(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)

(upbeat music) >> You got it, it's theCUBE. We are in Vegas. This is the Cube's live coverage day one of the full event coverage of AWS reInvent '22 from the Venetian Expo Center. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We love being in Vegas, Dave. >> Well, you know, this is where Super Cloud sort of was born. >> It is. >> Last year, just about a year ago. Steve Mullaney, CEO of of Aviatrix, you know, kind of helped us think it through. And we got some fun stories around. It's happening, but... >> It is happening. We're going to be talking about Super Cloud guys. >> I guess I just did the intro, Steve Mullaney >> You did my intro, don't do it again. >> Sorry I stole that from you, yeah. >> Steve Mullaney, joined just once again, one of our alumni. Steve, great to have you back on the program. >> Thanks for having me back. >> Dave: It's happening. >> It is happening. >> Dave: We talked about a year ago. Net Studio was right there. >> That was two years. Was that year ago, that was a year ago. >> Dave: It was last year. >> Yeah, I leaned over >> What's happening? >> so it's happening. It's happening. You know what, the thing I noticed what's happening now is the maturity of the cloud, right? So, if you think about this whole journey to cloud that has been, what, AWS 12 years. But really over the last few years is when enterprises have really kind of joined that journey. And three or four years ago, and this is why I came out of retirement and went to Aviatrix, was they all said, okay, now we're going to do cloud. You fast forward now three, four years from now, all of a sudden those five-year plans of evacuating the data center, they got one year left, two year left, and they're going, oh crap, we don't have five years anymore. We're, now the maturity's starting to say, we're starting to put more apps into the cloud. We're starting to put business critical apps like SAP into the cloud. This is not just like the low-hanging fruit anymore. So what's happening now is the business criticality, the scale, the maturity. And they're all now starting to hit a lot of limits that have been put into the CSPs that you never used to hit when you didn't have business critical and you didn't have that scale. They were always there. The rocks were always there. Just it was, you never hit 'em. People are starting to hit 'em now. So what's happening now is people are realizing, and I'm going to jump the gun, you asked me for my bumper sticker. The bumper sticker for Aviatrix is, "Good enough is no longer good enough." Now it's funny, it came in a keynote today, but what we see from our customers is it's time to upgrade the native constructs of networking and network security to be enterprise-grade now. It's no longer good enough to just use the native constructs because of a lack of visibility, the lack of controls, the lack of troubleshooting capabilities, all these things. "I now need enterprise grade networking." >> Let me ask you a question 'cause you got a good historical perspective on the industry. When you think about when Maritz was running VMWare. He was like any app, he said basically we're building a software mainframe. And they kind of did that, right? But then they, you know, hit the issue with scale, right? And they can't replicate the cloud. Are there things that we can draw from that experience and apply that to the cloud? What's the same, what's different? >> Oh yeah. So, 1992, do you remember what happened in 1992? I do this, weird German software company called SAP >> Yeah, R3. announced a release as R/3. Which was their first three-tier client-server application of SAP. Before that it ran on mainframes, TCP/IP. Remember that Protocol War? Guess what happened post-1992, everybody goes up like this. Infrastructure completely changes. Cisco, EMC, you name it, builds out these PCE client-server architectures. The WAN changes, MPLS, the campus, everything's home running back to that data center running SAP. That was the last 30 years ago. Great transformation of SAP. They've did it again. It's called S/4Hana. And now it's running and people are switching to S/4Hana and they're moving to the cloud. It's just starting. And that is going to alter how you build infrastructure. And so when you have that, being able to troubleshoot in hours versus minutes is a big deal. This is business critical, millions of dollars. This is not fun and games. So again, back to my, what was good enough for the last three or four years for enterprises no longer good enough, now I'm running business critical apps like SAP, and it's going to completely change infrastructure. That's happening in the cloud right now. And that's obviously a significant seismic shift, but what are some of the barriers that customers have been able to eliminate in order to get there? Or is it just good enough isn't good enough anymore? >> Barriers in terms of, well, I mean >> Lisa: The adoption. Yeah well, I mean, I think it's all the things that they go to cloud is, you know, the complexity, really, it's the agility, right? So the barrier that they have to get over is how do I keep the developer happy because the developer went to the cloud in the first place, why? Swipe the credit card because IT wasn't doing their job, 'cause every time I asked them for something, they said no. So I went around 'em. We need that. That's what they have to overcome in the move to the cloud. That is the obstacle is how do I deliver that visibility, that control, the enterprise, great functionality, but yet give the developer what they want. Because the minute I stop giving them that swipe the card operational model, what do you think they're going to do? They're going to go around me again and I can't, and the enterprise can't have that. >> That's a cultural shift. >> That's the main barrier they've got to overcome. >> Let me ask you another question. Is what we think of as mission critical, the definition changing? I mean, you mentioned SAP, obviously that's mission critical for operations, but you're also seeing new applications being developed in the cloud. >> I would say anything that's, I call business critical, same thing, but it's, business critical is internal to me, like SAP, but also anything customer-facing. That's business critical to me. If that app goes down or it has a problem, I'm not collecting revenue. So, you know, back 30 years ago, we didn't have a lot of customer-facing apps, right? It really was just SAP. I mean there wasn't a heck of a lot of cust- There were customer-facing things. But you didn't have all the digitalization that we have now, like the digital economy, where that's where the real explosion has come, is you think about all the customer-facing applications. And now every enterprise is what? A technology, digital company with a customer-facing and you're trying to get closer and closer to who? The consumer. >> Yeah, self-service. >> Self-service, B2C, everybody wants to do that. Get out of the middle man. And those are business critical applications for people. >> So what's needed under the covers to make all this happen? Give us a little double click on where you guys fit. >> You need consistent architecture. Obviously not just for one cloud, but for any cloud. But even within one cloud, forget multicloud, it gets worst with multicloud. You need a consistent architecture, right? That is automated, that is as code. I can't have the human involved. These are all, this is the API generation, you've got to be able to use automation, Terraform. And all the way from the application development platform you know, through Jenkins and all other software, through CICD pipeline and Terraform, when you, when that developer says, I want infrastructure, it has to go build that infrastructure in real time. And then when it says, I don't need it anymore it's got to take it away. And you cannot have a human involved in that process. That's what's completely changed. And that's what's giving the agility. And that's kind of a cloud model, right? Use software. >> Well, okay, so isn't that what serverless does, right? >> That's part of it. Absolutely. >> But I might still want control sometimes over the runtime if I'm running those mission critical applications. Everything in enterprise is a heterogeneous thing. It's like people, people say, well there's going to, the people going to repatriate back to on-prem, they are not repatriating back to on-prem. >> We were just talking about that, I'm like- >> Steve: It's not going to happen, right? >> It's a myth, it's a myth. >> And there's things that maybe shouldn't have ever gone into the cloud, I get that. Look, do people still have mainframes? Of course. There's certain things that you just, doesn't make sense to move to the new generation. There were things, certain applications that are very static, they weren't dynamic. You know what, keeping it on-prem it's, probably makes sense. So some of those things maybe will go back, but they never should have gone. But we are not repatriating ever, you know, that's not going to happen. >> No I agree. I mean, you know, there was an interesting paper by Andreessen, >> Yeah. >> But, I mean- >> Steve: Yeah it was a little self-serving for some company that need more funding, yeah. You look at the numbers. >> Steve: Yeah. >> It tells the story. It's just not happening. >> No. And the reason is, it's that agility, right? And so that's what people, I would say that what you need to do is, and in order to get that agility, you have to have that consistency. You have to have automation, you have to get these people out of the way. You have to use software, right? So it's that you have that swipe the card operational model for the developers. They don't want to hear the word no. >> Lisa: Right. >> What do you think is going to happen with AWS? Because we heard, I don't know if you heard Selipsky's keynote this morning, but you've probably heard the hallway talk. >> Steve: I did, yeah. >> Okay. You did. So, you know, connecting the dots, you know doubling down on all the primitives, that we expected. We kind of expected more of the higher level stuff, which really didn't see much of that, a little bit. >> Steve: Yeah. So, you know, there's a whole thing about, okay, does the cloud get commoditized? Does it not? I think the secret weapon's the ecosystem, right? Because they're able to sell through with guys like you. Make great margins on that. >> Steve: Yeah, well, yeah. >> What are your thoughts though on the future of AWS? >> IAS is going to get commoditized. So this is the fallacy that a lot of the CSPs have, is they thought that they were going to commoditize enterprise. It never happens that way. What's going to happen is infrastructure as a service, the lower level, which is why you see all the CSPs talking about what? Oracle Cloud, industry cloud. >> Well, sure, absolutely, yeah. >> We got to get to the apps, we got to get to SAP, we got to get to all that, because that's not going to get commoditized, right. But all the infrastructural service where AWS is king that is going to get commoditized, absolutely. >> Okay, so, but historically, you know Cisco's still got 60% plus gross margins. EMC always had good margin. How pure is the lone survivor in Flash? They got 70% gross margins. So infrastructure actually has always been a pretty good business. >> Yeah that's true. But it's a hell of a lot easier, particularly with people like Aviatrix and others that are building these common architectural things that create simplicity and abstract the way the complexities of underneath such that we allow your network to run an AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, whatever, exactly the same. So it makes it a hell of a lot easier >> Dave: Super cloud. >> to go move. >> But I want to tap your brain because you have a good perspective of this because servers used to be a great margin business too on-prem and now it's not. It's a low margin business 'cause all the margin went to Intel. >> Yeah. But the cloud guys, you know, AWS in particular, makes a ton of dough on servers, so, or compute. So it's going to be interesting to see over time if that gets com- that's why they're going so hard after silicon. >> I think if they can, I think if you can capture the workload. So AWS and everyone else, as another example, this SAP, they call that a gravity workload. You know what gravity workload is? It's a black hole. It drags everything else with it. If you get SAP or Oracle or a mainframe app, it ain't going anywhere. And then what's going to happen is all your other apps are going to follow it. So that's what they're all going to fight for, is type of app. >> You said something earlier about, forget multicloud, for a moment, but, that idea of the super cloud, this abstraction layer, I mean, is that a real business value for customers other than, oh I got all these clouds, I need 'em to work together. You know, from your perspective from Aviatrix perspective, is it an opportunity for you to build on top of that? Or are you just looking at, look, I'm going to do really good work in AWS, in Azure? Now we're making the same experience. >> I hear this every single day from our customers is they look and they say, good enough isn't good enough. I've now hit the point, I'm hitting route limitations. I'm hitting, I'm doing things manually, and that's fine when I don't have that many applications or I don't have mission critical. The dogs are eating the dog food, we're going into the cloud and they're looking and then saying this is not an operational model for me. I've hit the point where I can't keep doing this, I can't throw bodies at this, I need software. And that's the opportunity for us, is they look and they say, I'm doing it in one cloud, but, and there's zero chance I'm going to be able to figure that out in the two or three other clouds. Every enterprise I talk to says multicloud is inevitable. Whether they're in it now, they all know they're going to go, because it's the business units that demand it. It's not the IT teams that demand it, it's the line of business that says, I like GCP for this reason. >> The driver's functionality that they're getting. >> It's the app teams that say, I have this service and GCP's better at it than AWS. >> Yeah, so it's not so much a cost game or the end all coffee mug, right? >> No, no. >> Google does this better than Microsoft, or better than- >> If you asked an IT person, they would rather not have multicloud. They actually tried to fight it. No, why would you want to support four clouds when you could support one right? That's insane. >> Dave and Lisa: Right. If they didn't have a choice and, and so it, the decision was made without them, and actually they weren't even notified until day before. They said, oh, good news, we're going to GCP tomorrow. Well, why wasn't I notified? Well, we're notifying you now. >> Yeah, you would've said, no. >> Steve: This is cloud bottle, let's go. >> Super cloud again. Did you see the Berkeley paper, sky computing I think they call it? Down at Berkeley, yep Dave Linthicum from Deloitte. He's talking about, I think he calls it meta cloud. It's happening. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> It's happening. >> No, and because customers, customers want that. They... >> And talk about some customer example or two that you think really articulates the value of why it's happening and the outcomes that it's generating. >> I mean, I was just talking to Lamb Weston last night. So we had a reception, Lamb Weston, huge, frozen potatoes. They serve like, I dunno, some ungodly percentage of all the french fries to all the fast food. It's unbelievable what they do. Do you know, they have special chemicals they put on the french fries. So when you get your DoorDash, they stay crispy longer. They've invented that patented it. But anyway, it's all these businesses you've never heard of and they do all the, and again, they're moving to SAP or they're actually SAP in the cloud, they're one of the first ones. They did it through Accenture. They're pulling it back off from Accenture. They're not happy with the service they're getting. They're going to use us for their networking and network security because they're going to get that visibility and control back. And they're going to repatriate it back from a managed service and bring it back and run it in-house. And the SAP basis engineers want it to happen because they see the visibility and control that the infrastructure guy's going to get because of us, which leads to, all they care about is uptime and performance. That's it. And they're going to say the infrastructure team's going to lead to better uptime and better performance if it's running on Aviatrix. >> And business performance and uptime, business critical >> That is the business. That is the business. >> It is. So what are some of the things next coming down the pike from Aviatrix? Any secret sauce you can share? >> Lot of secrets. So, two secrets. One, the next thing people really want to do, embedded network security into the network. We've kind of talked about this. You're going to be seeing some things from us. Where does network security belong? In the network. Embedded in the fabric of the network, not as this dumb device called the next-gen firewall that you steer traffic to. It has to be into the fabric of what we do, what we call airspace. You're going to see us talk about that. And then the next thing, back to the maturity of the cloud, as they build out the core, guess what they're doing? It's this thing called edge, Dave, right? And guess what they're going to do? It's not about connecting the cloud to the edge to the cloud with dumb things like SD-WAN, right? Or SaaS. It's actually the other way around. Go into the cloud, turn around, look out at the edge and say, how do I extend the cloud out to the edge, and make it look like a VPC. That's what people are doing. Why, 'cause I want the operational model. I want all the things that I can do in the cloud out at the edge. And everyone knows it's been in networking. I've been in networking for 37 years. He who wins the core does what? Wins the edge, 'cause that's what happens. You do it first in the core and then you want one architecture, one common architecture, one consistent way of doing everything. And that's going to go out to the edge and it's going to look like a VPC from an operational model. >> And Amazon's going to support that, no doubt. >> Yeah, I mean every, you know, every, and then it's just how do you want to go do that? And us as the networking and network security provider, we're getting dragged to the edge by our customer. Because you're my networking provider. And that means, end to end. And they're trying to drag us into on-prem too, yeah. >> Lot's going on, you're going to have to come back- >> Because they want one networking vendor. >> But wait, and you say what? >> We will never do like switches and any of the keep Arista, the Cisco, and all that kind of stuff. But we will start sucking in net flow. We will start doing, from an operational perspective, we will integrate a lot of the things that are happening in on-prem into our- >> No halfway house. >> Copilot. >> No halfway house, no two architectures. But you'll take the data in. >> You want one architecture. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, totally. >> Right play. >> Amazing stuff. >> And he who wins the core, guess what's more strategic to them? What's more strategic on-prem or cloud? Cloud. >> It flipped three years ago. >> Dave: Yeah. >> So he who wins in the clouds going to win everywhere. >> Got it, We'll keep our eyes on that. >> Steve: Cause and effect. >> Thank you so much for joining us. We've got your bumper sticker already. It's been a great pleasure having you on the program. You got to come back, there's so, we've- >> You posting the bumper sticker somewhere? >> Lisa: It's going to be our Instagram. >> Oh really, okay. >> And an Instagram sto- This is new for you guys. Always coming up with new ideas. >> Raising the bar. >> It is, it is. >> Me advance, I mean, come on. >> I love it. >> All right, for our guest Steve Mullaney and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

(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)

hello I'm John Furrier with thecube and welcome to this special presentation of the cube and Horizon 3.ai they're announcing a global partner first approach expanding their successful pen testing product Net Zero you're going to hear from leading experts in their staff their CEO positioning themselves for a successful Channel distribution expansion internationally in Europe Middle East Africa and Asia Pacific in this Cube special presentation you'll hear about the expansion the expanse partner program giving Partners a unique opportunity to offer Net Zero to their customers Innovation and Pen testing is going International with Horizon 3.ai enjoy the program [Music] welcome back everyone to the cube and Horizon 3.ai special presentation I'm John Furrier host of thecube we're here with Jennifer Lee head of Channel sales at Horizon 3.ai Jennifer welcome to the cube thanks for coming on great well thank you for having me so big news around Horizon 3.aa driving Channel first commitment you guys are expanding the channel partner program to include all kinds of new rewards incentives training programs help educate you know Partners really drive more recurring Revenue certainly cloud and Cloud scale has done that you got a great product that fits into that kind of Channel model great Services you can wrap around it good stuff so let's get into it what are you guys doing what are what are you guys doing with this news why is this so important yeah for sure so um yeah we like you said we recently expanded our Channel partner program um the driving force behind it was really just um to align our like you said our Channel first commitment um and creating awareness around the importance of our partner ecosystems um so that's it's really how we go to market is is through the channel and a great International Focus I've talked with the CEO so you know about the solution and he broke down all the action on why it's important on the product side but why now on the go to market change what's the what's the why behind this big this news on the channel yeah for sure so um we are doing this now really to align our business strategy which is built on the concept of enabling our partners to create a high value high margin business on top of our platform and so um we offer a solution called node zero it provides autonomous pen testing as a service and it allows organizations to continuously verify their security posture um so we our company vision we have this tagline that states that our pen testing enables organizations to see themselves Through The Eyes of an attacker and um we use the like the attacker's perspective to identify exploitable weaknesses and vulnerabilities so we created this partner program from a perspective of the partner so the partner's perspective and we've built It Through The Eyes of our partner right so we're prioritizing really what the partner is looking for and uh will ensure like Mutual success for us yeah the partners always want to get in front of the customers and bring new stuff to them pen tests have traditionally been really expensive uh and so bringing it down in one to a service level that's one affordable and has flexibility to it allows a lot of capability so I imagine people getting excited by it so I have to ask you about the program What specifically are you guys doing can you share any details around what it means for the partners what they get what's in it for them can you just break down some of the mechanics and mechanisms or or details yeah yep um you know we're really looking to create business alignment um and like I said establish Mutual success with our partners so we've got two um two key elements that we were really focused on um that we bring to the partners so the opportunity the profit margin expansion is one of them and um a way for our partners to really differentiate themselves and stay relevant in the market so um we've restructured our discount model really um you know highlighting profitability and maximizing profitability and uh this includes our deal registration we've we've created deal registration program we've increased discount for partners who take part in our partner certification uh trainings and we've we have some other partner incentives uh that we we've created that that's going to help out there we've we put this all so we've recently Gone live with our partner portal um it's a Consolidated experience for our partners where they can access our our sales tools and we really view our partners as an extension of our sales and Technical teams and so we've extended all of our our training material that we use internally we've made it available to our partners through our partner portal um we've um I'm trying I'm thinking now back what else is in that partner portal here we've got our partner certification information so all the content that's delivered during that training can be found in the portal we've got deal registration uh um co-branded marketing materials pipeline management and so um this this portal gives our partners a One-Stop place to to go to find all that information um and then just really quickly on the second part of that that I mentioned is our technology really is um really disruptive to the market so you know like you said autonomous pen testing it's um it's still it's well it's still still relatively new topic uh for security practitioners and um it's proven to be really disruptive so um that on top of um just well recently we found an article that um that mentioned by markets and markets that reports that the global pen testing markets really expanding and so it's expected to grow to like 2.7 billion um by 2027. so the Market's there right the Market's expanding it's growing and so for our partners it's just really allows them to grow their revenue um across their customer base expand their customer base and offering this High profit margin while you know getting in early to Market on this just disruptive technology big Market a lot of opportunities to make some money people love to put more margin on on those deals especially when you can bring a great solution that everyone knows is hard to do so I think that's going to provide a lot of value is there is there a type of partner that you guys see emerging or you aligning with you mentioned the alignment with the partners I can see how that the training and the incentives are all there sounds like it's all going well is there a type of partner that's resonating the most or is there categories of partners that can take advantage of this yeah absolutely so we work with all different kinds of Partners we work with our traditional resale Partners um we've worked we're working with systems integrators we have a really strong MSP mssp program um we've got Consulting partners and the Consulting Partners especially with the ones that offer pen test services so we they use us as a as we act as a force multiplier just really offering them profit margin expansion um opportunity there we've got some technology partner partners that we really work with for co-cell opportunities and then we've got our Cloud Partners um you'd mentioned that earlier and so we are in AWS Marketplace so our ccpo partners we're part of the ISP accelerate program um so we we're doing a lot there with our Cloud partners and um of course we uh we go to market with uh distribution Partners as well gotta love the opportunity for more margin expansion every kind of partner wants to put more gross profit on their deals is there a certification involved I have to ask is there like do you get do people get certified or is it just you get trained is it self-paced training is it in person how are you guys doing the whole training certification thing because is that is that a requirement yeah absolutely so we do offer a certification program and um it's been very popular this includes a a seller's portion and an operator portion and and so um this is at no cost to our partners and um we operate both virtually it's it's law it's virtually but live it's not self-paced and we also have in