>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back, everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have today, Mahmoud El Assir, he is the CTO and Senior Vice President of Global Technology Services at Verizon. And Annette Rippert, Senior Managing Director, Accenture Technology, North America. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Great to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we are talking today about Verizon's migration to the cloud, but Verizon is a company that many people have familiarity with, Mahmoud. Just lay out a few facts and figures for our viewers here. >> Sure, I'll say Verizon is Fortune 16 company. Last year we made $126 billion dollars from our, kind of, loyal customers. We are, today we deployed, we were the first people to deploy 5G. And we have 98% coverage in U.S., so we are America's fastest and most reliable wireless service. >> So it's a company that touches so many of our lives. >> Yup. >> Earlier this year, Verizon selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider. What was, one, what was the impetus for moving to the cloud? And two why AWS? >> Yeah, that's a great question. But I'd like to zoom out a little but more and talk about what is Verizon? What's our mission and how kind of tackling it? So when you think about Verizon, our mission is to deliver the promise of the digital world, right? Enable, deploy 5G and enable the 4th Industrial Revolution. And as part of this, it's all about empowering humans to do more, right? And in global technology solutions our winning aspiration is to develop products and services that our customers and employees love. And then we, and also to be the destination for world class technology talent. And be the investment innovation center for the company. So when it comes to digital transformation we look at the enables and where we want to invest our energy and how do you want to leverage the right partners. So the heart of our technology transformation is the public cloud. When you think about what the public cloud, it's like where you want us. It will allow us to spend more of our energy building solutions and for our customers. And creating value for our customers. Also public cloud will allow us, and or business, to experiment faster, better and cheaper. In technology our focus is to always save on efficiency, speed and innovation. So that is our kind of model and at the heart of this, public cloud is a key kind of element for our journey. >> Well I want to get into that journey a little bit more, but Annette, I want to bring you into the conversation here. So, Verizon is one of the leading communications companies that is migrating to the cloud at this scale. >> Yes. >> What are some of the lessons, as you have helped and observed and also helped this partnership grow, what are some of the key takeaways that you would say? >> Well, I think there is a couple you know, if you take a look at some of the lessons that our clients learn. You know when at Accenture we go into the market really helping our clients think about how do we leverage technology for achieving business outcomes. You just talked about some extraordinary business outcomes that you're looking to achieve and you'll do that through a variety of things, including leveraging technology. And so, just like that we encourage our clients to be thinking about what is the business innovation? What is the outcome? The disruption that we're looking to achieve through leveraging technologies like AWS, right? I think secondly, if you think a little bit about the importance in that journey of communicating that vision. Of what will it mean to be able to leverage that kind of technology? You just communicated a very strong vision. And that's so important to the change journey that many of these organizations go on. You know there is the importance of the investment strategy, but ultimately, the innovation that the organization itself the engineers within the organization are a part of delivering, you know, the kind of innovation that you'll be delivering is really, it will not only make such a big impact on those in your enterprise, delivering that. But, you know, to all of us who are consumers of your business strategy which will be fabulous. And I think, in the end, you know, one of the most exciting things, and it's really sitting Alexis, as we were talking a little bit about some of what Verizon is doing earlier in the day, one of the most important things is really thinking about how this provides an opportunity for the enterprise to change. So, you know, moving to be a much more agile enterprise, being able to respond to market changes, and certainly in the business that you're in, the market is changing everyday. And so by leveraging innovative products like AWS' platform, you know it really provides the opportunity to constantly leverage new technology in that environment. >> And that, as you said, the market is changing everyday and customers, they're demanding things and companies are providing customers with things they don't even know that they want until they have them in their hands. How, at a time when customer differentiation is such a key competitive advantage, how are you staying ahead of the game and making sure that you know you're sort of getting inside the heads of your customers? And then you're also delivering what they want and expect. >> Customers comes first at Verizon, right? So it's at the heart of our technology is also leveraging emerging technology. So cloud is one, scaling AIML is another one. One of the big programs we're doing is, how do you move personalization to one-on-one personalization? How do you make every customer feel they have their own network, our network. Like their own network that's personalized for their needs. There own experience, their own plans. Their own recognition. So that's key. So today when you think about most companies do segmentation or personalization at the cluster level. So one of the biggest things is we're shifting now from systems of engagement, and systems of records. We're inserting systems of insights. A system of insight allows to build the DNA for every customer and will allow us to personalize the customer experience for every customer at the customer level based on all the data, kind of, we know about them, from the data they use with us, and will allow us to personalize their experience at every touch point. >> So what, how would that look like? What will a personalized customer experience at Verizon look like in the future going forward? What are some of your goals and aspirations? >> Imagine you're like a, you've bought every iPhone, since iPhone one through like iPhone ten, right? >> I can imagine that. >> So you're an iPhone enthusiast, right? So, when you come up on our website recommend, like the iPhone, the next iPhone say, the next iPhone is up, the next iPhone red is up or so. So we know more about you and your history and we recommend right accessories, we recommend and so we tell you, hey this stuff is coming. So you feel we're watching out for you. You're like we know, we know you. We know you better than anybody. So at any touch point when you come to us we kind of tell you what's the next thing for you. And then even when you don't know we, like from a network kind of performance from everything we proactively, kind of cater for you. That's a big one. The other one, how do you, when you want to talk to us, how do you get leverage technology like Chatbots and conversationally AVRs and stuff. And make sure you feel you're like, we know you. If you have a different accent, we recognize the accent, then you say, hey do you want to speak in that language? >> (laughs) >> So imagine the power of doing that. Versus today you have to do, like you have Spanish AVR, you have to have a, or have a Spanish kind of call center. Imagine through a IML and Chatbots and stuff, you can recognize all the stuff and personalize the experience. Today at Verizon, we are known of our network superiority. And we have great customer experience but we want to be known also for our experience the same way we are known for our network. And we believe that at Verizon, there is always a higher gear. So we all aspire for the higher gear and aspire our customers to feel they have a Verizon for every customer. >> So this, that's from the customer experience. And as you said, the goal is to have the customer feel that the company empathizes with them and really gets them. What about the workforce changes? I mean Annette was talking about the importance of change management and the cultural shift that these kinds of transformations entail. Have you come up against any challenges at Verizon in terms of this migration? >> Sure I would say, at the heart of our kind of transformation, there are four main pillars. The first pillar is, enabling all these modern technologies. This is like cloud, Cloud Native, API, AI, ML. And especially go back to cloud, the time of enabling cloud was very important to get everybody on board at beginning of the journey. So one of our biggest thing is to get like the security team on board, as early in the process as possible, and make sure security team is a development team, not just a kind of a controls team. So having an engineering team on the security side is a big one to kind of automate all this kind of, all the security controls we need in the cloud so we have the right guardrails and have everything automated. Another thing, same thing like with the other teams. Get them on board in the journey have an advisory kind of board with the other team and security team and legal teams and everybody is onboarding on the journey. So that's I'd say key and pay lots of dividends investment upfront but pays lots of dividends so you can move faster. It's like more of a slow down to speed up. So that's a big one. The second one is, technology is one thing, but you need the culture. So you need to have sustainable momentum in this kind of movement. So the proxy we wanted to have is like have AWS certifications. Because you need 10% believers to have momentum. So our proxy to believers is AWS certifications. So we put a program in place we call it: Verizon Cloud Train. And that train basically is like a 12-week, six sprints, and we help our teams prepare for their certification. So last year we did more than a thousand, we have more than 1800 people probably right now certified with AWS. >> That is incredible. >> At the same time, we set up a dojo's, which are like emergent centers. So we have like 40, 50 seats in different cities and with like five six coaches. So if you are a team who wants to come in and move your application to the cloud, we help you do it. If you want to decompartmentalize your application to microservices we help you. If you want to do ABI's, we help you. So we helped you build deep expertise into these technologies we are doing. So that is like, transforming the teams, and up scaling, I would call it up scaling the talent, is key. Hiring great talent in key rolls is also key. The third pillar is changing the way we work from, what you call a project based, to outcome based. And this beyond agile. Agile is an enabler for this, but how do you change the model where everything is outcome based? Where you have the business and the technology team working together to move an outcome. If I want to increase my kind of video-on-demand revenue per customer, everybody making all the changes, experimenting, and making sure that's a need, is moving. It's not like I did my code, I delivered my, I did my testing, I deployed my app. It's what's a business and what's a customer kind of expectation. And fourth one is, how do you establish internal kind of communities and get out of a like the thiefdoms and stuff. And get a culture of kind of sharing and cheering for others. So we have like Dev Ops days internally within the company, bring in external, internal speakers. We have internal kind of intersourcing for some piece of code. So you have to fire on all cylinders I would say. And get as many kind of parties included as early in the process. And have also an objective to have everything as code. And it's a journey, so you have to always keep on exercising new muscles and more muscles and the more muscles you exercise, the faster you can go. >> So Mahmoud, Annette already shared with us her key learnings from your experience and your journey. What would you say, I mean you're hear at AWS reInvent, it's not your first rodeo, you've been to this conference many times before. When you're talking with other CTO's, CIO's and they're saying, hey, so how's it going for you? What's your advice for a company that is really just starting this, this process? >> Sure, I would say the movement to the public cloud is not just a cost play. I mean, cost needs to be, efficiency needs to be there, but that shouldn't be the primary kind of objective. The primary objective should be speed and innovation. At the same time, deliver a cost. Lots of people say, oh do I, is the same, you can't compare it same-for-same. Because it's different. On prem you can do like A, B testing. In the cloud you can do A to Z testing for much cheaper. You don't need everything you have on prem. You can experiment, so think about it as accelerating the speed of innovation. That's the key one. And I said it before, but I'll say it again. It's like all about having the right kind of, from like a security perspective, people will argue, oh public cloud is insecure? I would argue, public cloud can be more secure than on prem because you have all the tools to kind of automatically, kind of protect and detect and recover. And you have more tooling to allow you to be more secure. It's having the right kind of guardrails and the right controls, right automation and right teams. So it's, you have to build muscle across all these fronts. And have them as a front as possible. >> Great, and great note to end on. Thank you so much Mahmoud and Annette. >> Thank you. >> I appreciate it. >> Very good. >> Been really fun having you on the show. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> We will have more >> Thanks, Ann. >> from theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit, coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everyone to theCube's live coverage of the Monaco Crypto Summit here in Monaco. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube, and Lauren Bissell here, founder and CEO of Immutable Industries, focused on the advancement of technologies in art, entertainment, blockchain across multiple sectors. Great background in entertainment music, complying that into the convergence and to crypto. Welcome to theCube. I appreciate it. >> Thank you so much. Thank you guys for having me. It's been an incredible day so far. >> So we were just talking before we came on camera, your background and just the people you've worked with in the music industry. You've been there for a very long part of your career, from the beginning. Now you're on the wave of Web3, crypto, DeFi. There's a confluence of refactoring businesses. We're seeing that impact. And I think a lot of people, finance and entrepreneurial, the best brains are coming into the sector because it's an opportunity, clearly, to reset and refactor old antiquated business models and practices, in a new way to achieve the same things. Better, faster, cheaper >> Exactly. Better, faster, cheaper, is good sometimes, other times that's... We will see. But I think for me, coming in from the music industry was something that, I honestly never expected to be involved in blockchain and futuristic tech. It's always something that I admired, but I didn't really see, "Okay. Here's how I can be involved in that." I was obsessed with it. But as I was sort of progressing my career as a music producer, I saw so many issues with the industry. The way capital came in, the way that it was distributed. I mean, these things are still happening today. But I was just constantly looking around for better solutions and how to make this work in a better way. In 2017, when I started really diving into crypto, that was something where I saw a huge opportunity for the entire industry. The music industry is notorious for just sort of being behind the curve when it comes to new tech. And it's a shame. When you're in an industry that's full of art and innovation, you would think that it's something... It's an industry that would embrace this position. Maybe some people do this, and I applaud those people very much. But in general, the music industry is kind of behind. We live a little bit in the Wild West. Not in the futures way, but kind of in the old way. I'm just really excited to be able to bring these things into the industry. >> It's interesting. I'm not in the industry, in the music side, but I've been on the software industry, where you had the proprietary software, the rights, and people used to build software. And then when the company went under, the software was gone, lost forever. And in around the late eighties, nineties, open source movement happened, and it just changed everything. And I think, to me, I feel like this is a similar structural inflection point in change, where rights are changing. People are still holding onto like, "He can't use the copyright." And I even saw a stat that said, with AI now, you can actually copyright every single melody, every single note in music. So that means like, "Who the hell's going to develop anything?" So are even rights even matter? So rights, ownership, art, mixing. Funny story of my son, a year and a half ago, mixed an old song from a band that wasn't around, and it became a TikTok sensation. Hundreds of millions of listens, and then the Spotify and Apple account was making like 20,000 a week, and DistroKid cut him off. Because someone went back and claimed the copyrights. But it was a mix of a couple of different pieces of the song for a new melody. But because that wasn't his work, the middle man killed the account. >> Right. But if there had been maybe an easier solution for him to go get those rights. So I actually used to be a rights and royalties negotiation specialist. I was on the phone with labels, every second of every day. From a producer standpoint, you're trying to find something that works for the artist, something that works for the label, something that you can arrange in perpetuity, if possible. But it's just... Again, there's so many people that have to just get on the phone- >> Like a busy gen system of like- >> Yeah. >> Weirdness >> Right. >> What's the solution? >> I mean, right now one of the favorite... It's super simple. Smart contracts related to publishing and royalties. Now you still need, probably in the interim, someone to go out and... The old school job for someone in rights and royalties is sitting in a restaurant and listening to see if the music is being played, and then you write it all down on a piece of paper. I mean, that's quite old school, but that still happens in a lot of places. So we can kind of move into smart contracts for the payment systems, and eventually we can move into AI, to actually detect what music is being played where. Just to go, not really on a tangent, but it's like, "Okay. Well, are we taking a job away from someone who's supposed to sit in a restaurant and listen to the music?" Well, I think we're developing a lot of new jobs by needing to generate this software. This is more- >> I've heard that. We've heard that argument before, "Oh! Bank tellers are going to be put out of business by the ATM machine." Turns out there's more branches now. >> Right. >> Okay. There's a total waste there. I mean, people say that are like... I mean, but it does bring up the next gen, the creator, the young artist, the ability to collaborate with smart contracts, the removal of the middle person in all this, the intermediaries. That's really the key, right? >> I think it is the key. And like I said, before removal of the middle person, some people would look down on that. I think it's more efficient systems. When you have more efficient systems, you have more efficient societies, you can create bigger and better things. So is there a change process that has to happen there? Yeah, of course. But this is humanity, this is history, this is what happens. >> Okay. So you're a pro, you've been through- >> I just embrace that. >> You've been through the business, you got the scar tissue, you got the experience, you got the brains. Now you're here in the front of a new generation, a lot of pioneering going on, a lot of chaos, a lot of confusion. Some people... Blood's spilling on the ground. There's a lot of stuff going on, that is opportunity. What are you up to? How are you attacking this market, how do you look at it, what's on your mind? >> Yeah. I mean, so what's funny, I've actually been spending the last few years, sort of directly advising individuals and companies in the music industry. So everyone from artists to label executives, content distribution executives, licensing teams and publishers, and sort of explaining, "Here's how things work. Here's how we think they're going to go. And here's how, instead of running away from that and trying to block your artists from using that system, we can actually use this to enhance the financial pie of the music industry, instead of just trying to steal a piece of everyone else's pie." That's what I really want to do, is, the industry pie can get bigger. We don't need to steal your blueberries. It's just- >> They're picking up crumbs and fighting over crumbs >> Exactly. The industry changed, and I understand why it's scary. I really, really do. I've lived through this. But it's going to be- >> What do they say? What's your advice to them, and what's their reaction? Is it like, "Yeah, you said that you'd get lip service." Or like, "Yeah, we're trying my best. I'll stop drinking, I promise." I mean, I've heard... I tried last week. I mean, are they actually getting it done, or they don't know what to do? >> Yeah. Well, I think it starts with individuals. I actually spent a lot of time working with individuals on education and how they can take that information to their companies or implement that in their companies. It's on sort of a corporate level. It is slower. That's okay. That's expected. But educating sort of individuals, like I said, that's what I've been doing for the past few years, is what's really been helpful. Because if you just kind of do this overnight, I understand it's not going to happen overnight. But being able, like I said, to figure out, "Okay. We grow the financial pie for the whole industry." This accumulates, this helps the health of the industry. Like I said, I grew up in the industry. I care a lot about the industry. I actually want to see good things happen- >> Positive change. >> It's in my heart, in my soul, to make the music industry- >> So Lauren, I got to ask you. So as you see the industry changing, and it's going to be hard to get people to go through transformation. >> Yeah. >> They have to get there. Otherwise, they'll be extinct. And we kind of see that. Is there new brands emerging that have a clean sheet of paper? Because I'm a far young artist, I'm saying to myself, "Okay. If I can write my own ticket..." And by the way, brands become platforms is a big trend you're seeing with NFTs and- >> Yeah. >> And these great Web3 platforms. So I got more social power, I got collective intelligence, I got network effect, I got fans. All that's tappable now from a monetization standpoint. >> Yeah. >> Are there new agencies, new brands, emerging that's artists friendly like this? >> I mean, that's one of the reasons we're here, to begin with. I'm obviously just going to mention Digital Bits, because they're literally creating NFTs for brands. I'm here because I believe in what they're building. Their model is applicable to brands, it's applicable to artists and athletes. I actually truly believe in what they're building and how they're doing it. NFTs is a faster way to achieve what we thought we were going to achieve with sort of the tokenization of a person or an individual brand. NFTs, I think, is a better way to do that. Obviously NFTs are tokens as well, but it's a different type of thing than an ICO. >> It has more versatility and it's got the same kind of characteristics- >> Yeah. I think you can build more community with it, you can maintain the value of the token itself, the non-punchable token itself, a little bit better, and you can build community around it. >> What are some of the companies you're advising and people you're advising? Are they record labels, are they executive, like an executive coach on one end, business consultant on the other? >> Yeah. >> What's some of the range of... >> So I actually advise a couple of brands, I can't completely speak about in the music industry, but from the executive position, I do advise individual executives from the label and the content distribution side, on sort of how to implement futurist tech into their company a little bit better, and sort of what the real things that are going on, the new things that are going on. I actually just took on a role for a company called Cyber Yachts, which I'm really excited about. This one's just going to be fun. International music, entertainment, fun. >> Do you need some media up there? We'll have to do interviews on both- >> Yeah. You can come on the metaverse yacht and the physical yacht, if you want to. But- >> Monaco's a great place for that. >> We will be here. >> All right. >> Absolutely. >> So tell me about the future of some of these big agencies you mentioned? Because if you look at the market right now, if you zoom out, content is king, distribution is Kong. That's what they say. There's a lot more distribution now more than, it seems, content. That's maybe on some perspectives. But it seems like there's a lot more outlets looking for better content. >> Always. >> Do you agree that distribution's hungry for the content, or is there more content than distribution? >> I think it just depends on the type of content. If you look at the content that's being distributed over, say social media, for example, there's a plethora of content. >> Yeah. I guess I'm not- >> There's actually, now, this new hierarchy there, where you have to really scrap to get to the top. So in a weird way, you're seeing that sort of mimic. We see how societies work. So now that's become very hierarchical, and that's almost mimicking the way the traditional industry has been developed. So we go through these cycles. >> It must be hard for a record label to try to do the A and R job, when you have more artists emerging from TikTok, Instagram, the social networks, or- >> I would say their job's probably gotten easier. >> Do you think because of the filtering? >> Well, yeah. Now you can view so much talent in a tiny amount of time online. Now, do I know what they are like lives, do I know how they perform? No, I got to go figure that out. But before you had to go to clubs and sit in there, and run around a city. You can only be in so many places at one time. >> You got to chase content down, look it down. >> Yeah. >> All right, so what's the most exciting thing that you think is happening in the whole crypto world, that's people should pay attention to, that's going to impact some of the mainstream? What's the most important things, do you think? >> Well, something that's actually, somewhat unrelated to music, which is government adoption. Sorry, but hands down, that is the most exciting and important thing that's going on right now. >> Adopting it and embracing it is important. >> Adopting it, embracing it, new regulations coming out. >> Are you happy with the progress? >> Yeah. I mean, it takes time. But right now we're the biggest sort of country that sun is, El Salvador. >> And now Monaco's leaning in. >> Now Monaco is obviously leaning in, that's... It's exciting. It's really exciting. >> Well, to me, I think Digital Bits, so when you climbed in earlier, is that, there's a legitimate crossover between the physical asset, digital asset world, and now the kind of the tough parts, the in between the details and the gaps, the contracts, the royalties. >> Yeah. >> Compliance. What does that even mean? >> Right. >> How is that going to get sorted out? Do you think this is going to settle itself out on its own or self govern, a little bit of a iron hand in there, or... >> It'll be a mix. I mean, there's a lot of trial and error going on right now, as far as governments. Like I said, there's really only a few places in the world that are doing it. I applaud these places for their bravery because... Don't get me wrong. It's going to be a struggle. There's going to be failures and successes, and being willing to be one of the countries that does that, that shows some grit. I really respect it. >> And the upside is if they get it right, it's huge. Lauren, final question. What are you up to next, what's on your mind? What are you working on beyond this consultancy? What's around the corner for you? Where do you see the self dots connecting in the future? >> Well, I'm really... Right now I travel quite a bit. I spend a lot of different... A lot of time at different conferences. I spoke earlier a little bit about an education program that I'm developing with an alliance with Draper University in El Salvador. So I want to finish the programming for that. We're going to scale that out across multiple countries. And that's everything from education for governments and education for people that, maybe just recently heard of Bitcoin and they don't even know how to go about seeing what it is. >> 5G in emerging countries is pretty potential there. >> It is. Absolutely. >> Great stuff. Lauren, thanks for coming on theCube sharing. >> Thank you so much. >> I appreciate it. Lauren Bissell here on theCube, I'm John Furrier, live in Monaco, for the Monaco Crypto Summit, Digital Bits. We got a big gala event tonight with Prince Albert in attendance. A lot of action, a lot of big news happening here. All the players are gathered for the inaugural Monaco Crypto Summit. I'm John Furrier. We'll have more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>>Okay, welcome back everyone. It's the Cube's coverage of AWS, Amazon re Mars machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. I'm John Prairie host of the cube. We're here for two days, live coverage, and we're getting all the stories and story here is our entrepreneur hot startup making things happen, making more connectivity, go Diana GenZ, founder and CEO of El speed, El or L speed. Welcome to the cube. >>Well, speed represents how fast we can transfer the data. And so an L is a upper electro sort of magnetic phenomena that lives above thunderstorms and it moves very, very fast. It looks like it moves faster than the speed of light. So we play on the speed of elves. >>Well, let's get into it cuz I love the love, the approach you take. And this is consistent with the theme of the show, a lot of industrial change and innovations sometimes recycling old technology to help invent new ones, integrations platforms coming together, little bit more, open, less proprietary. You're in an area where you're gonna solve the bandwidth problem with unique new ways. Yeah. Pick them in to explain what you're working on. What's the project and what's the ambition. >>Yes, exactly. I think we fit really well in that concept of taking something that has a lot of heritage reliability. We are very familiar with this technology. We've used it for more than 50 years. We like it. Um, and the problem with that technology has been that it's very expensive. It's not affordable, not affordable to people like you and me such that that amount of bandwidth can actually be available to us. So what we have done is really focused on advanced materials and manufacturing techniques to make this new technology significantly more affordable. So like, >>And technology is >>So we make power amplifiers that are based on TTS. So TTS are in amplifiers that actually like are currently being operated on the Voyager way back, long time ago. Um, it's a very old technology and we have taken it and really revamped it and looked at it differently. And how can we make it to technology over the future? Um, so we specifically operate in millimeter wave frequencies, um, and at millimeter wave frequencies, we can provide significantly more bandwidth than what you can do at lower frequency. >>Okay. So the folks that aren't wireless say, what does millimeter wave mean? >>Millimeter wave is the amount of frequency that you have sort of in space. So the wavelength of that frequency is a millimeter wave range. So sort of the size of your nail or something like that, thickness of your nail. And so because of that, when you start operating at those frequencies, you can send significantly more information, right? The frequencies that we use today are sort of on a order of, you know, centimeters, you know, 10 centimeters, something like that. So about like this. And so, and that doesn't allow you to send as much data as you can at these higher frequencies. >>So more bandwidth >>Significantly more >>Than so the problem you're solving is taking something that's actually high bandwidth and has long ranges, >>Correct. >>Should bring it to the common price points to be deployed. >>That's >>Right, >>Correct. That's right. So this particular technology allows you to generate enough power so you can send the data over long distances. So if you are on the ground, you can create 40 plus kilometer links or you can send that information straight to space all the way to the geo stations, right? So you actually have enough power, um, to provide that amount of bandwidth. So the, the challenge has been is affordability, which is what we have done is focus specifically is how do you reduce that cost? >>Well, I love anything that gets me more bandwidth, more, no one ever went out of business for providing more bandwidth. Well maybe the app <laugh>, um, than monopolies. Um, talk about how you got here. What was the origination story? Um, you work at slack, not confused with slack as in the messaging application, the Stanford linear accelerator in technically Menlo park. I think >>It is in Menlo park, in Menlo >>Park up Palo. Okay. >>So, so it's right on sand hill road, right? Right. >>Sand hill road next, all the VCs that drive past it all the time, what's it like there? And how was it like, were you guys working on this at slack? Was it like something that you had a lot of interest in? Were you scratching this itch so to >>Speak? So this particular technology has many applications. Um, and so particle accelerators are one of the applications of this technology. So, and, um, right. So some of the users for particle accelerators are of course facilities like slack, where we do some amazing science. Um, but you can take that same particle accelerator. Right. And we use it for cancer treatment. So one technology doesn't just apply to sort of one solution, you know, I'm using