(thoughtful electronic music) >> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Enterprise applications are an enormous market, and they're enormously important to organizations globally. Essentially, the world's businesses are running on enterprise applications. Companies' processes are wired into these systems, and the investments that they make in people, process, and technology are vital to these companies' success. But it's complicated because many of these systems are decades old. Markets have changed, but the ERP system for example fundamentally hasn't. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. This week, we're going to do a data download on the enterprise software space, and put forth some themes in our thesis around this very important segment. I'd like to do a shout-out to my friend Sarbjeet Johal, who helped me frame this segment, and he's a strategic thinker and he shared some excellent insights for this episode. What I'd first like to do is let's lay out the scope of what we're going to talk about today. So we're going to focus on the core enterprise apps that companies rely on to run their businesses. Talkin' about the systems of record here, the ERP, the financial systems, HR, CRMs, service management we'll put in there. We may touch on some of the other areas, but this is core that we're going to drill into. This is a big, big market. Customers spend many hundreds of billions of dollars in this area, you could argue about a half a trillion. And it's a mature market, as you'll see from the data. Look, it's good to be in the technology business today. This business is doing better than most, and within the technology business, it's better to be in software because of the economics and scale. And if you have a SaaS cloud model, it's even better. But the market, it is fragmented, not nearly as much as it used to be, but there are many specialized areas where leaders have emerged. ServiceNow and ITSM or Workday and HCM are good examples of companies that've specialized and then exploded, first as we saw ServiceNow blow past Workday's valuation. It was nearly 2x at one point. Now, that was before Workday crushed its earnings this week. It's up 15% today. ServiceNow took a slight breather earlier this month, but it's up on Workday sympathy today. Salesforce also beat earnings, and of course replaced Exxon Mobile on the DOW Industrials, can you imagine that? But let's bring it back to this digital transformation that you hear about. This is the big cliche from all the tech companies and especially software players. Now a lot of this DX, I sometimes call it, is related to old systems. It's especially true for the mega-caps like Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and even Microsoft. Take ERP and some of the mature products for example, like Oracle R12, or SAP R3 or R4. Many of these systems were put in place 15 years ago, and yeah, they're going to need to transform. They are burnt in. They were installed in what, 2005? It was before the iPhone, before social media, before machine learning and AI made its big comeback, and before cloud. These systems were built on the 1.0 of cloud. The businesses have changed but the software really hasn't. It happens every 10 to 15 years, companies have to upgrade or re-implement their systems, and optimize for the way business now runs, because they had to be more competitive and more agile. They can't do it on their old software. And God help you if you made a bunch of custom modifications. Good lucking tryin' to rip those out. And this is why pure play companies in the cloud like ServiceNow and Workday have done so well. They're best-of-breed and they're cloud, and it sets up this age-old battle that we always talk about, best-of-breed versus integrated suites. So let's bring in some of the other themes and feedback that we get from the community. Now we've definitely seen this schism play out between on-prem and cloud plays. And that's created some challenges for the legacy players. People working remotely has meant less data center, less on-prem action for the legacy companies. Now, they have gone out and acquired to get to the cloud and/or they've had to rearchitect their software like Oracle has done with Fusion. But think about something like Oracle Financials. Oracle is tryna migrate them to Fusion, or think about SAP R3, with R4, SAP pushing HANA. All this is going to cloud-based SaaS. So the companies that've been pure play SaaS are doing better, and I say quasi-modern on this slide because Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, even Coupa, NetSuite which is now Oracle, SuccessFactors which SAP purchased, et cetera, these are actually pretty old companies, the earlier part of the 2000s or in the case of Salesforce, 1999. And you're seeing some really different pricing models in the market. Things are moving quickly to an OPEX model. You have the legacy perpetual pricing, and it's giving way to subscriptions, and now we even see companies like Datadog and Snowflake with so-called consumption-based pricing models, priced as a true cloud. And we think that that's going to eventually spill into the core SaaS applications. Now one of the concerns that we've heard from the community is that some of the traditional players that were able to hide from COVID earlier this year might not have enough deferred revenue dry powder to continue to power through the pandemic, but so far the picture continues to look pretty strong for the software companies. We'll get into some of that. Now, finally, this is a premise that I talked to Sarbjeet about, the disruption perhaps comes from cloud and developer ecosystems. Y'know I remember John Furrier and I had a conversation awhile back with Jerry Chen from Greylock. It was on theCUBE, and it was kind of like, went like this. People were talking about whether AWS was going to enter the applications market, and the thesis here is no, or not in the near future. Rather, the disruptive play, and this is really Sarbjeet's premise, is to provide infrastructure for innovation, and a PaaS layer for differentiation, and developers will build modern cloud-native apps to compete with the SaaS players on top of this. This is intriguing to me, and is likely going to play out over the next decade, but it's going to take a while, because these SaaS players are, they're very large, and they continue to pour money into their platforms. Now let's talk about the shift from CAPEX to OPEX and bring in some ETR data. Of course, this was well in play pre-COVID, but the trend has been accelerating. This chart shows data from the August ETR survey, and it was asking people to express their split between CAPEX and OPEX spend, and as you can see, the trend is clear. Goes from 48% last year, 55% today, and moving to over 62% OPEX a year from now. It's no surprise, but I think it could happen even faster depending on the technical debt that organizations have to shed. And hence, the attractiveness again of the SaaS cloud players. So now let's visualize some of the major players in this space, and do some comparisons. Here we show one of our favorite views, and what we're doing here is we juxtapose net score on the vertical axis with market share on the horizontal plane. Remember, net score is a measure of spending momentum. Each quarter, ETR asks buyers, are you planning to spend more or less, and they essentially subtract the lesses from the mores to derive net score. Market share on the other hand is a measure of pervasiveness in the dataset, and it's derived from the number of mentions in the sector divided by the total mentions in the survey, and you can see each metric in that embedded table that we put in there. So I said earlier, this was a pretty mature market and you can see that in the table. Eh, kind of middle-of-the-road net scores with pretty large shared ends, i.e. responses in the dataset, but a lot of red. There are some standouts, however, as you see in the upper right, namely, ServiceNow and Salesforce. These are two pretty remarkable companies. ServiceNow entered the market as a help desk or service management player, and has dramatically expanded its TAM, really to the point where they're aiming at $5 billion in revenue. Salesforce was the first in cloud CRM, and is pushing 20 billion in revenue. I've said many times, these companies are on a collision course, and I stand by that, as any of the next great software companies, and these are two, are going to compete with all the mega-caps, including Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft, and they'll bump into each other. Which brings us to those super-cap companies. You see Microsoft with Dynamics, they show up like they always do. I'm like a broken record on Microsoft. I mean they're everywhere in the survey data. Now Oracle and SAP, they've been extremely acquisitive over the years, and you can see some of their acquisitions on this chart. I've said many times in theCUBE that Larry Olsen used to denigrate his competitors for writing checks instead of code, but he saw the consolidation trend happening in the ERT, ERP space before anyone else did, and with the $10 billion PeopleSoft acquisition in 2005, set off a trend in enterprise software that did a few things. First, it solidified Oracle's position further up the stack. It also set Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri off to create a next-generation cloud software company, Workday, which you can see in the chart has a net score up there with ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Coupa, and it also led to Oracle Fusion Middleware, which is designed as an integration point for all these software components, and this is really important because Oracle is moving everything into its cloud. And you can see that its on-prem net score, which puts it deep into negative territory. Now SAP, take a look at them, they have much higher net scores than Oracle, and you can see it's acquired SaaS properties like Ariba, Concur, and SuccessFactors, which have decent momentum. But you know, SAP, and we've talked about this before, is not without its challenges. With SAP, HANA is the answer to all of its problems. The problem is that it's not necessarily the answer to all of SAP's customers' problems. Most of SAP's legacy customers run SAP on Oracle or other databases. HANA is used for the in-memory query workload, but most customers are going to continue to use other databases for their systems of record. So this adds complexity. But HANA is very good at the query piece. However, SAP never did what Oracle did with Fusion, which as you might recall, took more than a decade to get right. HANA is SAP's architectural attempt to unify the SAP portfolio and get, (laughs) really get off of Oracle, but it's many years away, and it's unclear when or if they'll ever get there. All right, let's move on. Here's a look at a similar set of companies, but I wanted to show you this view because it gives you a detailed look at ETR's net score approach, and it tells us a few things more. And remember, this is a survey of almost 1,200 technology buyers. That's the N, that's the respondent rate. So this chart shows the net score granularity for the enterprise players that we were just discussing. Let me explain this. Net score is actually more detailed than what I said before. It comprises responses in four categories. The lime green is new adoptions. The forest green is growth in spending of 6% or more, the gray is flat spend, the pink is a budget shrink of 6% or greater, and the red is retiring the platform. So what this tells us is that there's a big fat middle of stay the same. The lime green is pretty small, but you can see, NetSuite jumps out for new adoptions because they've been very aggressive going after smaller and mid-sized companies, and Coupa, the spend management specialist, shows reasonably strong new adoptions. Now ServiceNow is interesting to me. Not a ton of new adoptions. They've landed the ship and really penetrated larger organizations. And while new adoptions are not off the charts, look at the spending more categories, it's very very strong at 46%. And the other really positive thing for ServiceNow is there's very little red. This company is a beast. Now Salesforce similarly, not tons of new adoptions, but 40% spend more. For a company that size, that's pretty impressive. Workday similarly has a very strong spending profile. At the bottom of the chart, you see a fair amount of red, as we saw on the XY graph. But now, let's take another view of net score. Think of this as a zoom in, which takes those bar charts but shows it in a pie format for individual companies. So we're showing this here for ServiceNow, Workday, and Salesforce, and we've superimposed the net score for these three in green, so you can see ServiceNow at 48%, very good for a company headed toward five billion. Same with Workday, 40% for a company of similar size, and Salesforce has a comparable net score, and is significantly larger than those two revenue-wise. Now this is the same view, this next chart's the same view for SAP and Oracle, and you can see substantially lower than the momentum leaders in terms of net score. But these are much larger companies. SAP's about 33 billion, Oracle's closer to 40 billion. But Oracle especially has seen some headwinds from organizations spending less which drags its net score down. But you're not seeing a lot of replacement in Oracle's base because as I said at the top, these systems are fossilized and many are running on Oracle. And the vast majority of mission-critical workloads are especially running on Oracle. Now remember, this isn't a revenue-weighted view. Oracle charges a steep premium based on the number of cores, and it has a big maintenance stream. So while its net score is kind of sucky, its cashflow is not. All right, let's wrap it up here. We have a very large and mature market. But the semi-modern SaaS players like Salesforce and ServiceNow and Workday, they've gone well beyond escape velocity and solidified their positions as great software companies. Others are trying to follow that suit and compete with the biggest of the bigs, i.e. SAP and Oracle. Now I didn't talk much about Microsoft, but as always they show up prominently. They're huge and they're everywhere in this dataset. What I think is interesting is the competitive dynamics that we talked about earlier. These kind of newer SaaS leaders, they're disrupting Oracle and SAP, but they're also increasingly bumping into each other. You know, ServiceNow has HR for example, and they say that they don't compete with Workday, and that's true. But y'know, these two companies, they eye each other and they angle for account control. Same thing with Salesforce. It's that software mindset. The bigger a software company gets, the more they think they can own the world, because it's software, and if you're good at writing code and you see an opportunity that can add value for your customers, you tend to go after it. Now, we didn't talk much about M&A, but that's going to continue here, especially as these companies look for TAM expansion and opportunities to bring in new capabilities, particularly around data, analytics, machine learning, AI and the like, and don't forget industry specialization. You've seen Oracle pick up a number of industry plays and as digital transformation continues, you'll see more crossing of the industry streams because it's data. Now, the disruption isn't blatantly obvious in this market right now, other than SaaS clouds going after SAP and Oracle, and it's because these companies are deeply entrenched in their customer organizations and change is risky. But the cloud developer, the open source API trend, it could lead to disruptions, but I wouldn't expect that until the second half of this decade as cloud ecosystems really begin to evolve and take hold. Okay, well that's it for today. Remember, these Breaking Analysis episodes, they're all available as podcasts wherever you listen so please subscribe. I publish weekly on Wikibon.com and SiliconANGLE.com, so check that out, and please do comment on my LinkedIn posts. Don't forget, check out ETR.plus for all the survey action. Get in touch on Twitter, I'm @dvellante, or email me at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching everybody. Be well, and we'll see you next time. (thoughtful electronic music)

>>From the cube studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cute conversation. Hi, welcome back. I'm Stu middleman. And this is a cube conversation digging in with, talking about what they're doing to help people. Yeah. Really bringing some of the networking ideals to cloud native environment, both know in the cloud, in the data centers program, Krishna penny. He is the vice president of software. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much for talking to me. Alright, so, so Krishna the pin Sandow team, uh, you know, very well known in the industry three, uh, you innovation. Yeah. Especially in the networking world. Give us a little bit about your background specifically, uh, how long you've been part of this team and, uh, you know, but, uh, you know, you and the team, you know? Yeah. >>And Sando. Yup. Um, so, uh, I'm VP of software in Sandow, um, before Penn Sarno, before founding concern, though, I worked in a few startups in CME networks, uh, newer systems and Greenfield networks, all those three startups have been acquired by Cisco. Um, um, my recent role before this, uh, uh, this, this company was a, it was VP of engineering and Cisco, uh, I was responsible for a product called ACA, which is course flagship SDN tonic. Mmm. So I mean, when, why did we find a phone, uh, Ben Sandoz? So when we were looking at the industry, uh, the last, uh, a few years, right? The few trends that are becoming clear. So obviously we have a lot of enterprise background. We were watching, you know, ECA being deployed in the enterprise data centers. One sore point for customers from operational point of view was installing service devices, network appliances, or storage appliances. >>So not only the operational complexity that this device is bringing, it's also, they don't give you the performance and bandwidth, uh, and PPS that you expect, but traffic, especially from East West. So that was one that was one major issue. And also, if you look at where the intelligence is going, has been, this has been the trend it's been going to the edge. The reason for that is the motors or switches or the devices in the middle. They cannot handle the scale. Yeah. I mean, the bandwidths are growing. The scale is growing. The stateful stuff is going in the network and the switches and the appliances not able to handle it. So you need something at the edge close to the application that can handle, uh, uh, this kind of, uh, services and bandwidth. And the third thing is obviously, you know, x86, okay. Even a few years back, you know, every two years, you know, you're getting more transistors. >>I mean, obviously the most lined it. And, uh, we know we know how that, that part is going. So the it's cycles are more valuable and we don't want to use them for this network services Mmm. Including SDN or firewalls or load balancer. So NBME, mutualization so looking at all these trends in the industry, you know, we thought there is a good, uh, good opportunity to do a domain specific processor for IO and build products around it. I mean, that's how we started Ben signed off. Yeah. So, so Krishna, it's always fascinating to watch. If you look at startups, they are often yeah. Okay. The time that they're in and the technologies that are available, you know, sometimes their ideas that, you know, cakes a few times and, you know, maturation of the technology and other times, you know, I'll hear teams and they're like, Oh, well we did this. >>And then, Oh, wow. There was this new innovation came out that I wish I had add that when I did this last time. So we do, a generation. Oh, wow. Talking about, you know, distributed architectures or, you know, well, over a decade spent a long time now, uh, in many ways I feel edge computing is just, you know, the latest discussion of this, but when it comes to, and you know, you've got software, uh, under, under your purview, um, what are some of the things that are available for that might not have been, you know, in your toolkit, you know, five years ago. Yeah. So the growth of open source software has been very helpful for us because we baked scale-out microservices. This controller, like the last time I don't, when we were building that, you know, we had to build our own consensus algorithm. >>We had to build our own dishwasher database for metrics and humans and logs. So right now, uh, we, I mean, we have, because of open source thing, we leverage CD elastic influx in all this open source technologies that you hear, uh, uh, since we want to leverage the Kubernetes ecosystem. No, that helped us a lot at the same time, if you think about it. Right. But even the software, which is not open source, close source thing, I'm maturing. Um, I mean, if you talk about SDN, you know, seven APS bank, it was like, you know, the end versions of doing off SDN, but now the industry standard is an ADPN, um, which is one of the core pieces of what we do we do as Dean solution with DVA. Um, so, you know, it's more of, you know, the industry's coming to a place where, you know, these are the standards and this is open source software that you could leverage and quickly innovate compared to building all of this from scratch, which will be a big effort for us stocked up, uh, to succeed and build it in time for your customer success. >>Yeah. And Krishna, I, you know, you talk about open forum, not only in the software, the hardware standards. Okay. Think about things, the open compute or the proliferation of, you know, GPS and, uh, everything along that, how was that impact? I did. So, I mean, it's a good thing you're talking about. For example, we were, we are looking in the future and OCP card, but I do know it's a good thing that SEP card goes into a HP server. It goes into a Dell software. Um, so pretty much, you know, we, we want to, I mean, see our goal is to enable this platform, uh, that what we built in, you know, all the use cases that customer could think of. Right. So in that way, hardware, standardization is a good thing for the industry. Um, and then same thing, if you go in how we program the AC, you know, we at about standards of this people, programming, it's an industry consortium led by a few people. >>Um, we want to make sure that, you know, we follow the standards for the