(upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Women in Tech: International Women's Day, 2022. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Erin Chu joins me next. Life Sciences Lead at AWS Open Data. Erin, welcome to the program. >> Thanks so much for having me, Lisa. Tell me a little bit about you and your role at AWS. >> I would love to. So I am a life sciences lead on the AWS Open Data team, and we are really in the business of democratizing access to data. We believe that if you make high quality, high impact data openly available in the cloud, that people can start innovate, make discoveries and do science faster with those data. So we have a number of specialists with expertise in different domains. Geospatial sciences, climate sustainability, statistical regulatory and then of course myself, the life sciences lead. >> So, you have a really interesting background. You're a veterinarian by training. You have a PhD, you've worked in mobile veterinary clinics, and also in an animal genomic startup, how did you make the change from the clinical side to working for a large international, one of the biggest companies in the world? >> Yeah, I love that question because so much of, I think, anybody's career path is serendipitous and circumstantial, right? But the fact is I was working in a mobile veterinary clinics while I was finishing up a PhD in molecular genomics. And at the same time was reached out to by a professor at Cornell who had started a little dog genomic startup. And he said, "Hey, we need a veterinarian who can talk to people and who understands the genomic side of things?" And I said, "Yeah, I'm your girl." And I came on full time with that startup towards the end of my PhD, signed on after I finished, came on on as their senior veterinary geneticist. Startups a great whirlwind. You end up learning a ton. You have a huge, deep learning curve. You're wearing every possible hat you can. And after a couple years there, I wondered what else I could do. And simply said, where else could I look for work? And how else could I grow? And I decided to try the larger tech world, because I said, this is a toolkit I don't have yet. So I'd like to try and see how I can do it, and here I am. >> And you, I was reading about you that you felt empowered by the notion that I have to trust my instincts. You look at careers in biology, you decided what directions you wanted to take but how did you kind of conjure that feeling of empowerment? >> Yeah, I have to see say I have an incredibly supportive team and in supportive manager, but a lot of it was simply because I've never been afraid to fail. The worst thing that someone can ever say to you is, no or that you didn't do that well. Once you come across that once in your life, it doesn't hurt so bad the second time around. And so, I was hired for a very specific data set that my team was helping to manage. And that does take up a good deal of my time, it still does, but I also had the freedom to say, "Hey, what are the trends in biology? I am an expert in this field. What do I know is coming around the corner? What do I know my researchers need?" And I was entrusted with that, this ability to say, "Hey, these are the decisions I think we should make." And I got to see those outcomes fairly quickly. So, my managers have always put a good deal of trust in me and I don't think I've let them down. >> I'm sure you haven't. Tell me a little bit about some of your mentors or sponsors that have helped guide you along the way and really kind of feel that empowerment that you already had. >> Absolutely. Well, the first and foremost mentor in has been my mother. So, in the spirit of International Women's Day, my mom is actually the first Asian engineer to ever reach executive level. Asian female engineer to ever reach executive level at IBM. And so, I spent my life seeing what my mother could do, and watching her just succeed. And I think very early it clear, she said, "What can't you do?" And that was kind of how I approached my entire life, is what can't I do, and what's the worst thing that will happen. You fail and then you try again. So she is absolutely my first mentor, and a role model to me and hopefully to women everywhere, honestly. I've had some amazing teachers and mentors. My professor who oversaw my PhD, Dr. Paul Soloway. He's currently still at Cornell, really just said, "What decisions do you want to make?" And, "I will support you in the best way I can." And we learned a lot together. I have a professor at Cornell who I still come back. I speak at her alternate careers in veterinary medicine because she just... And she was the one who told me, "Erin, you have a really high buoyancy factor. Don't lose that." And her name is Dr. Carolyn McDaniel. And she has just been such a positive force just saying, "What else could we do?" >> Well, that's- >> And, "Never let your degrees or your training say that this is what you have to do. Think of it as a starting point." >> That's a great point. We often, especially when we're little kids, many of us, you think of these very defined, doctor, lawyer, accountants, nurse instead of having something like you do and being able to go, what else can I do with this? How can I take this education, this information and the interest that I have and parlay it into something that really can kick the door wide open. And to your point, I love how your mom was saying, "What can't you do?" That's a message that everyone needs to hear. And there's an AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program. Talk to me a little bit about that. I'm always interested in sponsorship programs. >> Oh, thanks for asking. So the Open Data Sponsorship Program or the ODP since Open Data Sponsorship Program can be a little mouthful after you say it a few times, but the ODP is a program that AWS sponsors where we will actually cover at the cost of storage transfer and egress of high impact data sets in the cloud. Basically, we know that sometimes the barrier to getting into cloud can be very high for certain providers of gold standard data sets. And when I mean gold standard data sets, I mean like NASA Sentinel-2, or the National Institutes of Health Sequence Read Archive. These are invaluable data sets that are ingested by thousands if not millions of users every day. And what we want to do is lower that barrier to cloud and efficient distribution of those data to zero. So, the program is actually open to anybody. It can be a government entity, it can be a startup, it can be nonprofit. We want to understand more about your data and help you distribute it well in the cloud. >> So this is for any type of organization regardless of industry? >> That's right. >> So, you're really allowing more organizations... One of the things that we say often when we're talking on theCUBE is that every company these days is a data company, or it has to be. Every company has to be a tech company, whether we're talking about your grocery store or AWS, for example. So helping organizations to be able to take that data, understand it, and have those personal conversations that as consumers we expect is critical, but it's challenging for organizations that say, "Well, I came up in retail and now I've got to be a tech company." Talk to me about kind of empowering organizations to be able to use that data, to grow the organization, grow the business, but also to delight customers 'cause of course we are quite picky. >> You're so right. Data is power and it doesn't matter what you are selling or who you are serving. If you have the data about your product. And also to some degree, the data about who your consumers are, you can really tailor an experience. I always tell my colleagues that data is impersonal, right? You can look at bits and bites, numbers, structured columns and rows, but you can funnel data into a truly personal experience as long as you do you it right. And hopefully, when I work with my data providers I ask them, how do you want people to use your data? What are the caveats? How can we make these data easy to work with? But also easy to draw correct insights from. >> Right, that easy to use is critical because as you know the proliferation of data just continues and it will continue. If we think of experiences. I want to go back to your experience. What's been the biggest learning curve that you've had so far? >> Oh my gosh. So, the best part of being at a large company is that you're not in the same room or even like whatever the same slack channel as all of your colleagues, right? Coming from a startup or clinical space where quite literally you are in the same room as everybody 'cause there are less than 60 of you, you could just talk to the person who might be an internal stakeholder. You had that personal relationship, and frankly, like most of the time your views were very aligned. It was sell the product, get to MVP. Moving into larger tech, the steepest curve I had other than becoming very comfortable in the cloud, in all the services that AWS has to offer, were to manage those internal relationships. You have to understand who the stakeholders are. There typically many, many of them for any given project or a company that we're serving. And you have to make sure that you're all aligned internally, make sure that everyone gets what they need and that we reach that end to ultimately serve the customer together. >> Yeah, that communication and collaboration is key. And that's something that we've seen over the last two years, is how dependent we've all become on collaboration tools. But it is a different type of relationship. You're right. Going from a clinic where you're all in the same room or the same location to everyone being distributed globally. Relationship management there is key. It's one of my favorite things about being in tech is that, I think it's such a great community. It's a small community, and I think there's so there's so much opportunity there. If you're a good person, you manage those relationships and you learn how to work with different types of people. You'll always be successful. Talk to me about what you would say, if someone's saying, "Erin, I need some advice. I want to change industries or I want to take this background that I have, and use it in a different industry." What are the three pieces of advice that you would share? >> Oh, absolutely. So, the first thing that I always talk with my... I have quite a few colleagues who have approached me from all different parts of my life. And they've said, "Erin, how did you make the change? And how can I make a change?" And the first thing I say is let's look at your resume and define what your translational skills are. That is so big, right? It doesn't matter what you think you're a specialist in, it's how generalizable are those specialty skills and how can you show that to somebody who's looking at your resume. Let's call it a nontraditional resume. And the second is don't hesitate to ask question. Go for the informational interview. People want to tell you about how they've gotten to where they are and how you might be able to get there too. And so I say, get on LinkedIn and start asking questions. If one person says yes, and you get no responses I call that a success. Don't be afraid of not getting a response, that's okay. And the last thing, and I think this is the most important thing is to hold onto the things that make you happy no matter where you are in your life. It's important to realize you are more than your job. It is important to remember what makes you happy and try to hang on those. I am a gym rat. I admit that I am a gym rat. I'm in the gym five days a week. I have a horse. I go out to see him at least two or three a days. I know it's typical veterinarian, right? You just collect niches until you run out of things you want to pay for. But those are things that have been constant through 20 plus years of being in the workforce. And they've been what kept me going. Let's revise that in ten years. >> So critical because as we all know tech can be all consuming. It will take everything if you let it. So being able to have... We always talk about the balance. Well, the balance is hard. It's definitely a way to scale, right? It's going back and forth, but being able to hold onto the things that actually make you who you are, I think make you better at your job, probably more productive and happier. >> I agree. I totally agree. >> Another thing that you believe, which I love, this is an important message is that, if you look at a job, I like how you said earlier, the worst they can say is no. You have nothing to lose. And it's really true. As scary as that is same thing with raising your hand as you say, and I agree with you about that. Ask a question. It's not a dumb question. I guarantee you. If you're in a room or you're on a Zoom or even in a slack channel. A fair number of people probably have the same question. Be the one to raise your hand and say, "Maybe I missed this. Can you clarify this?" But you also think that you don't have to meet all the job requirements. If you see something that says, five years experience in this or 10 years in that or must have this degree or that degree, you're saying you don't have to meet all that criteria. >> I agree. Yeah, that's another big thing is that, I'll literally talk to people who are like, "Well, Erin, this job application, look at all these requirements and I can't fill these requirements." I'm like, "First of all, who says you can't?" Just because you don't have a certification, what has your work thus far done to reflect that? Yeah, you can meet that requirement, even if you don't have an official certification. But two, like what's the worst thing that happens. You don't get a call back from a recruiter. That's okay. I have so many friends who are afraid of failure, and I tell them, just fail once doesn't hurt. It never hurts as much as you think it's going to hurt. And then you just keep going. >> You keep going and you learn. But you've also brought up a great point about those transfer growth skills or those soft skills that are so important. Communication skills, for example. Relationship building skills that may not be in that written job description. So you may not think about actually there's a tremendous amount of importance that these skills have. That having this kind of breadth of background. I think is always so interesting we think about thought diversity, and if we're talking about women in tech. We know that the number of women in technical roles is is still pretty low, but there's so much data that shows that companies that have even 30% females on their executive staff are more performant and more profitable. So that thought diversity is important, but we need more women to be able to feel that empowerment I think that you feel. >> Yes. >> So when you think of International Women's Day with the theme of breaking the bias, what does that mean to you and where do you feel we are in terms of breaking the bias? >> Yeah, so it's interesting, I was just on a working group with some of my colleagues from our larger organization at AWS. And we were talking about, what are different kinds of bias and what our strategies to go ahead and combat them. The fact is we are all making progress and it has to be in one step at a time. I don't think that if we snapped our fingers, things would just go away. You have to take one step at a time. I also come at it from a data perspective, right? I'm a data person. I work with data. And like I said, data is, or data are, if you want to be correct. Data are impersonal, right? They are just statistics, their numbers, but you can use data to suddenly say, "Hey, where are the biases? And how can we fix them?" So I'm going to give you a great example. So my mother, again, a wonderful woman, a super amazing role model to me. She was diagnosed with breast cancer last year. And she being a smart lady, actually looked online. She went online on Google Scholar and PubMed Central. And she said, "May, look..." May is my little nickname. She goes, "Look at these numbers." She said, "My prognosis is terrible. Look at these numbers, how can you say that this is worth it. That chemotherapy is worth it." And I looked at it and I said, "Mom, I hate to break this to you. But this is a retrospective study of several thousand women from the Bavarian cancer registry." And you might guess I am not a Bavarian origin. I had a chat with her and I said, "Mom, let's look at the data. What are the data? And how can you take away stuff from this with the caveat that you may very well not have the same genetic background as some of the women or most of the women in this registry." There are biases. We know when we look at population sequencing, when we look at the people who are sequenced, the people who put in medical survey information. There are not representations of certain ethnicities of certain sexes, of certain parts of the country. One of the things I really want to do in the next three years is say, how can we support people who are trying to increase representation and research so that every single woman gets the right care and can feel like they are themselves represented in what we call precision medicine or personalized care. >> Absolutely. >> That's a long story. >> It was a great story. >> That was a long answer to answer your question. >> You talked about how your mom was a great inspiration to you and it sounds like you've been quite a great inspiration to her as well. Was a delight talking with you, Erin. Congratulations on your success on being able to be one of those people that is helping to break the bias. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> My pleasure. For Erin Chu, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching Women in Tech: International Women's Day, 2022. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to the theCUBE's coverage of IBM think 2021, the digital experience. I'm Lisa Martin. I've got two guests here with me next. We're going to be talking about IBM and Cisco. Please welcome Candace Tripp, a partner at Global Security Services Alliances at IBM. Kandyce, it's great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you. It's great to be here, Lisa. >> And Erin Jensen joins us as well. Global Partner Executive for IBM at Cisco. Erin, welcome to you as well. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> I love it, three women, power women on a tech panel. >> I know, I love it. >> Isn't that nice? It's rare. >> It is. >> Exciting. >> Praise God. All right, let's go ahead, Erin and we're going to start with you. Let's talk about Cisco's strategy and security and how that aligns with IBM. >> Absolutely. Thanks Lisa. So Cisco in the last seven years have made considerable amount of investment in our portfolio. And in fact, it's one reason why I joined Cisco. I've been hearing about customer problems across many security threat vectors and issues. And customers are really looking for a product portfolio that helps them across all their security needs. IBM has taken a similar approach, right? We're not just one product or one service. IBM also has a service portfolio that helps customers through the long haul and their security journey. We're both working to solve problems like Zero Trust, SAS, Cloud security, and helping all of our customers with digital transformation and moving to the cloud. And so both of us have really taken a similar long-term approach to our customer vision and security. >> We've heard a lot about security challenges and the expansion of threat vectors and surfaces and data in the last year or so. So that double-down focus from both IBM and Cisco on security is absolutely critical for customers. Kandyce, let's get your perspective now. Talk to me about IBM security services and the value that it delivers with Cisco's security portfolio, those two powerhouses together. >> Yeah. Great question. I really appreciate it. One of the things I want to point out is just that IBM security services is one of the largest MSPs in the industry. And I think it's a really exciting time and I'm very thrilled to be a part of that. And the answer to your question, we simplify security solutions, we reduce risk, we provide architectural consulting and systems integration. And we do that in support of our partnerships, just like with Cisco, with Cisco, excuse me. So I think it's a really exciting partnership and there's a lot of value provided. >> And then Kandyce also, you recently launched IBM security services Alliance program. What can you tell us about that? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I'm very excited about it. We launched it on March 1st of this year. And it is a very targeted program that's designed to promote support and reward us like set of partners. And Cisco is one of those partners that has been invited to participate. And these are the partners that are committed to doing a couple of different things. One of which is supporting the development of our offerings. It's also partners that are integrating into our technology platform and they also train and enable our engineers, our consultants as well as our sellers. So they bring a lot of value to the table. And like I said before, Cisco is one of the partners that have been invited to participate. And we're very excited. >> Yeah. >> Go ahead Erin. >> And just to add on that as Candace is saying like Cisco is really excited to participate in this program. It's really, truly about delivering an outcome to our customers. And so the program gives us tools to make investments integrations, et cetera. And the part about partnership it's an evolution of things, right? We want to work together. The landscape of the threats are changing, our world's changing, we're in a pandemic, we've got to be able to pivot and really help customers solve these problems together. And the Alliance program gives us a formal way a really kind of put in the wood behind the arrow. So we're really excited to participate. >> Thanks Erin, excited to have you. >> Great. So Kandyce, I'm curious, as Erin was saying that the threat vector, things are expanding, we've seen so much flux. They're saying we're in a dynamic market, situation is a pretty big understatement. What was the impetus of this Alliance? Was it, this Alliance program, did it have anything to do with the flux that we've been through in the last year? >> Well, I think anytime you launch a program or create a strategy, you're obviously solving a problem. And we all know that security is complex and we need to simplify it. And in today's market, there's a shortage of professionals in the industry. There's a lot of siloed processes and a lot of tools. And anytime that you can bring a strategy to the table that solves some of these challenges, it's definitely worthwhile. And our goal is to bring together advisors and integrated leading technologies vendors such as Cisco. And our goal is to help our clients obviously. And optimally, what we want to do is we want to align their security strategy. We want to make sure that we protect their digital users, their data, their assets. We also want to modernize our technology with these advisors. And ultimately, we found a partnership in Cisco in regards to this program, where we can solve some of our customer's challenges and we can leverage this partnership to the fullest. >> Can you talk to me a little bit about the difference between a technology alliances program and a security service Alliance partner at IBM security program? >> Kandyce: Absolutely. Well, I think it's to call out that Cisco is both actually. We do have a Technology Alliance partners as you mentioned, and Security Service Alliance partners and our Technology Alliance partners are purpose built integrations with IBM security products. On the opposite side, you have Security Service Alliance partners where there's kind of two aspects to it. It could be, it's an either situation where they're integrated into our security service offering or we build an offering around the partners technology. And in the case of Cisco there's many product integrations. I'll name two as examples, one being QRadar and the other being Resilient. But I think what makes the partnership so interesting is there's an extensive portfolio to choose from. And I think that makes it very exciting for our clients to kind of look at what we bring to the table jointly and create leverage out of that. Erin, do you have anything to add? >> A couple of things. So the questions we get a lot from customers is, is there overlap in some of these software solutions? And the fact is there really isn't. We are more complimentary than competitive. And one of the things that we want to do to enhance the customer experience is really give a customer the confidence, but also a full service solution. The way Cisco views IBM and security space is like the glue, right? We provide all the automation a lot of the visibility, our tools, for instance QRadar, pump all of the log information and help with instant response to how customers look at threats. And we really want them to, customers would feel confident by being together and really let's face it, IBM and Cisco are the biggest players in the market. But to Kandyce's point they're also looking for innovation from us and we giving them the roadmaps to go to the next level. So our partnership really provides that. And in fact, it's really important to note that IBM is actually a big Cisco client and has invested in some of our technologies around Umbrella, Next-Gen firewall and our IPS and AnyConnect Solution. So truly our use case is between our companies too not just for our customers. So it's part of our loyalty and commitment to each other but also to all the folks who are making investments working with IBM and Cisco. >> So there's a long history deep collaboration between IBM and Cisco here. I'm wondering if either of you and Kandyce we'll start with you, can you talk about anything that you saw in the last year. I'm thinking, from a security perspective we saw governments and schools and hospitals and healthcare organizations being attacked because they were, there was so much focus on those organizations. I'm curious if there's any industries that you guys saw in the last year or so in particular that really have benefited from your Security Services Alliance program? >> Well, I think we just launched the program in March. So we are currently in the process of rolling it out but will say, as a organization we spend a lot of time making sure that we're relevant to the community, that we're solving some of the deepest problems in the industry. And I think it's an exciting time and I know that IBM Security Services brings a lot of solutions to its clients and we'll continue to do so. >> And then Erin, tell me from Cisco's perspective and yes, Kandyce you mentioned that this is a brand new program. What are some of the things that you're looking forward to being able to help clients in industries that I mentioned and really any industry pivot as we're still in such a globally challenging situation? >> Yes. So I won't necessarily talk about verticals but let's talk about the pandemic. So many of our customers in all different kinds of verticals have had to take their business home. Securing all the remote workers, doing what we call Zero Trust and edge security making sure they are who they say they are when they're connecting to the mothership. And so we've really put a lot of effort at Cisco around addressing these problems in a fast and efficient way. And then IBM helps us manage that for customers. So if they don't have the bandwidth, once solutions go in and we turn the key on they don't have the bandwidth to manage this themselves, IBM really picks that ball up and runs with it. So that's another big value out of our partnership. But let's face it, gosh, a year and a half ago all of this changed on the dime. So we had to pivot really quickly. And because we have teams in place are already working together on how we service these solutions through IBM, this was not necessarily a very hard shift. We were able to do this quickly and provide information and kind of stay ahead of the curve while we saw our customers go through this transition. >> And I can only imagine how critical IBM and Cisco were together as you mentioned, Erin, that pivot to work from home happened so quickly for millions and millions, hundreds of millions of not more of people, and there's a good amount of us that are still in that situation that are reliant on technologies. But like IBM and Cisco are delivering, for collaboration, for communication, even to connect families I'm sure what you guys have done helping those customers pivot is just the tip of the iceberg in helping them not just survive this time but be able to thrive, maybe even focus resources on identifying new products on new services, new ways to delight their customers. >> Yeah, I think that's the other thing that's happening between our firms kind of within security and also more broadly is a lot of our customers are moving to the Cloud and they really need help with this kind of full service look and strategy and ongoing managing and the long haul from a partner. So one of the things that's also been really valuable in our partnership is we have teams of people on account level that really understand our customers and can make these recommendations based on what we're putting together behind the scenes and helping them through the journey. So security is clearly a big part of, kind of what's on everyone's mind, but as far as, can a regular IT operations and networking, it's all part of one journey. And so this layered approach is I think what differentiates our partnership absolutely in the marketplace. >> I agree with you, Erin. I think there's a lot to be excited about that. >> We'll good. Ladies, thank you for joining me today. Talking to me about this new security strategy Alliances Program, what it's offering, the power that IBM and Cisco are bringing jointly to your customers. We look forward to seeing what happens in the next year. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you. >> Well, Kandyce Tripp and Erin Jensen. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think, the digital experience. (soft upbeat music)

