(upbeat music) >> Every company needs great salespeople, it's one of the most lucrative professions out there. And there's plenty of wisdom and knowledge that's been gathered over the years about selling. We've heard it all, famous quotes from the greatest salespeople of our time, like Zig Ziglar and Jeffrey Gitomer, and Dale Carnegie and Jack Welch, and many others. Things like, "Each of us has only 24 hours in a day, "it's all about how we use our time." And, "You don't have to be great to start, "but you have to start to be great." And then I love this one, "People hate to be sold, but they love to buy." "There are no traffic jams on the extra mile, "make change before you have to." And the all time classic, "Put that coffee down. "Coffee is for closers." Thousands of pieces of sales advice are readily available in books, videos, on blogs and in podcasts, and many of these are free of charge. So why would entrepreneurs start a company to train salespeople? And how is it that sharp investors are pouring millions of dollars into this space? Hello everyone, and welcome to this Cube Video Exclusive, my name is Dave Vellante, and today we welcome Paul Fifield who's the co-founder and CEO of Sales Impact Academy who's going to answer these questions and share some exciting news on the startups. Paul, welcome to "The Cube" good to see you again. >> Yeah, good to see you again, Dave, great to be here. >> Hey, so before we get into the hard news, tell us a little bit about the Sales Impact Academy, why'd you start the company, maybe some of the fundamentals of this market, your total available market, who you're targeting, you know, what's the premise behind the company? >> Yeah sure. So I mean, I started the company, it was actually pretty organic in the way it began. I had a 10 year career as a CRO and it was, you know, had a couple of great hits with two companies, but it was a real struggle to basically, you know, operate as a CRO and learn your craft at the same time. And so when I left my last company, I kind of got out there, I wanted to kind of give back a little bit and I started doing some voluntary teaching in and around London, and I actually, one of the companies I started was in New York so I got schooled very much on a sort of US approach to how you build a modern you know, go to market and sales operation. Started going out there, doing some teaching, realized that so many people just didn't have a clue about how to build a scalable and predictable revenue function, and I kind of felt sorry for them. So I literally started doing some, you know, online classes myself, got my co-founder Alex to put curriculum together as well and we literally started just doing online classes, very live, very organic, just a Google Drive and some decks, and it really just blew up from there. >> That's amazing. I mean, so you've my, you know, tongue and cheek up front, but people might wonder, why do you need a platform 'cause there's so much free information out there? Is it to organize, is it a discipline thing? Explain that. >> Well, I think the way I sort of see this is that is that the lack of structured learning and education is actually one of the greatest educational travesties, I think, of the last 50 years, okay. Now sales and go to market is a huge global profession, right? Half the world's companies are B2B, so roughly that's a proxy for half the world's GDP, right? Which is $40 trillion of GDP. Now that 40 trillion rests on kind of the success of the growth and the sales functions of all those companies. Yet in its infinite wisdom, the global education system literally just ignored sales and go to market as a profession. Some universities are kind of catching up, but it's really too little too late. So what I sort of say to people, you imagine this Dave, right. You imagine if the way that law worked as a profession let's say, is that there's no law school, there's no law training, there's no even in work professional continuous professional development in law. The way that it works is you leave university, join a company, start practicing law and just use like YouTube just to maybe like, you know, where you're struggling, just use YouTube to like work out what's going on. The legal profession would be in absolute chaos. And that's what's happened in the sales and go to market profession, okay. What this profession desperately desperately needs is structured learning, good pedagogy, good well designed course and curriculum. And here's the other thing, right? Is the sort of paradox of infinite information is that just because all the information is out there, right, doesn't mean it's actually a good learning experience. Like, where do you find it? What's good? What's not good? And also the other thing I'd point out is that there is this kind of myth that all the information is out there on the internet. But actually what we do, and we'll come into it in a second is, the people teaching on our platform are the elite people from the industry. They haven't got time to do blog posts and just explain to people how they operate. They're going from company to company working at like, you know, working at these kind of elite companies. And they're the people that teach, and that information is not readily available and freely out there on the internet. >> Yeah, real opportunity, you made some great points there. I think business schools are finally starting to teach a little bit about public speaking and presenting, but nobody's teaching us how to sell. As Earl Nightingale says, "To some degree we're all salespeople, "selling our family on living the good life" or whatever. What movie we want to see tonight. But okay, let's get to the hard news. You got fresh funding of 22 million, tell us about that, congratulations. You know, the investors, what else can you share with us? >> Sure. Well, I mean, obviously, you know, immensely proud. We started from very sort of humble beginnings, as I said, we've now scaled very rapidly, we're a subscription business, we're a SaaS business. We'll come onto some of the growth metrics shortly, but just in a couple of years, you know, the last year which ended January, we grew 500% from year one, we're now well over 125 people, and I'm very, very, very honored, flattered, humbled that MIT, obviously one of those prestigious universities in the world, has taken a direct investment by their endowment fund, HubSpot Ventures. Another Boston great has also taken a direct investment as well. They actually began as a customer and loved what we were doing so much that they then decided to make an investment. Stage 2 Capital who invested in our seed round pretty much tripled down, played a huge role in helping us assemble MIT and HubSpot ventures as investors, and they continue to be an incredible VC giving us amazing, amazing support that their LP network of go to market leaders is second to none. And then Emerge Education, who is our pre-seed investor, they're actually based in London, also joined this round as well. >> Great, well actually, let's jump ahead. Let's talk about the metrics. I mean, if Stage Two is involved, they're hardcore. What can you share with us about, you know, everybody's chasing AR and NR and the like, what can you share with us? >> They are both pretty important. Well, I think from a headcount perspective, so as I mentioned our fiscal ends at the end of January, each year. We've gone from 25 to over 125 employees in that time. We've gone from 82 to 260 customers also in that time. And customers now include HubSpot, Gong, Klaviyo, GitHub, GT, Six Cents, so some really sort of major SaaS companies in the space. Our revenue's grown significantly with 5X. So 500% increase in revenue year over year, which is pretty fast, very proud of that. Our learning community has gone from over 3000 people to almost 15,000 professionals, and that makes us comfortably, the largest go to market learning community in the world. >> How did you decide when to scale? What were the sort of signals that said to you, "Okay, we're ready, "we have product market fit, "we can now scale the go to market." What were the signals there, Paul? >> Yeah. Well, I mean, I think for a very small team to achieve that level of growth in customers, to be kind of honest with you, like it's the pull that we're getting from the market. And I think the thing that has surprised me the most, perhaps in the last 12 months, is the pull we're getting from the enterprise. We're you know, I can't really announce, we've actually got a huge pilot with one of the largest companies actually in the world which is going fantastically well, our pipeline for enterprise customers is absolutely huge. But as you can imagine, if you've got distributed teams all over the world, we're living and working in this kind of hybrid world, how on earth do you kind of upscale all those people, right, that are, like I say, that are so distributed. It's impossible. Like in work, in the office delivery of training is pretty much dead, right? And so we sort of fill this really big pain, we solved this really, really big pain of how to effectively upskill people through this kind of live curriculum and this live teaching approach that we have. So I think for me, it's the pull that we're getting from the market really meant that you know, we have to double down. There is such a massive TAM, it is absolutely ridiculous. I mean, I think there are 20 million people just in sales and go to market in tech alone, right. And I mentioned to you earlier, half the world's companies effectively, you know, are B2B and therefore represent, you know, at its largest scope, our TAM. >> Excellent, thank you for that. Tell us more about the product and the platform. How's it work if I'm a customer, what type of investment do I have to make both financially? And what's my time commitment? How do you structure that? >> So the model is basically on a seat model. So roughly speaking, every seat's about a thousand dollars per year per rep. The lift is light. So we've got a very low onboarding, it's not a highly complex technical product, right? We've got a vast curriculum of learning that covers learning for, you know, SDRs, and the AEs, and CS reps, and leadership management training. We're developing curriculum for technical pre-sales, we're developing curriculum for revenue operations. And so it's very, very simple. We basically, it's a seat model, people literally just send us the seats and the details, we get people up and running in the platform, they start then enrolling and we have a customer success team that then plots out learning journeys and learning pathways for all of our customers. And actually what's starting to happen now, which is very, very exciting is that, you know, we're actually a key part of people's career development pathway. So to go from you know, SDR1 let's say to SDR2, you have to complete these three courses with Sales Impact Academy, and let's say, get 75% in your exam and it becomes a very powerful and simple way of developing career pathway. >> Yeah, so really detailed curriculum. So I was going to say, do I as a sales professional, do I pick and choose the things that are most relevant for me? Or are people actually going through a journey in career progression, or maybe both? >> Yeah, it's a mixture of both. We tend to see now, we're sort of starting to standardize, but really we're developing enough curriculum that over, let's say a 15 year period, you could start with us as an SDR and then end as a chief revenue officer, you know, running the entire function. This is the other thing about the crazy world of go to market. Very often, people are put into roles and it's sink or swim. There's no real learning that happens, there's no real development that happens before people take these big steps. And what this platform does so beautifully is is it equips people with the right skills and knowledge before they take that next step in their profession and in their career. And it just dramatically improves their chances of succeeding. >> Who are the trainers? Who's leading the classes, how do you find these guys, how do you structure? What are the content, you know, vectors, where's all that come from? >> Yeah. So the sort of secret source of what we do, beyond just the live instruction, beyond the significant amount of peer to peer learning that goes on, is that we go and source the absolute most elite people in go to market to teach, okay. Now I mentioned to you before, you've got these people that are going from like job to job at the very like the sort of peak of their careers, working for these incredible companies, it's that knowledge that we want to get access to, right. And so Stage 2 Capital is an incredible resource. The interesting thing about Stage 2 Capital as you know Dave, you know, run by Mark Roberge, who was on when we spoke last year and also Jay Po is all the LPs of Stage 2 Capital represent 3 to 400 of the most elite go to market professionals in the world. So, you know, about seven or eight of those are now on an advisory board. And so we have access to this incredible pool of talent. And so we know by consulting these amazing people who are the best people in certain aspects of go to market. We reach out to them and very often they're at a stage in their career where they're really kind of willing to give back, of course there are commercials around it as well, and there's lots of other benefits that we provide our teachers and our faculty, and what we call our coaches. But yeah, we source the very, very best people in the world to teach. >> Now, how does it work as a user of your service? Is it all on demand? Do you do live content or a combination? >> Yeah look, one of the big differentiators is this is a live delivery of learning, okay. Most learning online is typically done on demand, self-directed, and there's a ton of research. There's a great blog post on Andrew's recent site. A short time ago, which is talking about how the completion rates of on demand learning are somewhere between 3 and 6%. That is like, that's awful. >> Terrible. >> I was like why bother? However, we're seeing through that live instruction. So we teach two, one hour classes a week, that's it. We're upskilling very busy people, they're stressed, they've got targets. We have to be very, very cognizant of that. So we teach two, one hour classes a week. Typically, you know, Monday and a Wednesday, or a Tuesday and a Thursday. And that pace of learning is about right, it's kind of how humans learn as well. You know, short bursts of information, and then put that learning and those skills that you've acquired in class literally to work minutes after the class finishes. And so through that, and it sits in your calendar like a meeting, it doesn't feel overwhelming, you're learning together as a team as well. And all that combined, we see completion rates often in excess of 80% for our courses. >> Okay, so they block that time out- >> In the calendar, yeah. >> And they make an investment. Go ahead, please. >> Yeah yeah, exactly, sorry Dave. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So like, you know, we have course lengths. So one of our shorter courses are like four hours long over two weeks. And again, it's just literally in the calendar. We also teach what we call The Magic Learning Hour. And the magic learning hour is this one specific hour in the day that enables teams all over the western hemisphere to join the same class. And that magic learning hour is eight o'clock Pacific 11 o'clock Eastern, >> 4: 00 PM over in the UK, and 5:00 PM in the rest of Europe. And that one time in the day means that these enterprises have got teams all over the western hemisphere joining that class, learning together as a team, plus it's in the calendar and it's that approach is why we're seeing such high engagement and completion. >> That's very cool, the time zone thing. Now who's the target buyer? Are you selling only to sales teams? Can I as an individual purchase your service? >> Yeah, that's a good question. Currently it's a very much like a B2B motion. As I mentioned earlier on, we're getting an enormous pull from the enterprise, which is very exciting. You know, we have an enterprise segment, we have sort of more of a startup earlier stage segment, and then we have a mid-market segment that we call our sort of strategic, and that's typically and most of like venture backed, fast growth tech companies. So very much at the moment a B2B motion. We're launching our own technology platform in the early summer, and then later on this year we're going to be adding what's called PLG or a product led growth, so individuals can actually sign up to SIA. >> Yeah, I mean, I think you said $1,000 per year per rep, is that right? I mean, that's- >> Yeah. >> That's a small investment for an individual that wants to be part of, you know, this community and grow his or her career. So that's the growth plan? You go down market I would imagine, you talked about the western hemisphere, there's international opportunities maybe, local language. What's the growth plan? >> Yeah, I mean look, we've identified the magic learning hour for the middle east and APAC, which is eight o'clock in the morning in Istanbul, right. Is 5:00 PM in Auckland, it's quite fun trying to work out like what this optimum magic learning hour is. What's incredible is we teach in that time and that opens up the whole of the middle east and the whole of APAC, right, right down to Australia. And so once we're teaching the curriculum in those two slots, that means literally you can have teams in any country in the world, I think apart from Hawaii, you can actually access our live learning products in work time and that's incredibly powerful. So we have so many like axis of growth, we've got single users as I mentioned, but really Dave that's single users we'll be winning from the enterprise and that will represent pipeline that we could then potentially convert as well. And look, you make a very good point. You know, we've seen students are now leaving university with over $100,000 dollars in debt. We've got a massive, massive debt problem here in the US with student debt. You could absolutely sign up to our platform at let's say a hundred bucks a month, right. And probably within six months, gain enough knowledge and skill to walk into a $60,000 a year based salary job as an SDR, that's a huge entry level salary. And you could do that without even going to university. So there could be a time here where we become a really viable alternative to actually even going to university. >> I love it. The cost education going through the roof, it's out of reach for so many people. Paul, congratulations on the progress, the fresh funding. Great to have you back in "The Cube." We'd love to have you back and follow your ascendancy. I think great things ahead for you guys. >> Thank you very much, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for "The Cube, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante snowflake they love the stock at 400 and hated at 165 that's the nature of the business i guess especially in this crazy cycle over the last two years of lockdowns free money exploding demand and now rising inflation and rates but with the fed providing some clarity on its actions the time has come to really dig into the fundamentals of companies and there's no tech company that's more fun to analyze than snowflake hello and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we look at the action of snowflake stock since its ipo why it's behaved the way it has how some sharp traders are looking at the stock and most importantly what customer demand looks like the stock has really provided some great theater since its ipo i know people who got in at 120 before the open and i know lots of people who kind of held their noses and bought the stock on day one at over 300 a day when it closed at around 240 that first day of trading snowflake hit 164 this week it's all-time low as a public company as my college roommate chip simonton a long time trader told me when great companies trade at all times time lows because of panic it's worth taking a shot he did now of course the stock could go lower there's geopolitical risk and the stock with a 64 billion market cap is expensive for a company that's forecast to do around 2 billion in product revenue this year and remember i don't recommend stocks you shouldn't take my advice and my comments you got to do your own research but i have lots of data and i have opinions and i'm willing to share that with you stocks like snowflake crowdstrike z-scaler octa and companies like this are highly volatile when markets are moving up they're going to move up faster than the mean when they're declining they're going to drop more severely and that's clearly what's happened to snowflake so with a company like this you when you see panic selling you'll also see panic buying sometimes like we we've seen with this name it went from 220 to 320 in a very short period earlier snowflake put in a short-term bottom this week and many traders feel the issue was oversold so they bought okay but not everyone felt this way and you can see this in the headlines snowflake hits low but cloud stocks rise and we're going to come back to that is it a buy don't buy the dip buy the dip and what snowflake investors can learn from microsoft and from the street.com snow stock is sliding on the back of ill-conceived guidance and to that i would say that conservative guidance these days is anything but ill-conceived now let's unpack all this a bit and to do so i reached out to ivana delevska who has been on this program before she's with spear invest a female-led etf that goes deep into understanding supply chains she came on breaking analysis and laid out her thesis to buy the dip on snowflake this is a while ago she told me currently spear still likes snowflake and has doubled its position let me share her analysis she called out two drivers for the downside interest rates you know rising of course in snowflakes guidance which my own publication called weak in that previous chart that i just showed you so let's dig into that a bit snowflake guided for product revenues of 67 year on year which was below buy side expectations but i believe within sell side consensus regardless the guide was nuanced and driven by snowflake's decision to pass along price efficiencies to customers from optimizing processor price performance predominantly from aws's graviton too this is going to hit snowflakes revenue a net of about a hundred million dollars this year but the timing's not precise because it's going to hit 165 million but they're going to make up 65 million in increased demand frank slootman on the earnings call made this very clear he said quote this is not philanthropy this stimulates demand classic slootman the point is spear and other bulls believe that this will result in a gain for snowflake over the medium term and we would agree price goes down roi gets better you throw more projects at snowflakes customers going to buy more snowflake and when that happens and it gives the company an advantage as they continue to build their moat it's a longer term bet on cloud and data which are good bets now some of this could also be competitive pressures there have been you know studies that are out there from competitors attacking snowflakes pricing and price performance and they make comparisons oracle's been pretty aggressive as have others but so far the company's customers continue to consume now at a very fast rate now on on this front what can we learn from microsoft that applies to snowflake that's the headline here from benzinga so the article quoted a wealth manager named josh brown talking about what happened to microsoft after the dot-com bubble burst and how they quadrupled earnings over the next decade and the stock went sideways suggesting the same thing could happen to snowflake now i'd like to make a couple of comments here first at the time microsoft was a 23 billion dollar company and it had a monopoly and was already highly profitable steve ballmer became the ceo of microsoft right after the dot-com bubble burst and he hugged onto windows for dear life and lived off of microsoft's pc software