>>Hey, everyone. I want to welcome you back. This is our intermission. And let me tell you what a morning we've had for those of you that don't know. I'm, Hayma Ganapati, I'm in product marketing at Docker. And I would just want to quote, actually someone who was in one of the chat rooms and this, I think encapsulates exactly how I feel today, because this is my first Docker con and the quote was from. And he said, I feel like a kid in an ice cream store where I don't know which flavor to choose. I want to go to all of the sessions and I got to tell you that's how I felt. And, you know, um, I want to just do some specific call-ups. Um, first of all, Dana way to keep it real in your interview. I love the cube interview. If you miss that, um, it was really great. >>She talks a lot about, uh, CI CD pipeline and you know, what to do with GoodHub. It was great. Um, I also want to say that I was, uh, slipping back and forth between the community rooms and way to go Brazil obrigado until all of the people who participate in the Brazil room, we had about 250 plus people in that room. And the, the chat window was just going crazy and in the French community room, Vive left hall. So if you've a uncle funny, uh, we had about 150 plus people in that room. So I just want to say that, you know, we've been seeing a lot of participation and I just want to thank everyone for attending and for participating on people have been so kind in the chat rooms, we just want to remind you to stay kind, you know, presenters put a lot of effort into their presentations, so just, you know, offer some positive and supportive critique to them. >>And the other thing I want to mention is all of the countries that we're seeing, all of the participation. So I'm just going to call out a few. We have people from the Netherlands, from Canada, from South Africa, Akron, Ohio, Belgium, Austria, yeah, Ecuador, New Zealand. And he cut up Westchester. Like, I mean, it just goes list goes on and on and on. And I think this really speaks to the power of Docker community. And it's a real testimony to how people from all over the world are in love with Docker technology and are excited to be here. And so I just wanted to thank everyone again and want to remind you that we want to leverage the power of community. And we have a fundraising campaign going on to help, uh, people who are affected by COVID. And you know, some of our big communities, especially in India and Brazil are, have been really affected by COVID. >>So we're asking you to contribute and we'd really like you to participate. Um, we have, uh, the, the link you can see here, Docker donates, you can tweet about it and would love to see the numbers go up for those donations, because, you know, I've personally been affected, had some family members pass away from COVID in India, and I'm sure other people may have stories that firsthand or secondhand. So please do that and let's show what the power of Docker community can do. And before I hand over to, to Peter, I'm just going to read out some of the tweets we've been getting, okay, this Brett and Peter, these are great. Uh, one of the, one of the tweets said dev environments is one of the most exciting features in the past few years. Super excited to try this out. Great, great, great tweet. Yeah. >>I agree to, um, another loving the content that was not your tweets. You can, you can slip me the 20 bucks later. Um, there's another tweet that says loving the content from hashtag Docker con so far fascinating use cases and interesting progress and future directions love that. And then there's another one I'm trying to find it here. Uh, I've been waiting for this so long Docker builds now work on Intel and M one. So keep those tweets coming. We love getting this kind of feedback and we love reading the chat room. So, um, Peter, you know, I attended your, your panel and I love that we were talking about a security and that moving, moving it left. So how did that go for you? >>Uh, it was, it was, uh, it was extremely fun. And for those that are, uh, I think my parents might be watching, so they probably watched it and were like, w this is the most boring thing I've ever seen, but, um, you know, you get a bunch of geeks and, uh, Brett has told me I should use geek instead of nerd, but I, I liked, uh, geek. So you get a bunch of geeks talking about security and coding and, um, what, what, what containers actually are, what vulnerabilities are. Yeah, it was, it was extremely fun. The panel was fantastic. They were very engaging the chat. I mean, I couldn't keep up with the chat. Right. It would just kept flying by, uh, luckily I had a helper to pull off questions, but, um, yeah, it's super exciting. You can, I know we're all remote, but you can just feel that energy, right. It was, it was great. It was great. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. It's super >>Connected. I felt that with your panel to Brett as well, sorry to talk over you there, but yeah. How did, how did it go for you? I, there was a lot of engagement in your session. >>Uh, ditto, like it was just, uh, there was so many questions. We only got to get a fraction of them. I tried to pick themes because, uh, when you talk about continuous testing and integration and all the things that take a part of that, um, you, you end up with lots of, well, what I like is the discussion around opinions, because so much of these pipelines from code on your machine, into production and everything in between, it's really, uh, it's a culture. It turns out to be the description of your culture and how you all perceive testing, how you, what you value in testing. And so that really started to come out as a theme, um, throughout that show. And we, we ran at a time. I was also watching Peters and it was fantastic, but like you think an hour is enough time to cover a topic, but it's just tipping tip of the iceberg kind of stuff. So I think it was super helpful. I learned some things, um, I really enjoyed watching Peters and, uh, yeah, can't wait for the next one. There's >>More than that. And likewise, great. I mean, I know, I know we're w maybe we pat chose it, but it, it was, it was super exciting to watch your panel. They were very Nikos, one of my favorite people in the world, uh, a fellow Austinite, but, um, yeah, I love that too. How you, uh, you were talking about opinions right. And playing off each other. It's, it's always interesting to hear smart people, uh, how they think, right. Yeah. I learned from how they think, right. Yeah. A hundred percent. >>So, all right. So we're, we're, um, what's next? Like, we, we gotta keep this thing going, so I've got to remember that. >>I want to, so I want to talk a bit about some of the panels that are, or the sessions that are coming up and just want to remind people that happened this afternoon. I'm all about use cases. You know, I was a developer for many decades, and it's great to hear how other developers are using the tools. But, uh, as a developer, I always wanted to know how are, what are the end user applications? And so we have two exciting sessions at 1:00 PM. We have sneak and red ventures, and they're going to be talking about how they used Docker containers. The title of the, uh, uh, session is great. An ounce of prevention, curing, insecure, container images. So check that out. And we also have another one at one 30 with Massimo, from AWS and Dexter Legaspi from Sirius XM. And they're going to be talking about a real world application using Docker containers. So I really want you to, to encourage you to attend those. >>Yeah. Um, can I say one really quick? Cause I'm Sue and a shout out to Eric Smalling. He's giving the red ventures talk with our partners. He's awesome. Go check out his, uh, but I'm really excited about Matt. Jarvis's sneak talk around. Uh, I think we might've talked about it earlier. My container image has 500 vulnerabilities vulnerabilities now what, right. I mean, I think as developers, as we're coming into this and dev ops and everybody right. You scan and then you see all these vulnerabilities just shoot by. And you're like, well, what do I do? So Matt, Matt will be addressing that. And he is fantastic. I can go on. There's a bunch of them. >>Yeah. There's a whole bunch of coming up and right up after this, I'm on a live stream with a bunch of panels on get ops. And then after that, Peter will be back. And so stay tuned and thanks for watching during the intermission. And we'll see you soon. >>I'm also leading the women in tech panel attend that. Don't forget to do that. >>Absolutely. Yep. All right. Ciao. Ciao >>For me like my first, oh, I get it about Docker was when I used a SQL server container on my neck book for the first time >>Being able to install Docker desktop, which was the first thing that I did and be able to build this without worrying about any of my software versions that I currently had on my machine. It was >>Awesome. One of the things, because I love the most about Docker is because I write books and I do video training courses to help a lot of people take their first steps with Docker and containers and to get a connection with those people and for them to come back to me and say, do you know what this is so cool, so easy, and it's going to change both my job. And, but also my organization, my team, all of that kind of stuff, change the experience that our customers have with our applications and what our business really puts a smile on my face. If >>You want to use containers, then Docker is the first toys, especially with tools like the mark Docker, compose, you can, uh, easily do your day-to-day job as a developer, or even if you're an ops person, then there are the books of the cloud and other things. So yeah, the idea is that we can go the simplicity one simple task, uh, to, uh, Daugherty mate and make that reuse as many times. Uh, that is one of the cool things I like about my >>Favorite part about Docker is using it as a developer tool. I using Docker desktop, really easy to install, really easy to run. >>Every time I come back to DACA, I love the simplicity of the way that it works, especially on things like security, which I find frustrating and hard. It's just done so seamlessly. And so my favorite thing about DACA is not just that it changed the world in the way that we develop in and ship and build applications and put that. It's just so easy that even the guy, like, I think >>It really is all about finding that aha moment, that hook where Docker really makes sense to you because once you have that moment, then all of a sudden, you, you know, you are on your way to being a Docker power user. >>We need for people to understand this technology better before they can, uh, actually dive deep into that. And Docker makes it easier to explain things, to explain the concept of containers, to explain how containers will work, how you can split your environments, how you can, uh, standardize all your pipelines and so on. It's important that we also take the time to help other people. And I think it's very important that we also give back and that's part of the motto of open sources. How do we give back to other people and how we help other people learn? And I think that's what I'm really passionate about. This whole thing is continuing, uh, giving back to the community. I just >>Hope and has fun at Docker con. And I know that there's a lot of great speakers coming and I will be watching the talks, even though they're happening at 3:00 AM and in my local time zone, um, I'm pretty excited to watch and, uh, hopefully watch more than later on streaming or YouTube or wherever they're going to be. So I hope everyone has fun and learn something and yeah, I don't see how you couldn't have fun.

