sense. If somebody's trying to provoke it, to do something wrong, that it's robust to those types of interactions. You want to make sure that it preserves privacy. You know, you want to make sure that it's secure, that nobody can hack into it. And so all of those risks are somewhat new. Not all of them are entirely new. As you said, the concept of model risk management has existed for many years. We want to make sure that each black box does what it's supposed to do. Just AI machine learning just raises it to the next level. And we're just trying to keep up with that and make sure that we develop processes, you know, controls that we look at technology that can orchestrate all this de-risking of transition to AI. >> Deloitte's a big firm. You guys saw you in the US open sponsorship was all over the TV. So that you're here at re:Mars show that's all about building up this next infrastructure in space and machine learning, what's the role you have with AWS and this re:Mars. And what's that in context of your overall relationship to the cloud players? >> Alexey: Well, we are, we're one of the largest strategic alliances for AWS, and AWS is one of the largest ones for Deloitte. We do a ton of work with AWS related to cloud, related to AI machine learning, a lot of these new areas. We did a presentation here just the other day on conversational AI, really cutting edge stuff. So we do all of that. So in some ways we participate in that part of the, the part of the room that I mentioned that is trying to kind of push the envelope and get the new technologies out there, but at the same time, Deloitte is a brand that carries a lot of, you know, history of trust, and responsibility, and controls, and compliance, and all of that comes, >> John: You get a lot of clients. I mean, you have big names. Get a lot of big name enterprises >> Right. >> That relied on you. >> Right, and so >> They rely on you now. >> Exactly, yeah. And so, it is natural for us to be in the marketplace, not only with the message of, you know, let's get to the better mouse trap in AI and machine learning, but also let's make sure that it's safe, and secure, and robust, and reliable, and trustworthy at the end of the day. And so, so this trustworthy message is intertwined with everything that we do in AI. We encourage companies to consider trustworthiness from the start. >> Yeah. >> It shouldn't be an afterthought, you know. Like I always say, you know, if you have deployed a bot and it's been deciding whether to issue loans to people, you don't want to find out that it was like, you know, biased against a certain type of (indistinct) >> I can just see in the boardroom, the bot went rogue. >> Right, yeah. >> Through all those loans you know. >> And you don't want to find out about it like six months later, right? That's too late, right? So you want to build in these controls from the beginning, right? You want to make sure that, you know, you are encouraging innovation, you're not stifling any development, and allowing your- >> There's a lot of security challenges too. I mean, it's like, this is the digital transformation sweet spot you're in right now. So I have to ask you, what's the use case, obviously call center's obvious, and bots, and having, you know, self-service capabilities. Where is the customers at right now on psychology and their appetite to push the envelope? And what do you guys see as areas that are most important for your customers to pay attention to? And then where do you guys ultimately deliver the value? >> Sure. Well, our clients are, I think, are aware of the risks of AI. They are not, that's not the first thing that they're thinking about for the most part. So when we come to them with this message they listen, they're very interested. And a lot of them have begun this journey of putting in kind of governance, compliance, controls, to make sure that as they are proceeding down this path of building out AI, that they're doing it responsibly. So it is in a nascent stage. >> John: What defines responsibility? >> Well, you want to, okay, so responsibility is really having governance. Like you have a, you build a robot dog, right? So, but you want to make sure that it has a leash, right? That it doesn't hurt anybody, right? That you have processes in place that at the end of the day, humans are in control, right? I don't want to go back to the Skynet analogy, right? >> John: Yeah. >> But humans should always be in control. There should always be somebody responsible for the functioning of the algorithm that can throw the switch at the right time, that can tweak it at the right time, that can make sure that you nudge it in the right direction that at no point should somebody be able to say, oh, well, it's not my fault. The algorithm did it, and that's why we're in the papers today, right? So that's the piece that's really complex, and what we try to do for our clients as Deloitte always does is kind of demystify that, right? >> John: Yeah. >> So what does it actually mean from a procedures, policies, >> John: Yeah, I mean, I think, >> Tools, technology, people. >> John: Yeah, I mean, this is like the classic operationalizing a new technology, managing it, making sure it doesn't get out of control if you will. >> Alexey: Exactly. >> Stay on the leash if you will. >> Alexey: Exactly. Yeah. And I guess one piece that I always like to mention is that, it's not to put breaks on these new technologies, right? It's not to try to kind of slow people down in developing new things. I actually think that making AI trustworthy is enabling the development of these technologies, right? The way to think about it is that, we have, you know, seat belts, and abs brakes, and, you know, airbags today. And those are all things that didn't exist like 100 years ago, but our cars go a lot faster, and we're a lot safer driving them. So, you know, when people say, oh, I hate seatbelts, you know, you're like, okay, yes, but first of all, there are some safety technologies that you don't even notice, which is how a lot of AI controls work. They blend into the background. And more importantly, the idea is for you to go faster, not slower. And that's what we're trying to enable our clients to do. >> Well, Alexey, great to have you on theCube. We love Deloitte come on to share their expertise. Final question for you is, where do you see this show going? Where do you guys, obviously you here, you're participating, you got a big booth here, where's this going? And what's next, where's the next dots that connect? Share your vision for this show, and kind of how it, or the ecosystem, and this ecosystem, and where you're going to intersect that? >> Wow. I mean, this show is already kind of pushing the boundaries. You know, we're talking about machine learning, artificial intelligence, you know, robotics, space. You know, I guess next thing I think, you know, we'll be probably spending a lot of time in the metaverse, right? So I can see like next time we come here, you know, half of us are wearing VR headsets and walking around and in meta worlds, but, you know, it's been an exciting adventure and, you know I'm really excited to partner and spend, you know spend time with AWS folks, and everybody here because they're really pushing the envelope on the future, and I look forward to next year >> The show is small, so it feels very intimate, which is actually a good feeling. And I think the other thing in metaverse I heard that too. I heard quantum. I said next, I heard, I've heard both those next year quantum and metaverse. >> Okay. >> Well, why not? >> Why not? Exactly, yeah. >> Thanks for coming on theCube. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> All right. It's theCube coverage here on the ground. Very casual Cube. Two days of live coverage. It's not as hot and and heavy as re:Invent, but it's a great show bringing all the best smart people together, really figure out the future, you know, solving problems day to day problems, and setting the new economy, the new industrial economy. And of course, a lot of the world problems are going to be helped and solved, very positive message space among other things here at re:Mars. I'm John furrier. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome back to Vegas. Lisa Martin here covering snowflake summit 22. We are live at Caesar's forum. A lot of guests here about 10,000 attendees, actually 10,000 plus a lot of folks here at the momentum and the buzz. I gotta tell you the last day and a half we've been covering this event is huge. It's probably some of the biggest we've seen in a long time. We're very pleased to welcome back. One of our cube alumni to the program, Ron Tayo principal and chief data officer at Deloitte one. It's great to have you joining us. >>Yeah, no, thank you. Super excited to be here with you today. >>Isn't it great to be back in person? Oh, >>I love it. I mean the, the energy, the, you know, connections that we're making definitely, definitely loving and loving the experience. >>Good experience, but the opportunity to connect with customers. Yes. I'm hearing a lot of conversations from snowflake folks from their partners like Deloitte from customers themselves. Like it's so great to be back in person. And they're really talking about some of the current challenges that are being faced by so many industries. >>That's right. Oh, that, that is, you know, I would say as a consultant, you know, it all comes down to that personal connection and that relationship. And so I am, I'm all for this and love, you know, being able to connect with our customers. >>Yeah. Talk to me about the Deloitte snowflake partnership. Obviously a ton of news announced from snowflake yesterday. Snowflake is a rocket ship. Talk to us about the partnership, what you guys do together, maybe some joint customer examples. >>Yeah. I mean, so snowflake is a strategic Alliance partner. We won the, you know, SI partner of the year award and for us, the, the shift and the opportunity to help our clients modernize and achieve a level of data maturity in their journey is, is strategically it's super important. And it's really about how do we help them leverage, you know, snowflake has underlying data platform to ultimately achieve, you know, broader goals around, you know, their business strategy. And our approach is always very much connected to overarching business strategies and sense of, is it a finance transformation, a supply chain transformation, a customer transformation, and what are the goals of those transformations and how do we ensure that data is a critical component to enabling that and with, you know, technologies and vendors and partners like snowflake, allowing us to even do that at a faster, better, cheaper pace only increases the overall business case and the value and the impact that it generates. >>And so we are super, super excited about our partnership with snowflake and we believe, you know, the journey is very, very bright. You know, we, this is the future, you know, often tell folks that, you know, data has and will continue to be more valuable than sort of the systems that own it and manage it. And I think we're starting to see that. I think the topic that I discussed today around data collaboration and data sharing is an example of how we're starting to see, you know, the importance and the value of data, you know, become way more important and more of the focus around the strategy for, for organizations >>As the chief data officer, what do data sharing and data collaboration mean to somebody in your position and what are some of the conversations you have with customer other CDOs at customer organizations? >>Yeah, so, so my role is, is sort of twofold. I, I am responsible for our internal data strategy. So when you think about Deloitte as a professional service organization, across four unique businesses, I am a customer of snowflake in our own data modernization journey, and we have our own strategy on how and what we share, not only internally across our businesses, but also externally across, you know, our partners. So, so I bring that perspective, but then I also am a client service professional and serve our clients in their own journey. So I often feel very privileged in, in the opportunity to be able to sort of not only share my own experience from a Deloitte perspective, but also in how we help our clients >>Talk about data maturation. You mentioned, you know, the volume of data just only continues to grow. We've seen so much growth in the last two years alone of data. We've seen all of us be so dependent on things like media and entertainment and retail, eCommerce, healthcare, and life sciences. What, how do you define data maturation and how does Deloitte and snowflake help companies create a pathway to get there? >>Yeah. Yeah. So I would say step one for us is all about the overarching business strategy. And when you sort of double click on the big, broad business strategy and what that means from a data strategy perspective, we have to develop business models where there is an economical construct to the value of data. And it's extremely important specifically when we talk about sharing and collaborating data, I would say the, the, the, the assumption or the, or, or, or, or the posture typically seems to be, it's a one way relationship, our strategy and what we're pushing, you know, again, not only internally within ourselves, but also with our clients, is it has to be a bidirectional relationship. And so you, you hear of, of the concepts of, you know, the, the, the data clean room where you have two partners coming together and agreeing with certain terms to share data bidirectionally. Like I do believe that is the future in how we need to do, you know, more data collaboration, more data sharing at a scale that we've not quite seen. Yes. Yet >>The security and privacy areas are increasingly critical. We've seen the threat landscape change so dramatically the last couple of years, it's not, will we get hit by a cyber talk? It's when yes. For every industry, right? The privacy legislation that just we've seen it with GDPR, CCPA is gonna become CPR in California, other states doing the same thing. How do you help customers kind of balance that line of being able to share data equitably between organizations between companies do so in a secure way, and in a way that ensures data privacy will be maintained. >>Yeah. Yeah. So first absolutely recognizing, evolving, recognize the evolving regulatory landscape. You mentioned, you know, California, there's actually now 22 states that have a, is it 22 now? Right? Yeah. 22 states that have a privacy act enacted. And our projection is in the next 12 to 18 months, all states will have one. And so absolutely a, a perceived challenge, but one that I think is, is addressable. And, and I think that gets to the spirit of the question for us. There's, there's four dimensions that an organization needs to work through when it comes to data sharing. The first one is back to the, the business goal and objective, like, is there truly a business need? And is there value in sharing data? And it needs to have a very solid business model. Okay. So, so that's the first step. The second step is what are the legal terms? >>What are the legal terms? What can you do? What can't you do? Do you have primary rights, secondary rights? The third dimension is around risk. What is the risk and exposure, not