>>From around the globe, it's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>Oh, welcome back to the cube. As we continue our coverage of AWS reinvent 2020, you know, I know you're familiar with Moneyball, the movie, Brad Pitt, starting as Billy Bean, the Oakland A's general manager, where the A's were all over data, right. With the Billy Bean approach, it was a very, uh, data driven approach to building his team and a very successful team. Well, AWS is taking that to an extraordinary level and with us to talk about that as Matt Hearst, who was the head of global sports marketing and communications at AWS and Matt, thanks for joining us here on the queue. >>John is my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. You >>Bet. Um, now we've already heard from a couple of folks, NFL folks, uh, at re-invent, uh, about the virtual draft. Um, but for those of our viewers who maybe aren't up to speed on that, or having a chance to see, uh, what those folks had to say, uh, let's just talk about that as an opener, um, about your involvement with the NFL and particularly with, with the draft and, and what that announcement was all about. >>Sure. We, we saw, we've seen a great evolution with our work with the NFL over the past few years. And you mentioned during the infrastructure keynote where Michelle McKenna who's, the CIO for the NFL talks about how they were able to stage the 2020 virtual draft, which was the NFL is much most watched ever, uh, you know, over 55 million viewers over three days and how they were unable to do it without the help and the power of AWS, you know, utilizing AWS is reliability, scalability, security, and network connectivity, where they were able to manage thousands of live feeds to flow to the internet and go to ESPN, to airline. Um, but additionally, Jennifer LinkedIn, who's the SVP of player health and innovation at the NFL spoke during the machine learning keynote during reinvent. And she talked about how we're working with the NFL, uh, to co-develop the digital athlete, which is a computer simulation model of a football player that can replicate infinite scenarios in a game environment to help better foster and understanding of how to treat and rehabilitate injuries in the short term and in the long-term in the future, ultimately prevent, prevent and predict injuries. >>And they're using machine learning to be able to do that. So there's, those are just a couple of examples of, uh, what the NFL talked about during re-invent at a couple of keynotes, but we've seen this work with the NFL really evolve over the past few years, you know, starting with next gen stats. Those are the advanced statistics that, uh, brings a new level of entertainment to football fans. And what we really like to do, uh, with the NFL is to excite, educate, and innovate. And those stats really bring fans closer to the game to allow the broadcasters to go a little bit deeper, to educate the fans better. And we've seen some of those come to life through some of our ads, uh, featuring Deshaun Watson, Christian McCaffrey, um, these visually compelling statistics that, that come to life on screen. Um, and it's not just the NFL. AWS is doing this with some of the top sports leagues around the world, you know, powering F1 insights, Buddhist league, and match facts, six nations, rugby match stats, all of which utilize AWS technology to uncover advanced stats and really help educate and engage fans around the world in the sports that they love. >>Let's talk about that engagement with your different partners then, because you just touched on it. This is a wide array of avenues that you're exploring. You're in football, you're in soccer, you're in sailing, uh, you're uh, racing formula one and NASCAR, for example, all very different animals, right? In terms of their statistics and their data and of their fan interest, what fans ultimately want. So, um, maybe on a holistic basis first, how are you, uh, kind of filtering through your partner's needs and their fans needs and your capabilities and providing that kind of merger of capabilities with desires >>Sports, uh, for AWS and for Amazon are no different than any other industry. And we work backwards from the customer and what their needs are. You know, when we look at the sports partners and customers that we work with and why they're looking to AWS to help innovate and transform their sports, it's really the innovative technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence, high performance computing, internet of things, for example, that are really transforming the sports world and some of the best teams and leagues that we've talked about, that you touched on, you know, formula one, NASCAR, NFL, Buena, Sligo, six nations, rugby, and so on and so forth are using AWS to really improve the athlete and the team performance transform how fans view and engage with sports and deliver these real-time advanced statistics to give fans, uh, more of that excitement that we're talking about. >>Let me give you a couple of examples on some of these innovative technologies that our customers are using. So the Seattle Seahawks, I built a data Lake on AWS to use it for talent, evaluation and acquisition to improve player health and recovery times, and also for their game planning. And another example is, you know, formula and we talk about the F1 insights, those advanced statistics, but they're also using AWS high-performance computing that helped develop the next generation race car, which will be introduced in the 2022 season. And by using AWS F1 was able to reduce the average time to run simulations by 70% to improve the car's aerodynamics, reducing the downforce loss and create more wheel to wheel racing, to bring about more excitement on the track. And a third example, similar to, uh, F1 using HPC is any of those team UK. So they compete in the America's cup, which is the oldest trophy in international sports. And endosteum UK is using an HPC environment running on Amazon, easy to spot instances to design its boat for the upcoming competition. And they're depending on this computational power on AWS needing 2000 to 3000 simulations to design the dimension of just a single boat. Um, and so the power of the cloud and the power of the AWS innovative technologies are really helping, uh, these teams and leagues and sports organizations around the world transform their sport. >>Well, let's go back. Uh, you mentioned the Seahawks, um, just as, uh, an example of maybe, uh, the kind of insights that that you're providing. Uh, let's pretend I'm there, there's an outstanding running back and his name's Matt Hearst and, uh, and he's at a, you know, a college let's just pretend in California someplace. Um, what kind of inputs, uh, are you now helping them? Uh, and what kind of insights are you trying to, are you helping them glean from those inputs that maybe they didn't have before? And how are they actually applying that then in terms of their player acquisition and thinking about draft, right player development, deciding whether Matt Hertz is a good fit for them, maybe John Wallace is a good fit for them. Um, but what are the kinds of, of, uh, what's that process look like? >>So the way that the Seahawks have built the data Lake, they built it on AWFs to really, as you talk about this talent, evaluation and acquisition, to understand how a player, you know, for example, a John Walls could fit into their scheme, you know, that, that taking this data and putting it in the data Lake and figuring out how it fits into their schemes is really important because you could find out that maybe you played, uh, two different positions in high school or college, and then that could transform into, into the schematics that they're running. Um, and try to find, I don't want to say a diamond in the rough, but maybe somebody that could fit better into their scheme than, uh, maybe the analysts or others could figure out. And that's all based on the power of data that they're using, not only for the talent evaluation and acquisition, but for game planning as well. >>And so the Seahawks building that data Lake is just one of those examples. Um, you know, when, when you talk about a player, health and safety, as well, just using the NFL as the example, too, with that digital athlete, working with them to co-develop that for that composite NFL player, um, where they're able to run those infinite scenarios to ultimately predict and prevent injury and using Amazon SageMaker and AWS machine learning to do so, it's super important, obviously with the Seahawks, for the future of that organization and the success that they, that they see and continue to see, and also for the future of football with the NFL, >>You know, um, Roger Goodell talks about innovation in the national football league. We hear other commissioners talking about the same thing. It's kind of a very popular buzz word right now is, is leagues look to, uh, ways to broaden their, their technological footprint in innovative ways. Again, popular to say, how exactly though, do you see AWS role in that with the national football league, for example, again, or maybe any other league in terms of inspiring innovation and getting them to perhaps look at things differently through different prisms than they might have before? >>I think, again, it's, it's working backwards from the customer and understanding their needs, right? We couldn't have predicted at the beginning of 2020, uh, that, you know, the NFL draft will be virtual. And so working closely with the NFL, how do we bring that to life? How do we make that successful, um, you know, working backwards from the NFL saying, Hey, we'd love to utilize your technology to improve Clare health and safety. How are we able to do that? Right. And using machine learning to do so. So the pace of innovation, these innovative technologies are very important, not only for us, but also for these, uh, leagues and teams that we work with, you know, using F1 is another example. Um, we talked about HPC and how they were able to, uh, run these simulations in the cloud to improve, uh, the race car and redesign the race car for the upcoming seasons. >>But, uh, F1 is also using Amazon SageMaker, um, to develop new F1 insights, to bring fans closer to the action on the track, and really understand through technology, these split-second decisions that these drivers are taking in every lap, every turn, when to pit, when not to pit things of that nature and using the power of the cloud and machine learning to really bring that to life. And one example of that, that we introduced this year with, with F1 was, um, the fastest driver insight and working F1, worked with the Amazon machine learning solutions lab to bring that to life and use a data-driven approach to determine the fastest driver, uh, over the last 40 years, relying on the years of historical data that they store in S3 and the ML algorithms that, that built between AWS and F1 data scientists to produce this result. So John, you and I could sit here and argue, you know, like, like two guys that really love F1 and say, I think Michael Schumacher is the fastest drivers. It's Lewis, Hamilton. Who's great. Well, it turned out it was a arts incentive, you know, and Schumacher was second. And, um, Hamilton's third and it's the power of this data and the technology that brings this to life. So we could still have a fun argument as fans around this, but we actually have a data-driven results through that to say, Hey, this is actually how it, how it ranked based on how everything works. >>You know, this being such a strange year, right? With COVID, uh, being rampant and, and the major influence that it has been in every walk of global life, but certainly in the American sports. Um, how has that factored into, in terms of the kinds of services that you're looking to provide or to help your partners provide in order to increase that fan engagement? Because as you've pointed out, ultimately at the end of the day, it's, it's about the consumer, right? The fan, and giving them info, they need at the time they want it, that they find useful. Um, but has this year been, um, put a different point on that for you? Just because so many eyeballs have been on the screen and not necessarily in person >>Yeah. T 20, 20 as, you know, a year, unlike any other, um, you know, in our lifetimes and hopefully going forward, you know, it's, it's not like that. Um, but we're able to understand that we can still bring fans closer to the sports that they love and working with, uh, these leagues, you know, we talk about NFL draft, but with formula one, we, uh, in the month of may developed the F1 Pro-Am deep racer event that featured F1 driver, uh, Daniel Ricardo, and test driver TA Sianna Calderon in this deep racer league and deep racers, a one 18th scale, fully autonomous car, um, that uses reinforcement learning, learning a type of machine learning. And so we had actual F1 driver and test driver racing against developers from all over the world. And technology is really playing a role in that evolution of F1. Um, but also giving fans a chance to go head to head against the Daniel Ricardo, which I don't know that anyone else could ever say that. >>Yeah, I raced against an F1 driver for head to head, you know, and doing that in the month of may really brought forth, not only an appreciation, I think for the drivers that were involved on the machine learning and the technology involved, but also for the developers on these split second decisions, these drivers have to make through an event like that. You know, it was, it was great and well received. And the drivers had a lot of fun there. Um, you know, and that is the national basketball association. The NBA played in the bubble, uh, down in Orlando, Florida, and we work with second spectrum. They run on AWS. And second spectrum is the official optical provider of the NBA and they provide Clippers court vision. So, uh, it's a mobile live streaming experience for LA Clippers fans that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to visualize data through on-screen graphic overlays. >>And second spectrum was able to rely on, uh, AWS is reliability, connectivity, scalability, and move all of their equipment to the bubble in Orlando and still produce a great experience for the fans, um, by reducing any latency tied to video and data processing, um, they needed that low latency to encode and compress the media to transfer an edit with the overlays in seconds without losing quality. And they were able to rely on AWS to do that. So a couple of examples that even though 2020 was, uh, was a little different than we all expected it to be, um, of how we worked closely with our sports partners to still deliver, uh, an exceptional fan experience. >>So, um, I mean, first off you have probably the coolest job at AWS. I think it's so, uh, congratulations. I mean, it's just, it's fascinating. What's on your want to do less than in terms of 20, 21 and beyond and about what you don't do now, or, or what you would like to do better down the road, any one area in particular that you're looking at, >>You know, our, our strategy in sports is no different than any other industry. We want to work backwards from our customers to help solve business problems through innovation. Um, and I know we've talked about the NFL a few times, but taking them for, for another example, with the NFL draft, improving player health and safety, working closely with them, we're able to help the NFL advance the game both on and off the field. And that's how we look at doing that with all of our sports partners and really helping them transform their sport, uh, through our innovative technologies. And we're doing this in a variety of ways, uh, with a bunch of engaging content that people can really enjoy with the sports that they love, whether it's, you know, quick explainer videos, um, that are short two minute or less videos explaining what these insights are, these advanced stats. >>So when you see them on the screening and say, Oh yeah, I understand what that is at a, at a conceptual level or having blog posts from a will, Carlin who, uh, has a long storied history in six nations and in rugby or Rob Smedley, along story history and F1 writing blog posts to give fans deeper perspective as subject matter experts, or even for those that want to go deeper under the hood. We've worked with our teams to take a deeper look@howsomeofthesecometolifedetailingthetechnologyjourneyoftheseadvancedstatsthroughsomedeepdiveblogsandallofthiscanbefoundataws.com slash sports. So a lot of great rich content for, uh, for people to dig into >>Great stuff, indeed. Um, congratulations to you and your team, because you really are enriching the fan experience, which I am. One of, you know, hundreds of millions are enjoying that. So thanks for that great work. And we wish you all the continued success down the road here in 2021 and beyond. Thanks, Matt. Thanks so much, Sean.

>> Voice Over: Data is at the heart of transformation, and the change every company needs to succeed. But it takes more than new technology. It's about teams, talent and cultural change. Empowering everyone on the front lines to make decisions, all at the speed of digital. The transformation starts with you, it's time to lead the way, it's time for thought leaders. (soft upbeat music) >> Welcome to Thought.Leaders a digital event brought to you by ThoughtSpot, my name is Dave Vellante. The purpose of this day is to bring industry leaders and experts together to really try and understand the important issues around digital transformation. We have an amazing lineup of speakers, and our goal is to provide you with some best practices that you can bring back and apply to your organization. Look, data is plentiful, but insights are not, ThoughtSpot is disrupting analytics, by using search and machine intelligence to simplify data analysis and really empower anyone with fast access to relevant data. But in the last 150 days, we've had more questions than answers. Creating an organization that puts data and insights at their core, requires not only modern technology but leadership, a mindset and a culture, that people often refer to as data-driven. What does that mean? How can we equip our teams with data and fast access to quality information that can turn insights into action? And today we're going to hear from experienced leaders who are transforming their organizations with data, insights, and creating digital first cultures. But before we introduce our speakers, I'm joined today by two of my co-hosts from ThoughtSpot. First, chief data strategy officer of the ThoughtSpot is Cindi Howson, Cindi is an analytics and BI expert with 20 plus years experience, and the author of Successful Business Intelligence: Unlock the Value of BI & Big Data. Cindi was previously the lead analyst at Gartner for the data and analytics Magic Quadrant. In early last year, she joined ThoughtSpot to help CEOs and their teams understand how best to leverage analytics and AI for digital transformation. Cindi great to see you, welcome to the show. >> Thank you Dave, nice to join you virtually. >> Now our second cohost and friend of theCUBE is ThoughtSpot CEO Sudheesh Nair Hello Sudheesh, how are you doing today? >> I'm well, good to talk to you again. >> That's great to see you, thanks so much for being here. Now Sudheesh, please share with us why this discussion is so important to your customers and of course to our audience, and what they're going to learn today. (upbeat music) >> Thanks Dave, I wish you were there to introduce me into every room that I walk into because you have such an amazing way of doing it. It makes me feel also good. Look, since we have all been you know, cooped up in our homes, I know that the vendors like us, we have amped up our sort of effort to reach out to you with, invites for events like this. So we are getting very more invites for events like this than ever before. So when we started planning for this, we had three clear goals that we wanted to accomplish. And our first one, that when you finish this and walk away, we want to make sure that you don't feel like it was a waste of time, we want to make sure that we value your time, then this is going to be used. Number two, we want to put you in touch with industry leaders and thought leaders, generally good people, that you want to hang around with long after this event is over. And number three, as we plan through this, you know we are living through these difficult times we want this event to be more of an uplifting and inspiring event too. Now, the challenge is how do you do that with the team being change agents, because teens and as much as we romanticize it, it is not one of those uplifting things that everyone wants to do or likes to do. The way I think of it, changes sort of like, if you've ever done bungee jumping, and it's like standing on the edges, waiting to make that one more step you know, all you have to do is take that one step and gravity will do the rest, but that is the hardest step today. Change requires a lot of courage, and when we are talking about data and analytics, which is already like such a hard topic not necessarily an uplifting and positive conversation most businesses, it is somewhat scary, change becomes all the more difficult. Ultimately change requires courage, courage to first of all, challenge the status quo. People sometimes are afraid to challenge the status quo because they are thinking that you know, maybe I don't have the power to make the change that the company needs, sometimes they feel like I don't have the skills, sometimes they may feel that I'm probably not the right person to do it. Or sometimes the lack of courage manifest itself as the inability to sort of break the silos that are formed within the organizations when it comes to data and insights that you talked about. You know, that are people in the company who are going to have the data because they know how to manage the data, how to inquire and extract, they know how to speak data, they have the skills to do that. But they are not the group of people who have sort of the knowledge, the experience of the business to ask the right questions off the data. So there is the silo of people with the answers, and there is a silo of people with the questions, and there is gap, this sort of silos are standing in the way of making that necessary change that we all know the business needs. And the last change to sort of bring an external force sometimes. It could be a tool, it could be a platform, it could be a person, it could be a process but sometimes no matter how big the company is or how small the company is you may need to bring some external stimuli to start the domino of the positive changes that are necessary. The group of people that we are brought in, the four people, including Cindi that you will hear from today are really good at practically telling you how to make that step, how to step off that edge, how to dress the rope, that you will be safe and you're going to have fun, you will have that exhilarating feeling of jumping for a bungee jump, all four of them are exceptional, but my owner is to introduce Michelle. And she's our first speaker, Michelle I am very happy after watching our presentation and reading your bio that there are no country vital worldwide competition for cool parents, because she will beat all of us. Because when her children were small, they were probably into Harry Potter and Disney and she was managing a business and leading change there. And then as her kids grew up and got to that age where they like football and NFL, guess what? She's the CIO of NFL, what a cool mom. I am extremely excited to see what she's going to talk about. I've seen this slides, a bunch of amazing pictures, I'm looking to see the context behind it, I'm very thrilled to make that client so far, Michelle, I'm looking forward to her talk next. Welcome Michelle, it's over to you. (soft upbeat music) >> I'm delighted to be with you all today to talk about thought leadership. And I'm so excited that you asked me to join you because today I get to be a quarterback. I always wanted to be one, and I thought this is about as close as I'm ever going to get. So I want to talk to you about quarterbacking our digital revolution using insights data, and of course as you said, leadership. First a little bit about myself, a little background as I said, I always wanted to play football, and this is something that I wanted to do since I was a child, but when I grew up, girls didn't get to play football. I'm so happy that that's changing and girls are now doing all kinds of things that they didn't get to do before. Just this past weekend on an NFL field, we had a female coach on two sidelines, and a female official on the field. I'm a lifelong fan and student of the game of football, I grew up in the South, you can tell from the accent and in the South is like a religion and you pick sides. I chose Auburn University working in the Athletic Department, so I'm testament to you can start the journey can be long it took me many, many years to make it into professional sports. I graduated in 1987 and my little brother, well, not actually not so little, he played offensive line for the Alabama Crimson Tide. And for those of you who know SEC football you know, this is a really big rivalry. And when you choose sides, your family is divided, so it's kind of fun for me to always tell the story that my dad knew his kid would make it to the NFL he just bet on the wrong one. My career has been about bringing people together for memorable moments at some of America's most iconic brands. Delivering memories and amazing experiences that delight from Universal Studios, Disney to my current position as CIO of the NFL. In this job I'm very privileged to have the opportunity to work with the team, that gets to bring America's game to millions of people around the world. Often I'm asked to talk about how to create amazing experiences for fans, guests, or customers. But today I really wanted to focus on something different and talk to you about being behind the scenes and backstage. Because behind every event every game, every awesome moment is execution, precise repeatable execution. And most of my career has been behind the scenes, doing just that, assembling teams to execute these plans, and the key way that companies operate at these exceptional levels, is making good decisions, the right decisions at the right time and based upon data, so that you can translate the data into intelligence and be a data-driven culture. Using data and intelligence is an important way that world-class companies do differentiate themselves. And it's the lifeblood of collaboration and innovation. Teams that are working on delivering these kinds of world-class experiences are often seeking out and leveraging next generation technologies and finding new ways to work. I've been fortunate to work across three decades of emerging experiences, which each required emerging technologies to execute. A little bit first about Disney, in the 90s I was at Disney, leading a project called destination Disney, which it's a data project, it was a data project, but it was CRM before CRM was even cool. And then certainly before anything like a data-driven culture was ever brought up. But way back then we were creating a digital backbone that enabled many technologies for the things that you see today, like the magic band, just these magical express. My career at Disney began in finance, but Disney was very good about rotating you around, and it was during one of these rotations that I became very passionate about data. I kind of became a pain in the butt to the IT team, asking for data more and more data. And I learned that all of that valuable data was locked up in our systems, all of our point of sales systems, our reservation systems, our operation systems, and so I became a shadow IT person in marketing, ultimately leading to moving into IT, and I haven't looked back since. In the early 2000s I was at Universal Studios Theme Park as their CIO, preparing for and launching the wizarding world of Harry Potter. Bringing one of history's most memorable characters to life required many new technologies and a lot of data. Our data and technologies were embedded into the rides and attractions. I mean, how do you really think a wand selects you at a wine shop. As today at the NFL, I am constantly challenged to do leading edge technologies using things like sensors, AI, machine learning, and all new communication strategies, and using data to drive everything from player performance, contracts to where we build new stadiums and hold events. With this year being the most challenging, yet rewarding year in my career at the NFL. In the middle of a global pandemic, the way we are executing on our season is leveraging data from contract tracing devices joined with testing data. Talk about data, actually enabling your business without it we wouldn't be having a season right now. I'm also on the board of directors of two public companies, where data and collaboration are paramount. First RingCentral, it's a cloud based unified communications platform, and collaboration with video message and phone, all in one solution in the cloud. And Quotient Technologies, whose product is actually data. The tagline at quotient is the result in knowing. I think that's really important, because not all of us are data companies, where your product is actually data. But we should operate more like your product is data. I'd also like to talk to you about four areas of things to think about, as thought leaders in your companies. First just hit on it is change, how to be a champion and a driver of change. Second, how to use data to drive performance for your company, and measure performance of your company. Third, how companies now require intense collaboration to operate, and finally, how much of this is accomplished through solid data-driven decisions. First let's hit on change. I mean, it's evident today more than ever, that we are in an environment of extreme change. I mean, we've all been at this for years and as technologists we've known it, believed it, lived it, and thankfully for the most part knock on wood we were prepared for it. But this year everyone's cheese was moved, all the people in the back rooms, IT, data architects and others, were suddenly called to the forefront. Because a global pandemic has turned out to be the thing that is driving intense change in how people work and analyze their business. On March 13th, we closed our office at the NFL in the middle of preparing for one of our biggest events, our kickoff event, the 2020 Draft. We went from planning, a large event in Las Vegas under the bright lights red carpet stage to smaller events in club facilities. And then ultimately to one where everyone coaches, GMs, prospects and even our commissioner were at home in their basements. And we only had a few weeks to figure it out. I found myself for the first time being in the live broadcast event space, talking about bungee dress jumping, this is really what it felt like. It was one in which no one felt comfortable, because it had not been done before. But leading through this, I stepped up, but it was very scary, it was certainly very risky but it ended up being Oh, so rewarding when we did it. And as a result of this, some things will change forever. Second, managing performance. I mean, data should inform how you're doing and how to get your company to perform at this level, highest level. As an example, the NFL has always measured performance obviously, and it is one of the purest examples of how performance directly impacts outcome. I mean, you can see performance on the field, you can see points being scored and stats, and you immediately know that impact, those with the best stats, usually win the games. The NFL has always recorded stats, since the beginning of time, here at the NFL a little this year as our 100 and first year and athletes ultimate success as a player has also always been greatly impacted by his stats. But what has changed for us, is both how much more we can measure, and the immediacy with which it can be measured. And I'm sure in your business, it's the same, the amount of data you must have has got to have quadrupled recently and how fast you need it and how quickly you need to analyze it, is so important. And it's very important to break the silos between the keys to the data and the use of the data. Our next generation stats platform is taking data to a next level, it's powered by Amazon Web Services, and we gathered this data real time from sensors that are on players' bodies. We gather it in real time, analyze it, display it online and on broadcast, and of course it's used to prepare week to week in addition to what is a normal coaching plan would be. We can now analyze, visualize, route patterns speed, matchups, et cetera, so much faster than ever before. We're continuing to roll out sensors too, that we'll gather more and more information about player's performance as it relates to their health and safety. The third trend is really I think it's a big part of what we're feeling today and that is intense collaboration. And just for sort of historical purposes it's important to think about for those of you that are IT professionals and developers, you know more than 10 years ago, agile practices began sweeping companies or small teams would work together rapidly in a very flexible, adaptive and innovative way, and it proved to be transformational. However today, of course, that is no longer just small teams the next big wave of change, and we've seen it through this pandemic is that it's the whole enterprise that must collaborate and be agile. If I look back on my career when I was at Disney, we owned everything 100%, we made a decision, we implemented it, we were a collaborative culture but it was much easier to push change because you own the whole decision. If there was buy in from the top down, you got the people from the bottom up to do it, and you executed. At Universal, we were a joint venture, our attractions and entertainment was licensed, our hotels were owned and managed by other third parties. So influence and collaboration and how to share across companies became very important. And now here I am at the NFL and even the bigger ecosystem. We have 32 clubs that are all separate businesses 31 different stadiums that are owned by a variety of people. We have licensees, we have sponsors, we have broadcast partners. So it seems that as my career has evolved centralized control has gotten less and less and has been replaced by intense collaboration not only within your own company, but across companies. The ability to work in a collaborative way across businesses and even other companies that has been a big key to my success in my career. I believe this whole vertical integration and big top down decision making is going by the wayside in favor of ecosystems that require cooperation, yet competition to coexist. I mean the NFL is a great example of what we call coopertition, which is cooperation and competition. When in competition with each other, but we cooperate to make the company the best it can be. And at the heart of these items really are data-driven decisions and culture. Data on its own isn't good enough, you must be able to turn it to insights, partnerships between technology teams who usually hold the keys to the raw data, and business units who have the knowledge to build the right decision models is key. If you're not already involved in this linkage, you should be, data mining isn't new for sure. The availability of data is quadrupling and it's everywhere. How do you know what to even look at? How do you know where to begin? How do you know what questions to ask? It's by using the tools that are available for visualization and analytics and knitting together strategies of the company. So it begins with first of all making sure you do understand the strategy of the company. So in closing, just to wrap up a bit, many of you joined today looking for thought leadership on how to be a change agent, a change champion, and how to lead through transformation. Some final thoughts are be brave, and drive, don't do the ride along program, it's very important to drive, driving can be high risk but it's also high reward. Embracing the uncertainty of what will happen, is how you become brave, get more and more comfortable with uncertainty be calm and let data be your map on your journey, thanks. >> Michelle, thank you so much. So you and I share a love of data, and a love of football. You said you want to be the quarterback, I'm more an old wine person. (Michelle laughing) >> Well, then I can do my job without you. >> Great, and I'm getting the feeling now you know, Sudheesh is talking about bungee jumping. My boat is when we're past this pandemic, we both take them to the Delaware Water Gap and we do the cliff jumping. >> That sounds good, I'll watch. >> You'll watch, okay, so Michelle, you have so many stakeholders when you're trying to prioritize the different voices, you have the players, you have the owners you have the league, as you mentioned to the broadcasters your, your partners here and football mamas like myself. How do you prioritize when there's so many different stakeholders that you need to satisfy? I think balancing across stakeholders starts with aligning on a mission. And if you spend a lot of time understanding where everyone's coming from, and you can find the common thread ties them all together you sort of do get them to naturally prioritize their work, and I think that's very important. So for us at the NFL, and even at Disney, it was our core values and our core purpose is so well known, and when anything challenges that we're able to sort of lay that out. But as a change agent, you have to be very empathetic, and I would say empathy is probably your strongest skill if you're a change agent. And that means listening to every single stakeholder even when they're yelling at you, even when they're telling you your technology doesn't work and you know that it's user error, or even when someone is just emotional about what's happening to them and that they're not comfortable with it. So I think being empathetic and having a mission and understanding it, is sort of how I prioritize and balance. >> Yeah, empathy, a very popular word this year. I can imagine those coaches and owners yelling. So I thank you for your metership here. So Michelle, I look forward to discussing this more with our other customers and disruptors joining us in a little bit. (soft upbeat music) >> So we're going to take a hard pivot now and go from football to Chernobyl, Chernobyl, what went wrong? 1986, as the reactors were melting down they had the data to say, this is going to be catastrophic and yet the culture said, "No, we're perfect, hide it. Don't dare tell anyone," which meant they went ahead and had celebrations in Kiev. Even though that increased the exposure the additional thousands getting cancer, and 20,000 years before the ground around there and even be inhabited again, This is how powerful and detrimental a negative culture, a culture that is unable to confront the brutal facts that hides data. This is what we have to contend with, and this is why I want you to focus on having fostering a data-driven culture. I don't want you to be a laggard, I want you to be a leader in using data to drive your digital transformation. So I'll talk about culture and technology, isn't really two sides of the same coin, real-world impacts and then some best practices you can use to disrupt and innovate your culture. Now, oftentimes I would talk about culture and I talk about technology, and recently a CDO said to me, "You know Cindi, I actually think this is two sides of the same coin. One reflects the other, what do you think?" Let me walk you through this, so let's take a laggard. What is the technology look like? Is it based on 1990s BI and reporting largely parameterized reports on-premises data warehouses, or not even that operational reports, at best one enterprise data warehouse very slow moving and collaboration is only email. What does that culture tell you? Maybe there's a lack of leadership to change, to do the hard work that Sudheesh referred to. Or is there also a culture of fear, afraid of failure, resistance to change complacency and sometimes that complacency it's not because people are lazy, it's because they've been so beaten down every time a new idea is presented. It's like, no we're measured on least cost to serve. So politics and distrust, whether it's between business and IT or individual stakeholders is the norm. So data is hoarded, let's contrast that with a leader, a data and analytics leader, what is their technology look like? Augmented analytics, search and AI-driven insights not on-premises, but in the cloud and maybe multiple clouds. And the data is not in one place, but it's in a data lake, and in a data warehouse, a logical data warehouse. The collaboration is being a newer methods whether it's Slack or teams allowing for that real time decisioning or investigating a particular data point. So what is the culture in the leaders? It's transparent and trust, there is a trust that data will not be used to punish, that there is an ability to confront the bad news. It's innovation, valuing innovation in pursuit of the company goals, whether it's the best fan experience and player safety in the NFL or best serving your customers. It's innovative and collaborative. There's none of this, oh, well, I didn't invent that, I'm not going to look at that. There's still pride of ownership, but it's collaborating to get to a better place faster. And people feel empowered to present new ideas to fail fast, and they're energized, knowing that they're using the best technology and innovating at the pace that business requires. So data is democratized and democratized, not just for power users or analysts, but really at the point of impact what we like to call the new decision makers. Or really the frontline workers. So Harvard business review partnered with us to develop this study to say, just how important is this? They've been working at BI and analytics as an industry for more than 20 years. Why is it not at the front lines? Whether it's a doctor, a nurse, a coach, a supply chain manager a warehouse manager, a financial services advisor. 87% said they would be more successful if frontline workers were empowered with data-driven insights, but they recognize they need new technology to be able to do that. It's not about learning hard tools, the sad reality only 20% of organizations are actually doing this, these are the data-driven leaders. So this is the culture and technology, how did we get here? It's because state of the art keeps changing. So the first generation BI and analytics platforms were deployed on-premises, on small datasets really just taking data out of ERP systems that were also on-premises, and state of the art was maybe getting a management report, an operational report. Over time visual based data discovery vendors, disrupted these traditional BI vendors, empowering now analysts to create visualizations with the flexibility on a desktop, sometimes larger data sometimes coming from a data warehouse, the current state of the art though, Gartner calls it augmented analytics, at ThoughtSpot, we call it search and AI-driven analytics. And this was pioneered for large scale data sets, whether it's on-premises or leveraging the cloud data warehouses, and I think this is an important point. Oftentimes you, the data and analytics leaders, will look at these two components separately, but you have to look at the BI and analytics tier in lockstep with your data architectures to really get to the granular insights, and to leverage the capabilities of AI. Now, if you've never seen ThoughtSpot I'll just show you what this looks like, instead of somebody's hard coding a report, it's typing in search keywords and very robust keywords contains rank, top, bottom getting to a visualization that then can be pinned to an existing Pinboard that might also contain insights generated by an AI engine. So it's easy enough for that new decision maker, the business user, the non analyst to create themselves. Modernizing the data and analytics portfolio is hard, because the pace of change has accelerated. You used to be able to create an investment, place a bet for maybe 10 years. A few years ago, that time horizon was five years, now it's maybe three years, and the time to maturity has also accelerated. So you have these different components the search and AI tier, the data science tier, data preparation and virtualization. But I would also say equally important is the cloud data warehouse. And pay attention to how well these analytics tools can unlock the value in these cloud data warehouses. So ThoughtSpot was the first to market with search and AI-driven insights. Competitors have followed suit, but be careful if you look at products like Power BI or SAP Analytics Cloud, they might demo well, but do they let you get to all the data without moving it in products like Snowflake, Amazon Redshift or Azure Synapse or Google BigQuery, they do not. They require you to move it into a smaller in memory engine. So it's important how well these new products inter operate. The pace of change, it's acceleration, Gartner recently predicted that by 2022, 65% of analytical queries will be generated using search or NLP or even AI, and that is roughly three times the prediction they had just a couple years ago. So let's talk about the real world impact of culture. And if you've read any of my books or used any of the maturity models out there whether the Gartner IT score that I worked on, or the data warehousing institute also has a maturity model. We talk about these five pillars to really become data-driven, as Michelle spoke about, it's focusing on the business outcomes, leveraging all the data, including new data sources. It's the talent, the people, the technology, and also the processes, and often when I would talk about the people in the talent, I would lump the culture as part of that. But in the last year, as I've traveled the world and done these digital events for thought leaders you have told me now culture is absolutely so important. And so we've pulled it out as a separate pillar, and in fact, in polls that we've done in these events, look at how much more important culture is, as a barrier to becoming data-driven. It's three times as important as any of these other pillars. That's how critical it is, and let's take an example of where you can have great data but if you don't have the right culture there's devastating impacts. And I will say, I have been a loyal customer of Wells Fargo for more than 20 years, but look at what happened in the face of negative news with data, that said, "Hey, we're not doing good cross selling, customers do not have both a checking account and a credit card and a savings account and a mortgage." They opened fake accounts, facing billions in fines, change in leadership, that even the CEO attributed to a toxic sales culture, and they're trying to fix this. But even recently there's been additional employee backlash saying that culture has not changed. Let's contrast that with some positive examples, Medtronic a worldwide company in 150 countries around the world, they may not be a household name to you, but if you have a loved one or yourself, you have a pacemaker, spinal implant, diabetes you know, this brand. And at the start of COVID when they knew their business would be slowing down, because hospitals would only be able to take care of COVID patients, they took the bold move of making their IP for ventilators publicly available, that is the power of a positive culture. Or Verizon, a major telecom organization, looking at late payments of their customers, and even though the US federal government said "Well, you can't turn them off." They said, "We'll extend that even beyond the mandated guidelines," and facing a slow down in the business because of the tough economy, he said, "You know what? We will spend the time upskilling our people giving them the time to learn more about the future of work, the skills and data and analytics," for 20,000 of their employees, rather than furloughing them. That is the power of a positive culture. So how can you transform your culture to the best in class? I'll give you three suggestions, bring in a change agent identify the relevance, or I like to call it WIIFM, and organize for collaboration. So the CDO whatever your title is, chief analytics officer chief digital officer, you are the most important change agent. And this is where you will hear, that oftentimes a change agent has to come from outside the organization. So this is where, for example in Europe, you have the CDO of Just Eat takeout food delivery organization, coming from the airline industry or in Australia, National Australian Bank, taking a CDO within the same sector from TD Bank going to NAB. So these change agents come in disrupt, it's a hard job. As one of you said to me, it often feels like Sisyphus, I make one step forward and I get knocked down again, I get pushed back. It is not for the faint of heart, but it's the most important part of your job. The other thing I'll talk about is WIIFM, what is in it for me? And this is really about understanding the motivation, the relevance that data has for everyone on the frontline as well as those analysts, as well as the executives. So if we're talking about players in the NFL they want to perform better, and they want to stay safe. That is why data matters to them. If we're talking about financial services this may be a wealth management advisor, okay, we could say commissions, but it's really helping people have their dreams come true whether it's putting their children through college, or being able to retire without having to work multiple jobs still into your 70s or 80s. For the teachers, teachers, you asked them about data, they'll say, "We don't need that, I care about the student." So if you can use data to help a student perform better that is WIIFM. And sometimes we spend so much time talking the technology, we forget what is the value we're trying to deliver with it. And we forget the impact on the people that it does require change. In fact, the Harvard Business Review Study, found that 