customer who's coming in, uh, who wants to program it., it's good to have a standards based thing rather than doing something completely proprietary at the same time you're enabling innovations. And then those innovations here to push it back to the open source. That's what we trying to do with before. Yeah. Excellent. I've had some, some real good conversations about before. Um, and, and the way, uh, and Tondo is, is leveraging that, that may be a little bit differently. You know, you talk about standards and open source, oftentimes it's like, well, is there a differentiator there, there are certain parts of the ecosystem that you say, well, kind of been commodified. Mmm. Obviously you're taking a lot of different technologies, putting them together, uh, help, help share the uniqueness. Okay. And Tondo what differentiates, what you're doing from what was available in the market or that I couldn't just cobbled together, uh, you know, a bunch of open source hardware and software together. >>Yeah. I mean, if you look at a technologist, I think the networking that both of us are very familiar with that. If you want to build an SDN solution, or you can take a, well yes. Or you can use exhibit six and, you know, take some much in Silicon and cobble it together. But the problem is you will not get the performance and bandwidth that you're looking for. Okay. So let's say, you know, uh, if you want a high PPS solution or you want a high CPS solution, because the number of connections are going for your IOT use case or Fiji use case, right. If you, uh, to get that with an open source thing, without any assist, uh, from a domain specific processor, your performance will be low. So that is the, I mean, that's once an enterprise in the cloud use case state, as you know, you're trying to pack as many BMCs containers in one set of word, because, you know, you get charged. >>I mean, the customer, uh, the other customers make money based on that. Right? So you want to offload all of those things into a domain specific processor that what we've built, which we call the TSC, which will, um, which we'll, you know, do all the services at pretty much no cost to accept a six. I mean, it's to six, you'll be using zero cycles, a photo doing, you know, features like security groups or VPCs, or VPN, uh, or encryption or storage virtualization. Right. That's where that value comes in. I mean, if you count the TCO model using bunch of x86 codes or in a bunch of arm or AMD codes compared to what we do. Mmm. A TCO model works out great for our customers. I mean, that's why, you know, there's so much interest in a product. Excellent. I'm proud of you. Glad you brought up customers, Christina. >>One of the challenges I have seen over the years with networking is it tends to be, you know, a completely separate language that we speak there, you know, a lot of acronyms and protocols and, uh, you know, not necessarily passable to people outside of the silo of networking. I think back then, you know, SDN, uh, you know, people on the outside would be like, that stands for still does nothing, right? Like networking, uh, you know, mumbo jumbo there for people outside of networking. You know what I think about, you know, if I was going to the C suite of an enterprise customer, um, they don't necessarily care about those networking protocols. They care about the, you know, the business results and the product Liberty. How, how do you help explain what pen Sandow does to those that aren't, you know, steeped in the network, because the way I look at it, right? >>What is customer looking? But yeah, you're writing who doesn't need, what in cap you use customer is looking for is operational simplicity. And then he wants looking for security. They, it, you know, and if you look at it sometimes, you know, both like in orthogonal, if you make it very highly secure, but you make it like and does an operational procedure before you deploy a workload that doesn't work for the customer because in operational complexity increases tremendously. Right? So it, we are coming in, um, is that we want to simplify this for the customer. You know, this is a very simple way to deploy policies. There's a simple way to deploy your networking infrastructure. And in the way we do it is we don't care what your physical network is, uh, in some sense, right? So because we are close to the server, that's a very good advantage. >>We have, we have played the policies before, even the packet leaves the center, right? So in that way, he knows his fully secure environment and we, and you don't want to manage each one individually, we have this, okay, Rockwell PSM, which manages, you know, all this service from a central place. And it's easy to operationalize a fabric, whether you talk about upgrades or you talk about, you know, uh, deploying new services, it's all driven with rest API, and you can have a GUI, so you can do it a single place. And that's where, you know, a customer's value is rather than talking about, as you're talking about end caps or, you know, exactly the route to port. That is not the main thing that, I mean, they wake up every day, they wake up. Have you been thinking about it or do I have a security risk? >>And then how easy for me is to deploy new, uh, in a new services or bring up new data center. Right. Okay. Krishna, you're also spanning with your product, a few different worlds out. Yeah. You know, traditionally yeah. About, you know, an enterprise data center versus a hyperscale public cloud and ed sites, hi comes to mind very different skillset for management, you know, different types of okay. Appointments there. Mmm. You know, I understand right. You were going to, you know, play in all of those environments. So talk a little bit about that, please. How you do that and, you know, you know, where you sit in, in that overall discussion. Yes. So, I mean, a number one rule inside a company is we are driven by customers and obviously not customer success is our success. So, but given said that, right. What we try to do is that we try to build a platform that is kind of, you know, programmable obviously starting from, you know, before that we talked about earlier, but it's also from a software point of view, it's kind of plugable right. >>So when we build a software, for example, at cloud customers, and they use BSC, they use the same set of age KPI's or GSP CRS, TPS that DSC provides their controller. But when we ship the same, uh, platform, what enterprise customers, we built our own controller and we use the same DC APS. So the way we are trying to do is things is fully leverage yeah. In what we do for enterprise customers and cloud customers. Mmm. We don't try to reinvent the wheel. Uh, obviously at the same time, if you look at the highest level constructs from a network perspective, right. Uh, audience, for his perspective, what are you trying to do? You're trying to provide connectivity, but you're trying to avoid isolation and you're trying to provide security. Uh, so all these constructs we encapsulated in APA is a, which, you know, uh, in some, I, some, some mostly like cloud, like APS and those APIs are, are used, but cloud customers and enterprise customers, and the software is built in a way of it. >>Any layer is, can be removed on any layer. It can be hard, right? Because it's not interested. We don't want to be multiple different offers for different customers. Right. Then we will not scale. So the idea when we started the software architecture, is that how we make it pluggable and how will you make the program will that customer says, I don't want this piece of it. You can put them third party piece on it and still integrate, uh, at a, at a common layer with using. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, Krishna, you know, I have a little bit of appreciation where some of the hard work, what your team has been doing, you know, a couple of years in stealth, but, you know, really accelerating from, uh, you know, the announcement coming out of stealth, uh, at the end of 2019. Yeah. Just about half a year, your GA with a major OEM of HPE, definitely a lot of work that needs to be done. >>It brings us to, you know, what, what are you most proud about from the work that your team's doing? Uh, you know, we don't need to hear any, you know, major horror stories, but, you know, there always are some of them, you know, not holes or challenges that, uh, you know, often get hidden yeah. Behind the curtain. Okay. I mean, personally, I'm most proud of the team that we've made. Um, so, uh, you know, obviously, you know, uh, our executors have it good track record of disrupting the market multiple times, but I'm most proud of the team because the team is not just worried about that., uh, that, uh, even delegate is senior technologist and they're great leaders, but they're also worried about the customer problem, right? So it's always about, you know, getting the right mix, awfully not execution combined with technology is when you succeed, that is what I'm most proud of. >>You know, we have a team with, and Cletus running all these projects independently, um, and then releasing almost we have at least every week, if you look at all our customers, right. And then, you know, being a small company doing that is a, Hmm, it's pretty challenging in a way. But we did, we came up with methodologists where we fully believe in automation, everything is automated. And whenever we release software, we run through the full set of automation. So then we are confident that customer is getting good quality code. Uh, it's not like, you know, we cooked up something and that they should be ready and they need to upgrade to the software. That's I think that's the key part. If you want to succeed in this day and age, uh, developing the features at the velocity that you would want to develop and still support all these customers at the same time. >>Okay. Well, congratulations on that, Christian. All right. Final question. I have for you give us a little bit of guidance going forward, you know, often when we see a company out and we, you know, to try to say, Oh, well, this is what company does. You've got a very flexible architecture, lot of different types of solutions, what kind of markets or services might we be looking at a firm, uh, you know, download down the road a little ways. So I think we have a long journey. So we have a platform right now. We already, uh, I mean, we have a very baby, we are shipping. Mmm Mmm. The platforms are really shipping in a storage provider. Uh, we are integrating with the premier clouds, public clouds and, you know, enterprise market, you know, we already deployed a distributed firewall. Some of the customers divert is weird firewall. >>So, you know, uh, so if you take this platform, it can be extendable to add in all the services that you see in data centers on clubs, right. But primarily we are driven from a customer perspective and customer priority point of view. Mmm. So BMW will go is even try to add more ed services. We'll try to add more storage features. Mmm. And then we, we are also this initial interest in service provider market. What we can do for Fiji and IOT, uh, because we have the flexible platform. We have the, see, you know, how to apply this platform, this new application, that's where it probably will go into church. All right. Well, Krishna not a penny vice president of software with Ben Tondo. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, sir. It was great talking to you. All right. Be sure to check out the cube.net. You can find lots of interviews from Penn Sundo I'm Stu Miniman and thank you. We're watching the cute.

(calming music) >> Hello and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here at AWS re:Invent day three of our scintillating coverage here on theCUBE. I'm Savannah Peterson, joined by John Furrier. John Day three energy's high. How you feeling? >> I dunno, it's day two, day three, day four. It feels like day four, but again, we're back. >> Who's counting? >> Three pandemic levels in terms of 50,000 plus people? Hallways are packed. I got pictures. People don't believe it. It's actually happening. Then people are back. So, you know, and then the economy is a big question too and it's still, people are here, they're still building on the cloud and cost is a big thing. This next segment's going to be really important. I'm looking forward to this next segment. >> Yeah, me too. Without further ado let's welcome our guests for this segment. We have Brad from AMD and we have Rahul from you are, well you do a variety of different things. We'll start with CloudFix for this segment, but we could we could talk about your multiple hats all day long. Welcome to the show, gentlemen. How you doing? Brad how does it feel? We love seeing your logo above our stage here. >> Oh look, we love this. And talking about re:Invent last year, the energy this year compared to last year is so much bigger. We love it. We're excited to be here. >> Yeah, that's awesome. Rahul, how are you feeling? >> Excellent, I mean, I think this is my eighth or ninth re:Invent at this point and it's been fabulous. I think the, the crowd, the engagement, it's awesome. >> You wouldn't know there's a looming recession if you look at the activity but yet still the reality is here we had an analyst on yesterday, we were talking about spend more in the cloud, save more. So that you can still use the cloud and there's a lot of right sizing, I call you got to turn the lights off before you go to bed. Kind of be more efficient with your infrastructure as a theme. This re:Invent is a lot more about that now. Before it's about the glory days. Oh yeah, keep building, now with a little bit of pressure. This is the conversation. >> Exactly and I think most companies are looking to figure out how to innovate their way out of this uncertainty that's kind of on everyone's head. And the only way to do it is to be able to be more efficient with whatever your existing spend is, take those savings and then apply them to innovating on new stuff. And that's the way to go about it at this point. >> I think it's such a hot topic, for everyone that we're talking about. I mean, total cost optimization figuring out ways to be more efficient. I know that that's a big part of your mission at CloudFix. So just in case the audience isn't versed, give us the pitch. >> Okay, so a little bit of background on this. So the other hat I wear is CTO of ESW Capital. We have over 150 enterprise software companies within the portfolio. And one of my jobs is also to manage and run about 40 to 45,000 AWS accounts of our own. >> Casual number, just a few, just a couple pocket change, no big deal. >> And like everyone else here in the audience, yeah we had a problem with our costs, just going out of control and as we were looking at a lot of the tools to help us kind of get more efficient one of the biggest issues was that while people give you a lot of recommendations recommendations are way too far from realized savings. And we were running through the challenge of how do you take recommendation and turn them into real savings and multiple different hurdles. The short story being, we had to create CloudFix to actually realize those savings. So we took AWS recommendations around cost, filtered them down to the ones that are completely non-disruptive in nature, implemented those as simple automations that everyone could just run and realize those savings right away. We then took those savings and then started applying them to innovating and doing new interesting things with that money. >> Is there a best practice in your mind that you see merging in this time? People start more focused on it. Is there a method or a purpose kind of best practice of how to approach cost optimization? >> I think one of the things that most people don't realize is that cost optimization is not a one and done thing. It is literally nonstop. Which means that, on one hand AWS is constantly creating new services. There are over a hundred thousand API at this point of time How to use them right, how to use them efficiently You also have a problem of choice. Developers are constantly discovering new services discovering new ways to utilize them. And they are behaving in ways that you had not anticipated before. So you have to stay on top of things all the time. And really the only way to kind of stay on top is to have automation that helps you stay on top of all of these things. So yeah, finding efficiencies, standardizing your practices about how you leverage these AWS services and then automating the governance and hygiene around how you utilize them is really the key >> Brad tell me what this means for AMD and what working with CloudFix and Rahul does for your customers. >> Well, the idea of efficiency and cost optimization is near and dear to our heart. We have the leading. >> It's near and dear to everyone's heart, right now. (group laughs) >> But we are the leaders in x86 price performance and density and power efficiency. So this is something that's actually part of our core culture. We've been doing this a long time and what's interesting is most companies don't understand how much more efficiency they can get out of their applications aside from just the choices they make in cloud. but that's the one thing, the message we're giving to everybody is choice matters very much when it comes to your cloud solutions and just deciding what type of instance types you choose can have a massive impact on your bottom line. And so we are excited to partner with CloudFix, they've got a great model for this and they make it very easier for our customers to help identify those areas. And then AMD can come in as well and then help provide additional insight into those applications what else they can squeeze out of it. So it's a great relationship. >> If I hear you correctly, then there's more choice for the customers, faster selection, so no bad choices means bad performance if they have a workload or an app that needs to run, is that where you you kind of get into the, is that where it is or more? >> Well, I mean from the AMD side right now, one of the things they do very quickly is they identify where the low hanging fruit is. So it's the thing about x86 compatibility, you can shift instance types instantly in most cases without any change to your environment at all. And CloudFix has an automated tool to do that. And that's one thing you can immediately have an impact on your cost without having to do any work at all. And customers love that. >> What's the alternative if this doesn't exist they have to go manually figure it out or it gets them in the face or they see the numbers don't work or what's the, if you don't have the tool to automate what's the customer's experience >> The alternative is that you actually have people look at every single instance of usage of resources and try and figure out how to do this. At cloud scale, that just doesn't make sense. You just can't. >> It's too many different options. >> Correct The reality is that your resources your human resources are literally your most expensive part of your budget. You want to leverage all the amazing people you have to do the amazing work. This is not amazing work. This is mundane. >> So you free up all the people time. >> Correct, you free up wasting their time and resources on doing something that's mundane, simple and should be automated, because that's the only way you scale. >> I think of you is like a little helper in the background helping me save money while I'm not thinking about it. It's like a good financial planner making you money since we're talking about the economy >> Pretty much, the other analogy that I give to all the technologists is this is like garbage collection. Like for most languages when you are coding, you have these new languages that do garbage collection for you. You don't do memory management and stuff where developers back in the day used to do that. Why do that when you can have technology do that in an automated manner for you in an optimal way. So just kind of freeing up your developer's time from doing this stuff that's mundane and it's a standard best practice. One of the things that we leverage AMD for, is they've helped us define the process of seamlessly migrating folks over to AMD based instances without any major disruptions or trying to minimize every aspect of disruption. So all the best practices are kind of borrowed from them, borrowed from AWS in most other cases. And we basically put them in the automation so that you don't ever have to worry about that stuff. >> Well you're getting so much data you have the opportunity to really streamline, I mean I love this, because you can look across industry, across verticals and behavior of what other folks are doing. Learn from that and apply that in the background to all your different customers. >> So how big is the company? How big is the team? >> So we have people in about 130 different countries. So we've completely been remote and global and actually the cloud has been one of the big enablers of that. >> That's awesome, 130 countries. >> And that's the best part of it. I was just telling Brad a short while ago that's allowed us to hire the best talent from across the world and they spend their time building new amazing products and new solutions instead of doing all this other mundane stuff. So we are big believers in automation not only for our world. And once our customers started asking us about or telling us about the same problem that they were having that's when we actually took what we had internally for our own purpose. We packaged it up as CloudFix and launched it last year at re:Invent. >> If the customers aren't thinking about automation then they're going to probably have struggle. They're going to probably struggle. I mean with more data coming in you see the data story here more data's coming in, more automation. And this year Brad price performance, I've heard the word price performance more this year at re:Invent than any other year I've heard it before, but this year, price performance not performance, price performance. So you're starting to hear that dialogue of squeeze, understand the use cases use the right specialized processor instance starting to see that evolve. >> Yeah and and there's so much to it. I mean, AMD right out of the box is any instance is 10% less expensive than the equivalent in the market right now on AWS. They do a great job of maximizing those products. We've got our Zen four core general processor family just released in November and it's going to be a beast. Yeah, we're very excited about it