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante, and as part of my CEO and CXO series I've been bringing in leaders around the industry and I'm really pleased to have Sudheesh Nair, who is the CEO of ThoughtSpot Cube alum. Great to see you against Sudheesh, thanks for coming on. >> My pleasure Dave. Thank you so much for having me. I hope everything is well with you and your family. >> Yeah ditto back at you. I know you guys were in a hot spot for a while so you know we power on together, so I got to ask you. You guys are AI specialists, maybe sometimes you can see things before they happen. At what point did you realize that this COVID-19 was really going to be something that would affect businesses globally and then specifically your business. >> Yeah it's amazing, isn't it? I mean we used to think that in Silicon Valley we are sitting at the top of the world. AI and artificial intelligence, machine learning, Cloud, IOT and all of a sudden this little virus comes in and put us all in our places basically. We are all waiting for doctors and others to figure these things out so we can actually go outside. That tells you all about what is really important in life sometimes. It's been a hard journey for most people because of what a huge health event this has been. From a Silicon Valley point of view and specifically from artificial intelligence point of view, there is not a lot of history here that we can use to predict the future, however early February we had our sales kick off and we had a lot of our sellers who came from Asia and it became sort of clear to us immediately during our sales kick off in Napa Valley that this is not like any other event. The sort of things that they were going through in Asia we sort of realized immediately that us and when it gets to the shores of the US, this is going to really hurt. So we started hunkering down as a company, but as you mentioned early when we were talking, California in general had a head start, so we've been hunkered down for almost five weeks now, as a company and as the people and the results are showing. You know it is somewhat contained. Now obviously the real question is what next? How do we go out? But that's probably the next journey. >> So a lot of the executives that I've talked to, of course they start with the number one importance is the health and well-being of our employees. We set up the work from home infrastructure, et cetera. So that's I think, been fairly well played in the media and beginning to understand that pretty well. Also, you saw I talked to Frank Slootman and he's sort of joked about the Sequoia memos, that you know eliminate unnecessary expenses and practices. I've always eliminated unnecessary expenses, keep it to the essentials, but one of the things that I haven't probed with CEOs and I'd love your thoughts on this is, did you have to rethink sort of the ideal customer profile and your value proposition in the specific context of COVID? Was that something that you deliberately did? >> Yeah so it's a really important question that you asked, and I saw the Frank interview and I a 100% agree with that. Inside the company we have this saying, and our co-founder Ajeet actually coined the phrase of living like a middle-class company, and we've always lived that, even though we have, 300 plus million dollars in the bank and we raised a big round last year. It is important to know that as a growth stage company, we are not measured on what's in the bank. It's about the value that we are delivering and how much I'll be able to collect from customers to run the business. The living like a middle-class family has always been the ethos of the company and that has been a good thing. However, I've been with ThoughtSpot for a little more than 18 months. I joined as the CEO. I was an early investor in the company and there are a couple of big changes that we made in the last 18 months, and one of is moving to Cloud which we can talk. The other one has been around narrowing our focus on who we sell to, because one of the things that, as you know very well Dave, is that the world of data is extremely complex. Every company can come in and say, "We have the best solution out there" and it can just be in the world, but the reality is no single product is going to solve every problem for a customer when it comes to a data analytics issue. All we can hope for is that we become part of a package or solution that solves a very specific problem, so in that context there's a lot of services involved, a lot of understanding of customer problems involved. We are not a bi-product in the sense of Tableau or click on Microsoft, but they do. We are about a use case based outcomes, so we knew that we can't be everywhere. So the second change we made is actually a narrower focus, exclusively sell to global. That class, the middle class mentality, really paid off now because almost all the customers we sell to are very large customers and the four work verticals that we were seeing tremendous progress, one was healthcare, second was financial sector, the third was telecom and manufacturing and the last one is repair. Out of these four, I would say manufacturing is the one where we have seen a slowdown, but the other verticals have been, I would say cautiously spending. Being very responsible and thus far, I'm not here to say that everything is fine, but the impact if you take Zoom as a spectrum, on one end of the spectrum, where everything is doing amazingly well, because they are a good product market fit to hospitality industry on the other side. I would say ThoughtSpot and our approach to data analytics is closer to this than that. >> That's very interesting Sudheesh because, of course health care, I don't think they have time to do anything right now. I mean they're just so overwhelmed so that's obviously an interesting area that's going to continue to do well I would think. And they, the Financial Services guys, there's a lot of liquidity in the system and after 2009 the FinTech guys or the financial, the banks are doing quite well. They may squeeze you a little bit because they're smart negotiators, but as you say manufacturing with the supply chains, and in retail, look, if your ecommerce I mean Amazon hit, all-time highs today up whatever, 20% in the last two weeks. I mean just amazing what's happening, so it's really specific parts of those sectors will continue to do well, won't they? >> Absolutely, I think look, I saw this joke on Twitter, what's the number one cost? What is in fact (mic cuts out). Very soon people will say it is COVID and even businesses that have been tried to, sort of relatively, reluctant to really embrace the transformation that the customers have been asking for. This has become the biggest forcing function and that's actually a good thing because consumers are going to ultimately win because once you get groceries delivered to you into your front doors, it's going to be hard to sort of go back to standing in the line in Costco, when InstaCart can actually deliver it for you and you get used to it, so there are some transformation that is going to happen because of COVID. I don't think that society will go back from, but having said that, it's also not transformation for the sake of transformation. So speaking from our point of view on data analytics, I sort of believe that the last three to four years we have been sort of living in the Renaissance of enterprise data analytics and that's primarily because of three things. The first thing, every consumer is expecting, no matter how small or the big business, is to get to know them. You know, I don't want you to treat me like an average. I don't want you treat me like a number. Treat me like a person, which means understand me but personalize the services you are delivering and make sure that everything that you send me are relevant. If there's a marketing campaign or promo or customer support call, make sure it's relevant. The relevance and personalization. The second is, in return for that. customers are willing to give you all sorts of data. The privacy, be damned, so to a certain extent they are giving you location information, medical information,-- And the last part is with Cloud, the amount of data that you can collect and free plus in data warehouse like Snowflakes, like Redshift. It's been fundamentally shifted, so when you toggle them together the customers demand for better actors from the business, then amount of data that they're willing to give and collect to IOT and variables and then cloud-based technologies that allows you to process and store this means that analyzing this data and then delivering relevant actions to the consumers is no longer a nice to have and that I think is part of the reason why ThoughtSpot is finding sort of a tailwind, even with all this global headwind that we are all in. >> Well I think too, the innovation formula really has changed in our industry. I've said many times, it's not Moore's law anymore, it's the combination of data plus AI applied to that data and Cloud for scale and you guys are at the heart of that, so I want to talk about the market space a little bit. You look at BI and analytics, you look at the market. You know the Gartner Magic Quadrant and to your point, you know the companies on there are sort of chalk and cheese, to borrow a phrase from our friends across the pond. I mean, you're not power BI, you're not SaaS. I mean you're sort of search led. You're turning natural language into complex sequel queries. You're bringing in artificial intelligence and machine intelligence to really simplify and dramatically expand and put into the hands of business people analytics. So explain a little bit. First of all, do I have that sort of roughly right? And help us frame the market space how you think about it. >> Yeah I mean first of all, it is amazing that the diverse industry and technologies that you speak to and how you are able to grasp all of them and summarize them within a matter of seconds is a term to understand in itself. You and Stew, you both have that. You are absolutely right. So the way I think of this is that BI technologies have been around and it's played out really well. It played it's part. I mean if you look at it the way I think of BI, the most biggest BI tool is still Excel. People still want to use Excel and that is the number one BI tool ever. Then 10 years ago Tableau came in and made visualizations so delightful and a pic so to speak. That became the better way to consume complex data. Then Microsoft came in Power BI and then commoditized and the visualization to a point that, you know Tableau had to fight and it ended up selling to the Salesforce. We are not trying to play there because I think if you chase the idea of visualization it is going to be a long hard journey for ThoughtSpot to catch Tableau in visualization. That's not what we are trying to do. What we are trying to do is that you have a lot of data on one hand and you have a consumer sitting here and saying data doesn't mean you treated me well. What is my action that is this quote, very customized action quote. And our question is, how does beta turn into bespoke action inside a business? The insurance company is calling. You are calling an insurance company's customer support person. How do you know that the impact that you are getting from them is customized. But turning data into insight is an algorithmic process. That's what BI does, but that's like a few people in an organization can do that. Think of them like oil. They don't mix with water, that's the business people. The merchandising specialist who figures out which one should become site and what should be the price what should be ranking. That's the merchandiser. Their customer support person, that's a business user. They don't necessarily do Python or SQL, so what happens is in businesses you have the data people like water and the business people who touch the customer and interact with them every day, they're like the water. They don't mix. The idea of ThoughtSpot is very simple. We don't want this demarcation. We don't want this chasm. We want to break it so that every single person who interact with the customer should be able to have an interactive storytelling with the data, so that every decision that they make takes data into insight to knowledge to action, and that decision-making pipeline cannot be gut driven alone. It has to be enabled by data science and human experience coming together. So in our view, a well deployed data platform, decision-making platform, will enhance and augment human experience, as opposed to human experience says, this data says that, so you've got to pick one. That's an old model and that has been the approach with natural language based interactive access with the BI being done automated through AI in the backend, parts what we are able to put very complex data science in front of a 20 year experienced merchandising specialist in a large e-commerce website