>>from the cube studios in Palo alto in boston connecting >>with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cute conversation. Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global public sector Partner awards. I'm your host, Natalie ehrlich. Today we'll discuss the award for the most customer obsessed mission based win for state and local government. I'm pleased to introduce our guests for today's session Todd, Carey, Global Head West Business group Cognizant and David. Sullivan chief executive officer of Elizabeth river crossings. Thank you gentlemen for joining the program. >>Thanks >>Thanks Todd. >>I'd love to start with you. How are companies thinking about cloud today in their businesses? >>Well, there's some, some really exciting developments but at the heart of a cloud is changing the way companies interact with their customers, their suppliers and the way they think about business. And at cognizant it is really a customer first customer centric approach and then we work our way back to a solution. But most of the time, cloud decisions are not really made from a cost optimization or cost take out point of view. They're made from a customer experience or a business driver point of view. And how do we make businesses better? More, more scalable, more agile, more flexible and we've really built some some really great solutions that are industry specific and we've loved working with the R. C. In this capacity. >>How about you? I'd love to get your insight. Um As well. David, what what what do you see is like the main challenges and also how next gen technologies like you know, five G. Can help alleviate in those issues. >>Um Yes. First, it, like Todd said that, you know, the customer has an expectation and that expectation is raised every day by what they experienced in every other channel they work in and shop in and whatever they're doing so, so expectations are always increasing from the customer side, responsiveness personalization. They want to see all of that in everything they do, including paying their told bill. Um, and so I think as technology has changed, you know, tolling has kind of come from technology that is really 2030 years old or older. Uh, two more of a modern influence. And today we use R. F. I. D. Tags that are embedded in things like EZ Pass. But in the future it will be, it'll be your, your mobile device or your automobile itself that that triggers a total transaction and helps us process it and making in a way that is fast, convenient and most importantly accurate. >>Yeah. Well staying with you, David, I'd love to hear how working with AWS helped modernize your systems and as well as if you could give us some insight on your tracking systems. >>Yes. So with AWS, we have been working with Cognizant. Cognizant is our tolling subcontractor. So they are responsible for providing our tolling system. And we had what I would call a typical legacy tolling system. We had to data centers, both of them located pretty close together, a primary and a redundant data center and both of them very close to flood prone areas. And in our location in the southeast corner of Virginia were very vulnerable to tropical storms and tidal flooding. So part of our concern was, you know, we're exposed all our infrastructure, all our tolling infrastructure is exposed. So as we began to pursue a cloud strategy, uh the first idea was just to lift everything out of our environment and move it to a W. S. And Cognizant pull that off in about three months, uh which is really pretty incredible and we never missed a beat. Uh You know, we did it over a three day holiday weekend, but from a business transaction standpoint it all flowed once in the cloud. We began to rethink now that we're out of these legacy hardware environments, How do we get out of the legacy application environment and embrace what the cloud enables and working closely with Cognizant who had a great vision for how this could be achieved. We were able to, you know, systematically move through and migrate to a cloud first cloud oriented uh system. And uh you know, it's given us lower cost, increased availability and most importantly for our customer service agents that deal with customers or customers that deal with the web, it's given them a better experience uh shorter call times, better information and you know, and and frankly better customer satisfaction. >>Terrific. Well, thank you for that Todd. Let's shift to you. What do you see as the next phase of this digital transformation process? >>Well, as David hidden, I think it's an important theme of cloud first. I mean most companies in our clients start with that cloud forest, cloud native mentality. But for cognizant, our cloud approach is really customer first and being able to start with the client in mind and then work our way back into a technology staff or into a scalable solution. But specifically for the coal industry, there's a lot of things that are needed around revenue, predictability and looking at potential leakages. But as we hit on already of making sure that we're really delivering a great customer experience. And so with our solution, as we expect our tolling solution to really grow, we're keeping it cloud native, we're keeping it modular in nature and integration ready. So for example, are total customers can use their own roadside solutions or hand picked some of the small back office modules that they want to use. It's always going to be purpose bill and align to our customer and we see nothing but growth in this segment. It's very exciting. >>Yeah. Terrific. Well, David, you know, now that you've actually implemented this, what do you see as the next phase? What is your vision um for the future for your business in 2021? >>Well, I think, you know, for for us moving forward, um you know, we've been in this uh as Todd said, kind of a modular approach, which is great because you can make the changes and really manage your risk while you're making them. Um so you're you're moving small things. Whereas traditionally new systems meant massive investments, long, long time implementation times and you know, all in cut overs, all of which are packed with risk. So, you know, we want to reduce our risk and the solution that we have being cloud native allows us to really incrementally and quickly, just continually to improve the system. So you know, on our forecast, we would like to have a better insight into our customers and you know, support a direct app, Annie R. C. App that would allow our customers to interact with us and give us a better view of the customer um and a better experience for the customer overall. But you know, we, our goal is to build that total transaction accurately fairly. And then if the customer has an issue to be able to treat them in a way that uh that they feel respected and and valued as a customer because we we do look at it that way. >>Yeah, Terrific. I mean obviously, you know, engagement such an important issue in this area. Now I'd like to shift gears and here a little bit more about, you know, what are some of the other applications that cognizant could provide beyond tolling and let's shift this to Todd? >>Well, David had done a little bit, there's there's a lot of when we start to focus on the customer, there's a lot of opportunity there on the front side. So mobile apps, websites, the synchronization of data, but then also the way that we support that customer interacting with that data. Things like I've er automating, call centers, being able to support that customer through the entire chain of custody. There's some new and exciting applications now that we come out and David touched on a little bit too in terms of vehicles. So the vehicles to everything type motion. That's an exciting development in this segment as well to be able to continually integrate everything that's in the customer ecosystem. So whether that's uh, the, the need to pay a bill or be able to drive a car through a gate and be able to simply not touch anything but be able to have that all the way that payment process all the way through and have clear visibility into usage and insights. And then also be able to turn all that data over to a company like er, C to make good decisions based on what they see in terms of buying patterns, consumption, etcetera. There's a lot of expansion going on in this and the greatest part about this is it's built on the AWS platform. So when we architect something in a cloud native way, we can rapidly expanded and we can really streamline the investment required to jump start any kind of innovation and best of all our customers in keeping with the best model, really only pay for the actual traffic that they use so we can keep those long term costume. >>Yeah. Well, excellent point. Thank you both gentlemen for joining our program. Really loved having you. And uh, you know, that was Todd, Cary and David. Sullivan. Excuse me. And I'm your host, Natalie or like, Thank you for watching. >>Mm hmm. Mm.

[Music] from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston it's the cube covering the IBM think brought to you by IBM hi everybody we're back and this is Dave Valentine you're watching the cubes coverage of the IBM think 20/20 digital event experience lisa cisco is here she's the global head of go to market and IBM cloud at wit-pro Lisa good to see you thanks for coming on how you doing you're welcome how things holding up down in Florida you guys staying safe good working from home like like most of us everyone's doing good so I want to ask you don't go right to it talk about digital transformation and I want to get your take and maybe share some thoughts that we've heard from clients but digital transformation you're kind of in the heart of it you've got cloud you do and work with cognitive and AI and and blockchain and and the like so what are you seeing in terms of how clients are adopting this notion this digital transformation journey and how has kovat affected that great question so the hopefully the digital transformation won't always be about Kovan but there always will be a need for companies to move quickly and adopt new technologies and do things that are unexpected whether that's from an acquisition or an unexpected competitive move or new market that they want to be in so any of those things and affect businesses and what we're seeing right now is businesses who have adopted digital technology and by extension adopted cloud as the backbone to that digital technology have been able to move faster in this environment they're able to do things like work from home they're able to ensure security is in place they're able to give their employees and their customers access to information in a faster and more cost-effective way and so we're really not excited to have coated but we're really it's an interesting time to be looking at digital technologies and first mover advantages here and the digital Tudo era is all about enabling business responsiveness and those are the things that we're doing with the technology plays that we're working on today yeah I mean the customers we've talked to the the CIOs the CISOs they've said in many hard-hit industries hey we basically has shut down spending with some exceptions digital transformation being one of them you've got experience in two areas that are being affected pretty dramatically by kovat want a supply chain on the other is e-commerce you know supply chains are just you know especially for a while we're just in shambles or seeming to come back you know a little bit but what have you seen from the supply chain and what do you think what kind of changes do you expect are gonna be affected by koban going forward so again this was an area that if you had invested in your supply chain and you have automated some of those processes you're having an easier time onboarding your suppliers and knowing where your shipments are and understanding what your forward-looking position is going to be if you haven't done those things um even though your IT budgets might be being slashed they're things that you have to do right now and so doing some of those things using supply chain automation on the cloud it's it's um it's the right way for companies to go right now that find themself in a predicament and maybe aren't as prepared as they'd like to be so some of the technologies that we're helping bring to market we've we're seeing results with with things like five times faster adoption and 40% more cost efficient than if they weren't trying to do these things in an automated way using the cloud and so for companies that that need help doing this iBM has some of the best supply chain solutions in the market and and Wipro certainly has years of experience bringing those turquoise and then e-commerce is the other one I mean obviously there's been an explosion nobody wants to go out if they don't have to we're ordering anything and everything online there's been a kind of similar situation right if you if you had your kind of e-commerce you know we have you been running water through the pipes and you've perfected that over the last you know a couple of years or part of a decade then you're in pretty good shape but what are you seeing there with if you didn't have a loyal customer base now the time to really get used to interacting with your customers in that way so restaurants for example think the local mom-and-pop shops I live in a small town outside of Orlando and I'm seeing little businesses get online and and sew clothing and wine and things that they wouldn't normally see and dabbling in e-commerce so it's it's really comfortable for most people now to buy things online and we're seeing services that you wouldn't normally be be having online things like education k12 all allerjies everything can be pretty much bought on-line these days or consumed in a digital format and so I think again customers that have experience in doing this are ahead of the curve and customers that don't are going to quickly find that they have too I want to turn our attention to in the conversation to cloud and get your perspectives I mean I've reported a number of times that you know the IBM cloud it's not it's not an infrastructure as a service and the race to the bottom obviously IBM offers infrastructure of service but IBM strategy is not to try to take AWS head-on and you know storage cost per bit it's really to bring value through its software estate and portfolio and help its customers really take advantage of that the cloud model how are you and your clients taking advantage of the IBM cloud what kind of solutions do you have that are that are specific that leverage the IBM cloud that's correct we have two solutions that we're working on building out with with IBM and leveraging hybrid clouds so for an environment where 94% of enterprises have multiple clouds now they all have a combination of AWS or Azure or private clouds or IBM cloud and 73% of our clients see the ability to move between those clouds as a high priority and we are addressing that with two main solutions that we've built out at with row one is called our boundary list enterprise solution and you can think of that as the infrastructure and the knowledge we've taken the knowledge from thousands of successful hybrid cloud migrations that we've done and we've built it into this framework to help our customers be able to have a single dashboard and manage their view across hybrid cloud in an automated way and be able to be nimble and move between those clouds as business requirements it demand that they do and so that's the boundary-less Enterprise side the other side that we're working on with IBM is the application and integration modernization and we have a solution that we call moderniser and that is using some of the IBM technologies some third-party technologies and again the with our knowledge from our successful engagement and making it so that we can easily see what the workload is going to be to contain a rise and a single integration methodology that we're going to be bringing to our clients to help them be able to do this in a in an automated in a better way a faster way a more economical way so those are the two things that we're working on now and some of IBM's products are under the covers things like multiple cloud manager some of their DevOps and automation tools and there's some some tools again from third parties in firmware that we've brought in there as well so the boundary let's enterprise them in the idea there is that you've got a layer that allows you to go across clouds and have the same experience whether you're on pram whether you're in an Amazon Cloud and IBM cloud as you're wherever is that correct and it's a single sort of cloud experience single dashboard you know glass that you can look and you can serve you know in an IT environment your constituents the best way possible so that you're not locked into any cloud vendor and you can take advantage of where your workloads need to go and the modernization piece the modernized moderniser you talk about how clients are approaching it where do they start when they modernize their applicants that they do kind of and you help them do an application portfolio assessment they identify the high value workloads in their portfolio maybe the ones that they're going to sunset is a rationalization exercise the first step may be to talk about that every client is different but if the plant was to approach us and recommend the best practice we actually have a free two-week consulting engagement that we use for our clients that take a look at the workloads that they have and potentially will want to move to good we help them organize those workloads and figure out what the low-hanging fruit will be the things that will take a little bit more time on the things that are going to give them the highest bang for the buck and we will make some recommendations to them and that that two-week engagement about how to get started what about the I wanna shift gears talk about the you guys done in India with the Novus lab what is that all about what kind of expertise is there how does how two clients take advantage of that so we in IBM and out of the first soon-to-be announced we've just built it and we're soon to launch the I began with pro nobis loan you know this is the latin word from new or for innovation and that's what we plan to be doing in this lounge together so we have we pro talent and 150 seats where we'll have clients and different experts coming in and in residing in that center as well as access to all of the products i just talked about we'll be working closely with the IBM on GSI labs and bringing in new technologies building out new solutions so everything from taking supply chain to the next step to adding additional industry solutions one of the first things that we're going to do in that IBM Davis line just take advantage of the new IBM finance services cloud which is going to be a covering cloud focused at that industry and we're really excited to get started working on that technology to bring in our clients so ok so that's a that's an example of an industry solution and it's what it's it's optimized or for for banking and financial services or explain that if you would that's correct so iBM has worked with their clients in the financial services industry and they have packaged some of the governance and security and regulations that are needed for the financial services industry and they've put that into a solution that they'll be rolling out shortly I'm sure you'll hear more about it at IBM thing and that solution is going to be based on the industry guidelines by country on rolling out in the US and then shortly to Europe and we're going to be able to use that to jumpstart a lot of the workloads that we want to bring to our financial services clients without having to make them reinvent the wheel or all of the governance and security and regulatory things that they need well I can see you guys doing this across multiple industries kind of an out of the box you know tune something for retail government financial services Manufacturing healthcare where you've got the the requisite of security and compliance edicts depending on where you are in the world if it's a global organization you're able to you know identify what those local laws are maybe there's certain analytics capabilities and dashboards that you'd include is that is that kind of the right way to think about this that's exactly where we're headed and we're already starting to talk about healthcare as the next industry where we tackling after the services yeah well I mean the healthcare is that there are so heads down right now yeah believe you know we could think they'd come out of this and take a take a little breather and then can really you know get back to some of the more strategic things that they want to do in the industry I'll leave you with the last word kind of where you see the IBM Wipro partnership going you know what's your vision for that we really like IBM's approach in terms of avoiding vendor lock-in but we love what's happened with the acquisition of Red Hat and being able to use that technology more easily in our solutions we think that the industry approach is the right approach all of those things will have our focus in the noon double Ange this year and so while things are unusual in this current environment and we have a lot of things that we have to do immediately to help our clients just be able to survive we're very much looking to the future and what we can bring when this is all over that will help our clients make sure that they're ready for whatever the next Rose might be well Lisa thanks very much for coming on the cube you got a deep experience appreciate you sharing that with our with our audience they say you're welcome and thank you for watching everybody this is Dave Volante for the cube and our continuing coverage wall-to-wall coverage of IBM think 2020 the digital event experience you watch in the cube we were right back right after this short break [Music] you

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of women in computing. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here at theCUBE. We're at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, the best name in tech conferences. 18,000 women here in Orlando, filling up the Orange County Conference Center. We're excited to be here for our fourth year, and part of the whole program is getting some of the leadership from AnitaB.org on to give us an update and we're really excited to have Elizabeth Ames. She's the SVP of Marketing and Alliances and Programs but we just think of her as Elizabeth at AnitaB.org. So, Elizabeth, great to see you. >> Great to be here. >> Absolutely >> We're thrilled to have you here at the Celebration. >> I can't believe it's been four years. I've been telling so many people. There are still so many people that have never been here. I was amazed at the keynote, the first day, there was the call, the houselights went up, how many people it's their first time, and as big as this conference is, as much the people that know it love it, there's still a lot of people that have not been exposed to this show. >> It's absolutely the case. We have every year it seems like more and more sort of first timers. Which is great because we love to have them come but we'd love to have them come back. I think it's really an expression of how this issue has become a big issue and that the women are really engaged and excited and they want to be a part of it, so it's great. >> The other thing I don't think a lot of people know is there's obviously a lot of recruiting going on, there's a lot of young people here which is really what I think gives it its flavor, but we had Workday on. They said they had 140 people here from Workday. I talked to a guy last night at dinner from Google, I think they had 180 people and I said to her, "Do you have any show "that you bring that many people to "that's not your own show, so the amount of investment" And then I said, it's all young, fresh out of school No, it's all ranges, all ages. So again, I think there's a lot going on here that people are just not that exposed to. >> Yeah, that's absolutely true. So, if you look at our attendance overall, about 70% are industry and a lot of those are companies that are bringing their women and some of them are their younger women who have maybe been in the firm, in the company for a year or two or three or something like that, but the place where a lot of women drop out of the industry is more mid-career and so I think more and more companies are seeing this as a way to help their mid-career women recommit to the field and make those connections with the community at large and get a little bit more reinvigorated so we definitely see companies bringing all kinds of women out of their organization, and they like to bring a mix, so that they have some of their senior women that are sort of mentoring women who are mid-career or women who are more junior and it just gives them a really good mix. And then about 30% of our attendees are academic, we call it academic, but it's primarily students, so undergraduate, graduate, post doc, and research type people, and then some amount of professors and teaching assistants, those types of people. >> Yeah, and I really think it's the youth that give this show its special vibe. I mean there's a lot of great keynotes and some fantastic stories and really great global representation, a ton of African representation. But I do think it's the youth, it's the youngsters that bring a really unique and positive energy that you don't really see at many other conferences. >> Yeah, and I think part of that is that the community at large, you know women that are in the field they care about the women coming up and they want them to succeed and they want them to have every single opportunity so everybody's kind of invested in them and interested in nurturing and helping them along. So it does create this really, I don't know, positive environment, right. We always jokingly say there's a reason we call it a celebration. We don't call it a conference, we call it a celebration. >> Everyone's a delegate too. I like that too. It's not attendees. And that's come up on a number of interviews too where when people have reflected back on people that have helped them along the way the payback, it's almost like it's been scripted is, OK, now you need to do this to the next person to really pay it forward and that again is a consistent theme that we have also heard from the keynotes earlier today, that it is about paying it forward, which is funny because sometimes you'll hear kind of a catty women reputation that they're trying to keep each other down, you know that that was kind of a classic, another hurdle that women had to face in the professional world that they weren't necessarily supporting each other, and that is not the case here, at all. It's very much a supportive environment. >> We may have a self selection bias going on here >> Well that's okay >> But I think there's nothing but support for one another in the community and everybody recognizes that we all have to pull together. >> Right. So interesting times at AnitaB.org, the organization that puts on Grace Hopper, change of leadership, we had Brenda on, so kind of a fresh face, fresh energy. Telle. I'm going to see if I can get her a horse tomorrow to ride off into the sunset if the sun breaks out here in Orlando, so it's exciting times. It's a time of transition, always a little kind of mixed feelings, but also tremendous excitement and kind of new chapter, if you will. So tell us a little bit about what's going on at AnitaB.org >> It's an incredibly exciting time. First of all, a nod to Telle. She's been at the helm for 15 years. She's seen an incredible amount of growth. She took this on really as a favor to her dear dear friend and then took on the mantle upon Anita's death. She's done an amazing job. She's certainly an icon within the community overall I'm sure you'll hear more from her in the future. It's been great. Brenda is new fresh face. She has accomplished some pretty amazing things with the Chicago Public Schools. She's really invigorated to step into this space and it's great having her. I think the thing that you really, hopefully you got from her when she was here is that she is just this incredibly genuine person. She's lived the experience. She can relate to what all of these women have gone through. She has this profound commitment to make things different. And just the biggest heart that you could possibly imagine. >> Right, and a little chip on her shoulder. Which she talked about and it's come up time and time again where when people are told they can't do things for a lot of people, there's no greater motivator than being told you can't do this, you shouldn't do this, you're not qualified. She said "I've