person um you know sessions as well and we also can customize these to any partners that have a large group of people and we can just we can do one in person or virtual just specifically for that partner well any kind of incentive opportunities and marketing opportunities everyone loves to get the uh get the deals just kind of rolling in leads from what we can see if our early reporting this looks like a hot product price wise service level wise what incentive do you guys thinking about and and Joint marketing you mentioned co-sell earlier in pipeline so I was kind of kind of honing in on that piece sure and yes and then to follow along with our partner certification program we do incentivize our partners there if they have a certain number certified their discount increases so that's part of it we have our deal registration program that increases discount as well um and then we do have some um some partner incentives that are wrapped around meeting setting and um moving moving opportunities along to uh proof of value gotta love the education driving value I have to ask you so you've been around the industry you've seen the channel relationships out there you're seeing companies old school new school you know uh Horizon 3.ai is kind of like that new school very cloud specific a lot of Leverage with we mentioned AWS and all the clouds um why is the company so hot right now why did you join them and what's why are people attracted to this company what's the what's the attraction what's the vibe what do you what do you see and what what do you use what did you see in in this company well this is just you know like I said it's very disruptive um it's really in high demand right now and um and and just because because it's new to Market and uh a newer technology so we are we can collaborate with a manual pen tester um we can you know we can allow our customers to run their pen test um with with no specialty teams and um and and then so we and like you know like I said we can allow our partners can actually build businesses profitable businesses so we can they can use our product to increase their services revenue and um and build their business model you know around around our services what's interesting about the pen test thing is that it's very expensive and time consuming the people who do them are very talented people that could be working on really bigger things in the in absolutely customers so bringing this into the channel allows them if you look at the price Delta between a pen test and then what you guys are offering I mean that's a huge margin Gap between street price of say today's pen test and what you guys offer when you show people that they follow do they say too good to be true I mean what are some of the things that people say when you kind of show them that are they like scratch their head like come on what's the what's the catch here right so the cost savings is a huge is huge for us um and then also you know like I said working as a force multiplier with a pen testing company that offers the services and so they can they can do their their annual manual pen tests that may be required around compliance regulations and then we can we can act as the continuous verification of their security um um you know that that they can run um weekly and so it's just um you know it's just an addition to to what they're offering already and an expansion so Jennifer thanks for coming on thecube really appreciate you uh coming on sharing the insights on the channel uh what's next what can we expect from the channel group what are you thinking what's going on right so we're really looking to expand our our Channel um footprint and um very strategically uh we've got um we've got some big plans um for for Horizon 3.ai awesome well thanks for coming on really appreciate it you're watching thecube the leader in high tech Enterprise coverage [Music] [Music] hello and welcome to the Cube's special presentation with Horizon 3.ai with Raina Richter vice president of emea Europe Middle East and Africa and Asia Pacific APAC for Horizon 3 today welcome to this special Cube presentation thanks for joining us thank you for the invitation so Horizon 3 a guy driving Global expansion big international news with a partner first approach you guys are expanding internationally let's get into it you guys are driving this new expanse partner program to new heights tell us about it what are you seeing in the momentum why the expansion what's all the news about well I would say uh yeah in in international we have I would say a similar similar situation like in the US um there is a global shortage of well-educated penetration testers on the one hand side on the other side um we have a raising demand of uh network and infrastructure security and with our approach of an uh autonomous penetration testing I I believe we are totally on top of the game um especially as we have also now uh starting with an international instance that means for example if a customer in Europe is using uh our service node zero he will be connected to a node zero instance which is located inside the European Union and therefore he has doesn't have to worry about the conflict between the European the gdpr regulations versus the US Cloud act and I would say there we have a total good package for our partners that they can provide differentiators to their customers you know we've had great conversations here on thecube with the CEO and the founder of the company around the leverage of the cloud and how successful that's been for the company and honestly I can just Connect the Dots here but I'd like you to weigh in more on how that translates into the go to market here because you got great Cloud scale with with the security product you guys are having success with great leverage there I've seen a lot of success there what's the momentum on the channel partner program internationally why is it so important to you is it just the regional segmentation is it the economics why the momentum well there are it's there are multiple issues first of all there is a raising demand in penetration testing um and don't forget that uh in international we have a much higher level in number a number or percentage in SMB and mid-market customers so these customers typically most of them even didn't have a pen test done once a year so for them pen testing was just too expensive now with our offering together with our partners we can provide different uh ways how customers could get an autonomous pen testing done more than once a year with even lower costs than they had with with a traditional manual paint test so and that is because we have our uh Consulting plus package which is for typically pain testers they can go out and can do a much faster much quicker and their pain test at many customers once in after each other so they can do more pain tests on a lower more attractive price on the other side there are others what even the same ones who are providing um node zero as an mssp service so they can go after s p customers saying okay well you only have a couple of hundred uh IP addresses no worries we have the perfect package for you and then you have let's say the mid Market let's say the thousands and more employees then they might even have an annual subscription very traditional but for all of them it's all the same the customer or the service provider doesn't need a piece of Hardware they only need to install a small piece of a Docker container and that's it and that makes it so so smooth to go in and say okay Mr customer we just put in this this virtual attacker into your network and that's it and and all the rest is done and within within three clicks they are they can act like a pen tester with 20 years of experience and that's going to be very Channel friendly and partner friendly I can almost imagine so I have to ask you and thank you for calling the break calling out that breakdown and and segmentation that was good that was very helpful for me to understand but I want to follow up if you don't mind um what type of partners are you seeing the most traction with and why well I would say at the beginning typically you have the the innovators the early adapters typically Boutique size of Partners they start because they they are always looking for Innovation and those are the ones you they start in the beginning so we have a wide range of Partners having mostly even um managed by the owner of the company so uh they immediately understand okay there is the value and they can change their offering they're changing their offering in terms of penetration testing because they can do more pen tests and they can then add other ones or we have those ones who offer 10 tests services but they did not have their own pen testers so they had to go out on the open market and Source paint testing experts um to get the pen test at a particular customer done and now with node zero they're totally independent they can't go out and say okay Mr customer here's the here's the service that's it we turn it on and within an hour you're up and running totally yeah and those pen tests are usually expensive and hard to do now it's right in line with the sales delivery pretty interesting for a partner absolutely but on the other hand side we are not killing the pain testers business we do something we're providing with no tiers I would call something like the foundation work the foundational work of having an an ongoing penetration testing of the infrastructure the operating system and the pen testers by themselves they can concentrate in the future on things like application pen testing for example so those Services which we we're not touching so we're not killing the paint tester Market we're just taking away the ongoing um let's say foundation work call it that way yeah yeah that was one of my questions I was going to ask is there's a lot of interest in this autonomous pen testing one because it's expensive to do because those skills are required are in need and they're expensive so you kind of cover the entry level and the blockers that are in there I've seen people say to me this pen test becomes a blocker for getting things done so there's been a lot of interest in the autonomous pen testing and for organizations to have that posture and it's an overseas issue too because now you have that that ongoing thing so can you explain that particular benefit for an organization to have that continuously verifying an organization's posture yep certainly so I would say um typically you are you you have to do your patches you have to bring in new versions of operating systems of different Services of uh um operating systems of some components and and they are always bringing new vulnerabilities the difference here is that with node zero we are telling the customer or the partner package we're telling them which are the executable vulnerabilities because previously they might have had um a vulnerability scanner so this vulnerability scanner brought up hundreds or even thousands of cves but didn't say anything about which of them are vulnerable really executable and then you need an expert digging in one cve after the other finding out is it is it really executable yes or no and that is where you need highly paid experts which we have a shortage so with notes here now we can say okay we tell you exactly which ones are the ones you should work on because those are the ones which are executable we rank them accordingly to the risk level how easily they can be used and by a sudden and then the good thing is convert it or indifference to the traditional penetration test they don't have to wait for a year for the next pain test to find out if the fixing was effective they weren't just the next scan and say Yes closed vulnerability is gone the time is really valuable and if you're doing any devops Cloud native you're always pushing new things so pen test ongoing pen testing is actually a benefit just in general as a kind of hygiene so really really interesting solution really bring that global scale is going to be a new new coverage area for us for sure I have to ask you if you don't mind answering what particular region are you focused on or plan to Target for this next phase of growth well at this moment we are concentrating on the countries inside the European Union Plus the United Kingdom um but we are and they are of course logically I'm based into Frankfurt area that means we cover more or less the countries just around so it's like the total dark region Germany Switzerland Austria plus the Netherlands but we also already have Partners in the nordics like in Finland or in Sweden um so it's it's it it's rapidly we have Partners already in the UK and it's rapidly growing so I'm for example we are now starting with some activities in Singapore um um and also in the in the Middle East area um very important we uh depending on let's say the the way how to do business currently we try to concentrate on those countries where we can have um let's say um at least English as an accepted business language great is there any particular region you're having the most success with right now is it sounds like European Union's um kind of first wave what's them yes that's the first definitely that's the first wave and now we're also getting the uh the European instance up and running it's clearly our commitment also to the market saying okay we know there are certain dedicated uh requirements and we take care of this and and we're just launching it we're building up this one uh the instance um in the AWS uh service center here in Frankfurt also with some dedicated Hardware internet in a data center in Frankfurt where we have with the date six by the way uh the highest internet interconnection bandwidth on the planet so we have very short latency to wherever you are on on the globe that's a great that's a great call outfit benefit too I was going to ask that what are some of the benefits your partners are seeing in emea and Asia Pacific well I would say um the the benefits is for them it's clearly they can they can uh talk with customers and can offer customers penetration testing which they before and even didn't think about because it penetrates penetration testing in a traditional way was simply too expensive for them too complex the preparation time was too long um they didn't have even have the capacity uh to um to support a pain an external pain tester now with this service you can go in and say even if they Mr customer we can do a test with you in a couple of minutes within we have installed the docker container within 10 minutes we have the pen test started that's it and then we just wait and and I would say that is we'll we are we are seeing so many aha moments then now because on the partner side when they see node zero the first time working it's like this wow that is great and then they work out to customers and and show it to their typically at the beginning mostly the friendly customers like wow that's great I need that and and I would say um the feedback from the partners is that is a service where I do not have to evangelize the customer everybody understands penetration testing I don't have to say describe what it is they understand the customer understanding immediately yes penetration testing good about that I know I should do it but uh too complex too expensive now with the name is for example as an mssp service provided from one of our partners but it's getting easy yeah it's great and it's great great benefit there I mean I gotta say I'm a huge fan of what you guys are doing I like this continuous automation that's a major benefit to anyone doing devops or any kind of modern application development this is just a godsend for them this is really good and like you said the pen testers that are doing it they were kind of coming down from their expertise to kind of do things that should have been automated they get to focus on the bigger ticket items that's a really big point so we free them we free the pain testers for the higher level elements of the penetration testing segment and that is typically the application testing which is currently far away from being automated yeah and that's where the most critical workloads are and I think this is the nice balance congratulations on the international expansion of the program and thanks for coming on this special presentation really I really appreciate it thank you you're welcome okay this is thecube special presentation you know check out pen test automation International expansion Horizon 3 dot AI uh really Innovative solution in our next segment Chris Hill sector head for strategic accounts will discuss the power of Horizon 3.ai and Splunk in action you're watching the cube the leader in high tech Enterprise coverage foreign [Music] [Music] welcome back everyone to the cube and Horizon 3.ai special presentation I'm John Furrier host of thecube we're with Chris Hill sector head for strategic accounts and federal at Horizon 3.ai a great Innovative company Chris great to see you thanks for coming on thecube yeah like I said uh you know great to meet you John long time listener first time caller so excited to be here with you guys yeah we were talking before camera you had Splunk back in 2013 and I think 2012 was our first splunk.com and boy man you know talk about being in the right place at the right time now we're at another inflection point and Splunk continues to be relevant um and continuing to have that data driving Security in that interplay and your CEO former CTO of his plug as well at Horizon who's been on before really Innovative product you guys have but you know yeah don't wait for a breach to find out if you're logging the right data this is the topic of this thread Splunk is very much part of this new international expansion announcement uh with you guys tell us what are some of the challenges that you see where this is relevant for the Splunk and Horizon AI as you guys expand uh node zero out internationally yeah well so across so you know my role uh within Splunk it was uh working with our most strategic accounts and so I looked back to 2013 and I think about the sales process like working with with our small customers you know it was um it was still very siled back then like I was selling to an I.T team that was either using this for it operations um we generally would always even say yeah although we do security we weren't really designed for it we're a log management tool and we I'm sure you remember back then John we were like sort of stepping into the security space and and the public sector domain that I was in you know security was 70 of what we did when I look back to sort of uh the transformation that I was witnessing in that digital transformation um you know when I look at like 2019 to today you look at how uh the IT team and the security teams are being have been forced to break down those barriers that they used to sort of be silent away would not commute communicate one you know the security guys would be like oh this is my box I.T you're not allowed in today you can't get away with that and I think that the value that we bring to you know and of course Splunk has been a huge leader in that space and continues to do Innovation across the board but I think what we've we're seeing in the space and I was talking with Patrick Coughlin the SVP of uh security markets about this is that you know what we've been able to do with Splunk is build a purpose-built solution that allows Splunk to eat more data so Splunk itself is ulk know it's an ingest engine right the great reason people bought it was you could build these really fast dashboards and grab intelligence out of it but without data it doesn't do anything right so how do you drive and how do you bring more data in and most importantly from a customer perspective how do you bring the right data in and so if you think about what node zero and what we're doing in a horizon 3 is that sure we do pen testing but because we're an autonomous pen testing tool we do it continuously so this whole thought I'd be like oh crud like my customers oh yeah we got a pen test coming up it's gonna be six weeks the week oh yeah you know and everyone's gonna sit on their hands call me back in two months Chris we'll talk to you then right not not a real efficient way to test your environment and shoot we saw that with Uber this week right um you know and that's a case where we could have helped oh just right we could explain the Uber thing because it was a contractor just give a quick highlight of what happened so you can connect the doctor yeah no problem so um it was uh I got I think it was yeah one of those uh you know games where they would try and test an environment um and with the uh pen tester did was he kept on calling them MFA guys being like I need to reset my password we need to set my right password and eventually the um the customer service guy said okay I'm resetting it once he had reset and bypassed the multi-factor authentication he then was able to get in and get access to the building area that he was in or I think not the domain but he was able to gain access to a partial part of that Network he then paralleled over to what I would assume is like a VA VMware or some virtual machine that had notes that had all of the credentials for logging into various domains and So within minutes they had access and that's the sort of stuff that we do you know a lot of these tools like um you know you think about the cacophony of tools that are out there in a GTA architect architecture right I'm gonna get like a z-scale or I'm going to have uh octum and I have a Splunk I've been into the solar system I mean I don't mean to name names we have crowdstriker or Sentinel one in there it's just it's a cacophony of things that don't work together they weren't designed work together and so we have seen so many times in our business through our customer support and just working with customers when we do their pen tests that there will be 5 000 servers out there three are misconfigured those three misconfigurations will create the open door because remember the hacker only needs to be right once the defender needs to be right all the time and that's the challenge and so that's what I'm really passionate about what we're doing uh here at Horizon three I see this my digital transformation migration and security going on which uh we're at the tip of the spear it's why I joined sey Hall coming on this journey uh and just super excited about where the path's going and super excited about the relationship with Splunk I get into more details on some of the specifics of that but um you know well you're nailing I mean we've been doing a lot of things on super cloud and this next gen environment we're calling it next gen you're really seeing devops obviously devsecops has already won the it role has moved to the developer shift left is an indicator of that it's one of the many examples higher velocity code software supply chain you hear these things that means that it is now in the developer hands it is replaced by the new Ops data Ops teams and security where there's a lot of horizontal thinking to your point about access there's no more perimeter huge 100 right is really right on things one time you know to get in there once you're in then you can hang out move around move laterally big problem okay so we get that now the challenges for these teams as they are transitioning organizationally how do they figure out what to do okay this is the next step they already have Splunk so now they're kind of in transition while protecting for a hundred percent ratio of success so how would you look at that and describe the challenge is what do they do what is it what are the teams facing with their data and what's next what are they what are they what action do they take so let's use some vernacular that folks will know so if I think about devsecops right we both know what that means that I'm going to build security into the app it normally talks about sec devops right how am I building security around the perimeter of what's going inside my ecosystem and what are they doing and so if you think about what we're able to do with somebody like Splunk is we can pen test the entire environment from Soup To Nuts right so I'm going to test the end points through to its I'm going to look for misconfigurations I'm going to I'm going to look for um uh credential exposed credentials you know I'm going to look for anything I can in the environment again I'm going to do it at light speed and and what what we're doing for that SEC devops space is to you know did you detect that we were in your environment so did we alert Splunk or the Sim that there's someone in the environment laterally moving around did they more importantly did they log us into their environment and when do they detect that log to trigger that log did they alert on us and then finally most importantly for every CSO out there is going to be did they stop us and so that's how we we do this and I think you when speaking with um stay Hall before you know we've come up with this um boils but we call it fine fix verifying so what we do is we go in is we act as the attacker right we act in a production environment so we're not going to be we're a passive attacker but we will go in on credentialed on agents but we have to assume to have an assumed breach model which means we're going to put a Docker container in your environment and then we're going to fingerprint the environment so we're going to go out and do an asset survey now that's something that's not something that Splunk does super well you know so can Splunk see all the assets do the same assets marry up we're going to log all that data and think and then put load that into this long Sim or the smoke logging tools just to have it in Enterprise right that's an immediate future ad that they've got um and then we've got the fix so once we've completed our pen test um we are then going to generate a report and we can talk about these in a little bit later but the reports will show an executive summary the assets that we found which would be your asset Discovery aspect of that a fix report and the fixed report I think is probably the most important one it will go down and identify what we did how we did it and then how to fix that and then from that the pen tester or the organization should fix those then they go back and run another test and then they validate like a change detection environment to see hey did those fixes taste play take place and you know snehaw when he was the CTO of jsoc he shared with me a number of times about it's like man there would be 15 more items on next week's punch sheet that we didn't know about and it's and it has to do with how we you know how they were uh prioritizing the cves and whatnot because they would take all CBDs it was critical or non-critical and it's like we are able to create context in that environment that feeds better information into Splunk and whatnot that brings that brings up the efficiency for Splunk specifically the teams out there by the way the burnout thing is real I mean this whole I just finished my list and I got 15 more or whatever the list just can keeps growing how did node zero specifically help Splunk teams be more efficient like that's the question I want to get at because this seems like a very scale way for Splunk customers and teams service teams to be more so the question is how does node zero help make Splunk specifically their service teams be more efficient so so today in our early interactions we're building customers we've seen are five things um and I'll start with sort of identifying the blind spots right so kind of what I just talked about with you did we detect did we log did we alert did they stop node zero right and so I would I put that you know a more Layman's third grade term and if I was going to beat a fifth grader at this game would be we can be the sparring partner for a Splunk Enterprise customer a Splunk Essentials customer someone using Splunk soar or even just an Enterprise Splunk customer that may be a small shop with three people and just wants to know where am I exposed so by creating and generating these reports and then having um the API that actually generates the dashboard they can take all of these events that we've logged and log them in and then where that then comes