(piano music) >> Presenter: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to the theCUBE's coverage of IBM think 2021, the digital experience. I'm Lisa Martin. I've got two guests here with me next. We're going to be talking about IBM and Cisco. Please welcome Candace Tripp, a partner at Global Security Services Alliances at IBM. Kandyce, it's great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you. It's great to be here, Lisa. >> And Erin Jensen joins us as well. Global Partner Executive for IBM at Cisco. Erin, welcome to you as well. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> I love it, three women, power women on a tech panel. >> I know, I love it. >> Isn't that nice? It's rare. >> It is. >> Exciting. >> Praise God. All right, let's go ahead, Erin and we're going to start with you. Let's talk about Cisco's strategy and security and how that aligns with IBM. >> Absolutely. Thanks Lisa. So Cisco in the last seven years have made considerable amount of investment in our portfolio. And in fact, it's one reason why I joined Cisco. I've been hearing about customer problems across many security threat vectors and issues. And customers are really looking for a product portfolio that helps them across all their security needs. IBM has taken a similar approach, right? We're not just one product or one service. IBM also has a service portfolio that helps customers through the long haul and their security journey. We're both working to solve problems like Zero Trust, SAS, Cloud security, and helping all of our customers with digital transformation and moving to the cloud. And so both of us have really taken a similar long-term approach to our customer vision and security. >> We've heard a lot about security challenges and the expansion of threat vectors and surfaces and data in the last year or so. So that double-down focus from both IBM and Cisco on security is absolutely critical for customers. Kandyce, let's get your perspective now. Talk to me about IBM security services and the value that it delivers with Cisco's security portfolio, those two powerhouses together. >> Yeah. Great question. I really appreciate it. One of the things I want to point out is just that IBM security services is one of the largest MSPs in the industry. And I think it's a really exciting time and I'm very thrilled to be a part of that. And the answer to your question, we simplify security solutions, we reduce risk, we provide architectural consulting and systems integration. And we do that in support of our partnerships, just like with Cisco, with Cisco, excuse me. So I think it's a really exciting partnership and there's a lot of value provided. >> And then Kandyce also, you recently launched IBM security services Alliance program. What can you tell us about that? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I'm very excited about it. We launched it on March 1st of this year. And it is a very targeted program that's designed to promote support and reward us like set of partners. And Cisco is one of those partners that has been invited to participate. And these are the partners that are committed to doing a couple of different things. One of which is supporting the development of our offerings. It's also partners that are integrating into our technology platform and they also train and enable our engineers, our consultants as well as our sellers. So they bring a lot of value to the table. And like I said before, Cisco is one of the partners that have been invited to participate. And we're very excited. >> Yeah. >> Go ahead Erin. >> And just to add on that as Candace is saying like Cisco is really excited to participate in this program. It's really, truly about delivering an outcome to our customers. And so the program gives us tools to make investments integrations, et cetera. And the part about partnership it's an evolution of things, right? We want to work together. The landscape of the threats are changing, our world's changing, we're in a pandemic, we've got to be able to pivot and really help customers solve these problems together. And the Alliance program gives us a formal way a really kind of put in the wood behind the arrow. So we're really excited to participate. >> Thanks Erin, excited to have you. >> Great. So Kandyce, I'm curious, as Erin was saying that the threat vector, things are expanding, we've seen so much flux. They're saying we're in a dynamic market, situation is a pretty big understatement. What was the impetus of this Alliance? Was it, this Alliance program, did it have anything to do with the flux that we've been through in the last year? >> Well, I think anytime you launch a program or create a strategy, you're obviously solving a problem. And we all know that security is complex and we need to simplify it. And in today's market, there's a shortage of professionals in the industry. There's a lot of siloed processes and a lot of tools. And anytime that you can bring a strategy to the table that solves some of these challenges, it's definitely worthwhile. And our goal is to bring together advisors and integrated leading technologies vendors such as Cisco. And our goal is to help our clients obviously. And optimally, what we want to do is we want to align their security strategy. We want to make sure that we protect their digital users, their data, their assets. We also want to modernize our technology with these advisors. And ultimately, we found a partnership in Cisco in regards to this program, where we can solve some of our customer's challenges and we can leverage this partnership to the fullest. >> Can you talk to me a little bit about the difference between a technology alliances program and a security service Alliance partner at IBM security program? >> Kandyce: Absolutely. Well, I think it's to call out that Cisco is both actually. We do have a Technology Alliance partners as you mentioned, and Security Service Alliance partners and our Technology Alliance partners are purpose built integrations with IBM security products. On the opposite side, you have Security Service Alliance partners where there's kind of two aspects to it. It could be, it's an either situation where they're integrated into our security service offering or we build an offering around the partners technology. And in the case of Cisco there's many product integrations. I'll name two as examples, one being QRadar and the other being Resilient. But I think what makes the partnership so interesting is there's an extensive portfolio to choose from. And I think that makes it very exciting for our clients to kind of look at what we bring to the table jointly and create leverage out of that. Erin, do you have anything to add? >> A couple of things. So the questions we get a lot from customers is, is there overlap in some of these software solutions? And the fact is there really isn't. We are more complimentary than competitive. And one of the things that we want to do to enhance the customer experience is really give a customer the confidence, but also a full service solution. The way Cisco views IBM and security space is like the glue, right? We provide all the automation a lot of the visibility, our tools, for instance QRadar, pump all of the log information and help with instant response to how customers look at threats. And we really want them to, customers would feel confident by being together and really let's face it, IBM and Cisco are the biggest players in the market. But to Kandyce's point they're also looking for innovation from us and we giving them the roadmaps to go to the next level. So our partnership really provides that. And in fact, it's really important to note that IBM is actually a big Cisco client and has invested in some of our technologies around Umbrella, Next-Gen firewall and our IPS and AnyConnect Solution. So truly our use case is between our companies too not just for our customers. So it's part of our loyalty and commitment to each other but also to all the folks who are making investments working with IBM and Cisco. >> So there's a long history deep collaboration between IBM and Cisco here. I'm wondering if either of you and Kandyce we'll start with you, can you talk about anything that you saw in the last year. I'm thinking, from a security perspective we saw governments and schools and hospitals and healthcare organizations being attacked because they were, there was so much focus on those organizations. I'm curious if there's any industries that you guys saw in the last year or so in particular that really have benefited from your Security Services Alliance program? >> Well, I think we just launched the program in March. So we are currently in the process of rolling it out but will say, as a organization we spend a lot of time making sure that we're relevant to the community, that we're solving some of the deepest problems in the industry. And I think it's an exciting time and I know that IBM Security Services brings a lot of solutions to its clients and we'll continue to do so. >> And then Erin, tell me from Cisco's perspective and yes, Kandyce you mentioned that this is a brand new program. What are some of the things that you're looking forward to being able to help clients in industries that I mentioned and really any industry pivot as we're still in such a globally challenging situation? >> Yes. So I won't necessarily talk about verticals but let's talk about the pandemic. So many of our customers in all different kinds of verticals have had to take their business home. Securing all the remote workers, doing what we call Zero Trust and edge security making sure they are who they say they are when they're connecting to the mothership. And so we've really put a lot of effort at Cisco around addressing these problems in a fast and efficient way. And then IBM helps us manage that for customers. So if they don't have the bandwidth, once solutions go in and we turn the key on they don't have the bandwidth to manage this themselves, IBM really picks that ball up and runs with it. So that's another big value out of our partnership. But let's face it, gosh, a year and a half ago all of this changed on the dime. So we had to pivot really quickly. And because we have teams in place are already working together on how we service these solutions through IBM, this was not necessarily a very hard shift. We were able to do this quickly and provide information and kind of stay ahead of the curve while we saw our customers go through this transition. >> And I can only imagine how critical IBM and Cisco were together as you mentioned, Erin, that pivot to work from home happened so quickly for millions and millions, hundreds of millions of not more of people, and there's a good amount of us that are still in that situation that are reliant on technologies. But like IBM and Cisco are delivering, for collaboration, for communication, even to connect families I'm sure what you guys have done helping those customers pivot is just the tip of the iceberg in helping them not just survive this time but be able to thrive, maybe even focus resources on identifying new products on new services, new ways to delight their customers. >> Yeah, I think that's the other thing that's happening between our firms kind of within security and also more broadly is a lot of our customers are moving to the Cloud and they really need help with this kind of full service look and strategy and ongoing managing and the long haul from a partner. So one of the things that's also been really valuable in our partnership is we have teams of people on account level that really understand our customers and can make these recommendations based on what we're putting together behind the scenes and helping them through the journey. So security is clearly a big part of, kind of what's on everyone's mind, but as far as, can a regular IT operations and networking, it's all part of one journey. And so this layered approach is I think what differentiates our partnership absolutely in the marketplace. >> I agree with you, Erin. I think there's a lot to be excited about that. >> We'll good. Ladies, thank you for joining me today. Talking to me about this new security strategy Alliances Program, what it's offering, the power that IBM and Cisco are bringing jointly to your customers. We look forward to seeing what happens in the next year. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you. >> Well, Kandyce Tripp and Erin Jensen. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think, the digital experience. (soft upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to the third day of wall-to-wall coverage here at Kubecon + CloudNativeCon 2019 in San Diego. I am your host for the three days of coverage, Stu Miniman. Joining me this morning is Justin Warren. And happy to welcome back to the program, Erin Boyd who's a senior principal software engineer at Red Hat. Erin, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, so we had a chance to catch up in Barcelona on theCUBE there. Storage is definitely one of the faster moving areas of this ecosystem over the last two years. Why don't we start with, really, the event? So, you know, as I said, we're in day three but day zero there were a whole lot of things we had. Some of your peers at Red Hat have talked about OpenShift Commons, but storage, to my understanding had a couple of things going on. Why don't you share with our audience a little bit of that? >> Sure, so we had a SIG face-to-face for Kubernetes, it was probably one of the best attended. We had to cap the number of attendees, so about 60 different people came to talk about the future of Kubernetes in storage, and what we need to be doing to meet our customers' needs. In conjunction with that, there was a parallel session called CNS Days, which is Container Native Storage Days. That event is very customer focused, so I really enjoyed bouncing between the two of them. To go from the hypothetical, programming, architecture view, straight to what customers in the enterprise are looking at and doing, and what their real needs are. >> So from that SIG, can you actually share a little bit of where we are, where some of the requests are? We know storage is never one way to fix it, there's been some debates, there's a couple different ways to do... I mean, traditional storage, you've got block, file, and object. Cloud storage, there are more options in cloud storage today than there was, if I was to configure a server, or buy a storage array in my own data center. So where are we, what are those asks? What's on the roadmap there? >> Right, so I think for the past five years, we've been really focused on being mindful of what APIs are common across all the vendors. I think we want to ensure that we're not excluding any vendors from being part of this ecosystem. And so, with that, we've created the basis of things like persistent volumes, persistent volumes claims, storage classes to automate that, storage quotas to be able to have management and control over it. So I think now we're looking to the next evolution of... As the model's maturing, and people are actually running stateful applications on Kubernetes, we need to be addressing their needs. So things like snapshotting, eventually volume cloning, which has just gone in, and migrating. All these type of things that exist within the data plane are going to be the next evolution of things we look at in the SIG. >> Yeah, so one criticism that's been mentioned about Kubernetes a few times, that one, it's a bit complicated. But also, it didn't really deal that well with stateful sets. Stateful data management has always been, it's been a little bit lacking. That seems to have pretty much been sorted out now. As you mentioned, there's a lot more work being done on storage operators. But you're talking about some of these data management features that operators from other paradigms are kind of used to being there. When you're thinking about moving workloads to Kubernetes, or putting in new workloads on Kubernetes, if you're unsure about, "Well, will I be able to operate this in the same way that I did things before?" How do you think people should be thinking about those kind of data services in Kubernetes? >> So I think it's great that you mentioned operators. Because that was one of the key things when Rook came into the landscape, to be able to lower the complexity of taking something that requires physical storage and compute, geography, node selection. All those things, it helped people who were used to just the cloud model. I create a PVC, it's a request for storage, Amazon magically fulfills it. I don't know what's backing it. To be able to take these more complex storage systems and deploy them within the ecosystem, it also does a good job supporting our Brownfield customers, because not every customer that's coming to Kubernetes is green. So it's important that we understand that some customers want to keep their data on-prem, maybe burst to the cloud to leverage those services, but then keep their data close to home. So operators help facilitate that. >> Yeah, Erin, I hesitate a little bit to ask this, but I'm wondering if you can do a little compare, contrast for us, for what the industry had done back in OpenStack days? When I looked at storage, every traditional storage company certified their environment for OpenStack. On a storage standpoint, it feels like a different story to me when I hear about the ecosystem of operators in OpenStack. So I know you know this space, so maybe you can give us a little bit of what we learned in the past. What's similar, what's different? >> Right, well I think one of the benefits is we have a lot of the same key players. As you may know, OpenShift has pivoted from Gluster to Ceph, Ceph being the major backer of OpenStack. So we're able to take some of that technical debt, and learn our lessons from things we could improve, and apply those things within Kubernetes. I just think that it's a little slower migration, because in OpenStack, like you said, we had certification, there were different drivers. And we're trying to learn from, maybe, I wouldn't even call those mistakes, but, how can we better automate this? What can we do from an operational perspective to make it easier? >> Well I think because one of the... It felt like we were kind of taking some older models and... I'm testing it, I'm adding it. The ecosystem for operators here is different. Many of these, we're talking very much software-driven solutions. It's built for container architectures, so it's understandable that it might take a little bit longer because it's a different paradigm. >> Right, well, and I think the certification kind of... It wasn't an inhibitor but it certainly took a lot of time. And I think our take was on... We used to have all the storage providers be entry providers within Kubernetes. And with CSI, we have since started to redo the plugins and the sidecars, and move that out of core. So then the certification kind of falls outside of that instead of being more tightly wound into the platform. And I think it will allow us to have a lot more flexibility. Instead of waiting on each release, vendors can create operators, certify them themselves, have them in their own CSI driver, and move at the pace that they need to move. >> So how do you balance that need for Kubernetes to be a common operating platform that people can build on with each vendor's desire to provide their own unique capabilities that they think that they do particularly well? That's why they charge the money that they do, because they think that theirs is the best storage ever. How do you balance that tension between the need for a standard platform and to make it interoperable, but still allowing the flexibility for people to have their own kind of innovation in there? >> So when we created the storage class, for instance, to be able to create a service level over storage, to be able to provide the provisioner that we're going to use, we made the specification of that section completely opaque. And what that allowed us to do is that when vendors wrote their provisioners and now their CSI drivers, allowed them to feed in different attributes of the storage that they want to leverage, that don't necessarily have to be in core Kubernetes. So it provided a huge amount of flexibility on that. The other side of that, though, is, the feeback we get from real users is "I need backup and recovery, and I need DR, and I need that across the platform." So I really think as we look to scale this out, we have to be looking at the commonalities between all storage and bringing those APIs into Kubernetes. >> One of the things I've really liked to see in this ecosystem over the last year or so, and really highlighted at this show, we're talking a lot more about workloads and applications and how those... What works today and where we're growing. Can you speak a little bit from your world as to where we are, what's working great, what customers are deploying, and a little bit, the road map of where we still need to go? >> Sure, I think workloads are key. I mean, I think that we have to focus on the actual end-to-end delivery of that, and so we have to figure out a way that we can make the data more agile, and create interfaces to really enable that, because it's very unlikely that an enterprise company is going to rely on one cloud or stay with one cloud, or want their data in one cloud. They're going to want to have the flexibility to leverage that. So as we enable those workloads, some are very complex. We started with, "Hey, I just want to containerize my application and get it running. Now I want to have some sort of state, which is persistent storage, and now I want to be able to scale that out across n number of clusters." That's where the workloads become really important. And long term, where we need policy to automate that. My pod goes down, I restart it, it needs to know that because of, maybe, the data that that workload's producing, it can only stay in this geographical region. >> Yeah, we talk about multicloud. You mentioned data protection, data protection is something I need to do across the board. Security is something I need to do across the board. My automation needs to take all that into account. How's Red Hat helping customers get their arms around that challenge? >> Yeah, so I think Red Hat really does take a holistic view in making sure that we provide a very consistent, secure platform. I think that's one of the things that you see when you come on to OpenShift, for instance, or OKR, that you're seeing security tightened a little bit more, to ensure that you're running in the best possible way that you can, to protect your data. And then, the use of Rook Ceph, for instance, Ceph provides that universal backplane, where if you're going to have encryption or anything like that, you know it's going to be the same across that. >> It sounds like there's an opportunity here for people new to Kubernetes who have been doing things in a previous way. There's a little bit of reticence from this community to understand enterprise, they're like, "Well, actually, you're kind of doing it wrong. It's slow and inflexible." There's actually a lot of lessons that we've learned in enterprise, particularly around these workloads. Having security, having backup in DR. In the keynote this morning, there was a lot of discussion about the security that either is in Kubernetes, and some parts it's kind of lacking. I think there's a lot that both of these communities can learn from each other, so I'm seeing a lot of moves of late to be a little bit more welcoming to some people who are coming to Kubernetes from other ecosystems. To be able to bring the ideas that they have that... We've already learned these lessons before, we can take some of that knowledge and bring it into Kubernetes to help us to do that better. Do you see Red Hat bringing a lot of that expereience in its work... Red Hat's been around for quite some time now, so you've done a lot of this already. Are you bringing all of that knowledge into Kubernetes and sharing it with the ecosystem? >> Absolutley, and just like Stu pointed out, I mean, OpenStack was a big part of our evolution, and security within RHEL, and I think we absolutely should take those lessons learned and look to how we do protect our customers' data, and make sure that the platform, Kubernetes itself and as we evolve OpenShift, can provide that, and ways that we can certify that. >> Erin, you're meeting with a lot of customers. You were talking about the Day Zero thing. What's top of mind for your customers? We talk about, that Kubernetes has crossed the chasm but to get the vast majority, there's still lots of work to do. We need to, as an industry, make things simpler. What's working well, and what are some of the challenges from the customers that you've talked to? >> So I think, if you walk in, across the hall, and you see how many vendors are there, it's trying to get a handle on what I should even be doing. And as the co-lead of the CNCF Storage SIG, I think that's one of the initiatives that we take very seriously. So in addition to a storage whitepaper, we've been working on use cases that define, when should I use a data store? When should I use object? Why would I want to use file? And then really taking these real-world examples, creating use cases and actual implementations so someone can, "Oh, that's similar to my workload." Here are some tools to accelerate understanding how to get that set up. And also creating those guard rails from an architectural standpoint. You don't want to go down this path, that's not right for your workload. So we're hoping to at least provide an education around containerized storage that'll help customers. >> Yeah, I'm just curious. I think back ten years ago, I was working for a large storage company. We were having some of these same conversations. So is it very different now in the containerized, multicloud world? Or are some of the basic decision tree discussions around block, file, and object and application the same as we might have been having a decade ago? >> I think we're starting to just touch on those, and I'm glad that you brought up object. That was one of the things I talked about in Barcelona, and we actually talked about at the face-to-face. To me, it's kind of the missing piece of storage today in Kubernetes, and I think we're finally starting to see that more customers are asking for that and realizing that's an important workload to be able to support at its core. So I think, yes, we're having the same conversations again, but certainly in a different context. >> Yeah, I mean, back in the day, it was, the future is object but we don't know how we'd get there. If you look behind the scenes in most public clouds, object's running a lot of what's there. All right, Erin, I want to give you the final word. KubeCon 2019, from that storage perspective. What should people watching take away? >> That we're only beginning with storage, yeah. We still have a lot of work to do, but I think it's a wonderful community and vibrant, and I think there'll be a lot of changes in the coming years. >> All right. Well, definitely a vibrant ecosystem. Erin, thank you so much for all the updates. We'll be back with more coverage here, for Justin Warren. I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's the theCUBE, covering KUBECON and CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by RedHat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and the Ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman. My co-host, Corey Quinn. 