without learning Python, without learning people, without understanding data warehouse >> Right so, a couple of things I want to pick up on. I mean data is plentiful, insights aren't. That's really the takeaway from one of the things that you mentioned and this notion of storytelling is very, very important. I mean, all business people, they better be storytellers in some way shape or form and what better way to tell stories than with data, and so, because as you say it's no longer gut feel, it's not the answer anymore. So it seems to me Sudheesh, that you guys are transformative. The decision to focus on the global 2000 and really not, get washed up in the Excel, well I could just do it in Excel, or I'm going to go get Power BI, it's good enough. It's really, you're trying to be transformative and you've got a really disruptive model that we talked about before, search led and you're speaking to the system, or, typing in a way that's more natural, I wonder if you could comment on that and particularly that disruption of that transformation. >> Remember we are selling to global 2000. Almost all of them will have Tableau or one of these power BI or one of these solutions already, so you're not trying to go right and change that. What we have done is very clearly focus on use cases. We're transforming data into action. We will move the needle for the bit, but for example with the COVID situation going on, one of the most popular use cases for us is around working capital management. Now a CFO who's been in the business for 20 or 30 years is an expert and have the right kind of gut feeling about how her business is running when it comes to working capital. However, imagine now she can do 20 what-if scenarios in the next five seconds or next 10 minutes without going to the SPN 18, without going to the BI team. She can say what if we reduce hiring in Japan and instead we focus them on Singapore? What if we move 20% of marketing dollars from Germany to New York? What would be the impact of AR going up by 1% versus AP going down by 1%? She needs to now do complex scenarios, but without delay. It's sort of like how do I find a restaurant through Yelp versus going to the lobby to talk to a specialist who tells me the local restaurant. This interactive database storytelling for gut enhances the decision-making is very powerful. This is why, customer have, our largest customer has spent more than $26 million with ThougthSpot and this is not small. Our average is around close to 700k. This week for example, we are having a webinar where Verizon's SVP of Analytics specifically focused on finance. He's actually going to be on a webinar with our CFO. Our CFO Sophie, one of our financial specialists and Jeff Noto from Verizon are going to be on this talking about working capital management. What parts ThoughtSpot is a portion of, but they are sharing their experience of how do we manage, so that kind of varies, like extremely rigid focus on use cases, supply chain, modeling different things so that someone who knows Asia can really interact with the data to figure out if our supply chain from Bangladesh is going to be impacted because of COVID can we go to Ecuador? What will that look like? What will be the cost? What's the transportation cost, the fuel cost, Business has become so complex you don't have time to take five, six days to look at the report, no matter how pretty that report is, you have to make it efficient. You need to be able to make a lightning fast decision and something like COVID is really exposing all of that because day by day situation on the ground is changing. You know, employees are calling in sick. The virus is breaking out in one place, other place. If it's not, curves are going up and down so you cannot have any sort of delay between human experience and data signs and all of that comes down to your point telling visual stories so that the organization can rally behind the changes that they want to make. >> So these are mission-critical use cases. They are big problems that you're solving and attacking. As you said, you're not all things to all people. One of the things you're not is a data store, right? So you've got a partner, you've got to have an ecosystem, whether it's cloud databases, the cloud itself. I wonder if you could talk about some of the key partnerships that you're forming and how you're going to market and how that's affecting your business. >> Yeah, I mean one of the things that I've always believed in Silicon Valley is that companies die out of indigestion, not out of starvation. You try to do everything. That's how you end up dying and for us in the space of data, it's an extremely humbling space because there is so much to do, data prep, data warehousing, you know a mash-up of data, hosting of data, We have clearly decided that our ability is best spent on making artificial intelligence to work, interactive storytelling for business use and that's it. With that said, we needed a high velocity agility partner in the back end and Cloud based data warehouse have become a huge tailwind for us because our entire customer deployments are on Cloud, and the number one, obviously as you know from Frank's thing, the Snowflake has actually given, customers have seen Snowflakes plus ThoughtSpot is actually a good thing and we are exclusive in global 2000 and the Snowflake is climbing up there and we are able to build a good mutual partnership, but we are also seeing a really creative partnership all the way from product design to go to market and compensation alignment with Amazon on their push on Redshift as well. Google, we have announced partnership. There is a little bit of (mic cuts out) in the beginning we are getting, and just a couple of weeks ago we started working with Microsoft on their Azure Synapse algo. Now I would say that it's lagging, we still have work to do but Amazon and Snowflake are really pushing in terms of what customers want to see, and it completely aligns with our value popular, one plus one equals three. It really works well for our customers >> And Google is what, BigQuery plus Google Cloud, or what are you doing there? >> Yep so both Amazon and Google. Well, what we are doing at three different pieces. One if obviously the hosting of their cloud platforms. Second is data warehouse and enterprise data warehouse, which is Redshift and BigQuery. Third, we are also pretty good at taking machine learning algorithms that they have built for specific verticals. We're going to take those and then ingest them and deliver better. So for example if you are one of the largest supply companies in the world and you want to know what's the shipment rate from China and it shows and then the next thing you want to know is what the failure rate on this based on last behavior when you compressed a shipment rate, and that probably could use a bit of specific algorithms and you know Google and others have actually built a library of algorithms that can be injected into ThoughtSpot. We will simply answer the question of we may have gotten that algorithm from the Google library, sort of the business use is concerned. It doesn't really matter, so we have made all that invisible and we are able to deliver democratized access to Bespoke Insights to a business user, who are too sort of been afraid to deal with the sector data. >> Since you mentioned that you've got obviously several hundred million dollars in cash. You've raised over half a billion. You've talked previously about potential acquisitions, about IPO, are you considering acquisitions? M&A at this point in time? I mean there may be some deals out there. There's certainly some talent out there, but boy the market is changing so fast. I mean, it seems to, certain sectors are actually doing quite well. Will you consider M&A at this point? >> Yes, so I think IPO and M&A are two different-- IPO definitely, it will be foolish to say that this hasn't pushed our clients back a little bit because this is a huge event. I think there will be a correction across valuation and all of that. However, it is also important for us we use this opportunity to look at how we are investing our resources and investment for long-term versus the short-term and make sure that we are more focused and more tightening at the belt. We are doing that internally. Having said that, being a private company our valuation is, you know at least in theory, frozen, and then we have a pretty good cash position of close to $300 million, which means that it is absolutely an opportunity for us to seriously consider M&A. The important thing going back to my adage of, companies don't die out of starvation. It is critical to make sure that whatever we do, we do it with clarity. Are we doing it for talent? Are we doing it for tech? Or are we doing it for market? When you have a massive event like this, it is a poor idea to go after new market. It is important to go to our existing customers who are very large global 2000 firms and then identify problems that we cannot solve otherwise and then add technology to solve those problems, so technology acquisitions are absolutely something to consider, but it needs some more time to settle in because, the first two weeks were all people who were blindsided by this, then the last two weeks we have now gotten the mojo back in sales and mojo back in engineering, and now I think it is time for us to digest and prepare for these next two, three quarters of event and as part of that, companies like us who are fortunate enough to be on a good cash position, we'll absolutely look for interesting and good deals in the M&S space. >> Yeah, it makes sense, is tell and tech and, post IPO you can worry about Tam expansion. You'll be under pressure to do that as the CEO, but for now that's a very pragmatic approach. My last question is, there's some things when you think about, you say five weeks now you've been essentially on lockdown. You must, as many of us start thinking about wow, a lot of this work from home which came so fast people wouldn't even think about it earlier. You know, some companies mandated the beehive approach. Now everybody's open to that. There are certain things that are likely to remain permanent post COVID. Have you thought much about that? Generally and specifically how it might affect your business, the permanence of post COVID. Your thoughts. >> Yeah I've thought a lot about it. In fact, this morning I was speaking with our CRO Brian McCarthy about this. I think the change will happen, think of like an onion's inner most layer, I think the most, my hope is, that the biggest change will be in every one of us internally, as a what sort of a person am I and what does my position in the world means. The ego of each one of us that we carry because if this global event in one shot did not make you rethink your own sort of position in this big universe I think that's a mess. So the first thing has to be about being a better person. The second thing is, I had this two, three days of fever which was negative for COVID but I isolated myself, but that gave me sort of an idea of dipping in the dark room where I'm hoping my family won't get infected and you know my parents are in India so I sort of also realized that what is really important for you in life and how much family should mean to you, so that goes to the first, yourself second, your relationship with family, but having said that, the third thing when it comes to business building is also the importance for building with quality people, because when things go wrong it is so critical to have people who believe in the purpose of what you are trying to build. People with good faith and unshakable faith, personal faith and unshakable faith in the purpose of the company and most importantly you mentioned something which is the story telling. People, leaders who can absolutely communicate with clarity and certainty. It becomes the most important thing to lead an organization. I mean, you are a small business owner. You know we are in a small company with around 500 people. There is nothing like sitting at home waiting to see how the company is doing over email if you're a friend line engineer or a seller. Communication becomes so critical, so having the trust and the respect of organization and have the ability to clearly and transparently communicate is the most important thing for the company and over communicating due to the time of crisis. These things are so useful even after this crisis is over. Obviously from a technology point of view, you know people have been speaking a lot about working remotely and technology changes, security, those things will happen but I think if these three things were to happen in that order. Be a better person, be a better family member and be a better leader, I think the world will be better off and the last thing I'll also tell you, that you know in Silicon Valley sometimes we have this disregard for arts and literature and fight over science. I hope that goes away, because I can't imagine living without books, without movies, without Netflix and everything. Art makes yourself creative and enriches our lives. You know, sports is no longer there on TV and the fact that people are able to immerse their imagination in books and fiction and watch TV. That also reminds you how important it is to have a good balance between arts and science in this world, so I have a long list of things that I hope we as a people and as a society will get better. >> Yeah, a lot more game playing in our household and it's good to reconnect in that regard. Well Sudheesh, you've always been a very clear thinker and you're in a great spot and an awesome leader. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was really great to see you again. All the best to you, your family and the broader community in your area. >> Dave, you've been very kind with this. Thank you so much, I wish you the same and hopefully we'll get to see face-to-face in the near future. Thanks a lot. >> I hope so, thank you. All right and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering ScienceLogic Symposium 2019. Brought to you by ScienceLogic. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE's exclusive coverage of ScienceLogic Symposium 2019 here at the Ritz Carlton in Washington, D.C. Happy to welcome to the program first-time guest but a long-time customer of ScienceLogic, Karl Fosburg, who's the senior director of systems integration at Hughes. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, so we're here in D.C., and that's important 'cause first of all, you're based down here, and ScienceLogic is based down here. >> Yup. Bring us back a little bit. You said you'd been a customer a long time as to... maybe give us a little bit of the before picture, if you could. >> Sure, so yeah, we've been a customer for 12 years now, and we picked ScienceLogic for a big list of reasons, actually wrote the RFI itself, and probably 20 pages long. Lots of people came back and gave us responses. ScienceLogic was one of the short-listed candidates that we picked out. We did a bake-off with a couple other vendors, and ScienceLogic was the clear winner. >> All right. So Karl, lets zoom out for a second here >> Okay. and just give us a level set on Hughes, what Hughes is today. You know, I'm familiar with what Hughes was back in the day and there's certain pieces that are no longer there so give us a level set on the company in the business. >> Yeah, sure. So, Hughes is formally known as Hughes Network Systems, were owned by EchoStar Corporation and we're a managed service provider. We have a consumer business where we provide broadband internet to folks that live really out in the countryside and can't get cable, or DSL, or FIOS, things like that. We have about 1.4 million subscribers in our consumer business. We've also launched consumer services in South America, Brazil, Ecuador, Columbia, places like that. Really serving under-served areas for giving them broadband. We also have an enterprise business where we sell to credit card processing, gas and oil, pipelines, fast foods, places like that. >> Okay. So Karl, is it safe to say you use satellites but no longer put them into space? >> We use satellites, that's correct. We contract that out now. Yeah, we are the last remaining Hughes company. >> Yeah. So, service providers are always fascinating to me because we talk about enterprise IT and how fast things are changing. At least for my entire career, when I talk to service providers, change and growth is really just baked into the DNA. >> Yep. I need to move fast. When you talk about scale, it means something very different and living in that complex world, and just give us a little bit about what things are like in 2019 for you. >> Sure, yeah. The scale is always our challenge. Like I like to say, we have sales people too and they're out there selling new products and services constantly. So we needed to be able to grow with those sales. We started out with a couple thousand devices that needed monitor in applications. Now we're up to almost 30 thousand Nox systems that we monitor. Also, we're keeping track of nearly 2 million terminals and the status of them and things like that. So, yeah, scale is super important to us. >> Okay. So, bring us inside, where ScienceLogic fits into your equation. >> Sure. So when we put out our FI to industry years ago, we were trying to replace a whole bunch of different tools. We had other vendor products and things like that. We really wanted to consolidate tools as much as possible into a single platform. Traditional ICNP, SNMP monitoring is how we originally started. Now we have lots and lots of integration with other tools, APM products, different streaming media products. We're integrating more and more with streaming services now in terms of getting data into the platform. So, yeah ... >> Yeah. Karl, I'd love to get your viewpoint. Something that came through to me in the keynote is on the one hand the years like, oh, well AIOps is going to replace things like some of the traditional players here, but then you see onto the stage it's like, oh okay, we're actually going to have integrations with a number of these tools. So yes, there's overlap but it needs to be integrated. How do you look at that as, is this the primary product? Is this a piece of the product? How do data collection between all these various tools go together? Well, that's a great question 'cause that's exactly what we and lots of other folks are grappling with right now. We've got data producers all over the place now, and we're really focused on the data production and high quality data back at the source into a real pub-sub type of architecture of which we believe that ScienceLogic will be both a producer and consumer of that pub-sub architecture, and whether it's the one tool to rule them all or not? Probably not, no ones going to be that, and we've got lots of vendors that purport to be the one tool to rule them all. But really, we're focused on ScienceLogic at this point to be really the focus, especially for our operations folks. We've got 24/7 staff. They use ScienceLogic as their main tool that they go to. So that's really where we want the data to end. That's where we want as much intelligence to end as possible. >> So, I'd be curious... You've been using the tool for a dozen years now. 12 years ago the discussion of data wasn't no where near what it was today. >> Correct. Can you bring us through a little bit of that journey, and you mentioned data a bunch, but how important is that? Where are you in your journey for... There was that maturity model that was put up there, the role of data today, and where do you see it going? >> Well, data is everything today. 12 years ago we were grappling with things like naming conventions and simple firewall rules and whatnot. Those days are long, long past. Now, the data quality and the pipeline is what we're focused on right now 'cause like Dave said in the keynote, "Garbage in, garbage out". We're really really focused on trying to get good quality data by focusing on the source of the data. As opposed to fixing it after it's been moved into whatever platform it ends up in. So we're using proper scheme of management and trying to bake-day the governance into the actual engineered products, and if it's not governed data then you don't get to look at it. And that's really our focus. We're an engineering company at heart so we actually write most of our own software. So we're kind of in control of our own destiny there, and we're really focused on pushing that back because we think the benefits in the long run are going to be worth that investment to get clean data all the way back to the source. >> Yeah. So Karl, one of the big shifts I've seen in the last few years... When you talked about managing and monitoring, I used to as the administrator or controller, used to be able to go and touch all of those pieces. Today, there's more and more some of those pieces I need to manage not just the stuff that's in my environment or my hosted environment, but outside of my environment and doing public clouds. >> Yep. >> Bring us up to speed as to where does Cloud fit? What's your Cloud strategy? >> Sure. We're actually launching some of our first applications in GCP right now. So we're working with our Google partners in this particular case to integrate the data that they can collect natively in their systems, bring it back in as actionable events into ScienceLogic platform, while keeping the vast majority of the data native to their platform. No need to bring back application specific data unless we're actually going to do something with it, or if we need to cross-correlate it with other information. The data sources live in our data centers, not in GCP. So we need to combine it with information we know about, our on-prem equipment, plus the applications running there. So that's the data we'll bring back to cross correlate. >> How do you decide what lives where, and where does ScienceLogic fit in the whole discussion? >> Yeah, that's a good question. What lives where... We kind of go back to license models and cost models. We're pretty good sticklers about focus on doing proper upfront analysis to make sure we don't end up with some six or seven figure bill at the end of the year from a Cloud provider. We also tend to do a lot of stuff on-prem because a lot of our systems have to run in one of our data centers. If you've ever driven past our building you'll see these large large dish's antennas outside. A lot of our equipment has to be within milliseconds or microseconds even of those dishes. So we actually have a large data center presence kind of scattered around the country and around the world. So, we have the compute resources to do it ourselves. >> Yeah, and even I would think edge computing something that plays into what you're doing. What do you see as some of the main challenges as the kind of footprint for what you're doing and things to spread out more? >> Yeah. Keeping, let's say pet projects, and shadow IP projects, keeping them in check is a really big focus right now, and also with DevOps sort of the "I'll do everything, I'm going to be my own IP department" philosophy is a new challenge that we're facing. So integrating with what the DevOps guys are building into our overall monitoring strategy, that's when a new challenge has really creeped up or it last, lets say six months or a year. >> Okay. Is there an intersection between your use of the ScienceLogic in the DevOps team yet? >> Not a big one yet. I think we're still learning DevOps at this point. I consider it a lifestyle change, not really a thing that you go get. So, I think we're still kind of early adoption for DevOps, and really only greenfield projects at this point in time. >> Okay. How about the term of the show is AIOps, so what's your act in the AIOps? Where do things like machine learning and automation fit into your environment? >> Yeah. We actually have quite a few used cases where we really think that machine learning is going to help us a lot. Cross-correlation is a big area for us. We have lots of information, but figuring it out, feeding like the APMs and Cisco ACI software defined networking, and those bits of information all into one product, we've been challenging ScienceLogic on this for quite a while. It's like, okay, you guys know about everything now. Tell us something that we didn't know before, and that's kind of where we're at, and seeing the announcements from this morning was really encouraging that we're finally see the horizon at this point. >> Yeah. If you can, (mumble), but how has ScienceLogic been doing on the roadmap? What helps between ScienceLogic