in is number two is how do we prioritize those logs right so how do we create visibility to logs that that um are have critical impacts and again as I mentioned earlier not all cves are high impact regard and also not all or low right so if you daisy chain a bunch of low cves together boom I've got a mission critical AP uh CPE that needs to be fixed now such as a credential moving to an NT box that's got a text file with a bunch of passwords on it that would be very bad um and then third would be uh verifying that you have all of the hosts so one of the things that splunk's not particularly great at and they'll literate themselves they don't do asset Discovery so dude what assets do we see and what are they logging from that um and then for from um for every event that they are able to identify one of the cool things that we can do is actually create this low code no code environment so they could let you know Splunk customers can use Splunk sword to actually triage events and prioritize that event so where they're being routed within it to optimize the Sox team time to Market or time to triage any given event obviously reducing MTR and then finally I think one of the neatest things that we'll be seeing us develop is um our ability to build glass cables so behind me you'll see one of our triage events and how we build uh a Lockheed Martin kill chain on that with a glass table which is very familiar to the community we're going to have the ability and not too distant future to allow people to search observe on those iocs and if people aren't familiar with it ioc it's an instant of a compromise so that's a vector that we want to drill into and of course who's better at Drilling in the data and smoke yeah this is a critter this is an awesome Synergy there I mean I can see a Splunk customer going man this just gives me so much more capability action actionability and also real understanding and I think this is what I want to dig into if you don't mind understanding that critical impact okay is kind of where I see this coming got the data data ingest now data's data but the question is what not to log you know where are things misconfigured these are critical questions so can you talk about what it means to understand critical impact yeah so I think you know going back to the things that I just spoke about a lot of those cves where you'll see um uh low low low and then you daisy chain together and they're suddenly like oh this is high now but then your other impact of like if you're if you're a Splunk customer you know and I had it I had several of them I had one customer that you know terabytes of McAfee data being brought in and it was like all right there's a lot of other data that you probably also want to bring but they could only afford wanted to do certain data sets because that's and they didn't know how to prioritize or filter those data sets and so we provide that opportunity to say hey these are the critical ones to bring in but there's also the ones that you don't necessarily need to bring in because low cve in this case really does mean low cve like an ILO server would be one that um that's the print server uh where the uh your admin credentials are on on like a printer and so there will be credentials on that that's something that a hacker might go in to look at so although the cve on it is low is if you daisy chain with somebody that's able to get into that you might say Ah that's high and we would then potentially rank it giving our AI logic to say that's a moderate so put it on the scale and we prioritize those versus uh of all of these scanners just going to give you a bunch of CDs and good luck and translating that if I if I can and tell me if I'm wrong that kind of speaks to that whole lateral movement that's it challenge right print serve a great example looks stupid low end who's going to want to deal with the print server oh but it's connected into a critical system there's a path is that kind of what you're getting at yeah I use Daisy Chain I think that's from the community they came from uh but it's just a lateral movement it's exactly what they're doing in those low level low critical lateral movements is where the hackers are getting in right so that's the beauty thing about the uh the Uber example is that who would have thought you know I've got my monthly Factor authentication going in a human made a mistake we can't we can't not expect humans to make mistakes we're fallible right the reality is is once they were in the environment they could have protected themselves by running enough pen tests to know that they had certain uh exposed credentials that would have stopped the breach and they did not had not done that in their environment and I'm not poking yeah but it's an interesting Trend though I mean it's obvious if sometimes those low end items are also not protected well so it's easy to get at from a hacker standpoint but also the people in charge of them can be fished easily or spearfished because they're not paying attention because they don't have to no one ever told them hey be careful yeah for the community that I came from John that's exactly how they they would uh meet you at a uh an International Event um introduce themselves as a graduate student these are National actor States uh would you mind reviewing my thesis on such and such and I was at Adobe at the time that I was working on this instead of having to get the PDF they opened the PDF and whoever that customer was launches and I don't know if you remember back in like 2008 time frame there was a lot of issues around IP being by a nation state being stolen from the United States and that's exactly how they did it and John that's or LinkedIn hey I want to get a joke we want to hire you double the salary oh I'm gonna click on that for sure you know yeah right exactly yeah the one thing I would say to you is like uh when we look at like sort of you know because I think we did 10 000 pen tests last year is it's probably over that now you know we have these sort of top 10 ways that we think and find people coming into the environment the funniest thing is that only one of them is a cve related vulnerability like uh you know you guys know what they are right so it's it but it's it's like two percent of the attacks are occurring through the cves but yeah there's all that attention spent to that and very little attention spent to this pen testing side which is sort of this continuous threat you know monitoring space and and this vulnerability space where I think we play a such an important role and I'm so excited to be a part of the tip of the spear on this one yeah I'm old enough to know the movie sneakers which I loved as a you know watching that movie you know professional hackers are testing testing always testing the environment I love this I got to ask you as we kind of wrap up here Chris if you don't mind the the benefits to Professional Services from this Alliance big news Splunk and you guys work well together we see that clearly what are what other benefits do Professional Services teams see from the Splunk and Horizon 3.ai Alliance so if you're I think for from our our from both of our uh Partners uh as we bring these guys together and many of them already are the same partner right uh is that uh first off the licensing model is probably one of the key areas that we really excel at so if you're an end user you can buy uh for the Enterprise by the number of IP addresses you're using um but uh if you're a partner working with this there's solution ways that you can go in and we'll license as to msps and what that business model on msps looks like but the unique thing that we do here is this C plus license and so the Consulting plus license allows like a uh somebody a small to mid-sized to some very large uh you know Fortune 100 uh consulting firms use this uh by buying into a license called um Consulting plus where they can have unlimited uh access to as many IPS as they want but you can only run one test at a time and as you can imagine when we're going and hacking passwords and um checking hashes and decrypting hashes that can take a while so but for the right customer it's it's a perfect tool and so I I'm so excited about our ability to go to market with uh our partners so that we understand ourselves understand how not to just sell to or not tell just to sell through but we know how to sell with them as a good vendor partner I think that that's one thing that we've done a really good job building bring it into the market yeah I think also the Splunk has had great success how they've enabled uh partners and Professional Services absolutely you know the services that layer on top of Splunk are multi-fold tons of great benefits so you guys Vector right into that ride that way with friction and and the cool thing is that in you know in one of our reports which could be totally customized uh with someone else's logo we're going to generate you know so I I used to work in another organization it wasn't Splunk but we we did uh you know pen testing as for for customers and my pen testers would come on site they'd do the engagement and they would leave and then another release someone would be oh shoot we got another sector that was breached and they'd call you back you know four weeks later and so by August our entire pen testings teams would be sold out and it would be like well even in March maybe and they're like no no I gotta breach now and and and then when they do go in they go through do the pen test and they hand over a PDF and they pack on the back and say there's where your problems are you need to fix it and the reality is that what we're going to generate completely autonomously with no human interaction is we're going to go and find all the permutations of anything we found and the fix for those permutations and then once you've fixed everything you just go back and run another pen test it's you know for what people pay for one pen test they can have a tool that does that every every Pat patch on Tuesday and that's on Wednesday you know triage throughout the week green yellow red I wanted to see the colors show me green green is good right not red and one CIO doesn't want who doesn't want that dashboard right it's it's exactly it and we can help bring I think that you know I'm really excited about helping drive this with the Splunk team because they get that they understand that it's the green yellow red dashboard and and how do we help them find more green uh so that the other guys are in red yeah and get in the data and do the right thing and be efficient with how you use the data know what to look at so many things to pay attention to you know the combination of both and then go to market strategy real brilliant congratulations Chris thanks for coming on and sharing um this news with the detail around the Splunk in action around the alliance thanks for sharing John my pleasure thanks look forward to seeing you soon all right great we'll follow up and do another segment on devops and I.T and security teams as the new new Ops but and super cloud a bunch of other stuff so thanks for coming on and our next segment the CEO of horizon 3.aa will break down all the new news for us here on thecube you're watching thecube the leader in high tech Enterprise coverage [Music] yeah the partner program for us has been fantastic you know I think prior to that you know as most organizations most uh uh most Farmers most mssps might not necessarily have a a bench at all for penetration testing uh maybe they subcontract this work out or maybe they do it themselves but trying to staff that kind of position can be incredibly difficult for us this was a differentiator a a new a new partner a new partnership that allowed us to uh not only perform services for our customers but be able to provide a product by which that they can do it themselves so we work with our customers in a variety of ways some of them want more routine testing and perform this themselves but we're also a certified service provider of horizon 3 being able to perform uh penetration tests uh help review the the data provide color provide analysis for our customers in a broader sense right not necessarily the the black and white elements of you know what was uh what's critical what's high what's medium what's low what you need to fix but are there systemic issues this has allowed us to onboard new customers this has allowed us to migrate some penetration testing services to us from from competitors in the marketplace But ultimately this is occurring because the the product and the outcome are special they're unique and they're effective our customers like what they're seeing they like the routineness of it many of them you know again like doing this themselves you know being able to kind of pen test themselves parts of their networks um and the the new use cases right I'm a large organization I have eight to ten Acquisitions per year wouldn't it be great to have a tool to be able to perform a penetration test both internal and external of that acquisition before we integrate the two companies and maybe bringing on some risk it's a very effective partnership uh one that really is uh kind of taken our our Engineers our account Executives by storm um you know this this is a a partnership that's been very valuable to us [Music] a key part of the value and business model at Horizon 3 is enabling Partners to leverage node zero to make more revenue for themselves our goal is that for sixty percent of our Revenue this year will be originated by partners and that 95 of our Revenue next year will be originated by partners and so a key to that strategy is making us an integral part of your business models as a partner a key quote from one of our partners is that we enable every one of their business units to generate Revenue so let's talk about that in a little bit more detail first is that if you have a pen test Consulting business take Deloitte as an example what was six weeks of human labor at Deloitte per pen test has been cut down to four days of Labor using node zero to conduct reconnaissance find all the juicy interesting areas of the of the Enterprise that are exploitable and being able to go assess the entire organization and then all of those details get served up to the human to be able to look at understand and determine where to probe deeper so what you see in that pen test Consulting business is that node zero becomes a force multiplier where those Consulting teams were able to cover way more accounts and way more IPS within those accounts with the same or fewer consultants and so that directly leads to profit margin expansion for the Penn testing business itself because node 0 is a force multiplier the second business model here is if you're an mssp as an mssp you're already making money providing defensive cyber security operations for a large volume of customers and so what they do is they'll license node zero and use us as an upsell to their mssb business to start to deliver either continuous red teaming continuous verification or purple teaming as a service and so in that particular business model they've got an additional line of Revenue where they can increase the spend of their existing customers by bolting on node 0 as a purple team as a service offering the third business model or customer type is if you're an I.T services provider so as an I.T services provider you make money installing and configuring security products like Splunk or crowdstrike or hemio you also make money reselling those products and you also make money generating follow-on services to continue to harden your customer environments and so for them what what those it service providers will do is use us to verify that they've installed Splunk correctly improved to their customer that Splunk was installed correctly or crowdstrike was installed correctly using our results and then use our results to drive follow-on services and revenue and then finally we've got the value-added reseller which is just a straight up reseller because of how fast our sales Cycles are these vars are able to typically go from cold email to deal close in six to eight weeks at Horizon 3 at least a single sales engineer is able to run 30 to 50 pocs concurrently because our pocs are very lightweight and don't require any on-prem customization or heavy pre-sales post sales activity so as a result we're able to have a few amount of sellers driving a lot of Revenue and volume for us well the same thing applies to bars there isn't a lot of effort to sell the product or prove its value so vars are able to sell a lot more Horizon 3 node zero product without having to build up a huge specialist sales organization so what I'm going to do is talk through uh scenario three here as an I.T service provider and just how powerful node zero can be in driving additional Revenue so in here think of for every one dollar of node zero license purchased by the IT service provider to do their business it'll generate ten dollars of additional revenue for that partner so in this example kidney group uses node 0 to verify that they have installed and deployed Splunk correctly so Kitty group is a Splunk partner they they sell it services to install configure deploy and maintain Splunk and as they deploy Splunk they're going to use node 0 to attack the environment and make sure that the right logs and alerts and monitoring are being handled within the Splunk deployment so it's a way of doing QA or verifying that Splunk has been configured correctly and that's going to be internally used by kidney group to prove the quality of their services that they've just delivered then what they're going to do is they're going to show and leave behind that node zero Report with their client and that creates a resell opportunity for for kidney group to resell node 0 to their client because their client is seeing the reports and the results and saying wow this is pretty amazing and those reports can be co-branded where it's a pen testing report branded with kidney group but it says powered by Horizon three under it from there kidney group is able to take the fixed actions report that's automatically generated with every pen test through node zero and they're able to use that as the starting point for a statement of work to sell follow-on services to fix all of the problems that node zero identified fixing l11r misconfigurations fixing or patching VMware or updating credentials policies and so on so what happens is node 0 has found a bunch of problems the client often lacks the capacity to fix and so kidney group can use that lack of capacity by the client as a follow-on sales opportunity for follow-on services and finally based on the findings from node zero kidney group can look at that report and say to the customer you know customer if you bought crowdstrike you'd be able to uh prevent node Zero from attacking and succeeding in the way that it did for if you bought humano or if you bought Palo Alto networks or if you bought uh some privileged access management solution because of what node 0 was able to do with credential harvesting and attacks and so as a result kidney group is able to resell other security products within their portfolio crowdstrike Falcon humano Polito networks demisto Phantom and so on based on the gaps that were identified by node zero and that pen test and what that creates is another feedback loop where kidney group will then go use node 0 to verify that crowdstrike product has actually been installed and configured correctly and then this becomes the cycle of using node 0 to verify a deployment using that verification to drive a bunch of follow-on services and resell opportunities which then further drives more usage of the product now the way that we licensed is that it's a usage-based license licensing model so that the partner will grow their node zero Consulting plus license as they grow their business so for example if you're a kidney group then week one you've got you're going to use node zero to verify your Splunk install in week two if you have a pen testing business you're going to go off and use node zero to be a force multiplier for your pen testing uh client opportunity and then if you have an mssp business then in week three you're going to use node zero to go execute a purple team mssp offering for your clients so not necessarily a kidney group but if you're a Deloitte or ATT these larger companies and you've got multiple lines of business if you're Optive for instance you all you have to do is buy one Consulting plus license and you're going to be able to run as many pen tests as you want sequentially so now you can buy a single license and use that one license to meet your week one client commitments and then meet your week two and then meet your week three and as you grow your business you start to run multiple pen tests concurrently so in week one you've got to do a Splunk verify uh verify Splunk install and you've got to run a pen test and you've got to do a purple team opportunity you just simply expand the number of Consulting plus licenses from one license to three licenses and so now as you systematically grow your business you're able to grow your node zero capacity with you giving you predictable cogs predictable margins and once again 10x additional Revenue opportunity for that investment in the node zero Consulting plus license my name is Saint I'm the co-founder and CEO here at Horizon 3. I'm going to talk to you today about why it's important to look at your Enterprise Through The Eyes of an attacker the challenge I had when I was a CIO in banking the CTO at Splunk and serving within the Department of Defense is that I had no idea I was Secure until the bad guys had showed up am I logging the right data am I fixing the right vulnerabilities are my security tools that I've paid millions of dollars for actually working together to defend me and the answer is I don't know does my team actually know how to respond to a breach in the middle of an incident I don't know I've got to wait for the bad guys to show up and so the challenge I had was how do we proactively verify our security posture I tried a variety of techniques the first was the use of vulnerability scanners and the challenge with vulnerability scanners is being vulnerable doesn't mean you're exploitable I might have a hundred thousand findings from my scanner of which maybe five or ten can actually be exploited in my environment the other big problem with scanners is that they can't chain weaknesses together from machine to machine so if you've got a thousand machines in your environment or more what a vulnerability scanner will do is tell you you have a problem on machine one and separately a problem on machine two but what they can tell you is that an attacker could use a load from machine one plus a low from machine two to equal to critical in your environment and what attackers do in their tactics is they chain together misconfigurations dangerous product defaults harvested credentials and exploitable vulnerabilities into attack paths across different machines so to address the attack pads across different machines I tried layering in consulting-based pen testing and the issue is when you've got thousands of hosts or hundreds of thousands of hosts in your environment human-based pen testing simply doesn't scale to test an infrastructure of that size moreover when they actually do execute a pen test and you get the report oftentimes you lack the expertise within your team to quickly retest to verify that you've actually fixed the problem and so what happens is you end up with these pen test reports that are incomplete snapshots and quickly going stale and then to mitigate that problem I tried using breach and attack simulation tools and the struggle with these tools is one I had to install credentialed agents everywhere two I had to write my own custom attack scripts that I didn't have much talent for but also I had to maintain as my environment changed and then three these types of tools were not safe to run against production systems which was the the majority of my attack surface so that's why we went off to start Horizon 3. so Tony and I met when we were in Special Operations together and the challenge we wanted to solve was how do we do infrastructure security testing at scale by giving the the power of a 20-year pen testing veteran into the hands of an I.T admin a network engineer in just three clicks and the whole idea is we enable these fixers The Blue Team to be able to run node Zero Hour pen testing product to quickly find problems in their environment that blue team will then then go off and fix the issues that were found and then they can quickly rerun the attack to verify that they fixed the problem and the whole idea is delivering this without requiring custom scripts be developed without requiring credential agents be installed and without requiring the use of external third-party consulting services or Professional Services self-service pen testing to quickly Drive find fix verify there are three primary use cases that our customers use us for the first is the sock manager that uses us to verify that their security tools are actually effective to verify that they're logging the right data in Splunk or in their Sim to verify that their managed security services provider is able to quickly detect and respond to an attack and hold them accountable for their slas or that the sock understands how to quickly detect and respond and measuring and verifying that or that the variety of tools that you have in your stack most organizations have 130 plus cyber security tools none of which are designed to work together are actually working together the second primary use case is proactively hardening and verifying your systems this is when the I that it admin that network engineer they're able to run self-service pen tests to verify that their Cisco environment is installed in hardened and configured correctly or that their credential policies are set up right or that their vcenter or web sphere or kubernetes environments are actually designed to be secure and what this allows the it admins and network Engineers to do is shift from running one or two pen tests a year to 30 40 or more pen tests a month and you can actually wire those pen tests into your devops process or into your detection engineering and the change management processes to automatically trigger pen tests every time there's a change in your environment the third primary use case is for those organizations lucky enough to have their own internal red team they'll use node zero to do reconnaissance and exploitation at scale and then use the output as a starting point for the humans to step in and focus on the really hard juicy stuff that gets them on stage at Defcon and so these are the three primary use cases and what we'll do is zoom into the find fix verify Loop because what I've found in my experience is find fix verify is the future operating model for cyber security organizations and what I mean here is in the find using continuous pen testing what you want to enable is on-demand self-service pen tests you want those pen tests to find attack pads at scale spanning your on-prem infrastructure your Cloud infrastructure and your perimeter because attackers don't only state in one place they will find ways to chain together a perimeter breach a credential from your on-prem to gain access to your cloud or some other permutation and then the third part in continuous pen testing is attackers don't focus on critical vulnerabilities anymore they know we've built vulnerability Management Programs to reduce those vulnerabilities so attackers have adapted and what they do is chain together misconfigurations in your infrastructure and software and applications with dangerous product defaults with exploitable vulnerabilities and through the collection of credentials through a mix of techniques at scale once you've found those problems the next question is what do you do about it well you want to be able to prioritize fixing problems that are actually exploitable in your environment that truly matter meaning they're going to lead to domain compromise or domain user compromise or access your sensitive data the second thing you want to fix is making sure you understand what risk your crown jewels data is exposed to