(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. theCUBE is here, live at AWS re:Invent 2021. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. theCUBE has two sets today, two, not one, two, two live sets, two remote sets, over 100 guests on the program at this event, it's a lot, talking about the next generation of cloud innovation with AWS and its massive ecosystem of partners and we are pleased to welcome Walton Smith to the program, the public sector, director of strategic partnerships for Worldwide Technology, Walton welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much for having me, it's really amazing to be here and look forward to a great conversation. Isn't it great to be in person again? >> It's so nice to be in person, I mean I'm glad everybody's being safe and, and checking vaccine status and whatnot, but it's good to get back and, and, and work with people cause we can really drive innovation when, when we get together. >> Those hallway conversations or those conversations here at events that you just can't replicate by video conferencing, right? Not replicate that, you getting grabbed in the hall and say, hey, have you thought about leveraging XYZ to do something? To me that's what makes this conference great. >> Talk to me about what's going on at WWT. What are some of the, the things that you guys have been working on? >> It's a really exciting time at Worldwide, we're really working closely with AWS to drive innovation to the edge. We're excited about their outpost offering, we actually have one in our data center, Sandy announced it today in a partnership with Intel to, to allow our customers to try to work out use cases, to, to kick the tires, so to speak, to see how it works as well as our partners to get their ISV products certified on the outpost platform. >> So I'm familiar with your ATC in St. Louis, is that what you're referring to? >> That's correct. >> Give us a little, give us a little insight into what goes on there, I know it's pretty amazing from a customer perspective because you are agnostic. because you are agnostic. >> Walton: Correct. >> You're there to serve the customer, but tell me, tell me what happens in the ATC. >> We say we're agnostic, but we have our, our, our preferences because we know- >> sure, sure, okay. what actually works. But our ATC is our crown jewel, it's about a $600 million data center that we built solely for proof of concepts for our customers. So our, our top customers come in and say, I have this problem, how can I solve it? And so with us being the single biggest reseller of just about every ISV is out there, I can stand up a, a, a Dell, I can stand up a, a, a Dell, Dell compute next to NetApp storage with Cisco router on top of it to replicate what my customer has at the VA, for example, and then to be able to plug in an outpost to show how leveraging the outpost can give them a single pane of glass to be able to work on their workload, so the training that our FSI, Federal System Integrators have put into their staff or our government customers on the Amazon platform can now be driven into their data center, so it's really taking the cloud down to where the data is. >> In terms of public sector, what are some of the prominent use cases that you guys are helping customers to solve, especially given the tumultuous times that we're still living in? Sure, so what we saw during COVID especially was how most of the government agencies had the capability to allow say 5% to 10% of their workforce to work remotely. And then with COVID, they went to 95% to a 100% workforce. So, a lot of the time we've spent over the last year is how do we securely allow our government employees to get access to the information, because as we know, the government was more valuable than ever to get us through this pandemic, we had to give them the tools that they needed to be able to make the decisions to, to move the country forward. >> Talk about security if you will for a second, we have seen such a dramatic change in the security landscape, the threat landscape, ransomware as a service, it's, you know, the cyber criminals, lot of money in it, they're becoming far more brazen. What are some of the things that you're seeing specifically with respect to security use cases? >> It's, it's gone from, let me just buy everything that's out there and that'll give me security to, I need to have visibility into my environment, because if, if you look at target, it's a great case studies around that, they had all the tools, they just didn't tie it all together. And so as more and more nation state actors And so as more and more nation state actors try to attack our government, or it's a great way to make money, I mean, in, in this, in the presentation, Sandy's today, they talked about, if you looked at the GDP of what's been taken in ransomware, it's like the 10th biggest country in the world, I mean, it's scary and staggering how much money is lost. So what we think, going back to our ATC, we can stand up their environment, we can work with the top security providers in the world to show those customers how we can give them that visibility, the, the, the protection and the ability to get back up, because there's really only two types of organizations, those who've been hacked and those who don't know they've been hacked, they're going to get in, it's how do we mitigate the damage, how do we get them back up and running and how we protect my customers or have some of the most sensitive data in the world, how do we protect that so our government can keep us safe and keep us moving forward. >> Yeah, cause these days it's a matter of when we get hacked, not if. And of course we are only hearing about the large attacks. >> Walton: Correct. We don't hear about- all of the ones that go on day in and day out, I think, I think I saw a stat recently that a ransomware attack happens like once every 11 seconds. >> Correct, I mean, just walking through here, how many text messages you've gotten? You want a free iPad click here, I mean, they're, they're down to the individual level. It's a whole lot cheaper to give a couple people, really powerful laptops, pizza and beer, and have them go attack, than it is to, to set up a real business and so, unfortunately, as long as there's money in it, there's going to be bad actors out there. We think partnering with AWS and other partners can help build solutions. >> You know, WWT has had an interesting history because you didn't start with the dawn of cloud. >> Walton: Right. So you've been in the business of AT for a long time So you've been in the business of AT for a long time and logistics out of St. Louis in a lot of ways. What does that look like in terms of navigating that divide? You know, there's a, there's a whole storied history of companies that were not able to cross the divide from the mainframe era to the client server era, let alone to cloud. You seem to have, you seem to be doing that pretty well. >> I, I appreciate that, I mean, we're the biggest company no one's ever heard of. We're 14, $15 billion privately held firm, the same two guys that founded it, still run it today and all they want to do is do cool things, they want it to be truly the best place to work. So from day one, they've invested in training our staff, building the ATC to give us the tools we need to be successful and then because we're a trusted partner with Amazon Intel and our other partners out there, they're investing in us to help build solutions, so we have over 6,000 engineers, they get up every day, how do I build something that can help our customers really drive change and innovation? So it's been a really fun ride and the, the best is yet to come. >> Talk to me about your customer focus, you know, when we talk, here we are at reinvent, we always talk with AWS about their, you know, Dave, we talked about this customer obsession, the fact that they're working backwards from the customer, do you share that sort of philosophy? Does WWT share that philosophy with AWS? >> 100%?, if you go to WWT.com we've published everything that we have so you can get full access to our lab to learn about x ISV and go deep to learn about x ISV and go deep and see the million and a half labs we've built around, say Red Hat and go and get access to it. So we think that if we educate our customers, there are going to be customers for life, and they're going to come to us with their biggest problems. And that what's, is what's exciting and what enables us to, to really continue to grow. >> And how did the customers help you innovate? And that's one of the things we, I was thinking yesterday with, with this AWS flywheel of when Adam was introducing, and now we have a, now we have, and it was because he would say, we did this, but you needed more, but you being the customer needed more. >> 100%, it, it's we want our customers to come to us with their biggest problems, because that's when we, the exciting innovation works. And so the ability to sit down with the foremost expert in, in virus control and be able to, in, in virus control and be able to, what are the tools that she need to be able to get ahead of the next change to COVID? How can we give them the tools to do that? That's what we want to do, the scalability, the ability to reach out to others is what Amazon brings. So we can bring the data science, we can bring the understanding of the storage, the security, and the network and then AWS gives that limitless scalability to solve those problems and to bring in someone from Africa, to bring in someone from the European Union to, to work together to solve those problems, that's what's, what's exciting and then coming back to the outpost, to be able to put that in the data center, we know the data center is better than just about anybody out there, so it would be the ability to add innovation to them, to bring those part ISV partners together. It's really exciting that Intel is funding it because they know that if, if customers can see the art of the possible, they're going to push that innovation. >> One of the things we've also sort of thematically Dave and I with guests, and the other has been talking about this week is that every company has to be a data company, whether it's public sector, private sector, if you're not, or if you're not on your way, there's a competitor right here in the rear view mirror ready to take your place. How do you help public sector organizations really develop, embrace an execute a data full course strategy? >> So we have a cadre of over 125 data scientists that work every day to help organizations unlock their most valuable asset, that data, their people and be able to put the data in the right place at the right time and so by investing in those data scientists, investing in the networking folks to be able to look at the holistic picture is how we can bring those solutions to our customers, because the data is the new oil of, of the environment and sorry for my Southern twang on the oil, but it, but it truly is the most valuable asset they have and so, how do we unlock that? How do they pull that data together, secure it? Because now that you're aggregating all that data, you're making it a treasure trove for those bad actors that are out there, so you've got to secure it, but then to be able to learn and, and automate based on, on what you learned from that data. >> You know I, I think with hindsight, it's easy to, it's easy to say, well, of course WWT is where WWT is today. Five years ago, though, I think it would have been an honest question to ask, how are you going to survive in the world of cloud? And here we are, you've got outposts. >> Walton: Sure. >> And, and of course it makes sense because you're focused on customers, sounds like I'm doing a commercial for you, But I'm a fan- >> I'll gladly apreciate that- because I, I, I've worked with you guys in a variety of roles for a long time, seems like yesterday we were testing a bunch of different storage arrays of the ATC and now you've got outposts in cloud and you're integrating it together. It's really more of the same, I'm sure if we had your founders here, they'd tell you, Dave, it's all the same. >> Walton: Correct. It's all the same. >> It's AT, it's where, where's the compute, where's the storage, how do you get access to it and the cloud has given the ability to, to scale and do things you could never imagine. I think it's the reason we're here is because our leadership continues to invest and pushing that envelope to give people the freedom to go out with that crazy idea, what if we did this? And having the tools and the ability to do that is, is what, what drives our innovation and that's what we bring to our customers and our partners, that ability to innovate to, that ability to innovate to, to tackle that next problem. >> So what's the tip of the spear right now for you guys? What are you, what's, what's, what's kind of, what's next? What are you waiting to have delivered to the ATC to racket, stack and cable up? >> Lot's of stuff that I can't tell you about because there, there's things that Amazon is, is always working on that we work with before it, it's, it's made public, so there's a lot of really cool stuff in the pipeline, because the, as you think about moving to the data center, that's one thing, moving to truly to the edge, where you can help that war fighter, where you can help that mission, where you can do disaster recovery, leveraging the snowball family, the outpost family, and custom built tools that really allow for quick response and custom built tools that really allow for quick response to whatever that problem is, is that next front and that's where we've been for a long time, helping our, our war fighters and folks do what needs to be done. Outpost sees that you can leverage big AWS Outpost sees that you can leverage big AWS to build the models, push it down to the edge because you don't have time or the bandwidth to get it back into the big cloud, to be able to put that compute and storage and analytics on the edge to make real time decisions, is what we have to do to stay relevant and that's where the joint partnership is really exciting. >> It's what you have to do to stay relevant, it's also what your customers need, cause one of the things that we've learned in the pandemic is that real-time data and access to it is no longer, longer a nice to have, this is business critical for everything. >> Correct and even if you have a fat pipe to get it, you need to make real time decisions and if you're in a really sandy space, excuse me, making hard decisions, you've got to get the best information to that soldier when, when they need it to, to save our lives or to save the other people's lives so it's, it's, it's not just a nice to have, it's mission critical. >> It is mission critical, Walton, thank you so much, we're out of time, but thank you for joining Dave and me talking about- >> Really enjoyed it. all the stuff going on with, with worldwide, the partnership with AWS, how you're helping really transform the public sector, we appreciate your time and your insights. >> Thank you so much, have a great conference. >> Thanks, you too. >> Okay, thanks. >> All right, from my buddy, Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage. 