>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to the cubes presentation of the 80 startup showcase marketing technology, emerging cloud scale customer experiences. This is season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering the exciting startups from the, a AWS ecosystem to talk about all the top trends and also featuring the key customers. I'm your host, John ER, today we're joined by Louis Fernando, Denise vice president of peak pay social and John Kim, the CEO of Sandberg to learn about the future of what's going on in fostering deeper customer relationships. Gentlemen, thanks for joining us in the cube showcase, >>Excited to be here. >>So John talk about Sendbird real quick set the table for us. What you guys do, you got a customer here to highlight some of the key things you're doing with customers, the value proposition what's Sendbird and what's the showcase about, >>Yeah, I'm really excited to be here. Uh, I'm John founder, C of Sandberg. So Sandberg is the worst leading conversations platform for mobile applications. We can power user to user conversations in mobile applications, as well as the brand to user conversations such as marketing sales and support. So, uh, today we power over quarter billion users on a monthly basis. Uh, we have, you know, through over 300 employees across seven different countries around the world, we work with some of the world's leading, uh, uh, customers such as big pay that we are going to showcase today, along with other, uh, wonderful customers like DoorDash, Reddit, <inaudible> sports and so forth. We have collectively raised over 200 million in funding. Um, so that's kind of where we are today. >>Well, it's always great to have, uh, one great success. Uh, good funding, more important is the customers. And I love showcases where the customers do the talking, because that means you've got some success stories. Louise, talk about, um, are you happy customer? What's it like working with Sandberg? Give us the, give us the scoop. >>So sandbar is being a great partner with us. So pick pay is a Brazilian payment app. We're at a FinTech here with more than 30 million active users using everyday pick pay to pay everything. So the, the, the majority of the payments are between peers, between people. So sandbar is, is helping us to improve a lot this journey to make it more pleasant between every everyone who are using big, big. So we are here, let's talk and it's a >>Pleasure. Yeah, it's awesome. Well, I great to have you guys on great, great relationship. And one of the things we've been talking about on the cube, if the folks watching that know our audience, no we've been banging the, the drum hard on this new world and this new patterns of user expectations and building relationships in this new digital world is not about the old way, the old MarTech way. There are new new use cases, new expectations by the consumers, John, that are, that are bringing up new opportunities, but also expectations. It's not about, I mean, I mean, if someone's using discord, for example, cuz they're gamers, they're done discord. If they want to communicate with, with slack, they, I do slack, SMS, kind of old hat. You got WhatsApp, you've got all these now peer to peer organic connections, multiple channels. This is all the new world. What's your vision on this new relationship building digital communication world. >>Yeah. So I, I think you brought a really good point there. One of the most frequently used applications in the world today are messaging applications across any countries, any region, any culture, if you look at the most frequently used and most longest used applications are usually some form of a, a messaging application. Now the end users or the customers in the world are so used to using, uh, uh, such a, you know, frictionless ver very responsive, modern experience on those messaging applications. What we want to help with the business around the world, the 99.9% of the business around the world don't have those really te knowledge or user experience expertise in messaging. So we want to help our businesses, help our customers be able to harness the power of modern messaging capabilities and then be able to embed it in their own business so that they can retain their users on their platform, engage with them in the con context that their, uh, what their business is about so that they can not only, uh, control or provide a better user experience, but also be able to, uh, understand their users better, uh, understand what they're doing on their businesses, be able to own and, uh, control the data in a more secure and safe way. >>So really it's uh, we're like the Robin hood of the world trying to keep superpower yeah. Back to the businesses. >>Yeah. Deal from the rich idea, the messaging scale. Bring that to everybody else. I love that. Uh, and you got kind of this double int Robin hood kind of new for the new generation finance. This is about taking the advantage of scalable platforms, monopolies, right. And giving the entrepreneur an opportunity to have that same capability feature, rich Louise PPE. You guys used Sendbird together. You have to level up, you gotta compete with those big monopolies to pride, scalable conversations. Okay. How did you engage this? What was your success path look? What was it look like? >>Yeah. When we look to this majority, the bigger chat apps that we have nowadays in the market, we are looking to them and then Brazilians are using for their daily course, but Brazilians are paying every day millions and millions of payments. And these chat apps are not, uh, able to, to, to deal with these payments. So what we are doing here is that, uh, providing a solution where every conversation that are going to happen before, during, or after a payment between the, the people, they would, uh, uh, have a nice platform that could afford all, all of their emotions and discussions that they have to do before or after the payment. So we are putting together the chat platform and we with the payment platform. So that's, that's what we are doing now. >>Okay. So just so I get this right. You're using Sandberg essentially integrated your mobile payment experience. Okay. Which is your app you're Sandberg to bring that scalability into the, into the social app application into the app itself. Is that right? >>Yes. Perfect. Integrated with the payment journey. So everybody who is going to pay, they need to find the one, the, the one they want to pay and then they can chat and conclude the payment through the platform. Yeah. I >>Mean, why not have it right there at point of, uh, transaction. Right. Um, why did you, um, decide to, um, to use conversations in your mobile wallet? Just curious. >>So it's important to say that we were born social. We born in 2012. So when our main main product was peer to peer payments, so everybody were sending money to a friend requesting or charging their family. So a service provider. And once we, we started as a social platform in that period. In that moment, we are just focusing in likes comments and like public interactions and the word become more private. And as soon we under understood this situation, we decided to move from a public feed to a private, to a private interaction. So that's, uh, that then the, the conversational space was the solution for that moving from a public interaction to a private interaction. So between the peers, which are involved in the, the transaction. So that's why we are providing the chat solution integrated with payments. >>That's a great call. John, just give some context here, again, for the folks watching this is now expected, this integrated experience. What's your, how would you talk to folks out there? I mean, first of all, I, I, I see it clearly, you've got an app, you gotta have all this integration and you need it scaling to reach features. Talk about your view on that. Is that the, is that what's happening here? What's, what's the real dynamic here. What's the, the big trend. >>Yeah. One thing that's, uh, super interesting about, uh, uh, like messaging experience in general, if you think about any kind of conversations that's happening, uh, digitally between human beings, more and more conversations, just like what Louis mentioned earlier are happening between in a private setting, even on applications, whether it be slack or other forms of communication, uh, more hap uh, more conversations happen through either one-on-one conversations or in a private small group settings. And because people feel more secure, uh, safe to have, uh, more intimate conversations. So even when you're making transactions is more, you know, there's a higher trust and, uh, people tend to engage, uh, far better on platforms through these kind of private conversations. That's where we kind of come in, whether it be, you want to set a one-on-one conversations or with a group conversation. And then ultimately if you want to take it public in a large group setting, you can also support, you know, thousands, if not, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, uh, engaging a public forum as well. So all of those capabilities can be implemented using something Ember, but again, the world is, uh, right now the businesses and how the user are, are interacting with this with each other is all happening through digital conversations. And we're seeing more and more of that happening, uh, throughout the life cycle of our company. >>Yeah, just as a sidebar, I was just talking to a venture in San Francisco the other day, and we're talking about the future of security and SAS and cloud scale. And, you know, the conversation went to more of, is it SAS? Is it platform as a service Louis? I wanna get your thoughts because, you know, you're seeing more and more needs for customization, low code, no code. You're seeing these trends. You gotta built in security. So, you know, the different, the old SAS model was softwares a service, but now that's everything in the cloud is softwares a service. So, but you need to have that platform kind of vibe for scale customization, maybe some developer integration, cuz apps are becoming the, the touchpoint. So can you walk us through what your vision was when you decided to integrate, chat into your app and how did you see that chat, changing the customer experience for payments and across your user journey? Cause, I mean, it's obvious now looking at it, but it might not have been for some. What was your, what was your vision? And when you had to do that, >>When you looked to Brazilian reality, we can see those in, uh, payment apps. All of them are focused on the transactional moment. And as soon as we started to think, how could be, how could our journey be better, more pleased than the others and make people want to be here and to use and to open our app every day is just about making the interaction with the peers easier, even with a merchant or even with my friend. So the main point that our first step was just to connect all, all the users between themselves to payments. The second step we are providing now is using the chat platform, the send bird platform as a platform for peak pay. So we are going to provide more best information. We're going to provide a better customer experience through the support and everything. So, um, this, this, this interaction or this connection, this partnership with Sandberg are going to unlock a new level of service for our users. And at the same time, a much more pleasant or a more pleasant journey for them while they are using the, the app for a, a simple payment, or if they are going to look for a group objective or maybe a crowdfund in the future or a group to decide, or just to pay something. So we are then locking a new level of interaction between the peers between the people and the users that are, that are involved into this, this payment or this simple transaction, we are making it more conversational. >>Yeah. You're making the application more valuable. We're gonna get to that in the next segment about, you know, the future of apps one and done, you see a lot of sports apps, oh, this big tournament, you know, and then you use it and then you never use it again until next year. You know, you have very time specific apps, but now you guys are smart to kind of build this in, but I gotta ask you a question because a lot of developers and companies out there always have this buy versus build decision. Why did you decide to use Sendbird versus building it in house? It's always kind of like the big trade off. >>Yeah. First of all, it will take a long, long time for us to achieve a major platform as Sandberg. And we are not a chat platform. So we are going to use this social interaction to improve the payment platform that we have. So when we look to the market and we found Sandberg, then we thought, okay, this guys, they are a real platform. And through the conversations, we are seeing that they are roadmap working in synergy with our roadmap. And then we can, we could start to deliver value to our, to our users in a fastest way. Could you imagine it spending 2, 3, 4 years to develop something like sand? And even when we achieve this point, probably our solution will be, would be weaker than, than Sandberg. So it was like no brainer to do that. Yeah. Because we want to improve the payment journey, not to do a chat, only a chat platform. So that's why we are working together to prove it's >>Really, you start to see these plugins, these, you know, look at Stripe for payments, for instance, right. And here in the success they've had, you know, people want to plug in for services. So John, I gotta ask you about, um, about the, the complexity that goes into it. The trust required that they have for you, you have to do this heavy lifting, you gotta provide the confidence that your service is gonna have to scale the compliance. Talk about that. What do you guys do under the covers that make this easy again, great business model, heavy lifting done by you. Seamless integration provide that value. That's why business is good, but there's a lot going on share what's happening under the, under the covers. >>Yeah. Um, before going to like the technical, like intricacy of what we do just to provide a little bit of background context on why we even started this business is we, uh, this is my second startup. My first company was a gaming company. We had built like chat three, four times just for our own game. So we were basically, we felt like we were reinventing the wheel. And then we actually went on a buyer's journey when we were building a social application, uh, uh, for, for, uh, uh, building our own community. We tried to actually be a buyer to see if we can actually find a solution. We want to use turns out that there weren't a lot of like sophisticated, you know, top notch, modern, uh, uh, chat experience that we can build using some other third party solutions. So we had to build all of that ourselves, which became the foundation for se today. >>And what we realized is that for most companies like using a building, the most sophisticated chat is probably not going to be their highest priority in case a pick pay will be, you know, financial transactions and all the other business that can be built on and hosted by platform like pick pay. But, you know, building the most topnotch chat experience would be a priority for a company like let's say WhatsApp or, or telegram, but it will probably not be the priority for, you know, major gaming companies, food delivery companies, finance companies, chat is not the highest priority. That's kind of where we come in, cuz chat is the highest priority for us. And we also have a privilege of working with some of the other, uh, world industry, uh, industry leaders. So by, uh, having this collective experience, working with the industry leaders, we get, uh, uh, technological superiority, being able to, uh, scale to, you know, hundreds of millions of users on a monthly basis. Also the security and the compliances by working with some of the largest commercial banks on some of the largest FinTech applications across the globe. So we have, you know, security, compliances, all the industry, best practices that are built in and all the new topnotch user experience that we are, uh, building with other customers can be also be, uh, utilized by a customer like pick pay. So you get this collective almost like evolutionary benefit. Yeah. By, uh, working with a company like us, >>You get a lot of economies of scale. Could you mind just sharing the URL for the company? So folks watching can go get, do a deep dive. Cause I'm you guys got a lot of, lot of, um, certifications under the covers, a lot of things you guys do. So you mind just sharing URL real quick. >>Yeah. So our company, uh, you can find everything about our company on sandberg.com like carrot pigeon. So, uh, you're sending a bird to send a message. So, uh, yeah. send.com >>All so let's get it to the application, cuz this is really interesting cuz Chad is table stakes now, but things are evolving beyond Chad. You gotta integrate that user experience. It's data. Now you gotta have scale. I mean, you know, people who wanna roll their own chat will find out there's a lot of client side and backend scale issues. Right. You can have a tsunami river like on Twitch, you know, you chat. I mean that, could you got client side issues, data scale. <laugh> right. You got backend. Um, Louis, talk about that dynamic because you know, as you start to scale, you want to rely on that. Talk about this dynamic, how apps now are integrating all these new features. So is it, are apps gonna go like more multifunctional? Do you see apps one and done? What's the, how do you guys see this app world playing out and where does, does the Sendbird fit in? And >>Just, just let me know better John, about the performance or about the, just, just let me >>Oh, slow with performance. Uh, performance is huge, right? You gotta have no one wants to have lag on, on chat. >>Okay. So, um, big pay when we look to the payments have millions, thousands of, of, of payments happen happening every second. So what we are doing now is moving all the payments through a conversation. So it always happened inside the conversation. So since from the first moment, um, every second counts to convert this client. And since from the first moment we never saw in, on Sandberg, any issue about that. And even when we have a question or something that we need to improve the team we're working together. So that that's, those are the points that are making us to work together and to make things going pretty fast. When we look to the users who are going to use chat, they are, their intention is three times better than the users who are not using payments through the chat. They are average. Average spent is three times higher too. >>So they, they are making more connections. They are chatting with their friends. They are friends are here. So the network effect is stronger. So if they're going to pay and they need to wait one more second, two seconds to conclude the payment, probably they will not go into choose paying through the, again, they will use only the wallet, only the code, only the Alliance of the user. So that's is so important for us to perform really, really fast. And then this is what we are finding. And this is what is happening with the integration with Sandberg. >>And what's interesting is, is that the by build chat with conversation, we just had a minute ago kind of plays in here. You get the benefits of Sandberg, but now your transactional fidelity is in the chat <laugh> that you don't build that you rely on them on. So again, that's an interesting dynamic. This is the future of apps, John, this is where it matters. The engagement. This is what you talk about is the new, the new digital experience who would've thought that five, 10 years ago. I mean, chat was just like, Hey, what's going around direct message. Now it's integral part of the app. What's your reading. >>Yeah. I mean, we're seeing that across, uh, uh, to Lewis's point, not just transactions, but like marketing messages are now being sent through chat. So the marketing is no longer just about like giving discount calls, but you can actually reengage with the brand. Uh, also support is becoming more real time through chat. So you're actually building a relationship. The support agents have a better context about the previous conversations and the transactions, the sales conversations, even like building, uh, building alerts, notification, all those things are now, uh, happening through conversations. And that's a better way for customers to engage with the brand cuz you actually, you're actually building a better relationship and also, uh, being able to trust the