>> Narrator: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, coming to you from our Palo Alto studios today for a Cube conversation. I'm really excited to have our next guest on. You see them all over on social, a very active community member. And we have not heard from him for a little while, so I'm psyched to have him on. He's Bobby Allen. He is a tech and Cloud evangelist. Bobby, how you doing? >> I'm good, Jeff, how are you? >> Good, so, I'm just to have the obligatory check-in. So, you're getting through this madness of COVID, and family's good, everything's good? >> Yeah, everybody's good. I've got a teen and a twin. They haven't driven us crazy yet. So, so far, everybody's healthy and everybody's good. >> Good, good. So, let's jump into it, Bobby. You know, people talk about Cloud as being, there's a lot of great benefits to Cloud, you know, kind of, cost savings, and agility, and more importantly, really as a driver of innovation which I think most people are kind of late to the party there, they think really more on cost savings versus innovation, but now, it's been around, you know, AWS has been around kind of, broke open the door in terms of public Cloud, and then everything was a public Cloud and not because of public Cloud, and then we have hybrid Cloud and we have multicloud. And now, things are kind of, settling down. So, when you talk to people about Cloud, how should they think about the reality of it once they kind of, leave the trade show and they're getting back to their desk, and they actually have to start implementing some things? >> So, great question, Jeff, First of all, thank you for giving me that opportunity to answer that. This is how I think about Cloud. So, we often talk about Cloud in terms of gym memberships, right? Like going to the Cloud is like buying a gym membership. I actually argue that the Cloud is actually more like weights. If you apply weights to a good form you're going to get stronger, if you apply weights to a bad form you're going to hurt yourself. And what we found is that a lot of these companies, Jeff, are applying Cloud and automation to things that really didn't make a lot of sense. And so, they're wasting more money, they're getting more frustrated, and they're wondering why Cloud was not this magic bullet that just solved everything. It didn't fix world peace and global hunger, and now, they're worse off than they were before. There are a couple of reasons I can go into about that but hopefully, that answers the question at first. We're training the wrong way, Jeff. We're adding weight to things that don't make sense and we're hurting ourselves. >> So, it it just I picked the wrong application or are they operating it in a way as they operated it when it was on-prem? 'Cause the thing I always think of, which is interesting, right? Is everybody always talks about spinning up capacity, right? Spin up capacity. You're running a promotion on the Superbowl, and you're going to have a bunch of people hitting your coupon but they'd never talk about spinning it down. And I went to a really interesting presentation one time where a guy talked about their application. He's like, we like when you turn it off, when you turn off our application, we're not making any money, but it tells that you know, kind of how to operate this thing, which is turn it on, but don't forget to turn it off. And I think, you know, we had a situation on one of our little applications that we left open and let something run and ended up with a bill that we weren't necessarily anticipating, not because we did anything wrong, but we just didn't do the right thing, which was to turn off that particular service when we didn't need it. So, what's the wrong way, what's the wrong exercise? Why are people screwing this up? >> So, I think the problem, Jeff, is actually more upstream. So, my personal mantra for 2020 has been, tech is the easy part, data and behavior are the hard parts. And I think you nailed it, right? That Cloud is only about what you need to buy, not what you need to change, then you're going to be woefully disappointed with the results. And so, when I'm saying go upstream, what I'm finding is, missed expectations, Jeff, sink more projects than bad code broken APIs or large bills? The thing that we're missing is, we're thinking that technology replaces the need to have a conversation. So, for example, when we say we want to do something better in the Cloud, what does better actually mean? So, let's talk about food for a second. Hopefully, I don't make your people hungry 'cause it's around lunchtime. But if we think about Cloud application like a recipe, are we tryna make a mediocre recipe better or make a good recipe at scale, right? 'Cause if you take a nasty recipe and scale it out, you're just going to go broke faster. So, really the question is, which problem are we trying to solve? What is the issue that we're really wrestling with? And so, we need to have a better vocabulary, more descriptive conversations. And so, let me give you one that I often talk to customers about, right? We talk about technical debt a lot of times. And technical debt, Jeff, in my opinion, is being used as a misnomer. So, they're kind of, different sorts of debt that I see often in the C-suite. So, there's technical debt where I don't like what we're running, there's data debt where I don't know what we're running, and there's brain debt where I don't know what we want. And Jeff, I would argue that a lot of things that are masquerading as technical debt in the C-suite are really brain debt. I haven't figured out what we want to do, I haven't thought about what we're willing and able to change. And so, that's why the Cloud is a disappointment because we haven't figured out what we want for lunch. (laughs) >> So, it's a classic like people process technology program, you know, problem. And we hear about it all the time, right? And everyone loves to focus on the technology. I haven't heard it really explained that well, but that's what you're saying. It's like, we'll just jump to that part so we don't have to actually ask the hard questions, right? And the thing that makes me think of it when you talked about that is it's kind of like the whole data aggregation problem and all the big data adventures when half the time people don't know what data is where, so, even just going through the exercise of cataloging, finding, organizing, cleansing, all that kind of stuff before you really start to think about what can you do with the big data project? You got to get the baseline down before you can get into the fancy stuff. Sounds kind of like, what you're talking about. >> You nailed it, Jeff. And I'm actually going to piggyback on something you said. This is actually the problem that I think we're wrestling with in Cloud and in life. There it is, right? And we're got to put a fine point in it for the listeners. We are struggling, Jeff, with how to evaluate better versus different. And so, what Cloud has done more importantly, Cloud has shortened the amount of time that we're willing to spend on something before we just start over again. And so, the question that we wrestle with is, do I need to do the same thing a little bit differently? Do I need to tweak it or is there something better that's come along where I need to throw everything away, start all over again, and wipe the slate clean. And so, here's what ends up happening, right? The challenge that we have building on that is how we choose, Jeff, is more important than what we choose because a lot of us are making choices but we're not developing a framework to choose in a world where different things are pushed at us really every day and every night, right? Amazon and Azure are changing literally thousands of things every night. And if I feel like there's something new out there, I have to understand, is this noise, or is this something I pay attention to? Is this a size for a project or is this something that helps my value? If you don't have a way to choose, Jeff, every new option is going to just lead to more confusion and more decommitment. >> Right, well, I mean, you raised a really interesting point which is how do CIOs keep up with all this stuff? I mean, how do they possibly keep the lights on, you know, run digital transformation, kind of, keep up with the, Lord knows, how many changes like you said, get made at Amazon every single day I mean, the feature set when Andy stands on stage at re-invent and lists all the services. I think he's using like a two-and-a-half point font on a 200 foot video screen. I mean, there's so much there. So, how do you help people take a step back from, it's like driving, you know, a car with headlights through snow at night. You know, it's just like kuchu chu chu. How do you help people take a step back and be a little bit more thoughtful, a little bit more intentional, a little bit more circumspect to lay a good foundation which is going to be what the rest of the house is built on. If you don't have it, it's just going to crumble, if you have it, then at least you have a chance of success. How do you help guide them and get out of that snow storm? >> So, I'm going to give you a new acronym, Jeff, but I think it starts with humility. It starts with us admitting that we don't have this all figured out yet. I often tell a lot of customers, Cloud is that best a teenager that just learned how to drive. And Cloud similar to teenagers, the ability of what it can do is, kind of, in conflict with what it can comprehend in terms of unintended consequences. And so, if Cloud is changing all the time, let's not talk about, we crushed it, we nailed it, we knocked it out of the park. Let's raise our hand and say, you know what? I humbly need some help, because here's what we do, Jeff. In this industry, we throw around acronyms and terms all the time. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, BDaaS, DBaaS, whatever. I'm going to introduce the term CaaS, but that's not containers as a service job. I think what we're getting is confusion as a service. (laughs) There's so many things that are changing that people are overwhelmed but because we want to act so much like we're crushing it on social media, we really need to say, I need help, I can't do this in a spreadsheet anymore. Please are there solutions out there that can help me automate some of this stuff so that I'm not a victim of my own ignorance. So, humility, right? Embrace other people that have solved some of this problem before, somebody has solved this problem. There are companies out there that are taking in the data, that are automating the decision-making, and that can help you, right? Bring people in, bringing outside help. >> Right, well, the other piece you just talked on is automation, and it goes back to your earlier comment about, you know, scale, bad things at scale are not good. So, if you don't get things dialed in now, and you start applying automation, and you start applying machine speed, you know, then things can get really squirrely really quick. So, that's even another kind of, you know, danger zone coming ahead, start to plan and make sure you've got your stuff organized or now you're going to automate it at machine speed, IOT, 5G, and really run things ragged super quickly. >> Jeff, I agree a hundred percent with that. I want to go back to something you talked about before. People process technology. I want to tweak that. I think we really need to evolve into people, process, product, or people, process, problem. It's got to go back to what am I creating or what am I solving this helping someone? And the technology is something that I will use or not if that helps me meet that outcome. But as technologists, Jeff, a lot of us are getting lazy. I want to play with Kubernetes. I want to play with containers. I want to play with serverless. I want to play with IOT. Who is that actually solving a problem for? Is what we've got to come back to because if I'm not doing that, the less you submit that I'm playing with this, but I'm not really making something better for a customer or adding more value to the business. >> So, again, what are your tips and tricks? 'Cause things are not going to get less complicated, right? As we've talked about Amazon's rolling out new services all the time. Google is really starting, you know, Google Cloud is really starting to rage. Obviously, Satya has done an amazing job with Microsoft, and then there's Oracle Cloud and IBM Cloud, and all these secondary Clouds, Equinix, and that acceleration is only going up. So, how do you, you know encourage people, coach people, tell people to make sure that they're taking a step back and being organized and thoughtful, and not just racing ahead at the next bright shiny object? >> So, great question again, Jeff. I think people have to have to be careful that just because you hear about something a lot doesn't mean it's proven to scale. Social media is dangerous in the sense that we think that we hear something a hundred times then a means that is polished. And I think that as enterprises and as businesses, you know, go with something that's proven, but dip a toe in the water, if you're not sure about it. So, maybe you are experimenting with some things in DevTests, but here's some practical tips that I'll give. Three things, right? I recommend that people typically start here with Cloud strategy, the three D's of data are what I recommend people begin with. Don't begin with the widgets, the shiny objects, begin with data storage, begin with data transport and begin with data organization. We know that data is the lifeblood of the enterprise, right? That's what all of us are focused on right now, right? Data is collected from watches, from websites, from things like self-driving cars, eventually. So, how is my data going to be stored? 'Cause that's the most important part of likely what we're doing as a corporation. How is it going to be transported? Am I okay with spending X amount of dollars on Egress? Do I have latency issues? And then when it comes to data organization, databases, data warehouses, data lakes, I would start with my philosophy, Jeff, on how I plan to leverage that information across any of the multi or hybrid providers that I plan to spin up, because if I start with the data that connects me better to the customer, how am I going to leverage this data then make something better for them? And then any venue honestly, Jeff, that I choose to execute in we'll have tools and utilities and packages that I can leverage to make something better for someone. >> The piece you didn't mention though, was the application. So, where's the application? Say you still start with the data foundationally, and then go to the application or? >> Yes. >> But most of the initiatives driven kind of, at the application level layer? >> They are, and I'm glad you mentioned that. So, practically speaking, let me go down a level to double-click on stuff. Well, people want to be Cloud native, right? 'Cause we don't want to run servers. We don't want to run boxes, we don't even really want to do VMS anymore. One thing that I recommend, that I believe is high reward and low risk is that people strongly consider adopting database as a service, and this is the reason why. It gives us a format to go to something that's Cloud native that doesn't have to be totally rewritten. So, the juice is worth the squeeze there because I'm reducing labor, I'm reducing maintenance, I'm reducing cycles, the DBaaS that people like that have to do, but I'm not paying to refactor an application. Where we struggle, Jeff, and maybe this is another topic, we really struggle with the value of applications, and because we don't know the value of an app, we're using the cost of an app as a proxy. And so, if you don't know the value of something, you're always going to be at risk of over or under improving it. This is why I like database as a service. I can be more nimble, I can reduce labor, and I'm not rewriting an application and spending more to rewrite it than the app is worth. If I totally refactor, or if I totally replatform, the cost may outstrip the value. DBaaS is almost always a slam dunk, 'cause I'm going to reduce manual things that my people are doing that freeze them up, to focus more on customers and evolve in the end. That's what I see pretty consistently in the enterprise. >> That is really scary. That statement that you said that people don't necessarily know the value of the app and using cost as a proxy is not good. You know, I had Butch Rizzo on recently, and he did a study on, you know, trying to figure out the value of data, versus the the value of an app. And he did some research of that UCSF, and what they did is they basically said the value of the data is dependent on the business process that you can improve, or the business project that you want to do. You make an estimate as to what the ROI in that process is, and then you basically see if it's worthwhile to do. And that case and point was, you know, running a promotion at Chipola 'cause bill loves Chipola, but he had a real concrete way that, you know, if we can increase sales at the target stores by, you know, 10%, or we can increase the average ticket by 20 cents or we can increase the average number of items ordered by 0.5 or whatever. So, you know, real far metrics that tie back to real numbers, that tie back to value that you can make an assessment of that project, and that project is enabled by data. So, I hope people are doing that far applications 'cause cost is not the way to figure out value >> The challenge that we have, Jeff, when we look at a lot of the things in the Cloud, there's a big difference between if I have "big C" customers, someone who's literally pulling out a wallet or a credit card to pay for my service or product versus "little C" customers like internally. If I'm paying for a streaming service, and the cost of the streaming service goes up the value of that's likely also going up because I'm serving more big C customers. If the cost of a password reset manager goes up and internal application that nobody was likely paying for, and that's really the dilemma that a lot of folks have in the enterprise, Jeff. Am I going to take something that has limited value like a password application, and put it in a place that can have unlimited spend. Now, if I'm a Netflix or Disney plus, if my spend is going up, my value is going up because I'm serving more big C people that are going to pull out their credit card and give me money. So, a lot of the struggle is when we drill down into this in the enterprise is the people that have the little C customers that don't have anybody paying them 'cause they're tryna understand this is like funny money in our houses job. My kids are teenagers. If I was to charge them, right? For room and board or for dinner, they don't have any money. So, the value of what they think about my cooking on the weekend, right? It's hard to put a value on that because they're not paying me, but if I had a food truck, it's easy to put a value on that, are people buying it or not? So, again, the challenges between internal or external customers and asked me to get any things I charged back and show back, we need a model to understand, is this something that you're tolerating or something that you're actually choosing and are you willing to spend money on it? >> Yeah, and it's a complicated issue, right? Because the other thing is you'd say, you take this conversation over to the security space, which I always find fascinating 'cause investigating security is kind of like investing in insurance and you can't use all your money to insure everything a hundred percent or else you just, why would you even do it? But you have to have some, and it's not a real clear ROI, but the potential downside is pretty huge. So, it's this kind of, balancing act, as you said, it's not really clean as to what the true value of that is unless you tie it back to some specific event, a breach, you know, some type of pins getting stolen, et cetera. So, these are not hard questions, but it's funny 'cause they're not technology questions, right? They're business value questions, and they're priority questions, and they're trade off questions. That's the other thing, right? You don't have infinite resources. So, even if you solve the model here you need to solve it within a portfolio of challenges, opportunities to then, as you said, you know, kind of rank order, where do you spend that next version of dollar? 