>>Hi, everyone. And thanks for joining us today for our session on the 2020 Data Drivers Award winners. I'm excited to be here today with you. I'm a lease. Bergeron, vice president, product marketing for snowflake. Thes rewards are intended to recognize companies and individuals for using snowflakes, data cloud to drive innovation and impact in their organizations. Before we start our conversations, I want to quickly congratulate all of our award winners. First in the business awards are data driver of the year is Cisco. Our machine learning master is you Nipper, Our data sharing leader is Rakuten. Our data application of the year is observed and our data for good award goes to door dash for the individual and team awards. We first have the cost. Jane, Chief Digital officer of Paccar. We have a militiamen, director of cybersecurity and data science winning our data science Manager of the Year award at Comcast for a date. A pioneer of the year. We have Faisal KP, who's our senior manager of enterprise data Services at Pizza Hut. And lastly, we have our best data team going to McKesson, led by Jimmy Herff Data and Analytics platform leader Huge congratulations to all of these winners. It was very difficult to pick them amongst amazing set of nominations. So now let's dive into our conversations. We'll start with the data driver of the year. Representing Cisco today is Robbie. I'm a month do director data platform, data and analytics. >>Let me welcome everybody to the wonderful. Within a few years before Cisco used to be a company, you know, in making the decisions partly with the data and partly with the cuts. Because, you know, the data is told in multiple places the trading is not done right and things like that. So we, you know, really understood it. You know what was a challenge in the organism? By then we defined the data strategy on we put in a few plants in place, and it is working very well. But what is more important is basically how we provide the data towards data scientists and the data community in Cisco. I'm making them available in a highly available scalable on the elastic platforms. That's where you know, snowflake came into picture really very well for arrest, along with the other data strategies that we have had in place more importantly, data. Democratization was a key. You know, you along with the simplification, something technologies involved in the past. Our clients need to be worrying, laudable the technologies involved, you know, for example, we used to manage her before we make it. Snowflake Andi Snowflake, in a solve all of these problems for us with the ease on it. Really helping enabling a data data given ordinances in our >>system. In the data sharing leaders category, Rockhampton was our winner. We have mark staying trigger VP of analytics here to share their story. I >>wanna thank Snowflake for the award, and it's an honor to be a today. The ease of use of snowflake has allowed projects to move forward innovation to move forward in a way that it simply couldn't have done on old Duke systems or or or other platforms. And I think the truth the same is true for us on a lot of the similar topics, but also in the data sharing space, data sharing is a part off innovation. Like I think, most of the tech companies we work with certainly are business partners, merchants, but also with a range of other service providers and other technology vendors, um on other companies that we strategically share data with 2 May benefit of their service or thio to allow data modeling or advanced data collaboration or strategic business deals using the data and evaluated with the data on. But I think if you look Greece snowflake, you would see a lot of time and effort money going to just establishing that data connection that often involved substantial investments in technology data pipelines, risk evaluation, hashing, encrypt encryption. Security on what we found with snowflakes sharing functionality is that we can not eliminate those concerns, but that the technology just supports the ability to share data securely easily, quickly in a way that we could never do >>previously. Now we have a really inspiring winner of the data for good award door dash with their Project Dash Initiative here to speak about their work is act shot near Engineering manager >>Thank you sports to snowflake for recognizing us for this initiative. Eso For those of you who don't know, Dash, the logistics technology platform company that connects people with the best in their cities and Project Dash, our flagship social impact program, uses the door dash logistics platform to tackle the challenges like hunger and food waste. It was launched in 2018 on over the first two years in partnership with food recovery organizations, we powered the delivery off over £2 million of surplus food from businesses to hunger relief agencies across the U. S. And Canada. Andi simply do Toko with tremendous need has a much we were ableto power. The delivery often estimated 5.8 million meals to food insecure communities and frontline workers across 48 states on the 3.5 million off. These meals have been delivered since much. We do all of our analysis for our business functions from like product development to skills and social impact in snowflake On the numbers I just provided here actually have come from Snowflake on. We have used it to provide various forms of reporting, tow our government and non profit partners on this snowflake. We can help them understand the impact, analyzed friends and ensure complaints in cases where we are supporting efforts for agencies like FEMA, our USDA onda. Lastly, our team is really excited to be recognized by snowflake for using data for good. It has reminded us to continue doubling down on our commitment to using our product and expertise to partner with communities we operated. Thank you again. >>The winner of the machine Learning Master's word is unit for Energy. Viola Sarcoma Data Innovation leader is here on behalf of unit for >>Hello, everyone, Thanks for having me here. It's really a pleasure. And we were really proud to get this award. It means a lot for you. Nipper. It's huge recognition for our effort since last couple of years assed part of our journey and also a celebration off our success now for you. Newport. It would not be possible to start looking at Advanced Analytics techniques, not having a solid data foundation in place. And that's where we invested a lot in our cloud data platform in the cloud back by snowflake. Having this platform allowed us to employ advanced analytics techniques, combining data from Markit from fundamental data, different other sources of data like weather and extracting new friends, new signals that basically help us to partly or even in some cases fully automate some trading strategy. And we believe this will be really fundamental for for the future off raiding in our company and we will definitely invest in this area in the future. >>Our data application of the year is observed. Observers recognizes the most innovative, data driven application built on Snowflake and representing observed today is their CEO, Jeremy Burton. >>Let me just echo the thanks from the other folks on the coal. I mean snowflakes, separation of storage. Compute. I can't overstate what a really big deal it is. Um, it means that we can ingest in store data. Really? For the price of Amazon s three on board, we're in a category where vendors of historically charged for volume of data ingested. So you can imagine this really represents huge savings. Um, in addition, and maybe on a more technical note, snowflakes, elastic architectures really enables us to direct queries appropriately, based on the complexity of the query. So small queries or simple queries weaken director extra small warehouses and complex queries. We can direct, you know, for Excel. Or I think even a six x l is either there are on its way. The key thing there is that users they're not sitting around waiting for results to appear regardless of the query complexity. So I mean, really? The separation storage compute on the elastic architectures is a really big deal for us. >>Turning to the data Pioneer of the Year Award, I'm excited to be here with Faisal KP, senior manager of Enterprise Data Services from Pizza Hut. >>First of all, thank you, Snowflake, for giving this wonderful person. I think it means a lot for us in terms of validating what we're doing. I think we were one of the earlier adopters of Snowflake. We saw the vision of snowflake, you know, stories. Russell's computer separation on all the goodies, right? Right from back in 2017, I believe what snowflake enabled us is to actually get the scale with very little manpower, which is needed to man the entire system. So on the Super Bowl day, we have, you know, the entire crew literally a boardroom where the right from the CME, most of the CEOs to all the folks will be sitting and watching what is happening in the system. And we have to do a lot of real time analytics during that time. So with snowflake, you know, way used the elasticity of the platform we use, you know, platform you know their solutions, like snow pipe to basically automate the data ingestion coming through various channels, from the commas, from the stores, everything simultaneously. So as soon as the program is done, you know, we can scale scale down to our normal volume, which means we can, you know, way can save a lot. Of course. So definitely it snowflake has been game changer for us in terms of how we provide real time analytics. Our systems are used by thousands off restaurants throughout the country and, you know, by hundreds of franchisees. So the scale is something we have achieved with a lot of ability and success. >>In the category of data science Manager of the Year Award, we have a mission Min, director of cybersecurity and data science at Comcast. >>So thank you for having me and thank you for this wonderful award. So one of the biggest challenges you see in this other security spaces the tremendous amount of data that we have to compute every day to find the gold haystack. So one of the big challenges we overcame with by uniting snowflake was how do we go from like my other counterparts on the panel have said Theo operational overhead of maintaining a large data store and moved to more of results driven and data focused environment. And, you know, part of that journey was really the tremendous leadership. Comcast saying, You know, we want Thio through our day to day lives by relying less on operational work and Maura on answering questions. And so you know, over the last year we've really put Snowflake at the center of our ecosystem, knowing that it's elastic platform and its ability scale infinitely have given us the ability to dream big and use it to drop five cybersecurity. And while it's traditionally used for cybersecurity, we're starting to see the benefits right away and the beauty of the snowflake. Ecos, Miss. We're now able to enable folks that not traditionally have big data skills, but they have standards, sequel skills, and they could still work in the snowflake platform. So, you know, the transition to cloud has been very powerful for us as an organization. But I think the end story, the real takeaways, by moving our secretary operation to the cloud, we're now been able to enable more people and get the results they were looking for. You know, as other people have said fast, people hate to wait. So the scale of snowflake really shines. >>Yeah. Now, let's hear from our data Executive of the year. The Cost. Jane. Chief Digital Officer Packer. >>Thank you very much, Snowflake, for this really incredible recognition and honor of the work we're doing it back. Are we began. The first step in this process was for us to develop an enterprise Great data platform in the cloud capable off managing every aspect of data at scale. This this platform includes snowflake as our analytics data warehouse amongst many other technologies that we used for ingestion of data, data processing, uh, data governance, transactional, uh, needs and others. So this platform, once developed, has really helped us leverage data across the broad pack. Our systems and applications globally very efficiently and is enabling pack are, as a result to enhance every aspect. Selfish business with data. >>Ah, big congratulations again to all of the winners of the 2020 Data Drivers Awards. Thanks so much for joining us for a great conversation. And we hope that you enjoy the rest of the data cloud summit

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards brought to you by Amazon web services. >> Hi, and welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and we're here at the AWS Public Sector. Their Partner Awards, really enjoying this. We get to talk to some of the diverse ecosystem as well as they've all brought on their customers, some really phenomenal case studies. Happy to welcome to the program two first time guests. First of all, we have Jared Bell, he's the Chief Engineer of self response, operational readiness at T-Rex Solutions and T-Rex is the award winner for the most customer obsessed mission-based in Fed Civ. So Jared, congratulations to you and the T-Rex team and also joining him, his customer Michael Thieme, he's the Assistant Director for the Decennial Census Program systems and contracts for the US Census Bureau, thank you so much both for joining us. >> Good to be here. >> All right, Jared, if we could start with you, as I said, you're an award winner, you sit in the Fed Civ space, you've brought us to the Census Bureau, which most people understand the importance of that government program coming up on that, you know, every 10 year we've been hearing, you know, TV and radio ads talking about it, but Jared, if you could just give us a thumbnail of T-Rex and what you do in the AWS ecosystem. >> So yeah again, my name's Jared Bell and I work for T-Rex Solutions. T-Rex is a mid tier IT federal contracting company in Southern Maryland, recently graduated from hubs on status, and so T-Rex really focuses on four key areas, infrastructure in Cloud modernization, cybersecurity, and active cyber defense, big data management and analytics, and then overall enterprise system integration. And so we've been, you know, AWS partner for quite some time now and with decennial, you know, we got to really exercise a lot of the bells and whistles that are out there and really put it all to the test. >> All right, well, Michael, you know, so many people in IT, we talk about the peaks and valleys that we have, not too many companies in our organization say, well, we know exactly, you know, that 10 year spike of activity that we're going to have, I know there's lots of work that goes on beyond that, but it tells a little bit , your role inside the Census Bureau and what's under your purview. >> Yes, the Census Bureau, is actually does hundreds of surveys every year, but the decennial census is our sort of our main flagship activity. And I am the Assistant Director under our Associate Director for the IT and for the contracts for the decennial census. >> Wonderful and if you could tell us a little bit the project that you're working on, that eventually pulled T-Rex in. >> Sure. This is the 2020 census and the challenge of the 2020 census is we've done the census since 1790 in the United States. It's a pillar, a foundation of our democracy, and this was the most technologically advanced census we've ever done. Actually up until 2020, we have done our censuses mostly by pen, paper, and pencil. And this is a census where we opened up the internet for people to respond from home. We can have people respond on the phone, people can respond with an iPhone or an Android device. We tried to make it as easy as possible and as secure as possible for people to respond to the census where they were and we wanted to meet the respondent where they were. >> All right. So Jared, I'd love you to chime in here 'cause I'm here and talking about, you know, the technology adoption, you know, how much was already in plans there, where did T-Rex intersect with this census activity? >> Yeah. So, you know, census deserves a lot of credit for their kind of innovative approach with this technical integrator contract, which T-Rex was fortunate enough to win. When we came in, you know, we were just wrapping up the 2018 test. we really only had 18 months to go from start to, you know, a live operational tests to prepare for 2020. And it was really exciting to be brought in on such a large mission critical project and this is one of the largest federal IT products in the Cloud to date. And so, you know, when we came in, we had to really, you know, bring together a whole lot of solutions. I mean, the internet self response, which is what we're going to to talk about today was one of the major components. But we really had a lot of other activities that we had to engage in. You know, we had to design and prepare an IT solution to support 260 field offices, 16,000 field staff, 400,000 mobile devices and users that were going to go out and knock on doors for a numeration. So it was real6ly a big effort that we were honored to be a part of, you know, and on top of that, T-Rex actually brought to the table, a lot of its past experience with cybersecurity and active cyber defense, also, you know, because of the importance of all this data, you know, we had the role in security all throughout, and I think T-Rex was prepared for that and did a great job. And then, you know, overall I think that, not necessarily directly to your question, but I think, y6ou know, one of the things that we were able to do to make ourselves successful and to really engage with the census Bureau and be effective with our stakeholders was that we really build a culture of decennial within the technical integrator, you know, we had brown bags and working sessions to really teach the team the importance of the decennial, you know, not just as a career move, but also as a important activity for our country. And so I think that that really helped the team, you know, internalize that mission and really drove kind of our dedication to the census mission and really made us effective and again, a lot of the T-Rex leadership had a lot of experience there from past decennials and so they really brought that mindset to the team and I think it really paid off. >> Michael, if you could bring us inside a little a bit the project, you know, 18 months, obviously you have a specific deadline you need to hit, for that help us understand kind of the architectural considerations that you had there, any concerns that you had and I have to imagine that just the global activities, the impacts of COVID-19 has impacted some of the end stage, if you will, activities here in 2020. >> Absolutely. Yeah. The decennial census is, I believe a very unique IT problem. We have essentially 10 months out of the decade that we have to scale up to gigantic and then scale back down to run the rest of the Census Bureau's activities. But our project, you know, every year ending in zero, April 1st is census day. Now April 1st continued to be census day in 2020, but we also had COVID essentially taking over virtually everything in this country and in fact in the world. So, the way that we set up to do the census with the Cloud and with the IT approach and modernization that we took, actually, frankly, very luckily enabled us to kind of get through this whole thing. Now, we haven't had, Jared discussed a little bit the fact that we're here to talk about our internet self response, we haven't had one second of downtime for our response. We've taken 77 million. I think even more than 78 million responses from households, out of the 140 million households in the United States, we've gotten 77 million people to respond on our internet site without one second of downtime, a good user experience, a good supportability, but the project has always been the same. It's just this time, we're actually doing it with much more technology and hopefully the way that the Cloud has supported us will prove to be really effective for the COVID-19 situation. Because we've had changes in our plans, difference in timeframes, we are actually not even going into the field, or we're just starting to go into the field these next few weeks where we would have almost been coming out of the field at this time. So that flexibility, that expandability, that elasticity, that being in the Cloud gives all of our IT capabilities was really valuable this time. >> Well, Jared, I'm wondering if you can comment on that. All of the things that Michael just said, you know, seem like, you know, they are just the spotlight pieces that I looked at Cloud for. You know, being able to scale on demand, being able to use what I need when I need it, and then dial things down when I don't, and especially, you know, I don't want to have to, you know, I want to limit how much people actually need to get involved. So help understand a little bit, you know, what AWS services underneath, we're supporting this and anything else around the Cloud deployment. >> Sure, yeah. Michael is spot on. I mean, the cloud is tailor made for our operation and activity here. You know, I think all told, we use over 30 of the AWS FedRAMP solutions in standing up our environment across all those 52 system of systems that we were working with. You know, just to name a few, I mean, internet self response alone, you're relying heavily on auto scaling groups, elastic load balancers, you know, we relied a lot on Lambda Functions, DynamoDB. We're one of the first adopters through DynamoDB global tables, which we use for a session persistence across regions. And then on top of that, you know, the data was all flowing down into RDS databases and then from there to, you know, the census data Lake, which was built on EMR and Elasticsearch capabilities, and that's just to name a couple. I mean, you know, we had, we ran the gamut of AWS services to make all this work and they really helped us accelerate. And as Michael said, you know, we stood this up expecting to be working together in a war room, watching everything hand in hand, and because of the way we, were able to architect it in partnership with AWS, we all had to go out and stay at home, you know, the infrastructure remain rock solid. We can have to worry about, you know, being hands on with the equipment and, you know, again, the ability to automate and integrate with those solutions Cloud formation and things like that really let us keep a small agile team of, you know, DevSecOps there to handle the deployments. And we were doing full scale deployments with, you know, one or two people in the middle of the night without any problems. So it really streamlined things for us and helped us keep a tight natural, sure. >> Michael, I'm curious about what kind of training your team need to go through to take advantage of this solution. So from bringing it up to the ripple effect, as you said, you're only now starting to look at who would go into the field who uses devices and the like, so help us understand really the human aspect of undergoing this technology. >> Sure. Now, the census always has to ramp up this sort of immediate workforce. We hire, we actually process over 3 million people through, I think, 3.9 million people applied to work for the Census Bureau. And each decade we have to come up with a training program and actually training sites all over the country and the IT to support those. Now, again, modernization for the 2020 census, didn't only involve the things like our internet self response, it also involves our training. We have all online training now, we used to have what we called verbatim training, where we had individual teachers all over the country in places like libraries, essentially reading text exactly the same way to exactly over and over again to our, to the people that we trained. But now it's all electronic, it allows us to, and this goes to the COVID situation as well, it allows us to bring only three people in at a time to do training. Essentially get them started with our device that we have them use when they're knocking on doors and then go home and do the training, and then come back to work with us all with a minimal contact, human contact, sort of a model. And that, even though we designed it differently, the way that we set the technology of this time allowed us to change that design very quickly, get people trained, not essentially stop the census. We essentially had to slow it down because we weren't sure exactly when it was going to be safe to go knocking on door to door, but we were able to do the training and all of that worked and continues to work phenomenally. >> Wonderful. Jared, I wonder if you've got any lessons learned from working with the census group that might be applicable to kind of, the broader customers out there? >> Oh, sure. Well, working with the census, you know, it was really a great group to work with. I mean, one of the few groups I worked with who have such a clear vision and understanding of what they want their final outcome to be, I think again, you know, for us the internalization of the decennial mission, right? It's so big, it's so important. I think that because we adopted it early on we felt that we were true partners with census, we had a lot of credibility with our counterparts and I think that they understood that we were in it with them together and that was really important. I would also say that, you know, because we're talking about the go Cloud solutions that we worked, you know, we also engage heavily with the AWS engineering group and in partnership with them, you know, we relied on the infrastructure event management services they offer and was able to give us a lot of great insight into our architecture and our systems and monitoring to really make us feel like we were ready for the big show when the time came. So, you know, I think for me, another lesson learned there was that, you know, the Cloud providers like AWS, they're not just a vendor, they're a partner and I think that now going forward, we'll continue to engage with those partners early and often. >> Michael the question I have for you is, you know, what would you say to your peers? What lessons did you have learned and how much of what you've done for the census, do you think it will be applicable to all those other surveys that you do in between the big 10 year surveys? >> All right. I think we have actually set a good milestone for the rest of the Census Bureau, that the modernization that the 2020 census has allowed since it is our flagship really is something that we hope we can continue through the decade and into the next census, as a matter of fact. But I think one of the big lessons learned I wanted to talk about was we have always struggled with disaster recovery. And one of the things that having the Cloud and our partners in the Cloud has helped us do is essentially take advantage of the resilience of the Cloud. So there are data centers all over the country. If ever had a downtime somewhere, we knew that we were going to be able to stay up. For the decennial census, we've never had the budget to pay for a persistent disaster recovery. And the Cloud essentially gives us that kind of capability. Jared talked a lot about security. I think we have taken our security posture to a whole different level, something that allowed us to essentially, as I said before, keep our internet self response free of hacks and breaches through this whole process and through a much longer process than we even intended to keep it open. So, there's a lot here that I think we want to bring into the next decade, a lot that we want to continue, and we want the census to essentially stay as modern as it has become for 2020. >> Well, I will tell you personally Michael, I did take the census online, it was really easy to do, and I'll definitely recommend if they haven't already, everybody listening out there so important that you participate in the census so that they have complete data. So, Michael, Jared, thank you so much. Jared, congratulations to your team for winning the award and you know, such a great customer. Michael, thank you so much for what you and your team are doing. We Appreciate all that's being done, especially in these challenging times. >> Thank you and thanks for doing the census. >> All right and stay tuned for more coverage of the AWS public sector partner award I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technology's World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we are live at Dell Technologies World 2019 in Las Vegas with about 15,000 or so other people. There's about 4,000 of the Dell Technologies community of partners here as well. Day one as I mentioned, we're very pleased to welcome back one of our cube alumni, Karen Quintos, EVP and Chief Customer Officer from Dell Technologies, Karen, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you. Always great to be with you all. >> So one of the things you walk down on stage this morning with Michael Dell and and the whole gang and you started to share a story that I'd love for you to share with our audience about this darling little girl, Phoebe from Manchester, England that has to do with this Dell Technologies partnership with Deloitte Detroit and 3D prosthetics. Can you share this story and what it meant about this partnership. >> Well we wanted to tell this story about Phoebe because we really wanted the audience to understand the innovation and all of what's done it with social good is really about the individual, You know, technology plays a key role but the face behind the technology and the innovation are people and you know, as you mention Phoebe is from Manchester, U.K. Her father wrote this blog about Phoebe's experience. Phoebe's aunt, Claire works for Deloitte. She had access to a lot of what they could do in terms of 3D printing and basically came to Dell and we were able to take it and scale it and accelerate it and speed it up with a engineer by the name of Seamus who saw what the precision workstation could do. So it was this small idea to help an amazing little girl like this that has now turned into this movement around how do we more rapidly, quickly scale 3D prosthetics so these children and adults can have a chance at a normal life so. >> What kind of prosthetics did you guys build for her? >> It's an arm, so the very first arm that we built for her when