7700 here in Barcelona, Spain, for KUBECON, CLOUDNATIVECON. Happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest, Erin Boyd, who is a senior Principal Software Engineer in the office of the CEO of RedHat. Erin, thanks so much for joining us. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Alright, so just a couple of weeks ago, I know I was in Boston, you probably were too, >> Yep. >> For RedHat Summit. Digging into a lot of the pieces. You focus on multi-cloud and storage. Tell us a little bit about, you know, your role, and what you're doing here at the KUBECON show. >> Sure, I'd be happy to. So for over a year now, RedHat's really been kind of leading the pack on hybrid cloud. You know, allowing customers to have more choice, you know, with both public and private cloud offerings. And, of course, OpenShift being our platform built on Kubernetes, we believe that should be the consistent API in which we have Federation. Yeah, so Erin, I got to talk to quite a few OpenShift customers at RedHat Summit. It was really how they're using that as a lever to help them really gain agility in their application deployment. But, let's start for a second, without getting too fanatic, you say hybrid cloud. What does that mean to your customers? You know, RedHat has a long legacy of, well, lives everywhere. So, public cloud, private cloud, hosting provider, all of the environments, you, RedHat, Enterprise, Linux, can live there. So in your space, what does hybrid cloud mean? >> So, hybrid cloud, I think follows a model of real. It's everywhere. So it's having OpenShift run on top of that and being able to have the application portability that you would expect. Along with the application portability, which is my focus, is having the data agility within those applications. >> Alright, how do you wind up approaching a situation where an app is now agile enough to move between providers almost seamlessly, without having it, I guess, descend down to the lowest common denominator that all providers that it's on are going to provide? I mean, at some point, doesn't that turn into treating the cloud as a place to just run your either instances or containers, and not taking advantage of, I guess, the platform level services? >> Sure, so I think that the API should expose those choices, I don't think it's a one size fits all when we talk about, you know, if you move your application maybe your data doesn't necessarily have to move. So part of the core functionality the Federation is meant to provide, which has been renamed Kubefed since Summit, is that you have the choice within that. And, you know, defining policies around the way we do this. So, perhaps your application is agile enough to span three different clouds, but due to data privacy, you want to keep your data on prem. So, Kubefed should enable you to have that choice. >> You know, so you know, help us dig down a little bit in the storage, you know, environment here, you know. >> Sure. I go back and I worked for a very large storage company that was independent before it got bought for a very large sum of money. But, we had block and file storage. And mostly, that you know, lived in a box, or in a certain application. >> Right. You know, the future, we always talked that there's going to be this wonderful object storage and actually it's designed to be, you know, we'll shard it, we'll spread it around >> Right. And it can live in lots of places. Cloud, a lot of times has that underneath it, so you know, have we started to you know, cross that gap of you know, that mythical nirvana of where say, you know, storage should actually live up to that distributive architecture that we're all looking for. >> Right, so with Kubernetes, the history is, we started off with only file systems. Block is something very new within the last couple releases that I actually personally worked on. The next piece that we're doing at Red Hat is leading the charge to create CRDs for object storage. So it's defining those APIs so customers can dynamically provision and manage their object storage with that. In addition, we recently acquired a company called NooBaa that does exactly that. They're able to have that data mobility through object buckets across many clouds doing the sharding and replication with the ability to dedupe. And that's super important because it opens up for our customers to have image streams, photos, things like that that they typically use within an enterprise, and quickly move the data and copy it as they need to. >> Yeah, so I've actually talked to the Noovaa team. I would joke with them that, didn't they deduplicate, couldn't they deduplicate their name 'cause it's like Noovaa. >> (laughs) yeah. >> So you know, plenty of vowels there. But, right, storage built for the cloud world is, you know, what we're talking about there. >> Right. >> How's that different from some of the previous storage solutions that we've been dealing with? >> So I think before, we were trying to maybe make fit what didn't work. That's not to say that file and block aren't important. I mean, having local storage for a high performance application is absolutely critical. So I think we're meeting the market where it is. It's dependent on the behavior of the application. and we should be able to provide that. And applications that primarily run in the cloud and need that flexibility, we should be offering object as a first-class citizen, and that's why our work with those CRDs is really critical. >> What is the customer need that drives this? Historically, with my own work with object stores, I tend to view that as almost exclusively accessed via HTTP end points. And at that point, it almost doesn't matter where that lives, as long as the networking and security and latency requirements are being met. What is it that's driving this as making it a first-class citizen built in to Kubernetes itself, the Rook? >> So it allows us to create the personas that we need. So it allows an administrator to administrate storage, just like they would normally with your persistent volume, persistent volume claims and quotas. And then it abstracts the details of, for instance, including that URL in your application. We use a config map within the app so the user doesn't have access necessarily to your keys in the cloud. It also creates a user so you're able to manage users like you would normal objects, which is a little bit different than the PV PVC, and that's why we feel like you know, it's important to have a CRD that defines object in that sense because it is a little bit different. >> All right, so Erin, is this Rook we're talking about then, is, you know, Rook, did I understand, I think got to 1.0, just got released. >> Yeah. >> You know, give us the update on what Rook is, you know, how that fits with this conversation we've been having. >> Right. You know, where we are with the maturity of it. And Rook, as was on the keynote this morning, you know, is a great CNCF project with a really healthy community behind it. One of the provisioners we've created as part of those object CRDs is a Rook provisioner for CEF block, or excuse me, CEF object. We also have an s3 provisioner. So, you know, we hope to have, just like we had external provisioners in Kubernetes, use, you know, allow for the same contribution from the community for those. >> Okay, yeah, there, I remember a couple of years ago at the show, this fixing storage for containers in Kubernetes was something that was a little bit contention in there, and there were a few different projects out there. >> Right. >> For that, you know, where are we with that? We understand that it's never, you know, one solution for every single use case. You know, you already talked about, you know, block file and object. >> Right. >> And how there's going to be a you know, a spectrum of options. >> Sure and so I think there's lots of things to fix. >> Yeah. >> When you talk about that. One of the key things that Rook offered was the ability to ease the deployment of the storage and administration of it, and, as you know, Rook you know, has a plethora of different storage systems that it provides. And, you know, what we're really pushing at RedHat, which I think is important, is having, you know, operators. Like the operator hub that was released with OpenShift 4.0. Rook will be an operator in there. So what that allows is for more automation and true scaling. 'Cause that's where we want to get to with hybrid cloud. If you're managing 10,000 clusters, you cannot do that manually. So having Rook, having operators, and automating the storage piece underneath is really critical to make it now-scale happen. >> Forgive my ignorance. When you say that Rook winds up exposing, for example, now an object store underneath. Is that it's own pile of disks on a system somewhere that it's running? Is it wrapping around object store provided by other cloud providers? Is it something else entirely? What is the, where do the actual drives that hold my data, when I'm using Rook's object store, live? So with Rook today, the object storage that it uses is CEF object. So it exposes the ability to create, you know the CEF components underneath, which Rook can lay down and then expose the object piece of that. So that's the first provisioner in there, yep. >> Wonderful. >> Alright, so I guess when I think about object storage, for years it's been, well, I've got s3 compatibility. And that's kind of the big thing. >> Yep. Is Rook s3 compatible then? Is it, you know, giving more flexibility to users to make this the standard in a cloud native environment? Help us, you know, put a fine as to what this is and isn't. >> Yeah, that's a great question, actually, and we get asked it often. So one of the first provisioners we did is just a proof the concept was an s3, a generic s3 provisioner. And of course, CEF is s3 compliant, so it also does that, but you know, there isn't a standard for object. So most providers of object are s3 compatible. We found it very easy to take off the s3 provisioner we created to create the CEF one. There wasn't much differentiation, which means it's a great pattern for anyone to want to onboard. >> Yeah. Do you find that as s3 itself, and of course, it's competitors of other cloud providers, become more capable, you're starting to see differentiation. Now easy example would be with some of the object storage tiers, where there's increased latency on retrievals. In some cases, as little as five minutes, or as much as 12 hours. Other providers, like Google Cloud, for example, or Azure, have consistent retrieval times on their archive storage. As an easy example, is that something that you're going to start seeing divergence on as object storage becomes smarter by, I guess, all of the providers as they race each other to improve their products. >> Absolutely. I think tiering is one of the facets of object that's really critical. And you know, of course, as we spoke earlier, it's physics, you know, and having data consistency at that very low threshold is important. So, you know, using the storage for what it's worth. Using the best tools, and pulling object into the ecosystem is part of that. >> Yeah, Erin, is there anything that differentiates kind of Kubernetes storage from, you know, what people are familiar with in the past? >> I think Kubernetes storage continues to evolve. The more we learn about how people use Kubernetes, and their needs, I think we listen closely to the community and we develop against that. >> Okay, I guess the other thing is, you know, what kind of feedback are you getting from customers? Where are we along this maturation journey. You know, my history is you know, I worked when we had to fix networking and storage in virtualized environment, and it took about a decade. We're five years into Kubernetes. It feels like we've, you know, accelerated that based on what we've done in the past, but you know, definitely, you know, when it first started, it was you know, let's put stateless stuff in containers and you know, storage will be an afterthought. >> Right. >> Or something that was kind of a side car over here where you had your repository. >> Right. And I think that's the beauty of Kubefed, is that in order to have true hybrid cloud, and have Federation, we have to come together in consensus with both network compute and storage. So it really brings the story full circle. >> Perfect. What do you think right now customers are having their biggest challenges with, as they start wrapping their minds around this new way of thinking? I mean, again, it's easy for a tiny start-up, it's Twitter for Pets, or something like that, to spin off in a pure cloud native way, but larger companies with this legacy concept known as a business model that might involve turning a profit, generally predate cloud, and have done an awful lot of stuff on the data center. What are they seeing as currently being limiting factors on their digital transformation? >> So with Kubernetes just being five years old, as we celebrate the birthday today, I think customers are also maturing. You know, they're entering the landscape, learning about Kubernetes, learning how to containerize, you know, lift and ship their applications, and then they're running up, to costs, right? And lock-ins and things they want to avoid. And that's really where we in the community want to provide a platform and a runway for them to have that choice. >> Alright. Erin, any customer successes that you can share with us, either about the operator or about work specifically? >> Certainly not with Federation. We haven't released it. It will come out in OpenShift 4.2, so we don't have any customer success stories yet, but I would say definitely it's a request, and you know, we're asking customers about it, and if they're interested. And you will find many times maybe they're not familiar with the word Federation, but they're definitely interested in that use case. >> Okay, how's the general feel. You know, what kind of feedback are you getting from customers so far, things that you're excited about that are happening here at the show? >> I'm just excited that Kubernetes is kind of growing up. And it's you know, becoming a true enterprise-level project that customers rely on, and build their business on. >> Well, Erin Boyd, really appreciate you joining us, sharing all the updates. Look forward to the upcoming release, and definitely get to follow up with you soon, to hear about those customers as they start rolling it out. >> Alright, great. Thank you. >> Alright. For Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman, here at KUBECON, CLOUDNATIVECON 2019, Barcelona, Spain. Thanks for watching theCUBE (techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering DELL Technologies World 2019. Brought you by DELL Technologies, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with John Furrier, day two of theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019. We have been talking with lots of great folks the last couple of days, and we are pleased to welcome to theCUBE Erin Banks, Director of Product Marketing for DELL EMC. Erin it's great to have you on theCUBE. >> It's great to be here, thank you so much. >> So this is the second branded DELL Technologies World. The first one since DELL became a publicly traded company once again. But you have a storied past of all this experience with a lot of these brands. Give us a little bit of your background as you've made your way through all these companies, and left your mark. >> Yeah, I feel like I've hit just about every corporate conference that we have under DELL Technologies, 'cause I came in originally through RSA around 2006, and then that acquisition happened, and then I transitioned over to EMC. So then we started the whole EMC World before, RSA Conference, EMC World. Always continuing to support security. Always continuing to do that. Went to VMware, they're doing the support security. We had a Vspecials program, so we wanted to sell EMC products for VMware products. So we continue to do that. So I think there's VMware and then I came back, I left for a little bit and then I came back. So I always joke that I have four companies I think left, and I would've had like, I think I get an award for having worked at every seven of the companies. (Lisa laughs) >> At least a mug, right? >> Yeah, I should get something I think. >> You should. >> Yeah, I think so. A jacket. >> Alright, so what's your current role now? So you're working in what group? Where are you now? >> Yeah, so right now I'm focused on structure, storage, divisions. So that's going to be Isilon, ECS, ClarityNow and the project Nautilus, and we're focused from a marketing perspective. I'm the Director of Product Marketing for that group. >> Yeah, storage didn't get a lot of keynote coverage. Normally they do get a lot with the EMC, 'cause obviously there's a lot of things going on around Dell Technology World, but Michael Dell said, storage isn't stopping, 'cause you have more data coming in. So unstructured is a big part of it. >> It's huge. >> Whether it's social data, gestured, any kind of Data Exaust, IoT, data is data, right? And the unstructured is the large growing percentage of the overall data population. >> Yeah, I think somebody gave me a statistic that 80% of the data that's generated is unstructured data, right? And people need to keep it and they need to, in some situations like Thomas Driving Systems, they need to keep it for a very very long time. So, there's always that debate of all these years that I've been at these conferences, about how long you keep the data, and obviously archiving them and where are you moving them, giving the customers the options. We're still obviously talking about that, which is great, but now we just have more and more data. Now it's really, from an Isilon perspective, we're focused on the management, and also the real estate, right? Because there isn't just every amount of space that every data center can have. Customers are running out of data center space, and they're running out of people, right? And they're like, listen, I can't hire anymore people, I want to focus on the business, and that's what we support from an Isilon perspective, is focusing on the business. I mean we obviously focus from all of UDS, but our announcements today were a focus on Isilon. >> So large growth, okay, but with the habit of, okay, just store it, we'll get to it later, it's been a nice luxury with unstructured, because some of the technology allows you to store it. Some call it a data lake or data swamp, depending on how you look at it. Now that the focus is getting more out of the data, while still storing it, right? Just throw it into the pile or into the corpus or into the data lake or whatever storage it is. Getting the mechanism to get the data out, and making it relevant and valuable is a focus. What's going on there? What are some key trends that are happening that you guys are riding? >> Yeah, well we're talking a lot, we have a campaign around data capital, right? And obviously as we all know, data has a lot of value within organizations. I'd like to tell customers that data has more value than we do as the employees. Companies will get bought and they'll fire the people, because they just want the data. And we can't ignore that fact, right? What does it say about the businesses customers? What does it say about their likes or dislikes? What does it say about where the company needs to go? The only way you know, to be successful, I think, in the next three to five years is to understand your customers and what they need, right? We had a bank the other day that was like, well all of our customers are 50 years old, so we're not going to do applications, and we don't really care about our data, and you're like, but you have people that are coming up behind that are using applications, right? That want more of a service. It's no longer, I say to banks, you don't need to buy another bank, right? You need to provide a service to me. How do you get that value out of that data to understand who I am as a customer or what I like, where I travel, what do I do in my day to day life, and give me that service, so I continue to be a customer for you. That's essential. >> It is essential. We talk about customer experience a lot. It's absolutely essential, because whether we're consumers of banking services or retail or whatever it is, we have so much choice. >> Correct. >> And especially with social media, I talk about unstructured data, we have a voice and the opportunity to get that out there, and go in turn. So really evaluating that data and understanding, and making decisions on that data to deliver a personalized experience is table stakes. >> Yes, I mean, we talk about this all the time, about the markets that are not doing it. Like retail, right? They always talk about, everyone wants to go to Amazon and buy their clothes or now there's boxes that are coming to your door with all the clothes in it. So how does the real estate business stay essential to me as a buyer, we all need clothes, but what gets me back into the store, right? And we talk about the sensors, right? We talk about the data that is generated of just me walking around the stores. How long do I spend in front of an item, right? Can I have a coupon that's popped up on my phone, right? How do I get more from an experience. And I think these are the struggles that organizations are having. We were talking to a customer that's managing a sports arena and the biggest thing is, how do you get them back into the arena? How do you change their experience, because they're a Canadian company, they don't want to be standing outside in the cold, 'cause it's hockey season, everyone loves it. How do you get them in earlier, because now there's more security, right? We have this, I always call it the physics effect, right? You have one change, it ripples into everything else. So it's cold, the security lines are long, I'd rather be at home watching this. How do I get that experience? And these are the partnerships that are being created with companies like athletic companies, and sports arenas and sports teams and things like that to really change an experience that we have, and the only way you could do that is with data, right? The enormous amount of data that we have. We couldn't do that if we didn't have the data. >> So what do they just come up with a better solution, not standing outside and getting in quickly? >> Yes, so, yeah we talked about this, right? We did a great podcast about this, because they're now doing these programs where they'll bring you in earlier, right? So maybe they'll have dinner and of couple beers, right? And you can come in and kind of enjoy the arena when no game is going on, but you get in earlier out of the cold. They talked about buying retail from your seats, right? And they test it out. That wasn't successful. So it's a really good kind of option along those lines. People like to walk around and look, and they touch and feel the items, and look at all of their options. So these are great things that they were able to test. The digital signage has been a huge impact from an analytics perspective. Really being able to change it. The amount of growth that organizations have achieved from just digital signage has been enormous. So, they're really transforming their businesses in different aspects, and it's all really driven from the data. >> So what's going on with the products that you guys are doing? What's the value proposition for Isilon? Where's the focus for you now? >> Yeah, so, we're always continuing to just answer the questions that our customers are having. Which always comes down to the amount of data that we have, how to continue to manage that, and then how to manage it in this data center. So we had a release today, which were focused both from a software aspect as well as a hardware aspect and now our software of OneFS, so it's still the single file system, is not being able to scale out to 252 nodes. It was 144 before. Now it's 58 petabytes. And what I love most about that is, how you manage 58 petabytes is exactly how you manage a terabyte. I mean that's important to a customer, where they're saying, I could easily add storage within a minute, I don't have to worry about it, and I have the same amount of people managing the system. I just have to focus on the workloads, and I just have to focus on the applications. And then our customers are saying, again, we're running out of the real estate, how can you give us a more dense box, right? We need the performance of a hybrid, but we need the capacity of an archive systems, again, we need to be able to do more with less almost. So we introduced the H5600 this week or today. And really just being able to give our customers what they need to really continue to drive their business forward. I always say, it's always about the workloads, and the applications. I'm inspired by what our customers are doing. They're just doing these innovative tools, and work and everything, because no longer they're being constrained from an IT perspective, right? The technology is now doing the heavy lifting, and now we're able to really utilize the data for what it's worth and getting the most out of it. Which I just love that, right? I think that's important to businesses. >> Put today's announcements in the perspective of the Workforce. We've talked a lot about Workforce the last couple of days, about really enabling businesses to do so much with this distributed Workforces, but in terms of Workforce optimization, the density that you just talked about, what are some of the immediate impacts that customers are going to realize that's going to, besides productivity improvements? >> Yeah, again, I've had direct conversations with customers, it was like an autonomous driving system, and they were saying, listen, again, I don't have a head count, nobody wants to give me more head count. I can't keep doing this. What the business wants to do is, they want to get to market fast. Because if we can get to the market fast, then we can drive that business faster, and that's what we need. How can you help me? And that's what I love about, not only the unstructured data conversation, but the Isilon conversations that we're having is like, how can you help my business? Well okay, we understand that there's struggles. Again, no data center, don't have the head count, they'll give us developers, right? They want to drive in these other markets, right? And then were saying, great, we'll continue to drive this one file system capability, but give you this enormous growth, and really continue to drive that, right? >> If they get revenue, they can get head count. So this I back to >> Correct. >> the cloud model of, let's get some value out there quickly, time to value. >> Yeah, and then the question is, where is the optimal head count that you need? Is it to do with somebody just continuing to rack and stack. Or is it someone that's really going to get the value out of that data, continue to push that, to test the systems. Again, they want to get to the market first. How can we enable that? How can we really help them to do that? That's our goal. >> So talk about customers and their receptiveness for AI. We hear a lot about it all the time, but really looking at, we talked about the volume of data, we could talk about that for days and days, but really enabling customers to harness the power of AI machine learning to extract the insights. Where are those conversations going with customers as it relates to Isilon and some of the things today, but just in general, where's there appetite with respect to being ready to harness the power of AI? >> We ask this question a lot about where are we in the AI landscape, right? And some customers are really focused on that, but they have a completely different model than some of the companies that have been our traditional companies that we've been kind of like focused on. So it's kind of a between the both, right? I think a lot of it, in my opinion, a lot of it has to do with the culture, right? It's a completely different way of thinking about a business, and it's a completely different way of focusing on, not only your data, but like the data management. You know with the joke about a data swamp, cleaning the data, having a business focus that's driven specifically from data is a culture change. And not a lot of people are willing to have that culture change. New companies can do that, 'cause that's how they developed the company, right? But when you see some of the companies that we've all been a part of for all of these years, that's not that easy. So, in the little baby steps, which is why I love telling those customer stories, so I'll be like, listen, this is possible, this is not just fake, we're not just fairies floating around us, right? This is truth capablities-- >> It's real transformation, that's