44% said lack of change management is the biggest barrier to leveraging both new technology but also being empowered to act on those data-driven insights. The third point, organize for collaboration. This does require diversity of thought, but also bringing the technology, the data and the business people together. Now there's not a single one size fits all model for data and analytics. At one point in time, even having a BICC, a BI Competency Center was considered state of the art. Now for the biggest impact, what I recommend is that you have a federated model, centralized for economies of scale, that could be the common data, but then in bed, these evangelists, these analysts of the future, within every business unit, every functional domain, and as you see this top bar, all models are possible but the hybrid model has the most impact, the most leaders. So as we look ahead to the months ahead, to the year ahead, an exciting time, because data is helping organizations better navigate a tough economy lock in the customer loyalty, and I look forward to seeing how you foster that culture that's collaborative with empathy and bring the best of technology, leveraging the cloud, all your data. So thank you for joining us at thought leaders, and next I'm pleased to introduce our first change agent Thomas Mazzaferro, chief data officer of Western Union, and before joining Western Union, Tom made his mark at HSBC and JP Morgan Chase spearheading digital innovation in technology operations, risk compliance, and retail banking. Tom, thank you so much for joining us today. (soft upbeat music) >> Very happy to be here and looking forward to talking to all of you today. So as we look to move organizations to a data-driven capability into the future, there is a lot that needs to be done on the data side, but also how does data connect and enable, different business teams and technology teams into the future. As we look across our data ecosystems and our platforms and how we modernize that to the cloud in the future, it all needs to basically work together, right? To really be able to drive over the shift from a data standpoint, into the future. That includes being able to have the right information with the right quality of data at the right time to drive informed business decisions, to drive the business forward. As part of that, we actually have partnered with ThoughtSpot to actually bring in the technology to help us drive that, as part of that partnership, and it's how we've looked to integrated into our overall business as a whole. We've looked at how do we make sure that our business and our professional lives, right? Are enabled in the same ways as our personal lives. So for example, in your personal lives, when you want to go and find something out, what do you do? You go on to google.com or you go on to Bing, or go to Yahoo and you search for what you want, search to find an answer. ThoughtSpot for us as the same thing, but in the business world. So using ThoughtSpot and other AI capability is allowed us to actually enable our overall business teams in our company, to actually have our information at our fingertips. So rather than having to go and talk to someone or an engineer to go pull information or pull data, we actually can have the end users or the business executives, right? Search for what they need, what they want, at the exact time that action needed, to go and drive the business forward. This is truly one of those transformational things that we've put in place. On top of that, we are on the journey to modernize our larger ecosystem as a whole. That includes modernizing our underlying data warehouses, our technology or our (indistinct) environments, and as we move that we've actually picked to our cloud providers going to AWS and GCP. We've also adopted Snowflake to really drive into organize our information and our data, then drive these new solutions and capabilities forward. So big portion of us though is culture, so how do we engage with the business teams and bring the IT teams together to really drive these holistic end to end solutions and capabilities, to really support the actual business into the future. That's one of the keys here, as we look to modernize and to really enhance our organizations to become data-driven, this is the key. If you can really start to provide answers to business questions before they're even being asked, and to predict based upon different economic trends or different trends in your business, what does is be made and actually provide those answers to the business teams before they're even asking for it. That is really becoming a data-driven organization. And as part of that, it's really then enables the business to act quickly and take advantage of opportunities as they come in based upon industries, based upon markets, based upon products, solutions, or partnerships into the future. These are really some of the keys that become crucial as you move forward right into this new age, especially with COVID, with COVID now taking place across the world, right? Many of these markets, many of these digital transformations are celebrating, and are changing rapidly to accommodate and to support customers in these very difficult times. As part of that, you need to make sure you have the right underlying foundation, ecosystems and solutions to really drive those capabilities, and those solutions forward. As we go through this journey, both of my career but also each of your careers into the future, right? It also needs to evolve, right? Technology has changed so drastically in the last 10 years, and that change is only a celebrating. So as part of that, you have to make sure that you stay up to speed, up to date with new technology changes both on the platform standpoint, tools, but also what our customers want, what do our customers need, and how do we then surface them with our information, with our data, with our platform, with our products and our services, to meet those needs and to really support and service those customers into the future. This is all around becoming a more data-driven organization such as how do you use your data to support the current business lines. But how do you actually use your information your data, to actually better support your customers better support your business, better support your employees, your operations teams and so forth, and really creating that full integration in that ecosystem is really when you start to get large dividends from these investments into the future. With that being said I hope you enjoyed the segment on how to become and how to drive a data-driven organization, and looking forward to talking to you again soon, thank you. >> Tom, that was great, thanks so much. Now I'm going to have to brag on you for a second, as a change agent you've come in disrupted, and how long have you been at Western Union? >> Only nine months, I just started this year, but there'd be some great opportunities and big changes, and we have a lot more to go, but we're really driving things forward in partnership with our business teams, and our colleagues to support those customers forward. >> Tom, thank you so much that was wonderful. And now I'm excited to introduce you to Gustavo Canton, a change agent that I've had the pleasure of working with meeting in Europe, and he is a serial change agent. Most recently with Schneider Electric, but even going back to Sam's Club, Gustavo welcome. (soft upbeat music) >> So hi everyone my name is Gustavo Canton and thank you so much Cindi for the intro. As you mentioned, doing transformations is a you know, high effort, high reward situation. I have empowerment in transformation and I have led many transformations. And what I can tell you is that it's really hard to predict the future, but if you have a North Star and you know where you're going, the one thing that I want you to take away from this discussion today, is that you need to be bold to evolve. And so in today, I'm going to be talking about culture and data, and I'm going to break this down in four areas. How do we get started barriers or opportunities as I see it, the value of AI, and also how do you communicate, especially now in the workforce of today with so many different generations, you need to make sure that you are communicating in ways that are nontraditional sometimes. And so how do we get started? So I think the answer to that is, you have to start for you, yourself as a leader and stay tuned. And by that, I mean you need to understand not only what is happening in your function or your field, but you have to be very into what is happening in society, socioeconomically speaking, wellbeing, you know, the common example is a great example. And for me personally, it's an opportunity because the number one core value that I have is wellbeing. I believe that for human potential, for customers and communities to grow, wellbeing should be at the center of every decision. And as somebody mentioned, it's great to be you know, stay in tune and have the skillset and the courage. But for me personally, to be honest to have this courage is not about not being afraid. You're always afraid when you're making big changes and your swimming upstream. But what gives me the courage is the empathy part, like I think empathy is a huge component because every time I go into an organization or a function, I try to listen very attentively to the needs of the business, and what the leaders are trying to do, what I do it thinking about the mission of how do I make change for the bigger, you know workforce so the bigger good, despite the fact that this might have a perhaps implication, so my own self interest in my career, right? Because you have to have that courage sometimes to make choices, that are not well seeing politically speaking what are the right thing to do, and you have to push through it. So the bottom line for me is that, I don't think they're transforming fast enough. And the reality is I speak with a lot of leaders and we have seen stories in the past, and what they show is that if you look at the four main barriers, that are basically keeping us behind budget, inability to add, cultural issues, politics, and lack of alignment, those are the top four. But the interesting thing is that as Cindi has mentioned, this topic about culture is actually gaining more and more traction, and in 2018, there was a story from HBR and it was for about 45%. I believe today, it's about 55%, 60% of respondents say that this is the main area that we need to focus on. So again, for all those leaders and all the executives who understand, and are aware that we need to transform, commit to the transformation and set us deadline to say, "Hey, in two years, we're going to make this happen, what do we need to do to empower and enable these search engines to make it happen?" You need to make the tough choices. And so to me, when I speak about being bold is about making the right choices now. So I'll give you samples of some of the roadblocks that I went through, as I think the intro information most recently as Cindi mentioned in Schneider. There are three main areas, legacy mindset, and what that means is that we've been doing this in a specific way for a long time, and here is how we have been successful. We're working the past is not going to work now, the opportunity there is that there is a lot of leaders who have a digital mindset, and their up and coming leaders that are perhaps not yet fully developed. We need to mentor those leaders and take bets on some of these talents, including young talent. We cannot be thinking in the past and just wait for people you know, three to five years for them to develop, because the world is going to in a way that is super fast. The second area and this is specifically to implementation of AI is very interesting to me, because just example that I have with ThoughtSpot, right? We went to an implementation and a lot of the way the IT team functions, so the leaders look at technology, they look at it from the prism of the prior or success criteria for the traditional BIs, and that's not going to work. Again, your opportunity here is that you need to really find what success look like, in my case, I want the user experience of our workforce to be the same as your experience you have at home. It's a very simple concept, and so we need to think about how do we gain that user experience with this augmented analytics tools, and then work backwards to have the right talent, processes and technology to enable that. And finally, and obviously with COVID a lot of pressure in organizations and companies to do more with less, and the solution that most leaders I see are taking is to just minimize cost sometimes and cut budget. We have to do the opposite, we have to actually invest some growth areas, but do it by business question. Don't do it by function, if you actually invest in these kind of solutions, if you actually invest on developing your talent, your leadership, to see more digitally, if you actually invest on fixing your data platform is not just an incremental cost, it's actually this investment is going to offset all those hidden costs and inefficiencies that you have on your system, because people are doing a lot of work in working very hard but it's not efficiency, and it's not working in the way that you might want to work. So there is a lot of opportunity there, and you just to put it into some perspective, there have been some studies in the past about you know, how do we kind of measure the impact of data? And obviously this is going to vary by organization, maturity there's going to be a lot of factors. I've been in companies who have very clean, good data to work with, and I think with companies that we have to start basically from scratch. So it all depends on your maturity level, but in this study what I think is interesting is, they try to put a tagline or attack price to what is a cost of incomplete data. So in this case, it's about 10 times as much to complete a unit of work, when you have data that is flawed as opposed to have imperfect data. So let me put that just in perspective, just as an example, right? Imagine you are trying to do something and you have to do 100 things in a project, and each time you do something it's going to cost you a dollar. So if you have perfect data, the total cost of that project might be a $100. But now let's say you have any percent perfect data and 20% flow data, by using this assumption that flow data is 10 times as costly as perfect data, your total costs now becomes $280 as opposed to $100, this just for you to really think about as a CIO, CTO, you know CSRO, CEO, are we really paying attention and really closing the gaps that we have on our infrastructure? If we don't do that, it's hard sometimes to see the snowball effect or to measure the overall impact, but as you can tell, the price tag goes up very, very quickly. So now, if I were to say, how do I communicate this? Or how do I break through some of these challenges or some of these barriers, right? I think the key is I am in analytics, I know statistics obviously, and love modeling and you know, data and optimization theory and all that stuff, that's what I can do analytics, but now as a leader and as a change agent, I need to speak about value, and in this case, for example for Schneider, there was this tagline coffee of your energy. So the number one thing that they were asking from the analytics team was actually efficiency, which to me was very interesting. But once I understood that I understood what kind of language to use, how to connect it to the overall strategy and basically how to bring in the right leaders, because you need to, you know, focus on the leaders that you're going to make the most progress. You know, again, low effort, high value, you need to make sure you centralize all the data as you can, you need to bring in some kind of augmented analytics, you know, solution, and finally you need to make it super simple for the you know, in this case, I was working with the HR teams and other areas, so they can have access to one portal. They don't have to be confused and looking for 10 different places to find information. I think if you can actually have those four foundational pillars, obviously under the guise of having a data-driven culture, that's when you can actually make the impact. So in our case, it was about three years total transformation but it was two years for this component of augmented analytics. It took about two years to talk to, you know, IT, get leadership support, find the budgeting, you know, get everybody on board, make sure the success criteria was correct. And we call this initiative, the people analytics, I pulled up, it was actually launched in July of this year. And we were very excited and the audience was very excited to do this. In this case, we did our pilot in North America for many, many manufacturers, but one thing that is really important is as you bring along your audience on this, you know, you're going from Excel, you know in some cases or Tableau to other tools like you know, ThoughtSpot, you need to really explain them, what is the difference, and how these two can truly replace some of the spreadsheets or some of the views that you might have on these other kind of tools. Again, Tableau, I think it's a really good tool, there are other many tools that you might have in your toolkit. But in my case, personally I feel that you need to have one portal going back to seeing these points that really truly enable the end user. And I feel that this is the right solution for us, right? And I will show you some of the findings that we had in the pilot in the last two months. So this was a huge victory, and I will tell you why, because it took a lot of effort for us to get to these stations. Like I said it's been years for us to kind of lay the foundation, get the leadership and chasing culture, so people can understand why you truly need to invest what I meant analytics. And so what I'm showing here is an example of how do we use basically, you know a tool to capturing video, the qualitative findings that we had, plus the quantitative insights that we have. So in this case, our preliminary results based on our ambition for three main metrics, hours saved, user experience and adoption. So for hours saved, our ambition was to have 10 hours per week per employee save on average, user experience or ambition was 4.5 and adoption 80%. In just two months, two months and a half of the pilot we were able to achieve five hours, per week per employee savings. I used to experience for 4.3 out of five, and adoption of 60%. Really, really amazing work. But again, it takes a lot of collaboration for us to get to the stage from IT, legal, communications obviously the operations things and the users, in HR safety and other areas that might be basically stakeholders in this whole process. So just to summarize this kind of effort takes a lot of energy, you are a change agent, you need to have a courage to make these decision and understand that, I feel that in this day and age with all this disruption happening, we don't have a choice. We have to take the risk, right? And in this case, I feel a lot of satisfaction in how we were able to gain all these very souls for this organization, and that gave me the confidence to know that the work has been done, and we are now in a different stage for the organization. And so for me it safe to say, thank you for everybody who has believed obviously in our vision, everybody who has believed in, you know, the word that we were trying to do and to make the life for, you know workforce or customers that are in community better. As you can tell, there is a lot of effort, there is a lot of collaboration that is needed to do something like this. In the end, I feel very satisfied with the accomplishments of this transformation, and I just want to tell for you, if you are going right now in a moment that you feel that you have to swim upstream you know, what would mentors what people in this industry that can help you out and guide you on this kind of a transformation is not easy to do is high effort but is well worth it. And with that said, I hope you are well and it's been a pleasure talking to you, talk to you soon, take care. >> Thank you Gustavo, that was amazing. All right, let's go to the panel. (soft upbeat music) >> I think we can all agree how valuable it is to hear from practitioners, and I want to thank the panel for sharing their knowledge with the community, and one common challenge that I heard you all talk about was bringing your leadership and your teams along on the journey with you. We talk about this all the time, and it is critical to have support from the top, why? Because it directs the middle, and then it enables bottoms up innovation effects from the cultural transformation that you guys all talked about. It seems like another common theme we heard, is that you all prioritize database decision making in your organizations, and you combine two of your most valuable assets to do that, and create leverage, employees on the front lines, and of course the data. That was rightly pointed out, Tom, the pandemic has accelerated the need for really leaning into this. You know, the old saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, well COVID's broken everything. And it's great to hear from our experts, you know, how to move forward, so let's get right into it. So Gustavo let's start with you if I'm an aspiring change agent, and let's say I'm a budding data leader. What do I need to start doing? What habits do I need to create for long lasting success? >> I think curiosity is very important. You need to be, like I say, in tune to what is happening not only in your specific field, like I have a passion for analytics, I can do this for 50 years plus, but I think you need to understand wellbeing other areas across not only a specific business as you know, I come from, you know, Sam's Club Walmart retail, I mean energy management technology. So you have to try to push yourself and basically go out of your comfort zone. I mean, if you are staying in your comfort zone and you want to use lean continuous improvement that's just going to take you so far. What you have to do is and that's what I tried to do is I try to go into areas, businesses and transformations that make me, you know stretch and develop as a leader. That's what I'm looking to do, so I can help transform the functions organizations, and do these change management and decisions mindset as required for these kinds of efforts. >> Thank you for that is inspiring and Cindi, you love data, and the data is pretty clear that diversity is a good business, but I wonder if you can add your perspectives to this conversation. >> Yeah, so Michelle has a new fan here because she has found her voice, I'm still working on finding mine. And it's interesting because I was raised by my dad, a single dad, so he did teach me how to work in a predominantly male environment. But why I think diversity matters more now than ever before, and this is by gender, by race, by age, by just different ways of working and thinking is because as we automate things with AI, if we do not have diverse teams looking at the data and the models, and how they're applied, we risk having bias at scale. So this is why I think I don't care what type of minority, you are finding your voice, having a seat at the table and just believing in the impact of your work has never been more important. And as Michelle said more possible >> Great perspectives thank you, Tom, I want to go to you. I mean, I feel like everybody in our businesses in some way, shape or form become a COVID expert but what's been the impact of the pandemic on your organization's digital transformation plans? >> We've seen a massive growth actually you know, in a digital business over the last 12 months really, even in celebration, right? Once COVID hit, we really saw that in the 200 countries and territories that we operate in today and service our customers and today, that there's been a huge need, right? To send money, to support family, to support friends and loved ones across the world. And as part of that, you know, we are very honored to support those customers that we across all the centers today. But as part of that celebration, we need to make sure that we had the right architecture and the right platforms to basically scale, right? To basically support and provide the right kind of security for our customers going forward. So as part of that, we did do some pivots and we did celebrate some of our plans on digital to help support that overall growth coming in, and to support our customers going forward. Because there were these times during this pandemic, right? This is the most important time, and we need to support those that we love and those that we care about. And in doing that, it's one of those ways is actually by sending money to them, support them financially. And that's where really are part of that our services come into play that, you know, I really support those families. So it was really a great opportunity for us to really support and really bring some of our products to this level, and supporting our business going forward. >> Awesome, thank you. Now I want to come back to Gustavo, Tom, I'd love for you to chime in too. Did you guys ever think like you were pushing the envelope too much and doing things with data or the technology that was just maybe too bold, maybe you felt like at some point it was failing, or you pushing your people too hard, can you share that experience and how you got through it? >> Yeah, the way I look at it is, you know, again, whenever I go to an organization I ask the question, Hey, how fast you would like to conform?" And, you know, based on the agreements on the leadership and the vision that we want to take place, I take decisions and I collaborate in a specific way. Now, in the case of COVID, for example, right? It forces us to remove silos and collaborate in a faster way, so to me it was an opportunity to actually integrate with other areas and drive decisions faster. But make no mistake about it, when you are doing a transformation, you are obviously trying to do things faster than sometimes people are comfortable doing and you need to be okay with that. Sometimes you need to be okay with tension, or you need to be okay, you know debating points or making repetitive business cases onto people connect with the decision because you understand, and you are seeing that, hey, the CEO is making a one, two year, you know, efficiency goal, the only way for us to really do more with less is for us to continue this path. We cannot just stay with the status quo, we need to find a way to accelerate transformation... >> How about you Tom, we were talking earlier was Sudheesh had said about that bungee jumping moment, what can you share? >> Yeah you know, I think you hit upon it. Right now, the pace of change will be the slowest pace that you see for the rest of your career. So as part of that, right? That's what I tell my team is that you need to feel comfortable being uncomfortable. I mean, that we have to be able to basically scale, right? Expand and support that the ever changing needs the marketplace and industry and our customers today and that pace of change that's happening, right? And what customers are asking for, and the competition the marketplace, it's only going to accelerate. So as part of that, you know, as we look at what how you're operating today in your current business model, right? Things are only going to get faster. So you have to plan into align, to drive the actual transformation, so that you can scale even faster into the future. So as part of that, so we're putting in place here, right? Is how do we create that underlying framework and foundation that allows the organization to basically continue to scale and evolve into the future? >> We're definitely out of our comfort zones, but we're getting comfortable with it. So, Cindi, last question, you've worked with hundreds of organizations, and I got to believe that you know, some of the advice you gave when you were at Gartner, which is pre COVID, maybe sometimes clients didn't always act on it. You know, they're not on my watch for whatever variety of reasons, but it's being forced on them now, but knowing what you know now that you know, we're all in this isolation economy how would you say that advice has changed, has it changed? What's your number one action and recommendation today? >> Yeah well, first off, Tom just freaked me out. What do you mean this is the slowest ever? Even six months ago, I was saying the pace of change in data and analytics is frenetic. So, but I think you're right, Tom, the business and the technology together is forcing this change. Now, Dave, to answer your question, I would say the one bit of advice, maybe I was a little more, very aware of the power in politics and how to bring people along in a way that they are comfortable, and now I think it's, you know what? You can't get comfortable. In fact, we know that the organizations that were already in the cloud, have been able to respond and pivot faster. So if you really want to survive as Tom and Gustavo said, get used to being uncomfortable, the power and politics are going to happen. Break the rules, get used to that and be bold. Do not be afraid to tell somebody they're wrong and they're not moving fast enough. I do think you have to do that with empathy as Michelle said, and Gustavo, I think that's one of the key words today besides the bungee jumping. So I want to know where's Sudheesh going to go on bungee jumping? (all chuckling) >> That's fantastic discussion really. Thanks again to all the panelists and the guests, it was really a pleasure speaking with you today. Really virtually all of the leaders that I've spoken to in theCUBE program recently, they tell me that the pandemic is accelerating so many things, whether it's new ways to work, we heard about new security models and obviously the need for cloud. I mean, all of these things are driving true enterprise wide digital transformation, not just as I said before lip service. And sometimes we minimize the importance and the challenge of building culture and in making this transformation possible. But when it's done right, the right culture is going to deliver tremendous results. Yeah, what does that mean getting it right? Everybody's trying to get it right. My biggest takeaway today, is it means making data part of the DNA of your organization. And that means making it accessible to the people in your organization that are empowered to make decisions that can drive you revenue, cut costs, speed, access to critical care, whatever the mission is of your organization. Data can create insights and informed decisions that drive value. Okay, let's bring back Sudheesh and wrap things up. Sudheesh please bring us home. >> Thank you, thank you Dave, thank you theCUBE team, and thanks goes to all of our customers and partners who joined us, and thanks to all of you for spending the time with us. I want to do three quick things and then close it off. The first thing is I want to summarize the key takeaways that I had from all four of our distinguished speakers. First, Michelle, I was simply put it, she said it really well, that is be brave and drive. Don't go for a drive along, that is such an important point. Often times, you know that I think that you have to do to make the positive change that you want to see happen. But you wait for someone else to do it, why not you? Why don't you be the one making that change happen? That's the thing that I picked up from Michelle's talk. Cindi talked about finding the importance of finding your voice, taking that chair, whether it's available or not and making sure that your ideas, your voices are heard and if it requires some force then apply that force, make sure your ideas are good. Gustavo talked about the importance of building consensus, not going at things all alone sometimes building the importance of building the courtroom. And that is critical because if you want the changes to last, you want to make sure that the organization is fully behind it. Tom instead of a single take away, what I was inspired by is the fact that a company that is 170 years old, 170 years old, 200 companies and 200 countries they're operating in, and they were able to make the change that is necessary through this difficult time. So in a matter of months, if they could do it, anyone could. The second thing I want to do is to leave you with a takeaway that is I would like you to go to thoughtspot.com/nfl because our team has made an app for NFL on Snowflake. I think you will find this interesting now that you are inspired and excited because of Michelle's talk. And the last thing is, please go to thoughtspot.com/beyond, our global user conferences happening in this December, we would love to have you join us. It's again, virtual, you can join from anywhere, we are expecting anywhere from five to 10,000 people, and we would love to have you join and see what we would have been up to since the last year. We have a lot of amazing things in store for you, our customers, our partners, our collaborators, they will be coming and sharing, you'll be sharing things that you have been working to release something that will come out next year. And also some of the crazy ideas for engineers I've been cooking up. All of those things will be available for you at ThoughtSpot Beyond, thank you, thank you so much.

(speaks in foreign language) >> Narrator: Data is at the heart of transformation and the change every company needs to succeed, but it takes more than new technology. It's about teams, talent, and cultural change. Empowering everyone on the front lines to make decisions, all at the speed of digital. The transformation starts with you. It's time to lead the way, it's time for thought leaders. >> Welcome to Thought Leaders, a digital event brought to you by ThoughtSpot. My name is Dave Vellante. The purpose of this day is to bring industry leaders and experts together to really try and understand the important issues around digital transformation. We have an amazing lineup of speakers and our goal is to provide you with some best practices that you can bring back and apply to your organization. Look, data is plentiful, but insights are not. ThoughtSpot is disrupting analytics by using search and machine intelligence to simplify data analysis, and really empower anyone with fast access to relevant data. But in the last 150 days, we've had more questions than answers. Creating an organization that puts data and insights at their core, requires not only modern technology, but leadership, a mindset and a culture that people often refer to as data-driven. What does that mean? How can we equip our teams with data and fast access to quality information that can turn insights into action. And today, we're going to hear from experienced leaders, who are transforming their organizations with data, insights and creating digital-first cultures. But before we introduce our speakers, I'm joined today by two of my co-hosts from ThoughtSpot. First, Chief Data Strategy Officer for ThoughtSpot is Cindi Hausen. Cindi is an analytics and BI expert with 20 plus years experience and the author of Successful Business Intelligence Unlock The Value of BI and Big Data. Cindi was previously the lead analyst at Gartner for the data and analytics magic quadrant. And early last year, she joined ThoughtSpot to help CDOs and their teams understand how best to leverage analytics and AI for digital transformation. Cindi, great to see you, welcome to the show. >> Thank you, Dave. Nice to join you virtually. >> Now our second cohost and friend of theCUBE is ThoughtSpot CEO Sudheesh Nair. Hello Sudheesh, how are you doing today? >> I am well Dave, it's good to talk to you again. >> It's great to see you. Thanks so much for being here. Now Sudheesh, please share with us why this discussion is so important to your customers and of course, to our audience and what they're going to learn today? (gentle music) >> Thanks, Dave, I wish you were there to introduce me into every room that I walk into because you have such an amazing way of doing it. It makes me feel also good. Look, since we have all been cooped up in our homes, I know that the vendors like us, we have amped up our, you know, sort of effort to reach out to you with invites for events like this. So we are getting way more invites for events like this than ever before. So when we started planning for this, we had three clear goals that we wanted to accomplish. And our first one that when you finish this and walk away, we want to make sure that you don't feel like it was a waste of time. We want to make sure that we value your time, and this is going to be useful. Number two, we want to put you in touch with industry leaders and thought leaders, and generally good people that you want to hang around with long after this event is over. And number three, as we plan through this, you know, we are living through these difficult times, we want an event to be, this event to be more of an uplifting and inspiring event too. Now, the challenge is, how do you do that with the team being change agents? Because change and as much as we romanticize it, it is not one of those uplifting things that everyone wants to do or likes to do. The way I think of it, change is sort of like, if you've ever done bungee jumping. You know, it's like standing on the edges, waiting to make that one more step. You know, all you have to do is take that one step and gravity will do the rest, but that is the hardest step to take. Change requires a lot of courage and when we are talking about data and analytics, which is already like such a hard topic, not necessarily an uplifting and positive conversation, in most businesses it is somewhat scary. Change becomes all the more difficult. Ultimately change requires courage. Courage to to, first of all, challenge the status quo. People sometimes are afraid to challenge the status quo because they are thinking that, "You know, maybe I don't have the power to make the change that the company needs. Sometimes I feel like I don't have the skills." Sometimes they may feel that, I'm probably not the right person to do it. Or sometimes the lack of courage manifest itself as the inability to sort of break the silos that are formed within the organizations, when it comes to data and insights that you talked about. You know, there are people in the company, who are going to hog the data because they know how to manage the data, how to inquire and extract. They know how to speak data, they have the skills to do that, but they are not the group of people who have sort of the knowledge, the experience of the business to ask the right questions off the data. So there is this silo of people with the answers and there is a silo of people with the questions, and there is gap. These sort of silos are standing in the way of making that necessary change that we all I know the business needs, and the last change to sort of bring an external force sometimes. It could be a tool, it could be a platform, it could be a person, it could be a process, but sometimes no matter how big the company is or how small the company is. You may need to bring some external stimuli to start that domino of the positive changes that are necessary. The group of people that we have brought in, the four people, including Cindi, that you will hear from today are really good at practically telling you how to make that step, how to step off that edge, how to trust the rope that you will be safe and you're going to have fun. You will have that exhilarating feeling of jumping for a bungee jump. All four of them are exceptional, but my honor is to introduce Michelle and she's our first speaker. Michelle, I am very happy after watching her presentation and reading her bio, that there are no country vital worldwide competition for cool patents, because she will beat all of us because when her children were small, you know, they were probably into Harry Potter and Disney and she was managing a business and leading change there. And then as her kids grew up and got to that age, where they like football and NFL, guess what? She's the CIO of NFL. What a cool mom. I am extremely excited to see what she's going to talk about. I've seen the slides with a bunch of amazing pictures, I'm looking to see the context behind it. I'm very thrilled to make the acquaintance of Michelle. I'm looking forward to her talk next. Welcome Michelle. It's over to you. (gentle music) >> I'm delighted to be with you all today to talk about thought leadership. And I'm so excited that you asked me to join you because today I get to be a quarterback. I always wanted to be one. This is about as close as I'm ever going to get. So, I want to talk to you about quarterbacking our digital revolution using insights, data and of course, as you said, leadership. First, a little bit about myself, a little background. As I said, I always wanted to play football and this is something that I wanted to do since I was a child but when I grew up, girls didn't get to play football. I'm so happy that that's changing and girls are now doing all kinds of things that they didn't get to do before. Just this past weekend on an NFL field, we had a female coach on two sidelines and a female official on the field. I'm a lifelong fan and student of the game of football. I grew up in the South. You can tell from the accent and in the South football is like a religion and you pick sides. I chose Auburn University working in the athletic department, so I'm testament. Till you can start, a journey can be long. It took me many, many years to make it into professional sports. I graduated in 1987 and my little brother, well not actually not so little, he played offensive line for the Alabama Crimson Tide. And for those of you who know SEC football, you know this is a really big rivalry, and when you choose sides your family is divided. So it's kind of fun for me to always tell the story that my dad knew his kid would make it to the NFL, he just bet on the wrong one. My career has been about bringing people together for memorable moments at some of America's most iconic brands, delivering memories and amazing experiences that delight. From Universal Studios, Disney, to my current position as CIO of the NFL. In this job, I'm very privileged to have the opportunity to work with a team that gets to bring America's game to millions of people around the world. Often, I'm asked to talk about how to create amazing experiences for fans, guests or customers. But today, I really wanted to focus on something different and talk to you about being behind the scenes and backstage. Because behind every event, every game, every awesome moment, is execution. Precise, repeatable execution and most of my career has been behind the scenes doing just that. Assembling teams to execute these plans and the key way that companies operate at these exceptional levels is making good decisions, the right decisions, at the right time and based upon data. So that you can translate the data into intelligence and be a data-driven culture. Using data and intelligence is an important way that world-class companies do differentiate themselves, and it's the lifeblood of collaboration and innovation. Teams that are working on delivering these kind of world class experiences are often seeking out and leveraging next generation technologies and finding new ways to work. I've been fortunate to work across three decades of emerging experiences, which each required emerging technologies to execute. A little bit first about Disney. In '90s I was at Disney leading a project called Destination Disney, which it's a data project. It was a data project, but it was CRM before CRM was even cool and then certainly before anything like a data-driven culture was ever brought up. But way back then we were creating a digital backbone that enabled many technologies for the things that you see today. Like the MagicBand, Disney's Magical Express. My career at Disney began in finance, but Disney was very good about rotating you around. And it was during one of these rotations that I became very passionate about data. I kind of became a pain in the butt to the IT team asking for data, more and more data. And I learned that all of that valuable data was locked up in our systems. All of our point of sales systems, our reservation systems, our operation systems. And so I became a shadow IT person in marketing, ultimately, leading to moving into IT and I haven't looked back since. In the early 2000s, I was at Universal Studio's theme park as their CIO preparing for and launching the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Bringing one of history's most memorable characters to life required many new technologies and a lot of data. Our data and technologies were embedded into the rides and attractions. I mean, how do you really think a wand selects you at a wand shop. As today at the NFL, I am constantly challenged to do leading edge technologies, using things like sensors, AI, machine learning and all new communication strategies, and using data to drive everything, from player performance, contracts, to where we build new stadiums and hold events. With this year being the most challenging, yet rewarding year in my career at the NFL. In the middle of a global pandemic, the way we are executing on our season is leveraging data from contact tracing devices joined with testing data. Talk about data actually enabling your business. Without it we wouldn't be having a season right now. I'm also on the board of directors of two public companies, where data and collaboration are paramount. First, RingCentral, it's a cloud based unified communications platform and collaboration with video message and phone, all-in-one solution in the cloud and Quotient Technologies, whose product is actually data. The tagline at Quotient is The Result in Knowing. I think that's really important because not all of us are data companies, where your product is actually data, but we should operate more like your product is data. I'd also like to talk to you about four areas of things to think about as thought leaders in your companies. First, just hit on it, is change. how to be a champion and a driver of change. Second, how to use data to drive performance for your company and measure performance of your company. Third, how companies now require intense collaboration to operate and finally, how much of this is accomplished through solid data-driven decisions. First, let's hit on change. I mean, it's evident today more than ever, that we are in an environment of extreme change. I mean, we've all been at this for years and as technologists we've known it, believed it, lived it. And thankfully, for the most part, knock on wood, we were prepared for it. But this year everyone's cheese was moved. All the people in the back rooms, IT, data architects and others were suddenly called to the forefront because a global pandemic has turned out to be the thing that is driving intense change in how people work and analyze their business. On March 13th, we closed our office at the NFL in the middle of preparing for one of our biggest events, our kickoff event, The 2020 Draft. We went from planning a large event in Las Vegas under the bright lights, red carpet stage, to smaller events in club facilities. And then ultimately, to one where everyone coaches, GMs, prospects and even our commissioner were at home in their basements and we only had a few weeks to figure it out. I found myself for the first time, being in the live broadcast event space. Talking about bungee jumping, this is really what it felt like. It was one in which no one felt comfortable because it had not been done before. But leading through this, I stepped up, but it was very scary, it was certainly very risky, but it ended up being also rewarding when we did it. And as a result of this, some things will change forever. Second, managing performance. I mean, data should inform how you're doing and how to get your company to perform at its level, highest level. As an example, the NFL has always measured performance, obviously, and it is one of the purest examples of how performance directly impacts outcome. I mean, you can see performance on the field, you can see points being scored and stats, and you immediately know that impact. Those with the best stats usually win the games. The NFL has always recorded stats. Since the beginning of time here at the NFL a little... This year is our 101st year and athlete's ultimate success as a player has also always been greatly impacted by his stats. But what has changed for us is both how much more we can measure and the immediacy with which it can be measured and I'm sure in your business it's the same. The amount of data you must have has got to have quadrupled recently. And how fast do you need it and how quickly you need to analyze it is so important. And it's very important to break the silos between the keys to the data and the use of the data. Our next generation stats platform is taking data to the next level. It's powered by Amazon Web Services and we gather this data, real-time from sensors that are on players' bodies. We gather it in real time, analyze it, display it online and on broadcast. And of course, it's used to prepare week to week in addition to what is a normal coaching plan would be. We can now analyze, visualize, route patterns, speed, match-ups, et cetera, so much faster than ever before. We're continuing to roll out sensors too, that will gather more and more information about a player's performance as it relates to their health and safety. The third trend is really, I think it's a big part of what we're feeling today and that is intense collaboration. And just for sort of historical purposes, it's important to think about, for those of you that are IT professionals and developers, you know, more than 10 years ago agile practices began sweeping companies. Where small teams would work together rapidly in a very flexible, adaptive and innovative way and it proved to be transformational. However today, of course that is no longer just small teams, the next big wave of change and we've seen it through this pandemic, is that it's the whole enterprise that must collaborate and be agile. If I look back on my career, when I was at Disney, we owned everything 100%. We made a decision, we implemented it. We were a collaborative culture but it was much easier to push change because you own the whole decision. If there was buy-in from the top down, you got the people from the bottom up to do it and you executed. At Universal, we were a joint venture. Our attractions and entertainment was licensed. Our hotels were owned and managed by other third parties, so influence and collaboration, and how to share across companies became very important. And now here I am at the NFL an even the bigger ecosystem. We have 32 clubs that are all separate businesses, 31 different stadiums that are owned by a variety of people. We have licensees, we have sponsors, we have broadcast partners. So it seems that as my career has evolved, centralized control has gotten less and less and has been replaced by intense collaboration, not only within your own company but across companies. The ability to work in a collaborative way across businesses and even other companies, that has been a big key to my success in my career. I believe this whole vertical integration and big top-down decision-making is going by the wayside in favor of ecosystems that require cooperation, yet competition to co-exist. I mean, the NFL is a great example of what we call co-oppetition, which is cooperation and competition. We're in competition with each other, but we cooperate to make the company the best it can be. And at the heart of these items really are data-driven decisions and culture. Data on its own isn't good enough. You must be able to turn it to insights. Partnerships between technology teams who usually hold the keys to the raw data and business units, who have the knowledge to build the right decision models is key. If you're not already involved in this linkage, you should be, data mining isn't new for sure. The availability of data is quadrupling and it's everywhere. How do you know what to even look at? How do you know where to begin? How do you know what questions to ask? It's by using the tools that are available for visualization and analytics and knitting together strategies of the company. So it begins with, first of all, making sure you do understand the strategy of the company. So in closing, just to wrap up a bit, many of you joined today, looking for thought leadership on how to be a change agent, a change champion, and how to lead through transformation. Some final thoughts are be brave and drive. Don't do the ride along program, it's very important to drive. Driving can be high risk, but it's also high reward. Embracing the uncertainty of what will happen is how you become brave. Get more and more comfortable with uncertainty, be calm and let data be your map on your journey. Thanks. >> Michelle, thank you so much. So you and I share a love of data and a love of football. You said you want to be the quarterback. I'm more an a line person. >> Well, then I can't do my job without you. >> Great and I'm getting the feeling now, you know, Sudheesh is talking about bungee jumping. My vote is when we're past this pandemic, we both take him to the Delaware Water Gap and we do the cliff jumping. >> Oh that sounds good, I'll watch your watch. >> Yeah, you'll watch, okay. So Michelle, you have so many stakeholders, when you're trying to prioritize the different voices you have the players, you have the owners, you have the league, as you mentioned, the broadcasters, your partners here and football mamas like myself. How do you prioritize when there are so many different stakeholders that you need to satisfy? >> I think balancing across stakeholders starts with aligning on a mission and if you spend a lot of time understanding where everyone's coming from, and you can find the common thread that ties them all together. You sort of do get them to naturally prioritize their work and I think that's very important. So for us at the NFL and even at Disney, it was our core values and our core purpose is so well known and when anything challenges that, we're able to sort of lay that out. But as a change agent, you have to be very empathetic, and I would say empathy is probably your strongest skill if you're a change agent and that means listening to every single stakeholder. Even when they're yelling at you, even when they're telling you your technology doesn't work and you know that it's user error, or even when someone is just emotional about what's happening to them and that they're not comfortable with it. So I think being empathetic, and having a mission, and understanding it is sort of how I prioritize and balance. >> Yeah, empathy, a very popular word this year. I can imagine those coaches and owners yelling, so thank you for your leadership here. So Michelle, I look forward to discussing this more with our other customers and disruptors joining us in a little bit. >> (gentle music) So we're going to take a hard pivot now and go from football to Chernobyl. Chernobyl, what went wrong? 