(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Fal.Con 22. We're here at the ARIA hotel in Las Vegas. We're here in Las Vegas, a lot. Dave Nicholson, Dave Alante. Fal.Con 22, wall to wall coverage, you're watching theCUBE. Anthony Kunya is here. He's the chief information security officer at Mercury Financial. And he's joined by his deputy CISO, Alex Arengo. Welcome, gentlemen. >> Good to see you. >> Thank you very much. Good to be here. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. >> Yeah, so this is a great event. This is our first time being at the, a CrowdStrike customer event. We do a lot of security shows, but this is really intimate. We got a high flying company. Tell us first about, of Mercury Financial. What are you guys all about? >> Oh, that's a fantastic question. Let's leeway into that. So Mercury Financial is a credit card company that serves people who are near prime. So be it some kind of hardship in their life. They had something impacted, be a financial impact, maybe a medical impact, an emergency, something, a death family where somehow their credit was impacted. We give 'em the opportunity through our motto, better credit, better life, to build up that credit score to add livelihood to their ability to be financially stable. >> I mean, I think this is huge because you know, so many people it's like, okay, one strike and you're out. >> Right. >> You know, that's just not right. You got- >> No, not at all. >> You got to give people another chance. And so there's so much talent out there. I think about some of the mistakes I made, Dave, when I was a younger man, but- >> No comment. >> Right. So I heard a stat today that I thought was great. Did you guys see the keynote? >> Yes. >> Of course. >> So in the keynote, the, they did the thing at Black Hat but they said what's XDR and I thought- Anthony] Oh goodness. >> My favorite, and I'm not going to ask you what XDR is. >> Okay, good, thank God. >> But my favorite answer was a holistic approach to endpoint security. And, you know, I think as a CISO you have to take a holistic approach to a security- >> Of course. >> Okay. >> Maybe talk about, a little bit about how you do that. >> Wow, a holistic approach I would say and I could, I'll give you an opportunity to speak as well, but a holistic approach it's people processes in technology. So a holistic approach would be, it isn't one box that you check. It's not a technology that is a silver bullet that fixes anything. Those technologies, those services are implemented by people. So good training, our human firewall, the forefront of implementing those technologies to build those processes and incorporate people and a level of sincerity and integrity that we build. So I feel like a holistic approach is both cyber culture to build the cyber resilience program that we so dearly need. >> And I could spend all day talking about security organizations, SecOps, DevSecOps, data SecOps, et cetera, but, but Alex, how, what is your role as the deputy CISO? How do you compliment what Anthony does? >> I got to bring it all together, right? So technically, what are we putting in place? What are the requirements that these stakeholders have? Their needs, their wants. We all have something that we need and want in our environment as an employee, as a customer, as a stakeholder. How do do we get that to market? How can we get it there quickly? You know, and it's really about finding the partners that can get us there, right? That can leverage us, that can force multiply us. >> Yes. >> You know, give my people more time to get the work done, the good work. >> Right, the hard work, of course. >> So paint a picture. You know, we hear a lot about all the different, the bevy of tools, the, how complicated CISOs tell us all the time, that we just don't have enough talent. We're looking for partners to help us compromise, but paint a picture of your environment and how you guys use CrowdStrike. >> Oh, that's a good one. Do you want to take this one? >> Great one, right? I mean, we leverage CrowdStrike at every way we can. We're a Fal.Con complete customer. So they're an extension of our team. They're an extension of our SOC right? >> Yeah. >> We leverage them for many things. We leverage them to understand the risk in our environment. Where we're at in zero trust. How we can really bring a lot of the new processes that the business wants to market, right? How can we get there as fast as possible? Can we make it secure, right? I'm a Mercury card customer also. So I'm, I have a vested interested in that. And I like to drive that, that's, so it comes down to can you align your holistic approach, or your organizational goals and bring that to a really good security product that is world class? >> And I can add a little bit to that as well. So I look at it as a triangle. So we leverage Fal.Con complete as that first level, tier one triage, people who do and understand the product extremely well, we leverage them quite a bit. We also have a VSOC service that we have this like, consider tier two or the middle of the triangle, by Verse, right? >> Yeah. >> Fantastic boutique security company that just has been working with us year over year, innovation, strategic initiatives, always there to play. And then Alex Arengo, and the threat management team, is our top tier, that's tier three, that's the top of the pyramid. By the time it bubbles up to Alex, that's when the real work happens, everyone's triaging, collecting data, putting together pieces. And then Alex and his teammates, and people that he's trained, fantastic, comes and puts it all together and paints a picture so we can then take that information and describe it in layman's terms, simple terms, to the business, to make them understand the level of risk, what we have to do to get to, and through that attack, or that indication of compromise, et cetera, so that we can remediate it, rectify it. >> Right, it's building that security culture foundation, right? It's getting everyone to buy into that. >> Yeah. >> It's a holistic approach and it's really the best way to do it, right? You get bought in from the stakeholders understand what they need to do, and what the goals of the business are. And it really works really well >> We journey together. >> We build a program together. >> Dave, I think that that cultural aspect is critical. Cause I've said many times, bad user behavior trumps good security every time. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Oh goodness. >> Every time. >> Nicely put, I like that. >> So, I know we're early in the week still, but we did have the keynote. Is there anything that you are hearing, in terms of vision, that peaks your interest specifically, and then also sort of the follow up question is, are you guys kind of like lifeguards who can't ever relax at the beach? >> That's why I have a deputy CISO. Well, nobody can take time off, we have to share this. Of course we do. Most definitely. What would you say would be the next, most innovative thing that were looking for? >> Yeah, what's the next big thing, as far as you're concerned? >> The next biggest thing is definitely building the relationships we have. As we bring in new technologies, we go even more Cloud native. How do we leverage that expertise, that of the partners that we're bringing on board like Zscaler, CrowdStrike, Verse, right? How do we make them a part of the team, and make them perform, bring that world class quality talent across the spectrum, you know, from DevOps to that security analyst, picking up the phone and saying, I'm not really sure what's going on, but there's a culture that's built there where everybody comes to the table to feed, right? We all eat together. >> The ecosystem. >> Yes. >> That is the tooling that we leverage day in and day out. That's how we sleep at night. We have to pick our partners. >> You know, we talked about the ecosystem up front, and you look around, you can see the ecosystem and it's growing. >> Yes. >> And I predict it's going to grow a lot more. >> Yes. >> That's, and it has to, right? I mean, exactly what you're saying is that no one company can do it alone. And we heard, you know, we heard, it is confusing. You hear CrowdStrike's doing Identity, but then they partner with Okta. Right, and they're here out on the floor. So that's what you guys need. Talk a little bit more about the importance of ecosystem and partnerships from your perspective. >> Oh I got a good one for this. So I use the metaphor of having a restaurant. So we run a restaurant really well. We know what we want in the menu. We have a chef, we know how we want to put together, but we need excellent ingredients. You make muffins well. Bring your muffin into the restaurant. That brings and builds that rapport. That I want the menu to be rich and empower people to come in and say, you know, I've never had scallops or octopus before, I hear you guys make it better than anyone else, well, our ingredients are fantastic. Therefore, no matter what we do when we present it, it's perfect, it's palatable. >> Yeah. That's great. You're not making ice cream, but you're serving it. >> I can't, if you ever want to show us. >> We're just converging our bakery, you know? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, salt, salt is the key. >> We're just working the bakery part out, yeah. >> Okay, I want to ask you about Cloud because you know, in 2010, 2011, when you talk to a financial services firm, Cloud, no, that's an evil word, now everybody's Cloud first. George Kurts talks about how, I mean essentially CrowdStrike is dogmatic. We are Cloud native. We have a Cloud native architecture. I know Gartner has this term CNAP or Cloud native application platform. So what does the Cloud mean to you guys? How does it fit in? What does Cloud native architecture do for you? >> It lets us converge everything we've been talking about. How do we, you know, that's a really big struggle that all security teams are having at, having today. How do I converge threat intelligence? How do I converge the environment that I'm in? How do I converge the threat intel that's coming in, right? All this, you're getting, security teams are constantly on a swivel, right? They're looking left, they're looking right. They're trying to identify what to do first. And you bring in the right partners. >> Yes. >> And you get in, you build the right program. You cement that culture internally. And it really provides dividends. >> You know what I think as well, Dave, is in the past, everyone was more data center based. >> Right. >> The Cloud was like a thing we'd forklift, we'd move over, we were born in the Cloud. So Cloud native Application protection is something that we need and will drive innovation. Will align with our strategic initiatives. We need people to think like the Cloud is what's happening. Super Cloud, some of the things that we spoke about. >> Yeah, so I was at, when we were at reinforced, I had this new mental model emerge, and it sort of hit me in the face. And you tell me, I'd love to talk to practitioners to say, yeah, that makes sense or, no, that's crap. So it seems like the Cloud has become the first line of defense for CISOs. Now you're Cloud first or Cloud native, so, okay. But then now you've got the shared responsibility model. And I don't know if you use multiple Clouds. Do you use multiple Clouds? >> We cannot say. >> Cannot say, okay, let's assume for a second, your, some of your colleagues, CISO colleagues, use multiple Clouds. >> They should, okay, sure. >> Now they've got multiple shared responsibility models. Now you've got also the application development team. They're being asked to be the pivot point to actually execute, they got to secure the platform. They got to secure the containers, their run time. >> Workloads, yes. >> And then you got audit behind you is kind of the last line of defense. So things are shifting. Describe sort of the organizational dynamic that you see, not necessarily specific to Mercury Financial, or that would be cool, but generally in the industry. >> Oh, I would say, I could say this, that having Cloud, multitenancy Cloud or the super Cloud model where we could abstract our services our protection, the different levels of security tooling, being able to abstract and speak a common language where you could run in Azure, GCP or AWS, and still have a common language that you can interpret and leverage between all the tooling would be something I would love to see. >> That's Super Cloud >> A magical, that is that. >> That is a Cloud interpreter essentially. >> I think we use different words, but yes. >> A PAs layer, super PAs layer, sorry to take it too far. >> Yeah, like, I want to be able to abstract it and speak a language that would work in any of the- >> What does that do for you as a technology practitioner? >> Well, imagine if you had to speak three different languages with three different people, get lost in translation. If we could speak a common language across all the different platforms and all the different footprints, it would be easier to define our security posture. Where are we? Are we secure? You might say security groups in AWS, it might be, mean something else, but it's still a level of protection that surrounds the end point, right? Something that would abstract that level would be very fun. Very good for me. >> It's, you know, it's pretty easy to understand your use case for this. When you're talking about here we are, Mercury Financial, you have the most sensitive financial information about people, right? >> Right, absolutely. >> A data breach where all of the information about your customers getting out there on the dark web. Right? Heart attack time. >> Instantly. >> What are some things that people might not think about though, that are going on in your world? What would surprise someone who maybe isn't a security specialist in terms of the things that you're dealing with as far as threats are concerned? >> I'm going to leave that on you. >> Can you think of some examples of things that you could, you know, obviously generic examples. >> Right. >> Yes. >> I'm going to point to the number one and two most common ways that applications and businesses are getting owned right now. And that's misconfigurations on your web app or a vulnerable application or phishing. And those are both very important things, right? A lot of development teams, they want to get things to market as soon as possible. And maybe security's on the back foot. It's about building that culture and to, you know, being Cloud native helps you have a, you can provide different tool sets to your organization that helps you understand that posture and makes you help those business decisions. Are we in a good posture to go forward right now? That's a big question that I think most security organizations need to ask themselves and the need to hold other stakeholders accountable. >> So phishing and the concept of social engineering, still alive and well? >> Oh, goodness. >> Always. >> Everything starts with people. The human firewall has to be front of mind. Security can't be an afterthought or a bolt on, that's something that you think about, well, I guess if I have to meet our compliance, it doesn't work with us. >> Comes back to the culture that you're actually talking about before. >> 100%, yeah, cyber resiliency starts with cyber culture. >> Kevin Mandy has said it today. I, never underestimate the adversary. The adversary- >> Of course. >> Is highly capable, motivated, big ROI and it just keeps getting bigger. The more technology gets embedded into our lives. The more lucrative hacking becomes. >> And more attack vectors. We have more areas that we could be potentially penetrated. >> They have a lot of time. Those threat actors have a lot of time. >> They do have a lot of time, yeah. >> Right. >> Right and to your point, you're constantly on the swivel. Right, you don't have time. >> Right. >> No, we don't. >> So do your responsibilities touch on things like fraud detection as well? >> Yeah, oh, that- >> Is that a silly question? I'm thinking- >> Yeah, no, it really is, so- >> No, not at all. >> Or there isn't segregation between what we would think of as IT and the credit card transaction that fires up a red flag. >> Those are integrated. >> It's definitely important. And in any business, right? Is to, like I mentioned, I use this word a lot converge, right? It's converging that intel, that fraud intelligence and making it into a process where we're reducing the risk and the losses that the business is incurring. >> Yes. >> It's so important, right? That we build that culture within the fraud teams, the operational teams, the, you know really anybody who has a really large stake in whatever the business product is. And, you know, being Cloud native, bringing in the right partners, building that security culture. I mean, that's the biggest one. >> Yeah, we've flown. >> It's last and definitely not least, it is, the culture's where you need to be. >> Absolutely. >> You know, you guys, I'm sure, you know, work with a lot of different vendors, a lot of tools, or sometimes the tools are point tools, they're best to breed. CrowdStrike says it wants to be a generational company. >> Oh, yeah. >> It says this notion of an unstoppable breach is a myth. You guys can't live that way. You have to assume you're going to breach but can CrowdStrike be a generational company? >> I think they've proven themselves. They've been around over a decade now. it's 11 years. They just had their birthday yesterday, right? >> Yeah. >> Or anniversary, the company started? >> Yeah. 11 years, yeah. >> I absolutely, and I also agree to add it a little bit part, from the fraud part. I think CrowdStrike would be an integral piece of the overall solution that we have. It hits so many different aspects and looks at so many different potential attack vectors. I keep using that word, but I think integrating fraud in other parts and other functions of the business will start to see that they can leverage CrowdStrike. That there's tooling within CrowdStrike innovatively, like ahead of the game. And I always like that about CrowdStrike, being way ahead of the game and thinking in front of our adversaries. I think other departments will be like, what tools do you have, how can we use them? This is fantastic, this makes us feel better. We don't have to worry about that. We can focus in on what we're good at and build that best of breed solution. So fraud can focus on fraud and you can leverage the tooling and the infrastructure that we provide them together holistically to build a security program that's beyond reproach. >> Guys, we got to go, great perspectives. Always love having the practitioners on. >> Yeah, thank you. >> I really appreciate your time, thank you. >> Yeah, absolutely, always a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time. >> Anthony, Alex, Dave and Dave will be right back, right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from Fal.Con 2022 from the ARIA in Las Vegas. >> Cheers my friend. >> Yeah, of course. (cheerful music)

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Welcome back to HPE. Discover 2022. My name is Dave Lanta. I'm here with my co-host John fur. John we've been watching the evolution of H HP to HPE. We've seen GreenLake when Antonio Neri, I called it. I called it burn the boats. He goes, no, no, no, it wasn't burn the boats. I said, well, okay, burn the bridges. But it was all in on as a service on, on GreenLake. And we're gonna talk about that. Brad Shapiro is here. He's the vice president and managing director of the enterprise business at HPE financial services. Brad. Good to see him. Good to see >>You as well. >>Yeah, you guys got it all started. When, when Antonio kinda laid down, the gauntlet said, this is where we're going. Let's make it happen now. Cause the first place he turned I would imagine is the financial services said, okay, how do we start this today? Can you help us? And they take us back to that >>And yeah, sure. So, you know, uh, yeah, HP financial services, um, it's kind of a foundational element cuz when you think about it, asset management is really what we're doing here. And I know asset management's a, a big word, right? And it can mean lots of things to, to different people. Um, in this context, uh, we started looking at how do customers manage assets over the life cycle and a lot of customers while they were interested in a consumption model and looking at GreenLake for their private cloud, they were certainly looking at public cloud for certain workloads and then maybe even traditional data center for other activities that, that they're running. So it's really that hybrid environment. Uh, but they were stuck going well, Hey, I'm in a CapEx model today. How do I get out of CapEx and really get into this hybrid model? >>And that's where asset management comes in. So one of the, the biggest initial focus is, and we continue to have that focus. We call it our accelerated migration offer and it's really us going in and acquiring the customer assets, moving it on the HPE balance sheet and then figuring out what are we gonna do with those assets, which are gonna stay in use under a consumption model, which are excess. And we can put through our, uh, asset up cycling process, we monetize the majority of that, put that back into reuse and then maybe a small amount gets recycled. So, so really focused on the assets and accelerating customers transition to GreenLake. Did you >>See, or are you seeing a difference between like Le traditional leasing customers who already have kind of on that model versus like what you just described as sort of the, the CapEx was more complicated, you gotta get, I presume procurement involved the legal issues and was there a lot less, was it less friction with the, the leasing customers? Well, >>You know, I, I look at leasing and financing, very similar to CapEx. It's, it's a much more traditional model versus this new as a service experience. Um, so if, if they were in a leasing model, we could convert those leases into GreenLake. I wouldn't say one was any more difficult than the other. Yeah. Um, they were both really traditional mindset, um, and not really looking at a consumption model. So I think we had our fair share of both. And I think we, we have and are able to address both customers moving in into a consumption >>Mode. Right. How does this tie into sustainability? Because you know, we have on one end of the spectrum, the, the high end sustainability, you know, the, the science and sure. And the behind it, tactically speaking companies still now want to operate in this kind of, there's a sustainable angle here. Yeah. Talk about that piece of it. How does that tie in obviously consumption versus CapEx you're building, you're not building, what, what does that thread through the sustainability angle? >>Yeah. So, so first let me just say sustainability is really important to our customers. Um, and, and we're seeing it all over and it is real. Um, the good thing is that you can get business value out of the solutions and have a more sustainable model. So when I think about, and I talk to customers about sustainability, uh, there's a number of fronts they're focused on one, their customers believe it's important, right? So, so they're focused on making sure they're driving sustainable models. Uh, I've seen an increasing number of customers, both commercial and public sector have sustainability requirements in their tenders, in their RFPs. And you have to be able to, to comply with those. Um, second, uh, they, they look at it and go, how do I attract talent? It's increasingly important for them to attract talent. And then really if you, because >>They wanna work for a mission driven company that's >>Sustainable. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and the third area is investors. You know, the investment community is now looking at ESG and whole and you know, certainly environmental impacts, um, in where they're making an investment. So quick personal story, I was talking, uh, to a friend of mine who works for a hedge fund and he was telling me over the last year, they've hired a whole team. That's focused on just doing analysis of companies, ESG initiatives, determining where they're gonna invest their money. So it's, it's a wall street thing now. So this is real from a number of angles where, where sustainability has an impact. Now, how we play in that. Um, clearly when you go to a GreenLake consumption model, the idea is improving utilization of the asset. So driving higher utilization means you need less assets. You know, over time, the, the secret is we're gonna sell you less, right? >>You're gonna have less assets, but you're gonna have higher utilization. That's good for the environment where HPE Fs comes in is when those assets are done. We put those assets back into reuse. So we have a remark, we have remarketing facilities, one in, in Andover, mass, one in kin Scotland. And then we have 80 different facilities. We have partnerships around the world and our focus is how do we drive more reuse, 85% of the assets we get back, go into reuse. And when you look at servers and PCs and things like that, it's over 95% go into reuse. So a real focus on reuse is good for the environment as well. And then needless to say, the new technology that goes into a GreenLake deal, we're seeing like 30% energy savings coming, coming out of those environments. So all really good stuff related to it's >>Interesting. I mean, a couple points there is one is, you know, Benoff kind of got it all started pre pandemic. He was out talking about, you know, sustainability and ESG. And a lot of people were like, no way. It's all about bottom line profits. And so he was ahead of that. And I guess, you know, back to at least you were, oh, you were always in the residual value game, but now it's a little different, isn't it? Absolutely. It's, it's it's yes. You gotta figure out what the value of that asset's gonna be, but also there's a sustainability aspect of it as >>Well. Yeah, absolutely. And the, the pretty cool thing here is while you drive sustainability, we're also seeing customers that, that go into GreenLake. Um, we had a good example with Kern county, a 42% savings over their CapEx environment when they moved to GreenLake. So it was better for the environment and significant savings. So you can have kind of like have your cake and eat it too. You, you get better environmental, uh, impacts and you're getting better bottom line, uh, performance. >>It's a business case there too do. Now we kind of, I was talking upfront about the, the early days of GreenLake where, you know, they were, it was a financial model. Yeah. And now it's evolving to actually a technology model. We heard Alma with the platform. How has that, or has that changed the way that financial services your >>Group >>Yeah. Approaches the, the, the market. >>Yeah. So, um, yeah, that's a great point. You know, when people talk about GreenLake, they think about the old days. And, and look, I've been around a while. I remember the flex capacity, right? Yeah, of course this isn't flex capacity. I mean, the platform's amazing and it really starts to bring to life the whole thought, when we talk about hybrid, right, there are workloads sure. They might belong best in the public cloud. Right. There, there are workloads that belong best in the private cloud, under the HPE GreenLake model. And there are still workloads that customers may say, Hey, look, I've got legacy applications. I'm gonna continue to run them in a traditional data center. And so from an H P E Fs perspective, you know, we look at this, not as a leasing and financing company, we're looking at this on how do we leverage the customer's existing assets? >>How do we create incremental budget using those existing assets? And then what kind of model best serves that workload? And then how do you optimize the capacity and the spend on that? So, you know, an interesting note in the past year, we put 500 million back into customer budgets by just leveraging their existing it estate. And, and it does, it's not all HPE product, you know, we're, we're, we're monetizing third party products in the data center, in the network, in the workplace. So we can really look at, we call it any tech any time, anywhere we look at all the technology and really assess what's the best way to leverage that investment. Yeah. And, and get the most out of >>It. Yeah. I mean, it's really evolved from just recycling assets for profit, but integrating the business model into the value proposition, the core value proposition in GreenLake. That's great innovation. Um, and, and congratulations on that. Sure. My, my question for you is more kind of zooming out at the market. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, from your perspective in financial services at HPE, what has the pandemic proven to you guys? How has it changed? How you guys work and how has it changed the customer environment? Cuz you mentioned assets. I think real estate. Oh no. One's going back to work. Yeah, no one's been in the office. How has the market changed with hybrids as a steady state now coming outta the pandemic? What are customers doing with the assets? What are some of the trends that you're seeing in the customer base? >>Yeah. So, so look, I'll give you my personal perspective of what I think about as a business leader. And when I talk to customers, I think we're all thinking about the same thing. So I start with experience, what experience do I wanna create for my customers and very closely linked to that, my colleagues, right? So it, the, the people working in our organization, what experience am I creating for them? So they can in turn, create that experience for partners and customers externally. So experience is one thing. The second is innovation, right? We spend a lot of time thinking about what's next? Where do we want to go? What's the innovation and more and more that innovation is all digital, right? So digital transformation is huge within my organization. And it's huge within all of our customers. Dave, I think the last time we talked, I was in my living room on a little laptop screen and zoom and, and I think I use the analogy E every business is now a digital business, even my pizza shop in jerseys. >>Yeah. Right. I mean, everything was online curbside pickup. So what I'm finding is the, the trends in terms of how to leverage technology is how do you create that customer experience? And then how does digital now blend as we're coming out of the pandemic? And, and you're, you know, now able to go into restaurants and stores, how do you blend digital with that in person experience and maybe leverage the best of both. Right. And, and how do you do that in a seamless way to really give customers choice and give them that smooth, seamless experience. So that, that's what I see happening. And you know, what we are trying to do with our asset management plays with the financial modeling we do is how do we get more of that spend going to innovation versus maintenance. And, and that's a big key because, you know, you have to be fast. So I talk about innovation. I talk about customer experience, speed to market. I mean, you know, and the bar keeps getting higher, right? It's like, as soon as you think you're fast, you're slow. We, because you have to keep, it all keeps rolling. >>We heard yesterday on the cube from, uh, one of the HP point, next executives said, you gotta perform and transform >>At the >>Same time at the same time. And you gotta know where the people are gonna land. Absolutely. And how the assets are gonna be distributed. >>And to your point, Brad, you know, from our virtual interview, you're so right. I mean, every business has to be a digital business. And you know, my, my personal story, John, you know, my brother Richie was the executive chef at legal seafood. Right. Pandemic. So then that was a, a place you wanted to go to that restaurant, famous restaurant in Boston when they reopened, they weren't ready. Right. They didn't have the digital story together. They ended up having to, we were just at Smith and Linsky, they ended up selling to Smith and Wilensky's oh, and you, you drive around, you see a lot of these retail businesses is shut down. Yeah. Right. And so, okay. So we're, they weren't able to get through that, you know, cross that chasm in digital transformation. Yeah. A lot of businesses were able to and make it a tailwind. >>Yeah. And, and look, the other thing I think all businesses are focused on right now, uh, with the labor market is talent. And, and so when you think about all of these things tying together, you want to drive, uh, you know, innovation. You want to drive your digital transformation. You wanna make that environmentally sustainable. And, and I think all of that, if you start putting all that together, those are the companies that are gonna attract the talent in the marketplace. And, and really there there's a battle for talent and >>You wanna make it profitable. Uh, Brad bureau. Thanks so much for you. Great to see you face to face. >>Yeah. Likewise. Thanks. Thanks. >>All right. Keep it right there, John. And I will be back. We're wrapping up day three of HPE, discover 2022. You're watching the cube.

