>> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of PagerDuty Summit 22. Lisa Martin with you here on the ground. I've got one of our alumni back with me. Sean Scott joins me, the Chief Product Officer at PagerDuty. It's great to have you here in person. >> Super great to be here in person. >> Isn't it nice? >> Quite a change, quite a change. >> It is a change. We were talking before we went live about it. That's that readjustment to actually being with another human, but it's a good readjustment to have >> Awesome readjustment. I've been traveling more and more in the past few weeks and just speaking the offices, seeing the people the energy we get is the smiles, it's amazing. So it's so much better than just sitting at your home and. >> Oh, I couldn't agree more. For me it's the energy and the CEO of DocuSign talked about that with Jennifer during her fireside chat this morning, but yes, finally, someone like me who doesn't like working from home but as one of the things that you talked about in your keynote this morning was the ways traditionally that we've been working are no longer working. Talk to me about the future of work. What does it look like from PagerDuty's lens? >> Sure. So there's a few things. If we just take a step back and think about, what your day looks like from all the different slacks, chats, emails, you have your dashboards, you have more slacks coming in, you have more emails coming in, more chat and so just when you start the day off, you think you know what you're doing and then it kind of blows up out of the gate and so what we're all about is really trying to revolutionize operations so how do you help make sense of all the chaos that's happening and how do you make it simpler so you can get back to doing the more meaningful work and leave the tedium to the machines and just automate. >> That would be critical. One of the things that such an interesting dynamic two years that we've had obviously here we are in San Francisco with virtual event this year but there's so many problems out there that customer landscape's dealing with the great resignation. The data deluge, there's just data coming in everywhere and we have this expectation when we're on the consumer side, that we're going to be that a business will know us and have enough context to make us that the next best offer that actually makes sense but now what we're seeing is like the great resignation and the data overload is really creating for many organizations, this operational complexity that's now a problem really amorphously across the organization. It's no longer something that the back office has to deal with or just the front office, it's really across. >> Yeah, that's right. So you think about just the customer's experience, their expectations are higher than ever. I think there's been a lot of great consumer products that have taught the world, what good looks like, and I came from a consumer background and we measured the customer experience in milliseconds and so customers talking about minutes or hours of outages, customers are thinking in milliseconds so that's the disconnect and so, you have to be focused at that level and have everybody in your organization focused, thinking about milliseconds of customer experience, not seconds, minutes, hours, if that's where you're at, then you're losing customers. And then you think about, you mentioned the great resignation. Well, what does that mean for a given team or organization? That means lost institutional knowledge. So if you have the experts and they leave now, who's the experts? And do you have the processes and the tools and the runbooks to make sure that nothing falls on the ground? Probably not. Most of the people that we talk to, they're trying to figure it out as they go and they're getting better but there's a lot of institutional knowledge that goes out the door when people leave. And so part of our solution is also around our runbook automation and our process automation and some of our announcements today really help address that problem to keep the business running, keep the operations running, keep everything kind of moving and the customers happy ultimately and keep your business going where it needs to go. >> That customer experience is critical for organizations in every industry these days because we don't to your point. We'll tolerate milliseconds, but that's about it. Talk to me about you did this great keynote this morning that I had a chance to watch and you talked about how PagerDuty is revolutionizing operations and I thought, I want you to be able to break that down for this audience who may not have heard that. What are those four tenants or revolutionizing operations that PagerDuty is delivering to ORGS? >> Sure, so it starts with the data. So you mentioned the data deluge that's happening to everybody, right? And so we actually do, we integrate with over 650 systems to bring all that data in, so if you have an API or webhook, you can actually integrate with PagerDuty and push this data into PagerDuty and so that's where it starts, all these integrations and it's everything from a develop perspective, your CI/CD pipelines, your code repositories, from IT we have those systems are instrumented as well, even marketing, more tech stacks we can actually instrument and pull data in. The next step is now we have all this data, how do we make sense of it? So, we think we have machine learning algorithms that really help you focus your attention and kind of point you to the really relevant work, part of that is also noise suppression. So, our algorithms can suppress noise about 98% of the noise can just be eliminated and that helps you really focus where you need to spend your time 'cause if you think about human time and attention, it's pretty expensive and it's probably one of your company's most precious resources is that human time and so you want the humans doing the really meaningful work. Next step is automation, which is okay. We want the humans doing the special work, so what's the TDM? What's the toil that we can get rid of and push that to the machines 'cause machines are really good at doing very easy, repetitive task and there's a lot of them that we do day in, day out. The next step is just orchestrating the work and putting, getting everybody in the organization on the same page and that's where this morning I talked about our customer service operations product into the customer service is on the front lines and they're often getting signals from actual customers that nobody else in the organization may not even be aware of it yet So, I was running a system before and all our metrics are good and you get a customer feedback saying, "This isn't working for me," and you go look at the metrics and your dashboards and all looks good and then you go back and talk to the customer some more and they're like, "No, it's still not working," and you go back to your data, you're back to your dashboards, back to your metrics and sure enough, we had an instrumentation issue but the customer was giving us that feedback and so customer service is really on the front lines and they're often the kind of the unsung heroes for your customers but they're actually really helping and make sure that everything, the right signals are coming to the dev team, to the owners that own it and even in the case when you think you have everything instrumented, you may be missing something and that's where they can really help but our customer service operations product really helps bring everybody on the same page and then as the development teams and the IT teams and the SRA has pushed information back to customer service, then they're equipped, empowered to go tell the customer, "Okay, we know about the issue. Thank you." We should have it up in the next 30 minutes or whatever it is, five minutes, hopefully it's faster than longer, but they can inform the customer so to help that customer experience as opposed to the customer saying, "Oh, I'm just going to go shop somewhere else," or "I'm going to go buy somewhere else or do something else." And the last part is really around, how do we really enable our customers with the best practices? So those million users, the 21,000 companies in organizations we're working with, we've learned a lot around what good looks like. And so we've really embedded that back into our product in terms of our service standards which is really helps SRES and developers set quality standards for how services should be implemented at their company and then they can actually monitor and track across all their teams, what's the quality of the services and this team against different teams in their organization and really raise the quality of the overall system. >> So for businesses and like I mentioned, DocuSign was on this morning, I know some great brand customers that you guys have. I've seen on the website, Peloton Slack, a couple that popped out to me. When you're able to work with a customer to help them revolutionize operations, what are some of the business impacts? 'Cause some of the things that jump out to me would be like reduction in churn, retention rate or some of those things that are really overall impactful to the revenue of a business. >> Absolutely. And so there's a couple different parts of it. One is, all the work what PagerDuty is known for is orchestrating the work for a service outage or a website outage and so that's actually easy to measure 'cause you can measure your revenue that's coming in or missed revenue and how much we've shortened that. So that's the, I guess that's our kind of the history and our legacy but now we've moved into a lot of the cost side as well. So, helping customers really understand from an outage perspective where to focus our time as opposed to just orchestrating the work. Well now, we can say, we think we have a new feature we launched last year called Probable Origin. So when you have an outage, we can actually narrow in where we think the outage and just give you a few clues of this looks anomalous, for example. So let's start here. So that still focus on the top line and then from an automation perspective, there's lots and lots of just toil and noise that people are dealing with on a day in, day out basis and then some of it's easy work, some of it's harder work. One of the ones I really like is our automated diagnostics. So, if you have an incident, one of the first things you have to do is you have to go gather telemetry of what's actually happening on the servers, to say, is the CPU look good? Does the memory look good? Does the disc look good? Does the network look good? And that's all perfect work for automation. And so we can run our automated diagnostics and have all that data pumped directly into the incident so when the responder engages, it's all right there waiting for them and they don't have to go do all that basic task of getting data, cutting and pasting into the incident or if you're using one of those old ticketing systems, cutting and pacing into a a tickety system, it's all right there waiting for you. And that's on average 15 minutes during an outage of time that's saved. And the nice thing about that is that can all be kicked off at time zero so you can actually call from our event orchestration product, you can call directly into automation actions right there when that event first comes in. So you think about, there's a warning for a CPU and instantly it kicks off this diagnostics and then within seconds or even minutes, it's in the incident waiting for you to take action. >> One of the things that you also shared this morning that I loved was one of the stats around customer sale point that they had 60 different alerts coming in and PagerDuty was able to reduce that to one alert. So, 60 X reduction in alerts, getting rid of a lot of noise allowing them to focus on really those probably key high escalations that are going to make the biggest impact to their customers and to their business. >> That's right. You think about, you have a high severity incident like they actually had a database failure and so, when you're in the heat of the moment and you start getting these alerts, you're trying to figure out, is that one incident? Is it 10 incidents? Is it a hundred incidents that I'm having to deal with? And you probably have a good feeling like there's, I know it's probably this thing but you're not quite sure and so, with our machine learning we're able to eliminate a lot of the noise and in this case it was, going from 60 alerts down to one, just to let you know, this is the actual incident, but then also to focus your attention on where we think may be the cause and you think about all the different teams that historically have been had to pull in for a large scale incident. We can quickly narrow into the root cause and just get the right people involved. So we don't have these conference bridges of a hundred people on which you hear about. When these large cottages happen that everyone's on a call across the entire company and it's not just the dev teams and IT teams, you have PR, you have legal, you have everybody's involved in these. And so the more that we can workshop their work and get smarter about using machine learning, some of these other technologies then the more efficient it is for our customers and ultimately the better it is for their customers. >> Right and hopefully, PR, HR, legal doesn't have to be some of those incident response leaders that right now we're seeing across the organization. >> Exactly. Exactly. >> So when you're talking with customers and some of the things that you announced, you mentioned automated actions, incident workflows, what are you hearing from the voice of the customer as the chief product officer and what influence did that have in terms of this year's vision for the PagerDuty Summit? >> Sure. We listen to our customers all the time. It's one of our leadership principles and really trying to hear their feedback and it was interesting. I got sent some of the chat threads during the keynote afterwards, and there's a lot of excitement about the products we announced. So the first one is incident workflows, and this is really, it's a no code workflow based on or a recent acquisition of a company called Catalytic and what it does is it's, you can think of as kind of our next generation of response plays so you can actually go in and and build a workflow using no code tooling to say, when this incident happens or this type of incident happens, here's what that process looks like and so back to your original comment around the great resignation that loss institutional knowledge, well now, you're building all this into your processes through your incident response. And so, I think the incident workflows, if you want to create a incident specific slack channel or an incident specific zoom bridge, or even just in status updates, all that is right there for you and you can use our out of the box orchestrations or you can define your own 'cause we have back to the, our customer list, we have some of the biggest companies in the world, as customers and we have a very opinionated product and so if you're new to the whole DevOps and full service ownership, we help you through that. But then, a lot of our companies are evolving along that continuum, the operational maturity model continuum. And at the other end, we have customers that say "This is great, but we want to extend it. We want to like call this person or send this or update this system here." And so that's where the incident workflows is really powerful and it lets our customers just tailor it to their processes and really extend it for them. >> And that's GA later this year? >> Later this year, yes, we'll start ING probably the next few months and then GA later this year. >> Got it. Last question, as we're almost out of time here, what are some of the things that as you talk to customers day in and day out, as you see you saw the chats from this morning's live keynote, the excitement, the trust that PagerDuty is building with its customers, its partners, et cetera, What excites you about the future? >> So it's really why I came to PagerDuty. I've been here about a year and a half now, but revolutionizing operations, that's a big statement and I think we need it. I think Jennifer said in her keynote today, work is broken and I think our data, we surveyed our customers earlier this year and 42% of the respondents were working more hours in 2021 compared to 2020. And I don't think anyone goes home and if I could only work more hours, I think there's some and if I could only do more of this like TDM, the TDM, more toils, if I could only do more of that, I think life would be so good. We don't hear that. We don't hear that a lot. We hear about there's a lot of noise. We have a massive attrition that every company does. That's the type of feedback that we get and so we're really, that's what gets me excited about, the tools that we're building that and especially when I think just seeing the chat even this morning about some of the announcements, it shows we've been listening and it shows the excitement in our customers when they're, lots of I'm going to use this tool, that tool, I can just use PagerDuty which is awesome. >> The momentum is clear and it's palpable and I love being a part of that. Thank you so much Sean for joining me on theCube this afternoon, talking about what's new, what's exciting and how you guys are fixing work that's broken that validated me thinking the work was broken so thank you. >> Happy to be here and thanks for having me. >> My pleasure. For Sean Scott. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCube's coverage of PagerDuty Summit 22 on the ground from the San Francisco. (soft music)

>>Um, okay, thanks to the studio there for the handoff. Appreciate it. We're here for breaking news and it's exciting that we have who's the managing director. Google is breaking some hard news here, Dave. We want to bring him in and get commentary while we end up Dave too. Honestly, the story here is cloud city. We are in the cloud city and all, thanks for coming on remotely into our physical hybrid set here. Thanks for coming >>On. Thank you, John. And very excited to be here. What Juliet. >>Well, we got Bon Jovi ready to play. Everyone's waiting for that concert in the year. The only thing standing between bunch of LV and all the great stuff. So a lot of people watching. Thanks for coming on, sir. So you guys got some big news, um, first Erickson partners with you guys on 5g platform, deal with Anthem, as well as, uh, open ran Alliance. You guys are joining huge, a Testament to the industry. I see Google with all your innovation you guys have in the big three cloud hyperscalers. Obviously you guys invented SRE, so you know, you no stranger to large scale. What's the news. Let's tell us why this Erickson news is so important. Let's start with the Erickson announcement. >>Sure. So John, I mean, we are very excited today to finally bring to the market, the strategic partnership that we've been building with Erickson for the last few months, uh, the partnership to recent retreat, which is very important to the industry is you're actually doing this in conjunction with very large CSPs. So it's not been in isolation. You are in fact in the press release that we have already launched something to get the big telecom Italia in Italy, because you will see that also in the past. And really the partnership is on three pillars. Number one, how can CSBs monetize 5g and edge, which is the real team at the moment using Google clouds solutions like the edge computing platform and, and POS, and Erikson's cutting edge 5g components, 5g solutions. And if we can onboard these together at the CSP, such as telecom Italia, that creates massive pain to market efficiency. So that's 0.1 because speed and agility is key John, but then point to it also unlocks a lot of edge use cases for a bunch of verticals, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, so on, which are already starting to launch together with that. Excellent. And so that's the second pillar. And then the final pillar of course, is this continuously cloud native innovation that you just highlighted. John, we are going to try and double down on it between ourselves and Ericsson to really time created this cloud native application suite or 5g or whatever. >>Talk about the innovations around cloud, because the message we're hearing him this year at mobile world Congress, is that the public cloud is driving the innovation. And, you know, I can be a little bit over the top. So the telcos are slow. They're like glaciers, they move slow, but they're just moving packets. They are there. They're moving the network around. The innovation is happening on top. So there's some hardened operations operating the networks. Now you have a build concept cloud native enables that. So you've got containers. You can put that encapsulate that older technology and integrated in. So this is not a rip and replace. Someone has to die to win. This is a partnership with the tellers. Can you share your thoughts on that piece? >>Smart Antone's photo? We believe that it's a massive partnership opportunity. There's zero conflict or tensions in this sort of ecosystem. And the reason for that is when you talk about that containerization and right once and deploy everywhere type architecture that we are trying to do, that's where the cloud native really helps. Like when you create Ericsson 5g solutions with the operators, adjust telecom Italia, once you build a solution, you don't have to worry about, do I need to kick it back again and again, but every deployment, as long as your mantra, genetics and working, you shouldn't be able to have the same experience. >>Yeah, I'm John. I talk all the time in the cube about how developers are really going to drive the edge. You're clearly doing that with your distributed cloud, building out a telco cloud. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how you see that evolving. A lot of the AI that's done today is done in the cloud. A lot of modeling being done. When you think about edge, you think about AI inferencing, you think about all these monetization opportunities. How are you thinking about that? >>So I think David, first of all, it's a fan best six Sigma in how we are looked in at analytics at the edge, right? So we, uh, we have realized that is a very, very, uh, uh, uh, data computing, heavy operation. So certainly the training of the models is still going to stay in cloud for the foreseeable future. But the influencing part that you mentioned is there something that we can offer to the edge? Why is that so important in the pandemic era, think of running a shop or a factory floor, completely autonomously meeting zero minimal human intervention. And if you want to look at an assembly line and look at AI influencing as a way to find out assembly line defects on products in manufacturing, that's very difficult problem to solve unless you actually create those influencing models at the edge. So creating that ecosystem of an Erickson and a Google cloud carrier gives you that edge placement of the workloads that would fit right next to our factory floor in our manufacturing example. And then on top of that, you could run that AI influence thing to really put in the hands of the manufacturer, a visual inspection capability to just bring this to life. >>Great. Thank you for that. And now the other piece of the announcement of course, is the open, open ran. We've been talking about that all weekend and you know, you well, remember when cloud first came out, people were concerned about security. Of course. Now everybody's asking the question, can we still get the reliability and the security that we're used to with the telcos? And of course over time we learned that you guys actually pretty good at security. So how do you see the security component, maybe first talk about the open ran piece, why that's important and how security fits? >>Sure. So first of all, open trend is something that we have taken great interest in the last year or so as it started evolving. And the reason for that is fairly simple. Dave, this aggregation of networks has been happening for some time in the radio layer. We believe that's the final frontier of sort of unlocking and dis-aggregating that radio layer. And why is it so important? 80% of the operators spend globally is on radio. 80% is on radio. If you disaggregate that. And if the internet synergies for your CSP partners and clients, that meant you have standard purpose hardware standard for software with open interfaces, number one, massive difference in VCO. Number two, the supply chain gets streamlined and become still really, really simple way to manage a fairly large distribution. That's about to get larger in 5g and the capital clarity that 5g needs. >>You're thinking of tens of thousands of micro cells and radio cells going everywhere. And having that kind of standardized hardware software with openings of Essex is an extremely important cost dimension to every new site finished that the reason we got to exact open brand was you can now run for a lot of API APIs on the radio net, cetera, that then certainly brings a whole developer community on the radio later. That then helps you do a bunch of things like closed loop automation for network optimization, as well as potentially looking at monetization opportunities by hyper personalizing, yours and mine experiences at the waist level from the self-doubt. And so that really is what is driving us towards this open grind paper. Come on, we go and >>Got a minute and a half. I want to get your thoughts real quick on, on open source and the innovation. Um, Danielle Royston, who's the CEO of telco, Dr. She's at a keynote today. And she mentioned that the iPhone 14 years ago was launched. Okay. And you think about open and you mentioned proprietary with the 5g and having Iran be more commodity and industry standard. That's going to lower the costs increase the surface here of infrastructure. Everyone wins because everyone wants more connectivity options. Software is going to be the key to success for the telco industry. And open source is driving. That is Android. The playbook that you guys pioneered, obviously at Google with the smart phones was very successful. How is that a playbook or an indicator to what could happen at telecom? >>Absolutely. John and the parallel and analogy that you raised is photon. Be believed in the telco world and tossed multi cloud as a unifying software development layer. The app development platform is the way that people will start to drive this innovation, whether it's radio or whether it's in the core or whether it's on the side of pups, same software planning, everywhere that really allows you that whole development models that we are familiar with, but on the telecom side. And that's where we are seeing some massive innovation opportunities for systems to come on board. >>That's great stuff. And I was just heard someone in the hallway just yesterday and say, you want to be the smartphone. You don't want to be the Blackberry going forward. That's pretty much the consensus here at mobile world Congress. I'm all. Thank you for coming on and sharing the hard news and Google regulations on the Erickson Anthem platform, a deal as well as the open Ranton Alliance. Uh, congratulations. Good to see you. And by the way, you'll be keynoting tomorrow on the cube featured segment. So >>Watch that in there. Thank you, John. Thank you. Glad >>To be here. Benching director telecom, industry, solicitor, Google, obviously player. He's managing that business. Big opportunities for Google because they have the technology. They got the chops, Dave, and we're going to now bring this Daniel. Russia says here when to bring up on the stage, Bon Jovi is about to go on behind us Bon Jovi's here. And this is like a nightclub, small intimate setting here in cloud city. Dave Bon. Jovi's right there. He's going to come on stage after we close down here, but first let's bring up the CEO of telco. Dr. And yeah, it was great to see she's hot off the keynote. We're going to see you to Mike. Great to see you. Oh, it's great to be there. We're going to see you tomorrow for an official unpacking of the keynote, but thanks for coming by and closing, >>Swinging by. I never closed down the show. It's been a big, it's been a big day-to-day at MWC and in cloud city, really starting to get packed. I mean, everyone's coming in the band's warming up. You can kind of hear it. Um, I think Elon Musk is about to go on as well. So I mean, it's really happening all the buzz about cloud city out there in the hallway. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, I think everyone's talking about it. I'm really, really excited with how it's going. >>Well, this is awesome. While we got you here, we want to put you to work being the cube analyst for the segment. You just heard Google. Uh, we broke them in for a breaking news segment. So hard news Erickson partnership. We're in the factory, former Erickson booth. They're not even here, it's now the Calco VR booth, but that's a relation. And then open ran again, open source, you got five G you got open source all happening. What's your take on this? >>You see, you know, there's two big. And I, I talked about it, my keynote this morning, and there's two big technological changes that are happening in our industry simultaneously. And I don't think we could have had it MWC 21. I certainly wanted to make it about the public cloud. I think I'm sort of successful in doing that. And I think the other piece is open ramp, right? And I think these two big shifts are happening and, um, I'm really thrilled about it. And so, yeah, >>Well I loved your keynote. We were here, live. Chloe was here filling in for Dave while David was going to do some research and some breaking stories to you are on stage. And we were talking well, he's like, there's trillions of dollars, John on the table. And I was making the point, the money is at the middle of the table and it's changing hands if people don't watch it. And then you onstage that this trillions of dollars, this is a real competitive shift with dollars on the table. And you've got cultural collision. You got operators and builders trying to figure out it feels like dev ops is coming in here. Yeah. I mean, what's the, what's the holistic vibe. What's >>The, yeah, I think my message is about, we can use the software and specifically the software, the public cloud to double your ARPU without massive cap X expenditure. And I think the CSPs is always viewed to get the increase in ARPU. I got to build out the network. I got to spend a lot of money. And with these two technologies that require might be dropped. And then in exchange for doubling our poo, why not? We should do that. Absolutely. >>You know, your message has been pretty clear that you got to get on, on the wave that arrived the way you're going to become driftwood. As John said yesterday. And I think it's pretty, it's becoming pretty clear that that's the case for the telcos. I feel like Danielle, that they were entering this decade, perhaps with a little bit more humility than they have in the past. And then, you know, maybe, especially as it relates to developers, we're just talking about building out the edge. We always talk about how developers are really going to be a key factor in the edge. And that's not a wheelhouse necessarily. It's obviously they're going to have to partner for that to have going to have to embrace cloud native. I mean, it's pretty clear that your premise is right on it. We'll see how long it takes, but if it, if they don't move fast, you know, what's going to happen. Well, I >>Think you look at it from the enterprise's perspective. And I think we just heard Google talking about it. We need to provide a tech stack that the enterprises can write to now, historically they haven't had this opportunity historically that CSPs have provided it. Now you're going to be able to write against Google's tech stack. And that's something that is documented. It's available. There's developers out there that know it. Um, and so I think that's the big opportunity and this might be the big use case that they've been looking for with 5g and looking forward to 16th. And so it's a huge opportunity for CSS. >>I think that's an important point because you got to place bets. And if I'm betting on Google or Amazon, Microsoft, okay. Those are pretty safe bets, right. Those guys are going to be around. >>I mean, they're like, no, don't trust the hyperscalers. I'm like, um, are you guys nuts? If they're safe, right. Safe >>Bets in terms of your investment in technology, now you got to move fast. Yeah. That's the other piece of it. You've got to change your business model. >>Well, you gotta be in the right side of history too. I mean, I mean, what is trust actually really mean? The snowflake trust Amazon, it sure did to get them where they are. Um, but now that's a >>Great example, John. It really is because there's a company that can move fast, but at the same time they compete with the same time they add incremental value. And so yeah, >>Here, the, you can see the narrative like, oh no, we're partnering telcos. Aren't bad. No one needs to die to bring in the new containers. Do we'll help them manage that operational legacy. But if they don't move, they're going to have an asset. That'll get rolled up into a SPAC or some sort of private equity deal. And because the old model of building cap backs and extract rents is kind of shifting because the value shifting. So to me, I think this is what we're watching still kind of unknown. Danielle Love to get your thoughts on this because if the value shifts to services, which is a consumption model like cloud, yeah. Then you can, don't have to try and extract the rents out of the cap ex >>Yeah. I don't think you need to own the entire stack to provide value. And I think that's where we are today in telco, right there. I mean, nuts and bolts of the stack, the servers, you know, the cabling, everything. And I'm like, stand on the shoulders of these amazing tech giants that have solved, you know, mega data centers, right. Huge data centers at scale, and just leverage their, their investment and uh, for your own benefit, it starts to focus. And we heard, um, all talking about it starts to focus on your subscriber and driving a great experience for us. Right? Yeah. Well, you're >>Talking about that many times they can do, but you're right. If the conversation hasn't has to go beyond, okay, we're just conductivity. It's gotta be ongoing and be like, oh, it's $10 a month for roaming charges. Ah, great. Yeah. Tick that box, right? It's those value added services that you're talking about and it's an infinite number of those that can be developed. And that's where the partnerships come in a creativity in the industry. It's just >>A blank piece of paper for, well, we, you know, everyone thinks Google knows everything about you, right. We've had the experience on our phone where they're serving of ads and you're like, how did you write Facebook? But you know, who knows more about us than, than Google or your mother, even your telco, you take your phone with you everywhere. Right? And so it's time to start unlocking all of that knowledge and using it to provide >>A really great, by the way, congratulations on the CEO to Toby and the investment a hundred million dollars. That's a game changer statement again, back to the billing. And there's a good, there's a whole new chain, even all up and down the stack of solutions, great stuff. And I want to unpack that tomorrow. I don't hold that. We're going and we're going to meet tomorrow. I want, I wanna want to leave that to stay >>In the data for a second, because you made the point before in your keynote as well. That it's, that it's the data that drives the value of these companies. Why is it that apple, Amazon, Google Facebook now trillion dollar evaluations. It's all about the data and the telcos have the data, but they can't figure out how to turn that into valuation. >>There's two parts of the data problem, which is number one, the data is trapped in on-premise siloed systems that are not open. You can't connect them and they certainly can't do without. And we talked about it, I think yesterday, you know, millions of dollars of expenditure. And I think the other piece that's really interesting is that it's not connected to a mechanism to get it out in a timely manner, right? This is data that's aging by the minute. And when it takes you weeks to get the insight it's useless. Right? And so to Togi we announced the launch to Togi, I'll get a little to Tokyo plug in there, right. To Toby is connecting that insight to the charger, to the engagement engine and getting it out to subscribers. I think that's the beginning of this connection. I think it's a hard problem to solve and would have been solved already. >>But I think the key is leveraging the public cloud to get your data out of on-premise and, and mashing it up against these great services that Google and Azure and Amazon provides to drive it into the hands of the subscriber, make it very actionable, very monetizeable right at the end, that's what they want. More ARPU, more revenue. Right. And you know, we heard some keynotes from GSA yesterday, some big, big guys, you know, talking about how, you know, it's not fair that these other communication platforms are not regulated. You know, telco is heavily regulated and they're like, it's not fair. And I'm like, yep. It's not fair. That's like right. South complaining about it and start treating your customers better. So they are, they're happy to give you more. >>Yeah. And I think that's the message about the assets do, um, well, one thing I will say is this mobile world Congress is that we've been having a lot of fun here in cloud city. I have to ask you a personal question. Have you been having fun? You look great on the keynote of spring to your staff, cloud cities. Beautiful. Spectacular here. Give us some highlights, personal highlights from your trip. So far, >>Number one, I'm, I'm psyched that the keynote is delivered and, and done. I mean, I think it takes my blood pressure down a blind, um, you know, the spring in my step, I wore these fun little tennis shoes and, and that was really fun, but yeah, I'm having, I'm having, I think a lot of things, great conversations. Yes. The attendance has reduced, um, you know, usually you see hundreds of people from the big group carriers, especially the European groups and yeah, the attendance is reduced, but the senior guys are here, right. The senior leadership teams are in the booth or having meetings, running amazing conversations. I think the last year we really did live a decade in one year. I think they woke up to the power of the public cloud. I mean, there was no way that they got business done without cloud based tools. And I think the light bulb went off, I think I'm right in the right moment. Awesome. Do you think that, >>Do you think that they'd think in there, like left money on the table because you look at the pandemic, there were three categories of companies, losers, people who held the line struggled and then winners. Yeah. Big time tailwind booming. Obviously the zooms of the world telcos did well. They were up and running. Uh, this, this was good. You think we might've left some money on the table? They could have done more. >>Yeah. I think the ones that were, you know, people talk about digital transformation where digital telco we're digitally enabled, but I think the pandemic really tested this. Right. Can you deliver a contactless SIM or do you need to go to a store in person to get to go pick it up? And I had a broken SIM during the pandemic. My provider made me go to the store and I'm like, is it even open? And so I heard other stories of telcos that were very digitally enabled, right. They were using Uber to deliver Sims, all sorts of fun, crazy stuff and new ideas. And they were able to pivot right. Agile. And so I think, I think that was a really big telemedicine booming. So >>If you were in a digital business during the pandemic in general, you're out of business maybe unless you were telco, but I think you're right. I think the light bulb went off. It was an aha moment. And they said, oh, if >>We don't, I mean, I am not kidding. Right. As an ex CEO where I was trying to collect signatures on renewals, right. Here's a DocuSign, which for the world is like, duh. I mean, our school uses DocuSign. I had telcos that required an in-person signature, right. In some country once a month on Tuesday between 10 and two. And I'm like, how are you doing business? Like that? That's like the dark ages. >>Yeah. This is where the crypto guys got it right. With know your customer. Right. >>Because they have the data. Well, there's a lot of things that come in wrong. We don't want to get the whole show on that, but then you have great to have you drop biopsy Bon Jovi's here. How did you get Bon Jovi? Huge fan, New Jersey boy Patriots fan. We'd love it. Well, >>Yeah. I mean, who doesn't love Bon Jovi. Right. Um, we knew we wanted a rocker, right. Rock and roll is all about challenging the status quo. Um, that, I mean, since the beginning and that's what we're doing here, right. We're really challenging. Like the way things have been done in telco kind of just shattering the glass ceiling and lots of different ways. Right. Calling the old guys dinosaurs. I'm sure those guys love me. Right. I mean, how much do they hate me right now? Or they're like that girl? Oh, we're punk >>Rock. They're rock and roll. Right, right. I mean, maybe we should have gotten the clash >>Right. Black flag. Right. I'm a little bit old. >>Accessible. Still >>Edgy. Yeah. So really excited to get them here. Um, I've met him before. Um, and so hopefully he'll remember me. It's been a couple of years since I've seen him. So can't wait to connect with him again. I think we have Elon Musk coming up and that's going to be, it's always exciting to hear that guy talk. So >>Yeah, it could be inspiration off after you've talked to space, space X and kind to star lake. >>Right. I mean, those guys are launching rockets and deploying satellites. And >>I think that's really interesting for >>Rural right. In telco. Right. Being able to deploy very quickly in rural where the, maybe the cost, um, you know, per gig doesn't make sense. You know, the cost for deployment of tower. I think, I mean, that's an interesting idea right there. It's exciting. It's exciting. >>He's inspirational. I think a lot of people look at the younger generation coming into this issue. Why are we doing things? A lot of people are questioning and they see the cloud. They're saying, oh, Hey, you're a B, why are we doing this? This is such an easier, better way. Yeah. I think eventually the generation shifts >>It's coming. I'm so excited to be a part of it. Yeah. Great, >>Great leadership. And I want to say that you are real innovative, glad to have us here and presenting with you here. >>Awesome team. I'm psyched to have you guys. We talked last night about how great this partnership has said. Yeah. >>Cuba's keep us rocking inside the cloud city. The streets of the city are packed in here. All stuff. Great stuff. Thanks for coming on. Thanks. Bon Jovi is here. We've got a shot. A bunch of we do we have a screenshot of Bon Jovi? Yup. There it is. Okay. He's about to come on stage and uh, we're gonna take a break here. We're gonna take and send it back to Adam and the team in the studio. Thanks guys.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, thanks to the studio there for the handoff. Appreciate it, we're here for breaking news and it's exciting that we have Amol Phadke who's the Managing Director, Google is breaking some hard news here, Dave, so we want to bring him in and get commentary while we end out day two. Obviously, the story here is CLOUD CITY. We are in the CLOUD CITY. Amol, thanks for coming on remotely into our physical hybrid set here. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. I'm very excited to be here, virtually at MWC 21. >> Oh we got Bon Jovi ready to play. Everyone's waiting for that concert and you're the only thing standing between Bon Jovi and all the great stuff so. >> A lot of people watching. >> Thanks for coming on. Seriously you guys got some big news first Ericsson partners with you guys on 5G, platform deal with anthesis as well as open O-ran Alliance. You guys are joining huge testament to the industry. Obviously Google with all your innovation you guys have in the big three cloud hyperscalers. Obviously you guys invented SRE, so you know, you're no stranger to large scale. What's the news? Tell us why this Ericsson news is so important. Let's start with the Ericsson announcement. >> Sure, so, John, I mean, we are very excited today to finally bring to the market, the strategic partnership that we've been building with Ericsson for the last few months, the partnership, the reason we feel this is very important to the industry is we are actually doing this in conjunction with very large CSPs. So it's not done in isolation. You in fact saw in the press release that we have already launched something together with Telecom Italia in Italy. Because you will see that also in the press. And really the partnership is on three pillars. Number one, how can CSPs monetize 5G and Edge, which is a real team at the moment using Google Clouds solutions like the Edge computing platform and Anthos and Ericsson's cutting Edge 5G components, 5G solutions. And if we can onboard this together at the CSPs, such as Telecom Italia, that creates massive time to market efficiency. So that's point 1. Speed and agility is key John. But then point 2, it also unlocks a lot of Edge use cases for a bunch of verticals, retail, manufacturing, healthcare and so on. Which we are already starting to launch together with Ericsson. And so that's the second pillar. And then the final pillar of course, is this continuous wave of Cloud Native innovation that you just highlighted, John. We are going to try and double down on it between ourselves and Ericsson to really try and create this Cloud Native Application Suite for 5G over time. >> Talk about the innovations around Cloud, because the message we're hearing this year at Mobile World Congress is that the public cloud is driving the innovation and you know, I can be a little bit over the top and say, so the Telcos are slow, they're like glaciers, they move slow, but they're just moving packets. They are there, they're moving the network around. The innovation is happening on top. So there's some hardened operations operating the networks. Now you have a build concept, Cloud Native enables that. So you've got containers. You can put that, encapsulate that older technology and integrate it in. So this is not a rip and replace, someone has to die to win. This is a partnership with the Telco's. Can you share your thoughts on that piece? >> Spot on, John, spot on. We, we believe that it's a massive partnership opportunity. There's zero conflict or tensions in this sort of ecosystem. And the reason for that is, when you talk about that containerization and write once and deploy everywhere type architecture, that we are trying to do, that's where the Cloud Native be really helps. Like when you create Ericsson 5G solutions with the operators at Telecom Italia, once you build a solution, you don't have to worry about, do I need to go create that again and again for every deployment. As long as you have Anthos and Ericsson working, you should be able to have the same experience everywhere. >> Yeah, John and I talk all the time in theCUBE about how developers are really going to drive the Edge. You're clearly doing that with your Distributor Cloud, building out a Telco Cloud. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how you see that evolving and a lot of the AI that's done today is done in the cloud. A lot of modeling being done. When you think about Edge, you think about AI inferencing, you think about all these monetization opportunities. How are you thinking about that? >> Sure, so I think David first of all, it's a fantastic segue into how we are looking at analytics at the Edge, right? So we, we have realized that (connection disruption) is a very, very data computing, heavy operation. So certainly the training of the models is still going to stay in cloud for the foreseeable future. But the influencing part that you mentioned, is definitely something that we can offload to the Edge? Why is that so important? In the pandemic era think of running a shop or a factory floor, completely autonomously, needing zero minimal human intervention. And if you want to look at an assembly line and look at AI influencing as a way to find out assembly line defects on products and manufacturing. That's a very difficult problem to solve unless you actually create those influencing models at the Edge. So creating that ecosystem of an Ericsson and a Google Cloud and Telecom Italia type of carrier, gives you that Edge placement of the workloads that would fit right next to a factory floor in our manufacturing example. And then on top of that, you could run the AI influencing to really put in the hands of the manufacturer, a visual inspection capability to just bring this to life. >> Great, thank you for that and now the other piece of the announcement of course is the open, Open RAN. We've been talking about that all week. And you know, you well remember when Cloud first came out, people were concerned about security. And of course, now everybody's asking the question, can we still get the reliability and the security that we're used to with the Telcos? And of course over time we learned that you guys actually are pretty good at security. So how do you see the security component? Maybe first talk about the Open RAN piece, why that's important and how security fits? >> Sure, so first of all, Open RAN is something that we have taken great interest in the last year or so as it started evolving. And the reason for that is fairly simple Dave, this aggregation of networks has been happening for some time. In the radio layer, we believe that's the final frontier of sort of unlocking and desegregating that radio layer. And why is that so important? 80% of the operators spent globally is on radio across the entire infrastructure, 80% is on radio. If you disaggregate that and if you created synergies for your CSP partners and clients, that meant you have standard purpose hardware, standard purpose software with open interfaces, number one, massive difference in PCO. Number two, the supply chain gets streamlined and becomes a really, really simple way to manage a fairly large distribution, that's about to get larger with 5G and the capillarity that 5G needs. You're thinking of tens of thousands of micro cells and radio cells going everywhere. And having that kind of standardized hardware, software with open interfaces, is an extremely important cost dimension too. And on the revenue side, the things is that, the reason we got so excited with Open RAN was, you can now run a lot of API's on the radio net itself. That then suddenly brings a whole developer community on the radio layer. That then helps you do a bunch of things like closed loop automation for network optimization, as well as potentially looking at monetization opportunities by hyper personalizing yours and mine experiences at a device level, from the cell tower. And so that really is what is driving us towards this Open RAN type announcement. >> John: Amol, we've only got a minute and a half. I want to get your thoughts real quick on, on Open Source and the innovation. Danielle Royston, who's the CEO of TelcoDr. She's a keynote today. And she mentioned that the iPhone, 14 years ago was launched, okay. And you think about Open, and you mentioned proprietary with the 5G, and having O-RAN be more commodity and industry standard. That's going to lower the costs, increase the surface area of infrastructure. Everyone wins, 'cause everyone wants more connectivity options. Software is going to be the key to success for the telco industry, and Open Source is driving that. Is Android the playbook that you guys pioneered, obviously at Google with phones was very successful. How is that a playbook or an indicator to what could happen at Telco? >> Absolutely John and the parallel analogy that you raised is spot on. We believe in the Telco world Anthos multi-cloud as a unifying software development layer and the app development platform is the way that people will start to drive this innovation. Whether it's a radio or whether it's in the core or whether it's on the IT side of house. Same software running everywhere. That really allows you that whole CICD SRE type development models that we are familiar with, but on the telecom side. And that's where we are seeing some massive innovation opportunities for start, that would be for systems to come on. >> John: That's great stuff. And I was, just heard someone in the hallway just yesterday and say, you want to be the smartphone. You don't want to be the Blackberry going forward. That's pretty much the consensus here at Mobile World Congress. Amol, thank you for coming on and sharing the hard news with Google. Congratulations on the Ericsson Anthos platform deal as well as the Open Ran Alliance. Congratulations, good to see you. And by the way, you'll be keynoting tomorrow on theCUBE featured segments. So, watch that interview. >> Thank you John. Glad to be here. >> Thanks Amol. Managing Director, Telecom Industry Solutions at Google, obviously player, he's managing that business. Big opportunities for Google because they have the technology to get the chops Dave, and we're going to now, bring on Danielle Royston, she's here, I want to bring her up on the stage. Bon Jovi's about to go on, behind us, Bon Jovi's here. And this is like a nightclub, small intimate setting here in CLOUD CITY. Dave, Bon Jovi is right there. He's going to come on stage after we close down here, but first let's bring up the CEO of TelcoDR, Danielle Royston, great to see you. She's hot off the keynote. We're going to see you have a mic. Great to see you. >> Oh, it's great to be here, awesome. >> We are going to see you tomorrow for an official unpacking of the keynote but thanks for coming by and closing, swinging by. >> I know we're closing down the show. It's been a big, it's been a big day today at MWC and in CLOUD CITY. >> And Bon Jovi by the way. >> Day two, I mean really starting to get packed. >> And I mean, everyone's coming in, the band's warming up. You can kind of hear it. I think Elon Musk is about to go on as well. So I mean, it's really happening. >> A lot of buzz about CLOUD CITY out there in the hallway. >> Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think everyone's talking about it. I'm really, really excited >> Awesome. >> with how it's going, so yeah. >> Well, this is awesome, while we got you here, we want to put you to work being theCUBE analyst for this segment. You just heard Google. We broke them in for a breaking news segment. Obviously, so hard news Ericsson partnership. We're in the, actually former Ericsson booth. They're not even here, it's now the TelcoDR booth. But that's and then Open RAN again, Open Source. You got 5G, you got Open Source all happening. What's your take on this, as you're seeing this? >> Yeah, I think, you know, there's two big, and I talked about in my keynote this morning, there's two big technological changes that are happening in our industry simultaneously. And I don't think we could have had it--MWC 21 I certainly wanted to make it about the Public Cloud. I think I'm sort of successful in doing that. And I think the other piece is Open RAN, right? And I think these two big shifts are happening and I'm really thrilled about it. And so, yeah, we saw these two. >> I loved your keynote, we were here live Chloe was here filling in for Dave while Dave was going to do some research and getting some breaking stories. But you are on stage and, and we were talking, Chloe's like, these there's trillions of dollars, John on the table. And I was making the point, that the money's in the middle of the table and it's changing hands. If people don't watch it. And then you onstage said there's trillions of dollars. This is a real competitive shift with dollars on the table. And you've got cultural collision. You've got operators and builders trying to figure out, it feels like Dev Ops is coming in here. >> Yeah. >> I mean, what's the, what's the holistic vibe. What's the, what do you? >> Yeah, I think my message is about, we can use the software and specifically the software, the Public Cloud, to double your ARPU without massive CapEx expenditure. And I think the CSPs has always viewed to get the increase in ARPU, I got to build out the network, I got to spend a lot of money. And with these two technologies that require might be dropped. And then in exchange for doubling our ARPU, why not? We should do that absolutely. >> You know, your message has been pretty clear that you got to get on, on the wave. Got to ride the wave or become driftwood, as John said yesterday. And I think it's pretty, it's becoming pretty clear that that's the case for the Telcos. I feel like Danielle, that they entering this decade, perhaps with a little bit more humility than they have in the past. And then, you know, maybe, especially as it relates to developers, we're just talking about building out the Edge. We always talk about how developers are really going to be a key factor in the Edge and that's not a wheelhouse necessarily. But, obviously they're going to have to partner for that to have, they're going to have to embrace Cloud Native. I mean, it's pretty clear that your premise is right on. We'll see how long it takes, but if it, if they don't move fast, you know, what's going to happen. >> Well, I think you look at it from the enterprise's perspective. And we just heard Google talking about it. We need to provide a tech stack that the enterprises can write to. Now, historically they haven't had this opportunity. Historically that CSPs have provided it. Now you're going to be able to write against Google's tech stack. And that's something that is documented, it's available. There's developers out there that know it. And so I think that's the big opportunity. And this might be the, the big use case that they've been looking for with 5G and looking forward to 6G. And so it's a huge opportunity for CSPs to do that. >> I think that's an important point because you've got to place bets. And if I'm betting on Google or Amazon, Microsoft, okay, those are pretty safe bets, right? Those guys are going to be around. >> You think, I mean, they're like, no, don't trust the hyperscalers. And like, are you guys nuts? They're safe bets. >> Safe bets in terms of your investment in technology, now you've got to move fast. >> Yeah. >> That's the other piece of it. >> Yeah. >> You got to change your business model. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Well, you got to be in the right side of history too. I mean, I mean, what is trust actually really mean? Does Snowflake trust Amazon? It sure did to get them where they are, but now they're looking at other options. >> That is a great example, John. It really is, because there's a company that can move fast, but the same time they compete, but the same time they add incremental value. >> And so here you can see the narrative like, oh no, we're partnering, Telcos aren't bad. No one needs to die to bring in the new. Well containers do, will help them manage that operational legacy, but culturally, if they don't move, they're going to have an asset that'll get rolled up into a SPAC or some sort of private equity deal. And because the old model of building CapEx and extract rents is kind of shifting because the value's shifting. So to me, I think this is what we're watching still kind of unknown. Danielle, love to get your thoughts on this, because if the value shifts to services, which is a consumption model like cloud, >> Yeah. >> Then you can, don't have to try to extract the rents out of the CapEx or, what's your thought, I mean. >> Yeah, I don't think you need to own the entire stack to provide value. And I think that's where we are today in Telco, right. There, I mean, nuts and bolts of the stack, the servers, you know, the cabling, everything. And I'm like, stand on the shoulders of these amazing tech giants that have solved, you know, mega data centers, right? Huge data centers at scale, and just leverage their investment and for your own benefit and start to focus, and we heard Amol talking about it, starts to focus on your subscriber and driving a great experience for us, right, yeah. >> Well, you've talking about that many times that you exhibit, you're right. If the conversation has been, has to go beyond, okay, we're just connectivity. It's got to be going to be like, oh, it's $10 a month for roaming charges, ah great. >> Yeah. >> Tick that box. Right, it's those value added services that you're talking about. And it's an infinite number of those that can be developed. And that's where the partnerships come in, and creativity in the industry. It's just a blank piece of paper. >> Well, we, you know, everyone thinks Google knows everything about you, right? We've had the experience on our phone where they're serving up ads and you're like, how did it? >> Facebook does? >> Right, Facebook. But you know who knows more about us than, than Google or your mother even, your Telco. >> Yeah. >> You take your phone with you everywhere, right? And so it's time to start unlocking all of that knowledge and using it to provide a really great experience. >> And by the way, congratulations on the CEO to Totogi and the investment hundred million dollars. That's a game changer statement again, back to the billing and the there's a good, there's a whole new team, even all up and down the stack of solutions, great stuff. And I want to unpack that tomorrow. I want to hold that, we're going to meet tomorrow. I want to, I want to, leave that here. >> Stay in the data for a second, because you made the point before in your keynote as well. That, it's that it's the data that drives the value of these companies. Why is it that Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook now trillion dollar valuations. >> Yeah. >> It's all about the data and the Telco's have the data, but they can't figure out how to turn that into valuation. >> I think there's two parts of the data problem, which is number one, the data is trapped in on-premise, siloed systems that are not open. You can't connect them, and you certainly do it without, and we talked about it, I think yesterday, you know, millions of dollars of expenditure. And I think the other piece that's really interesting is that it's not connected to a mechanism to get it out in a timely manner, right? This is data that's aging by the minute. And when it takes you weeks to get the insight , it's useless, right? And so to Totogi, we announced the launch of Totogi, I'll get a little to Totogi plug in there, right. Totogi is connecting that insight to the charger, to the engagement engine and getting it out to subscribers. I think that's the beginning of this connection. I think it's a hard problem to solve it would have been solved already. But I think the key is leveraging the Public Cloud to get your data out of on-premise and, and mashing it up against these great services that Google and Azure and Amazon provide to drive it into the hands of the subscriber, make it very actionable, very monetizeable right at the end, that's what they want. More ARPU, more revenue, right. And you know, we've heard some keynotes from GSMA yesterday, some big, big guys, you know, talking about how, you know, it's not fair that these other communication platforms are not regulated. You know, Telco is heavily regulated and they're like, it's not fair. And I'm like, yep, it's not fair. That's life, right? >> Yeah. >> Stop complaining about it and start treating your customers better. So they're happy to give you more money. >> Yeah, and I think that's the message about the assets too. But one thing I will say, this Mobile World Congress, is that we've been having a lot of fun here in CLOUD CITY. I have to ask you a personal question. Have you been having fun? You look great on the keynote. You have a spring to your step. CLOUD CITY is beautiful, spectacular here. >> Yeah. >> Give us some highlights, personal highlights from your trip so far. >> Well number one, I'm, I'm psyched that the keynote is delivered in and done. I mean, I think it takes my blood pressure down a bunch. You know, the spring in my step, I wore these fun little tennis shoes and that was really fun. But yeah, I'm having, I'm having, I think a lot of things, great conversations. Yes the attendance is reduced. You know, usually you see hundreds of people from the big group carriers, especially the European groups. And yeah the attendance is reduced, but the senior guys are here, right? The senior leadership teams are in the booth. We're having meetings, we're having amazing conversations. I think the last year we really did live a decade in one year. I think they woke up to the power of the Public Cloud. >> Yeah, the pandemic helped. >> I mean, there was no way that they got business done without cloud based tools. And I think the light bulb went off. I think I'm right in the right moment. It's Awesome. >> Do you think that, do you think that they'll think in there, like left money on the table because you look at the pandemic, there were three categories of companies, losers, people who held the line, struggled and then winners. >> Yeah. >> Big time tale wind, booming. Obviously the Zooms of the world. Telco's did well. They were up and running, business was good. You think they might've left some money on the table? They could have done more. >> Yeah, I think the ones that were, you know, people talk about digital transformation. We're digital Telco, we're digitally enabled. And I think the pandemic really tested this, right. Can you deliver a contactless SIM? Or do you need to go to a store, in person, to get to go pick it up? And I had a broken SIM during the pandemic. My provider made me go to the store and I'm like, is it even open? And so I heard other stories of Telcos that were very digitally enabled, right. They were using Uber to deliver sims, and all sorts of fun, crazy stuff and new ideas. And they were able to pivot. >> Agile. >> Right, agile. And so I think, I think that was a really big wake up call. >> Telemedicine booming. >> So If you were in a digital business during the pandemic. In general, you're out of business, maybe unless you were a Telco, but I think you're right. I think the light bulb went off. It was an aha moment. And they said, oh-oh, if we don't move. >> I mean, I am not kidding right. As an ex-CEO where I was trying to collect signatures on renewals, right. Here's a DocuSign, which for the world is like, duh. I mean, our school uses DocuSign. I had telcos that required an in-person signature, >> Facts. >> Right, in some country, once a month on Tuesday between 10 and 2. And I'm like, how are you doing business, like that? That's like the dark ages. >> Yeah, this is where the crypto guys got it right, with know your customer. >> Yeah, right. >> 'Cause they have the data. >> Well, they had to, they had to. >> Yeah. >> There's a lot of things that's going wrong on crypto, we don't want to, we could do a whole show on that. But Danielle great to have you drop by, obviously Bon Jovi's here. How did you get Bon Jovi? Huge fan, New Jersey boy, Patriot's fan. >> Yeah. >> Dave, we love him. >> Fantastic. >> Well, I mean, who doesn't love Bon Jovi, right? We knew we wanted a rocker, right. Rock and roll is all about challenging the status quo. That, I mean, since the beginning and that's what we're doing here, right. We're really challenging like the way things have been done in Telco. Kind of just shattering the glass ceiling in lots of different ways, right. Calling the old guys dinosaurs. I'm sure those guys love me, right. I mean, how much do they hate me right now? Or they're like that girl, oh, so. >> Well we are punk rock. They're rock and roll. >> Right, right. I mean, maybe we should have gotten The Clash, right. Black Flag, right. I'm a little bit older than you. >> Bon Jovi's good. >> Right, we'll go with Bon Jovi. >> We like both of them. >> Accessible, right. >> Once's more conservative rock and roll still edgy. >> Yeah, so really excited to get them here. I've met him before. And so hopefully he'll remember me. It's been a couple of years since I've seen him. So can't wait to connect with him again. I think we have Elon Musk coming up and that's going to be, it's always exciting to hear that guy talk, so yeah. >> Yeah, he's going to be inspiration he'll talk space, SpaceX, >> Oh yeah. >> And possibly Starlink. >> Talking about the edge. >> Starlink, right. >> Starlink. >> I mean, those guys are launching rockets and deploying satellites and I think that's really interesting for rural. For rural right in Telco, right. Being able to deploy very quickly in rural where the, maybe the cost, you know, per gig doesn't make sense. You know, the cost for deployment of tower, I think. I mean, that's an interesting idea right there, yeah. >> It's exciting, he's inspirational. I think a lot of people look at the younger generation coming in and saying why are we doing things? A lot of people are questioning and they see the cloud. They're saying, oh, A or B, why are we doing this? This is such an easier, better way. >> Yeah. >> I think eventually the generation shifts in time. >> It's coming. I'm so excited to be a part of it, yeah. >> Great, great leadership. And I want to say that you are real innovative, glad to have us here and presenting with you here. >> Awesome team. >> I'm excited to have you guys. We talked last night about how great this partnership is, so thank you so much, yeah. >> TheCUBE, theCUBE's rocking inside the CLOUD CITY. The streets of the CLOUD CITY are hustling and booming. >> Packed. >> Packed in here. All stuff, great stuff. Thanks for coming on. >> Yep, thanks so much. >> Bon Jovi is here, we got a shot of Bon Jovi. Do we have a screenshot of Bon Jovi? >> Yeah, there it is. >> There it is, yeah. >> Okay, he's about to come on stage and we're going to take a break here. We're going to take and send it back to Adam and the team in the studio. Thanks guys.