(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone. Welcome back to this Cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." Got a great conversation around Cloud Native, Cloud Native Journey, how enterprises are looking at Cloud Native and putting it all together. And it comes down to operations, developer productivity, and security. It's the hottest topic in technology. We got Chris Jones here in the studio, director of Product Management for Platform9. Chris, thanks for coming in. >> Hey, thanks. >> So when we always chat about, when we're at KubeCon. KubeConEU is coming up and in a few, in a few months, the number one conversation is developer productivity. And the developers are driving all the standards. It's interesting to see how they just throw everything out there and whatever gets adopted ends up becoming the standard, not the old school way of kind of getting stuff done. So that's cool. Security Kubernetes and Containers are all kind of now that next level. So you're starting to see the early adopters moving to the mainstream. Enterprises, a variety of different approaches. You guys are at the center of this. We've had a couple conversations with your CEO and your tech team over there. What are you seeing? You're building the products. What's the core product focus right now for Platform9? What are you guys aiming for? >> The core is that blend of enabling your infrastructure and PlatformOps or DevOps teams to be able to go fast and run in a stable environment, but at the same time enable developers. We don't want people going back to what I've been calling Shadow IT 2.0. It's, hey, I've been told to do something. I kicked off this Container initiative. I need to run my software somewhere. I'm just going to go figure it out. We want to keep those people productive. At the same time we want to enable velocity for our operations teams, be it PlatformOps or DevOps. >> Take us through in your mind and how you see the industry rolling out this Cloud Native journey. Where do you see customers out there? Because DevOps have been around, DevSecOps is rocking, you're seeing AI, hot trend now. Developers are still in charge. Is there a change to the infrastructure of how developers get their coding done and the infrastructure, setting up the DevOps is key, but when you add the Cloud Native journey for an enterprise, what changes? What is the, what is the, I guess what is the Cloud Native journey for an enterprise these days? >> The Cloud Native journey or the change? When- >> Let's start with the, let's start with what they want to do. What's the goal and then how does that happen? >> I think the goal is that promise land. Increased resiliency, better scalability, and overall reduced costs. I've gone from physical to virtual that gave me a higher level of density, packing of resources. I'm moving to Containers. I'm removing that OS layer again. I'm getting a better density again, but all of a sudden I'm running Kubernetes. What does that, what does that fundamentally do to my operations? Does it magically give me scalability and resiliency? Or do I need to change what I'm running and how it's running so it fits that infrastructure? And that's the reality, is you can't just take a Container and drop it into Kubernetes and say, hey, I'm now Cloud Native. I've got reduced cost, or I've got better resiliency. There's things that your engineering teams need to do to make sure that application is a Cloud Native. And then there's what I think is one of the largest shifts of virtual machines to containers. When I was in the world of application performance monitoring, we would see customers saying, well, my engineering team have this Java app, and they said it needs a VM with 12 gig of RAM and eight cores, and that's what we gave it. But it's running slow. I'm working with the application team and you can see it's running slow. And they're like, well, it's got all of its resources. One of those nice features of virtualization is over provisioning. So the infrastructure team would say, well, we gave it, we gave it all a RAM it needed. And what's wrong with that being over provisioned? It's like, well, Java expects that RAM to be there. Now all of a sudden, when you move to the world of containers, what we've got is that's not a set resource limit, really is like it used to be in a VM, right? When you set it for a container, your application teams really need to be paying attention to your resource limits and constraints within the world of Kubernetes. So instead of just being able to say, hey, I'm throwing over the fence and now it's just going to run on a VM, and that VMs got everything it needs. It's now really running on more, much more of a shared infrastructure where limits and constraints are going to impact the neighbors. They are going to impact who's making that decision around resourcing. Because that Kubernetes concept of over provisioning and the virtualization concept of over provisioning are not the same. So when I look at this problem, it's like, well, what changed? Well, I'll do my scale tests as an application developer and tester, and I'd see what resources it needs. I asked for that in the VM, that sets the high watermark, job's done. Well, Kubernetes, it's no longer a VM, it's a Kubernetes manifest. And well, who owns that? Who's writing it? Who's setting those limits? To me, that should be the application team. But then when it goes into operations world, they're like, well, that's now us. Can we change those? So it's that amalgamation of the two that is saying, I'm a developer. I used to pay attention, but now I need to pay attention. And an infrastructure person saying, I used to just give 'em what they wanted, but now I really need to know what they've wanted, because it's going to potentially have a catastrophic impact on what I'm running. >> So what's the impact for the developer? Because, infrastructure's code is what everybody wants. The developer just wants to get the code going and they got to pay attention to all these things, or don't they? Is that where you guys come in? How do you guys see the problem? Actually scope the problem that you guys solve? 'Cause I think you're getting at I think the core issue here, which is, I've got Kubernetes, I've got containers, I've got developer productivity that I want to focus on. What's the problem that you guys solve? >> Platform operation teams that are adopting Cloud Native in their environment, they've got that steep learning curve of Kubernetes plus this fundamental change of how an app runs. What we're doing is taking away the burden of needing to operate and run Kubernetes and giving them the choice of the flexibility of infrastructure and location. Be that an air gap environment like a, let's say a telco provider that needs to run a containerized network function and containerized workloads for 5G. That's one thing that we can deploy and achieve in a completely inaccessible environment all the way through to Platform9 running traditionally as SaaS, as we were born, that's remotely managing and controlling your Kubernetes environments on-premise AWS. That hybrid cloud experience that could be also Bare Metal, but it's our platform running your environments with our support there, 24 by seven, that's proactively reaching out. So it's removing a lot of that burden and the complications that come along with operating the environment and standing it up, which means all of a sudden your DevOps and platform operations teams can go and work with your engineers and application developers and say, hey, let's get, let's focus on the stuff that, that we need to be focused on, which is running our business and providing a service to our customers. Not figuring out how to upgrade a Kubernetes cluster, add new nodes, and configure all of the low level. >> I mean there are, that's operations that just needs to work. And sounds like as they get into the Cloud Native kind of ops, there's a lot of stuff that kind of goes wrong. Or you go, oops, what do we buy into? Because the CIOs, let's go, let's go Cloud Native. We want to, we got to get set up for the future. We're going to be Cloud Native, not just lift and shift and we're going to actually build it out right. Okay, that sounds good. And when we have to actually get done. >> Chris: Yeah. >> You got to spin things up and stand up the infrastructure. What specifically use case do you guys see that emerges for Platform9 when people call you up and you go talk to customers and prospects? What's the one thing or use case or cases that you guys see that you guys solve the best? >> So I think one of the, one of the, I guess new use cases that are coming up now, everyone's talking about economic pressures. I think the, the tap blows open, just get it done. CIO is saying let's modernize, let's use the cloud. Now all of a sudden they're recognizing, well wait, we're spending a lot of money now. We've opened that tap all the way, what do we do? So now they're looking at ways to control that spend. So we're seeing that as a big emerging trend. What we're also sort of seeing is people looking at their data centers and saying, well, I've got this huge legacy environment that's running a hypervisor. It's running VMs. Can we still actually do what we need to do? Can we modernize? Can we start this Cloud Native journey without leaving our data centers, our co-locations? Or if I do want to reduce costs, is that that thing that says maybe I'm repatriating or doing a reverse migration? Do I have to go back to my data center or are there other alternatives? And we're seeing that trend a lot. And our roadmap and what we have in the product today was specifically built to handle those, those occurrences. So we brought in KubeVirt in terms of virtualization. We have a long legacy doing OpenStack and private clouds. And we've worked with a lot of those users and customers that we have and asked the questions, what's important? And today, when we look at the world of Cloud Native, you can run virtualization within Kubernetes. So you can, instead of running two separate platforms, you can have one. So all of a sudden, if you're looking to modernize, you can start on that new infrastructure stack that can run anywhere, Kubernetes, and you can start bringing VMs over there as you are containerizing at the same time. So now you can keep your application operations in one environment. And this also helps if you're trying to reduce costs. If you really are saying, we put that Dev environment in AWS, we've got a huge amount of velocity out of it now, can we do that elsewhere? Is there a co-location we can go to? Is there a provider that we can go to where we can run that infrastructure or run the Kubernetes, but not have to run the infrastructure? >> It's going to be interesting too, when you see the Edge come online, you start, we've got Mobile World Congress coming up, KubeCon events we're going to be at, the conversation is not just about public cloud. And you guys obviously solve a lot of do-it-yourself implementation hassles that emerge when people try to kind of stand up their own environment. And we hear from developers consistency between code, managing new updates, making sure everything is all solid so they can go fast. That's the goal. And that, and then people can get standardized on that. But as you get public cloud and do it yourself, kind of brings up like, okay, there's some gaps there as the architecture changes to be more distributed computing, Edge, on-premises cloud, it's cloud operations. So that's cool for DevOps and Cloud Native. How do you guys differentiate from say, some the public cloud opportunities and the folks who are doing it themselves? How do you guys fit in that world and what's the pitch or what's the story? >> The fit that we look at is that third alternative. Let's get your team focused on what's high value to your business and let us deliver that public cloud experience on your infrastructure or in the public cloud, which gives you that ability to still be flexible if you want to make choices to run consistently for your developers in two different locations. So as I touched on earlier, instead of saying go figure out Kubernetes, how do you upgrade a hundred worker nodes in place upgrade. We've solved that problem. That's what we do every single day of the week. Don't go and try to figure out how to upgrade a cluster and then upgrade all of the, what I call Kubernetes friends, your core DNSs, your metrics server, your Kubernetes dashboard. These are all things that we package, we test, we version. So when you click upgrade, we've already handled that entire process. So it's saying don't have your team focused on that lower level piece of work. Get them focused on what is important, which is your business services. >> Yeah, the infrastructure and getting that stood up. I mean, I think the thing that's interesting, if you look at the market right now, you mentioned cost savings and recovery, obviously kind of a recession. I mean, people are tightening their belts for sure. I don't think the digital transformation and Cloud Native spend is going to plummet. It's going to probably be on hold and be squeezed a little bit. But to your point, people are refactoring looking at how to get the best out of what they got. It's not just open the tap of spend the cash like it used to be. Yeah, a couple months, even a couple years ago. So okay, I get that. But then you look at the what's coming, AI. You're seeing all the new data infrastructure that's coming. The containers, Kubernetes stuff, got to get stood up pretty quickly and it's got to be reliable. So to your point, the teams need to get done with this and move on to the next thing. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> 'Cause there's more coming. I mean, there's a lot coming for the apps that are building in Data Native, AI-Native, Cloud Native. So it seems that this Kubernetes thing needs to get solved. Is that kind of what you guys are focused on right now? >> So, I mean to use a customer, we have a customer that's in AI/ML and they run their platform at customer sites and that's hardware bound. You can't run AI machine learning on anything anywhere. Well, with Platform9 they can. So we're enabling them to deliver services into their customers that's running their AI/ML platform in their customer's data centers anywhere in the world on hardware that is purpose-built for running that workload. They're not Kubernetes experts. That's what we are. We're bringing them that ability to focus on what's important and just delivering their business services whilst they're enabling our team. And our 24 by seven proactive management are always on assurance to keep that up and running for them. So when something goes bump at the night at 2:00am, our guys get woken up. They're the ones that are reaching out to the customer saying, your environments have a problem, we're taking these actions to fix it. Obviously sometimes, especially if it is running on Bare Metal, there's things you can't do remotely. So you might need someone to go and do that. But even when that happens, you're not by yourself. You're not sitting there like I did when I worked for a bank in one of my first jobs, three o'clock in the morning saying, wow, our end of day processing is stuck. Who else am I waking up? Right? >> Exactly, yeah. Got to get that cash going. But this is a great use case. I want to get to the customer. What do some of the successful customers say to you for the folks watching that aren't yet a customer of Platform9, what are some of the accolades and comments or anecdotes that you guys hear from customers that you have? >> It just works, which I think is probably one of the best ones you can get. Customers coming back and being able to show to their business that they've delivered growth, like business growth and productivity growth and keeping their organization size the same. So we started on our containerization journey. We went to Kubernetes. We've deployed all these new workloads and our operations team is still six people. We're doing way more with growth less, and I think that's also talking to the strength that we're bringing, 'cause we're, we're augmenting that team. They're spending less time on the really low level stuff and automating a lot of the growth activity that's involved. So when it comes to being able to grow their business, they can just focus on that, not- >> Well you guys do the heavy lifting, keep on top of the Kubernetes, make sure that all the versions are all done. Everything's stable and consistent so they can go on and do the build out and provide their services. That seems to be what you guys are best at. >> Correct, correct. >> And so what's on the roadmap? You have the product, direct product management, you get the keys to the kingdom. What is, what is the focus? What's your focus right now? Obviously Kubernetes is growing up, Containers. We've been hearing a lot at the last KubeCon about the security containers is getting better. You've seen verification, a lot more standards around some things. What are you focused on right now for at a product over there? >> Edge is a really big focus for us. And I think in Edge you can look at it in two ways. The mantra that I drive is Edge must be remote. If you can't do something remotely at the Edge, you are using a human being, that's not Edge. Our Edge management capabilities and being in the market for over two years are a hundred percent remote. You want to stand up a store, you just ship the server in there, it gets racked, the rest of it's remote. Imagine a store manager in, I don't know, KFC, just plugging in the server, putting in the ethernet cable, pressing the power button. The rest of all that provisioning for that Cloud Native stack, Kubernetes, KubeVirt for virtualization is done remotely. So we're continuing to focus on that. The next piece that is related to that is allowing people to run Platform9 SaaS in their data centers. So we do ag app today and we've had a really strong focus on telecommunications and the containerized network functions that come along with that. So this next piece is saying, we're bringing what we run as SaaS into your data center, so then you can run it. 'Cause there are many people out there that are saying, we want these capabilities and we want everything that the Platform9 control plane brings and simplifies. But unfortunately, regulatory compliance reasons means that we can't leverage SaaS. So they might be using a cloud, but they're saying that's still our infrastructure. We're still closed that network down, or they're still on-prem. So they're two big priorities for us this year. And that on-premise experiences is paramount, even to the point that we will be delivering a way that when you run an on-premise, you can still say, wait a second, well I can send outbound alerts to Platform9. So their support team can still be proactively helping me as much as they could, even though I'm running Platform9s control plane. So it's sort of giving that blend of two experiences. They're big, they're big priorities. And the third pillar is all around virtualization. It's saying if you have economic pressures, then I think it's important to look at what you're spending today and realistically say, can that be reduced? And I think hypervisors and virtualization is something that should be looked at, because if you can actually reduce that spend, you can bring in some modernization at the same time. Let's take some of those nos that exist that are two years into their five year hardware life cycle. Let's turn that into a Cloud Native environment, which is enabling your modernization in place. It's giving your engineers and application developers the new toys, the new experiences, and then you can start running some of those virtualized workloads with KubeVirt, there. So you're reducing cost and you're modernizing at the same time with your existing infrastructure. >> You know Chris, the topic of this content series that we're doing with you guys is finding the right path, trusting the right path to Cloud Native. What does that mean? I mean, if you had to kind of summarize that phrase, trusting the right path to Cloud Native, what does that mean? It mean in terms of architecture, is it deployment? Is it operations? What's the underlying main theme of that quote? What's the, what's? How would you talk to a customer and say, what does that mean if someone said, "Hey, what does that right path mean?" >> I think the right path means focusing on what you should be focusing on. I know I've said it a hundred times, but if your entire operations team is trying to figure out the nuts and bolts of Kubernetes and getting three months into a journey and discovering, ah, I need Metrics Server to make something function. I want to use Horizontal Pod Autoscaler or Vertical Pod Autoscaler and I need this other thing, now I need to manage that. That's not the right path. That's literally learning what other people have been learning for the last five, seven years that have been focused on Kubernetes solely. So the why- >> There's been a lot of grind. People have been grinding it out. I mean, that's what you're talking about here. They've been standing up the, when Kubernetes started, it was all the promise. >> Chris: Yep. >> And essentially manually kind of getting in in the weeds and configuring it. Now it's matured up. They want stability. >> Chris: Yeah. >> Not everyone can get down and dirty with Kubernetes. It's not something that people want to generally do unless you're totally into it, right? Like I mean, I mean ops teams, I mean, yeah. You know what I mean? It's not like it's heavy lifting. Yeah, it's important. Just got to get it going. >> Yeah, I mean if you're deploying with Platform9, your Ops teams can tinker to their hearts content. We're completely compliant upstream Kubernetes. You can go and change an API server flag, let's go and mess with the scheduler, because we want to. You can still do that, but don't, don't have your team investing in all this time to figure it out. It's been figured out. >> John: Got it. >> Get them focused on enabling velocity for your business. >> So it's not build, but run. >> Chris: Correct? >> Or run Kubernetes, not necessarily figure out how to kind of get it all, consume it out. >> You know we've talked to a lot of customers out there that are saying, "I want to be able to deliver a service to my users." Our response is, "Cool, let us run it. You consume it, therefore deliver it." And we're solving that in one hit versus figuring out how to first run it, then operate it, then turn that into a consumable service. >> So the alternative Platform9 is what? They got to do it themselves or use the Cloud or what's the, what's the alternative for the customer for not using Platform9? Hiring more people to kind of work on it? What's the? >> People, building that kind of PaaS experience? Something that I've been very passionate about for the past year is looking at that world of sort of GitOps and what that means. And if you go out there and you sort of start asking the question what's happening? Just generally with Kubernetes as well and GitOps in that scope, then you'll hear some people saying, well, I'm making it PaaS, because Kubernetes is too complicated for my developers and we need to give them something. There's some great material out there from the likes of Intuit and Adobe where for two big contributors to Argo and the Argo projects, they almost have, well they do have, different experiences. One is saying, we went down the PaaS route and it failed. The other one is saying, well we've built a really stable PaaS and it's working. What are they trying to do? They're trying to deliver an outcome to make it easy to use and consume Kubernetes. So you could go out there and say, hey, I'm going to build a Kubernetes cluster. Sounds like Argo CD is a great way to expose that to my developers so they can use Kubernetes without having to use Kubernetes and start automating things. That is an approach, but you're going to be going completely open source and you're going to have to bring in all the individual components, or you could just lay that, lay it down, and consume it as a service and not have to- >> And mentioned to it. They were the ones who kind of brought that into the open. >> They did. Inuit is the primary contributor to the Argo set of products. >> How has that been received in the market? I mean, they had the event at the Computer History Museum last fall. What's the momentum there? What's the big takeaway from that project? >> Growth. To me, growth. I mean go and track the stars on that one. It's just, it's growth. It's unlocking machine learning. Argo workflows can do more than just make things happen. Argo CD I think the approach they're taking is, hey let's make this simple to use, which I think can be lost. And I think credit where credit's due, they're really pushing to bring in a lot of capabilities to make it easier to work with applications and microservices on Kubernetes. It's not just that, hey, here's a GitOps tool. It can take something from a Git repo and deploy it and maybe prioritize it and help you scale your operations from that perspective. It's taking a step back and saying, well how did we get to production in the first place? And what can be done down there to help as well? I think it's growth expansion of features. They had a huge release just come out in, I think it was 2.6, that brought in things that as a product manager that I don't often look at like really deep technical things and say wow, that's powerful. But they have, they've got some great features in that release that really do solve real problems. >> And as the product, as the product person, who's the target buyer for you? Who's the customer? Who's making that? And you got decision maker, influencer, and recommender. Take us through the customer persona for you guys. >> So that Platform Ops, DevOps space, right, the people that need to be delivering Containers as a service out to their organization. But then it's also important to say, well who else are our primary users? And that's developers, engineers, right? They shouldn't have to say, oh well I have access to a Kubernetes cluster. Do I have to use kubectl or do I need to go find some other tool? No, they can just log to Platform9. It's integrated with your enterprise id. >> They're the end customer at the end of the day, they're the user. >> Yeah, yeah. They can log in. And they can see the clusters you've given them access to as a Platform Ops Administrator. >> So job well done for you guys. And your mind is the developers are moving 'em fast, coding and happy. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah. >> And and from a customer standpoint, you reduce the maintenance cost, because you keep the Ops smoother, so you got efficiency and maintenance costs kind of reduced or is that kind of the benefits? >> Yeah, yep, yeah. And at two o'clock in the morning when things go inevitably wrong, they're not there by themselves, and we're proactively working with them. >> And that's the uptime issue. >> That is the uptime issue. And Cloud doesn't solve that, right? Everyone experienced that Clouds can go down, entire regions can go offline. That's happened to all Cloud providers. And what do you do then? Kubernetes isn't your recovery plan. It's part of it, right, but it's that piece. >> You know Chris, to wrap up this interview, I will say that "theCUBE" is 12 years old now. We've been to OpenStack early days. We had you guys on when we were covering OpenStack and now Cloud has just been booming. You got AI around the corner, AI Ops, now you got all this new data infrastructure, it's just amazing Cloud growth, Cloud Native, Security Native, Cloud Native, Data Native, AI Native. It's going to be all, this is the new app environment, but there's also existing infrastructure. So going back to OpenStack, rolling our own cloud, building your own cloud, building infrastructure cloud, in a cloud way, is what the pioneers have done. I mean this is what we're at. Now we're at this scale next level, abstracted away and make it operational. It seems to be the key focus. We look at CNCF at KubeCon and what they're doing with the cloud SecurityCon, it's all about operations. >> Chris: Yep, right. >> Ops and you know, that's going to sound counterintuitive 'cause it's a developer open source environment, but you're starting to see that Ops focus in a good way. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Infrastructure as code way. >> Chris: Yep. >> What's your reaction to that? How would you summarize where we are in the industry relative to, am I getting, am I getting it right there? Is that the right view? What am I missing? What's the current state of the next level, NextGen infrastructure? >> It's a good question. When I think back to sort of late 2019, I sort of had this aha moment as I saw what really truly is delivering infrastructure as code happening at Platform9. There's an open source project Ironic, which is now also available within Kubernetes that is Metal Kubed that automates Bare Metal as code, which means you can go from an empty server, lay down your operating system, lay down Kubernetes, and you've just done everything delivered to your customer as code with a Cloud Native platform. That to me was sort of the biggest realization that I had as I was moving into this industry was, wait, it's there. This can be done. And the evolution of tooling and operations is getting to the point where that can be achieved and it's focused on by a number of different open source projects. Not just Ironic and and Metal Kubed, but that's a huge win. That is truly getting your infrastructure. >> John: That's an inflection point, really. >> Yeah. >> If you think about it, 'cause that's one of the problems. We had with the Bare Metal piece was the automation and also making it Cloud Ops, cloud operations. >> Right, yeah. I mean, one of the things that I think Ironic did really well was saying let's just treat that piece of Bare Metal like a Cloud VM or an instance. If you got a problem with it, just give the person using it or whatever's using it, a new one and reimage it. Just tell it to reimage itself and it'll just (snaps fingers) go. You can do self-service with it. In Platform9, if you log in to our SaaS Ironic, you can go and say, I want that physical server to myself, because I've got a giant workload, or let's turn it into a Kubernetes cluster. That whole thing is automated. To me that's infrastructure as code. I think one of the other important things that's happening at the same time is we're seeing GitOps, we're seeing things like Terraform. I think it's important for organizations to look at what they have and ask, am I using tools that are fit for tomorrow or am I using tools that are yesterday's tools to solve tomorrow's problems? And when especially it comes to modernizing infrastructure as code, I think that's a big piece to look at. >> Do you see Terraform as old or new? >> I see Terraform as old. It's a fantastic tool, capable of many great things and it can work with basically every single provider out there on the planet. It is able to do things. Is it best fit to run in a GitOps methodology? I don't think it is quite at that point. In fact, if you went and looked at Flux, Flux has ways that make Terraform GitOps compliant, which is absolutely fantastic. It's using two tools, the best of breeds, which is solving that tomorrow problem with tomorrow solutions. >> Is the new solutions old versus new. I like this old way, new way. I mean, Terraform is not that old and it's been around for about eight years or so, whatever. But HashiCorp is doing a great job with that. I mean, so okay with Terraform, what's the new address? Is it more complex environments? Because Terraform made sense when you had basic DevOps, but now it sounds like there's a whole another level of complexity. >> I got to say. >> New tools. >> That kind of amalgamation of that application into infrastructure. Now my app team is paying way more attention to that manifest file, which is what GitOps is trying to solve. Let's templatize things. Let's version control our manifest, be it helm, customize, or just a straight up Kubernetes manifest file, plain and boring. Let's get that version controlled. Let's make sure that we know what is there, why it was changed. Let's get some auditability and things like that. And then let's get that deployment all automated. So that's predicated on the cluster existing. Well why can't we do the same thing with the cluster, the inception problem. So even if you're in public cloud, the question is like, well what's calling that API to call that thing to happen? Where is that file living? How well can I manage that in a large team? Oh my God, something just changed. Who changed it? Where is that file? And I think that's one of big, the big pieces to be sold. >> Yeah, and you talk about Edge too and on-premises. I think one of the things I'm observing and certainly when DevOps was rocking and rolling and infrastructures code was like the real push, it was pretty much the public cloud, right? >> Chris: Yep. >> And you did Cloud Native and you had stuff on-premises. Yeah you did some lifting and shifting in the cloud, but the cool stuff was going in the public cloud and you ran DevOps. Okay, now you got on-premise cloud operation and Edge. Is that the new DevOps? I mean 'cause what you're kind of getting at with old new, old new Terraform example is an interesting point, because you're pointing out potentially that that was good DevOps back in the day or it still is. >> Chris: It is, I was going to say. >> But depending on how you define what DevOps is. So if you say, I got the new DevOps with public on-premise and Edge, that's just not all public cloud, that's essentially distributed Cloud Native. >> Correct. Is that the new DevOps in your mind or is that? How would you, or is that oversimplifying it? >> Or is that that term where everyone's saying Platform Ops, right? Has it shifted? >> Well you bring up a good point about Terraform. I mean Terraform is well proven. People love it. It's got great use cases and now there seems to be new things happening. We call things like super cloud emerging, which is multicloud and abstraction layers. So you're starting to see stuff being abstracted away for the benefits of moving to the next level, so teams don't get stuck doing the same old thing. They can move on. Like what you guys are doing with Platform9 is providing a service so that teams don't have to do it. >> Correct, yeah. >> That makes a lot of sense, So you just, now it's running and then they move on to the next thing. >> Chris: Yeah, right. >> So what is that next thing? >> I think Edge is a big part of that next thing. The propensity for someone to put up with a delay, I think it's gone. For some reason, we've all become fairly short-tempered, Short fused. You know, I click the button, it should happen now, type people. And for better or worse, hopefully it gets better and we all become a bit more patient. But how do I get more effective and efficient at delivering that to that really demanding- >> I think you bring up a great point. I mean, it's not just people are getting short-tempered. I think it's more of applications are being deployed faster, security is more exposed if they don't see things quicker. You got data now infrastructure scaling up massively. So, there's a double-edged swords to scale. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah. I mean, maintenance, downtime, uptime, security. So yeah, I think there's a tension around, and one hand enthusiasm around pushing a lot of code and new apps. But is the confidence truly there? It's interesting one little, (snaps finger) supply chain software, look at Container Security for instance. >> Yeah, yeah. It's big. I mean it was codified. >> Do you agree that people, that's kind of an issue right now. >> Yeah, and it was, I mean even the supply chain has been codified by the US federal government saying there's things we need to improve. We don't want to see software being a point of vulnerability, and software includes that whole process of getting it to a running point. >> It's funny you mentioned remote and one of the thing things that you're passionate about, certainly Edge has to be remote. You don't want to roll a truck or labor at the Edge. But I was doing a conversation with, at Rebars last year about space. It's hard to do brake fix on space. It's hard to do a, to roll a someone to configure satellite, right? Right? >> Chris: Yeah. >> So Kubernetes is in space. We're seeing a lot of Cloud Native stuff in apps, in space, so just an example. This highlights the fact that it's got to be automated. Is there a machine learning AI angle with all this ChatGPT talk going on? You see all the AI going the next level. Some pretty cool stuff and it's only, I know it's the beginning, but I've heard people using some of the new machine learning, large language models, large foundational models in areas I've never heard of. Machine learning and data centers, machine learning and configuration management, a lot of different ways. How do you see as the product person, you incorporating the AI piece into the products for Platform9? >> I think that's a lot about looking at the telemetry and the information that we get back and to use one of those like old idle terms, that continuous improvement loop to feed it back in. And I think that's really where machine learning to start with comes into effect. As we run across all these customers, our system that helps at two o'clock in the morning has that telemetry, it's got that data. We can see what's changing and what's happening. So it's writing the right algorithms, creating the right machine learning to- >> So training will work for you guys. You have enough data and the telemetry to do get that training data. >> Yeah, obviously there's a lot of investment required to get there, but that is something that ultimately that could be achieved with what we see in operating people's environments. >> Great. Chris, great to have you here in the studio. Going wide ranging conversation on Kubernetes and Platform9. I guess my final question would be how do you look at the next five years out there? Because you got to run the product management, you got to have that 20 mile steer, you got to look at the customers, you got to look at what's going on in the engineering and you got to kind of have that arc. This is the right path kind of view. What's the five year arc look like for you guys? How do you see this playing out? 'Cause KubeCon is coming up and we're you seeing Kubernetes kind of break away with security? They had, they didn't call it KubeCon Security, they call it CloudNativeSecurityCon, they just had in Seattle inaugural events seemed to go well. So security is kind of breaking out and you got Kubernetes. It's getting bigger. Certainly not going away, but what's your five year arc of of how Platform9 and Kubernetes and Ops evolve? >> It's to stay on that theme, it's focusing on what is most important to our users and getting them to a point where they can just consume it, so they're not having to operate it. So it's finding those big items and bringing that into our platform. It's something that's consumable, that's just taken care of, that's tested with each release. So it's simplifying operations more and more. We've always said freedom in cloud computing. Well we started on, we started on OpenStack and made that simple. Stable, easy, you just have it, it works. We're doing that with Kubernetes. We're expanding out that user, right, we're saying bring your developers in, they can download their Kube conflict. They can see those Containers that are running there. They can access the events, the log files. They can log in and build a VM using KubeVirt. They're self servicing. So it's alleviating pressures off of the Ops team, removing the help desk systems that people still seem to rely on. So it's like what comes into that field that is the next biggest issue? Is it things like CI/CD? Is it simplifying GitOps? Is it bringing in security capabilities to talk to that? Or is that a piece that is a best of breed? Is there a reason that it's been spun out to its own conference? Is this something that deserves a focus that should be a specialized capability instead of tooling and vendors that we work with, that we partner with, that could be brought in as a service. I think it's looking at those trends and making sure that what we bring in has the biggest impact to our users. >> That's awesome. Thanks for coming in. I'll give you the last word. Put a plug in for Platform9 for the people who are watching. What should they know about Platform9 that they might not know about it or what should? When should they call you guys and when should they engage? Take a take a minute to give the plug. >> The plug. I think it's, if your operations team is focused on building Kubernetes, stop. That shouldn't be the cloud. That shouldn't be in the Edge, that shouldn't be at the data center. They should be consuming it. If your engineering teams are all trying different ways and doing different things to use and consume Cloud Native services and Kubernetes, they shouldn't be. You want consistency. That's how you get economies of scale. Provide them with a simple platform that's integrated with all of your enterprise identity where they can just start consuming instead of having to solve these problems themselves. It's those, it's those two personas, right? Where the problems manifest. What are my operations teams doing, and are they delivering to my company or are they building infrastructure again? And are my engineers sprinting or crawling? 'Cause if they're not sprinting, you should be asked the question, do I have the right Cloud Native tooling in my environment and how can I get them back? >> I think it's developer productivity, uptime, security are the tell signs. You get that done. That's the goal of what you guys are doing, your mission. >> Chris: Yep. >> Great to have you on, Chris. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Chris: Thanks very much. 0 Okay, this is "theCUBE" here, finding the right path to Cloud Native. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone and welcome back to The Cube. We are covering VMware Explore live in San Francisco. This is our third day of wall to wall coverage. And John Furrier is here with me, Lisa Martin. We are excited to welcome two guests from Kasten by Veeam, please welcome Tom Laden, VP of marketing and Matt LeBlanc, not Joey from friends, Matt LeBlanc, the systems engineer from North America at Kasten by Veeam. Welcome guys, great to have you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Tom-- >> Great, go ahead. >> Oh, I was going to say, Tom, talk to us about some of the key challenges customers are coming to you with. >> Key challenges that they have at this point is getting up to speed with Kubernetes. So everybody has it on their list. We want to do Kubernetes, but where are they going to start? Back when VMware came on the market, I was switching from Windows to Mac and I needed to run a Windows application on my Mac and someone told me, "Run a VM." Went to the internet, I downloaded it. And in a half hour I was done. That's not how it works with Kubernetes. So that's a bit of a challenge. >> I mean, Kubernetes, Lisa, remember the early days of The Cube Open Stack was kind of transitioning, Cloud was booming and then Kubernetes was the paper that became the thing that pulled everybody together. It's now de facto in my mind. So that's clear, but there's a lot of different versions of it and you hear VMware, they call it the dial tone. Usually, remember, Pat Gelter, it's a dial tone. Turns out that came from Kit Colbert or no, I think AJ kind of coined the term here, but it's since been there, it's been adopted by everyone. There's different versions. It's open source. AWS is involved. How do you guys look at the relationship with Kubernetes here and VMware Explore with Kubernetes and the customers because they have choices. They can go do it on their own. They can add a little bit with Lambda, Serverless. They can do more here. It's not easy. It's not as easy as people think it is. And then this is a skill gaps problem too. We're seeing a lot of these problems out there. What's your take? >> I'll let Matt talk to that. But what I want to say first is this is also the power of the cloud native ecosystem. The days are gone where companies were selecting one enterprise application and they were building their stack with that. Today they're building applications using dozens, if not hundreds of different components from different vendors or open source platforms. And that is really what creates opportunities for those cloud native developers. So maybe you want to... >> Yeah, we're seeing a lot of hybrid solutions out there. So it's not just choosing one vendor, AKS, EKS, or Tanzu. We're seeing all the above. I had a call this morning with a large healthcare provider and they have a hundred clusters and that's spread across AKS, EKS and GKE. So it is covering everything. Plus the need to have a on-prem solution manage it all. >> I got a stat, I got to share that I want to get your reactions and you can laugh or comment, whatever you want to say. Talk to big CSO, CXO, executive, big company, I won't say the name. We got a thousand developers, a hundred of them have heard of Kubernetes, okay. 10 have touched it and used it and one's good at it. And so his point is that there's a lot of Kubernetes need that people are getting aware. So it shows that there's more and more adoption around. You see a lot of managed services out there. So it's clear it's happening and I'm over exaggerating the ratio probably. But the point is the numbers kind of make sense as a thousand developers. You start to see people getting adoption to it. They're aware of the value, but being good at it is what we're hearing is one of those things. Can you guys share your reaction to that? Is that, I mean, it's hyperbole at some level, but it does point to the fact of adoption trends. You got to get good at it, you got to know how to use it. >> It's very accurate, actually. It's what we're seeing in the market. We've been doing some research of our own, and we have some interesting numbers that we're going to be sharing soon. Analysts don't have a whole lot of numbers these days. So where we're trying to run our own surveys to get a grasp of the market. One simple survey or research element that I've done myself is I used Google trends. And in Google trends, if you go back to 2004 and you compare VMware against Kubernetes, you get a very interesting graph. What you're going to see is that VMware, the adoption curve is practically complete and Kubernetes is clearly taking off. And the volume of searches for Kubernetes today is almost as big as VMware. So that's a big sign that this is starting to happen. But in this process, we have to get those companies to have all of their engineers to be up to speed on Kubernetes. And that's one of the community efforts that we're helping with. We built a website called learning.kasten.io We're going to rebrand it soon at CubeCon, so stay tuned, but we're offering hands on labs there for people to actually come learn Kubernetes with us. Because for us, the faster the adoption goes, the better for our business. >> I was just going to ask you about the learning. So there's a big focus here on educating customers to help dial down the complexity and really get them, these numbers up as John was mentioning. >> And we're really breaking it down to the very beginning. So at this point we have almost 10 labs as we call them up and they start really from install a Kubernetes Cluster and people really hands on are going to install a Kubernetes Cluster. They learn to build an application. They learn obviously to back up the application in the safest way. And then there is how to tune storage, how to implement security, and we're really building it up so that people can step by step in a hands on way learn Kubernetes. >> It's interesting, this VMware Explore, their first new name change, but VMWorld prior, big community, a lot of customers, loyal customers, but they're classic and they're foundational in enterprises and let's face it. Some of 'em aren't going to rip out VMware anytime soon because the workloads are running on it. So in Broadcom we'll have some good action to maybe increase prices or whatnot. So we'll see how that goes. But the personas here are definitely going cloud native. They did with Tanzu, was a great thing. Some stuff was coming off, the fruit's coming off the tree now, you're starting to see it. CNCF has been on this for a long, long time, CubeCon's coming up in Detroit. And so that's just always been great, 'cause you had the day zero event and you got all kinds of community activity, tons of developer action. So here they're talking, let's connect to the developer. There the developers are at CubeCon. So the personas are kind of connecting or overlapping. I'd love to get your thoughts, Matt on? >> So from the personnel that we're talking to, there really is a split between the traditional IT ops and a lot of the people that are here today at VMWare Explore, but we're also talking with the SREs and the dev ops folks. What really needs to happen is we need to get a little bit more experience, some more training and we need to get these two groups to really start to coordinate and work together 'cause you're basically moving from that traditional on-prem environment to a lot of these traditional workloads and the only way to get that experience is to get your hands dirty. >> Right. >> So how would you describe the persona specifically here versus say CubeCon? IT ops? >> Very, very different, well-- >> They still go ahead. Explain. >> Well, I mean, from this perspective, this is all about VMware and everything that they have to offer. So we're dealing with a lot of administrators from that regard. On the Kubernetes side, we have site reliability engineers and their goal is exactly as their title describes. They want to architect arch applications that are very resilient and reliable and it is a different way of working. >> I was on a Twitter spaces about SREs and dev ops and there was people saying their title's called dev ops. Like, no, no, you do dev ops, you don't really, you're not the dev ops person-- >> Right, right. >> But they become the dev ops person because you're the developer running operations. So it's been weird how dev ops been co-opted as a position. >> And that is really interesting. One person told me earlier when I started Kasten, we have this new persona. It's the dev ops person. That is the person that we're going after. But then talking to a few other people who were like, "They're not falling from space." It's people who used to do other jobs who now have a more dev ops approach to what they're doing. It's not a new-- >> And then the SRE conversation was in site, reliable engineer comes from Google, from one person managing multiple clusters to how that's evolved into being the dev ops. So it's been interesting and this is really the growth of scale, the 10X developer going to more of the cloud native, which is okay, you got to run ops and make the developer go faster. If you look at the stuff we've been covering on The Cube, the trends have been cloud native developers, which I call dev ops like developers. They want to go faster. They want self-service and they don't want to slow down. They don't want to deal with BS, which is go checking security code, wait for the ops team to do something. So data and security seem to be the new ops. Not so much IT ops 'cause that's now cloud. So how do you guys see that in, because Kubernetes is rationalizing this, certainly on the compute side, not so much on storage yet but it seems to be making things better in that grinding area between dev and these complicated ops areas like security data, where it's constantly changing. What do you think about that? >> Well there are still a lot of specialty folks in that area in regards to security operations. The whole idea is be able to script and automate as much as possible and not have to create a ticket to request a VM to be billed or an operating system or an application deployed. They're really empowered to automatically deploy those applications and keep them up. >> And that was the old dev ops role or person. That was what dev ops was called. So again, that is standard. I think at CubeCon, that is something that's expected. >> Yes. >> You would agree with that. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So now translating VM World, VMware Explore to CubeCon, what do you guys see as happening between now and then? Obviously got re:Invent right at the end in that first week of December coming. So that's going to be two major shows coming in now back to back that're going to be super interesting for this ecosystem. >> Quite frankly, if you compare the persona, maybe you have to step away from comparing the personas, but really compare the conversations that we're having. The conversations that you're having at a CubeCon are really deep dives. We will have people coming into our booth and taking 45 minutes, one hour of the time of the people who are supposed to do 10 minute demos because they're asking more and more questions 'cause they want to know every little detail, how things work. The conversations here are more like, why should I learn Kubernetes? Why should I start using Kubernetes? So it's really early day. Now, I'm not saying that in a bad way. This is really exciting 'cause when you hear CNCF say that 97% of enterprises are using Kubernetes, that's obviously that small part of their world. Those are their members. We now want to see that grow to the entire ecosystem, the larger ecosystem. >> Well, it's actually a great thing, actually. It's not a bad thing, but I will counter that by saying I am hearing the conversation here, you guys'll like this on the Veeam side, the other side of the Veeam, there's deep dives on ransomware and air gap and configuration errors on backup and recovery and it's all about Veeam on the other side. Those are the guys here talking deep dive on, making sure that they don't get screwed up on ransomware, not Kubernete, but they're going to Kub, but they're now leaning into Kubernetes. They're crossing into the new era because that's the apps'll end up writing the code for that. >> So the funny part is all of those concepts, ransomware and recovery, they're all, there are similar concepts in the world of Kubernetes and both on the Veeam side as well as the Kasten side, we are supporting a lot of those air gap solutions and providing a ransomware recovery solution and from a air gap perspective, there are a many use cases where you do need to live. It's not just the government entity, but we have customers that are cruise lines in Europe, for example, and they're disconnected. So they need to live in that disconnected world or military as well. >> Well, let's talk about the adoption of customers. I mean this is the customer side. What's accelerating their, what's the conversation with the customer at base, not just here but in the industry with Kubernetes, how would you guys categorize that? And how does that get accelerated? What's the customer situation? >> A big drive to Kubernetes is really about the automation, self-service and reliability. We're seeing the drive to and reduction of resources, being able to do more with less, right? This is ongoing the way it's always been. But I was talking to a large university in Western Canada and they're a huge Veeam customer worth 7000 VMs and three months ago, they said, "Over the next few years, we plan on moving all those workloads to Kubernetes." And the reason for it is really to reduce their workload, both from administration side, cost perspective as well as on-prem resources as well. So there's a lot of good business reasons to do that in addition to the technical reliability concerns. >> So what is those specific reasons? This is where now you start to see the rubber hit the road on acceleration. >> So I would say scale and flexibility that ecosystem, that opportunity to choose any application from that or any tool from that cloud native ecosystem is a big driver. I wanted to add to the adoption. Another area where I see a lot of interest is everything AI, machine learning. One example is also a customer coming from Veeam. We're seeing a lot of that and that's a great thing. It's an AI company that is doing software for automated driving. They decided that VMs alone were not going to be good enough for all of their workloads. And then for select workloads, the more scalable one where scalability was more of a topic, would move to Kubernetes. I think at this point they have like 20% of their workloads on Kubernetes and they're not planning to do away with VMs. VMs are always going to be there just like mainframes still exist. >> Yeah, oh yeah. They're accelerating actually. >> We're projecting over the next few years that we're going to go to a 50/50 and eventually lean towards more Kubernetes than VMs, but it was going to be a mix. >> Do you have a favorite customer example, Tom, that you think really articulates the value of what Kubernetes can deliver to customers where you guys are really coming in and help to demystify it? >> I would think SuperStereo is a really great example and you know the details about it. >> I love the SuperStereo story. They were a AWS customer and they're running OpenShift version three and they need to move to OpenShift version four. There is no upgrade in place. You have to migrate all your apps. Now SuperStereo is a large French IT firm. They have over 700 developers in their environment and it was by their estimation that this was going to take a few months to get that migration done. We're able to go in there and help them with the automation of that migration and Kasten was able to help them architect that migration and we did it in the course of a weekend with two people. >> A weekend? >> A weekend. >> That's a hackathon. I mean, that's not real come on. >> Compared to thousands of man hours and a few months not to mention since they were able to retire that old OpenShift cluster, the OpenShift three, they were able to stop paying Jeff Bezos for a couple of those months, which is tens of thousands of dollars per month. >> Don't tell anyone, keep that down low. You're going to get shot when you leave this place. No, seriously. This is why I think the multi-cloud hybrid is interesting because these kinds of examples are going to be more than less coming down the road. You're going to see, you're going to hear more of these stories than not hear them because what containerization now Kubernetes doing, what Dockers doing now and the role of containers not being such a land grab is allowing Kubernetes to be more versatile in its approach. So I got to ask you, you can almost apply that concept to agility, to other scenarios like spanning data across clouds. >> Yes, and that is what we're seeing. So the call I had this morning with a large insurance provider, you may have that insurance provider, healthcare provider, they're across three of the major hyperscalers clouds and they do that for reliability. Last year, AWS went down, I think three times in Q4 and to have a plan of being able to recover somewhere else, you can actually plan your, it's DR, it's a planned migration. You can do that in a few hours. >> It's interesting, just the sidebar here for a second. We had a couple chats earlier today. We had the influences on and all the super cloud conversations and trying to get more data to share with the audience across multiple areas. One of them was Amazon and that super, the hyper clouds like Amazon, as your Google and the rest are out there, Oracle, IBM and everyone else. There's almost a consensus that maybe there's time for some peace amongst the cloud vendors. Like, "Hey, you've already won." (Tom laughs) Everyone's won, now let's just like, we know where everyone is. Let's go peace time and everyone, then 'cause the relationship's not going to change between public cloud and the new world. So there's a consensus, like what does peace look like? I mean, first of all, the pie's getting bigger. You're seeing ecosystems forming around all the big new areas and that's good thing. That's the tides rise and the pie's getting bigger, there's bigger market out there now so people can share and share. >> I've never worked for any of these big players. So I would have to agree with you, but peace would not drive innovation. And in my heart is with tech innovation. I love it when vendors come up with new solutions that will make things better for customers and if that means that we're moving from on-prem to cloud and back to on-prem, I'm fine with that. >> What excites me is really having the flexibility of being able to choose any provider you want because you do have open standards, being cloud native in the world of Kubernetes. I've recently discovered that the Canadian federal government had mandated to their financial institutions that, "Yes, you may have started all of your on cloud presence in Azure, you need to have an option to be elsewhere." So it's not like-- >> Well, the sovereign cloud is one of those big initiatives, but also going back to Java, we heard another guest earlier, we were thinking about Java, right once ran anywhere, right? So you can't do that today in a cloud, but now with containers-- >> You can. >> Again, this is, again, this is the point that's happening. Explain. >> So when you have, Kubernetes is a strict standard and all of the applications are written to that. So whether you are deploying MongoDB or Postgres or Cassandra or any of the other cloud native apps, you can deploy them pretty much the same, whether they're in AKS, EKS or on Tanzu and it makes it much easier. The world became just a lot less for proprietary. >> So that's the story that everybody wants to hear. How does that happen in a way that is, doesn't stall the innovation and the developer growth 'cause the developers are driving a lot of change. I mean, for all the talk in the industry, the developers are doing pretty good right now. They've got a lot of open source, plentiful, open source growing like crazy. You got shifting left in the CICD pipeline. You got tools coming out with Kubernetes. Infrastructure has code is almost a 100% reality right now. So there's a lot of good things going on for developers. That's not an issue. The issue is just underneath. >> It's a skillset and that is really one of the biggest challenges I see in our deployments is a lack of experience. And it's not everyone. There are some folks that have been playing around for the last couple of years with it and they do have that experience, but there are many people that are still young at this. >> Okay, let's do, as we wrap up, let's do a lead into CubeCon, it's coming up and obviously re:Invent's right behind it. Lisa, we're going to have a lot of pre CubeCon interviews. We'll interview all the committee chairs, program chairs. We'll get the scoop on that, we do that every year. But while we got you guys here, let's do a little pre-pre-preview of CubeCon. What can we expect? What do you guys think is going to happen this year? What does CubeCon look? You guys our big sponsor of CubeCon. You guys do a great job there. Thanks for doing that. The community really recognizes that. But as Kubernetes comes in now for this year, you're looking at probably the what third year now that I would say Kubernetes has been on the front burner, where do you see it on the hockey stick growth? Have we kicked the curve yet? What's going to be the level of intensity for Kubernetes this year? How's that going to impact CubeCon in a way that people may or may not think it will? >> So I think first of all, CubeCon is going to be back at the level where it was before the pandemic, because the show, as many other shows, has been suffering from, I mean, virtual events are not like the in-person events. CubeCon LA was super exciting for all the vendors last year, but the attendees were not really there yet. Valencia was a huge bump already and I think Detroit, it's a very exciting city I heard. So it's going to be a blast and it's going to be a huge attendance, that's what I'm expecting. Second I can, so this is going to be my third personally, in-person CubeCon, comparing how vendors evolved between the previous two. There's going to be a lot of interesting stories from vendors, a lot of new innovation coming onto the market. And I think the conversations that we're going to be having will yet, again, be much more about live applications and people using Kubernetes in production rather than those at the first in-person CubeCon for me in LA where it was a lot about learning still, we're going to continue to help people learn 'cause it's really important for us but the exciting part about CubeCon is you're talking to people who are using Kubernetes in production and that's really cool. >> And users contributing projects too. >> Also. >> I mean Lyft is a poster child there and you've got a lot more. Of course you got the stealth recruiting going on there, Apple, all the big guys are there. They have a booth and no one's attending you like, "Oh come on." Matt, what's your take on CubeCon? Going in, what do you see? And obviously a lot of dynamic new projects. >> I'm going to see much, much deeper tech conversations. As experience increases, the more you learn, the more you realize you have to learn more. >> And the sharing's going to increase too. >> And the sharing, yeah. So I see a lot of deep conversations. It's no longer the, "Why do I need Kubernetes?" It's more, "How do I architect this for my solution or for my environment?" And yeah, I think there's a lot more depth involved and the size of CubeCon is going to be much larger than we've seen in the past. >> And to finish off what I think from the vendor's point of view, what we're going to see is a lot of applications that will be a lot more enterprise-ready because that is the part that was missing so far. It was a lot about the what's new and enabling Kubernetes. But now that adoption is going up, a lot of features for different components still need to be added to have them enterprise-ready. >> And what can the audience expect from you guys at CubeCon? Any teasers you can give us from a marketing perspective? >> Yes. We have a rebranding sitting ready for learning website. It's going to be bigger and better. So we're not no longer going to call it, learning.kasten.io but I'll be happy to come back with you guys and present a new name at CubeCon. >> All right. >> All right. That sounds like a deal. Guys, thank you so much for joining John and me breaking down all things Kubernetes, talking about customer adoption, the challenges, but also what you're doing to demystify it. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you very much. >> Our pleasure. >> Thanks Matt. >> For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube's live coverage of VMware Explore 2022. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe. (gentle music)

(light music playing) >> Welcome back to VEEAMON 2022 in Las Vegas. We're at the Aria. This is theCUBE and we're covering two days of VEEAMON. We've done a number of VEEAMONs before, we did Miami, we did New Orleans, we did Chicago and we're, we're happy to be back live after two years of virtual VEEAMONs. I'm Dave Vellante. My co-host is David Nicholson. Eric Herzog is here. You think he's, Eric's been on theCUBE, I think more than any other guest, including Pat Gelsinger, who at one point was the number one guest. Eric Herzog, CMO of INFINIDAT great to see you again. >> Great, Dave, thank you. Love to be on theCUBE. And of course notice my Hawaiian shirt, except I now am supporting an INFINIDAT badge on it. (Dave laughs) Look at that. >> Is that part of the shirt or is that a clip-on? >> Ah, you know, one of those clip-ons but you know, it looks good. Looks good. >> Hey man, what are you doing at VEEAMON? I mean, you guys started this journey into data protection several years ago. I remember we were actually at one of their competitors' events when you first released it, but tell us what's going on with Veeam. >> So we do a ton of stuff with Veeam. We do custom integration. We got some integration on the snapshotting side, but we do everything and we have a purpose built backup appliance known as InfiniGuard. It works with Veeam. We also actually have some customers who use our regular primary storage device as a backup target. The InfiniGuard product will do the data reduction, the dedupe compression, et cetera. The standard product does not, it's just a standard high performance array. We will compress the data, but we have customers that do it either way. We have a couple customers that started with the InfiniBox and then transitioned to the InfiniGuard, realizing that why would you put it on regular storage? Why not go to something that's customized for it? So we do that. We do stuff in the field with them. We've been at all the VEEAMONs since the, since like, I think the second one was the first one we came to. We're doing the virtual one as well as the live one. So we've got a little booth inside, but we're also doing the virtual one today as well. So really strong work with Veeam, particularly at the field level with the sales guys and in the channel. >> So when INFINIDAT does something, you guys go hardcore, high end, fast recovery, you just, you know, reliable, that's kind of your brand. Do you see this movement into data protection as kind of an adjacency to your existing markets? Is it a land and expand strategy? Can you kind of explain the strategy there. >> Ah, so it's actually for us a little bit of a hybrid. So we have several accounts that started with InfiniBox and now have gone with the InfiniGuard. So they start with primary storage and go with secondary storage/modern data protection. But we also have, in fact, we just got a large PO from a Fortune 50, who was buying the InfiniGuard first and now is buying our InfiniBox. >> Both ways. Okay. >> All flash array. And, but they started with backup first and then moved to, so we've got them moving both directions. And of course, now that we have a full portfolio, our original product, the InfiniBox, which was a hybrid array, outperformed probably 80 to 85% of the all flash arrays, 'cause the way we use DRAM. And what's so known as our mural cash technology. So we could do very well, but there is about, you know, 15, 20% of the workloads we could not outperform the competition. So then we had an all flash array and purpose built backup. So we can do, you know, what I'll say is standard enterprise storage, high performance enterprise storage. And then of course, modern data protection with our partnerships such as what we do with Veeam and we've incorporated across the entire portfolio, intense cyber resilience technology. >> Why does the world, Eric, need another purpose built backup appliance? What do you guys bring that is filling a gap in the marketplace? >> Well, the first thing we brought was much higher performance. So when you look at the other purpose built backup appliances, it's been about our ability to have incredibly high performance. The second area has been CapEx and OpEx reduction. So for example, we have a cloud service provider who happens to be in South Africa. They had 14 purpose built backup appliances from someone else, seven in one data center and seven in another. Now they have two InfiniGuards, one in each data center handling all of their backup. You know, they're selling backup as a service. They happen to be using Veeam as well as one other backup company. So if you're the cloud provider from their perspective, they just dramatically reduce their CapEx and OpEx. And of course they've made it easier for them. So that's been a good story for us, that ability to consolidation, whether it be on primary storage or secondary storage. We have a very strong play with cloud providers, particularly those meeting them in small that have to compete with the hyperscalers right. They don't have the engineering of Amazon or Google, right? They can't compete with what the Azure guys have got, but because the way both the InfiniGuard and the InfiniBox work, they could dramatically consolidate workloads. We probably got 30 or 40 midsize and actually several members of the top 10 telcos use us. And when they do their clouds, both their internal cloud, but actually the clouds that are actually running the transmissions and the traffic, it actually runs on InfiniBox. One of them has close to 200 petabytes of InfiniBox and InfiniBox, all flash technology running one of the largest telcos on the planet in a cloud configuration. So all that's been very powerful for us in driving revenue. >> So phrases of the week have been air gap, logical air gap, immutable. Where does InfiniGuard fit into that universe? And what's the profile of the customer that's going to choose InfiniGuard as the target where they're immutable, Write Once Read Many, data is going to live. >> So we did, we announced our InfiniSafe technology first on the InfiniGuard, which actually earlier this year. So we have what I call the four legs of the stool of cyber resilience. One is immutable snapshots, but that's only part of it. Second is logical air gapping, and we can do both local and remote and we can provide and combine local with remote. So for example, what that air gap does is separate the management plane from the actual data plane. Okay. So in this case, the Veeam data backup sets. So the management cannot touch that immutable, can't change it, can't delete it. can't edit it. So management is separated once you start and say, I want to do an immutable snap of two petabytes of Veeam backup dataset. Then we just do that. And the air gap does it, but then you could take the local air gap because as you know, from inception to the end of an attack can be close to 300 days, which means there could be a fire. There could be a tornado, there could be a hurricane, there could be an earthquake. And in the primary data center, So you might as well have that air gap just as you would do- do a remote for disaster recovery and business continuity. Then we have the ability to create a fenced forensic environment to evaluate those backup data sets. And we can do that actually on the same device. That is the purpose built backup appliance. So when you look at the architectural, these are public from our competitors, including the guys that are in sort of Hopkinton/Austin, Texas. You can see that they show a minimum of two physical devices. And in many cases, a third, we can do that with one. So not only do we get the fence forensic environment, just like they do, but we do it with reduction, both CapEx and OpEx. Purpose built backup is very high performance. And then the last thing is our ability to recover. So some people talk about rapid recovery, I would say, they dunno what they're talking about. So when we launched the InfiniGuard with InfiniSafe, we did a live demo, 1.5 petabytes, a Veeam backup dataset. We recovered it in 12 minutes. So once you've identified and that's on the InfiniGuard. On the InfiniBox, once you've identified a good copy of data to do the recovery where you're free of malware ransomware, we can do the recovery in three to five seconds. >> Okay. >> So really, really quick. Actually want to double click on something because people talk about immutable copies, immutable snapshots in particular, what have the actual advances been? I mean, is this simply a setting that maybe we didn't set for retention at some time in the past, or if you had to engineer something net new into a system so to provide that logical air gap. >> So what's net new is the air gapping part. Immutable snapshots have been around, you know, before we were on screen, you talked about WORM, Write Once Read Many. Well, since I'm almost 70 years old, I actually know what that means. When you're 30 or 40 or 50, you probably don't even know what a WORM is. Okay. And the real use of immutable snapshots, it was to replace WORM which was an optical technology. And what was the primary usage? Regulatory and compliance, healthcare, finance and publicly traded companies that were worried about. The SEC or the EU or the Japanese finance ministry coming down on them because they're out of compliance and regulatory. That was the original use of immutable snap. Then people were, well, wait a second. Malware ransomware could attack me. And if I got something that's not changeable, that makes it tougher. So the real magic of immutability was now creating the air gap part. Immutability has been around, I'd say 25 years. I mean, WORMs sort of died back when I was at Mac store the first time. So that was 1990-ish is when WORMs sort of fell away. And there have been immutable snapshots from most of the major storage vendors, as well as a lot of the small vendors ever since they came out, it's kind of like a checkbox item because again, regulatory and compliance, you're going to sell to healthcare, finance, public trade. If you don't have the immutable snapshot, then they don't have their compliance and regulatory for SEC or tax purposes, right? With they ever end up in an audit, you got to produce data. And no one's using a WORM drive anymore to my knowledge. >> I remember the first storage conference I ever went to was in Monterey. It had me in the early 1980s, 84 maybe. And it was a optical disc drive conference. The Jim Porter of optical. >> Yep. (laughs) >> I forget what the guy's name was. And I remember somebody coming up to me, I think it was like Bob Payton rest his soul, super smart strategy guy said, this is never going to happen because of the cost and that's what it was. And now you've got that capability on flash, you know, hard disk, et cetera. >> Right. >> So the four pillars, immutability, the air gap, both local and remote, the fence forensics and the recovery speed. Right? >> Right. Pick up is one thing. Recovery is everything. Those are the four pillars, right? >> Those are the four things. >> And your contention is that those four things together differentiate you from the competition. You mentioned, you know, the big competition, but how unique is this in the marketplace, those capabilities and how difficult is it to replicate? >> So first of all, if someone really puts their engineering hat to it, it's not that hard to replicate. It takes a while. Particularly if you're doing an enterprise, for example, our solutions all have a hundred percent availability guarantee. That's hard to do. Most guys have seven nines. >> That's hard. >> We really will guarantee a hundred percent availability. We offer an SLA that's included when you buy. We don't charge extra for it. It's like if you want it, like you just get it. Second thing is really making sure on the recovery side is the hardest part, particularly on a purpose built backup appliance. So when you look at other people and you delve into their public material, press releases, white paper, support documentation. No one's talking about. Yeah, we can take a 1.5 petabyte Veeam backup data set and make it available in 12 minutes and 12 seconds, which was the exact time that we did on our live demo when we launched the product in February of 2022. No one's talking that. On primary storage, you're hearing some of the vendors such as my old employer that also who, also starts with an "I", talk about a recovery time of two to three hours once you have a known good copy. On primary storage, once we have a known good copy, we're talking three to five seconds for that copy to be available. So that's just sort of the power of the snapshot technology, how we manage our metadata and what we've done, which previous to cyber resiliency, we were known for our replication capability and our snapshot capability from an enterprise class data store. That's what people said. INFINIDAT really knows how to do the replication snapshot. I remember our founder was one of the technical founders of EMC for a product known as the Symmetric, which then became the DMAX, the VMAX and is now is the PowerMax. That was invented by the guy who founded INFINIDAT. So that team has the real chops at enterprise high-end storage to the global fortune 2000. And what are the key feature checkbox items they need that's in both the InfiniBox and also in the InfiniGuard. >> So the business case for cyber resiliency is changing. As Dave said, we've had a big dose last several months, you know, couple years actually, of the importance of cyber resiliency, given all the ransomware tax, et cetera. But it sounds like the business case is shifting really focused on avoiding that risk, avoiding that downtime time versus the cost. The cost is always important. I mean, you got a consolidation play here, right? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Dedupe, does dedupe come into play? >> So on the InfiniGuard we do both dedupe and compression. On the InfiniBox we only do compression. So we do have data reduction. It depends on which product you're using from a Veeam perspective. Most of that now is with the InfiniGuard. So you get the block level dedupe and you get compression. And if you can do both, depending on the data set, we do both. >> How does that affect recovery time? >> Yeah, good question. >> So it doesn't affect recovery times. >> Explain why. >> So first of all, when you're doing a backup data set, the final final recovery, you recovered the backup data set, whether it's Veeam or one of their competitors, you actually make it available to the backup administrator to do a full restore of a backup data set. Okay. So in that case, we get it ready and expose it to the Veeam admin or some other backup admin. And then they launch the Veeam software or the other software and do a restore. Okay. So it's really a two step process on the secondary storage model and actually three. First identifying a known good backup copy. Second then we recover, which is again 12, 13 minutes. And then the backup admin's got to do a, you know, a restore of the backup 'cause it's backup data set in the format of backup, which is different from every backup vendor. So we support that. We get it ready to go. And then whether it's a Veeam backup administrator and quite honestly, from our perspective, most of our customers in the global fortune 2000, 25% of the fortune 50 use INIFINIDAT products. 25% and we're a tiny company. So we must have some magic fairy dust that appeals to the biggest companies on the planet. But most of our customers in that area and actually say probably in the fortune 500 actually use two to three different backup packages. So we can support all those on a single InfiniGuard or multiples depending on how big their backup data sets. Our biggest InfiniGuard is 50 petabytes counting the data reduction technology. So we get that ready. On the InfiniBox, the recovery really is, you know, a couple of seconds and in that case, it's primary data in block format. So we just make that available. So on the InfiniBox, the recovery is once, well two. Identifying a known good copy, first step, then just doing recovery and it's available 'cause it's blocked data. >> And that recovery doesn't include movement of a whole bunch of data. It's essentially realignment of pointers to where the good data is. >> Right. >> Now in the InfiniBox as well as in InfiniGuard. >> No, it would be, So in the case of that, in the case of the InfiniGuard, it's a full recovery of a backup data set. >> Okay. >> So the backup software just launches and it sees, >> Okay. >> your backup one of Veeam and just starts doing a restore with the Veeam restoration technology. Okay? >> Okay. >> In the case of the block, as long as the physical InfiniBox, if that was the primary storage and then filter box is not damaged when you make it available, it's available right away to the apps. Now, if you had an issue with the app side or the physical server side, and now you're pointing new apps and you had to reload stuff on that side, you have to point it at that InfiniBox which has the data. And then you got to wait for the servers and the SAP or Oracle or Mongo, Cassandra to recognize, oh, this is my primary storage. So it depends on the physical configuration on the server side and the application perspective, how bad were the apps damaged? So let's take malware. Malware is even worse because you either destroying data or messing, playing with the app so that the app is now corrupted as well as the data is corrupted. So then it's going to take longer the block data's ready, the SAP workload. And if the SAP somehow was compromised, which is a malware thing, not a ransomware thing, they got to reload a good copy of SAP before it can see the data 'cause the malware attacked the application as well as the data. Ransomware doesn't do that. It just holds it for ransom and it encrypts. >> So this is exactly what we're talking about. When we talk about operational recovery and automation, Eric is addressing the reality that it doesn't just end at the line above some arbitrary storage box, you know, reaching up real recovery, reaches up into the application space and it's complicated. >> That's when you're actually recovered. >> Right. >> When the application- >> Well, think of it like a disaster. >> Okay. >> Yes, right. >> I'll knock on woods since I was born and still live in California. Dave too. Let's assume there's a massive earthquake in the bay area in LA. >> Let's not. >> Okay. Let's yes, but hypothetically and the data center's cat five. It doesn't matter what they're, they're all toast. Okay. Couple weeks later it's modern. You know, people figure out what to do and certain buildings don't fall down 'cause of the way earthquake standards are in California now. So there's data available. They move into temporary space. Okay. Data's sitting there in the Colorado data center and they could do a restore. Well, they can't do a restore. How many service did they need? Had they reloaded all of the application software to do a restoration. What happened to the people? If no one got injured, like in the 1989 earthquake in California, very few people got injured yet cost billions of dollars. But everyone was watching this San Francisco giants played in Oakland, >> I remember >> so no one was on the road. >> Al Michael's. >> Epic moment. >> Imagine it's in the middle of commute time in LA and San Francisco, hundreds of thousands of people. What if it's your data center team? Right? So there's a whole bunch around disaster recovery and business country that have nothing to do with the storage, the people, what your process. So I would argue that malware ransomware is a disaster and it's exactly the same thing. You know, you got the known good copy. You've got okay. You're sure that the SAP and Oracle, especially on the malware side, weren't compromised. On the ransomware side, you don't have to worry about that. And those things, you got to take a look at just as if it, I would argue malware and ransomware is a disaster and you need to have a process just like you would. If there was an earthquake, a fire or a flood in the data center, you need a similar process. That's slightly different, but the same thing, servers, people, software, the data itself. And when you have that all mapped out, that's how you do successful malware ransomeware recovery. It's a different type of disaster. >> It's absolutely a disaster. It comes down to business continuity and be able to transact business with as little disruption as possible. We heard today from the keynotes and then Jason Buffington came on about the preponderance of ransomware. Okay. We know that. But then the interesting stat was the percentage of customers that paid the ransom about a third weren't able to recover. And so 'cause you kind of had this feeling of all right, well, you know, see it on, you know, CNBC, should you pay the ransom or not? You know, pay the ransom. Okay. You'll get back. But no, it's not the case. You won't necessarily get back. So, you know, Veeam stated, Hey, our goal is to sort of eliminate that problem. Are you- You feel like you guys in a partnership can actually achieve that. >> Yes. >> So, and you have customers that have actually avoided, you know, been hit and were able to- >> We have people who won't publicly say they've been hit, but the way they talk about what they did, like in a meeting, they were hit and they were very thankful. >> (laughs) Yeah. >> And so that's been very good. I- >> So we got proof. >> Yes, we absolutely have proof. And quite honestly, with the recent legislation in the United States, malware and ransomware actually now is also regulatory and compliance. >> Yeah. >> Because the new law states mid-March that whether it's Herzog's bar and grill to bank of America or any large foreign company doing business in the US, you have to report to the United States federal government, any attack, same with the county school district with any local government, any agency, the federal government, as well as every company from the tiniest to the largest in the world that does, they're supposed to report it 'cause the government is trying to figure out how to fight it. Just the way if you don't report burglary, how they catch the burglars. >> Does your solution simplify testing in any way or reduce the risk of testing? >> Well, because the recovery is so rapid, we recommend that people do this on a regular basis. So for example, because the recovery is so quick, you can recover in 12 minutes while we do not practice, let's say once a month or once every couple weeks. And guess what? It also allows you to build a repository of known good copies. Remember when you get ransomeware, no one's going to come say, Hey, I'm Mr. Rans. I'm going to steal your stuff. It's all done surreptitiously. They're all James Bond on the sly who doesn't say "By the way, I'm James Bond". They are truly underneath the radar. And they're very slowly encrypting that data set. So guess what? Your primary data and your backup data that you don't want to be attacked can be attacked. So it's really about finding a known good copy. So if you're doing this on a regular basis, you can get an index of known good copies. >> Right. >> And then, you know, oh, I can go back to last Tuesday and you know that that's good. Otherwise you're literally testing Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday to try to find a known good copy, which delays the recovery process 'cause you really do have to test. They make sure it's good. >> If you increase that frequency, You're going to protect yourself. That's why I got to go. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBEs. Great to see you. >> Great. Thank you very much. I'll be wearing a different Hawaiian shirt next to. >> All right. That sounds good. >> All right, Eric Herzog, Eric Herzog on theCUBE, Dave Vallante for David Nicholson. We'll be right back at VEEAMON 2022. Right after this short break. (light music playing)

>>Welcome everyone to the cubes presentation of the AWS startup showcase open cloud innovations. This is season two episode one of the ongoing series and we're covering exciting and innovative startups from the AWS ecosystem. Today. We're going to focus on the open source community. I'm your host, Dave Vellante. And right now we're going to talk about open source security and mitigating risk in light of a recent discovery of a zero day flaw in log for J a Java logging utility and a related white house executive order that points to the FTC pursuing companies that don't properly secure consumer data as a result of this vulnerability and with me to discuss this critical issue and how to more broadly address software supply chain risk is Don Fisher. Who's the CEO of tide lift. Thank you for coming on the program, Donald. >>Thanks for having me excited to be here. Yeah, pleasure. >>So look, there's a lot of buzz. You open the news, you go to your favorite news site and you see this, you know, a log for J this is an, a project otherwise known as logged for shell. It's this logging tool. My understanding is it's, it's both ubiquitous and very easy to exploit. Maybe you could explain that in a little bit more detail. And how do you think this vulnerability is going to affect things this year? >>Yeah, happy to, happy to dig in a little bit in orient around this. So, you know, just a little definitions to start with. So log for J is a very widely used course component that's been around for quite a while. It's actually an amazing piece of technology log for J is used in practically every serious enterprise Java application over the last 10 going on 20 years. So it's, you know, log for J itself is fantastic. The challenge that organization organizations have been facing relate to a specific security vulnerability that was discovered in log for J and that has been given this sort of brand's name as it happens these days. Folks may remember Heartbleed around the openness to sell vulnerability some years back. This one has been dubbed logged for shell. And the reason why it was given that name is that this is a form of security vulnerability that actually allows attackers. >>You know, if a system is found that hasn't been patched to remediate it, it allows hackers to get full control of a, of a system of a server that has the software running on it, or includes this log for J component. And that means that they can do anything. They can access, you know, private customer data on that system, or really do anything and so-called shell level access. So, you know, that's the sort of definitions of what it is, but the reason why it's important is in the, in the small, you know, this is a open door, right? It's a, if, if organizations haven't patched this, they need to respond to it. But one of the things that's kind of, you know, I think important to recognize here is that this log for J is just one of literally thousands of independently created open source components that flow into the applications that almost every organization built and all of them all software is going to have security vulnerabilities. And so I think that log for J is, has been a catalyst for organizations to say, okay, we've got to solve this specific problem, but we all also have to think ahead about how is this all gonna work. If our software supply chain originates with independent creators across thousands of projects across the internet, how are we going to put a better plan in place to think ahead to the next log for J log for shell style incident? And for sure there will be more >>Okay. So you see this incident as a catalyst to maybe more broadly thinking about how to secure the, the digital supply chain. >>Absolutely. Yeah, it's a, this is proving a point that, you know, a variety of folks have been making for a number of years. Hey, we depend, I mean, honestly these days more than 70% of most applications, most custom applications are comprised of this third party open source code. Project's very similar in origin and governance to log for J that's just reality. It's actually great. That's an amazing thing that the humans collaborating on the internet have caused to be possible that we have this rich comments of open source software to build with, but we also have to be practical about it and say, Hey, how are we going to work together to make sure that that software as much as possible is vetted to ensure that it meets commercial standards, enterprise standards ahead of time. And then when the inevitable issues arise like this incident around the log for J library, that we have a great plan in place to respond to it and to, you know, close the close the door on vulnerabilities when they, when they show up. >>I mean, you know, when you listen to the high level narrative, it's easy to point fingers at organizations, Hey, you're not doing enough now. Of course the U S government has definitely made attempts to emphasize this and, and shore up in, in, in, in, in push people to shore up the software supply chain, they've released an executive order last may, but, but specifically, I mean, it's just a complicated situation. So what steps should organizations really take to make sure that they don't fall prey to these future supply chain attacks, which, you know, are, as you pointed out are inevitable. >>Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a great point that you make that the us federal government has taken proactive steps starting last year, 2021 in the fallout of the solar winds breach, you know, about 12 months ago from the time that we're talking, talking here, the U S government actually was a bit ahead of the game, both in flagging the severity of this, you know, area of concern and also directing organizations on how to respond to it. So the, in May, 2021, the white house issued an executive order on cybersecurity and it S directed federal agencies to undertake a whole bunch of new measures to ensure the security of different aspects of their technology and software supply chain specifically called out open source software as an area where they put, you know, hard requirements around federal agencies when they're acquiring technology. And one of the things that the federal government that the white house cybersecurity executive order directed was that organizations need to start with creating a list of the third-party open source. >>That's flowing into their applications, just that even have a table of contents or an index to start working with. And that's, that's called a, a software bill of materials or S bomb is how some people pronounce that acronym. So th the federal government basically requires federal agencies to now create Nessbaum for their applications to demand a software bill of materials from vendors that are doing business with the government and the strategy there has been to expressly use the purchasing power of the us government to level up industry as a whole, and create the necessary incentives for organizations to, to take this seriously. >>You know, I, I feel like the solar winds hack that you mentioned, of course it was widely affected the government. So we kind of woke them up, but I feel like it was almost like a stuck set Stuxnet moment. Donald were very sophisticated. I mean, for the first time patches that were supposed to be helping us protect, now we have to be careful with them. And you mentioned the, the bill of its software, bill of materials. We have to really inspect that. And so let's get to what you guys do. How do you help organizations deal with this problem and secure their open source software supply chain? >>Yeah, absolutely happy to tell you about, about tide lift and, and how we're looking to help. So, you know, the company, I co-founded the company with a couple of colleagues, all of whom are long-term open source folks. You know, I've been working in around commercializing open source for the last 20 years that companies like red hat and, and a number of others as have my co-founders the opportunity that we saw is that, you know, while there have been vendors for some of the traditional systems level, open source components and stacks like Linux, you know, of course there's red hat and other vendors for Linux, or for Kubernetes, or for some of the databases, you know, there's standalone companies for these logs, for shell style projects, there just hasn't been a vendor for them. And part of it is there's a challenge to cover a really vast territory, a typical enterprise that we inspect has, you know, upwards of 10,000 log for shell log for J like components flowing into their application. >>So how do they get a hand around their hands around that challenge of managing that and ensuring it needs, you know, reasonable commercial standards. That's what tide lifts sets out to do. And we do it through a combination of two elements, both of which are fairly unique in the market. The first of those is a purpose-built software solution that we've created that keeps track of the third-party open source, flowing into your applications, inserts itself into your DevSecOps tool chain, your developer tooling, your application development process. And you can kind of think of it as next to the point in your release process, where you run your unit test to ensure the business logic in the code that your team is writing is accurate and sort of passes tests. We do a inspection to look at the state of the third-party open source packages like Apache log for J that are flowing into your, into your application. >>So there's a software element to it. That's a multi-tenant SAS service. We're excited to be partnered with, with AWS. And one of the reasons why we're here in this venue, talking about how we are making that available jointly with AWS to, to drink customers deploying on AWS platforms. Now, the other piece of the, of our solution is really, really unique. And that's the set of relationships that Tyler has built directly with these independent open source maintainers, the folks behind these open source packages that organizations rely on. And, you know, this is where we sort of have this idea. Somebody is making that software in the first place, right? And so would those folks be interested? Could we create a set of aligned incentives to encourage them, to make sure that that software meets a bunch of enterprise standards and areas around security, like, you know, relating to the log for J vulnerability, but also other complicated parts of open source consumption like licensing and open source license, accuracy, and compatibility, and also maintenance. >>Like if somebody looking after the software going forward. So just trying to basically invite open source creators, to partner with us, to level up their packages through those relationships, we get really, really clean, clear first party data from the folks who create, maintain the software. And we can flow that through the tools that I described so that end organizations can know that they're building with open source components that have been vetted to meet these standards, by the way, there's a really cool side effect of this business model, which is that we pay these open source maintainers to do this work with us. And so now we're creating a new income stream around what previously had been primarily a volunteer activity done for impact in this universe of open source software. We're helping these open source maintainers kind of GoPro on an aspect of what they do around open source. And that means they can spend more time applying more process and tools and methodology to making that open source software even better. And that's good for our customers. And it's good for everyone who relies on open source software, which is really everyone in society these days. That's interesting. I >>Was going to ask you what's their incentive other than doing the right thing. Can you give us an example of, of maybe a example of an open source maintainer that you're working with? >>Yeah. I mean, w we're working with hundreds of open source maintainers and a few of the key open source foundations in different areas across JavaScript, Java PHP, Ruby python.net, and, you know, like examples of categories of projects that we're working with, just to be clear, are things like, you know, web frameworks or parser libraries or logging libraries, like a, you know, log for J and all the other languages, right? Or, you know, time and date manipulation libraries. I mean, they, these are sort of the, you know, kind of core building blocks of applications and individually, they, you know, they may seem like, you know, maybe a minor, a minor thing, but when you multiply them across how many applications these get used in and log for J is a really, really clarifying case for folks to understand this, you know, what can seemingly a small part of your overall application estate can have disproportionate impact on, on your operations? As we saw with many organizations that spent, you know, a weekend or a week, or a large part of the holidays, scrambling to patch and remediate this, a single vulnerability in one of those thousands of packages in that case log. >>Okay, got it. So you have this two, two headed, two vectors that I'm going to call it, your ecosystem, your relationship with these open source maintainers is kind of a, that just didn't happen overnight, and it develop those relationships. And now you get first party data. You monetize that with a software service that is purpose built as the monitor of the probe that actually tracks that third, third party activity. So >>Exactly right. Got it. >>Okay. So a lot of companies, Donald, I mean, this is, like I said before, it's a complicated situation. You know, a lot of people don't have the skillsets to deal with this. And so many companies just kind of stick their head in the sand and, you know, hope for the best, but that's not a great strategy. What are the implications for organizations if they don't really put the tools and processes into place to manage their open source, digital supply chain. >>Yeah. Ignoring the problem is not a viable strategy anymore, you know, and it's just become increasingly clear as these big headline incidents that happened like Heartbleed and solar winds. And now this logged for shell vulnerability. So you can, you can bet on that. Continuing into the future and organizations I think are, are realizing the ones that haven't gotten ahead of this problem are realizing this is a critical issue that they need to address, but they have help, right. You know, the federal government, another action beyond that cybersecurity executive order that was directed at federal agencies early last year, just in the last week or so, the FTC of the U S federal trade commission has made a much more direct warning to private companies and industry saying that, you know, issues like this log for J vulnerability risk exposing private, you know, consumer data. That is one of the express mandates of the FTC is to avoid that the FTC has said that this is, you know, bears on both the federal trade commission act, as well as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley act, which relates to consumer data privacy. >>And the FTC just came right out and said it, they said they cited the $700 million settlements that Equifax was subject to for their data breach that also related to open source component, by the way, that that had not been patched by, by Equifax. And they said the FTC intents to use its full legal authority to pursue companies that failed to take reasonable steps, to protect consumer data from exposure as a result of log for J or similar known vulnerabilities in the future. So the FTC is saying, you know, this is a critical issue for consumer privacy and consumer data. We are going to enforce against companies that do not take reasonable precautions. What are reasonable precautions? I think it's kind of a mosaic of solutions, but I'm glad to say tide lift is contributing a really different and novel solution to the mix that we hope will help organizations contend with this and avoid that kind of enforcement action from FTC or other regulators. >>Well, and the good news is that you can tap a tooling like tide lift in the cloud as a service and you know, much easier today than it was 10 or 15 years ago to, to resolve, or at least begin to demonstrate that you're taking action against this problem. >>Absolutely. There's new challenges. Now I'm moving into a world where we build on a foundation of independently created open source. We need new solutions and new ideas, and that's a, you know, that's part of what we're, we're, we're showing up with from the tide lift angle, but there's many other elements that are going to be necessary to provide the full solution around securing the open source supply chain going forward. >>Well, Donald Fisher of tide lift, thanks so much for coming to the cube and best of luck to your organization. Thanks for the good work that you guys do. >>Thanks, Dave. Really appreciate your partnership on this, getting the word out and yeah, thanks so much for today. >>Very welcome. And you are watching the AWS startup showcase open cloud innovations. Keep it right there for more action on the cube, your leader in enterprise tech coverage.