she was about five years old had the frozen Disney theme painted on it. I asked her father Keith what is the one that she's wearing now because she's now this like really super cool seven-year-old that goes to school and all of her classmates and friends around her see her as this rock star and the one that she has today is printed with unicorns and rainbows. So if you know anything about seven-year-old girls, it's all about unicorns and rainbows and she's done an amazing thing and she's inspired so many other people around the world, individuals, customers, partners like Deloitte and others that we're working with to really take this to a whole new level. >> Karen, I think back to Dell you know, if you think back a couple of decades ago you know, drove a lot of the some of the waves of technology change you know, think back to the PC, but in the early days it was you know supply chain and simple ordering in all these environments and when I've watched Dell move into the enterprise, a lot of that is, I need to be listening to my customer, I need to be much closer to them because it's not just ordering your SKU and having it faster and at a reasonable price but there's a lot more customization. Can you talk about how you're kind of putting that center, that customer in the center of the discussion and that feedback loops that you have with them, how that's changed in Dell. >> Yeah sure, so all of the basic fundamentals around you got to order, deliver, make the supply chain work to deliver for our customers still matters but it's gone beyond that to your point and probably the best way to talk about it is these six customer award winners that we recognized last night. I've gotten to know all six of those over the last year and while they are doing amazing things from a digital transformation using technology in the travel business, the automotive business, banking, financial services, insurance, kind of across the board, the thing that they say consistently is look, we didn't always have the answer in terms of what we needed but you came in, you listened, you rolled up your sleeves to try to figure out how you could design a solution that would meet the needs that we have and they said, that's why you're one of the most strategic partners that we have. Now you can do all those other things, right? You can supply chain ride and build and produce and all that but it's the design of a solution that helps us do the things that will allow us to be differentiated and you look at that list of six customers and brands that they represent, right, Carnival Cruise Lines, USAA, Bradesco, McLaren I mean, the list kind of goes on, they are the differentiators out there and we're really honored to be able to be working with them. >> So we're only a day one and it's only just after lunchtime but one of the things I think somatically that I heard this morning in the keynote with Michael and Pat and Jeff and Satya and yourself is, it's all about people. A couple interviews I did earlier today, same sort of thing, it's like we had the city of Las Vegas on. This is all driven by the people in for the people so that sense of community is really strong. I also noticed this year's theme of real transformation, parlays off last year's theme of make it real, it being digital transformation, IT, security, workforce transformation, what are some of the things that were like at Dell Technologies. Cloud this morning for example, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC that you guys specifically heard say from last year's attendees that are manifesting in some of the announcements today and some of the great things the 15 or so thousand people here are going to get to see and feel and touch at this year's event? >> Well, Lisa you nailed it. What you heard on stage today is what customers have been telling us over the last year. We unveiled about a month ago with a very small group of CIOs in Amia, our cloud strategy, our portfolio, the things that we're going to be able to do and one customer in particular immediately chimed in and said, we need you in the cloud and we need you in there now because you offer choice, you offer open, you offer simplicity, you offer integration and they're like, there's just too many choices and a lot of them are expensive. So what you heard on stage is absolutely a manifestation of what they told us. The other pieces, look, I think I think the industry and CIOs are very quickly realizing their workforce matters, making them happy and productive matters having them enabled that they can work flexibly wherever they want to really, really matters and you know, our Unified Workspace ONE solution is all about how we help them simplify, automate, streamline that experience with their workforce so their employees stick around. I mean, there's a war on talent and everybody's dealing with it and that experience is really, really important in particular to the gensies and the millennials. >> Karen, I love that point. Actually, I was really impressed this morning. In the press and analyst session this morning, there was a discussion of diversity and inclusion and the thing that I heard is, it's a business imperative, it's not, okay it's nice to do it or we should do it but no, this is actually critical to the business. Can you talk about what that means and what you hear from your customers and partners. >> Yes, yes, well, we're seeing it in spades and all of these technology jobs that are open, right. So look, all the research has shown that if you build a diverse team, you'll get to a more innovative solution and people generally get that but what they really get today is here in the U.S. alone, there's 1.1 million open technology jobs by the year 2024, half of them, half of them are going to be filled by the existing workforce. So there is this war in talent that is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger and I think that's what really has given a wake-up call to corporations around why this matters. I think the other piece that we're starting to see, not just around diversity but in our other social impact priorities around the environment as well as how we use our technology for good, look, customers want to do business with a corporation that has a soul and they stand for something and they're doing something, not just a bunch of talking heads but where it's really turning into action and they're being transparent about the journeys and where they're at with it. So it matters now to the current generation, the next generation, it matters to business leaders, matters to the financial services community, which you start to see you know, some of the momentum around you know, the black stones and state street. So it's really exciting that we're part of it and we're leading the way in a lot of number of areas. >> And it's something to that we talked about a lot on theCUBE, diversity and inclusion from many different levels, one of them being the business imperative that you talked about, the workforce needing to compete for this talent, but also how much different products and technologies and apps and APS and things can be with just thought diversity in and of itself and I think it's refreshing to what Stu was saying, hey, we're hearing this is a business imperative but you're also seeing proof in the pudding. This isn't just, we've got an imperative and we're going to do things nominally, you're seeing the efforts manifest. One of the, Draper Labs who was one of the customer award winners. That video that was shown this morning struck probably everyone's heart with the campfire in Paradise California. >> Tragic. >> I grew up close to there and that was something that only maybe, I get goosebumps, six months ago, so massively devastating and we think you know, that was 2018 but seeing how Dell Technologies is enabling this laboratory to investigate the potential toxins coming from all of this chart debris and how they're working to understand the social impact to all of us as they rebuild, I just thought it was a really nice manifestation of a social impact but also the technology breadth and differentiation that Dell has enabling. >> That was also why this story today was so great about Phoebe, right because it's where you can connect the human spirit with technology and scale and have an even bigger impact and there's so much that technology can help with today. You know, that that story about Phoebe. From the time that her aunt from Deloitte identified, you know, what we could do, all the way to the time that Phoebe got her first arm was less than seven months, seven months and you think about you know, some of the other prototypes that were out there, times would take years to be able to do it. So I love that you know, connection of human need with the human spirit and connecting and inspiring and motivating so many children and adults around the world. >> And what what are some of the next, speaking of Phoebe and the Deloitte digital 3D prosthetics partnership, what are some of the other areas we're going to see this technology that this little five-year-old from Manchester spurned. >> Well, I'll give you another example. So we, there was an individual in India, actually an employee of ours that designed an application to help figure out how to deploy healthcare monitoring in some of the remote villages in India where they don't have access to basic things that we take for granted. Monitoring your blood pressure, right, checking your cholesterol level and he created this application that a year later now, we have given kind of the full range of the Dell portfolio technology suite. So it is you know our application plus Pivotal plus VMware plus Dell EMC combined with the partnering that we've done with Tata Trust and the State of India, we've now deployed this healthcare solution called Life Care Solution to nearly 37 million rural residents, citizens in India. >> Wow 37 million. >> 37 million, so a small idea, you take from a really passionate individual, a person, a human being and figure out how you can really leverage that across the full gamut of what Dell can do, I think the results are incredible. >> Awesome, you guys also have a Women in Technology Executive Summit that you're hosting later this week. Let's talk about that in conjunction of what we talked a minute ago about, it's a business imperative as Stu pointed out, there are tangible, measurable results, tell us about this. >> Well, I'm kind of done honestly with a lot of the negativity around, oh, we're not making any progress, oh, we need to be moving fast and if you look at the amount of effort, energy and focus that is going into this space by so many companies and the public sector, it's remarkable and I've met a number of these CIOs over the last year or two, so we basically said let's invite 20 of them, let's share our passion, have made progress, care about solving this across their organization. A lot of us are working on the same things so if we simply got in a room and figured out, are their power in numbers and if we worked collectively together, could we accelerate progress. So that's what it's all about. So we have about 15 or 20 CEOs, both men and women and we'll be spending you know, six or seven hours together and we want to walk away with one or two recommendations on some things that we could collaborate on and have a faster, bigger impact. >> And I heard that, you mentioned collaboration, that's one of the vibes I also got from the keynote this morning when you saw Michael up there with Pat and Jeff and Satya, the collaboration within Dell Technologies, I think even talking with Stu and some of the things that have come out and that I've read, it seems to be more symbiosis with VMware but even some the, like I said, we're only in, I wouldn't even say halfway through day one and that is the spirit around here. We talk about people influence, but this spirit of collaboration is very authentic here. You are the first chief customer officer for Dell, if you look back at your tenure in this role, could you have envisioned where you are now? >> No, because it was like the first ever chief customer officer at Dell and you know, it really gave me a unique opportunity to build something from scratch and you know, there's been a number of other competitors as well as other companies that have announced in the last year or so the need to have a chief customer officer, the need to figure out how, which is a big remit of mine across Dell Technologies, how do we how do we eliminate the silos and connect the seams because that's where the value is going to be unlocked for our customers. That's what you saw on stage today. You saw the value of that with Jeff, with Pat, with Satya, some you know, one of our most important partners out there. Our customers don't want point solutions, they want them to be integrated, they want it to be streamlined, they don't be automated, they want us to speed time to value, they want us to streamline a lot of the back-office kind of mundane things that they're like, I don't want my people spending their time anymore and doing that and that's where we see Dell Technologies being so much more differentiated from other choices in the market. >> Yep, I agree with you. Well Karen, thank you so much for joining Stu and me on theCUBE this afternoon, sharing some of the stories, look forward to hearing next year what comes out of this year's as Women in Tech Exec Summit. Thank you so much for your time. >> Thank you very much, thank you. >> with Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE, live day one of Dell Technology World from Las Vegas, thanks for watching. (light electronic music)

>> Announcer: From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE covering CloudNOW's 7th annual Top Women Entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. (lively music) >> Hi, Lisa Martin with theCUBE on the ground at Facebook Headquarters. We're here with the CloudNOW Top Women Entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards, their seventh annual. We're here with one of the award winners, Katherine Kostereva, the founder and CEO of bpm'online. Katherine, it's great to have you here. >> It's honor to be here. Thank you very much, Lisa. >> Congratulations on the CloudNOW award, but also you are no stranger to awards. Even in 2018, you were named one of the Top 50 SaaS CEOs for 2018. Not just female CEOs, CEOs. That's a pretty big honor as well. >> Katherine: Thank you. >> So bpm'online I want folks to understand not just your career path, but also that you're pretty persistent and bold. Bpm'online is a very successful and well-known business in Europe. >> Katherine: Right. >> Founded in 2002 with five people. >> 16 years ago. >> 16 years ago. >> Bootstrapped. >> Bootstrapped by yourself, and here you are recently moved to the US and you're basically kind of start-up in the US. >> Exactly. >> Tell us a little bit about that story. What you grew as a female leader in Europe, and the impetus to say we can do more and bring the business to the United States. >> Absolutely, would love to tell you this story. So 16 years ago we built this company. Bootstrapped it, no investors, no friends and family money. Just from zero, from scratch, and have successfully grown the business until we started to hear from our customers who were large, global organizations using our software in Europe. We started to hear, "Hey guys, "why we don't know you in the United States? "Why our headquarters doesn't know your name?" And then we started to talk to Gartner and Forrester, and they said exactly the same. Your technology is so amazing, and, right now, we are included in five Gartner Magic Quadrants and five Forrester Waves. And technology is amazing, but why you are not here in the United States? So, eventually, I moved to the United States with some of my peers, and we started to build our office in Boston. It happened three years ago. So right now we feel ourselves like a start-up here in Boston. While back like several years ago in Europe, and right now actually in Europe, this is a strong, mature company with 500 people in the company, working in the company in six offices. >> And business process automation, CRM, well-known in Europe, tell us about why did you select Boston and not come out here to Silicon Valley when you decided to move out here? >> (laughs) That's a great question, and I have a very easy answer to this question. As we have so many customers, partners and actually team members in Europe, we just wanted to find something with a shortest time-zone like time difference, right. So the difference between Europe and Boston is five to seven hours while here's it's additional plus three hours. So my day usually starts with Europe, so, when I start working around 7 a.m. in the morning, I work work with Europe, then I work with the United States, and then in the evening I start working with APAC with Asia, with Australia because we have our office in Australia as well. So we have our customers and people working in Australia, so this is my evening hours. >> Oh my goodness, so here you are being recognized tonight as a female entrepreneur. Tell us about your inspiration, and what has kept you persistent. Being a female in technology is challenging, and we all know that and, for many reasons. Hopefully one day it won't matter, gender, but it does. What are some of your recommendations for not only founding a company, and really kind of harnessing that persistence but also growing a culture that supports diversity. That understands and embraces change. >> This is a great question. Honestly, for me those are my customers, and that what I would recommend all women and female and male entrepreneurs to talk more to their customers because when you and your customers have the same vision about how to develop the company, how to develop the product, it inspires you. You just, you move on. You want to develop. You want to develop more, and just to give you an example both our customers and our team we believe that organization just can't have excellent customer relations without very holistic business processes beneath. So we believe that organization, if we're talking about mid-sized and large organization, they need to have holistic processes first, and then, based on this process, they going to have great customer relations. So this is kind of our vision and our mission, and that's what our customers share with us and that what has inspires me to move on and on and develop new products for our customers. >> Well, Katherine congratulations on the CloudNOW Award win. >> Thank you. >> Thanks so much for joining us on the program, and we hope you have a great night. >> Thank you so much for your time. Honor to be here. Thank you >> Our pleasure. We want to thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin for theCUBE at Facebook Headquarters. We'll see you next time. (lively, airy music)

[Music] when welcome to the special exclusive cube conversation here in Palo Alto in our studios I'm John for your host of the cube we have a very special guest speaking for the first time around some alleged alleged accusations and also innuendo around the Amazon Web Services Jedi contract and his firm c5 capital our guest as Andre Pienaar who's the founder of c5 capital Andre is here for the first time to talk about some of the hard conversations and questions surrounding his role his firm and the story from the BBC Andre thanks for a rat for meeting with me John great to have me thank you so you're at the center of a controversy and just for the folks who know the cube know we interviewed a lot of people I've interviewed you at Amazon web sources summit Teresa Carl's event and last year I met you and bought a rein the work you're doing there so I've met you a few times so I don't know your background but I want to drill into it because I was surprised to see the BBC story come out last week that was basically accusing you of many things including are you a spy are you infiltrating the US government through the Jedi contract through Amazon and knowing c-5 capital I saw no correlation when reading your article I was kind of disturbed but then I saw I said a follow-on stories it just didn't hang together so I wanted to press you on some questions and thanks for coming in and addressing them appreciate it John thanks for having me so first thing I want to ask you is you know it has you at the center this firm c5 capital that you the founder of at the center of what looks like to be the fight for the big ten billion dollar DoD contract which has been put out to multiple vendors so it's not a single source deal we've covered extensively on silicon angle calm and the cube and the government the government Accounting Office has ruled that there are six main benefits of going with a sole provider cloud this seems to be the war so Oracle IBM and others have been been involved we've been covering that so it kind of smells like something's going along with the story and I just didn't believe some of the things I read and I want to especially about you and see five capitals so I want to dig into what the first thing is it's c5 capital involved in the Jedi contract with AWS Sean not at all we have absolutely no involvement in the Jedi contract in any way we're not a bidder and we haven't done any lobbying as has been alleged by some of the people who've been making this allegation c5 has got no involvement in the general contract we're a venture capital firm with a British venture capital firm we have the privilege of investing here in the US as a foreign investor and our focus really is on the growth and the success of the startups that we are invested in so you have no business interest at all in the deal Department of Defense Jedi contract none whatsoever okay so to take a minute to explain c5 firm I read some of the stories there and some of the things were intricate structures of c5 cap made it sound like there was like a cloak-and-dagger situation I want to ask you some hard questions around that because there's a link to a Russian situation but before we get to there I want to ask you explain what is c5 capital your mission what are the things that you're doing c5 is a is a British venture capital firm and we are focused on investing into fast-growing technology companies in three areas cloud computing cyber security and artificial intelligence we have two parts our business c5 capital which invests into late stage companies so these are companies that typically already have revenue visibility and profitability but still very fast-growing and then we also have a very early stage startup platform that look at seed state investment and this we do through two accelerators to social impact accelerators one in Washington and one in Bahrain and it's just size of money involved just sort of order magnitude how many funds do you have how is it structure again just share some insight on that is it is there one firm is there multiple firms how is it knows it work well today the venture capital business has to be very transparent it's required by compliance we are a regulated regulated firm we are regulated in multiple markets we regulated here in the US the sec as a foreign investor in london by the financial conduct authority and in Luxembourg where Afonso based by the regulatory authorities there so in the venture capital industry today you can't afford to be an opaque business you have to be transparent at all levels and money in the Western world have become almost completely transparent so there's a very comprehensive and thorough due diligence when you onboard capital called know your client and the requirements standard requirement now is that whenever you're onboard capital from investor you're gonna take it right up to the level of the ultimate beneficial ownership so who actually owns this money and then every time you invest and you move your money around it gets diligence together different regulators and in terms of disclosure and the same applies often now with clients when our portfolio companies have important or significant clients they also want to know who's behind the products and the services they receive so often our boards our board directors and a shell team also get diligence by by important clients so explain this piece about the due diligence and the cross country vetting that goes on is I think it's important I want to get it out because how long has been operating how many deals have you done you mentioned foreign investor in the United States you're doing deals in the United States I know I've met one of your portfolio companies at an event iron iron on it iron net general Keith Alexander former head of the NSA you know get to just work with him without being vetted I guess so so how long a c5 capital been in business and where have you made your investments you mentioned cross jurisdiction across countries whatever it's called I don't know that so we've been and we've been in existence for about six years now our main focus is investing in Europe so we help European companies grow globally Europe historically has been underserved by venture capital we on an annual basis we invest about twenty seven billion dollars gets invested in venture capital in Europe as opposed to several multiples of that in the US so we have a very important part to play in Europe to how European enterprise software companies grow globally other important markets for us of course are Israel which is a major center of technology innovation and and the Middle East and then the u.s. the u.s. is still the world leader and venture capital both in terms of size but also in terms of the size of the market and of course the face and the excitement of the innovation here I want to get into me early career because again timing is key we're seeing this with you know whether it's a Supreme Court justice or anyone in their career their past comes back to haunt them it appears that has for you before we get there I want to ask you about you know when you look at the kind of scope of fraud and corruption that I've seen in just on the surface of government thing the government bit Beltway bandits in America is you got a nonprofit that feeds a for-profit and then what you know someone else runs a shell corporation so there's this intricate structures and that word was used which it kind of implies shell corporations a variety of backroom kind of smokey deals going on you mentioned transparency I do you have anything to hide John in in in our business we've got absolutely nothing to hide we have to be transparent we have to be open if you look at our social media profile you'll see we are communicating with the market almost on a daily basis every time we make an investment we press release that our website is very clear about who's involved enough who our partners are and the same applies to my own personal website and so in terms of the money movement around in terms of deploying investments we've seen Silicon Valley VCS move to China get their butts handed to them and then kind of adjust their scenes China money move around when you move money around you mentioned disclosure what do you mean there's filings to explain that piece it's just a little bit so every time we make an investment into a into a new portfolio company and we move the money to that market to make the investment we have to disclose who all the investors are who are involved in that investment so we have to disclose the ultimate beneficial ownership of all our limited partners to the law firms that are involved in the transactions and those law firms in turn have applications in terms of they own anti-money laundering laws in the local markets and this happens every time you move money around so I I think that the level of transparency in venture capital is just continue to rise exponentially and it's virtually impossible to conceal the identity of an investor this interesting this BBC article has a theme of national security risk kind of gloom and doom nuclear codes as mentioned it's like you want to scare someone you throw nuclear codes at it you want to get people's attention you play the Russian card I saw an article on the web that that said you know anything these days the me2 movement for governments just play the Russian card and you know instantly can discredit someone's kind of a desperation act so you got confident of interest in the government national security risk seems to be kind of a theme but before we get into the BBC news I noticed that there was a lot of conflated pieces kind of pulling together you know on one hand you know you're c5 you've done some things with your hat your past and then they just make basically associate that with running amazon's jedi project yes which i know is not to be true and you clarified that joan ends a problem joan so as a venture capital firm focused on investing in the space we have to work with all the Tier one cloud providers we are great believers in commercial cloud public cloud we believe that this is absolutely transformative not only for innovation but also for the way in which we do venture capital investment so we work with Amazon Web Services we work with Microsoft who work with Google and we believe that firstly that cloud has been made in America the first 15 companies in the world are all in cloud companies are all American and we believe that cloud like the internet and GPS are two great boons which the US economy the u.s. innovation economy have provided to the rest of the world cloud computing is reducing the cost of computing power with 50 percent every three years opening up innovation and opportunities for Entrepreneurship for health and well-being for the growth of economies on an unprecedented scale cloud computing is as important to the global economy today as the dollar ease as the world's reserve currency so we are great believers in cloud we great believers in American cloud computing companies as far as Amazon is concerned our relationship with Amazon Amazon is very Amazon Web Services is very clear and it's very defined we participate in a public Marcus program called AWS activate through which AWS supports hundreds of accelerators around the world with know-how with mentoring with teaching and with cloud credits to help entrepreneurs and startups grow their businesses and we have a very exciting focus for our two accelerators which is on in Washington we focus on peace technology we focus on taking entrepreneurs from