(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, where we are here on the show floor at AWS re:Invent. We are theCUBE. I am Savannah Peterson, joined with John Furrier. John, afternoon, day two, we are in full swing. >> Yes. >> What's got you most excited? >> Just got lunch, got the food kicking in. No, we don't get coffee. (Savannah laughing) >> Way to bring the hype there, John. >> No, there's so many people here just in Amazon. We're back to 2019 levels of crowd. The interest levels are high. Next gen, cloud security, big part of the keynote. This next segment, I am super excited about. CUBE Alumni, going back to 2013, 10 years ago he was on theCUBE. Now, 10 years later we're at re:Invent, looking forward to this guest and it's about security, great topic. >> I don't want to delay us anymore, please welcome Mark. Mark, thank you so much for being here with us. Massive day for you and the team. I know you oversee three different units at Amazon, Inspector, Detective, and the most recently announced, Security Lake. Tell us about Amazon Security Lake. >> Well, thanks Savannah. Thanks John for having me. Well, Security Lake has been in the works for a little bit of time and it got announced today at the keynote as you heard from Adam. We're super excited because there's a couple components that are really unique and valuable to our customers within Security Lake. First and foremost, the foundation of Security Lake is an open source project we call OCFS, Open Cybersecurity Framework Schema. And what that allows is us to work with the vendor community at large in the security space and develop a language where we can all communicate around security data. And that's the language that we put into Security Data Lake. We have 60 vendors participating in developing that language and partnering within Security Lake. But it's a communal lake where customers can bring all of their security data in one place, whether it's generated in AWS, they're on-prem, or SaaS offerings or other clouds, all in one location in a language that allows analytics to take advantage of that analytics and give better outcomes for our customers. >> So Adams Selipsky big keynote, he spent all the bulk of his time on data and security. Obviously they go well together, we've talked about this in the past on theCUBE. Data is part of security, but this security's a little bit different in the sense that the global footprint of AWS makes it uniquely positioned to manage some security threats, EKS protection, a very interesting announcement, runtime layer, but looking inside and outside the containers, probably gives extra telemetry on some of those supply chains vulnerabilities. This is actually a very nuanced point. You got Guard Duty kind of taking its role. What does it mean for customers 'cause there's a lot of things in this announcement that he didn't have time to go into detail. Unpack all the specifics around what the security announcement means for customers. >> Yeah, so we announced four items in Adam's keynote today within my team. So I'll start with Guard Duty for EKS runtime. It's complimenting our existing capabilities for EKS support. So today Inspector does vulnerability assessment on EKS or container images in general. Guard Duty does detections of EKS workloads based on log data. Detective does investigation and analysis based on that log data as well. With the announcement today, we go inside the container workloads. We have more telemetry, more fine grain telemetry and ultimately we can provide better detections for our customers to analyze risks within their container workload. So we're super excited about that one. Additionally, we announced Inspector for Lambda. So Inspector, we released last year at re:Invent and we focused mostly on EKS container workloads and EC2 workloads. Single click automatically assess your environment, start generating assessments around vulnerabilities. We've added Lambda to that capability for our customers. The third announcement we made was Macy sampling. So Macy has been around for a while in delivering a lot of value for customers providing information around their sensitive data within S3 buckets. What we found is many customers want to go and characterize all of the data in their buckets, but some just want to know is there any sensitive data in my bucket? And the sampling feature allows the customer to find out their sensitive data in the bucket, but we don't have to go through and do all of the analysis to tell you exactly what's in there. >> Unstructured and structured data. Any data? >> Correct, yeah. >> And the fourth? >> The fourth, Security Data Lake? (John and Savannah laughing) Yes. >> Okay, ocean theme. data lake. >> Very complimentary to all of our services, but the unique value in the data lake is that we put the information in the customer's control. It's in their S3 bucket, they get to decide who gets access to it. We've heard from customers over the years that really have two options around gathering large scale data for security analysis. One is we roll our own and we're security engineers, we're not data engineers. It's really hard for them to build these distributed systems at scale. The second one is we can pick a vendor or a partner, but we're locked in and it's in their schemer and their format and we're there for a long period of time. With Security Data Lake, they get the best of both worlds. We run the infrastructure at scale for them, put the data in their control and they get to decide what use case, what partner, what tool gives them the most value on top of their data. >> Is that always a good thing to give the customers too much control? 'Cause you know the old expression, you give 'em a knife they play with and they they can cut themselves, I mean. But no, seriously, 'cause what's the provisions around that? Because control was big part of the governance, how do you manage the security? How does the customer worry about, if I have too much control, someone makes a mistake? >> Well, what we finding out today is that many customers have realized that some of their data has been replicated seven times, 10 times, not necessarily maliciously, but because they have multiple vendors that utilize that data to give them different use cases and outcomes. It becomes costly and unwieldy to figure out where all that data is. So by centralizing it, the control is really around who has access to the data. Now, ultimately customers want to make those decisions and we've made it simple to aggregate this data in a single place. They can develop a home region if they want, where all the data flows into one region, they can distribute it globally. >> They're in charge. >> They're in charge. But the controls are mostly in the hands of the data governance person in the company, not the security analyst. >> So I'm really curious, you mentioned there's 60 AWS partner companies that have collaborated on the Security lake. Can you tell us a little bit about the process? How long does it take? Are people self-selecting to contribute to these projects? Are you cherry picking? What does that look like? >> It's a great question. There's three levels of collaboration. One is around the open source project that we announced at Black Hat early in this year called OCSF. And that collaboration is we've asked the vendor community to work with us to build a schema that is universally acceptable to security practitioners, not vendor specific and we've asked. >> Savannah: I'm sorry to interrupt you, but is this a first of its kind? >> There's multiple schemes out there developed by multiple parties. They've been around for multiple years, but they've been built by a single vendor. >> Yeah, that's what I'm drill in on a little bit. It sounds like the first we had this level of collaboration. >> There's been collaborations around them, but in a handful of companies. We've really gone to a broad set of collaborators to really get it right. And they're focused around areas of expertise that they have knowledge in. So the EDR vendors, they're focused around the scheme around EDR. The firewall vendors are focused around that area. Certainly the cloud vendors are in their scope. So that's level one of collaboration and that gets us the level playing field and the language in which we'll communicate. >> Savannah: Which is so important. >> Super foundational. Then the second area is around producers and subscribers. So many companies generate valuable security data from the tools that they run. And we call those producers the publishers and they publish the data into Security Lake within that OCSF format. Some of them are in the form of findings, many of them in the form of raw telemetry. Then the second one is in the subscriber side and those are usually analytic vendors, SIM vendors, XDR vendors that take advantage of the logs in one place and generate analytic driven outcomes on top of that, use cases, if you will, that highlight security risks or issues for customers. >> Savannah: Yeah, cool. >> What's the big customer focus when you start looking at Security Lakes? How do you see that planning out? You said there's a collaboration, love the open source vibe on that piece, what data goes in there? What's sharing? 'Cause a big part of the keynote I heard today was, I heard clean rooms, I've cut my antenna up. I'd love to hear that. That means there's an implied sharing aspect. The security industry's been sharing data for a while. What kind of data's in that lake? Give us an example, take us through. >> Well, this a number of sources within AWS, as customers run their workloads in AWS. We've identified somewhere around 25 sources that will be natively single click into Amazon Security Lake. We were announcing nine of them. They're traditional network logs, BBC flow, cloud trail logs, firewall logs, findings that are generated across AWS, EKS audit logs, RDS data logs. So anything that customers run workloads on will be available in data lake. But that's not limited to AWS. Customers run their environments hybridly, they have SaaS applications, they use other clouds in some instances. So it's open to bring all that data in. Customers can vector it all into this one single location if they decide, we make it pretty simple for them to do that. Again, in the same format where outcomes can be generated quickly and easily. >> Can you use the data lake off on premise or it has to be in an S3 in Amazon Cloud? >> Today it's in S3 in Amazon. If we hear customers looking to do something different, as you guys know, we tend to focus on our customers and what they want us to do, but they've been pretty happy about what we've decided to do in this first iteration. >> So we got a story about Silicon Angle. Obviously the ingestion is a big part of it. The reporters are jumping in, but the 53rd party sources is a pretty big number. Is that coming from the OCSF or is that just in general? Who's involved? >> Yeah, OCSF is the big part of that and we have a list of probably 50 more that want to join in part of this. >> The other big names are there, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Peloton Networks, all the big dogs are in there. >> All big partners of AWS, anyway, so it was an easy conversation and in most cases when we started having the conversation, they were like, "Wow, this has really been needed for a long time." And given our breadth of partners and where we sit from our customers perspective in the center of their cloud journey that they've looked at us and said, "You guys, we applaud you for driving this." >> So Mark, take us through the conversations you're having with the customers at re:Inforce. We saw a lot of meetings happening. It was great to be back face to face. You guys have been doing a lot of customer conversation, security Data Lake came out of that. What was the driving force behind it? What were some of the key concerns? What were the challenges and what's now the opportunity that's different? >> We heard from our customers in general. One, it's too hard for us to get all the data we need in a single place, whether through AWS, the industry in general, it's just too hard. We don't have those resources to data wrangle that data. We don't know how to pick schema. There's multiple ones out there. Tell us how we would do that. So these three challenges came out front and center for every customer. And mostly what they said is our resources are limited and we want to focus those resources on security outcomes and we have security engines. We don't want to focus them on data wrangling and large scale distributed systems. Can you help us solve that problem? And it came out loud and clear from almost every customer conversation we had. And that's where we took the challenge. We said, "Okay, let's build this data layer." And then on top of that we have services like Detective and Guard Duty, we'll take advantage of it as well. But we also have a myriad of ISV third parties that will also sit on top of that data and render out. >> What's interesting, I want to get your reaction. I know we don't have much time left, but I want to get your thoughts. When I see Security Data Lake, which is awesome by the way, love the focus, love how you guys put that together. It makes me realize the big thing in re:Invent this year is this idea of specialized solutions. You got instances for this and that, use cases that require certain kind of performance. You got the data pillars that Adam laid out. Are we going to start seeing more specialized data lakes? I mean, we have a video data lake. Is there going to be a FinTech data lake? Is there going to be, I mean, you got the Great Lakes kind of going on here, what is going on with these lakes? I mean, is that a trend that Amazon sees or customers are aligning to? >> Yeah, we have a couple lakes already. We have a healthcare lake and a financial lake and now we have a security lake. Foundationally we have Lake Formation, which is the tool that anyone can build a lake. And most of our lakes run on top of Lake Foundation, but specialize. And the specialization is in the data aggregation, normalization, enridgement, that is unique for those use cases. And I think you'll see more and more. >> John: So that's a feature, not a bug. >> It's a feature, it's a big feature. The customers have ask for it. >> So they want roll their own specialized, purpose-built data thing, lake? They can do it. >> And customer don't want to combine healthcare information with security information. They have different use cases and segmentation of the information that they care about. So I think you'll see more. Now, I also think that you'll see where there are adjacencies that those lakes will expand into other use cases in some cases too. >> And that's where the right tools comes in, as he was talking about this ETL zero, ETL feature. >> It be like an 80, 20 rule. So if 80% of the data is shared for different use cases, you can see how those lakes would expand to fulfill multiple use cases. >> All right, you think he's ready for the challenge? Look, we were on the same page. >> Okay, we have a new challenge, go ahead. >> So think of it as an Instagram Reel, sort of your hot take, your thought leadership moment, the clip we're going to come back to and reference your brilliance 10 years down the road. I mean, you've been a CUBE veteran, now CUBE alumni for almost 10 years, in just a few weeks it'll be that. What do you think is, and I suspect, I think I might know your answer to this, so feel free to be robust in this. But what do you think is the biggest story, key takeaway from the show this year? >> We're democratizing security data within Security Data Lake for sure. >> Well said, you are our shortest answer so far on theCUBE and I absolutely love and respect that. Mark, it has been a pleasure chatting with you and congratulations, again, on the huge announcement. This is such an exciting day for you all. >> Thank you Savannah, thank you John, pleasure to be here. >> John: Thank you, great to have you. >> We look forward to 10 more years of having you. >> Well, maybe we don't have to wait 10 years. (laughs) >> Well, more years, in another time. >> I have a feeling it'll be a lot of security content this year. >> Yeah, pretty hot theme >> Very hot theme. >> Pretty odd theme for us. >> Of course, re:Inforce will be there this year again, coming up 2023. >> All the res. >> Yep, all the res. >> Love that. >> We look forward to see you there. >> All right, thanks, Mark. >> Speaking of res, you're the reason we are here. Thank you all for tuning in to today's live coverage from AWS re:Invent. We are in Las Vegas, Nevada with John Furrier. My name is Savannah Peterson. We are theCUBE and we are the leading source for high tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Hey, everyone, welcome back to the cubes on the ground. Coverage of Pedro Duty Summit 22. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I'm very excited to be joined by Manjula Toleration, the S VP and chief customer officer at page duty. Welcome to the programme. >>Thank you, Lisa. It's great to have chatted with you this morning as well, >>isn't it? I have had the great fortune of watching her fireside chat. That Mandela did, um, with is the logic monitor that was >>she of logic. >>And I thought, She's got great energy. We're gonna have a great conversation. So let's talk about the customer experience these days. One of the things I think that's been very, very short supply in the pandemic is patience. I know it's been in short supply with me and, of course, in our consumer lives in our business lives. The customer experience, though, has been something that every company needs to really pin their businesses on. Because if it's not a good customer experience, that customer goes right to social media. They churn. They leave, but they take others down with them. Talk to me about how the customer experience fits into this year's summit. Especially for this, we have to be ready for everything in a digital world environment. >>I love this question, and I reason I love this question is I even look at my own behaviour. But before we get into that, let's talk about data. I'm just reading an article. Mackenzie did a survey. Did you know that from pre covid to today customer interactions that have moved to digital are from 41% to 65%? That's exponential. That's huge. And guess what? We've all got impatient. You become like our kids, and I think about myself as an individual. If I need tied right now to do my laundry, I need it right now. So if I go to Costco website to order it so that it can get delivered in the next hour, and even if there's a second glitch on it, I'll swap over to Amazon and I'll swap over to target. That's what's happening in real world, whether it be to see or it's b to B, and why is it important to the points we are making in terms of ready for anything in the world of digital everything. It's important because customers are impatient. It's a digital world. I don't walk into the store to do any interactions anymore. And the reality of all of this is it's grounded on trust. Customers have to trust you and the window of choice not only in the B two b, but a lot in the enterprise and the B to B world. It's about trust, right? And what does pager duty do? Pager duty is at the heart of this pager. Duty is at the heart of making every second matter, and every second is equal to money. Absolutely. And it's about customer experience. And it isn't about just the experience where of an employee who may not sleep at night because they got a disruption due to an incident which is also super important during the mass resignation. But it is also about the CEO agenda and the boardroom, because how our CEO s driving customer trust in order to keep customers and drive this new era of digital everything as digital transformation is occurring. Well, >>I know patriarchy was doing that. I had the chance to watch um, CEO Jennifer to, uh, fireside chat, her keynote, and then her fireside chat with the CEO of Doc, You Sign And you. The Storey was very bidirectional, very symbiotic in terms of the trust that he has in Houston and Austin has and Pedro duty. But talk to me as the chief customer officer. What is it that's unique about how patriarchy works with its customers? 21,000 plus now to build and maintain that trust, especially in such volatile times? >>You know what is really cool? I joined page duty a little less than two years ago. In the next few days, it'll be two years now. What do I find exciting as a chief customer officer and the go to market teams differentiation versus other customers? We had a born SAS company and what do we have access to form our customers? We have access to their operations data and that combination of our core values that is championing the customer and the data science that we have about how customers are using our data is a differentiation. That's the magic. So if you think about why pager duty is bringing this level of trust to the customers, it's because we know how many and let's take an example. Employee retention, mass resignation. We know which employee was called. How many times at night during an outage. Can we give that guidance to managers and leaders in order to drive that trust? Absolutely. And on the other hand, we are driving amazing return on investment at the executive levels for the customer experience that they are driving. So Peter Duty is becoming the trusted advisor all the way from practitioners, where we are improving their work life balance to the executive levels, >>improving work. Life balance is so critical. There was a stat that Sean Scott shared this morning that that was looking at the amount of work volume from 2020 compared to 2021 42% of people said, I am working more hours. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say, Can I work more? Please? No. That work life balance is critical, but also the ability to deliver that seamless digital customer experience that we all expect, Um, and and to get it right the first time is critical. But using that customer data as you're saying, empowering the organisations, not just the customer support folks or the SRS or the develops folks but all the way up to the C suite to ensure that their brand reputation is valuable, it's maintained, and that trust is really bidirectional. That's the secret sauce. >>You're absolutely right. You know, there's a different dimension to this as well. We think about how we're using customer data in order to achieve the results. We want three vectors here. Number one is we'll use customer data to really understand what is best in class on up time. What is the best in class to reduce noise during alert, what is best in best in class for customer service operations? And because we have customer data, we can benchmark we can benchmark. What industry? What's happening in the financial services industry? What's happening in the technology industry? What's happening in the retail industry. Our customers love that, so we will share with them. The customer success organisation, especially the customer success managers, will go in and meet with the customers and say This is where you stand in reference to your peers and customers love here about that. This is the differentiated value proposition, right? The second thing that our customer success managers do is share with the customers This is where you are in reference to your peers in your vertical other vertical. But let me tell you how you can improve your deployment, the performance of our technology and you're all operating model. As a result of the data we've got, >>there's the proactive nous. That's another differentiator of of what I was hearing today from pager duty. That you're enabling those CSM is to be proactive when so often many are reactive, and it's the customer that's found the problem first. >>Yes, I'll even talk more about the reactive to proactive. We build a methodology, and I'm sure Shaun Scott covered it as well, which is a maturity curve moving from reactive to proactive because so many of our customers are saying we are reacting when we have a disruption on our digital platform, but 30% of the times we are hearing from customers before we are hearing from ourselves. So how do we become proactive? And how does that data signs actually start showing the signs when a potential disruption could occur? And that is about moving reactive to overall proactive. I'd also like to add one more dimension to this, you know, when customers are doing really well. They're optimised on our platform. They don't want to hear from our post sales organisation all the time. They want a human touch when they need it. They want a digital touch when they need it. By using our data and our data science, we are becoming one of the best world class customer success organisations in the world and you ask why? The reason is because we are using data science in order to build and we have built the early warning system. The early warning system tells us how every single of our customers is doing in terms of both their growth as well as the risk that they may leave us. So if a customer is very healthy on a scale of 1 200 if we have a healthy customer, we will engage with them potentially just digitally and engage with them with our services are customer success team and our entire post sales organisation, when there is an optimisation and when they really need us. So data scientists being used not only in terms of giving customer the right information to grow them, but how we interact with them as well, >>that's brilliant. And there's so many organisations that I talked to across industries that cannot get that right. >>And >>so customers are being contacted too frequently. They may have said. I opted out, I don't want and then suddenly that that the first responders, the incident responders, is marketing. But that happens so frequently, you think. But there's an opportunity there. It's not rocket science, but it's about leveraging that data in an optimal, smart way. But you guys are light years ahead of a lot of other companies that haven't figured that >>out. No, we are leading edge and we are leading edge because we had a born SAS company and we've got effective operations data of the customer, and we have some of the best data scientists and the analysts within my organisation. Looking at this, engaging with the customer and only optimising the magic is data science and humans coming together to engage with customers and drive customer success for the customer and ultimately building their customer experience for their customers. >>Let's talk about some of the numbers Mandela, because they are really impressive. I was looking at some stats. You're paid your duties renewal rates are over 95%. Your growth is incredible, just coming off the biggest quarter ever, but also the gross annual benefit from customers. Talk to me about that alone. That can be up to $10 million. These read these tangible business outcomes that pager duty is delivering to customers are significant, >>and again, it's based on data science. This is not making you know what traditional companies do. Traditional companies will go to the customer and say, Tell me your business imperatives. Tell me your what are the business problems you're solving are because we have the data science. We have our oi arranging from 309 100% very impressive within a couple of months. We think about it if we are able to drive incidents that are very, very significant. And I know you've got the numbers in terms of growing our reducing the workload on very expensive engineering. Uh, individuals within the organisation from, I believe, 3200 and 25,000, and I know you have those numbers think about If 30% of your organisation focuses just on innovation and product development, worse is on an incident, and they work, life balance, the quality of life increases, the retention of the employees, and yet the company's only driving their growth. That is why our customers love us. That is why our renewal rates are greater than 95%. That's why a net retention scores are greater than 100 and 2020% over