monopoly microsoft became an extremely profitable and remarkably uninteresting caretaker of a pc in on-prem software estate during balmer's tenure so i just don't see the comparison as relevant snowflake you know they're going to make struggle for other reasons but that one didn't really resonate with me what's interesting is this chart it poses the question do cloud and data markets behave differently it's a chart that shows aws growth rates over time and superimposes the revenue in the red in q1 2018 aws generated 5.4 billion dollars in revenue and that was growing at the time at nearly a 50 rate now that rate as you can see decelerated quite significantly as aws grew to a 50 billion dollar run rate company that down below where you see it bottoms now it makes sense right law of large numbers you can't keep growing that fast when you get that big well oops look what happened in 2021 aws's growth rate bottoms in the high 20s and then rockets back up to 40 this past quarter as aws surpasses a 70 billion dollar run rate so you have to ask is cloud different is data different is cloud data different or data cloud different let's put it in the snowflake parlance can cloud because of its consumption model and the speed of innovation and ecosystem depth and breadth enable snowflake to exhibit lots of variability in its growth rates versus a say progressive and somewhat linear decline as the company grows revenue which is what you would expect historically and part of the answer relates to its market size here's a chart we've shared before with some additions it's our version of snowflake's total available market they're tam which snowflake's version that that blue data cloud thing superimposed on the right it shows the various layers of market opportunity that we came up with that that snowflake and others we think have in front of them emerging from the disruption of legacy data lakes and data warehouses to what snowflake refers to as its data cloud we think about the data mesh concept and decentralized data architectures with domain ownership and data product and service builders as consistent with snowflake's data cloud vision where snowflake data stores are nodes they're just simply discoverable nodes on the mesh you could have you know data bricks data lakes you know s3 buckets on that mesh it doesn't matter they can be discovered they can be shared and of course they're governed in a federated model now in snowflake's model it's all inside the snowflake data cloud that's fine then you'll go to the out years it gets a little fuzzy you know from edge locations and ai inference it becomes massive and decision making occurs in real time where machines and machine data take over the world instead of you know clicks and keystrokes sounds out there but it's real and how exactly snowflake plays there at this point is unclear but one thing's for sure there'll be a lot of data and it's going to find its way into snowflake you know snowflake's not a real-time engine it's an analytical system it's moving into the realm of data science and you know we've talked about the need for you know semantic layer between those those two worlds of analytics and data science but expanding the scope further out we think that snowflake is a big role to play in this future and the future is massive okay check you got the big tam now as someone that looks at companies through a fundamentals prism you've got to look obviously at the markets in the tan which we just did but you also want to understand customers and it's not hard to find snowflake customers capital one disney micron alliance sainsbury sonos and hundreds of other companies i've talked to snowflake customers who have also been customers of oracle teradata ibm neteza vertica serious database practitioners and they tell me it's consistent soulflake is different they say it's simpler it's more agile it's less complicated to secure and it's disruptive to their traditional ways of doing data management now of course there are naysayers i've spoken to a number of analysts that feel snowflake is deficient in areas like workload management and course complex joins and it's too specialized in a world where we're seeing the convergence of analytics and transactional workloads our own david floyer believes that what oracle is doing with mysql heatwave is radically disruptive to many of the database architectures and blows away anything out there and he believes that snowflake and the likes of aws are going to have to respond now this the other criticism here is that snowflake is not architected for real-time inference where a lot of that edge activity is is going to happen it's a multi-hundred billion dollar market and so look snowflake has a ton of competition that's the other thing all the major cloud players have very capable and competitive database platforms even though they all partner with snowflake except oracle of course but companies like databricks and have garnered tons of vc other vc funded companies have raised billions of dollars to do this kind of elastic consumption based separate compute from storage stuff so you have to always keep an open mind and be aware of potential blind spots for these companies but to the criticisms i would say look snowflake they got there first and watch their ecosystem it's a real key to its continued success snowflake's not going to go it alone and it's going to use its ecosystem partners to expand its reach and accelerate the network effects and fill those gaps and it will acquire its stock is valuable so it should be doing that just as it did with streamlit a zero revenue company that it bought for 800 million dollars in stock and cash just recently streamlit is an open source python library that gets snowflake further deeper into that data science space that data brick space and look watch what snowflake is doing with snowpark it's an api library for processing data and building data intensive applications we've talked about snowflake essentially being becoming the super cloud and building this sort of path-like layer across clouds rather than trying to do it all themselves it seems snowflake is really staring at the api economy and building its ecosystem to plug those holes so let's come back to the customers here's a chart that shows snowflakes customer spending momentum or net score on the the top line that's the vertical axis and pervasiveness in the data or market share and that bottom brown line snowflake has unprecedented net scores and held them up for many many quarters as you can see here going back you know a couple years all leading to its expanded market penetration and measured as pervasiveness of so-called market share within the etr survey it's not like idc market share it's pervasiveness in the data set now i'll say this i don't see how this is sustainable i've been waiting for this to moderate i wouldn't be surprised to see snowflake come back to earth a little bit i think they'll clearly still be highly elevated based on the data that i've seen but but i could see in in one or more of the etr surveys this year this starting to moderate as they get they get big it's just it has to happen um but i would again expect them to have a high spending velocity score but i think we're going to see snowflake you know maybe porpoise a bit here meaning you know it moderates it comes back up it's just really hard to sustain this piece of momentum and higher train retain and scale without absorbing some some friction and some head woods that's going to slow you down but back to the aws growth example it's entirely possible that we could see a similar dynamic with snowflake that you saw with aws and you kind of see it with salesforce and servicenow very successful large entrenched entrenched companies and it's very possible that snowflake could pull back moderate and then accelerate that growth even though people are concerned about the moderated guidance of 80 percent growth yeah that's that's the new definition of tepid i guess i look i like to look at other some other metrics the one that really called you know my my my attention was the remaining performance obligations this last quarter rpo snowflakes is up to something like 2.6 billion and that is a forward-looking indicator of of future revenues so i want to i'd like to see that growing and it's growing at a fast pace so you're going to see some ups and downs with snowflake i have no doubt but i think things are still looking pretty solid for the company growth companies like snowflake and octa and z scalar those other ones that i mentioned earlier have probably been repriced and refactored by investors while there's always going to be market and of course geopolitical risk especially in these times fundamentals matter you've got huge market well capitalized you got a leadership position great products and strong customer adoption you also have a great team team is something else that we look for we haven't touched on that but i'll leave you with this thought everyone knows about frank slootman mike scarpelli and what they've accomplished in their years of working together that's why the stock you know in ipo was was so overvalued they had seen these guys do it before slootman just documented in all this in his book amp it up which gives great insight into the history of of that though you know that pair and and the teams that they've built the companies that they've built how he thinks about building companies and markets and and how you know total available markets super important but the whole philosophy and culture that that he's building in his management style but you got to wonder right how long is this guy going to keep going what keeps him motivated you know i asked him that one time here's what he said why i mean are you in this for the sport what's the story here uh actually that that's not a bad way of characterizing it i think i am in it uh you know for the sport uh you know the only way to become the best version of yourself is to be uh to be under the gun and uh you know every single day and that's that's certainly uh what we are it sort of has its own rewards building great products building great companies uh you know regardless of you know uh what the spoils may be uh it has its own rewards and i i it's hard for people like us to get off the field and uh you know hang it up so here we are so there you have it he's in it for the sport how great is that he loves building companies and that my opinion that's how frank slootman thinks about success it's not about money money's the byproduct of success as earl nightingale would say success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal i love that quote building great companies building products that change the world changing people's lives with data and insights creating jobs creating life-altering wealth opportunities not for himself but for thousands of employees and partners i'd say that's a pretty worthy ideal and i hope frank slootman sticks with it for a while okay that's it for today thanks to stephanie chan for the background research she does for breaking analysis alex meyerson on production kristen martin and cheryl knight on social with rob hoff on siliconangle and thanks to ivana delevska of spear invest and my friend chip symington for the angles from the money side of things remember all these episodes are available as podcasts just search breaking analysis podcast i publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data you can reach me at devolante or david.velante siliconangle.com and this is dave vellante for cube insights powered by etrbsafe stay well and we'll see you next time [Music] you

>>Hi, everyone. Welcome to the cube and unstoppable domain, special showcase women of web three or well, three I'm super excited for this season. We have three great guests, Sandy Carter, the SVP and channel chief of unstoppable domains. Noel Bailey managing director for the entertainment, AKA disco leper. That's her handle NFT handle. We'll talk more about that. And Kristen Mirabella, Bella director of business development, Gemini all in the web three world here for women of web three. Welcome to the show. So what a great announcement, Sandy? What is the wow three women of web three. And why did you announce it on stumbled domains? Web three. >>Awesome. Well, thanks John. So today we are so excited to announce unstoppable women of web three. And one of the things that we noticed ourselves plus 60 plus companies is that we need more diversity in the web three space. So our mission is to make web three more accessible for everyone to help women with that first step and be very action oriented. So we're going to launch education, networking and events as we move forward. And we're real excited to start today, March 8th, we've got a 24 hour Twitter space. We have a YouTube live. We're going to be auction and off some NFTs to donate to girls in tech, a not-for-profit who is also going to launch a mentoring platform for women in web three. We'll also be announcing a hundred inspirational women's and Webster, and I can take up the entire time talking about all we have in store to make web three accessible to everyone. >>That's awesome. We're going to unpack that lot of things to talk about there. I'm really looking forward to it, neural, your, you got a great story here. What are the lazy lions and, and the queen so to speak and what are you guys doing? And tell us about your handle. >>That's a lot of questions there. John, why don't we start with that? So, I mean, I started my NFT journey about six months ago only, and I got really lucky in entering into the space for the lazy lions to start with and the Kings and existing Queens that were kind of in that space to begin were incredibly welcoming. I literally like, I love being the person in the room that asked the dumb question, because if I, if I can ask it, then, you know, there's, there's a hundred other people there that aren't asking that question. And so when I stepped into the, you know, the pride space with Twitter and discord, getting to know the lazy lions before I even got into my first project, they were incredibly welcoming. Like any question that I asked they had an answer for. And so, you know, why we're kind of wondering with unstoppable and supporting that? >>Well, one, once we, once through that space, I got introduced to queen Sandy as well. You know, she's part of the pride and, and one of the lazy lions and again, yeah, it's that whole symbiotic relationship where you've got, you know, Kings and Queens, men and women kind of in the pride, but it's not just about men and women either. It's the diversity aspect where it's people from all different cultures, backgrounds all around the world. And so, you know, getting in and learning and growing together in this brand new space that we're all part of creating. And then Unstoppables a huge part of that with the gateway to allowing people to kind of get into it, to begin. So it just all makes sense. We're going to expense. >>Okay, we're going to unpack that in a minute, but Kristen w what's going on with Gemini and web three, what's going on in the ecosystem there? How are you supporting the women of web three initiative? >>Really excited. Gemini is an exchange and custodian. We offer access to cryptocurrencies. We are your access points. We're the access point for women who are trying to embrace their own financial freedom and build their own story, be economically empowered and interacting with web three in a way that's going to be increasingly necessary. As, as this continues to build, Gemini is really excited to be able to provide a platform for education for anyone and especially women who are looking to build their knowledge base around what's happening in cryptocurrency. How can they interact with it? How can they make really good financial decisions as they look to interact with networks, you know, within defy, what tokens do they want to be able to, you know, purchase, move off of a centralized platform like Geminis. We are very regulated. We're very secure as an access point to be able to interact with cryptocurrencies and use crypto to interact with this ecosystem that's growing. You can, you know, as a woman decide on a really good idea on how you want to embrace that financial freedom of interacting with the protocol that might unlock your potential to be more financially independent, make really good decisions about the future of what your, your family might need economically, you know, in Gemini as an access point for that, as far as crypto and other digital assets go is where we were really proud that we can power that network. >>So we have to chip and I got the lazy lions. You have the unstoppable, all three of you guys are in the middle of all the action and it's super game-changing. It's also a cultural shift. You seeing a lot of young, the young generation, as well as senior experienced people coming in, certainly technologists are coming in, business leaders are coming in and it just feels like a whole nother cultural shift. So we have to ask you, what are you guys most excited for in this roadmap for women of web three what's on your mind? What do you guys see? What's the vision? >>Well, I'll start first. You know, one of the things that I'm really excited about is getting women to experience web three, not just book learning, but really get in there and interact and play with it. So for example, John, there is a game called de-central land. They sell land. And what they're going to help us do is to build a virtual women of web three headquarters inside of the game. And as women go there, they're going to experience, you know, logging in, they're going to experience crypto, like Kristin does talked about they'll experience. NFT is like disco, just talked about. And so it won't just be book smart. They'll be able to get in there and do and see and play, which I think is the best way to learn about web three. >>For me, I'd say, I mean, honestly, I'm most excited about getting it started. There's been so much work kind of going into this to begin with. And, and this space is, is also new and constantly growing and kind of evolving, changing as we go because we're pioneers kind of in this space, really. Like we all have web three. And so getting it started and it continues to grow and evolve from there, which is, you know, a lot to do with kind of community driven initiatives what's happening in the market and the space at the time as well. So super get it started, build it. And it keeps growing from there. >>Christine, what's your vision to what, how do you see this evolving what's what do you hope for and what are some of the things you're excited about? >>I couldn't agree more. What I think is really exciting is that again, if you're looking to learn about this, you know, Sandy you're so right, you're not gonna learn about really how to unlock the potential of this ecosystem by reading about it. You have to get in there, find crypto, come to Geminis platform, open an account, understand what it means to buy cryptocurrency, buy Bitcoin, understand what you're comfortable with. Use resources like our crypto pedia, to understand the differences between tokens, the differences between layers. Why would you buy this token and transfer it off of the platform where you're looking to interact with three, maybe you're looking at these web three applications and you want to understand what generating income through one of these looks like you really got to start with the basics, but start here, purchase something, move it off. You know, test it, use little, little amounts. >>You don't have to buy a full Bitcoin. I think that that's a common misconception with people who are really starting to get interested in the space, especially as they start to learn about cryptocurrency, buy a tiny piece, you know, you don't need to sell the farm, move it off the platform, learn a little bit about how you can interact, build a community around yourself. There are a lot of women who are learning how to do this and through NFTs and through other interests that you might naturally have, you can really embrace the technology and understand what it can do for you. >>You know, you, you mentioned that in the early days of Bitcoin, even a theory of giving it away was a big part of that kind of early days of community. And Earl, you mentioned the word pride as part of the lazy lions community is a big part of this. Sandy, you know, this you've seen communities develop over the years, this new kind of community dynamic is a network effect, but it's also people centric. It's also about reputation. So it's about being open and collaborative. I mean, it sounds like a bunch of cliches jammed together, but this is kind of the world we're in for web three. Can you guys share your thoughts on that and get a reaction to that? >>Yeah. And I just wanted to jump on kind of what Kristin was mentioning there as well. You know, like, and Sandy, like get in there, get started, like have a little taste, have a little of this watch learn and then kind of tying into your community aspect there, ask the questions, get into, and you know, the two, the couple of main spaces, there are discord and Twitter, which, and again, I signed up my Twitter account in 2014 and I pretty much didn't touch it, like from 2015 kind of onwards, like now learning and getting in and growing with this space, that's kind of where the mediums are to start with with that. So yeah. Get in and get started and, and ask the questions on the way >>Sandy, you see Twitter and discord as the primary. >>Yeah. Yeah. There's so many this guy, right. Because you know, I'm on, I'm now on telegram. I'm on disbarred, I'm on Twitter, I'm on signal. I just got invited to signal groups. So this is one of the areas that we need to work on for web three. I think all of us would agree is just that interface. Part of the reason that we're launching this is because it is hard today, right? Web three is hard. And so there's multiple communications channels, you know, and that's why we love, you know, partners like Jim and I, who are making it easier and lazy lions who are setting up these communities. You know, when you buy in it of T you're really not, I guess you are buying the NFT for value, but you're also buying into the community disco. And I have been meeting actually every Saturday night for a while now with the rest of the Queens, planning out women of web three, Kristin and Jim and I, and I have been meeting together it's about the people and the networking and the tribe that you're part of as well. You really nailed it on the community piece. >>You know, ever since we started talking about it unstoppable, I got to say, I've been wanting to get the cube and FTS going because it is a community dynamic, but it's also this got practical usage of is there's data behind it. There's actually real use cases. Can you guys share your thoughts on how you see the use cases being applied specifically to the world, but also to, to women of web three to Wasn't go first. >>Yeah. We're also polite. We're all quite polite. And do you want to go first? You're one of our partners, we'll let you start us off. >>Sorry. I didn't want to and want to jump in there and they want to get started a real applications of, of what this looks like. I think goes back to an idea I had at the top of the call as there's clarity, as that continues to emerge as web three continues to build. And we understand what this really means. I think many would say that there's, you know, lack of clarity around what web three means. Maybe there are some platforms that are slightly more centralized than others. If we think of what web three in general represents, you know, it's this idea of decentralization empowering you through ownership of your data, empowering you through the ability to do things in a decentralized way, but you're not able to do on web two. And I think the real application of transition of where we are today into what this becomes is, you know, I think we keep nailing it on the head. >>You really have to get out there and practice. You have to understand what this transition means for you and what does it mean for what you're trying to achieve? So if my personal stance is, is really solid in