conflict countries like Sudan Nigeria Pakistan to come to Washington to work on campus in the US government building the u.s. Institute for peace to scale these startups to learn all about cloud computing to learn how they can grow their businesses with cloud computing and to go back to their own countries to build peace and stability and prosperity their heaven so we're very proud of this mission in the Middle East and Bahrain our focus is on on female founders and female entrepreneurs we've got a program called nebula through which we empower female founders and female entrepreneurs interesting in the Middle East the statistics are the reverse from what we have in the West the majority of IT graduates in the Middle East are fimo and so there's a tremendous talent pool of of young dynamic female entrepreneurs coming out of not only the Gulf but the whole of the MENA region how about a relation with Amazon websites outside of their normal incubators they have incubators all over the place in the Amazon put out as Amazon Web Services put out a statement that said hey you know we have a lot of relationships with incubators this is normal course of business I know here in Silicon Valley at the startup loft this is this is their market filled market playbook so you fit into that is that correct as I'm I get that that's that's absolutely correct what we what is unusual about a table insists that this is a huge company that's focused on tiny startups a table started with startups it double uses first clients with startups and so here you have a huge business that has a deep understanding of startups and focus on startups and that's enormous the attractor for us and terrific for our accelerators department with them have you at c5 Capitol or individually have any formal or conversation with Amazon employees where you've had outside of giving feedback on products where you've tried to make change on their technology make change with their product management teams engineering you ever had at c5 capital whore have you personally been involved in influencing Amazon's product roadmap outside they're just giving normal feedback in the course of business that's way above my pay grade John firstly we don't have that kind of technical expertise in C 5 C 5 steam consists of a combination of entrepreneurs like myself people understand money really well and leaders we don't have that level of technical expertise and secondly that's what one our relationship with AWS is all about our relationship is entirely limited to the two startups and making sure that the two accelerators in making sure that the startups who pass through those accelerators succeed and make social impact and as a partner network component Amazon it's all put out there yes so in in a Barren accelerator we've we formed part of the Amazon partner network and the reason why we we did that was because we wanted to give some of the young people who come through the accelerator and know mastering cloud skills an opportunity to work on some real projects and real live projects so some of our young golf entrepreneurs female entrepreneurs have been working on building websites on Amazon Cloud and c5 capital has a relationship with former government officials you funded startups and cybersecurity that's kind of normal can you explain that positioning of it of how former government if it's whether it's US and abroad are involved in entrepreneurial activities and why that is may or may not be a problem certainly is a lot of kind of I would say smoke around this conversation around coffin of interest and you can you explain intelligence what that was it so I think the model for venture capital has been evolving and increasingly you get more and more differentiated models one of the key areas in which the venture capital model is changed is the fact that operating partners have become much more important to the success of venture capital firms so operating partners are people who bring real world experience to the investment experience of the investment team and in c-five we have the privilege of having a terrific group of operating partners people with both government and commercial backgrounds and they work very actively enough firm at all levels from our decision-making to the training and the mentoring of our team to helping us understand the way in which the world is exchanging to risk management to helping uh portfolio companies grow and Silicon Valley true with that to injuries in Horowitz two founders mr. friendly they bring in operating people that have entrepreneurial skills this is the new model understand order which has been a great source of inspiration to us for our model and and we built really believe this is a new model and it's really critical for the success of venture capitals to be going forward and the global impact is pretty significant one of things you mentioned I want to get your take on is as you operate a global transaction a lots happened a lot has to happen I mean we look at the ICO market on the cryptocurrency side its kind of you know plummeting obsoletes it's over now the mood security children's regulatory and transparency becomes critical you feel fully confident that you haven't you know from a regulatory standpoint c5 capital everything's out there absolutely risk management and regulated compliance and legal as the workstream have become absolutely critical for the success of venture capital firms and one of the reasons why this becomes so important John is because the venture capital world over the last few years have changed dramatically historically all the people involved in venture capital had very familiar names and came from very familiar places over the last few years with a diversification of global economic growth we've seen it's very significant amounts of money being invest invested in startups in China some people more money will invest in startups this year in China than in the US and we've seen countries like Saudi Arabia becoming a major source of venture capital funding some people say that as much as 70% of funding rounds this year in some way or another originated from the Gulf and we've seen places like Russia beginning to take an interest in technology innovation so the venture capital world is changing and for that reason compliance and regulation have become much more important but if Russians put 200 million dollars in face book and write out the check companies bright before that when the after 2008 we saw the rise of social networking I think global money certainly has something that I think a lot of people start getting used to and I want on trill down into that a little bit we talked about this BBC story that that hit and the the follow-on stories which actually didn't get picked up was mostly doing more regurgitation of the same story but one of the things that that they focus in on and the story was you and the trend now is your past is your enemy these days you know they try to drum up stuff in the past you've had a long career some of the stuff that they've been bringing in to paint you and the light that they did was from your past so I wanted to explore that with you I know you this is the first time you've talked about this and I appreciate you taking the time talk about your early career your background where you went to school because the way I'm reading this it sounds like you're a shady character I like like I interviewed on the queue but I didn't see that but you know I'm going to pressure here for that if you don't mind I'd like to to dig into that John thank you for that so I've had the I've had the privilege of a really amazingly interesting life and at the heart of at the heart of that great adventures been people and the privilege to work with really great people and good people I was born in South Africa I grew up in Africa went to school there qualified as a lawyer and then came to study in Britain when I studied international politics when I finished my studies international politics I got head hunted by a US consulting firm called crow which was a start of a 20 years career as an investigator first in crawl where I was a managing director in the London and then in building my own consulting firm which was called g3 and all of this led me to cybersecurity because as an investigator looking into organized crime looking into corruption looking into asset racing increasingly as the years went on everything became digital and I became very interested in finding evidence on electronic devices but starting my career and CRO was tremendous because Jules Kroll was a incredible mentor he could walk through an office and call everybody by their first name any Kroll office anywhere in the world and he always took a kindly interest in the people who work for him so it was a great school to go to and and I worked on some terrific cases including some very interesting Russian cases and Russian organized crime cases just this bag of Kroll was I've had a core competency in doing investigative work and also due diligence was that kind of focus yes although Kroll was the first company in the world to really have a strong digital practice led by Alan Brugler of New York Alan established the first computer forensics practice which was all focused about finding evidence on devices and everything I know about cyber security today started with me going to school with Alan Brolin crawl and they also focused on corruption uncovering this is from Wikipedia Kroll clients help Kroll helps clients improve operations by uncovering kickbacks fraud another form of corruptions other specialty areas is forensic accounting background screening drug testing electronic investigation data recovery SATA result Omar's McLennan in 2004 for 1.9 billion mark divested Kroll to another company I'll take credit risk management to diligence investigator in Falls Church Virginia over 150 countries call Kroll was the first CRO was the first household brand name in this field of of investigations and today's still is probably one of the strongest brand names and so it was a great firm to work in and was a great privilege to be part of it yeah high-end high-profile deals were there how many employees were in Kroll cuz I'd imagine that the alumni that that came out of Kroll probably have found places in other jobs similar to yes do an investigative work like you know they out them all over the world many many alumni from Kroll and many of them doing really well and doing great work ok great so now the next question want to ask you is when you in Kroll the South Africa connection came up so I got to ask you it says business side that you're a former South African spy are you a former South African spy no John I've never worked for any government agency and in developing my career my my whole focus has been on investigations out of the Kroll London office I did have the opportunity to work in South Africa out of the Kroll London office and this was really a seminal moment in my career when I went to South Africa on a case for a major international credit-card company immediately after the end of apartheid when democracy started to look into the scale and extent of credit card fraud at the request of this guy what year was there - how old were you this was in 1995 1996 I was 25 26 years old and one of the things which this credit card company asked me to do was to assess what was the capability of the new democratic government in South Africa under Nelson Mandela to deal with crime and so I had the privilege of meeting mr. Mandela as the president to discuss this issue with him and it was an extraordinary man the country's history because there was such an openness and a willingness to to address issues of this nature and to grapple with them so he was released from prison at that time I remember those days and he became president that's why he called you and you met with him face to face of a business conversation around working on what the future democracy is and trying to look at from a corruption standpoint or just kind of in general was that what was that conversation can you share so so that so the meeting involved President Mandela and and the relevant cabinet ministers the relevant secretaries and his cabinet - responsible for for these issues and the focus of our conversation really started with well how do you deal with credit card fraud and how do you deal with large-scale fraud that could be driven by organized crime and at the time this was an issue of great concern to the president because there was bombing in Kate of a Planet Hollywood cafe where a number of people got very severely injured and the president believed that this could have been the result of a protection racket in Cape Town and so he wanted to do something about it he was incredibly proactive and forward-leaning and in an extraordinary way he ended the conversation by by asking where the Kroll can help him and so he commissioned Kroll to build the capacity of all the black officers that came out of the ANC and have gone into key government positions on how to manage organized crime investigations it was the challenge at that time honestly I can imagine apartheid I remember you know I was just at a college that's not properly around the same age as you it was a dynamic time to say the least was his issue around lack of training old school techniques because you know that was right down post-cold-war and then did what were the concerns not enough people was it just out of control was it a corrupt I mean just I mean what was the core issue that Nelson wanted to hire Kroll and you could work his core issue was he wanted to ensure the stability of South Africa's democracy that was his core focus and he wanted to make South Africa an attractive place where international companies felt comfortable and confident in investing and that was his focus and he felt that at that time because so many of the key people in the ANC only had training in a cold war context that there wasn't a Nessy skill set to do complex financial or more modern investigations and it was very much focused he was always the innovator he was very much focused on bringing the best practices and the best investigative techniques to the country he was I felt in such a hurry that he doesn't want to do this by going to other governments and asking for the help he wanted to Commission it himself and so he gave he gave a crawl with me as the project leader a contract to do this and my namesake Francois Pienaar has become very well known because of the film Invictus and he's been he had the benefit of Mandela as a mentor and as a supporter and that changed his career the same thing happened to me so what did he actually asked you to do was it to train build a force because there's this talk that and was a despite corruption specifically it was it more both corruption and or stability because they kind of go hand in hand policy and it's a very close link between corruption and instability and and president Ellis instructions were very clear to Crowley said go out and find me the best people in the world the most experienced people in the world who can come to South Africa and train my people how to fight organized crime so I went out and I found some of the best people from the CIA from mi6 the British intelligence service from the Drug Enforcement Agency here in the US form officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's detectives from Scotland Yard prosecutors from the US Justice Department and all of them for a number of years traveled to South Africa to train black officers who were newly appointed in key roles in how to combat organized crime and this was you acting as an employee he had crow there's not some operative this is he this was me very much acting as a as an executive and crow I was the project leader Kroll was very well structured and organized and I reported to the chief executive officer in the London office nor Garret who was the former head of the CIA's Near East Division and Nelson Mandela was intimately involved in this with you at Krall President Mandela was the ultimate support of this project and he then designated several ministers to work on it and also senior officials in the stories that had been put out this past week they talked about this to try to make it sound like you're involved on two sides of the equation they bring up scorpions was this the scorpions project that they referred to so it was the scorpions scorpion sounds so dangerous and a movie well there's a movie a movie does feature this so at the end of the training project President Mandela and deputy president Thabo Mbeki who subsequently succeeded him as president put together a ministerial committee to look at what should they do with the capacity that's been built with this investment that they made because for a period of about three years we had all the leading people the most experienced people that have come out of some of the best law enforcement agencies and some of the best intelligence services come and trained in South Africa and this was quite this was quite something John because many of the senior officers in the ANC came from a background where they were trained by the opponents of the people came to treat trained them so so many of them were trained by the Stasi in East Germany some of them were trained by the Russian KGB some of them were trained by the Cubans so we not only had to train them we also had to win their trust and when we started this that's a diverse set of potential dogma and or just habits a theory modernised if you will right is that what the there was there was a question of of learning new skills and there was a question about also about learning management capabilities there was also question of learning the importance of the media for when you do difficult and complex investigations there was a question about using digital resources but there was also fundamentally a question of just building trust and when we started this program none of the black officers wanted to be photographed with all these foreign trainers who were senior foreign intelligence officers when we finished that everyone wanted to be in the photograph and so this was a great South African success story but the President and the deputy president then reflected on what to do with his capacity and they appointed the ministerial task force to do this and we were asked to make recommendations to this Minister ministerial task force and one of the things which we did was we showed them a movie because you referenced the movie and the movie we showed them was the untouchables with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery which is still one of my favorite and and greatest movies and the story The Untouchables is about police corruption in Chicago and how in the Treasury Department a man called Eliot Ness put together a group of officers from which he selected from different places with clean hands to go after corruption during the Probie and this really captured the president's imagination and so he said that's what he want and Ella yeah okay so he said della one of the untouchables he wanted Eliot Ness exactly Al Capone's out there and and how many people were in that goodness so we asked that we we established the government then established decided to establish and this was passed as a law through Parliament the director of special operations the DSO which colloquy became known as the scorpions and it had a scorpion as a symbol for this unit and this became a standalone anti-corruption unit and the brilliant thing about it John was that the first intake of scorpion officers were all young black graduates many of them law graduates and at the time Janet Reno was the US Attorney General played a very crucial role she allowed half of the first intake of young cratchits to go to Quantico and to do the full FBI course in Quantico and this was the first group of foreign students who've ever been admitted to Quantico to do the full Quantico were you involved at what score's at that time yes sir and so you worked with President Mandela yes the set of the scorpions is untouchable skiing for the first time as a new democracy is emerging the landscape is certainly changing there's a transformation happening we all know the history laugh you don't watch Invictus probably great movie to do that you then worked with the Attorney General United States to cross-pollinate the folks in South Africa black officers law degrees Samar's fresh yes this unit with Quantico yes in the United States I had the privilege of attending the the graduation ceremony of the first of South African officers that completed the Quantico course and representing crow they on the day you had us relationships at that time to crawl across pollen I had the privilege of working with some of the best law enforcement officers and best intelligence officers that has come out of the u.s. services and they've been tremendous mentors in my career they've really shaped my thinking they've shaped my values and they've they've shaved my character so you're still under 30 at this time so give us a is that where this where are we in time now just about a 30 so you know around the nine late nineties still 90s yeah so client-server technologies there okay so also the story references Leonard McCarthy and these spy tapes what is this spy tape saga about it says you had a conversation with McCarthy me I'm thinking that a phone tap explain that spy tape saga what does it mean who's Lennon McCarthy explain yourself so so so Leonard McCarthy it's a US citizen today he served two terms as the vice president for institutional integrity at the World Bank which is the world's most important anti-corruption official he started his career as a prosecutor in South Africa many years ago and then became the head of the economic crimes division in the South African Justice Department and eventually became the head of the scorpions and many years after I've left Kroll and were no longer involved in in the work of the scorpions he texted me one evening expressing a concern and an anxiety that I had about the safety of his family and I replied to him with two text messages one was a Bible verse and the other one was a Latin saying and my advice name was follow the rule of law and put the safety of your family first and that was the advice I gave him so this is how I imagined the year I think of it the internet was just there this was him this was roundabout 2000 December 2007 okay so there was I phone just hit so text messaging Nokia phones all those big yeah probably more text message there so you sitting anywhere in London you get a text message from your friend yep later this past late tonight asking for help and advice and I gave him the best advice I can he unfortunately was being wiretapped and those wiretaps were subsequently published and became the subject of much controversy they've now been scrutinized by South Africa's highest court and the court has decided that those wiretaps are of no impact and of importance in the scheme of judicial decision-making and our unknown provenance and on and on unknown reliability they threw it out basically yeah they're basically that's the president he had some scandals priors and corruption but back to the tapes you the only involvement on the spy tapes was friend sending you a text message that says hey I'm running a corruption you know I'm afraid for my life my family what do I do and you give some advice general advice and that's it as there was there any more interactions with us no that's it that's it okay so you weren't like yeah working with it hey here's what we get strategy there was nothing that going on no other interactions just a friendly advice and that's what they put you I gave him my I gave him my best advice when you when you work in when you work as an investigator very much as and it's very similar in venture capital it's all about relationships and you want to preserve relationships for the long term and you develop deep royalties to its people particularly people with whom you've been through difficult situations as I have been with Leonard much earlier on when I was still involved in Kroll and giving advice to South African government on issues related to the scorpius so that that has a lot of holes and I did think that was kind of weird they actually can produce the actual tax I couldn't find that the spy tapes so there's a spy tape scandal out there your name is on out on one little transaction globbed on to you I mean how do you feel about that I mean you must've been pretty pissed when you saw that when you do it when when you do when you do investigative work you see really see everything and all kinds of things and the bigger the issues that you deal with the more frequently you see things that other people might find unusual I are you doing any work right now with c5 at South Africa and none whatsoever so I've I retired from my investigative Korea in 2014 I did terrific 20 years as an investigator during my time as investigator I came to understood the importance of digital and cyber and so at the end of it I saw an opportunity to serve a sector that historically have been underserved with capital which is cyber security and of course there are two areas very closely related to cyber security artificial intelligence and cloud and that's why I created c5 after I sold my investigator firm with five other families who equally believed in the importance of investing private capital to make a difference invest in private capital to help bring about innovation that can bring stability to the digital world and that's the mission of c-5 before I get to the heart news I want to drill in on the BBC stories I think that's really the focal point of you know why we're talking just you know from my standpoint I remember living as a young person in that time breaking into the business you know my 20s and 30s you had Live Aid in 1985 and you had 1995 the internet happened there was so much going on between those that decade 85 to 95 you were there I was an American so I didn't really have a lot exposure I did some work for IBM and Europe in 1980 says it's co-op student but you know I had some peak in the international world it must been pretty dynamic the cross-pollination the melting pot of countries you know the Berlin Wall goes down you had the cold war's ending you had apartheid a lot of things were going on around you yes so in that dynamic because if if the standard is you had links to someone you know talked about why how important it was that this melting pot and how it affected your relationships and how it looks now looking back because now you can almost tie anything to anything yes so I think the 90s was one of the most exciting periods of time because you had the birth of the internet and I started working on Internet related issues yet 20 million users today we have three and a half billion users and ten billion devices unthinkable at the time but in the wake of the internet also came a lot of changes as you say the Berlin Wall came down democracy in South Africa the Oslo peace process in the time that I worked in Kroll some of them made most important and damaging civil wars in Africa came to an end including the great war in the Congo peace came to Sudan and Angola the Ivory Coast so a lot of things happening and if you have a if you had a an international career at that time when globalization was accelerating you got to no a lot of people in different markets and both in crow and in my consulting business a key part of what it but we did was to keep us and Western corporations that were investing in emerging markets safe your credibility has been called in questions with this article and when I get to in a second what I want to ask you straight up is it possible to survive in the international theatre to the level that you're surviving if what they say is true if you if you're out scamming people or you're a bad actor pretty much over the the time as things get more transparent it's hard to survive right I mean talk about that dynamic because I just find it hard to believe that to be successful the way you are it's not a johnny-come-lately firms been multiple years operating vetted by the US government are people getting away in the shadows is it is is it hard because I almost imagine those are a lot of arbitrage I imagine ton of arbitrage that you that are happening there how hard or how easy it is to survive to be that shady and corrupt in this new era because with with with investigated with with intelligence communities with some terrific if you follow the money now Bitcoin that's a whole nother story but that's more today but to survive the eighties and nineties and to be where you are and what they're alleging I just what's your thoughts well to be able to attract capital and investors you have to have very high standards of governance and compliance because ultimately that's what investors are looking for and what investors will diligence when they make an investment with you so to carry the confidence of investors good standards of governance and compliance are of critical importance and raising venture capital and Europe is tough it's not like the US babe there's an abundance of venture capital available it's very hard Europe is under served by capital the venture capital invested in the US market is multiple of what we invest in Europe so you need to be even more focused on governance and compliance in Europe than you would be perhaps on other markets I think the second important point with Gmail John is that technology is brought about a lot of transparency and this is a major area of focus for our piece tech accelerator where we have startups who help to bring transparency to markets which previously did not have transparency for example one of the startups that came through our accelerator has brought complete transparency to the supply chain for subsistence farmers in Africa all the way to to the to the shelf of Walmart or a big grocery retailer in in the US or Europe and so I think technology is bringing a lot more more transparency we also have a global anti-corruption Innovation Challenge called shield in the cloud where we try and find and recognize the most innovative corporations governments and countries in the space so let's talk about the BBC story that hit 12 it says is a US military cloud the DoD Jedi contractor that's coming to award the eleventh hour safe from Russia fears over sensitive data so if this