brand more because there is a channel for you to communicate and, and, and be seen and be heard, uh, by the brand. So we do believe that that's the future of the business and how more and more, uh, brands will be building relationships with their customers. >>Yeah. I love, I love your business model. I think it's really critical. And I think that stickiness is a real, uh, call out point there and the brand, the co-branding and the branding capability, but also really quickly in the last minute we have John and Luis, if you don't mind talking about security, I mean, I can't go a day now without getting an SMS scam, uh, text, uh, you seeing it now on WhatsApp. I mean, I don't even use telegram anymore. I mean, come on. So like, like this is now a problem. The old way has been infiltrated with spam and security issues. Security has to be there. The trust and security real quick, John, we'll start with you and we all Louis go, go ahead. >>No, no. Just, just to, to say how important is that we are not only a chatting platform. We are a payment platform, so we have money now, the transaction. So here in Brazil, we have all this safe, the, the, the layers, the security layers that we have in, on our app. And then we have the security layers provided from Sandburg. So, and when we look to the features, Sandberg are providing to us a lot of features that help users to feel safer like per refined profiles, like announcements, where it's a profile from peak pay, where the users can recognize. So this is peak pay talking with me. It's not a user trying to pass, trying to use big Bay's name to talk with me. So these issues is something that we are really, really, we really care about here because we are not only a chat platform. As I said before, we are a payment platform. We are a FinTech, we're at a digital bank. So we need to take care a lot and we don't have any complaint about it because Sandberg understood it. And then they, they, they are providing since the first moment with the perfect solutions and the user interface to make it simpler for the users to recognize that we speak, pay who is chatting with them, not a user with, with bad, bad intentions. >>Great, great insight, Louis. Thanks for sharing that, John really appreciate you guys coming on. Great showcase. Real final word. John will give you the final word folks watching out there. How do they engage with Sendbird? I want to integrate, I want to use your chat service. What do I do? Do I have to connect in as it managed service is the line of code. What do I do to get Sendbird? >>Yeah. So if you're a developer building a mobile application, simply come visit our website, we have a open documentation and SDK you can download and simply plug into your application. You can have a chat experience up and running matter of minutes, if not ours using our UI kit. So we want to make it as easy as possible for all the builders in the world to be able to harness the superpower of digital conversations. >>All right, great. Congratulations, John, on your success and all the growth and Louis, thanks for coming in, sharing the customer perspective and great insight. Thanks for coming on the showcase. Really appreciate it. Thanks for your time. >>Yeah. Thank you for having me. >>Okay. The a of us startup showcase season two, episode three here I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards Program. This session's award is going to be profiling the Most Customer Obsessed Mission-based Win in the education domain. I'm your host, Donald Klein, with theCUBE. And today we are joined by Fernando Castillo. He's the Business Development Manager at CloudHesive, and then also Luis Muñoz, who's the Information Director at the Unibersidad de Los Lagos. >> Okay, everyone. Welcome to today's session. All right. Fernando, thanks for taking some time out and joining us today. Wanted to start with you and wanted to hear a little bit of background about CloudHesive. Obviously, you're a company that had won an award last year, but you're back on this year, again. Want you give us some a little bit of the story of CloudHesive, and what kind of services you provide? (speaking in foreign language) >> Translator: Thank you very much, Donald. Yes, CloudHesive is a managed consulting service provider in the cloud. We are AWS Partner and since 2014 we have been providing solutions focusing on security, trustability, and scalability in the cloud. Accompany companies to their main objective, which is reducing operational costs and increasing their productivity as they move forward in the adaption of cloud services. >> Very good. Okay. And then Luis, I'm going to turn to you now, want you talk to us a little bit about your role there at the Unibersidad de Los Lagos, and how you started this project? (speaking in foreign language) >> Translator: Good afternoon. I belong to the academic department of the engineering department at the University of Los Lagos and the director of the IT of this school. For several years, for about five years, we've been analyzing the deployment of these automation at universities of Chile. Since it's not a common item in the country, we've done several benchmarking worldwide, especially in Spain, Mexico, Columbia, and places where it's more developed. And eventually, we have to take some demos that allowed us to make some decisions. This topic was not going to be considered in 2020, but it happened because of a political situation, social political in Chile in 2019. So we have to move forward the process, but we had already made a global analysis and this was one of the reasons why we have to get closer to AWS Partners and this allowed us to move this process forward within the university. >> Okay. Very good. All right. Well then, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to come back to you, Fernando, and I want you to talk a little bit about the overall goal of what you were trying to help the university with. (speaking in foreign language) >> Translator: Well, within the main objectives we had in the project was to have a platform that would support a concurrent load of thousands of students, especially in University of Los Lagos. They had requested to have around 15,000 students and the main complication or the main challenge was to keep a virtual attendance, which is now known as learning management system, but also having the possibility of having video classes in two days, something similar to what we are doing today, but with 50 or up to 100 students. This was one of the main objectives of the project. >> Okay, understood. So the goal is here to deploy this platform and open source platform and make it available for about 15,000 students. Okay. Now coming back to you, Luis, there was a time constraint here, correct? You needed to get the system going very quickly. Maybe you could explain why you needed to accelerate this program so quickly. (speaking in foreign language) >> Translator: Well, literally, the pandemic conditions in the country started to be more evident and more severe since the first week of March in 2020. And so we have to make the decision, the double-sided decision of choosing an infrastructure that we could not buy at that time, given the emergency, logistic emergency of the pandemic at the server's room and to keep a stable platform for that number of users, student and professors of university. So we started conversations to make this scale up and move everything to the cloud. This was the first decision. So we decided to use Amazon and with CloudHesive, we were able to organize the academics charter in the same platform. So as to move no longer than three weeks so that we could give classes, online classes with the students while we were learning this new normal, which was virtual distance education. This was very difficult of every morning, afternoon, and evening of work, but this allowed us not to fall behind in the first semester of the educational needs of the students. With this modality, we have around 5% more students that we used to last year in 2020, in March 2020. And this allowed us to have a more visible structure for those who were questioning this new modality and we were applied to take this new modality in the end. >> Okay. So because of the pandemic, you had to accelerate the deployment of this learning management system very quickly. And you had to learn how to manage the system at the same time that you were deploying it. Okay. Understood. So a lot of challenges there. All right. So then maybe coming back to you, Fernando. Wanted you talk about your role and how CloudHesive helped with this sort of this very rapid deployment of this LMS system. (speaking in foreign language) >> Translator: Well, talking about the challenges and how we were able to get to the objective, within the plan, deployment and development have to accompany the University of Los Lagos not only with the use of the platform, but also how to change management. One of the biggest challenges was to do a security audit, the deployment of scalable infrastructures. And one of the main topics was, one of the main challenges for CloudHesive that we can now talk about and obtained objective was to do the tests from the point of view of scalability and security getting into 15,000 students, concurrent students, stimulating the workload of the university, keeping 99.5 availability of the platform. Going back to the challenges, it's not only the scalability and stability. Nowadays, the University of Los Lagos platform can continue to grow, as Luis mentioned, without the need to look for new resources. But with our implementation, deployment and development, we already have a scalable resource as they increase the number of professors and students to their university. >> Okay. Understood, understood. Now, maybe talk a little bit just to continue with that point. Maybe talk for a minute about how you leverage the AWS platform in order to be able to accelerate this project. What aspects of your partnership with AWS enabled you to deploy the system so quickly? (speaking in foreign language) >> Translator: Well, talking about that, we based on a referential architecture of AWS, which is an open source middle platform, and within these competencies and within things, they belong to the education. We also have the problems, the presence of (indistinct), which allows us to deploy new solution and new integrations. So this allowed us as the team to, within weeks, to develop new features that would allow us to deal with each of the requirements of the universities, specifically. So within the first week, the University of Los Lagos had the connectivity with the academic sector. On the second week, they had the infrastructure to support out two-way videos. And on the third week, they already had the platform completely deployed with all the security safeguards that we already have in all of our products and services. So having worked hand-in-hand with AWS allowed us to have success in time with this platform. >> Wow. So that's fantastic. You were able to deploy this entire system from the connection with the academics to the video infrastructure to actually getting all the security implementations in place. You were able to do that in a three week cycle, is that correct? >> Yeah, that's correct. >> Fantastic. Okay. So Luis, coming back to you then, so working with CloudHesive as a partner to help deploy the platform on AWS gave you fantastic speed and agility to get the system working. Maybe talk a little bit now about the challenges of getting students and educators to adapt the system, and what kind of successes you had? (speaking in foreign language) >> Translator: First of all, they have to, we need to need to know the geography, the landscape of the university. The geography is very varied. We have mountains and lakes and so forth, and connectivity concepts are very difficult in this area. In addition, University of Los Lagos has the characteristic of receiving students from very poor sectors within the region. So this means that more than 80% have a free education, as there are few universities that exist in the country. So one of the technological challenges was for these students to receive the mechanisms and technology to have the connectivity they needed. After that, we had a very big training plan with the deployment company, CloudHesive, with the permissions, and eventually together, we were able to go beyond students and professors. And I remember we had 50% students and professors logged in to the platform, and nowadays, we have 100% students and professors logged in having classes in the platform. But most importantly, nowadays, we have an analytical control because of an integration with CloudHesive, with certain tools that allow us to gather data in real time. And we can do a follow-up of the student that is closer actually from the previous situation when we didn't have this technology. If the student is not logged in, we can reach them directly or indirectly to know, what is happening with his meeting, which is the kind of support, academic, social or economic support that they need. Before, it was harder to get this. So we have a communion between technology and social services that we can provide as a university. And of course, the adaptability of CloudHesive in as much as most of the requirements that we needed. So as to have a good response, they've been very providing, they provided a very robust service in this terms. >> Fantastic. So you were able to reach 100% percent of your target audience very quickly. Is that correct? Great. >> Yes. >> And maybe just to kind of follow up one more. Just talk a little bit about the future of your program. Now that you've worked so hard to establish the system and to connect your students and your teachers and to optimize the system, what is your plan to use it going forward? Are you looking to expand it? What would you say are your goals? (speaking in foreign language) >> Translator: First of all, for better or for worse, this modality came here to stay. The pandemic may end, but it generated opportunities that nationwide, it moved forward at least seven or eight times faster, these kinds of possibilities. So it's hard to use or waste this opportunity with the face-to-face classes. The university nowadays, thanks to the platform and the work done by CloudHesive and AWS, the university won ministry projects from the Ministry of Education in the country, have a strengthening plans for other kinds of services that were not incorporated before, like the idea of virtual library, research work, academic development work, of training and cultural transformation as well. But eventually, they are happening in this virtually environments. And the university won this possibility through the ministry, bridging the gap between the academic sector and the students. And in order to elaborate a little bit more from the previous question, we did a survey last year and ended not long ago. And most professors said that 80%, more than 80% said that the virtual environment was considered as good or very good. So we have a very good assessment in order to participate in this project that were won by the university and they are nowadays being applied. So this generates development in the academic sector, in research, in library, in content creation, global communication, working together with other universities with work postgraduate courses and other universities without the need of getting out of home. So this is a very competitive advantage that we didn't have before. And since 2020, we were able to develop. >> Fantastic. Well, congratulations on a really well put together program. And I'm excited to hear that you've won an award in your country and that you're planning to expand the system more broadly. I think that's a fantastic success story. So maybe just to wrap this up here with you Fernando, why don't you talk a little bit about, so obviously, you guys were very critical in helping this system be deployed very quickly, but very securely at the same time. How do you see your role going forward in enabling these types of situations, this distance learning type formats? (speaking in foreign language) >> Translator: Well, just as Luis said, taking this project with the University of Los Lagos, this showed the importance of looking at technological advances and to improve the universities and research centers and how to focus on innovation and bringing the future education down. For us, the data generated in this virtual interactions are very valuable and having a clear perspective, so as to organize this data for, to make more effective decisions that allow us to act in real time. This is what we are focusing on right now. So as to keep, I mean, prove, and being able to provide new tools, the research centers and universities to operate quickly, safely, and cost effectively. >> Okay, fantastic. So really, the real lesson learned here is by working with a partner like yourself, you were able take an open source learning management system and then deploy it very quickly, manage it, and then secure it in a way that allowed the university then to do their work. So I think that's a really great end-to-end delivery story. So I think, maybe if you want to make one last comment, Fernando, about your role in any kind of future expansion for this type of work. (speaking in foreign language) >> Translator: Yes, of course. I would like to thank Amazon and University of Los Lagos, of course for giving us the chance to work together and develop this project successfully. And answering your question, I would like to say that this is a good incentive to build more robust solutions, as long as we have our focus on our clients, when working and as a final comment, I would just would like to thank you and hope to see you again with a new project. >> Okay, well, congratulations to you both on winning this award. And for CloudHesive, this is your second year in a row of winning a Public Sector Award. So with that, I'm going to sign off today and I'm going to thank you both for attending. Today, we've had Fernando Castillo, the Business Development Manager from CloudHesive and then Luis Muñoz, the Information Director at the Uniberisdad de Los Lagos, and thank you both for attending. This is Donald Klein for theCUBE, until next time. (bright music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020, sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>Welcome back to the queue. It's virtual coverage of Avis reinvent 2020 I'm John furry, your host. Um, this is a cute virtual we're here. Not in, in remote. We're not in person this year, so we're doing the remote interviews. And then this segment is going to build on the quantum conversation we had last year, Richard moles, general manager of Amazon bracket and aid was quantum computing and Fernando Brandao head of quantum algorithms at AWS and Brent professor of theoretical physics at Caltech. Fernando, thanks for coming on, Richard. Thanks for joining us. >>You're welcome to be here. >>So, Fernando, first of all, love your title, quantum algorithms. That's the coolest title I've heard so far and you're pretty smart because you're a theoretical professor of physics at Caltech. So, um, which I'd never be able to get into, but I wish I could get into there someday, but, uh, thanks for coming on. Um, quantum has been quite the rage and you know, there's a lot of people talking about it. Um, it's not ready for prime time. Some say it's moving faster than others, but where are we on quantum right now? What are, what are you, what are you seeing Fernanda where the quantum, where are peg us in the evolution of, of, uh, where we are? >>Um, yeah, what quantum, uh, it's an emerging and rapidly developing fields. Uh, but we are see where are you on, uh, both in terms of, uh, hardware development and in terms of identifying the most impactful use cases of one company. Uh, so, so it's, it's, it's early days for everyone and, and we have like, uh, different players and different technologies that are being sport. And I think it's, it's, it's early, but it's exciting time to be doing quantum computing. And, uh, and it's very interesting to see the interest in industry growing and, and customers. Uh, for example, Casa from AWS, uh, being, uh, being willing to take part in this journey with us in developmental technology. >>Awesome. Richard, last year we talked to bill Vass about this and he was, you know, he set expectations really well, I thought, but it was pretty much in classic Amazonian way. You know, it makes the announcement a lot of progress then makes me give us the update on your end. You guys now are shipping brackets available. What's the update on your end and Verner mentioned in his keynote this week >> as well. Yeah, it was a, it was great until I was really looking at your interview with bill. It was, uh, that was when we launched the launch the service a year ago, almost exactly a year ago this week. And we've come a long way. So as you mentioned, we've, uh, we've, uh, we've gone to general availability with the service now that that happened in August. So now a customer can kind of look into the, uh, to the bracket console and, uh, installed programming concept computers. You know, there's, uh, there's tremendous excitement obviously, as, as you mentioned, and Fernando mentioned, you know, quantum computers, uh, we think >>Have the potential to solve problems that are currently, uh, uh, unsolvable. Um, the goal of bracket is to fundamentally give customers the ability to, uh, to go test, uh, some of those notions to explore the technology and to just start planning for the future. You know, our goal was always to try and solve some of the problems that customers have had for, you know, gee, a decade or so now, you know, they tell us from a variety of different industries, whether it's drug discovery or financial services, whether it's energy or there's chemical engineering, machine learning, you know, th the potential for quantum computer impacts may industries could potentially be disruptive to those industries. And, uh, it's, it's essential that customers can can plan for the future, you know, build their own internal resources, become experts, hire the right staff, figure out where it might impact their business and, uh, and potentially disrupt. >>So, uh, you know, in the past they're finding it hard to, to get involved. You know, these machines are very different, different technologies building in different ways of different characteristics. Uh, the tooling is very disparate, very fragmented. Historically, it's hard for companies to get access to the machines. These tend to be, you know, owned by startups or in, you know, physics labs or universities, very difficult to get access to these things, very different commercial models. Um, and, uh, as you, as you suggested, a lot of interests, a lot of hype, a lot of claims in the industry, customers want to cut through all that. They want to understand what's real, uh, what they can do today, uh, how they can experiment and, uh, and get started. So, you know, we see bracket as a catalyst for innovation. We want to bring together end-users, um, consultants, uh, software developers, um, providers that want to host services on top of bracket, try and get the industry, you know, rubbing along them. You spoke to lots of Amazonians. I'm sure you've heard the phrase innovation flywheel, plenty of times. Um, we see the same approach that we've used successfully in IOT and robotics and machine learning and apply that same approach to content, machine learning software, to quantum computing, and to learn, to bring it together. And, uh, if we get the tooling right, and we make it easy, um, then we don't see any reason why we can't, uh, you know, rapidly try and move this industry forward. And >>It was fun areas where there's a lot of, you know, intellectual computer science, um, technology science involved in super exciting. And Amazon's supposed to some of that undifferentiated heavy. >>That's what I am, you know, it's like, >>There's a Maslow hierarchy of needs in the tech industry. You know, people say, Oh, why five people freak out when there's no wifi? You know, you can't get enough compute. Right. So, you know, um, compute is one of those things with machine learning is seeing the benefits and quantum there's so much benefits there. Um, and you guys made some announcements at, at re-invent, uh, around BRACA. Can you share just quickly share some of those updates, Richard? >>Sure. I mean, it's the way we innovate at AWS. You know, we, we start simple and we, and we build up features. We listen to customers and we learn as we go along, we try and move as quickly as possible. So since going public in, uh, in, in August, we've actually had a string of releases, uh, pretty consistent, um, delivering new features. So we try to tie not the integration with the platform. Customers have told us really very early on that they, they don't just want to play with the technology. They want to figure out how to, how to envisage a production quantum computing service, how it might look, you know, in the context of a broad cloud platform with AWS. So we've, uh, we launched some integration with, uh, other AWS capabilities around security, managing limits, quotas, tagging resources, that type of thing, things that are familiar to, uh, to, to, to current AWS users. >>Uh, we launched some new hardware. Uh, all of our partners D-Wave launched some, uh, uh, you know, a 5,000 cubit machine, uh, just in September. Uh, so we made that available on bracket the same day that they launched that hardware, which was very cool. Um, you know, we've made it, uh, we've, we've made it easier for researchers. We've been, you know, impressed how many academics and researchers have used the service, not just large corporations. Um, they want to have really deep access to these machines. They want to program these things at a low level. So we launched some features, uh, to enable them to do their research, but reinvent, we were really focused on two things, um, simulators and making it much easier to use, uh, hybrid systems systems that, uh, incorporate classical compute, traditional digital computing with quantum machinery, um, in the vein that follow some of the liens that we've seen, uh, in machine learning. >>So, uh, simulators are important. They're a very important part of, uh, learning how to use concepts, computers. They're always available 24, seven they're super convenient to use. And of course they're critical in verifying the accuracy of the results that we get from quantum hardware. When we launched the service behind free simulator for customers to help debug their circuits and experiments quickly, um, but simulating large experiments and large systems is a real challenge on classical computers. You know, it, wasn't hard on classical. Uh, then you wouldn't need a quantum computer. That's the whole point. So running large simulations, you know, is expensive in terms of resources. It's complicated. Uh, we launched a pretty powerful simulator, uh, back in August, which we thought at the time was always powerful managed. Quantum stimulates circuit handled 34 cubits, and it reinvented last week, we launched a new simulator, which actually the first managed simulator to use tensor network technology. >>And it can run up to 50 cubits. So we think is, we think is probably the most powerful, uh, managed quantum simulator on the market today. And customers can flip easily between either using real quantum hardware or either of our, uh, stimulators just by changing a line of code. Um, the other thing we launched was the ability to run these hybrid systems. You know, quantum computers will get more, no don't get onto in a moment is, uh, today's computers are very imperfect, you know, lots of errors. Um, we working, obviously the industry towards fault-tolerant machines and Fernando can talk about some research papers that were published in that area, but right now the machines are far from perfect. And, uh, and the way that we can try to squeeze as much value out of these devices today is to run them in tandem with classical systems. >>We think of the notion of a self-learning quantum algorithm, where you use a classical optimization techniques, such as we see machine learning to tweak and tune the parameters of a quantum algorithm to try and iterate and converge on the best answer and try and overcome some of these issues surrounding errors. That's a lot of moving parts to orchestrate for customers, a lot of different systems, a lot of different programming techniques. And we wanted to make that much easier. We've been impressed with a, a, an open projects, been around for a couple of years, uh, called penny lane after the Beatles song. And, um, so we wanted to double down on that. We were getting a lot of positive feedback from customers about the penny lane talk it, so we decided to, uh, uh, make it a first class citizen on bracket, make it available as a native feature, uh, in our, uh, in our Jupiter notebooks and our tutorials learning examples, um, that open source project has very similar, um, guiding principles that we do, you know, it's open, it's cross platform, it's technology agnostic, and we thought he was a great fit to the service. >>So we, uh, we announced that and made it available to customers and, uh, and, and, uh, already getting great feedback. So, uh, you know, finishing the finishing the year strongly, I think, um, looking forward to 2021, you know, looking forward to some really cool technology it's on the horizon, uh, from a hardware point of view, making it easy to use, um, you know, and always, obviously trying to work back from customer problems. And so congratulations on the success. I'm sure it's not hard to hire people interested, at least finding qualified people it'd be different, but, you know, sign me up. I love quantum great people, Fernando real quick, understanding the relationship with Caltech unique to Amazon. Um, tell us how that fits into the, into this, >>Uh, right. John S no, as I was saying, it's it's early days, uh, for, for quantum computing, uh, and to make progress, uh, in abreast, uh, put together a team of experts, right. To work both on, on find new use cases of quantum computing and also, uh, building more powerful, uh, quantum hardware. Uh, so the AWS center for quantum computing is based at Caltech. Uh, and, and this comes from the belief of AWS that, uh, in quantum computing is key to, uh, to keep close, to stay close of like fresh ideas and to the latest scientific developments. Right. And Caltech is if you're near one computing. So what's the ideal place for doing that? Uh, so in the center, we, we put together researchers and engineers, uh, from computer science, physics, and other subjects, uh, from Amazon, but also from all the academic institutions, uh, of course some context, but we also have Stanford and university of Chicago, uh, among others. So we broke wrongs, uh, in the beauty for AWS and for quantum computer in the summer, uh, and under construction right now. Uh, but, uh, as we speak, John, the team is busy, uh, uh, you know, getting stuff in, in temporary lab space that we have at cottage. >>Awesome. Great. And real quick, I know we've got some time pressure here, but you published some new research, give a quick a plug for the new research. Tell us about that. >>Um, right. So, so, you know, as part of the effort or the integration for one company, uh, we are developing a new cubix, uh, which we choose a combination of acoustic and electric components. So this kind of hybrid Aquacel execute, it has the promise for a much smaller footprint, think about like a few microliters and much longer storage times, like up to settlements, uh, which, which is a big improvement over the scale of the arts sort of writing all export based cubits, but that's not the whole story, right? On six, if you have a good security should make good use of it. Uh, so what we did in this paper, they were just put out, uh, is, is a proposal for an architecture of how to build a scalable quantum computer using these cubits. So we found from our analysis that we can get more than a 10 X overheads in the resources required from URI, a universal thought around quantum computer. >>Uh, so what are these resources? This is like a smaller number of physical cubits. Uh, this is a smaller footprint is, uh, fewer control lines in like a smaller approach and a consistent, right. And, and these are all like, uh, I think this is a solid contribution. Uh, no, it's a theoretical analysis, right? So, so the, uh, the experimental development has to come, but I think this is a solid contribution in the big challenge of scaling up this quantum systems. Uh, so, so, so John, as we speak like, uh, data blessed in the, for quantum computing is, uh, working on the experimental development of this, uh, a highly adequacy architecture, but we also keep exploring other promising ways of doing scalable quantum computers and eventually, uh, to bring a more powerful computer resources to AWS customers. >>It's kind of like machine learning and data science, the smartest people work on it. Then you democratize that. I can see where this is going. Um, Richard real quick, um, for people who want to get involved and participate or consume, what do they do? Give us the playbook real quick. Uh, so simple, just go to the AWS console and kind of log onto the, to the bracket, uh, bracket console, jump in, you know, uh, create, um, create a Jupiter notebook, pull down some of our sample, uh, applications run through the notebook and program a quantum computer. It's literally that simple. There's plenty of tutorials. It's easy to get started, you know, classic cloud style right now from commitment. Jump in, start simple, get going. We want you to go quantum. You can't go back, go quantum. You can't go back to regular computing. I think people will be running concert classical systems in parallel for quite some time. So yeah, this is the, this is definitely not a one way door. You know, you go explore quantum computing and see how it fits into, uh, >>You know, into the, into solving some of the problems that you wanted to solve in the future. But definitely this is not a replacement technology. This is a complimentary technology. >>It's great. It's a great innovation. It's kind of intoxicating technically to get, think about the benefits Fernando, Richard, thanks for coming on. It's really exciting. I'm looking forward to keeping up keeping track of the progress. Thanks for coming on the cube coverage of reinvent, quantum computing going the next level coexisting building on top of the shoulders of other giant technologies. This is where the computing wave is going. It's different. It's impacting people's lives. This is the cube coverage of re-invent. Thanks for watching.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. Hello, everyone. This is Dave Balanta. And welcome to the cubes Virtual coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 with a special focus on the A p N partner experience. I'm excited to have two great guests on the program. Fernando Castillo is the head s a p on AWS Partner Network and s A P Alliance and AWS and Stephen Jones is the general manager s a p E c to enterprise that aws Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Great to see you. >>I'm here. >>So guys ASAP on AWS. It's a core workload for customers. I call it the poster child for mission Critical workloads and applications. Now a lot has happened since we last talked to you guys. So So tell us it. Maybe start with Stephen. What's going on with Sapna Ws? Give us the update. >>I appreciate the question Day. Look, a lot of customers continue to migrate. These mission critical workloads State of us on a good example is the U. S. Navy right? Who moved their entire recipe landscape European workload AWS. This is a very large system of support. Over 72,000 users across 66 different navy commands. They estimate that 70 billion worth of parts and goods actually transact through the system every year. Just just massive. Right? And this this type of adoptions continued to accelerate a very rapid clip. And today, over 5000 customers now are running SFP workloads. I need to be us on there really trusting us, uh, to to manage and run these workloads. And another interesting stat here is that more than half of these customers are actually running asap, Hana, which is a safe He's flagship in memory database. >>Right, Fernando, can you add to that? >>Sure. So definitely about, you know, the customs are also SCP themselves continue to lose a dollar less to run their own offerings. Right? So think about conquer SCP platform. SCP analytics were when new offers like Hannah Cloud. In addition to that, we continue to see the P and L despondent network to grow at an accelerated pace. Today we have over 60 SNP company partners all over the world helping SFP customers s O that customers are my green. There s appeal asking CW's. They only look for reduced costs, improved performance but also toe again access to new capabilities. So innovate around their core business systems and transform their businesses. >>So for now, I wonder if I could stay with you for a minute. I mean, the numbers that Steve was putting out there, it's just massive scale. So you obviously have a lot of data. So I'm wondering when you talk to these customers, Are you discerning any common patterns that are emerging? What are some of the things that you're hearing or seeing when you analyze the data? >>Sure. So just to give a couple example right. Our biggest customers are doing complete ASAP. Transformations on Toe s four Hana. Their chance they're going to these new S a p r p code nine All customers have immediate needs, and they're taking their existing assets to AWS, so looking to reduce costs and improve performance, but also to sell them apart for innovation. This innovation is something that operation or something that they can wait. They need it right now. It's they This time to innovate is now right on some of these customers saying that while s and P has nice apart. So that is a multi year process on most organizations and have a look from waiting for this just before they start innovating. So instead of that, they focus on bringing what they have on start innovating right away on Steve has some great stories around here, so maybe Steve can share with that. Goes with that? >>Yeah, that'd be great, Steve. >>Yeah. Look, I think a good example here on and Fernando touched it, touched on it. Well, right. So customers coming from all kind of different places in their journey aws as it relates to this this critical workload and some are looking to really reap the benefits of the investments they made over the last couple decades sometimes. And Vista is a really good example Here, um there a subsidiary of Cook Industries, they migrated and moved their existing S a P r P solution called E c C. To AWS. They estimate that this migration alone from an infrastructure cost savings perspective, has netted them about two million per year. Additionally, you know, they started to bring some of the other issues they were trying to solve from a business perspective, together now that they were on the on the on the business on the AWS platform. And one thing that recognizes they had different data silos, that they had been operating in an on premises world. Right? So massive factories solution and bringing all of that data together on a single platform on AWS and enriching that with the SCP data has allowed them to actually improve their forecasting supply chain processes across multiple data sources and the estimate that that is saving them additional millions per year. So again, customers are not necessarily waiting to innovate. Um, but actually moving forward now. >>All right, so I gotta ask, you don't hate me for asking this question, but but everybody talks about how great they are. Supporting s a P is It's one of the top, of course, because s a p, you know, huge player in the in the application space. So I want you guys to address how aws specifically compares Thio some of your competitors that are, you know, the hyper scaler specifically as it relates to supporting S a P workloads. What's the rial differential value that you guys bring? Maybe Steve, you could start >>Sure, you're probably getting to know us a little bit. Way don't focus a lot on competition, Aziz mentioned week We continue to see customers adopt AWS for S a p a really rapid clip. And that alone actually brings a lot of feedback back into how we consider our own service offerings as it relates to this particular workload on that, that's it. That's important signal right for what we're building. But customers do tell us the security performance availability matters, especially for this workload, which, you know, to be honest, is the backbone of many, many organizations. Right? And we understand why. And there was a study that was done recently about a. D. C. Where they found that even a single hour of unplanned downtime as a released this particular workload could cost millions. And so it's it's super important. And if you look at, um, you know, publicly available data from an average perspective, um, it has considerably less downtime than the other hyper scale is out there way. Take the performance and availability of oh, our entire global footprint and in this workload in particular, super important. >>Well, you