where is your crown jewels data is in the cloud is it on-prem has it been copied to a share drive that you weren't aware of if a domain user was compromised could they access that crown jewels data you want to be able to use the attacker's perspective to secure the critical data you have in your infrastructure and then finally as you fix these problems you want to quickly remediate and retest that you've actually fixed the issue and this fine fix verify cycle becomes that accelerator that drives purple team culture the third part here is verify and what you want to be able to do in the verify step is verify that your security tools and processes in people can effectively detect and respond to a breach you want to be able to integrate that into your detection engineering processes so that you know you're catching the right security rules or that you've deployed the right configurations you also want to make sure that your environment is adhering to the best practices around systems hardening in cyber resilience and finally you want to be able to prove your security posture over a time to your board to your leadership into your regulators so what I'll do now is zoom into each of these three steps so when we zoom in to find here's the first example using node 0 and autonomous pen testing and what an attacker will do is find a way to break through the perimeter in this example it's very easy to misconfigure kubernetes to allow an attacker to gain remote code execution into your on-prem kubernetes environment and break through the perimeter and from there what the attacker is going to do is conduct Network reconnaissance and then find ways to gain code execution on other machines in the environment and as they get code execution they start to dump credentials collect a bunch of ntlm hashes crack those hashes using open source and dark web available data as part of those attacks and then reuse those credentials to log in and laterally maneuver throughout the environment and then as they loudly maneuver they can reuse those credentials and use credential spraying techniques and so on to compromise your business email to log in as admin into your cloud and this is a very common attack and rarely is a CV actually needed to execute this attack often it's just a misconfiguration in kubernetes with a bad credential policy or password policy combined with bad practices of credential reuse across the organization here's another example of an internal pen test and this is from an actual customer they had 5 000 hosts within their environment they had EDR and uba tools installed and they initiated in an internal pen test on a single machine from that single initial access point node zero enumerated the network conducted reconnaissance and found five thousand hosts were accessible what node 0 will do under the covers is organize all of that reconnaissance data into a knowledge graph that we call the Cyber terrain map and that cyber Terrain map becomes the key data structure that we use to efficiently maneuver and attack and compromise your environment so what node zero will do is they'll try to find ways to get code execution reuse credentials and so on in this customer example they had Fortinet installed as their EDR but node 0 was still able to get code execution on a Windows machine from there it was able to successfully dump credentials including sensitive credentials from the lsas process on the Windows box and then reuse those credentials to log in as domain admin in the network and once an attacker becomes domain admin they have the keys to the kingdom they can do anything they want so what happened here well it turns out Fortinet was misconfigured on three out of 5000 machines bad automation the customer had no idea this had happened they would have had to wait for an attacker to show up to realize that it was misconfigured the second thing is well why didn't Fortinet stop the credential pivot in the lateral movement and it turned out the customer didn't buy the right modules or turn on the right services within that particular product and we see this not only with Ford in it but we see this with Trend Micro and all the other defensive tools where it's very easy to miss a checkbox in the configuration that will do things like prevent credential dumping the next story I'll tell you is attackers don't have to hack in they log in so another infrastructure pen test a typical technique attackers will take is man in the middle uh attacks that will collect hashes so in this case what an attacker will do is leverage a tool or technique called responder to collect ntlm hashes that are being passed around the network and there's a variety of reasons why these hashes are passed around and it's a pretty common misconfiguration but as an attacker collects those hashes then they start to apply techniques to crack those hashes so they'll pass the hash and from there they will use open source intelligence common password structures and patterns and other types of techniques to try to crack those hashes into clear text passwords so here node 0 automatically collected hashes it automatically passed the hashes to crack those credentials and then from there it starts to take the domain user user ID passwords that it's collected and tries to access different services and systems in your Enterprise in this case node 0 is able to successfully gain access to the Office 365 email environment because three employees didn't have MFA configured so now what happens is node 0 has a placement and access in the business email system which sets up the conditions for fraud lateral phishing and other techniques but what's especially insightful here is that 80 of the hashes that were collected in this pen test were cracked in 15 minutes or less 80 percent 26 of the user accounts had a password that followed a pretty obvious pattern first initial last initial and four random digits the other thing that was interesting is 10 percent of service accounts had their user ID the same as their password so VMware admin VMware admin web sphere admin web Square admin so on and so forth and so attackers don't have to hack in they just log in with credentials that they've collected the next story here is becoming WS AWS admin so in this example once again internal pen test node zero gets initial access it discovers 2 000 hosts are network reachable from that environment if fingerprints and organizes all of that data into a cyber Terrain map from there it it fingerprints that hpilo the integrated lights out service was running on a subset of hosts hpilo is a service that is often not instrumented or observed by security teams nor is it easy to patch as a result attackers know this and immediately go after those types of services so in this case that ILO service was exploitable and were able to get code execution on it ILO stores all the user IDs and passwords in clear text in a particular set of processes so once we gain code execution we were able to dump all of the credentials and then from there laterally maneuver to log in to the windows box next door as admin and then on that admin box we're able to gain access to the share drives and we found a credentials file saved on a share Drive from there it turned out that credentials file was the AWS admin credentials file giving us full admin authority to their AWS accounts not a single security alert was triggered in this attack because the customer wasn't observing the ILO service and every step thereafter was a valid login in the environment and so what do you do step one patch the server step two delete the credentials file from the share drive and then step three is get better instrumentation on privileged access users and login the final story I'll tell is a typical pattern that we see across the board with that combines the various techniques I've described together where an attacker is going to go off and use open source intelligence to find all of the employees that work at your company from there they're going to look up those employees on dark web breach databases and other forms of information and then use that as a starting point to password spray to compromise a domain user all it takes is one employee to reuse a breached password for their Corporate email or all it takes is a single employee to have a weak password that's easily guessable all it takes is one and once the attacker is able to gain domain user access in most shops domain user is also the local admin on their laptop and once your local admin you can dump Sam and get local admin until M hashes you can use that to reuse credentials again local admin on neighboring machines and attackers will start to rinse and repeat then eventually they're able to get to a point where they can dump lsas or by unhooking the anti-virus defeating the EDR or finding a misconfigured EDR as we've talked about earlier to compromise the domain and what's consistent is that the fundamentals are broken at these shops they have poor password policies they don't have least access privilege implemented active directory groups are too permissive where domain admin or domain user is also the local admin uh AV or EDR Solutions are misconfigured or easily unhooked and so on and what we found in 10 000 pen tests is that user Behavior analytics tools never caught us in that lateral movement in part because those tools require pristine logging data in order to work and also it becomes very difficult to find that Baseline of normal usage versus abnormal usage of credential login another interesting Insight is there were several Marquee brand name mssps that were defending our customers environment and for them it took seven hours to detect and respond to the pen test seven hours the pen test was over in less than two hours and so what you had was an egregious violation of the service level agreements that that mssp had in place and the customer was able to use us to get service credit and drive accountability of their sock and of their provider the third interesting thing is in one case it took us seven minutes to become domain admin in a bank that bank had every Gucci security tool you could buy yet in 7 minutes and 19 seconds node zero started as an unauthenticated member of the network and was able to escalate privileges through chaining and misconfigurations in lateral movement and so on to become domain admin if it's seven minutes today we should assume it'll be less than a minute a year or two from now making it very difficult for humans to be able to detect and respond to that type of Blitzkrieg attack so that's in the find it's not just about finding problems though the bulk of the effort should be what to do about it the fix and the verify so as you find those problems back to kubernetes as an example we will show you the path here is the kill chain we took to compromise that environment we'll show you the impact here is the impact or here's the the proof of exploitation that we were able to use to be able to compromise it and there's the actual command that we executed so you could copy and paste that command and compromise that cubelet yourself if you want and then the impact is we got code execution and we'll actually show you here is the impact this is a critical here's why it enabled perimeter breach affected applications will tell you the specific IPS where you've got the problem how it maps to the miter attack framework and then we'll tell you exactly how to fix it we'll also show you what this problem enabled so you can accurately prioritize why this is important or why it's not important the next part is accurate prioritization the hardest part of my job as a CIO was deciding what not to fix so if you take SMB signing not required as an example by default that CVSs score is a one out of 10. but this misconfiguration is not a cve it's a misconfig enable an attacker to gain access to 19 credentials including one domain admin two local admins and access to a ton of data because of that context this is really a 10 out of 10. you better fix this as soon as possible however of the seven occurrences that we found it's only a critical in three out of the seven and these are the three specific machines and we'll tell you the exact way to fix it and you better fix these as soon as possible for these four machines over here these didn't allow us to do anything of consequence so that because the hardest part is deciding what not to fix you can justifiably choose not to fix these four issues right now and just add them to your backlog and surge your team to fix these three as quickly as possible and then once you fix these three you don't have to re-run the entire pen test you can select these three and then one click verify and run a very narrowly scoped pen test that is only testing this specific issue and what that creates is a much faster cycle of finding and fixing problems the other part of fixing is verifying that you don't have sensitive data at risk so once we become a domain user we're able to use those domain user credentials and try to gain access to databases file shares S3 buckets git repos and so on and help you understand what sensitive data you have at risk so in this example a green checkbox means we logged in as a valid domain user we're able to get read write access on the database this is how many records we could have accessed and we don't actually look at the values in the database but we'll show you the schema so you can quickly characterize that pii data was at risk here and we'll do that for your file shares and other sources of data so now you can accurately articulate the data you have at risk and prioritize cleaning that data up especially data that will lead to a fine or a big news issue so that's the find that's the fix now we're going to talk about the verify the key part in verify is embracing and integrating with detection engineering practices so when you think about your layers of security tools you've got lots of tools in place on average 130 tools at any given customer but these tools were not designed to work together so when you run a pen test what you want to do is say did you detect us did you log us did you alert on us did you stop us and from there what you want to see is okay what are the techniques that are commonly used to defeat an environment to actually compromise if you look at the top 10 techniques we use and there's far more than just these 10 but these are the most often executed nine out of ten have nothing to do with cves it has to do with misconfigurations dangerous product defaults bad credential policies and it's how we chain those together to become a domain admin or compromise a host so what what customers will do is every single attacker command we executed is provided to you as an attackivity log so you can actually see every single attacker command we ran the time stamp it was executed the hosts it executed on and how it Maps the minor attack tactics so our customers will have are these attacker logs on one screen and then they'll go look into Splunk or exabeam or Sentinel one or crowdstrike and say did you detect us did you log us did you alert on us or not and to make that even easier if you take this example hey Splunk what logs did you see at this time on the VMware host because that's when node 0 is able to dump credentials and that allows you to identify and fix your logging blind spots to make that easier we've got app integration so this is an actual Splunk app in the Splunk App Store and what you can come is inside the Splunk console itself you can fire up the Horizon 3 node 0 app all of the pen test results are here so that you can see all of the results in one place and you don't have to jump out of the tool and what you'll show you as I skip forward is hey there's a pen test here are the critical issues that we've identified for that weaker default issue here are the exact commands we executed and then we will automatically query into Splunk all all terms on between these times on that endpoint that relate to this attack so you can now quickly within the Splunk environment itself figure out that you're missing logs or that you're appropriately catching this issue and that becomes incredibly important in that detection engineering cycle that I mentioned earlier so how do our customers end up using us they shift from running one pen test a year to 30 40 pen tests a month oftentimes wiring us into their deployment automation to automatically run pen tests the other part that they'll do is as they run more pen tests they find more issues but eventually they hit this inflection point where they're able to rapidly clean up their environment and that inflection point is because the red and the blue teams start working together in a purple team culture and now they're working together to proactively harden their environment the other thing our customers will do is run us from different perspectives they'll first start running an RFC 1918 scope to see once the attacker gained initial access in a part of the network that had wide access what could they do and then from there they'll run us within a specific Network segment okay from within that segment could the attacker break out and gain access to another segment then they'll run us from their work from home environment could they Traverse the VPN and do something damaging and once they're in could they Traverse the VPN and get into my cloud then they'll break in from the outside all of these perspectives are available to you in Horizon 3 and node zero as a single SKU and you can run as many pen tests as you want if you run a phishing campaign and find that an intern in the finance department had the worst phishing behavior you can then inject their credentials and actually show the end-to-end story of how an attacker fished gained credentials of an intern and use that to gain access to sensitive financial data so what our customers end up doing is running multiple attacks from multiple perspectives and looking at those results over time I'll leave you two things one is what is the AI in Horizon 3 AI those knowledge graphs are the heart and soul of everything that we do and we use machine learning reinforcement techniques reinforcement learning techniques Markov decision models and so on to be able to efficiently maneuver and analyze the paths in those really large graphs we also use context-based scoring to prioritize weaknesses and we're also able to drive collective intelligence across all of the operations so the more pen tests we run the smarter we get and all of that is based on our knowledge graph analytics infrastructure that we have finally I'll leave you with this was my decision criteria when I was a buyer for my security testing strategy what I cared about was coverage I wanted to be able to assess my on-prem cloud perimeter and work from home and be safe to run in production I want to be able to do that as often as I wanted I want to be able to run pen tests in hours or days not weeks or months so I could accelerate that fine fix verify loop I wanted my it admins and network Engineers with limited offensive experience to be able to run a pen test in a few clicks through a self-service experience and not have to install agent and not have to write custom scripts and finally I didn't want to get nickeled and dimed on having to buy different types of attack modules or different types of attacks I wanted a single annual subscription that allowed me to run any type of attack as often as I wanted so I could look at my Trends in directions over time so I hope you found this talk valuable uh we're easy to find and I look forward to seeing seeing you use a product and letting our results do the talking when you look at uh you know kind of the way no our pen testing algorithms work is we dynamically select uh how to compromise an environment based on what we've discovered and the goal is to become a domain admin compromise a host compromise domain users find ways to encrypt data steal sensitive data and so on but when you look at the the top 10 techniques that we ended up uh using to compromise environments the first nine have nothing to do with cves and that's the reality cves are yes a vector but less than two percent of cves are actually used in a compromise oftentimes it's some sort of credential collection credential cracking uh credential pivoting and using that to become an admin and then uh compromising environments from that point on so I'll leave this up for you to kind of read through and you'll have the slides available for you but I found it very insightful that organizations and ourselves when I was a GE included invested heavily in just standard vulnerability Management Programs when I was at DOD that's all disa cared about asking us about was our our kind of our cve posture but the attackers have adapted to not rely on cves to get in because they know that organizations are actively looking at and patching those cves and instead they're chaining together credentials from one place with misconfigurations and dangerous product defaults in another to take over an environment a concrete example is by default vcenter backups are not encrypted and so as if an attacker finds vcenter what they'll do is find the backup location and there are specific V sender MTD files where the admin credentials are parsippled in the binaries so you can actually as an attacker find the right MTD file parse out the binary and now you've got the admin credentials for the vcenter environment and now start to log in as admin there's a bad habit by signal officers and Signal practitioners in the in the Army and elsewhere where the the VM notes section of a virtual image has the password for the VM well those VM notes are not stored encrypted and attackers know this and they're able to go off and find the VMS that are unencrypted find the note section and pull out the passwords for those images and then reuse those credentials across the board so I'll pause here and uh you know Patrick love you get some some commentary on on these techniques and other things that you've seen and what we'll do in the last say 10 to 15 minutes is uh is rolled through a little bit more on what do you do about it yeah yeah no I love it I think um I think this is pretty exhaustive what I like about what you've done here is uh you know we've seen we've seen double-digit increases in the number of organizations that are reporting actual breaches year over year for the last um for the last three years and it's often we kind of in the Zeitgeist we pegged that on ransomware which of course is like incredibly important and very top of mind um but what I like about what you have here is you know we're reminding the audience that the the attack surface area the vectors the matter um you know has to be more comprehensive than just thinking about ransomware scenarios yeah right on um so let's build on this when you think about your defense in depth you've got multiple security controls that you've purchased and integrated and you've got that redundancy if a control fails but the reality is that these security tools aren't designed to work together so when you run a pen test what you want to ask yourself is did you detect node zero did you log node zero did you alert on node zero and did you stop node zero and when you think about how to do that every single attacker command executed by node zero is available in an attacker log so you can now see you know at the bottom here vcenter um exploit at that time on that IP how it aligns to minor attack what you want to be able to do is go figure out did your security tools catch this or not and that becomes very important in using the attacker's perspective to improve your defensive security controls and so the way we've tried to make this easier back to like my my my the you know I bleed Green in many ways still from my smoke background is you want to be able to and what our customers do is hey we'll look at the attacker logs on one screen and they'll look at what did Splunk see or Miss in another screen and then they'll use that to figure out what their logging blind spots are and what that where that becomes really interesting is we've actually built out an integration into Splunk where there's a Splunk app you can download off of Splunk base and you'll get all of the pen test results right there in the Splunk console and from that Splunk console you're gonna be able to see these are all the pen tests that were run these are the issues that were found um so you can look at that particular pen test here are all of the weaknesses that were identified for that particular pen test and how they categorize out for each of those weaknesses you can click on any one of them that are critical in this case and then we'll tell you for that weakness and this is where where the the punch line comes in so I'll pause the video here for that weakness these are the commands that were executed on these endpoints at this time and then we'll actually query Splunk for that um for that IP address or containing that IP and these are the source types that surface any sort of activity so what we try to do is help you as quickly and efficiently as possible identify the logging blind spots in your Splunk environment based on the attacker's perspective so as this video kind of plays through you can see it Patrick I'd love to get your thoughts um just seeing so many Splunk deployments and the effectiveness of those deployments and and how this is going to help really Elevate the effectiveness of all of your Splunk customers yeah I'm super excited about this I mean I think this these kinds of purpose-built integration snail really move the needle for our customers I mean at the end of the day when I think about the power of Splunk I think about a product I was first introduced to 12 years ago that was an on-prem piece of software you know and at the time it sold on sort of Perpetual and term licenses but one made it special was that it could it could it could eat data at a speed that nothing else that I'd have ever seen you can ingest massively scalable amounts of data uh did cool things like schema on read which facilitated that there was this language called SPL that you could nerd out about uh and you went to a conference once a year and you talked about all the cool things you were splunking right but now as we think about the next phase of our growth um we live in a heterogeneous environment where our customers have so many different tools and data sources that are ever expanding and as you look at the as you look at the role of the ciso it's mind-blowing to me the amount of sources Services apps that are coming into the ciso span of let's just call it a span of influence in the last three years uh you know we're seeing things like infrastructure service level visibility application performance monitoring stuff that just never made sense for the security team to have visibility into you um at least not at the size and scale which we're demanding today um and and that's different and this isn't this is why it's so important that we have these joint purpose-built Integrations that um really provide more prescription to our customers about how do they walk on that Journey towards maturity what does zero to one look like what does one to two look like whereas you know 10 years ago customers were happy with platforms today they want integration they want Solutions and they want to drive outcomes and I think this is a great example of how together we are stepping to the evolving nature of the market and also the ever-evolving nature of the threat landscape and what I would say is the maturing needs of the customer in that environment yeah for sure I think especially if if we all anticipate budget pressure over the next 18 months due to the economy and elsewhere while the security budgets are not going to ever I don't think they're going to get cut they're not going to grow as fast and there's a lot more pressure on organizations to extract more value from their existing Investments as well as extracting more value and more impact from their existing teams and so security Effectiveness Fierce prioritization and automation I think become the three key themes of security uh over the next 18 months so I'll do very quickly is run through a few other use cases um every host that we identified in the pen test were able to score and say