five quarters. And that is why we have more than 30% growth year over year, quarter over quarter. >>When I saw that stat Manville about you know, the number of incidents reduced, >>that >>translates to employee productivity and and looking at it in terms of FTE. From a quantity perspective, that's the first time I've seen a company and I interview a lot of companies actually put it in that perspective, and I thought, That is huge. That's how organisations should be talking about that rather than reducing feeds are going. We are victims of the great resignation is look at the impact that can be made here by using data science by using the right mix of human and automation together. It's that's the first time. So congratulations to you and Pedro duty for the first time I've seen that and I think everybody needs to be working to be able to explain it that way, especially the fact that we're still in a volatile environment. >>Absolutely. It's about customer experience, but it is just as much employee experience. There is so much that the industry is talking about. That's top of mind for board levels. That's top of mind from CEO S. How do I retain my employees and drive greater operational efficiency? And now, with the macro economic challenges that are occurring in terms of inflation and in and the cost to serve and increasing the profits are customers are making. Operational efficiency is becoming even more important so that the employees are focusing more on innovation rather than downtime or disruptions. And it's actually about growing the business rather than just running the business. And if we can optimise running the business growth is what our customers are looking >>for, right? I always think, and we're almost out of time here. But I always think the employee experience and the customer experience are like this, and they should be. But it's critical to optimise both. How do you when you talk to some of those big and our price customers. We have Doc Watson on the main stage this morning, but I was looking at the website and three that jumped out to me that I use peloton, salesforce and slack. How do you advise them? You have this wealthiest gold of information on customers. This is how you need to leverage it in the right way to grow your business. What are some of the top three things you recommend those customers do, for example, >>that so let me talk about a couple of customers as an example. There are some customers of ours in the retail business, or it is a telecommunication company that is trying to increase their, um, up time from 98.7% to 3 nines as an example, or a tech company that doesn't even know that they were down for six hours in one small part of their business. And we're trying to figure out how do we solve for that as customers are overall complaining. So for us as a organisation, the magic is again bringing data together employee engagement, and what we do is we use the data to engage with their customers to ultimately understand what is their business value proposition. If you don't do it in isolation, you do it in. What is the customer trying to achieve? Are they trying to achieve the best in class website? Are they trying to achieve increased operational efficiency? What are their metrics? What are their numbers? And we take our data, our people, to marry all of that together. And that's the magic. >>I love it. I wish we had more time. Angela. We are out of time but talking about the value of the customer experience, the impact that is possible to be made leveraging technologies like pager duty. It's It's revolutionising operations. It's revolutionising customers 21,000 plus one million plus users at a time. It's awesome. You have to come back so we can talk more because I can. No, we're just scratching the surface here. >>Yes, we are. This is a very, very exciting area right now, and it is a great opportunities for chief customer officers on really rallying the whole company on championing the customers because whether it's a product, our capabilities, it's really a major transformation happening in the in the industry, and we need to stay very close to it? >>Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining me today. It's been such a pleasure talking to you. I look forward to seeing you again. >>Real pleasure, Lisa, To get to know you. And the gun was she was awesome. >>Good. Thank you for Manjula. Televisa. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes on the ground. Coverage of pager duty. Summit 22 from San Francisco. Thanks for watching. And bye for now. Mm mm. Mm mm.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> When Facebook changed its name to Meta last fall, it catalyzed a chain reaction throughout the tech industry. Software firms, gaming companies, chip makers, device manufacturers, and others have joined in hype machine. Now, it's easy to dismiss the metaverse as futuristic hyperbole, but do we really believe that tapping on a smartphone, or staring at a screen, or two-dimensional Zoom meetings are the future of how we work, play, and communicate? As the internet itself proved to be larger than we ever imagined, it's very possible, and even quite likely that the combination of massive processing power, cheap storage, AI, blockchains, crypto, sensors, AR, VR, brain interfaces, and other emerging technologies will combine to create new and unimaginable consumer experiences, and massive wealth for creators of the metaverse. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wiki Bond Cube Insights, powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis" we welcome in cyber expert, hacker gamer, NFT expert, and founder of ORE System, Nick Donarski. Nick, welcome, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, sir, glad to be here. >> Yeah, okay, so today we're going to traverse two parallel paths, one that took Nick from security expert and PenTester to NFTs, tokens, and the metaverse. And we'll simultaneously explore the complicated world of cybersecurity in the enterprise, and how the blockchain, crypto, and NFTs will provide key underpinnings for digital ownership in the metaverse. We're going to talk a little bit about blockchain, and crypto, and get things started there, and some of the realities and misconceptions, and how innovations in those worlds have led to the NFT craze. We'll look at what's really going on in NFTs and why they're important as both a technology and societal trend. Then, we're going to dig into the tech and try to explain why and how blockchain and NFTs are going to lay the foundation for the metaverse. And, finally, who's going to build the metaverse. And how long is it going to take? All right, Nick, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about your background, your career. You started as a hacker at a really, really young age, and then got deep into cyber as a PenTester. You did some pretty crazy stuff. You have some great stories about sneaking into buildings. You weren't just doing it all remote. Tell us about yourself. >> Yeah, so I mean, really, I started a long time ago. My dad was really the foray into technology. I wrote my first program on an Apple IIe in BASIC in 1989. So, I like to say I was born on the internet, if you will. But, yeah, in high school at 16, I incorporated my first company, did just tech support for parents and teachers. And then in 2000 I transitioned really into security and focused there ever since. I joined Rapid7 and after they picked up Medis boy, I joined HP. I was one of their founding members of Shadowlabs and really have been part of the information security and the cyber community all throughout, whether it's training at various different conferences or talking. My biggest thing and my most awesome moments as various things of being broken into, is really when I get to actually work with somebody that's coming up in the industry and who's new and actually has that light bulb moment of really kind of understanding of technology, understanding an idea, or getting it when it comes to that kind of stuff. >> Yeah, and when you think about what's going on in crypto and NFTs and okay, now the metaverse it's you get to see some of the most innovative people. Now I want to first share a little bit of data on enterprise security and maybe Nick get you to comment. We've reported over the past several years on the complexity in the security business and the numerous vendor choices that SecOps Pros face. And this chart really tells that story in the cybersecurity space. It's an X,Y graph. We've shown it many times from the ETR surveys where the vertical axis, it's a measure of spending momentum called net score. And the horizontal axis is market share, which represents each company's presence in the data set, and a couple of points stand out. First, it's really crowded. In that red dotted line that you see there, that's 40%, above that line on the net score axis, marks highly elevated spending momentum. Now, let's just zoom in a bit and I've cut the data by those companies that have more than a hundred responses in the survey. And you can see here on this next chart, it's still very crowded, but a few call-outs are noteworthy. First companies like SentinelOne, Elastic, Tanium, Datadog, Netskope and Darktrace. They were all above that 40% line in the previous chart, but they've fallen off. They still have actually a decent presence in the survey over 60 responses, but under that hundred. And you can see Auth0 now Okta, big $7 billion acquisition. They got the highest net score CrowdStrike's up there, Okta classic they're kind of enterprise business, and Zscaler and others above that line. You see Palo Alto Networks and Microsoft very impressive because they're both big and they're above that elevated spending velocity. So Nick, kind of a long-winded intro, but it was a little bit off topic, but I wanted to start here because this is the life of a SecOps pro. They lack the talent in a capacity to keep bad guys fully at bay. And so they have to keep throwing tooling at the problem, which adds to the complexity and as a PenTester and hacker, this chaos and complexity means cash for the bad guys. Doesn't it? >> Absolutely. You know, the more systems that these organizations find to integrate into the systems, means that there's more components, more dollars and cents as far as the amount of time and the engineers that need to actually be responsible for these tools. There's a lot of reasons that, the more, I guess, hands in the cookie jar, if you will, when it comes to the security architecture, the more links that are, or avenues for attack built into the system. And really one of the biggest things that organizations face is being able to have engineers that are qualified and technical enough to be able to support that architecture as well, 'cause buying it from a vendor and deploying it, putting it onto a shelf is good, but if it's not tuned properly, or if it's not connected properly, that security tool can just hold up more avenues of attack for you. >> Right, okay, thank you. Now, let's get into the meat of the discussion for today and talk a little bit about blockchain and crypto for a bit. I saw sub stack post the other day, and it was ripping Matt Damon for pedaling crypto on TV ads and how crypto is just this big pyramid scheme. And it's all about allowing criminals to be anonymous and it's ransomware and drug trafficking. And yes, there are definitely scams and you got to be careful and lots of dangers out there, but these are common criticisms in the mainstream press, that overlooked the fact by the way that IPO's and specs are just as much of a pyramid scheme. Now, I'm not saying there shouldn't be more regulation, there should, but Bitcoin was born out of the 2008 financial crisis, cryptocurrency, and you think about, it's really the confluence of software engineering, cryptography and game theory. And there's some really powerful innovation being created by the blockchain community. Crypto and blockchain are really at the heart of a new decentralized platform being built out. And where today, you got a few, large internet companies. They control the protocols and the platform. Now the aspiration of people like yourself, is to create new value opportunities. And there are many more chances for the little guys and girls to get in on the ground floor and blockchain technology underpins all this. So Nick, what's your take, what are some of the biggest misconceptions around blockchain and crypto? And do you even pair those two in the same context? What are your thoughts? >> So, I mean, really, we like to separate ourselves and say that we are a blockchain company, as opposed to necessarily saying(indistinct) anything like that. We leverage those tools. We leverage cryptocurrencies, we leverage NFTs and those types of things within there, but blockchain is a technology, which is the underlying piece, is something that can be used and utilized in a very large number of different organizations out there. So, cryptocurrency and a lot of that negative context comes with a fear of something new, without having that regulation in place, without having the rules in place. And we were a big proponent of, we want the regulation, right? We want to do right. We want to do it by the rules. We want to do it under the context of, this is what should be done. And we also want to help write those rules as well, because a lot of the lawmakers, a lot of the lobbyists and things, they have a certain aspect or a certain goal of when they're trying to get these things. Our goal is simplicity. We want the ability for the normal average person to be able to interact with crypto, interact with NFTs, interact with the blockchain. And basically by saying, blockchain in quotes, it's very ambiguous 'cause there's many different things that blockchain can be, the easiest way, right? The easiest way to understand blockchain is simply a distributed database. That's really the core of what blockchain is. It's a record keeping mechanism that allows you to reference that. And the beauty of it, is that it's quote unquote immutable. You can't edit that data. So, especially when we're talking about blockchain, being underlying for technologies in the future, things like security, where you have logging, you have keeping, whether you're talking about sales, where you may have to have multiple different locations (indistinct) users from different locations around the globe. It creates a central repository that provides distribution and security in the way that you're ensuring your data, ensuring the validation of where that data exists when it was created. Those types of things that blockchain really is. If you go to the historical, right, the very early on Bitcoin absolutely was made to have a way of not having to deal with the fed. That was the core functionality of the initial crypto. And then you had a lot of the illicit trades, those black markets that jumped onto it because of what it could do. The maturity of the technology though, of where we are now versus say back in 97 is a much different world of blockchain, and there's a much different world of cryptocurrency. You still have to be careful because with any fed, you're still going to have that FUD that goes out there and sells that fear, uncertainty and doubt, which spurs a lot of those types of scams, and a lot of those things that target end users that we face as security professionals today. You still get mailers that go out, looking for people to give their social security number over during tax time. Snail mail is considered a very ancient technology, but it still works. You still get a portion of the population that falls for those tricks, fishing, whatever it might be. It's all about trying to make sure that you have fear about what is that change. And I think that as we move forward, and move into the future, the simpler and the more comfortable these types of technologies become, the easier it is to utilize and indoctrinate normal users, to be able to use these things. >> You know, I want to ask you about that, Nick, because you mentioned immutability, there's a lot of misconceptions about that. I had somebody tell me one time, "Blockchain's Bs," and they say, "Well, oh, hold on a second. They say, oh, they say it's a mutable, but you can hack Coinbase, whatever it is." So I guess a couple of things, one is that the killer app for blockchain became money. And so we learned a lot through that. And you had Bitcoin and it really wasn't programmable through its interface. And then Ethereum comes out. I know, you know a lot about Ether and you have solidity, which is a lot simpler, but it ain't JavaScript, which is ubiquitous. And so now you have a lot of potential for the initial ICO's and probably still the ones today, the white papers, a lot of security flaws in there. I'm sure you can talk to that, but maybe you can help square that circle about immutability and security. I've mentioned game theory before, it's harder to hack Bitcoin and the Bitcoin blockchain than it is to mine. So that's why people mine, but maybe you could add some context to that. >> Yeah, you know it goes to just about any technology out there. Now, when you're talking about blockchain specifically, the majority of the attacks happen with the applications and the smart contracts that are actually running on the blockchain, as opposed to necessarily the blockchain itself. And like you said, the impact for whether that's loss of revenue or loss of tokens or whatever it is, in most cases that results from something that was a phishing attack, you gave up your credentials, somebody said, paste your private key in here, and you win a cookie or whatever it might be, but those are still the fundamental pieces. When you're talking about various different networks out there, depending on the blockchain, depends on how much the overall security really is. The more distributed it is, and the more stable it is as the network goes, the better or the more stable any of the code is going to be. The underlying architecture of any system is the key to success when it comes to the overall security. So the blockchain itself is immutable, in the case that the owner are ones have to be trusted. If you look at distributed networks, something like Ethereum or Bitcoin, where you have those proof of work systems, that disperses that information at a much more remote location, So the more disperse that information is, the less likely it is to be able to be impacted by one small instance. If you look at like the DAO Hack, or if you look at a lot of the other vulnerabilities that exist on the blockchain, it's more about the code. And like you said, solidity being as new as it is, it's not JavaScript. The industry is very early and very infantile, as far as the developers that are skilled in doing this. And with that just comes the inexperience and the lack of information that you don't learn until JavaScript is 10 or 12 years old. >> And the last thing I'll say about this topic, and we'll move on to NFTs, but NFTs relate is that, again, I said earlier that the big internet giants have pretty much co-opted the platform. You know, if you wanted to invest in Linux in the early days, there was no way to do that. You maybe have to wait until red hat came up with its IPO and there's your pyramid scheme folks. But with crypto it, which is again, as Nick was explaining underpinning is the blockchain, you can actually participate in early projects. Now you got to be careful 'cause there are a lot of scams and many of them are going to blow out if not most of them, but there are some, gems out there, because as Nick was describing, you've got this decentralized platform that causes scaling issues or performance issues, and people are solving those problems, essentially building out a new internet. But I want to get into NFTs, because it's sort of the next big thing here before we get into the metaverse, what Nick, why should people pay attention to NFTs? Why do they matter? Are they really an important trend? And what are the societal and technological impacts that you see in this space? >> Yeah, I mean, NFTs are a very new technology and ultimately it's just another entry on the blockchain. It's just another piece of data in the database. But how it's leveraged in the grand scheme of how we, as users see it, it can be the classic idea of an NFT is just the art, or as good as the poster on your wall. But in the case of some of the new applications, is where are you actually get that utility function. Now, in the case of say video games, video games and gamers in general, already utilize digital items. They already utilize digital points. As in the case of like Call of Duty points, those are just different versions of digital currencies. You know, World of Warcraft Gold, I like to affectionately say, was the very first cryptocurrency. There was a Harvard course taught on the economy of WOW, there was a black market where you could trade your end game gold for Fiat currencies. And there's even places around the world that you can purchase real world items and stay at hotels for World of Warcraft Gold. So the adoption of blockchain just simply gives a more stable and a more diverse technology for those same types of systems. You're going to see that carry over into shipping and logistics, where you need to have data that is single repository for being able to have multiple locations, multiple shippers from multiple global efforts out there that need to have access to that data. But in the current context, it's either sitting on a shipping log, it's sitting on somebody's desk. All of those types of paper transactions can be leveraged as NFTs on the blockchain. It's just simply that representation. And once you break the idea of this is just a piece of art, or this is a cryptocurrency, you get into a world where you can apply that NFT technology to a lot more things than I think most people think of today. >> Yeah, and of course you mentioned art a couple of times when people sold as digital art for whatever, it was 60, 65 million, 69 million, that caught a lot of people's attention, but you're seeing, I mean, there's virtually infinite number of applications for this. One of the Washington wizards, tokenized portions of his contract, maybe he was creating a new bond, that's really interesting use cases and opportunities, and that kind of segues into the latest, hot topic, which is the metaverse. And you've said yourself that blockchain and NFTs are the foundation of the metaverse, they're foundational elements. So first, what is the metaverse to you and where do blockchain and NFTs, fit in? >> Sure, so, I mean, I affectionately refer to the metaverse just a VR and essentially, we've been playing virtual reality games and all the rest for a long time. And VR has really kind of been out there for a long time. So most people's interpretation or idea of what the metaverse is, is a virtual reality version of yourself and this right, that idea of once it becomes yourself, is where things like NFT items, where blockchain and digital currencies are going to come in, because if you have a manufacturer, so you take on an organization like Nike, and they want to put their shoes into the metaverse because we, as humans, want to individualize ourselves. We go out and we want to have that one of one shoe or that, t-shirt or whatever it is, we're going to want to represent that same type of individuality in our virtual self. So NFTs, crypto and all of those digital currencies, like I was saying that we've known as gamers are going to play that very similar role inside of the metaverse. >> Yeah. Okay. So basically you're going to take your physical world into the metaverse. You're going to be able to, as you just mentioned, acquire things- I loved your WOW example. And so let's stay on this for a bit, if we may, of course, Facebook spawned a lot of speculation and discussion about the concept of the metaverse and really, as you pointed out, it's not new. You talked about why second life, really started in 2003, and it's still around today. It's small, I read recently, it's creators coming back into the company and books were written in the early 90s that used the term metaverse. But Nick, talk about how you see this evolving, what role you hope to play with your company and your community in the future, and who builds the metaverse, when is it going to be here? >> Yeah, so, I mean, right now, and we actually just got back from CES last week. And the Metaverse is a very big buzzword. You're going to see a lot of integration of what people are calling, quote unquote, the metaverse. And there was organizations that were showing virtual office space, virtual malls, virtual concerts, and those types of experiences. And the one thing right now that I don't think that a lot of organizations have grasp is how to make one metaverse. There's no real player one, if you will always this yet, There's a lot of organizations that are creating their version of the metaverse, which then again, just like every other software and game vendor out there has their version of cryptocurrency and their version of NFTs. You're going to see it start to pop up, especially as Oculus is going to come down in price, especially as you get new technologies, like some of the VR glasses that look more augmented reality and look more like regular glasses that you're wearing, things like that, the easier that those technologies become as in adopting into our normal lifestyle, as far as like looks and feels, the faster that stuff's going to actually come out to the world. But when it comes to like, what we're doing is we believe that the metaverse should actually span multiple different blockchains, multiple different segments, if you will. So what ORE system is doing, is we're actually building the underlying architecture and technologies for developers to bring their metaverse too. You can leverage the ORE Systems NFTs, where we like to call our utility NFTs as an in-game item in one game, or you can take it over and it could be a t-shirt in another game. The ability for having that cross support within the ecosystem is what really no one has grasp on yet. Most of the organizations out there are using a very classic business model. Get the user in the game, make them spend their money in the game, make all their game stuff as only good in their game. And that's where the developer has you, they have you in their bubble. Our goal, and what we like to affectionately say is, we want to bring white collar tools and technology to blue collar folks, We want to make it simple. We want to make it off the shelf, and we want to make it a less cost prohibitive, faster, and cheaper to actually get out to all the users. We do it by supporting the technology. That's our angle. If you support the technology and you support the platform, you can build a community that will build all of the metaverse around them. >> Well, and so this is interesting because, if you think about some of the big names, we've Microsoft is talking about it, obviously we mentioned Facebook. They have essentially walled gardens. Now, yeah, okay, I could take Tik Tok and pump it into Instagram is fine, but they're really siloed off. And what you're saying is in the metaverse, you should be able to buy a pair of sneakers in one location and then bring it to another one. >> Absolutely, that's exactly it. >> And so my original kind of investment in attractiveness, if you will, to crypto, was that, the little guy can get an early, but I worry that some of these walled gardens, these big internet giants are going to try to co-op this. So I think what you're doing is right on, and I think it's aligned with the objectives of consumers and the users who don't want to be forced in to a pen. They want to be able to live freely. And that's really what you're trying to do. >> That's exactly it. You know, when you buy an item, say a Skin in Fortnite or Skin in Call of Duty, it's only good in that game. And not even in the franchise, it's only good in that version of the game. In the case of what we want to do is, you can not only have that carry over and your character. So say you buy a really cool shirt, and you've got that in your Call of Duty or in our case, we're really Osiris Protocol, which is our proof of concept video game to show that this all thing actually works, but you can actually go in and you can get a gun in Osiris Protocol. And if we release, Osiris Protocol two, you'll be able to take that to Osiris Protocol two. Now the benefit of that is, is you're going to be the only one in the next version with that item, if you haven't sold it or traded it or whatever else. So we don't lock you into a game. We don't lock you into a specific application. You own that, you can trade that freely with other users. You can sell that on the open market. We're embracing what used to be considered the black market. I don't understand why a lot of video games, we're always against the skins and mods and all the rest. For me as a gamer and coming up, through the many, many years of various different Call of Duties and everything in my time, I wish I could still have some this year. I still have a World of Warcraft account. I wasn't on, Vanilla, Burning Crusade was my foray, but I still have a character. If you look at it that way, if I had that wild character and that gear was NFTs, in theory, I could actually pass that onto my kid who could carry on that character. And it would actually increase in value because they're NFT back then. And then if needed, you could trade those on the open market and all the rest. It just makes gaming a much different thing. >> I love it. All right, Nick, hey, we're out of time, but I got to say, Nick Donarski, thanks so much for coming on the program today, sharing your insights and really good luck to you and building out your technology platform and your community. >> Thank you, sir, it's been an absolute pleasure. >> And thank you for watching. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts, just search "Breaking Analysis Podcast", and you'll find them. I publish pretty much every week on siliconangle.com and wikibond.com. And you can reach me @dvellante on Twitter or comment on my LinkedIn posts. You can always email me david.vellante@siliconangle.com. And don't forget, check out etr.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR, happy 2022 be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Presenter: From around the globe, it's the cube, with digital coverage of pager duty summit 2020. Brought to you by pager duty. >> Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, today talking with Tammy Bryant is a cube alumna, the principal Site reliability engineer at Gremlin and the co-founder and CTO of the Girl Geek Academy. Tammy, it's great to have you on the program again. >> Hi Lisa, thanks so much for having me again. It's great to be here. >> So one of the things I saw in your background 10 plus years of technical expertise, and SRE, and chaos engineering, and I thought chaos engineering, I feel like I'm living in chaos right now. What is chaos engineering and why do you break things on purpose? >> Yep. So the idea of chaos engineering is that we're, breaking systems but in a thoughtful controlled way, to identify weaknesses in systems. So that's really what it's all about. The idea there is, you know, When you're doing really complicated work with technical systems, so like, for example, distributed systems and say, for example, you're working at a bank, it's tough to be able to pinpoint the exact failure mode that could cause a really large outage for your customers. And that's what chaos engineering is all about. you inject the failure proactively, to identify the issues and then you fix them before they actually cause really big problems for customers and you do it during the middle of the day, you know, when you're feeling great, instead of being paged in the middle of the night for an incident, that's actually like causing your customers pain, and making you lose a lot of money. So that's what chaos engineering really is. >> Are you seeing in the last six months since the world is so different, are you seeing an increase in customers? Now with, the for example, Brick and Mortars shut down and everything having to convert to digital if it wasn't already? Is there an increase in demand for chaos engineering services? >> Yeah, definitely. So a lot of people are asking what is chaos engineering, how can I use ,it will it help me reduce my incidents? and definitely because there are a lot of new services that have been rolled out recently, say, for example, curbside pickup. That's a whole new thing that had to be created really recently to be able to handle a large amount of load. And you know, people show up, they want to get their product really fast, 'cause they want to be able to just get back home quickly. And that's something that we've been working on with our customers is to make sure that curbside pickup experience is really great. The other interesting thing that we've been working on because of the pandemic is making sure that banks are really reliable, and that customers are able to get access to their money when they need it. And able to see that information too. And you can imagine that not as when you're in lockdown, and you only can leave your house for maybe an hour a day, you need to be able to quickly get access to your money to buy food, and we've seen some big incidents recently, where that hasn't been the case. Yeah. >> And I can imagine I mean, just thinking of what happened with, everything six months ago and how people were, we are just, demanding, right, consumers were demanding, we expect to get whatever we want, whether it's something we buy on Amazon, something that we stream on Netflix, or whatnot, we have this expectation that we can almost get it in real time. But there was a there was, you know what, there was a delay a few months ago, and there still is to some degree. But companies like Amazon and Netflix, I can imagine, really must have a big focus on chaos engineering, to test these things regularly. And now have proved, I would imagine to some degree that with chaos engineering that they have built, they're built to withstand that. >> Yes, exactly. So our founders at Gremlin came from Netflix and Amazon, our CEO had worked at both where he done chaos engineering, and that's actually why he decided to create Gremlin. It's the first company in the world to offer chaos engineering as a service. And you know, obviously, when you're working somewhere like Netflix, you know the whole product, you have to be able to get access to that movie, that TV show, right in that moment, and also customers expect to be able to see that on for example. There PlayStation in their living room and it should work and there paying for a subscription, So, to be able to keep them on that subscription, you need to offer a great service. Same thing with Amazon, you know, Amazon.com, they've done a lot of chaos engineering work over many years now to be able to make sure that everything is available. And it's not just that, the entire amazon.com is up and running. It's also for example, that when you go and look at a page that the recommendation service works toO and they're able to show you, hey, here's some other things that you might like to get to buy at this time. And I like as as a consumer, I love that 'cause it helps me save time and effort and even money as well 'cause it's giving you some good advice. So that's the type of statement we do. >> Exactly, So. when you're working with customers, I'd love to understand just a little bit from the, like the conversational standpoint is this now, is chaos engineering now, at kind of the sea level or is it still sort of in within the engineering folks 'cause looking at this as a make or break, knowing that for example, Netflix, there's Hulu, there's Disney Plus, there's Apple TV. Plus, if we don't get something that we're looking for right away, there's prime, we're going to go to another streaming service. So are you starting to see like an increase in demand from companies that no, we have competition right behind us, we've got to be able to set up the infrastructure and ensure that it is reliable. Now more than ever. >> Yeah, exactly. That's really, really important. I'm seeing a lot of executives. I mean, I've seen that since the beginning, really, since I first started working at Gremlin. I would often be invited by executives to come and give talks actually, within their company, to help the teams learn about chaos engineering, and I love doing that, It's really great. So I'd be invited by C levels, or VPs, from different departments. And I often get people adding me on LinkedIn from all over the world who are in leadership roles, because really, like, you know, they're responsible for making sure that their companies can hit those critical metrics and make sure that they're able to achieve their really, you know, demanding business goals, and then they're trying to help their teams be able to achieve that, too. So I've actually been so pleased to see that as well. Like it is really cool to have an executive reach out and say, hey, I'm thinking of helping my team, I'd like to get them introduced to you can you come and just teach them about this topic? And I love being able to do that it's really positive. And it's the right way to improve. >> It is, and I think nowadays, with reliability being more important than ever, you know, we talked to leaders from industry, from every industry. And there are certain things right now that are going to be shaping the winners and the losers of tomorrow. And it sounds to me like chaos engineering is one of those things that's going to be fundamental to any type of business to not just survive these times, but to thrive going forward. >> Yes, I definitely think so. I mean, obviously, people can easily just go to a different URL and try and use a different service. And you know, we're seeing now failure across so many different industries. We didn't see that before. But for example, you know, I'm sure you've seen in the news or heard from friends and family about schools, now being completely online. And then kids can't actually access, their calls their resources, what they need to learn every day. So that really just shows you how much it's impacting us as a society, we really know that the internet is critical. It's amazing that we have the internet, like how lucky we are to have this, but it needs to work for us to actually be able to get value out of it. And that's what chaos engineering is all about. You know, were able to make sure that everything is reliable, so it's up and running. And we do that by looking at things like redundancy. So we'll do failover work where we completely shut down an application or service and make sure it gracefully fails over. We also do a lot of dependency failure work, where you're actually looking to say, this is the critical path of this service. And a lot of people don't think about this, but the critical path really starts at sign in. So you need to make sure that login and sign in works really well. It's not just about like the experience once you've signed in, that has to work well all the way through. So actually if you have a good understanding of user experience, it helps you create a much better pathway and understand those critical pieces that the customer needs to be able to do to have a great experience. And I care a lot about that. Like whenever I go and work somewhere, I always read customer tickets, I always try and understand what are the customer pain points. And I love listening to customers and then just solving their problems. The last thing I want them to do is, you know, be complaining or be really annoyed on Twitter because something just isn't working when they need it to be working. And it is really critical these days. It's a the internet is a really serious part of our day to day life. >> Oh, it's a lifeline. I mean, that's, some folks. It's the only way that they're connecting with the outside world, is through the internet. So when things aren't, I had a friend whose son first day of college couple weeks ago, freshman year, first class couldn't get into zoom. And that's a stressful situation. But I imagine too, though, that and I know you're going to be speaking at the pager duty summit that more folks need to understand what this is. And I can tell the you have a real authentic passion for it. Talk to us about what you're going to be talking about at the pager duty summit. >> Sure thing, I'm really excited to be speaking at Pager Duty Summit very soon. My talk is called building, and scaling SRE teams, so site reliability engineering teams. And this is something that I've done previously. I've built out the SRE teams at Dropbox for both databases as well as storage. So block storage, and then I also lead the code workflows team. And that's for, you know, over 500 million users, people accessing the critical data that they store on Dropbox all the time. You know the way that folks use Dropbox is in so many different ways. Maybe it's like really famous music musicians who are trying to create an amazing new album that happens or maybe it's a lawyer preparing for a court case, and they need to be able to access their documents. So those are a lot of customer stories that would come up over time. And prior to that, I worked at the National Australia Bank as well leading teams too and obviously like people care about their money if they can't access their money. If there incorrect transactions, if there are missing transactions, you know, duplicate transactions, maybe people don't mind so much about it you get like a double deposit, but it's still not good from the bank's perspective. So there's all types of different chaos that can happen. And I found it to be really interesting to be able to dive into that and make sure that you can make improvements. And I love that it makes customers happier. And also, it helps you improve your company as a whole. So it's a really good thing to be able to do, And with my talk, I'm going to talk to folks about, you know, not only why it's important to build out a reliability practice at your organization, you know, back in the day, people used to go, why would you need a security team? You know, why would we need that? now everybody has a security team, everyone has a chief security officer as well. But why don't we focus on reliability, like we know that we see incidents out in the news all the time, but for some reason, we don't have the chief reliability officer. I think that's definitely going to be something that will appear in the future just like the chief security officer roll up. But that's what I'm going to talk about there. How you can find site reliability engineers, I'll share a few of my secrets. I won't give any spoilers out. But there's actually quite a few places that you can find amazing people. There's even a school that you can hire them from, which I've done in the past. And then I'll talk to you about how you can interview them to make sure that you get the best people on your team. There are a number of things that I think are very important to interview for. And then once you've got those folks on your team, I'll talk to you about how you can make sure that they're successful. How to set them up for success and make sure that they're aligned to not only your business goals, but also your core values as a company, which is really important too. >> Yeah, that's fantastic. It's very well rounded, I'm curious, what are some of the the characteristics that you think are really critical for someone to become a successful SRE? >> Yeah, so there's a few key things that I look for. One thing is that, somebody who is really good at troubleshooting, so they need to be able to be comfortable with complexity, ambiguity and open ended challenges and problems and also thrive in those types of environments. Because often you're seeing something that you've never seen happen before. And also you're working with really complicated systems. So you just need to be able to feel good in that moment. And you can test for that during an interview question on troubleshooting and debugging. So that's something that I'll go into in more detail. But that's definitely the first characteristic. The other thing, of course, is you want to have someone who is good at being able to build solutions. So they can code, they understand automation, they can figure out how can I take this pain point, this problem? And how can I automate it and then scale this out and make it available for everyone across my organization? So someone who has that mindset of building tools for others, and often they are internal tools, because maybe you're building a tool that helps everybody know, who's on call every single critical service at the company and also non critical service and they can identify that in a minute or less like maybe even just in a few seconds, and then they can quickly get that person involved, if anything need to escalate to them. Via for example, a tool like pager duty, that's really what you want. You want them to be able to think, how can I just make this efficient? How can I make sure that we can get really great results? And yeah, I think they also just need to be really personable too and work well in a really complicated organizational structure. Because usually they have to work with the engineering team, the finance team to understand the revenue impact. They need to be able to work with the PR team and the social media team, if they're incidents, and then they need to provide information about when this incident is going to be resolved, and how they can update VIP customers. They need to talk to the sales team, because what happens if you're giving a demonstration, and then somehow there's an issue, or failure that happens, an incident and then in the middle of your very important sales demo, you're not able to actually deliver it that can happen a lot too. So there are a lot of very important key skills. >> Sounds like it's a really cross functional role, pivotal to an organization, that needs to understand how these different functions not only operate, but also operate together, is that somebody that you think has certain types of previous work experience? Is this something that you talked to the Girl Geek Academy girls about? How did they get into? I'm curious, like what the career path is? >> Yeah, it's interesting, like I find a lot of SRE's often come from either a few different backgrounds. One is they came through the world of Linux and understanding systems, and just being really interested in that. Like deep diving into the kernel, understanding how to improve performance of systems. The other side is maybe they came from coding background where they were actually building applications and features. I started off actually on that side, but I also had a passion for Linux. And then I sort of spread over into the other side and was able to learn both. And then often you know, someone who's comfortable with being on call and handling incidents, but it is a lot of skills, like that's actually something that I often talk to folks about, and they asked me how can I become a great SRE? There's so many things I need to learn. And I just say, you know, take it slow, try and gradually increase your number of skills. People often say that there is like there's some curve for SRE's, where you have the operations side, on one side, and then the coding side on the other. And often like the best person sits right in the middle where they have both ops and engineering skills. But it's really hard to find those people. It's okay if you have someone that's like, really deep, has amazing knowledge of Linux and scaling systems and internet management, and then you can pair them up with a really amazing programmer who's great at software engineering and software architecture, that's okay, too. >> We've been hearing for a long time about this sort of negative unemployment with respect to cyber security professionals. Is that, are you guys falling into that same category as well with SRE? Or is it somehow different or you just know this is exactly what we're looking for? We want to go out there, and even in the Girl, Greek Academy, maybe help girls learn how to be able to find what I imagine are a lot of opportunities. >> Yeah, there are so many opportunities for this. So it's definitely an opportunity because what I see is there's not enough SRE's. So tons of companies all over the world will actually ping me and say, hey, Tommy, how do I hire SRE's, that's why I decided to give this talk because I wanted to package that up and just share that information as to how you can do it. And also, maybe you can't find the SRE's because they don't exist. But you can help retrain your team. So you can have an engineer learn the skills that are required to be an SRE, that's totally possible too, maybe move them over to become an SRE. With girl geek Academy, one of the things that I've done is run hackathons and workshops and just online training sessions to help girls learn these new skills. So that's exactly what our mission is, is to teach 1 million girls technical skills by 2025. And I love to do mentoring at scale, which is why it's been really cool to be able to do it online and through these like workshops and remote hackathons. And I definitely love to do something where else work with some of our customers actually, and run an event. I did one a while back, it was really cool, we were able to have all of the girls come in and be at the customer's office and actually learn skills with the customer, which was really fun. And it helps them actually think, hey, I could work one day that would be really amazing. And I'm going to do that again in November. And it's kind of fun too. We can do things like have like, you know, dad and mom and then daughter day, where you actually bring your daughter to work and help her learn technical skills. That's really fun because they get to see what you do and they understand it more and see how cool chaos engineering really is. Then they think oh, wow, you're so awesome, this is great. >> I love it, that's fantastic. Well it sounds like, like I said before your passion for it is really there. What, I think is really interesting is how you're talking about chaos engineering and just the word in and of itself chaos. But you painted in such a positive lights critical business critical, but also the all the opportunities there that businesses have to learn and fine tune so such an interesting conversation. Yeah, Tammy. We have you back on the program. But I thank you so much for joining me today. And for those folks that lucky enough that are attending the pager duty summit, they're going to get to learn a lot from you. Thank you. >> Thanks so much for having me, Lisa. >> For Tammy Bryant, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this cube conversation. (upbeat music)

>>from >>around the >>globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of pager duty. Summit 2020. Brought to you by pager duty. Hey, welcome back to Brady. Jeffrey here with the Cube in Palo Alto studios today. And we're talking about an upcoming event. It's one of our favorites. This will be the fourth year that we've been doing it. And it's pager duty summit. And we're excited to have from the pager duty team. She's Caroline Gus, the VP of corporate marketing from pager duty. Caroline, Great to see you. >>Hi, Jeff. Great to see you again. >>Absolutely. So, you know, I was thinking before we turn on the cameras we've been doing pager duty for I think this will be like, say, our fourth year that first year was in the cool, um, cruise ship terminal pier. I gotta written appear 27 which was which was nice. And then the last two years, you've been in the, you know, historic Westin ST Francis in downtown San Francisco, which is a cool old venue, but oh, my goodness. You guys were busting at the seams last year. So this year, year to go virtual. There's a whole bunch of new things that that you could do in virtual that you couldn't do in physical space. At least when you're busting out of the seems so First off, Welcome and >>talk a little >>bit about planning for virtual versus planning for a physical event from, you know, head of marketing perspective. >>Absolutely. I mean, the first thing that's changed for us is the number of people that can come. It's five x the number of people that were able to join us, the Western last year. So we have, uh, we we expect to have 10,000 people registered on attending age duty summit. The second thing is thea share number of sessions that we can put on. Last year, I think we had around 25 sessions. This year we have between 40 and 50 on again. That's because we're not constrained by space and physical meeting rooms, so it's being a really exciting process for us. We've built a fantastic agenda on. It's very much personalized, you know, developers come to our event. They love our event for the opportunity to learn mixed with their peers, get best practices and hands on experience. So we have many more of those types of sessions when we have done previously, and that things like labs and Bird of Feather Sessions and Emma's. But we've also built a whole new track of content this year for executives. Page Julie has, um, many of the Fortune 500 on 4100 customers. We work very closely with CEO CTO, so we have built sessions that are really designed specifically for that audience on I think for us it's really opened up. The potential of this event made it so much broader and more appealing than we were able to do when we were, As you say, you know, somewhat confined by the location in downtown San Francisco. >>I think it's such an interesting point. Um, because before you were constrained, right, If you have X number of rooms over a couple of days, you know you've got to make hard decisions on breakouts and what could go in and what can't go in. And, you know, will there be enough demand for these for this session versus another session? Or from the perspective of an attendee, you know, do they have to make hard tradeoffs? I could only attend one session at one oclock on Tuesday and I got to make hard decisions. But this is, you said really opens up the opportunities. I think you said you doubled. You doubled your sessions on and you got five X a number of registrations. So I think, you know, way too many people think about what doesn't happen in digital vs talking about the things that you can do that are impossible in physical. >>Yeah, I think at the very beginning. Well, first of all, we held our Amir summit events in London in July. So that was great because we got Thio go through this experience once already. And what we learned was the rial removal of hurdles in this process. So, to your point about missing the session because you're attending another session, we were calling this sort of the Pelton version of events where you have live sessions. It's great to be there, live participate in the live Q and A, but equally you have an entire on demand library. So if you weren't able to go because there was something else at the same time, this is available on demand for you. So we are actually repeating live sessions on two consecutive day. So on the Monday we're on everything on the Tuesday I ask because show up again for life Q and A at the end of their sessions. But after that it's available forever on an on demand library. So for us, it was really removing hurdles in terms of the amount of content, the scheduling of the content on also the number of people that content in attend, no geographical boundaries anymore. It used to be that a customer of ours would think, Well, I'll send one or two people to the page duty summit. They could learn all the great innovation from page duty, and they'll bring it back to the team that's completely changed. You know, we have tens of 20 signing up on. All of them are able to get that experience firsthand. >>That's really interesting. I didn't didn't even think about, you know, kind