and your vendor ecosystem out there? What more could they be doing to make your life easier? >> Yeah, that's a good question. So, if you would ask me that a year ago I probably wouldn't have been as encouraged as I am today. It was a challenge and they're engineering company, we're an engineering company. Sometimes you have to focus on foundation, and it's not cool, it's not sexy, it's not shiny, but you have to do it. And I think they've been focused a lot on their foundational aspects of the product which will actually enable doing things like machine learning. There's no point in doing machine learning if you have bad data or if you have a platform that doesn't support very very fast queries, and the graph QL database. We think that we're going to use that extensively and through the API, not even through the UIs. So, I think foundation is important. I think they focused on it for the last couple of years. I think we're finally going to start to see the benefits of it. Both single factor sort of machine learning, anomaly detection, but we really want to see it on a cross domain. I want to be able to see in ScienceLogic impacted by in our full stack environment. >> Yeah. I'd expect you probably had some visibility into what was coming up in the Big Ben release. Is there anything that jumped out at you, or that you're ready to use day one? >> The automations, for sure. We'll use that definitely day one. The way they've gone through and really made it a lot easier to use. You don't have to be a python developer anymore to actually get a lot of benefits out of the product. So I can turn that over to some of our junior engineers to actually handle those things, and we get a lot more sophisticated with them now. Primarily we used to focus on, "oh, let's send an email" type of thing. Now we can actually execute back-end actions without having to have a programmer to do it. So that right away we're going to use out of box. >> Okay. And in that forward looking piece, without breaking any visibility you have into their roadmap, what would you like to see more? >> I'd like to see more getting performance data into their real scalable, laterally scalable back end. And that's certainly an area that I'd love to see as much progress as fast as possible on. Also the Pub-Sub subscribing to streams coming out of our Kafka cluster. We want that to be in the product as soon as possible 'cause we really believe that that's where the majority of our data of the future is going to come from. Also, new applications, they come and go. Docker containers spin up, spin down. So the state of something is no longer fixed and we need to be able to integrate with Kubernetes and our open shift platform to be able to know, "Well what should be running right now?" So, those are the things that are on our roadmap that we need out of the product as soon as possible. >> Yeah. So it definitely came to me that ScienceLogic's listening. Are they moving fast enough for you? >> No. No ones ever moved fast enough. So, yeah, they're moving so that's good, but yeah, I could use it today if they had it. >> All right. Karl, last thing, you've been to a few of the ScienceLogic events in the past. You've been to other industry shows, what's special about the show? What brings you and your team to ScienceLogic symposiums? >> One of the things that ScienceLogic does a really good job is they bring a lot of resources here, and actual resources that actually know stuff. It's not just telling me, "Oh, that shiny new object is going to be in the platform at some indeterminate time in the future." It's the actual engineers, people writing code, product managers, things like that. So having access directly to the people who actually do the platform updates and changes is super valuable. The new sensor where we can touch and feel, take attires on new things has been excellent this year. So I think that's probably the thing, just quick access to all the resources. We have a bit of an advantage, we're only 45 minutes up the road. We can come down here as need be to visit their headquarters but having everyone here at one time is great. >> All right. Well Karl Forsberb, really appreciate you sharing your history and experience in future direction as to where things are going on your end. >> All right. >> I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from ScienceLogic 2019. Thanks for watching theCube. (upbeat music)

(click) >> Welcome this special Cube conversation in the Intel Tech Lounge at the Sundance Film Festival. I'm John Furrier with The Cube. We are here with Ari Kuschnir, who is the founder and managing partner of Missing Pieces. Doing some really amazing work on the future of filmmaking. He's got a great entrepreneurial spirit. And creative desire to deliver great product. Welcome! >> Thank you, thank you. >> So, tell them about Missing Pieces and what's going on in your world. So, there's context. Take a minute to explain what you are working on. >> Well, the premise is to be at this intersection of storytelling technology. And to make stuff people actually want to watch. And VR and AR are parts of it. But not the whole. So, I know some of the conversation focus is on, is on VR, and we're just as excited about where storytelling is headed. In terms of what technology allows us to do. But the key for me is. I'm just passionate about, a new thing comes out. And I want to figure out how to make something really great. But meaningful, and powerful with that. >> We were talking before you came out about filmmaking, obviously trained in the discipline, obviously a variety of other things. But I want to get your perspective, we're on top of this new generation, what does that mean to you? When you hear that new generation, a new creative is coming? What does that mean to you? >> Yeah, I feel like I've ridden the wave of the thing as it's happened. And I mean, the company has too. So, I went to film school in the late 90s. And it was the first time you could buy like, first Final Cut, and the first wave of that. So you could make art little movies on the weekend, you no longer needed even to go to the school itself to borrow the equipment. That was revolutionary in 1999. And then 2005, when we started thinking about the company. You know, your Vimeo, YouTube, video i-Pod all come out within five months of each other. Towards the later part of the year. And it's a revolution. It's clear that with distribution, now not only can we make it and edit it in our laptops. But we can put it out, and millions of people could watch it. And that was the first time that was possible. And it was revolutionary. And I think it still is, to some degree. So, we've just, you know, as it evolves what I see is that, it's not, I've always felt like it's not enough to make the sausage as they say. You know, the directors, the talent that I sign now. Like the project we have now here at Sundance, young Jake. Jake is a great example of a creative who you can't fit in a box. He's an Internet artist, he's a rapper. He's an interactive video maker. He did an app called Emoji.Ink. And he does celebrity emoji portraits. He has a hundred thousand followers on Instagram. So, he can command his own audience. So, when a brand, or an agency comes to him. It's a very different approach than when they come for a very straight up work for hire, director's commercial kind of thing. That is the future, I mean. The future is about having a passionate audience, making things for that audience, understanding it. And being able to communicate with them on a daily basis, or a weekly basis in a powerful way, right? Through story. >> Yeah, I mean, you're riding the wave. And the waves are getting bigger. One of the things we do, we do a lot of tech coverage. And we see this in Cloud computing where software changed from Waterfall to Agile. And now the craft's coming back on the software side. But still now, software is eating the creative world. Because now a new wave is coming. So, speak to that, because you're, this is, you can almost look at the old ways. You mentioned the commercials and films. Almost like the Waterfall. You know, crafts, craft it up and you ship it. And you hope it works well. >> Ari: Yeah. >> But now, you have this new model of iteration. Where it's more Agile creative. How do you do Agile, like your artist, and not lose the craft? >> Yeah, well it's a challenge. Look, I've had so many opportunities in our 10 plus year career to kind of go in that direction of just like quantity over quality. And we could just never do it. I mean we're just not cut out for it. But at the same time, I'm not, I never ignore, how to optimize the content based on data, and based on what the landscape is looking like. So, an important thing for example that we consider in every project is context. Like what, how is this project going to be released? Oh, it turns out that, it's really a big social media push. It's not a TV thing. Or it turns out specifically it's Facebook versus Instagram. And that's a very different type of edit. And a very different type of way you start the video. 'Cause you've got a certain, even a different format, and a different way of looking at the content. So, you start to get into, and then you start to iterate, and look at the different ways in which you can repurpose, and rerelease the content, but customize it for each thing. So, you get into this really interesting place where the data is driving the story. And the feedback is driving the story. >> And the audience is part of the journey. >> Yes. And the comments, and the way in which people are taking the thing that you've made and re-interpreting it, is really interesting. And part of the story. >> You trigger a lot of emotion with me, when we're talking, because, you know, as an entrepreneur, I started media businesses turning into, and no-one has even seen this kind of media business before. But I have no media training of any kind. I did a science major. So, there's certain, and I've observed that there's dogma in the journalism business. And there's, but you know, how dare I challenge that, or others. You're doing the same thing. >> I love that by the way. >> So, I want to ask you. What is the dogma with the old world, 'cause the naysayers are usually the ones with the dogma. "Oh, it will never work!" >> Ari: Yeah. >> So, you're on the front end of this new trend. But you're going to have a visibility into what they're thinking, what is that? >> The dogma is, you know, the whole like, there's only big name directors, and you know, it's a certain caliber of work. And that craft is the ultimate thing. And that you just have to make the thing great. And it'll do the thing that is needs to do. Without any thinking in terms of context, or media buyer. How it can actually become a social, socially engaged piece. So, the thing that we're always fighting is some version of that. And then because we came from a scrappy place, but we're now, you know, a pretty legit thing, I think people, some people will still be like, well that's the kind of like, the problem solving sometimes gets interpreted as scrappy. Which is a word I really don't like. And I think-- >> It's a compliment on one hand. >> Yeah. >> But some people look at it as an insult. "Oh, he's just scrappy!" >> Well-- >> "He's not legit!" >> You never want to be the cheap solution. You want to be the solution that people call because nobody else can solve this problem for you. I think we, there's a strand of the company that's like, the kind of like, pick up the phone and we'll figure it out. And, the impossible project that nobody else can do. And then there's another strand where it's just like, you just want to make stuff people actually want to watch. How hard it that? The thing where you could just buy the media, and expect the results is trickier and trickier. >> I mean you could be different, and innovative, but that might not be good. But if you're good doing it, you're differentiated and you're innovating. >> Ari: That's right. >> What's the filmmaking track on that line. Because certainly there's a lot of innovation. And with innovation comes failure. But people are trying to be different. And being different actually is a good thing. What are some of the trends that you're seeing where people are having some success. And where people are stumbling. >> Yeah, that's a