and AWS announced support for it so we're excited to see what they deliver there too. But price performance is so critical and again it's going back to the complexity of these environments. Giving some of these enterprises some help, to help them understand where they can get additional value. It goes well beyond the retail price. There's a lot more money to be shaved off the top just by spending time thinking about those applications. >> Yeah, absolutely. I love that you talked about collaboration we've been talking about community. I want to acknowledge the AWS super fans here, standing behind the stage. Rahul, I know that you are an AWS super fan. Can you tell us about that community and the program? >> Yeah, so I have been involved with AWS and building products with AWS since 2007. So it's kind of 15 years back when literally there were just a handful of API for launching EC2 instances and S3. >> Not the a hundred thousand that you mentioned earlier, my goodness, the scale. >> So I think I feel very privileged and honored that I have been part of that journey and have had to learn or have had the opportunity to learn both from successes and failures. And it's just my way of contributing back to that community. So we are part of the FinOps foundation as well, contributing through that. I run a podcast called AWS Insiders and a livestream called AWS Made Easy. So we are trying to make sure that people out there are able to understand how to leverage AWS in the best possible way. And yeah, we are there to help and hold their hand through it. >> Talk about the community, take a minute to explain to the audience watching the community around this cost optimization area. It's evolving, you mentioned FinOps. There's a whole large community developing, of practitioners and technologists coming together to look at this. What does this all mean? Talk about this community. >> So cost management within organizations is has evolved so drastically that organizations haven't really coped with it. Historically, you've had finance teams basically buy a lot of infrastructure, which is CapEx and the engineering teams had kind of an upper bound on what they would spend and where they would spend. Suddenly with cloud, that's kind of enabled so much innovation all of a sudden, everyone's realized it, five years was spent figuring out whether people should be on the cloud or not. That's no longer a question, right. Everyone needs to be in the cloud and I think that's a no-brainer. The problem there is that suddenly your operating model has moved from CapEx to OpEx. And organizations haven't really figured out how to deal with it. Finance now no longer has the controls to control and manage and forecast costs. Engineering has never had to deal with it in the past and suddenly now they have to figure out how to do all this finance stuff. And procurement finds itself in a very awkward way position because they are no longer doing these negotiations like they were doing in the past where it was okay right up front before you engage, you do these negotiations. Now it's kind of an ongoing thing and it's constantly changing. Like every day is different. >> And you got marketplace >> And you got marketplace. So it's a very complex situation and I think what we are trying to do with the FinOps foundation is try and take a lot of the best practices across organizations that have been doing this at least for the last 10, 15 years. Take all the learnings and failures and turn them into hopefully opinionated approaches that people can take organizations can take to navigate through this faster rather than kind of falter and then decide that oh, this is not for us. >> Yeah. It's a great model, it's a great model. >> I know it's time John, go ahead. >> All right so, we got a little bumper sticker exercise we used to say what's the bumper sticker for the show? We used to say that, now we're modernizing, we're saying if you had to do an Instagram reel right now, short hot take of what's going on at re:Invent this year with AMD or CloudFix or just in general what would be the sizzle reel, that would be on Instagram or TikTok, go. >> Look, I think when you're at re:Invent right now and number one the energy is fantastic. 23 is going to be a building year. We've got a lot of difficult times ahead financially but it's the time, the ones that come out of 23 stronger and more efficient, and cost optimize are going to survive the long run. So now's the time to build. >> Well done, Rahul let's go for it. >> Yeah, so like Brad said, cost and efficiencies at the top of everyone's mind. Stuff that's the low hanging fruit, easy, use automation. Apply your sources to do most of the innovation. Take the easiest part to realizing savings and operate as efficiently as you possibly can. I think that's got to be key. >> I think they nailed it. They both nailed it. Wow, well it was really good. >> I put you on our talent list of >> And alright, so we repeat them. Are you part of our host team? I love this, I absolutely love this Rahul we wish you the best at CloudFix and your 17 other jobs. And I am genuinely impressed. Do you sleep actually? Last question. >> I do, I do. I have an amazing team that really helps me with all of this. So yeah, thanks to them and thank you for having us here. >> It's been fantastic. >> It's our pleasure. And Brad, I'm delighted we get you both now and again on our next segment. Thank you for being here with us. >> Thank you very much. >> And thank you all for tuning in to our live coverage here at AWS re:Invent, in fabulous Sin City with John Furrier, my name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (calm music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to the BizOps Manifesto Power panel talking about, "Embracing Agility Across the Business." I'm Lisa Martin, there are three guests here with me today, to break down this topic. Pierre Viljoen, CTO at Global Head of Enterprise Technology and Governance at HTL Enterprise Studio. Hey Pierre, welcome. >> Thank you >> Lisa: Dave West is also here, the CEO of Scrum.org. Hey Dave, good to have you with us. >> Hi Lisa, hi everybody. >> Lisa: And Serge Lucio is here as well, the general manager of Broadcom's Enterprise Software Division. Hey Serge, good to have you on the program. >> Thank you, good to be here. >> So we're going to be talking about the people and the process and technology requirements that businesses need to adopt to be able to embrace agility across the business. We're going to also be talking a lot about this inaugural BizOps industry research survey, on the state of digital business. A lot of very interesting findings that we're going to go through in the next 20 minutes or so. So the first question guys is, the BizOps survey found that over 519 individuals over five countries business and technology executives. This survey found, most organizations still expect this year to be as challenging as last year. I want you to kind of walk us through why that is, and how is that going to impact digital transformation initiatives? Pierre, we'll start with you, then Dave, then Serge. >> Sure, thank you Lisa. So, I think these days, disruption is no longer an exception. It's kind of become the norm or the rule, in terms of how we operate. And as executives in companies have learned over the last year, with everything that's happened is that, you can only modernize to a point, and then you need to do a little bit more. And what really is needed is for us to understand, going forward, how we're actually going to remodel our business by harnessing the resources that we have in a much more agile way, in a more fluent way, from an organizational perspective. And I think our current midterm goal, probably, is that we're capable of remodeling how we can remove roadblocks. These kinds of roadblocks in the future, and get us in a better position where we are. I don't expect things to change dramatically over the next year. More in line with us making sure that we're more future proof in the way in which we're working. >> We still have remote workers, global uncertainty, the vaccine. Dave, what are your thoughts on the impact of this year on digital transformation initiatives? >> Yeah, it's funny. When I think of, sort of uncertainty and chaos, I think that COVID really started it rolling down a hill, but unfortunately it's literally like rolling down a hill, these chaos and complexity. It's getting faster and faster and harder and harder. We're talking about the new norm, right? What is the new normal? We just don't know. And I think the reality is that most organizations were surprised by the impact of COVID-19 and because of that, they responded very quickly. Many of them, people were working at home, they're looking at their supply chain, looking at localization, all sorts of really important things happen, but very quickly, not very strategically. I think the next few years we're going to see, hopefully, some of that realizing into strategy and actually starting to fundamentally change how the business is looking at the world. We've sort of entered the digital age, Lisa, this next age of innovation, we have moved out of mass production and the age of oil, into something very, very different. And I think those organizations, every organization out there is going to have to get a handle on that and COVID was the wake up, right? And I think the next five years are going to be very interesting. >> I agree with you that that accelerant was, I didn't think of it before as a big ball rolling downhill. And now I don't think I'm going to be able to get that out of my head. But Serge, talk to us about your thoughts, the impacts to digital transformation initiatives. >> Yeah, I think back to what Dave was describing. The big challenge is the uncertainty. Many organizations are faced with, currently, a lot of unknowns about, if and when things will go back to, quote unquote, some kind of normality. And with that kind of uncertainty, there's a lot of challenges to the planning from an investment point of view. So, Dave was talking about a short-term versus long-term Like, a lot of these organizations are basically focused on just getting by over the next 12 months and trying to figure out what needs to happen over the next 12 months. At the same time, there's a lot of challenges with respect to readiness and uncertainty. And so, in that context, you got kind of this tension between, "How much do I invest short term "on basically tactical initiatives, "How do I care about teams? "How do I enable these teams "to deliver in weeks as opposed to months? "And then at the same time, "how do I continue to invest "to fundamentally change my operating model?" And that tension is very real. Within many of the organizations we serve. >> One of the things that the survey found was that most of the respondents were very willing to embrace being more agile in order to be able to better respond to rapidly changing market conditions. But I want to get your opinion on what that actually really means, that willingness to embrace being agile. What does it really mean? And what do organize organizations have to do differently? Pierre, I'll start with you. >> Sure, I think we had a discussion a while back and Dave actually got into something interesting where he said, without quoting a famous sneaker brand, just go out and do it. I think that's probably the most important part of this. Most organizations are struggling to figure out, "How should we embrace Agile? "Should we jump in at full scale now? "Should we be looking Scrum? "Should we be doing Scrum-Falls? "Should we be falling over our own feet?" Nobody knows exactly, what might be the right sector? I think the most important part is to pick up a pair of solid principles that you're going to embrace, start executing on them, start learning as you go, and basically improve as you move forward. Over the last year, we've embraced digital product management quite a lot on our side. And it's had tremendous benefits without us, per se, aiming for those benefits at the end of the day. And these are things that you learn as you go. And if you're going to wait around, analysis paralysis is going to be the killer of Agile at the end of day >> "Just do it," I like that. Good advice. Dave, what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, so, I think that what's really interesting is, Agile has been around for 20 years. The manifesto was signed 20 years ago. Scrum came into the world 25 years ago. All of these sort of Agile approaches, but they were predominantly focused on technology. And I think that one thing that I've noticed, over and over again, is that the realization by C-level executives, level sevens, or whatever they're called, they've realized that it's not about technology. (chuckles) It's great, the technologies. I guess the technology's always worked in this complex world because customers never knew what they wanted. We didn't know how are we going to do it. We'd never worked together before. We didn't know how much it was going to cost. So, because of that (chuckles) we had to work in an agile way in technology. But ultimately, I think, one of the big differences going forward, is going to be that, there I say that intersection of business and technology, that BizOps kind of model that we talked about in the manifesto, and what the survey was really trying to tease out. I think that's really, really going to be interesting. And I don't know what that actually means, in terms of the execution. I hope it means that we're going to see teams better aligned to business outcomes. I hope it means that we're going to actually allow those teams that are actually know what they're approaching to make decisions. I hope it means that planning is going to be more directional rather than task level. I hope it means that we're going to start measuring the success in terms of business outcomes, not in terms of the work that we do. I hope it means all of these things. But we will wait and see, because experience would indicate that after a big disaster, lots of people tend to go back to exactly how they worked before, with that sort of emus kind of mentality or ostrich or whatever things sticks its head in the ground. I don't know. >> Sometimes we just want to go back to when things were safe and normal. But in terms of kind of following on, Dave, what you said, 94%, in this survey, 94% of respondents said we should adopt BizOps to increase competitiveness. So, that willingness is there in a vast majority of the respondents. So, I'd like to get your thoughts on what that willingness actually means and what they need to do differently. >> Yes. The problem is that, I think everybody understand that you have to be agile, right? You need to be able to respond quickly to your customer needs. You need to put the customer at the center of everything you do, right? So, conceptually, everybody understands that. The problem is really the operating model that many of these large organizations are dealing with to this day, right? So, you have these sort of Berkeley, kind of organized organization, with functional roles, specialized roles. And when you think about kind of generally, well, one of the big challenges is that you need to start to think horizontally, right? You need to start to start to think about what kind of value streams and what part of the cross functional teams that need to be organized and integrated to deliver on specific business outcomes. You need to start shifting from the traditional contract-based model that(indistinct) to a model which is much more based on trust, right? And we need to move away from vanity measurements and KPIs that many of the organizations typically lead by, to really focus on one thing and one thing only, which is that business value has been delivered. So, fundamentally, I think it requires a bit of a redesign of the operating model in these organizations. And one where, especially when you have a risk adversed kind of organizations, you need to start to be more accepting of risk, fundamentally. >> More accepting of risk. You brought something up there starts that I want to tackle in the next question with respect to culture. But one of the things that the survey uncovered was an interesting kind of seeming contradiction. The majority of respondents said, "We agreed, digital transformation "is about business outcomes "more than it is about technology." But 62% said, "We're still adopting technology for technology's sake." What does that actually mean? And what's the kind of cultural impact there for organizations to really get that more aligned on the digital transformation and the technology and the business outcomes? Pierre, we'll start with you. >> Sure. So, I think there were a number of reports this year talking about what's happened, what's not happened, and the majority of them focused on the fact that, as tech leaders, for years we've been praying to the gods to get budget approved to do all kinds of modernization activities to our infrastructure, our IT, tools, et cetera. And, lo and behold, the ball comes rolling down the hill, smashes a few things and we basically get some blank checks. So, we run around and we buy a whole bunch of stuff to modernize and to embrace this ability to do things differently. And in that whole process, what we basically did was buy more tools and buy more technology. And in that whole process, we didn't really embrace what it is that we're trying to achieve. So, basically aligning the technology to the actual business requirements getting closer to the customer, being able to understand where our market's moving, how we're capable of reducing the journey, if I can put it that way, and make sure that we're more aligned to where we need to be. So, although a lot of CIOs and CTOs got away with doing a lot of great stuff over the last year and users like me are like, "Ooh! I don't have to worry "about stupid VPNs and things anymore." That all went away. But in the same instance, I didn't really get anything that changed the organizational dynamic, which is a challenge. We still have the fundamental problems we have because the business leaders are not yet embracing the deep monitor of the processes that are supported by the technology. And then driving that in such a way that we can gain more business value which is important. To Serge's previous point, we're doing all these great things but we're not focusing on the incremental value that we're supposed to be getting. >> Dave, did it surprise you that there was this seemingly contradictory response? Yes, it's more about business outcomes and technology, but we're still adopting technology for technology's sake. What are your thoughts on that? And how can organizations actually start to move the needle on that? >> E-comm by cultural change, right? But you do know that your board and your leadership want you to do something, and the easiest thing you can do is buy something. I'm a sort of now an American, so, that's kind of my mantra in life, right? "When in doubt go shopping." Which is fantastic, just for the record. (Lisa laughs) But so, you've got to be seen to be doing something, whether it's replacing a VPN, which is always a fun thing to do, or whether it's getting on Slack. Everyone's going to be on Slack. that's going to help. But actually the core is that, exactly what Serge and Pierre have been saying all along, it's that, "Okay. So what is our business all about? "What are our customers? "what did they actually need? "What do our employees need? "How do we build a better value stream "from customer to the organization? "How do we align our teams to that? "How do we incentivize correctly "both the employees that are working "and our partners that are providing things "in this supply chain. How do we do all of those things?" Ultimately though, that means that we have to take a step back which is a very frustrating thing at the moment. And actually look at what is our business all about? What is the mission of it? Who are the customers? Take a moment to find what those are. And then, soon as we have that, and we don't have to do it. As Pierre said, we don't have to do it completely. We can do it incrementally. Organizations are very inward looking. That is the industrial mindset. That is that paradigm. It's looking, as Serge talked about, silos, "optimizing my department," "optimizing my budget, optimizing my kingdom." And what we're talking about is something that cross cuts all of that. So, the decision making is going to change around where the investments go and that's going to be really, really challenging. So, I'm not surprised, I'm not at all surprised that everybody says we should be doing this. And it's like classic. Everybody says we need to be fitter, but we're still all not fit. (Serge laughs) It's sort of, that's just the reality of the world that we live in, right? But we have to start making a stand. And the place we begin is customers. That's the place. And as soon as we start doing that, then everything else just becomes quite easy, actually. >> I like that. Focus on customers and it becomes easy. Serve, I'm kidding. What are your thoughts on this? >> Yeah, I think Dave summarized it well. It's very easy to just buy a tool or buy something, right? Fundamentally changing kind of an operating model is very difficult, but you need to fundamentally rethink for instance, all the responding initiatives. So, something as mundane as, You know, as a leader in my organization I have a budget, right? What's my incentive of collaborating with my peers in terms of delivering credible analysis form. And so, that to me kind of a fundamental shift that we need to operate, and that's probably one of the reasons why many of our largest organizations that we're serving are starting to introduce some new roles like a Chief Digital Officer, as kind of a way to kind of bring kind of a slightly different organization design. The challenge, though, is that, well, all of these teams are still kind of integrated with this fabric of these large systems which exist. So when we look at these value streams, in fact they're not independent from one another. You have a bunch of interdependencies. You are looking at kind of networks of these value streams. But the fundamental shift that we need to see is what we want these organizations to think about, ultimately with the part of the products or services that need to be focused on, all of these become kind of the primary things that we measure from point of view, and how do we align teams and projects and funding along these kinds of outcomes? >> So being customer focused, also being more broadly focused you mentioned the Chief Digital Officer role, which has an interesting role. It's supposed to look more, holistically, internally and externally. And we know that these organizations know we need to be better at this. like Dave's joke about we know we need to be more fit. But what's it going to take to actually create that collaboration, so that IT and business leaders are really working in lockstep and doing so in a timely fashion, so, that they're able to stay competitive. I do want to know from each of you, are you seeing examples of this already in progress? Pierre, let's start with you. >> I can only give you another example and say, one of the interesting things that we did was we try to embrace the delivery of services at HR in kind of a different frame this year, and kind of productize the services that we deliver. Now, if you're most people, you're trying to think about, "How do I set up things like communities "of practice and collaboration between people so "that they can work together on developing new services "new features, new products, et cetera." And we set out with creating this agile way of working. What we didn't anticipate, which was a very nice side effect, is that, because of COVID, because of the catalyst that it provided us, the remote working, people sense of ownership is inherently there. Meaning that self-organization of teams started happening. Nobody needed to crack a whip to get a bunch of guys to talk together with one another to figure out how to get stuff done. It's not like you could walk over to the water cooler and have a chat to Bob. Bob is a thousand miles away, or Bobby's sitting in another State. So, all of a sudden, all dynamic changed. And I have to say, people are a lot more resilient than what they're being given credit for. And if, as organizations, we embrace the culture in such a way and harness it in a positive way, we can actually get this movement to happen. And we actually can make the sum of the parts to be more than the whole. And this year we've seen that happen. And by no means, are we done 'cause we still have a lot of work to do, like Serge said, we have budgets, and budgets give you finite amount of movement left or right. Then you have to do what's best and possible within the frame that you're given. But I think embracing the cultural change and helping people to really excel at that and empowering them makes a huge difference in the way that you can get stuff done. >> Absolutely. Dave, what are your thoughts on this? >> I'm going to say something a little bit controversial, I think. I'm not a big fan of Chief Digital Officers. It just seems like we've got a problem. And some would argue that, "Well, if you've got a problem with somebody "you should get a coach" and all this stuff "and you get it sorted." And that's probably a good thing. But most digital officers, they're going to build a long-term career and create yet another stove pipe and that stove pipe's responsible for bringing all the other stove pipes together. It sounds a bit odd. If a digital officer is really there as a short term enabler, 'cause you asked IT and business leaders, trying to get them to work together better. The best business leaders (bell dings) know about IT, right? The best business leaders are IT sanctuary. Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos are great business leaders, but they know about technology, right? That's what brings them together. Technology is an asset and they may not be the most biggest expert in it, but they care deeply about learning about that stuff. So, I think the next few years we're going to see a lot of C-level and leaders in organizations become a lot more tech savvy, and maybe hire coaches to help them navigate. And the Chief Digital Officer will become more of a coach rather than a person that rolls out Slack or something, you know? (Pierre laughs) So, I think that is going to be the next big jump, really, when we realize that you don't get an additional thing. It's just part of what you do. >> Serge, agree, disagree? >> I agree. The reality is that it is happening, right? Don't get me wrong. We see that every day that so many States are highly integrated, organizations and teams are measuring business value, business outcomes. The problem is that it's oftentimes a very small subset of what these organizations are doing. And so, it's almost like the CEO is coming as kind of these new kind of, as Dave described. And it's got this new style organization which is really there to kind of scale what has been working with these organizations, but we're kind of creating this kind of almost shadow organization, as opposed to fundamentally rethinking and redesigning the organization and redesigning kind of the operating model. And so, we're kind of layering new stuff as opposed to fundamentally transforming. So, as long as it is just kind of just a step towards kind of a true transformation, I think that's fine. The challenge is to, again, create kind of a new set of silos, which are now called value streams, as opposed to young functional silos that we have today. >> So a lot of opportunities identified in this survey but there are still a lot of challenges there. So, I'd love to get you guys and our final question here in this panel to help us understand, from the BizOps coalition's perspective, how are you helping organizations to navigate these challenges, so, they can become successful, transform and actually become agile to respond to rapidly changing market conditions? Pierre, kick us off. >> Sure, from a coalition perspective, we're just trying to make sure that there's a set of sensible principles. That people can look at, can adopt that I think Dave mentioned it in another discussion, that give you that clarity of thought and mind in terms of what should you be thinking? How should you be thinking about it? What are the various aspects you need to consider? And then from that perspective, how do you implement these things in a sensible way for your organization? By no means is this this like, "Here are the 10 steps, you do them, and you're done." You'll be rich beyond your wildest dreams. It's not how it work. You're still going to have to work at it. You're still going to have to figure some stuff out. You're going to have to deep in yourself in your organizational policies, procedures, understand how the organization is actually working. You can't strap a V8 to Mini Cooper and expect to break the land speed record, without the wheels falling off, or something going wrong. So, you really need to harness that in a more sensible manner to move forward. And I think the coalition is on the right path to help organizations realize, "what is the sensible way to go?" "What are principles we can adopt "that we can abide by that will help us drive business "in a different way and close this chasm of disparity "between business and IT?" >> And Dave, your perspective on the BizOps coalition, helping organizations to sort through these challenges. >> Yeah. I'm going to share a little bit of a personal story. So, I must admit that I wasn't keen on the whole idea, and Serge sent me some stuff and he's like, "Could you just provide some feedback." And I did, and then there was a press release with my name on it. I saw, I was like, "Oh my God! "I better get involved because I don't want to "have my name associated "with something that doesn't make sense" But I've actually been surprisingly, I've actually found it a lot more positive than I thought because of exactly what Pierre's saying. So, basically, the coalition is a group of vendors, a bucolic of consultants, some pseudo thought leaders that think they are very thoughtful and maybe they're not, people like me. (Pierre laughs) And what we're doing though, is actually trying to get some clarity of terminology, get some clarity of, what are the principles? What are those key principles? How do they relate to each other? Get some, some synergy to allow, 'cause there's so much noise out there. And hopefully, this is going to say, "Okay, this is what BizOps is. "This is why it's important. "These are some simple things." And then hopefully, because of the breadth that Serge and others have managed to get in terms of membership, we're going to get all of those organizations to be consistently talking about these things, which will then create pressure on the market to actually start adopting these things in the way that we're proposing, or challenge those ideas and then make them better. So, I'm kind of excited about it, surprisingly, 'cause the last thing we need is yet another manifesto and group of people that spend their whole time talking about things and never getting anything done. But actually I think there might be some valuable stuff that comes out here and we're going to inspect and adapt to make sure it is valuable. And if it isn't, we will stop. (chuckles) (Lisa laughs) >> And Serge, strap us up with your thoughts and extending that value. >> Look, we started the BizOps manifesto really with kind of a very simple observation. Everybody's talking about the same stuff, right? But you have a value stream management church, the digital product management's church, the DevOps church, with Scrum church, the safe church. Right? But we're all saying the same thing. But we create so much confusion with our large enterprise customers, but it's just not a grain on a set of principles. And just saying like, look, fundamentally, we're all talking about the same thing. And there are process aspects, there are cultural aspects. There is what you measure. But fundamentally we agree on the same core set of principles. And so for me, the BizOps manifesto, first and foremost is to get the stakeholders from these different communities together, and recognize that, at the end of the day, we share the same values and create some clarity to the market as to how these pieces fit to one another. The second aspect, which is more from our point of view, as one of the vendors of tools, right? There's tons of tools out there. We talk a lot about kind of measuring business outcomes as a primary way to actually align to everybody in our organization. Well, today if you look at any of these organizations, on average, they use about 40 different tools on one of these value streams. None of that stuff integrates with one another. It's extremely difficult for an organization to be able to trace from an investment, all the way to stuff that delivers value and production to a customer. And so, one of my hopes for the coalition is that we start to actually provide some platform, data models, ontologies, to start to integrate those different tools to facilitate that kind of integration. So, those are kind of the two things which I think we can really help kind of develop and and improve on. >> Well, we know that there's a tremendous amount of folks out there that are wanting to embrace agility across the business, identifying areas where they need to do work. So, great advice from the three of you. Thank you so much for joining me on this power panel today and sharing what organizations can do to really embrace that agility across the organization. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Pierre Viljoen, Dave West and Serge Lucio. I'm Lisa Martin. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe it's the CUBE with digital coverage of Devops Virtual Forum, brought to you by Broadcom. >> Continuing our conversations here at Broadcom's DevOps Virtual Forum. Lisa Martin here, please do welcome back to the program. Serge Lucio, the general manager of the Enterprise Software Division at Broadcom. Hey Serge welcome. >> Thank you. Good to be here. >> So I know you were just participating with the BizOps manifesto that just happened recently. I just had the chance to talk with Jeffrey Hammond and he unlocked this really interesting concept but I wanted to get your thoughts on, spiritual co-location as really a necessity for BizOps to succeed in this unusual time in which we're living. What are your thoughts on spiritual co-location in terms of cultural change versus adoption of technologies? >> Yeah, it's quite interesting, right. When we think about the major impediments for DevOps implementation, that means all about culture, right? And swore over the last 20 years we've been talking about silos. We'd be talking about the paradox for these teams too when it goes to align. And in many ways it's not so much about these teams aligning but about being in the same car, in the same books, right? It's really about fusing those teams around kind of the common purpose, a common objective. So to me this is really about kind of changing this culture where people start to look at kind of OKRs instead of the key objective that drives the entire team. Now, what it means in practice is really that's we need to change a lot of behaviors, right? It's not about the ER key, it's not about roles. It's about, you know, who can do what and when, and, you know, driving a bias towards action. It's also means that we need, I mean, especially in this COVID times it becomes very difficult, right? To drive kind of a kind of collaboration and affinity between these teams. And so I think there's a significant role that especially tools can play in terms of providing this conference feedback from teams to be in that preface spiritual qualification. >> Well, and it talked about culture being it's something that, you know, we're so used to talking about DevOps with respect to velocity, all about speed here. But of course this time everything changed so quickly but going from the physical spaces to everybody being remote really does take. It's very different than you can't replicate it digitally but there are collaboration tools that can kind of really be essential to help that cultural shift, right? >> Yeah, so to me we tend to talk about collaboration in a very mundane way, right? Of course we can use zoom. We can all get into the same room. But the point when I think when Jeff says spiritual co-location, it's really about, we all share the same objective. Do we have a means for instance, our pipeline, right? When you talk about DevOps probably we all started thinking about this continuous delivery pipeline that basically drives the automation, the orchestration across the team. But just thinking about a pipeline, right? At the end of the day, it's all about what is the meantime to feed back to these teams. If I'm a developer and I commit code, how long does it take for, you know, that code to be processed through pipeline or quick and I get feedback? If I am a finance person, who's funding a product or a project, what is my meantime to beat back? And so a lot of, kind of a, when we think about the pipeline, I think what's been really inspiring to me in the last year or so is that there is much more of an adoption of that door effect metrics. There is way more of a focus around value stream management. And to me, this is really when we talk about collaboration it's really a balance. How do you provide that feedback to the different stakeholders across the life cycle in a very timely matter? And that's what we would need to get to in terms of kind of this notion of collaboration. It's not so much about people being in the same physical space. It's about, you know, when checking code, you know, to do I guess the system to automatically identify what I'm going to break. If I'm about to release some allocation, how can the system help me reduce my change builder rate? Because it's able to predict that some issue was introduced in the application or the product. So I think there's a great role of technology and AI candidates to actually provide kind of that new level of collaboration. >> So we'll get to AI in a second but I'm curious, what are some of the metrics you think that really matter right now is organizations are still in some form probably of transformation to this new almost 100% remote workforce. >> So I'll just say first I'm not a big fan of metrics. And the reason being that, you know, you can look at a change failure rate, right, or a leak time or cycle time. And those are interesting metrics, right? The trend on metric is absolutely critical. But what's more important these I'll do get to the root cause. What is taught to you lead to that metric to degrade or improve over time. And so I'm much more interested and we, you know, fruit for Broadcom. Are we more interested in understanding what are the patterns that contribute to this? So I'll use a very mundane example. You know, we know that cycle time is heavily influenced by organizational boundaries. So, you know, we talk a lot about silos, but we we've worked with many of our customers doing value stream mapping. And oftentimes what you see is that really the boundaries of your organization creates a lot of idle time, right? So to me, it's less about the metrics. I think the door metrics are pretty, you know, valid set metrics but what's way more important is to understand, what are the anti parents? What are the things that we can detect through the data that actually are affecting those metrics? And I mean, over the last 10, 20 years, we've learned a lot about kind of what are the anti parents within our large enterprise customers? And there are plenty of them. >> What are some of the things that you're seeing now with respect to patterns that have developed over the last seven to eight months? >> So I think the two areas which clearly are evolving very quickly are on kind of the front end of the life cycle where DevOps is more and more embracing value stream management, value stream mapping. And I think what's interesting is that in many ways, the product is becoming the new silo. The notion of a product is very difficult by itself to actually define. People are starting to recognize that a value stream is not its own little kind of island. That in reality, when I did find a product this product, oftentimes as dependencies on our products and that in fact, you're looking at kind of a network of value streams, if you will. So on that and there is clearly kind of a new sets if you will of anti-patterns where, you know, products are being defined as a set of OTRs. They have interdependencies and you have to have a new set of silos. On the other hand the other kind of key movement to ease around the SRE space, where I think there is a cultural clash. While the DevOps side is very much embracing this notion of OTRs and value stream mapping and value management. On the other end, you have IT operations teams. We still think business services, right? For them they think about configure items, think about infrastructure. And so, you know, it's not uncommon to see, you know, teams where, you know, the operations team is still thinking about hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands of business services. And so there is this boundary where I think, well, SRE has been put in place, and there's lots of thinking about what kind of metrics can be defined. I think, you know, going back to culture, I think there's a lot of cultural evolution that's still required for, you know, true operations teams. >> And that's a hard thing. Cultural transformation in any industry pandemic or not is a challenging thing. You now talked about AI and automation of minutes ago. How do you think those technologies can be leveraged by DevOps leaders to influence their successes and their ability to collaborate and maybe see eye to eye with the SREs? >> Yeah, so there're kind of too, so even for myself, right? As a leader of , you know, 1500 people organization, there's a number of things I don't see, right, on a daily basis. And I think the technologies that we have at our disposal today from the AI are able to mine a lot of data and expose a lot of issues that as leaders we may not be aware of. And some of these are pretty kind of easy to understand, right? We all think we're agile. And yet when you start to understand, for instance, what is the is a work in progress, right, during the sprint? When you start to analyze the data you can detect for instance, that maybe the teams are over committed, that there is too much work in profits. You can start to identify kind of interprocess either from a technology or from a people point of view, which were hidden. You can start to understand that maybe the change failure rate is dragging. So I believe that there is a fundamental role to be played by the tools to expose again these anti parents. To make these things visible to the teams to be able to even compare teams, right? One of the things that's amazing is now we have access to tons of data not just from a given customer, but across a large number of customers. And so we start to compare all of these teams kind of operate and what's working, what's not working. >> Thoughts on AI and automation as a facilitator of spiritual co-location? >> Yeah, absolutely. It's, you know, there's a the problem we all face is the unknown, right? The velocity, the volume, variety of the data, every day we don't really necessarily completely appreciate what is the impact of our actions, right? And so AI can really act as a safety net that enables us to understand what is the impact of our actions. And so, yeah, in many ways, the ability to be informed in a timely matter to be able to interact with people on the basis of data and collaborate on the data in the actual matter, I think is a very powerful enabler on, in that respect. I mean, I've seen countless of times that for instance at the SRE boundary to basically show that we'll turn the quality attributes of an incoming release, right? And exposing that to an operations person, an SRE person and enabling that collaboration dialogue through there is a very, very powerful tool. >> Do you have any recommendations for how teams can use, you know, the SRE folks, the DevOps says can use AI and automation in the right ways to be successful rather than some ways that aren't going to be non-productive. >> Yeah, so to me there's a part that the question really is when we talk about data. There are different ways you can use data, right? So you can do a lot of analytics, predictive analytics. So I think there is a tendency to look at, let's say a specific KPI, like an availability KPI or change failure rate. And to basically do a regression analysis and projecting all these things is going to happen in the future. To me that's a bad approach. The reason why I fundamentally think it's a better approach is because we, our systems the way we develop software is a non-leader kind of system, right? Software development is not linear