been in positions "where I've been told I can't be there." So to have that little chip on her shoulder I think is a real driver for many folks. >> It is. We recently did a little written piece it hasn't actually gotten published yet where we kind of went back and looked at a lot of the language that we're hearing today about women are not biologically suited to be programmers or women aren't this or women aren't that. And we did this little let's look back historically, and when did women get certain rights, and one of the things that really stood out for us in looking at that was women weren't admitted to all of the premier colleges, Harvard, Yale, whatever, until the 1960s. Which is kind of shocking when you think about it. >> Yeah, it's like yesterday practically. >> The language that was used at the time was almost identical to the language that we're hearing today. Women weren't biologically suited for this, it's really not in the right makeup for them. And yet today, half the students at those schools are women. And women have earned their way there. I just kind of laughingly say it's like deja vu all over again. We've heard all of that. we've heard people tell us you can't do that, you shouldn't do that, no you're not welcome and I think women they're not going to back down. >> It's interesting times too, because the classic gates, the distribution gate, the financing gate, the investment gate, to build companies, to create companies, they've all been broken down and kudos or serendipitously computing is the vehicle that's broken down a lot of those traditional barriers. You used to be, you couldn't start a new company because you had to get into distribution. You couldn't be a writer, there was only a few newspaper editors that controlled everything. That's all completely changed and now ubiquitous distribution, democratization of software, open source, you don't have to raise a bunch of money and buy a bunch of servers. It's so much easier to go out and affect the world and there's no easier way to affect the world than writing a great piece of software. >> Yeah, I think you're spot on on that. There's so much more leverage out there for people that want to start something. I believe that will accrue to the advantage of women. I always end up saying women are going to do great things and then I have to stop myself and say they are doing great things today. I think we've seen that already with some of the keynotes. Fei-Fei Li, and yet you hear her story as an immigrant and as a mother, as an Asian woman. She's had her challenges and she told her personal story not like with a woe is me but with a clear eye towards the things that she had to overcome to get where she was. >> And a lot of hard work, just a flat out a lot of hard work including working at the dry cleaners while she was going to school. >> Yeah, exactly. And yet there she is, one of the leaders in that space and doing incredible things. So I think you're starting to hear more and more about those women. I think they've always been there. I think that we just don't hear as much about them. So, this venue is such a great opportunity for us to hear more of their stories. >> Right, and we learned a lot about that last year with the whole Hidden Figures thing that we had on here as well as the movie and that was again, in the 60's. So we're in October, it's kind of the end the year. As you look forward to 2018, what are some of your priorities for AnitaB.org? I won't put you on the hook to tell us where Grace Hopper will be next year. You can tell us if you want. >> I saw it posted at Pride someplace. >> Is it posted already? >> I saw that and it was like whoa, I didn't know that was in the wild yet. >> But give us kind of a look. What are your priorities for next year? I know AVI Local has been a thing that's been growing over time. What are you kind of looking at as you're doing your 2018 planning? >> As amazing as it is to have 18,000 people here, which just blows our mind, we hope it continues to grow. We also know that no matter how big this conference gets that not everyone will be able to come here for a variety of reasons and so building out the local communities and making it so that, empowering those local communities to have smaller versions of this type of thing and growing this movement to a bigger scale that really encompasses all the women that are out there because even though people here say "Oh, 18,000 women, holy cow" it's a tip of the iceberg. There are thousands and thousands more women out there, we know there are. We really want to find a way to reach every single one of them and bring support and connection and inspiration to every single one of them so that they stay in the field, can achieve their dreams and their highest potential. That will have an impact on them and on the communities they live in. That's really what our focus is. >> Well, Elizabeth, again. Always great to see you. Congratulations on a phenomenal conference. And thank for inviting us to be here. It's really, honestly, one of our favorite places to be. >> We love having you here. I would just end by saying all you people out there, come join us next year. >> There you go. Are you going to tell them where? >> Houston, Texas. >> In Houston. - Back in Houston. >> Good barbecue. Ask me, I'll tell you where to go. Alright, she's Elizabeth Ames. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2017. Thanks for watching. [Upbeat Techno Music]

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, we are here at Dell EMC World. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Paul Gillin. This is going to be a great segment, I'm so excited to have you both on the program. We're here welcoming Carolyn Rodz, she is the founder of Circular Board, and Elizabeth Gore, who is an entrepreneur in residence here at Dell. Welcome both to the program. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Thanks for having us. >> So this week you unveiled Alice. This is the first AI based virtual advisor for women entrepreneurs. I want get to talking about Alice, meeting Alice, but first I want to just ask you Elizabeth, you're an entrepreneur in residence at Dell, explain to us how that program works. >> Sure, so it's my great pleasure to have worked the last almost three years now with Dell and now Dell Technologies. Every couple of years Michael Dell and his leadership team choose an individual who have a very specific focus to support eco-systems for entrepreneurs. So we use all of the muscle we have across Dell Technologies to support policy for entrepreneurs, in the 180 countries that we live and work. Also what are the best eco-systems and platforms that help entrepreneurs scale. And one of them is the Circular Board and we've been really proud to partner with them for the last two years because they use a digital platform that is very scalable and women are only getting 3% of venture capital in the US. So access to capital, mentorship, networks is really critical and so we're really excited to partner with, what you'll hear about Alice, to help solve that problem. >> So Carolyn, Elizabeth just laid out the problem, that women are just not getting a lot of easy dollars, there's not a lot of support, not a lot of encouragement, there's just a lack of community. So talk about Alice and how she fills this gap. >> Yeah so we hear a lot about the problem, and realized it was time to find a solution. And that's what Alice is all about, so Alice was started as, really the answer to what I wish I would've had when I started my first company years ago and what we saw over and over again with women everywhere. And that was integration into the existing start-up eco-system, and connectivity to resources like events, experts, content and tools to help their companies grow. And that's exactly what Alice does, is connect them based on their unique company profile and their real time needs. >> And you can go to helloalice.com and you can start using it right away. >> Exactly. >> So what does it do? How does it work? >> Yeah so a founder enters in their profile based on their industry, stage of growth and their location. Alice curates needs based on what they're looking for today. So if they're looking for a technology solution to a problem that they're having it will connect her to the right resources for her company to grow. If she needs an attorney to help her, who is the right attorney based on where she is and the industry that she's in. So for every person the answers are different, and as Alice populates she gets smarter and smarter about a founder's needs and starts to use predictive learning to make smarter responses for her. >> How do you ensure Alice will be used only by women? I mean, can anybody access this resource? >> Yeah she's open to everybody, she was really coded with gender in mind so from the start we looked at what were the unique needs of women, how did they learn and absorb information best. And that was were we started to create the platform but certainly she's open to everybody. The more the merrier. >> So give us some use cases. I know that you just unveiled her yesterday, a big deal. But talk about how you see an entrepreneur in, say, a small town somewhere in America using Alice and finding success. >> Well you look at what's happening today, it's a very fragmented eco-system. So there are great events, there are wonderful accelerators and programs around the world happening. But if you're in a place that doesn't have these resources you're certainly removed from the eco-system, or even if you are in a city that has great resources, lots of times when you're starting a company you aren't familiar with what exists and so it's a huge learning curve to just start to navigate that space. And that's where Alice comes in. It's how to help founders navigate the eco-system and also connect with expertise that may not be in their own location. So if you're in New York and working on a technology platform there are great resources available in Silicon Valley that you're missing out on and our goal is to bridge that gap. >> You mentioned Carolyn, Alice is something you wish you had had when you were starting your business. As entrepreneurs can you talk about some of the biggest challenges that you faced. >> Sure, one of the things that when you're launching a company is there are, as Carolyn said, a lot of resources out there but you're time poor as an entrepreneur. Your heads are down, you're just trying to get profitable, make sure your product is correct. So what is really critical is that this is curated exactly for that moment in the life cycle of a business. So am I just getting started, am I raising my series A or am I pre-IPO entrepreneur? I want the resources in that moment that are right for me. And what has not worked, Dell has really focused on a lot of platforms but you can't just take an existing platform and turn it pink for women, that just doesn't work. So we actually were really proud that Pivotal, one of our family of companies within Dell, did thousands of hours of user testing with the Circular Board team and actually looked at how do women access information, how do they access capital, why aren't so many of them integrating into existing systems? So all the way down to the code they've been really thinking about how to integrate women into these existing systems so they will raise their capital, get the mentorship, tap into supplier diversity programs, and that's why we think helloalice.com is going to be a huge change agent. >> I think we can agree the venture capital world, particularly in Silicon Valley, is very male dominated. There's an old boy's network there. Have you sensed that there is a willingness to change? That that attitude is changing at last? >> Yeah I think so. There's certainly some unconscious bias but women are starting companies now twice as fast as their male counterparts, so anyone who's really into-- >> Woah, where'd that number come from? >> The Chamber of Commerce announced that last year. >> Wow. >> Now unfortunately their fail rates are still unusually high and only 2% are making over a million dollars, however for an enterprise company like Dell or for a venture capital firm, I want to see those companies that are coming out rapidly and have the best products. So yes, they're starting to really understand and look at how do we interact with women in their companies. However what Alice will do is provide a great pipeline for the best companies to those venture firms. And you've already thought about that a lot. >> Yeah and we've also seen there's a huge desire from all of these resources to get more women involved in their programs. There's a huge desire from the women to get more involved and what we're trying to do is filter down to who are the right women for the right programs at the right time and make those connections. >> So tell me more, when you look ahead and at what Alice could possibly do for a generation and future generations of female entrepreneurs, what's your greatest hope? What's your greatest wish? >> Re-writing the statistics around women entrepreneurs ultimately and boosting economies, creating jobs and solving the big problems of the world. But what's exciting is, you think about the process right now where you turn to experts for advice, and imagine being able to scale that expertise, not only to the people who know that person, or where those personal relationships exist, but being able to provide access to every entrepreneur whether they reside in a rural community in Africa or in the middle of Silicon Valley. >> Where does the data come from? What are you plugging into on the back end? >> We relied heavily on partnerships and experts to find the best of the best. It isn't a numbers game in terms of quantity of content, but really looking for the very best answers to specific problems that founders have. So we've partnered with organizations like The Kauffman Foundation and Case Foundation and Small Business Administration and Department of Commerce and companies like Dell who have been really supportive in terms of getting us really quality content to help solve these problems. >> Dell, as you started talking about how Michael Dell is a big believer in this and obviously he's an entrepreneur himself. But can you tell us a little bit more about what skin Dell has in this game. >> Sure, absolutely. So we look at this as a business case for us, a business imperative as well as a social and economic comparative. So it is important to us to be the in-the-end solutions provider now that we have a suite of companies that can do that, from the day I buy my first laptop and try to launch my company, all the way up to commercial and enterprise solutions. So if we are really going to be that we have to be in front of these entrepreneurs. So Alice is way for us to get in front of fast growth entrepreneurs, provide the technology, the resources and the knowledge we have to be in front of them. So for us that's really important business. For the social and economic case, women put 90% of their income back into their communities and families and so for us, Michael and I have always believed that entrepreneurs are the ones solving the major social problems out there with solutions that are even more sustainable sometimes than Government, or most time frankly. So for us it's also a social imperative and women just happen to be the ones that are getting stuff done, both for their communities, their family and their business. >> So there's a doing good element to this-- >> Sure absolutely, absolutely. >> You both talked about a lot of entrepreneurs, and there's so much start-up activity, everybody's an entrepreneur these days. What are the characteristics of the successful ones? What do you look for Elizabeth? >> So I'm a very founder first person. I see a lot of great ideas but that founder has to have the drive, the know-how and the make it happen attitude. I also think that founders, it's really important that they understand technology. Every company is a technology company now, it doesn't matter what industry you're in. So first, do they have that drive, do they have that how-to attitude, do they surround themselves with people that are going to help their company scale 'cause every founder has weaknesses, do they understand the technology eco-system? So those are part of the things that I look for. I'm sure you might have different. >> Yeah those certainly, and I think that persistence. It is really hard to be heard among a very cluttered eco-system, and where we see the greatest success are those founders that continue to put forward and keep asking the questions and keep enlisting the help that they need to find the solutions that they're looking for. >> Before we let you go, what's your piece of advice for women out there who's starting a business, maybe struggling a bit. Beyond hook up with Alice, what's your best advice for her? >> Build the right team, find a co-founder, enlist the right investors to help provide the capital that you need, get the right partners on board and really look beyond just your employees as your team, but really look, who is the circle that you're enlisting behind your business to make it happen. >> And I would say it's really important to put purpose into profit. So really understand, while you're going after that profitability, why did you start in the first place, what is the purpose that your company is going after? On those hard days put that back into your focus. So put purpose into profit. >> And let's be sure to tell people how they get in touch, how they find Hello Alice, Twitter, a website and all. >> Visit helloalice.com to register and participate in Alice. And we want to welcome everybody, not just entrepreneurs but also experts and investors and advisors as well. And then online you can follow us at Alice Connects on Twitter and Facebook. >> Carolyn, Elizabeth, thanks so much. >> Pleasure, thank you all. >> Thanks so much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Paul Gillin, we will have more from Dell EMC World just after this.

(bright music) (crowd talking indistinctly in the background) >> Hey guys, welcome back to Detroit, Michigan. theCUBE is live at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2022. You might notice something really unique here. Lisa Martin with our newest co-host of theCUBE, Savannah Peterson! Savannah, it's great to see you. >> It's so good to be here with you (laughs). >> I know, I know. We have a great segment coming up. I always love talking couple things, cars, one, two, with companies that have been around for a hundred plus years and how they've actually transformed. >> Oh yeah. >> Ford is here. You have a great story about how you, about Ford. >> Ford brought me to Detroit the first time. I was here at the North American International Auto Show. Some of you may be familiar, and the fine folks from Ford brought me out to commentate just like this, as they were announcing the Ford Bronco. >> Satish: Oh wow. >> Which I am still lusting after. >> You don't have one yet? >> For the record. No, I don't. My next car's got to be an EV. Although, ironically, there's a Ford EV right behind us here on set today. >> I know, I know. >> Which we were both just contemplating before we went live. >> It's really shiny. >> We're going to have to go check it out. >> I have to check it out. Yep, we'll do that. Yeah. Well, please welcome our two guests from Ford, Satish Puranam, is here, The Technical Leader at Cloud and Rebecca Risk, Principal Architect, developer relations. We are so excited to have you guys on the program. >> Clearly. >> Thanks for joining us. (all laugh) >> Thank you for having us. >> I love you're Ford enthusiasts! Yeah, that's awesome. >> I drive a Ford. >> Oh, awesome! Thank you. >> I can only say that's one car company here. >> That's great. >> Yes, yes. >> Great! Thank you a lot. >> Thank you for your business! >> Absolutely. (all laugh) >> So, Satish, talk to us a little bit about- I mean I think of Cloud as a car company but it seems like it's a technology company that makes cars. >> Yes. Talk to us about Ford as a Cloud first, technology driven company, and then we're going to talk about what you're doing with Red Hat and Boston University. >> Yeah, I'm like everything that all these cars that you're seeing, beautiful right behind us it's all built on, around, and with technology, right? So there's so much code goes into these cars these days, it's probably, it's mind boggling to think that probably your iPhones might be having less code as opposed to these cars. Everything from control systems, everything is code. We don't do any more clay models. Everything is done digital, 3D, virtual reality and all that stuff. So all that takes code, all of that takes technology. And we have been in that journey for the last- since 2016 when we started our first mobile app and all that stuff. And of late we have been like, heavily invested in Google. Moving a lot of these experiences, data acquisition systems AI/ML modeling for like all the autonomous cars. It's all technology and like from the day it is conceived, to the day it is marketed, to the day when you show up for a servicing, and hopefully soon how you can buy and you know, provide feedback to us, is all technology that drives all of this stuff. So it's amazing for us to see everything that we go and immerse ourselves in the technology. There is a real life thing that we can see what we all do for it, right? So- >> Yes, we're only sorry that our audience can't actually see the car, >> Yep. >> but we'll get some B-roll for you later on. Rebecca, talk a little bit about your role. Here we are at KubeCon, Savannah and I and John were talking when we went live this morning, that this is huge. That the show floor is massive, a lot bigger than last year. The collaboration and the spirit of the community is not only alive and well, as we heard in the keynote this morning, it's thriving. >> Yeah. >> Talk about developer relations at Ford and what you are helping to drive in your role. >> Yeah, so my team is all about helping developers work faster with different platforms that my team curates and produces, so that our developers don't have to deal with all of the details of setting up their environments to actually code. And we have really great people, kind of the top software developers in the company, are part of my team to produce those products that other people can use, and accelerate their development. And we have a great relationship with the developers in the company and outside with the different vendor relationships that we have, to make sure that we're always producing the next platform with the next tech stack that our developers will want to continue to use to produce the really great products that we are all about making at Ford. >> Let's dig in there a little bit because I'm curious and I suspect you both had something to do with it. How did you approach your Cloud Native transformation and how do you evaluate new technologies for the team? >> It's sometimes- many a times I would say it's like dogfooding and like experimentation. >> Yeah. Isn't anything in innovation a lot of- >> Yeah, a lot of experimentation. We started our, as I said, the Cloud Native journey back in 2016 with Cloud Foundry and things, technologies around that. Soon realized, that there was like a lot of buzz around that time. Twelve-Factor was a thing, Stateless was a thing. And then all those Stateful needs to drive the Stateless. So where do we do that thing? And the next logical iteration was Kubernetes was bursting upon the scene at that time. So we started doing a lot of experimentation. >> Like the Kool-Aid man, burst on the Kubernetes scene- >> Exactly right. >> Through the wall. >> So, the question is like, why can't we do? I think we were like crazy enough to say that Kubernetes people are talking about our serverless or Twelve-Factor on Kubernetes. We are crazy enough to do Stateful on Kubernetes and we've been doing it successfully for five years. So it's a lot about experimentation. I think good chunk of experiments that we do do not yield the results that we get, but many a times, some of them are like Gangbusters. Like, other aspects that we've been doing of late is like partnering with Becky and rest of the organization, right? Because they are the people who are like closest to the developers. We are somewhat behind the scenes doing some things but it is Becky and the rest of the architecture teams who are actually front and center with the customers, right? So it is the collaborative effort that we've been working through past few years that has been really really been useful and coming around and helping us to make some of these products really beautiful. >> Yeah, well you make a lot of beautiful products. I think we've all, I think we've all seen them. Something that I think is really interesting and part of why I was so excited for this interview, and kind of nudged John out, was because you've been- Ford has been investing in technology in a committed way for decades and I don't think most people are aware of that. When I originally came out to Dearborn, I learned that you've had a head of VR who happens to be a female. For what it's worth, Elizabeth, who's been running VR for you for two and a half decades, for 25 years. >> Satish: Yep. >> That is an impressive commitment. What is that like from a culture perspective inside of Ford? What is the attitude around innovation and technology? >> So I've been a long time Ford employee. I just celebrated my 29th year. >> Oh, wow! >> Congratulations! >> Wow, congrats! That's a huge deal. >> Yeah, it's a huge deal. I'm so proud of my career and all that Ford has brought to me and it's just a testament. I have many colleagues like me who've been there for their whole career or have done other things and come to Ford and then spent another 20 years with us because we foster the culture that makes you want to stay. We have development programs to allow you to upscale and change your role and learn new things and play with the new technologies that people are interested in doing and really make an impact to our community of developers at Ford or the company itself and the results that we're delivering. So to have that, you know, culture for so many years that people really love to work. They love to work with the people that they're working with. They love to stay engaged and they love the fact that you can have many different careers within the same umbrella, which we call the "blue oval". And that's really why I've been there for so long. I think I probably had 13 very unique and different jobs along the way. It's as if I left, and you know shopped around my skills elsewhere. But I didn't ever have to leave the company. It's been fabulous. >> The cultural change and adoption of- embracing modern technology- Cloud Native automotive software is impressive because a lot of historied companies, you guys have been there a long time, have challenges with that because it's really hard to get an entire moving, you'll call it the blue oval, to change and adapt- >> Savannah: I love that. >> and be willing to experiment. So that that is impressive. Talk about, you go by Becky, so I'll call you Becky, >> Rebecca/Becky: Yeah. >> The developer culture in terms of the developers really being the center of the nucleus of influencing the direction in which the company's going. I imagine that they probably are fairly influential. >> Yeah, so I had a very- one of the unique positions I held was a culture change for our department, Information Technology in 2016. >> Satish: Yeah. >> As the teacher was involved with moving us to the cloud, I was responsible- >> You are the transformation team! This is beautiful. I love this. We've got the right people on the show. >> Yeah, we do. >> I was responsible for changing the culture to orient our employees to pay attention to what do we want to create for tomorrow? What are the kind of skills we need to trust each other to move quickly. And that was completely unique. >> Satish: Yeah. >> Like I had men in the trenches delivering software before that, and then plucked out because they wanted someone, you know who had authentic experience with our development team to be that voice. And it was such a great investment that Ford continues to do is invest in our culture transformation. Because with each step forward that we do, we have to refine what our priorities are. And you do that through culture transformation and culture management. And that's been, I think really, the key to our successful pivots that we've made over the last six years that we've been able to continue to refine and hone where we really want to go through that culture movement. >> Absolutely. I think if I could add another- >> Please. >> spotlight to it is like the biggest thing about Ford has been among various startup-like culture, right? So the idea is that we encourage people to think outside the box, right? >> Savannah: Or outside the oval? >> Right! (laughs) >> Lisa: Outside the oval, yes! >> Absolutely! Right. >> So the question is like, you can experiment with various things, new technologies and you will get all the leadership support to go along with it. I think that is very important too and like we can be in the trenches and talk about all of these nice little things but who the heck would've thought that, you know Kubernetes was announced in 2015, in late 2016, we have early dev Kubernetes clusters already running. 