in my company for communications, right. And this is how it related to the work that I was doing at slack. So at slack, my focus was on materials and manufacturing of these particular devices. And I really focused on what is fundamental limitation of how much power you can really pack into the size of the device. If you can really shrink the size of the device, you know, what can you do? And that applies whether it's particle accelerators or these millimeter wave amplifiers that I'm working on today. Um, and yes, slack <laugh> without the K yes. Is, is a, uh, particle accelerated laboratory that's operated, uh, by Stanford for the department >>And all the geeks know about it's it's it's folklore certainly in Silicon valley. Yes. And I didn't even know they had the hidden tunnels behind in the >>Mouth. They do, they >>Too kind of >>Stuff up there. I think they're back to having tours. So that's, it's always worth visiting. >>Let me get a little kind of camera crew in there. All right. Let's talk about back to the, back to your opportunity there. Um, how many people do you have working for you? What's the funding status? Where are you in your journey? >>So I hired my first person last June, uh, and we're at 14 people today. Um, we have just did the first close of our seed round. So we had our Pree round last year and we are sort of in the middle of our seed round right now. Um, and the plan is to get to series a sometime next year, depending on sort of performance >>And what we are already. So you're product building mode right now. >>We actually are in product building mode. We have, uh, product delivery scheduled in the next few months, >>You know? So you have customers ordering amplifiers. >>Yes. We actually have customer orders. >>What's the price point you're getting at what's cause that I could see people lining up in this >>Well. So because of our focus on manufacturing, we are also attaching customer interest to volume. So it depends on whether you're buying 10 of them or a thousand of them. So the price point varies <laugh> >>Course. >>So >>Buying bulk, Amazon <laugh> yes. You have a lot of outposts out there potentially. And you got the telecoms edge booming. Yes. Um, they got full blown data centers now at these absolutely. It used to be just, you know, monopoles or, you know, trust towers. >>Well, so this is one of the advantages of having a wireless technology. If you're trying to put a, a location that's remote or even semi remote for you to be able to put a fiber link, that spot is years an enormous amount of investment. So you can get the same amount of data movement if you switch to technology like ours mm-hmm <affirmative> um, and so, yeah, that's a, it's a great application for, um, for millimeter >>Weight. So things are going good. You got orders, you've got product being built. You're gonna get through your seat to soon to have series a >>Next year. Yeah. And so the next step for us is building a factory, uh, which is we are sort of doing a, a planned low rate, initial production, uh, starting probably at the end of this year, trying to scale to sort of tens of units per week. Um, and then after that, trying to get the factory, they'll be able to do sort of 10 times that, uh, but we are gauging that with a customer interest so that we are matching the production to the >>What's what's your current, uh, verticals that are most interested now. >>So our primary application space is communications and back holes specifically. Uh, I think we're very well positioned to enter that market. Um, it sort of the next focus is going to space. So actually being on the space vehicles and, but to do that, we have to go for the space qualifications. So we have a team focusing on how to space >>Qualified. It's all certifications, all kinds of security checks. >>Correct. So that will take a little bit of time. I think the earliest we'll get there is next year. Yeah. Um, and so, but there is a lot of interest and support from sort of current companies, the new space companies to sort of help move technology faster. Yeah. Otherwise you can't get access to something that's new, right. Space qualification >>Takes space. I'm space force, everyone I talk to here and all over the industry on NASA to space force, they want to move faster. They don't wanna be perceived as that old slow antiquated systems. Yes. They want to be cooler and faster, but secure. >>Absolutely >>Security is a huge deal right now. >>And that's one of the advantages that we provide. Right. We are relying on a heritage technology and also because it's millimeter wave, it provides you a certain amount of security, right. Because it's much, much harder to intercept than anything else. Right. >>Well, exciting news. Congratulations. Thank you. Um, if you wanna take a minute to go plug for your startup, you're gonna hire, um, what's status. >>Um, you mean for my new employees? >>Yeah. What are you looking for customers? What kind of customers you looking hire? >>Absolutely >>Put commercial out there from the company. >>Okay. So when it comes to customers, we are looking for people that are willing to move really fast, as fast as we are moving and willing to actually consider something like millimeter wave for their backhoe applications. So starting at K band and all the way to WB frequencies for those that are my customers, they will know exactly what I'm talking about. Yes. And so, and we are bringing a technology that's reliable and bringing their cost down by a factor of 10, meaning something that was half a million before is going to be significantly cheaper today. And you could afford to actually buy >>Thousand faster, cheaper. >>Exactly. That's that's, that's the thing. So when it comes to employees, so we are growing really fast. Um, and we have a very fun team that cares about people. So for example, we spend one hour every week to actually talk about growth and personal development as sort of part of our culture. It's something we're committed to is that you have to love what you do. And so when you come to work, you better be having fun. Yeah. And so we are looking for people that are very techy, but also sort of are human centered and are willing to make the world a better place, which is what sort of El is all about is, you know, making technology useful for people, right. When it comes to communications, right. Making me a, you connected or us connected to the rest of the world as we sit here. >>Yeah. And more empathetic and connected, like just connected emotionally >>Connected in Mo both ways. >>Yeah. Both ways. Exactly physical and emotional and more bandwidth, more connections. Right. >>And you can have that interaction to be significantly higher quality. Right. If you can actually recreate that environment with my >>Day, I work for you. Sounds like a great place. No, <laugh> no. I'll stay with Mike Day job. Thanks Dan. Thanks for coming on the queue. Appreciate >>It. Of course. Thank you for hosting me. >>Okay. We're here at re Mars. All the hot startups are here. Technologists. It's kind of a geeky nerd show and it's really cool because it's about industrial innovation and about space and all the cool things we love at the cube. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching.

>> Welcome back everyone. CUBE live coverage here in Las Vegas for AWS Amazon Web Services, reinvent 2021. In person event on the floor, back in business, theCUBE. Two live sets pumping out content left and right. Three and a half days of wall to wall overage, over 120 interviews, stream 28 hours literally on the main site as well as on the CUBE zone. Go to CUBEreinvent.com to get all the action, all the videos will be there. Of course theCUBE.net. I'm John Furrier, your host, with Dave Nicholson my cohost this week and Sarbjeet Johal cloud strategist, influencer, all around great guy, CUBE alumni, here to break down reinvent in context to the cloud industry. Sarbjeet, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Good to see you guys in person finally. >> I'm so excited. I did all these interviews the past two years in person and I've been remote, now were in person, great to do it, everyone's excited. 27,000 people here at reinvent. Stand in line for classes. By the way, they're not offering these classes online, only the leadership classes and the keynote. If you're not here, you're not getting the classes. >> I like the vibe actually. I thought it would be more subdued but it is better than what I thought and energy is here. It's not like 2019, it's not. >> That's 60,000 people, you couldn't even get through the hallway. Any company would love to have 27,000 people but I got to say, this year we were just talking earlier on the segment this morning, I wanted to get your thoughts on this, you go back 15 years ago when AWS rolled out, you have EC2, S3, SQS, you had to roll your own. Basically your alternative was better than building a data center or hosting on a colo. So great, check, you don't have to buy the technology tax. I think you had to fill in the glue layers, you had to kind of roll your own and build it up. Now everyone is scaling up and next gen cloud is a completely different architecture. You got serverless, you got all the glue layers pretty much there, and you can still add stuff on it, so a completely different mindset. Changing the startup speed game. Changing the enterprise. Looking pretty good. What's your reaction to the new architecture in cloud vis a vis where it came from? >> My reaction to the new architecture is that number one it's just new. We change stuff all the time in software stacks and what I was grasping within myself sitting in my hotel in the morning listening to Warner's keynote was that we have started to accumulate the technology debt even in cloud. We cooked up some some stuff with the scripts and we automated stuff with programing, language of your choice, or CLIs. Then became the cloud formation automation, orchestration of your cloud stack, if you will. Then Hashicorp are like, so Hashicorp are sitting on the side there. But now there's another abstraction layer on top of that which was announced during Warner's keynote today. I think the new abstraction layers leave the pervious architectures a little stale. It's always like, what should you do? Should you refactor your existing stacks or should you not touch that? Just go from now on on the new architecture? I think it's getting busy, complicated, a lot of number of services. >> What do you think other people are saying? I saw you did a little snippet with Dion Hinchcliffe online, nice Tweet there, you got a big video coming out. As you talk to other folks and influencers and people in the front lines, what are they saying about Amazon Reinvent this year? >> I think almost everybody's saying that number of services is expanding exponentially. I was thinking that 200 plus number of services or whatever that number is today, it's mind boggling. I totally understand that when you have two teams that they want to take the credit for creating a new service and they want to publish it. They want to do a press release and all that. But my request to all cloud providers, mainly three, is to not call everything a new service. Call that feature of a service. So number of services has to be reduced, collapsed if you will. We need umbrella services and then under that there should be features of services, that's one thing. Another feedback I got from some second tier partners is that they have the competency program for partners. They announced that. They had that earlier but new competencies. It leaves the second or third tier partners in the cold. Only the first tier partners can get those competencies because for that they have to send a lot of money, train people, then they get that check box, oh, you can do this. >> This whole services thing and what you call a service, if you called everything a service a new feature of DNS or a new thing here and there, serverless, there's be thousands of features, services. I think Amazon, I think they culled it down to like, 200, is the number we hear. >> But isn't that part of the role of the partner, the services provider, the consultancy, to act as a bridge between all of those services and features, whatever you want to call them and figuring out exactly what the end user customer actually needs? The idea that AWS is messaging here is targeted directly towards end user customers. There's a lot to be desired there because how do you translate that? I'm thinking, compare and contrast that with the Steve Jobs approach of there shall be three. There will be a large, a medium and a small. I know that this is more complex, but when you come out and you say, 475 different kinds of instances, you're leaving that to your partners to translate. To your point, if you're segregating those partners into categories where only a top tier has access to everything, interesting place to be. >> A couple of discussions I had with partners was that I actually suggested them to create a bank of reference architectures, we call that in Amazon terms. But it's not only technical side of things, but business as well. They need to create some principle based architectures and have a bank of that and then prescribe that to their customers base. I think that's the only way to simplify these things because as you said, if you have 200 different types of instances, for instance, (laughs), it is hard. It is really hard. >> I want to get your thoughts, we talk about this on Twitter all the time so the folks watching, if you want to follow our rants and raves on Twitter, follow us on Twitter you'll get all the action, all the influencers are there. Competition. I've been ranting all week and been saying it for a long time, Microsoft's not even close to Amazon. I'm a bit over the top but I'll just say that if Amazon goes unchecked, Microsoft's ecosystem's going to get decimated. Why would I want to run software, my software, on a suboptimal performance infrastructure? Microsoft had Windows back in the day and had the system software and the application suite but they encouraged developers to build on top of Windows. Their "dot net" or ecosystem. That game's over. I guess Window's runs on Amazon too, whatever. But now the cloud is the Windows. The cloud is the system software. So developers are running on top of the cloud. >> Yes. >> So who wins? >> I think Open wins. Not Open-source. Open-source and Open are different things, we always discuss that. I think Open wins, the close systems have this problem of protectionism which doesn't work, with our little kids at home or your economy as whole. When you protect your local industry, the economy goes down. I've seen that, I'm an economist by education as you guys know. >> Yes. >> I think it's the same, when you protect too much of whatever you have, I think it's has a worse effect. But there's one narrative, Satya sort of narrates if you will, he says that, hey, when you use Windows, you keep everything, 100%. We are not taking a cut. When you're sitting in a cloud marketplace, somebody's getting a cut. That's the argument. >> Terry Chen said, because he puked on what I said, he said better could win. >> Yes. >> That's one thing. Okay, I buy that. Azure could be better in some use cases. But I think over all Amazon wins hands down currently. Certainly with the custom processors. >> You haven't mentioned GCP. >> Actually GCP. >> What can you say about it? >> What you could say is that AWS right now has either constructed or is benefiting from the highest barrier to entry to any business in the history of our planet. You can look at the investment that GCP is making to the tune of six billion dollars a year to go after market share. Are they going after current market share which is arguably the 20% of IT that's in cloud now? Or are they going for future market share which is a piece of the larger pie? When you talk about who wins, I think it's still possible for- >> Hold on, hold on. >> You left Oracle out. I think it's still possible. >> Hold on, hold on, hold on. >> I can tell you about Oracle. >> Hold on, hold on. This is a thought exercise, I'm going to ask you guys this question. It may be rhetorical, you don't need to answer it. If you went to all the people out there buying Azure and GCP, no offense guys, and you said, "Put aside all your credits you've been given, how much are you actually using?" If you take the incentives away, why are you on those clouds from a performance perspective? >> Sorry to cut you off. We know that Oracle uses incentives, X codes, leads for sale, and all that stuff, we know that. A lot of people know that. So cloud became shelfware there, we know the story. I'm leaving Oracle to the side. But I think Google has legs. Google's cloud has legs. They are a very enduring focus company. They are more open-source friendly and data science friendly as well. I think they are actually a number two, personally I believe. I'm a developer by heart, so they are number two developer cloud after Amazon. >> I think it's well know, I agree with you by the way. I think people may not know this but it's well known in the industry that Amazon has been mostly afraid of Google more than Microsoft. I think now because of this market share, the ecosystem war that's going to happen in a very short period of time, Microsoft's more of a threat on paper. But Google's got more threat to sling shot back and front technically because if you look at Graviton, the stack that they're building for ISVs and developers, Amazon's clearly winning. Google can pull that off. If they get it, they got to have their own way. >> Let me tell you, the one thing actually, if we want to know what was the fumble this time? I have some, actually I will talk about it in my radio, if you have enough time here. I think Google will do better because they're open and Amazon is complex. I was thinking during the keynotes, what are the clues to Amazon, AWS, leaving which is helping Google and Azure, mainly Google. Google is simple actually, a lot simpler to use, but again having said that, there's one thing actually, the new term I'm trying to define is the feature proximity. Amazon has feature proximity, like the best. When you are doing one thing and you want to do another thing, they have that all right there. They're ahead of the game. They have their 5G, private 5G on all their stuff, it's very futuristic. >> By the way, I got Amazon to agree to get me some private 5G for when we go back home. We're going to setup an outdoor area for some open CUBE action with some 5G. >> Actually we could put that on a nice van with the logos and all that. We could move around. >> We'll park it right there on El Camino, right next to Stanford University. Maybe we could live in one of those things too. >> Make it a taco truck and I'll join you guys. >> (laughs) Taco truck for free food. >> Yeah, let's do that. >> All seriousness guys, I want to get your thoughts as we wrap up this segment on the analysis of the cloud industry. What do you guys think, your opinion, it's going to take, I'll start by saying I think Amazon, if not contested for their leadership in the performance of silicon and the stack for software developers and owners to run the fastest they can run away with this. I think Microsoft and Google better be cranking right now to make it easy and have silicon advantage as well. I think clearly if the ecosystem's going to be at play, because the shift is happening to modernize software development, low code, no code, every shift everyone will go to the best performance, independent of cost and incentives. Amazon's got lower cost too so they got the fly wheel going. >> I can make mine short. I think GCP can also be successful. But I think already the amount of momentum that AWS has, the wind behind it's sails, I was at EMC for many years and we used to joke about our arch nemesis Hitachi Data Systems and saying that they were quite discouraged every morning as they woke up learning that they were a year further behind. Every night they went to sleep. They woke up the next day and they were a year further behind. Watching the announcements coming out of this event this week, I think there are some people at GCP and Microsoft and others who have that sense. But having said that, we're at the dawn of at era of cloud. There's plenty of room for a lot of players. When you give us your thoughts, I'd like your answer to the question, how much are consumers in the driver's seat today? Will the customers be able to demand multi sourcing? >> I think customers, you work with your money. Customers can demand that but at the same time customers can get stuck in a platform and they can't get out. We usually talk about when to lock in. There's one thing that Amazon keeps saying that we are open, we are open and the other vendors are like, these brands. I think that kind of narrative can come bite back to them. It's not a good thing to say. You don't want to be cocky about your features or you are the best and all that stuff. I think you want to stay humble and respect the other guys as well because they are coming right behind you. I think the key is developers. I have the bias towards developers because I was a developers but I totally believe deep down, actually I have tried to put my developer hat off and still think that way about these constructs. Developers are the people who call the shots. If you are not developer friendly you can't do much. >> That's a good point. >> That's my warning to Amazon. Don't go away from developers. You are number one developer cloud, stay there. This refocus is good, but put that to the side, not make that front center. Google has made that front center, I think that's a mistake. >> Yeah, you have the features, the right features, but again, speed, performance. Developers, capture the opportunity. Developers want to move fast. That's the entrepreneurship. Sarbjeet, great to have you on theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me here, I enjoyed it. Great set here. >> All right, Dave Nicholson's here. Dave Nicholson, CUBE host. I'm John Furrier. You're watching theCUBE, the world leader in technology coverage. We'll be back with more live coverage from Reinvent after this short break. (upbeat music)

(calm electronic music) >> Hey, welcome back everyone to theCUBE coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're here with two sets with live content, pumping out 120 years over the course of a couple of days, 28 hours of programming from the people making things happen, sharing the news, and the insight. We've got Sandy Carter, worldwide public sector vice president of partners and programs for Amazon web services. Sandy, CUBE alumni, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you. >> Great to see you too, John. It's so awesome to be here in person, right? >> The news is coming more and more. We got health care news. We got this news, we got all kinds of certification. We just recently talked on a segment about all the great stuff on certifications, but healthcare is booming, okay? We got talking about delivering the kind of performance that people need in healthcare with data, and you've got delivery, destination is healthcare. Let's talk health care, what's going on? >> Yeah, so we made a couple of really awesome announcements around healthcare today. So if you think about it, one of the big trends in healthcare is digitizing health records, so electronic healthcare records to really help and assist with patient care. So, because that is so big, we launched an initiative for electronic healthcare records, migration assistance. And what that means is that, we have now added technical subject matter experts and industry subject matter experts in the healthcare space who understand EHR, electronic health records, to help us migrate at least 500 ISV applications over to AWS. This is really big news, because so far, most of those applications are running on-premises. So getting them over to the cloud gives them the scalability, gives them the agility, that they need to provide all of us better healthcare. >> Well, one of the big themes is the Epic performance, the database on the cloud. Cloud has given so much agility and has changed the game. I mean, I'm old enough to remember, I mean, we can look back on the shifts in technology. You had that era of healthcare where data and the records were super important. Privacy, lock it down. Don't talk to each other. Are we going to respect the privacy of the individuals? That's all now changed with horizontal scalable data, as Swami pointed out, who's the SVP leader of AI and the data for AWS, whole new paradigm of data architecture. This is disrupting healthcare. >> Yes And you've got the Epic situation. Take us through, why is this important? Why are we talking about Epic? >> Well, so EHR is one of the announcements. And then the second big announcement, is our Epic on AWS announcement. So, you may have covered this back in the August, September timeframe, we announced a new EC2 instance, called the M6I. And Epic, which is one of the leading global healthcare providers in the world, has been migrated to the cloud. And so, they started testing themselves, Epic started testing on the M6I. And so what we saw is a 40% performance improvement. Now that is, that's huge, as well as a 30% reduction in total cost of ownership. So if you're a partner out there, you're going to see, as your application runs on top of Epic, you're going to get that performance gain. And Epic has an amazing ecosystem, John. They have what they call the code travelers. They kind of exist on Epic, cause everybody uses Epic. Those ISBs are now going to get that benefit, and 90% of the current Epic customers. And then, our consulting partners are also going to see the benefit, because of that total cost of ownership reduction of 30%. So imagine you're a consulting partner, you're now going to go into a hospital that's using Epic and tell them that you can reduce their total cost of ownership by 30%. That's amazing! >> Well, first of all, the cost thing is amazing. But also, when you mentioned the instances, what's happening with the graviton and the processors and the performance you're getting in the cloud now, the applications are running faster and lower cost. So, you know, databases, they really want the boast horsepower. So you've got the cloud performance, you've got the lower cost. Why wouldn't anyone want to run it anywhere else? This is what I'm saying on my story I wrote Sunday night. All the modern applications will go to the best performance, even legacy apps. >> That's right, and I think this is so important because you know, you need performance, you need speed. You need to get the rest of this application migrated over. That's why we got the EHR migration initiative. And then if you couple that with our third announcement around authority to operate that now gives you that security and compliance, right? Because if you're a hospital, you can't risk having that patient information exposed. And so we introduced as an authority to operate a program that enables our partners to get HIPAA and high trust authorization faster, cheaper, so that they can move with this new digital trend that's happening all across healthcare. I mean, it is our fastest growing area today, growing at 105%. >> Yeah, it points to examine, it's another one of those areas that is urgent under COVID. It's exploding because of the demand, just on performance. And Swami said it today, also in the keynote, the AI data keynote, governance should be an enabler, not an inhibitor. >> Sandy: That's right. So when you start getting into governance where you can start managing the data in a way that's cool for people to use the data, but protect the privacy, you then can have the modern apps. >> And if I could just add on one thing there, today we talked about, you know, when you go on your digital transformation journey, it requires digital security, especially in healthcare. And so as you have those requirements, you have to be able to, not just get stuff to the cloud, it's got to be secure. And that's why HIPAA and high trust exist today. >> And these fine grain controls now available are amazing. So again, I love the way you guys are going in this direction with AWS. I got to say every year, it's like, wow, again. But I want to get back to this ISV angle because I think this is super important. Again, I teased this out on my post Sunday night, when I, after my sit down with Adam Selipski was that, if I'm a software vendor, an ISV, an independent software vendor, or a software owner, I want my app to run faster, period, okay? I want my app to make money, which means valued by customers. I don't want my app to be slower and not be seen in front of my customers. So again, ISV is now an opportunity, Epic is a shining example of that, where now as an ISV, I can innovate and not have to do the heavy lifting. This is a huge point. Can you just share some color on this, because this is like, I think kind of the elephant in the room. The ISVs are going to go where the action is. >> That's right, and you know, the Epic ecosystem is such a force. Epic being a global healthcare leader, getting that performance level, all of those codes, they call them code travelers, that exist around Epic. All of those applications can now take advantage of that performance improvement, which for me is a game changer because all that data, I mean, I know that, you know, I was just in an emergency room with my daughter. She had a trouble, we thought she broke her elbow. And, you know, we were sitting there waiting as the person's entering and waiting and entering and waiting. So that performance really makes a difference, right? In your customer satisfaction, in your patient care, all the things that really matter, the business outcome areas, not just the technology side. It's a game changer for healthcare. >> It's the delivery of one, your health, your life. And two, hassle time, avoiding the steps, waiting in the wrong room, going here, waiting for this, getting a test you don't need. >> Sandy: That's right. >> It's a hassle for the customer, but also puts pressure on the supply chain, the operational bandwidth, and with telemedicine around the corner, you know, everything is happening with telemedicine. Why I might not need to go to the hospital if I don't have to, so again, another big wave coming is telemedicine. >> Yeah, that's right, and in fact, we launched that healthcare startup accelerator, where we invited healthcare companies from around the world to come in and get extra support as a brand new partner, as a next gen partner, and that was actually one of the top areas of focus. About 40% of the companies came in around telemedicine. And one of the really interesting partners that came in through that accelerator was a partner named Get lab. They do, you know, surgeon training, which is quite fascinating, and they were doing that and Time named them one of the top, most innovative companies of the year in 2021. And they accredited a lot of their success to the healthcare accelerator that we just launched as well. >> So much action going on. I got to get your thoughts on just in general healthcare, do you find the vibe to be more from the doctors and the service providers? Because they're the ones on the front lines. They're in the foxhole, so to speak. It always seems to me that they always wish things went faster, similar to government workers, right? It's like, I wish there wasn't red tape. I wish it was easier. Why aren't we doing this? That seems to have been like, the culture. And now it's shifting back to, all right, now we're having fun. We're delivering care. We're riding the right wave. >> I agree, you know, these business outcomes make a huge difference, I think. And I think that that transformation that you're talking about, is occurring much faster than anybody anticipated. I predict in 2022, you're going to see this increased focus, not just on telemedicine, patient care overall. Like how do you combine the two together? How are you able to move quicker to provide more diagnostics? So for example, one of our partners, GE Healthcare, was using AI and ML with one of our partner programs and was able to automate the radiology workflow. I mean, just think about radiology, reading X-rays, how fast that can be with AI and ML. It increased the diagnostic accuracy by 30%. I think you're going to see lots more use of technology to speed up diagnosis, to increase that customer, patient care. I think that's really going to be the trend in 2022. And it's great for all of us. >> And computer vision, by the way, with explainable AI, can come in, talk about analyzing x-rays and or film, more and more tech coming in and machine learning is driving a lot of it. >> I completely agree. Machine learning, I would say machine learning and analytics, you know? Now that we've got the data and you know, the data, IDC says that data coming in from IOT sensors increased by four x since COVID, so imagine, you know, there are now robots working in the hospital, gathering your readings of your, you know, how strong you breathe, your temperature, all your vital signs are now coming in from IOT sensors. So you're just seeing this explosion of data and healthcare, which only makes diagnosis and hopefully cures, new vaccines, more possible because now you've got more data to work with, right? That data accuracy is going up. Data sources are going up. It's just a really powerful combination. >> Yeah, healthcare is great. Sandy, it's been an amazing run on the healthcare side. It's continuing to change, in a good way, how care is managed and delivered and dispensed and cost savings. I do want to ask you if you could point out to the audience, just from within the partner base, what's the big trend there? Because obviously they're all engaged, seeing all kinds of new things. Where's the innovation vibe? What are some, what's the pattern in the partners, more software development, more cloud, more AI? What's the, what would you, how would you rank the activities of innovation? >> Yeah, I would say there are five prime drivers today on the technology side, you know. First and foremost right now is IOT, believe it or not. And IOT, because it's driving so much data and you have to have data for the second big trend, which is artificial intelligence and machine learning. So that data is essential for feeding all the modeling that's going on. We're also seeing the edge come to pass really fast, right? A lot of work on outpost. In fact, at the conference, we announced that we just opened an outpost innovation center with WWT and Intel MDC. We already have an innovation center for outpost in Seattle. So we opened one in DC for our partner community as well. So we're seeing a lot of focus on that edge. Containers, as we talked about earlier, 60% of customers want containers. So our partners to be, need to be all over it. And then another huge trend in public sector is blockchain. So if you think about, you know, Panama, El Salvador, Ukraine, they're all moving to Bitcoin. And I just went over to the Wynn hotel cause we're here in Vegas, did you see how many vendors are taking Bitcoin out? It's amazing! And so all of that is built on blockchain. So we also introduced a set of workshops and POCs with our partners around blockchain because we see it happening in states, in countries, and then the countries drive everything else to have to use or leverage that chain for Bitcoin. >> Great trends, the tailwind, the wave is here. It's a big wave, healthcare, public sector, a lot of change. Sandy Carter. Thank you for the great commentary. Great insight, great to see you. Thanks for coming back on theCUBE. >> Nice to see you too, yep. >> It's theCUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We got two sets wall-to-wall coverage, here in person, live event, as well as hybrid, we have the software as well. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in global tech coverage. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (calming electronic music)