this host allowed us to do something significant therefore it's it's really critical you should be increasing your logging here hey these hosts down here we couldn't really do anything as an attacker so if you do have to make trade-offs you can make some trade-offs of your logging resolution at the lower end in order to increase logging resolution on the upper end so you've got that level of of um justification for where to increase or or adjust your logging resolution another example is every host we've discovered as an attacker we Expose and you can export and we want to make sure is every host we found as an attacker is being ingested from a Splunk standpoint a big issue I had as a CIO and user of Splunk and other tools is I had no idea if there were Rogue Raspberry Pi's on the network or if a new box was installed and whether Splunk was installed on it or not so now you can quickly start to correlate what hosts did we see and how does that reconcile with what you're logging from uh finally or second to last use case here on the Splunk integration side is for every single problem we've found we give multiple options for how to fix it this becomes a great way to prioritize what fixed actions to automate in your soar platform and what we want to get to eventually is being able to automatically trigger soar actions to fix well-known problems like automatically invalidating passwords for for poor poor passwords in our credentials amongst a whole bunch of other things we could go off and do and then finally if there is a well-known kill chain or attack path one of the things I really wish I could have done when I was a Splunk customer was take this type of kill chain that actually shows a path to domain admin that I'm sincerely worried about and use it as a glass table over which I could start to layer possible indicators of compromise and now you've got a great starting point for glass tables and iocs for actual kill chains that we know are exploitable in your environment and that becomes some super cool Integrations that we've got on the roadmap between us and the Splunk security side of the house so what I'll leave with actually Patrick before I do that you know um love to get your comments and then I'll I'll kind of leave with one last slide on this wartime security mindset uh pending you know assuming there's no other questions no I love it I mean I think this kind of um it's kind of glass table's approach to how do you how do you sort of visualize these workflows and then use things like sore and orchestration and automation to operationalize them is exactly where we see all of our customers going and getting away from I think an over engineered approach to soar with where it has to be super technical heavy with you know python programmers and getting more to this visual view of workflow creation um that really demystifies the power of Automation and also democratizes it so you don't have to have these programming languages in your resume in order to start really moving the needle on workflow creation policy enforcement and ultimately driving automation coverage across more and more of the workflows that your team is seeing yeah I think that between us being able to visualize the actual kill chain or attack path with you know think of a of uh the soar Market I think going towards this no code low code um you know configurable sore versus coded sore that's going to really be a game changer in improve or giving security teams a force multiplier so what I'll leave you with is this peacetime mindset of security no longer is sustainable we really have to get out of checking the box and then waiting for the bad guys to show up to verify that security tools are are working or not and the reason why we've got to really do that quickly is there are over a thousand companies that withdrew from the Russian economy over the past uh nine months due to the Ukrainian War there you should expect every one of them to be punished by the Russians for leaving and punished from a cyber standpoint and this is no longer about financial extortion that is ransomware this is about punishing and destroying companies and you can punish any one of these companies by going after them directly or by going after their suppliers and their Distributors so suddenly your attack surface is no more no longer just your own Enterprise it's how you bring your goods to Market and it's how you get your goods created because while I may not be able to disrupt your ability to harvest fruit if I can get those trucks stuck at the border I can increase spoilage and have the same effect and what we should expect to see is this idea of cyber-enabled economic Warfare where if we issue a sanction like Banning the Russians from traveling there is a cyber-enabled counter punch which is corrupt and destroy the American Airlines database that is below the threshold of War that's not going to trigger the 82nd Airborne to be mobilized but it's going to achieve the right effect ban the sale of luxury goods disrupt the supply chain and create shortages banned Russian oil and gas attack refineries to call a 10x spike in gas prices three days before the election this is the future and therefore I think what we have to do is shift towards a wartime mindset which is don't trust your security posture verify it see yourself Through The Eyes of the attacker build that incident response muscle memory and drive better collaboration between the red and the blue teams your suppliers and Distributors and your information uh sharing organization they have in place and what's really valuable for me as a Splunk customer was when a router crashes at that moment you don't know if it's due to an I.T Administration problem or an attacker and what you want to have are different people asking different questions of the same data and you want to have that integrated triage process of an I.T lens to that problem a security lens to that problem and then from there figuring out is is this an IT workflow to execute or a security incident to execute and you want to have all of that as an integrated team integrated process integrated technology stack and this is something that I very care I cared very deeply about as both a Splunk customer and a Splunk CTO that I see time and time again across the board so Patrick I'll leave you with the last word the final three minutes here and I don't see any open questions so please take us home oh man see how you think we spent hours and hours prepping for this together that that last uh uh 40 seconds of your talk track is probably one of the things I'm most passionate about in this industry right now uh and I think nist has done some really interesting work here around building cyber resilient organizations that have that has really I think helped help the industry see that um incidents can come from adverse conditions you know stress is uh uh performance taxations in the infrastructure service or app layer and they can come from malicious compromises uh Insider threats external threat actors and the more that we look at this from the perspective of of a broader cyber resilience Mission uh in a wartime mindset uh I I think we're going to be much better off and and will you talk about with operationally minded ice hacks information sharing intelligence sharing becomes so important in these wartime uh um situations and you know we know not all ice acts are created equal but we're also seeing a lot of um more ad hoc information sharing groups popping up so look I think I think you framed it really really well I love the concept of wartime mindset and um I I like the idea of applying a cyber resilience lens like if you have one more layer on top of that bottom right cake you know I think the it lens and the security lens they roll up to this concept of cyber resilience and I think this has done some great work there for us yeah you're you're spot on and that that is app and that's gonna I think be the the next um terrain that that uh that you're gonna see vendors try to get after but that I think Splunk is best position to win okay that's a wrap for this special Cube presentation you heard all about the global expansion of horizon 3.ai's partner program for their Partners have a unique opportunity to take advantage of their node zero product uh International go to Market expansion North America channel Partnerships and just overall relationships with companies like Splunk to make things more comprehensive in this disruptive cyber security world we live in and hope you enjoyed this program all the videos are available on thecube.net as well as check out Horizon 3 dot AI for their pen test Automation and ultimately their defense system that they use for testing always the environment that you're in great Innovative product and I hope you enjoyed the program again I'm John Furrier host of the cube thanks for watching

(lively music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage in San Francisco for VMware Explorer 22 formerly VMworld, Dave 12 years we've been covering VMware's annual conference. Going next level explores bigger theme, Multi-cloud another inflection point for VMware. And again at the center of it is the partners Zia Yusuf is here senior vice president strategic ecosystem and industry solutions. You're the, you're, you got the keys to the kingdom for VMware, welcome to theCube. >> It's a pleasure, I mean, you guys are a legend here. This is my first time here. So, it's a pleasure and excited to chat with you. >> Well, great to have you, every single year, since 2010 we've always had great commentary and discussion and sometimes contentious discussion around the role of partners. Visa V, VMware's value proposition, VMware dominant and the enterprise data center, everyone knows that. Dominant and hybrid was first there, everyone knows that. Now going to the next level, the customer stay, they stay with VMware, they don't really leave. They still got a great loyal base but now the enterprise is going NextGen cloud native. The partners are energized with the conversations we're hearing is huge. There's changes of roles is clarity on value proposition. Monetization is hoppin'. It's great stuff, what's going on? You're new, but you have a view of this before. Take us through your what's going on in the partner network, what's the state of the union? >> Yeah, I think, thanks for the question. I think maybe just step back a second right, the word partners is a big word. It covers all kinds of things. VMware has had a rich history of partnerships you know, mostly technology related partnerships. So much of our products depend on other partners, OEM partners, and so on. We've also had a rich history of our channel. So, as you look at different channel partners as you look at going through different parts of the segment SMB and so on, in a cloud context, based on what's happening we needed to take an integrated ecosystem approach. That's the word I use, right. And for me it's, it's a little bit like a spider's web. Like no single strand in the web is that strong but when you put it together thoughtfully in a very deliberate way. That's what an integrated ecosystem strategy. And so we've got our VCP partners, longstanding history that machine continues. We've got our channel partners and OEM partners that machinery continues obviously Dell strategic partner, significant business. The parts of the puzzle that I've been focusing on is five other different pieces. So first of course, is our hyper scale partnerships long history with AWS, very successful history. We have GCVE with GCP. We announced, I think three, four months ago that GCP was joining our VMware cloud universal and a big announcement yesterday about Microsoft doing the same. And hopefully we extend that. So, as we work with this hyper scaler six or seven of these partners, it's a, as you can imagine kind of a multidimensional chess game, if you will a little bit competitive mostly cooperative and stuff, right. The GSI is very exciting piece of it. The essentials that Deloitte, Deloitte announced a new business unit on VMware, ACL did the same. That energy level has really gone up. You see it at the show here as well. We recognize that these significant SI's play a huge role in the decision making process with customers. And we want to enable them to build significant VMware businesses. It's a different game from that perspective. Last thing I'm point out is, industry and verticals. Right I mean, this is not being necessarily an area because of the layer of the stack we've been in. Obviously Telco is an end to end business unit for us. We have products, we have a go to market on Telco, public sector to some degree because you need all these three letter agencies and the security and compliance. But as you look at financial services as you look at retail, as you look at healthcare we need to be aware of the workload we need especially on modern apps, especially on the edge. So we kind of doubling down on some of our vertical capabilities. So, all of those things are connected as well, right. The SI to the hyper scale partners in a vertical context. >> What's the biggest change that you've seen? Because we've observed some partners are leaning out as they change their business. And VMware has got new partners coming in, leaning in. So you got mentioned, Dave mentioned Telco and you got new use cases with edge and multi-cloud so you know, some people kind of maybe age out or change their strategy, some double down the core partner network, and then new ones come in. What's been the biggest change, if you can look at that holistically? >> Yeah, it's a great question, right? Because it's so multidimensional and there is no such thing as a GSI global system because they build products. Sometimes they act as a reseller, they're a solution provider. Also they provide services. So as their business model changes, we have to adjust how we engage with them. We can't put them in nice clean buckets. And that's what I'm doing with my colleagues here is how do we really enable them? And one of the things, I mean, I've done this type of stuff, I was at SAP for many years. We need to figure out how do we make them successful? Not just, this is what VMware wants you to do. We need to understand their business model and how do we fit into that? 'Cause if they grow, then we grow with that. And that is honestly a little, it's a subtle point, but it's a little bit of a nuanced. >> Yeah, it's very nuanced, but you have to nail that. You got to overlay. >> 100% >> The strategy where the enablement is technically or product wise, economics and conflict. (John laughing) >> And profitably, if they're profitably is important to us it's not just their growth. >> So Zia, I want to test the premise on you, something, John and I have been working on this notion of super cloud. And we did an event earlier this month, but one of the aspects that's kind of nuance and futuristic is if I'm a, let's say a financial services company and I'm going through a digital transformation I would be looking strategically at what, say Amazon did taking it's internal IT and then pointing at the world. I would say, I have data. I have tools, I have software, I have expertise that's really unique and could be value add. And I would be thinking, how do I monetize that, create my own cloud. And I'm actually just going to throw it into a public cloud to do that. I've got mainframes running, I've got Oracle stuff on Prem. I'm not going to shift that stuff into the cloud and maybe some of it, but I've got transaction systems and proprietary data. And a lot of it is running on VMware and I've got cloud stuff too. I would be looking at, okay, how do I build my own cloud and put my data, my tooling, my software in front of a new ecosystem, my own ecosystem that I can you know monetize. Are you seeing- >> Without spending the CapEx. >> Yeah, without having to build data centers? Right, exactly. I want to take advantage of the gift that the hyper scalers are given. Are you seeing any activity bubbling up in that regard? >> It's a really, it's a really interesting question. And I think the terminology that we've used around cloud smart kind of goes into that. So let me take what you said. >> Okay please, yeah. >> And frame it in a slightly different way. You can standardize on public clouds and everybody's using the same thing. You're using the same services, and so on. Theoretically that could lose some of your differentiation. Right, I mean, especially for financial services companies that have built so much of their you know, trading test down to the milli, milli, millisecond and how do they do that, and so on. So, I think you have something there right. So, as they look at their technology and software strategy, yes there's cost reduction aspects of it. There's refactoring aspects of it that hygiene that needs to be done as Rughu talked about from this cloud chaos to cloud smart, if you will but then how do you differentiate on the business processes? How do you differentiate that then down into the workloads? And I think that's where to use an old term. It takes a village, right, you've got the system integrator that's providing this stuff. You've got other strategy firms like the BCGs and McKinseys of the world that have huge influence now. Then you've got technology players that are coming into that. And I think the cloud smart approach is to do exactly what you're saying. It's not just the refactoring, it's not just movement to the cloud. How do you retain your competitive edge from the processes the models, the thinking that you've built up over many years. So, I don't know if it's super cloud or what that means, but that at the end of the day, this is about business processes. At the end of the day, this is about having a competitive edge in the market and I think you could do it. >> It's industry cloud, right? >> It's, that's a good way to put it. >> Yeah. >> I think Industry cloud is a good way. >> Why is there security cloud, Why isn't there an insurance cloud? Why's there a FinTech cloud? So I mean if you look at Goldman Sachs capital one. >> Right. >> There, CapEx is handled by AWS. Snowflake built their entire business on AWS. Didn't spend the dime on CapEx. Well, they spent a lot of operating expense for that CapEx and the fees, but still they became successful. And then the rest is history. So, I think people are seeing this idea of I'll ride that back on the CapEx of the hyper scalers and then use the tooling from the partner network and what's available. To then, cobble together in an architectural engineered way, distributed computing way, a new way to do things. Okay, so if you believe that, which we do, then you say, oh, it's on the balance sheet. So, what we've been hearing from companies is like, "Hey it's going to be on the balance sheet", I better have an income statement impact on the top line. So, you start to see behavior change at the customers not IT powering the business and the back office and terminals and some app. >> Crosscutting. >> It's like, no, no, no this is a digital business. So, the integration of balance sheet income statement on the economics is driving a lot of the behavior at the customers. So we see customers thinking this way and it's like we've never seen this level of business model refactoring as well as partner vendor selection, product technology mix at the same time. >> And VMware. >> At this level. >> Need the connective tissue between the hyper scalers in the ecosystem and actually provide those cross cloud connections. >> Yeah. >> You know, to the extent there's a business case there, that's what we're trying to of squint through. Is it going to be hybrid with on-prem in one cloud or is there an advantage of going cross clouds beyond just avoiding lock in you know, to take advantage of global infrastructure? >> So and then the next question is the Tam then bigger which means the partners are better? >> Yeah right. >> Participate in that. >> Yeah, I think, and we look at economics of this, right? I mean, there's a huge emphasis on cost, right. Cost, and I completely get that. I think, as I've talked to customers both now that I'm here but before advising a range of companies the innovation process, the time to impact is equally important all right as you compete. There's no point in just getting your cost down. If you're then getting beaten up in the market and you're not able to differentiate with new digital services. And this is where call it super cloud, call it industry cloud. We need to connect up to the business processes and the business impact and not just in my view the cost infrastructure piece of it. >> Yeah. And that we can't do on our own, we're not an apps company. So we're, you're not SAP, we're not Oracle, but we need to work with those players to make sure that their workloads are optimized in the right cloud in the right configuration. And that is a job to be done as opposed to just let's take it to town. >> And there's clearly a technology business case, especially if we're working with companies like VMware who's going to help me you know, simplify. >> Right. >> My move to the multi-cloud but there's also a business and economic impact in that. Even if it's not, if it could be simple as if I partner with Microsoft I'm going to do more business right if I'm one of these industry clouds. So I see that as another potential tailwind, it's really, it's like when Dreesen says all your companies are software companies, to me all companies are cloud companies, now increasingly. >> Look the difference between cloud and apps and then stuff, I mean like. >> Yeah, it's all. >> It's like you know there's used to be infrastructure and then apps company and so on. We need to deliver with our ecosystem partners and integrated solution and solution with a big S not just the technology solution but the broader, I mean look at the change management. >> Yeah, yeah. >> We talked about culture, I mean, if you don't get that piece right and the change management piece. >> Everything, yeah. >> You know the rest of it is history. >> Well and it's got to be delivered as a service, >> It has to be. >> Which is huge implications as to how you deal with change management. >> And this goes back to my kind of first comment is I really try and think of this by architecting the ecosystem. I don't like the word alliances. Right I mean, let's say kind of a one to one relationship. You know, let's do an agreement, let's go have dinner, but architecting the ecosystem the spiders web, who are the different players how can we compliment each other? And if it, Deloitte and a Microsoft want to do amazing business together related to VMware technology I want to encourage that. And so those third party Connections. >> You guys your contextualizing the ecosystem, basically. And I think from a customers standpoint that's a benefit to them, in my opinion in fact, Dave, remember at our supercloud.world event URL supercloud.world is the plug for the site. They can check it out. One of the comments from the cloudarati panel was we had a title this session called the innovators dilemma you know question mark you know . >> Best book ever written. >> Yeah, yeah. And so the, one of the panels said, it shouldn't be, we should change it to the integrators dilemma because what's happening is that integration is now standard table stakes and, but integrating the right things now matters, right? So, integration for integration sake isn't necessarily the end game anymore. >> And this is where. >> And this kind of where you're getting at with the spider's web is that integrating properly is a solution mindset. >> And look, I'm integrating also, you know have to bring in data from that perspective. Right, at the end of the day data being the new oil, if you will, the integration allows that data to flow to the right place at the right time to make the right decision. Now, we are not doing all of those pieces but we are certainly enabling that. And as you especially start looking at what we can do on the edge and what we can do in a retail store and a factory and so on those kinds of things come together. >> Okay, Zia take some time. We got a couple minutes left, only two minutes left, I want you to get some commentary directly to the audience around what specifically you're doubling down on. That's new that you're investing in on the partner network or your partner strategy. What is a steady state that's being nurtured and farmed or whatever word you want to use, but here's our core thing. Here's the area of improvement we're going to be in you know, cranking the handle on take us through that. >> Sure. >> I know you got OAM, got telco, got new things going on. >> Yeah so, maybe a couple of things right. >> lay it all out. >> First of all it has to be linked to VMware strategy. So as we transition on this journey to subscription saas ARR, we need to bring our ecosystem along to do that. That has business model implications that has implications on how we engage with them, how we define success how we value things. So that's an important journey. Secondly, is we need to do a better job of enabling our partners. Right, I mean, we have our partner connected. We do a pretty good job on the channel side. We need to do a better job on the GSIs is really understanding their business model, how they're engaging with their customers and provide them the technology the support, the financial resources, so that they can be successful. That's very important. Third is, to connect the dots on the ecosystem, right? I mean it's a, I've spent a lot of time in this event as well in joint meetings between system integrators and hyper scalers with our technology colleagues on Intel or NetApp or AMD. And these are companies that we have a rich history with. We're trying to connect, because that's how customers look at it. So, connecting the dots between the ecosystem super important to us, and then look, there's a change management journey within VMware. We also need to understand how we can engage with partners in a more productive, effective way. How do we scale this up? I believe, I think our leadership in Raghu and Sumit we are not going to succeed unless we have a profitable, engaged, passionate ecosystem around. >> Yeah I mean, they got to make money. They got to. >> Exactly. >> Be successful, have successful customers, their end customers your customers. Well, all good, question of where you're investing the most right now. If you had to put a kind of the pie chart together, I mean some of it's steady state like it's a machine, some of it's new like Telco for instance I mean here's. >> I think again, rich history on the channel side, we continue to invest there. Very valuable to go do that. I think some of these newer areas around the system integrators, especially the large ones, the Whipple's the HCLs, Deloittes essentials of the world, very important. The hyper scaler relationships directly leads into ARR. You saw the VMC cloud Universal will continue. >> We have Google on great props from Google. >> Yeah, We love it you guys. >> Yeah, and so look, I think we are not multi-cloud unless we go do this. Right I mean, Raghuram made a joke about this. We were single cloud and now we're multi-cloud, we want our customers to be able to procure these integrated solutions through VMware and our hyper scaler partners will continue to do that's when multi-cloud really become. And so the GTM motion, the discounting the commission structure all of that machinery is an important radio for me. >> Zia thank you so much for coming on theCube. I know you've been super busy. You got to go out and hit all the partners say hello, compressing you know, got to hit the pavement, say hello to everyone. >> It's been fantastic, the partners have too many, too many parties and so. (Interviewers laughing) But that's a fun part of my job, but appreciate your time. >> You got good stamina. >> Thanks Zia. >> So you got to have that in this game. Not about the faint of heart here at VMware. Zia thank you for coming on. >> Of course. >> This is the cube coverage, back after lunch. After the short break day two of three days of live coverage here in Moscone West on the street floor level of the event I'm John Furrier with Dave Alante. We'll be right back. (lively 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.