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> UiPath has had a long, strange trip to IPO. How so you ask? Well, the company was started in 2005. But it's culture, is akin to a frenetic startup. The firm shunned conventions and instead of focusing on a narrow geographic area to prove its product market fit before it started to grow, it aggressively launched international operations prior to reaching unicorn status. Well prior, when it had very little revenue, around a million dollars. Today, more than 60% of UiPath business is outside of the United States. Despite its headquarters being in New York city. There's more, according to recent SEC filings, UiPath total revenue grew 81% last year. But it's free cash flow, is actually positive, modestly. Wait, there's more. The company raised $750 million in a Series F in early February, at a whopping $35 billion valuation. Yet, the implied back of napkin valuation, based on the number of shares outstanding after the offering multiplied by the proposed maximum offering price per share yields evaluation of just under 26 billion. (Dave chuckling) And there's even more to this crazy story. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, Powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis we'll share our learnings, from sifting through hundreds of pages (paper rustling) of UiPath's red herring. So you didn't have to, we'll share our thoughts on its market, its competitive position and its outlook. Let's start with a question. Mark Roberge, is a venture capitalist. He's a managing director at Stage 2 Capital and he's also a teacher, a professor at the B-School in Harvard. One of his favorite questions that he asks his students and others, is what's the best way to grow a company? And he uses this chart to answer that question. On the vertical axis is customer retention and the horizontal axis is growth to growth rate and you can see he's got modest and awesome and so forth. Now, so I want to let you look at it for a second. What's the best path to growth? Of course you want to be in that green circle. Awesome retention of more than 90% and awesome growth but what's the best way to get there? Should you blitz scale and go for the double double, triple, triple blow it out and grow your go to market team on the horizontal axis or should be more careful and focus on nailing retention and then, and only then go for growth? What do you think? What do you think most VCs would say? What would you say? When you want to maybe run the table, capture the flag before your competitors could get there or would you want to take a more conservative approach? What would Daniel Dines say the CEO of UiPath? Again, I'll let you think about that for a second. Let's talk about UiPath. What did they do? Well, I shared at the top that the company shunned conventions and expanded internationally, very rapidly. Well before it hit escape velocity and they grew like crazy and it got out of control and he had to reign it in, plug some holes, but the growth didn't stop, go. So very clearly based on it's performance and reading through the S1, the company has great retention. It uses a metric called gross retention rate which is at 96 or 97%, very high. Says customers are sticking with it. So maybe that's the right formula go for growth and grow like crazy. Let chaos reign, then reign in the chaos as Andy Grove would say. Go fast horizontally, and you can go vertically. Let me tell you what I think Mark Roberge would say, he told me you can do that. But churn is the silent killer of SaaS companies and perhaps the better path is to nail product market fit. And then your retention metrics, before you go into hyperbolic growth mode. There's all science behind this, which may be antithetical to the way many investors want to roll the dice and go for super growth, like go fast or die. Well, it worked for UiPath you might say, right. Well, no. And this is where the story gets even more interesting and long and strange for UiPath. As we shared earlier, UiPath was founded in 2005 out of Bucharest Romania. The company actually started as a software outsourcing startup. It called the company, DeskOver and it built automation libraries and SDKs for companies like Microsoft, IBM and Google and others. It also built automation scripts and developed importantly computer vision technology which became part of its secret sauce. In December 2015, DeskOver changed its name to UiPath and became a Delaware Corp and moved its headquarters to New York City a couple of years later. So our belief is that UiPath actually took the preferred path of Mark Roberge, five ticks North, then five more East. They slow-cooked for the better part of 10 years trying to figure out what market to serve. And they spent that decade figuring out their product market fit. And then they threw gas in the fire. Pretty crazy. All right, let's take a peak (chuckling) at the takeaways from the UiPath S1 the numbers are impressive. 580 million ARR with 65% growth. That asterisk is there because like you, we thought ARR stood for annual recurring revenue. It really stands for annualized renewal run rate. annualized renewal run rate is a metric that is one of UiPath's internal KPIs and are likely communicate that publicly over time. We'll explain that further in a moment. UiPath has a very solid customer base. Nearly 8,000, I've interviewed many of them. They're extremely happy. They have very high retention. They get great penetration into the fortune 500, around 63% of the fortune 500 has UiPath. Most of UiPath business around 70% comes from existing customers. I always say you're going to get more money out of existing customers than new customers but everybody's trying to go out and get new customers. But UiPath I think is taking a really interesting approach. It's their land and expand and they didn't invent that term but I'll come back to that. It kind of reminds me of the early days of Tableau. Actually I think Tableau is an interesting example. Like UiPath, Tableau started out as pretty much a point tool and it had, but it had very passionate customers. It was solving problems. It was simplifying things. And it would have bid into a company and grow and grow. Now the market fundamentals for UiPath are very good. Automation is super hot right now. And the pandemic has created an automation mandate to date and I'll share some data there as well. UiPath is a leader. I'm going to show you the Gartner Magic Quadrant for RPA. That's kind of a good little snapshot. UiPath pegs it's TAM at 60 billion dollars based on some bottoms up calculations and some data from Bain. Pre-pandemic, we pegged it at over 30 billion and we felt that was conservative. Post-pandemic, we think the TAM is definitely higher because of that automation mandate, it's been accelerated. Now, according to the S1, UiPath is going to raise around 1.2 billion. And as we said, if that's an implied valuation that is lower than the Series F, so we suspect the Series F investors have some kind of ratchet in there. UiPath needed the cash from its Series F investors. So it took in 750 million in February and its balance sheet in the S1 shows about 474 million in cash and equivalent. So as I say, it needed that cash. UiPath has had significant expense reductions that we'll show you in some detail. And it's brought in some fresh talent to provide some adult supervision around 70% of its executive leadership team and outside directors came to the company after 2019 and the company's S1, it disclosed that it's independent accounting firm identified last year what it called the "material weakness in our internal controls over financial report relating to revenue recognition for the fiscal year ending 2018, caused by a lack of oversight and technical competence within the finance department". Now the company outlined the steps it took to remediate the problem, including hiring new talent. However, we said that last year, we felt UiPath wasn't quite ready to go public. So it really had to get its act together. It was not as we said at the time, the well-oiled machine, that we said was Snowflake under Mike Scarpelli's firm operating guidance. The guy's the operational guru, but we suspect the company wants to take advantage of this mock market. It's a good time to go public. It needs the cash to bolster its balance sheet. And the public offering is going to give it cache in a stronger competitive posture relative to its main new competitor, autumn newbie competitor Automation Anywhere and the big whales like Microsoft and others that aspire and are watching what UiPath is doing and saying, hey we want a piece of that action. Now, one other note, UiPath's CEO Daniel Dines owns 100% of the class B shares of the company and has a 35 to one voting power. So he controls the company, subject of course to his fiduciary responsibilities but if UiPath, let's say it gets in trouble financially, he has more latitude to do secondary offerings. And at the same time, it's insulated from activist shareholders taking over his company. So lots of detail in the S1 and we just wanted to give you some of those highlights. Here are the pretty graphs. If whoever wrote this F1 was a genius. It's just beautiful. As we said, ARR, annualized renewal run rate all it does is it annualizes the invoice amount from subscriptions in the maintenance portion of the revenue. In other words, the parts that are recurring revenue, it excludes revenue from support and perpetual license. Like one-time licenses and services is just kind of the UiPath's and maybe that's some sort of legacy there. It's future is that recurring revenue. So it's pretty similar to what we think of as ARR, but it's not exact. Lots of customers with a growing number of six and seven figure accounts and a dollar-based net retention of 145%. This figure represents the rate of net expansion of the UiPath ARR, from existing listing customers over a 12 month period. Translation. This says UiPath's existing customers are spending more with the company, land and expand and we'll share some data from ETR on that. And as you can see, the growth of 86% CAGR over the past nine quarters, very impressive. Let's talk about some of the fundamentals of UiPath's business. Here's some data from the Brookings Institute and the OECD that shows productivity statistics for the US. The smaller charts in the right are for Germany and Japan. And I've shared some similar data before the US showed in the middle there. Showed productivity improvements with the personal productivity boom in the mid to late 90s. And it spilled into the early 2000s. But since then you can see it's dropped off quite significantly. Germany and Japan are also under pressure as are most developed countries. China's labor productivity might show declines but it's level, is at level significantly higher than these countries, April 16th headline of the Wall Street Journal says that China's GDP grew 18% this quarter. So, we've talked about the snapback in post-COVID and the post-isolation economy, but these are kind of one time bounces. But anyway, the point is we're reaching the limits of what humans can do alone to solve some of the world's most pressing challenges. And automation is one key to shifting labor away from these more mundane tasks toward more productive and more important activities that can deliver lasting benefits. This according to UiPath, is its stated purpose to accelerate human achievement, big. And the market is ready to be automated, for the most part. Now the post-isolation economy is increasingly going to focus on automation to drive toward activity as we've discussed extensively, I got to share the RPA Magic Quadrant where nearly everyone's a winner, many people are of course happy. Many companies are happy, just to get into the Magic Quadrant. You can't just, you have to have certain criteria. So that's good. That's what I mean by everybody wins. We've reported extensively on UiPath and Automation Anywhere. Yeah, we think we might shuffle the deck a little bit on this picture. Maybe creating more separation between UiPath and Automation Anywhere and the rest. And from our advantage point, UiPath's IPO is going to either force Automation Anywhere to respond. And I don't know what its numbers are. I don't know if it's ready. I suspect it's not, we'd see that already but I bet you it's trying to get there. Or if they don't, UiPath is going to extend its lead even further, that would be our prediction. Now personally, I would have Pegasystems higher on the vertical. Of course they're not an IPO, RPA specialist, so I kind of get what Gartner is doing there but I think they're executing well. And I'd probably, in a broader context I'd probably maybe drop blue prism down a little bit, even though last year was a pretty good year for the company. And I would definitely have Microsoft looming larger up in the upper left as a challenger more than a visionary in my opinion, but look, Gartner does good work and its analysts are very deep into this stuff, deeper than I am. So I don't want to discount that. It's just how I see it. Let's bring in the ETR data and show some of the backup here. This is a candlestick chart that shows the components of net score, which is spending momentum, however, ETR goes out every quarter. Says you're spending more, you're spending less. They subtract the lesses from the mores and that's net score. It's more complicated than that, but that's that blue line that you see in the top and yes it's trending downward but it's still highly elevated. We'll talk about that. The market share is in the yellow line at the bottom there. That green represents the percentage of customers that are spending more and the reds are spending less or replacing. That gray is flat. And again, even though UiPath's net score is declining, it's that 61%, that's a very elevated score. Anything over 40% in our view is impressive. So it's, UiPath's been holding in the 60s and 70s percents over the past several years. That's very good. Now that yellow line market share, yes it dips a bit, but again it's nuanced. And this is because Microsoft is so pervasive in the data stat. It's got so many mentions that it tends to somewhat overwhelm and skew these curves. So let's break down net score a little bit. Here's another way to look at this data. This is a wheel chart we show this often it shows the components of net score and what's happening here is that bright red is defection. So look at it, it's very small that wouldn't be churn. It's tiny. Remember that it's churn is the killer for software companies. And so that forest green is existing customers spending more at 49%, that's big. That lime green is new customers. So again, it's from the S1, 70% of UiPath's revenue comes from existing customers. And this really kind of underscores that. Now here's more evidence in the ETR data in terms of land and expand. This is a snapshot from the January survey and it lines up UiPath next to its competitors. And it cuts the data just on those companies that are increasing spending. It's so that forest green that we saw earlier. So what we saw in Q1 was the pace of new customer acquisition for UiPath was decelerating from previous highs. But UiPath, it shows here is outpacing its competition in terms of increasing spend from existing customers. So we think that's really important. UiPath gets very high scores in terms of customer satisfaction. There's, I've talked to many in theCUBE. There's places on the web where we have customer ratings. And so you want to check that out, but it'll confirm that the churn is low, satisfaction is high. Yeah, they get dinged sometimes on pricing. They get dinged sometimes, lately on service cause they're growing so fast. So, maybe they've taken the eye off the ball in a couple of counts, but generally speaking clients are leaning in, they're investing heavily. They're creating centers of excellence around RPA and automation, and UiPath is very focused on that. Again, land and expand. Now here's further evidence that UiPath has a strong account presence, even in accounts where its competitors are presence. In the 149 shared accounts from the Q1 survey where UiPath, Automation Anywhere and Microsoft have a presence, UiPath's net score or spending velocity is not only highly elevated, it's relative momentum, is accelerating compared to last year. So there's some really good news in the numbers but some other things stood out in the S1 that are concerning or at least worth paying attention to. So we want to talk about that. Here is the income statement and look at the growth. The company was doing like 1 million dollars in 2015 like I said before. And when it started to expand internationally it surpassed 600 million last year. It's insane growth. And look at the gross profit. Gross margin is almost 90% because revenue grew so rapidly. And last year, its cost went down in some areas like its services, less travel was part of that. Now jump down to the net loss line. And normally you would expect a company growing at this rate to show a loss. The street wants growth and UiPath is losing money, but it's net loss went from 519 million, half a billion down to only 92 million. And that's because the operating expenses went way down. Now, again, typically a company growing at this rate would show corresponding increases in sales and marketing expense, R&D and even G&A but all three declined in the past 12 months. Now reading the notes, there was definitely some meaningful savings from no travel and canceled events. UiPath has great events around the world. In fact theCUBE, Knock Wood is going to be at its event in October, in Las Vegas at the Bellagio . So we're stoked for that. But, to drop expenses that precipitously with such high growth, is kind of strange. Go look at Snowflake's income statement. They're in hyper-growth as well. We like to compare it to Snowflake is a very well-run company and it's in hyper-growth mode, but it's sales and marketing and R&D and G&A expense lines. They're all growing along with that revenue. Now, perhaps they're growing at a slower rate. Perhaps the percent of revenue is declining as it should as they achieve operating leverage but they're not shrinking in absolute dollar terms as shown in the UiPath S1. So either UiPath has applied some magic automation mojo to it's business (chuckling). Like magic beans or magic grits with my cousin Vinny. Maybe it has found the Holy grail of operating leverage. It's a company that's all about automation or the company was running way too hot on the expense side and had a cut and clean up its income statement for the IPO and conserve some cash. Our guess is the latter but maybe there's a combination there. We'll give him the benefit of the doubt. And just to add a bit more to this long, strange trip. When have you seen an explosive growth company just about to go public, show positive cashflow? Maybe it's happened, but it's rare in the tech and software business these days. Again, go look at companies like Snowflake. They're not showing positive cashflow, not yet anyway. They're growing and trying to run the table. So you have to ask why is UiPath operating this way? And we think it's because they were so hot and burning cash that they had to reel things in a little bit and get ready to IPO. It's going to be really interesting to see how this stock reacts when it does IPO. So here's some things that we want you to pay attention to. We have to ask. Is this IPO, is it window dressing? Or did UiPath again uncover some new productivity and operating leverage model. I doubt there's anything radically new here. This company doesn't want to miss the window. So I think it said, okay, let's do this. Let's get ready for IPO. We got to cut expenses. It had a lot of good advisors. It surrounded itself with a new board. Extended that board, new management, and really want to take advantage of this because it needs the cash. In addition, it really does want to maintain its lead. It's got Automation Anywhere competing with it. It's got Microsoft looming large. And so it wants to continue to lead. It's made some really interesting acquisitions. It's got very strong vision as you saw in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and obviously it's executing well but it's really had to tighten things up. So we think it's used the IPO as a fortune forcing function to really get its house in order. Now, will the automation mandate sustain? We think it will. The forced match to digital worked, it was effective. It wasn't pleasant, but even in a downturn we think it will confer advantage to automation players and particularly companies like UiPath that have simplified automation in a big way and have done a great job of putting in training, great freemium model and has a culture that is really committed to the future of humankind. It sounds ambitious and crazy but talk to these people, you'll see it's true. Pricing, UiPath had to dramatically expand or did dramatically expand its portfolio and had to reprice everything. And I'm not so worried about that. I think it'll figure that pricing out for that portfolio expansion. My bigger concern is for SaaS companies in general. I don't like SaaS pricing that has been popularized by Workday and ServiceNow, and Salesforce and DocuSign and all these companies that essentially lock you in for a year or two and basically charge you upfront. It's really is a one-way street. You can't dial down. You can only dial up. It's not true Cloud pricing. You look at companies like Stripe and Datadog and Snowflake. It is true Cloud pricing. It's consumption pricing. I think the traditional SaaS pricing model is flawed. It's very unfairly weighted toward the vendors and I think it's going to change. Now, the reason we put cloud on the chart is because we think Cloud pricing is the right way to price. Let people dial up and dial down, let them cancel anytime and compete on the basis of your product excellence. And yeah, give them a price concession if they do lock in. But the starting point we think should be that flexibility, pay by the drink. Cancel anytime. I mentioned some companies that are doing that as well. If you look at the modern SaaS startups and the forward-thinking VCs they're really pushing their startups to this model. So we think over time that the term lock-in model is going to give way to true consumption-based pricing and at the clients option, allow them to lock-in for a better price, way better model. And UiPath's Cloud revenue today is minimal but over time, we think it's going to continue to grow that cloud. And we think it will force a rethink in pricing and in revenue recognition. So watch for that. How is the street going to react to Daniel Dines having basically full control of the company? Generally, we feel that that solid execution if UiPath can execute is going to outweigh those concerns. In fact, I'm very confident that it will. We'll see, I kind of like what the CEO says has enough mojo to say (chuckling) you know what, I'm not going to let what happened to for instance, EMC happen to me. You saw Michael Dell do that. You saw just this week they're spinning out VMware, he's maintaining his control. VMware Dell shareholders get get 40.44 shares for every Dell share they're holding. And who's the biggest shareholder? Michael Dell. So he's, you got two companies, one chairman. He's controlling the table. Michael Dell beat the great Icahn. Who beats Carl Icahn? Well, Michael Dell beats Carl Icahn. So Daniel Dines has looked at that and says, you know what? I'm not just going to give up my company. And the reason I like that with an if, is that we think will allow the company to focus more on the long-term. The if is, it's got to execute otherwise it's so much pressure and look, the bottom line is that UiPath has really favorable market momentum and fundamentals. But it is signing up for the 90 day short clock. The fact that the CEO has control again means they can look more long term and invest accordingly. Oftentimes that's easier said than done. It does come down to execution. So it is going to be fun to watch (chuckling). That's it for now, thanks to the community for your comments and insights and really always appreciate your feedback. Remember, I publish each week on Wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and these episodes are all available as podcasts. All you got to do is search for the Breaking Analysis podcast. You can always connect with me on Twitter @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or comment on my LinkedIn posts. And we'll see you in clubhouse. Follow me and get notified when we start a room, which we've been doing with John Furrier and Sarbjeet Johal and others. And we love to riff on these topics and don't forget, please check out etr.plus for all the survey action. This is Dave Vellante, for theCUBE Insights Powered by ETR. Be well everybody. And we'll see you next time. (gentle upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> In our 2020 predictions post, we said that organizations would begin to operationalize their digital transformation experiments and POCs. We also said that based on spending data that cybersecurity companies like CrowdStrike and Okta were poised to rise above the rest in 2020, and we even said the S&P 500 would surpass 3,700 this year. Little did we know that we'd have a pandemic that would make these predictions a virtual lock, and, of course, COVID did blow us out of the water in some other areas, like our prediction that IT spending would increase plus 4% in 2020, when in reality, we have a dropping by 4%. We made a number of other calls that did pretty well, but I'll let you review last year's predictions at your leisure to see how we did. Hello, everyone. This is Dave Vellante and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. Erik Bradley of ETR is joining me again for this Breaking Analysis, and we're going to lay out our top picks for 2021. Erik, great to see you. Welcome back. Happy to have you on theCUBE, my friend. >> Always great to see you too, Dave. I'm excited about these picks this year. >> Well, let's get right into it. Let's bring up the first prediction here. Tech spending will rebound in 2021. We expect a 4% midpoint increase next year in spending. Erik, there are a number of factors that really support this prediction, which of course is based on ETR's most recent survey work, and we've listed a number of them here in this slide. I wonder if we can talk about that a little bit, the pace of the vaccine rollout. I've called this a forced march to COVID, but I can see people doubling down on things that are working. Productivity improvements are going to go back into the business. People are going to come back to the headquarters and that maybe is going to spur infrastructure on some pent-up demand, and work from home, we're going to talk about that. What are your thoughts on this prediction? >> Well, first of all, you weren't wrong last year. You were just, (laughs) you were just delayed. Just delayed a little bit, that's all. No, very much so. Early on, just three months ago, we were not seeing this optimism. The most recent survey, however, is capturing 4%. I truly believe that still might be a little bit mild. I think it can go even higher, and that's going to be driven by some of the things you've said about. This is a year where a lot of spending was paused on machine learning, on automation, on some of these projects that had to be stopped because of what we all went through. Right now, that is not a nice to have, it's a must have, and that spending is going quickly. There's a rapid pace on that spending, so I do think that's going to push it and, of course, security. We're going to get to this later on so I don't want to bury the lede, but with what's happening right now, every CISO I speak to is not panicked, but they are concerned and there will definitely be increased security spending that might push this 4% even higher. >> Yeah, and as we've reported as well, the survey data shows that there's less freezing of IT, there are fewer layoffs, there's more hiring, we're accelerating IT deployments, so that, I think, 34% last survey, 34% of organizations are accelerating IT deployments over the next three months, so that's great news. >> And also your point too about hiring. I was remiss in not bringing that up because we had layoffs and we had freezes on hiring. Both of that is stopping. As you know, as more head count comes in, whether that be from home or whether that be in your headquarters, both of those require support and require spending. >> All right, let's bring up the next prediction. Remote worker trends are going to become fossilized, settling in at an average of 34% by