1986, as the reactors were melting down, they had the data to say, "This is going to be catastrophic," and yet the culture said, "No, we're perfect, hide it. Don't dare tell anyone." Which meant they went ahead and had celebrations in Kiev. Even though that increased the exposure, additional thousands getting cancer and 20,000 years before the ground around there can even be inhabited again. This is how powerful and detrimental a negative culture, a culture that is unable to confront the brutal facts that hides data. This is what we have to contend with and this is why I want you to focus on having, fostering a data-driven culture. I don't want you to be a laggard. I want you to be a leader in using data to drive your digital transformation. So I'll talk about culture and technology, is it really two sides of the same coin? Real-world impacts and then some best practices you can use to disrupt and innovate your culture. Now, oftentimes I would talk about culture and I talk about technology. And recently a CDO said to me, "You know, Cindi, I actually think this is two sides of the same coin, one reflects the other." What do you think? Let me walk you through this. So let's take a laggard. What does the technology look like? Is it based on 1990s BI and reporting, largely parametrized reports, on-premises data warehouses, or not even that operational reports. At best one enterprise data warehouse, very slow moving and collaboration is only email. What does that culture tell you? Maybe there's a lack of leadership to change, to do the hard work that Sudheesh referred to, or is there also a culture of fear, afraid of failure, resistance to change, complacency. And sometimes that complacency, it's not because people are lazy. It's because they've been so beaten down every time a new idea is presented. It's like, "No, we're measured on least to serve." So politics and distrust, whether it's between business and IT or individual stakeholders is the norm, so data is hoarded. Let's contrast that with the leader, a data and analytics leader, what does their technology look like? Augmented analytics, search and AI driven insights, not on-premises but in the cloud and maybe multiple clouds. And the data is not in one place but it's in a data lake and in a data warehouse, a logical data warehouse. The collaboration is via newer methods, whether it's Slack or Teams, allowing for that real-time decisioning or investigating a particular data point. So what is the culture in the leaders? It's transparent and trust. There is a trust that data will not be used to punish, that there is an ability to confront the bad news. It's innovation, valuing innovation in pursuit of the company goals. Whether it's the best fan experience and player safety in the NFL or best serving your customers, it's innovative and collaborative. There's none of this, "Oh, well, I didn't invent that. I'm not going to look at that." There's still pride of ownership, but it's collaborating to get to a better place faster. And people feel empowered to present new ideas, to fail fast and they're energized knowing that they're using the best technology and innovating at the pace that business requires. So data is democratized and democratized, not just for power users or analysts, but really at the point of impact, what we like to call the new decision-makers or really the frontline workers. So Harvard Business Review partnered with us to develop this study to say, "Just how important is this? We've been working at BI and analytics as an industry for more than 20 years, why is it not at the front lines? Whether it's a doctor, a nurse, a coach, a supply chain manager, a warehouse manager, a financial services advisor." 87% said they would be more successful if frontline workers were empowered with data-driven insights, but they recognize they need new technology to be able to do that. It's not about learning hard tools. The sad reality only 20% of organizations are actually doing this. These are the data-driven leaders. So this is the culture and technology, how did we get here? It's because state-of-the-art keeps changing. So the first generation BI and analytics platforms were deployed on-premises, on small datasets, really just taking data out of ERP systems that were also on-premises and state-of-the-art was maybe getting a management report, an operational report. Over time, visual based data discovery vendors disrupted these traditional BI vendors, empowering now analysts to create visualizations with the flexibility on a desktop, sometimes larger data, sometimes coming from a data warehouse. The current state-of-the-art though, Gartner calls it augmented analytics. At ThoughtSpot, we call it search and AI driven analytics, and this was pioneered for large scale data sets, whether it's on-premises or leveraging the cloud data warehouses. And I think this is an important point, oftentimes you, the data and analytics leaders, will look at these two components separately. But you have to look at the BI and analytics tier in lock-step with your data architectures to really get to the granular insights and to leverage the capabilities of AI. Now, if you've never seen ThoughtSpot, I'll just show you what this looks like. Instead of somebody hard coding a report, it's typing in search keywords and very robust keywords contains rank, top, bottom, getting to a visual visualization that then can be pinned to an existing pin board that might also contain insights generated by an AI engine. So it's easy enough for that new decision maker, the business user, the non-analyst to create themselves. Modernizing the data and analytics portfolio is hard because the pace of change has accelerated. You used to be able to create an investment, place a bet for maybe 10 years. A few years ago, that time horizon was five years. Now, it's maybe three years and the time to maturity has also accelerated. So you have these different components, the search and AI tier, the data science tier, data preparation and virtualization but I would also say, equally important is the cloud data warehouse. And pay attention to how well these analytics tools can unlock the value in these cloud data warehouses. So ThoughtSpot was the first to market with search and AI driven insights. Competitors have followed suit, but be careful, if you look at products like Power BI or SAP analytics cloud, they might demo well, but do they let you get to all the data without moving it in products like Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, or Azure Synapse, or Google BigQuery, they do not. They require you to move it into a smaller in-memory engine. So it's important how well these new products inter-operate. The pace of change, its acceleration, Gartner recently predicted that by 2022, 65% of analytical queries will be generated using search or NLP or even AI and that is roughly three times the prediction they had just a couple of years ago. So let's talk about the real world impact of culture and if you've read any of my books or used any of the maturity models out there, whether the Gartner IT Score that I worked on or the Data Warehousing Institute also has a maturity model. We talk about these five pillars to really become data-driven. As Michelle spoke about, it's focusing on the business outcomes, leveraging all the data, including new data sources, it's the talent, the people, the technology and also the processes. And often when I would talk about the people in the talent, I would lump the culture as part of that. But in the last year, as I've traveled the world and done these digital events for thought leaders. You have told me now culture is absolutely so important, and so we've pulled it out as a separate pillar. And in fact, in polls that we've done in these events, look at how much more important culture is as a barrier to becoming data-driven. It's three times as important as any of these other pillars. That's how critical it is. And let's take an example of where you can have great data, but if you don't have the right culture, there's devastating impacts. And I will say I have been a loyal customer of Wells Fargo for more than 20 years, but look at what happened in the face of negative news with data. It said, "Hey, we're not doing good cross-selling, customers do not have both a checking account and a credit card and a savings account and a mortgage." They opened fake accounts facing billions in fines, change in leadership that even the CEO attributed to a toxic sales culture and they're trying to fix this, but even recently there's been additional employee backlash saying the culture has not changed. Let's contrast that with some positive examples. Medtronic, a worldwide company in 150 countries around the world. They may not be a household name to you, but if you have a loved one or yourself, you have a pacemaker, spinal implant, diabetes, you know this brand. And at the start of COVID when they knew their business would be slowing down, because hospitals would only be able to take care of COVID patients. They took the bold move of making their IP for ventilators publicly available. That is the power of a positive culture. Or Verizon, a major telecom organization looking at late payments of their customers and even though the U.S. Federal Government said, "Well, you can't turn them off." They said, "We'll extend that even beyond the mandated guidelines," and facing a slow down in the business because of the tough economy, They said, "You know what? We will spend the time upskilling our people, giving them the time to learn more about the future of work, the skills and data and analytics for 20,000 of their employees rather than furloughing them. That is the power of a positive culture. So how can you transform your culture to the best in class? I'll give you three suggestions. Bring in a change agent, identify the relevance or I like to call it WIIFM and organize for collaboration. So the CDO, whatever your title is, Chief Analytics Officer, Chief Digital Officer, you are the most important change agent. And this is where you will hear that oftentimes a change agent has to come from outside the organization. So this is where, for example, in Europe you have the CDO of Just Eat, a takeout food delivery organization coming from the airline industry or in Australia, National Australian Bank taking a CDO within the same sector from TD Bank going to NAB. So these change agents come in, disrupt. It's a hard job. As one of you said to me, it often feels like. I make one step forward and I get knocked down again, I get pushed back. It is not for the faint of heart, but it's the most important part of your job. The other thing I'll talk about is WIIFM What's In It For Me? And this is really about understanding the motivation, the relevance that data has for everyone on the frontline, as well as those analysts, as well as the executives. So, if we're talking about players in the NFL, they want to perform better and they want to stay safe. That is why data matters to them. If we're talking about financial services, this may be a wealth management advisor. Okay, we could say commissions, but it's really helping people have their dreams come true, whether it's putting their children through college or being able to retire without having to work multiple jobs still into your 70s or 80s. For the teachers, teachers you ask them about data. They'll say, "We don't need that, I care about the student." So if you can use data to help a student perform better, that is WIIFM and sometimes we spend so much time talking the technology, we forget, what is the value we're trying to deliver with this? And we forget the impact on the people that it does require change. In fact, the Harvard Business Review study found that 44% said lack of change management is the biggest barrier to leveraging both new technology, but also being empowered to act on those data-driven insights. The third point, organize for collaboration. This does require diversity of thought, but also bringing the technology, the data and the business people together. Now there's not a single one size fits all model for data and analytics. At one point in time, even having a BICC, a BI competency center was considered state of the art. Now for the biggest impact, what I recommend is that you have a federated model centralized for economies of scale. That could be the common data, but then embed these evangelists, these analysts of the future within every business unit, every functional domain. And as you see this top bar, all models are possible, but the hybrid model has the most impact, the most leaders. So as we look ahead to the months ahead, to the year ahead, an exciting time because data is helping organizations better navigate a tough economy, lock in the customer loyalty and I look forward to seeing how you foster that culture that's collaborative with empathy and bring the best of technology, leveraging the cloud, all your data. So thank you for joining us at Thought Leaders. And next, I'm pleased to introduce our first change agent, Tom Mazzaferro Chief Data Officer of Western Union and before joining Western Union, Tom made his Mark at HSBC and JP Morgan Chase spearheading digital innovation in technology, operations, risk compliance and retail banking. Tom, thank you so much for joining us today. (gentle music) >> Very happy to be here and looking forward to talking to all of you today. So as we look to move organizations to a data-driven capability into the future, there is a lot that needs to be done on the data side, but also how does data connect and enable different business teams and the technology teams into the future? As we look across our data ecosystems and our platforms, and how we modernize that to the cloud in the future, it all needs to basically work together, right? To really be able to drive an organization from a data standpoint, into the future. That includes being able to have the right information with the right quality of data, at the right time to drive informed business decisions, to drive the business forward. As part of that, we actually have partnered with ThoughtSpot to actually bring in the technology to help us drive that. As part of that partnership and it's how we've looked to integrate it into our overall business as a whole. We've looked at, how do we make sure that our business and our professional lives, right? Are enabled in the same ways as our personal lives. So for example, in your personal lives, when you want to go and find something out, what do you do? You go onto google.com or you go onto Bing or you go onto Yahoo and you search for what you want, search to find an answer. ThoughtSpot for us is the same thing, but in the business world. So using ThoughtSpot and other AI capability is it's allowed us to actually enable our overall business teams in our company to actually have our information at our fingertips. So rather than having to go and talk to someone, or an engineer to go pull information or pull data. We actually can have the end users or the business executives, right. Search for what they need, what they want, at the exact time that they actually need it, to go and drive the business forward. This is truly one of those transformational things that we've put in place. On top of that, we are on a journey to modernize our larger ecosystem as a whole. That includes modernizing our underlying data warehouses, our technology, our... The local environments and as we move that, we've actually picked two of our cloud providers going to AWS and to GCP. We've also adopted Snowflake to really drive and to organize our information and our data, then drive these new solutions and capabilities forward. So a big portion of it though is culture. So how do we engage with the business teams and bring the IT teams together, to really help to drive these holistic end-to-end solutions and capabilities, to really support the actual business into the future. That's one of the keys here, as we look to modernize and to really enhance our organizations to become data-driven. This is the key. If you can really start to provide answers to business questions before they're even being asked and to predict based upon different economic trends or different trends in your business, what decisions need to be made and actually provide those answers to the business teams before they're even asking for it. That is really becoming a data-driven organization and as part of that, it really then enables the business to act quickly and take advantage of opportunities as they come in based upon industries, based upon markets, based upon products, solutions or partnerships into the future. These are really some of the keys that become crucial as you move forward, right, into this new age, Especially with COVID. With COVID now taking place across the world, right? Many of these markets, many of these digital transformations are celebrating and are changing rapidly to accommodate and to support customers in these very difficult times. As part of that, you need to make sure you have the right underlying foundation, ecosystems and solutions to really drive those capabilities and those solutions forward. As we go through this journey, both in my career but also each of your careers into the future, right? It also needs to evolve, right? Technology has changed so drastically in the last 10 years, and that change is only accelerating. So as part of that, you have to make sure that you stay up to speed, up to date with new technology changes, both on the platform standpoint, tools, but also what do our customers want, what do our customers need and how do we then service them with our information, with our data, with our platform, and with our products and our services to meet those needs and to really support and service those customers into the future. This is all around becoming a more data-driven organization, such as how do you use your data to support your current business lines, but how do you actually use your information and your data to actually better support your customers, better support your business, better support your employees, your operations teams and so forth. And really creating that full integration in that ecosystem is really when you start to get large dividends from these investments into the future. With that being said, I hope you enjoyed the segment on how to become and how to drive a data-driven organization, and looking forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you. >> Tom, that was great. Thanks so much and now going to have to drag on you for a second. As a change agent you've come in, disrupted and how long have you been at Western Union? >> Only nine months, so just started this year, but there have been some great opportunities to integrate changes and we have a lot more to go, but we're really driving things forward in partnership with our business teams and our colleagues to support those customers going forward. >> Tom, thank you so much. That was wonderful. And now, I'm excited to introduce you to Gustavo Canton, a change agent that I've had the pleasure of working with meeting in Europe and he is a serial change agent. Most recently with Schneider Electric but even going back to Sam's Clubs. Gustavo, welcome. (gentle music) >> So, hey everyone, my name is Gustavo Canton and thank you so much, Cindi, for the intro. As you mentioned, doing transformations is, you know, a high reward situation. I have been part of many transformations and I have led many transformations. And, what I can tell you is that it's really hard to predict the future, but if you have a North Star and you know where you're going, the one thing that I want you to take away from this discussion today is that you need to be bold to evolve. And so, in today, I'm going to be talking about culture and data, and I'm going to break this down in four areas. How do we get started, barriers or opportunities as I see it, the value of AI and also, how you communicate. Especially now in the workforce of today with so many different generations, you need to make sure that you are communicating in ways that are non-traditional sometimes. And so, how do we get started? So, I think the answer to that is you have to start for you yourself as a leader and stay tuned. And by that, I mean, you need to understand, not only what is happening in your function or your field, but you have to be very in tune what is happening in society socioeconomically speaking, wellbeing. You know, the common example is a great example and for me personally, it's an opportunity because the number one core value that I have is wellbeing. I believe that for human potential for customers and communities to grow, wellbeing should be at the center of every decision. And as somebody mentioned, it's great to be, you know, stay in tune and have the skillset and the courage. But for me personally, to be honest, to have this courage is not about not being afraid. You're always afraid when you're making big changes and you're swimming upstream, but what gives me the courage is the empathy part. Like I think empathy is a huge component because every time I go into an organization or a function, I try to listen very attentively to the needs of the business and what the leaders are trying to do. But I do it thinking about the mission of, how do I make change for the bigger workforce or the bigger good despite the fact that this might have perhaps implication for my own self interest in my career. Right? Because you have to have that courage sometimes to make choices that are not well seen, politically speaking, but are the right thing to do and you have to push through it. So the bottom line for me is that, I don't think we're they're transforming fast enough. And the reality is, I speak with a lot of leaders and we have seen stories in the past and what they show is that, if you look at the four main barriers that are basically keeping us behind budget, inability to act, cultural issues, politics and lack of alignment, those are the top four. But the interesting thing is that as Cindi has mentioned, these topic about culture is actually gaining more and more traction. And in 2018, there was a story from HBR and it was about 45%. I believe today, it's about 55%, 60% of respondents say that this is the main area that we need to focus on. So again, for all those leaders and all the executives who understand and are aware that we need to transform, commit to the transformation and set a deadline to say, "Hey, in two years we're going to make this happen. What do we need to do, to empower and enable these change agents to make it happen? You need to make the tough choices. And so to me, when I speak about being bold is about making the right choices now. So, I'll give you examples of some of the roadblocks that I went through as I've been doing transformations, most recently, as Cindi mentioned in Schneider. There are three main areas, legacy mindset and what that means is that, we've been doing this in a specific way for a long time and here is how we have been successful. What worked in the past is not going to work now. The opportunity there is that there is a lot of leaders, who have a digital mindset and they're up and coming leaders that are perhaps not yet fully developed. We need to mentor those leaders and take bets on some of these talents, including young talent. We cannot be thinking in the past and just wait for people, you know, three to five years for them to develop because the world is going in a way that is super-fast. The second area and this is specifically to implementation of AI. It's very interesting to me because just the example that I have with ThoughtSpot, right? We went on implementation and a lot of the way the IT team functions or the leaders look at technology, they look at it from the prism of the prior or success criteria for the traditional BIs, and that's not going to work. Again, the opportunity here is that you need to redefine what success look like. In my case, I want the user experience of our workforce to be the same user experience you have at home. It's a very simple concept and so we need to think about, how do we gain that user experience with these augmented analytics tools and then work backwards to have the right talent, processes, and technology to enable that. And finally and obviously with COVID, a lot of pressure in organizations and companies to do more with less. And the solution that most leaders I see are taking is to just minimize costs sometimes and cut budget. We have to do the opposite. We have to actually invest on growth areas, but do it by business question. Don't do it by function. If you actually invest in these kind of solutions, if you actually invest on developing your talent and your leadership to see more digitally, if you actually invest on fixing your data platform, it's not just an incremental cost. It's actually this investment is going to offset all those hidden costs and inefficiencies that you have on your system, because people are doing a lot of work and working very hard but it's not efficient and it's not working in the way that you might want to work. So there is a lot of opportunity there and just to put in terms of perspective, there have been some studies in the past about, you know, how do we kind of measure the impact of data? And obviously, this is going to vary by organization maturity, there's going to be a lot of factors. I've been in companies who have very clean, good data to work with and I've been with companies that we have to start basically from scratch. So it all depends on your maturity level. But in this study, what I think is interesting is they try to put a tagline or a tag price to what is the cost of incomplete data. So in this case, it's about 10 times as much to complete a unit of work when you have data that is flawed as opposed to having perfect data. So let me put that just in perspective, just as an example, right? Imagine you are trying to do something and you have to do 100 things in a project, and each time you do something, it's going to cost you a dollar. So if you have perfect data, the total cost of that project might be $100. But now let's say you have 80% perfect data and 20% flawed data. By using this assumption that flawed data is 10 times as costly as perfect data, your total costs now becomes $280 as opposed to $100. This just for you to really think about as a CIO, CTO, you know CHRO, CEO, "Are we really paying attention and really closing the gaps that we have on our data infrastructure?" If we don't do that, it's hard sometimes to see the snowball effect or to measure the overall impact, but as you can tell, the price tag goes up very, very quickly. So now, if I were to say, how do I communicate this or how do I break through some of these challenges or some of these barriers, right? I think the key is, I am in analytics, I know statistics obviously and love modeling, and, you know, data and optimization theory, and all that stuff. That's what I came to analytics, but now as a leader and as a change agent, I need to speak about value and in this case, for example, for Schneider. There was this tagline, make the most of your energy. So the number one thing that they were asking from the analytics team was actually efficiency, which to me was very interesting. But once I understood that, I understood what kind of language to use, how to connect it to the overall strategy and basically, how to bring in the right leaders because you need to, you know, focus on the leaders that you're going to make the most progress, you know. Again, low effort, high value. You need to make sure you centralize all the data as you can, you need to bring in some kind of augmented analytics, you know, solution. And finally, you need to make it super-simple for the, you know, in this case, I was working with the HR teams and other areas, so they can have access to one portal. They don't have to be confused and looking for 10 different places to find information. I think if you can actually have those four foundational pillars, obviously under the guise of having a data-driven culture, that's when you can actually make the impact. So in our case, it was about three years total transformation, but it was two years for this component of augmented analytics. It took about two years to talk to, you know, IT, get leadership support, find the budgeting, you know, get everybody on board, make sure the success criteria was correct. And we call this initiative, the people analytics portal. It was actually launched in July of this year and we were very excited and the audience was very excited to do this. In this case, we did our pilot in North America for many, many, many factors but one thing that is really important is as you bring along your audience on this, you know. You're going from Excel, you know, in some cases or Tableu to other tools like, you know, ThoughtSpot. You need to really explain them what is the difference and how this tool can truly replace some of the spreadsheets or some of the views that you might have on these other kinds of tools. Again, Tableau, I think it's a really good tool. There are other many tools that you might have in your toolkit but in my case, personally, I feel that you need to have one portal. Going back to Cindi's points, that really truly enable the end user. And I feel that this is the right solution for us, right? And I will show you some of the findings that we had in the pilot in the last two months. So this was a huge victory and I will tell you why, because it took a lot of effort for us to get to this stage and like I said, it's been years for us to kind of lay the foundation, get the leadership, initiating culture so people can understand, why you truly need to invest on augmented analytics. And so, what I'm showing here is an example of how do we use basically, you know, a tool to capturing video, the qualitative findings that we had, plus the quantitative insights that we have. So in this case, our preliminary results based on our ambition for three main metrics. Hours saved, user experience and adoption. So for hours saved, our ambition was to have 10 hours per week for employee to save on average. User experience, our ambition was 4.5 and adoption 80%. In just two months, two months and a half of the pilot, we were able to achieve five hours per week per employee savings, a user experience for 4.3 out of five and adoption of 60%. Really, really amazing work. But again, it takes a lot of collaboration for us to get to the stage from IT, legal, communications, obviously the operations things and the users. In HR safety and other areas that might be basically stakeholders in this whole process. So just to summarize, this kind of effort takes a lot of energy. You are a change agent, you need to have courage to make this decision and understand that, I feel that in this day and age with all this disruption happening, we don't have a choice. We have to take the risk, right? And in this case, I feel a lot of satisfaction in how we were able to gain all these great resource for this organization and that give me the confident to know that the work has been done and we are now in a different stage for the organization. And so for me, it's just to say, thank you for everybody who has belief, obviously in our vision, everybody who has belief in, you know, the work that we were trying to do and to make the life of our, you know, workforce or customers and community better. As you can tell, there is a lot of effort, there is a lot of collaboration that is needed to do something like this. In the end, I feel very satisfied with the accomplishments of this transformation and I just want to tell for you, if you are going right now in a moment that you feel that you have to swim upstream, you know, work with mentors, work with people in the industry that can help you out and guide you on this kind of transformation. It's not easy to do, it's high effort, but it's well worth it. And with that said, I hope you are well and it's been a pleasure talking to you. Talk to you soon. Take care. >> Thank you, Gustavo. That was amazing. All right, let's go to the panel. (light music) Now I think we can all agree how valuable it is to hear from practitioners and I want to thank the panel for sharing their knowledge with the community. Now one common challenge that I heard you all talk about was bringing your leadership and your teams along on the journey with you. We talk about this all the time and it is critical to have support from the top. Why? Because it directs the middle and then it enables bottoms up innovation effects from the cultural transformation that you guys all talked about. It seems like another common theme we heard is that you all prioritize database decision making in your organizations. And you combine two of your most valuable assets to do that and create leverage, employees on the front lines, and of course the data. Now as as you rightly pointed out, Tom, the pandemic has accelerated the need for really leaning into this. You know, the old saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, well COVID has broken everything and it's great to hear from our experts, you know, how to move forward, so let's get right into it. So Gustavo, let's start with you. If I'm an aspiring change agent and let's say I'm a budding data leader, what do I need to start doing? What habits do I need to create for long-lasting success? >> I think curiosity is very important. You need to be, like I said, in tune to what is happening, not only in your specific field, like I have a passion for analytics, I've been doing it for 50 years plus, but I think you need to understand wellbeing of the areas across not only a specific business. As you know, I come from, you know, Sam's Club, Walmart retail. I've been in energy management, technology. So you have to try to push yourself and basically go out of your comfort zone. I mean, if you are staying in your comfort zone and you want to just continuous improvement, that's just going to take you so far. What you have to do is, and that's what I try to do, is I try to go into areas, businesses and transformations, that make me, you know, stretch and develop as a leader. That's what I'm looking to do, so I can help transform the functions, organizations, and do the change management, the essential mindset that's required for this kind of effort. >> Well, thank you for that. That is inspiring and Cindi you love data and the data is pretty clear that diversity is a good business, but I wonder if you can, you know, add your perspectives to this conversation? >> Yeah, so Michelle has a new fan here because she has found her voice. I'm still working on finding mine and it's interesting because I was raised by my dad, a single dad, so he did teach me how to work in a predominantly male environment, but why I think diversity matters more now than ever before and this is by gender, by race, by age, by just different ways of working and thinking, is because as we automate things with AI, if we do not have diverse teams looking at the data, and the models, and how they're applied, we risk having bias at scale. So this is why I think I don't care what type of minority you are, finding your voice, having a seat at the table and just believing in the impact of your work has never been more important and as Michelle said, more possible. >> Great perspectives, thank you. Tom, I want to go to you. So, I mean, I feel like everybody in our businesses is in some way, shape, or form become a COVID expert, but what's been the impact of the pandemic on your organization's digital transformation plans? >> We've seen a massive growth, actually, in our digital business over the last 12 months really, even acceleration, right, once COVID hit. We really saw that in the 200 countries and territories that we operate in today and service our customers in today, that there's been a huge need, right, to send money to support family, to support friends, and to support loved ones across the world. And as part of that we are very honored to be able to support those customers that, across all the centers today, but as part of the acceleration, we need to make sure that we have the right architecture and the right platforms to basically scale, right? To basically support and provide the right kind of security for our customers going forward. So as part of that, we did do some pivots and we did accelerate some of our plans on digital to help support that overall growth coming in and to support our customers going forward, because during these times, during this pandemic, right, this is the most important time and we need to support those that we love and those that we care about. And doing that some of those ways is actually by sending money to them, support them financially. And that's where really our products and our services come into play that, you know, and really support those families. So, it was really a great opportunity for us to really support and really bring some of our products to the next level and supporting our business going forward. >> Awesome, thank you. Now, I want to come back to Gustavo. Tom, I'd love for you to chime in too. Did you guys ever think like you were pushing the envelope too much in doing things with data or the technology that it was just maybe too bold, maybe you felt like at some point it was failing, or you're pushing your people too hard? Can you share that experience and how you got through it? >> Yeah, the way I look at it is, you know, again, whenever I go to an organization, I ask the question, "Hey, how fast you would like to conform?" And, you know, based on the agreements on the leadership and the vision that we want to take place, I take decisions and I collaborate in a specific way. Now, in the case of COVID, for example, right, it forces us to remove silos and collaborate in a faster way. So to me, it was an opportunity to actually integrate with other areas and drive decisions faster, but make no mistake about it, when you are doing a transformation, you are obviously trying to do things faster than sometimes people are comfortable doing, and you need to be okay with that. Sometimes you need to be okay with tension or you need to be okay, you know, debating points or making repetitive business cases until people connect with the decision because you understand and you are seeing that, "Hey, the CEO is making a one, two year, you know, efficiency goal. The only way for us to really do more with less is for us to continue this path. We can not just stay with the status quo, we need to find a way to accelerate the transformation." That's the way I see it. >> How about Utah, we were talking earlier with Sudheesh and Cindi about that bungee jumping moment. What can you share? >> Yeah, you know, I think you hit upon it. Right now, the pace of change will be the slowest pace that you see for the rest of your career. So as part of that, right, this is what I tell my team, is that you need to be, you need to feel comfortable being uncomfortable. Meaning that we have to be able to basically scale, right? Expand and support the ever changing needs in the marketplace and industry and our customers today, and that pace of change that's happening, right? And what customers are asking for and the competition in the marketplace, it's only going to accelerate. So as part of that, you know, as you look at how you're operating today in your current business model, right? Things are only going to get faster. So you have to plan and to align and to drive the actual transformation, so that you can scale even faster into the future. So it's part of that, that's what we're putting in place here, right? It's how do we create that underlying framework and foundation that allows the organization to basically continue to scale and evolve into the future? >> Yeah, we're definitely out of our comfort zones, but we're getting comfortable with it. So Cindi, last question, you've worked with hundreds of organizations and I got to believe that, you know, some of the advice you gave when you were at Gartner, which was pre-COVID, maybe sometimes clients didn't always act on it. You know, not my watch or for whatever, variety of reasons, but it's being forced on them now. But knowing what you know now that, you know, we're all in this isolation economy, how would you say that advice has changed? Has it changed? What's your number one action and recommendation today? >> Yeah, well first off, Tom, just freaked me out. What do you mean, this is the slowest ever? Even six months ago I was saying the pace of change in data and analytics is frenetic. So, but I think you're right, Tom, the business and the technology together is forcing this change. Now, Dave, to answer your question, I would say the one bit of advice, maybe I was a little more very aware of the power in politics and how to bring people along in a way that they are comfortable and now I think it's, you know what, you can't get comfortable. In fact, we know that the organizations that were already in the cloud have been able to respond and pivot faster. So, if you really want to survive, as Tom and Gustavo said, get used to being uncomfortable. The power and politics are going to happen, break the rules, get used to that and be bold. Do not be afraid to tell somebody they're wrong and they're not moving fast enough. I do think you have to do that with empathy, as Michelle said and Gustavo, I think that's one of the key words today besides the bungee jumping. So I want to know where Sudheesh is going to go bungee jumping. (all chuckling) >> Guys, fantastic discussion, really. Thanks again to all the panelists and the guests, it was really a pleasure speaking with you today. Really, virtually all of the leaders that I've spoken to in theCUBE program recently, they tell me that the pandemic is accelerating so many things. Whether it's new ways to work, we heard about new security models and obviously the need for cloud. I mean, all of these things are driving true enterprise-wide digital transformation, not just as I said before, lip service. You know, sometimes we minimize the importance and the challenge of building culture and in making this transformation possible. But when it's done right, the right culture is going to deliver tournament results. You know, what does that mean? Getting it right. Everybody's trying to get it right. My biggest takeaway today is it means making data part of the DNA of your organization. And that means making it accessible to the people in your organization that are empowered to make decisions, decisions that can drive new revenue, cut costs, speed access to critical care, whatever the mission is of your organization, data can create insights and informed decisions that drive value. Okay, let's bring back Sudheesh and wrap things up. Sudheesh, please bring us home. >> Thank you, thank you, Dave. Thank you, theCUBE team, and thanks goes to all of our customers and partners who joined us, and thanks to all of you for spending the time with us. I want to do three quick things and then close it off. The first thing is I want to summarize the key takeaways that I heard from all four of our distinguished speakers. First, Michelle, I will simply put it, she said it really well. That is be brave and drive, don't go for a drive alone. That is such an important point. Often times, you know the right thing that you have to do to make the positive change that you want to see happen, but you wait for someone else to do it, not just, why not you? Why don't you be the one making that change happen? That's the thing that I picked up from Michelle's talk. Cindi talked about finding, the importance of finding your voice. Taking that chair, whether it's available or not, and making sure that your ideas, your voice is heard and if it requires some force, then apply that force. Make sure your ideas are heard. Gustavo talked about the importance of building consensus, not going at things all alone sometimes. The importance of building the quorum, and that is critical because if you want the changes to last, you want to make sure that the organization is fully behind it. Tom, instead of a single takeaway, what I was inspired by is the fact that a company that is 170 years old, 170 years old, 200 companies and 200 countries they're operating in and they were able to make the change that is necessary through this difficult time in a matter of months. If they could do it, anyone could. The second thing I want to do is to leave you with a takeaway, that is I would like you to go to ThoughtSpot.com/nfl because our team has made an app for NFL on Snowflake. I think you will find this interesting now that you are inspired and excited because of Michelle's talk. And the last thing is, please go to ThoughtSpot.com/beyond. Our global user conference is happening in this December. We would love to have you join us, it's, again, virtual, you can join from anywhere. We are expecting anywhere from five to 10,000 people and we would love to have you join and see what we've been up to since last year. We have a lot of amazing things in store for you, our customers, our partners, our collaborators, they will be coming and sharing. We'll be sharing things that we have been working to release, something that will come out next year. And also some of the crazy ideas our engineers have been cooking up. All of those things will be available for you at ThoughtSpot Beyond. Thank you, thank you so much.

