>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, This is "Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante". >> Black Hat 22 was held in Las Vegas last week, the same time as theCUBE Supercloud event. Unlike AWS re:Inforce where words are carefully chosen to put a positive spin on security, Black Hat exposes all the warts of cyber and openly discusses its hard truths. It's a conference that's attended by technical experts who proudly share some of the vulnerabilities they've discovered, and, of course, by numerous vendors marketing their products and services. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis", we summarize what we learned from discussions with several people who attended Black Hat and our analysis from reviewing dozens of keynotes, articles, sessions, and data from a recent Black Hat Attendees Survey conducted by Black Hat and Informa, and we'll end with the discussion of what it all means for the challenges around securing the supercloud. Now, I personally did not attend, but as I said at the top, we reviewed a lot of content from the event which is renowned for its hundreds of sessions, breakouts, and strong technical content that is, as they say, unvarnished. Chris Krebs, the former director of Us cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, CISA, he gave the keynote, and he spoke about the increasing complexity of tech stacks and the ripple effects that that has on organizational risk. Risk was a big theme at the event. Where re:Inforce tends to emphasize, again, the positive state of cybersecurity, it could be said that Black Hat, as the name implies, focuses on the other end of the spectrum. Risk, as a major theme of the event at the show, got a lot of attention. Now, there was a lot of talk, as always, about the expanded threat service, you hear that at any event that's focused on cybersecurity, and tons of emphasis on supply chain risk as a relatively new threat that's come to the CISO's minds. Now, there was also plenty of discussion about hybrid work and how remote work has dramatically increased business risk. According to data from in Intel 471's Mark Arena, the previously mentioned Black Hat Attendee Survey showed that compromise credentials posed the number one source of risk followed by infrastructure vulnerabilities and supply chain risks, so a couple of surveys here that we're citing, and we'll come back to that in a moment. At an MIT cybersecurity conference earlier last decade, theCUBE had a hypothetical conversation with former Boston Globe war correspondent, Charles Sennott, about the future of war and the role of cyber. We had similar discussions with Dr. Robert Gates on theCUBE at a ServiceNow event in 2016. At Black Hat, these discussions went well beyond the theoretical with actual data from the war in Ukraine. It's clear that modern wars are and will be supported by cyber, but the takeaways are that they will be highly situational, targeted, and unpredictable because in combat scenarios, anything can happen. People aren't necessarily at their keyboards. Now, the role of AI was certainly discussed as it is at every conference, and particularly cyber conferences. You know, it was somewhat dissed as over hyped, not surprisingly, but while AI is not a panacea to cyber exposure, automation and machine intelligence can definitely augment, what appear to be and have been stressed out, security teams can do this by recommending actions and taking other helpful types of data and presenting it in a curated form that can streamline the job of the SecOps team. Now, most cyber defenses are still going to be based on tried and true monitoring and telemetry data and log analysis and curating known signatures and analyzing consolidated data, but increasingly, AI will help with the unknowns, i.e. zero-day threats and threat actor behaviors after infiltration. Now, finally, while much lip service was given to collaboration and public-private partnerships, especially after Stuxsnet was revealed early last decade, the real truth is that threat intelligence in the private sector is still evolving. In particular, the industry, mid decade, really tried to commercially exploit proprietary intelligence and, you know, do private things like private reporting and monetize that, but attitudes toward collaboration are trending in a positive direction was one of the sort of outcomes that we heard at Black Hat. Public-private partnerships are being both mandated by government, and there seems to be a willingness to work together to fight an increasingly capable adversary. These things are definitely on the rise. Now, without this type of collaboration, securing the supercloud is going to become much more challenging and confined to narrow solutions. and we're going to talk about that little later in the segment. Okay, let's look at some of the attendees survey data from Black Hat. Just under 200 really serious security pros took the survey, so not enough to slice and dice by hair color, eye color, height, weight, and favorite movie genre, but enough to extract high level takeaways. You know, these strongly agree or disagree survey responses can sometimes give vanilla outputs, but let's look for the ones where very few respondents strongly agree or disagree with a statement or those that overwhelmingly strongly agree or somewhat agree. So it's clear from this that the respondents believe the following, one, your credentials are out there and available to criminals. Very few people thought that that was, you know, unavoidable. Second, remote work is here to stay, and third, nobody was willing to really jinx their firms and say that they strongly disagree that they'll have to respond to a major cybersecurity incident within the next 12 months. Now, as we've reported extensively, COVID has permanently changed the cybersecurity landscape and the CISO's priorities and playbook. Check out this data that queries respondents on the pandemic's impact on cybersecurity, new requirements to secure remote workers, more cloud, more threats from remote systems and remote users, and a shift away from perimeter defenses that are no longer as effective, e.g. firewall appliances. Note, however, the fifth response that's down there highlighted in green. It shows a meaningful drop in the percentage of remote workers that are disregarding corporate security policy, still too many, but 10 percentage points down from 2021 survey. Now, as we've said many times, bad user behavior will trump good security technology virtually every time. Consistent with the commentary from Mark Arena's Intel 471 threat report, fishing for credentials is the number one concern cited in the Black Hat Attendees Survey. This is a people and process problem more than a technology issue. Yes, using multifactor authentication, changing passwords, you know, using unique passwords, using password managers, et cetera, they're all great things, but if it's too hard for users to implement these things, they won't do it, they'll remain exposed, and their organizations will remain exposed. Number two in the graphic, sophisticated attacks that could expose vulnerabilities in the security infrastructure, again, consistent with the Intel 471 data, and three, supply chain risks, again, consistent with Mark Arena's commentary. Ask most CISOs their number one problem, and they'll tell you, "It's a lack of talent." That'll be on the top of their list. So it's no surprise that 63% of survey respondents believe they don't have the security staff necessary to defend against cyber threats. This speaks to the rise of managed security service providers that we've talked about previously on "Breaking Analysis". We've seen estimates that less than 50% of organizations in the US have a SOC, and we see those firms as ripe for MSSP support as well as larger firms augmenting staff with managed service providers. Now, after re:Invent, we put forth this conceptual model that discussed how the cloud was becoming the first line of defense for CISOs, and DevOps was being asked to do more, things like securing the runtime, the containers, the platform, et cetera, and audit was kind of that last line of defense. So a couple things we picked up from Black Hat which are consistent with this shift and some that are somewhat new, first, is getting visibility across the expanded threat surface was a big theme at Black Hat. This makes it even harder to identify risk, of course, this being the expanded threat surface. It's one thing to know that there's a vulnerability somewhere. It's another thing to determine the severity of the risk, but understanding how easy or difficult it is to exploit that vulnerability and how to prioritize action around that. Vulnerability is increasingly complex for CISOs as the security landscape gets complexified. So what's happening is the SOC, if there even is one at the organization, is becoming federated. No longer can there be one ivory tower that's the magic god room of data and threat detection and analysis. Rather, the SOC is becoming distributed following the data, and as we just mentioned, the SOC is being augmented by the cloud provider and the managed service providers, the MSSPs. So there's a lot of critical security data that is decentralized and this will necessitate a new cyber data model where data can be synchronized and shared across a federation of SOCs, if you will, or mini SOCs or SOC capabilities that live in and/or embedded in an organization's ecosystem. Now, to this point about cloud being the first line of defense, let's turn to a story from ETR that came out of our colleague Eric Bradley's insight in a one-on-one he did with a senior IR person at a manufacturing firm. In a piece that ETR published called "Saved by Zscaler", check out this comment. Quote, "As the last layer, we are filtering all the outgoing internet traffic through Zscaler. And when an attacker is already on your network, and they're trying to communicate with the outside to exchange encryption keys, Zscaler is already blocking the traffic. It happened to us. It happened and we were saved by