2017, we are live with workloads on Kubernetes! >> Savannah: Early adopters over here. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> I'm like all of this thing doesn't happen without lot of foresight and support from the leadership, but it's also the grassroot efforts that is encouraged all along to be on the front end of all of these things and try different things. Some of them may not work >> Savannah: Right. >> But that's okay. But how do we know we are doing something, if you're not failing? We have to fail in order to do something, right? >> Lisa: I always say- >> So I think that's been a great thing that is encouraged very often and otherwise I would not be doing, I've done a whole bunch of stuff at Ford. Without that kind of ability to support and have an appetite for, some of those things would not have been here at all. >> I always say failure is not a bad F-word. >> Satish: Yep. >> Savannah: I love that. >> But what you're talking about there is kind of like driving this hot wheel of experimentation. You have to have the right culture and the mindset- >> Satish: Absolutely. >> to do that. Try fail, move on, learn, iterate, go. >> Satish: Correct. >> You guys have a great partnership with Red Hat and Boston University. You're speaking about that later today. >> Satish: Yes. >> Unpack that for us. What, from a technical perspective, what are you doing and what's it resulting in? >> Yeah, I think the biggest thing is Becky was talking about as during this transformation journey, is lot has changed in very small amount of time. So we traditionally been like, "Hey, here's a spreadsheet of things I need you to deliver for me" to "Here is a catalog of things, you can get it today and be successful with it". That is frightening to several of our developers. The goal, one of the things that we've been working with Q By Example, Red Hat and all the thing, is that how can we lower the bar for the developers, right? Kubernetes is great. It's also a wall of YAML. >> It's extremely complex, number one complaint. >> The question is how can I zero on? I'm like, if we go back think like when we talk about in cars with human-machine interfaces, which parts do I need to know? Here's the steering wheel, here's the gas pedal, or here's the brake. As long as you know these two, three different things you should be fairly be okay to drive those things, right? So the idea of some of the things with enablementing we are trying to do is like reduce that barrier, right? Reduce- lower the bar so that more people can participate in it. >> One of the ways that you did that was Q By Example, right, QBE? >> Satish: Yes, Yes. >> Can you tell us a little bit more about that as you finish this answer? >> Yeah, I think the biggest thing with Q By Example is like Q By Example gives you the small bite-sized things about Kubernetes, right? >> Savannah: Great place to start. >> But what we wanted to do is that we wanted to reinforce that learning by turning into a real world living example app. We took part info, we said, Hey, what does it look like? How do I make sure that it is highly available? How do I make sure that it is secure? Here is an example YAML of it that you can literally verbatim copy and paste into your editor and click run and then you will get an instant gratification feedback loop >> I was going to say, yeah, they feel like you're learning too! >> Yes. Right. So the idea would be is like, and then instead of giving you just a boring prose text to read, we actually drop links to relevant blog posts saying that, hey you can just go there. And that has been inspirational in terms of like and reinforcing the learning. So that has been where we started working with the Boston University, Red Hat and the community around all of that stuff. >> Talk a little bit about, Becky, about some of the business outcomes. You mentioned things like upskilling the workforce which is really nice to hear that there's such a big focus on it. But I imagine too, there's more participation in the community, but also from an end customer perspective. Obviously, everything Ford's doing is to serve the end customers >> Becky: Right. How does this help the end customer have that experience that they really, these days, demand with patience being something that, I think, is gone because of the pandemic? >> Right? Right. So one of the things that my team does is we create the platforms that help Accelerate developers be successful and it helps educate them more quickly on appropriate use of the platforms and helps them by adopting the platforms to be more secure which inherently lead to the better results for our end customers because their data is secure because the products that they have are well created and they're tested thoroughly. So we catch all those things earlier in the cycle by using these platforms that we help curate and produce. And that's really important because, like you had mentioned, this steep learning curve associated with Kubernetes, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> So my team is able to kind of help with that abstraction so that we solve kind of the higher complex problems for them so that developers can move faster and then we focus our education on what's important for them. We use things like Q By Example, as a source instead of creating that content ourselves, right? We are able to point them to that. So it's great that there's that community and we're definitely involved with that. But that's so important to help our developers be successful in moving as quickly as they want and not having 20,000 people solve the same problems. >> Satish: (chuckles) Yeah. >> Each individually- >> Savannah: you don't need to! >> and sometimes differently. >> Savannah: We're stronger together, you know? >> Exactly. >> The water level rises together and Ford is definitely a company that illustrates that by example. >> Yeah, I'm like, we can't make a better round wheel right? >> Yeah! So, we have to build upon what we have already been built ahead of us. And I think a lot of it is also about how can we give back and participate in the community, right? So I think that is paramount for us as like, here we are in Detroit so we're trying to recruit and show people that you know, everything that we do is not just old car and sheet metal >> Savannah: Combustion. >> and everything and right? There's a lot of tech goes and sometimes it is really, really cool to do that. And biggest thing for us is like how can we involve our community of developers sooner, earlier, faster without actually encumbering them and saying that, hey here is a book, go master it. We'll talk two months later. So I think that has been another journey. I think that has been a biggest uphill challenge for us is that how can we actually democratize all of these things for everybody. >> Yeah. Well no one better to try than you I would suspect. >> We can only try and hope everything turns out well, right? >> You know, as long as there's room for the bumpers on the lane for if you fail. >> Exactly. >> It sounds like you're driving the program in the right direction. Closing question for you, what's next? Is electric the future? Is Kubernetes the future? What's Ford all in on right now, looking forward? (crowd murmuring in the background) >> Data is the king, right? >> Savannah: Oh, okay, yes! >> Data is a new currency. We use that for several things to improve the cars improve the quality of autonomous driving Is Level 5 driving here? Maybe will be here soon, we'll see. But we are all working towards it, right? So machine learning, AI feedback. How do you actually post sale experience for example? So all of these are all areas that we are working to. We are, may not be getting like Kubernetes in a car but we are putting Kubernetes in plants. Like you order a Marquis or you order a Bronco, you see that here. Here's where in the assembly line your car is. It's taking pictures. It's actually taking pictures on Kubernetes platform. >> That's pretty cool. >> And it is tweeting for you on the Twitter and the social media platform. So there's a lot of that. So it is real and we are doing it. We need more help. A lot of the community efforts that we are seeing and a lot of the innovation that is happening on the floor here, it's phenomenal. The question is how we can incorporate those things into our workflows. >> Yeah, well you have the right audience for that here. You also have the right attitude, >> Exactly. >> the right appetite, and the right foundation. Becky, last question for you. Top three takeaways from your talk today. If you're talking to the developer community you want to inspire: Come work for us! What would you say? >> If you're ready to invest in yourself and upskill and be part of something that is pretty remarkable, come work for us! We have many, many different technical career paths that you can follow. We invest in our employees. When you master something, it's time for you to move on. We have career growth for you. It's been a wonderful gift to me and my family and I encourage everyone to check us out careers.ford.com or stop by our booth if you're happen to be here in person. >> Satish: Absolutely! >> We have our curated job openings that are specific for this community, available. >> Satish: Absolutely. >> Love it. Perfect close. Nailed pitch there. I'm sure you're all going to check out their job page. (all laugh) >> Exactly! And what you talked about, the developer experience, the customer experience are inextricably linked and you guys are really focused on that. Congratulations on all the work that you've done. We got to go get a selfie with that car girl. >> Yes, we do. >> Absolutely. >> We got to show them, we got to show the audience what it looks like on the inside too. We'll do a little IG video. (Lisa laughs) >> Absolutely. >> We will show you that for our guests and my cohost, Savannah Peterson. Lisa Martin here live in Detroit with theCUBE at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2022. The one and only John Furrier, who you know gets FOMO, is going to be back with me next. So stick around. (all laugh) (bright music)

>>Good morning. Welcome back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. We have two live sets here. We've got over a hundred guests on the program this week with our live sets of remote sets, talking about the next decade in cloud innovation. And I'm pleased to be welcoming back. One of our cube alumni timbers. She ran the founder and CPO of Jenny-O to the program. Tom is going to be talking about why 2022 is the year open data architectures surpass the data warehouse Timur. Welcome back to the >>Cube. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. It's >>Great to be here at a live event in person, my goodness, sitting side by side with guests. Talk to me a little bit about before we kind of dig into the data lake house versus the data warehouse. I want to, I want to unpack that with you. Talk to me about what what's going on at Jemena you guys were on the program earlier this summer, but what are some of the things going on right now in the fall of 2021? >>Yeah, for us, it's a big year of, uh, a lot of product news, a lot of new products, new innovation, a company's grown a lot. We're, uh, you know, probably three times bigger than we were a year ago. So a lot of, a lot of new, new folks on the team and, uh, many, many new customers. >>It's good, always new customers, especially during the last 22 months, which have been obviously incredibly challenging, but I want to unpack this, the difference between a data lake and data lake house, but I love the idea of a lake house by the way, but talk to me about what the differences are similarities and how customers are benefiting. Sure. Yeah. >>I think you could think of the lake house as kind of the evolution of the lake, right? So we have, we've had data lakes for a while. Now, the transition to the cloud made them a lot more powerful and now a lot of new capabilities coming into the world of data lakes really make the, that whole kind of concept that whole architecture, much more powerful to the point that you really are not going to need a data warehouse anymore. Right. And so it kind of gives you the best of both worlds, all the advantages that we had with data lakes, the flexibility to use different processing engines, to have data in your own account and open formats, um, all those benefits, but also the benefits that you had with warehouses, where you could do transactions and get high performance for your, uh, BI workloads and things like that. So the lake house makes kind of both of those come together and gives you the, the benefits of both >>Elizabeth talk to me about from a customer lens perspective, what are some of the key benefits and how does the customer go about from say they've got data warehouses, data lakes to actually evolving to the lake house. >>You know, data warehouses have been around forever, right? And you know, there's, there's been some new innovation there as we've kind of moved to the cloud, but fundamentally there are very close and very proprietary architecture that gets very expensive quickly. And so, you know, with a data warehouse, you have to take your data and load it into the warehouse, right. You know, whether that's a, you know, Terra data or snowflake or any, any other, uh, you know, database out there, that's, that's what you do. You bring the data into the engine. Um, the data lake house is a really different architecture. It's one where you actually, you're having, you have data as its own tier, right? Stored in open formats, things like parquet files and iceberg tables. And you're basically bringing the engines to the data instead of the data to the engine. And so now all of a sudden you can start to take advantage of all this innovation that's happening on the same set of data without having to copy and move it around. So whether that's, you know, Dremio for high performance, uh, BI workloads and SQL type of analysis, a spark for kind of batch processing and machine learning, Flink for streaming. So lots of different technologies that you can use on the, on the same data and the data stays in the customer's own account, right? So S3 effectively becomes their new data warehouse. >>Okay. So it can imagine during the last 22 months of this scattered work from Eddie, and we're still in this work from anywhere environment with so much data being generated at the edge of the edge, expanding that bringing the engines to the data is probably now more timely than ever. >>Yeah. I think the, the growth in data, uh, you see it everywhere, right? That that's the reason so many companies like ourselves are doing so well. Right? It's, it's, there's so much new data, so many new use cases and every company wants to be data-driven right. They all want to be, you know, to, to democratize data within the organization. Um, you know, but you need the platforms to be able to do that. Right. And so, uh, that's very hard if you have to constantly move data around, if you have to take your data, you know, which maybe is landing in S3, but move it into, you know, subsets of it into a data warehouse. And then from there move, you know, substance of that into, you know, BI extracts, right? Tableau extracts power BI imports, and you have to create cubes and lots of copies within the data warehouse. There's no way you're going to be able to provide self-service and data democratization. And so really requires a new architecture. Um, and that's one of the main things that we've been focused on at Dremio, um, is really taking the, the, the lake house and the lake and making it, not just something that data scientists use for, you know, really kind of advanced use cases, but even your production BI workloads can actually now run on the lake house when you're using a SQL technology. Like, and then >>It's really critical because as you talked about this, you know, companies, every company, these days is a data company. If they're not, they have to be, or there's a competitor in the rear view mirror that is going to be able to take over what they're doing. So this really is really critical, especially considering another thing that we learned in the last 22 months is that there's no real-time data access is no longer, a nice to have. It's really an essential for businesses in any organization. >>I think, you know, we, we see it even in our own company, right? The folks that are joining the workforce now, they, they learn sequel in school, right. They, they, they don't want to report on their desk, printed out every Monday morning. They want access to the database. How do I connect my whatever tool I want, or even type sequel by hand. And I want access to the data and I want to just use it. Right. And I want the performance of course, to be fast because otherwise I'll get frustrated and I won't use it, which has been the status quo for a long time. Um, and that's basically what we're solving >>The lake house versus a data warehouse, better able to really facilitate data democratization across an organization. >>Yeah. Because there's a big, you know, people don't talk a lot about the story before the story, right. With, with a data warehouse, the data never starts there. Right. You typically first have your data in something like an S3 or perhaps in other databases, right. And then you have to kind of ETL at all into, um, into that warehouse. And that's a lot of work. And typically only a small subset of the data gets ETL into that data warehouse. And then the user wants to query something that's not in the warehouse. And somebody has to go from engineering, spend, you know, a month or two months, you know, respond to that ticket and wiring up some new ETL, uh, to get the data in. And so it's a big problem, right? And so if you can have a system that can query the data directly in S3 and even join it with sources, uh, outside of that things like your Oracle database, your, your SQL server database here, you know, Mongo, DB, et cetera. Well, now you can really have the ability to expose data to your, to your users within the company and make it very self-service. They can, they can query any data at any time and get a fast response time that that's, that's what they need >>At self-service is key there. Speaking of self-service and things that are new. I know you guys dromio cloud launched that recently, new SAS offering. Talk to me about that. What's going on there. Yeah. >>We want to stream your cloud. We, we spent about two years, um, working on that internally and, uh, really the goal was to simplify how we deliver all of the, kind of the benefits that we've had in our product. Right. Sub-second response times on the lake, a semantic layer, the ability to connect to multiple sources, but take away the pain of having to, you know, install and manage software. Right. And so we did it in a way that the user doesn't have to think about versions. They don't have to think about upgrades. They don't have to monitor anything. It's basically like running and using Gmail. Right? You log in, you, you get to use it, right. You don't have to be very sophisticated. There's no, not a lot of administration you have to do. Um, it basically makes it a lot, a lot simpler. >>And what's the adoption been like so far? >>It's been great. It's been limited availability, but we've been onboarding customers, uh, every week now. Um, many startups, many of the world's largest companies. So that's been, that's been really exciting actually. >>So quite a range of customers. And one of the things, it sounds like you want me to has grown itself during the pandemic. We've seen acceleration of, of that, of, of, uh, startups, of a lot of companies, of cloud adoption of migration. What are some, how have your customer conversations changed in the last 22 months as businesses and every industry kind of scrambled in the beginning to, to survive and now are realizing that they need to modernize, to thrive and to be competitive and to have competitive advantage. >>I think I've seen a few different trends here. One is certainly, there's been a lot of, uh, acceleration of movement to the cloud, right? With, uh, uh, you know, how different businesses have been impacted. It's required them to be more agile, more elastic, right. They don't necessarily know how much workload they're gonna have at any point in time. So having that flexibility, both in terms of the technology that can, you know, with Dremio cloud, we scale, for example, infinitely, like you can have, you know, one query a day, or you can have a thousand queries a second and the system just takes care of it. Right. And so that's really important to these companies that are going through, you know, being impacted in various different ways, right? You had the companies, you know, the Peloton and zooms of the world that were business was exploding. >>And then of course, you know, the travel and hospitality industries, and that went to zero, all of a sudden it's been recovering nicely, uh, you know, since then, but so that flexibility, um, has been really important to customers. I think the other thing is just they've realized that they have to leverage data, right? Because in parallel to this pandemic has been also really a boom in technology, right? And so every industry is being disrupted by new startups, whether it's the insurance industry, the financial services, a lot of InsureTech, FinTech, you know, different, uh, companies that are trying to take advantage of data. So if you, as a, as an enterprise are not doing that, you know, that's a problem. >>It is a problem. It's definitely something that I think every business and every industry needs to be very acutely aware of because from a competitive advantage perspective, you know, there's someone in that rear view mirror who is going to be focused on data. I have a real solid, modern data strategy. That's going to be able to take over if a company is resting on its laurels at all. So here we are at reinvent, they talked a lot about, um, I just came off of Adam psyllid speeds. So Lipsey's keynote. But talk to me about the jumbo AWS partnership. I know AWS its partner ecosystem is huge. You're one of the partners, but talk to me about what's going on with the partnership. How long have you guys been partners? What are the advantages for your customers? >>You know, we've been very close partners with AWS for, for a number of years now, and it kind of spans many different parts of AWS from kind of the, uh, the engineering organization. So very close relationship with the S3 team, the C2 team, uh, you know, just having dinner last night with, uh, Kevin Miller, the GM of S3. Um, and so that's kind of one side of things is really the engineering integration. You know, we're the first technology to integrate with AWS lake formation, which is Amazon's data lake security technology. So we do a lot of work together on kind of upcoming features that Amazon is releasing. Um, and then also they've been really helpful on the go-to-market side of things on the sales and marketing, um, whether it's, you know, blogs on the Amazon blog, where their sales teams actually promoting Dremio to their customers, um, uh, to help them be successful. So it's really been a good, good partnership. >>And there they are, every time I talked to somebody from Amazon, we always talk about their kind of customer first focus, their customer obsession sounds like you're, there's deep alignment on from the technical engineering perspective, sales and marketing. Talk to me a little bit about cultural alignment, because when you're going into customer conversations, I imagine they want to see one unified team. >>Yeah. You know, I think Amazon does have that customer first and obviously we do as well. And we, you know, we have to right as a, as a startup for us, you know, if a customer has a problem, the whole company will jump on that problem. Right. So that's where we call it customer obsession internally. Um, and I think that's very much what we've seen, you know, with, with AWS as well as the desire to make the customer successful comes before. Okay. How does this affect a specific Amazon product? Right? Because anytime a customer is, uh, you know, using Dremio on AWS, they're also consuming many different AWS services and they're bringing data into AWS. And so, um, I, I think for both of us, it's all about how do we solve customer problems and make them successful with their data in this case. Yup. >>Solving those customer problems is the whole reason that we're all here. Right. Talk to me a little bit about, um, as we have just a few more minutes here, we, when we hear terms like, future-proof, I always want to dig in with, with folks like yourself, chief product officers, what does it actually mean? How do you enable businesses to create these future-proof data architectures that are gonna allow them to scale and be really competitive? Sure. >>So yeah, I think many companies have been, have experienced. What's known as lock-in right. They, they invest in some technology, you know, we've seen this with, you know, databases and data warehouses, right? You, you start using that and you can really never get off and prices go up and you find out that you're spending 10 times more, especially now with the cloud data warehouses 10 times more than you thought you were going to be spending. And at that point it becomes very difficult. Right? What do you do? And so, um, one of the great things about the data lake and the lake house architecture is that the data stays stored in the customer's own account. Right? It's in their S3 buckets in source formats, like parquet files and iceberg tables. Um, and they can use many different technologies on that. So, you know, today the best technology for, for, you know, sequel and, you know, powering your, your mission critical BI is, is Dremio, but tomorrow they might be something else, right. >>And that customer can then take that, uh, uh, that company can take that new technology point at the same data and start using it right. That they don't have to go through some really crazy migration process. And, you know, we see that with Teradata data and Oracle, right? The, the, the old school vendors, um, that's always been a pain. And now it is with the, with the newer, uh, cloud data warehouses, you see a lot of complaints around that, so that the lake house is fundamentally designed. Especially if you choose open source formats, like iceberg tables, as opposed to say a Delta, like you're, you're really, you know, future-proofing yourself. Right. Um, >>Got it. Talk to me about some of the things as we wrap up here that, that attendees can learn and see and touch and feel and smell at the jumbo booth at this reinvent. >>Yeah. I think there's a, there's a few different things they can, uh, they can watch, uh, watch a demo or play around with the dremmel cloud and they can talk to our team about what we're doing with Apache iceberg. It's a iceberg to me is one of the more exciting projects, uh, in this space because, you know, it's just created by Netflix and apple Salesforce, AWS just announced support for iceberg with that, with their products, Athena and EMR. So it's really kind of emerging as the standard table format, the way to represent data in open formats in S3. We've been behind iceberg now for, for a while. And so that to us is very exciting. We're happy to chat with folks at the booth about that. Um, Nessie is another project that we created an source project for, uh, really providing a good experience for your data, where you have version control and branching, and kind of trying to reinvent, uh, data engineering, data management. So that's another cool project that there, uh, we can talk about at the booth. >>So lots of opportunity there for attendees to learn even thank you, Tomer for joining me on the program today, talking about the difference between a data warehouse data lake, the lake house, did a great job explaining that Jamil cloud what's going on and how you guys are deepening that partnership with AWS. We appreciate your time. Thank you. Thanks for having me. My pleasure for Tomer. She ran I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube. Our coverage of AWS reinvent continues after this.