only from a data security perspective, but what is the risk if someone uses a data inappropriately, and then the fourth one is around ethics and the ethical use of data. And we see lots of examples where an organization has consent has rights to the data, but the way they used it might have not necessarily been, you know, among the kind of ethical framing. And so for us, those four dimensions is what guides us and our clients in developing a very robust data, sharing data collaboration framework that ensures it's connected to the overall business strategy, but it provides enough of the guardrails to minimize legal and ethical risk. So >>With that in mind, what do the customer conversations look like? Cause you gotta have a lot of players, the business folks, the data folks, every line of business needs data for its functions. Talk to us about how the customer conversations and projects have evolved as data is increasingly important to every line of business. >>Yes. I would say the biggest channel, or maybe the, the, the denominator at this point that we're seeing bring the, let's say diversity of needs to more common denominator has been AI. So every organization at this point is driving massive AI programs. And in order to really scale AI, you know, the, the algorithm cannot execute without data. Yeah. And so for us, at least in our experience with our customers, AI has almost been the, the, the mechanism to have these conversations across the different business stakeholders and do it in a way that, you know, you're not necessarily boiling the ocean, cuz I think that's the other element that makes this a bit hard is, well, what, what data do you want me to share and for what purpose? And when you start to bring it into sort of more individual swim lanes and, and, and our experience with our customers is AI has sort of been that mechanism to say, am I automating, you know, our factory floor? Am I bringing AI and how we engage and serve our customers? Right? Like it be, it be begins to sort of bring a little bit more of, of that repeatability at a, at an individual level. So that's been a, a really good strategy for us in our customers >>In terms of the customer's strategy and kind of looking forward, what are some of the things that excite you about the, the future of data collaboration, especially given all of the news that snowflake announced just yesterday? >>Yes. Yeah. I think for me, and this is both the little bit of the ambition, as well as the push, it's no longer a question of should it's it's how and for what? And so, so yes, I mean the, the, the snowflake data cloud is a network that allows us to integrate, you know, disparate and unique data assets that have never, you know, been possible before. Right. So we're in this network, it's now a matter of figuring out how to use that and for what purpose. And so I, I go back to, we, each individual organization needs to be figuring out the how, and for what not, when this is the future, we all need it. Yeah. And we just need to figure out how that fits in our individual businesses >>In terms of the, how that's such an interesting, I love how you bring that up. It's not, it's not when it's definitely how, because there's gonna be another competing business or several right there in the rear view mirror, ready to take your place. Yep. If you don't act quickly, how does Deloitte and snowflake help customers achieve the, how quickly enough to be able to really take advantage of data sharing and data collaboration so that they can be very competitive? >>Yeah. So there's two main, maybe even three driving forces in this. What we see is when there's a common purpose across director, indirect competitors and the need to share data. So I think the poster child of this was the pandemic, and we started to see organizations again, either competitively or non-com competitively share data in ways for a greater good, right. When there was a purpose, we believe when that element exists, the ability to share data is going to increase. We believe the next big sort of common purpose out there in the world is around ESG. And so that's gonna be a big driver for sharing data. So that's one element. The other one is the concept of developing integrated value chains. So when you think about any individual business and sort of where they are in that piece of the value chain, developing more integrated value across, let's say a manufacturer of goods with a distributor of those goods that ultimately get to an end customer. >>They're not sharing data in a meaningful way to really maximize their overall, you know, profitability. And so that's another really good, meaningful example that we're seeing is where there's value across, you know, a, what appears to be a siloed set of steps, and really looking at it more as an integrated value chain, the need to share data is the only way to unlock that. And so that's, that's the second one. The, the third one I would say is, is around the need to address the consumer across sort of the multiple personas that we all individually sit. Right? So I go into a bank and I'm, I'm a client. I walk into a retail store and I'm a customer. I walk into my physician's office and I'm a patient at the end of the day. I am still the same person. I am still one. And so that consumer element and the convergence of how we are engaging and serving that consumer is the third, big shift that is really going to bring data collaboration and sharing to the next level. >>Do you think snowflake is, is the right partner of the defacto for delight to do that with? >>Absolutely. I think, you know, the head start of the cloud, the data cloud platform and the network that it's already established with all the sort of data privacy and security constraints around it. Like that's a big, that's a big, you know, check right. That we don't have to worry about. It's there for sure. >>Awesome. Sounds like a great partnership, Juan. Thank you so much for joining me on the program. It's great to have you back on the cube in person sharing what Deloitte and snowflake are doing and how you're really helping to transform organizations across every industry. We appreciate >>Your insights. Yeah. No, thank you for having me here. My pleasure. Always a pleasure. Thank you. >>All right. For Juan. I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from snowflake summit 22 at Caesar's forum. You write back with our next guest.

>>The Cube Presents Dell Technologies World Brought to You by Dell. >>Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Cubes Coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022. Live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin With a Volonte. This is Day two of the Cubes coverage. We've had a lot of great focus on talking about multi cloud partner ecosystems, as et cetera, the last day and a half. Now we're going to have a conversation with Dell, and we've got two guests joining us. Please welcome David Linthicum, the chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte, and Brad Lewis, the senior vice president and GM of the global transformation office at Dell Technologies. Guys, welcome to the Cube. >>Thank you for having us. You guys >>so lots to talk about multi cloud. You can't. It's one of the biggest themes here, David. I want to start with you. One of the things that Michael Dell said in his keynote, and he said it on the Cape today is its multi cloud world by default. What does that mean to you? >>What that means is that if you don't find multi cloud, multi cloud is going to find you. It's a complex distributed system that basically is invasive to what we do within the enterprise. So anybody who's leveraging cloud computing is going to find that there is a need to leverage multiple clouds of multiple kinds of technologies. And therefore we're kind of focused on what's in between the clouds versus the clouds themselves. And I think that's okay. We're leveraging multi cloud by choice. It's driving innovation. It's driving agility. That's why people are adopting it. So whether or not you have it or not within your enterprise chances are you do. Are you going to have it pretty soon, >>right? I think stand I saw yesterday was 75% of organisations have at least 3 to 4 different clouds. What is your take on when you're talking with customers in the field? How are they? How are they managing that approach? What are they doing right? What do they Maybe not doing right. >>I think what they're doing wrong mainly was hit. That one first is that they're managing their clouds within the silos. And so, in other words, are using whatever native tools are in the particular cloud provided to do operations do security, governance, things like that. And the reality is, it's a more holistic approach that needs to be taken. We need to span these solutions across the different cloud providers and also the existing legacy systems thinking holistically about that. It's just something we haven't done ever with an I t. And now we're having to do it. Read. >>What is the global transformation office? Adele, What's your What's your role in your mission? Sure. >>So our mission is working with our customers, who are really focused on driving outcome centric types of relationship with us, so worried less about the just in and of itself and really wanting to figure out how do I take advantage of all of those capabilities that Dell and its partner ecosystem have to drive business value? Ultimately, what does a great experience look like that or a developer for my lines of business? How do I start to improve the type of agility that I've got? How do I office stuff up some of the types of flexible platforms that I'm really reading about or aspiring to be able to offer? So being able to look at that holistic through through the lens of technology, the economics of that. The operational constructs and operating models around it and being able to really take all of those assets and capabilities and map them to the types of outcomes, milestones and timelines that are relevant to that. >>Who is your ideal partner at the customer? Is it uh, C I o the line of business? Somebody in infrastructure? >>It's all of the above, I think, as we get as we get through the conversation, what will become apparent is tech as part of the answer. So it's not. It's important. It has to be considered. It has to be architected. Well, it has to be operated well. But as important as taking an increasingly more so is how to David's point, how are you going to go and build that common model of operational construct around all of these different platforms so you don't end up with a silo based approach? Application owners and driving utilisation and adoption is important and more so than it's ever been. So having those line of business tie ins and the application owners all of those different stakeholders finance and being able to set expectations well and being able to deliver against those consistently and reliably and the impact that has on confidence and investment. All of those things become part of the fabric of a collective that's about mapping to those. So there's no one set of stakeholders that we work with. But what is really important as having somebody who sits across all of those things that has the ability to call the shots and make decisions when hard decisions are having to be made because where things don't typically work well is when we get into stalemates or standoffs, where there's different factional issues or politics comes into it or somebody is not empowered? Having that governance model so that there is a senior stakeholder who can move roadblocks and make sure that we remain aligned is one of the most critical factors. >>David question for you removing those roadblocks the last two years. Obviously, we've seen a lot of organisations massively pivot multiple times right to survive and not to thrive. But we've seen so much investment in the remote workforce and now a lot of businesses facing ageing infrastructure, what do we do? How do you help them remove those roadblocks? Obviously time is of the essence right. So from a competitive perspective, what more do some of those conversations look and sound like >>they're one? Get the obstacles out of the way. In other words, if you think this is about building more data centres to have more VPN, traffic and things like that, that's not what it's all about. This is about finding solutions that provide scalability within the organisation and it's going to maintain scalability. Keep in mind, we're running to work force. People are going to work independently. They're gonna exist on their own infrastructure. They're going to have their own data which is personalised to them. They're gonna basically interact with other employees and other co workers in different, more collaborative ways. Hopefully. So the idea being that we're trying to get everything back centralised again is crazy. We need to figure out ways in which we can diversify the workforce, diversify that kind of technology we're using and leverage things that are really kind of on demand and scalable quick thinking about building data centres. >>Okay, so square the circle for me because I totally agree with what you just said. But it seems like a lot of organisations when it comes to data are taking that approach like Okay, let's centralise all the data so we can make it more manageable and more efficient to manage. Yet we talk about edge. Data is distributed by its very nature. So help me understand that Yin and Yang. >>I think it's partially we get into, obviously, the governance and the data governance and sort of all of the regulator in compliance aspects of that part of it is also emerging technologies. It's the area that's probably the least mature. We spend a lot of time figuring around how to have operational toolsets around multi cloud. Then we figured about how to have applications traverse multi cloud. Now we're moving on to the real crux of the problem and especially as translate edge start to take hold. We're generating large volumes of data is being generated at the edge. It's being generated in the in the core, and that ability to look at things holistically is going to become increasingly important. It's an area of focus for obviously us at Dell Technologies. It's where we're investing heavily and from an R and D standpoint. It's where the marketplace is going to evolve. But it's still in an early stage of maturity and being able to look at that holistically, >>so not necessarily shove it all into a single data store but enable it to be distributed and managed and and governor who should own the data life cycle. Should it be somebody in the business? Should it be somebody in I t. Should it be a data >>group? >>It's >>now. There is a long How long have we got? Well, I mean, you must have these discussions. We absolutely do, but sort of being serious about it. I think the important point is the people who ultimately are the ones who are who are responsible for getting value from that data is where it should resign. So because of the people who have the greatest insight and understanding of how of how to really get value from it, because ultimately we want to pivot from having a data conversation to how do we generate information and actionable information? It's not a data problem in and of itself, it's it's This is a business intelligence. How do we get value from this and that the