essentially the headline that's bolded says a technology company bidding for a Pentagon contract that's Amazon Web Services to store sensitive data has close partnerships with a firm linked to a sanctioned Russian oligarch the BBC has learned goes on to essentially put fear and tries to hang a story that says the national security of America is at risk because of c5u that's what we're talking about right now so so what's your take on this story I mean did you wake up and get an email said hey check out the BBC you're featured in and they're alleging that you have links to Russia and Amazon what Jon first I have to go I first have to do a disclosure I've worked for the BBC as an investigator when I was in Kroll and in fact I let the litigation support for the BBC in the biggest libel claim in British history which was post 9/11 when the BBC did a broadcast mistakenly accusing a mining company in Africa of laundering money for al-qaeda and so I represented the BBC in this case I was the manager hired you they hired me to delete this case for them and I'm I helped the BBC to reduce a libel claim of 25 million dollars to $750,000 so I'm very familiar with the BBC its integrity its standards and how it does things and I've always held the BBC in the highest regard and believed that the BBC makes a very important contribution to make people better informed about the world so when I heard about the story I was very disappointed because it seemed to me that the BBC have compromised the independence and the independence of the editorial control in broadcasting the story the reason why I say that is because the principal commentator in this story as a gentleman called John Wheeler who's familiar to me as a someone who's been trolling our firm on internet for the last year making all sorts of allegations the BBC did not disclose that mr. Weiler is a former Oracle executive the company that's protesting the Jedi bidding contract and secondly that he runs a lobbying firm with paid clients and that he himself often bid for government contracts in the US government context you're saying that John Wheeler who's sourced in the story has a quote expert and I did check him out I did look at what he was doing I checked out his Twitter he seems to be trying to socialise a story heavily first he needed eyes on LinkedIn he seems to be a consultant firm like a Beltway yes he runs a he runs a phone called in interoperability Clearing House and a related firm called the IT acquisition Advisory Council and these two organizations work very closely together the interoperability Clearing House or IC H is a consulting business where mr. Weiler acts for paying clients including competitors for this bidding contract and none of this was disclosed by the BBC in their program the second part of this program that I found very disappointing was the fact that the BBC in focusing on the Russian technology parks cocuwa did not disclose the list of skok of our partners that are a matter of public record on the Internet if you look at this list very closely you'll see c5 is not on there neither Amazon Web Services but the list of companies that are on there are very familiar names many of them competitors in this bidding process who acted as founding partners of skok about Oracle for example as recently as the 28th of November hosted what was described as the largest cloud computing conference in Russia's history at Skolkovo this is the this is the place which the BBC described as this notorious den of spies and at this event which Oracle hosted they had the Russian presidential administration on a big screen as one of their clients in Russia so some Oracle is doing business in Russia they have like legit real links to Russia well things you're saying if they suddenly have very close links with Skolkovo and so having a great many other Khayyam is there IBM Accenture cisco say Microsoft is saying Oracle is there so Skolkovo has a has a very distinguished roster of partners and if the BBC was fair and even-handed they would have disclosed us and they would have disclosed the fact that neither c5 nor Amazon feature as Corcovado you feel that the BBC has been duped the BBC clearly has been duped the program that they broadcasted is really a parlor game of six degrees of separation which they try to spun into a national security crisis all right so let's tell us John while ago you're saying John Wyler who's quoted in the story as an expert and by the way I read in the story my favorite line that I wanted to ask you on was there seems to be questions being raised but the question is being raised or referring to him so are you saying that he is not an expert but a plant for the story what's what's his role he's saying he works for Oracle or you think do you think he's being paid by Oracle like I can't comment on mr. Wireless motivation what strikes me is the fact that is a former Oracle executive what's striking is that he clearly on his website for the IC H identifies several competitors for the Jedi business clients and that all of this should have been disclosed by the BBC rather than to try and characterize and portray him as an independent expert on this story well AWS put out a press release or a blog post essentially hum this you know you guys had won it we're very clear and this I know it goes to the top because that's how Amazon works nothing goes out until it goes to the top which is Andy chassis and the senior people over there it says here's the relationship with c5 and ATS what school you use are the same page there but also they hinted the old guard manipulation distant I don't think they use the word disinformation campaign they kind of insinuate it and that's what I'm looking into I want to ask you are you part are you a victim of a disinformation campaign do you believe that you're not a victim being targeted with c5 as part of a disinformation campaign put on by a competitor to AWS I think what we've seen over the course of this last here is an enormous amount of disinformation around this contract and around this bidding process and they've a lot of the information that has been disseminated has not only not been factual but in some cases have been patently malicious well I have been covering Amazon for many many years this guy Tom Wyler is in seems to be circulating multiple reports invested in preparing for this interview I checked Vanity Fair he's quoted in Vanity Fair he's quoted in the BBC story and there's no real or original reporting other than those two there's some business side our article which is just regurgitating the Business Insider I mean the BBC story and a few other kind of blog stories but no real original yes no content don't so in every story that that's been written on this subject and as you say most serious publication have thrown this thrown these allegations out but in the in those few instances where they've managed to to publish these allegations and to leverage other people's credibility to their advantage and leverage other people's credibility for their competitive advantage John Wheeler has been the most important and prominent source of the allegations someone who clearly has vested commercial interests someone who clearly works for competitors as disclosed on his own website and none of this has ever been surfaced or addressed I have multiple sources have confirmed to me that there's a dossier that has been created and paid for by a firm or collection of firms to discredit AWS I've seen some of the summary documents of that and that is being peddled around to journalists we have not been approached yet I'm not sure they will because we actually know the cloud what cloud computing is so I'm sure we could debunk it by just looking at it and what they were putting fors was interesting is this an eleventh-hour a desperation attempt because I have the Geo a report here that was issued under Oracle's change it says there are six conditions why we're looking at one sole cloud although it's not a it's a multiple bid it's not an exclusive to amazon but so there's reasons why and they list six service levels highly specialized check more favorable terms and conditions with a single award expected cause of administration of multiple contracts outweighs the benefits of multiple awards the projected orders are so intricately related that only a single contractor can reasonably be perform the work meaning that Amazon has the only cloud that can do that work now I've reported on the cube and it's looking angle that it's true there's things that other clouds just don't have anyone has private they have the secret the secret clouds the total estimated value of the contract is less than the simplified acquisition threshold or multiple awards would not be in the best interest this is from them this is a government report so it seems like there's a conspiracy against Amazon where you are upon and in in this game collect you feel that collateral damage song do you do you believe that to be true collateral damage okay well okay so now the the John Wheeler guys so investigate you've been an investigator so you mean you're not you know you're not a retired into this a retired investigator you're retired investigated worked on things with Nelson Mandela Kroll Janet Reno Attorney General you've vetted by the United States government you have credibility you have relationships with people who have have top-secret clearance all kinds of stuff but I mean do you have where people have top-secret clearance or or former people who had done well we have we have the privilege of of working with a very distinguished group of senior national security leaders as operating partisan c5 and many of them have retained their clearances and have been only been able to do so because c5 had to pass through a very deep vetting process so for you to be smeared like this you've been in an investigative has you work at a lot of people this is pretty obvious to you this is like a oh is it like a deep state conspiracy you feel it's one vendor - what is your take and what does collateral damage mean to you well I recently spoke at the mahkum conference on a session on digital warfare and one of the key points I made there was that there are two things that are absolutely critical for business leaders and technology leaders at this point in time one we have to clearly say that our countries are worth defending we can't walk away from our countries because the innovation that we are able to build and scale we're only able to do because we live in democracies and then free societies that are governed by the rule of law the second thing that I think is absolutely crucial for business leaders in the technology community is to accept that there must be a point where national interest overrides competition it must be a point where we say the benefit and the growth and the success of our country is more important to us than making commercial profits and therefore there's a reason for us either to cooperate or to cease competition or to compete in a different way what might takes a little bit more simple than that's a good explanation is I find these smear campaigns and fake news and I was just talking with Kara Swisher on Twitter just pinging back and forth you know either journalists are chasing Twitter and not really doing the original courting or they're being fed stories if this is truly a smear campaign as being fed by a paid dossier then that hurts people when families and that puts corporate interests over the right thing so I think I a personal issue with that that's fake news that's just disinformation but it's also putting corporate inches over over families and people so I just find that to be kind of really weird when you say collateral damage earlier what did you mean by that just part of the campaign you personally what's what's your view okay I think competition which is not focused on on performance and on innovation and on price points that's competition that's hugely destructive its destructive to the fabric of innovation its destructive of course to the reputation of the people who fall in the line of sight of this kind of competition but it's also hugely destructive to national interest Andrae one of the key stories here with the BBC which has holes in it is that the Amazon link which we just talked about but there's one that they bring up that seems to be core in all this and just the connections to Russia can you talk about your career over the career from whether you when you were younger to now your relationship with Russia why is this Russian angle seems to be why they bring into the Russia angle into it they seem to say that c-5 Cable has connections they call deep links personal links into Russia so to see what that so c5 is a venture capital firm have no links to Russia c5 has had one individual who is originally of Russian origin but it's been a longtime Swiss resident and you national as a co investor into a enterprise software company we invested in in 2015 in Europe we've since sold that company but this individual Vladimir Kuznetsov who's became the focus of the BBC's story was a co investor with us and the way in which we structure our investment structures is that everything is transparent so the investment vehicle for this investment was a London registered company which was on the records of Companies House not an offshore entity and when Vladimir came into this company as a co investor for compliance and regulatory purposes we asked him to make his investment through this vehicle which we controlled and which was subject to our compliance standards and completely transparent and in this way he made this investment now when we take on both investors and Co investors we do that subject to very extensive due diligence and we have a very robust and rigorous due diligence regime which in which our operating partners who are leaders of great experience play an important role in which we use outside due diligence firms to augment our own judgment and to make sure we have all the facts and finally we also compare notes with other financial institutions and peers and having done that with Vladimir Kuznetsov when he made this one investment with us we reached the conclusion that he was acting in his own right as an independent angel investor that his left renova many years ago as a career executive and that he was completely acceptable as an investor so that you think that the BBC is making an inaccurate Association the way they describe your relationship with Russia absolutely the the whole this whole issue of the provenance of capital has become of growing importance to the venture capital industry as you and I discussed earlier with many more different sources of capital coming out of places like China like Russia Saudi Arabia other parts of the world and therefore going back again to you the earlier point we discussed compliance and due diligence our critical success factors and we have every confidence in due diligence conclusions that we reached about vladimir quits net source co-investment with us in 2015 so I did some digging on c5 razor bidco this was the the portion of the company in reference to the article I need to get your your take on this and they want to get you on the record on this because it's you mentioned I've been a law above board with all the compliance no offshore entities this is a personal investment that he made Co investment into an entity you guys set up for the transparency and compliance is that true that's correct no side didn't see didn't discover this would my my children could have found this this this company was in a transparent way on the records in Companies House and and Vladimir's role and investment in it was completely on the on the public record all of this was subject to financial conduct authority regulation and anti money laundering and no your client standards and compliance so there was no great big discovery this was all transparent all out in the open and we felt very confident in our due diligence findings and so you feel very confident Oh issue there at all special purpose none whatsoever is it this is classic this is international finance yes sir so in the venture capital industry creating a special purpose vehicle for a particular investment is a standard practice in c-five we focus on structuring those special-purpose vehicles in the most transparent way possible and that was his money from probably from Russia and you co invested into this for this purpose of doing these kinds of deals with Russia well we just right this is kind of the purpose of that no no no this so in 2015 we invested into a European enterprise software company that's a strategic partner of Microsoft in Scandinavian country and we invested in amount of 16 million pounds about at the time just more than 20 million dollars and subsequent in August of that year that Amir Kuznetsov having retired for nova and some time ago in his own right as an angel investor came in as a minority invest alongside us into this investment but we wanted to be sure that his investment was on our control and subject to our compliance standards so we requested him to make his investment through our special purpose vehicle c5 raised a bit co this investment has since been realized it's been a great success and this business is going on to do great things and serve great clients it c5 taking russian money no see if I was not taking Russian money since since the onset of sanctions onboarding Russian money is just impossible sanctions have introduced complexity and have introduced regulatory risk related to Russian capital and so we've taken a decision that we will not and we can't onboard Russian capital and sanctions have also impacted my investigative career sanctions have also completely changed because what the US have done very effectively is to make sanctions a truly global regime and in which ever country are based it doesn't really matter you have to comply with US sanctions this is not optional for anybody on any sanctions regime including the most recent sanctions on Iran so if there are sanctions in place you can't touch it have you ever managed Russian oligarchs money or interests at any time I've never managed a Russian oligarchs money at any point in time I served for a period of a year honest on the board of a South African mining company in which Renova is a minority invest alongside an Australian company called South 32 and the reason why I did this was because of my support for African entrepreneurship this was one of the first black owned mining companies in South Africa that was established with a British investment in 2004 this business have just grown to be a tremendous success and so for a period of a year I offered to help them on the board and to support them as they as they looked at how they can grow and scale the business I have a couple more questions Gabe so I don't know if you wanna take a break you want to keep let's take a break okay let's take a quick break do a quick break I think that's great that's the meat of it great job by the way fantastic lady here thanks for answering those questions the next section I want to do is compliment

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back to Las Vegas. We are live here at AWS re:Invent along with Justin Moore and I'm John Wallis. I know when you travel these days, all you want is, you want it to work, right? >> Yeah. >> We just want to get there. Well, I'll tell you what, Phil Wood from EasyJet wants you to get there as well. As does Matt Leonard from CenturyLink. Gentlemen, glad to have you with us. >> Thanks very much. >> We appreciate it. >> EasyJet, a European-based carrier just north of London, so we're talking about air travel. You are, as we've just recently learned, you are a Catalyst Award winner from CenturyLink, there's a reason for that and that's a point of distinction. So Matt, if you would maybe take us through a little bit about what EasyJet did to earn that distinction. >> Sure, the Catalyst Award is an award that we give out in combination with VMware to kind of highlight customers that are doing new and exciting things with regard to digital transformation. We've been a provider of services and a partner with EasyJet for a long time and they've done some really cool things with regard to services they provide their end customers. And we play a very very small part of that. Two exciting things that are my personal favorites with regard to EasyJet is the Look and Book service. So within the application if you want to book a new trip you normally have to type in the airport that you want to go to, and you have to figure out what's the name of the airport, or the three-digit code. With the EasyJet application you can upload a picture and it has intelligence that's used to figure out that picture and what that landmark is and then what the nearest airport is. So that's pretty exciting. And the second exciting thing within the application >> is a trip in one tap. So you can basically justdial in how much money you want to spend for a trip, hit the Go button, in literally one tap it'll recommend a city, a hotel, and a fun and exciting thing that's happening during that duration of time. So for last minute travelers, my family's certainly one of those, we got a free period of time, one tap it'll tell you where to stay, how to get there with EasyJet and then what's exciting happening within that city. >> So I could put in, I say, I want to spend 300 dollars a ticket, and tap boom, and it'll say you can go to Brussels, you can go to Amsterdam but you can't make it to Dublin this weekend, right? Or whatever. I love that. So what has that done for your business in terms of, on a micro level and a macro level, what's it doing in terms of that interface and what's it mean to your business in general? >> As a business, we're 23 years old, so we started very much like a startup and we kind of came in at low-cost airline bracket. But now what we're renowned for is the convenience, and you've got two examples there where our customers love that because it's a convenient way. They don't have to do lots of searching, they can just take the photograph and they know exactly where they're going to go. And that's really what differentiates us is that convenience and the customer experience that we offer to all of our customers. We have a lot of customers. We have 90 million passengers a year. They come to us because they know not just that we give great value but that experience. So what it's done, it's made us grow. And that's literally how we continue to grow is to expand those customer services and Centurylink have been a part of that journey for over half of our tenure as an airline. >> It sounds like technology is actually right on the edge of driving that value for customers and making things easy. Like just the experience of being able to walk out and take a photo of something and say, I want to go here. I would like to go out and see if I can trick it by taking a photo of the Eiffel Tower out in the back here. >> We'll go and try it out in a bit. >> I'm confident. >> We'll see how it goes. That's making use of a whole bunch of technologies. It's got mobile technology in there, it's got image recognition, it's got machine learning. What else are you seeing at the show here at AWS, what are some of the technologies that you think will drive the next evolution of things, what's going to win you the next award? >> I think one of the things I've really been looking at is around data and around the personalization. So we talked about customer experience but our whole journey of taking a plane, taking a holiday, for example, it's from the moment you book it to the moment you get back. There's so many touch points during that and there's so much data that we can take from that. So I've been really interested in looking at how different organizations and how Amazon have been using data. I also think you can't come to a show like this without looking at machine learning and AI. We're using aspects of that in how we analyze our data, but that's certainly something I think's going to change the airline industry moving forward. >> How important is a partnership with someone like CenturyLink in making sure that you get the best use of these technologies? >> Matt talked about that they have a small part to play but you've got to understand that every single customer, every single search on our website goes through a network. In order for us to connect to our customers, be they booking a flight, be they on a flight, we've got to go through a reliable network. And the way I describe it, it needs to be effortless. It needs to just work. You mentioned that right at the beginning. But I also think as well for us to exploit technologies like the cloud, which is what we're starting to invest a lot more into, we need a partner who can help us on that journey. So again, that's where CenturyLink and the partnership we've got has been absolutely crucial. The things that we're doing with CenturyLink around making sure that we're only paying for our network for what we use. We're an airline. Our airports are seasonal so kind of traditional networks, what you'll end up doing is paying for bandwidth all year, when in the winter seasons if you're not flying there that's dead money. So it's simple things like that but that makes a huge difference towards my cost base perspective. >> And time of day, I assume that affects that as well? >> Absolutely. I mean, clearly in our summer periods we fly a lot, so time of day during the summer, there's not that many hours we don't fly. >> You get a lot of daylight over there, right? (laughter) >> But certainly in winter where we have our kind of summer destinations, it makes a big big difference. And that's cost we pass on to the customer as well which is massively important. >> What is it about the customer that you don't know? You talked about AI, what that could do for you down the road. How much information, how much data do you think you can extract from the customer to make that experience even better, and what do you need to know about them, and how will CenturyLink help you get there? >> You need to know everything. I mean, we know that we sell a hundred seventy million bacon sandwiches a year. Whether that's useful or not, but we know that. >> There's hungry people. >> That's a lot of bacon. >> It is a lot. But it means that we know the type of food that our customers want to eat, we know the top destinations, even knowing how long between booking a flight and actually flying. So we know from a price perspective and from a making sure our planes are full or making sure we're not overselling our flights. All of that information, there's just a wealth of data that you're getting out there. And it's not just customers. One of the big factors for us is safety. So we use our data now to analyze maintenance. So we have predicted maintenance around when's the right time to put in spare parts but also what's the most efficient time so that we're not disrupting the customer. So actually we may want to bring a maintenance cycle sooner so we can open up more routes for customers to fly when they want to. So it's very hard to answer that question cause every day we're coming up with new ideas or new bits of information that at the time we never thought we needed to know but that actually turns out to be an absolutely crucial part of our offer. >> That's not an unusual thing for most people in a world where there's this much dynamic, this much change going on. So what process do you run through to figure out, where should we be looking to find out the next set of optimizations? Or how do you discover what is the next thing that you should work on, like where does the idea for, maybe we should build this app. Where does that come from? >> I don't think there's one model. I think what's always been at the heart of EasyJet is innovation, and we've always focused on the customer. So we have a great loyalty scheme and our customers are very loyal. We have 75% loyalty with our customers which is phenomenal. We get a lot of feedback and that feedback drives a lot of the ideas that we push forward. So I think it's a mixture of our passion, it's a mixture of our experience, but I'd say that feedback from the customer, that drives a lot of the ideas that we do moving forward. >> From the CenturyLink perspective, you received certification for the MSP designation. >> Yup. >> Working in the travel business, what does that do, or how does that MSP certification translate over to learning about a different industry, to applying different approaches, unique approaches, because it's not one size fits all. They have very, very specific challenges that you're trying to address. >> Yeah, so on a broader sense, our mission with clients like EasyJet and customers interested in the cloud is really to connect, migrate, and then manage their workloads within the cloud. That's really what we're focused on. And there's certainly commonalities within verticals but every customer's different, and really assessing, starting with the customer, and that's a common thing that I think both EasyJet as well as CenturyLink and certainly Amazon have in common, really focused on that customer journey. One of the approaches that we take through a program called CustomerLink is put the customer right in the center of the team and we've applied the Agile methodology to that customer engagement process. So we do a standup meeting once every two weeks, we do sprints once every two weeks. A lot of our customers are part of that board that we use to activate the sprint and to define priorities and what actions are. So really pulling the whole team together across different departments, focusing on the customer first, and in many cases the customer's customer first cause a lot of your priorities are based on what your customers are after, and really making sure that we're working on the right activity in a very lean way, pulling away as much waste as possible that aren't contributing to adding value to the customer journey. >> And then from your side of the fence going forward, you've mentioned four or five general areas, you've said, we could improve here, we could look at this, we could look at that. How do you prioritize and say, okay, let's focus here now and then we'll move on. So if you had to focus now, or for the next twelve months, what would that be on? >> So we've actually just relaunched our strategy. At the heart we are