in nature. And so I think there's a, this is probably the worst approach is to actually focus on metrics. On the other hand if you start to actually understand at a more granular level, what are the things which are contributing to this, right? So if you start to understand, for instance that whenever maybe, you know, you affect a specific part of the application that translates into production issues. So we have, I've actually a customer who identified that over 50% of their unplanned outages were related to specific components in your architecture. And whenever these components were changed this resulted in this implant outages. So if you start to be able to basically establish causality, right? Cause an effect between kind of data across the last cycle. I think this is the right way to use AI. And so pharma to be, I think it's way more about kind of a classification problem. What are the causes of problems that do exist and affect things as opposed to an hourly predictive which I don't think is as powerful? >> So I mentioned in the beginning of our conversation that just came off the BizOps manifesto. You're one of the authors of that. I want to get your thoughts on DevOps and BizOps overlapping, complimenting each other. What, from the BizOps perspective, what does it mean to the future of DevOps? >> Yeah, so it's interesting, right? If you think about DevOps, there's no founding document, right? We can refer to the Phoenix project. I mean, there are a set of documents which have been written, but in many ways there is no clear definition of what DevOps is. If you go to the DevOps Institute today you'll see that, you know, they are specific trainings for instance on value management on SRE. And so in many ways, the problem we have as an industry is that there are set practices between agile, DevOps, SRE, value stream management, Ital, right? And we all basically talk about the same things, right? We all talk about essentially accelerating in the meantime to feedback, but yet we don't have a common framework to talk about that. The other key thing is that we add to wait for genius, Jean Kim's last book to really start to get into the business aspect, right? And for value mapping to start to emerge for us to start as an industry, right? IT to start to think about what is our connection with the business aspect, what's our purpose, right? And ultimately it's all about kind of driving these business outcomes. And so to me, BizOps is really about kind of putting a lens on kind of this critical element that it's not business and IT that we in fact need to fuse business and IT. That I need needs to transform itself to recognize that it's this value generator, right? It's not a cost center. And so the relationship to me, it's more than BizOps provides kind of this over all kind of framework, if you will. That set the context for what is the reason for IT to exist. What are the core values and principles that IT needs to embrace to, again, change from cost center to value center. And then we need to start to use this as a way to start to unify some of, again, the core practices, whether it's agile, DevOps, value stream mapping, SRE. So, I think over time, my hope is that we start to organize a lot of our practices, language and cultural elements. >> Last question Serge in the last few seconds we have here, talking about this, the relation between BizOps and DevOps. What do you think as DevOps evolves? And as you talked to circle some of your insights, what should our audience keep their eyes on in the next six to 12 months? >> So to me the key challenge for the industry is really around. So we were seeing a very rapid shift towards kind of project to product, right? Which we don't want to do is to recreate kind of these new silos, these hard silos. So that's one of the big changes that I think we need to be really careful about. Because it is ultimately, it is about culture. It's not about kind of how we segment the work, right? And any true culture that we can overcome kind of silos. So back to, I guess, with Jeffrey's concept of kind of the spiritual co-location, I think it's really about that too. It's really about kind of focusing on the business outcomes on kind of aligning, on driving engagement across the teams, but not for create kind of a new set of silos which instead of being vertical are going to be these horizontal products. >> Great advice Serge that looking at culture as kind of a way of really addressing and helping to reduce, replace challenges. We thank you so much for sharing your insights and your time at today's DevOps Virtual Forum. >> Thank you. Thanks for your time. Serge Lucio, Lisa Martin, we'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of DevOps virtual forum. Brought to you by Broadcom. >> Hi guys, welcome back. So we have discussed the current state and the near future state of DevOps and how it's going to evolve from three unique perspectives. In this last segment, we're going to open up the floor and see if we can come to a shared understanding of where DevOps needs to go. In order to be successful next year. So our guests today are you've seen them all before. Jeffrey Hammond is here the VP and Principal Analyst serving CIO at Forrester. We've also got Serge Lucio, the GM of Broadcom Enterprise Software Division. And Glyn Martin, the head of QA Transformation at BT. Guys welcome back. Great to have you all three together. >> Hi Lisa. (Serge speaks faintly) >> Good to be here. >> All right. So we're all very socially distanced as we talked about before. Great to have this conversation. So let's start with one of the topics that we kicked off the forum with. Jeff, we're going to start with you spiritual colocation. That's a really interesting topic that we've uncovered. But how much of the challenge is truly cultural? And what can we solve through technology? Jeff, we'll start with you, then Serge, then Glyn, Jeff take it away. >> Yeah I think fundamentally, you can have all the technology in the world. And if you don't make the right investments in the cultural practices in your development organization. You still won't be effective. Almost 10 years ago, I wrote a piece. Where I did a bunch of research around what made high performance teams software delivery teams high performance. And one of the things that came out as part of that was that these teams have a high level of autonomy. And that's one of the things that you see coming out of the Agile Manifesto. Let's take that today. Where developers are on their own in their own offices. if you've got teams where the team itself had a high level of autonomy. And they know how to work, they can make decisions. They can move forward. They're not waiting for management to tell them what to do. And so what we have seen is that organizations that embraced autonomy, and got their teams in the right place. And their teams had the information that they needed to make the right decisions. Have actually been able to operate pretty well, even as they've been remote. And it's turned out to be things like well, how do we actually push the software that we've created into production that have become the challenge is not. Are we writing the right software? And that's why I think the term spiritual colocation is so important. Because even though we may be physically distant, we're on the same plane, we're connected from a shared purpose. There's a Surgeon I worked together a long, long time ago, so just it's been what, almost 15-16 years, since we worked at the same place. And yet I would say there's probably still a certain level of spiritual colocation, between us. because of this shared purposes that we've had in the past and what we've seen in the industry, and that's a really powerful tool to build on. So what do tools play as part of that, to the extent that tools make information available to build shared purpose on. To the extent that they enable communication so that we can build that spiritual colocation. To the extent that they reinforce the culture that we want to put in place. They can be incredibly valuable, especially when we don't have the luxury of physical colocation. Hope that makes sense.(chuckles) >> It does. I should have introduced this last segment as we're all spiritually colocated. All right. So Serge, clearly you're still spiritually colocated with Jeff. Talk to me about what your thoughts are about spiritual of colocation. The cultural impact and how technology can move it forward? >> Yes, so I think, while I'm going to sound very similar to Jeff in that respect. I think it starts with kind of shared purpose, and understanding how individuals teams contribute to kind of a business outcome. What is our shared goals our shared vision with what is it we're trying to achieve collectively. And keeping kind of the line to that. And so it really starts with it Now, the big challenge always is over the last 20 years, especially in large organization has been specialization of roles and functions. And so we all have started to basically measure which we do on a daily basis using metrics, which oftentimes are completely disconnected from kind of a business outcome. Or is it on purpose. We kind of revert that to Okay, what is my database uptime? What is my cycle time? Right. And I think which we can do or where we really should be focused as an industry is to start to basically provide a lens for these different stakeholders to look at what they're doing. In the context of benefiting this business outcomes. So, probably one of my theories experience was to actually witness at one of our large financial institution. Two stakeholders across development and operations staring at the same data. Like which was related to economy changes, test execution results, coverage, official liabilities, and all the overran direction of incidents. And when you start to put these things in context, and represent that in a way that these different stakeholders can look at from their different lens. And they can start to basically communicate, and understand how they jointly or complement to do that kind of common vision or objective. >> And Glyn, we talked a lot about transformation with you last time. What are your thoughts on spiritual colocation and the cultural part of technology impact? >> Yeah, I mean I agree with Jeffrey that, you know, the people and culture are the most important thing. Actually, that's why it's really important when you're transforming to have partners who have the same vision as you. Who you can work with have the same end goal in mind. And we would constantly found that with our continuing relationship with Broadcom. What it also does, are those tools can accelerate what you're doing and can drive consistency. You know, we've seen within simplify, which is BT's Flagship Transformation Program, where we're trying to as it says, simplify the number of system stacks that we have. The number of products that we have, actually at the moment we've got different value streams within that program. Who have got organizational silos who are trying to rewrite the wheel. Who are still doing things manually. So in order to try and bring that consistency, we need the right tools that actually are at an enterprise grade, which can be flexible to work with in BT. Which is such a complex and very different environment, depending on what area BT you're in. Whether it's consumer, whether it's a mobile area, whether it's large global or government organizations. We found that we need tools that can drive that consistency. But also flex to Greenfield Brownfield kind of technologies as well. So it's really important that as it's a from a number of different aspects. That you have the right partner, and to drive the right culture here, and the same vision, but also who have the tool sets to help you accelerate, They can't do that on their own. But they can help accelerate what it is you're trying to do. And a really good example of that is we're trying to shift left, which is probably a quite a bit of a buzz phrase. And they're kind of testing well at the moment. But I could talk about things like Continuous Delivery Director to Broadcom tools. And it has many different features to it, but very simply on its own. It allows us to give the visibility of what the teams are doing. And once we have that visibility, then we can talk to the teams around could they be doing better component testing? Could they be using some virtualized services here or there? And that's not even the main purpose of Continuous Delivery Director. But it's just a reason that tools themselves can just give greater visibility of have much more intuitive and insightful conversations with other teams and reduce those organizational silos. >> Thanks, Glyn So we kind of sum that up autonomy, collaboration tools that facilitate that. So let's talk now about metrics. From your perspective, what are the metrics that matter Jeff? >> Well, I'm going to go right back to what Glyn said about data that provides visibility that enables us to to make decisions with shared purpose. And so business value has to be one of the first things that we looking at. How do we assess whether we have built something that is valuable? That could be sales revenue, it could be Net Promoter Score, if you're not selling what you've built, it could even be what the level of reuse is within your organization. Or other teams picking up the services that you've created. One of the things that I've begun to see organizations do is to align value streams with customer journeys. And then to align teams with those value streams. So that's one of the ways that you get to a shared purpose. 'Cause we're all trying to deliver around that customer journey. The value associated with it. And we're all measured on that. There are flow metrics, which are really important. How long does it take us to get a new feature out. From the time that we conceive it to the time that we can run our first experiments with it. There are quality metrics, some of the classics or maybe things like defect density or meantime to response. One of my favorites came from a company called Ultimate Software. Where they looked at the ratio of defects found in Production defects found in pre production. And their developers were in fact measured on that ratio and told them that guess what quality is your job too. Not just the test departments group. The fourth level that I think is really important in the current situation that we're in, is the level of engagement in your development organization. We used to joke that we measured this with the parking lot metric. How how full was the parking lot at 9, and how full was it at 5 o'clock. I can't do that anymore, since we're not physically colocated. But what you can do is you can look at how folks are delivering. You can look at your metrics in your SCCM environment, you can look at the relative rates of churn, you can look at things like well are our developers delivering during longer periods. Earlier in the morning, later in the evening? Are they delivering on the weekends as well. Are those signs that we might be heading toward burnout, because folks are still running at sprint levels instead of marathon levels. So all of those in combination, business value, flow, engagement and quality. I think form the backbone of any sort of metrics program. The second thing that I think you need to look at is what are we going to do with the data and the philosophy behind the data is critical. Unfortunately I see organizations where they weaponize the data. And that's completely the wrong way to look at it. What you need to do is you need to say. "How is this data helping us to identify the blockers? The things that aren't allowing us to provide the right context for people to do the right thing? And then what do we do to remove those blockers to make sure that we're giving these autonomous teams, the context that they need to do their job in a way that creates the most value for the customers?" >> Great advice, Jeff. Glyn over to you metrics that matter to you that really make a big impact. And also how do you measure quality kind of following on to the advice that Jeff provided? >> I mean, Jeff provided some great advice. Actually, he talks about value, he talks about flow, both of those things are very much on my mind at the moment. But there was a time, listen to a speaker called Mia Kirsten, a couple of months ago, he talked very much around how important flow management is. And remove and using that to remove waste, to understand in terms of, making software changes. What is it that's causing us to do it longer than we need to? So where are those areas where it takes too long. So I think that's a very important thing. For us, it's even more basic than that at the moment. We're on a journey from moving from waterfall to agile. And the problem with moving from waterfall to agile is, with waterfall, the the business had a kind of comfort that everything was tested together, and therefore it's safer. And with agile, there's that kind of how do we make sure that you know, if we're doing things quick, and we're getting stuff out the door that we give that confidence, that that's ready to go? Or if there's a risk that we're able to truly articulate what that risk is. So there's a bit about release confidence. And some of the metrics around that and how healthy those releases are and actually saying we spend a lot of money, in an investment setting up agile teams training agile teams. Are we actually seeing them deliver more quickly? And are we actually seeing them deliver more value quickly? So yeah, those are the two main things for me at the moment. But I think it's also about, generally bringing it all together DevOps. We've got the kind of value ops, AI Ops. How do we actually bring that together to so we can make quick decisions, and making sure that we are delivering the biggest bang for our partners. >> Absolutely biggest bang for the partners. Serge your thoughts. >> Yes I think we all agree, right? It starts with business metrics, flow metrics. These are one of the most important metrics and ultimately, I mean, one of the things that's very common across I highly functional teams is engagements, right? When you see a team that's highly functional, and that's agile, that practices DevOps everyday. They are highly engaged. That definitely true. Now back to you, I think, Jeff's points on weaponization of metrics. One of the key challenges we see is that organizations traditionally have been kind of, setting up benchmarks. Right. So what is a good cycle time? What is a good mean time? What is a good mean time to repair? The problem is that this is very contextual, right? It's going to vary quite a bit, depending on the nature of application and system. And so one of the things that we really need to evolve as an industry. Is to understand that it's not so much about those flow metrics is about are these flow metrics ultimately contribute to the business metric. To the business outcome. So that's one thing. The second aspect, I think that's oftentimes misunderstood, is that when you have a bad cycle time or what you perceive as being a bad cycle time or bad quality. The problem is oftentimes like, how do you go and explore why, right? What is the root cause of this? And I think one of the key challenges is that we tend to focus a lot of time on metrics. And not on the I type patterns, which are pretty common across the industry. If you look at for instance things like, lead time for instance. It's very common that organizational boundaries are going to be a key contributor to bad lead time. And so I think that there is reviewing the metrics, there is I think a lot of work that we need to do in terms of classifying this untied PaaS. Back to you, Jeff, I think you're one of the cool offers of Water-Scrum Fall as a key pattern in the industry or anti-patterns. >> Yeah >> But Water Scrum Fall, right. Is the key one right? And you will detect that through kind of a defect rival rates. That's right, that looks like an S curve. And so I think it's the output of the metrics is what do you do with those metrics. >> Right. I'll tell you Serge, one of the things that is really interesting to me in that space is. I think those of us had been in industry for a long time, we know the anti patterns, 'cause we've seen them in our career,(laughs) maybe in multiple times. And one of the things that I think you could see tooling do is perhaps provide some notification of anti patterns based on the telemetry that comes in. I think it would be a really interesting place to apply machine learning and reinforcement learning techniques. So hopefully something that we'd see in the future with DevOps tools. 'Cause as a manager that maybe only a 10 year veteran or a 15 year veteran. You may be seeing these anti patterns for the first time, and it would sure be nice to know what to do when they start to pop up.(chuckles) >> That would right? Insight, always helpful. All right guys, I would like to get your final thoughts on the fit one thing that you believe our audience really needs to be on the lookout for. and to put on our agendas. For the next 12 months. Jeff will be back to you. >> I would say, look for the opportunities that this disruption presents. And there are a couple that I see. First of all, as we shift to remote central working, we're unlocking new pools of talent. Where it's possible to implement more geographic diversity. So look to that as part of your strategy. Number two, look for new types of tools. We've seen a lot of interest in usage of low code tools. To very quickly develop applications. That's potentially part of a mainstream strategy as we go into 2021. Finally, make sure that you embrace this idea that you are supporting creative workers. That agile and DevOps are the peanut butter and chocolate to support creative workers with algorithmic capabilities. >> Peanut butter and chocolate. Glyn where do we go from there? What's the one silver bullet that you think that needs to be on the look out for? >> (indistinct) out I certainly agree that low code is next year, we'll see much more low code. We've already started going moving towards more of a SaaS based world but low code also. I think as well for me, we've still got one foot in the kind of cloud camp. We'll be fully trying to explore what that means going into the next year and exploiting the capabilities of cloud. But I think the last thing for me is, how do you really instill quality throughout the kind of the life cycle When I heard the word scrum for it kind of made me shut it. 