good. I mean what I see is, the things that do well take cultural context into account, and again speak to the people in that way. So, it's like a feedback loop that it's creating with its own audience. And we almost always, there's almost always a time in the process when we're dealing with an agency, or a brand where things start to go a little bit like, too, too much, and in that direction that you don't want it to take. Somebody, usually me, or someone will say, "Look, if we make these changes. "Or if we go in this direction. "We won't want to share it. "And if we don't want to share it, "nobody's going to want to share it." So, that becomes a key thing. Whereas before you could sort of away with some of that, now it's like, well, it has to pass this sort of, kind of litmus test in terms of like, are you comfortable with sharing this thing, because it speaks to you or not. >> So, I want to ask you the hard question, we're here at the Intel Tech Lounge, obviously Intel is doing a lot of tech things. They're trying to get all this new tech. And I see it on, whether you watch the NFL playoffs, with, you know, with the camera angles, the games, on basketball games. You see them using the power of technology-- >> We're actually working on an Intel Olympics VR related project that got a little tease ad, CES. So, I can just say that. >> Yeah I know, so what's the tech? What's the cool new game changer in your mind. As a tool that you need to be more successful, and other artists could use? >> Hmmm, well, you tend to, yeah I mean, I think we-- >> John: More horsepower, more compute, more-- >> No, I mean it's really the, What happened with the AR was really interesting, which was, everyone realized, oh, the phone's already in our pocket. While the headset needs to be something that really needs to be standalone. It needs to be $200. You know, like, you sort of, there's different kinds of headsets, of course. They do different kinds of things. But that's an extra hardware. The phone we already have in our pockets. So, everyone's started taking AR seriously. Including the big players. And what that allowed was a, a rethinking of what the possibilities with story would be. So, in some ways this last year has been a readjustment, and a rethinking of, well, what can you do with the phone that you've already got in your pocket. In terms of expanding the storytelling. Or placing a story in the middle of your living room, you know. A layer, using the phone as a window and a layer. But I'm equally as excited about what's coming in VR, interactive VR, room-scale VR, you know. The project that we have here is an interactive 360 project with a phone. >> What's that called? >> It's called On My Way. And the artist is young Jake. And the original conceit of it, is, it's Jake, there's four Jakes in a car. And every time you move the phone to a different Jake, it changes the Jake. So, as soon as it passes the quadrants. So, the four quadrant it kind of swaps the Jake. And that creates a really fun, and interesting thing. And he actually designed it for the phone, vertical. Because that's the way most people are going to experience it. >> John: That's awesome. >> But it's playing on a headset as well. >> Oh you're definitely a new creative. Love chatting with you. >> Thank you. >> Final, well, I have two questions, first one is, Sundance, what's the story this year? What's your report? If you had to go back and your friend asked you to give him a report, "Hey, what happened Ari, "what's going on at Sundance this year?" >> A combination of really interesting high-end VR projects. Some of them leaning into this kind of like more psychedelic less narrative driven stuff. Which I really like. Kind of like really embracing the fact that it's another world, and taking you there. And then the AR stuff. There's a thing called Tender, Ten Day R. Or Tendar. Which is a play on Tinder, by Tinder Claus. Which is, uses augmented reality, and emotion, and machine learning, everything that you could hope for in a really interesting way. So, that's kind of showing you where it's going. So, I think those two things. >> Psychedelic's interesting. I always, I mean this kind of tangent. But in, I've been seeing on The Cube interviews, I think we're going to have a digital hippy revolution. >> Ari: Definitely! >> And it's coming. I mean you can feel it. It's a different culture. >> When I was looking a lot of people, yeah, a lot of people are scared to, I mean, VR is a really great consciousness expanding way to go to get into other worlds. Without, you know-- >> And will all the crap going on in the world today you can almost look at this as a Sixties like movement in this modern era. Where it could be a major catalyst for massive change. >> Yeah, and there's a piece about, you know, this female shaman that grows through the tribe in Ecuador. And became the first ever female shaman for her tribe. And there's a piece called Chorus that, within it. Which is just super weird and trippy. And almost has no plot, but is amazing. >> All right Ari, you've got to run. Quick soundbite. What are you working on, what's exciting you these days? Share a little bit about what's happening. >> A variety of, again it's the full spectrum of storytelling, so it's not one thing. It's really pushing, experiential pushing, branded content pushing, original content that we're getting a lot more into that game. Long form series. VR series. Really, that's kind of the next wave for the company is to set foot, much stronger in the original space, and create our own original IP. Our own original content. >> Awesome, Ari Kuschnir managing partner and founder of Missing Pieces, check them out. Lot of great work. And again, it's a whole new game changing, from storytelling to the tech. The collision between technology and artistry, and creative, and it's happening. It's here at Sundance, at the Intel Tech Lounge. I'm John Furrier with The Cube conversation here at Sundance, which is part of our coverage. Was to look at the angle of Sundance 2018. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat techno music) >> And welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're having a CUBE Conversation in our Palo Alto Studios. We're excited to have our next guest, who is an ABIE award winner from the Grace Hopper Celebration. Would've been competing in early October, we tried to get her on then, schedules didn't mesh so it took us a few months, but we're really excited to have our next guest. She's Mercedes Soria, she is a VP of Software Engineering for Knightscope. Mercedes, welcome. >> Thank you, thank you, I am so happy to be here. >> Absolutely, so, congratulations again on your award of leadership and part of the winnings of that is you got to keynote in front of 18,000 people. So A, What was your impression of Grace Hopper and B, how did you like keynoting in front of 18,000 folks? >> Yes, how was Grace Hopper, it was a huge community of women in technology. I was so excited to be there, everybody was just looking up to women, everybody was trying to help each other. How do you go forward in your career, and I was really focused on STEM careers, which is one of my passions. So I was so glad to be there. And how it was to keynote in front of 18,000 people, so I hadn't done that before, so I can check it off my bucket list, that was one thing. And it was amazing, there were so many women who just clapped and they just kept supporting it and I had to stop several times while I was giving the speech, so it was once in a lifetime opportunity that I'm very grateful for. >> It's an amazing accomplishment, again, congratulations, and it's amazing show, if you haven't been to Grace Hopper, you have to sign up, how fast you say it sold out? >> Mercedes: 25 minutes. >> 25 minutes, oh. Go to anitaborg. or anitab.org now, that's right, they changed the URL, yeah, I'll have to check it out. So let's jump in about Knightscope. So for the people who aren't familiar, go the website, knightscope.com, a bunch of really cool fun stuff, tell us about what Knightscope's all about. >> So Knightscope is a company that is trying to cut the crime cost to the US in half. So most people don't know that the US spends about one trillion dollars a year just to deal with crime in the US, so our goal at Knightscope is to cut that in half with the use of new technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics. A group is software plus hardware plus humans, so we take the good things that humans do, which is make strategic decisions, the good things that machines do, which is do the monotonous work and store data for a very long time, and we combine those to try to help with crime. >> Right, so that's a nice explanation. The short answer is, if you go to the website, it's all rolled up into these cool robots that look like C-3PO, and I'm wondering if there's a little man inside there, but we'll get into that later. But I think it's a really interesting concept because you are bringing together many of the hot topics in technology right now, so one of'em just with robotics. You got these robots of various shapes and sizes, but as you said, really, it's the synergy of the robots with the people that give kind of a one plus one makes three effect. How is it, where are those points of intersection, and how does the robot help the human do a better job, and how does the human help the robot do a better job? >> So the robot helps the human because, in this case, security guards have to walk around the same places all day long, right, they have their route, they do that all day long and they get very, very bored, and they get to the point where they don't care anymore and they just scan a badge and then that is the job, right? So that's what the robots do, which is, they don't mind going around the same area all day long, recording data, recording video. That's where the synergy is. Now what the robots, at this point, can do is make a decision in terms of, okay, I have this five things, should I make an alarm to my supervisor and say a guard needs to come. The robot only provides information, so all of that information that we provide is so the human can make a decision on what to do next. >> And does it feed into, I mean obviously these are big security systems that already exist inside these big buildings and these big facilities. Does your robot tie back into those facilities, is it a different layer on top of it, how does it work with the existing security infrastructure that's already in place? >> So the existing security infrastructure is a bit separate at this time. There is a project that we're working on in terms to integrate because there's so many security systems out there, for a start up like us, we need to be very smart in terms of where we spend our resources. So we got to do studies and figure out which were the better senders, the better companies that we need to partner with to do that. But at this point, it's a separate tool, so you open it and all the gear you need is a current browser, you can open it from anywhere in the world, and your security people can look at all the data the machine has collected. >> Right, so the other interesting piece that you're tying together via these machines is really this combination of AI and ML, artificial intelligence, machine learning, but also your background is in user interface, so it can't just be happening in the background because these machines need to do their job, executing through and with people, on the UI side and the security guards and the security infrastructure behind them. So as you've introduced more AI and machine learning into the software components that you can drive the UI, how is that changing the world, how is the UI world changing because now you've got so much more data and so much more kind of compute behind that before it even gets to the actual user that's interfacing with it? >> Yeah so the UI's a little more rich these days, it used to be a webpage and HTML and JavaScript page, and that's all it did, right, but now we have a lot more information that we can provide. For example, we have machine learning algorithms that detect if there's people in an image, so I don't only tell you this is my video, but I also give you a picture of the person that I just saw, and then I tell you, hey, this is what I saw. It makes your experience