'Cause it really can have a very a huge difference on the return. >> Okay, I think if I was going to give a, maybe a final piece of advice to the audience, Jeff, it would be to not confuse planning and analysis. That's something that I've talked about before. There's a big difference between those two things, and I often use the analogy of tax planning versus tax preparation. Jeff, when we collect our receipts, and our W-2s and 1099s, and go to our CPA at the beginning of the next year, we can't call that tax planning. That's tax preparation. It's already kind of done and dusted as long as you don't mess it up, it's pretty much a foregone conclusion. And the enterprise is doing a lot of analysis and a lot of preparation, but really we need to do more planning. We need to look at the tools and the companies that are helping us simulate and plan for the future that's coming because then when we're talking about it, right? When you're sitting with your CPA and you're saying, what if I do this with my retirement or 401k, or real estate assets, when they can talk to you about what might happen, right? You're not in crisis, it's not a fire drill, it's not a dumpster fire, you can have a very easy conversation around the pros and cons of that. So, I think that's one thing we really have to embrace is press ahead, talk to those consultants and those solution providers, is this really planning or is this just analysis? Is this looking backwards or is it really looking forward and giving me some insight into the things that are coming so that I feel smarter going into the next season? >> And the opportunity to make a change before you hit December 31st. I mean, I think that's a really great analogy. Well, Bobby, a lot of great stuff squeezed in in a few short minutes, it's super fun to catch up, and I just love all your analogies and your stories because at the end of the day, it is about people, and it's about priorities, and it's about business, it's not about the technology. So, thank you so much for sharing your insight. >> Thank you, Jeff. Thanks for having me. >> Oh, absolutely, all right. He's Bobby Allen, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from our Palo Alto studio. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (bright music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everyone, to the "Supercloud 22." I'm John Furrier, host of "The Cube." This is the Cloud-erati panel, the distinguished experts who have been there from day one, watching the cloud grow, from building clouds, and all open source stuff as well. Just great stuff. Good friends of "The Cube," and great to introduce back on "The Cube," Adrian Cockcroft, formerly with Netflix, formerly AWS, retired, now commentating here in "The Cube," as well as other events. Great to see you back out there, Adrian. Lori MacVittie, Cloud Evangelist with F5, also wrote a great blog post on supercloud, as well as Dave Vellante as well, setting up the supercloud conversation, which we're going to get into, and Chris Hoff, who's the CTO and CSO of LastPass who's been building clouds, and we know him from "The Cube" before with security and cloud commentary. Welcome, all, back to "The Cube" and supercloud. >> Thanks, John. >> Hi. >> All right, Lori, we'll start with you to get things going. I want to try to sit back, as you guys are awesome experts, and involved from building, and in the trenches, on the front lines, and Adrian's coming out of retirement, but Lori, you wrote the post setting the table on supercloud. Let's start with you. What is supercloud? What is it evolving into? What is the north star, from your perspective? >> Well, I don't think there's a north star yet. I think that's one of the reasons I wrote it, because I had a clear picture of this in my mind, but over the past, I don't know, three, four years, I keep seeing, in research, my own and others', complexity, multi-cloud. "We can't manage it. They're all different. "We have trouble. What's going on? "We can't do anything right." And so digging into it, you start looking into, "Well, what do you mean by complexity?" Well, security. Migration, visibility, performance. The same old problems we've always had. And so, supercloud is a concept that is supposed to overlay all of the clouds and normalize it. That's really what we're talking about, is yet another abstraction layer that would provide some consistency that would allow you to do the same security and monitor things correctly. Cornell University actually put out a definition way back in 2016. And they said, "It's an architecture that enables migration "across different zones or providers," and I think that's important, "and provides interfaces to everything, "makes it consistent, and normalizes the network," basically brings it all together, but it also extends to private clouds. Sometimes we forget about that piece of it, and I think that's important in this, so that all your clouds look the same. So supercloud, big layer on top, makes everything wonderful. It's unicorns again. >> It's interesting. We had multiple perspectives. (mumbles) was like Snowflake, who built on top of AWS. Jerry Chan, who we heard from earlier today, Greylock Penn's "Castles in the Cloud" saying, "Hey, you can have a moat, "you can build an advantage and have differentiation," so startups are starting to build on clouds, that's the native cloud view, and then, of course, they get success and they go to all the other clouds 'cause they got customers in the ecosystem, but it seems that all the cloud players, Chris, you commented before we came on today, is that they're all fighting for the customer's workloads on their infrastructure. "Come bring your stuff over to here, "and we'll make it run better." And all your developers are going to be good. Is there a problem? I mean, or is this something else happening here? Is there a real problem? >> Well, I think the north star's over there, by the way, Lori. (laughing) >> Oh, there it is. >> Right there. The supercloud north star. So indeed I think there are opportunities. Whether you call them problems or not, John, I think is to be determined. Most companies have, especially if they're a large enterprise, whether or not they've got an investment in private cloud or not, have spent time really trying to optimize their engineering and workload placement on a single cloud. And that, regardless of your choice, as we take the big three, whether it's Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, each of them have their pros and cons for various types of workloads. And so you'll see a lot of folks optimizing for a particular cloud, and it takes a huge effort up and down the stack to just get a single cloud right. That doesn't take into consideration integrations with software as a service, instantiated, oftentimes, on top of infrastructure of the service that you need to supplement where the obstruction layer ends in infrastructure of the service. You've seen most IS players starting to now move up-chain, as we predicted years ago, to platform as a service, but platforms of various types. So I definitely see it as an opportunity. Previous employers have had multiple clouds, but they were very specifically optimized for the types of workloads, for example, in, let's say, AWS versus GCP, based on the need for different types and optimized compute platforms that each of those providers ran. We never, in that particular case, thought about necessarily running the same workloads across both clouds, because they had different pricing models, different security models, et cetera. And so the challenge is really coming down to the fact that, what is the cost benefit analysis of thinking about multi-cloud when you can potentially engineer the resiliency or redundancy, all the in-season "ilities" that you might need to factor into your deployments on a single cloud, if they are investing at the pace in which they are? So I think it's an opportunity, and it's one that continues to evolve, but this just reminds me, your comments remind me, of when we were talking about OpenStack versus AWS. "Oh, if there were only APIs that existed "that everybody could use," and you saw how that went. So I think that the challenge there is, what is the impetus for a singular cloud provider, any of the big three, deciding that they're going to abstract to a single abstraction layer and not be able to differentiate from the competitors? >> Yeah, and that differentiation's going to be big. I mean, assume that the clouds aren't going to stay still like AWS and just not stop innovating. We see the devs are doing great, Adrian, open source is bigger and better than ever, but now that's been commercialized into enterprise. It's an ops problem. So to Chris's point, the cost benefit analysis is interesting, because do companies have to spin up multiple operations teams, each with specialized training and tooling for the clouds that they're using, and does that open up a can of worms, or is that a good thing? I mean, can you design for this? I mean, is there an architecture or taxonomy that makes it work, or is it just the cart before the horse, the solution before the problem? >> Yeah, well, I think that if you look at any large vendor... Sorry, large customer, they've got a bit of everything already. If you're big enough, you've bought something from everybody at some point. So then you're trying to rationalize that, and trying to make it make sense. And I think there's two ways of looking at multi-cloud or supercloud, and one is that the... And practically, people go best of breed. They say, "Okay, I'm going to get my email "from Google or Microsoft. "I'm going to run my applications on AWS. "Maybe I'm going to do some AI machine learning on Google, "'cause those are the strengths of the platforms." So people tend to go where the strength is. So that's multi-cloud, 'cause you're using multiple clouds, and you still have to move data and make sure they're all working together. But then what Lori's talking about is trying to make them all look the same and trying to get all the security architectures to be the same and put this magical layer, this unicorn magical layer that, "Let's make them all look the same." And this is something that the CIOs have wanted for years, and they keep trying to buy it, and you can sell it, but the trouble is it's really hard to deliver. And I think, when I go back to some old friends of ours at Enstratius who had... And back in the early days of cloud, said, "Well, we'll just do an API that abstracts "all the cloud APIs into one layer." Enstratius ended up being sold to Dell a few years ago, and the problem they had was that... They didn't have any problem selling it. The problem they had was, a year later, when it came up for renewal, the developers all done end runs around it were ignoring it, and the CIOs weren't seeing usage. So you can sell it, but can you actually implement it and make it work well enough that it actually becomes part of your core architecture without, from an operations point of view, without having the developers going directly to their favorite APIs around them? And I'm not sure that you can really lock an organization down enough to get them onto a layer like that. So that's the way I see it. >> You just defined- >> You just defined shadow shadow IT. (laughing) That's pretty- (crosstalk) >> Shadow shadow IT, yeah. >> Yeah, shadow shadow it. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> I mean, this brings up the question, I mean, is there really a problem? I mean, I guess we'll just jump to it. What is supercloud? If you can have the magic outcome, what is it? Enstratius rendered in with automation? The security issues? Kubernetes is hot. What is the supercloud dream? I guess that's the question. >> I think it's got easier than it was five, 10 years ago. Kubernetes gives you a bunch of APIs that are common across lots of different areas, things like Snowflake or MongoDB Atlas. There are SaaS-based services, which are across multiple clouds from vendors that you've picked. So it's easier to build things which are more portable, but I still don't think it's easy to build this magic API that makes them all look the same. And I think that you're going to have leaky abstractions and security being... Getting the security right's going to be really much more complex than people think. >> What about specialty superclouds, Chris? What's your view on that? >> Yeah, I think what Adrian is alluding to, those leaky abstractions, are interesting, especially from the security perspective, 'cause I think what you see is if you were to happen to be able to thin slice across a set of specific types of workloads, there is a high probability given today that, at least on two of the three major clouds, you could get SaaS providers that sit on those same infrastructure of the service clouds for you, string them together, and have a service that technically is abstracted enough from the things you care about to work on one, two, or three, maybe not all of them, but most SaaS providers in the security space, or identity space, data space, for example, coexist on at least Microsoft and AWS, if not all three, with Google. And so you could technically abstract a service to the point that you let that level of abstract... Like Lori said, no computer science problem could not be... So, no computer science problem can't be solved with more layers of abstraction or misdirection... Or redirection. And in that particular case, if you happen to pick the right vendors that run on all three clouds, you could possibly get close. But then what that really talks about is then, if you built your seven-layer dip model, then you really have specialty superclouds spanning across infrastructure of the service clouds. One for your identity apps, one for data and data layers, to normalize that, one for security, but at what cost? Because you're going to be charged not for that service as a whole, but based on compute resources, based on how these vendors charge across each cloud. So again, that cost-benefit ratio might start being something that is rather imposing from a budgetary perspective. >> Lori, weigh in on this, because the enterprise people love to solve complexity with more complexity. Here, we need to go the other way. It's a commodity. So there has to be a better way. >> I think I'm hearing two fundamental assumptions. One, that a supercloud would force the existing big three to implement some sort of equal API. Don't agree with that. There's no business case for that. There's no reason that could compel them to do that. Otherwise, we would've convinced them to do that, what? 10, 15 years ago when we said we need to be interoperable. So it's not going to happen there. They don't have a good reason to do that. There's no business justification for that. The other presumption, I think, is that we would... That it's more about the services, the differentiated services, that are offered by all of these particular providers, as opposed to treating the core IaaS as the commodity it is. It's compute, it's some storage, it's some networking. Look at that piece. Now, pull those together by... And it's not OpenStack. That's not the answer, it wasn't the answer, it's not the answer now, but something that can actually pull those together and abstract it at a different layer. So cloud providers don't have to change, 'cause they're not going to change, but if someone else were to build that architecture to say, "all right, I'm going to treat all of this compute "so you can run your workloads," as Chris pointed out, "in the best place possible. "And we'll help you do that "by being able to provide those cost benefit analysis, "'What's the best performance, what are you doing,' "And then provide that as a layer." So I think that's really where supercloud is going, 'cause I think that's what a lot of the market actually wants in terms of where they want to run their workloads, because we're seeing that they want to run workloads at the edge, "a lot closer to me," which is yet another factor that we have to consider, and how are you going to be moving individual workloads around? That's the holy grail. Let's move individual workloads to where they're the best performance, the security, cost optimized, and then one layer up. >> Yeah, I think so- >> John Considine, who ultimately ran CloudSwitch, that sold to Verizon, as well as Tom Gillis, who built Bracket, are both rolling in their graves, 'cause what you just described was exactly that. (Lori laughing) Well, they're not even dead yet, so I can't say they're rolling in their graves. Sorry, Tom. Sorry, John. >> Well, how do hyperscalers keep their advantage with all this? I mean, to that point. >> Native services and managed services on top of it. Look how many flavors of managed Kubernetes you have. So you have a choice. Roll your own, or go with a managed service, and then differentiate based on the ability to take away and simplify some of that complexity. Doesn't mean it's more secure necessarily, but I do think we're seeing opportunities where those guys are fighting tooth and nail to keep you on a singular cloud, even though, to Lori's point, I agree, I don't think it's about standardized APIs, 'cause I think that's never going to happen. I do think, though, that SaaS-y supercloud model that we were talking about, layering SaaS that happens to span all the three infrastructure of the service are probably more in line with what Lori was talking about. But I do think that portability of workload is given to you today within lots of ways. But again, how much do you manage, and how much performance do you give up by running additional abstraction layers? And how much security do you give up by having to roll your own and manage that? Because the whole point was, in many cases... Cloud is using other people's computers, so in many cases, I want to manage as little of it as I possibly can. >> I like this whole SaaS angle, because if you had the old days, you're on Amazon Web Services, hey, if you build a SaaS application that runs on Amazon, you're all great, you're born in the cloud, just like that generations of startups. Great. Now when you have this super pass layer, as Dave Vellante was riffing on his analysis, and Lori, you were getting into this pass layer that's kind of like SaaS-y, what's the SaaS equation look like? Because that, to me, sounds like a supercloud version of saying, "I have a workload that runs on all the clouds equally." I just don't think that's ever going to happen. I agree with you, Chris, on that one. But I do see that you can have an abstraction that says, "Hey, I don't really want to get in the weeds. "I don't want to spend a lot of ops time on this. "I just want it to run effectively, and magic happens," or, as you said, some layer there. How does that work? How do you see this super pass layer, if anything, enabling a different SaaS game? >> I think you hit on it there. The last like 10 or so years, we've been all focused on developers and developer productivity, and it's all about the developer experience, and it's got to be good for them, 'cause they're the kings. And I think the next 10 years are going to be very focused on operations, because once you start scaling out, it's not about developers. They can deliver fast or slow, it doesn't matter, but if you can't scale it out, then you've got a real problem. So I think that's an important part of it, is really, what is the ops experience, and what is the best way to get those costs down? And this would serve that purpose if it was done right, which, we can argue about whether that's possible or not, but I don't have to implement it, so I can say it's possible. >> Well, are we going to be getting into infrastructure as code moves into "everything is code," security, data, (laughs) applications is code? I mean, "blank" is code, fill in the blank. (Lori laughing) >> Yeah, we're