Zscaler." So that's pretty cool. So not only is the cloud the first line of defense, as we sort of depicted in that previous graphic, here's an example where it's also the last line of defense. Now, let's end on what this all means to securing the supercloud. At our Supercloud 22 event last week in our Palo Alto CUBE Studios, we had a session on this topic on supercloud, securing the supercloud. Security, in our view, is going to be one of the most important and difficult challenges for the idea of supercloud to become real. We reviewed in last week's "Breaking Analysis" a detailed discussion with Snowflake co-founder and president of products, Benoit Dageville, how his company approaches security in their data cloud, what we call a superdata cloud. Snowflake doesn't use the term supercloud. They use the term datacloud, but what if you don't have the focus, the engineering depth, and the bank roll that Snowflake has? Does that mean superclouds will only be developed by those companies with deep pockets and enormous resources? Well, that's certainly possible, but on the securing the supercloud panel, we had three technical experts, Gee Rittenhouse of Skyhigh Security, Piyush Sharrma who's the founder of Accurics who sold to Tenable, and Tony Kueh, who's the former Head of Product at VMware. Now, John Furrier asked each of them, "What is missing? What's it going to take to secure the supercloud? What has to happen?" Here's what they said. Play the clip. >> This is the final question. We have one minute left. I wish we had more time. This is a great panel. We'll bring you guys back for sure after the event. What one thing needs to happen to unify or get through the other side of this fragmentation and then the challenges for supercloud? Because remember, the enterprise equation is solve complexity with more complexity. Well, that's not what the market wants. They want simplicity. They want SaaS. They want ease of use. They want infrastructure risk code. What has to happen? What do you think, each of you? >> So I can start, and extending to the previous conversation, I think we need a consortium. We need a framework that defines that if you really want to operate on supercloud, these are the 10 things that you must follow. It doesn't matter whether you take AWS, Slash, or TCP or you have all, and you will have the on-prem also, which means that it has to follow a pattern, and that pattern is what is required for supercloud, in my opinion. Otherwise, security is going everywhere. They're like they have to fix everything, find everything, and so on and so forth. It's not going to be possible. So they need a framework. They need a consortium, and this consortium needs to be, I think, needs to led by the cloud providers because they're the ones who have these foundational infrastructure elements, and the security vendor should contribute on providing more severe detections or severe findings. So that's, in my opinion, should be the model. >> Great, well, thank you, Gee. >> Yeah, I would think it's more along the lines of a business model. We've seen in cloud that the scale matters, and once you're big, you get bigger. We haven't seen that coalesce around either a vendor, a business model, or whatnot to bring all of this and connect it all together yet. So that value proposition in the industry, I think, is missing, but there's elements of it already available. >> I think there needs to be a mindset. If you look, again, history repeating itself. The internet sort of came together around set of IETF, RSC standards. Everybody embraced and extended it, right? But still, there was, at least, a baseline, and I think at that time, the largest and most innovative vendors understood that they couldn't do it by themselves, right? And so I think what we need is a mindset where these big guys, like Google, let's take an example. They're not going to win at all, but they can have a substantial share. So how do they collaborate with the ecosystem around a set of standards so that they can bring their differentiation and then embrace everybody together. >> Okay, so Gee's point about a business model is, you know, business model being missing, it's broadly true, but perhaps Snowflake serves as a business model where they've just gone out and and done it, setting or trying to set a de facto standard by which data can be shared and monetized. They're certainly setting that standard and mandating that standard within the Snowflake ecosystem with its proprietary framework. You know, perhaps that is one answer, but Tony lays out a scenario where there's a collaboration mindset around a set of standards with an ecosystem. You know, intriguing is this idea of a consortium or a framework that Piyush was talking about, and that speaks to the collaboration or lack thereof that we spoke of earlier, and his and Tony's proposal that the cloud providers should lead with the security vendor ecosystem playing a supporting role is pretty compelling, but can you see AWS and Azure and Google in a kumbaya moment getting together to make that happen? It seems unlikely, but maybe a better partnership between the US government and big tech could be a starting point. Okay, that's it for today. I want to thank the many people who attended Black Hat, reported on it, wrote about it, gave talks, did videos, and some that spoke to me that had attended the event, Becky Bracken, who is the EIC at Dark Reading. They do a phenomenal job and the entire team at Dark Reading, the news desk there, Mark Arena, whom I mentioned, Garrett O'Hara, Nash Borges, Kelly Jackson, sorry, Kelly Jackson Higgins, Roya Gordon, Robert Lipovsky, Chris Krebs, and many others, thanks for the great, great commentary and the content that you put out there, and thanks to Alex Myerson, who's on production, and Alex manages the podcasts for us. Ken Schiffman is also in our Marlborough studio as well, outside of Boston. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, they help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters, and Rob Hoff is our Editor-in-Chief at SiliconANGLE and does some great editing and helps with the titles of "Breaking Analysis" quite often. Remember these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen, just search for "Breaking Analysis Podcasts". I publish each on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, and you could email me, get in touch with me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or you can DM me @dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn posts, and please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis". (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back, everyone, it's theCUBE's coverage here live in Las Vegas for re:Invent 2019, this is theCUBE's seventh year covering re:Invent, the event's only been going for eight years, it feels like a decade, so much growth, so much action, I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante, here extracting the signal from the noise in the Intel AWS studio of theCUBE, thank you for that sponsorship. Mike Miller is our next guest, he's director of AI devices at AWS, super excited for this segment, because DeepRacer's here, and we got some music, AI is the front and center, great to see you again, thanks for coming on. >> Absolutely, thank you for having me on again, I appreciate it. >> All right, let's just jump right in, the toys. Developers are geeking out over DeepRacer and the toys you guys are putting out there as a fun way to play and learn. >> Absolutely, getting hands-on with these new broadly applicable machine learning technologies. >> Let's jump into DeepRacer, so first of all, give us a quick update on what's happened between last year and this year in the DeepRacer community, there's been a lot of froth, competitiveness, street battles, and then we'll get an update, give us a quick update on the community. >> So we launched DeepRacer last year as a 1/18 scale race car designed to teach reinforcement learning, so this thing drives by itself around the tracks. We've got an online experience where customers can train models, so we launched a DeepRacer league where we plan to visit 22 sites around the world at AWS summits, where developers can come visit us and race a car physically around a track, and we had online contests, so every month we had a new track for developers to be challenged by and race their cars around the track. We've seen tremendous engagement and excitement, a little bit of competition really gets developers' juices going. >> It's been a lot of fun, congratulations, by the way. >> Absolutely, thank you. >> All right, let's get into the new toy, so DeepRacer 2.0, whatever you're calling it, just DeepRacer-- >> DeepRacer Evo. >> Evo, okay. >> New generation, so we've basically provided more opportunities to race for developers, more challenges for them to learn, and more ways for them to win. So we integrated some new sensors on this car, so on top there's a LIDAR, which is a laser range finding device that can detect other cars or obstacles in the rear of the car and to the sides, and in the front of the car we have stereo cameras that we added so that the car can sense depth in front of it, so with those new sensors, developers can now be challenged by integrating depth sensing and object avoidance and head to head racing into their machine learning models. >> So currently it's not an obstacle course, correct, it's a race track, right? >> So we call it a time trial, so it's a single car on the track at a time, how fast can you make a lap, our world record actually is 7.44 seconds, set by a young lady from Tokyo this past year, really exciting. >> And she was holding up the trophy and said this is basically a dream come true. And so, what are they trying to optimize, is it just the speed at the turn, what are they sort of focused on? >> Yeah, it's a little bit of art and a little bit of science, so there's the reinforcement learning model that learns through what's called a reward function, so you give the car rewards for achieving specific objectives, or certain behaviors, and