the theme. The developers are a key part of this. This is something that we've seen. Developers using data as part of their application. Making that addressable, making it fast access is one, that's awesome. The other interesting dynamic that I want to get your thoughts on, because you have a security background is securing data and also governance or also driving use cases in applications that might not have been foreseen. We're one year into GDPR, and I don't think really anything's changed, but, I don't want to go on that rant, but now you have other regulatory things that's saying, hey, you know what, we might have to deal with the data differently. So how is Isilon enabling that? Is it just another use case? >> Yeah, I mean it is absolutely just in another use case that we're just going to have to focus on from the aspect of what's the implication. What are their customers looking at? When we talk specifically about GDPR, that's fairly new, right? We're just trying to figure this out, and trying to look at those different kind of aspects. A lot of that was also the right to know, and right to remove, and saying, what do you know about me and how do you kind of manage that? So a lot of that is really focused on a data management aspect and it's not just from Isilon, but it's, how do you manage it, right? So the ClarityNow capabilities that we have, right? This product that we were able to acquire, that really will give you that great insight into your data, so you can make those decisions, it says, alright, well this is all of our information on Erin Banks, this is her likes, dislikes, whatever that information has, right? We're able to really manage that a lot better, and the data management is the really next important step of the data collection, the data processing. It's understanding what you have, because it all comes in, but it doesn't add value until you really know what you have and what you don't have. Because even from an analytics perspective, you might have to supplement that data from some other resource. Maybe you need to change the application, and get additional data. This is all really driven across that same kind of aspect. This is the same conversation, and we'll just continue to fuel that and have that, and enable them to do that. That's why I say, we want to inspire our customers to be like, wow, I didn't realize that I could do that with tech, right? And then start enabling them to be innovative, and that's what we're still continuing to do. >> What's one of your favorite stories of, we had talked about your tenure within the Dell Technologies family when we first started, but looking at today in 2019, every company is a tech company or has to be. If you look back over the last 10, 12 years, what's some of your favorite stories of how this company Dell Technologies has enabled, and it's companies, a surprising customer to become a tech company? >> Yeah, and I think the number one thing that I personally love, right? That keeps me here. That brought me back, right? Not only was it just 2006 and staying, but said, I want to go back to that, is because what I really feel is, our experience that we have across every market, right? The geographies, the struggles that customers are having, and what we're able to learn from them, and really help our customers excel. It's not just us selling products, right? It's not just selling services, it's not just selling software, right? It's us trying to get out there and saying, this is how other customers are using it, this is how they've been successful, this is where they've downfall, lets help you, right? As we're trying to bring companies further along on their business journey, and we're saying, we've worked with customers to do this, we'll continue to work with you to do that, and we can do it across all seven of these companies end-to-end. It's a very impactful capabilities across applications, security, which is incredibly important, right? IT and Workforce and all these individual transformations, and that's what I think is a passion, and the best part of what we do. >> Well Erin, thank you so much for joining John and me on theCUBE this afternoon, and walking us through some of these key things, helping customers of any industry really excel, and unlock the capital in their data. We appreciate your time. >> I appreciate yours, thank you so much. >> Our pleasure. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live day two of our coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019 from Vegas. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a Cube conversation. >> Welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're in our Palto Alto studios today for a Cube conversation, kind of an interesting conversation around trying to connect big enterprises who are always trying to be innovative with small companies who are usually innovative but don't necessarily have the connections the big companies that have a little bit more resources and might be interested in the things that they're working on. Really doing that through podcasts, which is a really growing venue. It's been going on for a while, but we're seeing a big uptake in, I think, the consumption of podcasts, who's doing podcasts, the brands behind podcasts. So we're really happy to have them all the way from Texas. It's Erin Gregor and Syya Yasotornrat, the cofounders of Innovation Calling. So welcome. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank for having us. >> Absolutely, so did I get the description right of Innovation Calling, or give everyone kind of your overview of what you guys are up to. >> Yeah, so Innovation Calling was developed with the fact of there's, being in Dallas, we've got a lot of large corporations with innovation labs. They're trying to stand out. They're trying to connect with great talent, but a lot of these people, everybody's got an innovation lab, and we've talked about this before. If you're in the Fortune 500, you are a tech company whether you like it or not. And so we just saw this potential to highlight these companies to be able to hopefully get talent. And then on the other side enterprise companies are trying to connect with start-ups, established start-ups, not ideas, but established and there's a lot to sift through. Hopefully the goal of the podcast is to highlight these companies and help with that sifting and help with the talent pool and really connecting the creators with the companies that are trying to create. >> What's kind of the objective of that matching 'cause clearly it's not a hiring, you're not a hiring service. >> Right. >> You're talking about companies, not people, so what's kind of the objective? What's kind of your best case if this connection works? >> So for us our best case scenario is, obviously, we are at the forefront of innovation with emerging technologies today. Obviously Silicon Valley has a lot of talent and a lot of corporations already in that space, but when you think of the mid-tier, second-tier cities like Dallas, for example, you don't have as many tech workers, but there's still need for that type of talent, right? >> Right. >> With podcasting as our venue and medium to communicate that, we also realized that there was a great potential for these corporations to leverage podcasting as a way to communicate and do their outreach. Again, we're on those mid-tier second-tier cities where you might not have the plethora of folks here in the Bay Area. >> Right, right, but even if they connect with that company, are you thinking that there's going to be some type of technical alliance, some type of partnership, an OEM agreement, or what again kind of if you're pitching this to the small company, what am I like "Yay! You're finally getting" Ya know I listened to your podcast the other day. You had a woman on from Erickson, and I'm building some 5G widget. What's kind of my anticipated outcome of participating and kind of following your funnel and connecting with Erickson? >> So we have a couple of different ways. First of all, we can through us, we've actually made a lot of handshakes, so that's what I love to do is help create the handshakes and we've done that personally. The other side is we are taking the next step and doing live events. So that podcast that you talked about was a series of women in tech leadership where it's not just a live podcasting event but a networking event. So we're really taking the next step in creating these opportunities that you can be in the same room more exclusive type room that we're putting together, a lot of invite only perspective, but helping to make those connections where I see somebody from Erickson is going to be there, I want to make sure and now I can actually be in person and make that happen too. >> Okay. Why podcast? How did you come to use podcast as kind of your medium? >> So I think there's been a tradition in the last five six years that podcast does have the potential to blow up. I think now in 2019 we've actually hit that threshold where there's actually consumer response and with enough studies what they've discovered is most podcast listeners are actually educated business professionals. They tend to lean towards technology, yet you don't see a lot of technology-branded podcasts. And so we looked at the market. A lot of hobbyist type and personal branded podcasts, but we think now is the right time for corporations to make the investment to understand that the medium of traditional advertising is actually evolving and podcast is leading that forefront. You're seeing a lot of huge investments. Actually here there's a hundred million dollar plus investments for the purpose of growing the podcast community. >> Is that for the infrastructure? Or is that for the actual talent and the community and the content generation? >> Yes, the answer is yes, it's everything. (laughter) A company that does a lot of production but builds the community too. >> So I listen to Malcolm Gladwell's all the time. We got to interview him at Quickbooks Connect a couple years ago. You know, really interesting podcast. There's guys like Joe Rogan and stuff that obviously got a ton of great pub when he had Elon Musk on, who smoked not really a joint but kind of a joint and that, but I'm curious on the business side, are there some kind of lighthouse podcasts that you guys see that you use either as an example for what you're trying to develop or as an example to show? I'm just going to keep using Erickson just 'cause it's top of mind from what I just watched. To show them to say hey this is the type of thing that you guys should be trying to do. Who are some of your favorites? >> I'm a big fan of Hackable McAfee that has rolled out. When you think of tech branding and that is what we do focus on is technology based corporations, we tend to lead toward speeds and feeds. That's kind of our, we're engineered background folks in general, right? But I thought Hackable does a great job of pulling in some technology but then using stories or using events of being hacked, for example, something that the audience can relate to. And it's a storytelling, and that's the story arc that I think in general we're helping corporations understand the value of storytelling. It's not just about a product. It's not just selling a cup per se, but the story around it. How good that cup of coffee will feel when you drink it or you know, the experience or memories that you have it evokes. >> So how far are you along on your journey? You have a number of podcasts up already on your site. Are you the first inning, the third inning, is this still kind of early days or where are you in your development of your concept and your company? >> Well, we have a couple of different components to our business, so the podcast has What I was telling you about too we have a network component, we've got a consulting services. Our goal for Innovation Calling was let's first prove the concept. Let's plug into a network. Let's make sure we We'll be the test case essentially, and we've proven that. So from that perspective of that component, we're hitting, we're almost at 100,000 downloads of our podcasts. You know, we're doing pretty well with that. And now as we build it's the next component, so we're bringing on a couple customers from a consulting basis and we help not just with the production but with the promotion. So you spoke earlier about, I always kind of look at if the tree falls in the forest but no one was there to hear it, did it actually happen? I feel that saying fits with a lot of corporate podcasts. They're out there, but no one knows they're out there. So are you going to continue spending that kind of money on production and time with your employees if you're not going to do anything to promote it. And no one knows it exists? So we help on both sides of that scale. >> So on your podcast, which has been the women in tech theme, is that kind of the theme you're going to continue, or is that kind of a launching thing and you're going to turn into other themes? >> That's just a component. So Innovation Calling, there's men on the actual podcast. But we started that specific series to yes talk about the technology perspective of women, but how did you get there? What's your story of growing? So that's just a segment of that podcast again to bring in to really theme the live events to help grow that community on a segment basis? So as that grows, our goal is to do a couple different other types of segments. We talked about a channel. The idea of that yesterday with a client, so we want to actually take the bigger part of Innovation Calling and niche it down bit by bit on the live event scale. >> And then on the event side, how often are you doing them? What's the format, how many people, frequency, and what's the format? >> Syya is ready to go. >> She's ready to go. >> Let me tell you, I'm ready to go. First off, there's wine and hors d'oeuvres, so if we can't wine you and dine you I suppose, but no, really again we're about building community first and foremost. The Dallas Fort Worth area is making great strides in the entrepreneurial side. Big investments to get major corporations to come in the area, so we think this is a great opportunity for these folk to come together. A lot of folks from outside of town, who are looking to build their network again because they've been relocated. And then, you know, our themes. Women in technology is our first theme because, quite frankly we're sort of biased a little bit towards that. >> Well it's a good theme. >> Got to help our people. >> But again it is a very casual format right now. It's interview-based. >> Is it a hundred people? Five hundred people? >> We actually started and we want it to be intimate. We want the value of the network to actually make genuine connections as opposed to if it gets too large, I feel like some individual might be left off the side. So we actually started off our very first one that sold out was forty people and we did not want more than that in a room. Quite frankly then it gets claustrophobic. >> What about frequency? >> Once a month. >> Once a month. >> Our goal is to keep the size about 75-100 of those, max out at 100, but make sure to Syya's point keep them at an intimate scale. >> What about geography? Obviously you guys are based out of Dallas Fort Worth area. You're here in Silicon Valley. What's kind of your geographic plan? How do you see this kind of evolving? >> Absolutely. We would love to share this across the United States. Again we want to make sure Dallas is viable, proves a point. It is a second-tier city versus something like the Silicon Valley area or Chicago, New York, etc. We are not trying to create a brand new women in technology group, if you will. We're actually working in collaboration with existing women technology groups. We're just simply leveraging the networking opportunity through live podcasting. Again, growing the podcast medium. >> Yeah, I would say by early 2020 our goal is to be in, to come out here and to be able to have an audience to do a live event. We actually had drinks with someone last night about that collaboration, so we'd love to grow it on a perspective and be able to do it in different communities 'cause I've been podcasting for about five years through other businesses and the live event, it's just really. I mean you know you do live interviews. >> I do a lot of live events. >> There's just something special about that connection and then being there live to do the interview. It's a really fun format. >> Right. So do you have any upcoming guests you can plug or share with us today on your next couple podcasts? >> Our next event is actually April 9th. (laughter) (mumbles) April 9th and we're going to have Crystal Christensen, VP of Tech Support at SonicWall. We're very excited to have her onboard. We're still in confirmation, but we're going to be expecting folks from SalesForce, HPE, and Facebook for our next events. >> Okay, great. Where do people go to listen to the podcasts? >> Innovationcalling.com >> All right. Well Syya, Erin, thanks for stopping by. Hopefully you have a good successful couple of days in Silicon Valley and safe travels home. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much for having us, Jeff. Appreciate it. >> She's Erin, she's Syya, I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. We're at our Palo Alto studios for our Cube conversation. Thanks for watching. We'll catch ya next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCube! Covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing, brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of the Grace Hopper conference, here in Orlando. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Rick. We're joined by Erin Yang. She is the VP of Technology Product Management for Workday. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Of course, thank you for having me. >> So tell us a little bit about what you do at Workday and what are the most exciting projects you're working on right now? >> All right, so I lead up our Technology Product Management team at Workday, and so for those of you who might not have heard of Workday, we are a leading cloud provider for financial management, human capital management, analytical applications. Been around since 2005, I've been there for the last six years and I would say the technology is such an exciting part of the company and one of the things that really drew me there so a lot of people don't the original story around workday but when we started we had this amazing mix of really experienced leaders who had been in the enterprise space before, who had built a lot of these products before. Combined with cloud technologies, just taking off and no one had really done the HCM and the cloud before financials in the cloud and so they were able to completely start over, we like to say with a clean sheet of paper, with new technologies but having experience in the industry and build from there. So we have a single technology platform that powers all of our different applications and that's the part of the company that I sit on. >> So you're really in the core technology that's driving the application. Desired technology NOD, ATM or one of the other sets. >> So the things that my team really looks after are security, integration, our infrastructure, the common data model and the common work flow that goes across the different applications. And the fact that we can have a single platform that connects all the applications, makes it so much easier for our customers and that's really been the philosophy of the company, which is customers first. We really focus on making our customers happy and so one of our company goals is always hitting 95% customer satisfaction, which is really unheard of in the enterprise industry when most people are not super happy with those products. And we've been able to hit 97% in the last year that we did the surveys. >> It's an interesting part of the SAS model because unlike a traditional enterprise software sale, they make the sale, they collect the 15%. But you're getting paid monthly I assume and maybe it's an annual contract. So you have to keep delivering value each and every single month cause you don't have this long term, big giant, enterprise license. >> It's a subscription revenue model. It's no more of a you deliver a product, then you don't think about it anymore. It's a continuous partnership with our customers. And I think that's why the relationship matters so much with our customers, they're stuck with us to a certain extent and we want to make sure that they're happy, that they're getting the value that they wanted out of the product and then we can also grow with them. And so one of the interesting parts of our technology is that we actually abstract the application and business logic from the technology itself through a meta data language that we've built out internally. And so we've been able to swap out our persistence technology, change the way that we store data, scale our transactions without our customers even knowing it. So that's kind of one of the beautiful parts of the way that our architecture was designed. >> So it's the architecture but then what else are you doing to hit that 97%. The key is empathizing with your customer. >> We spend a lot of time with our customers, that's one of the big points, almost every single product, every single feature that we build has a design partner program where we literally are with our customers, understanding what their pain points are and figuring out how can we solve those pain points in the product. And on the fact that we're pure SAS, so we just have one version that every customer has. So if we're improving the product for one customer, we're improving it for all of our customers. And so we're able to just focus on that single version instead of splitting our attention across old versions and maintaining old systems. >> So shifting gears a little bit to Grace Hopper specifically. You talked about, before we turned on the cameras that Workday made a big investment in Grace Hopper this year and you brought a huge contingent of people. I think its interesting and I think a lot of people know that there's a lot of hiring that goes on. I don't know that everyone knows as a development opportunity where companies bring large contingents. I wonder if you can speak to one. What is the value that you guys made this investment in this show around people that already work for Workday. >> So ultimately we're here because at Workday, we really believe in diversity, being good for our business, being good for our people. It helps us make better decisions, helps us build better products, we're more creative and it helps the bottom line. I think there's a lot of research out there now. And so at Grace Hopper we think this is the best way because it's such a big event to improve all aspects of the talent pipeline. So it's not just the hiring coming in from college, which we are definitely doing but it's also bringing, we have over 130 employees who came here from Workday and all walks in their careers. So some newer more junior people and some more experienced people. And we really think that the networking that they can do here, the sessions that they can come to to do professional development and learn. One of our sessions is how to get out of that middle management quagmire. How do they continue moving up and forward in their careers. It's not just that entry point into that junior entry level position. >> So what an investment. Outside of your own event, I would imagine that's probably the biggest presence you have at any tech event. >> I think it is, I haven't heard of us having more than 130 people at any other event. And it's a big investment especially because our big customer conference is next week. (laughs) We're all busy with that but this is a important enough event for us, both for college recruiting, both for professional developments and for, like I said, building that network even within the women who are here at Workday because we're a bigger company now and this is a good opportunity for us all to strengthen those relationships and we have eight employees who are speaking in sessions and that's a great experience as well. To get up on stage, to build your presence, learn how to speak and communicate and challenge yourself in that way. >> What would you say has been the biggest challenges in your career and your someone who grew up in the bay area, went to the same high school Steve Jobs, Stanford graduate, working in this industry for a while now. What would you say you've learned along the way in terms of overcoming challenges. >> I would say I've had a lot of opportunities growing up and I would say some of the biggest challenges though are the impressions that people might have of you that you need to overcome >> Okay interesting. >> And so for me it's like, first you start off as a female and so people think you might be leaning towards certain areas and so starting from when I was young I got a rush out of defying expectations that people had of me and maybe that's how I have ended up to where I am today. But I like to surprise people but some people don't like that and so I can see that being a challenge for some women if they're saying I really like math and technology and science and if it gets them odd looks or even just a lack of support, they might, start backing off and start thinking they may be better suited for something else. But for me I actually really liked the challenge, it made me more excited to overcome that and say hey, I can be a woman, I want to surprise more people, I want to get into Stanford and do electrical engineering cause that's not going to be the expected path that others have of me and I want to show that I can do it. And it's been really nice to see more and more female role models who have stories like that. Because then you start making it the norm so that if someone really is hesitant on whether they should or shouldn't be going down that path if they see other women who've been strong and achieved many things that they were able to do that. >> Before the cameras were rolling, you were also talking about your experience at Workday and mentorships and the sponsors that you've received. Can you tell our viewers a little bit more about your experience. >> I think that's been a big part of my journey at Workday. I started off as the product manager for our collaboration team. It was my first time doing product management only six years ago and my manager at that time, he really believed in me and combine that with the fact that we're at a fast growing company we were only 900 people at that point. I told you we're over 7000 now, lots of opportunities were coming up. He was able to say, there's this other opportunity around our extensibility area, which was totally unrelated to collaboration but he's like, you've down well with what I gave you over here, why don't you try this? And it was not something I would personally volunteer for cause I actually didn't think that I was capable of doing it. But he's like, no, I believe in you, I think you can do it, I've already advocated for you that you should take on this role. And so I stepped into it, did a good enough job for them to say, okay we're going to keep investing in her. And that manager continued to really put me forward for other opportunities and then when he switched roles he nominated me to be his successor for leading the whole team and so he's been a really major part of my career progression here at Workday and I think having someone who can be there to advocate for opportunities for you, and also teach you how to navigate and organization, who are the key decision makers, who do you need to influence, what are the relationships you need to build. All of that is such valuable knowledge to have that you may not know otherwise. A mentor might not even be able to do that for you but someone who's really sponsoring you can. >> Well Erin thanks so much for joining us here in the cube, its been great talking to you. >> Thank you so much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Rick, we will have more from Grace Hopper just after this. (upbeat techno music)