>>Hi, Felix. Great to be here. >>Likewise. Um, so when I started reading about data mesh, I think about a year ago, I found myself the more I read about it, the more I find myself agreeing with other principles behind data mesh, it actually took me back to almost the starting of Colibra 13 years ago, based on the research we were doing on semantic technologies, even personally my own master thesis, which was about domain driven ontologies. And we'll talk about domain-driven as it's a key principle behind data mesh, but before we get into that, let's not assume that everybody knows what data measures about. Although we've seen a lot of traction and momentum, which is fantastic to see, but maybe if you could start by talking about some of the key principles and, and a brief overview of what data mesh, uh, Isabella of >>Course, well, they're happy to, uh, so Dana mesh is an approach is a new approach. It's a decentralized, decentralized approach to managing and accessing data and particularly analytical data at scale. So we can break that down a little bit. What is analytical data? Well, analytical data is the data that fuels our reporting as a business intelligence. Most importantly, the machine learning training, right? So it's the data, that's, it's an aggregate view of historical events that happens across organizations, many domains within organizations, or even beyond one organization, right? Um, and today we manage, uh, this analytical data through very centralized solutions. So whether it's a data lake or data warehouse or combinations of the two, and, uh, to be honest, we have kind of outsource the accountability for it, to the data team, right? It doesn't happen within the domains. Uh, what we have found ourselves with is, uh, central button next. >>So as we see the growth in the scale of organizations, in terms of the origins of the data and in terms of the great expectations for the data, all of these wonderful use cases that are, that requires access to that, unless we're data, uh, we find ourselves kind of constraints and limited in agility to respond, you know, because we have a centralized bottleneck from team to technology, to architecture. So there's a mesh kind of is that looks at the past what we've done, accidental complexity that we've kind of created and tries to reimagine a different way of, uh, managing and accessing data that can truly scale as this origins of the data grows. As they become available within one organization, we didn't want a cloud or another, and it links down really the approach based on four principles. Uh, so I so far, I haven't tried to be prescriptive as exactly how you implement it. >>I leave that to Elizabeth, to the imaginations of the users. Um, of course I have my opinions, but, but without being prescriptive, I think there are full shifts that needs to happen. One is, uh, we need to start breaking down the, kind of this complex problem of accessing to data around boundaries that can allow this to scale out a solution. So boundaries that are, that naturally fits into that model or domains, right. Our business domain. So, so there's a first principle is the domain ownership of the data. So analytical data will be shared and served and accountable, uh, by the domains where they come from. And then the second dimension of that is, okay. So once we break down this, the ownership of the database on domains, how can we prevent this data siloing? So the second principle is really treating data as a product. >>So considering the success of that data based on the access and usability and the lifelong experience of data analysts, data scientists. So we talk about data as a product and that the third principle is to really make it possible feasible. We need to really rethink our data platforms, our infrastructure capabilities, and create a new set ourselves of capabilities that allows domain in fact, to own their data in fact, to manage the life cycle of their analytical data. So then self-serve daytime frustration and platform is the fourth principle. And the last principle is really around governance because we have to think about governance. In fact, when I first wrote it down, this was like a little kind of concern in, in embedded in what some of my texts and I thought about, okay, now to make this real, we need to think about securing and quality of the data accessibility of the data at scale, in a fashion that embraces this autonomous domain ownership. So we have to think about how can we make this real with competition of governance? How can we make those domains be part of the governance, federated governance, federally, the competition of governance is the fourth principle. So at insurance it's a organizational shift, it's an architectural change. And of course technology needs to change to get us to decentralize access and management of Emily's school data. >>Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense. If you want to scale, typically you have to think much more distributed versus centralized at we've seen it in other practices as well, that domain-driven thinking as well. I think, especially around engineering, right? We've seen a lot of the same principles and best practices in order to scale engineering teams and not make the same mistakes again, but maybe we can start there with kind of the core principles around that domain driven thinking. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? Why that is so important than the kind of data organizations, data functions as well? >>Absolutely. I mean, if you look at your organizations, organizations are complex systems, right? There are eight made of parts, which are basically domains functions of the business, your automation and your customer management, yourselves marketing. And then the behavior of the organization is the result of an intuitive, you know, network of dependencies and interactions with these domains. So if we just overlay data on this complex system, it does make sense to really, to scale, to bring the ownership and, um, really access to data right at the domain where it originates, right. But to the people who know that data best and most capable of providing that data. So to optimize response, to change, to optimize creating new features, new services, new machine learning models, we've got to kind of think about your call optimization, but not that the cost of global good. Right. Uh, so the domain ownership really talks about giving autonomy to the domains and accountability to provide their data and model the data, um, in a responsible way, be accountable for its quality. >>So no collect some of the empower them and localize some of those responsibilities, but at the same time, you know, thinking about the global goods, so what are they, how that domain needs to be accountable against the other domains on the mission? That's the governance piece covers that. And that leads to some interesting kind of architectural shifts, because when you think about not submission of the data, then you think about, okay, if I have a machine learning model that needs, you know, three pieces of the data from the different domains, I ended up actually distributing the computer also back to those domains. So it actually starts shifting kind of architectural as well. We start with ownership. Yeah, >>No, I think that makes a ton of sense, but I can imagine people thinking, well, if you're organizing, according to these domains, aren't gonna be going to grades different silos, even more silos. And I think that's where it second principle that's, um, think of data as a product and it comes in, I think that's incredibly powerful in my mind. It's powerful because it helps us think about usability. It helps us think about the consumer of that data and really packaging it in the right way. And as one sentence that I've heard you use that I think is incredibly powerful, it's less collecting, more connecting. Um, and can you elaborate on that a little bit? >>Absolutely. I mean the power and the value of the data is not enhanced, which we have got and stored on this, right. It's really about connecting that data to other data sets to aluminate new insights. The higher order information is connecting that data to the users, right. Then they want to use it. So that's why I think, uh, if we shift that thinking from just collecting more in one place, like whatever, and ability to connect datasets, then, then arrive at a different solution. So, uh, I think data as a product, as you said, exactly, was a kind of a response to the challenges that domain-driven siloing could create. And the idea is that the data that now these domains own needs to be shared with some accountability and incentive structure as a product. So if you bring product thinking to data, what does that mean? >>That means delighting the experience that there are users who are they, they're the data analysts, data scientists. So, you know, how can we delight their experience of their journey starts with a hypothesis. I have a question. Do I have right data to answer this question with a particular model? Let me discover it, let me find it if it's useful. Do I trust it? So really fascinated in that journey? I think we have two choices in that we have the choice of source of that data. The people who are really shouldn't be accountable for it, shrug off the responsibility and say, you know, I dumped this data on some event streaming and somebody downstream, the governance or data team will take care of a terror again. So it usable piece of information. And that's what we have done for, you know, half century almost. And, or let's say let's bring intention of providing quality data back to the source and make the folks both empower them and make them accountable for providing that data right at the source as a product. And I think by being intentional about that, um, w we're going to remove a lot of accidental complexity that we have created with, you know, labyrinth pipelines of moving data from one place to another, and try to build quality back into it. Um, and that requires, you know, architectural shifts, organizational shifts, incentive models, and the whole package, >>The hope is absolutely. And we'll talk about that. Federated computational governance is going to be a really an important aspect, but the other part of kind of data as a product next to usability is whole trust. Right? If you, if you want to use it, why is also trusts so important if you think about data as a product? >>Well, uh, I mean, maybe we turn this question back to you. Would you buy the shiniest product if you don't trust it, if you, if you don't trust where it comes from, can I use it? Is it, does it have integrity? I wouldn't. I think, I think it's almost irresponsible to use the data that you can trust, right. And the, really the meaning of the trust is that, do I know enough about this data to, to, for it, to be useful for the purpose that I'm using it for? So, um, I think trust is absolutely fundamental to, as a fundamental characteristics of a data as a product. And again, it comes back to breaching the gap between what the data user knows needs to know to really trust them, use that data, to find it, whether it's suitable and what they know today. So we can bridge that gap with, uh, you know, adding documentation, adding SLRs, adding lineage, like all of these additional information, but not only that, but also having people that are accountable for providing that integrity and those silos and guaranteeing. So it's really those product owners. So I think, um, it's just, for me, it's a non trust is a non-negotiable characteristic of the data as a product, like any other consumer product. >>Exactly. Like you said, if you think about consumer product, consumer marketplace is almost Uber of Amazon, of Airbnb. You have the simple rating as a very simple way of showing trust and those two and those different stakeholders and that almost. And we also say, okay, how do we actually get there? And I think data measure also talks a little bit about the roles responsibilities. And I think the importance overall of a, of a data product owner probably is aligned with that, that importance and trust. Yeah, >>Absolutely. I think we can't just wish for these good things happens without putting the accountability and the right roles in place. And the data product owner is just the starting point for us to stop playing hot potato. When it comes to, you know, who owns the data will be accountable for not so much. Who's the actual owner of that data because the owner of the data is you and me where the data comes really from, but it's the data product owner who's going to be responsible for the life cycle of this. They know when the data gets changed with consumers, meaning you feel as a new information, make sure that that gets carried out and maybe one day retire that data. So that long term ownership with intimate understanding of the needs of the user for that data, as well as the data itself and the domain itself and managing the life cycle of that, uh, I think that's a, that's a necessary role. >>Um, and then we have to think about why would anybody want to be a data product owner, right? What are the incentives we have to set up in the infrastructure, you know, in the organization. Um, and it really comes down to, I think, adopting prior art that exists in the product ownership landscape and bring it really to the data and assume the data users as the, as the customers, right. To make them happy. So our incentives on KPIs for these people before they get product on it needs to be aligned with the happiness of their data users. >>Yep. I love that. The alignment again, to the consumer using things like we know from product management, product owner of these roles and reusing that for data, I think that makes it makes a ton of sense. And it's a good leeway to talk a little about governance, right? We mentioned already federated governance, computational governance at we seeing that challenge often with our customers centralizing versus decentralizing. How do we find the right balance? Can you talk a little bit about that in the context of data mesh? How do we, how do we do this? >>Yeah, absolutely. I think the, I was hoping to pack three concepts in the title of the governance, but I thought that would be quite mouthful. So, uh, as you mentioned, uh, the kind of that federated aspects, the competition aspects, and I think embedded governance, I would, if I could add another kind of phrasing there and really it's about, um, as we talked about to how to make it happen. So I think the Federation matters because the people who are really in a position listed this, their product owners in a position to provide data in a trustworthy, with integrity and secure way, they have to have a stake in doing that, right. They have to be accountable, not just for their little domain or a big domain, but also they have to have an accountability for the mesh. So some of the concerns that are applied to all of the data front, I've seen fluid, how we secure them are consistently really secure them. >>How do we model the data or the schema language or the SLO metrics, or that allows this, uh, data to be interoperable so we can join multiple data products. So we have to have, I think, a set of policies that are really minimum set of policies that we have to apply globally to all the data products and then in a federated fashion, incentivize the data product owners. So have a stake in that and make that happen because there's always going to be a challenge in prioritizing. Would I add another few attributes? So my data sets to make my customers happy, or would I adopt that this standardized modeling language, right? They have to make that kind of continuous, um, kind of prioritization. Um, and they have to be incentivized to do both. Right. Uh, and then the other piece of it is okay, if we want to apply these consistent policies, across many data products and the mesh, how would it be physically possible? >>And the only way I can see, and I have seen it done in service mesh would be possible is by embedding those policies as competition, as code into every single data product. And how do we do that again, platform has a big part of it. So be able to have this embedded policy engines and whatever those things are into the data products, uh, and to, to be able to competition. So by default, when you become a data product, as part of the scaffolding of that data product, you get all of these, um, kind of computational capabilities to configure your, your policies according to the global policies. >>No, that makes sense. That makes, that makes it on a sense. That makes sense. >>I'm just curious. Really. So you've been at this for a while. You've built this system for the 13 years came from kind of academic background. So, uh, to be honest, we run into your products, lots of our clients, and there's always like a chat conversation within ThoughtWorks that, uh, do you guys know about this product then? So and so, oh, I should have curious, well, how do you think data governance tehcnology then skip and you need to shift with data mesh, right. And, and if, if I would ask, how would your roadmap changes with database? >>Yeah, I think it's a really good question. Um, what I don't want to do is to make, make the mistake that Venice often make and think of data mesh as a product. I think it's a much more holistic mindset change, right? That that's organization. Yes. It needs to be a kind of a platform enablement component there. And we've actually, I think authentically what, how we think about governance, that's very aligned with some of the principles and data measures that federate their thinking or customers know about going to communities domains or operating model. We really support that flexibility. I think from a roadmap perspective, I think making that even easier, uh, as always kind of a, a focus focus area for us, um, specifically around data measures are a few things that come to mind. Uh, one, I think is connectivity, right? If you, if you give different teams more ownership and accountability, we're not going to live in a world where all of the data is going to be stored on one location, right? >>You want to give people themes the opportunity and the accountability to make their own technology decisions so that they are fit for purpose. So I think whatever platform being able to really provide out of the box connectivity to a very wide, um, area or a range of technologies, I think is absolutely critical, um, on the, on the product as a or data as a product, thinking that usability, I think that's top of mind, uh, that's part of our roadmap. You're going to hear us, uh, stock about that tomorrow as well. Um, that data consumer, how do we make it as easy as possible for people to discover data that they can trust that they can access? Um, and in that thinking is a big part of our roadmap. So again, making that as easy as possible, uh, is a, is a big part of it. >>And, and also on the, I think the computation aspect that you mentioned, I think we believe in as well, if, if it's just documentation is going to be really hard to keep that alive, right? And so you have to make an active, we have to get close to the actual data. So if you think about a policy enforcement, for example, some things we're talking about, it's not just definition is the enforcement data quality. That's why we are so excited about our or data quality, um, acquisition as well. Um, so these are a couple of the things that we're thinking of, again, your, your, um, your, your, uh, message around from collecting to connecting. We talk about unity. I think that that works really, really well with our mission and vision as well. So mark, thank you so much. I wish we had more time to continue the conversation, uh, but it's been great to have a conversation here. Thank you so much for being here today and, uh, let's continue to work on that on data. Hello. I'm excited >>To see it. Just come to like.

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019 brought to you by UI path. Hello. We've already welcome to Las Vegas. This is day two of the year. >>Path forward conference UI path forward three. So what UI Pat does is they named their events one two three last year we were at Miami in the year before was one. Their North American event, which was in New York city. Here is three at the Bellagio hotel in in Las Vegas. 3000 people here for this rocket ship company growing revenues, they've got over $300 million in annual recurring revenue. That's up from 25 million in 2017 so you're talking about greater than 12 X increase in annual recurring revenues over 3000 employees. Now, Daniel Dienes, the CEO just named the industries the tech industry's latest billionaire. He's now dressing like a billionaire last year. He's in a tee shirt this year. He looks more like a more like a CEO. So we're going to be interviewing him later on today, but let's get right into it. The keynotes today comprised God Kirkwood who gave some predictions and that's her. >>I'm going to go, I'm going to talk about his predictions. I'm going to make some comments on those predictions and give you some thoughts of my own. Maybe throw in a few predictions of from Dave Vellante and then Craig LeClaire from Forrester gave a keynote. He was on the QBs today. Very knowledgeable analysts, probably one of the industry's top analysts, and I'll make some comments on some of the things he said. So let me get right into it. You got Kirkwood when you do these predictions, you know I put 'em out there. Of course it is smart. He's going to do these things and make them somewhat self-serving for RPA and UI path. So I'll make some comments on that as first one. One those was, there'll be a global economic downturn. I can't remember if he actually pinned a date, but I think he said it's in paint pending. >>Let's let's say 2020 he said that's good for RPA. Why would that be good for RPA? Because if there's an economic downturn, people are gonna want to get more. For less, and they're going to want to automate. They're gonna want to spend money and get fast ROI. And RPA potentially is a way to do that. It's not necessarily good news for low wage workers. They're doing mundane tasks. But nonetheless, he made the statement that it's good for our RPA. I would say this, I think a lot of this is going to depend on 2020 and the election in the United States as to what happens. I think it's very unclear right now. You saw the democratic debates last night. It's very clear that there's a, there's a swing to the left. Elizabeth Warren is, is kind of appears to be the front runner. So I would, I would make this prediction. >>I actually think Trump was gonna win the election. You know, don't hate me for saying that all you Trump haters, but I think whatever happens, maybe, maybe doesn't win the election. Maybe he wins the election and then, and then the subsequent election goes to the Democrats. But I think there's going to be a major swing back to the left. And I think that what that's gonna do, it's gonna open up the checkbooks and put more pressure on debt and I don't think there's a real issue right now of too fast economic growth of inflation. It's obviously something that economists watch, but if interest rates start rising back to the Clinton era levels, that means big trouble for the economy. But I don't see that necessarily happening in 2020 I think 2020 we'll see some moderation. I definitely think we're seeing less tech spending expected for Q four and I think that'll spill into 2020 based on the ETR and enterprise technology research data that we see. >>But I think it's actually a healthy pullback. I kind of agree with guy on that front. I actually think it is good for RPA. I think RPA is one of those sectors that you see in the ETR surveys that is gaining share relative to other tech spending and I think that will continue in any downturn. So I expect softness. However you define downturn, I don't think it's going to be falling off the cliff or a disaster, but I definitely think spending will be more tepid. Second thing he said is RPA will become the YouTube for automations. Think of YouTube as a container. I am not going to spend a lot of time on this one. A YouTube and RPA. I think no one's a consumer, but his, his analogy was around a container for automations, just like YouTube was a container for for video. I think they have aspirations to scale like YouTube, but if you look at RPA is a right now a back office, B2B business function and I think it'll stay that way for a couple of years. >>I'll make some statements on that. Automations will move from snowflake to snowball. What does he mean by that? Well today automations are all unique. Every company, and he made this statement feels like it's automations are a snowflake there. Everyone is different and what he's predicting is that over time these automations will become, there'd be more commonality in those automations. I think that's true. I do think while there are definite business processes that are unique to companies that there are a lot of similarities. Things like the UI path marketplace will allow people to share automations and I think there will be much more commonality. I think it's critical for scale. Number four, he said students entering the workforce will force employers to use automation. He didn't give a timeframe on this, but I'll tell you one thing. At a 2020 I've got three kids in college with two kids in college, one that's recently, recently graduated, who does something. >>Most kids in college have no clue what robotic process automation is, let alone what the acronym RPA stands for. So this is going to take some time. asked a hundred college kids what RPA is and I bet you maybe one or two have heard of it, even know what it is. So that's not happening today. I think that'll take probably another two cycles of graduate's before that really hits. We heard from the college of William and Mary yesterday where Tom Clancy and the college have partnered to really push in RPA into the curriculum and I think that's great. I'm going to talk, Tom Clancy's, a expert in the area of training and education that's going to take some time to bake out. So I would put that again. Guy didn't give a timeframe, but I would, I would say that's, that's five to eight years away. Number five, we'll continue to be surprised by the intelligence of machines and the stupidity of humans. >>Well, what he meant by that was there are some things that humans do that are repetitive, that are mistakes. They make the same mistakes over and over and over again, and machines won't necessarily do that. I do think this, that the gap or the number of things, if you make a list between the number of things that humans can do versus what robots can do with a physical or software robots, that gap is closing. There's no question about it. It's, you know, short few years ago, robots couldn't even climb stairs and now they can and you're, you're seeing things like chatbots improving. There's still, you know, a lot of them are still crap frankly, but, but you're going to see a lot of money go into chatbots. And so I do think that that gap will, will close. And I think it's, it's gonna, it's gonna come down to education and creativity in terms of the impact on job loss. >>And I'll make some comments about that in a moment. The six prediction, there are seven overall, so bear with me here. Automation will be discussed in the United nations con and the context will be jobs, wages and global economics. That's already happened. It's already happening. People are concerned about the impact on productivity and, and so, you know, that's a lock. The last one was consolidation amongst RPA vendors and automation led services will accelerate. I totally agree with this. He mentioned work fusion and amp works as two companies that are gonna. We're going to where we're going to see consolidation. We've already seen it. SAP got bought Contexto so you see in the big whales come into this market in four talks a lot about RPA. Anytime there's a fast growing software segment like RPA and as a leader like UI path, would you other companies all you know on their tail automation anywhere and blue prism automation anywhere in UI path have a ton of dough. >>You're going to see the big software companies say, wait a minute, I need a piece of that pie. Because software companies generally feel like every dime that's spent on software should go to them. That's the mentality of an SAP or an Oracle or even IBM and so either, unquestionably, you're going to see some consolidation. You mentioned service providers as well. Companies like symphony. I've been making a lot of comparisons this week between what I see in the UI path ecosystem and what I saw way back in the early part of this decade in the service now ecosystem. You had a company with Fritz like cloud sharper, which nobody ever heard of. They were a service management ITSMs expert and Accenture eventually snapped them up and came in. You saw DXC or CSC at the time do the same thing. And so I think you'll see the same thing here in this ecosystem. >>This ecosystem here is happening. It's buzzing, but it's got to grow and, and you're already seeing Deloitte and cognizant and E Y and PWC. The big guys could have jump in here. I often say that SIS love to eat at the trough and they know where the money is and the money appears to be in RPA because really there's so many screwed up processes inside companies. RPA is actually can give them a quick ROI. Now let me turn to some of my thoughts on this. Let me talk about the job impact of automation the vendors would have. You believe that it's all good, that people love this and and when they bring in software robots, it makes their lives better because they're doing less money, less money, less of the mundane tasks, and they're able to focus on new, more strategic things to our customer that we've talked to here in the cube. >>And also privately. This is true, people do love your software. Robots. When we were Jean younger yesterday from security benefit. If you Civ most excited she's ever been, you know, having said that, Craig Le Claire's research shows that over the next 10 years we will see a 16% job loss of jobs will disappear, rolls will disappear, and by the way, foresters at the low end of the spectrum of that forecast. Most forecast say 30 40% of jobs are going to get disrupted. I tend to believe that Craig's number is probably a better one at the lower end of that spectrum, but that's still a huge number. You are going to see unquestionably job impact from automation. Absolutely. No question in my mind. I think you're already seeing it now. Look it. Humans have always been replaced by machines, but for the first time in history we're seeing Keith cognitive functions replacing humans and as going to have a big disruptive impact on the workforce. >>And the other piece of this I would predict we are going to see a productivity boost. I think a significant productivity boost. Let me share you some data with the Bureau of labor statistics, which you know, you may look at that, you know in question some of their methodologies, but over the longterm, I think it's a viable metric from 2007 to 2018 productivity grew at 1.3% that's an anemic rate from from 1947 to 2018 productivity grew at 2.1% so Oh seven to 18 half the longterm productivity gain, 2000 to 2007 2.7% and then from, and then what we saw in Q one of 19 3.4% uptick in productivity. Is that sustainable? I think it is. I think we're now entering a, a new phase of productivity growth and I think it's gonna be driven by things like RPA and other automation. So that is going to have an impact back to the earlier statements on job loss. >>Okay. The other thing is I want to talk about the forecast, the market. Last year at UI path two in Miami, I said that I thought that forecast was low. They had like $4 billion by 2020 and I sort of called out Craig LaClaire on that, you know, and so I said this could be 10 billion by 2020 now he clarified that today up on stage. I was including services in, in my prediction, correct. Declares follows this market much more closely than I do. So I'll defer to him on, on on that. But he put in the services number and he showed the services to license ratio of around, you know, three X or so. But he actually had this very serial number about 10 billion by 2020 so I felt, felt good about that. That kind of bat my back of napkin prediction. I used to do this stuff at IDC for a living. >>So you know, actually got a little knack for that on an analog basis. Then he showed sort of his, his forecast for the market, you know, growing at a very linear rate. Now I'll say this, I think hot markets like RPA, they generally don't grow at a, at a, at a linear steady rate. If you look at some of the emerging forecasts that I, you know, for instance, IDC had in my years there, we would always have these linear like smooth growth forecasts. You know, some of those big markets, you know, think, you know, early days of the PC, the, the, the, the internet flash storage, you know, things of that nature. They tend to, these disruptive technologies tend to grow in an curve or an S curve. So what you see is sort of this momentum building where the market is being seeded. Know Gardner has RPA now in the trough of disillusionment. >>So you're seeing some of this, okay, the little engine that could, and then what you see is this steep part of the S curve growing and then after it explodes and hits escape velocity, it's sort of stretches out into maturity. And I think that's what you're going to see with RPA. But some things have to happen before that happens. And one is specifically the RPA has to move from the back office to the front office. It has to move from only really dealing with pretty simple, mundane tasks to more complicated automations. It's got to be able to deal with unstructured data. It's gotta be able to handle on attended or rather attended bots where you're injecting humans into the equation and you're actually using machine learning and artificial intelligence to to learn and then identify other areas of automation and actually have systems of agency that can act. >>In other words, a bot will call another bot that actually can complete a transaction and so you're going to see a lot of money spent here. This is a big chasm. I think that RPA has to cross. We're going to talk to Daniel DNAs about this. He's a big ticker. He's a go big or go home guy, and so I think those things I would predict those things actually are going to happen because you're going to see so much effort and money and emphasis put into AI and for competitive advantage that I actually think that RPA can lead that and then again come back to the consolidation. I think you will see some consolidation. I think you're seeing UI path. Try to take the lead automation anywhere is kind of pressing the lead if you will. Both companies have raised a couple of billion dollars if you combine them and I think the way this market shakes out is any and you're going to have some of the big whales come in like SAP. >>I think the way this happened is you're going to see one or two specialists emerge. I think UI path is on its way there automation anywhere as well and and the number one player is going to make a lot of money. The number two players going to do two. OK the number three player is going to struggle and everybody else is kinda be either break even or they're going to bundle it in like SAP as part of their overall portfolio and compete on that basis. So I would predict that UI path will maintain its lead. I think its got the culture to do that. I think automation anywhere also could company is going to keep pressing that lead and those should are two companies you know that you need to watch me. Interesting to see. Blue prism, I think they are somewhat under capitalized. They went to the public markets. >>The spending data actually shows all three of these companies as well as some of the legacy companies like Pega systems actually gaining could have more share relative to other initiatives. So I think even some of these legacy companies are going to continue to chug along and actually do pretty well in the business. But, but the real darling, you know, I think it's going to be UI path. All the bankers are hovering around earlier on this week trying to get their business. They know there's an IPO coming at some point. Again, we'll ask Daniel Dienes about that today. You have it. That's my intro. Some of my predictions. Some a guy Kirkwood's predictions. Wall-to-wall coverage on the cube today, day two at UI path forward three from Las Vegas. We'll be right back right after this short break.