>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Welcome back to Dell tech world 2022. This is the cube alive. My name is Dave Volante. We're here with our wall to wall coverage. This is day two. We actually started last night. Uh, the, the cube after dark John furry is here. Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson. We're gonna talk about apex. The business value of apex flex on demand. Darren fedora is here. He's the senior vice president of Dell financial services, and we're joined by a customer and a partner Jud Barron is R and D infrastructure architect at Silicon labs. And Steve end is the regional VP of copy center comp computer center. I say that like I'm from Boston guys. Welcome to the queue. >>Thank you, >>Darren, take us through what's going on with, with apex, you got custom solutions, you know, people are gonna ask, is this just a financial gimick? What is this? >>No gimmicks, no gimmicks, Dave. So I think when we think about technology, historically customers purchased, they bought and they owned and they may have financed it and paid over time, but it was really an ownership model, especially in infrastructure and apex is about subscription. So think about Dell apex, as you can either buy, or you can subscribe to your technology and under apex subscription, we have options for custom based solutions or an outcome base. And I know today we're gonna talk about flex on demand and, and custom based solutions. So it's a high level pay for what you use when you use it with a high level of choice and flexibility. All >>Right, Steve, I'm gonna ask you to play little >>Co-host all right. I like >>This. Okay. So add some color color commentary, Jud, tell us a little bit about, uh, Silicon labs. I'm really interested in what your requirements were, your challenges and kinda why you landed on, on apex. Sure. >>Uh, Silicon labs is a semiconductor company were headquartered in Austin, 10 Xs, uh, just under a billion dollars a year right now. And, uh, at any ed shop or, uh, that, that people who are doing electronic design automation, that's not just in the semiconductor industry, but we have these HPC farms who are running, you know, millions of jobs a day. And the, a balance that you have to strike when you're doing capacity planning in one of these environments is we have these things called tape outs, and that's where we're finishing a project and there's a much higher volume of jobs that we have to run and you have to decide, do we buy for peak or do we, you know, come under that some amount and say, oh, we're gonna buy 80% of what we think >>As an over, over, over under, right. Do we over buy for peak normally, right, correct. Right >>Hard. One is geo Overy the under buy. It's always a hard decision. >>There's a tradeoff. Right? And, and so the, the challenge there is that you'll end up kind of linking the time and potentially miss a tape out window. And there's costs associated with that because you work with the Foundry and you kind of schedule based off that tape out when you're gonna deliver the photo mask to them. So anyway, the point is we in the past using a traditional like camp X, we're gonna buy a bunch of servers. We, we tend to undershoot whatever our peaks are. Cause we may have a peak every couple of months during, you know, these tape outs. Uh, but you know, sometimes tape outs, slip. And so one slips two months, another one comes in a little bit early and now you have multiple tape outs in the same months. And what was gonna be a, a small, uh, difference in from peak to what you actually purchased ends up being a big peak. And, uh, the thing that was interesting to us about flex on demand is the ability to have a commit rate that, you know, the customer can work with Dell financial services to figure out is that 80% is at 60% whatever. And they give us additional servers that we pay just when we're using them. Now I'm somewhat oversimplifying the process. Um, but we're, we gotta talk about that, >>But, but the point is, if I understand it correctly, that infrastructure was dominoing the, the time to tape out in a negative way, and you you've been able to address that more cost effectively. >>It, it can, it, it has on occasion. And so this, this basically gives us a way to lever to pull, to say, well, we can spend some additional OPEX this month and open up this additional capacity. So it's not like bursting to the cloud. Exactly. Uh, because I mean, you have to have the equipment in your data center already for you to be able to use it. But, um, it's under a traditional acquisition model. It's, it's just not a, a, a thing that was available to us before and looking at leasing or other types of, uh, you know, financing was wasn't really attractive previously, but the flex on demand model, when we first heard about it, we're like, that's very interesting. Tell me more. And we ended up using it in, in Austin, and then we built a whole data center in Asia and did the whole thing on flex on demand and >>Got it. Okay, Steve, uh, talk a little bit about your role what's going on at, at computer center and you know, why apex give us the background? Yeah. >>Um, computer center is a, one of the largest global VAs on the planet, right? Um, we, we have a lot of global and international reach, but at the end of the day, it's about one on one customer of relationships. Um, talking to them, understanding what their challenges are. And we've had a multiyear relationship with Jud. I've known you for a long time. And, and, um, typically that relationship, or initially that relationship was about collaborating, working hand in hand, kind of figure out what the solutions were that best fit their environment to solve their issues they need. And it was typically a procurement, a, a purchase based relationship and, and it worked well for a long time, but it, when Jud posed the challenge to us about kind of more pay as you go, uh, uh, subscription based modeling for, for how he want to do acquire in the future. >>Um, we just, we huddle with the Dell team collectively, um, and, and talked about what we could offer and how we could solve the problem. Uh, apex is a really nice brand today, but this was two and a half years ago, Uhhuh. Okay. So it was a little, we were a little early on on putting it together. I feel good that we were able to, to put that type of solution together for Jud and it's, and it's working today, working wonderful today. And it was good for it's good for the whenever it's good for the customer, the manufacturer and the partner altogether. It's a wonderful solution. >>So you took a little risk, but it worked out and you helped. >>Yeah, that was probably the infancy as we were growing our, as a service, think of this, you know, there's a, a lot of big words out there, Dave, right? As a service utility cloud, it doesn't matter what it is super cloud it's super cloud. It doesn't really matter. Super. This is really Jud was talking about a really important element, which is around flexibility choice. There's uncertainty oftentimes in a, in an environment, but they want to control. They still want have a level of control and leveraging partnerships, being able to deliver flexibility and choice. Don't worry about the words. Don't worry about cloud utility as a service we end up solving the customer need, right? And when we talk about flex on demand, I'll give you a little bit deeper into flex on demand. So when we think about flex on demand, it really is about understanding the customer needs and our capability and Jed reference this, determining what a baseline is. So if you think about your own utility bill, right, you, you go home and even if you're on vacation for a month, I'm sure you went on vacation for a month right. Month at a time. If I ever. >>Yeah, >>I know, but if you leave you your utility bill, even if you don't turn on a light, you still get a utility bill, it's your baseline. So we, we determine a baseline with our customers, with computer center, to understand in your environment, you're gonna use this minimum amount and that becomes your baseline. And that baseline can go as low as 25%. And up to 80% in a environment, it usually is typically in this 70, 80%. And then we determine what is gonna be optimal based on that 25 or above we charge based on the usage on a day to day basis, average by a month. And if you go up one month during your peak, you get charged at that peak. If you then a couple months are lower, then you're gonna pay only for the usage. And so for a customer that's growing has variability or seasonality. >>Um, this is a great model cuz they can still control their environment either within their own domain or um, in a colo. They also have the capability to pick anything within the Dell ISG catalog, any product, configure it to meet their environment, be able to work with a trusted partner like computer center. That it's a solution based on a partner relationship and delivers choice and flexibility on the catalog of anything Dell sells within your control of how you can configure it. So it gives this ability to say, instead of buying and instead of paying a predictable payment, a I E a financing I'm gonna pay for use. Yeah. If I turn on my light switch more or if it's during the summer in Texas where I am the ACS a lot higher. So your utilities go up and if you are a much lower because you're on vacation in Hawaii, maybe you've been in vacation in Hawaii for a month, you're gonna have a much lower and you're gonna hit your baseline. Right. So it gives flexibility choice and it gives the control back to the customer. >>Okay. So the whole ISD portfolio. So you're like the tip of the spear for future apex, right? >>We, we, we absolutely are the tip and that's why, you know, Steve referenced a couple years ago as we were still in our infancy, growing, listening to our customers, listening to our partners, we've evolved to become a more robust program, um, 35 countries today. So we can cover 35 countries over the globe, all ISG you products that are sold with a high level of flexibility and it, and it's Jud and feedback over time that we've continued to evolve this program. Mm-hmm >>So Jud you, if I understood correctly, the business impact to you was gonna better predict predictability. You didn't have to over buy or undery and take all that risk. Is that right? You maybe could quantify. Did you ever quantify that? What can you tell us about the, the business impact? Yeah, >>Sure. So, I mean, traditionally we will, uh, base our capacity demands on, uh, complex calculation that effectively just boils down to number of engineers, like head count, uh, and you know, kind of personas within that. And we figure out, okay, well how many compute do we need? And then we say, okay, well how many tape outs are we doing? And when are those tape outs gonna land? And try to figure out which months are gonna be the hot months and the design teams have to kind of vary their tape out schedules so that they don't pile up all into like July or something. And then there's not enough compute capacity. So with, with something like flex on and where I can turn additional capacity on in our HBC farm, it, you know, we just go in and make some changes to the LSF configuration and say, Hey, you know, now you've got these extra nodes available. >>We don't really have to worry about that as much. Uh, in fact, last year we, we ended up with one month where for us, it was unusual. We had five tape outs, uh, at all land within two weeks of one and a other. And they all finished, which in previous years before we had deployed that that would not have been the outcome things we would've had multiple, uh, tape outs delayed. And you know, that that's a seven figure impact for each one of those commits that we miss with the foundries. So it it's a big deal. >>Yeah. That's real dollars. And >>It is. And you know what else, this, as, as Joe's going through this, we all know their supply chain chain constraints, right? And this solves a lot of supply constraints because Joe, if you would be purchasing today, you'd be buying, you're looking at had, and you're actually having to purchase today where if you go into an apex flex on demand, you don't have that full commitment of having to purchase, but you can get ahead of the supply chain. So you can be looking six months in advance, you can be doing capacity planning and I'm Jed. I'm sure you're doing that leveraging. Like what's my future and not be worried about, I have this huge burden upfront. >>Yeah. And I mean, we have two levers right now. One is we have this extra capacity there. I can, you know, pick up the phone and, and call our Dell rep and say, Hey, I'm gonna modify my commit rate. And so now that's, you know, the new baseline I can use all day every day. Uh, and, and, you know, we still have some burstability and then separately, we can say, we want to expand the contract or, or, or, you know, basically acquire more hardware for additional burst or additional commit. Both of those things are, are options. We only had the, we had to go buy it and we need to know when we have to have it available. So you kind of back into this ordering schedule for, uh, you know, like a traditional CapEx purchase. >>So Steve, obviously Silicon labs is, is leaning again. Are you seeing any other patterns in your customer base, uh, where this is being applied? What can you share >>With us there? Yeah, it's it, I believe this is a fairly horizontal solution. Any customer can really utilize it. I mean, traditionally people would buy for two and three years worth of capacity and slowly consume it over time, but you paid up front. Right. That's how it, that's kind of how it worked. Cause I didn't want to go back to the well year after year after year. Right. So, um, you know, and I, and I think, I think if anything, the, the, the cloud, the hyperscalers has, uh, taught the world, some things taught the industry. Some things, you know, in a, in a perfect world customers like to consume and pay for what they use, you know, and in the increments that they use it as much as possible as closely aligned to that as they could get. And what I see, what I see in this, you know, cuz I, I kind of put solu in my role, I'm putting solutions and customers and bringing those together other right. And, and complimenting that with services of our own. Right. But, but what I see over time that, that almost all the manufacturers and Dells does a wonderful job, but almost all the manufacturers will be delivering technology on a subscription basis. So the more I learn, the more I know, the more I understand about how to deliver those and provide those to customers is better off we are >>Because it aligns with business value. And that's what you're seeing Jud correct. >>Steve made an interesting comment in there. Uh, you know, he was talking about the cloud and for us, there's always pressure to say, Hey, you know, can we burst in the cloud? And for Edda workloads, every time we look at this, it's a data problem. It, it, it's not a computing problem for us. EA workloads tend to generate a lot of data and you know, there's a, there are a lot of tools, uh, you know, there's just a bunch of stuff that you have to have available to run those jobs. And so you have to look at that very carefully. The company that I work for Silicon labs has been around for a long time and we have a lot of development effort. That's been put into automating and simplifying things for our design engineering and trying to, you know, manipulate that and make it to where we can burst just certain jobs out to the cloud efficiently and cost effectively. Hasn't really resonated for us. But the flex on demand thing gave a us the ability to kind of achieve some of that burst ability. I mean, not to the same level of scale of course, but you know, we, we can do that at, you know, our own speed in our own data centers with our own data. And we don't have to worry about trying to, you know, peel an onion and put something new together, make it cloud friendly. It's >>Substantially similar. We gotta go. But to Aaron bring us home. >>Yeah. Hey, I think when we think about Dell, it's about listening to our customers and our partners. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, which we continue to do. We continue to evolve our products and, and apex is around choice and flexibility in delivering to customers an option to pay for what they use. It's a great solution. Appreciate the time guys. >>Great conversation. Thanks so much for coming on the cube. All right. Thank you. Good luck. All right. And thank you for watching. This is Dave VoLTE for the cube. We've been back with more wall to wall coverage. John furry, you'll be back Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson. You're watching the queue >>And.

>>Welcome to the customer. Obsession begins with data session. Uh, thank you for, for attending. Um, at Cloudera, we believe that a custom session begins with, uh, with, with data. Um, and, uh, you know, financial services is Cloudera is largest industry vertical. We have approximately 425 global financial services customers, uh, which consists of 82 out of a hundred of the largest global banks of which we have 27 that are globally systemic banks, uh, four out of the five, uh, top stock exchanges, eight out of the 10 top wealth management firms and all four of the top credit card networks. Uh, so as you can see most financial services institutions utilize Cloudera for data analytics and machine learning. Uh, we also have over 20 central banks and it doesn't or so financial regulators. So it's an incredible footprint, which glimpse Cloudera, lots of insight into the many innovations that our customers are coming in up >>With >>Customers have grown more independent and demanding. Uh, they want the ability to perform many functions on their own and, uh, be able to do it. Uh, he do them on their mobile devices, uh, in a recent Accenture study, more than 50% of customers, uh, are focused on, uh, improving their customer experience through more personalized, uh, offers in advice. The study found that 75% of people are actually willing to share their data for better personalized offers and more efficient and intuitive of services >>Together. And >>A better understanding of your customers use all the data available to develop a complete view of your customer and, uh, and better serve them. Uh, this also breaks down, uh, costly silos, uh, shares data in, in accordance with privacy laws and assists with regulatory adherence. So different and organizations are going to be at different points in their data analytics and AI journey. Uh, there are several degrees of streaming and batch data, both structured and unstructured. Uh, you need a platform that can handle both, uh, with common, with a common governance layer, um, near real time and real real-time sources help make data more relevant. So if you look at this graphic, looking at it from left to right, uh, normal streaming and batch data comes from core banking and, uh, and lending operations data in pretty much a structured format as financial institutions start to evolve. >>Uh, they start to ingest near real-time streaming that comes not only from customers, but also from, from newsfeeds for example, and they start to capture more behavioral data that they can use to evolve their models, uh, and customer experience. Uh, ultimately they start to ingest more real-time streaming data, not only, um, standard, uh, sources like market and transaction data, but also alternative sources such as social media and connected sources, such as wearable devices, uh, giving them more, more data, better data, uh, to extract intelligence and drive personalized actions based on data in real time at the right time, um, and use machine learning and AI, uh, to drive anomaly detection and protect and predict, uh, present potential outcomes. >>So this >>Is another way to look at it. Um, this slide shows the progression of the big data journey as it relates to a customer experience example, um, the dark blue represents, um, visibility or understanding your customer. So we have a data warehouse and are starting to develop some analytics, uh, to know your customer and start to provide a better customer 360 experience. Uh, the medium blue area, uh, is, uh, customer centric or where we learn, uh, the customer's behavior. Uh, at this point we're improving our analytics, uh, gathering more customer centric information to perform, uh, some more exploratory, uh, data sciences. And we can start to do things like cross sell or upsell based on the customer's behavior, which should improve, uh, customer retention. The light blue area is, uh, is proactive customer inter interactions or where we now have the ability, uh, to predict customers needs and wants and improve our interaction with the customer, uh, using applied machine learning and, and AI, uh, clap the Cloudera data platform. >>Um, you know, business use cases require enabling, uh, the end-to-end journey, which we referred to as the data life cycle, uh, what the data life cycle, what is the data life cycle that our customers want to take their data through to enable the end-to-end data journey. If you ask our customers, they want different types of analytics, uh, for their diverse user bases to, to help them implement their, their, their use cases while managed by a centralized security and governance later layer. Uh, in other words, um, the data life cycle to them provides multifunction analytics, uh, at each stage within the data journey, uh, that, uh, integrated and centralized, uh, security, uh, and governance, for example, uh, enterprise data consists of real-time and transactional type type data. Examples include, uh, clickstream data, web logs, um, machine generated, data chatbots, um, call center interactions, uh, transactions, uh, within legacy applications, market data, et cetera. >>We need to manage, uh, that data life cycle, uh, to provide real enterprise data insights, uh, for use cases around enhance them personalized customer experience, um, customer journey analytics, next best action, uh, sentiment and churn analytics market, uh, campaign optimization, uh, mortgage, uh, processing optimization and so on. Um, we bring a diverse set of data then, um, and then enrich it with other data about our customers and products, uh, provide reports and dashboards such as customer 360 and use predictions from machine learning models to provide, uh, business decisions and, and offers of, uh, different products and services to customers and maintain customer satisfaction, um, by using, um, sentiment and turn analytics. These examples show that, um, the whole data life cycle is involved, um, and, uh, is in continuous fashion in order to meet these types of use cases, uh, using a single cohesive platform that can be, uh, that can be served by CDP, uh, the data, the Cloudera data platform. >>Okay. Let's, uh, let's talk about, uh, some of the experiences, uh, from our customers. Uh, first we'll talk about Bunco, something there. Um, Banco Santander is a major global bank headquartered in Spain, uh, with, uh, major operations and subsidiaries all over Europe and north and, and south America. Uh, one of its subsidiary, something there UK wanted to revolutionize the customer experience with the use of real-time data and, uh, in app analytics, uh, for mobile users, however, like many financial institutions send them there had a, he had a, had a large number of legacy data warehouses spread across many business use, and it's within consistent data and different ways of calculating the same metrics, uh, leading to different results. As a result, the company couldn't get the comprehensive customer insights it needed. And, uh, and business staff often worked on multiple versions of the truth. Sometimes there worked with Cloudera to improve a single data platform that could support all its workloads, including self-service analytics, uh, operational analytics and data science processes in processing 10 million transactions, daily or 30,000 transactions per second at peak times. >>And, uh, bringing together really, uh, nearly two to two petabytes of data. The platform provides unprecedented, uh, customer insight and business value across the organization, uh, over 80 cents. And Dera has realized impressive, uh, benefits spanning, uh, new revenues, cost savings and risk reductions, including creating analytics for, for corporate customers with near real-time shopping behavior, um, and, and helping identify 7,000 new corporate, uh, customer prospects, uh, reducing capital expenditures by, uh, 3.2 million annually and decreasing operating expenses by, uh, 650,000, um, enabling marketing to realize, uh, 2.4 million in annual savings on, on cash back on commercial transactions, um, and protecting 3.7 million customers from financial crime impacts through 95, new proactive control alerts, improving risk and capital calculations to reduce the amount of money. It must set aside, uh, as part of a, as part of risk mandates. Uh, for example, in one instance, the risk team was able to release a $5.2 million that it had withheld for non-performing credit card loans by properly identifying healthy accounts miscategorized as high risk next, uh, let's uh, talk about, uh, Rabo bank. >>Um, Rabobank is one of the largest banks in the Netherlands, uh, with approximately 8.3 million customers. Uh, it was founded by farmers in the late 19th century and specializes in agricultural financing and sustainability oriented banking, uh, in order to help its customers become more self-sufficient and, uh, improve their financial situations such as debt settlement, uh, rebel bank needed to access, uh, to a varied mix of high quality, accurate, and timely customer data, the talent, uh, to provide this insight, however, was the ability to execute sophisticated and timely data analytics at scale Rabobank was also faced with the challenge of, uh, shortening time to market. Uh, it needed easier access to customer data sets to ensure that they were using and receiving the right financial support at the right time with, with, uh, data quality and speed of processing. Um, highlighted as two vital areas of improvement. Robert bank was looking to incorporate, um, or create new data in an environment that would not only allow the organization to create a centralized repository of high quality data, but also allow them to stream and, uh, conduct data analytics on the fly, uh, to create actionable insights and deliver a strong customer service experience. >>Rabobank >>Leverage Cloudera due to its ability to cope with heavy pressures on data processing and its capability of ingesting large quantities of real-time streaming data. They were able to quickly create a new data lake that allowed for faster queries of both historical and real-time data to analyze customer loan repayment patterns, uh, to up to the minute transaction records, um, Robert bank and, and its customers could now immediately access, uh, the valuable data needed to help them understand, um, the status of their financial situation, this enabled, uh, rebel bank to spot financial disasters before they happened, enabling them to gain deep and timely insights into which customers were at risk of defaulting on loans. Um, having established the foundation of a modern data architecture Rabobank is now able to run sophisticated machine learning algorithms and, uh, financial models, uh, to help customers manage, um, financial, uh, obligations, um, including, uh, loan repayments, and are able to generate accurate, uh, current liquidity overviews, uh, no next, uh, let's, uh, speak about, um, uh, OVO. >>Uh, so OVO is the leading digital payment rewards and financial services platform in Indonesia, and is present in 115 million devices across the company across the country. Excuse me. Um, as the volume of, of products, uh, within Obos ecosystem increases, the ability to ensure marketing effectiveness is critical to avoid unnecessary waste of time and resources, unlike competitors, uh, banks, w which use traditional mass marketing, uh, to reach customers over, oh, decided to embark on a, on a bold new approach to connect with customers via a ultra personalized marketing, uh, using the stack, the team at OVO were able to implement a change point detection algorithm, uh, to discover customer life stage changes. This allowed OVO, uh, to, uh, build a segmentation model of one, uh, the contextual offer engine Bill's recommendation algorithms on top of the product, uh, including collaborative and context-based filters, uh, to detect changes in consumer consumption >>Patterns. >>As a result, OVO has achieved a 15% increase in revenue, thanks to this, to this project, um, significant time savings through automation and eliminating the chance of human error and have reduced engineers workloads by, by 30%. Uh, next let's talk about, uh, bank Bri, uh, bank Bri is one of the largest and oldest, uh, banks in Indonesia, um, engaging in, in general banking services, uh, for its customers. Uh, they are headquartered in, in Jakarta Indonesia, uh, BR is a well-known, uh, for its, uh, focused on financing initiative initiatives and serves over 75 million customers through its more than 11,000 offices and rural outposts, >>Um, Bri >>Needed to gain better understanding of their customers and market, uh, to improve the efficiency of its operations, uh, reduce losses from non-performing loans and address the rising concern around data security from regulators and consumers, uh, through enhanced fraud detection. This would require the ability to analyze vast amounts of, uh, historical financial data and use those insights, uh, to enhance operations and, uh, deliver better service. Um, Bri used Cloudera's enterprise data platform to build an agile and reliable, uh, predictive augmented intelligence solution. Uh, Bri was now able to analyze 124 years worth of historical financial data and use those insights to enhance its operations and deliver better services. Um, they were able to, uh, enhance their credit scoring system, um, the solution analyzes customer transaction data, and predicts the probability of a customer defaulting on, on payments. Um, the following month, it also alerts Bri's loan officers, um, to at-risk customers, prompting them to take the necessary action to reduce the likelihood of a Vanette profit lost. Uh, this resulted in improved credits in, in improved, uh, credit scoring system, uh, that cut down the approval of micro financing loans, uh, from two weeks to two days to two minutes and, uh, enhanced, uh, fraud detector. >>All right. Uh, this example shows a tabular representation, uh, the evolution of a customer retention use case, um, the evolution of data and analytics, uh, journey that, uh, that for that use case, uh, from aware, uh, text flirtation, uh, to optimization, to being transformative, uh, with every level, uh, data sources increase. And, uh, for the most part, uh, are, are less, less standard, more dynamic and less structured, but always adding more value, more insights into the customer, uh, allowing us to continuously improve our analytics, increase the velocity of the data we ingest, uh, from, from batch, uh, to, uh, near real time, uh, to real-time streaming, uh, the volume of data we ingest continually increases and we progress, uh, the value of the data on our customers, uh, is continuously improving, allowing us to interact more proactively and more efficiently. And, and with that, um, I would, uh, you know, ask you to consider an assess if you are using all the, uh, the data available to understand, uh, and service your customers, and to learn more about, about this, um, you know, visit cloudera.com and schedule a meeting with Cloudera to learn more. And with that, thank you for your time. And thank you for listening.

(upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm Joe Rodriguez, Managing Director of Financial Services at Cloudera. Welcome to the Fight Fraud with Data session. At Cloudera we believe that fighting fraud begins with data. So financial services is Cloudera's largest industry vertical. We have approximately 425 global financial services customers, which consists of 82 out of a hundred of the largest global banks of which we have 27 that are globally systemic banks. Four out of the five top stock exchanges, eight out of the top 10 wealth management firms and all four of the top credit card networks. So as you can see, most financial services institutions utilize Cloudera for data analytics and machine learning. We also have over 20 central banks and a dozen or so financial regulators. So it's an incredible footprint which gives Cloudera lots of insight into the many innovations that our customers are coming up with. Criminals can steal thousands of dollars before a fraudulent transaction is detected. So the cost to purchase your account data is well worth the price to fraudsters. According to Experian, credit and a debit card account information sells on the dark web for a mere $5 with the CVV number and up to $110 if it comes with all the bank information, including your name, social security number, date of birth, complete account numbers, and other personal data. Our customers have several key data and analytics challenges when it comes to fighting financial crime. The volume of data that they need to deal with is huge and growing exponentially. All this data needs to be evaluated in real time. There are new sources of streaming data that need to be integrated with existing legacy data sources. This includes biometrics data and enhanced authentication video surveillance, call center data, and of course all that needs to be integrated with existing legacy data sources. There is an analytics Arms Race between the banks and the criminals, and the criminal networks never stop innovating. They also have to deal with disjointed security and governance. Security and governance policies are often set per data source or application requiring redundant work across workloads. And they have to deal with siloed environments. The specialized nature of platforms and people results in disparate data sources and data management processes. This duplicates efforts and divides the business risk and crime teams, limiting collaboration opportunities between them. CDP enhances financial crime solutions to be holistic by eliminating data gaps between siloed solutions, with an enterprise data approach, advanced data analytics and machine learning. By deploying an enterprise wide data platform, you reduce siloed divisions between business risk and crime teams and enable better collaboration through industrialized machine learning, you tighten up the loop between detection and new fraud patterns. Cloudera provides the data platform on which a best of breed applications can run and leverage integrated machine learning. Cloudera stands rather than replaces your existing fraud modeling applications. So Oracle, SAS, Actimize, to name a few, integrate with an enterprise data hub to scale the data, increase speed and flexibility and improve efficacy of your entire fraud system. It also centralizes the fraud workload on data that can be used for other use cases in applications like Enhanced KYC and Customer 360 for example. I just wanted to highlight a couple of our partners in financial crime prevention, Simudyne and Quantexa. So Simudyne provides fraud simulation using agent-based modeling machine learning techniques to generate synthetic transaction data. This data simulates potential fraud scenarios in a cost-effective GDPR-compliant virtual environment to significantly improve financial crime detection systems. Simudyne identifies future fraud topologies for millions of simulations that can be used to dynamically train new machine learning algorithms for enhanced identification. And Quantexa connects the dots within your data using dynamic entity resolution, and advanced network analytics to create context around your customers. This enables you to see the bigger picture and automatically assesses potential criminal behavior. Now let's go over some of our customers and how they're using Cloudera. First, we'll talk about United Overseas Bank or UOB. UOB is a leading full service bank in Asia with a network of more than 500 offices in 19 countries and territories, in Asia Pacific, Western Europe and North America. UOB built a modern data platform on Cloudera that gives it the flexibility and speed to develop new AI and machine learning solutions and to create a data-driven enterprise. UOB set up it's big data analytics center in 2017. It was Singapore's first centralized big data unit within a bank to deepen the bank's data analytic capabilities and to use data insights to enhance the bank's performance. Essential to this work was implementing a platform that could cost efficiently bring together data from dozens of separate systems and incorporate a range of unstructured data, including voice and text. Using Cloudera CDP and machine learning, UOB gained a richer understanding of its customer preferences to help make their banking experience simpler, safer, and more reliable. Working with Cloudera, UOB has a big data platform that gives business staff and data scientists, faster access to relevant and quality data for self-service analytics, machine learning and emerging artificial intelligence solutions. With new self-service analytics and machine learning driven insights, UOB has realized improvements in digital banking, asset management, compliance, AML, and more. Advanced AML detection capabilities, help analysts detect suspicious transactions either based on hidden relationships of shell companies and high risk individuals with Cloudera and machine learning technologies, UOB was able to enhance AML detection and reduce the time to identify new links from months to three weeks. Next, let's speak about MasterCard. So MasterCard's principle business is to process payments between banks and merchants and the credit issuing banks and credit unions of the purchasers who use the MasterCard brand debit and credit cards to make purchases. MasterCard chose Cloudera Enterprise for fraud detection and to optimize their DW infrastructure, delivering deep insights and best practices and big data security and compliance. Next, let's speak about Bank Rakyat in Indonesia or BRI. BRI is one of the largest and oldest banks in Indonesia and engages in the provision of general banking services. It's headquartered in Jakarta, Indonesia. BRI is well-known for its focus on microfinancing initiatives and serves over 75 million customers through its more than 11,000 offices and rural service outposts. BRI required better insight to understand customer activity and identify fraudulent transactions. The bank needed a solid foundation that allowed it to leverage the power of advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to gain better understanding of customers and the market. BRI used Cloudera Enterprise data platform to build an agile and reliable, predictive augmented intelligence solution to enhance its credit scoring system. And to address the rising concern around data security from regulators and customers, BRI developed a real-time fraud detection service powered by Cloudera and Kafka, BRI's data scientists developed a machine learning model for fraud detection by creating a behavioral scoring model based on customer savings, loan transactions, deposits, payroll and other financial real-time data. This led to improvements in its fraud detection and credit scoring capabilities, as well as the development of a new digital microfinancing product. With the enablement of real-time fraud detection, BRI was able to reduce the rate of fraud by 40%. It improved relationship manager productivity by two and a half fold. It improved the credit scoring system to cut down on micro-financing loan processing times from two weeks to two days to now two minutes. So fraud prevention is a good area to start with data focus if you haven't already. It offers a quick return on investment and it's a focused area that's not too entrenched across the company. To learn more about fraud prevention, go to www.cloudera.com, and you should schedule a meeting with Cloudera to learn even more. And with that, thank you for listening and thank you for your time. (upbeat music)

>>Uh, hi, I'm Joe Rodriguez, managing director of financial services at Cloudera. Uh, welcome to the fight fraud with a data session, uh, at Cloudera, we believe that fighting fraud with, uh, uh, begins with data. Um, so financial services is Cloudera's largest industry vertical. We have approximately 425 global financial services customers, uh, which consists of 82 out of a hundred of the largest global banks of which we have 27 that are globally systemic banks, uh, four out of the five top, uh, stock exchanges, uh, eight out of the top 10 wealth management firms and all four of the top credit card networks. So as you can see most financial services institutions, uh, utilize Cloudera for data analytics and machine learning, uh, we also have over 20 central banks and a dozen or so financial regulators. So it's an incredible footprint which gives Cloudera lots of insight into the many innovations, uh, that our customers are coming up with. Uh, criminals can steal thousands of dollars before a fraudulent transaction is detected. So the cost of, uh, to purchase a, your account data is well worth the price to fraudsters. Uh, according to Experian credit and debit card account information sells on the dark web for a mere $5 with the CVV number and up to $110. If it comes with all the bank information, including your name, social security number, date of birth, uh, complete account numbers and, and other personal data. >>Um, our customers have several key data and analytics challenges when it comes to fighting financial crime. The volume of data that they need to deal with is, is huge and growing exponentially. Uh, all this data needs to be evaluated in real time. Uh, there is, uh, there are new sources of, of streaming data that need to be integrated with existing, uh, legacy data sources. This includes, um, biometrics data and enhanced, uh, authentication, uh, video surveillance call center data. And of course all that needs to be integrated with existing legacy data sources. Um, there is an analytics arms race between the banks and the criminals and the criminal networks never stop innovating. They also we'll have to deal with, uh, disjointed security and governance, security and governance policies are often set per data source, uh, or application requiring redundant work, work across workloads. And, and they have to deal with siloed environments, um, the specialized nature of platforms and people results in disparate data sources and data management processes, uh, this duplicates efforts and, uh, divides the, the business risk and crime teams, limiting collaboration opportunities between CDP enhances financial crime solutions, uh, to be holistic by eliminating data gaps between siloed solutions with, uh, an enterprise data approach, uh, advanced, uh, data analytics and machine learning, uh, by deploying an enterprise wide data platform, you reduce siloed divisions between business risk and crime teams and enable better collaboration through industrialized machine learning. >>Uh, you tighten up the loop between, uh, detection and new fraud patterns. Cloudera provides the data platform on which a best of breed applications can run and leverage integrated machine learning cloud Derrick stands rather than replaces your existing fraud modeling applications. So Oracle SAS Actimize to, to name a few, uh, integrate with an enterprise data hub to scale the data increased speed and flexibility and improve efficacy of your entire fraud system. It also centralizes the fraud workload on data that can be used for other use cases in applications like enhanced KYC and a customer 360 4 example. >>I just, I wanted to highlight a couple of our partners in financial crime prevention, uh, semi dine, and Quintex, uh, uh, so send me nine provides fraud simulation using agent-based modeling, uh, machine learning techniques, uh, to generate synthetic transaction data. This data simulates potential fraud scenarios in a cost-effective, uh, GDPR compliant, virtual environment, significantly improved financial crime detection systems, semi dine identifies future fraud topologies, uh, from millions of, of simulations that can be used to dynamically train, uh, new machine learning algorithms for enhanced fraud identification and context, um, uh, connects the dots within your data, using dynamic entity resolution, and advanced network analytics to create context around your customers. Um, this enables you to see the bigger picture and automatically assesses potential criminal beads behavior. >>Now let's go some of our, uh, customers, uh, and how they're using cloud caldera. Uh, first we'll talk about, uh, United overseas bank, or you will be, um, you'll be, is a leading full service bank in, uh, in Asia. It, uh, with, uh, a network of more than 500 offices in, in 19 countries and territories in Asia, Pacific, Western Europe and north America UA, um, UOB built a modern data platform on Cloudera that gives it the flexibility and speed to develop new AI and machine learning solutions and to create a data-driven enterprise. Um, you'll be set up, uh, set up it's big data analytics center in 2017. Uh, it was Singapore's first centralized big data unit, uh, within a bank to deepen the bank's data analytic capabilities and to use data insights to enhance, uh, the banks, uh, uh, performance essential to this work was implementing a platform that could cost efficiently, bring together data from dozens of separate systems and incorporate a range of unstructured data, including, uh, voice and text, um, using Cloudera CDP and machine learning. >>UOB gained a richer understanding of its customer preferences, uh, to help make their, their banking experience simpler, safer, and more reliable. Working with Cloudera UOB has a big data platform that gives business staff and data scientists faster access to relevant and quality data for, for self-service analytics, machine learning and, uh, emerging artificial intelligence solutions. Um, with new self-service analytics and machine learning driven insights, you'll be, uh, has realized improvements in, in digital banking, asset management, compliance, AML, and more, uh, advanced AML detection capabilities, help analysts detect suspicious transactions either based on hidden relationships of shell companies and, uh, high risk individuals, uh, with, uh, Cloudera and machine learning, uh, technologies. You you'll be, uh, was able to enhance AML detection and reduce the time to identify new links from months 2, 3, 3 weeks. >>Excellent mass let's speak about MasterCard. So MasterCard's principle businesses to process payments between banks and merchants and the credit issuing banks and credit unions of the purchasers who use the MasterCard brand debit and credit cards to make purchases MasterCard chose Cloudera enterprise for fraud detection, and to optimize their DW infrastructure, delivering deepens insights and best practices in big data security and compliance. Uh, next let's speak about, uh, bank Rakka yet, uh, in Indonesia or Bri. Um, it, VRI is one of the largest and oldest banks in Indonesia and engages in the provision of general banking services. Uh, it's headquartered in Jakarta Indonesia. Uh, Bri is well known for its focus on financing initiatives and serves over 75 million customers through it's more than 11,000 offices and rural service outposts. Uh, Bri required better insight to understand customer activity and identify fraudulent transactions. Uh, the bank needed a solid foundation that allowed it to leverage the power of advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to gain better understanding of customers and the market. >>Uh, Bri used, uh, Cloudera enterprise data platform to build an agile and reliable, predictive augmented intelligence solution, uh, to enhance its credit scoring system and to address the rising concern around data security from regulators, uh, and customers, uh, Bri developed a real-time fraud detection service, uh, powered by Cloudera and Kafka. Uh, Bri's data scientists developed a machine learning model for fraud detection by creating a behavioral scoring model based on customer savings, uh, loan transactions, deposits, payroll and other financial, um, uh, real-time time data. Uh, this led to improvements in its fraud detection and credit scoring capabilities, as well as the development of a, of a new digital microfinancing product, uh, with the enablement of real-time fraud detection, VRI was able to reduce the rate of fraud by 40%. Uh, it improved, uh, relationship manager productivity by two and a half fold. Uh, it improved the credit score scoring system to cut down on micro-financing loan processing times from two weeks to two days to now two minutes. So fraud prevention is a good area to start with a data focus. If you haven't already, it offers a quick return on investment, uh, and it's a focused area. That's not too entrenched across the company, uh, to learn more about fraud prevention, uh, go to kroger.com and to schedule, and you should schedule a meeting with Cloudera, uh, to learn even more. Uh, and with that, thank you for listening and thank you for your time. >>Welcome to the customer. Obsession begins with data session. Uh, thank you for, for attending. Um, at Cloudera, we believe that a custom session begins with, uh, with, with data, um, and, uh, you know, financial services is Cloudera is largest industry vertical. We have approximately 425 global financial services customers, uh, which consists of 82 out of a hundred of the largest global banks of which we have 27 that are globally systemic banks, uh, four out of the five top stock exchanges, eight out of the 10 top wealth management firms and all four of the top credit card networks. Uh, so as you can see most financial services institutions utilize Cloudera for data analytics and machine learning. Uh, we also have over 20 central banks and it doesn't or so financial regulators. So it's an incredible footprint, which glimpse Cloudera, lots of insight into the many innovations that our customers are coming up with. >>Customers have grown more independent and demanding. Uh, they want the ability to perform many functions on their own and, uh, be able to do it. Uh, he do them on their mobile devices, uh, in a recent Accenture study, more than 50% of customers, uh, are focused on, uh, improving their customer experience through more personalized offers and advice. The study found that 75% of people are actually willing to share their data for better personalized offers and more efficient and intuitive services to get it better, better understanding of your customers, use all the data available to develop a complete view of your customer and, uh, and better serve them. Uh, this also breaks down, uh, costly silos, uh, shares data in, in accordance with privacy laws and assists with regulatory advice. It's so different organizations are going to be at different points in their data analytics and AI journey. >>Uh, there are several degrees of streaming and batch data, both structured and unstructured. Uh, you need a platform that can handle both, uh, with common, with a common governance layer, um, near real time. And, uh, real-time sources help make data more relevant. So if you look at this graphic, looking at it from left to right, uh, normal streaming and batch data comes from core banking and, uh, and lending operations data in pretty much a structured format as financial institutions start to evolve. Uh, they start to ingest near real-time streaming data that comes not only from customers, but also from, from newsfeeds for example, and they start to capture more behavioral data that they can use to evolve their models, uh, and customer experience. Uh, ultimately they start to ingest more real time streaming data, not only, um, standard, uh, sources like market and transaction data, but also alternative sources such as social media and connected sources, such as wearable devices, uh, giving them more, more data, better data, uh, to extract intelligence and drive personalized actions based on data in real time at the right time, um, and use machine learning and AI, uh, to drive anomaly detection and protect and predict, uh, present potential outcomes. >>So this is another way to look at it. Um, this slide shows the progression of the big data journey as it relates to a customer experience example, um, the dark blue represents, um, visibility or understanding your customer. So we have a data warehouse and are starting to develop some analytics, uh, to know your customer and start to provide a better customer 360 experience. Uh, the medium blue area, uh, is a customer centric or where we learn, uh, the customer's behavior. Uh, at this point we're improving our analytics, uh, gathering more customer centric information to perform, uh, some more exploratory, uh, data sciences. And we can start to do things like cross sell or upsell based on the customer's behavior, which should improve, uh, customer retention. The light blue area is, uh, is proactive customer inter interactions, or where we now have the ability, uh, to predict customers needs and wants and improve our interaction with the customer, uh, using applied machine learning and, and AI, uh, the Cloudera data platform, um, you know, business use cases require enabling, uh, the end-to-end journey, which we referred to as the data life cycle, uh, what the data life cycle, what is the data life cycle that our customers want, uh, to take their data through, to enable the end to end data journey. >>If you ask our customers, they want different types of analytics, uh, for their diverse user bases to help them implement their, their, their use cases while managed by a centralized security and governance later layer. Uh, in other words, um, the data life cycle to them provides multifunction analytics, uh, at each stage, uh, within the data journey, uh, that, uh, integrated and centralized, uh, security, uh, and governance, for example, uh, enterprise data consists of real time and transactional type type data. Examples include, uh, click stream data, web logs, um, machine generated, data chat bots, um, call center interactions, uh, transactions, uh, within legacy applications, market data, et cetera. We need to manage, uh, that data life cycle, uh, to provide real enterprise data insights, uh, for use cases around enhanced them, personalized customer experience, um, customer journey analytics next best action, uh, sentiment and churn analytics market, uh, campaign optimization, uh, mortgage, uh, processing optimization and so on. >>Um, we bring a diverse set of data then, um, and then enrich it with other data about our customers and products, uh, provide reports and dashboards such as customer 360 and use predictions from machine models to provide, uh, business decisions and, and offers of, uh, different products and services to customers and maintain customer satisfaction, um, by using, um, sentiment and churn analytics. These examples show that, um, the whole data life cycle is involved, um, and, uh, is in continuous fashion in order to meet these types of use cases, uh, using a single cohesive platform that can be, uh, that can be served by CDP, uh, the data, the Cloudera data platform. >>Okay. Uh, let's talk about, uh, some of the experiences, uh, from our customers. Uh, first we'll talk about Bunco suntan there. Um, is a major global bank headquartered in Spain, uh, with, uh, major operations and subsidiaries all over Europe and north and, and south America. Uh, one of its subsidiaries, something there UK wanted to revolutionize the customer experience with the use of real time data and, uh, in app analytics, uh, for mobile users, however, like many financial institutions send them there had a, he had a, had a large number of legacy data warehouses spread across many business use, and it's within consistent data and different ways of calculating the same metrics, uh, leading to different results. As a result, the company couldn't get the comprehensive customer insights it needed. And, uh, and business staff often worked on multiple versions of the truth. Sometime there worked with Cloudera to improve a single data platform that could support all its workloads, including self-service analytics, uh, operational analytics and data science processes, processing processing, 10 million transactions daily or 30,000 transactions per second at peak times. >>And, uh, bringing together really, uh, nearly two to two petabytes of data. The platform provides unprecedented, uh, customer insight and business value across the organization, uh, over 80 cents. And there has realized impressive, uh, benefits spanning, uh, new revenues, cost savings and risk reductions, including creating analytics for, for corporate customers with near real-time shopping behavior, um, and, and helping identify 7,000 new corporate, uh, customer prospects, uh, reducing capital expenditures by, uh, 3.2 million annually and decreasing operating expenses by, uh, 650,000, um, enabling marketing to realize, uh, 2.4 million in annual savings on, on cash, on commercial transactions, um, and protecting 3.7 million customers from financial crime impacts through 95, new proactive control alerts, improving risk and capital calculations to reduce the amount of money. It must set aside, uh, as part of a, as part of risk mandates. Uh, for example, in one instance, the risk team was able to release a $5.2 million that it had withheld for non-performing credit card loans by properly identifying healthy accounts miscategorized as high risk next, uh, let's uh, talk about, uh, Rabobank. >>Um, Rabobank is one of the largest banks in the Netherlands, uh, with approximately 8.3 million customers. Uh, it was founded by farmers in the late 19th century and specializes in agricultural financing and sustainability oriented banking, uh, in order to help its customers become more self-sufficient and, uh, improve their financial situations such as debt settlement, uh, rebel bank needed to access, uh, to a varied mix of high quality, accurate, and timely customer data, the talent, uh, to provide this insight, however, was the ability to execute sophisticated and timely data analytics at scale Rabobank was also faced with the challenge of, uh, shortening time to market. Uh, it needed easier access to customer data sets to ensure that they were using and receiving the right financial support at the right time with, with, uh, data quality and speed of processing. Um, highlighted as two vital areas of improvement, Rabobank was looking to incorporate, um, or create new data in an environment that would not only allow the organization to create a centralized repository of high quality data, but also allow them to stream and, uh, conduct data analytics on the fly, uh, to create actionable insights and deliver a strong customer experience bank level Cloudera due to its ability to cope with heavy pressures on data processing and its capability of ingesting large quantities of real time streaming data. >>They were able to quickly create a new data lake that allowed for faster queries of both historical and real time data to analyze customer loan repayment patterns, uh, to up to the minute transaction records, um, Robert bank and, and its customers could now immediately access, uh, the valuable data needed to help them understand, um, the status of their financial situation in this enabled, uh, rebel bank to spot financial disasters before they happened, enabling them to gain deep and timely insights into which customers were at risk of defaulting on loans. Um, having established the foundation of a modern data architecture Rabobank is now able to run sophisticated machine learning algorithms and, uh, financial models, uh, to help customers manage, um, financial, uh, obligations, um, including, uh, long repayments and are able to generate accurate, uh, current real liquidity. I refuse, uh, next, uh, let's uh, speak about, um, uh, OVO. >>Uh, so OVO is the leading digital payment rewards and financial services platform in Indonesia, and is present in 115 million devices across the company across the country. Excuse me. Um, as the volume of, of products within Obos ecosystem increases, the ability to ensure marketing effectiveness is critical to avoid unnecessary waste of time and resources, unlike competitors, uh, banks, w which use traditional mass marketing, uh, to reach customers over, oh, decided to embark on a, on a bold new approach to connect with customers via, uh, ultra personalized marketing, uh, using the Cloudera stack. The team at OVO were able to implement a change point detection algorithm, uh, to discover customer life stage changes. This allowed OVO, uh, to, uh, build a segmentation model of one, uh, the contextual offer engine Bill's recommendation algorithms on top of the product, uh, including collaborative and context-based filters, uh, to detect changes in consumer consumption patterns. >>As a result, OVO has achieved a 15% increase in revenue, thanks to this, to this project, um, significant time savings through automation and eliminating the chance of human error and have reduced engineers workloads by, by 30%. Uh, next let's talk about, uh, bank Bri, uh, bank Bri is one of the largest and oldest, uh, banks in Indonesia, um, engaging in, in general banking services, uh, for its customers. Uh, they are headquartered in, in Jakarta Indonesia, uh, PR is a well-known, uh, for its, uh, focused on micro-financing initiative initiatives and serves over 75 million customers through more than 11,000 offices and rural outposts, um, Bri needed to gain better understanding of their customers and market, uh, to improve the efficiency of its operations, uh, reduce losses from non-performing loans and address the rising concern around data security from regulators and consumers, uh, through enhanced fraud detection. This would require the ability to analyze the vast amounts of, uh, historical financial data and use those insights, uh, to enhance operations and, uh, deliver better service. >>Um, Bri used Cloudera's enterprise data platform to build an agile and reliable, uh, predictive augmented intelligence solution. Uh, Bri was now able to analyze 124 years worth of historical financial data and use those insights to enhance its operations and deliver better services. Um, they were able to, uh, enhance their credit scoring system, um, the solution analyzes customer transaction data, and predicts the probability of a customer defaulting on, on payments. Um, the following month, it also alerts Bri's loan officers, um, to at-risk customers, prompting them to take the necessary action to reduce the likelihood of the net profit lost, uh, this resulted in improved credit, improved credit scoring system, uh, that cut down the approval of micro financing loans, uh, from two weeks to two days to, to two minutes and, uh, enhanced fraud detection. >>All right. Uh, this example shows a tabular representation, uh, the evolution of a customer retention use case, um, the evolution of data and analytics, uh, journey that, uh, that for that use case, uh, from aware, uh, text flirtation, uh, to optimization, to being transformative, uh, with every level, uh, data sources increase. And, uh, for the most part, uh, are, are less, less standard, more dynamic and less structured, but always adding more value, more insights into the customer, uh, allowing us to continuously improve our analytics, increase the velocity of the data we ingest, uh, from, from batch, uh, to, uh, near real time, uh, to real-time streaming, uh, the volume of data we ingest continually increases and we progress, uh, the value of the data on our customers, uh, is continuously improving, allowing us to interact more proactively and more efficiently. And, and with that, um, I would, uh, you know, ask you to consider and assess if you are using all the, uh, the data available to understand, uh, and service your customers, and to learn more about, about this, um, you know, visit cloudera.com and schedule a meeting with Cloudera to learn more. And with that, thank you for your time. And thank you for listening.