best place for the data to live is the people who are going to be able to make the most of that. So >>Deloitte's gonna be having these conversations all the time with your customers. But this is, uh, an organisational discussion, isn't it? >>It's also a functional discussion. You have to remember that there's two tiers there. There's the people who own the data tier but don't necessarily want to administer the data so they know what the data is, What it does, they control how it's changed. They control how it's monitored, and we have multiple people that are distributed all over the company that do that. And then there's the people that actually run the control plane, and we get to distribute a data we're having to get to a common control plane that goes across the various databases, which is able to make the changes to the metadata and changes to the technical geeky stuff we have to do to keep data running. And so it's okay to have that. It's okay to have non technical and technical users who still maintain ownership of the data, and they work together in kind of a devops situation to make sure that we're maintaining the data to the needs of the business, and we have the business owners in there to tell us what that is. And we have the data administrators and that would actually make the changes. >>So the technology is, uh, an implementation detail in that model. Um, that's not It's not the tail wagging the dog. It's subservient to the business. Essentially, >>they're working together. And the reality is that the people who have the technical know how and have the business now how are often city in two different organisations that can exist anymore. They need to be maintained. They need to remove the barriers. And I deal with this with my clients all the time. They can't sit in silos. They need to collaborate together to make sure that the systems and the data are going to reflect and to solve the needs of the business. The only way to do that is to have collaboration at that level. >>So Lisa referenced multi cloud by default. You know, Chuck Witton was talking about that on the Cube recently. Uh, so I have often said multi clouds, Really? Multi vendor. It's like, Oh, I woke up. I got all these clouds. Okay, So what are the right strategies for customers? Where are they starting? How are they thinking about it? >>The people who are making the best progress is looking at it holistically. Looking at what does what does God look like? What are the things that are important to us? One of the capabilities were wanting to offer up and going into going into things, worried less about the tech of it. But more about how are we going to do things like accelerate business agility? How are we going to start to empower our lines of business to have first mover advantage? How do we take advantage of all of these disparate capabilities that over time it's going to vary? Who has competitive advantage? You could have one provider comes up with something that's a really compelling use case for what you're looking to do. But so if you've got the ability to be able to consume as a consistent ecosystem, all of those different partners, it's very easy to tap into that quickly and effectively delivering it. If you're trying to build things so that you're only tied into different people in different ways with different operational constructs, that don't really talk very well together. It's going to become very difficult for you to really take the maximum advantage of multi Cloud. So the thing that I would stress is, what are you actually trying to accomplish out of that work from the top down? Think about what good looks like. What are the capabilities that are meaningful and impactful to the business. And then the easiest thing in the world is to figure out which technology choices you have that enable that. But it has to be done through that lens of what is business value look like? And how do we manage that? And maximise that versus making desperate sort of distinct technology choices >>with the focus on business scene, which is absolutely critical. David, What's the GTM like between Dell and Deloitte? How do you when you bring them in? It's >>a perfect relationship. You've got to remember the customers and our clients have to have two things. Number one. They have to have a trusted adviser, and someone can bring to bear risk. Financial financial analysis, the ability to deal with technology, data, security, governance, things like that which are hard problems to solve. But do so in an objective way, making sure we're bringing the right solutions to bear to solve the problems looking after for the client as well as a technology partner that has the breath of everything you see on this floor that we can pick and choose different technologies to bring together to solve their exact needs. So having a partner like Dell is very important because ultimately allows us to pick the right solutions for the customer and bring to bear the exact solutions are going to solve their issues and do so in a way where they're going to be 100% optimised, where the solution that they're running is going to be near 100% optimisation as much as we can, and therefore that's going to value the business. Do you tend >>to these days, uh, to come into an organisation on a more sort of project basis? Or is it more things like we're talking digital transformation or data architecture? And then you figure out okay, where's the priorities? And the spending have to be is a kind of a top down or is it bottom up or a middle out? >>It tends to be a little bit of well, ultimately it ends up being both. So whether the conversation starts at a macro level and it's a more existential, how do we? How do we want to go to market and how do we want to support our business? A lot of conversations start that way. Sometimes it'll be bottom up where it is a specific project. We've got a net new application. We've got to go to market initiative, a new geography, whatever it happens to be. That is sort of what spawns that type of a dialogue. But ultimately, those two things do end up balancing out. Because if you do anything well and the expectation is that we're going to do things well, then it will grow. Or alternatively, if the aspiration is is that you want to do things in the best way possible, it will attract and pull through use cases and projects as and where required anyway. So the two things end up becoming pretty symbiotic, irrespective of whether it started as a top down. Michael meets a customer and sort of starts that way, or it's something from the grassroots up that it's more demand based from a project. >>When you have edged discussions with customers, how much of that is? You know, maybe it's the OT people or the folks out at the edge, and how much is I t involved in those discussions? >>It tends to be so. It's becoming more mainstream that it's a more holistic conversation, so a little bit is always the case. Some of the early conversations tend to be about use cases that are very business century so that you will have conversations with somebody who imagine somebody doing payments of distributed payments in financial services or something like that. And it's all about mobile banking and proximity and things. So you tend to talk to people about well, what are the potential use cases? How do you monetise some of those things? And then you talk to end up in a technology conversation or some could be potentially. Somebody says, Well, look, we've got the Capital Markets group want to do something, or the consumer banks want to go do something that's eccentric. How would we go about doing that from the organisation? We're now getting to a much greater degree of maturity with a lot of customers where it is a collaborative where you've got the person who owns the business problem or the business opportunity, plus the technology group. And it's a collaborative around. Well, what does the technology solution need to be able to offer up and deliver? And if we can do those things, how would we then go and leverage that technology and the most effective way to drive those types of business outcomes? We're talking about seeing >>a similar >>patterns. Yeah, I'm seeing very similar patterns. Ultimately, this is about tactical technology that has a strategic purpose. And you gotta remember we've had edge in one way, shape or form around for the last 30 years. We just haven't done it very well. And the thing is, we're starting to move a lot of these processes and a lot of these data collections, a lot of these analytics and a lot of knowledge engines, you know, out to the edge of the networks. And by doing so, that creates a strategic opportunity for folks in the organisations to figure out how that's going to work for them. And so it isn't necessarily a geeky conversation that we're having it strategically. We're looking to expand the way in which we're doing compute and doing data storage. It has these opportunities within the industry you're in. We're going to build this technology to make it happen. And that goes to both sides, people who do the implementation boards of directors and CEOs. But >>you can kick out if you have to, >>but they've all got to be there. And that collaboration seems like it's absolutely foundational to overall projects being successful. Guys, thank you so much for joining David me on the programme today. Talking about Dylan deployed better together and all the opportunities that there are to unlock the value and multi cloud. We appreciate your insights. >>Thanks for having us our >>pleasure. Thanks for our guests and a volonte. I'm Lisa Martin coming to you live from Las Vegas. Day two of our coverage of Dell Technologies World stick around. We'll be right back with our next guest. >>Thanks. >>Mm. Mhm. Mhm.

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path. >>Hey, welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, with Dave Volante, the cube is here, live at UI path forward for very excited to be here in person. Next topic, the smart factory, a couple of guests here to unpack that for us, Jason Brixton joins us the smart factory lead at Deloitte and Thomas Hanson, the CRO of UI path gentlemen, and welcome to the program. Thank you. Thank you for having us great to have you great to be in person. Let's talk about smart track factory factory Ford auto. What is it from Deloitte perspective and then UI path. >>So if you think about smart factory, it's really that transition from the old kind of analog manufacturing environment to the digital, digital operating type environment that we see today. So technology has really changed in the last three or four years. And as a result of that elevation of technology, we're able to do a lot more on the manufacturing floor than we ever could. So what used to be more analog or hybrid with a little bit of technology is now starting to shift really to end to end integrated manufacturing operations that are based on digital platforms and we're loving it. It's a great place to be >>Great. Tell us what's your perspective? >>Well, first of all, it's great to be here. Thank you for the invite. It's so nice to be away from soon calls or, or other type of, uh, of calls, right. And be in person. Uh, look, we have an amazing partnership with the lights. Um, we have worked together for years. We've done more than 400 joint engagements with the large companies across the world. And in that process, we've really gone deeper from a vertical and industry perspective and smart factory is really the starting point of going super specific and figuring out what does automation or how does automation rather play into, um, to a, to a smart factory, like a beautiful trombone, that music from a beautiful trombone. >>So years ago, we wrote a piece talking about the cloud as an opportunity and how to take advantage of it. And one of the, the premise of the piece was you've got to build ecosystems and maybe it's within an industry or within a practice and build data in different disciplines because the power of many versus the capabilities of one, this smart factory initiative that you guys have going, it feels like an ecosystem play. Can you describe that ecosystem? Who's involved? I know SAP in for AWS, but, but tell us more about the ECOS. >>Yeah, sure. So your, your hunch, there is a great one, right? We, we learned early on that trying to do this as Deloitte or Deloitte plus one just, wasn't going to get it done, right? You really needed to harness the power of the many. And so at the, at the core of what we're doing at the smart factory at Wichita, that you alluded to is about bringing an ecosystem to life. So we have 21 partners that are going to be participating out of the gate with the smart factory. Wichitan the intent is to show a seamless solution and actual end-to-end production facility that showcases 21 amazing technologies and partners. And we're just really thrilled about what we're able to show our clients. So, >>Yep. So Koch industries owns Inforce. So obviously that's the Wichita connection, is that right? So they got to be involved in this. I mean, they were amazing company, but what can you tell us about, uh, their, their involvement? >>Yep. So Coke, obviously the in for connection, uh, Dragos, which is another in four company as a founder within, uh, within the ecosystem, which is fantastic. There they play at the core. They're also an incredibly important client, right? So the Coke business on the whole is critical to how we think about manufacturing across a whole range of industries from discreet production to scale process. Um, they're fantastic partners and we've had a great time working with them. And you guys are just, >>It's about to launch through soft launch. Can you tell us more where you are in the progression? >>Sure. So soft launch started two days ago. Oh wow. So the building, we have the keys, uh, we are doing some visits with a handful of friends and family, that ecosystem partners that you mentioned, there'll be coming out, uh, to see it and to provide some feedback. And then we go live in earnest in January >>At Thomas where's UI path fit. >>Well, we fit in essay as a key part in this initiative. Um, look, we, as a company, we are part the preferred partner. First, we do all our business together with partners and we have right about almost 5,000 partners now, globally. And then there's a few, then there's a few in that 5,000 that are unique that really stand out. And Deloitte of course is one of those very, very special partners that we work with globally, but also locally here in the us, across all the states across all the industries. So we're thrilled to be part of this automation plays a key key part of smart factory. When you think about it, the evolution of work there's so much boring, mundane work on there. Humankind is better served, spending their time and effort on the non mundane on the innovative on the creative. And that's what we try to ensure that the humans in the loop so to speak are focused on the innovative work, the graded work, and we have software robots, RPA automation handle all that boring and mundane work, >>Right? Letting the folks focus on the value, add to themselves a value add to the organization, more strategic investments. Thomas question for you is in terms of you talked about this being horizontal across industries, but I'm curious about what some of the feedback is from some of your