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>>Welcome back to Los Angeles, Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here on day three of the cubes, coverage of coop con and cloud native con north America, 21, Dave, we've had a lot of great conversations. The last three days it's been jam packed. Yes, it has been. And yes, it has been fantastic. And it's been live. Did we mention that it's inline live in Los Angeles and we're very pleased to welcome one of our alumni back to the program. David Stephanie is here. The CEO of Trulio David. Welcome back. It's good to see you. >>Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. Isn't it great to be in person? Oh man. It's been a reunion. >>It hasn't been a reunion and they have Ubered been talking about these great little, have you seen these wristbands that they have? I actually asked >>For two, cause I'm a big hugger, so >>Excellent. So, so here we are day three of coupon. That's actually probably day five, our third day of coverage. I'm losing track to it's Friday. I know that, that I can tell you, you guys announced two dot five a couple of weeks ago. Tell us what's in that. What's exciting. Before we crack open Twilio, uh, choy. >>Sure, sure. Well, it's been exciting to be here. Look, the theme right of resiliency realize has been it's right up our wheelhouse, right? To signal that more people are getting into production type of environments. More people require data protection for cloud native applications, right? And, uh, there's two dot five releases. It is as an answer to what we're seeing in the market. It really is centered predominantly around, uh, ransomware protection. And uh, you know, for us, when we look at this, I I've done a lot of work in, in cybersecurity, my career. And we took a hard look about a year ago around this area. How do we do this? How do we participate? How do we protect and help people recover? Because recovery that's part of the security conversation. You can talk about all the other things, but recovery is just as important. And we look at, uh, everything from a zero trust architecture that we provide now to adhering, to NIST standards and framework that's everything from immutability. Uh, so you can't touch the backups now, right? Uh, th that's fine to encryption, right? We'll encrypt from the application all the way to that, to the storage repository. And we'll leverage Keem in that system. So it's kind of like Bitcoin, right? You need a key to get your coin. You as an end-user only have your key to your data alone. And that's it. So all these things become more and more important as we adopt more cloud native technology. And >>As the threat landscape changes dramatically. >>Oh yeah. I got to tell you right. Every time we, you, you publish an application into another cloud, it's a new vector, right? So now I'm living in a multi-cloud world where multiple applications in my data now lives, right? So people are trying to attack backups through, uh, consoles and the ministry of consoles to the actual back of themselves. So new vectors, new problems need new solutions. >>And you mentioned, you mentioned something, you, you, you asked the question, how do we participate? And we are here at KU con uh, w uh, cloud native foundation. So what about, what's your connection to the open source community and efforts there? How do you participate in that? >>Yeah, so it's a really great question because, you know, uh, we are a closed source solution that focuses all of our efforts on the open source community and protecting cloud native applications. Our roots have been protecting cloud native applications since 2013, 2014, and with a lot of very large logos. And, um, you know, through time there are open source projects that do emerge, you know, in this community. And for example, Valero is an open source data protection platform, um, for all of its goodness, as a, as a community-based project, they're also deficiencies, right? So Valero in itself is, uh, focuses only on label based applications. It doesn't really scale. It doesn't have a UI it's really CLI driven, which is good for some people and it's free. But you know, if you need to really talk about an enterprise grade platform, this is where we pick up, you know, we, in our last release, we gave you the ability to capture your Valero based backups. And now you want to be an adult with an enterprise caliber, you know, backup solution and continue to protect your environment and have compliance and governance needs all satisfied. That's where, that's where we really stand out. >>Well, when you're talking to customers in any industry, what are the things that you talk about in terms of relief, categorizing the key differentiators that really make Trulia stand out above the competition? >>Yeah. Cause there, there a bunch of, they're a bunch of great competitors out there. There's no doubt about it. A lot of the legacy folks that you do see perhaps on those show floor, they do tuck in Valero and under the, under the covers, they can check a box or you can set aside some customer needs some of the pure play people that, that we do see out there, great solutions too. But really where we shine is, you know, we are the most flexible agnostic solution that there is in this market. And we've had people like red hat and Susa and verandas, digital ocean and HPS morale. And the list goes on, certify, say, Trulio is the solution of choice. And now no matter where you are in this journey or who you're using, we have your back. So there's a lot of flexibility. There we are complete storage agnostic. >>We are cloud agnostic in going back to how you want to build our architecture application. People are in various phases in their, in their journey. A lot of times, many moons ago, you may have started with just a label based application. Then you have another department that has a new technique and they want to use helm, or you may be adopting open shift and you're using operators to us. It doesn't matter. You have peace of mind. So whether you have, you have to protect multiple departments or you as an end user, as one single tenant are using various techniques, we'll discover or protect and we can move forward. >>So if you looked at, if you look at it from a workload basis, um, and you look at your customers are the workloads that you're protecting. What's, what's the mix of what you think of as legacy virtualized things versus containerized things. And then, and then, and then the other kind of follow on to that is, um, are you seeing a lot of modernization and migration or are you seeing people leave the legacy things alone and then develop net new in sort of separate silos? >>Yeah. So that's a great question. And I, to tell you the answer varies, that's, that's the honest answer, right? You end up having, you may have a group or a CIO that says, look, your CTO says, we're moving to this new architecture. The water's great, bring your applications in. And so either it's, we're going to lift and shift an application and then start to break it apart over time and develop microservices, or we're gonna start net new. And it really does run, run the gambit. And so, you know, as we look at, for some of those people, they have peace of mind that they can bring their two on applications in and we can recover. And for some people that say, look, I'm going to start brand new, and these are gonna be stateless applications. Um, we've seen this story before, right? Our, our, uh, uh, I joke around, it's kinda like the movie Groundhog's day. >>Uh, you know, we, we started many moons ago within the OpenStack world and we started with stateless to stateful. Always, always, always finds a way, but for the stateless people, um, when you start thinking about security, I've had conversations with CSOs around the world who say, I'm going to publish a stainless application. What I'm concerned about things like drift, you know, what's happening in runtime may be completely different than what I intended. So now we give you the ability to capture that runtime state compare. The two things identify what's changed. If you don't like what you see, and you can take that point in time recovery into a sandbox and forensically take it apart. You know, one of our superpowers, if you will, is the, our point in time, backups are all in an open format. Everyone else has proprietary Schemos. So the benefit of an open format is you have the ability to leverage a lot of third party tooling. So take a point in time, run scanners across it. And it, God forbid Trulio goes away. You still have access and you can recreate a point in time. So when you start thinking about compliance, heavy environments, think about telcos, right? Or financial institutions. They have to keep things for 15 years, right? Technologies change, architectures change. You can't have that lock-in >>So we continue to thrive. And on that front, one of the marketing terms that we hear a lot, and I want to get your opinion on this as a feature proofing, how do you, what does, what does it mean to you and Trillium and how do you enable that for organizations, like you said, for the FSI is I have to keep data for 15 years and other industries that have to keep it for maybe even longer. >>I mean, right. The future proof, uh, you know, terminology, that's part of our mantra actually, when I talked about, you know, a superpower being as agnostic and flexible as can be right, as long as you adhere to standards, right? The standards that are out here, we have that agnostic play. And then again, not just capturing an applications, metadata data, but that open format, right? Giving you that open capability to unpack something. So you're not, there is no, there is no vendor lock-in with us at all. So all these things play a part into, into future-proofing yourself. And because we live and breathe cloud native applications, you know, it's not just Kubernetes right? Over the course of time, there'll be other things, right. You're going to see mixed workloads too. They're gonna be VM based in the cloud and container based in the cloud and server lists as well. But you, as long as you have that framework to continuously build off of it, that's, that's where we go. You know, uh, it shouldn't matter where your application lives, right? At the end of the day, we will protect the application and its data. It can live anywhere. So conversations around multi-cloud change, we start to think and talk across cloud, right? The ability to move your application, your data, wherever it, wherever it needs to be to. >>Well, you talked about recoverability and that is the whole point of backing up video. You have to be able to recover something that we've seen in the last 18, 19 months. Anyone can backup >>Data. >>That's right. That's right. If you can't recover it, or if you can't recover it in time. Yeah. We're talking like going on a business potential and we've seen the massive changes in the security landscape in the last 18, 19 months ransomware. I was looking at some, some cybersecurity data that showed that just in the first half of this calendar year, January one to June 30, 20, 21, ransomware was up nearly 11 X DDoS attacks are up. We've got this remote workforce. That's going to probably persist for a while. So the ability to recover data from not if we get hit by ransomware, but when we get hit by ransomware is >>When you're, you're absolutely right. And, and, and to your plate anyway. So anyone can back up anything. When you look at it, it's at its highest form. We talk about point time where you orchestration, right. Backup is a use case. Dr. Is a use case, right? How do you, reorchestrate something that's complex, right? The containers, these applications in the cloud native space, there are morphous, they're living things, right? The metadata is different from one day to the next, the data itself is different from when one day the net to the next. So that's, what's so great about Trillium. It's such an elegant solution. It allows your, reorchestrate a point in time when and where you need it. So yes. You have to be able to recover. Yes. It's not a matter of if, but when. Right. And that's why recovery is part of that security conversation. Um, you know, I I've seen insurance companies, right? They want to provide insurance for ransomware. Well, you're gonna have enough attacks where they don't want to provide that insurance anymore. It costs too much. The investment that you make with, with Trulio will save you so much more money down the road. Right. Uh, who's our product manager actually gave a talk about that yesterday and the economics were really interesting. >>Hmm. So how has the recovery methodology who participates in that changed over time? As, as we, you know, as we are in this world of developer operators who take on greater responsibility for infrastructure things. Yeah. Who's, who's responsible for backup and recovery today and how, how has that changed >>Everyone? Everyone's responsible. So, you know, we rewind however many years, right? And it used predominantly CIS admin that was in charge of backup administrator, but a ticket in your backup administrator, right. Cloud native space and application lifecycle management is a team sport. Security is a team sport. It's a holistic approach. Right? So when you think about the, the team that you put out on the field, whether your DevOps, your SRE dev sec ops it ops, you're all going to have a need for point in time, we orchestration for various things and the term may not be backup. Right? It's something else. And maybe for test dev purposes, maybe for forensic purposes, maybe for Dr. Right. So I say it's a team sport and security as a holistic thing that everyone has to get on board with >>The three orchestration is exactly the right way to talk about absolute these processes. It's not just recovery, you're rebuilding >>Yeah. A complex environment. It's always changing. >>That's one of the guarantees. It's always going to be changing >>That much. >>Can you give us a, leave us with a customer example that you think really articulates the value of what Trulio delivers? >>Yeah. So it's interesting. I won't say who the customer is, but I'll tell you it's in the defense agency, it's a defense agency. Uh, they have developers all over the place. Uh, they need self-service capabilities for the tenants to mind their own backups. So you don't need to contact someone, right. They can build, they have one >>Dashboard, single pane of glass or truth to manage all their Corinthians applications. And it gives them that infrastructure to progress whether your dev ops or not your it ops, uh, this, this group has rolled it out across the nation and they're using in their work with very sensitive environments. So now we have they're back. And what are some of the big business outcomes that they're achieving already? >>The big business outcomes? Well, so operational efficiencies are definitely first and foremost, right? Empowering the end user with more tools, right? Because we've seen this shift left and people talking about dev ops, right. So how do I empower them to do more? So I see that operational efficiency, the recoverability aspect, God forbid, something goes wrong. How do you, how do you do that in the cost of that? Um, and then also, um, being native to the environment, the Trillium solution is built for Kubernetes. It is built on go. It is a Qubit stateless Kubernetes application. So you have to have seamless integration into these environments. And then going back to what I was saying before, knowing peace of mind, the credibility aspect, that it is blessed by, you know, red hat and suicide Mirandas and all these other, other folks in the field, um, that you can guarantee it's going to work >>Well, that helps to give your customers the confidence that there, and that confidence might sound trivial. It's not, especially when we're talking about security, it's not at all that, that's a, that's a big business outcome for you guys. When a customer says, I'm confident I have the right solution, we're going to be able to recover when things happen, we try, we fully trust in the solution that we're, >>And we'll bring more into production faster that helps everyone out here too. Right? It feels good. You have that credibility. You have that assurance that I can move faster and I can move into different clouds faster. And that's, we're gonna continue to put, we're gonna continue to push the envelope there. You know, coming a, as we look into, you know, going forward, we're going to come out with other capabilities. That's going to continue to differentiate ourselves from, from folks. Uh, we'll, we'll talk about in time, the ability to propagate data across multiple clouds simultaneously. So making RTOs look at the split seconds and minutes. And so I hope that we can have that conversation next time we were together, because it's really exciting. >>Any, any CTA that you want to give to the audience, any, any, uh, like upcoming or recent webinars that you think they would be really benefit from? >>I guess one thing I put out there is that, um, I understand that people need to continuously learn. There is a skillset hole in, in this market. We can, we understand that, you know, and people look to us as not just a vendor, but a partner. And a lot of the questions that we do get are how do I do this? Or how do I do that? Engage us, ask us to consume our product is really, really easy. You can download from the website or go to an, you know, red hats operator hub, or go to the marketplace over at Susa, and let's begin to begin and we're here to help. And so reach out, right? We want everyone to be successful. >>Awesome. trillium.io. David, thank you for joining us. This has been an exciting conversation. Good >>To see you all. >>Likewise. Good to see you in person take care. We look forward to the next time we see you when unpacking what other great things are going on on Trulia. We appreciate your >>Time. Thank you so much. Good to be here >>For David's fie and David Nicholson, the two Davids I'm going to sandwich. I'm Lisa Martin, you we're coming to you live from Los Angeles. This is Q con cloud native con north America, 2021. Stick around our next guest joins us momentarily.