of whole teams being able to attend down instead of just certain individuals because of budget constraints, or you can't send your whole team, you know, a way for a conference in a particular area. But the piece to that you're supporting that were over and over is that the net new registrants goes up so dramatically in terms of the names and and and who those individuals are because a lot of people just couldn't attend for for various reasons, whether it's cost, whether it's, uh, geography, whether it's they just can't take time off from from from leaving their primary job. So it's a really interesting opportunity to open up, um, the participation to such a much bigger like you said five x five X, and increase in the registration. That's pretty good number. >>That's right. Yeah. I mean, that crossed boundaries gone away. This event is free on DWhite. That's actually meant is, as I say, you know, larger teams from the same company are attending. Uh, In addition, we have a number of attendees who are not actually paid to duty customers right now to previously. This was very much a community event for, you know, our page duty users on now we actually have a large number of I asked, interested future customers that will be coming to the event. So that's really important for us. And also, I think, for our sponsor partners as well, because it's bordering out the audience for both of us. So let's >>talk about sponsors for a minute, because, um, one of the big things in virtual events that people are talking about quite often is. Okay, I can do the keynotes, and I could do the sessions. And now I have all these breakout sessions for, um, you know, training and certification and customer stories, etcetera. But when it comes to sponsors, right sponsors used, you know, go to events to set up a booth and hand out swag and wander badge. Right? And it really was feeding kind of a top level down funnel. That was really important. Well, now those have gone away. Physical events. So from the sponsor perspective, you know, what can they expect? What? What do you know the sponsor experience at pager duty Summit. Since I don't have a little tiny booth at the Westin ST Francis given out swag this year. >>Yeah. So one important thing is the agenda and how we're involving our sponsors in our agenda this time, something that we learned is we used to have very long keynotes. You know, the keynote could be an hour long on involved multiple components and people would stay in that room for a now er on did really stay and watch sessions all day. So we learned in the virtual format that we need to be shorter and more precise in our sessions on that opened up the opportunity to bring in more of our partners, our sponsorship partners. So zendesk Salesforce, Microsoft some examples. So they actually get to have their piece of both of our keynote sessions and of our technical product sessions. I'm really explain both the partnership with pager duty, but also they're called technology and the value that they provide customers. So I think that the presence of sponsors in content is much higher than it was before on we are still repeating the Expo format, so we actually do have on Expo Hall that any time there's breaking between sessions, you could go over to the Expo ball, and it actually runs throughout as well, and you can go in and you can talk to the teams. You can see product demos, so it's very much a virtual version of the Expo Hall where you went and you want around and you picked up a bit of swag, >>so you mentioned keynotes and and Jennifer and and the team has always had a fantastic keynotes. I mean, I just saw Jennifer being interviewed with Frank's Luqman and and Eric Juan from Zoom By by Curry, which was pretty amazing. I felt kind of jealous that I didn't get to do that. But, um, talk tell us a little bit about some of the speakers I know there'll be some some, you know, kind of big rally moment speakers as well as some that are more down to technical track or another track. Give us some highlights on on some of the people. I will be sharing the stage with Jennifer. >>Absolutely, I said. I think what's really unique about Page duty Summit is that we designed types of content for different types of attendees. So if you're a developer, your practitioner, we have something like this from Jones of Honeycombs, who's talking about who builds the tools that we all rely on today, and how do they collaborate to build them together in this virtual world? Or we have J. Paul Reed from Netflix talking about how to handle the stress of being involved in incidents, So that's really sessions for our core audience of developers who are part of our community and pager duty really helps them day to day with with that job. And then we have the more aspirational senior level speakers who could really learn from a ZA leader. So Bret Taylor, president and CEO of Salesforce, will be joining us on the main stage. You'll be talking about innovation and trust in today's world on. Then we have Derrick Johnson. He is president of N A A. C P, and he'll be talking about community engagement and particularly voter engagement, which is such an important topic for us right now. Aan den. We have leaders from within our customers who are really talking about the way they use pager duty thio drive change in their organization. So an example would be porches, bro. He runs digital for Fox on, and he's gonna be talking about digital acceleration. How large organization like Fox can really accelerate for this digital first world that we find ourselves living in right now, >>right? Well, you guys have such a developer focus because pager duty, the product of solution, has to integrate with so many other, um, infrastructure, you know, monitoring and, uh, and all of all those different systems because you guys were basically at the front line, you know, sending them the signals that go into those systems. So you have such a broad, you know, kind of ecosystem of technology partners. I don't know if people are familiar with all the integrations that you guys have built over the years, which is such a key piece of your go to market. >>That's right. I mean, we we like to say we're at the center of the digital ecosystem. We have 203 170 integrations on. That's important because we want anyone to be able to use page duty no matter what is in their technology stack technology stacks today are more complex than they've ever been before, particularly with businesses having to shift to this digital first model since we all began shelter in place, you know, we all are living through digital on working and learning through digital on DSO. The technology stacks that power that are more complicated than ever before. So by having 370 integrations, we really know that we conserve pretty much any set of services that your business. It's using. >>Yeah, we've all seen all the means right about who's who's pushing your digital transformation. You know, the CEO, the CEO or or covert. And we all know the answer to toe what's accelerated that whole process. So okay, but so before I let you go, I don't even think we've mentioned the date. So it's coming up Monday, September, September 21st through Thursday, September 24th not at the West End Online and again. What air? What are you hoping? You're kind of the key takeaways for the attendees after they come to the summit? >>Yeah, a couple of things. I mean, first of all, I think will be a sense of belonging. Three attendees, the uses, a pager duty. They are really the teams that are at the forefront of keeping our digital services working on. But what that means is responding to incidents we've actually seen. Ah, 38% increase in the volume of incidents on our platform since covert and shelter in place began. Wait 30 >>38% increase in incidents since mid March. >>That's correct. Since the beginning of on bear in mind incidents. Prior to that in the six months prior, they were pretty flat. There wasn't instant growth. But what we've also seen is a 20% improvement in the time that it takes to resolve an incident from five minutes down to four minutes. So what that really means is that the pager duty community is working really hard. They're improving their practices. Hopefully our platform, our platform is a key part of how, but these are some people under pressure, so I hope that people can come and they can experience a sense of belonging. They can learn from each other about experiences. How do you manage the stress of that situation on what are some of the great innovations that make your job easier in the year ahead? The second thing that we don't for that community is that we are offering certification for P. D. You page due to university for free this year. It's of course, with a value of $7500. Last year, you would attend page duty summit on you would sit through your sessions and you would learn and you would get certified. So this year it's offered for free. You take the course during summit. But you can also carry on if you miss anything for 30 days after. So we're really feeling that, you know, we're giving back there, offering a great program for certification and improved skills completely free to help our community in this in this time of pressure, >>right? Right. Well, it is a very passionate community, and, you know, we go to so many events and you can you can really tell it's palatable, you know, kind of what the where the tight communities are and where people are excited to see each other and where they help each other, not necessarily only at the event, but you know, throughout the year. And I think you know a huge shout out to Jennifer on the culture that she's built there because it is very warm. It's very inclusive, is very positive. And and that energy, you know, kind of goes throughout the whole company and ice the teaser. You know this in something that's built around a device that most of the kids today don't even know what a pager is, and just the whole concept of carrying a pager and being on call right and being responsible. It's a very different way to kind of look at the world when you're the one that has that thing on your hip and it's buzzing and someone's expecting, Ah, return call and you gotta fix something So you know, a huge shout out to keep a positive and you're smiling nice and big culture in a job where you're basically fixing broken things most of the time. >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's, I think, a joke that we make you know these things only break on Friday night or your wedding anniversary or Thanksgiving. But one of the announcements we're most excited about this year is the level of automation on artificial intelligence that we're building into our platform that is really going to reduce the number of interruptions that developers get when they are uncle. >>Yeah, I look forward to more conversations because we're gonna be doing a bunch of Cube interviews like Normal and, uh, you know, applied artificial intelligence, I think, is where all the excitement is. It's not a generic thing. It's where you applied in a specific application to get great business outcomes. So I look forward to that conversation and hopefully we'll be able to talk again and good luck to you and the team in the last few weeks of preparation. >>Thanks so much, Jeff. I've enjoyed talking to you. Thanks for having me. >>Alright. You too. And we'll see you later. Alright. She is Caroline. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> Woman: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting without leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to the special CUBE conversation, I'm John Furrier, host theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California, and doing a remote interview in our quarantine studio where we're getting the stories out there and sharing the content during the time of crisis when we're sheltering in place, as we get through this and get through the other side of the new normal. It's not necessarily normal, but it'll certainly create some normalcy around some of the new work at home, but also cybersecurity, I want to bring in a special guest who's going to talk with me about the impact of COVID-19 on cybersecurity, work at home, work in general, and also businesses practices. So, welcome Bill Welsh, who's the CEO of IronNet, who has taken over the helm run of the operations with General Keith Alexander, CUBE alumni as well, former NSA and former Cyber Command who's now leading a new innovative company called IronNet, which is deploying something really clever, but also something really realistic around cybersecurity so, Bill, thanks for joining me. >> Hey John, thanks for being with you. >> So, obviously, the COVID-19 crisis has created, essentially, a lot of exposure to the real world and, in general, around what it's like to work at home. Obviously, the economy's are crippled. This is an invisible threat. I've been chirping on Twitter and saying we've been fighting a digital war for a long time. There's been, the Internet has provided nation states the opportunity to attack folks using other mechanisms, open source and others, but if you look at this COVID-19, whether it's a bio weapon or not, it has crippled the country in the United States and caused crippling around the world, but it's just a threat and causing disruption, this is almost like a nuke, if you will, digital nuke. This is changing the game. You guys are in the cyber intelligence, cybersecurity area, what's your take on all of this and what are you hearing? >> Well I agree with you, John, I think that this is the invisible enemy, and as you know, right now with that going on, there's going to be adversaries that are going to take advantage of it. You see right now in some of the nation states where they're looking at opportunities to use this, to go after other countries, maybe just to test and see what their vulnerabilities are. You're seeing some activity overseas with nation states where they're looking at some of the military incursions, they're thinking about possible weaknesses with this invisible enemy. You know, it's affecting us in so many ways, whether it's economic, financial, our healthcare system, our supply chains, whether it's our, the supplies and groceries that we get to our people, so these are all challenging times that the adversaries are not going to just sit back and say oh well, you're in a crisis right now, we'll wait for the crisis to be alieved, we are now going to take advantage of it. >> And certainly the death toll is also the human impact as well, this is real world. This is something that we can have a longer conversation on, the time when we get more data in, and we'll certainly want to track this new, kind of digital warfare kind of paradigm, whether it's bio and or packets in cybersecurity, but the real impact has been this at scale exposure of problems and opportunities. For instance, IT folks were telling me that they underprovisioned their VPN access, now it's 100% everyone's at home. That's a disruption, that's not a hurricane, that's not a flood, this is now a new distraction to their operations. Other folks are seeing more hacks and more surface area, more threats from the old side getting hit. This has certainly impacted the cyber, but also people's anxiety at home. How are you guys looking at this, what are you guys doing, what's going on IronNet right now around cyber and COVID-19. >> Yeah, and what we're seeing right now is that our customers are seeing increasing awareness of their employees to understand what is going on around them and one of the things that we formed the company was the ability to assist enterprises of all sizes to collectively defend against threats that target their industries. We believe that collective defense is our collective responsibility. And it can't be just about technology, it's about some of the IT systems you talked about, being able to leverage them together. When I look at our top energy companies that we partner with, these individuals have great operators, but when you think about it, they have operators just for their company. What we're able to do within our environment, in our Iron Dome, is bring all that in together. We bring the human element and the IT element in order to help them solve positive outcomes for their industries. >> I want to dig into that because I think one of the things that I'm seeing coming out of this trend, post-pandemic is going to be the real emphasis on community. You're seeing people realizing through, whether it's doing Zoomification or Cubification, doing CUBE interviews and zooming and talking, I think you're going to see this element of I could do better, I can contribute either to society or to the collective at whole, and I think this collective idea you guys have with Iron Dome is very relevant because I think people are going to say wow, if I contribute, we might not have this kind of crisis again. This is something that's new, you guys have been on this collective thing with Iron Dome for a long time. I think this is pretty clever and I think it's going to be very relevant. Can you explain the Iron Dome collective, intelligence paradigm in the vision? >> Yeah, absolutely. And just to back up a little bit, what I will tell you is that we observed, as far as the problem statement, was that cyber is an element of national power, and people are using it to achieve their political, economic, and military objectives and now what you're seeing is are there other ways, cause while this COVID-19 may or may not have been anything as far as a bio-weapon, now others will see, well here's a way to bring down a country or an economy or something like that. We're also seeing that the cyber attacks are getting more and more destructive, whether it's WannaCry or NotPetya, we're also seeing the toolkits being more advanced, we're seeing how slow the response is by their cyber tools, so what we've looked at is we said wait, stop defending in isolation. That's what enterprises have been doing, they've been defending in isolation, no sharing, no collective intelligence as I would call it. And what we've been able to do is bring the power of those people to come together to collectively defend when something happens. So instead of having one security operation center defending a company, you can bring five or six or seven to defend the entire energy grid, this is one example. And over in Asia, we have the same thing. We have one of our largest customers over there, they have 450 companies, so if you think about it, 450 companies times the number of stock operators that they have in the security operation centers, you can think about the magnitude that we can bring the bearer of the arms, the warriors, to attack this crisis. >> So you're getting more efficiency, more acute response than before, so you got speed. So what you're saying is the collective intelligence provides what value? Speed, quality-- Yeah, it's at cloud scale, network speed, you get the benefit of all these operators, individuals that have incredible backgrounds in offensive and defensive operator experience including the people that we have, and then our partnership with either national governments or international governments that are allies, to make sure that we're sharing that collective intelligence so they can take action because what we're doing is we're making sure that we analyze the traffic, we're bringing the advanced analytics, we're bringing the expert systems, and we're bringing the experts to there, both at a technology level and also a personnel level. >> You know, General Alexander, one of the architects behind the vision here, who's obviously got a background in the military, NSA, Cyber Command, et cetera, uses the analogy of an airport radar, and I think that's a great metaphor because you need to have real-time communications on anything going on in as telemetry to what's landing or approaching or almost like landing that airplane, so he uses that metaphor and he says if there's no communication but it lags, you don't have it. He was using that example. Do you guys still use that example or can you explain further this metaphor? >> Absolutely, and I think another example that we have seen some of our customers really, in our prospects and partners really embrace is this concept of an immersive visualization, almost gaming environment. You look at what is happening now where people have the opportunity, even at home because of COVID-19, my teenage boys are spending way too much time probably on Call of Duty and Fortnite and that, but apply that same logic to cyber. Apply that logic to where you could have multiple players, multiple individuals, you can invite people in, you can invite others that might have subject matter expertise, you might be able to go and invite some of the IT partners that you have whether it's other companies to come in that are partners of yours, to help solve a problem and make it visualized, immersive, and in a gaming environment, and that is what we're doing in our Iron Dome. >> I think that's compelling and I've always loved the vision of abstracting away gaming to real world problems because it's very efficient, those kids are great, and the new Call of Duty came out so everyone's-- >> And they're also the next generation, they're the next generation of individuals that are going to be taking over security for us. So this is a great in mind... Cause this is something they already know, something they're already practicing, and something they're experts at and if you look at how the military is advancing, they've gone from having these great fighter pilots to putting people in charge of drones. It's the same thing with us is that possibility of having a cyber avatar go and fight that initiative is going to be something that we're doing. >> I think you guys are really rethinking security and this brings up my next topic I want to get your thoughts on is this crisis of COVID-19 has really highlighted old and new, and it's really kind of exposed again, at scale because it's an at scale problem, everyone's been forced to shelter in place and it exposes everything from deliveries to food to all the services and you can see what's important, what's not in life and it exposes kind of the old and new. So you have a lot of old antiquated, outdated systems and you have new emerging ones. How do you see those two sides of the street, old and new, what's emerging, what's your vision on what you think will be important post-pandemic? >> Well, I think the first thing is the individuals that are really the human element. So one, we have to make sure that individuals at home are, have all the things that they require in order to be successful and drive great outcomes, because I believe that the days of going into an office and sitting into a cube is yes, that is the old norm, but the new norm is individuals who either at home or on a plane, on a train, on a bus, or wherever they might be, practicing and being a part of it. So I think that the one thing we have to get our arms around is the ability to invite people into this experience no matter where they are and meet them where they are, so that's number one. Number two is making sure that those networks are available and that they're high speed, right? That we are making sure that they're not being used necessarily for streaming of Netflix, but being able to solve the cyber attacks. So there might be segmentation, there might be, as you said, this collective intelligent sharing that'll go across these entities. >> You know, it's interesting, Bill, you're bringing up something that we've been riffing on and I want to just expose that to you and kind of think out loud here. You're mentioning the convergence of physical, hybrid, 100% virtual as it kind of comes together. And then community and collective intelligence, we just talked about that, certainly relevant, you can see more movement on that side and more innovation. But the other thing that comes out of the woodwork and I want to get your thoughts on this is the old IoT Edge, Internet of things. Because if you think about that convergence of operational technologies and Internet technologies, ID, you now have that world's been going on for awhile, so obviously, you got to have telemetry on physical devices, you got to bring it in IT, so as you guys have this Iron Dome, collective view, hallux of view of things, it's really physical and virtual coming together. The virtualization-- >> It's all the above, it's all the above. The whole concept of IoT and OT and whether it's a device that's sitting in a solar wind panel or whether it's a device that's sitting in your network, it could be the human element, or it could actually be a device, that is where you require that cyber posture, that ability to do analytics on it, the ability to respond. And the ability to collectively see all of it, and that goes to that whole visualization I talked to you about, is being able to see your entire network, you can't protect something if you can't see it, and that's something that we've done across IronDome, and with our customers and prospects and with IronDefense, so it's something that absolutely is part of the things we're seeing in the cyber world. >> I want to get your reaction to some commentary that we've been having, Dave Vellante and myself on the team, and we were talking about how events have been shut down, the physical space, the venues where they have events. Obviously, we go to a lot of events with theCUBE, you know that. So, obviously that's kind of our view, but when you think about Internet of things, you think about collective intelligence with community, whether it's central to gamification or Iron Dome that you're innovating on, as we go through the pandemic, there's going to be a boomerang back, we think, to the importance of the physical space, cause at some point, we're going to get back to the real world, and so, the question is what operational technology, what version of learnings do we get from this shelter in place that gets applied to the physical world? This is the convergence of physical and virtual. We see as a big way, want to get your reaction to that. >> I absolutely agree with you, I think that we're going to learn some incredible lessons in so many different ways whether it's healthcare, financial, but I also, believe that's what you said, is that convergence of physical and virtual will become almost one in the same. We will see individuals that will leverage the physical when they need to and leverage the virtual when they need to. And I think that that's something that we will see more and more of of companies looking at how they actually respond and support their customer base. You know, some might decide to have more individuals in an at-home basis, to support a continuity of operations, some might decide that we're going to have some physical spaces and not others, and then we're going to leverage physical IT and some virtual IT, especially the cloud infrastructures are going to become more and more valuable as we've seen within our IronDome infrastructure. >> You know, we were riffing the other day in the remote interviews, theCUBE is going virtual, and we were joking that Amazon Web Services was really created through the trend of virtualization. I mean, VMware and the whole server virtualization created the opportunity for Amazon to abstract and create value. And we think that this next wave is going to be this pandemic has woken us up to this remote, virtual contribution, and it might create a lot of opportunities, for us, for instance, virtual CUBE, for virtual business. I'm sure you, as the CEO of IronNet, are thinking about how you guys recover post-pandemic, is it going to be a different world, are you going to have a mix of virtual, digital, integrated into your physical, whether it's how you market your products and engage customers to solving technical problems. This is a new management challenge, and it's an opportunity if you get it right, it could be a headwind or a tailwind, depending on how you look at it. So I want to get your thoughts on this virtualization post-pandemic management structure, management philosophy, obviously, dislocation with spacial economics, I get that and I always go to work in the office much but, beyond that, management style, posture, incentives. >> Yes, I think that there's a lot of things unpacked there. I mean, one is it is going to be about a lot of more communication. You know, I will tell you that since we have gone into this quarantine, we're holding weekly all hands, every Friday, all in a virtual environment. I think that the transparency will be even more. You know, one of the things that I'm most encouraged by and inspired by is the productivity. I will tell you, getting access to individuals has gotten easier and easier for us. The ability to get people into this virtual environment. They're not spending hours upon hours on commuting or flying on planes or going different places, and it doesn't mean that that won't be an important element of business, but I think it's going to give time back to individuals to focus on what is the most important priorities for the companies that they're driving. So this is an opportunity, I will tell you, our productivity has increased exponentially. We've seen more and more meetings, where more and more access to very high level individuals, who have said we want to hear what you guys are doing, and they have the time to do it now instead of jumping on a plane and wasting six hours and not being productive. >> It's interesting, it's also a human element too, you can hear babies crying, kids playing, dogs barking, you kind of laugh and chuckle in the old days, but now this is a humanization piece of it, and that should foster real communities, so I think... Obviously, we're going to be watching this virtualization of communities, collective intelligence and congratulations, I think Iron Dome, and iron offense, obviously which is core product, I think your Iron Dome is a paradigm that is super relevant, you guys are visionaries on this and I think it's turning out to be quite the product, so I want to congratulate you on that. Thanks for-- >> Thank you, John. Thanks for your time today and stay safe. >> Bill, thanks for joining us and thanks for your great insights on cyber COVID-19, and we'll follow up more on this trend of bio weaponry and kind of the trajectory of how cyber and scale cloud is going to shape how we defend and take offense in the future on how to defend our country and to make the world a safer place. I'm John Furrier, you're watching theCUBE here and our remote interviews in our quarantine studio in Palo Alto, thanks for watching. (lively music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, Host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California, for a special conversation with an industry analyst who's been, who travels a lot, does a lot of events, covers the industry, up and down, economically and also some of the big trends, to talk about how the at scale problem that the COVID-19 is causing. Whether it's a lot of people are working at home for the first time, to at scale network problems, the pressure points that this is exposing for what I would call the mainstream world is a great topic. Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research, friend of theCUBE. Zeus, welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you remotely. We're, as you know, working in place here. I came to the studio for, with our quarantine crew here, to get these stories out, 'cause they're super important. Thanks for spending the time. >> Hi, yeah, thanks, it's certainly been an interesting last couple months and we're probably, maybe half way through this, I'm guessing. >> Yeah, and no matter what happens the new reality of this current situation or mess or whatever you want to call it is the fact that it has awakened what us industry insiders have been seeing for a long time, big data, new networks, cloud native, micro-services, kind of at scale, scale out infrastructure, kind of the stuff that we've been kind of covering is now exposed for the whole world to see on a Petri dish that is called COVID-19, going, "Wow, this world has changed." This is highlighting the problems. Can you share your view of what are some of those things that people are experiencing for the first time and what's the reaction, what's your reaction to it all? >> Yeah, it's been kind of an interesting last couple of months when I talk to CIO's about how they're adapting to this. You know, when, before I was an analyst, John, I was actually in corporate IT. I was part of a business continuity plans group for companies and the whole definition of business continuity's changed. When I was in corporate IT, we thought of business continuity as being able to run the company with a minimal set of services for a week or a month or something like that. So, for instance, I was in charge of corporate technology and financial services firm and we thought, "Well, if we have 50 traders, can we get by with 10", right? Business continuity today is I need to run the entire organization with my full staff for an indefinite period of time, right? And that is substantially different mandate than thinking of how I run a minimal set of services to just maintain the bare minimum business operations and I think that's exposed a lot of things for a lot of companies. You know, for instance, I've talked to so many companies today where the majority of their employees have never worked remote. For you or I, we're mobile professionals. We do this all the time. We travel around. We go to conferences. We do this stuff all, it's second nature. But for a lot of employees, you think of contact center agents, in store people, things like that, they've never worked from home before. And so, all of a sudden, the new reality is they've got to set up a computer in the kitchen or their bedroom or something like that and start working from home. Also for companies, they've never had to think about a world where everybody worked remotely, right? So the VP in Infrastructure would have, the cloud apps they have, the remote access technology they have was set up for a subset of users, maybe 10%, maybe 15%, but certainly not everybody. And so now we're seeing corporate networks get crushed. All the cloud providers are getting crushed. I know some of the conferencing companies, the video companies are having to double, triple capacity. And so I think to your point when you started this, we would have seen this eventually with all the data coming in and all the new devices being connected. I think what COVID did was just accelerate it just to the point where it's exposed to everything at once. >> Yeah, and you know, I have a lot of, being an entrepreneur and done a lot of corporate legal contracts. The word force majeure is always a phrase that's a legal jargon, which means act of God or so to speak, something you can't control. I think what's interesting to your point is that the playbook in IT, even some of the most cutting edge IT, is forecasting some disruption, but never like this. And also disaster recovery and business continuity, as you mentioned, have been practices, but state of the art has been percentages of overall. But disaster recovery was a hurricane, or a power outage, so generators, fail over sites or regions of your cloud, not a change in a new vector. So the disruption is not disruption. It's an amplification of a new work stream. That's the disruption. That's what you're saying. >> Yeah, you know, that's correct. Business continuity used to be very data center-focused. It was, how do I get my power? How do I create some, replicate my office and have 50 desks in here, instead of 500? But now it's everybody working remotely, so I got to have ways for them to collaborate. I have to have ways for them to talk to customers. I have to have ways for them to deliver services. I have to enable people to do what they did in the office, but not in the office, right? And so that's been the big challenge and I think it's been an interesting test for CIO's that have been going through digital transformation plans. I think it's shifted a lot of budgets around and made companies look at the way they do things. There's also the social aspect of a job. People like to go to the office. They like to interact with co-workers. And I've talked to some companies where they're bringing in medical doctors, they're bringing in psychologists to talk to their employees, because if you're never worked from home before, it's quite a big difference. The other aspect of this that's underappreciated, I think, is the fact that now our kids are home, right? >> John: Yeah. (laughter) >> So we've got to contend with that. And I know that the first day that the shelter in place order got put in place for the San Francisco area, a new call, I believe a new version of Call of Duty had just come out. You know, we had some new shows pop up in Netflix, some series continuances. So now these kids who are at home are bored. They're downloading content. They're playing games. At the same time, we're trying to work and we're trying to do video calls and we're trying to bring in multiple video streams or even if they're in classrooms, they're doing Zoom-based calls, that type of thing, or using WebEx or an application like that, and it's played havoc on corporate networks, not just company networks, and so... >> Also Comcast and the providers, AT&T. You've got the fiber seems to be doing well, but Comcast is throttling. I mean, this is the crisis. It's a new vector of disruption. But how do you develop... >> Yeah, YouTube said that they're going to throttle down. Well, I think what this is is it makes you look at how you handle your traffic. And I think there's plenty of bandwidth out there. And even the most basic home routers are capable of prioritizing traffic and I think there's a number of IT leaders I've talked who have actually gone through the steps of helping their employees understand how you use your home networking technology to be able to prioritize video and corporate voice traffic over top. There are corporate ways to do that. You know, for instance, Aruba and Extreme Networks both offer these remote access points where you just plug 'em in and you're connected through a corporate network and you pick up all the policies. But even without that, there's ways to do with home. So I think it's made us rethink networking. Instead of the network being a home network, a WiFi network, a data center network, right, the Internet, we need to think about this grand network as one network and then how we control the quality of a cloud app when the person's home to the cloud, all the way back to the company, because that's what drives user experience. >> I think you're highlighting something really important. And I just want to illustrate and have you double down on more commentary on this, because I think, you know, the one network where we're all part of one network concept shows that the perimeter's dead. That's what we've been saying about the cloud, but also if you think about just the crimes of opportunity that are happening. You've got the hacker and hacking situation. You have all kinds of things that are impacted. There's crimes of opportunity, and there's disruption that's happening because of the opportunity. Can you just share more and unpack that concept of this one network? What are some of the things that business are thinking about now? You've got the VPN. You've got collaboration tools that sometimes are half-baked. I mean, I love Zoom and all, but Zoom is crashing too. I mean, WebEx is more corporate-oriented, but not really as strong as what Zoom is for the consumer. But still they have an opportunity, but they have a challenge as well. So all these work tools are kind of half-baked too. (laughing) >> Well, the thing is they were never designed... I remember seeing in an interview that Chuck Robbins had on CNBC where he said, "We didn't design WebEx to support everybody working from home". It just, that wasn't even a thought. Nowhere did he ever go to his team and say, build this for the whole world to connect, right? And so, every one of the video providers and the cloud collaboration providers have problems, and I don't really blame them, because this is a dynamic we were never expecting to see. I think you brought up a good point on the security side. We, a lot has been written about how more and more companies are moving to these online tools, like Zoom and WebEx and applications like that to let us communicate, but what does that mean from a security perspective? Now`all of sudden I have people working from home. They're using these Web-based applications. I remember a conversation I had about six months ago with one of the world's most famous hackers who does nothing but penetration tests now. He said that the cloud-based applications are his number one entry point into companies and to penetrate them, because people's passwords and things like that are fairly weak. So, now we're moving everything to the cloud. We're moving everything to these SaaS apps, right? And so now it's creating more exposure points. We've got fishers out there that are using the term COVID or Corona as a way to get people to click on links they shouldn't. And so now our whole security paradigm has blown up, right? So we used to have this hard shell we could drop around our company. We can't do that anymore. And we have to start worrying about things on an app-by-app basis. And it's caused companies to rethink security, to look at multi-factor authentication tools. I think those are a lot better. We have to look at Casb tools, the cloud access tools, kind of monitor what apps people are using, what they're not using. Trying to cut down on the use of consumer tools, right? So it's a lot for the security practice to take ahold of too. And you have to understand, even from a company standpoint, your security operations center was built on the concept they pull all their data into one location. SOC engineers aren't used to working remotely as well, so that's a big change as well. How do I get my data analyzed and to my SOC engineers when they're working from home? >> You know, we have coined the term Black Friday for the day after, you know, Thanksgiving. >> Thanksgiving, yeah. >> You know, the big surge, but that's a term to describe that first experience of, holy shit, everyone's going to the websites and they all crashed. So we're kind of having that same moment now, to your point earlier. So I want to read a statement that was on Nima Baidey's LinkedIn. He's at Google now, former Pivotal guy. You probably know him. He had a little graphic that says, "Who led the digital transformation of your company?" It's got a poll with a question mark. "A) Your CEO, B) your CTO, or C) COVID-19"? And it circles COVID-19 and that's the image and that's the meme that's going around. But the reality is it is highlighting it and I want to get your thoughts on this next track of thinking around how people may shift their focus and their spend, because, hey, hybrid cloud's great and multicloud's the next big wave, but screw multicloud. If I can't actually fix my current situation, maybe I'll push off some of the multicloud stuff or maybe I won't. So, how do you see the give and get of project prioritization, because I think this is going to wake everyone up. You mentioned security, clearly. >> Yeah, well, I think it has woken everybody up and I think companies now are really rethinking how they operate. I don't believe we're going to stop traveling. I think once this is over, people are going to hop back on planes. I also don't believe that we'll never go back into the office. I think the big shift here though, John, is we will see more acceptance to hire people out of region. I think that it's proved that you don't have to be in the office, right, which will drive these collaboration tools. And I also think we'll see less use of desktop phones and more use of video means. So now that people are getting used to using these types of tools, I think they're starting to like the experience. And so voice calls get replaced by video calls and that is going to crush our networks in buildings. So we've got WiFi 6 coming. We've got 5G coming, right. We've got lots of security tools out there. And I think you'll see a lot of prioritization to the network and that's kind of an interesting thing, because historically, the network didn't get a lot of C level time, right? It was those people in the basement. We didn't really know what they did. I'm a former network engineer. I was treated that way. (laughing) But most digital organizations now have to come to the realization that they're network-centric, and then so the network is the business and that's not something that anybody's ever put a lot of focus on. But if you look at the building blocks of digital IoT, mobility, cloud, the writing's been on the wall for a while, and I've written this several times. But you need to pay more attention to the network. And I think we're finally going to see that transition, some prioritization of dollars there. >> Yeah, I will attest you have been very vocal and right on point on that, so props to that. I do want to also double amplify your point. The network drives everything, that's clear. I think the other thing that's interesting and used to be kind of a cliche in a pejorative way is the user is the product. I think that's a term that's been coined to Facebook. You know, you're data. You're the product. If you're the product, that's a problem, you know. To describe Facebook as the app that monetizes you, the user. I think this situation has really pointed out that yes, it's good to be the product. The user value and the network are two now end points of the spectrum. The network's got to be kick ass from the ground up, but the user is the product now, and it should be, in a good way, not exploiting. So I think if you're thinking about user-centric value, how my kid can play Call of Duty, how my family can watch the new episode on Netflix, how I can do a kick ass Zoom call, that's my experience. The network does its job. The application service takes advantage of making me happy. So I think this is interesting, right. So we're getting a new thing here. How real do you think that is? Where are we on the spectrum of that nirvana? >> I think we're rapidly approaching that. I think it's been well documented that 2020 was the year that customer experience become the number one brand differentiate, right. In fact, I think it was actually 2018 that that happened, but Walker and Gartner and a few other companies would be 2020. And what that means is that if you're a business, you need to provide exemplary customer service in order to gain share. I think one of the things that was lost in there is that employee experience has to be best in class as well. And so I think a lot of businesses over-rotated the spin away from employee experience to customer experience, and rightfully so, but now they got to rotate back to make sure their workers have the right tools, have the right services, have the right data, to do their jobs better, because when they do, they can turn around and provide customers better experience. So this isn't just about training your people to service customers well. It's about making sure people have the right data, the right information to do their jobs, to collaborate better, right. And there's really a tight coupling now between the consumer and the employee, or the customer and the employee. And, you know, Corona kind of exposed to that, 'cause it shows that we're all connected, in a way. And the connection of people, whether they're the customers or employees or something, that businesses have to focus on. So I think we'll see some dollars sign back to internal, not just customer facing. >> Yeah, well, great insight. And, first of all, we all connect to your great CUBE alumni. But you're also right up the street in California. We're in Palo Alto. You're in San Mateo. You literally could have driven here, but we're sheltering in place. >> We're sheltered in place. >> Great insight and, you know, thanks for sharing that and I think it's good content for people, you know, be aware of this. Obviously they're living in it right now, but I think the world is going to be back to business soon, but it's never going to be the same. I think it's digital... >> No, it'll never be the same. I think this is a real watershed point for the way we work and the way we treat our employees and our customers. I think you'll see a lot of companies make a lot of change. And that's good for the whole industry, 'cause it'll drive innovation. And I think we'll have some innovation come out of this that we never saw before. >> Quick final word for the folks that are on this big wave that's happening. It's reality. It's the current situation now. What's your advice for them as they get on their surfboard, so to speak, and ride this wave? What's your advice to them? >> Yeah, I think use this opportunity to find those weak points in your networks and find out where the bottlenecks are, because I think having everybody work remotely exposes a lot of problems in processes and where a lot of the hiccups happen. But I do think my final word is invest in the network. I think a lot of the networks out there have been badly under-invested in, which I think is why people get frustrated when they're in stadiums or hotels or casinos. I think the world is shifting. Applications and people are becoming network-centric. And if those don't work, nothing works. And I think that's really been proven over the last couple months. If our networks can't handle the traffic and our networks can't handle what we're doing, nothing works. >> You know, you and I could do a podcast show called "No Latency"... >> (mumbles) so it'll be good. >> Zeus, thanks for coming on. I appreciate taking the time. >> No problem, John. >> Stay safe. And I want to follow up with you and get a check in further down the road, in a couple days or maybe next week, if you can. >> Yeah, looking forward to it. >> Thanks a lot. Okay, I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto Studios doing the remote interviews, getting the quick stories that matter, help you out, and (mumbles) great guest there. Check out ZK Research, a great friend of theCUBE, cutting edge, knows the networking. This is an important area. The network, the users' experience is critical. Thanks for coming and watching today. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (lighthearted music)

(upbeat music) >> Live, from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix.NEXT 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT. We are in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, hosting alongside Stu Miniman. We're joined by Fran Scott. She is a science and engineering presenter. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> No worries at all. It's good to be here actually. >> So you are a well known face to UK audiences. You are a three times BAFTA nominated science and engineering presenter. Well-known. >> Give her a winner. (laughter) >> You're the Susan Lucci of science. You are the pyrotechnician and you lead the Christmas lectures at the Royal Institute. >> Yeah. I head up the demonstration team at the Royal Institution. We come up with all the science demonstrations, so the visual ways to show the science ideas. I head up that team. We build the demonstrations and we show science to people rather than just tell them about it. >> So mostly, you have a very cool job. (chuckles) >> I love my job. >> I want to hear how you got into this. What was it? What inspired you? >> Oh gosh, two very different questions. In terms of what inspired me, I was very lucky enough to be able to pursue what I love. And I came from a family where answers weren't given out willy-nilly. If you didn't know something, it wasn't a bad thing. It was like a, "Let's look it up. Let's look it up." I grew up in an atmosphere where you could be anything because you didn't have to know what you had to be. You could just have a play with it. I love being hands-on and making things, and I grew up on a farm, so I was quite practical. But I also loved science. Went to university, did neuroscience at university. I enjoyed the learning part but, where I was in terms of the science hierarchy, I found out that once you actually go into a lab, there's a lot of lab work and not much learning straight away, and it was the learning that I loved. And so my friends actually got me into science communication. They took me to the science museum and they were like, "Fran, you will love this." And I was like, "Will I?" And I was like, "You are so right." I got a job at the science museum in London by just approaching someone on that visit and being like, "How do I get a job here?" And they were like, "Well, you got to do this, this, this." I was like, "I can do that." I got the job there and I realized I loved science demonstrations and building stuff. Eventually I just combined that love of science and being practical together. And now I produce and write, build science props and science stage shows. And then it became a thing. (laughter) Hand it to me, I love it. >> So Fran, our audience is very much the technology community. Very supportive of STEM initiatives. Give us a little flavor as to some of the things you're working on. Where is there need for activities? >> I suppose the biggest example of that would be a show that I did a few years ago where there was a big push for new coders within the UK. And I was getting approached time and time again for visual ways to show computer coding. Or programming, as we used to call it back in the day. I didn't have an answer because then, I wasn't a coder. So I was like, "Well, I'll learn. And then I'll figure out a demonstration because this is what I do. So why don't I do it on coding?" And so yeah, I set about. I learnt code. And I came up with an explosions based coding show. Error 404. And we toured around the country with that. Google picked it up and it was a huge success just because it was something that people wanted to learn about. And people were stumped as to how to show coding visually. But because this is what we do day in and day out with different subjects, we could do it with coding just like we do it with physics. >> What do you think is the key? A lot of your audience is kids. >> Yes and family audiences. >> So what is the key to getting people excited about science? >> I think science itself is exciting if people are allowed to understand how brilliant it is. I think some of the trouble comes from when people take the step too big, and so you'd be like, "Hang on but, why is that cool? Why?" Because they don't under... Well they would understand if they were fed to them in a way that they get it. The way I say it is, anyone can understand anything as long as you make the steps to get there small enough. Sometimes the steps are too big for you to understand the amazingness of that thing that's happening. And if you don't understand that amazingness, of course you're going to lose interest. Because everyone around you is going, "Ah, this is awesome, this is awesome!" And you're like, "What? What's awesome?" I think it's up to us as adults and as educators to just try and not patronize the children, definitely not, but just give them those little steps so they can really see the beauty of what it is that we're in awed by. >> One of the things that is a huge issue in the technology industry is the dearth of women in particular, in the ranks of technology and then also in leadership roles. As a woman in science and also showing little girls everywhere all over the UK what it is to be a woman in science, that's a huge responsibility. How do you think of that, and how are you in particular trying to speak to them and say, "You can do this"? >> I've done a lot of research onto this because this was the reason I went into what I'm into. I worked a lot of the time behind the scenes just trying to get the science right. And