seeing more of that with things like CDK and Pulumi, where you are actually coding up using a real language rather than the death by YAML or whatever. How much YAML can you take? But actually having a real language so you're not trying to do things in parsing languages. So I think that's an interesting trend. You're getting some interesting templates, and I like what... I mean, the counterexample is that if you just go deep on one vendor, then maybe you can go faster and it is simpler. And one of my favorite vendor... Favorite customers right now that I've been talking to is Liberty Mutual. Went very deep and serverless first on AWS. They're just doing everything there, and they're using CDK Patterns to do it, and they're going extremely fast. There's a book coming out called "The Value Flywheel" by Dave Anderson, it's coming out in a few months, to just detail what they're doing, but that's the counterargument. If you could pick one vendor, you can go faster, you can get that vendor to do more for you, and maybe get a bigger discount so you're not splitting your discounts across vendors. So that's one aspect of it. But I think, fundamentally, you're going to find the CIOs and the ops people generally don't like sitting on one vendor. And if that single vendor is a horizontal platform that's trying to make all the clouds look the same, now you're locked into whatever that platform was. You've still got a platform there. There's still something. So I think that's always going to be something that the CIOs want, but the developers are always going to just pick whatever the best tool for building the thing is. And a analogy here is that the developers are dating and getting married, and then the operations people are running the family and getting divorced. And all the bad parts of that cycle are in the divorce end of it. You're trying to get out of a vendor, there's lawyers, it's just a big mess. >> Who's the lawyer in this example? (crosstalk) >> Well... (laughing) >> Great example. (crosstalk) >> That's why ops people don't like lock-in, because they're the ones trying to unlock. They aren't the ones doing the lock-in. They're the ones unlocking, when developers, if you separate the two, are the ones who are going, picking, having the fun part of it, going, trying a new thing. So they're chasing a shiny object, and then the ops people are trying to untangle themselves from the remains of that shiny object a few years later. So- >> Aren't we- >> One way of fixing that is to push it all together and make it more DevOps-y. >> Yeah, that's right. >> But that's trying to put all the responsibilities in one place, like more continuous improvement, but... >> Chris, what's your reaction to that? Because you're- >> No, that's exactly what I was going to bring up, yeah, John. And 'cause we keep saying "devs," "dev," and "ops" and I've heard somewhere you can glue those two things together. Heck, you could even include "sec" in the middle of it, and "DevSecOps." So what's interesting about what Adrian's saying though, too, is I think this has a lot to do with how you structure your engineering teams and how you think about development versus operations and security. So I'm building out a team now that very much makes use of, thanks to my brilliant VP of Engineering, a "Team Topologies" approach, which is a very streamlined and product oriented way of thinking about, for example, in engineering, if you think about team structures, you might have people that build the front end, build the middle tier, and the back end, and then you have a product that needs to make use of all three components in some form. So just from getting stuff done, their ability then has to tie to three different groups, versus building a team that's streamlined that ends up having front end, middleware, and backend folks that understand and share standards but are able to uncork the velocity that's required to do that. So if you think about that, and not just from an engineering development perspective, but then you couple in operations as a foundational layer that services them with embedded capabilities, we're putting engineers and operations teams embedded in those streamlined teams so that they can run at the velocity that they need to, they can do continuous integration, they can do continuous deployment. And then we added CS, which is continuously secure, continuous security. So instead of having giant, centralized teams, we're thinking there's a core team, for example, a foundational team, that services platform, makes sure all the trains are running on time, that we're doing what we need to do foundationally to make the environments fully dev and operator and security people functional. But then ultimately, we don't have these big, monolithic teams that get into turf wars. So, to Adrian's point about, the operators don't like to be paned in, well, they actually have a say, ultimately, in how they architect, deploy, manage, plan, build, and operate those systems. But at the same point in time, we're all looking at that problem across those teams and go... Like if one streamline team says, "I really want to go run on Azure, "because I like their services better," the reality is the foundational team has a larger vote versus opinion on whether or not, functionally, we can satisfy all of the requirements of the other team. Now, they may make a fantastic business case and we play rock, paper, scissors, and we do that. Right now, that hasn't really happened. We look at the balance of AWS, we are picking SaaS-y, supercloud vendors that will, by the way, happen to run on three platforms, if we so choose to expand there. So we have a similar interface, similar capability, similar processes, but we've made the choice at LastPass to go all in on AWS currently, with respect to how we deliver our products, for all the reasons we just talked about. But I do think that operations model and how you build your teams is extremely important. >> Yeah, and to that point- >> And has the- (crosstalk) >> The vendors themselves need optionality to the customer, what you're saying. So, "I'm going to go fast, "but I need to have that optionality." I guess the question I have for you guys is, what is today's trade-off? So if the decision point today is... First of all, I love the go-fast model on one cloud. I think that's my favorite when I look at all this, and then with the option, knowing that I'm going to have the option to go to multiple clouds. But everybody wants lock-in on the vendor side. Is that scale, is that data advantage? I mean, so the lock-in's a good question, and then also the trade-offs. What do people have to do today to go on a supercloud journey to have an ideal architecture and taxonomy, and what's the right trade-offs today? >> I think that the- Sorry, just put a comment and then let Lori get a word in, but there's a lot of... A lot of the market here is you're building a product, and that product is a SaaS product, and it needs to run somewhere. And the customers that you're going to... To get the full market, you need to go across multiple suppliers, most people doing AWS and Azure, and then with Google occasionally for some people. But that, I think, has become the pattern that most of the large SaaS platforms that you'd want to build out of, 'cause that's the fast way of getting something that's going to be stable at scale, it's got functionality, you'd have to go invest in building it and running it. Those platforms are just multi-cloud platforms, they're running across them. So Snowflake, for example, has to figure out how to make their stuff work on more than one cloud. I mean, they started on one, but they're going across clouds. And I think that that is just the way it's going to be, because you're not going to get a broad enough view into the market, because there isn't a single... AWS doesn't have 100% of the market. It's maybe a bit more than them, but Azure has got a pretty solid set of markets where it is strong, and it's market by market. So in some areas, different people in some places in the world, and different vertical markets, you'll find different preferences. And if you want to be across all of them with your data product, or whatever your SaaS product is, you're just going to have to figure this out. So in some sense, the supercloud story plays best with those SaaS providers like the Snowflakes of this world, I think. >> Lori? >> Yeah, I think the SaaS product... Identity, whatever, you're going to have specialized. SaaS, superclouds. We already see that emerging. Identity is becoming like this big SaaS play that crosses all clouds. It's not just for one. So you get an evolution going on where, yes, I mean, every vendor who provides some kind of specific functionality is going to have to build out and be multi-cloud, as it were. It's got to work equally across them. And the challenge, then, for them is to make it simple for both operators and, if required, dev. And maybe that's the other lesson moving forward. You can build something that is heaven for ops, but if the developers won't use it, well, then you're not going to get it adopted. But if you make it heaven for the developers, the ops team may not be able to keep it secure, keep everything. So maybe we have to start focusing on both, make it friendly for both, at least. Maybe it won't be the perfect experience, but gee, at least make it usable for both sides of the equation so that everyone can actually work in concert, like Chris was saying. A more comprehensive, cohesive approach to delivery and deployment. >> All right, well, wrapping up here, I want to just get one final comment from you guys, if you don't mind. What does supercloud look like in five years? What's the Nirvana, what's the steady state of supercloud in five to 10 years? Or say 10 years, make it easier. (crosstalk) Five to 10 years. Chris, we'll start with you. >> Wow. >> Supercloud, what's it look like? >> Geez. A magic pane, a single pane of glass. (laughs) >> Yeah, I think- >> Single glass of pain. >> Yeah, a single glass of pain. Thank you. You stole my line. Well, not mine, but that's the one I was going to use. Yeah, I think what is really fascinating is ultimately, to answer that question, I would reflect on market consolidation and market dynamics that happens even in the SaaS space. So we will see SaaS companies combining in focal areas to be able to leverage the positions, let's say, in the identity space that somebody has built to provide a set of compelling services that help abstract that identity problem or that security problem or that instrumentation and observability problem. So take your favorite vendors today. I think what we'll end up seeing is more consolidation in SaaS offerings that run on top of infrastructure of the service offerings to where a supercloud might look like something I described before. You have the combination of your favorite interoperable identity, observability, security, orchestration platforms run across them. They're sold as a stack, whether it be co-branded by an enterprise vendor that sells all of that and manages it for you or not. But I do think that... You talked about, I think you said, "Is this an innovator's dilemma?" No, I think it's an integrator's dilemma, as it has always ultimately been. As soon as you get from Genesis to Bespoke Build to product to then commoditization, the cycle starts anew. And I think we've gotten past commoditization, and we're looking at niche areas. So I see just the evolution, not necessarily a revolution, of what we're dealing with today as we see more consolidation in the marketplace. >> Lori, what's your take? Five years, 10 years, what does supercloud look like? >> Part of me wants to take the pie in the sky unicorn approach. "No, it will be beautiful. "One button, and things will happen," but I've seen this cycle many times before, and that's not going to happen. And I think Chris has got it pretty close to what I see already evolving. Those different kinds of super services, basically. And that's really what we're talking about. We call them SaaS, but they're... X is a service. Everything is a service, and it's really a supercloud that can run anywhere, but it presents a different interface, because, well, it's easier. And I think that's where we're going to go, and that's just going to get more refined. And yes, a lot of consolidation, especially on the observability side, but that's also starting to consume the security side, which is really interesting to watch. So that could be a little different supercloud coming on there that's really focused on specific types of security, at least, that we'll layer across, and then we'll just hook them all together. It's an API first world, and it seems like that's going to be our standard for the next while of how we integrate everything. So superclouds or APIs. >> Awesome. Adrian... Adrian, take us home. >> Yeah, sure. >> What's your- I think, and just picking up on Lori's point that these are web services, meaning that you can just call them from anywhere, they don't have to run everything in one place, they can stitch it together, and that's really meant... It's somewhat composable. So in practice, people are going to be composable. Can they compose their applications on multiple platforms? But I think the interesting thing here is what the vendors do, and what I'm seeing is vendors running software on other vendors. So you have Google building platforms that, then, they will support on AWS and Azure and vice versa. You've got AWS's distro of Kubernetes, which they now give you as a distro so you can run it on another platform. So I think that trend's going to continue, and it's going to be, possibly, you pick, say, an AWS or a Google software stack, but you don't run it all on AWS, you run it in multiple places. Yeah, and then the other thing is the third tier, second, third tier vendors, like, I mean, what's IBM doing? I think in five years time, IBM is going to be a SaaS vendor running on the other clouds. I mean, they're already halfway there. To be a bit more controversial, I guess it's always fun to... Like I don't work for a corporate entity now. No one tells me what I can say. >> Bring it on. >> How long can Google keep losing a billion dollars a quarter? They've either got to figure out how to make money out of this thing, or they'll end up basically being a software stack on another cloud platform as their, likely, actual way they can make money on it. Because you've got to... And maybe Oracle, is that a viable cloud platform that... You've got to get to some level of viability. And I think the second, third tier of vendors in five, 10 years are going to be running on the primary platform. And I think, just the other final thing that's really driving this right now. If you try and place an order right now for a piece of equipment for your data center, key pieces of equipment are a year out. It's like trying to buy a new fridge from like Sub-Zero or something like that. And it's like, it's a year. You got to wait for these things. Any high quality piece of equipment. So you go to deploy in your data center, and it's like, "I can't get stuff in my data center. "Like, the key pieces I need, I can't deploy a whole system. "We didn't get bits and pieces of it." So people are going to be cobbling together, or they're going, "No, this is going to cloud, because the cloud vendors "have a much stronger supply chain to just be able "to give you the system you need. "They've got the capacity." So I think we're going to see some pandemic and supply chain induced forced cloud migrations, just because you can't build stuff anymore outside the- >> We got to accelerate supercloud, 'cause they have the supply. They are the chain. >> That's super smart. That's the benefit of going last. So I'm going to scoop in real quick. I can't believe we can call this "Web3 Supercloud," because none of us said "Web3." Don't forget DAO. (crosstalk) (indistinct) You have blockchain, blockchain superclouds. I mean, there's some very interesting distributed computing stuff there, but we'll have to do- >> (crosstalk) We're going to call that the "Cubeverse." The "Cubeverse" is coming. >> Oh, the "Cubeverse." All right. >> We will be... >> That's very meta. >> In the metaverse, Cubeverse soon. >> "Stupor cloud," perhaps. But anyway, great points, Adrian and Lori. Loved it. >> Chris, great to see you. Adrian, Lori, thanks for coming on. We've known each other for a long time. You guys are part of the cloud-erati, the group that has been in there from day one, and watched it evolve, and you get the scar tissue to prove it, and the experience. So thank you so much for sharing your commentary. We'll roll this up and make it open to everybody as additional content. We'll call this the "outtakes," the longer version. But really appreciate your time, thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thanks so much. >> Okay, we'll be back with more "Supercloud 22" right after this. (bright upbeat music)

(mellow music) >> Voiceover: Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE. Covering Smartsheet ENGAGE 2019. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Smartsheet ENGAGE, here in Seattle. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We are joined by Dr. WandaJean Jones. She is the Digital Learning Evangelist at GE Healthcare. Thank you so much for coming on the show! >> Thank you for having me. I'm so excited. >> Well we're excited to have you. So tell our viewers a little bit about what you do as the Digital Learning Evangelist, which is a very cool title. >> As Digital Learning Evangelist, the main part of my job is to manage our digital learning ecosystem. So, we have a learning management system, we use Adobe Captivate Prime. And then the other part of my job is to teach people how to use digital tools that will help make their lives a little bit easier. Save time, automate processes, and, you know, all the way around, create efficiencies. >> And how (chuckles). Are the employees willing to go there? Or are they naturally skeptical? I mean, what would you say? I mean, introducing a new technology to employees is famously a hard thing to do. How do you find it? >> Well, I'm a teacher at heart, so what I like to do is take what they already know and build off of that. So typically, if an employee comes to me and says, "WandaJean, we really want to learn "how to manage all of these Excel spreadsheets, "there's lots of data." I tell them, you know, "Come to the meeting with your Excel spreadsheets," and then I want them to tell me the story about their process, and then I go through and match them, kind of play matchmaker, and match them to that technology that already fits within their current behavior. There's some things that they'll have to change just a little bit, but we don't want to do it so much that they find it overwhelming, and say, "Oh my gosh, I'm never going to get this." So, I want to make sure they're comfortable and, you know, listening to them talk and seeing the sophistication in their current process, I'll know how far I can go. >> Now are these kind of next-gen productivity tools that you're getting them onto? Or are these kind of new collaboration tools that the company's taken on? What are some of the things you're transitioning them off of and putting them onto? >> I think one of the things is, the best part is, most of the work that's coming to me to transform, if you will, it's very manual. So, it's knowing where the tools are, and I make sure that I am very tool promiscuous. I like to go and look at all of these tools, and I like to understand which tools do what. And then I want to understand the role of the person and what they do for the business. And how those two can come together. So it's a matchmaker. The tools are, most of the time, digital collaborative tools. So we have a full suite of all sorts of tools at GE Healthcare. So we're definitely no short of tools. But sometimes people just haven't taken that digital leap to figure out, "How do I get my process "a little more digitized and save myself some time?" >> So what kinds of things are the people on your team working through, in terms of the kinds of processes you're helping them automate, the kinds of things you're helping them do manually, and how is Smartsheet coming into play here? >> Okay. So, I like to look at things from the triple constraints: Cost, quality, and speed. So, when you think about cost, quality, and speed, you want to take cost out of the process. You want to improve the quality by, you know, creating some sort of a standardization that everybody's going to do. And then you want to speed up the process that people can bring that, whatever it is, to market. And when I look at those three levers, this is exactly what my end users want to do anyway. So Smartsheet is able to answer all of those in such a remarkable way. That's usually the top of the list, when it comes to, you know, how are we going to implement this new digital process, Smartsheet is up there. It's the all-in-wonder. I call it the all-in-wonder tool at work, and people say, "Okay, here she comes. "She's going to talk about Smartsheet." That's because, I always say, "Smartsheet does a thousand things." That's why I really want to listen to what is necessary. I don't want to tell you about a thousand things. I only want to tell you about the things that, you know, you're looking at in this process. When the person starts using the new Smartsheet process, almost always they come back to me and say, "Look what else I found." So as they go on that journey, they start finding other things as well. And then we get excited together, and I say, "But did you see this?" And so, this whole, you know, Santa Claus is comin' to town (all laugh) That's kind of what it feels like. >> So, how has the collaboration culture changed over time? A lot of the conversations here around Smartsheet is that, A, you know, you can bring in people from an external organization, not to mention you can bring in external people from your organization within the big company. Have you seen a big change in you know, kind of how the teams form, and what's kind of the collaborative workgroup as these collaboration tools have suddenly become available? >> I think the biggest part with collaboration is now people know the upstream process and the downstream process. So, what information is going into this process, what do I need to do with it, and then what is the way that it needs to be ready for that next handoff, from a process perspective? So I like that. The @mentions are beyond wonderful. When I think about those @mentions, we have the place, especially in Smartsheet, to create comments. And you create the comment, but I'm too busy. I'm not going to go back to row 87 and see what you said. But, if you do this @mention, I've noticed that people, when they're using the app, you know, the @mention comes through. Even if they're not directly at their email, they'll go and see, "Oh, somebody's talking to me here." And so their app is helping them respond in real time. So, another part of the collaboration piece is cutting out collaboration. So, a lot of meetings, "'Kay, give me the status, what's the status." Well we can certainly just automate those reports, and make it exactly what, you know, the executive or the leader wanted to know, from a high-level perspective. And so, we don't have to have as many meetings. >> I love it though. That collaboration means cutting out collaboration. >> Mm-hmm. >> That is so important. One of the things that you said that was really striking is, understanding the upstream and the downstream. Because we heard on the main stage, and we are hearing a lot today, about how it's providing much more visibility. And leaders are able to see the big picture, and understand where things are working and where things are not working. But it actually, it's also helpful for the everyday employees, for the people who are several notches below, to understand and have that full picture. Can you talk about how having the full information has changed the way your company gets work done? >> Absolutely. So, inside of the process that I own, I'm in a learning and development team, and there are several trainers. There are several people who own curriculum and, you know, we are serving about 4,000 employees. We want to make sure these employees are getting the right learning that they need, and preparing them to do their job. So I certainly want to empower those trainers and curriculum owners to do their thing. I'm not going to go to class with you. I probably don't even know your content. But when I looked at Smartsheet dashboards, I started, you know, reporting is great. But when you flip it around, it's now a portal. And this is a information portal that everybody can be connected to. So, if we have a release in our system, if there's new materials that they can share, these can be happening right there at that portal. So I like it that I can empower people to not need me. And sometimes that can be scary. You think, "Oh, automation, it's coming, "and a robot's going to take over my job!" It's not that it's going to do, I have lots to do. But having this portal view allows people to go in and really be empowered. The other thing I have is sort of a ticketing system. So there's one of me, and 4,000 of them, and everybody might want something from WandaJean. So, I have a intake form that could easily take that work in and talk to me, and I get to know, you know, they put timeframes around when they need this. So I get to bubble up which ones are the most important ones, and which ones I can put off for a little bit. But at the end of the year, my leader might want to come back to me and say, "You know, what have you done for me lately?" And so, all of this input that has come through in this really standardized way could create a dashboard about what I've been doing, and I get to celebrate and understand, wow, I've had 50% more learning requests, and this many people wanted to learn about a tool, and, so I would have those metrics to even celebrate my own work and what I do as an individual. >> That's really interesting, right? 'Cause then you go from, the classic paradigm is there's data, right, which then becomes information, which then hopefully becomes some insight that you can actually take action. So it sounds like you're pulling that just on your straight-up inbound form, to actually get a whole lot of information on what's going on in that community, and where you can prioritize your time, your activities. >> Yes, well we create job requisitions and we hire people for roles. You know, you get this job description, you will do this and you will do that. It will be interesting at the end of the year to look back at this intake and see everything that you've actually done, versus what you signed up to do when you took the job. So, sometimes it looks really different, like, "Wait a minute, I think I need some more money." (Rebecca laughs) "'Cause I didn't get hired for this." >> Right, right, right, I've done so much more. >> Yes. >> Talk a little bit about the silos within the organization, and the ways in which the Smartsheet is helping break down those silos. >> Okay. So I talked to you guys a little earlier and told you that I believe that silo is an acronym for Secrets in the Learning Organization. And when you have those secrets, and you have no idea what this team or this team is doing, it could really cost the company cost, quality, speed. It's going to slow us down. We're going to both duplicate processes. And the quality of our product, instead of having process excellence, we'll have pockets of excellence. And we want to make everybody into these rockstars for the company. So, putting it together and making it more of, you know, a transparent ecosystem is awesome. The one thing that I really like is, when you map out a process and you pull in the right people and get those people involved, you'll get to understand, you know, resource management, any constraints, and you know, "Why is it, Bob, that you haven't done anything with this?" Where, I don't do that. And, you know, it starts a conversation. We can see, number one, what's wrong. And then we could have a conversation with the person about what's wrong. And it gives another action item for us to make it right. So without these sorts of, you know, without Smartsheet really helping us technologically bring those things together, it would be hard for me to even know where Bob is. It's a very big company. GE Healthcare is about 60,000 people. So, I don't know. I don't even know where Bob is right now. Bob, where are you? (laughter) But if Bob gets pulled into that Smartsheet, it shrinks the world, and it makes our big giant company just that much smaller, and people start knowing who you are and what you're supposed to be doing. And you get the right traffic of work. And then anything else that doesn't belong to you, it can get rerouted. >> Love to get your take on re-skilling, which isn't directly part of what you're doing, but you're currently doing re-skilling in terms of tools to execute different, you're training people to probably be more collaborative by using these tools and that different types of process. So important that re-skilling happens in the future, as all the jobs change. Just, you know, are people up for this? Are they excited to learn a new tool? Do they see that there're different ways to get work done than maybe our tradition? Or you still got the old codgers in the back, saying, you know, "That's not the way we did it 20 years ago!" >> Exactly, you do have that, you do have that. But, you know, this whole fake it until you make it, it's not going to work anymore. There's so many opportunities, especially within our company. We are sharing with our people leaders how to have collaboration across teams. Really don't think that your whole world is just right here inside of your job. Think broadly about what you do. And I like to say that, you know, I act locally but I think globally. So that just means, if I see that there is a process that I'm a part of, this is a mindset that we're sharing with our employees. If you see there's a process that you're a part of, and you see that it's broken and you fix it, fix it in such a way that it scales, and that it's applicable. You know, if we're all process managers, you probably have this problem too. So, create the fix, and then celebrate that socially, and show someone else, you can do it too. >> Rebecca: You can replicate this. >> You can replicate this. It's the classic before and after. You know, if we want to lose weight, we don't want to see the skinny person and telling, you know, how we got skinny. We want to see when you were larger, you know? You want to see the before and the after, and make sure that, you know, and when people see that, like, "It's possible? "I don't have to be, like, this superstar coder?" When they see how easy it is and they grab that process, I've seen them just do wonderful things. It's amazing, what our employees do. >> So, as a Digital Learning Evangelist, I mean, I don't know, how many are there of you in the world? And is it lonely? Do you come to these conferences to sort of have some community and some commiseration and understanding? I mean, what is it like, and how do you share your best practices with other people who do what you do in other companies? >> Well, in other companies, of course, our social networks, LinkedIn and those professional communities that I'm a part of, Smartsheet has a user group community, we can share there. Internally, there are people who are very interested in process. We use Yammer, so Microsoft Yammer. And we have a Smartsheet Yammer channel. This is one of the most healthiest channels in our business. We can see the stats on how many people are asking questions. And you have people coming there and saying, "Has anybody ever done this?" When I see that sort of curiosity, when I see someone in Europe jumping to help somebody in Mexico, it really is energizing, and it lets us know that everybody's trying to help everybody win. But how do I collaborate and get with other people? I do. I collaborate with other companies that, you know, I found out that Starbucks actually used Smartsheet during a disaster where there was a hurricane and they sent a Smartsheet forum out to their baristas, "Are you okay? "Can you make some coffee?" And, you know-- (laughter) >> Can you make the coffee. >> "And, oh by the way, take good pictures of the damage, "so we can submit it to our insurance." So, that's something that our company can use. And I'll take that back to our team, and say, "Guess what Starbucks did with this?" And, "Guess what PayPal did with this?" I sent PayPal's Smartsheet movie around to our executive team. They were very impressed. Now, it's not just that they were impressed. It's that, over the next two months, I heard that very same executive say, "We're going to create an integrated marketing calendar, "and we're going to use Smartsheet." That just made me feel so rewarded, that, you know, somebody is listening. You're not just talking! (Rebecca laughs) There are some converts! >> Great. Well, WandaJean, a pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you, thank you so much. >> Please come back again. >> Yes, I will! >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Jeff Fricks, stay tuned of more of theCUBE's live coverage of ENGAGE 2019. (minimal techno tone) (mellow music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> From the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering HoshoCon 2018 brought to you by Hosho. >> OK, welcome back everyone. We're live in Las Vegas for HoshoCon. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE. This is the first inaugural security conference around blockchain. Our next guest is John Kirch, who's the Chief Evangelist for Sentinel Protocol. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. Hey, it's great to be here, John. Thank you very much for inviting me. >> I love the shirt, I got my CUBE shirt here. You got your shirt on. Cool crowd here. So, before you get into some of the things you guys are working on, what's the scene here like, for people who aren't here, this is the first ever blockchain security conference around in the industry. What are the type of people that are here? And what's going on? Why is this important? >> Well, that's a really good question. I mean, I can think back and I remember meeting the president of Hosho. For the first time back in New York at Consensus. And he was giving a presentation, and I thought it was fantastic presentation, but we broke ice, we shook hands. And then we bumped into each other again in Soul. And then I was also talking to Tim Draper not too long ago. And Tim said, he was coming out here to Las Vegas to give a presentation. And he is one of our key investors. So we thought, it would be a good idea for us to show up as well. And we believe that many times in trade shows and other types of seminar series, there's too much emphasis on fintech and not on security. And the reason why I say that, is basically in the blockchain crypto world, right now one of the major challenges holding back the growth and the success is the lack of security. Not in a core blockchain technology, but in the Dapps and in the other connected applications. People are getting hacked. And there's different types of hackings, everything from Phishing, to malware, to DNS engine hacking, to smart contracts, web applications, I mean. >> The surface area is large. >> It, many different vectors, and it's complex. Something needs to be done about it in order to unlock the potential of blockchain crypto. >> Yeah, and I also love this event because one, it's, well first of anything is always good because it's present on creation, and you don't know, there might be another one, if it's around the next year or not. But I think this one seems like it's got the right people at it that it would grow. Because, remember. >> Yeah. >> The security is the number one problem, it should be seamless, it's complicated, multiple keys to deal with, multiple chains, never mind in the surface area for hacking. So I think blockchain is going to be a sea-change. We all know that, all tech alpha entrepreneurs are getting that. The complexity around the software is the key. What do you guys, how do you guys look at this? Because you guys are in the business to solve this problem. >> Right. >> What's the answer here? >> Well, we'd look at it from a experience point of view of cybersecurity. What I mean by that is that we have a lot of people on the team that come from companies like Palo Alto Networks, and F5, and Fortinet, I come from Darktrace, and other cybersecurity companies as well. But we'd look at it from the point of view, what did we do in the past, what were the problems, how can we leverage these technologies. What's wrong with the stuff that we did before, and how can we correct those gaps and provide a better product that's more usable, easier to install, and then has the multi-vector analysis capabilities to do the, not just antivirus, for instance, but how about AI, machine learning for detecting new anomalies and behavior or newer threats and attacks, or sandboxing. But how do we solve the problem is really our main focus. >> So I got to ask you question. A lot of people in the industry that are smart or trying to attack this problem, there's two schools of thoughts. We are going to get the software, going to get to the AI, got to do all the stuff over here, and then there's radical view is, Hey, the old model isn't working for blockchain, 'cause it's a different architecture, it's decentralized, so you can't just take network protocol stacks and say, Hey this is your security stack in the old network model to decentralize. So it needs a redo. >> Right. >> A refresh or a do-over. >> Right, right. >> So, this is, seems to be tension that's productive but still contentious. >> Right. >> What's the answer, because your old Juniper, Cisco switches might not be the perimeter-based firewall model, >> I'd love that question. >> We need a do-over or not? >> So, we are the world's first crowdsourced threat intelligence platform. I didn't say product, I said platform. And that means multiple various different types of products on our platform, but in addition to that, one of the biggest problems today is the need to update. Let's say, if you're looking at things from an antivirus point of view, if you haven't updated your database, your system, then you've got vulnerabilities that you haven't addressed. And so we don't need to be updated. Our system is running on a decentralized blockchain, and therefore is connected to APIs, to different types of endpoints. We are platform-agnostic, so we could connect to IoT-type devices or, you know, other types of, mobile telephones, or to PCs, servers, and so on. And, by having this collective cybersecurity intelligence, by definition, that means we have a richer, wider database of more information, than if you license a product from, let's say, any one of the antivirus vendors. You get that company's intelligence and support services only. But we're doing it, where we're taking company A plus B, plus C, plus this white hat hacker, plus this individual here, and we're, basically, combining all that together and offering it to our clients. >> And so, is it the single source of truth or knowledge around trust, how's the trust factor come in. 