'Cause I know that's a problem. That's where we're at with some of our things at the moment. So we need to get beyond that we need to be releasing changes more frequently into production. And actually being a bit more brave and having the confidence to actually do more testing in production and going straight to production itself. So expect to see much more of that next year. Yeah, thank you. I haven't got any food analogies unfortunately. (laughs) >> We all need some peanut butter and chocolate. All right Serge, Just take us on that sir. What's that nugget you think everyone needs to have on their agendas? >> That's interesting, right? So a couple of days ago, we had kind of a latest state of the DevOps report, right? And if you read through the report, it's all about velocity, right? It's all about we still are perceiving DevOps as being all about speed. And so to me the key advice is, in order to create kind of this spiritual colocation in order to foster engagement. We have to go back to what is it we're trying to do collectively. We have to go back to tie everything to the business outcome. And so for me, it's absolutely imperative for organizations to start to plot their value streams. To understand how they're delivering value into allowing everything they do from a metrics to delivery to flow to those metrics. And only with data, I think, are we going to be able to actually start to to restart to align kind of all these roles across the organizations and drive not just speed, but business outcomes. >> All about business outcomes. I think you guys, the three of you could write a book together. So I'll give you that as food for thought. Thank you all so much for joining me. Today and our guests, I think this was an incredibly valuable, fruitful conversation. And we appreciate all of you taking the time to spiritually colocate with us today. Guys, thank you. >> Thank you Lisa. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> For Jeff Hammond, Serge Lucio and Glyn Martin. I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you for watching the Broadcom DevOps virtual forum. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's theCUBE. With digital coverage of BizOps Manifesto Unveiled. Brought to you by BizOps Coalition. >> Hey, welcome back everybody ,Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the BizOps Manifesto Unveiled. Something has been in the works for a little while. Today's the formal unveiling and we're excited to have three of the core founding members of the manifesto, authors of the manifesto, if you will. And joining us again, we've had them all on individually, now we're going to have a great power panel. First up, we're going to have Mik Kersten returning. He's the founder and CEO of Tasktop. Mik, good to see you again. Where are you dialing in from? >> Great to see you again, Jeff. I'm dialing from Vancouver, Canada. >> Vancouver, Canada. One of my favorite cities in the whole wide world. Also we've got Tom Davenport, coming in from across the country. He's a distinguished professor and author from Babson College. Tom, great to see you. And I think you said you're at a fun exotic place on the East Coast. >> From Massachusetts, Cape Cod. >> Nice, great to see you again. And also joining Serge Lucio. He is the VP and General Manager Enterprise Software Division at Broadcom. Serge, great to see you again, where are you coming in from? >> From Boston right next to Cape Cod. >> Terrific. So welcome back, everybody again. Congratulations on this day. I know it's been a lot of work to get here for this unveil. But let's just jump into it. BizOps Manifesto, what was the initial reason to do this? And how did you decide to do it in a kind of a coalition, way bringing together a group of people versus just making it an internal company initiative that you know, you can do better stuff within your own company? Serge, why don't we start with you? >> Yeah, so I think we were at a really critical juncture, right. Many large enterprises are basically struggling with their digital transformation. In fact, many recognized that the business (indistinct) collaboration has been one of the major impediments to drive that kind of transformation. And if we look at the industry today, many people are, whether we're talking about vendors or system decorators, consulting firms, are talking about the same kind of concepts, but using very different language. And so we believe that bringing all these different players together as part of the coalition and formalizing, basically the core principles and values in a BizOps Manifesto, we can really start to kind of have a much bigger movement where we can all talk about kind of the same concepts and we can really start to provide, could have a much better support for large organizations to transform. So whether it is technology or services or training, I think that's really the value of bringing all of these players together. >> Great. And Mik to you. Why did you get involved in this effort? >> So I've been close and follow the agile movement since it started two decades ago with that manifesto. And I think we got a lot of improvement at the team level and I think as Serge has noted, we really need to improve at the business level. Every company is trying to become a software innovator, trying to make sure that they can pivot that quickly and then changing market economy and what everyone's dealing with in terms of needing to deliver value to customers sooner. However, agile practices have really focused that these metrics, these measures and understanding processes that help teams be productive. Those things now need to be elevated to the business as a whole. And that just hasn't happened. Organizations are actually failing because they're measuring activities and how they're becoming more agile, how teams are functioning not how much quickly they're delivering value to the customer. So we need to now move past that. And that's exactly what the BizOps Manifesto provides. >> Right, great And Tom to you, you've been covering tech for a very very long time. You've been looking at really hard challenges and a lot of work around analytics and data and data evolution. So there's a definitely a data angle here. I wonder if you could kind of share your perspective of what you got excited to sign onto this manifesto. >> Sure. Well, I have, you know, for the past 15 or 20 years, I've been focusing on Data Analytics and AI, but before that I was a process management guy and a knowledge management guy. And in general, I think, you know we've just kind of optimize that to narrow a level whether you're talking about agile or DevOps or MLops, any of these kind of ops oriented movements. We're making individual project performance and productivity better but we're not changing the business effectively enough. And that's the thing that appealed to me about the BizOps idea that we're finally creating a closer connection between what we do with technology and how it changes the business and provides value to it. >> That's great. Serge back to you, right. I mean, people have been talking about digital transformation for a long time and it's been you know, kind of trucking along and then COVID hit and it was instant light switch. Everyone's working from home, you've got a lot more reliance on your digital tools, digital communication, both within your customer base and your partner base but also then your employees. One of you can share how that really pushed this all along, right. Because now suddenly the acceleration of digital transformation is higher. Even more importantly, you got much more critical decisions to make into what you do next. So kind of your portfolio management of projects has been elevated significantly when maybe revenues are down and you really have to prioritize and get it right. >> Yeah. Maybe I'll just start by quoting Satina Nello, basically recently said that there's been two years of digital transformation just last two months. And in any many ways that's true. But yet when we look at large enterprises, they're still struggling with a kind of a changes in culture. That they really need to drive to be able to disrupt themselves. And not surprisingly you know, when we look at certain parts of the industry you know, we see some things which are very disturbing, right? About 40% of the personal loans today, are being originated by fintechs of a like of Sophie or LendingClub, right? Not to traditional brick and mortar for a bank. And so the, well, there is kind of a much more of an appetite and it's a more of a survival type of driver these days. The reality is that in order for these large enterprises to truly transform and engage on this digital transformation they need to start to really align the business in IT. You know, in many ways and make cover that agile really emerge from the core desire to truly improve software predictability which we've really missed is all that we start to aligning the software predictability to business predictability and to be able to have continual sleep continuous improvement and measurement of business outcomes. So by aligning that of these discuss inward metrics that's, IT is typically being using to business outcomes. We think we can start to really help different stakeholders within the organization to collaborate. So I think there is more than ever. There's an imperative to acts now and resolves I think is kind of the right approach to drive that kind of transformation. >> Great. I want to follow up on the culture comment with you, Tom because you've talked before about kind of process flow and process flow throughout a whore and an organization. And, you know, we talk about people process and tech all the time. And I think the tech is the easy part compared to actually changing the people the way they think. And then the actual processes that they put in place. It's a much more difficult issue than just the tech issue to get this digital transformation in your organization. >> Yeah. You know, I've always found that the soft stuff about, you know, the culture of a behavior the values is the hard stuff to change and more and more we realized that to be successful with any kind of digital transformation you have to change people's behaviors and attitudes. We haven't made as much progress in that area as we might have. I mean, I've done some surveys suggesting that most organizations still don't have data driven cultures. And in many cases there is a lower percentage of companies that say they have that then did a few years ago. So we're kind of moving in the wrong direction, which means I think that we have to start explicitly addressing that cultural, behavioral dimension and not just assuming that it will happen if we build system. You know, if we build it, they won't necessarily come. >> Right. So I want to go to you Nick. 'Cause you know, we're talking about workflows and flow and, and you've written about flow both in terms of, you know, moving things along a process and trying to find bottlenecks, identify bottlenecks which is now even more important again when these decisions are much more critical 'cause you have a lot less wiggle room in tough times, but you also talked about flow from the culture side and the people side. So, I wanted if you can just share your thoughts on, you know, using flow as a way to think about things, to get the answers better. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I'll refer back to what Tom has said. If you're optimized, you need to optimize your system. You need to optimize how you innovate and how you deliver value to the business and the customer. Now, what we've noticed in the data, since that we've learned from customers, value streams, enterprise organizations value streams, is that when it's taking six months at the end to deliver that value with the flow is that slow. You've got a bunch of unhappy developers unhappy customers when you're innovating house. So high performing organizations we can measure their end flow time and dates. All of a sudden that feedback loop the satisfaction your developer's measurably goes up. So not only do you have people context, switching glass you're delivering so much more value to customers at a lower cost because you've optimized for flow rather than optimizing for these other approximate tricks that we use which is how efficient is my agile team. How quickly can we deploy software? Those are important, but they do not provide the value of agility of fast learning of adaptability to the business. And that's exactly what the BizOps Manifesto pushes your organization to do. You need to put in place this new operating model that's based on flow on the delivery of business value and on bringing value to market much more quickly than you were before. >> Right. I love that. And I'm going back to you, Tom, on that to follow up 'cause I think, I don't think people think enough about how they prioritize what they're optimizing for 'cause you know if you're optimizing for A versus B, you know you can have a very different product that you kick out and let you know. My favorite example is with Clayton Christensen and innovator's dilemma talking about the three inch hard drive. If you optimize it for power, you know, is one thing if you optimize it for vibration is another thing and sure enough, you know, they missed it on the poem because it was the game console which drove that whole business. So when you when you're talking to customers and we think we hear it with cloud all the time people optimizing for a cost efficiency instead of thinking about it as an innovation tool. How do you help them kind of rethink and really, you know, force them to look at the prioritization and make sure they're prioritizing on the right thing is make just said what are you optimizing for? >> Oh yeah, you have one of the most important aspects of any decision or attempt to resolve a problem in an organization is the framing process. And you know, it's a difficult aspect to the decision to frame it correctly in the first place. There, it's not a technology issue. In many cases, it's largely a human issue, but if you frame that decision or that problem incorrectly to narrowly say, or you frame it as an either or situation where you could actually have some of both, it's very difficult for the process to work out correctly. So in many cases that I think we need to think more at the beginning about how we bring this issue or this decision in the best way possible before we charge off and build a system to support it. You know, it's worth that extra time to think carefully about how the decision has been structured. >> Right. Serge, I want to go back to you and talk about the human factors, because as we've just discussed, you could put it in great technology, but if the culture doesn't adopt it and people don't feel good about it, you know, it's not going to be successful and that's going to reflect poorly on the technology, even if it had nothing to do with it. And you know, when you look at the core values of the Bezos Manifesto, you know, a big one is trust and collaboration, you know, learn, respond and pivot. One of you can share your thoughts on trying to get that cultural shift so that you can have success with the people or excuse me, with the technology in the process and helping customers, you know, take this more trustworthy and kind of proactive position. >> So I think, at the ground level, it truly starts with the realization that we're all different. We come from different backgrounds. Often times we tend to blame the data. It's not uncommon my experiments that we spend the first you know 30 minutes of any kind of one hour conversation to debate the validity of the data. And so one of the first kind of probably manifestations that we've had or revelations as we start to engage with our customers is like just exposing high-fidelity data sets to different stakeholders from their different lens. We start to enable these different stakeholders to not debate the data. That's really collaborate to find a solution. So in many ways, when we think about kind of the types of changes that we're trying to truly effect around data driven decision making it's all about bringing the data in context, the context that is relevant and understandable for different stakeholders, whether we're talking about an operator or a developer or a business analyst. So that's, the first thing. The second layer I think, is really to provide context to what people are doing in their specific cycle. And so I think one of the best examples I have is if you start to be able to align business KPI whether you are counting you know, sales per hour, or the engagements of your users on your mobile applications, whatever it is. You can start to connect that KPI to business KPI to the KPIs that developers might be looking at, whether it is the number of defects or a velocity or whatever, you know metrics that they are used to actually track. You start to be able to actually contextualize in what we are the effecting, basically a metric that is really relevant in which we see is that this is a much more systematic way to approach the transformation than say, you know, some organizations kind of creating some of these new products or services or initiatives to drive engagements, right? So if you look at zoom for instance, zoom giving away it's service to education, is all about, I mean, there's obviously a marketing aspect in therapists. It's fundamentally about trying to drive also the engagement of their own teams. And because now they're doing something for good and the organizations are trying to do that. But you only can do this kind of things in a limited way. And so you really want to start to rethink how you connect to everybody's kind of a business objective through data and now you start to get people to stare at the same data from their own lens and collaborate on all the data. >> Right, great That's a good. Tom I want to go back to you. You've been studying IT for a long time, writing lots of books and getting into it. Why now, you know, what why now (laughs) are we finally aligning business objectives with IT objectives? You know, why didn't this happen before? And you know, what are the factors that are making now the time for this move with the BizOps? >> Well, much of a past, IT was sort of a back office related activity. And, you know, it was important for producing your pay check and capturing the customer orders but the business wasn't built around it. Now, every organization needs to be a software business data business a digital business, the auntie has been raised considerably. And if you aren't making that connection between your business objectives and the technology that supports it you run a pretty big risk of, you know going out of business or losing out to competitors totally. So, and even if you're you know, an industry that hasn't historically been terribly technology oriented customer expectations flow from, you know, the digital native companies that they work with to basically every industry. So you're compared against the best in the world. So we don't really have the luxury anymore of screwing up our IT projects or building things that don't really work for the business. It's mission critical that we do that well almost every time. >> Right. And I just want to follow up by that, Tom In terms of the, you've talked extensively about kind of these evolutions of data and analytics from artisanal stage to the big data stage, the data economy stage the AI driven stage and what I find diff interesting that all those stages, you always put a start date. You never put an end date. So, you know, is the big data I'm just going to use that generically moment in time, finally here, where we're you know, off mahogany row with the data scientists but actually can start to see the promise of delivering the right insight to the right person at the right time to make that decision. >> Well, I think it is true that in general, these previous stages never seemed to go away. The artisanal stuff is still being done but we would like for less and lesser of it to be artisanal, we can't really afford for everything to be artisanal anymore. It's too labor and time consuming to do things that way. So we shift more and more of it to be done through automation and to be done with a higher level of productivity. And, you know at some point maybe we reached the stage where we don't do anything artisanally anymore. I'm not sure we're there yet but you know, we are making progress. >> Right And Mick, back to you in terms of looking at agile 'cause you're such a student of agile, when you look at the opportunity with BizOps and taking the lessons from agile, you know what's been the inhibitor to stop this in the past. And what are you so excited about? You know, taking this approach will enable. >> Yeah. I think both Serge and Tom hit on this is that in agile what's happened is that we've been you know measuring tiny subsets of the value stream right. We need to elevate the data's there. Developers are working on these tools that delivering features that the foundations for great culture are there. I spent two decades as a developer. And when I was really happy is when I was able to deliver value to customers, the quicker I was able to do that the fewer impediments are in my way the quicker was deployed and running in the cloud the happier I was, and that's exactly what's happening. If we can just get the right data elevated to the business, not just to the agile teams but really these values of ours are to make sure that you've got these data driven decisions with meaningful data that's oriented around delivering value to customers. Not only these legacies that Tom touched on, which has cost center metrics from an IT, for IT being a cost center and something that provided email and then back office systems. So we need to rapidly shift to those new meaningful metrics that are customized business centric and make sure that every developer the organization is focused on those as well as the business itself, that we're measuring value and we're helping that value flow without interruptions. >> I love that Mik 'cause if you don't measure it, you can't improve on it but you got to be measuring the right thing. So gentlemen, thank you again for your time. Congratulations on the unveil of the BizOps Manifesto and bringing together this coalition of industry experts to get behind this. And you know there's probably never been a more important time than now to make sure that your prioritization is in the right spot and you're not wasting resources where you're not going to get the ROI. So congratulations again. And thank you for sharing your thoughts with us here on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you from Vancouver. >> Alright, so we had Serge, Tom and Mik. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. It's a BizOps Manifesto Unveiled. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering Inforum DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Well good afternoon, and welcome back here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage here at Inforum 2018, live from Washington, DC. We're in the Washington Convention Center centrally located, I got to tell ya. The White house less than a mile that way, Capital Hill's just right up the street as well. We're kind of caught in the middle. Bad spot to be these days! (laughing) >> I hope you're not setting the tone for this. >> We'll leave that alone. >> I like being in the middle, personally. (laughing) I'll take it from both sides. >> When you sit in the middle of the road, there's a six inch yellow line, you get it equally hard from both sides. >> Bring it on! >> So, lets stay away from that. Dave Vellante, John Walls and Rod Johnson, who is the EVP of Manufacturing and Supply Chain, and the GT Nexus Business Unit at Infor. Rod, good to see you Sir! >> Great to be here, thanks guys. >> You're okay with being in the middle? >> Yeah, sure! Yeah, of course. >> Independent thought, right? I love it. >> Middle of the road. It's the place to be. >> So you're the new kid on the block, right? >> One of them, yeah. >> You've been here, just at Infor for a few months now, assuming the EVP role. How's it been for you so far? >> Hey, it's been a breath of fresh air. I was 11 years with one of our competitors, the Oracle Corporation. Its quite a breath of fresh air. Go with a company that's agile, innovative, much more customer centric. I think the timing is perfect for a company like Infor, that's really grown up in these key industries and working with customers for over decades. Now its made this transition to the Cloud, and now I think all the markets are waking up. It's not just CRM or HR, they're looking at: How do I take advantage of all this innovation, the Cloud's the platform, and who's the companies that really understand our type of business, whether you're a distribution company, or a food company, or an A&D Company. So it's a great time to be here, there's a lot of good energy, a lot of good innovation. A lot of good buzz from the customers about what we're doing. >> Necessity is the mother of invention, as the saying goes. I mean, you're right. The model of just having an install base that you can have locked in and just keep milking is very hard to do these days. Unless, you know, some of the private equity guys have done it, that's clearly not the case here at Infor. You know, Oracle is successful at it. I think it's because they do spend a lot of money on R&D, but boy oh boy! That model, you can't just go and reinvent that. >> Right. >> You're going to fail. >> Right. >> And if you're trying to hold on to that model, maybe they're the exception that proves the rule, but you're going to be toast. You know, in the long run. So you see what Amazon's doing, you see what Microsoft; how Microsoft completely pivoted away from that model. >> Right, Right. >> And Infor's riding that wave. >> Right, right. Hey, this is a business model. Fundamental business model change. You know, we can talk a lot about the technology, but transitioning from a product company that sells a license that sits on a maintenance base is a model that's no longer viable for what customers expect. They want a service provider that's delivering continuous innovation in service, and that's a big change. That's a big change to how we engage with our customers, how we support them, the service levels we're committing to. So, I lived through a bunch of that stuff at Oracle, transitioning to the cloud had a role for the last six years; doing that both from a sales and a global strategy role. Here, we're trying to do it better, faster, and never lose sight of the customer. >> So, you've serviced the manufacturing sector. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's still a lot of Infor's business that install base and that maintenance. You're in the process of transitioning those customers. >> Yeah. >> So, that takes a lot of care, a lot of feeding, cause anytime there's a transition everybody wants a piece of that action. So how's that going, what's the conversation like, and why should they stay with Infor? >> The conversation is, One: We really believe in a pragmatic business-led path to the Cloud. There's not going to be any forced march, no technology agenda that's going to drive us. It's got to be driven by value. We've got to present a business case to them that makes sense. That makes them more productive, now allows them to better engage with their customers, delivers innovation to their supply chain. So that's what we're spending a lot of time talking about. What's the case for change? What's the business case for change? I mean, all of the stuff about operating the Cloud, the service levels, potential total co-services, great! But, at the end of the day we deal with pretty, we're dealing with manufacturers. They're pretty down to earth. They know that they make their money building stuff, and shipping stuff and servicing that product. So we got to be engaged at that level, to show them how we help them do that better. I think the excitement is growing. That they recognize that there is real net new business value, new innovation that could really help their business. >> So lets talk about that. Forced march is a powerful phrase and you certainly see that in the industry. Thinking about supply chain, and the opportunities to drive even more efficiencies out of the supply chain, maybe through automation, we've heard a lot about RPA. >> Yeah. >> Maybe even bring back some of that offshore manufacturing. >> Right. >> That's certainly a conversation >> Right. >> that's going on in your world, so talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, so one of our diamonds in the Infor portfolio is a product called GT Nexus. Which is, its been around for about 20 years. We have 65,000 companies around the world who are operating on a common network based platform that provides supply chain visibilities, supplies supply chain financial processing. Connects brands to their manufacturers to provide all the visibility and control and that. So, that's a powerful capability because you're right, it's an incredibly dynamic time. With the change of trade wars, weather events that are ever increasing. The supply chain's a very hard thing to manage. So if the asset is we've got a platform that enables companies to connect much deeper in their supply chain then use that information to make far better decisions on how they get their products to their customer at the right cost. So, and I see, you know the supply chain market, I always think of this transition to Cloud in waves. You know, we had the first wave breaking was the sales. Then the HR, the finance function. Operations in supply chains is the one that's cresting on the horizon. And you know, keep that going, we've got our surfboards in the water, we've got great capability. And we're really, really excited about what we can do for our clients! >> You got to ride the waves or you'll become driftwood >> How big is that wave? >> Well, hey that's the biggest market, right? I mean, you look at the size of the Enterprise software spend. Core ERP supply chain industry functionality is the big piece. It's probably two. It's probably by an HR, CRM, financials together, and it's not even as big as sort of the industry supply chain, manufacturing, procurement market core ERP market. So, its big! Its a big opportunity, but it requires a much more sophisticated response because you talk to our customers they're like hey, we operate our plants 365 days a year, three shifts sometimes in peak seasons. We can't afford an environment that isn't mission critical, that doesn't step up to service levels. So, you know, we're working really hard to address the mission critical system challenge, not just the benefits and payroll. >> So, there's certainly an opportunity with AI, with machine learning, certainly more analytics, bringing that to the manufacturing world. >> Oh yeah. >> So that's clearly fundamental to your strategies. >> Yeah. >> Is that, in your view, the tipping point to get really this whole market moving? >> I think. I mean I would agree with you. Its sort of an accumulation of digital capabilities. Certainly, mobility's sort of proved that its important, but its a little bit of a nice-to-have. Some of the innovations around user experiences, is really important but nice-to-have. I think that is the game changer. When you can use data as a weapon, a competitive weapon that you can make decisions faster, and how you discount your product or how you identify shortage faster than someone else. That's where, there's real money that comes out of that. >> What about Block Chain? We hear a lot about Block Chain in the supply chain and cutting out the middle man. We haven't heard much here about it, its not something. We're going to ask Charles. Somebody said to me, Once Charles gets on it, boom the company is behind it. >> Yeah. >> But, how real is that in manufacturing and supply chain specifically? Is it just way too early? Do you think there's potential there? Have you looked at it? >> Obviously we've looked at it, we've worked on with customers on prototypes. There's a couple areas, you know, there's a lot of hype as you guys know. You talked to a lot of us, a lot of hype in that space. It's certainly unproven in a lot of areas. But we think in the area of supply chain financing, Block Chain has a very, very powerful, you know, where you have multi parties, you've got suppliers and logistics companies and banks all who need a piece of information. We need distributed capabilities around that. We think there's a big potential in some of that area. We're talking. We're working with some of the banks on that. We think in the area of getting deeper into the supply chain around sustainability, to the ethical and traceability of the Supply Chain. You know, where you're goin down. Yeah we got customers in the pero business that are going down to the farms. They want to know exactly the lineage of all of their stuff that's going into their product that's ending up in a consumer. That's potentially a more efficient mechanism, to have all these different entities collaborating on a distributed model. So, I mean; and especially if we talk about the GT Nexus Network. There's natural extensions to it. That it already is a common platform that is serving a wide variety of companies, logistics companies, and manufacturers. So there's a lot of natural exit points from that, sort of, that integrated network to support a couple of these more extended processes that are a little bit more distributed. >> Yes, the smart contracts maybe fits there, and you talked about distributed a couple of times. What about IOT? The pendulum seems to be swinging now. Obviously Cloud is hot. Its got a re-centralization. But IOT's a whole new world. You get a lot of IT companies kind of pushing the IT model top down into operations technology and we don't think that's the way it's going to work. That the OT guys are actually going to drive the standards and the trends. What are you seeing? >> Well I think yeah hey, the people that have the, that make the equipment, you know, make the pipelines. Hey, obviously they got a big stake in this. You know, they understand how their kipid works, they know how to attach the sensors. They know how to translate things that are going on in the machines into data. We're going to be, and we're going to be taking that data, and how do you connect it to a business process. That's something that they don't understand. They don't understand how a heat event could translate, could connect to a maintenance process and how do you deploy a technician with the right part to go in there so they can offer some proactive service? So I think there's going to be a very tight partnership, where people coming from the equipment up, or the asset up, connect with the people that understand process analytics and sort of execution. >> Yeah. You talked about sustainability there just a moment ago, so obviously companies, their focus is changing in that regard. Right? People are paying more attention, a lot of that is being customer driven. >> Right >> At the same time too, in terms of distribution, in terms of manufacturing, customer expectations are changing too. Right? >> Right. >> We expect things on a much different time table. >> Absolutely. >> So how are you helping your clients recognize all those things? Like you're thinking about tomorrow today, and trying to get them to address that in terms of their technology plays down the road to meet these really fast changing demands. >> Yeah, I mean one of our really dominant industries is distribution. You know, probably three out of five distribution companies around the world run our software. So distribution is a space, typically between the manufacturing world and the consumer or the retail world is under tremendous pressure. While Amazon is inching into distribution centric industry so there's a lot of pressure from that, but there's also rising expectations that you have to do instantaneous fulfillment. That you have to provide complete visibility into where my order is, when am I going to get it, because I don't want to carry this supply. You got to carry it. So we're seeing a big rejuvenation of that industry, a little because of the pressures driving them to rethink e-commerce, to rethink the types of services they're providing to their companies. That even in some cases they're sneaking into retail, and having that type of experience because they need to compete in different ways. And I think that's always, the industry change is good for companies like us that have a lot of experience in the industry cause we can help them! Ya know, and they need a catalyst, right? They need a catalyst to go out and change and rethink how they operate, and it's created a pretty interesting opportunity. >> So, I wonder Rod if you could talk a little bit about, I know you're only a few months in, but just your impressions of the differentiation. Give us the bumper sticker pitch. Why Infor? How are you different? >> So, I mean, three things. Just netted out three things. Industry, and we talk a lot about industry. We talk a lot about last mile, its real. Its compelling to our customers. They're tired of having to finish the software for the vendor at their site. They want the provider to finish the software and take it to meet their unique needs. Two is I think even though we're smaller than some of the big, big names out there, I think pound for pound we out innovate almost every company. And I can talk very specifically, transitioning from a very, very large competitor. When you're actually looking into the detail of what we've actually delivered around AI, or what we've actually delivered around analytics or mobility, and pound for pound we fight way above our weight on that front. And I think, you know, if you look at even what we've done at Hook and Loop Digital over the years, the types of proof points we have with customers are something that very few of our competitors could boast. So I think, digital over use term, but just sort of understanding how this new technology works and being able to translate that to our customers is huge. And three, is culture. I think we have a fast oriented culture. There's not a lot of levels. We can cut through the nonsense for our customers pretty quickly. We organize around our customers, we don't have 3,000 sales teams trying to sell them piece parts so we can do the solution thing. And we're really working hard to differentiate on customer centricity. I made the comment yesterday at our executive forum that, in general, service at Enterprise Software stinks. You wouldn't accept, ya know, if a retailer was treating you the way the average Enterprise Software, you wouldn't accept it, right? You'd go somewhere else. We've had the benefit, or we've had customers that have such big investments in us, they have to deal with it. And we need to, we have an opportunity to fix that, to change that, to really reorganize and reorient our customer around the outcomes that matter to them. And its so important, if they're going to trust us. And its really about trust. They got to trust us to run their applications, our mission critical applications in our Cloud. We need to really change the game on that front, and we're doing a lot of things structurally. Like for example, maybe someone talked about were taking development customer support in Cloud operations, integrating that into a common organization. So, there's no finger pointing. If something goes down, its not well its the network, Its a bug, Its a knowledge issue. It's one team that's accountable for making sure that we resolve that issue rapidly. Same on the field side. So now we're organizing for manufacturing and distribution. Really, all the resources we need to both sell and service, deliver for our customers in a common team, so there's accountability. And on both sides. There's our product side, product and Cloud ops side, there's accountability and from a sort of customer engagement or accounts management accountability. And then, you know, we got to do a lot of things around service and automation, and better, proactive. We're running their cloud, we should be able to tell them, hey, this isn't running optimally. We need to come in and do this change. I mean, that's where we need to get. That's where the industry needs to get. And we want to get there first. >> Well, you're on the right path. >> Yeah. >> Again, congratulations on the new position, >> Yeah, thank you! >> and we appreciate the time here today, and wish you all the best down the road. >> I appreciate what you guys do. I love your show and content. >> Thank you, Rod. We appreciate that. Thank you sir. Back with more here on theCUBE. We are at Inforum 2018. We're in Washington, DC. (electronic jingle)

>> Announcer: Live from the Moscone center it's theCUBE covering AWS Summits San Francisco 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of AWS Summit San Francisco. Here at the Moscone Center West. I'm Stu Miniman, happy to have a distinguished panel of guests on the program. Starting down of the fair side, Steven Jones whose the Director of Solution Architecture with AWS, helping us talk about how AWS gets to market is Chris Wegmann, Manager and Director of Accenture, and then super excited to have a customer on the program Chad Anderson is the IT Director of Operations at Del Monte Foods. Gentleman, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Alright Chad, we're going to start with you, talk to us a little bit about your role inside Del Monte and really the journey of the cloud, something we've been talking about for years, but Del Monte has an interesting story. I want to kind of understand your role in that. Start us off. >> Ya so I oversaw the project for us to migrate everything to AWS. We started off with just needing to really understand if were missing something here. Like, shouldn't we be moving to the cloud and that ended up in a study where we just kind of went threw the numbers, we looked at what the benefits were going to be and it kind of just turned into a obvious choice for us to do it. >> Back us up for a second, give us you know your organization Del Monte Foods and your technology group is this global and scope kind of how many end user do you have? How many sites? Can you give us a little bit of the speeds and feeds of what what was being considered, was it everything or some pieces, what was the impetus for the journey of the cloud? >> Ya, so we have about a thousand users, globally we are mostly in Manila, for our global share services our business back office work is done there and then most of it is U.S. footprint of plants and distribution centers and headquarters, et cetera operations. >> Alright so Chris, the SI partner for this cloud journey. So bring us a little bit of insight, bring us back to you know, kind of what was the business challenge and what was your teams role in helping along those journeys? >> The business challenge was getting Del Monte, getting the heart of their organization SAP to AWS quickly. Alright, there was a short time frame, I learned a lot about fruit packing during the project, but it was about how quickly could we get there? So, when we actually started, we started looking at taking seven months to do the migration of their environment. We really got into it and really got focused on what needed to be done. We looked at a lot of automation, put a lot of automation on the process, a very diligent approach, and we were able to do it, we thought we could do it in four months, and we did in three and a half months so very rapid, and I think as Chad will tell you we really kind of focused on building the right architecture, putting a lot of automation, and then also getting it in there with the right performance and then being able to tune things down, because you can you can move so quickly between engine sizes and memory and it was a really really exciting process to go through. >> Ya, so you said it originally we thought it was seven months, and it was good and done in half that time. That's not my experience with Enterprise Software roll outs. So, what was the delta there? How was the team able to move so fast? >> A lot of it was obviously AWS, being able to spin up the infrastructure, being able to automate a lot of the tasks that had to be done. Alright we did it threw three different environment sets. So we started diligent, moved to test, then went to production, and in each step we automated more and more of the process so we were able to condense the speed of the technical work that had to take place in a really short amount of time. >> We had to treat it also, like a mission critical thing across it wasn't just a infrastructure move it really the application guys were focused on this, we stopped all development of other activities going on. We really just kind of turned everybody and say "Let's get this done as soon as possible "and not be competing with each other." >> When you say stop everything, but of course the business didn't stop, but was transition pretty seamless. >> I mean other projects. >> Ya, ya, ya I understand, but I mean from the cut over and