so it's really up to the developer to decide what kind of behaviors do they want to reward the car with, whether it's stay close to the center line, reduce the amount of turns, they can also determine its position on the track and so they can reward it for cutting corners close, speeding up or slowing down, so it's really a little bit of art and science through some experimentation and deciding. >> So we had Intel on yesterday, talking about some of their AI, Naveen Rao, great guy, but they were introducing this concept called GANs, Generative Adversarial Networks, which is kind of like neural network technology, lot of computer science in some of the tech here, this is not kiddie scripting kind of thing, this is like real deal. >> Yeah, so GANs actually formed the basis of the product that we just announced this year called DeepComposer, so DeepComposer is a keyboard and a cloud service designed to work together to teach developers about generative AI, and GANs are the technique that we teach developers. So what's interesting about generative AI is that machine learning moves from a predictions-based technology to something that can actually create new content, so create new music, new stories, new art, but also companies are using generative AI to do more practical things like take a sketch and turn it into a 3D model, or autocorrect colorize black and white photos, Autodesk even has a generative design product, where you can give, an industrial designer can give a product some constraints and it'll generate hundreds of ideas for the design. >> Now this is interesting to me, because I think this takes it to, I call basic machine learning, to really some more advanced practical examples, which is super exciting for people learning AI and machine learning. Can you talk about the composer and how it works, because pretend I'm just a musician, I'm 16 years old, I'm composing music, I got a keyboard, how can I get involved, what would be a path, do I buy a composer device, do I link it to Ableton Live, and these tools that are out there, there's a variety of different techniques, can you take us through the use case? >> Yeah, so really our target customer for this is an aspiring machine learning developer, maybe not necessarily a musician. So any developer, whether they have musical experience or machine learning background, can use the DeepComposer system to learn about the generative AI techniques. So GANs are comprised of these two networks that have to be trained in coordination, and what we do with DeepComposer is we walk users through or walk developers through exactly how to set up that structure, how these two things train, and how is it different from traditional machine learning where you've got a large data set, and you're training a single model to make a prediction. How do these multiple networks actually work against each other, and how do you make sure that they're generating new content that's actually of the right type of quality that you want, and so that's really the essence of the Generative Adversarial Networks and these two networks that work against each other. >> So a young musician who happens to like machine learning. >> So if I give this to my kid, he'll get hooked on machine learning? That's good for the college apps. >> Plug in his Looper and set two systems working together or against each other. >> When we start getting to visualization, that's going to be very interesting when you start getting the data at the fundamental level, now this is early days. Some would say day zero, because this is really early. How do you explain that to developers, and people you're trying to get attention to, because this is certainly exciting stuff, it's fun, playful, but it's got some nerd action in it, it's got some tech, what are some of the conversations you're having with folks when they say "Hey, how do I get involved, why should I get involved," and what's really going to be the impact, what's the result of all this? >> Yeah, well it's fascinating because through Amazon's 20 years of artificial intelligence investments, we've learned a lot, and we've got thousands of engineers working on artificial intelligence and machine learning, and what we want to do is try to take a lot of that knowledge and the experiences that those folks have learned through these years, and figure out how we can bring them to developers of all skill levels, so developers who don't know machine learning, through developers who might be data scientists and have some experience, we want to build tools that are engaging and tactile and actually tangible for them to learn and see the results of what machine learning can do, so in the DeepComposer case it's how do these generative networks actually create net new content, in this case music. For DeepRacer, how does reinforcement learning actually translate from a simulated environment to the real world, and how might that be applicable for, let's say, robotics applications? So it's really about reducing the learning curve and making it easy for developers to get started. >> But there is a bridge to real world applications in all this, it's a machine learning linchpin. >> Absolutely, and you can just look at all of the innovations that are being done from Amazon and from our customers, whether they're based on improving product recommendations, forecasting, streamlining supply chains, generating training data, all of these things are really practical applications. >> So what's happening at the device, and what's happening in the cloud, can you help us understand that? >> Sure, so in DeepComposer, the device is really just a way to input a signal, and in this case it's a MIDI signal, so MIDI is a digital audio format that allows machines to kind of understand music. So the keyboard allows you to input MIDI into the generative network, and then in the cloud, we've got the generative network takes that input, processes it, and then generates four-part accompaniments for the input that you provide, so say you play a little melody on the keyboard, we're going to generate a drum track, a guitar track, a keyboard track, maybe a synthesizer track, and let you play those back to hear how your input inspired the generation of this music. >> So GANs is a big deal with this. >> Absolutely, it forms the basis of the first technique that we're teaching using DeepComposer. >> All right, so I got to ask you the question that's on everyone's mind, including mine, what are some of the wackiest and/or coolest things you've seen this year with DeepComposer and DeepRacer because I can imagine developers' creativity straying off the reservation a little bit, any cool and wacky things you've seen? >> Well we've got some great stories of competitors in the DeepRacer league, so we've got father-son teams that come in and race at the New York summit, a 10 year old learning how to code with his dad. We had one competitor in the US was at our Santa Clara summit, tried again at our Atlanta summit, and then at the Chicago summit finally won a position to come back to re:Invent and race. Last year, we did the race here at re:Invent, and the winning time, the lap time, a single lap was 51 seconds, the current world record is 7.44 seconds and it's been just insane how these developers have been able to really optimize and generate models that drive this thing at incredible speeds around the track. >> I'm sure you've seen the movie Ford v Ferrari yet. You got to see that movie, because this DeepRacer, you're going to have to need a stadium soon, with eSports booming, this has got its own legs for its own business. >> Well we've got six tracks set up down at the MGM Grand Arena, so we've already got the arena set up, and that's where we're doing all the knock-out rounds and competitors. >> And you mentioned father-son, you remember when we were kids, Cub Scouts, I think it was, or Boy Scouts, whatever it was, you had the pinewood derby, right, you'd make a car and file down the nails that you use for the axles and, taking it to a whole new level here. >> It's a modern-day version. >> All right, Mike, thanks for coming on, appreciate it, let's keep in touch. If you can get us some of that B-roll for any video, I'd love to get some B-roll of some DeepRacer photos, send 'em our way, super excited, love what you're doing, I think this is a great way to make it fun, instructive, and certainly very relevant. >> Absolutely, that's what we're after. Thank you for having me. >> All right, theCUBE's coverage here, here in Las Vegas for our seventh, Amazon's eighth re:Invent, we're documenting history as the ecosystem evolves, as the industry wave is coming, IoT edge, lot of cool things happening, we're bringing it to you, we're back with more coverage after this short break. (techno music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering RSA Conference 2019. Brought to you by Forescout. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're at the RSA Conference in downtown San Francisco, it's crazy, 40,000 plus people, we'll get the number later today. We're in the Forescout booth for our first time, we're really excited to be here, and, you know, part of the whole Forescout story is the convergence of IT and OT, operations technology, and those things are coming together, which is such a critical piece of smart things, and smart cities, and smart cars. We're excited to have our next guest, Elisa Costante, on. She is the OT technology and innovation lead at Forescout. Elisa, great to see you. >> Great to see you, thank for having me. >> Absolutely. So you've got a PhD in this space, you picked a field that is pretty hot, so as you think back and look at the convergence of OT and IT, what are some of the top-level things that people are thinking about, but what are some of the top-level things that they're just missing? >> Well, when you speak about OT, typically you refer to critical infrastructure and the technology that operates things. So it's cyber-physical systems, right? And when you think of IT, you think about computer and you think about the web, and you're like, okay, when the two things meet? And then you put in the recipe, you put something like an IoT device, like an IP camera, or a sensor for the number of people in a room. Now these whole things are coming together. And they're coming together because they come with a lot of interesting use cases. You can have all the data and information to configure, for instance, your building, to be as smart as possible, and to have. >> They need smart wheels on that cart, my goodness. >> Of course. And you have a clear picture of how much energy you consume and then you can basically have the energy that is cheaper, because it just arrives in the moment that you need it. Now all of these things are IT and OT convergence. And all of these things make our cities and our world smarter today. >> Right, now one of the interesting things I saw in a talk getting ready for this is, you talked about, there's always been a lot of OT systems, they've been around for a while, >> Yeah. >> But they've always been siloed, you know, they haven't been connected to other OT systems and much less being connected to IT systems. >> Yeah >> So they weren't architected for that from the first point of view. So how does that get implemented? Are they re-architecting 'em? Are you guys overlaying a different kind of control plane? How do you take these siloed applications around, say, elevator operation, and then integrate it in with all these other things? >> So what happens is that those systems are legacy systems. That's why. There are like, 60% of the modern buildings, of the buildings today, they have, they are controlled and managed by system that are 20 years old. So what does it mean? That you make an investment and you don't want to change that investment. You are not going to renew all the backbones of your buildings, or of your manufacturing and operation factories. So what do you do on top of these legacy system that have been developed without security in mind, you put the IT systems, to monitor, to control, to have remote access and remote control. And this is where, like, things can go wrong, because if this is not done properly, and by having in mind, for instance, the threat landscape, that's where you will have the controller for your HVAC exposed to the internet, and can pull down all the air conditioning in a hospital, for instance. And that's why WannaCry can come and heat and put down tons and tons of hospitals. >> Right. It's pretty interesting, you know, I think it's a pretty common concept in security for people that you should only have access, you know, to the information you need around a particular project or particular dataset. But you talked about, in some of your other talks that I saw, about a lot of these devices come out of the box with all kinds of capabilities, right? 'Cause they're built for kind of the Nth degree, the maximum use, but there may be a whole bunch of stuff that's turned on out of the box that you probably need to turn off. >> Yeah, that's actually super interesting. If you look at IP cameras, now IP cameras, they should do one thing, record stuff that they see on the screen. But actually they come with a bunch of protocols indeed, like FTPs, Samba protocols, SSDP, that announce the camera on the network, and reveal a lot of information about those camera on the network that if RPCed by an attacker or by someone with not-good intentions, might actually be leveraged to turn the camera against the owner of the camera itself. >> Right, right. And do weird things that the camera should not. And that's really part of what the Forescout solution is, is making sure that the devices are profiled and acting in the way that they're supposed to act. And not doing stuff that they shouldn't be doing. >> Yeah, Forescout is a leader in device visibility. So what we do is we enter into a network, and we give full visibility of all the IP devices that are there, and that's most of the times is a wow effect, like, the asset owner has no ideas that they had a camera that was directly connected to the internet. Or they'd have a thermostat that communicates with the servers. So all of these things, we bring basically light on the dark sides of the network. >> Right. So excited to talk to you 'cause I think the smart cities and smart buildings is such an interesting concept and going to be so important as we get denser populations and smaller areas that connected to transportation. I wonder if you could share some examples that you see out in the field where the ROI on putting these things in, the good part, is way higher than maybe people expect. That because you're combining, you know, a one plus one equals three kind of an opportunity. >> Right, so actually, one example of a very useful and smart use case is, is happening in Amsterdam right now. The Bijlmer Arena, is basically all the walls are made of solar panels, which means it gets the energy and is able to basically self-sustain the arena. The arena is one of the biggest stadiums in the Netherlands. >> Ajax plays there probably? >> Exactly. >> Alright. >> Now what they do if they have collected more energy than they are able to consume, they provide that same energy to the neighbors. Which means that you have basically a small ecosystem that thanks to the collection of data, knowing what neighbor needs how much light and energy in a certain time, you can actually even improve sustainability and going green initiatives. >> I love the innovation that comes out of the Netherlands. We interviewed a company a long time ago, and they were basically doing segmented data centers, where you would have a piece of the data center in your house and they were selling it as free heating. And I'm like, is it free heating, or is it distributed data center? But I mean, the creativity is terrific. So as you look forward, you know, what are you excited about in 2019? What are some of your top initiatives that you're working on? >> So we are working on a lot of IT and OT convergence, and especially on the IoT part. So we are looking at all those tiny devices that you would not expect to be on your network, and what they can do, and how these old systems that have been conceived to be standalone are now starting to communicate, and what kind of threats this communication can bring, and what we can do to actually defend our customers from the threats that can be arised. >> Going to be a good year. Excited to watch the developments unfold. >> Yeah, thanks. >> All right Elisa, thanks for taking a few minutes of your day, I know you said you had early meetings, you're calling Europe, calling all over the world, so thanks for taking a few. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, she's Elisa, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at RSA Conference, RSAC is the hashtag, in the Forescout booth. I'm Jeff Frick, thanks for watching. >> Thank you. (upbeat music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Welcome to theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the shows to help extract the signal from the noise, and we are really excited. Oracle OpenWorld's coming up and we have an exclusive here on theCUBE, first time, welcoming Larry to the program. Wait. This is not the Larry I was expecting. Who do we have here? I know, sitting over there, Brian Reagan, CMO of Actifio. Brian, great to see you, >> Stu. >> I feel like I have a differently Larry than I was expecting. >> Stu, it's always a pleasure to be here, and I mean this is a big day. Obviously we take, you know, databases very seriously. We take Oracle OpenWorld very seriously. It's an important show for us, and we're excited to bring Larry the Bear back for the second year in a row at Oracle OpenWorld. Many might know him as the Database Beast, and so, he's excited to be here. What other Larry were you expecting, just out of curiosity? >> Well, we're talking about Oracle and database at the center. There's a certain Larry that most people expect. I was in Oracle OpenWorld once and Larry didn't show up because he was at the boat show. The boat race. But- - >> Larry the Bear is a big boat fan, too, but that's actually one of the reasons why we're excited to be out there. The other Larry I think that you might be referring to, the other Larry is how they refer to him out there too, is really Larry the Bear's hero, and if you think about a database beast, someone who's really dedicated their lives to databases, they really wanna meet the one and only King of Databases. And so, you know, he wants to live his dream next week, and meet the one and only Larry, his namesake, and really bond. >> Well, he, you know, having been to that show a few times, they are ecstatic to talk about databases. You've just got, you know, non-stop DBAs geeking out, digging into the weeds, and, you know, database, we've said many times on theCUBE, is the stickiest of applications in the environment, but, you know, there's a lot of money spent on this and a lot of manpower, so, you know, taming that environment is definitely a huge challenge for enterprises. >> Absolutely. We think the same, and in fact, Larry believes that databases- - The only thing stickier is probably like a big vat of honey. So, this is a bear who was- - Have you seen The Revenant, Stu? >> I'm familiar with it, and it has me a little bit worried. >> Yeah, that really was Larry a couple years ago. I mean, it was just, you know, he was untamed. He was going out of control like many databases in a lot of enterprises, until he discovered Actifio, and really discovered what could become of giving him back time in the day to hunt for salmon or pick berries, or whatever it is that bears do in their free time when they're not dealing with large databases. I mean, that's what Actifio brought to him, and he really wants to share that next week out at Oracle OpenWorld. >> Okay, and tell me, you said Larry got to know Actifio, where did Larry come from? >> So, Larry's originally from Chicago. >> Big Bears fan. >> And Cubs, go Cubs. >> He's relocated to Boston now that he's joined Actifio, and he's really taken with the