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version. My name is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE. As the saying goes, follow the money. And with me to talk about HPE Financial Services and the value that it can bring to customers are two great guests, Brad, Shapiro's VP and managing director of the Enterprise Business at HPE Financial Services. And Paul Sheeran is Managing Director of Worldwide Channel and SMB for HPE Financial Services. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Come on in. >> Thanks Dave, we really appreciate you having us. >> Hi, Dave. >> So Brad, why don't you start us off? Give us the rundown on HPE Financial Services. What's the scope of your services? Should we think of you as a bank? And maybe you could talk about some of the things that you do beyond financing. >> Yeah, that sounds great. So look, we are so much more than banking. Our mission is to create investment capacity to help customers accelerate their transformation. And maybe you could think of us as kind of like a two-in-one partner. We're part-CIO, part-CFO. We kind of refer to ourselves as the CIFO, if you will. And we've got an expertise in a number of different areas. Of course, we'll start with financial. And yes, we offer financial services, and we do an awful lot of financial solutioning. In our portfolio, it's over 13 billion of assets that have been financed. So that is a core competency for us. But we're more than that. We focus also on the technology side of things. And we have expertise in asset management. And we deal with multiple generations of technologies and all major manufacturers as well, not just HPE, but we understand technology and all different types, all different ages of technology. And lastly, we play a pretty big role around sustainability. HPE takes a leadership position when it comes to sustainability. And a lot of our capabilities around the circular economy and putting assets back into reuse play an important role in not only helping customers financially, but helping them meet their sustainability goals. >> I want to come back and ask you more about that, but Paul, I wonder... First of all, I like the CIFO. That's a great, little nomenclature. But Paul, if you're a small business, the CEO is also sometimes the CIO, is sometimes the CFO, a lot of hats. So maybe you could talk about the role that you guys play for SMBs and also channel partners. Channel's a whole different ball game. They want to make margin, they want to grow their business. So maybe you could discuss some of the differences in that channel. >> Yeah. Sure, Dave. Well, starting with the SMB customer is really critical part of our portfolio. As you said, they cover all the roles, so the CIO, CFO. And their budgets can be tight. And especially given the last 18 months, if you read some of the data out there, the budgets are really constrained, especially for the SMB customer. So we try and do, and what our mission is, is what we call creating investment capacity, giving budgets a boost, bringing that vitality to the SMB customer base, to all our customers, but especially SMB customers to help them be able to invest in their digital transformations going forward. So crucial now that all our customers are able to continue to invest in technology. And the pandemic clearly brought it home how important having a digital capability it is. So SMB budgets are tight, and what we try and do is give them that boost, give them that vitality to actually continue to advance ahead and make the right investments for the future. And then from the partners, we actually do a four and a half thousand partners around the world. As you said, partners, they're also not only looking for financial solutions, but how do we differentiate ourselves is to try and help that partner move to a digital platform. We have invested heavily in our digital tools over the last couple of years. So in terms of offering solutions, it can be literally zero touch, low touch so the partner community can plug into our platforms. We also help them on that journey as a service. So technology is moving to as a service. People want to consume technology as a service like they do in the rest of their lives. It's all about subscription. And partners need help to be able to move to another service way. Hopefully GreenLake is the answer. So we support HPE GreenLake's offering. But there's different parts along the way for partners that we look to help them. And last but not least is helping them about asset management. As Brad said, it's all about the assets and understanding how those assets are managed. And helping the partners, having a relevant conversation with their customers as to how best to put in an asset management strategy for their customers. So three areas that we look to differentiate ourselves, Dave. >> We got a lot to talk about. So I want to come back and talk about as a service as well. But Brad, I want to go back to sustainability. So is it just the right thing to do? What's the financial case? Is it good business as well, and where do you fit? >> Yeah, so we believe that sustainability is good for the environment, obviously, but it's also good for business. And when you think about what we bring to the table and those assets back into reuse. So we handle between three and four million assets a year, and over 90% of those, we put back into reuse, with about 10% going into recycling. Putting those back into reuse, the customer that has those assets, we can monetize those assets and help accelerate transformation. So we monetize the asset, and we fund that transition in that transformation so we can really help customers get more budget than they were expecting by leveraging what they would deem to be end-of-life assets, but we find another home for those assets. So it definitely helps customers accelerate the transformation, while being good for the world, good for the environment. >> And that's true, Paul, for SMBs, just maybe on a smaller scale, and definitely makes sense for the channel, right? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. Sustainability now is key. Certainly key for our channel partners is moving from a nice-to-have to a must-have. So absolutely, totally agree. >> Yeah. And it's almost like gain sharing. I mean, sometimes we sell used equipment on eBay. It helps fund future business or future transformation. So let's get into the transformations. Everybody talks about digital transformation. Coming into the pandemic, everybody talked about it, but there was a lot of complacency. We've all seen the wrecking ball and the acceleration we talk about all the time, but what role does HPE Financial Services, and do you have any specific solutions that support digital transformations? Any examples there? Maybe Brad, you could start it off. >> Yeah. Yeah. So I'll start off, and then Paul, feel free to jump in. Look Dave, what I would say is the pandemic taught us that every company is a technology company. And where HPFS comes in is we're looking to provide the investment capacity, which is the lifeblood of a company's digital roadmap. So if you don't have the investment capacity, there is no transformation. So when something like the pandemic comes up, and you can't budget for a pandemic, and revenues are down and budgets are getting squeezed, you really need a partner to help you with that. How do you uncover that investment capacity? So we we've talked to lots of customers. We've also done some research, and the ESG group and analysts basically found that 73% of organizations, not surprisingly, either delayed or canceled projects around IT transformation because of all the uncertainty. So what we're looking to do is leverage all of our capabilities in a timely fashion. Last year, we announced the idea of payment holidays and deferred payments so you could keep your transformation going and not have to pay for it for a full year. And now we look at it as we're coming out of the pandemic. And what we're looking to help customers with is one, help them transition their existing infrastructure into a modernized consumption model like GreenLake. Also looking to accelerate the velocity of the transformation programs by leveraging our capabilities around asset upcycling, as well as our accelerated migration program. And last, looking at our existing customers really doing some financial engineering with them, so they can stretch their budgets more and expand the budget to be able to handle new projects. >> Yeah, I mean, Paul, I think Brad nailed it. You're right, their transformations are strategic. They had to fund VDI initiatives or endpoint security or find some cash to buy laptops to support people at home. People were pulling out their servers and sticking them in their trunk and driving to their home because they couldn't get laptops for awhile. And so what are you seeing now, Paul, particularly in the channel. And of course, again, SMBs were squeezed. Maybe they don't have the liquidity that some of these large public companies have. A lot of people just shored up their balance sheets during the pandemic. Maybe the SMB doesn't have as much advantage to do that. But what are you seeing in regard to the sort of bounce back of spend in more strategic areas like transformation? >> Well, I think what we're seeing right now and what we're hearing, especially for SMB customer, is cash is king. It's all about cash preservation. It's about making sure that... You'll hear some studies where some SMB customers only have three or four months left of cash in their kitty to keep their businesses running. So that is really top of mind now. Would they have to invest? If they don't want invest, they're going to be dead in the water to stay ahead of the competition. So what we're looking to do is really help those customers preserve that cash and reach and look for different ways about how to boost their budget. There's actually nothing better than an example. Brad laid out very nicely in terms of what we can do. Bringing it to life, not so much an SMB customer, but there is UNAD. And UNAD is a university in Columbia based in Bogota. And their mission is very simple, it's all about excellence and learning. But as they went into the pandemic, they needed to invest in their distance learning platforms to really help their students. And like most businesses, cash and budget was being squeezed. Revenues were tight. So it would've been very easy to postpone that investment. Well, what we did with UNAD and working with UNAD under IT team was firstly to understand their existing IT estate and really see what assets are being utilized, what are not being utilized, what assets have reached or ended their useful life. And you'd be amazed. And it's not just the data center, we can work right across their whole estate. So as well as the data center, we look at the PCs. To your point, David, we look at even their print estate. And we identified many, many assets that were being underutilized and other assets that were end of life. So we were able to take those assets back and actually release value and boosts UNAD's budget. And some of those assets could not. They had no value. And sustainability was top of their agenda as well. As you'd imagine, the university wanted to lead and show their students that sustainability is key. So we were able to take those assets back and actually recycle them in a very environmentally sound way. So that was the first step to actually inject some cash into their budgets. The next step then was to look at their existing financial contracts that they had in place where maybe some of their banks and actually restructured those contracts to actually give them additional capacity to invest right now in technology. And I'm delighted to say they partnered with the HPE team, I mean, Aruba, to actually continue their five-year roadmap and actually improved their distance learning platforms. So I just thought that was a really good example right now and in the current climate as to show when we work together with our customers, what's actually possible. >> So let's talk a little bit more about GreenLake. I mean, for decades, I mean, even if I go back to the '80s, I saw financial instruments to sort of rent essentially, but it's different. GreenLake, HPE, has pivoted its entire company to as a service. And I want to understand better what role HPE Financial Services plays in making that transition. It's obviously a crucial part of the financing piece, but Brad, maybe you could tell us a little bit more there. >> Yeah, sure. And I think the great thing about GreenLake is it's more than just a consumption model, it's really providing that cloud experience, on-prem, and being able for customers to really manage a hybrid cloud experience. But where HPEFS plays a role, again, it's around our knowledge and ability around assets. So we are underneath GreenLake, doing financial engineering, managing the assets. But the biggest thing, when you think about how does a customer transition? If they're in a traditional cash purchase paradigm, the cost of change and figuring out how to move into a new type of paradigm and new consumption model can be daunting. So HPFS works closely with our GreenLake team and the customer, and we can take those existing assets and look to accelerate the migration into a GreenLake. A great example of that, a public sector customer, Kern County, they were in that cash paradigm, they had lots of assets. Like most entities, they were under pressure from a budget perspective. Tax revenues were down for a couple years in a row. So not only did moving to a GreenLake model provide some cost savings, and cost savings are important, but it also allowed them to deliver the services they needed to their constituents because they had that pay for use type of flexibility. They didn't have a long delay in procuring and provisioning equipment when they needed to roll something out. And again, once again, HPFS was able to monetize their existing assets, roll those into a GreenLake solution and help self-fund that transformation and really accelerate it to get from that cash paradigm model to a new GreenLake consumption model. >> Paul, what about the channel? I mean, on the one hand, I could see the channels loving GreenLake because there's a lot of services involved, and it's sort of an ongoing drip of cash as opposed to the sort of big hit. But on the other hand, it's the ongoing drip of cash as opposed to the big hit. What's the conversations like with the channel? How is that going? I mean, clearly it's the future, but how do they see it? >> I wouldn't say a drip of cash. We would call it an in-use revenue where it's very predictable, which is actually also a good thing, rather than a sort of a one-and-done solution. So clearly, GreenLake is very important to our channel partners, and we're seeing some really good adoption across the world. Again, we underpin that. The other thing to say is a lot of channel partners, as you likely say, want as sell services and become service providers. And what we also do is support not just the data center, but also workplace and print. And what you'll see on the printing side for many, many years, the print partners have been selling a contractual type of model. But a lot of partners now are moving all of their core portfolio into as a service. And there's different parts. It's nearly a cash to as a service journey, and there's different parts of that ladder on the way. And we will look to help our partners get along that ladder and hopefully position GreenLake. But there's also more simpler solutions like subscription that we can position on that journey. So it's really helping that partner get the confidence and the financial wherewithal and the infrastructure to get on the as a service journey. >> How about solutions? I mean, you guys have had some recent announcements. Maybe Brad, you can take us through sort of what the highlights of those were. >> Sure. So yeah, the first announcement was really the example I just provided, which was how do we transition customers to GreenLake? So again, that's a really important step for many customers, and something that we can help them with is moving from that existing paradigm to GreenLake. The second is really helping customers create velocity to move their transformation programs faster. And we do that in a number of ways, but again, all around the asset in our asset management expertise, whether we look to put those assets back into reuse in their facility, or if we look to monetize those assets and put them into reuse with a different customer. Really, it's all around how do we accelerate the customers transformation as we come out of a pandemic. And then lastly, the offering is really focused on how can we help the customer look at existing budget and really financially engineer where they're spending their money to create new pools of budget and cash so they can fund new projects. So it's interesting because when I look at the customers that we're doing these things with, it really spans every industry. So we're dealing with financial services and insurance companies, communications and broadcasting, travel and hospitality, you name it, manufacturing. So the interesting thing is, while sometimes you come out with solutions that are very industry-specific, I think our circumstances today really span lots of industries, both in the commercial and the public sector. And we're finding that these offers are really relevant right now for customers. >> Let's zoom out for a bit. And Brad, let's start with you, and then Paul, I want to get your unique perspectives from the standpoint of SMB in the channel. Summarize your overall strategy in that context. And then I'm interested in, how important do you feel the HPE Financial Services is with regards... And of course, you guys are biased, but that's okay, I want to hear your bias view. How important is it in the grand scheme of actually doing business with HPE. And I'm interested in in why HPE and how much of a competitive advantage you bring relative to some of your major competitors. >> Yeah, sure. So look, the strategy, in my mind, I'll start with HPFS, it's really making sure that we're working closely with our customers, understanding their needs from a business perspective and what business outcomes they're trying to achieve and then marrying both the financial planning and the technology planning to help those customers deliver and achieve those business outcomes. Doing that, also in a way that is sustainable and is good for the environment and helps customers achieve their sustainability initiatives. So kind of marrying that financial technology and sustainability portion of it. From my perspective, I think HPE is a fantastic partner. One, we've been at GreenLake for quite a while, and it continues to evolve. The experiences that we can provide customers now are significantly advanced from when flex capacity came out years and years and years ago. So I really think if a customer took a look at GreenLake a few years ago, you need to keep looking at it because it really has evolved, really creates a unique experience. But I think it's the combination of our technology. We have great technology in our portfolio. We have a fantastic model in GreenLake, and then we have all of the financial engineering expertise around assets and lifecycles and how to get the most out of your IT investment. And we are a partner. If you have sustainability initiatives, I mean, HPE talks the talk, we walk the walk. We do all of this for ourselves, and then we bring those practices out and share best practices with customers. So I really think it's a great time to partner with HP if you're a customer. >> Right, thank you for that, Brad. Paul, what would you add for your constituents? >> Brad, said it beautifully. So just a couple of points I'd add in. From a partner perspective, we are actually in every corner of the world. So we have that global footprint. And then as you see, consolidation in the market, that's very important, not only for our customers, but also for our partners, more and more solutions are going cross border and involve different regions. And we look to make sure that we're globally consistent in how we work with our partners and work with our customers. And the final thing I'd say is we get very excited about supporting our HPE colleagues. But from a channel perspective, we actually also support HPI, HP Inc. You will recall, before separation, that the companies did. So we also support the workplace and print environments, plus third party vendors, which again, is important for the channel community. Why do you need a one-stop shell? And where you'll often have a mixed technology and the solution. So we're there for that as well and always have been. And I think the partner community love our consistency there >> It's a nice arrow when you quiver. And of course we've seen laptop demand explode. And it looks like it's going to sustain for a while here. It's hard to predict, but Paul, still with you, tell us, thinking about the future, what's getting you jazzed up? >> Well, I said we have a global footprint, and every country is in a different place right now. As we sort of come out of the pandemic, some countries are still in the midst of it. But what gets me jazzed up and what gets me excited is the sense of optimism. I think we're sort of figured out how to navigate our way out of this pandemic and the current environment. And customers all recognize the need to invest in technology. Technology is the way forward. So that means having the capacity, investment capacity, the investment vitality, to make that investment. So what gets me excited is what we do is important and we're there to help. >> Great. Thank you. And then Brad, two-part question for you to bring us home. So what are you excited about, and what do you got going at Discover? >> So in terms of my excitement, I think Paul said it well, every company is a technology company. And when we see that everybody is going through a digital transformation, quite frankly, we at HPEFS are going through our own digital transformation. Paul mentioned earlier about Technomics. We have omni-channel ways of engaging with us that are consistent. We're looking at our customer and partner experience and continuing to improve those. So we're not resting on our laurels in what we've done in the past, we continue to change, to modernize, to create new and better ways of doing business with our customer base. So the exciting part, for me, is that change that comes with innovation and technology. And I just think HPE is a great place to be right now with all of that innovation going on. So you asked about Discover. So we're really excited. We've got a spotlight with Irv Rothman focused on investment agility and key to growth and regeneration. So that's really exciting. We have a few breakouts, making technology a force for good, getting back on track that create the investment vitality to take on the world and investment strategies to accelerate innovation in a disruptive world. So really excited about that. And then last, we've got some demos. We have a live interactive demo on our technology renewal center, as well as some on-demand demos of those renewal centers as well. So we've got a lot going on at Discover, and we're really excited about it. >> Great. Gentlemen, thank you for that. So I mean, look, cost of capital is low, but to have a technology partner with you that's also has financial expertise, that, to me, is a killer combination. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate your time. >> Dave, thanks for having us. >> Thanks, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of HPE Discover 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there for more great content. (upbeat music)

>>Yeah. >>Okay. Now we're going to look deeper into the intersection of technology and money and actually a force for good mobile. And the infrastructure around it has made sending money as easy as sending a text. But the capabilities that enable this to happen are quite amazing, especially because as users, we don't see the underlying complexity of the transactions. We just enjoy the benefits. And there's many parts of the world that historically have not been able to enjoy the benefits. And the ecosystems that are developing around these new platforms are truly transformative. And with me to explain, the business impacts of these innovations is all a person who is the head of mobile financial services at Ericsson Ola. Welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. Dave, Thank you for having me here in the program and really excited to tell me. Tell us about the product that we have within Ericsson. >>Okay, well, let's get right into it. I mean, your firm has developed the Ericsson wallet platform. What is that? Yes, >>so? So the wallet platform is one of the product, but, I mean, you can say offer here by Ericsson and the platform is built on enabled financial services not for only the bank segment, but also for the unbanked. And we have, you know, the function that we are providing as such Here is, uh, both transfer the service provided payment. You have the cash in the cash out. You have a lot of other feature that we kind of a neighbor through the ecosystem as such. And, uh, I would really like you say, to emphasize on on the use, and they really I'll say, uh, connectivity that we have in this platform here because, uh, looking at you can say the pandemic as such here. Now, we really have made you can say tremendous Shane here through all the functions etcetera feature that we have here. >>Yeah, so, I mean, I'm surrounded by banks in Massachusetts, right? No problem. I'm Boston, right? So But there's a lot of places in the world that that aren't I take for granted some of the capabilities that are there, but so part of this is to enable people who don't have access to those types of services. So maybe you could talk about that and talk about some of the things that you're enabling with the platform, >>right? So So you just think of their You can say unbanked people here, But we have across the emerging market. I think we have one point, you know, seven billion unbanked people here, but we actually can, through wallet platform enabled through getting a bank account, etcetera, and so on here and what we're actually providing you can say in this, uh, this feature is here is that you can pay your electricity bill, for example, Here, you can pay your your bill and you you can go through merchants. You can do the cashed out. You can do multiple thing here, just like I mean to to enable the the question that financial inclusion as well. So I mean I mean from from my point of view, where we're sitting, as I said, we also sitting in Sweden, we have bank account. We have something called swish where we send you can say money back, back and forward between the family, etcetera. So, on this type of transaction, we can and have enabled for all you can say, the user that I come across the the platform here and the kind of growth that we have within this usage here and and we're seeing also. I mean, we leverage here to get with a speed today on a fantastic scale that we actually have here with our our both you can say feature performers going, I will say, Really in in in in a in the direction that we couldn't imagine here you can say a few years back here. So it is fantastic transformation that we undergo here through through the platform of the technology that we have. >>You know, it reminds me of sort of the early days of mobile people talked about being able to connect, you know, remote users in places like Africa or other parts of the world that that haven't been able to enjoy things like a landline. Uh, and so I presume you're seeing a lot of interest in in those types of regions. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >>Yeah. Yeah, correct. I mean, I mean, we we see all of this region here, but for for example, Uh uh. Now, we we, uh we were not only entering, you can say the the, uh, specifically the African region, but also you can say the Middle East and the the the A C a specific and also actually Latin America. I mean, a lot of this country here are looking into you can say the expansion, how they can evolve. You can say the financial inclusion from what they have today, when they are, and you can say firm telecom provider, they would like to have an asset of different use case here, and we're seeing that transformation. But we have right now from just voice, you can say SMS and five year etcetera so on. This is the platform that we have to sort of enable the transaction for for a mobile financial system. But we would like also to see that the kind of operator or evolving the business with much more feature here. And this is another. You can say I was attraction to attract the user with the mobile transfer system. So we we we see this kind of expanding very heavily in this this kind of market. >>I think this is really transformative. I mean, in terms of people's lives. I mean, first of all, you're talking about the convenience of being able to move money as bits as opposed to paper, but as well I would think supporting entrepreneurship and business is getting started. I mean, there's a whole set of cultural and societal impacts that that you're having. How do you see that >>we we also providing you say I mean the world to such is also supporting, say microloans and need as an entrepreneur is to sort of start you can say any kind of company, but you need to kind of business around here. So we have seen that we have sort of enterprise services across function and the whole asset that we are that we are into today >>talking a little bit >>about >>partnerships and the ecosystems. I know you've got big partnerships with HPD. We're going to get to that. They're kind of a technology operator, but But what about, you know, other partnerships, like, I'm imagining that if I'm gonna pay my my my bill with this, you've got other providers that got to connect into your platform. So So how are those ecosystem partnerships evolving? >>Well, we are kind of the enabler, but we are providing to the operator the partnerships is then going through the operator. It could be any kind of you can say external instrument that we have today and the kind of you can go directly to the bank. You can go directly to any court provider. You have these amongst the court, etcetera and so on. But these are all partners of the and you can stay connected through there. You can say operator assault today. So what we're doing actually, with our platform is to kind of make the enable them to kind of provide the food ecosystem as partnership to to operate as us today. Here, So that that's kind of the baseline that we see how you can say we are sort of supporting of building the full ecosystem around the platform in order to connect here has come to both the like, the card. As I said here, the merchant, the bank, any kind of type of you can say I will say service provider here, but that we can see could enable the ecosystem >>okay. And so I mean, I don't want to geek out here, but it sounds like it's an open system that my developers can plug into through a p i s They're not gonna throw cold water on that. They're going to embrace it. So yeah, this is actually easy for me to integrate with, Is that correct? >>Correct. Correct. And they open API that we're actually providing today. I think that you can say there are five thousands of you can say developer, just you can say connecting to our system. And actually, we're also providing both sandbox and and other application in order to support this developers in order to to kind of create this ecosystem here. So it's a multiple things that we we see through you can say, hear, hear the both the partners partnership the open API or you can say the development that is doing through through the channels. So I mean, it's a fascinating, amazing development that we see up front here right now. >>Now, what's H. P s role in all this? What are they providing? How are you partnering with them? >>So it's very good question, I would say. And we we look back, you can say and we we have evaluated a lot of you say that the provider fruit year here, And, uh, you can just imagine the the kind of, uh, stability that we need to provide when it comes to the financial inclusion system here because what we need to have a very strong uptake of, uh, making sure that we don't both go with the performance and the stability and what we have seen in our lab is that hypocrisy today is we have domestically evolved how you can say our stability assessed on the system. And right now we are leveraging the the dog is with the microservices here, together with HV on the platform that you're providing. So I will say that the transformation we have done in the stability that we have get through the food. You can say HP system is really fantastic at the moment. >>Well, and you know, I'm no security expert, but I talked to a lot of security experts and what I what I do know is they tell me that that you can't just bolt security on. It's got to be designed in from the start. I would imagine that that's part of the HPD partnership. But what about security? Can I fully trust this platform >>now? It's It's very, very valid question. I would say we we have one of the most you can say secure system here were also running multiple external. You can say, uh, system validation there is called The PNDs s certification is a certification, But we we have external auditor, you can say trying to breach the system. Look at the process that we are developing making sure that we have You can say all of you can say the documentation really in shape and seeing that we follow the procedure when we are both developing the code and and also when we're looking into all the a p I s that were actually exposed to to to our end users. So I would say that we haven't had any bridge on our system and we we really working tightly. I'll say both together with I'll say, H b and and of course, the the customer, such and? And every time we do a Lawrence, we also make you can say final security validation on the system here in order to sort of see that we have and and two and because the application that is completely secure, So so that that that that's a very, very important topic. For from our point of view, >>Yeah, because it's the usual. I don't even want to think about that. Like I set up front. It's It's got to be hidden from me, all that complexity. But there's sort of the same question around compliance and privacy. I mean, often security, privacy. There's sort of two sides of the same coin, but compliance privacy You've got to worry about K. Y. C Know your customer? Uh, there's a lot of complexity around that, and and so that's another key piece. >>Mhm Now. Like you said, the K Y C is an important part that we have fully support in our system and we validate. You can say all the uses We we also are running, You can say with our credit scoring companies that the you can say our operator or are partnering with. So this combined, you can say, with both the K Y C and then and the credit scoring. But there were performing that. Let's make us a very you can say unique, stable platform as such. >>Okay, last question is, is what about going forward? What's the road map look like? What can you share? What should we expect going forward in terms of the impact that this will have on society and how the technology will evolve. >>Well, what is he going forward? And that's a very interesting question, because what we what we see right now is how we we we kind of have changed the life for for so many. You can say unbanked people here and we would like to have You can say, uh, any kind of assets that going forward here, any kind of you can see that the digital currency is a bouldering through both government. You can see over top players like Google. You can say, What's up all of these things. Here we want to be the one, but also connecting. You can say this type of platform together and see that we could be the heart of the ecosystem going forward here, independent in what kind of you can say customer we're aiming for. So I would say this This is kind of the role that we will play in the future here, depending on what kind of currency it would be. So it's very interesting future we see. With this, you can say abroad digital currency in the market and the trends that we are now right now, evolving on >>very exciting when we're talking about elevating, you know, potentially billions of people all, uh, thanks very much for sharing this innovation with the audience. And best of luck with this incredible platform. Congratulations. >>Thank you so much, Dave. And once again, thank you for having me here, and I'll talk to you soon again. Thank you. >>Thank you. It's been our pleasure. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Valenti. >>Yeah. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Okay.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and back in 2013, when it was becoming pretty obvious that the cloud was going to have a major impact on our industry, the IT industry, I wrote at the time that the way incumbents were going to have to compete was to really go into vertical markets and build ecosystems for their own clouds, and that's exactly what IBM did late last year, when it announced a major partnership with Bank of America in the financial services cloud, and guess what, Hillery Hunter is back in the house, she's the vice president and CTO of the IBM cloud, and an IBM fellow, Hillery, great to see you again, thanks for coming back on. >> Thanks so much for having me again, always a pleasure to be here. >> So we had an awesome conversation, I think we got into the FS cloud a little bit, but as I was saying, you guys announced last year, Bank of America, but let me start here. Why does the industry need a financial services cloud? >> Yeah, you know, it's key that we ground ourselves in that question of why a financial services cloud, and I think it really goes back to the sensitivity of the workloads and the data that that industry stewards. The financial services industry stewards the data of millions and millions of customers, and they are heavily regulated because of that, and they handle very high value transactions, and being able to take that context and translate that into what does it mean to do high value transactions, sensitive data, consumer data computing, also with all those benefits of elasticity and the value proposition of different deployment locations, is really what financial cloud is about. And those needs of that industry are a little bit different, the regulations are higher, the bar and data protection is higher, and the need to interlock across workload characteristics and the cloud deployment is a bit different. And so, we are bringing what we know about that industry to bear in the context also of cloud computing. >> Okay, so you're making some new announcements, there's some hard news here, but I want to know, if you're an executive, or business leader in the financial services industry, what's in it for me in these announcements? >> Yeah, what's in it for you is that we are moving into the next phase of financial services cloud in making the policy framework that has been developed through an enormous amount of work available to additional industry participants, and we're also moving into a phase of global expansion, and so being able to take this value proposition of an end to end considered secure and confine environment for financial services, out to more players in the industry, out to additional geographies and deployment locations, it's an exciting moment because everyone's really not looking just for a cloud, but they're looking for a choice of deployment locations, they're looking to move more workload to the cloud, and this is really about providing a cloud solution that more workload can move to, not just the first couple phases of analytics and things like that, but also moving into more transformation of the core of banking and the core of banking business, so it is about getting more workload to the cloud, getting that done faster, and getting it done at a net improved security and compliance posture. >> Got it, so I want to ask you about some learnings, now you're the double whammy of learnings here. When you announced the collaboration with B of A, obviously one of the top banks of the world, you've obviously made some progress since then, but the other part of that whammy was COVID. So what did you learn from the collaboration with B of A, and have you guys, how have you expanded your thinking BC, from before COVID, versus AC, after COVID? >> Yeah, you know, the initial motivation for this program was about having trust and transparency in public cloud, and having a public cloud suited also to sensitive and even core banking workloads. We have seen this conversation and the need for it and the urgency for it only pick up since COVID. A lot of things in the world kind of took a pause, but cloud computing really accelerated. We're seeing that businesses need to digitally transform their banking, so core banking transformation is a very hot topic. They need to deal with elasticity, we worked with banks during COVID that were having to suddenly stand up their national equivalent of the Payroll Protection Program. Banks that had to suddenly have three times the elasticity, because all of a sudden consumers were interacting with them purely digitally. And cloud can enable all of those kind of things, and so COVID has really accelerated the motivation toward banking in the cloud, and also toward core banking transformation, which is at the heart of setting a very high security bar in public cloud, to be able to also enable those kind of workloads. >> Yeah, so many changes as a result of COVID, I mean the volume of loans, like you said, everything was digital. I know a lot of older people that always still like to go into the bank, that like to see people, and they knew people and people knew them, well they had no choice but to go digital, so that's huge, if you didn't have a digital solution, and cloud is fundamental in that equation. But let's get into it a little bit more. We talked a little about this at IBM Think, but what are the key attributes that make the IBM financial services cloud suitable for financial services, is it the certifications, I wonder if you could add some color there. >> Yeah, so the key elements of the financial services cloud program are number one, a policy framework, which is a set of controls that are customized to the financial services industry, so this isn't about some existing standard, this is a customization of controls and security for the financial services industry, and that's a major element of what we're announcing right now. In addition to the policy framework is also the way that the different elements of the industry and of regulatory expertise are coming together, so this cloud, and these public cloud offerings, were co-developed and co-designed with IBM Promontory, with IBM Security Services that work with banks, with our anchor partner, and moving forward, we'll be advised by an advisory council of CSOs who have that day to day experience with security and with regulations. And so that is also a very unique context for not this being just a point in time with a policy framework, but being an ongoing initiative that will stay up to date, as security concerns and as regulatory concerns change. And the third aspect is a really unique set of technologies that make all of that possible, so you have to define how the cloud is going to be secure, and then you have to actually do it, and the unique capabilities that we have in IBM public cloud that have enabled this program include a number of things, but amongst them, the industry's highest standard for data protection, with our FIPS-140-2 Level 4 based key protect service, it includes capabilities that we'll be releasing through our acquisition of Spanugo around cloud security and compliance posture management, mapped back to that context of financial services. And so it's really three things, it's a policy framework custom and optimized for the financial services industry, the forward evolution of that through industry expertise, and participation of multi parties in that, and then core technologies that enable folks to accomplish that security posture through data protection, through cloud security posture management, et cetera. >> I forgot about the Promontory, you guys made that acquisition several years ago, that's a nice little feature of the FS cloud. But I want to ask, how hard is it to get these certifications? I mean it's obviously not a layup. Lot of work, lot of time, my reason of my question, is this a moat for you, as you guys start to scale? How difficult is it? >> Yeah, so we have been putting in the time and effort, and so that's why this is an exciting moment for us with the initial work product of this effort. And so our intention really is not for that to be a moat, but for us having traversed the moat, to now have a bridge there through the methodology that we built, through the control framework that we built, for others to now get across that moat. And so this is really about taking what is an extensive amount of work, and an extensive amount of expertise, IBM Promontory, you just mentioned, but they monitor over 70 regulatory obligations in over 20 jurisdictions globally, right? I mean this is a tremendous depth of expertise, and so having crossed the moat, and having built the bridge across it, this is where we can then help others to save time in this process of adopting public cloud for further workloads. >> You've mentioned workloads, you've talked about core financial workloads, but maybe give us a little insight on what type of workloads are the most suitable for the financial services cloud, because let's face it, most of the hardcore mission-critical workloads haven't moved, actually probably none of 'em have moved to the cloud, you kind of referenced that before. Ginni Rometty talks about that all the time. But what are the right workload strategic fits for your cloud? >> Yeah, you know you mentioned Ginni Rometty, and so I'll take a quick note there from some of the language that you'll hear her use, she talks about, there was chapter one of the cloud journey, and stuff that was on less sensitive data, analytics, some things on public information, were certainly done, also in finance and also in regulated industries in the cloud. And she talks about chapter two, chapter two being mission-critical workloads. And this program really is the definition of chapter two for the financial services industry. It is the enabling expertise, the enabling control set, the enabling security technologies, the enabling cloud services, for that chapter two, right, for that next layer of adoption of things that had been kept behind the firewall, had been kept in a private cloud context, can now be considered also for public cloud. And so easing that adoption, streamlining that process, et cetera, is really what we're looking to accomplish. >> I mean obviously IBM, huge presence in the banking community, is this really for just big banks? What about the ecosystem, what do you got in there for ISVs and SaaS providers? >> Yeah, you know, you asked me a question at the beginning here about COVID and what's happened, and I think, the transformation of ISV providers to become SaaS providers, the expansion of their capabilities being needed in payments and digital client experiences and such, also for regionals and second and third tier banking institutions and such, is as much of what is happening right now as anything else, amongst the first tiers, because there's just as much pressure for transformation and digital consumer experience, and other things like that, also in the regionals and second and third tiers. So part of our announcement is around the ecosystem of partners that we have now for the financial services cloud program. And that includes ISVs and SaaS providers that are servicing many different types of needs of institutions large and small, so we're seeing those that are servicing core banking, and payments, those that are servicing analytics use cases for this industry, and even HR function, just because of that concern about stewarding data well for these industries and those first tier banks, and so that transition to digital, that drive to infuse AI capabilities, the need to transform core banking, is something that's very much also happening within the ISV and SaaS providers, and we're thrilled with the wide variety of partner base that we're seeing develop there within our ecosystem for this program. >> I was talking to a CIO friend of mine several years ago, and he said to me, "You know, this idea of lifting and shifting, "it's fine, you get little cost savings, maybe, "but unless you change your operating model "and you drive an innovation agenda, "you really aren't going to get the type "of telephone number returns from cloud "that you would want or expect." So my question is around innovation, and we've said many times in theCUBE that the new innovation cocktail, it's not Moore's law anymore, it's the combination of data applying machine intelligence and then the cloud, and the reason why the cloud is important is scale, okay, there's maybe a little bit of cost as well, but it's also innovation. It's the ability to attract people into an ecosystem, and that resonates with line of business. If your cloud is just about making IT's life better, well that's nice, but what's in this announcement and in this initiative for the line of business? >> Yeah, it is all about the workloads. I always say that to me the cloud journey is about, number one your platform, which is the thing onto which you modernize. It is what are you going to get out of moving to containers, what are you going to get out of moving to microservices, how does that help all of those cloud metrics that you mentioned? But number two, it's about the workload, right, which workloads are we talking about, how will they deliver, how will those workloads be able to because of cloud deliver not just TCO but improvement in customer experience, how will those workloads be able to meet elasticity, resiliency, cybersecurity concerns, changes in the way the workforce is working these days, et cetera. And from the line of business perspective, there is a tremendous need to consume, for example, fintech-based innovation. But a lot of folks have struggled to move past POCs because of concerns about security and compliance, for those deployment scenarios, and so being able to bring the ISVs and SaaS providers, and then also fintechs into an ecosystem with a prescriptive and proactive security and compliance context is really what we're all about here. And that will enable a flourishing of adoption of innovation. >> You know, I always love to talk about the competition on these episodes. But I want to ask differentiation, how different is this, can I just go to any cloud supplier and get this, will I eventually be able to, what's IBM's differentiation, Hillery? >> Yeah, so you want to think of it that, in financial services, you are concerned, and you have to be concerned about everything. You have to be concerned about things into the details of the cloud itself, you have to be concerned about things that are related to the behavior and the permissions of your developers in that environment. Financial services cloud really has to be an end to end, soup to nuts conversation, and so this is a program of our public cloud, where end to end, we can stand behind and provide trust and resiliency and this policy framework, end to end within an environment that can be trusted for mission-critical workload. And so when we look at differentiation, our investments are in bringing together IBM's expertise all the way going back to regulations and security consulting that we've been doing for decades in this industry, applying that to that cloud context, taking capabilities that are developed all the way down into the transistors, investments we've made even into the silicon around how cryptography is done, bringing that into the cloud context. And so having brought those things together into our public cloud context, that's how we're able to solution this in a different way, because it really is end to end about the expertise, from all of that regulatory advising, that security context, all the way down into the silicon and the transistors, and I think that's a very unique value proposition, as a cloud provider, it's a tremendous opportunity for us to bring together those pieces. And to continue to be a trusted partner to these companies that we have long been a trusted partner of. >> Now of course you guys have a relationship with VMware, you were the first, actually, to announce a VMware cloud relationship. And so let's say, okay, I got some VMware workloads, I move 'em into your FS cloud. Make sure that I've got the security and compliance checked. Six months down the road, so I've done that sort of first step, what's next for me, is that the end, or are there other things on my journey? >> Yeah, so absolutely, I mean VMware is part of what we are solution financial services clients to, but also cloud-native, and OpenShift, containerization, that modernization journey, is an ongoing journey for everyone, and so to your point of what's next, we're seeing a continual conversation of balancing lift and shift and modernization across workloads, and there are different reasons at different points in time, for people to consider that. I think the key is that they trust where they are taking that data, and whatever the form is that the workload goes, it needs to be in the context of that trust around the data in a security context, and so we're absolutely seeing everything, honestly, from financial services institutions looking to engage with us, also in our new research innovation lab, where we're engaging directly with financial services clients that are trying to work through this differentiation, is it virtualization, is it containerization, is it even serverless? What is the right and most effective balance of how workloads are programmed and run for the next generation of banking. >> You know, Hillery, I've been doing a lot of interviews in the last decade, and it's been interesting to see the ascendancy of cloud, of course, but also the change in perception, particularly in financial services, in the early days of cloud, cloud was an evil word. The C that should not be named. And so I want to understand if I'm, and of course COVID has also changed the perception, because if you weren't digital and you didn't have cloud, you couldn't really transact businesses as well, you didn't have that business resiliency. So, what if I'm a financial services person now, okay, I'm through the knothole, I want to get started, where do I start? >> Yeah, well call us first, but past that, I think that the conversations, the first conversations that we're having with our clients are, number one, do you have an architecture? So is cloud not just a place, like I like to say, but is cloud a plan, is there an architectural plan to enable you to have consistency, for example, in your developer experience between your private cloud environment and your public cloud environment? Architecturally are there those foundational choices around common services about being able to deploy capabilities in one location, and develop them in another, et cetera. All those value propositions of what we have been creating around OpenShift and Cloud Paks in our public cloud, and consistency across different environments and such, I think that's the first thing to start with is architecting a cloud, not accidental usage of multiple environments, but architecting use of multiple environments. And then I think the second conversation is to make a security and compliance plan that is going to be robust enough to withstand even the intense scrutiny of a regulated industry CCO and risk team, and so that's the other foundational conversation that we're having with our clients, and helping them with, so we can provide services and reference architectures, and all that other kind of thing, to enable them to stabilize planning on both fronts, both architecturally for what cloud means in its entirety, not just a cloud, but in its entirety, all clouds, multicloud, hybrid cloud, et cetera. And then secondly, then, a comprehensive security plan for that public cloud choice, and that's what we're really locking down with this policy framework, is bringing standardization on that for public cloud. >> Well, lot of innovation for the financial services community, which is again your wheelhouse. I wrote a piece right around Think that IBM's future rests on its innovation agenda, and I'm glad you brought up the notion of private, public, and then the whole hybrid thing, because I see OpenShift as a key, and RedHat as a key enabler of that across whether it's cloud, on-prem, edge, across multiple clouds. That's an ambitious agenda, as somebody who's responsible for cloud. That is something that is real innovation, and really differentiable I think, in the marketplace, and probably pretty expensive to build out across all those different platforms. >> Yeah, it is, but I think on the word innovation, my mind, as an IBMer, goes to the IBM research division. Thousands of researchers globally, and they've very much been a part of this journey with us. The journey with us on containerization, the journey on workload modernization from monolith to microservices, the journey of our public cloud, and now also very much a part of our work in financial services, so our research division is this incredible gift and asset that we have, that is working with us also on our cloud security and compliance posture management, that security and compliance control center that we're talking about in this announcement, et cetera, and so them being a part of this innovation stream for us is a really exciting part, again, of bringing together all these different pieces that IBM has to offer in this space to make it all stack up, to be a cloud for financial services. >> I got a couple of little housekeeping items before we close here. This is announced for the US first, right? What about other regions, first of all, is that correct, and what about other regions? >> That's correct, and we are also announcing additional participation of global banking partners as well in this announcement. And so this is also again our initial public statement of our expansion past the US. >> Last question, so just give us a glimpse of the future, where do you want to be in a few years, thinking about let's say three years down the road, what's that outcome look like? >> Yeah, you know I think that three years from now, we would love to see that people are able to make a decision, going back to your question about the line of business owners, make a decision about what they're trying to accomplish with a workload, and not be held back by security and compliance concerns in terms of putting that workload where it needs to be, where it will be most efficient, and where it can be embraced by a set of cloud capabilities that enable it to move in a competitive pace forward, infusing AI into everything that is done. Leveraging the latest in technologies, and serverless computing and all these other kind of things that can facilitate a line of business delivering more value so that cloud really continues, but also realizes its promises in that chapter two version of the story, also for regulated industries and also for their mission-critical workloads. >> Well Hillery, good luck with this, I mean congratulations on the progress that you've made, really since you guys announced this late last year, and really excited to see this start to take off, and you're a great guest, love having you on, thank you so much. >> Thanks so much for having me, pleasure talking to you as always. >> All right, cheers. And thank you everybody for watching, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (calm music)