>>Yeah. >>Hello. Welcome to the Special Cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John for a host of the Cube. We have a conversation around a I for the enterprise. What this means I got two great guests. John Finelli, Vice President, virtual GPU at NVIDIA and Maurizio D V D C T o University of Pisa in Italy. Uh, Practitioner, customer partner, um, got VM world coming up. A lot of action happening in the enterprise. John. Great to see you. Nice to meet you. Remotely coming in from Italy for this remote. >>John. Thanks for having us on again. >>Yeah. Nice to meet >>you. I wish we could be in person face to face, but that's coming soon. Hopefully, John, you were talking. We were just talking about before we came on camera about AI for the enterprise. And the last time I saw you in person was in Cuba interview. We were talking about some of the work you guys were doing in AI. It's gotten so much stronger and broader and the execution of an video, the success you're having set the table for us. What is the ai for the enterprise conversation frame? >>Sure. So, um, we, uh we've been working with enterprises today on how they can deliver a I or explore AI or get involved in a I, um uh, in a standard way in the way that they're used to managing and operating their data centre. Um, writing on top of you know, they're Dell servers with B M or V sphere. Um, so that AI feels like a standard workload that night organisation can deliver to their engineers and data scientists. And then the flip side of that, of course, is ensuring that engineers and data scientists get the workloads position to them or have access to them in the way that they need them. So it's no longer a trouble ticket that you have to submit to, I t and you know, count the hours or days or weeks until you you can get new hardware, right By being able to pull it into the mainstream data centre. I can enable self service provisioning for those folks. So we actually we make a I more consumable or easier to manage for I t administrators and then for the engineers and the data scientists, etcetera. We make it easy for them to get access to those resources so they can get to their work right away. >>Quite progress in the past two years. Congratulations on that and looking. It's only the beginning is Day one Mercy. I want to ask you about what's going on as the CTO University piece of what's happening down there. Tell us a little bit about what's going on. You have the centre of excellence there. What does that mean? What does that include? >>Uh, you know, uh, University of Peace. Are you one of one of the biggest and oldest in Italy? Uh, if you have to give you some numbers is around 50 K students and 3000 staff between, uh, professors resurgence and that cabinet receive staff. So I we are looking into data operation of the centres and especially supports for scientific computing. And, uh, this is our our daily work. Let's say this, uh, taking us a lot of times, but, you know, we are able to, uh, reserve a merchant percentage of our time, Uh, for r and D, And this is where the centre of excellence is, Uh, is coming out. Uh, so we are always looking into new kinds of technologies that we can put together to build new solutions to do next generation computing gas. We always say we are looking for the right partners to do things together. And at the end of the day is the work that is good for us is good for our partners and typically, uh, ends in a production system for our university. So is the evolution of the scientific computing environment that we have. >>Yeah. And you guys have a great track record and reputation of, you know, R and D, testing software, hardware combinations and sharing those best practises, you know, with covid impact in the world. Certainly we see it on the supply chain side. Uh, and John, we heard Jensen, your CEO and video talk multiple keynotes. Now about software, uh, and video being a software company. Dell, you mentioned Dale and VM Ware. You know, Covid has brought this virtualisation world back. And now hybrid. Those are words that we used basically in the text industry. Now it's you're hearing hybrid and virtualisation kicked around in real world. So it's ironic that vm ware and El, uh, and the Cube eventually all of us together doing more virtual stuff. So with covid impacting the world, how does that change you guys? Because software is more important. You gotta leverage the hardware you got, Whether it's Dell or in the cloud, this is a huge change. >>Yeah. So, uh, as you mentioned organisations and enterprises, you know, they're looking at things differently now, Um, you know, the idea of hybrid. You know, when you talk to tech folks and we think about hybrid, we always think about you know, how the different technology works. Um, what we're hearing from customers is hybrid, you know, effectively translates into, you know, two days in the office, three days remote, you know, in the future when they actually start going back to the office. So hybrid work is actually driving the need for hybrid I t. Or or the ability to share resources more effectively. Um, And to think about having resources wherever you are, whether you're working from home or you're in the office that day, you need to have access to the same resources. And that's where you know the the ability to virtualize those resources and provide that access makes that hybrid part seamless >>mercy What's your world has really changed. You have students and faculty. You know, Things used to be easy in the old days. Physical in this network. That network now virtual there. You must really be having him having impact. >>Yeah, we have. We have. Of course. As you can imagine, a big impact, Uh, in any kind of the i t offering, uh, from, uh, design new networking technologies, deploying new networking technologies, uh, new kind of operation we find. We found it at them. We were not able anymore to do burr metal operations directly, but, uh, from the i t point of view, uh, we were how can I say prepared in the sense that, uh, we ran from three or four years parallel, uh, environment. We have bare metal and virtual. So as you can imagine, traditional bare metal HPC cluster D g d g X machines, uh, multi GPU s and so on. But in parallel, we have developed, uh, visual environment that at the beginning was, as you can imagine, used, uh, for traditional enterprise application, or VD. I, uh, we have a significant significant arise on a farm with the grid for remote desktop remote pull station that we are using for, for example, uh, developing a virtual classroom or visual go stations. And so this is was typical the typical operation that we did the individual world. But in the same infrastructure, we were able to develop first HPC individual borders of utilisation of the HPC resources for our researchers and, uh, at the end, ai ai offering and ai, uh, software for our for our researchers, you can imagine our vehicle infrastructure as a sort of white board where we are able to design new solution, uh, in a fast way without losing too much performance. And in the case of the AI, we will see that we the performance are almost the same at the bare metal. But with all the flexibility that we needed in the covid 19 world and in the future world, too. >>So a couple things that I want to get John's thoughts as well performance you mentioned you mentioned hybrid virtual. How does VM Ware and NVIDIA fit into all this as you put this together, okay, because you bring up performance. That's now table stakes. He's leading scale and performance are really on the table. everyone's looking at it. How does VM ware an NVIDIA John fit in with the university's work? >>Sure. So, um, I think you're right when it comes to, uh, you know, enterprises or mainstream enterprises beginning their initial foray into into a I, um there are, of course, as performance in scale and also kind of ease of use and familiarity are all kind of things that come into play in terms of when an enterprise starts to think about it. And, um, we have a history with VM Ware working on this technology. So in 2019, we introduced our virtual compute server with VM Ware, which allowed us to effectively virtual is the Cuda Compute driver at last year's VM World in 2020 the CEOs of both companies got together and made an announcement that we were going to bring a I R entire video AI platform to the Enterprise on top of the sphere. And we did that, Um, starting in March this year, we we we finalise that with the introduction of GM wears V, Sphere seven, update two and the early access at the time of NVIDIA ai Enterprise. And, um, we have now gone to production with both of those products. And so customers, Um, like the University of Pisa are now using our production capabilities. And, um, whenever you virtualize in particular and in something like a I where performances is really important. Um, the first question that comes up is, uh doesn't work and And how quickly does it work Or or, you know, from an I t audience? A lot of times you get the How much did it slow down? And and and so we We've worked really closely from an NVIDIA software perspective and a bm wear perspective. And we really talk about in media enterprise with these fair seven as optimist, certified and supported. And the net of that is, we've been able to run the standard industry benchmarks for single node as well as multi note performance, with about maybe potentially a 2% degradation in performance, depending on the workload. Of course, it's very different, but but effectively being able to trade that performance for the accessibility, the ease of use, um, and even using things like we realise, automation for self service for the data scientists, Um and so that's kind of how we've been pulling it together for the market. >>Great stuff. Well, I got to ask you. I mean, people have that reaction of about the performance. I think you're being polite. Um, around how you said that shows the expectation. It's kind of sceptical, uh, and so I got to ask you, the impact of this is pretty significant. What is it now that customers can do that? They couldn't or couldn't feel they had before? Because if the expectations as well as it worked well, I mean, there's a fast means. It works, but like performance is always concerned. What's different now? What what's the bottom line impact on what country do now that they couldn't do before. >>So the bottom line impact is that AI is now accessible for the enterprise across there. Called their mainstream data centre, enterprises typically use consistent building blocks like the Dell VX rail products, right where they have to use servers that are common standard across the data centre. And now, with NVIDIA Enterprise and B M R V sphere, they're able to manage their AI in the same way that they're used to managing their data centre today. So there's no retraining. There's no separate clusters. There isn't like a shadow I t. So this really allows an enterprise to efficiently deploy um, and cost effectively Deploy it, uh, it without because there's no performance degradation without compromising what their their their data scientists and researchers are looking for. And then the flip side is for the data science and researcher, um, using some of the self service automation that I spoke about earlier, they're able to get a virtual machine today that maybe as a half a GPU as their models grow, they do more exploring. They might get a full GPU or or to GPS in a virtual machine. And their environment doesn't change because it's all connected to the back end storage. And so for the for the developer and the researcher, um, it makes it seamless. So it's really kind of a win for both Nike and for the user. And again, University of Pisa is doing some amazing things in terms of the workloads that they're doing, Um, and, uh and, uh, and are validating that performance. >>Weigh in on this. Share your opinion on or your reaction to that, What you can do now that you couldn't do before. Could you share your experience? >>Our experience is, uh, of course, if you if you go to your, uh, data scientists or researchers, the idea of, uh, sacrificing four months to flexibility at the beginning is not so well accepted. It's okay for, uh, for the Eid management, As John was saying, you have people that is know how to deal with the virtual infrastructure, so nothing changed for them. But at the end of the day, we were able to, uh, uh, test with our data. Scientists are researchers veteran The performance of us almost similar around really 95% of the performance for the internal developer developer to our work clothes. So we are not dealing with benchmarks. We have some, uh, work clothes that are internally developed and apply to healthcare music generator or some other strange project that we have inside and were able to show that the performance on the beautiful and their metal world were almost the same. We, the addition that individual world, you are much more flexible. You are able to reconfigure every finger very fast. You are able to design solution for your researcher, uh, in a more flexible way. An effective way we are. We were able to use the latest technologies from Dell Technologies and Vidia. You can imagine from the latest power edge the latest cuts from NVIDIA. The latest network cards from NVIDIA, like the blue Field to the latest, uh, switches to set up an infrastructure that at the end of the day is our winning platform for our that aside, >>a great collaboration. Congratulations. Exciting. Um, get the latest and greatest and and get the new benchmarks out their new playbooks. New best practises. I do have to ask you marriage, if you don't mind me asking why Look at virtualizing ai workloads. What's the motivation? Why did you look at virtualizing ai work clothes? >>Oh, for the sake of flexibility Because, you know, uh, in the latest couple of years, the ai resources are never enough. So we are. If you go after the bare metal, uh, installation, you are going into, uh, a world that is developing very fastly. But of course, you can afford all the bare metal, uh, infrastructure that your data scientists are asking for. So, uh, we decided to integrate our view. Dual infrastructure with AI, uh, resources in order to be able to, uh, use in different ways in a more flexible way. Of course. Uh, we have a We have a two parallels world. We still have a bare metal infrastructure. We are growing the bare metal infrastructure. But at the same time, we are growing our vehicle infrastructure because it's flexible, because we because our our stuff, people are happy about how the platform behaviour and they know how to deal them so they don't have to learn anything new. So it's a sort of comfort zone for everybody. >>I mean, no one ever got hurt virtualizing things that makes it makes things go better faster building on on that workloads. John, I gotta ask you, you're on the end video side. You You see this real up close than video? Why do people look at virtualizing ai workloads is the unification benefit. I mean, ai implies a lot of things, implies you have access to data. It implies that silos don't exist. I mean, that doesn't mean that's hard. I mean, is this real people actually looking at this? How is it working? >>Yeah. So? So again, um you know for all the benefits and activity today AI brings a I can be pretty complex, right? It's complex software to set up and to manage. And, um, within the day I enterprise, we're really focusing in on ensuring that it's easier for organisations to use. For example Um, you know, I mentioned you know, we we had introduced a virtual compute server bcs, um uh, two years ago and and that that has seen some some really interesting adoption. Some, uh, enterprise use cases. But what we found is that at the driver level, um, it still wasn't accessible for the majority of enterprises. And so what we've done is we've built upon that with NVIDIA Enterprise and we're bringing in pre built containers that remove some of the complexities. You know, AI has a lot of open source components and trying to ensure that all the open source dependencies are resolved so you can get the AI developers and researchers and data scientists. Actually doing their work can be complex. And so what we've done is we've brought these pre built containers that allow you to do everything from your initial data preparation data science, using things like video rapids, um, to do your training, using pytorch and tensorflow to optimise those models using tensor rt and then to deploy them using what we call in video Triton Server Inference in server. Really helping that ai loop become accessible, that ai workflow as something that an enterprise can manage as part of their common core infrastructure >>having the performance and the tools available? It's just a huge godsend people love. That only makes them more productive and again scales of existing stuff. Okay, great stuff. Great insight. I have to ask, What's next one's collaboration? This is one of those better together situations. It's working. Um, Mauricio, what's next for your collaboration with Dell VM Ware and video? >>We will not be for sure. We will not stop here. Uh, we are just starting working on new things, looking for new development, uh, looking for the next beast. Come, uh, you know, the digital world is something that is moving very fast. Uh, and we are We will not We will not stop here because because they, um the outcome of this work has been a very big for for our research group. And what John was saying This the fact that all the software stock for AI are simplified is something that has been, uh, accepted. Very well, of course you can imagine researching is developing new things. But for people that needs, uh, integrated workflow. The work that NVIDIA has done in the development of software package in developing containers, that gives the end user, uh, the capabilities of running their workloads is really something that some years ago it was unbelievable. Now, everything is really is really easy to manage. >>John mentioned open source, obviously a big part of this. What are you going to? Quick, Quick follow if you don't mind. Are you going to share your results so people can can look at this so they can have an easier path to AI? >>Oh, yes, of course. All the all the work, The work that is done at an ideal level from University of Visa is here to be shared. So we we as, uh, as much as we have time to write down we are. We are trying to find a way to share the results of the work that we're doing with our partner, Dell and NVIDIA. So for sure will be shared >>well, except we'll get that link in the comments, John, your thoughts. Final thoughts on the on the on the collaboration, uh, with the University of Pisa and Delvian, where in the video is is all go next? >>Sure. So So with University of Pisa, We're you know, we're absolutely, uh, you know, grateful to Morocco and his team for the work they're doing and the feedback they're sharing with us. Um, we're learning a lot from them in terms of things we can do better and things that we can add to the product. So that's a fantastic collaboration. Um, I believe that Mauricio has a session at the M World. So if you want to actually learn about some of the workloads, um, you know, they're doing, like, music generation. They're doing, you know, covid 19 research. They're doing deep, multi level, uh, deep learning training. So there's some really interesting work there, and so we want to continue that partnership. University of Pisa, um, again, across all four of us, uh, university, NVIDIA, Dell and VM Ware. And then on the tech side, you know, for our enterprise customers, um, you know, one of the things that we actually didn't speak much about was, um I mentioned that the product is optimised certified and supported, and I think that support cannot be understated. Right? So as enterprises start to move into these new areas, they want to know that they can pick up the phone and call in video or VM ware. Adele, and they're going to get support for these new workloads as they're running them. Um, we were also continuing, uh, you know, to to think about we spent a lot of time today on, like, the developer side of things and developing ai. But the flip side of that, of course, is that when those ai apps are available or ai enhanced apps, right, Pretty much every enterprise app today is adding a I capabilities all of our partners in the enterprise software space and so you can think of a beady eye enterprises having a runtime component so that as you deploy your applications into the data centre, they're going to be automatically take advantage of the GPS that you have there. And so we're seeing this, uh, future as you're talking about the collaboration going forward, where the standard data centre building block still maintains and is going to be something like a VX rail two U server. But instead of just being CPU storage and RAM, they're all going to go with CPU, GPU, storage and RAM. And that's going to be the norm. And every enterprise application is going to be infused with AI and be able to take advantage of GPS in that scenario. >>Great stuff, ai for the enterprise. This is a great QB conversation. Just the beginning. We'll be having more of these virtualizing ai workloads is real impacts data scientists impacts that compute the edge, all aspects of the new environment we're all living in. John. Great to see you, Maurizio here to meet you and all the way in Italy looking for the meeting in person and good luck in your session. I just got a note here on the session. It's at VM World. Uh, it's session 22 63 I believe, um And so if anyone's watching, Want to check that out? Um, love to hear more. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >>Thanks for having us. Thanks to >>its acute conversation. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. We'll talk to you soon. Yeah,

>>text, you know, consumer opens up their iphone and says, oh my gosh, I love the technology behind my eyes. What's it been like being on the shark tank? You know, filming is fun, hang out, just fun and it's fun to be a celebrity at first your head gets really big and you get a good tables at restaurants who says texas has got a little possess more skin in the game today in charge of his destiny robert Hirschbeck, No stars. Here is CUBA alumni. Yeah, okay. >>Hi. I'm john Ferry, the co founder of silicon angle Media and co host of the cube. I've been in the tech business since I was 19 1st programming on many computers in a large enterprise and then worked at IBM and Hewlett Packard total of nine years in the enterprise brian's jobs from programming, Training, consulting and ultimately as an executive salesperson and then started my first company with 1997 and moved to Silicon Valley in 1999. I've been here ever since. I've always loved technology and I love covering you know, emerging technology as trained as a software developer and love business and I love the impact of software and technology to business to me creating technology that starts the company and creates value and jobs is probably the most rewarding things I've ever been involved in. And I bring that energy to the queue because the Cubans were all the ideas are and what the experts are, where the people are and I think what's most exciting about the cube is that we get to talk to people who are making things happen, entrepreneur ceo of companies, venture capitalists, people who are really on a day in and day out basis, building great companies and the technology business is just not a lot of real time live tv coverage and, and the cube is a non linear tv operation. We do everything that the T. V guys on cable don't do. We do longer interviews. We asked tougher questions, we ask sometimes some light questions. We talked about the person and what they feel about. It's not prompted and scripted. It's a conversation authentic And for shows that have the Cube coverage and makes the show buzz. That creates excitement. More importantly, it creates great content, great digital assets that can be shared instantaneously to the world. Over 31 million people have viewed the cube and that is the result. Great content, great conversations and I'm so proud to be part of you with great team. Hi, I'm john ferrier. Thanks for watching the cube. >>Hello and welcome to the cube. We are here live on the ground in the expo floor of a live event. The AWS public sector summit. I'm john for your host of the cube. We're here for the next two days. Wall to wall coverage. I'm here with Sandy carter to kick off the event. Vice president partner as partners on AWS public sector. Great to see you Sandy, >>so great to see you john live and in person, right? >>I'm excited. I'm jumping out of my chair because I did a, I did a twitter periscope yesterday and said a live event and all the comments are, oh my God, an expo floor a real events. Congratulations. >>True. Yeah. We're so excited yesterday. We had our partner day and we sold out the event. It was rock them and pack them and we had to turn people away. So what a great experience. Right, >>Well, I'm excited. People are actually happy. We tried, we tried covering mobile world congress in Barcelona. Still, people were there, people felt good here at same vibe. People are excited to be in person. You get all your partners here. You guys have had had an amazing year. Congratulations. We did a couple awards show with you guys. But I think the big story is the amazon services for the partners. Public sector has been a real game changer. I mean we talked about it before, but again, it continues to happen. What's the update? >>Yeah, well we had, so there's lots of announcements. So let me start out with some really cool growth things because I know you're a big growth guy. So we announced here at the conference yesterday that our government competency program for partners is now the number one industry in AWS for are the competency. That's a huge deal. Government is growing so fast. We saw that during the pandemic, everybody was moving to the cloud and it's just affirmation with the government competency now taking that number one position across AWS. So not across public sector across AWS and then one of our fastest growing areas as well as health care. So we now have an A. T. O. Authority to operate for HIPPA and Hi trust and that's now our fastest growing area with 85% growth. So I love that new news about the growth that we're seeing in public sector and all the energy that's going into the cloud and beyond. >>You know, one of the things that we talked about before and another Cuban of you. But I want to get your reaction now current state of the art now in the moment the pandemic has highlighted the antiquated outdated systems and highlighted help inadequate. They are cloud. You guys have done an amazing job to stand up value quickly now we're in a hybrid world. So you've got hybrid automation ai driving a complete change and it's happening pretty quick. What's the new things that you guys are seeing that's emerging? Obviously a steady state of more growth. But what's the big success programs that you're seeing right now? >>Well, there's a few new programs that we're seeing that have really taken off. So one is called proserve ready. We announced yesterday that it's now G. A. And the U. S. And a media and why that's so important is that our proserve team a lot of times when they're doing contracts, they run out of resources and so they need to tap on the shoulder some partners to come and help them. And the customers told us that they wanted them to be pro served ready so to have that badge of honor if you would that they're using the same template, the same best practices that we use as well. And so we're seeing that as a big value creator for our partners, but also for our customers because now those partners are being trained by us and really helping to be mentored on the job training as they go. Very powerful program. >>Well, one of the things that really impressed by and I've talked to some of your MSP partners on the floor here as they walk by, they see the cube, they're all doing well. They're all happy. They got a spring in their step. And the thing is that this public private partnerships is a real trend we've been talking about for a while. More people in the public sector saying, hey, I want I need a commercial relationship, not the old school, you know, we're public. We have all these rules. There's more collaboration. Can you share your thoughts on how you see that evolving? Because now the partners in the public sector are partnering closer than ever before. >>Yeah, it's really um, I think it's really fascinating because a lot of our new partners are actually commercial partners that are now choosing to add a public sector practice with them. And I think a lot of that is because of these public and private partnerships. So let me give you an example space. So we were at the space symposium our first time ever for a W. S at the space symposium and what we found was there were partners, they're like orbital insight who's bringing data from satellites, There are public sector partner, but that data is being used for insurance companies being used for agriculture being used to impact environment. So I think a lot of those public private partnerships are strengthening as we go through Covid or have like getting alec of it. And we do see a lot of push in that area. >>Talk about health care because health care is again changing radically. We talked to customers all the time. They're like, they have a lot of legacy systems but they can't just throw them away. So cloud native aligns well with health care. >>It does. And in fact, you know, if you think about health care, most health care, they don't build solutions themselves, they depend on partners to build them. So they do the customer doesn't buy and the partner does the build. So it's a great and exciting area for our partners. We just launched a new program called the mission accelerator program. It's in beta and that program is really fascinating because our healthcare partners, our government partners and more now can use these accelerators that maybe isolate a common area like um digital analytics for health care and they can reuse those. So it's pretty, I think it's really exciting today as we think about the potential health care and beyond. >>You know, one of the challenge that I always thought you had that you guys do a good job on, I'd love to get your reaction to now is there's more and more people who want to partner with you than ever before. And sometimes it hasn't always been easy in the old days like to get fed ramp certified or even deal with public sector. If you were a commercial vendor, you guys have done a lot with accelerating certifications. Where are you on that spectrum now, what's next? What's the next wave of partner onboarding or what's the partner trends around the opportunities in public sector? >>Well, one of the new things that we announced, we have tested out in the U. S. You know, that's the amazon way, right, Andy's way, you tested your experiment. If it works, you roll it out, we have a concierge program now to help a lot of those new partners get inundated into public sector. And so it's basically, I'm gonna hold your hand just like at a hotel. I would go up and say, hey, can you direct me to the right restaurant or to the right museum, we do the same thing, we hand hold people through that process. Um, if you don't want to do that, we also have a new program called navigate which is built for brand new partners. And what that enables our partners to do is to kind of be guided through that process. So you are right. We have so many partners now who want to come and grow with us that it's really essential that we provide a great partner, experienced a how to on board. >>Yeah. And the A. P. M. Was the amazon partner network also has a lot of crossover. You see a lot a lot of that going on because the cloud, it's you can do both. >>Absolutely. And I think it's really, you know, we leverage all of the ap in programs that exist today. So for example, there was just a new program that was put out for a growth rebate and that was driven by the A. P. N. And we're leveraging and using that in public sector too. So there's a lot of prosecutes going on to make it easier for our partners to do business with us. >>So I have to ask you on a personal note, I know we've talked about before, your very comfortable the virtual now hybrid space. How's your team doing? How's the structure looks like, what are your goals, what are you excited about? >>Well, I think I have the greatest team ever. So of course I'm excited about our team and we are working in this new hybrid world. So it is a change for everybody uh the other day we had some people in the office and some people calling in virtually so how to manage that, right was really quite interesting. Our goals that we align our whole team around and we talked a little bit about this yesterday are around mission which are the solution areas migration, so getting everything to the cloud and then in the cloud, we talk about modernization, are you gonna use Ai Ml or I O T? And we actually just announced a new program around that to to help out IOT partners to really build and understand that data that's coming in from I O T I D C says that that idea that IOT data has increased by four times uh in the, during the covid period. So there's so many more partners who need help. >>There's a huge shift going on and you know, we always try to explain on the cube. Dave and I talked about a lot and it's re platform with the cloud, which is not just lift and shift you kind of move and then re platform then re factoring your business and there's a nuance there between re platform in which is great. Take advantage of cloud scale. But the re factoring allows for this unique advantage of these high level services. >>That's right >>and this is where people are winning. What's your reaction to that? >>Oh, I completely agree. I think this whole area of modernizing your application, like we have a lot of folks who are doing mainframe migrations and to your point if they just lift what they had in COBOL and they move it to a W S, there's really not a lot of value there, but when they rewrite the code, when they re factor the code, that's where we're seeing tremendous breakthrough momentum with our partner community, you know, Deloitte is one of our top partners with our mainframe migration. They have both our technology and our consulting um, mainframe migration competency there to one of the other things I think you would be interested in is in our session yesterday we just completed some research with r C T O s and we talked about the next mega trends that are coming around Web three dato. And I'm sure you've been hearing a lot about web www dot right? Yeah, >>0.04.0, it's all moving too fast. I mean it's moving >>fast. And so some of the things we talked to our partners about yesterday are like the metaverse that's coming. So you talked about health care yesterday electronic caregiver announced an entire application for virtual caregivers in the metaverse. We talked about Blockchain, you know, and the rise of Blockchain yesterday, we had a whole set of meetings, everybody was talking about Blockchain because now you've got El Salvador Panama Ukraine who have all adopted Bitcoin which is built on the Blockchain. So there are some really exciting things going on in technology and public sector. >>It's a societal shift and I think the confluence of tech user experience data, new, decentralized ways of changing society. You're in the middle of it. >>We are and our partners are in the middle of it and data data, data data, that's what I would say. Everybody is using data. You and I even talked about how you guys are using data. Data is really a hot topic and we we're really trying to help our partners figure out just how to migrate the data to the cloud but also to use that analytics and machine learning on it too. Well, >>thanks for sharing the data here on our opening segment. The insights we will be getting out of the Great Sandy. Great to see you got a couple more interviews with you. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate you And thanks for all your support. You guys are doing great. Your partners are happy you're on a great wave. Congratulations. Thank you, john appreciate more coverage from the queue here. Neither is public sector summit. We'll be right back. Mhm Yeah. >>Mhm. Mhm robert Herjavec. People obviously know you from shark tank