>> Live from Boston Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Inforce 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to the live cube coverage here in Boston Massachusetts. This is theCUBE's coverage, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Special guest Shira Rubinoff, president of Prime Tech, Cybermind genius, VIP influencer. Love havin' her on. We are here at AWS re:Inforce, AWS inaugural event. Great to have you on, be host with us and to do more hosting and co-hosting with us as we bring the community cube to security. >> Excellent, I think this is the perfect conference to do that. >> Shira and Dave, so day one's in the books. We got another full day of coverage, a lot of action happening. I think the seminal point of this event is that you have Amazon Web Services. They already run the biggest event, re:Invent. They have summits all around the world. Some summits get huge numbers but this has been rebranded, re:Inforce, by design, this is not another summit, Dave, this is a game statement from Amazon. >> Well, Pat Gelsinger, several years ago, told us on theCube security's a do over, it's got to be reinvented and Amazon is reinforcing that message. And, rebuilding it from the ground up with developers and the security is code mindset. Your thoughts. >> Now certainly as technology advances, cloud security has to advance as well and the cloud is looking towards technology to know how to differentiate itself and continue to add to it and change up. And, as we talk about AWS, they secure the cloud and the customers have to secure in the cloud. Which is a very important piece because it almost lends itself. When people are talking about, how do you secure an environment and even if you look at organizations, there's a talk between the CIO, what's the role of a CIO and what's the role of a COO. Almost look at it like how AWS really positions itself. Securing the cloud, securing in the cloud, securing the industry itself, securing within the company. And, what AWS really has seen and really is doing is it's saying you got to work hand in hand, it has to be a partnership. And, a partnership is able to secure things much better than a one person. Because then you're putting the ownness on everybody and if everybody is actually thinking about security all the time, it's going to yield best security. >> And the things we heard, Shira, I want to get your thoughts on, encryption always on, everyone's watching, so, shared responsibility, these are the buzz words, reasoning. This is industry wide. I know you do a lot of traveling, do a lot of public speaking. You do a lot of work with some of the big companies and their transformations. What are you seeing? Because, you're out there getting the data, we got some data. What's the big trend, what's the macro trend right now, the most important story that needs to be told in this new reimagined security renaissance? >> Well, I think it's just that. I think that people are moving towards the cloud for the reasons of, one plus one equals three. You're going to have the security of the cloud and you're also going to have the security of the organization within the cloud. And the organizations are realizing today moving to the cloud they could have better overall security. So, that is the trend that I'm seeing, certainly from the larger companies out there and the smaller ones are building it from the ground up. They're saying, you know what, let's make it a solution that we're going to build, going right from day one and not putting band-aids on it to try to make it to secure after. So, they're really learning from the experts. >> Dave, I want to get your thoughts with Shira on this because all three of us do a lot of content. We make content for a living, we kind of think about that with users in mind, the audience. Well I overheard a couple of things at this event that I've been hearing at other events. Open ecosystems and the partner networks are developing. And so that makes a lot of sense, integration's a big part of security but I hear people saying, I want to meet more people, I wannna meet the person who runs, partners of that company. So, you have, I've seen for the first time a real hunger-- >> Yeah >> for social interaction at the events, more hunger for understanding who the other partners, not just what they sell-- >> You know what? >> but what's on their mind. >> So interesting, you bring that up and that's a very new piece we are seeing today. It used to be, this is my information and I'm not sharing it with you. I'm going to build something and you're going to have to guess what I'm doing because that's my secret sauce but companies were realizing that's not going to work. We need to collaborate, we need to share ideas. And the biggest companies are all banding together to share the best breed of technology and the best breed of way how to deal with security. Because, they realize that we're all trying to protect also from the same bad actors out there and they realize by collaborating, they're all stronger as a whole and stronger by themselves as well. So, this collaboration is a big deal and that's taking the trends forward >> Dave, what's your take on this? >> Well and it comes back to something we've talked about a lot today and over the years in theCube is this whole API economy. For decades, we've been trying to solve the distributed systems problem. You saw it in little pockets, obviously the internet, but it's in limited work loads. >> Amazon kind of did that. >> And Amazon has solved that problem. Massively scalable distributed systems and then, now it's okay, how do you secure it? So the shared responsibility model is very interesting and I think misunderstood. The number one problem we're hearing here, that customers are having is keeping up with Amazon because Amazon's moving at such a fast pace. That's so rare in the technology industry, where the vendors are always a little bit ahead of the customers but not light-years ahead. Amazon is just, like, pushing them out of the plane. And, so, I think the shared responsibility model is very important, I think it's misunderstood. >> Yes. >> I think people were expecting, oh, Amazon can take care of everything in the cloud and that's not the case. >> Correct. >> So-- >> Well if you're going to use the pushing out of the airplane analogy, you got to say, you got to make sure the parachute opens. >> Well. >> So when you pull the ripcord, this is what companies have to understand, that they got to be compatible with the way the architecture of cloud-native works and the right way to lift in shifts. So, there's a way to lift in shifts and there's a way not to lift in shifts. You can lift and shift infrastructure but you can't lift and shift entire workloads. >> Very true but also, making somebody responsible for their can of worms is important too. Because that also leads back to culture of the organization. If security is part of culture and they have responsibility as within the cloud that Amazon is pushing. You handle within the cloud, that's your wheelhouse, you do that, that's becoming something that becomes part of culture and is a everyday thing. Which, in turn I talk a lot about cyber-hygiene within organization, it's not just training, it's not just awareness, it's not just security and patching, and not just zero, there's also being aware of it and making it an everyday item, that has to be utilized. Amazon is right on the button with this. >> You know, I heard a phrase. >> Yeah. >> The best thing about doing these Cube interviews is that, you meet such smart people and learn a lot. But, I love the quote I heard from the co-founder of Sumo Logic. He was awesome and he said, "Process is a reflection of culture." And so in a digital transformation equation, which we all know, it's the cliche, people process technology. >> People process technology. >> People with talent gaps or skill gaps get it, technology plenty of tech, now, the process. >> Well, the process-- >> That's always the hardest nut to crack and most people won't give it up and they won't fight for it. >> Yeah. >> It's the most important. >> But, that's also the glue between the two. You're not going to have a secure environment if you're just dealing with security and you're not going to have a secure environment just dealing with the people. The process in the middle, the process, yes, the Canadian land of it. That's the glue between it. That's what makes it run and you have to get to that. As you were saying, you have to get to the process, you got to make that run well and then you nail the two together, that's full security. >> The other big thing here, not this conference but a theme that we've talked about for quite some time on theCube, is this notion of big tech. So it's been said that Amazon, Facebook, Google, maybe even Microsoft. Elizabeth Warren saying, break up big tech. Amazon, people have said, split AWS out from core Amazon retail. What do you guys think about that? Is that the right thing to do? >> No, I don't think it's the right thing to do. >> Why not? >> Like I said we had, Jimmy on earlier. They're not breaking any laws. And then, why would you want to take down what could be a competitive advantage for national security. >> Correct. >> AI is going to be, and machine learning, and the role of data is going to be a power source for good and also for safety. >> Of course. >> So why would you want to take the best companies, who are doing the best work, and handicap 'em, over one argument? That Facebook wasn't responsible in dealing with making billions of dollars in free cash flow. >> So the argument is-- >> And , in the election they broke democracy-- >> Okay, too big. That's not a good argument. >> No. >> Maybe, appropriating our data to sell more ads that should be looked at, don't you think? >> I just don't buy the tech for bad argument because, yes, some bad things have happened but the regulators and the law makers, you can't legislate what you don't understand, you can't regulate what you don't understand. So, as it's been coming out from the biggest minds in tech and in government, the law makers aren't smart enough yet. It's like they're in kindergarten, crayon outside the lines, they're tryin' to write. They don't even know what tech is, so. >> You know what, you've been taking about the Chernobyl, push the buttons, I feel like that's what public policy is putting forth. Just push the buttons now and blow it up. Rather, public policy should catch up, understand it and maybe set a framework and put in laws. So that we have a clear understanding. >> Our current government is like that scene in Chernobyl. >> Oh my god. >> That is exactly what's happening, Dave. You can apply that metaphor, just do it. >> The problem is there's no proper regulation yet. >> Right. >> You got to get everyone in the room and everybody has to agree, at least on a initial framework. We've started but we're no where near where we need to be. You have to look at safety of our nation and that's a big factor. I've gone to Congress, as a part of Cybersecurity Women, testifying for Congress and talking about this and they still don't have a handle. There's nobody who's running the ship. >> Describe what it was like there. >> Well, I went down with the executive woman for Women's Forum, which was an amazing group. We went down there, we talked to different people in Congress. They're very open to it and they realize that we really need to do something. The problem is it's very disorganized. Sadly, it's way too disorganized. Nobody knows who's calling the shots. There's a nice bunch of different groups that are working towards it but there's no one at the helm of it saying, all right, let's all fall into place and do it. Little pockets, doing little things, but not everybody banding together. That needs to change, that has to change. I'm hoping it's coming down to where it's going to be something. >> I think there's going to be a revolution in a positive way. Where again, back to my tech for good thing. I don't think people yet know how to articulate what tech for good is. There's plenty more use cases where tech could be used for good, than there are bad. Bad is always an early adopter before good. We've seen that in the web, the underbelly of multiple trends. But, the reality is, I see the bad as bad but I see so much more good going on that could be enabled. That's what I'm afraid of, that they litigate what's happening for bad and they screw the good. >> It's almost like technology, right? You have to be proactive, as well as reactive. Everybody is running to be reactive to a problem but no one was being proactive. Now, technology is understanding we have to be proactive, as well as reactive. Same like your saying, John, it has to happen from the front. >> All right, so, while you're here, I want to get you and Dave to weigh in on this, cause it's been near and dear to my heart for many years, over a decade. Humans and machines, this conversation's been discussed, here again, Dave, some of the smartest people in the industry are reiterating, Brian from, again, Sumo Logic, he's got a great view on this and there's others as well. The role of the human really is important, not just having machines do all this automation. It's not about job replacement, it's more the craft of creating outcomes that are going to be acceptable for defense, or for good, the human's critical. Your guys thoughts. >> Sure, so, we talk automation, right? People are afraid of that, they're saying, robots and machines are going to replace us. Not true. Downright it takes away menial tasks which will be giving jobs and actually creating jobs in a more meaningful way. I talk a lot about the human factors of technology and cybersecurity. Think about it, a human is developing technology to help a human, a human is using technology to hurt a human, what's the common factor? The human. We're dealing with people, they're not being replaced. There's always going to be humans there. So machines are going to help us with automation. It's going to help us with digital transformation, we'll throw the buzz words out there but they're actually meaningful, if you dial back and understand that. I think people are weary of it because they don't understand it. If they're not understanding, how it could actually help an organization, how it can be used right, then there's fear. So, we couple back to education. Education coupled with humans, machines, technology, we're going to have something very strong and really, really good. So, it's not something to be fearful of. It's something to educate yourself and be excited about and move along with technology, as it advances. >> Well, machines have always replaced humans, for various tasks. So, that's sort of natural. For the first time in history, we're replacing cognitive tasks and I think that's scares a lot of people. And, I think you're right on Shira, the answer is not to protect the past from the future, it's education. >> Correct. >> Because, innovation, we've talked about this, innovation comes from now a combination of things, it's not just Moore's law or new products that are coming out at some rapid pace. It's the combination of data, artificial intelligence, the cloud for scale. This combinatorial innovation is going to require new creativity, new thinking, and education is at the heart of that. So, I think the question is, what can public policy be to foster that? Are we teaching the right things? Is public policy and public and private partnerships fostering that type of innovation? And, so, I think there's reasons to be concerned in terms of productivity, impacts on wages, et cetera, et cetera. But, I'm an optimist, I think the future is very, very, bright. >> Okay, so, as we wrap down day one, great to have you on as a guest host, we're going to do a lot more coverage, so, we're going to be collaborating and we're going to initiate coverage of the security sector with theCube. You're going to start seeing us do a lot more events, distracting you from the noise, a lot more community involvement outreach, looking for participation and help from our friends, Cube alumni, the 8000 plus Cube alumni's that are out there, join us if you got some security chops, you know people in security have something to add, we're always open. We're here at re:Inforce. What's your guys thoughts here? I think it's a great event. I think it's going to be one of those moments, where we were present at creation, again, for another big wave, it's coming. Your thoughts about re:Inforce. >> Well, I think re:Inforce has found it's niche. I think it's needed. I think cloud security is being embraced. I think there's a real need for it. And, I think just highlighting those actions, that their taking is very much needed and we're going to see a lot more out of re:Inforce, for sure. >> Yeah, I agree, I mean critical mass here. I guess 8000 or so people that care about security, specifically care about cloud security, it's just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger. >> I mean, I was impressed by, first of all, that great cloud security across the board. I was really impressed by the amount of heavy hitters that are here and it's the heavy hitters that aren't the big exec brand names, the CEO of this company. You had the working CEOs of the startups, CEOs of the startups, the key biz dev people, the key marketing people-- >> CECOs >> and the CECOs are here, because they're investing. >> That's the pain point, they're feeling like they know. >> They're investing together and they're building out, in real time, it's really fast, a community around cloud security. >> So, it's interesting. So, you know, Andy Jassy's not here. You don't see Theresa. But, what you do see, is the CECO saying, I'm betting my business on the cloud, I can't scale without the cloud. I have to be at this show. And, your seeing, maybe, it's a little bit of Andy and Theresa, let go to grow and then sort of pyramid out. That innovation. >> Well, I saw Jassy at Public Sector Summit. I should of asked him this-- >> They can't be anywhere. >> I inferred from his response, when I did ask him if he's coming, is that in looking at how they're executing, they don't need the big guns here because the team's doing it. It's one of those, when you have organic chemistry coming together. You don't want the big execs being go do it. >> Sure >> You got to let it foster on it's own and that's why I'm impressed by the people here because they're the ones that are putting the sparks of creativity together, they're putting deals together, relationships are forming. That's how organic community is built. >> And, I don't think the people here want to hear, frankly, from Andy. They can hear from Andy at re:Invent. And, so, what they want to hear is the substance that they heard in the key notes today >> Security, call security. >> those are some serious-- >> Well for an inaugural event, this is amazing, right? For the sheer size of it, for a first time event is amazing and having the heavy hitters, like you said, really invested, and time, people don't have time. And to actually invest their time here and want to be here and want to learn and want to share. That speaks volumes. >> And, that's not to say Andy Jassy doesn't have substance. His key notes are among the best and there always-- >> But, you know, he's scripted >> super substantive >> But, here's the thing-- >> But, when it comes to security deep dives, you don't want to hear from him. You want to hear from somebody like Shmidt today. >> Well, some public information that I found out, that's now public is that there are a 100,000 security subscriptions in AWS marketplace. >> Wow. >> One million subscriptions paid for in AWS marketplace, as a whole. 100,000 plus security software buys there. >> Wow. >> Okay. That's huge. >> Yes >> Huge for a little cottage industry going on called Cloud Security. >> Look at the rate the industry's growing. Look at Cisco, we were just at Cisco a couple weeks ago. Cisco's a huge company, 40 billion dollar company. Their security practice is growing 21% a year. I mean, that's huge for a company that's growing basically single digits. >> Well, we'll have Josh on, sorry go ahead. >> Yeah, no, I said, just looking at all these large companies that we're all talking to and that we're dealing with, some that I'm consulting to. People are moving to the cloud and they're saying, that one of the big reasons or the reason, is for extra and more leveled security. So, I think cloud is going to be taking the forefront and I think it's going to be much bigger than people really think. >> And, customers are telling us, they want more innovation from the security vendor community and, again, that comes from cloud. The data comes from cloud, comes from machine intelligence. You put those things together-- >> Shira, great to have you on. Dave, as always profound insight, taking a red eye, you're an all day warrior. Energizer bunny. Cube coverage here, AWS re:Inforce, day one. Day two tomorrow, thanks for watching. >> Thank you. (techno music)

>> Live from San Francisco, California, it's theCUBE covering the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hi everybody, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the IBM Chief Data Officer Event. We're here at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco at the Centric Hyatt Hotel. This is the 10th anniversary of IBM's Chief Data Officer Summits. In the recent years, anyway, they do one in San Francisco and one in Boston each year, and theCUBE has covered a number of them. I think this is our eighth CDO conference. I'm Dave Vellante, and theCUBE, we like to go out, especially to events like this that are intimate, there's about 140 chief data officers here. We've had the chief data officer from AstraZeneca on, even though he doesn't take that title. We've got a panel coming up later on in the day. And I want to talk about the evolution of that role. The chief data officer emerged out of kind of a wonky, back-office role. It was all about 10, 12 years ago, data quality, master data management, governance, compliance. And as the whole big data meme came into focus and people were realizing that data is the new source of competitive advantage, that data was going to be a source of innovation, what happened was that role emerged, that CDO, chief data officer role, emerged out of the back office and came right to the front and center. And the chief data officer really started to better understand and help companies understand how to monetize the data. Now monetization of data could mean more revenue. It could mean cutting costs. It could mean lowering risk. It could mean, in a hospital situation, saving lives, sort of broad definition of monetization. But it was really understanding how data contributed to value, and then finding ways to operationalize that to speed up time to value, to lower cost, to lower risk. And that required a lot of things. It required new skill sets, new training. It required a partnership with the lines of business. It required new technologies like artificial intelligence, which have just only recently come into a point where it's gone mainstream. Of course, when I started in the business several years ago, AI was the hot topic, but you didn't have the compute power. You didn't have the data, you didn't have the cloud. So we see the new innovation engine, not as Moore's Law, the doubling of transistors every 18 months, doubling of performance. Really no, we see the new innovation cocktail as data as the substrate, applying machine intelligence to that data, and then scaling it with the cloud. And through that cloud model, being able to attract startups and innovation. I come back to the chief data officer here, and IBM Chief Data Officer Summit, that's really where the chief data officer comes in. Now, the role in the organization is fuzzy. If you ask people what's a chief data officer, you'll get 20 different answers. Many answers are focused on compliance, particularly in what emerged, again, in those regulated industries: financial service, healthcare, and government. Those are the first to have chief data officers. But now CDOs have gone mainstream. So what we're seeing here from IBM is the broadening of that role and that definition and those responsibilities. Confusing things is the chief digital officer or the chief analytics officer. Those are roles that have also emerged, so there's a lot of overlap and a lot of fuzziness. To whom should the chief data officer report? Many say it should not be the CIO. Many say they should be peers. Many say the CIO's responsibility is similar to the chief data officer, getting value out of data, although I would argue that's never really been the case. The role of the CIO has largely been to make sure that the technology infrastructure works and that applications are delivered with high availability, with great performance, and are able to be developed in an agile manner. That's sort of a more recent sort of phenomenon that's come forth. And the chief digital officer is really around the company's face. What does that company's brand look like? What does that company's go-to-market look like? What does the customer see? Whereas the chief data officer's really been around the data strategy, what the sort of framework should be around compliance and governance, and, again, monetization. Not that they're responsible for the monetization, but they responsible for setting that framework and then communicating it across the company, accelerating the skill sets and the training of existing staff and complementing with new staff and really driving that framework throughout the organization in partnership with the chief digital officer, the chief analytics officer, and the chief information officer. That's how I see it anyway. Martin Schroeder, the senior vice president of IBM, came on today with Inderpal Bhandari, who is the chief data officer of IBM, the global chief data officer. Martin Schroeder used to be the CFO at IBM. He talked a lot, kind of borrowing from Ginni Rometty's themes in previous conferences, chapter one of digital which he called random acts of digital, and chapter two is how to take this mainstream. IBM makes a big deal out of the fact that it doesn't appropriate your data, particularly your personal data, to sell ads. IBM's obviously in the B2B business, so that's IBM's little back-ended shot at Google and Facebook and Amazon who obviously appropriate our data to sell ads or sell goods. IBM doesn't do that. I'm interested in IBM's opinion on big tech. There's a lot of conversations now. Elizabeth Warren wants to break up big tech. IBM was under the watchful eye of the DOJ 25 years ago, 30 years ago. IBM essentially had a monopoly in the business, and the DOJ wanted to make sure that IBM wasn't using that monopoly to hurt consumers and competitors. Now what IBM did, the DOJ ruled that IBM had to separate its applications business, actually couldn't be in the applications business. Another ruling was that they had to publish the interfaces to IBM mainframes so that competitors could actually build plug-compatible products. That was the world back then. It was all about peripherals plugging into mainframes and sort of applications being developed. So the DOJ took away IBM's power. Fast forward 30 years, now we're hearing Google, Amazon, and Facebook coming under fire from politicians. Should they break up those companies? Now those companies are probably the three leaders in AI. IBM might debate that. I think generally, at theCUBE and SiliconANGLE, we believe that those three companies are leading the charge in AI, along with China Inc: Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, et cetera, and the Chinese government. So here's the question. What would happen if you broke up big tech? I would surmise that if you break up big tech, those little techs that you break up, Amazon Web Services, WhatsApp, Instagram, those little techs would get bigger. Now, however, the government is implying that it wants to break those up because those entities have access to our data. Google's got access to all the search data. If you start splitting them up, that'll make it harder for them to leverage that data. I would argue those small techs would get bigger, number one. Number two, I would argue if you're worried about China, which clearly you're seeing President Trump is worried about China, placing tariffs on China, playing hardball with China, which is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I think it's a good thing because China has been accused, and we all know, of taking IP, stealing IP essentially, and really not putting in those IP protections. So, okay, playing hardball to try to get a quid pro quo on IP protections is a good thing. Not good for trade long term. I'd like to see those trade barriers go away, but if it's a negotiation tactic, okay. I can live with it. However, going after the three AI leaders, Amazon, Facebook, and Google, and trying to take them down or break them up, actually, if you're a nationalist, could be a bad thing. Why would you want to handcuff the AI leaders? Third point is unless they're breaking the law. So I think that should be the decision point. Are those three companies, and others, using monopoly power to thwart competition? I would argue that Microsoft actually did use its monopoly power back in the '80s and '90s, in particular in the '90s, when it put Netscape out of business, it put Lotus out of business, it put WordPerfect out of business, it put Novell out of the business. Now, maybe those are strong words, but in fact, Microsoft's bundling, its pricing practices, caught those companies off guard. Remember, Jim Barksdale, the CEO of Netscape, said we don't need the browser. He was wrong. Microsoft killed Netscape by bundling Internet Explorer into its operating system. So the DOJ stepped in, some would argue too late, and put handcuffs on Microsoft so they couldn't use that monopoly power. And I would argue that you saw from that two things. One, granted, Microsoft was overly focused on Windows. That was kind of their raison