know, that's a great point, Steve. I mean, if you got critical mission critical applications like ASAP supporting the business, that's driving revenue. It's driving productivity. The higher the value of the application, the greater the impact when it's down, I wonder, Fernando, you know, Steve said, You guys don't focus on the competition. Well, is an analyst. You know, I always focused on the competition, So I wonder if you're gonna add anything to that. >>Sure. So again, as you can imagine, multiple analyst called Space right. And, uh, everybody shares information. And analysts have agreed that Italy's clean infrastructure services, including the three quite a for CP across the globe. So we feel very humble and honor about this recognition on this encourages to continue to improve ourselves to give you a couple examples for a 10 year in a row. Italy's US evaluated as a leader in the century Gardner Magic Quadrant, right for cloud infrastructure from services. And, as you know, the measure to access right they measure very execute on complete, insufficient were the highest, both of them. Another third party, just not keep with one is icy, right? You know, technology research dreamers, you already you might know advice for famous Well, the reason they publisher s a p on infrastructure service provider lands reports long name which, basically, the analyzers providers were best suited to host s a. P s four hana workloads on more broadly s a p Hannah landscapes, you know, very large scape ASAP 100 landscapes. So they recognize it, at least for the third year in a row. And conservative right, the best class enterprise. Great infrastructure towards security performances, Steve mentioned, but also making the panic community secure. Differentiation. Andi, they posted. They mentioned it all us as a little position in quadrant for the U. S. U K France, Germany, the Nordics in Brazil. So again, really honor and humble on discontinued in court just to continue to improve. >>You know, Steve, I just wrote a piece on Cloud 2030 trying to project what the next 10 years is gonna look like in one of the I listed a lot of things, but one of the things I talked about was some of the technical factors like alternative processors, specialized networks, and you guys have have have really, always done a good job of sort of looking at purpose built, you know, stuff that that can run workloads faster. How relevant is that in the the S A P community? >>Oh, that's a great question, David. It's It's absolutely relevant. You take a look at what? What we've done over the years with nitro and how we've actually brought the ability for customers to run on environmental infrastructure but still have that integrated, uh, native cloud experience. Uh, that is absolutely applicable to Unless if you workload and we're actually able toe with that technology, bring the capability to customers to run thes mission critical workloads on instances with up to 24 terabytes of brand, albeit bare metal, but fully integrated into the AWS network fabric, >>right? I mean, a lot of people, you know, need that bare metal raw performance on, and that makes sense that you've been, you know, prioritize such an important class of workload. I'm not surprised that that I mean, the numbers that you threw out a pretty impressive eso. It's clear you're leading the charge here. Maybe you could share a little glimpse of what's coming in the future. Show us a little leg, Steve. >>Yeah, well, look, uh, we know that infrastructure is super important. Thio. Our customers and in particular the customers are running these mission critical workloads. But there's a lot of heavy lifting, uh, that that we also want to simplify. And so you've seen some indications of what we've done here over the years, uh, ice G that Fernando mentioned actually called out. AWS is differentiating here, right? So for for many years, we've actually been leading in releasing tools for customers to actually orchestrate and automate the deployment of these types of worthless so ASAP in particular. I mean, if you think about it a customer who is coming to a to a hyper scale platforms like AWS and having to learn what that means, Plus understand all the best practices from S, A, P and AWS to make that thing really shine from a performance and availability perspective, that's a heavy asked. Right? So we put a lot of work from a tooling perspective into into automating this and making this super simple not just for customers, but also partners. >>Anything you wanna chime in on that particular the partner side, Fernando. >>Sure. So this is super important for public community, right? As you can imagine, the tooling that we're bringing together toe. The market is helping the Spanish to move quicker, right? So they don't have to reinvent. They will all the time. They will just take this and move and take it and move forward. Give an example. One of our parents in New York, three hosts. Thanks for lunch. We start with Steve just reference right. They want to create work clothes in an automated way. Speeding up the delivery time. 75% corporation is every environments. So it just imagine the the impact of these eso a thing here that is important is our goal is to help customers and partners move quicker, removing any undifferentiated heavy lifting, right, Andi, that's kind of the mantra of this group. >>You know, when you think about what Doug Young was saying is in the keynote, um, the importance of partners and I've been on this kick about we've moved in this industry from products to platforms, and the next 10 years is gonna be about leveraging ecosystems. The power of many versus the resource is of a few or even one is large is a W s so so partners air critical on I wonder if you could talk toe the role that that the network partners air playing in affecting S a p customer outcomes and strategies. Maybe Steve, you could take that first. >>Yeah, but look, we recognize that the migration on the management of these systems it's complex, right? And for years, we've invested in a global community of partners many partners who have been fundamental to s a p customer success over over a couple decades, Right? And so, um, that there are some nuances that that need to be realized when it comes to running ASAP on on a hyper scale platforms like AWS. And so we put a lot of work into making sure these partners are equipped to ensure customers have have a really good experience. And I mean, in a recent conversation I had with a CEO of a large, uh, CPG company, he told me he reflected that the partners really are the glue. That kind of brings it all together for them. And, uh, you know, just to share something with you today, our partners, our partner community network for S. If he is actually helping over 90% of net new customers who are coming toe migrate as if you were close to AWS, so they're just absolutely critical. >>So, Fernando, there's the m word, the migration, you know, it's you don't want to unless you have to, but people have to move to the cloud. So So what can you add to this conversation? >>Sure, they So again, just to echo what Steve mentioned, right? Uh, migration. Super important. We have ah group of partners that are right now specializing in migration projects. And they have built migration factories. You may have seen some of them. They have been doing press releases through the whole year saying that they're part of these and their special cells they're bringing to the helping customers adopt AWS. So they go through the next, you know, very detailed process. We call them map for ASAP partners. So they have these incremental value on top of being SCP competent funds, which I referred earlier on. This group has, as mentioned, you know, show additional capability to safeguard these migrations on. Of course, we appreciate and respect and we have put investment programs for them to help them support their own customers right in those in these migrations. But because the SNP ecosystem on it. But it's not about only migrations, right? One important topic that we need technologies as you as Steve mentioned, we have these great set of partner of customers have trusted us or 5000 through a year on these, uh, these customers asking for innovation right there, asking us how come the ecosystem help us innovate faster? So these partners are using a dollars a plan off innovation, creating new solutions that are relevant for SCP. So basically helping customers modernize their business processes so you can take an example like Accenture Data Accelerator writers taking SCP information and data legs Really harm is the power of data there or the Lloyd you know, kinetic finances helping, you know, deploy Central finance, which is a key component of SCP, or customer like partners like syntax that has created our industrial i o. T. Offering that connects with the SNP core. So more and more you will see thes ecosystem partners innovating on AWS to support SNP customers. >>You know, I think that's such an important point because for for decades have been around for a while. It's the migrations air like this. Oftentimes there's forced March because maybe a vendor is not going to support it anymore. Or you're just trying to, you know, squeeze Mawr costs out of the lemon. What you guys are talking about is leveraging an ecosystem for innovation and again that ties into the themes that we're talking about about Cloud 2030 in the next decade of innovation. Let's close, guys. What can customers ASAP customers AWS customers expect from reinvent this year? Um, you know, maybe more broadly, what can they expect from A W S in the coming 12 months? Maybe, Steve, you could give us a sense, and then Fernando could bring us home. >>You bet. Look, um, this year we've really tried to focus on customer stories, right? So we've we've optimized. There's a number of sessions here agreement this year. We want customers and partners to learn from other from other customer experiences, so customers will be able to listen to Bristol Myers Squibb talk about their performance, their their experiences, Alando Newmont's and Volkswagen. And I'll be talking about kind of different places where they are on this, this journey to cloud and this innovation life cycle, right, because it really is about choice and what's right for their business. So we're pretty excited about that. >>Yeah. Nice mix of representative Industries there. I Fernando bring us home, please. >>Sure. So, again, we think about 21 in the future. Rest assured, we'll continue to invest heavily to make sure it values remains the platform innovation. Right on choice for recipe customers where a customer wants to move their existing investments on continue to add value. So what they have already done for years or goto export transformation. We're here to support their choice. Right? And we're committed to that as part of our customers Asian culture. So we're super excited about the future. And we're thankful for you to spend time with us today. >>Great, guys, Look, these are the most demanding workloads we're seeing that that rapid movement to the cloud is just gonna accelerate over the coming years. Thanks so much for coming on The Cube. Really appreciate it. >>Our pleasure. Thank >>you. All >>right. Thank you for watching everyone keep it right there from or great content. You're watching the cube aws reinvent 2020

>> Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative computing foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE here in Barcelona, Spain. It's KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019, I'm Stu Miniman, and my cohost for two days wall-to-wall coverage is Corey Quinn. And we're always thrilled when we get to speak to a user, and not just any user but Fernando Alvarez, who is a cloud architect at X by Orange. Fernando, muchas gracias for joining us, Sir. >> It's a pleasure. >> So Orange, we are familiar and many people are. X by Orange though, maybe you could explain to our audience a little bit what this group is, inside of a large global brand. >> X by Orange is a subsidiary from Orange Spain, and from a Orange telecom group in France, and what we try to do is to reinvent the way that telco companies operates. Going more natural of a way than the traditional way. So it's more or less what we're trying to do, and we started operations in September of last year, just with a different proposal, to see if it could make it viable for the small and medium businesses in Spain. >> Yeah, so digital transformation, you know, many people talk about it, but I've had some really good conversations with customers in the last year or so. Data is so important to businesses these days. Being data-driven, and being software at the core of what you do. So, it's sometimes overstated that every company will be a software company some time in the future. But you have done these transformations before, and that's what brought you into X by Orange. So, tell us a little a bit, your role as a cloud architect, what's your mission and what's your role in the org? >> Well, my mission is to make all the different pieces inside the whole IT stack to work together, especially in a cloud environment. So from the designing from the whole ecosystem that supports the platform, and at the same time supports the whole company as a tech operator, or multiple tech operators. What my role is to make sure that everything fits together. We're trying to accomplish it and we're very happy to have it in a cloud environment, in public cloud and using Kubernetes, as our continuing orchestration engine. >> So, can you lay out are you in one public cloud? Many public clouds, data centers? What is your-- >> We are now in one public cloud in AWS but having this cloud orchestration layer allows us to move to, or to go multicloud or hybrid cloud as soon as we want to do it. But I think that we have to keep it simple from the beginning. Having a tight schedule to start operations is key to (stuttering) have our value proposal into the market and to do so we have to do it in a simple way so going first in one public cloud, going public cloud first because it's not a logical movement in a big company even though we are in Spain now but normally, big enterprises want to do in their own way in a private data center so what we want is to be very fast and to do so the election is clearly logical to go public cloud and to have an orchestration engine like Kubernetes to do everything, no? >> Do you find that making decisions that enable portability in the future if you want to move to alternate clouds or go hybrid, is in any way constraining what you're able to do or the speed you're able to innovate with? >> Yeah, but I think benefits are way better than the drawbacks of that. Normally every single decision you have to make about the architecture of NEPs, one of the key aspects is to see if it involves vendor blocking for any of the components on the stack for example in the public cloud. But I think it's worth the effort because most things that you can design as an engineer or as an architect can be solved not only using (stuttering) A specific solution from a specific cloud provider but using a more generic way. In this way then you can assure that you can move more or less easier to other cloud or to other infrastructure. >> All right, so I guess it begs the question, you said it's AWS today and Kubernetes, it's OpenShift yes? >> Yes. >> That is the, the Kubernetes platform? How did you come about choosing that and you know, obviously Red Hat, one of their strengths is working in lots of different environments so as you go to that hybrided multicloud was that the driver for them? Or were you a Red Hat customer? How did you end up with OpenShift? >> Yeah, that was one of the drivers. And the other was the support for the platform. We were in a really tight schedule and we knew Kubernetes well enough but we weren't sure if our knowledge were enough to be in operations in only nine months. So for that we get Red Hat on board, to have all their knowledge in terms of support and the professional services to help us to define how to do things with their platform on OpenShift and because OpenShift is like Kubernetes distribution we were sure enough that we share the Kubernetes way of doing things so that for us was a logical election. >> What was it that drove your move to the public cloud in the first place? And I guess your entire digital transformation by extension? >> Did you say what, sorry? >> What drove your entire decision to first go to the public cloud and secondly, to go I guess as part of your larger digital transformation? >> The main reason probably was the speed. At the beginning the whole company was started thinking that we were going to build our platform on a private cloud, but once we made the numbers and see that that needed one more year to start operations, with zero value to the customer, the decision was pretty easy. Let's go public cloud and let's think about this, if it really adds value in the future. >> All right. So Fernando if I heard you right you said nine months from you know, >> Yeah. >> when you went to deployment. Big companies aren't necessarily known for their speed of change. >> (laughing) Yeah. >> Talk a little bit about the organizational dynamics. How much internal ramp up there was versus relying on your partners and your vendors to be able to help you meet those schedules. >> The good news is that we had the full Orange support to start a new company and we started as a separate company recently because we wanted to be very fast. So instead of having all the processes from the big company to do something that maybe it will fail, or maybe it will affect the brand, we decided to start a new company from scratch, with Orange in its name because we have all the (stuttering) well-known, All the brand is well-known in the world, but at the same time we wanted to start from scratch. That's why we started with a little people, with most of them were coming from, some were industry instead of the telco industry and we started to build from scratch the whole company and that we were 20 in February 2018 and now we are more than 200 and we started operations in nine months from January 2018. So I think it was a really completely success in terms of speed. >> If you were going to do it all again starting over, what would you do differently? >> That's a really good question. Probably I will put even more effort in transmitting the right culture because when you grow a lot you have to be very carefully in transmitting the right culture to the new commerce. Because it's very easy to let dissipate the culture that you create at the beginning when you are only 10 or 20 people and it's very difficult to maintain it when you are 200. And then if you are 200 with a wrong culture you are transforming yourself in a big company with a small revenue so, that's something that needs to be taken into account. >> Okay, so what's the road map from here? Does the 200 then help infuse into the rest of the company? How do things work going forward? >> Well, what are we doing now is to, we build up a completely new IT stack, that was from the beginning multi tenant to host multiple telco operators and now we are hosting our second telco operator. That's Orange Spain branch for small and medium enterprises, that is now coming to our stack, so this is in our run up for this year, what we are doing is integrating all the stack from Orange Spain to the new one. And at the same time, trying to complete our portfolio with new products. And these new products could be managed and commercialized by X by Orange as a telco provider and also by Orange Spain as another telco provider. >> Right. When people look this show there are so many projects going on and so many different pieces. We sometimes hear "There's a lot of choices, how do I make them?" How did X by Orange, how did you figure out what pieces of the stack was Red Hat, mostly prescriptive as to how you do, or were you choosing the service mesh and all the other various pieces and what can you tell us about your stack? >> Well what I can tell you is that we put a lot of effort on designing the stack by ourselves, not having any turnkey solutions, because we think that this is key for the success of the company. Because normally telco operators put a lot of effort in their core network but they don't put so much effort in the software technology, but now things are changing a lot and we really think that the software layer is as much as important as it was the network. And here is the real perceived value from the customer now resides in the software pack, so we designed each part individually and we selected the right partners for starting the development of each part