>>Hello and welcome back to the cubes live coverage of A W. S. Public sector summit. I'm john Kerry hosting CUBA. We're live in Washington D. C. For two days, an actual event with an expo floor with real people face to face and of course we're streaming it digitally on the cube and cube channels. And so our next guest, Mark Francis chief digital health integration officer Electronic caregiver, Mark great to see you tech veteran and former intel back in the day. You've seen your ways of innovation. Welcome to the cube. >>Thanks so much. It's a pleasure to be here. >>So we were talking before we came on camera about all the innovation going back in the computer industry but now with health care and delivery of care telemedicine and how the structural systems are changing and how cloud is impacting that. You guys have an interesting solution on AWS that kind of, to me connect the dots for many tell us what you guys do and take us through the product. >>Sure. Happy to do so uh our company is electronic caregiver were actually founded back in 2009. We're based in Los cruces new Mexico so off the grid. Um but since that time we have been spending a lot of time and money doing foundational R and D pilots and product development work. Really say how do you bridge that chasm between the doctor's office and the patient home in a way that you can put a patient facing device and equipment in a patient's home that's going to drive high level of engagement, obtain actionable curated data that's presented out to caregivers and the caregivers can then act upon that to help direct and deliver high quality care. >>So basically is the future of medicine, >>the future of medicine. Right. Right. We look at medicine, we look at the future of medicine as being a hybrid model of in person care plus remote care. And we really see ourselves at the epicenter of providing a platform to help enable that. >>You know the big story here at the public sector. Some and we've been reporting on a digitally for the previous year is the impact the pandemic has had on the industry and and not just normal disruption, you know technology and start ups, disruption happens, structural changes being forced upon industries by the force majeure. That is the pandemic education, health care and so video and data and connected oriented systems are now the thing structurally that's changing it. That's causing all kinds of business model, innovations and challenges. Yeah. What's your take on that? Because this is real. >>Yeah. It is real. It it's funny that this is actually my third digital health company. Um First one was in in uh Silicon Valley early remote patient monitoring company. We end up selling it to bosh uh when I joined intel to be part of our digital health group, we did that for five years and ended a joint venture with G. E. So people have been playing around in remote patient monitoring telehealth for some time until the pandemic though there wasn't really a strong business model to justify scaling of these businesses. Um uh the pandemic change that it forced adoption and force the government to allow reimbursement coach as well. And as a result of that we've seen this pure if aeration of different product offering service offerings and then payment models around telehealth broadly speaking >>well since you started talking the music started cranking because this is the new music of the industry, we're here on the expo floor, we have face to face conversations going on and uh turn the music down. Hey thanks guys, this is a huge thing and I want to uh highlight even further what is the driver for this? Because is it, I mean actually clouds got some benefits but as you guys do the R. And D. What's going on with what's the key drivers for medicine? >>Yeah, I would take two things from a from a technology perspective, the infrastructure is finally in place to enable this type of charity distance before that it really wasn't there now that's there and the products that folks are used are much more affordable about the provider's side and the patient side. The main driver is um uh there's a lot of underlying trends that were happening that we're just being ignored Whether it was 50% non adherence to treatment plans, massive medication mismanagement um lack of professional and informal caregivers, all those things were kind of happening underneath the surface and then with Kobe, it all hit everybody in the phase. People started using telehealth and then realize, hey, we can deliver high quality care, we can deliver value based care mixed with a hybrid model of tele care plus patient care. And it turned out that, that, that works out well. So I think it's now a realization that tell care not only connects patients but solve some of these other issues around adherents, compliance, staffing and a number of other >>things and that this is a structural change we were talking about. Exactly. All right, So talk about amazon, what do you guys are doing on AWS? How's that all work? >>That's working out great. So as we, as we launch at a 2.0, we built it on 24 foundational aws and Amazon services. It's a serverless architecture, um, uh, which is delivered. What enables us to do is we have a whole bunch of different patients facing devices which we now integrate all into one back end through which we can run our data analytics are machine learning and then present curated actual data to the providers on top of that. We've also been developing a virtual caregiver that's really, really innovative. So we're using the unity engine to develop a very, very realistic virtual caregiver that is with the patient 24 hours a day in their home, they develop a relationship with that individual and then through that they can really drive greater you know more intimate care plan and a more intimate relationship with their human caregivers that's built using basic technology behind Alexa pauline lacks as well as IOT core and a lot of other ai ml services from from amazon as well. >>Not to get all nerdy and kind of seeking out here because under the hood it's all the goodness of amazon. We've got a server list, you got tennis is probably in there doing something who knows what's going on there, You've got polly let's do this and that but it also highlights the edge the ultimate network edges the human and if you've got to care for the patient at home or wherever on the run whatever. Yeah you got to get the access to the data so yeah I can imagine a lot of monitoring involved too. Yeah can you take us through how that works? >>Yeah and for us we like to talk about intelligence as opposed to data because data for data sakes isn't actionable. So really what can we do through machine learning and artificial intelligence to be able to make that data more actionable before the human caregiver because you're never going to take a human out of the equation. Uh But uh we had a lot of data inputs, they're both direct data inputs such as vital signs, we also get subtle data input. So with our with our uh with Addison or virtual caregiver uh the product actually come to the camera away from intel called the real sense cameras. And with that we get to see several signs of changes in terms of gate which might be in the indicative of falls risk of falls. We can see body temperature, pulse, heart rate, signs of stress, lack of sleep. Maybe that's a sign of uh adverse reaction to a new medication. There's a bunch of different direct and indirect inputs. We can take run some analysis against and then say hey there's something here you might want to look at because it might be indicating a change in health. >>So this is where the innovation around these bots and ai come in because you're essentially getting pattern matching on other signals you already know. So using the cameras and or sensors in to understand and get the patients some signaling where they can maybe take action call >>fun or Yeah, that's exactly. And the other thing we get, we get to integrate information related to what are called social determinants of health. So there's a whole body of research now showing that 65% of someone's health is actually driven by non clinical issues. So again issues of food security, transportation, access to care, mental health type issues in terms of stress and stuff like we can start gathering some of that information to based upon people's behaviors or for you to assessments which can also provide insights to help direct care. >>So maybe when I'm doing the Cuban reviews, you guys can go to work and look at me. I'm stressed out right now, having a great time here public sector, this is really cool. So take a minute to explain the vision. What does this go from here? I'll see low hanging fruit, telemedicine, check data, observe ability for patient for optimizing care, check what happens next industry disruption, what how these dominoes have been kind of fall? >>Yeah, for us uh we really are seeing more providers and more payers system. Integrators looking now to say how do I put together a comprehensive solution from the doctor's office to inpatient hospital to home that can remove it. A lot of barriers to care addi which is our platform is designed to be interoperable to plug into electronic health care systems, whether it's Cerner, Epic or Athenahealth, whatever it might be to be able to create that you pick us seamless platform for provider to use. We can push all of the data to their platform if they want to use that or they could use our platform and dashboard as well. We make it available to healthcare providers but also a lot of people are trying to age in place and they're getting treated by private duty providers, senior housing providers and other maybe less clinical caregivers. But if you're there every day with somebody you can pick up signs which might prevent a major health episode down the road. So we want to close that circle our our vision is how do we close the circle of care so that people get the right information at the right time to deliver the right >>care. So it's kind of a health care stack of a new kind of stack. So I have to ask you if there was an eye as pass and sass category um infrastructure as a service platform as a service. And then says it sounds like you guys are kind of combine the lower parts of the stack and enable your partners to develop on top of. Is that how it >>works? Yes it does. Yeah. Yeah. So with addie, the interesting thing that we've done it's designed to have open a P. I. For a lot of modules as well. So if we're working with the american Heart Association and we want to do a uh cardiac care module from using their I. P. We could do that if we want to integrate with Uber health or lift we could do that as well if we want to do something in the amazon and pill pack, it's a plug in that we could do that. So if I'm a patient or or a loved one at home instead of going to 10 different places or use our platform and then pull up four different apps. Everything can be right there at their fingertips. You can either do it by touch or you can use this voice because it's all a voice or a touch of interaction. >>So just because I'm curious and and and for clarification, the idea of going past versus SAS platform versus software as a service is why flexibility or customization? Why not go SAS and be a SAS application? >>Uh we've talked mostly about, we've we've gone back and forth platform as a service or infrastructure as a service. So that's more the debate that we've had. It's more about the scalability that we can offer. Um uh not just in the United States, but globally as well. Um and really that's really the thing that we've been looking at, especially because there's so many different sources of data, if you want to provide high quality care that needs to be integrated. We want to make sure that we created a platform, not just for what we provide but for what others in the environment can provide. >>So you really want to enable other people to create that very much layer on top of you guys, do you have out of the box SAS to get people going or is that just >>With the release of adding 2.0, now we do. So now folks go to our website and they contact our development those tools and and those libraries are available. >>Now, this is an awesome opportunity. So for people out there who are wanting to innovate on you, they can just say, okay, I'll leverage your the amazon web services of healthcare essentially. >>That's a nice bold ambitious statement. Yeah, but I mean kind of but if we if we can achieve that, then we'd be quite happy and we think the industry, you're gonna partner >>benefit of that. It's an ecosystem play. Exactly, yeah. It's kind of like. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And for us, what we do covert is a perfect example going back to that. So when Covid hit um were based in las cruces, new Mexico last winter lost crew system to el paso and overwhelmed. They're at capacity. Different health care systems came to us, they asked if we partner with them to deliver a basically a triage program for folks that were coming into the er with Covid. So we designed a Kobe at home programs. So you get diagnosed, get a kit, go home and using telehealth virtual visits, remote monitoring. Be able to stay healthy at home without doing community spread. And by making sure that you were being watched over by a care professionals 24 hours a day. We did that um worked with 300 people Malcolm would all of them said healthy. We were able to expand uh inpatient capacity by 77%. We saved the system over $6 million in in three months. We've now been asked and we're actually replicating that in Memphis now and then also we've been asked to do so down in Mississippi >>mark, great conversation. Uh real quick. I only I don't have much time left but I want to ask you, does this mean that we're gonna see a clip of proliferation of in home kind of devices to assist? >>Yeah, we will. Uh, what we've seen is a big pivot now towards hospital at home model of care. So you have providers saying, you know, I'll see you in my facility but also extend capabilities so I can see you and treat you at home as well. We've also seen a realization that telehealth is more than a than an occasional video visit because if all you're doing is replacing an occasional in person visit with an occasional video visit. You're not really changing things now. There's a whole different sensors ai other integrations that come together to be able to enable these different models >>for all the business school folks out there and people who understand what's going on with structural change. That's when innovation really changes. Yeah, this is structural change. >>Absolutely. >>Mark, thanks for coming on. Mark Francis chief Digital Health Integration Officer Electronic Caregiver here on the Q. Thanks. Coming >>on. Thank you. My pleasure. >>Okay, more coverage after this short break. I'm john Kerry, your host Aws public Sector summit, We'll be right back mm mm mm

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation [Music] welcome to this cube conversation lisa martin here with one of dell technologies customers what a great time to be talking about a candy company clifton dorsey joins me the vp at world corporation clifton welcome to the cube all right thank you i appreciate being here so i know royal corporation does more than candy but you know here we are approaching the holidays and and i think all of us could just use a feel-good story about candy but i know you do more tell our audience a little bit more about where else from a corporation standpoint sure war el corporation has been in family and it's a family-owned business for 50-plus years we're a co-packer co-manufacturer so you won't really see a world candy bar out there but we really help bring to life a lot of innovative ideas around the candy and the good for you products for a lot of our partners so talk to us about you're obviously working with dell technologies give us uh an insight into your data center operations your it environment before the solution that we're going to be talking about what was that like physical on-prem cloud sure well our data center kind of falls right in line with the same time of year as a horror story when i first came here and got on board a lot of outdated equipment despair and equipment separated our backups were they were few and far between um the the equipment was so old that some of it wasn't even supported anymore we had antiquated systems but the biggest thing is the confidence level you have zero confidence that your system stay running your backup it was an everyday occurrence just to try to get a reliable backup for just a piece of the data let alone all of our um all of our data and information that we had that confidence factor is table stakes and especially now it's it's if a company can't have confidence that their data is secure and protected that's you know folks that can't might not be around tomorrow but talk to me a little bit about from a workload's perspective what were you protecting vm's erp systems give us a slice of that data in terms of its impact in the business sure and you're correct you know having that that confidence level in the systems is what you need our sql databases are in there our erp system's in there our file servers and at the time even our email server was in there so any one of those goes down it's a business impact you know you have to look at what can't you do when that happens on our manufacturing floor we're collecting a lot of data coming back off the floor for all of our folks and purchasing and procurement and our run times to make sure that we're hitting our our dates on time so even our shipping and receiving team needs to know how the floor is running to know if we're going to hit those ship dates and when to schedule the truck so it literally all correlates and all comes together and i imagine also not just does that involve every aspect of world's business internally but relationships with the partners that you are helping fulfill right that's correct because we're making their product if they can't have a product on the shelves that impacts them you know so we really have to do everything that we can to make sure our systems are up make sure everything is running and really fulfill their order and get it out there so you can have that product yeah that's why often we talk about data protection and brand reputation go hand in hand so talk to me when you came into world you must have seen nowhere to go but up talk to me about some of the things that you said we have got to for example aging physical infrastructure we've got to replace that we obviously have to be able to have reliable data protection because we have to have the confidence that we can enable our teams and uh our partners but what were some of the things that you said all right let me kind of get a phased approach here what are we gonna change and why are we gonna do it with dell technologies sure so looking at our business continuity plan you don't have a good dr so you have to start looking backwards of where do you start so we have zero backups our data's not protected we have zero confidence in it we go back a little farther our systems aren't really there for us to back up so it really started at the appliance level in our server level to get rid of all of the old information get a new subset of servers in so we have a new vxrail environment in it integrates great with the integrated appliance ties directly into it so we have backups we have everyday backups we have fast and speedy backups then we can offload those to an off site so we now truly have a full business continuity plan and a dr disaster recovery situation that's critical because i was reading your case study and where there was no dr before talk to me about the ability to to leverage the clouds of now with what you've implemented uh and the power protect series you've now got the ability to from a dr perspective i just want to understand that especially here we are you know towards the end of 2020 when there's been such a shift to remote operations what's that cloud benefit like from a dr standpoint it's been great um you know we were old tape backups so someone had to be here to switch out the old tapes you know and hope that how do we get them off site who's taking them home what vault are they living in you know with the remote aspect all of that worry goes away everything is offloaded everything goes into a cloud if there is a situation we just work through our cloud environment we can reinstate business literally a click of a switch yeah i was looking at some of your statistics and it looks like about a 6x reduction in your backup windows and a huge reduction in your physical footprint the data center also imagine more green tell us a little bit about it from that perspective sure yeah a couple points should hit there i mean our deduplication and compression rates are higher than what we're expected by far so that's been a great spot as far as we don't need as much physical storage to hold all of that well with that we were able to take our racks we had three server racks we went down to half of one server rack so your heating and air conditioning your heating and cooling cost comes down your power cost comes down all of that soft cost that stretches around this environment really has a benefit for us i'm also thinking too in this time of everything shifting and data protection becoming business critical your team's productivity won we talked about um the the backup big reduction in backup windows but your team must be must be much more productive and also i imagine from confidence from a reputation standpoint your executives or senior management probably now has the confidence because you have the confidence that the data is secure yeah lisa that's true and even down to our user level when i first got here i mean our users were complaining about not being able to print a word document i mean not being able to print a document that's that's fundamental stuff started diving into it and our systems are just old disparate and weren't configured the best so our team's really been able to revamp all of that redo all of that and the confidence level around the organization has just really improved and it's great to see we now have a lot more time to work on tomorrow than living in the trenches of today which everyone needs right now since this it's pivot after pivot after pivot i'm curious how long ago did you come in like how many years ago did you find this antiquated system yeah i've been here a little over two years now okay so fairly recently what were some of the things that you think world was stuck in was it cultural was it operational what was it that you helped influence in terms of we have to make a change now sure one of the things for me is one of the old phrases i think is the worst phrase is well because we've always done it that way you know so getting a fresh line and a fresh look on something was able to really help out the innovation that dell brings to the table falls in line with the innovation that we bring for candy so let's look at what they have let's look at how they tie together but we have to do a full forklift of our infrastructure in our data center you want to look at the integrated systems and you know how you get that best performance not the best bang for the buck when it comes to the budget because if they're unbudgeted dollars you really got to get every dollar to stretch farther and looking at the vxrail with the integrated appliance and with the cdra to offload to you know a cloud site it was a perfect package it was the perfect pairing for what we needed but going from you talk about you know we've always done it this way and you're right we hear that a lot and it's well why you can do it so much differently can you imagine if they were still doing it that way in the era of covid but thinking about this big switch from um a big physical um footprint to going to hyper converged infrastructure how was that transition that you helped drive how did it shift the culture at world because i imagine it 50 year old company in leicester right yeah i believe it did i believe it helped everyone kind of just look at everything and say just because it works to get us here is it going to work with get us to tomorrow so everybody really started looking at different situations and different things when we sat down with our users we changed the entire desktop experience you know we have new laptops we have new operating systems we have the way things are working better so it really changed the culture through and through so you know when you go to work you want systems to work when you come in the last thing you want to deal with is oh is a computer is going to be down do i have to call it today so getting that scalability was great but getting that reliance from the user in from the keyboard the whole way back to your edge was a huge win for us and let's look at your team now having more time to be innovative especially i'm curious what you've been able to do the last six to seven months that you now have this reliable infrastructure data secure internally people can print things they can check their emails without having to bother i.t what are some of the new maybe strategic areas that you've been able to get involved in because you have the time to focus on them we're really getting involved with more of the plant all the equipment on the floor trying to collect that data and correlate all that data coming off the floor and now we're able to have a little fun of how do we get the data on the floor real-time collection back into the system and how can we have technology help drive that innovation on the floor when our r d department comes to us about we have a new product that needs to run where do we run it i'm now able to work with the manufacturing manager and say that type of product runs best on this machine and here's the data to support that that's really the fun of what we can do for tomorrow so does this now enable you to become data-driven whereas before maybe not so much yeah i agree yes very much so and it's good data it's not hypothetical data that someone put on a piece of paper and thought through it's really good data that we can correlate and collect and that's critical especially right now as everybody wants everything real time and the consumer demand is changes every industry and i think it's probably going to be a pretty big demand still this year for candy i know uh that sounds pretty good right about now i'd love to get your advice for men and women in your position coming into maybe a legacy business that has an antiquated infrastructure how do you recommend how do you advise that they go about approaching leadership and their teams to do a complete transformation i think it starts with a good partner you've got to have a good partner and able to put things in order i like to call it one hand to high five you have to have that good partner to fall back on you build a good solid solution and then you look at your budget can do but it's all about the culture if you can find out where your culture is suffering because people are upset when they come in because something doesn't work what's the root cause of that how do you get that out of play you know work with your folks i always say i want people to drive in happy i want people to drive home happy how do we make sure that is and i know it sounds weird coming from vit guy but you have a huge impact so when you can look at everyday experience of sitting down coming into your office and sitting down at your technology and it works it's just one level of stress that we no longer have i said it's a huge level of stress that you don't have and i think that's that's an important point that you bring up you want people to come in happy and leave happy but you also really challenge them to get out of your comfort zone just because we've always done it this way doesn't mean we should still should and actually if we do there might be a competitor right behind us that's ready to come in and take over this is a competitive differentiator and especially in the time of this dynamic environment in which we live the status quo the comfort zone probably going to be a factor in determining i think the winners of tomorrow do you agree with that i do agree with that and what we actually found is when we asked people to kind of think outside of their box and step back a minute we found that they were doing something as a as a band-aid well i have to now do it this way and it just became status quo when we pulled that band-aid off we kept going back kept going back kept going back found out you're doing something because it wasn't fixed four processes ago let's fix that now it's not even a thing you know so it just leverages them more time to think more outside of the box so how do i better this situation and they can really look at everything they do how do i make it better down to how the orders come in how we process the orders to even how we ship them out and how we package them up in the truck well when you were talking about band-aids like band-aid on band-aid on band-aid i just think inherently complexity yes so talk to me in the last question here as we wrap up here from a from a simplification perspective how has dell technologies helped transform and simplify the environment i don't know that i have the word i've been thinking for that how is that because it's been so monumental that they've done for us i mean down to we've been able to revamp our data center and i know that that sounds odd well it's just a vxrail it's just it's not it's being able to simplify all of the stuff we had down into 5u of rackspace allowed us to clean up our data center clean up that complexity everything's running inside of there we no longer have you know a tape drive sitting somewhere else we now have more man hours and the soft cost we have more man hours to do a lot more of the tomorrow world so the complexity we can at our own level of complexity when we want for security or anything else but we're not we don't have a whole spider web of stuff going on that we have to work through just to see where we need to start and that's really as you said what's the word it's transformative but it sounds to me like what you're doing as a leader yourself and with dell technologies is really enabling the organization or has enabled it to get out of its comfort zone embrace modernizing take out complexity where it's not needed and focus on business outcomes which at the end of the day is the most important thing it is and you know we have our own research and development team here for you know what's the next candy you're going to see on the market we have our own innovation team i challenged every one of the departments that i work with to think the same thing what's next in your world how can you re-innovate what you have what what haven't we thought of um you know and the old thing is no idea is a bad idea let's put it on the table let's bet vetted out let's see if it works but then also working with the other departments the other departments are now able to collaborate well i didn't know that you needed that yep that's the data i need oh that's easy here you go and it has really streamlined processes from from start to finish that collaboration is essential will clifton thanks for sharing what you're doing with dell technologies the um the new dp series great work there we look forward to hearing more of what's to come from world well i do appreciate thank you so much for your time lisa and the dell team um the appliances and everything has been great for us so we appreciate everything dell's done thank you excellent i know you have that confidence because you talked about it all right guys for clifton dorsey i'm lisa martin you're watching this cube [Music] conversation