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Ansible Fest 2020 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, Cube virtual's coverage of Ansible Fest 2020 virtual. We're not face to face this year. I'm your host John Furrier with theCube. We're virtual, this theCube virtual and we're doing our part, getting the remote interviews with all the best thought leaders experts and of course the Red Hat experts. We've got Walter Bentley, Senior Manager of Automation practice with Red Hat and Jason Smith, Vice President of North American services, back on theCube. We were in Atlanta last year in person. Guys, thanks for coming on virtually. Good morning to you. Thanks for coming on. >> Good morning John. Good morning, good morning. >> So since Ansible Fest last year a lot's happened where she's living in seems to be an unbelievable 2020. Depending on who you talk to it's been the craziest year of all time. Fires in California, crazy presidential election, COVID whole nine yards, but the scale of Cloud has just unbelievably moved some faster. I was commenting with some of your colleagues around the snowflake IBO it's built on Amazon, right? So value is changed, people are shifting, you starting to clear visibility on what these modern apps are looking like, it's Cloud native, it's legacy integrations, it's beyond lift and shift as we've been seeing in the business. So I'd love to get, Jason we'll start with you, your key points you would like people to know about Ansible Fest 2020 this year because there's a lot going on this year because there's a lot to build on and there's a tailwind for Cloud native and customers have to move fast. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah so, a lot has happened since last year and customers are looking to be a lot more selective around their automation technologies. So they're not just looking for another tool. They're really looking for an automation platform, a platform that they can leverage more of an enterprise strategy and really be able to make sure that they have something that's secure, scalable, and they can use across the enterprise to be able to bring teams together and really drive value and productivity out of their automation platform. >> What's the key points in the customers and our audience around the conversations around the learning, that's the new stuff happening in using Ansible this year? What are the key top things, Jason? Can you comment on what you're seeing the big takeaway for our audience watching? >> Yeah, so a lots change like you said, since last year. We worked with a lot of customers around the world to implement Ansible and automation at scale. So we're using our automation journeys as we talked about last year and really helping customers lay out a more prescriptive approach on how they're going to deliver automation across their enterprise. So customers are really working with us because we're working with the largest customers in the world to implement their strategies. And when we work with new customers we can bring those learnings and that experience to them. So they're not having to learn that for the first time and figure it out on their own, but they're really able to learn and leverage the experience we have through hundreds of customers and at enterprise scale and can take the value that we can bring in and help them through those types of projects much more quickly than they could on their own. >> It's interesting. We were looking at the research numbers and look at the adoption of what Ansible's doing and you guys are with Red Hat it's pretty strong. Could you share on the services side because there's a lot of services going on here? Not just network services and software services, just traditional services. What are the one or two reasons why customer engaged with Red Hat services? What would that be? >> Yeah so, like I said, I mean, we bring that experience. So customers that typically might have to spend weeks troubleshooting and making decisions on how they're going to deliver their implementations, they can work with us and we can bring those best practices in and allow them to make those decisions and implement those best practices within hours instead of weeks, and really be able to accelerate their projects. Another thing is we're a services company as part of a product company. So we're not there just to deliver services. We're really focused on the success of the customer, leveraging our technologies. So we're there to really train and mentor them through the process so that they're really getting up to speed quickly. They're taking advantage of all of the expertise that we have to be able to build their own experience and expertise. So they can really take over once we're gone and be able to support and advance that technology on their own. So they're really looking to us to not only implement those technologies for them, but really with them and be able to train and mentor them. Like I said, and take advantage of those learnings. We also help them. We don't just focus on the technologies but really look at the people in process side of things. So we're bringing in a lot of principles from DevOps and Agile on open practices and helping customers really transform and be able to do things in a new way, to be much more efficient, a lot more agile, be able to drive a lot more value out of our technology. >> Walter, I got to ask you, last year we were chatting about this, but I want to get the update. And I'd like you to just give us a quick refresh definition about the automation adoption journey because this is a real big deal. I mean, we're looking at the trends. Everyone realizes automation is super important at scale, as you think about whether it's software data, anything's about automation it's super important, but it's hard. I mean, the marketplace we were looking at the numbers. I was talking to IDC for you guys at this festival and of Ansible Fest, and they said about five to 10% of enterprises are containerized, which means this huge wave coming of containerization. This is about the automation adoption journey because you start containerizing, (laughs) right? You start looking at the workflows on the pipelinig and how the codes being released and everything. This is important stuff. Give us the update on the automation adoption journey and where it is in the portfolio. >> Well, yeah, just as you called it out, last year on main stage and Ansible fest, almost every customer expressed the need and desire to have to have a strategy as to how they drive their adoption of automation inside their enterprise. And as we've gone over the past few months of splitting this in place with many customers, what we've learned is that many customers have matured into a place where they are now looking at the end to end workflow. Instead of just looking at the tactical thing that they want to automate, they are actually looking at the full ribbon, the full workflow and determining are there changes that need to be made and adjusted to be more efficient when it comes to dealing with automation. And then the other piece as we alluded to already is the contagious nature of that adoption. We're finding that there are organizations that are picking up the automation adoption journey, and because of the momentum it creates inside of that organization we're finding other municipalities that are associated with them are now also looking to be able to take on the journey because of that contagious nature. So we can see that how it's spreading in a positive way. And we're really looking forward to being able to do more of it as the next quarter and the next year comes up. >> Yeah, and that whole sharing thing is a big part of the content theme and the community thing. So great reference on that, good thing is word of mouth and community and collaboration is a good call out there. A quick question for you, you guys recently had a big win with NTT DoCoMo and their engagement with you guys on the automation, adoption journey. Walter, what were some of the key takeaways? Jason you can chime in too I'd like to get some specifics around where it's been successful >> To me, that customer experience was one that really was really exciting, primarily because we learned very early on that they were completely embodying that open source culture and they were very excited to jump right in and even went about creating their own community of practice. We call them communities of practice. You may know them as centers of excellence. They wanted to create that very early in increment, way before we were even ready to introduce it. And that's primarily because they saw how being able to have that community of practice in place created an environment of inclusion across the organization. They had legacy tools in place already, actually, there was a home grown legacy tool in place. And they very quickly realized that it didn't need to remove that tool, they just needed to figure out a way of being able to how to optimize and streamline how they leverage it and also be able to integrate it into the Ansible automation platform. Another thing I wanted to very quickly note is that they very quickly jumped onto the idea of being able to take those large workflows that they had and breaking them up into smaller chunks. And as you already know, from last year when we spoke about it, that's a pivotal part of what the automation adoption journey brings to our organization. So to sum it all up, they were all in, automation first mindset is what that was driving them. And all of those personas, all of those personal and cultural behaviors are what really helped drive that engagement to be very successful. >> Jason, we'll get your thoughts on this because again, Walter brought up last year's reference to breaking things up into modules. We look at this year's key news it's all about collections. You're seeing content is a big focus, content being not like a blog post or a media asset. Like this is content, but code is content. It's sharing. If it's being consumed by other people, there's now community. You're seeing the steam of enabling. I mean, you're looking at successes, like you guys are having with NTT DoCoMo and others. Once people realize there's a better way and success is contagious, as Walter was saying, you are now enabling new ways to do things faster at scale and all that good stuff has been go check out the keynotes. You guys talk about it all day long with the execs. But I want to learn, right? So when you enable success, people want to be a part of it. And I could imagine there's a thirst and demand for training and the playbooks and all the business models, innovations that's going on. What are you seeing for people that want to learn? Is there training? Is there certifications? Because once you get the magic formula as Walter pointed out, and we all know once people see what success looks like, they're going to want to duplicate it. So as this wave comes, it's like having the new surfboard. I want to surf that wave. So what's the update on Ansible's training, the tools, how do I learn, it's a certification of all. Just take a minute to explain what's going on. >> Yeah, so it's been a crazy world as we've talked about over the last six, seven months here, and we've really had to adapt ourselves and our training and consulting offerings to be able to support our remote delivery models. So we very, very quickly back in the March timeframe, we're able to move our consultants to a remote work force and really implement the tools and technologies to be able to still provide the same value to customers remotely as we have in person historically. And so it's actually been really great. We've been able to make a really seamless transition and actually our C-SAT net promoter scores have actually gone up over the last six months or so. So I think we've done a great job being able to still offer the same consulting capabilities remotely as we have onsite. And so that's obviously with a real personal touch working hand in hand with our customers to deliver these solutions. But from a training perspective, we've actually had to do the same thing because customers aren't onsite, they can't do in person training. We've been able to move our training offerings to completely virtual. So we're continuing to train our customers on Ansible and our other technologies through a virtual modality. And we've also been able to take all of our certifications and now offer those remotely. So as, whereas customers historically, would have had to gone into a center and get those certifications in person, they can now do those certifications remotely. So all of our training offerings and consulting offerings are now available remotely as well as they were in person in the past and will be hopefully soon enough, but it's really not-- >> You would adopt to virtual. >> Excuse me. >> You had to adopt to the virtual model quickly for trainings. >> Exactly. >> What about the community role? What's the role of the community? You guys have a very strong community. Walter pointed out the sharing aspect. Well, I pointed out he talked about the contagious people are talking. You guys have a very robust community. What's the role of community in all of this? >> Yeah, so as Walter said, we have our communities a practice that we use internally we work with customers to build communities of practice, which are very much like a centers of excellence, where people can really come together and share ideas and share best practices and be able to then leverage them more broadly. So, whereas in the past knowledge was really kept in silos, we're really helping customers to build those communities and leverage those communities to share ideas and be able to leverage the best practices that are being adopted more broadly. >> That's awesome. Yeah, break down those silos of course. Open up the data, good things will happen, a thousand flowers bloom, as we always say. Walter, I want to get your thoughts on this collection, what that enables back to learning and integrations. So if collections are going to be more pervasive and more common place the ability to integrate, we were covering for VMware world, there's a VMware module collection, I should say. What are customers doing when you integrate in cross technology parties because now obviously customers are going to have a lot of choice and options. If I'm an integration partner, it's all about Cloud native and the kinds of things we're talking about, you're going to have a lot of integration touch points. What's the most effective way for customers integrating other technology partners into Ansible? >> And this is one of the major benefits that came out of the announcement last year with the Ansible automation platform. The Anible automation platform really enables our customers to not just be able to do automation, but also be able to connect the dots or be able to connect other tools, such as other ITM SM tools or be able to connect into other parts of their workflows. And what we're finding in breaking down really quickly is two things. Collections obviously, is a huge aspect. And not just necessarily the collections but the automation service catalog is really where the value is because that's where we're placing all of these certified collections and certified content that's certified by Red Hat now that we create alongside with these vendors and they're unavailable to customers who are consuming the automation platform. And then the other component is the fact that we're now moved into a place where we now have something called the automation hub. which is very similar to galaxy, which is the online version of it. But the automation hub now is a focus area that's dedicated to a customer, where they can store their content and store those collections, not just the ones that they pull down that are certified by Red hat, but the ones that they create themselves. And the availability of this tool, not only just as a SaaS product, but now being able to have a local copy of it, which is brand new out of the press, out of the truck, feature is huge. That's something that customers have been asking for a very long time and I'm very happy that we're finally able to supply it. >> Okay, so backup for a second, rewind, fell off the truck. What does that mean? It's downloadable. You're saying that the automation hub is available locally. Is that what-- >> Yes, Sir. >> So what does that mean for the