(upbeat intro jingle) >> 'Kay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent, 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, with your Matt Morgan, Vice President of Cloud Infrastructure Business Group of VMware, CUBE alumni. Matt, great to see you. Can't wait to see you in person, but thanks for coming in remotely for the virtual now hybrid CUBE for re:Invent. >> It's good to see you too, John. Thanks for having us. You know, it's our ninth year covering re:Invented, Remember the first year we went there, it was all developers, right? >> Right. >> And reminds me of the story that you guys have with AWS, you know, VMware Cloud, and VMware with vSphere pioneered operations in IT, you know, vSphere workloads, but now you move that all in the cloud. I remember Ragu when he announced that deal with Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy, we covered it extensively. People were like "What are they doing here? This is interesting". Boy- >> Yeah, you- >> The pundits all get it wrong. Their relationship has been blossoming. It's been really powerful, take us through the history here. >> Thanks, John, I mean, you're absolutely right. We have a phenomenal relationship with Amazon Web Services. The value of our partnership has been realized by customers all over the world, in every industry, as they embrace the seamless hybrid cloud experience powered by VMware, vSphere, and of course VM-ware Cloud Stack. Of course, we've recently expanded our operations here, including Japan and the launch of the Soccer Regions. And we're fully open for business with the U.S. Federal Government with VMware Cloud on AWS Gov Cloud. There's strong alignment across the field with new go-to-market teams on both sides and a powerful resell agreement that enables AWS sellers to take VMware Cloud on AWS and all the associated VMware services, such as VMware cloud disaster recovery, NSX vRealize Cloud Management, to their enterprise customers. And we couldn't be doing better. >> Yeah, and you brought up a lot of things there. You mentioned Outpost, mentioned Gov Cloud, you mentioned Marketplace, which means you mentioned the acronym, which is basically, I think it's called EDP Credits, which essentially the enterprise, Amazon's Salesforce working together. So, essentially full business model and technical integrations with Amazon. So, success certainly being demonstrated there. So congratulations, that being said, there's still more to do. We got this whole big wave coming on, you see the edge, you seeing multicloud, you seeing hybrid becoming the operational model, both on premises and in the cloud. And so, customers really are asking themselves "Okay, I got VMware, I got AWS Cloud, I got to secure these clouds now. I got to start putting the business model together on top of the technical architecture". You know, microservices, Kubernetes, Tansu, all the things you guys are doing, but customers want to ask you "What about securing the cloud?", this is the number one question, what's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, it's a great topic, John, at the end of the day, this is about evolving the hybrid cloud. And if you think about it, originally, the hybrid cloud was about unifying both infrastructure and operations between the on-premises world, and the public cloud world. And now what's happening, is we are seeing people embrace that in spades, and as a result of that, their Tier 1 applications are running both on-premises and in the public cloud. And with our new announced local cloud capabilities with VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost, it's leading to this whole new enterprise architecture, which we call the distributed cloud. When you look at deploying enterprise applications in a distributed cloud environment, the conversation starts with consistent networking and importantly security. So, let's talk about that for a moment. Customers are asking us "How do we secure our data when we start having infrastructure in a variety of locations? Are our applications and networks... Are they really secure when they run in these completely different environments? And importantly, when we move an application, we take it from our on-premise data center, we move it to the public cloud are the security policies... Are they moving with it? Do I need to re-architect for that?". And the real question, all of this boils down to "Are we expanding that attack surface when we move to VMware Cloud on AWS?". And so we have to come back to what do we do here to really alleviate these concerns? With data security, it's all about encryption, universal insights. We have the super root capability within our platform to ensure that everything is measured, every message from an application, every data, it's great for Chain Of Custody, Audit. Of course we have backup DR Ransomware. On the application side, of course, segmentation is super important with application centric firewalls, VPNs, tunneling, EDR, IDS, IPS. And of course, none of that matters if you have to reset everything up every time an application moves. And this is a real unique value proposition for us, it's about portability. We deliver portable security. We can move an application, the APIs are standard. You can move it up to the public cloud, your policies, your integrations, even if it's third-party integrations, they're maintained. And that really delivers the ability to say "Look, we can make sure your attack surface is not expanding, it's a controlled environment for you". And that really shrinks the risk factors associated with moving to this distributed cloud environment. >> You know, that's the really, I think the key point, I think that you brought up this infrastructure, kind of, table stakes. Which keeps rising because security's, honestly is now there's no... There's a huge... There's no perimeter. It's huge surface area. Everything has to be secured and locked down. And the big theme at re:Invent this year is data, right? So, you know, data and security all go hand in hand. And so that brings up the aspect of the edge. The edge is now booming, you seeing 5G again, you're here hearing it here at reinvent again, more and more 5G. You mentioned local services, Outpost is evolving. This is kind of the new area, and certainly, attack factor as well. So, you mentioned this whole local services. Take me through that because this becomes interesting because this is an architectural issue for enterprises to figure out, "Okay, I got to distribute a computing architecture, it's called The Cloud and multiple clouds. Now, I've got this edge, whole 'nother opening opens up the case for the architecture conversation". What's the strategy? How do you guys view the case? How do you make the case for local services? >> So, we were super excited to announce VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost. This is a local cloud as a service offering. So, let me break that down a little bit. Of course, compute at the edge is nothing new, but the problem with traditional approaches is typically edge locations may lack IT excellence. Which means there's no one there to manage the service. VMware Cloud on AWS outposts is that local cloud as a service, meaning it's fully managed and at the edge, that's a perfect fit. It's hand in glove for those types of workloads that are out, pushed all the way out, whether it's part of an agricultural deployment or an energy production facility or retail store, where there isn't that typical IT excellence. VMware cloud on AWS outposts enables customers to deploy the same Cloud instance as they're running VMware Cloud on AWS, but be able to do it out at that edge environment. And when you look at the overall value of VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost, it's about delivering a simpler, cost effective, consistent cloud experience for those on-prem environments that matches the operating model of the public cloud. Think of the places that you really want to have cloud infrastructure, where it's critical. Going back to your point on data, getting real time insights on that data, to be able to process that, we call those perishable insights. The value is the immediacy understanding that value specific to the moment it's being captured. Think about the different types of sensor environments, where data's coming off expensive equipment, that's measuring temperature and speed. Understanding that value back to the operator - really, really important. You don't have time to pipe that data up to a cloud process and send the results back down. Edge environments require that real-time stuff. So, together with AWS, we jointly deliver a fully managed service right down to the AWS hardware on which we built the VMware cloud instance. We think about where we're seeing the most interest here. You can look across all kinds of industries and use cases, and we're seeing it specifically in healthcare, out of the hospital, manufacturing for equipment monitoring, government, higher education, where those end points are typically virtualized. There are others, but these are the big ones so far. >> You know, I was just talking to an AMD executive or product marketing person on the gaming side. And they're living this right now because they're putting all the virtual collaboration in the cloud, all the data, because they have so much data and they have so much need for these special instances, whether it's GPUs, and CPUs, a mix and match. So, as instances become more special purposed, that's going to enable them to have more productivity. But then, when you have that baseline in the cloud, the edge also has processing power. So, I think people are starting to see this notion of "Okay, I'm in the cloud, but I can also have that cloud edge without moving data back to the centralized cloud and processing it at the edge with software". >> Yeah, that's true. >> This is real. >> It's super real. And the one that really resonates with customers, is one that we all understand and that's healthcare. Anytime you're in a regional environment where you're at a hospital, think of an ICU, the criticality of that data being processed, providing the insights, this is more mission critical than any other environment, because we're dealing with human lives, think about the complex compute requirements of that environment. And then look at the beauty and elegance of this system, a cloud-based system on premises, doing that compute, providing those insights, giving reality back to the clinician, so they can make those decisions. Healthcare is super, super important. And we see customers across the spectrum, looking at what's happening at the edge and embracing it, whether it's healthcare or other industries. And again, it's a perfect fit for them. >> Yeah, real quick, before we move on to what's new, I'm want to get to that, the Tansu stuff as well. What other industries are popping out? Obviously, manufacturing. What can you talk with some industries and some verticals that are really primed for this local cloud service? >> So, let's talk about manufacturing for a moment. Manufacturing is another facility oriented compute requirement that is perfectly fit, from a system and solution way like VMware cloud on AWS Outposts. Within the manufacturing environment, there's tons of very critical machines. There's inventory management, there's a combination of time management, people management, bringing it all together to ensure that process lines are moving as required, that inventory is provided at the specific moment it's needed, and to make sure that everything, especially in today's supply chain world is provided when is required. This type of capability allows an organization to bring in that sensor data, bring in that inventory data, produce applications that manage that in real time, delivering that compute. And in the manufacturing floor, again, limited IT excellence. So, this provides that capability. Another one is energy production. Think about energy production that's out in the field in North Dakota, or out on an oil rig that might be in the Gulf of Mexico. Not only are you dealing with lack of IT excellence, you're also dealing with limited connectivity. This equipment needs to be monitored and censored and the data from those sensors help drive critical decisions. And with limited connectivity, I mean, you may not even have an LTE signal, the need to do that real time is paramount, local cloud provides that. >> Yeah, and I'd also just add, because we're going to move on, but higher ED is going to be completely transformed. Well, I think that's going to be kind of like a pleat revamp. Let's get into what's new on VMware Cloud on AWS give us the update on the new things that people should know about. That's important that they should review, take us through that, what's new? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, the first is the integration with the AWS console. This is a big thing that we're delivering because VMware Cloud on AWS is a native service of AWS. I have to kind of say that twice, it's a native service of AWS. And because of that, we get the same operational and commerce experience for VMware Cloud instances as customers do with traditional AWS services. This means customers now have a choice between AWS centric operating model, which is highly relevant to DevOps and developers, or VMware centric operating model, which is very relevant to traditional operators, and IT users. VMware Cloud on AWS Gov Cloud is expanded to the U.S., East Virginia Region, and achieved aisle five certification. This new region will make the service more relevant for the Eastern Seaboard where much of the Federal Government resides. And of course with aisle five, it opens up VMware Cloud on AWS to the U.S. military and defense contractors, which is huge because there's massive cloud transformation contracts currently in play. And of course, VMware Cloud on AWS Gov Cloud provides the most secure enterprise cloud for those DOD customers, especially when they focus on those critical Tier 1 workloads. >> It's been three years since the GA of the VMware cloud on AWS, has been earlier, since you announced it> You're pumping on all cylinders, as we had predicted, others didn't, just FYI for the folks watching. What's the final vibe? End the segment with your view of what's going on with VMware Cloud on AWS? What's the bumper sticker? >> So, at the end of the day, every customer is looking to migrate and modernize their workloads. And VMWare cloud gives them that capability to do it faster than anyone else. Customers take their applications, tier 1 applications, move it to that secure distributed cloud construct, that idea of having VMware Cloud on AWS, sharing all those security policies, all of that consistent infrastructure and operations. And then they can modernize those applications, using all of those cloud services and the ability to use Tansu to containerize where applicable. We're excited about these capabilities, and our customers are adopting it faster each and every year. And we're thrilled about the traction we're had. And we're thrilled about the partnership we have with Amazon Web Services. So, lots more to come in this space. >> Lot of great stuff, people moving up the stack on the cloud, you're seeing more refactoring in the cloud. Matt Morgan, great to see you. We've been talking 'about this for years on theCUBE. Great to come on and give some insights. All happening. Infrastructure is code. And everyone's winning with containers and microservices. So, great stuff. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks a lot, John, take care. >> Okay, Matt Morgan, the VP of Cloud Infrastructure Business Group of VMware. This theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent, 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat outro jingle)

(upbeat intro jingle) >> 'Kay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent, 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, with your Matt Morgan, Vice President of Cloud Infrastructure Business Group of VMware, CUBE alumni. Matt, great to see you. Can't wait to see you in person, but thanks for coming in remotely for the virtual now hybrid CUBE for re:Invent. >> It's good to see you too, John. Thanks for having us. You know, it's our ninth year covering re:Invented, Remember the first year we went there, it was all developers, right? >> Right. >> And reminds me of the story that you guys have with AWS, you know, VMware Cloud, and VMware with vSphere pioneered operations in IT, you know, vSphere workloads, but now you move that all in the cloud. I remember Ragu when he announced that deal with Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy, we covered it extensively. People were like "What are they doing here? This is interesting". Boy- >> Yeah, you- >> The pundits all get it wrong. Their relationship has been blossoming. It's been really powerful, take us through the history here. >> Thanks, John, I mean, you're absolutely right. We have a phenomenal relationship with Amazon Web Services. The value of our partnership has been realized by customers all over the world, in every industry, as they embrace the seamless hybrid cloud experience powered by VMware, vSphere, and of course VM-ware Cloud Stack. Of course, we've recently expanded our operations here, including Japan and the launch of the Soccer Regions. And we're fully open for business with the U.S. Federal Government with VMware Cloud on AWS Gov Cloud. There's strong alignment across the field with new go-to-market teams on both sides and a powerful resell agreement that enables AWS sellers to take VMware Cloud on AWS and all the associated VMware services, such as VMware cloud disaster recovery, NSX vRealize Cloud Management, to their enterprise customers. And we couldn't be doing better. >> Yeah, and you brought up a lot of things there. You mentioned Outpost, mentioned Gov Cloud, you mentioned Marketplace, which means you mentioned the acronym, which is basically, I think it's called EDP Credits, which essentially the enterprise, Amazon's Salesforce working together. So, essentially full business model and technical integrations with Amazon. So, success certainly being demonstrated there. So congratulations, that being said, there's still more to do. We got this whole big wave coming on, you see the edge, you seeing multicloud, you seeing hybrid becoming the operational model, both on premises and in the cloud. And so, customers really are asking themselves "Okay, I got VMware, I got AWS Cloud, I got to secure these clouds now. I got to start putting the business model together on top of the technical architecture". You know, microservices, Kubernetes, Tansu, all the things you guys are doing, but customers want to ask you "What about securing the cloud?", this is the number one question, what's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, it's a great topic, John, at the end of the day, this is about evolving the hybrid cloud. And if you think about it, originally, the hybrid cloud was about unifying both infrastructure and operations between the on-premises world, and the public cloud world. And now what's happening, is we are seeing people embrace that in spades, and as a result of that, their Tier 1 applications are running both on-premises and in the public cloud. And with our new announced local cloud capabilities with VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost, it's leading to this whole new enterprise architecture, which we call the distributed cloud. When you look at deploying enterprise applications in a distributed cloud environment, the conversation starts with consistent networking and importantly security. So, let's talk about that for a moment. Customers are asking us "How do we secure our data when we start having infrastructure in a variety of locations? Are our applications and networks... Are they really secure when they run in these completely different environments? And importantly, when we move an application, we take it from our on-premise data center, we move it to the public cloud are the security policies... Are they moving with it? Do I need to re-architect for that?". And the real question, all of this boils down to "Are we expanding that attack surface when we move to VMware Cloud on AWS?". And so we have to come back to what do we do here to really alleviate these concerns? With data security, it's all about encryption, universal insights. We have the super root capability within our platform to ensure that everything is measured, every message from an application, every data, it's great for Chain Of Custody, Audit. Of course we have backup DR Ransomware. On the application side, of course, segmentation is super important with application centric firewalls, VPNs, tunneling, EDR, IDS, IPS. And of course, none of that matters if you have to reset everything up every time an application moves. And this is a real unique value proposition for us, it's about portability. We deliver portable security. We can move an application, the APIs are standard. You can move it up to the public cloud, your policies, your integrations, even if it's third-party integrations, they're maintained. And that really delivers the ability to say "Look, we can make sure your attack surface is not expanding, it's a controlled environment for you". And that really shrinks the risk factors associated with moving to this distributed cloud environment. >> You know, that's the really, I think the key point, I think that you brought up this infrastructure, kind of, table stakes. Which keeps rising because security's, honestly is now there's no... There's a huge... There's no perimeter. It's huge surface area. Everything has to be secured and locked down. And the big theme at re:Invent this year is data, right? So, you know, data and security all go hand in hand. And so that brings up the aspect of the edge. The edge is now booming, you seeing 5G again, you're here hearing it here at reinvent again, more and more 5G. You mentioned local services, Outpost is evolving. This is kind of the new area, and certainly, attack factor as well. So, you mentioned this whole local services. Take me through that because this becomes interesting because this is an architectural issue for enterprises to figure out, "Okay, I got to distribute a computing architecture, it's called The Cloud and multiple clouds. Now, I've got this edge, whole 'nother opening opens up the case for the architecture conversation". What's the strategy? How do you guys view the case? How do you make the case for local services? >> So, we were super excited to announce VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost. This is a local cloud as a service offering. So, let me break that down a little bit. Of course, compute at the edge is nothing new, but the problem with traditional approaches is typically edge locations may lack IT excellence. Which means there's no one there to manage the service. VMware Cloud on AWS outposts is that local cloud as a service, meaning it's fully managed and at the edge, that's a perfect fit. It's hand in glove for those types of workloads that are out, pushed all the way out, whether it's part of an agricultural deployment or an energy production facility or retail store, where there isn't that typical IT excellence. VMware cloud on AWS outposts enables customers to deploy the same Cloud instance as they're running VMware Cloud on AWS, but be able to do it out at that edge environment. And when you look at the overall value of VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost, it's about delivering a simpler, cost effective, consistent cloud experience for those on-prem environments that matches the operating model of the public cloud. Think of the places that you really want to have cloud infrastructure, where it's critical. Going back to your point on data, getting real time insights on that data, to be able to process that, we call those perishable insights. The value is the immediacy understanding that value specific to the moment it's being captured. Think about the different types of sensor environments, where data's coming off expensive equipment, that's measuring temperature and speed. Understanding that value back to the operator - really, really important. You don't have time to pipe that data up to a cloud process and send the results back down. Edge environments require that real-time stuff. So, together with AWS, we jointly deliver a fully managed service right down to the AWS hardware on which we built the VMware cloud instance. We think about where we're seeing the most interest here. You can look across all kinds of industries and use cases, and we're seeing it specifically in healthcare, out of the hospital, manufacturing for equipment monitoring, government, higher education, where those end points are typically virtualized. There are others, but these are the big ones so far. >> You know, I was just talking to an AMD executive or product marketing person on the gaming side. And they're living this right now because they're putting all the virtual collaboration in the cloud, all the data, because they have so much data and they have so much need for these special instances, whether it's GPUs, and CPUs, a mix and match. So, as instances become more special purposed, that's going to enable them to have more productivity. But then, when you have that baseline in the cloud, the edge also has processing power. So, I think people are starting to see this notion of "Okay, I'm in the cloud, but I can also have that cloud edge without moving data back to the centralized cloud and processing it at the edge with software". >> Yeah, that's true. >> This is real. >> It's super real. And the one that really resonates with customers, is one that we all understand and that's healthcare. Anytime you're in a regional environment where you're at a hospital, think of an ICU, the criticality of that data being processed, providing the insights, this is more mission critical than any other environment, because we're dealing with human lives, think about the complex compute requirements of that environment. And then look at the beauty and elegance of this system, a cloud-based system on premises, doing that compute, providing those insights, giving reality back to the clinician, so they can make those decisions. Healthcare is super, super important. And we see customers across the spectrum, looking at what's happening at the edge and embracing it, whether it's healthcare or other industries. And again, it's a perfect fit for them. >> Yeah, real quick, before we move on to what's new, I'm want to get to that, the Tansu stuff as well. What other industries are popping out? Obviously, manufacturing. What can you talk with some industries and some verticals that are really primed for this local cloud service? >> So, let's talk about manufacturing for a moment. Manufacturing is another facility oriented compute requirement that is perfectly fit, from a system and solution way like VMware cloud on AWS Outposts. Within the manufacturing environment, there's tons of very critical machines. There's inventory management, there's a combination of time management, people management, bringing it all together to ensure that process lines are moving as required, that inventory is provided at the specific moment it's needed, and to make sure that everything, especially in today's supply chain world is provided when is required. This type of capability allows an organization to bring in that sensor data, bring in that inventory data, produce applications that manage that in real time, delivering that compute. And in the manufacturing floor, again, limited IT excellence. So, this provides that capability. Another one is energy production. Think about energy production that's out in the field in North Dakota, or out on an oil rig that might be in the Gulf of Mexico. Not only are you dealing with lack of IT excellence, you're also dealing with limited connectivity. This equipment needs to be monitored and censored and the data from those sensors help drive critical decisions. And with limited connectivity, I mean, you may not even have an LTE signal, the need to do that real time is paramount, local cloud provides that. >> Yeah, and I'd also just add, because we're going to move on, but higher ED is going to be completely transformed. Well, I think that's going to be kind of like a pleat revamp. Let's get into what's new on VMware Cloud on AWS give us the update on the new things that people should know about. That's important that they should review, take us through that, what's new? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, the first is the integration with the AWS console. This is a big thing that we're delivering because VMware Cloud on AWS is a native service of AWS. I have to kind of say that twice, it's a native service of AWS. And because of that, we get the same operational and commerce experience for VMware Cloud instances as customers do with traditional AWS services. This means customers now have a choice between AWS centric operating model, which is highly relevant to DevOps and developers, or VMware centric operating model, which is very relevant to traditional operators, and IT users. VMware Cloud on AWS Gov Cloud is expanded to the U.S., East Virginia Region, and achieved aisle five certification. This new region will make the service more relevant for the Eastern Seaboard where much of the Federal Government resides. And of course with aisle five, it opens up VMware Cloud on AWS to the U.S. military and defense contractors, which is huge because there's massive cloud transformation contracts currently in play. And of course, VMware Cloud on AWS Gov Cloud provides the most secure enterprise cloud for those DOD customers, especially when they focus on those critical Tier 1 workloads. >> It's been three years since the GA of the VMware cloud on AWS, has been earlier, since you announced it> You're pumping on all cylinders, as we had predicted, others didn't, just FYI for the folks watching. What's the final vibe? End the segment with your view of what's going on with VMware Cloud on AWS? What's the bumper sticker? >> So, at the end of the day, every customer is looking to migrate and modernize their workloads. And VMWare cloud gives them that capability to do it faster than anyone else. Customers take their applications, tier 1 applications, move it to that secure distributed cloud construct, that idea of having VMware Cloud on AWS, sharing all those security policies, all of that consistent infrastructure and operations. And then they can modernize those applications, using all of those cloud services and the ability to use Tansu to containerize where applicable. We're excited about these capabilities, and our customers are adopting it faster each and every year. And we're thrilled about the traction we're had. And we're thrilled about the partnership we have with Amazon Web Services. So, lots more to come in this space. >> Lot of great stuff, people moving up the stack on the cloud, you're seeing more refactoring in the cloud. Matt Morgan, great to see you. We've been talking 'about this for years on theCUBE. Great to come on and give some insights. All happening. Infrastructure is code. And everyone's winning with containers and microservices. So, great stuff. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks a lot, John, take care. >> Okay, Matt Morgan, the VP of Cloud Infrastructure Business Group of VMware. This theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent, 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. 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>>Well, hello everybody. I'm John Walls here with the cube, and we're very happy to continue our coverage here of a splunk.com 21. And today we're going to talk about cyber security. Uh, obviously everybody is well aware of a number of, uh, breaches that have happened around the globe, but you might say there's been a surge in trying to prevent those from happening down the road. And I'm going to let our guests explain that Ryan Covar, who is the security strategist at Splunk. Ryan. Good to see you with, uh, with us here on the cube. Glad you could join us today. >>Thank you very much. I've wished we could have been doing this in person, but such as the time of life we live. >>Yeah. We have learned to live on zoom that's for sure. And, uh, it's the next best thing to being there. So, uh, again, thanks for that. Um, well, let's talk about surge, if you will. Um, uh, I know obviously Splunk and data security go hand in hand that is a high priority with the, with the company, but now you have a new initiative that you're just now rolling out to take that to an even higher level. Tell us about that. >>Yeah, something I'm extremely excited to announce. Uh, it's the first time we're really talking about it is that.com 21, which is wonderful. And it's kind of the culmination of my seven years here at Splunk. Uh, before I came to Splunk, I did about 20 years of cyber security research and defense and nation state hunting and threat intelligence and policy and compliance, and just about everything, uh, public sector in the U S and the UK private sector, a couple of different places. So I've kind of been around the block. And one of the things I've found that I'm really passionate about is just being a network defender or a blue teamer. And a lot of my time here at Splunk has been around that. It's been speaking at conferences, doing research, um, coming up with ways to basically defend organizations, but the tools they have at hand and something that we say Alon is, uh, we, we work on the problems of today and tomorrow, not the distant future, right? >>The really practical things. And we had an, you know, there was a little bit of a thing called solar winds. You might've heard of it. Um, that happened earlier in December and we were able to stand up kind of on an ad hoc ragtag group of Splunkers around the world, uh, in a matter of hours. And we worked about 24 hours for panning over to Australia, into a Mia, and then back over to America and able to publish really helpful work to, for our customers to detect or defend or mitigate against what we knew at the time around solar winds, the attack. And then as time went on, we were continuing to write and create material, but we didn't have a group that was focused on it. We were all kind of chipping in after hours or, you know, deep deprecating, other bits of work. >>And I said, you know, we really need to focus on this. This is a big deal. And how can we actually surge up to meet these needs if you will, uh, the play on the punter. So we created an idea of a small team, a dedicated to current events and also doing security research around the problems that are facing around the world insecurity who use Splunk and maybe even those who don't. And that's where the idea of this team was formed. And we've been working all summer. We're releasing our first research project, excuse me, uh, at.com, which is around supply chain, compromise using jaw three Zeke and Splunk, uh, author by myself and primarily Marcus law era. And we have other research projects coming out every quarter, along with doing this work around, just helping people with any sort of immediate cybersecurity threat that we're able to assist with. >>So what are you hoping that security teams can get out of this work? Obviously you're investing a lot of resources and doing the research, I assume, diversifying, you know, the areas and to which you're, um, exploring, um, ultimately what would be the takeaway if I was on the other end, if I was on the client and what would you hope that I would be, uh, extracting from this work? >>Sure. We want to get you promoted. I mean, that's kind of the, the joke of it, but we, we talk a lot. I want to make everyone in the world who use a Splunk or cybersecurity, looked into their bosses and defend their company as fast and quickly as possible. So one of the big, mandates for my team is creating consumable, actionable work and research. So we, you know, we joke a lot that, you know, I have a pretty thick beard here. One might even call it a neck beard and a lot of people in our community, we create things for what I would call wizards, cybersecurity wizards, and we go to conferences and we talk from wizard to wizard, and we kind of sit on our ivory tower on stage and kind of proclaim out how to do things. And I've sat on the other side and sometimes those sound great, but they're not actually helping people with their job today. And so the takeaway for me, what I hope people are able to take away is we're here for you. We're here for the little guys, the network defenders, we're creating things that we're hoping you can immediately take home and implement and do and make better detections and really find the things that are immediate threats to your network and not necessarily having to, you know, create a whole new environment or apply magic. So >>Is there a difference then in terms of say enterprise threats, as opposed to, if I'm a small business or of a medium sized business, maybe I have four or 500 employees as opposed to four or 5,000 or 40,000. Um, what about, you know, finding that ground where you can address both of those levels of, of business and of concern, >>You know, 20 years ago or 10 years ago? I would've answered that question very differently and I fully acknowledge I have a bias in nation state threats. That's what I'm primarily trained in, however, in the last five years, uh, thanks or not. Thanks to ransomware. What we're seeing is the same threats that are affecting and impacting fortune 100 fortune 10 companies. The entire federal government of the United States are the exact same threats that are actually impacting and causing havoc on smaller organizations and businesses. So the reality is in today's threat landscape. I do believe actually the threat is the same to each, but it is not the same level of capabilities for a 100% or 500 person company to a company, the size of Splunk or a fortune 100 company. Um, and that's something that we are actually focusing on is how do we create things to help every size of that business, >>Giving me the tools, right, exactly. >>Which is giving you the power to fight that battle yourself as much as possible, because you may never be able to have the head count of a fortune 100 company, but thanks to the power of software and tools and things like the cloud, you might have some force multipliers that we're hoping to create for you in a much more package consumable method. >>Yeah. Let's go back to the research that you mentioned. Um, how did you pick the first topic? I mean, because this is your, your splash and, and I'm sure there was a lot of thought put into where do we want to dive in >>First? You know, I'd love to say there was a lot of thought put into it because it would make me sound smarter, but it was something we all just immediately knew was a gap. Um, you know, solar winds, which was a supply chain, compromise attack really revealed to many of us something that, um, you know, reporters had been talking about for years, but we never really saw come to fruition was a real actionable threat. And when we started looking at our library of offerings and what we could actually help customers with, I talked over 175 federal and private sector companies around the world in a month and a half after solar winds. And a lot of times the answer was, yeah, we can't really help you with this specific part of the problem. We can help you around all sorts of other places, but like, gosh, how do you actually detect this? >>And there's not a great answer. And that really bothered me. And to be perfectly honest, that was part of the reason that we founded the team. So it was a very obvious next step was, well, this is why we're creating the team. Then our first product should probably be around this problem. And then you say, okay, supply chain, that's really big. That's a huge chunk of work. So the first question is like, well, what can we actually affect change on without talking about things like quantum computing, right? Which are all things that are, you know, blockchain, quantum computing, these are all solutions that are actually possible to solve or mitigate supply chain compromise, but it's not happening today. And it sure as heck isn't even happening tomorrow. So how do we create something that's digestible today? And so what Marcus did, and one of his true skillsets is really refining the problem down, down, down, down. >>And where can we get to the point of, Hey, this is data that we think most organizations have a chance of collecting. These are methodologies that we think people can do and how can they actually implement them with success in their network. And then we test that and then we kind of keep doing a huge fan of the concept of OODA loop, orient, orient, observe, decide, and act. And we do that through our hypothesizing. We kind of keep looking at that and iterating over and over and over again, until we're able to come up with a solution that seems to be applicable for the personas that we're trying to help. And that's where we got out with this research of, Hey, collect network data, use a tool like Splunk and some of our built-in statistical analysis functions and come out the other side. And I'll be honest, we're not solving the problem. >>We're helping you with the problem. And I think that's a key differentiator of what we're saying is there is no silver bullet and frankly, anyone that tells you they can solve supply chain, uh, let me know, cause I want to join that hot new startup. Um, the reality is we can help you go from a field of haystacks to a single haystack and inside that single haystack, there's a needle, right? And there's actually a lot of value in that because before the PR problem was unapproachable, and now we've gotten it down to saying like, Hey, use your traditional tools, use your traditional analytic craft on a much smaller set of data where we've pretty much verified that there's something here, but look right here. And that's where we kind of focused. >>You talked about, you know, and we all know about the importance and really the emphasis that's put on data protection, right? Um, at the same time, can you use data to help you protect? I mean, is there information or insight that could be gleaned from, from data that whether it's behavior or whatever the case might be, that, that not only, uh, is something that you can operationalize and it's a good thing for your business, but you could also put it into practice in terms of your security practices to >>A hundred percent. The, the undervalued aspect of cybersecurity in my opinion, is elbow grease. Um, you can buy a lot of tools, uh, but the reality is to get value immediately. Usually the easiest place to start is just doing the hard detail oriented work. And so when you ask, is there data that can help you immediately data analytics? Actually, I go to, um, knowing what you have in your network, knowing what you have, that you're actually trying to protect asset and inventory, CMDB, things like this, which is not attractive. It's not something people want to talk about, but it's actually the basis of all good security. How do you possibly defend something if you don't know what you're defending and where it is. And something that we found in our research was in order to detect and find anomalous behavior of systems communicating outbound, um, it's too much. >>So what you have to do is limit the scope down to those critical assets that you're most concerned about and a perfect example of critical asset. And there's no, no shame or victim blaming here, put on solar winds. Uh, it's just that, that is an example of an appliance server that has massive impact on the organization as we saw in 2020. And how can you actually find that if you don't know where it is? So really that first step is taking the data that you already have and saying, let's find all the systems that we're trying to protect. And what's often known as a crown jewels approach, and then applying these advanced analytics on top of those crown jewel approaches to limit the data scope and really get it to just what you're trying to protect. And once you're positive that you have that fairly well defended, then you go out to the next tier and the next tier in next year. And that's a great approach, take things you're already doing today and applying them and getting better results tomorrow. >>No, before I let you go, um, I I'd like to just have you put a, uh, a bow on surge, if you will, on that package, why is this a big deal to you? It's been a long time in the making. I know you're very happy about the rollout of this week. Um, you know, what's the impact you want to have? Why is it important? >>We did a lot of literature review. I have a very analytical background. My time working at DARPA taught me a lot about doing research and development and on laying out the value of failure, um, and how much sometimes even failing as long as you talk about it and talk about your approach and methodology and share that is important. And the other part of this is I see a lot of work done by many other wonderful organizations, uh, but they're really solving for a problem further down the road or they're creating solutions that not everyone can implement. And so what I think is so important and what's different about our team is we're not only thinking differently, we're hiring differently. You know, we have people who have a threat intelligence background from the white house. We have another researcher who did 10 years at DARPA insecurity, research and development. >>Uh, we've recently hired a, a former journalist who she's made a career pivot into cybersecurity, and she's helping us really review the data and what people are facing and come up with a real connection to make sure we are tackling the right problems. And so to me, what I'm most excited about is we're not only trying to solve different problems. And I think what most of the world is looking at for cybersecurity research, we've staffed it to be different, think different and come up with things that are probably a little less, um, normal than everyone's seen before. And I'm excited about that. >>Well, and, and rightly so, uh, Ryan, thanks for the time, a pleasure to have you here on the cube and, uh, the information again, the initiative is Serge, check it out, uh, spunk very much active in the cyber security protection business. And so we have certainly appreciate that effort. Thank you, Ryan. >>Well, thank you very much, John. You bet Ryan, >>Covar joining us here on our cube coverage. We continue our coverage of.com for 21.