d'etre, and they missed a lot of other opportunities. But the DOJ definitely slowed them down, and I think appropriately. And if out of that myopic focus on Windows, and to a certain extent, the Department of Justice and the government, the FTC as well, you saw the emergence of internet companies. Now, Microsoft did a major pivot to the internet. They didn't do a major pivot to the cloud until Satya Nadella came in, and now Microsoft is one of those other big tech companies that is under the watchful eye. But I think Microsoft went through that and perhaps learned its lesson. We'll see what happens with Facebook, Google, and Amazon. Facebook, in particular, seems to be conflicted right now. Should we take down a video that has somewhat fake news implications or is a deep hack? Or should we just dial down? We saw this recently with Facebook. They dialed down the promotion. So you almost see Facebook trying to have its cake and eat it too, which personally, I don't think that's the right approach. I think Facebook either has to say damn the torpedoes. It's open content, we're going to promote it. Or do the right thing and take those videos down, those fake news videos. It can't have it both ways. So Facebook seems to be somewhat conflicted. They are probably under the most scrutiny now, as well as Google, who's being accused, anyway, certainly we've seen this in the EU, of promoting its own ads over its competitors' ads. So people are going to be watching that. And, of course, Amazon just having too much power. Having too much power is not necessarily an indication of abusing monopoly power, but you know the government is watching. So that bears watching. theCUBE is going to be covering that. We'll be here all day, covering the IBM CDO event. I'm Dave Vallente, you're watching theCUBE. #IBMCDO, DM us or Tweet us @theCUBE. I'm @Dvallente, keep it right there. We'll be right back right after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> From Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Covering Actifio 2019 Data Driven. (upbeat techno music) Brought to you by Actifio. >> Hello everyone and welcome to Boston and theCUBE's special coverage of Actifio Data Driven 19. I'm Dave Vellante. Stu Miniman is here. We've got a special guest, John Furrier is in the house from from Palo Alto. Guys, theCUBE we love to go out on the ground, you know, we go deep. We're here at this data theme, right? We were there in the early days, John, you called me up and say, "Get your butt here, we're going to cover the first of Doop World". And since then things have moved quite fast. Everybody thought, you know, Hadoop Big Data was going to take over the world. Nobody even uses that term anymore, right? It's kind of, now it's AI, and machine intelligence, and block chain, and everything else. So what do you think is happening? Did the early Big Data days fail? You know, Frank Genus this morning called it The experimentation phase. >> I mean, I don't really think Frank has a good handle on what's going on in my opinion, cause I think it's not an experimentation, it's real. That was a wave that was essentially the beginning of, not an experimentation, of realization and reality that data, unstructured data in particular was real and relevant. Hadoop looked good off the tee, mill the fairway as we say, but the thing about the Hadoop ecosystem is that validated big data. Every financial institution jumped on it. Everyone who knew anything about data or had data issues or had a lot of data, knew the value. It's just that the apparatus to build via Hadoop was too expensive. In comes Cloud computing at scale, so, as Cloud was accelerating, you look at the Amazon Web Services Revenue Chart you can almost see the D mark where the inflection point is on the hockey stick of Amazon's revenue numbers. And that is the point in time where Hadoop was on the declining of failure. Hortonworks sold the Cloudera. Cloudera's earnings are at an all-time low. A lot of speculation of their entire strategy, and their venture back company went public, but bet the ranch to be the next data warehouse. That wasn't the business model. The data business was a completely new industry, completely being re-transformed, and, far from experimentation, it is real and definitely growing like a weed, but changing because of the underpinning infrastructure dynamics of Cloud Native, Microservices, and that's only going to get highly accelerated and the people who talk about context of industry like Frank, are going to be off. Their predictions will be off because they don't really see the new picture clear enough, in my opinion, >> So, >> I think he's off. >> So it's not so much of a structural change like it was when we went from, you know, mainframes to PCs, it's more of a sort of flow, evolution into this new area which is being driven, powered by new technologies, we talk about block chain machine intelligence and other things. >> Well, I mean, the make up of companies that were building quote, "Big Data Solutions", were trying to build an apparatus or mechanisms to solve big data problems, but none of them actually had the big data problem. None of them were full of data. None of them had a lot of data. The ones that had problems were the financial institutions, the credit card companies, the people who were doing a lot of large scale, um, with Google, Facebook, and some of the hyperscalers. They were actually dealing with the data tsunami themselves, so the practitioners ended up driving it. You guys at Wikibomb, we pointed this out on theCUBE many times, that the value was going to come from the practitioners not the suppliers of so called technology. So, you know, the Clouderas of the world who thought Hadoop would be relevant and growing as a technology were right on one side, on the other side of the coin was the Cloud decimation of that sector. The Cloud computer just completely blew away that Hadoop market because you didn't have to hire a PhD, you didn't have to hire specialty skills to stand up Hadoop clusters. You could actually throw it in the Cloud and get agile quickly, and get value out of data very very quickly. That has been real, it has not been an experiment. There's been new case studies, new companies born, new brands, so it's not an experiment, it is reality, and it's only going to get more real every day. >> And I add of course now you've got, you mentioned Cloudera and Hortenworks, you also got Matt Bar reeling Stu. Let's talk about Actifio. So they coined the term Copy Data Management, they created the category, of course they do a lot of backup, I mean, everybody in this space does a lot of backup. And then you saw the Silicon Valley companies come in. Particularly Cohesity and Rubric, you know, to a lesser extent he got some other guys like Zerto and Durva, but it was really those two companies, Cohesity and Rubric, they raised more money in their D round than Actifio has since inception. But yet Actifio keeps, you know, plodding along, growing, you know, word is they're profitable, you know, they're not like this really sectioned very East Coast versus kind of West Coast mentality. What's your take on what's going on? >> Yeah, so, Dave right, you look at the early days of Actifio and you say great, Copy Data Management, I have all these copies of data, how do I reduce my cost, get greater utilization than I have and leverage the data? I love the title of the show here, Data Driven. You know, we know at the center of digital transformation if you can't become data driven, like the CMO Brian Regan got up on stage talk about that industrialization of data. How am I going along that journey being this, I collected data versus now, you know, data, you know, is the reason that I make decisions, how I make decisions, I get smarter. The Cloud of course is a huge enabler of this, there's all these services that I can instantly access to be able to get greater insight, and move along with that environment, and if you look underneath all of these backup companies, it's really how I can change that data into business value and drive my business, the metadata underneath and all those pieces, not just the wonky storage and technical solutions that make things better, and I get a faster ROI. It's that data at the core of what we do and how do I get that as a business to accelerate. Because we know IT needs to be able to respond back to the business and data needs to be that rocket fuel. >> Is it the case of data haves and data have-nots? I mean, Amazon has data >> I mean, you're right-- >> and Facebook has data. >> We're talking about Actifio, you brought that up, okay, on this segment, on the inside segment, which is cool, they're here at the event, but they have a good opportunity but they also, they got some challenges. I mean, the thing about Actifio is, to my earlier point, which side of the wave are they on? Are they out too much out front with virtualization and Amazon, the Cloud will take them away, or are they riding the Cloud wave, making that an enabler? And I think what really I like about Actifio is because they have a lot of virtualization capabilities, the question is can they scale that Stu, to containers and microservices, because, the real opportunity in this market, in my opinion, is going to build on the virtualization trend, and make container aware, microservices capabilities because if they don't, then that would be a tell sign. Now either way it's a hot M&A market right now, so I think being in the market, horse on the track as you say. You look at the tableau sales force deal monster numbers we are in clearly a hot IPO market and a major roll up market on the M&A side. I think clearly there's two types of companies, old and new, and that is really what people are looking at, are they part of the old guard, are they the new guard. So, you know, this to me is going to be a tell sign of what they do next, can they make the data driven value proposition, you articulated Stu, actually a reality It's going to come from the technology underneath. >> Well I think it's a really interesting point you're making because, Stu as you probably know, that Amazon announced the Amazon backup service right, and you talked about the backup guys and they're like, "Ah yeah it's backup, but it really doesn't do recovery, it's really not that robust". It's part of me says, "Uh oh"... >> Watch out. >> You better move fast", because Amazon has stated, "Hey if you don't move fast we're going to just keep gobbling", and you've seen Amazon do this. What are your thoughts on that? Can these specialists, can they survive, John's talking about M&A. Can the market support all these guys along with the big, you know, traditional guys like Veritas, and Dell EMC, and IBM and Combol? >> Right, well so Actifio started very much in the data center. They were before this Could wave really took off. It's really only in the last year that they've been sassifying their product. So the question is, does that underlying IP, which wasn't tied to hardware, but, you know, sat at really more of, you know, reminded us of that storage virtualization battles that we talked about for years, Dave, but now they are going in the Cloud. They've got all the partnerships in the Cloud, but they are competing against those new vendors that you talked about like Cohesity and Rubric out there, and there's big money chasing this environment. So, you know, I want to talk to the customers here and find out, you know, where they are using them, and especially some of those first customers using this--. >> Well they clearly need a Cloud play cause that's clearly where the action is. But if you look at what's going on with Amazon, Azure, and Google you see a lot of on premises, Stu, because that's where the customers are. So just because the customers are currently not migrating their existing workloads to the Cloud doesn't mean it's not going to happen. So I think there's an opportunity for any company like Actifio, who may or may not be on the curve on the tech side, one little misfire on a tech bet could cripple the company and also make the company. There's a lot of high risk, reward ratio. How they handle containers. How they build on virtualizations. Virtualization going to to be part of the future with Cloud. These are the kind of the dynamics that are going to be in play, and they got some time on their hands because the on premises growth is because the clients are trying to figure out what to do and they're not going to be migrating, lifting, and shifting workloads all off to the Cloud. New will be Cloud based, but enterprises have proven why we are in multi-Cloud and hybrid-Cloud conversation, that... The enterprise on premises is not going away anytime soon. >> I want to ask you guys, John you specifically, about this sort of new Silicon Valley growth model and how companies are achieving escape velocity. When you and I made our first trip to Barcelona, I was having dinner with David Scott who was the CEO of 3PAR and he said to me, When I came to 3PAR the board said, "Hey we're willing to invest 30 million dollars in this company". And David Scott said to them, "I need way more, I need 80 million dollars". Today 80 million dollars is nothing. You saw, you know, Pure Storage hit escape velocity, was just throwing money, and growing at the problem. You're seeing Cohesity-- >> Well you can debate that. I mean, If you have to build a rocket ship, hit critical mass and you want to fund that, you're going to to need an enterprise. However, there's arguments on the south side that you can actually get fly wheel effect going early with less capital. So again, that's 3PAR-- >> But so that's my point. >> Well so that's 3PAR, that was 2009. >> So, yeah that was early days so that's ancient history. But software is generally supposed to be a capital efficient market, yet these companies are raising many hundreds and hundreds of millions, you know, half a billion dollar raises and they are putting it largely in promotion. Is that the new model, is that sustainable, in your view? >> Well I think you're conflating capital market dynamics with viable companies to invest in. I think there's a robust seed in series A market but the series A market and Silicon Valley is you know, 15 to 25 million, it used to be 3 to 5. So the dynamics are changing on funding. There's just not enough companies, horses on the track, to deploy capital at tranches of 30, 50, 80 million. So the capital markets are clearly going to have the money available so it's a market for the startups and the broke companies. That's separate from actually winning. So you've got slacks going public this weeks, you have other companies who have built business on a sass fly wheel, and then everything else is gravy in terms of the go to market, they got a couple hundred million. I think slack got close to a billion dollars in cash that they've raised. So they're flooded with cash, they'll never spend it all. So there are some companies that can achieve success like that. Others have to buy market share, they got to push and build out a sales force, and it's going to be a function of the role of customer, customization, specialism, and whatnot. But with AI machine leaning there's more efficiencies coming in so I think the modern company can do more with less. >> What do you think of the ride sharing on IPOs, Uber and Lift, do you abol? Do you like 'em or do you think it's just, they're losing too money and can't sustain it? >> I was thinking about that this morning after looking at the article in the Wall Street Journal in our coverage on Silicon angle. You look at Zoom communications, I like models that actually can take a simple concept and an existing mature market and disrupt it by being Cloud efficient and completely sass and data driven. That is an example of success. That to me, Zoom Communications and Zscaler, another company that we talk to, these are companies that were built with a specific value proposition that made the product and they were targeting mature markets with leaders in it. Video conferencing, Webex, Citrix, Zoom came out of nowhere, optimized on simple value proposition, used Cloud scale and data, and crushed it. Uber, Lift, little bit different issue. They're losing money but I would bet on the long term that that is going to be the used case for how people will have transportation. I think that's the long game and I think that without regulatory kind of pressure, without, there's regulatory issues that's really the big risk. But I believe that Uber and Lift absolutely will be long brands and just like Facebook was early on, although they threw off a lot of cash, those guys are building for penetration, and that's where the funding matters. Penetration is critical. Now they're the standard, and people really don't take taxis anymore, but they're really using the ride sharing. And you get the scooters, you get the bikes, they're all sequencing into these adjacent markets which drains more cash but builds the brand, builds the footprint. >> Well that's what I want to ask you. So people compare the early Uber, Lift, Taxi, Ride sharing to Amazon selling books, but there's all these other adjacencies. You have a thought on this? >> Well, just, you know, right, Uber Eats is a huge opportunity for that environment and autonomous vehicles everybody talks about, but it's still quite a ways out. So there are a lot of different- >> Scooters are the same, we're in San Diego, there are 8 gazillion scooters. >> San Diego had fun, you know, going around on their electronic scooters, boy, talk about the gig economy, they pay people at the night, to like go pay by the recharge you do on that, what is the future of work, >> Yeah, that's a great point. >> and how can we have that-- >> Uber going to look a lot like Amazon. You subsidize the front end retail side of the business, but look at the data that they throw up. Uber's data that they're gathering on, not only customer behavior, but just mapping services, 3-D mapping is going to be huge, so you've got these cars that are essentially bots on the road, providing massive mapping and traffic analysis. So you're going to start to see data driven, like Actifio slogan here, be a big part of all design decisions and value proposition from any company out there. And if they're not data driven I think they're going to be toast. >> Probably could because there's that data and that machine learning underneath, that can optimize, you know, where the people are, how I use the system, such a huge wave that we're watching. >> How about one last topic which is heavily data driven, it's Facebook. Facebook is obviously a data driven company, the Facebook crypto play, I love it, I love Facebook. I'm a bull on Facebook, I think it's been beat up. I think, two billion users is hard to replicate, but what's your thoughts on their crypto play? >> Well it's kind of a middle finger to the United States of America but it's a great catalyst for the international market because crypto needed a whale to come in and bring all those users in. Bad timing, in my mind, for Facebook, because given all the anti-trust and regulatory conversations, what better way to show your threat to the world order when you say we're going to run a banking system with a collection of international companies. I think the US is going to look at this and say, "Oh my God! They can't even be trusted to handle personal information and we're going to now let them run a banking system? Run monetary, basically World Bank equivalent infrastructure?" No frickin way! I think this is going to to be a major road to home. I think Facebook has to really make this an ecosystem play if they want to make it work, that's their telegraphic move they're saying, "Hey we want to do for the community but we got our own wallet and we got our own network". But they bring a lot to the table so it's going to be a really interesting dynamic to see the coalescing around Facebook because they could make the market. Look what Instagram did to Snapchat. They literally killed the company, took all their users. That is what's going to happen in the digital money economy when Facebook brings billions of users user experience with money. What happened with Snapchat with Instagram is going to happen to the World Bank if this continues. >> Where do you stand on the government breaking up big tech? >> So Dave, you know, you look in these companies, it's not easy to pull those apart. I don't think our government understands how most of big tech works. You know, take Amazon and AWS, that's one company underneath it. You know, Facebook, Microsoft. You know, Microsoft went through all these issues. Question Dave, we've had lots of debates on Twitter you know, are they breaking the law, are they not doing trust? I have some trust issues with Facebook myself, but most of the big companies up there I don't think the anti-trust kicks in, I don't think it makes sense to pull them apart. >> Stu, the Facebook story and the YouTube story are simply this, they have been hiding under the platform rules, of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and they are an editing platform so you can't sue them. Okay, once they become a publisher they could be sued. Just like CNN, Fox News, and everybody else. And we're publishers. So they've been hiding behind the platform. That gig is up. They're going to have to address are you a platform or are you a publisher? You're making editing decisions around what users can see with software, you are essentially editing the feed, that is a publisher role, with that becomes responsibility, and then obviously regulartory. >> Well Facebook is conflicted right now. They're trying to figure out which side of the fence to go on. >> No no no! They want one side! The platform side! They're make billions of dollars! >> Yeah but so they're making decisions about you know, which content to show and whether they monetize it. And when it's controversial content, they'll turn down the ads a little bit but they won't completely eliminate it sometimes. >> So, Dave, the only thing that the partisans in politics seem to agree on though is that big tech has too much power. You know, What's your take on that? >> Well so I think that if they are breaking the law then they should be moderated. But I don't think the answer is to go hard after Elizabeth Warren. Hard after them and break them up. I think you got to start with okay, because you break these companies up what's going to happen is they're going to be worth more, it's going to be AT&T all over again. >> While you guys were at Sysco Live, we covered this at Amazon Web Service and Public Sector Summit. The real issue in government, Stu, is there's too much tech for bad on the PR side, and there's not enough tech for good. Tech is not bad, tech is good. There's not enough promotion around the apps around there. There's real venture funds being created to promote tech for good. That's going to where the tide will turn. When does the tech industry start doing good stuff, not bad stuff. >> All right we've got to wrap. John, thanks for sitting in. Thank you for watching. Be right back, we're here at Actifio Data Driven 2019. From Boston this is theCUBE, be right back. (upbeat techno music)

(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to Palo Altos Cube Studios for CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE. We're with Kevin Ackroyd, CEO of Cision, CUBE Alumni. He's been on before. Building one of the most compelling companies that's disrupting and changing the game in Comms, advertising, PR, with Cloud technologies. Kevin, great to see you again, thanks for coming in. >> Likewise John, It's really good to be back. >> So, we haven't chatted in two years. You've been busy. Our last conversation was the beginning of 2017. Cision's done a lot of interesting things. You've got a lot of M and A under your belt. You're putting this portfolio together with Cloud technologies. Really been interesting. I really got to say I think you cracked the code on I think a new reality, a new economic reality. Also new capabilities for comms folks. Congratulations. >> Thank you, it's been a fun ride. >> So give us the update. So two years since we talked, how many deals, companies have you bought? What's the headcount, what's the revenue? Give us an update. >> In the four years, 12 acquisitions, seven of which have happened since I've been here. Up to 4,500 employees in over 40 countries. Customer count has grown to over 50,000 customers globally. Revenue's kind of gone from 500s to just shy of 800 million. A lot of leadership changes, and as you just mentioned, pretty seismic change, finally. We've certainly been the catalyst and the cattle prod for that seismic change around tech, data, measurement and analytics finally becoming mature and adopted inside this line of business like the Chief Communication Officer, the earn media folks. To say that they were not tech savvy a few years ago would be an understatement. So, a lot's been going on. >> Yeah, and certainly the trend is your friend, in my opinion, for you. But I think the reality is not yet upon people's general mindset. It's coming quickly, so if you look at some of the big trends out there. Look at fake news, look at Facebook, look at the Google effect. Elizabeth Warren wants to break up Big Tech, Amazon. Cloud computing, in that time period that you were, prior to just going to Cision, you had Oracle Cloud, done a lot of great things on the Marketing Cloud side. But the timing of Cloud computing, the timing of how media has changed. There's not many journalists anymore. We had Andy Cunningham, a legendary industry veteran, formerly of Cunningham Communications. He did the PR for Steve Jobs. You said, there's no more journalists, a few left, but you got to tell your story direct to the consumer. >> You do. >> This is now a new marketing phenomenon. This is a tailwind for you at Cision because you guys, although put these cubbies together, have a unique vision around bringing brand value advertising at PR economics. >> Yeah, that's a good way to put it. >> Tell us the vision of Cision and specifically the shift that's happening. Why are you guys important? What wave are you riding? >> So, there's a couple shifts, John. You and I have talked about this in previous programs There's this shift of the line of business, having to work in a whole bunch of non-integrated point solutions. The CFO used to live in 17 different applications from 17 vendors. That's all squished together. Now I buy from one Cloud platform, right, from Oracle or SAP. Same thing happened in Human Capital Management. 