>> Data is at the heart of transformation and the change every company needs to succeed, but it takes more than new technology. It's about teams, talent and cultural change. Empowering everyone on the front lines to make decisions all at the speed of digital. The transformation starts with you. It's time to lead the way it's time for Thought leaders. >> Welcome to "Thought Leaders" a digital event brought to you by ThoughtSpot. My name is Dave Vellante. The purpose of this day is to bring industry leaders and experts together to really try and understand the important issues around digital transformation. We have an amazing lineup of speakers and our goal is to provide you with some best practices that you can bring back and apply to your organization. Look, data is plentiful, but insights are not. ThoughtSpot is disrupting analytics by using search and machine intelligence to simplify data analysis and really empower anyone with fast access to relevant data. But in the last 150 days, we've had more questions than answers. Creating an organization that puts data and insights at their core requires not only modern technology, but leadership, a mindset and a culture that people often refer to as data-driven. What does that mean? How can we equip our teams with data and fast access to quality information that can turn insights into action. And today we're going to hear from experienced leaders who are transforming their organizations with data, insights and creating digital first cultures. But before we introduce our speakers, I'm joined today by two of my co-hosts from ThoughtSpot first chief data strategy officer at the ThoughtSpot is Cindi Howson. Cindi is an analytics and BI expert with 20 plus years experience and the author of "Successful Business Intelligence "Unlock the Value of BI & Big Data." Cindi was previously the lead analyst at Gartner for the data and analytics magic quadrant. And early last year, she joined ThoughtSpot to help CDOs and their teams understand how best to leverage analytics and AI for digital transformation. Cindi, great to see you welcome to the show. >> Thank you, Dave. Nice to join you virtually. >> Now our second cohost and friend of the cube is ThoughtSpot CEO Sudheesh Nair Hello, Sudheesh how are you doing today? >> I'm well Dave, it's good to talk to you again. >> It's great to see you thanks so much for being here. Now Sudheesh please share with us why this discussion is so important to your customers and of course, to our audience and what they're going to learn today. (upbeat music) >> Thanks, Dave. I wish you were there to introduce me into every room and that I walk into because you have such an amazing way of doing it. Makes me feel all so good. Look, since we have all been cooped up in our homes, I know that the vendors like us, we have amped up our sort of effort to reach out to you with invites for events like this. So we are getting very more invites for events like this than ever before. So when we started planning for this, we had three clear goals that we wanted to accomplish. And our first one that when you finish this and walk away, we want to make sure that you don't feel like it was a waste of time. We want to make sure that we value your time and this is going to be useful. Number two, we want to put you in touch with industry leaders and thought leaders, generally good people that you want to hang around with long after this event is over. And number three, as we plan through this, we are living through these difficult times. We want an event to be this event, to be more of an uplifting and inspiring event too. Now, the challenge is how do you do that with the team being change agents because change and as much as we romanticize it, it is not one of those uplifting things that everyone wants to do, or like to do. The way I think of it sort of like a, if you've ever done bungee jumping and it's like standing on the edges waiting to make that one more step, all you have to do is take that one step and gravity will do the rest, but that is the hardest step to take. Change requires a lot of courage. And when we are talking about data and analytics, which is already like such a hard topic, not necessarily an uplifting and positive conversation in most businesses, it is somewhat scary. Change becomes all the more difficult. Ultimately change requires courage. Courage to first of all challenge the status quo. People sometimes are afraid to challenge the status quo because they are thinking that maybe I don't have the power to make the change that the company needs. Sometimes they feel like I don't have the skills. Sometimes they may feel that I'm probably not the right person do it. Or sometimes the lack of courage manifest itself as the inability to sort of break the silos that are formed within the organizations, when it comes to data and insights that you talked about. There are people in the company who are going to hog the data because they know how to manage the data, how to inquire and extract. They know how to speak data. They have the skills to do that. But they are not the group of people who have sort of the knowledge, the experience of the business to ask the right questions off the data. So there is the silo of people with the answers, and there is a silo of people with the questions. And there is gap. This sort of silos are standing in the way of making that necessary change that we all know the business needs. And the last change to sort of bring an external force sometimes. It could be a tool. It could be a platform, it could be a person, it could be a process, but sometimes no matter how big the company is or how small the company is, you may need to bring some external stimuli to start the domino of the positive changes that are necessary. The group of people that we are brought in, the four people, including Cindi, that you will hear from today are really good at practically telling you how to make that step, how to step off that edge, how to dress the rope, that you will be safe and you're going to have fun. You will have that exhilarating feeling of jumping, for a bungee jump. All four of them are exceptional, but my honor is to introduce Michelle and she's our first speaker. Michelle, I am very happy after watching her presentation and reading our bio, that there are no country vital worldwide competition for cool patterns, because she will beat all of us because when her children were small, they were probably into Harry Potter and Disney. She was managing a business and leading change there. And then as her kids grew up and got to that age where they like football and NFL, guess what? She's the CIO of NFL. What a cool mom? I am extremely excited to see what she's going to talk about. I've seen the slides, tons of amazing pictures. I'm looking to see the context behind it. I'm very thrilled to make the acquaintance of Michelle and looking forward to her talk next. Welcome Michelle, it's over to you. (upbeat music) >> I'm delighted to be with you all today to talk about thought leadership. And I'm so excited that you asked me to join you because today I get to be a quarterback. I always wanted to be one. And I thought this is about as close as I'm ever going to get. So I want to talk to you about quarterbacking, our digital revolution using insights data. And of course, as you said, leadership, first a little bit about myself, a little background, as I said, I always wanted to play football. And this is something that I wanted to do since I was a child. But when I grew up, girls didn't get to play football. I'm so happy that that's changing and girls are now doing all kinds of things that they didn't get to do before. Just this past weekend on an NFL field, we had a female coach on two sidelines and a female official on the field. I'm a lifelong fan and student of the game of football. I grew up in the South. You can tell from the accent. And in the South football is like a religion and you pick sides. I chose Auburn university working in the athletic department. So I'm Testament to you can start the journey can be long. It took me many, many years to make it into professional sports. I graduated in 1987 and my little brother, well, not actually not so little. He played offensive line for the Alabama Crimson Tide. And for those of you who know SCC football, you know this is a really big rivalry. And when you choose sides, your family is divided. So it's kind of fun for me to always tell the story that my dad knew his kid would make it to the NFL. He just bet on the wrong one. My career has been about bringing people together for memorable moments at some of America's most iconic brands, delivering memories and amazing experiences that delight from Universal Studios, Disney to my current position as CIO of the NFL. In this job I'm very privileged to have the opportunity to work with the team that gets to bring America's game to millions of people around the world. Often I'm asked to talk about how to create amazing experiences for fans, guests, or customers. But today I really wanted to focus on something different and talk to you about being behind the scenes and backstage because behind every event, every game, every awesome moment is execution, precise, repeatable execution. And most of my career has been behind the scenes doing just that assembling teams to execute these plans. And the key way that companies operate at these exceptional levels is making good decisions, the right decisions at the right time and based upon data so that you can translate the data into intelligence and be a data-driven culture. Using data and intelligence is an important way that world-class companies do differentiate themselves. And it's the lifeblood of collaboration and innovation. Teams that are working on delivering these kinds of world casts experiences are often seeking out and leveraging next-generation technologies and finding new ways to work. I've been fortunate to work across three decades of emerging experiences, which each required emerging technologies to execute a little bit first about Disney in the 90s, I was at Disney leading a project called destination Disney, which it's a data project. It was a data project, but it was CRM before CRM was even cool. And then certainly before anything like a data-driven culture was ever brought up, but way back then we were creating a digital backbone that enabled many technologies for the things that you see today, like the magic band, Disney's magical express. My career at Disney began in finance, but Disney was very good about rotating you around. And it was during one of these rotations that I became very passionate about data. I kind of became a pain in the butt to the IT team asking for data more and more data. And I learned that all of that valuable data was locked up in our systems. All of our point of sales systems, our reservation systems, our operation systems. And so I became a shadow IT person in marketing, ultimately leading to moving into IT. And I haven't looked back since. In the early two thousands, I was at universal studios theme park as their CIO preparing for and launching "The Wizarding World of Harry Potter" bringing one of history's most memorable characters to life required many new technologies and a lot of data. Our data and technologies were embedded into the rides and attractions. I mean, how do you really think a wan selects you at a wan shop. As today at the NFL? I am constantly challenged to do leading edge technologies, using things like sensors, AI, machine learning, and all new communication strategies and using data to drive everything from player performance, contracts, to where we build new stadiums and hold events with this year being the most challenging yet rewarding year in my career at the NFL. In the middle of a global pandemic, the way we are executing on our season is leveraging data from contract tracing devices joined with testing data, talk about data, actually enabling your business without it w wouldn't be having a season right now. I'm also on the board of directors of two public companies where data and collaboration are paramount. First RingCentral, it's a cloud based unified communications platform and collaboration with video message and phone all in one solution in the cloud and Quotient technologies whose product is actually data. The tagline at Quotient is the result in knowing I think that's really important because not all of us are data companies where your product is actually data, but we should operate more like your product is data. I'd also like to talk to you about four areas of things to think about as thought leaders in your companies. First just hit on it is change how to be a champion and a driver of change. Second, how do you use data to drive performance for your company and measure performance of your company? Third, how companies now require intense collaboration to operate. And finally, how much of this is accomplished through solid data driven decisions. First let's hit on change. I mean, it's evident today more than ever, that we are in an environment of extreme change. I mean, we've all been at this for years and as technologists we've known it, believed it, lived it and thankfully for the most part, knock on what we were prepared for it. But this year everyone's cheese was moved. All the people in the back rooms, IT, data architects and others were suddenly called to the forefront because a global pandemic has turned out to be the thing that is driving intense change in how people work and analyze their business. On March 13th, we closed our office at the NFL in the middle of preparing for one of our biggest events, our kickoff event, the 2020 draft. We went from planning a large event in Las Vegas under the bright lights, red carpet stage to smaller events in club facilities. And then ultimately to one where everyone coaches GM's prospects and even our commissioner were at home in their basements. And we only had a few weeks to figure it out. I found myself for the first time being in the live broadcast event space, talking about bungee jumping. This is really what it felt like. It was one in which no one felt comfortable because it had not been done before. But leading through this, I stepped up, but it was very scary. It was certainly very risky, but it ended up being all so rewarding when we did it. And as a result of this, some things will change forever. Second, managing performance. I mean, data should inform how you're doing and how to get your company to perform at it's level. Highest level. As an example, the NFL has always measured performance, obviously, and it is one of the purest examples of how performance directly impacts outcome. I mean, you can see performance on the field. You can see points being scored in stats, and you immediately know that impact those with the best stats usually when the games. The NFL has always recorded stats since the beginning of time here at the NFL a little this year is our 101 year and athletes ultimate success as a player has also always been greatly impacted by his stats. But what has changed for us is both how much more we can measure and the immediacy with which it can be measured. And I'm sure in your business it's the same. The amount of data you must have has got to have quadrupled and how fast you need it and how quickly you need to analyze it is so important. And it's very important to break the silos between the keys, to the data and the use of the data. Our next generation stats platform is taking data to a next level. It's powered by Amazon web services. And we gathered this data real-time from sensors that are on players' bodies. We gather it in real time, analyze it, display it online and on broadcast. And of course it's used to prepare week to week in addition to what is a normal coaching plan would be. We can now analyze, visualize route patterns, speed match-ups, et cetera. So much faster than ever before. We're continuing to roll out sensors too that will gather more and more information about a player's performance as it relates to their health and safety. The third trend is really, I think it's a big part of what we're feeling today and that is intense collaboration. And just for sort of historical purposes, it's important to think about for those of you that are IT professionals and developers, more than 10 years ago, agile practices began sweeping companies where small teams would work together rapidly in a very flexible, adaptive, and innovative way. And it proved to be transformational. However, today, of course, that is no longer just small teams, the next big wave of change. And we've seen it through this pandemic is that it's the whole enterprise that must collaborate and be agile. If I look back on my career, when I was at Disney, we owned everything 100%. We made a decision, we implemented it. We were a collaborative culture, but it was much easier to push change because you own the whole decision. If there was buy-in from the top down, you've got the people from the bottom up to do it and you executed. At Universal we were a joint venture. Our attractions and entertainment was licensed. Our hotels were owned and managed by other third parties. So influence and collaboration and how to share across companies became very important. And now here I am at the NFL and even the bigger ecosystem, we have 32 clubs that are all separate businesses. 31 different stadiums that are owned by a variety of people. We have licensees, we have sponsors, we have broadcast partners. So it seems that as my career has evolved, centralized control has gotten less and less and has been replaced by intense collaboration, not only within your own company, but across companies. The ability to work in a collaborative way across businesses and even other companies that has been a big key to my success in my career. I believe this whole vertical integration and big top-down decision-making is going by the wayside in favor of ecosystems that require cooperation yet competition to co-exist. I mean, the NFL is a great example of what we call co-op petition, which is cooperation and competition. We're in competition with each other, but we cooperate to make the company the best it can be. And at the heart of these items really are data driven decisions and culture. Data on its own isn't good enough. You must be able to turn it to insights. Partnerships between technology teams who usually hold the keys to the raw data and business units who have the knowledge to build the right decision models is key. If you're not already involved in this linkage, you should be. Data mining isn't new for sure. The availability of data is quadrupling and it's everywhere. How do you know what to even look at? How do you know where to begin? How do you know what questions to ask it's by using the tools that are available for visualization and analytics and knitting together strategies of the company. So it begins with first of all, making sure you do understand the strategy of the company. So in closing, just to wrap up a bit, many of you joined today, looking for thought leadership on how to be a change agent, a change champion, and how to lead through transformation. Some final thoughts are be brave and drive. Don't do the ride along program. It's very important to drive. Driving can be high risk, but it's also high reward. Embracing the uncertainty of what will happen is how you become brave. Get more and more comfortable with uncertainty, be calm and let data be your map on your journey. Thanks. >> Michelle, tank you so much. So you and I share a love of data and a love of football. You said you want to be the quarterback. I'm more an old line person. (Michelle and Cindi laughing) >> Well, then I can do my job without you. >> Great. And I'm getting the feeling now, Sudheesh is talking about bungee jumping. My vote is when we're past this pandemic, we both take them to the Delaware water gap and we do the cliff jumping. >> That sounds good, I'll watch. >> Yeah, you'll watch, okay. So Michelle, you have so many stakeholders when you're trying to prioritize the different voices. You have the players, you have the owners, you have the league, as you mentioned, the broadcasters, your partners here and football mamas like myself. How do you prioritize when there's so many different stakeholders that you need to satisfy? >> I think balancing across stakeholders starts with, aligning on a mission. And if you spend a lot of time understanding where everyone's coming from, and you can find the common thread that ties them all together, you sort of do get them to naturally prioritize their work. And I think that's very important. So for us, at the NFL and even at Disney, it was our core values and our core purpose, is so well known and when anything challenges that we're able to sort of lay that out. But as a change agent, you have to be very empathetic. And I would say empathy is probably your strongest skill if you're a change agent. And that means listening to every single stakeholder, even when they're yelling at you, even when they're telling you your technology doesn't work and you know that it's user error, or even when someone is just emotional about what's happening to them and that they're not comfortable with it. So I think being empathetic and having a mission and understanding it is sort of how I prioritize and balance. >> Yeah, empathy, a very popular word this year. I can imagine those coaches and owners yelling. So, thank you for your leadership here. So Michelle, I look forward to discussing this more with our other customers and disruptors joining us in a little bit. (upbeat music) So we're going to take a hard pivot now and go from football to Chernobyl. Chernobyl what went wrong? 1986, as the reactors were melting down, they had the data to say, this is going to be catastrophic. And yet the culture said, "no, we're perfect, hide it. "Don't dare tell anyone." Which meant they went ahead and had celebrations in Kiev. Even though that increased the exposure, the additional thousands getting cancer and 20,000 years before the ground around there can even be inhabited again, this is how powerful and detrimental a negative culture, a culture that is unable to confront the brutal facts that hides data. This is what we have to contend with. And this is why I want you to focus on having, fostering a data-driven culture. I don't want you to be a laggard. I want you to be a leader in using data to drive your digital transformation. So I'll talk about culture and technology. Is it really two sides of the same coin, real-world impacts and then some best practices you can use to and innovate your culture. Now, oftentimes I would talk about culture and I talk about technology. And recently a CDO said to me, "Cindi, I actually think this is two sides "of the same coin. "One reflects the other." What do you think? Let me walk you through this. So let's take a laggard. What does the technology look like? Is it based on 1990s BI and reporting largely parametrized reports, on premises data, warehouses, or not even that operational reports at best one enterprise data warehouse, very slow moving and collaboration is only email. What does that culture tell you? Maybe there's a lack of leadership to change, to do the hard work that Sudheesh referred to, or is there also a culture of fear, afraid of failure, resistance to change complacency. And sometimes that complacency it's not because people are lazy. It's because they've been so beaten down every time a new idea is presented. It's like, no we're measured on least cost to serve. So politics and distrust, whether it's between business and IT or individual stakeholders is the norm. So data is hoarded. Let's contrast that with a leader, a data and analytics leader, what is their technology look like? Augmented analytics search and AI driven insights, not on premises, but in the cloud and maybe multiple clouds. And the data is not in one place, but it's in a data Lake and in a data warehouse, a logical data warehouse. The collaboration is being a newer methods, whether it's Slack or teams allowing for that real time decisioning or investigating a particular data point. So what is the culture in the leaders? It's transparent and trust. There is a trust that data will not be used to punish that there is an ability to confront the bad news. It's innovation, valuing innovation in pursuit of the company goals, whether it's the best fan experience and player safety in the NFL or best serving your customers. It's innovative and collaborative. There's none of this. Oh, well, I didn't invent that. I'm not going to look at that. There's still pride of ownership, but it's collaborating to get to a better place faster. And people feel empowered to present new ideas to fail fast, and they're energized knowing that they're using the best technology and innovating at the pace that business requires. So data is democratized. And democratized, not just for power users or analysts, but really at the point of impact what we like to call the new decision-makers or really the frontline workers. So Harvard business review partnered with us to develop this study to say, just how important is this? We've been working at BI and analytics as an industry for more than 20 years. Why is it not at the front lines? Whether it's a doctor, a nurse, a coach, a supply chain manager, a warehouse manager, a financial services advisor. Everyone said that if our 87% said, they would be more successful if frontline workers were empowered with data driven insights, but they recognize they need new technology to be able to do that. It's not about learning hard tools. The sad reality, only 20% of organizations are actually doing this. These are the data-driven leaders. So this is the culture in technology. How did we get here? It's because state-of-the-art keeps changing. So the first-generation BI and analytics platforms were deployed on premises on small datasets, really just taking data out of ERP systems that were also on premises. And state-of-the-art was maybe getting a management report, an operational report. Over time visual-based data discovery vendors disrupted these traditional BI vendors, empowering now analysts to create visualizations with the flexibility on a desktop, sometimes larger data, sometimes coming from a data warehouse. The current state of the art though, Gartner calls it augmented analytics at ThoughtSpot, we call it search and AI driven analytics. And this was pioneered for large scale datasets, whether it's on premises or leveraging the cloud data warehouses. And I think this is an important point. Oftentimes you, the data and analytics leaders will look at these two components separately, but you have to look at the BI and analytics tier in lockstep with your data architectures to really get to the granular insights and to leverage the capabilities of AI. Now, if you've never seen ThoughtSpot, I'll just show you what this looks like. Instead of somebody hard coding, a report it's typing in search keywords and very robust keywords contains rank top bottom, getting to a visual visualization that then can be pinned to an existing Pin board that might also contain insights generated by an AI engine. So it's easy enough for that new decision maker, the business user, the non analyst to create themselves. Modernizing the data and analytics portfolio is hard because the pace of change has accelerated. You use to be able to create an investment place a bet for maybe 10 years, a few years ago, that time horizon was five years, now it's maybe three years and the time to maturity has also accelerated. So you have these different components, the search and AI tier, the data science tier, data preparation and virtualization. But I would also say equally important is the cloud data warehouse and pay attention to how well these analytics tools can unlock the value in these cloud data warehouses. So ThoughtSpot was the first to market with search and AI driven insights. Competitors have followed suit, but be careful if you look at products like power BI or SAP analytics cloud, they might demo well, but do they let you get to all the data without moving it in products like Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, or Azure synapse or Google big query, they do not. They require you to move it into a smaller in memory engine. So it's important how well these new products inter operate. the pace of change, its acceleration Gartner recently predicted that by 2022, 65% of analytical queries will be generated using search or NLP or even AI. And that is roughly three times the prediction they had just a couple years ago. So let's talk about the real world impact of culture. And if you read any of my books or used any of the maturity models out there, whether the Gartner IT score that I worked on, or the data warehousing Institute also has the money surety model. We talk about these five pillars to really become data-driven. As Michelle, I spoke about it's focusing on the business outcomes, leveraging all the data, including new data sources, it's the talent, the people, the technology, and also the processes. And often when I would talk about the people and the talent, I would lump the culture as part of that. But in the last year, as I've traveled the world and done these digital events for Thought leaders, you have told me now culture is absolutely so important. And so we've pulled it out as a separate pillar. And in fact, in polls that we've done in these events, look at how much more important culture is as a barrier to becoming data-driven it's three times as important as any of these other pillars. That's how critical it is. And let's take an example of where you can have great data, but if you don't have the right culture, there's devastating impacts. And I will say, I have been a loyal customer of Wells Fargo for more than 20 years. But look at what happened in the face of negative news with data, it said, "hey, we're not doing good cross selling, "customers do not have both a checking account "and a credit card and a savings account and a mortgage." They opened fake accounts facing billions in fines, change in leadership that even the CEO attributed to a toxic sales culture, and they're trying to fix this. But even recently there's been additional employee backlash saying the culture has not changed. Let's contrast that with some positive examples, Medtronic, a worldwide company in 150 countries around the world. They may not be a household name to you, but if you have a loved one or yourself, you have a pacemaker, spinal implant diabetes, you know this brand. And at the start of COVID when they knew their business would be slowing down, because hospitals would only be able to take care of COVID patients. They took the bold move of making their IP for ventilators publicly available. That is the power of a positive culture. Or Verizon, a major telecom organization looking at late payments of their customers. And even though the U.S federal government said, "well, you can't turn them off. They said, "we'll extend that even beyond "the mandated guidelines." And facing a slow down in the business because of the tough economy, they said, you know what? "We will spend the time up skilling our people, "giving them the time to learn more "about the future of work, the skills and data "and analytics," for 20,000 of their employees, rather than furloughing them. That is the power of a positive culture. So how can you transform your culture to the best in class? I'll give you three suggestions, bring in a change agent, identify the relevance, or I like to call it WIFM and organize for collaboration. So the CDO, whatever your title is, chief analytics officer, chief digital officer, you are the most important change agent. And this is where you will hear that oftentimes a change agent has to come from outside the organization. So this is where, for example, in Europe, you have the CDO of Just Eat a takeout food delivery organization coming from the airline industry or in Australia, National Australian bank, taking a CDO within the same sector from TD bank going to NAB. So these change agents come in disrupt. It's a hard job. As one of you said to me, it often feels like Sisyphus. I make one step forward and I get knocked down again. I get pushed back. It is not for the faint of heart, but it's the most important part of your job. The other thing I'll talk about is WIFM. What is in it for me? And this is really about understanding the motivation, the relevance that data has for everyone on the frontline, as well as those analysts, as well as the executives. So if we're talking about players in the NFL, they want to perform better and they want to stay safe. That is why data matters to them. If we're talking about financial services, this may be a wealth management advisor. Okay we could say commissions, but it's really helping people have their dreams come true, whether it's putting their children through college or being able to retire without having to work multiple jobs still into your 70s or 80s for the teachers, teachers, you ask them about data. They'll say we don't, we don't need that. I care about the student. So if you can use data to help a student perform better, that is WIFM. And sometimes we spend so much time talking the technology, we forget what is the value we're trying to deliver with it. And we forget the impact on the people that it does require change. In fact, the Harvard business review study found that 44% said lack of change management is the biggest barrier to leveraging both new technology, but also being empowered to act on those data-driven insights. The third point organize for collaboration. This does require diversity of thought, but also bringing the technology, the data and the business people together. Now there's not a single one size fits all model for data and analytics. At one point in time, even having a BICC, a BI competency center was considered state-of-the-art. Now for the biggest impact what I recommend is that you have a federated model centralized for economies of scale. That could be the common data, but then in bed, these evangelists, these analysts of the future within every business unit, every functional domain. And as you see this top bar, all models are possible, but the hybrid model has the most impact, the most leaders. So as we look ahead to the months ahead, to the year ahead an exciting time, because data is helping organizations better navigate a tough economy, lock in the customer loyalty. And I look forward to seeing how you foster that culture that's collaborative with empathy and bring the best of technology, leveraging the cloud, all your data. So thank you for joining us at Thought Leaders. And next I'm pleased to introduce our first change agent, Tom Mazzaferro chief data officer of Western union. And before joining Western union, Tom made his Mark at HSBC and JPMorgan Chase spearheading digital innovation in technology, operations, risk compliance, and retail banking. Tom, thank you so much for joining us today. (upbeat music) >> Very happy to be here and looking forward to talking to all of you today. So as we look to move organizations to a data-driven, capability into the future, there is a lot that needs to be done on the data side, but also how does data connect and enable different business teams and technology teams into the future. As you look across, our data ecosystems and our platforms and how we modernize that to the cloud in the future, it all needs to basically work together, right? To really be able to drive and over the shift from a data standpoint, into the future, that includes being able to have the right information with the right quality of data, at the right time to drive informed business decisions, to drive the business forward. As part of that, we actually have partnered with ThoughtSpot, to actually bring in the technology to help us drive that as part of that partnership. And it's how we've looked to integrate it into our overall business as a whole we've looked at how do we make sure that our business and our professional lives right, are enabled in the same ways as our personal lives. So for example, in your personal lives, when you want to go and find something out, what do you do? You go onto google.com or you go on to Bing we go onto Yahoo and you search for what you want search to find and answer. ThoughtSpot for us as the same thing, but in the business world. So using ThoughtSpot and other AI capability it's allowed us to actually, enable our overall business teams in our company to actually have our information at our fingertips. So rather than having to go and talk to someone or an engineer to go pull information or pull data, we actually can have the end-users or the business executives, right. Search for what they need, what they want at the exact time that action need it to go and drive the business forward. This is truly one of those transformational things that we've put in place. On top of that, we are on the journey to modernize our larger ecosystem as a whole. That includes modernizing our underlying data warehouses, our technology, or our Eloqua environments. And as we move that, we've actually picked two of our cloud providers going to AWS and GCP. We've also adopted Snowflake to really drive and to organize our information and our data then drive these new solutions and capabilities forward. So they portion of us though is culture. So how do we engage with the business teams and bring the IT teams together to really drive these holistic end to end solutions and capabilities to really support the actual business into the future? That's one of the keys here, as we look to modernize and to really enhance our organizations to become data-driven, this is the key. If you can really start to provide answers to business questions before they're even being asked and to predict based upon different economic trends or different trends in your business, what does this is maybe be made and actually provide those answers to the business teams before they're even asking for it, that is really becoming a data-driven organization. And as part of that, it's really then enables the business to act quickly and take advantage of opportunities as they come in based upon, industries based upon markets, based upon products, solutions, or partnerships into the future. These are really some of the keys that become crucial as you move forward, right, into this new age, especially with COVID. With COVID now taking place across the world, right? Many of these markets, many of these digital transformations are accelerating and are changing rapidly to accommodate and to support customers in these very difficult times, as part of that, you need to make sure you have the right underlying foundation ecosystems and solutions to really drive those capabilities and those solutions forward. As we go through this journey, both of my career, but also each of your careers into the future, right? It also needs to evolve, right? Technology has changed so drastically in the last 10 years, and that change is only accelerating. So as part of that, you have to make sure that you stay up to speed, up to date with new technology changes both on the platform standpoint tools, but also what do our customers want? What do our customers need and how do we then service them with our information, with our data, with our platform and with our products and our services to meet those needs and to really support and service those customers into the future. This is all around becoming a more data organization such as how do you use your data to support the current business lines, but how do you actually use your information, your data to actually put a better support your customers, better support your business, better support your employees, your operations teams, and so forth, and really creating that full integration in that ecosystem is really when you start to get large dividends from this investments into the future. But that being said, hope you enjoy the segment on how to become and how to drive it data driven organization. And, looking forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you. >> Tom that was great thanks so much. Now I'm going to have to brag on you for a second as a change agent you've come in disrupted and how long have you been at Western union? >> Only nine months, so just started this year, but, doing some great opportunities and great changes. And we have a lot more to go, but, we're really driving things forward in partnership with our business teams and our colleagues to support those customers going forward. >> Tom, thank you so much. That was wonderful. And now I'm excited to introduce you to Gustavo Canton, a change agent that I've had the pleasure of working with meeting in Europe, and he is a serial change agent, most recently with Schneider electric, but even going back to Sam's clubs, Gustavo welcome. (upbeat music) >> So, hey everyone, my name is Gustavo Canton and thank you so much, Cindi, for the intro, as you mentioned, doing transformations is high effort, high reward situation. I have empowered many transformations and I have led many transformations. And what I can tell you is that it's really hard to predict the future, but if you have a North star and where you're going, the one thing that I want you to take away from this discussion today is that you need to be bold to evolve. And so in today, I'm going to be talking about culture and data, and I'm going to break this down in four areas. How do we get started barriers or opportunities as I see it, the value of AI, and also, how do you communicate, especially now in the workforce of today with so many different generations, you need to make sure that you are communicating in ways that are non-traditional sometimes. And so how do we get started? So I think the answer to that is you have to start for you yourself as a leader and stay tuned. And by that, I mean, you need to understand not only what is happening in your function or your field, but you have to be varying into what is happening in society, socioeconomically speaking wellbeing. The common example is a great example. And for me personally, it's an opportunity because the one core value that I have is well-being, I believe that for human potential, for customers and communities to grow wellbeing should be at the center of every decision. And as somebody mentioned is great to be, stay in tune and have the skillset and the courage. But for me personally, to be honest, to have this courage is not about not being afraid. You're always afraid when you're making big changes when you're swimming upstream, but what gives me the courage is the empathy part. Like I think empathy is a huge component because every time I go into an organization or a function, I try to listen very attentively to the needs of the business and what the leaders are trying to do. What I do it thinking about the mission of how do I make change for the bigger, workforce? for the bigger good. Despite this fact that this might have a perhaps implication on my own self-interest in my career, right? Because you have to have that courage sometimes to make choices that I know we'll see in politically speaking, what are the right thing to do? And you have to push through it. And you have to push through it. So the bottom line for me is that I don't think they're transforming fast enough. And the reality is I speak with a lot of leaders and we have seen stories in the past. And what they show is that if you look at the four main barriers that are basically keeping us behind budget, inability to act cultural issues, politics, and lack of alignment, those are the top four. But the interesting thing is that as Cindi has mentioned, these topics culture is actually gaining, gaining more and more traction. And in 2018, there was a story from HBR and it was about 45%. I believe today it's about 55%, 60% of respondents say that this is the main area that we need to focus on. So again, for all those leaders and all the executives who understand and are aware that we need to transform, commit to the transformation and set a state, deadline to say, "hey, in two years, we're going to make this happen. "What do we need to do to empower and enable "this change engines to make it happen?" You need to make the tough choices. And so to me, when I speak about being bold is about making the right choices now. So I'll give you samples of some of the roadblocks that I went through as I think transformation most recently, as Cindi mentioned in Schneider. There are three main areas, legacy mindset. And what that means is that we've been doing this in a specific way for a long time and here is how we have been successful what was working the past is not going to work now. The opportunity there is that there is a lot of leaders who have a digital mindset and there're up and coming leaders that are not yet fully developed. We need to mentor those leaders and take bets on some of these talent, including young talent. We cannot be thinking in the past and just wait for people, three to five years for them to develop because the world is going to in a way that is super fast. The second area, and this is specifically to implementation of AI is very interesting to me because just example that I have with ThoughtSpot, right, we went to implementation and a lot of the way is the IT team function of the leaders look at technology, they look at it from the prism of the prior all success criteria for the traditional Bi's. And that's not going to work. Again the opportunity here is that you need to really find what successful look like. In my case, I want the user experience of our workforce to be the same as user experience you have at home is a very simple concept. And so we need to think about how do we gain the user experience with this augmented analytics tools and then work backwards to have the right talent processes and technology to enable that. And finally, with COVID a lot of pressuring organizations, and companies to do more with less. And the solution that most leaders I see are taking is to just minimize costs, sometimes in cut budget, we have to do the opposite. We have to actually invest some growth areas, but do it by business question. Don't do it by function. If you actually invest in these kind of solutions, if you actually invest on developing your talent, your leadership to see more digitally, if you actually invest on fixing your data platform, it's not just an incremental cost. It's actually this investment is going to offset all those hidden costs and inefficiencies that you have on your system, because people are doing a lot of work and working very hard, but it's not efficiency, and it's not working in the way that you might want to work. So there is a lot of opportunity there. And you just to put into some perspective, there have studies in the past about, how do we kind of measure the impact of data. And obviously this is going to vary by your organization maturity, is going to, there's going to be a lot of factors. I've been in companies who have very clean, good data to work with. And I think with companies that we have to start basically from scratch. So it all depends on your maturity level, but in this study, what I think is interesting is they try to put attack line or attack price to what is the cost of incomplete data. So in this case, it's about 10 times as much to complete a unit of work when you have data that is flawed as opposed to have perfect data. So let me put that just in perspective, just as an example, right? Imagine you are trying to do something and you have to do 100 things in a project, and each time you do something, it's going to cost you a dollar. So if you have perfect data, the total cost of that project might be $100. But now let's say you have any percent perfect data and 20% flawed data by using this assumption that flawed data is 10 times as costly as perfect data. Your total costs now becomes $280 as opposed to $100. This is just for you to really think about as a CIO CTO, CHRO CEO, are we really paying attention and really closing the gaps that we have on our data infrastructure. If we don't do that, it's hard sometimes to see the snowball effect or to measure the overall impact. But as you can tell the price that goes up very, very quickly. So now, if I were to say, how do I communicate this? Or how do I break through some of these challenges or some of these various, right. I think the key is I am in analytics. I know statistics obviously, and love modeling and data and optimization theory and all that stuff. That's what I came to analytics. But now as a leader and as a change agent, I need to speak about value. And in this case, for example, for Schneider, there was this tagline called free up your energy. So the number one thing that they were asking from the analytics team was actually efficiency, which to me was very interesting. But once I understood that I understood what kind of language to use, how to connect it to the overall strategy and basically how to bring in the, the right leaders, because you need to focus on the leaders that you're going to make the most progress. Again, low effort, high value. You need to make sure you centralize all the data as you can. You need to bring in some kind of augmented analytics solution. And finally you need to make it super simple for the, in this case, I was working with the HR teams in other areas, so they can have access to one portal. They don't have to be confused in looking for 10 different places to find information. I think if you can actually have those four foundational pillars, obviously under the guise of having a data-driven culture, that's when you can actually make the impact. So in our case, it was about three years total transformation, but it was two years for this component of augmented analytics. It took about two years to talk to IT get leadership support, find the budgeting, get everybody