and then make altogether to work. Instead of going of a full stack provided by a unique company. >> Perfect. As you've gone down this path have you started to look down the serverless environment at all? Or are you strictly in a more container based approach? Let me broaden that a bit. Are you looking into functions as a service and other serverless technologies? Or are you mostly keeping it to more commonplace things that are half a step back? >> Well, in telco industry what is traditionally the vendor, the traditional vendor for the telco industry are the network vendors that are more in their way of virtualization instead of their continuation on not even to mention the deploying serverless. So we are putting a lot of effort on making them to understand and some of them they are understanding it really, really well, that it's key to have their products be able to make an extreme automation. So it's a pity that we don't have enough time (stuttering) to use technologies like serverless. We use them for little operations in our internal stack but we are not at the point of using it in products that we have because what we are doing is trying to, for example, to move the management part of the network services to the containers and now our efforts are in that place. >> And to be very clear, that's absolutely the right answer. You have to meet your customers where they are with things that are appropriate fits for the problems that they have. And average gating for a technology stack because, oh, it seemed like the right answer when I polled a bunch of people on stack overflow or something, is never the right answer to solve those problems, unless "How do I make people "on stack overflow happy?" is the question. Spoiler, you can't. >> Yeah, that's completely true, yeah. >> So Fernando one last question I had for you is here at a big show, what are you looking to get out of the show? What excited you to bring you to the event? And any other things around your experience so far, what you're hoping to do that you could share? >> I think that the most important thing when we're talking about the internal structural transformation for any sized company is the people and the mentality of the people. So I can never say enough times that we really need to invest time with people to embrace the change, to embrace the kind of culture that is behind... The CloudNative mentality because if not, if we don't do so, what we are doing is just transporting our old stack to a new technology without changing anything. So put in that effort, talk with people, make this change happen together with people that is working already in big companies is key for the success of any story. >> All right, well Fernando Alvarez, really appreciate you sharing your story. Congratulations on the progress so far. >> Thank you very much. >> And best of luck in the future. >> Thank you. >> All right. For Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Our first day of coverage at Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We are joined by a customer of Dell EMC, Fernando Almeida, the head of Infrastucture at Grupo Boticário. Welcome to theCUBE, Fernando. >> Thank you, thank you for invite me. I appreciate it. >> So you've been, as we were talking before we went live, an EMC customer, you're using VMware. This is your first Dell Technologies World, and you picked a big one. 14,000 attendees, loud music. There's a rock band going on there. Just an orientation, for our viewers, of Grupo Boticário. The largest perfume and cosmetics franchise in the world. So it automatically just smelled better when you got onto our side. (Fernando laughs) You guys have a presence in 1750 countries, cities, excuse me, and producing 300 million products every year. With that size of an organization, to be competitive, to offer different shaded products and a superior customer experience, and you think, we've got to transform our business. Where do you start? >> First of all, thank you for inviting me here. I'll talk a little bit about Grupo Boticário. Is a Brazilian company. It's maybe, I think 20,000 employees around the Brazil. Present in 11 countries. I dunno exactly counted but we present in 11 countries. The Grupo Boticário has 4,700 stores around the world. Yes, big, really big. The company is the-- I think is-- We don't have another company. We take companies like us, you know, it's the big one, McDonalds or Avon, no. Boticário is the biggest. The retail company start in 1977. Grupo Boticário is holding, responsible for five brands now: quem disse, berenice?, The Beauty Box, Eudora, and now Vult is the new one. The Grupo Boticário started in 2010, one roading responsible for five brands. It's a great company, a big one. >> Keith: It is big. >> Yeah. >> So, talk to us about some of the challenges being that big, that dispersed. As IT infrascture lead, people look at you to make sure that operation team's going. So talk about some of the pressures as you guys are competing. You really don't, as you say, you don't have a peer. But you have to stay ahead. Talk about some of those pressures of competing on your team. >> The most important, to support this company, we need to stay aware with the technology and they all help us to stay aware with the IT Transformation. My 2018 challenge is change the products, put on IT technology, the most products that they'll have, or other providers. Now when I see-- Do you guys know, see or know something like Butchcar stores, for example. When I go to these stores, we have a lot of lanes to pay. And now, after IT Transformation, we don't have more cashiers, for example. It's like Apple, for example. >> So I can come there and buy a product using my mobile phone. >> Exactly, exactly. This project lead was VMware products, Dell products, EMC legacy products, now Dell technology. I think this is a big project in 2018. >> So let's talk about, you said over 4,000, I think maybe 4700 stores. >> Fernando: Yes, yes. >> So you have a lot of people expecting this seamless, easy experience. Not just the consumers, but also the sales associates in the retail stores. Talk to us about the deployment model. As you needed to evolve IT to support that and allow your company to be competitive, from a technology standpoint, did you look at going from traditional infrastructure to converged, hyper converged? Talk to us about the transformation of your IT infrastructure as an enabler, of your digital transformation. >> Yes, good questions. Before a digital transformation we had, we lost our sales. Because a lot of lanes. >> You had a lot of customers like me, yeah. If there's a long, I can spend two hours shopping, long line-- >> Long line. >> I'm out of there. >> Go to another, you know it's crazy. After meeting with Dell, with VMware, I saw the-- I can't remember the products that I use. Airwatch. >> Keith: Yes. >> Yes, and they show us and it's pretty good to use here. Take care of the big store, to put these products, and I see the difference between a store with a cashier and the store without cashier. The sales grow up like 15%. >> Wow! >> Yeah, yeah. >> That's a dramatic improvement from the business bottom line perspective. >> Because the performance, agility. 15%, just one store. It's amazing. >> That's an amazing story. So Airwatch. VMware, I have to give them more credit. When they bought Airwatch, I can express my head, one billion dollar business. >> Fernando: Airwatch. >> Yeah, one billion dollar business. So it's amazing watching the growth for Airwatch and hearing your story. Can you talk about, you know, Michael Dell talks about Dell Technologies on top of Dell Technologies are best. Let's talk about the back end. Are you guys using some of the products that we saw on stage this morning, VxRail et cetera? >> Yes, yes, yes. We started out using VxRail this year, 2018. In the past, 2017, we changed storage. For example, we had mechanical discs. I can't remember the exact model, but we change for All Flash storage. The performance is pretty good. It's amazing. We put the offline stores, VxRail, Airwatch, all Dell Technology products, you know. Because of this, now we have 20, 25% more performance. It's really good for us. I think this is a big change for us and a big project when I talk about IT Transformation. >> One of the things that we hear often, and especially since the acquisition of the EMC Federation a couple of years ago, is IT leaders want to have seamlessness, simplicity, agility. Those are all keywords everybody needs to have them. But they want to have one stop, a one-stop-shop like Dell Technologies considers themselves. To be able to make digital transformation real. So you were using EMC acquisition, VMware as well. With Dell Technologies, is that allowing you to have this one-stop-shop location and be able to facilitate the transformation to ultimately meet customer demands, that are improving revenue and sales? >> Before the old technology, we have EMC products of course. But now, we have-- When I look at my point of view, the customer point of view, it's better after the change, after the merge, because we have just one company and a lot of products. I just talk to one person to buy a lot of products. It's more easy, it's more closed up (in Portuguese), it's more commitment. I think the portfolio right now is much better than before the merge, EMC with Dell. Now I think is better, much better. >> So let's talk about some of those sales and architecture meetings that you're having with Dell Technologies directly. What's different about that? 'Cause EMC will always come in and say "Oh, we have VMware, we have RSA, we have Pivotal." Unfortunately, they didn't have a server group. They didn't have a desktop group. Much, much bigger organization. One of the fears, is that they would become like their competitors and you'd go talk to a Dell Technologies rep, and there's just too much technology and they wouldn't be able to solution. It doesn't sound like that's been your experience. >> Well, before the merge, we used just EMC storage, only. Because I think, this is my opinion, I think the better products that EMC have in the past, before the merge, is the storage. And now, when I see Dell Technologies have kept the storage, but we have hyper convergence, we have VMware, together with this company. It is one company. For customers, I think it's much better. Just talk to one person like say, a few minutes ago. But, I'd think, when I see my environment in Boticário, I have a lot of challenges in this year because I need to say more. I need to put technology on my stores, to say more. I need to offer, for my final customer, a great product in agility, performance. If we have this, we have more sales, we have more stores. >> One of the things too that I was reading about getting ready for this show, is we're going to hear a lot about digital transformation, IT transformation, data. The volume continues to grow and grow and grow. And we have new technologies, emerging technologies: artificial intelligence, machine learning, IOT. How are you going to be able to leverage all of this data that you have across all of these stores. Data about customers, buying habits and things like that. How are you envisioning, in the future, leveraging emerging technologies to be able to, like you said, increase the number of stores, increase sales, and ultimately delight your customers? >> It's a surprise. (Keith laughs) I can't talk about it. >> Lisa: (laughs) Oh! >> It's really a surprise but you know, we have a great challenge when I think artificial intelligence and the other products, hyper convergence, block chain for example, but, it's a secret. I can't talk. >> It is a tough challenge. We hear the buzz words. I think I agree that it is a competitive advantage that I can take the stuff, stitch it together, and come up with a solution that's acting competitive and helps you to outsell your competition. So, I can appreciate that. Just one quick question about speeds and fees. A global company, a lot of data as you sell a lot more data. Michael said as you grow, the data grows, that you enable better use of the data. It feeds upon itself. What are the building blocks of your data platform? What technologies specifically are you using within Dell's storage portfolio? >> We use Airwatch, like I said. We use all-flash platforms. We use a lot of products, man. >> You're also using some BI-- >> VxRail, Isilon 2. Now we use Isilon 4 to support the stores. Of course, the most important to support the stores is all-flash storages and Airwatch. >> To sum up, you've already made big improvements to sales, to the customer in-store experience, to performance internally, as you mentioned switching to All-Flash Array. So you're well on your way in this digital transformation. We won't ask you any more questions about the secret sauce of using emerging technologies, but we look forward to hearing, maybe next year, what you're doing there to delight your customers. And we want to thank you for stopping by theCUBE, Fernando. >> I appreciate it, thank you. >> And you've been watching theCUBE. We want to thank you, as well. We are live, day one of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Lisa Martin, with my co-host Keith Townsend. Stick around, we'll be right back after a short break.

>> Narrator: From Berlin, Germany, it's theCUBE, covering Dataworks Summit Europe 2018. Brought to you by Hortonworks. >> Well hello, welcome to the Cube. I'm James Kobielus, I'm the lead analyst for the Wikibon team within SiliconANGLE Media. I'm your host today here at Dataworks Summit 2018 in Berlin, Germany. We have one of Hortonworks' customers in South America with us. This is Fernando Lopez of Quanam. He's based in Montevideo, Uruguay. And he has won, here at the conference, he and his company have won an award, a data science award so what I'd like to do is ask Fernando, Fernando Lopez to introduce himself, to give us his job description, to describe the project for which you won the award and take it from there, Fernando. >> Hello and thanks for the chance >> Great to have you. >> I work for Quanam, as you already explained. We are about 400 people in the whole company. And we are spread across Latin America. I come from the kind of headquarters, which is located in Montevideo, Uruguay. And there we have a business analytics business unit. Within that, we are about 70 people and we have a big data and artificial intelligence and cognitive computing group, which I lead. And yes, we also implement Hortonworks. We are actually partnering with Hortonworks. >> When you say you lead the group, are you a data scientist yourself, or do you manage a group of data scientists or a bit of both? >> Well a bit of both. You know, you have to do different stuff in this life. So yes, I lead implementation groups. Sometimes the project is more big data. Sometimes it's more data science, different flavors. But within this group, we try to cover different aspects that are related in some sense with big data. It could be artificial intelligence. It could be cognitive computing, you know. >> Yes, so describe how you're using Hortonworks and describe the project for which you won, I assume it's a one project, for which you won the award, here at this conference. >> All right, yes. We are running several projects, but this one, the one about the prize, is one that I like so much because I'm actually a bioinformatics student so I have a special interest in this one. >> James: Okay. >> It's good to clarify that this was a joint effort between Quanam and GeneLifes. >> James: Genelabs. >> GeneLifes. >> James: GeneLifes. >> Yes, it's genetics and bioinformatics company. >> Right. >> That they specialize-- >> James: Is that a Montevideo based company? >> Yes. In a line, they are a startup that was born from the Institut Pasteur, but in Montevideo and they have a lot of people, who are specialists in bioinformatics, genetics, with a long career in the subject. And we come from the other side, from big data. I was kind of in the middle because of my interest with bioinformatics. So something like one year and a half ago, we met both companies. Actually there is a research, an innovation center, ICT4V. You can visit ICT4V.org, which is a non-profit organization after an agreement between Uruguay and France, >> Oh okay. >> Both governments. >> That makes possible different private or public organizations to collaborate. We have brainstorming sessions and so on. And from one of that brainstorming sessions, this project was born. So, after that we started to discuss ideas of how to bring tools to the medical genetiticists in order to streamline his work, in order to put on the top of his desktop different tools that could make his work easier and more productive. >> Looking for genetic diseases, or what are they looking for in the data specifically? >> Correct, correct. >> I'm not a geneticist but I try to explain myself as good as I can. >> James: Okay, that's good. You have a great job. >> If I am-- >> If I am the doctor, then I will spend a lot of hours researching literature. Bear in mind that we have nearly 300 papers each day, coming up in PubMed, that could be related with genetics. That's a lot. >> These are papers in Spanish that are published in South America? >> No, just talking about, >> Or Portuguese? >> PubMed from the NIH, it's papers published in English. >> Okay. >> PubMed or MEDLINE or-- >> Different languages different countries different sources. >> Yeah but most of it or everything in PubMed is in English. There is another PubMed in Europe and we have SciELO in Latin America also. But just to give you an idea, there's only from that source, 300 papers each day that could be related to genetics. So only speaking about literature, there's a huge amount of information. If I am the doctor, it's difficult to process that. Okay, so that's part of the issue. But on the core of the solution, what we want to give is, starting from the sequence genome of one patient, what can we assert, what can we say about the different variations. It is believed that we have around, each one of us, has about four million mutations. Mutation doesn't mean disease. Mutation actually leads to variation. And variation is not necessarily something negative. We can have different color of the eyes. We can have more or less hair. Or this could represent some disease, something that we need to pay attention as doctors, okay? So this part of the solution tries to implement heuristics on what's coming from the sequencing process. And this heuristics, in short, they tell you, which is the score of each variant, variation, of being more or less pathogenic. So if I am the doctor, part of the work is done there. Then I have to decide, okay, my diagnosis is there is this disease or not. This can be used in two senses. It can be used as prevention, in order to predict, this could happen, you have this genetic risk or this could be used in order to explain some disease and find a treatment. So that's the more bioinformatics part. On the other hand we have the literature. What we do with the literature is, we ingest this 300 daily papers, well abstracts not papers. Actually we have about three million abstracts. >> You ingest text and graphics, all of it? >> No, only the abstract, which is about a few hundred words. >> James: So just text? >> Yes >> Okay. >> But from there we try to identify relevant identities, proteins, diseases, phenotypes, things like that. And then we try to infer valid relationships. This phenotype or this disease can be caused because of this protein or because of the expression of that gene which is another entity. So this builds up kind of ontology, we call it the mini-ontology because it's specific to this domain. So we have kind of mini-semantic network with millions of nodes and edges, which is quite easy to interrogate. But the point is, there you have more than just text. You have something that is already enriched. You have a series of nodes and arrows, and you can query that in terms of reasoning. What leads to what, you know? >> So the analytical tools you're using, they come from, well Hortonworks doesn't make those tools. Are they coming from another partner in South America? Or another partner of Hortonworks' like an IBM or where does that come from? >> That's a nice question. Actually, we have an architecture. The core of the architecture is Hortonworks because we have scalability topics >> James: Yeah, HDP? >> Yes, HDFS, High-von-tessa, Spark. We have a number of items that need to be easily, ultra-escalated because when we talk about genome, it's easy to think about one terrabyte per patient of work. So that's one thing regarding storage and computing. On the other hand, we use a graph