from your users stand point, did it go pretty smoothly? >> Oh definitely, these guys did an amazing job of putting together a plan that was really ready to be executed against. It took some, it took a lot of, I mean on my part it was really just to negotiate the extended maintenance window, but as far as the best compliment I ever got was people were like what did you do? Like I didn't even know that you guys did anything. From day one they took it and ran with it and we were stable. I mean it was pretty awesome. >> A black box, magic happens here and all of a sudden everything is running faster, scaling easier, cost is better, some of those types of thing? >> Ya, cocktails and beach time. >> Steve cocktails? I didn't realize that when I moved my enterprise application to cloud cocktails were involved. >> A few cocktails are involved. >> I mean look, I remember a few years ago where it was like well it's your development will do in the cloud, but I mean SAP has really raised cloud full boar and you know very strong partner, but bring us up to how does AWS help customers make sure that, this is critical things running the business, that it runs so smoothly. What have you learned along the way? What is different in 2018, then say it was even a year or two ago? >> A lot of great questions in there Stu, I would say this is become the new normal. Right? It use to be full disclosure, dev test, training type work loads in the early days but over the course of years we have taking a lot of learning with partners like Accenture and customers like Del Monte and we've taking those learnings and put them back into the platforms, so what you see today is a platform that a partner like Accenture could come in build a lot of automation tooling around, to reduce time frame from seven months down to three and a half. I think it was around two hundred servers, 50 of those were SAP related, and 25 terabytes of data that were moved in a short amount of time. So it's a combination of years worth of effort to build a platform that is scalable, resilient, and flexible. As well as the work that we have done directly with SAP that has gone right back into the platform. >> Chad bring us inside kind of operations on your team. What is the before and after? What's it look like? Was there change in personal or roles or skills? >> We transition services with our migration. So the Accenture team has taking over the long term operational activities as well as helping us through the migration efforts. We had a lot of preparation that was going on besides the server migration that was happening and I think what is really unique about them is because they can deliver these capabilities of the migration they have got a lot of the tooling and the automation is built into the operational mana services model as well. So it's been a much easier kind of hand over from those teams because we are working with the same vendor. >> Most of the time its not just that I've migrated from my environment to the cloud, but how does that enable the new services either Accenture from AWS from the marketplace. What has changed as to how you look at your SAP environment and kind of capability wise? >> It's just incredibly flexible now. It's just one of those situations where we can start small and we can scale so rapidly and it's like I feel like its kind of like walking into a fast food restaurant and just like oh, I'll take one of these, one of these, and one of these. You wait there and the food comes out, it just happens automatically. So, it's a great thing. >> Chris, I remember I interviewed a CEO a few years ago, and he said use to give me a million dollars in 18 months and I'll build you the Taj Mahal from my applications. Today I need to move faster and it's not a one time migration, but there's ongoing I've heard it a time and again there, so where does Accenture, it's not just the planning, where's Accenture involved? What is kind of the ongoing engagement? >> We go end to end. Right? So, we start out with strategy, we start out with a migration. The migration takes planning and execution, but really we focus on the run area as well using our Accenture platform and tooling that we have built. We really focus on how do you continue to optimize? How do you continue to improve performance? How do you govern? How do you do things like quota and security management and that type of stuff. I do think that a lot of our customers start with cloud think I can spin this stuff up, I can run it just like I ran my on premise data center and it's not the same. You go from a capacity planning person to a cost management person. You need to have a cloud architect understanding how you build your applications to be Cloud ready and AWS ready. There are a lot of great services, but if your not taking advantages of those services you can't auto scale, you can't do that stuff. So, we really help our clients go threw that entire process and make sure their getting the most value out of AWS all the way through the run for many years after they have done the migration. >> Chad, do you have any discussion of how are you reporting back to the business as to what were the hero numbers or success factors that said hey this was actually the right thing to do? >> Ya I mean we're a canned food company, so people are very interested in making sure that we are keeping our cost low. Most people from a business prospect want to talk to me about the efficiencies that their seeing and how's that going to show up a reduction in SG and A. We have seen it, I mean when you move to a group of people that can manage a larger set of infrastructure with a smaller group of people and the underline services can be turned on and off, so you only utilize what you really absolutely have. Those numbers show up on our bottom line. >> Steve, any other similar, what do you hear from customers when it comes to SAP, and what is the main driver, and what are the big hero things? >> So in the early days, it was all about cost right, driving cost out of the system. Now it's the flexibility, the ability to move quicker. Chad was relating earlier how you would spend a lot of time sizing environment and now there actually able to right size their environments using purpose built equipment the AWS has built for SAP. It's enabled them to actually reduce cost and move quicker. That's what we are hearing is common theme now these days. It's okay to move faster, to maybe not worry about sizing as much as we use to. >> Ya for future initiatives, I mean it's, there's all these windows of time that are just gone for us to stand up new services whether it's traditional application that needs servers and computer, whether it's SAP services, we are kind of all on that platform now where we can just click and plug in items much easier. >> Chad, what do things like digital transformation and innervation mean to a canned food company? >> We are desperately trying to get in touch of our consumer. So, whether were figuring out how to get improve kind of how we are managing our digital assets, how were managing, our pages on Amazon, or our pages on Walmart.com. We need to be much more in touch and much more consumer focused and a lot of these newer technologies, et cetera there built to run on AWS and we ready to kind of integrate that into our existing enterprise environment. >> Innervation has been a big part of our customers reason for moving to cloud. I'd say 18 months ago, we saw a big transition in our enterprise customers a lot of them were starting off with cost savings, for operational savings, just overall improvement of their operations, and then we seen about 18 months ago we saw a big shift of people very much focused on innervation and using AWS platform as that catalyst renovation. So, the businesses asking for Alexa apps, they're asking for the integration. Well, the SAP data has to be there to support that stuff. Right, and your enterprise tech has to be there, so by doing that it's enabled a lot of innervation in our processors. >> Chad, last question when you talk about innovation, are there certain areas that your team's investing in is it AI, is it IOT, you know what are some of the areas that you think will be the most promising and how do Accenture and AWS fit into those from your planning? >> Ya, I mean IOT is definitely an interesting area for us, and getting to a point where we can measure our effectiveness and our manufacturing processes, those are all really initiatives now that we're starting to focus on, now that we kind of gotten some of the infrastructure related stuff and were ready to kind of build out those platforms. We're talking about scaling out our OE software and our infrastructure its just such an easier conversation to kind of plan for those activities. We turned a three month sizing exercise as to how much IOT did and we think were going to have to process through these engines into a hey let's go with this and if it doesn't work then we'll take it out and increase the size. It really helps us deliver capabilities new capabilities and new types of ways of measuring or helping our business run in a much more effective and efficient way. >> Anything that you've learned along the way that you've turned to peers and say "Here's something I did, maybe do it faster or do it a little bit different way?" >> I think Accenture has been an amazing partner. I think a lot of people are skeptical about running their entire enterprise across the network and once you kind of bring them in and you really let them look under the cover of what you have. One of the reasons we went with them was just the trust and confidence that they had that we could do this. Once I kind of saw that it was like well I mean let's trust the process here. I mean these guys are the experts and so so that's been a big thing is just reach out learn about what people are doing. There's no reason why you can't do this. >> Well Chad, Chris, and Steve thank you both so much for highlighting the story of a customer's journey to the cloud. We will be back with lots more coverage here at AWS Summit in San Francisco. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(clicking) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. It looks like they're letting the general session out. We're here at the Professional Business Women of California Conference; 6,000 women, about 5% men really talking about, it's amazing, the 28th year. I've never been to this show about how women can get more inclusive and diversity and taking, executing on steps to actually make it happen as somebody said in the key note. It's not a strategy problem, it's an execution problem. So, we've got a great story here and we're really excited to have CUBE alumni, Andrea Ward. She's now the CMO of Magento Commerce. Welcome back, Andrea. >> Thank you so much, it's great to be here and great to be at this conference. The buzz is amazing and I was here two years ago and it's grown so much, just in the two years. >> How many people were there, they say it's 6,000, now. >> I mean, it looks like it's about doubled. I don't know what the numbers were two years ago but the participation is amazing and it's such a great opportunity for local businesses to bring employees from their companies, have them have a chance just to talk and learn from such powerful women. So, it's been a really great conference. >> And, it's also a cross of so many kind of verticals if you will, because you know we go to a lot of tech conferences. This is more kind of a cross industry with banking and insurance and, you know, United Airlines we talked to earlier. And so, it's a much more diverse kind of set. >> Absolutely, I mean the women on the panels this morning spanned legal professions, government, entertainment, business, really diverse issue and it's fantastic that women are coming together to support each other to help make a difference. >> So last we saw you, I think we were on the street on Howard Street a couple years back which was pretty exciting as well, but now your new company, Magento Commerce. So, for people who aren't familiar with the company, give them kind of the four-one-one. >> Yeah great, well Magento Commerce is a leading commerce technology platform for mid-size businesses. We have recently separated from Ebay about 15 months ago and are now a privately held company and we power about a third of the world's commerce, believe it or not. >> That is amazing. Yeah. >> A third of the world's eCommerce. >> That's right. So, it's a fantastic company. We're growing and a part of that growth is absolutely growing a more diverse workforce and we've been putting into place some initiatives since last year. >> Yeah, part of the key note conversations were, obviously, that you need to put goals down on paper and you need to measure them and I think it was Bev Crair from Intel talked about, you know, doing it across all the pay grades. It's not just in engineering or just on the board or just the executive ranks, but really all the way across and it sounds like you guys are executing that to really help you just grow the company generically. >> Well, we're in a very lucky position in that we're experiencing growth and so that gives us room to really go out and look for amazing talent across the board. And so, we put a focus on diversity and inclusion and by doing that, we've increased the percentage of women in all roles across the company by 50% and that's since last June. So I think, you know, really just what you said earlier about execution and putting some numbers and goals against that can really make a difference. >> Right, and if you hadn't had those, that execution detail you probably couldn't have grown that fast because let's face it, it's hard to get good talent. If you're not including a broader base of talent, you're not going to be able to achieve your goals. >> Well, that's right and I think that some of that is, I don't know if you want to call it unconscious bias or unintentional, we're used to hiring people that look like us, have experience like us. And so, by encouraging that diversity, it really has made us expand the pool of applicants, make sure that we're not going for the easiest choice or the simplest choice but really considering a wide range of candidates to fill those positions. >> You know, I don't the birds of a feather conversation comes up enough, it's just easy to go with what you're familiar with. So whether it's unconscious or not, it's just easy, people are busy, you want to check the box and get off to your next task. So, you have to take a step back and consciously do the extra work, take the extra effort. >> Well, in the industry we support, the industries we support are going through digital transformation, I mean, commerce is key and central to digital transformation. And, transformation and change means that you have to consider other perspectives. You need to learn from new ideas and I think, you know, diversity plays a big part in that as well. So, I think bringing that into our own company because we're supporting that broader industry has been very important. >> Right. So, I want to take that opportunity to pivot on what you just said about in terms of the changing role of commerce. You know, I often think of like banks because in a bank, you know, your relationship was with your local branch; maybe you knew the banker, maybe you knew a couple of the tellers whatever, but you had a personal connection. Now, most people's engagement with the brands they interact with is electronic and via their phone and it's interesting that you say that. And, it's the commerce around those engagements, that the commerce is becoming the central point of gravity if you will and the relationship is spawning all from that. >> Well, I mean, personal connections are still very important and commerce I feel is like the moment where a conversation really turns into a relationship. So, it's important that those digital experiences, the customer experiences really make up the right connection with the brand. And so, that seamless interaction between what happens at the branch, for example in the financial example, on what you can do at home, that needs to be very cohesive. It needs to be trustworthy, it needs to be authentic and that means businesses need to create individual experiences that really reflect their brand. And, our company specifically has really helped businesses create those experiences, seamless experiences and translated them from digital to in-store or in the branch. I think the biggest change now is how that's starting to impact business-to-business relationships, I think. >> In what way? In the consumer world, we're used to that now right? We're all doing that in our everyday experiences. Now, we're starting to see that also come into a business-to-business relationship. So, just like the seamless conveniences that you have online in your day to day life, people want to see that in the workplace, too. And so, we're seeing the biggest change now in those types of business models. >> They're rocking in the background, if you can't hear them. >> Yeah! We are here. >> Yeah! You know, it's funny, I just saw, something come across the feed talking about that annoying business-to-business add in Instagram, but then aren't you glad you saw it? >> Yeah. >> So, it's interesting how, you know, the B to C norms, you know, continue to help define what's going on in the B to B space and we've seen it in Enterprise Software Applications and Cloud and the flexibility and speed of innovation. It just continues to really drive the business-to-business relationship. >> Yeah, and I think just like in the business-to-consumer world, it has started with content in business-to-business. But, now people want to move from just learning and knowledge to actually transacting which means that companies need to enable specialized price list, account management, things like that and that's starting to surface in the commerce world as well. So, we're really excited about that and we're going to be sharing some of that at our conference next week; Imagine, in Las Vegas. >> Okay yeah, it's amazing how fast. It was not that long ago, we were just trying to get the 360 view. Right? We were just trying to pull from all the various desperate systems to know who that customer was for a given system. Now, it's a segmentation to want, a very different challenge. >> Right, I mean it's that change from thinking about trying to attract your customer to come to your business to really bringing the business to the customer. I mean, I think that's what some of this digital technology is allowing us to do. We're going to them rather than trying to draw them in to come to us, if that makes sense. This idea of commerce coming to you, right? >> And, it's got to come to you with something that's relevant, that's topical, that's timely. >> That's easy to execute, that can mirror a real experience. I mean, you hear a lot of things about, things like virtual reality, artificial intelligence. I mean, all of that's just gimmicks unless you can actually think about how you make that real for your brand. So, for example, we have a customer in Mexico City who is selling eyewear, right. And so, everybody when they buy glasses, they want to try them on, so we need to help them give their customers that virtual experience. If they can't come into the store and try them on, we want to be able to let them try them on at home. So, that's a natural extension of the brand and a way to use virtual reality and I think businesses are still trying to figure that out. But, if those customers didn't have that experience, it'd be less likely that they actually would buy or, you know, make a commerce transaction. >> But, if I'm hearing you, instead of it really kind of being in a marketing effort that then it's completed with a transaction, you're kind of coming at that which you just described from the transaction first and this is really a supporting or an enabling activity. >> That's right, it all starts with the customer understanding what is going to help them make their decisions. Giving them experiences that feel seamless, giving them options. So, if they want to come in-store but see what's maybe available at another store for pick-up or if they want to come in-store and order online or if they want to order from home and then go into the store and pick it up. It's really about giving the customer the right options for them. >> Right. >> Another great story we had is, I mean, how many of us travel, I know you travel a lot. >> Right. >> I travel a ton. >> Especially, to Vegas. (chuckling) >> Especially, to Vegas! And, you know, my kids are always expecting something when I come home but who has time? So, you know, one of our partners worked with the Frankfurt Airport and created an application where on the way to the airport, you can go shopping at all of their stores in the airport and have your package waiting for you at the gate on the way to the plane. So now, you know, they've figured out what their customers want to do first by creating this great shopping experience at the airport. Now, they know people are running through the airport, how can we extend that shopping experience for them while they're sitting in the taxi (chuckling) on the way, have it waiting for them at the gate? And so, for me personally, working for a company that's helping customers to do those kinds of things has really been fun. >> Right, because they always have the liquor for ya ready to go at the gate but never the kids', you know, t-shirts or a little tchotchke or, I can remember running through Heathrow time and time again trying to find something quickly. >> Yeah, and now with two kids and a husband that all want something different, (laughing) you know, it makes it much easier for me. >> Alright, Andrea, well you've been doing this marketing thing for a long time. I'll give you the last word both on the conference and kind of, you know, as a marketer to see where we're going with A.I. and really the ability to actually segment to one. You know, how exciting is that for you? >> Yeah, I mean, it's fantastic. I think, you know, marketers want to create relationships with their brand and all of these tools are giving us better access, better chance to create that fantastic experience. So, it's a great time to be a marketer. (chuckling) And, it's a great time to be at this conference, too so. >> Alright. Thanks very much. >> Thanks for stopping by, Andrea Ward. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from the Professional Business Women's Conference in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)