>>Mm. Joining me is Aaron Suzuki, founder and CEO of Prowess. >>Aaron. Welcome. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. >>Absolutely. Thanks for joining us. So let's dive right in. Tell us about prowess. >>Progress has been around for quite a while. We've been serving the technology industry from the very beginning, almost 20 years. We've always been able to bridge the gap between the story of the product and what it actually does. And a lot of times, there's a pretty fundamental disconnect between what engineering says and what marketing wants to claim. And so this is sort of how we got down this road of getting into testing and validation of products such as we do today quite quite extensively. And >>that's really what we're focusing on right now is this idea of your independence as a lab. And in this particular case, uh, it's a series of tests that you've done for, uh, you know, using Dell hardware combined with Broadcom cards. So talk a little more about that. About that the concept of independence and what that means. >>Yeah. You know, it's important to us that we stay vendor, agnostic, platform agnostic. Um, and there are a lot of things happening concurrently in the industry. A lot of people want to get a lot of work done really fast, and most customers are not sort of vendor exclusive. In fact, we're not sure we know of any. We always try to keep this objective point of view. That is to say that we don't allow our customers to buy results when we're doing quantitative testing. We really are out there trying to come up with a story or a narrative, and that really seemed to be The missing link in all of this is that there are the quantitative houses that do traditional benchmark testing on one side and then system integrators and kind of on the other extreme agencies. That would really do the narrative and the system integrator side build out a solution, but they wouldn't be able to tell you how it would perform. And so reconciling those two things really became challenging. So having a source that would be able to give you that insight that goes beyond just transactions, um, you know, per whatever unit of time and finding some of these metrics in between that we're more relevant to people's jobs. Where was really the inspiration for creating this unique practise that we call prowess? Labs? >>So, Erin, when I think about performance testing, uh, it's very easy to think of it from the perspective that it's a bunch of hardware slapped together in Iraq. You get some engineers, scientists to run some tests. Why prowess? What? What do you specifically bring to the table? That's meaningful? >>Performance testing is usually done in one of two ways, predominantly one way. It's a very academic approach, which says this specific benchmark test run this specific way gives us X. Another approach is more narrative in nature and more demonstrative. And there's this huge gap in between, and that's really what prowess labs exist to fulfil. >>So, Erin, give us an idea of the scale of prowess. How many of these projects have you worked on? How many how many customers have you worked with over >>over time? Um, we do this work with most of the leading global hardware and software manufacturers and a select number of emerging providers as well. So for us, you know, year to year dozens of projects of varying scope and scale. Various projects also running kind of programmatic form where we're kind of iterating constantly throughout the year. Um, so it's It's really a lot of fun for our team members to to do this. And some of them have been doing it for 10 or 12 years in continuity. >>Erin, Thanks for joining us to talk about practise today. >>My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Mhm. Yeah.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting adaptive data governance brought >>to you by >>Iota Ho. In this next segment, we're gonna be talking to you about getting to know your data. And specifically you're gonna hear from two folks at Io Tahoe. We've got enterprise account execs Evita Davis here, as well as Enterprise Data engineer Patrick Simon. They're gonna be sharing insights and tips and tricks for how you can get to know your data and quickly on. We also want to encourage you to engage with Sabina and Patrick. Use the chat feature to the right, send comments, questions or feedback so you can participate. All right, Patrick Sabetta, take it away. All right. >>Thanks, Lisa. Great to be here as Lisa mentioned guys. I'm the enterprise account executive here in Ohio. Tahoe you Pat? >>Yeah. Hey, everyone so great to be here. A said My name's Patrick Samit. I'm the enterprise data engineer here at Iota Ho. And we're so excited to be here and talk about this topic as one thing we're really trying to perpetuate is that data is everyone's business. >>I couldn't agree more, Pat. So, guys, what patent? I patent. I've actually had multiple discussions with clients from different organizations with different roles. So we spoke with both your technical and your non technical audience. So while they were interested in different aspects of our platform, we found that what they had in common was they wanted to make data easy to understand and usable. So that comes back. The pats point off being everybody's business because no matter your role, we're all dependent on data. So what Pan I wanted to do today was wanted toe walk. You guys through some of those client questions, slash pain points that we're hearing from different industries and different roles and demo how our platform here, like Tahoe, is used for automating those, uh, automating Dozier related tasks. So with that said, are you ready for the first one, Pat? >>Yeah, Let's do it. >>Great. So I'm gonna put my technical hat on for this one, So I'm a data practitioner. I just started my job. ABC Bank. I have over 100 different data sources. So I have data kept in Data Lakes, legacy data, sources, even the cloud. So my issue is I don't know what those data sources hold. I don't know what data sensitive, and I don't even understand how that data is connected. So how can I talk to help? >>Yeah, I think that's a very common experience many are facing and definitely something I've encountered in my past. Typically, the first step is to catalog the data and then start mapping the relationships between your various data stores. Now, more often than not, this has tackled through numerous meetings and a combination of Excel and something similar to video, which are too great tools in their own part. But they're very difficult to maintain. Just due to the rate that we are creating data in the modern world. It starts to beg for an idea that can scale with your business needs. And this is where a platform like Io Tahoe becomes so appealing. You can see here visualization of the data relationships created by the I Ho Tahoe service. Now, what is fantastic about this is it's not only laid out in a very human and digestible format in the same action of creating this view, the data catalog was constructed. >>Um, So is the data catalog automatically populated? Correct. Okay, so So what? I'm using iota. Hope at what I'm getting is this complete, unified automated platform without the added cost, of course. >>Exactly. And that's at the heart of Iota Ho. A great feature with that data catalog is that Iota Ho will also profile your data as it creates the catalog, assigning some meaning to those pesky column Underscore ones and custom variable underscore tents that are always such a joy to deal with. Uh, now, by leveraging this interface, we can start to answer the first part of your question and understand where the core relationships within our data exists. Personally, I'm a big fan of this >>view, >>as it really just helps the i b naturally John to these focal points that coincide with these key columns following that train of thought. Let's examine the customer I D column that seems to be at the center of a lot of these relationships. We can see that it's a fairly important column as it's maintaining the relationship between at least three other tables. Now you notice all the connectors are in this blue color. This means that their system defined relationships. But I hope Tahoe goes that extra mile and actually creates thes orange colored connectors as well. These air ones that are machine learning algorithms have predicted to be relationships. Uh, and you can leverage to try and make new and powerful relationships within your data. So I hope that answers the first part of your question. >>Eso So this is really cool. And I can see how this could be leverage quickly. Now. What if I added new data sources or your multiple data sources and needed toe? Identify what data sensitive. Can I Oh, Tahoe, Detect that. >>Yeah, definitely. Within the i o ta platform. There already over 300 pre defined policies such as HIPAA, ferpa, C, c, p, a and the like. One can choose which of these policies to run against their data along for flexibility and efficiency and running the policies that affect organization. >>Okay, so so 300 is an exceptional number. I'll give you that. But what about internal policies that apply to my organization? Is there any ability for me to write custom policies? >>Yeah, that's no issue. And is something that clients leverage fairly often to utilize this function when simply has to write a rejects that our team has helped many deploy. After that, the custom policy is stored for future use to profile sensitive data. One then selects the data sources they're interested in and select the policies that meet your particular needs. The interface will automatically take your data according to the policies of detects, after which you can review the discoveries confirming or rejecting the tagging. All of these insights are easily exported through the interface, so one can work these into the action items within your project management systems. And I think this lends to the collaboration as a team can work through the discovery simultaneously. And as each item is confirmed or rejected, they can see it ni instantaneously. All this translates to a confidence that with iota how you can be sure you're in compliance. >>Um, so I'm glad you mentioned compliance because that's extremely important to my organization. >>So >>what you're saying when I use the eye a Tahoe automated platform, we'd be 90% more compliant that before were other than if you were going to be using a human. >>Yeah, definitely. The collaboration and documentation that the iota ho interface lends itself to can really help you build that confidence that your compliance is sound. >>Does >>that answer your question about sense of data? >>Definitely so. So path. I have the next question for you. So we're planning on migration on guy. Have a set of reports I need to migrate. But what I need to know is that well, what what data sources? Those report those reports are dependent on and what's feeding those tables? >>Yeah, it's a fantastic questions to be toe identifying critical data elements, and the interdependencies within the various databases could be a time consuming but vital process and the migration initiative. Luckily, Iota Ho does have an answer, and again, it's presented in a very visual format. >>So what I'm looking at here is my entire day landscape. >>Yes, exactly. >>So let's say I add another data source. I can still see that Unified 3 60 view. >>Yeah, One feature that is particularly helpful is the ability to add data sources after the data lineage. Discovery has finished along for the flexibility and scope necessary for any data migration project. If you only need need to select a few databases or your entirety, this service will provide the answers. You're looking for this visual representation of the connectivity makes the identification of critical data elements a simple matter. The connections air driven by both system defined flows as well as those predicted by our algorithms, the confidence of which, uh can actually be customized to make sure that they're meeting the needs of the initiative that you have in place. Now, this also provides tabular output in case you need it for your own internal documentation or for your action items, which we can see right here. Uh, in this interface, you can actually also confirm or deny the pair rejection the pair directions along to make sure that the data is as accurate as possible. Does that help with your data lineage needs? >>Definitely. So So, Pat, My next big question here is So now I know a little bit about my data. How do I know I can trust it? So what I'm interested in knowing really is is it in a fit state for Meteo use it? Is it accurate? Does it conform to the right format? >>Yeah, that's a great question. I think that is a pain point felt across the board, be it by data practitioners or data consumers alike. another service that iota hope provides is the ability to write custom data quality rules and understand how well the data pertains to these rules. This dashboard gives a unified view of the strength of these rules, and your dad is overall quality. >>Okay, so Pat s o on on the accuracy scores there. So if my marketing team needs to run, a campaign can read dependent those accuracy scores to know what what tables have quality data to use for our marketing campaign. >>Yeah, this view would allow you to understand your overall accuracy as well as dive into the minutia to see which data elements are of the highest quality. So for that marketing campaign, if you need everything in a strong form, you'll be able to see very quickly with these high level numbers. But if you're only dependent on a few columns to get that information out the door, you can find that within this view, uh, >>so you >>no longer have to rely on reports about reports, but instead just come to this one platform to help drive conversations between stakeholders and data practitioners. I hope that helps answer your questions about that quality. >>Oh, definitely. So I have another one for you here. Path. So I get now the value of IATA who brings by automatically captured all those technical metadata from sources. But how do we match that with the business glossary? >>Yeah, within the same data quality service that we just reviewed. One can actually add business rules detailing the definitions and the business domains that these fall into. What's more is that the data quality rules were just looking at can then be tied into these definitions, allowing insight into the strength of these business rules. It is this service that empowers stakeholders across the business to be involved with the data life cycle and take ownership over the rules that fall within their domain. >>Okay, so those custom rules can I apply that across data sources? >>Yeah. You can bring in as many data sources as you need, so long as you could tie them to that unified definition. >>Okay, great. Thanks so much bad. And we just want to quickly say to everyone working in data, we understand your pain, so please feel free to reach out >>to us. We >>are website the chapel. Oh, Arlington. And let's get a conversation started on how iota Who can help you guys automate all those manual task to help save you time and money. Thank you. Thank >>you. Erin. >>Impact. If I could ask you one quick question, how do you advise customers? You just walk in this great example This banking example that you and city to talk through. How do you advise customers get started? >>Yeah, I think the number one thing that customers could do to get started with our platform is to just run the tag discovery and build up that data catalog. It lends itself very quickly to the other needs you might have, such as thes quality rules as well as identifying those kind of tricky columns that might exist in your data. Those custom variable underscore tens I mentioned before >>last questions to be to anything to add to what Pat just described as a starting place. >>Um, no, I think actually passed something that pretty well, I mean, just just by automating all those manual tasks, I mean, it definitely can save your company a lot of time and money, so we we encourage you just reach out to us. Let's get that conversation started. >>Excellent. Savita and Pat, Thank you so much. We hope you have learned a lot from these folks about how to get to know your data. Make sure that it's quality so that you can maximize the value of it. Thanks for watching.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. Yeah, welcome to the Cubes Live coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. I'm Lisa Martin and I have a Cube alumni joining me Next. Aaron Kelly, the GM of product marketing at AWS Aaron. Welcome back to the program. >>Thanks, Lisa. It's great to be here. >>Likewise, even though we don't get to all be crammed into Las Vegas together, uh, excited to talk to you about Amazon Connect, talk to our audience about what that is. And then let's talk about it in terms of how it's been a big facilitator during this interesting year, that is 2020. >>Great, yes, for sure. So Amazon Connect is a cloud contact center where we're really looking to really reinvent how contact centers work by bringing it into the cloud. It's an Omni Channel, easy to use contact center that allows customers to spin up contact centers in minutes instead of months. Its very scalable so can scale to 10 tens of thousands of agents. But it also scaled down when you when it's not in use and because it's got a pay as you go business model. You only pay when you're engaging with collars or customers. You're not paying for high upfront per agent fees every month. So it's really been a great service during this pandemic, as there's been a lot of unpredictable spikes in demand, uh, that customers have had to deal with across many sectors, >>and we've been talking for months now about the acceleration that Corbett has delivered with respect to digital transformation. And, of course, as patients has been wearing fin globally. I think with everybody when we're calling a contact center, we want a resolution quickly. And of course, as we all know is we all in any industry are working from home. So are they. So I can imagine during this time that being able to have a cloud contact center has been transformative, I guess, to help some businesses keep the lights on. But now to really be successful moving forward, knowing that they can operate and scale up or down as things change. >>Yeah, that's exactly right. And so one of the key benefits of connect his ability to very quickly on board and get started, you know, we have some very interesting and examples like Morrisons, which is a retailer in the UK They wanted to create a new service as you highlighted, which was a door, you know, doorstep delivery service. And so they needed to spin up a quick new contact center in order to handle those orders. They were able to do it and move all their agents remotely in about a day and be able to immediately start to take those orders, which is really powerful, you know. Another interesting example is the Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training. Which part of their responsibility is to deliver unemployment benefits for their citizens? Obviously a huge surge of demand there they were able to build an entirely new context center in about nine days to support their citizens. They went from a knave ridge of about 74 call volume sort of capacity per minute to 1000 call on capacity per minute. And in the first day of standing up this new context center, they were able to serve 75,000 Rhode Island citizens with their unemployment benefits. So really ah, great example of having that cloud scalability that ability to bring agents remotely and then helping citizens in need during a very, very difficult time, >>right? So a lot of uses private sector, public sector. What are some of the new capabilities of Amazon connected? You're announcing at reinvent. >>Yeah, So we announced five big capabilities this during reinvent yesterday that really spanned the entire experience, and our goal is to make it better for agents so they're more efficient. That actually helps customers reduce their costs but also create a better collar experience so that C sat could go up in the collars, can get what they need quickly and then move on. And so the first capability is Amazon Connect Voice I D, which makes it easier to validate that the person calling is who in fact, they say they are so in this case, Lee. So let's say you're calling in. You can opt in tow, have a voice print made of you. The next time you call in, we're able to use machine learning to match that voiceprint to know. Yes, it is Lisa. I don't need to ask Lisa questions about her mother's maiden name and Social Security number. We can validate you quickly as an agent I'm confident it's you. So I'm less concerned about things like fraud, and we can move on. That's the first great new feature. The second is Amazon Connect customer profiles. So now, once you join the call rather than me is an agent having to click around a different systems and find out your order history, etcetera. I could get that all surface to me directly. So I have that context. I can create a more personalized experience and move faster through the call. The third one is called Wisdom. It's Amazon Connect wisdom, which now based on either what you're asking me or a search that I might make, I could get answers to your questions. Push to me using machine learning. So if you may be asking about a refund policy or the next time a new product may launch, I may not know rather than clicking around and sort of finding that in the different systems is pushed right to me. Um, now the Fourth Feet feature is really time capability of contact lens for Amazon connect, and what this does is while you were having our conversation, it measures the sentiment based on what you're saying or any keywords. So let's say you called it and said, I want a refund or I want to cancel That keyword will trigger a new alert to my supervisor who can see that this call may be going in the wrong direction. Let me go help Aaron with Lisa. Maybe there's a special offer I can provide or extra assistance so I can help turn that call around and create a great customer experience, which right now it feels like it's not going in that direction. And then the last one is, um, Amazon Connect tasks where about half of an agents time is spent on task other than the call follow up items. So you're looking for a refund or you want me Thio to ship you a new version of the product or something? Well, today I might write that on a sticky note or send myself a reminder and email. It's not very tracked very well. With Amazon Connect task, I can create that task for me as a supervisor. I could then X signed those tax and I can make sure that the follow up items air prioritized. And then when I look at my work. You is an agent. I can see both calls, my chats and my task, which allows me to be more efficient. That allows me to follow up faster with you. My customer, Andi. Overall, it's gonna help lower the cost and efficiency of the Contact Center. So we're really excited about all five of these features and how they improve the entire life cycle of a customer contact. >>And that could be table stakes for any business in terms of customer satisfaction. You talked about that, but I always say, You know, customer satisfaction is inextricably linked to employee satisfaction. They need. The agents need to be empowered with that information and really time, but also to be able to look at. I want them to know why I'm calling. They should already know what I have. We have that growing expectation right as a consumer. So the agent experience the customer experience. You've also really streamline. And I could just see this being something that is like I said, kind of table stakes for an organization to reduce churn, to be able to service more customers in a shorter amount of time and also employee satisfaction, right, >>right that's that. That's exactly right. Trader Grills, which is one of our, you know, beta customers using some of these capabilities. You know, they're saying 25% faster, handle times so shorter calls and a 10% increase in customer satisfaction because now it's personalized. When you call in, I know what grill you purchased. And so I have a sense based on the grill, you purchase just what your question might be or what you know, what special offers I might have available to me and that's all pushed to me is an agent, So I feel more empowered. I could give you better service. You have, you know, greater loyalty towards my brand, which is a win for everyone, >>absolutely that empowerment of the agent, that personalization for the customer. I think again we have that growing demanded expectation that you should know why I'm calling, and you should be able to solve my problem. If you can't, I'm gonna turn and find somebody else who can do that. That's a huge risk that businesses face. Let's talk about some of the trends that you're seeing that this has been a very interesting year to say the least, what are some of the trends in the context center space that you guys were seeing that you're working Thio to help facilitate? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think one of the biggest trends that we're seeing is this move towards remote work. So as you can imagine, with the pandemic almost immediately, most customers needed to quickly move their agents to remote work scenario. And this is where Amazon Connect was a great benefit. For as I mentioned before, we saw about 5000 new contact centers created in March in April. Um, Atiya, very beginning of the pandemic. So that was a very, uh, that's a very big trend we're seeing. And now what we're seeing is customers were saying, Hey, when I have something like Amazon Connect that's in the cloud, it scales up. It provides me a great experience. I just need really a headset in a Internet connection from my agents. I'm not dealing with VPNs and, ah, lot of the complexity that comes with trying to move on on premises system remote. We're seeing a huge, you know, search of adoption and usage around that the ability to very quickly create a new context center around specific scenarios are use cases has been really, really powerful. So, uh, those are the big trends moving to remote remote work and a trend towards, um, spinning of new context that is quickly and then spending them back down as that demand moves or or those those those situations move >>right. And as we're all experiencing, the one thing that is a given during this time is the uncertainty that remains Skilling up. Skilling down volume changes. But looking as if a lot of what's currently going on from home is going to stay for a while longer, I actually not think about it. I'm calling into whether it's, you know, cable service or whatnot. I think What about agent is actually on their couch at home like I am working? And so I think it's being able to facilitate that because is transformative, and I think I think I'll step out on limbs side, you know, very potentially impact the winners and the losers of tomorrow, making sure that the consumer experience is tailored. It's personalized to your point and that the agents are empowered in real time to facilitate a seamless and fast resolution of whatever the issue is. >>Well, and I think you hit on it earlier as well. Agents wanna be helpful. They wanna solve a customer problem. They wanna have that information at their fingertips. They wanna be on power to take action. Because at the end of their day, they want to feel like they helped people, right? And so being able to give them that information safe from wisdom or being able to see your entire customer profile, Right? Right. When you come on board or know that you are Lisa, um, and have the confidence that I'm talking to Lisa, I'm not. This is not some sort of, you know, fishing, exercise, exercise. These are all really important scenarios and features that empower the agent, lowers cost significantly for the customer and creates a much better customer experience for you. The collar? >>Absolutely. And we all know how important that is these days to get some sort of satisfying experience. Last question. Erin, talk to us about, you know, as we all look forward, Thio 2021. For many reasons. What can we expect with Amazon? Connect? >>Well, we're going to continue to listen to our customers and hear their feedback and what they need, which what we certainly anticipate is continued focus on that agent efficiency, giving agents mawr of the information they need to be successful and answer customers questions quickly, continuing to invest in machine learning as a way of doing that. So using ML to identify that you are who you say you are, finding that right information. Getting data that I can use is an agent Thio. Handle those tasks and then automate the things that you know I really shouldn't have to take steps is a human to go do so if we need to send you a follow up email when when your product ships or when your refund is issued. Let me just put that in the system once and have it happened when it executes. So that level of automation continuing to bring machine learning in to make the agent experience better and more efficient, which ultimate leads to lower costs and better see set. These are all the investments. You'll see a sui continue for it next year. >>Excellent stuff, Erin, thank you so much for joining me on the program today, ensuring what's next and the potential the impact that Amazon connect is making. >>Thanks, Lisa. It's great to be here >>for Aaron Kelly. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes. Live coverage of AWS reinvent 2020.