from around the globe it's thecube covering space and cyber security symposium 2020 hosted by cal poly hello everyone welcome to the space and cyber security symposium 2020 hosted by cal poly where the intersection of space and security are coming together i'm john furrier your host with thecube here in california i want to welcome our featured guest lieutenant general john f thompson with the united states space force approach to cyber security that's the topic of this session and of course he's the commander of the space and missile system center in los angeles air force base also heading up space force general thank you for coming on really appreciate you kicking this off welcome to the symposium hey so uh thank you very much john for that very kind introduction also uh very much thank you to cal poly uh for this opportunity to speak to this audience today also a special shout out to one of the organizers uh dustin brun for all of his work uh helping uh get us uh to this point uh ladies and gentlemen as uh as uh john mentioned uh i'm jt thompson uh i lead the 6 000 men and women of the united states space forces space and missile system center which is headquartered here at los angeles air force base in el segundo if you're not quite sure where that's at it's about a mile and a half from lax this is our main operating location but we do have a number of other operating locations around the country with about 500 people at kirtland air force base in albuquerque new mexico uh and about another 500 people on the front range of the rockies uh between colorado springs and uh and denver plus a smattering of other much smaller operating locations nationwide uh we're responsible for uh acquiring developing and sustaining the united states space force's critical space assets that includes the satellites in the space layer and also on the ground layer our ground segments to operate those satellites and we also are in charge of procuring launch services for the u.s space force and a number of our critical mission partners across the uh department of defense and the intelligence community um just as a couple of examples of some of the things we do if you're unfamiliar with our work we developed and currently sustained the 31 satellite gps constellation that satellite constellation while originally intended to help with global navigation those gps signals have provided trillions of dollars in unanticipated value to the global economy uh over the past three decades i mean gps is everywhere i think everybody realizes that agriculture banking the stock market the airline industry uh separate and distinct navigation systems it's really pervasive across both the capabilities for our department of defense and capabilities for our economy and and individuals billions of individuals across our country and the planet some of the other work we do for instance in the communications sector uh secure communications satellites that we design and build that link america's sons and daughters serving in the military around the world and really enable real-time support and comms for our deployed forces and those of our allies we also acquire uh infrared missile warning satellites uh that monitor the planet for missile launches and provide advanced warning uh to the u.s homeland and to our allies uh in case some of those missile launches are uh nefarious um on a note that's probably a lot closer to home maybe a lot closer to home than many of us want to think about here in the state of california in 2018 smc jumped through a bunch of red tape and bureaucracy uh to partner with the u.s forest service during the two of the largest wildfires in the state's history the camp and woolsey fires in northern california as those fires spread out of control we created processes on the fly to share data from our missile warning satellites those are satellites that are systems that are purpose built to see heat sources from thousands of miles above the planet and we collaborated with the us forest service so that firefighters on the ground uh could track those fires more in real time and better forecast fires and where they were spreading thereby saving lives and and property by identifying hot spots and flare-ups for firefighters that data that we were able to working with our contractors pass to the u.s forest service and authorities here in california was passed in less than an hour as it was collected to get it into the hands of the emergency responders the first responders as quickly as possible and doing that in an hour greatly surpassed what was available from some of the other assets in the airborne and ground-based fire spotters it was really instrumental in fighting those fires and stopping their spread we've continued uh that involvement in recent years using multiple systems to support firefighters across the western u.s this fall as they battled numerous wildfires that unfortunately continue working together with the u.s forest service and with other partners uh we like to make uh we like to think that we made a difference here but there's still a lot more work to go and i think that we should always be asking ourselves uh what else can space data be used for and how can we more rapidly get that space data to uh stakeholders so that they can use it for for purposes of good if you will how else can we protect our nation how else can we protect our friends and allies um i think a major component of the of the discussion that we will have throughout this conference is that the space landscape has changed rapidly and continues to change rapidly um just over the past few years uh john and i were talking before we went live here and 80 nations now have uh space programs 80 nearly 80 space faring nations on the planet um if you just look at one mission area that uh the department of defense is interested in and that's small launch there are currently over a hundred different small launch companies uh within the u.s industrial base vying for commercial dod and civil uh payload capabilities uh mostly to low earth orbit it's it's just truly a remarkable time if you factor in those things like artificial intelligence and machine learning um where we're revolutionary revolutionizing really uh the ways that we generate process and use data i mean it's really remarkable in 2016 so if you think about this four years ago uh nasa estimated that there were 28 terabytes of information transiting their space network each day and that was four years ago um uh obviously we've got a lot of desire to work with a lot of the people in the audience of this congress or in this conference uh we need to work with big thinkers like many of you to answer questions on how best we apply data analytics to extract value and meaning from that data we need new generations of thinkers to help apply cutting edge edge theories of data mining cyber behaviorism and internet of things 2.0 it's just truly a remarkable time uh to be in the space business and the cyber aspects of the states of the space business are truly truly daunting and important to uh to all of us um integrating cyber security into our space systems both commercial and government is a mandate um it's no longer just a nice to have as the us space force and department of the air force leadership has said many times over the past couple of years space is becoming congested and contested and that contested aspect means that we've got to focus on cyber security uh in the same way that the banking industry and cyber commerce focus on uh cyber security day in and day out the value of the data and services provided is really directly tied to the integrity and availability of that data and services from the space layer from the ground control segments associated with it and this value is not just military it's also economic and it's not just american it's also a value for the entire world particularly particularly our allies as we all depend upon space and space systems your neighbors and friends here in california that are employed at the space and missile system center uh work with network defenders we work with our commercial contractors and our systems developers um our international allies and partners to try and build as secure and resilient systems as we can from the ground up that keep the global commons of space free and open for exploration and for commerce um as john and i were talking earlier before we came online there's an aspect of cyber security for space systems especially for some of our legacy systems that's more how do we bolt this on because we fielded those space systems a number of years ago and the the challenges of cyber security in the space domain have grown so we have a part that we have to worry about bolting it on but then we have to worry about building it in as we as we field new systems and build in a flexibility that that realizes that the cyber threat or the cyber security landscape will evolve over time it's not just going to be stagnant there will always be new vulnerabilities and new threat vectors that we always have to look at look uh as secretary barrett who is our secretary of the air force likes to say most americans use space before they have their first cup of coffee in the morning the american way of life really depends on space and as part of the united states space force we work with defense leaders our congress joint and international military teammates and industry to ensure american leadership in space i really thank you for this opportunity to address the audience today john and thanks so much to cal poly for letting me be one of the speakers at this event i really look forward to this for uh several months and so with that i look forward to your questions as we kind of move along here general thank you very much for the awesome uh introductory statement uh for the folks watching on the stream brigadier general carthan is going to be in the chat answering any questions feel free to chat away he's the vice commander of space and missile systems center he'll be available um a couple comments from your keynote before i get to my questions because it just jumped in my head you mentioned the benefits of say space but the fires in california we're living that here that's really real time that's a benefit you also mentioned the ability for more people launching payloads into space and i only imagine moore's law smaller faster cheaper applies to rockets too so i'm imagining you have the benefits of space and you have now more potential objects flying out sanctioned and maybe unsanctioned so you know is it going to be more rules around that i mean this is an interesting question because it's exciting space force but for all the good there is potentially bad out there yeah so i i john i think the uh i think the basics of your question is as space becomes more congested and contested is there a need for more international norms of how satellites fly in space what kind of basic features satellites have to perhaps deorbit themselves what kind of basic protections does do all satellites should all satellites be afforded as part of a peaceful global commons of space i think those are all fantastic questions and i know that u.s and many uh allied policy makers are looking very very hard at those kinds of questions in terms of what are the norms of behavior and how we uh you know how how we field and field is the military term but you know how we uh populate uh using civil or uh commercial terms uh that space layer at different altitudes uh low earth orbit mid mid-earth orbit geosynchronous earth orbit different kinds of orbits uh what the kind of mission areas we accomplish from space that's all things that need to be definitely taken into account as uh as the place gets a little bit not a little bit as the place gets increasingly more popular day in and day out well i'm super excited for space force i know that a new generation of young folks are really interested in it's an emerging changing great space the focus here at this conference is space and cyber security intersection i'd like to get your thoughts on the approach that space force is taking to cyber security and how it impacts our national goals here in the united states yeah yeah so that's a that's a great question john let me let me talk about in two uh two basic ways but number one is and and i know um some people in the audience this might make them a little bit uncomfortable but i have to talk about the threat right um and then relative to that threat i really have to talk about the importance of uh of cyber and specifically cyber security as it relates to that threat um the threats that we face um really represent a new era of warfare and that new era of warfare involves both space and cyber uh we've seen a lot of action in recent months uh from certain countries notably china and russia uh that have threatened what i referred to earlier as the peaceful global commons of space for example uh it through many unclassified sources and media sources everybody should understand that um uh the russians have been testing on orbit uh anti-satellite capabilities it's been very clear if you were following just the week before last the department of defense released its uh 2020 military and security developments involving the people's republic of china um uh and uh it was very clear that china is developing asats electronic jammers directed energy weapons and most relevant to today's discussion offensive cyber uh capabilities there are kinetic threats uh that are very very easy to see but a cyber attack against a critical uh command and control site or against a particular spacecraft could be just as devastating to the system and our war fighters in the case of gps and important to note that that gps system also impacts many civilians who are dependent upon those systems from a first response perspective and emergency services a cyber attack against a ground control site could cause operators to lose control of a spacecraft or an attacker could feed spoofed data to a system to mislead operators so that they send emergency services personnel to the to the wrong address right attacks on spacecraft on orbit whether directly via a network of intrusion or enabled through malware introduced during the systems production uh while we're building the satellite can [ __ ] or corrupt the data denial of service type attacks on our global networks obviously would disrupt our data flow and interfere with ongoing operations and satellite control i mean if gps went down i you know i hesitate to say it this way because we might elicit some screams from the audience but if gps went down a starbucks wouldn't be able to handle your mobile order uber drivers wouldn't be able to find you and domino's certainly certainly wouldn't be able to get there in 30 minutes or less right so with a little bit of tongue-in-cheek there from a military operations perspective it's dead serious um uh we have become accustomed in the commercial world to threats like lance ransomware and malware and those things have unfortunately become commonplace in commercial terrestrial networks and computer systems however what we're seeing is that our adversaries with the increased competition in space these same techniques are being retooled if you will to use against our national security space systems uh day in and day out um as i said during my opening remarks on the importance of cyber the value of these systems is directly tied to their integrity if commanders in the field uh firefighters in california or baristas in in starbucks can't trust the data they see they're receiving then that really harms their decision-making capabilities one of the big trends we've recently seen is the mood move towards proliferated leo uh uh constellations obviously uh spacex's uh starlink uh on the commercial side and on the military side the work that darpa and my organization smc are doing on blackjack and casino as well as some space transport layer constellation work that the space development agency is designing are all really really important types of mesh network systems that will revolutionize how we plan and field warfighting systems and commercial communications and internet providing systems but they're also heavily reliant on cyber security uh we've got to make sure that they are secured to avoid an accident or international damage uh loss of control of these constellations really could be catastrophic from both a mission perspective or from uh you know satellites tumbling out of low earth orbit perspective another trend is introductions in artificial intelligence and machine learning on board spacecraft or at the edge our satellites are really not so much hardware systems with a little software anymore in the commercial sector and in the defense sector they're basically flying boxes full of software right and we need to ensure the data that we're getting out of those flying boxes full of software are helping us base our decisions on accurate data and algorithms govern governing the right actions and that those uh that those systems are impervious to the extent possible uh to nefarious uh modifications so in summation a cyber security is vital element of everything in our national security space goals and i would argue for our national uh goals uh writ large including uh economic and information uh uh dimensions uh the space force leadership at all levels uh from uh some of the brand new second lieutenants that general raymond uh swore into the space force this morning uh ceremonially from the uh air force association's air space and cyberspace conference uh to the various highest levels general raymond uh general d t thompson myself and a number of other senior leaders in this enterprise we've got to make sure that we're all working together to keep cyber security at the forefront of our space systems because it they absolutely depend on it you know you mentioned uh hardware software threats opportunities challenges i want to ask you because you you got me thinking of the minute there around infrastructure i mean we've heard critical infrastructure you know grids here on on earth you're talking about critical infrastructure a redefinition of what critical infrastructure is an extension of what we have so i'd love to get your thoughts about space force's view of that critical infrastructure vis-a-vis the threat vectors because you know the term threat vectors has been kicked around in the cyber space oh yeah threat vectors they're always increasing the surface area well if the surface area is from space it's an unlimited surface area so you got different vectors so you got new critical infrastructure developing real time really fast and you got an expanded threat vector landscape putting that in perspective for the folks that aren't really inside the ropes on these critical issues how would you explain this and how would you talk about those two things well so i tell you um i just like um uh just like uh i'm sure people in the security side or the cyber security side of the business in the banking industry feel they feel like it's uh all possible threat vectors represent a dramatic and protect potentially existential threat to all of the dollars that they have in the banking system to the financial sector on the department of defense side we've got to have sort of the same mindset um that threat vector from to and through space against critical space systems ground segments the launch enterprise or transportation uh to orbit and the various different uh domains within uh within space itself like i mentioned before uh leo mio and geo-based satellites with different orbits all of the different mission areas that are accomplished from space that i mentioned earlier some that i didn't mention like weather tactical or wide band communications uh various new features of space control all of those are things that we have to worry about from a cyber security uh threat perspective and it's a it's a daunting challenge right now right yeah it's awesome and one of the things we've been following on the hardware side here in the on the ground is the supply chain we've seen you know malware being you know really put into really obscure hardware who manufactures it as being outsourced obviously government has restrictions but with the private sector uh you mentioned china and and the us kind of working together across these these peaceful areas but you got to look at the supply chain how does the supply chain the security aspect impact the mission of the u.s space force yeah yeah so so um how about another um just in terms of an example another kind of california-based historical example right um the very first u.s satellite uh explorer one was built by uh the jet propulsion uh laboratory folks uh not far from here in el segundo up in uh up in pasadena um that satellite when it was first built in the late 50s uh weighed a little bit over 30 pounds and i'm sure that each and every part was custom made and definitely made by u.s companies fast forward to today the global supply chain is so tightly coupled and frankly many industries are so specialized almost specialized regionally around the planet we focus every day to guarantee the integrity of every component that we put in our space systems is absolutely critical to the operations of those satellites and we're dependent upon them but it becomes more difficult and more difficult to understand the the heritage if you will of some of the parts that are used the thousands of parts that are used in some of our satellites that are literally school bus sized right the space industry especially uh national security space sector um uh is relatively small compared to other commercial industries and we're moving to towards using more and more parts uh from non-us companies uh cyber security and cyber awareness have to be baked in from the beginning if we're going to be using parts that maybe we don't necessarily um understand 100 percent like an explorer one uh the the lineage of that particular part the environmental difficulties in space are well known the radiation environment the temperature extremes the vacuum those require specialized component and the us military is not the only uh customer in that space in fact we're definitely not the dominant customer uh in space anymore all those factors require us along with our other government partners and many different commercial space organizations to keep a very close eye on our supply chains from a quality perspective a security perspective and availability um there's open source reporting on supply training intrusions from um many different breaches of commercial retailers to the infectious spread of uh you know compromised patches if you will and our adversaries are aware of these techniques as i mentioned earlier with other forms of attack considering our supply chains and development networks really becomes fair game for our adversaries so we have to uh take that threat seriously um between the government and industry sectors here in the u.s we're also working with our industry partners to enact stronger defenses and assess our own vulnerabilities last fall we completed an extensive review of all of our major contracts here at space and missile system center to determine the levels of cyber security requirements we've implemented across our portfolio and it sounds really kind of you know businessy geeky if you will you know hey we looked at our contracts to make sure that we had the right clauses in our contracts to address cyber security as dynamically as we possibly could and so we found ourselves having to add new language to our contracts to require system developers to implement some more advanced uh protective measures in this evolving cyber security environment so that data handling and supply chain perspective uh protections um from contract inception to launch and operations were taken into account uh cyber security really is a key performance parameter for us now it's as important as the the mission performance of the system it's as important as cost it's as important as schedule because if we deliver the perfect system on time and on cost uh it can perform that missile warning or that communications mis mission perfectly but it's not cyber secure if it doesn't have cyber protections built into it or the ability to implement mitigations against cyber uh threats then we've essentially fielded a shoe box in space that doesn't do the k the the war fighter or the nation uh any good um supply chain risk management is a is a major challenge for us uh we're doing a lot to coordinate with our industry partners uh we're all facing it head on uh to try and build secure and trusted components uh that keep our confidence as leaders firefighters and baristas uh as the case may be uh but it is a challenge and we're trying to rise to that challenge you know this so exciting this new area because it really touches everything you know talk about geeking out on on the tech the hardware the systems but also you put your kind of mba hat on you go what's the roi of the extra development and how you how things get built because the always the exciting thing for space geeks is like you're building cool stuff people love it's it's exciting but you still have to build and cyber security has proven that security has to be baked in from the beginning and be thought as a system architecture so you're still building things which means you've got to acquire things you got to acquire parts you got to acquire build software and and sustain it how is security impacting the acquisition and the sustainment of these systems for space yeah from initial development uh through planning for the acquisition design development fielding or production fielding and sustainment it impacts all aspects of of the life cycle john uh we simply especially from the concept of baking in cyber security uh we can't wait until something is built and then try and figure out how to make it cyber secure so we've moved way further uh towards working side by side with our system developers to strengthen cyber security from the very beginning of a system's development cyber security and the resilience associated with it really have to be treated as a key system attribute as i mentioned earlier equivalent with data rates or other metrics of performance we like to talk in uh in the space world about uh mission assurance and mission assurance has always you know sort of taken us as we as we technically geek out right mission assurance has always taken us to the will this system work in space right can it work in a vacuum can it work in you know as it as it uh you know transfers through uh the van allen radiation belt or through the the um the southern hemisphere's electromagnetic anomaly right will it work out in space and now from a resiliency perspective yeah it has to work in space it's got to be functional in space but it's also got to be resistant to these cyber security threats it's it's not just i think uh general dt thompson quoted this term it's not just widget assurance anymore it's mission assurance um uh how does that satellite uh operator that ground control segment operate while under attack so let me break your question a little bit uh just for purposes of discussion into into really two parts uh cyber uh for cyber security for systems that are new and cyber security uh for systems that are in sustainment or kind of old and legacy um obviously there's cyber vulnerabilities that threaten both and we really have to employ different strategies for for defense of of each one for new systems uh we're desperately trying to implement across the department of defense in particular in the space world a kind of a devsecops methodology and practice to delivering software faster and with greater security for our space systems here at smc we have a program called enterprise ground services which is a tool kit basically a collection of tools for common command and control of different satellite systems egs as we call it has an integrated suite for defensive cyber capabilities network operators can use these tools to gain unprecedented insight to data flows and to monitor space network traffic for anomalies or other potential indicators of of bad behavior malicious behavior if you will um uh it's rudimentary at this point but because we're using devsecops and that incremental development approach as we scale it it just becomes more and more capable you know every every product increment that we field here at uh at uh la air force base uh uh we have the united space space forces west coast software factory which we've dubbed kobayashi maru they're using those agile devops uh software development practices uh to deliver uh space awareness software uh to the combined space operations center uh affectionately called the csp that c-spock is just down the road uh from cal poly uh there in san luis obispo at vandenberg air force base they've securely linked the c-spock with other space operation centers around the planet our allies australia canada and the uk uh we're partnering with all of them to enable secure and enhanced combined space operations so lots of new stuff going on as we bake in new development uh capabilities for our our space systems but as i mentioned earlier we've got large constellations on satellite of satellites on orbit right now some of them are well in excess of a decade or more old on orbit and so the design aspects of those satellites are several decades old and so but we still have to worry about them because they're critical to our space capabilities um we've been working with an air force materiel command organization uh called crows which stands for the cyber resiliency office for uh weapon systems to assess all of those legacy platforms from a cyber security perspective and develop defensive strategies and potential hardware and software upgrades to those systems to better enable them to to live through this increasingly cyber security uh concerned era that we currently live in our industry partners have been critical to to both of those different avenues both new systems and legacy systems we're working closely with them to defend and upgrade uh national assets and develop the capabilities to do similar with uh with new national assets coming online the vulnerabilities of our space systems really kind of threaten the way we've done business in the past both militarily and in the case of gps economically the impacts of that cyber security risk are clear in our acquisition and sustainment processes but i've got to tell you it that as the threat vectors change as the vulnerabilities change we've got to be nimble enough agile enough to be able to bounce back and forth we can't just say uh many people in the audience are probably familiar with the rmf or the risk management framework approach to um to reviewing uh the cyber security of a system we can't have program managers and engineers just accomplish an rmf on a system and then hey high five we're all good uh it's a journey not a destination that's cyber security and it's a constant battle rhythm throughout a weapon systems life cycle not just a single event i want to get to this commercial business needs and your needs on the next question but before i go there you mentioned the agile and i see that clearly because when you have accelerated innovation cycles you've got to be faster and we saw this in the computer industry mainframes mini computers and then when you started getting beyond me when the internet hit and pcs came out you saw the big enterprises the banks and and government start to work with startups it used to be a joke in the entrepreneurial circles is that you know there's no way if you're a startup you're ever going to get a contract with a big business enterprise now that used to be for public sector and certainly uh for you guys so as you see startups out there and there's acquisition involved i'm sure would love to love to have a contract with space force there's an roi calculation where if it's in space and you have a sustainment view edit software you might have a new kind of business model that could be attractive to startups could you share your thoughts on the folks who want to be a supplier to you uh whether they're a startup or an existing business that wants to be agile but they might not be that big company we are john that's a fantastic question we are desperately trying to reach out to to those new space advocates to those startups to those um what we sometimes refer to within the department of defense those non-traditional uh defense contractors a couple of things just for uh thinking purposes on some of the things that we're trying to highlight um uh three years ago we created here at uh space and missile system center uh the space enterprise consortium uh to provide a platform uh a contractual vehicle really to enable us to rapidly prototype uh development of space systems and to collaborate uh between the u.s space force uh traditional defense contractors non-traditional vendors like startups and even some academic institutions uh spec as we call it space enterprise consortium uses a specialized contracting tool to get contracts uh awarded quickly many in the audience may be familiar with other transaction agreements and that's what spec is based on and so far in just three years spec has awarded 75 different uh prototyping contracts worth over 800 million dollars with a 36 reduction in time to award and because it's a consortium based competition for um for these kinds of prototyping efforts the barrier to entry for small and non-traditional for startups even for academic institutions to be able to compete for these kinds of prototypings is really lowered right um uh these types of partnerships uh that we've been working through on spec uh have really helped us work with smaller companies who might not have the background or expertise in dealing with the government or in working with cyber security uh for their systems both their developmental systems and the systems that they're designing and trying to build we want to provide ways for companies large and small to partner together and support um uh kind of mutually beneficial uh relationships between all um recently uh at the annual air force association uh conference that i mentioned earlier i moderated a panel with several space industry leaders uh all from big traditional defense contractors by the way and they all stressed the importance of building bridges and partnerships uh between major contractors in the defense industry and new entrants uh and that helps us capture the benefits of speed and agility that come with small companies and startups as well as the expertise and specialized skill sets of some of those uh larger contractors uh that we rely on day in and day out advanced cyber security protections and utilization of secure facilities are just a couple of things that i think we could be prioritizing more so in those collaborations as i mentioned earlier the spec has been very successful in awarding a number of different prototyping contracts and large dollar values and it's just going to get better right there's over 400 members of the space enterprise consortium 80 of them are non-traditional kinds of vendors and we just love working with them another thing that many people in the audience may be familiar with in terms of our outreach to innovators uh if you will and innovators that include uh cyber security experts is our space pitch day events right so we held our first event last november in san francisco uh where we awarded over a two-day period about 46 million dollars to 30 different companies um that had potentially game-changing ideas these were phase two small business innovative research efforts uh that we awarded with cash on the spot uh we're planning on holding our second