'Cause, if I'm a company I want to know that everything I'm running is updated. I want to know what it is first, and then it's updated. >> And you know, in this decentralized trustless world, there is, from our point of view, a need for an organization that can be trusted by people who have been hacked or experienced suspicious activity. So, we are addressing that, so we have a team of people called the Sentinels, and they are tested and certified by our internal cybersecurity experts, as having the capabilities and the knowledge and experience to contribute. And when those people make contributions, in terms of cybersecurity intelligence, we award them with points, and those points can be converted to fiat or into other crypto tokens. >> So you're tokenizing the contribution. >> We are. >> Relative to the crowdsourcing. >> Exactly. >> So this is like CrowdStrike, or is it different? >> Oh, it's different, I think, from CrowdStrike, because CrowdStrike, while it's a very good company and very good product, what we're doing is that we're combining blacklist with whitelist and we're providing the reporting service. And so, and we're running it on a blockchain, and the blockchain has certain elements that are very very good in terms immutability, or a very high type of resilience factor, or traceability, and so we're really taking our product and focusing it on the blockchain crypto world, but quite frankly, what we're building, because we're utilizing the technology in the optimal manner, it is also applicable to the conventional cybersecurity world too. And I expect that it'll be very commonly used there tomorrow. >> So, it's portable in the sense of the function. You can actually bring this to the class of cybersecurity, known detection type identification. >> I could be using it for Goldman Sachs or Bank of America, or, let's say, this hotel. >> Some of the global cybersecurity landscape, how would you, you know, if someone's putting their toe in the water for the first time. You're obviously in the trenches doing cutting edge work, certainly folks in Washington, D.C., around the world, have cyber conversations, from general Keith Alexander, there's new companies got some interesting things going on there. To kind of grokking it, what's so this, there's crowdsourcing, how would you brake up the cybersecurity market, 'cause cyber intelligence is a big part of regional cloud deployments now, Amazon's going to have a region in the Middle East. I'm sure they got their DNS monitored well. But you have network points and you have software running on them. How is the market sliced up? Is there categories, like, that are cleanly defined? How do you view that? >> Well, you know, I look at things from a point of view of having started in the cybersecurity world, John, back in 1998. And that was when I introduced the company called WatchGuard to the Japanese market, and also did that in Korea as well. But we pioneered the use of Linux appliances. Would you believe that? (John laughing) And we also pioneered managed security services. And so, one of the things that I learned over time as the cybersecurity world increased in complexity, I mean, back there it was easy, all you needed was an antivirus and you needed network firewall. >> And you had proprietary software too, open source wasn't as prevalent. >> Exactly, but things keep on getting ratcheted up, the complexity factor is growing. And now we look at cybersecurity and there are so many different types of products and services. And so it really comes down to understanding the security policy of the end user, of the organization or the individual. What type of PC they're using? Is it IBM, is it Apple? For them putting together a security policy and then bringing in different types of products that, basically, help that individual or that organization to satisfy that policy. And then tuning that over time. Most people don't think about that part, but the tuning process is also very important. So, and then educating people too, so. >> What's a number one industry problem that industry needs to solve as an industry, and then, what is the biggest concern that end users or organizations will have? Well, I think that biggest problem out there right now that hasn't been solved, is what's going on in front of our very eyes, this, the hacking of these exchanges and wallets. I mean, those organizations have lost now over three billion dollars, cumulative over the past few years, and then over one billion dollars this year. I mean, that's a lot of money. >> It's a lot of cash. >> And somebody needs to do something. >> And nobody knows where it goes, I mean, >> Well, actually we do know where it goes. Because, actually, that's the video I wanted to show today after my presentation, but there just wasn't enough time. We analyzed the Zaif hacking that happened just a few weeks ago. >> How much did they take? >> It was about 60 million dollars. But we analyzed that, and using crowdsourced information, we analyzed the transactions and so forth, and we found, believe it or not, that a large portion of those stolen Bitcoins were washed and went through Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange. And so, if they utilized our technology, to understand that the coins that are going through them were stolen, we would do a lot to increase the cost factor for monetizing stolen Bitcoins, we would help Binance to protect themselves. >> So the laundering of the coins, >> Yes. >> You could, basically, put a penalty on that, or >> Well, I don't look at it from a penalty point of view. I look at it from the point of view of helping people to make transactions that are kosher, that meet with their corporate policy, that comply with law, that enable them to ensure, that what they are doing is correct. >> So, you tracked the address, how do you know they are being washed, from that specific >> We, basically, track the addresses, we were able to track the addresses and I can show you a video later, if you like to, where we did just that. >> Yeah, I would like to get a copy of that. >> And the information, this is on the blockchain, show that the coins went through Binance. >> So, meaning the old classic IT operations, you always had the network management's piece, this is, again, can be a big part of traceability and accountability piece of it. >> Correct. >> This is important. >> Yeah, in fact, you know, it's really important that when you think about this world. For instance, if I were to give you five dollars. >> Thanks. >> And you were to get ripped off, and somebody took that five dollars from you, how would, John, how would you trace that five dollars? >> I would track the guy around that had stole it, find out where it is, but if I don't know who's took it, then... >> If you went to the police and ask them for help, do you think they could help you analyze and trace that and audit? >> Well, in San Francisco they break into cars and just take whatever they want. The police don't even show up. >> Right, but that's relying on luck, do you know, did he open the right car, >> I wouldn't. I wouldn't know who had this. >> But, you know, that's one of the great things is that with the blockchain technology, if you use it correctly, you can trace, many times, not all the time. But it does offer us very... >> 'Cause there's a digital footprint. >> Yeah. >> There's definitely a traceability aspect. >> And that's one of the nice advantages. So, I'd rather give you Bitcoin than the five-dollar bill. >> Yeah, I'll take the Bitcoin, it probably is worth more than the five. Money is going away, paper money, I don't now have a need for. Talk about the aspect of Bitcoin in cryptocurrency, as it relates to the funding of security attacks, because that's been a big concern, people trying to figure that out. Have you guys made any progress on tracking the funding, the underground funding for security attacks. >> Well, when you think about it, and when you think about the funding of security attacks, it's now teams, and a lot of these teams are very well trained and educated. >> And they're making some good money too. >> Yeah, and so they're making good money, they've monetized this. And all it takes is one time that they break in. And, so, once they break in, and you're compromised, so you have to defend every every time, and do it well, but they only need to break in once. But in terms of that, >> One bad day. >> The one bad day. >> One bad second. >> And your company's gone. >> Yeah. >> But the funding of these endeavors is getting more and more sophisticated, the money involved is becoming much much more bigger, and we need to ratchet up our defenses, so that we can provide an adequate response. >> So, what is the answer for me, let's just say, hypothetically, you know, I get, you know, 50 million in Bitcoin for theCUBE bank, for our community, and going to use that Bitcoin to have people have flourish with content, and I got to store it somewhere. >> Yeah. >> What do I do? >> Well. >> What's my answer? Do I call Binance and say, Hey if you going to wash and launder that, I might as well put it with you, because if you're the home for all the money. >> Well, I think that the optimal solution is to get it off the network, put it into a cold wallet, and safeguard that private key in a way that is very very secure. Do not leave it, you know, on your PC, don't tape it to your screen, but basically safeguard that privat key very well. Put it into a deposit box at a bank, that might be a good idea. >> Or multiple deposit boxes spread across. >> Yeah. >> With instructions, in case, >> But don't leave it, don't leave it in your wallet >> Yeah. >> And don't leave it on, writing on the chalkboard either, above your desk. >> Yeah (chuckling). >> But, I mean, basically, >> Or don't write it down where the surveillance cameras watching you write it down. >> And you might want to use a multisig wallet as well, and that will also increase the security as well. >> All right, well, what's the story with you guys? Give us a quick update on the Sentinel Protocol, the company. How big are you guys? You mentioned Draper funded you guys. What's the status? >> Well, you know, we started earlier this year, back in January, and now we have 30 security professionals, our headquarters are in Singapore, we have another big office up in Seoul, Korea, we have a third office in Tokyo. We now have over 42 partners. I'm very proud to say that we've got, amongst those partners, at least 10 exchanges and wallets signed on with us directly, that are very interested in using our technology, integrated into their applications. >> Yeah. >> And so, >> And why they work with you, for a hedge, for security, for insurance, what's the rationale? It's forensics, for data, what's the value for them? >> Once they've been hacked, it's pretty hard to recover. A lot of these companies that are hacked, in fact, it ends with the company closing, or being sold. So, basically, what they're trying to do is leverage our security to detect the threats and the attacks, you know, in a proactive online manner before they get damaged. And then, by doing that, they can enhance their branding, that's services they're providing to their clients, and they can also help to maximize the stability and growth of their organization, as well as, >> It's a heat shield. >> The future life. >> It's a shield for them. >> It's a shield, yes. >> So they're being proactive on the security front. >> Exactly. >> So minimize any damages that potentially could get through. >> You know, right now, John, unfortunately, if you get hacked, it's a wild, wild West, it's every man up to himself. >> Yeah, it's a total stage coach. >> Nobody's going to help you. >> With the mask on, no one knows who it is. You got to do some sort of real forensics and get lucky. >> Yeah. >> Sounds like it's hit or miss, right? >> Yeah, if you get lucky, you're a lucky man, I'll tell you, because most of the people out there are not getting lucky. >> Yeah. So, we're working together with our partners to, basically, solve this problem. >> And how much money did you guys raise? >> We raised approximately eight million dollars, but it was 25,000 Ethereum. >> OK, congratulations. >> Not at all, thank you very much. >> Well thanks for coming on. Great to meet you last night at dinner. Security is at the top of the agenda. We are here, this is theCUBE coverage, part of our ongoing 2018 blockchain cryptocurrency, now digital money coverage. Of course, as you know, we've been covering Bitcoin and blockchain on our blog since 2011, and more coverage here at HoshoCon, the first security conference dedicated to discuss security on the blockchain and the new digital assets that is now money. I'm John Furrier, stay with us for more after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)

live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California it's the queue covering Devon that create 2018 brought to you by Cisco okay welcome back everyone we're live here in Silicon Valley in Mountain View California it's keeps coverage dev net create here I'm John Firth mykos Lauren Cooney and next is Louie Louis froyo Technical Evangelist an IBM good to see you again thank you for having me Lauren ketchup IBM love to think shirt welcome back thank you thank you it's great here so what's going on for you here I am partnering with Cisco what's let's get what's going on well here are we're here to help you know sort of promote the idea around IOT analytics at the edge right with the idea of demonstrating a lot of the IBM products you know I did a workshop today and you know a lot of hands-on mechanical stuff but also leveraging some of the IOT technology offered by IBM so IBM cloud cloud analytics mainly is what you're doing that's right we've chat in the past going back big day two days Anup days when it was you know fashionable now it's kind of have a that's more data leaks nothing let's do the central part of the conversation ai is obviously Mark Zuckerberg and presenting in front of or testifying in front of the Senate's right it's all around AI in analytics Asli dated the data rules change but year conversation with Cisco is IOT yeah because a lot of the network stuff edge of the network these are paradigms that our network inherently perfect for Cisco that's right IBM does a lot of IOT job do a lot a blockchain work as well yeah this is all serving enterprise so what's the big theme real relevant theme for enterprises when it comes to things like how do I use flop chain or how do I use IOT how do I incorporate that tech into my enterprise well I think the first the first barrier is to just understand the technology and the limitations of that technology so you mentioned blockchain you know I'm out quite a bit in the field talking to people talking to partners IBM partners customers customers and there's this confusion around what's a blockchain is what blockchain is all about and the same with big data back in the day you mentioned you know we met up with some conferences back then I think they need to understand what the technologies do what they serve what purposes they serve so blockchain is fairly new right there's a lot of confusion there was the same with big data back and a very confusing IOT you know when we go out as a Technical Evangelist my team we go out and we talk to people there's an appetite to learn more to understand what this IOT thing is and how can they use it how did how can it help us make more money what are they drilling down on our where or better yet what are you evangelizing in what's what are they receptive to what's what's working for them what are they resonates with the customers or potential customers that you guys talk to first and foremost the fact that you know when we go out we have live sessions and we train we give them hands-on right out of the gate within you know 20 minutes they have a bot checkoff built within an hour we build a blockchain right with it with and they do it they see it they experience it and that excites them and then along the way we also we try to educate them on you know why this is important this is how it can be used you know IOT is you know this confusion around that - you know how can i leverage this but I've also talked to customers where they're doing some cool stuff with the edge and I think that leads to my next question actually was which is what use cases do you see what our customers talking about you know I think if you have people building block chains and things along those lines that's great but what are they going to apply it - yeah so there's a perfect example working with a customer and they they're businesses around drones you know UAVs to go out and look for anomalies on pipelines oil pipelines so they have a great technology a drone you know we can go 100 kilometers an hour they can go 100 kilometers in distance but what they need they really need to be able to look for things that shouldn't be there so computer vision you know machine learning deep learning and so we're working with them now to help them get the technology just right to live on the drone to be able to do image recognition highly with high accuracy in real-time so the machine learning in the IOT working out on the edge so is that Watson machine learning no no because it has to happen no we could do or watching today right the problem is you have to have that long-haul communication with the cloud now this needs to happen on the drone in real time okay so we're working with them to figure out you know how we can achieve that and there's some things coming out of IBM and in their future that'll make that a bit easier great and I think that that's an exciting awesome use case to be able to do computer vision on the fly and you know using these neural networks to make decisions I mean the drone example is real life and it's one of those things where we've seen many presentations and examples one of them I loves kind of I'm a wireless geek but I love the towers and I like to see how those they send your owns up there to look at the equipment and then look for repair so it's all automated it's all perfectly executed in the airspace if you will not name space but it goes in there you know power lines you know drones are being used to clear that's right debris and power line all kinds of use cases I think Accenture once told us there was a use case where on car accidents are scenes where they got to take the road and Thrones come in to a full representation and visual and reduces the that's right it's a time to survey the scene along you know one that's read you think about the wind farms these huge wind farms and they have to do inspections use some of these fields you see they're just 500 you know turbines out there and so you need to get out there and the drones are perfect they can look at the blades and you know because they have the high-speed cameras and those blades return and they can still look for defects and fractures and in predict you know using analytics again out there you know predictive maintenance to say hey you know there's something going on here you help us with the cube join me we did cube drone to go out and cover all of our events for us absolutely I'd love to work interviews I'd love to work with you guys that would be null series now just kidding aside is there a profile that you see with customers that resonates well in terms of why are some people more successful now on the cutting edge thing is they got the foresight they got the budget at IT what what's the perfect configuration what makes the customers or a tune to knocking down these low hanging fruit scenarios so I'm gonna say something that's obvious and I'm sure you see it all the time but it's just the risk risk-averse you know you need to put yourself out there you need to be you know a next-gen thinker and that's how we you know within my team when we think about going out and finding these next-gen partners you know born in the cloud you know they're thinking they're thinking beyond what's the from you so the people that are doing these this cool work there either you know a really hardcore tech you know like the drone example or these young entrepreneurs who really don't have much to lose and they have these great ideas you know certainly around blockchain I've heard some some cool ideas around blockchain what people want to do with it and so they you know they're small they're agile they have a vision and they'll take the chance you know the theme here that's interesting and Laura and I were talking about earlier is that the co-creation model is really where the ideas are going to come from so the old model was you pixton technology selection and you put it to work and you that should appreciate or amortize it over whatever period financially to pay back period all that nonsense now to a world where all the ideas are coming from the teams themselves yeah so the the suppliers the vendors don't pitch here's our IOT solution place our IOT fabric is invest Indies are the new approaches the new posture for vendors where these developers who are creating all the action yeah it certainly you know you see that look yeah yeah yeah that's how just you know the workshop we did here today you know if someone wants to kick the tires and wants to learn you know you're not gonna go to proprietary vendor equipments like the big data back in the day you know everyone started with the dupe that was the center of it right open so yeah and it's the same here so there's a lot of Technology open source free technology for people to go out and do prototypes and figure out what they need to do and that's what we're seeing people you know certainly when we go out and do our live events with IBM hands on immediately you know you're doing IOT solutions right so you can take it away and you can go back and then now you can apply it and build on it so you know it's going back to just education and people understanding what these technologies are how to use them and and how to get started you know the proverbial HelloWorld program is there a big event coming up for IBM you got you're gonna be going towards or what's your schedule look like you're on the road a lot what are the big things you got going on well we just had think out in Vegas are you guys were there I was there and we had IBM index not too long before that so that's sort of like the developer event like this for us on a team Aman we have schedules throughout the year to go through various cities there are 15 of us all around the country you know hosting meetups and you know initiating meetups getting partner events co-hosting with developers or cxos or oh so we we target the development team and we target the you know the decision maker around making purchases right so they need to be a part of that story you know we can easily win over the developers with our technology the hard part is winning over the people that signed the check so yeah it's exciting buddy thanks for stopping by great to see you yeah thank you very much your job analytics the heart of the IOT Louis froley Oh Technical Evangelist at IBM you know in the days where all the action is obviously the date as the center you got AI blockchain that's IBM's vision love does love the new love the new messaging from IBM right money we have two definite create here in Silicon Valley more live coverage after this short break