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Welcome back to the Cube's coverage. We're wrapping up day two, John furrier and Dave ante. We got some friends and colleagues, longtime friends, Crawford Del Pret is the president of IDC. Matt Eastwood is the senior vice president of infrastructure and cloud guys. Thanks for coming on spending time. Great to you guys. >>That's fun to do it. Awesome. >>Cravin I want to ask you, I, I think this correct me if I'm wrong, but this was your first physical directions as, as president. Is that true or did you do one in 2019? >>Uh, no, we did one in 20. We did, we did one in 20. I was president at the time and then, and then everything started, >>Well, how was directions this year? You must have been stoked to get back together. Yeah, >>It was great. I mean, it was actually pretty emotional, you know, it's, it's a community, right? I mean, we have a lot of customers that have been coming to that event for a long, long time and to stand up on the stage and look out and see people, you know, getting a little bit emotional and a lot of hugs and a lot of bringing people together. And this year in Boston, we were the first event really of any size that kind of came back. And when I kind of didn't see that coming in terms of how people, how ready people were to be together. Cause >>When did you did it April >>In Boston? Yeah, we did it March in March. Yeah, it was, it was, it was, it was a game day decision. I mean, we were, we had negotiated it, we were going back and forth and then I kind of made the call at the last minute, say, let's go and do it. And in Santa Clara, I felt like we were kind of opening up the crypt at the convention center. I mean, all the production people said, you know what? You guys were really the first event to be back. And attendance was really strong. You know, we, we, we got over a thousand. It was, it was really good. >>Good. It's always a fun when I was there. It was, it's a big deal. You guys prepare for it. Yeah. Some new faces up on the stage. Yeah. So, so Matt, um, you've been doing the circuit. I take it like, like all top analysts, super busy. Right. This is kind of end of the spring. I mean, I know it's summer, right. That's right. But, um, how do you look at, at discover relative some, some of the other events you've been at? >>So I think if you go back to what Crawford was just talking about our event in March, I mean, March was sort of the, the reopening and there was, I think people just felt so happy to be, to be back out there. You still get a little bit at, at these events. I mean, cuz for each, each company it's their first time back at it, but I think we're starting to get down what these events are gonna feel like going forward. Um, and it, I mean, there's good energy here. There's been a good attendance. I think the, the interest in getting back live and having face to face meetings is clearly strong. >>Yeah. I mean, this definitely shows that hybrids, the steady state, both events cloud. Yeah. Virtualization remotes. So what are you guys seeing with that hybrid mode? Just from a workforce, certainly people excited to get back together, but it's gonna continue. You're starting to see that digital piece. How is that impacting some of the, some of the customers you're tracking, who's winning and who's losing, coming out of the pandemic. What's the big picture look like? >>Yeah. I mean, if you, if you take a look at hybrid work, um, people are testing many, many, many different models. And I think as we move from a pandemic to an em, we're gonna have just waves and waves and waves of people needing that flexibility for a lot of different reasons, whether they have, uh, you know, preexisting conditions, whether they're just not comfortable, whether they have people who can't be vaccinated at home. So I think we're gonna be in this hybrid work for a long, long time. I do think though that we are gonna transition back into some kind of a normal, um, and I, and I think the big difference is that I think leaders back in the day, a long time ago, when people weren't coming into work, it was kind of like, oh, I know nothing's going on there. People aren't getting worked. And I think we're over that stage. Yeah. I think we're now into a stage where we know people can be productive. We know people can effectively work from home and now we're into the reason to be in the office. And the reason to be in the office is that collaboration, it's that mentoring it's that, you know, think about your 25 year old self. Do you wanna be staring at a windshield all day long and not kind of building those relationships? People want face to face, it's difficult. They want face >>To face and I would, and you guys had a great culture and it's a young culture. How are you handling it as an executive in terms of, is there a policy for hybrid or >>Yeah, so, so, so at IDC, what we did is we're in a pilot period and we've kind of said that the summertime is gonna be a pilot period and we've asked people, we're actually serving shocker, we're >>Serving, >>But we're, but we're, but, but we're actually asking people to work with their manager on what works for them. And then we'll come up with, you know, whether you are in, out of the office worker, which will be less than two days a hybrid worker, which will be three days or, uh, in, in the office, which is more than three days a week. And you know, we all know there's, there's, there's limitation, there's, there's, there's variability in that, but that's kind of what we're shooting for. And we'd like to be able to have that in place in the fall. >>Are you pretty much there? >>Yeah, I am. I, I am there three days a week. I I, Mondays and Fridays, unless, >>Because you got the CEO radius, right? Yeah. >><laugh>, <laugh> >>The same way I'm in the office, the smaller, smaller office. But so, uh, let's talk a little bit about the, the numbers we were chatting earlier, trying to squint through you guys are, you know, obviously the gold standard for what the market does, what happened in, you know, during the pandemic, what happened in 2021 and what do you expect to happen in, in 2022 in terms of it spending growth? >>Yeah. So this is, this is a crazy time, right? We've never seen this. You and I have a long history of, uh, of tracking this. So we saw in, in, in, in 2020, the market decelerated dramatically, um, the GDP went down to a negative like it always does in these cases, it was, you know, probably negative six in that, in that, in that kind of range for the first time, since I've been tracking it, which goes back over 30 years, tech didn't go negative tech went to about just under 3%. And then as we went to 2021, we saw, you know, everything kind of snap back, we saw tech go up to about 11% growth. And then of course we saw, you know, GDP come back to about a 4%, you know, ki kind of range growth. Now what's I think the story there is that companies and you saw this anecdotally everywhere companies leaned into tech, uh, company. >>You know, I think, you know, Matt, you have a great statistic that, you know, 80% of companies used COVID as their point to pivot into digital transformation, right. And to invest in a different way. And so what we saw now is that tech is now where I think companies need to focus. They need to invest in tech. They need to make people more productive with tech and it played out in the numbers now. So this year what's fascinating is we're looking at two Fastly different markets. We've got gasoline at $7 a gallon. We've got that affecting food prices. Uh, interesting fun fact recently it now costs over $1,000 to fill an 18 Wheeler. All right. Based on, I mean this just kind of can't continue. So you think about it, don't put the boat >>In the wall. Yeah. Yeah. >>Good, good, good, good luck. It's good. Yeah, exactly. <laugh> so a family has kind of this bag of money, right? And that bag of money goes up by maybe three, 4% every year, depending upon earnings. So that is sort of sloshing around. So if food and fuel and rent is taking up more gadgets and consumer tech are not, you know, you're gonna use that iPhone a little longer. You're gonna use that Android phone a little longer. You're gonna use that TV a little longer. So consumer tech is getting crushed, you know, really it's very, very, and you saw it immediately and ad spending, you've seen it in meta. You've seen it in Facebook. Consumer tech is doing very, very it's tough enterprise tech. We haven't been in the office for two and a half years. We haven't upgraded whether that be campus wifi, whether that be, uh, servers, whether that be, uh, commercial PCs, as much as we would have. So enterprise tech, we're seeing double digit order rates. We're seeing strong, strong demand. Um, we have combined that with a component shortage and you're seeing some enterprise companies with a quarter of backlog. I mean, that's, you know, really unheard at higher >>Prices, which >>Also, and therefore that drives that >>Drives. It shouldn't be that way. If there's a shortage of chips, it shouldn't be that way, >>But it is, but it is, but it is. And then you look at software and we saw this, you know, we've seen this in previous cycles, but we really saw it in the COVID downturn where, uh, in software, the stickiness of SaaS means that you just, you're not gonna take that stuff out. So the, the second half of last year we saw double digit rates in software surprise. We're seeing high single digit revenue growth in software now, so that we think is gonna sustain, which means that overall it demand. We expect to be between five and 6% this year. Okay, fine. We have a war going on. We have, you know, potentially, uh, a recession. We think if we do, it'll be with a lower case, R maybe you see a banded down to maybe 4% growth, but it's gonna grow this. >>Is it, is it both the structural change of the disruption of COVID plus the digital transformation yeah. Together? Or is it, >>I, I think you make a great point. Um, I, I, I think that we are entering a new era for tech. I think that, you know, Andrew's famous wall street journal oped 10 years ago, software is even world was absolutely correct. And now we're finding that software is, is eing into every nook and cranny people have to invest. They, they know disruptors are coming around every single corner. And if I'm not leaning into digital transformation, I'm dead. So >>The number of players in tech is, is growing, >>Cuz there's well, the number of players in tech number >>Industry's coming >>In. Yeah. The industry's coming in. So I think the interesting dynamic you're gonna see there is now we have high interest rates. Yeah. Which means that the price of funding these companies and buying them and putting data on is gonna get higher and higher, which means that I think you could, you could see another wave of consolidation. Mm-hmm <affirmative> because tech large install based tech companies are saying, oh, you know what? I like that now >>4 0 9 S are being reset too. That's another point. >>Yeah. I mean, so if you think about this, this transformation, right. So it's all about apps, absent data and differentiating and absent data. What the, the big winner the last couple years was cloud. And I would just say that if this is the first potential recession that we're talking about, where the cloud service providers. So I think a cloud as an operating model, not necessarily a destination, but for these cloud service providers, they've actually never experienced a slowdown. So how, and, and if you think about the numbers, 30% of, of the typical it budget is now quote, unquote cloud and 30% of all expenditures are it related. So there's a lot of exposure there. And I think you're gonna see a lot of, a lot of focus on how we can rationalize some of those investments. >>Well, that's a great point. I want to just double click on that. So yeah, the cloud did well during the pandemic. We saw that with SAS, have you guys tracked like the Tams of what got pulled forward? So the bit, a big discussion about something that pulled forward because of the pandemic, um, like zoom, for instance, obviously everyone's using zoom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Was there fake Tams? There was one, uh, couple analysts who were pointing out that some companies were hot during the pandemic will go away that that Tam doesn't really exist, but there's some that got pulled forward early. That's where the growth is. So is there a, is there a line between the, I call fake Tam or pulled forward TA that was only for the pandemic situationally, um, devices might be like virtual event, virtual event. Software was one, I know Hoppin got laid a lot of layoffs. And so that was kind of gone coming, coming and going. And you got SAS which got pulled forward. Yep. And it's not going away, but it's >>Sustaining. Yeah. Yeah. But it's, but, but it's sustaining, um, you know, I definitely think there was a, there was a lot of spending that absolutely got pulled forward. And I think it's really about CEO's ability to control expectations and to kind of message what it, what it looks like. Um, you know, I think I look, I, I, I think virtual event platforms probably have a role. I think you can, you can definitely, you know, raise your margins in the event, business, significantly using those platforms. There's a role for them. But if you were out there thinking that this thing was gonna continue, then you know, that that was unrealistic, you know, Dave, to, to your point on devices, I'm not necessarily, you know. Sure. I think, I think we definitely got ahead of our expectations and things like consumer PCs, those things will go back to historical growth >>Rates. Yeah. I mean, you got the install base is pretty young right now, but I think the one way to look at it too, is there was some technical debt brought in because people didn't necessarily expect that we'd be moving to a permanent hybrid state two years ago. So now we have to actually invest on both. We have to make, create a little bit more permanency around the hybrid world. And then also like Crawford's talking about the permanency of, of having an office and having people work in, in multiple modes. Yeah. It actually requires investment in both the office. And >>Also, so you're saying operationally, you gotta run the company and do the digital transformation to level up the hybrid. >>Yeah. Yeah. Just the way people work. Right. So, so, you know, you basically have to, I mean, even for like us internally, Crawford was saying, we're experimenting with what works for us. My team before the pandemic was like one third virtual. Now it's two third virtual, which means that all of our internal meetings are gonna be on, on teams or zoom. Right. Yeah. They're not gonna necessarily be, Hey, just coming to the office today, cuz two thirds of people aren't in the Boston area. >>Right. Matt, you said if you see cloud as an operating model, not necessarily a place. I remember when you were out, I was in the, on the, on the, on the zoom when, when first met Adam Celski yeah. Um, he said, you were asking him about, you know, the, the on-prem guys and he's like, nah, it's not cloud. And he kind of was very dismissive of it. Yeah. Yeah. I wanna get your take on, you know, what we're seeing with as Azure service GreenLake, apex, Cisco's got their version. IBM. Fewer is doing it. Is that cloud. >>I think if it's, I, I don't think all of it is by default. I think it is. If I actually think what HPE is doing is cloud, because it's really about how you present the services and how you allow customers to engage with the platform. So they're actually creating a cloud model. I think a lot of people get lost in the transition from, you know, CapEx to OPEX and the financing element of this. But the reality is what HPE is doing and they're sort of setting the standard. I think for the industry here is actually setting up what I would consider a cloud model. >>Well, in the early days of, of GreenLake, for sure it was more of a financial, you >>Know, it was kind of bespoke, right. But now you've got 70 services. And so you can, you can build that out. But >>You know, we were talking to Keith Townsend right after the keynote and we were sort of UN unpacking it a little bit. And I, I asked the question, you know, if you, if you had to pin this in terms of AWS's maturity, where are we? And the consensus was 2014 console filling, is that fair or unfair? >>Oh, that's a good question. I mean, um, I think it's, well, clouds come a long way, right? So it'd be, I, I, I think 20, fourteen's probably a little bit too far back because >>You have more modern tools I Kubernetes is. Yeah. >>And, but you also have, I would say the market still getting to a point of, of, of readiness and in terms of buying this way. So if you think about the HP's kind of strategy around edge, the core platform as a, as a service, you know, we're all big believers in edge and the apps follow the data and the data's being created in new locations and you gotta put the infrastructure there. And for an end user, there's a lot of risk there because they don't know how to actually plan for capacity at the edge. So they're gonna look to offload that, but this is a long term play to actually, uh, build out and deploy at the edge. It's not gonna happen tomorrow. It's a five, 10 year play. >>Yeah. I mean, I like the operating model. I'd agree with you, Matt, that if it's, if it's cloud operations, DevSecOps and all that, all that jazz it's cloud it's cloud operating and, and, and public cloud is a public cloud hyperscaler on premise. And the storage folks were presented. That's a single pane of glass. That's old school concepts, but cloud based. Yep. Shipping hardwares, auto figures. Yeah. That's the kind of consumption they're going for now. I like it. Then I, then they got the partner led thing is the partner piece. How do you guys see that? Because if I'm a partner, there's two things, wait a minute, am I at bottleneck to the direct self-service? Or is that an enabler to get more cash, to make more money? If I'm a partner. Cause you see what Essentia's doing with what they do with Amazon and Deloitte and et C. Yeah. You know, it's interesting, right? Like they've a channel partner, I'm making more cash. >>Yeah. I mean, well, and those channel partners are all in transition too. They're trying to yeah. Right. Figure out. Right, right. Are they, you know, what are their managed services gonna look like? You know, what kind of applications are they gonna stand up? They're they're not gonna just be >>Reselling, bought a big house in a boat. The box is not selling. I wanna ask you guys about growth because you know, the big three cloud, big four growing pick a number, I dunno, 30, 35% revenue big. And like you said, it's 30% of the business now. I think Dell's growing double digits. I don't know how much of that is sustainable. A lot of that is PCs, but still strong growth. Yep. I think Cisco has promised 9% >>In, in that. Right, right. >>About that. Something like that. I think IBM Arvin is at 6%. Yep. And I think HPE has said, Hey, we're gonna do three to 4%. Right. Which is so really sort of lagging and which I think a lot of people in wall street is like, okay, well that's not necessarily so compelling. Right. What does HPE have to do to double that growth? Or even triple that growth. >>Yeah. So they're gonna need, so, so obviously you're right. I mean, being able to show growth is Tanem out to this company getting, you know, more attention, more heat from, from investors. I think that they're rightly pointing to the triple digit growth that they've seen on green lake. I think if you look at the trailing, you know, 12 month bookings, you got over, you know, 7 billion, which means that in a year, you're gonna have a significant portion of the company is as a service. And you're gonna see that revenue that's rat being, you know, recognized over a series of months. So I think that this is sort of the classic SAS trough that we've seen applied to an infrastructure company where you're basically have to kind of be in the desert for a long time. But if they can, I think the most important number for HPE right now is that GreenLake booking snow. >>And if you look at that number and you see that number, you know, rapidly come down, which it hasn't, I mean off a very large number, you're still in triple digits. They will ultimately start to show revenue growth, um, in the business. And I think the one thing people are missing about HPE is there aren't, there are a lot of companies that want to build a platform, but they're small and nobody cares. And nobody let's say they throw a party and nobody comes. HP has such a significant installed base that if they do build a platform, they can attract partners to that platform. What I mean by that is partners that deliver services on GreenLake that they're not delivering. They have the girth to really start to change an industry and change the way stuff is being built. And that's the be they're making. And frankly, they are showing progress in that direction. >>So I buy that. But the one thing that concerns me is they kind of hide the ball on services. Right. And I, and I worry about that is like, is this a services kind of just, you know, same wine, new bottle or, >>Or, yeah. So, so I, I, I would argue that it's not about hiding the ball. It's about eliminating confusion of the marketplace. This is the company that bought EDS only to spin it off <laugh>. Okay. And so you don't wanna have a situation where you're getting back into services. >>Yeah. They're the only one >>They're product, not the only ones who does, I mean, look at the way IBM used to count and still >>I get it. I get it. But I think it's, it's really about clarity of mission. Well, I point next they are in the Ts business, absolutely. Point of it. It's important prop >>Drive for them at the top. Right. The global 50 say there's still a lot of uniqueness in what they want to buy. So there's definitely a lot of bespoke kind of delivery. That's still happening there. The real promise here is when you get into the global 2000 and yeah. And can start them to getting them to consume very standardized offers. And then the margins are, are healthy >>And they got they're what? Below 30, 33, 30 3%. I think 34% last quarter gross margin. Yeah. That that's solid. Just compare that with Dell is, I don't know. They're happy with 20, 21% of correct. You get that, which is, you know, I I'll come back. Go ahead. I want, I wanna ask >>Guys. No, I wanna, I wanna just, he said one thing I like, which was, I think he nailed it. They have such, um, big install base. They have a great channel. They know how to use it. Right. That's a real asset. Yeah. And Microsoft, I remember when their stock was trading at 26 when Baltimore was CEO. Yep. What they did with no, they had office and windows, so a little bit different. Yep. But similar strategy, leverage our install base, bring something up to them. That's what you're kind of connecting the >>Absolutely. You have this velocity, uh, machine with a significant girth that you can now move to a new model. They move that to a new model. To Matt's point. They lead the industry, they change the way large swath the customers buy and you will see it in steady revenue growth over time. Okay. So I just in that, well, >>So your point is the focus and there the right it's the right focus. And I would agree what's >>What's the other move. What's their other move, >>The problem. Triple digit booking growth off a number that gets bigger >>Inspired. Okay. >>Whats what's the scoreboard. Okay. Now they're go at the growth. That's the scoreboard. What are the signals? Are you looking at on the scoreboard Crawford and Matt in terms of success? What are the benchmarks? Is it ecosystem growth, number of services, triple growth. Yeah. What's the, what are some of the metrics that you guys are gonna be watching and we should be watching? >>Yeah. I mean, I dunno if >>You wanna jump in, I mean, I think ecosystem's really critical. Yeah. You want to, you want to have well and, and you need to sell both ways like HPE needs to be selling their technology on other cloud providers and vice versa. You need to have the VMs of the world on, you know, offering services on your platform and, and kind of capturing some, some motion off that. I think that's pretty critical. The channel definitely. I mean, you have to help and what you're gonna see happen there is there will be channel partners that succeed in transforming and succeeding and there'll be a lot that go away and that some, some of that's, uh, generational there'll be people that just kind of age outta the system and, and just go home. >>Yeah. Yeah. So I would argue it's, it's, it's, it's gonna be, uh, bookings growth rate. It's gonna be retention rate of the, of, of, of the customers, uh, that they have. And then it's gonna be that, that, um, you know, ultimately you're gonna see revenue, um, growth, and which is that revenue growth is gonna have to be correlated to the booking's growth for green lake cross. >>What's the Achilles heel