from the cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi I'm Stu mana man and welcome to a special cube conversation talking to leaders around the globe happy to welcome to the program two guests actually one is a cube alumni the other one I believe the first time on the program the Khan brothers I have a mirror and on TIFF so gentlemen thanks so much for joining us oh thank you for having us again yeah so here you know you and your brother you're coming out of stealth al Kyra is the company you two both work together at many companies we know you most recently from Katella we're a mirror you know we've spoken with you on the cube I believe right after that acquisition proc it was another company back in the day also happened to sell to Cisco but we know that you know networking is one of the you know toughest things in our industry now everybody thinks that their environment is is something challenging but you know we know networking in the weeds there's so many protocols and while networking as a whole doesn't change really fast there have been a lot of waves of change happening most recently of course cloud having a major impact on what's happening to the networking world Amir let's start with you you're the CEO your brother a tip is the CTO you're both co-founders give us a little bit of the background and the why of Al Kyra yes but after we sold patella I was looking for the next idea and we talked to multiple customers and multiple service providers a common theme that came across was the cloud networking was complex and when it came to multiple clouds it became exponentially complex it was not only learning multiple clouds but all the underlying constructs were different in each one of us so we decided that we need to take a look at a common solution which provides one way of connecting to all clouds that exist out there and provides common services like firewall and then from the governance perspective it becomes very challenging if you have very diverse environments so we are bringing analytics a common way of monitoring and managing the networks on top of that so it's a very comprehensive solution that the industry needed and they needed it as a service so we we dug deeper and came up with this idea went to the VCS and got funded very quickly to solve the problem and very proud to say that we are the first ones were in the industry for bringing computer networking as a service for multi cloud environments to the market all right now that's a that's a big vision and definitely something you know we hear from talking to customers you know absolutely multi-cloud most of the people there trying to figure out exactly what that means to their cuspid to their companies as well as it is not simple today aught if I want to pull you in you know we've seen you know many you know groups of talented you know development engine developers and engineers sometimes they try Ville in packs so when you look at you know what Amir just talked about the challenge in front of you give our audience a little bit of the understanding of you know the history of what you've been working on and is this you know a you know just turning the crank based on the latest and greatest technologies is that the coming together of some of the pieces that you've been thinking about for many years you know help us under the hood a little bit as to you know that this problem and the talents and what you're moving forward with for the last many many years both Amma and myself and other team are other team members we've been working on large customer networks whether those are service provider networks or whether those are enterprise networks so we have a deep understanding of the challenges they have based over over time so and now as I mentioned customers are transitioning to public clouds they are transitioning to SAS environments and there are a lot of challenges with which they are running into so we decided to take this challenge on and we brought together like a stellar team we have people who joined us from from botella as well as people from other large organizations they've been working on we have people from AWS we have people from Azure via people from other large companies so we have put together a great team we are very well funded and as I mentioned our approach has always always been to work with customers always understand their pain points and solve the real issues which which are having so that's approach we took and that's what we are doing here Adele here yeah so I did if I want to dig down a little bit more and actually we've got a slide I think you'll talk to because we know in networking a lot of the words sound the same you know is this an overlay I'm your said that at the service what gets deployed where is it what are the customers need to do where does this all live so if you could explain this this this diagram here for our audience so what the buildings do is a is a service and it's a cloud services exchange if you look at it and what it is comprised off is east cloud exchange points you can think of these as virtual pops and virtual polos and you can you can decide which region in the world or on the globe you want the DC X is to be spun up you come to our portal since it's consumed as a service you decide like what needs to reside on the CX PS which networking services you need there you can bring your own services or you can consume LTS services and when I talk about services or when I say services these can mean security services other networking services such as load balancers ipam DDI whatnot from the EC XPS you're gonna connect to multiple pounds from here without you as as Enterprise know without you knowing need to know anything about the underlying cloud providers networking concerts so all you do is you give us the requirements you say that you need to connect to this cloud this this is your appointment and we we do it for you so what basically what we are doing is we are virtualizing the clouds networks it's a so in the past we virtualize the when in our previous company and patella if you look at it it's virtualizing plan over different types of transports here we are virtualizing cloud it doesn't matter which public clouds you're sitting on which public cloud you need to connect to you know one service to consume you know one way of doing about networking great III that diagram definitely helped me a lot Amir let's talk my understanding you've got some customers what are some of the early things that they're using this for is this you know hybrid cloud going from their data center to a public cloud we talked about multi cloud does that mean we're actually connecting services between some of the public clouds help us understand what what your customers are seeing and starting to use it's a very interesting questions too we've been talking to multiple customers that we said and without a doubt every single customer that we are talking to has some sort of a multi cloud strategy and the reasons for them to get into multiple clouds could be either their some teams are using some applications which are optimized for a particle cloud one of the customers that we went to they were using one cloud and then acquired a company because of which you know another cloud was brought into the environment so all of a sudden they have a need to very quickly you know integrate those two environments and then there are you know with what's going on in the market today people are going to remote access requirements you know people are working from home and they need to get onto the network very quickly and consume applications which scale much better in the cloud so there's a demand from that perspective right so and in some cases one company becomes let's say Amazon becomes a competitor somewhere and people want to move to another cloud that could be another alternative right so so without fail many people are you know getting into cloud environments and the primary reason that I'm hearing now that many more companies will move into the cloud is going to be regulatory issues right so people are starting to think about pushing all the financial companies the healthcare companies to adopt multiple clouds for redundancy for high availability etc yeah you bring up a great point one of the questions we've been asking for the last couple of years is how is multi-cloud the same or different from what we used to see with multi-vendor aught if you know I think back to you go back you know 10 15 20 years ago and some of the M&A discussions that Omer was talking about you know you know I buy another company Oh what are they doing for their network well throw out their whole network and let's standardize on the vendor of choice that we have because it's better if I can go homogeneous well it's not as easy to do that in the public cloud so help us understand you know it's not as easy as that saying oh all these clouds they have API is they all use similar type type of abstractions and the like you know where does Al Kira really help make things easy for customers when they're when they're doing multi cloud so you know every cloud is doing things differently when it comes to networking so yeah at the end of the day functionality might be the same but how to achieve that how to get that working it's very different between each plug so now what we are seeing with these enterprises is that they have to build a deep understanding of each cloud before they can take on that cloud and nowadays cloud architects are in big demand they don't come cheap either so you don't necessarily just need the personal cloud architect with expertise in one account you need like architects with the expertise and multiple thoughts so so we wanted to solve that problem that's why we took this challenge on and we wanted to make it a make it one way of working with all these clouds so from a cloud architects perspective from a enterprises perspective why can't there be just one way of connecting to all these clouds why do I have to know the details of each cloud as armor said each cloud spring brings its own own its own value in different ways and there is a multi cloud strategy out there so either customers are in multiple pounds or they're looking at at multiple doubt so that's that's a big challenge right now and since what we are offering is as a service it's a unified global multi cloud network and again we're virtualizing the cloud network all right Amir you mentioned early on in the conversation that Acura is well funded you've got Sequoia and kleiner perkins as two of your investors you know definitely companies that look closely and understand the networking space help us understand the basics of the company though coming out of stealth right now is the product available where is it available you know where are you with with customer and deployments certainly we are making our product available on April 15 and many customers are trying it right now they're in the process of deploying it in production these are across industries healthcare manufacturing high-tech you know financial industries so customers span across multiple different verticals in addition to that many service providers are working with us to offer this to extend their capabilities into the cloud so many service providers have been struggling with that and this makes it very easy for them to complement their private connectivity solutions and extend their reach deeper into the cloud so the industry is very excited right now and we are excited because this is an opportunity you know which the cloud migration has brought to the table from networking perspective and if we had thought about it 10 years ago 20 years ago it was just not possible and now we have this capability in the clouds to offer in lastik capabilities do not only provide connectivity but but integrate the services like firewalls scale them up and down and provide proper governance yeah you bring up such a such a big point there I talked before about multi vendor and today you know the network team it's not just oh well I touch all of the gear that I manage as you said it's the service providers public clouds they need to span all those environments we've definitely seen a huge shift in service riders and their relationships with the public cloud over the last five years or so atif I guess that brings up a the important point here who's gonna be managing all this when it comes to a Keira is this the traditional Network person if they've been you know doing land maybe a little bit of an are they going to be doing it is the cloud team you know where does this sit in the you know conversation and jostling of roles that we're seeing as organizations are more and more embracing public cloud so it's Stu it's still a networking solution so what we are seeing working with our customers is that it's a it's a cloud architects who are were very excited when they see our solution now they can see that the network can can can show the same agility which they have been very they're being seen with with compute and storage and and rest of the stuff moving into the cloud so network was always like behind it took a lot lot of effort a lot of work to get the network to extend into clouds meeting all the all the enterprise requirements so now network architects are excited because they it's it's become very simple for them to to move into the cloud or extend their private connectivity into the club I'll give you an example we've been working with some large enterprises and they many of them they don't need to open up a manual or documentation to use our solution so our goal was always to make it so simple that anyone should be able to connect to a cloud without knowing anything about the networking constructs of a given cloud so you just come in you should just be able to give us the requirements that you need need this much capacity you need this much throughput you need B services to front-end the clouds these are your security policies which are global and you need like a multi global transport or global network a multi-level network and you should be able to just bring it up and you should on you should not need like certifications in cloud networking or certifications in using tools to orchestrate cloud connectivity so we are built a very scalable infrastructure which allows the customers to get a service from us or use our service which which meets the requirements all right I'd like to ask both of you you know it's April 2020 you're coming out of stealth you know I'm sure the product has you know all the features that your customers are asking for today but give us a look as we go through the kind of the next six to 12 months armor first from kind of a customer standpoint not if from the technology standpoint what should people be looking at both with your product how you're working with partners and you know really this multi cloud networking landscape our focus is on mid to large size enterprises and depending on which company you talk to their strategy varies to get into the cloud somewhere some are at a very early stage others have moved significant amount of workloads into into the cloud already the reality that we are seeing out there is that the hybrid environment is going to exist for a long long time and that's why we have built a solution which seamlessly integrates their existing wide area networking infrastructure to bring traffic into our solution and then we tie them seamlessly to the cloud and provide integrated services and Governors governance on top of that and they can define their own internal policies based on you know their enterprise needs so that's what we are seeing right now and going into the future I think that industry is going to continue to evolve it's still early the solutions will evolve quite a bit we have a first mover advantage to provide networking as a service and we are so excited to just continue to you know accelerate and help customers to migrate into the cloud as quickly as possible provided with the highest resiliency and security yes so from from a technology perspective as I said like we we believe in working with the customers and solving their use cases we are innovating at a very rapid pace and there are many many different use cases which which we are working on we have some of the use cases which we are which we have delivered so far where we are going out with a certain number of use cases and we will be adding more use cases as we as we go support support for more use cases and we support like all the major clouds right now we will be adding more clouds to our offering we offer a Marketplace on our portal as well so it's a it's a it's a cloud service with a built in marketplace of network services we will be expanding that marketplace as well with more services it's all based on the on the customer requirements and and we prioritize our offerings based on the requirements and there's a there's a lot of work ahead of us also it's just the beginning and as I said we are very excited to solve all these problems and make our customers successful excellent if you're a good setup for armors last slide here so we've got a slide here is that how do customers get started walk us through yeah as I have said we've our goal is to make it as simple as possible you know we live in a different world now where things change very very quickly but the customers just come to our portal they register or our service just like any other SAS based service they you know basically are taken to a canvas where they can draw their infrastructure drop services create policies within minutes and then you know across the globe and then click on the provision button and they can go and have coffee and the full infrastructure comes up literally in less than an hour as a matter of fact in many cases we have seen a comment in around half an hour across the globe this is the type of a solution or capability that the industry has never seen before in the industries we are very proud of bringing the solution to the market well congratulations both of you a lot of work goes into bringing a company to launch before I let you go I do have one last question you two are brothers you've worked together at a number of companies so you know give our audience but you know what it's like and you know what what keeps bringing you back to working together well we are very close family we've always you know you know studied together work together and many different companies we live about five minutes away from each other our kids hang out together we travel together so you know it's kind of interesting you know we've always had a very very close relation yeah this is this is a fifth company I guess where we are working together as he said like we have always worked together we have a we we have a same circle of friends also so so we have very very close to each other so yeah this is one of the best squash players in the country and nowadays he doesn't get much time but he was ranked in the top three for a long time in amateurs in the country well that is awesome well hopefully you know you get to get a little bit of break you know once the company goes into spell they know a lot of work moving forward but I'm Erin atif congratulations and thank you so much for joining us to announce coming out of stealth thank you thank you for having us thank you it's a pleasure to talk to you alright and we definitely look forward to tracking al Kyra in the future as that they move forward with adoption with their customers and their solution I'm still minimun and as always thank you for watching the queue [Music]

>>Yeah, yeah, yeah! >>Everybody, welcome back to the special digital presentation where we are tracking the transformation of Oracle consulting. And really, it's rebirth. Aaron Millstone is back. He's the senior vice president of consulting, joined by Jeff Davis. Who's ah, principal at Deloitte. He's the chief commercial officer for Oracle at Deloitte. Gentlemen, good to see you. Welcome. >>Thank you very much. >>Thanks for having me back. >>You're welcome, guys. Jeff, let me start with you. I've got the obvious question is why would Deloitte World Class? Yes, I well known why you partnering with Oracle Consultant? >>We're really It was a perfect match. The fact that we were looking to grow our oracle practice and really new and innovative ways around Oracle's cloud technology. Uh, in discussions with the oil, coal and specifically with Aaron Millstone, we discovered that we really had complementary capabilities and very little overlapping capabilities. So it was natural for us to find a way to work together. And specifically we found that there were strategic assets we had and there were tactical assets that Oracle had the mixture of two made a really unique and compelling value proposition for the customer base >>and Aaron. I mean, we've talked about the shift from from staff augmentation to much more strategic partnering with your customers. But you're not trying to compete with the big size of there's, there's it sounds like there's not a lot of overlap there. Where do you pick up and leave off for Deloitte? You describe that? >>Sure. I mean, we're You're right, right? We're not. We're not ever going to try to compete with the Deloitte. It's not our that's not in our DNA. It's not our intention. We exist to drive Oracle's to drive success for our customers on Oracle's cloud. That's that's our mantra. That's what we focus in on. So for us, right, we're deep technologists. We're We understand our cloud. We understand how cloud works within our various product suites that we migrate to the cloud. We understand how to manage it. We understand how to build paths extensions to it, but we don't have big program management. We don't understand non oracle components that well, you know, we've got some expertise here and there. But if we need to expand, you know, on Oracle solution to coexist with a Microsoft azure solution, we can't do that without going to a partner and as we bigger and the transformation that they're gonna have to change management and big, big transformation journey capabilities. Like again, That's not That's not expertise. >>Yeah, so Jeff will come back to you. So we see a lot of these deals. Sometimes we call them Barney deals. I love you. You love me. There's a press release, and that's it. But so one of the things we look for okay is their teeth behind this. You guys have come out with what you call elevate. What is elevate? How did it get started? And I have some follow up questions. >>Yeah, well, elevate really got started when Aaron and I started to look at the assets that each of the firms possessed on the Deloitte side, as Aaron suggested, We have deep capabilities and a broad range of technologies, some of them competing technologies with Oracle at the same time. Uh, we didn't have a great deal of depth in Oracle's technical products, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Autonomous. Our bench was not as big as Aaron's, and Aaron also had access to your local development at a level that we didn't have access to. So we really found ourselves in a situation where we could put those two capabilities together and we could offer something to our clients and a broad range of customers. Oracle customers in the field. They had access to all of the Lloyds capabilities, which includes great project management, great change management, real skill around the strategic aspects of cloud migration. And Aaron had tools on had resource is trained and developed around the late historical technology. They'd always be a step ahead of any s I So together we felt this was really a differentiation for marketplace, right, Erin? >>Yeah, absolutely right. And if I don't think I would add to it is that if you if you look at Deloitte approaches client conversation from, ah, business value perspective, you know, the work consulting teams tends to focus conversation. It tends to approach conversations with a focus on How do you want to do the technology? Um, both are helpful. But, you know, quite frankly, as we get into the bigger information in place, we need to lead with the Lloyd model of how do we How do we drive your business value and then begin from a technologist perspective, that's when we show up. So it really has been a very logical, very complimentary match. >>So you and I have talked about, you know, data centers and building data centers and investing. It's not just it's just not a good use of capital today. There's so many other things that organizations can do. You guys have identified data center. Consolidation is, is I'll call it Ah, you know, an initiative that you're seeing customers. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. Is that kind of a starting point for conversations? >>Yeah, well, it's definitely starting point, right? So we call it a referred to his infrastructure led transformation, Um, and appetite. The appetite for that is certainly high. We were seeing an increased focus on um, you know what customers need to do to take not just a workload here and there. But how do they get out of the data center business full? So it's a foregone conclusion, right? Like you just said, it's not. It's not really a question of should we invest in another data center? Where should we invest in up to in their data centers? The question has changed to Let's move the cloud. How do we get there and let's move in a big way? And that's why we're seeing that dialogue across all of our customers. And we find even for Oracle, it's been a learning for us, right? We started with on Oracle workload conversation, which is, Do you want to move this work? Work loads of oracle? But you want to move that Oracle workload works. And really, what we're finding is it's a wholesale transformation of everything in the data center, too. One or more clouds, right again, often often it's a multi cloud strategy, and that's okay. And we, you know, we were having more bigger conversations. The thing that has been really interesting is these conversations have evolved, and especially as we work with our partners at Deloitte, has been that, you know, we think that the combination of our our cloud technology, the consulting services that Oracle Consulting and Deloitte can bring to bear and then Oracle's ability to finance the whole deal makes the very compelling conversations for customers because you can walk in to a CEO to a CFO and say, Look on day one, you can actually have a lower spend that what you have today in your data center and get a cop transformation underway at the same time. >>So I want to come back to that business case and member Jeff, before we do, I want to ask you. So we heard Erin, you know, talking about the catalyst. You know, that sort of infrastructure transformation. But you're in the outcomes business, right in both. The bush has been deployed especially so So what is that North Star that you're seeing with customers? You know, it's not about the tech. They're not starting there. Um, that will often tell you that's kind of the easy part. But then we see tech coming and going, and it's the It's the business process. That's the people issues lining everybody. So what are you seeing is so the outcomes. What's that conversation like with your customers? >>Yeah, well, really, this conversation starts with business leadership. Um, if you think about it, there's a strong value proposition in infrastructure renewal. It's not at the top of mind, but once you start to understand the value that's created, it does raise two ah, high priority. Now, our experiences that virtually every board is looking for the C suite toe have a cloud strategy of some kind. People recognize the value of cloud in, uh in many of our clients and many of Oracle's customers, so the boards are pressing the C suite for a cloud strategy. Among those things are the value that cloud brings, including virtually unlimited scalability. Is is being tested real time now with a lot of current events. So when you see the scalability when you know you need a cloud strategy of some kind, your business advisors impressing you, the value proposition starts well, how do we get there? And what does it take to be successful? Our perspective is that it's it's fair to believe that the cloud will reduce infrastructure. Spend significantly. It's a great opportunity for consolidation. It also adds a layer of security, resiliency and scalability that you simply couldn't do on your own. So it addresses a lot of business needs Aziz well as a number of technical needs that need to be addressed. >>So let's talk a little bit more about that business cases that generally what you're seeing, where it starts is let's take some costs right out, and then Aaron, you and I talked about maybe investing that in the future of it. But is that really the starting point for the vast majority of customers? Let's let's let's cut some costs right away and get a payback immediately. >>So I'd like to share our perspective, which is, you know, nobody spends money for the sake of spending money on technology. It's got to have meaningful business value. So the conversation starts with really renewal and a path to the cloud. But there's a natural opportunity for savings in consolidation that we take advantage. We're not simply shifting from your hardware to the cloud we're actually modernizing, which will result in significant savings. But it also gives the business something that they don't have today at a level of security and scalability and ability to run a modern technology much faster, much better. Ah, and much more scalable. >>So a lot of people might again I go back to these deals. I think of this as a sales play. One of the things we look for is there. Is there any other integration? Are you doing co engineering in this case, maybe not, co engineering But are there tools that you're developing that you're taking to market, that you're actually leveraging? Eric, can you talk about that a little bit? Convinces. That's not just the sales play. >>Yeah, sure. And Jeff alluded to some of this earlier, too, right? So we definitely each had our respective tool. Angry Deloitte's investments in tools, what was built out of data that we have seen used quite a few times now we've been investing in something we call the Oracle soar. You know, our tools are, as you'd imagine, heavily Oracle focus. It's about moving Oracle technology to Oracle Cloud out of data and some of the tools that Deloitte's invested in our focus more comprehensively on holistically, looking at everything in a data center and everything that's across data centers and start to develop a set of facts around this stuff. But in both cases, we actually looked at these things and we said, You know what? If you combine these together, we get a very comprehensive view of what exactly it is, but we're looking at with a customer so we can tell everything from the types of traffic we see in the network to the specific versions of stuff you start to identify whether there's risk associated with having things, not aster on a supporter and get a very conference of you that's based on facts. And so, you know, we took those tools. We combined them together so that we can go into a customer and give a complete end and view from both on Oracle and Delight Perspective. And quite frankly, it doesn't matter whether the Lloyd leads or whether Oracle leads. We've developed these tools together. We're going to market together. And we've even got you know, the templates you'd expect consultancies tohave, right? So when you look at business cases, we've got joint business case templates that we've created together and that we're using actively with customers and therefore then we're refining them, improving them each time we do it. But, you know, we're at a point now where our tools are combined, templates are combined, and we even at this, you know, we're even Jeff in our poll earlier yesterday actually even got a joint Ah, war room that's constantly engaging with different account teams and making sure that we structurally approach things in a consistent way so that we're driving business value and using the tools appropriately. >>You know, I think, um, migration risk is probably one of the most significant factors in a business case. I mean, many don't understand it, but those in I t. And certainly hopefully in the executive office do you understand it? It sounds like that's a part of your tooling, anyway is designed to mitigate that's significant migration risk. When you talk about that a little bit, >>yeah, so we, you know, we approach migration from, you know, we start with the conversation. I'm almost always some type of log of what? The list of applications, what versions of things running they've been maintained by some might department somewhere, right? Or the collective? It's in varying degrees of accuracy is what we find. We don't rely on that. We go in and our our tools, our combined tooling across oracle, Deloitte interrogate the systems. We come back with actual information from the actual systems themselves. And then we started the plan. And so the funny thing is, with the migration, you know, probably 80% of the effort. 