database. We use Neo4j for that. >> James: Okay the Neo4j for graph. The Neo4j, you have Hortonworks. >> Yes and we also use, in order to process natural language processing, we use Nine, which is based here in Berlin, actually. So we do part of the machine learning with Nine. Then we have Neo4j for the graph, for building this semantic network. And for the whole processing we have Hortonworks, for running this analysis and heuristics, and scoring the variance. We also use Solr for enterprise search, on top of the documents, or the conclusions of the documents that come from the ontology. >> Wow, that's a very complex and intricate deployment. So, great, in terms of the takeaways from this event, we only just have a little bit more time, what of all the discussions, the breakouts and the keynotes did you find most interesting so far about this show? Data stewardship was a theme of Scott Knowles, with that new solution, you know, in terms of what you're describing as operational application, have you built out something that can be deployed, is being deployed by your customers on an ongoing basis? It wasn't a one-time project, right? This is an ongoing application they can use internally. Is there a need in Uruguay or among your customers to provide privacy protections on this data? >> Sure. >> Will you be using these solutions like the data studio to enable a degree of privacy, protection of data equivalent to what, say, GDPR requires in Europe? Is that something? >> Yes actually we are running other projects in Uruguay. We are helping the, with other companies, we are helping the National Telecommunications Company. So there are security and privacy topics over there. And we are also starting these days a new project, again with ICT4V, another French company. We are in charge of their big data part, for an education program, which is based on the one laptop per child initiative, from the times of Nicholas Negroponte. Well, that initiative has already 10 years >> James: Oh from MIT, yes. >> Yes, from MIT, right. That initiative has already 10 years old in Uruguay, and now it has evolved also to retired people. So it's a kind of going towards the digital society. >> Excellent, I have to wrap it up Fernando, that's great you have a lot of follow on work. This is great, so clearly a lot of very advanced research is being done all over the world. I had the previous guest from South Africa. You from Uruguay so really south of the Equator. There's far more activity in big data than, we, here in the northern hemisphere, Europe and North America realize so I'm very impressed. And I look forward to hearing more from Quanam and through your provider, Hortonworks. Well, thank you very much. >> Thank you and thanks for the chance. >> It was great to have you here on theCUBE. I'm James Kobielus, we're here at DataWorks Summit, in Berlin and we'll be talking to another guest fairly soon. (mood music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering Dell EMC world 2017 Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back to Dell E, Dell EMC world, I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Keith Townsend. We are joined by Fernando Thompson. He is the CIO of University of the Americas, Puebla, Mexico. Thanks so much for joining us, Fernando. >> Thanks Rebecca, to you. >> So I want you to just set the scene a little bit for our viewers and talk a little bit about some of the biggest technology problems you were facing on your campus. >> Well, Universidad de las Américas Puebla is in the state of Puebla. We have around, less than 10,000 students. We have 1,000 employees. And we are full dedicated to research and development. And also bachelor's degrees. I used to work for the federal government and also for the private sector in television and entertainment. But I have never been in such a huge challenge, like, in a university because, you know, it is, it is so difficult to implement the governance but at the same time the freedom and, if you think, well for instance, when, when is a period of time where, where more appears in the world, it's on vacations where the students of the universities have enough time to build that kind of thing. Not very creative people, so in, in the sense that, well we live in an environment where you have to deal, to deliver technology, to protect to millennials that doesn't want to be protected and also, you know, they always ask for more services, no? And now is coming the generation C, so, it's going to be real tough for the next years. >> So, so, so set the scene and talk to us about the kinds of things that you are trying to deliver. Better products, better speed, better services to both students, perspective students, faculty and staff. Talk about what some of the needs were. >> Well, we have to think that, actually, technology is very important in the university because we have to prepare our students to give them the tools to face the future. The world is changing. And, in Mexico right now, we have a huge challenge because we're competing against China, Brazil, and India. We used to have an advantage with, with the price, and people that is very well prepared and with their salaries, but not any longer. So, we have to give this advantage to our students. So, nine years ago, when I arrived to university, for instance, we have the subscription system, and it was awful, no? Because it was very slow with the performance and not very reliable, so the people was really complaining, no? Because we're a private, private university. You always suspect, you know, good performance for a private university. And especially in subscription where your main customer, that is a student. So, we start to work to fix the main system and it take us years, years, no? So, we passed through availability and relability but bad performance. Now, performance, but since we implement XtremIO and we changed our data center with Dell products, this very year, in, in, in the spring, in the spring semester, we make a huge change cause the subscription system now became, you know, one of the biggest transformation tools in the service for the students. What happened was that, during the subscription, we announced on a special day, and a special hour, 8:30, and if you are okay with your administrative stuff and qualifications, you can get into the system and subscribe. Four years ago, that takes, like, one hour or 45 minutes. But with the change that we made, now it is a matter of two minutes. So-- >> Wow. It was a change of 100 degrees, no? What happened was that, yes, we changed the application, but also, you know, with this Flash technology, we use it because at the end, what we want to make was, you know, to impact to the student, in order that they can receive the schedule. He can take faster decisions. They move very fast with their computers and with their devices, so they needed the applications, so, we build it, we test it, and it worked fantastic. And let me tell you something, no? How I measure, I don't have a business analytic tool or a business intelligence tool. What I have was, you know, access to Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. And, man, they gave us such a compliment, no? Like, hey TI finally did something well for us also and it was thousands of comments, no? >> Members was waiting. >> A lot of thumbs up. >> Yeah, yeah. Members was waiting, you know, to attack us, like, you shall not pass, and stuff like that. Like past years. But not this year. So, it was, it was, it was a successful story and now we are thinking to implement all these changes that we made in an ordered space itself, of the university. >> So let's talk about that a little bit. So that's, I think, is a great example of digital transformation. I don't need to ask you if you believe in digital transformation. That was a digital transformation to your business. Specifically, I'm interested in research. What type of research does the university do and how does your group play a role in enabling that? >> Yeah, basically, for instance, we have four programs of PSD with specialization in technology and also in environment, no? One of the top challenge that we are facing in Latin America. So we have to supply the technology that our researchers need. And it has to be at the same level of the United States. We belong to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools in the United States. So, it's not United States soil, but we belong to that association. >> Reporter: So you have the same SLEs? >> Yeah, basically, basically, you know? And we have to supply, you know, all the bandwidth and performance because they're discussing, at the same time, with people in Texas or Wisconsin or Alaska or Brazil and they need, you know, for instance, high-performance computing, storage, cloud tools, and for them, have to be, you know, pretty clear and transparent. What I mean is that they don't care, and they don't have to care about where it's working, of it is expensive or not, no? Do you have, do you have to supply what they need? Let me give you an example. For instance, a fractal. If you send the information of a fractal, we don't have a super-computer in our university, but we have a deal with another university and they have this super-computer. So, what we do is to supply the connection of the computer to send information and to receive information immediately, in order than the graphic can have information in real time. And people are taking decision in different parts of the, of the country with that information that we're sending. Sometimes, could be, you know, if we're facing a hurricane or we're going to have a problem with water or if we want to avoid, you know, you know, something that can happen with an earthquake or something like that. And with that kind of information, now, our researchers certainly can know what is happening. So, we give the info, we give the technology for them. We make a mixture between cloud-computing services and also our data center. Then that a wonderful tool because with XtremIO and with our new servers, if you can go to our new data center, you will realize that it's only Dell and EMC right there, no? And something funny is that we have a wonderful data center, but to be honest with you, we only use, right now, only three racks. So, the space that we are using right now with this new disk is, the space that we are saving is amazing, no? Because if you can, if you can see our racks, you will see that we have, for instance, Clarion, and DMX and another technology. Right now, we shut down all those racks. And right now, we are using just like, 40 inches of disk. And, man, you know, I have more performance, I have savings on air, savings on electricity. The people think then, right, we are having, you know, more space with more racks and more this. But not any longer. So, I think what is going to happen with Dell and EMC in the future, I think that they are going to deliver, for instance, 100 terabytes in just in a USB or something like that, it's the future. So, there's not going to be need over that, that's good, no? >> Hit it on the head of a, on the head of a pin. >> Yeah. >> Fernando, thank you so much for joining us. >> No, thank you to you. Thank you Rebecca, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Keith Townsen. We will have more from Dell EMC world after this. (progressive music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to Miami. Lisa Martin here live with the Cube at IFS Unleashed 2022. We're so excited to be here. We just had a great conversation with Ifss, CEO of Darren Rouse. Now we've got another exciting conversation. F1 is here. You know how much I love f1. Christian Peterson joins us as well, the Chief Product Officer at ifs, and Sean Edwards IT business partner at Aston Martin. F1. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you for having >>Us. Thank you >>Very much. We were talking about F one. We probably could have an entire conversation just on that, but Christian, I wanna talk with you. It's been three years since the Cube has covered ifs obviously for obvious reasons during that time. So much momentum has happened. IFS cloud was launched about 18 months ago. Give our audience an o, a flavor of IFS, cloud and some of the milestones that you've hit in such a short time period. >>Yeah, I mean IFS cloud is really transformational in many ways. It's transformational for first and foremost for our customers in what enables them to do, but also transformational for us from a technology perspective, how we work and how we do everything. And at the end of the day, it has really surfaced, served around the the, the fact of what we need to do for our customers. And what we saw our customers often do back then, or any company, was they were out looking for EAP solutions or FSM Solutions or EAM Solutions or what have you. And then they were trying to stitch it all together and we, we said like, Hang on a second, these these traditional software s, those are some that I'm guilty. You know, there's some that we actually invented over the years together with analysts. So we invented EER P and we invented CRM and EAM and all these different things. >>But at the end of the day, customers really want a solution to what they are, they are what they're dealing with. And so in these conversations it became very clear that and very repeated conclusions from the conversations that customers wanted something that could manage and help them optimize the use of their assets. Regardless of what industry you're in, assets is such a key component. Either you are using your assets or you're producing assets. Second thing is really get the best use of of your people, your teams and your crew. How do you get the right people on the right job at the same time? How do you assemble the right crew with the right set of skills in the crew? Get them to the right people at the same time. So, and then the final thing is of course customers, you know all the things that you need to do to get customers to answer these ultimate questions, Will you buy from this company again? And they should say yes. That's the ultimate results of moments of service. So that's how we bring it all together and that's what we have been fast at work at. That's what IFS cloud is all about. >>And you, you talked about IFS cloud, being able to to help customers, orchestrate assets, people, customers, Aston Martin being one of those customers. Shawn, you came from ifs so you have kind of the backstory but just give the audience a little bit of, of flavor of your role at Aston Martin and then let's dig into the smart factory. >>Sure. So I previously worked at IFS as a manufacturing consultant. So my bread and butter is production planning in the ERP sector. So we, I Aston Martin didn't have an ERP system pre IFS or a legacy system that wasn't working for them and the team couldn't rely upon it. So what we did was bring IFS in. I was the consultant there and as IFS always preached customer first, well customer first did come and I jumped to support the team. So we've implemented a fully RP solution to manage the production control and the material traceability all the way through from design until delivery to track. And we've mo most recently implemented a warehouse solution at Trackside as well. So we are now tracking our parts going out with the garage. So that's a really exciting time for RFS. In terms of the smart factory, it's not built yet. >>We're we're supposed to move next year. So that's really exciting cause we're quadrupling our footprint. So going from quite a small factory spread out across the North Hampton Share countryside, we're going into one place quadruple in our footprint. And what we're gonna start looking at is using the technology we're implementing there. So enabling 5G to springboard our IFFs implementations going forward with the likes of Internet of things to connect our 15 brand new CMC machines, but also things like R F I D. So that comes with its own challenges on a Formula One car, but it's all about speed of data capture, single point of truth. And IFFs provides that >>And well, Formula One, the first word that comes to mind is speed. >>Absolutely. Second >>Word is crazy. >>We, we are very unique in terms of most customers Christian deals with, they're about speed but also about profit and efficiency. That doesn't matter to us. It is all about time. Time is our currency and if we go quicker in designing and manufacturing, which ifs supports ultimately the cargo quicker. So speed is everything. >>And and if we, if we think of of people, customers and assets at Asset Martin F one, I can't, I can't imagine the quantity of assets that you're building every race weekend and refactoring. >>Absolutely. So a Formula one car that drives out of the garage is made up of 13,000 car parts, most of which, 50% of which we've made in house. So we have to track that all the way through from the smallest metallic component all the way up to the most complex assembly. So orchestrating that and having a single point of truth for people to look at and track is what IFFs has provided us. >>Christian, elaborate on that a little bit in terms of, I mean, what you're facilitating, F1 is such a great example of of speed we talked about, but the fact that you're setting up the car every, every other weekend maybe sometimes back to back weeks, so many massive changes going on. You mentioned 50% of those 13,000 parts you manufacture. Absolutely. Talk about IFS as being a catalyst for that. >>I mean the, it's, it's fascinating with Formula One, but because as a technology geek like me, it's really just any other business on steroids. I mean we talk, we talk about this absolutely high tech, super high tech manufacturing, but even, even before that, the design that goes in with CFDs and how you optimize for different things and loose simulation software for these things goes into manufacturing, goes into wind tunnels and then goes on track. But guess what, when it's on track, it's an asset. It's an asset that streams from how many sensors are on the car, >>I think it's over 10,000 >>Sensors, over 10,000 sensors that streams maybe at 50 hertz or 50 readings. So every lap you just get this mountain of data, which is really iot. So I always say like F one if one did IOT before anybody invented the term. >>Absolutely. >>Yep. You know, F1 did machine learning and AI before anybody thought about it in terms of pattern recognition and things like that with the data. So that's why it's fascinating to work with an organization like that. It's the, it's the sophistication around the technologies and then the pace what they do. It's not that what they do is actually so different. >>It is, it absolutely isn't. We just have to do it really quickly. Really >>Quickly. Right. And the same thing when you talk about parts. I mean I was fascinated of a conversation with, with one of your designers that says that, you know, sometimes we are, we are designing a part and this, the car is now ready for production but the previous version of that part has not even been deployed on the car yet. So that's how quick the innovation comes through and it's, it's, it's fascinating and that's why we like the challenge that Esther Martin gives us because if we can, if we can address that, there's a lot of businesses we can make happy with that as far, >>So Sha I talk a little bit about this is, so we're coming up, there's what four races left in the 2022 season, but this is your busy time because that new car, the 23 car needs to be debuted in what February? So just a few months time? >>Absolutely. So it's a bit cancer intuitive. So our busiest time is now we're ramping up into it. So we co, we go into something called car build which is from December to December to February, which is our end point and there's no move in that point. The car has gotta go around that track in February. So we have got to make those 13,000 components. We've gotta design 'em, we've gotta make 'em and then we've gotta get 'em to the car in February for our moment of service. They said it on stage. Our moment of service as a manufacturing company is that car going around the track and we have to do it 24 times next year and we've gotta start. Well otherwise we're not gonna keep up. >>I'm just gonna ask you what a, what a moment, what's a moment of service in f1 and you're saying basically getting that >>Functional car >>On the track quickly, as quickly as possible and being able to have the technology underpinning that's really abstracting the complexity. >>Absolutely. So I would say our customer ultimately is the driver and the fans they, they need to have a fast car so they can sport it and they ultimately drive it around the track and go get first place and be