then I realized there was no one like me doing science presenting. The girl was always the little bit of extra on the side and it was the man who was the knowledgeable one that was showing how to do the science. And the woman was like, "Oh, well that's amazing." And I was like, "Hang on. Let's try and flip this." And it just so happened that I didn't care if it was me. I just wanted a woman to do it. And it just happened that that was me. But now that I'm in that position, one, well I run a business as well. I run a business where we can train other new presenters to do it. It's that giving back. So yes, I train other presenters. I also make sure there's opportunity for other presenters. But I also try, and actually I work with a lot of TV shows, and work on their language. And work on the combination of like, "Okay, so you've got a man doing that, you got women doing this. Let's have a look at more diversity." And just trying to show the kids that there are people like them doing science. There's that classic phrase that, "You can't be what you can't see." So yes, it comes responsibility, but also there's a lot of fun. And if you can do the science, be intelligent, be fun, and just be normal and just enjoy your job, then people go, "Hang on," whether they're a boy or a girl, they go, "I want a bit of that," in terms of, "I want that as my job." And so by showing that, then I'm hopefully encouraging more people to do it. But it's about getting out and encouraging the next generation to do it as well. >> Fran, you're going to be moderating a panel in the keynote later this afternoon. Give our audience a little bit. What brought you to this event? What's going into it? And for those that don't get to see it live, what they're missing. >> I am one lucky woman. So the panel I'm moderating, it's all about great design and I am a stickler for great design. As a scientist, prop-builder, person that does engineering day in and day out, I love something when it's perfectly designed. If there is such a thing as a perfect design. So this panel that we've got, Tobias Manisfitz, Satish Ramachandran, and Peter Kreiner from Noma. And so they all come with their own different aspect of design. Satish works at Nutanix. Peter works at Noma, the restaurant here in Copenhagen. And Tobias, he designs the visual effects for things such as Game of Thrones and Call of Duty. And so yes, they each design things for... They're amazing at their level but in such a different way and for a different audience. I'm going to be questioning them on what is great design to them and what frictionless design means and just sort of picking their amazing brains. >> I love that fusion of technology and design as something they talked about in the keynote this morning. Think of Apple or Tesla, those two things coming together. I studied engineering and I feel like there was a missing piece of my education to really go into the design. Something I have an appreciation for, that I've seen in my career. But it's something special to bring those together. >> Yeah. I think care is brought in mostly because yes, one, I love design. But also I've worked a lot with LEGO. And so I was brought in to be the engineering judge on the UK version of LEGO Masters. Apparently, design in children's builds is the same as questioning the owner of NOMA restaurant. (chuckles) >> So what do you think? Obviously you're doing the panel tomorrow. What is in your mind the key to great design? Because as you said, you're a sucker for anything that is just beautiful and seamless and intuitive. And we all know what great design is when we hold it in our hands or look at it. But it is this very ineffable quality of something that... >> So the panel's later today actually. But in terms of great design, yes, we all know when we have great design. But the trouble comes in creating good design. I think the key, and it's always obvious when you say it out loud, but it's that hand in hand partnership with aesthetics and practicality. You can't have something that's just beautiful. But you can't have something that just works. You need to have it as a mixture of both. It's those engineers talking with the designers, the designers talking with the engineers. The both of them talking with the consumers. And from that, good design comes. But don't forget, good design means they're for different people as well. >> What are some of the most exciting things you're working on, because you are a professional pyrotechnician. We've never had someone like this on theCUBE before. This is amazing. This is a first time ever. >> I was strictly told no fire. >> Yes, thank you. We appreciate that. >> Well at the moment, as I said at the beginning, I'm lucky enough to head up the demo team at the Royal Institution. We are just heading into our Christmas lectures. Now if you don't know these Christmas lectures, they were the first science ever done to a juvenile audience. Back in 1825 was when they started. It's a tradition in the UK and so this year, we're just starting to come up with the demonstrations for them. And this year they presented by Hannah Fry, and so they're going to be on maths and algorithms and how that makes you lucky or does it make you lucky? We've been having some really fun meetings. I can't give away too much, but there definitely be some type of stunt involved. That's all I can say. But there's going to be a lot of building. I really need to get back, get my sore out, get stuff made. >> Excellent. And who is the scientist you most admire? >> Oh my word. >> Living or dead? >> Who is the scientist I most admire? (sighs) I do have... Oh gosh, this is... >> The wheels are churning. >> It's a cheesy one though, but Da Vinci. Just for his multi-pronged approach and the fact that he had so much going on in his brain that he couldn't even get everything down on paper. He'd half draw something and then something else would come to him. >> I had the opportunity of interviewing Walter Isaacson last year, and he loved... It was the, as we talked about, the science and the design and the merging of those. But reading that biography of him, what struck me is he never finished anything because it would never meet the perfection in his mind to get it done. I've seen that in creative people. They'll start things and then they'll move on to the next thing and there. Me as a engineering by training, it's like no, no. You need to finish work. Manufacturing from standpoint, work in progress is the worst thing you could have out there. >> He would be a rubbish entrepreneur. (chuckling) >> Right, but we're so lucky to have had his brain. >> Exactly. I think that's the thing. I think it gives us an insight into what the brain is capable of and what you can design without even knowing you're designing something. >> Well Fran, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. This was so fun. >> Thanks for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of .NEXT. (upbeat music)

>>from San Francisco. It's the Q covering pager duty. Summit 2019. Brought to you by pager Duty. >>Hey, welcome back. You're ready, Jeff? Rick here with the Cube. We're downtown San Francisco at the historic Western St Francis. A pager. Duty summit. It's the fourth year pager duty Summit, 30 year for the Q. Being here, I think they've about outgrown the venue. So he looked forward to seeing where we go next year. But we're excited to have somebody is at a very busy day. A lot of product announcements leading a lot of this effort. He's Jonathan. Randy, this s V P. Of product for pager duty. Jonathan, great to see you. Thanks for having me. So, congratulations. A lot of Ah lot of product announcements today. >>This is our biggest unveiling of the year. >>What s so I don't want you to pick your favorite baby, but what are some of the highlights? That goddess here today? >>Yes, a couple of big things today and tomorrow, not just today. >>Uh, >>first, we're really focused on applying. It is the buzzword of the sense of the new Millennium machine learning, but we're applying it across our entire portfolio, and we're doing it in a good way, not in a creepy way. We're doing in a good way to help organizations make sense of all the data they're getting. Tell him what's happening and, more importantly, what they could do to get better. And so that's something that we call our intelligence Dashboards is part of our analytics products. That's one big one, right? Right. And as you probably know, being here, pager duty is all about helping teams to be more effective in the moments that matter. And one of the other big announcements we have is intelligent triage. And so what is it way See with There's a lot of great companies here, partners that we're working with and whenever they're working, major issues within their companies were seconds, matter or even microseconds. They could lose millions of dollars that work in real time. They'll find out that there's multiple teams working on the same problems on Lee for one team to find out that somebody's undoing some of things that they're doing. So we focused in a huge way on building context, the visibility so that the teams in see what other issues air related That's what we call intelligent triage. So nobody needs to do double work, >>right? It's funny on the on the A I right in machine learning because they are the hot, hot, hot buzzword. But what I don't think are the hot buzzards, which is where all the excitement is happening, is it's the applied A I it's not Aye aye, for a eyes sake. Or were great. Aye aye company with an aye aye widget that we want to sell you. It's really leveraging a I within your core application space, your core domain expertise to make your abs do better things. And that's really what you guys have embraced. >>Absolutely. It's way have to be so empathetic to our users. Are users carry an unbelievable burden. They are on the front lines when things go down. They have, you know, minutes, seconds to make right decisions, and there's a lot of responsibility with that. So we're using a I in applied way to help them make sense of being overloaded with information, focus them in on the things that can make the biggest positive impact right, So it is applied a I in its purest form and >>the other part I found interesting is really anak knowledge mint that it's not just the people that have to fix the problem that needs to know about the problem, but there's a much larger kind of ecosystem that ecosystem around. That problem, whether it's sales reps executive for certain, is a whole bunch of people that should know, need to know, have value, to know beyond just the really smart person that I've now put on fixing the >>problem. You're bringing up a great point, which is a lot of people know page of duty because of how we help technical teams, developers and office people fix these incidents. When they happen right when a site goes down or when something search isn't working correctly but getting work done. We're taking that in its broadest context. It's beyond technical responders. First we have to service them. They're our core audience. They're why we're here today. But that unit of work getting work done goes beyond them as you're saying. It goes to what we call business responders who I could be working in a customer service team and while that incident is happening, I need that information so that I can ready my communication in case somebody calls up the sports desk and opens up a ticket. I need to know what to tell him right when it's gonna be fixed and how we're addressing their problems. Or I could be the CFO, a stakeholder and just want to know what's the real revenue impact of this outage of this time? So whether I'm taking action or I just need to know these air people outside of the sphere of the technical team and their business responders and stakeholders and we're automating the flow of information all of them so that they don't interrupt the poor responders team so they can focus on their work, >>right? Yeah. Another concept that kind of clarified today is all of your guys partnerships. You know, you've listened on your integration page on the Web site. It's clear. Well, data dog sales for Zenda Sumo AWS service now last CNN, IBM Blue mix. I mean, it's they can't go through the whole list. It's a huge list, but I think confusion in the market or maybe clarification is helpful is, you know, kind of where to those systems play versus your system when that Everyone wants to be a system of record, right? Everybody wants to be the database that has all the all the information. And yet you figured out a way to take your capabilities and augment all these other platforms and really puts you in a nice play across a really wide range of a problem. Sets. >>Yeah, it's it's so core to who we are way like to think of our pager duty platform. I always refer to it as it's a central nervous system, and what does that really mean? We always say it's a central nervous system and pager duty is about people. So all of those vendors, all of those companies, they're all valued partners. Many of them are customers of pager duty as well. They use us to keep their service is up on the monitoring world. But what pager duty is always focused on is ensuring that people two people collaboration to get real work done based on the information coming from those folks. So a lot of those vendors out there they play such an invaluable part of the ecosystem. They let us know they provide all the telemetry in the information in the data way, make sense of it and then engage people Finish that work. So in a way, you know that central nervous system is taking all these impulses just like a really central nervous system. And we're engaging the right people to help them effectively get the right right, and we couldn't do it without them. So the famous 350 plus way couldn't do what we do without them, and they're all here today. You >>didn't think I was going to read the whole hunt 350 >>Hope. That would be a long way >>Hades in desk on. And I know that was part of the new customer service and has been getting, you know, kind of your value kind of closer to the actual customer transaction. It's always in support of the customer transactions. The website's down transaction close, but this actually has taken it to the next level toe. Have a direct contact to the person who's actually engaged with the client to give them or inside is what's going on as being resolved in these type thing with a two way communication pattern. >>Yeah, it's something I'm personally really excited about. Where customer of zendesk as well. So we use end us and they use pager duty. So we get a lot of feedback on what's working, what's not working, which informed us and what we were doing. But there's two big problems in the industry that I've seen over, you know, two plus decades, which is customer service and support teams. They're dealing also on the front lines. Having them communicate and get information from development teams isn't always easy. And so both of us are really interested in kind of breaking down the walls between those organizations. But doing so in a way that's not interrupting those teams when they're doing their work that they have, right, so one, that's what we wanted to accomplish. How can we share information seamlessly automatically? So both teams are in sync, but they're not pestering each other and then to that work that's being done on the development side, when something does go wrong in a devil apps world, now, the customer support agents, the service agents they can get ahead of those cases that are being opened up, so they're not in the dark. They're not being flooded by tons of cases being opened up and they don't know what to say. They ready their communications and push it out because they're insane. >>It's really you think pager duty and notifications were surrounded by all these dashboards and computer stuff, but you made a really instant comment. It's all about the people you guys commissioned. A study called I'm gonna read an unplanned work, the human impact of an always on world and really going after unplanned work. Now it's funny, because everyone always talks about unplanned maintenance and on scheduled maintenance and the impacts on aircraft and the impacts on power generation and aircraft. This is the first time I've ever heard anyone couch it as as unplanned, which is completely disruptive fours on people and their lives, not to mention their service workers. And, according to the study, 2/3 of her pissed off and not too happy the way things are going at work anyway, with what kind of was zenith of that. And that's a really great way to reframe this problem into something much more human. >>The genesis of this all came from the concept that a CZ you'll read a lot we say we're always on. Let's keep it that way. Let's help help everyone. Keep it that way. It's a mantra with pager duty, and it comes from again when I say Genesis, it comes from even within our platform way. Don't have me Windows. We are on 24 7 360 days a year way have to be up when other service's aren't because of that. Whenever we work with organizations or vendors that that we pay for. And they say we have a maintenance window like a maintenance window my partner in crime runs engineering team are meant for. He always says maintenance Windows air for cars, not SAS software like there are no maintenance windows. And what that means as a first step is, if that's the case, there's no maintenance windows you're always on. Then you have to answer this question of how much time are you really spending unplanned work interruptions, right? So we really started taking not the heart. We really started trying to figure out what is the percentage everybody's trying to innovate more. That's planned war, right? Is it? 10% is a 20%. Is it 50%? The best organizations we see our 20 to 25% is unplanned work. We'll >>need 25% for the best organization. >>Yeah, so means not. So best organizations are very different, right? And so way feel that we uniquely can help organizations get way better at cutting down that time so that they can innovate more, Right? They're not firefighting. They're actually innovating and growing their business right. That's a big part of how we help people in these organizations do their job better. >>God, that's before you get in contact. Switching and pressure and disruption and >>way found some amazing statistics in my prior life. Iran Engineering. And it was at a sauce company. And what I found was whenever customers, whenever my top engineers would be put on Call Way, didn't have pager duty at the time, and they would be on call and interrupted on consecutive nights in the middle of the night. First, I would typically hear about when somebody was burned out is when I would see a resignation letter on my desk or somebody way no, after two or three or four successive interruptions in someone's personal life that goes on where they feel they're not being productive. One, they aren't productive at work either, to they're a huge retention risk. So way have that kind of data. We can look at it, and we can help management and organizations help them. And their teams take better care of their teams so that, you know, they're they're being more humane, humane knots, not human off pain, All right. And how you deal with those most expensive precious resource is in your company, which are your people is really important >>when they walk out the door every night, you know? So you gotta take care of him. So they come back the next day. It is? Yes. All right, Jonathan, last question is you as we wait, we're not quite done with some yet, but as we come to the closest on her arm really busy year. The AIPO. You guys have done amazing things, but you kind of flipped the calendar. Look forward. What are some of your kind of priorities as we as >>we move forward? Yeah. So it's been a crazy year. A lot of change and a couple things going forward. One were big partners with Amazon in a W S S O were attending reinvent. That's a big event for the company, but also at this event. As I mentioned before, it's probably our biggest unveiling of new innovations and products for our entire 12,000 plus customers. So for us, it may seem like it's an end. It's really just the beginning, because all of these products and intelligent triage business response, intelligent dashboards, these products that are apart, his capabilities that are part of our analytics and events intelligence on the pager duty, platform way have to keep evolving This we have to keep kind of moving forward because the world is always on and we've got to keep it that way. >>What? Andre just had a great line in his keynote about being scared is the generator of wisdom. But here it is, right here. Fear is the beginning of wisdom. Not necessarily fear, but fear getting caught. Keep moving that we have ahead of the pack. All right, Jonathan, Thanks for taking a few minutes and congratulations. I'm sure tough getting all those new babies out this week, but what a great what a great job. Thank you so much. All right. Pleasure. He's Jonathan. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube. Where? Pager duty Summit in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>>From San Francisco. It's the cube covering PagerDuty summit 2019 brought to you by PagerDuty. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the Q. We're a PagerDuty summit. It's the fourth year of the show. He's been here for three years. It's amazing to watch it grow. I think it's finally outgrown the Western Saint Francis here in lovely downtown San Francisco and we're really excited to be joined by our next guest. He's Alex Solomon, the co founder, co founder and CTO PagerDuty. Been at this over 10 years. Alex, first off, congratulations. And what a fantastic event. Thank you very much and thank you for having me on your show. So things have changed a lot since we had you on a year ago, this little thing called an IPO. So I'm just curious, you know, we have a lot of entrepreneurs. I watch a show as a founder and kind of go through this whole journey. What was that like? What are some of the things you'd like to share from that whole experience? >>Yeah, it was, it was incredible. I I, the word I like to use is surreal. Like just kind of going through it, not believing that it's real in a way. And adjoining by my, my lovely wife who came, came along for this festivities and just being able to celebrate that moment. I know it is just a moment in time and it's not, it's not the end of the journey certainly, but it is a big milestone for us and uh, being able to celebrate. We invited a lot of our customers, our early customers have been with us for years to join us in that, a celebration. Our investors who have believed in us from back in 2010. Right, right. We were just getting going and we just, we just had a great time. I love it. I love 10 year overnight success. 10 years in the making. >>One of my favorite expressions, and it was actually interesting when Jenn pulled up some of the statistics around kind of what the internet was, what the volume of traffic was, what the complexity in the systems are. And it's really changed a lot since you guys began this journey 10 years ago. Oh, it has. I mean back then, like the most popular monitoring tool is Nagios and new Relic was around but just barely. And now it's like Datadog has kind of taken over the world and the world has changed. We're talking about not just a microservices by containers and serverless and the cloud basically. Right. That's the kind of recurring theme that's changed over the last 10 years. But you guys made some early bets. You made bets on cloud. He made bets on dev ops. He made bets on automation. Yeah, those were pretty good. >>Uh, those, those turn out to be pretty good places to put your chips. Oh yeah. Right place, right time and um, you know, some, some experiential stuff and some just some raw luck. Right. All right, well let's get into it. On top of some of the product announcements that are happening today, what are some of the things you're excited to finally get to showcase to the world? Yeah, so one of the big ones is, uh, related to our event intelligence release. Uh, we launched the product last year, um, a few months before summit and this year we're making a big upgrade and we're announcing a big upgrade to the product where we have, uh, related incidents. So if you're debugging a problem and you have an incident that you're looking at, the question you're gonna ask is, uh, is it just my service or is there a bigger widespread problem happening at the same time? >>So we'll show you that very quickly. We'll show you are there other teams, uh, impacted by the same issue and we'll, we, we actually leveraged machine learning to draw those relationships between ongoing incidents. Right. I want to unpack a little bit kind of how you play with all these other tools. We, you know, we're just at Sumo logic a week or so ago. They're going to be on later their partner and people T I think it's confusing. There's like all these different types of tools. And do you guys partner with them all? I mean, the integration lists that you guys have built. Um, I wrote it down in service now. It's Splunk, it's Zendesk, it goes on and on. And on. Yeah. So explain to folks, how does the PagerDuty piece work within all these other systems? Sure. So, um, I would say we're really strong in terms of integrating with monitoring tools. >>So any sort of tool that's monitoring something and we'll admit an alert, uh, when something goes down or over an event when something's changed, we integrate and we have a very wide set of coverage with all, all of those tools. I think your like Datadog, uh, app dynamics, new Relic, even old school Nagios. Right. Um, and then we've also built a suite of integrations around all the ticketing systems out there. So service now a JIRA, JIRA service desk, um, a remedy as well. Uh, we also now have built a suite of integrations around the customer support side of things. So there'll be Zendesk and Salesforce. That's interesting. Jen. Megan had a good example in the keynote and kind of in this multi system world, you know, where's the system of record? Cause he used to be, you want it, everybody wanted it to be that system of record. >>They wanted to be the single player in the class. But it turns out that's not really the answer. There's different places for different solutions to add value within the journey within those other applications. Yeah, absolutely. I, I think the single pane of glass vision is something that a lot of companies have been chasing, but it's, it's, it's really hard to do because like for example, NewRelic, they started an APM and they got really good at that and that's kind of their specialty. Datadog's really good at metrics and they're all trying to converge and do everything and become the one monitoring solution to the Rooney rule them all right. But they're still the strongest in one area. Like Splunk for logs, new Relic and AppDynamics for APM and Datadog for metrics. And, um, I don't know where the world's going to take us. Like, are they, is there going to be one single monitoring tool or are, are you going to use four or five different tools? >>Right. My best guess is your, we're going to live in a world where you're still gonna use multiple tools. They each can do something really well, but it's about the integration. It's about building, bringing all that data together, right? That's from early days. We've called pager duty, the Switzerland monitoring, cause we're friends with everyone when we're partners with everyone and we sit on top right a work with all of these different roles. I thought her example, she gave him the keynote was pretty, it's kind of illustrative to me. She's talking about, you know, say your cables down and you know, you call Comcast and it's a Zendesk ticket. But >>you know then that integrates potentially with the PagerDuty piece that says, Hey we're, you know, we're working on a problem, you know, a backhoe clipped the cable down your street. And