(dramatic music) >> Hi I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another CUBE Conversation from our wonderful Palo Alto studios in beautiful Palo Alto, California. Another great conversation today, this one's especially interesting to me, we've got Tiffani Bova who's the Global Growth and Innovation Evangelist of Salesforce. Just written a book, great book by the way, Growth IQ, I guess it's coming out later in August of 2018. But Tiffani, I want to talk a little bit about something that seems near and dear to your heart, the notion of customer engagement and how that gets turned into business strategy. So, let's start there. What is, in your two and half years at Saleforce, what have you learned about customer engagement and how actionable is it, really? >> Well, you know, Peter, it's a great question 'cause I'd say this, you know, I thought I knew the answer to that question when I stated two and a half years ago and I've had the wonderful pleasure of spending time with customers of ours around the world and now I have a different perspective on what that is. You know, Clayton Christensen wrote that new book, Competing Against Luck and it was all about, sort of, the job that you have to do, right? You're going to go from point A to point B, are you going to catch a taxi or you going to catch an Uber. And what makes the difference if the job is the same, regardless of what you're doing. In my mind, right, it's the experience or the engagement that that particular driver or brand has with the customer that is riding in the back of the car, satisfying the need for the job that needed to be done. And when I started to shift my thinking around it's really this experience layer and this engagement layer of how easy is it, how friction, you could apply it to all kinds of industries now, you know. Whether it's meal delivery, or buying a book or buy, you know, software from someone like Salesforce or consulting or watching this show. It used to be you had to go and watch it live or you'd have to watch it on television, now we have very different ways and means in which you can be engaged. So that has been super exciting to me to see it live and in person as brands are really focusing on this importance of the way in which they engage with, connect with and inspire customers to do things with them as their brand of choice. >> So, as I said, Tiffani, I like the book and there is three or points that really want to draw out. I want to start with the first one though. >> Okay. >> Let's go back to this notion of engagement. >> Yes. >> You make the observation in the book and I also have some, a background, thinking about customer engagement, customer experience but you make a great point in the book that your brand is the promise that you're make to the marketplace. Customer experience is the customer side of the engagement. >> Right. >> It seems as though if there's a significant miss-match between those two, that's the first indication you've got a problem. If your brand promise and what is being experienced are not aligned, that says something, have I got that right? >> Absolutely and what's fascinating about that is many brands feel like they're totally aligned and then in mass, you know, research from all kinds of people whether it's McKenzie or Bain or Gartner or Forester or anybody else, you're seeing this disconnection where the brand thinks it's great and the customer's going, it's not that great. The gap between those two things, unfortunately, even with all the advancements with technology, I feel like it's getting wider, right? Because their still sort of, brands are still sort pushing out what they think is interesting and engaging and customers are going, it's kind of not so much. And so, this really a way and I really dug into it in Growth IQ of how brands can figure out, how do I get closer to that by starting with the customer and working their way back in. I mean, it's a long discussed topic of outside in versus inside out, it's nothing new there but now we have this advancements of technology that actually allow us to know what that outside in is telling us at scale, without having to throw people at the problem. >> Yeah, through data collection and other types of things. >> Absolutely. >> But it all starts with that impedance miss-match. >> Yes. >> And as you said, if businesses don't accept that they have a problem they're not going to change. But that is a measurable, actionable thing. >> Right. >> So, if nothing else, if nobody reads anything else out of the book, just that simple idea that it's not MPV, it's not, you know, other types of measures, your Net Promoter Score or other types of measures but it's, basically, is there that disconnect. So the second thing is is that you've observed how it can be made actionable. Now, you've come up with 10, a recipe, or let's call them 10 ingredients of different ways of thinking about what you might be able to do from a growth standpoint. Now, rather than going through all of them, let's just say that they're there but the thing that's interesting is you've come up with a general framework for how you can imagine putting those things together. You call it context combination sequence, what does that mean? >> It, I think it's, I, when I decided to embark on this journey of writing this book I said, you know, what do I feel has been missing, or what did I notice as a pattern as I was having conversations since I was traveling around and talking to customers. And it wasn't the decision that they make of how they were going to grow that was interesting, it was actually the fact that it was rarely in isolation. It was never a single answer to a very complex problem, it was a combination of a number of things. So, if you're going to launch a new product, like that's going to be your growth strategy, well, are you going to launch it yourself? Are you going to do it with partners? Are you going to launch it direct to consumer online or you going to go into retail? You have to then combine the fact that you want to launch a new product with other things to help you grow. Or if you you're going to say I want to reduce turn, it's not just, well, I'm going to lower a price because that's going to be a reason for people to stay, it's, well wait a second, are the platforms easy to use? Can people open a ticket easily? It's always in combination. >> Do I have visibility into whom I churn? >> And to whom I churn, right? But the first place people fail to start, let's to back to your original question of this gap between what customers expect and what businesses are doing is the context in the market has significantly shifted over the last decade. You could say, well obvious technology advancements but I think far more disruptive than technology is actually the customers themselves demanding more from brands. I want you to be better to the environment. I want you to be better socially. I want you to give me more value for what I'm spending. I want it as a service not as a product. I want it in a monthly bill not a one-time bill. I want to pay usage. Whatever they're saying, the customer has changed the context of the market. And I think that's one of the big triggers in this, so you start with context, what's going on, next is what are you going to combine those efforts with. And then the third thing and equally import is sequence. The order in which you do things actually has implications to the likelihood of success of whatever it is you're doing. If you're going to launch into a new market with a new product, and you don't have the infrastructure for distribution or selling or service in place before you launch the product, probably the wrong order. >> Right. >> Right and so if you need to set up the partnerships and the distribution and support and sales and marketing, support within region or translate things to language or do the things that you need to do to marketing materials or websites before you get there because if you launch, the first impression is gone if it's not a good experience for the customer. >> Yeah, you only have one time to make a first impression. >> You only have one time and it doesn't need to be perfect, but you cannot be just completely off the mark because getting them to come back is more expensive than it would of been had you just taken a pause, gotten it right and launched at the appropriate time. >> And that notion of context is also especially important because you identify something you call timing which is related to sequence in the fact that you have to be very honest about what you can and cannot effect. There are some things you may want to sequencing, you may want to fall the sequence. >> Right. >> But if the market isn't going to respond favorably, tell us a little bit about timing and how context shapes and resets prioritization as it changes as well. >> Yeah so, if you think of somebody like a Netflix, if Netflix had started with streaming and not with DVD mail, you know, in the United States at least, not everybody had bandwidth, it was too expensive, it was in very specific neighborhoods and as bandwidth started to make its way into the households and the cost started to decline, then they could say, well, wait a second, is this the best way to do it or could we potentially stream it and start doing OTT types of services? But they had to wait for the technology as well as the customer to catch up with what was possible. So, had they not done mail and started with streaming, maybe they couldn't of held on long enough. And so, mail was a great way to do, I'm going to capture these customers, I'm going to penetrate this base, get them to order more movies and do more things with me. Now I'm going to introduce streaming. Now I have this base of customers which now may want to transition to a new kind of delivery or experience that they want to have with us. And you might be surprised that they still have hundreds of thousands of mail customer including my mom, she still gets DVDs in the mail. And it's a huge profit engine for them, actually allows them to reinvest in the business to expand the streaming services other places in the world which may never get mail service, right. But in the beachhead of it and just let the customers churn out, never getting rid of it, not marketing it but not getting rid of it. So, had those timings been offered different, they may not have been as successful. So, it really has implications to think about what is the customer looking for, what is the temperature socially, what can technology help me deliver? Putting those things together and going, knowing what I know, I don't need it to be perfect but I'm willing to test it and fail and iterate and keep going as long as I keep that context of the market in mind and then the customer, you know, as sort of my true north of making sure that I'm aligning those things again, like we were talking about. >> So let me see if I can summarize that, so you got to get the context, which is-- >> Yes. >> What's really in the marketplace, customer, regulatory, competitor, all those other thing we think about. >> All those things. >> You think about the combination of recipes or combination of responses and then how you're going to sequence them out. Then that sequencing decision then goes back and says and what do I need to redefine about my understanding of context. >> That's right, that's right. >> So I got that right? >> You've got that right and I would tell you that-- >> So your avoiding boiling the ocean. >> Yeah, and that's what always, sort of, when I was trying to figure out what did I want to say in this book. I did not want it to be a boil of the ocean. I picked 10 paths to growth, none of which I think will be a surprise to anybody. It's a modernization on what Ansoff had done around the Ansoff four, there's that. There are things that now we have at our disposal which we didn't have at our disposal in 1957 when Ansoff came out. >> Yeah. >> I mean, so, you have to obviously introduce new things. So like, just using something like socially conscious enterprise was not something we were talking about 10 years ago. >> Right. >> But it's being used as a growth path now. And so, I wanted to try to give 10 very distinct growth paths so that people didn't feel overwhelmed by the hundreds of choices they could make. So if I could get it to something that was digestible and then say now, how do I put those things together. So I made natural associations between paths so that people would say, oh, if I'm going to do product and customer diversification, I might need to do partnerships. If I have a churn problem, I may need to optimize sales. Those two things fit together, right? If I'm going to, customer experience is at the foundation of everything. >> Right. >> Right, and so I tried to tell the story that people could say, oh, we're already on this path, should be stay on this path? Is it the right path? Should we be moving? Am I doing everything I could be doing to make this path be more effective? And that's what I was hoping to get out this is that I don't want people to think this is something completely flip the chessboard over and start from scratch. >> Right. >> I want you to pivot ever so slowly and make adjustments in real time so that you're not having to do, this is kind of an evolutionary versus revolutionary kind of transformation. >> Yeah, the strategies that seem to work today, or feature three things and kind of comes from Cluetrain Manifesto, agile, the empirical, they're based on data, they're optimistic, they identify what really can be done and their irritative, they take smaller steps when they do that. >> Yes. >> So, let me return back to kind of the notion of engagement, just for a second. >> Sure. >> One of the reasons why this book has so much prescriptive power is because there is a dramatic shift globally in market power. It used to be the sellers had the market power and therefore the information at your disposal that you used to make a decision largely came from the sellers and now, you're able to move into communities where buyers can come together and identify themselves in each other and use that source of information to help you make decisions. Very, very significant and profound shift and that's in many respects what's driving experience. Historically though, we've talked about sales and marketing alignment. (Tiffani laughing) About how we got to get the right message out, we got to enable sales in the right way. But customers spend most of their time with a brand in the form of a product or service which suggests that he whole notion of customer service and sustaining alignment between expectations and actuality in the customer service function becomes especially important. Have I got that right? >> You nailed it, I mean, I would say also you know, and I'm actually a practitioner before I was at Gartner, so I actually ran a division of Gateway computers, I ran sales and marketing for them. Before that I worked in web hosting company, we were the largest web hoster in the United States, we were actually four times the size of Rackspace. I was the beta client for ALOQUA, I was the beta client for Constant Contact. I was socially selling in 2000. Our shared property is web.com, if you watch golf. And so I was super early, so I'm actually a sales, I sort of say I'm a recovering seller, I bleed sales blood. (Peter laughing) And so when I was running both sales and marketing, I could argue with myself. But when I was just selling, you know, I understand this, you know, marketing giving us leads, sales not doing something with it. Then when I had customer service, you know, those three things together, I think today, is where companies really miss an opportunity. That just getting new customers in the door and it's so much more expensive to recruit new customers and to pay to get them versus just mining the gold you've already got. So, that is something that I'd say over the last two and a half years now that I'm here and I see it at scale that I will have conversations with CMOs and heads of sales and then the head of customer service is not in the room or it's just marketing and sales. So the same way marketing enables sales, they need to enable customer service. >> And, very importantly, the information that is being generated out of customer service-- >> Absolutely. >> Need to enable sales and marketing. >> Absolutely-- >> And in products. >> So I would tell you that in my opinion, the disconnection between what customers expect and businesses are doing actually is a manifestation of the unintentional consequence of the disconnection of teams because of the disconnection of metrics. Sales is very much, like how much did you sell? I mean, I'm over simplifying but how much did you sell. Marketing, how many leads did you, good or bad, how many leads? Customer service, how quickly did you get someone off the phone and how many calls did, tickets did you close today? Those three things pull those three groups in very different directions. So, something like a Net Promoter Score or churn or lifetime values, something can thread those three groups together in a metric so that people know that they're all in this together even though they play different roles. And so, I think the fact that people try to own customer experience worries me because I think the whole company has to be very focused on... >> It's a CEO job. >> But then it's a cultural shift, right? >> Absolutely. >> It's about culture, it's about this customer wants to have me help their problem but I have to get off the phone in two minutes because that's my quota and so do I get off the phone in two minutes or do I help my customer? >> Okay, let me make one quick comment and I'm going to ask you one last question. >> Yeah. >> And the quick comment I'll make is very prominent CEO of a very, very large computing company once said to me, I asked this person, 'cause I thought that they had won large because of marketing. And I said, so, tell me about he role of marketing within your company. And this person said to me, oh, marketing is what I put between engineering and sales so they don't kill each other. (Tiffani laughing) And I think that needs, obviously that orientation needs to change. But the last thing I wanted to talk about is one of the patterns you noted is disruption or disruptive-- >> Yes. >> I don't remember exactly what you called it but it boiled down, it could mean a lot of things, but you specifically focused on and you've already mentioned it, social good. >> Yep. >> As part of a strategy, give us a, you know 30 second, 44 second, why is social good becoming a viable strategy or viable pattern, one of the combinations that's working today? >> Well, I'd say, Salesforce was founded on the 1-1-1 model, which was very much about sort of this doing well by doing good, or doing good by doing good. But I would say this that even if you've watched television commercials over the last year, especially since Super Bowl last year, you'll see brands actually making statements about how they do well for the environment, how they're giving back, how they're hiring veterans, how they're doing things for... You know, Starbucks just announced they're going to- >> How they're willing to fly immigrant children home if they need to. >> Yeah, Starbucks is not doing a Starbucks in DC that will be signing so for hearing impaired. So you see people really making pivots and actually using that as I'm trying to connect with my constituency and my customer base in a new and different way. I love the fact that social consciousness is now getting into Unilever and getting into, you know the 1-1-1 model spread across 3,000 companies now. Or the Tom's model, one for one, buy a shoe, a shoe gets donated. You see it happening with a lot of start ups now where they're trying to start the company that way. Now, if you have a company that didn't start that way, there's not reason why you can't start to find a place where you can inject it going forward. But I'm super excited about that. >> Tiffani Bova, Global Growth Innovation Evangelist Salesforce, talking about the book Growth IQ. Again, great book. >> Thank you. >> Very prescriptive and I mean, I generally hate business books, lot of case studies. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, peter, it's been a pleasure. >> Absolutely, so once again, thanks for participating in our CUBE Conversation and until the next one, we'll see you soon. (dramatic music)