a lot more incursive. >> Right, and another potential integration point, right obviously with photos in the security system for IDs and passes and all those things. >> Yeah, even face detection at some point as well is very important for us. >> Now you have four different models, why do you have so many models, what's the use cases that would drive you to have four different models? Hard to support four models instead of one as a startup. >> Yeah so our customers have very different needs. Crime doesn't happen just in a shopping mall, crime happens at PG&E offices, it happens at the mall, it happens at different locations, it could be outside, it could be inside, it could be in a hospital, it can be in a parking lot, so what we tried to do was to cover all of those potential places where crime will be. So with that we have four products; we have the K5, which is our first product. It goes into ADA compliant environments like hospitals and data centers, it's a big robot and mainly used for things like a parking lot to detect license plates, to make sure that it's monitoring all the outside. Our second product is the K3 which is a smaller machine, and what it does is mainly goes inside, it can go through a door and it can do things like monitoring who's at the office at night, raising an alert if there was a fire, stuff that happens inside. We have the K7 which goes to outside places where you have things like speed bumps, you have different kind of terrain, gravel or other type. And then the K1 which is our static model that what we're working on that for the future is to have concealed weapon detection at that point, which is something that is very useful for places that have, like for hospitals, when somebody comes in, they want to be able to know if these people are armed. >> Right, I'm just curious if you can share where customers have seen the most impact, the most benefit by using one of your robots. What specific behaviors have just been a game changer when they put in the Knightscope robot? >> Yeah, so I can't tell you the actual customer, that is something >> No, no, that's okay. >> That we can't say, but I would tell you one example. We have, for example, a hospital and this place is open 24/7, obviously the emergency room, and when they will have, it's down in LA, so they will have at least one break-in every week at the parking lot. So we put our machines there and the past seven months that they have been there, they got zero, they got no break-ins. And the nurses now feel safer going to their cars, people feel safer going there at night, so that is one example. We also had an example of a shopping mall where there was a guy who was basically exposing himself and nobody could catch him because he would drive, as soon as he saw a security guard, he would drive out. So we were able to catch that person as well. There are some people to steal merchandise, so they came, they stole something, they left, and the very next day, they come back and they try to sell this back to the mall people, so by seeing who these people are then determining that they came back to the mall, we were able to apprehend them as criminals. >> Right, on the first example, on the parking lot example, does the robot have active deterrents that it can do, can it sound alarms, light lights, to make people feel safer in a parking lot, that's very different than just monitoring things? >> Yeah so what the robot does is, it has a sound that it's all day it's playing that sound, there's a lot of lights, the lights change color based on what's happening around the robot. Another thing that we have that helps a lot of people feel safe, we have a push-to-talk functionality, so if you were feeling something was wrong at night, you can push that button and you can directly talk to the people at the security operation center. They can walk you through what to do, they can follow you while you go to your car, there's different functionality that we have that helps people feel that they're safe outside. >> Right, and on the shoplifting one, it's interesting 'cause lots of stores have cameras, right, that's not a new thing. So what did your system do differently that the regular camera that they had in there before probably would've filmed the person but didn't necessarily wasn't firing off the alert, recognizing they were back again, did somebody go in and manually type in this particular person's a shoplifter. How did you guys take it to a much different level than just kind of a static security cam? >> So the main thing that you should keep in mind for static cameras is there's always black spots, blind spots, there's no way that they can see everything, and mainly you have cameras inside of the shops, you don't have them outside, so what we did is, we not only saw that we not only got the video of the person inside of the shop, but we saw them when they came outside, we saw them when they were moving, all of this is recorded in video and that we can then match them and see the people who were. Another thing that we do that cameras don't do is we can detect your mobile devices, anything that has that's looking for a network, we can identify that device, and that is always for you and that is always for that device, so we can match those devices when they come in. >> You shouldn't have waited this long but one of the most interesting things about the company and what you guys do, and it's highlighted by what you just said, is the way you go to market. People are not buying these robots, right, you offer the robots as a service, so really interesting model and really brings up interesting things like you said where you can do all kinds of software upgrades, you can do hardware upgrades, you can do all types of changes to the actual unit that the customer just benefits, it's a classic SAS model. So how did you get to that stage and how do people like having, now, kind of a simple monthly payment with all the upgrades and constant, I would imagine, a lot of upgrades coming pretty consistently? Pretty interesting way to go to market, how's that received in the market? >> It's very well, people really accepted, especially when it's new technology. We decided from the beginning that we wanted to be, to own the whole technology stack, and even the robot itself because we knew there would be a lot of upgrades, we knew there would be changes and we wanted to serve our customers in the very best way that was possible. So to help people adopt new technology, we help them with how do they perceive it on a daily basis. If you come to somebody and says they want you to buy a hundred thousand dollar robot, uh, you don't know what that's going to be, but if you said, I charge you ten dollars an hour and give you a robot, that not only changes software every other week, it changes hardware every six months, and you have whatever robot will fit your needs the best. People are really accepting of that model, to the point that all the companies are jumping into the same thing. >> It's really interesting because then it begs where you guys will develop as a company, you know, are you are robotics company, are you a software company, are you a software monitoring company, do you become really a security AI company that pulls from lots of different data and lots of different sources? It really opens up a broad range of opportunities for you guys in which you want to go or where you find your most expertise or where the market takes you. Pretty exciting way to go to market. >> Yeah so what we decided to was we wanted to be the Apple of security guards, so what Apple does is they have their software, their hardware, they own all of it, and therefore they have a very loyal following. We want to be that for security guards, so we own the whole environment, we make changes when we wanted to, and then we go to market that way. >> Okay, that's a great story and again it's knightscope.com, they're fun pictures for one, but it's a great story. But before I let you go, Telly would not be happy if I didn't take a few minutes to talk about your journey. How did you get here, VP of Software Engineering? You know, software's eating the world, it's a great place to be, you've got a solutions based system, but really it's a bunch of metal wrapped up with software inside. So how did you get here, and I wonder if you can share a little bit of your journey to become VP of Software Engineering? >> Yeah so I'm an immigrant, I'm not from the US. I was born South America, and when you're in South America and somebody tells you, hey there's an opportunity for you to go study in the US, you take that opportunity. So I came to the US to study for college, I had a Bachelors in Computer Science and then a Masters in Computer Science. >> Where did you go to school? >> I went to Middle Tennessee State University, and like I said, when somebody tells you, you're going to the US, you don't ask questions, you just go. >> So who made you that offer, how did that come about? >> My university in Ecuador, where I was from, they had an agreement with the university in Tennesee. So they would send students back and forth in an exchange program. >> So you're a good student, they identified you as having great potential and you got picked for that program? >> So 5,000 people apply for 20 spots when I applied. >> Wow. >> So 20 of us came, and out of the 20, the only two people who are staying in the US, my sister and I, we're twins, I have a twin sister. >> 'Cause you ask your sister for support, maybe? Twin sister. >> If I really, it probably had a lot to do with it. And then with technology, I found my way into Knightscope, and Knightscope is a really good company for women in technology specifically, and that is some of the work that I pushed myself to do. Our women in technology numbers are about 25% to 28% of the company which is a huge number for Silicon Valley. So we hire women, we try to mentor them, I myself take time to spend time with them, and then help them get a career that they're excited about. >> And when did you discover your affinity for computer science? It's always a great debate as to when is the best time, or when is the optimal time, or the most popular time for young girls and eventually young women to get involved in STEM? What was your experience? >> So I live with my uncle in Ecuador and my mother, so I always knew I wanted to do something structured, and at the beginning, he was an architect, so I thought I would be an architect, but then I started reading some science fiction books and the closest thing for me to science fiction, making that a reality, was a career in computer science and technology. So that's how I started, and that has led me to, now, Knightscope, and we're doing the most advanced technology that is out there, we're out there with artificial intelligence, we have machine learning, all of the technologies that are out there, robotics, we are using them to put them to use for the greater good. Our job is to keep America safe, and we all are working towards that goal. >> But I think you just want to make something fun that looked like C-3PO. >> It's more like R2-D2 actually, and if you want to see more, go to knightscope.com. >> Okay, and final question. So you're advice, more general advice, to older girls or young women, in terms of what they should do if they want to get into this or why they should consider a career in STEM if they haven't already. >> A career in STEM is very, very rewarding. You're going to be doing sometimes things that nobody else has done ever before. You're out there in front of everything that's happening with technology, and it's actually exciting. When you find other women that do what you want to do, look at people's backgrounds, look at what they've done, look what they're trying to accomplish, and then, make sure that you get into their lives and they'll help you through it. There's a lot of women who would be happy to help out and one of those is me, I'd be glad to help people out. >> Well, Mercedes, thank you so much, again, for spending some time. Congratulations on the award and comin' in and tellin' us your story and educating us more on Knightscope. >> Thank you, and if anybody wants to know, knightscope.com, they can find all about our technology. >> Alright, she's Mercedes, I'm Jeff Frick, we've been having a CUBE conversation in Palo Alto, thanks for watching, we'll catch you next time. (light techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Jeff Frick. We are joined by Yasmine Mustafa. She is the founder of ROAR. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> So ROAR is a self-defense wearable technology for women. Tell our viewers a little bit more about the technology and also really where you got the idea. >> Sure, I got the idea about four years ago. I decided to do something a little bit crazy. I got rid of all my possessions. I got rid of my apartment. I put a backpack on, and I booked a solo trip to South America for six months, and I did it for two reasons. The first reason is refugee, and when I came here, even though I was brought here when I was 15 applying for colleges, I actually found out I was undocumented, so I spent about 10 years working under the table trying to become legalized, and it was a very long, hard battle. It was very difficult to go to school and get a real job, and once I became a US citizen which happened five years ago, I was also able to sell my first company. I had a software company before ROAR. And after those two events, I said, "You know what, I'm 30 years old. "I deserve a break. "I've had a long journey. "I'm going to go celebrate." >> Jeff: Start another long journey. (laughs) >> Yeah, exactly. (laughing) I wanted to travel for so long and I couldn't 'cause when you're undocumented, it's really-- >> Hard to get back into the country. >> And you don't have the right credentials and even after I got my Green Card, I could. You can travel after getting your Green Card but I was so worried that I wouldn't be able to come back 'cause I've heard stories that I intentionally didn't, and so I booked this six-month trip as a way to reward myself and as a way to kind of make up for everything that had happened beforehand, and it was amazing trip. It was really life-changing. When I talk about it, I talk about my life in relation to before the trip and after the trip because it was so transformational, and I went to Spanish school for three weeks, did full Spanish immersions, stayed with a Spanish family in Ecuador, and then I went to Colombia and Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru. I spent a month in each country but as incredible as it was, it was also incredibly eye-opening because everywhere that I went and visited, I just kept hearing story after story of a time a woman had been attacked or abused or harassed, and it really opened my eyes to the violence women face every day, and a week after I came back to Philadelphia, it was in a downtown, when my neighbor went out to her car. It's a horrible story. She was grabbed from behind. she was dragged into an alley. She was severely assaulted, brutally assaulted. When I saw the news story the next day, that was when the light bulb moment hit, and I called up my cofounder, my formal adviser of my last company and told him about it, Anthony Gold, and we ended together to start ROAR for Good, and the concept initially was completely different. We thought the problem was that existing self-defense tools, pepper sprays, tasers was that you have to pull them out of your pocket or your purse for them to be useful, and it's not like you could just be like, "Excuse me. "One second," (laughing) and dig it out, so we thought let's make it wearable so that it's readily accessible. This is when Fitbit was huge, and the initial idea was actually called the macelet, mace in a bracelet, and (laughs) exactly, and as clever as that name was, we found out through market research that it was actually a terrible idea, that the number one fear that women had of self-defense tools is, "I'm afraid I'm going to be overpowered, and my own self-defense device used as a weapon against me," and another one, "What if I use it against myself accidentally?" And when we did more research, we found that existing self-defense tools are actually made by men for other men, and when the market opportunity for women came about, they shrunk it, they shrinked it and pinked it, and they didn't really account for women's needs, so we went back to the drawing board, and we said, "All right, we need to make something "that's stylish but discreet, "something that can call for help, "something that can ward off an attack, "and something that cannot be used "against the person wearing it", and that's how we came up with Athena. >> So do you have one that you can show are yours, what it looks like? >> I do, I do, yes. >> This is what it looks like. >> How it works, okay. >> So it has a magnetic band. Initially it was actually a bracelet, and when we were doing self-defense classes with prototypes, we actually found out the worst place to wear a safety device is on your wrist, and can you guess why? >> Somebody grabs your wrist, grabs your arm, right? >> Exactly, or now you only have the opposite hand to activate it, so we said, "No, we need to make something "that's more readily accessible "where both hands can be free," so we designed it with this magnetic strip so that you can clip it on any which way you want. The most popular options we've seen are purse, pocket bra strap, or lapel, and the way it works is if you feel nervous, if you want someone to watch over you, you triple press the button, and it sends your coordinates to your family and friends showing exactly where you are, and if there is danger, if you really need help right away, you press and hold it for three seconds, and it will also sound an alarm, and in about seven rings, you'll also be able to call emergency number, the local PSAP, 911 center in your neighborhood. >> Wow. >> It's such a great concept. As are so many great inventions are, it's really assembling a bunch of components that already exist, your cellphone, an app on your phone, your network of your contacts, the GPS in your phone, and assembling it in a slightly different way for a very specific application. >> Everything that's commonplace, it's in the device. There's nothing proprietary about it. It's just the way that we put it together. Again, we took existing technology and put it together in a way and tested it to make sure that it's something that can work, and we worked with police officers and self-defense instructors to put it together, which is really eye-opening as well. >> And the other part, if you can explore, it's a different way to interact with 911 so if it is an emergency, you're not picking up the phone, you're not talking but according to your website, it's faster, in a lot of ways, it's more efficient. There's a lot of benefits to a not phone call connection with what traditionally has been the way you ask for help, and how did getting that through, is that a regulatory thing? How did that whole process work? >> That's a great question. It's something that we probably spent about a year working on, and we actually have a partner that does it for us, so this partner, what's really cool about them is that they have a relationship with all 500 PSAPs, so a PSAP is just your local 911 center in your area, and our service is going to be able to to leverage their partnership to be able to connect with all of them. The way their system works is they can actually better track you through their service than your normal cellphone can, which is also really cool, and if you're my emergency contacts and I press this button 'cause I can't call 911 and you're in Orlando, I'm in Philadelphia, it will actually route you to the PSAP in my neighborhood versus your local PSAP so then it saves the time in terms of calling the Orlando PSAP and then having them call the Philadelphia PSAP and then finding me, so we're really, really excited about this opportunity. >> So apart from the technology, I want to talk to you a little bit about funding. Funding is one of the greatest barriers that really, all technologists but in particular, women founders face. Can you describe a little bit about how you went about finding sources of money? You already sold a company by then so you'd already been successful. >> Yes. >> But what about people without the track record? What would you say? >> Sure. I'd love to touch on the social mission aspect at some point too if you don't mind. For funding, I'm very lucky in the sense that my cofounder, he's also founded several companies in the past and fundraising is his thing, so he's been the one to lead it but what we did initially, so we spent about 18 months in product development, and we did a lot of testing, I mean really awkward, we put ourselves in really awkward situations where we went to parks and coffee shops, and showed people this and said, "Why would you not use this? "Tell me why you don't like this," and then we went back to the drawing board and did it again and again, and then we got to the point where people said, "Yeah, I want this. "I want this for my mom. "I want this for my child. "I want this for my college student." But there is a world of difference between, say, yeah, I want it versus buying it, so what we did initially is we actually launched a crowdfunding campaign. We launched an Indiegogo campaign, and for us, it was really a way to test if we really had, we were onto something. We initially had the goal of $40,000. The results really blew us away. We hit that $40,000 goal within the second day, got to 100 by the 10th day, 100,000, and then we ended the campaign with a little bit over 300,000 funding, and that really allowed us to do our seat stage round, and we were lucky from the sense we have a really interesting story. There is a billionaire couple in the UK that found out about us through the campaign after it took off. We had sales in every state in the country, 50 countries worldwide. Ashton Kutcher tweeted about it. It was amazing. It went viral for a little bit, which was incredible, but they learned about it, and then reached out to Indiegogo and said, "We want to meet this team, the company behind this team," and we connected with them, and they immediately put $2 million into the company. We went and met with them in Chicago after they came over, and within three days, we had the money in our bank account, so we got a little bit lucky but having that crowdfunding campaign, the success as validation really helped us to be able to raise that additional funding, and then we went to Ben Franklin Technology Partners, and they put in $250,000, our local economic resource center that does matching, and that's how we raised our initial seed to growth. >> And you mentioned the social mission piece so I want you to tell our viewers a little bit more. >> Yeah, so I, for a long tIme, lived in fear, so being undocumented, not really knowing what could happen, and I'm actually giving a talk tomorrow about my whole journey, and learning about women living in fear in another different way while traveling throughout South America. I didn't want to build a company that just built products and sold them to women that just put the onus on women 'cause it's too common for us to say were you drinking when something happens or don't do, don't wear this, don't go here, and we wanted to change that narrative, hence, the ROAR for Good aspect, and what we found after talking with psychologists and researchers is that violence against women stems from gender discrimination and inequality, and that there is one trait, if taught to young kids when they're most impressionable, can actually reduce violence against women, and that's empathy, and that empathy has actually decreased 40% over the last 20 years, and there is a controversy on whether or not it's something that's learned or innate but wherever you fall in that category, there is no denying that it is falling regardless, so we invest, we have what we call a ROAR Back program, which is we invest a portion of proceeds of every sale to nonprofits that specifically focus on teaching respect and healthy relationships to young kids when it matters most. >> Yasmine, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> It's a really exciting technology. Thank you. >> Hopefully we'll see you at Philly. We got to have a Philly show. >> Come to Philly, please. >> So you got Josh as a buddy so-- >> Yes. >> Come on, Josh. We got to have us some Philly. (laughing) >> I'm Rebecca Knight with Jeff Frick. We will have more from Grace Hopper just after this. (light music)