so to take kind of that triage and fix information and still pump that through to the Zen desk person who's engaging with the customer to actually give them a lot more information. So the two are different tracks, but they're really complimentary. >>Absolutely. And that's part of the incident life cycle is, is letting your customers know and helping them through customer support so that the support reps understand what's going on with the systems and can have an intelligent conversation with the customer. So that they're not surprised like a customer calls and says you're down. Oh, good to know. No, you want to know about that urge, which I think most people find out. Oh yeah. Another thing >>that struck me was this, this study that you guys have put together about unplanned work, the human impact of always on world. And you know, we talk a lot in tech about unplanned maintenance and unplanned downtime of machines, whether it's a, a computer or a military jet, you know, unplanned maintenance as a really destructive thing. I don't think I've ever heard anyone frame it for people and really to think about kind of the unplanned work that gets caused by an alert and notification that is so disruptive. And I thought that was a really interesting way to frame the problem and thinking of it from an employee centric point of view to, to reduce the nastiness of unplanned work. >>Absolutely. And that's, that V is very related to that journey of going from being reactive and just reacting to these situations to becoming proactive and being able to predict and, and, uh, address things before they impact the customer. Uh, I would say it's anywhere between 20 to 40 or even higher percent of your time. Maybe looking at software engineers is spent on the some plant work. So what you want to do is you want to minimize that. You want to make sure that, uh, there's a lot of automation in the process that you know what's going on, that you have visibility and that the easy things, the, the repetitive things are easy to automate and the system could just do it for you so that you, you focus on innovating and not on fixing fires. Right? Or if you did to fix the fire, you at least >>to get the fire to the right person who's got the right tone to fix the type. So why don't we just, you know, we see that all the time in incidents, especially at early days for triage. You know, what's happening? Who did it, you know, who's the right people to work on this problem. And you guys are putting a lot of the effort into AI and modeling and your 10 years of data history to get ahead of the curve in assigning that alerted that triage when it comes across the, the, uh, the trans though. >>Yeah, absolutely. And that's, that's another issues. Uh, not having the right ownership, get it, getting people, um, notified when they don't own it and there's nothing they can do about it. Like the old ways of, of uh, sending the alert to everyone and having a hundred people on a call bridge that just doesn't work anymore because they're just sitting there and they're not going to be productive the next day I work cause they're sitting there all night just kind of waiting for, for something to happen. And uh, that's kinda the, the old way of lack of ownership just blasted out to everyone and we have to be a lot more target and understand who owns what and what's, what, which systems are being impacted and they only let getting the right people on the auto call as quickly as possible. The other thing that came up, which I thought, you know, probably a lot of people are thinking of, they only think of the fixing guy that has to wear the pager. >>Sure. But there's a whole lot of other people that might need to be informed, be informed. We talked about in the Comcast example that people interacting with the customer, ABC senior executives need to be in for maybe people that are, you know, on the hook for the SLA on some of the softer things. So the assembly that team goes in need, who needs to know what goes well beyond just the two or three people that are the fixing people? Right. And that's, that's actually tied to one of our announcements, uh, at summit a business, our business response product. So it's all about, um, yes, we notify the people who are on call and are responsible for fixing the problem. You know, the hands on keyboard folks, the technical folks. But we've expanded our workflow solution to also Lupin stakeholders. So think like executives, business owners, people who, um, maybe they run a division but they're not going to go on call to fix the problem themselves, but they need to know what's going on. >>They need to know what the impact is. They need to know is there a revenue impact? Is there a customer impact? Is there a reputational brand impact to, to the business they're running. Which is another thing you guys have brought up, which is so important. It's not just about fixing, fixing the stuck server, it's, it is what is the brand impact, what is the business impact is a much broader conversation, which is interesting to pull it out of just the, just the poor guy in the pager waiting for it to buzz versus now the whole company really being engaged to what's going on. Absolutely. Like connecting the technical, what's happening with the technical services and, and uh, infrastructure to what is the, the impact on the business if something goes wrong. And how much, like are you actually losing revenue? There's certain businesses like e-commerce where you could actually measure your revenue loss on a per minute or per five minute basis. >>Right. And pretty important. Yeah. All right Alex. So you talked about the IPO is a milestone. It's, it's fading, it's fading in the rear view mirror. Now you're on the 90 day shot clock. So right. You gotta keep moving forward. So as you look forward now for your CTO role, what are some of your priorities over the next year or so that you kind of want to drive this shit? Absolutely. So, um, I think just focusing on making the system smarter and make it, uh, so that you can get to that predictive Holy grail where we can know that you're going to have a big incident before it impacts our customers. So you can actually prevent it and get ahead of it based on the leading indicators. So if we've seen this pattern before and last time it causes like an hour of downtime, let's try to catch it early this time and so that you can address it before it impacts for customers. >>So that's one big area of investment for us. And the other one I would say is more on the, uh, the realtime work outside of managing software systems. So, uh, security, customer support. There's all of these other use cases where people need to know, like, signals are, are being generated by machines. People need to know what's going on with those signals. And you want to be proactive and preventative around there. Like think a, a factory with lots and lots of sensors. You don't want to be surprised by something breaking. You want to like get proactive about the maintenance of those systems. If they don't have that, uh, you know, like say a multi-day outage in a factory, it can cost maybe millions of dollars. Right. >>All right, well, Alex, thanks a lot. Again, congratulations on the journey. We, uh, we're enjoying watching it and we'll continue to watch it evolve. So thank you for coming on. Alright, he's Alex. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube. We're at PagerDuty summit 2019 in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's theCUBE covering Ansible Fest 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE. We are broadcasting live here, in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, my co-host, TheCUBE's coverage of Red Hat, Ansible Fest. This is probably one of the hottest topic areas that we've been seeing in Enterprise Tech emerging, along with observability. Automation and observability is the key topics here. Automation is the theme, Stu, Ansible just finished their keynotes, keynote analysis, general availability of their new platform, the Ansible Automation Platform is the big news. It seems nuanced for the general tech practitioner out there, what's Ansible doing? Why are we here? We saw the rise of network management turn into observability as the hottest category in the cloud 2.0. companies going public, lot of M&A activity, observability is data driven. Automation's this other category that is just exploding in growth and change. Huge impact to all industries and it's coming from the infrastructure scale side where the blocking and tackling of DevOps has been. This is the focus Ansible and their show Automation for all, your analysis of the keynote, What's the most important thing going on here? >> So John, as you said automation is a super hot topic. I was just at the New Relic show talking about observability last week, we've got the Pager Duty show also going on this week. The automation is so critical. We know that IT can't keep up with things if they can't automate it. It's not just replacing some scripting. I loved in the keynote the talked about strategically thinking about automation. We've been watching the RPA companies talk about automation. There's lots of different automation, there's the right way to do it and another angle, John, that we love covering is what's going on with Open Source? You were just at the Open Core summit in San Francisco. The Red Hat team very clear, Open Source is not their business model. They use Open Source and everything that Red Hat does is 100% Open Source and that was core and key to what Ansible was and how it's created. This isn't a product pitch here, it is a community, John this is the 6th most active repository in GitHub. Out of over 100 million repositories out there, the 6th most active. That tells you that this is being used by the community, it's not a couple of companies using this, but it's a broad ecosystem. We hear Microsoft and Cisco, F5, lots of companies that are contributing as well as just all the Nusers. We heard JP Morgan in the keynote this morning, so a lot of participation there. But it is building out that sweep with a platform that you talked about, and we're going to spend a lot of time the next few days understanding this maturation and growth. >> Yeah, the automation platform that they announced, that's the big news. The general availability of their automation platform and Stu, the word they're using here is scale. This is something that you brought up the Open Core summit which I attended last week was the inaugural conference, lot of controversy. And this is a generational shift we are seeing the midst of our own eyes right in front of us, on the ground floor of a shift in Open Source community. How the platform of open source is evolving. What Amazon, now Azure and Google and the others are doing is showing that scale has changed the game in how Open Source is going to not only grow and evolve but shape application developers. And the reason why Ansible is so important right now and this conference is that we all know that when you stand up stuff, infrastructure, you've got to configure the hell out of it. DevOps has always been infrastructures code and as more stuff gets scaled up, as more stuff gets provisions, as more stuff gets built and created, the management and the controlling of the configurations, this has been real hotspot. This has been an opportunity and a problem. Anyone who's here, they're active because you know, this is a major pain point. This is a problem area that's an opportunity to take what is a blocking and tackling operational role, configuring standing up infrastructure, enabling applications and making it a competitive advantage. This is why they game is changing. We're starting to see platforms not tools. Your analysis, are they positioned? Was this keynote successful? >> Yeah, John. I really liked what Robyn Bergeron came out and talked about the key principles of what Ansible has done. It's simplicity, it's modularity and it's learning from Open Source. This project was only started in 2012. One of the things I always look at is in the old days you wanted to have that experience. There's not compressions algorithm for experience. Today, if I could start from day one today, and build with the latest tools, heavily using DevOps, understanding all of the experience that's happened in Open Source, we can move forward. So from 2012 to 2015 Red Hat acquired Ansible, to today in 2019, they're making huge growth and helping companies really leverage and mature their IT processes and move toward true business innovation with leveraging automation. >> Stu, this is not for the faint of heart either. These are rockstar DevOps infrastructure folks who are evolving in taking either network or infrastructure development to enable a software extraction layer for applications. It's not a joke either. I mean they've got some big names up on stage. One tweet I want to call out and get your reaction to. JP Morgan, his presentation the exec there, a tweet came out from Christopher Festa, "500 developers are working to automate business processes leading to among other benefits, 98% improvement in recovery times. What used to take 6 - 8 hours to recover, now takes 2 - 5 minutes." Christopher Festa. Stu. >> So John, that's what we wanted. How can we take these things that took hours and I had to go through this ticketing process and make that change. What I loved of what Chris from JP Morgan did, is he brought us inside and he said look, too make this change it took us a year of sorting through the security, the cyber, the control processes. We understand there's not just oh hey, lets sprinkle a little DevOps on everything and it's wonderful, we need to get buy in from the team, and it can spread between groups and change that culture. It's something that we've tracked in Red Hat for years and all of these environments. This is something that does require commitment, because it's not just John taking oh I scripted something, and that's good. We need to be able to really look at these changes because automation, if we just automate a bad process, that's not going to help out business. We really need to make sure we understand what we're automating, the business value and what is going to be the ramifications of what we're doing. >> Well one of the things I want to share with folks watching is research that we did at SiliconAngle, theCUBE and Wikibon as part of our CUBE insights, Stu I know you're a part of this. We talked to a bunch of practitioners and customers, dozens of our community members and we found that observability we've just pointed out, has been an explosive category. That automation has been identified, and we're putting a stake in the ground, right here in theCUBE as one of the next big sectors that will rise up as a small little white space will become a massive market, automation. You watch that cloud 2.0 sector called automation. Why? The reasoning was this, here's the results of our survey. Automations quickly becoming a critical foundational element of the network as enterprises focus on multi-cloud, network being infrastructures, service and storage, and multi-cloud rapid development and deployment. Software to find everything's happening, pretty much we've been covering that on theCUBE. And most enterprises are just grappling with this concept and see opportunities. The benefit that people see in automation as we've discovered, Stu, are the following: 1. Focused on focused efforts for better results, efficiency, security is a top driver on all these things. You've got to have security built into the software, and then automation is creating job satisfaction for these guys. This is mundane tasks being automated away. So people are happier so job satisfaction. And finally, this is an opportunity to re-skill. Stu, these are the key bullets points that we've found in talking to our community. Your reaction to those results. >> Yeah John, I love that. Ultimately we want to be able to provide not only better value to my ultimate end user, but I need to look internal. As you said, John, how can I retool some of my sales force and get them engaged. And if you want to hire the millennials, they want to not be doing the drudgery, they want to do something where they feel that they are making a difference. You laid out a lot of good reasons why it would help and why people would want to get involved. John, you know I've talked to a number of government adgencys, when we changed that 40 year old process and now we're doing things faster and better, and that means I can really higher that next generation of workers because otherwise I wouldn't be able to higher them to just do things the old way. >> Stu this is about cloud 2.0 and this is about modernization. You mentioned Open Source, Open Core summit, that is a tell sign that Open Source is changing, the communities are changing, this is going to be a massive wave. Again, we've been chronicling this cloud 2.0, we coined that term, and we're trying to identify those key points, obviously observability, automation. But look, at the end of the day, You've go to have a focused effort to make the job go better you heard JP Morgan pointing out. Minutes versus hours. This is the benefit of infrastructure as code. At the end of the day employee satisfaction, the people that you want to hire that can be redeployed into new roles, analytics, math, quantitative analysis, versus the mundane tasks. Automation is going to impact all aspects of the stack. So final question Stu, What are you expecting for the next two days, we're going to be here for two days, what do you expect to hear from our guests. >> So John, one of the things I'm going to really look at is as you mentioned, infrastructure where this all started. So how do I use it to deploy a VM, Ansible's there. VMware, I've already talked to a number of people in the virtualization community, the love and embrace Ansible. We saw Microsoft up on stage, loving and embracing. As we move towards micro-service architectures, containerization and all of these cloud native deployments, how is Ansible and this community doing? Where are the stumbling blocks? To be honest, from what I hear coming into this, Ansible has been doing well. Red Hat has helped them grow even more, and the expectation is that IBM will help proliferate this even further. The traditional competitors to Ansible, you think about the Chefs and Puppets of the world, have been struggling with that cloud native world. John, I know I see Ansible when I go to the cloud shows, I hear customers talking about it. So Ansible seems to making that transition to cloud native well but there are other threats in the cloud native world. When I go to the serverless conference, I have not yet heard where this fits into the environment. So we always know that that next generation in technology, how will this automation move forward. >> As Red Hat starts getting much more proliferated in major enterprises with IBM, which will extend their lead even further in the enterprise, it's an opportunity for Ansible. The community angle is interesting. I want to get your community angle real quick So I saw a tweet from NetApp, their tagline at their booth is Simplify, automate, orchestrate. Sounds like they're leaning into the Kubernetes world, containers, you've got the start of thinking about software obstructions, this aint the provisioning hardware anymore. Whole new ball-game. Your assessment of Ansible's community presence, I mentioned that was a tweet from Red Hat, I mean NetApp. What's your take on the community angle here? >> John it's all about community. The GitHub's staff speak for themselves, this is very much a community event. Kudos to the team here, a lot on the diversity, inclusion effort, so really pushing those things forward. So John, something we always notice at the tech shows, the ratios of gender is way more diverse at an event like this. We know we see it in the developer communities, that there's more diversity in there, gender and ethnicity. >> Still a lot of guys though. >> Sure there is, by the way, when they took over this hotel, all of the bathrooms are gender-neutral, so you can use whatever bathroom you want there. >> I'll make sure I'm using the right pronouns when I'm saying hello to people. Stu, thanks for Commentary. Keynote analysis, I'm John Ferrier with Stu Miniman, breaking down why we are here? Why Ansible? Why is automation important? We believe automation will be a killer category, we're going to see a lot of growth here, and again the impact is with machine learning and A.I. This is where it all starts, automating the data, the technology and the configurations going to empower the next generation modern enterprise. More live coverage from Ansible Fest after this short break. (Upbeat techno music)

live from Atlanta Georgia it's the tube covering ansible fest 2019 brought to you by Red Hat hello everyone welcome to the queue we are broadcasting live here in Atlanta Georgia I'm John force too many men my co-host the cubes coverage of Red Hat ansible Fest this is probably one of the hottest topic areas that we've been seeing in Enterprise tech emerging along with observability automation and observability is the key topics here automation is the theme stew ansible just finished their keynote keynote analysis general availability of their new platform the ansible automation platform is the big news this is a big I mean it seems nuanced for the general tech practitioner out there what's ansible doing why we here we saw the rise of network management turned into observability as the hottest category in the cloud cloud 2.0 companies going public a lot of M&A activity and observability is data-driven automations this other category that is just exploding and growth and change huge impact to all industries and it's coming from the infrastructure scale side where the blocking and tackling of DevOps has been this is the focus of ansible and their show automation for all your analysis of the keynote what's the most important thing going on here yes so John as you said automation is a super hot topic you know I was just at the New Relic show talking about observability last week we've got the Pedro Duty show also going on this week the the automation is so critical we know that IT can't keep up with things if they can't automate it and it's not just replacing some scripting I loved in the keynote they talked about strategically thinking about automation we've been watching the RP a companies talking about automation so there's lots of different automation there's the right way to do it and another thing angle John that we love covering is you know what's going on with open source you were just at the open core summit in San Francisco the Red Hat team very clear open source is not their business model it is they use open source and everything that Red Hat does is a hundred percent open source and that was core and key to what ansible was and how its created this isn't a product pitch here it's a community you know it's John this is the six most active you know repository in github so out of over a hundred million repositories out there the six most active so that tells you that this is being used by the community it's not a couple of companies using this but it's a broad ecosystem we hear Microsoft and Cisco f5 lots of companies that are contributing as well as just all of the end users we of JPMorgan in the keynote this morning so a lot of participation there but you know it is building out that suite with the platform that you talked about and we're gonna spend a lot of time in the next few days understanding this maturation and growth yeah the automation platform that they announced that's the big news the general availability of their automation platform and stew the word they're using here is scale okay and this is something that you brought up to open core summit which I attended last week was the inaugural conference a lot of controversy and this is a generational shift we are seeing in the midst of our own eyes right in front of us on the ground floor of a shift in open source community how the platform of open source is evolving what Amazon now azure and Google and the others are doing is they're showing that scale has changed the game in how open-source is going to not only grow and evolve but shape application developers and the reason why ansible is so important right now in this conference is that we all know that when you stand up stuff infrastructure you've got to configure the hell out of it DevOps has always been infrastructure is code and as more stuff gets scaled up as more stuff gets provision as more stuff gets built and created the management and the controlling of the configurations this has been a real hot spot this has been an opportunity and a problem so you know everyone who's here they're they're active because you know what this is a major pain point this is a problem area that's an opportunity to take what is a blocking and tackling operational role configurating standing up infrastructure enabling applications and making it a competitive advantage this is why the game is changing starting to see platforms not tools your analysis are they positioned was this keynote successful John and I really liked rut Robin Bergeron came out and talked about the key principles of what antal is done its simplicity its modularity and it's learning from open source this project was only started in 2012 so one of the things I always look at is in the old days you wanted you know to have that experience there's no compression algorithm for experience today if I could start from day one today and build with the latest tools you know heavily using DevOps understanding all of the experience that's happened in open source we can move forward so from 2012 to 2015 Red Hat you know acquired ansible to today in 2019 they're making huge growth and helping companies really leverage and mature their IT processes and move towards you know true business innovation with leveraging automation dude this is not and again this is not for the faint of heart either again these are Rockstar DevOps infrastructure folks who are evolving in taking either network and or infrastructure development to enable and software abstraction layer for applications and this not it's not a joke either I mean got some big names up on stage of just one tweet I want to call out and get your reaction to JP Morgan on his presentation the exact there he was tweet came out from Christopher Festa 500 developers are working to automate business processes leading to among other benefits ninety-eight percent improvement in recovery times what used to take six to eight hours to recover now takes two to five minutes Christopher Festa student so John that's what we want is how can we take these things that took you know hours and I had to go through this ticketing process and make that change what I loved of what Chris from JP Morgan said is he brought us inside he said look to make this change it took us a year of sorting through the security the cyber the the control processes we understand there's not just you know oh hey let's sprinkle a little DevOps on everything and it's wonderful we need to get you know buy-in from the team it you know and it can spread between groups and you know change that culture it's something that you know we've tracked in Red Hat for years and all of these environments this something that does require commitment because it's not just John taking oh I scripted something and and and that's good we need to be able to really look at these changes because automation if we just automate a bad process that's not gonna help our business we really need to make sure we understand what we're automating the business value and and what is going are going to be the ramification to what we're doing well one of the things I want to share with folks watching is some research that we did at Silk'n angle the cube and wiki bond it's part of our cube insights do I know you were part of this we talked to a bunch of practitioners and customers and dozens of our of our