22 things squished into the Cloud, one from Workday, right. Same thing happened, you had 25 different things for sales and service. That all squished together, into one CRM in the Cloud, I buy from Salesforce, right. And our last rodeo, the early part of this stack, it was me and Adobe battling it out for the right to go squish the entire the LUMAscape into a marketing cloud, right, so there could be one ring to rule them all for the CMO. So, it happens in every single category. It just hasn't had over here, happened on the earned media side and the Chief Communications Officer. So, bringing the tech stack so that now we are for the CCO what Adobe is for the CMO what Salesforce is for the CRO, Workday is for the CHRO. That has to happen. You can't do, you can't manage it this way without sophisticated tech, without automation, without integration, you can't do it. The second thing that had to happen, especially in marketing and advertising, they all figured out how to get revenue credit. Advertising was a slow single-digit CAGR industry for 50 years. And then something happened. After 5% CAGR for 50 years, and then something happened over the next 10 years. Digital paid went from like 15 billion to 150 billion. And what happened is that old, I know half my advertising is wasted on this one half. That went bye-bye. Now I know immediately, down to the page, down the ad unit, down to this, exactly what worked, right. When I was able to put Pixels on ads, John, you'd go to that page, Pixel would go on you, It would follow you around If you ended up putting something in the e-commerce shop that ad got credit. I'm not saying that's right, I'm just saying that's how the entire-- >> But that's how the infrastructure would let you, allowed you, it enabled you to do that. Then again, paid advertising, paid search, paid advertising, that thing has created massive value in here. >> Massive value. But my buyer, right, so the person that does the little ad on the most regional tech page got credit. My buyer that got Bob Evans, the Cloud King, to write an article about why Microsoft is going to beat AWS, he's a credible third party influencer, writing objectively. That article's worth triple platinum and has more credibility than 20,000 Microsoft sales reps. We've never, until Cision, well let's Pixel that, let's go figure out how many of those are the target audience. Let's ride that all the way down to the lead form that's right. Basically it's super simple. Nobody's ever tracked the press releases, the articles or any of the earned media content, the way people have tracked banner ads or e-commerce emails. Therefore this line of business never get revenue credit. It stayed over here in the OpEx pile where things like commerce and advertising got dumped onto the revenue pile. Well, you saw the crazy investment shift. So, that's really the more important one, is Comms is finally getting quantified ROI and business's attribution like their commerce and advertising peers for the first time ever in 2018 via what Cision's rolled out. That's the exciting piece. >> I think, I mean, I guess what I hear you saying is that for the first time, the PR actually can be measured, similar to how advertising >> You got it. >> Couldn't be measured then be measured. Now PR or communications can be measured. >> They get measured the same way. And then one other thing. That ad, that press release, down to the business event. This one had $2 million dollars of ad spend, this one had no ad spend. When it goes to convert, in CRM or it goes to convert on a website, this one came from banner ad, this one came from credible third party content. Guess which one, not only had zero ad spend instead of $2 million in ad spend. Guess which one from which source actually converts better. It's the guy that chose to read credible third-party article. He's going to convert in the marketing system way better that somebody who just clicked on the ad. >> Well certainly, I'm biased-- >> So all the way down the funnel, we're talking about real financial impact based on capturing earned media ID, which is pretty exciting. >> Well, I think the more exciting thing is that you're basically taking a value that is unfunded quote by the advertising firm, has no budget basically, or thin budgets, trying to hit an organic, credible outlet which is converting in progression to a buyer, an outcome. That progression is now tracked. But let's just talk about the economics because you're talking about $2 million in spend, it could be $20 million. The ratio between ad spend and conversion to this new element you mentioned is different. You're essentially talking about the big mega trend, which is organic content. Meaning connecting to sources. >> That's right. >> That flow. Of course, we believe and we, at the Cube, everyone's been seeing that with our business. Let's talk about that dynamic because this is not a funded operationalized piece yet, so we've been seeing, in the industry, PR and comms becoming more powerful. So, the Chief Communication Officer isn't just rolling out press releases, although they have to do that to communicate. You've got medium posts now, you've got multiple channels. A lot of places to put the story. So the Chief Communication Officer really is the Chief Storyteller Officer, Not necessarily the CMO. >> Emphatically. >> The Martech Stack kind of tracking. So talk about that dynamic. How is the Chief Communication Officer role change or changing? Why is that important and what should people be thinking about, if they are a Chief Communication Officer? >> You know, it's interesting. There's a, I'm just going to call it an actual contradiction on this front. When you and I were getting out of our undergrad, 7 out of 10 times that CCO, the Chief Communication Officer, worked for the CEO and 30% of time other. Yet the role was materially narrow. The role has exploded. You just said it pretty eloquently. This role has really exploded and widened its aperture. Right now though 7 out of 10 of them actually do work for the CMO, which is a pretty interesting contradiction. And only 30% of them work for the CEO. Despite the fact that from an organizational stand point, that kind of counter intuitive org move has been made. It doesn't really matter because, so much of what you just said too, you was in marketing's purview or around brand or around reputation or around telling the story or around even owning the key assets. Key assets isn't that beautiful Budweiser frog commercial they played on Super Bowl anymore. The key assets are what's getting done over in the communications, in part. So, from a storytelling standpoint, from an ownership of the narrative, from a, not just a product or a service or promotion, but the whole company, the whole brand reputation, the goodwill, all of that is comms. Therefore you're seeing comms take the widest amount of real estate around the boardroom table than they've ever had. Despite the fact that they don't sit in the chair as much. I mentioned that just because I find it very interesting. Comms has never been more empowered, never had a wider aperture. >> But budget wise, they're not really that loaded up with funding. >> And to my earlier point, it's because they couldn't show. Super strategic. Showing ROI. >> So, showing ROI is critical. >> Not the quality of clippings. >> It was the Maslow of Hierarchy of Needs if you can just show me that I put a quarter in and I got a dollar out. Like the ads and the e-commerce folks do. It simply drives the drives me. >> So take us through some of those analytics because people who know about comms, the old school comms people who are doing this, they should really be thinking about what their operation is because, can I get an article in the Wall Street Journal? Can Silicon Angle write about us? I've got to get more clippings. That tend to be the thing. Did we get the press release out on time? They're not really tied into some of the key marketing mix pieces. They tend to be kind of a narrow scope. Those metrics were pretty clear. What are the new metrics? What's the new operational playbook.? >> Yeah, we call those Vanity Metrics. I cared about theoretical reach. Hey, Yahoo tells me I reached 222 billion people, so I plug in 222 billion people. I reached more people than there are on the planet with this PR campaign. I needed to get to the basic stuff like how many people did I actually reach, number one. But they don't, they do theoretical reach. They work in things like sentiment. Well, I'm going to come up with, 100 reporters wrote about me. I'm going to come up with, how many of them I thought were positive, negative, neutral. Sentiment analysis, they measure number of reporters or hits versus their competitors and say, Proctor and Gamble rolled out this diaper product, how did I do this five days? How much did Proctor and Gamble diapers get written about versus Craft diapers versus Unilever's. Share a voice. Not irrelevant metrics. But not metrics the CEO and the CFO are going to invest in. >> Conversion to brand or sales, those kind of things? >> They never just never existed. Those never existed. Now when we can introduce the same exact metrics that the commerce and the ad folks do and say, I can tell you exactly how many people. I can tell you exactly who they were, demographic, firmographic, lifestyle, you name it. I can tell you who the audience is you're reaching. I can tell you exactly what they do. When those kind of people read those kind of articles or those kind of people read those kind of press releases, they go to these destinations, they take these behaviors. And because I can track that all the way down to whatever that success metric is, which could be a lead form if I'm B2B for pipe. It could be a e-commerce store from B2C. It could be a rating or review or a user generation content gourd. It could be a sign up and register, if I'm trying to get database names. Whatever the business metric is. That's what the commerce and the ad people do all day every day. That's why they are more funded than ever. The fact that press releases, articles, tweets, blogs, the fact that the earned media stuff has never been able to do those things is why they just continue to suffer and have had a real lack of investment prices going on for the last 20 year. >> Talk about the trend around-- >> It's simple stuff. >> I know, if you improve the ROI, you get more budget. >> It really is that simple. >> That's been the challenge. I think PR is certainly becoming, comms is becoming more powerful. People know I talk about it all the time. I think comms is the new CMO I think command and control and organic content work together in the organic. We've seen it first hand in our business. But, it's an issue of tech savviness and also vision. A lot of people just are uncomfortable shifting to the new realities. >> That's for sure. >> What are some of the people tech savvy look at when they look at say revamping comms platform or strategy versus say old school? >> I'll give you two answers on that, John. Here is one thing that is good for us, that 7 out of 10 to the CCOs work for the CMO. Because when I was in this seat starting to light that fire under the CMO for the first time, which was not that long ago, and they were not tech savvy, and they were not sophisticated. They didn't know how to do this stuff either. That was a good 10 year journey to get the CMO from not sophisticated to very sophisticated. Now they're one of the more sophisticated lines of business in the world. But that was a slog. >> So are we going to see a Comms Stack? Like Martech, ComTech. >> ComTech is the decision communication Cloud, is ComTech. So we did it. We've built the Cloud stack. Again like I said, just like Adobe has the tech stack for marketing, Cision has the tech stack for comms, and we've replicated that. But because the CCO works for the CMO and the CMO's already been through this. Been through this with Ad Techs, been through this with MarTech, been through this with eCommerce, been through this with Web. You know, I've got a three or four year sophistication path this time just because >> The learnings are there >> The company's already done it everywhere else. The boss has already done it everywhere else. >> So the learnings are there from the MarTech so it's a pretty easy leap to take? >> That's exactly right. >> It's just-- >> How CommTech works is shocking. Incredibly similar to how MarTech and AdTech work. A lot of it is the same technology, just being applied different. >> That's good news >> So, the adoption curve for us is a fantastic thing. It's a really good thing for us that 70% of them work for CMOs because the CMO is the most impatient person on the planet, to get this over because the CMO is sick of doing customer journeys or omni channel across just paid and owned. They recognize that the most influential thing to influence you, it's not their emails, it's not their push notifications, It's not their ads. It's recognizing which credible third-party content you read, getting them into that, so that they're influencing you. >> It's kind of like Google PageRank in the old days. This source is more relevant than that one, give it more weight. >> And now all of a sudden if I have my Cision ID, I can plug in the more weight stuff under your profile. I want to let him go across paid and owned too, I materially improve the performance of the paid and owned because I'm putting in the really important signal versus what's sitting over there in the DMP or the CDP, which is kind of garbage. That's really important. >> I really think. >> I thinks you've got a home run here. I think you've really cracked the code on this. I think you are absolutely right on the money with comms and CommsTech. I see it all the time. In my years of experiences, it's so obvious. Then again, the tailwind is that they've been through the MarTech. The question I have for you is cultural shift. That's a big one. So, I'm out evangelizing all the time about the CUBE Cloud and some of the things we're doing. I run into the deer in the headlights on one side, what do you mean? And then people like, I believe, I totally understand. The believers and the non believers. What's the cultural shift? Because some chief comms op, they're very savvy, progressive, we've got to make the shift. How do they get the ship to turn? What are some of the cultural challenges? >> And boy is that right. I felt the same thing, getting more doing it with the CMO. A lot of people kept their head in the sand until they got obsoleted. They didn't know. Could they not see the train coming? They didn't want to see the train coming. Now you go look at the top 100 CMOs in the world today. Pretty different bunch than who those top 100 CMOs were 10 years ago. Really different bunch. History's repeating itself over here too. You've got the extremely innovative CCOs that are driving that change and transformation. You've got the deer in the headlight, okay, I know I need to do this, but I'm not sure how, and you do have your typical, you know, nope, I've got my do not disturb sign and police tape over my office. I won't even let you in my door. I don't want to hear about it. You've got all flavors. The good news is we are well past the half point where the innovators are starting actually to deploy and show results, the deer in the headlights are starting to innovate, and these folks are at least opening up the door and taking down some tape. >> Is there pressure on the agency side now? A lot of agencies charge a lot of monthly billings for these clients, the old school thing. Some are trying to be progressive and do more services. Have you seen, with the Cision Cloud and things that you're doing, that you're enabling, those agencies seem to be more productive? >> Yes. >> Are the client's putting pressure on those agencies so they see more value? Talk about the agency dynamic. >> That's also a virtuous cycle too, right? That cycle goes from, it's a Bell Curve. At the beginning of the bell curve, customers have no clue about the communications. They go to their agencies for advice. So, you have to educate the agencies on how to say nice things about you. By the time you're at the Bell Curve, the client's know about the tech or they've adopted the tech, and the agencies realize, oh, I can monetize the hell out of this. They need strategy and services and content and creative and campaign. This is yet another good old fashioned >> High gross profit. >> A buck for the tech means six bucks for me as the service agency. At the bottom, over here, I'll never forget this when we did our modern marketing experiences, Erik, the CMO of Clorox said, hey, to all you agencies out there, now that we're mature, you know, we choose our our agency based on their fluency around our tech stack. So it goes that violently and therefore, the agencies really do need to try to get fluent. The ones that do, really reap rewards because there is a blatant amount of need as the line of business customer tries to get from here to here. And the agency is the is the very first place that that customer is going to go to. >> So, basically the agency-- >> The customer has first right of refusal to go provide these services and monetize them. >> So, the agency has to keep up. >> They certainly do. >> Because, if the game gets changed by speed, it's accelerated >> If they keep up, yup. >> Value is created. If they don't have their running shoes on, they're out. >> If they keep up and they stay fluent, then they're going to be great. The last thing back in the things. We've kind of hit this. This is one of those magic points I've been talking about for 20 years. When the CFO or the CEO or the CMO walk down to the CCOs office and say, where are we on this, 'cause it's out in the wild now, there are over 1200 big brands doing this measurement, Cision ID, CommsTech stuff. It's getting written about by good old fashioned media. Customer says, wow, I couldn't do this for 50 years, now I am, and look what I just did to my Comms program. That gets read. The world's the same place as it always has been. You and I read that. We go down to our comms department and say, wow, I didn't know that was possible, where are we on this? So the Where Are We On This wave is coming to communications, which is an accelerant. >> It's an accountability-- >> Now it's accountability, and therefore, the urgency to get fluent and changed. So now they're hiring up quantums and operations and statisticians and database people just like the marketers did. The anatomy of a communications department is starting to like half science half art, just like happened in marketing. Whereas before that, it was 95% art and 5% science. But it's getting to be 50/50. >> Do you have any competition? >> We have, just like always. >> You guys pretty much have PR Newswire, a lot of big elements there. >> We do. >> You've got a good foothold. >> This is just an example. Even though Marketo is part of Adobe, giant. And Eloqua is part of Oracle, giant and Pardot is part of Salesforce. You've got three goliaths in marketing automation. Hubspot's still sticking around. PeerPlay, marketing Automation. You can just picture it. CRM giants, Microsoft and Salesforce have eaten the world Zendesk's still kicking around. It's a little PeerPlay. That equivalent exists. I have nobody that's even one fifth as big as I am, or as global or complete. But I do have some small, point specific solution providers. They're still hanging out there. >> The thing is, one, first you're a great leader. You've seen the moving on the marking tech side. You've got waves of experience under your belt. But I think what's interesting is that like the Web 1.0, having websites and webpages, Web 2.0 and social networks. That was about the first generation. Serve information, create Affiliate programs, all kind of coded tracking. You mentioned all that. I over-simplified it, but you get the idea. Now, every company needs a new capability. They need to stand up media infra structure. What does that mean? They're going to throw a podcast, they're going to take their content, put them into multiple channels. That's a comms function. Now comms is becoming the new CMO-like capability in this earned channel. So, your Cloud becomes that provisioning entity for companies to stand up capabilities without waiting. Is that the vision? >> You've nailed it. And that is one of the key reasons why you have to have a tech stack. That's a spot on one, another one. Early in my career, the 20 influences that mattered, they were all newspaper reporters or TV folks. There was only 20 of them. I had a Rolodex. so I could take each one of them out for a three Martini lunch, they'd write something good about me. >> Wish is was that easy now. >> Now, you have thousands of influencers across 52 channels, and they change in real time, and they're global in nature. It's another example of where, well, if you don't automate that with tech and by the way. >> You're left behind. >> If you send out digital content they talk back to you in real time. You have to actually not only do influencer identification, outreach and curation, you've got to do real time engagement. >> There's no agility. >> There's none. >> Zero agility. >> None, exactly. >> There's no like Dev Ops mindset in there at all. >> Then the speed with which, it's no longer okay for comms to call the agency and say, give me a ClipBook, I've got to get it to my CEO by Friday. That whole start the ClipBook on Tuesday, I've got to have the ClipBook, the physical ClipBook on the CEO as an example. Nope, if I'm not basically streaming my senior executives in real time, curated and analyzed as to what's important and what it means, I can't do that without a tech stack. >> Well, Andy Cunningham was on the Cube. >> This whole thing has been forced to get modernized by cloud technology and transformation >> Andy Cunningham, a legend in the comms business who did all Steve Jobs comms, legend. She basically said on The Cube, it's not about waiting for the clips to create the ClipBook, create your own ClipBook and get it out there. Then evaluate and engage. This is the new command and control with digital assets. >> Now, it's become the real-time, curated feed that never stops. It sure as hell better not. Because comms is in trouble if it does. >> Well this is a great topic. But let's have you in this, I can go deep on this. I think this is a really important shift, and you guys are the only ones that are on it at this level. I don't think the Salesforce and the Adobe yet, I don't think they're nimble enough to go after this wave. I think they're stuck on their wave and they're making a lot of money. >> You know John, paid media and owned media. The Google Marketing Cloud, that SAP Marketing Cloud, Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce Marketing Clouds. They don't do anything in earned. Nothing. This is one of the reasons I jumped because I knew this needed to happen. But, you know, they're also chasing much bigger pots of money. Marketing and Advertising is still a lot more money. We're working on it to grow the pie for comms. But, bottom line is, they're chasing the big markets as I was at Oracle. And they're still pretty much in a violent arms race against each other. Salesforce is still way more focused on what Adobe's doing. >> You're just on a different wave. >> So, we're just over here doing this, building a billion dollar cloud leader, that is mission critical to everyone of their customers. They're going to end up being some pretty import partners to us, because they've been too focused on the big arms race against each other, in paid and owned and have not had the luxury to even go here. >> Well I think this wave that you're on is going to be really big. I think they don't see it, in my opinion, or can't get there. With the right surfboard, to use a surfing analogy, there's going to be a big wave. Thanks for sharing your insights. >> Absolutely. >> While you're here, get the plug in for Cision. What's going on, what's next? What's the big momentum? Get the plug in for the company. What are you guys still going to do? >> Plugin for the company. The company has acquired a couple of companies in January. You might see, one of which is Falcon. Basically Falcon is one of the big four in the land of Hootsuite, Sprinklr, Spredfast. Cloud companies do this. Adobe has Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, Parking Cloud. Salesforce has Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud. Cision has just become a multi cloud company. We now have the Cision Social Cloud and the Cision Communications Cloud. And we're going to go grab a couple hundred million dollars of stuff away from Sprinklr, Hootsuite and collapse social into this. Most of social is earned as well. So, look for a wing spread, into another adjacent market. I think that's number one. Then look for publishing of the data. That's probably going to be the most exciting thing because we just talked about, again our metrics and capabilities you can buy But, little teaser. If we can say, in two months here's the average click through on a Google ad, YouTube ad, a banner ad, I'll show it to you on a Blog, a press release, an article. Apples to apples. Here is the conversion rate. If I can start becoming almost like an eMarketer or publisher on what happens when people read earned, there's going to be some unbelievable stats and they're going to be incredibly telling, and it's going to drive where are we on that. So this is going to be the year. >> It's a new digital advertising format. It's a new format. >> That's exactly right. >> It's a new digital advertising format. >> And its one when the CEO understands that he or she can have it for earned now, the way he's had it for marketing and advertising, that little conversation walking down the hall. In thousands of companies where the CCO or the VP of PR looks up and the CEO is going where are we on that? That's the year that that can flip switches, which I'm excited about. >> Every silo function is now horizontally connected with data, now measured, fully instrumented. The value will be there and whoever can bring the value gets the budget. That's the new model. Kevin Ackroyd, CEO of Cision, changing the game in the shift around the Chief Communications Officer and how that is becoming more tech savvy. Really disrupting the business by measuring earned media. A big wave that's coming. Of course, it's early, but it's going to be a big one. Kevin, thanks for coming on. >> My pleasure, John, thank you. >> So, CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto Thanks for watching. >> Thanks John. (upbeat music)

(pulsating electronic music) >> Welcome everybody, this is theCube, I'm Paul Gillin. Physical security and cybersecurity have traditionally been sort of isolated worlds, they didn't talk to each other. But in the age of the Internet of Things we now have unprecedented opportunities to unite these two traditionally separate areas. Armored Things is a startup out of Boston and is doing some very interesting work in using intelligent devices to make decisions and to intuit patterns in crowd behavior which has applications in cybersecurity, crowd management, traffic management, a lot of different potential uses of this technology. With me are Julie Johnson the co-founder and President of Armored Things, and Chris Lord, the Chief Technology Officer, Welcome. >> Thank you. >> Why don't you describe in a nutshell, let's start out, what you do Julie. >> Great, Armored things is building software to do next generation incident response. We're using the IOT devices and their data to power decisions across large environments used for safety. So for example the data that we're collecting can be used to get better situational awareness within seconds and drive incident response in seconds instead tens of minutes, which is the state of the art today. >> And so it's sounds like, is security the primary target area or are there others? >> That's right, we sit at the intersection of physical and cybersecurity. This information can also be used to drive additional value over time but right now we're really focused on achieving that mission, using these devices, this technology to improve both the physical and cyber realms for Internet of Things. >> Chris why don't you give us an example of how your technology might be applied? >> Sure, so a very common one is, you know active shooter. People are very concerned about active shooter, and so how can you leverage all the data that you have across different devices, different systems that you have out there, in order to understand what happened, and get people the right information at the right time. A more commonplace example might be something like a protest formation. So if you look at a university campus where you might have a controversial group meeting on campus and you need to get early warning when there's a protest forming on the other side. Our technology will allow you to see that before it's gotten to a critical proportion or before it's marching down the street. >> So why don't you take a deeper dive and talk about what, how are you federating these devices? How are you using these multiple devices together? >> Well that's exactly what we are. So we're a data analytics layer across all the silos of data that you already have in your environment. So as you look around you might have motion sensors in your environment, you might have access control systems in your environment, you have wireless infrastructure in your environment, all these things are used for specific purposes now but nothings really trying to correlate and connect the data across all of them. So Armored Things builds a layer across all of them, brings that data together to give you better understanding of what's going on in your environment, people and your physical space. >> Julie talk about how the company came about, what are the origins? >> Sure, so I started working with Charles Curran our CEO about two years ago at Qualcomm. We were really focused on understanding the security portion of the IOT layer and how to manage these things in enterprise. So if you're familiar with IOT in the household there's been a lot of proliferation around turning your lights on, understanding who's at your front door, but in enterprise it's been much slower to adopt. Fundamentally we believe that part of that was because management took a lot of time. Every time you provisioned a device it took a number of minutes and because there was an intrinsic lack of security on each of the devices. So we went around and started talking to different potential customer groups about what it would look like to bring more IOT into their environments. And we really got pulled into universities, and large sporting and entertainment venues, who we're still working with as our primary customers today. Because they saw a desperate need for IOT, not only to save time on managing these devices, and to make sure that they're secure in their environments, but also to use them for physical security. So now that we've spent, you know $15 million in selling IP video cameras, or a few million dollars in selling access control systems, how do we actually elevate their use from what they were initially intended for. That spend has a secondary use when it comes to physical security. That ability to, you know quickly get cameras on the scene of an incident. That ability to harness data coming off of motion sensors or environmental sensors. How do we use all of that information to drive an awareness of our environments day-to-day and then use it in critical emergencies for a better response. >> I understand you're working with some sports teams right now. Can you describe a scenario in which you might be able to help them manage crowds more effectively? >> So there was a great example we heard about two weeks ago from a top team, who's recently hosted some World Series events. They had a unfortunate incident where they were watching, they were hosting a watch party for the World Series in their venue during an away game, and they handed about 40,000 paper tickets out. They got a great turnout, 20,000 people came to the venue. But in the seventh inning of the game the other 20,000 people decided that they also wanted to be in the venue in order to celebrate. That was a pretty unanticipated event. Usually in the fifth or sixth inning you start to consolidate your entrances, you start to consolidate your security personnel and send them to other parts of the venue, and the net result of that was they ended up closing the doors, not allowing additional entrance in, and tweeting that there wouldn't be additional people allowed to enter. There were a lot of security issues with letting 20,000 people in, in the seventh inning, not of the least is you don't know where they're coming from, and you don't really know what their intent is in coming so late to that venue. But there's patterns in the data that we could've seen sooner. So hypothetically, understanding that a normal game day has a couple hundred people entering in the fifth, sixth, seventh innings. Seeing a significant uptick in that number of people coming into your environment should immediately say, what's unique, you know what's different about this situation? Now how do I tie in my resources, my security personnel, my responders, and just maybe notify people who are in charge of making these types of decisions, so that we're not closing the gate and tweeting out to our fans that there's no more entries. >> And getting back to the technical nuances of this situation, how might your technology detect this crowd assembling