customer? What's the impact for them? >> So what that means is that previously, customers would have to connect into the internet. And the automation hub was a SaaS product, meaning it was available via the internet. You can go there, you can sync up and pull down content. And some customers prefer to have it in house. They prefer to have it inside of their firewall, within their control, not accessible through the internet. And that's just their preferences obviously for sometimes it's for compliance or business risk reasons. And now, because of that, we were able to meet that ask and be able to make a local version of it. Whereas you can actually have automation hub locally your environment, you can still sync up data that's out on the SaaS version of automation hub, but be able to bring it down locally and have it available with inside of your firewall, as well as be able to add your content and collections that you create internally to it as well. So it creates a centralized place for you to store all of your automation goodness. >> Jason, I know you got a hard stop and I want to get to you on the IBM question. Have you guys started any joint service engages with IBM? >> Yeah, so we've been delivering a lot of engagements jointly through IBM. We have a lot of joint customers and they're really looking for us to bring the best of both Red Hat services, Red Hat products, and IBM all together to deliver joint solutions. We've actually also worked with IBM global technology services to integrate Ansible into their service offerings. So they're now really leveraging the power of Ansible to drive lower cost and more innovation with our customers and our joint customers. >> I think that's going to be a nice lift for you guys. We'll get into the IBM machinery. I mean, you guys got a great offering, you always had great reviews, great community. I mean, IBM's is just going to be moving this pretty quickly through the system, I can imagine. What's some of the the feedback so far? >> Yeah, it's been great. I mean, we have so many, a large joint customers and they're helping us to get to a lot of customers that we were never able to reach before with their scale around the world. So it's been great to be able to leverage the IBM scale with the great products and services that Red Hat offers to really be able to take that more broadly and continue to drive that across customers in an accelerated pace. >> Well, Jason, I know you've got to go. We're going to stay with Walter while you drop off, but I want to ask you one final question. For the folks watching or asynchronously coming in and out of Ansible Fest 2020 this year. What is the big takeaway that you'd like to share? What is the most important thing people should pay attention to? Well, a couple things it don't have to be one thing, do top three things. what should people be paying attention to this year? And what's the most important stories that you should highlight? >> Yeah, I think there's a lot going on, this technology is moving very quickly. So I think there's a lot of great stories. I definitely take advantage of the customer use cases and hearing how other customers are leveraging Ansible for automation. And again really looking to not use it just as a tool, but really in an enterprise strategy that can really change their business and really drive cost down and increase revenues by leveraging the innovation that Ansible and automation provides. >> Jason, thank you for taking the time. Great insight. Really appreciate the commentary and hopefully we'll see you next year in person Walter. (all talking simultaneously) Walter, let's get back to you. I want to get into this use case and some of the customer feedback, love the stories. And we look, we'd love to get the new data, we'd love to hear about the new products, but again, success is contagious, you mentioned that I want to hear the use cases. So a lot of people have their ear to the ground, they look up the virtual environments, they're learning through new ways, they're looking for signals of success. So I got to ask you what are the things that you're hearing over and over again, as you guys are spinning up engagements? What are some of the patterns that are emerging that are becoming a trend in terms of what customers are consistently doing to overcome some of their challenges around automation? >> Okay, absolutely. So what we're finding is that over time that customers are raising the bar on us. And what I mean by that is that their expectations out of being able to take on tools now has completely changed and specifically when we're talking around automation. Our customers are now leading with the questions of trying to find out, well, how do we reduce our operational costs with this automation tool? Are we able to increase revenue? Are we able to really truly drive productivity and efficiency within our organization by leveraging it? And then they dovetail into, "Well, are we able to mitigate business risk, "even associated with leveraging this automation tool?" So as I mentioned, customers are up leveling what their expectations are out of the automation tools. And what I feel very confident about is that with the launch of the Ansible automation platform we're really able to be able to deliver and show our customers how they're able to get a return on their investment, how by taking part and looking at re-working their workflows how we're able to bring productivity, drive that efficiency. And by leveraging it to be able to mitigate risks you do get the benefits that they're looking for. And so that's something that I'm very happy that we were able to rise to the occasion and so far so good. >> Last year I was very motivated and very inspired by the Ansible vision and content product progress. Just the overall vibe was good, community of the product it's always been solid, but one of the things that's happening I want to get your commentary and reaction to this is that, and we've been riffing on this on theCube and inside the community is certainly automation, no brainer, machine learning automation, I mean, you can't go wrong. Who doesn't want automation? That's like saying, "I want to watch more football "and have good food and good wifi. I mean, it's good things, right? Automation is a good thing. So get that. But the business model issues you brought up ROI from the top of the ivory tower and these companies, certainly with COVID, we need to make money and have modern apps. And if you try to make that sound simple, right? X as a service, SaaS everything is a service. That's easy to say, "Hey, Walter, make everything as a service." "Got it, boss." Well, what the hell do you do? I mean, how do you make that happen? You got Amazon, you got Multicloud, you got legacy apps. You're talking about going in and re-architecting the application development process. So you need automation for the business model of everything as a service. What's your reaction to that? Because it's very complicated. It's doable. People are getting there but the Nirvana is, everything is a service. This is a huge conversation. I mean, it's really big, but what's your reaction to that when I bring that up. >> Right. And you're right, it is a huge undertaking. And you would think that with the delivery of COVID into our worlds that many organizations would probably shy away from making changes. Actually, they're doing the opposite. Like you mentioned, they're running towards automation and trying to figure out how do they optimize and be able to scale, based on this new demand that they're having, specifically new virtual demand. I'm happy you mentioned that we actually added something to the automation adoption journey to be able to combat or be able to solve for that change. And being able to take on that large ask of everything as a service, so to speak. And increment zero at the very beginning of the automation adoption journey we added something called navigate. And what navigate is, is it's a framework where we would come in and not just evaluate what they want to automate and bring that into a new workflow, but we evaluate what they already have in place, what automation they have in place, as well as the manual tasks and we go through, and we try to figure out how do you take that very complex, large thing and stream it down into something that can be first off determined as a service and made available for your organization to consume, and as well as be able to drive the business risks or be able to drive your business objectives forward. And so that exercise that we're now stepping our customers through makes a huge difference and puts it all out in front of you so that you can make decisions and decide which way you want to go taking one step at a time. >> And you know it's interesting, great insight, great comment. I think this is really where the dots are going to connect over the next few years. Everything is as a service. You got to lay the foundation. But if you really want to get this done I got to ask you the question around Ansible's ability to integrate and implement with other products. So could you give an examples of how Ansible has integrated and implemented with other Red Hat products or other types of technology vendors products? >> Right. So one example that always pops to the top of my head and I have to give a lot of credit to one of my managing architects who was leading this effort. Was the simple fact that you when you think about a mainframe, right? So now IBM is our new family member. When you think about mainframes, you think about IBM and it just so happens that there's a huge ask and demand and push around being able to automate ZOS mainframe. And IBM had already embarked on the path of determining, well, can this be done with Ansible? And as I mentioned before, my managing architect partnered up with the folks on IBM's side, so the we're bringing in Red Hat consulting, and now we have IBM and we're working together to move that idea forward of saying, "Hey, you can automate things with the mainframe." So think about it. We're in 2020 now in the midst of a new normal. And now we're thinking about and talking about automating mainframes. So that just shows how things have evolved in such a great way. And I think that that story is a very interesting one. >> It's so funny the evolution. I'm old enough to remember. I came out of college in the 80s and I would look at the old mainframe guys who were like "You guys are going to be dinosaurs." They're still around. I mean, some of the banking apps, I mean some of them are not multi threaded and all the good stuff, but they are powering, they are managing a workload, but this is the beautiful thing about Cloud. And some of the Cloud activities is that you can essentially integrate, you don't have to replace the old to bring in the new. This has been a common pattern. This is where containers, microservices, and Cloud has been a dream state because you can essentially re layer and glue it together. This is a big deal. What's your reaction to that? >> No, it's a huge deal. And the reality is, is that we need all of it. We need the legacy behaviors around infrastructure. So we need the mainframe still because they has a distinct purpose. And like you mentioned, a lot of our FSI customers that is the core of where a lot of their data and performance comes out of. And so it's not definitely not a pull out and replace. It's more of how they integrate and how can you streamline them working together to create your end to end workflow. And as you mentioned, making it available to your organizations to consume as a service. So definitely a fan of being able to integrate and add to and everything has a purpose. Is what we're coming to learn. >> Agility, the modern application, horizontal scalability, Cloud is the new data center. Walter great insights, always great to chat with you. You always got some good commentary. I want to ask you one final question. I asked Jason before he dropped off. Jason Smith, who was our guest here and hit a hard stop. What is the most important story that people should pay attention to this year at Ansible Fest? Remember it's virtual, so there's going to be a lot of content around there, people are busy, it's asynchronous consumption. What should they pay attention to from a content standpoint, maybe some community sizes or a discord group? I mean, what should people look at in this year? What should they walk away with as a key message? Take a minute to share your thoughts. >> Absolutely. Absolutely key messages is that, kind of similar to the message that we have when it comes down to the other circumstances going on in the world right now, is that we're all in this together. As an Ansible community, we need to work together, come together to be able to share what we're doing and break down those silos. So that's the overall theme. I believe we're doing that with the new. So definitely pay attention to the new features that are coming out with the Ansible automation platform. I alluded to the on-prem automation hub, that's huge. Definitely pay attention to the new content that is being released in the service catalog. There's tons of new content that focus on the ITSM and a tool. So being able to integrate and leverage those tools then the easier math model, there's a bunch of network automation advances that have been made, so definitely pay attention to that. And the last teaser, and I won't go into too much of it, 'cause I don't want to steal the thunder. But there is some distinct integrations that are going to go on with OpenShift around containers and the SQL automation platform that you definitely are going to want to pay attention to. If anyone is running OCP in their environment they definitely going to want to pay attention to this. Cause it's going to be huge. >> Private cloud is back, OpenStack is back, OCP. You got OpenShift has done really well. I mean, again, Cloud has been just a great enabler and bringing all this together for developers and certainly creating more glue, more abstractions, more automation, infrastructure is code is here. We're excited for it Walter, great insight. Great conversation. Thank you for sharing. >> No, it's my pleasure. And thank you for having me. >> I'm John Furrier with theCube, your host for theCube virtual's, part of Ansible Fest, virtual 2020 coverage. Thanks for watching. (gentle upbeat music)