where, you know, your financial future is rooted. And if we're talking about cryptocurrency in your ability to interact with these networks, like we've been saying, you have to practice, you have to understand and learn what you're getting yourself into. But I also think there's this element of being okay with making mistakes, but you are talking about your financial future. You're talking about something that's there really high stakes around making mistakes means starting with really good partners. You can start with platforms like Gemini. You can start with platforms like unstoppable domains and know that the foundation has been laid for you to be able to test these grounds. >>I think that what this becomes and what is really important here is knowing that there are going to be a few centralized points that are your access to this web of three, to this broader ecosystem. But being able to trust that these platforms have security in mind. So the security first mindset that empowers you to then go be in charge of data, privacy, being able to take charge of really what your interaction with the rest of this world means. And being, being able to trust that the foundational layer that you're entering that world through is one that can be trusted. I think that as we look at the real world application of this finding that right starting point is really important. >>Yeah. And I w I would just add John to, to what Kristen just said. There are also B2B use cases here. So we want to make sure that, you know, there's a lot of consumer work, but there's also B to B as well. So, you know, imagine you're in decentral land or you're in sandbox a game. If you're a retailer or in a consumer business, you can place your products or your portfolio inside of that game, there is now decentralized finance that's out there. How does that play a role in your company and the way that you're financing for your company? Not just for yourself, like Kristin mentioned, but also for your company. And then dowels, of course, fractional ownership of different things. We're seeing, you know, funding change. SPACs turning into dowels, all of this. If you look at our 24 hour Twitter space, I'm S I can't wait. I think I'm going to actually do a 24 hour bins for myself because >>That's a college come on. We gotta do. >>Right. I know this guy will be with me. Right. And just that last time I did, that was new. Yeah. >>Well, super exciting. I mean, wow, wow. Three could be a doubt. I mean, the vision here is really amazing. I am so impressed. I think this is a great thing because it could go anywhere. What do you guys see at Dow in the future merging communities and merging tribes together? How do you guys have you guys talked about that? What's the, what's the thought process there? >>We actually did talk about doing a Dow. We decided to kick off first and get everybody up to speed on what it was before we jumped into a doubt, which I think is pretty advanced and sophisticated. And so, you know, part of what we also see is if you look at part of the membership, you'll see women of blockchain, women of data BFF. I mean, all these women's groups coming together to unite as long with, along with a lot of major companies, web to companies, Google Deloitte I'll chair, with the who's, who of web three, you've got Gemini, you've got, you know, consensus, you've got blockchain.com. So, you know, I love this because we are coming together for a movement, not for individual companies, but to have an impact on the industry to really educate women. And John, I forgot one of the really cool things we're also announcing today is our first 100 inspirational women of web three. In fact, disco helped me come up with the name of that, because we do want to highlight as examples, all of these great women that are in the space so that we each can reach back and pull others forward. >>Okay, now we've got to get into the, the disco leopard, let's put the lower third up there so we can see it. And the name that's tell us about the story here. And what does it mean to you? Take us through the thought process, the experience and how you envision this unfolding. Cause it's an NFT. You have one it's >>Yeah, totally. I guess. I mean, starting with, so the disco leopard kind of piece to it as well, like in this new space, in the, in the web space, first of all, you get to like, come up with your own identity. So I got to pick this go leopard, like if he doesn't want to be a disco leopard. And so even just coming up with the journey of like, what is your identity with that? And then, you know, you go through that path of being doxed, meaning being revealed, people kind of know who you are or not, or keeping it, you know, kind of a name on the side, that's all. Okay. Like it's all part of that whole decentralized space, which is super exciting. So just so you know, like the disco leper feeds, you know, optimist glass, half full, you know, pessimist, glass, half empty. And then the third piece to that was disco leopard equals. Awesome. And that's where I saw it. And I'm like, that's me a hundred percent. I'm >>Trying to get your lower third, had your name next to it, >>But that's okay. I'm all right with that. I don't mind. So, you know, getting, getting into that to start with, and then, you know, when we were talking about partners and coming into this safe space as well, and yeah, absolutely kind of technology based partners infrastructure to make sure that we're, we're safe and we've got a smooth gateway kind of coming in, but I'm also gonna put communities into partnerships as well, because there are so many NFT projects, you know, defy gaming projects, et cetera, finding your people, finding the community that resonates with you and it's different for everyone. And that's a beautiful thing, but you get to kind of find like-minded people and join them. >>You know, I've been thinking this for about a long, long time, and I thought I was just weird, but now that it's happening, you guys are in the middle of it. The, your identity is so important now, and you could have a community and tribe to belong to, but yet traverse other tribes and move around. This is kind of the whole prospect of unstoppable, right? So Sandy, this is like a great future. You can be protected in a trusted tribe or community, and then still move around to others and engage. It's almost like a packet moving around a network. It's really about people too, on the internet. This is a total complete game changer. It wasn't really, it's not really possible prior to this. >>Yeah. I mean, if you look at all the members, you can move from a metaverse, you can move into gaming, you can go into defy, we've got NFT communities. And, and I love, you know, like you said, traversing, those communities, like we're going to do an auction and we've had donated NFTs. So disco and lazy lions, the queen of lazy lions are donating a lazy lion. Crypto chicks are gonna donate something. If you don't know what these are, these are all NFT communities that have their own identities as well. We have Deadheads NILAH and the long neck ladies, which is started by a 13 year old girl, who's going to talk on one of our Twitter spaces about how she had 13 earned millions of dollars and became times first artist in residence. So there's just, I mean, there's so much potential here and just look at all these amazing women on the screen. You know, I think web three, the face of web three is female. >>That's awesome. Any final thoughts for you guys and, and the session here, it's amazing. First of all, I'm so excited to, to have this conversation and be included and be included into the group here. Thank you for having me closing thoughts on women of web three, how people can get involved, what you guys aspire to be, what are some of the goals can take us through that? >>I guess for me looking at, you kind of asked the question of, you know, what we're most excited about with what's coming up with the international women's day. And, and, you know, what's beyond that. I'm really excited about what unstoppable are doing in introducing the gateway from web two to web three, because that whole 24, the, the events that we have coming on today is, you know, information, education, openness, how to use it, but what's coming beyond there. And it is that transition from web to, and how to, how do we even, like, I'm about to learn that as well. And as I said, I've been in that, in this NMT journey for six months learning thus far, but what does it look like to get into a web three experience and the web page and that design and look and feel so that next step of learning and getting into it. And again, anyone that's kind of being involved in this conversation now you'll be the first people stepping into that space as web three really comes to life. And it is the new web. Very exciting, >>Great. >>I couldn't agree more neural. What I think excites us the most is the level of interest and the level of engagement that we're seeing an unprecedented levels. These and what's coming next is that you're going to see more and more women and more, more people as part of these communities, as we've talked about wanting to learn, wanting to engage and wanting to be part of this and numbers that we really haven't even seen still yet. We've just scratched the surface. And what I want to ask everyone to do is not to wait not to wait until you feel like you're behind. Take action. Now go to our crypto pedia page, open an account at Gemini, start to interact with cryptocurrencies, understand what it means to take, you know, a crypto or digital asset off of a platform and interact with some of these networks, understand what it means to own, and then empty look at unstoppable domains and understand how you can start to dip your toe in. We really want to empower everyone with the knowledge of what you can do here, and we couldn't be more excited about the future >>Also Sandy final word. >>Yes. So I'm excited about a new world where diversity helps shape the next movement. You know, we've seen web one and web two shaped by, you know, homogeneous groups. And what I'm looking forward to is the future, because we know that innovation is driven by diversity of thought. And so for me, I'm really excited about today international women's day, where we're launching all these educational sessions, you know, Kristen mentioned don't wait, get involved, disco, you know, talked a lot about the potential of going from web two to web three. We hope to see tons of women learning from the web to world. And then I just have to say, I mean, if we could get this across in the virtual world, we're then going to also host an in real life I R L event at south by Southwest. So I'm real excited to be back in person to John so that I can actually give my, my fellow colleagues hugs as well. >>I can't wait to be in person. Thank you so much for coming on this. A great program today is international women's day, but every day is women of web three day. Thanks for sharing great insight. I'm looking forward to more conversations and seeing what happens and participating in any way that I can. And thanks for having me and including me in the conversation. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. This is the cubes conversations here in the showcase women of web three. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching.

(gentle upbeat music) >> People hate to be sold, but they love to buy. We become what we think about, think, and grow rich. If you want to gather honey, don't kick over the beehive. The world is replete with time-tested advice and motivational ideas for aspiring salespeople, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Norman Vincent Peale, Earl Nightingale, and many others have all published classics with guidance that when followed closely, almost always leads to success. More modern personalities have emerged in the internet era, like Tony Robbins, and Gary Vaynerchuk, and Angela Duckworth. But for the most part, they've continued to rely on book publishing, seminars, and high value consulting to peddle their insights and inspire action. Welcome to this video exclusive on theCUBE. This is Dave Vellante, and I'm pleased to welcome back Professor Mark Roberge, who is one of the Managing Directors at Stage 2 Capital, and Paul Fifield, who's the CEO and Co-Founder of Sales Impact Academy. Gentlemen, welcome. Great to see you. >> You too Dave and thanks. >> All right, let's get right into it. Paul, you guys are announcing today a $4 million financing round. It comprises $3 million in a seed round led by Stage 2 and a million dollar in debt financing. So, first of all, congratulations. Paul, why did you start Sales Impact Academy? >> Cool, well, I think my background is sort of two times CRO, so I've built two reasonably successful companies. Built a hundred plus person teams. And so I've got kind of this firsthand experience of having to learn literally everything on the job whilst delivering these very kind of rapid, like achieving these very rapid growth targets. And so when I came out of those two journeys, I literally just started doing some voluntary teaching in and around London where I now live. I spend a bunch of time over in New York, and literally started this because I wanted to sort of kind of give back, but just really wanted to start helping people who were just really, really struggling in high pressure environments. And that's both leadership from sense of revenue leadership people, right down to sort of frontline SDRs. And I think as I started just doing this voluntary teaching, I kind of realized that actually the sort of global education system has done is a massive, massive disservice, right? I actually call it the greatest educational travesty of the last 50 years, where higher education has entirely overlooked sales as a profession. And the knock-on consequences of that have been absolutely disastrous for our profession. Partly that the profession is seen as a bit sort of embarrassing to be a part of. You kind of like go get a sales job if you can't get a degree. But more than that, the core fundamental within revenue teams and within sales people is now completely lacking 'cause there's no structured formal kind of like learning out there. So that's really the problem we're trying to solve on the kind of like the skill side. >> Great. Okay. And mark, always good to have you on, and I got to ask you. So even though, I know this is the wheelhouse for you and your partners, and of course, you've got a deep bench of LPs, but lay out the investment thesis here. What's the core problem that you saw and how are you looking at the market? >> Yeah, sure, Dave. So this one was a special one for me. We've spoken in the past. I mean, just personally I've always had a similar passion to Paul that it's amazing how important sales execution is to all companies, nevermind just the startup ecosystem. And I've always personally been motivated by anything that can help the startup ecosystem increase their success. Part of why I teach at Harvard and try to change some of the stuff that Paul's talking about, which is like, it's amazing how little education is done around sales. But in this particular one, not only personally was I excited about, but from a fun perspective, we've got to look at the economic outcomes. And we've been thinking a lot about the sales tech stack. It's evolved a ton in the last couple of decades. We've gone from the late '90s where every sales VP was just, they had a thing called the CRM that none of their reps even used, right? And we've come so far in 20 years, we've got all these amazing tools that help us cold call, that help us send emails efficiently and automatically and track everything, but nothing's really happened on the education side. And that's really the enormous gap that we've seen is, these organizations being much more proactive around adopting technology that can prove sales execution, but nothing on the education side. And the other piece that we saw is, it's almost like all these companies are reinventing the wheel of looking in the upcoming year, having a dozen sales people to hire, and trying to put together a sales enablement program within their organization to teach salespeople sales 101. Like how to find a champion, how to develop a budget, how to develop sense of urgency. And what Paul and team can do in the first phase of essay, is can sort of centralize that, so that all of these organizations can benefit from the best content and the best instructors for their team. >> So Paul, exactly, thank you, mark. Exactly what do you guys do? What do you sell? I'm curious, is this sort of, I'm thinking in my head, is this E-learning, is it really part of the sales stack? Maybe you could help us understand that better. >> Well, I think this problem of having to upscale teams has been around like forever. And kind of going back to the kind of education problem, it's what's wild is that we would never accept this of our lawyers, our accountants, or HR professionals. Imagine like someone in your finance team arriving on day one and they're searching YouTube to try and work out how to like put a balance sheet together. So it's a chronic, chronic problem. And so the way that we're addressing this, and I think the problem is well understood, but there's always been a terrible market, sort of product market fit for how the problem gets solved. So as mark was saying, typically it's in-house revenue leaders who themselves have got massive gaps in their knowledge, hack together some internal learning that is just pretty poor, 'cause it's not really their skillset. The other alternative is bringing in really expensive consultants, but they're consultants with a very single worldview and the complexity of a modern revenue organization is very, very high these days. And so one consultant is not going to really kind of like cover every topic you need. And then there's the kind of like fairly old fashioned sales training companies that just come in, one big hit, super expensive and then sort of leave again. So the sort of product market fit to solve, has always been a bit pretty bad. So what we've done is we've created a subscription model. We've essentially productized skills development. The way that we've done that is we teach live instruction. So one of the big challenges Andreessen Horowitz put a post out around this so quite recently, one of the big problems of online learning is that this kind of huge repository of online learning, which puts all the onus on the learner to have the discipline to go through these courses and consume them in an on-demand way is actually they're pretty ineffective. We see sort of completion rates of like 7 to 8%. So we've always gone from a live instruction model. So the sort of ingredients are the absolute very best people in the world in their very specific skill teaching live classes just two hours per week. So we're not overwhelming the learners who are already in work, and they have targets, and they've got a lot of pressure. And we have courses that last maybe four to like 12 hours over two to sort of six to seven weeks. So highly practical live instruction. We have 70, 80, sometimes even 90% completion rates of the sort of live class experience, and then teams then rapidly put that best practice into practice and see amazing results in things like top of funnel, or conversion, or retention. >> So live is compulsory and I presume on-demand? If you want to refresh you have an on demand option? >> Yeah, everything's recorded, so you can kind of catch up on a class if you've missed it, But that live instruction is powerful because it's kind of in your calendar, right? So you show up. But the really powerful thing, actually, is that entire teams within companies can actually learn at exactly the same pace. So we teach it eight o'clock Pacific, 11 o'clock Eastern, >> 4: 00 PM in the UK, and 5:00 PM Europe. So your entire European and North American teams can literally learn in the same class with a world-class expert, like a Mark, or like a Kevin Dorsey, or like Greg Holmes from Zoom. And you're learning from these incredible people. Class finishes, teams can come back together, talk about this incredible best practice they've just learned, and then immediately put it into practice. And that's where we're seeing these incredible, kind of almost instant impact on performance at real scale. >> So, Mark, in thinking about your investment, you must've been thinking about, okay, how do we scale this thing? You've got an instructor component, you've got this live piece. How are you thinking about that at scale? >> Yeah, there's a lot of different business model options there. And I actually think multiple of them are achievable in the longer term. That's something we've been working with Paul quite a bit, is like, they're all quite compelling. So just trying to think about which two to start with. But I think you've seen a lot of this in education models today. Is a mixture of on-demand with prerecorded. And so I think that will be the starting point. And I think from a scalability standpoint, we were also, we don't always try to do this with our investments, but clearly our LP base or limited partner base was going to be a key ingredient to at least the first cycle of this business. You know, our VC firm's backed by over 250 CRO CMOs heads of customer success, all of which are prospective instructors, prospective content developers, and prospective customers. So that was a little nicety around the scale and investment thesis for this one. >> And what's in it for them? I mean, they get paid. Obviously, you have a stake in the game, but what's in it for the instructors. They get paid on a sort of a per course basis? How does that model work? >> Yeah, we have a development fee for each kind of hour of teaching that gets created So we've mapped out a pretty significant curriculum. And we have about 250 hours of life teaching now already written. We actually think it's going to be about 3000 hours of learning before you get even close to a complete curriculum for every aspect of a revenue organization from revenue operations, to customer success, to marketing, to sales, to leadership, and management. But we have a development fee per class, and we have a teaching fee as well. >> Yeah, so, I mean, I think you guys, it's really an underserved market, and then when you think about it, most organizations, they just don't invest in training. And so, I mean, I would think you'd want to take it, I don't know what the right number is, 5, 10% of your sales budget and actually put it on this and the return would be enormous. How do you guys think about the market size? Like I said before, is it E-learning, is it part of the CRM stack? How do you size this market? >> Well, I think for us it's service to people. A highly skilled sales rep with an email address, a phone and a spreadsheet would do really well, okay? You don't need this world-class tech stack to do well in sales. You need the skills to be able to do the job. But the reverse, that's not true, right? An unskilled person with a world-class tech stack won't do well. And so fundamentally, the skill level of your team is the number one most important thing to get right to be successful in revenue. But as I said before, the product market for it to solve that problem, has been pretty terrible. So we see ourselves 100%. And so if you're looking at like a com, you look at Gong, who we've just signed as a customer, which is fantastic. Gong has a technology that helps salespeople do better through call recording. You have Outreach, who is also a customer. They have technologies that help SDRs be more efficient in outreach. And now you have Sales Impact Academy, and we help with skills development of your team, of the entirety of your revenue function. So we absolutely see ourselves as a key part of that stack. In terms of the TAM, 60 million people in sales are on, according to LinkedIn. You're probably talking 150 million people in go to market to include all of the different roles. 