>> Welcome to theCUBEs, continuing coverage of Splunk's dot conf 21. I'm Dave Nicholson, and I am joined by Chris Faulk, director, cybersecurity policy, and strategic partnerships at MITRE corporation; As well as Mohan Koo, the co-founder and chief technology officer at tech systems. Now, uh, gentlemen, we've heard this before, but I think this is going to be the best example of a conversation on this subject I've ever had. Security is a team sport. So let's talk about how that applies, where MITRE and D techs and Splunk all come together and work as a team. Uh, starting with you, Chris. miter published the, the attack framework. And, just so people are clear on that Ca- all caps, ATT, Ampersand or, AndSign, I should say. Capital C, capital K looks like attack. That's how you say it. Their framework was created by MITRE. Uh, It's a bit of a game changer. Now, enterprise security teams use that pretty religiously. So, so tell us about that, and tell us what we can expect next from MITRE. >> So thank you David, uh, pleasure to be here. You know, I think that the, um, what made attack resonate with users is it's based on data; It started with data that we observed in our networks and organized around at that time, the emergent principle that Lockheed Martin had put out on the kill chain. Uh, so it gave it structure. And we have, we have been lucky that the community has sort of embraced that concept of what we started off. We got the numbers completely wrong. Uh, we, we started off with like 41 TTPs. And, um, that was because that was based on a small subset of data that we had, uh, and what's been powerful and what's made it truly wonderful as the community's adopted it. And it's, that's, what's it's added to it. It's an additive approach. Um, and but it's all based on data and it's all just a fabulous, um, opportunity for the community to come together. So, what Myers really focused on is understanding how data, and those, uh, problems come together. And then, we surround the ecosystem of that problem with things like language. So we give it a framework and we give it, um, we give it operational data so that it actually has resonance with the users of that community. >> So give me an example, uh, of the language that's used. You know, there are, there are things that are, that are under the heading of tactics as an example. Give me an example of some of those things. What did, what's the term in plain English, and what does it mean? >> So tactics are a way for, um, an adversary to go about taking care of their business. So, in the day, uh, when we were first thinking about this, we thought about it as, um, the old cartoons where you'd have the-the-the coyote and the-the sheep would check in, you know, the coyote was given his lunchbox. He was given it, um, if you think about it, as a, uh, the adversary target list. And he was given his tools, he was, he would open up his toolbox, and he would go after those targets for the day. And he would use those tools. What we realized is that in most cases, a lot of those tools were expensive to create. They were, uh, hard to, um, train up on. And so they tended to use the same basic toolkit over and over again. What changed was, perhaps one little thing that they would exploit that was always changing. And so what, you know, what I likened it to was a burglar. A burglar would show up with his bag of- of, uh, tools. He would have a crowbar, and he would have a flashlight, and he would have a bag. And what he would do is he sometimes choose to go in through the windows. Sometimes they choose to go in through the door. Sometimes he choose to go in through the basement. It didn't matter. But once he got in the house, he had that flashlight, he had that bag, and he had that crowbar, I could figure out through my sensors, what he had in his bag or with, with him, I could catch that. And then I could alert on that, and find the other pieces of that. And so that's what really tactics, um, are about and getting that-that concept boiled down to a language that, uh, cyber defenders could readily understand and put into practice in their businesses. >> So Mohan, tell us about Dtex; And I'm particularly interested in the, in the connection between DTex and what Chris was just talking about; That MITRE has provided us, uh, this language that attack provides us. Um, essentially, you're- You're looking- you're listening for those things that go bump in the night. Chris has given us a language to describe them. Tell- tell us how Dtex fits here. >> Yeah. So, so what we're doing, David, um, and thank you for having me as well, um, what we're doing is we're bringing to the table a whole different type of telemetry, and it's all around human behavior. And, and how we got together with MITRE, um, is actually a direct connection to how we got together with Splunk as well. I'm actually sitting here in Adelaide, in Australia, at the Australian Cyber Collaboration Center. And this is an initiative we put together with the state government of South Australia, and federal government as well, um, to actually bring everybody onto one trusted group. So we could break down the silos and collaborate a hell of a lot better. As we all know, the bad guys collaborate extremely well. You know, they share everything, including their IP and their tactics, and their techniques, everything is shared. And that puts them at an extreme advantage to the good guys, and girls, right? And-and so we have to do a much better job at that collaboration. And-and when we came together and were introduced to MITRE here at the Australian Cyber Collaboration Center, we decided that taking MITREs expertise, and they've got like 15, more than 15 years, worth of dedicated experience around behavioral science, and how it contributes to insider threats and studying that in some depth. Putting that together with the data that we're collecting for our enterprise customers was something that was really, really important, and actually, you know, it was here in the Australian Cyber Collaboration Center that we first kept locked together with Splunk. And Splunk started to identify a problem statement amongst their customers too, That, you know, the data that exists out there for security operations teams just doesn't have that cleanliness and, it doesn't have the context when it comes to human behavior. And that's really what we're bringing to the, to the table here. >> So give me an example of a human behavior that you're looking for, or, you know, so, so Splunk is- Splunk is providing this data that's being gathered from logs. These events are being rolled up and, uh, and-and DTex is analyzing them. Can you give us an example that doesn't educate adversaries of-of behaviors that you look at? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I'll-I'll just touch on it. And then I'll hand over to Chris cause, cause uh, MITRE are truly the experts of this stuff. But- but what I will say is that a lot of organizations, when they think about human behavior and the insider threat, per se, they always think about the malicious actor, right? The, the Snowden type character that's, that's maliciously, and intentionally, trying to get access to take stuff. But it's, it's much more than that. It's, it's also insiders that do negligent things, and it's insider's that are victims of-of their own lack of understanding of things that they're facing. And when outsiders are cleverer, or more technically proficient, they can find ways to-to usurp the insider, and get them to do bad things without them even knowing they're doing it. And so understanding intent, and we call it, at Dtex, we call it, indicators of intent, are really important for us to know. Those indicators are what we've been working with MITRE on for the last year or so; Kind of understanding what the newest, most complicated indicators of intent are. And how do we determine those to be able to know the difference between a malicious insider, versus somebody that's just doing the wrong thing without even knowing about it? I-I don't know, Chris, if-if you wanted to touch on that a little bit. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah Chris, absolutely. You've, you know, uh, Mohan's joining us from Australia, Chris, you and MITRE have done a ton of work with the U.S. Federal Government around detection, and prevention of those insider threats. Talk to us, talk us through that. And, and more specifically, tell us how that is applicable to nongovernmental agencies. >> Yeah, well, so I mean, think at the, at the core of it, human behavior is human cue and behavior. And whether those are being applied to, uh, critical infrastructures, whether they're being applied to working at a federal government organization, or a state, local, uh, government organization, it doesn't matter. Humans, humans have behaviors. Every human has behaviors. What makes them unique, is understanding the context behind those behaviors. And then looking for, uh, indicators that are distinguishable from an individual doing his, or her, job. Right? So, one of the challenges that you have with insider behavior is that, you know, data collection is everyone's job, at every organization, right? You're always trying to put together the numbers for the spreadsheet to-to brief to your boss. Well, when you're doing that data collection, it can look like normal work. And you can't trigger on something like that, because otherwise you're going to be triggering, uh, every individual doing their job every day. So you have to add additional context, and behavioral indicators to that, to understand how the individual is doing that differently in a case where they are up to-up to no good, we'll say, as opposed to under circumstances of doing their job in a regular course of action. So, what we have long held as beliefs about how people behave are actually manifesting themselves differently in online behavior; How fast they click, um, what kinds of tools they use to do legitimate work, versus the kinds of tools that they do-to do, uh, I'll call it elicit collection. Uh, literally those kinds of subtle nuances. So while they might do the same collection activities, how fast they do it, um, where they put that information, um, how they, how often they go back to the same site, those are indicators that when taken with that behavioral context really matter. And that's what distinguishes them from just normal, typical user behavior. >> So how much does that context vary between private entities, governmental entities, and across private entities? Is this the classic 80/20 situation where, you know, 80-80% of it's the same, 20% very different? What, what does that look like? >> Yeah, I would say that, you know, an 80/20 is a very good rule. I'd probably put it up closer to 90 to 95 to five, right? So behaviors work the same. Now, the protocols that organizations have are going to drive some of that, right? So a-a government organization is going to have certain things in place that a private company may or may not. So, you know, how, how locked down the systems are, the kinds of access, um, things that, that you allow. So do you allow USB drives? Do you allow, um, those kinds of-of capabilities in your organization? So, if you're a private sector organization, but even within a private sector organization, they'd run the gamut, right? You have very locked down environments like banks, and regulated industries and then, you have very unregulated industries as well. So it really isn't about government and industry. It's about the kind of, um, protocols that are already in place for other reasons that really drive the differences between that. And then you have, again, you have those additional safeguards that you have, say with a-with a government organization and that you've got, uh, security vetting, right? So you've done security vetting of a lot of your employees, whether even if it's not security clearance, it's a- it's a personnel vetting. And so, it's an additional level, um, but all it does is change the-the emphasis of-of where you place the value in your security mechanisms. >> So, you mentioned a variety of contexts. Mohan, We've had a mass shift to remote working, obviously. Um, Splunk has shared with us that, uh, that the customers are concerned about, you know, giving- giving people visibility without compromising privacy. And I, and I-I say Splunk like Splunk is a person (man laughing) We like to personalize everything here at theCUBE, but how is DTex helping with this challenge, this challenge of not being intrusive, yet, uh, getting the important work done that needs to be done? >> Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. And-and for us, you know, we, as DTex, we kind of grew up in-in Europe, that's kind of where we became an international organization. So, employee privacy is at the heart of everything that we do. And-and, we make privacy by designing into everything that we do. So, we're actually able to, uh, pseudo anonymize every bit of data that we're collecting, so that you're actually really, truly looking for bad behaviors or unusual behaviors. You're not looking for bad people or unusual people, right? Like it's, it's a very clear distinction; and being able to do it in a way that gives you the visibility, gives the organization, the visibility to prevent against risk and to de-risk the organization without infringing on anyone's privacy is, is really critical. And, you know, as Chris was mentioning, even if you go to the private sector, you know, you've got those very regulated banks or healthcare organizations that are typically quite locked down, but we're dealing more and more with, with high-tech companies, right? A lot of bay area firms, Silicon valley companies, which have always required the flexibility for their workforce, right? They want them to be innovative. They want them to do different things. And in order to do that, they need the ability to have any tools they need to get their job done. But in those environments, you can't have too many hard and fast controls. So how do we actually provide that visibility to the organization without infringing privacy? That is absolutely what the game is about. And so, you know, not kind of having to scrape screens, and type key strokes and type video capture, you know, that's the old school way of doing it. You know, in some cases maybe you do need that level of surveillance, but in most cases you absolutely do not. And so, you know, for many, many years, a lot of enterprise security organizations have been collecting way more data than they need to and taking way more intrusive approaches. And we're about backing that off and kind of getting the right balance between security and privacy, because what we truly believe is where you overlap security and privacy, that Venn diagram that you get in the middle is where you get safety. And we really see it as, as an extension of health and safety. >> So Mohan, if we do all of these things correctly, between Splunk, MITRE, and DTex, you get the perfect scenario where you're catching bad actors and you're not inconveniencing good actors. So what's your view of this? Dystopian future, Utopian future, a mix of both? >> Well, uh, look, I think-I think that the future really is, you know, as the title to this discussion is it's a team sport, right? Like, and, and I think the, the approach that Splunk is taking right now is absolutely the right one. Like we, we need to all come together. We can't be everything to everyone. I don't think there is a one size fits all solution in enterprise security today. And those organizations that understand that and recognize that, but neither is it, are we able to continue just kind of investing in hundreds of point solutions across the enterprise and layering them across the business. Like, band-aids, we need that consolidation, but we do need to take best of breed solution providers to, to focus on those integrations and doing it properly. And that's what we've really enjoyed about working with Splunk over the last couple of years is kind of taking a very holistic approach and realizing that we all need to come together to play these teams sport because, you know, we, as detects, we bring together a very clean data set that gives you that human telemetry and then MITRE brings to get brings the behavioral science capability and behavioral science understanding. And Splunk provides that big data platform to bring everything together and show it and visualize it. And, and really that's, that's, that's, that's one way of looking at it. And I, and I think, you know, going forward those vendors or those organizations that don't recognize that that proper integration actual true integration has to be done collectively. And it has to be done in a way that's light and easy for anybody to consume. >> Perfect way to wrap this cube conversation. Thank you, Mohan. Thank you, Chris. And thank all of you for joining us on this cube conversation or continuing coverage of splunk.com 21 continues. I'm Dave Nicholson. Thanks for joining.

>>Yeah. Hello and welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS public sector summit here in Washington D. C. We're live on the ground for two days. Face to face conference and expo hall and everything here but keith brooks who is the director and head of technical business development for a dress government Govcloud selling brains 10th birthday. Congratulations. Welcome to the cube. Thank you john happy to be E. C. 2 15 S three is 9.5 or no, that maybe they're 10 because that's the same day as sqs So Govcloud. 10 years, 20 years. What time >>flies? 10 years? >>Big milestone. Congratulations. A lot of history involved in Govcloud. Yes. Take us through what's the current situation? >>Yeah. So um let's start with what it is just for the viewers that may not be familiar. So AWS Govcloud is isolated. AWS cloud infrastructure and services that were purposely built for our U. S. Government customers that had highly sensitive data or highly regulated data or applications and workloads that they wanted to move to the cloud. So we gave customers the ability to do that with AWS Govcloud. It is subject to the fed ramp I and D O D S R G I L four L five baselines. It gives customers the ability to address ITAR requirements as well as Seaga's N'est ce MMC and Phipps requirements and gives customers a multi region architecture that allows them to also designed for disaster recovery and high availability in terms of why we built it. It starts with our customers. It was pretty clear from the government that they needed a highly secure and highly compliant cloud infrastructure to innovate ahead of demand and that's what we delivered. So back in august of 2011 we launched AWS GovCloud which gave customers the best of breed in terms of high technology, high security, high compliance in the cloud to allow them to innovate for their mission critical workloads. Who >>was some of the early customers when you guys launched after the C. I. A deal intelligence community is a big one but some of the early customers. >>So the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense were all early users of AWS GovCloud. But one of our earliest lighthouse customers was the Nasa jet propulsion laboratory and Nasa Jpl used AWS GovCloud to procure Procure resources ahead of demand which allowed them to save money and also take advantage of being efficient and only paying for what they needed. But they went beyond just I. T. Operations. They also looked at how do they use the cloud and specifically GovCloud for their mission programs. So if you think back to all the way to 2012 with the mars curiosity rover, Nasa Jpl actually streamed and processed and stored that data from the curiosity rover on AWS Govcloud They actually streamed over 150 terabytes of data responded to over 80,000 requests per second and took it beyond just imagery. They actually did high performance compute and data analytics on the data as well. That led to additional efficiencies for future. Over there >>were entire kicking they were actually >>hard core missing into it. Mission critical workloads that also adhere to itar compliance which is why they used AWS GovCloud. >>All these compliance. So there's also these levels. I remember when I was working on the jetty uh stories that were out there was always like level for those different classifications. What does all that mean like? And then this highly available data and highly high availability all these words mean something in these top secret clouds. Can you take us through kind of meetings >>of those? Yeah absolutely. So it starts with the federal compliance program and the two most popular programs are Fed ramp and Dodi srg fed ramp is more general for federal government agencies. There are three levels low moderate and high in the short and skinny of those levels is how they align to the fisma requirements of the government. So there's fisma low fisma moderate fisma high depending on the sensitivity of the government data you will have to align to those levels of Fed ramp to use workloads and store data in the cloud. Similar story for D. O. D. With srg impact levels to 45 and six uh impacts levels to four and five are all for unclassified data. Level two is for less sensitive public defense data levels. Four and five cover more sensitive defense data to include mission critical national security systems and impact level six is for classified information. So those form the basis of security and compliance, luckily with AWS GovCloud celebrating our 10th anniversary, we address Fed ramp high for our customers that require that and D. O. D impact levels to four and five for a sensitive defense guy. >>And that was a real nuanced point and a lot of the competition can't do that. That's real people don't understand, you know, this company, which is that company and all the lobbying and all the mudslinging that goes on. We've seen that in the industry. It's unfortunate, but it happens. Um, I do want to ask you about the Fed ramp because what I'm seeing on the commercial side in the cloud ecosystem, a lot of companies that aren't quote targeting public sector are coming in on the Fed ramp. So there's some good traction there. You guys have done a lot of work to accelerate that. Any new, any new information to share their. >>Yes. So we've been committed to supporting the federal government compliance requirements effectively since the launch of GovCloud. And we've demonstrated our commitment to Fed ramp over the last number of years and GovCloud specifically, we've taken dozens of services through Fed ramp high and we're 100% committed to it because we have great relationships with the Fed ramp, Jabor the joint authorization board. We work with individual government agencies to secure agency A. T. O. S. And in fact we actually have more agency A. T. O. S. With AWS GovCloud than any other cloud provider. And the short and skinny is that represents the baseline for cloud security to address sensitive government workloads and sensitive government data. And what we're seeing from industry and specifically highly regulated industries is the standard that the U. S. Government set means that they have the assurance to run control and classified information or other levels of highly sensitive data on the cloud as well. So Fed ramp set that standard. It's interesting >>that the cloud, this is the ecosystem within an ecosystem again within crossover section. So for instance um the impact of not getting Fed ramp certified is basically money. Right. If you're a supplier vendor uh software developer or whatever used to being a miracle, no one no one would know right bed ramp. I'm gonna have to hire a whole department right now. You guys have a really easy, this is a key value proposition, isn't it? >>Correct. And you see it with a number of I. S. V. S. And software as the service providers. If you visit the federal marketplace website, you'll see dozens of providers that have Fed ramp authorized third party SAAS products running on GovCloud industry leading SAAS companies like Salesforce dot com driven technology Splunk essay PNS to effectively they're bringing their best of breed capabilities, building on top of AWS GovCloud and offering those highly compliant fed ramp, moderate fed ramp high capabilities to customers both in government and private industry that need that level of compliance. >>Just as an aside, I saw they've got a nice tweet from Teresa Carlson now it's plunk Govcloud yesterday. That was a nice little positive gesture uh, for you guys at GovCloud, what other areas are you guys moving the needle on because architecturally this is a big deal. What are some areas that you're moving the needle on for the GovCloud? >>Well, when I look back across the last 10 years, there were some pretty important developments that stand out. The first is us launching the second Govcloud infrastructure region in 2018 And that gave customers that use GovCloud specifically customers that have highly sensitive data and high levels of compliance. The ability to build fault tolerant, highly available and mission critical workloads in the cloud in a region that also gives them an additional three availability zones. So the launch of GovCloud East, which is named AWS GovCloud Us East gave customers to regions a total of six availability zones that allowed them accelerate and build more scalable solutions in the cloud. More recently, there is an emergence of another D O D program called the cybersecurity maturity model, C M M C and C M M C is something where we looked around the corner and said we need to Innovate to help our customers, particularly defense customers and the defense industrial based customers address see MMC requirements in the cloud. So with Govcloud back in December of 2020, we actually launched the AWS compliant framework for federal defense workloads, which gives customers a turnkey capability and tooling and resources to spin up environments that are configured to meet see MMC controls and D. O. D. Srg control. So those things represent some of the >>evolution keith. I'm interested also in your thoughts on how you see the progression of Govcloud outside the United States. Tactical Edge get wavelength coming on board. How does how do you guys look at that? Obviously us is global, it's not just the jet, I think it's more of in general. Edge deployments, sovereignty is also going to be world's flat, Right? I mean, so how does that >>work? So it starts back with customer requirements and I tie it back to the first question effectively we built Govcloud to respond to our U. S. Government customers and are highly regulated industry customers that had highly sensitive data and a high bar to meet in terms of regulatory compliance and that's the foundation of it. So as we look to other customers to include those outside of the US. It starts with those requirements. You mentioned things like edge and hybrid and a good example of how we marry the two is when we launched a W. S. Outpost in Govcloud last year. So outpost brings the power of the AWS cloud to on premises environments of our customers, whether it's their data centers or Coehlo environments by bringing AWS services, a. P. I. S and service and points to the customer's on premises facilities >>even outside the United States. >>Well, for Govcloud is focused on us right now. Outside of the U. S. Customers also have availability to use outpost. It's just for us customers, it's focused on outpost availability, geography >>right now us. Right. But other governments gonna want their Govcloud too. Right, Right, that's what you're getting at, >>Right? And it starts with the data. Right? So we we we spent a lot of time working with government agencies across the globe to understand their regulations and their requirements and we use that to drive our decisions. And again, just like we started with govcloud 10 years ago, it starts with our customer requirements and we innovate from there. Well, >>I've been, I love the D. O. D. S vision on this. I know jet I didn't come through and kind of went scuttled, got thrown under the bus or whatever however you want to call it. But that whole idea of a tactical edge, it was pretty brilliant idea. Um so I'm looking forward to seeing more of that. That's where I was supposed to come in, get snowball, snowmobile, little snow snow products as well, how are they doing? And because they're all part of the family to, >>they are and they're available in Govcloud and they're also authorized that fed ramp and Gov srg levels and it's really, it's really fascinating to see D. O. D innovate with the cloud. Right. So you mentioned tactical edge. So whether it's snowball devices or using outposts in the future, I think the D. O. D. And our defense customers are going to continue to innovate. And quite frankly for us, it represents our commitment to the space we want to make sure our defense customers and the defense industrial base defense contractors have access to the best debris capabilities like those edge devices and edge capable. I >>think about the impact of certification, which is good because I just thought of a clean crows. We've got aerospace coming in now you've got D O. D, a little bit of a cross colonization if you will. So nice to have that flexibility. I got to ask you about just how you view just in general, the intelligence community a lot of uptake since the CIA deal with amazon Just overall good health for eight of his gum cloud. >>Absolutely. And again, it starts with our commitment to our customers. We want to make sure that our national security customers are defense customers and all of the customers and the federal government that have a responsibility for securing the country have access to the best of breed capability. So whether it's the intelligence community, the Department of Defense are the federal agencies and quite frankly we see them innovating and driving things forward to include with their sensitive workloads that run in Govcloud, >>what's your strategy for partnerships as you work on the ecosystem? You do a lot with strategy. Go to market partnerships. Um, it's got its public sector pretty much people all know each other. Our new firms popping up new brands. What's the, what's the ecosystem looks like? >>Yeah, it's pretty diverse. So for Govcloud specifically, if you look at partners in the defense community, we work with aerospace companies like Lockheed martin and Raytheon Technologies to help them build I tar compliant E. R. P. Application, software development environments etcetera. We work with software companies I mentioned salesforce dot com. Splunk and S. A. P. And S. To uh and then even at the state and local government level, there's a company called Pay It that actually worked with the state of Kansas to develop the Icann app, which is pretty fascinating. It's a app that is the official app of the state of Kansas that allow citizens to interact with citizens services. That's all through a partner. So we continue to work with our partner uh broad the AWS partner network to bring those type of people >>You got a lot of MST is that are doing good work here. I saw someone out here uh 10 years. Congratulations. What's the coolest thing uh you've done or seen. >>Oh wow, it's hard to name anything in particular. I just think for us it's just seeing the customers and the federal government innovate right? And, and tie that innovation to mission critical workloads that are highly important. Again, it reflects our commitment to give these government customers and the government contractors the best of breed capabilities and some of the innovation we just see coming from the federal government leveraging the count now. It's just super cool. So hard to pinpoint one specific thing. But I love the innovation and it's hard to pick a favorite >>Child that we always say. It's kind of a trick question I do have to ask you about just in general, the just in 10 years. Just look at the agility. Yeah, I mean if you told me 10 years ago the government would be moving at any, any agile anything. They were a glacier in terms of change, right? Procure Man, you name it. It's just like, it's a racket. It's a racket. So, so, but they weren't, they were slow and money now. Pandemic hits this year. Last year, everything's up for grabs. The script has been flipped >>exactly. And you know what, what's interesting is there were actually a few federal government agencies that really paved the way for what you're seeing today. I'll give you some examples. So the Department of Veterans Affairs, they were an early Govcloud user and way back in 2015 they launched vets dot gov on gov cloud, which is an online platform that gave veterans the ability to apply for manage and track their benefits. Those type of initiatives paved the way for what you're seeing today, even as soon as last year with the U. S. Census, right? They brought the decennial count online for the first time in history last year, during 2020 during the pandemic and the Census Bureau was able to use Govcloud to launch and run 2020 census dot gov in the cloud at scale to secure that data. So those are examples of federal agencies that really kind of paved the way and leading to what you're saying is it's kind >>of an awakening. It is and I think one of the things that no one's reporting is kind of a cultural revolution is the talent underneath that way, the younger people like finally like and so it's cooler. It is when you go fast and you can make things change, skeptics turned into naysayers turned into like out of a job or they don't transform so like that whole blocker mentality gets exposed just like shelf where software you don't know what it does until the cloud is not performing, its not good. Right, right. >>Right. Into that point. That's why we spend a lot of time focused on education programs and up skilling the workforce to, because we want to ensure that as our customers mature and as they innovate, we're providing the right training and resources to help them along their journey, >>keith brooks great conversation, great insight and historian to taking us to the early days of Govcloud. Thanks for coming on the cube. Thanks thanks for having me cubes coverage here and address public sector summit. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Mhm. Mhm mm.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this Cube Conversation. I am Lisa Martin. Jim Richberg joins me next, public sector CISO at Fortinet. Welcome to the program. Great to see you. >> Okay, good to be with you, Lisa. >> Lots of stuff has happened in the last year. I mean that's an epic understatement, right? But one of the things that... We saw this massive shift to work from home, and now we're... I hope I can say coming out of the pandemic, and we're starting to see this hybrid model of kind of work from anywhere. We also saw the massive spike in ransomware last year. Ransomware now being suddenly a household term. There's so much money in it. From a hybrid approach, what are some of the things that you're seeing? >> So, when we talk about hybrid, what we go back to is not going to be the office that we left. Some of us aren't going back at all. Some of us are going back in. We're not going to have assigned desks. Some of the offices are going to be in different places, and the nature of the work that we've been doing has changed. So it definitely means the new normal isn't going to look like the old normal did before March of 2021. So I tell organizations that they really need to think about what that means in terms of how they structure work, how they structured their networks. Because as you said, Lisa, it's going to be work from anywhere. Some of us are going to go back out on the road. We'll be the road warriors again. So you're not going back to a classic network, in an office with CAT5 Cat 5 cables, connecting everybody's desktop. And some of us are even going to get hired who never ever go to the office. So this is a situation where we really have to think through what this means in terms of how we work, the culture we have as a workplace, and unfortunately, it's not just the enterprise and the workforce that have been innovating. The threat actors have gone hybrid. There was a little pause while they started working from home, figuring out what to do, but the reality is they took us to lunch when they figured out exactly what these vulnerabilities in the small office, home office environment were, and how to exploit them. Lisa, you talked about ransomware rising 700% in the latter half of last year. And this is actually indicative of what I think is the biggest problem we have in cyber security. It's not technology. If you're willing to do a rip and replace and put in state of the art technology, there's some really good solutions. Some of that technology, when it starts incorporating artificial intelligence and automation, actually goes a long way to compensate for the workforce and skills gap we all hear about, 3 million people short. That's a true number. But Lisa, the biggest problem in cyber security from my perspective, and I've been doing this for 35 years, is metrics. We can't measure what's going on and say, "If I do this, this is how it affects the network security and this is how it affects the adversary's behavior." And that's exactly what we saw in this pivot to remote telework. It took networking and security working hand in hand to make that pivot. Because I've seen those two as the centerpiece of their organization. In March of last year, when we all went into lockdown, we would've gone and do shutdown if we haven't had the ability to forward deploy that IT to the home environment. And we can measure our success on the IT side. Did we have enough bandwidth? Did we give them the right platforms? Did the latency mean things froze up or not? We couldn't measure cybersecurity as well. We said, "Okay, due diligence says we'll give you a two-factor authentication, and we're going to do a secure connection back to the office. But then they said we were basically treating it as if you were logged on from your cube or your office, and the reality is you weren't. You were logged in from an environment that your organization had very little, if any, visibility or control into what was going on there, and that's how we got exploited. And because we couldn't measure that, it was only in hindsight that we could see exactly how insecure that was for many organizations. We cut corners. We had to do this to get up and running. That's not a good jumping off point for your status quo going into this hybrid environment in the future. >> So it sounds like you said the ransomware... When I spoke with with Derek Manky, I think about last month or so, ransomware were up 700%. I can only imagine what's happening this year, but one of the things I want to get your perspective on, Jim, is, what's top of mind for both public sector and private sector folks? As you're saying from a measurement perspective, There's a challenge there. There's this hybrid model that's amorphous we'll say. What are some of the things that are top of mind for them, and then how are you helping advise them? Because, as you say, the threat actors got to work pretty quick, so there's a race here. >> Well, top of mind for both of course is ransomware. And the ironic thing is ransomware is not a new phenomenon. It's been with us for a long time. It used to affect retail, one computer at a time, and it was 50 or 100 bucks to decrypt your personal computer. What has changed is the rise of cryptocurrency. It's so easy to monetize the ability to cash out with the victim now. There was a time five to 10 years ago where there were basically three places that were essentially the clearinghouses for this kind of stuff. So government could target those through law enforcement, and that meant that you really had the equivalent of the pawnbroker you needed to watch out for who was the fence that people were going to. Now, come on, cryptocurrency is essentially a fiat currency in some countries. So it's going everywhere. The fact that we have commoditized the ability to do it, you're familiar with ransomware as a service. You don't have to be a coder now. You rent the stuff. Sometimes you pay as much as 80% of the profit to the person you're renting it from. You're basically the mule doing the grunt work, but we've made it so that you don't need to know anything about computer science to carry this kind of crime off. And frankly, we've got some safe haven, some geopolitical safe heavens. It's much like spam was 10 years ago where there were a few countries where probably more traffic coming out as email was spammed in legitimate traffic. And we've got some big nation stages that are basically complicit in allowing this to occur, so safe haven. So this is why ransomware has become such a problem for everybody, and then of course you've got supply chain. You look at solar winds, you look at Microsoft Exchange, Office 365 vulnerability. This again is a problem that's been with us for a long time. It's one that tends to be focused primarily on government customers, because this is something where, yeah, you can do it as a criminal activity, but this really tends to be a game that nation states play against nation state terms. But something like SolarWinds was such an epiphany, was so serious that a lot of organizations said, "Oh my goodness, this attacked the root of trust. This fundamentally got into the system from the inside out." It scared people. And the reality is something like that infected far more people than were actively exploited. I've talked to some people in both the public sector at the state level, and in private sector who say, "Yes, my organization was compromised by this, but we weren't affected." So from my perspective, we were collateral damage. We were caught in the crossfire of a war between nation states. Do we want to spend our scarce cyber security resources trying to mitigate that kind of sophisticated threat? No, not when we know we've got ransomware, when we've got these vulnerabilities in the work from anywhere environment. That's where I want to put my next dollars. So it's been a health conversation with some of them as to what's most concerning to them and what they want to prioritize in mitigation. >> So if we look at some of the executive orders, Jim, that have come down, ransomware I said became a household word. I'm pretty sure my mom even knows the term ransomware, the Colonial Pipeline, the meat packing, where we're starting to see, wow, this is not just, as you said earlier in the beginning, isolated incidents or attacks. This is now affecting infrastructure, potentially public health and safety. Talk to me about some of the executive orders. What do you think they're going to do and where should agencies start? This race is going on. Like you said, they've got to be able to prioritize how they defend themselves. >> So two things to keep in mind when you look at an executive order. An executive order is the chief executive telling the executive branch what to do. If you look at the last executive order that President Biden signed on the 12th of May, people became seized with the fact that, "Oh my goodness, it tells the private sector it has to give threat information, it has to give breach information to the federal government, it has to change what it does in supply chain." You go no. It says when the federal government is your customer, when you're selling them a service, you have to do this. But otherwise, you don't do, by an executive order, something... It doesn't have the force of law. It just is the way you tell the executive branch to behave. So use that executive order as a case on point. Very large, very complex executive order that touched a lot of these things, ransomware, supply chain issues. The problem is you put a whole lot of good ideas in one executive order. You put a whole lot of aggressive time frame. Some things had to be done in 30, 45 days, 60 days, which is two weeks from now. It's crazy because one thing an executive order doesn't do is give you more money. The only way a government agency can spend money on this is if it aligned with the program it already had, or it has contingency funds, reserved funds to do it. So the problem is you take an executive order, you cram it full of good ideas, and you have too many good ideas. So the reality is this executive order tells the government to do a lot of things at once, and it has to by law, well, by the president's direction, focus on all this at once. But if I could pick and choose these, I would say start with the section that said focus on modernizing the cybersecurity of the federal government. There's goodness to come out of that. It has zero trust architecture. Federal government did a great idea of articulating what that was, even years before we called it zero trust. Federal government was segmenting its networks. It had need-to-know access. It was doing things. I come from the national security community. That was just the way we worked. We didn't call it anything fancy like zero trust. We didn't trust anybody. That's the way it worked in the spy business. But zero trust architecture, accelerating migration to the cloud, putting in multi-factor authentication and encryption of data at rest and in transit, deploying endpoint detection and response. Those are things in the executive order that if agencies could focus on those and make progress on implementing those, thumbs up, you have appreciably increased security without even touching the harder things that unfortunately are going to distract people like supply chain, and definitions of what critical software is and the cyber safety board. All good things, but the problem is if you try to do everything at once, the reality is you end up making progress on, appreciable progress on nothing. >> Right, which obviously we don't have the time for that. I'm curious getting your point, because one of the challenges with respect, well, threat vectors with respect to cybersecurity is people. With this shift to home, we had people using corporate devices on home networks and random devices, and now we've got this, as we talked about earlier, this hybrid approach coming back. But how much can zero trust help agencies really educate or really help defend form the human error that is often the cause of getting ransomware through email or an attachment. >> So, Lisa, that is exactly... We're handicapped by the name because zero trust sounds like I don't trust you, you're not trustworthy, rather than trust should be based on the transaction. Like if you need to read data to a file, why am I giving the ability to write to the file or, even worse, delete the file? Just give you what you need to get the job done. And this is tech that is your safety net. It's not Big Brother. When you do real-time monitoring as part of dynamic zero trust, it looks at it and says, "Well, Lisa is doing something she doesn't normally do with this application. Did she make a mistake? Did she say reply all on this, which was sending inside data to outside people on the email list? Do I at least want to ask her? Hey, Lisa, did you mean to do that?" So if you can educate people to say this is the organization looking out for you, it's looking over your shoulder as a friend. It's not here to be checking up on you. Language matters, and it's like we call things insider threat, recognizing that far more damage in an organization happens from people making mistakes. It's insider risk that we need to manage. An organization of any appreciable size has bad apples. That's just a law of nature. But when we call it.... I'm dealing with the insider threat. I've been in government. I've been shot at in some of my dicey situations. I want to avoid being attacked. I want to avoid threats. If I'm an organization, I don't want to avoid my insiders. That's my workforce. That's my biggest asset. They bring risk by their behavior. I need to manage that, but that's constructive. Don't make an adversarial by typecasting them all as threats. They're humans. They make mistakes. You can help them avoid some of those mistakes through technology, and zero trust gets into that. >> Got it. And then last question for you. Here we are, July 1st, crazy. Half a year has gone already. What are some of the things that you're expecting that are going to happen the rest of the year? What can organizations... You talked about some of the things they can implement now. Some of the things seems to be sort of like back to basics. But anything that you see on the horizon in the next six to nine months that organizations really need to be focused on? >> So as they put together their posture for operating in the new normal, I said security and IT were successful in getting us where we got in the pivot to remote telework because they worked hand in hand. So find things like that that you can use to demonstrate to your organization that you really are in the middle of the mix. So as we make this pivot to software defined networking. Because again, if we're going back to offices that are different, places with different kinds of infrastructure, we don't want to pull cable. We don't want to do that. Software-defined networking is a good way to do it, and there are different ways to do software-defined networking, some of which are inherently secure. So pick that one. In software-defined networking, the users love the fact that it gives them better latency, better performance on the apps they care about. The front office likes the fact that they get flexibility for continuity of operations, and they save money. This is the example of something that you can pick that allows you to say, "I'm giving you great performance and great security." Cloud is the same way. People understand I think at this point how to operate in a cloud, the challenge comes in saying, "I'm operating in multiple clouds." I need to say I don't really care. I don't really care where the data go or the compute resource is. I just need to connect the user, the device, data, and resources, regardless of location. And that's where this big approach to say, you know, it's about convergence. It's about convergence of IT and security, and really it's about convergence of computing to say, "I don't care if it's edge computing, or cloud computing, or work from home." It's all just computing, and we've got to connect, and we've got to enable that to be secure. That's the priority that if you take that mindset, thinking about the problem going forward, I think will allow CIOs and CISOs to say, "Look, we're making a difference for the organization, performance, cost, and security." >> Performance, cost, and security. It also sounds like a bit of a cultural change there, which is always challenging, but certainly that convergence as you mentioned, we've seen it be successful, and it's something that sounds now more important than ever. Jim, thank you so much for joining me on the program today, sharing all of your insights, some of the things that you're seeing in what organizations can do to protect themselves from this big threat of ransomware that probably isn't going anywhere anytime soon. >> I wouldn't expect it to, but it's been a pleasure talking to you, Lisa, and we'll have to look back and see how accurate we were with this crystal ball. >> Good, yeah. Jim, great to have you on the program. For Jim Richberg, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this Cube Conversation. (gentle music)