Bruins. I think he's excited for this season, but Larry has been really in the enterprise for his entire life, and has probably grappled with some of the biggest databases you've seen. Again, this is the database beast. Yeah, it used to be bad. >> Alright, Larry, anything else we should know about your background and what has you so excited about the show? >> Yeah, no, that's a good point. So, among the many things that Larry is eager to do next week, is to find out from others, you know, just what type of database beast they have in their data center. And in fact, he invites people to our booth number 3105, to come and share their experiences. In fact, for those who mention theCUBE and his appearance on the cube, we've got a special giveaway for them. But we're eager to- - We and Larry are eager to hear what people are dealing with out there in the database community and understand how Actifio can really help them solve their biggest Oracle challenges. >> Great. Any final things we should know about, Larry, before we send it? >> Obviously, I mean this is a- - You know, Larry is smarter than the average bear, Stu, and that's one of the reasons why he joined Actifio. He comes from a long line of IT centric bears. I mean, obviously, his cousin Smokey in the D.R. Arena. Yoga- - Yogi, rather. So it's, you know, very long bear history. He's excited about Oracle OpenWorld. He couldn't be more excited about being on theCUBE. He's been talking about it for weeks, and we're just excited that you were able to fit him in. >> Alright, well Larry, I hope your dream comes true and that you get to meet the other Larry at the show. Brian, always a pleasure to catch up with you. >> You too, Stu. >> Once again, thank you for joining us here on theCUBE. Be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all of our coverage and see us, and some of the interesting guests we get on throughout the industry. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> [Announcer] Live from Los Angeles, it's The Cube, covering E3 2018. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Hey, welcome back here, we're ready, Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at the Los Angeles Convention Center at E3, it's amazing. It's like 68,000 people. They're in every single hall, they're out in the streets, they're in the hotels, they're at LA Live, they're all over the place, for really the biggest gaming conference I think in the world, and we're excited to have our next guest, he's Dana Jan, he's a design director for Ready at Dawn, and you just introduced a new game, right? Great to see ya. >> Thank you very much for having me. Yes, that's true. We just announced Echo Combat last year in October, and today we're showing off on the floor. >> Private beta still or are you going to public beta you said soon? >> Yeah, we just had a closed beta actually. We're moving into open beta, and that's gonna be June 21st. >> Right, pretty amazing though, you guys have not been around that long, and this is already your third game. >> Well, the studio's been around for a while, so we've been making games for a long time. This is actually kind of a new foray for us though going into VR. We released a game called Lone Echo last year, and Echo Arena was a multi-player mode that we also launched simultaneously with Lone Echo, so yeah, this game is new and fresh, but it's, we've been developing VR now for a little over two years. >> Right, so from a design perspective in the VR space, what is some of the special considerations you have to be thinking about, either challenges and opportunities? >> Yeah, I mean some of the challenges are obviously, performance is a big deal for us. The game has to run at 90 frames per second on Oculus per eye, so that's rendering essentially like two different-- >> [Jeff] 90 frames per eye? >> Yeah, it's really fast. You have to render 90 frames per second, otherwise it gets really uncomfortable for the user, so we optimize a lot of our experiences. And it's even like, some of the ideas that we have, we have to figure out how to make them viable at that frame rate. And we have a lot of high-fidelity body movement going on in Lone Echo, Echo Arena, and now Echo Combat. We do a lot of IK work to kind of represent a full body avatar that honors essentially head, hands, and because our game takes place in zero G, we have this floating body that has to convincingly flow behind you wherever you go. >> [Jeff] Right >> Yeah, it's actually, it's a pretty big challenge for us as both designers, developers, and just on a technical standpoint to get all that to kind of harmoniously work together. >> Right, so other thing, just in terms of the game play inside VR, 'cause the other thing is right, you don't necessarily control which direction they're looking. I mean, how do you kind of direct the player to where you want them to look, and where you want them to participate? >> That's a great question. Actually, so part of the beauty of VR, is we try to do some of that like you would for a conventional game, trying to use lighting, trying to basically design environments with things, cues, details that would maybe help people along, but ultimately you're as free as you are, just like right now you and I, we can look all over the place. >> [Jeff] Right. >> We don't really want to restrict that. Part of the beauty of VR is that ultimate freedom. If you wanna of kind of go, look in that little corner underneath you for the whole game, you really can, and we try to as much as possible make that something that's beneficial too. We try to code every little bit of our world with something that's interesting to find, discover, so. >> Right, right. >> Yeah, it's freedom of movement, freedom of wherever you wanna be, whatever you wanna do. >> Right, so we're doing this as part of the Western Digital data makes possible program, and really as we get closer and closer to infinite store, infinite compute, infinite networking, you just said you've got designs, and you've got ideas that even today you can't necessarily put into place. So as you look forward for the opportunities when all these things are basically gonna be close to infinite, at close to zero cost, what are some of the things that excite you? Where do you see kind of using that power to do a better job, or different job in your storytelling? >> Yeah, I mean the horsepower that you need to run these kind of games is actually pretty staggering. We compute a lot of stuff on the GPUs, the CPUs, we have a lot of physics-oriented things in the game because VR is really big into like letting you kind of touch everything, and manipulate stuff, and it doesn't feel like you're really somewhere, you don't feel present unless you can actually interact with the environments. And for that we have to basically create tons, and tons, and tons of objects, we have physics constraints and things that are costly for the computation cycles. And then there's like memory issues. We have streaming that we have to kind of get better at. These worlds are very large, and so to store the things that you're gonna see and do, takes a lot of actual hard drive space, and the speed at which we can load and unload things, is a critical factor in terms of unlocking the freedom of your experience. >> Right, so when you get more horsepower, a new processor comes out, and you get more memory, whatever, I mean do you already have stuff keyed up where you want to use that? Is it more a realistic nature of the graphics, is it speed, I mean what are some of the priorities that you would immediately apply if you had some more horsepower tomorrow? >> Yeah, certainly I mean there are things that we absolutely know about like there's texture resolution, there's like I said, there's physics objects, there are just things that we end up going, that's too costly to do, we're gonna have to maybe stop doing that or cut back on it, or scope back. We do look at creating settings and things where our users who actually have more high-end machines, to actually turn that stuff back on, but I think every time we kind of go into another design kind of exercise and sort of looking at what do we want to do in VR, I think we're surprised at what does it take to actually accomplish it. And so I'm not sure I know right now fully what we're gonna start getting into and what kind of hardware that might require, but every day's just a different challenge, and that's part of the excitement of working in VR. >> Right, right and I was gonna say and also obviously the trade-offs. I mean you could go bananas on the texture, but at some point is it the law of diminishing returns in terms of the storytelling, in terms of the experience 'cause you can't optimize across all the potential variables. >> Yeah, no, you have to pick and choose, and you're right, like basically we look at what are our goals, what are we trying to get out of this experience, what do we want the user to really get out of it? And then we have to compromise. We have to make some of those smart choices. But I do think at some point, we'll have to make less compromises as the technology gets better, and certainly things like resolution, if the headsets have higher resolution then it makes sense to put more resolution into the textures because now you can actually see it, and so we kind of hit that synergy where both of those are unlocked, it'll never be infinite obviously, but to where they're more in sync with each other, maybe we can make that compromise now, but maybe in the future we won't. >> Yeah, the headset's a whole 'nother bucket of technology. >> It is yeah. >> That you guys have to account. >> But they're awesome I mean, yeah we're doing, I think it's really impressive to me how far we've come with the headset technology. And I think in the next few years, we're just gonna see even crazier advances. So I'm really excited about that. >> Not just slap on the phone in the cardboard box, like a couple years ago. Here's your VR box. >> I know, right? That's not that long ago if you think about it really. >> All right, Dana, well give a shout out, what's the date for the public beta so people know where to go and how to get involved. >> Yeah, our open beta's gonna be starting June 21st. They can sign up on oculus.com. And yeah, we're looking forward to people getting in there and seeing what their impressions are, and taking the feedback. >> All right, well, Dana, thanks for taking a few minutes and stopping by. >> Great, thank you very much. >> All right, he's Dana, and I'm Jeff. You're watching The Cube from E3 at the LA Convention Center. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: Live, from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE. Covering IFS World Conference 2018. Brought to you by, IFS. >> Rebecca: Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of IFS World Conference 2018 here in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. It's been a great day here. >> Jeff: Yes. >> We've had a lot of wonderful conversations, great panels. Last one to go, you can tell the atmosphere is getting... >> They're wheeling out all the alcohol I think... >> Exactly. Exactly. >> ...for the reception this evening. >> But we have saved best for last. We have Dan Matthews, who is the CTO of IFS and Bas De Vos who is the Director of IFS Labs. So Bas and Dan, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. >> So, when I talked, we've heard a lot about IFS Apps 10, and this is the big news, but what we haven't talked about too much is Arena. Can you describe to our viewers this new user experience, and what it means? >> Alright, well, IFS Arena, like you said, it's a new user experience via past applications, and that's something that's really important to us because it's important to our customers. Because what they want to do is, they want to put great tools in the hands of the people, right? And we all know when it comes to software, how great a tool is is a large part down to the user experience, so that's why we've done it. And what we've done is create something that we think is more inspired by really well-designed consumer software, but we've adapted that for these big enterprise applications like we are doing. >> It's pretty amazing in your keynote because you showed, I think five different UI's based on different devices in the prior versions, where now you're coming to kind of a standardized single (mumbles) experience across various platforms or across various devices to actually interact with the applications. That's got to be, feel good to get that down to kind of one responsive design. >> And to a degree, that's just rescinding to reality because you used to think about, you had your PC and you had a way of doing that. And then you go to your mobile app, or maybe, I mean, people are using so many different kinds devices today. So if we were to purpose build something just for your iPad, something for your phone, something for this, something for your TV, we'd be stuck forever, right? So what we did instead, is we said, "Let's build one experience that actually adapts "to all these different environments, "and get that really, really well." It's not that easy, but in the end, it's a much better way of approaching it. >> Right, and I thought the part that I liked was as when you're new to something, you don't necessarily want a high density of information in a screen or whatever, 'cause you're just not sure, you're learning, whatever, it's new. But then as you become more experienced, obviously your comfort zone goes up, you want a lot more dense information, and really, in your work platform you demoed earlier today, you have a lot of options whether you want kind of the more consumery, more picturey, less efficient way, or do you want the "I know this well, "and I want the thick content." >> And what we basically does, we flipped it upside down, 'cause if you look at Enterprise Software, and ERP, and has to management this kind of stuff, it always used to be designed for the professional, right? And then you would try to simplify it for the newbies that're coming into the business. Can we remove some things, hide some things away, configure some things? Now we've done it the other way around. So the default is it's designed for the novice person that's just coming in seeing this for the first time. And then as you learn, as you say, you can expand and grow, and they get sort of more rich in the data you're seeing. And this is really, really important right? Because people aren't staying that long in the jobs anymore. So if you think about people moving around, they know the business, but they might not know the business applications, so they basically come in, I'm a purchasing guy, come in, pick up the purchasing system directly, that's really really important. >> Needs to be intuitive? >> Yeah, make it intuitive first, and then progressively let people discover more, rather than give all the options and all the complexity and then expect them to simplify it. That's harder. >> So, Bas, I want to talk to you a little bit about the development process and how you come up with these kind of things. Can you describe how it works at IFS Labs, what approach you take? >> Yeah of course, and then perhaps Dan can add to this a little bit later as well. But because IFS Labs is just a part of the process, right? But if you look in our general development process, for us, it's very important to stay close to our customers, right? What do our customers need today? What do they need tomorrow? And we have to basically be able to deliver functionality they need for their problems right on time. And IFS Labs plays a part in that. We are basically (mumbles) for sending before that. So we approach it a little bit the other way around. So instead of looking at a customer problem and trying to find a solution for that, we basically look ahead. We look a couple of years in the future. What kind of technologies are coming up? What kind of possibilities are there, and can we find a problem for it? And that sounds strange, right? Because we're known in the business of finding problems. But it does allow us to experiment and come up with innovative solutions that might work for tomorrow. But before we actually move that into production, or hand it over to regular R&D development, well we do step back and go to our customers and say, "Hey wait a minute, this is what we are thinking Labs, "what do you think about that? "Does it work for you, does it help you?" and validate it with them. >> So it's an interesting challenge for Labs, for looking down the road, because, and Steve Jobs' famous quote, that we don't necessarily deliver just what our customers ask for. They're not asking for things that are down the road, so you got that responsibility to look down the road. On the other hand, nobody likes technology that doesn't have a problem to solve. So you got to be delicate. Because if you just build something for the sake of building something, maybe there's some ancillary value. But at the end of the day, someone's got to use it and they got to drive direct values. So how do you kind of play that balance beyond, "Yes we listen to customers, "but there's this other stuff coming "that maybe they're not too aware of"? >> Yeah that's true, totally true, I completely agree with you. And I think that is the role of IFS Labs, right? So if we look in the overall process, the fact that we have a Labs, we don't... A license to experiment with trying out stuff, validating it with our customers, we can basically... Try it out before we actually take a decision to build something that our customers are not waiting for. So exactly the problem you just sketched, I think that our interest, IFS Labs, to resolve that. >> We have seen this happening throughout history, right? So if you look at how IET started, for us, it started with a product in IFS labs, when together we want a customer learning and understanding how they should be applied to the kind of businesses and industries that we serve. And then it went into mainstream R&D development and then we have real solutions, and now we have customers, who've been live for years, using this kind of stuff. So that is exactly the process you want to have. Try it out, and when we have a grasp on how this relates to our customers, then we up the next level of investment and take it further. >> And then, similarly, we had a project in IFS Labs that, well we tried out, and after a couple of months or even longer we said, "This is not going to work "for our customers, it's actually not helping them today. "Might be a couple years from now, but today let's stop it." >> So was this how your kind of integration of AI and machine learning into the applications took place? You looked forward, this is a cool new thing we need to play, but at the same time, we're not going to name it after a smart dead guy. (group laughing) But really bake it into the applications where it makes the most sense. And that sounds like it's kind of your execution strategy. >> Yeah definitely and AIs are a very, very, very big topic, right? It's an umbrella for so many different types of applications. Dan was talking this morning about three main areas where we think AI makes most sense for our products. It's basically human-machine interaction, predictive maintenance and service, an automation. But each of those areas, they basically have their own... Own life cycle, right? So if you look at human-machine interaction, at the morning. This morning we were talking about the IFS Arena bot. We're actually in a proper development phase. So that's much further ahead in that cycle, while other AI related topics like doing mass-automation, only your (mumbles), that's earlier in the cycle and that's still in Labs. So although AI is a big umbrella topic, the different topics in there follow that same approach. >> Can you be a little more specific about the projects you're working on, or is it top secret? >> At the World Conference everybody wants to know our secrets, but luckily, at World Conference we share them. >> Jeff: This is between us four. >> Yeah nobody's listening, right? Or watching? (laughs) So yeah