competitive. So that is our moment of service to our drivers is to deliver that car 24 times next year. >>I imagine they might be a little demanding >>They are and I think it's gonna be exciting with Alonzo coming in, could the driver if we've gotta manage that change and he'll have new things that he wants to try out on a car. So adds another level of complexity to that. >>Well how influential are the drivers in terms some of the, the manufacturing? Like did they, are they give me kind of a a sense of how Alon Fernando Alanzo your team and ifs maybe collaborate, maybe not directly but >>So Alonzo will come in and suggest that he wants cars to work a certain way so he will feed back to the team in terms of we need this car, we need this car part to do this and this car part to do that. So then we're in a cycle when he first gets into the car in that February, we've then gotta turnaround car parts based off his suggestions. So we need to do that again really quickly and that's where IFS feeds in. So we have to have the release and then the manufacturer of the component completely integrated and that's what we achieve with IFFs and >>It needs to be really seamless. >>Absolutely. If, if we don't get it right, that car doesn't go out track so there's no moving deadline. >>Right. That's the probably one of the industries where deadlines do not move. Absolutely. We're so used to things happening in tech where things shift and change and reorgs, but this is one where the dates are set in their firm. >>Absolutely. And we have to do anything we can do to get that car on the track. So yeah, it's just a move. >>Christian, talk about the partnership a little bit from your standpoint in terms of how influential has Aston Martin F1 been in IFS cloud and its first 18 months. I was looking at some stats that you've already gotten 400,000 plus users in just a short time period. How influential are your customers in the direction and even the the next launch 22 R too? >>I mean our customers do everything plain and simple. That's that's what it is. And we have, we have a partnership, I think about every single customer as a partner of ours and we are partnering in taking technology to the next level in terms of, of the outputs and the benefits it can create for our customers. That's what it's all, all about. And I, I always think about these, these three elements I think I mentioned in our state as well. I think the partnership we have is a partnership around innovation. Innovation doesn't not only come from IFS or the technology partner, it comes from discussions, requirements, opportunities, what if like all these things. So innovation comes from everywhere. There's technology driven innovation, there's customer driven innovation, but that's part of the partnership. The second part of the partnership is inspiration. So with innovation you inspire. So when you innovate on something new that inspires new innovation and new thinking and that's again the second part of the partnership. And then the third part is really iterate and execute, right? Because it's great that we can now innovate and we can agree on what we need to do, but now we need to put it into products, put it in technology and put it into actual use. That's when the benefits comes and that's when we can start bringing the bell. >>And I think it's really intrinsically linked. I mean if you look at progress with Formula One teams and their innovation, it's all underpinned by our technology partners and that's why it's so important. The likes of Christian pushes the product and improves it and innovates it because then we can realize the benefits and ultimately save time and go faster. So it's really important that our, our partners and certainly inform one, push the boundaries and find that technology. >>And I think one of the things that we also find very, very important is that we actually understand our customers and can talk the language. So I think that was one of the key things in our engagement, Martin from the beginning is that we had a set of people that really understand Formula One felt it on their bodies and can have the conversation. So when the Formula One teams they say something, then we actually understand what we're talking about. So for instance, when we talk about, you know, track side inventory, well it's not that different from what a field service technician have in his van when he goes service. The only difference is when you see something happening on track, you'll see the parts manager go out to the pit lane with a tablet and say like, oh we need this, we need that, we need this and we need that. And then we'll go back and pick it and put it on the car and the car is service and maintain and off go. Absolutely. >>Yeah that speed always impresses me. >>It's unbelievable. >>Shannon, last question for you. From a smart factory perspective, you said you're moving in next year. What are some of the things that you are excited about that you think are really gonna be transformative but IFS is doing? >>So I think what I'm really excited about once we get in is using the technology they've already put in terms of 5G networks to sort of springboard that into a further IFS implementation. Maybe IFFs cloud in terms of we always struggle to keep the system up to date with, with what's physically happening so that the less data entry and the more automatic sort of data capture, the better it is for the formula on team cuz we improve our our single point of truth. So I'm really excited to look at the internet of things and sort of integrate our CNC machines to sort of feed that information back into ifs. But also the RFID technology I think is gonna be a game changer when we go into the new factory. So really >>Excited. Excellent. Well well done this year. We look forward to seeing Alonso join the team in 23. Fingers >>Crossed. >>Okay. Fingers crossed. Christian, Jeanette, it's been a pleasure to have you on the program. Thank you so much for sharing your insights and how ifs asked Martin are working together, how you really synergistically working together. We appreciate your time. >>Thank you very much for having us. Our >>Thanks for having us. And go Aston >>Woo go Aston, you already here first Lisa Martin, no relation to Aston Martin, but well, I wanna thank Christian Peterson and Shannon Edwards for joining me, talking about IFS and Aston Martin team and what they're doing at Speed and Scale. Stick around my next guest joins me in a minute. >>Thank you.

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, in our studios of theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, your host. We're here during the crisis of COVID-19 doing remote interviews. I come into the studio, we've got a quarantine crew are here, getting the interviews, getting the stories out there and of course, the story we're going to continue to talk about is the impact of COVID-19, and how we're all getting back to work, either working at home or working remotely and virtually certainly, but as things start to change, we're going to start to see events, mostly digital events, and we're here to talk about an event that's coming up called the Failover Conference from Gremlin which is now gone digital because it's April 21st. But I think what's important about this conversation that I want to get into is, not only talk about the event that's coming up, but talk about the scale problems that are being highlighted by this change in work environment, working at home. We've been talking about the at-scale problems that we're seeing whether it's a flood of surge of traffic and the chaos that's ensuing across the world and with this pandemic. So I'm excited, I've two two great guests, Alberto Fernando, senior vice president of marketing in Gremlin and Tammy Butow, principal site reliability engineer, or SRE. Guys thanks for coming on. Appreciate it, thank you. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alberto, I want to get to you first. We've know each other before. You've been in this industry. We've been all talking about the cloud native, cloud scale for some time. It's kind of inside the ropes, it's inside baseball. Tammy, you're a site reliability engineer. Everyone knows Google, knows how cloud works. This is large scale stuff. Now with the COVID-19, we're starting to see the average person, my brother, my sister, our family members and people around the world go, "Oh my God, this is really a high impact." This change of behavior, this surge of web, whether it's traffic on the internet or work at home tools that are inadequate, you start to see (laughs) the statistical things that were planned for, not working well, and this actually maps the things that we've been talking about in our industry. Alberto, you've been on this. How are you guys doing? >> Yeah. >> And what's your take on this situation we're in right now? >> Yeah, we're doing pretty well as a company. We were born as a distributed organization to begin with, so for us working in a distributed environment from all over the world is common practice day-to-day. Personally, I'm originally from Italy, my parents, my family, is Milan and Bergamo of all places, so I have to follow the news with extra care and it becomes so much clear nowadays that the technology is not just a powerful tool to enable our businesses but it also is so critical for our day-to-day life, and thanks to video calls, I can easily talk to my family back there every day. So that's really important. So yes, we've been talking for a long time as you mentioned about complex systems at scale and reliability often in the context of mission critical applications, but more and more of these systems need to be reliable also when it comes to back office systems that enable people to continue to work on a daily basis. >> Yeah, well our hearts go out to your family and your friends in Italy, and I hope everyone stays safe there (speaks faintly) a tough situation continues to be a challenge. Tammy, I want to get your thoughts. How's life going for you? You're a site reliable engineer. What you deal with on the tech side is now (laughs) happening in the real world. It's mind blowing to me that we're seeing these things happen, it's a paradigm that needs attention. How do you look at it as a SRE, dealing with mostly on the tech side now seeing it play out in real life? >> It's been such an interesting situation, obviously really terrible for everybody to have to go through and deal with, so one of the things that I specialize in as a site reliability engineer is incident management and so for example, I previously worked at Dropbox where I was the incident manager on call for 500 million customers, it's like 24/7 shift. These large scale incidents, you really need to be able to act fast. There are two very important metrics that we track and care about as a site reliability engineer. The first one is mean time to detection. How fast can you detect that something is happening? Obviously, if we detect an issue faster then you've got a better chance of making the impact lower so you can contain the blast radius. I like to explain it to people like, if you have a fire in your sauce bin in your kitchen, and you put it out, that's way better than waiting until your entire house is on fire. And the other metric is mean time to resolution. So how long does it take you to recover from the situation? So yeah, this is a large scale, global incident right now that we're in. >> Yeah, I know you guys do a lot, talk about chaos, theory and that applies. A lot of math involved, we all know that, but I think we need to look at the real world. This is now going to be table stakes and there's now a line in the sand here, pre-pandemic, post-pandemic, and I think you guys have an interesting company, Gremlin, in the sense that this is a complex system and that if you think about the world we're going to be living in, whether it's digital events that you guys have one coming up or how to work at home or tools that humans are going to be using, it's going to be working with systems, right? So you have this new paradigm going to be upon us pretty quickly and it's not just buying software mechanisms or software, it's a complex system, it's distributed computing, it's an operating system. I mean this is kind of the world. Can you guys talk about the Gremlin situation of how you guys are attacking these new problems and these new opportunities that are emerging? >> Sure, I can talk about that. So yeah, one of the things I've always specialized in over the last ten years is chaos engineering. And so the idea of chaos engineering is that your injecting failure on purpose to uncover weaknesses. So that's really important in distributed systems, with distributed cloud computing, all these different services that you're kind of putting together. But the idea is if you can inject failure, you can actually figure out what happens when I inject that small failure? And then you can actually go ahead and fix it. One of the things I like to say to people is focus on what you're top five critical systems are. Let's fix those first. Don't go for low hanging fruit. Fix the biggest problems first, get rid of the biggest amount of pain that you have as a company, and then you can go ahead and actually... If you think about Pareto principle, the 80/20 rule, if you fix 20% of your biggest problems, you'll actually solve 80% of your issues. That always works. It's something that I've done while working at the National Australia Bank doing chaos engineering. Also at Gremlin, at Dropbox and I help a lot of our customers do that too. >> Alberto, talk about the mindset involved. It's the most counter intuitive. Whoa! Whoa! Risk! The biggest system. >> Yeah >> I don't want to touch those. They're working fine right now. And then these problems just gestate, they kind of hang around to the bin in the kitchen fire, this is okay, I don't want to touch it. The house is still working. So this is kind of a new mindset. Could you talk about what your take is on that? Is the industry there? I mean, it was a kind of a corner case, you had Netflix, you had the Chaos Monkey those days and then now it's a DevOps practice, for a lot of folks, you guys are involved in that. What's the appetite and what's the progress of chaos engineering in mainstream case? >> Yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned DevOps, and recently Gartner came up with a new, revisited DevOps framework that has chaos engineering in the middle of the lifecycle management of your application. And the reality is that systems have become so complex in infrastructure, so many layers of abstractions. You have hundreds of services if you're doing microservices, but even if you're not doing microservices, you have so many applications connected to each other, build really complex workflows and automation flows. It's impossible for traditional QA to really understand where the vulnerability are in terms of resiliency, in terms of quality. Too often the production environment is also too different from the staging environment, and so you need a fundamentally different approach to go and find where your weaknesses are and find them before they happen, before you end up finding yourself in a situation like the one we're into today and you are not prepared. And so, so much of what we talk about is giving a tool and the methodology for people to go and find these vulnerabilities. Not so much about creating chaos, but it's about managing chaos that is built into our current system and exposing those vulnerabilities before they create problem. And so that's a very scientific methodology and tooling that we bring to market and we help customers well. >> Tammy, I want to get your thoughts on something. We used to riff a lot with our 10th unit CUBE, we've had a lot of conversation we've riffed over the years, but you know when the surge of Amazon web services came out it was pretty obvious that cloud's amazing and look at the startups that were born, you mentioned Dropbox, you worked there. These companies, all these born on the cloud, these hyper scale, companies built from scratch, great way to scale up. And we used to joke about Google, people would say, "I would like a cloud like Google," but no one has Googles use cases. And Google really pioneered the SRE concept, and you got to give 'em a lot of props for that. But now we're kind of getting to a world where it's becoming Google-like. There's more scale now than ever before. It's not a corner case, it's becoming more popular and more of a preferred architecture, this large scale. What's your assessment of the main stream enterprises, how far are they in your mind, are they there with chaos? Are they close? Are they doing it? How does someone develop an SRE practice to get the Google-like scale? 'Cause Google has an amazing network, they got large scale cloud, they have SRE's, they've been doing it for years. How does a company that's transforming their IT (laughs) have SRE's? >> That's a great question. I get asked this a lot as well. One of our goals at Gremlin is to help make the internet more reliable for everybody. Everyone using the internet, all of the engineers who are trying to build reliable services, and so I'm often asked by companies all over the world, how do we create an SRE practice and how do we practice chaos engineering? But you can get started actually rolling out your SRE program. Based on my experiences, I've done it. So when I worked at Dropbox, I worked with a lot of people who had been at Google, they've been at YouTube, they were there when SRE was rolled out across those companies, and then they brought those learnings to Dropbox, and I learned from them. But also the interesting thing is if you look at enterprise companies, so large banks. Say for example, I worked at the National Australia Bank for six years, we actually did a lot of work that I would consider chaos engineering and SRE practices. So for example, we would do large scale disaster recovery, and that's where you'd fail over an entire data center to a secret data center in an unknown location, and the reason is 'cause you're checking to make sure that everything operates okay if there's a nuclear blast. That's actually what you have to do and you have to do that practice every quarter. But if you think about it, it's not very good to only do it once a quarter. You really want to be practicing chaos engineering and injecting failure on purpose. I think actually, I prefer to do it three times a week, so I do it a lot. But I'm also someone who likes to work out a lot and be fit all the time so I know that if you do something regularly, you get great results. So that's what I always tell everyone. >> Yeah, get the reps in, as we say, get stronger, get the muscle memory. >> Yep, exactly. >> Guys, talk about the event that's coming up. You've got an event that was scheduled, physical event and then you were right in the planning mode and then the crisis hits. You're going digital, going virtual, it's really digital, but it's digital. It's on the internet. So how are you guys thinking about this? I know its out there. It's April 21st. Can you share some specifics around the event? Who should be attending and how do they get involved online? >> Yeah, the event really came together about a month ago when we started to see all the cancellations happening across the industry because of COVID-19 and we were extremely engaged in the community and we have a lot of talks and we were seeing a lot of conferences just dropping and so speakers losing their opportunity to really share their knowledge with respect with how you do reliability and topics that we focus on. And so we quickly pivoted as a company and created a new online event to give everyone in the community the opportunity to just failover to a new event as the conference name says and have those speakers who'll have lost their speaking slots have a new opportunity to go share their knowledge. And so that came together really quickly, we shared the idea with a dozen of our partners and everyone liked it and all the sudden this thing took off like crazy and just a month where we are approaching 4,000 registrations, we have over 30 partners signed up and supporting the initiative. A lot of past partners as well covering the event. So it was impressive to see the amount of interest that we were able to generate in such a short amount of time. And really, this is a conference for anybody who is interested in resiliency. If you want to know from the best on how to build business continuity across systems, people and processes, this is a great opportunity at no cost really. It's a free conference. >> And the target persona and the audience you want to have attend is what? SREs or