90% of the effort is in the planning stages and making sure that we understand exactly what we're moving exactly. When again, we're not. We're not dealing with the edge applications. Typically, we're dealing with the mission critical applications that are supporting the heart of a supply chain or a finance operation. And you can't. You just can't afford the down time that maybe you could afford on something that might be a consumer facing or a little less mission. Critical. So, yeah, we start finding very early and interrogate aggressively with actual data. >>Jeff, can you give us a sense as to how far you're into this elevate journey? May be thinking about a couple of customers either specifically or generically gonna where you're at with them. How far along? Maybe even some examples that you feel are representative. >>Sure. Um, you know, the the relationship has been probably about six Ah, close to seven months of maturity. In that time, we've had an opportunity to work on several key clients at scale. Uh, we've worked together in collaboration with one of the nation's largest retailers in the grocery business. We've worked collaboratively in aerospace and defense and also in the hospitality industry. In these cases, what we're finding and one is each one is in the various stage of maturity. One is done, one is in midstream on one is at the early stages and current economic conditions or driving a huge pipeline. Right now, I think our challenge right now is making sure that we identify those clients that can best take a value, take advantage of our services and our joint offering to deal with that pipeline. Right now, what we're finding is that the savings are at least as we projected. In some cases, we're finding even more. What people say they have and what people say they do isn't necessarily what you find when you get in there. But almost every case we're finding that there's unused equipment, unused capacity that they currently have redundancy, low utilization of their current assets. We can go a long way and streamlining that. Plus, I can't emphasize enough that ah, these days security is a major concern and we're adding a layer of security that they could never achieve themselves with soft. >>How do you guys on how the customers wanna approach the transaction? Is it a Bixby is a T and M. Is it a situation where you participate in some of the some of the savings of the game. How does the pricing work? >>So we have Go >>ahead. Um, I'll start off by saying each deal is really custom built around what a customer really needs, what they're trying to get out of it right now. As an example, Op X is very important. So we're engineering deals in a way that helps customers deal with their financial challenges, especially around op Ex. There are other structures that we can put in place. We have the backing of Oracle Finance, so we can be very innovative on deals they could be. When value was attained. They could be milestone based. There's just, uh, I think, a wide variety I don't want to say unlimited, but a wide variety of different options that we can offer our clients in order to be able to deal with whatever financial challenge or opportunity that may be looking at >>perfect, perfect. And you want >>to add to that >>and everything looking at other than you know, the there are. There are always things that are discovered during a personal project, and so, you know, we we also we do factor and things that allow some flexibility. Right? So even if we have a fixed price deal will include a bucket of ours to deal with, you know, unanticipated changes or even innovation. It doesn't have to be, You know, contingency could be Hey, we want to go out and spend and invest some money on artificial intelligence machine learning analytics over in this space since we've already moved these applications. All right, so we're approaching it again from a very flexible standpoint, and we're just point right. We can we can custom craft. Ah, deal to match what? The clients. Best business outcome. Okay. >>Yeah, that makes sense. That client might see some adjacent opportunity that they want to pursue, and they want that to be covered in the agreement I'm gonna end. Um, if you start with you, Aaron and then Jeff go to you. How? What do you guys see? A success? What does success look like? You know, when you were, you know, just less than a year in when you're 234 let's say five years and you look back, What does success look like? >>So, to me, successful success is gonna look like we've gotten a number of these big transformation deals in play. It's in motion, naturally between our organizations, not necessarily driven entirely by Jeff and I going out and driving the organization behave the right way. It's more in our DNA. But more importantly, I think we've gone into We've gone beyond the conversation of Let's Move workloads. We've gone into conversations off. Let's really talk about how to reimagine your business on top of Oracle's cloud and have an ongoing dialogue that looks at that transformation. Once we hit that 0.345 years from now, right, that will be a wild success, Jeff. >>But really, it's been around for 135 years. This is our birthday, uh, this year and in that time, what we've learned is there's no substitute for impact and value added to our clients. In our perspective, what this would success looks like his client success find success means improved scalability of their operations, uh, securing their technology and their data at a substantially lower cost, so that they can focus on what their core businesses and focus less on technology. That success to deploy >>right guys, thanks so much. Great session We're not only witnessing the rebirth of Oracle Consulting, but there's clearly a transformation going on. And it's cultural. Gentlemen, congratulations on your partnership. And thanks so much for coming on the Cube. >>Thank you so much >>for having us. >>You're welcome. Alright, Keep right there, everybody. We're back with our next guest covering Oracle Consulting North America. This is Dave Vellante with the Cube. Thanks for watching. >>Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, >>yeah.

>> Narrator: Live from Anaheim, California it's theCUBE covering Nutanix .NEXT 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT. We are wrapping a two-day show. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We saved the best for last. We have Ben Gibson, Chief Marketing Officer and Monica Kumar, SVP Products and Solutions at Nutanix. Thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having us. >> Yeah. >> So congratulations on a great show. 6,500 attendees and 20,000 were live streaming. We had Mark Hamill, Jessica Abel is speaking next. Energy, a great vibe. Congratulations, you both get a well-deserved vacation after this. But I want you to, Ben, close out the event and tell us a little bit about what you hope the attendees is come away with. >> Yeah thanks, and thanks to theCUBE for joining us here-- >> You are welcome. >> It's a long marathon, right, over the last two days. And thank you for the great coverage you provide for this event. Yeah, we're thrilled with the event, and for us, it really starts with getting even deeper, more connected with our customers, right? And so we do great keynotes and there's a lot of new product announcements which I know have been covered in good detail throughout the last two days. But at the core of it, it's how do we make our customers better positioned for how they do their jobs. So it's training and certification and networking with their peers, and you hear that all over the place. And so as excited as I've been over the last three days with the event and the grandeur of it all, the thing that really gets me pumped up the most is when I see these ad-hoc groups that just come together in a hallway, and they sit down. I go over and say, what're you guys up to? and we're like, well, this is like our AHV mashup group, and we get here and we talk about key challenges we have, key opportunities, best practices tips, and so it's that network effect for me above anything else is what is at the heart of this show. >> One of the highlights we pointed out yesterday and today in our intro was the community vibe you have here. You have a great loyal customer base, Net Promoter Score of 90 which is a monster number, congratulations. But it's a small intimate event, you guys were able to not make it a trade show but a conference that was intimate, content driven, content value with nice tracks. Lots of comments on the tracks. So a lot of good highlights. So my question to you Ben and Monica, what's your highlight so far? >> You know, I'll take this one. As a newbie, I'm one of the newest members of the team at Nutanix and this is my first .NEXT. Even though you say it's a small event, it's still 6,500 plus people and about 20,000 attendees online right. So I think it's still sizable, but the beauty is that we're still able to maintain that community feeling. And so for me the most exciting part was not only meeting with customers like our SisAdmins, DevOps folks, developers, IT directors, CIOs, partners, our own employees, we're like bringing everybody together here to discuss how we can make things better for the customers, and what are things that are working and how can we improve. So I think to me that's one of the biggest thing I'm taking away as I go back, is what we can take as a feedback and how we can do things better in how we bring products to the market. >> Ben, highlights for you? >> Yeah for me, well first of all, I got to interview my boyhood idol, Mark Hamill. (laughter) >> Pretty cool. >> And that was a lot of fun, right. And we've just gone through in an hour and half of great content, our Nutanix Mine announcement, that was great, we announced AHV support on frame. So that was exciting to me and then, the cool thing about our show is we like to mix it up with something that's really fun. And in my case and I know with many people in the arena, and I saw the meet and great afterwards, to bring out Mark Hamill. I had to contain myself because I am a big Star Wars geek at my core, and we had a great conversation. And you know when you feel the room, I felt the room of 6,500 hanging on his every word, right? And he talked about persistence in his career, how he started out, all the rejection he got earlier on. We talked about his career journey, so on a really fun way, it kinda connects with a lot of journeys we have with the professionals in the room that are going through a lot of change and rejection or taking a risk or a chance on new disruptive technology. >> Yeahm it's really been a home run. First of all, the theme of having of Star Wars and Mark here was really great because the demographic, we all love Star Wars, so nice connection-- >> Who doesn't? >> Nice connection to the tech audience but your customers consistently say in theCUBE and off theCUBE, in the hallways and other conversations that they took a bet with Nutanix and it paid off. And that's the rebel kind of mindset inside these cultures of pre-existing legacy, vendors, and so you guys are breaking through. This is a big part of the marketing, is to enable those rebels to be now the mainstream. >> Yeah it's, you know you're right, it's rebellion, you know, that's spreading and growing, but as a marketer here, there's plenty of conversation about how we differentiate, right, and the outcomes we create for the customers but then when I see one of our early customers, and we opened the conference, he shared a picture where he was flying in a Cessna plane over the Grand Canyon, and he had his iPhone, he was managing his clusters with Prism on his iPhone. And what he said was the outcome for me, yeah there's total cost of ownership, yes, there's high performance levels, you can go through the traditional outcomes that IT folks look at. But at the end of the day he said, I'm able to spend more time with my family, and that sounds kinda cheesy, but it's real, and you sense that and you learn about that when you're here with customers. And with Monica coming on board, yeah, we've always been great, I think, at marketing and communicating our technology advantage but it's about more than that, right? >> Yeah. >> Talk about about your role, you have a stellar career, you're now new to Nutanix, you're not new to the industry. What's your focus? What you're gonna be working on? >> As with everything we do at Nutanix, it's all about the customer, so we are obsessed with making sure that the customer has the best experience, whether it's with product quality or how we take our products to market. How we message it to connect to what problem that they need to solve. So I think the biggest challenge we have as a company, the opportunity is, we know the customers are moving to the cloud. Customers are embarking on journeys to a modernized infrastructure. They are embarking on journeys to be able to use multiple different clouds. There is a lot of complexity out there, so our opportunity is to simplify that complexity for the customer. So that's what I am going to undertake with Ben here, is come up with right solutions, the right packaging, the right messaging, the right offers for our customers that can make it easy for them to get on their journey that they choose to get on to the cloud. >> Rebecca and I were talking about on the kickoff yesterday, 10 years old, CUBE's ten years old, so we've been following you guys for a long time as well. You're growing up. You're still a young company, you've said you're a billion dollar startup. >> Yeah. >> That's the culture. What's next for you guys? What's the goal? What's the objective? Because you've built a great community organically, your content is on the mark at the conferences, also digitally, there's nice organic kind of discovery for your customers, are learning about Nutanix. Word of mouth is big, network effect you mentioned, new cultural, younger generation. So you got a lot of things working for you. What's next? >> Well, thank you. I agree with those things, (laughter) but I tell you, here's one thing I've been thinking about towards the opportunity. So if you look at the past year, and I talked about this in our recent investor day, that if you look at the amount of IT Spin tied to traditional three-tier data center architecture, storage, network, compute, running in separate silos, hundred billion plus in annual spin. Hyper conversions, great new modernizing infrastructure play, the market spend on that this year is probably five billion. So if you think about that, I think about only 5% of the legacy world been modernized. And I am not claiming a 100%, but I am claiming well north of an opportunity, well north of 5% to get there. So fundamentally, the first thing what's next is there's a lot of green field left to take advantage of here and for customers to understand the value, human value, as well as financial and operational value, of what we're up to here with our customers. And so that's next, and then at a higher level, and I know it's something Dheeraj and Sunil talk a lot about, it's, we've hyper-converged infrastructure, made that essentially invisible, much grander ambition, how do you hyper-converge clouds, how do you take the complexity Monica was just talking about and provide a lot of simplicity for App Mobility and the like and take that to the next level. So to me, there's still the core mission. We're just getting started right. >> You know I asked Sunil that question, I said, how do you make that happen? And he had a great comment. We weren't on camera, I wish he had said that on theCUBE. We were off theCUBE before. He said, "Well, people tasted Amazon, they tasted cloud, "and now they are gonna bring that "mojo to the enterprise on the premises, "because they realize the benefits of cloud by itself. "But they can't get everything to the cloud. "So they gotta get modernized on premises "and operating model, not so much a refresh." >> To add to that, if you think about the role of technology right, the role is to make our lives easier, whether it's at work or in our personal lives, so I think the next big frontier is all around automation. I think this whole move to the cloud is because people want to automate a lot of the mundane tasks, we've talked about that in the past with data and such. I think the same applies to infrastructure, so you're gonna see us really focused a lot more on, how can we help IT automate? A lot of the, you know, keeping the lights on type of tasks which could actually be easily be done by the machine or in the cloud or by the software, human beings then can focus on more important things. >> Right whether it's being over the Grand Canyon with your children or meaty tasks of our jobs. >> Exactly so it's about making IT become a service provider rather than a cost center. I think that's what we're gonna enable with our softwares, we continue to go forward. >> I'd love you to comment on Ayanna Howard, Dr. Ayanna Howard's keynote this morning, where she talked about actually smart machines working together with smart humans, and how that's really the collaborative AI, and that's really where the future is heading. How do you think about that, and how do you message that, and how do you approach that within Nutanix? >> Yeah I totally agree, it's not human versus the machine. It really is human plus the machine. It's the combination which is gonna be most powerful in how we adopt technology to make things better for us. Like I said, whether in our personal lives or work lives. I know a lot of examples in my own personal life that I can see how machines or softwares changed the things I used to do before which I don't do anymore. There's lots of examples, I know when growing up in India, we washed our clothes by hand and now we have, when I moved to U.S., we have the laundry machine, right? I mean, there's lots of small, small things that are happening now, we talk to our Alexas and we can command people, to call people, to turn the music on, to turn the lights off and what not. And I actually have benefited from those, my parents, I'll give you an example, I have older parents who live at home, and now it's amazing, my mom can say, Alexa turn off the light, or turn on the light if they have to wake in the middle of the night, guess what it's not dark anymore, the light gets turned on, it's a real use case, you know. (laughter) They won't trip and fall. So I'm like thank you Alexa (laughs). So I do think that power of machine and human is the combination where we're going next, and I think Sunil touched on it somewhat in his keynote too. We're talking about autonomous data centers, right. That's exactly what it is. We are injecting more of machine learning, more of AI technology in how we are analyzing the operations, and then how we act on the predictive intelligence that we're getting from the operations to fix things before they break. >> Ben, I want to ask you a question on the marketing side because one of the things that came out of the top stories that we identified here at the show was the move to software. It's a big part of Nutanix next generation shift and growth is gonna come from just software, not hardware, just a software company. And also Dheeraj mentioned that he has a new customer, Wall Street, (laughter) and so he has to manage that. He had a great answer on how he's gonna balance the short term Wall Street-ers and the long game that you guys play at the Nutanix, so you got the software transition, the middle of it, different economics, software economics are much more stronger than process improvement, box changing, changing boxes in a data center. So software's going to be a nice impact across the long game, but Wall Street may not understand that software, and as you guys go to the next level, from hiring and marketing software, how are you guys thinking about that? I know it's about a year under your belt now with software, what's the orientation? What's your posture for to the marketplace with the software play? >> That's a good question. I'm sure, you know, Dheeraj likes to talk about Wall Street and Main Street, right, and how do you balance the two. And yeah we are disrupting along established market. We are moving from hardware to software now rapidly in subscription-based consumption models, and we're doing all that at the same time we're growing at the rates we're growing. And so it's a lot of juggling in the air, right? >> And I'll throw channel in there too, you gotta channel the merging, your partner strategy is looking really good. The HPE relationship is I think a great signal, potentially, in more local expansion, more breadth channel marketing on the table (laughs). New things. >> I mean, the way I think about it, as a marketer here, is, you know, and Monica touched on this, how do we create and provide offers to market that take advantage of the freedom of choice of consumption of Nutanix, right. And then how do you take those to market through your sale organization, how do you increasingly take new offering and capability to market through the product itself, which is a well-worn practice in the SaaS world. And then the channel partners is a key part of this because the partners that really, and I met with many here this week that really on top of this, they want to build that value-added practices that are about providing new services and offerings on top of that software, and then to be able to offer it in effective ways. The marketer has think about how do we incentivize, how do we package, how do we message to bring these to the market. It's candidly a transition for us, but it's an exciting one. At the end-- >> And you guys, and you were open about it too, you recognize that it's happening. >> Yeah, and I see it, you know, those moves can be challenging, but those are also moves I think that Wall Street likes. >> Evaluational increase. >> So we're nearly finished with this conference, but we're already think ahead to the next one in Copenhagen. So talk a little about that, and then Nutanix Americas in 2020. >> Well good, so we're looking forward to taking the show across the pond to Copenhagen. We had a great, our Europe event last year in London was amazing, right. We had record turnout. We had close to, for a user conference, 35% of attendees were not even customers of Nutanix yet. And often for these conferences you see more existing users and then maybe some, and we so expect that trend to continue. We have a lot of traction across Europe, Copenhagen is a beautiful city. There'll be plenty new to announce there, so I can't leak anything early on that front yet. But that's gonna be exciting show. >> Come on. (laughter) >> It's taste. >> We won't tell anyone. >> And I'm sure he's gonna be hobnobbing with yet another celebrity in Copenhagen. I've renamed his title. He is the Chief Celebrity Officer at Nutanix now. >> Well, he and Mark Hamill are-- >> That's right. >> But we're best friends now. (laughter) >> And he was with Magic Johnson earlier. I have a long list of people he's been-- >> You're killing us. >> No, he is. (laughter) >> Yeah, Freddie Jackson. >> Well you know, all joking aside, it's customer experience. And if it's all business, it's all product and all technology, right, then you know, that's a certain level of experience, but part of this is the community and the happiness that we see in our customers is we make them happy, both in the technology we deliver, the partnership we enjoy with them, but then also some fun experiences we deliver to them. And that's the spirit of this show. >> Yeah you guys do a great job. I want it like highlight and also get your thoughts, and I want you to share with folks watching 'cause you guys do a great job on the content programs at your events, the mix and match up of the core meat on the tech bone, the solutions, but balance of guest hosts, guest celebrities kind of blend in the theme. What's the secret sauce? What's the playbook? What's the thinking behind lot of the content and how's that gonna translate digitally because you guys mix it up, it's not just all Nutanix all the time. You got partners, you got people from outside the industry, seems to reinforce, the threads kinda connect together. What's the, how do you guys think about that? >> Yeah well, the secret sauce at the core of this, Julie O'Brien, a woman named Erin Alonso on my team. We have a strong, small but mighty, very creative events team that understands that at the end of the day this is about learning, but it's also about show business too, right. And people want to come to relax, to learn, and to have fun too, and I think it's balancing the two. But it's not just, okay it's Mark Hamill, because he was in Star Wars. It's because we knew Mark had such a tight, iconic connection with our core demographic, in terms of the core customers we have, and I saw our customers, some with tears in their eyes when they were able to meet him afterwards. And so, okay there's, and I was joking hyper-convergence, I was talking to Mr. Hamill, I said, hyper-convergence, hyper-space, right, there's ways to connect the two together. But there's technology at the heart of both of that. So it's just a new and unique and surprising way, and one thing, I close with, we endeavor in marketing here when we run our campaigns, when we do our events, surprise and delight. Surprise and delight. It's inherent in the product with one click, and everything we do there, and we'd like to think it's inherent in our marketing and also an event like this. Surprise and delight. >> So Monica who'd your hero be up there on the stage? Who do you want to see at the next-- you boss is right here, (laughter) this is your chance to influence-- >> Oh my god, okay. If you really wanna know (laughs), he'll have to fly in from Bombay India, the movie star Shah Rukh Khan. He's got known as SRK. But he is a world-famous icon. So there you go, next one SRK. Talk to Sunil about it, he knows about SRK. >> We hear you. >> Note, noted. >> Well then Monica, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE, always a pleasure. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You've been watching theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT (techno music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's the cue covering Sisqo Live Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. You watching the Cube? The leader in live tech coverage is the first day of three days of coverage for Sisqo. Live for Europe. Lin Lucas is here. She's the chief marketing officer for Kohi City. Lend great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you here in Europe. >> We were just saying it's the first time that we've done this on the continent. So another >> first? Yeah. Another first. Been s so pleased to be in the U. S with you guys, that multiple shows. And now we were here in Barcelona, >> so it's a great venue. We've actually done a number of shows here. Then again, it's a pleasure having you on. Let's see, Let's get right to it. What's going on with you guys and Cisco? You got got some news. Let's talk about >> Absolutely. As you know, we don't stop innovating continuous innovation at Cohesity and a number of new things. So last week we announced a new Cisco validated design with hyper flex and Cohesity integrating for snapshot integration for backup and, of course, instant recovery of that critical data center infrastructure. And we're calling it hyper squared. So you get full hyper convergence for your primary and, of course, your backup. Another secondary application. >> And those guys just want to talk about hype reflects anywhere. Still, so it's like infinitive hype. Infinity, hyper flex, >> hyper square, >> so hyper squared. Love it. So you guys will. How does that work? You'll obviously you want to be the provider of data protection provider from Multi Cloud. That's a huge opportunity. So how do you do that? You'll you'll plug into whatever framework that customer wants. Presumably, a lot of customers wanted the Cisco framework out. Is that all? >> Oh, absolutely. Hit the nail on the head. I mean, Cisco, obviously, one of the most respected leaders in the world, tens of thousands of customers globally depend on them. I'm Francisco alum love being back here at the old stomping grounds and Cisco's been an investor in cohesive he now, since our serious sees. So, they really saw the promise in the benefit of what Kohi City offers with hybrid converge solutions for modern backup recovery. And to your point to the cloud. You know, Cisco's talking a lot about multi cloud here and cohesive E with our native cloud integration helps customers protect those backups on or those applications on hyper flex, and then instantly move them to a cloud of choice. And then, as you've mentioned, Cisco has so many fantastic relationships that there are very strong go to market partner with us. And when customers wanted by solution, they could get the whole solution from Cisco, including Cohesive >> Yulin. We're glad we have you on because connecting the dots between something like hyper converge, which we've been talking about for a number of years now, and how that fits into multi cloud. To some, it's a little clunky sometimes goods like. But I've got my data center. Or am I just doing backup to the cloud? Because what we know is customers, a. Cisco says their data is, you know, kind of de centred. It's no longer in the in the data center of all over the place. Companies like Kohi City can give you that centralized data protection. No matter where your environment is, walk us through what you're hearing from your customers. How they look at kind of their data center versus the multi cloud environment and data protection. >> Yeah, so I think it's Ah, you know, I think customers air now understanding that it's not either or right. There was a time when people thought, Wow, I'm going to move everything to the cloud And I really think there's a maturing of an understanding of what's going to work well for me in this cloud First world, what do I want to put there? And then what am I going to keep on premises? So that's one of the things that Cohee City innovated our core technology. A distributed Web scale file system spanning file system, which spans the data center and the cloud world seamlessly. And what we're seeing is customers air really using the cloud for archiving, getting off of tape because then they get that search capability very easy when they need Teo tearing and then, most importantly, disaster recovery. You know, in the event of something man made or natural, many, many organizations moving to the clouds for their second sight. And with Kohi City, that's very easy to make. That transfer happened in a very seamless way with our capability set. So I think what we're seeing is this really maturing of how customers look at it as a really holistic environment. And so Cisco calling it data centered. But we call this, you know, mass data fragmentation. And then with our spanning file system being able to really consolidate that now >> yeah, another thing that needs that kind of holistic view is security. I know it's something that's in your product. There was a random where announcement that you made last week tells how security fits into this world. >> Yeah, well, you know, I think we all hate to say it, but you know that old phrase, the new normal unfortunately ran somewhere, and malware has become the new normal for organizations of all sizes. You know, here in Europe, we have that off the situation with the N HS in the UK last year. Andi, it's happening everywhere. So you know one element that the's attackers air taking is looking at how to disable backups. And so this is really important that as a part of a holistic security strategy that organizations take a look at that attack vector. So what cohesive he's introduced is really unique. It's three steps. It's prevent its detect, prevent and then recover. So detect in terms of capabilities to see if there are nefarious changes being happened to the file system right, and then prevent with Helios automatically detecting and with our smart assistant providing that notification and then, if need be, recover with our instant mass restore capability, going back to any point in time with no performance issue. This is not taking time for the rehydration spanning file system doing this instantly and allowing an organization to basically say, Sorry, not today, attackers. We don't need to pay you because we can instantly restore back to a safe point in time. >> So let's unpack those a little bit. If we could detect piece, I presume there's an analytics component to that. You're you're observing the the behavior of the of the backup corpus is that right there, Which is a logical place because it's got all the corporate data in there >> that that's correct. So last year we introduced Helios, which is our global SAS space management system, as machine learning capability in it. And that's providing that machine learning based monitoring to see what kinds of anomalies may be happening that is then proactively alerted to the team >> and then the recovery piece, a ce Well, like you said, it's it's got to be fast. Gotta have high performance, high performance data movement, and that's fundamental to your file system. Is that what I'm hearing >> that architecture that's correct. That's one of the differences of our modern backup solution. Versus some of the non hyper converge architectures is the distributed Web file system, which our CEO Motorin, he was formally at Google, helped with developing their file system has what's called instant ability to go back into any point in time and recover not just one of'em, but actually at a v M wear. A couple years ago, we demonstrated thousands of'em is at a time, and the reason for that is this Web scale file system, which is really unique to Kohi City. And that's what allows a nightie organization to not be held hostage because they can not have two potentially spend not just ours, but even days with the old legacy systems trying to rehydrate. You know these backups if they have to go back potentially many months in time because you don't know that that ran somewhere may have been introduced, not say yesterday, but might have been several months ago, and that's one of the key advantages of this instant master store. >> I mean, this is super important rights, too, because we're talking about very granular levels of being able to dial up dial down. You could tune it by application of high value applications. You can. You have much greater granularity some of the crap locations that not, maybe not. It's important. So flexibility is key there. How about customers, any new customers that you can talk about? >> Absolutely. So one of the ones since we're here, it's just go live. So Cisco, along with Kohi City, we've been working with one of the largest global manufacturers of semiconductors and other electronic equipment, Tokyo Electron, based in Tokyo but also here in the U. K. On the continent. And they had one of those older backup solutions and were challenged with time. It was taking them to back up the restores not being predictable. So they've gone with Cohesive e running on Cisco UCS. Because we're a software to find platform. We offer our software on our customers, you know, choice of Certified Solutions and Cisco UCS. And so they've started with backup, but they're now moving very quickly into archiving to the cloud, helping reduce their costs and get off of tape and to disaster recovery. Ultimately, so super excited that together with Cisco, we could help this customer modernized their data center and, you know, accelerate their hybrid clouds strategy at the same time. >> Awesome. And then you guys were also protecting the Sisqo Live network here. What? Tell us about that? >> Yes. Oh, you know, Cisco builds an amazing network here. I mean, you've seen the operations center, a huge team of people. But as we all know, things could go wrong. Potentially. And so we are protecting the critical services that Cisco's providing to all of this is go live attendees here. So should something happen, which I'm sure won't. Kohi City will be used to instantly recover and bring backup critical services like DNA and other areas that they're depending on to serve. All of the thousands of showgoers here. >> So super hot space. We talked about this at PM World. Actually, last couple of years. Just how much activity and interest there is and the whole parlance is changing land on one of you could come and I used to be you back up when the world was tape. Now you're talking about data protection data management, which could mean a lot of things to a lot of people to a storage folks. It's, you know, it's pretty specific, but you're seeing a massive evolution of the space cloud. Clearly is the underpinning of the tailwind on it requires you guy's toe. To respond is an industry and cohesive, specifically is a company. So I wanted to talk about some of those major trends and how you guys are responding and you're leading. And, >> yeah, I think you know, folks have been a little bit surprised, like, Wait a minute. What's this kind of sleepy industry? Why is it getting all this funding? I mean, our own Siri's de funding. Middle of last year, two hundred fifty million dollars. Softbank banked along with Sequoia, of course. But really, the trend, as is being talked about Francisco Live, is data is. I don't want to say the new oil, but it's the water of the world, right? I mean, it's absolutely crucial to any business, the's days other than your talent. It's your most important business asset. >> And >> the pressure on the board and the CEO and the CEO and turn to be agile to do more with that data to know what you have because here we are in Europe, GDP are increasing, regulations is super important. And so you know, this has really brought for be need to create holistic ways to organize and manage and have visibility toe all of that data, and it's massively fragmented. We put out that research last year, massive data fragmentation and most of that data has been kind of under the water line in most people's minds. You know, you think about your primary applications and data that's really only twenty percent, and the other eighty percent in test Evan Analytics and Backup has been pretty fragmented in Siloed, and it hasn't yet had that vision of How could we consolidate that and move it into a modern space until folks like Mode Erin, you know, founded Cohesive E and applied those same hyper converge techniques that he did at new tonics. So I think that this investment just further validates the fact that data is the most important business asset, and people are really in need of new solutions to manage it, protected and then ultimately do Mohr with it gain insights out of it. >> You know, just a couple comments on that one is, you know, data. We always joke about data's the new oil. It's even more valuable because you can use data in multiple places. You can only put oil in your car once. And so so companies of being in and to realize that how valuable it is trying to understand that value, how to protect that and the GPR. It's interesting. It's it's really. The fines went into effect in Europe last May, but it's become a template, a framework globally. People, you know us. Compensate. All right, we gotta prepare for GPR. And then local jurisdictions announced thing. Well, that's a decent starting point. And so it's not just confined to Europe. It's really on everybody's mind. >> It is, and you brought up the cloud before. And you know the cloud is a new way for people to be agile, and they're getting a lot of value out of it. But it also continues to fragment their data and the visibility. No. In talking Teo Large CIA O of, ah, Fortune one hundred large organisation. He's actually has less visibility in many ways in the cloud because of the ease of proliferation of test ever. And that is creating Mohr. You know, stress, I would say in the system and need for solutions to both provide an enhanced set agility. Move data to the cloud, easily move it out when you need to. But also with regulation, be able to identify and delete. As you know, with GPR if needed, the information that you know your customer may ask you to remove from your systems. >> Yeah, well, I love this conversation a little following cohesively because you guys are up leveling the entire game. I've been following the data protection space for decades now, and the problem with data protection is has always been a bolt on, and companies like, oh, he city both with the funding your your vision. He really forcing the industry. They're kind of re think data protection, not as a bolt on what is a fundamental component of digital strategies and data strategy. So it's fun watching you guys. Congratulations on all the growth. I know you got more to go. So thanks so much for coming in the Cuban and always a pleasure to see you. >> All of always a pleasure to be here with you guys. Thanks very much. >> You're very welcome. All right. Keep it right there, buddy. Stew Minimum and David Lantz from Cisco Live. Barcelona. You watching the Cube?

>> Live, from Orlando Florida. It's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by Carmen Crincoli. He is the Senior Program Manager for Strategy and Ecosystem here at Microsoft. Thank you so much for coming on the show Carmen. >> Thanks for having me, really excited to be here, thank you. >> So, before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about, we're going to talk tech in this interview. But right now we're going to talk about solutions and really explain what the problems are that you are solving for your customers. So, talk about the customer pain points that you and your group are looking to solve. >> Yeah, so, the WSSD program when we conceived it was to address a problem that I think a lot of people who have worked with Microsoft technology are familiar with. We have some really great technology. It's very easy for users to dive in and start using it. But to really be successful requires an additional level of expertise that not every IT shop is going to have. And as it gets more and more complex and we start bringing more and more IT functionality into the stack with software defined technologies, that challenge grows. So we feel like we've had very, very great advances in what our tech can do. And we were watching our customers struggle with it. And we decided that the best was to fix it is to create a solution program and work with our partners who have that expertise to take them, bundle them together with a set of best practices, some additional testing and validation, to ensure that customers are selecting the right hardware for the tasks that they need, and then offer that as a solution instead of as build your own, which is a little more traditional in the Windows world. >> Explain how it works. So, there's a frazzled IT person who's saying "I don't know where to begin, but I have these issues," Can you give us some examples of how you hold a customer's hand through this and walk them through the process? >> Sure, sure. So, I would say the way we approach it right now is if a customer is going to get on board the HCI train, which more and more of them are, right, we're watching the industry shift in that direction pretty rapidly now. And they say, you know, I've heard about the Microsoft technologies, I've heard about storage spaces direct and your software defined networking capabilities, and I want to pursue that. You say, well, don't just go buy some servers or recycled servers off the shelf. We want you to contact some of our partners and talk to them about their solution catalog and say look, this is the kind of workload I'm going to consolidate on it, right. I'm consolidating virtual machines from multiple environments and it's going to be a mix of traditional line of business apps and SQL and I think I'm going to have about this I/O profile. They'll help you size a solution and then deliver it on site and integrate it into your business environment, right. It lets you get something that is more tailored to what you need rather than trying to piece it together. >> I want to hear a little bit more about HCI. But before we do, you got ecosystem as part of what you work on. I think most people understand that Microsoft has a huge ecosystem. Some things are really simple to understand. Server, you guys don't make servers. Operating system sits on top of that. The storage piece of it, I've worked in the storage industry for a number of years, worked with Microsoft. Obviously a huge player in the software layer. But that was back before we called it things like software defined storage and the software defined data center. And, heck, pre-cloud and all that stuff. So, you've been there 21 years at Microsoft. Give a little bit about, you know, where Microsoft thinks they need to play, how you partner with the ecosystem out there, and then we'll get into some of the new pieces. >> Yeah, we've always viewed storage as part of the air you breathe when you're computing, right. So we always partnered with the storage ecosystem to make sure that SANS and NAS devices work inside general IT environments. The shift to a software defined mentality involved some new learning, from a Microsoft perspective. We're taking on some of the integration responsibilities that storage vendors typically had. And that's part of what birthed WSSD as a solution program, was if we have to take on all of the integration work, how do we ensure that that's good quality, right. Just buying some disks off the shelf and plugging them into the motherboard does not result in an enterprise quality solution. So we had to define some parameters and then work with OEMs and partners who know how to do the integration work as well. Put some testing parameters around it, and turn out solutions, software defined solutions, that worked as well as the highly integrated, tested SANS and NAS devices of the last generation. >> Great. I think back, you know, like most people probably know Microsoft for SNB. You had protocols that help people with NAS devices. Help bring us up to speed when things like HCI. So, HCI, technology that's been around for a number of years. Many companies partner with Microsoft. Nutanix is a nearby partner of Microsoft. VMWare partners with Microsoft on some things but is a big player with their Vsan technologies. What do we call the Microsoft HCI solution and how would you compare and contrast it to the existing solutions out there? >> The traditional strength of Microsoft, right. We're very good at partnering, even with people we're competing with. We're very serious about it. Part of our core DNA is partnership and competition at the same time. So, our HCI stack is really about integrating the functionality that's there. I would say, the way we talk about it, there are three main components. There's the storage layer, which is storage spaces direct. There's the networking layer, which we just called software defined networking, which includes a network controller and network virtualisation capabilities. And then there's the computer layer, which is Hyper-V and the additional capabilities we layer in Hyper-V where we think we add a lot of value. Things like secured VMs and security capabilities that we add on. You layer those technologies together and integrate them into a solution with validated hardware, tested hardware, a network controller, network switch, and you get something that you can integrate into a business environment. These are all capabilities that are in Windows Server 2019 Datacenter, right. This is not an additional add-on. It's not a component. It's not a thing that you download. The solution program is really about taking the stuff that's in the box and making sure customers succeed in it without having to bring in all of the expertise into their IT staff from day one. >> Thanks for the explanation. The one piece, if I understand right, Azure stack also has storage space direct in it. So should I look at this as a spectrum of how Microsoft puts the pieces together and the WSSD is just one of the storage fundamental components that plays a few places along the stack? Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, it's kind of a foundational technology. Just like Windows Server is the host layer for all of the upper, higher level workloads, Storage Spaces Direct is the foundational layer for building our storage for all of these hyperconverged solutions. Azure stack's business goals are different, right. They're looking for Azure consistency and really giving an Azure experience to customer on prem. WSSD is more for the traditional IT shop that's used to running their own virtual environments and they're just looking for some infrastructure hosting of virtual workloads. So, we're covering different ends of, I would say, the IT maturity spectrum, with the two solutions. But the underlying pieces are very much the same, right. The plumbing that powers Azure stack and the plumbing that powers WSSD, and the plumbing that powers Azure, is built on a lot of the same core Windows technologies. >> So what are the outcomes of this solutions department? How have you seen changes in customer behavior, and helping them understand the best practices that have emerged as they implement and deploy different kinds of technologies. >> I'd say the biggest thing we've noticed is we get customers to be more successful when they work with our vendors, right. WSSD launched, the origninal version of the program for 2016, launched about nine months after we RTM'd. In that nine month gap, we had a lot of customers who were excited for the technology. We had been talking about it. Our engineering teams do a great job of making people excited for the technology. We get our lovely core IT geeks pumped for this stuff. And they were going out and implementing it on their own, right. Buying hardware that they thought conformed, trying to implement, and we were having a lot of struggles, right. It was generating more sport than we'd like. Customers weren't having the experience we wanted them to have with it. Since we've started the program, and we've been getting customers pointed at our hardware partners that deliver these solutions, we've had a lot more success, right. They're much happier with it. We have multiple stakeholders bought into the success of that customer solution, so the OEMs are just as invested as we are. As opposed to if you buy a server off the shelf, they're like the server's working fine, that's not my problem. So were just seeing a lot more customer success out of it and we want to keep driving that forward with the 2019 version of the solution program. >> Carmen, anything? there are so many announcements that were made at the show. Anything in your space that you want to make sure, kind of highlight that people might have missed? Everybody knows Windows Server 2019's coming, but what does that mean for your area, or anything outside of that one announcement? >> I think the most exciting thing is some of the tech improvements that I know really land with this IT Pro crowd that is here at Ignite. So, yesterday during Erin Chapel, our CVP of Windows Server, during her Windows Server 2019 intro session, she announced a number that we achieved on Windows Server 2019 with Intel scalable persistent memory. I forget what the name of it is. Anyway, it was a crazy IOPS number- >> Scalable optane stuff if I remember because we had Jake on yesterday from Intel. And he was like "Your mind will be blown when "you hear about this". >> It was like 13.8 million IOPS on a 12 node cluster right? We're continuing our engineering focus. We're an engineering company. We love making the tech better. And we're getting people excited for it. And then we're following up with the, by the way, if you want this kind of thing in your environment, or you need it, if you need to deliver it, these are the partners you work with. We partner with them. We engineer with them, right. This is a co-engineering program. Get the solution from them. So, I would say that's the new thing from my space, right. I get to piggyback on all of this great engineering announcement and work and excitement, and say this is how you succeed with the technology. Don't go do it yourself, go to these people. >> And we're here to help you. >> Yes, yes. That's why I'm really grateful that you guys had me on, right. One of the early things I've been told since I took over the program was I didn't even know Microsoft did HCI, and I definitely didn't know that you had a solution program. And I'm like, I know, I will work on fixing that. >> Well Carmen, look, HCI, we understand the virtualisation layer is critical there. Microsoft obviously, one of the top players in that industry. So, we've been waiting to hear a broader story from Microsoft in this space, so congrats on all the progress. >> Thank you, thank you. This has been a really fantastic show so far. We actually have hyperconverged expo in the application infrastructure area, where I have six of the WSSD partners just showing off their solutions in one tight space, along with the engineers who work on the HCI stack at Microsoft right nearby. So if anyone to come check it out, talk to the engineers who wrote the software, talk to the-- >> It's a really small space, you hyperconverged it, right? (Rebecca laughs) >> Yes, it is a hyperconverged space, yes. >> Well, Carmen, thank you so much and I encouage anyone who's here at Ignite to go check out that booth and see what it's all about. >> Great, thank you so much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman, we will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat music)