at this World Conference we're hosting an innovation area. And in the innovation area, we're showcasing a wide range of basically possible technologies and how you could apply them to future business. We basically took the approach of depicting an end-to-end automatous business. So basically go all the way from mining stuff, in a mine in the ground, to using that in a factory, to producing products for the customer. And we basically build all kinds of technologies in there to make that completely automatous. Might not all be possible today, but it's really there to inspire our customers to look ahead. Some examples of the things we're using, a block chain inside enterprisesque management, mixed reality with Microsoft HoloLens to do service repairs, digital twins in virtual reality, automatous vehicles. So there's a lot of interesting stuff going on there. >> That's great, those are the great buzzwords but you put them all within application, and they're just standalone. >> Dan: What it does really well, is it kind of illustrates how these technologies are used in context... >> Right. >> Dan: With all of these things. >> That's super. >> You are an IFS veteran, >> Yes. >> You came as a developer and now here you are, CTO. Tell our viewers a little bit about how the company has changed in your opinion, and also now as you are sort of making a bigger push into North America, what we can expect. >> Well, what else changed, if I go back and I've not been with this company for more than 20 years. But what I've seen is we've got a lot more professional. Of course, we're a big organization now, and the way we run things and the way the business is run is a lot more professional. If you go back to the late '90s, this was before the dot-com boom, everybody was pouring money into the IT industry, so that was not an objective. So we were doing R&D but we were also burning money. And I think after that bubble burst, we all learned to become proper business people as well. I'll tell you one that hasn't changed, though, and that really is the kind of atmosphere that is within the company, right? How close we are to our customers, and how the customers reality always comes first and how we all help each other support. That really hasn't changed despite the fact we're so much bigger and we're 20 years old and all that kind of stuff. >> So why do you think is it 'cause maintaining culture is really, really difficult and we go to a lot of shows and we often talk about if it's a founder-led, and if they're a good CEO to double benefit, to keep that culture, but when you got turned over at the top, how do you maintain the culture that you guys have built? >> I think in the beginning, I think it was a lot of that founder-led, right? It was really led by the founders and one of the founders was our CEO for many, many years. But then it kind of got ingrained a little bit, between the Scandinavia culture. That it's quite open, quite sort of friendly, helpful, lots of hierarchical. And that then sort of spread out as the business expanded into nationally. And we kept it also on the R&D side. We do a lot of R&D in Chalinka for example. Which has a surprisingly similar feeling in the culture, actually. So I think it just got so big and so strong in the company, that it just naturally, new people come in and naturally sort of carry on with that same way of being that we've had it before. >> Rebecca: They adopted and embraced it. >> Because that was the end, Dan said when he was doing his due diligence, right? The culture was a huge piece of why he came to the company. >> I think if they were the other way around, we have seen that when we brought businesses in as well, that is, right, these guys have a similar culture to us, great, fantastic business to bring into to the IFS family. >> Jeff: Sir, you were going to say? >> I was going to say, in the end also, you're attracting people to your company and the people that are staying are also the people that feel at at home, and that feel comfortable, and that feel, I'm a little bit shorter than Dan inside the company for two years now. But basically, I feel the same with the culture, right? And it fits me as a person, and therefore I think I'm inclined to stay longer at IFS than if the culture would not fit me. And as you attract people with the same mindset together. It only gets stronger. >> Right, well Dan and Bas, thank you so much. This has been really fun last panel of the day, so we appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Good luck on your keynote on Thursday. >> Bas: Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. This has been IFS World Conference 2018. We will have more after this. (light techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE. Covering IFS World Conference 2018. Brought to you by IFS. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IFS World here at Georgia here at World Congress Center I'm your host Rebecca Knight and along with my cohost Jeff Frick. We are joined by Cindy Jowden, she is the CEO North America a position she has held since 2004. Thanks so much for joining us Cindy. >> Good morning, how are you? >> Good, I'm good. >> Great. >> Good. >> It's our first IFS World, it's quite a show you guys have. >> Yeah, we're very excited, you know it's such a great opportunity for us to, you know, connect with so many of our great customers. >> So, tell us a little bit about the theme of this year's conference which is Connect to What's Next. What, what is that all about? >> Well, it's about connecting to what's going on next in technology, and in business, and in the economy. You know, we've got many, you know great customers who are, you know, medium to large size industries and they're having you know, all different kinds of things come toward them around business transformations, you know, their customers are becoming more demanding, consumers are becoming more demanding, and so this conference really helps them see not only what they're facing today but what they're facing for the future. You know, we've got many levels of people that come to this conference you know, we've got CFO's, CIO's to power users and so there's something here really for everyone. So, you know if you want to talk about trends in the industry, you want to talk about what's going on with our new versions of products, that's available. If you are a power user and you're in finance and you just want to go connect with a industry expert to find out how you can do your job easier, it's all here. >> So, it's not only what is next in the technology, it's also connecting human to human. >> Oh. >> I mean that's really what the congress is about. >> Oh, most definitely, you know it's really fun because you'll see you know, customers that maybe haven't seen each other in person since the last world conference. But, they connect and they talk all the time you know via the phone or Skype or whatever, but they see each other and they run and they hug each other and they say, "oh it's so good "to be able to see what's going on" and you know our customers share so much and so that's really just a great opportunity and also for our customers to connect with our experts and you know, the people that they work with, you know from day to day as well. >> Man: So you're CEO of North America. >> I'm the president of the Americas. >> President of the Americas. >> Yes. >> Which includes the southern hemisphere, right? >> Yes, you don't want to forget our friends in Latin America. >> That's right. So it's a Swedish, founded in Sweden, so how are things going in North America or South America, excuse me the Americas, and what kind of values and things that you take from a Swedish based company that you're applying here in the Americas that's maybe a little bit different than a company that was founded in Silicone Valley or someplace like that. >> That's a great question, you know at IFS we've got you know strong you know, Swedish roots and Swedish heritage which says, you know, do what's right, work hard, stay close to your customer and you know, say what you can do and if you can't do something, make sure you say that as well. So, it's setting that right expectations, and we've taken that and that's really pervasive through all that we do. And, you know, we want to make sure that we, you know, can do, you know, say what we do, deliver on what we do, and then, you know, our employees love working with our customers and I think our customers feel you know, feel that we're partners and it's not something that you know, we're not just saying something to get the next deal. It's not unusual for us to say well, I'm sorry, you know, we shouldn't work together because what you want to do Mr. Prospect, is something different and it's not really in our focus and you know and sometimes it's hard to do especially if you're in sales is to walk away from somebody who's ready to buy business, right? >> Right, right. >> But, we want to make sure that you know, the customers that we work with are really good fits for where we're going because these are really long term relationships. >> Right, and how about that, it probably increases your probability of customer success pretty dramatically if you can actually deliver you know, what they want. >> Oh, most definitely, most definitely and you know certainly we also, I don't have the largest marketing budget depending on you know, my competitors that I deal with and so I really depend on great customer satisfaction and great customer references to help, you know, bring the next prospect on as part of the IFS family. And, you know, and our customers I think are some of our best sales people out there. It's really, it's really great. >> One of the things that the CEO talked about in the key note was really about building trust and you were just talking about your marketing budget. He also said, we're not going to market nonsense. Can you talk a little bit about how you build that trust, being honest with customers, obviously, sorry we can't do that, we can't deliver that, but we can deliver this. How, what else, what