folks doing architectural work? What's the target >> Yeah >> person to attend? >> Architects, SREs, developers, business leaders who care about the quality and the reliability of their applications, who need to help create a framework and a mindset for their organizations that speaks to what Tammy was saying a minute ago. Having that constant practice on a daily basis about go and finding how to improve things. >> You know, Tammy we've been going to physical events with theCUBE and extracting the signal from the noise and distributed it digitally for 10 years and I got to ask you because now that those events have gone away, you talk about chaos and injecting failure. Doing these digital events is not as easy as just live streaming, it's hard to replicate the value of a physical event, years of experience and standards, roles and responsibilities to digital. A different consumption environment, it's asynchronous, you're trying to create a synchronous environment. It's its own complex system, so I think a lot of people who are experimenting and learning (laughs) from these events because it's pretty chaotic. So, I'd love to get your thoughts on how you look at these digital events as a chaos engineer. How should people be looking at these events? How are you guys looking at... I mean, obviously you want to get the program going, get people out there, get the content, but to iterate on this, how do you view this? >> It is really different. So I actually like to compare it to fire drills in SRE. So often what you do there is you actually create a fake incident or a fake issue, so you just, you were saying, "Let's have a fire drill." Similar to when you're in a building and you have a fire drill that goes off and you have wardens and everything and you all have to go outside. So we can do that in this new world that we're all in all of the sudden. A lot people have never run an online event and now all of a sudden they have to. So what I would say is like, do a fire drill. Run a fake one before you do the actual one to make sure that everything does work okay. My other tip is make sure that you have backup plans. Backup plans on backup plans on backup plans. As an SRE, I always have at least three to five backup plans. I'm not just saying plan A and plan B, but there's also a C, D, and E and I think that's very important and even when you're considering technology, one of the things we say with chaos engineering is, if you're using one service, inject failure and make sure that you can fail over to a different alternative servers in case something goes wrong. >> Yeah, hence the Failover Conference, which is the name of the conference. (chuckles) >> Exactly! >> Yeah, well we certainly are going to be sending a digital reporter there, virtually. If you need any backup plans, obviously we have the remote interviews here. If you need any help, let us know, really appreciate it. Great to see you guys. And thanks for sharing. Any final thoughts on the conference? What happens when we get through the other side of this? I'll give you guys a final word. We'll start with Alberto, with you first. >> Yeah, I think when we are on the other side of this, we'll understand even more the importance of effective resilience, architecting and testing. As a provider of tools and methodologies for that, we think we will be able to help customers when we do a significant leap forward on that side. And the conference is just super exciting. I think it's going to be a great event. I encourage everyone to participate. We have tremendous lineup of speakers that have incredible reputation in their field so I'm really happy and excited about the work that the team has been able to do with our partners put together at this type of event. >> Okay, Tammy. >> Yeah, for me, I'm actually going to be doing the opening keynote for the conference and the topic that I'm speaking about is that reliability matters more now than ever. And I'll be sharing some, bizarre, weird incidents that I have worked on myself that I have experienced, really critical strange issues that have come up. But yeah, I'm really looking forward to sharing that with everybody else, so please come along, it's free. You can join from your own home and we can all be there together to support each other. >> You got a great community support and there's a lot of partners, Press Media and ecosystem and customers, so congratulations Gremlin, having a conference on April 21st called the Failover Conference. TheCUBE and SiliconANGLE have a digital reporter there that will be covering the news. Thanks for coming on and sharing. I appreciate the time. I'm John Furrier in the Palo Alto studio with remote interview with Gremlin around their Failover Conference, April 21st. It's really demonstrating, in my opinion, the at scale problems that we've been working on the industry, now more applicable than ever before as we get post-pandemic with COVID-19. Thanks for watching. Be back. (calm music)

>> Narrator: From the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering food IT: Fork to Farm, brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hey, welcome back here and ready, Jeffrey Frick with theCUBE. We are in Silicon Valley at the Computer History Museum at a really unique event. It's food IT: Fork to farm, not the other way around, which you might think, "Hm, that doesn't make sense," but actually it does, really by the consumer-driven world that's hitting everything including the food and agriculture and we're really excited to have the guys running this show, representing The Mixing Bowl. Rob Trice is the founder and Michael Rose, partner, of The Mixing Bowl. Gentlemen, welcome. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> So, first off, a little history on this event, it's the first time we've been here. I think you said there's about 350 people, really a broad spectrum: academe, technology, farmers, from New Zealand, I think was the one I heard from the furthest place. What's kind of the genesis of this show? >> So, my background is 15 years in mobile internet, telecom venture capital and my wife, actually, a couple of years ago, started running a cattle ranch out on the Pacific Coast and through that I saw how little technology was being used on the ranch and amongst local food producers. I came back to Silicon Valley and none of the big food or ag. players were here then, four years ago. Monsanto just had up a venture group, Unilever and Nestle had one person each here, but by and large, Silicon Valley's IT innovation ecosystem was not focused on food and agriculture. So I started The Mixing Bowl as a little bit more than just a Meetup group and we did it a couple of times and then somebody said, "You know, we should do a conference on this topic." So the first year we did it at Stanford with a partner of ours, and we thought might have 150 people come. We had over 300 people come and it was this kind of audience, kind of cross-section of technologists, food and agriculturalists. So that's when I said, "You know, I'm done with telecom. I want to go ride this food tech, ag. tech wave and see where the heck this comes to roost." So, it's been four years now and I'm pleased to be working not only with Michael, but then our colleagues Seana and Brita, and having a blast, learning a lot. >> Okay, so that's the conference. What about for The Mixing Bowl specifically, what is your charter as an organization? >> Well we've got three aspects of our business, so the first one is information sharing, so doing events like this. We do themed events, we did a water-tech for agricultural event down in Fresno. And then we also are contributing writers for Forbes. We also have an advisory business where we work with large corporates who are seeking innovation and trying to bring innovation to the food and ag. Sector, trying to bring technology and innovation. And then we have an investment side of our business, out of the brand Better Food Ventures. So we invest in the space as well, we have about 12 companies in our portfolio. >> That's interesting that you said there wasn't a lot of tech in ag. here and yet, we talked to Paul from Ford, we talked about their conference that they have at Salinas and of course, Sacramento Valley, San Fernando Valley, or not San Fernando Valley, San Joaquin Valley is a huge producer of food. So why do you think it was so late to come here? >> Well, I think that there have been other opportunities and I think that there's a misperception that agriculture doesn't need IT and I think what we've now realized is there's a huge opportunity, whether it is Internet of Things or looking at tracking and transparency, there's a lot of inefficiencies in our food production system and there also are a lot of societal challenges that we have. Everyone talks about feeding nine billion people by 2050, but then also we look at food safety, we look at what the consumer wants, which is why we're here today, talking about the fork to the farm. Consumers want change in food. They want different kinds of food. They want it delivered to them in different ways. All of these are opportunities for tech to be applied to food and agriculture. >> So we love being here. Go ahead, Michael. >> No, I was just going to say, I think it's like any other vertical in any other sector that starts to adopt technology over time. And even in the ag. sector, you've seen in the commodity crops in the Midwest with the automation that they adopted technology early but you've got other sectors, whether it's the specialty crops down in Salinas or people who are doing almonds, etc. Those people are starting to adopt technology, they're just a little further behind than you are with commodity crops. >> Right. It's funny, we interviewed the guy from Caterpillar a few weeks ago, and they are already running huge fleets of autonomous vehicles in mining. Obviously they have a lot of equipment involved in agriculture as well, so it seems kind of start and stop depending on the vendors that you're talking about. But one of the big themes we talk about, we go to a lot of platform shows, right? It's Cloud, it's edge, it's connectivity, it's big data, drones, I mean, as you look at some of these big classifications of technology that are now being applied in ag. are there any particular ones that kind of jump out as either the catalyst or the leading edge of adoption that's really helping drive this revolution? >> I guess, if you think about the fact that we're kind of looking at this staircase of adoption. One thing that we need to do is actually digitize information and that's one of the challenges that we have. Once we digitize, then we can start to manage operations based on that data, then we can start to optimize, and then we can automate. So it's a four-step staircase that we look at and I think in a lot of cases, even at restaurants, a lot of them are still placing orders via fax and telephone. We need to get off of that and start getting them to order online through online platforms and so forth. So, at any rate, one area that I'm particularly excited about is aerial imaging for agriculture because I think you are instantaneously, by just doing a flyover, providing farmers with more information than they've ever had. In some cases, I think you could actually argue, you're going from a data desert to a data flood. Now the challenge is moving up that staircase to go make sense of that data and then ultimately be able to give prescriptive machine-learning or artificial intelligence-based recommendations to that farmer on how to do a better job, whether that is increasing sustainability, maximizing yield, looking at pricing, any of those kind of things. >> Right, one of the things you hear real often in every industry, is kind of the old guy using intuition versus becoming really a data-driven organization. Are you seeing that classic conflict, or do people get it pretty quickly when you can provide the data to show them things that they could never really see before? >> I was going to say, one of the biggest challenges that's also dictating the market timing is the fact that average American farmer is about 65, so we now are having this turn as the kids are coming back who are tech-enabled back to the production point, back to the farm and starting to take over farms from their parents. And their parents, of course, have just been maybe a little slower to adopt new technology. So it's just a timing issue. I think the other thing is, there are all the different pieces, whether it's the sensors or whether it's the connectivity of data or whether it's the storage of data, there needs to be a solution and they need to be integrated. And so we see this on the farm, getting that data off and then getting it stored and then how to use it. But then you also see this in restaurants. In restaurants, you have all of the delivery services coming in, so a restaurant can have seven different delivery services picking up from the restaurant. And they have seven different iPads that they have to manage with their point of sales system and very few of them currently will integrate with a POS, right? >> Right. And I think whether it's in a restaurant or on a farm, this lack of integration, API integration, making it a usable solution as opposed to a number of features, is where we're probably going to see a lot more tech innovation. I think unfortunately what you're probably also going to see is a lot of consolidation because you've had venture capital-backed companies with solutions for food and agriculture that have their own proprietary solution, their own OS. And we know that, from other tech sectors, that's not a long-term viable strategy. Ultimately, the data will be free, it will open up, it will interconnect, and we just need to happen in food and in agriculture. >> And are they getting that? Because the classic farmer dilemma that you learn in economics 101 is they have a great crop, crap prices go in the toilet. They have a crappy crop, price is up but they don't have enough quantity to share and gaming the system, and who's going to plant what? Do they start to see the value of sharing some level of data aggregation for the benefit of all? >> I think there's a misperception out there that farmers won't share their data. The reality is they're willing to share their data, if it's providing some value to them. A lot of people want to charge these farmers for their data without any demonstrable benefit to using that data. And I think where you can find a solution, I think the farmers are, speaking generally here, I think the other thing is, farmers know, if you're not paying for the data, you probably are the product, right? And they're smart enough to figure that out, so they don't want people misusing their data for reasons that aren't clear to them. And they've had bad experiences with that in the past. >> It's not any different than any other sector. I mean, go back seven years ago when people said, "Well, we're going to mix your data up with somebody else's data, but it's not a problem, right? Zeros and ones, it's bits." And they were both like, "Nooo," and they got over it, right? >> Right, but the other thing I'll say is I think that the challenges are changing and this is not just standard commodity ups and downs, particularly if you look at here in California, the specialty crops. We have lost access to what has been a cheap labor pool historically and we need to automate. So now we need to go where northern Europe has already gone, in terms of automating production for specialty crops and then things like climate change are causing different crops to grow in different seasons and we need to be able to predict that, we need to take more of it indoors as a nice complement to outdoor growing. So there's a lot of different things that farmers are dealing with now that they really haven't had to deal with in the future. And I think the same is true on the restaurant side. >> Yeah, and the predictability of understanding what your needs are going to be is going to be so important here, particularly because we need to see more automation, both on the farm and production and the restaurants. I know a lot of people talk about being concerned about losing their jobs to automation or robotics, but the reality is, the National Restaurant Association says in the next 10 years, we have a shortage of 200,000 line cooks. >> Jeff: Just line cooks? >> Just line cooks, right. So when you see someone like Chowbotics who's here showing the automated customized salad maker, there's clearly a need in the market place for these kind of approaches. >> The other thing too is you touch on such big, global societal issues. Obviously we're in California here, water. We had a really wet winter, but you know, I'm looking for the water track, I mean that's got to be a huge piece of this whole thing. You have the environmental concern, again, in California, there's always the fight between the farmers that want the water in the rivers and the environmentalists who want to keep the salmon swimming upstream. These are not simple problems that have an obvious solution, and as I think somebody said in they keynote, there's no free trade-off. You've got to make decisions based on values and they're not simple problems. So you guys are right in the middle of a lot of big society changes. >> Yeah, and I think that's one of the things. This is not just a US or a California thing. Globally, things are changing. And whether it is China having more disposable income available to eat more meat and what the ramifications of that are versus other societies with more environmental challenges moving front and center to them, the labor challenge. There's a lot of different things that are happening globally and we don't really have that connectivity layer globally to share this innovation to find the right solutions and get them addressing these market challenges. >> Right. >> Yeah, I would say the thing is, it is complex, so they're going to be talking about tomato growth later on today, and the example somebody was giving is we went to precision watering instead of spray, well, when you go to drip irrigation, you actually have to pressurize an entire system so you actually use more energy. So we use less water but we burn more coal, more oil, whatever it may be, to pressurize the system. And then if it produces a product that has more water content, you spend more energy drying it on the backend. So there's trade-offs. I would say the other thing that we found is really interesting is people ask us if we're social impact investors and we aren't but we have a social impact consideration about what we do, but pretty much everything that you see in this space right now from an innovative side is moving the ball forward, either it's better nutrition, it's less input, it's less chemicals, less water. So this innovation in food and ag. is just by its nature having a very positive impact. >> Right, two years ago, we called food IT macro to micro, and fundamentally what we believe at The Mixing Bowl is, as Michael said, at Better Food Ventures, we don't consider ourselves social impact investors, first and foremost, we want to keep financial grounding. However, I think at a core level, we all believe that harnessing IT to go address these societal challenges in food and agriculture is the biggest thing that we can make. So the reality is we're not going to be able to do much more with the chemical era, we've maximized the yield that we can get there. So now we are going to be looking at IT and how can we actually apply IT to these different challenges and I'm going to cough now. (Jeff laughs) (Rob coughs) >> Well, even something, people think IT and they think highly technical and they think of Cloud, they think of data connections, well look at food waste. The bulk of food waste that happens in our society happens at the home to the restaurant. So even if it's an iPhone app that's teaching our children how to deal with food waste in their home, it's a technical approach, it's hugely impactful. And it's those kind of touch points that will make a difference. >> Right, right. Well, Rob, Michael, thanks for inviting us, it's really fun to come to more of an application-centered show than an infrastructure show and see how the impact of Cloud and big data and sensors and IOT and drones and all of these things are having material impact on us day by day. So congratulations on the event and we'll let you go back to the keynote stage, they're waiting for you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. We are at the Food IT show in Mountain View, California. We'll be right back with the next guest after this short break. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)