customers, 8,000 customers. Now you've got a very large what, 726 million ARR, huge lot of customers over a hundred million ARR. What's been the feedback from some of those guys. >>Well, so first of all, uh, personally, I I've been in enterprise software for more than 20 years. And what I've experienced over the years are most large scale enterprise software projects tends to be multi-year in nature, be rather complex. And the failure rate can be rather high. Then in comes RPA and automation, which is a complete different kettle of fish in the sense that from conceptualization of identifying a process, to getting it built, getting it tested, getting it into production, you're talking days and weeks only. So the path to seeing value is so fast. What I've learned yesterday and today from the 1516 customer meetings I've had so far is the same unique trend or learning across all industries and also from various parts of the world. And that is very fast realization of value, perhaps starting initially with 5, 10 20 processes and then scaling super fast because the find that return on investment incredibly quickly with our solution. So that's what unifies it across geographies and across industries. >>What'd you think about the smart factory? And one of the things we've learned during COVID is there's so much unknown. So sometimes these processes aren't linear like a trombone, you know, going back and forth in and out, but is there unknown in the smart factory processes or is it pretty well known? And you can do the process mining on that known base. What's the dynamic >>Back there. So there's a few different dimensions to it. So yes, it is well known because it's a controlled environment, but one of the things that we're doing is we're actually actively introducing a lot of unknown factors to try to let the bots and the process mining kick into effect. Right? So we're artificially, let's just say injecting opportunity for us to do that. The other thing that we're doing is, and what's really unique about the smart factory at Wichita is it's one of four across the globe for Deloitte. And so we're bringing data in from the other three sites, which is data, that'll be less controlled. We're going to do process mining on that. Just try to take advantage of some of the, some of the capabilities associated with the solutions. >>Okay. So, so w when you think about process mining, do you start there, or do you start with, I sometimes call it paving the cow path, you know, taking what you've known, that linear process that, that hit that as the quick win, and then worry about the process money, or do you step back and say, wait a minute, we have to rethink the entire factory experience. Where do you start? >>I think it depends in the case of the smart factory with that, we've got a few different places, so we're using it to do ingestion of orders. So that's obviously a very controlled environment. We're then using it to do a lot of work around inventory management and optimization as well as month end close plays, which will be a lot more we're learning as we go. Right. So I think on the spectrum, it could be on either end my personal belief. If you look at it more long-term or actually out in the real world is that this is all about learning new things. It's about generating insights from data that frankly, you don't want human beings to have to go do that. And so having the ability to take advantage of an intelligent automation solution, as powerful as UI path is really a great advantage. >>One of the things that's misunderstood, I think about UI path is they look at what happened post let's say 2015, 2016, and say, oh, just like, just like every other Silicon valley company, double, double, triple, triple. And that's not how you guys started. You sort of let things bake for the better part of a decade and then got product market fit and then exploded. Um, and so that's, that to me was a key to your success in scaling this. I feel like you guys are building a new offering here. This is not just doing a one-off the product market fit. It's not like a point product. It's a, it's a big thing. So can you talk about the go to market, your product market fit? You're testing it out now, your goals, are you trying to scale this up? What, what are some of the things that you can share about your aspirations? So >>The partnership from a UI path perspective to Deloitte is a critical partnership. One of the select few on a global level, uh, we have enjoyed tremendous, uh, amount of engagements together. I mentioned early on 400, and I believe we, we now have together right about 1000 developers trained within your organization on your iPod, right? That's right. Yep. So we have a strong base that, of course we want to build full and hopefully put a syrup behind the thousand to 10,000. And over time, we want to make sure that it's globally inclusive, that we can serve all the marketers across the world where we have giant presence. And there's a select number of verticals and industries where we really have had success together that we of course want to go and specifically shoe in on what would have caused now be manufacturing together. And of course, a classic vertical we've been very strong in together as BFSI bank and financial services industry. So those are good areas. >>Well, Jason, you're building a business out of this, right? I mean, you've got a business plan around it and you're going to scale this thing. >>Oh, absolutely. Yeah. That's 100% the case. So we have smart factory at Wichita. That is part of our positioning in the marketplace. What we found is that telling people about tech and about solutions is one thing, showing it to them in a production environment is altogether different, right? Giving clients the opportunity to explore the art of the possible in a real setting like that is incredibly impactful. And so you talked about go to market, we see this relationship with the ecosystem and what we're trying to do in Wichita, that's sort of the epicenter of building an entire business, which ultimately will have huge global potential. >>We talk about speed for a minute. And the growth trajectory that UI path Thomas has been on for the last five years or so. I think I was reading, I think it was analysis that Dave wrote that in 2016 revenue was 1,000,020, 20, 15, 20, 20 600 million. So massive growth very quickly. My question, Jason is for you in terms of the speed. Ha how quickly are you looking to see the smart factory for Dato really impacting organizations around the globe because these guys are on a fast bulleted. >>Yeah. So I wish we had those growth rates. I will say though, selling and delivering these solutions holistically to manufacturers takes more time. So we think of our cycle as be measured, certainly in many months, certainly not years. We are starting to see an acceleration of that entire sales cycle and delivery cycle, just because of things like the pandemic driving organizations to just need to move faster. Frankly, if you're not moving towards digital manufacturing operations right now, you're probably behind. And so we're seeing that urgency from the market start to pick up, but we don't have that kind of growth rate, unfortunately. >>Well, what's it. What's interesting about Deloitte to me is you guys here, I think of you as a virtual company. I mean, I know you got a lot of bodies out there, but it's not like you've got a lot of physical locations. Right. And so now, but now you're just, you're investing in a physical plant essentially, >>Which is extremely exciting. We, we keep telling ourselves when we talk to folks, they own lots of buildings. So just because we're excited about our building doesn't mean they are, but you're exactly right, right. We're obviously a global services and products company. So this is one of a handful of buildings that are going to start to represent us as an organization. And we're really excited about what should we watch? >>It's kind of milestones for progress success. What are the markers that we should be paying attention to is independence. >>I think specifically on this, um, rapid experiment together, I think one of the key learnings we can take away that we can apply to other companies in the manufacturing industry specifically look from a UI perspective. We work with many large scale manufacturers around the world, but we've seen amazing fast progress with Bridgestone. For example, we implemented a smaller set of, uh, uh, bots that help them reduce their paperwork by 85% onto their branches with a Turkish e-commerce retailer called Archer. Lik I think I get the pronunciation correctly. They put 85 processes in place with our bots and are now to date transacting or running. I think it's 3 million e-commerce transactions with our processes. So the impact we can have in manufacturing together with the learnings from this, my factory, I think is just so exciting. Really? >>Yeah. The impact, the potential there is, is unlimited. Guys. Thank you for joining David, me talking to us about smart factory Ford auto, what it means for both businesses, how the partnership is evolving. It sounds like music from a beautiful trombone. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me today. Thank you For Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. The Cubas live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio at UI path forward for we'll be right back.

>> Woman: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector awards for the award of best migration solution. I'm your host Natalie Erlich and now we're joined by very special guests. We have Omer Enaam, application modernization leader at Deloitte Consulting and Bart Mason, technology lead for the Office of Recovery Services at the Utah Department of Human Services. Welcome, gentlemen. Good to have you on the show. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Well, terrific. I'd love to hear more about your migration from mainframe to AWS. Bart. Let's start with you. >> The state of Utah has a mainframe system and we have our child support application that was first developed in 1996 on the mainframe written in COBOL. The application served us well through the 24 years that we had it running on the mainframe. The issue was that the mainframe, it was getting difficult to find people who knew how to program in COBOL. But the biggest problems were any type of modernization. We were pretty much stuck to using what are called green screens, and there was no real easy way to do any type of modernization. And a lot of our applications that were public-facing or employee-facing, a lot of those web applications had to be written in a separate system and set up to connect and talk to the mainframe system. So it was a system that served us well but it was time to try and figure out what are we going to do about this? Because the mainframe was expensive and it was old technology that didn't let us advance to where we wanted to go in the future. So roughly about 2016, we started to investigate what are the possible ways that we can migrate our child support application off the mainframe. And we went through discussion such as a complete rewrite where we would start from the very beginning and rewrite our child support application. The child support application is a case management and an accounting system. And if we would have done a total rewrite we were told it would be upwards of $200 million to do a complete rewrite. We started looking at other possibilities and came across one possibility, and that is to do a migration off of the mainframe into the cloud. It would be a pre-session where we could do a lift and shift and basically take the code, change it into Java, and put it into the cloud running in EC2 instances. So it was an, we called it an intermediate step to modernization because it would get us one step to where we need to do, or where we need to go. And for modernization, it helps us to, since the program that it was, or the language it was migrated to was Java it made it so that we could do modernization. And we decided that if we did a lift and shift from the mainframe to AWS, that we could modernize at our own pace, we could modernize screen by screen or function by function. So it gave us the ability to control roll-outs and getting our application to where we needed to be. >> Terrific. And Omer, I'd love it if you could weigh in as well. What were, what was the support that you provided towards this migration? >> Yeah, of course. So as Bart pointed out, the state was looking for a approach that had high chance of success, high probability of user adoption with minimal impact to the organization. At the same time, have the ability to for the state to maintain and modernize at their own pace. So we work with Bart and explain to him a few options. And one of the options was using a automated coding data conversion approach where we take legacy programming languages like COBOL and convert them into Java. Just like translating the code from one language to another. And in the process, we guarantee that your your new system will work exactly. It will be functionally equal of what you do currently. And at the same time, it minimizes the risk. And it also allows the state to have no issues with their business continuity and additional training for their staff. So in a nutshell, we brought in a solution demonstrated to Bart and team and they bought into that, the idea that this is exactly what they want to do as a first step. And as we speak, we are working with the state to help them take that system in the cloud to the next level. Now we have unlocked the potential of digital transformation. Bart can build mobile apps in front of that application. That the state can. There are new analytics capabilities for that their employees can be more productive in providing services to the citizen. They can implement native capabilities from AWS to implement a process automation, implement some artificial intelligence-based tools to optimize the processes and make life easy and better for the employees, at the same time more importantly, serve the citizens in a better way. >> Mhm. And Bart I'd love it If you could share some further details on some of the considerations that you had such as risk and whether it could be used later in the future. >> The biggest thing, the biggest risk to us was that if we, as we migrated off the mainframe, there's a risk that we have to recertify our system with the Office of Child Support Enforcement in Washington, DC. When we build a system, the child support system, we're required to have them come in and do a assessment of our application and certify that it is an application that can be used for child support. If we would have done a rebuild from scratch, the risk would be that first a rebuild, from what we've seen can take anywhere from five to 10 years. I've already touched on how expensive it is, but it takes up to five or what we've seen, up to 10 years to do a complete rewrite. And the risk for us was that if we did a complete rewrite, we would still be on the mainframe for quite a long time. And we would have to have our system recertified with OCSE. And that can take anywhere from five to 10 years for a recertification too, so the risk was that if we did anything with the complete rewrites it would be several, several years going through rewrites and recertifications to get our system up