>>Bly from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cube covering ifs world conference 2019 brought to you by ifs. >>Okay. We're back in Boston, Massachusetts ifs world day one. You walked into cube Dave Vellante with Paul Gillen boss Devoss is here. He's the director of ISF I F S labs and Bob Dico who's the vice president of AI and RPA at ifs jets. Welcome. Good to see you again. Good morning bossy. We're on last year. I'm talking about innovation ifs labs. First of all, tell us about ifs labs and what you've been up to in the last 12 months. Well, I have has Lapsis a functioning as the new technology incubator. Fire Fest writes over continuously looking at opportunities to bring innovation into, into product and help our customers take advantage of all the new things out there to yeah. To, to create better businesses. And one of the things I talked about last year is how we want to be close to our customers. And I think, uh, that's what we have been doing over the pasta pasta year. Really be close to our customers. So Bob, you got, you got the cool title, AI, RPA, all the hot cool topics. So help us understand what role you guys play as ifs. As a software developer, are you building AI? Are you building RPA? Are you integrating it? Yes, yes. Get your paint. >>I mean, our value to our customers comes from wrapping up the technology, the AI, the RPA, the IOT into product in a way that it's going to help their business. So it's going to be easy to use. They're not going to need to be a technical specialist to take advantage of it. It's going to be embedded in the product in a way they can take advantage of very easily that that's the key for us as a software developer. We don't want to offer them a platform that they can just go and do their own thing. We want to sort of control it, make it easier for them. >>So I presume it's not a coincidence that you guys are on together. So this stuff starts in the labs and then your job is to commercialize it. Right? So, so take machine intelligence for example. I mean it can be so many things to so many different people. Take us back to sort of, you know, the starting point, you know, within reason of your work on machine intelligence, what you were thinking at the time, maybe some of the experiments that you did and how it ends up in the product. Oh, very good question. Right? So I think we start at a, Oh, well first of all, I think ifs has been using a machine learning at, at various points in our products for many, many years of Trumbull in our dynamic scheduling engine. We have been using neural networks to optimize fuel serve scheduling for quite some many years. >>But I think, um, if we go back like two years, what we sold is that, uh, there, there's a real potential, um, in our products that if you will take machine learning algorithms inside of the product to actually, um, help ultimately certain decisions in there, um, that could potentially help our business quite a bit. And the role of ifs lapse back in the day as that we just started experimenting, right? So we went out to different customers. Uh, we started engaging with them to see, okay, what kind of data do we have, what kind of use cases are there? And basically based on that, we sort of developed a vision around AI and a division back in the day was based on on three important aspects, human machine interaction optimization and automation. And that kind of really lended well with our customer use case. We talked quite a bit about that or the previous world conference. >>So at that point we basically decided, okay, you know what, we need to make serious work of this, uh, experimenting as boots. But at a certain point you have to conclude that the experiments were successful, which we did. And at that point we decided to look at, okay, how can we make this into a product and how to normally go system. We started engaging with them more intensively and starting to hand over in this guys, we decided the most also a good moment to bring somebody on board that actually has even more experience and knowledge in AI and what we already had as hive as labs. But that could basically take over the Baton. And say, okay, now I am going to run with it and actually start commercializing and productizing that still in collaboration with IVIS laps. But yeah, taking that next step in the road and then then Bob came onboard. >>Christian Pedersen made the point during the keynote this morning that you have to avoid the, the appeal of technology for technology's sake. You have to have it. I start with the business use case. You are both very technology, very deep into the technology. How do you keep disciplined to avoid letting the technology lead your, your activities? >>Well, both. Yeah. So, so I think a good example is what we see this world's going fronts as well. It is staying closer to customer and, and, and accepting and realizing that there is no, um, there's no use in just creating technology for sake of technology as you say yourself. So what we did here for example, is that we showcase collaboration projects with, with customers. So, for example, we show showcase a woman chair pack, which um, as a, as a manufacturing of spouting pouches down here in Massachusetts actually, uh, and they wanted to invest in robotics to get our widows. So what we basically did is actually wind into their factory literally on the factory floor and start innovating there. So instead of just thinking about, okay, how do robotics and AI for subrogations or one of our older products work together, we set, let's experiment on the shop floor off a customer instead of inside of the ivory towers. Sometimes our competitors to them, they'll start to answer your question. >>Sure. I can pick up a little, a little feasible. Yeah. Well, so in, I think the really important thing, and again, Christian touched on it this morning is not the individual technologies themselves. It's how they work together. Um, we see a lot of the underlying technologies becoming more commoditized. That's not where companies are really starting to differentiate algorithms after a while become algorithms. There's a good way of doing things. They might evolve slightly over time, but effectively you can open source a lot of these things. You can take advantage, the value comes from that next layer up. How you take those technologies together, how you can create end to end processes. So if we take something like predictive, we would have an asset. We would have sensors on that asset that would be providing real time data, uh, to an IOT system. We can combine that with historical maintenance data stored within a classic ERP system. >>We can pull that together, use machine learning on it to make a prediction for when that machine is gonna break down. And based on that prediction, we can raise a work order and if we do that over enough assets, we can then optimize our technicians. So instead of having to wait for it to break down, we can know in advance, we can plan for people to be in the right the right place. It's that end to end process where the value is. We have to bring that together in a way that we can offer it to our customers. There's certainly, you know, a lot of talk in the press about machines replacing humans. Machine of all machines have always replaced humans. But for the first time in history, it's with cognitive functions. Now it's, people get freaked out. A little bit about that. I'm hearing a theme of, of augmentation, you know, at this event. >>But I wonder if you could share your thoughts with regard to things like AI automation, robotic process automation. How are customers, you know, adopting them? Is there sort of concern up front? I mean we've talked to a number of RPA customers that, you know, initially maybe are hesitant but then say, wow, I'm automating all those tasks that I hate and sort of lean in. But at the same time, you know, it's clear that this could have an effect on people's jobs and lives. What are your thoughts? Sure. Do you want to kick off on them? Yeah, I'll know. Yeah, absolutely. That's fine. So I think in terms of the, the automation, the low level tasks, as you say, that can free up people to focus on higher value activities. Something like RPA, those bots, they can work 24, seven, they can do it error free. >>Um, it's often doing work that people don't enjoy anyway. So that tends to actually raise morale, raise productivity, and allow you to do tasks faster. And the augmentation, I think is where it gets very interesting because you need to, you often don't want to automate all your decisions. You want people to have the final say, but you want to provide them more information, better, more pertinent ways of making that decision. And so it's very important. If you can do that, then you've got to build the trust with them. If you're going to give them an AI decision that's just out of a black box and just say, there's a 70% chance of this happening. And what I founded in my career is that people don't tend to believe that or they start questioning it and that's where you have difficulty. So this is where explainable AI comes in. >>I do to be able to state clearly why that prediction is being made, what are the key drivers going into it? Or if that's not possible, at least giving them the confidence to see, well, you're not sure about this prediction. You can play around with it. You can see I'm right, but I'm going to make you more comfortable and then hopefully you're going to understand and, and sort of move with it. And then it starts sort of finding its way more naturally into the workplace. So that's, I think the key to building up successful open sexually. What it is is it's sort of giving a human the, the, the parameters the and saying, okay, now you can make the call as to whether or not you want to place that bet or make a different decision or hold off and get more data. Is that right? >>Uh, yeah. I think a lot of it is about setting the threshold and the parameters with within which you want to operate. Often if a model is very confident, either you know, a yes or a no, you probably be quite happy to let it automate. Take that three, it's the borderline decision where it gets interesting. You probably would still want someone to look over it, but you want them to do it consistently. You want them to do it using all the information to hand and say that's what you do. You're presented to them. And to add to that, um, I think we also should not forget they said a lot of our customers, a lot of companies are, are actually struggling finding quality stuff, right? I mean aging of the workforce riots, we're, we're old. I'm retiring eventually. Right? So aging of the workforce is a potential issue. >>Funding, lack of quality. Stop. So if I go back to the chair pack example I was just talking about, um, and, and, and some of the benefits they get out of that robotics projects, um, um, is of course they're saving money right there. They're saving about one point $5 million a year on money on that project, but their most important benefits for them, it's actually the fact that I have been able to move the people from the work floor doing that into higher scope positions, effectively countering the labor shortage today. They were limited in their operations, but in fact, I had two few quality stuff. And by putting the robots in, they were able to reposition those people and that's for them the most important benefits. So I think there's always a little bit of a balance. Um, but I also think we eventually need robots. >>We need ultimation to also keep up with the work that needs to be done. Maybe you can speak to Bobby, you can speak to software robots. We've, Pete with people think of robots, they tend to think of machines, but in fact software robots are, where are the a, the real growth is right now, the greatest growth is right now. How pervasive will software robots be in the workplace do you think in the three to five years? >> I think the software robots as they are now within the RPA space, um, they fulfill a sort of part of the Avril automation picture, but they're never going to be the whole thing. I see them very much as bringing different systems together, moving data between systems, allowing them to interact more effectively. But, um, within systems themselves, uh, you know, the bots can only really scratched the surface. >>They're interacting with software in the same way a human would on the whole by clicking buttons going through, et cetera, beneath the surface. Uh, you know, for example, within the ifs products we have got data understanding how people interact with our products. We can use machine learning on that data to learn, to make recommendations to do things that our software but wouldn't be able to see. So I think it's a combination. There's software bots, they're kind of on the outside looking in, but they're very good at bringing things together. And then insight you've got that sort of deeper automation to take real advantage of the individual pieces of software. >> This may be a little out there, but you guys >>are, you guys are deep into, into the next generation lot to talk right now about quantum and how we could see workable quantum computers within the next two to two to three years. How, what do you think the, the outlook is there? How is that going to shake things up? So >>let me answer this. We were actually a having an active project and I for slabs currently could looking at quantum computing, right? Um, there's a lot of promise in it. Uh, there's also a lot of unfilled, unfulfilled problems in that, right? But if you look at the, the potential, I think where it really starts playing, um, into, uh, into benefits is if the larger the, the, the optimization problems, the larger the algorithms are that we have to run, the more benefits it actually starts bringing us. So if you're asking me for an for an outlook, I say there is potential definitely, especially in optimization problems. Right. Um, but I also think that the realistic outlook is quite far out. Uh, yes, we're all experimenting it and I think it's our responsibility as ifs or ciphers laps to also look on what it could potentially mean for applications as we FSI Fs. >>But my personal opinion is the odd Lucas. Yeah. So what comes five to 10 years out? What comes first? Quantum computing or fully autonomous driverless vehicles? Oh, that's a tricky question. I mean, I would say in terms of the practical commercial application, it's going to be the latter in that much so that's quite a ways off. Yeah, I think so. Of course. Question back on on RPA, what are you guys exactly doing on RPA? Are you developing your own robotic process automation software or are you integrating, doing both say within the products? We, you know, if we think of RPA as, as this means of interacting with the graphical user interface in a way that a human would within the product. Um, we, we're thinking more in terms of automating processes using the machine learning as I mentioned, to learn from experience, et cetera. Uh, in a way that will take advantage of things like our API eighth, an API APIs that are discussed on main stage today. >>RPA is very much our way of interacting with other systems, allowing other systems when trapped with ifs, allowing us to, to send messages out. So we need to make it as easy as possible for those bots to call us. Uh, you know, that can be by making our screens nice and accessible and easy to use. But I think the way that RPA is going, a lot of the major vendors are becoming orchestrators really. They're creating these, these studios where you can drag and drop different components into to do ACR, provide cognitive services and you know, elements that you could drag and drop in would be to say, ah, take data from a file and load it into ifs and put it in a purchase order. And you can just drag that in and then it doesn't really matter how it connects to YFS. It can do that via the API. And I think it probably will say it's creating the ability to talk to ifs. That's the most important thing for us. So you're making your products a RPA ready, friendly >>you, it sounds like you're using it for your own purposes, but you're not an RPA vendor per se. You know what I'm saying? Okay. Here's how you do an automation. You're gonna integrate that with other RPA leadership product. I think we would really take a more firm partner approach to it. Right? So if a customer, I mean, there's different ways of integrating systems to get our RPA as a Google on there. There's other ways as well, right? That if a customer actually, um, wants to integrate the systems together using RPA, very good choice, we make sure that our products are as ready as much for that as possible. Of course we will look at the partner ecosystem to make sure that we have sufficient and the right partners in there that a customer has as a choice in what we recommends. But basically we say where we want to be agnostic to what kind of RPA feminists sits in there that was standing there was obviously a lot of geopolitical stuff going on with tariffs and the like. >>So not withstanding that, do you feel as though things like automation, RPA, AI will swing the pendulum back to onshore manufacturing, whether it's Europe or, or U S or is the costs still so dramatically advantageous to, you know, manufacture in China? Well, that pendulum swing in your opinion as a result of automation? Um, I have a good, good question. Um, I'm not sure it's will completely swing, but it will definitely be influenced. Right. One of the examples I've seen in the RPA space ride wire a company before we would actually have an outsourcing project in India where people would just type over D uh, DDD, the purchase orders right now. Now in RPA bolts scans. I didn't, so they don't need the Indian North shore anymore. But it's always a balance between, you know, what's the benefit of what's the cost of developing technology and that's, and it's, and, and it's almost like a macro economical sort of discussion. >>One of the discussions I had with my colleagues in Sri Lanka, um, and, and maybe completely off topic example, we were talking about carwash, right? So us in the, in the Western world we have car wash where you drive your car through, right? They don't have them in Sri Lankan. All the car washes are by hands. But the difference is because labor is cheaper there that it's actually cheaper to have people washing your car while we'd also in the us for example, that's more expensive than actually having a machine doing it. Right. So it is a, it's a macro economical sort of question that is quite interesting to see how that develops over the next couple of years. All right, Jess. Well thanks very much for coming on the cube. Great discussion. Really appreciate it. Thank you very much. You're welcome. All right. I'll keep it right there, but he gave a latte. Paul Gillen moved back. Ifs world from Boston. You watch in the queue.