50% of the world's companies are B2B. The TAM is huge. But what blows my mind, and this kind of goes back to this why the global education system has overlooked this because essentially if half the world's companies are B2B, that's probably a proxy for the half of the world's GDP, Half of the world's economic growth is relying on the revenue function of half the world's companies, and they don't really know what they're doing, (laughs) which is absolutely staggering. And if we can solve that in a meaningfully meaningful way at massive scale, then the impact should be absolutely enormous. >> So, Mark, no lack of TAM. I know that you guys at Stage 2, you're also very much focused on the metrics. You have a fundamental philosophy that your product market fit and retention should come before hyper growth. So what were the metrics that enticed you to make this investment? >> Yeah, it's a good question, Dave, 'cause that's where we always look first, which I think is a little different than most early stage investors. There's a big, I guess, meme, triple, triple, double, double that's popular in Silicon Valley these days, which refers to triple your revenue in year one, triple your revenue in year two, double in year three, and four, and five. And that type of a hyper growth is critical, but it's often jumped too quickly in our opinion. That there's a premature victory called on product market fit, which kills a larger percentage of businesses than is necessary. And so with all our investments, we look very heavily first at user engagement, any early indicators of user retention. And the numbers were just off the charts for SIA in terms of the customers, in terms of the NPS scores that they were getting on their sessions, in terms of the completion rate on their courses, in terms of the customers that started with a couple of seats and expanded to more seats once they got a taste of the program. So that's where we look first as a strong foundation to build a scalable business, and it was off the charts positive for SIA. >> So how about the competition? If I Google sales training software, I'll get like dozens of companies. Lessonly, and MindTickle, or Brainshark will come up, that's not really a fit. So how do you think about the competition? How are you different? >> Yeah, well, one thing we try and avoid is any reference to sales training, 'cause that really sort of speaks to this very old kind of fashioned way of doing this. And I actually think that from a pure pedagogy perspective, so from a pure learning design perspective, the old fashioned way of doing sales training was pull a whole team off site, usually in a really terrible hotel with no windows for a day or two. And that's it, that's your learning experience. And that's not how human beings learn, right? So just even if the content was fantastic, the learning experience was so terrible, it was just very kind of ineffective. So we sort of avoid kind of like sales training, The likes of MindTickle, we're actually talking to them at the moment about a partnership there. They're a platform play, and we're certainly building a platform, but we're very much about the live instruction and creating the biggest curriculum and the broadest curriculum on the internet, in the world, basically, for revenue teams. So the competition is kind of interesting 'cause there is not really a direct subscription-based live like learning offering out there. There's some similar ish companies. I honestly think at the moment it's kind of status quo. We're genuinely creating a new category of in-work learning for revenue teams. And so we're in this kind of semi and sort of evangelical sort of phase. So really, status quo is one of the biggest sort of competitors. But if you think about some of those old, old fashioned sort of Miller Heimans, and then perhaps even like Sandlers, there's an analogy perhaps here, which is kind of interesting, which is a little bit like Siebel and Salesforce in the sort of late '90s, where in Siebel you have this kind of old way of doing things. It was a little bit ineffective. It was really expensive. Not accessible to a huge space of the market. And Salesforce came along and said, "Hey, we're going to create this cool thing. It's going to be through the browser, it's going to be accessible to everyone, and it's going to be really, really effective." And so there's some really kind of interesting parallels almost between like Siebel and Salesforce and what we're doing to completely kind of upend the sort of the old fashioned way of delivering sort of sales training, if you like. >> And your target customer profile is, you're selling to teams, right? B2B teams, right? It's not for individuals. Is that correct, Paul? >> Currently. Yeah, yeah. So currently we've got a big foothold in series A to series B. So broadly speaking out, our target market currently is really fast growth technology companies. That's the sector that we're really focusing on. We've got a very good strong foothold in series A series B companies. We've now won some much larger later stage companies. We've actually even won a couple of corporates, I can't say names yet, but names that are very, very, very familiar and we're incredibly excited by them, which could end up being thousand plus seat deals 'cause we do this on a per seat basis. But yeah, very much at the moment it's fast growth tech companies, and we're sort of moving up the chain towards enterprise. >> And how do you deal with the sort of maturity curve, if you will, of your students? You've got some that are brand new, just fresh out of school. You've got others that are more seasoned. What do you do, pop them into different points of the curriculum? How do you handle it? >> Yeah we have, I'll say we have about 30 courses right now. We have about another 15 in development where post this fundraise, we want to be able to get to around about 20 courses that we're developing every quarter and getting out to market. So we're literally, we've sort of identified about 20 to 25 key roles across everything within revenue. That's, let's say revenue ops, customer success, account management, sales, engineering, all these different kinds of roles. And we are literally plotting the sort of skills development for these individuals over multiple, multiple years. And I think what we've never ceases to amaze me is actually the breadth of learning in revenue is absolutely enormous. And what kind of just makes you laugh is, this is all of this knowledge that we're now creating it's what companies just hope that their teams somehow acquire through osmosis, through blogs, through events. And it's just kind of crazy that there is... It's absolutely insane that we don't already exist, basically. >> And if I understand it correctly, just from looking at your website, you've got the entry level package. I think it's up to 15 seats, and then you scale up from there, correct? Is it sort of as a seat-based license model? >> Yeah, it's a seat-based model, as Mark mentioned. In some cases we sell, let's say 20 or $30,000 deal out the gate and that's most of the team. That will be maybe a series A, series B deal, but then we've got these land and expand models that are working tremendously well. We have seven, eight customers in Q1 that have doubled their spend Q2. That's the impact that they're seeing. And our net revenue retention number for Q2 is looking like it's going to be 177% to think exceeds companies like Snowflakes. Well, our underlying retention metrics, because people are seeing this incredible impact on teams and performance, is really, really strong. >> That's a nice metric compare with Snowflake (Paul laughs) It's all right. (Dave and Paul laugh) >> So, Mark, this is a larger investment for Stage 2 You guys have been growing and sort of upping your game. And maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, we're in the middle of Fund II right now. So, Fund I was in 2018. We were doing smaller checks. It was our first time out of the gate. The mission has really taken of, our LP base has really taken off. And so this deal looks a lot like more like our second fund. We'll actually make an announcement in a few weeks now that we've closed that out. But it's a much larger fund and our first investments should be in that 2 to $3 million range. >> Hey, Paul, what are you going to do with the money? What are the use of funds? >> Put it on black, (chuckles) we're going to like- (Dave laughs) >> Saratoga is open. (laughs) (Mark laughs) >> We're going to, look, the curriculum development for us is absolutely everything, but we're also going to be investing in building our own technology platform as well. And there are some other really important aspects to the kind of overall offering. We're looking at building an assessment tool so we can actually kind of like start to assess skills across teams. We certify every course has an exam, so we want to get more robust around the certification as well, because we're hoping that our certification becomes the global standard in understanding for the first time in the industry what individual competencies and skills people have, which will be huge. So we have a broad range of things that we want to start initiating now. But I just wanted to quickly say Stage 2 has been nothing short of incredible in every kind of which way. Of course, this investment, the fit is kind of insane, but the LPs have been extraordinary in helping. We've got a huge number of them are now customers very quickly. Mark and the team are helping enormously on our own kind of like go to market and metrics. I've been doing this for 20 years. I've raised over 100 million myself in venture capital. I've never known a venture capital firm with such value add like ever, or even heard of other people getting the kind of value add that we're getting. So I just wanted to a quick shout out for Stage 2. >> Quite a testimony of you guys. Definitely Stage 2 punches above its weight. Guys, we'll leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on. Good luck and we'll be watching. Appreciate your time. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, thank you everybody for watching this Cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante, and we'll see you next time.

>>Welcome back to HP discover 2021 the virtual version. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cube. We're here with Manav said Donna, who is the global head of sales and market development for cognitive business operations at Tata consultancy services Tcs. And we're gonna dig in to digital transformation and take a deeper dive into the customer journeys. Welcome Manav, >>thank you. Dave, thank you for inviting me to this. Uh appreciate and looking forward to have an intriguing dialogue. You Me too. >>Me too. I mean we talk about digital transformation all the time prior to the pandemic. You know, a lot of it was kind of buzz wordy um and there's a lot of complacency around it. But as we know if you weren't digital during the pandemic you're out of business but people were forced into it. They were rushed into I called the force marched the digital so you really didn't have time to be planned full. And now people are stepping back and saying, okay now we have an opportunity to get digital right and put that in air quotes. How do you think about digital transformation? What do you mean by that? >>Okay, see I think uh the way we look at it at this, yes, I will, I will probably take a step back where in um while the digital transformation has been in play, not just over the last year since the pandemic began, but um even before then uh where the shift uh in the customer organization that we have been seeing is largely from being product centric to be purpose centric, wherein the whole focus of the entire existence is to be able to serve the purpose for their consumers, their customers and so on and so forth. And and if you look at it, for example, total energies right? The looking to sell or produce fuel. They are looking to be responsible energy company producing, reliable, affordable and clean energy for the consumers. Right? Similarly, there are other examples damaged shipyards who are looking to be more of a maritime solutions provider rather than just a shipbuilding company. Uh, so, so what's really happening when the purpose is being the driving force behind any organizations agenda or even reason of existence? That purpose is actually the driving force also followed the digital transformation. That is basically shifting the pace of the way businesses are looking to drive consumer experiences, time to market and so on, so forth. Right? And if you see our we launched our new brand positioning in the last quarter, that's building on belief and and that's basically centered around this whole purpose driven mindset. What that means is that we believe that and then the technology is enabling digital transformation are going to be the pillar of the whole shift of the re imagination of the business models wearing businesses are coming together across industries and driven by the key goal of serving the customer in terms of driving the enhanced experience rather than just selling a product. So that's basically is really happening. And having said that now in the last year or so, what pandemic has done is basically accelerated the pace by a condom. Deep right? So so in that sense, some of the organizations that were not ready at that point, they are also kind of transformation and and and taking that leap frog, I would say so from that perspective and going by again by our brand positioning statement, building on belief, right? That's really helping towards that pretty good thing, the overall journey, three horizon business and I'll come to that in a minute, but I hope it is answering your question of what digital transformation and how pandemic has really helped it. >>I just want to get 1 um point of clarification you said and you cut out there for a second, you said go from product centric too, >>but to centric >>platform centric, got it, >>but centric >>purpose centric uh building on belief, got it. Okay, so something else you said they picked up on, you talked about um actually you know crossing industries and this is something that's new and that's enabled by digital. I want to get your thoughts on it. I mean if you look at industry structures historically, whether it's manufacturing or automotive or financial services or healthcare or media and entertainment, whatever it is, there was a value chain, there is a value chain that's built up in that business might be uh it might be R. And D. Sales and marketing, service, manufacturing, etcetera. And if you are in that industry, you largely stayed in that industry forever. And now you're seeing these, a lot of big company, a lot of big tech companies having a dual disruption agenda, not only horizontally to from a technical standpoint, but you're seeing amazon get into grocery, you know, they're they're buying studios, you're seeing your Apple get into finance. And so the enabler is data in digital and that talks to the business model re imagination that you're talking about. >>Absolutely and absolutely exactly what is happening, that's what I'm really talking about. And we are firmly believing that boundaries or those boundaries are going to be blood even more so going forward, as I took a few examples and you also talked about Apple, or or even amazon all the for example. Right, so all these technology companies are just being disrupted. So, having, having said that, that data being the new fuel at the same time, Cloud being the new er now cloud as a technology that is enabling the business model. Re imagination is not just on the outside, but also on the red side. And and that's where the boundaries are becoming so closer between edge and the cloud. And how how do we give that flexibility for to the customers, to people to adopt those digital technologies across the enterprise? Right. That's what, that's what the ship that we have been seeing. >>How do you see ecosystems playing in this? I mean it's kind of, I know it's an overused term but it seems to me to be increasingly important, its power of many versus the resources of one or a few. How do you see ecosystems driving? You know, this, this purpose driven business you talk about? >>Um very, very closely I would say, and I'll give you examples also in that sense. Right faster. Um if I talk about the journey I mentioned briefly earlier about three horizon based journey, right. The first and foremost being the setting up the digital foundation that basically could be through the combination of cloud, iOT analytics, artificial intelligence and so on so forth. Right? And then eventually moving on to re imagination of business models and then leveraging the purpose led ecosystem. Now in the Horizon one, when we are setting up the digital foundation, that is where the whole ecosystem comes into play. Where and where and if I talk about our co innovation network partners like HP, where we are working together to really bring in that flexibility for the customers, even in on premise environment, giving them that kind of uh features that they can experience also in the cloud to be really able to leverage the whole our beat at the edge or in the cloud. So that's where the kind of ecosystem coming together and and and those are also some of the challenges that we have seen that customers are facing today to be able to achieve the first horizon in that journey. The challenges like accelerated or all the time to market challenges. Like are they able to achieve the flexibility to be able to offer to the business and and challenges? Like are they able to achieve transformation at scale or is it just appointed um pointed poc sort of thing? Right so bringing the ecosystem together is able to help customers address those challenges, be it in terms of consumption driven, addressing the flexibility needs, be it in terms of the pre integrated solutions addressing the challenges related to time to market and so on and so forth. >>Can we stay on? The challenges for a minute? As I said, pre pandemic, there was a lot of complacency. We've all seen that meme of the wrecking ball coming in and kind of a tongue in cheek joke, but but the complacency is gone, so so there's there also, but still organizational challenges. It's not complacency anymore, but what's the right regime? What's the right approach? Uh everybody wants to get digital right, but a lot of people, you know, that's a do you see that as a challenge? Actually, not knowing where to prioritize it and you know, how can you help in that regard? >>Yeah, So, and I would also like to like to talk about what we have done in in certain with certain customer with challenges. Um some of the things I'll introduce TCS Cognex here, this is our platform which basically brings together the capabilities in a pre integrated uh, for, of predefined solutions accelerators of our value builders as we call it, um, for customers to be able to just integrate their environments to be able to manage the whole infrastructure or of the landscape in a completely automated and analytics driven manner. Right, so that's that's one way of addressing those challenges. What it also does is it gives that um power to the stakeholders in the organization to be able to address the key challenge of time to market because it is giving out or coming out in a pre integrated manner and be able to achieve that benefits or realize the benefits of transformation In in an accelerated time frame instead of waiting for 18-24 months, how can it be done in 3-6 months, for example. Right. That's that's that's one set and and similarly, uh if I talk about the flexibility, right, consumption driven manner is extremely, extremely important. And if I talk about hybrid cloud, so to say right today, About 1-2% of the on premise infrastructure is actually in a consumption driven manner while cloud is always gonna consumption to a manner. The trends that we're seeing is that by next year about minimum 15% of the on premise infrastructure in a hybrid cloud environment will be about or will be delivering a consumption-driven manner and and that's what is going to address the various the opportunity as well as the challenge to address that particular aspect of flexibility and that's where the ecosystem with the likes of us, teachers and HP coming together to provide solutions that are addressing those needs of our consumers. >>And when you talk about the consumption driven, obviously talking about things like HP Green Lake, that's a model that enables that kind of consumption model. You know, I feel like, I mean, I feel like that's kind of table stakes to be honest with, you, pointed out 1 to 2% of it. I said wow, clouds been around for a long time and now, but now we're seeing the rapid adoption 15% and we're also seeing, I mean I think I'll give H PE some props on this because they've got their whole company behind it, but there has to be a complimentary shift in the mindset of OK, we're not now selling boxes anymore and I think HP has done a pretty good job of this. They've made some announcements recently to that effect. They're doing an HPC. We just saw some storage announcements, so it's no longer, hey, here's a box to sell it and this is where a company like Tcs comes to play. You, you've, you've never had that box mentality, you have a solutions mentality and so, so the industry is moving in a very rapid pace now. My question is, are the customers ready for it? Are they ready for it? Because they have the cloud experience, are they ready for it on prem and what do they need to do to get ready for that? >>See um, to answer your first question already and what really is the trigger point for them being ready? The answer is yes. Okay. Um, I would say a large percentage of the customer base was ready even before pandemic, but pandemic has really made it even more prominent in the customer and that has become a need. We are seeing so many customers today. I mean, uh, in my global role, I'm seeing across industries and across markets right from north America to Australia Japan. We're in, we're in the need for having consumption. Everyone is even at on premise while cloud is definitely there, but even at on premise is so much so that really is the trigger um, at the same time now what is really driving that trigger apart from pandemic is to be able to offer that flexibility to their business. Businesses are basically reimagining, reimagining their whole uh where they are reaching out to their customers, where they are expanding into the newer markets and the speed is extremely, extremely important and that's what is really being the whole consumption, let's >>peel the onion on that. Somebody asked me this the other day why why as reserves. I said the same thing, flexibility and they're like, yeah, okay, but give me some examples. And so I said, well, first of all, they're paying by the drink. So it's a much fairer for the customer model instead of okay, charge them for what they're not even going to use or what they might use for a day or two or a month. The other is experimentation. It just seems to me that in the digital world you got to fail fast, You don't know, you don't know what, you don't know. And so these consumption models allow you to spin up experiments very quickly and cheaply and only pay for what you use is, am I, am I getting that right? >>Absolutely, Absolutely. And and and that that's exactly what the model is, that we as uh as a partner together, that we are offering. Only one thing that I would want to highlight here is, um while that's the foundation, as I said, it is setting up the digital foundation, giving the customers the flexibility. And if I talk about example, uh one of our british large, I am who really is leveraging this technology for them to be able to bring more resilience and boring traing and scales departments uh to be able to, you know, on the manufacturing line and ultimately driving to the sales value chain. So those are the things that are happening. And you took an example of basically talked about consuming purely as a service what you use. This model is basically expanding everywhere very recently. I mean I saw an out of bicycle as a service. I mean instead of buying a new bicycle, I'm just able to get one bicycle, you use it for a month, return it back to the to the owner to be able to use it only when I need it, let's say for example, so that's what is really happening even in the digital transformation, I just needed for a time basis for a particular purpose. I served that purpose, ultimately driving the business resilience, agility and then ultimately serving that purpose. Yeah, >>I think I'd love your thoughts on this. I think the real opportunity here is to for for technology companies like HP. E working with TCS to create a layer I called a layer that spans on prem name your favorite cloud or multiple clouds goes across clouds goes out to the edge. That's a layer that that hides all the underlying complexity. You're going to take care of that for me uh because it's complicated. No question about it, the bigger the universe gets, the more complicated gets. But as as a customer, I want to hide that complexity because I don't want people doing plumbing, I want people focus on on strategic initiatives and that to me, seems to be the killer app, if you will of infrastructure in the future. Is that that abstraction layer? Do you see it that way? >>Absolutely. And that's where the easiest Cognex comes into play very strongly. Right? As I said earlier, it's basically it said actually uh an air driven human machine collaboration suite. So what that really means, it is bringing together the capabilities from analytics to ai with our machine first principles and and really giving that obstructing player in a pre integrated manner from edged right up to the cloud and bringing it all together for the customers. So that that's exactly what how we are really helping the customers, um a team that, again, addressing those challenges of exploration, time to market flexibility and more importantly unifying the entire landscape into one single view if I am a C I O, or if I am a CFO, I want to see what is important to me, rather than going through multiple different dashboards support, so to say, Right, so that's what pieces Cognex, there's an important role in obstructing everything and presenting, identified you and in a draft formed service delivery model for the customers. >>So the history of TCS is pretty amazing. You guys have, I mean, the, the ascendancy of the company over the decades is actually so, so impressive now and your relationship with HP and now, of course, HP goes back, I think it goes back to the 90s. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that relationship, where it's come from, how it's evolving and where you want to see it going. >>So I think it's a um uh when you go back so long, right? Uh the only way you're able to sustain that long relationship when there is a value that we have been able to deliver to each other, and more importantly, the value that we have been able to deliver to our customers, right? And that has always been the, the mantra of the whole relationship and that continues to be going forward as well. So, so in that regard, I mean, while I would rather focus more on the future, history is definitely good, but I think going forward, um the kind of work that we're doing together to be able to solve some of our customers globally across the base across the industries is extremely valuable, both to us as well as two HP, I'm sure. And and that's where we are really looking to have uh, providing real value to our customers, not just from the technology perspective, ultimately elevating that value. How do we help them solve the business problems and not just the technology solutions? >>Well, I think we've learned that that's the 11 big thing we learned from the cloud is if you just shove all your stuff in the cloud lifted and shifted it. So what, uh, it's that operating model that you talked about earlier, that really is how you, you, you drop, you know, if you're a large company, you're talking about billions, uh, to the bottom line, not, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions, but that's, that's a game changer. I'll give you a final word enough. >>Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, as they said, I think, um, I hope I would not end up repeating my mistake, but, but that, um, solving the business problems, leveraging technology and, and irrespective of the location where the technology is based being on edge or on the cloud. It's the whole model of addressing the customer demands and the customers need is extremely, extremely important. So that's that's what the whole mantra is and that's what is really were driving us forward together in the journey, >>major shifts in industry. Digital is is the driver and and Manav. Thanks so much for being on the cube. Really appreciate your time. >>Sure, thank you. Thank you for having me >>And thanks for being with us for HP Discover 2021 the virtual version. You're watching the Cube, the leader in digital tech coverage. Keep it right there.

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage. Day two of Cisco Live from San Diego. I'm Lisa Martin. Dave Vellante is my esteemed cohost. And we're pleased to welcome one of Cisco and Cohesity's customers from Quantium, Craig Tayler, Executive Manager at Business Technology and Platforms. Craig, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. It's great to be here. >> Great seeing you. >> So, we love talking with customers. We love talking about data. Tell our audience a little bit about Quantium. I know you guys have expertise in two core domains, data science, AI, two really sexy topics that we talk about on theCUBE at every event. But give our audience a little bit of the flavor of who you guys are. >> Yeah, so Quantium's been around for 16 years, founded and headquartered in Sydney, Australia. And really, they are like you mentioned, the two main aspects of our business. So when you think of data science more as human intelligence, and then the AI side is how we can augment that with computers as much as possible. So, on the human intelligence side, we're looking at things like data curation, how can we work with a company to understand their data, perhaps monetize their data. And then on the AI side, we're more looking at things like, how do we do predictive modeling or predictive analytics, and how can we get that in front of maybe say a supply chain solution, or working with grocery stores around actually predicting how much fresh food they need. So we think of these things like, wouldn't it be great if we had a better idea of how much we needed? Less waste, less cost, everything else. So that's really how we kind of split the two sides of the company. >> You guys provide this as a service, is that right? >> Yeah, that's correct. So, with those two arms we focus on, whether it be a consulting engagement with a company, where that's a one-off, or an ongoing thing, and we have a range of products that we sell as well, with the idea that any of these companies, whether it be a bank or a retailer, can plug these tools into their existing solutions to give them some real data, some real impact, as opposed to the thoughts, or the feels, or the gut instincts, that we've been working on for so long, all right. >> So paint a picture of your environment. I mean, what does it look like? Cloud, not cloud, apps. >> Yeah. It's certainly a variety. So, if we think, on-premise is really where we do a lot of our work. And this is around, a lot of companies still feel a little bit sensitive around where their data is going, and they like that security of knowing physically where it's located. So on-premise stack we have a bit over 300 servers running a Hadoop cluster, that's where we do the majority of our AI work. And then what we augment that with is, and what we use the cloud a lot for, as we're doing work globally, we're doing a lot of work in North America, it's not feasible to bring all that data back to Sydney, process it, and send it all back, so then really, what we use the cloud for is to take our technology, take our analytics, to the data. So if we're working with a customer, West Coast, East Coast, and they're in Azure we'll deploy in Azure. If they're in GCP, we can deploy in GCP. And that's really how we use cloud is to offer our service, as much as we can, around the world. >> So you said, you got 300 servers, did I hear you right, in a Hadoop cluster, right? >> Yeah, correct. >> What's your distribution? >> We use MapR at the moment. I know there's certainly been a bit of news about them. >> I was going to ask you, well, all three of them. (Craig laughs) Well I guess Hortonworks now folded in, but-- >> Yeah, correct. Cloud has certainly shaken up that marketplace quite a bit. >> Dave: I'm sure, yeah. >> It's been something that we've been keeping a close eye on for quite a while. What's the future there? Is it another distribution? Will someone pick up MapR? Will they get through it? So it is interesting, it's certainly a challenge, but when you're playing in a more emerging space, these are some of the risks you take, but we've always felt that they're worth it. We've had many great years of that and we don't really see any reason that we're not going to get more great years out of that Hadoop environment. >> Yeah, I mean, the IP's going to survive, and it sounds like you guys were early on into it, you got a lot of value out of it. If you had to do it again, you'd probably do the same thing. >> Yeah, that's certainly true. I think, what we've built, there are cloud options on the hyperscale providers that you can use, but look, out of the box, they're not really capable of what we were trying to do. So if we had our time again, we probably would still build the same solution. We'd build it a little bit quicker, obviously, because it's a little bit more in the marketplace, it's not such an emerging technology, but I think we would do the same thing again. >> Dave: Right, and MapR was always ahead of the game with their approach. >> Correct. >> So, obvious question is, how do you protect that data? You're a Cohesity customer, but talk about the data protection aspect of that. >> Yeah, so this is where Cohesity really had a lot of synergies with us, was centralizing a whole raft of datasets into one location. And that's what we do with Hadoop. We take a lot of different datasets and we put it all there. We aggregate it there. So on the secondary data side we had the same problem. Silo datasets all over the environment. Things like, the protection aspect, the compliance aspect, it's not impossible, but it's very hard to manage. So what we really wanted to do was, what do we do with the data when we're not using it anymore? So we might still want to use it in the future, we have to hold onto it. And we needed a better solution for how we manage that. So, having Cohesity, which, to us, being a hyper-converged solution, it's very similar to how Hadoop works. It's a lot of data, a lot of compute, and that's how you deploy it. So we found that actually having all of that, the secondary kind of data that we still needed to keep, combined into one location, for us, it matched on a technology level. And then being able to have all that data in one space, you can do some analytics on it. How often are we using it? What is the data? How many copies of it do we have? So there are a lot of synergies from the data science aspect, and also the technology aspect, which has worked really well for us. >> So what was profound about Hadoop was the idea of bringing five megabytes of code to a petabyte of data, leaving the data where it is, highly distributed environment, obviously challenge protecting that. Help us understand. You're saying that Cohesity architecture is well-suited for that type of environment? >> Yeah, it certainly is. I mean, it augments it quite well, is how I'd say. So at the moment we keep the environments quite separate, but the way we manage them is very similar. So there's great audit login, great security controls that you can place on both environments. So the way that we structure Hadoop with role-based access, who can perform what action, the same thing applies in Cohesity. So now we sort of see that the way that we manage primary is the same way that we can manage secondary. So, it's easier for the staff, when we come to things like compliance or legislation, or, we value data, it's our lifeblood, so we have to be very careful with it. So if we want to do any audit reports or anything like this, we can do 'em the same way. Who has access, what they've done. >> So, Hadoop's been around a lot longer than Cohesity. So, what were you doing before Cohesity, and what were some of those challenges? >> Yeah, what we were doing was a lot. And that was really the only option we had. So we had four or five different solutions that had kind of organically grown over time, whether that was some secondary storage, multiple different backup products, throw a couple of NASes in there, just for good measure. >> Just in case. >> Yeah, just in case. And then really, what we were doing, and how we managed that, is we had close to one FTE dedicated to that environment. It's not great for that person, it's not really the funnest of jobs. And then obviously, the management of it becomes quite difficult. And so that was how we did it. We got by. But it certainly could have been a lot better. >> So that was one FTE dedicated to the backup? >> Just dedicated to the backup. >> Dedicated to data protection? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Okay. So then you bring in Cohesity, you do the business case, say oh wow, and part of that was we can free up this person to do other things, I presume, right? >> Yeah, yeah, definitely. That was actually certainly one of the key business cases. So, IT is a cost center. We certainly, we work for the business, we support the business, there's no doubt about that. But we are, at the end of the day, a cost center. So getting extra headcount or getting equipment, there has to be a really good business case behind this. And so we found that, so we freed up about 80% of time that we're spending on this, and so actually the two biggest things that we've seen as a benefit of that, staff engagement is actually a lot higher, right, because we don't have someone just dedicated to turning the screws on this old solution all the time. So they get to spend more time on newer tech, which is great, and obviously, if their time's freed-up, value-added activities. What can they be focusing on. >> So how's it work? Is it a self-service platform now? Or somebody, this individual, sets the overall policy, and then people apply it as they see fit, the application guys? >> Yeah, so we have a range. So our infrastructure team holds the overall management of it, and we have that one person who kind of, say rules it, so to speak, but the way we've done with this role-based access, we can give the service desk permission to search backups, so if someone needs a restore, or maybe legal and the compliance team want to know who was accessing what, we can give a lot more self-service to these teams. So the service desk, if they're dealing with an end-user that wants a restore, within 30 seconds, we can tell them, okay, here is the backup we have. Here are the dates that we have it. Which one do you want? Previously, that's a week-and-a-half turnaround. Escalate a ticket, spend three days doing restores and searching through it-- >> Dave: Working weekends. >> Right. Working weekends, and if you even do have the data. Typically what happens, by the time you've restored it, the customer has said, "Look, well I don't need it anymore." It's too late. >> So let's talk about some of the customer benefits. You've only deployed this about six months ago. >> Yeah, correct. >> You talked about a number of the benefits from a time perspective, allowing valuable FTEs to not only be reallocated for other projects, but also from a job satisfaction perspective-- >> Yeah definitely. >> Which is all the way up to the top end of the business. But in terms of helping customers extract more value from their data, monetizing their data, that example that you just gave of where it took too long to recover data before and the customer, the time has passed, what are some of the impacts that your customers are achieving so far? >> Yeah, so I think the biggest area of this that I think we actually look at the most, is that, like I mentioned earlier, we will do, say a piece of work with a customer, and then we'll keep that data. We might need it in the future, but there's not an ongoing engagement. What are we going to do with that? And so we tend to sort of put it aside. If a customer wants any further work done, or perhaps they want to come back with clarification, or anything like this, it then takes us quite a bit of time to find that data, get it back into production, get it back to the state that we were previously using it in. So, one of the biggest things that we've seen is actually now having all of that data always available on Cohesity, and being a hyper-converged platform, it has a lot of compute on it as well, so we can actually run some simple analytics on that data. So if a customer comes back and wants to query just a couple of small items, or perhaps we want to recheck a couple of things, super easy now for us to do that. And so we talk about time to market, or anything like this, is really big for us, and customer responsiveness. So if a customer is asking us a question and the answer is a five-minute answer, they don't want it in four days. So if we can turn that answer around a lot quicker, then obviously everyone's happier. >> And you've already been able to start achieving that? >> Yeah, we have been able to start achieving that already. Whether that be from a customer perspective, and certainly from a compliance perspective, if we have a customer that actually wants to know, where is our data, who has accessed it, everything else, we can turn that around straightaway. So obviously, when we talk about customer satisfaction, or that relationship, they feel a lot more comfortable that we're doing the right thing with their data, and that is obviously hugely invaluable for us as a business. >> And just another infrastructure question. These 300 servers, it's mostly UCS, is that right? Or a lot of UCS? >> Yeah, so we use Cisco for pretty much everything. We certainly are heavy, heavy users of UCS, and so, when we are looking at, I mean, implementing anything to the environment, you don't want it to be a lengthy process, because your return on investment is going to be hit. If you're spending three months installing something, you've already paid, you're getting no benefit out if it, it's now three months old before it's even implemented. So having this kit on Cisco UCS has been great for us, and we were having issues with our previous backup solution and we actually managed to implement the Cohesity solution on UCS and start using it before repairing our existing solution. So it's phenomenal how quickly, through UCS, we were able to bring it in. >> Dave: What kind of issues were you having? Just integration issues, or? >> Yeah, so with our previous backup solution, being a fragmented solution that we had stitched together, we had something as simple as a RAID controller failure caused a whole bunch of data corruption across multiple areas, and so, how the NAS saw the data corruption was different to how the SANDS saw it, and trying to re-index everything, we were struggling to understand what was going on. And whilst we were working through that, we actually had some other members of the team implement Cohesity and get it into the environment quicker than we could repair our existing solution. That's the power of Cisco UCS, really. >> Looking at this massive transformation that Cisco has been undergoing for a while, from a traditional network appliance vendor to now hardware, software, what are your thoughts on how that transformation, which is, in part, you could say, accelerated by DevNet, how is it going to enable businesses like yours to be able to start getting value even faster from the technology? >> Yeah, that's a very good question, and that's something, I think, a few of us in the industry, if we go back two, three, four, five years, was Cisco going to reinvent itself? What was that place? With hyperscale cloud, all these kind of things. I think quite a few people had some questions around what was going to happen in that space. They weren't always the quickest to market. They had great products, but there was a bit of speed issues there. And what we've seen as they've reinvented themselves is, Cisco has this great name for really being ahead of the curve, or leading industry, and this is, I think, what they were built on, really. And so it's been great from our perspective to see them, say, almost getting back to their roots a little bit, in this regard, and so for us, we are a technology business, we are fast-moving, our customers want things to be fast-moving, and so being able to rely on a technology partner like Cisco, and knowing that they're looking for the latest and greatest even quicker than ourselves, I think that's probably where we start to see the biggest impact. In the past, we might have a challenge that we need to solve, you talk to some vendors, and you might hear something like, oh, we're working on that. Maybe in 12 to 18 months we'll have it in the marketplace. Well we need it now. We don't need it in 18 months, it's a today problem. And that's not what we're seeing anymore with Cisco. Typically, any conversation we have with our account reps around here are some of the challenges, here are what our customers want to do, more frequently than not, our Cisco account reps will say, I think we have a solution for that. And that really, being able to partner with players like that in the industry, that makes some of the biggest differences for us as a company, because we need to partner with all these people to do what we do. >> Exactly. So, with all the momentum that you guys have achieved in just six short months, what's next? >> Yeah, Quantium is certainly a fast-moving company, like I mentioned, and what we wanted, we always like to run close to the leading edge, we're similar with Hadoop, we like to be early adopters. We like technology to grow with us. And this is what we saw in Cohesity. So, they haven't been around for long, and they're already doing everything we need. So we think, well this is a great mix. If we've got someone who's already solving everything that we need, this question of what next is great. And so as we move more towards your hyperscale cloud, being able to run Cohesity across all those environments to manage all of that data across all of it, that's certainly a big one that we're investigating. Like I mentioned, we keep pretty much all of our data, and so actually being able to use cloud as an archive solution, it sounds great, but then it's another silo to manage, it's another solution that you need to implement, but Cohesity will manage all that for us. So, the what next, I think, is we'll see the scale out of the solution as our data requirement grows, we will see it expand into the cloud environments that we're going to start building, so we really see it growing with us from that aspect. And then we see a great idea of being able to repurpose a lot of our on-premise hardware by archiving out to the cloud as well. >> What about SaaS? Do you see a need to use a Cohesity to protect your SaaS data, or are you kind of not there yet? >> Yeah, I think it certainly has a play there, it's still something that I think we're exploring a little bit more to make sure that it's a right fit. But certainly, there is an opportunity there to be explored, yeah. >> Always opportunities. Well Craig, we appreciate you stopping by theCUBE-- >> Thank you for having me. >> And sharing how Quantium is leveraging your partnerships with Cisco, with Cohesity, to drive those core business drivers of data science and AI. >> Thank you. >> Our pleasure. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from Cisco Live, in San Diego. (light music)

>> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley. HOLLOWAY ALTO, California It is a cube conversation. >> Hello and welcome to Cube conversations. I'm James Kabila's lead analyst at Wicked Bond. Today we've got an excellent guest. Who's a Cube alumnus? Par excellence. It's your own Haviv who is the founder and CEO of a guajillo. Hello. You're wrong. Welcome in. I think you're you're coming in from Tel Aviv. If I'm not mistaken, >> right? Really? Close the deal of any thanks from my seeing you again. >> Yeah. Nice to see you again. So I'm here in our Palo Alto studios. And so I'm always excited when I can hear your own and meet with your room because he always has something interesting in new to share. But what they're doing in the areas of cloud and serve earless and really time streaming analytics And now, data science. I wasn't aware of how deeply they're involved in the whole data Science pipelines, so ah, your own. This is great to have you. So my first question really is. Can you sketch out? What are the emerging marketplace requirements that USA gua Si are seeing in the convergence of all these spaces? Especially riel time streaming analytics edge computing server lis and data science and A I can you give us a sort of ah broad perspective and outlook on the convergence and really the new opportunities or possibilities that the convergence of those technologies enable for enterprises that are making deep investments. >> Yeah, so I think we were serving dissipated. What's happening now? We just call them different names will probably get into into this discussion in a minute. I think what you see is the traditional analytics and even data scientist Science was starting at sort of a research labs, people exploring cancer, expressing, you know, impact. Whether on, you know, people's moved its era. And now people are trying to make real or a Y from a guy in their assigned, so they have to plug it within business applications. Okay, so it's not just a veil. A scientist Inning the silo, you know, with a bunch of large that he got from his friends, the data engineer in the scan them and Derrickson Namesake runs to the boss and says, You know what? You know, we could have made some money in a year ago. We've done something so that doesn't make a lot of impact on the business, where the impact on the business is happening is when you actually integrate a I in jackpot in recommendation engines in doing predictive analytics on analyzing failures and saving saving failures on, you know, saving people's life. Those kind of use cases. Doctors are the ones that record a tighter integration between the application and the data and algorithms that come from the day I. And that's where we started to think about our platform. Way worked on a real time data, which is where you know, when you're going into more production environment of not fatal accident. Very good, very fast integration with data. And we have this sort of fast computation layer, which was a one micro services, and now everyone talks about micro services. We sort of started with this area, and that is allowing people to build those intelligent application that are integrated into the business applications. And the biggest challenges they see today for organizations is moving from this process of books on research, on data in a historical data and translating that into a visit supplication or into impact on business application. This is where people can spend the year. You know, I've seen the tweet saying with build a machine learning model in, like, a few weeks. And now we've waited eleven months for the product ization. So that artifact, >> Yes, that's what we're seeing it wicked bomb. Which is that A. I is the heart of modern applications in business and the new generation of application developers, in many ways, our data scientists, or have you know, lovers the skills and tools for data science. Now, looking at a glass zeros portfolio, you evolve so rapidly and to address a broader range of use cases I've seen. And you've explained it over the years that in position to go, as well as being a continuous data platform and intelligent edge platform, a surveillance platform. And now I see that you're a bit of a data science workbench or pipeline tooling. Clever. Could you connect these dots here on explain what is a guajillo fully >> role, Earl? Nice mark things for this in technology that we've built, OK, just over the years, you know, people, four years when we started, So we have to call it something else. Well, that I thought that analytic sort of the corporate state of science. And when we said continued analytics, we meant essentially feeding data and running, some of them speaking some results. This is the service opposed to the trend of truth which was dating the lady Throw data in and then you run the batch that analytic and they're like, Do you have some insight? So continue statistics was served a term that we've came up with a B, not the basket. You know, describe that you're essentially thinking, needing from different forces crunching it, Prue algorithms and generating triggers and actions are responsible user requests. Okay on that will serve a pretty unique and serve the fireman here in this industry even before they called it streaming or in a real time, data science or whatever. Now, if you look at our architecture are architecture, as I explained before, is comprised of three components. The first event is a real time, full time model database. You know, you know about it really exceptional in his performance and its other capabilities. The second thing is a pursue miss engine that allows us to essentially inject applications. Various guys, initially we started with application. I sense you do analytics, you know, grouping joining, you know, correlating. And then we start just adding more functions and other things like inference, saying humans recognitions and analysis. It's Arab is we have dysfunction engine. It allows us a lot of flexibility and find the really fast for the engine on a really fast data there endure it, remarkable results and then this return calling this turn this micro assume it's finger serve Ellis who certainly even where have the game of this or service gang. And the third element of our platform is a sense she having a fully manage, passed a platform where a ll those micro services our data and it threw a self service into face surfing over there is a mini cloud. You know, we've recently the last two years we've shifted to working with coronaries versus using our own A proprietary micro spurs does or frustration originally. So we went into all those three major technologies. Now, those pit into different application when they're interesting application. If you think about edge in the engine in serving many clouds, you need variety of data, sources and databases. With you, no problem arose streaming files. Terra. We'LL support all of them when our integrated the platform and then you need to go micro services that developed in the cloud and then just sort of shift into the enforcement point in the edge. And you need for an orchestration there because you want to do suffer upgrades, you need to protect security. So having all the integrated separated an opportunity for us to work with providers of agin, you may have noticed our joint announcement with Google around solution for hedge around retailers and an i O. T. We've made some announcement with Microsoft in the fast. We're going to do some very interesting announcement very soon. We've made some joint that nonsense with Samsung and in video, all around those errands, we continue. It's not that we're limited to EJ just what happens because we have extremely high density data platform, very power of fish and very well integrated. It has a great feat in the India, but it's also the same platform that we sell in. The cloud is a service or we sell two on from customers s so they can run. The same things is in the clouds, which happens to be the fastest, most real time platform on the Advantage service. An essential feature cannot just ignore. >> So you're wrong. Europe. Yeah, Iguazu is a complete cloud, native development and run time platform. Now serve earless in many ways. Seems to be the core of your capability in your platform. New Cleo, which is your technology you've open sourced. It's bill for Prem bays to private clouds. But also it has is extensible to be usable in broader hybrid cloud scenarios. Now, give us a sense for how nuclear and civilised functions become valuable or useful for data science off or for executing services or functions of data of the data science pipeline kick you connect the dots of nuclear and data science and a I from the development standpoint >> church. So So I think you know, the two pillars that we have technology that the most important ones are the data. You know, we have things like twelve batons on our data engine is very high performance and nuclear functions, and also they're very well integrated because usually services stateless. So you know, you you end up. If you want to practice that they have some challenges with service with No, no, you can't. You stay for use cases. You can mount files. You have real time connections to data, so that makes it a lot more interesting than just along the functions. The other thing, with no clothes that is extremely high performance has about two hundred times faster than land. So that means that you can actually go and build things like the stream processing and joins in real time all over practice, their base activities. You can just go and do collectors. We call them those like things. Go fetch information from whether services from routers for the X cybersecurity analysis for all sorts of sensors. So those functions are becoming like, you know, those nanobots technology of off the movies is that you just send them over to go and do things for you, whether it's the daily collection and crunching, whether it's the influencing engines, those things that, for example, get a picture of very put the model, decide what's in the picture, and that this is where we're really comes into play. They nothing important you see now an emergence off a service patterns in data science. So there are many companies that do like mother influencing as a service city what they do, they launch an end point of your eleven point and serve runs the model inside you send the Vector America values and get back in the Americans and their conversion. It's not really different and service it just wait more limited because I don't just want to send a vector off numbers because usually I understand really like a geo location of my cellphone, which are user I D. And I need dysfunction to cross correlated with other information about myself with the location. Then came commendation of which a product they need to buy. So and then those functions also have all sorts of dependency exam on different packages. Different software environment, horribles, build structures, all those. This is really where service technologies are much more suitable now. It's interesting that if you'LL go to Amazon, they have a product called Sage Maker. I'm sure yes, which is dinner, then a science block. Okay, now sage mint for although you would say that's a deal use case for after Onda functions actually don't use Amazon London functions in sage maker, and you ask yourself, Why aren't they using Lambda Stage Maker just telling you, you know you could use Lambda is a blue logic around sage maker. And that's because because London doesn't feed the use case. Okay, because lambda doesn't it is not capable of storing large content and she learning miles could be hundreds of megabytes or Landa is extremely slow. So you cannot do hi concurrency influencing with will land the function so essentially had to create another surveillance and college with a different name. Although if they just would have approved Landa, maybe it was one or a Swiss are So we're looking, We've took it, were taken the other approach We don't have the resources that I have so we created a monster virus Engine one servant attention does batch Frost is saying scream processing, consort, lots of data, even rocketeer services to all the different computation pattern with a single engine. And that's when you started taking all this trend because that's about yeah, we need two version our code. We need to, you know, record all our back into dependencies. And although yes, service doesn't so if we just had to go and tied more into the existing frameworks and you've looked at our frantically product called Tokyo Jupiter, which is essentially a scientist, right, some code in his data's passport book and then in clicks. One command called nuclear Deploy, it automatically compiles, is their science artifact in notebooks, that server and converted into a real hand function that can listen in on your next city. People can listen on streams and keep the scheduled on various timing. It could do magic. So many other things. So, and the interesting point is that if you think about their scientists there, not the farmers, because they should be a scientist on this's means that they actually have a bigger barrier to write in code. So if you serve in this framework that also automates the law daughter scaling the security provisioning of data, the versions of everything in fact fantasies, they just need to focus on writing other them's. It's actually a bigger back for the book. Now, if you just take service into them, Epstein's and they will tell you, Yeah, you know, we know how to explain, Doctor. We know all those things, so they're very their eyes is smaller than the value in the eyes of their scientists. So that's why we're actually seeing this appeal that those those people that essentially focus in life trying math and algorithms and all sorts of those sophisticated things they don't want to deal with. Coding and maintenance are refreshed. And by also doing so by oppression analyzing their cool for service, you can come back to market. You can address calle ability to avoid rewriting of code. All those big challenges the organizations are facing. >> You're gonna have to ask you, that's great. You have the tools to build, uh, help customers build serve Ellis functions for and so forth inside of Jupiter notebooks. And you mentioned Sage Maker, which is in a WS solution, which is up in coming in terms of supporting a full data science tool chain for pipeline development. You know, among teams you have a high profile partnerships with Microsoft and Google and Silver. Do you incorporate or integrator support either of these cloud providers own data science workbench offerings or third party offerings from? There's dozens of others in this space. What are you doing in terms of partnerships in that area? >> Yeah, obviously we don't want to lock us out from any of those, and, you know, if someone already has his work bench that I don't know my customers say they were locking me into your world back in our work when things are really cool because like our Jupiter is connected for real time connections to the database. And yes, serve other cool features that sentir getting like a huge speed boost we have. But that's on A with an within vigna of round Heads and Integration, which reviews are creating a pool of abuse from each of one of the data scientist running on African essentially launch clubs on this full of civilians whose off owning the abuse, which are extremely expensive, is you? No. But what we've done is because of her. The technology beside the actual debate engine is open source. We can accept it essentially just going any sold packages. And we demonstrate that to Google in danger. The others we can essentially got just go and load a bunch of packages into their work match and make it very proposed to what we provide in our manage platform. You know, not with the same performance levels. Well, functionality wise, the same function. >> So how can you name some reference customers that air using a guajillo inside a high performance data science work flows is ah, are you Are there you just testing the waters in that market for your technology? Your technology's already fairly mature. >> That says, I told you before, although you know, sort of changed messaging along the lines. We always did the same thing. So when we were continuous analytics and we've spoken like a year or two ago both some news cases that we Iran like, you know, tell cooperators and running really time, you know, health, a predictive health, monitoring their networks and or killing birds and those kind of things they all use algorithms. You control those those positions. We worked with Brian nailing customers so we can feed a lot of there there in real time maps and do from detection. And another applications are on all those things that we've noticed that all of the use cases that we're working with involved in a science in some cases, by the way, because of sort of politics that with once we've said, we have analytics for continuous analytics, we were serving send into sent into the analytic schools with the organization, which more focused on survey data warehouse because I know the case is still serve. They were saying, and I do. And after the people that build up can serve those data science applications and serve real time. Aye, aye. OK, Ianto. Business applications or more, the development and business people. This is also why we sort of change are our name, because we wanted to make it very clear that we're aren't the carnage is about building a new applications. It's not about the warehousing or faster queries. On a day of Eros is about generating value to the business, if you ask it a specific amplification. And we just announced two weeks in the investment off Samsung in Iguazu, former that essentially has two pillars beyond getting a few million dollars, It says. One thing is that they're adopted. No cure. Is there a service for the internal clouds on the second one is, we're working with them on a bunch of us, Della sighs. Well, use case is one of them was even quoted in enough would make would be There are no I can not say, but says she knows our real business application is really a history of those that involves, you know, in in intercepting data from your sister's customers, doing real time on analytics and responding really quickly. One thing that we've announced it because of youse off nuclear sub picture. We're done with inferior we actually what were pulled their performance. >> You're onto you see if you see a fair number of customers embedding machine learning inside of Realtor time Streaming stream computing back ones. This is the week of Flink forward here in San San Francisco. I I was at the event earlier this week and I I saw the least. They're presenting a fair amount of uptake of ml in sight of stream computing. Do you see that as being a coming meet Mainstream best practice. >> Streaming is still the analytics bucket. OK, because what we're looking for is a weakness which are more interactive, you know, think about like, uh, like a chatterbox or like doing a predictive analytic. It's all about streaming. Streaming is still, you know, it's faster flow data, but it's still, sir has delay the social. It's not responses, you know. It's not the aspect of legacy. Is that pickle in streaming? Okay, the aspect of throughput is is higher on streaming, but not necessarily the response that I think about sparks streaming. You know, it's good at crossing a lot of data. It's definitely not good at three to one on would put spark as a way to respond to user request on the Internet S O. We're doing screaming, and we see that growth. But think where we see the real growth is panic to reel of inches. The ones with the customer logs in and sends a request or working with telcos on scenarios where conditions of LA car, if the on the tracks and they settled all sorts of information are a real time invent train. Then the customer closer says, I need a second box and they could say No, this guy needs to go away to that customer because how many times you've gotten technician coming to your house and said I don't have that more exactly. You know, they have to send a different guy. So they were. How do you impact the business on three pillars of business? Okay, the three pillars are one is essentially improving your china Reducing the risk is essentially reducing your calls. Ask him. The other one is essentially audio, rap or customer from a more successful. So this is around front and application and whether it's box or are doing, you know our thing or those kind of us kisses. And also under you grow your market, which is a together on a recommendation in at this time. So all those fit you if you want, have hey, I incorporated in your business applications. In few years you're probably gonna be dead. I don't see any bits of sustained competition without incorporating so ability to integrate really real data with some customer data and essentially go and react >> changes. Something slightly you mentioned in video as a partner recently, Of course, he announced that few weeks ago. At their event on, they have recently acquired Melon ox, and I believe you used to be with Melon Axe, so I'd like to get your commentary on that acquisition or merger. >> Right? Yes, yes, I was VP Data Center man Ox. Like my last job, I feel good friends off off the Guider, including the CEO and the rest of the team with medicines. And last week I was in Israel's with talk to the media. Kansas. Well, I think it's a great merger if you think about men in Ox Head as sort of the best that breaking and storage technology answer Silicon Side and the video has the best view technologies, man. It's also acquired some compute cheap technologies, and they also very, very nice. Photonics technologies and men are today's being by all the club providers. Remiss Troll was essentially only those technical engagement would like the seizures and you know the rest of the gas. So now VP running with the computation engine in and minerals coming, we serve the rest of the pieces were our storage and make them a very strong player. And I think it's our threatens intel because think about it until they haven't really managed to high speed networking recently. They haven't really managed to come with Jiffy use at your combat and big technology, and so I think that makes a video, sort of Ah, pretty. You know, vendor and suspect. >> And another question is not related to that. But you're in Tel Aviv, Israel. And of course, Israel is famous for the start ups in the areas of machine learning. And so, especially with a focus on cyber security of the Israel, is like near the top of the world in terms of just the amount of brainpower focused on cyber security there. What are the hot ML machine? Learning related developments or innovations you see, coming out of Israel recently related to cybersecurity and distributed cloud environments, anything in terms of just basic are indeed technology that we should all be aware of that will be finding its way into mainstream Cloud and Cooper Netease and civilised environments. Going forward, your thoughts. >> Yes, I think there are different areas, you know, The guys in Israel also look at what happens in sort of the U. S. And their place in all the different things. I think with what's unique about us is a small country is always trying to think outside of the box because we know we cannot compete in a very large market. It would not have innovation. So that's what triggers this ten of innovation part because of all this tippy expects in the country. And also there's a lot of cyber, you know, it's time. I think I've seen one cool startup. There's also backed by our VC selling. Serve, uh, think about like face un recognition, critical technology off sent you a picture and make it such that you machine learning will not be able to recognize Recognize that, you know, sort of out of the cyber attack for image recognition. So that's something pretty unique that I've heard. But there are other starts working on all the aspects on their ops and information in our animal and also cyber automated cyber security and hope. Curious aspect. >> Right, Right. Thank you very much. Your own. This has been an excellent conversation, and we've really enjoyed hearing your comments. And Iguazu. It was a great company. Quite quite an innovator is always a pleasure to have you on the Cube. With that, I'm going to sign off. This is James Kabila's with wicked bond with your own haviv on dh er we bid You all have a good day. >> Thank you.