(electronic music) >> Announcer: From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Foundry Summit 2018, here in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts. Happy to welcome to the program first-time guest, Dr. Nic Williams, CEO of Stark and Wayne. Dr. Nic, thanks for joining me >> Thank you very much. I think you must've come to the conference from a different direction than I came. >> I'm a local, and I'm trying to get more people to come to the Boston area. We've been doing theCUBE now for, coming up on our ninth year of doing it, and it's only the third time I've done something in this convention center, so please, more tech shows to this area, Boston, the Hynes Convention Center, and things like that. >> There's plenty of tech people. I was at the Nero Cafe, everyone seemed like they were a tech person. >> Oh no, the Seaport region here is exploding. I've done two interviews today with companies here in Boston or Cambridge. There's a great tech scene. For some reason, you and I were joking, it's like, do we really need another conference in Vegas? I mean really. >> Dr. Nic: Right, no, I like the regional. >> But yeah, the weather here is unseasonably cold. It was snowing and sleeting this morning, which is not the Spring weather. >> It is April, it is mid-April, and it's almost snowing outside. >> Alright, so Dr. Nic, first of all, you get props for the T-shirt. You've got Iron Man and Doctor Doom, and we're saying that there is a connection between the superheroes and Stark and Wayne. >> Right, so Stark and Wayne is founded by two fictional superheroes. The best founders are the fictional ones, they don't go to meetings, they're too busy making, you know, films. >> Yes, but everybody knows that Tony Stark is Iron Man, but nobody's supposed to know that Bruce Wayne was Batman. >> Nic: Right, right. >> But I've heard Stark and Wayne mentioned a number of times by customers here at the conference. So, for our audience that doesn't know, what does Stark and Wayne do, and how are you involved in the Cloud Foundry ecosystem? >> So Stark and Wayne, I first found Bosh, I founded Stark and Wayne. Earlier than that I discovered Bosh, six years ago, when it was first released, became like, I claimed to be the world's first evangelist for Bosh, and still probably the number one evangelist. And so Stark and Wayne came out of that. I was VMWare Pivotal's go-to person for standing things up and then customers grew, and you know. Yeah, people want to know who to go to, and when it comes to running Cloud Foundry, that's us. >> Yeah well, there's always that discussion, right? We've got all these wonderful platforms and these things that go together, but a lot of times there's services and people that help to get those up. Pivotal, just had a great discussion with a Pivotal person, talking about the reason they bought Pivotal Labs originally was like, wow, when people got stuck, that's what Pivotal Labs helps with that whole application development, so you're doing similar things with Bosh? >> Correct. No it's, we have our mental model around what it is to run operations of a platform, where you're running complex software, but you have an end user who expects everything just to work. And they never want to talk to you, and you don't want to talk to them. So it's this new world of IT where they get what they want instantly, that's the platform and it has to keep working. >> Dr Nic, is it an unreasonable thing for people to say that, yeah I want the things to work, and it shouldn't go down, and you know-- >> What is shadow IT? Shadow IT is the rebellion against corporate IT, so we want to bring back, well, we want to bring the wonders of public services to corporate environments. >> Okay, so-- >> That's the Cloud Foundry's story. >> Yeah, so talk to me a little bit about your users. We've watched this ecosystem mature since the early days, you know, things are more mature, but what's working well? What are the challenges? What are some of the prime things that have people calling up your team? >> So our scope, our users, or our customers, are people, they're the GEs and the Fords of the world running either as a service or internally large Cloud Foundry installations. And whilst Cloud Foundry is getting better and better, the security model is better, the upgrades seem to be flawless, it does keep getting more complex. You know, you can't just add container to container networking and it not get more complicated, right? So, yeah, trying to keep up-to-date with not just the core, but even the community of projects going on is part of the novelty, but also it's trying to bring it to customers and be successful. >> Yeah, I go to a number of these shows that are open source and every time you come there, it's like, "Well, here's the main things we're talking about "but here's six other projects that come up." How's that impact some of what you were just talking about? But, maybe elaborate as to how you deal with the pace of change, and those big companies, how are they help integrate those into what they're doing, or do they, you know-- >> So my Twitter is different from your Twitter. So my Twitter is 10 years worth of collecting of people who talk about interesting things, putting in a URL, just referencing an idea they're having, so they tend to be the thought leaders. They might be wrong, or like, let's put Docker into production, like, it doesn't make it wrong, but you've got to be wary of people who are too early. And you just start to peace a picture of what's being built, and you start to know which groups and which individuals are machines, and make great stuff, and you sort of track their work. Like HashiCorp, Mitchell Hashimoto, I knew him before HashiCorp, and he is a monster, and so you tend to track their work. >> So your Twitter and my Twitter might be more alike than you think. >> Nic: No maybe, right. >> I interviewed Armon at the Cube-Con show last year. My Twitter blowing up the show was a bunch of people arguing about whether Serverless was going to eradicate this whole ecosystem. >> Well, we can argue about that if you like, I guess. >> But love, one of the things coming into this show, was, you know, how does the whole Kubernetes discussion fit into Cloud Foundry? We've heard at this show, Microsoft, Google, many others, talking about, look, open source communities, they're going to work together. >> Well Windows is going to track things 'cause they think they need to sell them, right? But then Microsoft has Service Fabric, which they've owned and operated internally for 10 years, and so, I think some really interesting products may be built on top of Service Fabric, because of what it is. Whereas, you know, Kubernetes will run things, Service Fabric may build net new projects. And then Cloud Foundry's a different experience altogether, so some people, it's what problems they experienced, comes to the solution they find, and unless you've tried to run a platform for people, you might not think the solution's a platform. You might think it's Kubernetes, but-- >> Yeah, so one of the things we always look at when we talk about platforms, is what do they get stood up for? How many applications do you get to stand up there? What don't they work for? Maybe you could help give us a little bit of color as to what you see? >> I'm pretty good at jamming anything into Cloud Foundry, so I have a pretty small scope of what doesn't fit, but typically the idea of Cloud Foundry is the assumption the user is a developer who has 10 iterations a day. Alright, so they want to deploy, test, deploy, test, and then layer pipelines on top of that. You also get, you're going to get the backend of long, stable apps, but the value is, for many people, is that the deploy experience. And then, you know, but whilst, you're going to get those apps that live forever, we still get to replace the underlying core of it. So you still maintain a security model even for the things that are relatively unloved. Andthis is really valuable, like the nice, clean separation of the security, the package, CVEs, and the base OS, then the apps is part of the-- >> Yeah, absolutely, there's been an interesting kind of push and pull lately. We need to take some of those old applications, and we may need to lift and shift them. It doesn't mean that I can necessarily take advantage of all the cool stuff, and there are some things that I can't do with them when I get them on to that new platform. But absolutely, you need to worry about security, you know, data's like the center of everything. >> If you're lifting and shifting, there probably is no developer looking after it, so it's more of an operator function, and they can put it anywhere they like. They're looking after it now, whereas the Cloud Foundry experience is that developer-led experience that has an operations backend. If you're lifting and shifting, if it fits in Cloud Foundry, great, if it fits in Kubernetes, great. It's your responsibility. >> Yeah, what interaction do you have with your clients, with some of the kind of cultural and operational changes that they need to go through? So thinking specifically, you've go the developers doing things, you know, the operators, whether they're involved, whether that be devops or not, but I'm curious-- >> So the biggest change when it comes to helping people who are running platforms. And I know many people want to talk about the cloud transformation, but let's talk about the operations transformation, is to become a service-orientated group who are there to provide a service. Yes you're internal, yes they all have the same email address that you do, but you're a service-orientated organization, and that is not technology, that is a mental mode. And if you're not service-orientated, shadow IT occurs, because they can go to Amazon and get a support organization that will respond to them, and so you're competing with Amazon, and Google, and you need to be pretty good. >> Yeah, you mentioned that, you know, your typical client is kind of a large, maybe I'm putting words in your mouth, the Fortune 1000 type companies, does this sort of-- >> We haven't got Berkshire. We haven't got Berkshire, and so if we're going to go Fortune 5, you know, we'd like, I've read my Warren Buffett biography, I reckon the FA are here to meet him I reckon. >> Right, so one of the questions, is this only for the enterprise? Can it be used for smaller businesses, for newer businesses? >> What's interesting is people think about Cloud Foundry as like, "Oh you run it on your infrastructure." Like, I did a talk in 2014, 15, when Docker was starting to be frothy, was, before you think you want to build your own pass, ring me on the hotline. Like, argue with me about why you wouldn't just use Heroku, or Pivotal Web Services, or IBM Cloud, like a public pass. Please, I beg of you, before you go down any path of running on-prem anything, answer solidly the question of why you just wouldn't use a public service. And yeah, so it really starts at that point. It's like, use someone else's, and then if you have to run your own. So, who's really going to have all these rules? It's large organization that have these, "Oh, no, no, we have to run our own." >> Well doctor, one of the things we've said for a while, is there's lots of things that enterprise suck at, that they need to realize that they shouldn't be doing. So start at the most basic level, there's like five companies in the world that are good at building data centers, nobody else should build data centers, if you're using somebody else that can do that. So as you go up and up the stack, you want to get rid of the undifferentiated lifting, things like that, so-- >> I like to joke that every CIO, the moment they get that job, like that's their ticket to get to build their own data center. It's like, what else was the point of becoming a CIO? I want to build my own data center. >> No, not anymore, please-- >> Not anymore, but you know, plus they've been around a little longer than-- >> So, what is that line? What should companies be able to consume a platform, versus where do they add the value, and do you help customers kind of understand that that-- >> By the time they're talking to us, they're pretty far along having convinced themselves about what they're doing. And they have their rules. They have their isolation rules, their data-ownership rules, and they'll have their level of comfort. So they might be comfortable on Amazon, Google, Azure, or they might still not be comfortable with public cloud, and they want the vSphere, but they still have that notion of we're going to run this ourselves. And most of them it's not running one, because that idea of we need our own, propagates throughout the entire organization, and they'll start wanting their own Cloud Foundry-- >> Look, I find that when I talk to users, we, the vendors, and those that watch the industry, always try to come up with these multi-cloud hybrid cloud-type discussion. Users, have a cloud strategy, and it's usually often siloed just like everything else, and right, they're using-- >> Developers-- >> I have some data service, and it's running on Google-- >> Developers just want to have a nice life. >> Microsoft apps. >> They just want to get their work done. They want to feel like, "Alright this is a great job, "like, I'm respected, I get interesting work, "we get to ship it, it actually goes into production." I think if you haven't ever had a project you've worked on that didn't go into production, you haven't worked long enough. Many of us work on something for it not to be shipped. Get it into production as quick as possible and-- >> So, do you have your, you know, utopian ideal world though as to, this is the step-- >> Oh, absolutely-- >> And this is how it'll be simple. >> Tell developers what the business problems are. Get them as close to the business problems, and give them responsibility to solve them. Don't put them behind layers of product managers, and IT support-- >> But Dr. Nic, the developers, they don't have the budget-- >> Speak for utopian-- >> How do we sort through that, because, right, the developer says they want to do this, but they're not tied to the person that has the budget, or they're not working with the operators, I mean, how do we sort through that? >> How do we get to utopia? >> Stu: Yeah. Well, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, they all solved utopia, right? So, this is, think more like them, and perhaps the CEO of the company shouldn't come from sales, perhaps it should be an IT person. >> Well, yeah, what's the T-shirt for the show? It was like running at scale, when you reach a certain point of scale, you either need to solve some of these things, or you will break? >> Right, alright look, hire great sales organizations, but if you don't have empathy for what your company needs to look like in five years time, you're probably not going to allow your organization to become that. The power games, alright? If everyone assumes that the marketing department becomes the top of the organization, or the, you know, then the good people are going to leave to go to organizations where they might be become CEO one day. >> Alright, Dr. Nic, want to give you the final word. For the people that haven't been able to come to the sessions, check out the environment, what are they missing at this show? What is exciting you the most in this ecosystem? >> Like any conference you go to, you come, the learning is all put online. Your show is put online, or every session is put online. You don't come just to learn. You get the energy. I live in Australia, I work from a coffee shop, my staff are all in America, and so to come and just to get the energy that you're doing the right thing, that you get surrounded by a group of people, and certainly no one walks away from a CF Summit feeling like they're in the wrong career. >> Excellent. Well, Dr. Nic, appreciate you helping us understand the infinity wars of cloud environments here. Stark and Wayne, thanks so much for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE. >> Dr. Nic: Thanks Stu. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017, brought to you by Oracle. (dynamic music) >> John: Hey, welcome back everyone, we're here live. Day two coverage of Oracle's Modern CX Modern Customer Experience #ModernCX. Also check out all the great coverage here on The Cube, but also on the web, a lot of great stories and one of the people behind all that is Des Cahill, who's joining Peter Burris and myself. Kicking off day two, Des, great to see you, Head of Customer Experience Evangelist, involved in a lot of the formation and really the simplification of the messaging across Cloud, so it's really one story. >> Yeah, absolutely, so John, Peter, great to be here. You know, I think the real story is about our customers and businesses that are going through transformation. So everything that we're doing at Oracle, in our CX organizations, helping these organizations make their digital business transformation and the reason they're going through this transformative process is to meet the demands of their customers. I'd say it's the era of the empowered customer. They're empowered by social, mobile, Cloud technologies and all of us in our daily lives can relate to the fact that over the last five, 10 years, the way that we buy, our journey as we buy products, as we do research, is completely different, than it used to be, right. >> Talk about the evolution, talk about the evolution of what's happening this week, because I think this is kind of a mark in time, at least from our observation, covering Oracle, this is our eighth year and certainly second year with the modern marketing experience now, >> Des: Yeah. >> the modern customer experience, where the feedback in the floor, and this is noteworthy, is that the quality is great, people at the booth are highly qualified, but it's simple. It's one fabric of messaging, one fabric of product. It feels like a platform, >> Yeah. >> and is that by design (laughs) or is that kind of the next step in the evolution of, >> Des: Yeah, John. >> Marketing Cloud meets Real Cloud and? >> Yeah, yeah, so absolutely John. I mean that, that is by design and again, to support our customers and their needs on this digital business transformation journey, it starts obviously with fantastic marketing, we've just got fantastic capabilities within our Marketing Cloud, but then that extends to Sales Cloud. If you generate leads in marketing and you're not handing them over to sales effectively or of a good sales automation engine and that goes on to commerce, CPQ, social, and service. And all of this, if we bring this back down to again, this notion of the empowered customer, if you're not providing those customers with connected experiences across marketing, sales, service, commerce, you're not... you're going to, you might lose those customers. I mean, we expect connected experiences across our whole journey. If I'm calling my cell phone provider, 'cause I got a problem, I don't, and I don't want to call one person, get transferred to another person and then go to the website to chat with someone, have a disconnected experience. I want them to, when I call, I want them to understand my history, my status as a customer, I'm spending 500 dollars a month on them, the problems I've had before. I want them to have context and to know me in that moment and as Mark Hertz says, it's like a moment of truth with my cell phone provider. Are they going to delight me and turn me into a customer advocate, or am I going to leave and go to another cell phone provider? >> Well let's talk just for a second, and I want to get your comments on this and how it relates specifically to what we're saying here. Digital has two enormous impacts. One, as you said, that a customer can take their research activities with them, on their cell phone. >> Yeah. They have learned, because of commerce and electronic commerce, they've learn to expect and demand a certain style of engagement >> Des: Right. >> and that's not going to change, so if you are not doing those things-- >> We like to say Amazon is the new benchmark, either B to C or B to B, it doesn't matter, right. >> It is a benchmark, at least on the commerce side, so it's, so that's one change, is that customers are empowered. The second big change though, is that increasingly, digital allows people to render products more as services and that's in many respects, what the Cloud's all about. >> Des: Right. >> How do you take an asset, that is a machine and render it as a service to someone? Well now we can actually use digital technologies to render things more as services. The combination of those two things are incredibly powerful, because customers, who now have the power to evaluate and change decisions all the time are now constantly making decisions, because it's a pay-as-you-go service world now. >> Des: Right. >> So how do those two things come together and inform the role, that marketing is going to play inside a business, 'cause increasingly, it seems to us that marketing is going to have to own that continuous, ongoing engagement and deliver that consistent value, so a customer does not leave, 'cause you have more opportunities to leave now. >> Well, I, so I think that's a good observation, Peter. I do think that marketers can play, and do play, a leading role in being the advocate for the customer within the brand, within the company and as a marketer myself, I think about not just the marketing function, but I think about, well, what is the experience, that that lead or that prospect going to have when I hand over to sales? And what is the experience that they are going to have, when I hand them over to service? And in my past roles as a CMO, the challenge I always faced was that I couldn't get information out of the sales automation system or out of the service automation system, so as a marketer, I couldn't optimize my marketing mix and I didn't have visibility on which opportunities I passed, which leads I passed over turned into the best opportunities, turned into the best deals, turned into the customers, that were most loyal, that got cross-sold and up-sold and were the happiest. So I think, going back to Oracle's strategy in all of this, it's about having a connected, end-to-end suite of Cloud applications, so that there's a consistent set of data, that is enabling these consistent, personalized, and immediate experiences. >> I think that's interesting and I want to just validate that, because I think, that is to me, the big sign that I think you guys are on the right track and executing and by the way, some of the things you're talking about used to be the holy grail, they're actually real now. >> Des: Right. >> The dynamic is the silos are a symptom of a digital-analog relationship. >> Des: Right. >> So when you have all digital, the moment of truth starts here, it's all digital. So in that paradigm, end-to-end wins. And at Mobile World Congress this year, one of the main themes when they talk about 5G, and all these things, that were going on, was you know, autonomous vehicles, (laughs) media entertainment, smart cities, a smart home, you know, talk to things. To your point, that's an end-to-end, so the entire world wants-- >> Des: Throw IoT in there. >> Throw IoT, >> Right. >> So again, these digital connections are all connected, so therefore, it is essentially an end-to-end opportunity. So whoever can optimize that end-to-end, while being open, while having access to the data, >> Des: Right. >> will be the winning formula. >> Des: Right. >> And that is something that we see and you obviously have that. >> And then the other piece is how do you actualize that data? Right, and I know you spoke with Jack Berkowitz about adaptive intelligent apps, it's, we're taking approach to artificial intelligence of saying, how can we bring to bear the power of machine learning, dynamic decision science, so that all this data, that's being collected and enabled by all these digital touch points, these digital signals, how do you take that data and how do you actualize that, 'cause the reality is, 80% of data that's collected today is dark, it's untouched, it's just collected, right. >> Well, here is the hard question for you, you know I am going to ask this, so I am going to ask it, here's the hard question. >> Des: Yeah. >> It really comes down to the data, and if you don't, you, connected networks and all that good stuff is great fabric, end-to-end. >> Des: Absolutely, yeah. >> This is certainly the future, it's the new normal, it's coming fast. >> Right. >> But at the end of the day, the conversation we've been having here is about the data. >> Des: Yes. >> What is your position with Oracle on connecting that data, 'cause that ultimately is what needs to flow. >> Des: Right. >> How does that work? Can you just take a minute to >> Sure, sure. >> to address that, how the data flows? >> Yeah, I think it starts with our end-to-end connected applications, that are able, that are connected with each other natively and are sharing that same data set. We obviously recognize that customers have mixed environments, so in those cases, we can certainly use our technologies to connect to their existing data stores, to synchronize with their existing systems, so it all starts with the cleanliness and quality of that baseline customer data. The second piece I'd say, is that we've made a lot of investments over the last five years in Oracle Data Cloud and Oracle Data Cloud is a set of anonymized, third party data. We've got 5 billion consumer IDs, we've got a billion business IDs. We've got a tremendous amount of data sources. We just announced a recent acquisition of a company called Moat, last week at our Oracle Data Cloud Summit in New York City. So we've made a tremendous investment in third party data, that can augment anonymized third party data, that can augment first party data, to allow people to have not just a connected view of the customer, but more of a comprehensive view and understanding of their customers, so that they can better talk to them and get them better experiences. >> That's the key there, that we're hearing with this intelligent, adaptive intelligent app kind of environment, >> Yeah, yeah. >> where machine learning. The third party data integrating within the first party data, that seems to be the key. Is that right, >> Absolutely. >> did I get that right? >> Yeah, well I would say there's a number of points, so I would say that, that, you know, you can think of the Oracle Data Cloud combining with the BlueKai DMP and being a great ad-tech business for us and a great solution for digital marketers in and of itself. What we've done with adaptive intelligent apps is that we've combined that third party data with decision science machine learning AI and we've coupled that with the Oracle Cloud infrastructure and the scale and power of that. So we're able to deliver real-time, adaptive learning and dynamic offers and content at 130 millisecond clips. So this is real-time interaction, so we are getting signals every time someone clicks, it's not a batch mode, one-off kind of thing. The third piece is that we have designed these, designed these apps to just embed natively, to plug into our existing CX applications. So if you're a marketer, you're a service professional, you're a sales professional, you can get value out of this day one. You've got a tremendous data set. You've got real-time, adaptive artificial intelligence and it plugs right into your existing apps. It's a win-win. Take your first party data, take your third party data, combine it together, put some decision science on there, some high bandwidth, incredible scale infrastructure and you're getting, you're starting to get to one-to-one marketing. You're freeing your marketing teams from being data analysts and segmenting and trying to get insight and you're letting the machine do that work and you're freeing up, you're freeing up your human capital to be thinking about higher-level tasks, about offers and merchandising and creative and campaigns and channels. >> Well, the way we think about it, Des, and I'll test you on this, is we think ultimately the machines are going to offer options. So they're going to do triage on a lot of this data >> Des: Right, right. >> and offer options to human decision-makers. Some of the discretions, we see three levels of interaction, >> Des: Yeah. >> Automated interaction, which, quite frankly, we're doing a lot of that today in finance systems. >> Des: Yes. >> But then we get to autonomous vehicles, highly deterministic networks, highly deterministic behaviors, >> Des: Right. >> that's what's going to be required in autonomy. No uncertainty. Where we have environmental uncertainty, i.e. that temperature's going to change or I, some IoT things are going to change, that's where we see the idea of turning the data and actuating it in the context of that environmental uncertainty. >> Des: Right. >> We think that this is all going to have an impact on the human side, what we call systems of augmentation, >> Des: Right. >> where the system's going to provide options to a human decision-maker, the discretion stays with the human decision-maker, culpability stays with the human decision-maker, >> Des: Right. >> but the quality of the options determine the value of the systems. >> So the augmentation is-- >> The augmentation's great. >> So let me give you a great example of that with AIA. So, take for example, you're a pro photographer and you got a big shoot the next day and your camera, your main camera you bought three months ago, it breaks. And you buy all your stuff at photog.com and you call 'em up and what could happen today? "Hi, what's your account number? "Who are you? "Wait, let me look you up, OK. "I'm sorry, I'm not authorized to get you a return." You know, boom, and the person's like, "I'm never going to buy from them again." Right, it's that moment of truth. Contrast that with a, 'cause the person making that decision, if it was the CEO getting that call, the CEO would be like, "We're going to get you a camera immediately." But that person that they're talking to is five levels down in a call center, Bismarck, North Dakota. If that person had AI, adaptive intelligent apps helping them out, then the AI would do the work in the background of analyzing the customer's lifetime value, their social reach, so their indirect lifetime value. It would look at their customer health, how many other services issues, that they have. It would look at, are there any warranty issues or known service failure issues on that camera and then it would look at a list of stores, that were within a five mile radius of that customer, that had those cameras in stock. And it would authorize an immediate pickup and you're on your way. It would just inform that person and enable them to make that decision. >> Even more than that, and this is a crucially important point, that we think people don't get when they talk about a lot of this stuff. These systems have to deliver not only data, but also authority. >> Exactly. The authority has to flow with the data. >> Des: Right. >> That's one of the advantages-- >> On both sides, by the way, on the identity and-- >> On both sides. >> And I think that employee wants that empowerment. >> Absolutely. >> No one wants to take a call and not make the customer happy, right. >> Peter: Absolutely, >> Yeah. >> because that's a challenge with some of the bolt-on approaches to some of these big applications, is that, yeah, >> Exactly. >> you can deliver a result, but then how is the result >> How is it manifested? >> integrated into the process >> Right. >> that defines and affords authority to actually make the decision? >> OK, so let's see, where are we on the progress bar then. because we had a great interview yesterday with the CMO from Time Warner. >> Yeah. >> OK, Kristen O'Hara, she was amazing. But basically, there was no old way of doing data, they were Time Warner, (laughs) they're old school media and they set up a project, you guys came in, Oracle came in, and essentially got them up and running, and it's changed their business practice overnight. >> Des: Right, right. >> So, and the other thing we heard yesterday was a lot of the stuff that was holy grail-like capabilities is actually being delivered. So give us a slice-and-dice what's shipping today, that's, that's hot and where's the work area that's road-mapped for Oracle? >> Sure, well-- >> And were you guys helping customers? >> Sure, I'll talk about a couple of examples, where we're helping customers. So, Denon and Marantz, high end audio company, brand's been around 100 years. The way music is delivered, is consumed, has changed radically in the last 20 years, changed radically in the last 10 years, changed even more radically in the last five years, so they've had to change their business model to keep up with that. They are embedding Oracle IoT Cloud into every product they sell, except their headphones, so all their speakers, all their AV receivers and they are using IoT data and Oracle Service Cloud to inform, not only service issues, like for example, they are, they're detecting failures pro-actively and they're shipping out new speakers, before they fail or they're pushing firmware to fix the problem, before it happens. They're not only using it to inform their service, they're using it to inform their R&D and their sales and marketing. Great example, they ship wireless speakers, HEOS wireless speakers, highly recommend 'em, I bought 'em for my kids for Christmas, they're the bomb. But customers were starting to... They were getting a lot of failures in these wireless speakers. They looked up the customer data, then they looked up the IoT data. They found that 80% of the speaker failures, the products were labeled Bathroom as location in the configuration of their home network setup and what they realized was that customers were listening to music in the bathroom, which is a use case they never thought of and the speakers weren't made to be water or humidity-proof, so they went to the R&D department, 14 months later, they ship a line of waterproof HEOS speakers. The second thing is they found people, who were labeling their speakers, Patio, they were using it on the patio, they didn't even have a rechargeable battery on it, so they came out with a line with a rechargeable battery on it. So they're not only using IoT data, for a machine maintenance function, >> John: 'cause they were behaving-- >> they're using IoT data to inform, inform R&D and they're also doing incredible marketing and sales activities. We had Don Freeman, the CMO of Denon on the main stage yesterday, talking about this great, great stuff they're doing. >> And what's the coolest thing this week, that you're looking at, you're proud of or excited about? >> I'm excited about a lot of stuff, John. This week is realized, you alluded to this week has been really, really fun, really great, a lot of buzz, obviously a lot of buzz around adaptive, intelligent apps and we've talked about that. But I would say also beyond a doubt, that intelligent apps for CX, we've introduced some great things in our Service Cloud, the capability to have a video chat, so Pella Windows was also on one of our panels today and they were talking about the ability for, to solve a service issue, the ability to show a video of what's going on, just increases the speed with which something can be diagnosed so much faster. We're integrating on the Service Cloud, we're integrating with WeChat and we're integrating with Facebook Messenger. Now, why would you do that? Well again, it comes back to this era of the empowered consumer. It's not enough that a company just has a website or an 0800 number that you can go to for support. Consumers are spending more time in social messaging apps, than they are on social messaging sites, so if the consumer wants to be served on Facebook Messenger, 'cause they spend their time on it, the brand has to meet them there. >> John: Yeah. >> The third thing would be the ability for the Marketing Cloud and Service and Sales Cloud, we've got chat bots, voice-driven, text-driven, AI-driven, so mobile assistant for the sales professionals, so you can input data on the road, "Hey, open an account, here's the data "for the transaction here what's going on." >> John: Yeah. >> Incredible, incredible stuff going on all over the stack. >> I think the thing, that excites me, is I look at the videos from last year and the theme was, "Man, you guys have "all these awesome acquisitions," >> Des: Right. >> "But you have this opportunity with the data," and you guys knew that and you guys tightened that together and doubled down on the data >> Des: Yeah, with banking, yeah-- >> and so I thought that was a great job and I like the messenging's clean, I think but more importantly is that in any sea change, you know, we joke about this, as we're kind of like historians and we've seen a lot of waves, >> Des: Right, for sure. >> and all these major waves, when the user's expectations shift, that's the opportunity. I think what you guys nailed here is that, and Peter alluded to it as well, is that the users are expecting things differently, completely differently. >> Let me share a stat with you. 50% of the companies that were in the Fortune 500 in the year 2000, are either out of business, acquired, gone, 50% and those companies, >> Dab or die. >> Blockbuster, Borders, did they stay relevant? >> John: Yeah. I think changing business practice based on data is what's happening, it's awesome. Des Cahill, here on The Cube. More live coverage, day two of Modern CX, Modern Customer Experience, #ModernCX. This is The Cube, I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, we'll be right back. (dynamic music)