and running in AWS. And the other problem would be that taking that amount of time would also, it would bring us probably not up to date with the current technologies as we did our rewrite because we'd be focused on rewriting that application and not taking advantages of services and applications that come up and can help us with our rewrites. So one of the biggest risks was that we'd have to do recertification with OCSE, With the migration, coming off the migration because it is a one for one migration where it went from COBOL to Java, we did not have to do a recertification. This allowed us to move the application as is and it functioned the exact same way that recertification was not a problem for us. OCSE said that, told us that it was not a risk or an issue that we'd have to take on. So the biggest risk was recertification for us but with the migration and moving into the cloud we went through their security processes and we came out without any big issues coming out of that. >> Fantastic. Thank you. Omer. I'd love to go to you now. What are some of the unique benefits of working with AWS? >> Sure. I think the biggest benefit is there, the extensive services that are available and having the the proven platform where you cut down your operational costs drastically. So comparing the mainframe costs with the Amazon cloud costs. Clearly the state has benefited a lot from the from a savings standpoint, infrastructure savings standpoint, and at the same time now, as I said, the the system is in the cloud, running on open architecture in the Java programming language, The AWS cloud provides us several capabilities natively which allows the state to use, to digitally transform the experience for the citizens and employees by implementing modern DevOps practices for for managing the, operating the system providing new capabilities to workers and supervisors for analytics to business process automation, having better call center integration capabilities and so forth. So there are endless opportunities. And the state is in the process of executing on a prioritized list Just before the pandemic hit, we worked with the state to lay out the future for their system and for their organization in the form of a one day innovation lab, where major stakeholders from the state gathered with Deloitte and we worked through a prioritization process and determined how we can take this system to the next level and really digitally transform the system and in the process, provide new services and better services to state employees and the citizens. >> Yeah. Terrific insight there. Now Bart, I'd like to shift it to you, asking the same question. What are your thoughts on working with AWS? Why choose them for this? >> We always have been looking at moving a lot of our applications into the cloud. We've been looking at that for several years. The advantages of moving to AWS is, from my point of view, and state's point of view, is that AWS provides a lot of services and it provides the capability for us to do a lot more for our applications. So for example, when we were on the mainframe, one of the biggest problems that we had was disaster recovery. We had a disaster recovery site in the Southern end of our states with another mainframe that we would sync up with our application. The problem was that we have over a hundred data connections. We connect to banks, external entities, internal entities. We have different types of connections. We have to do printing. We have to print checks and several things. Disaster recovery on the mainframe was something that we were never really capable of doing. We could get our application up and running but it just sat on the mainframe. We had no data connections, all that was extremely difficult and extremely expensive to do for disaster recovery on a mainframe and on alternate sites. Moving to AWS, one of the biggest things for us was that disaster recovery requirement. Because now that we're in AWS, it makes it more easier for us to spin up servers once servers go down, restore servers when they go down. We have all of our data connections in one location, and as systems become unrecoverable or have issues, it's easy for us to spin up another one or several in their place, or even our data connection, because they're all located in one place and we're using them all of the time. So disaster recovery was one of the big key components for us. The other component was that, as we modernize our application, we're looking at what AWS services are out there to help us with modernization. We're looking at services such as AWS Batch to replace our batch system. We're looking at databases to replace the current database that we're using. We're looking at using containers to containerize our applications and our ORSIS application, and also microservices. So moving off the mainframe was the first step and putting it all into servers on an EC2 instance. But then we look and say, okay, how can we do this and make this more modern and run better and more efficient? And then we started looking at all the AWS services that are out there, that run outside of an EC2 instance, for example. And we see that there's an endless possibility, and endless capabilities that we have at our fingertips to say, okay, we're off the mainframe less modernize by moving to Batch or let's start looking at containers and things like that to help us with our applications. So disaster recovery and the available services that we can move to to help us with our applications, what we look at. >> Well, thank you both so much for your insights, Bart Mason, Utah Department of Human Services as well as Omer Enaam, Deloitte Consulting and LLP. I'm your host for theCUBE. Thanks so much for watching. (outro music)

>>from around the globe. It's >>The Cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM Well hi everybody john Wallace here on the cube. Thanks for joining us here. As we continue our initiative of IBM think a chance to look at what IBM thinks in terms of infrastructure, we're talking to you about a hybrid cloud kind of the new trend. The thought that's going to the hybrid cloud, what's the future look like and help us cover that waterfront. A couple of experts from Deloitte Terry Cobb, the IBM Alliance lead at Deloitte Terry. Thank you for joining us. We look forward to this time together. >>Thank you so much for having me. You >>bet. And also introduced Dave Knight quickly, your colleague who is a senior solution architect and IBM Alliance cloud leader at Deloitte. Dave good to see you as well. Thanks for being with us. >>Thanks for having me. >>Alright, so maybe it's just for the two of you set the table for our viewers here in terms of your specific roles of delight. I talked about IBM and your connections there, but in terms of what you're doing there, how you work together and ultimately what kind of service you're trying to provide your clients terry? Why don't you jump on that first? >>Sure. So I've been with Deloitte for 16 years, I believe, maybe a little longer and focusing on the IBM like our strategic partnership. Um and so what that means is I work day in day out with our practitioners to identify and understand where our clients what are some of the critical business needs. And so I work with are leaders and and collaborate with IBM and we we look for ways to solve really unique critical business issues. Um and so part of my my background, so I've come from, you know, at my 30 year background and strategy management consulting. So it's really exciting. I get to use my uh consulting skills, my strategy skills to, you know, look at where we are in the market, what's what's happening in the market because that's a great example. There was a huge impact on how businesses, you know, work, how they work differently and how they handle their workforce. So it was a very interesting time. And and so bringing these two great firms together to solve some of these critical business issues. As for me, it's, you know, it's it's critical and it has a positive impact on, you know, for our clients. >>All right, dave from your side of the fence. >>Yeah. So um I sit in a similar place within the firm. I actually joined the last century. I've been with the firm for 21 years, so uh in a variety of roles, but all with with sort of a technical last solution architecture um, slant. Right, So, so just like Terry mentioned in the alliance function, we try to find opportunities to work together specifically between IBM and the Deloitte, you know, go to market services, uh my role as a solution architect and then as the cloud lead is to make sure that we've got the right mix of technology that we solve the client's problems uh efficiently and cost effectively. Uh and then, you know, sort of translate those, those business problems into technical solutions and then those technical solutions back into business solutions. So the business sees the value and its valuable not only for Deloitte from the services perspective, but also for IBM. >>He just almost just blew me away when you said you've been there since the last century. I haven't heard it quite put that way. And it's really that was really good, uh >>1999, to be fair, but still, it >>certainly implies a lot of experience. That's for sure. That's it. But that was really, that was a unique twist. So, kudos to you, let's talk about your client's first a little bit. So you talk about problems and we're talking about obviously technology and deployments and what capabilities are. So today, right. You've got on primary got off Premier, you've got private cloud, you've got public cloud, you've got edge technologies, you've got this really just this maelstrom basically of opportunity, but also confusion a little bit right? Um with different kinds of capabilities, different kinds of challenges. So Dave if you would, you know, let's look at it from the macro level then, in terms of how you start dissecting these kinds of decisions that the, the C T O. S and with your within your client list have to make and and how you help them chart their course in terms of determining priorities and what the right steps are for them to take. >>Okay. So I mean you sort of summarized my points actually quite nicely. We we help customers find their path, what's there, right approach to their digital transformation journey. Um We do have assets that help them, you know identify workloads where they might might run the best. Um We certainly have approaches and experience in the market having done this for for years. Uh you know it's the number one cloud professional services firm globally. We we we've garnered a lot of experience working with customers again helping among this journey. Um What we've learned is that one size does not fit all. Um Clearly cloud and more specifically public cloud is a game changer. It's here to stay, but it's not necessarily the right answer for every workload for every customer even. Um And so what we're starting to see is is a shift towards hybrid discussions and hybrid architecture discussions. Um and just as a quick, very simple example, um you wouldn't go purchase a mainframe to be a web server, right, That's that's significant overkill. And similarly, um the cloud is great for its, you know, capacity and and all the things that come with an economics, that sort of thing, but it's not necessarily the best platform for a credit card clearing house. Right. The transactional volume is simply too great. Right? So, um and that sort of very simplified example. Hybrid we think is the answer. And we're seeing lots of customers now that they've shifted a lot of their workloads to cloud that our cloud suitable. Um starting to ask us the more difficult questions, right, the core of my business, it's a high risk move. Can you help me sort this out? And in many cases the answer is don't move it, it's too extended at the edge. It's to augment it with cloud technologies such as AI and and enhance your service rather than replace it or move it to a different location. >>So you recently published a report that you did the mainframe market poll survey where you're looking at really, I guess migration plans or an appetite right to make these evolutions to, to to explore this hybrid cloud model that you've already detailed for us. Um, give me an idea if you would and our our viewers an idea a little bit about some of the key summaries of that in terms of what the appetite is for that, what the desires are, you know, are we ready to cut the court on the mainframe and let it go? Is there too much involved? We want to hang on. Um, you know, what's kind of, what's the mood out there right now? >>Yes, so we, we commissioned the double blind survey, we had a belief that we really wanted to explore it further, um, and that belief was, you know, a little tongue in cheek. The death of the mainframe is greatly over exaggerated. Um, and so again, this double blind survey, we commissioned it and, and we, we found a lot of interesting results. First and foremost, um, the mainframe for many customers is not going away. The vast majority of our survey respondents uh, indicated that was the case. Um, there was a couple of other interesting to, that's that, that we, we found in the results as well. Um uh, the first one is this isn't just a technology issue um It's a human capital um issue as well with the aging workforce. Um You know, mainframe not being quite as sexy in the age of java but coming back to IBM investments in the platform. Um And then another key point that we we found was security continues to be a key concern of business I. T. Uh and business, you know, owners. Um and that mainframe is seen as is the pillar of security sort of, they hold it up as sort of the example of security in the industry. Um Another interesting too that we found was that Um you know, one specific question asked about future growth plans and um over just under 60%. So over half answered three questions um that most people would think are at odds with each other and that is you know, are you expanding your mainframe? Over 60 said Yes. Um, are you advancing into cloud? Just under 60 said yes. And then there was a hybrid question which over half said they were going to look at hybrid. So that sort of marriage of mainframe and cloud in a hybrid way was an interesting thing that we weren't exactly expecting, but still quite interesting to explore. >>So >>when >>you hear this right about these, I mean not conflicting, but certainly, you know, interesting of uh survey findings, um, what do you make of that? What what are you, how are you reading those tea leaves a little bit about what people are saying about not ready to leave, but yet they're interested. And and so the concerns that they've brought up about security, about the asian workforce, I mean, you know, a lot of challenging uh, positions here, they have to be considered for your clients. >>You know, for me it was very interesting and and I believe, you know, one of the reasons we launched the survey was really to find out what is really going on with our clients because we're hearing a lot of, you know, there's a lot of news around clients migrating all their all their applications, >>I say all >>to the cloud and but yet we were spending a lot of time with clients that had mainframes and we were solving some of their mainframe issues and so we we were a little confused, so that was part of the impetus from really