space pitch day in the spring of 2021. uh we're planning on doing it right here in los angeles uh covent 19 environment permitting um and we think that these are you know fantastic uh uh venues for identifying and working with high-speed startups startups and small businesses who are interested in uh really truly partnering with the us air force it's a as i said before it's a really exciting time to be a part of this business uh and working with the innovation economy uh is something that the department of defense uh really needs to do in that um the innovation that we used to think was ours you know that 80 percent of the industrial-based innovation that came from the department of defense uh the the script has been flipped there and so now more than 70 percent uh particularly in space innovation uh comes from the commercial sector not from uh not from the defense business itself and so um that's a tsunami of uh investment and a tsunami of uh capability and i need to figure out how to get my surfboard out and ride it you know what i mean yeah i mean it's one of those things where the flip the script has been flipped but it's exciting because it's impacting everything are you talking about systems architecture you're talking about software you're talking about a business model you talk about devsecops from a technical perspective but now you have a business model innovation all the theaters of uh are exploding in innovation technical business personnel this brings up the workforce challenge you've got the cyber needs for the u.s space force there's probably a great roi model for new kinds of software development that could be priced into contracts that's a entrepreneurial innovation you got the the business model theater you've got the personnel how does the industry adopt and change you guys are clearly driving this how does the industry adjust to you yeah so um i think a great way to answer that question is to just talk about the kind of people that we're trying to prioritize in the u.s space force from a from an acquisition perspective and in this particular case from a from a cyber security perspective as i mentioned earlier it's the most exciting time to be in space programs uh really since the days of apollo um uh you know just to put it in terms that you know maybe have an impact with the audience uh from 1957 until today approximately 9 000 satellites uh have been launched from the various space faring countries around the planet uh less than two thousand of those nine thousand are still up on orbit and operational and yet in the new space regime um players like spacex have plans to launch you know 12 000 satellites for some of their constellations alone it really is a remarkable time in terms of innovation and fielding of space capabilities and all of those space capabilities whether they're commercial civil or defense are going to require appropriate cyber security uh protections it's just a really exciting time uh to be working in stuff like this and so uh folks like the folks in this audience who have a passion about space and a passion about cyber security are just the kind of people that we want to work with because we need to make sure our systems are are secure and resilient we need folks that have technical and computing expertise engineering skills to be able to design cybersecure systems that can detect and mitigate attacks uh but we also as you alluded to we need people that have that business and um you know business acumen human networking background so that we can launch the startups and work with the non-traditional businesses uh help to bring them on board help to secure both their data and our data and uh and and make sure our processes and systems are are free as much as possible from uh uh from attack um for preparation for for audience members who are young and maybe thinking about getting into this uh trade space um you gotta be smart on digital networking uh you gotta understand basic internet protocols concepts uh programming languages uh database design uh learn what you can from penetration or vulnerability testing and and uh risk assessment i will tell you this and i don't think he will i know he will not mind me telling you this but you've got to be a lifelong learner and so two years ago i'm at home one evening and i get a phone call on my cell phone and it's my boss the commander of air force space command uh general j raymond who is now currently the chief of space operations and he is on temporary duty flying overseas he lands where he's going and he first thing he does when he lands is he calls me and he goes jt um while i was traveling um i noticed that there were e-books available on the commercial airliner i was traveling on and there was an e-book on something called scrumming and agile devsecops and i read it have you read it um and i said no sir but if you tell me what the title of the book is i will read it and so i got to go to my staff meeting um you know the very next week the next time we had a staff meeting and tell everybody in the stab meeting hey if the four star and the three star can read the book about scrumming then i'm pretty sure all of you around this table and all our lieutenants and our captains our gs13s all of our government employees can get smart on uh the scrumming development process and interestingly as another side i had a telephone call with him last year during the holidays where he was trying to take some leave and i said sir what are you up to today are you are you you know making eggnog for the event tonight or whatever and the chief of space operations told me no i'm trying to teach myself python i'm at lesson two and it's not going so well but i'm i'm gonna figure this out and so that kind of thing if the chief of staff or the you know the the the chief of space operations can prioritize scrumming and python language and innovation in his daily schedule then we're definitely looking for other people who can do that and we'll just say lower levels of rank uh throughout our entire space force enterprise um look i i we don't need to need people that can code a satellite from scratch but we need to know we need to have people that have a basic grasp of the programming basics and cyber security requirements and that can turn those things into into meaningful actions obviously in the space domain things like basic physics and orbital mechanics are also important uh space is not an intuitive uh domain so under understanding how things survive uh on orbit is really critical to making the right design and operational decisions and you know i know there's probably a lot because of this conference i know there's a probably a whole lot of high-speed cyber security experts out in the audience and i need those people in the u.s space force the the country is counting on it but i wouldn't discount having people that are just cyber aware or cyber savvy right i have contracting officers and logisticians and program managers and they don't have to be high-end cyber security experts but they have to be aware enough about it to be able to implement cyber security protections um into our space system so the skill set is is really really broad um our adversaries are pouring billions of dollars into uh define designing uh and fielding offensive and destructive space cyber security weapons right they've repeatedly shown really a blatant disregard of safety and international norms for good behavior on orbit and the cyber security aspects of our space systems is really a key battleground going forward so that we can maintain that as i mentioned before peaceful uh global commons of space we really need all hands on deck if you're interested in helping in uniform if you're interested in helping uh not in uniform uh but as a government employee a commercial or civil employee to help us make cyber security more important uh or more cape more able to be developed for our space systems then we'd really love to uh to work with you or have you on the team to build that safe and secure future for our space systems lieutenant general john thompson great insight thank you for sharing all that awesome stories too and motivation for the young next generation the united states space force approach of cyber security really amazing talk thank you for your time final parting question is as you look out and you had your magic wand what's your view for the next few years in terms of things that we could accomplish it's a super exciting time what do you hope for so um um first of all john thanks to you and and thanks to cal poly uh for the invitation and and thanks to everybody for uh for their interest in cyber security especially as it relates to space systems that's here at the conference um uh there's a quote and i'll read it here uh from uh bernard schriever who was the uh the founder if you will uh a legend in uh dod space the founder of the western development division which was a predecessor organization to space and missile systems center general shrever i think captures the essence of what how we see the next couple of years the world has an ample supply of people who can always come up with a dozen good reasons why new ideas will not work and should not be tried but the people who produce progress are breed apart they have the imagination the courage and the persistence to find solutions and so i think if you're hoping that the next few years of space innovation and cyber security innovation are going to be a pony ride at the county fair then perhaps you should look for another line of work because i think the next few years in space and cyber security innovation are going to be more like a rodeo um and a very dynamic rodeo as it goes it is a an awesome privilege to be part of this ecosystem it's really an honor for me to um to be able to play some small role uh in the space ecosystem and trying to improve it uh while i'm trying to improve the chances of uh of the united states of america in a uh in a space war fighting uh uh environment um and so i thank all of you for uh participating today and for this little bit of time that you've allowed me to share with you thank you sir thank you for your leadership and thank you for the for the time for this awesome event space and cyber security symposium 2020 i'm john furrier on behalf of cal poly thanks for watching [Music]

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE covering space in cybersecurity symposium 2020 hosted by Cal Poly. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to the space and cybersecurity symposium, 2020 hosted by Cal Poly where the intersection of space and security are coming together. I'm John Furrier, your host with theCUBE here in California. I want to welcome our featured guest, Lieutenant General, John F. Thompson with the United States Space Force approach to cybersecurity. That's the topic of this session. And of course he's the commander of the space and missile system center in Los Angeles Air Force Base. Also heading up Space Force. General, thank you for coming on. I really appreciate to you kicking this off. Welcome to the symposium. >> Hey, so thank you very much, John, for that very kind introduction. Also very much thank you to Cal Poly for this opportunity to speak to this audience today. Also a special shout out to one of the organizers, Dustin Debrun, for all of his work, helping get us to this point. Ladies and gentlemen as a John mentioned, I'm JT Thompson. I lead the 6,000 men and women of the United States Space Force's Space and Missile System Center, which is headquartered here at Los Angeles Air Force Base and El Segundo. If you're not quite sure where that's at, it's about a mile and a half from LAX. This is our main operating location, but we do have a number of other operating locations around the country. We're about 500 people at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and an about another 500 people on the front range of the Rockies between Colorado Springs and Denver plus a smattering of other much smaller operating locations nationwide. We're responsible for acquiring, developing and sustaining the United States Space Force's, critical space assets. That includes the satellites in the space layer and also on the ground layer our ground segments to operate those satellites. And we also are in charge of procuring launch services for the US Space Force and a number of our critical mission partners across the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. Just as a couple of examples of some of the things we do, if you're unfamiliar with our work we developed and currently sustain the 31 satellite GPS constellation that satellite constellation, while originally intended to help with global navigation, those GPS signals have provided trillions of dollars in unanticipated value to the global economy over the past three decades. GPS is everywhere. I think everybody realizes that. Agriculture, banking, the stock market, the airline industry, separate and distinct navigation systems. It's really pervasive across both capabilities for our Department of Defense and capabilities for our economy and individuals, billions of individuals across our country and the planet. Some of the other work we do for instance, in the communications sector, secure communications satellites that we designed and build that link America's sons and daughters serving in the military around the world and really enable real time support and comms for our deployed forces. And those of our allies. We also acquire infrared missile warning satellites that monitor the planet for missile launches that provide advanced warning to the US Homeland and to our allies in case some of those missile launches are nefarious. On a note, that's probably a lot closer to home, maybe a lot closer to home than many of us want to think about here in the state of California. In 2018, SMC jumped through a bunch of red tape and bureaucracy to partner with the US Forest Service during two of the largest wildfires in the state's history, the Camp and Woolsey fires in Northern California. As those fires spread out of control, we created processes on the fly to share data from our missile warning satellites. Those are satellites that are systems that are purpose built to see heat sources from thousands of miles above the planet. And we collaborated with the US Forest Service so that firefighters on the ground could track those fires more in real time and better forecast fires and where they were spreading, thereby saving lives and property by identifying hotspots and flareups for firefighters. That data that we were able to working with our contractors pass to the US Forest Service and authorities here in California, was passed in less than an hour as it was collected to get it into the hands of the emergency responders, the first responders as quickly as possible and doing that in an hour greatly surpassed what was available from some of the other assets in the airborne and ground-based fire spotters. It was really instrumental in fighting those fires and stopping their spread. We've continued that involvement in recent years, using multiple systems to support firefighters across the Western US this fall, as they battled numerous wildfires that unfortunately continue. Working together with the US Forest Service and with other partners we'd like to think that we've made a difference here, but there's still a lot more work to go. And I think that we should always be asking ourselves what else can space data be used for and how can we more rapidly get that space data to stakeholders so that they can use it for purposes of good, if you will. How else can we protect our nation? How else can we protect our friends and allies? I think a major component of the discussion that we will have throughout this conference is that the space landscape has changed rapidly and continues to change rapidly. Just over the past few years, John and I were talking before we went live here and 80 nations now have space programs. Nearly 80 space faring nations on the planet. If you just look at one mission area that the Department of Defense is interested in, and that's small launch, there are currently over 100 different small launch companies within the US industrial base vying for commercial DoD and civil payload capabilities, mostly to lower earth orbit. It's truly a remarkable time. If you factor in those things like artificial intelligence and machine learning, where we're revolutionizing really, the ways that we generate process and use data. It's really remarkable. In 2016, so if you think about this four years ago, NASA estimated that there were 28 terabytes of information transiting their space network each day. And that was four years ago. Obviously we've got a lot of desire to work with a lot of the people in the audience in this conference, we need to work with big thinkers, like many of you to answer questions on how best we apply data analytics to extract value and meaning from that data. We need new generations of thinkers to help apply cutting edge theories of data mining, cyber behaviorism, and Internet of Things 2.0, it's just truly a remarkable time to be in the space business and the cyber aspects of the space business are truly, truly daunting and important to all of us. Integrating cyber security into our space systems, both commercial and government is a mandate. it's no longer just a nice to have as the US Space Force and Department of the Air Force leadership has said many times over the past couple of years, space is becoming congested and contested. And that contested aspect means that we've got to focus on cyber security in the same way that the banking industry and cyber commerce focus on cybersecurity day in and day out. The value of the data and services provided is really directly tied to the integrity and availability of that data and services from the space layer, from the ground control segments associated with it. And this value is not just military, it's also economic and it's not just American, it's also a value for the entire world, particularly our allies, as we all depend upon space and space systems. Your neighbors and friends here in California that are employed at the space and missile system center work with network defenders. We work with our commercial contractors and our systems developers, our international allies and partners to try and build as secure and resilient systems as we can from the ground up that keep the global comments of space free and open for exploration and for commerce as John and I were talking earlier, before we came online, there's an aspect of cybersecurity for space systems, especially for some of our legacy systems, that's more, how do we bolt this on? Cause we fielded those space systems a number of years ago, and the challenges of cybersecurity in the space domain have grown. So we have a part that we have to worry about, bolting it on, but then we have to worry about building it in as we field new systems and build in a flexibility that realizes that the cyber threat or the cybersecurity landscape will evolve over time. It's not just going to be stagnant. There will always be new vulnerabilities and new threat vectors that we all have to look at. Look, as Secretary Barrett, who is our secretary of the air force likes to say most Americans use space before they have their first cup of coffee in the morning. The American way of life really depends on space. And as part of the United States Space Force, we work with defense leaders, our Congress joint, and international military teammates and industry to ensure American leadership in space. I really thank you for this opportunity to address the audience today, John, and thanks so much to Cal Poly for letting me be one of the speakers at this event. I've really looked forward to this for several months. And so with that, I look forward to your questions as we kind of move along here. >> General, thank you very much for those awesome introductory statement. For the folks watching on the stream, Brigadier General Carthan's going to be in the chat, answering any questions, feel free to chat away. He's the vice commander of Space and Missile System Center, he'll be available. A couple of comments from your keynote before I get to my questions. Cause it just jumped into my head. You mentioned the benefits of say space with the fires in California. We're living that here. That's really realtime. That's a benefit. You also mentioned the ability for more people launching payloads into space. I'm only imagined Moore's law smaller, faster, cheaper applies to rockets too. So I'm imagining you have the benefits of space and you have now more potential objects flying out sanctioned and maybe unsanctioned. So is it going to be more rules around that? This is an interesting question cause it's exciting Space Force, but for all the good there is potentially bad out there. >> Yeah. So John, I think the basics of your question is as space becomes more congested and contested, is there a need for more international norms of how satellites fly in space? What kind of basic features satellites have to perhaps de orbit themselves? What kind of basic protections should all satellites be afforded as part of a peaceful global commons of space? I think those are all fantastic questions. And I know that US and many allied policy makers are looking very, very hard at those kinds of questions in terms of what are the norms of behavior and how we field, and field as the military term. But how we populate using civil or commercial terms that space layer at different altitudes, lower earth orbit, mid earth orbit, geosynchronous earth orbit, different kinds of orbits, what the kind of mission areas we accomplished from space. That's all things that need to be definitely taken into account as the place gets a little bit, not a little bit as the place gets increasingly more popular day in and day out. >> I'm super excited for Space Force. I know that a new generation of young folks are really interested in it's an emerging, changing great space. The focus here at this conference is space and cybersecurity, the intersection. I'd like to get your thoughts on the approach that a space force is taking to cybersecurity and how it impacts our national goals here in the United States. >> Yeah. So that's a great question John, let me talk about it in two basic ways. At number one is an and I know some people in the audience, this might make them a little bit uncomfortable, but I have to talk about the threat. And then relative to that threat, I really have to talk about the importance of cyber and specifically cyber security, as it relates to that threat. The threats that we face really represented a new era of warfare and that new era of warfare involves both space and cyber. We've seen a lot of action in recent months from certain countries, notably China and Russia that have threatened what I referred to earlier as the peaceful global commons of space. For example, it threw many unclassified sources and media sources. Everybody should understand that the Russians have been testing on orbit anti-satellite capabilities. It's been very clear if you were following just the week before last, the Department of Defense released its 2020 military and security developments involving the People's Republic of China. And it was very clear that China is developing ASATs, electronic jammers, directed energy weapons, and most relevant to today's discussion, offensive cyber capabilities. There are kinetic threats that are very, very easy to see, but a cyber attack against a critical command and control site or against a particular spacecraft could be just as devastating to the system and our war fighters in the case of GPS and important to note that that GPS system also impacts many civilians who are dependent on those systems from a first response perspective and emergency services, a cyber attack against a ground control site could cause operators to lose control of a spacecraft or an attacker could feed spoofed data to assist them to mislead operators so that they sent emergency services personnel to the wrong address. Attacks on spacecraft on orbit, whether directly via a network intrusion or enabled through malware introduced during the system's production while we're building the satellite can cripple or corrupt the data. Denial-of-service type attacks on our global networks obviously would disrupt our data flow and interfere with ongoing operations and satellite control. If GPS went down, I hesitate to say it this way, cause we might elicit some screams from the audience. But if GPS went down a Starbucks, wouldn't be able to handle your mobile order, Uber drivers wouldn't be able to find you. And Domino's certainly wouldn't be able to get there in 30 minutes or less. So with a little bit of tongue in cheek there from a military operations perspective, it's dead serious. We have become accustomed in the commercial world to threats like ransomware and malware. And those things have unfortunately become commonplace in commercial terrestrial networks and computer systems. However, what we're seeing is that our adversaries with the increased competition in space these same techniques are being retooled, if you will, to use against our national security space systems day in and day out. As I said, during my opening remarks on the importance of cyber, the value of these systems is directly tied to their integrity. If commanders in the field, firefighters in California or baristas in Starbucks, can't trust the data they're receiving, then that really harms their decision making capabilities. One of the big trends we've recently seen is the move towards proliferated LEO constellations, obviously Space X's Starlink on the commercial side and on the military side, the work that DARPA and my organization SMC are doing on Blackjack and Casino, as well as some space transport layer constellation work that the space development agency is designing are all really, really important types of mesh network systems that will revolutionaries how we plan and field war fighting systems and commercial communications and internet providing systems. But they're also heavily reliant on cybersecurity. We've got to make sure that they are secured to avoid an accident or international damage. Loss of control of these constellations really could be catastrophic from both a mission perspective or from a satellites tumbling out of low earth orbit perspective. Another trend is introductions in artificial intelligence and machine learning, onboard spacecraft are at the edge. Our satellites are really not so much hardware systems with a little software anymore in the commercial sector and in the defense sector, they're basically flying boxes full of software. And we need to ensure that data that we're getting out of those flying boxes full of software are helping us base our decisions on accurate data and algorithms, governing the right actions and that those systems are impervious to the extent possible to nefarious modifications. So in summation, cybersecurity is a vital element of everything in our national security space goals. And I would argue for our national goals, writ large, including economic and information dimensions, the Space Force leadership at all levels from some of the brand new second lieutenants that general Raymond swore in to the space force this morning, ceremonially from the air force associations, airspace and cyberspace conference to the various highest levels, General Raymond, General DT Thompson, myself, and a number of other senior leaders in this enterprise. We've got to make sure that we're all working together to keep cyber security at the forefront of our space systems cause they absolutely depend on it. >> You mentioned hardware, software threats, opportunities, challenges. I want to ask you because you got me thinking of the minute they're around infrastructure. We've heard critical infrastructure, grids here on earth. You're talking about critical infrastructure, a redefinition of what critical infrastructure is, an extension of what we have. So I'd love to get your thoughts about Space Force's view of that critical infrastructure vis-a-vis the threat vectors, because the term threat vectors has been kicked around in the cyberspace. Oh you have threat vectors. They're always increasing the surface area. If the surface area is from space, it's an unlimited service area. So you got different vectors. So you've got new critical infrastructure developing real time, really fast. And you got an expanded threat vector landscape. Putting that in perspective for the folks that aren't really inside the ropes on these critical issues. How would you explain this and how would you talk about those two things? >> So I tell you, just like, I'm sure people in the security side or the cybersecurity side of the business in the banking industry feel, they feel like it's all possible threat vectors represent a dramatic and protect potentially existential threat to all of the dollars that they have in the banking system, to the financial sector. On the Department of Defense side, we've got to have sort of the same mindset. That threat vector from, to, and through space against critical space systems, ground segments, the launch enterprise, or transportation to orbit and the various different domains within space itself. Like I mentioned before, LEO, MEO and GEO based satellites with different orbits, all of the different mission areas that are accomplished from space that I mentioned earlier, some that I did mention like a weather tactical or wide band communications, various new features of space control. All of those are things that we have to worry about from a cyber security threat perspective. And it's a daunting challenge right now. >> Yeah, that's awesome. And one of the things we've been falling on the hardware side on the ground is the supply chain. We've seen, malware being, really put in a really obscure hardware. Who manufactures it? Is it being outsourced? Obviously government has restrictions, but with the private sector, you mentioned China and the US kind of working together across these peaceful areas. But you got to look at the supply chain. How does the supply chain in the security aspect impact the mission of the US space Force? >> Yeah. Yeah. So how about another, just in terms of an example, another kind of California based historical example. The very first US Satellite, Explorer 1, was built by the jet propulsion laboratory folks, not far from here in El Segundo, up in Pasadena, that satellite, when it was first built in the late 50s weighing a little bit, over 30 pounds. And I'm sure that each and every part was custom made and definitely made by US companies. Fast forward to today. The global supply chain is so tightly coupled, and frankly many industries are so specialized, almost specialized regionally around the planet. We focus every day to guarantee the integrity of every component that we put in our space systems is absolutely critical to the operations of those satellites and we're dependent upon them, but it becomes more difficult and more difficult to understand the heritage, if you will, of some of the parts that are used, the thousands of parts that are used in some of our satellites that are literally school bus sized. The space industry, especially national security space sector is relatively small compared to other commercial industries. And we're moving towards using more and more parts from non US companies. Cybersecurity and cyber awareness have to be baked in from the beginning if we're going to be using parts that maybe we don't necessarily understand 100% like an Explorer one, the lineage of that particular part. The environmental difficulties in space are well known. The radiation environment, the temperature extremes, the vacuum, those require specialized component. And the US military is not the only customer in that space. In fact, we're definitely not the dominant customer in space anymore. All those factors require us along with our other government partners and many different commercial space organizations to keep a very close eye on our supply chains, from a quality perspective, a security perspective and availability. There's open source reporting on supply training intrusions from many different breaches of commercial retailers to the infectious spread of compromised patches, if you will. And our adversaries are aware of these techniques. As I mentioned earlier, with other forms of attack, considering our supply chains and development networks really becomes fair game for our adversaries. So we have to take that threat seriously. Between the government and industry sectors here in the US. We're also working with our industry partners to enact stronger defenses and assess our own vulnerabilities. Last fall, we completed an extensive review of all of our major contracts here at Space and Missile System Center to determine the levels of cyber security requirements we've implemented across our portfolio. And it sounds really kind of businessy geeky, if you will. Hey, we looked at our contracts to make sure that we had the right clauses in our contracts to address cybersecurity as dynamically as we possibly could. And so we found ourselves having to add new language to our contracts, to require system developers, to implement some more advanced protective measures in this evolving cyber security environment. So that data handling and supply chain protections from contract inception to launch and operations were taken into account. Cyber security really is a key performance parameter for us now. Performance of the system, It's as important as cost, it's as important as schedule, because if we deliver the perfect system on time and on cost, it can perform that missile warning or that communications mission perfectly, but it's not cyber secure. If it's doesn't have cyber protections built into it, or the ability to implement mitigations against cyber threats, then we've essentially fielded a shoe box in space that doesn't do the CA the war fighter or the nation any good. Supply chain risk management is a major challenge for us. We're doing a lot to coordinate with our industry partners. We're all facing it head on to try and build secure and trusted components that keep our confidence as leaders, firefighters, and baristas as the case may be. But it is a challenge. And we're trying to rise to that challenge. >> This is so exciting this new area, because it really touches everything. Talk about geeking out on the tech, the hardware, the systems but also you put your kind of MBA hat on you go, what's the ROI of extra development and how things get built. Because the always the exciting thing for space geeks is like, if you're building cool stuff, it's exciting, but you still have to build. And cybersecurity has proven that security has to be baked in from the beginning and be thought as a system architecture. So you're still building things, which means you got to acquire things, you got to acquire parts, you got acquire build software