an airline so our priority is about being number one or number two in all the primary airports. We've got to keep that. But we also recognize from the data that the amount of our customers who will book hotels or book further products through some of our partners that's something that we can actually capitalize on. So we're looking more into holidays now. Taking that customer centricity, and how do we make the end-to-end journey for our customers so including travel to and from airport and the whole day. So that's a priority for us. Continue building our customer loyalty. So as much as we pride ourselves on loyalty, we believe there's a lot more you can do. I think the airline loyalty schemes need to be shaken up a little bit more. If you look in the retail sector or things like that they're focusing on different things. It's no longer just the case of air miles. People want speedier boarding, or they want a better experience, better seating arrangements. So we're looking at our loyalty. And then also business. We talk about, we've got really good slots for when we fly planes. And they're slots that are competitive to a business traveler. So that's our three main areas, I would say, are business, holidays, and loyalty. >> Matt, you're going to be in business for a while. I think you're okay. If you could work on legroom, I'm sold. Matt and Phil, thank you for being with us. We appreciate the time. Join us here on theCUBE. You're watching our live coverage from Las Vegas at AWS re:Invent. (electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering Boomi World 2018. Brought to you by Dell Boomi. >> Good evening, welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin, live from Las Vegas at Boomi World '18. Been here all day talking with Dell Technology CEO, Michael Dell, to Dell Boomi execs, customers. We're joined by a couple of gentlemen now, one is a customer of Dell Boomi, that's Peter de Lange, from Digital Angel, the CEO and co-founder, welcome, and Mike Veldhuis, co-founder of Nalta, which is their transformation partner. Guys, thanks so much for joining me on theCUBE this afternoon. >> You're welcome. >> You're welcome. >> So, I first saw you this morning on stage, saw you accepting your award. This was Dell Boomi's first time honoring and recognizing customers so congratulations on being the winner of the Emerging Technology Award, but let's start by just giving our viewers an idea of, we'll start Mike, with you, Nalta, as a Boomi partner. >> Yup. >> Tell us a little bit about Nalta. What do you guys do, what makes you unique, where are you based? >> Well, first of all, we are from Holland. You know, so, for us it's great to be in Vegas, great to be in the U.S. and tell our story over here. We started in the Netherlands, in 2000. We're not a very big company compared to many large U.S. companies. We're a team of 60 people, and we started as an infrastructure company in 2000, already a Dell partner and we had a software department as well as software company and what's so cool about I.O.T. and the stuff we build nowadays is that we combine those two disciplines integrate I.T. platforms like we did for Digital Angel. >> So let's talk about Digital Angel. Thank you, Mike. First of all, I love the name, there's a lot of significance to that. We talked about award winner for Dell Boomi. Tell us a little bit about Digital Angel. What was the genesis of creating it not so long ago? >> Well, um, first thing was, if you're looking at what's happening in healthcare, one thing that's really important is getting qualified caregivers, because there's a big shortage on that. Next to that, if you look at the development of the baby boomers, the older or the seniors are, the group is growing, and on the other hand, the caregivers are less available. So how can we match that? So we need new technology. The first question was, or the main question, can we connect smart healthcare products to the internet? And maybe with those products we can help the healthcare sector. >> Give me an example of some of those products that you're talking about. >> The first product we have connected to our platform is a smart mattress. >> A smart mattress? >> Yeah, it's embedded with light sensors and it measures, for example, the way a person lies on a mattress, but it also measures the heartbeats, breathing rates, all those data variables. >> Wow. That's pretty cool, smart mattress. So, you had this idea, really kind of nothing in the Netherlands, or even here in the U.S. at the time, but healthcare is one of those industries that obviously, we're talking about life or death situations. There are so many devices that are not connected, and people can lose their lives as a result. So, walk us through this concept of a smart mattress and how you're working with manufacturers to build that and then we'll get to how you're working on transforming with Nalta. >> Yeah, no problem. Well, starting off from the question, can we connect, yes we can. Next of the factors is we need a platform to land all the data in. We need customers like manufacturers because they must produce products that are able to generate data. So the first one was the mattress, the next one is a bed, a wheelchair, so we already have several products live within approx situation. That's where we got off, yeah. >> So Mike, talk to us about when you first started engaging with Digital Angel. A presumably unique opportunity to really transform an industry, save lives, talk to us a little bit about when you guys got together to really take this idea and really help it grow and help transform an industry. >> First of all, for us, it's wonderful to work on such a huge case. Like you said, you're potentially saving lives and I.T., sometimes, is so I.T.-ish. You're talking about technology, tools, applications, technicians, engineers, it's all in that I.T. level, and that's perfectly fine. They're solving problems and challenges. But, talking about a business case or business itself is so energizing because you can actually tap into a customer's needs and help them find solutions for the challenges they have. And in this case, we are talking about I.O.T., internet of things, which is a little vague. Digital transformation is even vaguer. >> Right. >> So when Digital Angel approached us with this, on first sight, very simple need, we want to connect a mattress or a device to a platform to present the data and the insights of this device to the end customer in favor of the patient, it's our job to start questions, questioning, and listen and put it on paper, write user stories, get a clear picture of what the actual need is. Then from that, we build our first project and our first product, and eventually the first platform. That became the Digital Angel platform itself. >> And you've done this in a very short period of time. >> True. >> Uh, yeah. I think the, >> Eight months? >> No, no, no. It was faster. The first version was within seven months. >> Wow. Seven months. >> Yeah, and that's the beauty of if you can cooperate with people with knowledge like Nalta in a partnership, but also the availability of components like Dell Boomi. >> Yeah. >> So you can fasten up the process to create new things and that's really important to get much further and get things done. >> So let's unpack that a little bit more. Dell Boomi's platform as kind of a fueler, maybe some power to your platform? >> Mhmm. >> Talk to us about the integration, how you're using it specifically and what some of the new things that they announced this week, how does that excite you about being able to grow your business? >> Well, the thing is, and that's what Mike explained, is listen to the needs. So, we have needs as a company, Digital Angel, next to the fact that patients also have needs. How can we translate that into technology? So, the question we asked Mike, or Nalta, we must have a platform that is able to be completely flexible, so that's the basic, it must be able to do the analytics, if necessary. There's a long list of things we have to have within the platform and then, it's Nalta who is answering that question. >> Yeah, we translate it into a Boomi solution. And I think what's innovative, we just came out of a breakout session and one of the questions we got we were telling the Digital Angel Story and our story, how we work with customers, where does Boomi fit in? Does it come at last, what is the reason you put Boomi into the solution, just for moving data from point A to point B? The answer to that is that we have Boomi at the core of the design itself, so we start with Boomi, it's not an afterthought, it's not that we have a solution an application and now all of a sudden we have to tie it into a different ecosystem. We start with Boomi, and that's very powerful because we have all the time and flexibility to choose the best of great solutions around this Boomi solution, and that's what we've done. >> So, looking at this unique opportunity, to be able to transform average, everyday hospital products into smart devices that can actually influence the pace of care, the treatment of care, innovation. That's pretty remarkable. I'd love to understand, Peter, from your perspective, what are some of the actual results that you're starting to see maybe in the Netherlands. >> Yeah. >> You mentioned, I think before we went live that you're starting to come over here. Give us some of those tangible nuggets that you're like, this is why we're doing this, this is why we're helping these organizations connect. >> By having the platform and connecting all of those products, you have to know several things. When you are visiting healthcare institutes, one of the things is, we are using networks on 165 apps already, so we need another one. We already use I.T. related products, so, I'm busy with a patient and I have to scribe from one app to the other to get my information, but the thing I see is single information, because I can see the blood-pressure or the heartbeat or something like that. So if it's possible, can we combine that? So in the back end we can combine all the data of the different products and it enables us not only in the background, but also on the front end to have one user interface, so we don't need all the 165 apps. So we are creating time. >> Creating time? >> Yeah. >> Interesting. >> That's really interesting, and with that time, as a caregiver, because we know there's a shortage on caregivers, the right care at the right moment, to the right person can be given, and that's one of the goals we have and can already see as a result. We can also calculate saving, but the most important thing for us as the company, we want to improve the quality of life and not so much talk about savings. One of them is, the first digital product we've created, based on the data, saves 6000 dollars a year, for one digital product, for one patient. So that's in numbers. That's results. That's real, real results. >> I've never heard anybody talk about a business outcome as creating time. (laughter) >> But, in healthcare, we've talked about that a number of times, it's essential. So, last question, Peter, for you. You've mentioned expanding to the U.S., because of the things I find shocking in 2018 almost 2019 is you have a loved one who is in the hospital and there are so many people that come in to do rounds and they all have devices and nothing is connected. How are you going to help us in the U.S. to resolve that problem with Digital Angel? >> I can answer that with another example. One of the things was, if we are able to see how a person lies on his bed, and the care institute has a protocol, and the protocol says, you have to turn these patients each and every three hours, what we did know in total 30 to 50 percent of the people turn around themselves during the night. So you don't have to turn them. >> Interesting. >> Even if you turn them, the chance of example, pressure sores, is much higher. >> Really? >> Yeah. 30 to 50 percent. >> Wow. All of this by evaluating data. Well, gentlemen, I wish we had more time it's such an interesting use-case. Peter, congratulations on the award, Mike you as well. >> Thank you very much >> Thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and talking to us about how you guys are helping to transform an industry. >> Thank you very much, for the opportunity >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin. Stick around John Ferger and I will be back with our show wrap in just a short minute. (upbeat music)

>> Live from New York. It's theCUBE. Covering theCUBE New York City, 2018. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media, and it's ecosystem partners. >> I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, our next two guests are Jim Franklin with Dell EMC Director of Product Management Anant Chintamaneni, who is the Vice President of Products at BlueData. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thanks, John. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for coming on. >> I've been following BlueData since the founding. Great company, and the founders are great. Great teams, so thanks for coming on and sharing what's going on, I appreciate it. >> It's a pleasure, thanks for the opportunity. >> So Jim, talk about the Dell relationship with BlueData. What are you guys doing? You have the Dell-ready solutions. How is that related now, because you've seen this industry with us over the years morph. It's really now about, the set-up days are over, it's about proof points. >> That's right. >> AI and machine learning are driving the signal, which is saying, 'We need results'. There's action on the developer's side, there's action on the deployment, people want ROI, that's the main focus. >> That's right. That's right, and we've seen this journey happen from the new batch processing days, and we're seeing that customer base mature and come along, so the reason why we partnered with BlueData is, you have to have those softwares, you have to have the contenders. They have to have the algorithms, and things like that, in order to make this real. So it's been a great partnership with BlueData, it's dated back actually a little farther back than some may realize, all the way to 2015, believe it or not, when we used to incorporate BlueData with Isilon. So it's been actually a pretty positive partnership. >> Now we've talked with you guys in the past, you guys were on the cutting edge, this was back when Docker containers were fashionable, but now containers have become so proliferated out there, it's not just Docker, containerization has been the wave. Now, Kubernetes on top of it is really bringing in the orchestration. This is really making the storage and the network so much more valuable with workloads, whether respective workloads, and AI is a part of that. How do you guys navigate those waters now? What's the BlueData update, how are you guys taking advantage of that big wave? >> I think, great observation, re-embrace Docker containers, even before actually Docker was even formed as a company by that time, and Kubernetes was just getting launched, so we saw the value of Docker containers very early on, in terms of being able to obviously provide the agility, elasticity, but also, from a packaging of applications perspective, as we all know it's a very dynamic environment, and today, I think we are very happy to know that, with Kubernetes being a household name now, especially a tech company, so the way we're navigating this is, we have a turnkey product, which has containerization, and then now we are taking our value proposition of big data and AI and lifecycle management and bringing it to Kubernetes with an open source project that we launched called Cube Director under our umbrella. So, we're all about bringing stateful applications like Hadoop, AI, ML to the community and to our customer base, which is some of the largest financial services in health care customers. >> So the container revolution has certainly groped developers, and developers have always had a history of chasing after the next cool technology, and for good reason, it's not like just chasing after... Developers tend not to just chase after the shiny thing, they chased after the most productive thing, and they start using it, and they start learning about it, and they make themselves valuable, and they build more valuable applications as a result. But there's this interesting meshing of creators, makers, in the software world, between the development community and the data science community. How are data scientists, who you must be spending a fair amount of time with, starting to adopt containers, what are they looking at? Are they even aware of this, as you try to help these communities come together? >> We absolutely talk to the data scientists and they're the drivers of determining what applications they want to consume for the different news cases. But, at the end of the day, the person who has to deliver these applications, you know data scientists care about time to value, getting the environment quickly all prepared so they can access the right data sets. So, in many ways, most of our customers, many of them are unaware that there's actually containers under the hood. >> So this is the data scientists. >> The data scientists, but the actual administrators and the system administrators were making these tools available, are using containers as a way to accelerate the way they package the software, which has a whole bunch of dependent libraries, and there's a lot of complexity our there. So they're simplifying all that and providing the environment as quickly as possible. >> And in so doing, making sure that whatever workloads are put together, can scaled, can be combined differently and recombined differently, based on requirements of the data scientists. So the data scientist sees the tool... >> Yeah. >> The tool is manifest as, in concert with some of these new container related technologies, and then the whole CICD process supports the data scientist >> The other thing to think about though, is that this also allows freedom of choice, and we were discussing off camera before, these developers want to pick out what they want to pick out what they want to work with, they don't want to have to be locked in. So with containers, you can also speed that deployment but give them freedom to choose the tools that make them best productive. That'll make them much happier, and probably much more efficient. >> So there's a separation under the data science tools, and the developer tools, but they end up all supporting the same basic objective. So how does the infrastructure play in this, because the challenge of big data for the last five years as John and I both know, is that a lot of people conflated. The outcome of data science, the outcome of big data, with the process of standing up clusters, and lining up Hadoop, and if they failed on the infrastructure, they said it was a failure overall. So how you making the infrastructure really simple, and line up with this time of value? >> Well, the reality is, we all need food and water. IT still needs server and storage in order to work. But at the end of the day, the abstraction has to be there just like VMware in the early days, clouds, containers with BlueData is just another way to create a layer of abstraction. But this one is in the context of what the data scientist is trying to get done, and that's the key to why we partnered with BlueData and why we delivered big data as a service. >> So at that point, what's the update from Dell EMC and Dell, in particular, Analytics? Obviously you guys work with a lot of customers, have challenges, how are you solving those problems? What are those problems? Because we know there's some AI rumors, big Dell event coming up, there's rumors of a lot of AI involved, I'm speculating there's going to be probably a new kind of hardware device and software. What's the state of the analytics today? >> I think a lot of the customers we talked about, they were born in that batch processing, that Hadoop space we just talked about. I think they largely got that right, they've largely got that figured out, but now we're seeing proliferation of AI tools, proliferation of sandbox environments, and you're psyched to see a little bit of silo behavior happening, so what we're trying to do is that IT shop is trying to dispatch those environments, dispatch with some speed, with some agility. They want to have it at the right economic model as well, so we're trying to strike a better balance, say 'Hey, I've invested in all this infrastructure already, I need to modernize it, and that I also need to offer it up in a way that data scientists can consume it'. Oh, by the way, we're starting to see them start to hire more and more of these data scientists. Well, you don't want your data scientists, this very expensive, intelligent resource, sitting there doing data mining, data cleansing, detail offloads, we want them actually doing modeling and analytics. So we find that a lot of times right now as you're doing an operational change, the operational mindset as you're starting to hire these very expensive people to do this very good work, at the corest of the data, but they need to get productive in the way that you hired them to be productive. >> So what is this ready solution, can you just explain what that is? Is it a program, is it a hardware, is it a solution? What is the ready solution? >> Generally speaking, what we do as a division is we look for value workloads, just generally speaking, not necessarily in batch processing, or AI, or applications, and we try and create an environment that solves that customer challenge, typically they're very complex, SAP, Oracle Database, it's AI, my goodness. Very difficult. >> Variety of tools, using hives, no sequel, all this stuff's going on. >> Cassandra, you've got Tensorflow, so we try fit together a set of knowledge experts, that's the key, the intellectual property of our engineers, and their deep knowledge expertise in a certain area. So for AI, we have a sight of them back at the shop, they're in the lab, and this is what they do, and they're serving up these models, they're putting data through its paces, they're doing the work of a data scientist. They are data scientists. >> And so this is where BlueData comes in. You guys are part of this abstraction layer in the ready solutions. Offering? Is that how it works? >> Yeah, we are the software that enables the self-service experience, the multitenancy, that the consumers of the ready solution would want in terms of being able to onboard multiple different groups of users, lines of business, so you could have a user that wants to run basic spark, cluster, spark jobs, or you could have another user group that's using Tensorflow, or accelerated by a special type of CPU or GPU, and so you can have them all on the same infrastructure. >> One of the things Peter and I were talking about, Dave Vellante, who was here, he's at another event right now getting some content but, one of the things we observed was, we saw this awhile ago so it's not new to us but certainly we're seeing the impact at this event. Hadoop World, there's now called Strata Data NYC, is that we hear words like Kubernetes, and Multi Cloud, and Istio for the first time. At this event. This is the impact of the Cloud. The Cloud has essentially leveled the Hadoop World, certainly there's some Hadoop activity going on there, people have clusters, there's standing up infrastructure for analytical infrastructures that do analytics, obviously AI drives that, but now you have the Cloud being a power base. Changing that analytics infrastructure. How has it impacted you guys? BlueData, how are you guys impacted by the Cloud? Tailwind for you guys? Helpful? Good? >> You described it well, it is a tailwind. This space is about the data, not where the data lives necessarily, but the robustness of the data. So whether that's in the Cloud, whether that's on Premise, whether that's on Premise in your own private Cloud, I think anywhere where there's data that can be gathered, modeled, and new insights being pulled out of, this is wonderful, so as we ditched data, whether it's born in the Cloud or born on Premise, this is actually an accelerant to the solutions that we built together. >> As BlueData, we're all in on the Cloud, we support all the three major Cloud providers that was the big announcement that we made this week, we're generally available for AWS, GCP, and Azure, and, in particular, we start with customers who weren't born in the Cloud, so we're talking about some of the large financial services >> We had Barclays UK here who we nominated, they won the Cloud Era Data Impact Award, and what they're actually going through right now, is they started on Prem, they have these really packaged certified technology stacks, whether they are Cloud Era Hadoop, whether they are Anaconda for data science, and what they're trying to do right now is, they're obviously getting value from that on Premise with BlueData, and now they want to leverage the Cloud. They want to be able to extend into the Cloud. So, we as a company have made our product a hybrid Cloud-ready platform, so it can span on Prem as well as multiple Clouds, and you have the ability to move the workloads from one to the other, depending on data gravity, SLA considerations. >> Compliancy. >> I think it's one more thing, I want to test this with you guys, John, and that is, analytics is, I don't want to call it inert, or passive, but analytics has always been about getting the right data to human beings so they can make decisions, and now we're seeing, because of AI, the distinction that we draw between analytics and AI is, AI is about taking action on the data, it's about having a consequential action, as a result of the data, so in many respects, NCL, Kubernetes, a lot of these are not only do some interesting things for the infrastructure associated with big data, but they also facilitate the incorporation of new causes of applications, that act on behalf of the brand. >> Here's the other thing I'll add to it, there's a time element here. It used to be we were passive, and it was in the past, and you're trying to project forward, that's no longer the case. You can do it right now. Exactly. >> In many respects, the history of the computing industry can be drawn in this way, you focused on the past, and then with spreadsheets in the 80s and personal computing, you focused on getting everybody to agree on the future, and now, it's about getting action to happen right now. >> At the moment it happens. >> And that's why there's so much action. We're passed the set-up phase, and I think this is why we're hearing, seeing machine learning being so popular because it's like, people want to take action there's a demand, that's a signal that it's time to show where the ROI is and get action done. Clearly we see that. >> We're capitalists, right? We're all trying to figure out how to make money in these spaces. >> Certainly there's a lot of movement, and Cloud has proven that spinning up an instance concept has been a great thing, and certainly analytics. It's okay to have these workloads, but how do you tie it together? So, I want to ask you, because you guys have been involved in containers, Cloud has certainly been a tailwind, we agree with you 100 percent on that. What is the relevance of Kubernetes and Istio? You're starting to see these new trends. Kubernetes, Istio, Cupflow. Higher level microservices with all kinds of stateful and stateless dynamics. I call it API 2.0, it's a whole other generation of abstractions that are going on, that are creating some goodness for people. What is the impact, in your opinion, of Kubernetes and this new revolution? >> I think the impact of Kubernetes is, I just gave a talk here yesterday, called Hadoop-la About Kubernetes. We were thinking very deeply about this. We're thinking deeply about this. So I think Kubernetes, if you look at the genesis, it's all about stateless applications, and I think as new applications are being written folks are thinking about writing them in a manner that are decomposed, stateless, microservices, things like Cupflow. When you write it like that, Kubernetes fits in very well, and you get all the benefits of auto-scaling, and so control a pattern, and ultimately Kubernetes is this finite state machine-type model where you describe what the state should be, and it will work and crank towards making it towards that state. I think it's a little bit harder for stateful applications, and I think that's where we believe that the Kubernetes community has to do a lot more work, and folks like BlueData are going to contribute to that work which is, how do you bring stateful applications like Hadoop where there's a lot of interdependent services, they're not necessarily microservices, they're actually almost close to monolithic applications. So I think new applications, new AI ML tooling that's going to come out, they're going to be very conscious of how they're running in a Cloud world today that folks weren't aware of seven or eight years ago, so it's really going to make a huge difference. And I think things like Istio are going to make a huge difference because you can start in the cloud and maybe now expand on to Prem. So there's going to be some interesting dynamics. >> Without hopping management frameworks, absolutely. >> And this is really critical, you just nailed it. Stateful is where ML will shine, if you can then cross the chasma to the on Premise where the workloads can have state sharing. >> Right. >> Scales beautifully. It's a whole other level. >> Right. You're going to the data into the action, or the activity, you're going to have to move the processing to the data, and you want to have nonetheless, a common, seamless management development framework so that you have the choices about where you do those things. >> Absolutely. >> Great stuff. We can do a whole Cube segment just on that. We love talking about these new dynamics going on. We'll see you in CF CupCon coming up in Seattle. Great to have you guys on. Thanks, and congratulations on the relationship between BlueData and Dell EMC and Ready Solutions. This is Cube, with the Ready Solutions here. New York City, talking about big data and the impact, the future of AI, all things stateful, stateless, Cloud and all. It's theCUBE bringing you all the action. Stay with us for more after this short break.