getting out and enjoying market sensing and figure out what our clients really doing. And we didn't target, you know, the mainframe, you know, clients, we targeted main from clients but we didn't target mainframe users. We were looking at really the business users of the mainframe and the executives that have mainframes. And so we were, it was surprising to to get the information back and hear how important the mainframe, so us. Uh and and then when you start digging a bit deeper into, you know, what does cloud really mean? Your hybrid cloud comes to the surface and then you have people that have different meanings of hybrid cloud. So, really understanding what is hybrid cloud really mean and what does it mean for your business? And that's what we're solving today. It's like how do we how do we go to market around hybrid cloud and what benefits does it have work for our clients? >>Yeah, so, Dave yeah, to touch up on that, to follow up, I mean, so, how are you a Deloitte then taking these results and and kind of ingesting them and distilling them and deciding. All right, this is how we're going to define hybrid cloud perhaps. I mean, I don't know if that if that's a bold assumption, but I think you're probably trying to draw some parameters around it, Right? This is how our clients see it. So this is how we're gonna talk about it and then this is how we're going to take them on that journey. How instructive was this survey for that and actually what are you doing with it in terms of shaping your practice? >>Yeah, so it's a great question and it is driving um you know, not the survey by itself, but a lot of the market trends and including the surveys is driving um some reevaluation and refocusing quite frankly on on hybrid cloud um as an offering within the firm. Right? We we define hybrid cloud generally is, you know, seamless integration of data and applications across on and off premise. And with with the wave of five G that's coming at us, increasingly we're looking at architecture is that include edge uh into that that hybrid definition? Um you know, I've said this to a lot of folks uh for me, mainframe was the original cloud. So it's only natural that it should be part of solutions now. And what I mean by that is when it was released it was virtualized, it was virtually unlimited. Somebody else managed it for you. You you you you only paid for what you use. Those are all characteristics of the cloud as we know it today, but those were implemented in the 70s, the mainframe um and so, capturing those characteristics and newer technologies and then integrating those into architectures. I think it's going to be sort of the next wave of what we see in the industry and, and Deloitte is certainly positioning to help our customers on that journey. And >>before we sign off, I do want to touch on security issue again because you did bring it up a little bit earlier, but let's just talk about it holistically here, depending upon where you are, doesn't matter right edge on off private public. I mean security's gonna be first and foremost. And so what are you suggesting or what are you saying to your clients? You know, terry and dave on this. In terms of their security concerns, the awareness they have to have in that and the allocation of resources to make sure that, you know, whatever solutions they deploy, their their credible, they have integrity and and they're sustainable. So let's hit on security before we head out terry. If you don't mind jumping >>first, I'd like to address security. But even stepping back a little bit. So as clients for looking at moving applications to the cloud for hybrid cloud, it's really about, you know, making sure you have a strategy unless you address some of the underlying data infrastructure, you're gonna end up with you disparate data everywhere and you're not going to be able to, you're gonna have data silo issues, you're gonna have security issues. You also have complex architectural issues. So, you know, some of the work that we're doing with IBM and internally with our firm is trying to help clients understand like you take a step back and really evaluate their business requirements and making sure that they and your dave can you found on this. But it's really making sure they have the right strategy in place to address, you know, their data, where the data sets, how to innovate some of these applications and of course security, security is a huge concern. We see that from all of our clients and needs to be on prem and secure. Mhm. >>Just a final word. >>Yeah. Thanks. Just to add on to that. Right. So security is absolutely critical. As terry mentioned. Having a strategy is absolutely critical and having security be integral to that strategy is equally critical. Um As you said, it's everywhere, cloud on prem on the edge. I would even go so far as to say, you know, in your personal life and your professional life, it should be as pervasive as we like to think it is. I think the reality is that maybe isn't but that's part of the job of architects like me, is to make sure that it gets built in at its core. It's not an afterthought, it's integral. I've got some fantastic technologies around that, specifically in the Z space. Um you don't wanna get too too wonky here, but you know, Phipps 1 40 dash to level four encryption, which is unique in the market. Um, you know, data privacy, passports, pervasive encryption, all these things. Um, interestingly enough live in the mainframe but extended ideas cloud and um from my perspective, I think it's one of the unique uh, connections intersections where mainframe could actually help drive the growth of cloud um, in that hybrid model and even getting into future looking things like home, um, or fixed encryption, there's a raft of technologies coming out of IBM um, that help us ensure we have, you know, secure transactions, secure hybrid architectures as you put our security everywhere. >>Well, you can get a little wonky. That's okay. David terry, thank you for the time today. We certainly appreciate it. And thanks for shining light on your work at Deloitte and of course, that partnership you have. It's working so well with IBM. Thank you both. >>Thanks for having us. >>All right. We've been talking about hybrid cloud, the future of a hybrid cloud and the mainframe and it ain't dead yet. All right. John Wallace. Thanks for joining us here on the cube.

(Upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's Coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021 virtual I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE got two great guests from Deloitte Consulting Dave Knight who manages the Red Hat Relationship, Lee he's the lead there, and Mike Bourgeois who's the Public Sector Managing Director both from Deloitte Consulting LLP official name. Guys, great to come on, and we were just talking before camera about all the stories. Great to have you on theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Like I said we were just talking about all the stories from the transition from pre-COVID, COVID. Now we've got a view into post-COVID. I want to dig into that 'cause there's a lot of things happening. You guys have been in the trenches, front lines bringing solutions, but before we get into that, can you guys just introduce yourself share your roles at Deloitte and give us a quick overview of what you work on. >> Yeah, so again, thanks for having us John Dave Knight I'm a solution architect and Global Red Hat Alliance Manager for Deloitte. I've got responsibility for making sure that play nicely in the sandbox together or we've got a joint customer and solutions to deliver to those customers. >> Hi everyone, thanks for having us John, I'm a Managing Director Mike Bushwa out of Boston Texas. I am coming up on year 20 and Public Sector Consulting. My area of expertise is large state government systems that serve the needs of millions of citizens and thousands of state workers, good to be here. >> Yeah. Great to have you. And I wanted to chime in with you right away because Mike you are living in probably one of the hottest markets Public Sector. I've been following that for many, many years, generations actually from the early computer industry GSA contracts, all these contracts you've got all the Public Sector, they move very slowly but now the pandemic, there was no place to hide. Everything got pulled back, disruption, you can't just shut down critical infrastructure and critical services. People had to move fast. What was your experience and how is it now give us a taste of some of the challenges and the landscape. >> You bet John, so we talked a little bit before we started this, but my 20 year consulting career, I can't think of anything really in close to this, other than maybe Y2K and as Dave mentioned the Affordable Care Act Legislation in 2009, though that was a much smaller scale as it turned out to be. So I would be remiss not to share examples of extraordinary challenges our clients have had related to the pandemic. Department of Labor and Health and Human Service Agencies for example, responded to the pandemic in rapid timeframe that were rarely seen in government. Citizens that were used to coming in appealed offices, We're now required to do most things virtually. Deloitte has been privileged to assist clients with digital solutions across the country in response to this unprecedented event. And so I'd like to share just a couple of examples. The first is for Department of Labor, the pandemic contributed to millions of layoffs throughout the country Department of Labor workers found called volumes increasing by a 1000% in some cases, the amount of increased volume required agencies across the country hire temporary workers to help out. Millions of new unemployment claims needed to be filed in benefits rapidly provided to citizens of name. So the big challenge was the agency had to figure out how to rapidly file claims into the unemployment system, rather than requiring new citizens to use an external web application they were really unfamiliar, the agency needed more efficient approach. The approach we used was to create an internal web application that enabled workers to file unemployment insurance claims on behalf of citizens. Workers collected the necessary data from citizens and claims were filed into the system. The application enabled workers to focus on filing claims rather than sort of a technical support role showing how to people use an external web application. More citizen were served in much less time, claims are filed efficiently by train workers which resulted in benefits being received in a much more timely fashion. And so a second example is, with Department of Human Services. So one stay as mentioned Citizens were used to going into field offices but suddenly they were told you can't come into the field office. So once they provided a 100% virtual application and the important part here is certification solution for the Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or DSNAP for short. this application was stood up in two weeks, families who needed food assistance can now apply and be certified for benefits remotely. Today over 50,000 cases have certified and citizens receiving food nutrition assistance. Back to you John. >> So, I mean obviously there's some great use cases you got, basically I got to work at home, new architecture there you got to have a new workflows. I mean, this poses some real challenges. How did you guys put it together? I mean, Dave take us through where this all fits in with the Red Hat, because obviously now it's new deployment new capabilities have to be deployed for the pandemic. How does this bring together the partnership with Red Hat? >> Yeah, so great question and it really plays to the strength of both Deloitte and Red Hat, right? The success stories that Mike has illustrated show how we can quickly pivot as a firm to delivering these types of solutions and help our customers think through innovative ways to solve the problems. So, I mean the prime example that Mike just gave, everything used to be done in offices. Now it's all done remotely cause you can't go to the office even if you want to. And that is very much aligned with the innovation we get with our partnership with Red Hat, right? They've led the way in open source and some of the technologies that we've leveraged that our solutions include, answerable for automation, some of the middleware products, and I would say one of the cornerstones is the OpenShift Platform. Now that allows us to greatly accelerate the development and delivery of those solutions to our customers. Sort of again, aligning our innovative thinking with Red Hats Innovative Technologies. >> What would you say if someone said, "what's the partnership strengths and what needs specifically are you addressing with customers and customer needs?" >> So I, again, I think our lean towards innovation is a common thread across both firms and where we have our greatest strength. We like to take our customers on a journey but it's not our journey, it's their journey, right? So we help them figure out where they want to go and how they want to get there in a way that aligns with their business goals, their budgets all the sort of factors that drive those things and Red Hat is very open to that approach. They sort of invented the crowdsourcing of open source they made it into a business model. They've developed that from literally nothing. And that aligns very nicely with us. That's one of the key strengths. We also are firm believers in open source again to the degree that our customers like the leverage that to drive their journeys. And we're seeing that, especially in the Public Sector Space as being a key driver of the technologies they employ. >> Mike, I want to come back to you on this open ma component open question, open source, open to technology open innovation out in the open as Red Hat calls it. How does Red Hat open source software, address the needs for your customers for security and on-premise considerations. >> I'll talk a little bit about open source principles in general still the open source principles of transparency meritocracy community problem solving and collaboration. These are on its of both software innovation as well as organizational transformation. One of the highest demand transformation needs that I'm seeing in the market is the desire to adopt innovative technology, and most importantly, moving workloads to the cloud. It's no longer a thought, it is an imperative moving workloads to the cloud, on new deals hosted in the cloud, on an existing, is it large systems let Deloitte help us get to the cloud. So I believe the key to success embracing the cloud is recognizing first the need for change in people, processes and technology. The vehicle for this transformation is DevSecOps and innovative open source platforms, such as the OpenShift platform that Dave mentioned. OpenShift focuses on people, processes and technology and the security conversation becomes even easier. I mean, I see Linux was around for years, and we've always used Linux on our Java based workloads now we can have the conversation about saying, Hey, well that se Linux operating system we've been using for years now, there's this really cool Container Management Platform that we can solve real problems like auto scaling, in my Health and Human Services career, I can remember