and sustain it. How is security impacting the acquisition and the sustainment of these systems for space? >> Yeah. From initial development, through planning for the acquisition, design, development, our production fielding and sustainment, it impacts all aspects of the life cycle, John. We simply, especially from the concept of baking in cybersecurity, we can't wait until something is built and then try and figure out how to make it cyber secure. So we've moved way further towards working side by side with our system developers to strengthen cybersecurity from the very beginning of a systems development, cyber security, and the resilience associated with it really have to be treated as a key system attribute. As I mentioned earlier, equivalent with data rates or other metrics of performance. We like to talk in the space world about mission assurance and mission assurance has always sort of taken us as we technically geek out. Mission assurance has always taken us to the will this system work in space. Can it work in a vacuum? Can it work in as it transfers through the Van Allen radiation belt or through the Southern hemisphere's electromagnetic anomaly? Will it work out in space? And now from a resiliency perspective, yeah, it has to work in space. It's got to be functional in space, but it's also got to be resistant to these cybersecurity threats. It's not just, I think a General D.T Thompson quoted this term. It's not just widget assurance anymore. It's mission assurance. How does that satellite operator that ground control segment operate while under attack? So let me break your question a little bit, just for purposes of discussion into really two parts, cybersecurity, for systems that are new and cybersecurity for systems that are in sustainment are kind of old and legacy. Obviously there's cyber vulnerabilities that threatened both, and we really have to employ different strategies for defensive of each one. For new systems. We're desperately trying to implement across the Department of Defense and particularly in the space world, a kind of a dev sec ops methodology and practice to delivering software faster and with greater security for our space systems. Here at SMC, we have a program called enterprise ground services, which is a toolkit, basically a collection of tools for common command and control of different satellite systems, EGS as we call it has an integrated suite for defensive cyber capabilities. Network operators can use these tools to gain unprecedented insight to data flows and to monitor space network traffic for anomalies or other potential indicators of a bad behavior, malicious behavior, if you will, it's rudimentary at this point, but because we're using DevSecOps and that incremental development approach, as we scale it, it just becomes more and more capable. Every product increment that we feel. Here at LA Air Force Base, we have the United Space Force's West Coast Software Factory, which we've dubbed the Kobayashi Maru. They're using those agile DevOps software development practices to deliver a space awareness software to the combined space operations center. Affectionately called the CSpock that CSpock is just on the road from Cal Poly there in San Luis Obispo at Vandenberg Air Force Base. They've so securely linked the sea Spock with other space operation centers around the planet, our allies, Australia, Canada, and the UK. We're partnering with all of them to enable secure and enhanced combined space operations. So lots of new stuff going on as we bake in new development capabilities for our space systems. But as I mentioned earlier, we've got large constellations of satellites on orbit right now. Some of them are well in excess of a decade or more or old on orbit. And so the design aspects of those satellites are several decades old. But we still have to worry about them cause they're critical to our space capabilities. We've been working with an air force material command organization called CROWS, which stands for the Cyber Resiliency Office for Weapon Systems to assess all of those legacy platforms from a cyber security perspective and develop defensive strategies and potential hardware and software upgrades to those systems to better enable them to live through this increasingly cybersecurity concerned era that we currently live in. Our industry partners have been critical to both of those different avenues. Both new systems and legacy systems. We're working closely with them to defend and upgrade national assets and develop the capabilities to do similar with new national assets coming online. The vulnerabilities of our space systems really kind of threatened the way we've done business in the past, both militarily and in the case of GPS economically. The impacts of that cybersecurity risk are clear in our acquisition and sustainment processes, but I've got to tell you, as the threat vectors change, as the vulnerabilities change, we've got to be nimble enough, agile enough, to be able to bounce back and forth. We can't just say, many people in the audience are probably familiar with the RMF or the Risk Management Framework approach to reviewing the cyber security of a system. We can't have program managers and engineers just accomplish an RMF on a system. And then, hey, high five, we're all good. It's a journey, not a destination, that's cybersecurity. And it's a constant battle rhythm through our weapon systems lifecycle, not just a single event. >> I want to get to this commercial business needs and your needs on the next question. But before I go there, you mentioned agile. And I see that clearly because when you have accelerated innovation cycles, you've got to be faster. And we saw this in the computer industry, mainframes, mini computers, and then we started getting beyond maybe when the internet hit and PCs came out, you saw the big enterprises, the banks and government start to work with startups. And it used to be a joke in the entrepreneurial circles is that, there's no way if you are a startup you're ever going to get a contract with a big business enterprise. Now that used to be for public sector and certainly for you guys. So as you see startups out there and there's acquisition involved, I'm sure would love to have a contract with Space Force. There's an ROI calculation where if it's in space and you have a sustainment view and it's software, you might have a new kind of business model that could be attractive to startups. Could you share your thoughts on the folks who want to be a supplier to you, whether they're a startup or an existing business that wants to be agile, but they might not be that big company. >> John, that's a fantastic question. We're desperately trying to reach out to those new space advocates, to those startups, to those what we sometimes refer to, within the Department of Defense, those non traditional defense contractors. A couple of things just for thinking purposes on some of the things that we're trying to highlight. Three years ago, we created here at Space and Missile System Center, the Space Enterprise Consortium to provide a platform, a contractual vehicle, really to enable us to rapidly prototype, development of space systems and to collaborate between the US Space Force, traditional defense contractors, non traditional vendors like startups, and even some academic institutions. SPEC, as we call it, Space Enterprise Consortium uses a specialized contracting tool to get contracts awarded quickly. Many in the audience may be familiar with other transaction agreements. And that's what SPEC is based on. And so far in just three years, SPEC has awarded 75 different prototyping contracts worth over $800 million with a 36% reduction in time to award. And because it's a consortium based competition for these kinds of prototyping efforts, the barrier to entry for small and nontraditional, for startups, even for academic institutions to be able to compete for these kinds of prototyping has really lowered. These types of partnerships that we've been working through on spec have really helped us work with smaller companies who might not have the background or expertise in dealing with the government or in working with cyber security for their systems, both our developmental systems and the systems that they're designing and trying to build. We want to provide ways for companies large and small to partner together in support kind of mutually beneficial relationships between all. Recently at the Annual Air Force Association conference that I mentioned earlier, I moderated a panel with several space industry leaders, all from big traditional defense contractors, by the way. And they all stressed the importance of building bridges and partnerships between major contractors in the defense industry and new entrance. And that helps us capture the benefits of speed and agility that come with small companies and startups, as well as the expertise and specialized skill sets of some of those larger contractors that we rely on day in and day out. Advanced cyber security protections and utilization of secure facilities are just a couple of things that I think we could be prioritizing more so in those collaborations. As I mentioned earlier, the SPEC has been very successful in awarding a number of different prototyping contracts and large dollar values. And it's just going to get better. There's over 400 members of the space enterprise consortium, 80% of them are non traditional kinds of vendors. And we just love working with them. Another thing that many people in the audience may be familiar with in terms of our outreach to innovators, if you will, and innovators that include cyber security experts is our space pitch day events. So we held our first event last November in San Francisco, where we awarded over a two day period about $46 million to 30 different companies that had potentially game changing ideas. These were phase two small business innovative research efforts that we awarded with cash on the spot. We're planning on holding our second space pitch day in the spring of 2021. We're planning on doing it right here in Los Angeles, COVID-19 environment permitting. And we think that these are fantastic venues for identifying and working with high-speed startups, and small businesses who are interested in really, truly partnering with the US Air Force. It's, as I said before, it's a really exciting time to be a part of this business. And working with the innovation economy is something that the Department of Defense really needs to do in that the innovation that we used to think was ours. That 80% of the industrial base innovation that came from the Department of Defense, the script has been flipped there. And so now more than 70%, particularly in space innovation comes from the commercial sector, not from the defense business itself. And so that's a tsunami of investment and a tsunami of a capability. And I need to figure out how to get my surfboard out and ride it, you know what I mean? >> Yeah, It's one of those things where the script has been flipped, but it's exciting because it's impacting everything. When you're talking about systems architecture? You're talking about software, you're talking about a business model. You're talking about dev sec opsx from a technical perspective, but now you have a business model innovation. All the theaters are exploding in innovation, technical, business, personnel. This brings up the workforce challenge. You've got the cyber needs for the US Space Force, It's probably great ROI model for new kinds of software development that could be priced into contracts. That's a entrepreneurial innovation, you've got the business model theater, you've got the personnel. How does the industry adopt and change? You guys are clearly driving this. How does the industry adjust to you? >> Yeah. So I think a great way to answer that question is to just talk about the kind of people that we're trying to prioritize in the US Space Force from an acquisition perspective, and in this particular case from a cybersecurity perspective. As I mentioned earlier, it's the most exciting time to be in space programs, really since the days of Apollo. Just to put it in terms that maybe have an impact with the audience. From 1957 until today, approximately 9,000 satellites have been launched from the various space varying countries around the planet. Less than 2000 of those 9,000 are still up on orbit and operational. And yet in the new space regime players like Space X have plans to launch, 12,000 satellites for some of their constellations alone. It really is a remarkable time in terms of innovation and fielding of space capabilities and all of those space capabilities, whether they're commercial, civil, or defense are going to require appropriate cybersecurity protections. It's just a really exciting time to be working in stuff like this. And so folks like the folks in this audience who have a passion about space and a passion about cybersecurity are just the kind of people that we want to work with. Cause we need to make sure our systems are secure and resilient. We need folks that have technical and computing expertise, engineering skills to be able to design cyber secure systems that can detect and mitigate attacks. But we also, as you alluded to, we need people that have that business and business acumen, human networking background, so that we can launch the startups and work with the non traditional businesses. Help to bring them on board help, to secure both their data and our data and make sure our processes and systems are free as much as possible from attack. For preparation, for audience members who are young and maybe thinking about getting into this trade space, you got to be smart on digital networking. You got to understand basic internet protocols, concepts, programming languages, database design. Learn what you can for penetration or vulnerability testing and a risk assessment. I will tell you this, and I don't think he will, I know he will not mind me telling you this, but you got to be a lifelong learner and so two years ago, I'm at home evening and I get a phone call on my cell phone and it's my boss, the commander of Air Force Space command, General, J. Raymond, who is now currently the Chief of Space Operations. And he is on temporary duty, flying overseas. He lands where he's going and first thing he does when he lands is he calls me and he goes JT, while I was traveling, I noticed that there were eBooks available on the commercial airliner I was traveling on and there was an ebook on something called scrumming and agile DevSecOps. And I read it, have you read it? And I said, no, sir. But if you tell me what the title of the book is, I will read it. And so I got to go to my staff meeting, the very next week, the next time we had a staff meeting and tell everybody in the staff meeting, hey, if the four star and the three star can read the book about scrumming, then I'm pretty sure all of you around this table and all our lieutenants and our captains our GS13s, All of our government employees can get smart on the scrumming development process. And interestingly as another side, I had a telephone call with him last year during the holidays, where he was trying to take some leave. And I said, sir, what are you up to today? Are you making eggnog for the event tonight or whatever. And the Chief of Space Operations told me no, I'm trying to teach myself Python. I'm at lesson two, and it's not going so well, but I'm going to figure this out. And so that kind of thing, if the chief of staff or the Chief of Space Operations can prioritize scrumming and Python language and innovation in his daily schedule, then we're definitely looking for other people who can do that. And we'll just say, lower levels of rank throughout our entire space force enterprise. Look, we don't need people that can code a satellite from scratch, but we need to know, we need to have people that have a basic grasp of the programming basics and cybersecurity requirements. And that can turn those things into meaningful actions, obviously in the space domain, things like basic physics and orbital mechanics are also important spaces, not an intuitive domain. So under understanding how things survive on orbit is really critical to making the right design and operational decisions. And I know there's probably a lot, because of this conference. I know there's probably a whole lot of high speed cybersecurity experts out in the audience. And I need those people in the US Space Force. The country is counting on it, but I wouldn't discount having people that are just cyber aware or cyber savvy. I have contracting officers and logisticians and program managers, and they don't have to be high end cybersecurity experts, but they have to be aware enough about it to be able to implement cyber security protections into our space systems. So the skill set is really, really broad. Our adversaries are pouring billions of dollars into designing and fielding offensive and destructive space, cybersecurity weapons. They repeatedly shown really a blatant disregard of safety and international norms for good behavior on orbit. And the cyber security aspects of our space systems is really a key battleground going forward so that we can maintain that. As I mentioned before, peaceful global comments of space, we really need all hands on deck. If you're interested in helping in uniform, if you're interested in helping, not in uniform, but as a government employee, a commercial or civil employee to help us make cyber security more important or more able to be developed for our space systems. And we'd really love to work with you or have you on the team to build that safe and secure future for our space systems. >> Lieutenant General John Thompson, great insight. Thank you for sharing all that awesome stories too, and motivation for the young next generation. The United States Space Force approach to cybersecurity. Really amazing talk, thank you for your time. Final parting question is, as you look out and you have your magic wand, what's your view for the next few years in terms of things that we could accomplish? It's a super exciting time. What do you hope for? >> So first of all, John, thanks to you and thanks to Cal Poly for the invitation and thanks to everybody for their interest in cybersecurity, especially as it relates to space systems, that's here at the conference. There's a quote, and I'll read it here from Bernard Schriever, who was the founder, if you will, a legend in a DoD space, the founder of the Western development division, which was a predecessor organization to Space and Missile System Center, General Schriever, I think captures the essence of how we see the next couple of years. "The world has an ample supply of people "who can always come up with a dozen good reasons "why new ideas will not work and should not be tried, "but the people who produce progress are breed apart. "They have the imagination, "the courage and the persistence to find solutions." And so I think if you're hoping that the next few years of space innovation and cybersecurity innovation are going to be upon a pony ride at the County fair, then perhaps you should look for another line of work, because I think the next few years in space and cybersecurity innovation are going to be more like a rodeo and a very dynamic rodeo as it goes. It is an awesome privilege to be part of this ecosystem. It's really an honor for me to be able to play some small role in the space ecosystem and trying to improve it while I'm trying to improve the chances of the United States of America in a space war fighting environment. And so I thank all of you for participating today and for this little bit of time that you've allowed me to share with you. Thank you. >> Sir, thank you for your leadership and thank you for the time for this awesome event, Space and Cyber Cybersecurity Symposium 2020, I'm John Furrier on behalf of Cal Poly, thanks for watching. (mellow music)

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, good morning. Welcome to the cubes coverage of combo go 19 I'm Lisa Martin and it was stupid man. Hey Sue. Hey Lisa. Are you ready? I was going to ask you. Yes. Are you ready? >>I believe the statement this morning was, we're born ready. >>We are born ready? Yes. That was a big theme this morning. It's the theme of the event here at con Volvo 19 in Colorado and great parody this morning of all these old video clips of all these actors including the Lego movie stars from saying I'm ready. Even SpongeBob. That one got me, so we had a great day. Yesterday's to love some news came out Monday and Tuesdays a lots of great stuff to talk about. We had there a lot of their C level execs and let a new changes a call yesterday. Really got the vibe of, Hey, this is a new Combalt. >>It's interesting Lisa, because one of the things we've been talking about is the 20 years of pedigree that the company has. This Andre Mirchandani said yet they're doing some new items. I was talking to some of the partners in there like how come metallics like a separate brand, don't you worry about brand spread? We knew a thing about having too many brands on the program so it is the history, the experience, the lessons learned, the war chest as they said of all of the things that have gone wrong over the years and I sure know that from my time living on the vendor side is there's no compression algorithm for all the experience you've had and like, Oh we fixed something in that stays in the code as opposed to there's something brand new might need to work through things over time but metallic a separate brand but leveraging the partnerships and the go to market and the experience of Convolt overall. >>So if you want, my quick take is, you know metallic. I definitely, I think coming out of here is the thing we will be talking the most about their SAS plus model. I want to see how that plays in the marketplace. As I probed Rob, when we interviewed him, customers, when you think about SAS, it should just be, I worry about my data and I get up and running and they said they have a very fast up and running less than 15 minutes. That's great. But some of that optionality that they built in, Oh well I can bring this along or I can add this and do this. It's always worried that a wait, do I have to remember my thing? And as it changes down the road, do I have everything set up right? Those are things that we're trying to get away from when we go to a SAS or cloud model. >>And to your point, another theme of the show has been about operational simplification, not just what Combolt is doing internally to simplify their operations, but what they need to deliver to customers. Customers want simplicity rates. Do we, we talk about that at every show regardless of industry, but there is this, this line, and maybe it's blurring, >>like we talked a lot about blurred lines yesterday of too much choice versus simplification. Where's the line there? >> Yeah and a great point Lisa, so one of the items Sandra Mirchandani said yesterday in his keynote was that blurring the line between primary and secondary storage and I probed him on our interview is Convolt going into the primary storage market with Hedvig. Hedvig has got a, you know, a nice offering, strong IP, good engineering team. I think they want to make sure that customers that have bought head vigor want to keep buying Hedvig we'll do it, but it really, I think two years from now when you look back at is that core IP, how does that get baked into the solution? That's why they bought it. That's where it's going to be there. I don't think we're going to be looking two years from now and saying, Oh wow know Convolt they're going up against all the storage star Walton competing a bit gets HCI and everything. >>They have a strong partnership, so I think I got clarity on that for the most part, even though the messaging will will move over time on that, it will move over time on that. >> That's a good point that the song blurred lines kept popping into my head yesterday as we were talking about that. But one of the things that was clear was when we spoke with Rob Kalusi and about metallic, we spoke with Avinash Lakshman about Hedvig Sanjay as well as Don foster. They're already working on the technical integration of of this solutions and we even spoke with their VP of pricing. So from a customer, from a current Hedvig customer perspective, there is focus on that from Combolt's perspective. It's not just about integrating the technologies and obviously that has to be done really well, but it's also about giving customers that consistency and really for combo kind of a new era of transparency with respect to pricing. >>And another thing we talked about some of that transformation of the channel and Mercer row came on board only a couple of days officially on the job. He's helped a number of companies get ready for multicloud and absolutely we've seen that change in the channel over the last five to 10 years. Know back in his days when he was at VM world at VMware there the channel was, Oh my gosh, you know, when Amazon wins we all lose and today we understand it as much more nuance there. The channel that is successful partners with the hyperscale cloud environments, they have practices built around it. The office three 65 and Microsoft practices are an area that Convolt in their partners should be able to do well with and the metallic will tie into as well as of course AWS. The 800 pound gorilla in this space will be there. Combolt plays into that and you know, setting the channel up for that next generation with the SAS, with the software and living in a broader multicloud environment is definitely something to watch you a lot of news about the channel, not just from a leadership standpoint but also so metallic for the mid market >>really delivered exclusively through the channel but also the new initiative that they have. And we talked a little bit about this yesterday about going after and really a big focus with global systems integrators on the largest global enterprises. And when we spoke with their GTM chief of staff yesterday along with Mercer with Carmen, what they're doing, cause I said, you know, channel partners, all the channel partners that they work with work with their competitors. So you have to really deliver differentiation and it can't just be about pricing or marketing messaging goes all the way into getting those feet on the street. And that's another area in which we heard yesterday Combolt making strategic improvements on more feet on the street co-selling with partners, really pulling them deeper into enablement and trainings and to them that's one of the key differentiators that they are delivering to their partners. Yeah >>and Lisa, he, we got to speak to a number, a couple of customers we have more coming on today. It's a little bit telling that you know the average customer you talk to, they have five 10 years of experience there. They are excited about some of the new offerings, but as we've said many times metallic, the new Hedvig we want to talk to the new logos that they're going to get on board. That is something that for the partners has been an incentive. There were new incentives put in place to help capture those new logos because as we know, revenue was actually down in the last fiscal year a bit and Convolt feels that they have turned the corner, they're all ready to go. And one other note I'd like to make, the analogy I used last year is we knew a CEO was canoe CEO search was happening, a lot of things were in motion and it's almost as if you were getting the body ready for an organ transplant and you make sure that the antibodies aren't going to reject it. And in conversation with Sanjay, he was very cognizant of that. His background is dev offs and he was a CIO. We went for it, he was the CEO of puppet. So he's going to make things move even faster. And the pace of change of the last nine months is just the beginning of the change. And for the most part I'm not hearing grumbling underneath the customer seem fully on board. The employees are energized and definitely there was good energy last year, but a raise of the enthusiasm this year. >>Well Stu, first of all, you have just been on fire the last two days comparing their CEO transition to getting a body ready for a transplant. It's probably one of the best things I've heard in a long time. That was awesome. But you're right, we've heard a lot of positivity. Cultural change is incredibly difficult. You talked a minute ago about this as a 20 year old company and as we all have all experience and the industries in which we're in, you know, one of the things that's important is, is messaging that experience and talking about the things that that worked well, but also the things that didn't work well, that they've learned from that message was carried through the keynote this morning. That three customers on stage that we saw before we had to come to the side. And I, I had, my favorite was from Sonic healthcare. Matthew McCabe's coming on in shortly with us and I always appreciate, you know, I think the voice of the customer is the best brand validation that you can get. However, what's even better is a customer talking about when the technologies that they're using fail because it does happen. How are they positioned with the support and the training and the education that is giving them to make those repairs quickly to ensure business continuity and ensure disaster recovery. I think that to me that speaks volumes about the legacy, the 20 years of experience that combo has. >>Yeah, no, Lisa, you're absolutely right. There's certain products out there that we talk about uptime in 100% in this space. You, I believe the stat was about 94% success rate and we had NASA in the keynote yesterday talking about success versus partial success versus failures and Convolt really embraces that and has customers that we'll talk about that because there are times that things will happen and there are things that you need to be able to recover from ransomware. Often it is not a question of if, when it is going to be happened, at least. The other thing I want to get your comment on Jimmy chin who is the director and one of the, the cameraman of the free solo Oscar-winning free solo documentary definitely gave me a little bit of, Oh my gosh, look at some of the Heights and I was nervous just looking at some of this stuff they're doing. I like a little bit of lightweight hiking. I'm not a mountain climber, nothing like that. But he talked about when the camera goes on, there's that added pressure that goes on and it's sitting there. It's like, yeah, you know, we sit here live all day doing that. There's that, that energy to perform. But you know, we all appreciate the everybody watching and understanding that we're all human here and every time, every once in awhile a word or a mistake gets in there, but we keep going summit. Yeah, >>that's life. But also Jimmy chin, phenomenal. I think at 2018 they just won the Oscar just earlier this year for free. Solo. I have to watch that this weekend. But a couple of things that he talked about is that failure is a huge part of preparation. Couldn't agree more. What a simplified statement for somebody that not only has has skied Everest, the climbed Meru, I think they call it the shark fin of India, but what you talked about with what he documented with free solo and all of the thousands of sequences and he talked about that, Alex, I'm forgetting his last name, the guy who closed, who free soloed, El Capitan, all of these different failure scenarios that he rehearsed over and over again in case he encountered any of them, he would immediately be to remedy that situation and get himself back on track. I thought that message to me, failure is a good F-word if you use it properly. You know NASA, you mentioned yesterday and NASA was famous for coining in the 60s failure is not an option and I always say onto that cause I used to work for NASA, but it's a distinct possibility. And so what Jimmy chin shared this morning was electrified, but it also was a great understatement of what Combolt is helping their customers. We have to help you prepare for this. We can't help you prepare for all of it. As you mentioned, ransomware, it's not if but when. >>Well, right and both NASA and when the climbing is understanding where something could go wrong and therefore what the failures scenarios are. So you know rockets today you can't have a failure and by failure they mean look, if the rocket isn't going to work or something goes wrong, we need to make sure we don't have loss of life. That is something that if you look at blue origin and SpaceX that is pre eminent in there is we can't have another challenger disaster. We can't have some of these environments where we have the loss of human life. So that is number one. Some of the other ones, sometimes we know that the unknown happens or things don't go quite right. So being prepared to understand if something goes wrong, how do we recover from that? And that brings us back to the whole data protection and recovery of the environment because the best laid architecture, eventually something will happen and therefore we need to make sure that that data, the lifeblood of the company is able to be recovered and used and that the business can go forward even if some piece of infrastructure or some attack got through. >>There are, and there's inherent risk in every industry, whether you're talking about healthcare data, we talked with AstraZeneca yesterday, you know, genetics, clinical data, or you're talking about a retailer, doesn't matter. There's an inherent risks with every business and one of the most important things that I got out of the NASA talk yesterday, Jimmy Chin's talked today, some of the customers, is that preparation is key. You can't be over prepared. You really can't act fact. He said that you can't be overprepared in his line of work, but I think it applies to the inherent risks that any business has. Managing data. As we talk about Sue all the time, it's the lifeblood. It's the new oil. It is. It has to be available, accessible 24 by seven if it isn't and can't be. Businesses are massive risk in this day and age. Competitive competitors who have maybe better risk fault tolerance scenario in play. >>So that risk that they have to mitigate comes a preparation. We're going to be talking with Sandra Hamilton in just a few minutes about who leads customer success for combo. Really want to dig into the training, the support. We've heard that articulated from customers on stage that I don't wake up in the middle of the night anymore because I have this support from my trusted vendor combo and that is critical to any business staying up. Absolutely. We're going to hear from number of customers. I'm sure they're ready and we are ready for day two. We are ready. See, let's have a great day. Yeah, thanks. All right, so Sue and I will be right back with our first guest on day two of our coverage of comm Volkow for Stu. I'm Lisa Martin. We'll be right back.