year-end 2021. Now, I love this chart, you guys. It's been amazingly consistent to me, Erik. We're showing data here from ETR's latest COVID survey. So it shows that prior to the pandemic, about 15 to 16% of employees on average worked remotely. That jumped to where we are today and well into the 70s, and we're going to stay close to that, according to the ETR data, in the first half of 2021, but by the end of the year, it's going to settle in at around 34%. Erik, that's double the pre-pandemic numbers and that's been consistent in your surveys over the past six month, and even within the sub-samples. >> Yeah, super surprised by the consistency, Dave. You're right about that. We were expecting the most recent data to kind of come down, right? We see the vaccines being rolled out. We kind of thought that that number would shift, but it hasn't, it has been dead consistent, and that's just from the data perspective. What we're hearing from the interviews and the feedback is that's not going to change, it really isn't, and there's a main reason for that. Productivity is up, and we'll talk about that in a second, but if you have productivity up and you have employees happy, they're not commuting, they're working more, they're working effectively, there is no reason to rush. And now imagine if you're a company that's trying to hire the best talent and attract the best talent but you're also the only company telling them where they have to live. I mean, good luck with that, right? So even if a few of them decide to make this permanent, that's something where you're going to really have to follow suit to attract talent. >> Yeah, so let's talk about that. Productivity leads us to our next prediction. We can bring that up. Number three is productivity increases are going to lead organizations to double down on the successes of 2020 and productivity apps are going to benefit. Now, of course, I'm always careful to cautious to interpret when you ask somebody by how much did productivity increase. It's a very hard thing to estimate depending on how you measure it. Is it revenue per employee? Is it profit? But nonetheless, the vast majority of people that we talk to are seeing productivity is going up. The productivity apps are really the winners here. Who do you see, Erik, as really benefiting from this trend? This year we saw Zoom, Teams, even Webex benefit, but how do you see this playing out in 2021? >> Well, first of all, the real beneficiaries are the companies themselves because they are getting more productivity, and our data is not only showing more productivity, but that's continuing to increase over time, so that's number one. But you're 100% right that the reason that's happening is because of the support of the applications and what would have been put in place. Now, what we do expect to see here, early on it was a rising tide lifted all boats, even Citrix got pulled up, but over time you realize Citrix is really just about legacy applications. Maybe that's not really the virtualization platform we need or maybe we just don't want to go that route at all. So the ones that we think are going to win longer term are part of this paradigm shift. The easiest one to put out as example is DocuSign. Nobody is going to travel and sit in an office to sign a paper ever again. It's not happening. I don't care if you go back to the office or you go back to headquarters. This is a paradigm shift that is not temporary. It is permanent. Another one that we're seeing is Smartsheet. Early on it started in. I was a little concerned about it 'cause it was a shadow IT type of a company where it was just spreading and spreading and spreading. It's turned out that this, the data on Smartsheet is continuing to be strong. It's an effective tool for project management when you're remotely working, so that's another one I don't see changing anytime. The other one I would call out would be Twilio. Slightly different, yes. It's more about the customer experience, but when you look at how many brick and mortar or how many in-person transactions have moved online and will stay there, companies like Twilio that support that customer experience, I'll throw out a Qualtrics out there as well, not a name we hear about a lot, but that customer experience software is a name that needs to be watched going forward. >> What do you think's going to happen to Zoom and Teams? Certainly Zoom just escalated this year, a huge ascendancy, and Teams I look at a little differently 'cause it's not just video conferencing, and both have done really, really well. How do you interpret the data that you're seeing there? >> There's no way around it, our data is decelerating quickly, really quickly. We were kind of bullish when Zoom first came out on the IPO prospects. It did very well. Obviously what happened in this remote shift turned them into an absolute overnight huge success. I don't see that continuing going forward, and there's a reason. What we're seeing and hearing from our feedback interviews is that now that people recognize this isn't temporary and they're not scrambling and they need to set up for permanency, they're going to consolidate their spend. They don't need to have Teams and Zoom. It's not necessary. They will consolidate where they can. There's always going to be the players that are going to choose Slack and Zoom 'cause they don't want to be on Microsoft architecture. That's fine, but you and I both know that the majority of large enterprises have Microsoft already. It's bundled in in pricing. I just don't see it happening. There's going to be M&A out there, which we can talk about again soon, so maybe Zoom, just like Slack, gets to a point where somebody thinks it's worthwhile, but there's a lot of other video conferencing out there. They're trying to push their telephony. They're trying to push their mobile solutions. There's a lot of companies out there doing it, so we'll see, but the current market cap does not seem to make sense in a permanent remote work situation. >> I think I'm inferring Teams is a little different because it's Microsoft. They've got this huge software estate they can leverage. They can bundle. Now, it's going to be interesting to see how and if Zoom can then expand its TAM, use its recent largesse to really enter potentially new markets. >> It will be, but listen, just the other day there was another headline that one of Zoom's executives out in China was actually blocking content as per directed by the Chinese government. Those are the kind of headlines that just really just get a little bit difficult when you're running a true enterprise size. Zoom is wonderful in the consumer space, but what I do is I research enterprise technology, and it's going to be really, really difficult to make inroads there with Microsoft. >> Yep. I agree. Okay, let's bring up number four, prediction number four. Permanent shifts in CISO strategies lead to measurable share shifts in network security. So the remote work sort of hyper-pivot, we'll call it, it's definitely exposed us. We've seen recent breaches that underscore the need for change. They've been well-publicized. We've talked a lot about identity access management, cloud security, endpoint security, and so as a result, we've seen the upstarts, and just a couple that we called, CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler has really benefited and we expect them to continue to show consistent growth, some well over 50% revenue growth. Erik, you really follow this space closely. You've been focused on microsegmentation and other, some of the big players. What are your thoughts here? >> Yeah, first of all, security, number one in spending overall when we started looking and asking people what their priority is going to be. That's not changing, and that was before the SolarWinds breach. I just had a great interview today with a CISO of a global hospitality enterprise to really talk about the implications of this. It is real. Him and his peers are not panicking but pretty close, is the way he put it, so there is spend happening. So first of all, to your point, continued on Okta, continued on identity access. See no reason why that changes. CrowdStrike, continue. What this is going to do is bring in some new areas, like we just mentioned, in network segmentation. Illumio is a pure play in that name that doesn't have a lot of citations, but I have watched over the last week their net spending score go from about 30 to 60%, so I am watching in real time, as this data comes in in the later part of our survey, that it's really happening Forescout is another one that's in there. We're seeing some of the zero trust names really picking up in the last week. Now, to talk about some of the more established names, yeah, Cisco plays in this space and we can talk about Cisco and what they're doing in security forever. They're really reinventing themselves and doing a great job. Palo Alto was in this space as well, but I do believe that network and microsegmentation is going to be something that's going to continue. The other one I'm going to throw out that I'm hearing a lot about lately is user behavior analytics. People need to be able to watch the trends, compare them to past trends, and catch something sooner. Varonis is a name in that space that we're seeing get a lot of adoptions right now. It's early trend, but based on our data, Varonis is a name to watch in that area as well. >> Yeah, and you mentioned Cisco transitioning, reinventing themselves toward a SaaS player. Their subscription, Cisco's security business is a real bright spot for them. Palo Alto, every time I sit in on a VENN, which is ETR's proprietary roundtable, the CISOs, they love Palo Alto. They want to work, many of them, anyway, want to work with Palo Alto. They see them as a thought leader. They seem to be getting their cloud act together. Fortinet has been doing a pretty good job there and especially for mid-market. So we're going to see this equilibrium, best of breed versus the big portfolio companies, and I think 2021 sets up as a really interesting battle for those guys with momentum and those guys with big portfolios. >> I completely agree and you nailed it again. Palo Alto has this perception that they're really thought leaders in the space and people want to work with them, but let's not rule Cisco out. They have a much, much bigger market cap. They are really good at acquisitions. In the past, they maybe didn't integrate them as well, but it seems like they're getting their act together on that. And they're pushing now what they call SecureX, which is sort of like their own full-on platform in the cloud, and they're starting to market that, I'm starting to hear more about it, and I do think Cisco is really changing people's perception of them. We shall see going forward because in the last year, you're 100% right, Palo Alto definitely got a little bit more of the sentiment, of positive sentiment. Now, let's also realize, and we'll talk about this again in a bit, there's a lot of players out there. There will probably be continued consolidation in the security space, that we'll see what happens, but it's an area where spending is increasing, there is a lot of vendors out there to play with, and I do believe we'll see consolidation in that space. >> Yes. No question. A highly fragmented business. A lack of skills is a real challenge. Automation is a big watch word and so I would expect, which brings us, Erik, to prediction number five. Can be hard to do prediction posts without talking about M&A. We see the trend toward increased tech spending driving more IPOs, SPACs and M&A. We've seen some pretty amazing liquidity events this year. Snowflake, obviously a big one. Airbnb, DoorDash, outside of our enterprise tech but still notable. Palantir, JFrog, number of others. UiPath just filed confidentially and their CEO said, "Over the next 12 to 18 months, I would think Automation Anywhere is going to follow suit at some point." Hashicorp was a company we called out in our 2020 predictions as one to watch along with Snowflake and some others, and, Erik, we've seen some real shifts in observability. The ELK Stack gaining prominence with Elastic, ChaosSearch just raised 40 million, and everybody's going after 5G. Lots of M&A opportunities. What are your thoughts? >> I think if we're going to make this a prediction show, I'm going to say that was a great year, but we're going to even have a better year next year. There is a lot of cash on the balance sheet. There are low interest rates. There is a lot of spending momentum in enterprise IT. The three of those set up for a perfect storm of more liquidity events, whether it be continued IPOs, whether it could be M&A, I do expect that to continue. You mentioned a lot of the names. I think you're 100% right. Another one I would throw out there in that observability space, is it's Grafana along with the ELK Stack is really making changes to some of the pure plays in that area. I've been pretty vocal about how I thought Splunk was having some problems. They've already made three acquisitions. They are trying really hard to get back up and keep that growth trajectory and be the great company they always have been, so I think the observability area is certainly one. We have a lot of names in that space that could be taken out. The other one that wasn't mentioned, however, that I'd like to mention is more in the CDN area. Akamai being the grandfather there, and we'll get into it a little bit too, but CloudFlare has a huge market cap, Fastly running a little bit behind that, and then there's Limelight, and there's a few startups in that space and the CDN is really changing. It's not about content delivery as much as it is about edge compute these days, and they would be a real easy takeout for one of these large market cap names that need to get into that spot. >> That's a great call. All right, let's bring up number six, and this is one that's near and dear to my heart. It's more of a longer-term prediction and that prediction is in the 2020s, 75% of large organizations are going to re-architect their big data platforms, and the premise here is we're seeing a rapid shift to cloud database and cross-cloud data sharing and automated governance. And the prediction is that because big data platforms are fundamentally flawed and are not going to be corrected by incremental improvements in data lakes and data warehouses and data hubs, we're going to see a shift toward a domain-centric ownership of the data pipeline where data teams are going to be organized around data product or data service builders and embedded into lines of business. And in this scenario, the technology details and complexity will become abstracted. You've got hyper-specialized data teams today. They serve multiple business owners. There's no domain context. Different data agendas. Those, we think, are going to be subsumed within the business lines, and in the future, the primary metric is going to shift from the cost and the quality of the big data platform outputs to the time it takes to go from idea to revenue generation, and this change is going to take four to five years to coalesce, but it's going to begin in earnest in 2021. Erik, anything you'd add to this? >> I'm going to let you kind of own that one 'cause I completely agree, and for all the listeners out there, that was Dave's original thought and I think it's fantastic and I want to get behind it. One of the things I will say to support that is big data analytics, which is what people are calling it because they got over the hype of machine learning, they're sick of vendors saying machine learning, and I'm hearing more and more people just talk about it as we need big data analytics, we need 'em at the edge, we need 'em faster, we need 'em in real time. That's happening, and what we're seeing more is this is happening with vendor-agnostic tools. This isn't just AWS-aligned. This isn't just GCP-aligned or Azure-aligned. The winners are the Snowflakes. The winners are the Databricks. The winners are the ones that are allowing this interoperability, the portability, which fully supports what you're saying. And then the only other comment I would make, which I really like about your prediction, is about the lines of business owning it 'cause I think this is even bigger. Right now, we track IT spending through the CIO, through the CTO, through IT in general. IT spending is actually becoming more diversified. IT spending is coming under the purview of marketing, it's coming under the purview of sales, so we're seeing more and more IT spending, but it's happening with the business user or the business lines and obviously data first, so I think you're 100% right. >> Yeah, and if you think about it, we've contextualized our operational systems, whether it's the CRM or the supply chain, the logistics, the business lines own their respective data. It's not true for the analytics systems, and we talked about Snowflake and Databricks. I actually see these two companies who were sort of birds of a feather in the early days together, applying Databricks machine learning on top of Snowflake, I actually see them going in diverging places. I see Databricks trying to improve on the data lake. I see Snowflake trying to reinvent the concept of data warehouse to this global mesh, and it's going to be really interesting to see how that shakes out. The data behind Snowflake, obviously very, very exciting. >> Yeah, it's just, real quickly to add on that if we have time, Dave. >> Yeah, sure. >> We all know the valuation of Snowflake, one of the most incredible IPOs I've seen in a long time. The data still supports it. It still supports that growth. Unfortunately for Databricks, their IPO has been a little bit more volatile. If you look at their stock chart every time they report, it's got a little bit of a roller coaster ride going on, and our most recent data for Databricks is actually decelerating, so again, I'm going to use the caveat that we only have about 950 survey responses in. We'll probably get that up to 1,300 or so, so it's not done yet, but right now we are putting Databricks into a category where we're seeing it decelerate a little bit, which is surprising for a company that's just right out of the gate. >> Well, it's interesting because I do see Databricks as more incremental on data lakes and I see Snowflake as more transformative, so at least from a vision standpoint, we'll see if they can execute on that. All right, number seven, let's bring up number seven. This is talking about the cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. The battle to define hybrid and multi-cloud is going to escalate in 2021. It's already started and it's going to create bifurcated CIO strategies. And, Erik, spending data clearly shows that cloud is continuing its steady margin share gains relative to on-prem, but the definitions of the cloud, they're shifting. Just a couple of years ago, AWS, they never talk about hybrid, just like they don't talk about multi-cloud today, yet AWS continues now to push into on-prem. They treat on-prem as just another node at the edge and they continue to win in the marketplace despite their slower growth rates. Still, they're so large now. 45 billion or so this year. The data is mixed. This ETR data shows that just under 50% of buyers are consolidating workloads, and then a similar, in the cloud workloads, and a similar percentage of customers are spreading evenly across clouds, so really interesting dynamic there. Erik, how do you see it shaking out? >> Yeah, the data is interesting here, and I would actually state that overall spend on the cloud is actually flat from last year, so we're not seeing a huge increase in spend, and coupled with that, we're seeing that the overall market share, which means the amount of responses within our survey, is increasing, certainly increasing. So cloud usage is increasing, but it's happening over an even spectrum. There's no clear winner of that market share increase. So they really, according to our data, the multi-cloud approach is happening and not one particular winner over another. That's just from the data perspective that various do point on AWS. Let's be honest, when they first started, they wanted all the data. They just want to take it from on-prem, put it in their data center. They wanted all of it. They never were interested in actually having interoperability. Then you look at an approach like Google. Google was always about the technology, but not necessarily about the enterprise customer. They come out with Anthos which is allowing you to have interoperability in more cloud. They're not nearly as big, but their growth rate is much higher. Law of numbers, of course. But it really is interesting to see how these cloud players are going to approach this because multi-cloud is happening whether they like it or not. >> Well, I'm glad you brought up multi-cloud in a context of what the data's showing 'cause I would agree we're, and particularly two areas that I would call out in ETR data, VMware Cloud on AWS as well as VM Cloud Foundation are showing real momentum and also OpenStack from Red Hat is showing real progress here and they're making moves. They're putting great solutions inside of AWS, doing some stuff on bare metal, and it's interesting to see. VMware, basically it's the VMware stack. They want to put that everywhere. Whereas Red Hat, similarly, but Red Hat has the developer angle. They're trying to infuse Red Hat in throughout everybody's stack, and so I think Red Hat is going to be really interesting to, especially to the extent that IBM keeps them, sort of lets them do their own thing and doesn't kind of pollute them. So, so far so good there. >> Yeah, I agree with that. I think you brought up the good point about it being developer-friendly. It's a real option as people start kicking a little bit more of new, different developer ways and containers are growing, growing more. They're not testing anymore, but they're real workloads. It is a stack that you could really use. Now, what I would say to caveat that though is I'm not seeing any net new business go to IBM Red Hat. If you were already aligned with that, then yes, you got to love these new tools they're giving you to play with, but I don't see anyone moving to them that wasn't already net new there and I would say the same thing with VMware. Listen, they have a great entrenched base. The longer they can kick that can down the road, that's fantastic, but I don't see net new customers coming onto VMware because of their alignment with AWS. >> Great, thank you for that. That's a good nuance. Number eight, cloud, containers, AI and ML and automation are going to lead 2021 spending velocity, so really is those are the kind of the big four, cloud, containers, AI, automation, And, Erik, this next one's a bit nuanced and it supports our first prediction of a rebound in tech spending next year. We're seeing cloud, containers, AI and automation, in the form of RPA especially, as the areas with the highest net scores or spending momentum, but we put an asterisk around the cloud because you can see in this inserted graphic, which again is preliminary 'cause the survey's still out in the field and it's just a little tidbit here, but cloud is not only above that 40% line of net score, but it has one of the higher sector market shares. Now, as you said, earlier you made a comment that you're not necessarily seeing the kind of growth that you saw before, but it's from a very, very large base. Virtually every sector in the ETR dataset with the exception of outsourcing and IT consulting is seeing meaningful upward spending momentum, and even those two, we're seeing some positive signs. So again, with what we talked about before, with the freezing of the IT projects starting to thaw, things are looking much, much better for 2021. >> I'd agree with that. I'm going to make two quick comments on that, one on the machine learning automation. Without a doubt, that's where we're seeing a lot of the increase right now, and I've had a multiple number of people reach out or in my interviews say to me, "This is very simple. These projects were slated to happen in 2020 and they got paused. It's as simple as that. The business needs to have more machine learning, big data analytics, and it needs to have more automation. This has just been paused and now it's coming back and it's coming back rapidly." Another comment, I'm actually going to post an article on LinkedIn as soon as we're done here. I did an interview with the lead technology director, automation director from Disney, and this guy obviously has a big budget and he was basically saying UiPath and Automation Anywhere dominate RPA, and that on top of it, the COVID crisis greatly accelerated automation, greatly accelerated it because it had to happen, we needed to find a way to get rid of these mundane tasks, we had to put them into real workloads. And another aspect you don't think about, a lot of times with automation, there's people, employees that really have friction. They don't want to adopt it. That went away. So COVID really pushed automation, so we're going to see that happening in machine learning and automation without a doubt. And now for a fun prediction real quick. You brought up the IT outsourcing and consulting. This might be a little bit more out there, the dark horse, but based on our data and what we're seeing and the COVID information about, you said about new projects being unwrapped, new hiring happening, we really do believe that this might be the bottom on IT outsourcing and consulting. >> Great, thank you for that, and then that brings us to number nine here. The automation mandate is accelerating and it will continue to accelerate in 2021. Now, you may say, "Okay, well, this is a lay-up," but not necessarily. UiPath and Automation Anywhere go public and Microsoft remains a threat. Look, UiPath, I've said UiPath and Automation Anywhere, if they were ready to go public, they probably would have already this year, so I think they're still trying to get their proverbial act together, so this is not necessarily a lay-up for them from an operational standpoint. They probably got some things to still clean up, but I think they're going to really try to go for it. If the markets stay positive and tech spending continues to go forward, I think we can see that. And I would say this, automation is going mainstream. The benefits of taking simple RPA tools to automate mundane tasks with software bots, it's both awakened organizations to the possibilities of automation, and combined with COVID, it's caused them to get serious about automation. And we think 2021, we're going to see organizations go beyond implementing point tools, they're going to use the pandemic to restructure their entire business. Erik, how do you see it, and what are the big players like Microsoft that have entered the market? What kind of impact do you see them having? >> Yeah, completely agree with you. This is a year where we go from small workloads into real deployment, and those two are the leader. In our data, UiPath by far the clear leader. We are seeing a lot of adoptions on Automation Anywhere, so they're getting some market sentiment. People are realizing, starting to actually adopt them. And by far, the number one is Microsoft Power Automate. Now, again, we have to be careful because we know Microsoft is entrenched everywhere. We know that they are good at bundling, so if I'm in charge of automation for my enterprise and I'm already a Microsoft customer, I'm going to use it. That doesn't mean it's the best tool to use for the right job. From what I've heard from people, each of these have a certain area where they are better. Some can get more in depth and do heavier lifting. Some are better at doing a lot of projects at once but not in depth, so we're going to see this play out. Right now, according to our data, UiPath is still number one, Automation Anywhere is number two, and Microsoft just by default of being entrenched in all of these enterprises has a lot of market share or mind share. >> And I also want to do a shout out to, or a call out, not really a shout out, but a call out to Pegasystems. We put them in the RPA category. They're covered in the ETR taxonomy. I don't consider them an RPA vendor. They're a business process vendor. They've been around for a long, long time. They've had a great year, done very, very well. The stock has done well. Their spending momentum, the early signs in the latest survey are just becoming, starting to moderate a little bit, but I like what they've done. They're not trying to take UiPath and Automation Anywhere head-on, and so I think there's some possibilities there. You've also got IBM who went to the market, SAP, Infor, and everybody's going to hop on the bandwagon here who's a software player. >> I completely agree, but I do think there's a very strong line in the sand between RPA and business process. I don't know if they're going to be able to make that transition. Now, business process also tends to be extremely costly. RPA came into this with trying to be, prove their ROI, trying to say, "Yeah, we're going to cost a little bit of money, but we're going to make it back." Business process has always been, at least the legacies, the ones you're mentioning, the Pega, the IBMs, really expensive. So again, I'm going to allude to that article I'm about to post. This particular person who's a lead tech automation for a very large company said, "Not only are UiPath and AA dominating RPA, but they're likely going to evolve to take over the business process space as well." So if they are proving what they can do, he's saying there's no real reason they can't turn around and take what Appian's doing, what IBM's doing and what Pega's doing. That's just one man's opinion. Our data is not actually tracking it in that space, so we can't back that, but I did think it was an interesting comment for and an interesting opportunity for UiPath and Automation Anywhere. >> Yeah, it's always great to hear directly from the mouths of the practitioners. All right, brings us to number 10 here. 5G rollouts are going to push new edge IoT workloads and necessitate new system architectures. AI and real-time inferencing, we think, require new thinking, particularly around processor and system design, and the focus is increasingly going to be on efficiency and at much, much lower costs versus what we've known for decades as general purpose workloads accommodating a lot of different use cases. You're seeing alternative processors like Nvidia, certainly the ARM acquisition. You've got companies hitting the market like Fungible with DPAs, and they're dominating these new workloads in the coming decade, we think, and they continue to demonstrate superior price performance metrics. And over the next five years they're going to find their way, we think, into mainstream enterprise workloads and put continued pressure on Intel general purpose microprocessors. Erik, look, we've seen cloud players. They're diversifying their processor suppliers. They're developing their own in-house silicon. This is a multi-year trend that's going to show meaningful progress next year, certainly if you measure it in terms of innovations, announcements and new use cases and funding and M&A activity. Your thoughts? >> Yeah, there's a lot there and I think you're right. It's a big trend that's going to have a wide implication, but right now, it's there's no doubt that the supply and demand is out of whack. You and I might be the only people around who still remember the great chip famine in 1999, but it seems to be happening again and some of that is due to just overwhelming demand, like you mentioned. Things like IoT. Things like 5G. Just the increased power of handheld devices. The remote from work home. All of this is creating a perfect storm, but it also has to do with some of the chip makers themselves kind of misfired, and you probably know the space better than me, so I'll leave you for that on that one. But I also want to talk a little bit, just another aspect of this 5G rollout, in my opinion, is we have to get closer to the edge, we have to get closer to the end consumer, and I do believe the CDN players have an area to play in this. And maybe we can leave that as there and we could do this some other time, but I do believe the CDN players are no longer about content delivery and they're really about edge compute. So as we see IoT and 5G roll out, it's going to have huge implications on the chip supply. No doubt. It's also could have really huge implications for the CDN network. >> All right, there you have it, folks. Erik, it's great working with you. It's been awesome this year. I hope we can do more in 2021. Really been a pleasure. >> Always. Have a great holiday, everybody. Stay safe. >> Yeah, you too. Okay, so look, that's our prediction for 2021 and the coming decade. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast. You'll find it. We publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, and you got to check out etr.plus. It's where all the survey action is. Definitely subscribe to their services if you haven't already. You can DM me @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. This is Dave Vellante for Erik Bradley for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, everyone. Be well and we'll see you next time. (relaxing music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The steepest drop in the stock market since June 11th flipped the narrative and sent investors scrambling. Tech got hammered after a two-month run, and people are asking questions. Is this a bubble popping, or is it a healthy correction? Are we now going to see a rotation into traditional stocks, like banks and maybe certain cyclicals that have lagged behind the technology winners? Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of Wikibon's CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we want to give you our perspective on what's happening in the technology space and unpack what this sentiment flip means for the balance of 2020 and beyond. Let's look at what happened on September 3rd, 2020. The tech markets recoiled this week as the NASDAQ Composite dropped almost 5% in a single day. Apple's market cap alone lost $178 billion. The Big Four: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google lost a combined value that approached half a trillion dollars. For context, this number is larger than the gross domestic product for countries as large as Thailand, Iran, Austria, Norway, and even the UAE, and many more. The tech stocks that have been running due to COVID, well, they got crushed. These are the ones that we've highlighted as best positioned to thrive during the pandemic, you know, the work-from-home, SaaS, cloud, security stocks. We really have been talking about names like Zoom, ServiceNow, Salesforce, DocuSign, Splunk, and the security names like CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler. By the way, DocuSign and CrowdStrike and Okta all had nice earnings beats, but they still got killed underscoring the sentiment shift. Now the broader tech market was off as well on sympathy, and this trend appears to be continuing into the Labor Day holiday. Now why is this happening, and why now? Well, there are a lot of opinions on this. And first, many, like myself, are relatively happy because this market needed to take a little breather. As we've said before, the stock market, it's really not reflecting the realities of the broader economy. Now as we head into September in an election year, uncertainty kicks in, but it really looks like this pullback was fueled by a combination of an overheated market and technical factors. Specifically, take a look at volatility indices. They were high and rising, yet markets kept rising along with them. Robinhood millennial investors who couldn't bet on sports realized that investing in stocks was as much of a rush and potentially more lucrative. The other big wave, which was first reported by the Financial Times, is that SoftBank made a huge bet on tech and bought options tied to around $50 billion worth of high-flying tech stocks. So the option call volumes skyrocketed. The call versus put ratio was getting way too hot, and we saw an imbalance in the market. Now market makers will often buy an underlying stock to hedge call options to ensure liquidity in these cases. So to be more specific, delta in options is a measure of the change in the price of an option relative to the underlying stock, and gamma is a measure of the volatility of the delta. Now usually, volatility is relatively consistent on both sides of the trade, the calls and the puts, because investors often hedge their bets. But in the case of many of these hot stocks, like Tesla, for example, you've seen the call skew be much greater than the skew in the downside. So let's take an example. If people are buying cheap out of the money calls, a market maker might buy the underlying stock to hedge for liquidity. And then if Elon puts out some good news, which he always does, the stock goes up. Market makers have to then buy more of the underlying stock. And then algos kick in to buy even more. And then the price of the call goes up. And as it approaches it at the money price, this forces market makers to keep buying more of that underlying stock. And then the melt up until it stops. And then the market flips like it did this week. When stock prices begin to drop, then market makers were going to rebalance their portfolios and their risk and sell their underlying stocks, and then the rug gets pulled out from the markets. And that's really why some of the stocks that have run dropped so precipitously. Okay, why did I spend so much time on this, and why am I not freaking out? Because I think these market moves are largely technical versus fundamental. It's not like 1999. We had a double whammy of technical rug pulls combined with poor underlying fundamentals for high-flying companies like CMGI and Internet Capital Group, whose businesses, they were all about placing bets on dot-coms that had no business models other than non-monetizable eyeballs. All right, let's take a look at the NASDAQ and dig into the data a little bit. And I think you'll see what I mean and why I'm not too concerned. This is a year-to-date chart of the NASDAQ, and you can see it bottomed on March 23rd at 6,860. And then ran up until June 11th and had that big drop, but was still elevated at 9,492. And then it ran up to over 12,000 and hit an all-time high. And then you see the big drop. And that trend continued on Friday morning. The NASDAQ Composite traded below 11,000. It actually corrected to 10% of its high, 9.8% to be precise, and then it snapped back. But even at its low, that's still up over 20% for the year. In the year of COVID, would that have surprised you in March? It certainly would have surprised me. So to me, this pullback is sort of a relief. It's good and actually very normal and quite predictable. Now the exact timing of these pullbacks, of course, on the other hand is not entirely predictable. Not at all, frankly, at least for this observer. So the big question is where do we go from here? So let's talk about that a little bit. Now the economy continues to get better. Take a look at the August job report; it was good. 1.4 million new jobs, 340,000 came from the government. That was positive numbers. And the other good news is it translates into a drop in unemployment under 10%. It's now at 8.4%. And this is really good relative to expectations. Now the sell-off continued, which suggested that the market wanted to keep correcting, so that's good. Maybe some buying opportunities would emerge in over the next several months, the market snapped back, but for those who have been waiting, I think that's going to happen. And so that snapback, maybe that's an indicator that the market wants to keep going up, we'll see. But I think there are more opportunities ahead because there's really so much uncertainty. What's going to happen with the next round of the stimulus? The jobs report, maybe that's a catalyst for compromise between the Democrats and the Republicans, maybe. The US debt is projected to exceed 100% of GDP this calendar year. That's the highest it's been since World War II. Does that give you a good feeling? That doesn't give me a good feeling. And when we talk about the election, that brings additional uncertainty. So there's a lot to think about for the markets. Now let's talk about what this means for tech. Well, as we've been projecting for months with our colleagues at ETR, despite what's going on in the stock market and its rise, there's those real tech winners, we still see a contraction in 2020 for IT spend of minus 5 to 8%. And we talk a lot about the bifurcation in the market due to COVID accelerating some of these trends that were already in place, like digital transformation and SaaS and cloud. And then the work-from-home kicks in with other trends like video conferencing and the shift to security spend. And we think this is going to continue for years. However, because these stocks have run up so much, they're going to have very tough compares in 2021. So maybe time for a pause. Now let's take a look at the IT spending macroeconomics. This data is from a series of surveys that ETR conducted to try to better understand spending patterns due to COVID. Those yellow slices of the pies show the percent of customers that indicate that their budgets will be impacted by coronavirus. And you can see there's a steady increase from mid-March, which blend into April, and then you can see the June data. It goes from 63% saying yes, which is very high, to 78%, which is very, very high. And the bottom part of the chart shows the degree of that change. So 22% say no change in the latest survey, but you can see much more of a skew to the red declines on the left versus the green upticks on the right-hand side of the chart. Now take a look at how IT buyers are seeing the response to the pandemic. This chart shows what companies are doing as a result of COVID in another recent ETR survey. Now of course, it's no surprise, everybody's working from home. Nobody's traveling for business, not nobody, but most people aren't, we know that. But look at the increase in hiring freezes and freezing new IT deployments, and the sharp rise in layoffs. So IT is yet again being asked to do more with less. They're used to it. Well, we see this driving an acceleration to automation, and that's going to benefit, for instance, the RPA players, cloud providers, and modern software vendors. And it will also precipitate a tailwind for more aggressive AI implementations. And many other selected names are going to continue to do well, which we'll talk about in a second, but they're in the work-from-home, the cloud, the SaaS, and the modern data sectors. But the problem is those sectors are not large enough to offset the declines in the core businesses of the legacy players who have a much higher market share, so the overall IT spend declines. Now where it gets kind of interesting is the legacy companies, look, they all have growth businesses. They're making acquisitions, they're making other bets. IBM, for example, has its hybrid cloud business in Red Hat, Dell has VMware and it's got work-from-home solutions, Oracle has SaaS and cloud, Cisco has its security business, HPE, it's as a service initiative, and so forth. And again, these businesses are growing faster, but they are not large enough to offset the decline in core on-prem legacy and drive anything more than flat growth, overall, for these companies at best. And by the time they're large enough, we'll be into the next big thing, so the cycle continues. But these legacy companies are going to compete with the upstarts, and that's where it gets interesting. So let's get into some of the specific names that we've been talking about for over a year now and make some comments around their prospects. So what we want to do is let's start with one of our favorites: Snowflake. Now Snowflake, along with Asana, JFrog, Sumo Logic, and Unity, has a highly anticipated upcoming IPO. And this chart shows new adoptions in the database sector. And you can see that Snowflake, while down from the October 19th survey, is far outpacing its competitors, with the exception of Google, where BigQuery is doing very well. But you see Mongo and AWS remain strong, and I'm actually quite encouraged that it looks like Cloudera has righted the ship and you kind of saw that in their earnings recently. But my point is that Snowflake is a share gainer, and we think will likely continue to be one for a number of quarters and years if they can execute and compete with the big cloud players, and that's a topic that we've covered extensively in previous Breaking Analysis segments, and, as you know, we think Snowflake can compete. Now let's look at automation. This is another space that we've been talking about quite a bit, and we've largely focused on two leaders: UiPath and Automation Anywhere. But I have to say, I still like Blue Prism. I think they're well-positioned. And I especially like Pegasystems, which has, for years, been embarking on a broader automation agenda. What this chart shows is net score or spending velocity data for those customers who said they were decreasing spend in 2020. Those red bars that we showed earlier are the ones who are decreasing. And you can see both Automation Anywhere and UiPath show elevated levels within that base where spending is declining, so that's a real positive. Now Microsoft, as we've reported, is elbowing its way into the market with what is currently an inferior point product, but, you know, it's Microsoft, so we can't ignore that. And finally, let's have a look at the all-important security sector, which we've covered extensively and put out a report recently. So what this next chart does is cherry-picks of a few of our favorite names, and it shows the net score or spending momentum and the granularity for some of the leaders and emerging players. All of these players are in the green, as you can see in the upper right, and they all have decent presence in the dataset as indicated by the shared NS. Okta is at the top of the list with 58% net score. Palo Alto, they're a more mature player, but still, they have an elevated net score. CrowdStrike's net score dropped this quarter, which was a bit of a concern, but it's still high. And it followed by SailPoint and Zscaler, who are right there. The big three trends in this space right now are cloud security, identity access management, and endpoint security. Those are the tailwinds, and we think these trends have legs. Remember, net score in this survey is a forward-looking metric, so we'll come back and look at the next survey, which is running this month in the field from ETR. Now everyone on this chart has reported earnings, except Zscaler, which reports on September 9th, and all of these companies are doing well and exceeding expectations, but as I said earlier, next year's compares won't be so easy. Oh, and by the way, their stock prices, they all got killed this week as a result of the rug pull that we explained earlier. So we really feel this isn't a fundamental problem for these firms that we're talking about. It's more of a technical in the market. Now Automation Anywhere and UiPath, you really don't know because they're not public and I think they need to get their house in order so they can IPO, so we'll see when they make it to public markets. I don't think that's an if, that I think they will IPO, but the fact that they haven't filed yet says they're not ready. Now why wouldn't you IPO if you are ready in this market despite the recent pullbacks? Okay, let's summarize. So listen, all you new investors out there that think stock picking is easy, look, any fool can make money in a market that goes up every day, but trees don't grow to the moon and there are bulls and bears and pigs, and pigs get slaughtered. And I can throw a dozen other cliches at you, but I am excited that you're learning. You maybe have made a few bucks playing the options game. It's not as easy as you might think. And I'm hoping that you're not trading on margin. But look, I think there are going to be some buying opportunities ahead, there always are, be patient. It's very hard, actually impossible, to time markets, and I'm a big fan of dollar-cost averaging. And young people, if you make less than $137,000 a year, load up on your Roth, it's a government gift that I wish I could have tapped when I was a newbie. And as always, please do your homework. Okay, that's it for today. Remember, these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen, so please subscribe. I publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, so check that out, and please do comment on my LinkedIn posts. Don't forget, check out etr.plus for all the survey action. Get in touch on Twitter, I'm @dvellante, or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, everyone. Be well, and we'll see you next time. (gentle upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto, California. In our remote studio, we have a quarantine crew here during this COVID-19 crisis. Here talking about the crisis and the impact to business and overall work. Joined by a great guest Dustin Kirkland, CUBE alumni, who's now the chief product officer at Apex Clearing. This COVID-19 has really demonstrated to the mainstream world stage, not just inside the industry that we've been covering for many, many years, that the idea of at-scale means something completely different, and certainly DevOps and Agile is going mainstream to survive, and people are realizing that now. No better guest than have Dustin join us, who's had experiences in open source. He's worked across the industry from Ubuntu, Open Stack, Kubernetes, Google, Canonical. Dustin, welcome back to the CUBE here remotely. Looking good. >> Yeah, yeah, thanks, John. Last time we talked, I was in the studio, and here we are talking over the internet. This is a lot of fun. >> Well, I really appreciate it. I know you've been in your new role since September. A lot's changed, but one of the things why I wanted to talk with you is because you and I have talked many times around DevOps. This has been the industry conversation. We've been inside the ropes. Now you're starting to see, with this new scale of work-at-home forcing all kinds of new pressure points, giving people the realization that the entire life with digital and with technology can be different, doesn't have to be augmented with their existing life. It's a full-on technology driven impact, and I think a lot of people are learning that, and certainly, healthcare and finance are two areas, in particular, that are impacted heavily. Obviously, people are worried about the economy, and we're worried about people's lives. These are two major areas, but even outside that, there's new entrepreneurs right now that I know who are working on new ventures. You're seeing people working on new solutions. This is kind of bringing the DevOps concept to areas that quite frankly weren't there. I want to get your thoughts and reaction to that. >> Yeah, without a doubt, I mean, the whole world has changed in 30 short days. We knew something was amiss in China. We knew that there was a lot of danger for people. The danger for business, though, didn't become apparent until vast swathes of the work force got sent home. And there's a number of businesses and industries that are coping relatively well with this. Certainly those who have previously adopted, or have experienced, doing work remotely, doing business by video, teleconference, having resources in the cloud, having people and expertise who are able to continue working at nearly 100% capacity in 100% remote environments. There's a lot of technology behind that, and there are some industries, and in particular, some firms, some organizations, that were really adept and were able to make that shift almost overnight. Maybe there were a couple bumps along the way, some VPN settings needed to be tweaked, and Zoom settings needed to be changed a little bit, but for many, this was a relatively smooth transition, and we may be doing this for a very long time. >> Yeah, I want to get your thoughts, before we get into some of the product stuff that you guys are working on and some other things. What's your general reaction to people in your circles, inside industry and tech industry, and outside, what are you seeing a reaction to this new scale, work from home, social distancing, isolation, what are your observations? >> Yeah, you know, I think we're in for a long haul. This is going to be the new normal for quite some time. I think it's super important to check on the people you care about, and before we get into dev and tech, check on the people you care about, especially people who either aren't yet respecting the social distancing norms and impress upon them the importance that, hey, this is about you, this is about the people you care about, it's about people you don't even know, because there are plenty of people who can carry this and not even know. So definitely check on the people that you care about. And reach out to those people and stay in touch. We all need one another more than ever, right? I manage a team, and it's super important, I think, to understand how much stress everyone is under. I've got over a dozen people that report to me. Most of them have kids and families. We start out our weekly staff meeting now, and we bring the kids in. They're curious, they want to know what's going on. First five, 10 minutes of our meeting is meet the family. And that demystifies some of what we're doing, and actually keeps the other 50 minutes of the meeting pretty quiet in our experience. But it's really humanized an aspect of work from home that's always been a bit taboo. We laugh about the reporter in Korea whose kid and his wife came in during the middle of a live on-air interview. There's certainly, I've worked from home for almost 12 years, like, those are really uncomfortable situations. Until about a month ago, when that just became the norm. And from that perspective, I think there's a humanization that we're far more understanding of people who work from home now than ever before. >> It's funny, I've heard people say, you know, my wife didn't know what I did until I started working at home. And comments to seeing people's family, and saying, wow, that's awesome, and just bringing a personal connection, not just this software mechanism that connects people for some meeting, and we've all been on those meetings. They go long, and you're sitting there, and you're turning the camera off so you can sneeze. All those things are happening. But when you start to think about, beyond it being a software mechanism, that it's a social equation right now. People have shared experiences. It's been an interesting time. >> Yeah, and just sharing those experiences. We do a think internal on our Slack channel every day. We try to post a picture. We call it hashtag recess, and at recess we take a picture of walking the dogs, or playing with the kids, or gardening, or whatever it is, going for a run. Again, just trying to make the best of this, take advantage of, you know, it's hard working from home, but trying to take advantage of some of those once in a lifetime opportunities we have here. And my team has started pub quiz on Fridays, so we're mostly spread across, in the U.S., so we're able to do this at a reasonable hour, but the last couple of Fridays, we've jumped on a Zoom, downloaded a pub trivia game, most of us a crack a beer, or glass of wine, or a cocktail, and you know, it's just, it actually puts a punctuate mark on the end of the week, puts a period on the end of the week. Because that's the other thing about this, man, if you don't have some boundaries, it's easy to go from an eight or nine hour normal day to 10, 12, 14, 16 hour days, Saturday bleeds into Sunday bleeds into Monday, and then the rat race takes over. >> You got to get the exercise. You have a routine. That's my experience. What's your advice for people who are working at home for the first time? Do you have any best practices? >> I actually had a blog post on this about two weeks ago and put up almost a shopping list of some of the things that I've assembled here in the work from home environment. It's something I've been doing since 2008, so it's been there for a good long while. It's a little bit hard to accumulate all the technology that you need, but I would say, most important, have a space, some kind of space. Some people have more room or less, but even just a corner in a master bedroom with a standup desk, some space that is your own, that the family understands and respects. The other best practice is set some time boundaries. I like to start my day early. I'll try to break more a little bit for that recess, see the family some, and then knock off at a reasonable hour, so establish those boundaries. Yeah, I've got a bunch of tips in that blog post I can shoot you after this, but it's the sort of thing that, be a bit understanding, too, of other people in this situation for the first time, perhaps. So you know, offer whatever help and assistance you can, and be understanding that, man, things just aren't like they used to be. >> That's great advice. Thanks for the insights. Want to get to something that I see happening, and this always kind of happens when you see these waves where there's a downturn, or there's some sort of an event. In this case it's catastrophic in the way it vectored in like this and the impact that we just discussed. But what comes out of it is creativity around entrepreneurial activity, and certainly reinvention, businesses reforming, retrenching, resetting, whatever word, pivot, digital transformation, there's plenty of words for it. But this is the time where people can actually get a lot done. I always comment, in my last interview I did, you know, Shakespeare wrote Macbeth when he was sheltering in place, and Isaac Newton invented calculus, so you can actually get some work done. And you're starting to see people look at the new technology and start disrupting old incumbent markets, because now more than ever, things are exposed. The opportunity of recognition becomes clearer. So I wanted to get your thoughts on this. You're a product person, you've got a lot of product management skills, and you're currently taking this DevOps to financial market with fintech and your business, so you're applying known principles and software and tech and disrupting an existing industry. I think this is going to be a common trend for the next five years. >> Yeah, so on that first note, I think you're exactly right. There will be a reckoning, and there will be a ton of opportunities that come out of this for the already or the rapidly transformed digital native, digital focused business. There will be some that survive and thrive here. I think you're seeing a lot of this with the popularity of Zoom that has spiked recently. I think you're going to see technologies like DocuSign being used in places that, some of those places that still require wet signatures, but you just can't get to the notary and sign a, I don't know, a refi on your mortgage or something like that. And so I think you're going to see a bunch of those. The biggest opportunities are really around our education system. I've got two kids at home, and I'm in a pretty forward thinking school district in Austin, Texas, you know, but that's not the norm where our teachers are conducting classes and assignments over Zoom. I've got a kindergartener and a second grader. There's somewhat limits to what they can do with technology. I think you're going to see a lot of entrepreneurial solutions that develop in that space, and that's going to go from K through 12, and then into college. You think about how universities have had to shift and cancel classes, and what's happening with graduation. I've got a six and an eight year old, and I've been told I need to save $200,000 apiece for each of them to go to college, which is just an astounding number, especially to someone like me, who went to an inexpensive public university on a scholarship. Saving that kind of money for college, and just thinking about how much more efficient our education system might be with a lot more digital, a lot more digital education, digital testing and classes, while still maintaining the college experience, what that's going to look like in 10 years. I think we're going to see a lot of changes over these next 18 months to our educational system. >> Dustin, talk about the event dynamics. Physical events don't exist currently. Certainly, when they do come back, they should, and they will, the role of the virtual space is going to be highlighted and new opportunities will emerge. You mentioned education. People learn, not just for school, whether they're kids, whether they're professionals, learning and collaboration, work tools are going to reshape. What's your take on that marketplace, because we got to do virtual events. You can't just replicate a physical event and move it to digital. It's a complex system. >> Yeah, you're talking about an entire industry. We saw the Google Events, Google Next, Google IO, the Microsoft Events, just across the, I'm here in Austin, Texas, all of South by Southwest was canceled, which is just, it's breathtaking. When does that come back, and what does it look like? Is it a year or two or more from now? Events is where I spend my time, and when I get on a plane, and I fly somewhere, I'm usually going to a conference or trade show. Think about the sports industry. People who get on a plane, they go to an NFL game. John, I don't have all the answers, man, but I'm telling you, that entire industry is rapidly, rapidly going to evolve. I hope and pray that one day we're back to a, I can go back to a college football game again. I hope I can sit in a CUBE studio at a CUBE Con or an Open Stack or some other conference again. >> Hey, we should do a rerun, because I was watching the Patriots game last night, Tom Brady beating the Chiefs, October from last year. It was one of the best games of the season, went down to the wire, and I watched it, and I'm like, okay, that's Tom Brady, he's still in the Patriot uniform on the TV. Do we do reruns? This is the question. Right now, there's a big void for the next three months. What do we do? Do we replay the highlights from the CUBE? Do we have physical get togethers with Zoom? What's your take on how people should think about these events? >> Yeah, you know, the reruns only go so far, right? I'm a Texas Aggie, man. I could watch Johnny Football in his prime anytime. But I know what happened, and those games are just not as exciting as something that's a surprise. I'm actually curious about e-sports for the first time. What would it look like to watch a couple of kids who are really good at Madden Football on a Playstation go at it? What would other games that I've never seen look like? In our space, it's a lot more about, I think, podcasts and live content and staying connected and apprised of what's going on, making-- Oh, we locked up there for a second. It's, I think it's going to be really interesting. I'm still following you guys. I certainly see you active on social media. I'm sort of more addicted than ever to the live news, and in fact, I'm ready to start seeing some stuff that doesn't involve COVID-19, so from that perspective, man, keep churning out good content, and good content that's pertinent to the rest of our industry. >> That's great stuff. Well, Dustin, take a minute to explain what you're doing at Apex Clearing, your mission, and what are you guys excited about. >> Yeah, so Apex Clearing, we're a fintech. We're a very forward-focused, digitally-focused fintech. We are well positioned to continue servicing the needs of our clients in this environment. We went fully remote the first week of March, long before it was mandatory, and our business shifted pretty seamlessly. We worked through a couple of hiccups, provisioning extra VPN IP addresses, and upgrading a couple of service plans on some of the softwares, the service we buy, but besides that, our team has done just a marvelous job transitioning to remote. We are in the broker, dealer, and registered advisor space, so we provide the clearing services, which handles stock trades, equity trades, in the back end, and the custodial services. We actually hold, safeguard, the equities that our correspondents, we call our clients correspondents, their retail customers end up holding. So we've been around in our current form since about 2012. This was a retread of a previous company that was bought and retooled as Apex Clearing in 2012. Very shortly after that, we helped Robinhood, Wealthfront, Betterment, a whole bunch of really forward-looking companies reinvent what it meant to buy and sell and trade securities online, and to hold assets in a robo advisor like Betterment. Today, we are definitely well-known, well-respected for how quickly and seamlessly our APIs can be used by our correspondents in building really modern e-banking and e-brokerage experiences. >> So you guys-- >> So that went-- >> Are you guys like a DevOps platform-- >> We're more like software as a service for fintech and brokerage. So our products are largely APIs that our correspondents use their own credentials to interact with, and then using our APIs, they can open accounts, which means get an account number from the systems that allows them to then fund that account, connect via ACH and other bank connectivity platforms, transfer cash into those accounts, and then start conducting trades. Some of our correspondents have that down to a 60-second experience in a mobile app. From a mobile app, you can register for that account, if you need to, take a picture of an IED, have all of that imported, add your tax information, have that account number associated with your banking account, move a couple hundred dollars into that banking account, and then if the stock market's open, start buying and selling stock in that same window. >> Great, well, I wanted to talk about this, because to the