on board, make sure the safe criteria was correct. And we call this initiative, the people analytics portal, it was actually launched in July of this year. And we were very excited and the audience was very excited to do this. In this case, we did our pilot in North America for many, many manufacturers. But one thing that is really important is as you bring along your audience on this, you're going from Excel, in some cases or Tableau to other tools like, ThoughtSpot, you need to really explain them what is the difference and how these tools can truly replace, some of the spreadsheets or some of the views that you might have on these other kind of tools. Again, Tableau, I think it's a really good tool. There are other many tools that you might have in your toolkit. But in my case, personally, I feel that you need to have one portal going back to Cindi's point. I really truly enable the end user. And I feel that this is the right solution for us, right? And I will show you some of the findings that we had in the pilot in the last two months. So this was a huge victory, and I will tell you why, because it took a lot of effort for us to get to the station. Like I said, it's been years for us to kind of lay the foundation, get the leadership, and shaping culture so people can understand why you truly need to invest on (indistinct) analytics. And so what I'm showing here is an example of how do we use basically, a tool to capture in video the qualitative findings that we had, plus the quantitative insights that we have. So in this case, our preliminary results based on our ambition for three main metrics, hours saved user experience and adoption. So for hours saved or a mission was to have 10 hours per week per employee save on average user experience, or ambition was 4.5. And adoption, 80%. In just two months, two months and a half of the pilot, we were able to achieve five hours per week per employee savings. Our user experience for 4.3 out of five and adoption of 60%. Really, really amazing work. But again, it takes a lot of collaboration for us to get to the stage from IT, legal, communications, obviously the operations teams and the users in HR safety and other areas that might be, basically stakeholders in this whole process. So just to summarize this kind of effort takes a lot of energy. You are a change agent. You need to have a courage to make the decision and understand that I feel that in this day and age, with all this disruption happening, we don't have a choice. We have to take the risk, right? And in this case, I feel a lot of satisfaction in how we were able to gain all these very source for this organization. And that gave me the confidence to know that the work has been done and we are now in a different stage for the organization. And so for me, it to say, thank you for everybody who has believed, obviously in our vision, everybody who has believe in the word that we were trying to do and to make the life of four workforce or customers or in community better. As you can tell, there is a lot of effort. There is a lot of collaboration that is needed to do something like this. In the end, I feel very satisfied. With the accomplishments of this transformation, and I just want to tell for you, if you are going right now in a moment that you feel that you have to swim upstream what would mentors, what would people in this industry that can help you out and guide you on this kind of a transformation is not easy to do is high effort, but is well worth it. And with that said, I hope you are well, and it's been a pleasure talking to you. Talk to you soon, take care. >> Thank you, Gustavo, that was amazing. All right, let's go to the panel. (air whooshing) >> Okay, now we're going to go into the panel and bring Cindi, Michelle, Tom, and Gustavo back and have an open discussion. And I think we can all agree how valuable it is to hear from practitioners. And I want to thank the panel for sharing their knowledge with the community. And one common challenge that I heard you all talk about was bringing your leadership and your teams along on the journey with you. We talk about this all the time, and it is critical to have support from the top. Why? Because it directs the middle and then it enables bottoms up innovation effects from the cultural transformation that you guys all talked about. It seems like another common theme we heard is that you all prioritize database decision-making in your organizations and you combine two of your most valuable assets to do that and create leverage, employees on the front lines. And of course the data. And as you rightly pointed out, Tom, the pandemic has accelerated the need for really leaning into this. The old saying, if it ain't broke don't fix it. Well COVID is broken everything. And it's great to hear from our experts, how to move forward. So let's get right into it. So Gustavo, let's start with you if I'm an aspiring change agent and let's say I'm a budding data leader. What do I need to start doing? What habits do I need to create for long lasting success? >> I think curiosity is very important. You need to be, like I say, in tune to what is happening, not only in your specific field, like I have a passion for analytics, I can do this for 50 years plus, but I think you need to understand wellbeing other areas across not only a specific business, as you know I come from, Sam's club Walmart, retail, I mean energy management technology. So you have to try to push yourself and basically go out of your comfort zone. I mean, if you are staying in your comfort zone and you want to use lean continuous improvement, that's just going to take you so far. What you have to do is, and that's what I try to do is I try to go into areas, businesses, and transformation that make me stretch and develop as a leader. That's what I'm looking to do so I can help transform the functions organizations and do the change management, change of mindset required for these kinds of efforts. >> Michelle, you're at the intersection of tech and sports and what a great combination, but they're both typically male oriented fields. I mean, we've talked a little bit about how that's changing, but two questions. Tell us how you found your voice and talk about why diversity matters so much more than ever now. >> No, I found my voice really as a young girl, and I think I had such amazing support from men in my life. And I think the support and sponsorship as well as sort of mentorship along the way, I've had amazing male mentors who have helped me understand that my voice is just as important as anyone else's. I mean, I have often heard, and I think it's been written about that a woman has to believe they'll 100% master topic before they'll talk about it where a man can feel much less mastery and go on and on. So I was that way as well. And I learned just by watching and being open, to have my voice. And honestly at times demand a seat at the table, which can be very uncomfortable. And you really do need those types of, support networks within an organization. And diversity of course is important and it has always been. But I think if anything, we're seeing in this country right now is that diversity among all types of categories is front and center. And we're realizing that we don't all think alike. We've always known this, but we're now talking about things that we never really talked about before. And we can't let this moment go unchecked and on, and not change how we operate. So having diverse voices within your company and in the field of tech and sports, I am often the first and only I'm was the first, CIO at the NFL, the first female senior executive. It was fun to be the first, but it's also, very challenging. And my responsibility is to just make sure that, I don't leave anyone behind and make sure that I leave it good for the next generation. >> Well, thank you for that. That is inspiring. And Cindi, you love data and the data's pretty clear that diversity is a good business, but I wonder if you can add your perspectives to this conversation? >> Yeah, so Michelle has a new fan here because she has found her voice. I'm still working on finding mine. And it's interesting because I was raised by my dad, a single dad. So he did teach me how to work in a predominantly male environment, but why I think diversity matters more now than ever before. And this is by gender, by race, by age, by just different ways of working in thinking is because as we automate things with AI, if we do not have diverse teams looking at the data and the models and how they're applied, we risk having bias at scale. So this is why I think I don't care what type of minority you are finding your voice, having a seat at the table and just believing in the impact of your work has never been more important. And as Michelle said more possible. >> Great perspectives, thank you. Tom I want to go to you. I mean, I feel like everybody in our businesses in some way, shape or form become a COVID expert, but what's been the impact of the pandemic on your organization's digital transformation plans? >> We've seen a massive growth actually in a digital business over the last, 12 months, really, even in celebration, right? Once COVID hit, we really saw that in the 200 countries and territories that we operate in today and service our customers, today, that there's been a huge need, right? To send money, to support family, to support, friends and support loved ones across the world. And as part of that we are very, honored to get to support those customers that we, across all the centers today. But as part of that acceleration we need to make sure that we had the right architecture and the right platforms to basically scale, right, to basically support and provide the right kind of security for our customers going forward. So as part of that, we did do some pivots and we did accelerate some of our plans on digital to help support that overall growth coming in and to support our customers going forward, because there were these times during this pandemic, right? This is the most important time. And we need to support those that we love and those that we care about and doing that it's one of those ways is actually by sending money to them, support them financially. And that's where, really our part of that our services come into play that we really support those families. So it was really a great opportunity for us to really support and really bring some of our products to this level and supporting our business going forward. >> Awesome, thank you. Now I want to come back to Gustavo, Tom I'd love for you to chime in too. Did you guys ever think like you were, you were pushing the envelope too much in doing things with data or the technology that was just maybe too bold, maybe you felt like at some point it was failing or you're pushing your people too hard. Can you share that experience and how you got through it? >> Yeah, the way I look at it is, again, whenever I go to an organization, I ask the question, hey, how fast you would like transform. And, based on the agreements from the leadership and the vision that we want to take place, I take decisions. And I collaborate in a specific way now, in the case of COVID, for example, right. It forces us to remove silos and collaborate in a faster way. So to me, it was an opportunity to actually integrate with other areas and drive decisions faster, but make no mistake about it. When you are doing a transformation, you are obviously trying to do things faster than sometimes people are comfortable doing, and you need to be okay with that. Sometimes you need to be okay with tension, or you need to be okay debating points or making repetitive business cases until people connect with the decision because you understand, and you are seeing that, "hey, the CEO is making a one two year, efficiency goal. "The only way for us to really do more with less "is for us to continue this path. "We cannot just stay with the status quo. "We need to find a way to accelerate the transformation." That's the way I see it. >> How about you Tom, we were talking earlier with Sudheesh and Cindi, about that bungee jumping moment. What could you share? >> Yeah, I think you hit upon it, right now, the pace of change with the slowest pace that you see for the rest of your career. So as part of that, right, that's what I tell my team is that you need to be, you need to feel comfortable being uncomfortable. I mean, that we have to be able to basically scale, right, expand and support that the ever-changing needs in the marketplace and industry our customers today, and that pace of change that's happening, right. And what customers are asking for and the competition in the marketplace, it's only going to accelerate. So as part of that, as you look at what, how you're operating today in your current business model, right. Things are only going to get faster. So you have to plan into a line into drive the agile transformation so that you can scale even faster in the future. So as part of that, that's what we're putting in place here, right, is how do we create that underlying framework and foundation that allows the organization to basically continue to scale and evolve into the future? >> Yeah, we're definitely out of our comfort zones, but we're getting comfortable with it. So, Cindi, last question, you've worked with hundreds of organizations, and I got to believe that, some of the advice you gave when you were at Gartner, which is pre COVID, maybe sometimes clients didn't always act on it. They're not on my watch for whatever variety of reasons, but it's being forced on them now. But knowing what you know now that we're all in this isolation economy, how would you say that advice has changed? Has it changed? What's your number one action and recommendation today? >> Yeah, well, first off, Tom just freaked me out. What do you mean? This is the slowest ever even six months ago I was saying the pace of change in data and analytics is frenetic. So, but I think you're right, Tom, the business and the technology together is forcing this change. Now, Dave, to answer your question, I would say the one bit of advice, maybe I was a little more, very aware of the power and politics and how to bring people along in a way that they are comfortable. And now I think it's, you know what you can't get comfortable. In fact, we know that the organizations that were already in the cloud have been able to respond and pivot faster. So if you really want to survive as Tom and Gustavo said, get used to being uncomfortable, the power and politics are going to happen. Break the rules, get used to that and be bold. Do not be afraid to tell somebody they're wrong and they're not moving fast enough. I do think you have to do that with empathy, as Michelle said, and Gustavo, I think that's one of the key words today besides the bungee jumping. So I want to know where's the dish going to go bungee jumping. >> Guys fantastic discussion, really. Thanks again to all the panelists and the guests. It was really a pleasure speaking with you today. Really virtually all of the leaders that I've spoken to in the Cube program. Recently, they tell me that the pandemic is accelerating so many things, whether it's new ways to work, we heard about new security models and obviously the need for cloud. I mean, all of these things are driving true enterprise wide digital transformation, not just, as I said before, lip service. Sometimes we minimize the importance and the challenge of building culture and in making this transformation possible. But when it's done, right, the right culture is going to deliver tremendous results. Yeah, what does that mean getting it right? Everybody's trying to get it right. My biggest takeaway today is it means making data part of the DNA of your organization. And that means making it accessible to the people in your organization that are empowered to make decisions, decisions that can drive new revenue, cut costs, speed access to critical care, whatever the mission is of your organization. Data can create insights and informed decisions that drive value. Okay. Let's bring back Sudheesh and wrap things up. Sudheesh, please bring us home. >> Thank you. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, the Cube team, and thank goes to all of our customers and partners who joined us and thanks to all of you for spending the time with us. I want to do three quick things and then close it off. The first thing is I want to summarize the key takeaways that I had from all four of our distinguished speakers. First, Michelle, I will simply put it. She said it really well. That is be brave and drive. Don't go for a drive along. That is such an important point. Oftentimes, you know that I think that you have to do to make the positive change that you want to see happen but you wait for someone else to do it, not just, why not you? Why don't you be the one making that change happen? That's the thing that I've picked up from Michelle's talk. Cindi talked about finding the importance of finding your voice. Taking that chair, whether it's available or not, and making sure that your ideas, your voices are heard, and if it requires some force, then apply that force. Make sure your ideas are heard. Gustavo talked about the importance of building consensus, not going at things all alone sometimes building the importance of building the quorum. And that is critical because if you want the changes to last, you want to make sure that the organization is fully behind it. Tom, instead of a single takeaway, what I was inspired by is the fact that a company that is 170 years old, 170 years old, 200 companies and 200 countries they're operating in. And they were able to make the change that is necessary through this difficult time. So in a matter of months, if they could do it, anyone could. The second thing I want to do is to leave you with a takeaway that is I would like you to go to topspot.com/nfl because our team has made an app for NFL on Snowflake. I think you will find this interesting now that you are inspired and excited because of Michelle's talk. And the last thing is please go to thoughtspot.com/beyond our global user conference is happening in this December. We would love to have you join us. It's again, virtual, you can join from anywhere. We are expecting anywhere from five to 10,000 people, and we would love to have you join and see what we've been up to since last year. We have a lot of amazing things in store for you, our customers, our partners, our collaborators, they will be coming and sharing. We'll be sharing things that we've have been working to release something that will come out next year. And also some of the crazy ideas our engineers have been cooking up. All of those things will be available for you at the Thought Spot Beyond. Thank you. Thank you so much.

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation [Music] hi buddy this is Dave Volante and welcome to this cute conversation you know the we've been following a company called Activia for quite some time now they they've really popularized the concept of copy data management really innovative Boston based Waltham based company and with me Brian Regan who's the chief marketing officer and all 40 who's the newly minted chief revenue officer of actifi Oh guys great to see you I wish we were face to face that you're you're you're June event but this will have to do yeah you bet yeah so you know Brian you've been on the cube a bunch I'm gonna start with Paul if that's okay Paul you know just let's talk a little bit about your your background you've you've done a number of stance at a variety of companies you know big companies like IBM and others as well what attracted you to Activia in all honesty I've been a software guy and candidly a data specific leader for many many years and so IT infrastructure particularly associated around data has always been sort of my forte for fun on words there and and so Activia was just smack dab in the middle of that right and so when I was looking for my next adventure you know I had an opportunity to to meet with a shower CEO and Founder and describe and discuss kind of what activity was all about and candidly the the number of connections that we had that were the same a lot of our OEM relationships with people that I actually worked with and for and some that worked for me historically so it was almost this perfect world right and I'm a Boston guy so it was in my in my old backyard and it was just a perfect yeah it was a perfect match for what I was looking for which was really a small growth company that was trying to you know get to the next level that had compelling technology in a space that I was super familiar with and understanding and articulate the value proposition well as we're saying in Boston Paulie we got to get you back here I know I pack my cock let's talk about the let's talk about the climate right now I mean nobody expected this of course I mean it's funny I was I saw ash and an event in in Boston last fall we were talking like hey what do you expected for next year yeah a little bit of softening but you know nobody expected this sort of Black Swan but you guys I just got your press release you put out you had a good you had a good quarter you had a record first quarter um what's going on in the marketplace how you guys doing yeah well I think that today more than than ever businesses are realizing that data is what is actually going to carry them through this crisis and that data whether it's changing the nature of how companies interact with their customers how they manage through their supply chain and in frankly how they take care of their employees is all very data-centric and so businesses that are protecting that data that are helping businesses get faster access to that data and ultimately give them choice as to where they manage that data on-premises in the cloud and hybrid configuration those are the businesses that are really going to be top of a CIOs mind I think our q1 is a demonstration that customers voted with their wallets in their confidence in ectopy Oh has an important part of their data supplied nopal I want to come back to you first of all your your other people know you're next you're next Army Ranger so thank you for your service that's awesome you know I was talking to Frank's lute man we interviewed me other day and he was sharing with me sort of how he manages and and he says the other managed by a playbook he's a situational manager and that's something that he learned in the military well this is weird this is a situation okay and that really is kind of how you're trained and and of course we've never seen anything like this but you're trained to deal with things that you've never seen before so how are you seeing organizations generally actifi Oh specifically going to manage through this process what are some of the moves that you're advising recommending give us some insight there yeah so I'm it's really interesting it's a it's funny that you mentioned my military background I was just having this discussion with one of my leaders the other day that you know one of the things that they trained for in the military is the eventualities of chaos right and so when you when you do an exercise they we will literally tap the leader on the shoulder and say okay you're now dead and without that person being allowed to speak they take a knee and the unit has to go on and so what happens is you you learn by muscle memory like how to react in time suffice it or and you know this is a classic example of leadership and crisis and so um so it's just it's just interesting like so to me you have a playbook I think everybody needs to start with a playbook and then start with a plan I can't remember if it was Mike Tyson but one of them one of my famous quotes was you know let you know plan is good until somebody punches you in the face that's the reality of what just happened the business across the globe is it just got punched in the face and so you got a playbook that you rely on and then you have to remain nimble and creative and candidly opportunistic and from a leadership perspective I think you can't lose your confidence right so I've watched some of my friends and of what some other businesses crippled in the midst of this and I'm because they're afraid instead of instead of looking at this in my first commentary that our first staff meeting Brian if I remember it was this okay so what makes active feel great in disembark like not why is it not great right and so we didn't get scared we jumped right into it we you know we adjusted our playbook a little bit and candidly we just had a record quarter and we just down here the honestly date we took down deals in every single geography around the globe to include Italy I mean so it was insane it was really fun okay so this wasn't just one monster deal that gave you that record Porter is really a broad-based the demand yeah so if you you know if you dug underneath the covers you would see that we had the largest number of transactions ever in the first quarter we had the largest average selling price in the first quarter ever we had the largest contribution from our panel partners and our OEM partners ever and we had the highest number ever and so it was a it was really a nice truly balanced performance across the globe and across the size of deal sets and candidly across industries interesting I mean you use the term opportunistic and and I think you're right on I mean you obviously you don't want to be chasing ambulances at the same time you know we've talked to a lot of CEOs and essentially what they're doing and I'd like to get your feedback on this Brian you you you're kind of reassessing the ideal profile of a customer you're reassessing your value proposition in the context of the current pandemic and and I noticed that you guys in your press release talked about cyber resiliency you talked about digital initiatives you know data center transformations etc so maybe you could talk a little bit about that Brian did you do those things how did you do those things what kind of pace were you guys at how did you do it remotely with everybody working from home give us some color on that sure and you know Ashley if you were here you would probably remind us that Activia was born in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis so we we have essentially been bookended by two black swans over the last decade the and the lessons we learned in 2008 are every bit as as relevant today everything starts with cost containment in hospital and in protection of the business and so cio is in the midst of this shock to the system I think we're very much looking at what are the absolutely vital critical initiatives and what is a nice to have and I'm going to pause on my step and invest entirely in the critical mission and the critical initiatives tended to be around getting people safely working for remotely getting people safe access to their systems and their applications in their data and then ultimately it also became about protecting the systems from malicious individuals and state actors up unfortunately as we've seen in other times of crisis this is when crime and cyber crime particularly tends to spike particularly against industries that don't have the strong safeguards in place to to really ensure the resiliency their applications so we very much went a little bit back to the 2008 playbook around helping people get control of their costs helping people continue to do the things they need to do at a much more infrastructure light manner but also really emphasize the fact that if you are under attack or if you are concerned that you're infected but you don't know when you know instant access to data and a time machine that can take you back and forth to those points in time is something that is incredibly valuable so so let's >> cyber resiliency so specifically what is aekta video doing for its customers from a product standpoint capabilities maybe it's part of the the 10 see announcement as well but but can you can you give us some specifics on where you fit in let's take that use case cyber resiliency yeah absolutely so I think there's there's a staff of capabilities when it comes to cyber resiliency at the lowest level you need a time machine because most people don't know when they're in fact and so the ability to go back in time test the recoverability of data test the validity of the data is step one step two is once you've found the clean point being able to resume operations being able to resume the applications operation instantly or very rapidly is the next phase and that's something that Activia was founded on this notion of instant access to data and then the third phase and this is really where our partnerships really shine is you probably want to go back and mitigate that risk you want to go back and clean that system you want to go back and find the infection and eliminate it and that's where our partnership with IBM freezing resiliency services and their cyber incident recovery solution which takes the activity of platform and then rappers and a complete managed services around it so they can help the customer not only get their their systems and applications back on their feet but clean the systems and allow them to resume operations normally on a much safer and more stable okay so so that's interesting so Paul Paul was it kind of new adoptions was it was it increases from existing customers kind of a combination and you talk to that yeah totally so like ironically to really come clean we are the metrics that we had in the first quarter were very similar through the metrics that we see historically so the mix need our existing customer base and then our new customer acquisition were very similar to our historical metrics which candidly we were a little surprised by we anticipated um that the majority of our business would come from that safe harbor of your existing customer base but candidly we had a really nice split which was great which meant that you know a value proposition was resonating not only with our existing customer base where you would expect it but also in in any of our new customers as well who had been evaluating us that either accelerated or or just continue down the path of adoption during the time frame of Koba 19 across industries I would say that again um there was there were there were some industries I would say that pushed pause and so the ones that you can imagine that accelerated during during this past period were the ones you would think of right so financial institutions primarily as well as some some of the medical so some of those transactions healthcare and medical they accelerated along with financial institutions and then I would say that that we did have some industries that push pause and you can probably guess what some of those are a majority of those were the ones that we're dealing with the small and mid-sized businesses or consumer facing businesses things like retail stuff like that where we typically do have a pretty nice residence in a really nice value proposition but there were there were definitely some transactions that we saw basically just pause like we're going to come back but overall the yeah the feedback was just in general it felt like any other quarter and it felt like just pretty normal as strange as that sounds because I know speaking to a lot of my friends and gear companies your software companies they didn't have that experience but we did pretty well that's interesting I mean you're right I mean certain industries Airlines I'm interviewing a cio of major resort next week you know really interested to hear how they're you know dealing with this but those those are obviously depressed and they've dialed everything down but but we've we were one of the first to report that work from home pivot it didn't it didn't you know buffer the decline in IT spending that were expecting to be down you know maybe as much as 5% this year but it definitely offset it what about cloud we're seeing elevated levels in cloud demand guys you know have offerings there what are you seeing in cloud guys you want that yeah I'll start and then fall please please weigh in I think that'd be the move to the cloud that we've been witnessing and the acceleration of the MOOC table that we've been whipped over the past several years probably ramped up in intensity over the last two months The Improv been on the you know 18 to 24 month road map have all of a sudden been accelerated into maybe this year but in terms of the wholesale you know everything moves to cloud and I abandoned my on-premises estate I I don't think we've seen that quite yet I think the the world is still hybrid when it comes to cloud although I do think that the beneficiaries of this are probably the the non number one or number two cloud providers but the rest of the hyper scalers who are fighting for market share because now they have an opportunity to perhaps google for example a strategic partner of ours has a you know a huge offering when it comes to enabling work home and remote work so leveraging that as a platform and then extending into their enterprise offerings I think gives them a wedge that the you know Amazon might not have so this it's an acceleration of interest but I think it's just a continuation of the trend of seeing four years yeah and I would add a little bit if the you know IBM held their think conference this past week I don't know if you had an opportunity to participate there one of our OEM partners and oh yeah because you know when our the CEO presented his kind of opening his opening remarks it was really about digital transformation and he really he really kind of put it down to two things and said you know any business that's trying to transform is either talking about hybrid cloud but they're talking about AI and machine learning and that's kind of it right and so every digital business is talking in one of those categories and so when I look 2q1 it's interesting that we really didn't see anything other than as brian talked about all the cloud business which is some version of an acceleration but outside of that the customers that are in those industries that are in position to accelerate and double down during this opportunity didn't so and those that did not you know kind of just peeled back a little bit but overall I still I would agree with with ibm's assessment of the market that you know those are kind of the two hot spots and have a cloud is hot and the good news is we've got a nice guy operating Molloy yeah Arvind Krista talked about the the in and it has it maybe not I think but he talked earlier in his remarks on the earnings call just in Publix Davis that IBM must win the battle the architectural battle the hybrid cloud and also that he wants to lead with a more technical sell essentially which is submitted to me those those two things are great news for you guys obviously you know Red Hat is the linchpin of that I want to ask you guys about your your conference data-driven so we were there last year it was a great really great intimate event of course you know you hand up the physical events anymore so you've pushed to September you're going all digital would give us the update on on that program we're um we're eager to have the cube participate in our September event so I'm sure we'll be talking more about that in the coming weeks but awesome we love it we exactly so you can tell Frank to put that so we we've been participating in some of the other conferences I think most notably last week learning a lot and and really trying to cherry pick the best ideas and the best tactics for putting on a digital event I think that as we look to September and as we look to put on a really rich digital event one of the things that is I think first and foremost in our minds is we want to actually produce more on-demand digital content particularly from a technology standpoint our technology sessions last year were oversubscribed the digital format allows people to stream whenever they can and frankly as many sessions as they as they might so I think we can be far more efficient in terms of delivering technical content or the users of our technology and then we're also eager to have as we've done with data driven in the years past our customers tell the story of how they're using data and this year certainly I think we're going to hear a lot of stories about in particular how they use data during this incredible you know crisis and and hopefully renewal from crisis well one of my favorite interviews last year your show is the the guys from draft King so hopefully they'll be back on it will have some football to talk about let's hope I mean I want it I want to end with just sort of this notion of you know we've been so tactical the last eight weeks right I'm you guys too I'm sure just making sure you're there for customers making sure your employees are ok but as we start to think about coming out of this you know into a post probe Adaro it looks like it's gonna be with us for a while but we're getting back the you know quasi opening so I'm hearing you know hybrid is here to stay we agree for sure cyber resiliency is very interesting I think you know one of the things we've said is that that companies may sub optimize near-term profitability to make sure that they've got the flexibility and resilience business resiliency in place you know that's obviously something that is I think good news for you guys but but I'll start with Paul and then maybe Brian you can bring us home how do you see this sort of emergence from this lockdown and into the post ghovat era yeah so this is a really interesting topic for me in fact I've had many discussions over the last couple weeks with some of our investors as well as our executive staff and so my personal belief is that the way buying and selling has occurred for IT specifically at the enterprise level is about to go through a transformation no different than we watched the transformation of SAS businesses when you basically replace the cold-calling salesperson with an inside and you know inbound marketing kind of effort followed up with SDR and vdr because what we're finding is that our clients now are able to meet more frequently because we don't have the friction of airplane ride or or physical building to go through and so like that that whole thing has been removed from the sales process and so it's interesting to me that one of the things that I'm starting to see is that the amount of activity that our sales organization is doing and the amount of physical calls that were going on they happen to be online however you couple that with the cost savings of not traveling around the globe and not being in offices and and I really think that those companies that embrace this new model are gonna find ways to penetrate more customers in a less expensive way and I do believe that the professional sales enterprise salesperson of tomorrow is gonna look at then it looks today and so I'm super excited to be in a company that is smack dab in the middle of selling to enterprise clients and and watching us learn together how we're gonna buy sell and market to each other in this post public way because I I'm the only thing I really do know it's just not gonna be the way it used to be what is it gonna look like I think all of us are placing bets and I don't think anybody has the answer yet but it's gonna look different for sure they're very very thoughtful comments and so Brian you know our thinking is the differentiation and the war yes it gets one in digital how is that affecting you know sort of your marketing and your thing around that we we fortunately decided coming into 2020 our fiscal 21 that we were actually going to overweight digital anyway we felt that it was far more effective we were seeing far better conversion rates we saw you know way better ROI in terms of very targeted tentative digital campaigns or general-purpose ABM type of efforts so our strategy had essentially been set and and what this provided us is the opportunity to essentially redirect all of the other funds individually so you know we have essentially a two-pronged marketing you know attack Frank now which is you know digital creating inbounds and B DRS that are calling on those in bounds that are created digital and so it's a you know it's going to be a really interesting transition back when physical events if and when they do actually come back into form you know how much we decide to actually go back into that that been I think that you know to someone to some extent we've talked about this in the past II you know the physical events and the the sheer spectacle and this year you know audacity of having to spend a million dollars just to break through that was an unsustainable model and so I think this is this is hastening perhaps the decline or demise of really silly marketing expense and getting back to telling telling customers what they need to know to help their an assist their buying journey in their investigation journey into a new technology I mean the IT world is hybrid and I think the events world is also going to be hybrid to me nice intimate events you know they're gonna live on but they're also gonna have a major digital component to them I'm very excited that you know we're a lot of learnings now in digital especially around events and by September the a lot of the the bugs are gonna be worked out you know we've been going to it so it feels like 24/7 but really excited to have you guys on thanks so much really looking forward to working with you in in September it's data-driven so guys thanks a lot for coming on the cube oh my gosh thank you Dave so nice it's so nice to be here thank you alright pleasure you did thank you everybody thank you and thanks for watching this is Dave Volante for the cube and we'll see you next time [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Live, from Washington DC. It's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit here in Washington DC. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of John Furrier. We are excited to welcome to the program, General Keith Alexander former NSA Director, the first Commander to lead the US Cyber Command, Four-star General with a 40 year career. Thank you so much for coming theCUBE, we are honored, we are honored to have you. >> It is an honor to be here. Thank you. >> So let's talk about cyber threats. Let's start there and have you just give us your observations, your thoughts on what are the most pressing cyber threats that keep you up at night? >> Well, so, when you think about threats, you think about Nation States, so you can go to Iran, Russia, China, North Korea. And then you think about criminal threats, well all the things like ransomware. Some of the Nation State actors are also criminals at night so they can use Nation State tools. And my concern about all the evolution of cyber-threats, is that the attacks are getting more destructive, the malware has more legs with worms and the impact on our commercial sector and our nation, increasingly bigger. So you have all those from cyber. And then I think the biggest impact to our country is the theft of intellectual property, right. That's our future. So you look out on this floor here, think about all the technical talent. Now imagine that every idea that we have, somebody else is stealing, making a product out of it, competing with us, and beating us. That's kind of what Huawei did, taking CISCO code to make Huawei, and now they're racing down that road. So we have a couple of big issues here to solve, protect our future, that intellectual property, stop the theft of money and other ideas, and protect our nation. So when you think about cyber, that's what I think about going to. Often times I'll talk about the Nation State threat. The most prevalent threats is this criminal threat and the most, I think, right now, important for us strategically is the theft of intellectual property. >> So why don't we just have a digital force to counter all this? Why doesn't, you know, we take the same approach we did when we, you know, we celebrated the 75th anniversary D-day, okay, World War II, okay, that was just recently in the news. That's a physical war, okay. We have a digital war happening whether you call it or not. I think it is, personally my opinion. I think it is. You're seeing the misinformation campaigns, financial institutions leaving England, like it's nobody's business. I mean it crippled the entire UK, that like a big hack. Who knows? But its happening digitally. Where's the forces? Is that Cyber Command? What do you do? >> So that's Cyber Command. You bring out an important issue. And protecting the nation, the reason we set up Cyber Command not just to get me promoted, but that was a good outcome. (laughing) But it was actually how do we defend the country? How do we defend ourselves in cyber? So you need a force to do it. So you're right, you need a force. That force is Cyber Command. There's an issue though. Cyber Command cannot see today, attacks on our country. So they're left to try to go after the offense, but all the offense has to do is hit over here. They're looking at these sets of targets. They don't see the attacks. So they wouldn't have seen the attack on Sony. They don't see these devastating attacks. They don't see the thefts. So the real solution to what you bring up is make it visible, make it so our nation can defend itself from cyber by seeing the attacks that are hitting us. That should help us protect companies in sectors and help us share that information. It has to be at speed. So we talk about sharing, but it's senseless for me to send you for air traffic control, a letter, that a plane is located overhead. You get it in the mail seven days later, you think, well-- >> Too late. >> That's too late. >> Or fighting blindfolded. >> That's right. >> I mean-- >> So you can't do either. And so what it gets you to, is we have to create the new norm for visibility in cyber space. This does a whole host of things and you were good to bring out, it's also fake news. It's also deception. It's all these other things that are going on. We have to make that visible. >> How do you do that, though? >> What do you do? I do that. (laughing) So the way you do it, I think, is start at the beginning. What's happening to the network? So, on building a defensible framework, you've got to be able to see the attacks. Not what you expect, but all the attacks. So that's anomaly detection. So that's one of the things we have to do. And then you have to share that at network speed. And then you have to have a machine-learning expert system AI to help you go at the speeds the attacker's going to go at. On fake-news, this is a big problem. >> Yeah. >> You know. This has, been throughout time. Somebody pointed out about, you know, George Washington, right, seven fake letters, written to say, "Oh no, I think the King's good." He never wrote that. And the reason that countries do it, like Russia, in the elections, is to change something to more beneficial for them. Or at least what they believe is more beneficial. It is interesting, MIT has done some studies, so I've heard, on this. And that people are 70% more like to re-Tweet, re-Tweet fake news than they are the facts. So. >> Because it's more sensational, because it's-- >> That's food. It's good for you, in a way. But it's tasty. >> Look at this. It's kind of something that you want to talk about. "Can you believe what these guys are doing? "That's outrageous, retweet." >> Not true. >> Not true. Oh, yeah, but it makes me mad just thinking about it. >> Right, right. >> And so, you get people going, and you think, You know, it's like going into a bar and you know, you go to him, "He thinks you're ugly." and you go to me, and you go, "He thinks you're ugly." (laughs) And so we get going and you started it and we didn't even talk. >> Right, right. >> And so that's what Russia does. >> At scale too. >> At scale. >> At the scale point. >> So part of the solution to that is understanding where information is coming from, being able to see the see the environment like you do the physical environment at speed. I think step one, if I were to pick out the logical sequence of what'll happen, we'll get to a defensible architecture over the next year or two. We're already starting to see that with other sectors, so I think we can get there. As soon as you do that, now you're into, how do I know that this news is real. It's kind of like a block-chain for facts. How do we now do that in this way. We've got to figure that out. >> We're doing our part there. But I want to get back to this topic of infrastructure, because digital, okay, there's roads, there's digital roads, there's packets moving round. You mentioned Huawei ripping off CISCO, which takes their R and D and puts it in their pockets. They have to get that. But we let fake news and other things, you've got payload, content or payload, and then you've got infrastructure distribution. Right, so, we're getting at here as that there are literally roads and bridges and digital construction apparatus, infrastructure, that needs to be understood, addressed, monitored, or reset, because you've had email that's been around for awhile. But these are new kinds of infrastructure, but the payload, malware, fake news, whatever it is. There's an interaction between payload and infrastructure. Your thoughts and reaction to that as a Commander, thinking about how to combat all this? >> I, my gut reaction, is that you're going to have to change, we will have to change, how we think about that. It's not any more roads and avenues in. It's all the environment. You know, it's like this whole thing. Now the whole world is opened up. It's like the Matrix. You open it up and there it is. It's everything. So what we have to do is think about is if it's everything, how do we now operate in a world where you have both truths and fiction? That's the harder problem. So that's where I say, if we solve the first problem, we're so far along in establishing perhaps the level so it raises us up to a level where we're now securing it, where we can begin to see now the ideas for the pedigree of information I think will come out. If you think about the amount of unique information created every year, there are digital videos that claim it's doubling every year or more. If that's true, that half of, 75% of it is fiction, we've got a big road to go. And you know there is a lot of fiction out there, so we've got to fix it. And the unfortunate part is both sides of that, both the fiction and the finding the fiction, has consequences because somebody says that "A wasn't true, "That person, you know, they're saying, he was a rapist, "he was a robber, he was a drugger," and then they find out it was all fake, but he still has that stigma. And then the person over here says, "See, they accused me of that. "They're out to get me in other areas. "They can exclaim what they want." >> But sometimes the person saying that is also a person who has a lot of power in our government, who is saying that it's fake news, when it's not fake news, or, you know what, I-- >> So that's part of the issue. >> It's a very different climate >> Some of it is fake. Some of it's not. And that's what makes it so difficult for the public. So you could say, "That piece was fake, "maybe not the other six." But the reality is, and I think this is where the media can really help. This is where you can help. How do we set up the facts? And I think that's the hardest part. >> It's the truth. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's a data problem. And you know, we've talked about this off camera in the past. Data is critical for the systems to work. The visibility of the data. Having contextual data, the behavioral data. This gets a lot of the consequences. There's real consequences to this one. Theft, IP, freedom, lives. My son was video-gaming the other day and I could hear his friends all talking, "What's your ping start word? "What's your ping time? "I got lag, I'm dead." And this is a video game. Military, lagging, is not a game. People are losing their lives, potentially if they don't have the right tactical edge, access to technology. I know this is near and dear to your heart. I want to get your reaction. The Department of Defense is deploying strategies to make our military in the field, which represents 85% infantry, I believe, some statistic around that number, is relying on equipment. Technology can help, you know, that. Your thoughts on, the same direction. >> Going to the Cloud. Their effort to go to the Cloud is a great step forward, because it addresses just what you're saying. You know, everybody used to have their own data centers. But a data center has a fixed amount of computational capability. Once you reach it, you have to get another data center, or you just live with what you've got. In the Cloud if the problem's bigger, elasticity. Just add more corridors. And you can do things now that we could never do before. Perhaps even more importantly, you can make the Clouds global. And you can see around the world. Now you're talking about encrypted data. You're talking about ensuring that you have a level of encryption that you need, accesses and stuff. For mobile forces, that's the future. You don't carry a data center around with an infantry battalion. So you want that elasticity and you need the connectivity and you need the training to go with it. And the training gets you to what we were just talking about. When somebody serves up something wrong, and this happened to me in combat, in Desert Storm. We were launched on, everybody was getting ready to launch on something, and I said, "This doesn't sound right." And I told the Division Commander, "I don't agree. "I think this is crazy. "The Iraqis are not attacking us down this line. "I think it's old news. "I think somebody's taken an old report that we had "and re-read it and said oh my God, they're coming." And when we found out that was a JSTARS, remember how the JSTARS MTI thing would off of a wire, would look like a convoy. And that's what it was. So you have to have both. >> So you were on the cusp of an attack, deploying troops. >> That's right. >> On fake information, or misinformation, not accurate-- >> Old information. >> Old information. >> Old information. >> Old, fake, it's all not relevant. >> Well what happens is somebody interprets that to be true. So it gets back to you, how do you interpret the information? So there's training. It's a healthy dose of skepticism, you know. There are aliens in this room. Well, maybe not. (laughing) >> As far as we know. >> That's what everybody. >> But what a fascinating anecdote that you just told, about being in Desert Storm and having this report come and you saying, "Guys, this doesn't sound right." I mean, how often do you harken back to your experience in the military and when you were actually in combat, versus what you are doing today in terms of thinking about these threats? >> A lot. Because in the military, when you have troops in danger your first thought is how can I do more, how can I do better, what can I do to get them the intelligence they need? And you can innovate, and pressure is great innovator. (crunching sound) And it was amazing. And our Division Commander, General Griffith, was all into that. He said, "I trust you. "Do whatever you want." And we, it was amazing. So, I think that's a good thing. Note that when you go back and look at military campaigns, there's always this thing, the victor writes the history. (laughing) So you know, hopefully, the victor will write the truthful history. But that's not always the case. Sometimes history is re-written to be more like what they would like it to be. So, this fake news isn't new. This is something where I think journalists, historians, and others, can come together and say, "You know, that don't make sense. "Let's get the facts." >> But there's so much pressure on journalists today in this 24-hour news cycle, where you're not only expected to write the story, but you're expected to be Tweeting about it, or do a podcast about it later, to get that first draft of history right. >> So it may be part of that is as the reporter is saying it, step back and say, "Here's what we've been told." You know, we used to call those a certain type of sandwich, not a good-- (laughing) If memory serves it's a sandwich. One of these sandwiches. You're getting fed that, you're thinking, "You know, this doesn't make sense. "This time and day that this would occur." "So while we've heard this report. "It's sensational. "We need to go with the facts." And that's one of the areas that I think we really got to work. >> Journalism's changing too. I can tell you, from we've talked, data drives us. We've no advertising. Completely different model. In-depth interviews. The truth is out there. The key is how do you get the truth in context to real-time information for those right opportunities. Well, I want to get before we go, and thanks for coming on, and spending the time, General, I really appreciate it. Your company that you've formed, IronNet, okay, you're applying a lot of your discipline and knowledge in military cyber and cutting-edge tech. Tell us about your company. >> So one of the things that you, we brought up, and discussed here. When I had Cyber Command, one of the frustrations that I discussed with both Secretary Gates and Secretary Panetta, we can't see attacks on our country. And that's the commercial sector needs to help go fix that. The government can't fix that. So my thought was now that I'm in the commercial sector, I'll help fix the ability to see attacks on the commercial sector so we can share it with the government. What that entails is creating a behavioral analytic system that creates events, anomalies, an expert system with machine-learning and AI, that helps you understand what's going on and the ability to correlate and then give that to the government, so they can see that picture, so they have a chance of defending our country. So step one is doing that. Now, truth and lending, it's a lot harder than I thought it would be. (laughing) You know, I had this great saying, "Nothing is too hard "for those of us who don't have to do it." "How hard can this be?" Those were two of my favorite sayings. Now that I have to do it, I can say that it's hard, but it's doable. We can do this. And it's going to take some time. We are getting traction. The energy sector has been great to work with in this area. I think within a year, what we deploy with the companies, and what we push up to the Cloud and the ability to now start sharing that with government will change the way we think about cyber security. I think it's a disruptor. And we have to do that because that's the way they're going to attack us, with AI. We have to have a fast system to defend. >> I know you got to go, tight schedule here, but I want to get one quick question in. I know you're not a policy, you know, wonk, as they say, or expert. Well, you probably are an expert on policy, but if we can get a re-do on reshaping policy to enable these hard problems to be solved by entrepreneurs like yourself expertise that are coming into the space, quickly, with ideas to solve these big problems, whether it's fake news or understanding attacks. What do the policy makers need to do? Is it get out of the way? Do they rip up everything? Do they reshape it? What's your vision on this? What's your opinion? >> I think and I think the acting Secretary of Defense is taking this on and others. We've got to have a way of quickly going, this technology changes every two years or better. Our acquisition cycle is in many years. Continue to streamline the acquisition process. Break through that. Trust that the military and civilian leaders will do the right thing. Hold 'em accountable. You know, making the mistake, Amazon, Jeff Bezos, says a great thing, "Go quickly to failure so we can get "to success." And we in the military say, "If you fail, you're a dummy." No, no, try it. If it doesn't work, go on to success. So don't crush somebody because they failed, because they're going to succeed at some point. Try and try again. Persevere. The, so, I think a couple of things, ensure we fix the acquisition process. Streamline it. And allow Commanders and thought leaders the flexibility and agility to bring in the technology and ideas we need to make this a better military, a better intelligence community, and a better country. We can do this. >> All right. All right, I'm thinking Rosie the Riveter. We can do this. (laughing) >> We can do it. Just did it. >> General Alexander, thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE. (electronic music)

(upbeat techno music) >> Live from Barcelona Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, The Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome back, this is The Cube's coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019. I'm Stu Miniman with Corey Quinn as my cohost, even though he says kucon. And joining us on this segment, we're not going debate how we pronounce certain things, but I will try to make sure that I get Bridget Kromhout correct. She is a Principle Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. Thank you for coming back to The Cube. >> Thank you for having me again. This is fun! >> First of all I do have to say, the bedazzled shirt is quite impressive. We always love the sartorial, ya know, view we get at a show like this because there are some really interesting shirts and there is one guy in a three-piece suit. But ya know-- >> There is, it's the high style, got to have that. >> Oh, absolutely. >> Bringing some class to the joint. >> Wearing a suit is my primary skill. (laughing) >> I will tell you that, yes, they sell this shirt on the Microsoft company store. And yes, it's only available in unisex fitted. Which is to say much like Alice Goldfuss likes to put it, ladies is gender neutral. So, all of the gentleman who say, but I have too much dad bod to wear that shirt! I say, well ya know get your bedazzlers out. You too can make your own shirt. >> I say it's not dad bod, it's a father figure, but I digress. (laughing) >> Exactly! >> Alright, so Bridget you're doing some speaking at the conference. You've been at this show a few times. Tell us, give us a bit of an overview of what you're doing here and your role at Microsoft these days. >> Absolutely. So, my talk is tomorrow and I think that, I'm going to go with its a vote of confidence that they put your talk on the last day at 2:00 P.M. instead of the, oh gosh, are they trying to bury it? But no, it's, I have scheduled enough conferences myself that I know that you have to put some stuff on the last day that people want to go to, or they're just not going to come. And my talk is about, and I'm co-presenting with my colleague, Jessica Deen, and we're talking about Helm 3. Which is to say, I think a lot of times it would, with these open-sourced shows people say, oh, why do you have to have a lot of information about the third release of your, third major release of your project? Why? It's just an iterative release. It is, and yet there are enough significant differences that it's kind of valuable to talk about, at least the end user experience. >> Yeah, so it actually got an applause in the keynote, ya know. (Bridget laughing) There are certain shows where people are hootin' and hollerin' for every, different compute instance that that is released and you look at it a little bit funny. But at the keynote there was a singular moment where it was the removal of Tiller which Corey and I have been trying to get feedback from the community as to what this all means. >> It seems, from my perspective, it seemed like a very strange thing. It's, we added this, yay! We added this other thing, yay! We're taking this thing and ripping it out and throwing it right into the garbage and the crowd goes nuts. And my two thoughts are first, that probably doesn't feel great if that was the thing you spent a lot of time working on, but secondly, I'm not as steep in the ecosystem as perhaps I should be and I don't really know what it does. So, what does it do and why is everyone super happy to con sine it to the dub rubbish bin of history? >> Right, exactly. So, first of all, I think it's 100% impossible to be an expert on every single vertical in this ecosystem. I mean, look around, KubeCon has 7,000 plus people, about a zillion vendor booths. They're all doing something that sounds slightly, overlapping and it's very confusing. So, in the Helm, if you, if people want to look we can say there's a link in the show notes but there, we can, people can go read on Helm.sh/blog. We have a seven part, I think, blog series about exactly what the history and the current release is about. But the TLDR, the too long didn't follow the link, is that Helm 1 was pretty limited in scope, Helm 2 was certainly more ambitious and it was born out of a collaboration between Google actually and a few other project contributors and Microsoft. And, the Tiller came in with the Google folks and it really served a need at that specific time. And it was, it was a server-side component. And this was an era when the Roll by Stacks has control and Kubernetes was, well nigh not existent. And so there were a lot of security components that you kind of had to bolt on after the fact, And once we got to, I think it was Kubernetes 1.7 or 1.8 maybe, the security model had matured enough that instead of it being great to have this extra component, it became burdensome to try to work around the extra component. And so I think that's actually a really good example of, it's like you were saying, people get excited about adding things. People sometimes don't get excited about removing things, but I think people are excited about the work that went into, removing this particular component because it ends up reducing the complexity in terms of the configuration for anyone who is using this system. >> It felt very spiritually aligned in some ways, with the announcement of Open Telemetry, where you're taking two projects and combining them into one. >> Absolutely. >> Where it's, oh, thank goodness, one less thing that-- >> Yes! >> I have to think about or deal with. Instead of A or B I just mix them together and hopefully it's a chocolate and peanut butter moment. >> Delicious. >> One of the topics that's been pretty hot in this ecosystem for the last, I'd say two years now it's been service matched, and talk about some complexity. And I talk to a guy and it's like, which one of these using? Oh I'm using all three of them and this is how I use them in my environment. So, there was an announcement spearheaded by Microsoft, the Service Mesh Interface. Give us the high level of what this is. >> So, first of all, the SMI acronym is hilarious to me because I got to tell you, as a nerdy teenager I went to math camp in the summertime, as one did, and it was named SMI. It was like, Summer Mathematics Institute! And I'm like, awesome! Now we have a work project that's named that, happy memories of lots of nerdy math. But my first Unix system that I played with, so, but what's great about that, what's great about that particular project, and you're right that this is very much aligned with, you're an enterprise. You would very much like to do enterprise-y things, like being a bank or being an airline or being an insurance company, and you super don't want to look at the very confusing CNCF Project Map and go, I think we need something in that quadrant. And then set your ships for that direction, and hopefully you'll get to what you need. And it's especially when you said that, you mentioned that, this, it basically standardizes it, such that whichever projects you want to use, whichever of the N, and we used to joke about JavaScript framework for the week, but I'm pretty sure the Service Mesh Project of the week has outstripped it in terms of like speed, of new projects being released all the time. And like, a lot of end user companies would very much like to start doing something and have it work and if the adorable start-up that had all the stars on GitHub and the two contributors ends up, and I'm not even naming a specific one, I'm just saying like there are many projects out there that are great technically and maybe they don't actually plan on supporting your LTS. And that's fine, but if we end up with this interface such that whatever service mesh, mesh, that's a hard word. Whatever service mesh technology you choose to use, you can be confident that you can move forward and not have a horrible disaster later. >> Right, and I think that's something that a lot of developers when left to our own devices and in my particular device, the devices are pretty crappy. Where it becomes a, I want to get this thing built, and up and running and working, and then when it finally works I do a happy dance. And no one wants to see that, I promise. It becomes a very different story when, okay, how do you maintain this? How do you responsibly keep this running? And it's, well I just got it working, what do you mean maintain it? I'm done, my job is done, I'm going home now. It turns out that when you have a business that isn't being the most clever person in the room, you sort of need to have a longer term plan around that. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> And it's nice to see that level of maturation being absorbed into the ecosystem. >> I think the ecosystem may finally be ready for it. And this is, I feel like, it's easy for us to look at examples of the past, people kind of shake their heads at OpenStack as a cautionary tale or of Sprawl and whatnot. But this is a thriving, which means growing, which means changing, which means very busy ecosystem. But like you're pointing out, if your enterprises are going to adapt some of this technology, they look at it and everyone here was, ya know, eating cupcakes or whatever for the Kubernetes fifth birthday, to an enterprise just 'cause that launched in 2014, June 2014, that sounds kind of new. >> Oh absolutely. >> Like, we're still, we're still running that mainframe that is still producing business value and actually that's fine. I mean, I think this maybe is one of the great things about a company like Microsoft, is we are our customers. Like we also respect the fact that if something works you don't just yolo a new thing out into production to replace it for what reason? What is the business value of replacing it? And I think for this, that's why this, kind of Unix philosophy of the very modular pieces of this ecosystem and we were talking about Helm a little earlier, but there's also, Draft, Brigade, etc. Like the Porter, the CNET spec implementation stuff, and this Cloud Native application bundles, that's a whole mouthful. >> Yes, well no disrespect to your sparkly shirt, but chasing the shiny thing, and this is new and exciting is not necessarily a great thing. >> Right? >> I heard some of the shiny squad that were on the show floor earlier, complaining a little bit about the keynotes, that there haven't been a whole lot of new service and feature announcements. (Bridget laughing) And my opinion on that is feature not bug. I, it turns out most of us have jobs that aren't keeping up with every new commit to an open-source project. >> I think what you were talking about before, this idea of, I'm the developer, I yolo'd out this co-load into production, or I yolo'd this out into production. It is definitely production grade as long as everything stays on the happy path, and nothing unexpected happens. And I probably have air handling, and, yay! We had the launch party, we're drinkin' and eatin' and we're happy and we don't really care that somebody is getting paged. And, it's probably burning down. And a lot of human misery is being poured into keeping it working. I like to think that, considering that we're paying attention to our enterprise customers and their needs, they're pretty interested in things that don't just work on day one, but they work on day two and hopefully day 200 and maybe day 2000. And like, that doesn't mean that you ship something once and you're like, okay, we don't have to change it for three years. It's like, no, you ship something, then you keep iterating on it, you keep bug fixing, you keep, sure you want features, but stability is a feature. And customer value is a feature. >> Well, Bridget I'm glad you brought that up. Last thing I want to ask you 'cause Microsoft's a great example, as you say, as a customer, if you're an Azure customer, I don't ask you what version of Azure you're running or whether you've done the latest security patch that's in there because Microsoft takes care of you. Now, your customers that are pulled between their two worlds is, oh, wait, I might have gotten rid of patch Tuesdays, but I still have to worry and maintain that environment. How are they dealing with, kind of that new world and still have, certain things that are going to stay the old way that they have been since the 90's or longer? >> I mean, obviously it's a very broad question and I can really only speak to the Kubernetes space, but I will say that the customers really appreciate, and this goes for all the Cloud providers, when there is something like the dramatic CVE that we had in December for example. It's like, oh, every Kubernetes cluster everywhere is horribly insecure! That's awesome! I guess, your API gateway is also an API welcome mat for everyone who wants to, do terrible things to your clusters. All of the vendors, Microsoft included, had their managed services patched very quickly. They're probably just like your Harple's of the world. If you rolled your own, you are responsible for patching, maintaining, securing your own. And this is, I feel like that's that tension. That's that continuum we always see our customers on. Like, they probably have a data center full of ya know, veece, fear and sadness, and they would very much like to have managed happiness. And that doesn't mean that they can easily pickup everything in the data center, that they have a lease on and move it instantly. But we can work with them to make sure that, hey, say you want to run some Kubernetes stuff in your data center and you also want to have AKS. Hey, there's this open-source project that we instantiated, that we worked on with other organizations called Vertual Kubelet. There was actually a talk happening about it I think in the last hour, so people can watch the video of that. But, we have now offered, we now have Virtual Node, our product version of it in GA. And I think this is kind of that continuum. It's like, yes of course, you're early adapters want the open-source to play with. Your enterprises want it to be open-source so they can make sure that their security team is happy having reviewed it. But, like you're saying, they would very much like to consume a service so they can get to business value. Like they don't necessarily want to, take, Kelsey's wonderful Kubernetes The Hard Way Tutorial and put that in production. It's like, hmm, probably not, not because they can't, these are smart people, they absolutely could do that. But then they spent their, innovation tokens as, the McKinley blog post puts it, the, it's like, choose boring technology. It's not wrong. It's not that boring is the goal, it's that you want the exciting to be in the area that is producing value for your organization. Like that's where you want most of your effort to go. And so if you can use well vetted open-source that is cross industry standard, stuff like SMI that is going to help you use everything that you chose, wisely or not so wisely, and integrate it and hopefully not spend a lot of time redeveloping. If you redevelop the same applications you already had, its like, I don't think at the end of the quarter anybody is getting their VP level up. If you waste time. So, I think that is, like, one of the things that Microsoft is so excited about with this kind of open-source stuff is that our customers can get to value faster and everyone that we collaborate with in the other clouds and with all of these vendor partners you see on the show floor, can keep the ecosystem moving forward. 'Cause I don't know about you but I feel like for a while we were all building different things. I mean like, instead of, for example, managed services for something like Kubernetes, I mean a few jobs that would go out was that a start up that we, we built our own custom container platform, as one did in 2014. And, we assembled it out of all the LEGOs and we built it out of I think Docker and Packer and Chef and, AWS at the time and, a bunch of janky bash because like if someone tells you there's no janky bash underneath your home grown platform, they are lying. >> It's always a lie, always a lie. >> They're lying. There's definitely bash in there, they may or may not be checking exit codes. But like, we all were doing that for a while and we were all building, container orchestration systems because we didn't have a great industry standard, awesome! We're here at KubeCon. Obviously Kubernetes is a great industry standard, but everybody that wants to chase the shiny is like but surface meshes. If I review talks for, I think I reviewed talks for KubeCon in Copenhagen, and it was like 50 or 60 almost identical service mesh talk proposals. And it's like, and then now, like so that was last year and now everyone is like server lists and its like, you know you still have servers. Like you don't add sensation to them, which is great, but you still have them. I think that that hype train is going to keep happening and what we need to do is make sure that we keep it usable for what the customers are trying to accomplish. Does that make sense? >> Bridget, it does, and unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it there. Thank you so much for sharing everything with our audience here. For Corey, I'm Stu, we'll be back with more coverage. Thanks for watching The Cube. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. Live, Cube here in Las Vegas for AWS re:Invent. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Dave Vellante. Day three of wall to wall coverage, holding our voices together, excited for our next guest, Shayn Hawthorne, general manager at AWS, for the exciting project around the Ground Station, partnership with Lockheed Martin. Really kind of outside the box, announced on Tuesday, not at the keynote, but this is a forward thinking real project which satellites can be provisioned like cloud computing resources. Totally innovative, and will change the nature of edge computing, feeding connectivity to anything. So, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you guys for having me. You're right, my voice is going out this week too. We've been doing a lot of talking. (John laughs) >> Great service. This is really compelling, 'cause it changes the nature of the network. You can feed connectivity, 'cause power and connectivity drive everything. Power, you got battery. Connectivity, you got satellite. Totally obvious, now that you look at it, but, not before this. Where did it come from? How did it all start? >> You know, it came from listening to our customers. Our customers have been talking with us and they had a number of challenges in getting the data off of their satellites and down to the ground. So, we listened to these customers and we listened to the challenges they were experiencing in getting their data to the ground, having access to ground stations, having the ability at the network level, to move the data around the world quickly to where they wanted to process it. And then also, having complex business process logic and other things that were required to help them run their satellite downlinks and uplinks. And then finally, the ability to actually have AWS services right there where the data came down into the cloud, so that you could do great things with that data within milliseconds of it hitting the ground. >> So it's a essentially satellite as a service with a back end data capability, data ingestion, analytics, and management capability. That, how'd that idea come about? I mean, it just underscores the scale of AWS. And I'm thinking about other things that you might be able to, where'd the idea come from? How was it germinated? >> Well and actually, let me just say one thing, we actually would call it Ground Station as the service. It's the Ground Station on the surface of the earth that communicates with the satellite. It allows us to get the data off the satellite or send commands up to it. And so, like I was saying, we came up the idea by talking to our customers, and so we went into, I think this is an incredible part of working at Amazon, because we actually follow through with our leadership principals. We worked backwards from the customer. We actually put together a press release and a frequently asked questions document, a PR/FAQ, in a traditional six page format. And we started working it through our leadership and it got all the way to the point that Andy and the senior leadership team within AWS made the decision that they were going to support our idea and the concept and the architecture that we had come up with to meet these customers' requirements, we actually were able to get to that by about March of 2018. By the end of March, Andy had even had us go in and talk with Jeff. He gave us the thumbs up as well, and after six months, we've already procured 24 antennas. We've already built two Ground Stations in the United States and we've downlinked over hundreds of contacts with satellites, bringing Earth imagery down and other test data to prove that this system works. Get it ready for preview. >> It's unbelievable, because you're basically taking the principals of AWS, which is eliminating the heavy lifting, applying that to building Ground Stations, presumably, right, so, the infrastructure that you're building out, do you have partners that you're working with, are there critical players there, that are enabling this? >> Yeah, it's really neat. We've actually had some really great partnerships, both with helping us build AWS Ground Station, as well as partners that helped us learn what the customers need. Let me tell you, first off, about the partnership that we've had with Lockheed Martin to develop a new innovative antenna system that will collaboratively come together with the parabolic reflectors that AWS Ground Station uses. They've been working on this really neat idea that gives them ability to downlink data all over the entire United States in a very resilient way, which means if some of their Ground Stations antennas in Verge don't work, due to man made reasons or due to natural occurrences, then we're actually able to use the rest of the network to still continue to downlink data. And then, we complimentary bring in AWS Astra for certain types of downlinks and then also to provide uplink commanding to other satellites. The other customer partnership that we've worked with was working with the actual customers who are going to use AWS Ground Station, like DigitalGlobe, Black Sky, Capella SAR, HawkEye 360, who all provided valuable inputs to us about exactly what do they need in a Ground Station. They need the ability to rapidly downlink data, they need the ability to pay by the minute so that there are actually able to use variable expense to pay for satellite downlinks instead of capital expenses to go out and build it. And then by doing that, we're able to offer them a product that's 80% cheaper than if they'd had to go out and build a complete network similar to what we built. And, they're able to, like I said before, access great AWS services like Rekognition, or SageMaker, so that they can make sense of the data that they bring down to the Earth. >> It's a big idea and I'm just sort of curious as to, how and if you, sort of, validated it. How'd ya increase the probability that it was actually going to, you know, deliver a business return? Can you talk about that process? >> Well, we were really focused on validating that we could meet customer challenges and really give them the data securely and reliably with great redundancy. So we validated, first off by, we built our antennas and the Ground Stations in the previous software. We finished over a month and a half ago, and we've been rigorously testing it with our customer partners and then letting them validate that the information we've provided back to them was 100% as good as what they would've received on their own network, and we tested it out, and we've actually got a number of pictures and images downloaded over at our kiosk that were all brought in on AWS Ground Station, and its a superb products over there. >> So Shayn, how does it work? You write this press release, this working backwards document, describe that process. Was that process new to you? Had you done it at other companies? How did you find it? Was it a useful process, obviously it was, 'cause you got the outcome you're looking for, but, talk a little bit more about that approach. >> Yeah, it's actually very cool, I've only been at AWS for a year and a half. And so, I would say that my experience at AWS so far completely validates working backwards from customers. We were turned on to the idea by talking to our customers and the challenges they said. I started doing analysis after the job was assigned to me by Dave Nolton, my boss, and I started putting together the first draft of our PR/FAQ, started engaging with customers immediately. Believe it or not, we went through 28 iterations of the PR/FAQ before we even got to Andy. Everybody in our organization took part in helping to make it better, add in, ask hard questions, ensure that we were really thinking this idea through and that we were obsessing on the customer. And then after we got to Andy, and we got through approving that, it probably went through another 28 iterations before we got to Jeff. And then we went through talking with him. He asked additional hard questions to make sure that we were doing the right for the customer and that we were putting together the right kind of product. And finally we've been iterating it on it ever since until we launched it couple of days ago. >> Sounds like you were iterating, raising the bar, and it resonated with customers. >> Totally. And even as part of getting out of it-- >> That's Amazon's language of love. >> And then your engineering resource, you know, if people are asking you hard questions, you obviously need engineering folks to validate that it's doable. At what point do you get that engineering resource, how does that all work? >> Well, it's neat. In my division, Region Services Division, we actually were supporting it completely from within the division, all the way until we got approval from Andy. And then we actually went in and started hiring very good skills. To show you what kind of incredible people we have at Amazon, we only had to hire about 10% space expertise from outside of the company. We were actually able to bring together 80-90% of the needed skills to build AWS Ground Station from people who've been working at Amazon.com and AWS. And we came together, we really learned quickly, we iterated, failed fast, put things together, changed it. And we were able to deliver the product in time. The whole cloth made from our own expertise. >> So just to summarize, from idea to actual, we're going to do this, how long did that take? >> I'd say that took about three months. From idea to making a decision, three months. From decision to have a preview product that we could launch at re:Invent, six months. >> That's unbelievable. >> It is. >> If you think about something of this scope. >> And it was a joy, I mean it was an incredible to be a part of something like this. It was the best work I've ever done in my life. >> Yeah, space is fun. >> It is. >> Shayn, thanks for coming on theCUBE, sharing your story and insight, we love this. We're going to keep following it. And we're going see you guys at the Public Sector Summits, and all the events you guys are at, so, looking forward to seeing and provisioning some satellite. >> I'm looking forward to showing you what we do next. So thank you for having me. >> Great. We'll get a sneak peak. >> Congratulations. >> This is theCUBE here in Las Vegas, we'll be back with more coverage after this short break. (futuristic music)

from Austin Texas it's the cube covering cube con and cloud native con 2017 brought to you by Red Hat the Lenox foundations and the cubes ecosystem partners well everyone welcome back to our exclusive coverage from the cube here in Austin Texas we're live on the floor at cloud native con and cube con cubic on like kubernetes gone not the cube con us but cute con we're Michele norelli who's the senior software engineer at Microsoft also the co-chair with Kelsey Heights our great event record-setting attendance I'm John ferry your host with stew minimun Michele welcome to the cube thank you so much for having me so people don't know about if they might have watch the street if you had a stream you're on stage keynoting and managing the whole program here congratulations more attendees here at this event than all the other cube cause of cloud native combined shows the growth and interest in a new way to develop new way to engage with other developers and create value yeah kubernetes has been the heart of it explain cloud native con and cube con what's the difference because I love cloud native but what's this Cooper Denny's thing I love that too yeah was it related a intertwine Wayne take him into his plane there's a there's a really big kubernetes audience and community and they need time to engage and just like work with each other and learn from each other and that's where coop Connie came from soku-kun with the original conference and the first one was a November in Seattle in 2016 and I was actually at that wine was a few hundred people and it was just so small people were actually asking like what is a pod what is kubernetes which are fine questions asked today as well but it was everyone was asking this question nobody was past that point and then you know kubernetes was donated to the CNCs and there were also these other cloud native projects that came about in the space and so we wanted a conference that encompasses both all of the cloud native projects as well as serbs the kubernetes community as well so that's where both of them came from some of the other cloud native projects have their own conferences like Prometheus has prom time and that's been growing as well I think the last one was 200 people up from 70 the last so I gotta ask you because we even cover us we were there at the cube con I was actually having drinks with Luke Tucker at JJ we're like hey we should do this Cuban Eddie's thing and bolted onto the Linux Foundation so you're president creates with the whole team it's been fun to watch Wow yeah but it's the tale of two stories in the community in the industry companies that got funded and we're building open-source and our participants who are building projects out and then a new onboarding of new developers coming into the community a lot of first-timers here you're seeing a visibility into the success of cloud yeah and they're Rieger engaged so you got a lot of folks who have invested into the community and new entrants a migration into the community yeah what does that dynamic mean to the CN CF how is that impacting how you structure in the programming and what are some of the insiders talking about what it is what's the reality yeah I think a lot of it has to do with you know this is a really positive community and there are just like so many people working together and collaborating not just because they I mean it looks like nice to be in a positive community right but you kind of have to like these problems are really hard and it's good to learn from different organizations that have like come across these projects or problems starting in the in the space before and they'll come and collaborate I think some of the things that we've been talking about inside the community is how to actually how to onboard people so the kubernetes community is starting up a new mentorship program to help people that are new to the community start learning how to review code and then PR code and and be productive members in the community and whatever they whatever area they want miss Michelle want to hear about kind of some of the breadth and depth of the community here yeah you know we went there's so many announcements there's a bunch of wando's yeah it's a brand new project I think what it was four projects a year ago and it's now 14 you know right how does somebody's supposed to get their arms around it should they be beat me about that you know where should somebody start you know what do you recommend yeah start with the that's a great question by the way I think that people should start with with a solution to a problem they already have so just know that people have run into these problems before and you should just go into the thing that you know about first and then if that leads you to a different problem and there's a solution that the CNCs you know has already come across then you can go into and dive into the other palms for example I am really interested in kubernetes and have been in that space but I think tracing is really interesting too and I want to start learning how to incorporate that into my workflow as well so show you you're also one of the diversity chairs yeah for the event you talk about kind of a diverse global nature of this community yeah we are spread across all time zone so I actually want to share an experience I have as a sake lead in kubernetes so at first I really wanted to serve all of the time zones and so we have these weekly sick meetings at 9:30 a.m. Pacific and I was like no maybe we should have like alternate meetings like alternate weekly meetings for other time zones but after talking to those the people in the other time sounds like they're very far off actually like China Asia Pacific I realize that they're actually more interested in reading notes and watching videos which is something I didn't actually know you know it's it's you think like oh you have to serve every community in the same way but what I've learned and face to face yeah base to base exactly and that's not actually how that's not how actually everybody wants to interact and so that's been an interesting thing I've learned from the diverse nature and this in the space let's see a challenges I mean we've been talking we're just that reinvent last week at Amazon obviously the number of services that they're rolling out is pretty strong there's a leader in the cloud but as multi cloud becomes the choice for most most enterprises and businesses the service requirements the baseline is got to be established seeing your community rolling out a lot of great new services but storage old storage is transferring to machine learning in AI and you got I Oh tea right around the corner new new kinds of applications yeah okay it's changing the game on the old card storage and security obviously two important areas you got to store the data data is that the card of the value proposition and then security security how are you guys dealing with that those challenges those political grounds that people are have a lot of making a lot of money in an old storage you mean ship a storage drive and here's an architecture those are being disrupted yeah I think they I mean they'll continue to be disrupted I think people are just going to bring in new and new more new and new use cases and then people will come and meet them meet those customers where they are and people just have to change I guess get used to it yeah shifter die yeah I think that some that that we are getting to that point but I can't only time will tell we'll see what are something exciting things that you see from the new developers I just recognize some friends here that I've haven't that dark wondering the community are new and they're kind of like licking their chops like wow what an excitement I could feel value and I could have a distribution I got a community and I can make money and then Dan said you know project products profits you put the product profit motive right on the table but he's clear at the same not pay to play it's okay to have profits if you have a good product for me project I buy that but the new developers like that because as an end scoreboard what are you guys doing with that new community what survived there around those kinds of opportunities you guys creating any programs for them or yeah I think just to just they can get involved you know I think knowledge is power perspective is power also so being involved helps give you a perspective to see where those gaps are and then come up with those services that are profitable or those tools that are profitable and I think this space can be very lucrative based on the number of people he sponsors I think he said he said the show was wondering if you can comment when you're building the schedule how do you balance you know all those platinum sponsors versus you know some of the you know practitioner companies that are also getting involved how do you there are there are different levels of sponsorship right like you mentioned the events team has a sponsorship section or sponsorship team and they handle most of placing sponsors and all of that and so they'll get whatever level they want but actually Kelsey and I do a lot of research and see like what's happening in the community what's interesting what's new and and we'll find time to highlight that as well which one is research what's your role in Microsoft share with the audience what are you working on what's your day-to-day job is it just foundation work are you doing coding what do you coding what's your fav is the VI MX what do you prefer yes my work is 30% community and 70% engineering I really love engineering but I also really love the community and just getting these opportunities to give back you know build skills as well learning how to speak in front of people as well these are both valuable skills to learn and it gives me an opportunity to just give back what I've learned so I appreciate those but I mostly work on developer tools that are open source that help people use containers and kubernetes a little more easily so I work on projects like Helms drafts and Brigade and these are just like things that we've seen the pain points that we've experienced and we want to kind of share our solutions with them so draft is the one I've been working on a lot have you heard of drops okay let me do the two second draft is a tool for application developers to build containerized apps without really understanding or having to understand all of what is kubernetes and containers so that's my favorite space to know you know one of the things we look at coming in here is there's that balance between there's complexity but there's flexibility you know I've heard Kelsey talking about our on when I talk to customer they're like oh I love kubernetes because I take vault and I take envoy and I take all these different things that put together and it does what I want but a lot of people are daunted and they say oh I want to I want to just go to Microsoft Azure and they'll take care of that so how do you look at that and what is the balance that we should be looking for as an industry yeah we've been emphasizing in the community a lot on plug ability across contracts it's like a theme that I think almost every project hurts and a word that you'll hear a lot I'm sure you already have heard a lot and I think that's because you can't meet everyone's needs so you build this modular component that does one thing very well and then you learn how to extend it and or you give people the ability to extend it and so that's really great for scaling a project I I do really appreciate the clouds coming out all of them with their own managed services because it's hard to operate and understand all of these things it's it takes a lot of depth in knowledge context and just prior experience and so I think that'll just make it a lot easier for people to onboard onto these technologies I was going to ask you I was going to ask so you brought up fug ability we saw you know Netflix on stage was his phenomenal of the culture yeah dynamic I think that the Schumer important conversation you know something we've been talking about silage is a real part of what we're seeing tech being a part of but the the things that popped out at me in the keynote were service mesh and pluggable architecture so I want to get your thoughts for the folks that aren't there is that in the trenches and inside the ropes what is a pluggable architecture and what is a service mesh these days because you got lyft and uber and all these great companies who have built hyper scale and large-scale systems in open source and now our big tech success stories donating these kinds of approaches pluggable architectures and service man talk a minute to explain so pluggable architectures this is why you have one layer of your stuff there's a piece of software that does something does one thing very well but you know every I like to say that every company is a snowflake and that's okay and so you may have some workflow or need that is specific to your company and so we shouldn't limit you to just what we think is the right solution to a problem we should allow you to extend or extend these pieces of software with modular components or just extensible components that that work for you does that make a little more sense yeah I work on helm and we also have a pluggable architecture because we were just getting so many requests from the community and it didn't make sense to put everything in the core code based if we did if we accepted one thing it would really just interrupt somebody else's workflow so that that's helped us a lot in in my personal experience I really like plug water it's actually that means you can go build a really kick butt app yeah nail it down to your specifications but decoupler from a core or avoiding kind the old spaghetti code mindset but kind of creating a model where it can be leveraged yeah plugin we all know plugins are but right so so that someone else could take advantage of it exactly yeah a service mesh that's evolved yeah heard a lot of that what is that yeah it's um so developers this is actually the lift story is really interesting to me so at lyft developers were really uneasy about moving from the monolith to the micro-services architecture just because they didn't early understand the network component and we're like network reliability would not be so reliable would fail and time service meshes have allowed engineers at lyft to understand where their failures happen and in terms like of a network standpoint and so you're basically abstracting with network layer and allowing more transparency into it this is like very useful for when you have lots of Micra services and you want this kind of reliability and stability awesome so one point 9s coming Spence support Windows that's what key and now a congratulations just go to the next level I mean growth talk about the growth because it's fun for us to watch you know kind of a small group core young community less than three years old really to kubernetes kind of had some traction but it really is going to be commoditized and that's not a bad thing so how do you what's your take on this what's the vibe what's that what's the current feeling inside the community right now excited pinching ourselves no I think everybody's in awe everybody is in awe and we're just like we want to make this the best experience possible in terms of an open source experience you know we want to welcome people to the community we want to serve the people's needs and we just we just want to do a good job because this is really fun and I think the people working on these problems are having a lot of fun with with seeing this kind of growth and support it's been great certainly for US president creation president and creation of this whole movement it's been fun to watch a document final question what should people expect this week what is the show going to hopefully do what's your prediction what's your purpose here what should people expect this week and the folks that didn't make it what do they miss okay there are so many things happening it's insane you're going to get a little bit of everything there's lots of different tracks lots of diverse content I think I'm when I go to conferences in my personal experience I really love technical salons those are really great because you can get your hands dirty and you can get questions answered by the people who created the project that's an experience that is is really powerful for me I went to the first open tracing salon and that's where I kind of got my hands dirty with tracing and been siegelman who's doing the keynote today this afternoon was the person who was teaching me how to like do this stuff so yeah it was awesome like some marketing fluff no it's not and it's just like it's it's real experienced very expert like experts you know in the in the space teaching you these things so that that definitely can't be replicated I think the cig sessions will be really cool there's a big focus on not just learning stuff but also collaborating and and just talking about things before they get documented so that's a really good experience here it's an action-packed schedule I tweeted that it feels like I'm you know when Burning Man had like a hundred people announced this big thing I think this is the beginning of a amazing industry people are cool they're helpful they're getting you're getting involved answering questions open-book here yeah at cloud native Punk you've got thanks Michele Farrelly been coming on co-chair senior engineer at Microsoft great to have her on the cube great keynote great color great fun exciting times here at cloud native con I'm John furry the founders look at angle media with too many men my co-hosts more live coverage after the short break