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE! Covering KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and Ecosystem Partners. >> Hi, and welcome back. This is KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019 here in Barcelona. 7700 in attendance according to the CNCF foundation. I'm Stu Miniman and my co-host for this week is Corey Quinn. And happy to welcome back to the program, a cube-i-lom Rob Szumski, who's the Product Manager for Red Hat OpenShift. Rob, thanks so much for joining us >> Happy to be here. >> All right, so a couple of weeks ago, we had theCUBE in Boston. You know, short drive for me, didn't have to take a flight as opposed to... I'm doing okay with the jet lag here, but Red Hat Summit was there. And it was a big crowd there, and the topic we're going to talk about with you is operators. And it was something we talked about a lot, something about the ecosystem. But let's start there. For our audience that doesn't know, What is an operator? How does it fit into this whole cloud-native space in this ecosystem? >> (Corey) And where can you hire one? >> (laughs) So there's software programs first of all. And the idea of an operator is everything it takes to orchestrate one of these complex distributor applications, databases, messaging queues, machine learning services. They all are distinct components that all need to be life-cycled. And so there's operational expertise around that, and this is something that might have been in a bash script before, you have a Wiki page. It's just in your head, and so it's putting that into software so that you can stamp out mini copies of that. So the operational expertise from the experts, so you want to go to the folks that make MongoDB for Mongo, for Reddits, for CouchBase, for TensorFlow, whatever it is. Those organizations can embed that expertise, and then take your user configuration and turn that into Kubernetes. >> Okay, and is there automation in that? When I hear the description, it reminds me a little bit of robotic process automation, or RPA, which you talk about, How can I harem them? RPA is, well there's certain jobs that are rather repetitive and we can allow software to do that, so maybe that's not where it is. But help me to put it into the >> No, I think it is. >> Okay, awesome. >> When you think about it, there's a certain amount of toil involved in operating anything and then there's just mistakes that are made by humans when you're doing this. And so you would rather just automate away that toil so you can spend you human capitol on higher level tasks. So that's what operator's all about. >> (Stu) All right. Great. >> Do you find that operator's are a decent approach to taking things that historically would not have been well-suited for autoscaling, for example, because there's manual work that has to happen whenever a no-joinser leaves a swarm. Is that something operators tend to address more effectively? Or am I thinking about this slightly in the wrong direction? >> Yeah, so you can do kind of any Kubernetes event you can hook into, so if your application cares about nodes coming and leaving, for example, this is helpful for operators that are operating the infrastructure itself, which OpenShift has under the hood. But you might care about when new name spaces are created or this pod goes away or whatever it is. You can kind of hook into everything there. >> So, effectively it becomes a story around running stateful things in what was originally designed for stateless containers. >> Yeah, that can help you because you care about nodes going away because your storage was on it, for example. Or, now I need to re-balance that. Whatever that type of thing is it's really critical for running stateful workloads. >> Okay, maybe give us a little bit of context as to the scope of operators and any customer examples you have that could help us add a little bit of concreteness to it. >> Yeah, they're designed to run almost anything. Every common workload that you can think about on an OpenShift cluster, you've got your messaging queues. We have a product that uses an operator, AMQ Streams. It's Kafka. And we've got folks that heavily use a Prometheus operator. I think there's a quote that's been shared around about one of our customer's Ticketmaster. Everybody needed some container native monitoring and everybody could figure out Prometheus on their own. Or they could use operator. So, they were running, I think 300-some instances of Prometheus and dev and staging and this team, that team, this person just screwing around with something over here. So, instead of being experts in Prometheus, they just use the operator then they can scale out very quickly. >> That's great because one of the challenges in this ecosystem, there's so many pieces of it. We always ask, how many companies need to be expert on not just Kubernetes, but any of these pieces. How does this tie into the CNCF, all the various projects that are available? >> I think you nailed it. You have to integrate all this stuff all together and that's where the value of something like OpenShift comes at the infrastructure layer. You got to pick all your networking and storage and your DNS that you're going to use and wire all that together and upgrade that. Lifecycle it. The same thing happens at a higher level, too. You've got all these components, getting your Fluentd pods down to operating things like Istio on Service Mesh's, serviceless workloads. All this stuff needs to be configured and it's all pretty complex. It's moving so fast, nobody can be an expert. The operator's actually the expert, embedded from those teams which is really awesome. >> You said something before we got started. A little bit about a certification program for operators. What is that about? >> We think of it as the super set of our community operators. We've got the TensorFlow community, for example, curates an operator. But, for companies that want to go to market jointly with Red Hat, we have a certification program that takes any of their community content, or some of their enterprise distributions and makes sure that it's well-tested on OpenShift and can be jointly supported by OpenShift in that partner. If you come to Red Hat with a problem with a MongoDB operator, for example, we can jointly solve that problem with MongoDB and ultimately keep your workload up and keep it running. We've got that times a bunch of databases and all kinds of servers like that. You can access those directly from OpenShift which is really exciting. One-click install of a production-ready Mongo cluster. You don't need to dig through a bunch of documentation for how that works. >> All right, so Rob, are all of these specific only to OpenShift, or will they work with flavors of Kubernetes? >> Most of the operators work just against the generic Kubernetes cluster. Some of them also do hook into OpenShift to use some of our specialized security primitives and things like that. That's where you get a little bit more value on OpenShift, but you're just targeting Kubernetes at the end of the day. >> What do you seeing customers doing with this specifically? I guess, what user stories are you seeing that is validating that this is the right direction to go in? >> It's a number of different buckets. The first one is seeing folks running services internally. You traditionally have a DBA team that maybe runs the shared database tier and folks are bringing that the container native world from their VM's that they're used to. Using operators to help with that and so now it's self-service. You have a dedicated cluster infrastructure team that runs clusters and gives out quota. Then, you're just eating into that quota to run whatever workloads that you want in an operator format. That's kind of one bucket of it. Then, you see folks that are building operators for internal operation. They've got deep expertise on one team, but if you're running any enterprise today especially like a large scale Ecommerce shop, there's a number of different services. You've got caching tier, and load balancing tiers. You've got front-ends, you've got back-ends, you've got queues. You can build operators around each one of those, so that those teams even when they're sharing internally, you know, hey where's the latest version of your stack? Here's the operator, go to town. Run it in staging QA, all that type of stuff. Then, lastly, you see these open source communities building operators which is really cool. Something like TensorFlow, that community curates an operator to get you one consistent install, so everyone's not innovating on 30 different ways to install it and you're actually using it. You're using high level stuff with TensorFlow. >> It's interesting to lay it out. Some of these okay, well, a company is doing that because it's behind something. Others you're saying it's a community. Remind me, just Red Hat's long history of helping to give if you will, adult supervision for all of these changes that are happening in the world out there. >> It's a fast moving landscape and some tools that we have are our operator SDK are helping to tame some of that. So, you can get quickly up and running, building an operator whether you are one of those communities, you are a commercial vendor, you're one of our partners, you're one of our customers. We've got tools for everybody. >> Anything specific in the database world that's something we're seeing, that Cambrian explosion in the database world? >> Yeah, I think that folks are finally wrapping their heads around that Kubernetes is for all workloads. And, to make people feel really good about that, you need something like an operator that's got this extremely well-tested code path for what happens when these databases do fail, how do I fail it over? It wasn't just some person that went in and made this. It's the expert, the folks that are committing to MongoDB, to CouchBase, to MySQL, to Postgres. That's the really exciting thing. You're getting that expertise kind of as extension of your operations team. >> For people here at the show, are there sessions about operators? What's the general discussion here at the show for your team? >> There's a ton. Even too many to mention. There's from a bunch of different partners and communities that are curating operators, talking about best practices for managing upgrades of them. Users, all that kind of stuff. I'm going to be giving a keynote, kind of an update about some of stuff we've been talking about here later on this evening. It's all over the place. >> What do you think right now in the ecosystem is being most misunderstood about operators, if anything? >> I think that nothing is quite misunderstood, it's just wrapping your head around what it means to operate applications in this manner. Just like Kubernetes components, there's this desired state loop that's in there and you need to wrap your head around exactly what needs to be in that. You're declarative state is just the Kubernetes API, so you can look at desired and actual and make that happen, just like all the Kub components. So, just looking at a different way of thinking. We had a panel yesterday at the OpenShift Commons about operators and one of the questions that had some really interesting answers was, What did you understand about your software by building an operator? Cause sometimes you need to tease apart some of these things. Oh, I had hard coded configuration here, one group shared that their leader election was not actually working correctly in every single incidences and their operator forced them to dig into that and figure out why. So, I think it's a give and take that's pretty interesting when you're building one of these things. >> Do you find that customers are starting to rely on operators to effectively run their own? For example, MongoDB inside of their Kubernetes clusters, rather than depending upon a managed service offering provided by their public cloud vendor, for example. Are you starting to see people effectively reducing public cloud to baseline primitives at a place to run containers, rather than the higher level services that are starting to move up the stack? >> A number of different reasons for that too. You see this for services if you find a bug in that service, for example, you're just out of luck. You can't go introspect the versions, you can't see how those components are interacting. With an operator you have an open source stack, it's running on your cluster in your infrastructure. You can go introspect exactly what's going on. The operator has that expertise built in, so it's not like you can screw around with everything. But, you have much more insight into what's going on. Another thing you can't get with a cloud service is you can't run it locally. So, if you've got developers that are doing development on an airplane, or just want to have something local so it's running fast, you can put your whole operator stack right on your laptop. Not something you can do with a hosted service which is really cool. Most of these are opens source too, so you can go see exactly how the operator's built. It's very transparent, especially if you're going to trust this for a core part of the infrastructure. You really want to know what's going on under the hood. >> Just to double check, all this can run on OpenShift? It is agnostic to where it lives, whether public cloud or data center? >> Exactly. These are truly hybrid services, so if you're migrating your database to here, for example, over now you have a truly hybrid just targeting Kubernetes environment. You can move that in any infrastructure that you like. This is one of the things that we see OpenShift customers do. Some of them want to be cloud-to-cloud, cloud-to-on-prem, different environments on prem only, because you've got database workloads that might not be leaving or a mainframe you need to tie into, a lot of our FSI customers. Operators can help you there where you can't move some of those workloads. >> Cloud-on-prem makes a fair bit of sense to me. One thing I'm not seeing as much of in the ecosystem is cloud-to-cloud. What are you seeing that's driving that? >> I think everybody has their own cloud that they prefer for whatever reasons. I think it's typically not even cost. It's tooling and cultural change. And, so you kind of invest in one of those. I think people are investing in technologies that might allow them to leave in the future, and operators and Kubernetes being one of those important things. But, that doesn't meant that they're not perfectly happy running on one cloud versus the other, running Kubernetes on top of that. >> Rob, really appreciate all the updates on operators. Thanks so much for joining us again. >> Absolutely. It's been fun. >> Good luck on the keynote. >> Thank you. >> For Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman, back with more coverage two days live from wall to wall here at KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019 in Barcelona, Spain. Thanks for watching.