earlier bigger picture, I think people are going to be applying DevOps principles, younger entrepreneurs, but also, reborn, if you will, professionals who are old school IT or whatever, moving faster. And you wrote a blog post I want to get your thoughts on. You wrote it on April second. How we've adapted Ubuntu's time-based release cycles to fintech and software as a service. What is that all about? What's the meaning behind this post? You guys are doing something new, unique, or-- >> To this industry and to many of the people around me, even our clients and customers around me, this is a whole new world. They've never seen anything like it. To those of us who have been around Linux, open source, certainly Ubuntu, Open Stack, Kubernetes, it's just standard operating procedures. There's nothing surprising about it, necessarily. But either it's some combination of the financial services world, just the nature of proprietary software, but also the concept of software as a service, SaaS, which is very different than Ubuntu or Kubernetes or Open Stack, which is released software, right. We ship software at the end of an Ubuntu cycle or a Kubernetes cycle. It's very different when you're a software as a service platform, and it's a matter of rolling out to production some changes, and those changes then going live. So, I wrote a post mainly to give some transparency, largely to our clients, our correspondents. We've got a couple hundred customers that use the Apex platform. I've met with many of them in a sort of one-on-many, one-to-one, one-on-many basis, where I'll show up and deliver the product road map, a couple of product managers will come and do a deep dive. Part of what we communicate to those customers is around, now, around our release cycles, and to many of them, it's a foreign concept that they've just never seen or heard before, and so I put together the blog post. We shared it internally, and educated the teams, and it was well-received. We shared it externally privately with a number of customers, and it was well-received, and a couple of them, actually a couple of the Silicon Valley based customers said, hey, why don't you just put this out there on Medium or on your blog or under an Apex banner, because this actually would be really well-received by others in the family, other partners in the family. So I'm happy to kind of dive into a couple of the key principles here, and we can sort of talk through it if you're interested, John. >> Well, I think the main point is you guys have a release cycle that is the speed of open source to SaaS, and fintech, which again, proprietary stuff is slower, monolithic. >> Yeah, the key principle is that we've taken this, and we've made it predictable and transparent, and we commit to these cycles. You know, most people maybe familiar with Ubuntu releasing twice a year, right, April and October, Ubuntu has released every April and October since 2004. I was involved with Ubuntu between 2008 and 2018 as an engineer, an engineering manager, and then a product manager, and eventually a VP of product at Canonical, and that was very much my life for 10 years, oriented around that. In that time, I spent a lot of time around Open Stack, which adopted a very similar model. Open Stack's released every six months, just after the Ubuntu release. A number of the members of the technical team and the committee that formed Open Stack came out of either Ubuntu or Canonical or both, and really helped influence that community. It's actually quite similar in Kubernetes, which developed independent, generally, of Ubuntu. Kubernetes releases on a quarterly basis, about every three months, and again, it's the sort of thing where it's just a cycle. It happens like clockwork every three months. So when I joined Apex and took a look at a number of the needs that we had, our correspondents had, our relationship managers, our sales team, the client-facing people in the organization, one of the biggest items that bubbled straight to the top is our customers wanted more transparency into our road maps, tighter commitments on when we're going to deliver things, and the ability to influence those. And you know what, that's not dissimilar from any product managers plight anywhere in the industry. But what I was able to do is take some of those principles that are common around Ubuntu and Kubernetes and Open Stack, which by the way, are quite familiar. We use a lot of Ubuntu and Kubernetes inside of Apex, and many of our correspondents are quite familiar with those cycles, but they'd never really seen or heard of a software as a service, a SaaS vendor, using something like that. So that's what's new. >> You've got some cycles going now. You've got schedules, so just looking here, just to get this out there, 'cause I think it's data. You did it last year in October, November, mid-cycle in January of this year. You've got a couple summits coming up? >> Yeah, that's right, we've broken it down into three cycles per year, three 16-week cycles per year. So it's a little bit more frequent than the twice a year Ubuntu, not quite as frenetic as the quarterly Kubernetes cycles. 16 weeks time three is 48. That leaves us four weeks of slack, really to handle Thanksgiving and Christmas and end of year holidays, Chinese New Year, whatever might come up. I'll tell you from experience, that's always been a struggle in the Ubuntu and Open Stack and Kubernetes world, it's hard to plan around those cycles, so what we've done here is we've actually just allocated four weeks of a slush fund to take care of that. We're at three 16-week cycles per year. We version them according to the year and then an iterator. So 20A, 20B, 20C are our three cycles in 2020, and we'll do 21A, B, and C next year. Each of those cycles has three summits. So to your point about we get together, back in the before everyone stopped traveling, we very much enjoyed twice a year getting together for CUBE con. We very much enjoyed the Open Stack summits and the various Ubuntu summits. Inside of a small company like ours, these were physical. We'd get together in Dallas or New York or Chicago or Portland, which is the four places we have offices. We were doing that basically every six weeks or so for one of these summits. Now they're all virtual. We handle them over Zoom. When they were physical, we'd do the summit in about three days of packed agendas, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Now that we've gone to virtual, we've actually spread it a little bit thinner across the week, and so we've done, we've poked some holes in the day, which has been an interesting learning experience, and I think we're all much happier with the most recent summit we did, spreading it over the course of the week, accounting for time zones, giving ourself, everyone, lunch breaks and stuff. >> Well, we'll have to keep checking in. I want to certainly collaborate with you on the virtual digital, check your progress. We're all learning, and iterating, if you will, on the value that you can do with these digital ones. Try to get that success with physical, not always easy. Appreciate, and you're looking good, looking good and safe. Stay safe, and great to check in with you, and congratulations on the new opportunity. >> Yeah, thanks, John. >> Appreciate it. Dustin Kirkland, chief product officer at Apex Clearing. I'm John Furrier with the CUBE, checking in with a remote interview during this time when we are getting all the information of best practices on how to deal with this new at-scale, the new shift that is digital, that is impacting, and opportunities are there, certainly a lot of challenges, and hopefully, the healthcare, the finance, and the business models of these companies can continue and get back to work soon. But certainly, the people are still sheltered in place, working hard, being creative, be the coverage here in the CUBE. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (bright electronic music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with our leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wiki Bond CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we're changing the format a little bit, we're going right to the new data from ETR. You might recall that last week, ETR received survey results from over 1000 CIOs and IT practitioners. And they made a call at that time, which said that actually surprisingly, a large number of respondents about 40% said they didn't expect a change in their 2020 IT spending. At the same time about 20% of the survey said they're going to spend more largely related to Work From Home infrastructure. ETR was really the first to report on this. And it wasn't just collaboration tool like zoom and video conferencing. It was infrastructure around that security, network bandwidth and other types of infrastructure to support Work From Home like desktop virtualization. ETR made the call at that time, that it looked like budgets, were going to be flat for 2020. Now, you also might recall consensus estimates for 2020 came into the year at about 4%, slightly ahead of GDP. Obviously, that's all is changed. Last week, ETR took the forecast down, and we're going to update you today. We're now gone slightly negative. And with me to talk about that again, is Sagar Kadakia, who's the Director of Research at ETR. Sagar, great to see you again, thank you for coming on. >> Thanks for having me again David, really appreciate it. >> Let's get right into it. I mean, if you look at the time series chart that we showed last week, you can see how sentiment changed over time. That blue line was basically people who responded to the survey starting at 3/11. Now you've updated that, that forecast, really tracking after the COVID-19 really kicked in. Can you explain what we're seeing here in this chart? >> Yeah, no problem. The last time we spoke, we were around an N or sample size of about 1000. And we were right around that zero percent growth rate. One of the unique things that we've done is we've left this survey open. And so what that allows us to do is really track the impact on annual IP growth, essentially daily. And so as things have progressed, as you look at that blue line, you can really see the growth rate has continued to trend downwards. And as of just a day or two ago, we're now below zero. And so I think because of what's occurring right now, the overall current climate continues to slightly deteriorate. You're seeing that in a lot of the CIOs responses. >> If you bring that slide back up Andrew, I want to just sort of stay on this for a second. What I really like about what you guys are doing is you're essentially bringing event analysis in this. So if you see that blue line, you see on 3/13, a national emergency was declared and that's really when the blue line started to decline. What ETR has done is kind of reset that, reset the data since 3/13. Because it's now a more accurate reflection of what's actually happening happening in the market. Notice in the upper right, it says the US approved... The Senate last night approved a stimulus package. Actually, they're calling it an Aid Package. It's really not a stimulus package. It's an aid package that they're injecting to help. A number of our workers actually sounds like existing workers and small businesses and even large businesses like Boeing. Boeing was up significantly yesterday powering the Dow and potentially airlines. As you can see ETR is going to continue to monitor the impact, and roll this out. Really ETR is the only company that I know of anyway, that can track this stuff on a daily basis. So Sagar, that event analysis is really key, and you're going to be watching the impact of this stimulus slash aid packet. >> Yeah, so here's what we're doing on that chart. If you look at that yellow line again, effectively what you're seeing is, if we remove the first I think six or seven 100 respondents that took the survey and start tracking how budgets are changing as a 3/13, that's when the US declared a national emergency. We can recalculate the growth rate. And we can see it's around... It's almost negative one and a half. And so the beauty of doing this, really polling daily, is it allows us to be just as dynamic, as a lot of these organizations are. I think one of the things we talked about the last time was some of these budget changes are going to be temporary. And organizations are figuring out what they're doing day by day. And a lot of that is dictated based on government actions. And so uniquely here, what we're able to do is kind of give people a range and also say, "based on these events, "this is how things are changing."" And so I think we think the first biggest event was on 3/13, where the US effectively declared a national emergency over COVID-19. And now what we're going to start tracking between today and over the weekend, and Monday is: Are people getting more positive? Is there no change? Or is there further deterioration because of this aid package that got passed this morning? >> Now I want to share with our audience. I've been down to ETR's headquarters in New York, it's staffed with a number of data scientists and statistical experts. The ends here are well over 1000. I think we're over 1100 now, is that correct? What is the end that we're at today? >> That's right. Yeah, we're we're pushing right over 1200. And we're going to expect a few more hundred respondents. The good thing is it's balanced, which is important. All these events that are occurring, we want to make sure that we have at least a few hundred more CIOs and IT executives answering. And so every week as we kind of continue to do some of these breaking analysis, there are going to be a few more hundred CIOs. And we'll really be able to zero in or hone in on what they're saying. The growth rate on the IT side, it's going to continue to fluctuate. It's going to continue to be dynamic over the next few weeks, but right now versus (murmurs). We are in negative territory now. >> I want to also explain I mean, the end is important. But in and of itself, it's not the be all end all, what's important about the end, the larger it is, the more cuts you can make. And I want to share... You guys have been doing this for the better part of a decade. And so you have firm level data. And you've got indicators and markers that you've tracked over the years. For example, one of the things that ETR tracks is Giant Public and Private GDP we call it. And that's for example, I'm not saying that, that Mars is one of the companies but Mars is a huge private company, UPS before they went public, huge private company. ETR tracks firm level data, they of course anonymize that, but they can see markers and trackers and trends, and probably have, I don't know dozens of those types of segments. So the bigger the end is, the more... The higher the end within those buckets, and the better the confidence interval. And you guys are experts at really digging into that in trying to understand and read the tea leaves. >> That's right. The key to this survey is, it's not anonymous, we know who is taking the survey. Now to your point, we do anonymize and aggregate it when we display those results. But one of the unique capabilities is we're able to see all of these trend lines. The entire drill down survey that we did on COVID-19 through the lenses of different verticals so we can take a look at industrials materials manufacturing, healthcare, pharma, airlines, delivery services, health, and all these other verticals and get a feel for which ones are deteriorating the most, which ones look stable. And, we talked about last week and it continues to remain true this week. And again, the ends have gone up on all these verticals on the supply chain side. Industrials, materials manufacturing, healthcare, pharma, they continue and they also anticipate to see these things in the next few months, broken supply chains and on the demand side, it's really retail consumer airlines delivery services. That's coming down quite substantial. And I think, based on what United and some of these other airlines have done these last few days in terms of cutting capacity, that's just a reflection of what we're seeing. >> Let's dig into the data a little bit more and bring up the next chart. Last week, we're about 40% actually, exactly 40% where that gray line that said: CIOs and IT practitioners said, "no change." They're like the budget of the green. The green was actually at about 20 21%. So it's slightly up now at 22%. And you can see, most of the the green is in that one to 10% range. And you can see in the left hand side, it's obviously changing. Now we're at 37% in the gray line, slightly up in the green, and a little bit more down and in the red. So take us through what's changed Sagar. >> Yeah, to reiterate what we were talking about last week, and then I'll kind of talk about some of the change is, I think the market and a lot of our clients, they were expecting the growth rate to be more negative. Last week when we talked about zero percent. The reason that, it wasn't more negative is because we saw all these organizations accelerating spend because they had to keep employees productive. They don't want to catastrophe in productivity. And so you saw this acceleration, as you mentioned earlier in the interview around Work From Home tools, like collaboration tools, increasing bandwidth on the VPN networking side, laptops, MDM, so forth and so on. That continues to hold true today. Again, if we use the same example that we talked about last week, (mumbles) organizations, they have 40 50 60,000 employees or more working from home. You have to be able to support these individuals and that's why we're actually seeing some organizations accelerate spend and the majority organizations even though they are declining spend, some of that is still being offset by having to spend more on what we're calling kind of this Work From Home infrastructure. But I will say this: you are seeing more organizations versus last week, which is why the growth rate has come down, moving more and more towards the negative buckets. Again, there is some offset there. But the offset we talked about last week, Work From Home infrastructure is not a one-for-one when it comes to taking down your IT budget, and that continues to hold true. >> Let's talk a little bit about some of the industries retail, airlines, industrials, pharma, healthcare, what are you seeing in terms of the industry impact, particularly when it relates to supply chains, but other industry data that went through? >> I think the biggest takeaway is that healthcare pharma, industry materials, manufacturing organizations, they've indicated the highest levels of broken supply chains today. And they think in three months from now, it's actually going to get worse. And so we spoke about this last time, I don't think this is going to be a V shaped recovery from the standpoint of things are going to get better in the next few weeks or the next month or two. CIOs are indicating that they expect conditions to worsen over the next three months on the supply chain side and even demand the ones that are getting hit the hardest on the retail consumer side airlines, delivery services, they are again indicating that they anticipate demand to be worse three months from now. The goal is to continue serving and pulling these individuals over the next few weeks and months and to see if we can get a better timeline as we get into two edge but for the next few months, conditions look like they're going to get worse. >> I want to highlight some of the industries and let's make some comments here. Retail... You guys called out retail airlines, delivery services, industrials, materials, manufacturing, pharma and healthcare, there's some of the highest impact. I'll just make a few comments here. I think retail really, this accelerates the whole digital transformation. We already saw this starting, I think you'll see further consolidation and some permanence in the way in which companies are pivoting to digital. Obviously, the big guys like Walmart and the like are competing very effectively with Amazon. But, there's going to be some more consolidation there. I would say potentially the same thing in airlines that really are closely watching what the government is going to do. But, do we need this this many airlines? Do we need all this capacity? Maybe yes, maybe no. So watching that. And of course, healthcare right now, as I said last week in the braking analysis, they're just too distracted right now to buy anything. And they're overwhelmed. Now, of course, pharma, they're manufacturing, so they've got disruptions in supply chain and obviously the business. But there could be an upside down the road as COVID-19 vaccines come to the market. >> On the upside, I think you kind of hit it, right on the nail. When you get these type of events that occur. Sometimes it speeds up digital transformation. one of the things that the team and I have been talking about internally is: this is not your father's Keep The Lights On strategy so to speak. Organizations are very focused on maintaining productivity versus significantly cutting costs. What does that mean? Maybe three to five years ago, if this had occurred, you would have seen a lot of infrastructure as a service platform, as a service... A lot of these cloud providers, you'd have seen those projects decline as organization spent more on on plan. And we're not seeing that. We're seeing continued elevated budgets on the Cloud side and Micron just reported this morning and again, cited strong demand on the Cloud and data center side. That just goes to show that organizations are trying to maintain productivity. They want to continue these IT roadmaps and they're going to cut budgets where they can, but it's not going to be on the Cloud side. >> You know what, that's a really important point. This is not post Y2K, not 2008, 2007, 2008, 2009 because we've, pretended but a 10 year bull market, companies are doing pretty well, balance sheets are generally strong. They somewhat in whether, it was used to stronger companies, whether they're so they're not focused right now anyway, on cut cut cut as it was in the last few downturns. Let's go into some of the vendor data and some of the sector data, Andrew if you'd bring up the next chart. What we're showing here is really comparing the the blue is the January survey to the current survey in the yellow, and you're seeing some of the sectors that are up taking. You've identified mobile device management, big data and Cloud, some of the productivity, you mentioned DocuSign, Adobe zoom, Citrix, even VMware with the desktop virtualization. We've talked about security, you've got marketing and LinkedIn, my LinkedIn inbound is going through the roof as people are probably signing up for a LinkedIn premium. Let's talk about this a little bit. What you're seeing... Help us interpret this data. >> Yeah, sure. One of the things that everybody wants to know is, okay, so Work From Home infrastructures getting more spend for the vendors that are benefiting the most. One of the unique things that we can do is because we're kind of collecting all the DNA, from a tech stack aside from these organizations, we can overlap, how they're spending on these vendors. And also with the data that they provide in terms of whether they are increasing or decelerating their IT budgets because of COVID-19. What you're looking at here, is we isolated to all of those organizations and customers that indicated that they're increasing their budgets because of COVID-19. Because of the Work From Home infrastructure. And what we're doing is we're then isolating to vendors that are getting the most upticks in spend. This actually really nicely aligns with a lot of the themes that we were talking about collaboration tools. You see that VMware, they're all right on the virtualization side, MDM with Microsoft. And you're seeing a lot of other vendors with Citrix and Zoom and Adobe. These are the ones that we think are going to benefit from this kind of Work From home infrastructure movement. And again, it's all very... It's not just the qualitative and the commentary. This is all analytics, we really went in and analyzed every single one of these organizations that were increasing their budgets and tried to pinpoint using different data analysis techniques, and to see which vendors were really getting the majority or the largest, pie of that span. >> We had Sanjay Poonen, who's the CEO of VMware on yesterday and he was very sensitive but not trying to hear as your ambulance chasing because obviously they do desktop virtualization and VDI big workload. At the same time. I think he was also being cautious because there's probably portions of their business that are going to get hit, Michael Dell similarly, I think he was quoted in CRN as saying, "hey, are we seeing momentum in our laptop "business in our mobile business?" But as you guys pointed out, the flip side of that is their on prem business is probably going to suffer somewhat. It's a kind of like the Work From Home is a partial offset, but it's not a total offset. You're seeing that with a lot of these companies. Obviously, Microsoft, AWS, a lot of the cloud companies are very well positioned, how about some of the guys that are going to get impacted? Obviously, as I said that the on-prem folks, you guys talked about earlier it's not your father's Keep Your Lights On strategy. Okay but this... You asked the question, is this a reprieve for the legacy guys? Not quite, was your conclusion. What did you mean by that? >> I think a lot of times when you have these sub-events, the clients a lot of the market think okay, "some of the legacy vendors are going to do well "because, we're in malicious times, "and we don't want to keep on this kind "of next generation strategy." We're not seeing that and to the point that you highlighted earlier. There are... Even though these companies like Dell, like Cisco, where they're seeing some products accelerate, there are products to your point that are not doing as well The desktops, right? As an example for Dell or the storage. On the negative side or the legacy side where we're just not seeing any traction, the IBM's the Oracle on-prem, Symantec, which got acquired by Broadcom, checkpoint MicroStrategy. And there's another half dozen other vendors that we're seeing where they are not capitalizing. There is no reprieve for these legacy names. And we don't anticipate them getting additional spend, because of this Work From Home infrastructure kind of movement. >> Let's unpack that a little bit. It's interesting Symantec and checkpoint in security, security you think would get an uplift there, but what you're seeing here is... Let me just tell the audience who you called out. Symantec Teradata MicroStrategy, NET app Checkpoint Oracle and IBM, and I know there are others. But I would say this: These are companies that are getting impacted in a big way by the Cloud. Particularly like Symantec and checkpoint. That's a Cloud security companies are actually probably still doing pretty well. You take Teradata, their data is getting impact by the Cloud from folks like Snowflake and Redshift, MicroStrategy a lot of modern BI coming out. NetApp here's a company that's embraced the Cloud, but the vast majority of the business changess to be on-prem. I think IBM and Oracle are interesting. They're somewhat different. Actually a lot different IBM has services exposure, and you guys call that out, particularly around outsourcing. At the same time, it's going to be interesting to see IBM is going to get a lot of resources. Going to be interesting to see if they start coming out with corona virus related services. So watching for that, and then Oracle, their whole story is, "okay, we got Gen 2 Cloud and Mission Critical in the Cloud, but they're on-prem businesses, I think clearly going to be affected here is kind of what you guys pointed out, and I would agree with your thoughts. >> I think what we're seeing is organizations they had a Cloud roadmap, and that roadmap is continuing. The one thing that is changing in some of that roadmap is we need to be able to support employees as they work from home as we achieve this roadmap. And so that's why we're not seeing a reprieve on the legacy side. But we are seeing upticks and spin where we just wouldn't anticipate them right on maybe on Citrix, on Dell laptops, Adobe and a few other areas. Now, in terms of security side, some of the next gen security vendors like CrowdStrike APi, which is an MFA, those vendors are doing well. It makes sense, where you have more people working from home, you have more devices that are connecting to data applications. Just a component itself. And so you would expect spend to continue going up as you need more authentication, more Endpoint Protection. Cisco Meraki they do Cloud Networking. That piece is looking very good, even though Hardware networking is not looking very good at all. The Cloud Networking is looking good, which again makes sense, as you're increasing bandwidth on that side. >> Definitely stories of two sides of that coin. >> That's right >> I want to... Andrew, if you want to... If you wouldn't mind bringing up the next job, we're going to go back to the first one that we showed you with the time series. This is a very important point. Again, we can't stress it enough. We want to understand the impact of the stimulus or aid package. And ETR is going to continue to track that. What can we expect from you guys over the next week or so? >> The goal is to determine whether or not the stimulus is having an impact on how people are responding to our survey as a relates to how they're changing their budgets. The next four or five days, if we start seeing an uptick in this yellow and blue lines here, I think that's a positive. I think that shows that people are kind of wrapping their heads around, great government is taking action here. There is a roadmap in place to help us get out of this. But if the line continues coming down, it just may be that the last few weeks or the last month or so, there was just so much damage. There's not really... There's no coming back from this at least in the near term. So we are kind of watching out for that. >> Well, the Fed is definitely active. >> They're doing right what they can, they're pushing liquidity into the marketplace. People think out of bullets. I don't agree with the Fed. Fed has a quite a bit of of headroom and some dry powder, (murmurs) which is awesome. But the Fed itself, can't do it. You needed to have this fiscal stimulus. So we're excited to see that come to market. I think what I would say to our audiences, my concern is uncertainty. The markets don't like uncertainty and right now there's a lot of uncertainty. If you saw the piece on medium of The Hammer And The Dance it lays out some scenarios about what could happen to the healthcare system. You see people who say, "hey, we should shut down for 10 weeks." The president saying, "hey, we want "to get back to work by by April." The big concern that I have is: okay, maybe we can stamp it out in the near term and get back to work by late April, early May. But then what happens? Are people going to start traveling again? Are people going to start holding events again? And I think there's going to be some real question marks around that. That uncertainty I think, is something that we obviously have to watch. I think there is light at the end of the tunnel, when you look at China and some of the other things that are happening around the world, but we still don't know how long that tunnel is. I'll give you final thoughts before we wrap. >> I think and that's the biggest thing here is the uncertainty, which is why we're doing a lot of this event analysis. We're trying to figure out: after each one of these big events, is there more certainty in people's responses? And just we were talking about, sectors and verticals and vendors that are not doing well. Because the uncertainty we're seeing a lot of down ticks and spend amongst outsource IT and IT consulting vendors. And as long as the uncertainty continues, you're going to see more and more IT projects frozen, less and less spend on those outsource IT and IT consulting vendors and others. And until there's something really in place here where people feel comfortable, you're going to probably see budgets remain where they are, which right now they're negative. >> Folks as we said last week, Sagar and I, ETR is committed, theCUBE is committed to keep you updated on a regular basis. Right now on a weekly cadence. As we have new information, we will bring it to you. Sagar, thanks so much for coming on and supporting us. >> You're welcome and thanks for having me again. >> You're welcome. Thank you for watching this CUBE Insights powered by ETR. And remember all these breaking analysis available on podcast, go to etr.plus that's where all the action is in terms of the survey work. siliconangle.comm covers these breaking analysis and I published weekly on wikibond.com. Thanks for watching everybody. Stay safe. And we'll see you next time.