other kinds of ways do you make sure that you are building the kind of trusting, collaborative relationship with customers that you want? >> Well, it starts with listening. I mean, when you meet with a customer you got to step back, you have to listen, you have to be willing to listen to what you're doing well, and what you're, you know, what you need to improve on. And then you need to be able to take that in and then you know, synthesize it and then, you know, figure out how you're going to improve, you know and at IFS we're always striving to improve, not just with our products and you can see you know, we just released Applications 10 and that's exciting and many many things that are in Apps 10 came from feedback from our customers and from the user group. But, it's also listening with how we do service or how we work with our partners or do we need more partners? You know, we, you know, we have to just, you know be very open and communicative with our customers and I think everybody says that, you know, but you know, you don't say and say oh, I'm not going to listen to my customer. But, you really have to listen and then put it into action. >> Right, right. And, it's not easy to be maniacally focused on your customers, a lot of people say they are but when you peel back just a little bit they're more focused on their products, they're more focused on the competition, they're more focused on a lot of stuff so it is hard to be really singularly focused but you guys are kind of in services management management business so you work with those types of businesses that they themselves are really active in managing that client relationship. >> Oh, most definitely and when they're involved in that business they have very high expectations of what they expect, you know, on the other side when they're the customer as well. And I think we've learned some things from them, too and you know and how they, their service levels and things that they expect from that particular area. I also think it has something to do with the fact that, when we, you know IFS has been in the U.S. for, 20 some years now. But, we didn't come as the biggest player and so we really had to listen. We really had to work directly with those customers and you know we really needed to make sure that every one of those implementations was successful because we needed to you know have that customer ground swell of you know this is the greatest you know greatest software out there to help us continue to grow. >> Right. >> Really prove yourself. >> Exactly, exactly because I can. >> We're number two, we try harder right? >> Exactly, yeah. >> I mean it's a great its a great person to get together with versus we're number one and we're cocky and arrogant and don't care what you say. >> Exactly, exactly, exactly, yeah. >> So, so what is next, I mean we've seen the introduction of IFS 10 and I know we have some early adopters that it's already live with. You've got great scores, your NPS score, your Gartner insight scores are very high. What are some of your ambitions for growth? >> Well, certainly we want, you know, I would look to have the Americas be the largest region for IFS. I mean, that's, I think that you know we've got a great opportunity here. We've got a large market, we've got a great product and you know certainly we just want to continue to grow and so you know right now we are a large percentage of the IFS revenue but we want that to be even larger here in North America and in the Americas, so I think that's certainly very important to us. And we want to grow not only with what we're doing with IFS applications in its core, but also as we're adding new pieces with IFS, new add on products, new technologies to be able to make sure that our customers understand what we're doing there and how that can help their business. You know, I think it was interesting Dan's keynote today was talking about cloud which was a few years ago and now it's mainstream for us. Last time it was talking about IOT and now we've got more and more customers doing that, and so certainly we're looking about artificial intelligence and everybody is talking about that but at IFS we don't just want to say these buzz words. We want to really figure out as a customer what you need, how can you use this technology and monetize it, right because no one implements technology just to implement it. You want to have it help your business. And, so you know those are the kinds of things we're working on what's next and then there's going to be the next thing after you know, artificial intelligence and the next thing and that's why we depend on labs so we're always ahead of the curve and we can be bringing what our customers need. >> I thought it was interesting on Darren's keynote the other thing really is function versus experience, which he talked about time and time again and then with the Arena demonstration, kind of getting to a unified UI experience across all the different platforms. Looks like in nine you had kind of a different hodge podge of five and then you showed how Arena slowly replacing all of them so you'll have this unified experience. But, that's an interesting point of view, really to focus on the experience ahead of really the function and that seemed to be a pretty clear message in his keynote. >> Well, we've been focusing on user experience, that's been one of our you know, core things for the product road map for many years and I think Dan talked about that as well. Certainly it's a balance because if you don't have the feature and function it doesn't matter what your user experience is, you're not going to use it. But, IFS is a very feature rich product and then you need to make sure that you can make it easier to use and so certainly it is focusing on that user experience but continuing to add the functionality that we need to support that as well. And you know, millennials today, they expect to be able just to sit down, they don't want to go to days of training, they don't want to have to. It just should be intuitive and that's our, you know, really what we're trying to do is just to make sure that it's as intuitive to use as a consumer product but really has the depth that you need to get your job done because you know, our customers they have complex businesses and complex business problems that they need to solve and so we need to make sure that we can develop, you know use both and have both of them for our customers to use. >> But, historically in the ERP space was always function over experience and a lot of the historical companies had a pretty bad rap for the user experience so you know, to really prioritize that and then to add some of the automation and the AI to hide certain levels of that detail that you just don't need to see under the UI. I thought that was pretty impressive. >> Yeah, I think it is, I think it is and I think it's very special for where we're going and if you don't, people never really get to implement all the features and functions underneath it. And what my hope is, is that with a good user experience people will use more of the product and then they'll be able to use more of the features and functions that are there today and that we're adding for the future, and they can use that to make their businesses even better. >> So are you working with the customers in the labs, too? I mean, how, how, at what point, 'cause you said that's why you have the labs so you can experiment and iterate and then, but then how do you know what the customer, what is intuitive to the customer and then what the customer needs, how closely? >> Well we'll bring customers into the labs. We will do a labs tour, we did last year that we did that and you let some customers see that. Then our customers know that everything that we do in the labs doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to come out, right? Because you know, we want, we don't want them to fail, but they have the right to fail in the labs because you learn a lot about, you know, what didn't work as well. So, it's making sure that when we have events like this, you know, there's the innovation center over there and making sure that, you know, getting feedback on what they're doing there and letting customers see there and get their input. It's all, once again, about we've got ideas, we need to bring those ideas to the customer, listen to them, get their feedback, listen, and then take it back, synthesize it and go to the next step. >> Deliver it. >> You talked about growth, being a big objective. Are there any particular market segments that you're, that you're looking at? >> Well IFS has had an industry focus for quite some time and we don't expect to change that industry focus. You know, we're very focused on customers who make products and who can, you know, maintain and service assets and so you know right now we're very strong in aerospace and defense, we're extremely strong in service. You know we're ranked highest on those. We've got a great customer base in industrial manufacturing and process and in those particular industries and so we're going to continue to focus on those. I don't see that we're going to go outside those industries because there is more than enough market here in the Americas for us to focus on those and to be very good at it and we need to focus and be extremely good at what we do. Therefore, we can keep the good customer satisfaction. >> All right, and then we just had Tobias on too talking about IOT and really starting to integrate multiple data sources you know a lot more stuff into your existing application to expand on your capabilities. >> Cindy: Oh, most definitely, that's certainly the point. >> You don't need to build a bunch of new stuff necessarily. >> Cindy: Yeah, yeah exactly. >> Great, well Cindy thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. We've had a great time talking to you. >> Cindy: Great, it was a pleasure, thank you. >> Thanks. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick, we will have more from IFS World, theCUBE's live coverage just after this. (techno music)