(clicking) >> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Freck here with theCUBE. We're in Palo Alto, California at the Chertoff Event. It's called Security in the Boardroom and it's really about elevating the security conversation beyond the IT folks and the security folks out in the application space and out on the edge and really, what's the conversation going on at the boardroom, 'cause it's an important conversation. And one you want to have before your name shows up in the Wall Street journal on a Monday morning for not all the right reasons. So we're excited to have a real practitioner, Rich Baich. He's a chief information security officer for Wells Fargo. Welcome Rich. And in the company of Jason Cook who's the managing director with the Chertoff group. Great to see you Jason. So we talked a little bit off camera Rich. You've been in a lot of different seats in this game from consulting to now you're at Wells Fargo, and a few more that you ripped on this, but I can't remember them all. From your perspective, integrating this multi-dimensional approach. How do you see this conversation changing at the boardroom? >> Well I think most importantly, the board is a topic of discussion, one of the top discussions over the last couple of years. There's been a lot of guidance recently that's been put out to board directors through the National Association for Corporate Directors, as well as various consulting firms providing guidance. Board members need to be able to take this complex topic and simplify it down so that they can do their jobs. It's expected of them, and sometimes that can be a language barrier. So I think what I see happening is boards are beginning to hire individuals with some cybersecurity expertise. My example at Wells Fargo, we hired a retired general Suzanne Vautrino to come in as one of our cybersecurity, obviously experts in the board. And it's great having her in that board seat because often times, she can help me translate some of the issues and gain a different perspective from the board. >> So that's a pretty interesting statement. So they're actually putting security expertise in a formal board seat. >> Yes. >> That's a pretty significant investment in the space. >> But if you think about this. I mean why? >> Right. >> Right. >> Well most institutions today when you break them down are really technology companies that's just a business platform rolls on. So security is becoming part of not only the institution today but the institution of the future as organizations move towards digitalization. So having that ability to have someone who understands risk management side of cybersecurity as well as the practitioner side will only make, I think a boardroom that much stronger. So what's your experience in terms of trying to communicate the issues to a board? Just down and dirty. Where do you find the balance as to what they can absorb? What can they not absorb? How do you outlay the risks if you will and how they should think about driving investment in these areas? >> Well great points, the first and most important thing with boards is gaining trust. Did you have the expertise and you had the information. By no means could I bring all my data to a board meeting because it's just not digestible. So there's a little bit of an art of taking that down and building the trust and focusing on certain areas. But a point you made I think it's really important is one you have to help them understand what are the top risks and why. But when you're talking to a board, you have to be able to say, and this is what we're doing to address them and here is the time frame and here is the risk associated with this. Because in their minds, they're thinking what can I do to help you? And then secondly, Stu point was the decisioning regarding prioritization. in this particular space, there's always going to be risks but it's really the art of deciding which ones are more important. I'll talk to the board and I'll highlight things like probability of occurrence. So the higher the probability of occurrence of something happening really drives our prioritization. >> Then Jason from your perspective. You're coming in from outside the board trying to help out. How have you seen the security conversation and priority change over time, especially in the context of this other hot topic that everybody is jumping on, which is probably the agenda item, just before Rich comes in the room, which is digital transformation. We got to go, we got to go, we got to go. Everybody is evolving. We got to go, we're getting left behind, and then oh by the way. We're just going to come on afterwards and tell us what some of these risks are. >> Yeah and I think actually Rich started to touch on it. All organizations especially when you're looking at the Fortune 500 and around that shape and size are global. And they're all on a digital journey, whether they acknowledge they're actually a digital product company. All of them now, digitizing is happening. So as a result of that security is an absolute critical component of anything linked to that for all of the reasons that you can just read the headlines around. And actually at the boardroom level, it's more now, hopefully becoming a conversation that's about how do we as board members take responsibility and accountability for how to protect our organization. And it's framed now more and more so in a risk management conversation. Rather than just saying security 'cause security is like outside. But actually the reality is security and cyber activity because you're a digital organization. It's embedded into everything whether you realize it or not so the board needs to be education to what that means. How do you take risks in the context of digital activity and assign it to a risk management program approach rather than just saying it's the security guy that's got to come in and do that. And the security guy is most probably going to be the guy that absolutely has to understand that boardroom issue, and then execute upon it and bring options to the table every time in and around that space. But the main message I would say is take this from a risk management perspective and start using the language like that. And that's probability the other point that we were discussing just earlier in the security series today, that actually it's about risk management, and educating everyone very clearly as to what do we mean. What are we actually protecting. How are we protecting it and what are we doing as a set of board members, and as a leadership team to actually take forward enablement of the business. From a security perspective, understanding it but then also protecting the business. >> Right, so are you building models then for them to help them assign a value to that risk, so now they know how much that they have to invest. 'Cause the crazy thing about security, I'm sure you could always invest more right. You can always use a little bit more budget. There's a little bit more that you can do to make yourself a little bit more secure than you were without that investment. But nobody has infinite resources so as you said bad things can happen, it's really risk mitigation and knowing the profile and what to do about it. So how do help them model that? >> I can answer that and I know Rich can jump in, so what you're seeing is a brand new leader role emerging from the traditional IT security guy to now, the guy that isn't or person should I say more accurately that's engaged at the boardroom. That's there to talk about risks in the context of how the board sees it. And so what does that means? It means that absolutely, you need to know what you've got from a digital perspective. Everything from the traditional network to all of the IT assets and everything there. The key thing is you need to know what you've got, but you have then contextualize all of that against business risks. And pulling those two things together is the challenge that you see across the industry today 'cause there have been silos. And usually underneath that silos and many other silos so bringing that together is really important. And I think if you look at how we're going to see disrupt it is and how things are managed in the risk management perspective. Actually, that's what you're going to see come together. How do you bring those models together to give actionable intelligence that the board can react to or predict against, and that's not an easy thing to pull together. >> Yeah, and to take it more down to a tactical arena so you know at some point, like you said, you can't asking for more money. Because you're not practicing good business attributes because everybody can ask for more money. So I think as organizations mature their security programs, they're going to go to the board with issues like this. Endpoint security, there's so many different Endpoints security products out there that you could buy. But if you're practicing good risk management. You're starting off by saying what is the risk. Let's just talk about malware. So malware is the risk, well how much malware gets to your Endpoint. Unless just say in this particular instance, you're here. You go into a program where you're enhancing your tools, your techniques, you're shutting down USB ports. You're not allowing people to connect to the internet unless they go through the VPN. You're buying endpoint solutions to put on there. You're encrypting the endpoint, you're doing all these things and you suddenly see your monthly average of malware go from here to here. And then when you do that and you walk into a boardroom, and you can show them that and you say this is kind of our risk appetite. 'Cause we're never going to be able to reduce it but I could go spend some more money. I could go spend five million more dollars that I'm going to move it this much. I'd rather take that five million move it over to this risk which is right here to reduce it to that area. So I think that goes hand in hand with what Jason's saying but when you can get to that level to the board to help them understand their decision. They have a greater comfort level that the money is being spent and prioritization is occurring. >> Yeah, so if I may so that one of the things that you just touch on, I think is really useful for us kind of expand upon more. One of the advise points Chertoff Group had in our series session was around bringing cybersecurity experts to the boardroom. I know obviously, you're very active in the whole finance sector, providing advice and direction in that space. Can you tell us more about that? >> Sure so, what's particular in my world also as the chair or the financial services sector coordinating council. What we do is we work closely with the government, with policy and doctrine and then the FSI sector, financial services sector, analysis center is the group that really goes out, and kind of operationalize it through information sharing and that sort. But what we've seen is a desire to have, honestly more security professionals on boards. So CISOs potentially being asked to sit on public and private company boards to provide that expertise back to the company. So that the boardroom can help understand and transcend what is going on. Again from my standpoint, I feel very privileged to have one of them on my board today. And she's been just a wonderful addition, not only does she bring cyber expertise, but being a retired general brings a lot it to other additional. So I would predict, we'll see more and more CISOs being asked to sit on public and private boards. They bring that perspective as the business models move to digitalization. >> We can go on forever, forever and ever but we can't unfortunately, but I have one more question for you Rich. Is kind of this change in attitude amongst the CISO community and other people ideal security in terms sharing information. You mentioned on this group and you use to be, we didn't want to share if we got attacked for a lot of different reasons, but there's a real benefit to sharing information even across industries about the profile of some of these things that are happening. How are we seeing that kind of change and how much more valuable is it to have some other input from some other peers, than just kind of you with you're jewels that they're trying to protect. >> Sure so in general, from an industry standpoint, the financial services are much further ahead than a lot of the other industries 'cause we've been doing it along time. So sharing occurs officially through the FSI site but also you'll pick you phone up and call a friend right a way, and say hey, I've just seen some of you're IP space associated with so and so. So that informal sharing is there. It's a very tight community, in particularly from the financial services. You don't think of security as a differentiator necessarily because the reality of it is when an adversary chooses to point their direction at you. It's just a matter of time before they get around to your institution. So sharing occurs and secondly, the government been doing a great job of trying to break down those barriers. Work through all the issues that are related with sharing of classified, unclassified information. So there exists a model today, it seems to be working pretty well. Formal as well as informal and if you look at some of the past history. That sharing has really helped a lot of organizations. I see they only getting better and better as time goes by. >> And the point, I'd add to that is the financial services I said for example is one of the most mature out there. In fact, it is probably the most mature or global even out there. But that's taken time to establish the trust and the collaboration there. And the one recommendation that we would all give out to the industry as a whole is you need to be getting those types of things stood up. And you have to invest time into them to generate the collaboration and trust. You're not going to get it over night but you have to start somewhere in doing the same. Because really what good work is happening here, needs to be happening across the global industry as a whole. >> Right, alright Rich and Jason, we'll have to leave it there unfortunately. Really great insight and thanks for sharing your insight with us. >> Rich: And thank you. >> Alright, I'm Jeff Freck. You're watching theCUBE. We're at Security in the Boardroom at the Chertoff event, Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. (clicking)