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Conga Connect West 2018. Brought to you by Conga. >> Hey welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are winding down a very busy day here at the Conga Connect West. We're here at Salesforce. Benioff confirmed it. In the keynote 171,000 registered people. Hard to believe. We got about 3,000 of 'em here, hosted by Conga. Free drinks, free food, a lot of entertainment. Come on down. Are open for three days and the invitation is open. We're really happy, have two very special guests here as we wrap up today. We have Matt Schulz. He's the CEO of Conga. Matt, great to see you. >> Great to be here. >> And with him as Ryan Westwood, the CEO and co founder of Simplus. Ryan great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. So first off, Matt great event. You said you guys did this last year. >> Yep. >> Super way to get the community together, your customers together, your people together. Big investment. >> It's a big investment, but it's you know celebration of our customers and we have the most amazing loyal customers that I've ever seen. So we like to get together at least once a year. So this is not only our dream for celebration, but this is our Conga Connect user group here as well. >> Right. >> So now we're excited. >> So, It's interesting, right. We do a ton of shows and everybody wants to get customers on we loved to have customers on. Their hard to get on, either because they can't speak or it's your strategic advantage or, the whole bunch of reasons. I think we've only done about six or seven eight interviews here today and we had three customers on. So you know nice testament to what you guys are doing. >> Yeah. >> And Ryan. Tell us about Simplus. We've been hearing about Congo all day. Tell us about-- >> (laughs) Exactly, exactly. >> Thank you for the opportunity. Simplus started out as a Salesforce partner specifically to SteelBrick. So SteelBrick was an independent software vendor like like Conga, that was built on Salesforce and Salesforce acquired SteelBrick a few years ago. And we started out implementing SteelBrick and then when they were acquired by Salesforce, we took an investment from Salesforce and really have scaled alongside of Salesforce CPQ. But we kind of saw the emergence of CLM like we did CPQ, where we felt like this is this is the future. There is a big opportunity. There's a lot of wide space. And so when we met with Conga and the team, we were just even more excited. We knew that the technology in the market had a big opportunity, but then to have the experience of Matt and Bob and his team combined. We were excited to partner and go to market with Conga, just like we did with SteelBrick. So we've really made our brand on being kind of ahead of the market and, and really seeing what's happening and implementing the technologies that are the cutting edge of the Salesforce ecosystem. >> Yeah, and a big ecosystem it is, with the 170,000 people. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. >> And Matt you've got this crew together. We've heard time and time again today, a lot of people that have worked with you in the past. So you've got a pretty good formula, pretty good team of folks, that you've executed with. What about the importance of that, where, you know you've got trusted lieutenants, people you've kind of done this before with to be able to bring together coalesce relatively new team to take this thing to the next level. >> Yeah, we were talking a little bit off the air that you Ryan runs a services company. So everyone believes that the people business. Right? And then they meet me, I get it in social situations, what do you do? I'm CEO of a software company. They're like, oh, wow, it'd be great to have a technology like that. I'm like, wait a second, it's a people business. We don't have, I tell our employees that every time we get together, we don't have a factory that stamping out widgets. Like this is a people business. It's an interconnect with people business, actually. So I tell people, marketing sneezes, and, sales catches a cold, >> Right. >> We are all just completely joined at the hip. So for me to have the honor of working with people, second, third, fourth time and some of these companies, it's pretty incredible, very blessed, and it doesn't hurt that they're really good at what they do. >> Yeah, well, absolutely. And Ryan, you've got an interesting take too. Your, your kind of a leadership study, or you like to interview people. You've written lot of blog posts. So what is it about, kind of the leadership study that helps keep you going. Makes you tick. >> I think, I think as an entrepreneur, you realize over time how much you don't know. And it's amazing to surround yourself with other entrepreneurs or CEOs that have experienced things you haven't. And so through those platforms, Wall Street Journal, or Forbes, the writing I've done has been amazing for education. So I think I've interviewed 60 plus tech CEOs. public, private, all kinds of different different sizes of companies and I have learned so much. It's been a it's a really fun journey. The time I've spent with Matt and Bob and some entrepreneurs are CEOs like, like they are, there's just so much to learn. So I I've enjoyed sharing my journey with other people and writing about it, through the Forbes platform for the last four or five years. >> Such a great such a great lesson. I'm reading I pulled it up. I'm reading Sapiens right now. I don't know if you've read that book. Great book by Yuval Harari. Just come out with a new called the 21st Century. He's a historian, greatest historian. And he talks about one of the big changes to go to a scientific based world was when people decided they didn't know everything, and embrace the fact that we didn't know everything. And let's ask questions. Why does the sun come up over there? Why does the moon, and where before it was, kind of a deity from on high and everything is fine. And we'll just keep it though. So I think it's a really, smart, smart strategy to say; I love to learn from the people. So what I love about this job and get to talk to smart guys like you. Let's talk about kind about kind where Conga is going. You've got all these connected parts, talk to a bunch of people, you've got brought in through acquisitions, and you've got this thread that seems to weed through all the applications, workflow leaves to the applications. You got document creation, that ties back to managing your contracts. Interesting, how those things tie together. And now AI. You're going to have this kind of AI infusion. As we talked to people all the time, no one can go buy a pocket of AI. what I want is AI infuse, in all the applications that I interface to make them work better. So that's what's coming down. You got to be excited about that. >> Oh. it's incredible. I mean, the opportunity in front of us is amazing. This is the third company. I'm old, this is the third company I've been CEO of in the electronic documents space. So I've been in this space for 20 years now. And to see where we've come in 20 years. It's inspiring. It's amazing. If you look at just the sheer numbers and size of market. Congo really started in my mind, in our mind, and our team's mind back when we were all at DocuSign. As you know, I was CEO of DocuSign. Joined the company in January 2007. And we really put the team back together. They've built the early days of that company. But we had a vision back then around digital document transformation, and it included electronic signing, but electronic signing was a small part of that. And so we've been working really hard as you mentioned, building products. We've made some key acquisitions, and we built out the first digital document transformation suite in the industry. It's all the way from collaborating, creating documents to managing those documents and negotiating them to full contract Lifecycle Management with electronic signing a state of the art orchestration layer to build those productively for customers with a AI platform Conga AI supporting the entire platform. This product groups like a dream come true for us. It's 20 years in the making. And we're so excited. We've now released with the market. Companies growing like crazy. We've been named the fastest growing ISV in the entire Salesforce ecosystem. We have the highest volume downloaded app in the entire app exchange. And we've been rated the top from a customer satisfaction standpoint, the number one ISV in the entire Salesforce ecosystem. So either a blind squirrel found a nut or we were onto something there. this is a hot market. Customers like what we're doing. We're just going to keep growing and doing more. Yeah. >> And we heard the announcement earlier today about that Salesforce, actually integrating some of your product functionality directly into some of their offerings. Which is a great validation. >> Pretty excited and proud of that. Salesforce does not, I mean, with very few exceptions, like count them on three fingers kind of exceptions that I know of ever resells anyone else's product. Let alone resell it with their co branding. And so Salesforce announced here at dream force that they're reselling Conga's products now. Conga core generation is being co branded with Salesforce in Seoul along with invoice generation. I'm stumbling over the words because it's stunning that it's been a few years in the making, but we have a really strong relationship with Salesforce. We publicly announced they're an investor in the company, we're one of their top global ISV partners. So it was it was in some regards, a very natural thing for them to say, if we're going to build our document generation around our strongest partner. >> Right. Well, it's always good to hook your wagon to a rocket ship. And as evidenced by the very large building just outside these doors. >> Yeah. >> I think you picked a good one. >> Amazing I mean we are an amazing company, so my time with them dates back to when I was CEO DocuSign. So we did when I was there we did the first ISV deal of its kind with Salesforce. This was in 2009, and then brought them in as an equity investor in the company. So I've always Salesforce have been and always near and dear to my heart and a really amazing partner. This is my I think my 10th or 11th dream force. And so I'm all in. Like, well, the company's all in this is we're all all on the Salesforce bandwagon definitely. >> It looks like the bet's paying off. So congratulations to you and the team. >> Thanks, thanks. We got a lot of work to do, but it's going well. >> All right. Well thanks for taking a few minute. Ryan, Matt, and again, congratulations on a really great event. I think that things are turning people away the door. It's like, two people out two people in. (laughs) And thanks for having us. >> Like I said, it's nice to throw a party and have somebody show up. >> Absolutely. Thank you. >> Thanks for your time. >> All right. He's Matt, he's Ryan I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Where it's at Conga Connect West, at Salesforce dream force in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Conga Connect West 2018, brought to you by Conga. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at Salesforce Dreamforce, they're saying it's 170,000 people. Take public transit, do not bring your car, do not take Uber, grab a line, grab a BART, whatever you need. So we're excited to have a practitioner. We love to get customers on, we love to talk to people that are out here actually using all these tools, and our next guest, we're excited to have Becky Bastien. She's a senior force.com developer for BD, which is Becton Dicksinson-- >> Dickinson. >> Becky, welcome. >> Thank you. >> So, what type of products do you work on? >> So, I mean primarily we're a Salesforce.com platform, right? And we have a lot of add-ons with Conga, DocuSign, you name it, we're doing it. Apttus CLM, and we also use Oracle CPQ. Anything that connects to the Salesforce.com platform, you can imagine we probably use it. >> And you've been developing on Salesforce for a number of years, looking at your LinkedIn history, so you've got a lot of experience with the platform. Just a little bit of perspective, how this conference has changed, how Salesforce is a platform from just a pure play kind of Salesforce management system, which is what it started at CRM, to what kind of it is today? >> Yeah, I mean the conference has changed astronomically obviously over the years. What you said, it was 170 thousand, right? It's crazy. >> That's crazy. >> Logistically, it's a little tough to get around but it's so much fun and there's so much that you can learn here. It's just increased over the years. The content has gotten better, there's more focused areas, which I really like. I'm a developer at heart so I really focus on that. But as far as the platform itself, it's really grown. You can do anything with it. At BD, we even have done things that are completely custom, like our entire implementation team for one of our business units runs out of Salesforce.com as a project management application. We don't just use it for sales, right? >> Right. >> Or marketing, even. We use it across the board for implementation and now we're getting into the service aspect as well. >> Right, we're here at the Conga event and we talked before we turned the cameras on, you're using the Conga tool set in kind of a unique and slightly different way than some of the applications we've heard. I wonder if you could share some of the applications that you use and how you use them? >> Sure, so one of our primary uses of Conga is actually generating documents that are customer facing, that really educate our clients, our end clients and then also helps us with some of the data that we're gathering for our product development. But what we do is we go out to the client's site and we're actually sometimes in an operating room, or at a catheter injection or a blood draw, multiple things that we actually gather data on via another application called Fulcrum. We pull all that data back into Salesforce and then we use Conga to generate the documents that are customer facing. With that, it really empowers our business as well because they have full control over that Conga document, so they can make the changes that they need to, without involving IT, and we just kind of hook it all up in the back end for them. >> Right, right. It's really a new kind of world in terms of the opportunity to go gather data on your products, whether it's connected via an application or different things, as opposed to back in the old day, you made it, you shipped it, you sent it out through your distributor and you had no idea how end users are using it, how the doctors are using it in this case. >> Yeah. >> But now, you've got this opportunity to do more of a closed loop feedback, back into the product development. >> Yeah and it's not only a product development, but we're actually educating the hospitals on, are you using the product to what we actually manufactured it for? Are you using it for something entirely different? Are you using it the wrong way? It's actually an education tool back to our end customer and saying, "Hey, this is where you can improve "operating procedures," basically. >> Another hot topic that we hear about all the time, we go to all these conferences, is bots. You talked about, you guys are doing something interesting with bots, again, leveraging the Conga application probably not necessarily the way that's it's, I didn't see Bots on their product sheet. >> Yeah. >> Tell us a little bit about that application? >> Yeah, We have a bot where our sales reps can basically enter some information into an Excel spreadsheet. It's for a quick quote for a customer, and the bot will crawl that spreadsheet and feed it back into SAP. What we've found is that our sales reps are having a hard time getting the right customer number, getting the right contact information and things like that, where the Bot would fail if they didn't have the right information. What we've done with Conga is we generate that Excel spreadsheet from Salesforce.com so the sales rep is on an opportunity, and they generate the bot, they generate the spreadsheet, they fill out the rest of the information and then it gets sent along its way and it creates the order and SAP eventually. It's really cutting out some human error. >> Right, so does the Bot fill in the missing data? Or it just flags that you've got some incomplete stuff you have to fill in? >> Yeah so, we're passing it as much as we can for the rep. They're having to manually enter some things like what product, what quantity, and things like that, and then the bot crawls it and throws it into SAP. It's just an easier way for a rep when they're sitting out on-site with a client. They can actually put it in an Excel spreadsheet, which they love. >> Right. Of course we're trying to get 'em away from Excel spreadsheets anyway, but let's go ahead and automate some of it for them so it cuts out that error. >> It's a really interesting story because it's often a battle to get the sales people to work in Salesforce. >> Yeah. >> As opposed to report in Salesforce. >> Right. >> You're really kind of bridging that gap, letting 'em work in Excel, which isn't necessarily their preferred solution but if that's what they're doing and then integrating that back into the automated system. >> It's hard to change that behavior, for sure. >> Yes it is. >> But yeah, by giving them the bot, we're actually making them go into Salesforce. It gets them more comfortable with it and a way to drive user adoption. >> Right and I'm sure you can see a future where AI is going to enable more and more automation of all the little bits and pieces of that process going forward. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think, too, what we talked about with gathering all that data, that's one of the things with Einstein that we're really interested in, especially at Dreamforce this year, is learning more about Einstein and what we can do on the platform with all the data that we have gathered. >> Right, right. The other thing you mentioned before we turn on the cameras, it's again, kind of a new technology, is voice. Obviously with the proliferation of Alexa and Google Home and OK Siri, and all these things, voice is going to be an increasingly important way that people interact with applications. As you look forward, down the road, what are some of the opportunities you see there, where you can start to integrate more potential voice control into the applications? >> I think it kind of goes back to our sales reps, again. Where they're on on-site. If they can talk into their phone really quickly and say, "Update this opportunity amount." I mean, that's great. It gets them, again, into Salesforce, it's going to drive that user adoption. I saw a session on it earlier today and I thought it was pretty cool. I think they'll be excited about that. We're also implementing field service for Lightning. We have our actual texts that get dispatched out on-site, so I can really see them using that on the mobile experience as well. >> The dispatch is going out through Lightning and then the management of the service call is also happening inside of Lightning? >> Yeah, we're implementing Service Cloud right now. The next phase will be implementing field service for Lightning. We're now dispatching out of SAP, but we're looking to move it entirely to Salesforce. >> Wow. >> Yeah. >> Okay, if Marc Benioff came in and sat down, there was a guy that looked just like his brother here earlier, what would you ask him? What kind of magic wand you've been developing in this thing for a number of years, would you say, Marc, love it, love it, but could you just give me a little of this and and a little of that? >> I'd say, show me the road map and no safe harbor, tell me it's actually going to happen. No, I think mobile is where we're always really trying to figure out where Salesforce is going, and I think they've really improved. But I offline capability is something that has struggled with Salesforce. We have to rely on other apps that write back into Salesforce. >> Right. >> It'd be nice to eliminate those other offline applications and just use Salesforce.com for that offline power train. Because a lot of times we're at the hospital, and there's no wifi, there's no connection. >> Right, right. >> So we have to have that offline capability. >> Still kind of the soft underbelly of cloud-based things but 5G is coming, we were just at the AT&T show and we'll have 5G 10x the speed, 100x the speed. >> Bring it on, yeah. >> So good stuff. Alright, Becky, thanks for taking a few minutes. >> Absolutely. >> And keep coding away. >> Thank you. >> Alright. >> She's Becky, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Conga Connect West at Salesforce Dreamforce at the Thirsty Bear, downtown San Francisco, come on by. (upbeat techno music)

(exciting, upbeat music) >> (Announcer) Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge '17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> We're back. Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. This is theCube and we're here at ServiceNow Knowledge '17. Stanley Toh is here, he's the Global IT Director at semiconductor manufacturer Broadcom. Stanley, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Nice to be here. >> So, semiconductor, hot space right now. Things are going crazy and it's a good market, booming. That's good, it's always good to be in a hot space. But we're here at Knowledge. Maybe talk a little bit about your role, and then we'll get into what you're doing with ServiceNow. >> Sure. You're right. Semiconductor is booming. But we don't do anything sexy. Everything is components that go into your iPhones and stuff like that. They do the sexy stuff. We do the thing that make it work. So, I'm the what we call the Enterprise and User Services Director, so basically anything that touches the end user, from the help desk to collaboration to your PC support desk, everything is under. Basically anything that touches the end user, even onboarding, and then, now with the latest, we actually moved our old customer support portal to even ServiceNow CSM. >> Okay, so what led you to ServiceNow? Maybe take us back, and take us through the before and the after. >> Okay. Broadcom Limited, before we changed our name to Broadcom, we were Avago Technologies. We are very cloud centric. Anything that we can move to the cloud, we moved to the cloud. So we were the first multi-billion dollar company to move to Google, back in 2007. That was 10 years ago. And then we never stopped since. We have Opta, we have Workday. And if you look at it, all this cloud technology works so well with ServiceNow. And ServiceNow is a platform that has all the API and connectors to all these other cloud platforms. So, when we were looking and evaluating, first as just the ITSM replacement, we selected ServiceNow because of the ease of integration. But as we get into ServiceNow, and as we learn ServiceNow, we found that it's not just an ITSM platform. You can use it for HR, for finance, for legal, for facilities. Recently, probably about six months ago, we launched the HR module. And then three weeks ago, we went live with a CSM portal for the external customer. >> When you say you go back to 2007 with Google, you're talking about what, Google Docs? >> Everything. >> Dave: Everything. >> Email, calendar, docs, sites, Drive, but it was unknown. >> Dave: All the productivity stuff. >> Everything. >> Dave: Outsourced stuff. >> They were unknown then, >> Jeff: Right, right, right. >> And it's a risk. >> So what was the conversation to take that risk? Because obviously there was a lot of concern at the enterprise level on some of these cloud services beyond test/dev in the early days. Obviously you made the right bet, it worked out pretty well. (Stanley laughing) But I'm curious, what were the conversations and why did you ultimately decide to make that bet? >> Okay. So 2007 was just after the downturn. >> Jeff: Right. >> So everyone was looking at cost, at supportability. But at the same time, the mobile phone, the smart phone is just exploding in the market. So we want something that is very flexible, very scalable, and very easy to integrate, plus also give you mobility. So that's why we went with Google as the first cloud platform, but then we started adding. So right now, we can basically do everything on your smart phone. We have Opta as our single sign-on. From one portal, I go everywhere. >> Dave: Okay, so that's good. So you talked about some of the criteria for the platform. How has that affected how you do business, how you do IT business? >> See, IT has always been looked upon as a cost center. And we are always slow, legacy system, hard to use, we don't listen to you. (Jeff laughing) >> Dave: What do those guys do? >> You know, why are we paying those guys, right? And then you look at all the consumer stuff. They are sexy, they are mobile, they have pretty pictures. Now all your internal users want the same experience. So, the experience has changed. The old UNIX command key doesn't work anymore. They want something touch, GUI, mobile. They want the feel, the color, you know. >> That might be the best description (Stanley laughing) of the consumerization of IT, Dave, that we've ever had on theCUBE. >> It's really honest. Coming from an IT person, it is, it is honest. And now you've driven ServiceNow into other areas beyond IT. >> Stanley: Yes. >> You mentioned HR. >> HR. We went live six months ago. >> Okay. And these other areas, are you thinking about it, looking at it, or? >> So we are also looking with legal, because they have a lot of legal documents and NDAs and stuff like that. And ServiceNow have a very nice integration to DocuSign and Vox. So we are looking at that. But the latest one, we went live three weeks ago, is the CSM, the customer support management portal. And that one actually replaced one of our legacy system that has a stack of sixteen application running. And we collapsed that, and went live on ServiceNow CSM three weeks ago. >> And what has been, two impacts - the business impact, and, I'm curious, is it the culture impact. You sort of set it up as the attitude. We had fun with it, but it's true. What's the business impact? And what has the cultural impact been? >> The last few years, we have been doing a lot of acquisition. So we have been bringing in a lot of new BU's. Business units. And they want things to move fast, and we want to integrate them into one brand. So speed and agility is key when you do acquisitions. So that's why we are moving into a platform where we can integrate all these new companies easily. We found that in ServiceNow and we can integrate them. So for example, when we acquired Broadcom Corporation, they have 18,000 employees. We onboarded them on day one, and usually when you do an acquisition, they don't give you the employee information until the last minute. Two days, all I need, is to bring them all on, onboarded into my collaboration suite. I only need two days of the information, and on day one, Turn it on, they are live. Their information is in, they have an email account. All their information is in ServiceNow. They call one help desk, they call our help desk, they get all the help and services. So it's fully integrated on day one itself. >> And you guys also own LSI now, right? >> Yes, LSI. >> Emulex? >> Emulex, PLX. >> PLX. >> The latest acquisition is Brocade, which we will close in the summer. And then, the rumored Toshiba NAND business. So, yeah, we are doing a lot of acquisitions. >> Yeah, quite a roll-up there. >> Correct. So as you can see, they are all very different companies. So when they come in, they have different culture. They have different workflow, they have different processes. But if you integrate them into a platform that we are very familiar right now, it's the consumerized look and feel, it's very easy to bring them in. >> And that is the cultural change that has occurred. >> Yes, it's a huge, >> So do people love IT now? >> They still hate IT. (Jeff and Dave laughing) They still say iT is a cost center. But right now, they are coming around. They see that we are bringing value to them. So right now, IT is just not to provide you the basic. IT is to enable the business to be better and more competitive. >> A true partner for the business. >> Yes, correct. >> Stanley, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to hear your story, we appreciate it. >> Stanley: Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from ServiceNow Knowledge '17. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

extracting the signal from the noise it's the cube covering vmworld 2015 brought to you by vmware and its ecosystem sponsors now your host John furrier and Dave vellante okay welcome back everyone we are here live in San Francisco for vmworld 2015 SiliconANGLE media's the cube star flagship program we go out to the event and extract the students from noise i'm john furry the founders looking angle to of my coast and partner david lonte co-founder Wikibon calm slipping angles research are my next guess is sanjay poonen executive vice president general manager of vmware's end-user computing great to see you again welcome back to the cube John's pleasure to be here but I got to say one thing I'm waiting for the day when you have the tie and dave has the non-tidal I mean seriously you gotta quit that purple tile no I'm just getting a pleasure to be on your show I happy to wear tie but people would know it's phony baloney but I'm happy cape looks good d looks good in the neck but I'm California gotta be chillax a little bit here are you relaxed you feeling good I'm feeling great okay so you get a big body through your anniversary at vm work this month Wow excited to be here at the show so choice so give us the state of the union au CSAP to vmware now two years air wash huge acquisition we saw your an event you had here in San Francisco with all the top customers you have big name box big time player is working with you guys cloud needs a theme that you guys are really driving hard what's this all about where are we right now in your group and user computing is all the rage developer attraction and DevOps kind of connects the dots where are we with this yeah no I think it's been a fabulous two years we've hired a fantastic team I talked about this in my last show your some of the new people that joined us summative on Bob Jules no awasum were some of the people we promoted from within kit Kohlberg Eric Freiburg and then many of the people in the field we really really put together I think the best end-user computing team in the industry bar none it always starts to the people you know my people values where it's all started secondly we really started to innovate on product that differentiates us from the competition and made the bold move and mobile because mobile is the new desktop we joked internally that you could end user computing without a strategy you got that Josh yes yeah you know so that's in essence what we've done to be invisible and taking up the complexities away that's really the key will you yeah absolutely and making yourself relevant to where the world is going in this digitization of the workplace so we see this as a phenomenal opportunity for us to become the de facto brand in a Switzerland set of proposition you've got apple iOS you've got google android about windows microsoft OS 10 VMware's propositions via Switzerland type of company that can manage and secure all of those devices in very transparent fashion then lead and lead with that mobile story right I mean isn't that part of it yeah no absolutely mobile is the new desktop so it does become the key outcome the people are looking for and our proposition that we talked about last year working at the speed of life being able to go all the way from desktop to Tesla many of those things are really starting to resonate now as we talked to CIOs and so you know 10 at 2010 when we first did the cube six years ago Palmer its laid out the whole manifesto and user computing had a lot of disparate parts some of gods and have left explain to the folks out there and clarify the positioning of end-user computing visa V all the turmoil in the marketplace with customers cloud has got obviously hybrid cloud people I try to get their arms around that virtualization a lot of plumbing going on with SD and Isis and growth there a lot of stuff going on underneath your layer that's going to affect you how do you manage that clarify the positioning and then talk about how you respond to the growth that's going to come out of underneath you and the infrastructure yeah I think Paul Maritz had it right down he's one of the visionaries of our time and as he talked in 2010 that was around the time we actually coined the term workspaces the inwards 12 companies had coined the term mobile workspace and now many of those technologies are coming to bear so much of the demos that Paul actually noah was here at the time Steve Herod showed you know I'm actually sort of sitting on the shoulders of many of those giants in terms of driving this so the time has come now where the desktop virtualization market now is less costly and less complex so we've taken cost and complexity out and that's why now we're taking market share from Citrix and other players in that market in the mobile place we weren't moving fast enough we acquire the leader AirWatch in mobile security and we've now created an ecosystem out of that of the leading application providers that are all partnering at a Salesforce workday Adobe SI p everyone in the app space the telco providers players like a TMT vodafone singtel partnering with us and then the security players like palo alto networks of all embraced AirWatch and then we actually created some blue technologies that really bring the desktop and the mobile together like identity management identity as a service is becoming one of those very critical like critical items that's a life blood that ties desktop and mobile together because you're your device now becomes your second factor of authentication right you can use your fingerprint or retina scan all of these now really coming in a mature fashion so we're seeing huge growth out of particularly AirWatch side I think sixty percent last last quarter path to profitability I believe in 2016 no Pat's talking about it Carl's talking about at jonathan's talking about Joe Tucci's talk of everybody's talking about your business so what's driving that growth you just talked about that ecosystem that's got to be a lot of the leverage but maybe help us unpack deck wrote a little bit I think it has been and I'm biased so obviously next to VMware being acquired by emc one of the best acquisitions of modern you know last 18 months in enterprise software we were diligent just the same way EMC a treated VMware to be somewhat separate and independent we kept AirWatch fairly dependent for the first six months and gradually began the integration because there was a motion that Alain de Biron