hey welcome to analytics unleashed i'm robert christensen your host today thank you for joining us today we have three quick wins that drive big gains in the enterprise workloads and today we have olaf with erickson we have john with orok and we have dragon with dxc welcome thank you for joining me gentlemen yeah good to be here thank you thank you good to have you hey olaf let's start off with you what big problems are you trying to solve today that are doing for those quick wins what are you trying to do today top top of mind yeah when we started looking into this microservices for our financial platform we immediately saw the challenges that we have and we wanted to have a strong partner and we have a good relationship with hp before so we turned to hp because we know that they have the technical support that we need the possibilities that we need in our platform to fulfill our requirements and also the reliability that we would need so tell me i think this is really important you guys are starting into a digital wallet space that correct yeah that's correct so we are in a financial platform so we are spanning across the world and delivering our financial services to our end customers well that's not classically what you hear about ericsson diving into what's really started you guys down that path and specifically these big wins around this digitization no what what we could see earlier was that we have a mobile networks right so we have a lot of a strong user base within them uh both kind of networks and in the where we started in the emerging markets uh you normally they have a lot of unbanked people and that people also were the ones that you want to target so be able to instead of going down and use your cash for example to buy your fruits or your electricity bill etc you could use your mobile wallet and and that's how it all started and now we're also turning into the emerged markets also like the western side part of worlds etc that's fantastic and i hey i want to talk to john here john's with o'rock and he's the one of those early adopters of those container platforms for the uh in the united states here the federal government tell us a little bit about that program and what's going on with that john yeah sure absolutely appreciate it yeah so with orock what we've done is we developed one of the first fedramp authorized container platforms that runs in our moderate and soon to be high cloud and what that does is building on the israel platform gave us the capability of offering customers both commercial as well as federal the capability and the flexibility of running their workloads in a you know as a service model where they can customize and typically what customers have to do is they have to either build it internally or if they go to the cloud they have to be able to take what resources are available then tweak to those designs to make what they need so in this architecture built on open source and with our own infrastructure we offer you know very low cost zero egress capability but the also the workload processing that they would need to run data analytics machine language and other types of high performance processing that typically they would need as we move forward in this computer age so john you you touched on a topic that's i think is really critical and you had mentioned open source why is open source a key aspect for this transformation that we're seeing coming up in like the next decade yeah sure yeah with open source we shifted early on to the company to move to open source only to offer the flexibility we didn't want to be set on one particular platform to operate within so we took and built the cloud infrastructure we went with open source as an open architecture that we can scale and grow within because of that we were one of the very first fedramp authorizations built on open source not on a specific platform and what we've seen from that is the increased performance capability that we would get as well as the flexibility to add additional components that typically you don't get on other platforms so it was a it was a good move we went with and one that the customer will definitely benefit from that that's that's huge actually because performance leads to better cost and better cost leads better performance around that i i'm just super super happy with all the advanced work that you always are doing there is fantastic and dragon so so you're in a space that i think is really interesting you're dealing with what everybody likes to talk about that's autonomous vehicles you're working with automobile manufacturers you're dealing with data at a scale that is unprecedented can you just open that door for us to talk to about these big big wins that you're trying to get over the line with these enterprises yeah absolutely and um thank you robert we approach uh leveraging esmeral from the data fabric angle we practically have a fully integrated the esmeral data fabric into our robotic drive solution rewarding drive solution is actually a game changer as you've mentioned in accelerating the development of autonomous driving vehicles it's a an end-to-end hyper-scale machine learning and ai platform as i mentioned based on the esmeralda data fabric which is used by the some of the largest manufacturers in the world for development of their autonomous driving algorithms and i think we all in technology i think and following up at the same type of news and research right across the globe in in this area so we're pretty proud that we're one of the leaders in actually providing uh hyperscale machine learning platforms for uh kind manufacturers some of them i cannot talk about but bmw is one of uh one of the current manufacturers that we provide uh these type of solutions and they have publicly spoken about their uh d3 platform uh data driven development platform uh just to give you an idea um of the scale as robert mentioned uh daily we collect over 1.5 petabytes of data of raw data did you say daily data daily the storage capacity is over 250 petabytes and growing uh there's over 100 000 cores and over 200 gpus in the in in the compute area um over 50 50 petabytes of data is delivered every two weeks into a hardware in loop right for testing and we have daily uh thousands of engineers and data scientists accessing the relevant data and developing machine learning models on the daily basis right part of it is the simulation right simulation cuts the cost as well as the uh time right for developing of the autonomous uh driving algorithms and uh the the simulations are taking probably 75 percent of the research uh that's being done on this platform that's amazing dragon i i i i the more i get involved with that and i've been part of these conversations with a number of the folks that are involved with it i i computer science me my geekiness my little propeller head starts coming out i might just blows my mind and i think so i'm going to pivot back over to olaf oh left so you're talking about something that is a global network of financial services okay correct and the flow of transactional typically non-relational transactional data flows to actual transactions going through you have issues of potential fraud you have issues a safety and you have multi-geographic regional problems with data and data privacy how are you guys addressing that today so so to answer that question today we have managed to solve that using the container platform to together with the data fabric but as you say we need to span across different regions we need to have the data as secure as possible because we have a lot of legal aspects to look into because if our data disappears but your money is also disappearing so it's a really important area for us with the security and the reliability of the platforms so so that's why we also went this way to make sure that we have this strong partner that could help us with this because just looking at where we are deployed in in more than 23 countries today and and we it's processing more than 900 million us dollars per day in our systems currently so it is a lot of money passing through and you need to take security in a it's as it's a very important point right it really is it really is and so uh john i mean you you uh obviously are dealing with you know a lot of folks that have three letters as acronyms around the government agencies and uh they range in various degrees of certa of security when you say fedramp i mean what could you just uh articulate why the esmerald platform was something that you selected to go to that fedrak compliant container platform because i think that's that that kind of speaks to the to the industrial strength of what we're talking about yeah it all comes down to being able to offer a product that's secure that the customers can trust and when we went with fedramp fedramp has very stringent security requirements that have monthly poems which are performance reviews and and updates that need to be done if not on a daily basis on a monthly basis so the customers there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes that they don't are able to articulate and what by selecting the hp esmerald platform for containers um one of the key strengths that we looked at was the esmo fabric and it's all about the data it's all about securing the data moving the data transferring the data and from a customer's perspective they want to be able to operate in an environment that they can trust no different than being able to turn on their lights or making sure there's water in their utilities you know containers with the israel platform built on orok's infrastructure gives that capability fedramp enables the security tied to the platform that we're able to follow so it's government uh guided which includes this and many and over hundreds of controls that typically you know the customers don't have time or the capability to address so our commercial customers benefit our federal customers you know that you discuss they're able to follow and check the box to meet those requirements and the container platform gives us a capability where now we're able to move files which we'll hear about through the optimal fabric and then we're able to run the workloads in the containers themselves and give isolation and the security element of fed wrapping esmeral gave us that capability in order to paint that environment fedramp authorized that the customers benefit from from security so they have confidence in running their workloads using their data and able to focus on their core job at hand and not worry about their infrastructure the fundamental requirement isn't it that that isolation between that compute and storage and going up a layer there in in a way that provides them a set of services that they can i wouldn't say set it and forget it but really had the confidence that what they're getting is the best performance for the dollars that they're spending uh john my hat's off to what the work that you all do in there thank you we appreciate it yeah yeah and dragon i want to i wanted to pivot a little bit here because you are primarily the the operator what i consider one of the largest data fabrics on the on the planet for that matter um and i just want to talk a little bit about the openness of our architecture right of all the multiple protocols that we support that allow for you know you know some people may have selected a different set of application deployment models and virtualization models that allow to plug into the data fabric you know it did can you talk a little bit about that yeah and i i think um in my mind right um to operate uh such a uh data fabric at scale right um there were three key elements that we were looking for right uh that we found in uh esmeralda fabric ring the first one was a speed cost and scalability right the second one was the globally distributed data lake or ability to distribute data globally and third was certainly the strength of our partnership with with hpe in this case right so if you look at the uh as well data fabric it's it's fast it's cost effective and it's certainly highly scalable because we as you just mentioned stretch the uh sort of the capabilities of the data fabric to hundreds of petabytes and over a million the data points if you will and it important what was important for us was that the esmeralda fabric actually eliminates the need for multiple vendor solutions which would be otherwise required right because it provides integrated file system database or or a data lake right and the data management on top of it right usually you would probably need to incorporate multiple tools right from different vendors and the file system itself it's it's so important right when you're working at scale like this right and honestly in our research maybe there are three file systems in the world that can support uh this kind of size of the auto data fabric the distributed data lake was also important to us and the reason for that is you can imagine that these large car manufacturers are testing and have testing vehicles all around the world right they're not just doing it locally around the uh their data their id centers right so uh collecting the data and this 1.5 petabytes example right uh for for bmw on a daily basis it's it's it's really challenging unless you have the ability to actually leverage the data in a distributed data like fashion right so data can basically reside in different data centers globally or even on-premise and in cloud environments which became uh very important later because a lot of this car manufacturers actually have oems right that would like to get either portions of the data or get access to the data in a in different environments not necessarily in their data center um and truly i think uh to build something at this scale right uh you you need a strong partner and we certainly had that in hpe and uh we got the comprehensive support right for uh for the software um but but more importantly i think uh partner that clearly understood uh criticality of the data fabric trend and the need for the vice fast response right to our clients and you know jointly i think we met all the challenges and it's so doing i think we made the esmo data fabric a much better and stronger product over the over the last few years that's fantastic thank you dragon appreciate it uh hey so if we're going to wrap up here any last words olaf do you want to share with us no looking forward now in from our perspective on helping out with the kobe 19 situation that we have uh enabling people to still be in the market without actually touching each other and and and leaving maybe for action market and being at home etc doing those transactions that's great thank you john in last comment yeah thanks yeah uh look for uh a joint offering announcement coming up between hpe and orok where we're going to be offering sandbox as a service where the data analytics and machine language where people can actually test drive the actual environment as a service and if they like it then they can move into a production-wise environment so stay tuned for that that's great john thank you for that and hey dragon last words yeah last words um we're pretty happy what we have done already for car manufacturers we're taking this solution right in terms of the uh distributed data-like capabilities as well as the uh hyperscale machine learning and ai platform to other industries and we hope to do it jointly with you well we hope that you do it with us as well so thank you very much everybody gentlemen thank you so much for joining us i appreciate it thank you very much thank you very much hey this is robert christensen with analytics unleashed i want to thank all of our guests here today and we'll catch you next time thank you for joining us bye [Music] [Music] [Music] easy [Music] you

from around the globe it's thecube with coverage of kubecon and cloudnativecon north america 2020 virtual brought to you by red hat the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners hello and welcome back to the cube's coverage of kubecon plus cloud nativecon 2020 the virtual edition abinav joshi is here he's the senior product marketing manager for openshift at red hat and tom dean is the senior director of pro product management at cloudera gentlemen thanks for coming on thecube good to see you thank you very much for having us here hey guys i know you would be here it was great to have you and guys i know you're excited about the partnership and i definitely want to get in and talk about that but before we do i wonder if we could just set the tone you know what are you seeing in the market tom let's let's start with you i had a great deep dive a couple of weeks back with anupam singh and he brought me up to speed on what's new with cloudera but but one of the things we discussed was the accelerated importance of data putting data at the core of your digital business tom what are you seeing in the marketplace right now yeah absolutely so um overall we're still seeing a growing demand for uh storing and and processing massive massive amounts of data even in the past few months um where perhaps we see a little bit more variety is on by industry sector is on the propensity to adopt some of the latest and greatest uh technologies that are out there or that we we deliver to the market um so whether perhaps in the retail hospitality sector you may see a little bit more risk aversion around some of the latest tools then you you go to the healthcare industry as an example and you see we see a strong demand for our latest technologies uh with with everything that is that is going on um so overall um still a lot lots of demand around this space so abnormal i mean we just saw in ibm's earnings though the momentum of red hat you know growing in the mid teens and the explosion that we're seeing around containers and and obviously openshift is at the heart of that how the last nine months affected your customers priorities and what are you seeing yeah we've been a lot more busier like in the last few months because there's like a lot of use cases and if you look at the like a lot of the research and so on and we are seeing that from our customers as well that now the customers are actually speeding up the digital transformation right people say that okay kovac 19 has actually uh speeded up the digital transformation for a lot of our customers for the right reasons to be able to help the customers and so on so we are seeing a lot of attraction on like number of verticals and number of use cases beyond the traditional lab dev data analytics aiml messaging streaming edge and so on like lots of use cases in like a lot of different like industry verticals so there's a lot of momentum going on on openshift and the broader that portfolio as well yeah it's ironic the the timing of the pandemic but it sure underscores that this next 10 years is going to be a lot different than the last 10 years okay let's talk about some of the things that are new around data tom cloudera you guys have made a number of moves since acquiring hortonworks a little over two years ago what's new with uh with the cloudera data platform cdp sure so yes our latest therap uh platform is called cbp clara data platform last year we announced the public cloud version of cdp running on aws and then azure and what's new is just two months ago we announced the release of the version of this platform targeted at the data center and that's called cvp private cloud and really the focus of this platform this new version has been around solving some of the pain points that we see around agility or time to value and the ease of use of the platform and to give you some specific examples with our previous technology it could take a customer three months to provision a data warehouse if you include everything from obtaining the infrastructure to provisioning the warehouse loading the data setting security policies uh and fine-tuning the the software now with cbp private cloud we've been able to take those uh three months and turn it into three minutes so significant uh speed up in in that onboarding time and in time to valley and a key piece of this uh that enabled this this speed up was a revamping of the entire stack specifically the infrastructure and service services management layer and this is where the containerization of the platform comes in specifically kubernetes and red hat open shift that is a key piece of the puzzle that enables this uh order of magnitude uh improvement in time right uh now abner you think about uh red hat you think about cloudera of course hortonworks the stalwarts of of of open source you got kind of like birds of a feather how are red hat and cloudera partnering with each other you know what are the critical aspects of that relationship that people should be aware of yeah absolutely that's a very good question yeah so on the openshift side we've had a lot of momentum in the market and we have well over 2000 customers in terms of a lot of different verticals and the use cases that i talked about at the beginning of our conversation in terms of traditional and cloud native app dev databases data analytics like ai messaging and so on right and the value that you have with openshift and the containers kubernetes and devops like part of the solution being able to provide the agility flexibility scalability the cross cloud consistency like so all that that you see in a typical app dev world is directly applicable to fast track the data analytics and the ai projects as well and we've seen like a lot of customers and some of the ones that we can talk about in a public way like iix rbc bank hca healthcare boston children's bmw exxon mobil so all these organizations are being are able to leverage openshift to kind of speed up the ai projects and and help with the needs of the data engineers data scientists and uh and the app dev folks now from our perspective providing the best in class uh you say like experience for the customers at the platform level is key and we have to make sure that the tooling that the customers run on top of it uh gets the best in class the experience in terms of the day zero to day two uh management right and it's uh and and it's an ecosystem play for us and and and that's the way cloudera is the top isv in the space right when it comes to data analytics and ai and that was our key motivation to partner with cloudera in terms of bringing this joint solution to market and making sure that our customers are successful so the partnership is at all the different levels in the organization say both up and down as well as in the the engineering level the product management level the marketing level the sales level and at the support and services level as well so that way if you look at the customer journey in terms of selecting a solution uh putting it in place and then getting the value out of it so the partnership it actually spans across the entire spectrum yeah and tom you know i wonder if you could add anything there i mean it's not just about the public cloud with containers you're seeing obviously the acceleration of of cloud native principles on-prem in a hybrid you know across clouds it's sort of the linchpin containers really and kubernetes specifically linchpin to enable that what would you add to that discussion yeah as part of the partnership when we were looking for a vendor who could provide us that kubernetes layer we looked at our customer base and if you think about who clara is focused on we really go after that global the global 2000 firms out there these customers have very strict uh security requirements and they're often in these highly regulated uh industries and so when we looked at a customer's base uh we saw a lot of overlap and there was a natural good fit for us there but beyond that just our own technical evaluation of the solutions and also talking to uh to our own customers about who they do they see as a trusted platform that can provide enterprise grade uh features on on a kubernetes layer red hat had a clear leadership in in that front and that combined with our own uh long-standing relationship with our parent company ibm uh it made this partnership a natural good thing for us right and cloudera's always had a good relationship with ibm tom i want to stay with you if i can for a minute and talk about the specific joint solutions that you're providing with with red hat what are you guys bringing to customers in in terms of those solutions what's the business impact where's the value absolutely so the solution is called cbd or color data platform private cloud on red hat openshift and i'll describe three uh the three pillars that make up cbp uh first what we have is the five data analytic experiences and that is meant to cover the end to end data lifecycle in the first release we just came out two months ago we announced the availability of two of those five experiences we have data warehousing for bi analytics as well as machine learning and ai where we offer a collaborative data science data science tools for data scientists to come together do exploratory data analytics but also develop predictive models and push them to production going forward we'll be adding the remaining three uh experiences they include data engineering or transformations on uh on your data uh data flow for streaming analytics and ingest uh as well as operational database for uh real-time surveying of both structure and unstructured data so these five experiences have been re-banked right compared to our prior platform to target these specific use cases and simplify uh these data disciplines the second pillar that i'll talk about is the sdx or uh what what we call the shared data experience and what this is is the ability for these five experiences to have one global data set that they can all access with shared metadata security including fine grain permissions and a suite of governance tools that provide lineage provide auditing and business metadata so by having these shared data experiences our developers our users can build these multi-disciplinary workflows in a very straightforward way without having to create all this custom code and i can stitch you can stitch them together and the last pillar that i'll mention uh is the containerization of of the platform and because of containers because of kubernetes we're now able to offer that next level of agility isolation uh and infrastructure efficiency on the platform so give you a little bit more specific examples on the agility i mentioned going from three months to three minutes in terms of the speed up with i uh with uh containers we can now also give our users the ability to bring their own versions of their libraries and engines without colliding with another user who's sharing the platform that has been a big ask from our customers and last i'll mention infrastructure efficiency by re-architecting our services to running a microservices architecture we can now impact those servers in a much more efficient way we can also auto scale auto suspend bring all this as you mentioned bring all these cloud native concepts on premises and the end result of that is better infrastructure efficiency now our customers can do more with the same amount of hard work which overall uh reduces their their total spend on the solution so that's what we call cbp private cloud great thanks for that i mean wow we've seen really the evolution from the the wild west days of you know the early days of so-called big data ungoverned a lot of shadow data science uh maybe maybe not as efficient as as we'd like and but certainly today taking advantage of some of those capabilities dealing with the noisy neighbor problem enough i wonder if you could comment another question that i have is you know one of the things that jim whitehurst talked about when ibm acquired red hat was the scale that ibm could bring and what i always looked at in that context was ibm's deep expertise in vertical industries so i wonder what are some of the key industry verticals that you guys are targeting and succeeding in i mean yes there's the pandemic has some effects we talked about hospitality obviously airlines have to have to be careful and conserving cash but what are some of the interesting uh tailwinds that you're seeing by industry and some of the the more interesting and popular use cases yeah that's a very good question now in terms of the industry vertical so we are seeing the traction in like a number of verticals right and the top ones being the financial services like healthcare telco the automotive industry as well as the federal government are some of the key ones right and at the end of the day what what all the customers are looking at doing is be able to improve the experience of their customers with the digital services that they roll out right as part of the pandemic and so on as well and then being able to gain competitive edge right if you can have the services in your platform and make them kind of fresh and relevant and be able to update them on a regular basis that's kind of that's your differentiator these days right and then the next one is yeah if you do all this so you should be able to increase your revenue be able to save cost as well that's kind of a key one that you mentioned right that that a lot of the industries like the hospitality the airlines and so on are kind of working on saving cash right so if you can help them save the cost that's kind of key and then the last one is is being able to automate the business processes right because there's not like a lot of the manual processes so yeah if you can add in like a lot of automation that's all uh good for your business and then now if you look at the individual use cases in these different industry verticals what we're seeing that the use cases cannot vary from the industry to industry like if you look at the financial services the use cases like fraud detection being able to do the risk analysis and compliance being able to improve the customer support and so on are some of the key use cases the cyber security is coming up a lot as well because uh yeah nobody wants to be hacked and so and and so on yeah especially like in these times right and then moving on to healthcare and the life sciences right what we're seeing the use cases on being able to do the data-driven diagnostics and care and being able to do the discovery of drugs being able to say track kobit 19 and be able to tell that okay uh which of my like hospital is going to be full when and what kind of ppe am i going to need at my uh the the sites and so on so that way i can yeah and mobilize like as needed are some of the key ones that we are seeing on the healthcare side uh and then in terms of the automotive industry right that's where being able to speed up the autonomous driving initiatives uh being able to do uh the auto warranty pricing based on the history of the drivers and so on and then being able to save on the insurance cost is a big one that we are seeing as well for the insurance industries and then but more like manufacturing right being able to do the quality assurance uh at the shop floor being able to do the predictive maintenance on machinery and also be able to do the robotics process automation so like lots of use cases that customers are prioritizing but it's very verticalized it kind of varies from the vertical to a vertical but at the end of the day yeah it's all about like improving the customer experience the revenue saving cost and and being able to automate the business processes yeah that's great thank you for that i mean we we heard a lot about automation we were covering ansible fest i mean just think about fraud how much you know fraud detection has changed in the last 10 years it used to be you know so slow you'd have to go go through your financial statements to find fraud and now it's instantaneous cyber security is critical because the adversaries are very capable healthcare is a space where you know it's ripe for change and now of course with the pandemic things are changing very rapidly automotive another one an industry that really hasn't hadn't seen much disruption and now you're seeing with a number of things autonomous vehicles and you know basically software on wheels and insurance great example even manufacturing you're seeing you know a real sea change there so thank you for that description you know very often in the cube we like to look at joint engineering solutions that's a gauge of the substance of a partnership you know sometimes you see these barney deals you know there's a press release i love you you love me okay see you but but so i wonder if you guys could talk about specific engineering that you're doing tom maybe you could start sure yeah so on the on the engineering and product side um we've um for cbp private cloud we've we've changed our uh internal development and testing to run all on uh openshift uh internally uh and as part of that we we have a direct line to red hat engineering to help us solve any issues that that uh we run into so in the initial release we start with support of openshift43 we're just wrapping up uh testing of and we'll begin with openshift46 very soon on another aspect of their partnership is on being able to update our images to account for any security vulnerabilities that are coming up so with the guidance and help from red hat we've been we've standardized our docker images on ubi or the universal based image and that allows us to automatically get many of these security fixes uh into our into our software um the last point that i mentioned here is that it's not just about providing kubernetes uh red hat helps us with the end to end uh solution so there is also the for example bringing a docker registry into the picture or providing a secure vault for storing uh all the secrets so all these uh all these pieces combined make up the uh a strong complete solution actually the last thing i'll mention is is a support aspect which is critical to our customers in this model our customers can bring support tickets to cluberra but as soon as we determine that it may be an issue that uh related to red hat or openshift where we can use their help we have that direct line of communication uh and automated systems in the back end to resolve those support tickets uh quickly for our customers so those are some of the examples of what we're doing on the technical side great thank you uh enough we're out of time but i wonder if we could just close here i mean when we look at our survey data with our data partner etr we see containers container orchestration container management generally and again kubernetes specifically is the the number one area of investment for companies that has the most momentum in terms of where they're putting their efforts it's it's it's right up there and even ahead of ai and machine learning and even ahead of cloud which is obviously larger maybe more mature but i wonder if you can add anything and bring us home with this segment yeah absolutely and i think uh so uh one thing i want to add is like in terms of the engineering level right we also have like between cloudera and red hat the partnership and the sales and the go to market levels as well because once you build the uh the integration it yeah it has to be built out in the customer environments as well right so that's where we have the alignment um at the marketing level as well as the sales level so that way we can like jointly go in and do the customer workshops and make sure the solutions are getting deployed the right way right uh and also we have a partnership at the professional services level as well right where um the experts from both the orgs are kind of hand in hand to help the customers right and then at the end of the day if you need help with support and that's what tom talked about that we have the experts on the support side as well yeah and then so to wrap things up right uh so all the industry research and the customer conversation that we are having are kind of indicating that the organizations are actually increasing the focus on digital uh transformation with the data and ai being a key part of it and that's where this strategic partnership between cloudera and and red hat is going to play a big role to help our mutual customers uh through that our transition and be able to achieve the key goals that they set for their business great well guys thanks so much for taking us through the partnership and the integration work that you guys are doing with customers a great discussion really appreciate your time yeah thanks a lot dave really appreciate it really enjoyed the conversation all right keep it right there everybody you're watching thecube's coverage of cubecon plus cloud nativecon north america the virtual edition keep it right there we'll be right back

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's Virtual coverage of Amazon Web Services, AWS Public Sector Summit Online. We couldn't be there in person, but we're doing remote interviews. I'm John Furrier, your host of the cube. We've got a great segment from Asia Pacific on the other side of the world from California, about social impact, transforming teaching and learning with Cloud technology we've got three great guests. Hugo Richard is the CEO and co-founder of Dystech and Janine Teo CEO and founder of Solve Education founders and CEOs of startups is great Vincent Quah is the APAC Regional Head of Education, Healthcare Not-For-Profit and Research for AWS. (indistinct) big program. Vincent, thanks for coming on Janine and Hugo thank you for joining. >> Thanks for having us, John. >> Thanks John So, we're not there in person. We're doing remote interviews. I'm really glad to have this topic because now more than ever social change is happening. This next generation is building software and applications to solve big problems. And it's not like yesterday's problems, they're today's problems and learning and mentoring and starting companies are all happening virtually, digitally, and also in person. So the world's changing. So I got to ask you, Vincent we'll start with you Amazon, obviously big (indistinct) culture. You got two great founders here and CEOs doing some great stuff. Tell us a little bit what's going on at APAC, a lot of activity. I mean re-invent and the summits out there are really popular. Give us an update on what's happening. >> Thank you, thank you for the question, John. I think it's extremely exciting, especially in today's context, that we are seeing so much activities, especially in the education technology sector. One of the challenges that we saw from our education technology customers is that they're always looking for help and support in many of the innovation that they're trying to develop. The second area of observation that we had was that they are always alone with very limited resources and they usually do not know where to look for in terms of support and in terms of not who they can reach out to from a community standpoint, that is actually how we started and developed this program called AWS EdStart. It is a program specifically for education technology companies that are targeting, delivering innovative education solutions for the education sector. And we bring specific benefits to these education technology companies when they joined the program, AWS EdStart. Yeah, three specific areas, one is that we support them with technical support, which is really, really key trying to help them navigate in the various ranges of AWS services that allows them to develop innovative services. The second area is leaking them and building a community of like-minded education technology founders, and linking them also to investors and VCs. And lastly, of course, in supporting innovation, we support them with a bit of AWS Cloud credits, promotional credits for them so that they can go and experiment and develop innovations for their customers. >> That's great stuff I want to get into that program a little bit further because I think, you know, that's a great example of kind of benefits AWS provides (indistinct) free credits or, no one is going to turn away free credits. We'll take the free credits all the time, all day long, but really it's about the innovation. Janine I want to get your thoughts. How was Solve Education born? What problems were you solving? What made you start this company and tell us your story. >> Thank you so much for the question. So actually my co-founder was invited to speak at an African Innovation Forum couple of years back, and the topic that he was sharing with, how can Africa skip over the industrialization phase and go direct to the knowledge economy and that discussion went towards, in order to have access to the knowledge commonly you need knowledge and how do you get knowledge well through education. So that's when everybody in the Congress was a bit stuck, right? And the advice was in order to scale fast, we need to figure out a way to not while, you know, engaging the government and schools and teachers, but not depend on them for the success of the education initiative. So, and that's was what (indistinct) walk away from the conference. And when we met in Jakarta, we started talking about that also. So while I'm Singaporean, I worked in many developing countries. And the problem that we're trying to solve is it might be shocking to you, but UNESCO recently published over 600 million children and youth are not learning. And that is a big number globally, right? And out of all the SDGs per se, from UN, education, and perhaps I'm biased, because I'm a computer engineer, but I see that education is the only one that can be solved by transforming (indistinct) versus the other SDGs like, you know, poverty or hunger, right? Actually require big amount of logistic coordination and so on. So we saw a very interesting trend with mobile phones, particularly smart phones becoming more and more ubiquitous. And with that, we saw a very interesting opportunity for us to disseminate education through mobile technology. So we in self-education elevate people on a public through providing education and employment opportunities, (indistinct) on tech. And we.. our vision is to enable people to empower themselves. And what we do is that we build an open platform that provides everyone active education. >> Hugo How about your company? What problem are you solving? How did it all get started? Tell us your vision. >> Thanks, John. Well, look, it all started with a joke, one of the co-founder, Matthew, had a, he has a child who has severe learning disorder and dyslexia, and he made a joke one day about having (indistinct) that could support those kids. And I took the joke seriously. So we started sitting down and, you know, trying to figure out how we can make this happen. So it turns out that dyslexia is the most common learning disorder in the world. We have an estimated 10 to 20% of the worldwide population with the disorder, due to in context, that's between 750 million up to 1.5 billion individuals with that learning disorder. And so where we sort of try and tackle the problem is that we've identified that there's two key things for children with dyslexia. The first one is that knowing that it is dyslexia, meaning being assessed. And the second one is, so what, what do we do about it? And so given all expertise in data science and AI, we clearly saw an opportunity of sort of building something that could assess individual children and adults with dyslexia. The big problem with the assessment is that it's very expensive. We've met parents in the U.S. specifically who paid up to 6,000 U.S. Dollars for a diagnosis with an educational psychologist. On the other side, we have parents who wait 12 months before having a spot. So what we saw clearly is that the observable symptom of dyslexia are reading, and everyone has a smartphone and (indistinct) from smartphone is actually really good to record your voice. So we started collecting audio recordings from children and adults who have been diagnosed with dyslexia. And we then try to model and to recognize the likelihood of dyslexia by analyzing audio recording. So in theory, it's like diagnosed dyslexic, helping other undiagnosed dyslexic being diagnosed. So we have now (indistinct) them. That can take about 10 minutes, which requires no prior training costs, 20 U.S. Dollar, and anyone can use it to assess someone's likelihood of dyslexia. >> You know, this is the kind of thing that really changes the game because you also have learning for questions that are nonlinear and different. You've got YouTube, you've got videos, you have knowledge bases, you've got community. Vincent mentioned that Janine, you mentioned, you know, making the bits of driver and changing technology. This is the kind of thing that seems obvious now as look at it, but now you've got to put it into action. So, you know, one of the benefits of Cloud on AWS, we'll give a plug for Vincent's company here is that you can move faster. And that's something that Andy Jassy always talks about and Teresa Carlson, being builders and moving fast, but you got to build it. So Janine and Hugo, please take a minute to explain, okay, you got the idea, you're kicking the tires, you're putting it together. Now you've got to actually start writing code. What happens next? Janine, we'll start with you. >> Well, what happens next? Okay. So for us, we know education technology is not new, right. And education games are not new, but before we even started, we look at what's available and we quickly realized that the digital divide is very real, most technology out there first are not designed for (indistinct) devices, and also not designed for people who do not have internet at home. so with just that assessment, we quickly realized we need to do something about, and that's something that problem is. One is just one part of the whole puzzle. There's two other very important things. One is advocacy. Can we prove that we can teach through mobile devices? And then the second thing is motivation. And again, it's also really obvious, but, and people might think that, you know, marginalized communities are super motivated to learn. Well, I wouldn't say that they are not motivated, but just like all of us behavioral change is really hard, right? I would love to workout everyday, but you know, I don't really do that. So how do we use technology to, you know, to induce that behavioral change so that we can help support their motivation to learn. So those are the different things that we work on, certainly with it. >> Yeah, and then a motivated community, is even more impactful because then once the flywheel gets going, then it's powerful. Hugo your reaction to, you know, you got the idea, you got the vision, you're starting to put, take one step in front of the other. You got AWS, take us through the progression on the startup. >> Yeah, sure. I mean, what Janine said is, very likely to, to what we're trying to do, but for us, there's three key things that in order for us to be successful and help as much people as we can, it is three things. The first one is reliability. The second one is accessibility and the other one is affordability. So the reliability means that we have been doing a lot of work in the scientific approach as to how are we going to make this work And so we've.. We have a couple of scientific publications and we had to collect data and, you know, sort of publish this into AI conferences and things like that. So it makes sure that we have the scientific evidence behind us that support us. And so what that means is that we have to have a large amount of data and then put this to work, right on the other side of the accessibility and affordability means that Janine said, you know, it needs to be on the Cloud because if it's on the Cloud, it's accessible for anyone with any device, with an internet connection, which is, you know, covering most of the globe. So it's a good start. And so, the Cloud obviously allow us to deliver the same experience and the same value to clients and parent and teacher and (indistinct) professional around the world. And that's why, you know, it's been amazing, to be able to use the technology on the AI side as well obviously there is a lot of benefit of being able to leverage the computational power of the Cloud, to make better algorithm and better training. >> (indistinct) to come back to both of you on the AI question. I think that's super important. Vincent I want to come back to you though, because in Asia Pacific and that side of the world, you still have the old guard, the incumbents around education and learning, but there's great penetration with mobile and broadband. You have great trends as a tailwind for Amazon and these kinds of opportunities EdStart, what trends are you seeing that are now favoring you? Because with COVID, you know, the world is almost kind of like been a line in the sand is before