on, on HPE. If you had to do the SWAT, what's the, what's the w for HPE that they really need to pay >>Attention to. I mean, they, they need to continue their relentless focus on cost, particularly in the, in the core compute, you know, segment they need to be, they need to be able to be as cost effective as possible while the higher profit dollars associated with GreenLake and other services come in and then increase the overall operating margin and gross margin >>Picture for the, I mean, I think the biggest thing is they just have, they have to continue the motion that they've been on. Right. And they've been consistent about that. Mm-hmm, <affirmative> what you see where others have, have kind of slipped up is when you go to, to customers and you present the, the OPEX as a service and the traditional CapEx side by side, and the customers put in this position of trying to detangle what's in that OPEX service, you don't wanna do that obviously. And, and HP has not done that, but we've seen others kind of slip up. And, but >>A lot of companies still wanna buy CapEx. Right. Absolutely liquid. And, and I think, >>But you shouldn't do a, you shouldn't do that bake off by putting those two offers out. You should basically ascertain what they want to do. >>What's kind of what Dell does. Right. Hey, how, what do you want? We got this, we got >>This on one hand, we got this, the, we got that, right. Uh, the two hand sales rep, no, this CapEx. Thing's interesting. And if you're Amazon and Azure and, and GCP, what are they thinking right now? Cause remember what, four years ago outpost was launched, which essentially hardware. Yeah. This is cloud operating model. Yep. Yeah. They're essentially bringing outpost. This is what they got basically is Amazon and Azure, like, is this ABL on the radar for them? How would you, what, what are they thinking in your mind if we're on, if we're in their office, in their brain trust, are they laughing? Are they like saying, oh, they're scared. Is this real threat >>Opportunity? I, I, I mean, I wouldn't say they're laughing at all. I, I would say they're probably discounting a little bit and saying, okay, fine. You know, that's a strategy that a traditional hardware company is moving to. But I think if you look underneath the covers, you know, two years ago it was, you know, pretty basic stuff they were offering. But now when you start getting into some, you know, HPC is a service, you start getting into data fabric, you start getting into some of the more, um, sophisticated services that they're offering. And, and I think what's interesting about HP. What my, my take is that they're not gonna go after the 250 services the Amazon's offering, they're gonna basically have a portfolio of services that really focus on the core use cases of their infrastructure set. And, and I think one of the danger things, one, one of the, one of the red flags would be, if they start going way up the stack and wanting to offer the entire application stack, that would be like a big flashing warning sign, cuz it's not their sweet spot. It's not, not what they have. >>So machine learning, machine learning and quantum, okay. One you can argue might be up the stack machine learning quantum should be in their wheelhouse. >>I would argue machine learning is not up the stack because what they would focus on is inference. They'd focus on learning. If they came out and said, machine learning all the way up to the, you know, what a, what, what a drug discovery company needs to do. >>So they're bringing it down. >>Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, I think they're focusing on that middle layer, right? That, that, that data layer. And I think that helping companies manage their data make more sense outta their data structure, their data that's core to what they wanna do. >>I, I feel as though what they're doing now is table stakes. Honestly, I do. I do feel like, okay, Hey finally, you know, I say the same thing about apex, you >>Know, we finally got, >>It's like, okay guys, the >>Party. Great. Welcome to the, >>But the one thing I would just say about, about AWS and the other big clouds is whether they might be a little dismissive of what's truly gonna happen at the edge. I think the traditional OEMs that are transforming are really betting on that edge, being a huge play and a huge differentiator for them where the public cloud obviously have their own bets there. But I think they were pretty dismissive initially about how big that went. >>I don't, and I don't think anybody's really figured out the edge yet. >>Well, that's an, it's a battleground. That's what he's saying. I think you're >>Saying, but on the ecosystem, I wanna say up the stack, I think it's the ecosystem. That's gotta fill that out. You gotta see more governance tools and catalogs and AI tools and, and >>It immediately goes more, it goes more vertical when you go edge, you're gonna have different conversations and >>They're >>Lacking. Yeah. And they, but they're in there though. They're in the verticals. HP's in the, yeah, >>For sure. But they gotta build out an ego. Like you walk around here, the data, the number of data companies here. I mean, Starburst is here. I'm actually impressed that Starburst is here. Cause I think they're a forward thinking company. I wanna see that times a hundred. Right. I mean, that's >>You see HP's in all the verticals. That's I think the point here, >>So they should be able to attract that ecosystem and build that, that flywheel that's the, that's the hallmark of a cloud that marketplace. >>Yeah, it is. But I think there's a, again, I go back to, they really gotta stay focused on that infrastructure and data management. Yeah. >>But they'll be focused on that, but, but their ecosystem, >>Their ecosystem will then take it up from there. And I think that's the next stage >>And that ecosystem's gotta include OT players and communications technologies players as well. Right. Because that stuff gets kind of sucked up in that, in that edge play. Do >>You feel like HPE has a, has a leg up on that or like a little, a little bit of a lead or is it pretty much, you know, even raced right now? >>I think they've, I think the big infrastructure companies have all had OEM businesses and they've all played there. It's it's, it's also helping those OT players actually convert their own needs into more of a software play and, and not so much of >>Physical. You've been, you've been following and you guys both have been following HP and HPE for years. They've been on the edge for a long time. I've been focused on this edge. Yeah. Now they might not have the product traction that's right. Or they might not develop as fast, but industrial OT and IOT they've been talking about it, focused on it. I think Amazon was mostly like, okay, we gotta get to the edge and like the enterprise. And, and I think HP's got a leg up in my opinion on that. Well, I question is can they execute? >>Yeah. I mean, PTC was here years ago on stage talking >>About, but I mean, you think about, if you think about the edge, right. I mean, I would argue one of the best acquisitions this company ever did was Aruba. Right. I mean, it basically changed the whole conversation of the edge changed the whole conversation. >>If >>Became GreenLake, it was GreenLake. >>Well, it became a big department. They gave a big, but, but, but I mean, you know, I mean they, they, they went after going selling edge line servers and frankly it's very difficult to gain traction there. Yeah. Aruba, huge area. And I think the March announcement was when they brought Aruba management into. Yeah. Yeah. >>Totally. >>Last question. Love >>That. >>What are you guys saying about the, the Broadcom VMware acquisition? What's the, what are the implications for the ecosystem for companies like HPE and just generally for the it business? >>Yeah. So >>You start. Yeah, sure. I'll start, I'll start there. So look, you know, we've, you know, spent some time, uh, going through it spent some time, you know, speaking, uh, to the, to the, to the folks involved and, and, and I gotta tell you, I think this is a really interesting moment for Broadcom. This is Broadcom's opportunity to basically build a different kind of a conversation with developers to, uh, try to invest in. I mean, just for perspective, right? These numbers may not be exact. And I know a dollar is not a dollar, but in 2001, anybody, remember what HP paid for? Compact >>8,000,000,020, >>So 25 billion, 25 billion. Wow. VMware just got sold for 61 billion. Wow. Okay. Unbill dollars. Okay. That gives you a perspective. No, again, I know a dollar is not a dollar 2000. >>It's still big numbers, >>2022. So having said that, if you just did it to, to, to basically build your DCF model and say, okay, over this amount of time, I'll pay you this. And I'll take the money out of this period of time, which is what people have criticized them for. I think that's a little shortsighted. I, yeah, I think this is Broadcom's opportunity to invest in that product and really try to figure out how to get a seat at the table in software and pivot their company to enterprise software in a different way. They have to prove that they're willing to do that. And then frankly, that they can develop the skills to do that over time. But I do believe this is a, a different, this is a pivot point. This is not >>CA this is not CA >>It's not CA >>In my, in my mind, it can't be CA they would, they would destroy too much. Now you and I, Dave had some, had some conversations on Twitter. I, I don't think it's the step up to them sort of thinking differently about semiconductor, dying, doing some custom semi I, I don't think that's. Yeah. I agree with that. Yeah. I think I, I think this is really about, I got two aspiration for them pivoting the company. They could >>Justify the >>Price to the, getting a seat at the adults table in software is, >>Well, if, if Broadcom has been squeezing their supplies, we all hear the scutle butt. Yeah. If they're squeezing, they can use VMware to justify the prices. Yeah. Maybe use that hostage. And that installed base. That's kind of Mike conspiracy. >>I think they've told us what they're gonna do. >><laugh> I do. >>Maybe it's not like C what's your conspiracy theory like Symantec, but what >>Do you think? Well, I mean, there's still, I mean, so VMware there's really nobody that can do all the things that VMware does say. So really impossible for an enterprise to just rip 'em out. But obviously you can, you can sour people's taste and you can very much influence the direction they head in with the collection of, of providers. One thing, interesting thing here is, was the 37% of VMware's revenues sold through Dell. So there's, there's lots of dependencies. It's not, it's not as simple as I think John, you you're right. You can't just pull the CA playbook out and rerun it here. This is a lot more complex. Yeah. It's a lot more volume of, of, of distribution, but a fair amount of VMware's install >>Base Dell's influence is still there basically >>Is in the mid-market. It's not, it's not something that they're gonna touch directly. >>You think about what VMware did. I mean, they kept adding new businesses, buying new businesses. I mean, is security business gonna stay >>Networking security, I think are interesting. >>Same >>Customers >>Over and over. Haven't done anything. VMware has the same customers. What new >>Customers. So imagine simplifying VMware. Right, right. Becomes a different equation. It's really interesting. And to your point, yeah. I mean, I think Broadcom is, I mean, Tom Crouse knows how to run a business. >>Yeah. He knows how to run a business. He's gonna, I, I think it's gonna be, you know, it's gonna be an efficient business. It's gonna be a well run business, but I think it's a pivot point for >>Broadcom. It's amazing to me, Broadcom sells to HPE. They sell it to Dell and they've got a market cap. That's 10 X, you know? Yes. Yeah. All we gotta go guys. Awesome. Great conversation guys. >>A lot. Thanks for having us on. >>Okay. Listen, uh, day two is a, is a wrap. We'll be here tomorrow, all day. Dave ante, John furrier, Lisa Martin, Lisa. Hope you're feeling okay. We'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching the cube, your leader in enterprise tech, live coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase. Topic is MarTech: Emerging Cloud-Scale Experience. This is season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering the exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem. Talk about their value proposition and their company and all the good stuff that's going on. I'm your host, John Furrier. And today we're excited to be joined by Manyam Mallela who's the co-founder and head of AI at Blueshift. Great to have you on here to talk about the Blueshift-Intelligent Customer Engagement, Made Simple. Thanks for joining us today. >> Thank you, John. Thank you for having me. >> So last time we did our intro video. We put it out in the web. Got great feedback. One of the things that we talked about, which is resonating out there in the viral Twitter sphere and in the thought leadership circles is this concept that you mentioned called 10X marketer. That idea that you have a solution that can provide 10X value. Kind of a riff on the 10X engineer in the DevOps cloud world. What does it mean? And how does someone get there? >> Yeah, fantastic. I think that's a great way to start our discussion. I think a lot of organizations, especially as of this current economic environment are looking to say, I have limited resources, limited budgets, how do I actually achieve digital and customer engagement that helps move the needle for my key metrics, whether it's average revenue per user, lifetime value of the user and frequent interactions. Above all, the more frequently a brand is able to interact with their customers, the better they understand them, the better they can actually engage them. And that usually leads to long term good outcomes for both customer and the brand and the organizations. So the way I see 10X marketer is that you need to have tools that give you that speed and agility without hindering your ability to activate any of the campaigns or experience that you want to create. And I see the roadblocks usually for many organizations, is that kind of threefold. One is your data silos. Usually data that is on your sites, does not talk to your app data, does not talk to your social data, does not talk to your CRM data and so forth. So how do I break those silos? The second is channel silos. I actually have customers who are only engaging on email or some are on email and mobile apps. Some are on email and mobile apps and maybe the OTT TV in a Roku or one of the connected TV experiences, or maybe in the future, another Web3 environments. How do I actually break those channel silos so that I get a comprehensive view of the customer and my marketing team can engage with all of them in respect to the channel? So break the channel silos. And the last part, what I call like some of the little talked about is I call the inside silo, which is that, not only do you need to have the data, but you also have to have a common language to share and talk about within your organizations. What are we learning from our customers? What do we translate our learning and insight on this common data platform or fabric into an action? And that requires the shared language of how do I actually know my customers and what do I do with them? Like either the inside silo as well. I think a lot of times organizations do get into this habit like each one speaks their own language, but they don't actually are talking the common language of what did we actually know about the real customer there. >> Yeah, and I think that's a great conversation because there's two, when you hear 10X marketer or 10X conversations, it implies a couple things. One is you're breaking an old way and bringing in something new. And the new is a force multiplier, in this case, 10X marketer. But this is the cloud scale so marketing executives, chiefs, staffs, chiefs of staffs of CMOs and their staffs. They want to get that scale. So marketing at scale is now the table stakes. Now budget constraints are there as well. So you're starting to see, okay, I need to do more with less. Now the big question comes up is ROI. So I want to have AI. I want to have all these force multipliers. What do I got to do with the old? How do I handle that? How do I bring the new in and operationalize it? And if that's the case, I'm making a change. So I have to ask you, what's your view on the ROI of AI marketing, because this is a key component 'cause you've got scale factor here. You've got to force multiplier opportunity. How do you get that ROI on the table? >> I think that as you rightly said, it's table stakes. And I think the ROI of AI marketing starts with one very key simple premise that today some of the tools allow you to do things one at a time. So I can actually say, "can I run this campaign today?" And you can scramble your team, hustle your way, get everybody involved and run that campaign. And then tomorrow I'd say like, Hey, I looked at the results. Can I do this again? And they're like, oh, we just asked for all of us to get that done. How do I do it tomorrow? How do I do it next week? How do I do it for every single week for the rest of the year? That's where I think the AI marketing is essentially taking your insight, taking your creativity, and creating a platform and a tool that allows you to run this every single day. And that's agility at scale. That is not only a scale of the customer base, but scale across time. And that AI-based automation is the key ROI piece for a lot of AI marketing practitioners. So Forrester, for example, did a comprehensive total economic impact study with our customers. And what they found out was actually the 781% ROI that they reported in that particular report is based on three key factors. One is being able to do experiences that are intelligent at scale, day in and day out. So do your targeting, do your recommendations. Not just one day, but do it every single day. And don't hold back yourself on being able to do that. >> I think they got to get the return. They got to get the sales too. This is the numbers. >> That's right. They actually have real dollars, real numbers attached to it. They have a calculator. You can actually go in and plug your own numbers and get what you might expect from your existing customer base. The second is that once you have a unified platform like ours, the 10X marketer that we're talking about is actually able to do more. It's sometimes actually, it's kind of counterintuitive to think that a smaller team does more. But in reality, what we have seen, that is the case. When you actually have the right tools, the smaller teams actually achieve more. And that's the redundant operations, conflicting insights that go away into something more coherent and comprehensive. And that's the second insight that they found. And the third is just having reporting and all of the things in one place means that you can amplify it. You can amplify it across your paid media channels. You can amplify it across your promotions programs and other partnerships that you're running. >> That's the key thing about platforms that people don't understand is that you have a platform and it enables a lot of value. In this case, force multiplier value. It enables more value than you pay for it. But the key is it enables customers to do things without a line of code, meaning it's a platform. They're innovating on top of it. And that's, I think, where the ROI comes in and this leads me where the next question is. I wanted to ask you is, not to throw a wet blanket on the MarTech industry, but I got to think of when I hear marketing automation, I kind of think old. I think old, inadequate antiquated technologies. I think email blasting and just some boring stuff that just gets siloed or it's bespoke from something else. Are marketing automation tools created equal? Does something like, what you guys are doing with SmartHub? Change that, and can you just talk about that 'cause it's not going to go away. It's just another level that's going to be abstracted away under the coverage. >> Yeah, great question. Certainly, email marketing has been practiced for two or three decades now and in some form or another. I think we went from essentially what people call list-based marketing. I have a list, let me keep blasting the same message to everybody and then hopefully something will come out of it. A little bit more of saying, then they can, okay, maybe now I have CRM database and can I do database marketing, which they will call like, "Hey, Hi John. Hi Manyam", which is the first name. And that's all they think will get the customer excited about because you'll call them by name, which is certainly helpful, but not enough. I think now what we call like, the new age that we live in is that we call it graph-based marketing. And the way we materialize that is that every single user is interacting with a brand with their offerings. So that this interaction graph that's happening across millions of customers, across thousands of content articles, videos, shows, products, items, and that graph actually has much richer knowledge of what the customer wants than the first names or list-based ones. So I think the next evolution of marketing automation, even though the industry has been there a while, there is a step change in what can actually be done at scale. And which is taking that interaction graph and making that a part of the experience for the customer, and that's what we enable. That's why we do think of that as a big step change from how people are being practicing list-based marketing. And within that, certainly there is a relation of curve as to how people approach AI marketing and they are in a different spectrum. Some people are still at list-based marketing. Some people are database marketing. And hopefully will move them to this new interaction graph-based marketing. >> Yeah and I think the context is key. I like how you bring up the graph angle on this because the graph databases imply there's a lot of different optionality around what's happened contextually both over time and currently and it adds to it. Makes it smarter. It's not just siloed, just one dimensional. It feels like it's got a lot there. This is clearly I'm a big fan of and I think this is the way to go. As you get more personalization, you get more data. Graphic database makes a lot of sense. So I have to ask you, this is a really cutting edge value proposition, who are the primary buyers and users in an organization that you guys are working with? >> Yeah, great question. So we typically have CMO organizations approaching us with this problem and they usually talk to their CIO organizations, their counterparts, and the chief information officers have been investing in data fabrics, data lakes, data warehouses for the better part of last decade or two, and have some very cutting edge technology that goes into organizing all this data. But that doesn't still solve the problem of how do I take this data and make a meaningful, relevant, authentic experience for the customer. That's the CMO problem. And CMO are now challenge with creating product level experience with every interaction and that's where we coming. So the CMO are the buyers of our SmartHub CDP platform. And we're looking for consolidating hundreds of tools that they had in the past and making that one or two channel marketers. Actually, the 10X marketer that we talk about. And you need the right tool on top of your data lakes and data warehouses to be able to do that. So CMO are also the real drivers of using this technology. >> I think that also place the ROI equation around ROI and having that unified platform. Great call out there. I got to ask you the question here 'cause this comes up a lot and when I hear you talking, I think, okay, all the great stuff you guys have there. But if I'm a company, I want to make my core competencies mine. I don't really want to outsource or buy something that's going to be core to my business. But at the same time as market shifts, the business changes. And sometimes people don't even know what business they're in at the end of the day. And as it gets more complicated too, by the way. So the question comes up with companies and I can see this clearly, do I buy it? Do I build it? When it comes to AI because that's a core competency. Wait a minute, AI. I'm going to maybe buy some chatbot technology. That's not really AI, but it feels like AI, but I'm a company, I want to buy it or build it. That's a choice. What do you see there? 