John Marshall had in the context the way they ran their what's that we did not want to break and then over time in the second half of last year in the first half of this year we began to get two parts of VMware that we do well in to play the value side of big deals so we start to participate in elas now where larger conversations with customers the big accounts the volume site are the transaction partners our channel partners 75,000 partners of VMware now have an opportunity to take this mobile solution as a door-opener the CIO but remember now we're bringing together horizon on the desktop site air watching the mobile side with glue types of technologies like identity so the proposition just got like one plus one equals like 111 and that's a huge often you mentioned he'll I mean huge year renewal year in 2016 so that's going to be a tailwind it cloud-based solution around one of the reasons with why I watch it was there with a leader in cloud-based mobile John and Alan were very smart and creating a cloud-based solution not to say that they can't deploy on premise but its cloud first so think Salesforce in a world where everyone else looks like a siebel so we were very astute basically saying we want to look at a way by which the subscription revenue starts to become a flywheel yeah so I want to ask you about business mobility that's a theme that you guys have been big big on your ace application configuration I think it's called or yeah happy creating for the enterprise you had Salesforce box cisco workday and a bunch of other partners showing nsx identity the hard stuff the stuff that you will think about i was there at the event and I want you to compare that visa V some news at hit today with apple and cisco partnering on iOS traffic and prioritizing traffic for iOS apps on cisco hardware yeah which is essentially deep packet inspection looking at the routes and giving them a fast lane if you will that seems to be the trend this consumerization where new Apple examples saying okay differentiate with apple stuff versus Android are the business people thinking about that that way are we looking at nsx innovating under the hood explain the consumerization of business mobility why that's relevant and how hard it is when some things that you guys are doing we coined the term john consumer simple meets and a prize secure and you hear about that more tomorrow in my keynote which i encourage all your viewers to come to tomorrow the clock at nine o'clock there's some very special in huge news hint at and little bit but let's bring that together because who is one of the best at consumers simplicity today Apple okay and we basically are Google and much of what they do too but we took basically a strong partnership with apple and dialed it further and and his apples talked about publicly they have a group of enterprise partners where one among a very few 30 40 50 that they're working with in the EMM space and we investigated meaning enterprise mobile manager okay guy and as we we did that we also then looked at all the apps players that were very key to this mobile cloud ecosystem box you know native people exactly these are folks who are building a cloud-based mobile set of applications and we signed all of them up to this need of integration called app config with enterprise that the device operating system vendors like Apple and Google and us invented now what's happening is you're starting to see that ecosystem getting stronger so actually it's awesome because the apps that were announced today in the cisco apple announcement were WebEx spark the same applications i build laughs and fig yes for so we actually copying you guys well no they actually joining the ecosystem so i think it's awesome when you have an IBM in the ecosystem of vmware in the ecosystem now is cisco on the ecosystem it's amazing there you know there's lots of players we partner with SI PE last you're gonna see us doing more with them so our goal is to ensure that the lead players whether it's an applications world whether it's the networking world what's the security world start plugging into appropriate platform I remember the proposition of vmware though is to be Switzerland so we have to build strong relationships with apple with Google and Microsoft Windows 10 because they're all viable ecosystems in the post-pc world well of course you want to be neutral because you want to have you know rising tide as you said but your announcement also highlighted box docusign was in their AT&T you talk about some cool things I can split outspent reports by having an iphone so the rant random example but the but it highlights a new way of doing things right but i thought i asked her the question those are cloud native companies mean box workday mean they were born in the cloud if you will but what about the enterprises that aren't they have a lot of legacy that's a problem right so it's not easy to be cloud- talk about the challenges there and the opportunities how you guys are addressed i love that word because the each side of that coin is a challenging the opportunity so when we go to traditional enterprises they have client server applications or all browser applications that they want us to real deployment and you'll hear my keynote tomorrow a very key phrase any application on any device so you've got a client-server application and old browser application or native mobile app we can deliver into any device you pick your device you've got a traditional windows laptop at in client a mac OS and Android and iOS or a tesla with running some kind of you know maybe android inside it we can deploy those applications on any device and that requires the combination the technology we have from a horizon and AirWatch so what do we do in those traditional applications we virtualize them we can either virtualize the desktop or the app and deploy them onto at incline we think john the future is thin client computing where you know your glass that you present on is going to be like the glass the Corning makes us projectable and this phone becomes your remote control into your entire life so I love this conversation because there's so much talk in this business Gardner has bimodal IT IDC has the third platform and and but what you just described is doesn't doesn't say old stuff over here and new stuff over there it says extend the client-server apps the 19-year old legacy apps and allow them to participate in this cloud native cloud native doesn't mean throw away the old stuff and start with a blank piece of paper I wonder if you could first of all do you agree with that and what if you could talk about that as a strategy it's a very important strategy because if you are a new company like an uber or Netflix you don't have legacy infrastructure you can start completely new on a cloud native all cloud apps but for the majority of global 2000 companies they have existing applications client-server primarily some running in all browsers ie8 ie9 and you've got to bring those apps to the new world so we see the world moving clearly to mobile and html5 long term but there's still going to be many of those applications 3d applications for example you go to many of our large manufacturing customers they've got jet engine parts or parts of various different manufacturing processes that are still not yet html5 or mobile apps so bringing those old world of apps to a Chromebook or to an iOS device is something we can magically do but for these native mobile apps you want to make it one touch so the benefit of what we had with app configures now with one-touch secured by air watch you can now automatically get access to Salesforce or DocuSign or box this is the best of both worlds for the new apps single touch easy seamless access those apps for the old world world of apps you can seamlessly virtualize them in other words abstract them and then send them over to the ecosystem is critical in all of this and and a lot of times we see this trend toward vertical integration we watch what Oracle's do and you see what Amazon's doing the e così i'm hearing the ecosystem is still vital to your strategy absolutely and the ecosystem takes various different forms the device operating system players the system integrators the security players people like Paul all tanks and then in this world apps players are really really important I talked last year about SI p we had many new apps in that and you know just a small little hint tomorrow at nine o'clock you're going to see a major ecosystem player on stage with us never in the history of the world I don't want to blow the cat out of the bag and I want every one of your viewers gonna be big my lap gonna be huge so you got to come there okay so ecosystem just real quick profitable good economics people making money how's that economics work yeah you know via MERS all about ecosystem right you go to the show floor and vmworld has got thousands including companies that compete with us what you got to do is ensure that you're open and you allow even competitors to integrate with you ok I've got competitors that I compete with in my part of the business they've got to integrate with vsphere vice versa I've got to make sure that I can play in a heterogeneous world with a variety of companies that might compete in the STD sea world and part of the magic of doing this is to ensure that the ecosystem is proliferating but you have some platform player that's what's made vm VMware successful 600,000 greatest infrastructure company balls out I have box again to wrap here so I have a final question then I have a final final question because I need to get two questions in first api api f occasion as a term that we've been kicking around the openstack cloud community coined by google's Craig mcluckie on the cube it's been kicking around but API making your api's available if you overdo it you could cause some problems but you're mentioning interacting with of all these apps your take on that and the second final final question is how do you view DevOps do you care you're looking down at it saying go faster or you're agnostic what are you guys doing specifically around this API ification trend yeah i mean the devops in particular they're both of a related questions let me cover them in sort of a quick sequence everything that we should do as a platform you're a platform if you create a service-oriented architecture that allows others to plug into you so when we talk about app config for the enterprise part of what we did was created an API set with the device operating system players like Apple Google is an open it's an open standard that all EMS can can embrace and now then we natively integrate sales force or workday or essay p into that so the api's are absolutely important in every layer of vmware whether it's the desktop side was the mobile side with its SDDC we live by those principle as a platform company no doubt then as you think about DevOps there's aspects of now the management complexity in the cloud world that needs rethought because this isn't systems management the old way in which the client-server were looked at it DevOps really has a very key way which you can go from tested Evra production where you've got multiple clouds you've got federated clouds and we've got to make sure and this is something that we use internally a lot of our AirWatch solutions that are deployed because they're cloud first have DevOps built into them build an integration built between AirWatch and the management tools of vmware their customers who asked us to integrate in the service now this whole management platform the next generation mobile cloud management platform is going to have DevOps at the key at the heart of it and we think that's a huge opportunity for VMware and for our ecosystem so yes or no question senior management's behind DevOps we are absolutely behind everything that drives in the ecosystem DevOps is one key part of it but there are many other aspects this is one key part where the management platform is going and we're very very committed to making that I know you got to run to your meeting thanks so much Sanjay put in the general man and your EVP of then use a computer big announcement tomorrow watch his keynote tomorrow at 9am I nair on SiliconANGLE TV the cube is going to be covering all the keynotes then keep watching we'll be right back more with live coverage from San Francisco vmworld 2015 this is the cube with John fair and Dave vellante we'll be right back thanks John

from galvanized San Francisco extraction signal from the noise it's the kue cover the apache spark community event brought you IBM now your host John free George okay welcome back everyone we are live in San Francisco for this special q presentation with the IBM sparkman the event here live at galvanized in San Francisco workspace incubator great place for developer education IBM's big announcement today their commitment to spark they didn't see any numbers but I'm counting in the hundreds of millions of years to quote Papa Chiana on my call with him on Friday with rod $17 fuck yeah holler last for hundreds of millions yeah hundred millions of dollars getting late in the day going to be your coming rod Smith's our next guest rod welcome to the cube thank you very much with a catalyst behind spark at IBM worked hard on it yeah you guys tell a story what's the story well we worked on big data and I have a group of folks that go out and work with customers all the time and what we were doing Hadoop we would do these cool applications that sometimes you know small clusters 20 minutes you get a result and a customer would say can you do that in a couple seconds kind of look around and go what changed it means it did the business problem and they couldn't tell us but it's one of those data points in your head that go something's not quite right you know what's what's changing or what are they trying to tell me that they can't and that's when we started learning you know customers were looking for technology that they could iterate on quickly you know open-ended questions it wasn't the give me a problem do the game pew pew output I'm done this was oh gee there's the journey I now see some interesting insights I have other questions was it was something not right the data that they got didn't match their hypothesis or was it the expectation that if I can do it fast on google and find a Thai restaurant down the block well so I can it went that way something doesn't right what was with me that said why can't you tell me what you're really trying to accomplish what I learned is that as we go through these kind of digital transfer mation real real time they were thinking about how their business is going to change so fast and so the problems always been for technologists and vendors like IBM tell us the problem we pick out the technology and you're pretty well stuck with it it stays that way and they wanted more flexibility open-ended questions lots of different data sources on demand when they had to have it on this they wanted to see results along the way and they would rather have analytics be approximation that they could use quickly rather than after the fact and more accurate okay so you know when you went through that it wasn't they couldn't find a bi person to talk bad about and I couldn't find a data person so you know it was fun to try to put piece puzzles together and that's where spark came into this so I see a lot of other trends are kind of vectoring into that convergence which is in-memory databases you know the community flash for persistence store on the storage side so this you as a close to all that action what was the aha moment for for within IBM is han hey you know what this spark thing is the next Linux me we got to get out in front of this and help the community go faster and then kind of rising tide floats elbows what was that flash point flow we we had two of them one was that in our commerce group there's ways that they work on online pricing and there's a vendor stander which takes about a week when you get data off of a site or retail site they analyze that they correct the analytics they put it back up again takes about a week but we showed them a spark we could do it in about four hours a week down to four hours and now they started to think oh you know what do we offer customers now we have ways to have not just one product many products let's bring in other data location data traffic data weather data social data so that kind of exploded internally on this is a big change this is something that we can relate to cus of multiple data source of the need for unification and speed and and speed speed first because be first that's a heck all the speed i want to bring other data sets and it's time to value i mean if you're going to be a digital business and look at real time where it's going Netflix others have really set the standard on ok so then i'm a so let's take a next level so rod you're crazy we can't do that it would disrupt all these other businesses we have so how does that conversation happen within IBM the way that happens in IBM is rod you are crazy and you're going to cause me odds it up so please go away and I don't go away easily but you keep pushing on this and part of my job is to work with customers can I show value so I can take the product team saying you need to take this more seriously I've got currency now and then as you just said the marketplace starts to light up spark is on the front page as people are talking about how they're using it well Hadoop is growing too at the same time so it loop does it seeds the market seats the Mars you see you're playing ahead do but if you see the customer challenges and you're like you guys just connect the dots and and then it's back to the customer is talking about what their problems they want to use or the solutions are looking for so yeah it takes time because it's it's risky meaning that all of us have quarterly is what we're doing but how do we now make it safer for people in IBM jump in the water so that eventually they don't hate me so what's your what's your comment when a friend says hey rod you know linux was great but it's a different era oh you know here with cloud and mobile open source with the patch he's evolved to the point where it's very manageable for vendors to be contributed as well with with non company contributors how do you guys see the difference between those two worlds because really this is a Linux moment but there's no big bad main many many computer companies name frames out there but their specialized for like the Z systems are great but like this is scale out commodity hardware a dupe now that's growing how do you how do you describe that because there is a Linux correlation what linux was for open source then operating systems now this is kind of distributed analytics I think you're you're you know the the part of this is kind of real-time digital business transformations and while there is not a you know bad company out there you know amazon and others have shown how they can be online businesses and use analytics and be very effective but i'm a brick and mortar company and an online business how do i do the same thing and spark starts to really show that no they don't have a corner on the market we can compete so that's the big factor on this is well it's not one company doing this it's I need to be able to compete at the speed the businesses that didn't have to see that Amazon started kind of post recession or you know Dom bubble bursting you know web services was just kind of kicking through if we remember our history lessons and what happened was they really had no traction they built some building blocks right they made a good decision to integrate to core building blocks compute and storage and they built from there so in a way you guys can enable companies to have their own amazon like extensive experience because it's a fresh clean cute paper right it is and I think we're spark it's interesting is like you said in two verticals what do i do to retail what do I do in health care what are we doing finance right very specialized I we've shown in Watson you can do Watson for cancer research you can do Watson for cooking right but they're very vertical now so specialized domain expertise becomes really interesting right that's the big part and that's the part I really liked about spark they were the community really thought about solution developers you know they stayed away kind of middle ground I you don't have to be a deep dated person or a deep analytics API person what's the problem you want to solve how can I help you do that I think that's a you know that's interesting is that that's because most people go Jay this is speeds and feeds software we look at the solutions more holistic but then you're really talk about customer problems right the so-called outcomes that go on well that's what and I think that's the part that I've enjoyed is I want to talk to you you know about what your problem is I don't want to talk technology I you know I don't want to have to make a technology choice from stay one spark helps me with that I don't notify programming while all those things come together so I can concentrate we can concentrate on talking to the customer but you know learn from them what are you trying to accomplish so you watch the next things on your list good I just gonna say you know looking at your LinkedIn page i love this at BP emerging technologies for 20 some odd years so you see here you've seen a lot of technology's come a lot of emerging technologies and the acceleration of these technologies is only going more right you have a whole lot more in your portfolio you have to look at today then then you did yesterday or five years ago yeah why is sparks a special in the cornucopia of technologies that you've seen coming over the years it's a good question and and as I've done merging technologies I've learned that I have to you know listen to customers very carefully on it and when I hear those kind of repeatable business patterns do I see an economic change a transformation that really sticks with me and sometimes the old things have start really big you know they start out good and then they fade away but I always look for technologies that seem to have lots of dimensions to them from a business value standpoint that's what attracted me to spark and my team working with some customers on pocs we could do them quickly you know I really like to get to the point where you know we an industry we with notebooks and others we can do solutions in less than four hours for a customer what better thing to take your you know employee to lunch and spat them on the back for you know something that you didn't expect for weeks well one of the exciting things that you guys have done is you shine the spotlight on spark and you opened up the conversation globally around IBM is making a big move spark was a little bit of an outlier and the mainstream press I mean the press we're picking up spark oh yeah berkeley some credibility of great people behind it but now it's like wow it's going to get the attention of CX cxos out there and they're going to be like hmm if ibm's looking at it must be relevant because of the history you guys have with innovation but they're going to ask you the question I'm going to ask you which is it's not baked out yet where are we with this what are you guys going to do how does IBM work with the community to continue to bake out spark because a lot of people are using it bringing it in but it's evolving super fast and that's going to be the question is it baked and how does it get baked faster so I think there is lots of areas that if we just talked about if I'm doing retail or health care or fine it's going to be lots of specialized analytics because that's what spark for me is is enabling custom analytics on this second part is as you think about how you want to look at bigger problems I think that many times are learning is to try to you know once we got a technology lets make everything fit it rather than starting to separate it by business problems and I think we can do that now or we can bring to the table technology learning best practices around this and solutions I think you know at the end of the day it's house part can be integrated into a business solution and our customers very quickly and hopefully those customers see it broadly from interoperability standpoint of what they're going to do so the final question I have for you is what was the biggest learning that you've taken away from this process that was magnified through this whole journey of a taking IBM from being a participant in the as a citizen in the community early on as a founding member of spark this is back in two thousand nine so it wasn't like no one knew he was going on and you know we bird cover on Hadoop from the beginning so we'd love to watch these ecosystems grow but from from the early days to now today mmm what was the biggest thing that you learned that was magnified out of all the reactions all the feedback all the customers what can you share I I think for me when we did a spark hack you know our hackathon piece when 28,000 IBM ER showed up with ideas that told us twenty eight thousand 28,000 so now you stopped and 28,000 people who were focused on the customer so they had a thought of how this could be relevant this is great I mean this isn't like back talking for this isn't one little vein with a little stream it's big and it big was what we can do for our customer when was that um about two months ago how did you pull that off just out an email blast all the IBM's put on the message board to a crowd chat what did you do well when you put out an email blast the second one is you put on a webcam to explain to people what you're going to do with it what you'd like them to do and I'll we're setting it up and and then you step back and you know kind of cross your fingers hope people show up and then when you know you invite ten thousand and twenty eight thousand show up you kind of know that we're turning a corner as a company on understanding how we can use that for this this also highlights this whole connectedness apps internet of things and people are things to so their mobile device when you have that kind of people close to the action the creativity is there right there on the front lines and they don't feel like that the work they do is going to be taken by the machinery in the old days I got to go back all these hurdles I gotta jump now they could instantly be there with some solutions so that's that's super compelling the next question is security and how does how do you see that leaving in because now one of the things that came up will first meeting let me back up but I get this you think about security question for a second last week ahead dupe summit we were talking with the Hadoop ecosystem Hortonworks ODP conversations etc but when you looked at kind of like reading the tea leaves it was sparked that was kind of stealing the show the subtext was smart all the spark sessions were packed the developers had was salivating over sparks like to hear that I did why why is that why are the Hadoop developers salivating over spark is it because they wanted to go faster do they see extensions any thoughts I think that I've say it two ways one is I think there was and since I did who do for quite a while I think people thought for a while Hadoop was going to be an analytics platform and it it kind of went down the path of being immoral generalized platform so you can do more than MapReduce jobs so there's been this pent-up demand for really analytics focus and spark offered that focus and the performance side I think that's the parts in Hadoop sold kind of a false dream or it didn't materialize fast but I don't think of material out of false treaty I'm saying if they promise them around yeah it well and people set those you know well the fresh maybe yeah I don't think the vendors all I think was more than well vendors you know it did to unstructured data does that unstructured data does that storing data and I didn't be able to act on it creates some interesting dynamics I mean I've worked with customers who you know started to put data in Hadoop but to have put data dupe you know we're only going to do a year's worth of data and then putting three years of data because they want to do monte pucker up my Carlo simulations against a Monty Python it's time you threw water on us and we love yours we on the cube but the problem says we're talking about before like you know our internal use we can produce you know interesting innovations in days that's going to attract audiences because now they can show their you know business people what they can do for them that's what's really driving this I mean if you gotta see XO you know CMO says you know show me what you can do you know do segmentation on my population for these products they want it in in minutes not so you know going to run it in different jobs and the over a certain period of time I was just talking with the CEOs of docusign box 18 1018 Syrian kinky was executive director and then EVP a platform that Salesforce the common thread amongst those executives was the new digital transformation has such a dynamic or impactful economic impact yes I mean dr. Sanyal using examples how literally Deutsche Telekom saved 230 million dollars on one process yes one process yes with analytics and yeah process improvements extreme it sounds funny but it's extremely low hanging fruit they haven't had technology and the economics and be able support it now we do and now you're seeing the solution developer go I think I can make a business result faster yeah and if they can show it then businesses react and I think that's the beautiful thing about what Hadoop is done I mean I brought that up earlier trying to tease that out with reality we're seeing is that that mark is continuing to grow but there's a world beyond Hadoop yep I mean Hortonworks this public company I mean IBM is massive so you got Hadoop and then sparks a beautiful extension to that that enables so much more well I think spark will go further because it's more to me is another dimension it's an integration technology so i can have sparked up to legacy systems without hadoop you know in there doing analytics in there being an avenue for doing joins on data doing analytics on unstructured and transactional data whether data pulling it all together and I think that's the again talking about multi-dimensional that's what that was hard even five years ago so any relational database that's a nightmare yeah and you're asked about security so you want to touch on yeah okay go ahead so part of the things that I like about spark is the technology is called resilient distributed data sets r dds so I read data from a source and I make it into this r DD I can work on it that gives me a great data point or a great interaction with a Cassandra datastax did a really great job of a spark driver so you think about this in businesses for a db2 or something now I know where I can put my security and my governance I can put those at certain endpoints now as i'm reading in my application writing these things out so again back to my point of an integration it's not something that i'm trying to get around a business i'm at integrating extending their life and/or capabilities that's right so I got to ask you the internal IBM question my last question is it what's the vibe like at IBM because you know I've been you know I worked at IBM way back in the day back in the 80s and the cultures changed right so much mm-hmm but there's still a huge technical group of people at IBM so I got to ask you the question with all this new cloud innovation all this new capabilities to do stuff differently what's it like for all the technical guys at IBM right now because they got to be like Hayden we can now do this we can so new capabilities are emerging what's the what's the vibe like and what are some of the things that that are low-hanging fruit that are that our game change because low-hanging fruit is game-changing today oh yes I what's the vibe eternally at idea I've internally is very hot I mean the guys and gals at this you look at cloud computing look we've done with bluemix it got is getting you know great recent press it's getting great results with customers back to this time to value piece it's new to us I mean there's only a small group that started that so now the rest of the IBM arts are going this is really cool how do we do it now you've got analytics that you know we're starting you've been you know competencies are on this now you can take the real-time aspect so yeah the five is really all those little silos you know identity system here I got to build all the software now you can gotta go horizontal yeah so you know that's kind of a new thing that's kind of exciting it's gonna be fun to watch my final question I guess is my final final question is have you been keeping track this is the sixth and final time analytics well rods great to have you on the cube you're awesome great great commentary great great insight spark in the cloud is what data bricks announce what about an on-premise i'm a customer i want i want on prem I don't necessarily want to do what's next I 40 s or other stuff oh I think you're going to see you know like hybrid models for cloud where spark as a service is there on prem i think one of the really exciting parts to me is that one the unified program model to the portability of the analytic models so let's say I start on prom because I'm worried about security and other things and then I want to move it to a cloud service well I don't have to go rewrite it I can just move the analytics over from a model standpoint so I think you're going to see this evolved very fast as people want to do either on prem or hybrid or you know dedicated cuz of the integration capabilities and the distributed nature of it that's the point yep awesome well I'll let you get the last word on the segment share what the folks who's not or aren't watching what is this all about today why is in San Francisco today IBM's announcement what's so groundbreaking about it I know you're part of it a little bit biased but share the folks why what why now what's this all about what's what's what's going on here well we think that the kind of epicenter for spark innovation is here in San Francisco amp lab with data bricks and others are doing here and we want to be a part of that and I think spark technology senator setting up is about how we can contribute and learn and you know help the community grow we think this is gonna you brought some food to the party I mean you are I said earlier beer right you bring a you know the ml yeah you got them back other wine napa valley of course you got to go to wine well craft beers good north north bay thanks so much for coming on the cube really appreciate the insight because it is a great color from an expert IBM here we're on the ground this is the cube special presentation live in San Ruby back with more with live coverage of the breakouts in the event tonight IBM spark community event here in san fran at the galvanized workspace education center we write back