COVID and after COVID, there's more demand for learning and education and community now than ever before, not just for education, the geopolitical landscape, everything around the younger generation is more channels, more data, the more engagement, how are you looking at this? What's your vision of these trends? Can you share your thoughts on how that's impacting learning and teaching? >> So there're three things that I want to quickly touch on. Number one, I think governments are beginning to recognize that they really need to change the way they approach solving social and economic problems. The pandemic has certainly calls into question that if you do not have a digital strategy, you can't find a better time to now develop and not just develop a digital strategy, but actually to put it in place. And so government are shifting very, very quickly into the Cloud and adopting digital strategy and use digital strategy to address some of the key problems that they are facing. And they have to solve them in a very short period of time. Right, We will talk about speed, the agility of the Cloud, and that's why the Cloud is so powerful for government to adopt. The second thing is that we saw a lot of schools close down across the world, UNESCO reported, what 1.5 billion students out of schools. So how then do you continue teaching and learning when you don't have physical classroom open and that's where education technology companies and, you know, heroes like Janine's company and others, there are so many of them around are able to come forward and offer their services and help schools go online, run classrooms online, continue to allow teaching and learning, you know, online. And this has really benefited the overall education system. The third thing that is happening is that I think tertiary education and maybe even (indistinct) education model will have to change. And they recognize that, you know, again, it goes back to the digital strategy that they've got to have a clear digital strategy and the education technology companies like what, who we have here today. Just the great partners that the education system need to look at to help them solve some of these problems and get to addressing giving a solution very, very quickly. >> Well, I know you're being kind of polite to the old guard, but I'm not that polite. I'll just be, say it. There's some old technology out there and Janine and Hugo, you're young enough not to know what IT means because you're born in the Cloud. So that's good for you. I remember what I teach. Like in fact, there's a, there's a joke here in the United States so with everyone at home the teachers have turned into the IT department, meaning they're helping the parents and the kids figure out how to go unmute and how to configure a network address translation if their routers don't work, real problems. I mean, this was technology, schools were operating with low tech Zoom's out there. You've got video conferencing, you've got all kinds of things, but now there's all that support that's involved. And so what's happening is it's highlighting the real problems of the institutional technology. So Vincent, I'll start with you. This is a big problem. So Cloud solves that one, you guys have pretty much helped IT do things that they don't want to do anymore by automation. This is an opportunity, not necessarily.. There's a problem today, but it's an opportunity tomorrow. Could you just quickly talk about how you see the Cloud, helping all this manual training and learning new tools. >> Absolutely. So I want to say and put forth a hypothesis and that hypothesis is simply this. We are all now living in a Cloud empowered economy, whether we like it or not, we are touching and using services that are powered by the Cloud. And a lot of them are powered by the AWS Cloud, but we don't know about it. A lot of people just don't know, right? Whether you are watching Netflix, well in the old days, you're buying tickets and booking hotels on Expedia, or now you're actually playing games on Epic Entertainment, you know, playing Fortnite and all those kinds of games you're already using and a consumer of the Cloud. And so one of the big ideas that we have is we really want to educate and create awareness of top computing for every single person. If it can be used for innovation and to bring about benefits to society that is a common knowledge that everyone needs to have. And so the first big idea is, want to make sure that everyone actually is educated on Cloud literacy. The second thing is for those who have not embarked on a clear Cloud strategy, this is the time don't wait for another pandemic to happen because you want to be ready. You want to be prepared for the unknown, which is what a lot of people are faced with. And you want to get ahead of the curve. And so education, training yourself, getting some learning done. And that's really very, very important as a next step to prepare yourself to face the uncertainty and having programs like AWS EdStart actually helps to empower and catalyze innovation in the education industry that our two founders have actually demonstrated. So back to you, John. >> Congratulation on the EdStart, we'll get into that and real quickly, EdStart but let's first get the born in the Cloud generation Janine and Hugo you guys are competing, you got to get your apps out there. You've got to get your solutions. You're born in the Cloud. You have to go compete with the existing solutions. How do you view that? What's your strategy? What's your mindset, Janine, we'll start with you. >> So for us, we are very aware that we are solving a problem that has never been solved, right? If not, we wouldn't have so many people who are not learning. So this is a very big problem. And being able to leverage on Cloud technology means that we are able to just focus on what we do best, right? How do we make sure that learning is sufficient and learning is effective. And how do we get people motivated and all those sort of great things leveraging on game mechanics, social network, and incentives. And then while we do that on the Cloud side, we can just put that almost ourselves, everything to AWS Cloud technology to help us not worry about that. And you were absolutely right. The pandemic actually woke up a lot of people and has organizations like myself. We start to get queries from governments and other, even big NGOs on, you know, because before COVID we had to really do our best to convince them until (indistinct) are dry >> (indistinct) knock on doors and convince people. >> Yes. And now we don't have to do that. It's the other way around. So we are really, you know, we appreciate this opportunity and also we want to help people realize that in order to.. By adopting either a blended approach or adopting technology means that you can do mass customization of learning as well. And that's, what we could do to really push learning to the next level. So, and, there are a few other creative things that we've done with governments, for example, with the government of East Java on top of just using the education platform, as it is an educational platform, which is education (indistinct) on our civilization, they have added in a module that teaches COVID because, you know, their health care system is really under a lot of strain there, right? And adding this component in and the most popular mini game in that component is this game called Hoax Or Not. And it teaches people to identify what's fake news and what's real news. And that really went very popular and very well in that region of 25 million people. So that became not only just boring school subjects, but it can be used to teach many different things. And following that project, we are working with the Federal Government of Indonesia to talk about (indistinct) and even a very difficult topic like sex education as well. >> Yeah. And the learning is nonlinear, it's horizontally scalable, it's network graph. So you can learn, share about news. And this is contextual data. It's not just learning, it's everything. It's not like, you know, linear learning. It's a whole nother ballgame, Hugo, your competitive strategy. You're out there now, you got the COVID world. How are you competing? How's Amazon helping you? >> Absolutely John, look, this is an interesting one because the common competitor that we have are educational psychologist, they're not at tech. So I wouldn't say that we're competing against a competitor per se. I would say that we are competing against some old way of doing things. The challenge for us is to empower people, to be comfortable with having a machine, you know, analyzing your kid's audio recording and telling you if it's likely to be dyslexia. And this concept obviously is very new. You know, we can see this in other industry with AI, you know, you have the app that Stanford created to diagnose skin cancer by taking a photo of your skin. So it's being done in different industry. So the biggest challenge for us is really about the old way of doing things. What's been really interesting for us is that you know, education is lifelong, you know, you have a big pot in school, but when you're an adult you learn and, you know, we've been doing some very interesting work with the Justice Department where, you know, we look at inmate and, and, you know, often when people go to jail, they have, you know, some literacy difficulty. And so we've been doing some very interesting work in this field. We're also doing some very interesting work with HR and company who want to understand their staff and put management in place so that every single person in the company are empowered to do the job and, you know, achieve success. So, you know, we're not competing against Ed Tech. And often when we talk to other Ed Tech company, we come before, you know, we don't provide a learning solution. We provide an assessment solution, an E assessment solution. So really John, what we competing against is an old way of doing things. >> And that's exactly why the Cloud's so successful. You change the economics. You're actually a net new benefit. And I think the Cloud gives you speed. And your only challenge is getting the word out because the economics are just game changing, right? So that's how Amazon does so well, by the way, you can take all our recordings from theCUBE interviews, all my interviews and let me know how I do, okay. So got all the, got all the voice recordings for my interview. I'm sure the test will come back challenging. So take a look at that. >> Absolutely. >> Vincent I want to come back to you, but I want to ask the two founders real quick for the folks watching okay and hear about Amazon. They know the history, they know the startups that started on Amazon that became unicorns that went public. I mean, just a long list of successes born in the Cloud. You get big pay when you're successful, love that business model. But for the folks watching that are in the virtual garages or in their houses innovating and building out new ideas, what does EdStart mean for them? How does it work? Would you would recommend it? And what are some of the learnings that you have from working with EdStart? Janine We'll start with you. >> For me. So I would, for me, I would definitely highly recommend EdStart. And the reason is because EdStart, our relationship with EdStart, is almost not like a client-supplier relationship it's almost like business partners. So they not only help us with providing the technology. But on top of that, they have their system architects to work with my tech team and they have, you know, open technical hours for us to interact. And on top of that, they do many other things like building a community where, you know, people like me and Google can meet. And also other opportunities like getting out there, right? As you know, all of the startups run on a very thin budget. So how do we not pour millions of dollars into getting all that out there is another big benefit as well. So I'll definitely very much recommend EdStart. And I think another big thing is this, right? Now that we have COVID and we have demands coming from all other places including like, even (indistinct) from the Government of Gambia, you know, so how do we quickly deploy our technology right there? Or how do we deploy our technology from the people who are demanding our solution in Nigeria, right? With technology it is almost brainless. >> Yeah. The great enabling technology ecosystem to support you. I think, at the regions too. So the regions do help. I love we call them cube regions because we're on Amazon, we have our Cloud Hugo, EdStart your observations, experience and learnings from working with AWS. >> Absolutely. Look, there's a lot to say, so I'll try and make it short for anyone, but, so for us and me personally, and also as an individual and as a founder, it's really been a 365 sort of support. So like Janine mentioned, there's the community where you can connect with existing entrepreneur. You can connect with experts in different industry. You can ask technical experts and have a, you know, office hour every week. Like you said, Janine with, your tech team talking to a Cloud architect just to unlock any problem that you may have. And, you know, on the business side, I would add something which for us has been really useful is the fact that when we've approached government, being able to say that we have the support of AWS and that we work with them to establish data integrity, making sure everything is properly secured and all that sort of thing has been really helpful in terms of moving forward with discussion with potential client and government as well. So there's also the business aspect side of things, where when people see you, there's a perceived value that, you know, your entourage is smart people and people who are capable of doing great things. So that's been also really helpful. >> You know, that's a great point. The AppSec review process as you do deals is a lot easier when you're on AWS. Vincent we're a little bit over time. What a great panel here. Close us out, share with us what's next for you guys. You've got a great startup ecosystem and doing some great work out there and education as well, healthcare, how's your world going on? Take a minute to explain what's going on in your world. >> John I'm part of the public sector team worldwide in AWS, we have very clear mission statements. And the first is, you know, we want to bring about disruptive innovation. And the AWS Cloud is really the platform where so many of our Ed Techs, whether it's (indistinct) Health Tech, Gulf Tech, all those who are developing solutions to help our governments and our education institutions, our healthcare institutions to really be better at what they do. We want to bring about those disruptive innovations to the market, as fast as possible. It's just an honor and a privilege for us to be working. And why is that important? It's because it's linked to our second mission, which is to really make the world a better place to really deliver.. The kind of work that Hugo and Janine are doing. We cannot do it by ourselves. We need specialists and really people with brilliant ideas and think big vision to be able to carry out what they are doing. And so we're just honored and privileged to be part of their work. And in delivering this impact to society. >> The expansion of AWS out in your area has been phenomenal growth. I've been saying to Teresa Carlson and Andy Jassy and the folks at AWS for many, many years, that when you move fast with innovation, the public sector and the private partnerships come together, you starting to see that blending. And you've got some great founders here making a social impact, transforming teaching and learning. So congratulations, Janine and Hugo. Thank you for sharing your story on theCUBE. Thanks for joining. >> Thank you for having us >> thanks John >> Thank you, John. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE Virtual we're remote. We're not in person this year because of the pandemic you're watching AWS Public Sector Online Summit. Thank you for watching. (soft music)

>> Voice Over: Data is at the heart of transformation, and the change every company needs to succeed. But it takes more than new technology. It's about teams, talent and cultural change. Empowering everyone on the front lines to make decisions, all at the speed of digital. The transformation starts with you, it's time to lead the way, it's time for thought leaders. (soft upbeat music) >> Welcome to Thought.Leaders a digital event brought to you by ThoughtSpot, my name is Dave Vellante. The purpose of this day is to bring industry leaders and experts together to really try and understand the important issues around digital transformation. We have an amazing lineup of speakers, and our goal is to provide you with some best practices that you can bring back and apply to your organization. Look, data is plentiful, but insights are not, ThoughtSpot is disrupting analytics, by using search and machine intelligence to simplify data analysis and really empower anyone with fast access to relevant data. But in the last 150 days, we've had more questions than answers. Creating an organization that puts data and insights at their core, requires not only modern technology but leadership, a mindset and a culture, that people often refer to as data-driven. What does that mean? How can we equip our teams with data and fast access to quality information that can turn insights into action? And today we're going to hear from experienced leaders who are transforming their organizations with data, insights, and creating digital first cultures. But before we introduce our speakers, I'm joined today by two of my co-hosts from ThoughtSpot. First, chief data strategy officer of the ThoughtSpot is Cindi Howson, Cindi is an analytics and BI expert with 20 plus years experience, and the author of Successful Business Intelligence: Unlock the Value of BI & Big Data. Cindi was previously the lead analyst at Gartner for the data and analytics Magic Quadrant. In early last year, she joined ThoughtSpot to help CEOs and their teams understand how best to leverage analytics and AI for digital transformation. Cindi great to see you, welcome to the show. >> Thank you Dave, nice to join you virtually. >> Now our second cohost and friend of theCUBE is ThoughtSpot CEO Sudheesh Nair Hello Sudheesh, how are you doing today? >> I'm well, good to talk to you again. >> That's great to see you, thanks so much for being here. Now Sudheesh, please share with us why this discussion is so important to your customers and of course to our audience, and what they're going to learn today. (upbeat music) >> Thanks Dave, I wish you were there to introduce me into every room that I walk into because you have such an amazing way of doing it. It makes me feel also good. Look, since we have all been you know, cooped up in our homes, I know that the vendors like us, we have amped up our sort of effort to reach out to you with, invites for events like this. So we are getting very more invites for events like this than ever before. So when we started planning for this, we had three clear goals that we wanted to accomplish. And our first one, that when you finish this and walk away, we want to make sure that you don't feel like it was a waste of time, we want to make sure that we value your time, then this is going to be used. Number two, we want to put you in touch with industry leaders and thought leaders, generally good people, that you want to hang around with long after this event is over. And number three, as we plan through this, you know we are living through these difficult times we want this event to be more of an uplifting and inspiring event too. Now, the challenge is how do you do that with the team being change agents, because teens and as much as we romanticize it, it is not one of those uplifting things that everyone wants to do or likes to do. The way I think of it, changes sort of like, if you've ever done bungee jumping, and it's like standing on the edges, waiting to make that one more step you know, all you have to do is take that one step and gravity will do the rest, but that is the hardest step today. Change requires a lot of courage, and when we are talking about data and analytics, which is already like such a hard topic not necessarily an uplifting and positive conversation most businesses, it is somewhat scary, change becomes all the more difficult. Ultimately change requires courage, courage to first of all, challenge the status quo. People sometimes are afraid to challenge the status quo because they are thinking that you know, maybe I don't have the power to make the change that the company needs, sometimes they feel like I don't have the skills, sometimes they may feel that I'm probably not the right person to do it. Or sometimes the lack of courage manifest itself as the inability to sort of break the silos that are formed within the organizations when it comes to data and insights that you talked about. You know, that are people in the company who are going to have the data because they know how to manage the data, how to inquire and extract, they know how to speak data, they have the skills to do that. But they are not the group of people who have sort of the knowledge, the experience of the business to ask the right questions off the data. So there is the silo of people with the answers, and there is a silo of people with the questions, and there is gap, this sort of silos are standing in the way of making that necessary change that we all know the business needs. And the last change to sort of bring an external force sometimes. It could be a tool, it could be a platform, it could be a person, it could be a process but sometimes no matter how big the company is or how small the company is you may need to bring some external stimuli to start the domino of the positive changes that are necessary. The group of people that we are brought in, the four people, including Cindi that you will hear from today are really good at practically telling you how to make that step, how to step off that edge, how to dress the rope, that you will be safe and you're going to have fun, you will have that exhilarating feeling of jumping for a bungee jump, all four of them are exceptional, but my owner is to introduce Michelle. And she's our first speaker, Michelle I am very happy after watching our presentation and reading your bio that there are no country vital worldwide competition for cool parents, because she will beat all of us. Because when her children were small, they were probably into Harry Potter and Disney and she was managing a business and leading change there. And then as her kids grew up and got to that age where they like football and NFL, guess what? She's the CIO of NFL, what a cool mom. I am extremely excited to see what she's going to talk about. I've seen this slides, a bunch of amazing pictures, I'm looking to see the context behind it, I'm very thrilled to make that client so far, Michelle, I'm looking forward to her talk next. Welcome Michelle, it's over to you. (soft upbeat music) >> I'm delighted to be with you all today to talk about thought leadership. And I'm so excited that you asked me to join you because today I get to be a quarterback. I always wanted to be one, and I thought this is about as close as I'm ever going to get. So I want to talk to you about quarterbacking our digital revolution using insights data, and of course as you said, leadership. First a little bit about myself, a little background as I said, I always wanted to play football, and this is something that I wanted to do since I was a child, but when I grew up, girls didn't get to play football. I'm so happy that that's changing and girls are now doing all kinds of things that they didn't get to do before. Just this past weekend on an NFL field, we had a female coach on two sidelines, and a female official on the field. I'm a lifelong fan and student of the game of football, I grew up in the South, you can tell from the accent and in the South is like a religion and you pick sides. I chose Auburn University working in the Athletic Department, so I'm testament to you can start the journey can be long it took me many, many years to make it into professional sports. I graduated in 1987 and my little brother, well, not actually not so little, he played offensive line for the Alabama Crimson Tide. And for those of you who know SEC football you know, this is a really big rivalry. And when you choose sides, your family is divided, so it's kind of fun for me to always tell the story that my dad knew his kid would make it to the NFL he just bet on the wrong one. My career has been about bringing people together for memorable moments at some of America's most iconic brands. Delivering memories and amazing experiences that delight from Universal Studios, Disney to my current position as CIO of the NFL. In this job I'm very privileged to have the opportunity to work with the team, that gets to bring America's game to millions of people around the world. Often I'm asked to talk about how to create amazing experiences for fans, guests, or customers. But today I really wanted to focus on something different and talk to you about being behind the scenes and backstage. Because behind every event every game, every awesome moment is execution, precise repeatable execution. And most of my career has been behind the scenes, doing just that, assembling teams to execute these plans, and the key way that companies operate at these exceptional levels, is making good decisions, the right decisions at the right time and based upon data, so that you can translate the data into intelligence and be a data-driven culture. Using data and intelligence is an important way that world-class companies do differentiate themselves. And it's the lifeblood of collaboration and innovation. Teams that are working on delivering these kinds of world-class experiences are often seeking out and leveraging next generation technologies and finding new ways to work. I've been fortunate to work across three decades of emerging experiences, which each required emerging technologies to execute. A little bit first about Disney, in the 90s I was at Disney, leading a project called destination Disney, which it's a data project, it was a data project, but it was CRM before CRM was even cool. And then certainly before anything like a data-driven culture was ever brought up. But way back then we were creating a digital backbone that enabled many technologies for the things that you see today, like the magic band, just these magical express. My career at Disney began in finance, but Disney was very good about rotating you around, and it was during one of these rotations that I became very passionate about data. I kind of became a pain in the butt to the IT team, asking for data more and more data. And I learned that all of that valuable data was locked up in our systems, all of our point of sales systems, our reservation systems, our operation systems, and so I became a shadow IT person in marketing, ultimately leading to moving into IT, and I haven't looked back since. In the early 2000s I was at Universal Studios Theme Park as their CIO, preparing for and launching the wizarding world of Harry Potter. Bringing one of history's most memorable characters to life required many new technologies and a lot of data. Our data and technologies were embedded into the rides and attractions. I mean, how do you really think a wand selects you at a wine shop. As today at the NFL, I am constantly challenged to do leading edge technologies using things like sensors, AI, machine learning, and all new communication strategies, and using data to drive everything from player performance, contracts to where we build new stadiums and hold events. With this year being the most challenging, yet rewarding year in my career at the NFL. In the middle of a global pandemic, the way we are executing on our season is leveraging data from contract tracing devices joined with testing data. Talk about data, actually enabling your business without it we wouldn't be having a season right now. I'm also on the board of directors of two public companies, where data and collaboration are paramount. First RingCentral, it's a cloud based unified communications platform, and collaboration with video message and phone, all in one solution in the cloud. And Quotient Technologies, whose product is actually data. The tagline at quotient is the result in knowing. I think that's really important, because not all of us are data companies, where your product is actually data. But we should operate more like your product is data. I'd also like to talk to you about four areas of things to think about, as thought leaders in your companies. First just hit on it is change, how to be a champion and a driver of change. Second, how to use data to drive performance for your company, and measure performance of your company. Third, how companies now require intense collaboration to operate, and finally, how much of this is accomplished through solid data-driven decisions. First let's hit on change. I mean, it's evident today more than ever, that we are in an environment of extreme change. I mean, we've all been at this for years and as technologists we've known it, believed it, lived it, and thankfully for the most part knock on wood we were prepared for it. But this year everyone's cheese was moved, all the people in the back rooms, IT, data architects and others, were suddenly called to the forefront. Because a global pandemic has turned out to be the thing that is driving intense change in how people work and analyze their business. On March 13th, we closed our office at the NFL in the middle of preparing for one of our biggest events, our kickoff event, the 2020 Draft. We went from planning, a large event in Las Vegas under the bright lights red carpet stage to smaller events in club facilities. And then ultimately to one where everyone coaches, GMs, prospects and even our commissioner were at home in their basements. And we only had a few weeks to figure it out. I found myself for the first time being in the live broadcast event space, talking about bungee dress jumping, this is really what it felt like. It was one in which no one felt comfortable, because it had not been done before. But leading through this, I stepped up, but it was very scary, it was certainly very risky but it ended up being Oh, so rewarding when we did it. And as a result of this, some things will change forever. Second, managing performance. I mean, data should inform how you're doing and how to get your company to perform at this level, highest level. As an example, the NFL has always measured performance obviously, and it is one of the purest examples of how performance directly impacts outcome. I mean, you can see performance on the field, you can see points being scored and stats, and you immediately know that impact, those with the best stats, usually win the games. The NFL has always recorded stats, since the beginning of time, here at the NFL a little this year as our 100 and first year and athletes ultimate success as a player has also always been greatly impacted by his stats. But what has changed for us, is both how much more we can measure, and the immediacy with which it can be measured. And I'm sure in your business, it's the same, the amount of data you must have has got to have quadrupled recently and how fast you need it and how quickly you need to analyze it, is so important. And it's very important to break the silos between the keys to the data and the use of the data. Our next generation stats platform is taking data to a next level, it's powered by Amazon Web Services, and we gathered this data real time from sensors that are on players' bodies. We gather it in real time, analyze it, display it online and on broadcast, and of course it's used to prepare week to week in addition to what is a normal coaching plan would be. We can now analyze, visualize, route patterns speed, matchups, et cetera, so much faster than ever before. We're continuing to roll out sensors too, that we'll gather more and more information about player's performance as it relates to their health and safety. The third trend is really I think it's a big part of what we're feeling today and that is intense collaboration. And just for sort of historical purposes it's important to think about for those of you that are IT professionals and developers, you know more than 10 years ago, agile practices began sweeping companies or small teams would work together rapidly in a very flexible, adaptive and innovative way, and it proved to be transformational. However today, of course, that is no longer just small teams the next big wave of change, and we've seen it through this pandemic is that it's the whole enterprise that must collaborate and be agile. If I look back on my career when I was at Disney, we owned everything 100%, we made a decision, we implemented it, we were a collaborative culture but it was much easier to push change because you own the whole decision. If there was buy in from the top down, you got the people from the bottom up to do it, and you executed. At Universal, we were a joint venture, our attractions and entertainment was licensed, our hotels were owned and managed by other third parties. So influence and collaboration and how to share across companies became very important. And now here I am at the NFL and even the bigger ecosystem. We have 32 clubs that are all separate businesses 31 different stadiums that are owned by a variety of people. We have licensees, we have sponsors, we have broadcast partners. So it seems that as my career has evolved centralized control has gotten less and less and has been replaced by intense collaboration not only within your own company, but across companies. The ability to work in a collaborative way across businesses and even other companies that has been a big key to my success in my career. I believe this whole vertical integration and big top down decision making is going by the wayside in favor of ecosystems that require cooperation, yet competition to coexist. I mean the NFL is a great example of what we call coopertition, which is cooperation and competition. When in competition with each other, but we cooperate to make the company the best it can be. And at the heart of these items really are data-driven decisions and culture. Data on its own isn't good enough, you must be able to turn it to insights, partnerships between technology teams who usually hold the keys to the raw data, and business units who have the knowledge to build the right decision models is key. If you're not already involved in this linkage, you should be, data mining isn't new for sure. The availability of data is quadrupling and it's everywhere. How do you know what to even look at? How do you know where to begin? How do you know what questions to ask? It's by using the tools that are available for visualization and analytics and knitting together strategies of the company. So it begins with first of all making sure you do understand the strategy of the company. So in closing, just to wrap up a bit, many of you joined today looking for thought leadership on how to be a change agent, a change champion, and how to lead through transformation. Some final thoughts are be brave, and drive, don't do the ride along program, it's very important to drive, driving can be high risk but it's also high reward. Embracing the uncertainty of what will happen, is how you become brave, get more and more comfortable with uncertainty be calm and let data be your map on your journey, thanks. >> Michelle, thank you so much. So you and I share a love of data, and a love of football. You said you want to be the quarterback, I'm more an old wine person. (Michelle laughing) >> Well, then I can do my job without you. >> Great, and I'm getting the feeling now you know, Sudheesh is talking about bungee jumping. My boat is when we're past this pandemic, we both take them to the Delaware Water Gap and we do the cliff jumping. >> That sounds good, I'll watch. >> You'll watch, okay, so Michelle, you have so many stakeholders when you're trying to prioritize the different voices, you have the players, you have the owners you have the league, as you mentioned to the broadcasters your, your partners here and football mamas like myself. How do you prioritize when there's so many different stakeholders that you need to satisfy? I think balancing across stakeholders starts with aligning on a mission. And if you spend a lot of time understanding where everyone's coming from, and you can find the common thread ties them all together you sort of do get them to naturally prioritize their work, and I think that's very important. So for us at the NFL, and even at Disney, it was our core values and our core purpose is so well known, and when anything challenges that we're able to sort of lay that out. But as a change agent, you have to be very empathetic, and I would say empathy is probably your strongest skill if you're a change agent. And that means listening to every single stakeholder even when they're yelling at you, even when they're telling you your technology doesn't work and you know that it's user error, or even when someone is just emotional about what's happening to them and that they're not comfortable with it. So I think being empathetic and having a mission and understanding it, is sort of how I prioritize and balance. >> Yeah, empathy, a very popular word this year. I can imagine those coaches and owners yelling. So I thank you for your metership here. So Michelle, I look forward to discussing this more with our other customers and disruptors joining us in a little bit. (soft upbeat music) >> So we're going to take a hard pivot now and go from football to Chernobyl, Chernobyl, what went wrong? 1986, as the reactors were melting down they had the data to say, this is going to be catastrophic and yet the culture said, "No, we're perfect, hide it. Don't dare tell anyone," which meant they went ahead and had celebrations in Kiev. Even though that increased the exposure the additional thousands getting cancer, and 20,000 years before the ground around there and even be inhabited again, This is how powerful and detrimental a negative culture, a culture that is unable to confront the brutal facts that hides data. This is what we have to contend with, and this is why I want you to focus on having fostering a data-driven culture. I don't want you to be a laggard, I want you to be a leader in using data to drive your digital transformation. So I'll talk about culture and technology, isn't really two sides of the same coin, real-world impacts and then some best practices you can use to disrupt and innovate your culture. Now, oftentimes I would talk about culture and I talk about technology, and recently a CDO said to me, "You know Cindi, I actually think this is two sides of the same coin. One reflects the other, what do you think?" Let me walk you through this, so let's take a laggard. What is the technology look like? Is it based on 1990s BI and reporting largely parameterized reports on-premises data warehouses, or not even that operational reports, at best one enterprise data warehouse very slow moving and collaboration is only email. What does that culture tell you? Maybe there's a lack of leadership to change, to do the hard work that Sudheesh referred to. Or is there also a culture of fear, afraid of failure, resistance to change complacency and sometimes that complacency it's not because people are lazy, it's because they've been so beaten down every time a new idea is presented. It's like, no we're measured on least cost to serve. So politics and distrust, whether it's between business and IT or individual stakeholders is the norm. So data is hoarded, let's contrast that with a leader, a data and analytics leader, what is their technology look like? Augmented analytics, search and AI-driven insights not on-premises, but in the cloud and maybe multiple clouds. And the data is not in one place, but it's in a data lake, and in a data warehouse, a logical data warehouse. The collaboration is being a newer methods whether it's Slack or teams allowing for that real time decisioning or investigating a particular data point. So what is the culture in the leaders? It's transparent and trust, there is a trust that data will not be used to punish, that there is an ability to confront the bad news. It's innovation, valuing innovation in pursuit of the company goals, whether it's the best fan experience and player safety in the NFL or best serving your customers. It's innovative and collaborative. There's none of this, oh, well, I didn't invent that, I'm not going to look at that. There's still pride of ownership, but it's collaborating to get to a better place faster. And people feel empowered to present new ideas to fail fast, and they're energized, knowing that they're using the best technology and innovating at the pace that business requires. So data is democratized and democratized, not just for power users or analysts, but really at the point of impact what we like to call the new decision makers. Or really the frontline workers. So Harvard business review partnered with us to develop this study to say, just how important is this? They've been working at BI and analytics as an industry for more than 20 years. Why is it not at the front lines? Whether it's a doctor, a nurse, a coach, a supply chain manager a warehouse manager, a financial services advisor. 87% said they would be more successful if frontline workers were empowered with data-driven insights, but they recognize they need new technology to be able to do that. It's not about learning hard tools, the sad reality only 20% of organizations are actually doing this, these are the data-driven leaders. So this is the culture and technology, how did we get here? It's because state of the art keeps changing. So the first generation BI and analytics platforms were deployed on-premises, on small datasets really just taking data out of ERP systems that were also on-premises, and state of the art was maybe getting a management report, an operational report. Over time visual based data discovery vendors, disrupted these traditional BI vendors, empowering now analysts to create visualizations with the flexibility on a desktop, sometimes larger data sometimes coming from a data warehouse, the current state of the art though, Gartner calls it augmented analytics, at ThoughtSpot, we call it search and AI-driven analytics. And this was pioneered for large scale data sets, whether it's on-premises or leveraging the cloud data warehouses, and I think this is an important point. Oftentimes you, the data and analytics leaders, will look at these two components separately, but you have to look at the BI and analytics tier in lockstep with your data architectures to really get to the granular insights, and to leverage the capabilities of AI. Now, if you've never seen ThoughtSpot I'll just show you what this looks like, instead of somebody's hard coding a report, it's typing in search keywords and very robust keywords contains rank, top, bottom getting to a visualization that then can be pinned to an existing Pinboard that might also contain insights generated by an AI engine. So it's easy enough for that new decision maker, the business user, the non analyst to create themselves. Modernizing the data and analytics portfolio is hard, because the pace of change has accelerated. You used to be able to create an investment, place a bet for maybe 10 years. A few years ago, that time horizon was five years, now it's maybe three years, and the time to maturity has also accelerated. So you have these different components the search and AI tier, the data science tier, data preparation and virtualization. But I would also say equally important is the cloud data warehouse. And pay attention to how well these analytics tools can unlock the value in these cloud data warehouses. So ThoughtSpot was the first to market with search and AI-driven insights. Competitors have followed suit, but be careful if you look at products like Power BI or SAP Analytics Cloud, they might demo well, but do they let you get to all the data without moving it in products like Snowflake, Amazon Redshift or Azure Synapse or Google BigQuery, they do not. They require you to move it into a smaller in memory engine. So it's important how well these new products inter operate. The pace of change, it's acceleration, Gartner recently predicted that by 2022, 65% of analytical queries will be generated using search or NLP or even AI, and that is roughly three times the prediction they had just a couple years ago. So let's talk about the real world impact of culture. And if you've read any of my books or used any of the maturity models out there whether the Gartner IT score that I worked on, or the data warehousing institute also has a maturity model. We talk about these five pillars to really become data-driven, as Michelle spoke about, it's focusing on the business outcomes, leveraging all the data, including new data sources. It's the talent, the people, the technology, and also the processes, and often when I would talk about the people in the talent, I would lump the culture as part of that. But in the last year, as I've traveled the world and done these digital events for thought leaders you have told me now culture is absolutely so important. And so we've pulled it out as a separate pillar, and in fact, in polls that we've done in these events, look at how much more important culture is, as a barrier to becoming data-driven. It's three times as important as any of these other pillars. That's how critical it is, and let's take an example of where you can have great data but if you don't have the right culture there's devastating impacts. And I will say, I have been a loyal customer of Wells Fargo for more than 20 years, but look at what happened in the face of negative news with data, that said, "Hey, we're not doing good cross selling, customers do not have both a checking account and a credit card and a savings account and a mortgage." They opened fake accounts, facing billions in fines, change in leadership, that even the CEO attributed to a toxic sales culture, and they're trying to fix this. But even recently there's been additional employee backlash saying that culture has not changed. Let's contrast that with some positive examples, Medtronic a worldwide company in 150 countries around the world, they may not be a household name to you, but if you have a loved one or yourself, you have a pacemaker, spinal implant, diabetes you know, this brand. And at the start of COVID when they knew their business would be slowing down, because hospitals would only be able to take care of COVID patients, they took the bold move of making their IP for ventilators publicly available, that is the power of a positive culture. Or Verizon, a major telecom organization, looking at late payments of their customers, and even though the US federal government said "Well, you can't turn them off." They said, "We'll extend that even beyond the mandated guidelines," and facing a slow down in the business because of the tough economy, he said, "You know what? We will spend the time upskilling our people giving them the time to learn more about the future of work, the skills and data and analytics," for 20,000 of their employees, rather than furloughing them. That is the power of a positive culture. So how can you transform your culture to the best in class? I'll give you three suggestions, bring in a change agent identify the relevance, or I like to call it WIIFM, and organize for collaboration. So the CDO whatever your title is, chief analytics officer chief digital officer, you are the most important change agent. And this is where you will hear, that oftentimes a change agent has to come from outside the organization. So this is where, for example in Europe, you have the CDO of Just Eat takeout food delivery organization, coming from the airline industry or in Australia, National Australian Bank, taking a CDO within the same sector from TD Bank going to NAB. So these change agents come in disrupt, it's a hard job. As one of you said to me, it often feels like Sisyphus, I make one step forward and I get knocked down again, I get pushed back. It is not for the faint of heart, but it's the most important part of your job. The other thing I'll talk about is WIIFM, what is in it for me? And this is really about understanding the motivation, the relevance that data has for everyone on the frontline as well as those analysts, as well as the executives. So if we're talking about players in the NFL they want to perform better, and they want to stay safe. That is why data matters to them. If we're talking about financial services this may be a wealth management advisor, okay, we could say commissions, but it's really helping people have their dreams come true whether it's putting their children through college, or being able to retire without having to work multiple jobs still into your 70s or 80s. For the teachers, teachers, you asked them about data, they'll say, "We don't need that, I care about the student." So if you can use data to help a student perform better that is WIIFM. And sometimes we spend so much time talking the technology, we forget what is the value we're trying to deliver with it. And we forget the impact on the people that it does require change. In fact, the Harvard Business Review Study, found that 44% said lack of change management is the biggest barrier to leveraging both new technology but also being empowered to act on those data-driven insights. The third point, organize for collaboration. This does require diversity of thought, but also bringing the technology, the data and the business people together. Now there's not a single one size fits all model for data and analytics. At one point in time, even having a BICC, a BI Competency Center was considered state of the art. Now for the biggest impact, what I recommend is that you have a federated