community members and we found that observability we've just pointed out has been you know explosive category that automation has been identified and we're putting a stake in the ground right here in the cube as one of the next big sectors that will rise up as a small little white space will become a massive market automation you watch that cloud 2.0 sector called automation why the reasoning was this and here's the results of our of our survey automation is quickly becoming a critical foundational element of the network as enterprises focus on multi cloud network being infrastructure servers and storage a multi cloud rapid application development and deployment software-defined everything's happening pretty much we've been covering that on the cube and most enterprises are just crap lling with this concept and see opportunities the benefits that people see in automation as we've discovered still in the following one focused on focused efforts for better results efficiency security is a top driver on all these things because you got to have security built into the software and then automation is creating job satisfaction for these guys I mean they've been doing this is mundane tasks being automated way so people are happier so job satisfaction and finally this is an opportunity to rescale do these are the key bullet points that we found in talking to our serve our community your reaction to those those results yeah John I love that we know ultimately when we want to be able to provide not only better value to my ultimate end user but I need to look internal as you said John you know how can i you know retool some of my sales force and get them engaged and if you want to hire the Millennials they want a bit just and not be doing the drudgery they want to do something where they feel that they are making a difference and you know you laid out a lot of good reasons why it would help and why people would want to get involved John you know the government I've talked to a number of government agencies when they talk about you know we changed that 40-year old process and now we're doing things faster and better and that means I can really hire that next generation of workforce because otherwise I wouldn't be able to hire them to just do things the old way this is about cloud 2 point and this is about modernization and you mention open source open core summit that I think is a tell sign that open source is changing the communities are changing this is gonna be a massive wave again we've been chronicling this cloud 2 point of the week we coined that term we're trying to identify those key points obviously observability automation but look at the end of the day you got to have a focused effort to make the job go better you heard JP Morgan pointing out minutes versus hours this is the benefits of infrastructure as code in the end of the day employee satisfaction the people that you want to hire to re-skill that can be redeployed into new roles analytics math quantitative analysis versus the mundane tasks automation is going to impact all aspects of the stack so final questions do what are you expecting for the next two days we're gonna be here for two days what do you expect to hear from our guests yeah so John one of the things I'm going to really look at is as you mentioned infrastructure is that where this all started so you know how do I easy to play a VM you know ansible is there you know VMware I've already talked to a number of people in the virtualization community they love and embrace ansible we saw Microsoft up on stage loving embrace it as we move towards micro service architectures containerization and all of these cloud native deployments you know how is ansible in this community doing where the stumbling blocks to be honest from what I hear John coming into this anta Buhl's been doing well Red Hat has helped them grow even more and the expectation is that IBM will help proliferate this in even further the traditional competitors to ansible you think about the chef's in puppet to the world have been struggling with that cloud native world John I know I see ansible when I go to the cloud shows and I hear customers talking about it so ansible seems to be making that transition towards cloud native well but other threats in the cloud native world you know if I've said you know that when I when I go to the server lists you know conference I I don't I have not yet heard you know where this fits into the environment so we always know that that next generation and technology you know how will you know this automation move forward as Red Hat starts to get much more proliferating into major enterprises with IBM which will take their extend their lead even further in the enterprise it's an opportunity for ansible and the community angle is interesting I saw our tweets don't get your community your angle real quick on this I saw a tweet from NetApp their tagline at their booth is simplify automate and orchestrate sounds like they're leading into the kubernetes world containers you got to start thinking about software abstractions and this is the st. the you know provisioning hardware anymore whole new ballgame your assessment of an Sable's community presence mentioned I was a tweet from Red Hat I mean NetApp what's your take on the community angle here John it's all about community we the github stats speak for themselves this is very much a community invent you know kudos to the team here a lot on the diversity inclusion effort so really pushing those things forward John something we always notice at the tech shows the ratio of you know gender is way to more diverse at an event like this we know we see it in the developer communities that there was more diversity in there so by the way when they took over this hotel all of the bathrooms are I believe it's you know it's gender-neutral so you can use whatever bathroom yeah you know you you want there let's make sure I'm using the right pronoun when I'm going saying a lot of people Stu thanks for commentary keynote analysis I'm John first dude minimun breaking down why we are here why ansible why is automation important we believe automation will be a killer category we want to see a lot of growth here and again the impact is with machine learning and AI this is where it all starts automating the data the technology and the configuration is going to empower the next generation modern enterprise more live coverage from ansible fests after this short break

>> Live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCube. Covering AWS Reinforce 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone. Welcome back to the live Cube coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts for AWS, Amazon Web Services Reinforce with their inaugural conference around security, I'm (mumbles). We've got two great guests, from Splunk, Cube alumnis, and also, we do the Cube coverage Dot Conf., their annual conference, Haiyan Song, SVP, General Manager Security Market, Oliver Freidrichs, Vice President of Security Products, formerly with a company you sold to Splunk, doing Security Phantom, which was mentioned in the partner summit, so congratulations. Great to see you guys. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> So you guys are a really great example of a company that's been constantly innovating, on top of AWS, as a partner, differentiating, continuing to do business, and been successful. All the talk about Amazon could compete with partners, there's always been that myth. You guys have been operating successfully, got great customers on AWS, now you have the security conference, so now it's like a whole new party for you guys. 'Cause you don't go off to reinvent anymore, certainly, the big event, what do you guys think about all this Reinforce focus? >> First of all, I'm just super impressed. The size, the scale, and the engagement from the ecosystem that they have over here, and I think, you know you mentioned we've been really partnering and being successful. I think the secret is really about, just be very customer-focused. It's about what the customer needs, it's not what does each of us need, and when we have that focus, we know how to partner, we know how to engage. One of the examples that we have here is we're partnering up as the capture the flag exercise and it's powered by Splunk, it's put up by AWS Reinforce, and we wanted to bring the best user engagement, gamification of learning to this audience. >> And there's a demand for a security conference because a new breed, a new generation of engineering and enterprises as they move to DevOps, with security, all those same principals now apply, but the stakes are higher because you got to share data, you got to get the data, it's the data-driven problem. You guys are thinking outside-- I think four years ago at Dot Conf, the cyber security focus front and center, mainstream. >> Very much so. And I think for us, security is a big part of our user conference, too. But we're getting inspirations from this event and how we can further, really implify that message for our customers. But we're just so glad we're part of this, thank you for having us. >> We're glad, big love covering you, big success story. Oliver, I want to get to you on the Phantom. Yesterday it was mentioned in a great demo of the security hub, security hub's the big news here, it's one of their major announcements, what is a security hub? >> Yeah, so security hub, and you're right it was just announced that it reached general availability, which means it's available now to the rest of the world. It's a place to centralize a lot of your security management in AWS. So when you have detections, or Amazon calls them findings, coming from other security servers so they're centralized in security hub, where you can then inspect them, take action, investigate them. And one of the reasons we're here, is we've established an integration with security hub, where you can now take a finding coming from security hub, pull it into Splunk Phantom, and run an automation playbook to be able to, at machine speed, take action on a threat. So typically, you know if you're a human, you're looking at an event, and you're deciding what do I do, well I might want to go an suspend an AMI or go and move that AMI or change the access control group to a different access control group so that AMI can only communicate with a certain protected network if it's infected. Automation lets you do that instantaneously, so if you have an attacker who unfortunately may have gained control of your AMI, this allows you to react immediately, very very quickly to take action in that environment. >> And this is where the holes are in the network, and its administrative errors and (mumbles) sittin' out there that someone just configure it, now they're like, they could be out there, no one knows. >> Exactly. >> Could be just tired, I didn't configure it properly. But you guys were in the demos, I want to get your reaction that, because I was sittin' in the room, they highlighted Phantom in the demo. >> That's right. >> And so that was super important. Talk about that integration. What's actually going on under the covers there. >> Yeah, so at a basic level, we're pulling findings through the security hub API, into the automation platform. And then at that point, a playbook kicks off. And a playbook is basically, think of it as a big if this/then that statement. You see a threat, and you go and take a number of actions. You might go and block a port, you might go an suspend that AMI, you might go and disable a user, but you basically build that logic up based on a known threat, and you decide, here's what I'm going to do when I see this threat, and I'm going to turn that into a codified playbook that you can then run very rapidly. On the back end, we've had to integrate with a dozen other APIs like EC2, S3, Guard Duty and others to be able to take action in the environment as well to remediate threats, like changing the access control list or group on a resource. So it's closing that end-to-end loop. >> Hold on, Dave , one quick question on that followup. Then the SISO came in from Capital One and was off the record with this comment, was not really a sensitive comment, but I want to highlight and your both reaction to this. He says in terms of workforce and talent, mentality, 'cause the question came up about talent and whatnot, he sees a shift from better detection to better alerts, because of some of the demos, and implying, kind of connecting the dots, that the trend is to automate the threat detections the way you guys had demoed with Phantom, and then he was tying it back to, from a resource perspective, it frees his team up to do other things. This is a real trend. You agree with that statement? >> Absolutely. >> What's your thoughts? >> Honestly, we believe that we can be automating up to 90% of the level one analysts. There's a lot of routine route work that's done today in the SOC, and it's unforgiving, nobody wants to be a Tier One analyst, they all want to get promoted or go somewhere else, because it's literally a rat race. >> It's boring and it's repetitive, you just automate it. >> Who wants to do that, so we can automate that, we can free up about 50% of the analysts' time to actually focus on proactive activities, things that actually matter, like hunting, research and other development, writing counter-measures, versus the continually keeping up and drinking from a fire hose. >> So I wonder if we could talk about how Splunk has evolved. You guys started before cloud, which came in 2006 and then really took off later, before the sort of big data craze, and you guys mopped up in big data. You never really use that term in your marketing, but you kind of became the big data leader defacto, you got an IPO with actually relatively, by today's comparisons, small raises, >> Compared to today, yeah, yeah (laughs). >> Incredibly successful story, very capital-efficient. But then the cloud comes in, you mopped up on prem, how would you describe how the cloud has changed your strategy, obviously you go out an acquire companies heavily focused on automation, but how would you describe your cloud strategy and how has that changed Splunk? >> That's a great question. I think the fact that you have so many people here, just tells you that the whole industry is going through this transformation. Not only the digital transformation, the cloud transformation. And I'm glad you mentioned our root, it's all about big data, and nowadays security, in many ways, is actually more about data than anything else. 'Cause the data represents your business, and you protect your data, how do you leverage the data, represents your security strategy. The evolution for us, when you zero that into cloud is, we have really been a very early adopter of cloud, we've been providing cloud services for our customers from the very beginning, at least six years ago when we introduced a product called Storm and we continued to evolve that as the technology evolved, we evolved that with customers. So nowadays you probably know cloud is one of our fastest-growing segments of our business. The technology team has been really innovating, really really fast. How do we take a technology that we built for on-prem, how do we rebuilt it to be cloud-native, to be elastic, to be secure in the new way of DevOps. Those are some of the super exciting things we're doing as a company, and on the security side we're also, how do we help customers secure a hybrid world? 'Cause we truly believe the world going to stay hybrid for a long long time and we have companies like AWS really sort of pioneering and focusing and doing things great for the cloud, we still have a lot of customers who need companies and technologies and solutions like what Splunk bring in to bridge the world. >> I want to get you guys' thoughts on some comments we've had with some SISOs in the past, and I really can't say the names probably, but one of them, she was very adamant around integration. And now when you're dealing with an ecosystem, integration's been a big part of the conversation, and the quote was, on integration, "have APIs and "don't have it suck." And we evaluate peoples' integration based upon the qualities of their APIs. Implying that APIs are an integration point. You guys have a lot of experience with APIs, your thoughts on this importance of integration and the roles that APIs play, because that's, again, feeds automation, again it's a key, central component of the conversations these days. Integration, your reaction to that. >> So, maybe I'll start. I'd say we would not have had the success of Phantom Cyber or the Soar market, if not for having those APIs. 'Cause automation was not a new concept. It's been tried and probably not succeeded for many times, and the reason that we've been experiencing this great adoption and success with Phantom technology is because the availability of APIs. I think the other thing I would just add, I'm sure he has lot of experience in working that, Splunk was always positioned ourself as we want to be the neutral party, to bring everything together. And nowadays we're so glad we're doin' the integration, not only on the data side, which is still important. Bring the data, bring the dark data and shining a light on top of that, but also turning that into action through this type of API integration. >> So good investment, betting on integration years ago. >> Absolutely. >> Early on. >> We also change our culture. We previously say how many apps we have in our Splunk base. Now with Oliver being part of the team, Phantom being part of the portfolio, we say how many apps and how many APIs we had to integrate. That a change of metrics. >> All right, Oliver. It's up to you now. I'm sure you know I know where you stand on this, APIs being, a renaissance of APIs going to the next level, 'cause a lot of new things goin' on with Kubernetes and other things. You've got State now, you got Stateless, which is classic rest APIs, but now you got State data that's going to play a big role. Your thoughts on that, don't make the APIs suck, and we're going to evaluate vendors based upon how good their API is. >> Yeah, I think, look it's a buying decision today. It's a procurement decision whether or not you have open APIs. I think buyers are forcing us as an industry, as vendors, to have APIs that don't suck. We're highly motivated to have APIs that work well. >> That sounds like a t-shirt ready to come out (laughs) >> That's a great idea. >> The Cube API's coming, by the way. >> What does that mean, to have APIs that don't suck? >> So the, a great definition I heard recently was, the API that you use as a vendor to interface with your product should be the same API that customers can use to interface with your product. And if all of a sudden they're different, and you're offering a lesser API to customers, that's when they start sucking. As long as you're eating your own dog food, I think that's a good definition. >> So it's not neutered, it's as robust, and as granular. >> Exactly, exactly. And I think what, 20 years ago there were no APIs in security. To do what we do today, to automate all of this security response techniques that we do today, it wasn't even possible. We had to get to a certain level of API availability to even get to this stage. And today, again, unless, if you're a black box, people aren't going to buy your product anymore. >> Yeah, so, again, go the next level is visibility's another topic. So if you open the APIs up, the data's gettin' better, so therefore you can automate the level one alert, threat detections, move people up to better alerting, better creativity, then begs the question, at what point does the visibility increase? What has to happen in the industry to have that total shared environment around data sharing, because open APIs implies sharing of data. Where visibility could be benefited greatly . >> Yeah, I think visibility is really the key. You can't measure what you can't, you can't manage what you can't measure, and you can't, you have to see everything in your environment, your assets, users, devices, and all of your data. So visibility is essential. And it comes in a number of forms. One is getting access to your policy data, your configuration data, seeing how are my things configured? What assets do I have? Where are my S3 buckets? How many AMIs do I have? Who owns them? How many accounts do I have? I think that was one of the challenges before, probably the last three to four years, before that period, enterprises were setting up a lot of these shadow cloud environments, 'cause you could buy Amazon with your credit card, essentially. So that was one of the problems that we would see in the enterprise, when a developer would go and create their own Amazon environment. So getting visibility into that is really been a big advancement in the last few years. Finding those things. >> The birth of multi-cloud. Go ahead John. >> Doesn't make it easier. >> We were talking earlier in our intro Dave and I on the keynote analysis around you can configure it, you can secure it, and then we were riffing on the DevOps movement, which essentially decimated the configuration management landscape. Which was at that time a provisioning issue around developers. They'd have to essentially stand up and manage the network, and go and make sure the ports are all there, and they got load balances are in place, and that was a developer's job. Infrastructure as code took that away. That was a major bottom, hierarchical needs, that was the lowest need. Now with security, if DevOps can take away the configuration management and infrastructure as code, it's time for security to take away a lot of the configuration or security provisioning, if you will. So the question is, what are some of those security provisioning, heavy liftings, tasks that are going to be taken away when developers don't have to worry about security? So as this continues with cloud native, it becomes security native. As a developer, and I don't want to get in and start configuring stuff. I want the security team to magically, security as code, as Dave said. Where are we on that? What's your guys' thoughts on getting to that point? Is it coming soon? Is it here now? What are some of those provisioning tasks that are going to be automated away? >> I think we made a lot of progress in that area already. The ability to simply configure your environment, that Amazon has continued to add layers of check boxes and compliance that allow you to configure the environment far more seamlessly than having to go down into the granular access control list and defining a granular access control policy on your network ports or AMIs, for example. So I think the simplification of that has improved pretty dramatically. And even some of the announcements today in terms of adding more capabilities to do that. Encryption by default. I don't have to go configure my encryption on my data at rest. It's there. And I don't even have to think about it. So if someone steals a physical hard drive, which is very difficult to begin with, out of an Amazon data center, my data's encrypted, and nobody can get access to that. I don't even have to worry about that. So that's one of the benefits that I think the cloud adds, is there's a lot of default security built in that ends up normalizing security and actually making the cloud far more secure than traditional corporate environments and data centers. >> Well I still think you have to opt in, though. Isn't that what I heard? >> Opt in, yes. I would just add to that, I think it's like a rising tides. So the cloud is making lot of the infrastructure side more secure, more native, and then that means we need to pay more attention to the upper level applications and APIs, and identities, and access controls. I think the security team continue to have lot of jobs. Even yesterday they said well, not only we need to do what we need to do to secure the AWS, we also now get involved in every decision, all the other compa-- you know, like functions are doing, taking new sort of SASS services. So I guess message is the security professional continue to have jobs, and your job going to be more and more sophisticated, but more and more relevant to the business, so that I think is the change. >> So question. Oliver, you described what a good API experience is, from a customer perspective, Haiyan, you talked about hybrid. Can you compare the on prem experience with the cloud experience for your customers and how and they coming together? >> You want me to try that first? >> Sure. >> Okay. So, I think lot of the things that people have learned to protect or defend, or do detection response in the on prem world, is still very relevant in the cloud world. It's just the cloud world, I think it's just now really transforming to become more DevOps-centric. How you should design security from the get-go, versus in the on prem world was more okay, let's try to figure out how to monitor this thing, because we didn't really give lot of thoughts to security at the very beginning. So I think that is probably the biggest sort of mentality or paradigm shift, but on the other hand, people don't go and just flip into one side versus the other, and they still need to have a way of connecting what's happening in the current world, the current business, the one that's bring home the bacon, to the new world that's going to bring home the bacon in the future. So they're both really important for them. And I think having a technology as AWS and their whole ecosystem, that all embracing that hybrid world and ecosystem plate no one sort of single vendor going to do all of them, and pick the right solutions to do what you do. So in security, I think it's, you going to continue to evolve, to become more, when the security's built in, what is the rising tide that's going to dictate the rest of the security vendors do. You cannot just think as 10 years ago, five years ago, even two years ago. >> So that bolt-on mentality in the first decade of the millennium was a boon for Splunk. It was beautiful. 'Cause we got to figure out what happened, and you provided the data to show that. How does Splunk differentiate from all the guys that are saying "oh yeah, Splunk, they're on prem, we're the cloud guys." What's your story there? >> Our story is you can't really sort of secure something if you don't have experience yourself. Splunk cloud is probably one of the top, say 10 customers of AWS. We live in the cloud, we experience the cloud, we use the word drink, you know, like eat our own dog food, we like to say we drink our own champagne, if you will, so that's really driving lot of our technology development and understanding the market and really built that into our data platform, build that into our monitoring capabilities, and build that into the new technologies. How, you know, it's all about streaming, it's not about just somebody sending you information. It's about, in a hybrid world, how do you do it in a way that you, we have a term called the distributed data fabric search, because data is never going to be in one place, or even sort of in one cloud. How do we enable that access so you can get value? From a security perspective, how do we integrate with companies and solutions that's so native into the cloud, so you have the visibility not and the Bodong, but from the very beginning. >> So you're saying that cloud is not magic for a software company, it's commitment and it's a cultural mindset. >> Absolutely. >> Guys, thanks so much for comin' on, great to see you, we'll see you at Dot Conf, the Cube will be there this year again, I think for the seventh straight year. Oliver, congratulations on your product success, and mention as part of the AWS security hub presentation. >> Thank you. >> Good stuff from Splunk. Splunk is inside the Cube, explaining, extracting the signal from the noise, from one of the market-leading companies in the data business, now cyber security, I'm with (mumbles), we'll be back with more Cube coverage after this short break. (techno music)