>> From Union Square in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Pager Duty Summit '18. Now, here's Jeff Frick. >> Hey welcome back here everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Pager Duty Summit 2018, at the Weston St. Francis, Union Square in San Francisco. It's a beautiful day outside, a really historic building, and we're happy to be here for our second Pager Duty Summit, and our next guest, super excited to have him, we didn't have him last year. He's Alex Solomon, the Co-Founder and CTO of Pager Duty, Alex, great to see you. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Absolutely, so we were just talking a little bit. Before we turned the cameras on, you started this little adventure in '09, so it's been nine years. So what, I'd just love to get your perspective, as you come to something like this, and look at all these people that are here, to see what started as just a germ of an idea, back in your head nine years ago. >> Yeah, it's exciting to see such an amazing conference. We have over 800 people here today, and it's definitely buzzing. I could feel the excitement in the air. >> Right, well Ray Kurzweil is the Keynote, that's getting right up there. >> Exactly. >> Really an amazing story. One of the things that was, that was key to Ray's topic was the accelerating technology curve, in terms of power and performance, and it's not linear, it accelerates, and you guys have seen a huge growth in your business, and your throughput and all the incidents that you're reporting, and now we're talking about BI, and using Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to make some sense and to help filter through all this phenomenal amount of throughput. So how are you, how do you see that opportunity, how are you guys grasping the opportunity? What are you going to do with that Machine Learning? >> Sure, so about three months ago, we launched our new Event Intelligence product, which is all about capturing the, all the signals coming out of all of your different tools, things like monitoring tools. Things like ticketing systems, collaboration tools like Slack, and processing all those signals, mostly events and alerts and filtering out the noise. So a lot of alerts and events are not necessarily relevant for someone to get paged about in the middle of the night. Maybe it's a false alert, maybe it's something that has gone up, and will fix itself. >> Right. >> So it's about filtering out all the noise in there, and it's also about automatically clustering, and correlating related events. So we take those events in, and then we group them together into incidents, and we determine the surface area of the problem, which systems are affected, and we page those people, and only those people, so that they can respond to the incident. >> Right. So do you leverage the total learning of the Pager Duty System, in kind of an anonymized way, so you can leverage the multi-billions of dollars worth of incidents to get that type of learning, that was one of Ray's key themes, it helps if you have a billion of something, if you want to start applying some of these Machine Learning techniques. >> Exactly, so the more data you have when you're applying AI and ML, the better the results will be. We have over nine years of data that we've accumulated since founding the company, and we leveraged that for (mumbles) conditions, so for, I'll give you an example. If you're looking at an incident, you just got paged for something, or multiple people got paged, and you're looking at an evolving situation, our algorithms will automatically look in the past, and see has this type of problem happened before? Have you seen this type of incident before? Have you seen these events come in before, that are similar to this and, if so, what happened last time? >> Right. >> Who solved it, what was the resolution, so you can apply that knowledge, to the problem, and resolve it much faster. >> Right. So is it? So you do it both within the existing company, and their ecosystem so yeah, Joe solved it last time, Suzie solved it the time before, as well as to get more of an aggregate, of kind of an anonymized of we see this pattern over and over and over, this might be what you're looking at. >> Yeah, and we haven't done the aggregate picture yet, but it's something that we're very excited about, because we have the potential to become kind of like the Internet weather, where we can tell, based on the number of customers that we have, problems with the Internet, such as, let's say one of the Public Cloud providers is having an issue. Well, they have lots of customers that are Pager Duty customers, and they can now see oh, we have, we're seeing all of this additional incident activity, in this part of the Internet. >> Right. So there's something going on. >> Right. >> And we can start, this is an opportunity that we're very excited about, start telling, being able to tell, oh there's a problem with one of the Cloud providers, there's a problem with one of the main, big infrastructure providers that is commonly used by a lot of different companies. >> Right, because so many of these systems now, are so interdependent. You've got all these APIs, from all these different applications, all these different Cloud providers, and the whole thing stitched together so, trying to figure out where that little, the glitch is, is not necessarily as easy as when you kind of controlled everything. >> Exactly. >> It's funny too, because Jen had a line from her Keynote, which you just triggered. She said, "You know, we're the ones that want to be up, "when the rest of the world seems down." >> Yeah, exactly. >> So, let me expand on that a little bit. So you were the Founder. Jennifer came in a couple years ago, if I recall. I'm sure everyone who loves the classic entrepreneur tale, who liked to watch the show. You founded it, you got it to a certain point, and at some point you decided, you're going to bring in a new CEO. Wonder if you can talk a little bit about how that process went down. Kind of your thoughts as a Founder, of making that transition to see your company go, from this stage to that stage. >> Sure, sure, so yeah, I was the Founding CEO. I built, well me, not just by myself, but with my two Co-founders, and with the great team that we hired, we built the company from zero to over fifty million in annual recurring revenue. The company, when we decided to make that transition, I got into about 200 people or so. So a pretty good scale starting from nothing. >> Yeah, and to a fifty million run right, that's good. >> Yeah, and I'm a first-time entrepreneur, so I haven't done this before, and at that point we had a lot of work to do on the product side of things, like a lot of exciting new things, such as Event Intelligence that we just launched earlier this year, and other products are on Analytics and Visibility, that we're announcing here today. But I found myself spending a lot of my time, inside the building hiring and managing, and I didn't get enough of an opportunity to talk to customers and think about product, and think about the vision, what should we be building next? >> Right, right. >> So I wanted to go and focus more of my time in that direction. I initially started by thinking, maybe I can hire a CEOO, like a Chief Operating Officer to run Sales/Marketing and I can focus on Product and Engineering. Did a lot of due diligence, and talking to other CEOs who had been there, and done that, and realized that while that may solve some problems, it introduces new ones, and that the best bet is to find a World Class CEO. Like the best people out there in the world, are going to command that title, and they're going to want that role. >> Right. >> And I could still get to focus on product, and on talking to customers, and on vision, by replacing myself and taking on a CTO role, so that's what I ultimately decided to do. Had lots of help from the Board, who was very supportive in this decision, and they helped a lot with the interview process for, and the screening process for finding Jennifer. >> Well, you did good. We've known Jennifer for a long time, so I think that was one of your better hires. >> Absolutely. >> In the long history of the company. >> My best hire. Your best hire, very good. Well, and again, congratulations, it's funny you know, you see it over and over right? Overnight successes that are 10 years in the making. You know clearly, your last round of funding was a huge validation on your guy's strategy, and where you're taking the company, and then I just want to call out too, you guys were chosen for the Ernst & Young Co-founder, wait, hold on, the Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2018. Which is funny because you always think of that as maybe a little company just getting started right, or a really early entrepreneur. But you guys have been at this for nine years. Again, really good validation as to where you are in the market, and people realizing the value that you guys are delivering, so congratulations on that. >> Thank you very much. >> Alright Alex, well thanks for taking a few minutes from I'm sure, a very busy couple of days, and it was great to meet you. >> Absolutely, thanks for having me on the show. >> Alright, he's Alex, I'm Jeff. We're at Pager Duty Summit 2018, thanks for watching. (bright music)

(techno music) >> From Orlando, Florida, it's The Cube. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to The Cube. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we are at SAP Sapphire Now 2018 in Orlando. This is a massive event. Not only are there 20,000 people here but there's about a million engaging with SAP this week online. Amazing! We're joined by a Cube alumni. Welcome back to The Cube >> Thank you Lisa. Chris Hallenbeck. You are the SVP of Database and Data Management at SAP. >> What they tell me. (laughter) >> That's what they tell you. That's what your cards say? >> It is. >> Alright. Well, thanks for coming onto The Cube. So this event is enormous. Sixteen American football fields is this space. You really can close your rings. >> Well, and it is, is the energy is just crazy. It's actually different than other years. I don't know why but it really it is. >> You know yesterday, that's what Keith and I were saying yesterday. Bill McDermott really kicked things off with such enthusiasm and genuine energy. It was really amazing to see that. You don't see that with a lot of, see levels on day one. That energy was really palpable as was. >> Enterprise applications aren't that sexy huh? (crosstalk) >> Apparently they are. >> Well, apparently they are now. >> Who knew? >> Well, and that's the thing too. You guys wanting to be one of the top ten most valuable brands in the world. Up there with Apple, Google. And one of the cool things I saw yesterday on a bus out here was ERP that you can talk to and hear from. So taking this, what was an invisible product and making it now something that people can engage with like a digital assistant at home. Remarkable. >> Well, yeah. No. The user interface which has been a huge, huge thing. We have these massive UX labs throughout the world. We have ones in Palo Alto. We have ones throughout Germany and other locations. And we've been really looking at how people engage with the software. And it's not only through a screen although that's it and we win all these Red Dot awards, the Preeminent Design Award. We get those consistently now, many a year, for the work we're doing within UI which is fabulous work. But we're also again, a lot of people aren't in front of computers anymore. So how can I actually just speak into my phone and get all the information I need? How can I have the device speak to me? How can somebody wearing gloves on an assembly line, automatically they vibrate if they're reaching for the wrong bin and would have grabbed the wrong part which create a faulty defective product. So it's all built in, our actually shoes vibrating if something else happens. And so actually this interaction of sensors in two way, taking IOT data in, and then also feeding it back into signals but that's part of the interface of the software. It's not always sitting in a screen and if you are in front of a screen, they're actually pretty great to use. >> So speaking of these consumer technologies, we've had this expectation and these technologies have changed the expectations of what our business tech is. We expect to be able to do things such as, hey, say what's the latest score from last night's game. And now there's these intelligent streams of having conversations with computers. All that is powered by the data on the backend. SAP traditionally hadn't been. We talked about it on stage this morning. SAP hadn't been known for the type of company to sub at to the real-time data entry, real-time data analytics. >> Yeah. You're all about data management. We heard something on the stage this morning. What was it? Data management suite? (crosstalk) The mature database now. (crosstalk) What is that? What's that about? >> Well, now what we're finding, you know, HANA enabled these incredible use cases and originally we were all, we actually didn't run underneath SAP applications an entire database but really a data platform that people were doing these incredible innovations on. And then of course it really started to get swept underneath and it went under BW and then it became part of Sweden HANA and everyone just focused said, oh yeah, HANA is just gonna be like Netweaver. It's just a system that runs underneath SAP and we kept saying no, it's not, no, it's not. And it was sort of but that was its main, that was where it was mostly getting deployed. And then what you're actually seeing here at Sapphire is this massive breakout of technology in full use use cases. That people are using it outside even non-SAP customers are using it to solve their individual problems. Really going after that huge, that 80% of data which is non-SAP but the challenge there with is how do you handle that? Data is now sitting out in all these different clouds. HANA was known for orchestrating data but it was really designed to do it on premise because we knew not everyone's gonna put data into our system. We came in late, right. And yeah we're the fastest growing but data was sitting in Oracle, and the TIZA and that's coming up and going into data lakes, running on ADO and we could orchestrate and move that data into HANA or do it in place. Go to the cloud, it's totally different. Average customer and CIOs are telling you they have six to eight clouds and you're like, wait, how did you get to six to eight? And you're like, yeah, they've got data in storage just in Azure, in AWS, and in Google but they've also got in all these different cloud applications and a lot are from SAP but a lot aren't and yet and so companies are telling us we've lost the view of who our customer is. We've lost view of our business. Which is the opposite of what you would have expect from this data explosion and, you know, digital transformation which was like showed up and disappeared in like two years but so how do you handle that? If I have data. So much data sitting out there. IOT data in the edge, love file data sitting in object stores, I've got data in different applications, data still on Fram. How can I actually possibly move that? You can't. There's no way to put it all together in one cloud. Everyone says, oh, bring it to my cloud. It's not viable. >> Right. So how do I actually push compute, get the data I need, refine it in place, and orchestrate and move that together with the ultimate security in governance? Which is what our customers are wanting. They're saying, how Chris for our non-SAP data and SAP, can I move data for application integration? How do I do analytics? How can I pre-press data and load it into a data lake, into a data warehouse and then I'll come back and do some other cool stuff on it with data science? And that's all about by combining HANA and data hub together in a suite with deep integrations, technically from a data center readiness it's all as a service runs in the cloud but because we're SAP it's also on Prem enabled if you still want to run it that way. And it allows you to solve these huge data problems and we also help you. We bring SAPs intellectual property of data models to this so you can use things like Enterprise Architecture designer and say look we don't have a model of customer. I'm like, well yeah, what kind of industry are you in? Okay, I've got a high tech customer model pre-built for you so then you don't have to build that from scratch. We bring the things to you. So now you can get very, very quick value right from the implementation within weeks. >> And that speed is obviously essential. >> Well, how does it. (crosstalk) >> HANA's a terror, which it's known for. >> But you're right, sorry Keith, you're right that in the consumer world because we have access to everything everywhere from so many devices, we as business people expect the same thing. >> Yeah. And so that speed is critical. You talk about, you know, multiple clouds, data in so many different sources. It's not valuable unless you can actually harness it and extract insights that may only be viable for a quarter or something like that. >> But nobody even knows where the data is and so you look at like we're about to, we were talking about HANA. I just came back and we're coming out a little bit later the year with HANA data hub 2.3 which is part of HANA data management suite and that actually has a whole metadata repository. So someone who knows what they're doing goes in and maps out where all this data is located and actually they don't have to do it all themselves, it's got heuristic-al and semantic search to automatically map and categorize data. I can then map that back to like my definition of customer or supplier and other things. Now everyone doing all the analytics and doing exactly what you're talking about Keith where can I just say into my phone, hey, someone in board meeting goes hey what were our results within two peak last year over this year and show and break that down by city and have it just pop up. Just like you say to somebody, hey high school football game, didn't those two play together? Anyone can do that on a mobile device but we don't know the data in our own company. How do you do that? And then let HANA data management suite will automatically know where the data is, orchestrate, go get it, pull it together, and deliver that back to a mobile device that you might have spoken into. >> Do you have a favorite customer that articulates just what you said? >> I do. I just actually walked out of a session. It was just and it sounds a little boring but it's incredible what people are doing. So I just walked out of a thing with the Swiss Federal Railways. Sounds boring but you know where. I live in Europe and everything is by rail, right? And so they're doing about 60 percent of the rail traffic there is passengers, 1.25 million passengers a day plus the balance of 40 percent of the trains are freight. They're having a huge problem because you use huge, it's all electrical and they're trying and so when you get up and it's growing rapidly. So they're, and they do their own power with power plants and when they go up with power plants, when they go over peak they have to spot by at just massive times a premium on that data on that. And we're actually doing this a lot of place out of rail but they also use electricity on heaters and other stuff in the cold winters and air conditioners. They're now streaming information off the trains, off of the points all the way along the signals and from all the power plants. They know peak usage. It automatically detects when they're going to go over and rather than going into the plants, it actually cuts the heaters off for a second here or there. There's heaters in all the switching equipment. They know how long they can do it. HANA managed this, this is automatically so it's IOT in but it's automatically making automated business decisions, shutting down systems programmatically, intelligently actually using machine learning and keeping it. So now what they do, so now they don't need to go out to the spot market in buy energy anymore. It has cut their electrical usage by a third. >> How much money have they saved? >> No, what's a third is how much money they've saved. The electricity is still high but they're not buying that really, really >> The premium. expensive premium and so you're streaming data, it's all over, it's all happening in real time, and it's automatically kicking out business processes without human intervention. And then it's a platform for them where they're adding all this new capability to save in other ways and so it's just, you know, simple but clean really good use. Good for the planet. It's great for the customers. And now they have, and by the way, when you hit those peaks, that's when they short-out systems and that's when trains stall out. So actually you're getting better servicing of the trains. So, yeah, it's good storage. >> So edge core cloud, great breakdown of kind of the use case. The data is being collected at the edge. Data may not even be collected in a SAP system? (crosstalk) We're doing great! >> It's reality. >> It is reality and one of the things that I think architecturally that enterprises have a hard time wrapping their head around, HANA in-memory database defeats latency when you're inside the database, when you're inside of the data center, however you were thinking about HANA data management. How does the in-memory database impact and data management impact data retrieved from the edge? Help explain the importance of metadata and willing down that data so that we can get it back to the cloud and process their important data. >> Keith, it's a great question. Sometimes, HANA is not, you know. Although we like to go it's a hammer and we think everything's a nail but sometimes you don't which is why we have data hub. And it has unique capabilities for doing something called data pipelines and movement. So we can actually do all the data transformation movement calling tensor flow in flight. We do this as the data is in movement so we're actually doing all of that processing as it's moving through. If you need extra horsepower and want to combine different data types and there's certain capabilities pipeline engines don't solve well. HANA is a service which HANA is now completely cloud native. They can actually bring up HANA in a few seconds. It will take the data flow in, compute it, it's not being used as database, it's a compute layer out at the edge, the data flows out to move on to the next step usually via a data pipeline from data hub and that service gets shut off. So you just pay from small compute when you need to bring out the big guns and then it moves on. And maybe that data never comes back into a HANA system, maybe it does, but you're using the technological underpinnings of in-memory computing in this way as just literally a flow through compute engine. >> And I think that's the disconnect a lot of organizations have because you associate s4 bases, BW, all these applications on top of the database. They don't think of HANA as something that you can spin up, spin down. >> But that's brand-new and that is what we just announced and went live last week. So HANA was, there's traditional on-prem system, bare-metal, it run virtualized but I mean talking about big arm running HANA systems. Now to actually have it, so HANA as a service came up. We rewrote the entire thing to make it completely cloud native and orchestrated. It's all containerized in elastic. It runs, it came up last week running an AWS and available also in GCP. Our target is a little bit later this year. I always have to use a safe harbor language. It'll be coming up on, it'll be coming up in Azure and after all the rest of SAPs data centers and then also coming out and in Asia through Huawei and coming up in those data centers as well as some others we have planned. And that's where you actually get this fully elastic HANA that's able to come up and come down automatically. >> So this massive transformation that you guys have achieved in 46 years, say 46 years young, 390,000 customers. >> Yeah. SAP didn't get to where it is without having a really robust symbiotic partner relationship ecosystem. We're here in the NetApp booth. There's a 150 partner sessions alone at Sapphire this week. Talk to us a little bit about how the partner ecosystem is helping you guys give customers the flexibility and the choice that they need. >> Yeah, no, and it is. SAP can't do everything. And so a lot of the aspects are that we look at in very different ways. Of course, some companies and the big corporations we deal with need strategic SIs, these strategic integrators to do consulting and other pieces and we work really closely with them on and they have specialized practices and other things on both HANA. They're extending out into the HANA data management suite. We do the same thing since we realize you need boutiques. We're the fastest geospatial engine in the world but that's a very niche piece although geospatials may be the hottest data type out there happening right now. Those are very specialized boutique firms. So we work with all of those and to help our customers when they need that. So we work with a lot of specialists. We work boutiques but we couldn't do this without hardware partners, with storages which is why we allow. There's still a lot of folks running on Prem. So we still have to have all these things so we have HANA tailor data center integration so you can certify your systems like NetApp. You can certify everything else on prem so you don't have to rebuy new hardware. Use what you have. I'm not trying to get you to buy a bunch of new appliances. And then the other one is a lot of is via and OEMs have started building out on HANA but now what they really want to do is go directly on HDMS as the cloud offering because it runs both in any cloud, which is a very unique differentiator that we run in every major cloud out there, as well as coming back and running on-premise. They can play their applications very risk-free with the extreme security and governance we're providing within that stack to build applications that they want to sell and use for enterprises. >> So you've been with SAP about six years you said and even Bill McDermott said in his keynote on day one, biggest Sapphire ever. You've seen a tremendous amount of growth. The momentum here is so palpable. The types of validation that SAP is getting through the voice of the customer, through partners like Netta, the different partner ecosystem. That validation is electric. >> Yeah. >> What excites you about everything that was just announced in the last couple of days about the rest of 2018? Where do you go from here? >> Oh my god! Okay, it's like asking me to pick my favorite child. (crosstalk) But, you know, honestly I get to. You get to see the innovations that I still enjoy. I love the full use use cases because I'm like a compute guy at heart but I see all the applications that we've done in these demonstrations. The fact that people have applications that are giving all of the analytics in line with the transactions on these gorgeous UIs. I mean you run these things on a mobile device that means the data layer has 20 milliseconds to actually not only grab the data but to do all the predictive analytics and everything you see to give you that nice two second screen to screen time on your mobile device and that's what we've worked for six years to enable. And now we're seeing that potential coming out at places like Swiss Rail. Just was talking with Gustav Rossi through the biggest cancer research labs and hospitals throughout all of Europe. They're doing all this genomic research, personalized medicine for cancer patients throughout Europe using HANA. I didn't even know about it, you know, or other ones we talked about beef farmers. Talking about smart farming throughout all the Netherlands. Reducing pesticide use, water usage dramatically down, and they increased yields by 10 percent. I mean and they're doing this on native HANA. So this area for me, the excitement of people and busting out of the SAP core traditional CIO market and moving into this 80% of data is to me exciting that people are seeing that HANA is not just an SAP appliance but it's really a general-purpose data platform for these innovation use cases. >> Helping customers change their business, change industries, save lives, pretty cool stuff. >> Yeah, I think so. >> Chris, thank you so much for stopping by The Cube and sharing with us your enthusiasm and your excitement for what you're doing at SAP. We appreciate it. >> Well, thank you very much. This was awesome. Thank you guys. >> We want to thank you for watching The Cube. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend at SAP Sapphire 2018. Thanks for watching! (techno music)

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018, brought to you by NetApp. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin, with Keith Townsend on the ground at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018, we're in the NetApp booth, and we are joined by a CUBE alumni, Brian Ferrar, Marketing Manager for SAP at Cisco, welcome. >> Thank you, thank you, it's great to be here. >> So you are a veteran, you've been at Cisco, you said, about four years. But you have been in the SAP community for a long time. This is, I think I was reading, the 25th time that they've done an event like this. Now, obviously, an event with north of 20,000 people, a million people, Bill McDermott said, engaging online. Wow, we're in the NetApp booth. Tell us, Brian, about this trifecta: NetApp, Cisco, SAP. >> Well sure, thank you very much, first of all. We appreciate the invitation to be here. We've been working with Cisco, Cisco's been working with NetApp and SAP on solutions for our customers together for about 10 years. And in that time, our joint solution for SAP, which we called a FlexPod, which combines Cisco UCS servers with NetApp storage, and of course then there's Cisco networking. That's become one of the most preferred platforms to run SAP HANA on. There was a recent IDC survey, in fact, end of last year, in which they went out, without any consultation with us vendors, and did an independent, true market research survey, with over 300 end users of HANA, and they asked, what was the best platform, what was the most preferred platform to run on. And by far, it was FlexPod, with Cisco and NetApp. And the favorite storage platform, by far NetApp. So we think we're doing a really good job for our customers, but there's always room for improvement, so we're ever innovating, and that, I think, is the secret to our success. Constant, repetitive innovation, making it better and better and better. >> So if we look at these digital transformation platforms of the future: SAP HANA, Leonardo, and then we think about the Cisco, NetApp value prop. How does those individual components play in that equation? >> Well a couple of ways I think, it's a great question. First of all, you gotta start with the very core of what you're concerned about. This is a risky situation. You're running your companies most valuable asset, your supply chain, on this stuff. And so you wanna make sure that the platform you're using is rigorously tested and even more rigorously secured. So one of the things we're known for, and we do this with NetApp, on the FlexPod platform, is our CVDs, Cisco Validated Designs, in which we pretest and precertify everything that you would have to do to implement your SAP solution on a FlexPod. And that's all documented. So if you follow the instructions, you're gonna get a foolproof installation. Then the second way, is we need to make operation and management of these environments simpler and easier. Everybody's looking to reduce cost, reduce resources, improve performance. So one of the ways we've really distinguished ourselves in this market, especially with NetApp, is something we call policy-based infrastructure. We have a product called ACI, Application. (laughs) ACI, what's ACI? It's Application Centric Infrastructure. And it allows us to automate the deployment and management of HANA on these solutions. In fact, one SAP executive saw this and coined the term, One Click Deployment. And I won't say it's just one click deployment, there is some tweaking, but that speaks to the simplicity of deploying it on a FlexPod. But more than that, then we apply that automation to the management and the ongoing orchestration of that environment. And so, for example, if you wanna keep security threats out of your environment, you can automate our Tetration solution on top of that platform that looks at incoming code, looks for patterns, and detects inappropriate activity before it has time to harm your system. Another way we do that was with a product we're unveiling here at SAPPHIRE, which is AppDynamics for SAP. AppDynamics is a fairly famous company around monitoring applications, and Cisco acquired them about a year ago, and we're unveiling their solution for SAP in our booth with number 550, in fact. And that allows you to look all the way down to the code level and see what's happening. >> So, let's pick that apart a little bit, that's pretty amazing. I'm familiar with AppDynamics, it was a born-in-the-cloud solution. So when you think about SAP, and you think about traditional applications built on SAP, you don't think about AppDynamics, you know. AppDynamics was this thing that could allow you to monitor and troubleshoot code across clouds. What's their play with SAP. >> It's hard to say, anymore that anybody's running SAP just on premise, or just in cloud. We live in a hybrid world, a lot of people call it the multi cloud world. And you have to have these management and monitoring tools work both on prem and in the cloud. Basically, they gotta follow your data. And that's the beauty of AppDynamics, is it works across all those multi cloud environments. And I think that's the big play for us with them. We're very concerned about security, coming from a network background, we're very aware of intrusion capabilities, the size of your attack surface, how cloud actually increases the size of your attack surface. So you need a tool like AppDynamics, and other tools that Cisco has, as I mentioned our Tetration tool, to really watch that code and that data going across your infrastructure. And also to keep an eye out for bad actors. It's unfortunately a dangerous world now. Just read the news and see all the companies that have had their brand essentially held hostage with ransomware, for example. >> So let's talk about support. I love the idea of being able to take the infrastructure, outsource the engineering of that to Cisco, FlexPod, Tetration, these validated designs that makes deployment simple. But support, when there's a problem with a query, that's supporting a digital transformation initiative, who do I call? Do I call NetApp, do I call SAP, do I call Cisco? >> It's a great question, it's a great question, 'cause nobody here, not just Cisco, but no vendor here at the show today, implements a solution just on their own, and every environment has multiple pieces in the solution. Cisco takes ownership of the support of all the components, even our partner components, of any solution we deploy. So it's one stop shopping for your support calls. Now if we find it escalates to a higher and higher level, we have direct connections to our partners, third level support escalation teams, and we bring them in, and we solve the problem, but we never let go of it. We don't hand it off, we maintain that incident. No finger pointing, and if you've ever had any personal issues at home on your laptop, and tried to get somebody to help, and you call one person and they point you to another, Yeah, it just doesn't happen. >> My better half just always blames it on the network. And I'm not a network guy anymore, so it's never my fault. (laughing) >> But speaking of needing to delight customers, one of the things that, thematically, was talked about this morning in Bill Mcdermott's keynote is enabling the intelligent enterprise and really being able to embed AI into the technologies to unite the humans with the machines. I loved how he talked about augmenting humanity, and what he talked about there was really. >> The Brave New World, huh? >> Right, and kind of, not calling out their competitors by name, but we all know who they are, and really saying that what SAP is now doing is connecting, synchronizing, the demand chain with the supply chain. So enabling the customers who don't care what's under the hood, right? To focus on their customers, to get this comprehensive customer view. >> I actually really liked that part of the keynote because that description characterizes Cisco ourselves as SAP's customer. So we eat our own dog food, to use the cliche, but you talk about artificial intelligence and machine learning. Last year at SAPPHIRE, we won the HANA innovation award, for the innovation that we did on HANA with AI and machine learning. And we implement that internally, not just for our customers, but internally for ourselves, we do all our sales forecasting, and supply chain management with HANA using AI and machine learning for better insights. And it has made a world of difference to our internal supply chain and IT teams. I mean it's funny because, 20 years ago, we would have called it magic, and it's not, it's innovation. In fact that's the theme of our booth here at SAPPHIRE this week, is it's not magic, it's innovation. We actually have a magician in the booth sawing people in half. You're welcome to come by. If you fit in the booth, you can be sawed in half. >> I might be in trouble here. >> You have to be rather small, but we'll show you how the trick is even done. And that's the thing with innovation, differentiating it from magical claims that other vendors might make. We show you under the covers, how it's done, and we share everything and document everything. And that's actually going back to those CVDs that are so valuable to our customers. >> So let's talk about one of the pillars of Cisco, which is security. As we look at where data's at, we're talking about Edge, the data center, and somewhere in between, >> Yeah, everywhere in between. >> Everywhere in between, security has to follow the data. How does Cisco with NetApp help administrators follow the data? >> Oh, that's another good question. I was in a presentation from an analyst recently, it said the world's data is now increasing, it's doubling every two years. The entire world's data is doubling every two years. So how do you keep track of that and how do you manage it? One of the ways we do it, and we do this with NetApp as well and the FlexPod, is we have security embedded in every aspect, so we talk about computing at the Edge, with IOT devices, you know? Smart cars is an example everyone understands. But there's supply chain IOT out there on the Edge as well. Tracking shipments and ballots, and widgets, and units. And we talk about computing at the fog, and trying to get computing as close to the transaction as possible, for low latency, high performance. But then for deep analytics, you're bringing that data back to the core. So you've got a lot of places where you could be attacked, as I mentioned earlier, that attack surface has now grown dramatically, it's no longer isolated within the four walls of your data center. So we embed security at every place along that chain. Coming from a network heritage, we have intelligent routers, often ruggedized, that we can put out there in the Edge, with security, to catch inappropriate activity happening, coming in from an IOT source for example, from a sensor. That is not what we were expecting and could potentially be an attack. And then we can analyze it before it ever gets into your valuable data center. And so we're putting that security at the Edge, in the fog, on the servers, in the data center, on the routers, on the network, you name it. We think there's no one solution. You have to have an all encompassing end to end solution, that literally surrounds you with that security bubble, and that's what we're doing. In fact, we, by the way, to put a plugin for Cisco, we just came out with our annual Cybersecurity Report, which is one of the most popular supports on cyber security trends every year in the industry. So Cisco puts that together, and obviously takes it very seriously. >> So you mentioned AppDynamics before, monitoring SAP apps, you just mentioned security. Put that in the context of this next generation data center. What does a customer, what can they expect working with Cisco, NetApp, and SAP, to evolve to a next gen data center. >> It's an interesting question, because the very nature of the data center is changing now. I mean, you know if I'm on the road and I'm processing end of year financial closes or end of quarter financial closes, am I a data center? If I'm processing IOT data on the Edge, and because it's so critical, for example, take oil and gas. They can measure that remote oil well in dollars per second, or tens of thousands of dollars per second of down time. And so you want the data coming in from that well. Pressure, temperature, potential downtime, coming in in time to fix it before it breaks, is that now a data center? So we're talking about, what does it mean? The definitions of compute, of data capture have all changed. The idea is you've gotta follow that data. And that's what we're looking at for the future, I think, is the data center is no longer an internal monolithic, controlled environment, that you can be very certain of. Now you've gotta follow that data and adapt your security to the type of processing you're doing, whether it's in the data center core or out there on the Edge. And I think that's what we're evolving to. Someday we'll all be data centers. >> So let's talk about that, all on the data center. Developers are now developing applications, containers, they practically have data centers on their laptop. Connect the dots for us, where Cisco plays in. >> This is actually one of the latest developments, I think, in the industry, is the emergence of something called containers. And we're the first vendor to work with SAP to implement our Cisco container platform, to provide their SAP data hub with containerized access. So now, that SAP data hub can become the nucleus of all incoming data and processing all big data for new insights, regardless of the source of that data or the application that data's running on. And that's what the beauty of containers is, is it encapsulates that application, so those rules come with that data, and so now you can, literally, connect everything to that central SAP data hub, and have complete, what did Bill Mcdermott call it, 360 degree visibility. And that's made possible by the ability to tap into not just new big data solutions that you have out there, but legacy big data solutions. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when there was such a thing called the data warehouse. And they were all proprietary and there were a whole bunch of them. And there are still our customers out there running not only the new stuff, but the legacy stuff, 'cause it works, they figured it out, and they don't wanna change it, it gives them good insights. So how do you take that legacy stuff now, and link it and combine it with all the new stuff coming out of, for example, your SAP supply chain, and the answer is the containers on top of that SAP data hub will do that for you. And that's really where we're taking it. There was a language, Esperanto, years and years ago, that was created in the '60s, '50s even. And I think the idea was it was gonna be a universal language that anybody could speak. So I don't speak Spanish, if they don't speak English, but we both speak Esperanto. And of course it never took off, because it was yet another language to learn. But the idea, the concept of having this in between piece that makes anything connect to anything is still a very intriguing idea for the human mind. And you can apply that to this data sphere, this global data sphere, and now, with something like a data hub tool and containers, that serve that encapsulation purpose, you can actually have a nucleus of big data and analytics in your company, that doesn't care where the data was originated from or what application it's running. It's still available to plug into your analysis, your planning. >> Well who knew, SAP, we heard Kubernetes, and AppDynamics in one interview at SAP SAPPHIRE, that's amazing. >> Mind blown? >> I get paid by the buzzword, you know. >> Wow! >> Yeah, I'm in marketing. >> So am I, I gotta tap into your expertise now. Brian, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE, and talking with Keith and me about what's new with Cisco, your partnership with SAP, and NetApp, and happy birthday. >> Thank you very much, I appreciate it. Come to the party. I'm actually having Justin Timberlake perform this year. >> That's very nice of you. >> You're all invited. >> Well thank you, wow, I'm glad I could make it to your birthday party. >> You guys have a great day. >> We wanna thank you for watching theCUBE, we are at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, thanks for watching.