model, centralized for economies of scale, that could be the common data, but then in bed, these evangelists, these analysts of the future, within every business unit, every functional domain, and as you see this top bar, all models are possible but the hybrid model has the most impact, the most leaders. So as we look ahead to the months ahead, to the year ahead, an exciting time, because data is helping organizations better navigate a tough economy lock in the customer loyalty, and I look forward to seeing how you foster that culture that's collaborative with empathy and bring the best of technology, leveraging the cloud, all your data. So thank you for joining us at thought leaders, and next I'm pleased to introduce our first change agent Thomas Mazzaferro, chief data officer of Western Union, and before joining Western Union, Tom made his mark at HSBC and JP Morgan Chase spearheading digital innovation in technology operations, risk compliance, and retail banking. Tom, thank you so much for joining us today. (soft upbeat music) >> Very happy to be here and looking forward to talking to all of you today. So as we look to move organizations to a data-driven capability into the future, there is a lot that needs to be done on the data side, but also how does data connect and enable, different business teams and technology teams into the future. As we look across our data ecosystems and our platforms and how we modernize that to the cloud in the future, it all needs to basically work together, right? To really be able to drive over the shift from a data standpoint, into the future. That includes being able to have the right information with the right quality of data at the right time to drive informed business decisions, to drive the business forward. As part of that, we actually have partnered with ThoughtSpot to actually bring in the technology to help us drive that, as part of that partnership, and it's how we've looked to integrated into our overall business as a whole. We've looked at how do we make sure that our business and our professional lives, right? Are enabled in the same ways as our personal lives. So for example, in your personal lives, when you want to go and find something out, what do you do? You go on to google.com or you go on to Bing, or go to Yahoo and you search for what you want, search to find an answer. ThoughtSpot for us as the same thing, but in the business world. So using ThoughtSpot and other AI capability is allowed us to actually enable our overall business teams in our company, to actually have our information at our fingertips. So rather than having to go and talk to someone or an engineer to go pull information or pull data, we actually can have the end users or the business executives, right? Search for what they need, what they want, at the exact time that action needed, to go and drive the business forward. This is truly one of those transformational things that we've put in place. On top of that, we are on the journey to modernize our larger ecosystem as a whole. That includes modernizing our underlying data warehouses, our technology or our (indistinct) environments, and as we move that we've actually picked to our cloud providers going to AWS and GCP. We've also adopted Snowflake to really drive into organize our information and our data, then drive these new solutions and capabilities forward. So big portion of us though is culture, so how do we engage with the business teams and bring the IT teams together to really drive these holistic end to end solutions and capabilities, to really support the actual business into the future. That's one of the keys here, as we look to modernize and to really enhance our organizations to become data-driven, this is the key. If you can really start to provide answers to business questions before they're even being asked, and to predict based upon different economic trends or different trends in your business, what does is be made and actually provide those answers to the business teams before they're even asking for it. That is really becoming a data-driven organization. And as part of that, it's really then enables the business to act quickly and take advantage of opportunities as they come in based upon industries, based upon markets, based upon products, solutions, or partnerships into the future. These are really some of the keys that become crucial as you move forward right into this new age, especially with COVID, with COVID now taking place across the world, right? Many of these markets, many of these digital transformations are celebrating, and are changing rapidly to accommodate and to support customers in these very difficult times. As part of that, you need to make sure you have the right underlying foundation, ecosystems and solutions to really drive those capabilities, and those solutions forward. As we go through this journey, both of my career but also each of your careers into the future, right? It also needs to evolve, right? Technology has changed so drastically in the last 10 years, and that change is only a celebrating. So as part of that, you have to make sure that you stay up to speed, up to date with new technology changes both on the platform standpoint, tools, but also what our customers want, what do our customers need, and how do we then surface them with our information, with our data, with our platform, with our products and our services, to meet those needs and to really support and service those customers into the future. This is all around becoming a more data-driven organization such as how do you use your data to support the current business lines. But how do you actually use your information your data, to actually better support your customers better support your business, better support your employees, your operations teams and so forth, and really creating that full integration in that ecosystem is really when you start to get large dividends from these investments into the future. With that being said I hope you enjoyed the segment on how to become and how to drive a data-driven organization, and looking forward to talking to you again soon, thank you. >> Tom, that was great, thanks so much. Now I'm going to have to brag on you for a second, as a change agent you've come in disrupted, and how long have you been at Western Union? >> Only nine months, I just started this year, but there'd be some great opportunities and big changes, and we have a lot more to go, but we're really driving things forward in partnership with our business teams, and our colleagues to support those customers forward. >> Tom, thank you so much that was wonderful. And now I'm excited to introduce you to Gustavo Canton, a change agent that I've had the pleasure of working with meeting in Europe, and he is a serial change agent. Most recently with Schneider Electric, but even going back to Sam's Club, Gustavo welcome. (soft upbeat music) >> So hi everyone my name is Gustavo Canton and thank you so much Cindi for the intro. As you mentioned, doing transformations is a you know, high effort, high reward situation. I have empowerment in transformation and I have led many transformations. And what I can tell you is that it's really hard to predict the future, but if you have a North Star and you know where you're going, the one thing that I want you to take away from this discussion today, is that you need to be bold to evolve. And so in today, I'm going to be talking about culture and data, and I'm going to break this down in four areas. How do we get started barriers or opportunities as I see it, the value of AI, and also how do you communicate, especially now in the workforce of today with so many different generations, you need to make sure that you are communicating in ways that are nontraditional sometimes. And so how do we get started? So I think the answer to that is, you have to start for you, yourself as a leader and stay tuned. And by that, I mean you need to understand not only what is happening in your function or your field, but you have to be very into what is happening in society, socioeconomically speaking, wellbeing, you know, the common example is a great example. And for me personally, it's an opportunity because the number one core value that I have is wellbeing. I believe that for human potential, for customers and communities to grow, wellbeing should be at the center of every decision. And as somebody mentioned, it's great to be you know, stay in tune and have the skillset and the courage. But for me personally, to be honest to have this courage is not about not being afraid. You're always afraid when you're making big changes and your swimming upstream. But what gives me the courage is the empathy part, like I think empathy is a huge component because every time I go into an organization or a function, I try to listen very attentively to the needs of the business, and what the leaders are trying to do, what I do it thinking about the mission of how do I make change for the bigger, you know workforce so the bigger good, despite the fact that this might have a perhaps implication, so my own self interest in my career, right? Because you have to have that courage sometimes to make choices, that are not well seeing politically speaking what are the right thing to do, and you have to push through it. So the bottom line for me is that, I don't think they're transforming fast enough. And the reality is I speak with a lot of leaders and we have seen stories in the past, and what they show is that if you look at the four main barriers, that are basically keeping us behind budget, inability to add, cultural issues, politics, and lack of alignment, those are the top four. But the interesting thing is that as Cindi has mentioned, this topic about culture is actually gaining more and more traction, and in 2018, there was a story from HBR and it was for about 45%. I believe today, it's about 55%, 60% of respondents say that this is the main area that we need to focus on. So again, for all those leaders and all the executives who understand, and are aware that we need to transform, commit to the transformation and set us deadline to say, "Hey, in two years, we're going to make this happen, what do we need to do to empower and enable these search engines to make it happen?" You need to make the tough choices. And so to me, when I speak about being bold is about making the right choices now. So I'll give you samples of some of the roadblocks that I went through, as I think the intro information most recently as Cindi mentioned in Schneider. There are three main areas, legacy mindset, and what that means is that we've been doing this in a specific way for a long time, and here is how we have been successful. We're working the past is not going to work now, the opportunity there is that there is a lot of leaders who have a digital mindset, and their up and coming leaders that are perhaps not yet fully developed. We need to mentor those leaders and take bets on some of these talents, including young talent. We cannot be thinking in the past and just wait for people you know, three to five years for them to develop, because the world is going to in a way that is super fast. The second area and this is specifically to implementation of AI is very interesting to me, because just example that I have with ThoughtSpot, right? We went to an implementation and a lot of the way the IT team functions, so the leaders look at technology, they look at it from the prism of the prior or success criteria for the traditional BIs, and that's not going to work. Again, your opportunity here is that you need to really find what success look like, in my case, I want the user experience of our workforce to be the same as your experience you have at home. It's a very simple concept, and so we need to think about how do we gain that user experience with this augmented analytics tools, and then work backwards to have the right talent, processes and technology to enable that. And finally, and obviously with COVID a lot of pressure in organizations and companies to do more with less, and the solution that most leaders I see are taking is to just minimize cost sometimes and cut budget. We have to do the opposite, we have to actually invest some growth areas, but do it by business question. Don't do it by function, if you actually invest in these kind of solutions, if you actually invest on developing your talent, your leadership, to see more digitally, if you actually invest on fixing your data platform is not just an incremental cost, it's actually this investment is going to offset all those hidden costs and inefficiencies that you have on your system, because people are doing a lot of work in working very hard but it's not efficiency, and it's not working in the way that you might want to work. So there is a lot of opportunity there, and you just to put it into some perspective, there have been some studies in the past about you know, how do we kind of measure the impact of data? And obviously this is going to vary by organization, maturity there's going to be a lot of factors. I've been in companies who have very clean, good data to work with, and I think with companies that we have to start basically from scratch. So it all depends on your maturity level, but in this study what I think is interesting is, they try to put a tagline or attack price to what is a cost of incomplete data. So in this case, it's about 10 times as much to complete a unit of work, when you have data that is flawed as opposed to have imperfect data. So let me put that just in perspective, just as an example, right? Imagine you are trying to do something and you have to do 100 things in a project, and each time you do something it's going to cost you a dollar. So if you have perfect data, the total cost of that project might be a $100. But now let's say you have any percent perfect data and 20% flow data, by using this assumption that flow data is 10 times as costly as perfect data, your total costs now becomes $280 as opposed to $100, this just for you to really think about as a CIO, CTO, you know CSRO, CEO, are we really paying attention and really closing the gaps that we have on our infrastructure? If we don't do that, it's hard sometimes to see the snowball effect or to measure the overall impact, but as you can tell, the price tag goes up very, very quickly. So now, if I were to say, how do I communicate this? Or how do I break through some of these challenges or some of these barriers, right? I think the key is I am in analytics, I know statistics obviously, and love modeling and you know, data and optimization theory and all that stuff, that's what I can do analytics, but now as a leader and as a change agent, I need to speak about value, and in this case, for example for Schneider, there was this tagline coffee of your energy. So the number one thing that they were asking from the analytics team was actually efficiency, which to me was very interesting. But once I understood that I understood what kind of language to use, how to connect it to the overall strategy and basically how to bring in the right leaders, because you need to, you know, focus on the leaders that you're going to make the most progress. You know, again, low effort, high value, you need to make sure you centralize all the data as you can, you need to bring in some kind of augmented analytics, you know, solution, and finally you need to make it super simple for the you know, in this case, I was working with the HR teams and other areas, so they can have access to one portal. They don't have to be confused and looking for 10 different places to find information. I think if you can actually have those four foundational pillars, obviously under the guise of having a data-driven culture, that's when you can actually make the impact. So in our case, it was about three years total transformation but it was two years for this component of augmented analytics. It took about two years to talk to, you know, IT, get leadership support, find the budgeting, you know, get everybody on board, make sure the success criteria was correct. And we call this initiative, the people analytics, I pulled up, it was actually launched in July of this year. And we were very excited and the audience was very excited to do this. In this case, we did our pilot in North America for many, many manufacturers, but one thing that is really important is as you bring along your audience on this, you know, you're going from Excel, you know in some cases or Tableau to other tools like you know, ThoughtSpot, you need to really explain them, what is the difference, and how these two can truly replace some of the spreadsheets or some of the views that you might have on these other kind of tools. Again, Tableau, I think it's a really good tool, there are other many tools that you might have in your toolkit. But in my case, personally I feel that you need to have one portal going back to seeing these points that really truly enable the end user. And I feel that this is the right solution for us, right? And I will show you some of the findings that we had in the pilot in the last two months. So this was a huge victory, and I will tell you why, because it took a lot of effort for us to get to these stations. Like I said it's been years for us to kind of lay the foundation, get the leadership and chasing culture, so people can understand why you truly need to invest what I meant analytics. And so what I'm showing here is an example of how do we use basically, you know a tool to capturing video, the qualitative findings that we had, plus the quantitative insights that we have. So in this case, our preliminary results based on our ambition for three main metrics, hours saved, user experience and adoption. So for hours saved, our ambition was to have 10 hours per week per employee save on average, user experience or ambition was 4.5 and adoption 80%. In just two months, two months and a half of the pilot we were able to achieve five hours, per week per employee savings. I used to experience for 4.3 out of five, and adoption of 60%. Really, really amazing work. But again, it takes a lot of collaboration for us to get to the stage from IT, legal, communications obviously the operations things and the users, in HR safety and other areas that might be basically stakeholders in this whole process. So just to summarize this kind of effort takes a lot of energy, you are a change agent, you need to have a courage to make these decision and understand that, I feel that in this day and age with all this disruption happening, we don't have a choice. We have to take the risk, right? And in this case, I feel a lot of satisfaction in how we were able to gain all these very souls for this organization, and that gave me the confidence to know that the work has been done, and we are now in a different stage for the organization. And so for me it safe to say, thank you for everybody who has believed obviously in our vision, everybody who has believed in, you know, the word that we were trying to do and to make the life for, you know workforce or customers that are in community better. As you can tell, there is a lot of effort, there is a lot of collaboration that is needed to do something like this. In the end, I feel very satisfied with the accomplishments of this transformation, and I just want to tell for you, if you are going right now in a moment that you feel that you have to swim upstream you know, what would mentors what people in this industry that can help you out and guide you on this kind of a transformation is not easy to do is high effort but is well worth it. And with that said, I hope you are well and it's been a pleasure talking to you, talk to you soon, take care. >> Thank you Gustavo, that was amazing. All right, let's go to the panel. (soft upbeat music) >> I think we can all agree how valuable it is to hear from practitioners, and I want to thank the panel for sharing their knowledge with the community, and one common challenge that I heard you all talk about was bringing your leadership and your teams along on the journey with you. We talk about this all the time, and it is critical to have support from the top, why? Because it directs the middle, and then it enables bottoms up innovation effects from the cultural transformation that you guys all talked about. It seems like another common theme we heard, is that you all prioritize database decision making in your organizations, and you combine two of your most valuable assets to do that, and create leverage, employees on the front lines, and of course the data. That was rightly pointed out, Tom, the pandemic has accelerated the need for really leaning into this. You know, the old saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, well COVID's broken everything. And it's great to hear from our experts, you know, how to move forward, so let's get right into it. So Gustavo let's start with you if I'm an aspiring change agent, and let's say I'm a budding data leader. What do I need to start doing? What habits do I need to create for long lasting success? >> I think curiosity is very important. You need to be, like I say, in tune to what is happening not only in your specific field, like I have a passion for analytics, I can do this for 50 years plus, but I think you need to understand wellbeing other areas across not only a specific business as you know, I come from, you know, Sam's Club Walmart retail, I mean energy management technology. So you have to try to push yourself and basically go out of your comfort zone. I mean, if you are staying in your comfort zone and you want to use lean continuous improvement that's just going to take you so far. What you have to do is and that's what I tried to do is I try to go into areas, businesses and transformations that make me, you know stretch and develop as a leader. That's what I'm looking to do, so I can help transform the functions organizations, and do these change management and decisions mindset as required for these kinds of efforts. >> Thank you for that is inspiring and Cindi, you love data, and the data is pretty clear that diversity is a good business, but I wonder if you can add your perspectives to this conversation. >> Yeah, so Michelle has a new fan here because she has found her voice, I'm still working on finding mine. And it's interesting because I was raised by my dad, a single dad, so he did teach me how to work in a predominantly male environment. But why I think diversity matters more now than ever before, and this is by gender, by race, by age, by just different ways of working and thinking is because as we automate things with AI, if we do not have diverse teams looking at the data and the models, and how they're applied, we risk having bias at scale. So this is why I think I don't care what type of minority, you are finding your voice, having a seat at the table and just believing in the impact of your work has never been more important. And as Michelle said more possible >> Great perspectives thank you, Tom, I want to go to you. I mean, I feel like everybody in our businesses in some way, shape or form become a COVID expert but what's been the impact of the pandemic on your organization's digital transformation plans? >> We've seen a massive growth actually you know, in a digital business over the last 12 months really, even in celebration, right? Once COVID hit, we really saw that in the 200 countries and territories that we operate in today and service our customers and today, that there's been a huge need, right? To send money, to support family, to support friends and loved ones across the world. And as part of that, you know, we are very honored to support those customers that we across all the centers today. But as part of that celebration, we need to make sure that we had the right architecture and the right platforms to basically scale, right? To basically support and provide the right kind of security for our customers going forward. So as part of that, we did do some pivots and we did celebrate some of our plans on digital to help support that overall growth coming in, and to support our customers going forward. Because there were these times during this pandemic, right? This is the most important time, and we need to support those that we love and those that we care about. And in doing that, it's one of those ways is actually by sending money to them, support them financially. And that's where really are part of that our services come into play that, you know, I really support those families. So it was really a great opportunity for us to really support and really bring some of our products to this level, and supporting our business going forward. >> Awesome, thank you. Now I want to come back to Gustavo, Tom, I'd love for you to chime in too. Did you guys ever think like you were pushing the envelope too much and doing things with data or the technology that was just maybe too bold, maybe you felt like at some point it was failing, or you pushing your people too hard, can you share that experience and how you got through it? >> Yeah, the way I look at it is, you know, again, whenever I go to an organization I ask the question, Hey, how fast you would like to conform?" And, you know, based on the agreements on the leadership and the vision that we want to take place, I take decisions and I collaborate in a specific way. Now, in the case of COVID, for example, right? It forces us to remove silos and collaborate in a faster way, so to me it was an opportunity to actually integrate with other areas and drive decisions faster. But make no mistake about it, when you are doing a transformation, you are obviously trying to do things faster than sometimes people are comfortable doing and you need to be okay with that. Sometimes you need to be okay with tension, or you need to be okay, you know debating points or making repetitive business cases onto people connect with the decision because you understand, and you are seeing that, hey, the CEO is making a one, two year, you know, efficiency goal, the only way for us to really do more with less is for us to continue this path. We cannot just stay with the status quo, we need to find a way to accelerate transformation... >> How about you Tom, we were talking earlier was Sudheesh had said about that bungee jumping moment, what can you share? >> Yeah you know, I think you hit upon it. Right now, the pace of change will be the slowest pace that you see for the rest of your career. So as part of that, right? That's what I tell my team is that you need to feel comfortable being uncomfortable. I mean, that we have to be able to basically scale, right? Expand and support that the ever changing needs the marketplace and industry and our customers today and that pace of change that's happening, right? And what customers are asking for, and the competition the marketplace, it's only going to accelerate. So as part of that, you know, as we look at what how you're operating today in your current business model, right? Things are only going to get faster. So you have to plan into align, to drive the actual transformation, so that you can scale even faster into the future. So as part of that, so we're putting in place here, right? Is how do we create that underlying framework and foundation that allows the organization to basically continue to scale and evolve into the future? >> We're definitely out of our comfort zones, but we're getting comfortable with it. So, Cindi, last question, you've worked with hundreds of organizations, and I got to believe that you know, some of the advice you gave when you were at Gartner, which is pre COVID, maybe sometimes clients didn't always act on it. You know, they're not on my watch for whatever variety of reasons, but it's being forced on them now, but knowing what you know now that you know, we're all in this isolation economy how would you say that advice has changed, has it changed? What's your number one action and recommendation today? >> Yeah well, first off, Tom just freaked me out. What do you mean this is the slowest ever? Even six months ago, I was saying the pace of change in data and analytics is frenetic. So, but I think you're right, Tom, the business and the technology together is forcing this change. Now, Dave, to answer your question, I would say the one bit of advice, maybe I was a little more, very aware of the power in politics and how to bring people along in a way that they are comfortable, and now I think it's, you know what? You can't get comfortable. In fact, we know that the organizations that were already in the cloud, have been able to respond and pivot faster. So if you really want to survive as Tom and Gustavo said, get used to being uncomfortable, the power and politics are going to happen. Break the rules, get used to that and be bold. Do not be afraid to tell somebody they're wrong and they're not moving fast enough. I do think you have to do that with empathy as Michelle said, and Gustavo, I think that's one of the key words today besides the bungee jumping. So I want to know where's Sudheesh going to go on bungee jumping? (all chuckling) >> That's fantastic discussion really. Thanks again to all the panelists and the guests, it was really a pleasure speaking with you today. Really virtually all of the leaders that I've spoken to in theCUBE program recently, they tell me that the pandemic is accelerating so many things, whether it's new ways to work, we heard about new security models and obviously the need for cloud. I mean, all of these things are driving true enterprise wide digital transformation, not just as I said before lip service. And sometimes we minimize the importance and the challenge of building culture and in making this transformation possible. But when it's done right, the right culture is going to deliver tremendous results. Yeah, what does that mean getting it right? Everybody's trying to get it right. My biggest takeaway today, is it means making data part of the DNA of your organization. And that means making it accessible to the people in your organization that are empowered to make decisions that can drive you revenue, cut costs, speed, access to critical care, whatever the mission is of your organization. Data can create insights and informed decisions that drive value. Okay, let's bring back Sudheesh and wrap things up. Sudheesh please bring us home. >> Thank you, thank you Dave, thank you theCUBE team, and thanks goes to all of our customers and partners who joined us, and thanks to all of you for spending the time with us. I want to do three quick things and then close it off. The first thing is I want to summarize the key takeaways that I had from all four of our distinguished speakers. First, Michelle, I was simply put it, she said it really well, that is be brave and drive. Don't go for a drive along, that is such an important point. Often times, you know that I think that you have to do to make the positive change that you want to see happen. But you wait for someone else to do it, why not you? Why don't you be the one making that change happen? That's the thing that I picked up from Michelle's talk. Cindi talked about finding the importance of finding your voice, taking that chair, whether it's available or not and making sure that your ideas, your voices are heard and if it requires some force then apply that force, make sure your ideas are good. Gustavo talked about the importance of building consensus, not going at things all alone sometimes building the importance of building the courtroom. And that is critical because if you want the changes to last, you want to make sure that the organization is fully behind it. Tom instead of a single take away, what I was inspired by is the fact that a company that is 170 years old, 170 years old, 200 companies and 200 countries they're operating in, and they were able to make the change that is necessary through this difficult time. So in a matter of months, if they could do it, anyone could. The second thing I want to do is to leave you with a takeaway that is I would like you to go to thoughtspot.com/nfl because our team has made an app for NFL on Snowflake. I think you will find this interesting now that you are inspired and excited because of Michelle's talk. And the last thing is, please go to thoughtspot.com/beyond, our global user conferences happening in this December, we would love to have you join us. It's again, virtual, you can join from anywhere, we are expecting anywhere from five to 10,000 people, and we would love to have you join and see what we would have been up to since the last year. We have a lot of amazing things in store for you, our customers, our partners, our collaborators, they will be coming and sharing, you'll be sharing things that you have been working to release something that will come out next year. And also some of the crazy ideas for engineers I've been cooking up. All of those things will be available for you at ThoughtSpot Beyond, thank you, thank you so much.

(speaks in foreign language) >> Narrator: Data is at the heart of transformation and the change every company needs to succeed, but it takes more than new technology. It's about teams, talent, and cultural change. Empowering everyone on the front lines to make decisions, all at the speed of digital. The transformation starts with you. It's time to lead the way, it's time for thought leaders. >> Welcome to Thought Leaders, a digital event brought to you by ThoughtSpot. My name is Dave Vellante. The purpose of this day is to bring industry leaders and experts together to really try and understand the important issues around digital transformation. We have an amazing lineup of speakers and our goal is to provide you with some best practices that you can bring back and apply to your organization. Look, data is plentiful, but insights are not. ThoughtSpot is disrupting analytics by using search and machine intelligence to simplify data analysis, and really empower anyone with fast access to relevant data. But in the last 150 days, we've had more questions than answers. Creating an organization that puts data and insights at their core, requires not only modern technology, but leadership, a mindset and a culture that people often refer to as data-driven. What does that mean? How can we equip our teams with data and fast access to quality information that can turn insights into action. And today, we're going to hear from experienced leaders, who are transforming their organizations with data, insights and creating digital-first cultures. But before we introduce our speakers, I'm joined today by two of my co-hosts from ThoughtSpot. First, Chief Data Strategy Officer for ThoughtSpot is Cindi Hausen. Cindi is an analytics and BI expert with 20 plus years experience and the author of Successful Business Intelligence Unlock The Value of BI and Big Data. Cindi was previously the lead analyst at Gartner for the data and analytics magic quadrant. And early last year, she joined ThoughtSpot to help CDOs and their teams understand how best to leverage analytics and AI for digital transformation. Cindi, great to see you, welcome to the show. >> Thank you, Dave. Nice to join you virtually. >> Now our second cohost and friend of theCUBE is ThoughtSpot CEO Sudheesh Nair. Hello Sudheesh, how are you doing today? >> I am well Dave, it's good to talk to you again. >> It's great to see you. Thanks so much for being here. Now Sudheesh, please share with us why this discussion is so important to your customers and of course, to our audience and what they're going to learn today? (gentle music) >> Thanks, Dave, I wish you were there to introduce me into every room that I walk into because you have such an amazing way of doing it. It makes me feel also good. Look, since we have all been cooped up in our homes, I know that the vendors like us, we have amped up our, you know, sort of effort to reach out to you with invites for events like this. So we are getting way more invites for events like this than ever before. So when we started planning for this, we had three clear goals that we wanted to accomplish. And our first one that when you finish this and walk away, we want to make sure that you don't feel like it was a waste of time. We want to make sure that we value your time, and this is going to be useful. Number two, we want to put you in touch with industry leaders and thought leaders, and generally good people that you want to hang around with long after this event is over. And number three, as we plan through this, you know, we are living through these difficult times, we want an event to be, this event to be more of an uplifting and inspiring event too. Now, the challenge is, how do you do that with the team being change agents? Because change and as much as we romanticize it, it is not one of those uplifting things that everyone wants to do or likes to do. The way I think of it, change is sort of like, if you've ever done bungee jumping. You know, it's like standing on the edges, waiting to make that one more step. You know, all you have to do is take that one step and gravity will do the rest, but that is the hardest step to take. Change requires a lot of courage and when we are talking about data and analytics, which is already like such a hard topic, not necessarily an uplifting and positive conversation, in most businesses it is somewhat scary. Change becomes all the more difficult. Ultimately change requires courage. Courage to to, first of all, challenge the status quo. People sometimes are afraid to challenge the status quo because they are thinking that, "You know, maybe I don't have the power to make the change that the company needs. Sometimes I feel like I don't have the skills." Sometimes they may feel that, I'm probably not the right person to do it. Or sometimes the lack of courage manifest itself as the inability to sort of break the silos that are formed within the organizations, when it comes to data and insights that you talked about. You know, there are people in the company, who are going to hog the data because they know how to manage the data, how to inquire and extract. They know how to speak data, they have the skills to do that, but they are not the group of people who have sort of the knowledge, the experience of the business to ask the right questions off the data. So there is this silo of people with the answers and there is a silo of people with the questions, and there is gap. These sort of silos are standing in the way of making that necessary change that we all I know the business needs, and the last change to sort of bring an external force sometimes. It could be a tool, it could be a platform, it could be a person, it could be a process, but sometimes no matter how big the company is or how small the company is. You may need to bring some external stimuli to start that domino of the positive changes that are necessary. The group of people that we have brought in, the four people, including Cindi, that you will hear from today are really good at practically telling you how to make that step, how to step off that edge, how to trust the rope that you will be safe and you're going to have fun. You will have that exhilarating feeling of jumping for a bungee jump. All four of them are exceptional, but my honor is to introduce Michelle and she's our first speaker. Michelle, I am very happy after watching her presentation and reading her bio, that there are no country vital worldwide competition for cool patents, because she will beat all of us because when her children were small, you know, they were probably into Harry Potter and Disney and she was managing a business and leading change there. And then as her kids grew up and got to that age, where they like football and NFL, guess what? She's the CIO of NFL. What a cool mom. I am extremely excited to see what she's going to talk about. I've seen the slides with a bunch of amazing pictures, I'm looking to see the context behind it. I'm very thrilled to make the acquaintance of Michelle. I'm looking forward to her talk next. Welcome Michelle. It's over to you. (gentle music) >> I'm delighted to be with you all today to talk about thought leadership. And I'm so excited that you asked me to join you because today I get to be a quarterback. I always wanted to be one. This is about as close as I'm ever going to get. So, I want to talk to you about quarterbacking our digital revolution using insights, data and of course, as you said, leadership. First, a little bit about myself, a little background. As I said, I always wanted to play football and this is something that I wanted to do since I was a child but when I grew up, girls didn't get to play football. I'm so happy that that's changing and girls are now doing all kinds of things that they didn't get to do before. Just this past weekend on an NFL field, we had a female coach on two sidelines and a female official on the field. I'm a lifelong fan and student of the game of football. I grew up in the South. You can tell from the accent and in the South football is like a religion and you pick sides. I chose Auburn University working in the athletic department, so I'm testament. Till you can start, a journey can be long. It took me many, many years to make it into professional sports. I graduated in 1987 and my little brother, well not actually not so little, he played offensive line for the Alabama Crimson Tide. And for those of you who know SEC football, you know this is a really big rivalry, and when you choose sides your family is divided. So it's kind of fun for me to always tell the story that my dad knew his kid would make it to the NFL, he just bet on the wrong one. My career has been about bringing people together for memorable moments at some of America's most iconic brands, delivering memories and amazing experiences that delight. From Universal Studios, Disney, to my current position as CIO of the NFL. In this job, I'm very privileged to have the opportunity to work with a team that gets to bring America's game to millions of people around the world. Often, I'm asked to talk about how to create amazing experiences for fans, guests or customers. But today, I really wanted to focus on something different and talk to you about being behind the scenes and backstage. Because behind every event, every game, every awesome moment, is execution. Precise, repeatable execution and most of my career has been behind the scenes doing just that. Assembling teams to execute these plans and the key way that companies operate at these exceptional levels is making good decisions, the right decisions, at the right time and based upon data. So that you can translate the data into intelligence and be a data-driven culture. Using data and intelligence is an important way that world-class companies do differentiate themselves, and it's the lifeblood of collaboration and innovation. Teams that are working on delivering these kind of world class experiences are often seeking out and leveraging next generation technologies and finding new ways to work. I've been fortunate to work across three decades of emerging experiences, which each required emerging technologies to execute. A little bit first about Disney. In '90s I was at Disney leading a project called Destination Disney, which it's a data project. It was a data project, but it was CRM before CRM was even cool and then certainly before anything like a data-driven culture was ever brought up. But way back then we were creating a digital backbone that enabled many technologies for the things that you see today. Like the MagicBand, Disney's Magical Express. My career at Disney began in finance, but Disney was very good about rotating you around. And it was during one of these rotations that I became very passionate about data. I kind of became a pain in the butt to the IT team asking for data, more and more data. And I learned that all of that valuable data was locked up in our systems. All of our point of sales systems, our reservation systems, our operation systems. And so I became a shadow IT person in marketing, ultimately, leading to moving into IT and I haven't looked back since. In the early 2000s, I was at Universal Studio's theme park as their CIO preparing for and launching the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Bringing one of history's most memorable characters to life required many new technologies and a lot of data. Our data and technologies were embedded into the rides and attractions. I mean, how do you really think a wand selects you at a wand shop. As today at the NFL, I am constantly challenged to do leading edge technologies, using things like sensors, AI, machine learning and all new communication strategies, and using data to drive everything, from player performance, contracts, to where we build new stadiums and hold events. With this year being the most challenging, yet rewarding year in my career at the NFL. In the middle of a global pandemic, the way we are executing on our season is leveraging data from contact tracing devices joined with testing data. Talk about data actually enabling your business. Without it we wouldn't be having a season right now. I'm also on the board of directors of two public companies, where data and collaboration are paramount. First, RingCentral, it's a cloud based unified communications platform and collaboration with video message and phone, all-in-one solution in the cloud and Quotient Technologies, whose product is actually data. The tagline at Quotient is The Result in Knowing. I think that's really important because not all of us are data companies, where your product is actually data, but we should operate more like your product is data. I'd also like to talk to you about four areas of things to think about as thought leaders in your companies. First, just hit on it, is change. how to be a champion and a driver of change. Second, how to use data to drive performance for your company and measure performance of your company. Third, how companies now require intense collaboration to operate and finally, how much of this is accomplished through solid data-driven decisions. First, let's hit on change. I mean, it's evident today more than ever, that we are in an environment of extreme change. I mean, we've all been at this for years and as technologists we've known it, believed it, lived it. And thankfully, for the most part, knock on wood, we were prepared for it. But this year everyone's cheese was moved. All the people in the back rooms, IT, data architects and others were suddenly called to the forefront because a global pandemic has turned out to be the thing that is driving intense change in how people work and analyze their business. On March 13th, we closed our office at the NFL in the middle of preparing for one of our biggest events, our kickoff event, The 2020 Draft. We went from planning a large event in Las Vegas under the bright lights, red carpet stage, to smaller events in club facilities. And then ultimately, to one where everyone coaches, GMs, prospects and even our commissioner were at home in their basements and we only had a few weeks to figure it out. I found myself for the first time, being in the live broadcast event space. Talking about bungee jumping, this is really what it felt like. It was one in which no one felt comfortable because it had not been done before. But leading through this, I stepped up, but it was very scary, it was certainly very risky, but it ended up being also rewarding when we did it. And as a result of this, some things will change forever. Second, managing performance. I mean, data should inform how you're doing and how to get your company to perform at its level, highest level. As an example, the NFL has always measured performance, obviously, and it is one of the purest examples of how performance directly impacts outcome. I mean, you can see performance on the field, you can see points being scored and stats, and you immediately know that impact. Those with the best stats usually win the games. The NFL has always recorded stats. Since the beginning of time here at the NFL a little... This year is our 101st year and athlete's ultimate success as a player has also always been greatly impacted by his stats. But what has changed for us is both how much more we can measure and the immediacy with which it can be measured and I'm sure in your business it's the same. The amount of data you must have has got to have quadrupled recently. And how fast do you need it and how quickly you need to analyze it is so important. And it's very important to break the silos between the keys to the data and the use of the data. Our next generation stats platform is taking data to the next level. It's powered by Amazon Web Services and we gather this data, real-time from sensors that are on players' bodies. We gather it in real time, analyze it, display it online and on broadcast. And of course, it's used to prepare week to week in addition to what is a normal coaching plan would be. We can now analyze, visualize, route patterns, speed, match-ups, et cetera, so much faster than ever before. We're continuing to roll out sensors too, that will gather more and more information about a player's performance as it relates to their health and safety. The third trend is really, I think it's a big part of what we're feeling today and that is intense collaboration. And just for sort of historical purposes, it's important to think about, for those of you that are IT professionals and developers, you know, more than 10 years ago agile practices began sweeping companies. Where small teams would work together rapidly in a very flexible, adaptive and innovative way and it proved to be transformational. However today, of course that is no longer just small teams, the next big wave of change and we've seen it through this pandemic, is that it's the whole enterprise that must collaborate and be agile. If I look back on my career, when I was at Disney, we owned everything 100%. We made a decision, we implemented it. We were a collaborative culture but it was much easier to push change because you own the whole decision. If there was buy-in from the top down, you got the people from the bottom up to do it and you executed. At Universal, we were a joint venture. Our attractions and entertainment was licensed. Our hotels were owned and managed by other third parties, so influence and collaboration, and how to share across companies became very important. And now here I am at the NFL an even the bigger ecosystem. We have 32 clubs that are all separate businesses, 31 different stadiums that are owned by a variety of people. We have licensees, we have sponsors, we have broadcast partners. So it seems that as my career has evolved, centralized control has gotten less and less and has been replaced by intense collaboration, not only within your own company but across companies. The ability to work in a collaborative way across businesses and even other companies, that has been a big key to my success in my career. I believe this whole vertical integration and big top-down decision-making is going by the wayside in favor of ecosystems that require cooperation, yet competition to co-exist. I mean, the NFL is a great example of what we call co-oppetition, which is cooperation and competition. We're in competition with each other, but we cooperate to make the company the best it can be. And at the heart of these items really are data-driven decisions and culture. Data on its own isn't good enough. You must be able to turn it to insights. Partnerships between technology teams who usually hold the keys to the raw data and business units, who have the knowledge to build the right decision models is key. If you're not already involved in this linkage, you should be, data mining isn't new for sure. The availability of data is quadrupling and it's everywhere. How do you know what to even look at? How do you know where to begin? How do you know what questions to ask? It's by using the tools that are available for visualization and analytics and knitting together strategies of the company. So it begins with, first of all, making sure you do understand the strategy of the company. So in closing, just to wrap up a bit, many of you joined today, looking for thought leadership on how to be a change agent, a change champion, and how to lead through transformation. Some final thoughts are be brave and drive. Don't do the ride along program, it's very important to drive. Driving can be high risk, but it's also high reward. Embracing the uncertainty of what will happen is how you become brave. Get more and more comfortable with uncertainty, be calm and let data be your map on your journey. Thanks. >> Michelle, thank you so much. So you and I share a love of data and a love of football. You said you want to be the quarterback. I'm more an a line person. >> Well, then I can't do my job without you. >> Great and I'm getting the feeling now, you know, Sudheesh is talking about bungee jumping. My vote is when we're past this pandemic, we both take him to the Delaware Water Gap and we do the cliff jumping. >> Oh that sounds good, I'll watch your watch. >> Yeah, you'll watch, okay. So Michelle, you have so many stakeholders, when you're trying to prioritize the different voices you have the players, you have the owners, you have the league, as you mentioned, the broadcasters, your partners here and football mamas like myself. How do you prioritize when there are so many different stakeholders that you need to satisfy? >> I think balancing across stakeholders starts with aligning on a mission and if you spend a lot of time understanding where everyone's coming from, and you can find the common thread that ties them all together. You sort of do get them to naturally prioritize their work and I think that's very important. So for us at the NFL and even at Disney, it was our core values and our core purpose is so well known and when anything challenges that, we're able to sort of lay that out. But as a change agent, you have to be very empathetic, and I would say empathy is probably your strongest skill if you're a change agent and that means listening to every single stakeholder. Even when they're yelling at you, even when they're telling you your technology doesn't work and you know that it's user error, or even when someone is just emotional about what's happening to them and that they're not comfortable with it. So I think being empathetic, and having a mission, and understanding it is sort of how I prioritize and balance. >> Yeah, empathy, a very popular word this year. I can imagine those coaches and owners yelling, so thank you for your leadership here. So Michelle, I look forward to discussing this more with our other customers and disruptors joining us in a little bit. >> (gentle music) So we're going to take a hard pivot now and go from football to Chernobyl. Chernobyl, what went wrong? 