>> from Bahrain. It's the Q covering AWS Public sector Bahrain brought to you by Amazon Web service is >> Okay Welcome back, everyone to the cube coverage We are hearing by rain for a W s summit where cloud computing is changing the games. The Fintech panel discussion Yasmine el Sharif, head of Fintech Innovation Unit, Central Bank of Rain Thank you for joining >> us. Thank you for having me >> Elmo Yacht. Whose founder and CEO of Ammonia Technologies Thank you for coming on. Thank you for having so We're very robust Conversation before they turn on the cameras Fit in tech is hot. I'll see in global fintech Everyone knows what that is, but it's interesting because entrepreneurship and innovation is not just for start ups. It's for countries and hearing by rain, this ecosystem and the mandate to go cloud first has had a ripple effect. We were talking about open banking, mandate, open banking versus regulation, chasing innovation, holding it back. You guys here taking a different approach. Take a minute to explain the philosophy. >> Yeah, I think there's there's benefits to being late adopters to the game. I think in the case of behind it's been a very interesting journey. I think the we started with the whole AWS. But if you look at the prerequisites of technical adoption and creating Data Pool's for analytics to run on, I think the what's interesting about Bahrain is it's really led by regulation. If you look at the prerequisites of creating a digital economy, what's happening in financial service is, or the digitization or openness of financial service. Is it really one context off the bigger picture of Bahrain's digitization plan or the economic strategy? And really, what happens here is if you look at first built the data fools and or the data centers bring a W. A s in and create the data centers. Number two is creator data or cloud First policy. Move the entire government onto the cloud and then give the ownership of the data to the people by implementing the Bahrain personal data protection laws. Once you've done that, then you've given the ownership to the people and you've created what we have is we started with a unique identifies. So the citizens of the country or the residents of the country have a unique identify our number where they're known by once you've done that and then you start mandating certain sectors to open up with a P I integrations. You're creating a very, very interesting value proposition. It creates a much faster you leap frog, a generation of technology. You're going from the classic screen scraping technologies or whatever to a very a completely open infrastructure and open a P I. Where things air cryptographic Lee signed. People are in control of their data, people can control the mobility of their date, and you're really creating a very robust data pool for a lot of algorithms to sit on. >> You know what I love about this has me were talking before he came on cameras that you guys are thinking holistically as a knocking operating system is being in a geek that I am. I love that. But it's not just one thing you're doing, it's a it's a system and it's it's a modernization view. Now we all know that financial systems, power economies and fin tech innovation unit, but you're in. This is important. You gotta have that. That leg of the stool, that pillar that's working absolutely sandbox. You have technology mechanisms to roll in tech, move things quickly moving fast. What's the strategy? What if some of the key things What's the sandbox? >> Let me start by saying The Kingdom of Bahrain has always been considered as a centre of excellence as a financial centre of excellence. And we do realize at the Central Bank in order for us to maintain that position, we have to innovate. We have to remain dynamic and agile enough to make the necessary reforms within our regulations to meet the dynamics off the digital economy. Technology is changing the paradigm off the financial system on the changes happening extremely fast. Regulators have had to come up with a mechanism whereby they can harness and test the feasibility of these innovations whilst putting the risks in a controlled environments as regulators were not typically assigned to host incubators to host startups. However, because of all this change in technology, it has become extremely essential that we come up with a regulatory approach to enable startups as well as existing financial institutions to test out their innovative financial solutions in a controlled environment. So a sandbox is really a controlled live bounds time bounds environment, enabling startups as well as existing financial institutions to test out their innovative solutions under the strict supervision off the regulator, without being required to abide by full regulatory requirements directly with volunteer customers. >> You have to put this trick standards now but means sandboxes. What developers? No, it's a collaborative approach, absolutely not being an incubator. But you're setting up a rules of engagement, Senator startups to take what they know how to do >> exactly >> end up sandboxes in the cloud. That's what everyone does >> absolutely, and our journey with the sandbox has been very successful. We've launched our sandbox back in 2000 and 17. Up to date, we have 35 companies that have been admitted into the sun box. We have been able to graduate to companies successfully. One of them has been licensed as a crypto acid provider, the other as an open biking service provider. We have four other companies in the pipeline ready to graduates. I think all in all, our experience with Sun Box has enabled us to grow and develop his regulators. It has enabled us to maintain open communication with animators, to come tea, to learn the needs of innovators and to enable innovators to live, get familiar realized. With the regulatory environment of the Kingdom of Bahrain, >> you know, you guys are doing some really pioneering work. I wouldn't want to say it's really commendable. I know it's fast and new, but if you look at the United States with Facebook there now asking to be regulated regulation if it comes too late is bad because you know things got out of control and if you're too early, you can put a clamp down and stifle innovation. So the balance between regulation and innovation has always been an art, if you will. >> Exactly. >> What do you guys, How do you view that? What's the philosophy? >> So from a regular perspective, we think that regulation and innovation goes hand in hand, and we have to embrace innovation open heartedly. However, having said that, regulators have to run all common sense checks, meaning that we don't accept an innovation that will potentially pulls more harm to the financial stability of the economy as opposed to the advantages that puzzles. We've passed the number of different regulations to support innovation in the financial services sector dating back to 2014 when we first issued our payment service provider licenses allowing more competition and innovation within the payments sector. We've issued CROWDFUNDING regulations. We've issued robo advisory regulations. We've issued insurance aggregator regulations, crypto asset service provider regulations, open banking regulations, Justin in a few. And I think that each of the regulations that we have issued solves a specific pain point, whether it's to enhance financial inclusion, whether it's to empower customers by retaining ownership back, uh, of their financial information and data, Whether it's too also empower startups and to enable them to get it gain access to funding through digital platforms. >> Have dual. I want to get you in here because as an entrepreneur, like I love all that great, I just wanna get funded. I want my product to market. I need a capital market that's going to be robust. And I need to have that's capital providers state venture capital for private equity supporting their limited partners. So I want to see that I don't wanna be standing there when I need gas for my car. I need fuel. I got to get to the next level. This is what I want And he bought >> on. I think, the one thing John that is very important that people look at in the context of fintech today. Raising money investing into fintech Regulatory uncertainty is one that defines scalability today. Once your technology is proven, where you go next really is dependent on the regulator that you'll be dealing with in the context of that specific activity that you'll be performing. In the case of Bahrain, I must say we were blown away by the receptiveness. We in what way? Yes, yes, mean mentioned open banking, for example. We got into the regulatory sandbox, which you hear a lot about sandboxes all around the world. We got into the sandbox. We got into the sandbox with contact with with with an idea of building and accounts aggregator direct FBI integration to these banks. And we got into the sandbox. We There were no regulations at the time. They like the idea. We started bouncing ideas back and forth on how to develop it. We developed the technology. We started piloting the technology. We integrated to 15 banks in the country on a sandbox environment. The consul, the white paper on open banking, was listed. They sent it out for consultation. We integrated on a production environment to more than 70% of the banks in it in the country. The central Bank of Bahrain mandated open banking across the entire nation. With every retail bank all in a period of less than 18 months. That's insane. That's the kind of context. So as a no Vester exactly so as an investor or as an entrepreneur that looks at the sector. The question is here. If anything, I think the regulator in Bahrain is the one that's leading the innovation and these air the benefits of being late adopters. We get to test out and see what's going on in the rest of the world and really develop great regulations that will embrace and and foster innovation. >> You know, I love the liquidity conversation because this neck goes to the next level. Liquidity is a wonderful thing started. Wanna go public? If that's what happens in the U. S. Mergers and acquisitions, we have an incubator that we're gonna interview here flat Six labs just had to come. One of their companies got sold to match dot com. So you're seeing a lot of cross border liquidity. Yeah, this is a new dynamic. It's only gonna get stronger, more come. He's gonna come out of my reign in the region. Liquid is important. Absent. So how do you guys want to foster that? What's the strategy? Continue to do the same. >> So from a regular perspective again, we don't really holds. Thank you. Beaters are actually two accelerators, but what we do as we refined our regulations to support startups to gain access to liquidity, for example, are crowdfunding regulations that have been passed in 2017 and they support both. Equity is one of financing crowdfunding, including conventional as well as Sharia compliant. Crowdfunding transactions were also currently working on refining our regulations for enabling venture capitalists to take roots and marine and to support these startups. >> Yeah, I think John, you mentioned two things you mentioned regulation leading. When you mandate something like open banking, you are ultimately pushing the entire sector forward, saying you better innovators fastest possible. And there's a gap that you need to you need to basically bridge, and that really loosens up a lot of liquidity when it comes to partnerships. When it comes to acquisitions, when it comes to these banks ultimately looking for better solutions, so they that's the role of the regulator. Here we are seeing a lot of VC activity come to the region right now, the region is only starting to open up. AWS just went live a few months ago. We're seeing the cloud adoption start to really take effect, and this is where you'll start seeing real scalability. But I think the most compelling thing here is Previously people would look at the Middle East with a boot with a bit of skepticism. How much innovation can really take place and the reality is here. There are a few prerequisites that have been put in place. Foreign ownership is at 100% cloud. First policy. There's a lot of things that can really foster innovation. And we're, I mean, where as an entrepreneur, where living proof off this whole Team Bahrain initiative of the fact that you can get in you can build in accounts aggregator in a country that never even had the regulations to adopted to mandate it and to be Ultimately, I think Bahrain will become the global reference point for open banking very soon because it has mandated a regulation of open AP eyes with cryptographic signatures ultimate security frameworks with a robust infrastructure across an entire nation. And don't forget, we still have a population of below the age of 30 70% of our population below. So it gives a very compelling story t test your technology. And then what we end up saying is, once you're on AWS or any cloud for that matter than the scalability of the technology just depends on where you want to go in there. >> No doubt the demographics are solid here, and I love the announcement here. The bachelor's degree. Yeah, cloud computing. We've seen some data science degrees, so new skills are coming on. My vision is interesting. I think that would interest me about the region of Amazon. Being here is these regions create revitalisation? >> Yeah, you >> guys are in perfect position with this Modernization trend is beautiful, not only to be a template for the world but a center for global banking. So I think to me, is that, you know is I'm trying to put together and connect the dots of where this goes in the next two decades. I mean, if crypto currency market continues to get matured and stabilized, that's still flowing with a lot of money. A lot of money in the relay >> absolutely >> was not just the region business to do here for couples to come here. It's you guys playing a role in global financial system. That's of interest to me. What's your vision? >> Absolutely. I think that regulators around the world are starting to realize the importance of collaborating together, to try and work on policy challenges in line with innovation within the financial service of sector and to share experiences to share lessons learned at the Central Bank of Bahrain were a member of the Global Financial Innovation Network, which is an initiative that has Bean passed by the F C A in the UK Again, we're also a member of the authentic working group of the GCC and through these two different initiatives, we work alongside other regulators to collaborate on solving policy issues, to solve, to share experiences and knowledge and to try and harmonize our regulations. Because of the end of the day, startups and innovators ultimately will want to scale up and want to serve customers across the friend jurisdictions. So it's important to have that kind of harmonization in terms of regulations to foster innovation as well as to safeguard the overall security of the international financial. Um, >> keep partnerships. Do you guys need to do to kind of go global on this 20 year vision? Is there other things they have to fall into place? That needs to happen? >> I think >> 20 years is a long time, I say in the next. Let's take five years, for example. If you say in the next five years and where I see this going, the question is, what do entrepreneurs and startups need to look at a jurisdiction and say That's where I want to test my technology. You need a robust infrastructure. You need a regulator than embraces you. You need technical subsidies and financial subsidies that are available, and then you need an independent arm that can really hand hold you and take you to that >> thrust. Its critical trust, money making absolutely ability. >> Just add to that and Byron, we take great pride in our human capital, which we believe is one of our biggest assets. And today, with having your Amazon web service is in Bahrain, this has enabled training of young Bahrainis for the data and knowledge economies which is expected Thio greet around 5000 jobs within becoming five years through different schemes such as Amazon education. For example. >> This is super exciting, which we had more time. Congratulations. Love the vision again. Occupiers like to make money. They wanted environments could be trustworthy and some scalability on behind it. So good luck. We're behind you. We'll keep following up. Thanks for having a cube coverage here and by rain for AWS. I'm John Ferrier. Stay tuned for more after this short break.

>> From Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley it's theCUBE, covering the Churchills, 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Santa Clara, California at the Churchills. It's the ninth annual awards banquet put on by the Churchills Club, and this year is all about leadership. We're excited to be joined by our next guest who knows a little bit about leadership. He's Carl Guardino, the president and CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. Carl, great to see you. >> Great to see you, too, Jeff. >> So what is the Silicon Valley Leadership Group all about? >> The Silicon Valley Leadership Group is an association of about 360, primarily innovation economy employers that want to make a positive, proactive difference here in the region, as well as in our state and across the United States. >> What are some of the hot topics that are on top of the plate right now? Because there is a lot of craziness kind of going on here in Silicon Valley. >> There is. But what we try to do is impact those issues that are as important to families in their living rooms as they are to CEOs in their board rooms. And here in the bay area, we call those THEE issues. An acronym, T-H-E-E. The T, traffic; H, housing affordability; E, education; and the fourth E, the economy. And we try to bring together diverse points of view for those areas that unite us, where we can actually solve some of those challenges. >> Right, and those are big, big challenges. And you work both with public as well as private groups to try to bring them together to make movement on those things. >> We're a bridge. And the first thing about a bridge is that you try to bring folks together to cross the bridge and work together. The second most important thing about a bridge is that you build them, you don't burn them down. And that's the role that we try to play with 360 highly engaged CEOs and c-suite officers. >> And it's only appropriate, because tonight you'll be sitting down in a conversation with the mayor of San Jose, Sam Liccardo, to kind of get into some of these issues. San Jose seems to be on a roll right now, a positive roll. A lot of positive news coming out of San Jose. >> Yes, and that always starts with leadership rather than luck. San Jose mayor Sam Liccardo, 10th largest city in the United States, has been able to strike that balance of being pro-innovation economy, while also caring deeply about his citizens, the residents of San Jose, 1,053,000, and how we make sure that we have a strong and vibrant economy, but also a great quality of life. >> Right. So how do you even begin to - we'll start with traffic. The T in the THEE. To address that issue, it's so multifaceted, right, it's so tied to jobs, it's tied to housing, it's tied to the growth of the economy, you know, unfortunately freeways are slow to build, public transportation's expensive, but we continue to see growth there. How do you kind of eat that elephant, one bite at a time, with something like traffic? >> Well the role of the leadership group is, again, by bringing people together to solve complex problems in a democracy with winning solutions. So we'd rather win than whine. And when it comes to traffic, one of our core competencies is actually to lead and run ballot initiatives to fund transportation improvements throughout the region and the state. In fact, in the last 30 years alone, I've had the pleasure of going on loan from the leadership group to run ballot campaigns for transportation improvements that have totaled 30 billion dollars in revenue through those measures, approved by voters to reach into our own wallets, rather than our neighbors, to build improvements that, this Christmas, in time to go into your stocking, we'll be bringing BART to San Jose, and working on the electrification of Caltrain, linking transit and better road improvements, making it better for all of us trying to travel throughout this region. >> Right. Good, we need it. >> We do. >> And on the housing, you know, because the housing is also very closely tied to traffic, and we see that the old days of single-family homes on big pieces of dirt, those are going away. They just can't support it in higher density areas like San Fransisco, San Jose, to bring those jobs next to that. So we're seeing a huge transformation in the housing space as well. >> And we need a huge transformation, both in transportation and in housing. And it's really the flip side to the same coin. T, for tails, or transportation; H, for head, or housing. And you have to make sure that you keep those linked. In fact, one of our initiatives right now is to work with all six, fixed rail transit operators throughout the nine bay area counties. What are the current and future uses of those half miles around every fixed rail transit stop that you have? How do we maximize those uses? Here's a great example. What Google wants to do in downtown San Jose, at the Diridon SAP station, is only because of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group's work to bring BART to that station, electrify Caltrain, light rail is there, Amtrak, ACE, et cetera, and they want to have 20 to 25 thousand future Google employees there within the next 10 to 12 years. Why? Because it is a sustainable location that doesn't rely on you and I slogging through traffic in our single-occupant cars. >> Right. I can't wait to see what you guys do to El Camino. That's the next one that's going to - as somebody once said in one of these traffic things, it's just a bunch of old retail stores with empty parking lots, just placed by Microsoft. Or excuse me, by Amazon. So I think we'll see a big transformation with housing and jobs, you know, along that quarter, which happens to parallel the Caltrain, and is near and dear to my heart. So a lot of good opportunities I think to make improvements. >> Jeff, there is. And as hard as transportation and traffic solutions are to put into place, housing is even tougher. And while Bay Area residents think housing is the bigger crisis, the solutions are tougher to come about, because the community isn't as united on those solutions. So the role that a group of employers like ours play, is how do we bring people together around solutions that make sure that we build homes, that are good for everyone in our society. >> Well Carl, I like your positive attitude, a lot of winning and no whining, so I wish you nothing but success. And we'll be watching. >> Thank you, Jeff. >> You're welcome. He's Carl, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Churchills in Santa Clara, California. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.