>> Announcer: Live from San Jose, California, it's theCUBE, covering Big Data Silicon Valley 2017. (upbeat percussion music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Live here in Silicon Valley, San Jose, is the Big Data SV, Big Data Silicon Valley in conjunction with Strata Hadoop, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage. Over the next two days, we've got wall-to-wall interviews with thought leaders, experts breaking down the future of big data, future of analytics, future of the cloud. I'm John Furrier with my co-host George Gilbert with Wikibon. Our next guest is Yuanhao Sun, who's the co-founder and CTO of Transwarp Technologies. Welcome to theCUBE. You were on, during the, 166 days ago, I noticed, on theCUBE, previously. But now you've got some news. So let's get the news out of the way. What are you guys announcing here, this week? >> Yes, so we are announcing 5.0, the latest version of Transwarp Hub. So in this version, we will call it probably revolutionary product, because the first one is we embedded communities in our product, so we will allow people to isolate different kind of workloads, using dock and containers, and we also provide a scheduler to better support mixed workloads. And the second is, we are building a set of tools allow people to build their warehouse. And then migrate from existing or traditional data warehouse to Hadoop. And we are also providing people capability to build a data mart, actually. It allow you to interactively query data. So we build a column store in memory and on SSD. And we totally write the whole SQL engine. That is a very tiny SQL engine, allow people to query data very quickly. And so today that tiny SQL engine is like about five to ten times faster than Spark 2.0. And we also allow people to build cubes on top of Hadoop. And then, once the cube is built, the SQL performance, like the TBCH performance, is about 100 times faster than existing database, or existing Spark 2.0. So it's super-fast. And in, actually we found a Paralect customer, so they replace their data with software, to build a data mart. And we already migrate, say 100 reports, from their data to our product. So the promise is very good. And the first one is we are providing tool for people to build the machine learning pipelines and we are leveraging TensorFlow, MXNet, and also Spark for people to visualize the pipeline and to build the data mining workflows. So this is kind of like Datasense tools, it's very easy for people to use. >> John: Okay, so take a minute to explain, 'cus that was great, you got the performance there, that's the news out of the way. Take a minute to explain Transwarp, your value proposition, and when people engage you as a customer. >> Yuanhao: Yeah so, people choose our product and the major reason is our compatibility to Oracle, DV2, and teradata SQL syntax, because you know, they have built a lot of applications onto those databases, so when they migrate to Hadoop, they don't want to rewrote whole program, so our compatibility, SQL compatibility is big advantage to them, so this is the first one. And we also support full ANCIT and distribute transactions onto Hadoop. So that a lot of applications can be migrate to our product, with few modification or without any changes. So this is the first our advantage. The second is because we are providing, even the best streaming engine, that is actually derived from Spark. So we apply this technology to IOT applications. You know the IOT pretty soon, they need a very low latency but they also need very complicated models on top of streams. So that's why we are providing full SQL support and machine learning support on top of streaming events. And we are also using event-driven technology to reduce the latency, to five to ten milliseconds. So this is second reason people choose our product. And then today we are announcing 5.0, and I think people will find more reason to choose our product. >> So you have the compatibility SQL, you have the tooling, and now you have the performance. So kind of the triple threat there. So what's the customer saying, when you go out and talk with your customers, what's the view of the current landscape for customers? What are they solving right now, what are the key challenges and pain points that customers have today? >> We have customers in more than 12 vertical segments, and in different verticals they have different pain points, actually so. Take one example: in financial services, the main pain point for them is to migrate existing legacy applications to Hadoop, you know they have accumulated a lot of data, and the performance is very bad using legacy database, so they need high performance Hadoop and Spark to speed up the performance, like reports. But in another vertical, like in logistic and transportation and IOT, the pain point is to find a very low latency streaming engine. At the same time, they need very complicated programming model to write their applications. And that example, like in public sector, they actually need very complicated and large scale search engine. They need to build analytical capability on top of search engine. They can search the results and analyze the result in the same time. >> George: Yuanhao, as always, whenever we get to interview you on theCube, you toss out these gems, sort of like you know diamonds, like big rocks that under millions of years, and incredible pressure, have been squeezed down into these incredibly valuable, kind of, you know, valuable, sort of minerals with lots of goodness in them, so I need you to unpack that diamond back into something that we can make sense out of, or I should say, that's more accessible. You've done something that none of the Hadoop Distro guys have managed to do, which is to build databases that are not just decision support, but can handle OLTP, can handle operational applications. You've done the streaming, you've done what even Databricks can't do without even trying any of the other stuff, which is getting the streaming down to event at a time. Let's step back from all these amazing things, and tell us what was the secret sauce that let you build a platform this advanced? >> So actually, we are driven by our customers, and we do see the trends people are looking for, better solutions, you know there are a lot of pain to set up a habitable class to use the Hadoop technology. So that's why we found it's very meaningful and also very necessary for us to build a SQL database on top of Hadoop. Quite a lot of customers in FS side, they ask us to provide asset until the transaction can be put on top of Hadoop, because they have to guarantee the consistency of their data. Otherwise they cannot use the technology. >> At the risk of interrupting, maybe you can tell us why others have built the analytic databases on top of Hadoop, to give the familiar SQL access, and obviously have a desire also to have transactions next to it, so you can inform a transaction decision with the analytics. One of the questions is, how did you combine the two capabilities? I mean it only took Oracle like 40 years. >> Right, so. Actually our transaction capability is only for analytics, you know, so this OLTP capability it is not for short term transactional applications, it's for data warehouse kind of workloads. >> George: Okay, so when you're ingesting. >> Yes, when you're ingesting, when you modify your data, in batch, you have to guarantee the consistency. So that's the OLTP capability. But we are also building another distributed storage, and distributed database, and that are providing that with OLTP capability. That means you can do concurrent transactions, on that database, but we are still developing that software right now. Today our product providing the digital transaction capability for people to actually build their warehouse. You know quite a lot of people believe data warehouse do not need transaction capability, but we found a lot of people modify their data in data warehouse, you know, they are loading their data continuously to data warehouse, like the CRM tables, customer information, they can be changed over time. So every day people need to update or change the data, that's why we have to provide transaction capability in data warehouse. >> George: Okay, and then so then well tell us also, 'cus the streaming problem is, you know, we're told that roughly two thirds of Spark deployments use streaming as a workload. And the biggest knock on Spark is that it can't process one event at a time, you got to do a little batch. Tell us some of the use cases that can take advantage of doing one event at a time, and how you solved that problem? >> Yuanhao: Yeah so the first use case we encounter is the anti-fraud, or fraud detection application in FSI, so whenever you swipe your credit card, the bank needs to tell you if the transaction is a fraud or not in a few milliseconds. But if you are using Spark streaming, it will usually take 500 milliseconds, so the latency is too high for such kind of application. And that's why we have to provide event per time, like means event-driven processing to detect the fraud, so that we can interrupt the transaction in a few milliseconds, so that's one kind of application. The other can come from IOT applications, so we already put our streaming framework in large manufacture factory. So they have to detect the main function of their equipments in a very short time, otherwise it may explode. So if you... So if you are using Spark streaming, probably when you submit your application, it will take you hundreds of milliseconds, and when you finish your detection, it usually takes a few seconds, so that will be too long for such kind of application. And that's why we need a low latency streaming engine, but you can see it is okay to use Storm or Flink, right? And problem is, we found it is: They need a very complicated programming model, that they are going to solve equation on the streaming events, they need to do the FFT transformation. And they are also asking to run some linear regression or some neural network on top of events, so that's why we have to provide a SQL interface and we are also embedding the CEP capability into our streaming engine, so that you can use pattern to match the events and to send alerts. >> George: So, SQL to get a set of events and maybe join some in the complex event processing, CEP, to say, does this fit a pattern I'm looking for? >> Yuanhao: Yes. >> Okay, and so, and then with the lightweight OLTP, that and any other new projects you're looking at, tell us perhaps the new use cases you'd be appropriated for. >> Yuanhao: Yeah so that's our official product actually, so we are going to solve the problem of large scale OLTP transaction problems like, so you know, a lot of... You know, in China, there is so many population, like in public sector or in banks, they need build a highly scalable transaction systems so that they can support a very high concurrent transactions at the same time, so that's why we are building such kind of technology. You know, in the past, people just divide transaction into multiple databases, like multiple Oracle instances or multiple mySQL instances. But the problem is: if the application is simple, you can very easily divide a transaction over the multiple instances of databases. But if the application is very complicated, especially when the ISV already wrote the applications based on Oracle or traditional database, they already depends on the transaction systems so that's why we have to build a same kind of transaction systems, so that we can support their legacy applications, but they can scale to hundreds of nodes, and they can scale to millions of transactions per second. >> George: On the transactional stuff? >> Yuanhao: Yes. >> Just correct me if I'm wrong, I know we're running out of time but I thought Oracle only scales out when you're doing decision support work, not when you're doing OLTP, not that it, that it can only, that it can maybe stretch to ten nodes or something like that, am I mistaken? >> Yuanhao: Yes, they can scale to 16 to all 32 nodes. >> George: For transactional work? >> For transaction works, but so that's the theoretical limit, but you know, like Google F1 and Google Spanner, they can scale to hundreds of nodes. But you know, the latency is higher than Oracle because you have to use distributed particle to communicate with multiple nodes, so the latency is higher. >> On Google? >> Yes. >> On Google. The latency is higher on the Google? >> 'Cus it has to go like all the way to Europe and back. >> Oracle or Google latency, you said? >> Google, because if you are using two phase commit protocol you have to talk to multiple nodes to broadcast your request to multiple nodes, and then wait for the feedback, so that mean you have a much higher latency, but it's necessary to maintain the consistency. So in a distributed OLTP databases, the latency is usually higher, but the concurrency is also much higher, and scalability is much better. >> George: So that's a problem you've stretched beyond what Oracle's done. >> Yuanhao: Yes, so because customer can tolerant the higher latency, but they need to scale to millions of transactions per second, so that's why we have to build a distributed database. >> George: Okay, for this reason we're going to have to have you back for like maybe five or ten consecutive segments, you know, maybe starting tomorrow. >> We're going to have to get you back for sure. Final question for you: What are you excited about, from a technology, in the landscape, as you look at open source, you're working with Spark, you mentioned Kubernetes, you have micro services, all the cloud. What are you most excited about right now in terms of new technology that's going to help simplify and scale, with low latency, the databases, the software. 'Cus you got IOT, you got autonomous vehicles, you have all this data, what are you excited about? >> So actually, so this technology we already solve these problems actually, but I think the most exciting thing is we found... There's two trends, the first trend is: We found it's very exciting to find more competition framework coming out, like the AI framework, like TensorFlow and MXNet, Torch, and tons of such machine learning frameworks are coming out, so they are solving different kinds of problems, like facial recognition from video and images, like human computer interactions using voice, using audio. So it's very exciting I think, but for... And also it's very, we found it's very exciting we are embedding these, we are combining these technologies together, so that's why we are using competitors you know. We didn't use YARN, because it cannot support TensorFlow or other framework, but you know, if you are using containers and if you have good scheduler, you can schedule any kind of competition frameworks. So we found it's very interesting to, to have these new frameworks, and we can combine together to solve different kinds of problems. >> John: Thanks so much for coming onto theCube, it's an operating system world we're living in now, it's a great time to be a technologist. Certainly the opportunities are out there, and we're breaking it down here inside theCube, live in Silicon Valley, with the best tech executives, best thought leaders and experts here inside theCube. I'm John Furrier with George Gilbert. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (upbeat percussive music)