'Cause you guys have a very comprehensive platform. It's hard to replicate, imitates, inimitable. So what's your customers doing with respect buy and build? And where do they get the core competency? What do they get to have as a core competency? >> Fantastic. I think certainly, AI as it applies to at the organization level, I've seen this at my previous organization that I was part of, and there will be product and financial applications that are using AI for the service of that organization. So we do see, depending upon the size of the organization having in-house AI and data science teams. They are focused on these long term problems that they are doing as part of their product itself. Adjacent to that, the CMO organization gets some resources, but not certainly a lot. I think the CMO organization is usually challenged with the task, but not given the hundred people data science and engineering team to be able to go solve that. So what we see among our customer base is that they need agile platform to do most of the things that they need to do on a day to day basis, but augmented with what our in-house data science they have. So we are an extensible platform. What we have seen is that half of our customers use us solely for the AI needs. The other half certainly uses both AI modules that we provide and are actually augmented with things that they've already built. And we do not have a fight in that ring. But we do acknowledge and we do provide the right hooks for getting the data out of our system and bringing their AI back into our system. And we think that at the end of the day, if you want agility for the CMO, there should not be any barriers. >> It's like they're in the data business and that's the focus. So I think with what I hear you saying is that with your technology and platform, you're enabling to get them to be in the data business as fast as possible. >> That's right. >> Versus algorithm business, which they could add to over time. >> Certainly they could add to. But I think the bulk of competencies for the CMO are on the creative side. And certainly wrangling with data pipelines day in and day out and wondering what actually happened to a pipeline in the middle of the night is not probably what they would want to focus on. >> Not their core confidence. Yeah, I got that. >> That's right. >> You can do all the heavy lifting. I love that. I got to ask you on the Blueshift side on customer experience consumption. how can someone experience the product before buying? Is there a trial or POC? What's the scale and scope of operationalizing and getting the Blueshift value proposition in them? >> Yeah, great. So we actually recently released a fantastic way to experience our product. So if you go to our website, there's only one call-to-action saying, explore Blueshift. And if you click on that, without asking, anything other than your business email address, you're shown the full product. You're given a guided tour of all the possibilities. So you can actually experience what your marketing team would be doing in the product. And they call it Project Rover. We launched it very recently and we are seeing fantastic reception to that. I think a lot of times, as you said, there is that question mark of like, I have a marketing team that is already doing X, Y, Z. Now you are asking me to implement Blueshift. How would they actually experience the product? And now they can go in and experience the product. It's a great way to get the gist of the product in 10 clicks. Much more than going through any number of videos or articles. I think people really want to say, let me do those 10 clicks. And I know what impression that I can get from platform. So we do think that's a great way to experience the product and it's easily available from the main website. >> It's in the value proposition. It isn't always a straight line. And you got that technology. And I got to ask from between your experience with the customers that you're talking to, prospects, and customers, where do you see yourself winning deals on Customer Engagement, Made Simple because the word customer engagement's been around for a while, and it's become, I won't say cliche, but there's been different generational evolutions of technology that made that possible. Obviously, we're living in an era of high velocity Omni-Channel, a lot of data, the graph databases you mentioned are in there, big part of it. Where are you winning deals? Where are customers pain points where you are solving that specifically? >> Yeah, great question. So the organizations that come to us usually have one of the dimensions of either they have offering complexity, which is what catalog of content or videos or items do they offer to the customers. And on the data complexity on the other side is to what the scale of customer base that I usually target. And that problem has not gone away. I think the customer engagement, even though has been around for a while, the problem of engaging those customers at scale hasn't gone away and it only is getting harder and harder and organizations that have, especially on what we call the business-to-consumer side where the bulk of what marketing organizations in a B2C segments are doing. I have tens to millions of customers and how do I engage them day in and day out. And I think that all that problem is only getting harder because consumer preferences keeps shifting all the time. >> And where's your sweet spot for your customer? What size? Can you just share the target organization? Is it medium enterprise, large B2C, B2B2C? What's the focus area? >> Yeah, great question. So we have seen like startups that are in Silicon Valley. I have now half a million monthly active users, how do I actually engage them to customers and clients like LendingTree and PayPal and Discovery and BBC who have been in the business for multiple decades, have tens of millions of customers that they're engaging with. So that's kind of our sweet spot. We are certainly not maybe for small shop with maybe a hundred plus customers. But as you reach the scale of tens of thousands of customers, you start seeing this problem. And then you start to look out for solutions that are beyond, especially list-based marketing and email blast. >> So as the scale, you can dial up and down, but you have to have some enough scale to get the data pattern. >> That's right. >> If I can connect the dots there. >> I would probably say, looking at a hundred thousand or more monthly active customer base, and then you're trying to ramp up your own growth based on what you're learning and to engage those customers. >> It's like a bulldozer. You need the heavy equipment. Great conversation. For the last minute we have here Manyam, give you a plug for the company. What's going on? What are you guys doing? What's new? Give some success stories, your latest achievements. Take a minute to give a plug for the company. >> Yeah, great. We have been recognized by Deloitte as the fastest growth startup two years in a row and continuing to be on that streak. We have released currently integrations with AWS partners and Snowflake partners and data lake partners that allow implementing Blueshift a much streamlined experience with bidirectional integrations. We have now hundred plus data connectors and data integrations in our system and that takes care of many of our needs. And now, I think organizations that have been budget constraint and are trying to achieve a lot with a small team are actually going to look at these solutions and say, "Can I get there?" and "Can I become that 10X marketing organization? And as you have said, agility at scale is very, very hard to achieve. Being able to take your marketing team and achieve 10X requires the right platform and the right solution. We are ready for it. >> And every company's in the data business that's the asset. You guys make that sing for them. It's good stuff. Love the 10X. Love the scale. Manyam Mallela, thanks for coming on. Co-founder, Head of AI at Blueshift. This is the AWS Startup Showcase season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering the exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. >> Thank you, John. (upbeat music)

(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)

>>Okay, welcome back everyone. This is the cube coverage here at Remar. Amazon Remar stands for machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. And we're here for a robotics. Cool segments. We have Monia on the desk. We'll get Caitlin Caitlin clay bar head. Ofri welcome to the cube and follow Virginian, founder and CEO of Moxi. Thanks for coming on and thanks for bringing this special third guest. Thank you for helping >>Us. >>This is exciting. Okay. So first of all, we'll get into the company a second, but what do we, what is this? What what's going on? This is amazing. >>Go. This is Moxi. This is our first product out of embodied and it is a social, emotional learning AI friend for children, ages five to 10 currently. >>That's what he, he or she likes me. Yes. Staring at me right now. I'm a child. Thank he. Nice to see you. >>And it has all sorts of content and in multi back and forth interaction. Yeah. And it's, it's our first pass at doing socially. >>Okay. So this product is shipping. >>It is shipping. Yeah. Available. It is available. We've been out for over a year now shipping for over a year now. >>Okay. Oh man. It just makes me feel good. It must be a big seller across all use cases. So what's the number one thing you guys getting attention on right now from Moxi besides the cool factor, the tech what's going on? >>Well, I think we have received a lot of interest from many people because Mo Mox is captured the imagination of people in terms of what is possible in the future. And really the Genesis of it is that I've been doing robotics for 20 years and sort of a little bit disappointed with what we have accomplished in robotics, because there's so much where we can do we have dreamt about robots for centuries. But what we were dreaming about was not robotic vacuum cleaners, which guilty as charged. I was part, I was a CTO at iRobot and we wanna see robots that can actually can really care for us from childhood to retirement. And Moxi represents the AI technology we have developed. That's gonna make that next wave of robotics to flourish. >>You must be really excited because I think right now, one of the main, my main walkaway themes so far from this show is technology's not the blocker anymore. It's the people human side of it, where it used to be technology slow. And robotics has been that area where we've seen great innovation, but where's that needle moving moment coming. I think now with cloud and all the things happening seems to be the moment. >>I think we are seeing exponential growth in technology. That's gonna enable robots to become unreal. As an example, Moxi uses very advanced, conversational engine where you literally can talk to Moxi about anything you want. So it can be a real companion. It will understand, you understand your needs and emotions and start working on social, emotional development for children. This technology, which are as transformer models, deep neural networks that are trained on millions of conversation. We are seeing every year, 10 X improvement to this. So I predict in the next two to three years, you will be able to have a conversation with Moxi. That's like having a subject expert matter expert in every single subject. Yeah. >>Yeah. That's like getting a cube interview like instantly, Hey, Moxie, what's the information. So I could see the tie in and it's just my mind's blown, I guess in the sense of the use cases are wide. You get wide ranging use cases, elderly care, child development, loneliness, all kinds of social, emotional factors. >>Yeah. We've built a really incredible platform that we're hoping to expand out beyond kids. I mean, kids is kind of our, this is our first product, but Moxi the fact that we have what we call our social X platform and the tools where you can create content and Moxi can have conversations about any number of things it's >>So share. What's what technology is under the covers here with the human robotic interface kind of dynamic, you got software, you got hardware, you're gonna have code. You got the neural networks. It's kind of the confluence of a lot of different vectors coming together. What's the secret sauce. >>So that's what we call our social X platform. And really it you're right. Everything has to work in concert and at a price point that's affordable for people. So Moxie's able to actually track people in the real world and we are able to fuse people's speech. And you know, we do facial recognition for the specific child. So Moxie knows its mentor and personalize the interaction over time. >>Well, she's talking to me or he is a, she is a gender neutral robot, I guess, like whatever I want it to be, I guess >>We've left it intentionally gender neutral, but kids kind of yeah. Prescribe whatever gender they feel connected. >>Yes. Good, good. You enables the user. Yes. Really? The key what's what's been the biggest use case that you didn't think would be coming to the table with Moxi anything surprise you, you must get a lot of reactions. >>Yeah. So you covered some of the ones we are focused on. We are particularly focused on mental health from childhood to retirement and aging gracefully. After we launched Moxi we had a TikTok video that went crazy viral. We got 40 million views on this. And that led to a lot of interest from celebrities. Yeah. >>From some of the most luxury hotel chains that have reached out to us and they want to use the technology in Moxi to develop a personal Butler for every guest room, as an example, that's one example, right? So we have one of the largest violence intervention program in the us that caters to children that have unfortunately been through very traumatic experiences in their life and want to use Moxi as a way to provide therapy to these children. Yeah. Yeah. So the use cases are very broad. We even have people from different countries that were very interested in using Moxi for, for instance, teaching a Chinese child, how to speak English, immersively by interacting with Moxi, which is the best way to learn a different language. So I think the implications of this are paramount. Yeah. We will even see in contact centers, centers, customer support centers, and so on will use technology like this for having them empathetic AI that's actually taking care of your customer service complaints rather than a robotic way of >>Interacting with. I was just on, on earlier with an interview here with Deloitte and AWS on conversational AI and trust was a big conversation. Yes. Trust and, and ethics. So you got ethics, trust bias, all these things are of factors. You got human interaction from a physical and then software standpoint. What, what other hard problems are in here that you guys are solving? Come on. This is incredible because these are hard problems. >>Yes they are. And one of them is the famous cocktail party problem. And Palo being our fearless CEO really drove the team to get Moxi to this state where Moxie's able to interact with people, even in this environment, which is pretty incredible and like lock in and have a back and forth conversation. It's very exciting. >>So Moxi how do you feel you feeling good? What's the biggest challenge you've had here? Audio. Congratulations. That's really impressive. I'm so impressed. And again, it it's again, not to oversimplify it. There's a lot of hard problems going on here that are, that are being solved. >>Absolutely. There's >>Human interaction. You get a physical device. >>Exactly. It's a physical device. And like how we have designed Moxi down to the color of Moxie's eyes, the color of the shell, all of that has taken a lot of iteration to get to a point where we really have a robot that people feel like they can trust, feel like they can connect with. And, >>And even something to add to this is that we have many robots that cost tens of thousands of dollars, because it's very easy to keep adding more sensors and more compute power. And so on. You end up with robots that cost 10, 20, $30,000. One of the goals we set at the outset was we want to make Moxi as, as affordable as an iPhone. So, and Moxi is right. The price point of Moxi is same as owning an iPhone. You pay about a thousand dollars up front plus a monthly subscription fee. And that not >>The Ram cap upgrade the Ram on that too. >>We have very limited brand. >>We have please. Very, >>If you can convince it >>IPhone, I can always get the 2 56 or the one terabyte, >>Right? No, it, it really actually makes it much harder to develop technology that's affordable >>For yeah. Yeah, totally. >>And we wanted to do that because we wanted to have impact. >>So are you shipping now or are you on allocation? I can imagine that demand is off the >>Charts. Definitely. We sold out last year when we launched the product. Now we are resolving supply chain issues that everyone is suffering from due to COVID and this year we'll have better ability to meet demand. >>So this is people want it. There's a lot of demand. >>Right? >>You guys a smile having fun. Yes. Right. All right. So now talking about the product, take me through the product. What's the challenges here. Obviously the animation in the camera. I see the camera. I see some lights there at heart speaker. What would Moxi be doing if wasn't, if we weren't here, if we were at home. >>So as in interacting with a child at home, we've seen a lot of people actually put Moxy on the floor and kids will like lay down and interact with Moxy. And there are a lot of different activities right now it's doing a little jukebox dance, but there are more kind of therapy or mental health and, and social, emotional learning, driven content. Like children can read a book with Moxi and we use the screen, not just to show that great, cute facial expression and the eye contact, but we also can show icons and some additional information. And so in this way, we've created a very new type of interface for a machine, with a child, >>Not to get all product visionary and roadmap oriented here. But I can imagine interfacing out to a third party screens in the future where this is gonna stay compact and affordable. And if I'm interacting and I want to display a visual, is that something you guys are guys going beyond that you're still focused on the product here? So what's some of the vision you have >>There definitely. There will be versions of our social X platform, finding their way into what we may call the metaverse, where you could have hyper realistic models of humans driven by our AI to interact with you the way you and I are interacting, but embodiment where the name of the companies derive from is actually super important in the kind of things we are doing with mental health and social emotional development. Because the physical co-presence of an entity like this interacts with our brains in a different way than when we do on extreme. So there is gonna be both versions for some applications will be virtual. Other applications will be >>Physical. Well, that's a wait and see, see what happens, sell out the next batch inventory where the product yeah. >>And the embodiment. It does. It just, it hits a little different, you know, kids yeah. Will actually physically tuck Moxi in at night. There's there's something there >>That's, there's something there tangible, I think it's great. Home run. I mean, just having the response, the visual response, the facial makes an impact instantly. >>Absolutely. >>So you can extend that out, probably make it more immersive, whether it's metaverse or within your home. >>Yeah. And now with AR VR goggles, where you get this 3d immersive experience, it may get closer to the impact we can have with an embodied agency. So the lines are blurring obviously between the physical and the digital. >>Well, great to have you guys on. Thanks for bringing the, the, the Moxi on Moxi to come on. This event kind of symbolizes this revolution. We're seeing the robotics industrial shift space is a good example of one. This is another machine learning, the software business cloud, all great, you know, force multipliers to enable value creation. Where do you guys see this going Remar as this whole intersection, you got a lot of different disciplines coming together. We're seeing here in the cube and we're talking to folks that we think it's gonna be a needle moving moment for the, for the industrial era. What do you guys take on this? >>Absolutely. I mean, >>Robotics has always been right around the corner, but with the advances of technology in the last 10 years or so, this is now really possible and it's growing at exponential rates. So the future is exciting. Obviously we have to guide it. You talked about ethics. So being ethical about it, being mindful about how we want to deploy this technologies to actually have positive impact on us. For instance, we do not believe in replacing a human labor or the need for humans, but we believe in augmenting humans, right. And technology today can actually do that. Yeah. >>Know that whole argument's been debunked for decade, the whole bank teller. Oh, they're gonna put tellers outta business. No, there's more tellers now than ever before. So I think technology is gonna create much greater aperture of, of opportunities. And I think the question I'd love to get, get you guys to share is this is gonna wake up a lot of generational, young talent to come into the workforce, cuz the problems are there. It's not a technology. It's a human mind, creative problem. Now it's more of, you know, you're gonna see robotics probably being accelerated even more now than it is. It's still growing. Yeah. Young kids love robotics. >>I mean, it's incredible to see the breadth of applications of robotics at, at this event specifically and just, I don't know, getting into it. I mean, I haven't been in it as long as you pow, but five, 10 years ago, you wouldn't have seen, I mean, this just wouldn't be possible. >>The robotics clubs are more popular now in high, most high schools in the United States than some sports there's a and a B team and people get cut from the B team. There's so much demand. There's so much excitement cuz it's building. If you get your hands on and it's got software, it's got coding. Absolutely. It's got building. >>Absolutely. And you are, you are creating, there are figures like Steve jobs, Jeff Bezos, LAN Musk that are inspiring children to go into stem education and really build a career in that area, which is much more exciting than the, the opposite. >>Great. What do you guys think about re Mars this year? What's your walk away? What's the big story here besides Moxi cuz we recovered that right now. What's what's the, what's the trend. What's the high level. What's the most important story people should pay attention to? >>I think we're just gonna see robotics or machine learning and we're just gonna see it in almost every application and it's going to be, the word was ambient was being used during the keynote. And I think that's really true. Ambient intelligence, like having robots in your everyday life as well as just AI in your everyday life. And it's gonna feel seamless. >>It's pretty impressive. Paul, what's your take on the, the >>Big story? I would say one of the trends we are seeing at even here at AWS, Amazon re remarks is making machines more human. Yeah. Even Astro the product that was launched last September, I believe by Amazon is adding a lot of facial affect emotions and understanding of humans for decades. We have been bound to using keyboards and touch screens and yeah. Clicks here and there. And it's gonna change it's time for machines to learn, to understand us. Yeah. And that is gonna be a trend that we will see even in the self self-driving cars, which are not gonna have a steering wheel, but the machine will understand our mood and drive accordingly. >>Yeah. And you know, Apollo, you guys are doing Caitlin your work here. I think highlights what I'm seeing as it's a future theme. That's positive. It has a vibe of like, we need a good to come. You know, it's like, when's the good gonna happen? And I think, >>I think we're ready for that. >>The theme's here though. They're very positive forward thinking practical engineered, you know, and solving problems, right? Real problems. The climate change and the keynote. We talking about healthcare and, and having things be solved this way. This is the new, the new normal, it's a human problem now to solve >>It is. And I think we are all, all of us are a bit more aware of that after the pandemic, because pan the pandemic was hard on everyone in different ways and we are more mindful of the positive. Right? We are looking for something positive and hopefully yeah. Coming out of the pandemic, now we have a global crisis, but these, these technologies will transform life and the world in a positive way. Yeah. >>You guys doing a great job. Congratulations on the success of >>Moxi. Thank >>You. Great work. Thanks for sharing that. Thank you. I wanna let more platform maybe next time. We'll have a conversation. We'll talk about the platform in tric season, then detail. So, but thanks for coming on the queue. Appreciate the problem. >>Thank you. Our pleasure. Okay. >>It's the Cube's coverage here in Las Vegas for Amazon re Mars. I'm John furrier. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break.