(light techno music) >> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Covering ZertoCon 2018. Brought to you by Zerto. >> This is The Cube. We're at ZeratoCon 2018, Hines Convention Center in Boston. My name's Paul Gillin. My guest is John White, the VP of Product Strategy at Expedient. Why don't you start off by giving us just the elevator pitch on what Expedient is all about. >> Sure, Expedient is a cloud-service provider as well as managed service provider, and we also have data centers that we operate here mainly on the east coast. We have seven cities and 11 data centers. Those are in Boston here, locally as well as Baltimore, Maryland, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Memphis, Tennessee. And then we actually, we'll put our private cloud services really anywhere. So we actually will put 'em on the customer's premises to meet that need as well as in partner data centers anywhere over the world, if they have to deal with compliance, security, whatever it might be, we'll go and tackle those problems for them. So our goal is to be an infrastructure as a service provider for, you know, really all the enterprise. >> So, when would a company do business with you verses a Microsoft or an Amazon? >> Yeah, so, if you kind of look at really three ways to kind of go cloud, right? You can still do it yourself. You can build some cloud-based services. And that's, again, you're in it on your own. You can go all the way to the extreme, which is the AWS or the Azures, and that's more, again, you're kind of in a do-it-yourself type of mentality. And your support structure there is a little bit different. It's maybe a little bit more mechanical, a little bit more robotical. If you need help in transitioning and figuring out where your workload should sit, and maybe creating more of a hybrid cloud so it's maybe on your premises, it's inside one of our data centers, and then maybe it's even in one of those AWS or Azures. You're going to work with a company like Expedient to go and help you figure out where you should put your workloads, first off. And then how to create that long-term strategy so you get the best of all worlds that are out there, not just one prescriptive cloud. >> So, you're kind of a high-touch cloud provider then. >> Very, very high touch, yeah. Our whole product service is actually a la carte menus. So you pick and choose what you want. We can manage servers, we can provide virtual infrastructure, we can do things like DR as a service, backups as a service, all those pieces. So you build, basically, your perfect IT strategy with us. And then direct connects into AWS and Azure and some other cool products coming soon to kind of make your life a little bit easier, consuming and running your work loads in public clouds. >> Well we hear a lot these days about multi-cloud, about customers wanting to shift their work load seamlessly around between multiple back-end cloud providers. Certainly vendors talk about that a lot. Do you hear customers talking about it? >> Yeah, we have some customers starting to talk about it. And, you know, in the beginning, they just wanted to see, okay, I'm running workloads in AWS, I'm running workloads in Expedient, I'm multi-cloud. And then they start to understand. well, our management's really hard. And the network's really hard, and the security's really hard. And we're doing backups another way than we've done it traditionally. And we're helping customers bridge that gap and saying, we can take some of the security policies that we've been running internally in our data center, and maybe you've been doing inside your data center, and take those out into the public cloud. Simplifying things with networking. We're a pretty big VM or NXS shop. So doing something where you can create tagging and policies local inside the Expedient data center, and then being able to translate those up into AWS and Azure, to make it, basically, one seamless network, is really, really big and key for our customers. It's something that I think is still new. We have a handful of customers that we're working on a lot of cool research projects on. But I think it's going to be something that's going to be the dominant force here in the next few years. >> You mention disaster recovery as a service. Now is that where Zerto fits into your plan? >> Correct, yeah. We've been working with Zerto for quite some time now really since they were just comin' to Boston. And we worked and spent a ton of time with them getting them to understand the needs of service providers, 'cause they were traditionally enterprise focused. And that partnership that we've built over the years has done tremendous value for not only our customers but our businesses. And we've actually had two year-over-year growth for the last three years with them. And actually, we just won the Service Partner Growth Partner of the Year Award with them. So we're creating some pretty cool solutions around DR as a service, and taking some of our network background and actually simplifying DR for our customers that way. So, we use Zerto as well as VM Ware, and some of our own product connectivity, NSX, to actually simplify the package of DR to get the recovery time objective down into 10, 15 minutes, instead of four hours or eight hours or multiple days that really most people are experiencing right now. >> So when you look at the landscape, there are a lot of disaster recovery solution providers you could've worked with. What does Zerto do that's really different? >> The part, well, on a technology wise, watching them take a look at the change block that's occurring that's out of the VM1 environment, making an agnostic from a storage layer, that was really big for us in the beginning on the technical tip-in. And then the partnership, as of late, really since the beginning, was the big value differentiator that we just couldn't find in other companies that're out there. We locked arms with their product management team and their product strategy team right away. We gave them literally two sheets of paper and said these are the things we need to be successful as a service provider using your software. They went down, checked 'em all off. We started goin' at it, and we started then growing that year-over-year for the last three years. So, it's been an amazing partnership. They have a strategic team that understands where the marketing industry's going. And we're going to use them, and leverage them, as much as we possibly can to help out our customers, give 'em the best outcomes they can possibly get. >> When your customers talk to you about backup, where do you see them going? Where is that market headed? >> So backup, traditional backup is something we've been doin' for quite some time. We do petabytes of backups every year for customers. Still using tape, believe it or not, as well. We have a lot of discs-- >> Tape will never die. >> Tape is still out there. I actually have a bumper sticker that I think EMC made when they bought Avamar saying Tape is Dead. And I don't think it's going to die anytime soon. >> Mainframe was dead, too. >> Yeah, right, mainframe has been dead and we still roll new ones into our data centers on a regular basis and then put cloud beside it. But on the backup side of it, if you look at some of the new disasters, right? Look at Atlanta. Their disaster was different. It wasn't a natural disaster, it was a-- >> Radsomeware attack. >> Ransomeware attack. Right, that's a new disaster. We're going to find new disasters, and you can't go and restore back from 24 hours ago and think that that's good. We don't live in that world anymore. It needs to be from five minutes, seven minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it might be. So, we use their journaling today to actually get those quick recoveries. And if they can extend that out, I think it's going to be pretty powerful for customers to say, okay, I want to go back to two years, three days, and six hours from now. And say, gimme that point in time, snap. That's the way I want to actually restore that data. Succeeding in that vision I think will definitely change the game for how we actually look at doing backup and restores in the future. >> A lot of talk at this conference about resilience. >> John: Um hmm. >> Is that a concept that you think customers, your customers, have really internalized? They understand what that means? >> They're getting it, yeah, definitely. I mean, DR even was something that we had to kind of walk them into. But now, if they have an outage, it's not just money that they're losing. It's the reputation. And as we all know now, reputation is key. And you look at Twitter. When somebody has an outage, or has a problem, I mean, their users essentially just blow 'em up and there's memes and all kinds of other stuff. There's a lot of funny ones for the airlines, from Delta and Southwest havin' those challenges. And so, our customers today are realizing that yeah, we can't go a day or two without having service to our customers. We can maybe go a minute or two, but that's about it. We need to make sure we're being resilient with our data. We need to make sure we're protecting it, we'll be able to create ways to quickly roll it back to make sure our customers are up on line. Because they just can't go down anymore. >> How important is security as a driver of resilience and spending on disaster recovery now? >> Yeah, security is definitely, with being able to quickly restore from like a ransomware, it's startin' to bring that infrastructure that has been, security's been a little different there, and where network security's been a little bit different, kind of bringing them together to create, say, we need to have a full package. We not only need to figure out how we're blocking it at the edge and blocking it internally east west, but we need to figure out, if we're going to get breached, 'cause we're going to get breached, how can we quickly restore from that? How can we make sure we're not being held ransom for Bitcoin or whatever the next currency's going to be that they're going to be held ransom for that they just can't pay because maybe it would knock them out of business. >> So, John, Expedient, being a small, specialized cloud service provider, you're kind of dancing with elephants when you're out there with Amazon and Microsoft. What's the secret? What keeps you guys successful and how do you keep viable? >> There's a lot of different things. I think the way we focus on technologies is a little bit unique. I mean, we're there to design the best technical solution for that customer. And not maybe fit them into a one-size-fits-all outfit. The other side of it is, a lot of our customers like the local touch and feel. Majority of our customers are at and around our data centers. That way they can get to learn the facility, they can, even if they're running cloud services with us, they know where it lives. That maybe eases their minds from a compliance standpoint, security standpoint. Or just in a trust, saying, I'm going to take my data that's been living inside of my data center, that's key to my business, and I'm going to give it to somebody, I at least want a face and a name so I can know who to call and who to talk to if there is ever a problem. >> Face to face still matters. >> It does, and I think it's always going to matter. And I think we're always going to have some sort of high interaction with every enterprise out there. And that's what they're going to need. 'Cause this stuff can never commoditize all the way. Creating the solution is still hard. Maybe the bits and pieces underneath it are a little bit easier, but the whole packages is going to always be unique and really hard to define in a one-size-fits-all for a lot of those enterprises. >> John White, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> We'll be back from Zertocon 2018 here in Boston. I'm Paul Gillin, this is The Cube. (light techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> The sun has come out, but we're still talking about a lot of the cloud here at the OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program the 2018 Super User Award winner, George Mihaiescu, who's the senior cloud architect with the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research or OICR. First of all, congratulations. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> And thank you so much for joining us. So cancer research, obviously is, one of the things we talk about is how can technology really help us at a global standpoint, help people. So, tell us a little about the organization first, before we get into the tech of it? >> So OICR is the largest cancer research institution in Canada, and is funded by government of Ontario. Located in Toronto, we support about 1,700 researchers, trainees and clinician staff. It's focused entirely on cancer research, it's located in a hub of cancer research in downtown Toronto, with Princess Margaret Hospital, Sick Kids Hospital, Mount Sinai, very, very powerful research centers, and OICR basically interconnects all these research centers and tries to bring together and to advance cancer research in the province, in Canada and globally. >> That's fantastic George. So with that, sketch out for us a little bit your role, kind of the purview that you have, the scope of what you cover. >> So I was hired four years ago by OICR to build and design cloud environment, based on a research grant that was awarded to a number of principal investigators in Canada to build this cloud computing infrastructure that can be used by cancer researchers to do large-scale analysis. What happens with cancer, because the variety of limitations happening in cancer patients, researchers found that they cannot just analyze a few samples and draw a conclusion, because the conclusion wouldn't be actually valid. So they needed to do large-scale research, and the ICGC, which is International Cancer Genome Consortium, an organization that's made of 17 countries that are donating, collecting and analyzing data from cancer patients, okay, they decided to put together all this data and to align it uniformly using the same algorithm and then analyze it using the same workflows, in order to actually draw conclusion that's valid across multiple data sets. They are focusing on the 50 most common types of cancer that affect most people in this world, and for each type of cancer, at least two countries provide and collect data. So for brain cancer, let's say we have data sets from two countries, for melanoma, for skin, and this basically gives you better confidence that the conclusion you draw is valid, and then the more pieces of the puzzle you throw on the table, the easier to see the big picture that's this cancer. >> You know George, I mean, I'm a former academic, and you know, the more data you get right, the more infrastructure you're going to have to have. I'm just reading off the announcement, 2,600 cores, 18 terabytes of RAM, 7.3 petabytes of storage, right, that's a lot of data, and it's a lot of... accessed by a lot of different researchers. When you came in, was the decision to use OpenStack already made, or did you make that decision, and how was the cloud architected in that way? >> The decision was basically made to use open source. We wanted basically to spend the money on capacity, on hardware, on research and not on licensing and support. >> John: Good use of everybody's tax dollars. >> Exactly, so you cannot do that if you have to spend money for paying licensing, then you probably have only half of the capacity that you could. So that means less large analysis, and longer it takes, and more costly. So Ceph for storing the data sets and OpenStack for infrastructure as a service offering was a no-brainer. My specialty was in OpenStack and Ceph, I started OpenStack seven years ago, so I was hired to design and build, and I had a chance to actually do alignment, and invitation calling for some of the data sets, so I was able to monitor the kind of stress that this workflows put on the system, so when I design it, I knew what is important, and what to focus on. So it's a cloud environment, it's customized for cancer research. We have very good ratio of RAM per CPU, we have very large local discs for the VM, for the virtual machines to be able to download very large data sets. We built it so if one compute node fails, you only impact a few workflows running there, you don't impact single small points of failures. Another tuning that we applied to the system too. >> George, can walk us through a little bit of the stack? What do you use, do you build your own OpenStack, or do you get it from someone? >> So basically, we use community hardware, we just high-density chassis, currently from Super Micro, Ubuntu for the operating system, no licensing there, OpenStack from the VM packages. We focus more on stability, scalability and support costs, internal support costs, because it's just myself and I have a colleague Gerard Baker, who's a cloud engineer, and you have to support all this environment, so we try to focus on the features that are most useful to our users, as well as less strain on our time and support resources. >> I mean that's, let's talk about the scalability right? You said the team is you and a colleague. >> George: Yes. >> But mostly, right. And you know, in the olden days, right, you would be taking care of maybe a handful of machines, and maybe some disk arrays in the lab. Now you're basically servicing an entire infrastructure for all of Canada, right? At how many universities? >> Well basically, it's global, so we have 40 research projects from four continents. So we have from Australia, from Israel, from China, from Europe, US, Canada. So approved cancer researchers that can access the data open up an account with us, and they get a quota, and they start their virtual machines, they download the data sets from the extra API of Ceph to their VMS, and they do analysis and we charge them for the time used, and because the use, everything is open source, and we don't pay any licensing fees, we are able to, and we don't run for profit, we charge them just what it costs us to be able to replenish the hardware when it fails. >> Nice, nice. And these are actually the very large machines, right? Because you have to have huge, thick data sets, you've got big data sets you have to compare all at once. >> Yeah, an average bandwidth of a file that has the normal DNA of the patient, and they need also the tumor DNA from the biopsy, an average whole genome sequence is about 150 gigabytes. So they need at least 300 gigabytes, and depending on the analysis, if they find mutations, then the output is usually five, 10 gigabytes, so much smaller. For other workflows, you have to actually align the data, so you input 150 gigabytes and the output is 150 or a bit more with metadata. And so nevertheless, you need very large storage for the virtual machines, and these are virtual machines that run very hard, in terms of you cannot do CPU over subscription, you cannot do memory over subscription, when you have a workflow that runs for four days, hundred percent CPU. So is different than other web scale environments, where you have website was running at 10%, or you can do 10 to one subscription, and then you go much cheaper or different solutions. Here you have to only provide what you have physically. >> John: That's great. >> George, you've said you participated in the OpenStack community for about seven years now. >> George: Yes. >> What kind of, do you actually contribute code, what pieces are you active in the community? >> Yeah, so I'm not a developer. My background is in networking, system administration and security, but I was involved in OpenStack since the beginning, before it was a foundation. I went to the first OpenStack public conference in Boston seven years ago, at the International Intercontinental Hotel and over time I was involved in discussions from the RAC channel, mailing list support, reporting backs. Even recently we had very interesting packet affected as well. The cloud package that is supposed to resize the disk of the VM as it boots, it was not using more than two terabytes because it was a bug, okay. So we reported this, and Scott Moffat, who's the maintainer of the cloud utils package, worked on the bug, and two days later, we had a fix, and they built a package, it's in the latest cloud Ubuntu image, and that happen, everybody else is going to use the same virtual Ubuntu package, so somebody who now has larger than two terabytes VMs, when they boot, they'll be able to resize and use the entire disk. And that's just an example of how with open source we can achieve things that would take much longer in commercial distribution, where even if you pay, doesn't necessarily mean that the response... >> Sure. Also George, any lessons learned? You've been with us a long time, right, and like Ceph. One thing we noticed today in the keynote, is actually a lot of the storage networking and compute wasn't really talked, those projects were maybe down focused a bit, as they talked about all the connectivity to everything else. So, I mean any lessons, so you... My point is, the infrastructure is stable of OpenStack, but any lessons learned along the journey? >> I think the lessons are that you can definitely build very affordable and useful and scalable infrastructure, but you have to get your expectations right. We only use from the open standard project that we consider are stable enough, so we can support them confidently without spending, like if a project adds 5% value to your offering, but eats 80% of your time debugging and trying to get it working, and doesn't have packages and missing documentation and so on, that's maybe not a good fit for your environment if you don't have the manpower to. And if it's not absolutely needed. Another very important lesson is that you have to really stay up to date, like go to the conferences, read the emails from the mailing list, be active in the community, because the OpenStack meetups in Toronto for 2018, we present there, we talk to other members. In these seven years I read tens of thousands of emails, so I learn from other users experiences, I try to help where I can. You have to be involved with the developers, I know the Ceph core developers, Sage and other people. So, you can't do this just by staying on the side and looking, you have to be involved. >> Good, George what are you looking for next from this community? You talked about the stability, are there pieces that you're hoping reach that maturity threshold for yourselves, or new functionalities that you're looking for down the road? >> I think what we want to provide to our researchers, 'cause they don't run web scale applications, so their needs are a little bit different. We want to add Magnum to our environment, to allow them deploy Kubernetes cluster easily. We want to add Octavia to expose the services, even though they don't run many web services, but you have to find a way to expose them when they run them. Maybe, Trove, database as a service, we'll see if we can deploy it safely and if it's stable enough. Anything that OpenStack comes up with, we basically look, is it useful, is it stable, can you do it, and we try it. >> George, last thing. Your group is the Super User of the Year. Can you just walk us through that journey, what led to the nomination, what does it mean to your team to win? >> I think we are a bit surprised, because we are a very small team, and our scale is not as big as T-Mobile or the other members, but I think it shows that again, for a big company to be able to deploy OpenStack at scale and make it work, it's maybe not very surprising 'cause yes, they have the resources, they have a lot of manpower and a lot of... But for a small institution or organization, or small company to be able to do it, without involving a vendor, without involving extra costs, I think that's the thing that was appreciated by the community and by the OpenStack Foundation, and yeah, we are pretty excited to have won it. >> All right, George, let me give you the final word, as somebody that's been involved with the community for a while. What would you say to people if they're, you know, still maybe looking from the outside or played with it a little bit. What tips would you give? >> I think we are living proof that it can be done, and if you wait until things are perfect, then they will never be, okay. Even Google has services in beta, Amazon has services in beta. You have to install OpenStack, it's much more performant and stable than when I started with OpenStack, where there was just a few projects, but definitely they will get help from the community, and the documentation's much better. Just go and do it, you won't regret it. >> George, as we know, software will eventually work, hardware will eventually fail. >> Absolutely. >> So, George Mihaiescu, congratulations to OICR on the Super User of the Year award, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, we're getting towards the end of day one of three days of wall to wall coverage here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: From San Mateo, California, it's theCUBE covering SnapLogic Innovation Day 2018, brought to you by SnapLogic. >> Hey, welcome back, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Crossroads 101 and 92. You've probably been there. You're probably stuck in traffic. Look up, you'll see the sign SnapLogic. That's where we are. We're talking digital transformation. You've probably heard us talk about digital transformation on theCUBE, but not that many people or, excuse me, companies actually have an executive who's in charge of digital transformation. And that's not the case here at SnapLogic. And we're really excited to have our next guest. She's Diletta D'Onofrio, and she's the Head of Digital Transformation for SnapLogic. Welcome. >> Thank you, thank you for inviting me. >> Absolutely, so why does SnapLogic have a Head of Digital Transformation? I've never heard that for a company, and you're not really running digital transformation inside the company. You're helping your customers' digital transformation journey. >> Yeah absolutely, because integration is at the core of many transformations that we see led by our clients. And it's not about implementing a software for the most part. There's always the people processing technology. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So what we are trying to do is to insert ourselves in the strategic discussion so that the implementation is more solid and secure. >> Right, right. >> And, so that's the intent of our practice. >> Right, and as you said, people process technology. We hear it all the time, and we hear a lot, too, of best practices in digital transformation is you have to make a commitment to that process change. You have to make a commitment to the people change. That's actually the hardest part. >> Diletta: Yeah. >> I think integration, usually, no one really wants to talk about integration up front because that's that hard little piece that we have to worry about down the road, but let's just not pretend that we have to do that. But as you said, that's a really important piece. It's tying all these systems together. So, you've been helping people with digital transformation here and in some of your prior jobs. So when you sit down with someone who's never heard that term, what do you tell them? What is digital transformation? >> So typically, we're pretty fortunate because I think especially in high tech, here in the valley, there are many clients that have a role which is equivalent to mine and is focused internally on digital transformation. So there either the head of digital transformation, the chief of digital officer. And what we typically do with them is to try to figure out what their plans are and participate to their journey by obviously helping from an integration perspective. >> Jeff: Right. >> Both on the application and data side. >> And where do there usually report up? It's always an interesting conversation because we go to chief data officer events. We go to chief analytics officer events. So you've got kind of these new evolving roles that are really built around data and enabling data and becoming a data driven enterprise. But does it report to the CIO? Does it report to the CTO? Does it report to up through the CEO? And then now you've got this role of people kind of heading up the digital transformation. Where do you see them reporting through? And what's kind of the most effective? Maybe that's a better question. What's the more effective place for them to report through? >> It's a little bit all over the map. There is not a standard. For example, a couple of clients, at Qualcomm, our equivalent in digital transformation is head of application, and he reports to the CIO. >> Jeff: Okay. >> So that's pretty traditional. Often the CIO is chartered with digital transformation for obvious reasons. He has the skillset, he has the team, he has the capability. But, I've seen cases where he or she reports to the CEO. >> Okay. >> Which is even more interesting I think because then it put an emphasis on the importance of the program and the importance of the targets associated with this program. So another client of ours airborne in Texas is actually the CMO and head of sales who reports to the CEO and is also in charge of digital transformation. And we are helping him with some cust-- >> It has the hat of also sales and marketing? >> Diletta: Absolutely, three jobs. >> So that's pretty interesting. Which is good cause those are the things that are kind of leading edge, front edge, to the client. As opposed to digital transformation just on your back-end processes. System integrators, in both those companies, you just listed as big companies. The system integrators have been building transformation businesses for a long, long time. How do they fit? How do you work with them? How does that kind of all come together around the project? >> Yep, so Qualcomm for example, you can see pretty much any single system integrator that you can imagine of. And they all have a portion of the transformation. >> Jeff: Right. >> None of them covers the entire scope. >> Jeff: Right. >> And the interesting portion as well is that because they are all competitors, often there is not a lot of collaboration. And then we are a little bit kind of agnostic, but obviously we have an interest in penetrating the account in terms of making the use of our technology. >> Right. >> So it's in our interest in what I'm trying to do, obviously I come from the system integrator world, so I do speak their language. And what we are trying to do is to work with them to make sure that we understand, were there use cases, were there business cases, and we kind of work together across different objective to enable the client to hopefully be digitally transformed. >> Right, so it's such a big word and the CEOs are talking to the boards about it and the public companies are talking to the analysts on the earnings call. We're going to digitally transform, and these are big organizations that are complex and have many, many pieces and parts. How do you get started? What are some best practices for people that have a board edict, or have a CEO edict? We need to digitally transform, I'm afraid of the competition, I don't even know who's coming. Where should people start, how do they slice and dice this thing so their not trying to eat the whole elephant in one bite? >> Yeah, the only cases that I've seen success on are the ones where, hopefully the leader has done that before. In some kind of shape or form. If it's a brand new chief digital officer, there are more challenges. But the most important thing is kind of keep the momentum. And you tend to keep the momentum through some sort of quick-wing. So if the scope is too large, and the roadmap is to fix over three or five years given the speed of change in technology is very difficult to achieve those goals. >> Jeff: Right. >> So it's much better to have a more agile mentality and maybe plan a year ahead. We did some very tangible, deliverable in the way and mobilize everyone around this. So that the momentum is kept and it's not just a nice word that a company has because they need to talk about the digital transformation. >> Right, and then what do you look at? You obviously have a specific point of view. You have your background and you've been a system integrator, and transformation leader. But in terms of coming from the SnapLogic point of view and integration, and that opportunity, What do you look for as opportunities for those early wins? Either based on prior experience or you just know there's some really inefficient ugly things that you can make big difference on, relatively easy. What do you look for as kind of those first wins in a digital transformation project? >> Yeah, ideally we love to be involved with everything to do with customer and sales and revenue. Because obviously those are the biggest paying point for the client. >> Jeff: Right. >> But often, you need to be flexible enough to understand what the priorities are. Currently I am involved in a much more traditional close activity accounting process. You will be thinking, okay, this may cost us, but actually fixing that problem first will create a lot of credibility within the company. So I think a company like ours has to be very flexible, need to listen to the client. >> Mh-hm. >> And be very flexible in terms of what priorities to start with first. >> Right. >> To prove the technology and then progress, maybe for higher value-- >> Right. >> activities. >> So I would hope it's 2018, that people understand that they're not setting forth on a five-year SAP, ERP implementation. Are we hopefully passed that, that this is not new information. That you need to take small bites, small victories, and move quickly. >> Yeah. >> Are we there? >> Yes but, still, I've seen a lot of strategy document and business plan that are two, three years of arisen and I think the arisen is way too long. But also at the same time, is this still teaching function? So you ask to picture a vision, at least directionally. >> Right. Right. >> So I think the vision has to be generic enough to then flex with the project and the activities within. >> Right. >> Two, three months. >> Right. >> Quarterly on most occasions. >> It's so funny that we continue to find these massive inefficiencies all over the place. You'd think that most of it had been wrung out by now. Between the European PA Limitations and all the business process reengineering, I guess was the old process >> Yes. >> before digital transformation. So I just wonder if you can share some stories from the field about some of these relatively short duration projects, and the yields that they are providing on this path to a more comprehensive digital transformation. >> Yeah so, the first example that comes to mind, again, going back to Qualcomm. When they talk about human capital management or engineering, what is interesting there is that you take the entire hire to retire. And it's pretty overwhelming. From the moment you hire an employee to the moment you obviously retire their function or their role, And what they did quite interestingly, was to come up with a few applications that will make the life of the employees and their manager easier. So we are biting the process by building application that for example, enable to facilitate the on-boarding or application that help HR with analytics and inquires. And gradually trying to automate the process which today even in a large company like a Fortune 100 company can be incredibly manual. >> Right. Right. >> And then another example that comes to mind to me is if you look at the entire holder to cash cycle of a company, from the moment the client to get in contact with the company through a website, to the moment they actually purchase the product. Again, there are many touch point and they're often disconnected. And a client of ours, Airborne, what we're doing with them is to just take one small bite which is figuring out from the time a client tried to configure a product on the website to the time they want to try the product. Our experience can be more automated. So that there is not a lot of interaction necessarily with customer services which has a limited bandwidth. But it's much more self-service. >> Jeff: Right. Right. >> And then gradually tackle the rest of the holder to cash cycle. >> So both of those examples are really about automating manual processes. >> Diletta: Yeah. >> As you just described them. So then what are the KPIs that you're using to measure success? Is it total time duration? Number of steps? Calls back to a person? What are some of the metrics of success? >> Yeah, so you see on the customers side it's kind of easy because you tend to very much require feedback from the customer. So if the customer satisfaction index goes up, or revenue goes up, or less return. So those KPIs we're kind of more familiar with. >> Okay. >> But when you look at the HR award, the human capital management award, there are so many ramifications of being able to serve your employees better. But much more intangible. Like for example, turnover. Well there is good turnover and bad turnover. So if you're serving your employees better with better hours, by which they can self-service some of their activities. Does it translate in less turnover? Maybe yes, or maybe actually that's translating more turnover because maybe the employees that sneak around are the ones that are more technology savvy, so. >> Right. >> Diletta: The human capital management side is harder in terms of defining KPIs. In it's much more early stage then anything to do with customer. And then there is the other universe associated with digitalizing product. Like for example, the world of IOT. That we are involved with, with a few clients. And that is a very measurable and tangible because you actually coming up with new product and what we're doing is facilitating the ability to access data. >> Jeff: Right. >> Which is a very tangible element of the product development lifecycle. >> So of all the transformation projects that you're involved in, how would you break them down in rough numbers of kind of cost savings on an existing process, which is through automation. Versus kind of forward facing customer facing, let's just call it warpped around a customer experience so ultimately you're getting higher customer satisfaction scores and revenue. Versus the third which you just touched on, which is so, so important. Which is converting from a product based company or some of these more tangible into more of a service recurring revenue. That's probably built around that product and the example that gets thrown around all the time is, when GE starts selling miles of propulsion versus selling engines. It's a very different kind of relationship. So in the things that you work on, how would you kind of break up the percentages in those three buckets? >> Yeah, so what we see still a lot, and what I would like to see less, is the first bucket. >> Jeff: Okay. >> Which is reducing cost so I will save more than 50%. >> Jeff: Okay. >> Which is around reduce cost, drive efficiency, better reporting, eliminating application, right? Because many client have too many application to preform some of these back office processes. >> Right. Right. >> And they're very much associated with cost exercise. >> Right. >> And so over 50%, for sure. >> Okay. And that's logical cause that's obviously an easy place to start. You're not changing the company per se. >> Yeah. >> You're looking for efficiencies. Alright so, Diletta, I'll give you the last word before we sign off. If you get called in to a new project, it's a CEO, they're stressed out, they know they have to do this. What do you tell them about digital transformation? How do you kind of help them break it down so it's not just this overwhelming, giant, goal on high? But actually something that they should get excited about, something they can have some success with and something that ultimately is going to be a really good thing. >> I think there is no one recipe. It's about figuring out where the company wants to go. What is the primary objective? Is it sales? Is it new market? Is it new product? And then kind of break it down in a tangible chunck and it kind of makes sense to them. But you got to go for the first priority item. This year I'm sure we'll be able to articulate very well. >> Yes, get that quick win. Well Diletta, thanks for spending a few minutes with us. And good luck on transforming everybody. (laughs) >> Thank you. >> Alright, she's Diletta, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE, from SnapLogic headquarters in San Mateo, California. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> Announcer: From San Mateo, California, it's theCUBE covering SnapLogic Innovation Day 2018, brought to you by SnapLogic. >> Hey, welcome back, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Crossroads 101 and 92. You've probably been there. You're probably stuck in traffic. Look up, you'll see the sign SnapLogic. That's where we are. We're talking digital transformation. You've probably heard us talk about digital transformation on theCUBE, but not that many people or, excuse me, companies actually have an executive who's in charge of digital transformation. And that's not the case here at SnapLogic. And we're really excited to have our next guest. She's Diletta D'Onofrio, and she's the Head of Digital Transformation for SnapLogic. Welcome. >> Thank you, thank you for inviting me. >> Absolutely, so why does SnapLogic have a Head of Digital Transformation? I've never heard that for a company, and you're not really running digital transformation inside the company. You're helping your customers' digital transformation journey. >> Yeah absolutely, because integration is at the core of many transformations that we see led by our clients. And it's not about implementing a software for the most part. There's always the people processing technology. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So what we are trying to do is to insert ourselves in the strategic discussion so that the implementation is more solid and secure. >> Right, right. >> And, so that's the intent of our practice. >> Right, and as you said, people process technology. We hear it all the time, and we hear a lot, too, of best practices in digital transformation is you have to make a commitment to that process change. You have to make a commitment to the people change. That's actually the hardest part. >> Diletta: Yeah. >> I think integration, usually, no one really wants to talk about integration up front because that's that hard little piece that we have to worry about down the road, but let's just not pretend that we have to do that. But as you said, that's a really important piece. It's tying all these systems together. So, you've been helping people with digital transformation here and in some of your prior jobs. So when you sit down with someone who's never heard that term, what do you tell them? What is digital transformation? >> So typically, we're pretty fortunate because I think especially Nytec here in the valley, there are many clients that have a role which is equivalent to mine and is focused internally on digital transformation. So there either the head of digital transformation, the chief of digital officer. And what we typically do with them is to try to figure out what their plans are and participate to their journey by obviously helping from an integration perspective. >> Jeff: Right. >> Both on the application and data side. >> And where do there usually report at? It's always an interesting conversation because we go to chief data officer events. We go to chief analytics officer events. So you've got kind of these new evolving roles that are really built around data and enabling data and becoming a data driven enterprise. But does it report to the CIO? Does it report to the CTO? Does it report to up through the CEO? And then now you've got this role of people kind of heading up the digital transformation. Where do you see them reporting through? And what's kind of the most effective? Maybe that's a better question. What's the more effective place for them to report through? >> It's a little bit all over the map. There is not a standard. For example, a couple of clients, at Qualcomm, our equivalent in digital transformation is head of application, and he reports to the CIO. >> Jeff: Okay. >> So that's pretty traditional. Often the CIO is chartered with digital transformation for obvious reasons. He has the skillset, he has the team, he has the capability. But, I've seen cases where he or she reports to the CEO. >> Okay. >> Which is even more interesting I think because then it put an emphasis on the importance of the program and the importance of the targets associated with this program. So another client of ours airborne in Texas is actually the CMO and head of sales who reports to the CEO and is also in charge of digital transformation. And we are helping him with some cust-- >> It has the hat of also sales and marketing? >> Diletta: Absolutely, three jobs. >> So that's pretty interesting. Which is good cause those are the things that are kind of leading edge, front edge, to the client. As opposed to digital transformation just on your back-end processes. System integrators, in both those companies, you just listed as big companies. The system integrators have been building transformation businesses for a long, long time. How do they fit? How do you work with them? How does that kind of all come together around the project? >> Yep, so Qualcomm for example, you can see pretty much any single system integrator that you can imagine of. And they all have a portion of the transformation. >> Jeff: Right. >> None of them covers the entire scope. >> Jeff: Right. >> And the interesting portion as well is that because they are all competitors, often there is not a lot of collaboration. And then we are a little bit kind of agnostic, but obviously we have an interest in penetrating the account in terms of making the use of our technology. >> Right. >> So it's in our interest in what I'm trying to do, obviously I come from the system integrator ward so I do speak their language. And what we are trying to do is to work with them to make sure that we understand, were there use cases, were there business cases, and we kind of work together across different objective to enable the client to hopefully be digitally transformed. >> Right, so it's such a big word and the CEOs are talking to the boards about it and the public companies are talking to the analysts on the earnings call. We're going to digitally transform, and these are big organizations that are complex and have many, many pieces and parts. How do you get started? What are some best practices for people that have a board edict, or have a CEO edict? We need to digitally transform, I'm afraid of the competition, I don't even know who's coming. Where should people start, how do they slice and dice this thing so their not trying to eat the whole elephant in one bite? >> Yeah, the only cases that I've seen success on are the ones where, hopefully the leader has done that before. In some kind of shape or form. If it's a brand new chief digital officer, there are more challenges. But the most important thing is kind of keep the momentum. And you tend to keep the momentum through some sort of quick-wing. So if the scope is too large, and the roadmap is to fix over three or five years given the speed of change in technology is very difficult to achieve those goals. >> Jeff: Right. >> So it's much better to have a more agile mentality and maybe plan a year ahead. We did some very tangible, deliverable in the way and mobilize everyone around this. So that the momentum is kept and it's not just a nice word that a company has because they need to talk about the digital transformation. >> Right, and then what do you look at? You obviously have a specific point of view. You have your background and you've been a system integrator, and transformation leader. But in terms of coming from the SnapLogic point of view and integration, and that opportunity, What do you look for as opportunities for those early wins? Either based on prior experience or you just know there's some really inefficient ugly things that you can make big difference on, relatively easy. What do you look for as kind of those first wins in a digital transformation project? >> Yeah, ideally we love to be involved with everything to do with customer and sales and revenue. Because obviously those are the biggest paying point for the client. >> Jeff: Right. >> But often, you need to be flexible enough to understand what the priorities are. Currently I am involved in a much more traditional close activity accounting process. You will be thinking, okay, this may cost us, but actually fixing that problem first will create a lot of credibility within the company. So I think a company like ours has to be very flexible, need to listen to the client. >> Mh-hm. >> And be very flexible in terms of what priorities to start with first. >> Right. >> To prove the technology and then progress, maybe for higher value-- >> Right. >> activities. >> So I would hope it's 2018, that people understand that they're not setting forth on a five-year SAP, ERP implementation. Are we hopefully passed that, that this is not new information. That you need to take small bites, small victories, and move quickly. >> Yeah. >> Are we there? >> Yes but, still, I've seen a lot of strategy document and business plan that are two, three years of arisen and I think the arisen is way too long. But also at the same time, is this still teaching function? So you ask to picture a vision, at least directionally. >> Right. Right. >> So I think the vision has to be generic enough to then flex with the project and the activities within. >> Right. >> Two, three months. >> Right. >> Quarterly on most occasions. >> It's so funny that we continue to find these massive inefficiencies all over the place. You'd think that most of it had been wrung out by now. Between the European PA Limitations and all the business process reengineering, I guess was the old process >> Yes. >> before digital transformation. So I just wonder if you can share some stories from the field about some of these relatively short duration projects, and the yields that they are providing on this path to a more comprehensive digital transformation. >> Yeah so, the first example that comes to mind, again, going back to Qualcomm. When they talk about human capital management or engineering, what is interesting there is that you take the entire hire to retire. And it's pretty overwhelming. From the moment you hire an employee to the moment you obviously retire their function or their role, And what they did quite interestingly, was to come up with a few applications that will make the life of the employees and their manager easier. So we are biting the process by building application that for example, enable to facilitate the on-boarding or application that help HR with analytics and inquires. And gradually trying to automate the process which today even in a large company like a fortune 100 company can be incredibly manual. >> Right. Right. >> And then another example that comes to mind to me is if you look at the entire holder to cash cycle of a company, from the moment the client to get in contact with the company through a website, to the moment they actually purchase the product. Again, there are many touch point and they're often disconnected. And a client of ours, Airborne, what we're doing with them is to just take one small bite which is figuring out from the time a client tried to configure a product on the website to the time they want to try the product. Our experience can be more automated. So that there is not a lot of interaction necessarily with customer services which has a limited bandwidth. But it's much more self-service. >> Jeff: Right. Right. >> And then gradually tackle the rest of the holder to cash cycle. >> So both of those examples are really about automating manual processes. >> Diletta: Yeah. >> As you just described them. So then what are the KPIs that you're using to measure success? Is it total time duration? Number of steps? Calls back to a person? What are some of the metrics of success? >> Yeah, so you see on the customers side it's kind of easy because you tend to very much require feedback from the customer. So if the customer satisfaction index goes up, or revenue goes up, or less return. So those KPIs we're kind of more familiar with. >> Okay. >> But when you look at the HR award, the human capital management award, there are so many ramifications of being able to serve your employees better. But much more intangible. Like for example, turnover. Well there is good turnover and bad turnover. So if you're serving your employees better with better hours, by which they can self-service some of their activities. Does it translate in less turnover? Maybe yes, or maybe actually that's translating more turnover because maybe the employees that sneak around are the ones that are more technology savvy, so. >> Right. >> Diletta: The human capital management side is harder in terms of defining KPIs. In it's much more early stage then anything to do with customer. And then there is the other universe associated with digitalizing product. Like for example, the world of IOT. That we are involved with, with a few clients. And that is a very measurable and tangible because you actually coming up with new product and what we're doing is facilitating the ability to access data. >> Jeff: Right. >> Which is a very tangible element of the product development lifecycle. >> So of all the transformation projects that you're involved in, how would you break them down in rough numbers of kind of cost savings on an existing process, which is through automation. Versus kind of forward facing customer facing, let's just call it warpped around a customer experience so ultimately you're getting higher customer satisfaction scores and revenue. Versus the third which you just touched on, which is so, so important. Which is converting from a product based company or some of these more tangible into more of a service recurring revenue. That's probably built around that product and the example that gets thrown around all the time is, when GE starts selling miles of propulsion versus selling engines. It's a very different kind of relationship. So in the things that you work on, how would you kind of break up the percentages in those three buckets? >> Yeah, so what we see still a lot, and what I would like to see less, is the first bucket. >> Jeff: Okay. >> Which is reducing cost so I will save more than 50%. >> Jeff: Okay. >> Which is around reduce cost, drive efficiency, better reporting, eliminating application, right? Because many client have too many application to preform some of these back office processes. >> Right. Right. >> And they're very much associated with cost exercise. >> Right. >> And so over 50%, for sure. >> Okay. And that's logical cause that's obviously an easy place to start. You're not changing the company per se. >> Yeah. >> You're looking for efficiencies. Alright so, Diletta, I'll give you the last word before we sign off. If you get called in to a new project, it's a CEO, they're stressed out, they know they have to do this. What do you tell them about digital transformation? How do you kind of help them break it down so it's not just this overwhelming, giant, goal on high? But actually something that they should get excited about, something they can have some success with and something that ultimately is going to be a really good thing. >> I think there is no one recipe. It's about figuring out where the company wants to go. What is the primary objective? Is it sales? Is it new market? Is it new product? And then kind of break it down in a tangible chunck and it kind of makes sense to them. But you got to go for the first priority item. This year I'm sure we'll be able to articulate very well. >> Yes, get that quick win. Well Diletta, thanks for spending a few minutes with us. And good luck on transforming everybody. (laughs) >> Thank you. >> Alright, she's Diletta, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE, from SnapLogic headquarters in San Mateo, California. Thanks for watching. (bright music)