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering VMWorld 2017. Brought to you by VMWare and its ecosystem partners. (bright music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with the Cube, here with my guest host, Justin Warren. Happy to have a returning Cube alum, but in a different role then we had. It's been a few years. Tal Klein, who is the author of The Punch Escrow. >> Au-tor, please. No, I'm just kidding. (laughing) Tal, thanks so much for joining us. It's great for you to be able to find time to hang out with the tech geeks rather than all the Hollywood people that you've been with recently. (laughing) >> You guys are more interesting. (laughing) >> Well thank you for saying that. So last time we interviewed you, you were working for a sizable tech company. You were talking about things like, you know, virtualization, everything like that. Your Twitter handle's VirtualTal. So how does a guy like that become not only an author but an author that's been optioned for a movie, which those of us that, you know, are geeks and everything are looking at, as a matter of fact, Pac Elsiger this morning said, "we are seeing science fiction become science fact." >> That's right. >> Stu: So tell us a little of the journey. >> Yeah, cool, I hope you read the book. (laughing) I don't know, the journey is really about marketing, right? Cause a lot of times when we talk about virtual, like, in fact last time I was on the Cube, we were talking about the idea that desktops could be virtual. Cause back then it was still this, you know, almost hypothetical notion, like could desktops be virtual, and so today, you know, so much of our life is virtual. So much of the things that we do are not actually direct. I was watching this great video by Apple's new augmented reality product, where you sit in the restaurant and you look at it with your iPad, and it's your plate, and you can just shift the menu items, and you see the menu items on your plate in the context of the restaurant and your seat and the person you're sitting across from. So I think the future is now. >> Yeah, it reminds of, you know, the movie Wall-E, the animated one. We're all going to be sitting in chairs with our devices or Ready Player One, you know, very popular sci-fi book that's being done by Speilberg, I believe. >> Yes, yeah, very exciting. >> Tell us a little bit about your book, you know, we talked, when I was younger and used to read a lot of sci-fi, it was like, what stuff had they done 50 years ago that now's reality, and what stuff had they predicted, like, you know, we're going to go away from currency and go digital currency, and it's like we're almost there. But we still don't have flying cars. >> Yeah, we're, I mean, the main problem with flying cars is that we need pilots. And I think actually we're very close to flying cars, cause once we have self-driving vehicles and we no longer need to worry about it being a person behind the joystick, then we're in really good shape. That's really the issue, you know, the problem with flying cars is that we are so incompetent at driving and or flying. That's not our core competency, so let's just put things that do understand how to make those things happen and eliminate us from the equation. >> Everything is a people problem. >> Yeah, so when I wrote the book, Punch Escrow, Punch Escrow, (laughing) when I wrote the book, I really thought about all the things that I read growing up in science fiction, you know, things like teleportation, things like nanotechnology, things like digital currency, you know, how do we make those, how do we present those in a viable way that doesn't seem too science fictiony. Like one of the things I really get when people read the book is it feels really near-future, even though it's set like 100 plus years in the future, all the concepts in it feel very pragmatic or within reach, you know? >> Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting, we look at, you know, what things happen in a couple of years and what things take a long time. So artificial intelligence, machine learning, it's not like these are new concepts, you know? I read a great book by, you know, it was Isaacson, The Innovators. You go back to like Aida Lovelace, and the idea of what a machine or computer would be able to do. So 100 years from now, what's real, what's not real? We still all have jobs or something? >> We have jobs but different. Remember, I don't know if you're a historian, but back in the industrial age, there was a whole bunch of people screaming doom and gloom. In fact, if we go way back to the age of the Luddites, who just hated machines of any kind. I think that in general, we don't like, you know, we're scared of change. So I do think a lot of the jobs that exist today are going to be done by machines or code. That doesn't mean the jobs are going away. It means jobs are changing. A lot of the jobs that people have today didn't exist in the industrial age. So I think that we have to accept that we are going to be pragmatic enough to accept the fact that humans will continue to evolve as the infrastructure powering our world evolves, you know? We talk about living in the age of the quantified self, right? There's a whole bunch that we don't understand how to do yet. For example, I can think of a whole industry that tethers my FitBit to my nutrition. You know, like there's so much opportunity that for us to say, oh that's going to be the end of jobs, or the end of innovation or the end of capitalism, is insane. I think this just ushers in a whole new age of opportunity. And that's me, I'm just an optimist that way, you know. >> So the Luddites did famously try to destroy the machines. But the thing is, the Luddites weren't wrong. They did lose their jobs. So what about the people whose jobs are replaced, as you say net new, there's a net new number of jobs. But specific individuals, like people who manufacture cars for example, lose their jobs because a robot can do that job safer and better and faster than a human can do it. So what do we do with those humans? Because how do we get people to have new jobs and retrain themselves? >> I address some of these notions in the book. For example, one of the weird things that we're suffering from is the lack of welders in society today, cause welding has become this weird thing that we don't think we need people for, so people don't really get trained up in it because, you know, machines do a lot of welding but there's actually specialty welding that machines can't do. So I think the people who are really good at the things that they do will continue to have careers. I think their careers will become more niche. Therefore they'll be able to create, to demand a higher wage for it because almost like a carpenter, you know, a specialist carpenter will be able to earn a much higher wage today by having fewer customers who want really custom carpentry versus things that can be carved up by a machine. So I think what we end up seeing is that it's not that those jobs go away. It's they become more specialized. People still want Rolls Royces. People still want McLarens. Those are not done by machines. Those are hand-made, you know? >> That's an interesting point, so the value of something being hand-made becomes, instead of it being a worse product, it's actually- >> Tal: That's a big concept in the book. >> Oh okay, right. >> A big concept in the book is that we place a lot of value on the uniqueness of an object. And that parlays in multiple ways. So one of the examples that I use in the book is the value of a Big Mac actually coming from McDonald's. Like, you can make a Big Mac. We know the recipe for a Big Mac. But there is a weird sort of nacent value to getting a Big Mac from McDonald's. It's something in our brain that clicks that tethers it to an originality. Diamonds, another really good example. Or you know, we know there's synthetic diamonds. We still want the ones that get mined in the cave. Why? We don't know. Right, they're just special. >> Because De Beers still has really good marketing. (laughing) >> So I think there's- >> That's interesting, so the concept of uniqueness, which again comes to scarcity and so on. As an author, someone who is no doubt, signed a lot of his book, that means that that book is unique because it's signed by the author, unlike something which is mass produced and there is hopefully thousands and thousands of copies that you sell. >> Going into this, I actually thought about that a lot. And that's why I've created like multiple editions of the book. So like the first 500 people who pre-ordered it, they get like a special edition of the book that's like stamped and all this kind of stuff. I even used different pens. (laughs) I appreciate that because I'm also a collector. I collect music, I collect books. And you know, so I see those aspects in myself. So I know what I value about them, you know? >> And the crossover between music and books is interesting. So as someone who has a musical background, I know that there's a lot of musicians who'll come out with special editions, and you know, because this is an age where we can download it. You can download the book. Do you think there is something, is there something that is intrinsic to having a physical object in a virtual world? >> I think to our generation, yes. I'm not so sure about millennials, when they grow up. But there are, for example, I'm going to see U2 next week, I'm very lucky to see that. But part of the U2 buying experience, to get access to the presale, you need to be part of their fan club. To be a part of their fan club, you need to get, you get like a whole bunch of limited edition posters, limited edition vinyl, and all this kind of stuff. So there's an experience. It's no longer just about going to see U2 at a concert. There's like the entire package of you being a special U2 fan. And they surround it with uniqueness. It's not necessarily limited, but there's an enhanced experience that can't just be, it's not just about you having a ticket to a single concert. >> Justin: Yeah, okay. >> I'm curious, the genre, if you'd call it, is hard science fiction. >> Yes. >> The challenge with that is, you know, what is an extension of what we're doing, and what is fiction? And people probably poke at that. Have you had any interesting experience, things like that? I mean, I've listened to a lot of stuff like Andy Weir, like let the community give feedback before he created the final The Martian. (laughing) But so yeah, what's it like, cause we can, the geeks can be really harsh. >> Yes, I've learned from my Reddit experience that, so what's really funny about it is the first draft of this novel was hard as nails. It was crazy. And my publisher read it, and it would have made all the hard science fiction guys super happy. My publisher read it, he was like, you've written a really great hard science fiction book, and all five people who read it are going to love it. (laughing) You know, but like, I came here with my buddy Danny. He couldn't even get through the first three pages of it. He's like, he wanted to read it. So part of working through the editorial process is saying, look, I care a lot about the science because one of my deep goals is to write a STEM-oriented book that gets people excited about technology and present the future as not a dystopian place. And so I wanted the science to be there and have a sort of gravity to the narrative. But yeah, it's tough. I worked with a physicist, a biologist, a geneticist, an anthropologist, and a lawyer. (laughs) Just to try to figure out, how do we carve out, you know, what does the future look like, what does the evolution of each individual sciences, we talked about the mosquitoes, right? You know, we're already doing a lot of crazy stuff with mosquitoes. We're modifying them so that the males mate with females that carry the Zika virus, you know, give birth to offspring that never reach maturity. I mean, this is just crazy, it's science fiction. And now that they're working on modifying female mosquitoes into vaccine carriers instead of disease carriers. I mean, this is science fiction, right? Like who believes this stuff? It's crazy. >> Christopher is amazing. >> Yeah, I've loved, there's been a bunch of movies recently that have kind of helped to educate on STEM some, you know, Martian got a lot of people excited, you know, Hidden Figures, the one that I could being my kids that are teenagers now into it and they get excited, oh, science is great. So the movie, how much will you be involved? You know, what can you share about that experience, too, so far? >> It's been, it's very surreal. That's the word is use to describe it, the honest, god's honest truth, I mean. I've been very lucky in that my representation in Hollywood is this rock-solid guy called Howie Sanders. And he's this bigger-than-life Hollywood agent guy. He's hooked me up, we've made a lot of business decisions that we're focused less on the money and more on the team, which is nice to be, like when you're in your 40s and you're more financially settled, you're not in the kind of situation where you might be in your 20s and just going to sign the first deal that people give you. So we really focused on hooking up with like the director, James Bovin is, you know, he's the guy who co-created Flight of the Concords. He did the Muppets movie, you know, Alice Through the Looking Glass. Really professional guy but also really understands the tone of the book, which is like humorous, you know, kind of sarcastic. It's not just about the technology. It's also about the characters. Same thing with the production team. The two producers, Mandeville Productions, I was just talking to Todd Lieberman, and we're talking about just what is augmented reality, like how does it look like on the screen? So I'm not- >> It's not going to look like Blade Runner is what I'm hearing. >> (laughs) I don't know. It's going to look real. I imagine, I don't know, they're going to make whatever movie they're going to make, but their perspective, one of the things we talked about is keeping the movie very grounded. Like you know, one of the big questions they ask first going into it is before we even had any sort of movie discussions is like is this more of like a Looper, Gattica, or District Nine, or is it more like The Fifth Element, you know, I mean, is it like, do you want it to be this sort of grounded movie that feels authentic and real and near future or do you want this to be like completely alien and weird and out of it. And the story is more grounded. So I think a lot, hopefully what we display on the screen will not feel that far away from reality. >> Okay, yeah. >> You do marketing in your day job. >> I do. >> I'm curious as you look at this, kind of the balance of educating, reaching a broad audience, you have passion for STEM, what's your thoughts around that? Is it, I worry there's so much general, like television or things like that, when I see the science stuff, it like makes me groan. Because you know, it's like I don't understand that. >> I am the worst, because I got a security background too, so that's the one I get scrambled on. The war, I mean, like. >> Wait, thank goodness I updated my firewall settings because I saved the world from terrorists. >> Hang on, we're breaking through the first firewall. Now we're through the second firewall. (laughing) Now we're going through the third firewall, like 15 firewalls. And let me upload the virus, like all that stuff. It's difficult for me. I think that, you know, hopefully, there's also a group in Hollywood called the Hollywood Science and Entertainment Exchange. And they're a group of scientists who work with film makers on, you know, reigning things in. And film makers don't usually take all their advice, i.e. Interstellar, (laughing) but you know, I think (laughing) in many cases there's some really good ideas that come to play into it that hopefully bring up, like I think Jarvis for example, in Iron Man or the Avengers is a really cool implementation of what the future of AI systems might be like. And I know they used the Hollywood Science Exchange to figure out how is that going to work? And I think the marketing aspect is, you know, the reason I came up with the idea for this book is because my CEO of a company I used to work for, he had this whole conversation about teleportation, like teleportation was impossible. And he's like, it's not because the science, yes, the science is a problem right now, but we'll get over it. The main issue is that nobody would ever step foot into a device that vaporizes them and then printed them out somewhere else. And I said, well that's great, cause that's a marketing problem. (laughing) >> Yeah, you're dead every time you do it. But it's the same you, I can't tell the difference. >> Well, you say you're dead, I'm saying you're just moving. (laughing) >> Artificial intelligence, you know, kind of a big gap between the hype to where we need to go. What's your thoughts on that space in general? >> I think that we have, it's a great question because I feel like that's a term that gets thrown around a lot, and I think as a result it's becoming watered down. So you've this sort of artificial intelligence that comes with like, you know, Google building an app that can beat the world's best Go player, which is a really, really difficult puzzle. The problem is, that app can do one thing, and that's play Go. You put in it a chess game, and it's like I don't know what's going on. >> It's a very specialized kind of intelligence, yeah. >> Now with Open AI, you know, they just had some pretty interesting implementations where they actually played video games with a real live competition and won. Again, you know, but without the smack talk, which really I think would add a lot. Now you got to get an AI to smack talk. So I think the problem is we haven't figured out a really good way of creating a general purpose AI. And there's a lot of parallels to the evolution of computing in general because if you look at how computers were before we had general purpose operating systems like Unix, every computer was built to do a very, very specific function, and that's kind of what AI is right now. So we're still waiting to have a sort of general purpose AI that can do a lot of specialized activities. >> Even most robots are still very single-purpose today. >> That's the fundamental problem. But you're seeing the Cambridge guys are working on sort of the bipedal robot that can do lots of things. And Siri's getting better, Cortana's getting better, Watson's getting better, but we're not there. We still need to find a really good way of integrating deep knowledge with general purpose conversational AI. Cause that's really what you need to like, Stu, what do you need? Here, let me give it to you, you know? >> Do you draw a distinction between AI that's able to simply sort of react as a fairly complex machine or something that can create new things and add something? >> That's in the book as well. So the fundamental thing that I don't think we get around even in the future is giving computers the ability to actually come up with new ideas. There's actually a career, the main job of the protagonist in the book, his job is a salter. And his job is to salt AI algorithms to introduce entropy so they can come up with new ideas. >> Okay, interesting. >> So based off the sort of chaos theory. >> Like chaos monkey, right? >> Yeah. And that's really what you're trying to do is like, okay, react to things that are happening because you can't just come up with them on their own. There's a whole, I don't want to bore you, but there's a whole bunch of stuff in the book about how that works. >> It's like hand-carving ideas that are then mass produced by machines. >> Yeah, I don't know if you guys are going to have Simon Crosby on here, he's kind of like an expert on that. He was the Dean of Kings College, which is where Turing came from. So he really knows a lot about that. He's got a lot of strong ideas about it. But I learned a lot from him in that regard. There's a lot of like, the snarky spirit of Simon Crosby lives on in my book somewhere. But he's just funny cause he's, coming from that field, he immediately sees a lot of BS right off the bat, whenever anybody's presenting. He's got like the ability to just cut through it. Because he understands what it would actually take to make that happen, you know? So I tried to preserve some of that in the book. >> That is refreshing in the tech industry. >> So Tal, I need to let you, you know, wrap this up. Give us a plug for the book, tell us, when are we going to be able to see this on the big screen? >> I don't know about the big screen, but the Punch Escrow is now available. You can get it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, anywhere books are sold. It's been optioned by Lionsgate. The director attached to it is James Bovin, production team is Mandeville Productions. I'm very excited about it. Go check it out. It's a pretty quick read, reads like a technothriller. It's not too hard. And it's fun for the whole family. I think one of the coolest things about it is that the feedback I've been getting has been that it really is appealing to everybody. I've got mother-in-laws reading it, you know, it's pretty cool. Initially I sold it, my initial audience is like us, but it's kind of cool, like, Stu will finish the book, he'll give it to, you know, wife, daughter, anything, and they're really digging it. So it's kind of fun. >> Justin: Thanks a lot. >> Tal Klein, really appreciate you coming. Congratulations on the book, we look forward to the movie. Maybe, you know, we'll get the Cube involved down the road. (laughing) >> And we're giving away 75 copies of it here at Lakeside booth, if you guys want to come. >> Tal Klein, author of The Punch Escrow, also CMO of Lakeside, who is here in the thing. But yeah, (laughing) a lot of stuff. Justin and I will be back with more coverage here from VMWorld 2017. You're watching the Cube. (bright music)

(electronic music) >> Hello and welcome to the Cube conversation. I'm John Furrier here in the Palo Alto studios with two great guests, Tara Chklovski, who is the founder and CEO of Iridescent and Anar Simpson, global ambassador of Technovation. First, thanks for coming in today. I appreciate moving your schedules around to come in. Thanks for coming into our studio. >> You bet, yeah. >> So Sundar Pichai was at your event. That's the big story this past week has been the Google memo from a low level employee who wrote some things that got the whole world shaking around gender biases, role of women in tech, and as we do a lot of women in tech as you know at the Cube. Hundreds and hundreds of women in over the years, friends, and also smart people. This is a pretty big moment for you guys. You had an event at Google. Sundar canceled his all hands meeting to address this under fear of retaliation and safety but came to your event on the Google campus. Surprising to many, as written up on VCode and the Verge. Pretty notable. So tell us about what happened. >> So this was the 2017 Technovation world pitch competition and the award ceremony and Sundar came and he talked to a lot of the girls who were presenting their ideas to solve problems in their community and then he had a little bit of a one on one conversation to learn a little bit more about the kinds of problems, their interest in technology, entrepreneurship, and then he addressed the crowd of 900 plus supporters and really reemphasized that there's a place for women in technology, and more importantly, for him and Google, that there's a place for these girls at Google. >> Talk about your mission. >> Right, so Technovation's mission is to empower girls to become technology entrepreneurs and it's much more than just learning how to code. It's really about telling girls that if there's a problem in their community, technology can help them have a very powerful voice. We've been running for eight years and Anar is our global ambassador who has helped us grow to more than 100 countries, but Technovation's relationship with Google is eight years long. Google has supported Technovation, was the very first technology company to support Technovation way before any other company saw the potential and since then, since 2010, Google has provided funding, mentors, spaces, not just across the U.S. but globally. >> Is it beyond entrepreneurship and beyond coding? Talk about specifically what you guys are bringing to folks outside of Silicon Valley. >> Oh, sure, so my role as the global ambassador for Technovation is really getting to girls all over the world and saying to them, you need to be engaged in technology. And what we found, as Tara mentioned, we've been doing this now, I've been doing this now for five years, is that we're building a movement. We're bringing in girls, we're bringing in mentors, we're bringing in companies and governments together to make this a reality for girls in tech careers in their own countries. >> What's some examples during your life when you had those kind of change moments? >> I think Iridescent, we are now in our 12th year, and every couple of months, it's a change moment because it's a test of grit and just believing in yourself because I started it with just an idea and grew it to be an organization that's all over the world and it doesn't come with just full hearted focus and a lot of courage is what I've seen, I think. I've also seen that how much you are passionate about an idea really swings how the other person is thinking and so the idea only matters so much, I think, of course I mean the track record and everything has to be there, but I think a lot of it depends on your own passion for it and I think I've come to realize that passion is maybe proportional to the complexity and the impact of the problem you're trying to solve, so if you're only trying to solve a small problem, you lose interest in two years. And maybe that's why, I'm always curious, like why do so many start ups fail after two or three years? It's because maybe you came in not thinking that you're going to change the world, maybe you came in because you wanted to make quick money or exit or whatever and so I think for me, it's this is my life's work and we want to bring more underrepresented communities into innovation, and so it's not something that is going to be solved easily. >> Let's get back to the Sundar event that you guys were at because I think it's a good conversation to have because one of the things that came out of the brouhaha that became that memo really was a conversation publicly. Now, it's been polarized here. There's just kind of a hate kind of mindset with it most of the time, plenty of stuff on the internet to go read through but there was actually some good conversations in the industry. What was the conversation like during the event because this was in full conversation mode while you guys were having your 2017 world pitch competition, which he presided over and had a speech to the entrepreneurs. What was it like? What were some of the conversations that were taking place? >> I think the most powerful piece of the whole evening was really the girls walking in and seeing the incredible diversity that we have in this world, right? So we had girls from and mentors and supporters from over 30 countries and just them coming and waving the flags and different faces and different cultures all trying to make the world a better place, I mean it's rare that you see that using technology and I think it's very fitting that Silicon Valley is the center of this, but I think there was not one dry eye in the group because you realize, the conversation is so much bigger than one company, one country. It is something that affects us as all human beings and you're believing in human potential so I think seeing these young girls, some of them 10 years old, there was this, I think, maybe the crowd's favorite was these 10 year old girls from Cambodia who want to improve the lives of these people working in cottage industries, right, and they created an app like say Etsy or something, but focused on Cambodian products and the courage of these little girls, I think everybody walks away feeling, okay there's hope. Even in the midst of all of this discussion. >> Yeah it creates a lightning rod in some ways and hopefully it will move on to the substantive conversations. How do you guys feel about what happened and as you take this mission forward? You guys are doing some amazing work, we'll do a whole nother segment, I think, that's on that in a minute, but given the landscape now, how do you view this and how are you talking with friends and colleagues and family members around it because I've certainly had conversations with my friends, certainly on the east coast, like no, no, that's not the way Silicon Valley is. Google actually is a very cool company, it's not exactly like what you think it is. They're very open. They support a lot of great initiatives and they're candid. And then I go on and explain, it's like a university, serene little area, have this little ecosystem, that they've kind of built a university culture, if you will. But it is open and there's things that happen that get misrepresented and that was my take. That's for the folks that filmed at Silicon Valley. But what's your take? What do you think about what's happening? >> So this is really, really good that you brought up the university campus environment. So I have two girls. They're both millennials and they're both in the tech world and we have this discussion and here is the perfect answer, right. So one of my daughters, Kat, she said that when she read that, she thought it was basically a gathering of his thoughts and it was a gathering of his thoughts because he was probably asked to adhere to I&D staff that's going on in every company right now, right, and so it was a little bit of a, wait a second, you know. He wants to sort of respond to his being asked to go to I&D staff and then Katia said, but you know mom, it was just a gathering of his thoughts and this is an essay, and it was a poorly written one, and if I was grading it, I would give him a C minus. Then my older daughter said-- >> Host: I would have given him an F on that one. She's generous. >> Because he did, he tried to make it very professional and very academic and she said but it was a first draft, he has not, he didn't proceed to toughen it up, solidify it, find more evidence, have it critiqued. It was just a gathering of his thoughts and he hasn't gone through the presses and both these girls graduated from Berkeley and so I think they would know what a C paper looks like versus an A paper. And then my older daughter said, and the other thing is, you know, it's not like I&D efforts are actually bad but what we're trying to do is we're trying to condense the time in which we're trying to get women at equal pairing in the tech world. Now, you know women have never been at equal pairing in many professions. They were not enough doctors, lawyers, accountants, you name it, right? Main Street, Wall Street has never had equality. And now we're looking at technology and the reason everything just flairs up in technology is because we live in today's world where news and information is available all the time. So there's two things going on. Information is readily available. People can come into the conversation very quickly and whenever anything happens in Silicon Valley, the effect is massive because all eyes are on Silicon Valley all the time. So it's a bit of a distorted view but we have gone through this. It took a long time for women to become astronauts. It took a long time for women to become neurosurgeons. It took a long time for women to become lawyers and dentists. It will take a little bit of time for women to become top technologists, but we're hoping that it'll shorten and things happen quickly in the valley and we're trying to get that quicker and so we're seeing a little bit of friction. This is responses from millennials so for me, it was like, yes. >> Host: Interesting perspective. >> Yes, great perspective, and when Sundar said these things at the world pitch, I was sitting in the second row and every time he said something I would clap real loud and Todd said, why are you being so good and I said I need to hear that, I need to hear him say that because-- >> Host: What did he say that moved you? >> Oh he just said, you know you have a place in technology and I said yes, we needed to hear you say that right away, all the time and especially to these girls, these eight to 18 year old girls, and all of the ones that come from 100 countries that weren't at Google but were listening to the live pitch. >> We seem to be going back to a crowd that wants to see respect for the individual and citizenship. These were company values at Hewlett Packard, when I was there, that I always remembered was unique. They go hey, you can have differences, but if you have respect for the individual and you have a citizenship mindset. That seemed to have been lost in tech. With this whole movement you see and win at all costs, being an asshole is what you got to do to be a CEO or flip it fast or bros program, so it became a very selfish environment. It seems to be shifting now, with this conversation. Your thoughts? >> So I have to say, doing a start up is not easy. Getting successful in this world is not easy. Shaking the status quo is not easy, so I have to say that the same people, and we're not going to name names, but the same people who are very arrogant and have little respect for the laws and rules, they have given us products that are changing peoples' lives. There is no question about it. Without their bravado, without their I don't care, I'm just going to go over you if you don't comply with me, a lot of ride sharing wouldn't even have happened, and to me, when you provide employment, when you provide alternative services, when you provide something that takes away the way things were, I see that as a plus. I think what we're seeing is that's needed to a certain extent and then you realize, okay now we have to get back to growing it and working it and if you keep going in that mode, you probably won't succeed. >> So being tough and determined and having grit is what you need to break through those walls as a start up. You don't need to be necessarily a jerk, but your point is if you're creating value. >> If you're creating value, and that sometimes you actually have to be a jerk because there are very few brave, non-jerk people who have gone against a big unions and big monopolies. Right, you and I, I would not be able to go against the taxi commission. You need somebody who is a complete a-hole to do that. And he did that and it made a difference. He doesn't have to continue to do that and that's the point. >> There's a meme going around on the internet, if you want to make friends, sell ice cream. >> Exactly! >> So you cannot always win friends when you're pioneering things. >> And you know, there is a balance and maybe we've fostered the fact that you need to be that attitude for everything and that's not true so the pendulum shifted a bit too much but I think that we shouldn't scorn them because really they have made a difference, let's just let everybody get back to-- >> Its a tough world out there to survive and you have to have that kind of sharp elbows to make things happen and it's the value you're providing is how you do it. >> Exactly. >> Well it's no secret to the folks that know me and watch The Cube and know the Silicon Valley that I'm a huge proponent for computer science and, you know, as someone who kind of fell into that in the '80s, it's now become very interesting in that the surface area for computer science has increased a lot and its not just coding and heads down and squashing bugs and writing code. There's been a whole nother evolution of Soft Scales, Agile, Cloud, you've seen a full transformation with the potential unlimited compute available, with mobile now 10 years plus into the iPhone you see new infrastructure developing so it creates the notion that, okay, you can bring the science of computers to a whole nother level. That must be attractive as you guys have that capability to bring that to bear in the programs. Can you guys comment on how you guys see just the role of computer science playing out and this is not a gender thing, this is more of, as I have a young daughter I try to say, it's not just writing code, you could certainly whip out a mobile app, but it's really bringing design to it or bringing a personal passion that you might have, so what are some of the patterns you're seeing in the surface area of what's now known as computer science? >> I think it's super important because as technology has progressed, we've been able to provide this program. If we were still programming in front of screens and doing the what you see is what you get kind of thing without, we would not be there. I think the big thing that's happened in the last 10 years is the mobile phone. I mean, if you find a girl anywhere today in the world, chances are she'll have a mobile phone on her and she's going to be loathe for you to take that one thing from her. You could take other things from her, but try taking that phone away from her. She will not let you. And so the fact that she's so attached to that mobile phone means that you can then tell her, hey, you don't have to be just a consumer of that thing, you can be a producer of that thing. Anything that you see on there, you can actually design. This is power. This is your thing to good and great and better. And if we can shift that in their minds that this is their link to the world that's wide open, we're seeing that. >> Well the world is consumed by it. I mean, a lot of women in the world will be consumers of product, certainly with AI, the conversation over the weekend I was having with folks as the role of women is super important not just in AI, but as software becomes cognitive, you have to align with half the audience that's out there. Must be hard for a guy to program something that's going to be more oriented towards women, but it brings up the question of application and whether it's self driving cars or utility from work to play and everything in between, software and the role of software is going to be critical and that seems to be pretty clear. Question is how do you inspire young girls. That's the question that a lot of fellow males that I talk to who are fathers of daughters and who are promoting women in tech and see that vision. What are some of the inspiration areas? How do you really shake the interest and how do you have someone really kind of dig in and enjoy it and taste it and feel it? >> So there is some research to back what the formula is that works to drive change in behavior and so there is, one of the biggest names in cognitive psychology is Albert Bandura. He's a professor at Stanford. But basically it's the same principles that drive, say, the addiction from alcohol or weight loss or any kind of new behavior change. So the first is you need to have exposure to someone whom you respect showing that this is something of meaning, and so the key words are someone you respect, right? And so media can play a very big role here, for scale, right, otherwise it's only maybe a teacher or a parent and if they're not exposed to technology they can't really affect your... And so media can play a huge role there. Second is the experience itself, like how do you make it easy to get started. And then it's like learning from video games, so you make it very, very easy, like the first step is just come over here, it'll be fun, there's pizza, come, right, like your friends are coming, but then the feedback has to be very fast, so the first step, and that's where your good curriculum matters. So that's where also working on a mobile phone is very appealing even though maybe apps is not-- >> Host: It's relatable. >> It's relatable but the feedback is instantaneous and so the programming language that the girls use is block based so even though you don't have any prior programming background, you can still build a working app, so that's critical. Then human beings get tired very easily and so the feedback needs to keep changing. It has to be unpredictable. The third piece is that of expectations. Sou have to have very high expectations and so that's why this current discussion around cognitive differences in gender, I feel is missing the point, because it's not what you're born with, what are you capable of? And so if we looked at our genetics, we would never go to space, we would never go to the deepest parts of the ocean, because we're not meant for that. But we had really high visions and expectations and so human beings rose to that. And then the last piece is less relevant in developing countries but it's still important, so it's sort of the human energy. We're not a brain disassociated from the body, we're connected, right? And so if you're hungry and tired and sleepy, not the right time to sort of make a dramatic change in you interests, so this is relevant like for us, we tried to figure out which countries are we going to work in, so post-conflict, war-torn areas are not the best areas to start a new program in. You need the right-- >> So you're saying the biological argument of, of course they're different, men and women, but it's the capability, that's where people are missing the boat. >> And the support system. So have high expectations, provide them with the right support, but the most important thing is your own beliefs in that. >> Let's get your thoughts on that 'cause I think you guys have a great program with Technovation, you mentioned mentors. Key part of the formula most likely. What we here, in the conversation I've had with women here has been, there's a real call to arms at the executive level now, folks my age in the 50s who made it, who were there, succeeding, they really want to give back and they really have recognized the value of having that peer mentorship and then inspiring the young generation, whether it's part of the things that we cover like Grace Hopper or Technovations, things that you do, or even just mentoring in their own communities. What does that mentorship look like that you guys see that you'd like to see double down on or areas you'd like to see tweaked or perceptions that need to change? What's your thoughts on mentorship and the role of inspiring young girls? >> Mentorship from men? >> Host: Men and women, I mean... >> From both? >> Well I see the mentorship with women, as that's the first step. I have a whole nother conversation, in my opinion, about the men needing training, not just like go to class and learn how to talk but how to empathize. >> Well my big thing has been that when you wanted to encourage women up the ladder in your companies or you wanted to encourage women to actually get in to technical roles, that intent should not be placed in the CSR department of your organization 'cause that speaks volumes, right? To say oh, well that's in the social responsibility department or the HR, that just says, okay, so you're not really, you don't think we're capable of helping you with your product or service, we're sort of part of this, and it's like, no. So I think you want to mainstream it, which is what a lot of I&D things are trying to do now. >> Host: Inclusion and diversity. >> Inclusion and diversity. >> To make it part of the fabric, not a department checkbox. >> Exactly. >> That's what you're getting at. >> Exactly and the involvement of these departments, to include everybody and to