before it was even visually apparent? >> Good question, so there's many, many different things. So part of what we do is rely on diversity of data from different sources. So that might be mobile devices. That might be from wireless. That might be from cameras that you have there and doing occupancy counts on those cameras. It might be from other, you know motion sensors you have in your environment. All this data gets aggregated so that we can come up with a good understanding of population and flow within your environment. So we would have early indications and bring that awareness to people that have to respond, people who might be sitting in a network operations center, and looking at other cameras but not seeing the information. So we can bring the information right there, notify them that there's a problem forming before it's gotten to critical proportions. >> Fantastic. >> One more thought on that is there's kind of a unique advantage in data to go beyond what humans can perceive. When we're looking at these knocks, you know they have thousands of video cameras potentially united in one central screen. It takes not only having the right camera up but also noticing a degree of difference that might be quite minute, to actually see it as an anomaly in real-time. So you can imagine, you know a university campus where people are walking through the campus at a certain pace every single day. One day everyone's walking just 30% faster, not running just walking, why? You know is there a suspicious package? Is there someone gathered there that you know is attracting people that they don't necessarily want to be associated with, or end up in a vulnerable position? How can we see that in the data faster than someone in the control room might notice it and alert people to respond. >> And with machine learning, of course now we have the means to do that. Chris, talk about the, it strikes me that there must be a lot of complexity involved. You've got a great diversity of devices out there you have to connect to. Every institution would have a different fabric. How are you technically pulling this all together? >> Well the nice thing about a lot of these technologies is there is standardization across many of these different types of devices, and there are, you know there are tiers of players right. And so we do have to be selective about who we integrate with. We are integrated with the top-tier players in all these categories, and we'll prioritize other integrations over time based on our customers and our market so. >> And Julie, what are your plans for deployment? What's your timeframe? >> We're looking to rollout our first generation of product in the next nine to twelve months. That really drives home at that situational awareness piece. So before we even get to building through incident response at scale, the ability to give people very specific cues during a critical emergency. How do we start with getting more information to the people who are there? So getting occupancy, flow, the dynamics of movement around a campus or a large venue. How do we start equipping the police personnel, and security personnel to make better decisions and drive value from there. >> I understand there's no shortage of demand for your solution. >> We do have some top-tier universities, and pro-sporting and entertainment venues who we're working with to build the right solution not just the solution that we think is needed, but the solution that they're telling us, "Hey we would really like to use something like this." >> I also understand you've pulled together a team, kind of a dream team, talk about some of the people that you've brought on board for this operation which few people have even heard of. >> Yeah so I think the first of those you're seeing here, so Chris joined us as co-founder and CTO and has been really an asset to this team given his background in cybersecurity from Carbon Black and before that. And you know if you want to add more to that please feel free to. >> No thanks. >> We've also brought in, I would call it two pillars of our strategy. One one the physical security side and one on the machine learning data analytics side, and those two women are Elizabeth Carter. Who came to us from Apple, where she led crisis management for the Americas. She previously worked at Chertoff Group where she sat at the intersection of physical and cybersecurity, and before that actually worked for the city of New York, where she understood weapons of mass destruction, different types of biological and chemical weapons response planning. So she's kind of the pillar of our physical security response understanding and driving product. The other woman, her name is Clare Bernard and she recently joined us from another Boston startup called Tamr where she was running product and engineering for them. Clare's background is actually in particle physics. She was BU and John's Hopkins, and happened to work with the team that discovered the God particle while she was getting her PhD. So we' think she's as smart as you can find, and is going to help us think about these data challenges, the analytics piece at a scale that, you know we think has the potential to really improve physical security and cybersecurity. I would be remiss if I didn't mention the rest of our team. Our CEO Charles comes from a background in the venture capital community and is just incredibly knowledgeable about the process of building a company from the ground up, and has many skills when it comes to recruiting as well. Really helped drive some of these hires forward and the rest of the team is the next generation of rising stars, people from Oracle, HP Vertica, other Carbon Black individuals. People who just have experience from across the board that's going to help us build the right solution. >> And you know at a time when diversity has been a major issue for tech companies, I understand your team is unusually well represented. >> I think our executive team is about 60% women, which we're very proud of. I think our team in general might actually be, >> About that too, yup. >> About 60% women, which we're also very proud of. And I'd like to say that that's organic. That we've worked with some great advisors and potential customers, and I do think that from my perspective, it's been helpful to have younger women coming in who see a path forward for senior women in executive roles in their company. I think that's something that can't be underestimated. >> Where do you stand in funding right now? >> We just closed our first institutional capital about a week and a half ago. We're still finishing the close of that round but we have a Boston based partner who's very focused on machine learning and analytics, and also has been a well recognized investor in the cyber security realm. So we're very fortunate to have this investor as our partner, and excited to keep working with them. >> Chris, as someone whose background is in cybersecurity how do you see the security landscape changing now with the IOT coming on and the possibility of really transforming the way organizations look at their physical and cybersecurity operations? >> Good question, so over time they're converging, and they're converging I think more rapidly than we expected, so now I'm going to step back a little bit and say that there's a lot of parallels. Cybersecurity I think is probably about five years ahead of physical security in terms of maturity of technology and approaches to problems. And then so what we're seeing right now, and we're part of the force behind that, is taking the learnings from cyber security and applying them to physical security right. So when we talk about situational awareness, when we talk about the data analytics that supports that, and when we talk about incident response and orchestration automation. All of those are core to taking cybersecurity and applying it to physical security. In terms of convergence, we're seeing many cases, and this is going back a number of years, where people are using cyber events to create physical problems right. Stuxnet is a classic example, but you can do the same thing by taking over something and instilling panic in a stadium, and causing you know, all sorts of grief, cyber driving physical. You can also see cases where people who are running cybersecurity operation centers want access to physical knowledge of their environment in order to do their job better. Whether it is a malicious insider that they suspect, whether it's an infection that occurs on a particular machine, being able to pull up the cameras, know who was there at the time, bringing all that information together, is again necessary in order to understand their perception of situational awareness. So two converging towards one, we're going to be building towards that goal from our perspective. >> Now the flip side of federating IOT devices is that the bad guys can do the same thing. So you potentially have a much broader attack surface. That has to be factoring into your thinking. What is the embedded security in your platform? >> So, we're not going to address fully that right now, but so we take advantage of best in breed security principles in our design both for security and for privacy. But in terms of the dependency we have on a lot of IOT devices and IOT systems, part of what helps us is diversity of data across those, and diversity of devices right. And so while you might have compromises in specific cases, the fact that you are dealing with so many, and so many different categories at the same time, allows you to maintain and fulfill your mission, and deliver what you're trying to do regardless of some of those individual compromises. We're also in a unique vantage point where we can actually see the operational integrity of what's going on. So when you look across all those different categories and you look at the data that we're collecting, whether it's malicious or not, we're able to identify a failure, and bring that to the attention of the people who are dependent on those systems. So we could be an early morning to cyber events, malicious or not. >> Julie, entrepreneurs love to dream. I'm sure you are thinking big, beyond the immediate cybersecurity applications. Where could Armored Things eventually go? >> That's a great question. The dream is that we become not only the dominant solution for physical and cyber security for schools and large venues. But we bring our solution into K, 12 where some of this is desperately needed. That's kind of the mission orientation of our team. How do we start to drive value in a way that we can get to every school in the country sooner. In the longer term though, I think there's a lot of opportunities with IOT and we're still kind of at the tip of the iceberg here. We're going to see all sorts of new devices come online over the next two, five, 10 years. The growth of these devices is incredible. And the question is how do we continue this challenge of solving the data at scale in a way that continues to drive value, not just for some of the first use cases, which are often around marketing, and understanding an environment in that sense, but also continuing that physical cybersecurity angle. >> Enormous potential and hope you stay based in Boston. We can use more companies like that. Chris Lord and Julie Johnson, thanks very much for joining us today on theCUbe. >> Thanks Paul. >> Thank you. >> Armored Things, keep your eye on them. You're going to be hearing a lot more about this company in the months to come. I'm Paul Gillin, this is theCube.

>> Hello, everyone. Welcome to the special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, co-host of theCUBE. We're here at Sundance Film Festival, the Intel Tech Lounge for a one on one conversation with Kane Lee, who's the head of content at Baobab Studios in California. Thanks for joining me here at the Intel Tech Lounge. >> Really excited to be here. >> You know we just had a panel on the new creative here, and Intel is showing some great technology. Things like volumetric, all kinds of really hardcore tech. Really powering some of the VR, AR, mixed reality, all the trends that are happening around user experience. But, a new creative artist is out there. A new storyteller. It could be a 12 year old to a 50 year old. You're in the middle of it. You're an award winning producer. So you're building the stories, you're building the content. What's the biggest thing happening here at Sundance? >> I think it's really interesting, because content has always been my passion. Good storytelling. And growing up, it was always books and films, and all these traditional mediums that inspired me to sort of dream, and right here in Sundance, we're in the middle of a great sea change going on, because technology and art are coming together in such a fast pace, to really usher in the new generation of storytelling, and we're all very fortunate to be in the middle of that. This is a very unique period in our history as humans, and our culture, to challenge what storytelling really means, because VR, for us at Baobab, is the next great medium. And Sundance recognizes that. Technology companies like Intel recognize that. So we're all coming together at the film festival, and working together to define what that will mean. >> Kane, you're an Emmy award winning producer. Baobab's doing some cutting edge work. Take a minute to talk about what Baobab is doing, and why is it so relevant? We know it's cool. We've interviewed the CEO and Founder before. Share with the audience, what is Baobab doing? Why is it so relevant? >> So, we formed a couple years ago, and at the time, VR was, and it still is, in its very nascent stage. One thing that we recognized, was an opportunity to try to create content that would appeal for people from the ages of five to 105. There was a lot of documentaries, there was a lot of experiential art house type of material. And there was a lot of gaming type of content for VR. For us, we're big lovers of animation and how that unites families, kids, grandparents, teenagers, and we saw an opportunity to try to create content that could appeal to all of these different types of people through animation. So that's sort of our mission, is to inspire your childlike sense of wonder, using two mediums that are so meant for each other, which are animation and VR. >> I'd like to talk about some of the work you got going on a little bit later, but I want to talk about that 12 year old in his room, or the 16 year old that's got a full rig, tricked out with the keyboard, they're laying down music, they're building music, they're gaming, they might be creating art. They are a living, breathing creative. And, they're self learning. They're jumping on Youtube. They're jumping into VR meetups and groups. They're self learning. >> Kane: Absolutely. >> How do you connect to them? What do they do? What's the playbook? How do these people go to the next level? What's the industry doing around this? >> I think, one example I'll give is, I was at Annecy Film Festival, and that's one of the biggest animation focused film festivals in the world, and I was showcasing our very first piece, it was called Invasion, starring Ethan Hawke, where you're actually in the body of a bunny rabbit, and you meet another bunny rabbit. You create a bond. And together you thwart an alien invasion on Earth. What was so interesting to me, was I had never seen that sort of, that demo, that teenage demo, where young boys and girls would actually bring their parents back to the experience, and say this is what I want to study in college. This is what I want to do in art school. So, I think that they, growing up with all this new technology, really sort of get the idea of being in realtime, and having storytelling in realtime. And seeing that level of interest from that age group was very sort of affirming to us that we're on the right track, in terms of the next generation of storytelling. >> Well you guys are definitely on the right track, I can say that. But I think what your point confirms, and connects the dots for people that might not be in the industry is that the old tech world was, the geeks did it, software was an art and you had to be in that CS club. The democratization is a big trend here, and what you're talking about is, people are humanizing, they can see real emotional, practical examples. So the young guns, the young kids, they don't have baggage. They look at it with a clean slate and going, I want that. I can see myself using this. I can self actualize with this. So really kind of tips the scales, and proves the point. >> Absolutely. We world premiered Asteroids, our second VR experience, starring Elizabeth Banks, and one of the biggest millennial stars, Ingrid Nilson, last year at Sundance. Even had the first red carpet VR premiere in Sundance history. And watching the younger generation, it was our first piece where we actually used the controllers that had just come out in that past year. And watching them go in with no preconceived notions on what using controllers could be, to be a character in the experience, it was just fascinating, because they picked it up faster than anyone, and learned the language of being a character, and having hand controllers as a robot, so you could play fetch with an alien dog, or you could mirror their actions, or they might mirror yours, and creating these bonds and these experiences. So, that sort of fresh perspective is really exciting. >> Talk about the role of these experiences, and how they connect people, because one of the big trends also online today, in today's, I would say, yeah the peg the evolution is, you're really getting into the immersive experience, I believe that. But, content creates bonds between people, and good experiences creates glue between relationships, and forges new ones, maybe enhances existing ones. This is a big part of the media. >> Absolutely. For us, emotional connection is the key to getting people to put on headsets, and to come back to our experiences. And that emotional connection for us, is what we've witnessed, in terms of people forming bonds with our characters. So, everyone knows that VR can bring you to brand new worlds, and exciting places, and immerse you in places that you can never go. But, the one thing that I think we learned in our experience with VR, is that if you can create a bond between the user and other characters in the experience that they believe is real, and we use psychology, technology, and storytelling to do that, then they want to come back again and again. So, one of the trickiest parts of VR is trying to get people to have repeat views. And the feedback we've gotten from a lot of the technology platforms is people come back time and time again, and it seems to be because they actually believe these characters are real, and that they're friends. >> So talk about your journey, because you're at the front end of this wave, and you're participating, you're creating art, you're creating work product. You're building technology with the Baobab Studios. What would you do if you were 16? If you were a sophomore in high school, knowing what you know, and you could go back in time, or you could be today what you know at 16, what would you do? >> When I was 16, I had no idea what I was going to do. When I graduated from college, I had no idea what I was going to do. But what I will say is, VR is really unique because it's so interdisciplinary. So, it actually invites people from all different fabrics of society, and different types of education. The most, I would encourage 16 year olds to just be who they are, and to play. And if I talked to my 16 year old self, I would have just encouraged myself to follow my interest and pursuits more, because many years later, actually VR has brought me back to a lot of my roots, and different things that I studied growing up, and was fascinated by. >> So it ignited your passion. >> Absolutely. >> Or things that you were really into, that you might have forgotten. Is that- >> Yeah, I studied something called symbolic systems at Stanford University, and I had no idea what I was doing. It combined computer science, psychology, linguistics, and philosophy. And the first thing I did after college was pursue potentially a career as a lawyer. But now it all makes sense. VR makes, brings everything together. >> What could have been, you know? >> Absolutely. >> Well, a lot of neural network, symbolic systems, this is the underpinnings of this complex fabric that is powering this content market. So I'd love to get your thoughts. Is there a success formula that you're seeing emerging, I know there's no silver bullet yet. A lot of experimentation. A lot of new things happening. But as this technology, and the scaffolding around it is being built, while also original content is being built, it's still evolving. What's the success formula, and what's the pitfall? What to stay away from? >> I think it's about, it's really about good storytelling. And I think it's a time to be courageous and brave, and put forward stories that wouldn't have otherwise been told in the more traditional mediums. Our latest project in production that I'm so personally excited about, is called Legend of Crow. It stars John Legend as a beautiful bird with the most beautiful feathers, and the most gorgeous voice, who during dark and cold times, must go on a heroes journey to bring light back to the world. Something I feel like in this day and age, a lot of people can relate to. But, on top of this story being based upon a beautiful Native American legend that hasn't really been exposed to the world, we've taken the opportunity to take the themes of diversity and self sacrifice, and self acceptance, to create an all star cast of minorities and women, and that's something I feel the younger generations can really relate to, because having worked a lot in Hollywood as a producer in traditional TV and film, things take a while, and there's a certain way of casting and doing things that follow an older model, and I think younger audiences are excited to have a character like Moth in our experience who speaks both Spanish and English, because that's the way the world is today. >> So I got to ask you a quick, you brought up diversity and inclusion kind of in your comment. I got to bring this up, because you guys do hit a nice demographic that I think is super relevant and important, the younger generation. So I talk to a lot of young people all the time. I say things like, you don't need to be a computer scientist to get into this game. You can be super smart. You don't need to learn how to code hardcore coding to get into this. And they respond to that. And that's one kind of, I would say, narrative that conventional wisdom might not be right. And the other one is the diversity. So my son, 16 year old, says, "Dad, your generation is so politically correct. All this nonsense." So, the younger generation is not living what we're living in, in these dark times, I would say, certainly with diversity, but how does VR really equalize? And will the storm pass? Diversity, inclusion, all that great stuff that are core issues, certainly are being worked on. But, do we see hope here? >> Absolutely. I think disruption in the form of a new technology and a new medium is, while scary to some people, is actually the most exciting and fertile time to equalize. Our CEO, Maureen Fan, who is a college classmate of mine, always wanted to work in animation. And she finally saw the right opportunity when VR came, and we put on headsets for the first time, and saw how there could be a new wave of exciting animators, through this disruptive technology. Because everyone else in more traditional animation is so focused on the old model, and the old ways of doing things, of getting things off the ground, of financing, of creating certain kinds of content that have been proven over time, in the old sort of studio model. >> What were some of those things that were instrumental in this breakout, to forge this new ground? >> I think a lot of it is the technology finally being ready. Our CTO, Larry Cutler, actually studied virtual reality at Stanford a decade before Maureen and I were there, and he had always been waiting for the right time to go into VR. >> Does he preach down, hey kids, I used to walk in the snow with bare feet to you guys, or has he, what's his role, how's he doing? >> He's amazing. He was the head of global character tech for all of Dreamworks animation, and like I said, I think one thing that distinguishes us from some of the other people in VR is that we're so focused on characters, so focused on them making eye contact with you, or with their facial features reacting in realtime, and being very believable, and forging that bond between you and that character. So, for us, that character technology, and having the top people in that space work with us, is the long term thing that is going to differentiate us from the crowd. >> I'd like to get your reaction to my comment about the computer science, and that's mainly, mostly a Silicon Valley thing, living in Palo Alto, so, but people are struggling when they go to college. What should I major in? And there's a narrative right now, oh you got to learn how to code, you got to be a computer science major. You don't. You don't have to be a CS major. Some of the most creative and technical brilliance can also come from other disciplines. What's your reaction to that, and what's your advice? >> I think people should just follow their effort. Because, if you follow what naturally comes to you, what you're good at, and that also has meaning and interest to you, and something that you can get feedback along the way, which is the great thing about being in a growing space, you are going to just spend your, you're going to spend a lot of late nights doing that stuff, and you can always bring it into your career path when that happens. And I think, we're in a very DIY time in VR. No one knows anything. We're constantly making mistakes, but then learning from them. And that's the most exciting process of being where we are. So, to people who are of college age, I would just tell them follow your effort. If you're interested in VR, it's an exciting time to just do it yourself. Learn from your mistakes. And then, and try to create something new. >> What does the new creative mean to you. When you hear that, new creative, what does that mean to you? >> You know, it's interesting being at these talks and panels, and at all these festivals, because I feel like a lot of people are looking for that new innovator who comes out of nowhere, and sort of just redefines the industry. And that could very well happen. But I actually think what's really exciting about right now is, it's more about having, understanding the bridge between all the different mediums and disciplines. I think new things are created when you combine areas that have not been traditionally aligned. So for example, Orson Welles arguably created one of the first great cinematic masterpieces in Citizen Kane, but he was able to do so by bringing values from theater, and from radio, and areas where he sort of learned the art of storytelling. And he was able to combine them in new and interesting ways that people hadn't seen before. So, for me it's less about looking for that silver bullet of a creative person who comes out of nowhere, but these younger generations who understand these different mediums, combining them and creating connections with them in an exciting way. >> Brooks Brown from Starbury Studios said on the panel, the next breakout star is going to be the kid in the basement that no one's ever heard of. >> Very possibly, but that kid in the basement, he needs to be passionate about a lot of different disciplines. So, what we've tried to emulate in doing so, is bringing the best people in gaming, bringing the best people from traditional film, bringing people who had interests in a lot of different areas, different art forms, and letting them kind of play together and learn from each other. Argue with each other, you know? And then come up with something that no one's seen before. >> We're going to have to come up with a camera, so that could be like an experiment. Like it's just a reality show in and of itself. All that talent, multi discipline together. >> Absolutely. >> John: It's like dynamite ready to explode. >> It's the challenge, it's the blessing, it's the curse and the blessing of our medium right now, because there's so much more to discover, but if people come in and have an open mind, and are willing ... If the people from Hollywood are willing to learn from the people who do gaming in Silicon Valley, who are open to learning from the people in New York who grew up on live theater, I feel those, finding that intersection, finding those beautiful intersections are where we're going to thrive. >> Well you guys highlight that multi disciplinary thing, but also highlights why diversity is so important. Diversity brings the most perspectives to the table, the most data, most contribution. It might be a little bit longer to work through the arguments, right? You got to be patient. >> Absolutely you have to be patient. We're really lucky to be working with John Legend on our VR piece. He had actually been looking for several years to find, wanting to play in this space, but not wanting to do it with the wrong partner at the wrong time. So, it's, there's an art to timing in everything that we do right now, and when we presented to him the story we're doing with the Legend of Crow, it felt like the perfect sort of match. >> Legend of Crow coming out. Head of Content, Kane Lee here, Baobab Studios. Thanks for spending the time here on the Cube Conversation. What's the timing of the release of the program? >> Probably late spring, but we're going to be announcing some news around that soon, and we have some more exciting updates about it that I can't wait to share. >> Alright, we are here at the Intel Tech Lounge as the Cube's Conversation at Sundance Film Festival, part of our coverage of Sundance 2018. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.