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Think 2019. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at IBM Think 2019 in San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we're welcoming a couple of guys to theCUBE for the first time. We've got Craig Reese, Cisco global alliance executive at IBM, and Jeff Gatz, IBM partner alliance executive at Cisco. >> Correct. >> Alright, guys, so this is not the first time that you've met. You guys have been working together for a very long time. Craig, let's start with you. As we look at this world that we're in today. The average company has, what? Five different private clouds, public clouds. We're in this reality of hybrid multi-cloud. I read a stat the other day, Stu, that you shared with me, that 80% of organizations in 2018 migrated data or apps from public cloud. So there's this inherent challenging kind of complex situation that we live in. >> That is true. >> What is the hard truth that organizations have to go through or face about transacting business in a multi-cloud environment? >> Yeah, well, it's as you described, it is a multi-cloud, so by definition is complex. Two, the kind of the easy things have been moved, right? So maybe only 20% of the workloads, the easy stuff is moved, now the hard stuff has to start, and how do you do that? How do you understand what those workloads are? How do you understand which cloud's the right cloud? If any cloud. Maybe it needs to stay on-premise, right? So as you're looking at private cloud, public cloud, on-prem, how do you get there? Who can help you get there? And that we believe we come in, both from a services provider as well as a key technology partner, right? I mean, the technology alone isn't enough, right? You have to be able to figure out how to have it work within the organization and have the technology work as well for you. It's a balancing act but we think that's where our strong suit is from and IBM Services standpoint. >> And I'd say that complexity, it almost leads to paralysis for a lot of businesses. They've done what they can do, that 80% becomes really difficult, and so they end up in a cycle of what's the right technology? What's the right solution? How do I move forward? And that's where Cisco looks at IBM Services and says, okay, this is a partnership that allow our customers to more easily transition into that next phase of digitization. >> We were actually at Cisco Live in Barcelona two weeks ago and we heard a lot about multi-cloud and how those solutions fit together. Explain to our audience a little bit, what is the IBM plus Cisco? How does that go together? Both companies have a long history in the data center. IBM's got lots of applications, CISCO, of course, strong on the network. So explain where there's some of those deep intersection points and some of the services that come together. >> So if you start from a services or you start from the IBM-Cisco relationship standpoint, we're not new kids on the block. We go back decades, two decades, together in terms of IBM as a partner deploying Cisco technologies, incorporating Cisco technologies, and our customers. So we have a strong base of skills, we have a long history, but I think in this cloud world, we also have a shared perspective that it is a multi-cloud world. It's not, well, you're going to do this and we're going to do this. We do have a shared perspective of what our customers need and we believe that together we bring a unique proposition to them in the marketplace, far different than maybe I would say different than other Cisco partner, but also even just from a services integrator, or an IT services integrator, which is really what we are. >> So just to parlay on that 'cause one of the things we really worked with with customers is there's a lot of different ways customers want to consume technology now. And so there's standard systems integrator perspective, but really what we're seeing now is customer's are a lot more interested in, how do I offload IT and just go about the business of running what I'm good at? I want somebody else to do the thing that they're good at so I can do what I'm good at. And so when you look as a managed service provider, what does that really mean? So is it just as a service consumption model? Is that something more along the lines of, take it over for me and manage everything together? And where we see really unique value, where IBM's really investing, that we're really excited about, is in the automation and orchestration across the globe for their customer. So not just, how do I provide hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud, but offer that in a way that is consumptive, and then automated and orchestrated for them so that it really is just a turnkey easy button, if you will. >> Customers have gotten spoiled, right? It's easy, swipe a card and all of a sudden you're spun up. Well, now they're looking for that at a broader range across the enterprise, and what Jeff just said, that's one of where we think we can bring value to them in helping them get to that consumption model that they want, they've gotten used to, while they're still trying to do the hard stuff with the technology. >> So, Craig, what's a double click into that value perspective? Where does IBM and your services really shine here, and help customers actually leverage what you're bringing to unlock the value of their data? >> So first off would be global, right? I mean, let's face it, we are a large company, global presence, both in terms of our skill base, in terms of the management capabilities that Jeff talked about that we have. So we bring that global footprint, that global presence, to be able to deploy, design, build, run, manage, kind of take them through their whole life cycle. And in our offerings, it's kind of the where we're going. We're going from being a custom one-off, custom two-off. It's really looking at standardizing 80, 90% of this to drive the automation benefits, to drive the consistency and the delivery model, to deliver the SLAs that they want out of this, all backed up by the business model that how they want to consume it. So it's a definite change in going down that path. >> Jeff, you mentioned earlier that customer's can just have paralysis based on there's so many choices out there. And here Craig talking about we need to get standardization. That's one of the challenges today is there's so many options. It's nice if I just can consume something as a service, but, oh, my business is a little bit different and I have special requirements. Something I heard a lot at the Cisco show and I'm hearing in here is you need to meet them where they are. And at the Cisco show, it was the bridge to possible. It's like, where are you today and how do you get there? Help give us a little bit of insight as to, because today IT is, in my words, I'll say it's a heterogeneous mess. (chuckles) Everybody, it's like I built it based on what I need and inside I built temples of excellence or silos. So how do I get from that world before that was highly fragmented and very different to allowing it to be able to be scalable, and grow, and change faster? >> So virtualization becomes that double-edged sword, right? It gives us that flexibility, but it also causes that fragmentation across 'cause I have so much more flexibility now. So I think the generic 80/20 rule applies. Every customer, your mileage may vary, right? But you can get to a base standard of what is the right platform with which to provide the flexibility that individual customers need, and that's where the experience of IBM Services, they've worked with every Fortune 1000 customer you can possibly imagine. So they've seen all the permutations that are out there, especially as it relates to deploying Cisco technology. So they understand what base they need going forward, and then what part are they going to have to tweak for those customer's to really adopt and execute on their IT strategy? >> So when you're in customer conversations, and this is a question for both of you, so, Craig, we'll start with you. When we look at the data problem, it goes all the way up to the C level, right? To the boardroom because there's a tremendous amount of value that needs to be unlocked there. When you're having these conversations, especially the capabilities, combined power that Cisco and IBM bring together, where are these conversations with customers? Are you starting at that C-suite or are you talking with the guys and the gals with the feet on the street that are living in this chaotic heterogeneity? I think, that Stu called it. (Craig laughing) Where do those conversations begin, Craig? >> I think it is at the C-suite for a large portion of it, at least the direction maybe comes from the C-suite. We need to do something different than how we did. Who could we talk to? Who can we bring in to have that conversation? Kind of may move down to the teams that are closer to the ground. And you start hearing themes that become kind of common. How do I deal with security? How do I deal with data privacy? Where I have those concerns. How do I determine what applications and workloads I should move where, and what's the most cost-effective place for those to run? So I think we can bring that expertise, we can bring that guidance, that consultative approach to those discussions with the customer. Not only us but with the Cisco team as well to really start getting to the point where we believe the offerings we have to move you to a hybrid cloud, migration path, or this type of offering, it does hit that 80%, and then we can hone in on, but what is that 20% that's unique for your business that we have to figure out maybe uniquely from a technology standpoint, from services we offer, from the SLA, whatever it would be, to really get them there. But I think it starts more at the top but works its way down. My view, anyway. >> I completely agree. The conversation starts at the C-suite, but that tends to be relatively generic, right? In terms of this is our strategy, and then it gets passed down, and you get into that 20% which is the heavy lifting as soon as you get down to the next layer. But it does start from the top down, and it has to these days. >> And I distinctly remember one customer we had where we did sit in a room. It started from the top and we had lots of smart people in the room, and we had three possibilities sketched out on the whiteboard. Which one do we think really solves the problem here? Because there are multiple paths to go to get there, and we had to pick the path we think makes the most sense, and then convince the customer this is the right way to go and get them bought in. >> One of the things that if you look at this, the transformation that people are going through, in many ways that moved to from a capex model to an opex model is one of the things, the promise of the cloud. But you talk about struggles in the C-suite. The CFO used to say, here's your budget for the year, and I can understand that, and, wait, this is going to be uncertain and I'm not sure what that bill's going to be next month or a quarter from now, or how do I do my planning? Give us a little bit of insight into that transformation. >> I tell you, it's uncertain as a service provider too. (laughing) There's two sides to that. They just say, well, I want an SLA and I want a service, and I want it to go infinitely up and infinitely down. You have to sort of meet, de-risk each side, where you pick your battles, and get to a point where the customer believes the service is valuable from a business standpoint, from a productivity standpoint, from hitting the objectives that they set down from the C-suite, and you hopefully have a good partnering relationship, triangular, customer, partner, service provider, where you're having that ongoing dialogue, you're delivering on the value, you're helping to expand that, and those risk issues go away over time. But the proof is always in the first six, 12 months of delivery. >> I'll borrow your phrase of meeting customers where they're at, right? This idea of consumption. I think a lot of customers are interested in it, but there's a cost to that financial flexibility. And so maybe it starts at a zero to a hundred flexibility, and it comes quickly down based on what you determine jointly between the three of us is really the right solution. That's really where it's at in this as a service model. It makes a lot more sense, it's easier to do, and it's purely software, but as soon as you're on-premise, that becomes a slightly more challenging conversation and that's what this partnership does day in and day out. So as we wrap this up, one thing I kind of want to do is click in to the customer experience a little bit more. You were talking, Craig, about a lot of companies have moved the easy stuff, right? They've pushed that easy button. They have a hybrid multi-cloud, a strategy that's effective for 20% of their business. For the other 80%, are you saying where, I mean, in any company, in any industry, Stu, we know this, as we talk to companies all over the globe, data is the life blood of any organization that has transformative power. But, I'm curious, in that journey to get a company from 20%, to 30%, to 40%, where they're actually starting to have to tackle those more complex workloads, are you seeing any industries in particular that are, I don't want to say early adopters, but are understanding the value that IBM Services and Cisco are bringing together in order to facilitate the speed at which they have to transform? >> So I would say our customer base is cross industry. What I would say is the industry that seems to have the most questions, the most concerns, the most reservations is the financial services industry. And there they have to be very specific around what's my data privacy issue, where am I at with security? I got to tell you, Cisco has some very strong customers in that space that really help in that partnership, particularly around the financial services industry. They're the toughest ones, I think, at this point, from my standpoint. >> Yeah, I mean financial services, obviously where you and I engage a lot, but I would say the thing that's most exciting to me is that it's not just financial services. We're seeing it across the board. I wouldn't say there's an industry outside of, industries or companies that are born in the cloud model, but the more, legacy's the wrong word, but traditional business models, they're all shifting, because they have to to remain relevant. >> Exactly, they have to. Well, that just means plenty of opportunities-- >> Absolutely. >> For IBM Services and Cisco. Gentlemen, thank you so much for chatting with Stu and me on the program today. We appreciate it and congratulations, you're now CUBE alumni, so you each get a reward. It's like a gold start but it's a blue CUBE sticker. >> Awesome, and I would like to thank Cisco for being a Platinum Partner here at IBM Think this week. We appreciate them being a partner here in the partner showcase. >> Yeah, and then for the folks that are here the show, please come by, get your free pair of socks, and you can get signed up to win special prizes. >> Special prizes and socks. Wow, you guys, that's-- >> What more could you want? >> I'm speechless. Thanks so much Craig and Jeff, appreciate your time. For Stu Miniman, and I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from day one coverage of IBM Think 2019. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next 2018, brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. (electronic music) >> Hello, everyone, welcome to theCUBE, here, live in San Francisco at Masconi South. We're here with Google Cloud Next Conference. It's Google Next 2018. It's theCUBE's exclusive three days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, and I'm joined with my co-host Dave Vallente. Jeff Rick's here, the whole team is here. This is a big break out moment for Google Cloud and we're going to break it down for you. Going to have interviews with Diane Green coming in today, Google Executives, Google's top women in the Cloud, top customers, and top people within the ecosystem. Google Cloud is really going to the next level. This show is really about coming out party for two years of work that Diane Green and her team have been doing, transforming Google from the largest Cloud for their own business, to making Google Cloud consumable and easy to use with the technology for large enterprise customers as well as developers around the world, global platform. Dave, we had the keynote here. I'd say Google we're seeing, introduce their Google Cloud service platform GCP certifying partners, Cisco announced on stage they are re-selling Google Cloud, which takes a big objection off the table around not having a quote, "Enterprise ready sales force". Google is in every large enterprise, Google's Cloud is morphing into a large scale technology driven Cloud. The number one advantage they have is their technology, their OpenSource, and now a partnership with Cisco, and all the machine learning and all the infrastructure that they have are bringing out a new look. This is Google's coming out party. This is really two years of hard work, that Diane Green and the team have accomplished. Working, bringing on new people, bringing on a whole new set of capabilities. Checking the boxes for the table stakes, trying to get it to pull position, for the Cloud game, obviously Amazon is significantly ahead of everybody. Microsoft making great progress, their stock is up. Microsoft, although leveraging their core confidency, the enterprise and the office, and all the existing business that they do. Again a B to B, Google bringing in end-user centric view with all the automation. Big announcements. Google Cloud services platform, Histeo is now shipping in production, doubling down on Kubernetes, this is Google looking at new abstraction layers for developers and businesses. Diane Green, not the most elegant in her keynotes, but really hitting all her marks that she needed to hit. Big customer references, and really showcasing their competitive advantage, what they want to do, the posture of Google Cloud is clear, next is the execution. >> So here at Google Next 25,000 registered people, so big crowd. Diane Green said on stage 3000 engineers here, we want to talk to you. The Cisco announcements, classic case of a company without a Cloud, wanting to partner up with somebody that has a Cloud, Google, and Google, without a big enterprise sales presence. Obviously Cisco brings that. So kind of match made in heaven. Obviously, Cisco's got relationships with other Cloud providers, particularly Microsoft but, to me this makes a lot of sense. It's going GA in August, you also saw underneath that, GKE, Google Kubernetes Engine, now it's on prem, so you're seeing recognition of hybrid. We heard Diane Green talk about two years ago when she started John, she got a lot of heat from the analysts. You're not really an enterprise company, you got a long way to go, it's going to take you a decade. She basically laid down the gun and said, we are there. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about what leadership means. You just made a comment that Amazon is obviously in the lead. What is leadership? How does Google define leadership? Clearly they're leading in aspects of the Cloud. Scale, automation, OpenSource, contributing a lot, it makes me wonder, does this hundred plus billion dollar company with a hundred billion dollars in the bank, do they really care about how much money they make in the enterprise? Or are they trying to sort of change the way in which people do development, do programming, that's maybe a form of leadership that we really haven't often seen in the industry. I mean I go back, I harken back, not that it's an exact comparison, but you think about Xerox park and all the contributions they made to the industry, think about the contributions that Google's making with TensorFlow, with Kubernetes, with Istio, a lot of OpenSource chops giving to the community. And taking their time about monetizing it, not that a couple billion dollars or billion dollars a quarter is not monetization, but compared to 25 billion of Amazon, and what Microsoft's doing it's much smaller market share. >> I mean that's a great point about the monet, all the analysts and all the Wall Street guys are going to go to try to figure out, squint through the numbers try to figure out how you make money on this. We've been talking to a lot of the Google Executives and a lot of the engineers leading up to Google Next, we've had great relationship, some of their inside people. The common theme Dave that I'm hearing is absolutely they're playing the long game, but if Google's smart, they will leverage their retail business, ads and other things, and not focus on the short-term monetization, and that's pretty clear, some of the posture. That they're looking at this as an engineering culture, engineering DNA, OpenSource DNA, and they're about speed. When I press Google people and say, "What is the DNA of Google Cloud?". It all comes back down to the same thing, inclusive, open, speed. They're going to focus on how to make things faster, that has always been the culture at Google, make page loads faster, make things go faster. Amazon has the notion of, ship things as fast as possible at lower prices. Amazon is make stuff go faster and make it easy to use from a consumer standpoint so, easy of use has always been a consumer DNA of Google, and now with Cloud, if they don't focus on the short-term, they continue to march the cadence of open, speed, ease of use, and take that user-centric view, to make things easier that's key. I'm really impressed with the announcement, one little kind of technical kind of nuance is this Istio. Istio is an extension of Kubernetes, and this is where you're starting to see some signals from Google on where they're going to be scanning through with (mumbles). And that is as Kubernetes builds on top of containers, and as Kubernetes starts to be more of an orchestration layer, the services that are deployed in the Cloud are going to have more and more functionality. This is classic moving up the stack. This is an only an opportunity to build abstraction layers, that make things really easy to consume, and make things faster. If they can get that position, that beach head, they will enable developer greatness, and that'll maybe hopefully change the game a little bit, and sling shot them into a position that's different than what Amazon, I mean, what Microsoft's doing. Microsoft's just brute force, throwing everything at Cloud. The numbers look good on paper, but will that truly translate to ease of use, large scale, global deployment, managing data at scale. I mean Google's great some technology, and that is their number one thing that they have a their disposal. >> Well Istio, the classic case of dog fooding, right John? I mean there's Google, using tons and tons of micro services for its own purposes, enter gate, how do we simplify this? How do we automate this? And how do we pay it forward? And that's what they do, that's their culture. This is a company that's, again, talk about leadership, they spent well over $10 billion a year on Capex, you can argue easily they got the biggest Cloud in the world, certainly they got more underwater cable, the biggest network in the world, so these are forms of leadership. Diane Green talked about information technology powering every aspect of the business. I mean we've heard that since Nick Carr said IT doesn't matter, but now it seems like more than ever, it's more important. She also said CIO's realized they're not in the data center business, but yet they only have a small fraction of their workloads in the Cloud. This is why she said Google is seeing, and others I'm sure, seeing such big growth in the Cloud. But then she underscored, but we're modern Cloud. We're not lift and shift Cloud. We're not doing what Oracle's doing and sticking the existing apps in the Cloud. We're doing things differently. You talk about this a lot John, you talked to a couple of really high level women in Google, about the new development model, the new programming model, they're really changing the way in which people think about software development. >> Yeah I mean I think one of the things that's clear is that, the modern era can hear around software development. Software development life cycle, certainly we hear, Agile have been going on for the DevOps movement and that's kind of been out there, but what's changing now is that software engineering, or software development, isn't just computer science. You don't need three computer science degrees to do Cloud and do development. The aperture is widening on what computer science is, that's opening up more women in tech, and as Diane Green pointed out on her keynote, there's a re-engineering of business going on, there's new discoveries happening, and half the population is women, and so women should be part of making the products consumed by women and other people. So there's a huge opportunity to fill the gender diversity gap, but more importantly I think what's interesting about Google Cloud in particular is that they kind of figured out something, and it might have been a pop to their arrogance balloon but it used to be, "Oh, everyone wants to be like Google, 'cause we're so huge and we're great". 'Cause they are. Their technology is phenomenal, you look at what Google's built and Urs has been on stage, they have built probably the best most complex system to power their business, and all of a sudden that's come out from map produced paper, Kubernetes, which they're now doubling down on, Google has done amazing. They're about 10 to 15 years ahead of the market in terms of technology by my estimate. The problem that they've had when they first started doing Cloud was, oh just, you want to be like Google. No people don't want to be like Google, people can't be like Google, what they now understand is that people want what Google has, and that's ease of use, DevOps, fully com instead of libraries, com instead of interfaces, really ease of rolling out at scale applications. That's different. People want the benefits of what Google has for their business, not, they don't want to be like Google. I think that was the, I think that Diane Green two years ago, came in and reset. They've hired great enterprise people, and the question is can they catch up? How fast can they catch up? They're checking the boxes, they're doing the table stakes, and can they harvest the best that they're making? Auto ML is a great example. IT operations is going to be decimated as an industry sector. All the industry analysts and the financial analysts have not yet observed this but, anyone who's in the business of IT operations is going to get decimated. Automation's going to take that away and make it a service, it's going to be a human component, but the value is going to shift up the stack. This is something that we're seeing as to look at value of start ups, IT operations, AI operations, this is a new category of the industry, and Google is betting on that. That to me is a big tell sign. >> And we've been talking about the economics of that for years, but I want to come back to something you said. Google clearly was late to the enterprise party, and I think part of the reason you were touching on this is I think they underestimated the degree to which organizations, enterprise in particular, have all this technical debt built up. You can't just rip out and replace, these companies are making money with their existing Oracle databases, with their existing outdated processes, but they're making money, they're meeting Wall Street expectations, they're making their big bonuses so they can't just stop doing that. It'd be like Google to your point, but Google is playing the long game, they are doing something differently, and they're trying to help people get to this new era of software development, so I think that's a very very important point. >> Melody Meckfessel, one of the VP of Engineering, she is going to announce a survey that she did. It's interesting, they pulled the human aspect of development, and they asked the question, "What do you care about?". And developers care about generally the enterprise and kind of Cloud native developers, really two things. Technical debt, and time to push code. If technical debt accumulates, that's a huge problem, makes them unhappy, makes them kind of, not happy with how things are going, and then also speed. If you're shipping code it takes more than a few minutes to get back the commits that it hit. That's a problem. This is a huge issue. You said technical debt. Enterprise IT has been accumulating decades of technical debt, that's now running the company. So as re-engineering the business theme that Diane Green points out, really is spot on, people are going to stop buying IT and be deploying services more in the future, and using those services to drive business value. This to me is a big shift, this is what's going to hurt in (mumbles) and enterprises that, no one's buying IT. They're building platforms, the product is the platform, and the sense of services will enable applications to sit on top of them. This is an absolute mindset shift, and that impacts every vertical that we cover. You've covered IOT and everything else. The way CIOs think about this is they think about a portfolio, and it's just to simplify it. It's like run the business, grow the business, transform the business. And by far, the biggest investments are in run the business, and they can't stop running the business, they can't stop investing in running that business. What they can do is say, okay we can grow the business with these new projects and these new initiatives, and we can transform the business with new models of software development, as we transform into a digital company as a software company. So that it increasingly going to be pouring investments there, and it's slowly sunset, the run the business apps. It happens over decades. It doesn't happen over night. >> Well that's actually the number one point I think that didn't come out in the keynote but Earl's talked about it, where he said the old model is lift and shift. When we covered at the Linux foundation, and the CNC app, and the other shows that we go to is that what containers and Kubernetes are bringing to the market, the real value of that, is that existing IT CIOs don't have to rip and replace old apps, and that's a lot of pressure, the engineering requirements, there's personnel requirements, there's migration, so with Kubernetes and containers, containers and Kubernetes, you can essentially keep them around for as long as they need to be around. So you can sunset the applications and let the apps take its natural life cycle course, while bringing in new functionality. So if you want to be Cloud native right out of the gate, with Google Cloud, and some of these great services, like AI and machine learning that's going on, you can actually bring it in natively, containerize and with Kubernetes and now Istio, build a set of services to connect existing applications, and not feel the pressure and the heat, the budget for it, the engineer for it, to actually hire against it, to manage the existing life cycle. This is a huge accelerant for Cloud native. The rip and replace doesn't have to happen. You can certainly sunset applications at will, but you need to kill the old, to bring in the new. This is a very very important point. >> Yeah so a couple things that Diane Green hit on that I just want to go quickly through her keynote. She talked about, like you say, a small fraction of workloads are actually in the Cloud, but she asked the question, why Google? She said "Look, we're an enterprise company, but we're a modern enterprise company. We take all the information from that Cloud, we organize it, we allow you to put it back intelligently. We've got a global Cloud and it's unbelievably complex. We've got 20 years of scaling and optimizing, with that elite team. We've the most advanced Cloud in the world". She said, she didn't give the number, but many many football size, football stadium size data centers around the world that are carbon neutral with tons of fiber under the ocean, specialized processors, talked about Spanner, which is this amazing distributed, globally distributed consistent transactional database, big query, and she also talked about a consistency with a common core set of primitives. Now I want to ask her about that, 'cause I think she was taking a shot at Amazon, but I'm not sure, if they have a, to make a similar statement, so we're going to ask her about that when she comes on. She also said, the last thing I'll share with you is, "AI and security are basically hand in hand". She said security is what everybody's worried about, AI is the big opportunity, those are the two areas where Google is putting some of its greatest resources. >> That was my favorite sound bite by the way, she said, "Security's the number one worry, and AI is the number one opportunity". Really kind of points to it. On the primitive things, I don't think that's so much a shot at Amazon, as in it's more of multi Cloud. We've been kind of seeing multi Cloud vapor ware for months, past year, 'cause it kind of is. What we were seeing with Cloud native community and OpenSource is multi Cloud can only happen if you can run the same map across multiple Clouds with common interfaces, and that ultimately is I think what they're trying to solve. My favorite sound bites from her keynote is, she said, quote, "We've got 20 years scaling Google Cloud", it's obviously very large, number one Cloud, if you want to put Clouds in benchmarks and without (mumbles) of the enterprise number one, in terms of tech and scale. But she says, "My main job at Google two years ago was surfacing the great technologies and services, and make it easy to use. We have a technical infrastructure, TI, that has big query, Spanner, and then consistencies across all primitives", and she said on top of the technical infrastructure they got Gmail, Gsuite, maps, et cetera et cetera, powering at large scale, dealing with all the threat intelligence, and a ton of body of technology around II. And then to cap it all off, leader in OpenSource. To me this is where Google's betting big, with security as the number one worry, which is a major check box with AI kind of the catnip for developers. And they got security features. If you compare Amazon to Google Cloud, Amazon wins on sense of services in terms of number of features, but the question is, does Google have the right features? These are the questions we're going to have. And the dig at Amazon was Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, friend of Diane Green, I've seen them both speak at Stanford, so she bumped into, what she said, "Reed Hastings is a power user of Google Chrome and Gsuite", and kind of said how great it is, but that's not Netflix. Now Netflix is an Amazon customer, so interesting jab there was about Reed Hastings personally but not about Netflix being a customer of Google Cloud. The question is, can Diane Green convince Reed Hastings to move Netflix from Amazon to Google Cloud? That's the question I'm going to ask her. >> The other piece of the keynote that I thought was quite interesting was Urs Holzle, who's the Senior Vice President of Technology Infrastructure who was doing Cloud before anybody talked about Cloud, he said, "Cloud's a fundamental shift in computing. GCP gives you access to unlimited computing on the world's largest network". Talked about Spanner, the globally consistent distributed database, ML APIs for doing speech and natural language recognition. Big query, the big data warehouse, basically a silo buster, but he said what's still missing, is essentially that hybrid (mumbles) all the Cloud's are different. I interpreted that meaning closed. So he said, "Things like setting up a network, provisioning a virtual machine, are all different". And basically to your point John, that stuff is going to get automated away. So Istio, they talked about Apogee, visibility, orchestration, serverless, they talked about GKE on prem, which is Google Kubernetes Engine on prem, and then Cisco came out on stage. The big partnership, the big news from the keynote. >> Lets talk about what we're going to look for this week in Google Cloud, and also within the industry. Dave I'll start. I'm looking for Google's technology architecture map, which I love, I think they've got a great solution, does that translate to the enterprise? In other words, can they take what Google has and make it usable and consumable for enterprises without having the be like Google strategy, use what Google has benefited from, in a way that enterprises can consume. I'm going to look for that, see how the technology can fit in there. And then I think the most important thing that I'm going to swing through all the hype here and the comment and the news and Kool Aid that they're spreading around, is how are they making the ecosystem money? Because if Google Cloud wants to take the long game, they got to secure the beach head of the viable, large scale Cloud which I think they're doing extremely well. Can they translate that into a ecosystem flourishing market? Does that make money for developers? They talk about going into verticals as a core strategy and healthcare being one. Can they go in there, in financial services, manufacturing, transportation, gaming and media, and attract the kind of partners and business customers that allow them to do better business? Does it translate the distribution for developers? Do businesses make more money with Google? That to me is the ultimate tell sign with how Google Cloud translates to the market place. Ecosystem, benchmark, and value to customers in terms of money making, utility of the users, and their customers' customers. >> So two things for me John. One is the same as yours is ecosystem. I learned from the SiliconANGLE editorial team, by the way, go to siliconangle.com, there's some great editorial to drop this week in support of just what's going on in Cloud and Google Next, but I learned from reading that stuff, Google late to the party. Only 13,000 partners. Amazon's got 100,000 Cloud partners. (mumbles) has 70,000 Cloud partners. Where, what's the ecosystem strategy, how are they going to grow? How are they going to help make money? The second thing is, basic question, I want to understand what Google wants in the Cloud. What's their objective? I know Amazon wants to dominate infrastructures of services, and be the leader there. I know that Microsoft wants to take its existing software state, bring it to the Cloud. I'm not really clear on what exactly Google's objectives are. So I want to get clarity on that. >> I think it's going to be developers, and one of the things we're going to dig into as the OpenSource. theCUBE coverage here in San Francisco, live coverage of three days wall-to-wall, (mumbles) Dave Vallante, stay with us. thecube.net is where you can find the live feed if you're watching this on SiliconANGLE or around the web, or with Syndicate. Go to thecube.net to get all the content, and siliconangle.com has a Cloud special this week. The team is putting out a ton of content. Covering the news, critical analysis, and what it means and the impact of Google Cloud into the industry and to their customers. So I'm John Furrier, Dave Vallante, stay with us, live coverage here, be right back. (electronic music)