make it more diverse is going to be not frictionless. It will be friction until a time where it won't even be necessary. I&D departments should have one goal which is to work themselves out of a job. If they can work themselves out of a job, then the company would have done what it needs to be done, but I think-- >> Meaning it's self sufficient, it's self governing, people are humans, it's respect for individuals. I mean this just basically comes down to, if you look at it as humans, it takes it, every conversation could be tabled, that's what? There's a person on the other side, it's a human being, not a woman or a white male or whatever. They're not there yet, but I mean certainly that would be the endgame, so in that scenario, that department's out of business, the I&R, the inclusion and diversity department, has done its job. >> Exactly, you don't need one because you know you're okay. And I think capabilities is really important in corporations and this isn't anybody's fault, this is just how it's been done. This has just been the culture of it. Who gets invited to which meetings. Who gets invited to which conferences. And so we heard the CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki saying, you know, she had to sort of elbow a little bit to say hey, why am I not allowed at a certain conference and it's like, maybe just wake up to that and say why aren't you involving more people at conferences and think tanks because, you know, I come from an oil and gas background and people used to do a lot of deals on the golf course 'cause oil and gas people play golf a lot and a lot of deals used to happen, well in the Valley we don't play golf a lot but we do do other things, conferences or get togethers, and if you don't include the people in your team as groups or representationally, well they're not going to be there when you make these decisions so maybe just be a little bit-- >> Exclusionary is a problem and Kleiner Perkins was taken to task, they had ski trips apparently planned and they did all mostly guys and they didn't invite the women part, there was a big scandal. This is where they make that, it's a normative thing and they've got to change the norms. >> Change the norms and if you actually want your company which is made of all kinds of people to move really far ahead, don't be like that. Include everybody because the only goodness about that is you'll go forward. If you don't include somebody, well you're going to hurt them. >> I want to add to that. So there's quite a bit of data. So the patterns are not anything different from what the message girls get from school and parents. So if you look at the data there are 100 countries that legally discriminate against women and so what message industry is telling, is really, firstly it doesn't filter through to the larger population. Silicon Valley is a completely different problem, but overall, the messages girls are given is like, this is not for you, and so especially in some of the most populous, dense countries of the world. And so we have to fight a lot of these kinds of perceptions from the ground up and the number one gatekeeper is the father and so a key part of what we've now done to date is to provide education and training to the parents because there's a very moving story that we work in a remote town in south India and a mentor who's very dedicated has been trying to get these girls to participate in Technovation. He did that and then one girl was actually offered a job but the father kept saying no, not needed, no girl in my family ever needs to work, but he fought it and so the girl actually gets a job. And then a year later, the father calls the mentor and said, you know what, I'm so grateful that you did it because a day after she got the job, I got hit in an accident and I lost my job, but it's these kinds of perceptions that have to be changed one person at a time which is what makes this very hard, unless you actually are able to get the media to change the messaging and I think in the U.S., which is, there's some very interesting studies and a question, right, like if you were to think, would there be more women in STEM in poorer, developing countries versus richer, highly developed countries. Where would you see more women in STEM? The answer is actually the women in the poorer countries like Iran, Malaysia. The reason is because in an individualistic society like in the U.S., where there's a lot of emphasis on materialistic but it's also about are you happy. The conversation has changed from parents telling children and do what makes you happy and then you are very prone to advertising and advertising works when it's highly targeted and highly gendered. And so in the 60s, there was no such thing as pink and blue. Now there is pink and blue. And so now we just made our entire society entirely susceptible to advertising. And girls are passive and complaint and boys are aggressive and so then when you're looking at the board structures, it's very, very hard to fix the problem right there. You have to go down deeper because you don't get leaders who are complaint. Maybe secretaries are compliant. But you have to fix the message that teachers give girls, that parents give their baby girls when they are born, and so industry is just sort of in the spotlight right now but the issue is not that of industry, I think it's also that of society. >> Industry, if you look at what Sundar is supporting you guys it's interesting that this industry seems to chipping and certainly Silicon Valley is a little different as you said, but in general, it is a cultural parent thing. Any plans there with Technovations to have a parent track? >> Yes, totally. I mean, I think, right now, 10% of parents actually volunteer to be mentors, kind of like girl scout troop leaders, and so we are trying to figure out, okay, what is a way to involve parents and to make them part of the discussion? >> Tara, Anar, thanks so much. This is The Cube conversation here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier here in the Palo Alto Studios, with two great guests, Tara Chklovski, who's the founder and CEO of Iridescent, and Anar Simpson, Global Ambassador of Technovation. Thanks for coming in today. Appreciate moving your schedules around to come in. Thanks for coming to our studio. >> You bet, yeah. >> So Sundar Pichai was at your event. That's the big story this past week. There's has been a Google memo from a low level employee who wrote some things that got the whole world sharking around gender biases, role of women in tech. We do a lot of women in tech as you know in theCUBE, hundreds and hundreds of women over the years, friends, and also smart people. This seem a pretty big moment for you guys. You had an event at Google. Sundar canceled his on-hands meeting to address this, under fear of retaliation and safety, but came to your event on Google Campus, surprising to many. It's written up on Recode and The Verge. Pretty notable. So tell us about what happened. >> So, yeah, this was the 2017 Technovation World Pitch Competition and the awards ceremony. And Sundar came and he talked to a lot of the girls who were presenting their ideas to solve problems in their community, and then he had a little bit of a one-on-one conversation to learn a little bit more about the kinds of problems, their interest in technology entrepreneurship, and then he addressed the crowd of 900 plus supporters, and really emphasized that there's a place for women in technology, and more importantly, for him and Google, that there's a place for these girls at Google. >> Great timing for you guys too. And I want to drill more into what happened but I want to just point out this was a scheduled stop for Sundar in terms of it. You guys have a program called Technovation which was a 2017 World Pitch, folks around, you're the Global Ambassador, take a minute to talk about what Technovation is. Why was it on Google's Campuses? What was it all about? What does Global Ambassador mean? Talk about your mission. >> Right, so Technovation's mission is to empower girls to become technology entrepreneurs and it's much more than just learning how to code. It's really about seeing girls and telling girls that if there's a problem in their community, technology can help them have a very powerful voice. We've been running for eight years and Anar is our Global Ambassador who's helped us grow to more than a hundred countries. Technovation's relationship with Google is eight years long. Google has supported Technovation, was the very first technology company to support Technovation way before any other company saw the potential. And since then, since 2010, Google has provided funding, mentors, spaces, not just across the US but globally. And so this year, it was a year long worth of relationship made with code which is their arm focusing on gender equality. They basically provided funding but made this event possible at Google headquarters. >> Anar talk about the Global Ambassador role you have, and kind of comes down to the question for Tara as well, is it beyond entrepreneurship and beyond coding? I mean talk about specifically what you guys are bringing to folks outside the Silicon Valley. >> Oh sure, so my role as the Global Ambassador for Technovation is really getting to girls all over the world and saying to them you need to be engaged in technology. And what we found, as Tara mentioned, we've been doing this now, I've been doing this now for five years, is that we're building a movement. We're bringing in girls, we're bringing in mentors, we're bringing in companies and governments together to make this a reality for girls in tech careers in their own countries. And I want to go back and address Google's relationship with Technovation a little bit more because this is more of an anecdote. I got into Technovation not willingly. Six years ago I had a start-up, it was called Parallel Earth, and I was working hard at it. And I was using the offices at Mozilla because they allow people to do that, you know people like me to work there. And one day somebody sent me a note, it just came on the internal email system, and they said, "You're a woman, you're in tech, "there's an event going on at Andreessen Horowitz "where the luminaries of the Valley are going to be talking." And so the luminaries were Mary Samayo who was at Google at that time, Freada Kapor Klein, Padma Ashriwurier , and I think that there was two other people. And so we went to this event and we sat in a packed room at Andreessen Horowitz. And these women, the luminaries at the Valley at that time, each one of them stood up and told us their story, and afterwards they fed us hors d'oeuvres and offered us wine. And then they said before you go, we have one to ask of you which is could you sign up to be a mentor for Technovation. And I thought to myself, no, I am like over my head in my own company. I don't even have time for myself. And they asked, be a mentor, it's just two hours a week for 12 weeks. And I thought to myself, oh God, man, I drank their wine, I ate their hors d'oeuvres, I listened to them and now how can I say no? And so I signed up. And it was a stretch for me because what happened at that time, the curriculum was still being delivered by a person. And so I've been assigned to the Google Campus in Mountainview. And somebody in engineering at Google had been able to get a room, a very small conference room. And so for 12 weeks I met this team of girls from Mountainview, and there were other mentors like me, and then there was a whole bunch of girls from Sequoia High School. And John, in that 12 weeks, I was a changed woman. Those five girls, they blossomed under me. When I met them, I said to them, "I'm here, I am a type A, this is a competition." >> "I signed up for the Andreessen Horowitz--" >> Exactly, exactly. "Listen, I got my own star, "but we're going to win, this is a competition." So they just rolled their eyes at me, like, who the heck she is, we don't even want to be here. >> John: They draw the short straw on this one. >> Exactly. But those 12 weeks changed my life. >> John: In what way, what way did it change your life? >> I have a degree in Computer Science. I have a Master's in Communication. I went to Stanford for innovation and entrepreneurship. So I've been in the field for a very long time. And what I saw in terms of the curriculum, what I saw in terms of the mentorship, what I learned about design thinking and being able to create an app, I never had that. When people like me, we go in to a university, and doing computer, we never had that kind of stuff. And I thought, oh my God, if I'd had that, I would be, like, soaring the skies right now. And to have girls who really came to this table with nothing, and you see them becoming graphic designers because they had a little bit of access to Microsoft Paint, someone who has the ability to do PowerPoint, one girl, in my team of five, almost never showed up, she was late, she never came, and then two sessions before the Pitch, she showed up and she realized, have we've gone so far without her. So here's what she did, she took that little graphic that that woman who'd done it in Paint, and she got her mom and they went to some t-shirt shop, and they got that graphic printed. And the next time she came, there were five t-shirts that said the name of our team which was Intoxication Station, and one for me. And then it turns out she's a really good speaker. Who knew? So she almost never came, brought these shirts, was the speaker for the group, and we won the local competition and then the next one, then we placed second in the finals. >> She came in, contributed with a t-shirt, and graced you the back end, won the trust of the group, ended up being the speaker and winning the award. >> Yes, they grew, they literally, you know if you take a time lapse and you see a flower blossom, that's exactly what happened. >> Tara talk about your credentials 'coz you have a Ph.D. >> So I have a, yeah, Bachelor's in Physics, and Master's in Aerospace, and I was in the Ph.D. program in Aerospace but I dropped out because I wanted to start Iridescent. >> That's good. Dropping out of Ph.D. has a good track record. A lot of folks who dropped out of Stanford includes some of the big names we now know. What's some examples during your life when you had those kind of changed moments? >> I think, Iridescent, we are now in our 12th year. Every couple of months it's a changed moment because it's a test of grit. And just believing in yourself because I mean, I started with just an idea and grew it to be an organization that's all over the world. And it doesn't come with just full-hearted focus. A lot of courage is what I've seen. I have also seen how much you are passionate about an idea really swings how the other person is thinking. And so the idea only matters so much, I think, of course, I mean, the track record and everything has to be there, but I think a lot of it depends on your own passion for it, and I've come to realize that passion is maybe proportional to the complexity and the impact of the problem you're trying to solve. So if you're only trying to solve a small problem, you lose interest in two years, right, and maybe that's why, I'm always curious, why do so many start-ups fail after two or three years? It's because maybe you came in not thinking that you're going to change the world, maybe you came in because you wanted to make quick money, or et cetera, whatever. And so I think for me this is my life's work. And if you want to bring more and to represent the communities into innovation. And so it's not something that's going to be solved easily. >> Start-up success and then people working on teams, really is about inclusion and letting things bloom and being ready for anything. That's the greatest feat. Let's get back to the Sundar event that you guys were having. Now this is a good conversation to have because one of the things that came out of the aha that became that memo, really was a conversation publicly. And now it's been polarizing. There's just some kind of a hate, hate kind of mindset with it most of the time. Plenty of stuff in the internet to go read there, but what actually are some good conversations in the industry? What was the conversation like during the event? Because this was in full conversation mode while you guys were having your 2017 World Pitch competition of which he presided over and had a speech to the entrepreneurs. What was it like? What are some of the conversations that were taking place? >> I think the most powerful piece of the whole evening was really the girls walking in and seeing the incredible diversity that we have in this world, right. So we had girls, and mentors, and supporters, from over 30 countries and just them coming and waving the flags, and different faces, and different cultures, all trying to make the world a better place. I mean, it's rare that you see that, using technology. And I think it's very fitting that Silicon Valley is the center of this. But I think there was not one dry eye in the group because you realized the conversation is so much bigger than one company, one country. It is something that affects us as all human beings, and you believing in human potential. So I think seeing these young girls, some of them 10 years old, there was this, I think, maybe the crowd's favorite was these 10-year-old girls from Cambodia who want to improve sort of the lives of these people working in cottage industries, right. And they created an app, like, say, Etsy or something, but focused on Cambodian products, and the courage of these little girls, I think everybody walks away feeling okay there's hope even in the midst of all of this discussion. >> It creates a lightning rod in some ways that hopefully will move on to the substantive conversations. How do you guys feel about what happened as you take this mission forward? You guys are doing some amazing work. And we'll do a segment on that in a minute, but given the landscape now, how do you view this? How are you talking with friends and colleagues and family members around it? Because I certainly had conversations with my friends certainly in the east coast, like, "No, no, that's not the way Silicon Valley is." Google actually is a very cool company. It's not what you think it is. They're very open. They support a lot of great initiatives. And they're candid. And then I go on and explain. It's like a university. So me and Larry have this little ecosystem that they've kind of built the university culture if you will. But it's open and there's things that happened that get misrepresented. That was my take for the folks who don't know Silicon Valley. But what's your take? What do you think about what's happened? >> So this is really, really good that you brought up the university campus, environment of it. So I have two girls, they're both millennials, and they're both in a tech world. And we had this discussion. And here is the perfect answer, right. So one of my daughters, Kat, she said that when she read that, she thought it was basically a gathering of his thoughts. And it was a gathering of his thoughts because he was probably asked to adhere to I&D stuff that's going on, in every company right now, right. And so he was like a little bit of a, wait a second, he wants to sort of, respond to his being asked to go to I&D stuff. And then Katya said, "But you know mom, "it was just a gathering of his thoughts. "And if this is an essay, and it was a poorly written one, "and if I was grading it, I would give him a C minus." Then my older daughter said-- >> John: Oh, she'll give him an F on that one. >> Right. >> John: C minus, she's generous. >> No, because he did. He tried to make it very professional and very academic. And she said but it was a first draft. He didn't proceed to toughen it up, solidify it, find more evidence, have it critic. It was just a gathering of his thoughts and he hasn't gone through the process. Both these girls graduated from Berkeley and so I think they would know what a C paper look like versus an A paper. And then my older daughter said, "And the other thing is, "it's not like "I&D efforts "are actually bad, "but what we're trying to do is "we're trying to condense the time "in which we're trying to get women "at equal peering in the tech world." Now women have never been at equal peering in many professions. There were not enough doctors, lawyers, accountants, you name it, right? Main street, Wall Street has never had equality. And now we're looking at technology and the reason everything just flares up in technology is because we live in today's world, where news and information is available all the time. So there's two things going on. Information is readily available. People can come in to the conversation very quickly. And whenever anything happens in Silicon Valley, the effect is massive because all eyes are on Silicon Valley all the time. So it's a bit of a distorted view. But we have gone through this. It took a long time for women to become astronauts. It took a long time for women to become neurosurgeons. It took a long time for women to become lawyers and dentists. It will take a little bit of time for women to become top technologists. But we're hoping that it'll shorten and things happen quickly in the Valley and we're trying to get that quicker. And so we're seeing a little bit of friction. This is responses from millennials. So for me it was like-- >> John: Interesting perspective. >> Yes, great perspective. And when Sundar said these things at the World Pitch, I was sitting in the second row and every time he said something I would clap really loud. And Todd said, "Why are you being so good?" And I said, "I need to hear that. "I need to her him say that because--" >> John: What did he say that moved you? >> Oh, he just said you have a place in technology. And I said yes. We needed to hear you say that right away, all the time, and especially to these girls, these two 18-year-old girls, and all of the ones that come from a hundred countries that weren't at Google but were listening to the live pitch. And I needed to hear it. I'm a veteran but I needed to hear it because-- >> It's interesting too the narrative that the millennials and certainly the younger kids hear is an echo of what comes down. And, interesting, my son who is 15, at dinner last night said, "Dad, I'm a white male. "What does that mean?" >> Poor guy. >> Then I'm like, oh my God, he's a kid. So, again, things are shifting, they're out of context. Tara your thoughts on how this all evolves and the positive things that folks can do. What's your perspective? >> Yeah, I mean, I think, I had a lot of discussion with my husband yesterday on this because he's a white male, right? And, but also we have two daughters, right. And so there's this whole he for she campaign, right. And that I think like our conversation earlier, the discussion has to be very inclusive and you cannot polarize. And I think I have to be careful because, I mean, my passion is what drives the work because the work is hard, but I have to also remind that, okay, there's a whole another segment of the population that cares, right, and, so I think it's just constantly remembering these kinds of things. I think in terms of what the industry can do, I think the normal thing is that people are doing which is really well, investing lower in the pipeline, investing in young girls, and all of that kind of stuff, and also sort of the inclusion and diversity stuff in the workforce. But I think there are some other segments, other industries that we can learn from, and I think one very unique place is actually the aviation industry. But the experimental aircraft, so we're just aviation enthusiasts, right. And so they have this gathering, yearly annual gathering, and 600,000 people come from all over the world, the thing that makes it unique and there's almost equal representation, there are two things that make it very unique. First is the family affair. And I think the tech industry has done a very good job, sort of convening these developer conferences but they are closed and most of them are 100% male, right? I think there could be something there where the, again much more than a company, that the industry has to do. And to make it maybe not commercial but do it as a fun family gathering and not in Silicon Valley. And then I think the second would be to actually lean on the veterans of the industry to share their passion with the young ones. And I think one of the problems of technology is that it's moved so fast that it has become very abstract. And nothing is very hands on. If you open up something, you will not understand anything. And so what the aviation industry had done really well is to showcase the core fundamental principles of how these things work using the old airplanes, old engines, combustion engines. But you can see how things work, right, and so-- >> John: It's like kindergarten. >> Exactly, exactly, start that way and then you can go into the more complex. But I think there's a role for the veterans of the tech world to play here. And I think it's not just sort of gender but it's also maybe age and making it much more about the family, rather than just the developer in the family. >> Tara and Anar, you guys are inspiration. Thanks for taking the time. And I've had the, my age, luxury of spending nine years at Hewlett Packard company before, maybe these early 90s when Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were around. And one of the things that really influenced me, and I think this is something that I see a positive light coming in this industry, to your point, about so much changes, is that we seem to be going back to a crowd that wants to see respect for the individuals, citizenship. These were company values at Hewlett Packard when I was there that I always remembered was unique. Hey, you can have differences but if you have respect for the individual, and you have the citizenship mindset, that seems to have been lost in tech, and with this whole movement you're seeing, win at all cost, being an asshole, what you going to do to be a CEO, or flip it fast, or programs. So it became a very selfish environment. It seems to be shifting that way with this conversation. Your thoughts? >> So I have to say doing a start-up is not easy. Getting successful in this word is not easy. Shaking the status quo is not easy. So I have to say that the same people and we're not going to name names, but the same people who are very arrogant and have little respect for the laws and rules, they have given us products that are changing people's lives. There is no question about it. With that, they're a provider. With that, they're sort of "I don't care, I'm just going to go over you "if you don't comply with me." A lot of ride sharing, wouldn't even have happened. And to me when you provide employment, when you provide alternative services, when you provide something that takes away the way things were, I see that as a plus, okay. I think what we're seeing is that's needed to a certain extent, and then you realized, okay, now we have to get back to growing it and working it. And if you keep going in that mode, you probably won't succeed. >> So being tough and determined and having grit is what you need to breakthrough those walls as a start-up. You don't need to be necessarily a jerk. But your point is if you're creating value. >> If you're creating value, and that sometimes you actually have to be a jerk because there are a very few brave, non-jerk people who have gone against big unions and big monopolies, right. I would not be able to go against the taxi commission. You need somebody who's a complete a-hole to do that. And he did that and it made a difference. He doesn't have to continue to do that and that's-- >> There was a meme going around the internet, "If you want to make friends, sell ice cream." >> Exactly. >> So you can't always win friends when you're pioneering. >> Right, right. There is a balance and maybe we've fostered the fact that you need to be that attitude for everything and that's not true. The pendulum shifted a bit too much. But I think that we shouldn't scorn them because really they have made a difference. Let everybody get back to-- >> It's a tough world out there to survive. And you have to have that kind of sharp elbows to make things happen. But it's the value your providing, it's how you do it. >> Exactly. >> Well thanks so much guys for coming up. Appreciate to spend the time to talk about your awesome event at 2017 World Pitch as part of Technovation where Sundar represented Google in your great program with young girls go over some tech books. Thanks for sharing. This is CUBE conversation here at Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

from the noise it's the cube covering vmworld 2015 brought to you by VM world and its ecosystem sponsors now your host Stu minimun and Brian Grace Lee Patrick Shanna's on for a member of the technical staff for dr. Patrick saw you at the end of our spring tour and now you're here at the you know picking up the fall tour so thank you for joining us again hey thanks for having me alright so I mean last year you know containers with VMware I mean was a big discussion we kind of all had that you've got some background with Microsoft right and VMware yeah and VMware so you know there was kind of a joke of you know oh the old Microsoft you know extend embrace and we'll see how we go from there but you know it's been a year later so can you give us a little bit of the update of kind of you know how docker in VMware how do you guys see each other I could evm where is a great partner you so the announcement this morning VMware embrace containers so I'm super excited to be here some of the announcements that were made this morning is now this year is a control plane for containers there's this notion of native containers in this year one of the things that excites me the most is their project bonville that they talked about this morning it's actually been made by one of my friends on the ex-colleagues banchory and what they're doing in there that they are implemented the back end for the darker engine in terms of these fear primitives so when you're creating images it creates a set of vmdk layers and when you're creating when you want to create a container the isolation primitives are the ones of VMS as opposed to linux containers all right so that's a very good way of running container yes sir patrick last time we're in the cube you did a great job of helping us you know kind of walk the stack I don't know if you saw we actually did a research piece kind of layering the whole stack so here the announcement you mentioned this morning is the vSphere integrated containers and they've got photon and they've got Bonneville on and let me ask you am I looking at this right that we're VMware I mean VMware very much down at the infrastructure level yeah so when they build that photon layer you know whether they call it just enough virtualization as Kate kolbert said this morning when I heard him speak um but dr. sits on top of that am I getting that right yeah it's exactly right and actually one of my reasons for joining VMware I think four years ago was for them to go up stack and at that time it was with cloud foundry and I would argue that maybe with cloud foundry we were a little bit too much up stack compared to my vm worries at the bottom when I present the whole stack usually I talk about like the new hardware the new hardware today is your cloud provider it's a Amazon Microsoft Google and then the virtualization with VMware so that's the new hardware and that's where vmware is very strong so they manage networking storage and compute on top of that you have the OS layer and what really got me interested into moving to darker is that the whole landscape just changed when containers appear two years ago and the whole industry is reorganizing around that so what happened at the OS layer that all the OS providers starting with chorus initially who studied that friend started doing minimal release of their OS that are just designed to run containers so coral I started that trend but then very quickly read had followed with project atomic and then we went to with winter core the most interesting to me is Ranchero s where they run docker for everything so they have two darker system darker and userland occur and then VMware came out with photon I think twas last June or something like that and today I think they have a preview to of that coming out on top of that you have ducker so the rocker engine running and on top of the darker engine you have orchestration platforms and these are the ones that are replacing what used to be past platform as a service and when I was at Google I was doing google appengine at vmware i was doing cloud foundry now you see cloud foundry reinventing itself as a control plane for containers and so one of the announcement that excited me most in the keynote this morning is that now Cloud Foundry is running with photon they have an integrated distribution so finally vmware is going up stack with its own stack like vSphere at the bottom then on top of that you have photon and then on top of that you have cloud foundry yeah so really exciting times yeah I think for me one of the things that I always hear that feels like it's confusing or off the markets a lot of people want to kind of get into this containers replaces VMs or VMs versus container debate and as if they're both sort of infrastructure layer which if you think about them is something that holds that I could see you make the mistake but but Dockers is something that developers love they love to package their applications they love this idea of right on my laptop push it somewhere do you find that confusion a lot in the marketplace I mean oh yeah I find that a lot and I think it's tied to the rise of DevOps it really in the past five years the this new movement called DevOps like really took off and DevOps is a lot about people and processes a little bit about products as well and I think when docker appeared it was the right level of abstraction for DevOps to happen like the right packaging construct where developers can put all their dependencies in a container and then ups have all the right knobs to tweak for putting that in production but it's the same thing that you put in production that you have on your developer machine so to me a lot of the confusion assoc d2 docker is tied to that because it's a technology that you use both by developers and by ops I think vmware is doing a really good job of giving up so kind of control they need to put darker in production yeah so we're here at vmworld a lot of talk about vmware in containers you guys doing a ton of stuff with Microsoft like yeah talk a little bit about because you know for a long time people like to say what containers have been along for on for a long time Linux containers and but but windows and microsoft adopting this like what's going on there yeah so the partnership with Microsoft is super exciting so after a VMware I actually moved to Microsoft and at Microsoft my role was to help all the darker partners to get onto Azure and since I join I've seen all the work that happened with microsoft recently we've done tons of stuff we end many many different integration points to me the most important one is finally we have native windows containers that shipped with a Windows Server tv3 like literally I think two weeks ago so that's something that was pre announced that dark on and my croissan'wich came onstage with the ducati sure to do a demo now you can run it on Azure yourself what's exciting there is that the concepts that are at the heart of docker are based on using c groups and name spaces which are linux kernel features for isolation of your workloads the thing is these isolation primitive similar ones existed in windows server and especially the version of Windows Server that was running within Microsoft data center for to power Bing and things like that to have denser workloads in the data center where the Microsoft team has done is that they re implemented the darker back end in terms of windows containers primitives and so now you can create Windows net application running on windows server in windows native containers the beauty of it if you're a developer especially an enterprise developer in the enterprise basically you have half and half Java and.net very often like developers go from one to the other or they are developers who do Java others doing dotnet they have completely different tool chains now with darker they have a single tool chain that they can use to build a multi container application that use different technologies behind the scene so finally developers can use the best tools for the father father job yep so pattern one of the things we look at every year here at vmworld is how are we doing it kind of fixing the things that broke when virtualization went into both storage and networking yeah and it was big discussion point at dr. Khan this year you put up a beta of docker networking yep storage I'd say is even a little bit you know further behind there so you know what's the latest on how you guys think of that you know where are we along that maturity curve of you know storage and networking for for containers so I'm really glad you asked that because when i joined occur in march that was my first project to kick-start a project to do darker extensibility and the two extension points that we created based on ecosystem and customer demands were about storage and networking and so I'd acha kaun in June we announced to extension points for dr. a plug-in system one for networking and one for volumes and what I really love about what happened at vmworld today this morning in the keynote is that VMware implemented a networking plug-in based on NSX as well as a volume plug inning in collaboration with a cluster HQ who had built flutter and help us create that extension point four volumes so finally one of the big issues with containers is that when you were deploying it in a multi host set up especially with swarm and compose when you're stunning to the orchestration before June there was no way to to move one container when state full container with data to another machine with a volume plug-in now you can do that and with the networking aspect now you can refer to containers by instead of like doing links and there were some complicated ways to do that now you can use either the native networking driver that comes with ducker but as usual we use the philosophy of batteries included but replaceable and so you can plug networking plug-in coming from nsx if you're using this fear under the hood yeah so still we're we're going to be doing a panel tomorrow on on containers one of the things I want to dig into we're gonna have intel on the show and tells doing some neat things where they're they're calling it clear containers but in essence it's it's kind of the equivalent for the vm we're proud of you know VT technology right hardware isolation of processes talk about just what's the potential of that for containers ability to better leverage hardware to make containers a it's faster and yeah so that aspect of internal research is super exciting and it corroborates some of the things i see happening in the marketplace right now especially on the research side where you have both like Linux containers became super successful in the past two years now that we're going in production there will be lots of different type of isolation technologies applied to containers and so one of the first one I heard about West project banville where it's implemented in terms of this year primitives another one is the clear container by Intel another one that I heard about that that came through the oci project that will talk about that new standard that we announced a cocoon is called is called things of run V and it's based on the hyper SH container technology based on virtualization so I see more and more people using virtualization as an implementation for isolation in containers yeah talk about what's going on with run see so you know six months ago it was we had this you know are we gonna have diverging container standards you guys stood up with core OS and 20 other companies and said we're no we're going to have one standard what's going on with with oci and run c and that thing that's been super exciting so that was my second project that docker we announced it at Daka Connie you that we had a 20 of the biggest companies in the industry joining to create a standard container especially core OS joining as well as Google and Amazon and everybody and what blew my mind is that we're what were free month later less than three months later the team right now is preparing a first draft of the spec for September they've been working actively all throughout the summer we put out we started working on the spec just after dark on we had the darker contributor summit and the the working group for OC I was the largest we had like 15 people from different companies starting to iterate on the spec they continued throughout the summer and now we have something that's close to a first draft of the spec with a reference implementation that's runs in one of the most interesting development that happens there and that really speaks to the power of open source and open stone is is that once the specs started to mature we started to have already a second reference a second implementation of the spec that's called rungy that's been built by the hyper SH project based on virtualization and then why way contributed a test suite for compliance of the of the spec so that spec is advancing really fast yeah so I was having a conversation with Jim's emmalin who runs the Linux Foundation II week or so ago at linux con and we asked him we said you know it's hard because you love them all like your kids do you have a favorite project he said yeah no question oci is my favorite project right now just because of the promise of portability the sort of write once run anywhere so you're working on it it's an important product the Linux domain is really looking at you guys to make this work and and drive that portability yeah and the Linux Foundation has done a really great job at coordinating the work of all the maintainer Xin there it's really a neutral ground where we can advance so that all of us can innovate on top of it now a lot of the competition is happening at the upper layer of the stack like oci I think we all agree on the semantics of what a container runtime should be now at the higher level there are lots of discussions about how the orchestration should be done and there you have 15 different projects you have swarmed from darker this mess those this coup banaras which is very opinionated and one of the other development this summer is that Google and many others including us dr. with part of that announced an another foundation called the CNC F the cloud native computing foundation where the goal there is to create reference tax for orchestration that can interoperate together pretty much along the same line of the work that darker did with a mesosphere for having a swarm plugin for mezclas so Patrick boy there's been so much movement in this space we talked multiple foundations a lot going on one of the things we came out of dr. Khan that we were just I guess a little concerned about is how many people actually run an import and we know you know I mean live through the the VMware lived through the Linux you know adoption phases so is it fair to kind of gauge that piece of it you know what do you see when you know you're talking to the practitioners and the you pick users out there as to you know how should we be measuring you know that's a naturally occurring production yeah so I would say it's maturing a lot we see more and more users putting darker in production there are lots of holes still in the offering that needs to be filled and that's why I'm pretty excited to see VMware stepping in and saying hey for production use we have a lot of technology that you can use to put that in production some of the things that we've seen is a like networking and volumes so that was really needed now that there are lots of plugins I hope that people will have an easier time putting that into production the agreement on what orchestration should be so people are still asking a lot of question about which orchestrator should i use for my containers in production and so I've seen so people using measures others using coronary some are trying swarm there's still lots of questions out there about what the right stack should look like and I would say as usual in software project it kind of depends on what you're running well the one thing that concerns me and it's always there's so many good things going on around docker I've been doing some research over the last couple of months looking at all the different platforms so everything from you know dr. native to what hoshi corp is doing to what openshift is doing and we were we talkin to Adrian Cockroft he said you know dockers reached sort of plaid in terms of speed it moves so fast you guys are releasing some every two months how do you deal with that because you deal with the ecosystem how do they deal with the fact that you're now part of their core platform but you're releasing new stuff every two months I mean are we going to get into something where it's like well it's it's one dot six and two dot one and how do you deal with that yeah so ducker itself as a company is maturing addict Akane you one of the big things that we announced is a darker trusted registry and aqus yes so we have a version of docker that is supported where we're going to do backwards a porting of patches so for people who really want to run it in production we have an offering that supported for them so that they are not obliged to run on the tape every time some of the startups that I've seen out there like large startups with a more in the consumer space who have larger data center and a pretty mature ops team they some of them are running on tip or on the latest version of darker but in the enterprise you can assume that like the adoption of new versions will be slower and so we have that like support offering for for all the versions of darker now the darker open source project is continuing to fire I like to create lots of things and there are lots of poor request the project is more successful than ever I think in the last like recently the most prolific contributor was Microsoft in the project there are lots of torrid has a huge contributor that Google as well is sending lots of pull requests so there are not lots of new features coming with each new release but at the same time we're really working on a platform that everybody is going to use and that needs to mature that's why you have that really fast pace of innovation in that space yeah so I mean Patrick here you're you're in the weeds of some of this so the other one that comes up quite a bit of courses security so even just this last week there's a big back and forth on Twitter and a couple of blog posts talking about it you know what what your thought is to how how we should talk about kind of the maturity and where we're going with the container security discussion yeah so as you guess container security is one of our big focus abductor because that's one of the things that people are expecting from a platform especially to run in production my colleague yoga Monica did lots of blog posts recently about how to improve your security in production security is not only a factor of the software itself but on the all the processes that you put in place around it and basically around darker you have to put in place with some kind of processes you have for operating systems like getting the latest release of the official images I don't know if you saw that there's been a blog post like talking where they looked randomly at all the images in docker hub and evaluating them for security issues one of the things that they didn't look at is that the latest releases of operating systems that we have in there in blocker images are just tracking the upstream releases and people who have sound security practices internally I'll just pulling these latest releases all right last question I have for you Patrick it's it easy for people to come I come in here and be like oh well you know biggest threat to vmware is is docker what what I love talking to you is you know this is a real small community I over the last year a lot of former VMware people now working over a doctor and not that they're unhappy with VMware and you know Microsoft is is in the mix you know so I mean this whole community is pulling together and doing a lot of work a lot of contribution you know what do you see out there from the technology community to help mature this whole space yeah I'd say both VMware and Microsoft at the operating system an infrastructure level as well as Google at the orchestration layer VMware a red hat at the operating system layer like everybody is trying to make darker a sound platform to run in production so what I see in all corners is just darker getting solidified and getting part of most people's production infrastructure with all these efforts on the security and stability and processes as well as the development processes there are lots of innovation in the terms of CI CD integration with darker no no she saw the work that cloudbees has been doing for integrating jenkins with darker so doctor is both the platform for apps and for devs and in that in that qualification that the ecosystem is very broad both on the dev tools side as well as on the ops and platform side all right well Patrick unfortunately at a time is always great chatting with you thank you so much for joining us we'll be back with lots more coverage here from being real 2015 and thank you for watching you inseam six months you