every year when open enrollment comes around systems engineers are teed up, and ready to manually add those to a BMR cluster or something like that. Well, now we don't have to do these things. We can rely on Kubernetes so auto scale, and then and get rid of those instances when workload demands seven resolved. So it's a really cool technology kind of behind the scenes. It's not the dog and pony show sometimes but in the end it helps the clients and Deloitte remain consistent with those service level agreements. >> That's a great example about the open enrollment illustrates the fact that, you got to provision more stuff to take that load on it. It's always hard in Public Sector you might not have the speed. So I got to follow up and ask you, you guys have had wins in the Public Sector lately with Red Hat, you guys Deloitte and Red Hat working together and get some wins under your belt, on around cloud and cloud and technology obviously with the pandemic has needs there. Are you guys seeing any particular sector challenges specifically around Public Sector as it goes this next level a lot of modernization happening we're seeing that, but any challenges that you're seeing, can you give some examples of how these challenges are being addressed? First talk about the challenges and then give some examples of how they're overcoming them. >> So I can jump in here with this one then, and Mike I think you probably have some maybe Public Sector specific examples, but one of the things that I think is common across all industries is resource constraints, right? And particularly as we look for human resources and not in the HR sense, but developers, CIS admins those types of resources as Mike said, the cloud is here to stay, right? And it's not something that people are thinking about it's de facto part of the conversation. And that's great, but it leads to silos of skills which puts further sort of strain on a limited pool of resources within most sites IT organization. So something like an OpenShift, something like an Ansible solves problems related to resource constraints, because they're skills that are portable across cloud environments, right? If you can manage OpenShift you can manage OpenShift on-prem, you can manage it recently released AWS version of that ROSA on the Azure version of that. So it's no matter where you're running it you've got a common set of skills and access sort of a force multiplier, same thing with Ansible automation, right? If you can write scripts, with an Ansible you can do those repeatable tasks in a much more efficient fashion. And again sort of multiplying the capacity of your existing workforce. >> So you've got an operating leverage there. I mean, this is what you're getting at is that, Public Sector and other commercial areas they kind of got to get used to this fact that, you get some leverage here, you get some operating leverage. >> More or less has always been a thing in IT. And it's not relenting that's for sure. >> It's been more at the more, with less has always been kind of a tagline for budget cuts, right? You can squeeze more out of the investment. Here it's kind of like do more with less than the sense of there's more net new things happening with leverage. So, I mean, do you agree with that? What's your take on that? >> Yeah, I think that's exactly right. It's more with less from a resource perspective, right? Typically it was budget, but no money is just another resource. Now we're getting into the personnel side of it. The other thing I would say is, something like an OpenShift Platform allows the Mike's point around DevOps, it allows the developers to develop, right? I have an article in wired.com about this, where developers are saddled with meetings and they have to become concerned with infrastructure and they have traditionally and security. And I am I doing all these things that aren't related to development. If you have a good DevOps Platform in place the security folks can build guard rails into the platform and the developers can just go develop which is what they want to do in the first place. Yeah exactly, that's another riff on the more, with less, again in a resource, the human resource way versus the budget way. >> Yeah, and that really is where OpenShift ties in. Mike what's your take on this? Because with this kind of program ability infrastructure as code DevSecOps kind of modern developers, Public Sector loves that, because they just want to build the new apps. They got to modernize. So change the infrastructure once. And then a lot of ma many benefits on top of it. It's almost like, it sounds like an operating system to me. >> Yeah, lots of thoughts going around my head right now but I'll say the more with less to me when I'm having client conversations is imagine a world of higher innovation, more technology at lower costs, right? I mean, so CIO is light up when I explained to them the orders of magnitude cost savings on top of the innovation introduced to their environment. So when moving workloads to the cloud is not as easy as just packaging up a binary and dropping in on a name, your cloud provider, right? There's an entire, a blueprinting strategy. There's a Cloud Native Architecture, modernization discussion, so we do those sorts of things, at Deloitte and we work with clients very closely to do that. I want to say teaming with Red Hat allows us to be proactive with our design and reference architecture validation. The Collaborative Partnership in Relationship allows us to connect senior engineers from Deloitte and Red Hat. So we have low level strategic discussions, we validate our assumptions and optimize to use a Red Hat technology. What we're doing in Public Sector is separating the monolithic application into layers. And whenever it comes to technologies like Ansible, like OpenShift, like Jenkins, all of these things that any application needs and Public Sector, we're saying out to the account teams across the country, look this is a slower layer DevOps Platform. And by the way, you can run any .Net or Java based workload on it. So we're trying to make opinionated reference architecture so that regardless of the solution, we can just go to market with that platform that tried and true production application. So I'll give a quick example John, if now's a convenient time regarding, well, one of the things that we've done for particular state client. >> Definitely yeah, give the use cases we love those. >> Yes so one of the impactful modernization that struck my mind was the State of Washington. They've mentioned the affordable care act earlier, there are two major things that came out of that. One was the eligibility and enrollment systems had to be modified across all 50 states. But the second thing and the primary driver behind the affordable care act was health insurance exchange. A way for millions of citizens to have access to healthcare using Subsidized Health Insurance Plans. So in Washington and health benefits exchange is that health insurance exchange, State of Washington has been a client of Deloitte since 2012. The solution was originally designed using closed source proprietary products. There are three drivers for change. The first is the API gateway was end of life and needed to be replaced. Number two was the client wanted it to move health benefit exchange to the cloud from an on-premise hosting arrangement. And third is reducing cost of those solution with innovative products. So the agency was looking for a platform that provided flexibility, auto-scaling and performance and lower cost of ownership. So we worked with the agency and we evaluated a variety of API Management and Integration Platforms after reviewing the outcomes for each proof of concept the agency decided to move forward with Red Hats, three skill API Management Platform, Red Hat Fuse for Integration and OpenShift Container Platform that offered the auto-scaling continuous integration tools and out of the box monitoring and reporting capabilities proactively monitor the health of the solution. I often describe a little bit of OpenShift as a data center or DevSecOps in the box. It just is all there. You don't need to add layers on top of OpenShift install and configure it, tune it and just you're off and running in a short amount of time. So three outcomes I'll mention, go ahead, John. >> NO continue, I thought you were finished. So on the outcomes side, the first outcome the agency substantially lower the cost of ownership using commercially supported open source while increasing access to innovative emerging technology. So the agency wanted a solution not only to meet their current needs, but extend the solution going forward. The beautiful thing about OpenShift is you can drop a container images into the platform without installing an operating system. It's all just there and it's spreading to be extended. The number two outcome cloud migration. Deloitte work collaboratively with the agencies and infrastructure and managed services team to successfully migrate the health benefit exchange to the cloud. And the last thing a bit obvious, but that's successful release, working collaboratively with our client. We were able to migrate the solution within 100 days from making the products decision. The cut over to the new solution was seamless with minimal downtime and zero production issues or exceptionally proud of that. >> Great stuff, great use case. And again, those are great business examples. Dave, I want to get this last question to you and Mike can chime in too. As Red Hat Summit evolves, and we're hearing the theme here at the event about transformation is the innovation, Innovation is about scale. When you hear the words like in a box or Hybrid Cloud you hear about an operating environment. So it's an opportunity to set the table for the next generation, this is what I see. What do you guys see as people talk about Hybrid Cloud and soon to be Multiple Cloud? Because you guys you said have tough relationships. You deal with IBM and Red Hat and you probably deal with other people. Clients want, from what we hear they want back to the Multi Vendor Open Connection Distributed Environment. That's what they want. So how does your relationship evolve, given all this is happening? How do you see the future, please chime in. >> Thanks, that's a fantastic question. I actually think the market is coming catching up to where I've been thinking for quite a while. And that is the Hybrid is kind of where it's at. A lot of customers have been in some sort of Hybrid mode as part of the step or a journey to the cloud, getting all the way to the cloud. But I think we're seeing some transition. I know customers are starting to ask me more and more about Hybrid solutions for a variety of reasons, right? The easy workloads for the most part have either been moved or be are being moved, or at least there's a strategy and a plan to get them moved. And now we're starting to be asked about some of the more difficult architecture type questions, right? The workloads that are a little bit more sticky to the on-premise model. And so Hybrid becoming more of the endpoint as opposed to a step along the journey. The other big thing is some repatriation, right? Workloads coming off of cloud. Maybe they seem like good candidates but for whatever reason, the cost drivers or other things weren't realized, let's get them back on premise. Maybe it's a regulatory thing and new regulations are making folks uncomfortable. So I see Hybrid as a pretty interesting next wave of cloud, Deloitte as a far or we're skilling up or tooling up in order to address the needs of our customers, again are starting to ask us these really challenging questions about Hybrid Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Architectures. >> Yeah and just the key point there is that you think about it like with the way you're discussing it, it's a platform, not a tool, right? So if you think about it like a platform then you can move things around and look at architectures and changes of how resources and workloads are deployed and then what data you're getting from it. Whether you bring it to a factory, for instance you say, Hey, okay, we're going to put it on prem because it's a factory or whatever, and you need more data. What was the changeover? This is like a day to operations kind of mindset. What's your comment on that? >> Well I mean I have actually going back three years now, one of the marketing lines that we developed internally, was moved to a platform, not a provider. But because you get that flexibility, now, the reality is what works stay where they're put for a variety of reasons. But I think one of those reasons could be, because they're put in places where they tend to not want to move, right? So if we could put them into a platform where, there is some portability built into the platform, I think we might have a different sort of outcomes for customers. And I think architecture is absolutely the key, right? That to me is the secret sauce here. >> Mike set up for you to close us out here, platform, Public Sector, Hybrid, that's what they want. It's an ideal scenario for anyone in Public Sector and in general, and why wouldn't you want to have a great platform that's it can be programmed, and rearchitected at will for the benefit of the business powered by software. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, all good points and I will agree with Dave that Hybrid is certainly evolving. Eight years ago, Hybrid was consuming and address validation API in the cloud and not custom coding that, but today I do agree that Hybrid Cloud is all about a vehicle a way of moving workloads across data centers. It's an architecture that is encapsulated by something like an OpenShift so that you can federate your workloads across data centers. You can put them in one or easily moved them to the other. Maybe that's for a variety of reasons. It could be compute and storage is being reduced by one provider versus the other. So the solutions were we're designing today, they are data center agnostic, we're not being tied to data centers anymore. The best design solutions, you can just let them move in their easy manner. So that that's my take on Hybrid Cloud. And I would say the and Red Hat are making investments to help us advance that thinking help us advance those solutions. We had Deloitte have created a Red Hat OpenShift lab environment, and we've done this purposely to validate reference architectures to show account teams the way we have delivered the very very large accounts to show them what DevSecOps to means from a product perspective and to give them opinionated processes to be successful in delivering these large type solutions. >> Dave, Mike, thanks for coming on, and I appreciate you guys coming on theCUBE and sharing the perspective on the Red Hat Relationship with Deloitte Consulting. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, John. >> This is CUBE Coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021, am John for your host, thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's theCube with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. >> Hi, and welcome to theCube Virtual in our coverage of AWS re:Invent. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Today we are joined by Shawn Snyder. She is the managing director at Deloitte and Cloud Migration market leader. Thanks for coming on the show Shawn. >> Thank you, Rebecca. I'm glad to be here. >> So we're talking today about cloud migration in the public sector in the COVID era, but I want to start by having you introduce yourself to our viewers tell them a little bit about what you do at Deloitte. >> Sure, I'm Shawn Snyder. I'm a managing director based out of Atlanta. I lead our cloud migration offering for our government and public sector clients. So that really means that I serve clients in the government, both public sector local government agencies, as well as federal agencies and helping them move to the cloud, and I'm also responsible for building out our capabilities, our tools, our resources, and people to help clients do that in a very fast and accelerated way. >> So even putting aside the pandemic for a second, shifting to the cloud is such a big and daunting undertaking for so many organizations, including federal agencies. How do you help CIOs and clients think through the processes and what they need to do and how they need to do it? >> Yeah, I mean, it all starts with where are they at on this journey, right? We actually have a show our clients like a typical journey to the cloud and, you know, we have a method and set of tools that we can work with them depending on where they are but if they're just in the initial stages of exploring, moving to cloud, it typically starts with a strategy and really understanding what, you know, how engaged is the mission and the agencies in supporting this. Are they really looking to continue to build their own talent? What is the end state look like? Do they want to build cloud skills and cloud engineering skills within their organization, or are they looking to do more of a managed service model? So a lot of these conversations happen and also around what platforms they want to use and then we typically look at their portfolio of applications. So it could be, you know, they're looking to move out of a data center and go more to a cloud virtual environment. It could be that they're looking to move a couple of mission critical applications that are highly complex with lots of data and sensitive information, so. It really kind of depends on what they're trying to achieve and what is the business result that they're looking to gain. >> And how do you help them think through the business case for this? Because I know that that is definitely an imperative. >> So we take a couple of, I can give you an example. So when we were working with a state in local agency, looking at a big mission critical integrated eligibility system, they wanted to be able to move because they were, the technology was getting a little dated. It was eating inflexible to maintain and when they were looking at the maintenance costs that they were spending on both the infrastructure and the application, it was starting to, you know, take up to 90% of the budget and so the lack of ability to be able to do new capabilities and new innovation when you're talking about especially post COVID, which I know we haven't gotten into, but when they're looking, there's actually more and more products and aid that's being made available. So they need more flexibility, and so what we did was we actually did a bunch of analysis around what does that technology stack look like? What's the cost drivers and then we built out what the future would look like on the, in this particular case was the AWS platform. How could they take advantage of some native services and reduce some of their licensing costs? How could they upgrade through our products? We have a seamless way to upgrade to cloud suitable operating systems. So in this case, they were on an outdated Windows and Linux platforms. We were able to update that to cloud suitable, which allowed them to, you know, save a lot of money in terms of their infrastructure costs to maintain some of that outdated infrastructure and then we get them on end state tools around security monitoring, around infrastructure monitoring and so they can really streamline some of those infrastructure costs as they are spending tremendous amount of money just on the tools when they're managing all of that on-prem, on a complex system. >> So thinking about now we are in this pandemic, which has changed everything about the way we live and the way we work, moving to the cloud was a business goal. Something that a lot of organizations sort of had, in they're two and three year, two and five-year plan. Now it is an absolute mandate. What are you seeing? What are you hearing? What are organizations saying to you now? >> There's just such a, there's such a demand for speed and doing it at scale very fast. So prior to COVID, like you said, it was a multi-year journey. We'll get to it when we can, but there were other priorities that automatic, always got in the way of that and also just the cost justification, right? When you're talking about migration and a lot of times these systems that's portfolio systems are outdated, they're not cloud suitable. So how do you have to refactor them? That can get pretty costly pretty quickly. Now our clients want to move fast and they have a virtual work workforce, they need more scale. They need more storage for some of the data. They need to be able to integrate with other partners, especially in the healthcare space, whether it's at the state and local agency level or in the federal space, that ability to create that ecosystem of being able to transmit and share data in a very secure way at a very large volume is becoming, you know, mission critical with combating COVID with being able to protect our citizens. >> Speed is the name of the game, as you're saying. So what, how is Deloitte investing in automation and what kinds of migration accelerators are you bringing to clients now? >> So a few different things. One, we are partnering with AWS, both on a professional services perspective, as well as with some programs. So we've integrated our methodologies and we've been certified by AWS for our methodology around migration acceleration program. So that's the map because of our qualifications of the amount of migrations we do globally, as well as our methodology and tool set, we're able to offer this joint map program, which allows us to team with AWS. Go on site in quickly use our tools to diagnose what applications are actually at cloud ready to move, how fast can they move? And it gives a lot of information around technical configurations, what servers they reside on, and all of basically the affinities, all of the information you would need to be able to move those applications and if it's not cloud suitable, we can detect if it, how quickly we could get it cloud suitable. What would need to be done is an application code, or is it database, or is it operating system? What are those things that need to get upgraded to move it to the cloud? And is it worth moving to the cloud? So we actually look at the business value that each of these applications are providing and saying, you know, this might be more suited to stay on-prem for now. So we work with them through this map program to really come up with that detailed migration schedule and plan and we then use that information that we collected during that diagnostic phase feeds into our migration tools. So the migration is actually automated with the information that was collected during the diagnostics and the landing zones, and all of the sizing of the infrastructures able to be sized appropriately based on the information that was collected. >> I want to ask you about innovation. In a lot of these Cube Virtual conversations that we're having, we're hearing from a lot of executives that the pandemic has been a forcing mechanism in sort of forcing people to think more resourcefully, more ingenuitively about how they solve these pressing problems. What have you experienced, and have you seen in particular examples of innovation that have been inspiring and exciting for you? >> Yes, absolutely. So I actually work in the federal health space most, and our ability to be able to stand up an application or a service, whether it's a Salesforce service, the AWS platform, but we've been able to stand up contact tracing for local agencies, for state agencies. We've been able to set up cloud native services that allow the data that's getting collected across these different organizations to be able to make meaningful information using machine learning and some of the other native services that are available within cloud and they can be stood up very quickly and very cost-effectively and I think that's the other value that cloud is unlocking for organizations and really now starting to realize that they can move towards innovation and start to spend much more money on innovation than what they were doing previously on spending most of the budget on maintenance. >> When you're talking to clients now about the future, what are they thinking? What's on their minds in this sort of this 12 to 24 month plan? Are they just thinking we just need to get through this next period and cope with this uncertainty? Or are they thinking about the future. >> Moving to cloud isn't just an infrastructure move. I think that's getting your head around what does it mean? What does your workforce have to look like? What does, how do you collaborate with the business? What are the, what is the future innovation use cases? What is going to, how do you actually start to use those use cases to demonstrate early value and start to do things much more in an agile and iterative way instead of, you know, delivering something in a, you know, several months or years. So it, it really is shifting, it's a transformation for how the office of the CIO or how they actually operate. It's creating integrated teams within the CIO organization. We're actually embedding different disciplines like engineering, infrastructure, IT operations, security operations, risk management, financial management, these disciplines as part of these, what we call DevOps DevSecOps type teams, and be able to deliver an end-to-end product on a particular platform in a very agile way. >> In thinking about the future of the workforce and how the pandemic is changing people's careers. I know that you serve as the technology campus champion at Georgia Tech, and you're very active in recruiting bright young business talent. Can you talk to our viewers a little bit about the changes that you foresee in terms of how people plan their careers and their professional development and anything in particular that Deloitte is doing to make sure that the pandemic does not have such a damaging effect, you know, from a lot of statistics that women are dropping out of the workforce in large numbers. >> Yes, so let me unpack your question a couple of ways. So, you know, first of all, you know, I'm really passionate about talent development and recruiting, and I've learned recruiting efforts at the undergrad for many, many years, and I've always been a technologist. So now, like just seeing how technology is embedded in all of the business that we do and it's so mission critical, you now, I'm very focused on making sure there's more women and more minorities going into technology oriented degrees. There's so much you can do with a technology degree and the of career careers that are available, you know, are unlimited. We can't hire enough people that have the right skills. There's just a war on talent for people that have the right security and cybersecurity skills, cloud engineering skills, and just the analytical skills. I mean, this is very complex stuff that you're trying to, you know, build stuff and create stuff that hasn't been created before. So I find it extremely fascinating and I hope that people can see the creative side of things and the scientific it's really bringing it both together and that's what I try to mentor a lot of the recruits on campus. In addition to that, so I think that there's tremendous amount of opportunity for folks going into those types of degrees, as well as for women I, you know, it's been a challenge because people are, you know, some schools aren't closed are not open. If you have a dual working family, it can be a big challenge if you're taking care of children or elderly parents, for example. So at Deloitte, we actually recently implemented a dependent care policy for folks that could take advantage of additional stipend to subsidize, you know, childcare or dependent care. So that's helped a little bit, we're also really focused on diversity inclusion. So, you know, really having candid conversations, individual conversations around what are your boundaries at work right now? Can, do you have to be off right now from, you know, dinner time till bedtime? What does that look like? And we're trying to really help people have the tools and feel comfortable about having those conversations, 'cause it's not just women, it's men, too. I mean, this, these are difficult situations that we're all, you know, co living with our spouses and our significant others and our children, and potentially, you know, extended family members and trying to work in the same environment and is very challenging, and so we're trying to create space for people to be able to have those conversations and make it work for them. >> Don't I know it's Shawn. So just in terms of thinking about the future and what is next for Deloitte, and you've just talked about how you are a technologist at heart, and you see so much excitement about bringing in different disciplines, different functions to solve these urgent and pressing problems. What do you foresee for yourself and for Deloitte over these next couple of years, as we emerge hopefully out of this crisis situation. >> I think Deloitte, you know, one reason I've stayed at Deloitte for so long is that we've always been really focused on how does the technology solve the business problem, the mission problem? And so we have a real opportunity to continue to be able to bring the IT and the technology enablement and make sure it aligns to the business strategy and so the business use cases, you know, we've invested a lot in our labs Capabilities where we're able to bring different disciplines, whether it's, you know, HR and talent thinking about workforce of the future, you know, that technology stack and the architects together, as well as the thinking about across the ecosystem, what are some of the future use cases that you're not even thinking about? So we're able to bring a lot of these different disciplines or subject matter experts together. Now I'll be in a very virtual way, but we've been able to take these lab concepts and it really helps kind of get that out of the possible defined and really strong alignment across these different constituents across the enterprise. So that is really exciting to me. I also think the investment that we're making in our cloud engineering practice, in our alliances with companies like AWS, it really gives us insight into where the technology is going and making sure our staff and our tools and our resources available to us are aligned to that more than investments are being made in the technology. >> So well Shawn thank you so much for coming on theCube Virtual. It's a pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you very much Rebecca. >> I'm Rebecca Knight stay tuned for more of theCube Virtual's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020.