1986, as the reactors were melting down, they had the data to say, "This is going to be catastrophic," and yet the culture said, "No, we're perfect, hide it. Don't dare tell anyone." Which meant they went ahead and had celebrations in Kiev. Even though that increased the exposure, additional thousands getting cancer and 20,000 years before the ground around there can even be inhabited again. This is how powerful and detrimental a negative culture, a culture that is unable to confront the brutal facts that hides data. This is what we have to contend with and this is why I want you to focus on having, fostering a data-driven culture. I don't want you to be a laggard. I want you to be a leader in using data to drive your digital transformation. So I'll talk about culture and technology, is it really two sides of the same coin? Real-world impacts and then some best practices you can use to disrupt and innovate your culture. Now, oftentimes I would talk about culture and I talk about technology. And recently a CDO said to me, "You know, Cindi, I actually think this is two sides of the same coin, one reflects the other." What do you think? Let me walk you through this. So let's take a laggard. What does the technology look like? Is it based on 1990s BI and reporting, largely parametrized reports, on-premises data warehouses, or not even that operational reports. At best one enterprise data warehouse, very slow moving and collaboration is only email. What does that culture tell you? Maybe there's a lack of leadership to change, to do the hard work that Sudheesh referred to, or is there also a culture of fear, afraid of failure, resistance to change, complacency. And sometimes that complacency, it's not because people are lazy. It's because they've been so beaten down every time a new idea is presented. It's like, "No, we're measured on least to serve." So politics and distrust, whether it's between business and IT or individual stakeholders is the norm, so data is hoarded. Let's contrast that with the leader, a data and analytics leader, what does their technology look like? Augmented analytics, search and AI driven insights, not on-premises but in the cloud and maybe multiple clouds. And the data is not in one place but it's in a data lake and in a data warehouse, a logical data warehouse. The collaboration is via newer methods, whether it's Slack or Teams, allowing for that real-time decisioning or investigating a particular data point. So what is the culture in the leaders? It's transparent and trust. There is a trust that data will not be used to punish, that there is an ability to confront the bad news. It's innovation, valuing innovation in pursuit of the company goals. Whether it's the best fan experience and player safety in the NFL or best serving your customers, it's innovative and collaborative. There's none of this, "Oh, well, I didn't invent that. I'm not going to look at that." There's still pride of ownership, but it's collaborating to get to a better place faster. And people feel empowered to present new ideas, to fail fast and they're energized knowing that they're using the best technology and innovating at the pace that business requires. So data is democratized and democratized, not just for power users or analysts, but really at the point of impact, what we like to call the new decision-makers or really the frontline workers. So Harvard Business Review partnered with us to develop this study to say, "Just how important is this? We've been working at BI and analytics as an industry for more than 20 years, why is it not at the front lines? Whether it's a doctor, a nurse, a coach, a supply chain manager, a warehouse manager, a financial services advisor." 87% said they would be more successful if frontline workers were empowered with data-driven insights, but they recognize they need new technology to be able to do that. It's not about learning hard tools. The sad reality only 20% of organizations are actually doing this. These are the data-driven leaders. So this is the culture and technology, how did we get here? It's because state-of-the-art keeps changing. So the first generation BI and analytics platforms were deployed on-premises, on small datasets, really just taking data out of ERP systems that were also on-premises and state-of-the-art was maybe getting a management report, an operational report. Over time, visual based data discovery vendors disrupted these traditional BI vendors, empowering now analysts to create visualizations with the flexibility on a desktop, sometimes larger data, sometimes coming from a data warehouse. The current state-of-the-art though, Gartner calls it augmented analytics. At ThoughtSpot, we call it search and AI driven analytics, and this was pioneered for large scale data sets, whether it's on-premises or leveraging the cloud data warehouses. And I think this is an important point, oftentimes you, the data and analytics leaders, will look at these two components separately. But you have to look at the BI and analytics tier in lock-step with your data architectures to really get to the granular insights and to leverage the capabilities of AI. Now, if you've never seen ThoughtSpot, I'll just show you what this looks like. Instead of somebody hard coding a report, it's typing in search keywords and very robust keywords contains rank, top, bottom, getting to a visual visualization that then can be pinned to an existing pin board that might also contain insights generated by an AI engine. So it's easy enough for that new decision maker, the business user, the non-analyst to create themselves. Modernizing the data and analytics portfolio is hard because the pace of change has accelerated. You used to be able to create an investment, place a bet for maybe 10 years. A few years ago, that time horizon was five years. Now, it's maybe three years and the time to maturity has also accelerated. So you have these different components, the search and AI tier, the data science tier, data preparation and virtualization but I would also say, equally important is the cloud data warehouse. And pay attention to how well these analytics tools can unlock the value in these cloud data warehouses. So ThoughtSpot was the first to market with search and AI driven insights. Competitors have followed suit, but be careful, if you look at products like Power BI or SAP analytics cloud, they might demo well, but do they let you get to all the data without moving it in products like Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, or Azure Synapse, or Google BigQuery, they do not. They require you to move it into a smaller in-memory engine. So it's important how well these new products inter-operate. The pace of change, its acceleration, Gartner recently predicted that by 2022, 65% of analytical queries will be generated using search or NLP or even AI and that is roughly three times the prediction they had just a couple of years ago. So let's talk about the real world impact of culture and if you've read any of my books or used any of the maturity models out there, whether the Gartner IT Score that I worked on or the Data Warehousing Institute also has a maturity model. We talk about these five pillars to really become data-driven. As Michelle spoke about, it's focusing on the business outcomes, leveraging all the data, including new data sources, it's the talent, the people, the technology and also the processes. And often when I would talk about the people in the talent, I would lump the culture as part of that. But in the last year, as I've traveled the world and done these digital events for thought leaders. You have told me now culture is absolutely so important, and so we've pulled it out as a separate pillar. And in fact, in polls that we've done in these events, look at how much more important culture is as a barrier to becoming data-driven. It's three times as important as any of these other pillars. That's how critical it is. And let's take an example of where you can have great data, but if you don't have the right culture, there's devastating impacts. And I will say I have been a loyal customer of Wells Fargo for more than 20 years, but look at what happened in the face of negative news with data. It said, "Hey, we're not doing good cross-selling, customers do not have both a checking account and a credit card and a savings account and a mortgage." They opened fake accounts facing billions in fines, change in leadership that even the CEO attributed to a toxic sales culture and they're trying to fix this, but even recently there's been additional employee backlash saying the culture has not changed. Let's contrast that with some positive examples. Medtronic, a worldwide company in 150 countries around the world. They may not be a household name to you, but if you have a loved one or yourself, you have a pacemaker, spinal implant, diabetes, you know this brand. And at the start of COVID when they knew their business would be slowing down, because hospitals would only be able to take care of COVID patients. They took the bold move of making their IP for ventilators publicly available. That is the power of a positive culture. Or Verizon, a major telecom organization looking at late payments of their customers and even though the U.S. Federal Government said, "Well, you can't turn them off." They said, "We'll extend that even beyond the mandated guidelines," and facing a slow down in the business because of the tough economy, They said, "You know what? We will spend the time upskilling our people, giving them the time to learn more about the future of work, the skills and data and analytics for 20,000 of their employees rather than furloughing them. That is the power of a positive culture. So how can you transform your culture to the best in class? I'll give you three suggestions. Bring in a change agent, identify the relevance or I like to call it WIIFM and organize for collaboration. So the CDO, whatever your title is, Chief Analytics Officer, Chief Digital Officer, you are the most important change agent. And this is where you will hear that oftentimes a change agent has to come from outside the organization. So this is where, for example, in Europe you have the CDO of Just Eat, a takeout food delivery organization coming from the airline industry or in Australia, National Australian Bank taking a CDO within the same sector from TD Bank going to NAB. So these change agents come in, disrupt. It's a hard job. As one of you said to me, it often feels like. I make one step forward and I get knocked down again, I get pushed back. It is not for the faint of heart, but it's the most important part of your job. The other thing I'll talk about is WIIFM What's In It For Me? And this is really about understanding the motivation, the relevance that data has for everyone on the frontline, as well as those analysts, as well as the executives. So, if we're talking about players in the NFL, they want to perform better and they want to stay safe. That is why data matters to them. If we're talking about financial services, this may be a wealth management advisor. Okay, we could say commissions, but it's really helping people have their dreams come true, whether it's putting their children through college or being able to retire without having to work multiple jobs still into your 70s or 80s. For the teachers, teachers you ask them about data. They'll say, "We don't need that, I care about the student." So if you can use data to help a student perform better, that is WIIFM and sometimes we spend so much time talking the technology, we forget, what is the value we're trying to deliver with this? And we forget the impact on the people that it does require change. In fact, the Harvard Business Review study found that 44% said lack of change management is the biggest barrier to leveraging both new technology, but also being empowered to act on those data-driven insights. The third point, organize for collaboration. This does require diversity of thought, but also bringing the technology, the data and the business people together. Now there's not a single one size fits all model for data and analytics. At one point in time, even having a BICC, a BI competency center was considered state of the art. Now for the biggest impact, what I recommend is that you have a federated model centralized for economies of scale. That could be the common data, but then embed these evangelists, these analysts of the future within every business unit, every functional domain. And as you see this top bar, all models are possible, but the hybrid model has the most impact, the most leaders. So as we look ahead to the months ahead, to the year ahead, an exciting time because data is helping organizations better navigate a tough economy, lock in the customer loyalty and I look forward to seeing how you foster that culture that's collaborative with empathy and bring the best of technology, leveraging the cloud, all your data. So thank you for joining us at Thought Leaders. And next, I'm pleased to introduce our first change agent, Tom Mazzaferro Chief Data Officer of Western Union and before joining Western Union, Tom made his Mark at HSBC and JP Morgan Chase spearheading digital innovation in technology, operations, risk compliance and retail banking. Tom, thank you so much for joining us today. (gentle music) >> Very happy to be here and looking forward to talking to all of you today. So as we look to move organizations to a data-driven capability into the future, there is a lot that needs to be done on the data side, but also how does data connect and enable different business teams and the technology teams into the future? As we look across our data ecosystems and our platforms, and how we modernize that to the cloud in the future, it all needs to basically work together, right? To really be able to drive an organization from a data standpoint, into the future. That includes being able to have the right information with the right quality of data, at the right time to drive informed business decisions, to drive the business forward. As part of that, we actually have partnered with ThoughtSpot to actually bring in the technology to help us drive that. As part of that partnership and it's how we've looked to integrate it into our overall business as a whole. We've looked at, how do we make sure that our business and our professional lives, right? Are enabled in the same ways as our personal lives. So for example, in your personal lives, when you want to go and find something out, what do you do? You go onto google.com or you go onto Bing or you go onto Yahoo and you search for what you want, search to find an answer. ThoughtSpot for us is the same thing, but in the business world. So using ThoughtSpot and other AI capability is it's allowed us to actually enable our overall business teams in our company to actually have our information at our fingertips. So rather than having to go and talk to someone, or an engineer to go pull information or pull data. We actually can have the end users or the business executives, right. Search for what they need, what they want, at the exact time that they actually need it, to go and drive the business forward. This is truly one of those transformational things that we've put in place. On top of that, we are on a journey to modernize our larger ecosystem as a whole. That includes modernizing our underlying data warehouses, our technology, our... The local environments and as we move that, we've actually picked two of our cloud providers going to AWS and to GCP. We've also adopted Snowflake to really drive and to organize our information and our data, then drive these new solutions and capabilities forward. So a big portion of it though is culture. So how do we engage with the business teams and bring the IT teams together, to really help to drive these holistic end-to-end solutions and capabilities, to really support the actual business into the future. That's one of the keys here, as we look to modernize and to really enhance our organizations to become data-driven. This is the key. If you can really start to provide answers to business questions before they're even being asked and to predict based upon different economic trends or different trends in your business, what decisions need to be made and actually provide those answers to the business teams before they're even asking for it. That is really becoming a data-driven organization and as part of that, it really then enables the business to act quickly and take advantage of opportunities as they come in based upon industries, based upon markets, based upon products, solutions or partnerships into the future. These are really some of the keys that become crucial as you move forward, right, into this new age, Especially with COVID. With COVID now taking place across the world, right? Many of these markets, many of these digital transformations are celebrating and are changing rapidly to accommodate and to support customers in these very difficult times. As part of that, you need to make sure you have the right underlying foundation, ecosystems and solutions to really drive those capabilities and those solutions forward. As we go through this journey, both in my career but also each of your careers into the future, right? It also needs to evolve, right? Technology has changed so drastically in the last 10 years, and that change is only accelerating. So as part of that, you have to make sure that you stay up to speed, up to date with new technology changes, both on the platform standpoint, tools, but also what do our customers want, what do our customers need and how do we then service them with our information, with our data, with our platform, and with our products and our services to meet those needs and to really support and service those customers into the future. This is all around becoming a more data-driven organization, such as how do you use your data to support your current business lines, but how do you actually use your information and your data to actually better support your customers, better support your business, better support your employees, your operations teams and so forth. And really creating that full integration in that ecosystem is really when you start to get large dividends from these investments into the future. With that being said, I hope you enjoyed the segment on how to become and how to drive a data-driven organization, and looking forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you. >> Tom, that was great. Thanks so much and now going to have to drag on you for a second. As a change agent you've come in, disrupted and how long have you been at Western Union? >> Only nine months, so just started this year, but there have been some great opportunities to integrate changes and we have a lot more to go, but we're really driving things forward in partnership with our business teams and our colleagues to support those customers going forward. >> Tom, thank you so much. That was wonderful. And now, I'm excited to introduce you to Gustavo Canton, a change agent that I've had the pleasure of working with meeting in Europe and he is a serial change agent. Most recently with Schneider Electric but even going back to Sam's Clubs. Gustavo, welcome. (gentle music) >> So, hey everyone, my name is Gustavo Canton and thank you so much, Cindi, for the intro. As you mentioned, doing transformations is, you know, a high reward situation. I have been part of many transformations and I have led many transformations. And, what I can tell you is that it's really hard to predict the future, but if you have a North Star and you know where you're going, the one thing that I want you to take away from this discussion today is that you need to be bold to evolve. And so, in today, I'm going to be talking about culture and data, and I'm going to break this down in four areas. How do we get started, barriers or opportunities as I see it, the value of AI and also, how you communicate. Especially now in the workforce of today with so many different generations, you need to make sure that you are communicating in ways that are non-traditional sometimes. And so, how do we get started? So, I think the answer to that is you have to start for you yourself as a leader and stay tuned. And by that, I mean, you need to understand, not only what is happening in your function or your field, but you have to be very in tune what is happening in society socioeconomically speaking, wellbeing. You know, the common example is a great example and for me personally, it's an opportunity because the number one core value that I have is wellbeing. I believe that for human potential for customers and communities to grow, wellbeing should be at the center of every decision. And as somebody mentioned, it's great to be, you know, stay in tune and have the skillset and the courage. But for me personally, to be honest, to have this courage is not about not being afraid. You're always afraid when you're making big changes and you're swimming upstream, but what gives me the courage is the empathy part. Like I think empathy is a huge component because every time I go into an organization or a function, I try to listen very attentively to the needs of the business and what the leaders are trying to do. But I do it thinking about the mission of, how do I make change for the bigger workforce or the bigger good despite the fact that this might have perhaps implication for my own self interest in my career. Right? Because you have to have that courage sometimes to make choices that are not well seen, politically speaking, but are the right thing to do and you have to push through it. So the bottom line for me is that, I don't think we're they're transforming fast enough. And the reality is, I speak with a lot of leaders and we have seen stories in the past and what they show is that, if you look at the four main barriers that are basically keeping us behind budget, inability to act, cultural issues, politics and lack of alignment, those are the top four. But the interesting thing is that as Cindi has mentioned, these topic about culture is actually gaining more and more traction. And in 2018, there was a story from HBR and it was about 45%. I believe today, it's about 55%, 60% of respondents say that this is the main area that we need to focus on. So again, for all those leaders and all the executives who understand and are aware that we need to transform, commit to the transformation and set a deadline to say, "Hey, in two years we're going to make this happen. What do we need to do, to empower and enable these change agents to make it happen? You need to make the tough choices. And so to me, when I speak about being bold is about making the right choices now. So, I'll give you examples of some of the roadblocks that I went through as I've been doing transformations, most recently, as Cindi mentioned in Schneider. There are three main areas, legacy mindset and what that means is that, we've been doing this in a specific way for a long time and here is how we have been successful. What worked in the past is not going to work now. The opportunity there is that there is a lot of leaders, who have a digital mindset and they're up and coming leaders that are perhaps not yet fully developed. We need to mentor those leaders and take bets on some of these talents, including young talent. We cannot be thinking in the past and just wait for people, you know, three to five years for them to develop because the world is going in a way that is super-fast. The second area and this is specifically to implementation of AI. It's very interesting to me because just the example that I have with ThoughtSpot, right? We went on implementation and a lot of the way the IT team functions or the leaders look at technology, they look at it from the prism of the prior or success criteria for the traditional BIs, and that's not going to work. Again, the opportunity here is that you need to redefine what success look like. In my case, I want the user experience of our workforce to be the same user experience you have at home. It's a very simple concept and so we need to think about, how do we gain that user experience with these augmented analytics tools and then work backwards to have the right talent, processes, and technology to enable that. And finally and obviously with COVID, a lot of pressure in organizations and companies to do more with less. And the solution that most leaders I see are taking is to just minimize costs sometimes and cut budget. We have to do the opposite. We have to actually invest on growth areas, but do it by business question. Don't do it by function. If you actually invest in these kind of solutions, if you actually invest on developing your talent and your leadership to see more digitally, if you actually invest on fixing your data platform, it's not just an incremental cost. It's actually this investment is going to offset all those hidden costs and inefficiencies that you have on your system, because people are doing a lot of work and working very hard but it's not efficient and it's not working in the way that you might want to work. So there is a lot of opportunity there and just to put in terms of perspective, there have been some studies in the past about, you know, how do we kind of measure the impact of data? And obviously, this is going to vary by organization maturity, there's going to be a lot of factors. I've been in companies who have very clean, good data to work with and I've been with companies that we have to start basically from scratch. So it all depends on your maturity level. But in this study, what I think is interesting is they try to put a tagline or a tag price to what is the cost of incomplete data. So in this case, it's about 10 times as much to complete a unit of work when you have data that is flawed as opposed to having perfect data. So let me put that just in perspective, just as an example, right? Imagine you are trying to do something and you have to do 100 things in a project, and each time you do something, it's going to cost you a dollar. So if you have perfect data, the total cost of that project might be $100. But now let's say you have 80% perfect data and 20% flawed data. By using this assumption that flawed data is 10 times as costly as perfect data, your total costs now becomes $280 as opposed to $100. This just for you to really think about as a CIO, CTO, you know CHRO, CEO, "Are we really paying attention and really closing the gaps that we have on our data infrastructure?" If we don't do that, it's hard sometimes to see the snowball effect or to measure the overall impact, but as you can tell, the price tag goes up very, very quickly. So now, if I were to say, how do I communicate this or how do I break through some of these challenges or some of these barriers, right? I think the key is, I am in analytics, I know statistics obviously and love modeling, and, you know, data and optimization theory, and all that stuff. That's what I came to analytics, but now as a leader and as a change agent, I need to speak about value and in this case, for example, for Schneider. There was this tagline, make the most of your energy. So the number one thing that they were asking from the analytics team was actually efficiency, which to me was very interesting. But once I understood that, I understood what kind of language to use, how to connect it to the overall strategy and basically, how to bring in the right leaders because you need to, you know, focus on the leaders that you're going to make the most progress, you know. Again, low effort, high value. You need to make sure you centralize all the data as you can, you need to bring in some kind of augmented analytics, you know, solution. And finally, you need to make it super-simple for the, you know, in this case, I was working with the HR teams and other areas, so they can have access to one portal. They don't have to be confused and looking for 10 different places to find information. I think if you can actually have those four foundational pillars, obviously under the guise of having a data-driven culture, that's when you can actually make the impact. So in our case, it was about three years total transformation, but it was two years for this component of augmented analytics. It took about two years to talk to, you know, IT, get leadership support, find the budgeting, you know, get everybody on board, make sure the success criteria was correct. And we call this initiative, the people analytics portal. It was actually launched in July of this year and we were very excited and the audience was very excited to do this. In this case, we did our pilot in North America for many, many, many factors but one thing that is really important is as you bring along your audience on this, you know. You're going from Excel, you know, in some cases or Tableu to other tools like, you know, ThoughtSpot. You need to really explain them what is the difference and how this tool can truly replace some of the spreadsheets or some of the views that you might have on these other kinds of tools. Again, Tableau, I think it's a really good tool. There are other many tools that you might have in your toolkit but in my case, personally, I feel that you need to have one portal. Going back to Cindi's points, that really truly enable the end user. And I feel that this is the right solution for us, right? And I will show you some of the findings that we had in the pilot in the last two months. So this was a huge victory and I will tell you why, because it took a lot of effort for us to get to this stage and like I said, it's been years for us to kind of lay the foundation, get the leadership, initiating culture so people can understand, why you truly need to invest on augmented analytics. And so, what I'm showing here is an example of how do we use basically, you know, a tool to capturing video, the qualitative findings that we had, plus the quantitative insights that we have. So in this case, our preliminary results based on our ambition for three main metrics. Hours saved, user experience and adoption. So for hours saved, our ambition was to have 10 hours per week for employee to save on average. User experience, our ambition was 4.5 and adoption 80%. In just two months, two months and a half of the pilot, we were able to achieve five hours per week per employee savings, a user experience for 4.3 out of five and adoption of 60%. Really, really amazing work. But again, it takes a lot of collaboration for us to get to the stage from IT, legal, communications, obviously the operations things and the users. In HR safety and other areas that might be basically stakeholders in this whole process. So just to summarize, this kind of effort takes a lot of energy. You are a change agent, you need to have courage to make this decision and understand that, I feel that in this day and age with all this disruption happening, we don't have a choice. We have to take the risk, right? And in this case, I feel a lot of satisfaction in how we were able to gain all these great resource for this organization and that give me the confident to know that the work has been done and we are now in a different stage for the organization. And so for me, it's just to say, thank you for everybody who has belief, obviously in our vision, everybody who has belief in, you know, the work that we were trying to do and to make the life of our, you know, workforce or customers and community better. As you can tell, there is a lot of effort, there is a lot of collaboration that is needed to do something like this. In the end, I feel very satisfied with the accomplishments of this transformation and I just want to tell for you, if you are going right now in a moment that you feel that you have to swim upstream, you know, work with mentors, work with people in the industry that can help you out and guide you on this kind of transformation. It's not easy to do, it's high effort, but it's well worth it. And with that said, I hope you are well and it's been a pleasure talking to you. Talk to you soon. Take care. >> Thank you, Gustavo. That was amazing. All right, let's go to the panel. (light music) Now I think we can all agree how valuable it is to hear from practitioners and I want to thank the panel for sharing their knowledge with the community. Now one common challenge that I heard you all talk about was bringing your leadership and your teams along on the journey with you. We talk about this all the time and it is critical to have support from the top. Why? Because it directs the middle and then it enables bottoms up innovation effects from the cultural transformation that you guys all talked about. It seems like another common theme we heard is that you all prioritize database decision making in your organizations. And you combine two of your most valuable assets to do that and create leverage, employees on the front lines, and of course the data. Now as as you rightly pointed out, Tom, the pandemic has accelerated the need for really leaning into this. You know, the old saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, well COVID has broken everything and it's great to hear from our experts, you know, how to move forward, so let's get right into it. So Gustavo, let's start with you. If I'm an aspiring change agent and let's say I'm a budding data leader, what do I need to start doing? What habits do I need to create for long-lasting success? >> I think curiosity is very important. You need to be, like I said, in tune to what is happening, not only in your specific field, like I have a passion for analytics, I've been doing it for 50 years plus, but I think you need to understand wellbeing of the areas across not only a specific business. As you know, I come from, you know, Sam's Club, Walmart retail. I've been in energy management, technology. So you have to try to push yourself and basically go out of your comfort zone. I mean, if you are staying in your comfort zone and you want to just continuous improvement, that's just going to take you so far. What you have to do is, and that's what I try to do, is I try to go into areas, businesses and transformations, that make me, you know, stretch and develop as a leader. That's what I'm looking to do, so I can help transform the functions, organizations, and do the change management, the essential mindset that's required for this kind of effort. >> Well, thank you for that. That is inspiring and Cindi you love data and the data is pretty clear that diversity is a good business, but I wonder if you can, you know, add your perspectives to this conversation? >> Yeah, so Michelle has a new fan here because she has found her voice. I'm still working on finding mine and it's interesting because I was raised by my dad, a single dad, so he did teach me how to work in a predominantly male environment, but why I think diversity matters more now than ever before and this is by gender, by race, by age, by just different ways of working and thinking, is because as we automate things with AI, if we do not have diverse teams looking at the data, and the models, and how they're applied, we risk having bias at scale. So this is why I think I don't care what type of minority you are, finding your voice, having a seat at the table and just believing in the impact of your work has never been more important and as Michelle said, more possible. >> Great perspectives, thank you. Tom, I want to go to you. So, I mean, I feel like everybody in our businesses is in some way, shape, or form become a COVID expert, but what's been the impact of the pandemic on your organization's digital transformation plans? >> We've seen a massive growth, actually, in our digital business over the last 12 months really, even acceleration, right, once COVID hit. We really saw that in the 200 countries and territories that we operate in today and service our customers in today, that there's been a huge need, right, to send money to support family, to support friends, and to support loved ones across the world. And as part of that we are very honored to be able to support those customers that, across all the centers today, but as part of the acceleration, we need to make sure that we have the right architecture and the right platforms to basically scale, right? To basically support and provide the right kind of security for our customers going forward. So as part of that, we did do some pivots and we did accelerate some of our plans on digital to help support that overall growth coming in and to support our customers going forward, because during these times, during this pandemic, right, this is the most important time and we need to support those that we love and those that we care about. And doing that some of those ways is actually by sending money to them, support them financially. And that's where really our products and our services come into play that, you know, and really support those families. So, it was really a great opportunity for us to really support and really bring some of our products to the next level and supporting our business going forward. >> Awesome, thank you. Now, I want to come back to Gustavo. Tom, I'd love for you to chime in too. Did you guys ever think like you were pushing the envelope too much in doing things with data or the technology that it was just maybe too bold, maybe you felt like at some point it was failing, or you're pushing your people too hard? Can you share that experience and how you got through it? >> Yeah, the way I look at it is, you know, again, whenever I go to an organization, I ask the question, "Hey, how fast you would like to conform?" And, you know, based on the agreements on the leadership and the vision that we want to take place, I take decisions and I collaborate in a specific way. Now, in the case of COVID, for example, right, it forces us to remove silos and collaborate in a faster way. So to me, it was an opportunity to actually integrate with other areas and drive decisions faster, but make no mistake about it, when you are doing a transformation, you are obviously trying to do things faster than sometimes people are comfortable doing, and you need to be okay with that. Sometimes you need to be okay with tension or you need to be okay, you know, debating points or making repetitive business cases until people connect with the decision because you understand and you are seeing that, "Hey, the CEO is making a one, two year, you know, efficiency goal. The only way for us to really do more with less is for us to continue this path. We can not just stay with the status quo, we need to find a way to accelerate the transformation." That's the way I see it. >> How about Utah, we were talking earlier with Sudheesh and Cindi about that bungee jumping moment. What can you share? >> Yeah, you know, I think you hit upon it. Right now, the pace of change will be the slowest pace that you see for the rest of your career. So as part of that, right, this is what I tell my team, is that you need to be, you need to feel comfortable being uncomfortable. Meaning that we have to be able to basically scale, right? Expand and support the ever changing needs in the marketplace and industry and our customers today, and that pace of change that's happening, right? And what customers are asking for and the competition in the marketplace, it's only going to accelerate. So as part of that, you know, as you look at how you're operating today in your current business model, right? Things are only going to get faster. So you have to plan and to align and to drive the actual transformation, so that you can scale even faster into the future. So it's part of that, that's what we're putting in place here, right? It's how do we create that underlying framework and foundation that allows the organization to basically continue to scale and evolve into the future? >> Yeah, we're definitely out of our comfort zones, but we're getting comfortable with it. So Cindi, last question, you've worked with hundreds of organizations and I got to believe that, you know, some of the advice you gave when you were at Gartner, which was pre-COVID, maybe sometimes clients didn't always act on it. You know, not my watch or for whatever, variety of reasons, but it's being forced on them now. But knowing what you know now that, you know, we're all in this isolation economy, how would you say that advice has changed? Has it changed? What's your number one action and recommendation today? >> Yeah, well first off, Tom, just freaked me out. What do you mean, this is the slowest ever? Even six months ago I was saying the pace of change in data and analytics is frenetic. So, but I think you're right, Tom, the business and the technology together is forcing this change. Now, Dave, to answer your question, I would say the one bit of advice, maybe I was a little more very aware of the power in politics and how to bring people along in a way that they are comfortable and now I think it's, you know what, you can't get comfortable. In fact, we know that the organizations that were already in the cloud have been able to respond and pivot faster. So, if you really want to survive, as Tom and Gustavo said, get used to being uncomfortable. The power and politics are going to happen, break the rules, get used to that and be bold. Do not be afraid to tell somebody they're wrong and they're not moving fast enough. I do think you have to do that with empathy, as Michelle said and Gustavo, I think that's one of the key words today besides the bungee jumping. So I want to know where Sudheesh is going to go bungee jumping. (all chuckling) >> Guys, fantastic discussion, really. Thanks again to all the panelists and the guests, it was really a pleasure speaking with you today. Really, virtually all of the leaders that I've spoken to in theCUBE program recently, they tell me that the pandemic is accelerating so many things. Whether it's new ways to work, we heard about new security models and obviously the need for cloud. I mean, all of these things are driving true enterprise-wide digital transformation, not just as I said before, lip service. You know, sometimes we minimize the importance and the challenge of building culture and in making this transformation possible. But when it's done right, the right culture is going to deliver tournament results. You know, what does that mean? Getting it right. Everybody's trying to get it right. My biggest takeaway today is it means making data part of the DNA of your organization. And that means making it accessible to the people in your organization that are empowered to make decisions, decisions that can drive new revenue, cut costs, speed access to critical care, whatever the mission is of your organization, data can create insights and informed decisions that drive value. Okay, let's bring back Sudheesh and wrap things up. Sudheesh, please bring us home. >> Thank you, thank you, Dave. Thank you, theCUBE team, and thanks goes to all of our customers and partners who joined us, and thanks to all of you for spending the time with us. I want to do three quick things and then close it off. The first thing is I want to summarize the key takeaways that I heard from all four of our distinguished speakers. First, Michelle, I will simply put it, she said it really well. That is be brave and drive, don't go for a drive alone. That is such an important point. Often times, you know the right thing that you have to do to make the positive change that you want to see happen, but you wait for someone else to do it, not just, why not you? Why don't you be the one making that change happen? That's the thing that I picked up from Michelle's talk. Cindi talked about finding, the importance of finding your voice. Taking that chair, whether it's available or not, and making sure that your ideas, your voice is heard and if it requires some force, then apply that force. Make sure your ideas are heard. Gustavo talked about the importance of building consensus, not going at things all alone sometimes. The importance of building the quorum, and that is critical because if you want the changes to last, you want to make sure that the organization is fully behind it. Tom, instead of a single takeaway, what I was inspired by is the fact that a company that is 170 years old, 170 years old, 200 companies and 200 countries they're operating in and they were able to make the change that is necessary through this difficult time in a matter of months. If they could do it, anyone could. The second thing I want to do is to leave you with a takeaway, that is I would like you to go to ThoughtSpot.com/nfl because our team has made an app for NFL on Snowflake. I think you will find this interesting now that you are inspired and excited because of Michelle's talk. And the last thing is, please go to ThoughtSpot.com/beyond. Our global user conference is happening in this December. We would love to have you join us, it's, again, virtual, you can join from anywhere. We are expecting anywhere from five to 10,000 people and we would love to have you join and see what we've been up to since last year. We have a lot of amazing things in store for you, our customers, our partners, our collaborators, they will be coming and sharing. We'll be sharing things that we have been working to release, something that will come out next year. And also some of the crazy ideas our engineers have been cooking up. All of those things will be available for you at ThoughtSpot Beyond. Thank you, thank you so much.