(fast intro music) >> Narrator: From London England, it's the Cube, covering Coupa Inspire 19 EMEA. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey, welcome to The Cube. Lisa Martin coming to you from Coupa Inspire 19 in London. Pleased to welcome one of Coupa's spend setters, joining me now is James Wagstaff, the chief procurement officer of Provident. James, welcome to the Cube. >> Hello, Lisa, nice to be here. >> So you had a very busy day. Thank you for taking some time to talk to me about Provident, what you doing with Coupa. But give our audience an overview of Provident and what you guys do and deliver to your customers. >> Very good, so Provident is a ftse 250 UK financial services business. It lends money to people without access to mainstream lending. Um, so it's real focus is to do that in a responsible, caring way. So if you can't borrow money from Barclays or HSBC, then Provident is a company that will help you get back to access to that mainstream market. >> Individuals as well as like small businesses? >> Consumers, around two million people in the UK currently use Provident, either the credit card or our home credit or our car leasing business. >> Okay, so how long have you been there? >> I have been at Provident now since April of 2018. >> Okay. >> So we're coming up now to, I think 19 months, and we put Coupa into the bank, which is the credit card business in April or April/May. >> Okay talk to me, though, about about your journey in business and finance. One of the things I read about you is that you were encouraged from an early age to really understand all aspects of a business from operations to finance to marketing to truly provide value through procurement. Talk to me about the history there that you have. >> So I'm a big fan of mentor programs. So I think everyone should have a mentor, and I lucked into mine, a chap called Terry, who, for reasons best known to him, took me under his wing. I was quite old when I came to procurement. I was around late 20s, maybe 30, and he had a vision about what great procurement looked like, and it was a holistic view. So procurement at its worst can be very tactical, very cost focused, and Terry was very focused on the bigger picture, about top-line growth not just bottom line, and right from day one, he seeded that in me, and it's been the strength of my career. So I owe Terry, Terry Western, if he's watching, I owe Terry, I owe Terry everything for that. And then I spent the last 10 years as an expat. So prior to Provident, I had three years as the group CPI for VimpelCom, which is the Russian equivalent of Vodafone or AT&T, who have businesses throughout Soviet Union, CIS, and Asia-Pac. And then seven years with Huawei, who are China's largest private company, telecoms company, and I was traveling around the world on the sales side facing procurement. So that was a very sobering enlightening experience to see procurement from the supplier side of the table, and I think it's made me a different procurement person as a result in terms of the way the I treat people and relate to people. So that holistic nature combined with, I think, a very business-centric view of what procurement should do. >> Interesting, though, that you that you said, I got a late start in procurement, but your start was founded upon someone giving you very solid advice of look beyond that because this is an element of the business that can, somebody that clearly was seeing how transformative, but also how it was important for procurement to partner and understand different requirements and needs within each division within an organization, so it sounds like you didn't really grow up in that traditional siloed approach of procurement. >> I did not, and I think that for me it makes my life interesting. So I think if you're in procurement and the danger is you become quite siloed, you're very narrow, and I did my MBA quite recently while I was traveling just to get that bigger perspective. It makes the job fun. I mean, I think you know you can negotiate contract after contract after contract, but it's the context of what that's doing for the business. And I think when I looked at Coupa as a system, it was with that in mind. So looking at Coupa, not from the perspective of what it did for procurement, but how it was for end-user customers. So as a service, was it really, really simple to use? Did it feel like an Amazon shopping experience? Because that drives adoption, and if you can get people wanting to use the system because it's easy, then the data's in the system, and then the data's in the system you can do something with it. So you're not, you're not fighting that adoption issue that you would be on a lot of systems. So if you go to some of the big ERP systems, they can be really hard for people to change and adopt, and Coupa's not been like that. It's been relatively easy. >> Interesting that you talk about it as it needs to be as simple as an Amazon marketplace. As consumers we're so used to that, right. I mean, people transact daily and get fulfillment of whatever product or service they're ordering from Amazon within... Sometimes it's within an hour or two. So we have this expectation and this demand. To your point, though, about wanting to have software that would be as easy for your teams to take up, that consumer effect. Talk to me about that as an influence. Because you know, kind of right away experience with other systems that might be bigger legacy systems that are challenging to get folks to use because they're not that intuitive. Did you know right away when you came into Provident that I need to have something that is more consumer-like. >> I knew that we needed a system and because as a regulated industry, we had to control our spend. So the fact that we needed a procurement system was a given, so then the choice is what do you buy? I think you don't really need a big ERP unless you really want to spend a lot of money on assistant inspirations and complexity. So your then into the mid-market space. And, um, there's a lot of vendors out there that have had an on-premise model, been around a long time, but you can feel that when you use it. So I didn't do a paper-based RFP. I think this is probably a terrible way of evaluating systems because you can get a function list on paper, but that doesn't really tell you what it's like to use. So the procurement process was around video online demos. So getting users into the room, three hours for an online demo walk through the system. So it's a very non-traditional procurement process to buy a procurement system. And I think at the end of that, I think it was a more valuable process for it. >> Was that something that was driven by you or was that something that was driven by Coupa? Is that how they deliver that type of experience? >> It was driven by me, but I think it was welcomed by Coupa. I think, I think from the sales guys I think they do an awful lot of paper-based RFP, and I think it's a challenge because it's very hard to differentiate on paper. Actually, a lot of the systems kind of do the same stuff, but it's not what they do. It's how they do it. And you can't, you can't get that out of the paper. You have to see it and feel it and touch it. >> Exactly. One of the things that Rob Bernshteyn talks about, and he spoke about it this morning, is that the best UI is no UI. And he really talked about what they've done to be user-centric and talked proudly about the adoption that they've had. And you know, it's... We all know whatever software you're putting in an organization, all these, you know, whether its marketing, finance, operation, sales, if people aren't going to use it, it's not going to be able to deliver the value that whoever purchased it and brought it on needs it to do. Talk to me about that user-centric. Did you see and feel that right away in those demos? >> I think if you're a procurement guy, you have suppliers every day send you certain messages, and those messages are fairly consistent around, you know, delivering value and solutions. I mean, Rob's great. He's a bit of a force of nature. Um, you got to say that. But what I like about it is that he's got a very clear sense of vision about what the system should be, and I think he's done a great job of getting that throughout the company, top to bottom. And to date we've felt that. So normally what happens is you buy the software license, you sign the agreement, there's lots of love and care, and then kind of the vendor disappears a little bit, and you're on your own. And to date, Coupa done a great job. We got Damian Pinnell, who's our success manager. I get the sense that he really cares about whether the system is going to do what it promised to do. And how do we get more value out of it? Some of it is about selling more licenses because Coupa have got other modules they want you to buy, but that's kind of okay if the modules are delivering more value, then you don't mind paying for them. But even the modules we own, there is a real sense of are you exploiting it to the max? And that's pretty cool. >> What are some of the key values that you have gleaned so far in just the, what, maybe six months or so that you guys have been using the platform? >> So I'm getting, I'm quite surprised at the extent to the insights, the value I'm getting out of the insights. So as an example, and I'll be honest. Coupa told me that said your, your spend-through catalog is 27% and your industry top quartile is 95. And I kind of went, "Nah, I don't believe you." And then they said, "Your electronic invoicing could be 77%, and you're currently single digits." And I went, "Nah, I don't believe you." And then through the community we spoke to Co-Oper, another Coupa customer, and Marley there was saying, "No, we're doing it. We're at this. "We're at 95% or 97% even." And I went "Well, how are you doing it?" And she just talked me through how they sell it to suppliers and how, in my head, the reluctance to adopt actually evaporated because she was able to sell the idea to suppliers, sell the value as. She didn't force them to do it. She just said this is what you're going to get out of it if you do it this way, and she's genuinely got to 97. So what it's done for me is it's remove my own blockers in my own mind, you know, in my own head "You can't do this." Well, insights and speaking to other communities. Yes, I can. So it's opened my, changed my targets, changed what I think is possible. And I think that's cool. >> You look back to the beginning of your journey in procurement, business, and finance, when you were given this great advice, like "Be open-minded, understand how different parts of the business work," from then to where you are now and what you're able to deliver, in just a short time, leveraging Coupa, would have believed you'd been able to go from there to there? >> Uh, yeah, so Terry would always say to me, you know, if you're going to negotiate a deal, before you even pick up a contract, you would spend an hour with the business owner or the techie or whoever it is, and you just white board, at a technical level, what the solution is. I think that, years and years and years of doing that, of going deeper into technology and software and integration and through deal after deal after deal, when you come to run the project, to implement Coupa, you have that as a foundation. So you're not just at the surface and relying on other technical people because you're lost when you get to this level of detail. You've already got a little bit more depth. So I think that was the big spin-off, in a way. That you're able to have more in-depth conversations at a technical level, which you need to unblock stuff. >> So some of the news that came out today. They talked about what they're doing to expand Coupa Pay with American Express. I was just talking with Barclays. Barclays card been on that for a little while. Looking at the payment space for instance, on the BDC side, we have this expectation as consumers. We can do any transaction, we can pay bills. It hasn't been as... On the B2B side, it hasn't been as innovative. Some technology gaps, large scale. Where do you see Coupa in that respect with what they're doing with Coupa Pay? Do you see that influence from the consumer side that might eventually become an important part of what you're able to do at Provident? >> We haven't enabled Coupa Pay, so I'm in a position to talk authoritatively about it. >> In terms of taking the consumer and demand? >> So I look at the one-time-use credit cards, and I'm really quite excited about what that could do, and I kind of get the business sense and the use case behind that. So that's certainly on our radar. I like the risk-aware products as well, using the big data and AI stuff. So, there's a few things in the road map I've got my eye on. We're deploying expenses module in December/January, so that'll keep us busy on that. And then we'll need to route six months of data through Coupa so that we've got enough of a data pool to do the analytics. So we've got a busy road map, that's for sure. >> For a last question for you, James, for peers of yours, whether they're in financial services industry or not that are facing similar challenges and opportunities to transform procurement, what's you're best advice? >> Mmm, go and spend a few years as a supplier. I think procurement suffers a little bit from people who have only ever been in procurement. And I think that different perspective would be enormously powerful. So I think if we could get more marketing people, more lawyers, more different people and different professions into procurement, I think it would give you a broader perspective rather than a "I've grown up in procurement the last 20 years" sort of perspective. So go and get that holistic, global view would be my suggestion. >> Well, James, that's great advice for anybody, anywhere, and I'm sure Terry would be proud to hear you say that. >> I'm sure he would. >> Thank you so much for joining me on The Cube and sharing with us what Provident is doing with Coupa. We appreciate your time. >> It's been a real pleasure. Thank you, Lisa. >> Excellent. To James Wagstaff, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching The Cube from Coupa Inspire 19. Thanks for watching. (computerized tune)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi, everybody, welcome to this Cube Insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis I want to talk to you about what I learned this week at Dell Technology's financial analyst meeting in New York. They gathered all the financial analysts, Rob Williams hosted it, he's the head of IR, Michael Dell of course was there. They had Dennis Hoffman who is the head of strategic planning, Jeff Clarke who basically runs the business and Tom Sweet, of course, who was the star of the show, the CFO, all the analysts want to see him. Dell laid out its longterm goals, it provided much clearer understanding of its strategic direction, basically focused on three areas. Dell believes that IT is getting more complex, we know that, they want to capitalize on that by simplifying IT. We'll talk about that. And then they want to position for the wave of digital transformations that are coming and they also believe, Dell believes, that it can capitalize on the consolidation trend, consolidating vendors, so I'll talk about each of those. And so let me bring up the first slide, Alex, if you would. The takeaways from the Dell financial analyst meeting. Let me share with you the overall framework that Tom Sweet laid out. And I have to say, the messaging was very consistent, these guys were very well-prepared. I think Dell is, from a management perspective, very well-run company. They're targeting three to 5% growth on what they're saying is a 4% GDP forecast. Or sorry, 4%, I have GDP here, it's really 4% industry growth. GDP's a little lower than that obviously. So this is IDC data, Gartner data, 4% industry growth. So that's an error on my part, I apologize. The strategies to grow relative to their competition. So grow share on a relative basis. So whatever the market does, again, not GDP, but whatever the market does, Dell wants to grow faster than the market. So it wants to gain share, that's its primary metric. From there they want to grow operating income and they want to grow that faster than revenue, that's going to throw off cash. And then they're going to also continue to delever the balance sheet. I think they paid down 17 billion in debt since the EMC acquisition. They want to get to a two X debt to EBITA ratio within 18 months. And what they're saying is, you know, they talked about, Tom Sweet talked about this consistent march toward investment-grade rating. They've been talkin' about that for awhile. He made the comment, we don't need to have a triple A rating but we want to get to the point where we can reduce our interest expense, and that will, 'cause they'll drop right into the bottom line. So they talked about these various levers that they can turn, some of them under the P and L, gaining share, some are their operating structure and their organizational structure, and one big one is obviously their debt structure. The other key issue here is will this cut the liquidity discount that Dell faces? What do I mean by that? Well, VMware has about a $60 billion valuation. Dell owns about 80% of VMware, which would equate to 48 billion. But if you look at Dell's market cap, it's only 37 billion. So it essentially says that Dell's core business is worth minus 11 billion. We used to talk about this when EMC owned VMware. Its core business only comprised about 40% of the overall value of the company, in this case because of the high debt, Dell has a negative value. And it's not just the high debt. Michael Dell has control over the voting shares, it's essentially a conglomerate structure, there's very high debt, and it's a relatively low margin business, notwithstanding VMware. And so as a result, Dell trades at a discount relative to what you would think it should trade at, given its prominence in the market, $92 billion company, the leader in every category under the sun. So that's the big question is can Dell turn these levers, drop EBITA or cash to the bottom line, affect operating income, and then ultimately pay down its debt and affect that discount that it trades at? Okay, bring up, if you would, Alex, the next slide. Now I want to share with you the takeaways from the Dell line of business focus. This really was Jeff Clarke's presentations that I'm going to draw from. Servers, we know, they're softer demand, but the key there is they're really faced tough compares. Last year, Dell's server business grew like crazy. So this year the comparisons are lessened. But there's less spending on servers. I'll share with you some of the ETR data. Storage, they call it holding serve, you saw last quarter I did an analysis, I took the ETR data and the income statement, it showed Pure was gaining share at like 22% growth from the income statement standpoint. Dell was 0% growth but is actually growing faster than its competitors. With the exception of Pure. It's growing faster than the market. So Dell actually gained share with 0% growth. Dell's really focused on consolidating the portfolio. They've cut the portfolio down from 80, I think actually the right number is 88 products, down to 20 by May of 2020. They've got some new mid-range coming, they've just refreshed their data protection portfolio, so again, by May of next year, by Dell Technologies World they'll have a much, much more simplified portfolio. And they're gaining back share. They've refocused on the storage business. You might recall after the acquisition, EMC was kind of a mess. It was losing share before the acquisition, it was so distracted with all the Elliott Management stuff goin' on. And kind of took its eye off the ball, and then after the acquisition it took awhile for them to get their act together. They gained back about 375 basis points in the last 18 months. Remember a basis point is 1/100th of 1%. So gaining share and their consistent focus on trying to do that. Their PC business, which is actually doin' quite well, is focused on the commercial segment and focused on higher margins. They made the statement that the PCs are kind of undersupply right now so it's helping margins. There's a big focus in Jeff Clarke's organization on VMware integration. To me this makes a lot of sense. To the extent that you can take the VMware platform and make Dell hardware run VMware better, that's something that is an advantage for Dell, obviously. And at the same time, VMware has to walk the fine line with the ecosystem. But certainly it's earned the presence in the market now that it can basically do what I just said, tightly integrate with Dell and at the same time serve the ecosystem, 'cause frankly, the ecosystem has no choice. It must serve VMware customers. The strategy, essentially, is to, as I say, capitalize on vendor consolidation, leverage value across the portfolio, so whether it's pivotal, VMware integration, the security portfolio, try to leverage that and then differentiate with scale. And Dell really has the number one supply chain in the tech business. Something that Dave Donatelli at HP, when he was at HP, used to talk about. HPE doesn't really talk about that supply chain advantage anymore 'cause essentially it doesn't have it. Dell does. So Jeff Clarke's reorganization, he came in, he streamlined the organization, really from the focus on R and D to product to collaboration across the organization and the VMware integration. I actually was quite impressed with when I first met Jeff Clarke I guess two years ago now, what he and the organization have accomplished since then. No BS kind of person. And you can see it's starting to take effect. So we'll keep an eye on that. The next slide I want to show you, I want to bring in the ETR data. We've been sharing with you the ETR spending intention surveys for the last couple of weeks and months. ETR, enterprise technology research, they have a data platform that comprises 4,500 practitioners that share spending data with them. CIOs, IT managers, et cetera. What I'm showing here is a cut off of the server sector. So I'm going to drill down into server and storage. So these are spending intentions from the July survey asking about the second half of 2019 relative to the first half of 2019. And this is a drill-down into the giant public and private firms. Why do I do that? Because in meeting the ETR, this is the best indicator. So it's big, big public companies and big private companies. Think Uber. Private companies that spend a ton of dough on IT. UPS before it went public, for example. So those companies are in here. And they're, according to ETR, the best indicators. What this chart shows, so the bars show, and I've shared this with you a number of times, the lime green is we're adding, we're new to this platform, we're new adoption. The evergreen is we're spending more, the gray is we're spending the same, the light red or pink is we're spending less, and the dark red is we're leaving the platform. So if you subtract the red from the green you get what's called a net score, and that's that blue line. And this is the overall server spending intentions from that July survey. The end is about 525 respondents out of the 4,500. And this is, again, those that just answered the question on server. So you can see the net score on server spend is dropping. And you can see the market share on server is dropping. The takeaway here is that servers, as a percentage of overall IT spend, are on a downward slope, and have been for quite some time. Back to the January '16 survey. Okay, so that's going to serve us. Let's take a look at the same data for storage. So if, Alex, if you bring up the storage sector slide, You can see kind of a similar trend. And I would argue what's happening here, a couple of things. You've got the CLOB effect, I'll talk about that some more, and you've also got, in this case, the flash, all-flash array effect. What happened was you had all-flash arrays and flash come into the data center, and that gave performance a huge headroom. Remember, spinning disk was the last bastion of mechanical movement and it was the main bottleneck in terms of overall application performance. IO was the problem. Well you put a bunch of flash into the system and it gives a lot of headroom. People used to over-provision capacity just for performance reasons. So flash has had the effect of customers saying, hey, my performance is good, I don't need to over-provision anymore, I don't need to buy so much. So that combined with cloud, I think, has put down the pressure on the storage business as well. Now the next slide, Alex, that I want you to bring up is the vendor net scores, the server spending intentions. And what I've done is I've highlighted Dell EMC. Now what's happening here in the slide, and I realize it's an eye chart, but basically where you want to be in this chart is in the left-hand side. What it shows is the spending intentions and the momentum from the October '18, which is the gray, the April '19, which is the blue, and then the July '19 which is the most recent one. Again, the end is 525 in the servers for the July '19 survey. And you can see Dell's kind of in the middle of the pack. You'd love to be in the left-hand side, you know, Docker, Microsoft, VMware, Intel, Ubuntu. And you don't want to be on the right-hand side, you know, Fujitsu, IBM, is sort of below the line. Dell's kind of in the middle there, Dell EMC. The next slide I want to show you is that same slide for storage. And again, you can see here is that on-- So this is vendor net scores, the storage spending intentions. On the left-hand side it's all the high growth companies. Rubrik, Cohesity, Nutanix, Pure, VMware with vSAN, Veeam. You see Dell EMC's VxRail. On the right-hand side, you see the guys that are losing momentum. Veritas, Iron Mountain, Barracuda, HitachiHDS, Fusion-io still comes up in the survey after the acquisition by Western Digital. Again, you see Dell EMC kind of holding serve in the middle there. Not great, not bad. Okay, so that's kind of just some other ETR data that I wanted to share. All right, next thing we're going to talk about is the macros market summary. And Alex, I've got some bullet points on this, so if you bring up that slide, let me talk about that a little bit. So five points here. First, cloud continues to eat away at on-prem, despite all this talk about repatriation, which I know does happen. People try to throw everything to the cloud and they go, whoa! Look at my Amazon bill, yeah, I get that. That's at the margin. The main trend is that cloud continues to grow. That whole repatriation thing is not moving the on-prem market. On-prem is kind of steady eddy. Storage is still working through that AFA injection. Got a lot of headroom from performance standpoint. So people don't need to buy as much as they used to because you had that step function in performance. Now eventually the market will catch up, all this digital transformation is happening, all this data is flowing through the system and it will catch up, and the storage market is elastic. As NAN prices fall, people will, I predict, will buy more storage. But there's been somewhat of a lull in the overall storage market. It's not a great market right now, frankly, at the macro level. Now ETR does these surveys on a quarterly basis. They're just about to release the October survey, and they put out a little glimpse on Friday about this survey. And I'll share some bullet points there. Overall IT spending clearly is softening. We kind of know that, everybody kind of realizes that. Here's the nuance. New adoptions are reverting to pre-2018 levels, and the replacements are rising. What does this mean? So the number of respondents that said, oh yes, we're adopting this platform for the first time is declining, and the replacements are actually accelerating. Why is that? Well I was at ETR last week and we were talking about this and one of the theories, and I think it's a good one, is that 2016, 2017 was kind of experimentation around digital transformation. 2018, people started to put things into production or closer to production, they were running systems in parallel, and now they're making their bets, they're saying, hey, this test worked, let's put this heavy into production in 2019, and now we're going to start replacing. So we're not going to adopt as much stuff 'cause we're not doing as much experimentation. We're going to now focus and narrow in on those things that are going to drive our business, and we're going to replace those things that aren't going to drive our business. We're going to start unplugging them. So that's some of what's happening. Another big trend is Microsoft. Microsoft is extending its presence throughout. They're goin' after collaboration, you saw the impact that they had on Slack and Slack stock recently. So Slack Box, Dropbox, are kind of exposed there. They're goin' after security, they've just announced a SIM product. So Splunk and IBM, they're kind of goin' after that base. The application performance management vendors. For instance, New Relic. Microsoft goin' after them. Obviously they got a huge presence in cloud. Their Windows 10 cycle is a little slower this time around, but they've got other businesses that are really starting to click. So Microsoft is one of the few vendors that really is showing accelerated spending momentum in the ETR data. Financial services and telcos, which are always leading spender indicators, are actually very weak right now. That's having a spillover effect into Europe, which is over-banked, if I can use that term. Banking heavy, if you will. So right now it's not a pretty picture, but it's not a disaster. I don't want to necessarily suggest this as like going back to 2007, 2008, it's not. It's really just a matter of things are softening and it's, you know, maybe taking a little breath. Okay, so let me summarize the meeting overall. Again, it was a very well-run meeting. Started at 9:00, ended at 12:00, bagged lunch, go home. Nice and crisp. So these guys are very well-prepared. I think, again, Dell is a extremely well-managed company. They laid out a much clearer vision for Wall Street of its strategy, where it's headed. As they say, they're going after IT complexity. I want to make a comment on this. You think about Legacy EMC. Legacy EMC was not the company that you would expect to deal with complexity. In fact, they were the culprit of complexity. One of the things that Jeff Clarke did when he came in, he said, this portfolio's too complex, needs to be simplified. Joe Tucci used to say, overlap is better than gaps. Jeff Clarke said we got too much overlap. We don't have a lot of gaps so let's streamline that portfolio. Taking advantage of vendor consolidation, this is an interesting one. Ever since I've been in this business, which has been quite a long time now, I've been hearing that buyers want to consolidate the number of vendors that they have. They've really not succeeded in doing that. Now can they do that now 'cause there are less vendors? Well, in a sense, yes, there are less sort of on-prem big vendors. EMC's no longer in the market, you don't have companies like Sun and Digital anymore, Compact is gone. HP split in two, but still. You're not seeing a huge number of new vendors, at scale, come into the market. Except you've got AWS and Google as new players there. So I think that injects sort of a new dynamic that a lot of people like to put cloud aside and kind of ignore it and talk about the old on-prem business, but I think that you're going to see a lot of experimentations and workload ins and outs, particularly with AWS and Google and of course Azure, which is in itself, their cloud is almost a separate force. So we'll see how that shakes up. As I say, servers right now, Dell's got a very tough compare. I think Dell will be fine in the server space. Storage, it's all about simplifying the portfolio, they've got a refreshed portfolio focused on regaining share. They've rebranded everything Power, so their whole line is going to be Power by, if it's not already, by May of next year, Dell Technologies World. It's a much more scalable portfolio. And I think Dell's got a lot of valuation levers. They're a $92 billion company, they've got their current operations, their current P and L, their share gains, their cross-company synergies, particularly with VMware, they can expand their TAM into cloud with partnerships like they're doing with AWS and others, Google, Microsoft. The Edge is a TAM expansion opportunity to them. And also corporate structure. You've seen them. VMware acquired Pivotal. They're cleaning that up. I'm sure they could potentially make some other moves. Secureworks is out there, for example. Maybe they'll do some things with RSA. So they got that knob to turn and they can delever. Paying down the debt to the extent that they can get back to investment grade, that will lower their interest rates, that'll drop right to the bottom line, and they'll be able to reinvest that. And Tom Sweet said, within 18 months, we'll be able to get there with that two X ratio relative to EBITA, and that's when they're going to start having conversations with the rating agencies to talk about you know, hey, maybe we can get a better rating and lower our interest expense. Bottom line, did Wall Street buy the story? Yes. But I don't think it's going to necessarily change anything in the near term. This is a show me from Missouri, prove it, execute, and then I think Dell will get rewarded. Okay, so this is Dave Vellante, thanks for watching this Cube Insights powered by ETR. We'll see ya next time. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Diego California it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live, US, 2019 brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back we're here at the San Diego convention center for Cisco Live 2019 and you're watching theCUBE the worldwide leader in enterprise tech coverage helping extract the signal from the noise. I'm Stu Miniman we've had three days wall to wall coverage my co-host Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin are all in the house and I'm really excited to actually sit down one on one with one of the users at this user conference the 30th anniversary conference actually for Cisco with their users and partners over 28,000 so speaking for all of them right? We have Sebastien Morissette who's an IT architect specialist at Intact Financial Corporation come to us from beautiful Montreal Canada. >> Exactly. >> All right thank you so much for joining us so Sebastien first of all how many Cisco Lives have you been too? >> Honestly this is my first. >> Oh absolutely exciting for that, my first one I came too was actually 10 years ago I joked at the 20th anniversary they went back 20 years to have some 80's bands they had The Bangles and Devo on and now on the 30 year they moved 10 years forwards they have two great bands from the 90's Wheezer and Foo Fighters so your first time at Cisco Live give us your general impressions of the show. >> Well actually it's been very great I've had a lot of appearances I had to do as well so I got some sessions in I did some work as well so it's amazing to see how these events unfold right? Like the sheer size of this thing and how many people are involved, how many booths how many technical sessions you can have so, I was very pleased I'm here with a lot of people from my team as well from Intact so you know we get the chance to do stuff outside of the work area as well so it's interesting right? It's giving us this opportunity to really deep dive into what we love which is technology but at the same time spend some time together outside of work. >> That's awesome, we've had gorgeous weather here in San Diego hope you definitely get to see the sights before we geek out on some of the technology just give our audience a little bit about Intact and the insurance business but give us a little bit about the history of the company and core focus. >> Okay well Intact is a company that was, they grew as acquisitions with acquisitions we've typically, we were ING Canada back in, before 2010 and afterwards we were publicly traded now so we're Intact Financial Corp. Typically we're the number one PNC insurer in Canada and we've been working with different partners to build our data center 2.0 initiative which is kind of a new offering of you know modern IT services within Intact. >> Okay great and just to, your purview in the company and just the comment about the company is you know when you talk about those transformations you know MNA is something we see a lot in your industry and put some extra special challenges in place when you're doing that but tell us a little bit about what's under your role and scope as to kind of locations, people however you measure you know what, boxes or ports or whatever. >> Okay well you know typically my role is lead architect within the infrastructure and security group for North America Intact through acquisition we actually bought OneBeacon Insurance last year, so typically we now have a US presence as well in specialty insurance, specialty lines so typically whenever we're looking at different technologies we look at the skills sets that we have, we look to see what can be the better half for us to you know accelerate and be more agile in how we actually consume technology so in some cases whatever we're looking at building up these new features like I was talking for data center 2.0 it happens that some of the technologies and the skill sets we have were with Cisco which is why we are here today with the team. >> All right so Sebastien you talk about data center 2.0 and transformation there at the organizational level is it branded data center transformation does the word digital transformation come up in your discussions? >> Yeah data center 2.0 is actually kind of the project name that we've been giving this initiative for the past two years but it really is at the essence a digital transformation, what we're doing is we're typically taking training wheels to the Cloud so we're building an on-prem private Cloud offering with multi-sites so we have three sites in the scope right now and the goal is really to actually allow our business to expand into the Cloud while being in a secure on-prem environment when we get to that maturity level where we feel we're ready to actually really go into public Cloud our software engineering teams our development teams will have experienced it on-prem safely and will have a confidence level to bringing them there so it has been transformational also because we decided to push DevOps culture as far as we can from an infrastructure team so we were trying to get all the adoption from our software engineering folks to actually structure themselves, bring on DevOps team and that we can share with them so they can actually be more agile and get a lot more done without having to depend on us and spend a lot of time waiting for VM's or stuff so trying to accelerate that. >> Awesome I love that 'cause sometimes you hear okay we're going to 2.0 it's basically a fancy refresh but we're going to keep things mostly the same when I hear DevOps I know that culture and organization is something that is a key piece of that, I have to ask you without getting down into the pedantics of this, when you say a private Cloud that's in your data center we understand some of the covenants and reasons what you have but how do you determine whether, what was your guiding line as to how is this a Cloud versus just some new virtualized environment? >> I've had the chance to have great executive sponsorship from my senior vice president typically we were looking at how can we access the Cloud? The way I approached it was overhauling what we do was not the route to go what I asked him to do is say you know trust me I'll start with a clean slate and we will build a brand new landing area for Cloud native applications and new methodologies for modern IT services so typically in the end we didn't overhaul anything that we had we built a brand new sandbox for Intact to be able to work with so we went from disaster recovery to business continuity in that move we've built a three site approach because when I was looking at kind of my capex expenditure if I was building two sites to be fully resilient and be business continuity I would be spending 200% of my capital to actually build up that capacity when you go to three sites it seems awkward but you just need 50% on each site of your capacity to ensure 100% of coverage of your requirements, so in the end you're actually spending 150% of your capacity, or your capex to buy the compute, so there's an incentive there as well. So to answer your question more precisely it's very easy for us to see how it's a Cloud because we're not operating it the same way we're operating our other environment and since we started from scratch every process has been revised we haven't kept everything we had before so we had the chance to build something brand new for that specific offering that our software engineering groups were asking us to do. >> All right that's exciting stuff there when you look at these multi-site deployments I think back in my career and I worked on some of these environments, management, security and networking are absolutely critical, I hear oh okay I've got 50% in each oh my God what if a site gets isolated and I can't talk to those other two so luckily I'm guessing Cisco has something to do with your rollout, we're obviously here at Cisco Live so give us a little bit inside the architecture and especially you know what kind of Cisco pieces are you using? >> All right well you know typically the way that our story started was kind of weird the first thing we've done is we've actually went to Cisco to redesign a DMZ and we got out from Cisco Montreal team with an idea to not just change and buy ACI switches for the DMZ but actually rebuild our whole design to you know integrate ACI into the fabric and then when you start talking about firewalls or switches they tell you well with ACI you have contracts so it really started that way so we built an ACI fabric with the Cisco HyperFlex hyper-converged infrastructure as our compute layer so typically think of it as Intact is building our new version of a software defined data center. So with building that we have all the components so we have the virtualization like you spoke of earlier which is running like you know VMware on site, on top of the HyperFlex and then we have the ACI since we had three sites we topped it off with the multi-site orchestrator to be able to manage consistent policies around all of our three sites and in the end we needed to have an orchestrator to be able to deploy the content onto that and when we were looking at it early on it was Clicker when Cisco purchased Clicker we were looking at finding a Cloud management platform, so we ended up using CloudCenter which is now CloudCenter Suite and in the way we were using it, which was a little atypical from the typical way clients are using CloudCenter today we're taking it into the data center and out to the Cloud whereas when I was talking with Kip Compton earlier this week he was saying you know what sometimes our clients buy it more for the Cloud first and I was like well we have like the inverse story of exactly how we did the opposite but it works as well, so typically where we stand today I have the three sites we're able to deploy with CloudCenter we've got multi-site on top of that and the idea it really is that, I spoke about training wheels earlier well we're taking them off right? In the next couple of weeks we're starting to look into negotiations with public Cloud providers trying to move towards the public Cloud and you know there's exciting news that came out from Cisco this week while I was here about the fact that now you know they're forecasting a lot more collaboration with Microsoft and AWS and now they have all the three major Cloud providers covered with ACI Anywhere so that means all of our security that you were talking about earlier will now have a consistent policy model applied all, everywhere so to be honest I'm not too concerned about if we did a good choice a couple of years back I think we're in our sweet spot right now. >> Yeah and you're right it's a different story than we've generally heard from Cisco and some customers which is I have all of these public Cloud's and I have my data center and I'm looking for some piece to help tie it together and that the CloudCenter Suite is there so you feel you're confident with the platform that you chose and that's going to give you the flexibility as to whichever public Cloud or public Cloud you choose are you at the point there that do you know which public Cloud you're going to be on or maybe it's a little too early? >> Well to be honest you know we're keeping our options open you know we have different providers that are offered, you know the major public one there's Amazon there's Google Cloud we're not closing any options it's really a question of us to do the same secure approach that we've done right now with this offering to really go one at a time make sure that we're able to nail it down, make it secure that we get all the information back so I'm not at a possibility right now to disclose which ones we're dealing with because we're still negotiating but in the end we're not limiting ourselves we just want to be able to scale. >> Right you're confident that the Cisco solution that you choose will give you the flexibility no matter which one you use or if you use multiples or need to make switches along the way? >> Yeah. >> Question I have for you on that is when you look at multi-Cloud one of the things that are challenging for companies is how do I make sure I've got the skillsets because workloads might be portable, networks might be connected but understanding how I manage each of those environments so do you feel CloudCenter Suite's going to help you through that? You know what do you see as you look out over your roadmap as to what that's going to mean for you know your DevOps team and the people managing this environment as it spreads out to the public Cloud? >> Actually I'm feeling really confident because you know especially after seeing a couple of sessions of what Roland Acra and Kip have announced for the data center and for the Cloud piece we're seeing more and more normalization being done by Cisco to actually allow us to be confident in the fact that on prem we're doing ACI and that our policies are going to be mapped to the constructs of the different Cloud providers. So for me what it means is I don't necessarily need to become specialized in how we're going to be operating inside of a Cloud we need to make sure that we get the proper policies built into the different products you know Cisco's branding it the Anywhere right? They have the HX Anywhere the ACI Anywhere and typically that's what we like about it is I can have one consistent set of skillsets and allow the people to use it one thing I found interesting about this week and it's not necessarily to do like more promotion for Cisco is like the Cloud First ACI right? So being able to be starting with ACI in the Cloud I found that was kind of interesting because when you know how the multi-site orchestrator works means apps you build out in the Cloud you're going to be able to to pull back in through the MSO and push it back on prem or anywhere in other Clouds afterwards so I found that was very intuitive of them to go to that route of allowing us to you know transparently migrate apps between sites. >> All right so Sebastien you're using a lot of the latest and greatest from Cisco you talk about the HX the ACI the CloudCenter Suite what advice do you give to your peers out there and they say you know I've used Cisco products for a long time Cisco makes great products but you know simplicity and management across the product lines was something that you know needed some work what does the Cisco of today look like you know what's working well? What still would you like to see them progress on? >> Well you know for us one of the things that was nice like I mentioned earlier is we're typically going greenfield so I didn't have a lot of the issues that other companies might be facing if they're trying to take their brownfield and actually make it into what we've built so my first advice would be if you're able to get the executive sponsorship to build a greenfield environment there's nothing in Cloud native applications that is you know symmetric with the traditional environment of a data center, it's completely different ways of working we have one week sprints we patch everything as it comes out if an application goes into the environment it needs to be functional with that patching cycle of almost every time we're at n or n-1 so, my thing is think about applications as being the center of what you actually need and not the infrastructure, let the infrastructure be what it is because you're going to be anywhere right? So that's one of the things I would say, from what you said about Cisco and the integration you were right, we have lived a couple of items like that in the last two years and a half, however I've noticed that these new software components like CloudShare and everything not necessarily the hardware part Cisco nails hardware like it works they've been doing it for years the thing is with these software teams they're very customer driven we have access to the engineers now I mean we've had meetings with the Canadian execs Roland Acra's team we were able to get access to the developers and the teams here in the US so, every company has challenges I would be lying if I told you that even at Intact we don't have silos and we don't have issues sometimes with different teams managing together but I feel as if at least for the technologies that we're using they've done good work for us to actually help us get through that. >> Well it's interesting Sebastian you bring that up because I look at you say okay, you've got a greenfield environment awesome, we can go do some new tech, well let's throw in there the DevOps and let's change all the other pieces you're like completely overhauling your environment how much of that were there some new team members that came in as part of that or you know I look people, process and technology sounded like you were taking it all on at once, did that work well? Would you have if you looked back would you have changed some of the ordering and maybe you know gotten one piece before the other or did it help to kind of you know start brand new start fresh and get everything going? >> Well I wouldn't redo the part of starting fresh however, it helped us get really good pace and work you know it's our first agile project as an infrastructure group so all of that was great learning experience the only thing I would say is you need to make sure your organization is ready for that level of change because it's one thing to have one VP sponsorship to actually build out this type of approach but where we struggled a little bit was afterwards getting the rest of our IT organization to kind of want to get onboard. because we are building something new, the traditional environment is not disappearing and we're telling our software engineering groups here's a new area where you can play in but you know typically I'd say that it's been well received we have not had the need to build new skillsets because we're doing infrastructure as code so typically a lot of the stuff we're building we're making sure it's automated so that way it's very nice and lean and when we build a new site we have a lot of automation already built in so we can properly just deploy so lessons learned like you've asked me I'd say that typically I'd probably do much of what I did the same way, but I would work a little bit more on the people area just to make sure that the message is clearly understood that what we're building is for the future of Intact and make sure that we spend a little bit more time managing that aspect because for the technology it's fine for the time it took and everything it's fine, it's really people the change is significant to most of them and when you've been doing something for a long time and someone comes up and disrupts it's like if we were disrupting our own company right? So typically I'd say, that would be something that I would say to people manage that properly or you will have a lot more work to do inside of that initiative to actually gain everybody's momentum and get them to be behind you. >> Well Sebastien I really appreciate you walking us through all of your transformation I want to just give you the final word sounds like you've got great access to Cisco really hope you're happy with what you've done final word is to you know your expectations coming into a show like this and you know what your take aways will be from Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego? >> Well outside from the amazing weather you mean or yeah? so you know typically I like the event I've been to other events before, like I said this is my first time at Cisco but what I've seen is that Cisco's really into getting their customers to understand their technology so they're really present so I really liked how you know we were given the opportunity to do hands on labs and actually learn new technologies so typically great experience coming here and great opportunities and thanks so much for having us. >> Well Sebastien Morissette congratulations to your team at Intact and thank you so much for sharing this story. >> Thank you so much. >> All right we've got a little bit more left here of three days wall to wall coverage Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego for Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin I'm Stu Miniman and thanks as always for watching theCUBE. 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>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE and we're here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Group. Happen to have on the program one of the users here at the event, Andrew Baxter, who's the Director of Systems Engineering with Commonwealth Financial Network. Andrew, thanks so much for joining me. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, tell us a little bit about your organization and your role there. >> Certainly, Commonwealth Financial Network is an independent broker-dealer. We have a network of roughly 2,000 advisors throughout the country, just based in the U.S right now and we, that's what we do. We're a clearing house for them. We provide all their IT infrastructure for them. >> Okay, the good news is that financial, like most industries, isn't going through any change today, right, Andrew? >> Oh, yeah, absolutely no. We've got the Department of Labor is our big bugaboo right now. >> Yep. So what are some of the biggest challenging? Is it regulation? Is it uncertainty? Is it, you know, technology? What are some of the drivers of the business? >> It's a combination of both. We have a lot of issues with regulation because of such people as Enron and whatnot. >> Smartest people in the room, right? >> Exactly. And it's not, the regulation's not a bad thing. It's just, can be problematic to work with. So the most recent one is the Department of Labor where they have decided how your retirement funding can be managed and to make sure that there is no conflict of interest. >> Okay, so. (laughs) It, yeah, we're not going to get political here. >> No, nope, no, absolutely. >> And go into how much government and all everything like that. >> What does that mean to your all? Tell us a little bit about what you manage >> Sure >> and really from that standpoint. >> So my group is responsible for our virtualization, our server platform, all of our storage, our data protection be it back up, antivirus, things like that. So we've got several different systems from a performance standpoint, and then we've got also have things from a compliance standpoint, a lot of WORM drives in the form of Centera or Hitachi Content Platform, and then the storage that goes around it and the applications that go with them. >> Alright. Well, you've got one of the hot button topics, security. >> Yeah. >> Tell us a little bit about, you know, there's the compliance and the security, how is that impacting what you're doing these days? >> So they're sort of two different things. Compliance is one thing, >> Yeah. maintaining your compliance with the security level. You know, we have a whole group, two groups actually, independent of each other, that sort of check each other, and then check us to make sure that, one, we're keeping the patch levels up, but also that we're following best practices to try to keep the bad guys out. We, I think everybody knows that you can't keep them out if they really want in. It really comes down to how you're going to react and so we've got to make sure that we have the tools in place to be able to react appropriately. >> Yeah, one of the things we've been looking at is, you know, security used to just be ah let the networking people take care of it. >> Right. >> We put up some firewalls. We do some things. Now, security, a lot of times, getting up to the board level type of discussion. What's the dynamic in your organization? >> Yeah, so, we do have the traditional on the network side. But we have a group within that that is specifically focused on that and it's more than just the network side of it. And then we have the information security group and that's more the board level where they're helping to define what types of data are critical, you know, personally identifiable information. We have HIPAA, other regulations like that, FINRA, the SEC, that we have to make sure we secure your information as well as possible. >> Okay, what brings you to this event? >> So, we've been a customer or partner with Winslow. I like to think of my vendors, for lack of a better word, as partners. I don't want to just use them as somebody I call when I need something. I want them to be somebody who is involved in the process, whatever that may be. And in this case, right now we're currently using them for all of our virtual desktop infrastructure, from the storage, the server standpoint. We're using some Dell products for wireless and things like that. And then, as time goes on, we start to do more refresh of equipment, then we're going to be looking at all of the vendors and not just the traditional ones. So, you know, you got the big three, sort of, HP, Dell and Lenovo in the server market or UCS as well. So we're going to make sure we look at all of them to see who has the best offering for us, for what we need. >> Okay. What about a cloud? How does that fit into your organization? Do you have, you know, cloud means many things to many people. >> Sure. >> But what does it mean to your organization? What's the strategy look like today? >> So we have two situations. One, we are actually a cloud for all of our advisors. We provide them with their exchange, their active directory, their antivirus, their patching, things like that. And then we're also looking at the Azure and the AWS offerings. We had to be very careful as we move to those offerings because we have to make sure that we retain this security level when that data leaves our hands, as it were. The financial markets tend to be a little slow moving to that kind of stuff because we've got very sensitive data that we've got to make sure that doesn't go away, doesn't get breached, and doesn't become generally available to the world. >> Yeah. Talk to us a little bit about what data means to your organization >> Sure. >> Of course, securities piece. How are you, are there initiatives to leverage data more, you know, you look almost like a service provider. >> Sure. >> We've seen many organizations that leverage that kind of technology. >> So, one of the, there's a couple different ways we do that. One of them is the actual software we've written for our advisors to use. So we're providing them with all the information they could ever want about their clients, their performance of the portfolios, things like that. But then there's also, on the other side, we're starting to look more into the power of BI and that kind of information so that we can start leveraging, sort of, paying more attention to how our products are being used in a more proactive manner instead of reactive. >> Okay, Curious how things like Hyperledger and Blockchain, you know, play into, does it play into anything you're doing today? What does your organization look at? >> Not currently. It will be down the road, I'm sure. But at this point it's not something we, because we really just haven't moved anything out to that area yet. >> Okay, great. I want to give you, really, the last word. What do you, kind of, when you come into an event like this, what are you looking for? What do you hope to take away from this? >> I'm looking for what's new, what's coming. I want, I need to make sure that I'm trying to stay ahead of things because part of what we have to do is we have to set the tone for what's going to be coming in the coming years. And so, I don't want to just see the same old thing. And that's one thing I like about Winslow. They do keep on the cutting edge. They do keep on forward. They've got cloud, you know, for lack of a better term, as part of their portfolio. And I feel that they actually know what they're doing. I have worked with some vendors that, they could spell the word, but that was about it. >> Absolutely. The cloud washing if you will. >> Yes. >> Alright, well, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate the updates on where all of this technology fits into your environment and you've been watching theCUBE.

>>Hello everyone. Welcome to the Super Cloud Event preview. I'm John Forry, host of the Cube, and with Dave Valante, host of the popular Super cloud events. This is Super Cloud two preview. I'm joined by industry leader and Cube alumni, Victoria Vigo, vice president of klos Cross Cloud Services at VMware. Vittorio. Great to see you. We're here for the preview of Super Cloud two on January 17th, virtual event, live stage performance, but streamed out to the audience virtually. We're gonna do a preview. Thanks for coming in. >>My pleasure. Always glad to be here. >>It's holiday time. We had the first super cloud on in August prior to VMware, explore North America prior to VMware, explore Europe prior to reinvent. We've been through that, but right now, super Cloud has got momentum. Super Cloud two has got some success. Before we dig into it, let's take a step back and set the table. What is Super Cloud and why is important? Why are people buzzing about it? Why is it a thing? >>Look, we have been in the cloud now for like 10, 15 years and the cloud is going strong and I, I would say that going cloud first was deliberate and strategic in most cases. In some cases the, the developer was going for the path of risk resistance, but in any sizable company, this caused the companies to end up in a multi-cloud world where 85% of the companies out there use two or multiple clouds. And with that comes what we call cloud chaos, because each cloud brings their own management tools, development tools, security. And so that increase the complexity and cost. And so we believe that it's time to usher a new era in cloud computing, which we, you call the super cloud. We call it cross cloud services, which allows our customers to have a single way to build, manage, secure, and access any application across any cloud. Lowering the cost and simplifying the environment. Since >>Dave Ante and I introduced and rift on the concept of Supercloud, as we talked about at reinvent last year, a lot has happened. Supercloud one, it was in August, but prior to that, great momentum in the industry. Great conversation. People are loving it, they're hating it, which means it's got some traction. Berkeley has come on board as with a position paper. They're kind of endorsing it. They call it something different. You call it cross cloud services, whatever it is. It's kind of the same theme we're seeing. And so the industry has recognized something is happening that's different than what Cloud one was or the first generation of cloud. Now we have something different. This Super Cloud two in January. This event has traction with practitioners, customers, big name brands, Sachs, fifth Avenue, Warner, media Financial, mercury Financial, other big names are here. They're leaning in. They're excited. Why the traction in the customer's industry converts over to, to the customer traction. Why is it happening? You, you get a lot of data. >>Well, in, in Super Cloud one, it was a vendor fest, right? But these vendors are smart people that get their vision from where, from the customers. This, this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum. We all talk to customers and we tend to lean on the early adopters and the early adopters of the cloud are the ones that are telling us, we now are in a place where the complexity is too much. The cost is ballooning. We're going towards slow down potentially in the economy. We need to get better economics out of, of our cloud. And so every single customers I talked to today, or any sizable company as this problem, the developers have gone off, built all these applications, and now the business is coming to the operators and asking, where are my applications? Are they performing? What is the security posture? And how do we do compliance? And so now they're realizing we need to do something about this or it is gonna be unmanageable. >>I wanna go to a clip I pulled out from the, our video data lake and the cube. If we can go to that clip, it's Chuck Whitten Dell at a keynote. He was talking about what he calls multi-cloud by default, not by design. This is a state of the, of the industry. If we're gonna roll that clip, and I wanna get your reaction to that. >>Well, look, customers have woken up with multiple clouds, you know, multiple public clouds. On-premise clouds increasingly as the edge becomes much more a reality for customers clouds at the edge. And so that's what we mean by multi-cloud by default. It's not yet been designed strategically. I think our argument yesterday was it can be, and it should be, it is a very logical place for architecture to land because ultimately customers want the innovation across all of the hyperscale public clouds. They will see workloads and use cases where they wanna maintain an on-premise cloud. On-premise clouds are not going away. I mentioned edge Cloud, so it should be strategic. It's just not today. It doesn't work particularly well today. So when we say multi-cloud, by default we mean that's the state of the world. Today, our goal is to bring multi-cloud by design, as you heard. Yeah, I >>Mean, I, okay, Vittorio, that's, that's the head of Dell Technologies president. He obvious he runs it. Michael Dell's still around, but you know, he's the leader. This is a interesting observation. You know, he's not a customer. We have some customer equips we'll go to as well, but by default it kind of happened not by design. So we're now kind of in a zoom out issue where, okay, I got this environment just landed on me. What, what is the, what's your reaction to that clip of how multi-cloud has become present in, in everyone's on everyone's plate right now to deal with? Yeah, >>I it is, it is multi-cloud by default, I would call it by accident. We, we really got there by accident. I think now it's time to make it a strategic asset because look, we're using multiple cloud for a reason, because all these hyperscaler bring tremendous innovation that we want to leverage. But I strongly believe that in it, especially history repeat itself, right? And so if you look at the history of it, as was always when a new level of obstruction that simplify things, that we got the next level of innovation at the lower cost, you know, from going from c plus plus to Visual basic, going from integrating application at the bits of by layer to SOA and then web services. It's, it's only when we simplify the environment that we can go faster and lower cost. And the multi-cloud is ready for that level of obstruction today. >>You know, you've made some good points. You know, developers went crazy building great apps. Now they got, they gotta roll it out and operationalize it globally. A lot of compliance issues going on. The costs are going up. We got an economic challenge, but also agility with the cloud. So using cloud and or hybrid, you can get better agility. And also moving to the cloud, it's kind of still slow. Okay, so I get that at reinvent this year and at VMware explorer we were observing and we reported that you're seeing a transition to a new kind of ecosystem partner. Ones that aren't just ISVs anymore. You have ISVs, independent software vendors, but you got the emergence of bigger players that just, they got platforms, they have their own ecosystems. So you're seeing ecosystems on top of ecosystems where, you know, MongoDB CEO and the Databricks CEO both told me, we're not an isv, we're a platform built on a cloud. So this new kind of super cloudlike thing is going on. Why should someone pay attention to the super cloud movement? We're on two, we're gonna continue to do these out in the open. Anyone can participate. Why should people pay attention to this? Why should they come to the event? Why is this important? Is this truly an inflection point? And if they do pay attention, what should they pay attention to? >>I would pay attention to two things. If you are customers that are now starting to realize that you have a multi-cloud problem and the costs are getting outta control, look at what the leading vendors are saying, connect the dots with the early adopters and some of the customers that we are gonna have at Super Cloud two, and use those learning to not fall into the same trap. So I, I'll give you an example. I was talking to a Fortune 50 in Europe in my latest trip, and this is an a CIO that is telling me >>We build all these applications and now for compliance reason, the business is coming to me, I don't even know where they are, right? And so what I was telling him, so look, there are other customers that are already there. What did they do? They built a platform engineering team. What is the platform? Engineering team is a, is an operation team that understands how developers build modern applications and lays down the foundation across multiple clouds. So the developers can be developers and do their thing, which is writing code. But now you as a cio, as a, as a, as a governing body, as a security team can have the guardrail. So do you know that these applications are performing at a lower cost and are secure and compliant? >>Patura, you know, it's really encouraging and, and love to get your thoughts on this is one is the general consensus of industry leaders. I talked to like yourself in the round is the old way was soft complexity with more complexity. The cloud demand simplicity, you mentioned abstraction layer. This is our next inflection point. It's gotta be simpler and it's gotta be easy and it's gotta be performant. That's the table stakes of the cloud. What's your thoughts on this next wave of simplicity versus complexity? Because again, abstraction layers take away complexity, they should make it simpler. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, so I'll give you few examples. One, on the development side and runtime. You, you one would think that Kubernetes will solve all the problems you have Kubernetes everywhere, just look at, but every cloud has a different distribution of Kubernetes, right? So for example, at VMware with tansu, we create a single place that allows you to deploy that any Kubernetes environment. But now you have one place to set your policies. We take care of the differences between this, this system. The second area is management, right? So once you have all everything deployed, how do you get a single object model that tells you where your stuff is and how it's performing, and then apply policies to it as well. So these are two areas and security and so on and so forth. So the idea is that figure out what you can abstract and make common across cloud. Make that simple and put it in one place while always allowing the developers to go underneath and use the differentiated features for innovation. >>Yeah, one of the areas I'm excited, I want to get your thoughts of too is, we haven't talked about this in the past, but it, I'll throw it out there. I think the, the new AI coming out chat, G P T and other things like lens, you see it and see new kinds of AI coming that's gonna be right in the heavy lifting opportunity to make things easier with AI and automation. I think AI will be a big factor in super cloud and, and cross cloud. What's your thoughts? >>Well, the one way to look at AI is, is one of the main, main services that you would want out of a multi-cloud, right? You want eventually, right now Google seems to have an edge, but you know, the competition creates, you know, innovation. So later on you wanna use something from Azure or from or from Oracle or something that, so you want at some point that is gonna be prone every single service in in the cloud is gonna be prone to obstruction and simplification. And I, I'm just excited about to see >>What book, I can't wait for the chat services to write code automatically for us. Well, >>They >>Do, they do. They're doing it now. They do. >>Oh, the other day, somebody, you know that I do this song par this for. So for fun sometimes. And somebody the other day said, ask the AI to write a parody song for multi-cloud. And so I have the lyrics stay >>Tuned. I should do that from my blog post. Hey, write a blog post on this January 17th, Victoria, thanks for coming in, sharing the preview bottom line. Why should people come? Why is it important? What's your final kind of takeaway? Billboard message >>History is repeat itself. It goes to three major inflection points, right? We had the inflection point with the cloud and the people that got left behind, they were not as competitive as the people that got on top o of this wave. The new wave is the super cloud, what we call cross cloud services. So if you are a customer that is experiencing this problem today, tune in to to hear from other customers in, in your same space. If you are behind, tune in to avoid the, the, the, the mistakes and the, the shortfalls of this new wave. And so that you can use multi-cloud to accelerate your business and kick butt in the future. >>All right. Kicking kick your names and kicking butt. Okay, we're here on J January 17th. Super Cloud two. Momentum continues. We'll be super cloud three. There'll be super cloud floor. More and more open conversations. Join the community, join the conversation. It's open. We want more voices. We want more, more industry. We want more customers. It's happening. A lot of momentum. Victoria, thank you for your time. Thank you. Okay. I'm John Farer, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching.

(gentle instrumental music) >> Okay, we're back with Tom Christensen who's the global technology advisor and executive analyst at Hitachi Vantara. And we're exploring how Hitachi Vantara drives customer success, specifically with partners. You know Tom, it's funny, back in the early part of the last decade, there was this big push around, remember it was called green IT, and then the 07-08 financial crisis sort of put that on the back burner. But sustainability is back, and it seems to be emerging as a mega trend in IT. Are you seeing this? Is it same wine new label? How real is this trend and where's the pressure coming from? >> Well, we clearly see that sustainability is a mega trend in the IT sector. And when we talk to CIOs or senior IT leaders or simply just invite them in for a round table on this topic, they all tell us that they get the pressure from three different angles. The first one is really end consumers, and end consumers nowadays are beginning to ask questions about the green profile and what are the company doing for the environment. And this one here is both private and public companies as well. The second pressure that we see, is coming from the government. The government thinks that companies are not moving fast enough, so they want to put laws in that are forcing companies to move faster. And we see that in Germany as an example, where they are giving a law into enterprise companies to follow the human rights and sustainability, three levels back in the supply chain. But we also see that in EU they are talking about a new law that they want to put into action, and that one will replicate to 27 countries in Europe. But this one is not only Europe, it's the rest of the world where governments are talking about forcing companies to move faster than we have done in the past. So we see two types of pressure coming in, and at the same time, this one here starts off at the CEO at a company, because they want to have the competitive edge and be able to be relevant in the market. And for that reason they're beginning to put KPIs on themselves as the CEO, but they also are hiring sustainability officers with sustainability KPIs. And when that happens, it replicates down in the organization and we can now see that some CIOs, they have a KPI, others are indirectly measured. So we see direct and indirect. The same with CFOs and other C levels, they all get measured on it, and for that reason it replicates down to IT people. And that's what they tell us on these round tables. I get that pressure every day, every week, every quarter. But where is the pressure coming from? Well, the pressure is coming from end consumers and new laws that are put into action, that force companies to think differently and have focus on their green profile and doing something good for the environment. So those are the three pressures that we see. But when we talk to CFOs as an example, we are beginning to see that they have a new score system where they put out request for proposal, and this one is in about 58% of all request for proposal that we receive, that they are asking for our sustainability take, what are you doing as a vendor? And in their store system, cost has the highest priority and number two is sustainability. It weighs about 15, 20 to 25% when they look at your proposal that you submit to a CFO. But in some cases the CFO say, "I don't even know where the pressure is coming from. I'm asked to do it." But they're asked to do it because end consumers, laws, and so on, are forcing them to do it. But I would answer, yeah sustainability has become a maker trend this year and it's even growing faster and faster every month we move forward. >> Yeah, Tom, it feels like it's here to stay this time. And your point about public policy is right on, and we saw the EU leading with privacy and GDPR, and it looks like it's going to lead again here. Just shifting gears, I've been to a number of Hitachi facilities in my day. Odawara is my favorite, because on a clear day you can see Mount Fuji but other plants I've been to as well. What does Hitachi do in the production facility to reduce CO2 emissions? >> Yeah, I think you're hitting a good point here. So what we have, we have a facility in Japan and we have one in Europe and we have one in America as well, to keep our production close to our customers and reduce transportation for the factory out to our customers. But you know, in the EMEA region, back in 2013, we created a new factory. And when we did that, we were asked to do it in an energy neutral way, which means that we are moving from being powered by black energy to green energy in that factory. And we built a factory with concrete walls that were extremely thick to make it cold in the summertime and hot in the wintertime, with minimum energy consumption. But we also put 17,000 square meters of solar panels on the roof to power that factory. We were collecting rain water to flush it in the toilet. We were removing light bulbs with LED. And when we send out our equipment to our customers, we put it in a rack, instead of sending out 25 packages to a customer. We want to reduce the waste as much as possible. And you know, this one was pretty new back in 2013. It was actually the biggest project in EMEA at that time. I will say if you want to build a factory today that's the way you are going to do it. But it has a huge impact for us when electricity is going up in price and oil and gas prices are coming up. We are running with energy neutral in our facility, which is a big benefit for us going forward. But it is also a competitive advantage to be able to explain what we have been doing the last eight, nine years in that factory. We are actually walking the talk, and we make that decision, even though it was a really hard decision to do back in 2013. When you do decisions like this one here, the return of investment is not coming the first couple of years. It's something that comes far out in the future, but right now we are beginning to see the benefit of the decision we made back in 2013. >> I want to come back to the economics, but before I do, I want to pick up on something you just said, because you hear the slogan, "Sustainability by design." A lot of people might think, "Okay, that's just a marketing slogan to vector into this mega trend," but it sounds like it's something that you've been working on for quite some time based on your last comments. Can you add some color to that? >> Yeah, so, the factory is just one example of what you need to do to reduce the CO2 emission in that part of the life of a product. The other one is really innovating new technology to drive down the CO2 emission. And here we are laser focused on what we call decarbonization by design. And this one is something that we have done the last eight years, so this is far from new for us. So between each generation of products that we have put out over the last eight years, we've been able to reduce the CO2 emission by up to 30 to 60% between each generation of products that we have put into the market. So we are laser focused on driving that one down but we are far from done, we still got eight years before we hit our first target net zero in 2030. So we got a roadmap where we want to achieve even more with new technology. At its core it's a technology innovator and our answer is to reduce the CO2 emission, and the decarbonization of the data center is going to be through innovating new technology because it has the speed, the scale, and the impact to make it possible to reach your sustainability objectives going forward. >> How about recycling? Where does that fit? I mean, the other day it was... A lot of times at a hotel you used to get bottled water now you get plant-based waters in a box and so we are seeing it all around us. But for a manufacturer of your size, recycling and circular economy, how does that fit into your plans? >> Yeah, let me try to explain what we are doing here because one thing is how you produce it. Another thing is how you innovate all that new technology, but you also need to combine that with service and software, otherwise you won't get the full benefit. So what we are doing here when it comes to exploring circular economics, it's kind of where we have an eternity mindset. We want to see if it is possible to get nothing out to the landfill. This is the aim that we are looking at. So when you buy a product today you get an option to keep it in your data center for up to 10 years. But what we want to do when you keep it for 10 years, is to upgrade only parts of the system. So let's say that you need more CPU power, you just switch the controller to next generation controller and you get more CPU power in your storage system, to keep it those 10 years. But you can also expand with new disk media, flash media, even media that doesn't exist today will be supported over those 10 years. You can change your protocol in the front end of your system to have new protocols and connect to your server environment with the latest and greatest technology. See, the benefit here is that, you don't have to put your system into a truck and a recycle process after three years, four years, five years, you can actually postpone that one for 10 years. And this one is reducing the emission again. But once we take it back, you put it on the truck and we take it into our recycling facility. And here we take our own equipment, like computer network and switches, but we also take competitive equipment in and we recycle as much as we can. In many cases, it's only 1% that goes to the landfill or 2% that goes to the landfill. The remaining material will go into new products either in our cycle or in other parts of the electronic industry. So it will be reused for other products. So when we look at what we've been doing for many years that has been linear economics, where you buy material, you make your product, you put it into production, and it goes into the landfill afterwards. The recycling economics is really, you buy material, you make your product, you put it into production, and you recycle as much as possible. The remaining part will go into the landfill. But where we are right now is exploring circular economics, where you actually buy material, make it, put it into production, and you reuse as much as you can. And only 1-2% is going into the landfill right now. So we have come along, and we honestly believe that the circular economics is the new economics going forward for many industries in the world. >> Yeah, and that addresses some of the things that we were talking about earlier about sustainability by design. You have to design that so that you can take advantage of that circular economy. I do want to come back to the economics, because in the early days of so-called green IT, there was a lot of talk about, "Well I'll never be able to lower the power bill, and the facilities people don't talk to the IT people," and that's changed. So explain why sustainability is good business, not just an expense item, but can really drive bottom line profitability. I understand it's going to take some time, but help us understand your experience there Tom. >> Yeah, let me try to explain that one. You often get the question about sustainability. Isn't that a cost? I mean how much does it cost to get that green profile? But you know, in reality, when you do a deep dive into the data center, you realize that sustainability is a cost saving activity. And this one is quite interesting, and we have now done more than 1,200 data center assessment around the world, where we have looked at data centers. And let me give you just an average number from a global bank that we work with. And this one is not different from all the other cases that we are doing. So when we look at the storage area, what we can do on the electricity by moving an old legacy data center into a new modernized infrastructure, is to reduce the electricity by 96%. This is a very high number, and a lot of money that you save, but the CO2 emission is reduced by 96% as well. The floor space can go up to 35% reduction as well. When we move down to the compute part, we are talking about 61% reduction in electricity on the compute part, just by moving from legacy to new modern infrastructure, and 61% on the CO2 emission as well. And see this one here is quite interesting, because you save electricity and you do something really good for the environment at the same time. In this case I'm talking about here, the customer was paying 2.5 million U.S. dollar annually, and by just modernizing that infrastructure, we could bring it down to 1.1 million. This is 1.4 million savings straight into your pocket and you can start the next activity here, looking at moving from virtual machine to containers. Containers only use 10% of the CPU resources compared to a virtual machine. Move up to the application layer if you have that kind of capability in your organization. Modernizing your application with sustainability by design and you can reduce the CO2 emission by up to 50%. There's so much we can do in that data center, but we often start at the infrastructure first and then we move up in the chain and we give customers benefit in all these different layers. >> Yeah, a big theme of this program today is what you guys are doing with partners. Are partners aware of this in your view? Are they in tune with it? Are they demanding it? What message would you like to give the channel partners, resellers, and distributors who may be watching? >> So the way to look at it is that we offer a platform with product, service and software, and that platform can elevate the conversation much higher up in the organization, and partners get the opportunity here to go up and talk to sustainability officers about what we are doing. They can even take it up to the CEO, and talk about how can you reach your sustainability KPI in the data center. What we've see in this round table when we have sustainability officers in the room, is that they are very focused on the green profile, and what is going out of the company. They rarely have a deep understanding of what is going on in the data center. Why? Because it's really technical and they don't have that background. So just by elevating the conversation to these sustainability officers, you can tell them what they should measure and how they should measure that. And you can be sure that that will replicate down to the CIO and the CFO, and there will immediately be a request for proposal going forward. So this one here is really a golden opportunity to take that story, go out and talk to different people in the organization, to be relevant, and have an impact, and make it more easy for you to win that proposal when it gets out. >> Well, really solid story on a super important topic. Thanks Tom, really appreciate your time and taking us through your perspectives. >> Thank you Dave, for the invitation. >> Yeah, you bet. Okay, in a moment we'll be back to summarize our final thoughts, keep it right there. (gentle instrumental music)